16 10 544 https://oralhistory.uah.edu/files/original/ed1bb3c89bb63d941b811b4ebb814cb0.pdf cfd58e225dfdefc7a7773859c8cda894 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Saturn V Collection Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context ohc_stnv_000041_T Title A name given to the resource Sloop, John L. (Transcript) Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1971-12-02 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource .pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Interviews Text Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives and Special Collections, Huntsville, Alabama Language A language of the resource en Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource This material may be protected under U. S. Copyright Law (Title 17, U.S. Code) which governs the making of photocopies or reproductions of copyrighted materials. You may use the digitized material for private study, scholarship, or research. Though the University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives and Special Collections has physical ownership of the material in its collections, in some cases we may not own the copyright to the material. It is the patron's obligation to determine and satisfy copyright restrictions when publishing or otherwise distributing materials found in our collections. https://oralhistory.uah.edu/files/original/b5d0670da24978745ec9e86365127fda.jpg 4598197eb9b09fa4ae86fb6882190ee7 https://oralhistory.uah.edu/files/original/7ff5cd4f71b09914c1fe3028eda9616f.mp4 ae6df47cf5edab432e8f6a8caa273c99 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Saturn V Collection Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context ohc_stnv_000041_A Title A name given to the resource Sloop, John L. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1971-12-02 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource .MP4 Type The nature or genre of the resource Interviews Audio Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives and Special Collections, Huntsville, Alabama Language A language of the resource en Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource This material may be protected under U. S. Copyright Law (Title 17, U.S. Code) which governs the making of photocopies or reproductions of copyrighted materials. You may use the digitized material for private study, scholarship, or research. Though the University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives and Special Collections has physical ownership of the material in its collections, in some cases we may not own the copyright to the material. It is the patron's obligation to determine and satisfy copyright restrictions when publishing or otherwise distributing materials found in our collections. https://oralhistory.uah.edu/files/original/be75e253d311cf5b317f036eb0808639.jpg cc0c4f909af1a8ef79e706ad5968148a https://oralhistory.uah.edu/files/original/d82ff524e723c178da82fa20efdbaa39.mp4 a43cd4d8a8bcbfa6d1137a21683eaf6f Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Christensen, David Collection Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Sieber, Werner Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Christensen, David Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 1:00:22 Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound [00:00:05] Werner Sieber: So, my name is Werner Sieber. Today is the 22nd of July, 1971. I'm talking to Mr. Christensen and Ms. Heimburg. [00:00:20] David Christensen: And you would tell a little bit about how you got involved with Peenemünde starting in ‘36. [00:00:27] WS: That means starting in 1936 again. That means being an assistant, a scientific or engineering assistant in the Institute for Technical Physics or Applied Physics at the University of – Technical University of Hanover. I got involved for the first time, I did hear about the Peenemünde project for the first time about ‘36, ‘37. And Dr. von Braun and Dr. Thiel were having a discussion with Professor Hase, who was the boss of the Institute. I'm not quite sure if this was the first time that Dr. von Braun had discussions with Professor Hase. But at that time, I accidentally became witness of it since I was running a special experiment in the large room of Professor Hase’s. And when Dr. von Braun came, I was asked to sit on the table and participate in the discussion. And from this developed at first a cooperative type of work with Kummersdorf at that time. We had to develop flame temperature measuring instrument based on the line reversal method. And it was supposed to be an automated one, since it was supposed to sit close to the rocket engine and to measure the temperature. And from there more involvement, especially later when the project moved to Peenemünde resulted. The Institute was about 50% engaged with their work to work together with Peenemünde when the war arrived. [00:02:30] WS: I personally was still at the Institute at that time to finish my thesis, my PhD thesis. And actually, I made my PhD before the war started in ‘39 and had a contract with Zeiss Jena. But when the war arrived, I was civilian type drafted together with several of the Institute to work for the Peenemünde project. So being drafted as a civilian for the Peenemünde project, I had from there a massive contact with Peenemünde. I did live in Hanover and did mainly work in the Applied Physics Institute to develop instrumentation. But I had to do many TDY trips up to Peenemünde, normally staying for several weeks there, trying out the instrumentation and coming back and improving it. My personal contact essentially was during the first two years with the wind tunnel and Dr. Herrmann and Mr. Ramm of the wind tunnel at that time. But I had to develop was the temperature measuring method for the wind tunnel and we choose to use the Schlieren method and having upstreams of the wind tunnel arc which would create a shock wave. And this shock wave going through the field of view of the Schlieren apparatus would be illuminated from the Schlieren apparatus with two other arcs, the time difference between was known, the distance on the picture was known, so this way the velocity and out of the velocity the temperature was derived. Now this one was only one of 40 different research contracts which the Institute of Applied Physics in Hanover under Professor Hase had to accomplish for Peenemünde. The arrangement was very similar, in a way actually, as nowadays the government is contracting with universities. I, in the meantime, became chief engineer of the Institute and as such had contact then also with the other research contracts and personally also was not only supervising but working on some of them throughout the next few years. And they were not so much for the wind tunnel anymore but actually for the test division, if I may call it this way. I don't recall the proper name under Dr. Schilling at that time. Mr. Heimburg was part of it and my main contact in the test division was the instrument development lab under Mr. Albert Schuler. [00:05:51] DC: He was directing with Peenemünde and you were working closely with Schuler. [00:05:55] WS: Schuler was in charge of the instrument development lab. He was developing instrumentation up at Peenemünde but most of it contracting it out to university institutes. They were in Dresden [or Traisen?], in Darmstadt and in Hanover. They were the three main ones I recall at that time. And our main contact with Schuler was to develop level gauges for liquid oxygen and for alcohol. And those ones mass producing also for all the first charts and all the first V-2's had our level gauges in it. [00:06:43] DC: Did they become flight hardware? [00:06:45] WS: So, they became flight hardware, and we had to come up with a certain production of it involving local industry in Hanover. And developing it, manufacturing it, checking it out and then taking care of all the mishaps which normally will come about. It was one of the works which I had to do for 20 years, ‘41, ‘42, ‘43 and so on. [00:07:17] DC: So, in other words the university was the prime contractor, and you had to go out and sub out the hardware and all these other items? [00:07:25] WS: That's right. [00:07:26] DC: It was a little bit of a unique situation. I guess you don't really have that in this country, do you? [00:07:32] WS: I do not really know how the contracting part was done right now if you ask me. I was essentially behind the quality control to get the materials together, seeing that this part is done for the check out and so on. The contracting could have been done — I do not know. Professor Hase actually had a unique position. He was professor and director of the Institute for Applied Physics but at the same time he also had a private company, the so-called Pyro-Werk where he developed temperature and radiation sensing instrumentation. [00:08:19] DC: [He got to wear two hats now?]. [00:08:21] WS: [Two hats?] and also part of the contracts or the contacts with Peenemünde were with the Pyro-Werk and part of it was the Institute. Both being together so we did do some of the research, which then was manufactured through the Pyro-Werk. So, the Pyro-Werk, the small one, let’s say 50 to 100 men per year but a very specialized instrumentation company. And Dr. [Schitting?] who I had later made contact in the fundamental which he became the boss of the test division so to speak. That means he was deputy director of this Pyro-Werk right at the start of the war. That means the deputy to Professor Hase, at the company. Whereas I was the counterpart at the Institute and was called over engineer at that time. So that is how we worked together. [00:09:22] DC: Would you talk a little bit about some of the problems at the end of the war, materials, quality control. I am sure things deteriorated there. Did you keep production going pretty well on these instruments? [00:09:34] WS: No, we surely had problems. The longer the war lasted, the more difficult it became to get the proper materials for our instruments. Especially the level gauges having them manufactured and competing with other contracts those companies had. [00:09:54] DC: Who had the priority in other words? [00:09:55] WS: So, the priority deal and continuously our priority either did go down and then there was another one, I forgot all the code names, but whenever the new priority for Peenemünde or if they had a good shot and it looked like it was a good deal then we got a good priority and also could get something. [00:10:16] DC: It would shift occasionally. The priorities would shift. [00:10:18] WS: Through the so called Rüstungskommando, that means the local military installation who was governing what the companies whom they were working for and watching the priorities for. [00:10:32] DC: The military government was overseeing all these different things. [00:10:35] WS: It was a military production type agency in Hanover for… [00:10:42] DC: For that area. [00:10:43] WS: For the area. So, we had to work for them and getting the men on our service for the instruments. Now out of the 40 research contracts which we were doing some of them were for the warheads. One of them was for example developing a special ‘feeler’ which was the very front of the V-2 would be the one touching ground first and exploding at the back. So that was something half a meter long and an electrical device. And this one surely had to be developed in a way that it would not explode the warhead already while getting warm during the heating period during reentry. [00:11:38] DC: Was it ever developed and used? [00:11:43] WS: It was used. It was then mass produced since it was a quartz type tubing deal with electrical contact was produced by the OSRAM in Berlin. [00:12:01] DC: And your group developed it? [00:12:03] WS: It was developed and all the heating type of experiments if they would withstand the heat of what we essentially did is, we were dipping this [worry?] and it was called the Elefantenrüssel part. The nose part of an… the trunk of an elephant. It was the sensitive part which was in front of it. I personally was involved in it. We were dipping it in hot melting metal which would have the proper heat transfer like it would see during reentry. Simulating this type of – and seeing that it would not ignite it but only after it is down there. But on the other side keeping it mass-wise and as light so that most of it could be warhead. [00:13:02] DC: Did you ever consider putting a timer that would only activate the warhead after a certain point in the trajectory? [00:13:10] WS: I did. This one was… [00:13:12] DC: That way too. [00:13:13] WS: – that way too. But I do not recall right now when it was made active. But anyhow it was the main heating part during which time it was made. [00:13:27] DC: Was it a more effective warhead then? [00:13:30] WS: It was more effective – [00:13:32] DC: More blast area? [00:13:33] WS: – more blast area, that means for certain applications that’s why it was made. Then the warhead, as such, surely had to be temperature insulated also during this reentry period. But this one had to be done with a minimum of mass and coming up there with the thickness of the layer and the proper material was also a part of my job. Another one was to determine the heat conductivity and the heat capacity of the TNT, if I may call it this way. I do not recall right now the proper name of the stuff in the warhead. And in doing this one, I guess, during war time you are not watching safety too well. But anyhow, I was doing this myself. I had to come up with a kind of a size of a hand grenade. Heating that from the outside had its temperature instrumented and then measuring the heat increase. [00:14:47] DC: You made like a model study then? [00:14:50] WS: Taking part of the proper stuff. But if the temperature would go too high it actually would go off. And in order to prevent that others were involved, that means I had to do it in a certain part of the building. But my safety precautions were not too well at that time. I still struggle a bit if I think about it right now. [00:15:16] DC: Did you come up with anything to help improve the thickness of the warhead? What was the result of this? [00:15:23] WS: We came up with a recommendation that means how many millimeters of insulation there ought to be so that the warhead just would not ignite it. There would be a few seconds time in order to come up with a maximum of warhead [inaudible] Not too much of the protection of it. [00:15:50] DC: You were pretty well in the direct loop then. Problem areas, they would throw these problems out. [00:15:56] WS: Since Professor Hase was a specialist in temperature measurement, radiation measurement, heat, that's why those problems came to pass. These are just a few of the ones which we were doing there and which I recall right now. [00:16:11] DC: Was this part of the so-called ‘wisdom day’ effort where they would throw all the problems out on the table and people would come and look at them and select the ones they were interested in and take them back to the university to work on? Were you familiar with this? [00:16:24] WS: I know that those things were coming about and at that time there was also other Peenemünde problems being picked up by the Navy or by the Air Force. How to overcome the [inaudible], the anti-[radar?] screens, the shaft and so on. We picked up a few then from the Navy also. But our main involvement was with Peenemünde. And I personally was mostly involved in the Peenemünde deal. [00:17:07] DC: I understand that these wisdom day events, they would have these things and maybe give you two years to come back with a solution. [00:17:15] WS: But that means we had enough problems with Peenemünde. So, we actually were more or less forced, I might say so, also to go to this type of meetings and to look at them and say – well, Professor Hase was essentially the one that was in judging who should work on it and if he would see something which maybe he could work on it. I remember I had to make a study once also out [inaudible]. For the flak, that means the anti-aircraft projectiles, in order to detonate them if they are not hitting the airplanes, could the change in the earth magnetic field which an airplane has, due to the fact that it has a lot of iron with it, could this one be used to detonate the anti-aircraft projectiles? And out of a few small experiments to support it and so on. And at that time, [inaudible] the amplifier deal, there was no miniaturization and so on. And in order to withstand shocks and so on, our conclusion was it is not enough. [00:18:34] DC: This was for proximity fuze to Wasserfall? [00:18:37] WS: Yeah, proximity fuze. [00:18:38] DC: To Wasserfall, I mean. [00:18:39] WS: No, not for Wasserfall. That means normal anti-aircraft. That means it was for the air force. It was not a Peenemünde type deal. But a proximity type deal. It's just since you mentioned those special projects that have been picked up. This one was one of them. [00:18:58] DC: One basic question here. Who would actually originate these problem statements? Who was your contact coordinator at Peenemünde? Was it a technical man or administrator? Who were you dealing with? [00:19:12] WS: We dealt with the technical. Like Mr. Schuler, for example, all his limitations for test stands. [00:19:21] DC: Right. So, he would originate the scope of work, give you a contract and then you would come back. [00:19:26] WS: Or Dr. [Steurer?], if it came to the field type deal. We had a few contracts, for example, to determine. He had certain materials which were treated at the outside for special projects coming up with special radiation coefficients. Alpha or epsilon type deals. And in order to find out if this one was right and up to which temperature it could descend and so on. So, we were working in the materials research to speak [inaudible] in this respect. [00:19:58] DC: Well, let's see. Just to move it along now. Maybe we could go on down towards the end of the war. [00:20:06] WS: Yeah, no. [00:20:07] DC: Tell a little bit what happened to you and how you ended up with the group that came here. That might be interesting. [00:20:14] WS: Now, towards the end of the war, one of the problems, let's say during the last six months, was that due to the bombing, some of the companies who were delivering raw material or such parts for the level gauges, it fell out. So, we had to look for special ones. I recall for example that in January of [’35?], I had to make a trip to Thüringen up to the glassblowers. [00:20:45] DC: January ‘45? [00:20:46] WS: Yeah. In order to find out if we could use for the level gauges where we were using certain ceramics at that time. It was a two-legged type, having electronics inside and having certain ceramics which were subbed in, so to speak. It was maybe making it out of glass since we could not get the ceramics anymore. I don't know. There was some problem in that. It didn't get too far since before they really could deliver [the things?]. Just a few weeks later, that means everything started to deteriorate. But anyhow, the last few weeks before being overhauled, I still was at Hanover at the institute. The bombing raids were practically every night, so I was spending most of my time. I was privately bombed out already twice, so my family was not in Hanover anymore. I was most of the nights at the university and in the shelter there. Quite a few bombing raids did hit the university and we had a firefight on those nights. Also, the laboratory I was working in was bombed out, I guess it was February of that year with all the… everything which I had written up and so on. So, I didn't get afterwards anything, no photos, no nothing. [00:22:21] DC: Oh, really? You lost all your – [00:22:23] WS: There was the part where this lab was situated. There was just empty air. This part of the building was just level. [00:22:32] DC: [In that day?] you had nothing? [00:22:33] WS: Including the apparatus which I had in there and all the instruments and so on. I had also there my last private books and let's say what you have from your studies and PhD and whatnot. The other part, a year prior to this one, I lost in a bombing rate on my private place. I was living at the fourth story of an apartment house and this one was completely demolished. So after having lost all this one, I didn't have much left in Hanover besides my working place. And so, when then the American forces were approaching Hanover from the west, they were about 20 kilometers to the west when according to instructions we were making, destroying certain things at the institute, certain paperwork. [00:23:34] DC: Were these things classified as secret primarily? [00:23:37] WS: Yeah, everything which was in a safe we had according to instructions to destroy. So, for example one of those igniters I talked about, those [Elefantenrüssel?] and so on, all those ones in the [Pyro-Werk?]. And then after doing this one, we were freed to do what I wanted. [00:24:02] DC: Turned loose. [00:24:04] WS: Turned loose at least, since it was already in the status of disorganization. There was more or less continuous bombing of Hanover and artillery you could hear to the west moving in. So, what I did was I still had a bicycle so I could take the little things I had which were just a briefcase full of things. And with the bicycle during a bombing raid, I left Hanover. Actually, against the instructions, since we had to work with so called Volkssturm. Everybody was supposed to get a gun and to shoot and so nobody was supposed to leave Hanover. But it was a nonsensical deal anyhow. So, I was convinced I couldn't help them there so I was using a bombing raid to leave Hanover where everybody was in the... I disappeared on my bicycle and did go north and my family lived about 120 kilometers north of Hanover in a small place called Rotenburg which is right in the middle between Bremen and Hanover and I tried to reach them. And in going up, that means fleeing German military groups were continuously crossing the road. I was, I guess, more in the ditches beside the road with my bicycle, since continuously [keep flying?] … [00:25:57] DC: Was this around February? [00:25:59] WS: That was in April. In April, I guess. I can't point the date right now. I guess the final day was the final day was 8th of May and it was three weeks prior to the final end when Dönitz or somebody made a final entry. Anyhow it was still three weeks to go. Hanover wasn't overhauled yet. Hamburg wasn't yet and they were just about approaching Bremen, I guess. So right in front of the front the … through the fleeing German groups I did find my way through the roads, not the main roads but still continuously keep fleeing airplanes were shooting at anything that was moving. So, it did take me a long time. I left fairly early in the morning. I guess it was a morning attack on Hanover at 6 o'clock and I arrived at midnight. A thing that I could have done in six hours easily. But there were quite a few hold ups and one of the most dangerous ones besides being shot – getting a bullet from anywhere, was that means in advancing quite a few prisoner camps and upper camps and so on were opened up and the prisons were opened up. So groups of those poor fellows they were just roaming around and I had to go with my bicycle just on my own through them and they all had sticks in their hands just to walk on and so on. So, they could have hit me but apparently, they were just marching somewhere like I was. Just like doped. Anyhow somehow, I made it to Rotenburg where my family was and I was glad. Actually, they were living in a hospital. My wife, I had her going to her brother, who was the chief medical fellow in a big hospital in Rotenburg. Not a military one, it was actually for retarded folks and so she was fairly safe there. And there it did take another two weeks before the, since it was far north it was the Britishers before they came to Rotenburg and those were also a few days especially one very bad day that means when they finally moved through Rotenburg. And then afterwards being under British occupation I had to report to the marketplace everybody who able bodied men between 15 and 65 had to report for clean-up work, and so on, under 40 Britishers. So, there was an airfield, former German airfield close by about 20 kilometers to Rotenburg which was completely destroyed due to air raid and so on. And this one was supposed to be made the place for a tank division or something like that. [00:30:09] [recording cuts] [00:30:20] WS: Werner Hans Sieber, again. [chuckles] I just mentioned at the other side that from Göttingen I was going to Witzenhausen signing my contract and going back to my family who didn't know anything about it. I arrived the next day late and told them that I signed up with the Americans and had a contract with them. They just didn't believe it but… Quite a few got crazy during this time. So, the first deal is contract surely you have something to show. My brother, who was where my wife did stay, he said, “He surely would have something to show!” No. Now I have to mention that he was a doctor in an institution for retarded and for…damaged… what do you call that? [00:31:21] DC: Unstable. [00:31:22] WS: He was, anyhow, not a psychoanalyst, but anyhow, knowing this type of deal. So, he was questioning that maybe I got crazy in the meantime or if I still was on my feet. Anyhow, yes that's what it is. And I even told them that I had been told that at a certain day, the Americans would come with a truck and pick up a few things which my wife had and picking them up my family and me and would bring us to Witzenhausen. This day would be so and so, and I guess that was about a week later something like this or maybe two weeks at the most. Anyhow they said alright we will find out. So, the day came closer and the few things we had we packed. Next morning at 6 the truck was supposed to come and it didn't come. We were ready, the kids were ready. No truck. No information either. The day did go by alright something might have happened. We did try the next day again. Sorry, no truck. We tried I guess a third time and then gave up. But now my credibility was completely gone. That means that the day prior to it we still had a big party. They brought out their last wine and so on. “Goodbye and see you in the United States,” and you know all these nice deals. [00:33:07] DC: Sendoff party. [slight chuckle] [00:33:09] WS: So, the credibility was definitely gone. And later I did find out that this doctor talked to his sister, my wife, privately and said, “I guess see this war had [inaudible]. Don't believe it too much. That means we just play along with him a little bit, but let's try to get him back on his feet,” and so on. [00:33:37] DC: No one would believe you, if you had nothing to show. [00:33:39] WS: Nothing to show! Now surely comes the following. That means every two weeks you had to get your ration cards in order to buy anything to live. Now I had worked at first in Rotenburg for the British then in Hanover and I closed it out in Hanover in order to go to Rotenburg and just to wait two weeks. I had enough ration cards to live. But now I didn't have ration cards and I would have to work again, show some work before I would get them. So, in order to get ration cards I didn't get them since I wasn't working. I did go to the burgermeister and said I wanted to talk privately with him. My name is so-and-so and so on and the following is the case. The Americans want to come and pick me up and have a contract with them to go for half a year over there and work with them and so on. He said, “That is a good story. Where does your paperwork?” I said, “There isn't.” Not even a piece of paper. I said “No, nothing at all. I'm not even supposed to talk about it. I can't give you.” Since now it's a small place and my brother-in-law was known I got for the next two weeks ration cards just to a special deal from the burgermeister. But unfortunately, after those two weeks still I wasn't picked up and no news. [00:35:14] DC: You were getting a little mad by then. [00:35:16] WS: I did go mad and somehow by some tricks, I just didn't want to start working again since they could come any time. And if I was 20 kilometers away, they wouldn't find me. I would miss it. So, I wanted to stay around the house as a matter of fact. I never did go away any further than my wife would know where it is so that within a few minutes we could be brought together. To make it short, they didn't believe me anymore. [00:35:51] DC: How long did you wait there? [00:35:53] WS: It was about four weeks and one day suddenly a jeep came up. Lieutenant Wheeler. I guess I recall his name. Lieutenant Wheeler came. “You are,” so and so. I never met him. “Yes I am.” “I am sorry that we couldn't pick you up.” Now, my English was even worse than it is now. I had some school English but still I could make out with him. Although he also could talk some German. We already did it in English. And he said the time now came and that they did not pick us up was due to the reason that Witzenhausen was not the place anymore but Landshut. Landshut would be. And in rearranging and making those preparations that means they didn't pick anybody up. But on the other side, they could not give us a message. So, they were very sorry. But now it's such and such a day and that was just three or four days later they would be coming. Now after he was around, they all believed us again and we finally moved down to Landshut. [00:37:09] DC: You finally have a final going away party? [00:37:11] WS: Now there was a final one, but there was no wine left. [Laughing] So we were moving by truck to Hanover and in Hanover we were put in a special car together with Dieter Grau and, I guess, his wife. He probably told you the same thing. And Millinger was in there and two or three others. Actually, it was an old car and this one was attached to a kind of a fast train. Which in the meantime, now they even had train connections going all the way that means down to Munich. And so, we did go with the train in an unheated car, it was freezing and so on. And finally, it showed up in Landshut. And there we were supposed as the third shipment. Dieter Huzel, and then Grau, and Millinger, and so on. About 30 of them, Angele and so on. And you probably heard from Angele what happened. He did show up there, Dr. Henning did show up there. He came out of a concentration camp, an American one and so on. They all did show up finally down there. And we were supposed still to go to the United States before Christmas. And probably somebody else told you already it did not quite work out this way. We had to wait until a very few days after Christmas. I really don't recall the date. And we were moved then from Landshut to Le Havre. In Le Havre we did stay several days, I don't know, maybe a week in the fortress there. Always being very well kept from contact with any American soldier or the population or what have you for our own protection, I guess. During this time, it still was needed. We were living underground in the Kasematten, that means the protected places. [00:39:37] DC: Did you get another piece of paper this time or a contract? [00:39:40] WS: No, no. [00:39:41] DC: Still nothing more? [00:39:43] WS: We didn't have anything in our hands. We did get sea ration on the trip and then did get, while we were in Le Havre, we were eating in the mess hall after all the other troops had eaten. And we were eating like hogs. I recall, there was many eggs in the morning. I personally, my weight was 124 pounds at that time when I arrived in Le Havre. And I started gaining very heavily from there on. Since we could eat as much as we wanted to, actually we were overdoing it, unfortunately. If you are hungry, you first eat and— [00:40:29] DC: the [weight?] will catch up. That's what Angele said too. He was quite slim. Found out he could live on very little when you have to, you know. You still have a lot of energy. [00:40:39] WS: And I recall, you know, cigarettes were something really scarce. And I guess a little piece of paper was given to us, you are right. One piece here that said that we were entitled to $6 a day. And from those $6 in Le Havre, I guess we got the first time $6 in our hands or something, we could buy cigarettes. So— [00:41:06] DC: It’s like Christmas almost. [00:41:08] WS: The cigarettes we could buy was Zipper. They were called Zipper. They were as bad as you can think of. I don't know why they were even made and for whom they were made. But anyhow, as soon as we could get a hold of better ones, we couldn't even smoke them. Although we were used to smoke [peppermint tea?] and [inaudible] during the war time. So, in Le Havre we were put on board of a Liberty ship. Actually, I'm following now completely the Angele story. So, he probably told you the 32 fellows of us we were brought in a room, let's say it was twice as big as this one, four or five on top of each other. And the weather was very rough and the captain prided himself one day to say there's no ship between the French coast and New York. Everybody could go back to the harbor. And that last day, we did make some progress. We could keep before the wind. Unfortunately, we were drifted back half a mile. So, we didn't make any progress. And it was really very rough. It was so rough that the ship made the funniest noises. And Dr. Henning who was a specialist in welding who was with us, he inspected some of those places. [00:42:47] DC: Getting worried, yeah? [00:42:49] WS: Just out of the fun of it. But we didn't feel too well. Actually, the whole ship was full of, I don't know if it had a division, it was about 2,000 soldiers, I don't know why it is. All of them negroes. [00:43:05] DC: Oh black, [inaudible]. Do they know you were on the ship? [00:43:09] They were not supposed to know it. So, we were kept in our room 24 hours a day. We had an adjoining place where we could – toilet, you know, this was the shower. And there was one hour a day where we could go on deck at a certain part. Just going up and standing there. So surely, they were aware of it. It was a prisoner group. That's how it was known to them. And whenever they left the mess hall, then we could go down and try to eat. Very few could eat. We were not allowed to bring any food to anybody who did stay back. So, some of them being very sick like Angele, we couldn't even bring him something back. So, he didn't eat anything. And he couldn't walk on his own anymore so we had to carry him to the medical [inaudible]. We were checked three times during this trip by the medics. They wanted to make them sure that we were not sick. Maybe they also did find it interesting that we used to check us out. Anyhow three times we had complete checkouts. And finally arriving in New York several days overdue. I guess it was 17 days. There was food on board only and water for 14 days. So, there was no drinking water left anymore. So, they started the machinery for converting sea water to drink water. There was a dark brownish steel which means you didn't want to do anything but wash your hands in it. Drinking, I don't know if they still had something for coffee or tea or something. I don't know how we were. Anyhow with the last sea rations, we finally made in New York. And there we were kept underneath in our room until six hours after the troops disembarked and nobody would see us. And then it was dark in the evening and then we did leave the ship and we did go on board of a bus and we were brought to Fort Belvoir near Washington, Alexandria. And there we then did stay for, I guess, two weeks or something. Being interrogated by the CIA, or what all these organizations are, about all our connections with Hitler and the Nazis and what we did. I guess we were fingerprinted 50 times. I recall one whole morning a whole stack of cards. I had to repeat fingerprinting after fingerprinting. And they were sent around all across the world. They wanted to make sure. And I can see that. The lie detector tests were then done later in Fort Bliss. They were not done there. I do not recall it. But anyhow, there were quite a few truth interrogators who talked very well in German. They tried to find out if the history or the story of our life which we had to write down – but this was all the details – whether this was true or not. And then from there, we boarded a train all the way to Fort Bliss. [00:46:58] DC: What about New Orleans? [00:47:00] WS: Well, to New Orleans. It would take two days and two nights or something like this. Anyhow, so we had a special car for us. And then at special times we were permitted to go to the diner. And at that time nobody else was in the diner. And on our way to the diner, we were not supposed to talk at all so that nobody would find out that funny talk we had. But still we were looking very funny with our clothes. [00:47:37] DC: Just what you had on your back? [00:47:3] WS: After all the bombing raids and so on underneath you had funny shoes. So, we looked like a funny [pack?]. Everybody looking, “What's that?” But in a way, apparently lots of things can happen over here. Even a funny group like this can go across country. [00:48:02] DC: Nobody says too much, eh? [00:48:03] WS: No reporters. That was the main deal. No reporters were supposed to come. We were not supposed to talk to anybody. [00:48:09] DC: How many American soldiers were with you at the time? Were they in civi— [00:48:12] WS: Civilian. Civilians. [00:48:13] DC: Civilians. How many were there? [00:48:16] WS: To be Frank, I don't know. Let's say three. [00:48:19] DC: Three? [00:48:20] WS: Four. [00:48:21] DC: Thirty people. Three soldiers. [00:48:24] WS: Yeah. Yeah. Just among us. [00:48:29] DC: Were you surprised at what you saw in America? Did you expect what you saw? Or what was your impression? [00:48:37] WS: Oh, I was surely very eager to see what was going on. So, at first, we were beefed a bit that incoming into New York Harbor we couldn't be on deck and look at it. [00:48:47] DC: See the skyline. [00:48:48] WS: Skyline. And at the other side, that means our cabin did not have any port hole. We couldn't look out at all. So, it did take several hours until we finally could go on deck and see the skyline. But at that time, you were already anchored. You didn't see how coming in or the Statue of Liberty or all that you normally expect to see. So, we had to be under deck at that time. And then going with this train, it's very interesting. It's going through small villages and seeing how the train stops in a village that is right close to the roadway that is without the big railroad station. We did find out that most of the road crossings did not have to [pass standard?]. [00:49:46] DC: Looked pretty primitive, I guess. [00:49:44] WS: It was just a completely different deal. And then the wideness of the country. You could ride for hours without seeing much on cities or heavy stations. That was very interesting. Then in New Orleans we had an hour overlay so we could go out of the car and just go around the block, so to speak, without contacting anybody. So, we didn't see anything from New Orleans besides going across the railroad from the Mississippi. So, it was a very interesting trip. Finally coming to West Texas and the desert and then finally winding up in Fort Bliss by there where there's not much green. [00:50:32] DC: When you got to Bliss, did you go out to the launch stands much? Or did you stay right at El Paso? [00:50:39] WS: I personally did stay very much in Fort Bliss proper. I belonged to a group which was supposed to plan for test stands for the ramjet. It was this project which we were supposed to work on. So, we had to look through catalogs and discussing it also with certain company representatives on what type of instrumentation we would be using to build up test stands for ramjet development. And having the test stands built in a way that they could be put, either built right away on it or could be put on flatbeds in order to move them up— [00:51:30] DC: So you started looking through catalogs and instruments? [00:51:34] WS: Yeah. All right. So, I was supposed to head up the instrumentation group for the test stands of the ramjet development. So, I was not in the design group for, let me say, it was just the test stands. So that's where most of my assignment was for. We then were building up in Fort Bliss test stands, as you probably had heard from others already, a small wind tunnel, blow down type wind tunnel, which was a unique deal also. Because at that time we were very few and we did not have much help. So, for example, the little wind tunnel, it's a blow down one of these bottles which had high pressure air and then blowing it down and having Schlieren pictures and making, I was building up a little Schlieren apparatus for it and having three pressure measurements on the models, which was the intake type nozzle for the run track. It was supposed to be a supersonic one. So, all the shock waves should be shown here. And building up the instrumentation for it, that means I personally was my own designer and technician. I was cabling it up. I was doing the test running the test. [00:53:01] DC: It was like the old days at Peenemünde; starting from scratch all over again. [00:53:04] WS: So actually, during the test of this little, I guess it did take us two years to build it up. It was a little shed where the test stand was in, the [bottles?] outside and a measuring trailer connected to it is about 25 [?] in the oscillograph. All remotely to be controlled. And we were actually three fellows running the test stand. Max Novak was one. In charge, was Herman Weidner and myself. So, the three of us were running the test. We were inside of the test stand and taking the manipulations. Max Novak opening up the big valves. We sent him to turning and so on. And Weidner being in charge of it. And it was a tremendous noise in this little shed. And the roof was nearly falling in. I recall only that when at that time Colonel Toftoy was supposed to visit us, he was not permitted to be doing the test inside of the shed. [00:53:22] DC: When did you first meet Toftoy? What was your experience with him? [00:53:26] WS: To be frank, I personally did not have too many contacts with him. I surely met him it was quite... [coughing] Sorry about the interruption. You were asking when I met at that time Colonel Toftoy. Actually, was during some meeting in Fort Bliss, not prior to it. We had what was called certain [?] room, main assemblies where everybody was coming together. At that time Major Hamill was telling us how things were going, what we should do and should not do. He was our commanding officer. But surely Colonel Toftoy came for a visit once in a while. [00:55:16] DC: Hamill was more of the [inaudible]. [00:55:19] WS: Hamill surely was the one whom we had practically daily contact with. That Colonel Toftoy was actually in Washington or somewhere else. What other names do you recall of the Americans or GE people? Any other people there? [00:53:37] WS: All right, we had quite some contact with the GE people. A fellow, unfortunately, not remembering too well the names. I surely remember Dr. Porter's name. I really do not know when I saw him or if I saw him at all. But there were certain other ones with GE and we were working together with them very closely. But I am sorry that after 25 years and I am getting old, I am not shaking with my head yet, but the memory of the names is always something bad. [00:56:13] DC: Well, what were you doing with GE? Were they taking your sketches and making drawings? [00:56:17] WS: Yeah, that’s right. They were the design group. They were the ordering group. They were just like a support group. What mostly like a support group does. I do not know if this one was supposed to be the role or the proper designation for it. Actually, you could call it they were in charge of it and we were helping them. That is more how it looked like. But they were the ones really behind it, building up and seeing that things were built up and also providing the manpower to others. [00:56:52] DC: Were there a few people out there at that time from GE? Where did they come from? Did they come in from— [00:56:58] WS: They had a special place where they did stay at in Fort Bliss. But… I am sorry. At that time, I was more in the planning work. I did have certain contacts, but maybe I did not care that much or I forgot about it. How that was organized. I left it up to the Schilling [center?] and the Heimburg [center?]. I was worrying about it and I heard about their problems. [00:57:28] DC: Then you worked on this ramjet program for quite a while, then you eventually came to Huntsville. Did you work on anything else at Fort Bliss besides the ramjet? [00:57:38] WS: No, it was essentially this ramjet program. We finally did build our test stands. The low-down wind tunnel was a local one. The other test stands, the ignition test stand and the compression test stand, were built on flat beds so that we could move with them. We actually did. I do not know if it was ‘48 or ‘49. We did move up in the California mountains close to Bishop, up to 10,000 feet high. The purpose was to run the ramjet at a higher elevation. The test stands were made movable and so we were spending a late summer. It was not no wind, but at least there was no snow. [00:58:30] DC: What part of California was this? [00:58:34] WS: Bishop is the closest part of it, the closest city. From there I did go up, let's say, 10 miles up in the mountains, close to the King's Canyon. There was a lake. Unfortunately, here again, remembering names is something bad for me. Maybe I can point it out over here. [00:59:01] [recording cuts] [00:59:03] DC: Like the Navajo program, did you have any contact with any other [inaudible]? [00:59:08] WS: I personally did not have any. Thinking back, there might have been a few other things. Especially during the first year, once in a while, a [wizard?] was announced coming from somewhere across the country wanting to know what we were doing. For example, I recall that one fellow was very much interested in servo and this line reversal machine which we were building for Kummersdorf. Or how the level gauges were built up. This type of thing. We were trying to get information from it. There was some scanty type of literature available, but most of it they did try to get out of the discussions. [00:59:53] DC: What was the final conclusion of the ramjet program? Did it really work out? It was finally cancelled? [00:59:59] WS: It was finally cancelled. Now don't ask me. Mr. Heimburg probably could answer the question or somebody why it– [1:00:08] [recording cut] [END] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context ohc_crst_000024_A Title A name given to the resource Sieber, Werner Description An account of the resource Early German rocketry in mid-1930s, especially wind tunnel research. Role of technical universities in such research on V-2 Rocket systems. Life in days leading up to and after the end of WWII. Coming to America through Operation Paperclip. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource .MP4 Type The nature or genre of the resource Interviews Audio Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives and Special Collections, Huntsville, Alabama Language A language of the resource en Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource This material may be protected under U. S. Copyright Law (Title 17, U.S. Code) which governs the making of photocopies or reproductions of copyrighted materials. You may use the digitized material for private study, scholarship, or research. Though the University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives and Special Collections has physical ownership of the material in its collections, in some cases we may not own the copyright to the material. It is the patron's obligation to determine and satisfy copyright restrictions when publishing or otherwise distributing materials found in our collections. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource July 22, 1971 https://oralhistory.uah.edu/files/original/a705cea94f8c6307cccef6cdc4bff6a1.jpg 4598197eb9b09fa4ae86fb6882190ee7 https://oralhistory.uah.edu/files/original/28765d82f28cf7deaad8093921ff2a56.mp4 4ea317de21e262d8c4ff1c6d19f7a693 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Saturn V Collection Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Shettles, Mack Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Bilstein, Roger E. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 0:31:32 Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound [00:00:07] MS: This mission thing is just a good example of the functional part again. Let's see, I don't want to hang up on these charts too long. Of course, all this required a great deal of travel, and it was about that time that headquarters recognized—and we all recognized—the need for communicating, not just by writing and not just by telephone, but by having our conferences together. That's when the idea of this [inaudible] center network…We have diagrams over here. This is the way it is today. It wasn't this extensive when it first got started. [00:00:54] MS: [Inaudible], all NASA communications are contracted for and managed by Marshall Center. [Inaudible] We had a Saturn [phone?] control center...Let’s see, we had NASA headquarters, we had an Apollo…See, this has changed…We had an Apollo Center. [Inaudible] We had two different buildings. [Inaudible] At the Cape, we had an Apollo Action Center, and at Houston, we had an Apollo Action Center. These are tied in by the so-called [full?] wire network. All that meant was we had a [inaudible] wire that was both transmitted and received voice simultaneously, unlike many voice-activated circuits. Again, this seems to be something of a minor detail, but actually that's so important. You have written this up very nicely too, by the way. I'll just repeat it though. [00:02:05] MS: [Inaudible] people can sit in this conference room, the conference room at the Cape, the headquarters; make a presentation; and people anywhere in the room, by virtue of these overhead microphones—[they’re tuned so they don’t have feedback?]—anybody anywhere in the room can speak equally well to any other control room. This greatly facilitated communications in a free-form type of conference. It enabled…See, what you usually had was managers sitting around this main table here—project managers, functional managers, typical conference let’s say—then around the room, they would have invited guys, whatever the problem was—let's say S-II [structures?]—they would have guys from R&D labs, contractors, local representatives, systems engineering perhaps, whoever happened to be involved, maybe the quality people, they would always be sitting around the room. They were secondary characters in the act. However, they were fully observers, and they didn't have to go up to the table or anything like that to speak. They could speak from their chair. This psychologically made them more likely to speak up. [00:03:30] MS: In other words…I don't know what you call it, managerial wise, I guess it's…You know, you’ve ever heard of Douglas McGregor and Theory X and Theory Y, the autocratic versus democratic, participative type of management? The idea that you usually found in Saturn V was not autocratic, it was participative. No matter who the engineer was or where he was, they were going to get a chance to talk. He said, “I think the so and so valve when we put this hydrogen in this thing, I think that valve's going to start closing slowly.” He said, “I know it acts fine in regular temperatures,” but if you thought that for any reason that you thought it was going to close a little slowly, a few milliseconds slow, it looks a little [mad?]. That's the reason this thing was done like this. There wasn't one [inaudible] leader at the front that said, “I speak for the Marshall Space Flight Center!". Everybody spoke. Well, that's a hell of a way to run an organization. What it did was it felt like a [weeding?] machine. What do you call it, [inaudible]? [00:04:41] RB: Did you get into a situation where too many people were trying to speak at once, or was there just a natural inclination to control, self-control? [00:04:49] MS: You could get into it, especially if they got a little excited about the subject. At that point, the chairman of the meeting in the control room had to get the thing under control. That was the [trip up?]. He didn't dictate what was said, but he said, “Okay, fellas, everybody gets a chance to talk, but [inaudible], and we'll all get a chance. [00:05:09] RB: I'm noticing these signs on the table—teleconference tips—warning you that the mic picks up every word and every sound. Did I remember correctly, once you said that you had problems with that, because people started making, you know, not snide but sharp comments about people elsewhere, and they found out that it was picked up? [laughs] [00:05:28] MS: That’s right. [00:05:30] RB: And it would override the major speaker. Some guys making a presentation, these things tended to override sometimes. [00:05:36] MS: Yes, because if a man speaks louder in the back of the room than the man in front is speaking, then he'll become the guy that everybody hears in all these other places. Most people think because they're sitting in the back of the room that there's a microphone in the front of the room. It’s a hold over from the 1930s. You're used to it. The lectern had a microphone. You see Franklin D. Roosevelt, you know? They got all these microphones up here. If you're out in the audience, you can do all the talking you want and nothing comes through. That wasn’t the case here, but people still had this in their mind. They kept seeing FDR, and all these microphones up on the lectern. That wasn't the way it worked. So it did have to be controlled. In fact, that is the problem even today. That’s why you have these little signs around here. You just can’t get…Battle them continually…[Inaudible] [00:06:36] MS: Okay. As an organization to this thing—you’ve written this up too—a long distance [xerography?] system was installed. As you well know, all that was the [LVX?] system was a way of transmitting paper data to other locations, and it could be so-called broadcast [inaudible] all the centers at one time or they could send it to selected centers [inaudible]. We made our view graphs, and you were very well described how you could have a simultaneous conference. All the centers would have copies of the charts. They already had view graphs, so they could show them on their thing. It was not as good as television. We couldn't afford television. This was suggested and looked into that we have live television. This gets a little hairy because you have to have a television camera operator. You have all these wires. You have to have special lighting. You‘d be shifting the camera from one man to the other frequently. Finally we decided that’s just not quite… [00:07:46] RB: This is your problem too if you have got all that equipment in here, create a lot of heat in the room too and become uncomfortable. [00:07:51] MS: We have had television activities in this room, but it has to be limited, you see? You have to have your action [inaudible] take place up at forward front of this thing like a stage. All this back here becomes lighting and assistant directors and sound men. They’ve got all their jazz rigged up. It wasn't really practical. [00:08:19] MS: That saved a lot of airplane flights, I'll have to say. I thought it was one of the best things that anybody ever did was to have this network conference room set up. In fact, I was briefing some people one day and happened to have this guy from an airline there. I said, “It saves you the trouble of physically removing bodies from one point to another. You can get the [fall?]. He said, “Well, wait a minute now!” But at about that time, in the same audience, was a man from Bell Telephone, and he says, “Great idea!” [both laugh] [00:09:02] RB: I'm glad you reminded me of this conference center network because I had forgotten that. I don’t think I brought that out as clearly as I should have in the rough draft that I’ve got. [00:09:14] MS: I think that was a very important thing because it was an instantaneous thing. If you wanted to follow something, you had it right down the hall or in the next building over. A lot of times they'd go dig these things out while the meeting was in progress. Roger, do you think there’s any need to go through all these charts? Let me just… [00:09:38] RB: No, I think that… [00:09:39] MS: I think you see what we've got here. [00:09:41] RB: [Inaudible] Right idea of what the charts were about, and the fact that you could single thread things down to a small detail. I'm glad you brought out too that there were functional charts as well as hardware charts, and I should bring that out in writing too. [00:09:57] MS: Here’s a really complicated chart… [00:09:59] RB: The [spec tray?] [00:10:01] MS: The [spec tray?] I had to keep that up. Dr. Rudolph…At a Christmas party, and he always referred to himself as a simple blacksmith. You ever heard that term? Nobody's ever…Well, anyway…That was his little technique of getting people to come down out of the esoteric technological terms, which was sometimes used simply to cloud the issue. He’d bore in until they could explain it in simple terms. He played dumb. He said, “Well, I'm just a simple blacksmith.” Here’s this guy, a veteran of the V-2 program, the Pershing program manager. “I'm a simple blacksmith.” So I wrote him a little thing, a parody on Longfellow, “Under the spreading chestnut tree, the village smithy stands…” I wrote a parody on that. It’s called, “Under the specification tree, the Saturn smithy stands.” [both laugh] Went on and on about that. He thought that was great. He got a kick out of that. Specification…under the spreading specification tree…There you go. And this did tie in all specs real well. The specification, of course, is what does a piece of hardware have to do? If you don't know what it has to do then it almost becomes a person's own interpretation. He says, “Well, I think it ought to do so and so.” Once you write down and have to get somebody’s approval, it solidifies. [00:11:43] RB: That sounds so obvious, but it strikes me…It's always the obvious things that can hang you out because if you get a guy and say, “We want a valve that will withstand 500 PSI under certain conditions.” He said, “Okay, I can do that.” He builds a valve that will do it, but that valve may not do the job that it's really required to do in terms of interfacing some place else. So you've got to do the spec, you have to design the valve to do this and such and interface some place else. Is that what you're getting at here? [00:12:13] MS: One time—I think I mentioned these charts to you here—at one time, the program manager says, “We have so many documents in this thing, I don't think everybody understands what takes precedence.” You see, if you work in the mission operations area, you tend to take a document called “Mission Operations Plan,” which is put out at headquarters and signed off by some really high ranking cat up there, and you say, “Well, that's the Mission Operations Plan. I'm going to follow that. See, I’m in the Saturn. I follow what the Manned puts out.” But you may find out that there's a document that supersedes the Mission Operations Plan. It might be the Apollo Program Development Plan. That is the case here. Their Configuration Management Manuals, R and QA manuals, test requirements and all these that had…Were very official. The program spec, the Saturn V project spec. And how do all these relate to each other? [00:13:27] MS: I spent weeks and weeks sifting through every document I could find in a whole Saturn program and tried to relate these things and finally divided them into functional groups. You see, like this: manning and finance, technical description and systems engineering, liability and quality assurance, test, mission ops, logistics, procurement and contracts, schedules and showed what document required what other document and how this thing flows. Some of these are planning documents and some reporting documents. This is a fairly obvious thing too, you say, “Well, heck, everybody knows that.” But the funny thing is all these documents arose without any plan. People saw the need for a document, and they would go ahead and produce this thing either at the Apollo program level or Saturn V project level. Sometimes the center would turn out plans. They’d turn out the regulations for inspecting [hulk bolts?] The specifications for inspecting [hulk bolts?]. You say, “Well, that's it!” That's a very expensive process, and maybe the program manager didn't want to follow that. Well, do you have to follow that? I don’t know. So what this was was trying to sort out what document took precedence over what other document. It's a very dull looking two pages here, but every time we explain this to somebody from headquarters or somebody from the Senate or the Department of Defense, they thought this was a terrific idea because it gave a visible coherence to the documentation. [00:15:13] RB: It strikes me you can never write that thing logically in a narrative. But, you know, you could never say, “This takes precedence over that except in instances where…” because that's what you get into. If you can visualize it like that and see the lines of coordination, you can read it readily [faster?] it seems. [00:15:33] MS: I thought it was sort of a dull thing when Bill Sneed first told me to do it, but then as I got into it, I began to see what the problem was. Nobody knew what was really the ruling document, and which ones were co equal, and so forth. Oh, here's a chart on incentive contracting. See, we're converting to incentive contracts—you mentioned that. Here we got Ed King. He's a staff member, and he's following this on all the stages. By the way, [inaudible] happening on all the stages. Here’s a thing on reliability on all the stages. [tape cuts out, restarts at Roger Bilstein saying “But if you can visualize it like that…”] [00:17:07] MS: Let's see…I know I’m not covering everything I should cover, but…This is qualification of all the components—stage by stage and total and total after Rudolph. Now this is something. Each project manager had to get up and tell about all the components. You see, I think the publicized figure was there were six million parts in the Saturn V vehicle, and these things all had to be so-called “qualified.” That is, they had to undergo certain tests and meet these specifications and all these conditions. Once they had done that, then the component was qualified for flight. They had a little certificate and sign this thing off. Let's think about that for a minute. [00:17:55] RB: That's a lot of parts to... [00:17:57] MS: That’s a lot of parts. Then you got the additional problem of deciding whether to qualify the resistors in a small electrical relay system or you just certify the relay system itself. Because many times, the resistor or transistor of some sort would be a failure point. Or a little bit of printed circuit board inside this little black box, it would be a failure point. Something would happen. The thing would short circuit during operation. Do you go down and qualify the printed circuit boards or do you qualify the whole black box? That all had to be worked out. At any rate, it was. Dr. Rudolph had a chart here in his room which showed him the total summation of how component qualification was coming. He not only had to track the big stages, he had to track all the little bitty parts, but he didn't want to get bogged down in detail. This is really a summarization—number of components that had to be qualified, the number that were at that given time and then he had a lot of other data underneath here [in digital form?]. Then he has the total vehicle. It's like a typical business chart. Right here you see that. [00:19:21] RB: Okay. This is the total vehicle and this is by state. [00:19:24] MS: By state. [00:19:25] RB: One for the IU and one for the subsystem. [00:19:28] MS: So you have GSE. GSE was a horse of a different color because it was a bunch of piece parts almost. They had a lot of trouble with GSE on the Pershing program, but Dr. Rudolph put a lot of effort on that thing. He had had problems before. Here's the chart on reviews, assessments, and certifications. They have followed nothing but that. All the stages of all the vehicles: 501, 502, 503. [00:20:15] RB: I'm just curious, why was all this considered so confidential? Was it because of the…Was it considered national security or terms of contractual relationship with the contractor? [00:20:31] MS: Well, I didn't know it was considered so confidential. [00:20:33] RB: No? I just noticed on the back of one of these things here. [00:20:36] MS: Oh! Those were confidential. Oh, I can explain that. All launch dates were by decree of NASA headquarters, confidential. That was the only thing that was confidential. So every chart that showed a launch date had to be classified. [00:20:56] RB: Why was that, do you think? [00:21:01] MS: I'm not quite sure unless it was just a holdover from the Department of Defense missile launching days. Might have been a thing by NASA headquarters just to keep the launch dates away from the public so that people weren't, you know, if we had a slippage and we weren't under the gun, so to speak. They could change the dates without anybody getting all on their backs about it. I don't know. But eventually the launch date…That's the only thing I know of the launch date…Oh, there was another thing I think, but we didn't…Something about engine specifications. There was some engine technical data which was confidential, which may have been because they were considering using the engines on some DOD project or something. I'm not too familiar with that. I do remember that the engines had some kind of a technical classification problem, and we had this launch date problem. [00:21:58] RB: I suppose you get into the same thing in certain aspects of construction if DOD was going to use certain types of construction, something like that, that could be confidential. They're classified kind of… [00:22:13] MS: Here's a good old S-II stage. They had their problems. They switched from one kind of material to another in midstream, different thicknesses, and they had to go to different welding techniques. They had a common bulkhead which was thirty-three feet in diameter. Now a common bulkhead had been built before on S-IVB stages, but not a thirty-three foot diameter job. Boy, they had their problems. You can see this chart right here, there are…one, two, three, four, five errors indicating major problem areas on that given date—tenth of March ‘66. All kinds of slippages. See all these anticipated slippages. Every time you see a diamond that goes out like that from some place back here where there's a little triangle indicates an estimated slippage. Things look like bad, bad, man. [laughs] And then you have to find out why this was slipping. This is where you go into these backup charts and all. [00:23:24] RB: Okay, and these red arrows—the problems—have numbers on them? [00:23:28] MS: Yeah, those were related to these written problem sheets. [00:23:44] RB: Okay. Boy, they were slipping on the transporters. Transporters were slipping [inaudible]. It almost…It gets to be a real problem because if you're building a transporter, for example, and the word comes down that the stage itself is slipping, you’re inclined to say, “Okay, there's no big rush on this thing. Let’s cool it.” You know? [Inaudible] [00:24:07] MS: That's right. [00:24:08] RB: So the result was that they would begin to slip. [00:24:16] MS: We're trying to locate a cartoon which shows each stage as a racehorse. It's got a finish line up here by the [inaudible] program manager headquarters, losing the finish line back and forth. [00:24:31] RB: That's the cartoon that Sid was telling me about? [00:24:33] MS: Yeah. [00:24:34] RB: Okay, yeah. And Rudolph was on an operating table [inaudible]? [00:24:38] MS: Well, I thought it was about that. That's a different cartoon. I thought that was on the same cartoon, but apparently that was a different one. But that was one of the tricks is to get all these stages like your biscuits and your jelly to come out even. You have to put your time and attention to the item that's required. These tiger teams…You know, they established the tiger team. The S-II got so bad off that they just got a whole mass of people, including the project manager and a whole bunch of experts. They just went out and jumped on North American Rockwell's doorstep and says, “Here we are, fellas. We want to help you. Is there any way we can help you? And we better be helping you quick because you guys are holding up the show.” [00:25:26] RB: Yeah. [00:25:27] MS: This tiger team...I’m sure you’ve… [00:25:30] RB: Is that when they got started? With S-II? They really weren't…Were the other periods of time? [00:25:35] MS: That's the first time I recall a tiger team. In fact, it was the big tiger team effort. [00:25:43] RB: You know, one of the things that still gets me is why this thing is so much different from other control rooms. I just want to kind of recap that again. One of the things is, as far as the charts are concerned, the people around. That makes a big difference. [00:26:00] MS: Right. [00:26:01] RB: But that's backed up too by the matrix, management matrices. [00:26:04] MS: That's right. [00:26:07] RB: And the other thing that strikes me—I think it reflects the managerial intent of the Saturn V program offices—you've got charts, you say, for hardware, the project managers. But it's very significant, you've got a separate set of charts for the functional managers. They were writing, you know, just as many problems and just as much importance as anybody else. I understand that too, that was unique kind of with the Saturn V program office. In fact, the functional managers had as much muscle as anybody else in the organization. [00:26:39] MS: Yeah, I've never seen it really carried to that degree before. Nor has it been to that degree since. [00:26:50] RB: Would it have been necessary in some place else, like for instance the engine program office? [00:26:56] MS: No. Because they had a single operating unit, I think. Engine didn't require all this integration business, you see? That's one reason that I don't believe that the Saturn management approach is transferable simply saying, “Okay, use that system on this project here.” See, because what we had, and I'm going to pump this handle one more time, was a number of major hardware units being built at a number of locations throughout the whole country. All this had to be brought together to perform a given function—that is a launch on a given date—and they had to succeed technically, and they had to not exceed their budget. It all had to be coordinated. Now, I don't know of any other project except going to the moon that's ever really required quite an effort like this. Usually, I mean, even building a B-17 in World War II, I wasn't there, but I had a feeling that Boeing could almost do that thing up in Seattle. They would just buy parts. I think that was a different concept. You just buy parts and bring them in. The biggest deal might be buying an engine from somebody like Pratt & Whitney or the like. But never anything for each unit in itself was so important. [00:28:38] RB: One of the other areas where that would have been included was the Saturn I-IB office. But there you're dealing with only two stages. [00:28:50] MS: Yeah. Two out of the three were developed in-house. [00:28:55] RB: In-house, yeah. [00:28:57] MS: They really were out on the S-IVB as it was a case unto itself. They said, “We will buy this stage.” They didn't need all this…They just really had one big stage coming from one place. [00:29:20] RB: And even though Chrysler wound up with the contract, that technology for building the basic S-I, S-IB first stages had been pretty well [inaudible]. [00:29:31] MS: The whole thing was designed, tested, and they [were flown here?]. [00:29:36] RB: The tankages were taken out of other Redstone and Jupiter programs. There really weren't the multitude of problems they had with the Saturn V. [00:29:46] MS: I believe we built fifteen S-I and S-IB stages here at Huntsville. I can't swear to that, but I believe all the S-I stages were built here. I believe the first five S-IB stages. [00:30:02] RB: I thought they'd shifted that down to Michoud though. [00:30:05] MS: Maybe the last three S-Is were built in Michoud. [00:30:08] RB: Chrysler took it over. [00:30:10.] MS: Maybe you're right. [00:30:12] RB: Chrysler built the last two of the S-I stages. [00:30:15] MS: Was that what it was? [00:30:16] RB: I don't really know for sure. I was under the impression they had all the S-IB stages [and if they did?][inaudible] Michoud. [00:30:21] MS: Oh, did they? Maybe you’re right. [00:30:24] RB: I'm not really positive about that so...But in any case, the point is, you say the basic design work and stuff, those two stages for the Saturn 1 and 1-B, the first stages, are basically similar. [00:30:39] MS: Right. [00:30:45] RB: The only thing different were the upper stages. But even on the shuttle or the Skylab, you don't have the staff functions having the similar muscles as they did in the Saturn V program. Is that an aspect of managerial preference or just the logic of the program account for that? [00:31:11] MS: Well, I think number one, you hit it is managerial preference. However, I think that in certain programs, the manager's preference would be outweighed by the necessity of doing it that way. [tape ends] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context ohc_stnv_000040_A Title A name given to the resource Shettles, Mack (Part 1) Description An account of the resource Michael Shettles describes how NASA’s Saturn V program relied on innovative management and communication systems to coordinate the highly complex effort of building and launching the rocket. He explains that Marshall Space Flight Center developed an advanced teleconference network that connected NASA Headquarters, Marshall, Kennedy Space Center, Houston, and other locations, allowing engineers, managers, contractors, and specialists to participate equally in real-time discussions without extensive travel. Shettles emphasizes that the Saturn V program fostered a participative management style in which any engineer could raise technical concerns, regardless of rank, while meeting chairs ensured orderly discussion. He also discusses the use of document management systems, specifications, and visual charts to clarify reporting relationships, establish document precedence, track schedules, monitor component qualification, and identify problem areas across all stages of the program. These management tools enabled leaders such as Arthur Rudolph to oversee millions of individual parts without losing sight of critical issues, while "tiger teams" were assembled to resolve major development problems, particularly on the troubled S-II stage. Shettles concludes that the Saturn V management approach was unique because it integrated multiple contractors, NASA centers, functional organizations, and hardware elements into a single coordinated program, a level of organizational complexity he believed was unlike any other aerospace project of its time. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource .MP4 Type The nature or genre of the resource Interviews Audio Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives and Special Collections, Huntsville, Alabama Language A language of the resource en Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource This material may be protected under U. S. Copyright Law (Title 17, U.S. Code) which governs the making of photocopies or reproductions of copyrighted materials. You may use the digitized material for private study, scholarship, or research. Though the University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives and Special Collections has physical ownership of the material in its collections, in some cases we may not own the copyright to the material. It is the patron's obligation to determine and satisfy copyright restrictions when publishing or otherwise distributing materials found in our collections. https://oralhistory.uah.edu/files/original/78ec7fa073fd317edb444455ddb5514e.jpg 4598197eb9b09fa4ae86fb6882190ee7 https://oralhistory.uah.edu/files/original/732c2fa9adb1a3945e5fd45378d06771.mp4 dbd7c3046cd24db3156d79572a508de0 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Saturn V Collection Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Shettles, Mack Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Bilstein, Roger E. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 0:57:42 Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound [00:00:00] Mack Shettles: See, here's another thing, talking about the complexity in this thing. See, in an orbiter, in the space shuttle, right now they're planning to build at first a couple and later on perhaps five orbiters. But here we had a program where we were going to build 15 of these stages. How many stages are involved when we build fifteen Saturn Vs? Plus simultaneously building a number of Saturn IBs, like the S-IVB stages. On that chart, you'd just be surprised how many S-IVB stages had to be built. Let's see…One, two, three, four. Four stages on every Saturn V times fifteen stages is sixty stages—flight stages. Then you had your ground test stages, you know, like the static firing, the facilities check out, the structural tests. This goes into dozens and dozens of stages for the Saturn V. These things had to follow in some sequence too. Here's one that's taken a different slice of the cake. He's following [nice is nice?]. We get 501 launched, you can't forget that we haven't gotten to the moon. We've got to get 502, 503, 504 down there, delivered, and they have to meet these technical requirements—increased payload, for example. So here's a chart which follows these things and shows the interval and checks overlap and possible problems in transporters and the like. This thing got rather complicated. [00:02:20] Roger Bilstein: Okay, well, maybe we should...Oh, I know one of the things I wanted to ask about again was these things by Colonel [Sweet?]. Was that his name? [00:02:30] MS: Oh, yeah. Well, that wasn't really the main part of the Saturn program. [00:02:38] RB: No, it was just an interesting little sidebar. [00:02:40] MS: Yeah, well, it was typical of the briefings that we had to give people. We would have generals and admirals and people like that coming in for visits. Occasional congressmen or governors of the state, or just a group of educators, you know, the president of So-and-So University and his group would come in, any number of people would be briefed on the Saturn program. We were told about Colonel [Sweet?] would be here, but Colonel [Sweet?] never showed up. There really was a Colonel [Sweet?], but he simply used his name to send unknown groups. We were always told that the composition of the group was classified, and all you were supposed to do was to brief them on the Saturn program. Sometimes they would come in, and they would be wearing turtleneck shirts and looked a little academic. Then again, they'd come in and half of them would be in uniform with a lot of brass and medals. Occasionally, they would be with an Oriental. I went over to brief one Colonel [Sweet?] group, it turned out the only guy that could speak English was their leader, and the others were all Japanese. [00:04:09] RB: [Sweet?] was in the Pentagon some place? [00:04:12] MS: No, he was in NASA headquarters. He was the DOD interface. He had a title called NASA Interagency Affairs Coordinator, something to that effect. Interagency Affairs Coordinator. [00:04:33] RB: But he was acting as representative of DOD in that sense then? [00:04:38] MS: DOD, State Department, CIA. See? No matter what agency. Sometimes we'd have people like…guys would come in, another swarthy-skinned individual with a handlebar mustache and sixteen stars. I know this guy's a general from Honduras or someplace or someplace down in South America. You know a whole bunch of people with him and they... I couldn't tell you who they were, but I knew they weren't… [00:05:15] RB: I just think that it's indicative too of the number of kinds of people that were sent down here because Weber apparently felt very strongly about the success of this particular operation. [00:05:28] MS: One of the things that NASA was supposed to do was to make public its findings and its results. That's in our charter. We're an arm of the American people. [00:05:47] RB: Well, I'll guess that’s about [over it?]. I just want to kind of get some of these things back down and talk a little bit about the overhead stuff here. And you did have television, closed-circuit television from both Houston and the Cape? Is that right? [00:06:01] MS: Yes. Yes. [00:06:04] RB: So you could cover the launch. [00:06:05] MS: Launch only, right. Now that wasn't applicable…You couldn't pick up people in the rooms. You could pick up tests, like a wet countdown demonstration test at the Cape. That's where you load the fuel onto the plane… [00:06:21] RB: You weren't hooked up to [MTF?] by any chance? [00:06:27] MS: I'm not sure about that. It seems to me at one time they were going to be hooked up to [MTF?]. I don't know if it ever came to pass or not. [00:06:36] RB: I'm just curious—not that it makes that much difference. Do you have a direct hookup with [KSC?] or does that come through the HOSC over here that you pick it up? [00:06:44] MS: It comes through the, well, the LIEF board, Launch Information Exchange facility is what they call it. HOSC is on the LIEF circuit. Huntsville Operations Support Center is, in effect, a room where all these people meet. They are serviced by this LIEF board network, which is all tied into the overall communications facility—your regular telephone systems, plus your television transmission, and [communicating?] and like that. [00:07:20] RB: I'm just curious what is stored behind these doors. [00:07:24] MS: Oh, those are supplies. [00:07:27] RB: Okay, just pads, pencils, and stuff like that. [00:07:31] MS: Extra tapes and magnetic gadgets for these boards. [00:07:36] RB: I heard that Rudolph had problems getting this thing set up. Do you know anything about that? [00:07:41] MS: A little bit. See, Rudolph was convinced of the necessity of this, and nobody would put out any money for it. So I think he had to sort of scramble around and scrounge. He just took this space here, which isn't necessarily the ideal space, but it's what he could come up with. In fact, at one time—sort of a fun little thing to me—people would come in and look at the paneling, and they'd say, “Oh, these people are living plush! Plush!” So Dr. Rudolph had Harold Price—who at that time was the guy that operated the control room—he had Harold Price prepare a sign that says, “The cost of the vinyl wall covering in the hall is seven cents per square foot. The cost of this paneling is six and a half cents per square foot. We are not wasting governmental money by having paneling in this thing. It's cheaper than the stuff out in the corridor.” He had it right up next to the door there. [00:08:56] RB: [laughs] Well, was that the main problem? He couldn't get authorization to use the money for this thing? [00:09:02] MS: See, they needed it in the back back here—you've been in the back?—you know, there's a…A teleprompter came in here and rigged all these, well, carousel slide projectors, view-graph projectors, movie projector, television projector, recording device…Then had this…This all can be remotely controlled from this lectern here. You can start the movie machine, you can operate the slides, you can’t operate the view-graph of course. But you can dim the lights, turn out the lights, and so forth. Teleprompter put all that in. I think the total cost was something like $35,000. That's what I heard for this room. We have had a lot of people ask us what it cost. A lot of people looked at the design. I think I told you, I got a call one day from Raymond Loewy Associates in New York out of the clear blue. To this day I don't exactly know what they were up to, but they wanted to help. They wanted to discuss the layout of this control room. Apparently Raymond Loewy Associates—who I think, I think, “Gee whiz, Raymond Loewy!”—they wanted to, they had somehow heard about room 319, and they wanted to know how it was laid out. [00:10:30] RB: Why was Rudolph so insistent about getting it? Was it his experience in the Pershing program, you think? Or why did he make such a big thing about getting this thing? [00:10:40] MS: Well, I think it was just his personal philosophy that if you couldn’t put down information on a chart in a clear, graphic form that you didn't know what you were talking about. He could perceive it better that way too. He was just one of those persons. Some people don't mind reading page after page of writing. He would rather look at a graph. Well, I think a lot of businessmen are that way. They don't see how the sales trends are. We all see this thing. Look at the stock market report, you know, things going up and down, you track the thing. To describe this in words would be practically impossible. In fact, you said it yourself a while ago. So I think it boils down to that. It's a matter of transmitting. It's a way of communicating. It's as old as drawing an arrow in the dirt and saying, “We went this way.” [00:11:38] RB: Yeah, that's more graphic. [00:11:40] MS: It's graphic, you know? If your [trial’s?] behind you, and you lay out that arrow or sit stones down, and that's the way you go. This is a little bit more refined. When you get into the business of semantics and communication, you're getting beyond my capabilities. It must be related to that field. It may have been impossible, as you say, I think really it would have been impossible to put in words all that was summarized in graphic form here. [00:12:27] RB: Well, I think that really kind of covers it. [00:12:31] MS: I haven't said anything about PERT. I don't know if I should say anything about PERT or not. [00:12:34] RB: Okay, what do you have to say about PERT? [00:12:36] MS: PERT was one of our more unsuccessful things. We’ve been talking about success, and I think something should be said about PERT and its unsuccess [sic]. [00:12:45] RB: Okay. [00:12:50] MS: The critical path method that this construction firm first came up with…I think they were the first users of it. Forget who it was…Catalytic Construction Company or somebody. [00:13:03] RB: I had the impression that PERT was the thing that was developed in the Polaris program. [00:13:07] MS: Well, there's a matter of debate about that. I suspect that this Catalytic Construction Company, which I believe is—I'm not sure—might have been a division of Dupont. Man, the name's all wrong. Anyway, it was a pretty big outfit. In building large buildings and all, they found out they had to have this, this, this, and this, and this. They began to chart this thing out, and then they see what the critical path was. We better be getting the electrical wiring in because if we don't, we're not going to be able to perceive the rest of these things. It's a logic diagram, and you put the time intervals between events on there. Okay. I think that they did that first. [00:13:55] MS: Now, the Polaris people grabbed it and called it PERT. They refined it somewhat, carried it to a great extreme and said, “Well, this is a really terrific idea.” Now, we used PERT mainly because we were forced into using PERT. Most of the people liked the Gantt chart approach because it had a time scale across the top. PERT doesn't have a time scale across the top. The times are simply written digitally between events. You can't really compare when things are happening. Now, there is a version of PERT called a squared PERT network in which you put a time scale across the top, and you put the events on this time scale. Which improves the heck out of it, as far as conveying the information, then you begin to grasp the thing. But we didn't have that. We required our contractors to have PERT diagrams of all our activities, and I understand this went into the tens of thousands of events. These tens of thousands of events, again, in the same manner as this, flowed up into our project offices. We in turn summarized this thing and put it on this rear wall back there—a little picture of that PERT diagram. I think it may have been helpful in 501, but then it became apparent that simply having the same network… First of all, you didn't do the same things for 502 because a lot of these things were done. Once done, there was no need to show them again. You had to revise the network. You didn't do exactly the same thing in 502 like you didn't activate the test stands every time for every vehicle. There were things like that. You didn't re-qualify the component. You see the things I'm talking about there? [00:15:53] RB: So there's a lot of useless information that was clogged up the PERT network in a sense? [00:15:57] MS: Well, on the first one it was there, okay. But on the second one you didn't need all that. Finally it became obvious that you weren't getting anything out of it that you couldn't get out of one of these Gantt-type waterfall charts. So we dropped it. [00:16:12] RB: [What did you follow?] in the early R&D phase there? [00:16:21] MS: I think we had more problems than we had problem-solves from it. I'll give you an example. You're supposed to have a critical path. This critical path tells you, “Now get on this subject here.” Well, what happened was we'd have this thing up here, and you'd come out with thirty-seven negative paths. Are you familiar enough with PERT to know? A negative path is one in which you have an end objective set up, and you have a time now and an event. If there's not enough time to take from this event and achieve this objective, then you have what you call a negative path. It has negative time. Now, if from this time event to the end objective you have more than enough time, then you have a slack path. You've got extra time in the path. Okay. Now, whichever path requires the most time between now and the end objective, it may have slack in it. It could still be the critical path. It still hasn't had time to do it all, but it just has the least amount of slack time. [00:17:32] MS: Now, carrying it on further, if from this event now to the end objective, it turns out to be, requires 15 weeks more than you've got, then you've got a negative path, which is the critical path. You've got a negative time critical path. We wound up—like I say, at one time, I think somebody counted—thirty-seven paths, all with negative time on them. The time that separated them was not great. Let's say that the most critical path had seventeen weeks of negative slack. You had to make up seventeen weeks in order to still meet the end objective. The next critical path might have 16.5 weeks. The next one might have 15.3. The next one 13.5. There was no way of knowing how difficult the effort would be to improve this time so that you could meet the end objective. In other words, if you simply took the one with the greatest amount of negative slack and worked on it, it might have been the simplest problem to solve. Whereas the one way down here, the seventeenth most critical path, might have had a technical problem that was going to be so difficult to solve that you just could not get the slack time out. It may have been a really critical path that you really need to be working on. [00:19:04] MS: We discussed this with some people who were supposed to be PERT experts. So we kept thinking, “Well, we're learning about this.” We turned to IBM, and we turned to—I forget who all—there was supposed to be experts. The comp lab was real hot on this because it required a lot of computer time. Boy, it ran computers night and day over there on this PERT thing. When it boiled down to it, they didn't know a damn bit more about it than we did. In fact, they never had realized the practical operating problems in the application of this thing. Did I come through to you about this negative path? I've covered it really quickly. And if you're familiar with it, it'll make sense. If you're not, I hope it's made sense anyway. I hope I've been able to explain it. [00:19:57] MS: But at any rate, there was a certain amount of judgment, which did not come out of a computer printout. Now there's another thing. Here comes this computer printout umpteen inches thick. Now that you've got it, what do you do with it? You see, the program managers didn't have time to sit down and flip through this thing. It's very complicated. About every two or three weeks, they'd change something to do in column A to column C and this, that, and the other. It didn't come through graphically. It didn't communicate with you. The machine to man communication was difficult. It took an expert to sit down and analyze the printout and then transfer that into something that could be understood quickly by a busy program manager. [00:20:46] RB: Well, I've got an impression that sometimes it was useful because since the contractor was required to make PERT reports all the time, it was on occasion possible for a staff manager to find a glitch quicker than a project manager could because they were getting stuff directly off the floor, hardware floor [inaudible]. [00:21:09] MS: If this occurred, you can bet your bottom dollar the next time the printout came around, that wouldn't occur again. As soon as the project manager found out about it, he picks up his pencil, and he says, “Well, really the time between this, fifteen and sixteen, I have here estimated as sixteen weeks. That's really six weeks.” [clicks tongue] Makes that a six. The next printout, it doesn't show up at the critical path anymore. It's that simple to rig it. Just change your time estimate. And they did it. [00:21:41] RB: The managers here? Or the managers and contractors? [00:21:43] MS: Everywhere, at all levels, wherever the pressure was put on. The contractors…I don't think our program managers did it because they didn't have the input. But I suspected at the contractor level and at the resident management office level, they'd have a confab, and they'd legitimately say we're going to work out a different plan. You see, this is what you can't argue about. You say, “Well, the reason we reduced that from sixteen to six is we worked out an action plan.” You can't tell the difference between a legitimate action plan and simply a rig in the network unless you go through the whole thing yourself. You see, there's more work involved than there is savings that comes out of it. Incidentally, I say this not as a prejudiced PERT man, because I was one of the first persons involved in PERT back in the old ME lab—manufacturing engineering lab—when we drove PERT networks for SA-5, and I thought it was the most interesting thing I had gotten into. I really went at it in a very positive attitude: “Hot dog! This is very scientific, you know?” All these prints out and all… [00:22:57] RB: So you didn't really become disenchanted with it until though you got into this program control. [00:23:02] MS: The more complicated the program gets, the worse that thing gets. The day-to-day application is horrendous. [00:23:11] RB: What would you have done otherwise? [00:23:14] MS: What we did: use these summation-type bar charts. [00:23:19] RB: The guy…The information from the bar chart comes from some guy here picking up the phone out at Los Angeles and saying, “Hi, Kevin, I’m the…” [00:23:29] MS: Picking up the phone, being on a plane, getting a written report. We required scheduled reports to be submitted weekly, bar chart type. We required technical reports. This is what all these people are being paid for is to put together two-in-two. They see a technical welding problem, yet they see a schedule that says bulkhead number three is going to be completed on so-and-so day. Then you pick up the phone and say, “Look, how are you going to complete bulkhead number three when your welding problem hasn't been solved? In fact, it looks to me like you're going to be running a test on that at the time you're completing the bulkhead. You can't do that.” Then they work the problem. [00:24:18] RB: Well, that's interesting about PERT. I have to see if I can’t describe that a little better when I write. [00:24:26] MS: I had a guy on the United Airlines, if I remember, said they were about to get into PERT very heavily one day in a briefing. I just told him very frankly, I said, “I would walk cautiously.” He said they've been told that that would solve all their problems. I said, “Let me tell you a little bit about PERT when you get down to operating that thing.” I said, “In theory, there's no more beautiful system in existence. In fact, it is! It sounds terrific! I've never come across any management thing that sounded better that worked worse!” [00:25:08] RB: [laughs] Well, is PERT being used increasingly or decreasingly? [00:25:08] MS: Decreasingly. I very seldom see anything about PERT. [00:25:14] RB: They're getting back to Gantt charts again [inaudible]. [00:25:17] MS: Well, you'll see logic diagrams of people doing the early planning of projects and all, but I don't think they put times on all these things. I think it's…If I were going to plan the space tug, let's say, if I were a project manager, I might sit down and have my schedules chief fill me out of PERT network or a logic diagram of what we had to do—this and this and this—and how maybe interface with the shuttle had to be available here. I might have this on the chart, and I might look at it and think about it and have it crystallize in my mind the sequence of events. But as far as writing a computer program and start getting a weekly printout on that, I’d never, never do it. It just wouldn’t be worth it. [00:26:11] RB: They're not using PERT now with the shuttle or with the Sky... [00:26:17] MS: You would have to check them, but not to my knowledge. I haven't seen anything about PERT. I get a copy of the monthly report schedules book that the shuttle people put out, and it has nothing about PERT in there. [00:26:32] RB: [Inaudible] or is that different? [00:26:35] MS: Well, [SART?] is just a name for this Gantt-type bar chart approach. That's what they use. [00:26:50] RB: Okay, that’s very good about PERT [inaudible] [00:26:54] MS: I don't want somebody to jump into that thing. That's one of our replies to this Syracuse University report. They were [knocking?]...A lot of our management techniques were rather expensive. We brought out that PERT was fairly expensive, and we did not recommend its use again. But there were techniques that we thought were worth the money by configuration management. It provided that iron framework that kept things from going to hell in a [wheelbath?]. Things could have really gotten bad without that. They could have gotten bad without all that component qualification programs, all that ground testing—you know—bugs worked out of this thing before they launched. I didn't mean to take it so long. I know I got one of them… [00:27:53] RB: Okay, that's good. [tape cuts out] [00:28:38] MS: ...A rather busy period and production of the latter stages had already started. [00:28:44] RB: This is early 1966? [00:28:46] MS: This is early 1966, so I'll get into those charts in a minute. First, let me tell you about the control room, and most of these things…I read your write-up. You've got the hang of it already. But I think what you want me to say is how do I see it, okay? [00:29:08] RB: Yeah. [00:29:09] MS: Okay. [Inaudible] I'm going to repeat some of the things you said in order to keep this in my mind. [00:29:23] RB: That's fine, because I want to really get all this down on the paper for posterity here. [00:29:27] MS: The Saturn V was… [00:29:36] Third person: Let me interrupt you a second, Roger. [00:29:37] RB: Okay, go ahead. [00:29:39] MS: All right. Dr. Rudolph, I think, will have to be given credit to [inaudible], case may be, for this control room concept. This was inherent in Dr. Rudolph's philosophy of management. We both know that every manager of anything, from the lumber mill to Polaris missile, has his own idea about how to do things. Some people get involved very personally, some people delegate the heck out of things. Dr. Rudolph had a lot of traits, one of them which was he wanted to get all the management data…You’re really breaking in, aren’t you? [00:30:27] Third Person: Now, now [inaudible]. Roger, [inaudible] be glad to do it [inaudible]. [00:30:43] MS: Dr. Rudolph had a thing about transferring knowledge into graphic form. Some people refer to this as a fetish for charts. But there [inaudible] to be said for that. He was one of the prime movers, although headquarters would probably say [inaudible] in having this control room set up. Each chart in here is a summarization of what went on in a pyramid, as you well know, Saturn V, let’s say, S-IC stage office, S-IC contractor, and all the S-IC subcontractors. This is the hardware [fashion?] now. He had all this data [feeding?]. Parallel to this, he had all these functional things that went on, which are a little bit more difficult to describe. He had a functional manager, you know, for [inaudible] quality, for mission operations, for systems engineering, and that man was responsible for going into each stage, going to other centers, and keeping track of management across the entire stage. [00:32:39] RB: The vertical… [00:32:41] MS: The vertical thing. That data was just played on charts in here. Basically at one time, on this side of the room, this western end of the group, these were all hardware or stage oriented charts, and those were all functional charts. The only significance of that is that he attached just as much importance to the functional part that he did to the hardware part. [00:33:12] MS: Now, in addition to strictly hardware data, for example, in order to know what his hardware problems, progress, trends, and so forth were on a Saturn V launch vehicle in totality, he had to know what was going on on each stage. He therefore delegated to this stage manager the responsibility for accumulating all data related to this stage. Once the S-IC stage manager [returned?], [went to?] the S-IC contractor. The S-IC stage manager, as we both know too, and I don't mean to make this a little complicated, but he had lateral connections with working panels, with the laboratories. This thing was more complex than I'm drawing it right here. I mean, the S-IC stage manager had to keep on top of how his electrical system was going, for example. He also had to make contact with the engines people. At that time, the engines office was a separate office from Saturn V. [00:34:29] MS: Anyway, Rudolph said, “All right, you Mr. S-IC or you Mr. Instrument Unit, go out and get all this data together. [Inaudible] plan to do it. What I want to see is a summarized situation for me. I want this to be summarized in this control room in 319. I want it in a graphic form. I want it [inaudible]. I want somebody specifically responsible,”—as you pointed out, which is one of the key things to it wasn't an office, but a group of people responsible. He had a person—you can still see that person's name on these charts even to this day—that was responsible for making sure that information was correct. [00:35:12] MS: So all this data fed up, [inaudible] it fed laterally like to the engines office or one of these labs. They summarized it on charts like these, which is a very standard method. This is just a waterfall or just a Gantt-type chart back to the picture of what activities are occurring on which stage. Now, the reason I've got this other set of charts out here is that this entire control room has been an evolving process. As our problems change, what we show changes. This thing is pretty well all done. Now, we're in a storage portion of S-II. All active, all building, all testing and everything else has been done. This will show you that this was all tracked. We had a systematic method of showing whether an event was going to be early or late. If the latter was going to be late, then this thing was followed up. We've got a red arrow [that says?] problem area in addition to having a scheduled slide thing. This was part of a big board over here. [00:36:42] RB: The problem areas? [00:36:43] MS: We have two things covering problem areas. We had one that was a problem area board, which listed the problem and who did what to take care of it, and what the status was…The other thing was on the overall schedule, which is still here. This was a whole Saturn V program [thing?] This gave Dr. Rudolph an overall view of things. It went back even prior to President Kennedy’s declaration we're going to make it to the moon [inaudible]. [00:37:27] RB: Master summary schedule in other words? [00:37:30] MS: Here's JFK’s decision in May ‘61, and here's land on the moon July ‘69. All this stuff [inaudible] vehicle development, test facilities, test programs, showing all of these things. This was the big picture. These large arrows stick out in different places. Everywhere you have an arrow, on the problem board, you had a problem listed. We tracked that thing down so it got solved. I'll show you some charts in here. If the problem were of enough significance, he would make a special chart just for that problem. Generally, just listing it and using words was sufficient. [00:38:25] MS: This sounds [relative?] and minor also, but it’s important—and you've already written it down—this control room represented the acme of data collection for Saturn V. It corresponded in every way—in symbology, in width of the bars, in everything—to the control rooms that the other centers had, that Washington had, and that the contractors had. [00:39:03] MS: Dr. Rudolph, in fact, would get on people if they didn't have their triangles just exactly, they had their upside down to his. He didn't like that at all. Rudolph, most people feel like was a nitpicker, a [inaudible], [an imperialist?] What he really wanted, I think, was clear communication. He would just go on and on until everybody he was sure was saying the same thing and knew that they were saying the same thing. You’ve been in a meeting many times, everybody says, “Yeah, this is so, and this is so, and this is so.” Everybody at the center had a different idea. Rudolph would wrestle with this thing, and he would knead that dough until he knew everybody was on board. Then he'd go over to the next point. [00:39:51] MS: All these control rooms were [inaudible]. A great deal of effort was spent on this. Contractors weren't particularly happy because they had to display their data not only for Rudolph, but they had to display it the way he wanted it seen. A number of cases felt like they had better ways of doing it. You can imagine the Boeing company…They've been building planes, you know, since the old P-26 and all this kind of stuff, so they felt like they knew how to run a program. This didn't matter to Rudolph one wit. He wanted it done like this. And he was right—I think—because it enabled him to go and visit and all the people under him to go and visit from place to place. Immediately the thought process was simplified. They didn't have to go learn all this symbology. Like I say, this sounds like a small thing. This isn't a…In the totality of Saturn V, this is a small thing, but in the matter of management, it sure does save a heck of a lot of time once it got set up. [00:40:58] MS: Let me show you some of the [charts?] that he had. There were a number of special purpose charts here. He said, “Our number one objective here is to get 501”—the first Saturn V—“down to the Cape and get that thing launched.” So he's got stages of development. He's got activities—see, these are battleship tests and so forth—that must be accomplished prior to the deliverance of 501. These things were all related. See, he's got this drawn out here, and shows how the dynamic test vehicle, all the tests and all…Are we going to get these things? Is this [shaking?] going to get done in time? Will we get the results back? Will it be analyzed? How does that tie into the facility’s checkout vehicle, which was down at the KSC? What sort of problems are we having? [00:42:05] MS: The whole thing gets back to the fact that this thing was very…It took place in so many diverse geographical locations, with so many different companies, so many different organizations, that tying it all together was the problem. Much, much activity went into this tying together business. I think this is what Jim Webb was talking about when he said he had never seen anything so pulled together. Anybody can make charts, but these charts represented a coherent display of data. Every major item could be tracked back down to its finest points. This isn't so obvious, especially today, looking back on it. I mean, you have to have been here almost to see some of this thing. You can see the gist of this. You can see that he has things other than the 501 vehicle itself. Then he shows what's going on on 501. You can see all these things, you know, like this is a milestone that's taking place early. Here's one that's early. Here's one that's late. He's got major milestones circled around…Intermediate milestones…And it's just all there in a very systematic manner. [00:43:29] MS: They wanted to track the activation of a launch facility. Are we getting our GSC down there on time? So he's got all this graphically depicted, see? Howard Burns was a test and checkout project manager. Howard Burns couldn't direct anybody to do anything legally. That's an interesting thing. He was in charge of the test office. He had no directive authority in the classical sense at all, but Dr. Rudolph looked to him to see that this whole thing was being done. He had to get with the [LVGSE?] manager, he had to get with the Cape, Lord knows who all he had to get with…The Sanders display people up in New Hampshire or whatever. Rudolph didn't care, but Burns, in his opinion, was the functional manager to see that all the tests…Well, he had test, and one of the things under test he just allocated to him was this site activation thing here. [00:44:37] MS: There’s a KSC detailed flow plan, shows how this thing is going to be processed. Let me just cut through some of these. Here's a blow-up. Remember we showed you the dynamic test program and how it fed into 501? This is just a blow-up of that, of the dynamic test program. One chart, [inaudible]. If you want to see, there were some little bitty tabs back there a while ago says, “We've got a little problem,” flip over the end of the chart so-and-so, and you can follow this problem even more closely. Then here's the verbal problem area board I was talking about. The date the problem was reported, identifying it—that is—what piece of hardware is involved? [00:45:29] RB: The S-II. [laughs] [00:45:32] MS: The S-II. And LC-39-500F checkout, see? Which ties into the fact we just had a chart on the LC-39-500F checkout activation. He's got a man honchoing that thing. S-IIT captive firing program, and then it shows the status. Here's an extremely tight schedule for system development facility—red board—in development and debugging of integrated [gets?] operating system programs. The estimates are delivered to KSC 16 March ‘66. Then he's got another thing that says, “See display 40,” which is 500F-LC-39 and SA-501 tape requirements. So we just mentioned LC-39-500F chart. He's got another chart on the 501 tape—that is, you know—the control tapes, the launch vehicle digital control, and the launch site. They have some tapes and all. When a problem arose, it was expanded upon to the point necessary. [00:46:52] MS: This is another thing. Not only did he identify the problem, he said, “Fine, so we know that, we know the status, and we know that this man here is reporting this thing. Now who are the points of commitment?” He had a...Rudolph—I keep quoting Rudolph because I really feel like he was the guy behind this thing—he didn't believe in systems alone. This looks like a massive system. He tied people into these systems under points of commitment. He says, “Industrial operations” —this is for the S-II-1—he says, “Industrial operations is certainly involved, and R&DO is involved, and the contractor.” Then he says, “Who at each one of these places?” Colonel Yarkin, Mr. Widener, and a fellow named Greer. Now these guys, when he says points of commitment, that terminology in itself was debated, thrashed about, defined and redefined until everybody was nauseous with it because nobody could quite decide what a point of commitment was. Some people want to say, “Well, it's the top man on the pile. He's the only guy that can really commit.” But that really wasn't the case because back in this project component qualification test programs, they got guys down at lower management levels that they could work this thing out. That's all Dr. Rudolph wanted to know. It just tells you whether the problem was something that the top man in the organization—Colonel Yarkin was the head of the S-II project at that time—or whether somebody at a lower point in the organization can solve the problem. That's all he was wanting to do. He wanted to find out who was working that thing. [00:48:40] MS: I think I've told you before, I know I've been briefing people who have come in here. So many people from the Army to American Airlines have these control rooms, and they've got about four or five guys or something like that, and these guys run out and try to dig up all this data. They're just scroungers of data, and they come in and they make the best chart they can. So when the vice president in charge of operations comes in, they say, “Okay, now here's a picture on American Airlines progress, so and so, our passenger rate on the West Coast route, so and so on, so and so,” and they give them all this information. That's not the way this worked. There were people who kept up these charts, but they were simply hands of people who were truly responsible. And that's the difference between—in my opinion—an active, efficient control room like this and just whitewash, you know, just hanging stuff out. [00:49:44] RB: The people who are really involved in the actual operation were in fact responsible for the charts? [00:49:51] MS: That's right, and they have their name on the chart. The head of the office has his name and then the man in that office—it didn't matter what his position was either. I mean, first of all, they had to have an office symbol up there so they could, you know, you just had a name, you said, “Well, what office is he in?” So they had the office chief to get you zeroed in to that degree. Then they had a person, and he could have been just a plain engineer, or he could have been a branch chief, whoever it was, that man was responsible for that data on that chart. When I say he was responsible for that data that meant he had to collect it. He had to verify it, and he had to do this periodically. He had to really know what he was putting on there. [00:50:44] MS: Well, you came across those management matrices. That's the same thing. Rudolph wanted to show who was responsible for structural integrity of the S-II stage within the Saturn V program office, within the S-II project office, at North American Rockwell, in the R&D lab. He wanted to know who is responsible for structural integrity on the S-II stage. We had that thing plugged out. It had a structural subsystem. It had a person. If you wanted to talk that subject, you'd get these guys together, and boy, you could talk that subject. There wasn't any doubt about…“Well, gee whiz, I don’t know, I think the laboratory does that.” Then you have to call the laboratory chief and go through some rigmarole. There was none of that. It was very specific. These are quite a…Problem area things…Let's see… [00:52:02]: MS: Now, these problems I was just talking about, that could be anything from a technical problem to a financial problem to a contractual problem. There's no limitation on what these problems are. Now, here's a specialized chart. He had his engineering manager—Lou Bell at the time—Lou Bell picked out the major technical problem areas that he as the systems engineering chief…Here's a thing called “Uncontrolled Instrumentation For Captive Firing Tests, MTF, MSSC, SACTO, and Santa Susana.” Apparently, they had a lot of different types of instrumentation for captive firing at all these places. You see, a stage might be fired at Santa Susana and then fired at MTF, and they couldn't correlate the findings because the instrumentation was different. They may have it located in different ways or it might have had a different range of pickup or you couldn't compare a thrust on the S-IVB stage with thrust on the S-IVC stage because they had it instrumented differently. The project manager for the S-IVB and the project manager for S-IC could [sic] care less. They were doing it the way they thought best. [00:53:29] MS: So here's where this functional manager comes in. He says, “Look, you fellas are doing this differently. We can't compare it. We've got to get this thing coordinated.” The same thing would occur in reliability. One project office would be testing a LOX relief valve to certain criteria, and another stage office would be testing it to a different set of criteria, and you couldn't correlate the things. Dr. Rudolph, as the program manager, says, “Look, this has got to be integrated.” That's why he put so much emphasis on the functional managers. I don't know that we'll ever have that much emphasis again. Maybe so. But as you think about it, you'll see why he had to have not staff members but functional managers: because they had so damn many pieces of hardware that had to fit together. [00:54:23] RB: The functional manager, in a sense, had the authority to say to the S-IC and S-IVB, “We've got to get the instrumentation together,” and they had to do it. They could get together because if you had the right matrix chart, the S-IVB instrumentation manager could pick up a chart and see exactly who his counterpart was in the S-IC [stage?]. They could just get together and talk the same language and say, “Okay, we'll do this.” The systems engineer was the action manager overall for that, and he would [inaudible] them until he got it all…. And if he wanted help from R&DO, the systems engineer could pick up another matrix chart and find out exactly who R&DO was to help the two guys solve their mutual problems. [00:55:05] MS: Right. And see, this is extended in a number of things from instrumentation to welding problems between stages. You see, I mean, why…If one guy's got a welding problem on one stage, then you need to get the people that are specialists in welding. Maybe another stage has got this problem licked. You said it very well. [00:55:34] MS: Here's another example of a functional thing that was so necessary. This shows the mission requirements. For example, it shows the payload required for 501. It shows that 501 will be an unmanned vehicle. It says it's a launch vehicle and CSM development, 501 and 502. That's their primary mission. It shows how the payload commitment has to increase. I have to stop a minute here and think in terms of, I think, more like a mini historian. See, the [Manned’s?] building 501, and it's so far down the track that you can't go back and, let's say, reduce the weight of the S-II stage. But a report comes from Houston that the CSM is growing in weight, and fellas, the CSM is going to weigh five thousand pounds more than we thought it was going to weigh. Now, the first one doesn't, but later on we find out we're going to have to add these systems to the third and fourth flights and subsequent, so you're going to have to boost five thousand pounds more. So while you were building 501, you were changing 503 and 504, perhaps going to a different material. This did occur. It wasn't in those particular stages. They would upgrade the engine thrust, and all this sort of a mishmash. The more you think about it, you wonder how they kept it straight. This was configuration management can. We even have charts that show which vehicle, so-called first-effectivity charts, shows when this change first… [tape ends] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context ohc_stnv_000039_A Title A name given to the resource Shettles, Mack (Part 2) Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource .MP4 Type The nature or genre of the resource Interviews Audio Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives and Special Collections, Huntsville, Alabama Language A language of the resource en Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource This material may be protected under U. S. Copyright Law (Title 17, U.S. Code) which governs the making of photocopies or reproductions of copyrighted materials. You may use the digitized material for private study, scholarship, or research. Though the University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives and Special Collections has physical ownership of the material in its collections, in some cases we may not own the copyright to the material. It is the patron's obligation to determine and satisfy copyright restrictions when publishing or otherwise distributing materials found in our collections. Description An account of the resource Mack Shettles describes the immense complexity of managing the Saturn V program, emphasizing that success depended as much on disciplined program management as on engineering. He explains how Dr. Arthur Rudolph's control room used standardized graphical charts, responsibility matrices, and problem-tracking systems to integrate work across thousands of people, contractors, and facilities, allowing managers to monitor progress, identify issues, and coordinate solutions efficiently. Shettles argues that clear visual communication through Gantt-style charts was far more effective than lengthy reports or the PERT scheduling system, which he found overly complicated, labor-intensive, and susceptible to manipulation, ultimately providing less practical value for day-to-day management. He also discusses NASA's commitment to briefing visitors from government, military, and international organizations, the challenges of establishing the control room despite limited funding, and Rudolph's insistence on standardized reporting and clearly assigned accountability as essential elements in keeping the Apollo program on schedule despite constant technical changes and evolving mission requirements. https://oralhistory.uah.edu/files/original/27f4ac9f4ce414721fd1b4ea86eed7cf.pdf 609bd34cbb2bc8ad428f7b5ec93a65bb Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Saturn V Collection Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context ohc_stnv_000038_T Title A name given to the resource Seibel, Mathia P. (Transcript) Description An account of the resource Manufacturing problems and achievements with Saturn, contractor and vendor relations. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1971-08-30 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource .pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Interviews Text Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives and Special Collections, Huntsville, Alabama Language A language of the resource en Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource This material may be protected under U. S. Copyright Law (Title 17, U.S. Code) which governs the making of photocopies or reproductions of copyrighted materials. You may use the digitized material for private study, scholarship, or research. Though the University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives and Special Collections has physical ownership of the material in its collections, in some cases we may not own the copyright to the material. It is the patron's obligation to determine and satisfy copyright restrictions when publishing or otherwise distributing materials found in our collections. https://oralhistory.uah.edu/files/original/7745ffd3b47370df4464dee487827309.jpg 4598197eb9b09fa4ae86fb6882190ee7 https://oralhistory.uah.edu/files/original/1613abc414ee4f49ab6920c1b333a8cc.mp4 75d9f501d93675f148c1c3fcbc6691e8 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Saturn V Collection Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context ohc_stnv_000038_A Title A name given to the resource Seibel, Mathia P. Description An account of the resource Manufacturing problems and achievements with Saturn, contractor and vendor relations. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1971-08-30 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource .MP4 Type The nature or genre of the resource Interviews Audio Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives and Special Collections, Huntsville, Alabama Language A language of the resource en Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource This material may be protected under U. S. Copyright Law (Title 17, U.S. Code) which governs the making of photocopies or reproductions of copyrighted materials. You may use the digitized material for private study, scholarship, or research. Though the University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives and Special Collections has physical ownership of the material in its collections, in some cases we may not own the copyright to the material. It is the patron's obligation to determine and satisfy copyright restrictions when publishing or otherwise distributing materials found in our collections. https://oralhistory.uah.edu/files/original/51c5c97276e0352b3e67c758ecd67aab.jpg cc0c4f909af1a8ef79e706ad5968148a https://oralhistory.uah.edu/files/original/674773f0f82ef413dd806d591b3974b5.mp4 a3fe8859fc37c6c869e10dacdc258c03 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Christensen, David Collection Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context ohc_crst_000023_A Title A name given to the resource Schilling, Martin Description An account of the resource Experience in V-2 developemerit during WW II in Gernany. Role played by foreign workers at Peenemuende. Notes on interview, not interview. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1972-07-24 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource .MP4 Type The nature or genre of the resource Interviews Audio Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives and Special Collections, Huntsville, Alabama Language A language of the resource en Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource This material may be protected under U. S. Copyright Law (Title 17, U.S. Code) which governs the making of photocopies or reproductions of copyrighted materials. You may use the digitized material for private study, scholarship, or research. Though the University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives and Special Collections has physical ownership of the material in its collections, in some cases we may not own the copyright to the material. It is the patron's obligation to determine and satisfy copyright restrictions when publishing or otherwise distributing materials found in our collections. https://oralhistory.uah.edu/files/original/6760b8f1d7906b1d5ff0eac87c07debb.jpg cc0c4f909af1a8ef79e706ad5968148a https://oralhistory.uah.edu/files/original/5357c22cc4cb7da33fc8fb2b8a0226a5.mp4 015cfb6c26ef0c9b651e669eb07ed437 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Christensen, David Collection Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context ohc_crst_000022_A Title A name given to the resource Samaniego, Ramone Description An account of the resource Experiences with test stand construction and design at White Sands. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1971-08-23 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource .MP4 Type The nature or genre of the resource Interviews Audio Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives and Special Collections, Huntsville, Alabama Language A language of the resource en Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource This material may be protected under U. S. Copyright Law (Title 17, U.S. Code) which governs the making of photocopies or reproductions of copyrighted materials. You may use the digitized material for private study, scholarship, or research. Though the University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives and Special Collections has physical ownership of the material in its collections, in some cases we may not own the copyright to the material. It is the patron's obligation to determine and satisfy copyright restrictions when publishing or otherwise distributing materials found in our collections. https://oralhistory.uah.edu/files/original/6f126e3d6fb5e1e82586e0d044d52a8d.jpg cc0c4f909af1a8ef79e706ad5968148a https://oralhistory.uah.edu/files/original/c5da4190081be0a5531a6195886b31c0.mp4 87b34a806c4d8afc9e8d021e3efa6a42 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Christensen, David Collection Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context ohc_crst_000021_A Title A name given to the resource Rudolph, Arthur Description An account of the resource Audio is of a presentation to American Institue of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), not an interview. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource .MP4 Type The nature or genre of the resource Interviews Audio Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives and Special Collections, Huntsville, Alabama Language A language of the resource en Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource This material may be protected under U. S. Copyright Law (Title 17, U.S. Code) which governs the making of photocopies or reproductions of copyrighted materials. You may use the digitized material for private study, scholarship, or research. Though the University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives and Special Collections has physical ownership of the material in its collections, in some cases we may not own the copyright to the material. It is the patron's obligation to determine and satisfy copyright restrictions when publishing or otherwise distributing materials found in our collections.