Driscoll, D.H. ("Dan")

Driscoll, D.H. ("Dan")

D. H. Driscoll recounts his career from joining General Electric at Fort Bliss in 1947 through his work at Redstone Arsenal and NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, describing the transition from ramjet research to the development and testing of the Redstone and Saturn launch vehicles. He recalls the improvised early Redstone test facilities, built from repurposed military equipment, and later his leadership of Saturn I (S-I) and Saturn V first-stage (S-IC) testing, including engine development, acceptance testing, and oversight of contractor work. Driscoll argues that Marshall engineers—not contractors such as Boeing—were the primary designers of the S-I and S-IC, and he describes frequent conflicts with Boeing over authority, staffing, and testing responsibilities. He also discusses major technical challenges, including F-1 engine development, instrumentation, structural testing, and the investigation of pogo oscillations, offering his own explanation that pump dynamics and engine compliance were underestimated in the original analyses. Beyond technical issues, he reflects on acoustic testing, launch infrastructure, and the evolution of Marshall's engineering practices, while praising Wernher von Braun's open, idea-driven leadership and contrasting it with Rees's role as the practical decision-maker. Driscoll concludes that Apollo succeeded with exceptional managers and engineers but believes the program employed far more people than necessary, arguing that political and economic considerations contributed to its rapid expansion beyond purely technical requirements.

University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives and Special Collections, Huntsville, Alabama

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.

.MP4

en

Interviews

Audio

ohc_stnv_000012_A

Bilstein, Roger E. and Beltz, John Stuart

Driscoll, D.H. ("Dan")

[00:00:35] Roger Bilstein: Okay, go ahead.

[00:00:39] DH Driscoll: I came here in the ‘50s. [At that time?] the group was responsible for developing a ramjet. We're not even in the rocket business per se. This was a carryover from the way it started out of Fort Bliss where I went to work in March of ‘47 with the GE company as a lab assistant working in the combustion and fuels development part out there. Then when they came down here this continued on. Then in ‘51, I guess it was, or ‘50, shortly not too long after they moved down here the GE company lost their contract with the Army. They spread people out all over the place, and some of them they fired, and some of them were picked up in civil service. I went that time then to the Malta test station of GE where there was another part of the Hermes program going, which was a missile that be about the equivalent of a corporal-sized missile. That's where I started working on hydrogen peroxide decomposition and this kind of thing. Then I came back here in ‘53 and went to work for the government. At that time the Redstone was beginning to pick up, so…But even at that time there were no rocket engine test stands even here. The first one was the interim stand that—so-called—where the Redstones were fired that was more or less a [mood?] light and built up out of the framework of that thing is old Navy high-pressure bottles that were cut and welded to make the beams and a lot of stuff like this. The bunker where the instrumentation was were a couple old tanks that were used to store phosphorus in the old days when the Arsenal was a chemical plant as well as a shell loading operation. They used phosphorus to fill some of the or to make some of the stuff that they were putting in the shells as well as for flares or this type of thing. Those tanks were cut apart and rewelded together to form the block house. It was an honest-to-God poor man's test stand. Then the Redstone was fired on that. That was the first truly rocket engine test stand out in the area out there.

[00:03:52] John Stuart Beltz: You know when you drive by today you see that bunker which is three big round things, big round pieces of, it looks like tankage. What were they?

[00:04:01] DD: Those were the tanks. Those were the phosphorus storage tanks that were cut and then plate welded in there to form a room. The things, if you look out at the stand, you'll see that the columns, a lot of them are round. Those were Navy gas bottles taken off of old nitrogen trailers or something like this that the Navy had certified were no longer suitable for use, and the bottles taken off of those trailers, and then used just as simply a structural steel. So what else?

[00:04:48] RB: Were you around about the time that ARPA started talking about large boosters? Were you involved in that then?

[00:04:55] DD: Yes. Well, that, of course, came a lot of years later, but at that time, the—as you’re well aware—the S-I was sold as a demonstration of clustered engines. The initial build-up of that thing was done by the group that I later became in charge of when the fellow that was in charge left to go to industry. I came into it at about the ninth or tenth firing—I forget which out on the stand out there.

[00:05:42] RB: Of the S-I?

[00:05:43] DD: Of the S-IT, the test vehicle. The first shot out of the bag we burned all the turf, and I remember that on the first test run that I had anything to do with, direct responsibility for. That was caused by simply having too cold an environment in the boattail, too cold LOX, and the combination causing a LOX rich lead in the gas generator, which burned the damn turbines through. But then I had charge of that all through the rest of the development. I mean the testing part of it through the rest of the development and through the acceptance firing of flight stages before they went to Kennedy. Then later on the S-IC. We went through pretty much the same kind of procedure although considerable less number of firings.

[00:06:54] RB: Were you involved in upper stages as much at that time or [inaudible]?

[00:06:58] DD: Indirectly with having the responsibility for the government for sort of monitoring and bird-dogging what the contractor was doing either in Sacramento or the S-IV and the S-IVB were fired or down Mississippi where the S-II and later in the S-IC were fired. We had guys and I myself spent a lot of time in both of those places doing, well, it was more monitoring, cajoling, kicking in the ass, whatever you want to call it, just sort of keeping the thing rolling and going on the government side. In that direction, yes, we were involved with the upper stages also. Then we, of course, had an S-IVB stand out here that was a geometrical similar to the flight stage we used for a J-2 engine primarily.

[00:08:03] RB: But most your work done was done with the S-I and the S-IC?

[00:08:08] DD: The development work. This came because of the nature of what Marshall wanted to do. They developed basically the S-I, and they developed the S-IC in spite of the fact that Boeing later took it over, and Chrysler took it over. Boeing claims to be its developer, but they aren't. The thing was designed at Marshall. Boeing also designed it but parallel. [laughs]

[00:08:41] RB: Well, that's interesting. You really can't say that the S-IV or S-IVB had a parallel thing. As I understand it, you know, Marshall came up with, you know, basic specifications and a mission configuration. Douglas took it and then went ahead with the design configuration.

[00:08:58] DD: Oh yeah, the S-I and the S-IC followed pretty much the same route as the Redstone and Jupiter. See, it was a carryover and a gradual dying of the arsenal system. You familiar with what the arsenal system was? Well, the S-IC was really the death throes of the arsenal approach at Marshall. Because of that—and I'll explain now the other part of it—Boeing was given a prime contract and considered that they had that responsibility, but they really were never let in in that respect nor were they really prepared when they got that contract to do the job.

[00:09:54] JSB: Wasn't in the early phases of the contract negotiation, Marshall would put together the first three [inaudible]…

[[00:10:02] DD: Boeing though, in fact, has never accepted this concept as demonstrated or as measured by the number of people they brought on board. They manned up day one as though they were going to do the whole bloody thing, and they didn’t.

[00:10:21] JSB: Was that kind of wasteful of their manpower?

[00:10:22] DD: Damn right it was! One day I remember—and I don't know whether you want this [laughs] on the record. I don't care, okay? It's a fact. You can go back in the newspaper and check it. One day after Boeing was announced as a contractor, I got a call to come up to Heimberg's office, that there was Boeing management there. I went up there, and here was Nelson from Boeing and Cully and Dunnigan and the guy who is now one of our aldermen, Mr. Joe…What's his name? One of the ones that was elected last year, writes newsletters to people…Joe, oh, heck…Well, at any rate, they proceeded—Stoner was with him too—and they proceeded in to talk about their manpower and how they would like to know how things were done and all these good things and how they were going to move in and do this job. At that time what we had in the S-1C area was a hole in the ground. We were in the process of blasting out foundation, so that it could be made larger because of the change from the two to the three to the five engine business. Finally, we ran out of capacity after we had gone down the road with the construction of the stand and had to blast out and start over to a certain degree to increase the capacity for the five engine size. They proceeded to say, “Well, we've got all these good guys. We're gonna come in, you know, we're gonna do all these test operators.” I didn't say anything in the meeting with Heimberg, but I said, “Fellas, do you like to have a little tour of the area?” They said, “Oh, yeah, sure!” We got out the back door of the place, and I turned around. I said, “Now looky here! Nobody has told me that you have a damn thing to do with the responsibility for testing that S-IC out in this area, and until somebody does tell me with authority, I'm going to presume that you don't have any. I don't know who the hell told you you did, but I'm telling you you don't.” That was I believe on a Thursday. Friday night's paper—Huntsville Times—had a big headline: “800 Boeing People Arrived Responsible For A Test Program Testing Of The S-IC And Statifying” and all this kind of stuff, and this is the manager the local manager Joe whatever the hell his name is came up from Eglin and all this blah blah blah about all the good jobs they were going to create here and this thing. That weekend the Boeing company in Seattle told 200 of their people that were in the test business in general terms to be down here Monday morning and ready, and all we had was a bloody hole in the ground out there.

[00:14:21] JSB: What was the purpose of something like that? To get Marshall into giving them the test program?

[00:14:24] DD: Sure. Sure. On Monday morning I cut this damn article out. In fact, I was packing my stuff; I just saw the damn thing at home. I took it in the Heimberg's office, and I said, “Hey, Karl, what the hell is this?” He called up Slattery and chewed him a new assh*le. [laughs] He says, “Well, who released this thing?” Slattery says, “Not me!” It was a powerplay by the Boeing company, but it succeeded in giving them about 200 times three or four about 800 extra man-years on their contract. They sat in the damn HIC building down there with those 200 jackasses until we got this damn program going out here. But at that time all was out there was a damn hole in the ground. We were still over firing S-Is.

[00:15:31] JSB: How did they get 800 man-years out of it?

[00:15:33] DD: Well, they were in four years too soon and 200 people. Those 200 people stayed here.

[00:15:40] JSB: Did Marshall try to beat them back at all or was it because things were relatively good they could afford to carry that extra weight?

[00:15:48] DD: That's right. It's just another one of those things. But they did, man. They upheavaled [sic] that whole 200 people and created all kinds of problems for them and their families and disposal of their houses and all this crap.

[00:16:08] JSB: Did these people eventually go down to MTF when the test program got going down there?

[00:16:13] DD: We eventually had about eighty of them out here in a training role like we did with Chrysler. But a lot of them then ended up down in MTF and at Michoud.

[00:16:31] RB: As you started up with your own test program out here what kind of problems and difficulties did you run into?

[00:16:39] DD: Well, the first problem we had was with the steel that was being used for the load platform. It was tremendously thick plates. It was a high strength alloy steel, and the damn stuff started cracking. We had a big ring tail doozy with the US Steel Company over that thing. They had consultants in, and we had consultants, and all this kind of stuff. I guess in the S-IC, it went remarkably smooth. A lot of the stuff we had rung out on the single F-1 stands before we got to the full cluster. They were pretty much a good representative geometric simulation of a segment of the cluster. A lot of the procedures and these kind of things, measuring programs, and that type of thing were pretty well worked out before we came to the cluster. As a comparison we had something like, my mind remembers about thirty-five, thirty-six firings on the S-I. We had seventeen on the S-IC. The S-I got to be…There's no other program so you just keep on going. That'll lengthen your testing program. [laughs] If something doesn't come in to replace something you don't shut it off, you just keep on going.

[00:18:26] JSB: Did you learn anything about making those refinements and procedures that were later developed for the F-1?

[00:18:32] DD: For the F-1, yeah, sure.

[00:18:34] JSB: Measuring and things like that?

[00:18:36] DD: Oh yeah, but one thing that did come out of the F-1 was an awful lot of rougher on instrumentation than the S-I was. We had some difficulties getting reliable transducers and this type of thing. I guess the main thing was the learning process was just the bigger, biggerness factor [laughs] of the whole thing. But basically we didn't really have that many difficulties.

[00:19:09] JSB: Did any of the Boeing people come in for training on the S-I so they could extrapolate information to the S-IC?

[00:19:15] DD: Well, that was another funny phenomena with the Boeing Company. About a year, and I guess this you ought to take off the record.

[00:19:29] RB: Okay.

[tape stops and restarts]

[00:19:31] JSB: Was this parallel design, was a lot of design work done back in Seattle or did they actually wait until they got set up in Michoud? By this time the design was pretty well far along.

[00:19:39] DD: The design was done here.

[00:19:42] JSB: But they did some parallel designs like actuator arms and stuff like that.

[00:19:48] DD: Actuators were GFE to Boeing. The Astrionics lab went out and contracted directly for the development of those actuators. In fact, there are pieces of the whole Saturn stack that its evolution changed. I mean it evolved into a different thing as of today, but there were pieces of that whole thing that either the design or the hardware itself or the design and the hardware were furnished to the contractors to put into that bird. The design of the IU for instance and the electrical boxes that went down through the stack from the IU on down were a GFE design to North American and to Douglas and to IBM. The actuators were different. In some cases they were GFE'd like the S-IC. In the case of the S-II and the S-IVB, they were furnished by the contractor themselves. Marshall was all woven in and out of that thing. As I say, it was a death throes of a group of people that were brought up in the arsenal approach. You don't just erode that kind of thing rapidly.

[00:21:31] JSB: Now if Boeing did do some design, where did they do this? Did they do this back in [Seattle?]…

[00:21:35] DD: They did it down in the HIC building. No, Seattle had very little. They had Wichita did, you know, the…

[00:21:45] JSB: Wirings.

[00:21:47] DD: Yeah, some of the structural parts and things like that.

[00:21:52] JSB: Tooling? Wichita did mainly the tooling?

[00:21:55] DD: No, Wichita furnished some parts. I think they made the [bores?] and some of these for the bulkheads even though they were welded together at Michoud. Pieces of the wiring were done up at Michoud. The billets were made in a shipyard down on the Mississippi coast some place. Then the welding together of them and the machining of the wiring itself was done at the Michoud.

[00:22:22] JSB: Did they do a couple of wirings here?

[00:22:25] DD: Oh yeah, a lot of these procedures and things were worked out over here in ME. What the hell is it called now? PE?

[00:22:33] JSB: P&VE?

[00:22:35] DD: No, the shops. Manufacturing engineering is what it used to be called. Now it's called propulsion [inaudible]…Product and manufacturing technology or some hell damn thing. It's a shops area, fabrication area. It used to be called Fab Lab back—and I still call it Fab Lab. See, a lot of those procedures were worked out over here: how to weld the bulkheads, how to attach the…And the first—as you pointed out—the first three birds were made here. It was the T bird, the D bird, and the first flight bird. Then the first and second flight bird I guess. I'd have to go back and refresh my memory. The first bird made at Michoud was the facilities bird and then flight bird three. When three came across the stand up here, Boeing—through the process of fighting with each other [laughs]—Boeing was responsible for the static firing—by contract—the static firing of that bird. They came in with their flag on the stand and all this, and I told them, “Get that g*ddamn flag off of that stand, you sons of b*tches!” I made them take it down. I had a running gun battle with the Boeing Company the whole time.

[00:24:23] RB: Did you do some work on the pogo problems? On the S-IC?

[00:24:31] DD: Yeah, the S-IC and also…Over in the components area, they did on the S-II. We also had the S-II structural test area, which was structural test stand, which was down by the S-IC stand there. Which was not set up for that purpose but later was used to find the contributing pieces of the structural compliance and these kind of things that went into the whole model, the structural model, the dynamics model of the Saturn. That data was gleaned out of that test stand there.

[00:25:26] RB: Could you go in more to the pogo problems that you had and the studies and fixes that finally came out of it?

[00:25:34] DD: Oh, okay. Well, I can remember back, one the first things that von Braun kept hitting people over the head with was pogo on the Saturn V. People had witnessed pogo before. One of the classic ones I guess was the Bomarc, which was a pressure fed system that literally tore itself to pieces. Are you familiar with what pogo basically is? In other words, a divergent coupling between the variation and thrust and the response of the damn structural systems. The thing starts to feed on itself, and finally something gives. Everybody said, “Well, hell, pogo, we've looked at it and all this, and we ain't got no pogo in Saturn V.”

[00:26:35] RB: Marshall was saying this too?

[00:26:37] DD: Oh, yeah! Yeah.

[00:26:39] JSB: Was that because of the large structure, and I thought there was no damping in it to...

[00:26:42] DD: It was because of the analytical assumptions they had made, which turned out to just not be right. Now, there are two kinds or there can be pogo within a pogo if I get myself straight. The S-IC was more like a true pogo. In other words, the total vehicle really got involved with the thing. The S-II was—I've heard it referred to as mini pogo or something like this—but it was within the bird, within that stage itself, the structural compliance of the thrust frame, of the thrust structure with the engines, and the natural frequency of the whole thing. That thing was a miss, well, two things wrong. Rocketdyne had by an order of magnitude underestimated the compliance of their engine in both cases: the F-1 and the J-2. They didn't know, in spite of running 850 million tests, they didn't know the true compliance of those engines. The data that was later gathered by us on the stands out there showed by pulsing the engine. In other words, you take and you feed a pulse in and see what—you know, is it attenuated, is it increased, and how does it feed through the engine—showed that they were off by an order of magnitude, no two ways about it. That was one thing that was wrong in the assumptions that were made in the analytical thing. But all this happened after the fact and not before the fact.

[00:29:02] RB: All this came up then after the first Saturn V flight?

[00:29:06] DD: That's right, yeah. Then there was a phenomena—and this is my own analysis, which was later proven but never really admitted—there's a phenomena with any centrifugal type pump that at a certain set of conditions, that thing and a certain design of inducer, as all of the Rocketdyne engines have. You can make it happen on any of them, but the Rocketdyne engines—they claim don't have it, but it does happen because it's a natural phenomenon. We had it back on the Jupiter, and it is a point when… Are you familiar at all with the... Are you guys engineers?

[00:30:02] RB: No.

[00:30:03] DD: No?

[00:30:04] RB: We're historians.

[00:30:05] DD: [laughs] Oh, okay. Well, maybe I'm not doing any good.

[00:30:08] RB: No, you are, because this is what we're trying to get into, exactly what you're talking about.

[00:30:13] JSB: We're trying to be historians of technology.

[00:30:15] DD: [laughs] I see. There's a thing called an NPSH, that's positive suction head, head curve, okay? As you come along here with a pump, which means that you're dropping pump inlet conditions with a cryogenic, or with any liquid, it's either the temperature is going up so that you're coming closer to the vapor pressure or you're dropping the pressure, which says that you're coming closer to the vapor pressure. In any centrifugal pump, there's a point where you get a negative slope like this before the damn performance goes down to zero. What happens in this thing, if you dwell in here, is that if you are looking at your pump inlet pressure—now if I have pump here, and I'm coming in like so, and out like so, see—if I look at this pressure, pump inlet pressure here, I will see in this region right here, the nicest damn oscillator you ever saw. The trouble is that this point will be a function of a specific number like one empirical relationship that's used is called a T-H-O-M-A factor. Now I don’t remember all of what's in it now, but any pump of a given class in geometry, you can correlate the point at which this phenomena occurs to within a very small variance. For any given build, in terms of what you normally look at, the NPSH, it'll look like these things aren't really like that. Every pump will have this happen at a different set of operating conditions, but a common value of this thing.

[tape cuts out]

[00:32:54] DD: What they did on the F-1 and the J-2 is—especially the J-2, in my opinion—they ran into this thing again. The phenomena leads you to believe that you have some great big mystery because not every one of them will do it because not all of them have been calibrated to run through that spot. One of them will, or five of them will, and five of them won't.

[00:33:22] JSB: Is there a way to calibrate them so they won't run through that spot, or you don't know?

[00:33:25] DD: Yeah, you have to find out what it is. The trouble was we didn't find out. Rocketdyne and ourselves stuck our head in the sand and said, “Oh man, they can't do that!” But it's a phenomena that's in every damn centrifugal pump. Normally you just stay away from it. On the Jupiter, what happened was that they took the damn inducer—I don't know whether you know what an inducer looks like, just like a fan blade—and they drilled holes in the damn thing, which spoiled. See, this thing would appear to give you something for nothing. In effect, it is giving you something for nothing. If you look at the inducer as just a flow passage, if I have this flowing absolutely full of solid liquid, my delta P loss will be a value. If I now mix that with a gas, like either of the vapor of the liquid I'm in there or if I inject air, I will—at that same flow rate—I will get a lower delta P because of the reduction in friction losses along this wall. In effect, I am at this point getting a more efficient pump. The trouble with that is that the dang thing starts to feed on itself. This thing, if you were able to control your pump inlet, you could sit there and have that thing whistle all day long. It's a beautiful sine generator. When you put a pipe on here, this thing then takes the natural frequency of that pipe. What you get in here is not a pure sine wave. You get a typical water hammer. Hell, I can't remember now. Water hammer has a little jag in it like that, and it may come here. What that is is a reflection of this wave coming back down again. But you can do that with any centrifugal pump.

[00:35:37] RB: Well, when you're talking about centrifugal pumps, on the J-2 you're only talking about the LOX pump because they had an axial flow.

[00:35:45] DD: They had an axial flow pump on the F side. Yeah, it was the LOX pump. It was the LOX pump on the Jupiter, and it was the LOX pump on the F-1.

[00:35:53] RB: What happened then when you get into the S-IVB with only one J-2 engine? It just so happened that all those were calibrated?

[00:36:01] DD: They were operated different enough that they didn't get into this situation. There was a little bit on some of them too. It didn't get coupled with that damn thrust beam like you had on the S-II. It had a rubber thrust structure. That thing had a tremendous movement.

[00:36:29] RB: Oh yeah.

[00:36:30] DD: And the one that was giving them a fit was this center engine. When that center engine got to going hard enough, if you remember on…What flight was it that it shut itself down?

[00:36:44] RB: 502 I think.

[00:36:46] DD: Was it two? I don't remember. One of the later [inaudible]...

[00:36:51] RB: There was a restart problem on 502, yeah.

[00:36:54] DD: That damn thing, this thing got so bad in conjunction with this beam, that it fortuitously shut itself down. It went to the point where it caused this pump to cavitate so badly that the fire went out. It had a self-healing [laughs] type of phenomenon.

[00:37:25] JSB: And the S-II stage, just the center engine is the one that put the accumulator on?

[00:37:31] DD: The S-II stage started out with only the center engine accumulator, but I'm not sure whether they didn't put that on all five. I got off onto this g*ddamn shuttle and a lot of other stuff [inaudible].

[00:37:49] JSB: The expressions I've seen supporting the accumulators, they really don't know or can't predict mathematically the pogo effect yet. It still remains, most people talk to a bit of a mystery, but the accumulator works so they just put it on.

[00:38:04] DD: The accumulator detunes this. It doesn't get rid of this phenomenon. The phenomena is there, but the accumulator detunes this fluid column away from the natural frequency of that beam. Now, the whole mechanism of how pogo and all those kinds of things is really not mathematically expressed too well. People can't explain it. I think one of the reasons they can't explain it and don't want to explain it is they're going to refuse to believe that this will happen at every pump. If you operate the damn thing within that region, it'll happen. The way I stumbled across this thing was a report from Oak Ridge that had been running back on the Jupiter. They'd been running up at Oak Ridge some pumps with water.

[00:39:06] RB: You mean Tullahoma?

[00:39:07] DD: No, I mean Oak Ridge.

[00:39:08] RB: Oak Ridge?

[00:39:09] DD: Yeah. It was an AEDC report. I mean an AEC report. These pumps were probably liquid metal pumps or something like this, but they were calibrating with water. They observed this phenomenon. I got a hold of the Rocketdyne pump guys and said, “Hey, fellas,”— this was back in the Jupiter days—I said, “Hey, fellas, what the hell is this kind of thing? Does that happen in a pump?” They went digging back through their stuff when they found out they had observed some of these things in their water tunnel, and sure as hell. All these companies are great. They know there's a problem, but they wait and play the odds on it, never bothering anything. So they, uh...

[00:40:04] JSB: How can they do that with a manned rating of the engines?

[00:40:07] DD: It doesn't tear anything up. It doesn't bother anything. Normally it doesn't do [a darn thing to it?].

[00:40:15] JSB: Since the reliability has to be so high, why wouldn't they try to redesign for that initially?

[00:40:21] DD: Well, they don't know how to do it—to design out of it—necessarily. What it is is that you have to operate away from there. It's just like you don't intentionally ever operate down here because this is a loss in performance.

[00:40:42] RB: What about some of the scale model testing that went on? I understand, Dave, to say you're involved in scale model testing?

[00:40:49] Dave [Christensen?]: No. I asked him, he said no. I’m familiar with it.

[00:40:53] RB: Yeah.

[00:40:54] DD: You mean...

[00:40:55] [DC?]: Fritz [inaudible]

[00:40:58] DD: Fritz, uh…Well, what we used to do was, uh… For the Cape—it started out really, I guess, for the Cape—we'd set up a cluster of small motors. We did it for ourselves, too, to be able to check out what the flow pattern, water flow pattern, and quantity requirements were for flame deflectors and these types of things. Then it got over as things got bigger into the acoustics, like in the S-I, the near and far field acoustic levels that were generated from clustering that many, in essence, putting out that much thrust. In those two areas, there was a series—always a series—of models put together in order to help the people predict or get a handle on what they had to do to put in their specs—for the equipment at the Cape, for the launch deflector, for the heating on the members of our test stands and this kind of stuff—where we'd be likely to have to insulate for full duration firings, and those kinds of things. Fritz used to design, and the shop built these small scale models. They were used both in the, well, it started out in the S-I. He also had a rig that would allow the thing to rise, and there was a little scale model of the LUT, and gave them some indication of what kind of, you know, protection they would need for the lift-off times and this kind of thing. They made some significant changes to their initial designs at the Cape on the basis of the scale model tests.

[00:43:01] RB: The acoustic problem got to be pretty severe, didn't it? Isn't that where a lot of the—I'm trying to remember where is the report I read somewhere—over fifty percent of the potential damage even to the vehicle can accumulate from acoustical stuff. Does that ring a bell? Is that right?

[00:43:21] DD: Well, designers have a tendency at times to overdo things. If you take the, it isn't only just the dB level, it's also the frequency. If I have high dBs in the low frequency range, I can really tear things up because there's a lot of energy tied up in the low frequency thing. If I have a predominance of my total energy spectrum, which can look something like that, for instance, or even more sharp, this is dB. What those care…If I now plot, well, I didn't want to plot that anyway. Let me use this as time. When the missile takes off, the composite dB goes something like so as viewed at the tail end. What this is is a ground reflection of the acoustics feeding back and being reinforced with what's there. What they do is they take that thing and put a safety factor on top of it. But that thing only exists for, say, less than a half a second. Sure, things can break in a half a second, but then when they put them on their shake tables or in their acoustic tunnels or whatever, they take and flatten that out. It's a time safety factor and a level safety factor, and then the thing has to stand up for that length of time. No, the way we got into the acoustics business out there was the community. When we were firing the S-I on the east side of the S-I tower there, we had to make sure that our weather conditions, the atmospheric conditions, were not such as to create problems in the town, like the shopping center windows down there on the parkway, and all that kind of stuff.

[00:45:52] RB: I heard one story once that when they first started this, they had a pretty low overcast one day, and they fired up an S-I, and the shock wave deflected up and came somewhere in Birmingham.

[00:46:07] DD: You've got pieces of the story. One day when we were firing the S-IC, locally it was a beautiful atmosphere. Let me go back and say something else. Overcast is no criteria. It's a temperature inversion situation, which can happen to you on a clear day. What it is is your waves go up and they get bent as they're going through that thing, and then they start to come back down and are reflected basically just like a refraction of light. Locally, that day it was fine, and we fired out here. A little while later my wife called me and said, “Say, did you know there was an earthquake in Birmingham?” I said, “Hell, you're in Birmingham!” They got to checking into it, and sure as hell it was our firing had refocused and come down in Birmingham. Of course, nobody in Birmingham knew what the hell was going on with the S-IC in Huntsville. There were all kinds of calls and people all disturbed and all this kind of crap. This is mostly the low frequency stuff. That's what hurts you structurally. People feel it in their chest and this kind of thing. What we used to do was we had a horn, a big horn. We used to set out. First, there is a measuring net now throughout the city on this side and that side. In those days, what we did was we had mobile measuring of bits, and they'd go out some place the day of the firing, and they'd start running every hour. Sound condition, once it was calibrated with the real thing, which when our first go around was pretty crude. We stayed away rather than to take a chance, but as we got more information, more knowledge, it became pretty much a better routine.

[00:48:38] RB: Did you use sounding balloons then to check out the temperature inversion factors?

[00:48:41] DD: Yeah, we used to get all this good data. We used to start releasing balloons around there on the weather station on the arsenal.

[00:48:55] RB: What's your favorite story from the Saturn days? Or stories?
.
[00:49:10] DD: I don't know.

[00:49:15] RB: Do you have any things that you really stand out that you really make sure to tell your family and so on as time goes on?

[00:49:27] DD: Well, there's something that we know we won't learn, if there's ever anything like that again, not to build up to such a big operation, and then pay the penalty as we are now trying to shrink that thing. It's horrendous to try and shrink after something has been inflated to the degree of the whole Apollo operation was.

[00:49:57] JSB: Do you think they could have gotten by doing it within the Kennedy time frame without those extra people during that decade?

[00:50:03] DD: Yes. I do. Sincerely believe that.

[00:50:10] JSB: Don't you think it was built up during this period because they did expect more follow-on work in the beginning?

[00:50:17] DD: Yeah, I don't think it was done. Of course, those things are kind of hard to separate after they happen. Did it happen because of this or did it happen the other way around? I think that basically one of the things that, and it's I guess a matter of record even, that it really had two purposes. One was to pump the economy, and the other was to accomplish the technical feat. These two don't have to be related. You can pump the economy using a technical job as the rationale for it, but you can multiply the number of people that you get onto the thing way out of proportion to what the job really is. No, I think it could have been done considerably less people, and in the same time.

[00:51:27] RB: Within Heimberg's lab, did you get into problems concerning logistics? I think especially of the Guppy aircraft and the logistics of the S-IV as well.

[00:51:40] DD: Well, Heimberg is the guy that I guess is primarily responsible for that Guppy aircraft being in existence. He was the one that came and pushed it when this guy Conroy came with the idea and this type of thing. At one time, Heimberg also had the barge business and these kind of things, and they were later split off. He was merely filling a gap that he saw existed and filled it up. That was then of course taken by somebody else after that. The transportation handling and the transportation part was in his lab. He inherited part of that from launching and handling. Launching and handling was disbanded at the time that the launch crew went down there permanently as a center. There was still part of it left here, the handling equipment and some of those kind of things, the group of people like Hamilton and Spivey and some of these guys that then continued to have the handling equipment responsibility.

[00:53:11] RB: What about some of the personalities in terms of their managerial roles? Could you characterize Heimberg for us? Is there any relationship to von Braun and maybe Lee James and Oswald Lange and some of these people?

[00:53:25] JSB: Von Braun himself.

[00:53:30] DD: Well, let me start with von Braun. Von Braun ran an open shop. Any cat who thought he had a good idea had a pretty good chance to get in and tell von Braun about it. That's the kind of shop he ran. Consistent with that, he hardly ever said no. To anything. That's the part that Rees played.

[00:54:07] JSB: He was the man that went...

[00:54:10] DD: He was the one that had to say no because when von Braun was enthusiastic about everything. [laughs] Of course, there's bounds to that when you're trying to accomplish something on a schedule. You just can't go [inaudible]. He played a different role in that respect. He was also the chief designer. He could say no in that sense, but not in the sense of new and different things and what's the matter with this and that kind of thing. The two guys, in my opinion, together were an extremely competent pair. Separately, they maybe had grown a little too much lopsided or something or whatever you want to call it.

[00:55:16] JSB: They operated consciously as a team during this period?

[00:55:19] DD: Oh, yeah. All these years.

[00:55:23] JSB: I know they do on the organization chart with this idea of “I'll be the great placater and get people too enthused about the program, and you go around and make the managerial decisions.” But did von Braun make those maybe privately with Rees and then tell Rees that this had to go or was that Rees's decision himself?

[00:55:44] DD: Rees would be more like an operations manager type of thing. A lot of times, von Braun had promised people the moon. [laughs] Then it would be up to Rees to say, “Well, he didn't really mean that you're going to have a moon, fella.” [laughs] That type of thing. I think that von Braun grew to expect that over the years. [Inaudible] that they sat down and consciously said, “Hey, this is the way we're going to divide the thing.” I don't know.

[00:56:27] JSB: Did that cause any bitterness in people who were disappointed when their pet schemes got canceled?

[00:56:33] DD: Oh, hell yes! [laughs]

[00:56:35] JSB: I'm thinking of [Willy Reichert?] and the concept of parallel staging. I talked to him once when he was back in Germany.

[00:56:42] DD: He was back just not too long ago.

[00:56:45] JSB: He said that he was led to believe that if parallel staging didn't work on the Saturn I, that they might try it on the Saturn V. There wasn’t a provision for even after the first seven clustered stages to try parallel with the tanks that fall off, the tanks and engines that fall off in the center segment.

[00:57:07] DD: I don't know.

[00:57:10] JSB: He claimed that von Braun was very enthusiastic about that, but nothing ever happened. Maybe because [Koelle?] didn't like it very well.

[00:57:17] DD: Rudy had something going there, and I'm not sure what it was. Obviously it was enough to make him mad. He left the country. I think Rudy is a good man back in those days too.

[00:57:41] RB: Do you think that the size of the space program and the size of the program that Marshall managed generated any particular new managerial techniques and systems? Or were they just old tried and true methods that were polished up a little to work?

[00:58:00] DD: Well, a lot of them were drug in from military, large military programs. In other words, the Minuteman and Stoner and company and a lot of these management procedures that grew out of that kind of paper control systems fed right into the damn Apollo. It was really locked in once the fire happened, and it became an uncertainty. It also got locked in for another reason, and that is control of money. Or rather control of a program with a, let's say, an abundance of money. With an abundance of money, you can kill your time scale because people will have the freedom to just rinky dink with any damn thing they want to. You turn around and you find out, well hell, I thought that damn thing was designed. You find out, oh yeah it was. That was three weeks ago. But hell, we put a thousand guys on it, and now we got [inaudible], but it won't be here for a year. It grew out of that kind of thing too I believe.

[00:59:25] DD: Paper systems are not necessarily a government by themselves invention. The aircraft industry, I think it's a carryover from World War II of every job no matter how big it is is production oriented. Even if they’re gonna go for five of the damn things, they get into this god-darned cookbook type of paper control. A lot of it is they have to do because of their fluctuations in employment. The government will come along and they'll say, “Okay fellas, here's your damn contract. It's Friday afternoon. Oh dammit, we're going to come out there on Monday morning, and all we want to see is assh*les and elbows, fellas.” The only way that you can do that is with a cookbook. They have big reams of procedures and all this that are independent basically of what the job is.

[01:00:44] DD: I mean it's a job to develop a flying machine of some kind. They go out on the street, and they get Joe Blow and so on and they look at his credentials, “Yes sir, sit right down there. There's your damn book. Now go to work. By Tuesday afternoon we expect you to be hitting it, fella.” I think this kind of a thing is a carryover from the days when we got caught with our pants down in World War II. People said, “We ain't never going to have that happen to us again.” The way you do that is that you build a continuity. When the money isn't there, you build it in paper and store it until the next pump up the wagon comes along. People that say it's all the government's fault on paper, it is indirectly, but it's out of circumstances.

[01:01:35] DD: I think that the money doesn't flow, that the distribution of programs to companies is not even because of the procuring and selling and programming problems that you have with Congress and all these good things. Companies will have that paper no matter. It's one of the defenses they use when you tell them, “Hey, how the hell it takes you this much money to do this job. It's only a little old job.” Ah, it's your damn paper. You, government, your requirements, but those companies have it up the gazoo within their own operation. It's because of this business of complete flexibility and hiring. Not complete flexibility, but lack of longevity in the relationship between the individual and the company. He's bound by the Ten Commandments that go with that company. He doesn't have to ask, and nobody has to tell him this is what it is or he doesn't have to invent anything new, he just “That's what you do, fella.” Then they get a policeman to watch him: QC.

[01:02:56] RB: What about Lee James? What's your recollection of his method of operation?

[01:03:03] DD: Lee James was a guy who recognized that he was not strong technically. In my opinion, he was a good manager. I think that he operated, in my experience, a relatively open shop. O'Connor was a good manager, too. The Apollo program had fortune, well, maybe it was more than fortune, but with guys like Phillips and O'Connor, these were unusual human beings. It wasn't because they were generals or anything like that. To have found civilians of that caliber would have been difficult. We're just fortunate to have those two characters. James was a good manager. Rudolph had James' predecessor in the Saturn V. He was an extremely finicky old man. He used to really worry his troops, but he was very meticulous. I'd say a good manager and really was the one within that whole thing that picked up and implemented or adapted the various management schemes that were later used in the Apollo. Lange is a…

[tape ends]

1:05:11