Shettles, Mack (Part 1)

Shettles, Mack (Part 1)

Discussion of the conference center network

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

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Bilstein, Rodger E.

Shettles, Mack

[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]

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