NASA Craig, Jerry W. - June 2, 2000
Interview with Jerry Craig
Interviewer: Brandy Schnautz
Date of Interview: June 2, 2000
Location: Craig home, Junction, Texas
BRANDY SCHNAUTZ: Today is June 2, 2000. This oral history interview with Jerry Craig is being conducted at his 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. Mr. 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?
JERRY CRAIG: Yes, I am.
SCHNAUTZ: You are originally from Texas?
CRAIG: Yeah. I was born and raised. Actually, I was born in Lynn County and then raised mostly in the Houston area.
SCHNAUTZ: Where is Lynn County?
CRAIG: Lynn County is up near Lubbock.
SCHNAUTZ: Lubbock? I saw that in you bio, but I wasn’t sure where Lynn County was.
CRAIG: I wasn’t either. We just made a trip up to Palo Duro Canyon, and we were up in that neck of the woods, and I saw the places that, where I went as a child. My dad was from Chillicothe. You ever heard of that?
SCHNAUTZ: No.
CRAIG: A little-bitty town. We went to Chillicothe [and] found my granddad’s old place. He had carved it up into a subdivision. And so sure enough, we went to city hall and nobody knew anything. And I said, “Well, the name of it his place was called the Craig Edition.” “Oh, Craig Edition, yeah, it’s still here!” [They] got this old map. So I went out to the car and got a camera and took a picture of the map. It was a lot of fun.
SCHNAUTZ: You attended the University of Texas. I was wondering if it was natural for you to go there or did you, did you always know that you would got to UT?
CRAIG: No. Actually, when I was in high school I was a reasonably good student, but I was also interested in athletics. So, I had visions of being a college football star. And I really thought I’d go to Rice. And then Rice didn’t offer me a scholarship. So, I thought, “Mmm, now where.” Well, my mother actually said, “You should go to the University of Texas. It’s the state university. It’s the best university in the state.” And I never had been much of a fan of Texas, and I drug my feet. Then I came home one night from a date, it was a Sunday night, and she met me at the door and said that the last bus to Austin leaves at midnight, and you’re going to be on it.
So, she took me down to the bus station, and I got on the bus and rode all night up to Austin. Got off the bus, and they, at that time the university was a lot of temporary buildings, remember, this was after, it was the mid-fifties, so, it was after World War II, and a lot of the old barracks buildings had been transferred to state property. So, I made my way down to the campus there and found this place and washed my face and took the entrance exams. They came up that afternoon with my clothes and we looked around and found a place to live. That’s how I got to the University of Texas. [laughter] But I loved it after being there for a while. It’s a wonderful university.
SCHNAUTZ: I was going to ask what your experience was like there. Was it positive?
CRAIG: Oh, yeah. Of course, I wanted to be an engineer without really knowing exactly what engineers did. Because engineering was not that well known a profession, and I think the Apollo program probably put engineering on the map in terms of people becoming aware of the contributions of engineering to society and so forth. Anyway, yeah, I really liked living in Austin and probably would have lived in Austin except, back in those days, Austin had no jobs. The only employers were the university and the state. So I went on and got a masters degree and toyed with the idea of teaching and staying there. I probably would have got on somewhere else. In fact, I had several offers from other universities for Ph.D. work and I could have come back to the university and taught, but I didn’t.
While I was there, I worked at a place called the Defense Research Lab. I don’t know, it’s probably not still there. I might be, though. Anyway, I worked with some pretty outstanding people over there. A lot of the university professors, the better applied engineering professors, were on contract to them to do consulting work, if you will.
SCHNAUTZ: With the Defense Research Lab?
CRAIG: With the Defense Research Lab. Which was affiliated with the University of Texas. In other words, if you worked there, you were a university employee. So I did that my junior, senior, and masters years. And that was a lot of fun. That was a good introduction to engineering because we were doing, in part, military research, classified research. And, we built the original radar counter measures that were, have been used, they still are used [on] what you call chaff rockets, we did the work on what the little bi-poles would do to radars looking at them, and then designed and developed techniques for dispersing that chaff to make it appear that an aircraft was somewhere where it wasn’t. And we also did the original infrared countermeasures. Where infrared now, of course, is the infrared seeker that can look at the jet engine of an airplane and hone a missile in on it and kill it. We did the original work that allowed our airplanes somewhat immune to that because you can release infrared rockets, countermeasures, so that the infrared seekers will be deceived and think the airplane is someplace where it’s not.
Anyway, we did all that back in the, in the mid-fifties, early sixties. I almost did stay in Austin because, those people, about the time I was doing my masters work, formed a company called Tracor. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of Tracor. They begged me to just stay at DRL for a few months because the contract that you’ve been working on, which we had with the Air Force. Back at Patterson Air Force Base, [It is unclear as to whether he is referring to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio or Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado. Nonetheless, either one would have meant a relocation out of Texas.] [inaudible] is going to be transferred to our company. And you can go there, and we can pay you a lot more money, and you’ll actually be able to live in decent housing and so forth. I really thought I should have done that, but I didn’t. But all of those men, Marshall O’Grest, Gene Smith, who’s the guy that recently died, the president of the company? Damn, the mind is a terrible thing to waste.
Anyway, they were outstanding people. And then later offered me a job again, a year or so later after I had been at Exxon for a year of so. They tried to get me to come back, and I went back down there and interviewed, but by then they had their own little plant. Actually it was where the, this Mexican restaurant used to be when I was in college.
SCHNAUTZ: In Austin?
CRAIG: Yeah. I was about five or six blocks from the campus. It was down on, maybe, 16th Street or something. What was it called? El Toro or something. Good, good place to eat. Well, anyway, they bought that building and they were using it. But, at that time, I had already, the appeal of Apollo had taken a strong hold. So, I really wasn’t interested.
SCHNAUTZ: This was when you were working at Exxon?
CRAIG: Well, I worked at Exxon for about two years, right after I left Austin, as a mechanical engineer, project engineer. And we designed, developed, built chemical processing plants. Which, again, back in those days the technology of chemical manufacture was pretty new. And so there were a lot of things people didn’t know and they were just learning, and that was kind of interesting work, but on the other hand, I wasn’t completely happy with it because when I was at the university I was number one in my graduating class. I thought I was pretty smart. I figured I could do about anything in terms of you just give me a problem and I’ll go solve it. And there really weren’t a whole lot of problems to solve. I mean there were a few, but they had to be spread around, and most of the engineers there were what are, what I call “cookbook engineers,” because we had standards and you went to the standards book and it said, “You got this problem, use this application,” and so forth. So, there wasn’t a whole lot of room for computer modeling. Computers were brand new back then.
SCHNAUTZ: What was your major interest in the field?
CRAIG: Well, I was a mechanical engineer.
SCHNAUTZ: I meant, you were working with chemical processing, was that your, an interest?
CRAIG: No, no. I was not a chem engineer, I was a mechanical engineer. And, of course, the design of the processing equipment was a mechanical engineering problem. The design of the process was a chemical engineering problem. And I got a clue right away because we got to Exxon, I was only there a few months when they said, “We want to send you, we think you’re doing really good and we’re excited about your potential and we want you to go to this chemical engineering practice school.” And I said, “What’s that?” And they said, “Well, that’s where we send all our new chem engineers [to] teach them how to do Exxon-type stuff the Exxon way.” And I said, “Why do you want to do that?” And they said, “Well, you’ll have a lot better potential for advancement if you can do chem engineering work.” And I said, “Why didn’t you tell me that before you hired me?” “Oh, well there’s plenty of opportunities for mechanical engineers, too!” So, I went to there practice school, but for me that was kind of the writing on the wall. Here I am competing with guys with Ph.D.s in chem engineering and I’ve been to practice school! [laughter] And I’m thinking, “How many arms do I need to have tied behind my back before I lose this race?” So, I started looking around then.
But, anyway, back to DRL, that was a pretty exciting time. We did some interesting things there. We did, in fact, back then, you won’t believe this, but Georgetown was a country town. It’s amazing to me that you go up there now and you can hardly tell where Austin ends and Georgetown begins. So, we used to fly up there and do our radar countermeasures research. We had a light aircraft and we’d use their airport. We had a little building, a temporary building that we left out there and we left our radar equipment in it. And we come up there and activate the radar and then we’d fly over there and drop radar chaff or whatever equipment we were trying to validate. The Air Force would send B-58s over, and we’d look at them and we’d look at our radar simulation of it, and validate the simulation and so forth.
And, my career was almost short lived, because we had a really good pilot. This guy, his name was Phil Zeek and he was a bush pilot. His daddy had grown up down in Central America flying stuff in and out of the jungle, and Zeek started flying when he was about nine or something. So, he could just do anything with a light airplane. And, so, I was always quite comfortable. I would just sit back there and doze, and we’d do these maneuvers, because you had to do these real low altitude maneuvers to pick up equipment from the ground. We’d dangle a line down and they’d run out, and Zeek, Zeek would do a tight bank, and they’d attach things to the line, and we’d pull it in and so forth. And it never seemed dangerous, but looking back [laughter] it was. And, so, one day I showed up and they said, “Oh, Zeek’s gone.” “Where’s Zeek?” “Oh, Zeek is smuggling things into the country.” [laughter] No. They said, “Zeek has bought his own airplane, an old military surplus B-25, and he and his partner are going to fly things from Europe to the United States.” And I thought, “Zeek’s a smuggler.” [laughter] Anyway. [swats fly, misses] Missed him.
Anyway, so they, “We have a new pilot. This guy is really good. He’s a marine pilot.” “Uh oh.” That’s what I’d say today, “Uh oh.” [laughter] Anyway, so, he and I get into the airplane and head down to Georgetown, and about half way down there he loops the airplane. Well, this airplane is not an aerobatic airplane. It’s a Cessna 172, and I said, “What the hell are you doing!” I was a pilot. I had taken some pilot training. I didn’t have my license, yet, but I said, “What the hell are you doing?” “I just wanted to see what it would do.” That should have been a clue right there. [laughter] I should have bailed out. Anyway, once we got down there I found out he didn’t know how to do any of the maneuvers, and, in fact, he had never flown the airplane until the day before.
So, we’re out there, and he’s trying to do this, this maneuver I was describing a while ago, and the stall alarm is going off, so, we’re right at stall speed, and we’re about one hundred feet off the ground. And he’s trying to and the guys are running around on the ground trying to catch up with the airplane, and all of the sudden I felt the airplane stall. And I thought, “Oh, shit.” And the people on the ground said we missed the ground by about ten feet, and it was, of course, the airplane stalled and fell off of one wing, and fortunately he did have the presence of mind to push the nose over and gain speed and pull up, and we survived. [laughter] That was the end of my flying duties. I came back to Austin [and said], “I ain’t gonna fly with that guy again! If Zeek comes back, get Zeek. I’ll fly with him.” But that was and interesting time. I really liked Austin. I liked the university and still do. Well, my daughter went. My son would have gone but he made lousy grades.
SCHNAUTZ: So, Exxon followed?
CRAIG: Yeah, I worked there, and while I was at Exxon, let me tell you. When I was a kid, I was a real space buff. I used to read every book there was about space travel and so forth. So, in my high school yearbook I wrote, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I wrote, “I want to be the first man on the Moon.” So, I had visions of space travel being a reality in my life even as a very young person. Anyway, when Jack Kennedy announced that we were going to go to the Moon, boy, I was excited. And so I immediately found out how to write to—at that time I don’t know if it was called NASA or not, probably was I guess. Yeah, I guess it was called NASA then. Anyway, to apply. So, I got an application and sent it in, and at that time Langley [Field, Virginia] is where the space task force group was located. I sent my application in and then sat by the phone anxiously awaiting the call which never came. But every now and then I get a little card from Langley saying, “We have you application and we’re considering it. Please be patient.”
And then one day it was announced that they were going to move the Center of Apollo to Houston. So, I thought, “This is providential!” So, sure enough, the first thing you knew, there was a thing in the paper, “The employment office is now open in Houston.” So, I went in and interviewed in several different parts of the Center, and finally picked the Apollo Program Office as the place I wanted to work and went to work. And about six months later I got a little card back from Langley saying, “Sorry, we can’t use you.” [laughter] But, yeah, I quit Exxon to go to work for a fair amount less money just simply because I wanted to be a part of the Apollo program.
SCHNAUTZ: What year was that?
CRAIG: That would have been ’62.
SCHNAUTZ: So, the Apollo program was beginning. Was the Mercury program still [operational]?
CRAIG: We were flying Mercuries at the time. The first few weeks I was there we went down to the Cape [Canaveral, Florida], went through a Mercury spacecraft while it was undergoing checkout, and talked to some of the crew and some of the ops [operations] people who were fiddling around with it. That was actually a benefit to Apollo, the early stages of Apollo, having Mercury and Gemini flying. It kept, what I call, the institutional part of NASA out of the way. A lot of people wouldn’t agree with this, but we got to the Moon almost in spite of the operations people.
SCHNAUTZ: Do you think most of the work was done?
CRAIG: Most of the work was done by the contractors. I mean, the contractors, the industry, actually designed and built the Apollo spacecraft. NASA doesn’t actually design and build anything. NASA kibitzes. And we have a large part of the institution out there that have been kibitzing for many years and obviously some parts of it are productive, but a lot of it isn’t. We waste an enormous amount of money with all of the layers of people that we inflict upon the program. But, like I said, for the first five years of the program, they were so busy flying Mercury and Gemini that they didn’t bother us much. They weren’t around very much.
SCHNAUTZ: What was your role in Apollo in the beginning?
CRAIG: Well, when I came to NASA, I went to work in the Apollo Spacecraft Program Office. That was the organization that was responsible for managing the contractors who were designing and building the spacecraft. When I first came, they had already selected what is now Rockwell, then called North American, and they were building the Command and Service Module. And the decision had just recently been made to do what was called “lunar orbit rendezvous.” Are you familiar with that? Do you know anything about the Apollo spacecraft?
SCHNAUTZ: Some.
CRAIG: A lunar orbit rendezvous meant that you launched the spacecraft in its assemblage on a Saturn V rocket, and then when it gets to the Moon, one part of it separates and goes to the Moon and does what is called a lunar orbit rendezvous. But there was another competitive way to do it which would have, which would have been a direct descent. You could have launched to the Moon and back and just shedding parts of it. So, there were other, other ways to go. The lunar orbit rendezvous was considered to be a little more risky, in the sense that there were more opportunities for failure, which could lose the crew.
SCHNAUTZ: So, they went with the riskier operation?
CRAIG: Yeah, mainly because it required a smaller rocket. To go, do the thing direct descent, you had to design something that was at the time called a Nova rocket. There was Saturn and there was Nova. Nova was a much larger rocket. Of course, the people in Huntsville, Alabama, were all favor, the Germans wanted to build the bigger rocket, and it would have been an enormous rocket. The Saturn V was an enormous rocket. So, that decision had just been made. They had just decided to go with the lunar orbit rendezvous. And so, that meant you were going to have a lunar module as a separate entity. So, that was plucked out of the Rockwell contract, the North American contract, was redefined so that they were responsible for the Command and Service Module, which is the part that goes to and from the Moon.
And then Grumman, while I was there, I was part of the selection team that selected Grumman to do the Lunar Module, which was really the most difficult. Well, people will argue with that. But in my mind the Lunar Module was the more difficult engineering challenge because weight was at a premium. To go to the surface of the Moon and back with integral propulsion and all the other subsystems it took to land and navigate back to the Command Service Module was, at that time, people thought it was like trying to find a needle in a haystack. But now days it looks pretty simple with the technology we have. But back then it was obviously not something that was easy to do.
SCHNAUTZ: I read that the thickness of the walls [of the Lunar Module] was like tin foil.
CRAIG: Yeah, they were. Well, they were thicker than that. Everything had to be super light. We had WIP, Weight Improvement Program. We had SWIP, Super Weight Improvement Program. It was a constant battle to stay within this hundred thousand pound injective weight allocation, which is what we agreed with the rocket design people we could design and build the spacecraft within. And so, there was a constant battle to stay within that weight allocation.
SCHNAUTZ: I also read in you biography that after the Apollo Spacecraft Program, you were the Chief of Systems Integration Branch. I was wondering what exactly that was?
CRAIG: Having started there in the Apollo program, as you would expect, there was a lot of growing pains for a new organization, such a large program. So, there was a lot of problems with management when I first arrived. A guy named Charlie Frick had been brought in from industry to head the office, the program. He didn’t last long. He never even bought a house. He left and then they had a temporary chief Bob Piland, who was an old Langley guy, and he didn’t really know anything about management. He learned a lot later but at that time didn’t.
And the program really took off when a guy named Joe Shea was hired. Joe Shea was a genius, and absolute, one of the few people I ever met who I could say was just an absolute genius. He had an incredible mind, an incredible intellect. He had a tremendous command of every aspect of the program, technically, managerially, and so forth. And he came in in probably about ’63, ’64 maybe, and by then we had already done a lot of the design work on the Command Service Module at North American and it was not very good. There was a lot of criticism. And so, Joe initiated something called the Block II Program, which was a way in which we could redesign the Apollo using some professionally drawn-up specifications. Actually, going at it from a requirement standpoint as opposed to the way these Langley guys went at things, which was, “Uhh, let’s put a little of this over here and a little of that over here.” Really, a rather amateurish way of approaching the program. And Joe went away from all that. He got us away from all that and we started the Block II. And Joe was the head of the program. He also recognized this institutional problem. The fact that we had all of these people out there working who had come over from Langley who were research people who wanted to dabble with the spacecraft – guys like Max Faget, Aleck Bond, and so forth. These were all people who were great guys, smart guys, but really not program people. They didn’t know much about starting with requirements and building the program.
Anyway, Joe organized the Center in a way that those people were petitioned off in a way that they couldn’t, that they couldn’t do any damage to the contractor. And people like me who worked for Joe, he would put in charge of specific problem areas, requirement areas, and so forth, so that we could try to use those people productively, and that worked pretty good.
And it went on for several years until we had the fire. And at the time of the fire, the fire was actually a Block I spacecraft, it was a spacecraft Joe Shea inherited which he recognized as a inferior design, all of us did. In fact, I was with Joe once in Washington on a fateful day when he went up and they were discussing whether or not to fly that spacecraft or not. It was at the Cape. They’d been using it as a tool to validate all of the check out all the provisions, the ground support equipment, the gantries, the launch platforms, and so forth, interface with the launch vehicle. And Joe’s position was, and I sat right there and heard him make a very eloquent appeal that we not launch that spacecraft. His position was that we’d already learned 95%, 99% of what we can learn from this spacecraft. It’s not the design we’re taking to the Moon. Why go to all the trouble to take the risk, and so forth, of launching that spacecraft when we’re going to replace it with the Block II – a much better spacecraft design after this mission. That’ll be the flight, that’ll be the bird that takes us to the Moon. Well, the politicians in Washington, George Miller, [Jim] Webb, so forth, said, “No. We need, we need to fly something to keep the public behind us. So, let’s go ahead and fly it. It won’t cost us much, so, let’s go ahead and fly it.”
And then a few months later, of course, we had the fire with the vehicle on the launch pad and that was the end of Joe Shea. Joe had to take the blame even though it was none of his doings. “None of his doings” – that’s a little too charitable, but it’s very difficult to look back at that and say, “If Joe hadn’t been there, if George Low had been there would George have recognized that we had this tremendous fire hazard associated with have 14.7 psi pressure in the cockpit?” Probably not, because the people we had who were supposed to know about that kind of thing at that time were the Safety, Reliability, Quality Assurance people, and those guys had a lot of data. If they’d had a little snap they’ve said, “Oh! That’s a big hazard!” In fact, we’d even had incidents in Mercury and Gemini where they had had ignition events and so forth, but fortunately nothing would burn. And, so, the people who should have recognized it, should have blown the whistle didn’t. That’s the ones they should have canned. But, instead, those were old Langley guys, and they just sort of moved them around to make it appear they had done something to them. And poor Joe took the blame.
Anyway, so Joe left, and then George Low came in, and George was another tremendous individual. I don't think he had the intellect that Joe Shea had, but he had leadership skills that were just phenomenal. And, of course, George Low is a legend. He's dead, but he was a fantastic leader, both during Apollo and for the agency later. I worked with George. Well, let me go back, since this is an interview about me. At the time of the fire, during that time leading up to the fire, I was an engineer working in a branch, in the Systems Engineering Division and really didn't have, I was the thermodynamics engineer in the program office, so, most of the thermal aspects of the spacecraft, I took the lead in. I invented a few neat things I can point at and say, "Oh, wow. That's great stuff." But, but didn't really have a leadership role.
And then after the fire, shortly after the fire, Joe Shea, I had done some things for Joe directly, which were well above my pay grade, but he, he thought highly of me. And, so, I had the opportunity to do that, and then after the fire occurred, Joe immediately got on an airplane, went down to the Cape and tried to organize the investigation so that we could make sure we knew exactly what had happened. And, I guess the next day, or maybe within twenty-four hours, he had called and said, "I want Jerry to come up here." And so I did, and he said, "I want you" he said, "We've got two people on this investigation board who are bona fide fire experts. One of them was a guy named Irve Pinkle, who worked, I believe, for the National Bureau of Standards, and the other guy was named Homer Carhart, who worked for the Naval Research Lab. And he said, "I want you to be their right hand man. Anything they want, you get it for them. If anybody is going to find out what happened, it's going to be those two guys." And he said, "I want you. You can have anything you want, you can have anybody you want to to help you." But he said, "I want you to find out what happened."
So, this guy named Walt Guy. I don't know if he's one of your interviewees or not, he may probably still be at JSC. He hasn't got good sense. Anyway, I said, "I want Walt Guy to help me." So, Joe said, "Fine. Tell him I said so." So, Walt and I went around. He said, "You got two weeks to become and expert." So, we went everywhere there was to go in two weeks. I mean night and day talking to experts and became experts in two weeks. And then we spent, I spent, Walt wasn't there that long, but I spent the next several months at the Cape helping those two gentlemen.
And in the midst of all this Joe was replaced. But Joe stayed with it pretty much until we knew what had happened. And then after that, after the fire, after the investigation was done, and that was probably the low point of the program, we lost three of our friends. A lot of us felt guilty about it. We were down there and you hear the tapes, you see the debris. I spent hours and hours poring through the blackened debris trying to figure out what had happened. And a lot of the people who, who were leaders then in part of the program, because what followed that was two-and-a-half years of fanatic effort. I mean people just working night and day around the clock and on the road constantly. And just "whatever it took" was the attitude we had. And we were all down there together, and I think as a group, there never was any formal "take a pledge," but I think the people who worked in the Program Office at that point decided, "We're going to, we're going to make this thing happen."
So, when George Low came in, George called me back to the Center, and now I was this two-week expert in flammability, what causes fires and what you can do in an oxygen atmosphere. Because the decision that had to be made after the fire was do we go to the atmosphere that the Russians use. The Russians don't use oxygen.
SCHNAUTZ: What were they using?
CRAIG: They used air, just like you and I breathe here. One of the great virtues of air is that even though things will burn, houses burn down and so forth, it's not an explosively. It doesn't burn explosively. Anyway, so there was a big decision to be made. Do we, and to go back and redesign a spacecraft to go with 10 psi, the Denver atmosphere, or 14.7, which is what the Russians use, would have cost us a tremendous increase in the weight of the aircraft. These walls you're talking about had to be thicker because you had three times the pressure. We use 5 psi, 100% oxygen. That gave you the same, I don't know if you know about the physics of this, but your body needs a certain amount of oxygen in your lungs in order to breathe. And since we have 20% oxygen in a 15 pound atmosphere, you've got about 3 pounds of oxygen in your lungs whenever you're breathing. So, you need to replace that, and then for margin, 5 psi is what was selected, and that allows us to make the structure about as light as you could. The pressure wasn't. So, the decision was made, since we had tooling, a lot of long lead stuff was already built, to go back and change all that would have been years' delay. We decided to stay with it and simply redesign the spacecraft to be fireproof.
That really fell to be my job. George Low called me in and said, "Jerry, you're going to lead the team to make the spacecraft fireproof." So, he sent me off, out to Los Angeles. He had another team out there under Aaron Cohen who was looking to upgrade the electrical aspects because you have to have a spark to ignite a fire. Well that's an electrical problem. So, there was a team out there looking to upgrade the design to try to eliminate things like exposed wire bundles and sharp edges and so on. My job was to redesign the materials in the spacecraft so that they wouldn't burn in an oxygen atmosphere, which meant we had to mount a tremendous effort to gather data on how different materials react in that atmosphere because there was no database. Nobody had ever thought there was any reason to know what happened in 5 psi oxygen atmosphere. Not to mention the launch pad. The launch pad, we went with a different, we went to something called a 60/40 atmosphere where instead of having 100% oxygen on the pad when the spacecraft was at normal atmospheric pressure, we went with a different level of dilulence so that it tried to optimize the fire potential risk with the metabolic needs of the crew, the physiologic needs of the crew. Because as you launch, and the pressure goes down in the spacecraft during the launch period, you had to be sure that they didn't get the bends. Are you a diver?
SCHNAUTZ: No.
CRAIG: If oxygen comes out your blood boils and you get headaches, and it's not good for you – like it could kill you. [laughter] Anyway, so that kind of optimization went on as well. So, we had a lot of work to do just to gather the data, let alone select the materials, and we did, we did innovative things like designing fire brakes. If something did, God help us, catch fire [then] design a metal covering so it couldn't go anywhere where it wouldn't kill them because it would be something that would self-extinguish. And we designed fire extinguishers.
I remember probably the quickest contract ever awarded. We decided we needed a fire extinguisher and George Low said, "Jerry, go get a fire extinguisher designed and built." "Where do I go?" "Anywhere you need to go. Just go find somebody.” Well, at that time I knew about Southwest Research in San Antonio as an innovative group. In my two weeks of becoming an expert, I found out they were doing a lot of fire research. So, I called them up and said, "Can you people-- would you be able to work with us on designing a fire extinguisher for a 100% oxygen atmosphere in the Apollo spacecraft?” [They responded] "Come on down and talk to us." I jumped on the airplane and went over there, and we sat around part of that day and came up with a concept basically using a water-based get foam as something you could inject into electronic equipment compartments and it would fill up the compartment with foam, which would dampen any fire and it was not toxic. Again, you had to have something, since the crew would be exposed to it, if it got hot it wouldn't generate toxic materials that would kill them. So, anyway, we did all that in a matter of days.
I went home after that first visit with them, found the Procurement people, Betty [Craig, his wife and former NASA Procurement officer] would get a charge out of this, and said, "I need a contract with Southwest Research." "Where's your, where's your sole source justification?" "I don't have one. I've got something better. I've got George Low's direction that this must be done today." "Oh, why didn't you say so!" So, there was a lot of things like that that happened back then because people had the authority and the responsibility and the knowledge, and you could go get those things done."
SCHNAUTZ: Because the program was young?
CRAIG: Well, the program was, not only that, it wasn't, you see, what I consider happened to NASA after Apollo was that they substituted bureaucracy for brains. Then there was an urgent need, the country needed to beat the Russians. The country was concerned that our form of government, our way of life was threatened by communists and so forth. So there was a great feeling of urgency, that we had to win this race to the Moon with the Russians. Since then I've gotten to be good friends with the Russians we were racing with and realized that the race never really, never really was. There was a race. Some people say there wasn't a race. Well, there was a race, they were trying to go to the Moon, too. But once you get to know the kind of technology they had, it was like a race where one guy had two legs and one guy had one. These guys never had a chance.
SCHNAUTZ: But nobody had an idea that that was true at the time?
CRAIG: Nobody knew then because it was all, their society was so closely kept that nobody knew how. Mainly in the area of miniaturization and so forth. The Russians had no technology really in place when we started to work with them in the late ‘80s. Of course, that's why they had bigger rockets. Even today, they have larger rockets in general than we do.
Anyway, where was I? That was after the fire, and that went on for about two years, and during that time I became a branch chief. They just created a branch, they called it Thermodynamics and Materials Branch because I wanted to be a branch chief and wanted to get a promotion and a raise and so forth. Then, later, after that, when we had some consolidation, that's when I headed the Systems Integration Branch, which was really a group set up to work on problems that didn't logically fit in one subsystem or another, or one organization or compartment or another. Integration was cutting across all of the boundaries of the spacecraft and organizational elements.
So, we had really some of the top engineers in the program who worked in that branch, guys like Larry Williams, Al Joslin, Dick Colana, Charlie Hanes. These were all top-notch engineers who were really the brains behind Apollo. I mean, as you go do this interview, you're probably going to talk mainly to institutional people and they were the people who worked out in the institution. They [the men he named] were the, oh, what would you call it, the continuity in a technical sense. In other words, they remember when you did this test and something didn't burn in this atmosphere, they would be there five years from now and still remember that. Whereas program people, they move on from one phase of the program to another. They're still over there burning materials. So, anyway, those are the people who were in the branch, really, wonderful, talented people.
SCHNAUTZ: Did you move on to Space Station rather quickly after that or not?
CRAIG: No, actually, again, most of us back then felt that when Apollo was over we'd go to Mars. And we had people working on Mars lunar bases, Mars missions, and so forth. We had, when we had the fire, I had been selected to go to Stanford on a fellowship program. I really wanted to do some more graduate work. George Low called me in at that time and said, "Jerry, if you want to go, you can go, but it would be a big mistake. I really need you now." So, I thought, "There's no way." But he said, "If you'll stay and help me get to the Moon, I guarantee you'll have the opportunity to go once we’re to the Moon." Anyway, he made good on that, and went off out to Stanford at the end of the program.
Well, I guess I skipped a step. One step before that, there was a, George Low, after we had successfully gone to the Moon, was promoted. He became the Deputy Administrator of NASA, who really is the leading management official in the agency. He works directly for the Administrator, who is the head of NASA, but he's a political appointee. George was selected because of his management skills, leadership ability. Generally, a deputy, they survive more than one political appointee, and George did. He went up, so that would have been in 1970, he went to Washington, and in '71, he called me to come up there to work on a task force that had been established by the Nixon administration to try to start a new program called the New Technology Opportunities Program. George's idea was, he saw the public support for space was waning. They really no longer were going to be able to spend the kinds of money we'd spend to go to the Moon, so he felt that in order to avoid losing this tremendous technical team that had been assembled, we needed to broaden the base of NASA. So, he felt by providing technical management people as the core of this task force, that there was good possibility that NASA would be granted the charter to become the high-tech agency of the government.
So, that's what we were all about. We were trying in my particularly area that I was assigned was to be responsible for HUD [Housing and Urban Development] and LEAA, Law Enforcement Assistance Administration. Anyway, a couple of parts of the government, and the idea was to come up with technology programs which could attack the housing problems, pollution problems, as so on. And so, we went up there and worked for several months. There was a guy named Bill McGruter, who has been the head of the Supersonic Transport Program. He worked directly for Mr. Nixon, and, in fact, had an office adjacent to Nixon's. I remember at the time thinking, "That's the strangest damn thing.” Because McGruter, this was over in the old Executive Office Building. I don't know if you've been to Washington or not.
There’s two executive office buildings where the immediate staff of the president are housed, and one of them is the old Executive Office Building, a rather elegant-looking, eighteen hundreds design build. And that's where the president's office is, and his staff is around him, and ol' McGruter had an office right next to Nixon's. You could just walk in and out the door. Nixon had a lot of confidence in McGruter, and he was putting together this program [Supersonic Transport Program]. And it was supposed to be a several billion dollar a year thing, it was part of Nixon's re-election plan. He wanted to be able to tell people, "I'm going to use the same technology we used to go to the Moon. I'm now going to put it to work for you here on earth." It had a nice ring to it. So, ol' McGruter. We were progressing quite nicely and had pretty much the program laid out, and George Low was over there saying, "Yeah, yeah, yeah." He really had visions that once the program was sold, he was going to make that NASA's support of that program, this broader based technology push, the justification for maintaining our institution, if you will.
Of course, you've heard or read about Watergate, and [John] Ehrlichman, and [H.R.] Haldeman, and all the president's men who were the palace guards who protected Nixon from whatever they were protecting him from. But I remember at the time, McGruter's kid got in trouble down in Mexico. So, McGruter came in and he says, "I've got to go! I've got to go! My kid's in jail down in Mexico!" "What happened?" "I don't know. I've got to go!" So, he goes to Mexico to bail this kid out. The kid, I forget what happened to the kid, but the kid gets put in jail down in Mexico. He's a college student. So, McGruter is gone for three or four or five days, and when he comes back he doesn't have an office next to Nixon anymore. Ehrlichman and Haldeman had decided that he was too dangerous, that Nixon might actually do what he was saying. So, they had moved him out and down another floor where he had no access to the president. And the rest, as they say, is history, because the program never was approved, NASA never got the charter then to go and do these wonderful things which we no doubtedly could have done.
SCHNAUTZ: Was that the Urban Systems Project, or was that something different?
CRAIG: The only thing that really came out of that was the Urban Systems Project. [laughter] And that was largely because I, as an individual, had made somewhat of a name up there in the time I worked on that task force, and so, the powers that be within NASA, Low and a guy named Chuck Matthews, who was up there at that time running what we called the Applications Program. We carved that little program out and I worked on it for a couple of years. But it really wasn't. It was nothing compared to what we were trying to do.
SCHNAUTZ: What is the PEP Project?
CRAIG: The PEP project came along. Of course, Shuttle came along. I never worked on Shuttle. I think if I had it might not have happened. The shuttle was a huge mistake, still is, a huge mistake for NASA.
SCHNAUTZ: Why do you think that?
CRAIG: Well, number one, NASA’s charter was to explore space, not to build buses. The shuttle is just a bus to go back and forth to low earth orbits. That has nothing to do with what NASA was set up to do. The reason the Shuttle was done, and this is my view, is shortly after George Low went to Washington, Bob Gilruth, who had been the Director of the Center, retired, and he selected Chris Kraft, who was the head of the flight operations group – the people I call them the giant video game operators because that’s all they did. They just fiddle around with, they don’t build or design anything. They look at view graphs all day. The sit up there in the control Center. They appear on television to take credit for things they had nothing to do with, and so on.
Anyway, those people were, their jobs were threatened because if we weren’t flying spacecrafts, if there wasn’t a flight program, and the decision was made not to keep going back and forth to the Moon, then what are these guys going to do? They said, “Oh! If we can build this bus to go back and forth to space, [then] there’s job security!” So, that’s really what happened. They got a hold of the Agency and sold people on the idea of building this bus to go back and forth to space. The first premise that they adopted, which was a faulty premise, was that there was going to be hundreds and hundreds of flights in and out of space because we were going to do everything in space that we do on earth. Well, how dumb can you get? I mean, that was really stupid.
They sold people on the idea that there would be six hundred missions, or something like that, over a ten-year period. You’re going to be flying shuttle. They’re going to be running over each other going in and out of space over there at the Cape. And the second premise they adopted, and it was somewhat related to the first, was that somehow things were going to be cheaper because they’re reusable. Oh, really? Why is that? Space is a very hostile environment. When it comes back, aren’t you going to have to rebuild it anyway? Nobody ever asked that question, but, I mean, that’s a fact. It now costs ten times as much to fly people in and out of space than it cost back when we were flying expendables.
The Russians, the Russians can send three people to space for about twenty million dollars. We send six or eight people to space for five hundred million dollars. And that’s if we’re flying a bunch of them a year. If you knock a couple of flights off, then it becomes seven hundred million or eight hundred million. It costs an enormous amount just to have all those video game operators sitting around down there to be able to fly. So, it costs, I don’t know, two billion dollars a year to be able to fly and then it costs so much each flight.
SCHNAUTZ: Do you think there’s too much emphasis on people, putting people in space over exploring with non-manned spacecraft?
CRAIG: My answer is probably self-serving, but I really don’t. I think there’s a limit to what you can learn with robots. People, humans have the unique ability to analyze, interpret. So, I am a great believer in human presence in space as the key to the unlocking the mysteries of the potential of space. That’s why I think Space Station is an important step. If we can put people up in space to live and work there for a period of time, and, frankly, they don’t have to live in palatial settings. The [Russian] Mir Space Station is a perfectly adequate space station. You can put three, four, five, six, put a few more modules up there, live as many people as you’re going to live in the International Space Station, and it’s perfectly adequate to do what I just said.
No, I don’t think there’s an over-emphasis on people, I think there’s an over-emphasis on, on operating. That’s really what the Shuttle is. Originally, it was going to be an Ace trucking company – a bus. So, there’s an over-emphasis on providing jobs for people on earth, justified by putting people in space if we went back to the premise that NASA is here to explore space. So, what’s important to NASA is to unlock the mysteries of space, generally there’s no mystery left in low earth orbit. My God, we’ve been doing that now for forty years. So, let’s don’t do that anymore. If somebody wants to do that and it’s worth money to them, give them the Shuttle if they want that albatross and let them hang it around their neck.
Let’s instead go back and start preparing, we could take, there’s enough people living in the Hill Country [central Texas region] right now, that if you gathered up those people, a couple of hundred people, that worked on Apollo that live up here now and put them in a place and said, “We want you to go back to the Moon and provide a base to live there. And we want you to go to Mars.” We could probably do that in half the time with half as much money if you didn’t put that big institution down there that needs to be cared and fed. Because there’s no mystery left. We know how to do that, right? We did it. And it was successful. It was wonder. It was the most fantastic engineering achievement in the history of mankind and it’s already done. I mean, you know how to design heat shields. You know to design the guidance systems, the thermal systems, the environmental. There’s no mystery left. Not only we can do it, but the Russians can do it. Hell, the Chinese can do it. It won’t be long before everybody can do it.
SCHNAUTZ: Do you think there's a chance of regaining that focus?
CRAIG: Well, the pivotal time came when Mr. Bush was president. When Mr. Bush was president there was a group of people who felt as I do who worked on a task force and created a proposal, which Mr. Bush endorsed, which said, "Back to the Moon, this time to say. And on to Mars." So, I don't know if you remember that or not, but that was a major policy address that he made. Well, it was dead on arrival because there wasn't enough work done up on the [Capitol] Hill to create a support base for it.
I worked in the task force that sold the Space Station to Mr. [Ronald] Reagan. What you have to do to sell a major new initiative in Washington, is you have to go up an make allies. You have to make allies in, most importantly, the Department of Defense, but other agencies whose rice bowls are going to be impacted by NASA getting money to do programs. So, you have to be able to go up and create a "Why should this be done? Why should this be done now?" And that's what we did with Mr. Reagan. We went up and, God, I worked up there for two years and it was terrible. I hate Washington. And Betty came up and lived for half a year. That was because I threatened to quit. I guess we'd only been married for a few months.
And so, that's what had to be done with Mr. [George] Bush. You needed to go up and now create this and, frankly, the people that we put in place to help do that did a terrible job. It just never got off the ground. And then, of course, Mr. Bush lost the election. While he was still president, that was still the goal. We were having senior staff meetings, retreats. Ol' [Aaron] Cohen was the Director then, and we'd go over there and I remember Kranz, Gene Kranz, the head of the video game section of the Center, went over there and said [in a mocking voice], "We've got to first make sure we take care of the institution." And I said, "What the hell for? What do we need your institution for?" And he said, "Well, you can't do the program without the institution." And I said, "We can make a hell of a run at it. We sure did Apollo without it!" [laughter] "You don't know." Those people still run JSC, the people who believe the main thing is to preserve the Center, preserve the empire, whatever it takes to preserve the empire. They're still running things down there. I think if we elect a new president – maybe George W.
We’ll go ask his daddy, "What about this thing where you said we need to go back to the Moon? Do you still think that's true? It's a possibility. I've spoken to Congressman Smith, Lamar Smith's staff, and he's on the NASA Committee, about putting together some sort of task force of people of people up here in the Hill Country. Because I think you could, if somebody would provide us a place to work for a few weeks, why you could put together a blue print and go lay it on. Whenever they have the transition, if George W. wins the election, why go lay it on him.
SCHNAUTZ: Do you think a Republican administration is more supportive than a Democratic as far as the space program?
CRAIG: It's hard to say. It's pretty much a bipartisan program. There's been strong supporters on both sides of the aisle. I don't really believe, and it tends to go back and forth, ebbs and flows. Sometimes it suits one party. Basically, to neither party is space really important right now, and, so, it will be, and again, you've got to sell these things. These things don't happen. That's the part that most of the people in Houston don't understand. I think George Abbey probably understands that. He worked in Washington quite a bit. He's the Director of the Center down there now. By the way, George was in the Apollo Program Office. I never mentioned his name because he didn't do a hell of a lot. But, he worked. He was what we called a "dog robber." Do you know what that is?
SCHNAUTZ: No.
CRAIG: It's a military term. George was in the military. He and I were in the same branch when we first came to work out there and George was a captain, Captain Abbey. And I asked somebody, "What did George do in the Air Force?" "Oh, he was a dog robber." "What do they do?" "Well, anything the general wants he gets it for him." [laughter] Well, that's what he did. He did that for Joe Shea. He was Joe's right hand man – followed him around, carried his brief case. He did it for George Low. And he was very, very good at it, very, very good at it. He could, he could make almost anything happen be it illegal, immoral, or fattening. [laughter] And so, now George is the Director of the Center.
So, George, if somebody, George is not much of a visionary though. So, if somebody told ol' George, "George, we really want to make this new program happen. We want to go explore space again." Ol' George probably could figure out a way. He probably knows where enough bodies are buried up there in Washington. He could get a, and George has very good contacts in the military, and that's very important part of it, too. You could make a case that if the military were in charge of space, we'd be a lot further along.
SCHNAUTZ: Do you think so?
CRAIG: I said you could make a case. You could make a case the other way, too. That was a major. In Russia, the Russian military is basically in charge of space. That's not true today because Russia, pretty much their whole infrastructure collapsed when the Soviet Union collapsed. But, back when they were flying and doing great things in space, most of the key people were military people. You could make a case for it. I don't think it would be better because I'm not a military person. The military, I think we have a great military, it's atrophied somewhat under Clinton. But, nevertheless, if we get another strong leader.
If George Bush had won reelection this country would be so much stronger. I don't know what you as a young person think, but George Bush was a great man. He served his country in World War II, head of the CIA. He had this tremendous background. If you ever work in Washington, you'll know. He has military credentials. He's respected if he walks into the room by the chairmen of the Joint Chiefs. He has an intelligence background. If you work up there, you'll find that every branch of the government had intelligence people in it.
That's another thing you've got to find out. When you start trying to sell a program, you better understand that the military will know every detail of what you're selling. I don't care what you try to do to keep it secret. They're going to know every detail of it. So, you need to understand that, and say, "Okay, I'm going to use that as a strength. So, I'll make sure that these snitches that they've planted over here in the program are carrying back the message that I want them to carry back.”
SCHNAUTZ: Do you think working with the Russians today is a good thing? Or do you think that before the fall of communism their program was stronger and better to work with?
CRAIG: No. See, I think we missed a great opportunity. If you have a few more minutes? The last job I had at NASA was as head of the ACRV Project Office. The ACRV was the lifeboat of the Space Station. The Russians, of course, had an ACRV. It's called Soyuz. They used a small spacecraft to take people to and from space. That became the lifeboat. The way they structured the program, they only left the lifeboat there for three to six months because they used it to take them up there. So, they just rotated crews in and out on this lifeboat. So, it occurred to me, maybe, I'm not as swift as I used to be but still a little spring left, that since the Russians had one, maybe we should talk to them. Maybe we could get them to build us one because this was at the time when we had Detente. Well, I approached headquarters with that notion and they said, "You're crazy. We can't do that. That's stupid. No way we can work with the Russians." So, I said, "Okay. Never mind." NASA has their own resident spooks. So, you go up and meet with the spooks and they take you into a dark room and tell you that they'll kill you if you ever. [laughter]
Anyway, well, I had some really good young people working in my organization, and one of them was a military detailee. And he had access to some information known to the military that the Russians might be quite interested in working out a way to sell their spacecraft to NASA to be used as a ACRV. So, I sent this young fella off to the, at that time, the Russians were beginning to send their people over to deliver seminars. So, they'd talk about their space program and they'd have some of the artifacts there, and people would pay to come and see it. It was a way to raise money. This was back in the late '80s.
Well, we made informal contacts, and we exchanged telephone numbers, and so we began a little dialogue with them. And we were still getting a lot of static out of Dick Truly, who was at that time the head of NASA, and so, we talked to some people in Congress on our committee and told them we thought it was an enormous potential for saving money and lives and everything if we could work out a way to work with the Russians to apply their ACRV technology to our Space Station. So, they had a hearing, and they called ol' Truly over there and they said, "Admiral Truly, why is it that you don't want to let your people work with the Russians?" "Oh! I would! But this is a policy." So, they called in, I forget who the guy was, but he was the chief of staff to the president or something, and they asked him the same question. And he said, "Oh, I think that's a good idea. I think we should do that."
So, the rest, as they say, is history. So, we sent a delegation over there and began to work with the Russians on that long before it was popular to do so. And, frankly, the Russians, even though their technology is primitive, their program is very strong. They have very good engineers. They have a great corporate memory because they have longevity. Once your compartmentalized there, you're not going to go off and make millions on something else. You're going to work on that the rest of your life. So, I think there are a lot of strengths in the Russians program today.
NASA, unfortunately, when Dan Golden came in to head NASA. I don't know if you know anything about Golden or not, but he's kind of a prick. He came out of the black military side. The military has two sides. One side you've heard of and there's another side called the black military that you've never heard of, and you never will, because then they'd have to kill you if you ever did. That's not quite true.
Anyway, Golden was a program manager of TRW in black military programs, which means highly classified. And, as a result, the customer is quite compartmented. It's the intelligence side of the military. So, he came to NASA, and he brought that. I think there's a kind of paranoia that creeps in when you work at such a highly secret environment. Anyway, he brought that attitude with him, and he never, never let us deal with the Russians objectively, fairly, and so forth. We had started out working with them on "we want to be partners with you. We're willing to pay for what we get."
The reason I know what it costs them to put people in and out of space is because we developed our own economic models where we could tell what is cost them because we could tell what they were charging to fly Europeans or Chinese or whatever. We were well on our way to being able to buy an ACRV and put it into place for, I don’t know, a fourth of what NASA’s going to end up spending to build their own. And Golden came in and said, “No. We don’t want to do that. We want to make a political deal with them.” Of course, the Russians had no money. [laughter] We went over there and looked at their factories and they were crumbling. So, for a few cents on the dollar, you could have capitalized on their needs and our needs. But that never happened.
So, I view what is going on right now with Russia and all this publicity about the Russians not living up to their end of the agreement and so forth. It’s sort of payback time. They, they told Golden, “We need so much money to do this.” Golden said, “Uh. Let’s slam dunk them. Let’s go tell the president to tell Yeltsin to do it our way or the highway.” So, I think the Russians, they have a long memories, and they’ve simply, when the opportunity has arisen for them to use their bargaining power that they have right now, they’ve simply said, “We’re going to do that.”
SCHNAUTZ: So, it’s probably a lost opportunity there?
CRAIG: Yeah, maybe. Maybe it’s not too late. If we elect a new president, there are probably ways you can resurrect that relationship. The Russians still, at least, I haven’t have had any dealings with them in four or five years, but I’m sure they would still desperately like to be partners with the United States in space. Real partners, not something that’s dictated to them, but real partners where you acknowledge. The interesting thing about working with them, Betty worked with them back in the ‘70s when we had the Apollo-Soyuz, it was a political precursor to the Detente of the Gorbachev years.
When I worked with them, their infrastructure was in shambles, but you could see, “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” Because you could meet their structures guy and say, “Oh, that guy is like ol’ [Dick] Colana, that guy’s like.” They had exactly the same institutions and technical expertise, discipline that we had. In fact, in some respects they copied our institutions. In the Safety, Reliability, and Quality Assurance, for instance, they copied many of the practices that we pioneered during Apollo to get to the quality level that it took to get to the Moon. I had, I had a great respect for them and an admiration, and I think if you had dealt with them fairly and as equals, both trying to do the same thing. And, and had a much more open mind.
Golden’s attitude was, “We’ve got this shuttle and we’ve got this space station we want to build. So those are givens. So now, what kinds of things can we take from the Russians to help enhance that?” Still, you went back and you’ve got these two strong space programs. One has a space station. One has a launch vehicle spacecraft to take people to and from space that is much more efficient than the one we have. Let’s see, how can we synergize these two programs. And if it meant discarding large segments of our program at the saving of many, many billions of dollars, so be it. But nobody here has ever looked at it in that regard. But it still, it still could be done.
You could still do that today. And, frankly, until we do that, until we get out from under the burden of the Shuttle program, this enormous expense of operating that very inefficient system, then I don’t know how we’ll ever go back and explore space. It’s going to take a president that can. It will be a different paradigm; a whole different way of looking at it. But it’s not to be said that, certainly someone your age, ought to think that’s quite important. Because if mankind has any destiny other than defacing the planet and blowing ourselves up, it’s has to have something to do with being able to escape the bonds of this earth.
SCHNAUTZ: It’s true. Well, thank you for participating in this interview. It was very interesting talking to you.
CRAIG: Well, it was an interesting time in our life. Betty and I are both quite glad to be retired now. I would have left NASA a long time before, except that I wasn’t eligible to retire! [laughter] So, we can live quite comfortably now. I believe I’ve paid my dues. But I really thought about leaving NASA at the time I was working in Washington on that new technology program. I made contacts up there in other agencies, and I thought about it but didn’t. So, what are you going to do?