NASA Davis, Hubert P. - May 21, 1999
Interview with Hubert Davis
Interviewer: Amanda Brand
Date of Interview: May 21, 1999
Location: Davis home, Canyon Lake, Texas
BRAND: My name is Amanda Brand. It is 4 PM, Friday, May 21, 1999. I’m in the home of Mr. Hubert Davis in Canyon Lake, Texas. Mr. Davis, are you aware that this interview is being conducted for the NASA/SWT Oral History Project and will be available for research purposes?
DAVIS: Yes I am.
BRAND: Okay Mr. Davis. First of all I’d like to hear about your life before you went to work at NASA. Where did you grow up? What was your educational background? Your family life?
DAVIS: Okay I grew up in San Antonio and went to Texas A & M and was in the Aggie Band for four years which was great fun because it shows you what a group of three hundred people can accomplish if they all go the right direction and play their part at the right moment. And that’s a lesson that all of us can learn.
After A& M, I went directly into the U.S. Air Force taking time out to marry Mary. So June of 1951 was a busy month. I graduated on the first day of June, married on the ninth, and reported back to duty on the seventeenth all in the month of June 1951.
I went to pilot training, but they didn’t make left-handed airplanes so I ended up being an Aircraft Maintenance Officer and the Air Force sent me to Maintenance Officer School and then to Korea for a year. And that was an interesting experience, helping keep the F-86 airplanes pointed toward the Yalu River. As it turned out the person that I encountered later in my life and am still involved with, Buzz Aldrin, was in a different wing in Korea the same time I was there.
From there the Air Force sent me back to graduate school at Wright Patterson, at the residence school where I got what amounted to a masters degree and was assigned to the experimental flight test center at Edwards Air Force Base for a span of about three and a half years. And that was a very needy time at Edwards. We had a great deal of activity going on with brand-new airplanes and first flights and the like and I got the test tape and all that for a good long while and my job there was Chief of what they call the Technical Operations Crafts and Exporters. And I guess today we would call it mission control because what we did was to try to run the traffic of all the flight test activities underway on twenty-one different contractor programs at the same time plus the Air Force work and properly share the resources of the use of the lake bed, the telemetry frequencies, the space positioning, the radio frequencies, the chase aircraft, all the things that are necessary to do the flight test. And we juggled those resources to try to keep everyone happy as best we could with our communication system being an old-fashioned telephone PBX board with a Tech Sgt. on it. And that was great fun, quite an adventure.
From there I went to work at Chance Vought in Dallas. I left the Air Force and went into industry as an engineer and spent about three and a half years there working on a very advanced airplane for its day called the F8U-3 and then on future program proposal activities.
And then [President John F.] Kennedy in December of 1961 said we’re going to go to the moon and I thought that’s interesting. And shortly thereafter [Vice President] Lyndon Johnson said we’re going to do it from Houston, Texas and I said I’m gone. So, I applied for a job with NASA in January and reported for duty in Houston on the 27th day of March 1962 where I was put in charge of what they call the Power Propulsion Branch to work on all the propulsion systems, electrical power systems, and packing and storage systems and launch escape systems and the like for the Apollo spacecraft. And that’s where I spent the first year and a half or so of my time at NASA.
BRAND: What about after that? What did you do for the rest of your stay at NASA?
DAVIS: Well they had a reorganization, and I fancied myself to be a propulsion engineer and still do to some extent. But when they reorganized they had a group of technical people that had come down under Dr. Max Faget from Langley Research Center and we had a completely self-contained program office when I first arrived in 1962. That is, we took care of all the technical work as well as all the administrative work for the program. And we sort of derisively referred to Max’s organization as the hobby shop because they were involved in technology development of things we might someday need but weren’t directly a part of the program. Well, a chap named Jim Elms came in as Deputy Director of the [Manned Spacecraft] Center and observed that that was ridiculous. Here we were in what amounted to, what most of us considered a wartime situation because we took quite seriously the necessity of beating the Russians to the moon. And Elms said we’ve got to deploy these people more effectively than we are. So he organized what was called the subsystem management thing and parceled out the technical work including my propulsion work to Faget’s guys. I said fine, I’m going with it. And they said no you’re not. You are a member of the program office. You stay here. I said well what do you want me to do? So they said we want you to plan the ground test program for the entire Apollo Spacecraft Program. And we had had proposals come in for test objects from all sources and they piled one on top on the other. And are you familiar with the medical term triage?
BRAND: No sir, I’m not.
DAVIS: Okay. Triage is when something like the field hospital in a battle zone has to deal with patients that come in and they separate them into three groups thus the term triage. One group are those that can wait, that are hurt, but the wounds are not sufficient to our immediate attention. The second group are those that have a life-threatening situation, that they need to be operated on immediately if they’re going to be saved. And the third are those that are too far gone to warrant spending time on. So triage means segregating into categories.
So I was given the job of doing triage on our ground test proposals and we ended up canceling about one-third because they were redundant or not needed. We took another one-third and transferred them to the subsystem managers that Jim Elms had set up in Faget’s organization, and the remainder of them were combined systems or integrated systems test objects that we felt should be maintained in the system engineering organization in the program office so we kept those. And having organized this mess into something orderly and coming up with what we call the Spacecraft Certification Test Program where what we attempted to do was be sure that everything that needed to be done was done once, but unless justified for very good reasons, only once so we didn’t spend more time and money than necessary to get the data we needed to be sure that we were ready to go to the next step. So that was a fascinating and challenging time and once that was done then I picked up what was called Vehicle Management on some of the test articles including the ones used in the Thermal Vacuum Chamber there in Houston which you might have seen in Building 32 while you were there. Well we built a huge vacuum chamber…actually there’s a complex of several vacuum chambers. The largest one was called Chamber A and it…Chamber B was the next largest. And these are the test chambers where they simulated the conditions of space by pumping all the air out and using quartz lamps as to simulate the sun and cryogenically cooled panels on the opposite side to simulate the heat sink of space and we put the spacecraft on what amounted to an automatic rotisserie in these things so we could have them at whatever angle was appropriate for the test results. And we checked them out in the actual conditions of space here on earth. And by doing so we found flaws that I think would have cost us three missions had we not run those tests. So they proved to be very much worthwhile. And did you go to Space Center Houston when you were there?
BRAND: Yes sir we did.
DAVIS: Did you look up at the ceiling and see that lunar module?
BRAND: Yes we did.
DAVIS: Well that was my bird. That was LTA-8 and that’s the one that was the first lunar module to have all the subsystems installed. And it was necessary for us to pioneer all the test procedures that had to be written in great detail and what we considered to be the appropriate criteria for what constituted failure and what constituted success of any given test and then to actually conduct these tests. So it’s my contention that LTA-8, which is still there in Houston because it was used in the Thermal Vacuum Chamber rather than flown on a mission, was the vehicle by which we invented the Apollo lunar module. So that was great fun. And from that experience I then was pretty well committed on the lunar module side of the activities so I spent a great deal of time in Bethpage, New York where the Grumman plant was far more than I did at home much to Mary’s distress and worked on the first LTA-8 and brought it to Houston and actually involved myself heavily in conducting the tests on it. And when I was done, I was assigned as one of five vehicle managers and my rotation came up on lunar module number five which later became known as Eagle which is on the wall [points to picture on wall in living room]. And, as you know, that’s the one that was used by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to land first on the surface of the moon. And what’s not commonly known is that it wasn’t intended that LM-5 land on the moon early in the program. They had an orderly program where we were going to do the missions in earth orbit and then the missions in lunar orbit, and then the …ultimately the landing. And lunar module number six, LM-6, was destined to be the first to land which belonged to the chap right after me in the rotation for vehicle managers. I didn’t like that. And we sharpened … the fellows working with me and myself . . . sharpened our pencil and even though LM-6 had gained the benefit of what they call the super weight improvement program to take a lot of weight out of it…they did not pay the money to take out of the LM-5. I concluded that we could barely make it if we didn’t let the weight grow for eighteen months. And I went to the program manager George Low and I said George…I said you know this has been a very well planned program. We have planned on every possible contingency save one. He said oh, what’s that? I said success. I said in the event that Apollo 7, 8, 9, and 10 all serve their purposes fully and completely and without major difficulties we will have removed all the technical constraints on landing with Apollo 11 rather than Apollo 12 and I believe it could make the difference between our beating the Russians to the moon and not doing so because it means between three or four months of schedule. And I believe that you need to be a mean fellow and not let this vehicle grow one pound for the next eighteen months. So each time someone has something they just must add to it, something else must be found to take off to offset it. Otherwise we can’t make it. But if you will hold the line on the weight for the next eighteen months, we can use Lunar Module-5, Eagle, to be the first landing on the moon in July of 1969 rather than waiting on LM-6 in October. And I believe we’ve got to make a try for it.
Well, what did George say? He said yes and he did and we did. And all the effort of the preceding missions…of 7, 8, 9, and 10 did indeed serve their purposes in full and it released us to use Lunar Module-5, Apollo 11, Eagle with Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong in the crew cabin to be the first landing on the moon. And that was pretty much the high point of my time at NASA as you may well imagine.
And Buzz and I still banter about on it because if you recall on the landing of Apollo 11 they came very close to running out of fuel. And Buzz said its all your fault! You made us go in a heavyweight vehicle. I said, no you guys fooled around and you flew over some boulders when you shouldn’t have and it’s your fault because it was pilot error. So we’ve had a banter about that topic-in a friendly way-for the last thirty years. And I talked to Buzz just today as a matter of fact. He and I still associate with one another. We don’t think these…we don’t think these young guys are doing it right on where we’re going to go next in the space program so we’re trying to tell them this is how you should go about it. So, as I like to put it, I’m still meddling in their program. So that’s about pretty well the story.
BRAND: What did you do after the Eagle at NASA…?
DAVIS: Well, after Eagle, I went to work on LM-10. Since there were five of us, I came up in the rotation next on LM-10. And here again I was most fortunate because LM-10 was the one that was designated to be the first to undergo a great deal of modifications to carry the Lunar Rover vehicle and to be able to stay on the surface of the moon three days rather than one. So there were a massive number of changes to be made and it made it a great deal more interesting than one more of the same thing. And so I was able to work on Lunar Module-10 for the Apollo 15 mission that Jim Erwin and Dave Scott flew…the landing on the moon and they assigned me to LM-15 after that, but by that time the people at Grumman had learned how to do it so well that they really didn’t need me.
And shortly after that I went into Max Faget’s organization of engineering and development and what he called the Special Projects Office and what that amounted to was looking into what we did in the future. And at Special Projects the initial job turned out to be something akin to that of Inspector General, I guess, because I was asked to go review what other people were proposing to do and one of these propositions was a device that was supposed to go in the Space Shuttle once it was built called the Space Tug. And Max had the opinion that since it had very volatile hydrogen fuel, it was probably too dangerous for us to want to carry in the Space Shuttle and would I look into it and see whether his assumption was correct or not and to see where we went from there. So I looked into it and I came back and I said Max, you’re absolutely right. This thing is a bomb. We ought not to fly it. He said fine, we’ll keep it out. So for five long years I was “Horatio at the bridge” keeping some other people at another NASA center from putting this thing called the Space Tug in the Space Shuttle or a variant of the space tug which existed and had been flown already called the [unintelligible]. So I was able to keep them from planning to put it into the Space Shuttle for all that time.
And somewhere along the line I picked up the job of what they called Payload Engineering Office for the Space Shuttle. And it was my job to work with all the scientists and the others who were going to use the vehicle and be sure we had the resources available for them in terms of the volume in the payload bay, the weight lifting capabilities, the amount of electrical power supplied to them in the form they wanted it, the amount of heat rejection to dissipate the waste heat, the telemetry data that they would need to be piping back through the shuttle orbiter to come down to Earth. And so I had a lot of fun working with people that were to be the users of the Space Shuttle including the Air Force people who…as NASA headquarters decided we couldn’t have a shuttle unless we had NASA support it was necessary that we gain the support of the Air Force for the shuttle. And, to my way of thinking, that decision has had a very deleterious effect on the Space Shuttle. Because the Air Force insisted on the fifteen foot diameter by sixty foot long payload bay, they insisted upon being able to fly a mission called Mission 3A from the West Coast launch facilities was built and then never used. They insisted upon the vehicle having high thrust range capabilities which means that it would be able to go twelve hundred miles to the side of its normal trajectory so that it could return to Vandenburg Air Force Base on one orbit because the Earth’s rotation made it such that when the shuttle was going around one time, it was 1,200 miles to the side of the landing area and you had to be able to go cross range that far to land. And those things dictated the design of the vehicle and established its, I think, overly large size. Because Max and I wanted a vehicle that was no more than twelve by forty-five payload bay and about twenty-five thousand pounds of capability rather than sixty-five thousand pounds. And it would have been a much less expensive vehicle to buy, and to develop, and to operate. But we weren’t able to do that because of the insistence that we satisfy the Air Force requirements. That resulted in a large vehicle.
And I think there was another bobble made when a chap named John Yardley who was then the Director of Manned Space Flight or something in headquarters and had been a McDonald Aircraft executive during Mercury and Gemini and pretty well ran the program-he was a very fine man. But he was in charge of the Space Shuttle program in the early 70s and he went to President [Richard M.] Nixon [phone ringing] with the plans for the Space Shuttle. And it included all the bells and whistles the Air Force wanted, had grown large, and, as a consequence, had grown extensive. Now those days all of us wanted a vehicle that was two stages, fully reusable [wife talking on phone], both looked like aircraft and the booster would return to land and be reused each time. And we used the same propellants, hydrogen and oxygen, that we used in the orbiter. And it would be a fully reusable system because both vehicles came back as airplanes and landed on the runway to be used again another day. But as you might imagine, developing two vehicles was expensive and Nixon asked John Yardley the question, “Okay John, I hear what you want to do with this thing called the shuttle? Now, how much is it going to cost me? What’s the peak year funding?” And Yardley answered, “Mr. President, it will be about two billion dollars per year." And Nixon’s response to that was, “John, at two billion dollars a year there isn’t going to be a Space Shuttle. Give me one at one billion dollars a year and you can have it.” And from that conversation and pressure from the Utah congressional delegation came the decision to go with the solid rocket motors and do away with reusable boosters.
And the reusable booster is expensive because it’s built in what’s called segments in Utah. The segments are shipped by rail over carefully selected railroads because of their size and these segments then have to be put together at Cape Kennedy. And from the moment you unpack the first segment and set it on the mobile launch platform you’re operating the world’s largest firecracker stand. And people have to be exceedingly careful and it’s an expensive and time-consuming proposition to care for the safety concerns that the presence of these large, highly energetic, solid rocket motor segments pose for the rest of the activity. So its not just a matter of what they cost, it’s also the matter of the impact they have upon all the other activities there that run the price tag up to what it is today. And it was very obvious to many of us at the time that this was going to occur. So, all these years, I’ve been of the mind that if I’d been John Yardley and President Nixon had said what he said, my response would have been, thank you Mr. President. We’ll continue to fly our Saturn and Apollo Spacecraft hardware for a while until a more precipitous moment arises. And I think we would have been far better off today if we would have done so.
But we did not and the shuttle had proven to be a magnificent machine except that it has capabilities which were never used because the West Coast facility was completed with great thought and then jackhammered by the Air Force and has not been utilized for any shuttle flights nor will it ever be. And the Air Force missions have dictated the design as a consequence, have never been flown and never will be flown. But here we have a fifteen by sixty-foot payload base shuttle, with a targeted payload of sixty-five thousand pounds which none of them would quite make that, and with a twelve hundred mile cross range that’s never ever used because it isn’t needed to return to Kennedy. But we are stuck with a high price tag of operating this vehicle with the solid rocket motors that were the cause of the Challenger accident which cost seven lives and the loss of the orbiter Challenger. So, I think we should have taken a different path. And that was one of many fights, if you will, that I lost in my time at NASA, but I haven’t been dissuaded by those losses and I’m still doing what I can to try to have us do [clock chimes] what’s right and proper.
So today what I’m working on with Buzz Aldrin is a fly back booster for the Space Shuttle and we call it Starbooster and I have pictures of it and the like if anybody’s interested. But Buzz and I have been working on this together for four years and we don’t have the support that we think we should have because Dan Golden, the current NASA administrator, made what I considered to be an unwise move similar to that of John Yardley of saying that we’re going to build a vehicle that will reach orbit in a single stage. We’re going to build a vehicle called Venturestar that will take off early, fly into space, not stage or drop off anything, do its mission, return to Earth, and land and isn’t it wonderful we can turn it around and reuse it. And it will be very inexpensive to operate because it’s a single unit that doesn’t dispose of anything like the Shuttle who loses its big tank, you know.
That’s a wonderful plan. Unfortunately, the laws of physics get in the way because it’s a very difficult feat to achieve Earth orbit. You have to invest enough energy into the vehicle to achieve the velocity of about ten times that of a high-speed rifle bullet and to do that with a single stage, in my way of thinking, is twenty-five to thirty-five years away. And yet that’s the principal, future program that NASA has underway today is a precursor vehicle about half the size called the X-33 which was never intended to go into orbit because its not large enough to do so, but it was intended to be the stalking horse for the Venturestar the ship. And Buzz and I have known for year that that is not going to work.
Now on the other side of the aisle, if you will, there’s the Air Force. And when President Clinton first came in to office, he set up a short-lived policy that I think someone at NASA probably sold him on that said the Air Force role is to further develop our expendable launch vehicles such as the Atlas and the Titan and the Vulcan, and the NASA role is to develop the reusable vehicles for the future and the Air Force set up a panel under retired General Norman and they went forth and concluded that the best thing to do was to start a program called the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle Program . . . i.e. we’re sticking with the technology that Bernie Shreaver and others brought into being forty years ago for the early, liquid fuel ICBMs and we’re perpetuating that forty year old technology today through the current Air Force programs called the EELV.
And Buzz and I both shake our heads because we say neither one of those answers is correct. The answer lies betwixt and between. We most certainly need to make the best use of the resources we already possess, but we ought not to try for mission impossible and try to build a single stage. We’ll fail. And as time goes on, the weight growth of the X33 program and the difficulty they’ve had with the brand new, so-called new technology engine which, as a matter of fact, was fired twenty-five years ago people have forgotten, but they’re trying to develop this different concept rocket engine and they’re having difficulties with it. And I think the X-33 program has already demonstrated conclusively that the single stage to orbit thing is not going to make it. But the Air Force is boring down the path with their Expendable Launch Vehicle. Since they’re giving 500 billion dollars a piece to the two big aerospace companies, they are saying that’s a wonderful thing to do. Lockheed-Martin has a 941 million dollar contract for the X-33 and they say the single stage orbit is wonderful and as long as those funds hold out, you’re going to have the major aerospace industries stay with the path they’re on: X-33 and Venturestar on the NASA side, EELV on the other side. And what Buzz and I are proposing doesn’t apparently appeal to either party.
BRAND: Who is funding your project?
DAVIS: We are. Out of our pockets.
BRAND: Oh, okay.
DAVIS: And we’ve done so for four years and I’ve been buying my airline tickets to join Buzz out of NASA retirement pay and that’s getting a little burdensome. But I’m still, as I say, meddling in the program.
BRAND: So, between your retirement from NASA and your work with Buzz Aldrin what did you do…?
DAVIS: Okay…well I was going along happy as a clam running what’s called Future Programs Office for Max [Faget] in Houston and we were looking into all the wonderful things we could do in the future none of which we’ve yet done. And this, mind you, was in the 1970s, more than twenty years ago and I came up with an alternative to the Space Station for example. We had a study done by Grumman that we called the Orbital Instruction Demonstration Article, the OCDA. And it was a modest little project that would enable us to go up into space and learn how to do the construction tests that they’re going to have to embark upon now without having had if you will experimentation training in doing so with the big space station program that is now underway at enormous cost. And I proposed we build this thing and fly it, like in ’79 or ’80. And it didn’t happen because it didn’t, I guess, provide a large enough program to have the right number of jobs for the right number of congressional districts getting contracts to be politically viable.
I worked on another project that I’m still very much interested in that after a very long lapse of time NASA picked up on again called the Solar Power Satellite. Now the Solar Power Satellite was an idea of a gentleman that worked for Arthur D. Little in Boston named Dr. Peter Glaser. Now Peter is a wonderful, cultured European gentleman. He’s a Czech and he escaped from Prague just hours before the Russian tanks came in when they had the revolution there some twenty-five or thirty years ago. And he came to the U.S. and went to work with Arthur D. Little and he had this idea that the way in which mankind should acquire their base level electrical power…[End of Side A. Mr. Davis completed his sentence and waited for the tapes to be changed]. Glaser had this idea and he printed an article in the scientific magazine called Physics Today on his idea of what he called the Space Solar Power Project, SSPP I think. But what Peter had proposed was an elegant and daring plan to build satellites in the geostationary orbit occupied by our communication satellites today that was the size of Manhattan Island and consisted of these very very huge arrays of solar cells to take sunlight and produce electrical power from it. And he was going to use a antenna, broadcasting antenna, that was one kilometer, or 3,280 feet in diameter, to beam this power gathered in space down to earth and it would be received on a farm size receiving antenna called a rectennae and converted from microwave back into the power that would be put on the high lines that feed our homes and industries. And it was a fantastic idea because it is non-polluting, there’s no fuel required, and it puts a great deal less thermal burden on the planet because the conversion of microwave power into usable electrical power is a far more efficient process than burning fossil fuels, and, of course, you don’t produce any of the carbon dioxide or carbon monoxide or other noxious gases as you do when you burn such things as coal. So it appeared to be a very clean source of electricity and there was only one possible, or more likely probable, downside and that was it would cost more than we could afford to buy because imagine the scale of the undertaking. If we’re going to put the first space station is going in at 225 miles above the surface of the earth and is going to be perhaps football field size and we were talking about putting Manhattan Island sized satellites to 19,300 miles above the surface of the Earth which was a great deal more investment in energy to get it there. So it was truly a giant feat to do this. But Peter had the idea, and I was running in Future Programs in Houston and he brought it to me and said what do you think about this and I said well it certainly is bold, but I think it’s sufficiently interesting. I’d like to have the senior staff here at the center hear what you have to say about it. Would you come back and give a briefing? He said certainly. So I set up a meeting with Chris Kraft who was then the center director and Max Faget and all the senior management of the Center and we gathered in Chris’ conference room on the ninth floor of Building 1, and Peter stood up and went through his slides. And I was appalled at all these senior executives slapping on their knee and laughing at the man. And I was embarrassed because I’d invited him down to Houston and they were saying that’s silly. That’s damn near ridiculous. And I went to Peter after the meeting and said first I want to apologize on behalf of the whole group. I don’t think they knew what they were doing and I’m very sorry they gave you this shabby treatment. Secondly, I’ve got to tell you I think I agree with their assessment of your proposal because its so large an undertaking I don’t see how it could be in any way possible, but I’m not going to make that knee-jerk reaction. I’m going to look into it and I’m going to find out why I have this feeling that its not possible and when I find out why I’ll let you know. And he said gee, that’s all I ask.
Well that was a terrible mistake on my part because this occurred shortly before Thanksgiving and I worked for four days and four nights just before the Thanksgiving holiday with just about an hour out to go eat Thanksgiving dinner with the family. Working with a pocket calculator and a piece of accounting pad paper to do the work because that was before we had our personal computers and I did not find that fatal flaw. I called him up and I said Peter, I looked and looked and I cannot find why it is fundamentally impossible to do what you say we can do. I think the question is going to be what would it cost? How would we find the money to get it together? And I reported that to Faget and he said I don’t want to hear about it. He said if you can convince Guy Thibbodeaux, who was his college roommate and was a fellow that had run the propulsion group when he came down from Langley and Jim Elms gave my job, if you will, to this fellow Thibbodeaux which didn’t make me all that happy, but I got busy and forgot about it. But anyhow I went to Guy and said Guy, I want to talk to you about this thing. Mike asked me to brief you on it and, if you are persuaded, he’d listen. So I got together with Guy Thibbodeaux and we went through sheets of papers that I’d produced and he had some thoughts checked on it and he came back to me and said yeah, I think I buy it. Let’s go see Max. So we went to see Faget and the two of us went there and he listened to his former college roommate and said okay, let’s talk to Chris who was then the Center Director.
So it wasn’t long before Chris Kraft became the world’s leading advocate of the Space Solar Power thing and still is. And that led to setting up a program with NASA headquarters and astronaut Jack Schmidt, the geologist who flew on the last mission, who was by that time the Associate Administrator for Energy at NASA headquarters which was a short-lived position that NASA set up. They no longer have such a position. But Jack called up one of his friends, Dr. Bill Lenore, who had an earned Ph.D. in, would you believe, microwave energy which is one of the key technologies. And he asked Bill if he’d form a team NASA-wide, to pull together a team of fifteen to twenty people, to study this thing in more depth and come up with air time. And Lenore quite naturally asked me to help him, and I was sort of his lieutenant on this deal. And we had meetings all over the country at Cleveland with the Louis Research Center, with Washington. We went up to the propulsion laboratory and they pulled in experts in the various disciplines to look into this thing, and we’d banter it about, then studied it separately and then came together and shared our findings, critiqued one another and tried to punch holes in the other guy’s story. And we came out with a favorable report. Said yeah, it looks like Peter was on a good path and it’s something we need to look into further. And that then led to the Department of Energy getting involved and Congress and we embarked on about a three-year program with industry and spent something like twenty million dollars in studying the power…the solar powered satellite. And I made a bid to run one of the studies and was not given that job and I was kept out of it. I made some suggestions on how we ought to go about it some of which were accepted most of which were not. And the study went on three years and twenty million dollars were spent. And at the end of it the conclusion was by the National Academy of Sciences that it was technically feasible, but it was obscenely expensive and there was no way we’d be able to justify investing the money to find out whether it would work before you generate the first kilowatt of usable energy here on the ground. So, nothing came of it. And this report said that NASA should keep an eye on it, and periodically report to congress on their recent upgrade of the work, but of course by that time NASA had other fish to fry and they didn’t touch the matter for the next almost twenty years until year before last when they began the program once again and had some support in congress and the Solar Powered Satellite has now reemerged as a major undertaking by…major…I shouldn’t say major. It’s a medium sized activity by a group from NASA. This fellow named John Mankens at NASA headquarters is running the program now. And I’m delighted to see that they’re looking into it again.
But this brings out why you people that study history are so important to us. And the reason is if you don’t look at the lessons of the past you’re bound to repeat the same mistakes again and again and again and I see some of that underway in the space program today. That people haven’t really bothered themselves to understand the history of the undertaking such as the history of the Space Shuttle program and determining where we go next. People haven’t really seemed to have learned the lessons that many of us learned the hard way in the school of hard knocks and applied them and built upon them. So we tend to repeat the same errors generation after generation after generation. It’s up to you history majors to put a stop to that foolishness [laughter]. No I do think it’s important. I think what you’re doing here is an important thing. It’s unfortunate that most of the hard work you do will end up in books that sit on the shelves and gather dust, rather than being reviewed. But maybe enough people will review it to where it will make an impact and perhaps, just perhaps, some of the lessons learned will be applied in the future as a consequence of what you’re doing now. So I think what you’re doing is important.
BRAND: Thank you. I guess we should go back in time a little bit to the Apollo, to the time of the Apollo missions, and when we went to NASA after we read a few books it’s been apparent that the tension and the…I don’t know…the intensity of the entire project, kept many people at work long hours…What were your hours like during that period and what did it feel like to work in such a fast-paced environment?
DAVIS: Well I think all of us when we heard John Kennedy’s speech recognized full well that he had put all the chips on the table… on the U.S. vis a vi the Soviet Union. And the sophisticated Western world was not unduly impressed by Sputnik and they were impressed, but not unduly, so by Yuri Gregarin, but we lost those first two major steps of putting up the first satellite around the Earth and putting the first human in space. Later we lost putting the first woman in space as well.
But the third world, the uncommitted part of the world was ambivalent about whether democracy or central planning and communism were the superior social systems. And in those days it was not at all clear but what Communism was going to sweep our planet. And we were going to find ourselves in a very small defensive minority in this world of ours. And many of us that came into Apollo were, as I was, former military people and I looked upon the Apollo program as nothing less than a warfare conducted by peaceful means and I really believe that’s what transpired. And so all of us felt this sense of dedication that it was something that had to be done if we were going to prevent the world from becoming principally a communist-dominated planet. So yes there was a great sense of urgency and a great sense of pressure and most of us worked six days a week, most of us worked ten to fourteen hours a day. And when I went to Grumman for example I worked first and third shifts because by so doing, being there in the middle of the night, I could help break some logjams and get some things done and I could attend to the morning briefing for the first shift guys and have current information about what went on the night before. And I wasn’t any particular hero in this endeavor. I wasn’t doing any more than the one hundred thousand others, but all of us felt a great sense of dedication and a sense of purpose and a great sense of urgency on getting this thing done before it was done by the Soviet Union and further influence the uncommitted nations of the world to make a grossly improper choice.
So, it was a great deal of pressure and families suffered as a consequence. I was fortunate and I have a very patient lady, but there were many divorces as a consequence of Apollo. More than the statistical norm of heart attacks and strokes and other debilitative things as a consequence of the pressure. But it’s one of these things that had to be done and I feel grateful that I was able to be a part of it. It’s also something that I would not willingly go into again, never again in my life, because it’s too demanding. Did that respond to your question?
BRAND: Yes sir. Did you feel as if you were a part of the team work at NASA…the team effort?
DAVIS: Yes, I think there was a great sense of teamwork and the like. There were obviously the tensions between people as there are in any endeavor. There were the tensions of the contract/government/employee situation that sometimes got in the way because the necessary drive of the company is to make money and the necessary drive of the government is to spend as little as you can to get the thing done. And there’s a built-in tension there, but it’s natural, inevitable. But I always tried to deal with the matter without regard for whatever color the fellow’s badge happened to be, but there were people that were of varying quality if you will on both sides of the organization. And you just had to seek out the better people and make sure that the team was formed of the best people and try to keep those guys that were trouble makers, whether they were on one side or the other at arm’s length from what you were doing so they wouldn’t have the chance to interfere with it too much. And that had little to do with formal organizational structures by the way because there’s organizational structures in any group and there’s a quite different community of people with different strengths between them that get worked out. And the key is to look at the organizational chart and be sure you abide by it and don’t get yourself in too deep a trouble but very, very quickly see what the real organization is and how things work and what makes things tick and who the movers are and get it done with those guys and its different. I don’t think it’s what they teach you at Harvard or Stanford. It’s a very necessary skill to get involved with a group and you say, “Okay, which of these guys can I trust and which of these guys are …is it time to go?
BRAND: No. She’s passing me a question.
DAVIS: But I probably expounded too long on that topic. Go to the next question.
BRAND: What about when you were off the job in Clear Lake. What was Clear Lake like and the area…the surrounding area?
DAVIS: Well it was a brand-new area when we went there and when I first saw where the Center is today there were cows grazing on it. And where the community of Nassau Bay now is was a long country road leading back to what amounted to a farmhouse where real estate people were attempting to sell lots. And they were selling lots immediately behind filling stations along NASA Road 1 because they didn’t want to put streets any deeper in the subdivision than they had to so they were working over time. We built our home in El Lago which is a nice area and we moved into our brand new home there about a year after we got there and as you might imagine I didn’t pay nearly enough attention to the building process as I would like to have because I was off on travel and busy. And my wife had to carry more of the burden on making the choices on things having to do with the new home than was right. And she also had to carry more of the burden of raising our two sons than was right. But El Lago was a pleasant place to live. It was a pretty cloistered community because most of us worked at the center and we got together with our neighbors infrequently but maybe twice a month we’d have a bridge group or something. And church meant a lot to most of us and most of us did make it our business to attend Sunday services unless we had an airplane to catch or had to be somewhere on Sunday afternoon which happened maybe once a month. But it was good living in El Lago. We were close to our work and it was a very short commute and it was a pleasant place to live.
BRAND: But what about, for instance, when Neil Armstrong made the first step on the moon and were there any celebrations? We keep hearing about Splashdown Parties and things like this . . ..
DAVIS: Well, there’s a great deal more legend than I think fact there. Either that or I missed out. But certainly there were some celebrations, but most of the time when those events occurred fatigue overtook you right afterwards and you were ready to go sleep sixteen hours rather than party because everybody had been working day and night to try to make it happen. And when Neil and Buzz were on the moon for example, I think it was Buzz that turned around with his backpack and broke off a circuit breaker. You’ve heard that story have you not?
BRAND: No, sir. I haven’t.
DAVIS: Well as luck would have it, the circuit breaker he broke off was the Engine Arm circuit breaker and without having power for the engine they’d have been on the moon yet. Because you had to push the circuit breaker to arm the engine before you could lift off from the moon and head home. So we said aw shucks and a very cool guy in mission control…I have to hand it to the mission control guys. They were a lot cooler than I was. And the decision was well, Buzz see if you can take a ball point pen and press what’s left of the breaker and get it to latch. But three of us stayed up all that night and by morning we had three different ways of hot-wiring the bird figured out for them to use if they had to, but that was pretty well par for the course. You responded to situations and you worked out the plan to where you had the situation covered in depth and if Plan A didn’t work you go to Plan B and if Plan B didn’t work you had Plan C. And that was typical of the way we did our business all the way through and as you might imagine that was pretty demanding [clock chimes made some words unintelligible] so that’s what we did because we couldn’t afford failure. We took great pains to ensure that we had multiple paths of success available to us.
BRAND: Did your wife join any women’s organizations? Did they have anything for the NASA wives…?
DAVIS: Well, it was typical community things. She was in a bowling league and we were in a bridge group as substitutes. We didn’t play regularly, but we played every now and again with a bridge group including the people that are now our next-door neighbors. They were regulars. And she was pretty busy trying to keep me going. And one time in the latter stages of I think the Apollo 10 drill on lunar module number… no the Apollo 15 drill with lunar module 10, I spent so much time in Bethpage, New York she said look, either travel less or find someplace else to leave your dirty clothes. And she was right. I’d done too much so I eased off a little bit then. I then began … since we completed the landing and all these things were, you know, were of lesser importance. It was not necessary to continue this six day a week night and day thing, but sheer momentum carried us through on that for a year or so after the first landing because that’s what we’d gotten acclimated to for eight long years and that’s the way you’re supposed to work. Some of those habits carry over with me today, but that doesn’t mean it was the right thing to do and it was not the right response to the situation. And Buzz and I are probably entirely too uptight about today’s situation. We ought to relax and enjoy things, but…
BRAND: Under what terms did you leave NASA?
DAVIS: Under good terms. NASA came out with something called an early out. They were required to reduce the staff and the way they chose to do so was to give people the opportunity to retire much earlier than they normally would, and you pay the price for it with reduced retirement income each month. Someone came to me and said Hu, I understand were having an early out. And I said yeah, I read about that. And he said, Well, what are you going to do? And I said I don’t know what job I’m going to end up with when some of the old-timers leave. He said no, dummy. I’m talking about you. I said come on. I’m just a young squirt. He said you and I came in to NASA about the same time I bet you and you and I have about the same amount of time in the military which is why I’m knowledgeable and I think you are. Did you keep the announcement because I threw it in the garbage because I knew it didn’t apply to me? He said yeah and I said well get me a print of it if you will. So he gave me a print of it and sure enough, I read it, and by a few months I was eligible to retire in 1979 at age 48. And I didn’t know whether I would accept it or reject that thing and so I had by that time a little programmable HP67 pocket calculator and it had a little magnetic chip card that you fed to it you could program so I made up a little computer program and put in the actuarial tables and the NASA retirement rules and all the rest and started determining on net present value, like the economists use, what’s the right choice to make. And I kept running cases for myself and my friends with different assumptions. I never could find out a case where it said you ought to stay. And it finally dawned on me that that was because whoever set up the program designed it so with the idea of motivating people to help them reduce the size of the workforce. So I said okay, I guess I’ll take it. Because if you had any residual self-confidence it was foolish not to, you know, from a lifetime interest point of view. So I decided I was going to leave NASA and go do something else.
Now the next question was well what am I going to do and I did not want to move to the West Coast or New York because we’re Texans. And I did not want to go to work there in Houston as a support contractor because I’d seen some of my former associates take that path and they’d walk out with their shoulders back and their head held high and you’d see them six months later shuffling up the steps and they looked fifteen years older. And that was pretty much in my view a stultifying environment for a person to subject themselves to and I didn’t want any part of that. And so by the process of elimination I said well I guess I’ll be a consultant. And so I put in my papers, announced my retirement, got a couple of consulting assignments lined up shortly after I left. And having done that I said gee I wonder what the overhead costs are of being a consultant and I went to the computer again and, by that time I had a computer, and was appalled to find that eighty percent of what you earn goes to pay the expenses or seventy percent. It was some huge fraction. And I couldn’t believe my own numbers so I called several friends who’d been consultants for several years, and they said yeah that’s about right. You get to take a lot of nice trips, but you don’t get any real money.
So I was already committed and the clock was ticking. December the seventh of 1979 I was going to be separated from NASA and I needed to get myself squared away. So it occurred to me if I had that problem probably three hundred other people did too. They’d be taking the early-out retirement. Personnel expected a hundred people to take it and I guessed three hundred, I think 270 or some number actually did so. But I said well if I have that problem so do all these other guys and maybe there’s some economies of scale. So I got together with some friends and we formed a little company that was a consulting company called Eagle Engineering there in Houston and we opened our doors the first week of January 1980 with a cadre of five or six or eight and grew to about thirty or forty people and it was very successful. I spent about five years doing that before I moved here.
BRAND: Do you believe that NASA of the year 2000 and beyond is capable of making the same enormous strides that you all were able to make with the Soviet Union breathing down your necks in the 60s? Do you think they’re capable of the same growth . . .?
DAVIS: Well, no I don’t think we’re capable, but it doesn’t necessarily reflect on the people involved. It reflects on the time in which we live. Mankind cannot live in a continual state of stress. And it’s my opinion that history is not a continuous flow process. It occurs in bumps and starts and you have periods of intense human activity for good cause and you have other periods of long duration where things can and should be a great deal more laid back. So people that think of history as a continuum are simply mistaken. Something that was once said about flying: “Flying is endless hours of boredom punctuated by moments of stark terror.” Well, I think that in a larger sense the events of the world are much the same way, and events in our lives are the same way. So I don’t think it’s necessary for NASA to do what we did in the early 1960s.
BRAND: One other thing…, what . . . if you were sitting here interviewing a former NASA employee from your generation, what question would you ask that I might have missed?
DAVIS: Oh, I think you’ve done pretty well. I’m an engineer. I tend to think more in terms of numbers and facts, chronology and the like . . . so I would probably have . . .. If I were doing the interviews I probably would have structured it a great deal more and say okay what did you do from the first of August 1963 to you know, but that’s probably not the right way to go about it. So, I think you’re doing fine.