NASA Deiterich, Charles - May 26, 1999
Interview with Charles Deiterich
Interviewer: Sandra Davidson
Date of Interview: May 26, 1999
Location: Deiterich home, Bertram, Texas
Davidson: Today is Wednesday May 26, 1999. I’m Sandra Davidson, a graduate student involved in the NASA/SWTSU [Southwest Texas State University] Oral History Project. Today I’m in the home of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Deiterich in Bertram, Texas, where I will be talking with Mr. Deiterich about his work with NASA.
Mr. Deiterich, I’d like to start out by talking a little bit about where you were born and your early life.
DEITERICH: Well, let’s see. I was born in Pennsylvania in 1938. [laughs] A long time ago. And I moved to Texas to the Houston area when I was about thirteen. So, I’ve lived in the Houston area ever since then. And I went to Galena Park High School. I went to the University of St. Thomas in Houston. And then I had a couple of jobs after I got out of the University of St. Thomas. I worked for a little company over at Hobby Airport. I did flight simulators, and I did instrument repair. And then I worked for an electronics company, and then another electronics company, and then I went to work for NASA. So I was at NASA almost thirty years, from like 1964 ‘til 1994. And I guess that’s—I don’t know if you want more than that or not.
DAVIDSON: How did—well, first of all, let me ask. The jobs that you had before NASA, were they all in the Houston area as well?
DEITERICH: Yes they were. The first one was with Vecto Instrument Corporation, and then I worked for Dresser Electronics which is in the west part of Houston. And then I worked for a company called Test Equipment Corporation which is also in Houston. And then I went to work for NASA. So I was out of school for four years before I went to work for NASA. So I had about four years of other experience.
DAVIDSON: How is it that you became involved with the space program? Was space always something you were interested in when you were young? Or did you just. . . .
DEITERICH: Well, I was more interested in airplanes because I never thought much about space. Well, we all kind of thought about it a little bit but it was really not. . . . We’d all seen Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon comics, but you didn’t think much more about it. But then when I got in college, the Russians launched their Sputnik which was kind of interesting. And I was taking Physics at the time, so we all had to figure out what the trajectory was and all that sort of stuff in the Physics class.
DAVIDSON: Oh.
DEITERICH: And then when I worked for—of course, NASA was up in Langley, Virginia until about 1962 or so. And when I left SIE, actually, we ran out of contract, and so I got laid off. I tried to go to work for NASA at that time. And I put my application in and they were interviewing. Evidently, I tried the wrong place, or for the wrong kind of job. I tried to get in as an electrical engineer because I’d been doing electrical engineering work, but I didn’t have an electrical engineering degree. And so the E and D [Engineering and Development] folks didn’t want me. They didn’t think I was qualified. Later on, I went to work for Test Equipment Corporation in the meantime. And then a friend of mine who did get on at NASA took my application and dropped it in when they were starting to hire more people when they went down to where Johnson Space Center is now. They used to be up near Gulf Gate. They had a couple of buildings up on the Gulf Freeway, actually up in Houston, in the early days. When they moved down to the site, they picked up my application, and the guy who eventually hired me liked the fact that I worked on aircraft simulators. So I became part of the operations group instead of the engineering group. So it was the operation group the guys—the ones that worked the control center and that sort of stuff. So, from the time the Russians launched the Sputnik on, I was kind of interested in the space business then. Because then it became clear what it was, because before that it really wasn’t. I never did think too much about it. But I used to draw pictures of flying saucers when I was in high school too.
DAVIDSON: What did you think about the fact that they had launched that satellite? Were you amazed? Was it unbelievable?
DEITERICH: Well, no, I guess we knew that the U.S. had been trying to do it with a couple of Army rockets. And of course, they failed every time. And I was amazed that they beat us to it. They seemed to have more brute force, or in those days, they had more brute force than we did, so they could get a payload up, a lot easier I guess than we could. We wanted to finesse things, where they were more brute force. And that may be the wrong kind of analogy, but they seemed able to brute force their way through things where we kind of finessed our way through it.
DAVIDSON: When you went to work for NASA, what did your family think about that?
DEITERICH: Well, my dad was a big proponent of NASA and he was really excited because he wanted me to go to work for NASA as soon as he found out there was a NASA. Of course, it wasn’t in the cards at that time. So he was really excited. And my wife was excited because it was a good opportunity. It was a more stable environment. Back in those days, when you went to work for NASA, it was—job security was good. They had reasonable pay. It was never as good as the private sector, but their pay was good. So we were always glad to have a good, stable job. Plus the fact that it was a very exciting first kind of work. It was all leading-edge work.
DAVIDSON: During your early years of NASA, where were you living in Houston?
DEITERICH: I actually lived in a place called Woodland Acres which is on the north, kind of east side of Houston, very near Galena Park which is where I went to high school. And we lived there from like [19]61 ‘til ‘68. Actually, I went to work for NASA in ’64 but then in ’68 we moved down to a town called Friendswood, which is a town between Houston and Galveston, about ten or twelve miles from Johnson [Spacecraft Center]. And we stayed there until 1994. So we lived there for twenty-six years, I guess.
DAVIDSON: Was Friendswood an area that had quite a few astro--NASA employees?
DEITERICH: Well, I’d actually been to Friendswood before, when I was a kid. There was a—Shell Oil Company had kind of a park that they would use for swim meets, and swimming, and picnics and stuff. And when I was in high school at Galena Park one of the church members, the youth leader of the church group, worked for Shell. So he took us down to Friendswood, to the Shell park and we had our picnic down there. It was a little bitty town. Probably didn’t have two thousand people in it. In fact, they didn’t even sell cigarettes in town. You know, we moved down there in ’68 and they still didn’t sell cigarettes in town, let alone sell beer because it was a little Quaker town (hence the name “Friendswood”). Now, it’s got like twenty thousand people. But it was a nice little town. And we just lived kind of on the outskirts of it. Most people in my neighborhood, probably half of them, had something to do with NASA. Later on, less and less had to do with NASA. But a lot of people did. Chris Kraft lived about three or four blocks—I mean about half a mile—away, I guess. Deke Slayton lived near him. And Glynn Lunney lived down the street, you know. Cliff Charlesworth lived right down the street from me. So we had a lot of people who were in the space business in Friendswood. I guess they got attracted because it was a cute little, nice little town. It was small and kind of a . . . good place to live.
DAVIDSON: Then there must have been quite a community? A community spirit of all the people that worked at NASA?
DEITERICH: Oh, I think so. I think so. I guess the cohesive within the city was not as strong as it would be when you got to work. But there was a lot of people who even their after-hours activities would include other people from NASA.
DAVIDSON: What kinds of things would you do after work, sort of to unwind?
DEITERICH: Well, of course, everybody was raising kids, it seemed like. We were pretty young. Let’s see, how old was I? I was twenty-six when I went to work with NASA. So I was involved in Little League baseball, and girls’ softball, and Boy Scouts, and those kinds of things. And we’d run into a lot of other people that worked at NASA that were doing the same thing. So, I probably worked in Little League sports for probably eight or nine years and with Boy Scouts probably four or five years, I guess. So, we would do that. So generally, what I’d do when I left work I would go home because I always had to go to practice or something like that. And I’m sure that everybody else, no matter what job you have you do the same kinds of things.
DAVIDSON: Well, let’s talk a little bit about your work. What were some of your--I know that you’ve had a very long career at NASA. If you could just tell us a little bit about some of the projects you’ve worked on. Some of your duties and your responsibilities.
DEITERICH: Okay, well I never actively tried to leave the area I started in until I’d been there for probably fifteen years. Maybe like thirteen years, because I worked in what we called the Flight Dynamics area, which was the trajectory control area. And you can liken that like the guys—the air traffic controllers that guide the airplanes around the sky—it’s the same kind of job. I initially started out working the re-entry and the abort activities where we would compute the abort maneuvers or the re-entry maneuvers. And the maneuvers that would get you out of orbit, or bring you back from the moon and that sort of stuff. That was called the Retrofire Officer. And we had a Guidance Officer, and a Flight Dynamics Officer. And we made up the Flight Dynamics Team. So I actually worked on a couple of unmanned missions while we were trying out the Apollo spacecraft and the Saturn rockets. And then on Apollo 1—that’s the one where the three guys got killed—I was working on that mission. In fact, I was on the console when they were doing that test. I was working on the [Wally] Schirra mission and got pulled off of that to work on the Apollo 8 which was the one that went around the moon the first time. So I was the lead Retro on Apollo 8, which was kind of interesting. We all knew we were going to the moon. Everybody else knew that we were going to the moon, but it was classified so we couldn’t tell anybody we were going to the moon. So we’d try to do all this planning and that sort of stuff while you’re—“Gotta’ keep all that secret”. You couldn’t tell anybody. But it was a neat job. A lot of leading-edge stuff like I was saying. We got to come up with—one of the things that the trajectory guys do, is they have what we call pre-advisory data. We write out these, we call them pads, maneuver data. Then we give them to the CapCom [spacecraft communicator] and they would read it up to the crew. The crew would use this information to target their computer and monitor their maneuver. So, we would provide all that kind of data to the crew. So, we got to figure out what information we were going to send, and what the accuracy had to be and all that sort of stuff. And how the crew would use that information once they got it. So, it was a lot of neat and new stuff we got to do on Apollo 8, and even Apollo 7, because that was one of the first missions we did the Earth orbit on. And then I was the lead on Apollo 11, and I was the lead on Apollo 13. I think I was the lead on the rest of them after [Apollo] 13. So after the Apollo we did the Skylab, which was where they launched a workshop that was essentially a space station. And the Apollo command module went up and rendezvoused with it. And the crews would stay on board. They had a telescope and they would look at the ground. Look at the sun, and stars, and things like that. So they were doing, on orbit, space station kind of activities. And then after that, I was still a flight controller, I was still a Retro. I think we got rid of “the Retros” in Skylab. We just called ourselves “Flight Dynamics Officers” after that. Then I worked the ASTP [Apollo/Soyuz Test Project] which is where we rendezvoused with the Russians. I was a lead on that.
Then we started getting ready for the Shuttle and I worked the Approach and Landing Test [ALT]. You may not be familiar with that. The very first Shuttle was called the Enterprise. We did glide tests with it out at Edwards Air Force Base in California. They ferry it around on the back of a 747. But for those tests we actually launched it from the back of a 747. We were about 25 or 26 thousand feet, and we would release it off the top and it’d come down. I was the flight dynamics officer on that, so I designed all the flights. We did a couple of flights where we just went through the motions to make sure we had the right aerodynamics before we released it. Then we actually did five flight tests.
In fact, I built a little–I designed a little desktop calculator program where I could actually compute what was going on. And I got the aerodynamics out of a book—a reference book that they had--that Rockwell had. And I would put the thing in altitude and let it fly down. And after we built a profile because we had certain tests we wanted to do. We wanted to do certain maneuvers and see if we had enough time to get them all done. Then we’d go fly them in shuttle training aircraft, which was a Grumman Gulfstream, where the engine would run in reverse and come down steep but not be going too fast. And I got to go out in California. I rode with Dick Truley and Joe Engle, the astronauts when they were doing some approaches. That was kind of exciting.
So after that, I was still in the flight dynamics area. The organization may have moved around a little bit you know, and we might have been assigned to a different branch or section, but the activity was still the same. I still had the best job in the center I think, because there was really a lot to do.
And then we were getting ready for the first orbital flight, and John Young and Bob Crippen were going to be the crew on that flight. And I was working that pretty much, and then I changed jobs. I decided to get into management to make more money. I’d topped out as an engineer on the console. So I went to work in the Launch and Entry Procedures section. And we wrote the checklists that the crews would carry when they flew, and all the switches they had to throw. And the guys in the section designed the abort maneuvers, and how the crew would monitor various things. And they had CRT [cathode ray tube] screens on the Shuttle with different information. The guys would design those, figure out what lines needed to be on that. So I went up and became the Section Chief of that.
Then, they moved us around again, but my section went back to what was the old Operations Branch, but was really the old Flight Dynamics Branch. And the guy that was the Branch Chief went on to be a Flight Director. So I ended up being a Branch Chief of the guys where I started at, which was the Flight Dynamics area. After that, I was Operations Branch chief for awhile.
Then, we did another re-organization. We had a group called Mission Planning and Analysis Division and they would do the pre-mission trajectory studies where we would do the real-time trajectory control. Well, we merged those two divisions, and I became Deputy Division Chief of that division. John Harpel was the Division Chief. From there, we still had the Flight Dynamics guys in that same division. About that time, we had a—that’s when the Challenger had its problem, and I got stuck on a review board where we had to review the part of the activity that we had to do with it to see if it was anything we needed to fix, or any housecleaning we needed to do. And in the meantime, I was also the representative from Johnson [Space Center] for the range safety activity. The Air Force owns the range in Florida. They actually have people who watch the trajectories, and if something goes wrong, they’ll call an abort or if it’s an unmanned mission, they’ll blow up the rocket. So I was the NASA representative from Johnson [Space Center] to those guys. And we also did a big review to make sure everything we had to do was the right thing to do. And it turns out that most everything we’d been doing was all right. We made some suggestions for improvements here and there.
And then I also reviewed the pre-mission planning stuff. And I learned a lot about how we did pre-mission planning because I’d never done it before as far as the computer trajectories and that sort of stuff. That was always the MPAD [Mission Planning and Analysis Division] job. And we needed a new computer system. So since I knew all the stuff that had to be done, I got elected to put together this computer system. So we put together what we called a flight analysis design system—FADS. (We always have to come up with neat acronyms and we called them FADS). And I worked for about two years on that getting it together. And we ended up spending probably close to forty million dollars before we got it all done, but it works a lot better. Before, we had these big Univac computers. Now, we work on a lot of workstations instead. A lot of it’s on PCs now. It was a completely integrated system. We had like three hundred some odd work stations on it. Thirty-two bit precision and that sort of stuff. It was all secure so nobody could get into it and give us bad data. The guidance irodes which tell the Shuttle how to fly, which ways to go, are generated in this system. So we had to be right. So, we got all that done, and essentially, when that happened, I ended up taking over the operation of the computer system, and that's about where I was when I left.
So, as you see, until I really, just before the beginning--right, just before the beginning of the orbital Shuttle flights, I was just a guy down in the trench doing the stuff. Then I decided I wanted to make a little bit better retirement, so I got greedy and changed jobs. But actually it was really all neat.
When I was working in the Launch and Entry Procedures area we designed the night landing lights. We designed the approach aids that the crew uses when they come down in final glide slope. We went out to Hammond Air Force Base. Tim Brown and I were out there. It was in February. It was like thirty degrees at night. It was cold out there. [We were] running around turning lights on [and] turning them off. Crews would be flying T38s at them, you know, to see if they could see them and all that sort of stuff and how they worked out. We used to do a lot of exciting things.
The best part of NASA is that it's not the same thing day after day after day. Every day is something new. And the only thing bad about it is when you get into management is that you don't get to do a lot of hands-on. You get to argue about a lot of budget stuff.
DAVIDSON: [to Chris Elley, the cameraman]. Do you want to take a break?
ELLEY: No, we've got about four minutes. Actually three minutes.
DAVIDSON: What was the typical day like. I guess, you'd have to choose.
DEITERICH: Well, you're gonna' run out of tape before I tell you it all, but I can give you two scenarios, one from early on, and then one from when I became a manager. Early on, we would either be writing down our procedures of what we were gonna' do. But a lot of time we spent training. We would go in the control center and we had computers hooked up. And you would believe you were in a real flight room. All of the information would be the same, and the crews would be flying the simulator over in another building, over in Building 5. And it was just like a regular mission. It seemed so real. Virtual reality I guess is what you might call it today. We would practice, and we had to do so many SIMS [simulations] to get ready because the real-time computer system, which is where we get all of our information, would change from mission to mission, depending on what new they added to the vehicle. So we'd have to test the mission, test the simulator, and test the ground system, make sure the computer was doing the right thing. Giving us the right answers. So we would do a lot of that while we were training. We had books--reference books--a lot of data books, big thick data books—and we’d make sure the numbers we got were reasonable. Even though the computer spit them out, you had to make sure they made sense--you know, they weren't asking for the wrong thing. So we would do that. So a typical day would be--there wasn't a typical day. That would be one day.
The next day, you might have a meeting--what were called data priority meetings, flight techniques meetings where we'd go in, sit down with the crew and the engineers, go in and discuss how we were going to fly a mission. We would talk about the different things we needed to look at. They would say, “Well, you know there might be a heating problem or something that we had to be aware of.” So the engineers would come up and say, you know, "You can't fly this particular machine because there's a heating problem." So we’d have to figure out a way not to do that. So that was the kinds of things you would do when you were a Flight Controller. And there were other guys who worried about the systems, you know, and they’d say, "How much current can we pull out of a fuel cell? How far can we get away from the antenna pointed before we lose a signal? So, everybody, all the flight controllers had their own little area that they had to understand very well and make sure that their planning would be such that when the mission flew, it all kind of came together. [break]
DAVIDSON: Okay. I'd like to hear a little bit more about what a typical day was like.
DEITERICH: There were a lot of meetings. We had lots of meetings. We had what were called Mission Rules which was, if something happened, you'd try to figure out ahead of time what you were going to do so that you wouldn't have to think about it, and you might miss something if you really studied a problem so that if everybody got together and say, “Hey, this is the right thing to do.” You kind of do that when it's not in the heat of battle so it makes decisions easier. So we would have meetings on Mission Rules. We'd have meetings on procedures. We had meetings on requirements to put in the computer. And they'd say, "Well, no, you can't put that in because that costs too much," or "we can't program that because it's too much programming. One thing or another. That was kind of the way--a Flight Controller would do those kinds of things.
After simulations, sometimes we'd go down to the Red Barn, which is called the Singing Wheel and have a beer, you know, and that sort of stuff. And after missions, we always had a splashdown party and we’d go out and party a little bit. But once I got into management, we had different kinds of meetings, because we had personnel problems and things you had to deal with so you might have some meetings about that. Later on, we had a fifteen-minute Telecom everyday with the directorate so that was a thousand people--maybe not a thousand—maybe five hundred people, who were listening to this discussion. It was short, but if there was anything important being passed along, or if anything came up, we could share information without taking the time to write a formal memo and that sort of stuff. And then we'd have budget meetings. We'd discuss the budget. We'd have to justify everything that we did. If you could find a way to save money with a better idea, well, you could almost save that money and use it to spend on another idea. But if you came up with a good idea, but didn't have anything that you were going to get rid of, then it was more difficult to try to convince people to give you money for that. So, if it’d pay for its way, then, it was not too bad. But if it didn't pay for its way, you had to argue to--you know, because somebody was going to lose money somewhere else because the budget was pretty much fixed. Towards the last few years, we spent an awful lot of time working new budgets. They'd say, "Here's your money.” We’d go out and figure up a plan. Then they'd say, "Oh, we're going to cut it twenty per cent." So you go out, trying to figure out how to save money or what things you couldn’t do if you didn't have the money the budget from headquarters. So we'd spend a lot of time in those kinds of budget meetings.
Towards the end we also--early on, most of--or a good bit of the work was done by civil servants. I was a civil servant. As we got further and further into it, we had some contractors who would do technical work for us. And, towards the end. . . . And I think NASA's upper management's goal was to keep the Civil Service people doing the research and development, new stuff and the operations, and day to day operations hand off to a contractor. And I guess they figured it was cheaper that way. I don't know if it is or not. So we ended up spending a lot of time monitoring contractors which is not a lot of fun. You’d have to write. You’d have to see what they did. Then you'd have to write evaluations and go to meetings where we’d discuss what fees they should get, and what award if they lived up to their job . . . if they lived up to their contract.
And one thing I forgot to tell you, I spent a year evaluating four proposals for a fifteen-year contract—I don’t think it ended up being that long, but it was about a fifteen-year contract--to do the space operations. So I spent quite a bit of time reviewing what they were going to do in my particular flight dynamics and flight design activity. So I did spend a year over there, too. [laughs] I forgot about that—that was when I was a Deputy Division Chief for Flight Design and Management Division. I was over there about a year doing that. So, I really never was a deputy to my Division Chief. I was always off doing something special. The difference between the Flight Controller day to day job was doing a lot of technical stuff. And the management, you did a lot of technical and you did a lot of administrative and business type things. Of course, in management you got to influence more things because you can kind of control the direction the bigger things were going wherein, technical, when you're a Flight Controller you get to do the small things but it was always pretty neat and it was always pretty technical.
DAVIDSON: In talking about all the technicalities you had to do—I was kind of curious--despite all your training, did you ever feel that you weren't ready when you were sitting at the control panel on your first day there as a Retro?
DEITERICH: No. Well, I guess the very first flight that I flew was an unmanned 201. And they had problems with the vehicle, and they had problems with the weather and it was the very first one that we flew. So we had a lot of time to train. And the mission itself was almost pre-programmed so it was fairly cut and dry. So, you always feel excited when they’re gonna’ launch. I never felt like I wasn’t prepared. I never felt like I was undertrained or wasn’t ready for it. But it was always exciting. You think of this rocket with how many millions of parts and little dowels and wires and stuff that have to work right. You know, there’re a lot of things that can break. And that kind of stuff. You’re really on your toes. But I used to love launch abort SIMS where we would practice a launch and then somebody would put a failure in. Be an engine out or whatever. And then we’d have to come up with a plan on it. Maneuver and advise the CapCom or the Flight Director and then they would tell the crew and they’d execute the maneuver. So that was always a very exciting—like some of these video games, except it wasn’t really a video game. So it was—that was kind of exciting. I always felt like we had an adequate amount of training. And I—and some of this stuff I was doing—How could somebody train you to do something that’s never been done before unless they’d done it? Our training people really—they would go to our mission rules and they would listen to our procedures and they would try to figure out something that we had overlooked. They would throw that at us in our training. They did a pretty good job because trying to train somebody to do something that’s never been done [tape ends].
DAVIDSON: There are several projects that you were involved in with NASA, and one of them was the Apollo/Soyuz project. And I was just curious. You know, obviously there was a different perception, I would think, about the Russians between the 1950s and the late 1960s. And I was just wondering, you know, what you thought about when you went to Russia to train for the project. What was your impression of the country and about the people? Had that changed at all?
DEITERICH: You know, when we first heard about the Russians, we really didn’t have much of a clue as to what they were doing. I didn’t. Because everything they did was always under the wraps of secrecy. You never knew what they were doing, when they were going to launch. You never knew if they had a failure. So we really didn’t have much information on their capabilities or what kind of spacecraft they had. You know, when we went over to Russia it was in ’74, September ’74. I got to look at some of their hardware. And their hardware--remember I used the word “brute force”? Well, their hardware reminded me of brute force. Great big insulators. In their control center they had a lot of vacuum tube stuff. And we did too, but it just seemed like everything was 1930s. It reminded me of a 1930s radio, you know, is what it kind of reminded me of. The spacecraft they had was really teeny tiny. The Soyuz was really pretty small. But does have two pieces to it. But the part that re-enters is really small. About like our Gemini. So it wasn’t really very big. They, the people over there—we got there--of course, none of them spoke English. They all spoke Russian. They were very cautious. When you’d ride the subway, they would just sit there. They wouldn’t talk to each other. In fact, they wouldn’t talk to each other, let alone talk to us. They were very conservative, I guess you’d say. But I enjoyed it over there. One thing that was kind of funny--the first day we got over there we went into--I forget what they called it—like their space center. And we rode the bus over there. And it was pretty cold outside because they’re like fifty degrees north or so. So they’re pretty far north. It was in September, so it was cold. And I started to take my coat off and one of the Russian guys said, “No, no, don’t take your coat off.” It turns out that they don’t turn the heat on in their public buildings, or then they didn’t, until October. So, you’d sit around these meetings with your coats on until October. We left before October. We were there--it was the middle of September when we were there, which was kind of interesting. But the guys I worked with were really, really nice. They were very professional. They were very interested in what we were doing. They were very, you know, willing to help out. It was the language barrier—you know, words that we use—even though when you translate them literally, they don’t mean the same thing. So we had awhile to try and figure out what they were saying, even though the interpreter would convert it to English, it didn’t mean the same things to us. Like, we would say “change attitude’ they would say “turn.” Those kinds of things. But it was neat. When I was in--when I was over there, we’d walk around all over Moscow, you know, all over Red Square. I never really felt like there was a threat or anything. One time, I had a sore throat, so I went to the American embassy there to see the doctor there and he gave me some penicillin. And I came back. So I had to find my own way back. I was gonna’ ride the subway over to the space place and I got on the wrong subway. Some guy come up to me and said, “I don’t think you want on that subway. You want to get on this one over here.” Now, the chance of somebody speaking English and knowing I was on the wrong subway, he had to be my KGB guy. [laughs] So I never felt like I was really in any—I always felt like he would take care of me. Whoever this guy was watching me would take care of me. But it was kind of neat. The city was just as clean as a whistle. No trash or anything. It was pretty, pretty neat. I really enjoyed it. And like I say, the Russians, some of them came over to the U.S. too, some that I’d met over there. They were very friendly, they were really nice. Those guys didn’t really make the kind of dollars that we were making, you know. So, they really worked hard to do what they did and I guess job satisfaction was their biggest reward.
DAVIDSON: What are some of the most vivid memories that you have in your work with NASA?
DEITERICH: Gosh. Well, there’s a lot of them. Of course, I remember the Apollo 1 fire pretty well. And that was not very long. It was over in fifteen minutes. And then the Apollo 13. Well, I remember Apollo 8 because it was Christmas time. You know, everybody else,--I was sleeping on Christmas day because I had to work that mission. And that was the first manned mission I ever worked on and I was the lead for it. And I had the other two Retros because we had three teams that would fly the mission. One of them was my Branch Chief, and the other was my Section Head. And I was the lead because it was a classified mission, and it was the first time we used a lot of the software that we did in the control center, a lot of the computational programs. So I remember Apollo 8 very well. I remember Apollo12. Gee, you’re gonna’ get one for every flight just about.
In Apollo 12 I was the launch Flight—Launch Retro. And that was when Pete Conrad got hit with lightening. And it dumped—the spacecraft, computers, and platform all got shut down. And it was a little glitch, I guess, in the Saturn booster, but it was okay. And an interesting story is when you’re going around, if you’re in the lower orbit, you go around faster. In a higher orbit, you go around slower. If you think about it, the moon takes twenty-eight days to go around. And then the lower satellites, you know, take ninety minutes to go around. When you’re in lower orbit you go faster. Well, we had this lightning strike and the booster shut down. And the booster always tells you if you did the right thing, otherwise, it wouldn’t do it. And the booster says, “Yeah, I’m doing okay” so we come flying over to Australia. And we get acquisitioned early, which means that we started getting telemetry data earlier than we thought we should. Well, the flight dynamics guy, Jay Greene, we looked at each other when we got this early acquisition. Everybody else was happy because we were getting all this data early and they wanted to see what their systems were doing. We knew that if you got there early, you might be in a lower orbit, too. You might not have made orbit. Well, it turns out it was multi-pad, which just meant that the radio waves were bouncing off the atmosphere. But we didn’t know at the time. We were the only ones in the whole control center who were worried because we were getting acquisition early.
And then I remember Apollo 11, when we landed on the moon. In fact, Jay and I were the flight dynamics guys. We were on the console when we touched down on the moon which was kind of neat.
And then I remember Apollo 13, of course, with all the problems.
And then, let’s see, I think it was 14, we had a problem with the docking mechanism. I remember that. We had to bring it back. The Retros always kept track [phone rings] of the weight, CG, of the vehicle. And so if we’d bring something extra back, [phone rings] we had to figure out where we would put it, how much it was gonna’ weigh. And the reason whey we were worried about that is because it changes the aerodynamics of the thing during re-entry. So we had to take that into account so we could target them right. And let’s see, I guess the other missions were okay, but there wasn’t anything real spectacular about them.
Skylab, you know, we launched a Skylab. A workshop went up and the micrometeorite shield broke off and so we were gonna’ launch the crew the next day. Obviously we didn’t do that. And so we had to come up--we didn’t, but the engineers came up with a special heat shield to go over the Skylab to keep it cool and all that kind of stuff. So we worked on the rendezvous and that kind of stuff.
One of the missions, and I think it was the last mission, they had a problem with the service module. We had to work up a rendezvous technique, a rescue mission. It turns out we didn’t need it. And so that was kind of. . . .
And then the Apollo/Soyuz was kind of interesting just because we had the Russians. We were flying with the Russians. And we’d never flown with the Russians before. I was gonna’ say, we hadn’t flown that high inclination, but we really had. Skylab was a pretty high inclination.
And then of course ALT [Approach and Landing Test]. ALT was a really good program. What it was all about was just seeing if we could get the Space Shuttle, all the systems working, and see if it would fly, and all that sort of stuff. Most people in my area were working on the orbital part of what we were gonna’ do when we got into orbit. There was a very small group of people working the Approach and Landing Test stuff. We really got to do a lot of different kinds of things. Of course, I got to design the profiles. I got to be the Flight Dynamics guy that would guide the crews around. I would tell the 747 where to turn and all that sort of stuff. And when to get ready to drop the Shuttle, when to drop the Shuttle. And I would direct the crew. You know, they knew the path, but if they were high or low, I would tell them whether they were on course or not until they could turn all the way around and could see the ground to land. They would release on what we called the downwind side then they would go down and make a turn and come back in and land. So, they were kind of adjacent to the runway, but going the opposite direction but high. So that was really fun, doing all that stuff and going out and flying in the STA [Shuttle Training Aircraft]. So that was really one of the best programs I was on, because it was a pretty small group of people and we got to do a lot of different kinds of things. We got to interface with the FAA because they own the airspace outside of the Edwards Air Force Base. So we had to go outs and talk to those guys. We’d send them packages. We had to deal with the Navy up at China Lake because they owned some air space up there. And it was really, really, kind of neat job, that ALT stuff. “Approach and Landing Test” is what that stands for.
And then, working the night-lights in what we called the Precision Approach Path Indicators [PAPI], which tell the crew if they’re high or low when they’re coming on the glide slope. And then there was another one called Ball Bar which is—they’d come down and when they’d start coming around the corner, they would focus on the PAPIs when they were coming down the steep glide slope. Then, when they’d go around the corner, they’d focus on the ones down on the runway and they would tell them how they were coming around the corner. So we got to work on those. Tim Brown and I put that stuff together. We used big xenon lights to shine down the runway so when the crew came in to land--because there’s no landing lights on the Shuttle so they could see down the runway. Dick Truley, on STS 8, would land the first time at night which was kind of interesting. Let’s see.
You know the Shuttle does not have a magnetic compass on it? But the FAA requires magnetic compasses on every airplane. But the Shuttle doesn’t have one. It’s got three platforms, so I guess that counts. Three inertial [?] platforms. So, the whole time I was there was really kind of—did lots and lots of unforgettable things.
After ALT we did the Shuttle flights, and the Shuttle flights were really neat. I got to watch one. I never did get to see Apollo launch but I did get to go down and see one Shuttle launch. I tried to see two of them. John Crayton invited me down to two of them, but one of them he got sick and then we had to come home. No, the weather turned bad and we had to come home. And then when we went back down the next time, we got to see him go. It was really—if you ever get the chance to go to Florida to see a launch, you ought to do that. That was pretty spectacular.
And once I got over in management, I wasn’t doing that much exciting stuff. But it was fun to go sit in on the meetings where we had lots of different ideas and then get to kind of impress your judgement, force the answer to be what you thought was right. So that was kind of interesting, too. You get to listen to all sides. You would think that some things are cut and dry, but nothing is cut and dry. Everything is gray. One group of people want to do this, and another group of people want to do this. So, you get to kind of manage that which is kind of fun. I don't know if that helps you or not.
DAVIDSON: What do you think has been your greatest accomplishment?
DEITERICH: Oh, [clock chimes] I don't know. I think the stuff I did on Apollo 13 certainly was. . . .
ELLEY: Can you wait for the clock?
DEITERICH: Sure. It’s done.
I think the stuff I did on Apollo 13 was certainly instrumental in bringing the crew back. There was a lot of stuff that had to be worked out. And there were a lot of guys working it. But I think that was of significance. And I think the stuff I did on the early Apollo flights, Apollo 8. . . . We really basically figured out what it was we had to do to get to the moon, fly around the moon, come back and do it safely and give the crew enough time to get the things done they needed to do. I think that was very important. And I think the ALT thing really proved that the Shuttle could fly and that all the systems would work. The one part that I didn't tell you is that when I did the ALT stuff we also had systems tests so I had to make sure the systems had time to do what they needed to do and those kind of things while we were doing the normal trajectory control which is what I was concerned about. But when I was designing the flights, I had to make sure that some of the other things took place too, or could be accommodated in the flight. And then I think the work that I did on the Return to Flight Status after the Challenger accident was significant. The range safety review and then the flight design--what they called the flow process review. The flight design process review and then the follow on of the FADS computer system. I think those kinds of things really contributed significantly to where we are today.
DAVIDSON: What has been—I know, like I said, that you had a very long career with NASA. What do you think have been some of the most profound changes that have taken place as far as personnel, as far as technology, equipment?
DEITERICH: Well, it’s kind of interesting. We went to the moon with off-the-shelf hardware. There was no new hardware. Well, that’s probably not exactly right. Most of the hardware had either been verified somewhere else, or that sort of stuff. So you think—if we designed a vehicle with probably 1960 technology, and we used it in 1968, which is fine. Which is the way you want to do things. If you want something to work, you don’t start out with something that’s not been tried and proven. So that was why I think we succeeded because we used pieces of hardware that was actually proven. And as we—and the guys over at Marshall really don’t get—well, maybe they do—get the credit they deserve. But they are really top-notch propulsion engineers. And that sort of stuff was not off the shelf and they had to develop a lot of the rocket motors like the SRBs [solid rocket boosters] that they used for Shuttle and the main engine. Those things were operating almost at one hundred per cent efficiency. So, there has been kind of a trend toward looking ahead to things that you need as opposed to, you know, [President John F.] Kennedy said, “Hey, we’re going to the moon.” So everybody said you gotta use stuff that was already existing. Well, now we have time to plan for things that we’re going to do. That’s probably why it’s taking the space station so long to get things done. Because there are a lot of things that have to be invented as opposed to just taking them off the shelf. So I think there’s a tendency to do a little more down the road design planning than there used to be. And so, that kind of stuff—which is good, you know. We can still keep flying with what we have but we’re still thinking about down the future—down the road. But I really believe that the—as far as technology goes, I think we’re—we try to fly with proven technology, but always try to get more stuff to be proven.
As far as people are concerned, I think we were a lot more risk-taking in the old days because we didn’t have anything to lose. Of course, we were all young guys. I was twenty-six when I started, and so, we weren’t smart enough to be scared. That’s probably why all your fighter pilots are young guys. As we--of course, it was a new organization. And I think this is true of all government departments. When they’re new, they really shine. They take more risks. When you take more risks, you can get more things done. Of course you can fail, too. And then as you get—you know, we’ve become more engrained in bureaucracy now. There were things that we did on Apollo 8, like coming up with what data we were going to give the crew to come back from the moon with. You know, I sat down and scratched it out. We talked about it for about fifteen minutes and Frank Borman said, “That looks good to me.” Well today if you make a change you have to have a ten-hour meeting. You know, it’s gotta be reviewed by everybody. It’s gotta be signed off. So, we had put a lot of rigor into what we were doing. That was one thing nice about ALT. ALT was a one-shot thing. It was gonna’ occur over a short period of time. So when you do that, you really don’t have to have detailed rigor in your documentation, which we didn’t because the guys who were working it are gonna’ remember about it. But when you gotta hand something off to someone who’s gonna’ do it ten years from now, you’ve gotta write all this stuff down so they know how to do it. So you can pass the baton. If you’re not gonna’ pass the baton, you don’t have to be quite so rigorous. A lot of people don’t understand that, but that’s really true. Everything has become more rigorous. You know, the budget has become more rigorous. Before, we’d say, “Hey, I want a laptop computer.” “Okay.” Well, we didn’t have laptops then. “But, I want a calculator.” “Okay, you can get a calculator.” Now they’d say you have to write a justification memo and all this other stuff. So there’s a lot more rigor that’s being introduced. And then the budget cuts just. . . . We tried to plan too much, or we plan as much as we can and then realize we can’t do all that, so we had to cut some of that out. We had to figure what you’re cutting out and the dynamic change in what money is available to do things it really eats up a lot of money. You really spin your wheels a lot. We never did that, maybe part of it is because I was a worker and not a manager that I didn’t see all that. It might have been happening in the background, but I wasn’t aware of it. Of course, when I became a Section Head and the Division Chief etcetera, then I got to see all these things that were happening. So, that has happened. We’ve become more quagmired down in bureaucracy. We had programs like MAX Q, which was quality improvement and that sort of stuff. Those things are good, but sometimes we over do them. TQM. Total Quality Management and that sort of stuff.
ELLEY: We need to pause and change tapes. [change to tape 2 side A]
DAVIDSON: Okay, we were talking about some of the changes that have taken place.
DEITERICH: Well, the other part that has really changed from the early days was they give a lot more responsibilities, a lot more jobs to contractors. And I guess the reason we do that is because you can compete the contractors and I think there’s a thrust to try and keep the Civil Service guys doing the new and leading-edge kind of work, the research kind of stuff. Johnson’s not a research center, it’s an operations center, so that doesn’t really kind of ring true. There are new things, like the Space Station--how we operate the Space Station. That’s being done by the Civil Service guys. And they’re trying to hand more and more stuff off to the contractors. For example, up until probably 19—the early 1980s, we didn’t—in the trajectory area, or the console, we didn’t have any non-Civil Service. Everyone was either Civil Service or military. We did have some military Air Force guys, or Army guys who would fly. But now we have contractors flying those positions. And I guess the reason is, they were very responsible, and are very responsible positions and the contractors could do it. It’s just their stability people-wise is not as stable as the Civil Service, although the guys, who I personally know do it have been around for a long time and are capable of doing it. So we hand a lot of stuff off to contractors where we hadn’t before and have become a little more rigorous in what we do and how we do it.
DAVIDSON: I guess, we’ll backtrack a little bit. I know you were talking a little bit about Apollo 13 earlier. For some of those people who might not be quite familiar with what happened on Apollo 13, would you mind explaining it just a little bit?
DEITERICH: Okay. I forget exactly how far out we were. We were a day or two out. And we had almost reached what we called the sphere of influence of the moon. So if you were to come directly back, it’s almost as long as it would be to go around the moon. And we had some abort modes where you could go around the moon and come back. Or you could turn the vehicle straight around and fire—get rid of—the Lunar Excursion Module [LEM] and just fire the Command Service Module [CSM] back at the Earth and then come back. Well, there’s a point out there where it’s almost just easier to go around. You don’t have to do this great big burn to come back. Well, we were about to that position and one of the oxygen tanks blew up. It had a wire that had some insulation burn during a test at the Cape and when they turned the little fan that would move the cryogenics and the liquid oxygen around inside this tank—they called it “stirring” it [the tank contents] this insulation sparked, or a contact sparked. And anyway, it blew a hole in the tank and blew a side of the Command Service Module out, which was the normal part of the vehicle that the crew flew in coming back from the moon. There was the service module which had the engine, the big jet rocket engine, the fuel cells, the batteries, and that sort of stuff, and the command module were one unit. The command module was what re-entered. The service module provided the system’s support to get back. Well, when the service module had the explosion and started losing electrical power because the oxygen which runs the fuel cells was going away, they got into the Lunar Excursion Module and used that as a lifeboat to come back. We had no idea how the main engine on the service module was and we were scared to try to use it. So coming straight back was really not an option. To make a long—I’ll just kind of briefly go over the scenario. We had to power--the LEM, Lunar Excursion Module, only had batteries for three or four days depending on how long they stay on the moon. And they could power most of the stuff down. Maybe three or four days is even too long. It was two days. They only had. . . . It was set up for two people. Well, we had to keep it going for several days to go around the moon and come back, which means we really couldn’t use a lot of power and couldn’t keep its systems up a lot. We turned the Command Service Module—essentially turned it off. We were--actually on a trajectory that wasn’t coming back. . . . Normally we’d launch into a trajectory that was coming back to the Earth. But to get to a different kind of landing site, you could change your trajectory half way out which would help you get to a landing site on the moon. But it took away the free return. Our perigee was like twenty-five [thousand] or forty thousand miles above the Earth, which means that if you came back, you weren’t gonna’ land. I think it was forty thousand miles. So anyhow, we did one little small maneuver right away as soon as the accident occurred, right away--within ten hours. To get us back coming back to the Earth we actually were going to land a little bit in the Indian Ocean. So we got trajectory to come back to the Indian Ocean. We powered the LEM down. We went around the moon. We powered it somewhat down. We went around the moon and did a burn with the LEM pushing the Command Service Module which would speed the trajectory up to get back to the Pacific Ocean. It actually got us back about ten or twelve hours sooner. We were running out of oxygen. We were running out of batteries. We were running out of this, that, and the other. So we had to do that—to do this one burn. Then we shut everything down. The command module was all shut down. The LEM was pretty much shut down, so it started getting cold in there because all the equipment on there kind of keeps it warm. Well it was cold inside the LEM. And the LEM was venting a little bit which kept changing our trajectory. We had to do a trajectory correction burn. We wanted to do that but we didn’t want to power the vehicle back up so we remembered a trick. When you look at the moon you can see the shadow. Well, they have an optical instrument in the LEM and they align that obstacle instrument up on a determinator on the Earth and then by pointing it straight down and lining it up we gave it some numbers. And they lit the engine for a few seconds and then shut it back down which fixed their trajectory. So they were looking out the window. I mean, really, talk about pilotage. And they burned the engine. And then we came back. Well, we got close to entry. We brought the LEM up. We had enough battery power. We brought the LEM up because we had to do another correction burn to get us in the corridor. The corridor was only—goes from about five and a half degrees to about seven and a half degrees. So that’s the angle you have to be at coming in the atmosphere. So if you don’t do it right, you don’t survive. You either skip out, or you come in too steep. People say you burn up. You don’t burn up you pull too many Gs and what happens is your vehicle will come apart. But anyhow, so we came back and then we jettisoned the Service Module, jettisoned the LEM and landed the command module. Came back in. There were a lot of new and different things we had to do on that particular flight to figure out how to do because we really hadn’t thought about how we were going to do this two-impulse maneuver. One was to correct the trajectory and one was to speed it up coming back. But that’s kind of the scenario on Apollo 13. And I was the lead on that so I got to do a lot of the interfacing to figure out how we were gonna’ do things. Okay?
DAVIDSON: Yes, thank you. What have you learned about man’s abilities and his limitations?
DEITERICH: Well, a philosophical question. I think that with enough planning and enough forethought you can probably do almost anything you want to. It just takes time and money. And I think that probably we can do anything if we just put our heads together and do it. You know, when you think of all these guys that are super heroes that you’ve heard about, but you know a lot of them are just regular ole’ guys that just think straight.
DAVIDSON: I know that you’ve been interviewed at least twice before, once for the book Apollo by Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox, and another time as part of an oral history program at Space Center, a museum in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Are there any questions you wish that the interviewers had asked you but didn’t?
DEITERICH: Gosh, I can’t think of any. But I volunteer too much stuff as it is.
DAVIDSON: [laughs]
DEITERICH: But, no. The interview out at Alamogordo was kind of interesting and they taped it. In fact, I still haven’t sent back the rough draft which I need to do. But when I first started looking at it, I started being like an English teacher, correcting the grammar and all that sort of stuff. Then I realized that I don’t want to do that. So I’m just going back to make sure that they got the names spelled right or they didn’t say something that I didn’t say. But, no, I really—they were pretty thorough. Murray and Cox were thorough too. Pretty thorough. I don’t know if you’ve read, looked at their book or not but it’s kind of interesting. It’s a pretty good book.
DAVIDSON: I guess one of my last questions is, “What have you been up to since retirement?”
DEITERICH: Well, we left NASA on the 30th of April 1994. And we sold our house in Friendswood in July. And I had the slab poured for this house in November. And it’s all out of steel so I spent. . . . We had a place out on Lake Buchanan. From June of ‘94 to September of ’94 I was designing this house. It’s made out of steel so there weren’t any steel cables or anything so I had to do all my own loads analysis. So I got a little laptop computer and an Excel—I actually started out on a Lotus spreadsheet then went to Excel and designed the house and got a little CAD [computer aided design] program down at the University of Texas and drew the thing. Had somebody come in and weld it all together. I’ve been spending most of my time since then finishing this house off. I built the vanities and I built the bookcases. The only thing I didn’t do was sheetrock. I didn’t put the carpets down. I put the vinyl down. I didn’t build the kitchen cabinets. I put the vinyl down. I put--did all the trimwork. Did all the plumbing and all the wiring.
Then I built a hangar out here. I’ll show you my airplane in a minute. I started building an airplane in the last couple of months.
And we’ve done some travelling. Bought a motorhome. We’ve been up to Yellowstone. Been up to Washington D.C. Been to Niagara Falls, up to Colorado. We’ve been skiing two or three times. Been over to Stone Mountain and Philadelphia. So we’ve been doing some travelling around too.
And raising goats. I’ve got thirty something goats. Mostly for Ag [Agricultural] Exemption but they also keep the brush and stuff eaten down. That’s kind of what I’ve been doing. So I’ve been staying busy. I frankly don’t know when I had time to work. I guess things just didn’t get done. But basically—and now I’ve built this airplane. I belong to the Experimental Aircraft Association. There’s a chapter over here in Kingsland. And I see a couple of the guys on there. Ed Dalke and Jack George are on your list of people to be interviewed. And they are in the same organization. I’ve just started building an airplane. I’ve just started in the last two or three weeks so it’s not very far along.
DAVIDSON: Okay. Well, is there anything else you’d like to add?
DEITERICH: No. I guess I’ll ask you a question. Are you going to give me a copy of the rough draft?
DAVIDSON: You’ll be sent a copy.
DEITERICH: And you’re going to provide this to NASA I guess?
DAVIDSON: Yes. One copy will stay at Southwest and one copy at NASA.
DEITERICH: And people can check it out?
DAVIDSON: Yes.
DEITERICH: And will it be online?
DAVIDSON: I think they have a project in the works to get some of it online.
DEITERICH: That’s good. I just appreciate you all coming all the way up here. It’s a long drive up here. But I think it’s good because there’s a lot of stuff—you know one of the things we talked about was ALT. And Gene Kranz is writing a book on the operations, Control Center operations, and I know he’s having all kinds of heartburn trying to get it written, get it edited, and all that sort of stuff. And I can understand why he wants to do it because it’s not written down anywhere exactly how it all went together.
The ALT program—we used some techniques that I don’t know were ever used, and I don’t know if they ever will be used and they’re not documented. And I’ve thought about documenting them. Now, I will not publish them in a book to make money. I might write them down and just make a notebook of them. But one of them, which is really kind of interesting, is a little program that I came up with. We dropped the Shuttle—of course you have to worry about the wind blowing you off course because it’s a glider. It did have speed brakes so you had some range control with the speed brakes. If you wanted to go further you close them. If you wanted to shorten your approach you stuck them out. But you wanted to drop it at the right place so it could fly this trajectory and land. Well, when the wind’s blowing, how do you do that? Well, it turns out there’s some what’s called ballistics number which is the weight divided by the area divided by the coefficient of drag. You can take an equation and put that in there and see how the force of the wind will effect the Shuttle. It turns out that it takes about a minute—if you just take a Shuttle and stick it in the wind—it takes almost a minute to get up to the speed of the wind because it’s so heavy. It’s like a sinker as opposed to a feather. It would take the speed of the wind immediately. Well, I had some equations that I put together and I had this little—I call it—my little balloon. This is kind of a simulation on the computer. But I would drop this balloon. I would get the winds from the meteorologist out at Edwards Air Force Base and they would tell me what the wind speed at different altitudes were. And I’d take my little balloon and I’d drop it down through the atmosphere and it would blow around. I knew where I dropped it. I dropped it at zero zero. And wherever it touched down, the distance is where I would bias I’d move the drop point. So I’d go in and re-plot on the plot board a new drop point based on the wind drift of the thing. Of course when you flew it, then you’d end up right on the trajectory.
The other thing that I did was I would record this information. And we had a little chart that we would give the crew. There was a map and we would update their ground track so they would know where we were gonna’ be flying.
The other thing I did was that I’d take these same winds, and I knew what the performance of the 747 was. So I’d start at the new drop point and fly it backwards and let the wind blow it around. It turns out that, when you bank an airplane, you start losing lift. If it’s a high-performance airplane, it doesn’t matter. But with something as heavy as a 747 with the Shuttle on it, if you get over a ten-degree bank angle, you can’t climb. So we had to bank no more than ten degrees. And so I would take this drop point and I would come straight back and fly around the wind backwards and depending on the wind--this racetrack was just nothing but an oval—would get skewed because of the way the wind was blowing. So I had a little program that would go out and draw this new ground track and I would draw this on my plot board so I could tell the crew, the 747 crew, how to fly to get the altitude. Now those two programs are not documented at all. I think I have them somewhere. They were on a little ole’ Hewlitt Packard program is what they were on—a Hewlitt Packard calculator.
And now that I think about it, when I was Branch Chief of the guys that all the desktop calculators that they used, I’d make them document all that stuff. I’d make them lock up their disks, and have all these test cases. And I don’t think we ever really did that because it was such a small group. But remember, when you do it in a small group in a small period of time, you don’t need quite the rigor to make it happen and be safe because all the guys are doing it are all there and they know what’s going on. But when you try to hand the baton off to somebody else. Some of this information might be useful to somebody to know how to do that. At least record what we did because—I don’t think my—Well, my Branch Chief knew what I was doing, but I don’t think my Division Chief ever had a clue what we were doing. And I know the higher ups had no clue what we were doing. They just knew it worked. So from that perspective, I would like to probably do that sometime. But I would not write a book and try to publish it, I would write a technical paper. That might be a better way to put it. That’s all I got.
DAVIDSON: Okay. Well, thank you so much.
DEITERICH: You’re welcome.