NASA Barry, Thomas D. - May 30, 2000
Interview with Thomas D. Barry
Interviewer: Bradley Shreve
Date of Interview: May 30, 2000
Location: Barry home, Georgetown, Texas
SHREVE: Today is May 30, 2000. This oral history is being conducted at 132 Stetson Drive in Georgetown, Texas, the home of Mr. Barry. The interview is being conducted for the NASA/Johnson Space Center Oral History Project in conjunction with the Southwest Texas State University, Department of History.
Before going to NASA you worked at Sperry Gyroscope. Could you maybe kind of explain a little bit what you did there?
BARRY: I worked for Sperry Gyroscope and my first assignment was down in Albany, Georgia, which is in the southern part of Georgia, working on C-130s when they first started coming out. That's the Hercules and I worked on the autopilot and the flight systems. I worked there about a year in Georgia. Then I was transferred to California and I worked at all the SAC [Strategic Air Command] bases. At that time it was the height of the Cold War and the B-52s were on alert all the time and Sperry had the autopilot and flight instruments on the B-52s. So I would go around to all these bases in South Dakota and Washington and Arizona and all over, training the Air Force and trying to keep those B-52s flying. So I did that for two years.
While I was there I also worked down at Douglas, Long Beach [California], when they first started coming out with the DC-8 and I worked on that. So when they were coming out of the factory they would fly them a couple of times and if everything worked well, they would deliver them to the airline, like Delta Airline. If it didn't work well they had to fly them again and get all the bugs. So that was my job, to make sure that Sperry equipment worked well on the DC-8s.
So after that I got assigned to San Antonio and I was there working at Kelly Air Force base and Randolph Air Force base on B-52s and the T-38, which was a brand new fighter at that time. I was working on the autopilots and flight instruments and I went home on vacation and went to a job interview down in New York City, at a job fair. I guess when I was interviewed there were three test pilots that were up in this hotel and they interviewed me. So they asked me all about these flight instruments in the T-38 and I knew all about it. And that's how I wound up getting the job at NASA. So I heard from NASA and I went from San Antonio to Houston. And I actually was hired in at Langley [Virginia], before NASA was at Houston. Then I reported to Houston in 1962.
SHREVE: So you were living in New York when you went to the job fair?
BARRY: I was just on vacation for two weeks to see my family.
SHREVE: And you went to the job fair while there. What was it that got your interest in applying for a job at NASA?
BARRY: Well at that time I really didn't know too much about NASA, but it was really exotic at that time, you know, working on space. And then I went back to San Antonio and was working down there and I got a letter in the mail, offering me a job. It came as a surprise to me.
SHREVE: Did the Mercury flights influence you at all?
BARRY: Well, frankly, ever since I was in school, I always would have liked to have worked on the mission to the Moon. That was my one thing that I always had in mind. And at that time, the Russians had just put up Sputnik when I was just getting out of college and, yeah, the Mercury flights, they were all really interesting. They really got everybody's attention. I always felt my first ten years at NASA was more of a, you know, I would have worked there for nothing really. It was so good.
SHREVE: Good in what way?
BARRY: Interesting. Just fun to work on.
SHREVE: So when you first started NASA, you were working on Gemini on the Spacecraft Inertial Measurement Unit?
BARRY: Yeah, when I worked at NASA, out of our division they say there was a hundred, they assigned four of us to work on Gemini. My assignment was to work on the inertial measurement unit, which was made by Honeywell down in St. Petersburg [Florida]. And then IBM made the computer up in Oswego, New York. My assignment was to make sure all those inertial measurement units were okay and they passed acceptance tests and then that they were integrated with the computer up at IBM. So that's what I did. I would go down to Honeywell and the follow the IMUs [inertial measurement units] up to Oswego and stay [for] part of the integration tests. I was on the front end before the flights. I didn’t really work the flights themselves on any of the missions.
SHREVE: Remember the problem with Gemini 8 when they started spinning out of control?
BARRY: Yeah.
SHREVE: Did that have anything to do with the gyros?
BARRY: The platform saved them. The platform that I worked on didn't tumble. If you would exceed a certain rate it would tumble. Well anyhow he was spinning almost. I don't know whether it was 360 degrees a second or whatever, but he was spinning pretty fast and the whole gyros and platform held. So he got his attitude. He didn't lose his attitude out of that whole thing, that was really a marvel because it actually pushed us back and exceeded our specs [specifications] on the IMU. Yeah, so that was pretty interesting. At that time, he had a thruster that stayed hard over [that] caused the problem. A thruster stayed on and it spun, but the attitude stayed intact.
SHREVE: So after Gemini, you moved to Apollo. How did your duties change when you moved to Apollo?
BARRY: Well, when I went to Apollo, there were two aspects of Apollo that when I first started, everybody was working on the Command Module, the three men in the Command Module that would go to the Moon. And at that time they didn't have the Lunar Module; it was not invented yet. At that time, there was terrific controversy in Apollo on how to get there. [There were] three approaches. One was to direct launch and we would fly a Saturn directly to the Moon. The second one was we'd fly to Earth orbit and build a vehicle and go to the Moon. And, the third approach was to fly to Earth orbit and fly to lunar orbit and then from lunar orbit separate the vehicle and go down. So anyhow, that was invented by this guy [John] Houbolt in Langley, Virginia. He was a NASA engineer. He came up with that third method, which saved weight and really made the Apollo project possible. So with the result of this study, they developed the Lunar Module and the contract on that was won by Grumman.
And I worked on the Inertial Measurement Unit on the Lunar Module and the Command Module. It was the same unit, the same type of unit, only one was on the Command Module, one was on the LEM [Lunar Module]. And that was designed by MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology], Draper Lab, and that was a variation of a unit that they had developed for the Polaris submarines. So at the time, we had the Polaris submarines and they had their missiles. That was really state of the art. It was all classified and everything. So that was the best we had in the country at that time was theses gyros and inertial measurement units that were designed and developed by MIT. So MIT didn't make production units. They fonned it out companies like Sperry and AC [Delco] Sparkplug [which] was another company out in the Midwest that made these IMUs and gyros.
Anyhow, my job was to learn how they worked. I also set up a lab in Building 16, which was the Guidance and Navigation building. That was one of my primary jobs the first couple of years. First I set up a lab up in the Rich building, which was up in Houston before the Center [Johnson Space Center] was built. I set up a second lab down there. And they added on an addition and I set up a third lab, which was the inertial components lab, where we tested the gyros that were going to be flown. Not that actual ones that were going to fly, but we evaluated them and learned all about them and so forth. Also, we tested the accelerometers.
Then about that time, they decided that in addition to the main inertial measurement unit and the purpose of that was to measure acceleration along the thrusting vector of the vehicle when the engines fired. We wanted to know where it was going, how much it was accelerating, so you could determine distance. They wanted to have a back up system. So weight was very critical on the Lunar Module, in fact the walls were only as thick as Reynolds [tin foil] wrap. They didn't have to work in air at all. The whole Lunar Module was built to work in a vacuum so the walls could be real thin.
So anyhow, they developed a backup guidance system and that was called the strap down system and I worked on that right from the very beginning. That was the first strap down system that was ever built, designed, and used in the United States. And that was like the inertial measurement unit, only it didn't have gimbals. On the inertial measurement unit you had three gimbals. On the Apollo platform and on the Gemini platform you had four gimbals. So no matter what you did, these gyros always stayed still with respect to inertial space. But anyhow on the strap down system, all that gimbal movement was done artificially in the computer. So all the transformations of where the vehicle was moving were generated by the equations in the computer, so you didn't have to have these gimbals. As a result it was much lighter and smaller. But anyhow it was a big chance because it had just been kind of discovered or invented in a way a year before. Here we are, we're going to fly with it. That's the way it was in those days, they really moved out on new things. They didn't debate them for years.
So anyhow, management was a little worried so we came up with a deal with the Air Force where we would put them on a sled test out in Holloman Air Force base in New Mexico. They used to have these sled tests where they would have a rocket on a sled and they had these tracks and they would go down about a couple of miles and shoot off the sled and it would go up to about 500 or 600 miles per hour and then stop. So we put this package on them, on the sled, and fired them. So anyhow, we went with the Air Force. They were so anxious to learn about the strap down system because we had beat them to it. They offered to give the whole Sled Test program for free if we would loan them the strap down unit. That was my project. I was assigned to work with them and get the whole thing done. So we did. And we ran about ten sled tests and it worked good and measured the acceleration and everything properly. So it eased people’s problems that we were going to have a lot of unknown errors when we flew it. That was really a confidence gainer at NASA.
I was really working on the gyros and accelerometers during the Apollo program. I have one in there that I'll show you later if you like. But they were extremely accurate you know. Just to give you an idea of the accuracy involved. When they landed the first couple of missions, they landed on a big open plain, on the Sea of Tranquility, which had a lot of craters, but it was still pretty open. Why about the third or fourth landing, they decided to land right in the mountains and they landed in the Apennine Mountains on the Moon. They had to go down there and get within a couple hundred feet. So that's what the guidance system did, it brought them down there within a couple hundred feet of where they wanted to go. They had that much confidence to do it – the mountain range – because that's where the geologists wanted to go to find out the geology of the mountains rather than the open plains. So anyhow, that's kind of the system that we used. Initially there were a lot of competitors to it. All the companies had different approaches, but essentially that was they system we went with that was a variation of the system that was used on the Polaris submarines.
SHREVE: Wasn't there some concern over gimbal lock during the Apollo 13?
BARRY: Yeah. Well going back, this was always a big issue: gimbal lock. When I told you about the Gemini program and the inertial platform? Well, that had four gimbals. With four gimbals, you don't get any gimbal lock. The vehicle can rotate in any direction, spin around, and you won't get into gimbal lock. Well on Apollo, weight was really critical. So they decided hey, let's knock off the outer gimbal [and] save some weight. So they did. They went with just three gimbals. They decided, hey we'll put vehicle latitude restrictions on the vehicle. Just to save the weight of that one gimbal, which I don't know how much it was, maybe twenty pounds. It might of been more than that.
As a result of that, operationally, the rest of the program it would cause all kinds of havoc and they always had to know where the vehicle was and there was certain zones that it couldn't go into, that kind of thing. People are always keeping their eye on, for gimbal lock, because if you went to a place where the axes all lined up, the whole thing would spin and go out of control. Then you would have to realign the whole thing. So that was always an operational consideration, to put restrictions on your attitude, but it never did happen that I know of.
SHREVE: How would the axes all line up?
BARRY: Well the axes all lined up differently, depends on the different type of flight. And what they had was they had a sextant on board. You had to view it out the window and on the Lunar Module they had a telescope. And they would look at stars and determine the angle of the stars with respect to each other, with respect to the Sun, or with respect to the horizon. From those angles they would calculate the angles that they wanted the gimbals to point on the IMU and they would put through the computations, send signals to the gimbals to rotate to that orientation. And that's how they would align them. So, it was aligned very accurate, down to a couple of arc seconds, with these sextants.
SHREVE: What was the main difference between the Gemini and the Apollo spacecraft as far as the gyros?
BARRY: Well, on Gemini the inertial platform was made by Honeywell. On Apollo, it was made by MIT slash AC Sparkplug slash Sperry. And I would say that the Apollo one was much more accurate than the Honeywell one. But then again, it was much more complicated, and it was much more expensive, and it was more everything. I don't know that the Honeywell gyro couldn't do the job. At one time, I don't know if this has ever been brought out, but I used to go to these Gemini meetings and the program manager got the idea that they wanted to go to the Moon with Gemini. As Gemini was going up to eight- and fourteen-day mission, he thought we can go to the Moon and circle the Moon and come back. So he started pushing for that towards the end of Gemini – to keep it a continuing program. Well finally, it got cancelled. I think it was a good thing because it was taking away from Apollo and it was kind of getting to be like a competitor to Apollo. So there was a lot of talk of it at one time, trying to make Gemini go around the Moon.
SHREVE: Never talk of trying to do a lunar landing though using it?
BARRY: No, no you couldn't do that. So I don't know if it could've been done, but there weren't backups, no margin and all. So in my job and experience, I didn't really deal with the program office or the main elements. I was mainly in the labs back in Building 16 and worked on gyroscopes and that sort of thing and IMUs. Most of Apollo, for me, the biggest challenge, was that strap down system and that's what I had the most interest in and that's what I went for. And I was kind of one of the main people on the strap down back up system and that was made by United Aircraft from Connecticut and TRW out in California. So I used to go on a lot of trips to there, those places, and make sure everything was going right.
SHREVE: Were there lots of deadlines you had to meet?
BARRY: Yeah. My deadlines weren't so much deadlines. Like I say, I wasn't in the Project Office. I didn't have schedules for the vehicles. Mine were just going and supporting people at meetings and that sort of thing, technically, on the gyros and accelerometers. But on that program I didn't have any schedules that I was responsible for. But I'll tell you, it was tight. It was really go, go, go. Things were happening all the time. And I just might as well say it, Joe Shea was the project manager on the Apollo and he was just fantastic I thought. And when they had that fire, he got blamed for it. He took all the blame. But he did a good job and was so superior to anybody else that could've done it. He did all the hard part of the program. But it was really tight schedules [that] everybody was kind of working long hours and everything else. Then they had that fire and everything changed. From then on it was much more relaxed.
SHREVE: Really?
BARRY: Yeah.
SHREVE: How many hours did you work?
BARRY: Like I said, I wasn't involved in what you call project schedule, but we always worked ten hours a day.
SHREVE: Five, six days a week?
BARRY: Mainly, five. But there were a lot of times when you go on trips and then you'd be working much longer. And there was usually a lot of trips.
SHREVE: So with Apollo One they blamed the fire on people working too many hours?
BARRY: I wouldn't say that, no. Technically, it was blamed on the oxygen being the gas in the cabin. They used oxygen to save weight. A lot of these things weighted up. They just never thought they'd have a fire like that. And I guess everything in there was combustible, all these switches made out of plastic and things. So after the fire they redid all everything so it wouldn't burn. I really wasn't involved in that aspect of it at all. But I do know that Joe Shea, he took the whole blame for it. You don't see too many people who will stand up and take the whole blame for the whole thing anymore like he did.
SHREVE: Was there lots of talk of the Soviets getting to the Moon before us? Did that seem to be a factor in your job?
BARRY: I guess it was in a way, but it was more for the big managers that they would set these schedules, tight schedules, and try to keep them where I worked. Where I worked we didn't really get involved in that at all. We didn't really have any idea what the Russians were doing.
SHREVE: Where were you and what were your thoughts when Apollo 11 landed on the Moon?
BARRY: Can I go back before that, on Apollo 8?
SHREVE: Sure, okay.
BARRY: Like I say, I was mainly working the old lab. I was in charge of a small lab there and we did the gyros. So I wasn't really involved in the flight, all of the pizazz of it, the flight itself, the TV and all that. But they knew those two flights were going to be really busy and everything. So they asked for volunteers to help out at Mission Control on Apollo 8. That was the one that went up at Christmas time. So I volunteered to go up there and help out and just run their xerox machine or just do whatever they wanted, you know, to help out. So I went over there. As a result of that I was involved in the whole vehicle and the whole mission and that was really my favorite flight. That was the first time they went around the Moon. And I was right there in the room, small room over there, when they made that decision to go. And the guy was kind of sick and they didn't realize it until after they landed. They didn't tell them. That was really exciting. I just kind of was like a gopher or helper doing odd jobs around there. But I was in the Mission Control during most of Apollo 8 mission, which was a lot of fun. Then Apollo 11, I think I also helped out on that, but I didn’t really have any direct involvement in the flight.
By the time these flights occurred like that, our job was more or less almost done and we were looking on working on other stuff. Like when you see these things on TV and all, it's more about the guy sitting at the desk monitoring the flight and all that. Well all of our involvement and crises and big decisions and all that were done months and months before.
My understanding, there's about ten Saturn rockets. They hoped that out of the ten maybe two or one would get to the Moon and land. That's right. This is the Saturn file. And they did it on the first one. So they said, well, it's so successful so unanticipated that they didn't know what to do. They said hey, we need to drum up some ideas for these other missions. That's when they had the big crash program to develop the Lunar Buggy. That was done in about six months. All these things that eople hadn't really thought about all that and they never dreamt that it would be that successful. As a result, they landed there about seven times, I'm not sure, seven or eight, whichever. But like I say, those later missions they landed right in the mountain range. I mean they were really daring. And by the way, going back to NASA, it wasn't a great big bureaucracy. When I joined NASA it was only 200 people.
SHREVE: Two hundred at JSC?
BARRY: Yeah.
SHREVE: Including Mission Control?
BARRY: Including everybody. Yeah, but I mean it grew. When it started out it started out with 25 people. So it wasn't really very big. Mostly, during Mercury, it was not more than 50 people.
SHREVE: That's amazing.
BARRY: Yeah. So a lot of those people went on to be managers and so forth. They really had good management in those days, I thought, too. Apollo was really successful and once they got into Apollo 17 and all that, then people started saying gee, what do we do next? Everybody was so busy trying to get Apollo working that nobody was really paying attention to what should happen next and all of a sudden it has kind of come to the end of the table. What happens?
So then they started all these big layoffs and everything. It was like two years of really drudgery around there. They were laying off people every week and this and that. It was really bad times because they didn't know what they were going to do. They had a couple of programs like Apollo X – make Apollo into a Space Station and I worked on some of those studies. I guess they weren't prepared for it, you know, management or the president. [Richard] Nixon really didn't have too much interest in it, so he kind of let it go down. The whole thing kind of fell apart.
Then they started thinking how do they want to go for Space Station and so forth. Do they do the Space Station next or what, so that's when they came up for the idea of the Space Shuttle. I was involved in that right from the very beginning and that was really a lot of fun. Do you have anything else on Apollo?
SHREVE: No. In '73 you moved to Space Shuttle. You started on the Space Shuttle. And you worked as subsystem manager for Flight Control System. Could you maybe explain the duties with that?
BARRY: Okay. The early Space Shuttle was really exciting because the head of the engineering directorate Max Faget, he dreamt up the whole idea, you know and have a winged vehicle. So the early big controversy on Shuttle, there were two main things that were all important. One was it’s cross-range and the other one was the tiles versus being made out of titanium. So the one on the cross-range was the Air Force was involved with NASA on it. And they wanted to have a long wide cross-range to be able to go 2500 miles on either side of the landing, so that they could go wherever they wanted to, to do whatever they wanted with it. That required a really swept back wing. NASA wanted to be able to land it like an airplane on a runway. See, they wanted to be able to come down and that required it to be able to land at low speeds and have kind of conventional kind of wings. So this fight went on for a long time and then, between NASA and the Air Force. They finally compromised on some cross-range and that's the reason the delta wing is the way it is today. It's a result of that compromise between NASA and the Air Force. When they come in for entry, lets say they were coming in to spot X and it was cloudy there and they couldn't land, well cross-range would allow them to go to a different airport and land. So that was one thing. I wasn't involved in that, in those decisions. But they drove the program for the first year or two – the cross-range and then the controversy whether they should have tiles or titanium skin around tiles. And so the tiles went and, then later, they had a bunch of problems with those. They fell off and things like that.
When we had the first studies, I was involved in inertial measurement unit again. What should we put on it, what type? The whole thrust on the Shuttle was low cost, try to use commercial equipment. So I surveyed the airlines and what they did, went out to the airlines, like I said this company AC Sparkplug which is part of General Motors. They built the inertial measurement unit that were used on a lot of the airlines. Then there was another competitor called Kearfott. They had this IMU that was used on various fighter planes and then Honeywell had another platform. So these were three competitors. My first large effort was supporting my boss and our group on trying to determine which ones: what the problems were with them, how well they behaved out in field, what kind of reliability they had. We went out and asked the airlines. So we knew everything about them. They weren't doing too good. So we went to the Air Force bases and checked out these fighter planes, how many hours before they failed. A lot of these things would fail maybe 50 or 100 hours. We were looking for something much longer than that. So there was a big knock down competition between those three companies: Delco [AC Sparkplug], Honeywell, and Kearfott. After that, Kearfott won it. And I was pretty heavily involved in that.
So then once that got under way and Kearfott started making them, I was transferred to a different group, which that was part of the inertial guidance system. In addition to that, there’s also a Flight Control System. That had gyros and accelerometers also. So they assigned me over there and I worked on that on determining the selection and what we needed and that sort of thing for the flight control system gyros.
Well, on the Shuttle, there's three items involved. You got two solid rocket boosters on either side and then there's the big external tank and then there's the orbiter. Well, it turns out that the orbiter really was so, I wouldn't say fragile, but it was so flexible that they couldn't use it for flight control during first stage because it was bending too much. This is before they ever flew it. They calculated it. And that the solid rockets were pretty rigid. So we had gyros on those, these rate gyroscopes. And that was another decision that was ours. Rather than have all these companies building gyros for different parts, we had this commonality where we had the same gyroscopes in the solid rocket boosters as in the orbiter. And we made that stick. Once you try to do that they were always trying to find ways to get around it, but we made it stick.
Marshall Spaceflight Center made the solid rocket boosters and I worked with them pretty closely with they gyroscopes. So what would happen was the two solid rocket boosters were very rigid. So during first stage they would average the rates from the one side and the other and fly the vehicle accordingly and just ignore what was going on in the orbiter because the orbiter was kind of bouncing around. So that's what they used in first stage. Then in second stage and third stage they brought in the IMU measurements that were on the orbiter. So that was really exciting there. Also when I first got on it, the gyroscopes were located down by the engines on the solid rocket boosters. They were getting about 40 Gs. Really, there was a lot of vibration down in the engine area. So one of my things was to get them moved up higher, up into the top of the vehicle. So we got them moved up on the top of each SRB [solid rocket booster] and there were three rate gyro assemblies on the right SRB and three on the left. They would determine the pitch and roll of the whole vehicle, all the parts going up. So then you got these three units on each side and who will put down an answer, like pitch one, pitch two, or pitch three and roll and so which one is the right answer? So then we developed this redundancy management scheme to try to come up with the best way to number one, tell if one of them failed, or number two, pick the best value. So we came up with this mid-value select and quad mid-value select techniques. So real time when these three instruments were coming out with data, you could pick the middle value and be fairly confident that was a good value. And then on the other side pick it and average them and so forth and that was what they used to steer the vehicle.
So then you got into a lot of things. The biggest most exciting thing for me was actually, not the first flight itself, but before the flight, a couple of months, a month say, they had the whole vehicle locked down at the Cape [Cape Kennedy, Florida]. The way the Shuttle works is, what you do, is you start the main engines. You fire them up until they get to be 60 per cent, 80 per cent, to 90 per cent. Once they get to be 90 per cent, then you light the SRBs. So once you light the SRBs, you can't turn them off. So they're going to go. So you don't light the SRBs until the main engines are doing well and there were three main engines. But they decided to do it. Hey let's try this thing at the Cape, but lock it down. So they had it all locked down with cables and everything, so it wouldn't go off. And they were going to turn on the three engines and get it up to full thrust without the vehicle taking off. So they really wanted to see what the gyros were going to do too. So I was involved in that to see what the rates would look like, to see whether the vehicle was shaking so much that the gyro would just be putting out really bad data. So it turns out the gyros did their job and they detected the rates of the vehicle and the mid value was good. We used that. They used it to steer the engines and so forth and they went through a whole flight profile. The whole thing worked.
That was really complicated. The people that worked on the flight control equations on the Shuttle, I have to say deserve the highest honors. They were really the toughest jobs to make that whole thing stable. We had two SRBs and an orbiter and an external tank and all those things had different frequencies and vibrations and all that. They got that whole thing to work together.
So my main part was the gyroscopes to detect the rates of the vehicle and the different parts. So then once you get up into second and third stage, the vibrations decreased and the data out of the orbiter rate gyros was better, so then you included them into the vehicle calculations also. And so like the orbiter had four packages. One time we had three, but then we had four. This is in case anyone failed.
We had this method called MVS [mid-value select]. If you had three you could always use the middle signal. But if you had quad MVS you wanted to be able to detect at least two failures and isolate them. Once you're down to the final two the scheme was to average them. So the first value could detect and isolate out easily. Second failure, you could detect and isolate out. And then anything after that you just had to take your chance and average them. So that's what we had on the orbiter. We had four rate gyro packages and also four accelerometer packages. That was to get us through the first stage. I was involved in selecting the gyros. We ran life tests on them in the lab, just to see how well they would do and ran them for a year, 8000 hours. And they were all running pretty good. So they said let's go for another year so we ran them and then we doubled the speed and ran them for another year. So they really ran pretty well, these gyroscopes. Never had a failure. And on the SRBs, they only had to work 156 seconds. So I had a lot of confidence that those gyros were going to work. And they did.
Okay, back to Apollo one more time. When we finished Apollo, I thought this was pretty important. We had a lot of problems with the gyros, they were just so pushing the state of the art on performance that bearings were going out. You would always have these gyro failures. They weren't so much bearings failing, but they were just failing performance and they wouldn't meet performance anymore. And so it was very low-yield and they're really expensive to get a number of good gyros that would have the right performance and work. So after the program, my boss had this idea. Hey, lets go back and look at those gyros and run the bearings at a leisurely pace and just see what was it that caused the bearings to fail and what can we do about it. Let's try some different lubricants or different things like that. Well, these gyros, it was like a big, not a mystery, but it was like things get to be sacred cows in the field and in the gyro industry. Everybody used the same oil. It was a turban oil. Drapey used it and Honeywell used it and Kearfott used it. Everybody used it – the same batch of oil. There were a couple of big gallon drums and they would slide a whole industry because they didn't need many drops. So anyhow, we looked at that. Then my boss knew some people from Shell. So he gave some of this oil to them. They looked at it and said, “gee, this looks [like] pretty, old stuff. We got oil better than this.” So we got some samples from them and then we went to Monsanto and got some samples from them. We tried different oils. [We] tried different viscosities and we ran these bearings. And we ran them with a set of seven balls. We ran them with three balls and we ran them with retainers and we ran them without retainers. And we did a lot of experiments. So when we went to the gyros on the Shuttle they were much better. We had a lot more confidence and these gyros lasted thousands of hours, where on Apollo, we're talking hundreds of hours. So that was significant. It never did go anywhere in big time, but there was a lot of work done in that area.
So as a result, when we took off on those Shuttle flights, I was pretty confident that the gyros were going to work. The bearings were in good shape and the wheels were running and they would stay running for thousands of hours. But we had four packages. It wasn't likely that all four were going to fail. So we had a lot of margin on the Shuttle, a lot more than we did on Apollo. So now those gyros are still flying today. On the orbiter, the last time I checked before I retired, the same four packages were in the vehicle. That's after 70 flights. When I left the Shuttle program, I left after the seventh flight. By that time I was really bord. Everything was the same. So I was really looking to go to something else. But the gyro packages did well and, on the SRBs, they also did well.
The other thing that was really interesting was [that] we had to have a gyro package that was that would be reused twenty times on the SRB. That was the spec that we would take it and refurbish it and use it again. Well, the SRBs would come in and land in the ocean and they would come in at about sixty miles an hour on their parachutes. And so the gyro package would have to work after that, hose it off, get all the salt water, test it out, and fly it again. Well, one or two of those early flights, what happened was that one of those parachutes didn't open on the SRBs. So instead of coming down, I don't know what the exact rate was, about forty miles an hour, they came down at about eighty or ninety miles an hour. They hit hard when they'd wade into the ocean sixty feet down. Well the gyroscopes took a big slam. I think we might have lost one or two gyros after that, but that was about it. Most of them were reused. After every flight these SRBs land in the ocean, the gyro packages are reused, which I thought was pretty good. That is good.
SHREVE: So after Space Shuttle you moved to Space Station?
BARRY: Yeah. So like what I was saying all this time I worked on gyroscopes and accelerometers. So when they started Space Station, they decided to take one person from each branch in our division and form a new group. And it would be like inter-discipline group, where I was from the guidance and somebody else would be from data management and somebody else would be from power and somebody else from communication and so forth, so we would all be working together. And that was one of the highlights of my career. It was just being picked to get into that group and then being in there with all these neat guys. And we just started off on Space Station and kind of took a whole fresh start. It was really fun. We really went in there and tried to not have any preconceived prejudices. Ways to do the system, we tried to really be open and to find the systems. People get pretty territorial on their systems and organization. We tried to avoid all that.
So we laid out the avionics system for the Space Station. Then we had a contract out for some companies to look at it and put a lot more meat into it. And there were about seven big companies, the results TRW and McDonnell won the contract and IBM. And had some phase-A studies with them and I helped manage those phase-A studies. That was for the data management system for the Space Station.
At that time too, what was really funny [about] the Space Station was what it would look like. There were all kinds of competing designs. My favorite is this one here [shows diagram]. They called a delta. This was done by a group in the structures, mechanics division, in our directorate. I'll show you that later. So they had the power tower and the delta [and] a lot of these competing, different configurations. And then it turns out each Center had their own configuration, their pet configurations, and they were all competing. Well anyhow this delta, what it was with the whole frame would compress like a big spring. When you get up there you would open up this cylinder and the whole frame would pop out in the shape of this triangle. And then you would add the modules on the side. So you could put this whole thing up in one flight, which would really be neat.
But every time you come up with a vehicle, you got advantages and disadvantages. And that would fly inertially, which means you would fly facing the Sun or some angle that's respective to the Sun all the way around. And there's another type of vehicle, which say the power tower, and they have the big solar rays that are as big as a football field. Then you'd have a big column coming down and you had all the little modules down here [shows diagram]. And that was always pointing to the Earth. They call that local vertical kind of system.
So you had different groups at the different Centers all with their pet areas, like the astronomers wanted inertial system and other people in Earth Resources wanted local, vertical system. And so that went on for like two years. All these competing vehicle designs and they finally had a big show down competition. And this modular approach was selected here. At that time, we might have had fifteen configurations. This is back in 1986-88. And the configurations now are just, about 800. So there's been a lot of different variations on the thing. So all that was fun. We worked with them on that, the structures people.
I moved away from guidance and got into data management and integration. You had a lot of different systems on the vehicle. We had maybe eight or ten systems, like communications system, life support system, power management system, guidance system. We would make sure that they would all work together and that they had the same databases. And we'd find requirements for their data so that they could communicate with each other and that kind of thing. So I got into systems integration and I really did well there. From then on, I was mainly in that area for the rest of the career.
SHREVE: When was Russia introduced as a partner in Space Station?
BARRY: That was really right at the end of my career. Well, Space Station started off really great. Like I said, it had all these competing configurations, in-house, skunkworks, and different things to try to reduce them down. Then they had a big procurement and they finally selected a contractor – McDonnell – and a configuration. But what happened was I guess NASA felt that they still needed to sell it and they had all these customers and different people. They were always trying to sell the thing. They should have just did it, like in Apollo and Shuttle, we never asked anybody. And on Space Station it has always been trying to get people to buy into it and so as a result there was six different NASA Centers and they were always working, I wouldn't say against each other, but they weren't always working with each other. Everybody wanted to be in charge of the Space Station and so finally they appointed NASA, JSC would be in charge of the Space Station. But then it was tough for them to manage these other centers, because they were always pretty autonomous and you had to get them working together with you. A lot of my job was working with people from different centers and I didn't have any control over them. So the result was that NASA was kind of a management nightmare. The Space Station was, really. From top management, it really never really made things stick.
And then finally what happened was, somewhere along then nineties there, they got the idea that the Russians, maybe get them involved. So they got the Russians involved. Meanwhile what they did was just eliminated a lot of the systems that we were working on, like the guidance system we had developed and the old gyros which were the strap down gyros that I was telling you about earlier, and control them with gyros and got them through procurement and qual [qualification] test. Qual test is where you put it through a vibration and thermal vacuum and you really ring it out. So they were actually through all that, with all their failures. Every time you went through that vibration and the thing fails, you got to fix it and then go through it again. So by the time you finally get through, the thing’s in really bad shape. But you got to go through the whole thing before you pass. Well we had gone through all the systems and then they picked the Russian systems and so they just cancelled these things. So all these companies that had done all this hard work and people that were working on the guidance system was just pushed aside. So they come up with this Russian module. I don't know the whole thing was kind of, it was just totally scraped and redone back in the mid-nineties.
Then about that time I kind of was off the Space Station Integration part and I was working on the verification for the Space Station systems. And our job there was to set up at JSC a lab. That way we could check out all their integrated systems to make sure they were working together. So I worked on that for a couple of years. That was a lot of fun.
Then my last assignment was working on payloads. I got into payloads, which were in the back of the orbiter payload bay. Well I didn't think it was going to be complicated, but boy I had to learn the whole thing all over again. And what happens is they have cabling back in the payload bay for these payloads and they change every flight. Well they have data systems and power systems, interface for each of these payloads. This is all going back from the beginning of the Shuttle. There's an awful lot of wiring and cables that were available, so I had to learn all that. And each payload that would come along, say like a telescope or a manned module or whatever it was, you had to deal with them in the payload bay and make sure all the cables was right. Rockwell was the contractor. They came up with the drawings for each flight. Our group, I was in this payload integration group. We had to check through all the Rockwell drawings, all these payloads, to make sure that they were all right [that] there was no mistakes and that they interfaced with the orbiter and they were all correct. Not only that, but they were safe. So we had to sign these safety things that they would not screw up the orbiter vehicle, blow up or they had lithium batteries blow up or whatever.
So that was my last two years, I was involved in these payloads. And right at the last part, we got some Russian payloads. Well we got involved with the Russian Space Station modules, which were just coming in at that time. We had to go to these safety reviews and review theirs for safety. I know what it was. Where the Shuttle would land, not land but rendezvous with the Russian module. And then when the guys would go into the Russian module. To make sure that number one that when the Shuttle interfaced with it. They brought some cables and hooked up to their power, everything wasn't going to go haywire. So we had to try and figure out how the Russian modules worked and make sure that they were compatible. So that was kind of hairy part, especially when they get all these drawings and they’re all in Russian, so they had to be translated. What a mess that was.
SHREVE: Did it work out alright?
BARRY: Yeah, it did. They're doing it now you know, but that was at the Mir you know.
SHREVE: So what do you see the future of manned spaceflight?
BARRY: I see that us going to Mars. That's where I think our destiny is and I hope we go there as soon as we can.
SHREVE: How long do you think it will be?
BARRY: Well I would have stayed with NASA and not retired, if we were going to go to Mars. But I don't see that much pizazz in the Space Station program, but I really do see that NASA should be going to Mars. They should be pushing the state of the art, pushing and pushing the frontiers, and pushing technology. That’s where we need to be going, is Mars.
SHREVE: Do you have any projection of when we would get there?
BARRY: I'd say we might get there by 2015.
SHREVE: Before you left, had any work been started on it at all?
BARRY: Yeah, they've had a few studies on Mars. They came up with big prices and they were turned down. [President George] Bush didn't want to spend the money. I can't say that the studies were that good. I think what we need to do is we need to go assemble a vehicle in Earth orbit and go. Once we go to Mars, the next stop is Jupiter. I really feel that we could have been at Mars already. I feel, if we would have kept up after Apollo, we would have been at Mars. I just feel that way. That's what I think we should be doing, not messing around Earth orbit. We should turn it over to commercial companies and let them do it, what they want, except for telescopes and things like that.
SHREVE: So stuff in low Earth orbit would be done by private companies you think, ideally?
BARRY: Sure, yeah. Except for telescopes or x-ray telescopes or gamma ray telescopes or things like that where they need NASA to develop them. And we should have satellites, but more scientific. Communications and all that sort of thing. We should get out of and let them, industry, do it.
SHREVE: Sy Liebergot, who worked in Mission Control during Apollo and early Space Shuttle, stated that the Apollo years were a golden age of space exploration and that the accomplishments of the age may never be equaled. How do you feel about that statement?
BARRY: Well I guess it might never be equaled by a big team, a big team of people working on a project. I feel that was the ultimate of teamsmanship. People working together on Apollo. We never quite got it on the Space Station. As far as a golden age of science, I think is between 1895 and 1905 is my favorite years for discoveries.
SHREVE: So personally, what would you say was your most significant accomplishment at NASA?
BARRY: I would say my working on the systems integration on the early Space Station. Getting people [to] work together and finding the systems. And also my subsystem manager job on the Space Shuttle for the early flights. Getting the ALT [approach and landing tests] flights working and the SRBs and so forth. Getting the gyros to work on those.
SHREVE: Is there anything else that I haven't asked that you would like to add to the record?
BARRY: Yeah, I think there's a need for a history of NASA or the Apollo or the Shuttle programs from an engineering point of view. You get a lot of this on TV and so forth. But what you see is Mission Control and the thing, the flight. That's just like really the tip of the iceberg because most of the really important stuff and the decisions and tough jobs are done earlier. And if you could get somebody to really do a history of the technical trade-offs on these individual systems, it would be extremely interesting. Because every time you get these big decisions and trade-offs, you always have two camps, maybe three camps. And they fight like cats and dogs because they believe their system or their approach is better. So that comes down to management to decide which is the better approach. And that happened a lot of times during Apollo and Shuttle. I don't think it has ever been brought out. But that really deserves a good history is the engineering evolution and trade-offs that went on during those two programs – the Apollo and Shuttle.
SHREVE: Okay, well I guess that's all.
BARRY: Okay.