17 10 544 https://oralhistory.uah.edu/files/original/34346bcc87c80dcd1f16ebb34e663d66.jpg 4598197eb9b09fa4ae86fb6882190ee7 https://oralhistory.uah.edu/files/original/1f0dbba22caab53777bb112474cf3fde.mp4 eb499797a6777f7d64e1911de9ad9db7 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 Rogers, Richard Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Bilstein, Roger E. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 0:29:32 Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound [00:00:01] Richard Rogers: Well, let me tell you what my background is. I came on J-2 when I came here in August of ‘60. The contract was [let?] September of ‘60. As far as my dealings with Lewis prior to that time, I had none. From the time that I got on the contract, it was a matter of…It was already a design that had been bought by the government, so to speak. Of course, the design that we bought as we progressed through development ran into problems, which there were times where we borrowed on past experience. Best of my knowledge, all of the design concepts in that engine, Rocketdyne had certainly utilized those. [00:01:01] RR: At that time, the only thing we had [hydrogen fueled?] was the RL-10. It was a somewhat different engine in that way it started and, of course, the thrust levels. It was quite a jump from the RL-10 engine to the J-2 in the thrust level, weight, and so forth, and also requirements. I guess mainly what the restart requirements at that time. We had restart requirements. I guess from the…There were probably a couple of areas that…Problems that we encountered, the experiences that we took from the RL-10 program—one was an injector. The concept developed there—the rigid mesh injector—which is nothing more than a transpiration cool of the face by bleeding hydrogen through the backside. [00:02:08] RR: Hydrogen came into a manifold and dumped in between the LOX side and the combustion side. There was an annulus, which the LOX fluid was in the middle. The fuel fed into that annulus and was then mixed with LOX and, of course, the combustion process took place. A percentage of that, I think would vary anywhere from two or three percent, flowed through the rigid mesh face. Early injectors that Rocketdyne proposed—the old flat face H-1 type—I never had much dealing with H-1 before I got on J-2. They were the old flat face, like on like, ringed injectors—copper rings. We had face burning with them, and also a type impingement they had. [00:03:03] RR: We weren't able to get the performance specific impulse out of them. I guess we struggled along there for the early part of the program in the thrust chamber injector program trying to meet the C-STAR requirements. A number of the problems ran into was this face burning problem. This is what we did: we pulled that experience out of the [RPM?] program and applied it to J-2. This resolved the face burning problem. [00:03:38] Roger Bilstein: I was going to ask you how long were you trying to use the H-1 injector face in there before you went to the rigid mesh stuff? How many… [00:03:47] RR: I have to go back. We got records, but as I remember, it was all…I have to go back and check to be sure, but as I remember, it was up into October. See, we fired in ‘60, ‘62, ‘61, ‘62. We were in ‘61—about the middle part of ‘61—before we made that change. They cranked up—I believe about four months into the program as I remember—from the time they had the contract. The first firing in the thrust chamber stand, which was a water-cooled jacketed combustion chamber, was when we began to find out some of the face cooling problems we had. After several design iterations…You know, a contractor never likes to be asked to use a concept somebody else has used. It's just general nature. He'd rather design around it than somebody stand up and tell him he's got to take something that his competitor has used. That's not for the record, but that's the way it goes. Sometimes it's not invented here, they're not interested, especially when it's the competitor's idea. [00:05:05] RB: Did you have to start to kind of push that down Rocketdyne’s throat? [00:05:09] RR: Oh, we had to. I mean, we were way behind on performance. Like the spec at that time was based on a mixed ratio of 5:0 and 200k engine. The spec at that time was 422 seconds. We were running around somewhere around 415 to 419 with those type of injectors. The main reason being was, I guess, trying to get the mixed ratio distribution across the injector face with that type of injectors is pretty difficult. Not only that, but as you go out towards the periphery, you have to be very careful about how your LOX impinges is emitted out of the injector. If you get too much up against the wall, then you're either forced to put more film coolant in, which is you lose performance if you add fuel to the wall to keep it cool. You lose performance because then you're getting out of balanced mix ratio. In this case, you'd like to run around 5:1. That's injector mixed ratio now, not overall engine. If you're running 5:1 in a core, on a wall you're running 3:5:4. That's performance [LOX?]. Ideally you'd like to approach stoichiometric. I would say the thing we talked about, what do we learn out of PAS program, what was probably a major benefit from PAS program, or what technology base did we extrapolate from, I would have to say that probably the RL-10 in the injector area was a great benefit to it. [00:06:51] RB: Do you know anything…Was it the Pall Company or a guy named Paul who developed that rigid mesh? [00:06:58] RR: Pall Company. [00:06:59] RB: Yeah, face. Does that strike a bell with you? [00:07:01] RR: Yeah. [00:07:02] RB: Okay, is that the one? P-A-L-L? [00:07:04] RR: Yeah, I think that's it. I think…You know Dave Christen [sic]? [00:07:07] RB: He's the one who put me on you. [everyone laughs] Thank him for that later. [00:07:13] RR: Yeah, I think Dave used to represent them at one time. That was Pall Corporation, I think they’re the only ones who got it. They're the sole source of that material. [00:07:25] RB: Do you know any more about it? I mean how it was used in earlier programs? Do you have a line on that? [00:07:30] RR: I think, as best I understand, it got started…The application was for filters. That's how it really got started. It was a filter cartridge or a filter, used as a filter media. Someone had the bright idea, I guess, you know, that one of the things you got to do is keep the face cool, and how do you do it? When you start taking flat faces where you got to drill a hole in the face, you got to depend on heat transfer, which is they use copper. With the combustion temperature we had, it's pretty hot to handle, you know? You got to watch junctures. The copper alone won't work by itself without having steel ends in order to support the copper, so you got a juncture there where you got heat transfer problem. With the heat fluxes that we use associated with LOX hydrogen engines, as opposed to those that are associated with LOX kerosene engines and LOX RP engines. [00:08:29] Second interviewer: Is it different? Fluctuation in heat in the engine? [00:08:34] RR: In the combustion chamber, yeah. It gets a little different when it comes to base area because it has to do with the emissivity of the gas, of the exhaust product. In the F-1, you always had that fuel rich shroud around the periphery. [00:08:50] Second interviewer: And is that effect performance like hydrogen cooling of the walls in the J-2? I mean, does the same principle operate? [00:08:58] RR: Well, it's not. You're talking about the rigid mesh face? [00:09:00] Second interviewer: No, I'm just talking about when you're talking about LOX dumping out on the edge and ruining your balance on the wall. [00:09:06] RR: Well, yeah. Well, see you got to put the fuel…To answer your question, what I was talking about there is that you got to keep the wall. You got a certain heat flux at the throat, and your walls have to be kept cool. You got two things you got to worry about. Right where your combustion is completed—the face—as you progress down, you got to build up a boundary layer. You always have film coolant. You want to minimize that film coolant because it's used to fuel rich, and it's way out of balance. It's the way you ought to be burning to get maximum performance. But what I was telling you there is in flat face, you've got to impinge back in this way with your LOX. You don't dare to get on the side of the wall because of the inertia difference between the density of LOX and those of the fuel. The LOX penetrates through that stream where you've got to, say, relatively low velocities at the outer periphery in comparison to what you got at the center core. Then you begin to burn on the side of the wall at a very high temperature because locally the mixed ratio is real high. You're getting up close to stoichiometric, even higher than that. So what you've got to do is you've got to be able to minimize that film cooling so that the spray, the LOX—the last element—the time it gets over there that you've got a uniform mixture, not a glob going through that sheet of fuel and setting up a very local mixture ratio which are real high. If you do, then you burn right through the wall because the local temperature is really high at that point. [00:10:44] RB: Did you have trouble finding the right kind of steel tubing? Did you have trouble finding the right kind of steel tubing for the LH tube return post up to keep your wall cool? [00:10:56] RR: No, [inaudible] uses 347. 347 tube. No, they haven't had any trouble with the tube. We had more than adequate cooling at the throat because we put all the fuel except when we went to the gas generator which was three or four pounds a second. The rest of that flow was, say, seventy-eight pounds a second going through the chamber, so we had more than adequate cooling as far as taking care of the heat fluxes were there as long as everything was uniform. Of course, you get local conditions like sometimes in transit, you know, J-2 was plagued for a while with a fuel pump stall. Whenever you open the LOX valve, about that time, it begins to deprive the system of fuel because of the resistance in the system was so great and there wasn't enough head output at that time when you really needed it in order to open the LOX valve to pour the right amount of fuel in the chamber. You starved the system, in other words, you had almost the fuel flowing down because of the resistance and the fact that your pump was decaying down, you weren't putting out the head. You opened the LOX, which is a good quality, and sometimes we burnt the walls trying to tune the sequence up. This fuel pump stall problem the way we got out of that was going back through the system, taking out Delta P where we could. Initially, I guess you might say it was kind of sloppy as far as their care and design. I'm not assuring that they had the lowest Delta P system. We had to do that, plus we had to add another stage to the fuel pump. We had a six-stage axial flow pump. We had to come back in and add another stage, which went to seven stage pump, which increased the head output. Of course, this had to do too with the tuning of the LOX valve so that it cracked at the right rate, so that the fuel system wasn't overpowered by the LOX system. You got to affect chamber pressure, and they're both seeing the same thing. Now, if the LOX side is running ahead of the fuel side in pressure, then what's creating the chamber pressure is the LOX side. The fuel side now has got to work against it, so you got to tune the LOX valve so that the fuel essentially is leading the LOX in pressure. [00:13:21] RB: When we were out in Los Angeles, we talked to some people. Paul Fuller, do you know him? He’s out there. [00:13:26] RR: Yeah. [00:13:27] RB: Bob Fontaine was working on the F-1. I think John asked the question, “Does engine development and design be kind of a black art sometimes?” that you maybe make a fix on it, and the thing works, and you're not really quite sure what you did to make it work in the long run. Do you ever have that feeling? [00:13:48] RR: Well, no, not really. I guess the biggest thing sometimes is when you make several changes at one time. That's the thing, you know? [00:13:53] RB: Okay, that would be that. Right. [00:13:57] RR: A lot of times you have a problem, and you think that, well, if you do this and that and so forth, it does correct the problem. It's your best estimate through your analysis and observation of hardware. Sometimes you make those changes and then you have another problem, and then you're not quite sure which one of the three fixes you made simultaneously caused the other problem. But I think you all, in fact, I don't know of any case of any problem we ever had that we didn't eventually thoroughly understand it. We knew what the cause was. We sometimes, like I say, we make too many changes at one time. Sometimes schedule pressures force you to make two or three changes at one time rather than doing one at a time. As you know, it depends on what part of the development program you're in. If you're in the early phase and things are going kind of slow, and it seems like every day you test something's coming loose, you know? It seems like it's never going to end. As opposed to your get on out in the program where you got a lot of testing behind you and the bulk of the problems have gone away or solved. Then you get these sporadic problems like you [cook?] through two damn engines, and you don't even have the problem. In the third engine, there was something you did in manufacturing or there's some little something that you did is all of a sudden now creeping into an engine. Because there are changes going on all the time, really. If you're going to get there, you got to make them. Just, you know, several approaches to developing a rocket engine. You can take that first engine out there, and you just test it and test it and test it and repair and repair. You get all the problems, and you make one big block change. Sometimes that may take you a long time ever getting there or you can make the change, and you make that change in the pipeline over here where the engines are being built. There's pros and cons to developing an engine like this like that. Some people think it's better to do it on a block basis. Some people think it's better to do it when you got a problem, fix it and get it into your line. [00:16:01] RB: Is that the way you usually handle it then? [00:16:03] RR: That's the way it’s usually done. It just isn't time because every time you run a test, you don't want to let a component ride on there you know you're going to change. You test your [reliabilities?] based on the number of units and the number of tests, and if you're losing time by not going ahead and making a change, really soon you can. [00:16:30] RB: I had a question to ask about the failures in the J-2 engines on the S-2 and S-4B stage when you had 502. Now there was something that you discovered after you put it into a vacuum chamber, tested it in vacuum at altitude. Now weren't there vacuum and altitude tests done before or was that basically on just the engine throat areas that you didn't get up into the ASI area? Why didn't you discover that before? [00:16:56] RR: No. Well, we did testing at Tullahoma. We pulled the sail down, you know, about two tenths [PSI?] or something like that, which would have been adequate except Tullahoma sitting in a big hole, which the whole bottom of the hole was filled with water. Even though there's nitrogen purge, there's still quite a bit of moisture, and that's what this particular problem thrived on. That is, when you were at moist conditions, the minute the fuel started through the line, you started to liquefying the air or the moisture. Or you even froze the moisture on the bellows. Therefore that acted as a dampening device, see? Then when you put it in, say, an environment of helium where there is no moisture, there's no ice accumulation, then the thing is allowed to go through its thousands of cycles right quick. [00:17:46] RB: Where did you finally do the test with the helium atmosphere? [00:17:49] Second interviewer: Was that after the failure? [00:17:51] RR: That was after the failure. [00:17:52] RB: Yeah, it was after the failure. [00:17:53] RR: We didn't do any tests. We didn't have any failures. [00:17:55] Second interviewer: Did them out Santa Susana, that test with the helium? [00:17:59] RR Yeah, that was done there in Canoga Park. [00:18:01] RB: Okay, after the failure. [00:18:02] RR: After the failure, yeah. I tell you, I think that was just a stroke of luck, really, that we found that thing that quick. That's my personal feeling. Because that's the one you just don't ever, you would never think about. [00:18:19] RB: Yeah. [00:18:20] RR: I have to give Rocketdyne credit. They did a fantastic job of taking what test data and flight data and piecing all, you know, putting all the pieces together. If you took the data, it would tell you two things that went on. One was when the line failed, the start fuel to the injector, to the ASI. Well, when they, we didn't know it was flying, but as you start the fuel, you begin to roll the ASI out. Just begin to burn the whole center of it out. When you did that, then of course that changes your C-STAR. Now, if one takes the flight data and tries to go back and says, “Well, you know, I know something happened. I know I'm losing fuel.” We could see that in the environmental data. You could see temperatures. It had to be a fuel leak. Then you say, “Well, wherein a world. How much fuel am I losing?” Well, if you go back and assume in the calculations that you've got no damage to the injector, you know what the C-STAR is. You got hundreds of tests to tell you what that is. Then you try to balance the engine out with that C-STAR, not knowing if a damn big hole in the injector. It comes out in terms of you losing so much fuel. It came out like six or seven pounds of fuel going someplace. You try to balance it out that way. Well, we're talking about an ASI line that was flowing something like a pound or two at the most. That kind of fogged the issue there, trying to use the balance of what was going on that flight to say, where in the hell could we lose that much fuel? You know, what sources and start taking instrumentation, track it through the system. Someone got the bright idea out there, you know, you better start trying some of these lines to see what they do under flow condition. By doing the test and the environment they did it in, they found out right quick, you know? It’s amazing. I don’t know if you've ever seen in pictures or not. The actual failure. [00:20:15] Second interviewer: I heard there were pictures. [00:20:16] RR: They turned the valves on to start the test, and the line fails like that practically. What amazes me is how we went through all these other flights up until that time. Then had two failures, one on S-2 and one on S-4B. [laughs] [00:20:32] RB: Well, that first one was a suborbital flight, though. Of course, the S-4B is on the S-1… [00:20:37] RR: It's in a vacuum, always in a hard vacuum to start. [00:20:40] RB: Yeah. Were there any other problems with the J-2 engines that you recall? [00:20:46] RR: Any other problems? [00:20:48] RB: Yeah. You mentioned the injector face and that little problem with the ASI fuel line. [00:20:54] RR: Of course, that was the pogo problem. I think that was more of a…I would say it was the engine’s problem. It's just more of a structural problem. [00:21:05] RB: What about some of the materials that were used in the J-2 like Rene 48 [sic] and Inconel? Were those around at the beginning? [00:21:14] RR: Yeah. [00:21:15] RB: Okay. Could you tell me where you used some of those things specifically? [00:21:18] RR: Yeah, 718 was used in the injector billet. The injector's made from a big billet, which is eloxed out. In other words, the post of the injectors use an eloxed graphite plate. It's electrical discharge machining. You just take it, make the post. Later on, they drilled it first, then they came back and did elox on the post with a drill with elox process. The injector assembly, manifold, pumps—that's 718. [00:21:56] RB: What about the Rene? Was that primarily an F-1 material? [00:22:00] RR: Rene was an F-1 material. [00:22:02] RB: Yeah. What are the Kel-F lines? I just don't know. [00:22:05] RR: Huh? [00:22:06] RB: Kel-F. [00:22:07] RR: Kel-F liners? [00:22:08] RB: Yeah. [00:22:09] RR: Kel-F? It’s just… [00:22:10] RB: I have no idea what that is. [00:22:14] RR: We have a Kel-F liner LOX pump. [00:22:18] RB: In the LOX pump? [00:22:20] RR: [Inaudible] area. All that was for was to protect the blade surfaces from the walls of the housing in case there’s ever a part that came in and got lodged between they [wouldn’t?] be scrubbing against the surface. You have a plastic protection, you know, keep from building up any heat or if an inducer ever kissed [inaudible] bearing or something suddenly went bad, you have a certain amount of motion then you’d be kissing plastic for a while before you finally got to the metal. Well, then you could build up heat and blow the LOX pump. [00:22:56] RB: There was another question I had…Oh! About the gimbaling system…Did you ever build a mechanical screw system? [00:22:58] RR: Mechanical screw? [00:23:03] RB: Yeah. [00:23:04] RR: No. [00:23:05] RB: Rocketdyne was testing that on some test stands [00:23:06] RR: The program did some work on a pneumatic actuator, hydrogen driven turbine ball screw. [00:23:14] RB: But it never worked out very well? [00:23:15] RR: They never did much on it. It’s what they proposed. It’s a proposal they made. They built one or two and tried them out, but they didn’t have enough umph to them. They didn’t have power to give the rates that we required. Very sluggish. [00:23:32] RB: Okay, another question: how do you go about upgrading an engine when you went from 200 to 230k? When you start with a 200k engine what do you have to do to it to meet the desired thrust level? The higher one? [00:23:44] RR: Went from 200 to 225 then went 230k a second. [00:23:49] Second interviewer: In two separate steps? [00:23:50] RR: It was two separate steps. That’s kind of a hard one. First of all, the engine, when it was designed, was designed at a thrust point of 200k and a 5:0 mixed ratio. It had a PU valve, which allowed an excursion of five mixed ratio units on either side of that. In other words, that would’ve taken you to 5:5 mixed ratio or up to 4:5 from another 5:0. That’s if you vary the mixed ratio. In this case it was bypassing LOX around the LOX pump. Then your thruster is going to vary. You’re either taking out LOX or you’re putting more in. One or the other. In this case your thrust is going to rise. Well, in J-2 when it was bought it was a 5:0, 200k, and that’s the way it was going to be acceptance tested with the PU excursion. Since the engine was orificed [sic] 5:0, then you had no control of the exact thrust that you’d get when you’d go to either end of the excursion. It just so happened that when you went to the 5:5, you’d go as high as 238k. [00:25:13] RB: What was the factor…. [00:25:14] RR: As high as, okay? So as the design of the S-2 stage progressed, and they got thinking about the mission and what the requirements were, they came up with a scheme of flying the first portion of it at 5:5. When they needed the high thrust then the last third portion of the burn going back down to the lower mixed ratio with the specific impulse. As soon as you go up you lost gain [inaudible] like this occur second impulse. As you go out towards the higher mixed ratio, you don’t get the specific impulse but you get the higher thrust. That’s more important than the trajectory equations at that particular time in the S-2 boost. Later on in the flight you’re not so concerned about thrust anymore, you need Isp. You switch it back the other way, so your thrust is going down, but your Isp is going up. That was kind of the way the engine was burned in the S-2 and the S-4B. It had that same profile. [00:26:33] RB: Do you have to start upgrading stuff though like the turbo pumps and everything else when you start doing that? [00:26:37] RR: Well, you got to start testing that way. [00:26:39] RB: Yeah. [00:26:43] Second interviewer: Okay, what about the structures that these interface with? Has that all been taken care of beforehand that it will stand the stress of another... [00:26:51] RR: Well, so yeah, when we went to 225k, we orificed [sic] the engine at the 5:5 mix ratio in. They gave us very precise thrust at the end. We calibrated the engine 225 plus or minus about 6k. Usually the engine ran within 2 or 3k of the value. Every firing would be within that dispersion about 225. Well, wherever it was calibrated, you had about…Sometimes it was calibrated 227k. [00:27:20] Second interviewer: How do you go about calibration? [00:27:22] RR: Just change the orifice. Bouncing out there. [00:27:26] Second interviewer: Where do you get your calibration standards? Just accumulated data? [00:27:31] RR: Well, you got a computer program that models the engine. Before you have a flow test on various components, you have this data. You got pump data. All your pumps are green run before they go in the engine, so you know what their performance are. You take all this data, and you put it in the computer, and it comes out and tells you where the first cut to make. What the orifice should be put in there. It's not exactly the first run that you make. Then you come back and change the orifice, and you make another cut at it. Usually about two runs, I mean, you get really...Further along you get in the program, you get pretty good at it. You usually make it the first cut. But until you develop that skill and learn to get enough data, I guess, that's what it amounts to on valves. What kind of spurs, what influences the valves have on the balance of the engine. The chambers have various Delta Ps in them, and pumps have different efficiencies. They're very narrow. But when you start talking about hitting something within 3K out of 225, that's a pretty close shooting. [00:28:49] RB: So one other question. We're about out of the tape here, and we want to ask for a half an hour, so that we’ve done it. What does the J in the J-2 mean? [00:28:56] RR: The J? [00:28:58] RB: You know where they got the F in the F-1 and the H in the H-1? [00:29:02] RR: I don't know. I never really stopped to think where they got it. It's a series of A, B, C, D, H-1, F-1, and J, H. I don’t know. I never thought to how they… [00:29:07] Second Interviewer: It's kind of a series, Roger. [Inaudible] started off with… [00:29:13] RB: [Inaudible] start off with F. [00:29:19] Second interviewer: It's kind of in the series. It’s not like anything else. It’s not uniform. [00:29:23] RB: It's like playing the SA-203 before the SA- 202, okay. [laughs] [00:29:27] RR: I don't know. [00:29:29] Second interviewer: That's what it comes from. That's what people at Rocketdyne told me. [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_000037_A Title A name given to the resource Rogers, Richard ("Dick") Description An account of the resource Richard Rogers describes his experience working on the J-2 rocket engine program after joining in 1960, emphasizing how engineers adapted proven technologies from the earlier RL-10 engine to overcome major development challenges. He explains that one of the most significant improvements was replacing Rocketdyne's original H-1-style injector with a rigid mesh injector based on RL-10 technology, which solved injector face burning and improved engine performance. Rogers also discusses the technical complexities of combustion stability, cooling, fuel and oxidizer flow, fuel pump stall issues, and engine calibration, highlighting the iterative process of testing, analyzing failures, and implementing design changes under tight schedules. He recounts how engineers investigated and resolved the J-2's altitude-related ASI fuel line failure through post-flight testing in a helium environment, credits Rocketdyne's systematic failure analysis, and reflects that although multiple simultaneous design changes sometimes complicated troubleshooting, the engineering team ultimately identified the root cause of every major problem. The interview also covers materials selection, thrust upgrades from 200,000 to 230,000 pounds, engine testing and calibration methods, and the balance between maximizing thrust and specific impulse, providing a detailed firsthand account of the engineering decisions that contributed to the J-2's successful development for the Saturn program. 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/e15bdc37d578af79422bf48a0bd67702.jpg 4598197eb9b09fa4ae86fb6882190ee7 https://oralhistory.uah.edu/files/original/eee7642679fa09032afa9a5fce224660.mp4 6f07ea7ce6d9d700689dda735f91a5d5 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 Rees, Eberhard Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Bilstein, Roger E.; Beltz, John Stuart; and Christensen, David Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 0:32:32 Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound [00:00:07] Eberhard Rees: …I think we have to do it in the right way, as newspaper people like to do: who is guilty that this was done and who is not guilty that this was done and this kind of things. I do not believe we should write a controversial story only just for sensation. We ought to leave that to the newspaper people. [00:00:28] John Stuart Beltz: We certainly do not have that as the intent. Roger and I are interested in the history of technology and that is what we would like to concentrate on is the research and development in the phase and then the manufacturing phase. We want to go into management. Quite frankly, we are interested in the controversial stories but we just do not have time to go into that right at this point. We are doing a program history of the Saturn I, IB and the V. As you know, this will be extensively reviewed both by yourself and headquarters before it comes out. It is in a very rough state now. You might have seen some of the working papers that Roger and I have done. We still have to part of the story. We just learned from Hans Wuenscher this morning on relative strengths of tankage on the Saturn I which throws out a couple of paragraphs that I wrote on that already that I have to go back and correct. There will be a lot of that kind of revision as we learn more and more about that. [00:01:31] ER: I hope Wuenscher is right because the strengths business and this kind of things were done in some other department in astronautics. I hope he has given you the right thing. This is troublesome. [00:01:47] JSB: That is why we are going to need to do a lot of checking. [00:01:50] Roger Bilstein: That is the value of the review too. We only wish you had time to write the history actually. [00:01:56.] ER: You know, these things are very, very often hard to remember them even. [00:02:07] RB: John, do you want to do some questions or do you want me to? [00:02:13] JSB: We have several areas that we would like to talk about. We probably won't just finish in an hour today. Maybe we might like to come back later and talk to you. Maybe we could start by talking in the area of contracts and some of the major reasons why the prime contractors were selected both for technical reasons that Marshall thought that they had the ability to do the job best and were most cost effective, but also any other reasons like plant location, economic reasons for employment in various sections of the country, the ability to spread the word around. [00:02:50] ER: A very controversial subject. A very controversial subject. We might wind up in court. [00:03:00] JSB: You or me? [00:03:02] ER: No, no, no, no. We, NASA. And some contractors sticking out and said, “No, this wasn't so.” We would have really to go with a lawyer through the papers. Is it necessary to bring out the whys? Then we have to have long, long, long story adventures. We have then to get all the proposals in of all the contractors, and I even can't remember who all was bidding on the S-II, on the S-IC, on the IU, on all the others. [00:03:51] David Christensen: I agree with Dr. Rees on that, really taking the other side. I'm not so sure it's necessary either, you know, to bring in the whys. [00:03:59] ER: Can't we just say we have selected this contractors after a contest, after a competition? If you go into the why of that whole thing, then you, and make one little legal mistake, then, then... [00:04:25] DC: It opens up a can of worms. [00:04:27] ER: Some of the bidders again said, "No, this was not so. We had a better proposal.” This is very, very, very controversial. [00:04:38] JSB: There's a lot of times when a bidder will propose on something, get the contract, and then adopt the technology of his competitor to build it. [00:04:50] ER: Yeah, this has happened, and contracts don't want to hear that. Even don't want to read it in a history book. [00:05:01] DC: Could we do this maybe? Glance at the questions that we have, and right now, and see the ones that you might want to... [00:05:09] JSB: We'll get back to contracting, maybe by a backdoor way, but maybe we can talk about management right now. That’s also kind of controversial, but internally. Can you go back in your experience even to the, maybe, some of the carryover activities from Peenemuende under Dornberger; as your role as technical assistant to von Braun in managing this large enterprise; when you were in the development operations division and then into formation of NASA or Marshall Space Flight Center; and your particular role in going out and seeing that the contractors were doing their job, enforcing schedules, making sure that the necessary quality was being built in for manned rating? Can you talk in that area? [00:06:12] ER: Yeah, we could talk about that. We'll talk about that a little bit. [long pause] When we talk about the management of the Saturn, we should in the history book just describe how the management was and maybe less about the whys. See, I could now give you a long, long, long story how we have asked the manager of the So-and-So Company. We had to change managers almost everywhere, and I don't want to go into that. This is all gone. There were controversial points during the…When the 204 fire was and those three astronauts were killed, and then Mr. Webb was put in front of Congressional committees, and then the famous Phillips report came out. Those kind of things, and they are very, very controversial. This goes also into the spacecraft more than into the launch week. [00:07:56] JSB: When you were out there troubleshooting that, did you also get in touch with people at Seal Beach and work with them at all or was your prime responsibility with investigating the fire? [00:08:10] ER: I was never in the investigation of the fire. I only was then assigned to help that we could get out of it, the whole operation. The design was all done, and I had some designers from Houston with me at that time, but all what we want to do is we want to see that we get out of it rather than pointing fingers. Now, newspaper people want to have, of course, the finger pointing. They like that. They like that I have trouble with [skill rules?] or that I have trouble with this and this. There's a controversy and just this kind of things. I do not believe a history should now be written that way, always bringing out these controversial things, but rather the facts how it has turned out. [00:09:09] DC: Actually, we haven't really been hitting this controversial area with any of the others. Since you're the director, this is really the first time that we've been hitting, because you would have the answers, but again, I agree with you on that. I think that we should not write in a newspaper account, maybe something more technically oriented, really, and less controversial. [00:09:33] ER: You could write that thing, that whole history book, that in summary, one reader would say, “Well, for heaven's sake, well, this is a stinking mess.” You could write it that way. You could slant it that way. [00:09:46] DC: Maybe sell more copies. [00:09:48] ER: Even going sentence by sentence through, we could not prove that you were wrong. Just things which came up at that time out of context and so on. We had our trouble. We had blow up of test stands and so on and so on, and the questions all the time. You know, it's still going around now again since everybody's now disenchanted all of a sudden with space flight, which is, after my opinion, a dumb thing to do. First to be enthusiastic about something, and after we have accomplished it, now say, “The hell this was. We threw that money away because there are some poor people whom we had all the time.” The question is all the time, should we make everybody equally rich, no matter how dumb he is and no matter whether he wants to work or not, and not make any progress anymore? You know, the issue is even there's anti-research and science and technology now being brought up by the newspaper people. Say there's an anti-wave going through the country against science, which is just by some loudmouth in the hippie area. That's all that there is to it. There's no wave in the country, anti-science. But newspaper people want to bring this out. They constantly, I was asked that. [00:11:17] DC: It sells papers. [00:11:18] ER: It sells papers. But it's not even a fact that there's always some loudmouth hippie type guy who is too lazy to work, and he says, “Well, scientists argue that our air is contaminated,” and this kind of thing. At the same time, he drives to this assembly place where he opens his big mouth with an unadjusted car, which really is contaminated because he hasn't gotten the money, because he's too lazy to work, to adjust that, to tune his motor and this kind of thing. If we wouldn't have cars, we would have probably eliminated more than half the percent of our air pollution, because it's the automobile, mainly, not the big plant. That can be resolved. What we cannot solve is that everyone runs around with a car and makes an equal distribution. We have in the United States about 70 million automobiles, and in average per day, we burn about two to three or four gallons. If we take three gallons and 70 million cars, we have about 210 million gallons of gasoline burned every day into the air. [00:12:47] DC: That's why I'm really putting this [inaudible]. [00:12:50] ER: We have the best distribution all over the country. If we have some smokestacks there, there something can be done. It's just very local. But the cars distribute this thing evenly all over the country. What we ought to do is tell the guys, “You walk again.” [00:13:11] DC: Or ride a bicycle, whichever you’ve got. [00:13:13] ER: But they like to make science responsible for this, which is awfully dumb. [00:13:21] JSB: Within the development of the Saturn program, though, there were changes in the management structure here at Marshall Space Flight Center. I wonder if you would be willing to comment on…Historians, go and ask why. This is what we're trying to find out. If we can't ask you why, then we're not writing a history. What we wanted to ask you is why you changed some of the management structure. You went to project managers or program managers. Why did you bring Lee James in? Why did you put someone in head of a lab? We're trying to tell a story of how the Saturn developed. We can't not tell that story unless you tell us some whys. [00:13:58] ER: Well, shall we say now because So-and-So was an S.O.B? [00:14:02] JSB: No, I'm not asking you that. Let me say this. No, I'm not asking you to say that. But you changed the structure. Maybe as you put one lab under one industrial organization at one point, perhaps you put it under science and technology at another point. What happened in the Saturn program that caused you to do that? I'm not asking you to call anybody a son of a b*tch or anything else. I'm just trying to get a part of the story. [00:14:26] ER: Yeah. Well, the question is really should we put in too much whys? Or could we just factually say, “In 19-so-and-so, the management structure was changed?” [00:14:40] JSB: Okay, we can just say that. [00:14:41] ER: Could be writed [sic] that way, just as the facts. Because as soon as you go deeper into the whys, then you go immediately into controversial things. We certainly had the [post?] of some leading people because we haven't felt they were as good as others. [00:15:01] DC: Okay. Now, what about maybe let's... [00:15:09] JSB: What constraints in the Saturn…We're asking all why questions, I'm afraid. [00:15:18] ER: What were the major reasons for the selection of the prime contractors, Chrysler, Boeing, North American, Douglas, and IBM? [00:15:27] JSB: This is a supplementary question. [00:15:29] DC: [Flipping through papers] Oh, these are the supplementary. Let's come over here. Let’s try these here, Dr. Rees. Somewhere in here…Yes. These, we… [00:15:40] ER: In general, how would the EOR method have changed the Saturn design in comparison with the LOR mode? [00:16:02] DC: Or perhaps some other question in there. [00:16:06] ER: I have now ready to go into the EOR mode again. [00:16:13] JSB: Can you tell us where there are some people here at Marshall that supported EOR over LOR in the earlier discussion? [00:16:19] ER: Yeah. One of the most... [00:16:31] DC: Like it's been a real controversial issue, not so much... [00:16:34] ER: One of the strong promoters was Dr. Geissler for the EOR mode method, have changed the Saturn design. I think it was this way that we at that time have said, “Let's go up to an Earth orbit, and then in a smaller launch vehicle and then refuel it with oxygen, and then come up with another vehicle and refuel that with oxygen again, and then go from there to the moon. We would have rather than one big launch vehicle have to have smaller ones. What I would suggest in order to answer this question number one, that we give you a write-up on that. This might be better on two or three pages. It was this way that we said, “Let us go with two small launch vehicles into an Earth orbit and then refuel the one with another one.” The one was rather an oxygen carrier and the other one had only so much oxygen that it could just reach Earth orbit. Then there was the refueling mode, and this was considered quite a problem in orbit under weightless conditions. This was one of the big problems, and it was considered quite a problem to do that. Then we would have gone with the first vehicle from there to the moon. It would have also taken a somewhat bigger lunar lander. It goes about this way so that you may understand it. We would, and here's the Earth orbit. Here's the Earth. We would have gone with two vehicles up to an Earth orbit. First with one and then with an oxygen or two carrier. Then do refueling if you link. Then we would have gone from here and land directly on the moon without going into lunar orbit. This would have meant a bigger lunar lander because that lunar lander would have had then to have directly from the surface of the moon the fuel to go back here. It was a matter of propellant management and therefore a matter of the size of the vehicle. [00:20:10] DC: It would have meant a smaller Saturn though, wouldn’t it? [00:20:12] ER: It would have meant a smaller Saturn, but it would have meant a bigger lander. We shied away from such a bigger lander as never anybody had landed on the moon. I'm glad that we have such a small lander. The landing is still a difficult thing. We have weighed this mode against each other and this refueling problem under weightless conditions versus…And then we would have also had the landing problem. You know when we compare these methods, there was number one, the Nova, with a real big rocket going directly from Earth to the moon and land there. Then the second one was the EOR, the smaller things, but then with a bigger lander, which also looks easier. Then the third thing was going first in Earth orbit and then going into lunar orbit and then land again and then go up to the lunar orbit and then go down to Earth. Everybody had said at that time and still now not anymore, but before we have to head down, it isn't that the most complicated way, the lunar orbit way, which of course would also have meant an Earth orbit. We would have also in this fashion had to go to an Earth orbit, namely for doing that refueling. Anyhow, but I would prefer to give you a little write up. You might also want to talk about this with Dr. Geissler. [00:21:55] JSB: Dr. Rees, could you speculate if there were no constraints imposed by schedule? In other words, if President Kennedy just said get to the moon when you're ready and didn't say by the end of the decade, would you have maybe gone a different way or done the program differently? [00:22:12] ER: No, I don't think so. But we might have not pressed the program so strongly. It might have then gone into the 70s, and it would have probably cost us more money. Then second, there's another thing. If you do any work in this world without a schedule, you don't get anywhere. The first thing what you have to do for program management—and for yourself, even personally—to have a schedule. As soon as you work anymore without a schedule, for instance, when I'm retiring, I want to be on a schedule also, to do something on a schedule. If you don't do that anymore, then you are dragging along, and you are dying earlier. If you want to run an operation as Marshall Space Flight Center or any factory or any place whatsoever, you'd better set a schedule so that you can tell your people you do this by that time, you do this by that time, you do this by that time. This is the principle of management, after my opinion. If we just would tell our people, “Well, you do this and this and this sometime, don't worry when that's supposed to be done,” then the people get lazy. We can also now not say, “We need so and so much money” because somebody can always say, “Well, you need 100 million for this and this. If you do it longer with less people, then you might not need now 100 million. You might need them later.” You know, there's always two constraints. The one is the total amount a program costs, and the money we need for fiscal year. As soon as we say, “We need for fiscal year sounds so much, then we say we need it because we want to do this and this and this at that time.” So a program without a time schedule is no program. I want to go that far to say that. [00:24:17] DC: That was one of the biggest advantages of the Kennedy deadline. [00:24:21] ER: Yeah, it was the biggest. “I want you to go on the moon with men, land them safely there, and bring them back safely in this decade.” This is the important thing, and this ought to be [stressed?] very much in the whole thing. [00:24:38] DC: This is a little bit… [00:24:40] ER: And then in this decade, so we said then that the decade ends 1970. So we want to do it at least in 1969 at the latest. [00:24:51] DC: Along that line—and this is the leading question, you might not want to answer it, I don't know that I would—if Congress or NASA should authorize you all the money that you wanted for the Saturn program, generally, how much more would you ask for, if any? Or what in general would you use it? Or…The reason I'm asking that is, is the Saturn program…Have we gotten out of it about what we need to get out of it? [00:25:16] ER: Yeah, it's about what we needed. You know, when the program was set up by Kennedy, Kennedy incidentally said, “How much would that thing then cost?” Mr. Webb and Dr. Seamans said, “Well, 20 to 40 billions.” This was all right at that time. [00:25:36] DC: So we have pretty well gotten what we want out of the Saturn program. [00:25:41] ER: Yeah, we have pretty well gotten what we want out of the Saturn program. We did not need more money. [00:25:53] DC: Very good. Now we need it for the other two major programs, or at least the space shuttle, which is something else, of course, from Skylab... [00:26:02] ER: Unfortunately for the space shuttle, it is now first asked, “How much does that cost?” Whenever you bring up the total cost, then set off [inaudible] and say, “Let's not do that.” [00:26:20] DC: It'd be nice if we could have a deadline for the space shuttle, wouldn’t it? [00:26:23] ER: Yeah, well, we made one, but people always say, “Well, why, why, why, why, it doesn't have to be done.” The first thing that we made was before we even ask how much money we'll get and so on, when would such a thing possibly be ready? So we put right a deadline on that. Nobody…The President has not done this. We would very much like to have a commitment by the President of the United States for the shuttle. This is the difference between the Apollo program and this program, and then really go down the road. So you cannot do any work without a schedule. [00:27:04] JSB: Were there any special techniques of forecasting and scheduling developed to move the program along, like configuration management, things of this nature, that you were involved in? [00:27:16] ER: Yeah, we had to be at quite some…We have, of course, quite some techniques to do this, but the major technique in management of a program I found out is establishing the means for good visibility. This is after my opinion, the major point in all program management, and in everything also what you are doing. This is basic that you have visibility. What is going on at the present time? Now, for instance, budget visibility we get only after several weeks or so because the accounting process takes so long. When a contractor then is overrunning, we very often learn that only too late. We were pressing in our management business to have visibility all the time in the three major fields: how we stand on the schedule, how we send out the money, and how we are doing into technical performance. These are the three major points all the time. [00:28:32] JSB: How did you go about making the contractors aware of the need to make these things more visible? Roger and I went out and talked to the people out of North American, Bill Parker and Paul Wickham, and they said they had some troubles in knowing where they were. [00:28:49] ER: This was our major difficulty with all the contractors since ever I have been in this business that the contractor first establishes for himself visibility. Otherwise he can't manage either. Why the contractors hadn't seen this or don't want to see it, it's beyond my understanding. Because the first thing what you have to do is that you get visibility. This goes again for your everyday work. [00:29:21] JSB: Where did you develop these concepts of visibility here at Marshall? Were they developed here and then you took them out to the contractors and some of these [inaudible] establish these schedule boards and these control rooms and those types of things? [00:29:35] ER: Yeah, into schedule boards and this…You make a kind of a schedule. [Tears paper] Let's do it that way, that we say, “All right, you know the problem is all the time, that before you do any planning…” [interview interrupted] I think I should have with you some time, some longer time on this whole business. [tape restarts] [00:30:04] ER: …To try to put out [rather effects?] that this and this and this and this had happened, and put...I know you cannot await quite the why question. It also shouldn't be a dull story, but put down the skeleton effects first and then see whether we could put the whys in there. As to this EOR mode, you might want to talk to Dr. Geissler. He was strongest in this whole business. Then there's of course a man who has at that time done these things for us, and this is Mr. Williams who is now with Dr. von Braun. Frank Williams. [00:30:52] JSB: I've been trying to get a hold of him sometimes when he's down in Houston. [00:30:54] ER: Yeah, yeah. Now I do not know how this would work out, there is a man in Washington who writes the Apollo history, including the launch rate, and this is Bob Sherrod. He's been sitting on this thing now for a long time. I have the feeling without a time schedule. [All laugh] [00:31:17] DC: Yes, he had it when he slipped it. The publisher feels the same way. [00:31:19] ER: Nice guy, eh? [00:31:23] DC: Advanced [him $100,000?]. [00:31:24] ER: I do not know how professional [this dude is?] now. He might not want to have a discussion even with you because he might have the feeling that you copy his story. On the other hand, I would hate a little bit that three, four, five books come out. The one with that story, the other one with that story, and the third one with that story. [00:31:45] JSB: The work being published by the government printing office with NASA's… [00:31:48] DC: His is a commercial... [00:31:52] ER: Yeah, under a NASA contract. [00:31:54] JSB: Yeah, and his is going to be done, what? MacMillan? [00:31:56] DC: MacMillan and a commercial [inaudible]. [00:31:58] ER: Who is the man in Washington? I forgot the name again. When we had the contract with you, there was some man in Washington. [00:32:06] DC: General Smart, Gene Emme, Dr. Emme or…? [00:32:06] ER: Yeah, Emme. [00:32:08] DC: Yes, Gene Emme. [00:32:10] ER: Maybe his views, how you want to work together with Sherrod might be important. [00:32:16] DC: We've been working on this. Matter of fact, I’ve taken him out for dinner. [00:32:20] ER: The big trouble…I want to develop this program with you by making a lot of drawings eventually on a pad or on a blackboard. The problem with all these programs is… [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_000036_A Title A name given to the resource Rees, Eberhard Description An account of the resource Eberhard Rees discusses the challenges of writing an accurate history of the Saturn program, emphasizing that the focus should remain on technological development, management, and factual outcomes rather than controversial issues or assigning blame. He advises the historians to present events objectively while avoiding excessive attention to disputes involving contractors, management decisions, or incidents such as the Apollo 1 fire. Rees explains that Saturn program management relied heavily on schedules, visibility of technical progress, budgets, and contractor performance, arguing that firm deadlines were essential to successful program execution. He reflects on contractor selection, organizational changes at Marshall Space Flight Center, and the importance of effective oversight and communication. Rees also describes alternative lunar mission strategies, including Earth Orbit Rendezvous (EOR), and explains why Lunar Orbit Rendezvous (LOR) was ultimately preferred because it avoided the challenges of orbital refueling and required a more practical lunar lander. Throughout the interview, he stresses that historical accounts should provide context and facts while acknowledging the complexity of managing a large-scale engineering effort like Saturn and Apollo. 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/8ed2de1382a23e2c312f7811083d68fd.jpg cc0c4f909af1a8ef79e706ad5968148a https://oralhistory.uah.edu/files/original/1a58b7e13eaee6662f76cd72cd1667e1.mp4 2a40f4f52a7f6385bea7147359a6ab99 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_000020_A Title A name given to the resource Rees, Eberhard 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/d34aacad1ceb1358da39012b07f14e85.pdf 756dc526f9717a89b14d09d468e053ed 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_000035_T Title A name given to the resource Raiklen, Harold (Transcript) Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1971-03-11 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/3f25a0d62c186b0fc8ca0defce3ff5bc.jpg 4598197eb9b09fa4ae86fb6882190ee7 https://oralhistory.uah.edu/files/original/76e7eddc1b8c164be21555013fd638f2.mp4 4ff417b33e7f3c78a36b71f1fe45ed04 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_000035_A Title A name given to the resource Raiklen, Harold Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1971-03-11 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/570d3a4d8935ea32b272c135cfd949a3.jpg cc0c4f909af1a8ef79e706ad5968148a https://oralhistory.uah.edu/files/original/34c9e09620f0fa74491e71f54a19eb1c.mp4 959916d3f77fe17688878ac7308c2a45 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_000019_A Title A name given to the resource Poppel, Theodor Description An account of the resource History of the Von Braun team in World War II and in the early days in the USA. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1971 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/f21e88c42ca20fd35036ad91d4147483.jpg 4598197eb9b09fa4ae86fb6882190ee7 https://oralhistory.uah.edu/files/original/ee6dafb39e1e305c237ca8067e9c96fb.mp4 a40c384983640b334ef325741d10aae5 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 Pool, Carl (Roger Bilstein's summary) Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Bilstein, Roger E. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 0:20:45 Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound [00:00:00] Roger Bilstein: Part of the larger story of the logistics problem involved the use of barges not only on the Tennessee and Mississippi rivers, but also through the Gulf of Mexico, Panama Canal, and up on the Pacific side of California. And to get that story, Carl DeNeen suggested that we talk to the head of the NASA fleet, as he called it, a man named Carl Pool. [00:00:37] And Mr. Pool turned out to be an intriguing character. DeNeen described him as an old Navy boatswain, and Mr. Pool certainly had the look of an old Navy hand. He had a gorgeous tattoo, a very large tattoo on his forearm. He had also an appropriate [bay window?]. Not to denigrate him in any way, but just a very interesting character, [cut a?] very interesting figure. [00:01:08] So we picked up Pool at the headquarters area, and John Beltz was along. We drove his car down to the docks on the Tennessee River, where the three barges then in port were tied up. Pool was going to use the government car. Although his own car was out there, he wanted to use the government car. He was having trouble getting a hold of the keys, so John volunteered to take his own car, use his own gas. Mr. Pool obligingly agreed. [00:01:41] On the way down to the docks, Pool made some comments about the barges used in the Saturn program. They were the YFNB class, developed during the Second World War as floating supply repair maintenance areas or bases in forward areas in the Pacific. They were self-contained. They were not self-propelled, but they were self-contained. They had their own power supply, complete galley, very large work areas, and storage areas, keeping supplies, making these repairs to keep the fleet going in support of the military effort in World War II. [00:02:31] The three barges are tied up at the end of a very large, broad highway that runs all the way through the Marshall Space Flight Center complex, through some of the Army test areas, down to the dock side. The road was built especially to carry the various Saturn stages, the test assembly areas when they were manufactured at Marshall, down to the docks were loading aboard the barges, where they were carried either to Cape Kennedy or, in some instances, to the Mississippi Test Facility for further testing. The three barges in port at the time, as we faced them, on our left was the Palaemon, and the center was the Orion—the largest of the three barges—and on the right—as we looked at them—was the barge Promise. [00:03:26] These barges—as I understood it, as Carl Pool, talked to us—each carried, normally, about a twelve-man contingent. There was a five-man marine crew to see about the handling and running of the barge itself. There was a six-man stage crew who were aboard to make sure that the stages arrived and were cared for properly en route to their destination. There was one government observer. As I understood it, the government observer was there as the final arbiter to make decisions when decisions were necessary, perhaps if the marine group disagreed with the stage crew and also just as an observer. [00:04:12] For loading the barges, there were two different methods. For the Palaemon and the Promise, the procedure was to ballast the barge so that it sank down the water to a point where its edge was about eight inches above the lip or the edge of the dock. Then a sort of plank or platform was installed from the dock to the edge of the barge, and as the stage was rolled on, the weight of the stage itself would help bring the barge down to the level of the dock for easy loading. This was done with the Palaemon and the Promise, which carried the first S-Is and the first S-IB stages. The Orion was constructed especially to carry the S-IC stages, and in the case of the Orion, the edge of the barge was kind of stepped. It butted right into the edge of the dock, and there rested very firmly on a little ledge that was stepped into the dock, using approximately 500 tons of balance to snug the barge in. [00:05:36] We first went aboard the Promise, and one of the things that struck me immediately, and which Pool pointed out to us, were the reinforcement strips or aprons that ran up the length of the deck, one on each side. These were to take the weight of the tires of the transporter, as the whole thing with the loaded stage was rolled aboard. It was interesting to see then that this was a necessary step to take to beef up the basic structure of the barge. [00:06:06] There were a series of tie downs at each wheel, what he called an eight point tie down system. By each wheel were two points, and then the thing was secured at the top and down on the other side at two other points. So by each wheel there were two tie down points making a total of eight in all. 00:06:30] The barge was equipped with dehumidifiers—two on the port side, two on the starboard. There was considerable room beneath the deck in the original ship for storage. The original YFNB was about twenty-four feet in depth, two separate decks then, twelve feet each. To carry the stages they used the lower deck, there were still twelve feet below the lower deck, twelve feet then to the gunnels. But then of course a huge over structure had been prepared to take the stages of the rolled board. [00:07:17] The NASA organization kept the barges as completely self-sufficient transportation vehicles. Each barge had a power plant to run its air conditioning, provide power for light, provide power for the water system, plumbing system, machine shop, kitchen, general electronic gear needed to keep the barge in running order. [00:07:47] The Promise in particular was a floating repair ship for the Navy after World War II, based in Florida. It came into the NASA fleet as a result of the collapse of a lock in a dam in the Tennessee River. One of the stages was on its way down at the time, and the lock had collapsed stranding the barge and its cargo upstream. So another barge was brought up to meet it, known as the Compromise. The stage was unloaded, the special road had to be built around the damaged lock, it was reloaded aboard the Compromise, and the voyage continued. Later on, it was found that the Compromise was not really an appropriate name for NASA and so the C-O-M was dropped and the Compromise simply became the barge Promise. [00:08:46] The various YFNB barges acquired by NASA were largely in the Navy's “Mothball” fleet. The Promise in particular was a good example of its emergency requisition. There was very much a look of the carpenter about it, much rougher in feeling. Going aboard a barge or a seagoing vessel, one would expect to see more metal bulkheads, metal equipment, welding, things of this type, riveting. But the Promise definitely had a kind of almost a shack-like atmosphere about it. It was obvious that people who had inverted its various areas into bunk areas, crew areas had simply gone in and put up plywood partitions in the easiest manner, easiest load possible. It was livable, there wasn't anything particularly wrong with it. It just had this definitely rougher look about it. [00:09:49] One of the structures in one of the large work areas that we saw had been originally used as a radio repair shack, kind of inside the barge. The exterior of this room appeared to be just regular housing siding, the kind of thing you'd find on a normal ordinary home. The effect I must say was rather incongruous. The air conditioning unit was just hung from the ceiling at that time, it was leaking very badly, and there was a jerry-rigged catch on the runoff. It just had a very rough, different, compromised look about it. [00:10:34] In the early days of the barge operations, according to Pool, a lot of top management kind of liked the idea of riding along. It was sort of novel, especially the voyage down the California coast to Panama Canal and the Gulf. Karl Heimberg, he said, was the one who made the trip a couple of times. Vandersee was another. There were slightly larger bunk areas then for the VIPs from NASA who might have wanted to make a barge trip. [00:11:05] We passed into the galley area, which was a very interesting thing. Again, it had a kind of rough look about it, a compromised look. Confirming my stereotypes about Navy galleys, there were a couple of very luscious, girly calendars hanging on the walls. The galley was fairly well equipped with large stoves, fairly large refrigerators, and of course, the usual complement, table chairs, things of this type. [00:11:41] The power for the Promise was a Caterpillar diesel engine, AC, 60 kilowatts. Nearby was a repair room, a lathe, welding equipment, drill press, what appeared to be at one time a rather complete tool area, again fulfilling this self-standing, self-contained philosophy. There was enough tools and machinery on board ships to make emergency repairs, keep underway, do whatever was necessary. [00:12:20] We left the Promise and then went aboard the Orion. The difference really was quite obvious. On the Promise, the outside where the huge bulbous over structure had been added. On the outside of the vessel it was necessary to add metal V-shaped supports and metal supports on the sides. The bulbous structure overhung the original gunnels by about maybe three or four feet. There were metal supports then that went down to other parts of the original structure. It had the look of an American gunboat, the kind that you used to see on the Yangtze back in the 20s and 30s, kind of like a large canopy, canvas canopy aboard the thing. [00:13:11] The Orion was very much different, it was much slicker. As Poole pointed out to us, it had been taken into a Navy yard and constructed and engineered from the very beginning as a barge to carry a large S-IC stage. In getting the S-IC aboard the Orion, the crew made use of turnbuckles to sort of winch the thing in. Then it was secured, and there were guidelines painted on the deck of the barge. It had to be aligned rather exactly, because once it was aboard it was snugged up to an A-frame, very large, which it would have to be to accommodate the S-IC. The A-frame point, of course, was the center of the stage, and used not only to take the S-IC, but the S-II stage. There was a handling ring built into the S-II and S-IC stages attached to the A-frame. The A-frame took the entire weight, so that literally if the ship moved side to side, the stage would stay in one point. The barge literally moved around the stationary stage as it was affixed to the A-frame. [00:14:37] The equipment on the Orion included not only the dehumidifying equipment, but nitrogen port and starboard to keep pressure on the interior tanks of the S-IC and S-II stages to keep them from collapsing. When the Orion was built, the Coast Guard was on the spot in the shipyard. Although one got the impression from Pool that the barges were not entirely up to, say, Coast Guard or maritime regulations. They were enough to do the job, but maybe they weren't quite as up to snuff as they might have been. [00:15:19] We went up into the pilot house of the Orion, and Pool emphasized, as did Carl DeNeen, the role of the Mechling Barge Lines, Incorporated. M-E-C-H-L-I-N-G. Mechling Barge Lines, Incorporated based in Juliet, Illinois. As we understood it, the Mechling Barge Lines were unique in the fact that they had seaway rights to go from one river into the next, into the Gulf of Mexico, into the Pacific Ocean, into the various inland channels. Apparently other barge lines don't have the right to go into all these things. The cargo has to be transferred or even offloaded from one barge line to the next. The Mechling Line's seaway rights from port to port made it an extremely valuable asset to NASA and accounts for a large amount of business that the Mechling Barge Lines got. They made considerable use of the tugboat Carl Fuqua, F-U-Q-U-A. Fuqua is what it's sometimes called. The Fuqua was remotely equipped. In ordinary operation, the barge pushed, excuse me, the tug pushed the barge from behind. In the case of the Promise and the Palaemon, control took place then from the pilot house to the tug. But in the case of the Orion, control took place from the pilot house of the barge itself. [00:17:05] Some of the barge captains had to relearn the different kind of control that they experienced in this kind of thing. The power was supplied by the tug in the rear. Control took place forward. In case something did happen, there was an automatic remote control that switched back to the tug's pilot house so that it could be done from either place. When the captain and the barge and tug were underway, the crew or captain, whoever was doing the piloting, would do a six hour stint and six hours off, the tug captain and the pilot then alternating. The pilot house of the Orion, of course, included a full array of various electronic communications here since it was in all respects the command post whenever the barge and tug was underway. It was a loaded cargo. [00:18:020] A few random bits of information. When the locks collapsed with the dam, the Tennessee Valley Authority had the responsibility to build the roads around the locks. It was done fairly rapidly because the NASA program, or the Saturn program at this time, had a national priority rating because the roads got built fairly fast. It not only served NASA, however, it also served the Atomic Energy Commission, which also used the Tennessee River with large and sometimes bulky and highly valuable cargoes. [00:18:40] Typically, the tug boats would push barges and cargoes in river areas and at sea they would be towed. But in much of the seaborne operations of NASA, the ship used was the Point Barrel. The Point Barrel was an AKD, a Navy designation ship. It was originally used in the Navy as a dry dock ship. The aft part of the ship then was a rather hollow thing designed to be used as a dry dock in forward areas. The Point Barrel actually served five years in Arctic duty. It could stay frozen in the ice for long periods of time. It's a cargo area, if you want to call it that, it provided easy access, and it was fairly uncluttered for the stowage of materials and supplies for the Arctic party. The Point Barrel is now in Brooklyn in the Navy's reserve fleet, and although the Navy is responsible for its maintenance, the bill for it is still paid by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. [00:19:57] Whenever NASA got ready for a mission using the barges and tugs, they acquired their crews from the Mechling Company. As I recall there was an annual contract signed with the Mechling Company for the first time for it to supply the required crew whatever NASA demanded it. Usually NASA had to give about a two weeks notice to get a crew from Illinois down, get them aboard the barge, get the thing ship shape, and have also then signed a tug, and a crew for the tug to handle the necessary work. [00:20:44] And this is the conclusion of the tape concerning the logistics interview with Carl Pool. 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_000034_A Title A name given to the resource Pool, Carl (Roger Bilstein's summary) 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 This transcript describes the logistical operations behind transporting Saturn rocket stages using NASA’s specialized barge fleet and highlights an interview with Carl Pool, head of the NASA fleet. Bilstein describes how Pool explains how former Navy YFNB-class barges were adapted into self-contained transport vessels capable of carrying Saturn stages from Marshall Space Flight Center along the Tennessee and Mississippi Rivers, through the Gulf of Mexico, the Panama Canal, and to launch facilities in California and Florida. The discussion covers the design modifications required for transporting massive rocket components, including reinforced decks, tie-down systems, dehumidification equipment, nitrogen systems, power supplies, and specialized loading methods for different stages such as the S-IC and S-II. The transcript contrasts the older, more improvised Promise and Palaemon barges with the purpose-built Orion, which was engineered specifically for the massive Saturn V first stage. Pool also describes the crews, operational procedures, and partnership with Mechling Barge Lines, whose unique navigation rights allowed NASA cargo to move across interconnected waterways and coastal routes. Overall, the interview illustrates the complexity, ingenuity, and large-scale logistical planning required to support the Saturn program’s transportation needs. https://oralhistory.uah.edu/files/original/365453a508f48922e1e8de0182708e30.jpg 4598197eb9b09fa4ae86fb6882190ee7 https://oralhistory.uah.edu/files/original/7b33c85bc48c988fa6dfef2f243c371d.mp4 757daddee4f043d6393f242af49035b3 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 Pease, Robert Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Bilstein, Roger E. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 0:57:30 Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound [00:00:00] Roger Bilstein: Interview with Bob Pease, J-2 engine. Now one of these things in the design of the J-2, I get the impression that it was designed to be tested at altitude and sea level or something like that. But no, designed to be tested at sea level although it was going to be fired very high. Was this a particular problem? Was it the first engine to be designed that way at least in the liquid hydrogen technology class? [00:00:32] Bob Pease: No, let me say that there was a particular desire to be able to fire the complete engine including the bell nozzle which was a 27.5 to 1 air ratio nozzle, under the sea level test stand conditions. The reason for doing this of course was number one to ensure that we had the ability to fire the engine with more ease, which you can do in a sea level environment than if you have to do it in an altitude chamber. The test frequency—the question was important—so the engine bell nozzle was designed to flow full at the sea level test conditions. This was important in order to get the proper heat fluxes and so forth into the chamber. In other words, the chamber was being cooled by hydrogen. The hydrogen of course picks up heat as it goes up through the wall and comes into the injector, so trying to get as near as possible the proper heat transfer conditions on the chamber under sea level firing. Another thing involved was the fact that if the nozzle didn't flow full, not only would it affect the heat transfer to the thrust chamber wall, it would also make it difficult to [tape cuts out] …Not recording? [00:02:36] RB: Okay, we're on again. [laughs] [00:02:38] BP: Did you miss all that or should I go? [00:02:40] RB: Why don't you just recapitulate? I think I moved this over here because sometimes we get a lot of overtone noise from air conditioning equipment. [00:02:48] BP: Well, I think I can shorten that down now. [00:02:50] RB: Okay. [00:02:52] BP: I think if I understand your question, you're saying…The basic question you asked was the engine, some reason for having the engine designed to both be fired at sea level and at altitude, and was this a first in the engine business? To recapitulate, yes, there was a reason for having the engine be able to fire both at sea level and altitude. The reason to have it fire at sea level is in order to obtain more easily the testing, numbers of tests and so forth, and to do it under an easier test environment than you have to when you're playing with the diffusers and altitude equipment. That facilitates your development effort that way. Because of this, the engine was designed to give as near as possible the proper performance on the sea level test by having the nozzle flow full. If it doesn't flow full, you have problems in measuring the thrust, and you also have a difference in heat transfer to the thrust chamber wall. [00:04:23] BP: As it turned out, the engine…There were still differences in the way the engine performed at sea level and the way it performed on the altitude test. There were some changes in the engine power balance due to the difference in pressure ratio between sea level and altitude across the turbine areas. There was also some difference in the heat transfer to the thrust chamber wall simply by the fact that under the altitude conditions you had, I'd say, a very reduced atmospheric situation, and you weren't even transferring atmospheric heat into the thrust chamber wall. [laughs] There were some differences, both in those two areas. However, I don't know if I'm answering your question completely on this. Was this a first? I think it was a first from the standpoint of trying to get a nozzle of a higher expansion ratio to flow fully at sea level. The nozzle was a special contour which was designed in order to facilitate this. That part of it was a first. I believe on previous programs, such as the RL-10, we had to use some type of diffuser system if we were going to flow the full, complete [engine?] nozzle. So I don't know, does that…? [00:06:07] RB: Yeah. That answers the question, I think. I’ll have to do some research on it too, try and find out some more things. Maybe I can pick up the phone sometime, just call you back. [00:06:16] BP: Yeah, fine. [00:06:17] RB: Now, they did use vacuum diffuser equipment in the J-2 development. [00:06:22] BP: Yes, they did. [00:06:23] RB: Was there a difference, say, in the diffuser equipment that Rocketdyne installed there and what was used at Tullahoma? [00:06:31] BP: Yes. [00:06:32] RB: Why was there a difference? I mean, how did the difference occur and what was the intent? Why do some of the testing at Susanna and why do some at Tullahoma? [00:06:41] BP: Well, what amounts to this is that when the program started, it was recognized that there still had to be an altitude system type test to verify the engine behavior on their altitude. Even though the engine was designed such that it could be tested at sea level, it was still recognized there would be some differences when testing in an altitude environment. From a very important beginning program outset, the steam operated diffuser was planned at Santa Susanna to evaluate the engine under vacuum operating conditions. The steam operated diffuser operated in such a manner as that steam was supplied during the engine start transient, which pulled the capsule pressure down to something in the neighborhood of 80,000 feet. When the engine started, the diffuser would operate in a manner of…It would be activated by the exhaust gases of the nozzle in order then to maintain the capsule vacuum pressure under main stage operating conditions. When the engine shut down, the steam would come on again to try to maintain the altitude conditions. Well, when this system was actually put into operation, it was discovered that the steam system was unable to maintain the 80,000 foot altitude during the start transient. Part of the reason for this was the fact that when the diffuser and steam system were designed, they didn't anticipate the amount of hydrogen fuel lead that was going to be produced by the engine. Hydrogen being densities and so forth it is, this fuel lead very quickly saturated the altitude producing capabilities of the steam system such that the altitude would drop down to less than 20,000 feet during the start. [00:09:12] RB: If you're shooting for 80, that's not a very good condition. [laughs] [00:09:16] BP: Right. Not only that, they also found that there was considerable steam blowback and turbulence that came back and got into the nozzle area, which also fouled up the heat transfer inputs to the chamber one thing or another. Between the pressure ratio across the oxidizer turbine and the steam blowback, it was felt that our altitude simulation was less than optimal. From that standpoint, we then made an investigation to find out if the Tullahoma facility would be available in order to run some additional series of altitude tests. In fact, along with this investigation, we also investigated constructing another altitude facility at Santa Susanna, which would have been operated by another type of steam system, one which would have kept the altitudes up in the neighborhood of 90 to 100,000 feet at all times. Rocketdyne had successfully demonstrated what they called a hyper flow steam system using basically an H-1 engine to generate steam. Instead of having a steam accumulator, which had limited capacities, they were going to fire essentially a rocket engine with water injection, which would have generated a very large steam capacity instantaneously upon demand for keeping the altitude up. That system looked very good and would have cost us, however, several million dollars to put that in at Santa Susanna. In the process of looking at all this, it became apparent that it would be more cost effective to activate the Tullahoma stand, the J-4 cell at Tullahoma for this purpose. That's how the Tullahoma program came into being. Once we got into the J-4 cell, we did find that we did learn some further knowledge as to the engine starting characteristics that wasn't apparent at the testing at Santa Susanna, either under the altitude or the sea level testing. [00:11:55] RB: So you had to do a little redesign? [00:11:580] BP: Yeah, there did cause some redesign, but it was not of a major nature, mainly orificing and balancing of the engine start primarily. The Tullahoma conditions on the transfer to the thrust chamber and so forth were further verified as being accurate. This is just a side note, when I looked at the flight data, they found that the flight data substantiated our performance results at Tullahoma. Tullahoma was a pretty good facility for that standpoint. One thing that Tullahoma didn't do, or any of the testing didn't do, was did not find what we call the ASI problem of 502. [00:12:51] RB: Can you go into that a little bit? [00:12:55] BP: Sure. [00:12:57] RB: We're still running. [00:13:02] BP: You might have already got some history on this, you may have known, we did fail an ASI line in the S-II stage and also in the S-IVB stage on flight 502. The ASI fuel line was later discovered to be a fatigue failure of the line caused by flow vibration, or its flow induced vibration. Turns out that this was not discovered under sea level testing or even under altitude conditions of the Tullahoma stand because, well, number one, under sea level conditions, there's a condensation of air that gets in between the bellows section. This does two things. Number one, it's maybe a lesser effect of it, but it does provide some damping in the bellows. Secondly, it does affect the heat transfer boundary layer conditions on the inside of the flow path. When Rocketdyne ran laboratory tests and took photographs, movie photographs, and made other flow dynamics studies, they found out that the heating effect of the line actually changed the flow induced vibration characteristics. I'm not a flow vibration expert, so I'm trying to explain it in… [00:14:49] RB: Neither am I. [both laugh] [00:14:53] BP:…Simple terms as I understand it. In other words, apparently it changed the boundary layer conditions on the inside of the line so that the flow pattern wasn't the same. Now, why didn't this happen at Tullahoma? Well, there's a good altitude condition we were obtaining—100,000 feet or so—there's still enough nitrogen present in the cell to—this is a theory is presumed on to, at least the calculations have been made—to provide the same effect. [00:15:35] RB: Okay, I didn't understand that then. So was nitrogen still existing in the cell to create that kind of frost buildup and have the same damping effect? [00:15:43] BP: Well, there's both nitrogen and water, and I say nitrogen because I believe in Rocketdyne's testing they proved that frost alone would not prevent the failure. It really, really had to be the air condensation. In other words, yeah, if it were packed with ice, it's one thing, but a minor frost buildup, I think alone was not considered sufficient to prevent the failure. The way I understand it now is that they believe there was enough nitrogen condensation within the cell to have done this. Now, I guess one way of…Maybe another way of tackling the problem is that I don't really know if this is a feasible way if nitrogen could have been substituted for some other gas such as a helium purge. The reason they don't like helium is because the lighter the gas is the harder it is to pump it out. [00:16:45] RB: But isn't that the way they finally got to fix on it though? They put it in a helium tank or something? [00:16:51] BP: Yes, as a matter of fact, in the testing at Santa Susanna, they tested with a helium environment, vacuum environment, with [arid?] environments, and they found out that it would fail under the helium environment because the helium wouldn't condense. It would fail under the vacuum environment, the hard vacuum environment in a test small test capsule, they can pump it down quite a bit higher altitude to Tullahoma. So that's how they finally pinpointed it was by isolating these different environments. [00:17:34] BP: So it's quite an interesting investigation. I think to many of us it's sad that there are always certain problems that one cannot predict in advance and all the analytical techniques cannot even plan for. Well, now that we know about this one, we will always plan for it. I'm sure that in the space shuttle management program or other future programs, we will still continue to plan altitude type testing. Although in this particular case on J-2, it didn't find this problem. [00:18:22] RB: You were out at Rocket...Were you the MSFC representative out there? [00:18:27] BP: I was the resident manager for the J-2. [00:18:32] RB: Do you remember very much about the story on the injector face and the use of Rigi-Mesh? Were you involved in that? [00:18:42] BP: Yes. [00:18:43] RB: Could you give me a little bit more? [00:18:45] BP: What would you like to know about it? [00:18:46] RB: It's my understanding that it was the Pall Corporation that came up with the Rigi-Mesh stuff in New York, and they got this out of the Atomic Energy Commission program and used it for filtering gases or something? [00:19:00] BP: Yes, I believe that's correct. I know the material was produced for purposes of such of that nature. I guess it also had been used on the RL-10 program. [00:19:15] RB: My question is this. You had some problems with the injector, I guess. Well, normal development problems. Where does the decision come to get into Rigi-Mesh? Does Marshall say that? [00:19:28] BP: Well, I just happened to be intimately involved in that one. We started the J-2 program. Rocketdyne had proposed a copper ring type injector, which was typical of most previous Rocketdyne designs with the various orifice holes drilled at various angles in the copper. The Rigi-Mesh had been used successfully on the RL-10 program and had been in fact introduced to the RL-10 program by Lewis people. Before that, where they got it from—I think what you say is right—the Atomic Energy Commission may have used it for filtering devices, one way or another. But it was used in the RL-10 program as an injector plate medium in order to allow the hydrogen to filter through and partially cool the face by that means. People were concerned at that time about the problem of cooling the face and felt that Lewis people felt we might have some problems with the copper. In the early part of the J-2 program, we got back to the initial discussions on how to get it into the program. It was suggested to Rocketdyne by NASA that they include in the development program an alternate design of a Rigi-Mesh face type injector, and that they evaluate both the copper design which they proposed and this alternate Rigi-Mesh injector. Sometime downstream, there would be a decision made as to which one was best. [00:21:27] RB: In this case, the impetus came from NASA to Rocketdyne? [00:21:30] BP: Right, and this is part of NASA's transfer of technology, whatever you want to call it. We were aware of the material, we were aware that it had been used in the rocket engine programs, and we felt that Rocketdyne ought to look at it also. So after—I don't remember the exact time frame, but I think it was within probably about the first six to nine months—the early injector testing, they did test several copper versions and several Rigi-Mesh versions. The overall assessment of Rocketdyne came to the conclusion—and NASA agreed—that Rigi-Mesh performed not only performance-wise better in terms of the particular concentric post orifices where the hydrogen came out around each post, each LOX [oxidizer?] post in the Rigi-Mesh face. The design performed well from an Isp standpoint, and it performed well from a cooling standpoint, there was no problem with burning. We did have some problems with the copper injector on burning the rings and lands and so forth. I remember one where we had green flame coming out the chamber during one test. [both laugh] I'm sure they could have solved the copper problem, I'm sure they could have solved the cooling problem, but it just turned out that in that evaluation the Rigi-Mesh was best. [00:23:04] RB: This is an interesting feature it seems to me of the Saturn, or NASA programs generally, that you do hear here is Marshall operating, cooperating with Lewis and with the contractor. It's the kind of technology of one center, in this case Lewis, that comes through Marshall into the Rocketdyne facility, that there’s this interchanging [inaudible]... [00:23:23] BP: I remember that particular one because I had worked with the Lewis people on the technical committee of the source evaluation for the J-2. In that capacity I got familiar with those people and that particular subject. I was a part of convincing Rocketdyne that we should do this. [00:23:53] RB: Now again there's a question I wanted to ask, kind of a specific one. Rocketdyne got the contract and started to work to put together an experimental engine and later fired an experimental engine. Now where the hell do you get an experimental engine? Do you just go out in the shop and start hand working an injector face, put together a few tubes? How do you do that? [00:24:18] BP: Well, you first have to design it. [00:24:20] RB: Yeah [laughs]. Well, what I'm getting at is there's no manufacturing lines set up yet really. The first test engine really is a handmade product. Is it accurate to say that? [00:24:32] BP: No, no it isn't. Now the J-2, Rocketdyne designed a J-2 engine as they envisioned it in their original proposal model. [00:24:43] RB: Oh, the computer model. I know they used a lot of computer stuff, configurations… [00:24:47] BP: That's true, they looked at their analysis, and they sized the ducts, tubes and so forth with a proper thrust chamber size with a proper heat transfer and all that type of thing. In other words, they designed the engine from a dimensional standpoint based on all their analysis. They went out and released orders for material, which is not just raw material but vendors to make certain basic castings and forgings and so forth, and even some components which they purchased from vendors, which was either modification off the shelf items like small valves and things of that sort. Or they actually ordered components from certain vendors to their own specifications. This material comes in house, it's machined to the drawings; it's checked out to the specifications; and they put an engine together. Now they call this an experimental engine. I believe the first one was essentially called “Experimental Engine” because they had very little if any experience with the major components. One exception was the hydrogen turbopump, which was basically a modification of one that they had already built and run for the Atomic Energy Commission on the Rover program. We were starting with basically an off the shelf turbopump, which was modified somewhat for the J-2 application. The oxidizer pumps were not too unsimilar from the previous engine programs like the H-1 and the Atlas and other LOX/RP engines. The oxidizer pumps were quite similar in design to what they had used before. Some modifications such that J-2 they used separate pumps rather than two pumps run by a gearbox. Each pump had its own turbine and that was a new innovation from previous engines. [00:27:12] BP: It is not just a handmade type of thing. It's actually analyzed, designed, hardware is released and built, and so forth. Not only that, they didn't just release one set of hardware, they released groups of hardware. I think they released maybe four or five engines worth of hardware, probably even the initial release. From the first engine firing, the experimental engine, they found out some things, which they went back and made some corrections to. The hardware was already in the pipeline. It was like they might have to, well, I can't think of a specific example that occurred on the J-2 but…Well, I think of one thing that happened, our famous 27.5 to 1 thrust chamber, which was flows full at sea level, developed a phenomenon which they hadn't predicted, and that's called side loads. During the start transient, a very eccentric load developed in the chamber, forcing the chamber over to one side. Some of the first engines they ran, they actually physically distorted the chamber, distorted the actuator systems, and things trying to hold the chamber in place, engine in place. They had to quick come up with what they call a horse collar, which was a device that came in and grabbed the chamber at the throat. It would hold the engine stable, take the load during the start, and once it was running then the thing would drop away so the engine could be gimbaled. But that was not predicted, and that's an example of a kind of a modification to find out you have to make. [00:29:02] RB: Were they able to work out the side load problem that they were on and get rid of that horse collar thing? [00:29:07] BP: No. [00:29:08] RB: That stayed in the whole program? [00:29:09] BP: Yes it did. The S-II stage and ground firing used devices to hold the chambers in place. [00:29:14] RB: And the S-IVB then also has the same thing? [00:29:17] BP: During ground firing. [00:29:18] RB: During ground firing. [00:29:19] BP: And that's ground equipment. [00:29:20] RB: Okay, it's not flight hardware? [00:29:21] BP: No, the side loads don't exist in flight because of the vacuum condition. [00:29:26] RB: Okay. [tape cuts out] [00:29:27] RB: It takes a minute or a second to get here, to run up. Okay, I think we're probably back on here. [00:29:35] BP: Okay, so I kind of went beyond maybe the scope of your original question. [00:29:39] RB: No, I'm glad to find out. I didn't know about it. [00:29:41] BP: There were any number of problems that, of course, came out of the early engine firings, which caused either modification of hardware, which had been released in the system, or certainly got cranked into the next batch of hardware design that was going to be released in the system. [00:30:04] RB: Could you pick out a problem that you remember, especially that developed during the test and qualification program that brought about a redesign of hardware? [00:30:14] BP: We had lots of those. [laughs] I don't know if there's any one you want me to emphasize... [00:30:22] RB: We read the NASA press releases and the AIAA presentations by Rocketdyne people—which isn't to say anything against them, you know?—but you get the impression that this was a beautiful program. You know there must have been a problem somewhere. [00:30:36] BP: I guess this is a matter of debate. I don't know. My own personal philosophy is that you have a development program to find out what's wrong with things and correct it. In other words, I think it's more accurate to say that happiness should be finding a failure rather than not finding a failure because if you don't find it, then you're going to be hung up sometime in a critical mission or flight or something of that sort. The J-2 program did find lots of failures and had to correct them during the program. The most difficult part of it came into play when we had to release engines for production, and we had engines in the production pipeline, and we were still finding failures. It's particularly difficult because then it means that the solution has to be found that we can crank into the production line and fix that particular piece of production hardware. Not only before it's delivered from the line, but we had cases where engines had already been delivered to the field that we had to send out modification kits to fix them. A lot of people look at this as saying, “Well gee, why didn't you find all those things before you sent those engines out to production?” Truth of the matter is that the program always needs the production hardware before it's fully developed. [00:32:18] RB: For schedules? To meet your schedules? [00:32:21] BP: For schedules. We have not only on the Saturn program, but on every program in the missile rocket business that I've ever looked at including the Air Force program, we have a situation of what we call concurrent development and production. General Schriever recognized that during the early IBM days. We certainly had it during the Saturn Apollo. The engine being one of the long lead items for the entire system suffers particularly because the vehicle people would like to get an operational engine cranked in their vehicle as soon as possible. Many times they'd like to have it rather than waiting to have it at some point where you install the engine down at the Cape before you launch it. They're not satisfied with that. Usually they want to crank the engine in in the early part of the vehicle build up cycle back at the vehicle manufacturing area so that the whole system, engine to vehicle, goes through the system checkouts. Maybe sometime in the future, we can promote a philosophy to give us more time in the engine area where we can install the engines at the other end of the line. [both laugh] Which just means maybe as much as a year of expert development and maturity. [00:33:47] RB: Can you give an example? Do you remember what kind of modifications you were sending out? [00:33:53] BP: Yeah. Well, let me give an example that hit us in the production line before we were just beginning to deliver the first flight engine for Saturn IB, which was going to Douglas with engine number fifteen, 2015 I believe. Now this engine was in the stages of final assembly when we discovered that we had burned out a section of the gas generator wall, actually put a hole in it. In fact, I believe this happened on one of the battleship engines that we had sent to Douglas Sacramento. It happened on another engine or two that were being fired in Santa Susanna. This launched an intensive development effort to solve this problem, which Rocketdyne came up with a change to the throat of the gas generator. They call it [inaudible] choke ring, which diverted the gases somewhat so they didn't impinge on the wall. So this [inaudible] choke ring then had to be worked into all the gas generators that were on the line. It meant actually cutting the gas generator, which was welded to the fuel turbine [manifold?], taking this assembly off, reworking it, re-welding everything back up again. It was quite a re-working turnaround problem. It was a modification that could be incorporated into existing hardware to solve the problem. That's an example of a problem that hit us during the manufacturing cycle. [00:35:56] BP: One of the most serious development problems I think in terms of seriousness that we found was the fact that we had some very definite problems in the engine start sequence. During an attempted semi-qualification, which we call PFRT testing, we did discover that we did have a control problem or a sequencing problem. We started build up which actually caused the LOX valve to be forced closed such that the LOX valve had such hydraulic pressure against it it wouldn't open properly. This caused excessive back pressure since the gas generator was tapped off above the LOX valve. The gas generator LOX balance went LOX rich. We got too hot temperatures and burned out the turbine and a few other things. This did point out the fact we had a problem there. [00:37:17] BP: We'd also been having problems in starting the engine due to the hydrogen pump stall, which in case power balance was very sensitive between the LOX and fuel turbine speed buildups. If the pressure in the chamber built up too fast because the LOX pump was putting more LOX in the main thrust chamber causing the main thrust chamber pressure to build up too fast, this caused excessive back pressure on the hydrogen side. It got ahead, you might say, of the hydrogen pump buildup, and we had that condition which forced the operating and the operating curve of the pump, which pushed it over into the stall region. The pump would stop pumping. That was called hydrogen stall. [00:38:13] BP: There was extensive development effort launched to find improvements to the start sequence, which necessitated running a much larger number of engine system tests than we had originally planned. The only way you could work on this problem was to run the engine system. The other problem I mentioned when we burned out the gas generator, we solved the problem in the gas generator pit. In this case, there was no other way to solve the problem except to make many, many cut and tries, as it will, at the engine test itself. Rocketdyne used all of their analytical methods in the start computer, which they had developed and so forth, and tried to make refinements on that computer in order to get a better handle on things. They used all the techniques that they could. Really what it came down to is that you had to make an adjustment and then try it. The final solution had to be tested under altitude conditions to make sure that it was also valid because of the altitude affecting the start. [00:39:37] RB: Okay, that's very good. You know, these are a good example, I think, you know, of what happened [inaudible]. Another brief question here, and then I've taken enough of your time, I think. J-2 was built for a mission of around 500 seconds, but the lifetime was about 3,750 seconds around that area. [00:40:01] BP: Yes, 3,750 was the qualification one. [00:40:04] RB: Okay, now why the difference? What were you doing inside those 3,750 seconds that you needed that many of when the actual mission was only 500? [00:40:16] BP: Well, I guess that's a philosophical sort of question. It gets back down to some basic assumptions. Number one is the fact that I guess when an engine is delivered to the Cape for flight, it's already going to have a certain amount of time on it. It's not going to be zero time. There's about 750 seconds allocated for the acceptance test of the engine. Then there was another 500 seconds allocated for the vehicle test, ground test. They did fire the S-II stages and S-IVB stages on the ground for quite a while. I guess they fired all of the S-II stages. Then as a reserve, there were additional time allocated beyond that. [00:41:19] BP: Suppose you have a vehicle problem or a reason to refire the vehicle for some reason on the ground, you might have to run another complete test. You can rationalize yourself that you might have engines at least 1,500 seconds that would still have to be qualified for flight. It turns out most of them didn't have that much time on them when they got to the Cape. More like, I say 1,500 to 2,000 seconds, you could rationalize. You might be in that range, but most of them were in the 1,000 to 1,200 range that actually turned out. All right, so then beyond that, you say, “Well, why would you need any more time?” This is strictly a matter of judgment in fact that trying to make a maturity reliability type assessment, I think the goal of 3,750 was chosen because it would also increase the confidence level upon which the engine say of some lesser time would have their flight. [00:42:34] RB: Is this part of the manned rating philosophy too? [00:42:38] BP: Yes. Well, it was at least in our minds at that time. The fact that we were going to fly manned in previously qualified engines, much less time. We felt that 3,750 seconds was perhaps not an unreasonable amount of time at all for a hydrogen type of an engine. I can't say that this is any magic number for a manned space flight because it wasn't. The F-1 had a qualification time of 2,250 seconds, which was felt reasonable for the conditions that you expect with a LOX/RP type engine. The fuel made a considerable difference because there were more effects on the F-1 life by using RP fuel because of coking, carbon deposits, and other other types of problems that you've got with the fuel. Hydrogen engine stays just brand shiny clean. You don't have those kind of problems, and you can expect a longer life inherently from a hydrogen engine. This was one reason why I'd say somewhat arbitrarily 3,750 was chosen to be at least some measure beyond what we have done in the LOX/RP type engines. That's about it. There are probably some other philosophical reasons that you might get from some other people. I don't know. [00:44:14] RB: [laughs] Well, do you have any, you know, things that you'd like to say? [00:44:16] BP: Well, just to make one more little sidelight on this whole thing…In fact, I don't know when the designer looks at 3,750 seconds, whether he designed the bearing carrier much different than whether it was 3,000 or 2,000 or what. We actually ran some R&D engines with, of course, some component replacement here and there, but we had components on R&D engines which had gone well over up to 20,000 seconds. We had several other samples at ten, 15,000, that range. [00:45:00] RB: It gives you a pretty high confidence factor. [00:45:02] BP: Well, yeah, as a matter of fact, it's because of this kind of data that we feel rather confident that the space shuttle main engine we can eventually attain the seven and a half hour life on mission requirements. In fact, we don't even know today that some of the J-2 components wouldn't have gone much beyond the 20,000 seconds because we just gave up at that point. Some of them weren't even worn out. If we had to today take a J-2 engine and make it a reusable type of engine to go to a long life—many missions—we have some data, which there will be some areas in the J-2 that we know are life limited, which would have to be redesigned. From a general standpoint, it did give us high confidence in the J-2 from the J-2 data that many of the hydrogen type components would run considerably longer than what we ever tested before. [00:46:18] RB: Well, I've taken a good share of your time here. [00:46:22] BP: Well, I understood you wanted about an hour. Anything else you have on your list that you want to go into? [00:46:30] RB: No, some of the…There are questions that I picked up just reading odds and ends of things. One thing that is really a stupid question, but what does J-2 mean? [00:46:43] BP: [Laughs] Doesn't mean anything particularly. The Rocketdyne had a system of numbering engines. Well, maybe it's a lack of system. We had…I can't really say where it started. Rocketdyne had an E-1 experimental engine program. They had the F-1 program. It seemed to me there was a D program somewhere that didn't live very long. I don't know what happened to some of the other numbers in between. They probably died in the proposal [mill?] somewhere. But there was H-1, of course, which was picked on H-1. I think they skipped I for obvious reasons. The next thing that came out of the bag after H-1 was the J-1. [00:47:48] RB: Oh, J-1? [00:47:50] BP: Rocketdyne peddled this around the country in the advanced design sales department, I'd say, for a while. [00:48:00] RB: Was it a hydrogen engine? [00:48:02] BP: Yeah, it was an advanced design concept really, which they called J-1. Then when NASA got serious about going into a development of a hydrogen type engine of the 200,000 pound class, then to distinguish from the version that they had been peddling around the country, they would call it the J-2. I guess basically I don't even think J-2 appeared in their proposal, but when they got down to negotiating the contract, they said, “Well, we're going to call this the J-2 since we had J-1. Does anybody object?” NASA didn't have any numbering system established for engines like the Air Force had the [XLR?] type series. We didn't have any official numbering system, so we said, “We don't know it makes any difference.” Well, J-2. Of course, we already had the H-1 being one, and the F-1 program had already been started. It seemed chronological to us to call it the J-2. [both laugh] [00:49:13] RB: While you were out there, do you remember any incidents that struck you or remember as being humorous or funny? People out there who were really strong characters, little anecdotes about any of them? [00:49:30] BP: I probably could if I thought about it a little bit. After all those years, we certainly had a lot of interesting meetings. [laughs] It got pretty wild at times, but let me think a minute here. Well, I really can't remember anything offhand. As I say, I'm sure I would if I thought about it a bit. [00:50:07] RB: What about Von Braun? [00:50:09] BP: He used to come out quite often to the West Coast and visit the Rocketdyne and review the program. He attended many of our review meetings that we had in the early days. Later on, he got…Demands were heavier on his time, he came out less often. He usually managed to come out once a year and review all of the activities at Rocketdyne. [00:50:40] RB: Did you find those helpful, necessarily, or was it something you did because it was for his primary information benefit? [00:50:47] BP: No, I wouldn't say…Obviously, I think that it was not only a general feeling by the NASA people, but I think the contractor, too, appreciated the opportunity to bring the center director—Von Braun, of course, being the center director at the time—up to date on what was going on. I think this helped the morale a lot because you did feel that the top management was interested in the effort. Not only that, I think that Von Braun himself was quite an inspiration to the program and any meetings that he attended. His comments and observations were—I would say—very, very helpful because it put what we were doing in one detailed part of the center—Apollo—and the whole system somewhat in more context as to really what our objective was. That was helpful. I think those types of meetings perhaps gave us more insight on where we really should be going and probably some of the day-to-day directives that we used to get. [both laugh] [00:52:17] RB: It's too easy to put the director of File 13 down there, I suppose too. [00:52:24] BP: My only general comment on the whole thing, I thought it was a very interesting program. I think that certainly learned a lot from the program. Much of what we learned from the program, we will attempt to apply in general to our management of future programs. In other words, not just learning what to do, but certainly a few things that we learned, I hope perhaps, not to do in a future program of this type. One thing I think that we learned, I think might be of specific interest, in looking back over the J-2 program history…We've done a lot of this in the last couple of years, going back into our history and deciding how we might possibly improve the approach, the management as a development approach in the management. This is even over and above the technical things that are obviously going into the new program. We're trying to apply this to our management approach now, the take on the shuttle engines. Just for example of this, I think we learned in looking over the J-2 program we need to have more emphasis on the component and subsystems testing. Also, we learned we need to get in earlier to testing limits of the hardware in J-2. For example, we had run the hydrogen turbopump a number of months at some fairly nominal type missions. They're within specifications, so to speak. Performance was fine, no problems. Well, I won't say no problems, but the things seemed to perform well basically. When they started to run what you might call higher limits to higher power levels, higher speeds and things of this sort, it might be on the outer fringes of the operational environment. In other words, the engine probably wouldn't run there, except maybe under some unusual conditions or what have you. We failed the turbine wheel, and found we got into a serious vibration problem with the turbine wheel, what they called a non-synchronous whirl. [00:55:29] RB: A non-synchronous whirl? [00:55:31] BP: That's right, but it was a critical vibration problem at a certain speed, the turbine just wouldn't stand up and developed a fatigue crack and came apart. Unfortunately, that caused us then to put some limits on the production hardware in the sense that we had to inspect turbine wheels out in the field for a certain number of engines until we got to the production model that had the new turbine wheel in it. People look back on that and say, “Now had we the first couple of weeks, we’d run that turbopump, taken that machine up to that condition, we would have found the problem sufficiently early to prevent any impact at all on the program.” This might sound a little critical of some of the things we did in the program. It doesn't bother me to talk about it because I think that a development program is a learning process in itself, and nobody can be 100 percent smart in developing something that's completely unknown or… You just can't predict everything. These types of things will, I think, make us a little smarter going into the new programs. On the other hand, there are probably some things about the new high-pressure designs that we think we understand today, but we'll come crawling out of the woodwork at it. [both laugh] [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_000033_A Title A name given to the resource Pease, Robert Description An account of the resource In this interview, Bob Pease discusses the development, testing, and evolution of the Saturn J-2 rocket engine, focusing on the engineering challenges and lessons learned during the program. He explains the importance of designing the engine’s high-expansion nozzle to operate effectively at sea level for easier testing while still performing in the vacuum of space, and describes how altitude testing at facilities such as Santa Susanna and Tullahoma revealed differences in engine behavior and led to improvements. Pease details major development issues, including the ASI line fatigue failure, injector design decisions that led to the adoption of Rigi-Mesh technology, engine start problems, hydrogen turbopump challenges, and the need for modifications during concurrent development and production. He emphasizes that failures during testing were essential for improving reliability and that the J-2 program’s extensive qualification testing built confidence for future spaceflight systems. Pease also reflects on NASA’s collaboration with Rocketdyne and other organizations, the influence of leaders such as Wernher von Braun, and the management lessons from the J-2 program that informed later engine development efforts, including the Space Shuttle main engine. 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/783fa47a5d58dec71ce74100fcbed50b.jpg 4598197eb9b09fa4ae86fb6882190ee7 https://oralhistory.uah.edu/files/original/a9e05afcb8f95dc5b7373339f1bbf464.mp4 c854a1abfc0cd3cf0f11245e9f8b1d8e 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 Paul, Hans G.. Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Bilstein, Roger E. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 0:10:37 Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound [00:00:00] Hans Paul: You tell me what you want to, what you're interested in. I don't know. I have not... [00:00:08] Roger Bilstein: I think we’re interested in everything you said [inaudible]. [laughs] [00:00:11] HP: I have not prepared anything for this [inaudible]. It might be good; it might be bad. I don't know. [00:00:21] RB: Well, we have lots of questions. Perhaps we can just call you back sometime. [00:00:25] HP: Are you ready now? [00:00:26] RB: Yeah, go ahead. [00:00:27] HP: What I wanted to say…I made it a point that many people think the [rapid?] engine is the whole of the [propulsion system?], and it is not. It is a very essential and a very important part, but there are many, many other aspects that are equally important, which cannot be neglected [inaudible]. I tried to illustrate this. The thermal engineering was extremely important, as was the orbital restart of the J-2 engine. Again, on the S-IVB. You know, they run up [inaudible] and say, “You cannot [inaudible] orbit extremely difficult.” Furthermore, on the ground, you have still the atmosphere. If you are not careful, the atmosphere is [cool?] You don't see it; you don't pay for it. And orbit, [inaudible] [and what happened?] [00:01:22] HP: First of all, we insisted that we run our test in…Now if I say so, I might [inaudible]...We felt that we should simulate orbit in the Tullahoma test facility [inaudible]. Then we had to prove it, I guess, for three months. Presentation after presentation. Finally [inaudible] “You’re sure about this?” [Inaudible] Are you familiar with it? You know, you can fire the J-2 engine, the vacuum, up to and so-and-so many thousand of feet. And what did we find? We found that the cross-over duct [overheated?]. There was heat [soaked?] back [or whatever?] it was. During restart, so oxygen pump—or turbine first—got more energy than intended or designed for. If you do so, then you change, during the start-up, the mixture. You get more oxygen in your gas generator and in your gas generator mainly. This increases your temperature, so you exceed the upper temperature. If you do so, then you burn up your turbine [case?], and there is no second start. [00:02:58] HP: So we found this out. Then, of course, after you have this proof, then you can sit down…And then the contractor, of course. They analyze it. They should have done this before. They didn’t because they are confident that during their tests on the ground, they never really have a problem like this. An engineer must never be overconfident. He must always be suspicious. He must be skeptical by profession, otherwise he is [inaudible]. What I wanted to say is that our thermal properties, [inaudible] the whole propulsion system—from the lowest temperature, the [reach?] or [real?], close to zero, up to the highest temperatures, which can be handled at the present time technologically—they play a very important part. Regardless of which new project comes in [inaudible] the temperature control, the astronaut basically brushes off the radiator, then turns around and brushes himself off and brushes the dust back on the radiator again, which causes low temperatures and the missing [inaudible] after take off temperature problems. This aspect is extremely essentially the point. It is not normally as a rule realized by, except for the few who are intensively involved in it [inaudible]. [00:04:37] RB: Did you get involved very much with insulation problems then too? [00:04:41] HP: Oh yeah, we do. We call it the high temperature heat protection. On the lower end, the conservation of hydrogen, we call it cryopropellant preservation. We do this. I think we are on the forefront. [00:05:00] RB: I was curious about the difference in design—if you want to comment about it—between the S-IVB, which had the internal insulation, and the S-II, which had the external. [00:05:09] HP: I can show it to you. This is the data—the evaporation, lots of liquid hydrogen storage. The hydrogen evaporation is [inaudible] day is shown here, and here is the storage volume, liters. So if you have a container that is 100 liters, and you lose one percent, then it’s here. If you lose ten percent, it’s here. If you lose 100 percent a day, then it’s here. Is that clear? Can [inaudible]. [00:05:41] HP: Now you asked about the S-IV. The hydrogen loss of the internal insulation on the S-IV is 0.9 here. In orbit, it is down here. On the S-II stage, with the external insulation, the helium-purged foam on the S-II stage on the ground is here. The NAPCO spray foam insulation, we consider this on the ground, because the attitude is not high enough. The pressure is too high. But it's here. Does this answer your question? [00:06:16] HP: In other words, the S-IV on the ground would have an evaporation loss of over 100 percent. The S-II, there’s not much difference. It's at 100 percent, but it is a little bit better. Whereas in orbit, the S-IVB—now this would be in orbit it would be better too—it has ten, I would say it is probably fifteen, around fifteen or twenty percent. [00:06:50] HP: Now you asked what we are doing in insulation. We just tested a few weeks ago this 105 inch in diameter liquid hydrogen storage tank. It's 10,000 liters, a little bit more than 10,000 liters capacity. You see it is less than one percent, it is 0.3 percent. In thirty days, you would have ten percent loss. That is [inaudible]. [00:07:23] RB: Excuse me, going back to the S-II, there is a problem because you really don't consider it lost in orbital mode. [00:07:28] HP: Let me tell you, this insulation was not available at the time [this stage had been built?] ten years ago. This insulation was not in [inaudible]. For the time being, you must say that if you are on the ground you can always replenish. It's a short flight of five minutes, doesn't amount to anything. I think it was adequate. It was very adequate. But the improvement from year to year if you show it on a log scale is peanuts. What we need now. I should not interrupt you. You asked a question. [00:08:07] RB: The S-IVB was a little…Can you say that the S-IVB was a little more efficient then? [00:08:13] HP: No, because on the ground, it was even…Let’s see…We are nitpickers who say, [“Was it working?”] I would say—if you ask me—I would say the S-IVB and the S-II were the state of [inaudible]. It served the purpose. [00:08:30] RB: Okay, that's what I'm getting at, I guess. [00:08:32] HP: It served the purpose. And now, the requirements are greatly increasing and are much tougher. These insulations for orbital storage would not be good enough. Unfortunately, we have been able to reduce this by roughly two orders of magnitude. Let me explain. You see, in a storage container, the surface area of the volume changes with the third rule of the volume. [00:09:12] RB: I’ll take your word for it. [00:09:12] HP: In other words, what it loses…Take a sphere. If you have a small sphere, then the external area is relatively large compared to the content. If you have a big sphere, then the volume can hold increases faster [compared to surface area?]. For a storage container, a big container is always [at an advantage?]. I have shown this by plotting in here the one-third power of the volume. In other words, if you take this volume here, you go three or you could go three over here. One, one, two, three. This line would come from here to here. In other words, if you have 100,000 instead of 100, then your loss comes down by the third rule of thousands, which is [inaudible]. That is exactly what we choose here. In other words, what I should not do, I should not compare the loss of a small container to that of a big container. I have to normalize it. This is what these lines do. [00:10:33] John Stuart Beltz: Excuse me, I hate to interrupt. We've run over our time, and we also have no energy. [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_000032_A Title A name given to the resource Paul, Hans G. 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 Hans Paul’s interview emphasizes that successful rocket propulsion depends on more than the engine itself, highlighting the critical roles of thermal engineering, insulation, and temperature management within the overall propulsion system. Paul discusses the importance of accurately simulating orbital conditions during J-2 engine testing, explaining how vacuum tests at the Tullahoma facility revealed overheating in the cross-over duct that affected the oxygen pump turbine, altered mixture ratios, raised gas generator temperatures, and threatened turbine damage during engine restarts. He stresses the need for engineers to remain skeptical and thoroughly test systems rather than rely solely on successful ground tests. Paul also describes NASA’s work in thermal protection, including high-temperature protection and cryogenic propellant preservation, and compares insulation approaches used on the S-IVB and S-II stages, noting that both were state-of-the-art for their time and adequate for Apollo missions despite limitations in long-duration orbital storage. He explains advances in insulation technology, including improved liquid hydrogen storage systems that greatly reduced evaporation losses, and discusses how larger storage volumes improve efficiency because surface area increases more slowly than volume. Overall, Paul argues that thermal management was a fundamental factor in the success of Saturn-era propulsion systems and would remain essential for future space projects. https://oralhistory.uah.edu/files/original/306b64963df175b7c656c0e395dd57b9.pdf 4fc48558363e4d0712055ae9b531ce59 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_000031_T Title A name given to the resource Parker, William (Transcript) Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1971-03-23 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.