43 10 510 https://oralhistory.uah.edu/files/original/1e05edfd0ab7115f748497513b503c0b.jpg 2ac136667df5f7693ae8f5fea227bc45 https://oralhistory.uah.edu/files/original/48fc54df5111fc8c732f0e57cf3c698e.mp4 ad9603fcea177f7466e7415239aad58f 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 Bob Ward Collection Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Shaner, Tom Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Ward, Bob Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 1:47:15 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 spc_ward_000002_01 Title A name given to the resource Shaner, Tom Description An account of the resource Interview with Tom Shaver on Wernher von Braun, describing his character, personality, and funny stories from his time as von Braun's assistant. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1999-03-04 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/bdb426d50462a342d3283ba899858ec5.pdf e0291e8ebf66147db0d4a75cfe1e0f99 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 Bob Ward Collection Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Shaner, Tom Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Ward, Bob Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 33 pages 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 spc_ward_000002_01T Title A name given to the resource Shaner, Tom (Transcript) Description An account of the resource Transcript with notes on an Interview with Tom Shaver on Wernher von Braun, describing his character, personality, and funny stories from his time as von Braun's assistant. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1999-03-04 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/55417a23e2d9d3e4e7f03a90434d12b9.jpg 2ac136667df5f7693ae8f5fea227bc45 https://oralhistory.uah.edu/files/original/be62ec9aace29d5ed81862af6253e004.mp4 e43c821c9c173cb9f5b7d806f466a21a 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 Bob Ward Collection Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Shepard, Jim Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Ward, Bob Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 0:48:41 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 spc_ward_000001_01B Title A name given to the resource Shepard, Jim Description An account of the resource Conversation with Jim Shepherd regarding stories of Wernher von Braun, Safety protocol at Marshall Space Flight Center, and Stennis test center in Mississippi. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1998-10-05 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/be7cb86bde8c28089ea581fec811c8ec.jpg 2ac136667df5f7693ae8f5fea227bc45 https://oralhistory.uah.edu/files/original/5af98e566f37e1e99e4cbe947e8b587a.mp4 6b12b0b0638a1728ee83afcc5132ee38 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 Bob Ward Collection Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Shepard, Jim Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Ward, Bob Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 1:42:01 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 spc_ward_000003 Title A name given to the resource Shepard, Jim Description An account of the resource Interview with Jim Shepherd on memories from Wernher von Braun, including him hunting and working with space camp. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1998-10-08 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/abfa013d8d51feeb37f8c659c3b42c7a.pdf 7f60800aa37869f66472a372d9a4bf35 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 Bob Ward Collection Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Shepard, Jim Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Ward, Bob Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 12 pages 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 spc_ward_000001_01BT Title A name given to the resource Shepard, Jim (Transcript) Description An account of the resource Transcript with notes on a Conversation with Jim Shepherd regarding stories of Wernher von Braun, Safety protocol at Marshall Space Flight Center, and Stennis test center in Mississippi. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1998-10-05 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/c66fa928db8f5ff05f2b58a3b8fe4312.pdf 415bd83f6d68a6642a4b47d8111c067b 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 Bob Ward Collection Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Shepard, Jim Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Ward, Bob Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 13 Pages 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 spc_ward_000003T Title A name given to the resource Shepard, Jim (Transcript) Description An account of the resource Transcript with notes on an Interview with Jim Shepherd on memories from Wernher von Braun, including him hunting and working with space camp. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1998-10-08 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/a705cea94f8c6307cccef6cdc4bff6a1.jpg 4598197eb9b09fa4ae86fb6882190ee7 https://oralhistory.uah.edu/files/original/28765d82f28cf7deaad8093921ff2a56.mp4 4ea317de21e262d8c4ff1c6d19f7a693 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Saturn V Collection Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Shettles, Mack Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Bilstein, Rodger E. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 0:31:32 Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound [00:00:07] MS: This mission thing is just a good example of the functional part again. Let's see, I don't want to hang up on these charts too long. Of course, all this required a great deal of travel, and it was about that time that headquarters recognized—and we all recognized—the need for communicating, not just by writing and not just by telephone, but by having our conferences together. That's when the idea of this [inaudible] center network…We have diagrams over here. This is the way it is today. It wasn't this extensive when it first got started. [00:00:54] MS: [Inaudible], all NASA communications are contracted for and managed by Marshall Center. [Inaudible] We had a Saturn [phone?] control center...Let’s see, we had NASA headquarters, we had an Apollo…See, this has changed…We had an Apollo Center. [Inaudible] We had two different buildings. [Inaudible] At the Cape, we had an Apollo Action Center, and at Houston, we had an Apollo Action Center. These are tied in by the so-called [full?] wire network. All that meant was we had a [inaudible] wire that was both transmitted and received voice simultaneously, unlike many voice-activated circuits. Again, this seems to be something of a minor detail, but actually that's so important. You have written this up very nicely too, by the way. I'll just repeat it though. [00:02:05] MS: [Inaudible] people can sit in this conference room, the conference room at the Cape, the headquarters; make a presentation; and people anywhere in the room, by virtue of these overhead microphones—[they’re tuned so they don’t have feedback?]—anybody anywhere in the room can speak equally well to any other control room. This greatly facilitated communications in a free-form type of conference. It enabled…See, what you usually had was managers sitting around this main table here—project managers, functional managers, typical conference let’s say—then around the room, they would have invited guys, whatever the problem was—let's say S-2 [structures?]—they would have guys from R&D labs, contractors, local representatives, systems engineering perhaps, whoever happened to be involved, maybe the quality people, they would always be sitting around the room. They were secondary characters in the act. However, they were fully observers, and they didn't have to go up to the table or anything like that to speak. They could speak from their chair. This psychologically made them more likely to speak up. [00:03:30] MS: In other words…I don't know what you call it, managerial wise, I guess it's…You know, you’ve ever heard of Douglas McGregor and Theory X and Theory Y, the autocratic versus democratic, participative type of management? The idea that you usually found in Saturn V was not autocratic, it was participative. No matter who the engineer was or where he was, they were going to get a chance to talk. He said, “I think the so and so valve when we put this hydrogen in this thing, I think that valve's going to start closing slowly.” He said, “I know it acts fine in regular temperatures,” but if you thought that for any reason that you thought it was going to close a little slowly, a few milliseconds slow, it looks a little [mad?]. That's the reason this thing was done like this. There wasn't one [inaudible] leader at the front that said, “I speak for the Marshall Space Flight Center!". Everybody spoke. Well, that's a hell of a way to run an organization. What it did was it felt like a [weeding?] machine. What do you call it, [inaudible]? [00:04:41] RB: Did you get into a situation where too many people were trying to speak at once, or was there just a natural inclination to control, self-control? [00:04:49] MS: You could get into it, especially if they got a little excited about the subject. At that point, the chairman of the meeting in the control room had to get the thing under control. That was the [trip up?]. He didn't dictate what was said, but he said, “Okay, fellas, everybody gets a chance to talk, but [inaudible], and we'll all get a chance. [00:05:09] RB: I'm noticing these signs on the table—teleconference tips—warning you that the mic picks up every word and every sound. Did I remember correctly, once you said that you had problems with that, because people started making, you know, not snide but sharp comments about people elsewhere, and they found out that it was picked up? [laughs] [00:05:28] MS: That’s right. [00:05:30] RB: And it would override the major speaker. Some guys making a presentation, these things tended to override sometimes. [00:05:36] MS: Yes, because if a man speaks louder in the back of the room than the man in front is speaking, then he'll become the guy that everybody hears in all these other places. Most people think because they're sitting in the back of the room that there's a microphone in the front of the room. It’s a hold over from the 1930s. You're used to it. The lectern had a microphone. You see Franklin D. Roosevelt, you know? They got all these microphones up here. If you're out in the audience, you can do all the talking you want and nothing comes through. That wasn’t the case here, but people still had this in their mind. They kept seeing FDR, and all these microphones up on the lectern. That wasn't the way it worked. So it did have to be controlled. In fact, that is the problem even today. That’s why you have these little signs around here. You just can’t get…Battle them continually…[Inaudible] [00:06:36] MS: Okay. As an organization to this thing—you’ve written this up too—a long distance [xerography?] system was installed. As you well know, all that was the [LVX?] system was a way of transmitting paper data to other locations, and it could be so-called broadcast [inaudible] all the centers at one time or they could send it to selected centers [inaudible]. We made our view graphs, and you were very well described how you could have a simultaneous conference. All the centers would have copies of the charts. They already had view graphs, so they could show them on their thing. It was not as good as television. We couldn't afford television. This was suggested and looked into that we have live television. This gets a little hairy because you have to have a television camera operator. You have all these wires. You have to have special lighting. You‘d be shifting the camera from one man to the other frequently. Finally we decided that’s just not quite… [00:07:46] RB: This is your problem too if you have got all that equipment in here, create a lot of heat in the room too and become uncomfortable. [00:07:51] MS: We have had television activities in this room, but it has to be limited, you see? You have to have your action [inaudible] take place up at forward front of this thing like a stage. All this back here becomes lighting and assistant directors and sound men. They’ve got all their jazz rigged up. It wasn't really practical. [00:08:19] MS: That saved a lot of airplane flights, I'll have to say. I thought it was one of the best things that anybody ever did was to have this network conference room set up. In fact, I was briefing some people one day and happened to have this guy from an airline there. I said, “It saves you the trouble of physically removing bodies from one point to another. You can get the [fall?]. He said, “Well, wait a minute now!” But at about that time, in the same audience, was a man from Bell Telephone, and he says, “Great idea!” [both laugh] [00:09:02] RB: I'm glad you reminded me of this conference center network because I had forgotten that. I don’t think I brought that out as clearly as I should have in the rough draft that I’ve got. [00:09:14] MS: I think that was a very important thing because it was an instantaneous thing. If you wanted to follow something, you had it right down the hall or in the next building over. A lot of times they'd go dig these things out while the meeting was in progress. Roger, do you think there’s any need to go through all these charts? Let me just… [00:09:38] RB: No, I think that… [00:09:39] MS: I think you see what we've got here. [00:09:41] RB: [Inaudible] Right idea of what the charts were about, and the fact that you could single thread things down to a small detail. I'm glad you brought out too that there were functional charts as well as hardware charts, and I should bring that out in writing too. [00:09:57] MS: Here’s a really complicated chart… [00:09:59] RB: The [spec tray?] [00:10:01] MS: The [spec tray?] I had to keep that up. Dr. Rudolph…At a Christmas party, and he always referred to himself as a simple blacksmith. You ever heard that term? Nobody's ever…Well, anyway…That was his little technique of getting people to come down out of the esoteric technological terms, which was sometimes used simply to cloud the issue. He’d bore in until they could explain it in simple terms. He played dumb. He said, “Well, I'm just a simple blacksmith.” Here’s this guy, a veteran of the V-2 program, the Pershing program manager. “I'm a simple blacksmith.” So I wrote him a little thing, a parody on Longfellow, “Under the spreading chestnut tree, the village smithy stands…” I wrote a parody on that. It’s called, “Under the specification tree, the Saturn smithy stands.” [both laugh] Went on and on about that. He thought that was great. He got a kick out of that. Specification…under the spreading specification tree…There you go. And this did tie in all specs real well. The specification, of course, is what does a piece of hardware have to do? If you don't know what it has to do then it almost becomes a person's own interpretation. He says, “Well, I think it ought to do so and so.” Once you write down and have to get somebody’s approval, it solidifies. [00:11:43] RB: That sounds so obvious, but it strikes me…It's always the obvious things that can hang you out because if you get a guy and say, “We want a valve that will withstand 500 PSI under certain conditions.” He said, “Okay, I can do that.” He builds a valve that will do it, but that valve may not do the job that it's really required to do in terms of interfacing some place else. So you've got to do the spec, you have to design the valve to do this and such and interface some place else. Is that what you're getting at here? [00:12:13] MS: One time—I think I mentioned these charts to you here—at one time, the program manager says, “We have so many documents in this thing, I don't think everybody understands what takes precedence.” You see, if you work in the mission operations area, you tend to take a document called “Mission Operations Plan,” which is put out at headquarters and signed off by some really high ranking cat up there, and you say, “Well, that's the Mission Operations Plan. I'm going to follow that. See, I’m in the Saturn. I follow what the Manned puts out.” But you may find out that there's a document that supersedes the Mission Operations Plan. It might be the Apollo Program Development Plan. That is the case here. Their Configuration Management Manuals, R and QA manuals, test requirements and all these that had…Were very official. The program spec, the Saturn V project spec. And how do all these relate to each other? [00:13:27] MS: I spent weeks and weeks sifting through every document I could find in a whole Saturn program and tried to relate these things and finally divided them into functional groups. You see, like this: manning and finance, technical description and systems engineering, liability and quality assurance, test, mission ops, logistics, procurement and contracts, schedules and showed what document required what other document and how this thing flows. Some of these are planning documents and some reporting documents. This is a fairly obvious thing too, you say, “Well, heck, everybody knows that.” But the funny thing is all these documents arose without any plan. People saw the need for a document, and they would go ahead and produce this thing either at the Apollo program level or Saturn V project level. Sometimes the center would turn out plans. They’d turn out the regulations for inspecting [hulk bolts?] The specifications for inspecting [hulk bolts?]. You say, “Well, that's it!” That's a very expensive process, and maybe the program manager didn't want to follow that. Well, do you have to follow that? I don’t know. So what this was was trying to sort out what document took precedence over what other document. It's a very dull looking two pages here, but every time we explain this to somebody from headquarters or somebody from the Senate or the Department of Defense, they thought this was a terrific idea because it gave a visible coherence to the documentation. [00:15:13] RB: It strikes me you can never write that thing logically in a narrative. But, you know, you could never say, “This takes precedence over that except in instances where…” because that's what you get into. If you can visualize it like that and see the lines of coordination, you can read it readily [faster?] it seems. [00:15:33] MS: I thought it was sort of a dull thing when Bill Sneed first told me to do it, but then as I got into it, I began to see what the problem was. Nobody knew what was really the ruling document, and which ones were co equal, and so forth. Oh, here's a chart on incentive contracting. See, we're converting to incentive contracts—you mentioned that. Here we got Ed King. He's a staff member, and he's following this on all the stages. By the way, [inaudible] happening on all the stages. Here’s a thing on reliability on all the stages. [tape cuts out, restarts at Roger Bilstein saying “But if you can visualize it like that…”] [00:17:07] MS: Let's see…I know I’m not covering everything I should cover, but…This is qualification of all the components—stage by stage and total and total after Rudolph. Now this is something. Each project manager had to get up and tell about all the components. You see, I think the publicized figure was there were six million parts in the Saturn V vehicle, and these things all had to be so-called “qualified.” That is, they had to undergo certain tests and meet these specifications and all these conditions. Once they had done that, then the component was qualified for flight. They had a little certificate and sign this thing off. Let's think about that for a minute. [00:17:55] RB: That's a lot of parts to... [00:17:57] MS: That’s a lot of parts. Then you got the additional problem of deciding whether to qualify the resistors in a small electrical relay system or you just certify the relay system itself. Because many times, the resistor or transistor of some sort would be a failure point. Or a little bit of printed circuit board inside this little black box, it would be a failure point. Something would happen. The thing would short circuit during operation. Do you go down and qualify the printed circuit boards or do you qualify the whole black box? That all had to be worked out. At any rate, it was. Dr. Rudolph had a chart here in his room which showed him the total summation of how component qualification was coming. He not only had to track the big stages, he had to track all the little bitty parts, but he didn't want to get bogged down in detail. This is really a summarization—number of components that had to be qualified, the number that were at that given time and then he had a lot of other data underneath here [in digital form?]. Then he has the total vehicle. It's like a typical business chart. Right here you see that. [00:19:21] RB: Okay. This is the total vehicle and this is by state. [00:19:24] MS: By state. [00:19:25] RB: One for the IU and one for the subsystem. [00:19:28] MS: So you have GSE. GSE was a horse of a different color because it was a bunch of piece parts almost. They had a lot of trouble with GSE on the Pershing program, but Dr. Rudolph put a lot of effort on that thing. He had had problems before. Here's the chart on reviews, assessments, and certifications. They have followed nothing but that. All the stages of all the vehicles: 501, 502, 503. [00:20:15] RB: I'm just curious, why was all this considered so confidential? Was it because of the…Was it considered national security or terms of contractual relationship with the contractor? [00:20:31] MS: Well, I didn't know it was considered so confidential. [00:20:33] RB: No? I just noticed on the back of one of these things here. [00:20:36] MS: Oh! Those were confidential. Oh, I can explain that. All launch dates were by decree of NASA headquarters, confidential. That was the only thing that was confidential. So every chart that showed a launch date had to be classified. [00:20:56] RB: Why was that, do you think? [00:21:01] MS: I'm not quite sure unless it was just a holdover from the Department of Defense missile launching days. Might have been a thing by NASA headquarters just to keep the launch dates away from the public so that people weren't, you know, if we had a slippage and we weren't under the gun, so to speak. They could change the dates without anybody getting all on their backs about it. I don't know. But eventually the launch date…That's the only thing I know of the launch date…Oh, there was another thing I think, but we didn't…Something about engine specifications. There was some engine technical data which was confidential, which may have been because they were considering using the engines on some DOD project or something. I'm not too familiar with that. I do remember that the engines had some kind of a technical classification problem, and we had this launch date problem. [00:21:58] RB: I suppose you get into the same thing in certain aspects of construction if DOD was going to use certain types of construction, something like that, that could be confidential. They're classified kind of… [00:22:13] MS: Here's a good old S-2 stage. They had their problems. They switched from one kind of material to another in midstream, different thicknesses, and they had to go to different welding techniques. They had a common bulkhead which was thirty-three feet in diameter. Now a common bulkhead had been built before on S-4-B stages, but not a thirty-three foot diameter job. Boy, they had their problems. You can see this chart right here, there are…one, two, three, four, five errors indicating major problem areas on that given date—tenth of March ‘66. All kinds of slippages. See all these anticipated slippages. Every time you see a diamond that goes out like that from some place back here where there's a little triangle indicates an estimated slippage. Things look like bad, bad, man. [laughs] And then you have to find out why this was slipping. This is where you go into these backup charts and all. [00:23:24] RB: Okay, and these red arrows—the problems—have numbers on them? [00:23:28] MS: Yeah, those were related to these written problem sheets. [00:23:44] RB: Okay. Boy, they were slipping on the transporters. Transporters were slipping [inaudible]. It almost…It gets to be a real problem because if you're building a transporter, for example, and the word comes down that the stage itself is slipping, you’re inclined to say, “Okay, there's no big rush on this thing. Let’s cool it.” You know? [Inaudible] [00:24:07] MS: That's right. [00:24:08] RB: So the result was that they would begin to slip. [00:24:16] MS: We're trying to locate a cartoon which shows each stage as a racehorse. It's got a finish line up here by the [inaudible] program manager headquarters, losing the finish line back and forth. [00:24:31] RB: That's the cartoon that Sid was telling me about? [00:24:33] MS: Yeah. [00:24:34] RB: Okay, yeah. And Rudolph was on an operating table [inaudible]? [00:24:38] MS: Well, I thought it was about that. That's a different cartoon. I thought that was on the same cartoon, but apparently that was a different one. But that was one of the tricks is to get all these stages like your biscuits and your jelly to come out even. You have to put your time and attention to the item that's required. These tiger teams…You know, they established the tiger team. The S-2 got so bad off that they just got a whole mass of people, including the project manager and a whole bunch of experts. They just went out and jumped on North American Rockwell's doorstep and says, “Here we are, fellas. We want to help you. Is there any way we can help you? And we better be helping you quick because you guys are holding up the show.” [00:25:26] RB: Yeah. [00:25:27] MS: This tiger team...I’m sure you’ve… [00:25:30] RB: Is that when they got started? With S-2? They really weren't…Were the other periods of time? [00:25:35] MS: That's the first time I recall a tiger team. In fact, it was the big tiger team effort. [00:25:43] RB: You know, one of the things that still gets me is why this thing is so much different from other control rooms. I just want to kind of recap that again. One of the things is, as far as the charts are concerned, the people around. That makes a big difference. [00:26:00] MS: Right. [00:26:01] RB: But that's backed up too by the matrix, management matrices. [00:26:04] MS: That's right. [00:26:07] RB: And the other thing that strikes me—I think it reflects the managerial intent of the Saturn V program offices—you've got charts, you say, for hardware, the project managers. But it's very significant, you've got a separate set of charts for the functional managers. They were writing, you know, just as many problems and just as much importance as anybody else. I understand that too, that was unique kind of with the Saturn V program office. In fact, the functional managers had as much muscle as anybody else in the organization. [00:26:39] MS: Yeah, I've never seen it really carried to that degree before. Nor has it been to that degree since. [00:26:50] RB: Would it have been necessary in some place else, like for instance the engine program office? [00:26:56] MS: No. Because they had a single operating unit, I think. Engine didn't require all this integration business, you see? That's one reason that I don't believe that the Saturn management approach is transferable simply saying, “Okay, use that system on this project here.” See, because what we had, and I'm going to pump this handle one more time, was a number of major hardware units being built at a number of locations throughout the whole country. All this had to be brought together to perform a given function—that is a launch on a given date—and they had to succeed technically, and they had to not exceed their budget. It all had to be coordinated. Now, I don't know of any other project except going to the moon that's ever really required quite an effort like this. Usually, I mean, even building a B-17 in World War II, I wasn't there, but I had a feeling that Boeing could almost do that thing up in Seattle. They would just buy parts. I think that was a different concept. You just buy parts and bring them in. The biggest deal might be buying an engine from somebody like Pratt & Whitney or the like. But never anything for each unit in itself was so important. [00:28:38] RB: One of the other areas where that would have been included was the Saturn 1-1-B office. But there you're dealing with only two stages. [00:28:50] MS: Yeah. Two out of the three were developed in-house. [00:28:55] RB: In-house, yeah. [00:28:57] MS: They really were out on the S-4-B as it was a case unto itself. They said, “We will buy this stage.” They didn't need all this…They just really had one big stage coming from one place. [00:29:20] RB: And even though Chrysler wound up with the contract, that technology for building the basic S-1, S-1B first stages had been pretty well [inaudible]. [00:29:31] MS: The whole thing was designed, tested, and they [were flown here?]. [00:29:36] RB: The tankages were taken out of other Redstone and Jupiter programs. There really weren't the multitude of problems they had with the Saturn V. [00:29:46] MS: I believe we built fifteen S-1 and S-1B stages here at Huntsville. I can't swear to that, but I believe all the S-1 stages were built here. I believe the first five S-1B stages. [00:30:02] RB: I thought they'd shifted that down to Michoud though. [00:30:05] MS: Maybe the last three S-1s were built in Michoud. [00:30:08] RB: Chrysler took it over. [00:30:10.] MS: Maybe you're right. [00:30:12] RB: Chrysler built the last two of the S-1 stages. [00:30:15] MS: Was that what it was? [00:30:16] RB: I don't really know for sure. I was under the impression they had all the S-1B stages [and if they did?][inaudible] Michoud. [00:30:21] MS: Oh, did they? Maybe you’re right. [00:30:24] RB: I'm not really positive about that so...But in any case, the point is, you say the basic design work and stuff, those two stages for the Saturn 1 and 1-B, the first stages, are basically similar. [00:30:39] MS: Right. [00:30:45] RB: The only thing different were the upper stages. But even on the shuttle or the Skylab, you don't have the staff functions having the similar muscles as they did in the Saturn V program. Is that an aspect of managerial preference or just the logic of the program account for that? [00:31:11] MS: Well, I think number one, you hit it is managerial preference. However, I think that in certain programs, the manager's preference would be outweighed by the necessity of doing it that way. [tape ends] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context ohc_stnv_000040_A Title A name given to the resource Shettles, Mack (Part 1) Description An account of the resource Discussion of the conference center network 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. 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Title A name given to the resource Saturn V Collection Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Shettles, Mack Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Bilstein, Roger E. Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 0:57:42 Transcription Any written text transcribed from a sound [00:00:00] Mack Shettles: See, here's another thing, talking about the complexity in this thing. See, in an orbiter, in the space shuttle, right now they're planning to build at first a couple and later on perhaps five orbiters. But here we had a program where we were going to build 15 of these stages. How many stages are involved when we build fifteen Saturn Vs? Plus simultaneously building a number of Saturn 1Bs, like the S-4B stages. On that chart, you'd just be surprised how many S-4B stages had to be built. Let's see…One, two, three, four. Four stages on every Saturn V times fifteen stages is sixty stages—flight stages. Then you had your ground test stages, you know, like the static firing, the facilities check out, the structural tests. This goes into dozens and dozens of stages for the Saturn V. These things had to follow in some sequence too. Here's one that's taken a different slice of the cake. He's following [nice is nice?]. We get 501 launched, you can't forget that we haven't gotten to the moon. We've got to get 502, 503, 504 down there, delivered, and they have to meet these technical requirements—increased payload, for example. So here's a chart which follows these things and shows the interval and checks overlap and possible problems in transporters and the like. This thing got rather complicated. [00:02:20] Roger Bilstein: Okay, well, maybe we should...Oh, I know one of the things I wanted to ask about again was these things by Colonel [Sweet?]. Was that his name? [00:02:30] MS: Oh, yeah. Well, that wasn't really the main part of the Saturn program. [00:02:38] RB: No, it was just an interesting little sidebar. [00:02:40] MS: Yeah, well, it was typical of the briefings that we had to give people. We would have generals and admirals and people like that coming in for visits. Occasional congressmen or governors of the state, or just a group of educators, you know, the president of So-and-So University and his group would come in, any number of people would be briefed on the Saturn program. We were told about Colonel [Sweet?] would be here, but Colonel [Sweet?] never showed up. There really was a Colonel [Sweet?], but he simply used his name to send unknown groups. We were always told that the composition of the group was classified, and all you were supposed to do was to brief them on the Saturn program. Sometimes they would come in, and they would be wearing turtleneck shirts and looked a little academic. Then again, they'd come in and half of them would be in uniform with a lot of brass and medals. Occasionally, they would be with an Oriental. I went over to brief one Colonel [Sweet?] group, it turned out the only guy that could speak English was their leader, and the others were all Japanese. [00:04:09] RB: [Sweet?] was in the Pentagon some place? [00:04:12] MS: No, he was in NASA headquarters. He was the DOD interface. He had a title called NASA Interagency Affairs Coordinator, something to that effect. Interagency Affairs Coordinator. [00:04:33] RB: But he was acting as representative of DOD in that sense then? [00:04:38] MS: DOD, State Department, CIA. See? No matter what agency. Sometimes we'd have people like…guys would come in, another swarthy-skinned individual with a handlebar mustache and sixteen stars. I know this guy's a general from Honduras or someplace or someplace down in South America. You know a whole bunch of people with him and they... I couldn't tell you who they were, but I knew they weren't… [00:05:15] RB: I just think that it's indicative too of the number of kinds of people that were sent down here because Weber apparently felt very strongly about the success of this particular operation. [00:05:28] MS: One of the things that NASA was supposed to do was to make public its findings and its results. That's in our charter. We're an arm of the American people. [00:05:47] RB: Well, I'll guess that’s about [over it?]. I just want to kind of get some of these things back down and talk a little bit about the overhead stuff here. And you did have television, closed-circuit television from both Houston and the Cape? Is that right? [00:06:01] MS: Yes. Yes. [00:06:04] RB: So you could cover the launch. [00:06:05] MS: Launch only, right. Now that wasn't applicable…You couldn't pick up people in the rooms. You could pick up tests, like a wet countdown demonstration test at the Cape. That's where you load the fuel onto the plane… [00:06:21] RB: You weren't hooked up to [MTF?] by any chance? [00:06:27] MS: I'm not sure about that. It seems to me at one time they were going to be hooked up to [MTF?]. I don't know if it ever came to pass or not. [00:06:36] RB: I'm just curious—not that it makes that much difference. Do you have a direct hookup with [KSC?] or does that come through the HOSC over here that you pick it up? [00:06:44] MS: It comes through the, well, the LIEF board, Launch Information Exchange facility is what they call it. HOSC is on the LIEF circuit. Huntsville Operations Support Center is, in effect, a room where all these people meet. They are serviced by this LIEF board network, which is all tied into the overall communications facility—your regular telephone systems, plus your television transmission, and [communicating?] and like that. [00:07:20] RB: I'm just curious what is stored behind these doors. [00:07:24] MS: Oh, those are supplies. [00:07:27] RB: Okay, just pads, pencils, and stuff like that. [00:07:31] MS: Extra tapes and magnetic gadgets for these boards. [00:07:36] RB: I heard that Rudolph had problems getting this thing set up. Do you know anything about that? [00:07:41] MS: A little bit. See, Rudolph was convinced of the necessity of this, and nobody would put out any money for it. So I think he had to sort of scramble around and scrounge. He just took this space here, which isn't necessarily the ideal space, but it's what he could come up with. In fact, at one time—sort of a fun little thing to me—people would come in and look at the paneling, and they'd say, “Oh, these people are living plush! Plush!” So Dr. Rudolph had Harold Price—who at that time was the guy that operated the control room—he had Harold Price prepare a sign that says, “The cost of the vinyl wall covering in the hall is seven cents per square foot. The cost of this paneling is six and a half cents per square foot. We are not wasting governmental money by having paneling in this thing. It's cheaper than the stuff out in the corridor.” He had it right up next to the door there. [00:08:56] RB: [laughs] Well, was that the main problem? He couldn't get authorization to use the money for this thing? [00:09:02] MS: See, they needed it in the back back here—you've been in the back?—you know, there's a…A teleprompter came in here and rigged all these, well, carousel slide projectors, view-graph projectors, movie projector, television projector, recording device…Then had this…This all can be remotely controlled from this lectern here. You can start the movie machine, you can operate the slides, you can’t operate the view-graph of course. But you can dim the lights, turn out the lights, and so forth. Teleprompter put all that in. I think the total cost was something like $35,000. That's what I heard for this room. We have had a lot of people ask us what it cost. A lot of people looked at the design. I think I told you, I got a call one day from Raymond Loewy Associates in New York out of the clear blue. To this day I don't exactly know what they were up to, but they wanted to help. They wanted to discuss the layout of this control room. Apparently Raymond Loewy Associates—who I think, I think, “Gee whiz, Raymond Loewy!”—they wanted to, they had somehow heard about room 319, and they wanted to know how it was laid out. [00:10:30] RB: Why was Rudolph so insistent about getting it? Was it his experience in the Pershing program, you think? Or why did he make such a big thing about getting this thing? [00:10:40] MS: Well, I think it was just his personal philosophy that if you couldn’t put down information on a chart in a clear, graphic form that you didn't know what you were talking about. He could perceive it better that way too. He was just one of those persons. Some people don't mind reading page after page of writing. He would rather look at a graph. Well, I think a lot of businessmen are that way. They don't see how the sales trends are. We all see this thing. Look at the stock market report, you know, things going up and down, you track the thing. To describe this in words would be practically impossible. In fact, you said it yourself a while ago. So I think it boils down to that. It's a matter of transmitting. It's a way of communicating. It's as old as drawing an arrow in the dirt and saying, “We went this way.” [00:11:38] RB: Yeah, that's more graphic. [00:11:40] MS: It's graphic, you know? If your [trial’s?] behind you, and you lay out that arrow or sit stones down, and that's the way you go. This is a little bit more refined. When you get into the business of semantics and communication, you're getting beyond my capabilities. It must be related to that field. It may have been impossible, as you say, I think really it would have been impossible to put in words all that was summarized in graphic form here. [00:12:27] RB: Well, I think that really kind of covers it. [00:12:31] MS: I haven't said anything about PERT. I don't know if I should say anything about PERT or not. [00:12:34] RB: Okay, what do you have to say about PERT? [00:12:36] MS: PERT was one of our more unsuccessful things. We’ve been talking about success, and I think something should be said about PERT and its unsuccess [sic]. [00:12:45] RB: Okay. [00:12:50] MS: The critical path method that this construction firm first came up with…I think they were the first users of it. Forget who it was…Catalytic Construction Company or somebody. [00:13:03] RB: I had the impression that PERT was the thing that was developed in the Polaris program. [00:13:07] MS: Well, there's a matter of debate about that. I suspect that this Catalytic Construction Company, which I believe is—I'm not sure—might have been a division of Dupont. Man, the name's all wrong. Anyway, it was a pretty big outfit. In building large buildings and all, they found out they had to have this, this, this, and this, and this. They began to chart this thing out, and then they see what the critical path was. We better be getting the electrical wiring in because if we don't, we're not going to be able to perceive the rest of these things. It's a logic diagram, and you put the time intervals between events on there. Okay. I think that they did that first. [00:13:55] MS: Now, the Polaris people grabbed it and called it PERT. They refined it somewhat, carried it to a great extreme and said, “Well, this is a really terrific idea.” Now, we used PERT mainly because we were forced into using PERT. Most of the people liked the Gantt chart approach because it had a time scale across the top. PERT doesn't have a time scale across the top. The times are simply written digitally between events. You can't really compare when things are happening. Now, there is a version of PERT called a squared PERT network in which you put a time scale across the top, and you put the events on this time scale. Which improves the heck out of it, as far as conveying the information, then you begin to grasp the thing. But we didn't have that. We required our contractors to have PERT diagrams of all our activities, and I understand this went into the tens of thousands of events. These tens of thousands of events, again, in the same manner as this, flowed up into our project offices. We in turn summarized this thing and put it on this rear wall back there—a little picture of that PERT diagram. I think it may have been helpful in 501, but then it became apparent that simply having the same network… First of all, you didn't do the same things for 502 because a lot of these things were done. Once done, there was no need to show them again. You had to revise the network. You didn't do exactly the same thing in 502 like you didn't activate the test stands every time for every vehicle. There were things like that. You didn't re-qualify the component. You see the things I'm talking about there? [00:15:53] RB: So there's a lot of useless information that was clogged up the PERT network in a sense? [00:15:57] MS: Well, on the first one it was there, okay. But on the second one you didn't need all that. Finally it became obvious that you weren't getting anything out of it that you couldn't get out of one of these Gantt-type waterfall charts. So we dropped it. [00:16:12] RB: [What did you follow?] in the early R&D phase there? [00:16:21] MS: I think we had more problems than we had problem-solves from it. I'll give you an example. You're supposed to have a critical path. This critical path tells you, “Now get on this subject here.” Well, what happened was we'd have this thing up here, and you'd come out with thirty-seven negative paths. Are you familiar enough with PERT to know? A negative path is one in which you have an end objective set up, and you have a time now and an event. If there's not enough time to take from this event and achieve this objective, then you have what you call a negative path. It has negative time. Now, if from this time event to the end objective you have more than enough time, then you have a slack path. You've got extra time in the path. Okay. Now, whichever path requires the most time between now and the end objective, it may have slack in it. It could still be the critical path. It still hasn't had time to do it all, but it just has the least amount of slack time. [00:17:32] MS: Now, carrying it on further, if from this event now to the end objective, it turns out to be, requires 15 weeks more than you've got, then you've got a negative path, which is the critical path. You've got a negative time critical path. We wound up—like I say, at one time, I think somebody counted—thirty-seven paths, all with negative time on them. The time that separated them was not great. Let's say that the most critical path had seventeen weeks of negative slack. You had to make up seventeen weeks in order to still meet the end objective. The next critical path might have 16.5 weeks. The next one might have 15.3. The next one 13.5. There was no way of knowing how difficult the effort would be to improve this time so that you could meet the end objective. In other words, if you simply took the one with the greatest amount of negative slack and worked on it, it might have been the simplest problem to solve. Whereas the one way down here, the seventeenth most critical path, might have had a technical problem that was going to be so difficult to solve that you just could not get the slack time out. It may have been a really critical path that you really need to be working on. [00:19:04] MS: We discussed this with some people who were supposed to be PERT experts. So we kept thinking, “Well, we're learning about this.” We turned to IBM, and we turned to—I forget who all—there was supposed to be experts. The comp lab was real hot on this because it required a lot of computer time. Boy, it ran computers night and day over there on this PERT thing. When it boiled down to it, they didn't know a damn bit more about it than we did. In fact, they never had realized the practical operating problems in the application of this thing. Did I come through to you about this negative path? I've covered it really quickly. And if you're familiar with it, it'll make sense. If you're not, I hope it's made sense anyway. I hope I've been able to explain it. [00:19:57] MS: But at any rate, there was a certain amount of judgment, which did not come out of a computer printout. Now there's another thing. Here comes this computer printout umpteen inches thick. Now that you've got it, what do you do with it? You see, the program managers didn't have time to sit down and flip through this thing. It's very complicated. About every two or three weeks, they'd change something to do in column A to column C and this, that, and the other. It didn't come through graphically. It didn't communicate with you. The machine to man communication was difficult. It took an expert to sit down and analyze the printout and then transfer that into something that could be understood quickly by a busy program manager. [00:20:46] RB: Well, I've got an impression that sometimes it was useful because since the contractor was required to make PERT reports all the time, it was on occasion possible for a staff manager to find a glitch quicker than a project manager could because they were getting stuff directly off the floor, hardware floor [inaudible]. [00:21:09] MS: If this occurred, you can bet your bottom dollar the next time the printout came around, that wouldn't occur again. As soon as the project manager found out about it, he picks up his pencil, and he says, “Well, really the time between this, fifteen and sixteen, I have here estimated as sixteen weeks. That's really six weeks.” [clicks tongue] Makes that a six. The next printout, it doesn't show up at the critical path anymore. It's that simple to rig it. Just change your time estimate. And they did it. [00:21:41] RB: The managers here? Or the managers and contractors? [00:21:43] MS: Everywhere, at all levels, wherever the pressure was put on. The contractors…I don't think our program managers did it because they didn't have the input. But I suspected at the contractor level and at the resident management office level, they'd have a confab, and they'd legitimately say we're going to work out a different plan. You see, this is what you can't argue about. You say, “Well, the reason we reduced that from sixteen to six is we worked out an action plan.” You can't tell the difference between a legitimate action plan and simply a rig in the network unless you go through the whole thing yourself. You see, there's more work involved than there is savings that comes out of it. Incidentally, I say this not as a prejudiced PERT man, because I was one of the first persons involved in PERT back in the old ME lab—manufacturing engineering lab—when we drove PERT networks for SA-5, and I thought it was the most interesting thing I had gotten into. I really went at it in a very positive attitude: “Hot dog! This is very scientific, you know?” All these prints out and all… [00:22:57] RB: So you didn't really become disenchanted with it until though you got into this program control. [00:23:02] MS: The more complicated the program gets, the worse that thing gets. The day-to-day application is horrendous. [00:23:11] RB: What would you have done otherwise? [00:23:14] MS: What we did: use these summation-type bar charts. [00:23:19] RB: The guy…The information from the bar chart comes from some guy here picking up the phone out at Los Angeles and saying, “Hi, Kevin, I’m the…” [00:23:29] MS: Picking up the phone, being on a plane, getting a written report. We required scheduled reports to be submitted weekly, bar chart type. We required technical reports. This is what all these people are being paid for is to put together two-in-two. They see a technical welding problem, yet they see a schedule that says bulkhead number three is going to be completed on so-and-so day. Then you pick up the phone and say, “Look, how are you going to complete bulkhead number three when your welding problem hasn't been solved? In fact, it looks to me like you're going to be running a test on that at the time you're completing the bulkhead. You can't do that.” Then they work the problem. [00:24:18] RB: Well, that's interesting about PERT. I have to see if I can’t describe that a little better when I write. [00:24:26] MS: I had a guy on the United Airlines, if I remember, said they were about to get into PERT very heavily one day in a briefing. I just told him very frankly, I said, “I would walk cautiously.” He said they've been told that that would solve all their problems. I said, “Let me tell you a little bit about PERT when you get down to operating that thing.” I said, “In theory, there's no more beautiful system in existence. In fact, it is! It sounds terrific! I've never come across any management thing that sounded better that worked worse!” [00:25:08] RB: [laughs] Well, is PERT being used increasingly or decreasingly? [00:25:08] MS: Decreasingly. I very seldom see anything about PERT. [00:25:14] RB: They're getting back to Gantt charts again [inaudible]. [00:25:17] MS: Well, you'll see logic diagrams of people doing the early planning of projects and all, but I don't think they put times on all these things. I think it's…If I were going to plan the space tug, let's say, if I were a project manager, I might sit down and have my schedules chief fill me out of PERT network or a logic diagram of what we had to do—this and this and this—and how maybe interface with the shuttle had to be available here. I might have this on the chart, and I might look at it and think about it and have it crystallize in my mind the sequence of events. But as far as writing a computer program and start getting a weekly printout on that, I’d never, never do it. It just wouldn’t be worth it. [00:26:11] RB: They're not using PERT now with the shuttle or with the Sky... [00:26:17] MS: You would have to check them, but not to my knowledge. I haven't seen anything about PERT. I get a copy of the monthly report schedules book that the shuttle people put out, and it has nothing about PERT in there. [00:26:32] RB: [Inaudible] or is that different? [00:26:35] MS: Well, [SART?] is just a name for this Gantt-type bar chart approach. That's what they use. [00:26:50] RB: Okay, that’s very good about PERT [inaudible] [00:26:54] MS: I don't want somebody to jump into that thing. That's one of our replies to this Syracuse University report. They were [knocking?]...A lot of our management techniques were rather expensive. We brought out that PERT was fairly expensive, and we did not recommend its use again. But there were techniques that we thought were worth the money by configuration management. It provided that iron framework that kept things from going to hell in a [wheelbath?]. Things could have really gotten bad without that. They could have gotten bad without all that component qualification programs, all that ground testing—you know—bugs worked out of this thing before they launched. I didn't mean to take it so long. I know I got one of them… [00:27:53] RB: Okay, that's good. [tape cuts out] [00:28:38] MS: ...A rather busy period and production of the latter stages had already started. [00:28:44] RB: This is early 1966? [00:28:46] MS: This is early 1966, so I'll get into those charts in a minute. First, let me tell you about the control room, and most of these things…I read your write-up. You've got the hang of it already. But I think what you want me to say is how do I see it, okay? [00:29:08] RB: Yeah. [00:29:09] MS: Okay. [Inaudible] I'm going to repeat some of the things you said in order to keep this in my mind. [00:29:23] RB: That's fine, because I want to really get all this down on the paper for posterity here. [00:29:27] MS: The Saturn V was… [00:29:36] Third person: Let me interrupt you a second, Roger. [00:29:37] RB: Okay, go ahead. [00:29:39] MS: All right. Dr. Rudolph, I think, will have to be given credit to [inaudible], case may be, for this control room concept. This was inherent in Dr. Rudolph's philosophy of management. We both know that every manager of anything, from the lumber mill to Polaris missile, has his own idea about how to do things. Some people get involved very personally, some people delegate the heck out of things. Dr. Rudolph had a lot of traits, one of them which was he wanted to get all the management data…You’re really breaking in, aren’t you? [00:30:27] Third Person: Now, now [inaudible]. Roger, [inaudible] be glad to do it [inaudible]. [00:30:43] MS: Dr. Rudolph had a thing about transferring knowledge into graphic form. Some people refer to this as a fetish for charts. But there [inaudible] to be said for that. He was one of the prime movers, although headquarters would probably say [inaudible] in having this control room set up. Each chart in here is a summarization of what went on in a pyramid, as you well know, Saturn V, let’s say, S-1C stage office, S-1C contractor, and all the S-1C subcontractors. This is the hardware [fashion?] now. He had all this data [feeding?]. Parallel to this, he had all these functional things that went on, which are a little bit more difficult to describe. He had a functional manager, you know, for [inaudible] quality, for mission operations, for systems engineering, and that man was responsible for going into each stage, going to other centers, and keeping track of management across the entire stage. [00:32:39] RB: The vertical… [00:32:41] MS: The vertical thing. That data was just played on charts in here. Basically at one time, on this side of the room, this western end of the group, these were all hardware or stage oriented charts, and those were all functional charts. The only significance of that is that he attached just as much importance to the functional part that he did to the hardware part. [00:33:12] MS: Now, in addition to strictly hardware data, for example, in order to know what his hardware problems, progress, trends, and so forth were on a Saturn V launch vehicle in totality, he had to know what was going on on each stage. He therefore delegated to this stage manager the responsibility for accumulating all data related to this stage. Once the S-1C stage manager [returned?], [went to?] the S-1C contractor. The S-1C stage manager, as we both know too, and I don't mean to make this a little complicated, but he had lateral connections with working panels, with the laboratories. This thing was more complex than I'm drawing it right here. I mean, the S-1C stage manager had to keep on top of how his electrical system was going, for example. He also had to make contact with the engines people. At that time, the engines office was a separate office from Saturn V. [00:34:29] MS: Anyway, Rudolph said, “All right, you Mr. S-1C or you Mr. Instrument Unit, go out and get all this data together. [Inaudible] plan to do it. What I want to see is a summarized situation for me. I want this to be summarized in this control room in 319. I want it in a graphic form. I want it [inaudible]. I want somebody specifically responsible,”—as you pointed out, which is one of the key things to it wasn't an office, but a group of people responsible. He had a person—you can still see that person's name on these charts even to this day—that was responsible for making sure that information was correct. [00:35:12] MS: So all this data fed up, [inaudible] it fed laterally like to the engines office or one of these labs. They summarized it on charts like these, which is a very standard method. This is just a waterfall or just a Gantt-type chart back to the picture of what activities are occurring on which stage. Now, the reason I've got this other set of charts out here is that this entire control room has been an evolving process. As our problems change, what we show changes. This thing is pretty well all done. Now, we're in a storage portion of S-2. All active, all building, all testing and everything else has been done. This will show you that this was all tracked. We had a systematic method of showing whether an event was going to be early or late. If the latter was going to be late, then this thing was followed up. We've got a red arrow [that says?] problem area in addition to having a scheduled slide thing. This was part of a big board over here. [00:36:42] RB: The problem areas? [00:36:43] MS: We have two things covering problem areas. We had one that was a problem area board, which listed the problem and who did what to take care of it, and what the status was…The other thing was on the overall schedule, which is still here. This was a whole Saturn V program [thing?] This gave Dr. Rudolph an overall view of things. It went back even prior to President Kennedy’s declaration we're going to make it to the moon [inaudible]. [00:37:27] RB: Master summary schedule in other words? [00:37:30] MS: Here's JFK’s decision in May ‘61, and here's land on the moon July ‘69. All this stuff [inaudible] vehicle development, test facilities, test programs, showing all of these things. This was the big picture. These large arrows stick out in different places. Everywhere you have an arrow, on the problem board, you had a problem listed. We tracked that thing down so it got solved. I'll show you some charts in here. If the problem were of enough significance, he would make a special chart just for that problem. Generally, just listing it and using words was sufficient. [00:38:25] MS: This sounds [relative?] and minor also, but it’s important—and you've already written it down—this control room represented the acme of data collection for Saturn V. It corresponded in every way—in symbology, in width of the bars, in everything—to the control rooms that the other centers had, that Washington had, and that the contractors had. [00:39:03] MS: Dr. Rudolph, in fact, would get on people if they didn't have their triangles just exactly, they had their upside down to his. He didn't like that at all. Rudolph, most people feel like was a nitpicker, a [inaudible], [an imperialist?] What he really wanted, I think, was clear communication. He would just go on and on until everybody he was sure was saying the same thing and knew that they were saying the same thing. You’ve been in a meeting many times, everybody says, “Yeah, this is so, and this is so, and this is so.” Everybody at the center had a different idea. Rudolph would wrestle with this thing, and he would knead that dough until he knew everybody was on board. Then he'd go over to the next point. [00:39:51] MS: All these control rooms were [inaudible]. A great deal of effort was spent on this. Contractors weren't particularly happy because they had to display their data not only for Rudolph, but they had to display it the way he wanted it seen. A number of cases felt like they had better ways of doing it. You can imagine the Boeing company…They've been building planes, you know, since the old P-26 and all this kind of stuff, so they felt like they knew how to run a program. This didn't matter to Rudolph one wit. He wanted it done like this. And he was right—I think—because it enabled him to go and visit and all the people under him to go and visit from place to place. Immediately the thought process was simplified. They didn't have to go learn all this symbology. Like I say, this sounds like a small thing. This isn't a…In the totality of Saturn V, this is a small thing, but in the matter of management, it sure does save a heck of a lot of time once it got set up. [00:40:58] MS: Let me show you some of the [charts?] that he had. There were a number of special purpose charts here. He said, “Our number one objective here is to get 501”—the first Saturn V—“down to the Cape and get that thing launched.” So he's got stages of development. He's got activities—see, these are battleship tests and so forth—that must be accomplished prior to the deliverance of 501. These things were all related. See, he's got this drawn out here, and shows how the dynamic test vehicle, all the tests and all…Are we going to get these things? Is this [shaking?] going to get done in time? Will we get the results back? Will it be analyzed? How does that tie into the facility’s checkout vehicle, which was down at the KSC? What sort of problems are we having? [00:42:05] MS: The whole thing gets back to the fact that this thing was very…It took place in so many diverse geographical locations, with so many different companies, so many different organizations, that tying it all together was the problem. Much, much activity went into this tying together business. I think this is what Jim Webb was talking about when he said he had never seen anything so pulled together. Anybody can make charts, but these charts represented a coherent display of data. Every major item could be tracked back down to its finest points. This isn't so obvious, especially today, looking back on it. I mean, you have to have been here almost to see some of this thing. You can see the gist of this. You can see that he has things other than the 501 vehicle itself. Then he shows what's going on on 501. You can see all these things, you know, like this is a milestone that's taking place early. Here's one that's early. Here's one that's late. He's got major milestones circled around…Intermediate milestones…And it's just all there in a very systematic manner. [00:43:29] MS: They wanted to track the activation of a launch facility. Are we getting our GSC down there on time? So he's got all this graphically depicted, see? Howard Burns was a test and checkout project manager. Howard Burns couldn't direct anybody to do anything legally. That's an interesting thing. He was in charge of the test office. He had no directive authority in the classical sense at all, but Dr. Rudolph looked to him to see that this whole thing was being done. He had to get with the [LVGSE?] manager, he had to get with the Cape, Lord knows who all he had to get with…The Sanders display people up in New Hampshire or whatever. Rudolph didn't care, but Burns, in his opinion, was the functional manager to see that all the tests…Well, he had test, and one of the things under test he just allocated to him was this site activation thing here. [00:44:37] MS: There’s a KSC detailed flow plan, shows how this thing is going to be processed. Let me just cut through some of these. Here's a blow-up. Remember we showed you the dynamic test program and how it fed into 501? This is just a blow-up of that, of the dynamic test program. One chart, [inaudible]. If you want to see, there were some little bitty tabs back there a while ago says, “We've got a little problem,” flip over the end of the chart so-and-so, and you can follow this problem even more closely. Then here's the verbal problem area board I was talking about. The date the problem was reported, identifying it—that is—what piece of hardware is involved? [00:45:29] RB: The S-2. [laughs] [00:45:32] MS: The S-2. And LC-39-500F checkout, see? Which ties into the fact we just had a chart on the LC-39-500F checkout activation. He's got a man honchoing that thing. S-2T captive firing program, and then it shows the status. Here's an extremely tight schedule for system development facility—red board—in development and debugging of integrated [gets?] operating system programs. The estimates are delivered to KSC 16 March ‘66. Then he's got another thing that says, “See display 40,” which is 500F-LC-39 and SA-501 tape requirements. So we just mentioned LC-39-500F chart. He's got another chart on the 501 tape—that is, you know—the control tapes, the launch vehicle digital control, and the launch site. They have some tapes and all. When a problem arose, it was expanded upon to the point necessary. [00:46:52] MS: This is another thing. Not only did he identify the problem, he said, “Fine, so we know that, we know the status, and we know that this man here is reporting this thing. Now who are the points of commitment?” He had a...Rudolph—I keep quoting Rudolph because I really feel like he was the guy behind this thing—he didn't believe in systems alone. This looks like a massive system. He tied people into these systems under points of commitment. He says, “Industrial operations” —this is for the S-2-1—he says, “Industrial operations is certainly involved, and R&DO is involved, and the contractor.” Then he says, “Who at each one of these places?” Colonel Yarkin, Mr. Widener, and a fellow named Greer. Now these guys, when he says points of commitment, that terminology in itself was debated, thrashed about, defined and redefined until everybody was nauseous with it because nobody could quite decide what a point of commitment was. Some people want to say, “Well, it's the top man on the pile. He's the only guy that can really commit.” But that really wasn't the case because back in this project component qualification test programs, they got guys down at lower management levels that they could work this thing out. That's all Dr. Rudolph wanted to know. It just tells you whether the problem was something that the top man in the organization—Colonel Yarkin was the head of the S-2 project at that time—or whether somebody at a lower point in the organization can solve the problem. That's all he was wanting to do. He wanted to find out who was working that thing. [00:48:40] MS: I think I've told you before, I know I've been briefing people who have come in here. So many people from the Army to American Airlines have these control rooms, and they've got about four or five guys or something like that, and these guys run out and try to dig up all this data. They're just scroungers of data, and they come in and they make the best chart they can. So when the vice president in charge of operations comes in, they say, “Okay, now here's a picture on American Airlines progress, so and so, our passenger rate on the West Coast route, so and so on, so and so,” and they give them all this information. That's not the way this worked. There were people who kept up these charts, but they were simply hands of people who were truly responsible. And that's the difference between—in my opinion—an active, efficient control room like this and just whitewash, you know, just hanging stuff out. [00:49:44] RB: The people who are really involved in the actual operation were in fact responsible for the charts? [00:49:51] MS: That's right, and they have their name on the chart. The head of the office has his name and then the man in that office—it didn't matter what his position was either. I mean, first of all, they had to have an office symbol up there so they could, you know, you just had a name, you said, “Well, what office is he in?” So they had the office chief to get you zeroed in to that degree. Then they had a person, and he could have been just a plain engineer, or he could have been a branch chief, whoever it was, that man was responsible for that data on that chart. When I say he was responsible for that data that meant he had to collect it. He had to verify it, and he had to do this periodically. He had to really know what he was putting on there. [00:50:44] MS: Well, you came across those management matrices. That's the same thing. Rudolph wanted to show who was responsible for structural integrity of the S-2 stage within the Saturn V program office, within the S-2 project office, at North American Rockwell, in the R&D lab. He wanted to know who is responsible for structural integrity on the S-2 stage. We had that thing plugged out. It had a structural subsystem. It had a person. If you wanted to talk that subject, you'd get these guys together, and boy, you could talk that subject. There wasn't any doubt about…“Well, gee whiz, I don’t know, I think the laboratory does that.” Then you have to call the laboratory chief and go through some rigmarole. There was none of that. It was very specific. These are quite a…Problem area things…Let's see… [00:52:02]: MS: Now, these problems I was just talking about, that could be anything from a technical problem to a financial problem to a contractual problem. There's no limitation on what these problems are. Now, here's a specialized chart. He had his engineering manager—Lou Bell at the time—Lou Bell picked out the major technical problem areas that he as the systems engineering chief…Here's a thing called “Uncontrolled Instrumentation For Captive Firing Tests, MTF, MSSC, SACTO, and Santa Susana.” Apparently, they had a lot of different types of instrumentation for captive firing at all these places. You see, a stage might be fired at Santa Susana and then fired at MTF, and they couldn't correlate the findings because the instrumentation was different. They may have it located in different ways or it might have had a different range of pickup or you couldn't compare a thrust on the S-4B stage with thrust on the S-1-C stage because they had it instrumented differently. The project manager for the S-4B and the project manager for S-1C could [sic] care less. They were doing it the way they thought best. [00:53:29] MS: So here's where this functional manager comes in. He says, “Look, you fellas are doing this differently. We can't compare it. We've got to get this thing coordinated.” The same thing would occur in reliability. One project office would be testing a LOX relief valve to certain criteria, and another stage office would be testing it to a different set of criteria, and you couldn't correlate the things. Dr. Rudolph, as the program manager, says, “Look, this has got to be integrated.” That's why he put so much emphasis on the functional managers. I don't know that we'll ever have that much emphasis again. Maybe so. But as you think about it, you'll see why he had to have not staff members but functional managers: because they had so damn many pieces of hardware that had to fit together. [00:54:23] RB: The functional manager, in a sense, had the authority to say to the S-1C and S-4B, “We've got to get the instrumentation together,” and they had to do it. They could get together because if you had the right matrix chart, the S-4B instrumentation manager could pick up a chart and see exactly who his counterpart was in the S-1C [stage?]. They could just get together and talk the same language and say, “Okay, we'll do this.” The systems engineer was the action manager overall for that, and he would [inaudible] them until he got it all…. And if he wanted help from R&DO, the systems engineer could pick up another matrix chart and find out exactly who R&DO was to help the two guys solve their mutual problems. [00:55:05] MS: Right. And see, this is extended in a number of things from instrumentation to welding problems between stages. You see, I mean, why…If one guy's got a welding problem on one stage, then you need to get the people that are specialists in welding. Maybe another stage has got this problem licked. You said it very well. [00:55:34] MS: Here's another example of a functional thing that was so necessary. This shows the mission requirements. For example, it shows the payload required for 501. It shows that 501 will be an unmanned vehicle. It says it's a launch vehicle and CSM development, 501 and 502. That's their primary mission. It shows how the payload commitment has to increase. I have to stop a minute here and think in terms of, I think, more like a mini historian. See, the [Manned’s?] building 501, and it's so far down the track that you can't go back and, let's say, reduce the weight of the S-II stage. But a report comes from Houston that the CSM is growing in weight, and fellas, the CSM is going to weigh five thousand pounds more than we thought it was going to weigh. Now, the first one doesn't, but later on we find out we're going to have to add these systems to the third and fourth flights and subsequent, so you're going to have to boost five thousand pounds more. So while you were building 501, you were changing 503 and 504, perhaps going to a different material. This did occur. It wasn't in those particular stages. They would upgrade the engine thrust, and all this sort of a mishmash. The more you think about it, you wonder how they kept it straight. This was configuration management can. We even have charts that show which vehicle, so-called first-effectivity charts, shows when this change first… [tape ends] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context ohc_stnv_000039_A Title A name given to the resource Shettles, Mack (Part 2) Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource .MP4 Type The nature or genre of the resource Interviews Audio Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives and Special Collections, Huntsville, Alabama Language A language of the resource en Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource This material may be protected under U. S. Copyright Law (Title 17, U.S. Code) which governs the making of photocopies or reproductions of copyrighted materials. You may use the digitized material for private study, scholarship, or research. Though the University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives and Special Collections has physical ownership of the material in its collections, in some cases we may not own the copyright to the material. It is the patron's obligation to determine and satisfy copyright restrictions when publishing or otherwise distributing materials found in our collections. Description An account of the resource Dr. Rudolph, his love of charts, and their impact on the Saturn V project https://oralhistory.uah.edu/files/original/be75e253d311cf5b317f036eb0808639.jpg cc0c4f909af1a8ef79e706ad5968148a https://oralhistory.uah.edu/files/original/d82ff524e723c178da82fa20efdbaa39.mp4 a43cd4d8a8bcbfa6d1137a21683eaf6f Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Christensen, David Collection Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context ohc_crst_000024_A Title A name given to the resource Sieber, Werner Description An account of the resource Early German rocketry in mid-1930s, especialy wind tunnel research. Role of technical unversities in such research. Engineering problems met and solutions on the V-2. Life in days immediately after end of WW II. 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/296288ffe163a1e79024ebe03d4b15df.png f7a05be7a395f1a3d29136a4442b4c29 https://oralhistory.uah.edu/files/original/7cf21cfa17d87b47773c66286d2ce3c4.mp4 72b58f48df3c530891aa9300408c7c04 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 The United States Army Redstone Arsenal Collection Oral History A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge. Interviewee The person(s) being interviewed Vaughn, Skip Interviewer The person(s) performing the interview Boles, Vinny Duration Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.) 1:07:00 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_army_000013 Title A name given to the resource Skip Vaughn Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2025-09-12 Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource .MP4 Type The nature or genre of the resource Oral History Video 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.