NASA Bell III, David - June 5, 2000

Interview with David Bell

 

Interviewer: Jeffrey E. Brooks

Date of Interview: June 5, 2000

Location: Bell home, Weimer, Texas

 

 

 

BROOKS:  Today is June 5, 2000. This oral history with David Bell is being conducted in Weimer, Texas, at the home of the interviewee.  This interview is being conducted for the NASA/Johnson Space Center Oral History Project in conjunction with Southwest Texas State University by graduate student Jeff Brooks.  Mr. Bell, are you aware that this interview is being conducted for the NASA/Southwest Texas State University Oral History Project, and will be available for research purposes?

 

BELL:  Yes, I’m aware.

 

BROOKS:  Well, Mr. Bell, thank you for joining me today.  We’ll start off with a few general questions.  Tell me about your college education.

 

BELL:  I got my college degree from Trinity University [San Antonio, Texas].  The degree was in chemistry.  Shortly after that, I went to Texas University to do master’s work in physics.  This was during the time of the Korean War, and before I got through my master’s at Texas, I volunteered for the service and went into the Korean War.  Fortunately, I stayed stateside the whole time, but I did go through Keesler Air Force Base [Mississippi], in electronics training, and Sandy Air Force Base, in New Mexico, in special weapons.

 

When I got out of the service, I went back to San Antonio and got a job working at Pearl Brewing Company for a year.  Wanting to get back into the technology part of my life, I applied for a job out at Kelly Air Force Base [San Antonio], where I was employed as a nuclear physicist.  During that time, we were working on the nuclear propelled aircraft and we were a staff function with the general at the base.  We sort of shot down that program as being too risky to fly a nuclear aircraft over a city and have it blow up and show a city with radioactive materials.  So, eliminating the WS-125A weapons system sort of eliminated my job.

 

Then I went to work for Martin Marietta Corporation as an electrical engineer.  During this time, I worked on various programs with the Navy and with other government agencies, on designing, developing, and testing nuclear generators.  During this time, unbeknownst to me, I also worked on a NASA program, where we developed the nuclear generators that are on the Moon.

 

After having worked there for a while, I came back to San Antonio and started working on my master’s thesis at Trinity University in chemistry.  I completed my master’s thesis, and at that time NASA was formed at Houston, so I applied there as an aerospace technologist and was hired and that started my NASA career.

 

BROOKS:  How did your career up to that point prepare you for NASA?

 

BELL:  I think, in retrospect, the training I had in the Air Force was in electronics, which we studied all the way from the basic systems all the way up through an ANAPQ13 radar system.  In going through Sandy Air Force Base and Kirkland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, I studied nuclear materials and became very aware of the potential hazards.  Then, going back to Kelly Air Force Base and working with the WS125A weapons systems, I had to construct an overhaul facility for radioactive engines, and as a result, I went across the United States to various nuclear facilities where they were making fuel elements.  I also attended Columbia University, where we learned the nuclear fuel reprocessing of spent fuel elements.  Then I attended the University of California, Berkeley, where I took a nuclear physics course there to also learn what I could about nuclear materials and hazards and how to measure radioactive materials.  Then, my Air Force career, I was sent to Biloxi, Mississippi, where I learned about – I talked about that already – on the electronics.

 

But I think all this, together, just kind of blended very well with what I was doing at NASA.  It gave me the supporting data that I needed to really form a basis of development of the fuel cell.

 

BROOKS:  Of course, when all of this was going on in your life, in 1957 the Soviet Union launched Sputnik.  How did you feel when you first heard about that?

 

BELL:  I guess I got really interested in the program.  In fact, I went out to St. Mary’s University, and this is in San Antonio, and took a course in space travel, just to learn more about trajectories and what you could expect in space.  At that time, they didn’t know much about the environment, which is a very tough environment – to be in a vacuum, cold temperatures, high temperatures.  It’s all mixed together.

 

BROOKS:  So, at this point, you started working for NASA?

 

BELL:  Well, that really just got me started in space travel, and I guess that kind of prepared me.  I had a few lectures with various clubs in San Antonio on space travel as a result of this.  It just kind of was natural to just follow on, to go into the NASA program.

 

BROOKS:  How did you first come to work for NASA?

 

BELL:  I was at San Antonio, and I had just completed my Master’s thesis.  I was transferring from Martin Marietta Corporation back to Kelly Air Force Base.  I read in the paper about NASA establishing at Houston.  So, I made a trip to Houston and applied.  That same day that I applied, they hired me.  So, it was kind of natural from where I’d been to go right in to the work at NASA.  I think the last course I took on my thesis was a paper written on fuel cells, which told about the development and who was doing the work and what direction they were going in.  When I went to NASA, they didn’t have anybody who knew anything about fuel cells and they needed someone.  So, I seemed to be the appropriate person for them to hire.

 

BROOKS:  Can you tell me a little bit about fuel cells?

 

BELL:  A fuel cell is a new device that consumes, as reactants, both hydrogen and oxygen.  The two, combined together, make water as a byproduct.  Electricity is generated.  This electricity is used on the spacecraft to power up all the systems with electrical power.  The water is used on spacecraft, in the environmental control systems, to maintain temperatures, and also the astronauts drink the water from the fuel cells.  So, it was a very interesting program.

 

At that time, the fuel cell in development stage was only a one square centimeter electrode.  Since that time, we had pushed it all through the Apollo spacecraft and into the Shuttle spacecraft, but we also started a commercial development with United Technology, which is Pratt & Whitney, in Hartford, Connecticut, and also General Electric in Boston.  They were making fuel cells at a 26-megawatt plant, and the cells themselves were the size of a wall in a room.  So, they were much bigger than the one square centimeter that we started out with.

 

BROOKS:  So, early in your NASA career, you were working with fuel cells.  What were your responsibilities?

 

BELL:  I started out as doing the ground support systems and all the test facilities that were geared to test fuel cells to support fuel cells and, shortly after that, I was appointed as a subsystem manager on the fuel cells for LEM [Lunar Excursion Module].  Then I went through the Apollo, which was the Command Service Module, [which] had fuel cells in it.

 

I was subsystem manager.  In that position, you assisted the contractors in designing, development, and testing of the fuel cell to meet the needs of the spacecraft.  It involved a lot of traveling.  In fact, I have over seven million air miles traveling back and forth between Houston, Pratt & Whitney in Hartford, General Electric in Boston, North American in Oklahoma, and North American in California, and the space center in Florida [Cape Canaveral].  So, it required a lot of travel.

 

Also, I was appointed as a subsystem manager of the cryogenics storage subsystem, where they store cryogenics, which are cold temperature type of hydrogen and oxygen.  That was at Peach Aircraft, in Boulder, Colorado.  So, it involved a lot of travel back and forth.  Each month you went maybe one and sometimes two times a month, which left very little time in Houston.  But it takes that to pull a program together.

 

BROOKS:  You were clearly a busy guy.  In May of 1961, President Kennedy issues his challenge to America, to land a man on the Moon within a decade.  What was your reaction to his announcement?

 

BELL:  I guess, at that time, I used to go out in the backyard and look up at the Moon and think that someday we’d be landing on the Moon.  I don’t think there was ever any doubt in my mind that it would happen.  And it was just a matter of when they were going to do it.  And I guess I really got enthused about it and really wanted to be a part of the program at that time.  I had no idea, at that time, that I would be part of the program.  But it was a thrill to hear him say that.  Technology’s my bag.

 

BROOKS:  After the Moon became NASA’s objective, how did it change the atmosphere?  I mean, how did it change the attitudes of people at NASA?

 

BELL:  I think all the people I worked with at NASA – and I went there in `63, so it was a little after this – but it was very positive.  And the people there, we always talked about or successes.  I don’t think anybody ever thought about a failure.  Of course, we had failures, and as an engineer, your job is to define the failure and fix it.  I never really worried as much about who was responsible for the failure as I was about what happened and how do we keep it from happening again and where we go from here.  That’s the engineer’s job.

 

BROOKS:  So, when you came to NASA, the Apollo program was already pretty much in full swing?

 

BELL:  The Apollo program wasn’t much in full swing, but the Gemini and Mercury programs were – and I got in on support of them a little bit, not a whole lot, in the fuel cell section in the Gemini program.  Mercury was batteries.  I didn’t get involved too much in those programs, but I was involved somewhat in them.  My main emphasis was on the Apollo Program, getting it off the ground, and at that time, like I said, it was mainly in a document saying, “This is what we want to do and where we have to go with it.”

 

I picked it up as a one-square centimeter electrode and pushed it.  The reason it had never been pushed before it because it’s a very expensive program.  The fuel cell itself was, in the 1800s, came up with the idea of the fuel cell.  So, it wasn’t nothing new, it just never had been developed.  Our job was to develop it because it was the best power that the Apollo could use because of weight, efficiency, and the byproduct was water.  And that’s what was needed on the spacecraft.  You didn’t have to carry extra water.  You could use the water from the fuel cell.  Had you had just batteries, you would of had to haul up water also.  So, it was kind of natural for the Apollo program to go with fuel cells.  I think that was one of the things that hurt the Russians; they didn’t have a fuel cell.

 

BROOKS:  Speaking of the Russians, we were involved in the so-called “space race” with the Russians at that time.  Did you ever worry that the Russians would beat us to the Moon?

 

BELL:  No.  In fact, I personally didn’t take a challenge from the Russians at all. I had a job to do and I wanted to do the job.  They weren’t pushing me at all.  I was pushing the contractors to do their job.  So, I kept track of what they were doing, but I never felt a threat by them.  I guess you’d say it wasn’t a challenge to fight them, it was a challenge to do what we had to do, and that was put the man on the Moon and bring him back safely.

 

BROOKS:  Did you ever worry, though, that you wouldn’t be able to do it in the decade that Kennedy dictated?

 

BELL:  Never crossed my mind.

 

BROOKS:  You just have to do your job?

 

BELL:  Just do your job and if everybody did their job, it would be.  It happened just like it was supposed to.  And it happened, I think, sooner than it was supposed to.  I worked with some terrific personnel, very intelligent people.

 

BROOKS:  Tell me about them.

 

BELL:  Well, I guess my person, the I put up on top of the pole was Dr. [George] Low.  I thought he was an extraordinary type, manager.  He could pull things together and present them in such a way to make it clear to anyone.  I heard him go over a complete spacecraft breakdown from the top of the spacecraft – of the Apollo program, the Saturn V – to the bottom, and never hesitated about any of it, and give technical data, and understand how the whole system worked.  So he was a very brilliant man.  I think that’s what inspired me more than anybody.

 

The other people were smart.  The thing you had to look at is there’s quite a number of the subsystem managers.  Each one of them had their own field that they work in.  Each one became experts in that field.  When you put them all together, that’s what makes a success.

 

But Dr. Low had to pull everything together.  He was, overall, at that time, the program manager and his responsibility was the whole spacecraft.  So you kind of understand it.  It takes a really brilliant person to do that, and he did an excellent job of pulling it all together.

 

BROOKS:  Of course, the 1960s were dramatic years in America for a lot of other reasons than the Apollo program, with the Civil Rights movement, the Kennedy assassination, and the Vietnam War.  Considering how hard everyone is having to work in the Apollo program, did you even have time to follow all the other events?

 

BELL:  I guess I’d have to answer no.  I was so involved in the Apollo program.  We kind of ate and slept and whatever in the Apollo program.  You put blinders on and go straight ahead.

 

BROOKS:  Eighteen, twenty hours a day?

 

BELL:  I think that’s the dedication on the part of all, particularly the subsystem managers.  It was round-the-clock operations.  Some tests I stayed up for three days straight, just to make sure everything went right, took notes, and critiqued afterwards.  But I think the people were just really dedicated to the program.  It turned out good.

 

BROOKS:  In 1967, there was a fire in the Apollo 1 capsule during a test.  Even though you weren’t directly involved in that, what was your reaction to it?

 

BELL:  I was sort of directly involved in it, as I had responsibility for the cryogenics storage system.  When you really looked at the problem itself, you found out that there were evidently some tests, unauthorized tests run on the system, that was not recorded.  I’ll put it in real simple terms.  It’s like plugging in a coffee pot without any water in the coffee pot and the heater’s going to burn out.  That’s what happened in this case.  The wires charred.  And then when they went on the launch, everything checked out perfectly at launch.  There were no problems indicated.  When it went through the launch sequence, at max que, where the vehicle shakes violently, the wires evidently touched together.  But at that time, still nothing happened because the circuit is turned off.  The first time the circuit is turned on is trans-lunar operation, and trans-lunar operation, when they turned the switch on, that’s when the wires were shorted and caused the explosion.

 

We redesigned the system and we found out a lot of things about the system.  We tried to find out what the problem was – what caused it.  We had some good ideas what caused it, but our main concern as engineers was to solve the problems so they didn’t happen again.  And as a result of this, a lot of tests were run, a lot of things were found out about wiring systems, and this includes the fire with Grissom and White and Chaffee.  We found out that things like Teflon was not a good insulator in space and a pure oxygen environment like in the tank or in the spacecraft itself, that Teflon was impact sensitive and that it would explode and cause a fire.

 

So, as a result of the deaths, they weren’t in vain.  Even though everybody was shaken by the fact that we lost three astronauts, the management particularly was very shaken because they were associated closer with the astronauts than we were.  We were mostly associated with the hardware and interfacing with the astronauts on the hardware.  So we didn't see the astronauts except at tests.

 

But we learned that Teflon just wasn’t the best type of insulator to use.  And I think each one of these problems that we had, we had similar things that we looked as engineers, is to find out what the problems were, how it affected the spacecraft, and what we could do to prevent any such problems from arising again.  And we never had that problem again.

 

BROOKS:  So the mistakes and problems along the way made NASA a better agency.

 

BELL:  Definitely made NASA a better agency and the engineers better engineers.

 

BROOKS:  Where were you and what were you doing when Apollo 11 landed on the Moon?

 

BELL:  I was working as an engineer in Building 45, which has all the subsystem managers sitting around watching their CRTs, or Cathode Ray Tubes, to monitor all the different parameters.  And my job, at that time, was to monitor the parameter of the fuel cells and the cryogenic storage system.  We were also watching the little telltale off of the LEM vehicle, that when it touched down it told you that it touched down.  So we knew that it touched before they said, “The Eagle has landed.”

 

As soon as the light came on saying that it had touched down, all the engineers- there was a lot of yelling, a lot of crying, and the emotions were real thick.  So, it’s kind of hard to explain.  In fact, I still kind of- it’s an emotional thing to think about it.  You’ve worked on it for eight or ten years and all the sudden it comes to fruition.  It’s just a real, like winning the goal that you set out to do.

 

BROOKS:  You also were involved in some of the social activities of the employees at Johnson Space Center?

 

BELL:  Right.  I got really interested in trying to support to Employees Activities Association and I think from the beginning of that I got involved as quick as I could.  Became president of the Employees Activities Association.  Did a lot of things that I thought would help the employees have a better home life, better working environment.  Where the kids could come to the center and enjoy themselves, where the families could come.  I think I made an impact – quite an impact, in fact.

 

BROOKS:  What kind of things did you do?

 

BELL:  I started out with each one of the clubs and made sure that they had the support of the Center, such as baseball.  We put up baseball diamonds.  I built the stands that they had around the baseball diamonds for people to sit in, in my spare time.  I took care of the scuba diving people and got them a hookah, which pressurizes the breathing tanks, so that when they go down deep they can breath, and breath breathing air.

           

The other clubs at the Center, the dance club, the whatever club needed, all they needed to do was come to the board with a letter saying that this is what we’d like to do, and we need the support of the Center, and they got Center.  I was the one who started the Gilruth Recreation Center.  It wasn’t built during my time, but after that I planted the seed to get people thinking about building one.

 

I started working with high schools.  In fact, I was probably the first one to set up inter-communication between a high school in San Antonio and the Space Center, where students could interact with the astronauts and the engineers via telephone on a conference call and just be able to ask astronauts questions and get good answers and feel like a part of the program.  The astronauts were reaching out to the kids or the engineers were encouraging them to be engineers and work for NASA.  Turned out to be a real good program and, I guess, that’s all gone with some other programs they had with students, trying to get them involved with NASA.

 

I did quite a bit along that particular line.  Trying to make people realize that NASA was a good service to the people and that there was more involved in the program rather than just the Apollo Program.  We had a lot of spin-offs, which you hear about all the time, as a result of a lot of things that we did.

 

BROOKS:  What kinds of spin-offs?

 

BELL:  Well, working with General Electric, they used our fuel cell in the breath-analyzer at the Department of Public Safety for identifying drunks.  Cause the alcohol in their breath is what makes a fuel cell work.  And the alcohol in the air, or oxygen in the air, generates electrical current which measures and tells you how much they’ve been drinking.  So, that was one of the spin-offs, which in unusual.

 

BROOKS:  That’s amazing!

 

BELL:  And no one knows this, but that’s what actually happened.  But in the fuel cell itself, we were trying to push it as a commercial program at that time because the oil shortage came along at this time.  Fuel cells was a unique device by the fact that it could generate electrical energy at a high efficiency, about 72, 73%, where your best power generation systems they had were more like 33 to 34%.  So, it’s twice as efficient, didn't have any pollutants in the air, and water’s your byproduct, which every manufacturing company needs.  Fuel cells are very amenable to be put in homes or in buildings.  It doesn’t have to be one big central unit.  Over half your power, electrical distribution, is lost through distribution.  So, on the distribution, if you can save 50% of your power, by eliminating your distribution losses and then increase it by 200% by using your fuel cell, it makes energy a lot more available to people.  No noise involved.

 

BROOKS:  Why haven’t fuel cells been developed commercially?

 

BELL:  The problem was the catalyst they used was platinum, which is very expensive.  I started a program, which is still probably going on, utilizing some of my chemistry background from Trinity University, realizing that titanium had some similar attributes as platinum, as far as the periodic chart is concerned, I suggested that we run an R&D [research and development] program on substituting titanium for platinum and making the reaction think that it was all platinum.  And see if you could cheapen up the fuel cell by going this method.  And it turned out it worked fine.  And they were able to come in more the commercial line, using things other than platinum as a catalyst and fooling the reaction to thinking it was all platinum.  They used various things and experiments, but it turned out to be a very efficient operation.  You lose a little bit but not that much and you still get the end product of high efficiency, no noise, and water as your byproduct, while you’re generating electrical power.

 

BROOKS:  No one has been back to the Moon since 1972.  How does that make you feel?

 

BELL:  I think that they probably had, at that point, reached the climax of what needed to be done on the Moon and found out what they needed to find out.  I thought that the next big step was the Space Station.  And it took that a long time in coming and that's what kind of discouraged a little bit.  I knew that by the time that came along, I would be retired, which I am retired.  In fact, that kind of hastened my retirement.  Had they gone along with a space station immediately, which I think was the next step to do, I would have probably stayed on at NASA and continued working.  A lot of people dropped out because the type of jobs we had to do after your Apollo landing were in the Shuttle mission, became insignificant.

 

When you’re engineers, you have to have something to engineer.

 

BROOKS:  Was there any competition from aerospace industry, trying to draw off NASA employees?

 

BELL:  No.  I didn’t see any.  Of course, a lot of people left NASA and went to private contractors.  I didn’t see any people trying to draw people off.  In fact, they were trying to get jobs with NASA.  It’s kind of a strange situation, but that’s the way it turned out.  I think they felt like the space station was the next big thing, even for them.

 

BROOKS:  Toward the end of your NASA career, you were involved in life sciences?

 

BELL:  Yeah, in life sciences.  Since fuel cells had already developed, designed, and tested and flown on the Shuttle, the next thing they were doing was going into life sciences type work.  I got interested.  I was in between NASA Headquarters and the space centers like Johnson Space Center, Kennedy Space Center, Ames Research Center [California].  The job was to coordinate the effort between all these centers in getting experiments on board.  Due to my background in doing R&D work, I thought that would be a really interesting program to get into.

           

It turned out, at that time, that I got into that work, it was premature.  Decisions weren’t ready to be made.  They were doing a lot of shuffling on responsibilities between centers.  A good example is a monkey that comes from Ames Research Center.  I had to follow it on a responsibility chain from Ames Research Center to put it in the Shuttle for flight.  Ames, the P.I. or principal investigator at Ames, wanted to have the monkey through the whole thing.  Well, that’s not consistent with the Kennedy Space Center.  They said when anything gets to Kennedy Space Center, they have full control of it.  Well, that didn’t work out too well.  The P.I. is saying, “It’s my monkey.”  And the KSC is saying, “No, it’s my monkey.”

           

So it became kind of an involving situation on which way management wanted to go.  I felt like I was the one who was supposed to make these decisions.  Obviously, I wasn’t.  But that was causing a lot of rifts in the management circle as to how these things would be carried out.  I guess at this time, Congress was messing with our funding.  They’d come to us and say, “You have money.”  And next week it was, “No, you don’t have money.”

           

Problem I was having is a monkey, you can’t just turn him on and off.  You have to keep a training program going consistently, in order to train a monkey to do certain functions.  And these people that had the monkeys were principal investigators working on their doctorate, using this as their thesis.  It was difficult for me to go to them and say, “Sorry, you don’t have any money.  It’s been cut out.”  And then next week call them up and say, “Well, by the way, Dr. So-and-so, your program’s back on stream and we’re funded.”

           

And after doing this two or three times, it got kind of embarrassing.  It was just something I wasn’t used to.  If you give someone authority, you give them the responsibility.  Or it’s the other way around.  You give them responsibility, you give them the authority to do it.  I didn’t feel like I had that control and I guess that‘s caused me to go to early retirement.

 

BROOKS:  When you look back on your career with NASA, what are you most proud of?

 

BELL:  I think I’m most proud of the accomplishments I had, such as fuel cells and cryogenics storage system and the performance that it actually had in space.  These things had never operated on Earth, much less in space, and I think our testing and computer work here on Earth, showing what it would do in space, turned out to be just like it was in space.  To me, it was real impressive.  I enjoyed that.

 

Words can’t tell how you feel whenever something like that goes as well as it did.  In fact, a lot of the letters  [I have] substantiate the fact that a lot of other people felt the same way I did.  So, it makes you feel good when people recognize you did good work.

 

BROOKS:  What do you see for the future of manned spaceflight?

 

BELL:  I think that they’ll be doing a lot of development on the Space Station and that has to be pushed.  I think, as a result, you’ll get a lot of experiments done up there that’ll promote new development in our technology.  I guess some of the things they’ve talked about in the past has been ball bearings being manufactured perfectly ground, while on Earth they’re not.  So you get better crystal growths in space.  We have zero gravity and crystals grow different.  So they’ll be a lot of things that come out of space manufacturing that’s going to push our technology forward to where things become much better, fewer crystals.

 

A lot of things happen.  People won’t realize, until probably twenty years from now, just what has happened in space.  I think even today they still don’t recognize what happened as a result of Apollo.  One of these days it will all come out.

           

I think there’s just so many things that happened and I think to go back, again a little bit of background, was all the manufacturing facilities had to have a complete review of sauntering techniques, on how to make a good saunter joint.  The Air Force programs were having a lot of trouble because of electronic problems and it was a result of poor manufacturing techniques.  I think Apollo, going to the Moon, had to have a fourteen-day air free, actually twenty-eight day or fourteen-day, air free type operation and a lot of work went into making sure things were built right and tested.  And I think all these techniques fell into things like television output, VCRs.  All this technology was a spin-off of NASA making sure manufacturing facilities met the requirements set by the things that they were developing.  Like now, you plug in a television set and it operates a long time before failure, or a VCR, computers.  It’s all a result of the retraining of the manufacturing people to do a job properly and to have proper QC.  I guess that was one of our major contributions, other than just putting somebody on the Moon.

 

BROOKS:  When you first started at NASA, could you possibly have imagined where it would lead you?

 

BELL:  No.  [Laughter]  I knew I was getting in the fuel cell program, which I did get involved in that.  I guess I didn’t know that I was going to get involved in the nuclear generator position because I didn’t know at that time, when I first got involved, I didn’t know they had nuclear generators at NASA.  Until they approached me one day and asked me if I knew anything about generators and I told them yes.  It happened to be the one that I had designed, developed, and tested at Martin [Marietta Corporation] when I was there.  Which made it kind of a natural follow-on – to be able to support the program.

           

I had pictures of all the nuclear generators, and I had designed the test equipment they used on testing the nuclear generators.  So it was kind of a natural following.

 

BROOKS:  Tell me more about your work with the nuclear generators.

 

BELL:  I had really started at Martin Marietta Corporation.  First job I had there was to write the safety manual for nuclear generators and I guess that was because of some of my background.  Then, I went into a test lab there and was just about the become head of their test lab when I went to work for NASA.  But during the test phase I was doing on nuclear generators, I found out that the elements of the nuclear generators were breaking it, what they call a “hot shoe,” because of bonding.  I came up with a patent on how to bond thermal elements or [inaudible] to the “hot shoe” where it didn’t have a stress where it would break easy.  Turned out the I-squared R drop was a lot lower and the lifetime of the element was a lot longer, without it having any problems and it could through vibrations much better.

 

As a result, some of the nuclear generators, I think all of them, are still working on the Moon.  So it must have been satisfactory. 

 

BROOKS:  In recent years, there’s been some controversy about the use of nuclear power on spacecraft.  What would you say to those people who oppose it?

 

BELL:  Nuclear power is safe if handled properly.  It’s like anything else.  If you smoke around gasoline, it’s going to burn and blow up.  If you get in front of an x-ray unit at your dental office and then turn it on and they left it on for a long period of time, you’re going to be overexposed.  So if it’s not used properly, it’s dangerous.  If it’s used properly, there isn’t any problem with it.

           

I think the biggest concern I’ve always had is with the nuclear waste material.  It’s when you chemically process fuel in order to get the active fuel that you want, you have a lot of waste generated.  Disposal of that becomes a problem.  And I think one of the problems they’ll be working on for a long period of time before they solve.  I think that’s the greatest concern of most people on the use of nuclear fuels.  It’s not such much the use of it as contaminated products that have to be disposed of.

 

BROOKS:  We’re coming toward the end of the interview.  When you look back on your time with NASA, is there any day or any moment that stands out as especially important to you?

 

BELL:  That one’s a hard one to answer, because I think every day was important to me.  [Laughter]  We had a PERT [program evaluation review technique] network, which is a network of all the testing that had to be done, and it has to be done in a certain sequence, and you have to follow it all the way through.  I think every day you worried about the next milestone that you’re meeting.  Every time you meet it, you feel you’ve accomplished something, and it was important to you.  But then you look ahead for the next milestone.  And it was more milestone to milestone than it was from beginning to end.  You’re always having your eye on the end, but the main concern was the milestone that you had on that particular day or that particular week or that particular month of reaching that milestone.

 

They used to have a saying at the Space Center:  “you don’t want to be the long pole in the tent.”  Which means that all the pressure’s on you.  So you make that your milestone is met before everybody else meets theirs.  That was the competition if there was any.  But you did have to meet your milestones, and we did.

 

BROOKS:  The Apollo program is now seen as one of America’s greatest accomplishments.  How was it that we were able to do it?

 

BELL:  I think it all starts with management.  If you have good management at the top and you have good engineers at the bottom, good things happen.  I think most of the engineers I was in contact with were very resourceful.  When they had a problem, they knew where to go.  To give you an example of that, we were having with titanium welding and so was everybody else – the airlines industry, the Air Force in their launches off California.  And I called all the people in the United States who knew anything about welding titanium.  I called them all together at Beech Aircraft, in Boulder, Colorado.  We had a, you might call it, a symposium on titanium welding, to find out what the problems were.  I had the materials specialists from the Johnson Space Center there also.

 

We set up a program to identify the problem and each company, across the United States, worked on a particular part of the problem and we put it all together.  Everybody benefited from each other’s work.  And that’s the first time the industry as a whole pulled together to solve a problem without any interference from proprietary information or anything like that, because no one knew how to do it.  And as a result of this, we perfected titanium welding.  They know more about titanium welding than they do about iron.  And iron is one of our oldest used materials.  But presently we know more about titanium than we do about iron.  As a result, you don’t hear about any more explosions because of a tank blowing up or airplane coming down because titanium support broke, or something like this.  We solved a lot of those problems.  Again, that’s another spin-off of NASA programs.  It cost the government a lot of money to do this, but it was something that was needed and proved very beneficial at the end point.  So, I guess, as far as working with industry, that was one of my biggest milestones.  To be able to say that we solved a major problem for the United States.

 

BROOKS:  Can you say a few things about your post-NASA activities?

 

BELL:  Post-NASA hasn’t been that involved.  Once I left NASA, the things that I left behind were already done.  They were already flying them.  It was a matter of the engineers left behind to support it.  They hadn’t done any more R&D work in fuel cells or cryogenics storage.  So, it’s kind of been mostly in Space Station effort, trying to get that going. They use fuel cell technology there, but there wasn’t anything new.  I think all the R&D stopped, unfortunately, after I left.  They probably didn’t have the funding or the people with the background knowledge to pursue it, what needed to be done.  But that’s the way a program goes.  They lost a lot of highly trained people when they started down sizing NASA, and brought on a bunch of newer engineers.  Unfortunately, they’re going to have to retrain and learn the things that the oldest engineers knew.

 

After I left NASA, I went into real estate.  Those things that weren’t even identifiable with engineering.  Ran a bed and breakfast.  Now I’m out here on the ranch, running a ranch.  It’s a – I’ll put it in quotes – operating ranch.  I have cattle and we have horses.  Doing what we can just to enjoy ourselves now.  The pressure of meeting milestones is, kind of, off.  But I miss the technology work.  I’d really like to be back in it.

 

BROOKS:  Well, we’re just about out of time.  Is there anything else that you want to add?

 

BELL:  Well, I think, like a said before, the guys at NASA were very innovative group and their methods of solving problems and ideas that they came up with were really extraordinary.  I guess the downside of leaving NASA was that, when I got out in the real world, and I had to interface with people that had no education, had no drive, it was kind of a downer for me.  It took me awhile to get used to working with people that were, I don’t want to sound like a, I don’t know what you call it, prudish or whatever.  When you’ve been used to working with people who are very intelligent and each one in their own field.  When you talk to someone, you got a good answer and people stood behind their name.  In the space program, we didn’t tell lies.  I mean we told the truth.

 

When I got out in the real world, I found the real world was a lot different than what I was used to.  And that was kind of a downer.  I still sit down every once in a while, and daydream about things that need to be done and where to go and how to do them.  I guess I just never found the time to do it.  But that’s the best I can come up with “after NASA, what did I do.”  Mainly just to survive, make a living.

 

BROOKS:  Did you keep in touch with any of your former colleagues?

 

BELL:  It wasn’t through professional means.  It was through friendships.

 

BROOKS:  So, what are your final thoughts about your involvement with NASA?

 

BELL:  I guess I was really proud to be part of NASA.  Best thing that ever happened to me in my life, is to be involved in the program.  And I guess I’m like some of the other people, that said if you had to do that for nothing, you’d almost do it for nothing.  Because the rewards of it is so great – and the enthusiasm, the matter of accomplishing things, being able to interface with every president of companies all throughout the United States on a one-to-one basis,  being able to walk into a president’s office and be able to talk to the president of Beech, for instance, and discuss with him things that you want to talk about.  These are things that you couldn’t do as a private citizen.  And I think it opened a lot of doors.  I really enjoyed it and given the chance, I’d be back there doing the same thing, even today.

 

I think after the fire, I felt – and I wasn’t involved in the, I mean the [Challenger] explosion,  I wasn’t working in NASA, I’d already retired, at that time.  But I had this strong urge to go back to NASA and say, “Here I am.  Use me.  Send me out on investigation to find out what’s wrong:  why it crashed.”  Whatever they needed.  I’m at your disposal.  I wanted to do it real bad and I said, “No, I’d better not.”  But that was my feeling.

 

I really felt dedicated to the program, enough to make sure that the NASA program succeeded.  And even after I retired, I still wanted them to go.  So I would have gone back to work for NASA at the drop of a hat, just to be able to support the Shuttle program.  Unfortunately, they had other people to do the job.  One of those things that you feel you have a lot of experience, you know all the people.  It’s something you can contribute to your country.  And that’s the way I wanted to live.

 

BROOKS:  Okay, well, I think that just about wraps it up.  Mr. Bell, thank you very much.  This has been a very good interview.