NASA Bigham, James - May 26, 1999
Interview with James P. Bigham
Interviewer: Christopher Quinn
Date of Interview: May 26, 1999
Location: Bigham home, Horseshoe Bay, Texas
QUINN: Today is May 26, 1999. This oral history with James Bigham is being conducted at 814 Broken Arrow, the home of the interviewee, in Horseshoe Bay, Texas. The interview is being conducted for the NASA-Johnson Space Center Oral History Project in conjunction with Southwest Texas State University, History Department by graduate assistant Christopher Quinn.
Well, thank you for joining me today. You’re not a native Texan?
BIGHAM: No, from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania originally.
QUINN: And you went to school up there as well?
BIGHAM: No, I went to school in the Midwest at Purdue University. And later got my masters at the University of Washington in Seattle.
QUINN: How was your experience at Purdue?
BIGHAM: Great! I was from Pittsburgh of course, but I wanted to go to a good school but not too big, you know, a large school but not too big. Also, I wanted to study aeronautical engineering and Purdue was, at that time in forty-nine, was one of the few schools that had offered an aeronautical engineering degree. [Purdue] had a good school and really enjoyed it. Neil Armstrong was a Purdue graduate. He also has an aeronautical engineering degree. He graduated in fifty-five, which was two years after I did.
QUINN: Did you know him when you were there?
BIGHAM: No, I didn’t. I really didn’t. Of course, we were not entities then. We were just students. And he was two years behind and I never met him.
QUINN: When did you know that you wanted to study aeronautical engineering?
BIGHAM: Oh, well, you know I built model airplanes and I liked mathematics. I wasn’t sure what else to do. It just seemed like a logical choice. Could of studied business, but I was told and I think it was right that if you study engineering, it gives you a better overall background. And it’s a little more difficult. But, I really enjoyed it. Later, I got my masters degree in sixty-six at the University of Washington, which is a masters in aeronautics and astronautics. I immediately moved to NASA. So, it’s been my lifelong interest. I was in advanced ROTC [Reserve Officer Training Corps] and entered pilot training with the Air Force [and] was an instructor pilot in single engine jet aircraft for my term after finishing training.
QUINN: Right after Purdue, you were in the Air Force?
BIGHAM: Yeah. That was during the Korean War and they called us to duty. If you were in advanced ROTC graduate, you went on active duty right away. I went through pilot training in Arizona and got my wings at Williams Air Force Base in Arizona. Then they sent me to Craig Air Force Base in Alabama to get instructor pilot training. Then they rushed us over to Germany in early fifty-five, January fifty-five. The idea being that we would train ex-Luftwafta [NAZI Air Force] pilots to be instructor pilots. This was part of rearming Germany for NATO. But we got there. We had a lot of aircraft and the French said they weren’t sure that they really wanted to do that and so we just ended up training a few NATO pilots. But it was great duty because, number one the base [Hermann] Goering had built, was kind of the Air Force Academy for the Luftwaffe. It had not been bombed during he war, so everything was first class and we had all these jet aircraft which we could take for trips, you know, for navigational proficiency when we flew all over, all over Europe. So, it was very lucky, very lucky.
QUINN: Did you enjoy the instructing?
BIGHAM: Oh yeah, though I say we really didn’t do that much of it but there were some challenging moments but, yeah, yeah, I did.
QUINN: What was challenging about that?
BIGHAM: Well because with the students, they can get you in a lot of trouble. The trick of instructing is letting students go as far as they can without getting, without excessive risk. If you cut them off too early, they don’t learn. But on the other hand, if you’re too liberal at letting them make mistakes, you can get yourself into a lot of trouble.
QUINN: Any close calls?
BIGHAM: Oh, we had a few. Usually on landing. It takes a lot of practice to know how far you can let a student go before you take over control, how far you can go let him go without getting himself into trouble.
QUINN: Was this going to prove to be a harbinger for things to come at NASA for the simulator that you worked on?
BIGHAM: Well, yeah, yes. I felt comfortable, as we’ll get into I guess, with the Lunar Landing Training Vehicle was for training astronauts, have them land on the moon. We had telemetry, so you could see what kind of control inputs they were making. I mean it wasn’t like you ad the instructor up there with them. But you could look at what they were doing up in the, for the telemetry whether they were making excessive control inputs and that kind of thing. From that standpoint it was, yes it was useful. That background was really useful.
QUINN: After the Air Force, where did you go?
BIGHAM: Went to work for Boeing in Seattle in the commercial airplane division. First assignment was in the 707 program. This was in, just about the time the first 707 was delivered to Pan American. Spent some months on that. Then Boeing conceived of the 727 project and I was assigned to that to work on the design of the T-tail for the 727, which was something different from what Boeing had done in the past. Then, from there, I was with them about seven years. Moved to, let’s see, TFX program [which] became the F1-11 which Boeing competed with General Dynamics for and lost. General Dynamics got the contract. From there, went to the C-5 program which was, we were competing with Lockheed for that. And they [Lockheed] won that one. So I decided to take a leave of absence from Boeing and go back to school and get my masters and was fascinated by the manned space program. This was in sixty-five. My parents lived in Houston and I was down there visiting and went out to the Space Center for an interview and they made me an offer and I took it.
So, I joined them, Johnson Space Center, the Manned Spacecraft Center as it was known then – later changed to the Johnson Space Center. I joined them in, I think it was February of sixty, February of sixty-six.
QUINN: When was the first time, obviously the Mercury missions come caught your attention.
BIGHAM: Yeah, sure, Mercury and Gemini. They were still flying Gemini when I came on board. But I was assigned to what was called the flight crew support division which was responsible for all the simulators. That was their major job. There were quite a few: the Lunar Module Simulator and the Command Module Simulator. In fact, they had so much; they were really looking for somebody to take over this Lunar Landing Training Vehicle program. And that’s what I worked on right from the beginning.
QUINN: Why don’t you explain that.
BIGHAM: A little background. I’ll give you some reasons for it. Basically, it was used to train the astronauts in the final descent in the control characteristics of the Lunar Module in the final descent to the lunar surface, the last 500 feet. In testing a new airplane, the most challenging part of the flight is the landing. I mean, it requires the most delicate control. Ad the dangers are that if you don’t do it right, you hit too hard or you’ll land short or you’ll land too long. The landing is critical. And it’s difficult in fixed space simulators to train pilots to do that.
The Lunar Module was designed to fly only in the gravity field of the moon. So there was no way that the pilots could rehearse the moon landing. The first time that they did it was the first time they had the opportunity they had to fly the Lunar Module to a landing. NASA recognized early on that they needed a really good simulation to allow the flight crew to rehearse it. Landing on the moon, you had a strange environment, you have lighting, you’ve got obstructions that you may have to fly around which Armstrong did. And all this in a vehicle that you’ve never had an opportunity to fly before. So, we needed a free flight simulator. This was recognized back in sixty-one, sixty-two. And as a result, the money was given to the Edwards [Air Force Base, California], the Flight Research Center at Edwards, for what was called the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle Program. Edwards, the Flight Research Center people gave, awarded a contract to Bell Aerosystems of Buffalo, New York to design this LLRV which was the father of the LLTV, the Lunar Landing Training Vehicle.
The contract was for two, I think it was a fixed-price contract for two vehicles. Bell put one together for flight testing at Edwards. The second one, they were started over o the contract, so Edwards just asked them to deliver the parts and they would assemble it themselves at the Flight Research Center. Joe Walker, who was the famous test pilot later, killed, was the first pilot in the LLRV. And he did a lot of testing on it. The plan was to deliver it later on, to fully test it, then deliver it to the Manned Spacecraft Center at Ellington Air Force Base [Houston], so the astronauts could be trained on it. There were at least, use it to become initially familiar before the Lunar Landing Training Vehicle was delivered.
Now, the LLTV contract, it was recognized that this was a research vehicle and that its purpose was to find out what the flaws were and then you could improve the design to make a training vehicle out of it. Make, perhaps, make the cockpit a little more realistic. Work out the bugs of the avionics and that kind of thing.
When I came on board in sixty-six, discussions were under way with Bell to produce these three Lunar Landing Training Vehicles. They were instructed to try to make the cockpit layout s similar for the landing maneuver to the lunar module’s which involved using the actual lunar module hand controller that the pilot used for pitch, roll, and yaw – to control pitch, roll, and yaw and the altitude, altitude rate indicator which would tell him how high he was above the surface and fast he was descending to it. Ryan Aeronautical in San Diego was responsible for making the landing radar for the Lunar Module. We let a separate contract to them to produce a radar with similar levels of performance for the Lunar Landing Training Vehicle which they did and it was pretty good.
One of the major differences was, of course, in the Lunar Module the pilots were standing. We had to put them in an ejection seat in the LLTV because you were operating at a very low altitude. If anything went wrong, we had no choice but to bail out. I mean there wasn’t time to figure out what was happening if your control system went haywire and the engine didn’t respond or something like that. The pilot had to bail out. And that happened a couple of times and I’ll tell you about that.
Anyway, I don’t remember the exact dates but we let the contract for the three after very difficult negotiations. We were under tight cost constraints. We let the contract for the three LLTVs to Bell AeroSystems and the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle was delivered to Ellington. It was flight-tested. Neil Armstrong, who was, I mean he had been named as the commander for the first moon mission and he was very interested in this and we worked together on it. He’d come up with me to Bell, or out to Ryan to discuss with them what they were doing and see how they were progressing and how realistic it was and suggest improvements. It was very interesting.
QUINN: He worked in a facet as an engineer as well? Not only you but Neil Armstrong?
BIGHAM: Oh yeah, well the astronauts did that, I mean, course, they were vitally interested in all the engineering aspects and brought practical experience to the table. If you listen to some of the crew, like [Wally] Schirra, engineers don’t really know what they’re doing. The pilots have to watch them. But Neil wasn’t really like that. He was an engineer and he appreciated both sides of it, as well as a test pilot.
I might say that, I never thought that the Flight Research Center people got enough credit for what they did. What they had done, the X-15 program, which I don’t know if you knew that. That was an experimental high-altitude, high-speed research program that Edwards had to explore high-mach number flight, like six times the speed of sound. It was quite successful. Armstrong had been a test pilot in that. But that was, that was ended. That program was ended just before they got this research vehicle project. So they moved the people, project managers, project engineers from the X-15 program to the research vehicle program. And they did, really did a bang-up job – great job.
QUINN: Armstrong was one of the most experienced test pilots.
BIGHAM: Yeah, oh yeah, yeah. Anyway, they helped us get set up at Ellington. I might say the management at Johnson Space Center had great concerns about the whole program. They saw the dangers of it. As I expressed earlier, you know, it was low altitude. It was a very complex vehicle. It was the first; the LLTV was the first operational fly-by-wire vehicle ever. And when I say fly-by-wire that means there were no control cables or anything like that. It was all done with electrical signals. There had been research vehicles like that but we were trying to do, make this into an operational vehicle. And it was still, it was not a digital system; it was analog. And it was still, you might say it was operating but it was still experimental and very complex for an operational outfit like our aircraft operations people to run. So there was a level of expertise that you need for that thing. So management just was not all that enthusiastic about the program. But the astronauts said that we just, we have to have it. We’ve got to do that. So they had to bow to that decision.
But anyway, we got it to Ellington and started flying it. And the way they did that, we had a trailer. And by then, I was focusing in the LLTV and we turned it over to the operations people to fly. So I was out of that. But they had a trailer which, where the controller, the ground control people were and where they received the telemetry and kept an eye on what was happening during the flight. There was a loudspeaker so that you could hear what was going on between the pilot and ground if you were outside the trailer.
And, I don’t know, I think this was on Neil’s second or third flight. I don’t recall exactly. But it was, there was pressure to get them trained. They flew in what was a pretty windy day. It was kind of turbulent. And what happened as he was flying, because of the turbulence, there was, the attitude control system was rocket propelled. And in an effort to hold the vehicle steady, because of the turbulence, it used a lot of fuel. Basically, he ran out of fuel for his rockets. He was up at about two hundred feet before they could get him down. They were trying to get him down on the ground and he was trying to get down. But as the accident board later found, there was a faulty fuel sensor. So that the ground people really didn’t know how bad off he was. So he lost control of the vehicle and it began to go out of control and he said over the loudspeaker, “Got to leave the vehicle.” And it had a wonderful ejection seat.
The Webber people had designed this thing for high-speed aircraft and had been adapted to both the research vehicle and the training vehicle. And what it did was, it delivered fifteen times the force of gravity for about half a second which would accelerate it from zero to about two hundred miles an hour in half a second [laughter]. Once it moved the seat out, why then it had a mechanism that ejected him from the seat and another mechanism that automatically deployed the parachute. So it was just [finger snap] like that. And that’s what happened. He went up, separated from the seat, the parachute opened, and he floated gently to the ground. The vehicle flipped over backwards and crashed onto the runway.
They went out and brought him back to the radio shack. Buzz Aldrin was there. So we all went in. First thing we did is ask him was he okay. And he took off his flight suit and the only injury Neil had was the base of his buttocks where the edge of the seat had caught him and it was bruised. He had a big bruise. But other than that, he was fine. And appeared to be very, he was very calm about it. But so far as I know that was the first ejection that he had ver experienced. I could be wrong about that but he didn’t mention it.
The management, this was Dr. [Bob] Gilruth and his deputy was Chris Kraft, appointed an accident investigation board under Wally Schirra. And they found that, they found that, you know they blamed it on the fuel leveler sensor. But also put tighter weather restrictions in terms of wind velocity and so forth to avoid that kind of thing. We only had the one LLRV. They really never got around to flying the second one because in the meantime, we were doing all this, the first Lunar Landing Training Vehicle was delivered by Bell to Ellington for testing. And where it was thoroughly ground tested and we got into the flight-testing program. The feeling had been during the engineering, during the engineering portion of the program that since it flew at such a low velocity, we really didn’t need to do wind tunnel testing on the vehicle to determine its aerodynamic characteristics.
One of the major modifications, one of the major differences from the LLTV to the Research Vehicle was that a large canopy or cockpit, covered cockpit, had been put on the front of the vehicle to restrict the pilot’s visibility more like it would be in the Lunar Module. In other words, not give them the full field of vision, but rather, anyway here’s a picture of it. You can see that canopy. And that had definite aerodynamic, made a real difference in the aerodynamic characteristics of the vehicle.
So the test pilot was Joe Algranti, who was chief of Aircraft Operations at what was then, now the Johnson Space Center. He made a number of flights in it. They decided to see how fast the thing could go. He got going pretty fast and lost control of it. He lost control of it. I wasn’t there to see it but I did see the film of it. The vehicle rolled over on its side and when it did it just lost lift, and it began to plunge toward the ground. The ground control people were yelling at him, “Get out, Joe, get out! Eject.” And he ejected just before he hit the ground. But again that seat was so powerful. It saved him. And again, he wasn’t hurt. But the vehicle crashed. This time, Gilruth, they weren’t fooling around. They formed the accident board, which I had to go before ‘cause they asked me to handle the engineering aspects of the, you know, the wind tunnel. Something you had to do wind tunnel testing to find out what had been wrong.
That board consisted of Bob Gilruth, who at that time was the director of the Center. I would say an expert in stability and control. Chris Kraft who was also a control dynamics man. Deke Slayton who was head of the, my boss, effectively over my boss and so forth, the flight crew operations director. There was General Stevenson from headquarters and representatives from Flight Research Center. George Low who was head of the Apollo program and George Trimbull who was Gilruth’s deputy. That was the board. That was the people that we had to talk to. [laughter]
QUINN: Pretty intimidating.
BIGHAM: Yeah. But what I suggested after the accident and they took me up on it was that we needed to. Why didn’t we get, fly the LLTV in [what] we had what was called a Super Guppy, it was a modified Stratocruiser which was used to fly the upper stages of the Saturn Rocket to transport the upper stages of the Saturn Rocket. And it had a modified body, such that it had a diameter large enough that it could hold the Saturn Rocket, but it could also hold the Lunar Landing Training Vehicle. So it was arranged that we would put the LLTV in that thing and fly it up to Langley [Research Center, Virginia] to be put in their full-scale tunnel. Which we did.
Langley people were only really pleased to help us out and gave us first-class support. We put it in the full-scale tunnel and we made provisions for operating it not only with the engine off but with the engine on because there was a feeling the flow from the engine might materially affect the aerodynamic characteristics of the vehicle. We found out in a hurry that the villain in all this was that big canopy on the front. It was just like a big air scoop. And what happened, if the pilot was flying, even at a low velocity, at a certain side slip angle, in other words, a certain angle relative to the wind horizontally. There was a big, large torque on the vehicle which tended to make it unstable. That’s where Joe [Algranti] had been looking at the flight data. He somehow, jus gotten it without realizing, it was right on that angle. So as he built up speed, it forced the vehicle to rotate and he lost control of it. So the fix, as it turned out, was simple. We just took the roof off the canopy, which vented it. There were suggestions why don’t we put on wings or do this or that and that was too complicated. So all we did was just take the roof off the canopy. It was fine. It was fine after that.
So we got our data and we flew it back in the Guppy to Ellington and resumed flight testing under very tight restrictions and I was involved in that. Finally, I think about a month before Neil was to depart for the Cape [Canaveral] for Apollo 11, we got a number of flights in with him. And he got the training that he felt that he needed for the actual moon landing.
QUINN: How many flights was that?
BIGHAM: You know, I don’t remember exactly. Four or five. It wasn’t twenty. Four or five. Course he had his previous experience in the LLRV. And we were very curious of course when he came back from Apollo 11, what he thought of the fidelity of the trainer. As was management because, again, they would have loved to have stopped the program if they could have. And he was very generous. He said “[the] Lunar Module flew very much like the simulators, and like the Lunar Landing Training Vehicle, which I had flown more than 30 times at Ellington Air Force Base near the Space Center. I had made from 50 to 60 landings in the trainer, and the final trajectory which I flew to the landing was very much like those flown in practice. That of course gave me a good deal of confidence and a comfortable familiarity.” So, and with that, every astronaut after that was trained in the LLTV and there were no more crashes involving astronauts. Although, they were doing a test flight, I take it was on the third LLTV and they had a, had a complete electrical failure. So again the pilot had to bail out. So there were two, two LLTVs left and I don’t know where they are now.
QUINN: In spite of the fact that they were dangerous, it was very necessary because they weren't’ going to get a second chance and you wouldn’t want to lose an astronaut on the moon.
BIGHAM: Oh, no, no and I mean, of course, if Neil had come back and said really that it was, it was, the moon landing was so much different from what the it just wasn’t worth the risk in flying the LLTV, they would have canceled the program. But it was just the other way around. They needed that. They really needed that.
QUINN: During the mission, I mean after all this, the landing is crucial. You must have had a great sense of satisfaction.
BIGHAM: I did. I did. You know as an aeronautical engineer and particularly as a former pilot, there was never any doubt in my mind, that as an instructor pilot, that that thing, that was absolutely essential, that training. Again, if you think about it, it was not only the rough terrain and so forth, they only had a limited amount of fuel. They had a few seconds to get that on the ground or they’re out of fuel on the moon. So it required very precise control. You know there was never any doubt in my mind about it, which made me an enthusiastic supporter of the program.
But by then, course the engineering work was done and we moved on to the next program, which was the Shuttle [Space Shuttle]. Max Faget, who was the director of engineering at the Johnson Space Center, conceived of the Space Shuttle Program. And he formed what was called a Skunk Works Operation when there was about twenty-seven of us in a high bay area where we were developing concepts for the Space Shuttle. I was assigned as a shuttle manager for flight crew support division after coming off the LLTV which was, well when we were through flight testing the LLTV, through training Neil which like I say was about a month before Apollo 11.
QUINN: So you were on the Shuttle before . . .
BIGHAM: Before Apollo 11. Yeah, we watched, I remember watching the launch of Apollo 11 from the, in the Skunk Works trailer. We had a TV set tuned into Mission Control. So we watched the launch there and got back to work designing the Space Shuttle.
QUINN: So there was no celebration for you.
BIGHAM: No, no. But by then, course we turned it over to the Aircraft Operations people. They had their hands full. As soon as Neil was done, they started training the next pilot, which I think was Pete Conrad.
QUINN: Conrad and Bean and Dick Gordon?
BIGHAM: Could be. It all runs together.
But my mind was active again in looking at the Shuttle. As it turned out, there were two concepts that, Faget had one that was for a straight wing vehicle as opposed to a delta wind which the Shuttle is now, the delta wing. He felt that there was some benefits to having short, stubby wings and designing it that way. But as it worked out that wasn’t in the cards. It went with the delta wing design. And not only that, with a design which had a lot of drag. The reason that it had a lot of drag was because of those big engines on the base of it, three engines on the base of the shuttle. It causes, it’s not smooth back there, it causes a lot of what's called base drag. Plus the fact, for weight reasons, you didn’t want a whole lot of wing area, trying to make that as minimum, minimal as you could. So we’d call it the bomb with wings. And again, the Flight Research Center got into this. They had a lot of experience with unpowered landings. There was a debate whether we should have deployable jet engines so that they could, the astronauts could have some power to help them land it. But the Flight Research Center people had great experience in landing unpowered vehicles, like the X-15 and the Bell X-3 which Chuck Yeager flew. They were all unpowered landings in high drag vehicles just like the Shuttle. And the technique there is to effectively pick a spot a mile short of the runway and you dive the vehicle at it in a very high air speed and then a couple thousand feet above the ground you start to level off and bleed off your air speed as you fly into a landing and touch down hopefully at a reasonable speed. That’s the technique that the Research Center developed and that was the technique that is the technique that is used for landing the Space Shuttle.
But again, you can’t train the astronauts in the Space Shuttle. You need something that simulates its landing characteristics. My mind immediately focused on that, that we needed that. And [I] was assigned to work that problem for the Flight Crew Division.
The first people I got with were the Boeing people. It seemed to me, later agreed that while you can think of using an exotic vehicle like an F-102 which was a delta wing fighter developed by General Dynamics but which was obsolete. You could probably make that simulate the landing characteristics but it was out of production. What we were looking for was something where you could get spares that would be supported over the life of the program and we’re still flying Space Shuttles.
My focus was on commercial aircraft and there were three. There was the Boeing 737, which is a two engine. There was a Lockheed Jet Star, which is an executive jet, and Flight Research Center had one of those which it used for in-flight simulation. Finally, there was a Grumman Gulfstream, which is a really deluxe executive aircraft. So those three were the candidates and we asked them to submit to proposals, you know, as to what modifications they would make to their vehicles to simulate the landing characteristics of the Space Shuttle. Which they did. It turned out that the key item was trying to create enough drag, I mean, commercial transports are designed for minimal drag, you know, cause that’s money. Cause you use a lot of fuel. You want vehicles with minimal drag and high payload capacity.
The main problem was getting enough drag to simulate this Space Shuttle on landing trajectory. In-flight reverse thrust appeared to be the best candidate. But on the 737, they weren't able to do that, so Boeing lost that one. It's just that the engines are located underneath the wing and there’s just too much turbulence and buffeting to do that. Now, on the Jet Star, the Lockheed Jet Star and the Gulfstream, they both have two engines in the rear, below the tail. They’re just a little forward of the tail. The Gulfstream had a high T-tail where the horizontal stabilizer, it’s right on top of the vertical tail. On the Jet Star it was about half way up, the horizontal stabilizer was about half way up the vertical tail.
We decided to do an in-flight fly off. Grumman got one of its test pilots. They flew it out to Flight Research Center – the Gulfstream. And, of course, the Flight Research Center already had a Jet Star. So we went up and asked them to both put it in in-flight reverse thrust and see what happened. Very carefully.
It turned out on the Jet Star because the tail was closer to the engine that there was a lot of buffeting. When you went into in-flight reverse thrust, the flow out of the engines would go up and over the horizontal tail and really shook the rear end. Whereas on the Gulfstream, the plume from the reverse tended to pass underneath, underneath the tail which on the Gulfstream was at the top of the tail. So the plume from the reverse thrust passed underneath the horizontal stabilizer and the buffeting was fairly minimal. So that was key in picking the Gulfstream as the in-flight simulation. We had to get a name for it and we initially thought about the Shuttle In-Flight Simulator which is called the SIFS. But people thought that sounded like venereal disease. So we renamed it the Shuttle Training Aircraft, the STA, and that’s what it’s known as today.
So we solved the drag problem, but then you still had the problem of the control of the lift. I mean, you had a delta wing, whereas in low-lift, double wing on the Shuttle. But on the Gulfstream, you have, it’s high-lift vehicle. So you had to find a way of killing lift. What we did, we, Grumman modified the wings to put on large flaps which were controlled as a function of angle of attack of the vehicle and then that effectively, you had a pretty sophisticated digital computer system which was developed by Hindwell to effectively look at the performance of the vehicle. The Gulfstream, in flight, is measured by accelerometers and rate gyros, that kind of thing, compared to a model of what the Shuttle should look like and then it controlled the control surfaces of the Gulfstream. So that the flying characteristics of the vehicle as the pilot saw it was just the same as they would be on the Shuttle. The handling qualities, if you want to call it that. It was a pretty sophisticated little system.
Again, the pilots were, when we got it into production, the pilots were enthusiastic about it. It’s being used, still being used. In fact, we bought two initially. I think they bought a couple more to train, and they’re training all the pilots.
QUINN: And these were considerably safer?
BIGHAM: Oh yeah. The reason being that you had power. If you said that something was wrong you took it out of reverse thrust and flew around, go around. So to the best of my knowledge there has never been an accident. But I left there in eighty-nine, so I really don’t know what’s happened since then.
QUINN: You moved on to the Space Station Management Office
BIGHAM: Yeah, I was the project manager for what was called the Phase B, the preliminary design phase of the Training Aircraft. They formed a division to actually handle the production of the Training Aircraft and I moved onto the Space Station. I was asked, this was back in early eighty-one as I recall. And they asked me to come over as a manager for Avionics in the new Space Station Office which being formed at Johnson Space Center under Bob Piland, who I think was program manager. Which I did. And that later evolved into manager for the, what was called the Space Station Information System.
There are a lot of computer systems involved in Shuttle but even more so in Station. Right from the beginning, the management in Washington wanted to make that a very universal affair. They wanted to bring in not only the other research centers, give them a piece of the action if you will. This is Lewis Research Center up in Cleveland, Langley, Aims Research Center out in California, Kennedy [Space Center, Florida], Marshall [Space Center, Alabama]. But they wanted to bring in Europe, European Space Agency, the Japanese Space Agency, and Russia, Russian [Space Agency].
So it was a universal affair. And not only that from a flying space station standpoint. Contractors have their own computer systems for tracking, the parts, the parts numbering, the assembly of the vehicle, and so forth. And then there’s the scientific research systems. I mean in the, on board the space station you have experiments which are put together by different agencies. They all want their data. The question is do you let everybody go off and do their own thing or do you try to have some order to this, some level of integration? And the Jet Propulsion Laboratory [California] suggested that we needed to make it a major effort to see how far we could go integrating all these things. Networking if you will which at that time was in its infancy.
So anyway, they made me what’s called System Manager, SSIS Manager for the Program Office at Johnson. We started to work on this. Really our intent, when I started in eighty-one, was to fly the Station in ninety-two celebrating the 500th Anniversary of the Discovery of America, 1492-1992.
Well then Congress got into it. And every year went through a major redesign, get the cost down or whatever. So when I left in eighty-nine, we really, really hadn’t gotten that far along. And here we are in ninety-nine and we’re just now starting to fly it. One of the major problems we had was, and you always have in the Manned Spacecraft Program, is in the computer systems is keeping up with the rapid advance in the industry. Because you have to at some point you have to baseline something so you can get on producing it, and designing the wiring and so forth. In the meantime, the industry’s out here rapidly advancing computer systems technology, software technology, and networking. So you have to design a system which is flexible. But back in eighty-one when I started, networking was still something that you talked about but nobody had really done anything with. And there was an international group trying to make standards for it that everybody could, could live to. I think, eventually, Microsoft developed the standards and then what, it’s what we’re working to industry standards. But anyway I don’t know. I haven’t followed it so I don’t know what we’re doing in the Space Station right now. But it was, it was interesting at the time.
QUINN: Frustrating?
BIGHAM: Frustrating, yeah, yeah. I just felt we were beginning to make progress when I retired in eighty-nine. And again, I just don’t know what’s happened since then.
Well I know one interesting thing that happened was early on we decided that we needed major meeting to get a lot of the key people together just to discuss how to proceed on this. And we did that at the time of the, we were having that meeting at the time of the Challenger accident. And we were meeting in a large room, trying to get organized. And I guess there were probably about a hundred people there when one of the secretaries came in and said the Challenger had exploded. We didn’t have TV set, but here was a radio, so everybody. She brought in the radio. We turned it up and they gave the reports of it. We immediately got a TV set and tied into Mission Control. And we’re paralyzed, everybody’s just paralyzed. [We] sat watching the replays on commercial TV. That went on all that day.
Then the next day, we got everybody together and said we had to make a decision. Do we go on with this or should we cancel, reschedule? But everybody agreed let’s get on with it. Which we did and periodically we’d stop to get the news reports. But President [Ronald] Reagan came down and we stopped the meeting briefly so [if] people wanted to they could go and see that ceremony. I watched it on TV. We were still doing work trying to get things assembled. But it was a real shock, a real shock.
QUINN: How did that compare to the Apollo 1 fire?
BIGHAM: I would say it was probably even more shocking because of the public nature of it. So far as NASA people were concerned, it was bad. Both were bad. But because of, I mean here we were flying a civilian for the first time, the teacher [Christa McAuliffe]. And it exploded on television in full view around the world. So in terms of its impact, it was much worse, much worse.
In the Apollo fire, the Accident Investigation Board was headed by Frank Borman, the astronaut. And they did a whale of a job. I mean, they had to figure out what had happened, go through a complete redesign of the Apollo Command Module as well as looking at other aspects of the program, and trying to maintain a schedule of getting Armstrong to the moon before the end of the decade. And they did. Did a fine job.
Now because, I think because of the visibility of the Challenger accident, the president [Reagan] had no choice but to name a high-level review board, which was, I think chaired by former Secretary of State [William P.] Rogers, I think. And Neil Armstrong was on that. It had other scientists with no background in manned space flight. I feel we would have been much better off if we’d handled the investigation just like we handled the Apollo fire investigation. We’d kept it within the agency. It would have moved along faster but without a lot of adverse publicity. But it wasn’t possible to do that. So eventually things worked out. From that standpoint the Challenger accident was much worse than the fire.
QUINN: Deke Slayton had said that any mission, any crew could fly that. Were all the crews that similar? So for example if Armstrong’s crew had to back out of Apollo 11, could they move a crew in?
BIGHAM: Well, there was a certain amount of custom training, had to be a certain amount of custom training for each mission. I think probably what he meant was that they could be trained. You could take any crew and they could perform any other mission given the proper training. But each mission was different, had its own objectives in terms of experiments and so forth.
QUINN: You had said some very interesting things were didn’t get on tape. So I’m going to ask a few questions and hopefully it will go just as well. We were talking about the realistic future and I guess what my question is what can we expect in the future?
BIGHAM: Like I say, I think Dan Golden is a great administrator and he’s leading us in the right direction. [The] problem that he has to deal with is shrinking budgets in terms, with inflation and all. Slowly getting the Space Station assembled in orbit and that’s, as I say, we originally planned to fly that in ninety-two and here we are in ninety-nine. And I don’t know when they expected to be fully assembled. It’s probably three, two, three years off yet and manned. And that’ll be tough to do probably with the budget constraints and Russia’s failure to produce, able to produce as they said they would. We have to subsidize them.
Beyond that, certainly research is being done on Mars exploration. And there’s good unmanned Mars program going. And eventually perhaps we’ll do that. But the country really has to; the nation really has to make a commitment to that kind of thing. Right now the focus is on the Space Station. It will be interesting to see how that program develops and what if anything comes after that. And if there’s another dimension, if there’s another Challenger, another Shuttle accident, why that can throw the whole thing into. . .
QUINN: Right and you think that, do you think that’s a possibility?
BIGHAM: Yeah, it’s always a possibility. Goodness knows we have enough experience in it. But it’s a very complex vehicle and things do happen. It can happen. It can happen.
QUINN: What was your greatest personal accomplishment at NASA?
BIGHAM: Well, I felt the Lunar Landing Training Vehicle Program. It was a very complex program. It didn’t have much management support because of the dangers of it. The adverse publicity, they thought, which might result from any accident. But we did have the two accidents. We got through those okay. Fortunately, it was not picked up by the wire service. And it went on to be a very successful training program. The astronauts all felt it was realistic and that they absolutely needed it in preparation for the trying to do the landing on the moon. So I was very proud of that, proud of that role.
QUINN: And I had used the term earlier that you had “survived” at NASA for such a long time. You shied away from that word.
BIGHAM: Survived, yeah, it really wasn’t that way. I guess, you never quite know at NASA what’s going to happen next. I moved, was fortunate moving from the Lunar Landing Training Vehicle Program on to the Shuttle Program in its very early stages. And stayed with that through the seventies and moved to the Space Station in the eighties. The assignments within those programs were fluid, somewhat fluid. But in the Shuttle Program, I guess the major accomplishment was the, getting the Shuttle Training Aircraft Program conceived and under way. In the Space Station Program initiating work on the integration of the many scientific and operational computer systems that the Space Station is going to have. And again, I don’t know where that stands. I left the program in eighty-nine and here we are ten years later and I haven’t kept up with it. So I don’t know really.
QUINN: You had made a comment that I liked earlier that the Space Program was a young man’s. . .
BIGHAM: Oh yeah, yeah. Chris Kraft said that, pointed that out when he retired. He says, “You know, the pressures and the challenges of the Space Program are such, it’s more, more for the younger men.” And I think he meant twenties and thirties and us old guys ought to get out of the way. So that generation which did Apollo and Space Shuttle and is now retired. And Space Station Program, I know has been taken over by the two generations after us. They’re running that. And I think that’s the way it should be.
QUINN: Well I think that’s everything that I wanted to go back and cover. I think that’s a good way to end it. At this point, you got away from Houston and retired up here.
BIGHAM: Retired up here and determined to move on with some new things. As I mentioned I’m involved in civic activities. I’m an elected Director of the Property Owner’s Association and mentor in the high school program. My wife’s very active in civic activities. I’ve got my handicap down to nine and trying to bring that down further. I gave up golf when I worked for NASA when I joined them. [I] played some up at Boeing. But we were working six, seven days a week. There just wasn’t time. So I gave it up for twenty years. And thinking that when I retired, you know, it would be like driving a car, would come back real fast but it hasn’t. It’s taken a few years to get my handicap down.
QUINN: Well a nine handicap is nothing to sneeze at.
BIGHAM: No. I’m playing some of the best golf of my life right now.
QUINN: Well what was interesting too, you had mentioned that you didn’t keep in contact with astronauts or engineers, anyone that you had worked with. Is that because of the distance or because that was the job and you leave it at that?
BIGHAM: Well maybe I was a little different. I liked to separate my personal life from my business life. And, I had lived in, actually lived in Houston and commuted out to the Space Center.
QUINN: You were in downtown Houston?
BIGHAM: We lived near the Galleria off Memorial [Avenue]. It was great commuting cause you were always going against traffic and go into town on Memorial and then out [Interstate] 45 to the Space Center when all the traffic was coming in and vice-versa in the evening. So, I really didn’t have a lot of personal, real close, personal friendships out there. But I very much admired the people I worked with. But when I came there, I was a bachelor and doing a lot of dating in Houston. [laughter] There weren’t that many eligible, all the single gals were in Houston. Eventually got married and continued to commute from Houston. But really enjoyed the people I worked with but have lost contact with them.
QUINN: Well, I think that’s everything then. Again, thank you.