NASA Barnes, Charles M. - May 28, 1999
Interview with Charles M. Barnes
Interviewer: James W. Head
Date of Interview: May 28, 1999
Location: Barnes’ home, Sun City, Texas
This interview was conducted by James Head on May 28, 1999 in the living room of Dr. Charles M. Barnes’ home in Sun City, Texas.
HEAD: This is James Head. It is Friday, May 28, approximately 2:35 p.m. I am interviewing Dr. Charles Barnes at his home in Sun City, Texas as part of the NASA Oral History Project. Additionally, Mr. Chris Elley, a graduate student at Southwest Texas, is filming this interview.
HEAD: Good afternoon Dr. Barnes. Thank you for being a part of this NASA Oral History Project.
BARNES: My pleasure.
HEAD: I would like to start out briefly asking you a little bit about your background. And, first of all, where did you attend college and basically what did you major in?
BARNES: OK, my first college was Texas A & M and I took veterinary medicine. It is, of course, the only veterinary school in Texas. So you have to go to A&M. But of course, that is where I would rather go anyway. So, that was my first [and] I got a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine there. I went to college, later on, at the University of California and got a Ph.D. there in medical physics and comparative pathology. Comparative pathology, using the medical physics curriculum.
HEAD: After you graduated from college, then what did you do?
BARNES: After veterinary school, I started practicing in Cisco, Texas. This is a general practice, small and large animal practice. It is ranch country, so I got a lot of ranch calls. But I did take care of small animals too. I was the only veterinarian in the county for a while so we had a big territory. The nearest veterinarian to me was in Abilene, which was fifty miles away.
HEAD: When was this Dr. Barnes?
BARNES: I graduated in 1944. I began work that year, in the fall of that year.
HEAD: And how long did you have that practice in Cisco? Do you remember?
BARNES: We were there 2½ years, and then we left in September for attendance at a Southern Baptist Seminary. We were preparing to be foreign missionaries, my wife and I.
HEAD: And then after that, what did you do?
BARNES: I went to Mexico with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That was in 1947, the summer of ‘47.
HEAD: The atomic bomb that was dropped during WWII, how did that effect your future work?
BARNES: Later, I joined the Air Force -- after my work in Mexico and a very short stay in Louisiana -- I joined the Air Force and went regular Air Force. And, if you go regular, they decide that you should have additional training [other] than what you are in the Air Force for, your initial training. At that time, we had dropped the bomb, of course, in Japan, and subsequently had done a series of trials on naval vessels to see if you can sink them or not with an atomic bomb. And you can, you can easily sink them. But, the other question is, what about the radiation dose that the crewmembers would get. And so, on these -- and I wasn't involved in this, this is prior to my time -- the Armed Forces were involved with this and became concerned. We don't know what kind of radiation doses a person would get [from] a bomb, if it is dropped on our naval forces. And so, they put goats, some dogs, and some sheep and things like that, to simulate people on the boats. And the Government and the Armed Forces were particularly concerned about this. And my Veterinarian Corp boss was, General Kistler. He had no one trained in radiobiology and the effects of bomb, nuclear bombs, on people or on animals. He said, “I have got to train some people in this respect.” And so, I was sent to a bomb factory where we had a lot of research going on, and was trained initially there at the weapons production facility -- which was spewing out radioactive materials into the environment. And then, subsequently, I went to the atomic test site in Nevada for brief trips. But then, [I] ultimately ended up with the hydrogen bomb tests out in the Pacific Ocean area. We were very concerned about what nuclear weapons would do to people. And of course, you do not radiate people; you radiate animals simulating people. And that is where veterinarians come into the picture.
HEAD: When was the hydrogen bomb tested out in the Pacific?
BARNES: First one was in 1954, and then the following year they tested about twelve hydrogen weapons.
HEAD: What did they find?
BARNES: They found that you can eradicate an island. For example, if you put a hydrogen bomb on an island and explode it, the island disappears. I don't know how many millions of tons of soil that is that goes up in the air and disappears, but considerable. And, I have seen that personally, and I am very impressed. They are very deadly and have a tremendous amount of force. The other effects are the tremendous flash of light that can burn you if you are exposed, or it burns animals which are exposed. In the Pacific area we have a lot of rats. These are rats that got off the ships sometime historically and [are] living there, they are living on grass spurs. They are running out, and sometimes during the night they are out above ground. Other times they are down in the hole. If the weapon goes off and explodes during the time they are out, why, you will kill the mice, or the rat, [and] any birds in the air, too. It also will kill fish. Anything it comes in contact with. Immediately. But, of course, if they are below the ground, they are shielded, to a certain extent, by the amount of land between them, or the amount of water between them and the explosion site. But, I have personally had to hide my face from a hydrogen weapon explosion, fifty miles away. It would get so hot on my face I would hide behind a rail of the ship, for example, to keep from getting burned. So it is easy to get burned, just thermally burned, from this sort of weapons testing -- weapons explosions.
HEAD: How and when then did you get to NASA? How did this work lead into your position with NASA?
BARNES: Well, there were about a half-a-dozen veterinarians in the Air Force that were being trained at different places. I had a friend that trained at Oak Ridge [Tennessee]. I had two or three friends, actually being trained at Oak Ridge, and two or three fellows followed me at Hanford, Washington where I trained with fallout from the chemical processing plants there. And then I don't believe I had any veterinarians follow me to the Pacific Ocean, but, several veterinarians were involved in the atomic tests in Nevada in which domestic animals, swine particularly and sheep and goats -- which are about the size of a body, a person's body -- [are] placed in direct line with the explosions. So, after I went to graduate school -- I failed to mention [that] as soon as I finished the bomb test, hydrogen weapons testing, I was sent to graduate school at the University of California and got a Ph.D. degree. And then I was assigned to various testing organizations of the Department of Defense and the Atomic Energy Commission, as what we call a detailee. I was an Air Force officer, but, detailed to another agency to do some work for them, or in support of whatever their activity happened to be. I became, I guess, sort of a halfway expert in this business after my training was completed in, the University training was completed in ‘57. In 1958 I was sent to -- well I had worked with the Air Force on some projects there which we were sending things up into space, and weapons testing of the parts, the top of a ballistic missile for example, to check into how far they go and will they reenter the earth successfully or do they burn up when they reenter the earth -- a whole series of testing like that. So, each of us kind of felt like we rotate through each others jobs, because if you become an expert in a controlled field like this there are not many people that can replace you. And so they have to know that you are coming. I had been promised to NASA for some years actually, prior to moving to NASA. Finally they were ready to go, it looked like they were ready to go to the moon. Then when President [John F.] Kennedy told them they were going to go to the moon within the next ten years they got hot and heavy to do it. And they told the Air Force, we have got to have people right now to help us. So seven veterinarians were sent to Johnson Space Center [Houston, Texas] to do work there, and I was one of those people. Actually I was [the] number two man to arrive. There was one man already there working in food preparation for astronauts. I was assigned to NASA because of my experience with weapons and other experimental projects and what have you. For example, we had the time period when we were working on a nuclear-powered bomber. And this required a tremendous amount of research because the radiation levels in the nuclear bomber were such that they would kill the crew unless we figured out some way of protecting them. And so, we worked on those types of things prior to [coming to NASA]. So I was in a position to do some good for NASA.
HEAD: What year did you get to NASA?
BARNES: In 1968.
HEAD: And what did you find at Johnson Space Center when you got there? Just briefly describe it. I know it has changed significantly over the years.
BARNES: I guess it had been built there, it started probably ten years before that but, it went up real fast when they built the space center, Johnson Space Center. The area that we moved into was not constructed. They built our house while we were waiting for it to get finished.
HEAD: Where did you move?
BARNES: That was in Nassau Bay, just across the street from NASA, to the south. I could walk to work from my residence and it was a very, very nice place to live. Right on Clear Lake, some of the eddies of Clear Lake there.
HEAD: What do you remember about Clear Lake, the community of Clear Lake?
BARNES: Clear Lake City had been built by Humble Oil company. I guess it had been built, probably started at least five years before. They were still constructing houses there when we moved to NASA. But much of it had been built. Of course not like it is today, but many, many houses. It was a growing city when we moved to that area.
HEAD: Briefly, what did you do when you first got to NASA?
BARNES: I saluted the boss and said here I am. And he said, I am glad to see you and I happen to have a job for you. I have been waiting for you to get here. He explained that the earth is surrounded by radiation belts, called the Van Allen belts, and that we are going to penetrate those belts. The first one is out about 20,000 miles, something like that, and we are going to penetrate those belts in route to the moon. And we don't know what the radiation levels are there and we don't know how to get through the belts. How long it is going to take us. A whole lot of things that we don't know. Secondly, we don't know the kinds of radiation that the belts are composed of because the magnetic field of the earth traps particles coming from outer space, and puts it around, and makes the belts that surround the earth. Some of particles are very heavy particles that will penetrate, well some of them go on and penetrate the entire world -- I mean, come out the other side. They are that sturdy. We had no experience radiating animals with this kind of particles. So we quickly had to do some contractual work with people who had the equipment to manufacture, artificially, some pretty heavy-duty particles. And then try it out on domestic animals and also on primates, which simulate man quite well.
HEAD: Then your primary goal was what, when you first got to NASA?
BARNES: The primary goal was to get the guys to the moon and back safely.
HEAD: Since you got there in 1968 it didn't seem like you had much time to do that.
BARNES: That is correct, that is correct. [laughing]. However, due to my experience with the Atomic Energy Commission and with a whole host of other people working in the radiation field, in general terms we knew what had to be done and I knew the contractors that could do the job. And I knew all of the facilities which had large machines that could manufacture the kind of radiation that we needed to study.
HEAD: This must have been pretty expensive. Was money ever a problem?
BARNES: It never was a problem. Which is sort of funny to say that money is not a problem. But apparently the banks or the federal treasury opened the door and said go, we are going to go to the moon. We had about six NASA Centers and each one of them thought, we are going to go to the moon but they can't do it without me and what I am doing. Each one is a specialty center and each one of them worked in their own way. Of course, the ones who thought the most of it were the Germans who had developed some the bombs, not bombs but missiles, some time ago. They were very good at manufacturing thrust engines and what have you. Werner Von Braun, for example, and his team of people, were wonderful in doing all of this kind of work. He didn't work at the center I was stationed at, but that was one of the centers that was involved. They had other centers where some really good physicists had studied this kind of astronomy and some of the things that we had already been looking at for some time. So actually there were about six centers, each one of them thinking that they are going to the moon. And, sure enough, we did. All working together, but it had to be working together.
HEAD: If money wasn't a factor, then what was your major problem?
BARNES: Just getting the people aligned to go to work for us on this particular problem or problems that we had, that is one thing. And then you have to wait for the animal to respond to whatever dose of radiation you give them. Sure, you can kill them, and you can kill them overnight. But you are not interested in that because we don't want to kill any astronauts. The idea is that we are going to give them a dose that will make them sick, maybe. And, maybe we want them to last for six months to a year, or two years, or something like that. You start doing something with a two-year time span on it, [and] every monkey that you radiate for that amount of radiation, you have got to wait two years to see the result. That is what we are talking about. Time is of the essence. You have to have enough time to get the job done. It is still the same way right now. A lot of projects have not been completed because we have not had enough time. At the School of Aerospace Medicine, where we had a thousand monkeys or chimpanzees that had been irradiated, we just this year have finally destroyed the last thirty-five monkeys that were part of the contingent of a thousand. Because we waited for their life span. They were just getting old enough that they were going to die from something else, and we wanted to look at what was happening to them. Now I didn't get involved with that. I say we; I am speaking as a scientific group of people. That is one of the factors that you have to remember. When I say we, it doesn't necessarily mean that I personally twerked it with a screwdriver or anything that way. It's with a group of people, a group of scientists who work in this area.
HEAD: I am curious about -- going back to the money again -- you grew up partially during the depression.
BARNES: Very much so.
HEAD: In Texas?
BARNES: Right, Rising Star, Texas.
HEAD: What did you think about the money that NASA was spending on trying to get to the moon, or did you ever think about it?
BARNES: I never thought about it very much, because prior to going to NASA I had been with the Department of Defense, and I saw them waste a lot of money. By wasting, I mean like here is an island, and you have got a bunch of vehicles there, and if you explode a bomb near those vehicles, they all become radioactive. So rather than move the vehicles back to the United States, or at a safe distance, they just dump them in the ocean and go get some new ones -- as an example. I saw that happen. And in other things. Like we tried to build the nuclear bomber. My boss wanted to make it a Mach-3 bomber, a jet airplane that traveled at speeds of Mach-3. We didn't know how to build a non-nuclear bomber that would fly at Mach-3, a chemical bomber, if you will, a gasoline bomber. We didn't know how to go that fast. We didn't have a fuselage and wings designed to go that fast. We worked with lower speed aircraft to install our engines on and worked that way to try them out on lower speed aircraft. As a result of that, the time factor comes into play again, and we spent two billion dollars. Two billion dollars in the 1957-1958 time period is a lot of money. So, when we start talking about a few million as compared to the billions that was spent there…. Billions begin to scare us a little bit and it scared Congress because it closed the research down on the bomber. [We] found out that we couldn't build the airframe to begin with. We were just trying to move too fast. We is not me, but my boss and the people I work[ed] for.
HEAD: You said that time was a factor and you started during 1968 and had to figure out the effects of radiation before the astronauts went to the moon about a year later.
BARNES: We didn't know, you can assume that we didn't know all of the answers before we went to the moon. You can't do that, of course. You know we did circle the moon once and came back without landing. The lunar lander -- we still didn't know a lot of information about the moon and the area around the moon and around the earth [and] all these belts. We had some definition of it, but not the extent that we have now, today.
HEAD: Now let me get this straight -- you didn't know what the long-term effects would be on the astronauts when they went up there?
BARNES: We had some pretty good ideas based on what physicians have done to people who have back problems, for example. You have a bad back, they irradiate your back with radiation, and that is almost your entire body. An astronaut going into space gets a total body radiation; his whole body is radiated. We used the results of the people who did the spine radiation, and there were hundreds and hundreds of these people who have had their backs radiated. I mean, [with] sizeable doses. To say, well this was apparently safe, those doses were safe. However, we have got to realize the difference was we were not using heavy particles such as we would get in outer space, we were using X-rays, which is a soft wavelength particle. The other thing, we had the results of the Japanese nuclear bombs. But again, this was an instantaneous dose and not a small [dose] over a long period of time. So you have to give and take. We did have the results of a number of cattle that had been radiated at Oak Ridge, again with gamma rays, similar to X-rays. And we had the results of a few hundred hogs, which were as big as people, that had been kept till they died. I might mention that they didn't die of radiation, they died as a result of arthritic conditions. They had infections from the arthritic conditions because they got too fat. These were just some factors that we still would play with. Now with people who are too fat or they are too heavy, or what have you because they will have arthritis, which will affect them in addition to the radiation, and [unintelligible] the radiation effects. So, we had the people whose backs had been radiated [and] we had the Japanese results [and] we had a few accidents around nuclear facilities where people were accidentally exposed to radiation, killed or near-death experiences, and then we had these large animals. We had cattle. We had sheep and goats, which are pretty large animals. And we had one study done with donkeys where only their head was radiated. And you find out that donkeys are extremely sensitive to head radiation, which is something that we didn't expect at all. That is the reason you have to do hundreds of different kinds of animals to say well man is somewhere like these animals, perhaps. The other factor [that] is very important is to look at the depth of significant organs. If the liver is a significant organ and you give [it] too much dose…. You have to look how close the liver is to the surface, what kind of radiation it takes to penetrate to the liver, as an example. In case of the brain, what is the size of the brain, body organ size is important. We make mannequins and put dosimeters throughout these mannequins to measure these dose effects and differential doses that can occur to a person that is lying down, [or] sitting up, or what have you.
HEAD: Dr. Barnes, we were talking about the effects of radiation on astronauts--did the astronauts actually know--were they aware of the dangers of radiation?
BARNES: Absolutely. I think that in one of the articles that I have written, and by the way, I think that I have published probably twenty or thirty major articles in the NASA library which you will find there if you wanted to look that up, and close to one hundred articles in my total career, not all necessarily about radiation effects, but there is plenty of information there if anyone wants to look it up. The astronauts are some of the most intelligent people I have ever seen. I remember one time the astronauts were concerned about -- they would lay their head back on the couch and they would see a spark. [It] looked like a spark would go through this eye and come back over here, [pointing to the side of his eyes] like this. This is what was happening to them. And they were trying to figure out why. It was space particles striking the retina of their eye, and it was flaming, not flaming [but] flaring, if you will. But there is some very definite physics [that] gets involved with this. So we worked hard on it for a couple of days. And I remember having a class of astronauts which we were talking about going into space, they were getting ready for a particular mission. And these jokers had already done everything, everything I had read they had already read it at night. I mean, they’d do it overnight. It is absolutely amazing what they know already. So I didn't tell them anything they didn't already know. However, I guess I confirmed for them what they already knew, and that was helpful. So they are knowledgeable. Now we asked the question sometimes about their going into space and the risks that they take and the fact that the dose they may get could be lethal. Actually, we are very fortunate that we went up to the moon in between some heavy Sun flares. We had one Sun flare that, when we had no one in space, that would have fried every astronaut in space. But fortunately, we didn't have any astronauts in space at that time. So it can be dangerous and they know it. And the question is…we would should them, sometimes, pictures of chimpanzees that had been radiated to certain levels, and some of the chimpanzees would have some definite damage on their body and skin that you could see. We would say to the astronaut, now which one of these monkeys do you want to look like when you come back from the mission? Here is one that has had a 100 rad, this one has had 200 rad, this one has had 300 rad, 400 rad, and so forth. They would say, I tell you what, you just keep those monkey pictures in your pocket. We are going on this mission and we don't care how much radiation we have. We are going and we are going to complete the mission. Very, very active guys that say we're not going to slow down, we are going to complete our mission, that is the main thing. They realized, of course, that if things got bad, we couldn't return them in time anyway. The flight rules are that if it appears that there is going to be an overdose of radiation that would be severely damaging to the astronauts, you will turn the mission around and come back. But it is obvious that if you are out seven days, it takes you seven days to get home. And the radiation levels are such that it would get a lethal dose sometime within that seven days, it is a waste of time and effort. The question is how does this thing affect these animals and people mentally if you get an overdose. Can they perform? Can they push the right button to come back or not? And these are things that we worried about a lot, and, I think that in the future they are going to worry about it a lot more because we get into space station, and if we get up at altitudes where we have a lot of radiation, they are going to have some real problems. I know right now they are working on places that you can hide, if you will. Thick shielded areas of the space station where people will be able to protect themselves from some of the radiation of space. If it gets too bad, they may have to return to earth and get down below the magnetosphere.
HEAD: Is there anything that they could build on a space station that would completely protect them?
BARNES: No, no it is impossible because, and of course what we know at the present time…. Now maybe sometime in the future we will develop magnets or something else that can make it work differently, but we don't know that at the present time. A lot of people are thinking about those things, about what you can do to shield them. And certainly, you can cut out maybe 50% of the dose, but you can't cut it all out. And you still might have enough to kill the astronaut. Fortunately, most space station missions are designed for areas where they get quite a bit of protection from the magnetosphere of the earth itself. So they are not going up as high as we did when we were going to the moon. That makes a big difference.
HEAD: Do you ever remember any of the astronauts having any trepidations about the radiation?
BARNES: No, not at all.
HEAD: We were talking again about [President John F.] Kennedy's mandate, which he made to get on the moon within ten years. Do you feel like that had any effect, or caused any pressure to maybe to take shortcuts in your department?
BARNES: I don't know about shortcuts. I think we spent extra money and did more experiments because we had money available for us to do them. And I think it is very fortunate that we did have it and we got some things done that we couldn't do it under the present spending levels which are available to NASA.
HEAD: Obviously you did get to the moon in 1969.
BARNES: We did and I would love to be on a mission like that.
HEAD: Where were you when Armstrong set foot on the moon?
BARNES: Well I was in Mission Control at my station. Mission Control, of course -- and I think you were there last week so you understand how they do it -- it is a small group of people who sit with a capsule communicator. And then for each person who is there, there may be more than one room full of scientists, adjacent, that are feeding information to the people, to the capsule communicator. I was sitting in my room, which was in the same building but down the hall from the boss -- and my boss was a surgeon. We connected to him either by a telephone or by some other method. Many times we would just go down and talk it over. They didn't want everything to get on the net, necessarily.
HEAD: Was there any problems?
BARNES: No. No, no major problems. Certainly nothing that I remember being of any significance.
HEAD: Well how did you feel when he stepped on the moon? I mean you had worked toward, you as a group had worked toward this.
BARNES: I suppose. It was not a fantastic thought for me. The main thing was to get them back. Everybody worries about them being up there and maybe they can't get home. It is very tricky, and that is what we were really worried about more than stepping on the moon. We knew from our measurements on our machines, we had our dosimeters, that there wasn't any radiation problem on the moon. That's where they were settled down. And so in my place we were worried about radiation, that's our job. But we were worried about it being on the moon, so we didn't worry about that particular aspect. I am like everybody else. I guess if you ask 90% of the people, they were really happy about it. Momma said we never could do it, and here we are. We've done it.
HEAD: Do you remember any celebrations that took place? I have heard about the splashdown parties. Do you remember a splashdown party associated with that particular mission?
BARNES: Yeah, it was a biggie. But, my wife and I don't go to too many parties. We had kids like ten or twelve years old, along there, teenagers and sub-teens. We had a hotel next, well about four or five blocks from our house. And there were thirty-five hundred newspaper reporters from all over the world there. They were all trying to get into the swimming pool because it [is] kind of warm in July. We had membership in this swimming club so we came down and got in the pool too. And I noticed that people would take turns shoving…. Well it was after we got back, just landing on the moon wasn't it. It’s when you got back. Wait ‘till you get back. They would shove people in and get their clothes wet and have a little fun this way. But, there was not a lot of rowdiness, any more than anybody would expect, other than for any major event. But I must say, there was a lot of free food, free drinks and things like that the contractors furnished.
HEAD: Do you remember how your family and kids reacted to it?
BARNES: My wife thought, she was like me I guess, and, she thought it was great. Our kids all thought it was great because they got to go swimming and this sort of thing. But everybody was happy about the whole thing. One of our children sometimes doesn't understand why certain children get some privilege. For example, my son had a classmate -- well, my son was watching TV and here is this little kid, his classmate in grade school, and he is there with President [Lyndon B.] Johnson. His mouth pops open. What's he doing there with the President? Well, look there is his daddy standing next to him. He is an astronaut. Ohhh, you see. So these are the kinds of things. They grow up with kids that are astronaut's kids and scientist's kids, and they don't recognize sometimes that the real genius available there in that time period. [cough]
HEAD: Were they proud of their father? Were they proud of you for what you did?
BARNES: I suppose. [laughing] I remember once I was lecturing in Mexico City. I took my wife and children down. So these kids were saying, hey there is the son of the astronaut. And he [said], I don't know if I should say I am not an astronaut's son or not. But it is always pleasant, I guess, to be among a famous group of people. I visited, one time between missions, somewhere down in Chili --Santiago, Chili. And, I went to church with one of my friend’s sister, who was a missionary there. And all the kids said here is the astronaut, will you sign my Bible? And so I had to sign their Bible, and, unfortunately, I couldn't sign an astronaut's name. But, I did have some pictures to give away of the astronauts, and I made them happy. So it is kind of nice to be famous and yet I don't like to share the fame with those people, because they certainly deserve everything that they have, they get. It is pleasant to be in a community that way. It was pleasant for us to live in Nassau Bay where, I guess, within shouting distance of our house, there were at least five astronauts living and their families, and our kids played with them. [cough] And then the tour buses used to run through town and they would bring tourists out -- and here is where astronaut so and so lives, and this is where astronaut so and so lives. Our kids would stand out in the yard and wave at the tour buses, of course, and they think they are astronaut children, or something. It is just one of those things.
HEAD: Apollo 11 was, of course, would you say that was your greatest success, or NASA's greatest success?
BARNES: Well,--it certainly was a goodie. Of course they went on, and, I believe we had six or seven subsequent missions through Apollo 17, one of which didn't work -- 13 didn't work. But, if you look at the detail that goes into sending somebody to the moon, it is just absolutely fantastic to believe that you can do that successfully. And if we look at the frailty of the little lunar lander device, [and] if you look at how it is packaged up on the top of a 365-foot thing that sticks up like a big stick, broomstick, up in the sky, I guess you can call [it], or a big I don't know what, and how it [was] packaged, and then enclosed within this is a lunar landing device and with all of the engines and electronics that make it work, you land on the moon and then you can take off and rejoin the other one that is circling the moon. That is just absolutely inconceivable to me, how it has happened. But, we got some good mathematicians and good computer people to make it work. I think the whole series of Apollo was a resounding success, and our greatest success. Otherwise, other people would be doing it if it weren't that great, but nobody else has been able to accomplish this. We weren't the first to put a thing in orbit, a spacecraft not a Sputnik in orbit. The Russians did that. But, it made us get with it hot and heavy and get done what we did.
HEAD: Dr. Barnes, you have something actually that came off the Apollo.
BARNES: Yes, I do.
HEAD: Would you like to discuss this a little bit?
BARNES: Sure. I’d like to go a little bit into the history of this thing. First of all I guess I could set it up where the camera wants to look at it again. [sitting the handle up on the table in front of him] This is a handle [pointing to the back of the case enclosing the Apollo handle], and here on the back is a little note that talks about the handle in detail. I can use it as a guide. [takes the note out and looks at it] This is called an EVA handle, or Extra Vehicular Activity handle. Can you see it there, or do you want me to move it some other way? [asking the cameraman] I will get my reading glasses now. This is an Extra Vehicular Activity handle. If you can think about -- if you were up in space and you had to go outside the spacecraft, you would like something to hang on to. And if it’s completely dark, which it is except on the sun-side of the spacecraft, you need some way of lighting it up. And inside the lunar lander, which there are literally hundreds of buttons that you have to push in order to land successfully, you have to have some manner of electrical power to produce the light so that you know which button to push and do it correctly. When they first designed these spacecrafts, they decided that there was no way that you were going to get an electrical generator or anything like that to provide enough electricity. We will just have to use some kind of fluorescent object. And so we go back to something like grandma used to use. I know in my home we had a light bulb hanging in the middle of the room when we first got electricity. And there was a little radium piece of glass hanging from that, so that if you come in a dark room you pull that down, then you have a light that comes on. And that's the way you turn it on. That's the way you know where your light is. The hundreds of switches inside the lunar landing vehicle, plus a number of other switches that are outside, and things that you need to see in the dark, and things that you need to hang on to, like handles and what have you…. There are some markers, I might point them out with my pen [taking his pen and pointing at marks on the handle]. These markers (here, one here and one there, and one there at the bottom) that glow in the dark -- they fluoresce due to the energy of the material that is there and causes it to fluoresce. It is like a fluoroscope. You can see it in the dark.
On Apollo 10 spacecraft system, I believe it was, we had some people from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission come and apparently, they wanted to go to the [Kennedy] Space Center in Florida, for some reason. Everybody likes to go down and go swimming. If you can do an official mission, why that is great. So they came down and said, what can we do to earn our bread and keep while we are here? Well let's go look at these devices on this spacecraft. So they did, and took some smears, [using] some cotton swabs with alcohol on them. And they found out that some of these switch tips, little tiny switch tips about like you find on your light over here or a little smaller than that, [pointing toward a light switch on the wall], were leaking. And they found some radioactive material there. And so they said that you can't launch this into space because we have a rule that we are not going to launch any radioactive materials into space. They told them they would have to clean [the] spacecraft up, because they did not want the astronauts to become contaminated either. So it took them, I think, well forty million dollars’ worth of time. I have forgotten, forty thousand dollars a day, or something is what it cost them to take the time to clean up that spacecraft.
So they made a rule, everything that we sent up, we will not display it. We will just take it off and throw it away. So that is what they did. What we worry about, there is some plastic around these seals, around each one of these things, and in the vacuum of space, as you are probably aware if you are in a vacuum everything leaks. Maybe you didn't know that, but it is true, everything leaks and out-gases, as we would say. So, they redid these seals and they were satisfactory. But, the question is, after it has gone up and gone as high as the moon, [in] the pure vacuum of space, essentially, will it continue to hold it's material inside? So they said, we have got to do some studies on that. So they asked several contractors to take on the job of taking this material and keep testing it and see how long it is going to take before it starts losing it's ability to contain all the materials there. No one would do that because it was such a small job. They just wanted to do it once a year.
So a group of we veterinarians, there were four of us from NASA, formed a corporation -- had formed a corporation actually, a non-profit corporation, about three years previously -- and said to NASA, we will be glad to do this for you, free. But, we get to publish whatever we have learned, under our name. And, certainly, we will give NASA the credit that being the source of material, and what have you. They said, if you will do that then you can have the handles, we will give you the device to keep measuring radioactivity in the system, and what have you. Which they did. After I retired, even, I was still responsible for conducting this research. My job was to do this kind of research at the Space Center. So I continued to do it. Handles were taken off and thrown in the trash. All these little flipping things, switches, were all thrown in the trash. And they are all now at Oak Ridge or one of our nuclear facilities, in storage.
We took this one, my boss took this one out of the trash and said, take this one and go find out -- do a study. So we did a study on this. We did it for on about twenty years, as a corporation, International Veterinarian Foundation, and we found that we haven't been able to get any radiation out of the thing, so, apparently it is still safe. This now is twenty years, twenty-five years later, still an active thing and we feel like it may have some significance. On the back [pointing to the back of the case holding the handle] of this device, which is screwed in here, are a series of numbers, parts numbers. Everything has a part number on there. A piece of spacecraft that goes into space, and the inspection numbers from the people who did the QC they call it, quality control. They told us in the contract, which we wrote with NASA, this one happened to come from spacecraft number so and so because of these numbers that are on the back of it. And it did go into space. It went and circled the moon. And then we found out that it was Apollo 11, the mission that it came off of. So that's a fortuitous thing in that the Apollo11 spacecraft, which is in the Washington space museum, doesn't have any handle on it.
HEAD: It is almost thirty years old, almost been thirty years.
BARNES: Yeah, yeah. We think that this may have some value. And if there is money available -- Somebody would like to have it then to give [it] either to the museum to install it now that is has decayed through the years, or if they want to keep it in their own private collection, we feel like if they give us money for us to conduct further, more research at veterinarian schools, then we should give it to them. That is what our foundation's policy would be. So, why I still have it here [is] we haven't made any inroads about getting rid of the thing yet. But, it's very nice, a handy little thing to have around. And it has a nice story to it.
HEAD: Well it is a very historical piece. How would you describe your years at NASA if you were summing it up?
BARNES: Well, my career is fifty-one years long, roughly, after I got out of school and everything that I have done for the government. And I think it is certainly the high point in my career. However, every job I have had has always been better than the last one. Each one of them has been very exciting, and, I guess a person can approach it in that way. But it is hard to do anything more exciting than being in a group that is going to the moon. On the other hand, the second thing I did at NASA, in addition to working with the radiation problem, is to look at the earth from space, or spacecraft, and try to analyze what is happening on the earth over vast areas of the world. I worked secondly in a group called the Health Applications Office. And being able to look, say, over all of Mexico and say that certain parasites can grow in this part and they can't grow in another. And it is changing constantly, not every day, but seasonally. And if you are trying to eradicate mosquitoes, for example, that are causing people to die, and you can figure out where those mosquitoes are by having looked at it from space -- that is a worthwhile thing. And I actually believe that much of the things that NASA has done -- this is some of the most worthwhile things that they have done. A lot of people don't see going to the moon as a big thing, other than an adventure, this big adventure. But the technology that allowed man to get to the moon, technology that has allowed man now to analyze what's on the surface of the earth where we live, is all as a result of going to the moon, and the program that allowed us to do that. It is a very worthwhile thing, everything that NASA has done. They put out a bulletin each year --what has NASA done this year. I am just absolutely flabbergasted to think of all of the products that have come out of the development of spacecraft and technology -- computers and stuff of this nature. It has just been fantastic. So, what they have done has been very very worthwhile. Even though it has cost a lot of money, it has been worth the effort.
HEAD: Kind of along that same vein then, how would you compare the space program today compared to the goals of the 60's? Do you think the goals have changed significantly?
BARNES: Oh, very much so, they have changed. We just had one task to do back there and that was to go to the moon. That was it. Of course, there were a lot of tasks you had to do to get the first task completed. Actually that was just the first step. Now, in looking at the whole universe and take being in charge of the universe, of doing it to use and using the universe for the benefit of mankind, is something I consider to be an extremely worthwhile thing that NASA is going to do.
HEAD: NASA seemed to draw a lot of very talented people, such as yourself. What was it about NASA that drew these people?
BARNES: I think that it was very exciting programs and challenging programs. Of course, I was assigned there by the Air Force, and that is reason I went. But I must admit that I was challenged by it and I felt like it was a very very worthwhile assignment that the Air Force gave me to be able to work with these people. And now that it has happened and it's over, I can look back as a tremendous experience, a tremendous experience.
HEAD: When did you retire from NASA, Dr. Barnes?
BARNES: I retired from NASA in 1983. I retired from the Air Force in 1970.
HEAD: What have you been doing since your retirement?
BARNES: I went back to the ranch because I had been in the government forty-one years at that time, and I said it is time to get out of the racket and relax. Then the government called me on the phone. Some friends of mine said, we really could use you and your talent, or your experience, in a certain other place. So, I took a job in Panama as supervisor for veterinarian services throughout all Central America and Columbia. And this was a very challenging job also. Again, for three years we did that. Went back home and I was sitting around -- built a house, built a big barn -- and got a phone call and [they] said, we really could use you in Pakistan. I said, well I have never been to Pakistan, why can't I go? So, my wife and I took off for Pakistan. A very challenging job, a very difficult job, trying to help the Mujahideen, who are the freedom fighters of Afghanistan, get home and fight the Russians. Of course, that was U.S. policy at that time, also. So, my job was to do a very simple thing; buy good mules, of all things. Not many veterinarians get to buy mules anymore. And a person who had worked in radiation for a few years, it seems a little bit ridiculous to be buying mules. But, I was offered the job, and so I took it. And as a result of my work, and part of my work, and my subsequent veterinarian, who replaced me, the Mujahideen moved back into their country and the Russians moved out. The Mujahideen were able to shoot down airplanes, Russian airplanes, about one a day, and they lost heart and decided to go home. Now though, the weapons, which we trained the Mujahideen to use, are being used on each other. It is kind of like, what do you do? I don't know if it was a good thing to do or not, but, it was a very interesting thing. The people of that country, the Muslim people, were some people that I had never been in contact with before. Very challenging task.
HEAD: When did you move to Sun City?
BARNES: I had a coronary in Pakistan and then I had a coronary, another one, when I got back home -- they airvaced me back home. And we moved here in 1996, in February of ‘96. So we have been here a little over three years.
HEAD: The final question I would like to ask you Dr. Barnes. Is there any other person that you know would be interested in doing this oral history project?
BARNES: Yeah, I have another friend, Tom Barry--I don't know if you got Tom['s] name there or not. He is an astronomer and physicist. He lives here in Sun City. We could call him and find out. He's a real fine person. He just retired two years ago, I believe, from NASA, so he's a little different stage from I.
HEAD: I sincerely appreciate you letting me interview you Dr. Barnes. It has been a pleasure for me.
BARNES: Glad to do it.