NASA DeAtkine, Joseph - May 24, 2001
Interview with Joseph N. DeAtkine
Interviewer: Matt Tippens
Date of Interview: May 24, 2001
Location: DeAtkine home, Horseshoe Bay, Texas
MATT TIPPENS: Today is May 24, 2001. This oral history with Joseph DeAtkine is being conducted at the home of the interviewee in Horseshoe Bay, Texas. The interview is being conducted for the NASA Johnson Space Center, in conjunction with Southwest Texas State University, history department, by graduate student Matt Tippens.
Thank you for joining me today. Where did you grow up?
DEATKINE: Well, I grew up in the Army. My dad was a serviceman and we moved around quite a bit, but most of my growing up was done in Virginia, in the Hampton area of Virginia.
TIPPENS: Where did you go to college?
DEATKINE: Went to Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, in the Allegheny Mountains.
TIPPENS: What did you study there?
DEATKINE: Electrical engineering.
TIPPENS: How did you become interested in that?
DEATKINE: Well, I was very fortunate. As a teenager, the space program was just starting up, and it was really the rage of, I guess, all the young people my age. It was really a good time to be growing up because there was a race going on between the Russians and the Americans. Of course, they had launched Sputnik, and that kind of galvanized the country and, especially in the educational situation. All the schools were emphasizing math, science, and, of course, I caught the bug. We were living in Hampton, Virginia, which was close to Langley Research Center, where the Space Task Group, the first—the start of the manned spacecraft program was started at Langley Air Force Base at the Langley Research Center, and it was called a Space Task Group. So, we just lived a few miles from it and my dad, by the way, after he retired from the Army went to work for NASA at Langley. So, that's really how I got my start in all this.
TIPPENS: What were the kind of feelings at the time when Sputnik went up?
DEATKINE: I think everybody was shocked 'cause everyone thought that America was number one in science, and everything else for that matter. But when the Russians launched Sputnik, it really sent a ripple through the whole country that maybe we weren't doing so well. Of course, with the military implications of the whole thing. In those days everybody thought whoever had the high ground had the advantage. In military science you always hear, "take the high ground," because that gives you an advantage over your opponent. Well, the Soviets had the high ground at that time. So, it was kind of a scary thing 'cause not only did it show they could launch a satellite, they could also launch an ICBM [Intercontinental Ballistic Missile], and that made us all very vulnerable. So, in a way, it was a scary time, but, most of all, I think it gave you a real enthusiasm to compete. And that went on—that whole psychology went on for, gosh, for at least all the way through the lunar landing. After that, it began to back off quite a bit. But through the lunar landing that was kind of the psychology that gripped everybody that worked in the program.
TIPPENS: What were some of your responsibilities when you worked at the NASA Langley Research Center?
DEATKINE: I worked there as a student co-op. Virginia Tech had the co-operative program, in engineering anyway, at that time. What you would do is you would work a quarter, go to school a quarter, work a quarter, go to school a quarter. In stretched out a four-year curriculum to five years. Of course, after you had graduated, you would have, at least, almost two of years’ experience working in the technical area. After I graduated, I had my choice of working there at Langley in the research labs or going to Houston. Of course, I wanted to get in on the manned spacecraft program because that's what the most fun was.
As to your question of what kind of work I did at Langley, I worked in the laboratories there. I worked in everything from microelectronics to vacuum measurement systems to computer systems, all sorts of different electronic measuring systems there. I worked, I guess, seven different quarters there, each one in a different area. So, I got see quite a bit of what went on at Langley.
The one that was most interesting was working in the microelectronics section. That was in the, oh, I guess the spring of '65. In 1965, microelectronics people didn't think too much about it because about all it was good for in those days was to miniaturize electronics for the space vehicles. Of course, it takes a lot of propulsion and all to launch a pound of payload. So, it was very important to get your payload weights down, and the way they did that was to miniaturize electronics. Nobody ever dreamed of what would come today. It was kind of funny because my last day at work, my boss set me down and talked about coming back to work in his area. He told me, "Son.” He said, “This is where the future is.” He says, “As we miniaturize electronics, they not only get smaller and cheaper, but they become more reliable." I thought that was funny, because I couldn't have believed that back in those days, because it seemed like everything smaller had to be less reliable and that it would be more expensive to build, and so on, like that. But when I look back on that, I see how prophetic his words were. He was right [laughs].
TIPPENS: Did you want to stay at Langley or did you, rather, want to go to Houston?
DEATKINE: I wanted to go to Houston because that was where the manned spacecraft program was. It had just moved about two years prior, two or three years prior, to my graduation. They had moved from Langley to Houston. I had a brother in Houston already working in the space program two years ahead of me and, of course, he had good things to say. I came down to Houston to visit and, of course, manned space flight was the thing to do, so I wanted to get in on it. It's easy to understand, I'll tell ya [laughs].
TIPPENS: What year did you first come to JSC [Johnson Space Center]?
DEATKINE: Well, I visited in December of '65. I came to work in June of '66.
TIPPENS: What was the Clear Lake area like at that time, as far as housing, restaurants?
DEATKINE: Very quiet. Of course, it had been in operation for about three or four years already when the first house was built down there, but it was very quiet back in those days, not much traffic. I lived, for about the first two years, I lived in Pasadena which is part of Houston and had to commute to work, but finally bought a house in Clear Lake and moved down there. It was very quiet. There wasn't many stores or anything. You had to drive into Houston, as far as entertainment went, you had to drive into Houston. When I moved away from there three years ago, everything is down in Clear Lake now, and its very crowded and congested.
TIPPENS: How did you like the weather when you first got there?
DEATKINE: Well, I kind of liked it. I spent my last winter at Virginia Tech in the mountains there, and it snowed. We had snow all the time, and we even had one day when we couldn't have classes 'cause the snow was so deep. It was the first time in a hundred years, I think, the school had to shut down due to snow, and I had had enough of snow. So, when I got to Houston it was so hot and muggy, I thought, hey, this is kind of nice [laughs].
TIPPENS: You were a flight controller for several years. What were the responsibilities of that position?
DEATKINE: Yes, many years. The first job I really had—the first job I really had a responsible position on was AS-501 [Apollo-Saturn] which is a launch, an unmanned launch, of the first moon rocket. It was the Saturn V, and it was launched for the first time. The first two launches went unmanned, naturally, for obvious reasons. I was assigned to the remote site section, and I went to a place called Carnarvon, Australia, to work as the remote site flight controller. In other words, when it came over the western part of Australia, we had charge of the thing. We had commands and stuff on our consoles to control different functions on board the spacecraft.
My responsibilities were with what's called the ECON system and they stood for electrical power, environmental control systems, and the communications and instrumentation systems. So, they were my responsibilities on that flight. I did things like changing antennas and purging fuel cells, these were the hydrogen and oxygen fuel cells, which gave the electrical power for the spacecraft. They needed to be purged every so often, and one of the tests was to see how the purging went into orbit. Of course, they did it on the ground, then again, they do it in orbit, and in weightlessness and with the vacuum of space outside the vehicle, you want to see how things work. Of course, if things worked very well, the mission went very well. [I] had a real good time out in Australia, spent a month out there, got to see the outback, and worked with the Australian people that manned the site out there. We were the only Amer—the flight controllers that went out there were the only Americans out there. Everybody else that manned the site there in Carnarvon was Australian, worked with the telephone company out there. Real good troops. [I] had a good time out there.
TIPPENS: During the Apollo missions what were your duties?
DEATKINE: When I got back to Houston I went to work—let's see, the first flight was Apollo 7, and I worked in a position called INCO, I-N-C-O, and it was instrumentation communications. My job was to monitor those systems, change antennas, run the tape recorder on board, etc., things like that. I did that on Apollo 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11, and, let's see, 12, and 12, I worked Apollo 12 doing the same thing. For Apollo 13, we had a reorganization, the job I was doing went to another branch. The people that were in the branch I was in, which was the Apollo Systems Branch, we moved around and some of us went someplace, but I went into what's called Guidance, Navigation, and Control Systems Branch. On Apollo 13, I was working in the staff support room, in the back room, kind of, getting OJT [on the job training], so to speak, learning the ropes and so on, like that. That's where I was when Apollo 13 had its problem.
TIPPENS: What do you feel is your greatest accomplishment during this time?
DEATKINE: Well, of course the greatest accomplishment—I don’t know from a program standpoint—from all of us, a team standpoint, it would have to be Apollo 11. As far as accomplishments go, I don't know, I think all of them are pretty rewarding. I wouldn't put any one above the other, some of them I enjoyed more than the other, but I don't think any of them were any less important. The flight control jobs were the most stressful.
About the early, let’s see, no, about the mid-1980s, is when I moved over to management position working flight production. Flight production is simply the management of preparing for a mission, that is, getting all of the documentation, and all of the software, stuff like that, making sure it’s ready to support the simulations, which support the mission, and all that. And that's important but being a flight controller is probably more rewarding. Number one, it's more stressful and, number two, it was, I would think, more responsibility. You could do bad things if you did the wrong thing and, of course, you could help a lot if you did the right thing. So, that would have to be the most rewarding, and any of the missions were rewarding to me.
TIPPENS: Do you remember any great difficulties?
DEATKINE: Gosh there were lots of 'em [laughs].
TIPPENS: Does one stand out?
DEATKINE: It depends, if you ask the question on a program level, yeah, I could tell you about that. Then on a personal level, I guess on a personal level, there wasn't any real problems when I flew out at Carnarvon for that first AS-501. The GNC [Guidance, Navigation, and Control Systems] folks had a problem with—we oversped the vehicle coming back in testing the heat shield. It came in at quite a bit higher speed than a normal reentry would have done. Of course, it just proved the vehicle held together even better than it was designed for. That worked out pretty good.
As far as my own personal experiences go, working as an INCO those early flights, we had, you had to be on console all time because the vehicle would go into what was called a barbecue mode. To keep the temperatures even on the spacecraft, on one side you would have freezing on the other side you would have boiling due to the sun. Of course, you had to this huge temperature differential. Well, the way to mitigate that is you put it in a barbecue mode. You set the vehicle up where the sun is perpendicular to the spacecraft and then you slowly spin it, just like you would barbecue some beef on a roaster. I had to maintain the antennas, and as that thing rotated, you had to constantly change the antennas. Here you are sitting on a console, and it's a couple of day trip out to the moon, of course you're in shifts and all, but while you’re sittin' there and you need to go eat or go to the restroom or something, you've got these antennas you're constantly changing. If you didn't change them right, you would lose communication with the vehicle and, of course, the whole flight control team would jump on you at once. “What happened?” [laughs] “What's wrong there?” You know, I didn't switch it right or something. Anyway, you had to be on your toes. When you wanted to take a break, you had to switch that antenna and then run like heck, do whatever you needed to do, and then run back getting ready for the next antenna switch. It was kind of a trying experience, and we didn't have all the software things they have today that takes care of things like that. 'Cause later on, they went to a program where the antennas would switch automatically and things like that.
When we—even flying to the moon on Apollo 11, we didn't have that, and all these antennae look angles and things for the ground tracking station to look at the vehicle and see which antenna would be best for it, and so on like that. We didn't have these software algorithms that would tell us that. We had things, we had built over around the office like, one of the fellows who recently died, Dick Brown, came up with this ingenious little slide rule, which the three of used on the console. You'd just put in the angles that were in the inertial measurement unit from the vehicle and then you could pick out which site you were at, and so on, and turn this slide rule and it would tell you which antenna you should be on. So, you could always have the best antenna, so you'd have the maximum signal, get the clearest signal, and so on like that. It was a pretty hectic time.
Now, when I moved over to do the GNC job, our mission went pretty well. The Apollo 15—I worked in the front room as a prime guidance, navigation, and control officer. As I remember, everything went pretty doggone good on that flight. We did have some — I'm trying to think — if it was on that flight or a later flight. No, it was a later flight. No, that flight went very well.
Now, when Apollo-Soyuz came around, I worked on that program. We had a couple of problems on that one. When we docked with the Russian vehicle, it was a rather hard docking, a rather clumsy docking you might say. It disturbed the Russians that were in our control center. They were looking at their own telemetry coming down. Their vehicle got shook up quite a bit, and they came running out into the control room to find out what we had done to them. We hadn't damaged it or anything, it was just a rough docking, a little rougher than it needed to be. It turned out all right. Now, on entry, I wasn't on my, my boss was on the console at the time, the crew had missed something on the checklist during re-entry. They had opened up the vent valves, which let the outside air in too soon. We had these propellants on board, hypergolic propellants, these are propellants, you mix them together and they burn spontaneously, you don't need a spark or anything, but they were highly corrosive. They could do real damage to you. The crew, unfortunately, flipped their vent switch too soon and these things were still out gassing when they were on the parachutes, and it ingested. 'Cause the air from the outside came in, 'cause we always operated at a lower pressure in space than the 15 psi [pounds per square inch] down here on earth. So, when they opened those valves, of course, air rushed in and it sucked in some of the hypergolic fuels and it knocked, they actually passed out, all three of them. Fortunately, it wasn't life threatening or anything like that. When the scuba divers and all got to 'em, they had come around and all that. It was a little scary, but that was pretty eventful.
On Skylab [laughs]—I don't know what to say about Skylab. When it was launched, I remember we stood around—I was on the launch team, and everything went wrong. I mean, the thing fell apart going into orbit. I remember some of us flight controllers were standing around and we asked each other—usually you go around the room and say, "Do you have a problem?” and “What do you have that's wrong, that's not working right?" We kind of laughed and said, "Does anybody have anything that's working right?"
I mean, what happened to the thing was, Skylab was launched and evidently was designed such that was improperly vented inside the insulation and so on, that covered the outside of the Skylab. Of course, when it went up, it went into the vacuum of space, and this thing couldn't vent the higher pressure inside fast enough, so it ripped the insulation off. It ended up tearing one of the two solar wings. The thing had two big solar wings. One of them deployed early and got ripped off, and the other one was stuck, wouldn't deploy. We had lost a lot of the insulation, so the thing was overheating. The gyros had bubbles in them, which meant they weren't working right. They’re supposed to be—the gyros are what measures the rates of change of the vehicle as the vehicle moves. These bubbles caused an output that went from offscale high to offscale low, at a very high frequency. They were practically un-useable, even though some of us got together on the ground, and we had one fellow who came up with the idea of just trying to average out these oscillations and try to come up with a number. It worked a little bit, but they eventually had to replace all this.
Pete Conrad's mission that went up, a manned mission went up as a repair mission. They did a fantastic job. Really one of the great moments in the space program, in my opinion, because of all the great work they did. They deployed that solar wing that was stuck, so they got electrical power to the vehicle. They put a tent over the Skylab, and it looked just a like a tent, like you would have out in a picnic or something, just a tarpaulin over the vehicle that shielded it from the sun so it wouldn't overheat. [They] changed out the rate gyros. Gosh, I don't know what all they did, but they repaired so many things on that vehicle, and we went ahead and flew Skylab all the way to the end. In fact, finally had to bring it down, and, you probably don't remember, but many years later we did a controlled re-entry, and I use the word "controlled" because it came in uncontrolled. It was kind of like the [Mir], here a few months ago, that came in and everybody was worried about it hitting people and all that. They [Russians] did a better job, evidently. Theirs came in right over the Pacific, burned up, and hardly anybody even saw anything of that thing. Skylab started tumbling, and when it came in, much of it broke up over Australia, and came in over Australia. Fortunately, it was the outback, and I think its true, the story I had heard, one jack rabbit out in the outback got killed by a piece of debris, and that was it. That's how we brought in Skylab.
Apollo-Soyuz went pretty well, except for the two instances that I mentioned. Now, the Shuttle program, I think the Shuttle program, now let me think, Apollo 8 was one the scariest starting off, because we were going to leave earth orbit, we were going to go to the moon. Of course, communications were real vital to that mission, and I was working the communication systems back in those days. I was quite worried, but everything went flawless, it was a great mission, Apollo 8.
Now, the next one that really worried me a lot was the Shuttle, the first Shuttle flight. We had done some drop tests with the Shuttle, but they were un-powered, they rode on the back of a 747, was released, and they just guided it into the dry lakebed there out at the Edwards Air Force Base. So that wasn't too hairy. But the first Shuttle launch, we never launched a Shuttle until it was manned. The first flight was with two guys in it, John Young and Bob Crippen, and they went up with that thing never having been launched before. An extremely complex vehicle. It was far more complex than the Apollo program, the Skylab program, or any of the vehicles that went before it. Even to this day, it's extremely complex. The tiles were new. The engines we used on it were those throttle bolt, if I say the word right, hydrogen-oxygen liquid fueled engines, which we had never flown throttle bolt engines on a manned space flight before. They were prone to have problems. Down at MissU, where they tested them, there in Mississippi, they had numerous failures, things come apart there. The turbines, they had them spinning at tremendous speeds, and when they come apart, they come apart, and throw shrapnel all over the place. So, these were worries that I had and, I assume, everybody else had. I think everybody was very anxious and all that. The mission went very well, turned out to be real good, everything worked fine, so, we were real happy with that flight.
Now, when the Challenger accident occurred, I had just moved into management, so I wasn't in the control center for that. Other than that, the other Shuttle missions I worked were very nice, no major problems, everything. You know, the fact of the matter is they would kind of get so boring at times, you're kind of looking for problems, and the problems you found were very small and easily solvable, and, so on, like that. They went pretty good.
TIPPENS: What was your work schedule like around the time of Apollo, did you work a lot of hours, a lot of days of the week?
DEATKINE: When we had simulations and we worked missions, they were odd hours. You worked—we normally had three shifts, that's the way it usually worked, three shifts of about eight hours each. Of course, you had the overlap, you had to come in, get briefed by your colleague who was on the console before you, and then you would have to debrief whomever was relieving you. So, we spent anywhere from ten, eleven, twelve hours on a shift when we were flying. For simulations, most of the time we did them during the day, because they didn't want to pay overtime, but sometimes we would have whole mission simulations where you would work around the clock. You could get some pretty bad hours. It seems like I used to get my share of graveyard shifts, and I hated them 'cause you kind of get numb after a while.
The most trouble we had with shift work, that I found, was when Skylab launched, and we had all these problems. Because we had about four, I'm not sure, we either had four or five teams. I think it was just four teams at the time. I don't remember quite right. They had to pull two of the teams off to work checklist and things like that, preparation type stuff to get ready for the rescue flight. Those of us, like myself, who remained on the console, we had to work twelve-hour shifts but, then again, you had to be there for the handovers, which extended to fourteen hour shifts. I seemed to have a problem with one fellow that was supposed to relieve me who never could get up on time, and I'd have to call him. So, I sometime pulled sixteen, eighteen-hour shifts. So, that was, from a shift standpoint, that was the worst experience. It went on for a couple of weeks, and I'll tell you at the end of that I was numb. But we didn't have much choice, that was the only teams we had and you just go with them. Then when we launched the rescue teams, we brought everybody back on console and things got squared away pretty good after that.
TIPPENS: Was it stressful? Did it affect your home life? Were you married at the time?
DEATKINE: No, I wasn't married at the time, so it didn't affect that. Now I've heard of people being affected by it. Who knows whether it really made a difference or not. I wasn't in a position to say. I'll tell you, one of the stressful things that you do as a flight controller is the simulations themselves. Before any flight goes, you're on the console simulating missions and you have a simulation team that programs in malfunctions, and you’re graded on how well you do when these malfunctions are input. That can be pretty nerve racking at times, especially if you're not doing well on a console. I've had some that didn't go very well, and, I tell you, you worry about the next one coming up because it seems like if you had a few problems the previous sim [simulation], you know they're gonna come at you with some bad ones the next time, and they want to really test your mettle. So, that could be a little nerve racking.
But they could also be fun, too. If you really knew your stuff, and you were on top of your game, and you were doing a good job, it could, in a way, be more fun than the mission. Because they're always throwing problems in. If you solve them right, you're on top of it, you feel good about it. You can go home feeling real good. So, that right there could be pretty stressful, too. Of course, during a mission, if you had a problem, that's very stressful. Other than that, that's the way it went. When I worked in management, it was always personnel with your stress [laughs]. Dealing with people.
TIPPENS: Did you have some sense of the "space race" that was going on at the time?
DEATKINE: Oh [laughs], that's about all you had, really. The “space race”—even when I was a teenager growing up, it was going hot and heavy. A movie I saw here some years ago really showed, I think did a good job of showing what the atmosphere was like during that time, and that was the movie The Right Stuff. If you've ever seen it, or get a chance to see it, and you wonder what the mentality of the news corps was during that time, that movie did a great job of showing how things were. I don't think it exaggerated things very much at all.
We had a lot of feeling for the race itself. When I worked with Russians, Apollo-Soyuz mission, I went to Russia. Of course, that was back in the Soviet days when things were very clamped down tight and there was a lot of—why don’t we just say they watched you pretty close when you went over there. I spent a few weeks over there in Moscow and at Star City working with the Russians, getting ready for the Apollo-Soyuz mission. You could see it in them, and, of course, it was obvious in us. The Russians were very competitive about the "space race.” And we had already gone to the moon, so, in a way, the race to the moon was over. They lost. But, that, still, that competition was there.
Up until we landed on the moon, it was really fierce. In fact, we didn't know who was going to get there first, up until, maybe, a year before launch. We figured, barring an accident, we would be the first on the moon. But up until that time—you know, it seems like every time we did something, the Russians would do something even better. They were the first in space with Sputnik, they were the first to launch Yuri Gagarin, first man in space. It went on and on like that. They always put somebody up there first. They put a woman in space first. They had all these space firsts. We always felt like, whatever we did, they're gonna top us here in a few months. They'll jump ahead of us. So, we had that feeling, I guess, right up until Apollo 8, or maybe even after Apollo 8. Apollo 8 was when we went and circled the moon and came back home, didn't land, just did a circle around the moon and back home we came. When we did that, things were looking good, that vehicle worked good.
After the fire at the Cape [Canaveral, Florida], the [Virgil Ivan “Gus”] Grissom crew, when they died down there at the Cape, we really wondered then. We were put back—we had a down time of about a year in mission control, and we really didn't have that much to do. The vehicle had to be redesigned in many ways to make it safer, because obviously it wasn't a safe vehicle when it burned up on the pad. It had a hundred percent oxygen at atmosphere, which is, any kind of spark at all and you've got an uncontrollable fire. So, they had to fix that. They had to put in a quick egress hatch, had to be put in, and they did a lot of work on things like the environmental control system, to make it better, 'cause it was a real bulky system. A lot of us were worried. There were some people, I won't quote anybody's name, but was wondering if the Grissom mission had launched, would we have lost them in orbit. Of course, nobody will ever know the answer to that question, but it’s a nagging thing, and you wonder about that. Because, hey, it had all these problems just sitting there on the pad, what would of happened if had been launched in orbit being an inadequately designed vehicle? The problem was it was a race. Everybody was pushing to make the lunar landing before 1970, as President [John F.] Kennedy had called for. It was definitely a race—everything. We were pushin' all the time.
Apollo 8—I know my brother was working in the flight dynamics area. These are the people that control the trajectory and all, plan the trajectory, and all the mathematics that goes into the orbital mechanics and stuff that gets you to the moon and back. I know one of his bosses called him and asked him what he thought about it, about Apollo 8 going to the moon, 'cause we weren't quite ready to go to the moon yet. He thought it was a crazy idea to do it, but the upper management made the decision to go, and it turned out great, worked just fine. I know my brother was saying, "Boy, that was a gutsy call." [laughs]
'Cause at that time, we had only flown—I'm trying to think. It wasn't [snaps fingers]—gosh, I’m trying to get the—we flew Apollo 7 and it worked very well. Apollo 7 went very good. Then we flew, I think, if I'm not mistaken, Apollo 9. I think we did a whiffer deal, but I'm not sure. Apollo 9 was an earth orbit, where we checked out the LEM [Lunar Excursion Module] in earth orbit and then, for Apollo 8, it was simply the command and service module was launched, went to the moon and circled around it, and came back home. The fact that you left earth orbit and there was no—you didn't do a quick turnaround. The only way you came home was to loop the moon. That's the way you came home. You needed the gravitational assist and turn of the moon to change the trajectory and set you back on an earth-bound course. If any of your mathematics were off, you're gonna miss the moon, or, if you did it on the coming home, you'd miss the earth. If you came in too steep, you'd burn up in the atmosphere, 'cause you'd hit the atmosphere head on. That would burn up and crush the vehicle. If you came in too shallow, you would skip off and go back into space and do one of these long orbits, like comets do. You know, comets go out and come around there every so many years. Apollo 8 would of come back, maybe, in about a year, depending on how it skipped out, but it could have been months. Of course, the crew would have been long dead by then. All of their consumables would have given out and they would have perished. Apollo 8 was a big step, and upper management made the gutsy decision to go and it turned out real good. I think that then, after that mission, everybody really got a lot of confidence and figured we were gonna beat the Russians to the moon.
TIPPENS: Once Apollo 11 landed on the moon, there must have been just a great sense of accomplishment and maybe a sense of relief also?
DEATKINE: Boy, obviously. Now I wasn't on the landing team itself. I went in and they had a place set up upstairs to monitor everything going on. I worked one of the other shifts, But, of course, everybody was ecstatic when it landed. But the landing team, they had a problem coming in. The LEM computer was being overloaded with data, it couldn't process all the data it was being given. It turns out a guy at MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] labs, the Draper Lab at MIT, had seen this same phenomenon in simulations back at MIT. He had passed the word along back Houston, mission control, that he had seen this before.
So, our flight controller that was on, that was responsible for that system, went ahead and give the go ahead anyway, even though that thing wasn't working right. If you’re up on the space program, you probably realize that Neil Armstrong, when he came down, and he was close to the moon, he saw he was coming down in a boulder field, which would have, probably, turned over the LEM when it landed. It would have probably fallen over or something if he had landed in a boulder field. So, he extended his landing flight he was doing, his landing trajectory, and found a smoother spot and brought it down, and he had very little fuel. He was down to, well, I wouldn't say smelling fumes, but he was down pretty close to having empty tanks. Of course, when the tanks go empty, then boom, the thing just falls. We were fortunate. Apollo 11—we were pretty fortunate on that landing. Other than that, I think everything went real well.
TIPPENS: You've worked in two eras, the Apollo era and the Shuttle era. Which do you prefer?
DEATKINE: Apollo [laughs]. I have not heard any Apollo person say they liked the Shuttle era better than Apollo. There may be one of us out there somewhere that would say that, but I haven't met him yet, or at least he hasn’t fessed up to it. I mean, there was no comparison. You had the "space race" going on, the big race with the Russians, you had a budget that was practically unlimited, in a way. We flew, when I went to Australia, we flew first class, there and back. The deal was, when you went overseas you flew first class. When I went to Russia, during Apollo-Soyuz, after Apollo, I was back there in the little tourist section all cramped up, the most miserable guy going over there there could be. The budget went down after Apollo, there were cutbacks, we even had two minor layoffs, but they were layoffs just the same.
Now when Shuttle flew, there wasn't just the euphoria. Of course, there’s a new mission, and a lot of new people were involved. A lot of the Apollo people had gone on and retired, gone on to other places to work, and things like that. There just wasn't the same enthusiasm, I don't think, that we had in Apollo, not nearly.
TIPPENS: As Apollo drew to a close, are you disappointed we haven't been back to the moon since?
DEATKINE: A little bit. I'm not sure what we'd gain by going back to the moon, though, is my thought. I think most of people at NASA look forward to Mars as really our next big goal, and when that will happen, I don't know, because of the tremendous cost. It would be very expensive. Technology wise, we're probably OK. There's a lot of things that need to be worked out, things have gotta work right for a long period of time. When you're gone from home for two years or so, or however long it's gonna take, depending on how we go, things have gotta work right, and they've gotta work right for a couple of years and not goof up. Things like that need to be worked out.
We're doing some of that with the space station right now. Like staying up long durations in zero G [gravity]. That’ll be a problem for going to Mars, 'cause you're gonna be in weightlessness for a long, long time. We know that the body does not do well in weightlessness. Whether we need to create artificial gravity to alleviate that, or is there some kind of medication out there somewhere that will alleviate it, which isn't there right now. So, those things need to be worked out. Anyway, next question [laughs].
TIPPENS: I noticed you worked with the International Space Station. What did you do with that?
DEATKINE: I was in management at the time. We were working on getting things ready to support simulations, mainly to support simulations. We were still well away from flying. The space station, the International Space Station has been a real frustrating program from the get-go. It’s maybe ten years behind schedule, billions over budget. The way it started out, it went through several design changes. Finally, with the new administration, or a new administrator, we brought the Russians into the program. They were brought in to, I think, in my own mind, save the program, because it was behind schedule, over budget, things like that aren't good.
When the Russians were brought in, it seemed to give another boost because it improved relations with Russia, it provided money for the Russian scientists so that they wouldn't go off and work for some terrorist nation. It gave a more international flavor to the space station, even though other countries were already involved, by bringing the Russians in, it kind of filled out and complemented the whole situation with them onboard. I don't think it's really worked out that way. It's probably cost us more money, delayed us more because of all the problems we've had dealing with the Russians.
Of course, if you watch the news, you know the latest thing is sending the space tourist up, NASA said no, Russia said yes. So, they shipped him anyway, against the wishes of NASA. Things like this have been going on ever since we dealt with the Russians on the space station. So, it's been pretty frustrating, and there's been a lot of turnover in personnel at NASA and things like that. But it seems to be going now. It's up there, it's functioning, and things are going on. So, hopefully it will have a successful program.
TIPPENS: Why do you think so many former NASA employees have retired to the Hill Country area?
DEATKINE: Houston, when I drove into Houston from Virginia I said, "This has got to be the ugliest place I have ever seen in my life." Houston's not a pretty place. I like the ocean down there. I do miss Galveston, fishing in Galveston Bay, but other than that, it's about the only thing I miss. The Hill Country here is pretty and Bonnie [his wife] and I used to take trips when I was still working. We'd take trips up here into the Hill Country because we had pretty well made up our mind, years before I retired, that we would come to a place like this. My favorite hobby is golf, so I wanted to move to a golfing community. I wanted a place close to a lake where I could fish. We're on Lake LBJ. I wanted a pretty atmosphere and environment that's up here. That's why I think most of the people come up here, really for the beauty of the place, and the serenity, and so, like that.
TIPPENS: Your bio says you give presentations to local organizations and schools concerning the history of the space program. Tell me a little bit about that.
DEATKINE: Well, let's see, the first one I gave was to the Baptist church and I talked a lot about the space program, as far as what it's like to be a flight controller, but also what it's like to be an astronaut, some of the problems you run through as an astronaut, your training and so on. Of course, working in mission control, you heard all the stories about the astronauts, the good parts and the bad parts, and you try to go over some of that. You tell them how it is, what the problems of space flight are, what physiological problems the human body goes through and things like that. The things I think the older people would be interested in like John Glenn when he flew [on the Shuttle], and why they wanted to fly him, and what they hoped to learn that might help older people here on earth. So, I went through that with them, because at the Baptist church it was a luncheon on a Thursday, which told you they were almost all retired people there.
The next one I gave was to the astronomy class at Marble Falls High School [Marble Falls, Texas], and I came there and talked about the history of the program. And, of course, I went into—the teacher of the astronomy class when she called me on the phone and wanted me to come down there, she said, "I wanna hear all the good stories that they don't have in the newspapers and magazines." Of course, there's a lot of good stories, you probably wouldn't want to repeat in public, but she said, "The kids would really love to hear all the dirt on the astronauts," and stuff like that. You know, NASA PR [public relations] system is only gonna be positive, obviously, for obvious reasons. Of course, the press will pick up with the negative stuff that they can verify, but then, of course, there's all the stuff that can't be verified, which gets whispered, and all the rumors, and so on, like that. Well, anyway, that's what she said the kids wanted to hear about.
There's really not that much bad things going on, there's a few embarrassing things that happen to people like, for instance, for the men most of the time they get sick. First thing they do when they get off earth—in fact, Apollo 8, the three crewmen that went up, one of them, Rusty Swigert, got so sick. Now, we’re talking test pilots here, were not talking about some landlubber, we’re talking about throttle jockeys who do all the acrobatics in high performance aircraft and stuff like that. They tend to get sick when they get in orbit. Space sickness is kind of a unique kind of sickness. It’s not quite—it's related to motion sickness, but not quite the same. There's physiological changes that happen when you get in weightlessness, and it tends to make you sick. They do get sick. If you read John Glenn's book about his last trip, he didn't get sick the first time, when he launched, the first time he went up. But when he went up a few years ago on the Shuttle as a 70-something year old man, he got sick coming back in, and he was a lifetime flyer, and all that. Things do happen. So, that's what they wanted to hear.
Now, when I gave the talk to the rotary club here in town, I figured that's a business oriented organization, so I went into the history of the Johnson Space Center, how the contracts were led, all the shenanigans that went on to get the spacecraft center down in Houston, rather than somewhere else—the political gamesmanship that was used by the people in power to get it there. I went into the construction of the site and some of the people—in fact, we had one of the people there at the rotary club was one of the people involved in putting in the electrical power system to it. So, we talked some about that, and a little bit about the space program as far as flying and things like that goes, too. It was mostly oriented towards the development of the space center down there and why they put it there. There's a lot of good reasons why they put it there, not only political [laughs].
TIPPENS: What do you think about the future of NASA, and what would you like to see happen?
DEATKINE: Well, that's a real good question. Obviously, we need to go on with the International Space Station, simply because so much has been spent on it and so much work has been put into it. Two of the things the space station does for us that, probably, hadn't been done before, at least from the American standpoint, is long duration weightlessness and the physiological problems it causes the human and how we can alleviate them. That’s one of the things it does. The other is zero G manufacturing, referred to, kind of, as microgravity, because there's always a teensy bit of gravity up there, but they call it microgravity because it's so little. But doing things like investigating all kinds of experiments and stuff at zero G that can be done over a long period of time. Those are the two things the International Space Station does for you, so that type of work needs to continue.
As far as the long-term goal of NASA, obviously, it’s going to Mars, and after Mars it's beyond. That's gotta be the long-term goal. I need to couch that in saying I realize the huge expense it's gonna be. Politically, getting Congress or the President to support a program of that magnitude is gonna be a hard sell. I don't see that occurring in twenty years. In fact, I'll probably be dead when we go to Mars. I think we'll go someday, but I think it's a long way in the future.
Meantime, it's not at the Johnson Space Center, but out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory [California], you hear on the news that they're constantly launching space probes to Mars, Jupiter, and beyond, even going to asteroids and things like that. There's a lot of excitement, at least in that area of space exploration, and it's gonna continue. You get a lot for your money there, you get a lot of knowledge about space from the unmanned program. In a way, the two competed against each other all during Apollo, Shuttle program. We always competed with the people out at JPL [Jet Propulsion Laboratory], which is a NASA operation out there, but it was unmanned, and they usually ended up getting the short end of the stick. Now, it seems like they're getting more interest and the new administrator has put more emphasis on planetary type flight.
One interesting note, I don't know you're familiar with it, but some years ago we were supposed to build a super conducting super collider up at Waxahachie [Texas]. I don't know if you're familiar with it, but they had already dug these huge underground tunnels for the super cyclotron for high energy physics. Mr. Steven Weinberg at graduation at UT [The University of Texas, Austin, Texas], here a few days, had a few comments about things like that. The space station was in competition with that for money. Here was two huge programs, both would be centered in Texas. I guess—I don't know what happened to the other states' politicians, but, evidently, they did not want to fund two huge scientific programs in the same state. [They] didn't want to give all the pork barrel to one state, and it became between the super collider and the international space station.
The story goes, whether it's true or not, I heard a story that, and I have a friend here that worked on the super collider, and the story he had heard was that these high energy physics people went to Congress and said words to them like, "This stuff is so complicated we can't really explain it to you such that you'd understand." Well, that didn't go over very good. What they did with President Reagan was the NASA honchos built this really neat model of an assembled International Space Station, what it's gonna look like when it's finally completed in a few years. They brought that down and sat it at his desk and said, "There it is." He looked at it and smiled, "We gotta do it." [laughs]
TIPPENS: Looking back, are there any people that you worked with that had a significant impact on you, lifelong friends, that sort of thing?
DEATKINE: Yeah, I've got lifelong friends, guys who I communicate with daily on the internet, even though they don't live around—now there's a couple of guys that live around here. When I was back in Houston, they weren't real close friends, but people I worked with, so that's how I know them here. But say intimate friends, they're all back in Houston, but I communicate with them every day on the internet, which is really neat. Thank goodness for the internet. So, I stay in touch. I know stuff that goes on at NASA often before the people at NASA know about it, because of the grapevine. I get it on the internet, I see it, and I send it back to the co-worker that I used to work with. He says, "Oh, I didn't know this." [laughter] So, they get kind of tickled. Here I am 236 miles away, and I'm finding out things before they do about stuff that they're supposed to be working on. So, that's kind of funny. So, yeah, I keep up with it pretty good.
TIPPENS: Looking back to when you first became involved with aerospace, would you ever have imagined you would be part of something so historical?
DEATKINE: Well, yeah. When I went to work for Manned Space Flight Center, which is the Houston organization, in 1966, I figured history was being made, and I wanted to be part of it. Before that, of course, I didn't know. In fact, when I was in college, I was getting a lot of—we were in an arms race as well as a space race. There were a lot of companies, aerospace companies trying to recruit people for aircraft and missile work. Gosh, I must have had, I would guess, some—I lost count—but I think it was between twelve to fifteen job offers when I graduated. Of course, my NASA job was always there. But there were various people who wanted engineers for the arms race. I thought about it, because I'm still interested in aeronautics, you know, the fighter planes and stuff like that. I always read about those things. And science in general, I'm very much interested in. So, I could of went that route. But I decided to go with the space program because I knew history was going to be made there, and I wanted to be part of it.
TIPPENS: So, you would say you had no regrets?
DEATKINE: No, no. NASA has been very well to me, as you can see, we live well out here. The government retirement, you never get rich, but they pay you a nice retirement at least under the old civil service system, which the new civil service workers do not have, but under the old civil service system it was nice. They took care of the people very well. I did mention we had a couple of small layoffs, but for the most part the employment was pretty secure there. They treated you real good. So, no. I have no regrets. NASA was good to me.
TIPPENS: Well, that's all the questions I have. Thank you for your interview today.
DEATKINE: OK, Matt. It's my pleasure.