NASA Craig, Betty - June 2, 2000

Interview with Betty Craig

 

Interviewer: Brandy Schnautz

Date of Interview: June 2, 2000

Location: Craig home, Junction, Texas

 

 

SCHNAUTZ:  Today is June 2, 2000.  This oral history interview with Betty Craig is being conducted at her home in Junction, 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 student Brandy Schnautz.  Mrs. Craig, are you aware that this interview is being conducted for the NASA/Southwest Texas State University Oral History Project and will be available for research purposes?

 

CRAIG:  Yes, I am.

 

SCHNAUTZ:  Okay, Mrs. Craig, you were originally from Texas?

 

CRAIG:  Yes, I am from Texas.  I was born in Galena Park, Texas, which is near Houston.

 

SCHNAUTZ:  Just looking at your biography, I saw that you joined NASA very young.

 

CRAIG:  Yes, I graduated from high school in 1965, and I worked for a year for an insurance company in downtown Houston.  And then, when NASA was interviewing for secretarial/clerical help, I went out and filled out applications and interviewed and went to work for them after about a year after I'd been out of school.

 

SCHNAUTZ:  I was wondering what led you to do that.  Was it an interest in the space program or just a job?

 

CRAIG:  A little bit of both.  I was very interested in the space program.  There was a lot going on with the Apollo program at that time.  And, having grown up in the Houston area, I was aware of what was going on with that program, so I wanted to work on that program and also it was a good career opportunity for me even though I went in at a fairly entry-level position with NASA.  It was a fairly, fairly good, at that time, raise in salary from working for an insurance company.

 

SCHNAUTZ:  Being so young and working in that kind of atmosphere, what kind of challenges did you face, or were there any?

 

CRAIG:  Mostly, the challenges the first year of so were just in getting used to the terminology.  NASA, as you've probably learned, is full of acronyms, and so one of the first, first things that first year that I found I had trouble with was just knowing what people were talking about.  And you would have to either figure it out on your own or ask questions and say, "Wait a minute, was is a ABC?"  [Laughter]  That was kind of challenging for me.  Other than that, the first year or so there, I worked in an office with a lot of good people who were real supportive and real helpful, helpful in helping me learn the center and the agency and how things worked, and so it was really a very pleasant job.  I enjoyed it very much.

 

SCHNAUTZ:  I was looking at the different, from you biography, at the different places that you worked.  According to that you started in the Engineering Division.

 

CRAIG:  When I [was] hired on at Johnson Space Center, and at that time it was still called Manned Spacecraft Center, I interviewed and worked in a division within the Engineering Division, I worked in a section that was in the division.  I was there for, and I'm not good with dates, I was probably in that job a couple of years in that division.  I worked, when I was still a secretary, I worked in a number of offices, and I kind of jotted some down.  All of my files are in boxes stored away, so I really didn't have access to any kind of, anything to jog my memory.  But after working in that division I worked in the Procurement Division and worked there for a while.  Then they formed up a new office that was kind of a budget office.  They, they did budget type work that established and helped figure out budgets for the whole center, and it was kind of a new effort-- something different that they hadn't done and it was a new office, and I worked in that office for a year of so and then they ended up disbanding that office and forming something else.  And at that time was when I moved on to work in the Apollo Program Office.

 

SCHNAUTZ:  Was that a more exciting job working with Apollo or was it much the same?

 

CRAIG:  No, it was much more exciting.  The budget office job was interesting in that I learned a lot about how government budgets are put together for different organizations and that sort of thing.  So, I really learned a lot in that job.  But as far as exciting, I would say the Apollo Program Office, with the things going on there, were obviously – it was a much more exciting thing to do.  I worked for the manager for the Lunar Module Project, and that of course was very interesting.

 

SCHNAUTZ:  After that you talked about the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project Office.

 

CRAIG:  Yes, I went to work in that office.  The Apollo-Soyuz Test Project kind of followed along after the end of Apollo and they formed a new separate office for it.  And I went to work in that office, and that was very interesting.  I, in fact, got to go to Russia on a trip, which was very interesting.  Of course, back in that time, that was, I think, 1973, and it was a real interesting job.  Working with the Russians was extremely interesting.  We became friends with them and, in fact, years later, my husband, Jerry, worked on a project with the Russians, and it was really exciting for me because it was, gosh, twenty years later.  But a lot of the same people in their space program were still there, so, it was like having a reunion – getting to see these people twenty years later!  Because once the Apollo-Soyuz Project ended, we never thought we'd see any of those people again.  When it was over, there was nothing else going on with the Russians, and it was kind of tearful at the end of the project because you'd really become close friends with these people.  They came to Houston periodically.  We had people that went to Russia periodically.

 

I went once to Moscow for a two-and-a-half week meeting where we had fifty people over there and there was a lot of that back and forth, where you'd have large groups going-- them coming here or us going there.  So, you became pretty close friends with some of them, and you really felt – it was kind of sad, you thought, unlike most jobs, these people are going back to Russia, and we'll never see them again.  And so it was a real thrill for me to be able, all those years later, to find out that a lot of those same people were still working in the program, in their program, and when they got involved with NASA again, I was able to renew friendships with them, and that was real exciting for me.

 

SCHNAUTZ:  So, despite this being during the Cold War, it was very friendly?

 

CRAIG:  It was very friendly.  It was different than it was twenty years later, of course, in that at the time we were doing Apollo-Soyuz, they still, they still had their KGB [Soviet secret police] people and you kind of very quickly learned how to tell who were the real engineers, whatever interpreters, workers, for the Russia space program and who were the people sent along to watch them.  And I'm sure they didn't think it was obvious, but it became obvious real quickly who was doing the watching and who was doing the working.  And so there was a lot more of that back in '73 than there was, of course, twenty years later.  It wasn't nearly as much so that way.  They were not as free to, to talk about things back in '73.  They had to be careful what they said and did because of the environment.  So there, there was that difference.  But the people themselves that we worked, were, like I said, we became, became good friends with a lot of them.

 

SCHNAUTZ:  So when you were in Moscow, is that where their space program is set up?

 

CRAIG:  The meetings that we had were there, I think at that time when we would go there, they didn't take us to where there offices were.  They would have a separate building, that they had rented or leased or whatever, and that's where all of the meetings took place and everything.  So, again, that was a product of being back in '73, whereas later, when my husband went to Russia, they saw all kinds of things.  They saw hardware, they went to different places, to their actual offices and that sort of thing.  When we went in '73, I never saw where they had their offices or anything.  Everything was done in a separate building, and that was kind of just to keep us away from things and so they could keep it isolated and whatever.  They, their offices at that time, I think, were out on the outskirts of Moscow, but I never saw them.  And of course their launch facility was not, not really anywhere near Moscow, and we didn't go there.  Occasionally there were people from the NASA delegation who would be taken to some of those places but it would be a special occasion, very high level, one or two people that they might go and show them things, but the group in general, we didn't see any of that back in the 70s.

 

SCHNAUTZ:  When, when it was opposite and the Russians came here, were they allowed access to more, would you say, than we were?

 

CRAIG:  Yeah, probably, more so.  They probably were.  Although, you know, it was still, it was not, not, not a normal working relationship like you might expect.  There was still an awful lot of holding back, I think, on both sides.  But I would say, probably, they were allowed more access than, than we were on the other side.

 

SCHNAUTZ:  After that on your biography, you talked about working for the office of the Director.

 

CRAIG:  Yes, after, after the Apollo-Soyuz Project, that was a one, one launch project and that was in 1975.  So, after that took place, that, that office was disbanded.  And I went to work briefly over in the personnel office and then went to work in the office of the Director, and I worked for a fellow, who was the assistant director, I think?  Associate director?  I don't remember the titles anymore.  He was like third in command, I guess you would say.  There was a director and a deputy-director, and then he was kind of the next level down from that.

 

SCHNAUTZ:  At JSC?

 

CRAIG:  At JSC. 

 

SCHNAUTZ:  Going back to Apollo, what was your experience like during the first lunar landing?  Everyone remembers where they were, but I'm sure it was more meaningful for you.

 

CRAIG:  I was at home with my parents.  I was still living at home at that time, but, but I remember staying up all night [laughter] and watching it and that sort of thing, which I think probably 90% of the people in Houston did.  But, but it was, it was a real thrill.  Nothing that, in my opinion, NASA has ever done since Apollo has even come close to what they did during the Apollo program.

 

SCHNAUTZ:  So even working there, do you think it was even more, more meaningful than if you had not been working there – working at JSC?

 

CRAIG:  I don't know.  It's hard to say.  It was, it was a pretty big thrill all over the world, so it's hard to say.

 

SCHNAUTZ:  What about during the Apollo 13 crisis? 

 

CRAIG:  Yeah, again, that was another one of those things that, that was, was in that case extremely scary.  And I was not at that point in time working directly in the Apollo program Office, so, I wasn't as close to what was going on as some other people were, but it was, it was another one of those things that really made you realize the seriousness of what we were doing.  It was a very scary, scary evening. 

 

SCHNAUTZ:  What were your duties as a Contract Specialist?

 

CRAIG:  When I went to work in Procurement again, I had worked as a secretary in Procurement many years before, I went to work as a Contract Specialist.  And basically what that is, is you issue requests for proposals, you negotiate contracts, write contracts, and then deal with the contractors as they perform the contracts.  When I went in to that, I went into it as a training program, so I did a lot of, there was a lot of training and a lot of course work that they had me do in addition to my day-to-day functions for the first, oh, I would say, year at least.  It was an interesting job. 

 

I worked first in an area called Small Purchases, which is kind of where they started people out in training for that type of work.  And it, and it was just what it says, it was smaller purchases that were less complicated.  You didn't have to know quite as many regulations.  And then during the time I was doing that, they had me take a contract law course in order to do that kind of work there’s just thousands of rules and regulations and laws that you have to be aware of and at least know where to go find them in a given situation and understand how they work.  So it was a real learning experience for me.  I really enjoyed it.  I worked in Contracts and Procurements the rest of my NASA career.  I was a Contracting Officer when I retired.

 

SCHNAUTZ:  Are these contracts between NASA and builders of the equipment like the space shuttle?

 

CRAIG:  In a lot cases they are, yes.  The area that I worked in most after I left the small purchases training area was supporting what we called Aircraft Operations, which is out at Ellington Field, and it was a lot of aircraft type contracts.  Things like maintaining, of course, the aircraft.  We had one very large contract.  It was with a company located at Ellington and at a couple of other sites where we had airplanes, and they maintained the airplanes, kept them flying, and that sort of thing.  But we also did a lot of other different things.  One of the bigger projects that I worked on, we actually bought a 747 aircraft and modified it to make a shuttle, a second shuttle carrier aircraft—the one that carries the shuttle.  And so that was a pretty big project to, to go out and first of all, find and select and figure out how to buy a 747 because the government never, we didn’t, working for the federal government, you never had the money to just go say, “Okay, here’s the check, here’s the money.”  So, to buy an airplane, where there used to selling them and saying, “Okay, here’s your airplane, we want our money.”  We spent a lot of time and effort figuring out ways to do that within the constraints of the government budgets.  And we had to work out special provisions that had never really been done before in order to do that. 

 

And then, of course, the modification of the aircraft was real interesting.  They basically gutted the entire interior of the aircraft and we went up in it after they had taken everything out and it looked like you were in a big bowling alley or something.  It was a huge, huge thing.  But, that was probably one of the bigger projects that I worked on.  We also did a lot of modifications to smaller aircraft, the shuttle training aircrafts, which are the Gulf Stream aircrafts which they modify them to make them fly like a shuttle for training purposes.  When the pilots fly them, they actually, when they’re coming in they, they are modified so they will drop to land like the shuttle.  They have to be highly modified to do that.  We did a lot of modifications to those airplanes to get them to do what they wanted them to do.  So, it was pretty interesting.  It was an interesting area to work in.  I pretty much stayed in that field most of the time I was in Procurement.  I did a little bit of buying computers and that sort of thing, but most of it was aircraft related.

 

SCHNAUTZ:  I’m just curious about when you talked about gutting the inside.  The shuttle actually rides on top.  What is in the inside?

 

CRAIG:  Well, the inside, of course when the bought the airplane it was just—the one we bought was from Japan Airlines, so, it was just your basic 747 with all the seats.  But they take everything out except they left a few seats in for crew members if they were flying and needed to carry extra people or something.  But they totally beef up the structure of the airplane to enable it to carry this aircraft on top of it.  So, it really, it was a huge airplane and it’s totally modified with all this extra structure put in which enables it to carry the shuttle on top of it.  Once they’re through with it there’s not much on the inside because they really don’t want all, any extra weight other than what you got with the shuttle sitting on top of it.  So, there’s not a whole lot inside other than up at the front a few passengers’ seats which were left, maybe ten, fifteen, something.  I don’t remember the number.  But that’s really about all that’s on the inside of the airplane other than the normal cockpit area for the pilots.

 

SCHNAUTZ:  So, these are planes that have flown before?

 

CRAIG:  Yes, yes, it was a used, it was a Japan Airlines 747 that they were taking out of service and had put up for sale.  So, it, it was your basic commercial airliner, is what it was.

 

SCHNAUTZ:  As a Contracting Officer, was that, is that pretty much the same as a Contract Specialist?

 

CRAIG:  It’s the same in the same field.  The difference in being a Contracting Officer is like a next step up career-wise from being a Contract Specialist, and you have a lot more, a lot of authority and also a lot more responsibility.  You’re the person actually signing the contracts and responsible for making sure that everything is legal before you sign your name to any contract or any modification.  You’re the one whose neck is on the line if there’s something wrong with it.  As a Contract Specialist, you’re the one doing all the work and getting all the information and pulling it all together, but you, your name is not on the document.  So, if somebody, somebody comes back and says, “Boy, you really messed up this contract,” they’re not going to go the Contract Specialist, they’re going to go to the Contracting Officer and say, “Why did you sign this the way it is?”  So it’s, it’s the same job, you have to know the same things, the same, same level of knowledge of laws and of government regulations and procurement regulation, but it’s a different level of authority and responsibility.

 

SCHNAUTZ:  How much knowledge did you actually have to have about the equipment?  Was it more towards the legal side?

 

CRAIG:  It was more towards the regulation and legal side, but in a lot of cases, you had to, you had to have a pretty good knowledge of the equipment in order to know even what laws and regulations to apply.  So, you had, you had to know—clearly, you don’t know as much as the people that are the engineers and the people who are actually working with the equipment, but you had to know enough to be able to talk to them about it and find out what you needed to know and understand enough to know.  Because in a lot of cases there are some laws and regulations that only apply to certain things.  So, you had to have a pretty good conversant knowledge of it, anyway.  Obviously, there were a lot of things you didn’t know and you’d get to something and you’d have to call the technical people and say, “Hey, what does this mean or what is this?”

 

SCHNAUTZ:  You rose then pretty much through NASA.  Started out at a secretarial job and went on to become a Contracting Officer.  Was that unusual?

 

CRAIG:  Not really, I wouldn’t say it’s unusual.  At the time that I [was] hired on, NASA was hiring quite a lot of people.  They were still gearing up, and they, as years went on there were different things that happened as far as freezes where they quit hiring, that sort of thing.  They reached a point in time where a lot of, of the hiring or the promotions to people were within the agency, people that were either in the secretarial or administrative field went into these training, like mine was a training program, they went into these training programs where they would take you and train you for various functions.  In my case it was Procurement.  But there were a number, probably a lot more, people in the secretarial field who went into, what we called, administrative positions, and they became, some were in the budget, some were in personnel, various things, administering different offices and that sort of thing.  There were probably a lot more that went into that field than went into contracts like I did.

 

SCHNAUTZ:  Okay, sort of changing topics.  I was thinking NASA, even today, is a very male-dominated organization at the higher levels and the different positions.  I was wondering what it was like being a woman working in that type of atmosphere, especially back when you started?

 

CRAIG:  Well, when, I guess when I first started, of course I was fairly young, and that really wasn’t a problem or an issue for me with most people.  There are always a few people I guess in any situation that I would call “chauvinist,” and you had that all the way through until the time I retired.  But I would say that was not true of most of the people that I worked with.  I did find that there weren’t as many women in higher-level positions when I was at NASA, and I think that may be a little less true today, although I’m not sure.  I’ve been retired now for several years.  When I was mid-way, I would say mid-way through my career, people that I personally knew that were higher, higher-level, women within NASA, a handful there at JSC, and that’s out of a lot of people. 

 

I think there are more now, and I think in a way that’s probably good and bad.  I think there, there for a while, was a push to put women into the higher-level positions, and in some cases, they didn’t do it real wisely.  And there were a few cases that I was aware of where they did that and they didn’t really put the right person.  In their push to put women in, they didn’t, they didn’t always put the right woman or the right person.  They might select a woman over someone else who would have been better for the job.  But that happens, I’m sure, in any organization.  Unfortunately, the right person is not always selected [laughter] for the job in any case.  But I think that’s changed some now.  I think there are more women in higher positions.

 

SCHNAUTZ:  I was going to ask if you felt that how did you feel that atmosphere at NASA changed over the course of your employment there with female workers of just, in general?

 

CRAIG:  Well, I guess, first of all let’s address the “with female workers.”  I think there was, as my career progressed, there were a lot more women who went in to various fields such as the contracting field.  At the time that, for example, I worked in Procurement early on in my career as a secretary in the division office, and there were very few women professionals in Procurement.  It was mostly males.  By the time I went into Procurement, I would say it was probably, if anything, the other way around.  I don’t know the numbers, but I would say, my perception is, if is was not equally male-female at the Contracting Officer levels, it was at least, it may have been more women than men.  And that may be true now.  I don’t know how that’s changed since I retired.  As far as NASA in general, when I first went to work there, there was a level of enthusiasm that I found was lacking the last several years before I retired.  I think when the Apollo program ended, it was the reason a lot of people hired on at NASA, and once it was over, they were looking for something else to do but they didn’t have the same level of enthusiasm that they had had during the Apollo program.

 

SCHNAUTZ:  About, about what you just said about the enthusiasm going down.  I was going to ask you about that, if there was a noticeable difference between the atmosphere during the Apollo project when great things are happening?

 

CRAIG:  I think so and it was gradual thing I think, too.  There just didn’t seem to be the same focus after that.  The Shuttle program came along and it, it didn’t quite catch the same enthusiasm, I guess, as, as the Apollo program had.  The other thing that I, I noticed, and I think a lot of other people I worked with did, in later years when I worked at NASA, it seemed that there was an awful lot of bureaucracy.  NASA started out as this young, vital agency and as it grew older, and I think it’s true probably of all other agencies, but as it grew older it became more and more entrenched in itself.  It became harder to get things done, just extremely difficult in some cases to do what everybody would agree, “Here’s the right thing to do,” but you just couldn’t get there.  And, that is a real source of frustration to a lot of the younger people. 

 

When I left, I retired and there were a number of people I worked with in Procurement and Contracts that were younger than me.  They had had a point in time when they were allowed to hire quite a few people, and so they had gone out and hired a lot of kids right out of college.  [They] came in real enthusiastic and really worked hard and everything, and some of them had been there, by the time I retired, they were there ten years.  They were maybe between ten and fifteen years.  They were really unhappy.  Their attitude was, “Geez, I’ve already devoted ten or fifteen years, I’ve got that tied up in the government retirement system.  I wish I’d left five years ago or ten years ago.  I wish I’d left when I first got dissatisfied, because now I feel like I can’t leave and I’m miserable.”  And there was just an awful lot of that, and unfortunately, the people that I’ve talked to since I’ve retired, that feeling is still there.  And I don’t know, obviously since we live so far away now I don’t have as close of contact with the people and I don’t know how many of those younger people, that were such really good people and really enthusiastic, how many of them are still there.  A lot of them may still be there, a lot of them may not be.  There were a lot that did leave.  There were quite a few that did choose even though they had their eight, ten, twelve years in, to say, “Okay, I, the handwriting is on the wall, this is not what I want to do until I’m ready to retire.  I’m going to go do something else, even if it hurts.” 

 

SCHNAUTZ:  When do you think that change happened?

 

CRAIG:  I don’t know.  It was a gradual thing.  I would say the last, probably the last ten years that I was there, and I retired in ’93.  So, I would say, and there again I’m just guessing, but I would say the last ten years.  It wasn’t something that happened over night.  It was a gradual, a gradual thing. 

 

SCHNAUTZ:  But it wasn’t immediately after Apollo?

 

CRAIG:  No, I don’t think so.  No, I don’t think so.  I think it was more as the agency aged and became more entrenched in itself, like I said.  Things were done not because they were the right thing to do, but because they would make my organization bigger or whatever.  There were a lot of different reasons, but people at the working level felt like, “I’m not being allowed to do things the ways I should be allowed to, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”  There’s a real sense of frustration when you see things happening like that and you can’t do anything about it.  And I think that, I would say at least, over the ten years before I retired because by the time I retired, like I say, it was affecting, a lot of people when I retired would say, “Gee, I wish that I could retire because I really can’t see doing this another fifteen years or twenty years or whatever. 

 

SCHNAUTZ:  Was any of that, do you think, attributable to budgets being cut in the space program?

 

CRAIG:  Oh, I think that’s part of it.  Yeah, you get a lot of frustration from people when—and part of it’s not even so much budget, oh, I guess you can call it “budget cutting,” but a lot of it is priority shifting.  One of the things that was most frustrating to me, working in the area that I did, was that you’d work on a project and it would be something that everybody agreed, “We need to do this,” and you go off and put all this energy into, and I’m not talking about myself necessarily, but myself and other people, especially the technical people, they would go off and put all this energy into something and then either the money would go away or somebody somewhere else would just decide, “Let’s don’t do that after all.  Let’s take that money.  We’ve still got the money, but now we’ve changed out mind and we want to go do this.”  And that is very disheartening for people after a while, when that happens over and over.  They really put their heart and soul into working hard on something and never see it come to fruition.

 

SCHNAUTZ:  Changing gears, you met your husband at work?

 

CRAIG:  I did.  Actually, not at work.  We both worked at NASA.  I actually met him, a friend I worked with who also worked at NASA introduced us.  I really, although he worked in the Apollo program at the same time I did, he was in another area of it and I really did not, did not know him, had never met him.  There were a lot of people working on Apollo at that time.  And, I had a friend who said, “Hey, I want you to meet this guy that I know.  You’re single and he’s single.  I think, I think y’all might like each other.”  And so, [Laughter] it’s like, “Okay” and so I had lunch with him I think or something.  But, it was one of those kind of things.  We were introduced by a mutual friend.

 

SCHNAUTZ:  I also noticed that you obviously continued to work after marriage, and I was wondering if that was unusual at the time.

 

CRAIG:  I don’t think so.  I say that and I’m sure that there were some people who did.  But by the time Jerry and I got married, I had worked long enough that I had my own income, my own retirement.  It was really not anything I ever even considered, not continuing to work, at that point.  I liked what I was doing, and I’ve always said that if I was going to work anywhere I would work at NASA.  When I retired I had a few people ask about, “Well, what are you going to do?”  And I said, “Well, I’m retiring.  If I wanted to keep working I’d stay where I am.”  Yes, it’s frustrating and all that but I can’t think of anywhere else I’d rather be working.  I really never considered, considered that.  I had been married once before for about five years, and I was single long enough that I figured out that I needed to be able to take care of myself.  And I think that’s true of a lot of women my age or women I knew when I was working at NASA.  They weren’t just working until they got married for somebody else to take care of them.  They intended to work when they went to work and intended to work until they could retire and have their own retirement and their own independence, so to speak. 

 

SCHNAUTZ:  I was wondering if families at NASA,  if there was much socialization between them or were home life and work life pretty separate?

 

CRAIG:  I would say quite a lot of socialization.  Now at the time that, Jerry and I lived in Baytown, so we did not live in the Clear Lake area.  So, there was a little less socialization on our part, at least in the sense of weeknights and that sort of thing, although we had a lot of friends and still do have a lot of friends that we still keep in touch with and that we did have social lives with over the years.  I think there was a little more of that for people that lived in the NASA area because in a lot of cases they were neighbors.  And that, of course, makes a difference.  Their kids went to school together and that sort of thing.  Since, when Jerry and I married, his children were in school in Baytown, and so we never, really never considered living in the Clear Lake area because his kids were in Baytown and we wanted to be able to spend time, more time with them.

 

SCHNAUTZ:  I don’t know much about Houston, but is that quite a commute from Baytown to NASA?

 

CRAIG:  It was about twenty-five miles.  From where we lived to work was about twenty-five miles.

 

SCHNAUTZ:  Was traffic bad?

 

CRAIG:  It was not too bad.  Where we lived, we went, and if you’re not familiar with Houston it wouldn’t mean anything to you, but we went into work on Highway 146 and the only problem that we had traffic-wise was that there was a tunnel there at Baytown that we had to go through, and if there was not a problem at the tunnel, it took about twenty-five minutes to go twenty-five miles, or thirty minutes.  It really was not a bad drive at all, and not a heavy-traffic drive, so, it was actually a pretty pleasant drive.  But if there was a stalled car or a wreck or anything else, the tunnel would might be closed for hours, and so that was our source of frustration.  And they were building a big bridge, and we kept saying, “They’ll never get it finished.  We’ll be retired.”  And sure enough, about a year after we retired they finished the bridge.  So, it would really be an easy commute now, but that was our big problem then, was that tunnel, because you never knew when you left in the morning if you were going to have a problem, and you never knew when you worked in the afternoon if we were going to be home in thirty minutes or and hour and a half.

 

SCHNAUTZ:  So, what brought you to Junction from Houston?

 

CRAIG:  After we retired, we had intended to stay where we were in Baytown.  We lived on about six acres there and had a nice place and intended to stay there.  And then after we retired, we bought a small travel trailer, and we did a little traveling, and we had both, when we were kids, had come to the Hill Country, [we] hadn’t done much of that when we were working because we never really had that time to do anything like that.  And we were camping up at Fredericksburg one evening, and we were sitting there talking and we said, “Why are we still in Baytown?” [laughter]  The pollution’s bad, the traffic in Houston is terrible, and, of course, the humidity and all that, and we’ve both always had allergy problems and all that.  And so we said, “Now that we’re not working, and we were making a living there, now that we’re both retired.”  So we started looking around, and we looked for well over a year, looked all over the Hill Country, and this just happened to be a particular piece of property that we found that was what we wanted.  We wanted live water and we have a beautiful creek – which we’ll show you if you have time before you leave.  It’s just right back there below our deck.  We have a creek that runs all the way through our property and its very difficult to find acreage in the Hill Country that has a creek on it.  And so, when we found this spot we said, “Okay, this is it.” [laughter]  But we literally looked all over the Hill Country.  We didn’t start out with Junction in mind, it was just kind of as we looked that was where we ended up.

 

SCHNAUTZ:  It’s quite a contrast from Houston.  [laughter]

 

CRAIG:  Yes, it’s wonderful.

 

SCHNAUTZ:  Just a kind of general question, how do you feel about the state of the space program today?

 

CRAIG:  I feel like it’s in a pretty sad state, frankly.  I, I guess I, having been there through the beginning of shuttle and everything, I kind of feel like they’ve done all they can do with the shuttle.  When they, when I see the things that they do when they go up on these missions it’s like, “OK, been there, done that.  Why are we doing that again?  They’ve done that.”  I don’t know – the Space Station thing, I think, is something that needed to be done, but it’s taken so long to get to the point of doing it that it makes me wonder if it will ever really be anything viable.  It started out as something.  It was a good idea that ought to be done, but that was fifteen, no, fifteen years ago?  We were, and I didn’t mention this earlier in our careers, but Jerry worked in Washington for about a year on a task force for Space Station.  During that time period I went up there and worked for about six months and worked in the Procurement Office there at NASA Headquarters.  And that was in 1983.  So, we’re now twenty-seven, [laughter] no, that’s not right, seventeen years now.  Anyway, that was in ’83 and that was when they approved the Space Station and we’re still sitting here today and it hasn’t happened.

 

SCHNAUTZ:  Do you think more the fault of the U.S. or of Russia or both together?

 

CRAIG:  I think it’s the U.S., frankly.  The Russians were ready, ready to help with the Space Station and they, they had so many political changes and turmoil over there.  And I think the United States should have stepped in and, not necessarily NASA maybe, but the United States government as a whole should have stepped in and done some things when all of the changes started occurring in Russia.  They did not do that.  Changes are now occurring again in Russia and I think politically it’s something that, that we’ll all pay for down the road.  I think, I think the time was right to go in and help them to get on their feet.  The Russian people have suffered tremendously as a result of all the upheavals of going from communism to changes that have happened, and it’s still going on.  It seems like every time you turn around there’s another major upheaval in Russia, and I think the United States missed a big opportunity to prop them up and help them.  And I think, had they done that, I don’t think we’d be having the problems today that we’re having with Russian lack of timely support on Space Station.

 

SCHNAUTZ:  So, do you think in a way that the fall of communism in Russia made them less able?

 

CRAIG:  I think it did initially because they, everything fell apart.  They had no way to do anything.  And the horror stories you heard were as simple as washing machines.  The government had always run everything and if your washing machine broke, they got parts from here and here and here, and now “here and here and here” don’t talk to each other, can’t communicate, and you can’t get your washing machine fixed.  If that’s the case with washing machines, it has got to affect everything else.  So, yeah, I think everything just kind of fell apart, and they didn’t have a structure in place to get it all together again, and I think that’s where the United States could have helped them and instead we kind of sat back and watched them flounder.  And, of course, the Russian people were the ones on a day to day basis suffering for it.

 

SCHNAUTZ:  What do you see as the space program’s future?

 

CRAIG:  I don’t know.  Again, I’ve been away from it enough that I don’t know, I don’t know.  I think the Space Station, if they ever get it going really, that they can probably do some good things.  I just don’t have a lot of confidence that it’s ever going to do what they think it’s going to do for them.

 

SCHNAUTZ:  Do you ever think that the U.S. space program will get to Mars or do you think that’s an unrealistic possibility?

 

CRAIG:  I think that, I think that it’s a possible thing to do.  I don’t, I don’t see it happening the way things are being run right now within NASA.  Maybe forty years, fifty years down the road there won’t be a NASA, there will be a something else and they’ll figure out a way to do it.  I don’t, I can’t see it happening the way things are going today.  Which is not to say it shouldn’t happen.  [laughter]  It just doesn’t look to me as if the things are in place to make it happen.

 

SCHNAUTZ:  Do you think if the task was to go to the moon today, do you think it would be possible for the space program, the way it exists at the current time?

 

CRAIG:  No.  No, I don’t.  I think [that] part of what made it possible to go to the Moon was the fact that it was a new challenge and it was a new, a new organization and it brought in all these new people.  I think if that task were given to the agency today, they, they would do the same thing they’ve done with the Space Station.  It would flounder around for years and years and years.  [laughter]

 

SCHNAUTZ:  Due to bureaucratization and restrictions?

 

CRAIG:  Right.  Right. [It begins to rain] Rain!  Rain!  We may have to celebrate it’s raining and we need it so desperately here. 

 

SCHNAUTZ:  [laughter]  Is there anything else you would want to add that I haven’t asked you about.

 

CRAIG:  I don’t think so.  Nothing that comes to mind anyway. 

 

SCHNAUTZ:  Then, I thank you for participating in this.

 

CRAIG:  You’re welcome.

 

SCHNAUTZ:  Sure.

 

CRAIG:  Thank you for bringing the rain.