NASA Bizzell, Robert M. - May 25, 2001
Interview with Robert M. Bizzell
Interviewer: Carlyn Copeland
Date of Interview: May 25, 2001
Location: Bizzell home, Flatonia, Texas
COPELAND: Today is May 25, 2001. This oral history with Robert Murry Bizzell is being conducted in his home in Flatonia, Texas. This 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 Carlyn Copeland.
Thank you for joining me today, Mr. Bizzell. First thing, I just kind of want to get a little background. Where are you from originally?
BIZZELL: Western Oklahoma. Actually, it's Knute, Oklahoma, which is about a hundred miles west of Oklahoma City.
COPELAND: Where did you go to school? Did you go to college there in Oklahoma?
BIZZELL: Yes, I went to Southwestern Oklahoma State University, which is at Weatherford, Oklahoma. That's where I did my undergraduate work.
COPELAND: What, what was your undergraduate work?
BIZZELL: It was in math and physics. That's—and, and education. At that time, being a small-town boy from a cotton farm, I figured if you went to college, what you went for was to become a teacher. So, I did get a teaching certificate there. And I'd like—I start to say which I've never used, but actually I have, so I'm glad I did that. It was part of the thing, who I was, what I wanted to do.
COPELAND: Did you think when you graduated college, I mean, is that what you wanted to be? Did you want to go into teaching, or did you have another field in mind?
BIZZELL: This was a long time ago. We had no counselors then, not in high school, not even in college. And when you went to a small school—in fact, the, the high school I graduated from had only a hundred and fifty kids in the total school, so you didn't, you weren't exposed to all these fields that were there then. But certainly, there's more now that you can go into. So, a lot of it was just my experience and environment base was very small. Yeah, I mean it was a small town; it was a small world. It was a big thing just to go to college. But that was, that was then. I knew I didn't want to stay on a cotton farm the rest of my life [laughs]. So, that was most of the reason why I went to college.
And the choice of field—we didn't, even in the high school I went to, there was no chemistry classes, there were no physics classes, there were no biology classes, no botany classes, none of that. In fact, my senior year, we had to petition the state so that I could, we could get five students that wanted to take Algebra II. If you can imagine it, but we did. But that was—and, so, math was basically my choice when I went to college. I knew that was where my aptitude was, was in the math and the sciences area, but not science as in the—like I say, I thought I was a math and science freak, but I'd never taken biology or that sort of thing, but fortunately in college I got to take those things.
COPELAND: And you liked it.
BIZZELL: Oh, yeah! I really liked it. And there was no engineering schools or anything like that at Southwestern. You just took all the math courses and all the physics courses.
COPELAND: So, how did you get into engineering? Or what was your first job, I guess I should say, out of college?
BIZZELL: Well, my first job out of college was, it was those things, you know you're about to graduate, saying, "Now where am I going to go work?" And if you peeked, you'd see bulletins on the wall: so-and-so was going to be in town on such-and-such date in such-and-such building; if you're interested you can go interview. And you don't know what causes those things, you know, it’s accident. I saw the bulletin. I said, "Oh, what the heck. I'll go interview." But it—I went and interviewed with the Defense Mapping Agency, and it was in St. Louis, Missouri, working for the government. And as I was married at the time, so I needed the income. And I interviewed a number of teaching positions. And here's the reality of life: I could make, I could coach the baseball team, drive the school bus and make thirty-two hundred dollars a year, or I could go to St. Louis, Missouri and, because I had above a three-point grade point average, I could make fifty-seven thousand dollars, uh, fifty-seven hundred dollars a year. Five thousand seven hundred. And I said, "Damn. I have to go for the money, cause—." But it wasn't just the money. I wouldn't have gone if I didn't have some good feeling about what this was. And I said, “I want to try something before I go into the teaching field,” you know, which I thought I was going to do and get some experience.
So, away I went to St. Louis, Missouri, for the Defense Mapping Agency. It was at the Aeronautical Chart and Information Center up there where you spend six months training, learning how to make all the ramifications of making maps and that sort of thing, and I was always a map and geography freak anyway. I liked that. [I] found out there's a lot to it, especially when you're doing it for the military. Basically, it was for the Air Force, doing mapping projects for them. And there was a lot more involved in it than, than I had ever, ever thought because basically I ended up in the geophysics kind of department where we actually got involved in actually doing the gravity fields of the, of the world, everywhere there was a gravity measurements. Because this was a Cold War kind of thing, and the gravity fields were important because they affected missiles, you know, so it wasn't just aiming at that spot, all of the magnetic field and gravity field and all that affected all that.
So, I worked there and got the opportunity—some of us could apply, and I was fortunate to get selected to go work on a master's degree at Purdue University. And so, I did that. I went to West Lafayette, Indiana, and worked on a master's degree. And I ended up getting a master’s degree in Geodetic Sciences, which is basically the science of determining the size and shapes of the features on the earth or in any body and stuff. And that was—I really enjoyed that because it, I used my math and physics background.
When I went back to St. Louis after I got my degree and I was, been back three years and—. Then that was in the mid-sixties, and it was at that time that NASA was just getting formed. And a couple of guys up at St. Louis, at the agency, had actually gone to NASA because—it was some that had been in previous programs that they had been sent away, some to Ohio State University, University of Illinois. But one of the guys that had gone through that program and then left St. Louis, and went to NASA, and that was just when they were building up for Apollo and had a need of experienced people, you know, basically sent out a calls and it was just because of his contact that he got the word leaked back to St. Louis about his interest. And my wife was from Texas and her parents lived in Texas. And to be honest, St. Louis, Missouri, wasn't [laughs] my idea of heaven with the weather and all that kind of stuff. And then the opportunity, really was the opportunity to get back home, more back home, is what lead me to call, respond to the request and send in an application and go down for an interview.
And one of the proudest moments of my life was when I drove into the gates of NASA. After I stopped I didn't turn around and leave, because it hit me when I drove in there, "What is a little ol’ boy from a western Oklahoma cotton farm doing in a place like this?" It was, it was really, it really hit me. I mean the aura of NASA is really real, and it was real to me that day when I went in there. Fortunately, I went ahead and went to the interview. I mean it was—and the guy I was supposed to meet wasn't there, he was off on a trip, but his boss was there. And he made me fill out an application on the spot, and I drove away, and I was hired when I drove away. And it was, it was a pretty frightening kind of thing, but—. Anyway, that was the start, and I'm starting to ramble, so ask your next question. [laughs]
COPELAND: You're doing great! You're, actually, you're answering them as you, as we go along. I guess, I want to go back. You mentioned the Cold War a few minutes ago. And you were in, I guess you were working on your, your college studies still during the so-called “space race” between the United States and Russia during those late fifties and into the sixties, but do you remember what your thoughts were about that at that time? Were you concerned about it at all? Was it something you thought about?
BIZZELL: Well, I think the—yes, because even into my junior and senior year of college, see, we had the Cuban crisis. We had Gary Powers and U-2 incident. And a buddy of mine in college actually, we actually went up to Oklahoma City, Tinker Field, because we—there was a part of us said, you know—I wanted to be a part of that and went up to see about getting into navigator school, to become navigators because my math background and all that kind of stuff, because they had been hiring. Well, as it turned out, it was another one of those things that, “Hey, if you'd been here three months ago. Our last group filled up the class and now we're upping the standards, so we really want you to get your degree and then come back and talk to us about that.” So, it was almost disappointing. But, you know, the fact—I had really got myself worked up to go be a part of this, you know, with that. And then Kennedy's assassination happened, and that I, I can't explain that feeling. It, it hit the whole, whole country when that happened. And I think the whole country was kind of in depression. Nobody ever believed anything like that could happen, and then it happened. You realize how vulnerable you really are, and, if anything, taken for granted.
And at that time I, and then right after that, I guess I was in my last semester of college, I got married, and that put another new perspective on my life. Thinking, “Oh, I got to go out and make money and take care of this woman and a family.” So, by the time I got to my first job, which was in January of 1964, January or February, actually it was February 3, 1964, the Vietnam War was coming on, and actually during that period and while I was at Purdue and up at Purdue University and seeing protests and that sort of thing and the war, the war—. But at that time, we had a child at that time. I wasn't, I couldn't be drafted. I was in college, married, with a family. It was just the lottery thing that was going on. My number never come up, even though I think—.
Then, because they changed it about drafting, I might have, could've gotten taken, if my number got brought up, because I had a very close cousin who did go. Fortunately, he came back. But it was, it was tough, I mean, just those people who couldn't talk about it. And that's the thing around like this small town here, there's a lot of World War II veterans around here, and they were in Okinawa and D-Day and that sort of thing, and they still can't talk to their family about their experiences. So, it was very, that's all been very meaningful to me, those kinds of experiences about, talking about—. I was never in the military, but I've got a great sense of gratitude for the people that were, that's for sure. You have to stop me every now and then because I will just—.
COPELAND: Oh, no. You're doing great, just fine. So when you came to NASA, I know, from your résumé, I know that you worked in the, let's see, the JSC Earth Observations Division for about thirteen years. Can you kind of tell me what you did?
BIZZELL: Well, I just put that in my résumé because it's short and strip. Actually, I first started in the Mapping Sciences Laboratory because that was the first start of going to the moon and that's why they were hiring people like myself, with my background and skills because we were actually mapping the moon. We, with the photogrammetry and the photometry, and those kind of things, and actually I was involved in a great project there. We were actually with the astronauts when they were circling the moon, they were using just old-time sextons. We would pick out targets for them to track and with that data and doing the analysis of that data we could actually come up with a more precise measurement of that point on the moon and the plan was to get—like there's benchmarks all over the U.S., the U.S. Geological Survey and all that put benchmarks and so you know exactly—surveyors today, when they go measure your house and survey it, they're dependent on those benchmarks. You know, here's where here really is. That's what we were trying to establish on the moon, that was a bunch of those benchmarks on the moon. And we actually were successful in getting three, mostly the biggest success of all, Apollo—we were doing real good until Apollo 13, and now everybody's got to go rethink this and that sort of thing. And we got a number of sights on Apollo 14, its analysis and stats started to establish a data base, and then they cancelled the rest of the flights after 15. But it was still a good, good project and that data still exists and at least we've got a good data fix and data—datum, we call it datums or stratum, that sort of thing, for—if we ever decide to go back, at least we've got some areas where we know exactly where they are.
So, that was the Mapping Sciences Laboratory, and then when they cancelled the Apollo program, there was actually a RIF, a reduction in force, and that was unheard of. I mean NASA, I mean we always had good funding, that sort of thing, you know, from President Kennedy's charge to go to the moon and all that stuff. But with Apollo 13 and new Congresses and that sort of things and—you know, maybe we've been there, we've done that, maybe we don't need to do it ten times, kind of thing. So, it was a major refocusing of NASA and what was NASA all about. So, NASA was struggling to say, “We know space is good and it's our job as NASA to not just keep doing the same old things but keep looking ten years ahead and that sort of thing.” So, a lot of the engineering, that sort of thing, was all thinking about things like Shuttle. There was a lot of other proposals, too, that got thoroughly investigated. Now whether or not—and some of it was for supporting the airline industry. That was big and there’s still, that's still going on today. A lot of stuff that NASA does is, heavily supports the airline industry and development of new vehicles. Well, the aerospace plane. The one that goes like ten thousand miles an hour, gets from here to New York in thirty minutes or whatever.
Another aspect of it was unmanned. There was a lot of, and there still is today that argument about the manned part of it; it really cost a lot more because you're having man involved. Well, what about all this good stuff you can do from space with unmanned vehicles? And that had been going on and we knew, there, and there was a program developed called the Landsat program, which is basically going to stick a satellite up there with a lot of instruments looking back at the earth, getting data and working on the unmanned part of it. And that's when they created the Earth Observations Division, and it was our charge to really look at these, the unmanned part of the program because we knew this satellite was coming. And we at JSC were fortunate enough to be selected, which is really kind of strange because we were the manned spacecraft center then, it was—.
But every center got to put in a proposal kind of thing, and we were actually able to do that. And we were able to get a bunch of highly skilled people from the academia of Purdue University, Michigan [The University of Michigan], that sort of thing, who quit their professorships, that sort of thing, and got captured in the NASA aura, too, because we'd been having grants with them of getting feasibility studies until finally someone said, “Why don't you just come to work at NASA, become the core of a program for this unmanned research of the benefits from space?” So, that core group basically got together, and what we did was we geared all up to get ready for the first data from this Landsat satellite. Remote sensing, then that was the key word there. We developed the ability to get the data, how to compress it, analyze it, interpret it, that sort of thing from this Landsat satellite, and we started the remote sensing project there at JSC.
We had this one, our first major project—we did a feasibility kind of thing with aircraft data. We, NASA had the old U-2 planes then, and we were going over sights in, in the United States. We had ground people getting ground truth observations, collecting data with spectrometers, infrared cameras, and all these instruments to see if we could, with those instruments, we could, what we could detect and figure out over a large scale what was on the ground and what was going on. We worked—and the Department of Agriculture was very interested in being involved in this initial research and development because the biggest part of their problem, both for the U.S.—well, they have to predict very early in the season how much corn is going to be harvested, how much wheat is going to be harvested, and all they really get in terms of data is what the farmers plant. But they really don't know, “Well, is the grasshoppers gotten in there? Is there disease problems? Is there widespread flooding?” That sort of thing. So, with those programs, if we get repeated observations from space, you can look at, you can get it all three or four or five, six times a year and see, hey, is the crop growing, is it sprouting, is it vigorous, is it healthy, that sort of thing. So that was that program that we did with aircraft. And you can stop your tape and flip it over and I'll finish it.
So basically, after we proved not only the feasibility of doing this with, with aircraft, how to do aircraft data, and start to understand the instrumentation that was going to be on these Landsats, and the early Landsat was mainly going to be collecting data in the, in the visible, near-infrared, and into the infrared region of the spectrum. So, we advanced those instruments with airplane data for two reasons. One, to see if it was going to tell anything, if we could detect anything about what was going on on the ground that actually matched what was actually happening and understand that phenomena. And, also, we had to set up for ground processing to get ready for the Landsat data, to make sure it happened, because it was going to, you know, they had already established the data formats and the structure and all that stuff of how it was going to be sent down and what it was going to be converted to, what we'd have to have in terms of instrumentation on the ground to take these tapes and take all those bits and bytes and convert them into real stuff.
And the real stuff we was going to start working with, since we were working in the visible and near-infrared, and there was four bands of data that was coming in. In the photogrammetry industry there, we had a lot of, like I said, academia and those sort of things and what happens when you take channel three, channel four over channel two, do all those ratios and portions, are, are you going to get something you need with those combinations? So you've got four bands of data, but there's a lot of things you can do with four bands of data, besides just looking at them one at a time. You can add them, you can ratio them, and do those sort of things.
So, all in this period before we got the Landsat data there was people in academia going through all that, the paper solution, plus with the aircraft data, we got to test some of those. It gave us the best promise. So, by the time we got the real Landsat data, we knew what combination of things were most likely to give us the information that we were looking at. And in this case, working with the Department of Agriculture, what was important from a crop's, vegetation point of view. So, that's what we focused on, was to see if we could determine what was happening crop-wise, and it was important for the Department of Agriculture from the standpoint of knowing how it could affect their predictions for how much corn we were really going to have at the end of the season and wheat, and all those kind of stuff.
Because everybody's sitting around, the stock market people and grain companies are sitting there waiting for USDA to say, “Here's our estimate of how much stuff this is going to be,” and watch the stock market react to it. So, this had very long-reaching implications in that, not only from U.S. standpoint, but we were going, we were going to do Russia. Now—so, it was a three-year program. We were going to do this and do it in the U.S. where we could actually go and see—were we right? Could we see what was really there? Because, basically—and convert that into bushels of a crop per acre, so we actually took what observations we had on the ground and with the data that we were getting from space and converting that into an estimate of acreage and bushels per acre. Now, we couldn't do the bushels per acre. We could definitely do acreage from space, but that was a key component of the formula.
But basically, we did—and did statistics, because we did sampling, and applied the statistics that the guys, the statisticians, were working on to actually come up with the acreage. And what was—the first year was a real success because by the time we went through with all that, with our remote sensing data from the Landsat for an estimate of the wheat acreage, we were concentrating on wheat because that was the crop of interest to the USDA because that's where—they didn't—you can—the only way they had a good estimate of what Russia was going to do was what Russia told you. And it affected the commodities market severely, so wheat was the crop of focus. At the end of the season, and, because we, everybody had to turn in their estimates before all the crop was harvested and actually knew how many bushels of wheat was had. Our estimate was closer to the real answer than the USDA's had been formerly using their techniques that they had used in the past, just by calling, “How much wheat you going to have down there?” And that's kind of what it was. They have these agents all over and that's how they had to do it. So that really excited USDA, so then the next, next—.
Then we got geared up to doing Russia, and we did Russia and did a good job there, too, in coming up with an estimate on how much wheat Russia was really going to have. And this is over a period of three or four years, but basically—and then there comes NASA again, “Okay, USDA, here is where you're at. You've been with us all along. Take this technology as you will and go. Now we're going to go do something else.” 'Cause that was, I mean, NASA really isn't in the business of doing commodities market or crop predictions or something—basically it was the RMD to use space data for a useful application, and the USDA uses that today. Landsat's still going. They got improved Landsat. They're using more instrumentation, getting better all the time. And so we feel real good about the, you know, it's not a big thing that you think about when you hear about NASA. [laughs] Did you know about it?
COPELAND: I did not know. This is new, and it's fascinating!
BIZZELL: Yeah. Well, we felt real good about that, just a small group of people.
COPELAND: About how many people worked on that?
BIZZELL: Oh, it probably peaked to a hundred, something like that. I mean, this is, this includes the people that's looking at imagery and doing all that sort of stuff and saying, “this is wheat; this is corn,” that sort of thing.
COPELAND: Now this doesn't sound—it sounds like you guys were very busy with this. It doesn't sound like an eight to five, Monday through Friday kind of job.
BIZZELL: Oh, no, no.
COPELAND: What sort of hours did you put in?
BIZZELL: I don't know how many of these interviews you've done with NASA, but, and this was the thing about it that really amazed me, is starting from day one you couldn't wait to get there, and then you didn't want to leave. I didn't work forty-hour weeks. That's what I, I mean I put in my time card and got paid for it and that sort of thing, but I always put in fifty-hour weeks, sixty-hour weeks. You just did 'cause I mean—when you had, when you had a family, it got hard. And there was—and it was hard on a lot of people because families suffered from it. I'd have to get my head knocked every once in a while and getting a wake—well, when you got kids, too, Little League starts and that sort of thing, you're going to be involved with that.
But you never left job, really. It just, whatever you were involved in there. And you're, and you're surrounded by all the awesome people, I mean these bright people that are enthused, it was the most—I, I just count my blessings everyday. You can get in a lot of jobs and a lot of people are in jobs and they're stuck, you know. And I hope most people out there have jobs that, “Boy, this is—I'm doing what I always wanted to do, and I enjoy this.” But it couldn't, I think, they couldn't top what I was involved in because, like I say, you're surrounded by these people with a goal and a mission. And it was intense, I mean it was. I always laugh about it because I'm involved in some community activities here and say let's have a meeting and talk about it. Well, see, I was used to those meetings where you get in there and you holler and yell and state your position and everybody does, and then you decide what you're going to do and here's what you're going to do. You walk out and say, “Ya'll, how's your kids doing,” and all that good stuff. It was just, it was just really an incredible experience. And primarily from the people who you're surrounded with, it just all—and, and now I'm going to start getting teary-eyed. [laughs]
COPELAND: That's fantastic!
BIZZELL: Yeah.
COPELAND: To have a job that you love that much and to really enjoy the people. Is there anyone in particular, any group of people that you really felt had a really significant, maybe, impact on you?
BIZZELL: Oh, it was all of them. I mean it was—the groups would change. Like to say, I got to move around because after that remote sensing project was over with and there was just a lot of people involved in there, and I'd say a lot of them especially, and this was strange because at point when they brought in all these professors and academia, you know, kind of, but it wasn't like that at all because immediately they come in and they get—. To a certain extent they come in, "Oh, my gosh! I'm working at NASA," so they got to come and go.
I mean, when I was working on the moon project, getting the data and sightings, and I was a young kid then and part of the thing is after the crew landed from Apollo, and they did all their quarantine and did all that, I scheduled to go interview the astronauts to talk about—because I already had their data by that time, said, “Okay, here you're looking at Mare Tranquilious [Tranquillitatis] and this target sight.” I don't remember. We had targets and craters that we had named. Some of them I remember. Some of them I don't. But you entered in—I remember going in there for the interview with Ken Mattingly, just, “Oh, man, this is going to be tough,” but he was excited. He was so excited that he was doing this; I mean it was just incredible.
You know, I was just a low peon on the totem pole, but at NASA you had a role, and it was your responsibility. You were all equal. The astronauts there was, they were asking me questions, and it was one-on-one. It wasn't—there was never any superiority or anything like that exhibited at NASA. It was kind of like, it didn't matter what your ranking was, what your pay scale was, or anything. If you had a job, you were the expert in that particular area, and that was the environment that you worked in. It just—it was—like I say, it was incredible. Now I've lost track of my, where I was going with this because—.
Oh, after that, then I started working—because at that point they were starting space station. I had—all the time we were doing this, this Earth Observation Division project, the Shuttle program was started and going and that sort of thing. I mean, all people at NASA working on the Shuttle, that was the big focus at JSC, and here was this little ol’ group, and that's why we never—we were kind of left alone to do our thing; we worked on unmanned satellite stuff. But after we finished that and turned it over to the USDA, then we got to sort back into the mainstream of JSC projects because then the space station was just in its infancy. The thoughts of doing that, it was the thought about the Shuttle was supposed to last ten years. Right, here it is twenty years later, kind of thing is—so, I got involved in the space station project then.
And that was the first time—and then because other people on the sight got involved, and they knew me and I knew them, I got involved in this field called configuration management. That is—I probably wouldn’t mind talking about what I did, describe what configuration management did; it's a pretty broad field. But basically what it is—the engineers all had to determine what are the requirements, what are the specs that we're going to work to. And then as they provide that to all the engineers and designers and all that and the manufacturers and the people who are actually going to build the hardware, all through that life-cycle process of the design through the product actually being installed, you make sure that all the engineering and all the other pertinent requirements were met through all that process. And that's all paper.
It's, it's really—somebody's off there doing design, going through there and getting raw material, taking that raw material and converting it to something, putting it into a piece of hardware, installing it on there. It's like you just—without ever seeing a piece of hardware, you see it on the paper, “Yeah, it was done according to the design.” And, of course, in that life-cycle product process, some of this is all new stuff; there are changes made. “Oops!” And when we went to testing, “This thing didn't work like we thought it was going be. We got to go back to redesign.” So, you got to make changes. So, there's change control to the product, and that's all determined by a hierarchy of boards that go through there. Some can be done at the contractors' level, and some will have to go all the way up to the program manager.
In this case, we first started out—I was working in the program office for space station. And it was early in that design, basically talking about the feasibility. First thing we worked on was what was space station really going to look like, what was going to be its major components and that sort of thing. So, I worked on the configuration management part of that. Keeping—your job is to make sure that the program manager knows—you got to make sure he knows what this guy is bringing you meets the requirements, and that this is the requirements change, and what his role is going to be and so he can make his decision. And we were doing that at JSC because we were the lead center for the space station program office. Then the administration kind of changed and 51-L [Challenger] happened. The Challenger incident happened.
And that was when all, NASA looked at that and just from an overall structure change they came up with the conclusion that the people at headquarters weren't really paying attention like they should have, rightfully or wrongfully. Everybody felt some, some blame and some fault and so, naturally even up there they said—. So, but the result of that was they said, “We need to move the space station program office to headquarters. And that's—‘cause the overall, that's where the up-and-out, down-and-in kind of stuff—. Here's where the top-level decision and the requirements documentation tree, these set of requirements up here, they belong in headquarters.” And just from a logistics point of view or perception point of view, he says, “If we're going to make the decisions, let's—if we keep the program office in D.C., then everybody will acknowledge that here's where the buck stops.”
And this is just my opinion, by the way [laughs]. And I wasn't in all those meetings with the Congressmen and all that sort of stuff that they had. I've got the entire volume of the 51-L report, and I've been through it. Course, since I retired, I've gone through it even more. So that's just my assessment of all that.
But anyway, the effect was space station moved to D.C. and what they had to do. And it turned out to be—I mean, a lot of decisions are made, “This theoretically looks good.” It's kind of like Congress goes through this all the time. “Homeless people are homeless. The right thing to do is make them un-homeless.” The theory is always good and the intent is always good, but when you go to implement the solution, sometimes the solution becomes really bad.
And it turned out to be a bad solution to move headquarters because they said, “Okay, we're at headquarters now. Now we need staff. And so, people here [JSC], you can come to Washington, D.C., and work on the space station program out at D.C.” [They] found out real quick why that was a bad decision because not a single engineer from JSC, who was involved in the space station program at JSC, went to D.C. Just by choice. I thought, “No, thank you. I just don't want to do that.” But fortunately—with all the centers around NASA, there were a bunch of engineers that came up there, that unfortunately, you brought in bright people, very knowledgeable people, but they hadn't been people who'd been involved in the space station since day one—you'd've had to be brought up to speed. And that was one big problem.
Another big problem was that you was facing administration, Congress, all that kind of stuff. It was "Eh, [shrug] NASA, space, is that what we really want to be doing?" I mean, it was, “The country needs a new focus.” That sort of thing. And I'm not being critical of that, that's just a reality of the situation for space station. And then, and because of that, and, and being at D.C—and I went up there. I transferred up. I was going to go up for three months to help transition and set up the configuration management process and change boards and that sort of thing. I stayed three years. But it was a good experience from that standpoint but being at D.C. is just a different world.
You're just—where we come from, JSC, where a center is where you say, when you go to implement, you have all that base that if someone says, “We need to do this, here's the design,” and somebody is right there saying, “No, you can't do it that way because here's what happens when you go to do this.” You don't have all of that scrutiny as much up in headquarters as you have, “Well, you don't want to do it that way because the people in Georgia, it won't be of economic benefit to them.” I mean, you get more political kinds of discussions at D.C. than you do detailed engineering kind of discussions. It's just a whole new thinking process up there. And I better stop there before I say anything more [laughs].
COPELAND: Okay, so I want to—I'm interested in—what do you feel your most significant contribution or your most significant accomplishment, even, at NASA was?
BIZZELL: Oh, I was afraid you were going to ask that question. I mean, it just—I mean, you, at the young age you are, tell me the most significant event in your life that is going to affect you for the rest of your life. I, I just felt so good about so many things that I was involved in. There wasn't anything that I was involved in that was successful that I could say, "I did that," because I didn't. It was a bunch of people. I felt good about being there, being involved. I felt great about my, my lunar mapping project. It was just a little ol’ bitty piece that had nothing to do with going to the moon, didn't make going to the moon happen, or anything like that. But it was my piece that's going to be there forever in history. If we ever want to go back, there's going to be some data points on the moon that I, that wouldn't be there if I hadn't had my project. And I think that will help them determine, get there better and safer and know where they're going. Maybe. If they go to the area where we had those points. But even that, it will help determine—I mean, because of the extrapolation of that data to other regions, it'll help. That was a little ol' bitty thing. I felt real good about that.
I felt real good about the LACIE [Large Area Crop Inventory Experiment] project, the remote sensing project. A lot of that, I really got involved in, 'cause being a country boy, coming from a farm in Oklahoma, and cotton and wheat and all that kind of stuff was a part of that. And already knowing something about USDA, and how they operated, and that sort of thing, just from growing up there and being involved in it and watching the USDA and helping them basically change decades of a mindset and how they did things to actually accepting the space technology and the fact that, "Hey, we can do our job better," because of what I've done here. I—that was—it's a benefit to mankind that's going on today. You got to feel real good about that.
The Shuttle program, I mean, the space station program, as I was talking before about, it's—I’m using the analogy—kind of like the Vietnam War, you know? How you feel about that. And it wasn't that bad because—I was really spoiled, people at JSC were spoiled. Now, spoiled is not the right word, okay? But when we picked a task, everybody got together, and we did the task based on, what I like to use being a mathematician and physicist, you did it based on data that you knew and things you didn't know you theorized about and tested them, and the ones that didn't work you threw away, and then you tried the other ones. So it's a mathematician's logical process to solving a problem.
At the space station in headquarters, it was all this intangible data that wasn't relevant to solving the problem that I personally had problems with. Not that that's not good. I mean, that keeps our country going and they have all these other factors about who needs to be employed in California and Georgia and all that kind of stuff that is relevant from a country perspective. I have trouble with it because I need data to solve a problem and that's just a personal thing.
But after I left D.C., I had—I had signed up for a three-year term and timing was everything. I really got a lot of pressure to stay in D.C., but the South is my home. And I had this three-year contract. And we were having our first grandson in Texas and [clock starts to chime] I could either stay in D.C. and go through a divorce [laughs] or go back to, come back to JSC. It wasn't that—I mean, I wanted to come back. With the grandson and my other kids here and stuff like that, I was ready to get back and I was, to get back to my personal comfort range of attacking problems. I'm not, I'm not politically correct, and I know it. And that's not my bailiwick, personally. So, it was a good experience. I'm glad I was there, but I was glad to get back to JSC.
When I got back to JSC, I had, I had lots of choices in terms of where I got to go and I said—I had never been really involved in the mainstream Shuttle program, and the Shuttle program was undergoing some new kind of stuff. Well, it was only supposed to last ten years, and this was 1991. The ten years were up. So, they were having to do—they hadn’t—‘cause the space station and the design, redesign, redesign, redesign—it was going on and on. It wasn't going to come online. The Shuttle was still going to have to go on, so it was an opportunity to get in there and help, almost, restore. Like this house you're in here right now. I like taking things like that, restoring them, making them useful again. And I guess, I'm not saying I did that for Shuttle, but it was at least that process of saying, “What are we going to do to this? We've got hardware that's out past its lifetime.” That sort of thing.
So, being involved in that—I wanted to do that. And it was—and I got really involved in the configuration management part. I really enjoyed doing configuration management and here it was going to be in space, 'cause we're going to have to be creating new hardware, that sort of thing. They were building 105—Endeavor. If I use numbers instead of names, you'll have to stop me and say, "What's a 105?" Because they were building 105 [Endeavor], because it was going to be the vehicle that really integrated with the space station that was—and it was new technology. It wasn't to the baseline paper that built the original Shuttles.
And you asked about accomplishments—I got there in time to, once they really—they'd already done all the design work and done redesign and downtimes and that sort of thing. Then they were actually building the vehicle. And that was being accomplished out at Palmdale, California, by Rockwell [International Corporation], out there. So, I got to spend a lot of time in beautiful downtown Lancaster, California [laughs], in Palmdale because, although they were building it, we had to take the configuration management out there, and since you, to make sure that all the requirements were being met as they were assembling it. It's that thing that you got to check up all the paper before you lose access, before all those wires and harnesses and all that kind of stuff are covered up and you can't inspect them ever again [unintelligible].
So, that was awesome. This was a case where you're walking all over this vehicle that some people hardly ever get to see and that sort of thing and it was, it's another—I got exposure to another group of the people. ‘Cause mine had always been at the management level at JSC. Here's the guys that's down there with the screwdrivers and this kind of stuff actually—and it's another group of mindset, personality. These are the mechanics working on the vehicle, and I really enjoyed it. They didn’t like me so much [laughs] because these were guys that say, "Here's what's wrong with this. If I do this, it will make it better." And I say, "No, you can't do it. Here's what the design paper says you have to do. If you want to do what you say, which is probably real good, we got to back to the approval process and make sure you do it." Well, it was, it was really a love/hate relationship because they understood that, too, but "Eh! It's just paperwork. You're a bureaucrat!" kind of stuff.
But actually, not just from a historical point of view, but you have to know exactly how it was built and was it built per design because if anything ever breaks, the history, the investigation of what caused this and all this kind of stuff, the only thing you've got is the paper. So, you have to say, "Well, this is what we did. We made this change and we made this design change and here's what we did. And then the right guy approved it," and that sort of thing. There was a—and there especially, they wanted a strong configuration at this point because of 51-L [Challenger]. When they did 51-L, they found out that maybe all the paper wasn't exactly right.
There's always a lot of pressure and a lot of people, the mindset, and the engineers, the paper wasn't that important. There's not an engineer out there who says, "If it broke, I can fix it, and I can make it better." Not a single one. And you want them that way. They're good. They know the vehicle. They know the process. They know the physics and all that stuff, but they're engineers, and they're there because that's what they like to do, and that's what they do best. And they sure don't want this guy looking over their shoulder that says, "Yes, I understand, but we got to keep track of the design, the original design was there, so that's how it's going to get built. You may be right but maybe this guy over here down in Palmdale or out at Florida is installing or maybe the guy who has to operate it and do that sort of thing won't like your change." So, it takes the big guys to say, who listens to all the people coming in, and say, to say whether or not you're right or not. And—or maybe there's even a better idea.
So, boy, that was just—that interaction with those kind of skills with different focuses all to do this big thing that's going to fly, I don't know how. They're going to launch it. Every launch is awesome to me because of my configuration management experience; I knew that, I knew what waivers had been signed. And I got in trouble with that down at the launch site because, "Yeah, you can do that. All you got to do is sign, is get this waiver signed. If the big boys will sign the waiver, you're off the hook. Everybody's off the hook. They're the ones that the monkey's on in case something gets wrong.” They have the right, at least. And, in reality, they're the only ones with the authority to sign a waiver.
But then you've also got some politics involved. You're working with contractors down there who basically some—we had an administrator one time, and I'm not going to give a name here, who one time was looking at the launch after 51-L and he saw these piles of waivers, and he said something like, "I don't like this. I don't want to see anymore waivers." Basically, I think what he was saying, if we got a waiver it's 'cause something wasn't done right. Basically, I think he was saying, "I want everything done right." The fact that he said, "I don't want to see any more waivers," got into contractors' contracts. They got dinged financially for waivers.
So, you get in this process, your configuration management guy says, "I don't care. I'll help you process the waiver." This guy is trying to do everything he can. He doesn't want a waiver. It was, it was really a kind of a bad situation that had gotten created there because next thing you know, you weren't going to hear about anybody even having a problem because they weren't going to tell you it's waiverable. And then things get done, and you find out about them later and, well, that wasn't a waiverable situation, and you get to arguing about the requirements and the semantics and that sort of thing.
So, there some, there are some bad, there are some human things that happened at NASA and like I say, in this case, it wasn't—my thing is it was a communication problem that started right at the top and rippled down and that was, that was a part of it. But building 105, I was totally involved in that process and the delivery when it rolled out and when they put it on top of the 747, at the very back, I was back at JSC when it landed, and I got to go to the launch. That—I can't count that as an accomplishment. All I can do is count it as part of this whole exciting career that I had at NASA. It was a highlight, there's no question about it. It was a highlight.
And then after 105, then they started the OMDT program. I'm going to try to remember what the acronym stands for: Orbiter Maintenance Down Time. Basically, it was taking 102, 103, and 104, Columbia, Atlantis, and Discovery, and then—now they're getting serious about what we're going to do about these vehicles and all their hardware that have outlived their ten-year lifetime, is they established these things that are saying, “We're going to send the buses back to the barn and reconfigure them to the new technology. We've flown them enough. We know what needs to be fixed and updated, that sort of thing. We captured all that data. We know that the Shuttle programs are going to be used to go to the space station. And what it takes to extend its life.” See, they were basically planned to be up there for four days, I think—I know you'll get a lot of interviews that'll have an exact figure or a better figure, but thing is, “Hey, we may need to be up there for two weeks,” or something like that. So, the revitalization equipment, for breathing and all that kind of stuff, has to be upgraded to handle that.
And so, first one they took out there was 102, Columbia, in its first OMDT, and I got to go to the first OMDT and basically took all the redesign stuff and incorporated all that in this vehicle and made it brand spankin' spiffy new all over again. And that's pretty awesome. It's not like—the analogy is you're taking your 74-year-old, your 1974 Chevrolet and go put in a new engine and do what you need to do it, but this is on levels high above that. Like in configuration management, all the parts that are in it, there's just—there was—I wish I could remember numbers because I get them all jumbled together, but just imagine that there's 800,000 parts on a Shuttle vehicle. 250,000 of them were trackable parts, and when I say trackable parts, we had to know that they were there, where they were at all times.
And I had the fun responsibility of making sure that the systems in place—the contractors did most of the actual physical work of recording it—serial numbers of every one those 250,000 parts and, not only that part, but there may be twenty of them that were built, you had to know where every copy of those twenty were, what vehicle they were in and track them and that system for doing that and keeping track of that 'cause every time this engineer took that part off there to use he had to record the serial number and it had to get in the data base and everything and that was—.
In 102, we really discovered, and I credit the contractor on this, Rockwell, they're the ones that built the system early on that saved it for that, the CVAS, Configuration Verification and Accounting System. That thing was just wonderful. You talk about accomplishments, really CVAS went back to one guy who developed it and every time we need to fix it, that guy had to do it. This was a one-guy kind of thing, and he was always—I never ever met him. He lived in a little tomb somewhere [laughs], and that's what he did, that's what he worked on and what he saved.
In terms of the system that we had—not as many people as I would like that was involved at the contractor level because when you're in budget cuts, the first guys to go are those kind. You save the engineers and that sort of thing but those people—every one of them, every one of them had the same sense of responsibility about what they were doing with respect to configuration management and current control. They knew the requirements better than the engineers. An engineer may know all the requirements specific to his area. They knew them all. And they had to. They were the ones out there checking the paper and going through all of this and making sure it's right. Just did a phenomenal job.
But the biggest, phenomenal part of it was the spirit and the—I'm sorry, I'm thinking, trying to think of—the total sense of responsibility and duty to do their job while some other guy is pointing at his finger and saying things we can't repeat to him about them doing their job. But they stayed with it and were incredible. Because that had to be, had to be in place all the way through launch. And you're sitting out there on the pad and the countdown is going on and you got this paper-pusher or whatever else name they chose to call us, saying, "Well, you really can't launch. This hasn't been done." And there was a number of times where—like a overhead latch above the crew compartment wasn't checked off that it had been put in with the right screws and latched down. And it turned out it wasn't. If they had actually launched, that probably would have vibrated loose and caused all sorts of havoc. A loss of mission. A loss of mission is just disastrous. Loss of life is even more disastrous, but loss of mission is just something they want to avoid. So, the people who were doing that, that was what was what was keeping them going. "We're ain’t going to have a loss of mission because I didn't do my job."
So, like you say, accomplishment—basically my biggest accomplishment there was the fact that, knowing the requirements and being the guy that protected that group of people with my contacts with the project managers and program managers [unintelligible]. And every once in a while there would be an example that came up that I always made sure I shared [laughs], that those people were doing their job. It's still awesome to me when they launch [laughs] because I was so intimately involved and knew some of the things that went on to have to do it. And I'm not being critical, like I say, of anybody that did it, just all this collection of humans and all our failings, that they can get together and get this 800,000 parts together right some way and launch it.
It just—[laughs]. It's still just awesome. And that's, but that's the unheralded story of NASA, is that. Because, you know, you think you get a bunch of humans together in the corporate world, and it's a different thing that drives them kind of thing. But at NASA, it's just awesome. It really is. It's incredible how those thousands of people can look beyond their humanness and focus of the task and get it done.
Well, anyway—I’m getting teary-eyed again.
COPELAND: Well, I really want to thank you. I think that's actually a good note for us to end on.
BIZZELL: Okay.
COPELAND: You've given me just some really fascinating insight here, and I just thank you for talking with me today.
BIZZELL: Okay.
COPELAND: I appreciate it.
BIZZELL: Well, it is what it is. That's all I can think I can promise you, was—.
COPELAND: Well, and it was very good. I appreciate it. Thank you.