NASA Engert, Max - May 25, 1999
Interview with Max Engert
Interviewer: Mary Kochan
Date of Interview: May 25, 1999
Location: Engert home, Lakeway, Texas
KOCHAN: It is May, 25, 1999, and we’re here in the home of Max and Vera Engert. We are conducting oral interviews for the NASA Oral History Project connected with Southwest Texas State University. The tapes and transcripts that we’re producing here will become a part of the archives at NASA, and they’ll be available to be used for research. First of all, if we could start with some biographical information on you, sir, your background, education.
ENGERT: Just generally, I am sixty-nine years old now. I retired in 1993, about six years ago. I was raised here in Texas. I went into the Navy when I was about nineteen, came out and was over at the University of Texas at Austin. Degree in Engineering, Electrical Engineering. And I worked at Westinghouse, Baltimore, MD, on electronic radar equipment. After a couple of years there I came back to Houston and I worked for a small electronics company in Houston. In 1963 or 1962, NASA came to open up the Johnson Space Center, then called the Manned Spacecraft Center. They were looking for help, and that’s when I joined NASA. I was with them for thirty years. I thought that perhaps I would try to cover my experiences in about three segments. Each one about ten years long, that kind of related to the type of work, the positions I had at the time, and the nature of the work from my viewpoint, because that’s what you are looking for from us. That’s where I would like to start, where I first began to work there at the Manned Spacecraft Center. I made a few notes here. I hope you don’t mind. (CHIMES)
KOCHAN: Feel Free.
ENGERT: The early years, when I worked at NASA, starting in 1963, and I would say they culminated in 1972, with the end of the Apollo program. I look at the first few years as almost like a military operation, like you’re building up logistically, personnel and all aspects important to put a man on the moon. When I first went down, they did not have the Center that you know of now, the Johnson Space Center. Rather, we were scattered in about forty buildings all over south Houston, while they built the Center. I was hired as a junior engineer. At that time I only had four years’ experience. I was placed in a group that related to spacecraft communications. I was in a subsection of that related mainly to audio, television, and telemetry systems that we would need in the program as we went along. In fact, my first job was trying to outfit the laboratories we would need. For example, we had to do a lot of testing on all of our equipment, and one thing we didn’t have was a good laboratory for testing audio equipment. We had no acoustic chambers, things that we could take all the other noise out of the surroundings and really understand what we had. I recall going around town, especially to the medical centers, where they had facilities for testing audio, actually the audio capability of humans. But test equipment they had, perhaps that I needed. So, I was involved in that. I had to build up equipment for a television laboratory. At that time we had no spacecraft television. To kind of put you into a calibration point of time, the Mercury program had already started and we began to have some Mercury flights, the one-manned vehicle flights. Gemini was in development. We supported those programs with technical expertise, but our main purpose was to get ready for the flight to the moon and develop the equipment we needed. At that time, they had no television on any of the spacecraft. Since, in my mind, the NASA program has always been a program open to the public. And I guess politically, it was for the public when you think about it. And, so our process always has been one of a very open situation and of course, television would contribute to that. So, that’s part of the reason we wanted to get TV cameras on the spacecraft.
So I was involved in getting the laboratories ready for that, and then beginning to develop the systems. And initially, of course, we had to decide what kind of systems made sense. The key thing you have to recall, especially in those times, is that we were severely limited in how much weight we could throw into space. And so all systems were concerned with the size of the equipment, the weight of the equipment, how much power it consumes. When you get into communications, you quickly find that the key driver on power was the bandwidth of the communication link. And so, on these early systems and even the ones that we put on Apollo, we were limited in how much bandwidth we had available for communication purposes. And television is a tremendous user of bandwidth. It takes a lot more bandwidth to transmit television than it does to handle audio, and even telemetry that we would use. And so our basic television problem at that time that I was most involved in was trying to figure out how we could come up with a useful TV signal in a limited bandwidth. And our bandwidth at that time was perhaps as much as, after modulation and everything, less than a megahertz. You know the standard commercial television signal is about 4 ½ megahertz. So we had to come up with a nonstandard type of system. Generally, that field is called bandwidth compression. There are several ways to compress the bandwidth of a television signal. You can use some modulation techniques in the actual communication link. What you generally try to do is try to reduce the information rate without messing up the signal so much that you couldn’t get a picture there. So, we worked on a number of different techniques.
What we chose for Apollo was what we called slow scan TV. Instead of having a TV that comes at you sixty fields per second, thirty frames per second, we chose a ten frame, non-interlay system to get within our bandwidth. But, unfortunately we had to get that out to the public so that meant we had to develop equipment for the ground, called scan diversion equipment, to put it in a format that could go out over the commercial systems. So, I was in charge of that area and I had to get the right kind of people along with the equipment. So early on, I was involved in establishing budgets and actually, selling these if you will. As it turns out, I never got out of the job of selling budgets for the rest of my career. And I guess it’s just a fact of life. Money is always short and has to be portioned out and you have to go out and try to get what you need for your responsibilities. It was primarily hands on technical work there in the first few years. After awhile, I became sort of a senior manager, because we had been hiring a lot of young people with not much experience. I do remember writing out justifications to keep kids from getting drafted in those days so we could have them to work there with us. So we had a lot of young people as well.
So I was involved in the development of the TV systems and the audio equipment and then, as I became more experienced I began to pick up more responsibility for more of the total communication system on the spacecraft. That early system of course was a black and white system. I guess, one of the more interesting things I was involved in was when we were able to develop color systems. Again, we were limited in bandwidth and we had to come up with a different type of color system than is commercially used. And, actually, the version we came up with was an old version of the CBS sequential color system that had been invented way back in the late 30s, for that matter. And had probably been, if I recall correctly, one of the candidates for what eventually became the commercial system, but it didn’t make it. It had other problems in terms of the commercial system. But that was about the only thing that we could do to allow us to get color TV back from the moon with that long distance and the narrow communication links that we had. So, I was involved in that including the scan conversion equipment that you needed on the ground to make it commercial. It was always kind of a high profile system because the public affairs people and everybody were very interested in it.
What is most interesting about spacecraft television over the years for many years probably all the way to the point where we got into the shuttle, where we were doing work on orbit with remote controllers and things, that anybody would agree that it was an absolute requirement on the spacecraft. So it always had to fight its way on and we depended heavily on the public affairs people to justify it. But over time it became useful as people began to see that it’s neat to be able to see what’s going on up there.
One of the things I need to tell you is to develop a spacecraft; you end up with a prime contractor that pulls all the systems together. Typically, a large aircraft company, like McDonnell Douglas or Rockwell in those days. We, on the civil service side, were responsible for the initial development of the concepts and the specifications of the system. Typically we would then write a rather detailed statement of work, with these specifications and all the requirements that related to what we wanted and how it would work, and what the quantities and all would be, and schedules and that type of stuff. And so a lot of our work related to developing contracts with these contractors and then following that up with monitoring, watching them to make sure they did the right job. Now, in my case, since we had done so much of what we called in-house work, hands on work by engineers on the television systems, and the audio, and some of the telemetry, we proposed that we not make that part of a prime contract, but rather we provided, through the prime contractors, what we called government furnished equipment. So, I was one of the first engineers to propose that and take charge of that type of work. And at that point, I guess all the way into the space station program, we provided the television equipment and other equipment that I’ll tell you about later, as government furnished equipment. What that meant was that we had more hands-on responsibility and we in turn, once we had understood what we wanted to build, quite often we would go ahead and design and build some prototype models, TV equipment, our headsets. We built in-house little two-way communications systems for the astronaut to use when he was away from the spacecraft. We called that extravehicular activity communications systems, for that sort of thing. Eventually, we got to the point where they felt they needed an uplinked text and graphics systems. We had such limited communication with the astronauts, just the oral communications, that they finally came to the point where they would like to have written matter sent up. So, that was similar to the type – in a sense it was like a television system, only different formatting, different equipment and all. We built those things up in our laboratories and provided those as government furnished equipment also.
That involved me in quite a bit of procurement work. We would take these parts and put these things together initially, but then we would go out to an electronics contractor, like RCA or Westinghouse, to have them build up our flight hardware. That meant we had to go into a fair amount of procurement processes. As engineers, we were interested mainly in the technical aspect it. But, in order to make sure we got the right thing, we had to involve ourselves in the procurement processes. Of course, we had a separate procurement department. But they pretty much had to use our input and our specs and everything. In addition, we were responsible for the budget, the cost and schedule for this equipment. And so, we had to dictate the requirements. Our procurement people were excellent people, they had to keep us straight on the legalities of contracts and things like that, help us to go through the actual issuing of our requests for procurement. And then we would get the bids and we would have to negotiate these. It turned out to be very interesting from the standpoint that engineers know what they want, they know who they want to do the work for them, and they have a tendency, if you’re not careful, to say, “hey we want this company to do this work.” Well, you can’t get away with that in the government. You have to go out and bid across the board. Now occasionally, there were times when only one company could really do the job. We had things like unsolicited proposals, but those had to be heavily justified. I had that situation on the TV camera we sent to the moon. We had a particular tough problem in there because we wanted television during the lunar day and the lunar night. And that’s two extremes. We had no umbrella lighting for them to use at night. It was called earthshine, instead of moonshine you get earthshine on the lunar surface. So what we needed was an extremely low-light level TV camera. And it needed to be small; so that meant there was nothing off the shelf at the time to use. We had seen some research work on a special type of image sensor that had a light intensifier built in. And there was only one company building that. So, one job which got me into a lot of trouble was hiring an unsolicited justification for that because, naturally, procurement didn’t like that because it gives them headaches with people protesting that they could do the job. But I was able to get that through and we were able to get the contractor that had that particular technology and develop the camera that went to the moon.
That type of thing, where you’ve got a particular project and a particular piece of equipment, it so embroils you in the technical details of getting the job done, that you kind of lose sight of the big picture. I mean, you’re there trying to develop your thing. And I remember when we finally reached the moon, and this TV camera that my section had developed, was watching Armstrong go down the steps, we were watching that. So, it was about midnight there in the lab, we had the signal right there in the lab, it came through and everything worked. And you know, the feeling I had was not one of “gosh we did it.” But more like, “hey, it worked” as we thought it would. Now, we’re going on to something else. So, it took me awhile to get the feeling of the man on the moon and all that kind of thing because I was so deeply embroiled just in the technical aspect of what I had to do, my responsibility. But that was the culmination of a lot of work at that time.
One of the things we had to do, sometimes engineers might say the heck with it once they design something and it works; they’d just as soon go on to the next design project. But in NASA, at least at the Johnson Space Center, our approach was to have the engineers stay close to the equipment that they had been responsible for during the development phase. Long into the operational phase, it was our policy to keep the engineers handy so they could help on any kind of problems that developed during the operation of the mission. Now, we had an operations side of the house, which learned all the systems and had their own specialists in each area. For the most part, they were so well trained that they didn’t need that help. But every now and then there would be a glitch and they’d call us back in. So, part of our responsibility from that time forward all the way into much of the Shuttle program was to follow the equipment through the operations phase. But we were in the background at that point in time. That was another part of our responsibility.
About five years or so into my career, I began to get into other areas and I became section head of a group called micro-miniaturization laboratory. When I first went to work for NASA, their airborne equipment, military equipment, commercial equipment, and electronics were still using vacuum tubes, even though they were small. And we had very little transistorized equipment. Well, the pressure of the size/weight problem that I talked about earlier made us need to be using transistors and then the microcircuits which, you know, are wafers that have mini transistors and other components on them. What you now think of as microchips and microprocessors. In those days they weren’t available, so we set up a particular laboratory to learn what the technology was and develop it and apply it to all of our instrumentation and all of our equipment that we had. At that lab we set up from scratch, we set up big vacuum chambers, did definition work, grew our own semiconductors, used the things that are just so commonplace now they’re actually built on microcircuits. The TV camera that we built, the first one we built there that went to the moon, was the first one that had all solid state circuitry. So we were very proud of that, but that involved really getting into a new field for me at the component level, understanding the chemistry, the different processing equipment. It was very much of a learning experience. And since I was into this (unintelligible) equipment, I began to pick up responsibility for more of it, including the radios I was talking about, and so I specialized in that area for several years and eventually I became the head of the branch that did this kind of work.
Then the end of the Apollo program kind of culminated that phase of time where I had been a junior engineer, being a section head, developed equipment, broadened the scope of technical responsibilities, and at that point I began to ask to look into other areas. My responsibility broadened. That culminated in the end of the Apollo program, which was about 1972.
In the 70s, I would say up until about 1984, this was kind of a period there where we went along for awhile with some interim programs, like Skylab, which was a large module. The Command Module [crew module first used in the Apollo program] would go up, take a crew up there and back. A lot of the same systems were used, we kept improving them. And then we began to understand our needs for the Space Shuttle. And that consumed all of our thinking from the mid 70s into the early 80s. Again, we did much of the same sort of work. I was involved in a thing that did the TV cameras for all those and the other equipment.
I guess some of the more interesting aspects of that related to the conflicts we had between ourselves and our prime contractors, the design engineers and the initial specifiers of the system. And also keeping in place the way we did specialists in each technical area that worked in house, not only on the system that we needed for the spacecraft coming up, but also future. We always thought of ourselves as being at least, if not more, technically competent than our contractors. In fact we felt like we had to know as much as they knew in order to do the job. At the same time, what you run into is you had to give them responsibilities in turning out the product. So, since I was middle management at that point, I had to handle these type of conflicts where engineers thought they had to tell the contractor what to do, we had to work back and forth to get kind of a happy medium there because you want that contractor to meet his responsibility. We worked it across the board.
I got involved in helping obtain money for future projects from a systems technology standpoint. At that point, we began to see the possibility of solid-state TV cameras, for example. Where instead of this large image tube that we had on TV cameras before, the sensors instead of being like a vacuum tube about this long, it would be about the size of your thumb. And so that was the type of future technology projects that we liked to work on. And I don’t know what you’ve got in your camera there, but we ended up with all of our cameras being solid state sensors. It took us a while to get there, but we called those type of programs before they got on to a spacecraft, as being advanced research and technology. And so I was involved in proposing those type of projects and going to headquarters to sell them and get funding.
When we think about what we did on the television cameras, present day cameras, most of the circuitry that is required to function in there are similar in terms of driving sweeps and working with the signal and all. And I would imagine that the solid state circuitry, particularly microcircuits that we came up with, have gone into most commercial cameras and went into them shortly thereafter, because for one thing, we ended up with contracts with RCA, whose commercial division built TV cameras and things, and they would spin off from their space division anything that they picked up that we helped develop. The low light level systems probably got into the handheld TV cameras. I don’t know what the present state-of-the-art is, what they have there. But they finally ended up with the capability to make them small (CLOCK CHIMES). When we got to the point when we could make the cameras smaller and when we got to the shuttle program, we had enough [unintelligible] weight that we had a lot more power on board than we had during the Apollo systems. And we could go to the commercial format directly. One thing we did do in the communication link to allow us to handle that was to go to all digital communications, where we would code the signals and then they would be noise resistant and we didn’t have to have the same kind of signal power that you would have to have if it was just an analog type of communication system, that mostly was what you had in those early days. Now, this was all digital and I would say that within NASA as a whole, we pioneered the digital communication systems. And, of course, these things have ended up on your commercial satellites and that sort of thing. Although we did a lot of development and especially in the systems development of digital communications systems, relayed through a relay satellite, I look at that as the results of it being as much a total NASA effort as any particular group or individuals at NASA.
We had other centers, like the Jet Propulsion Lab (California), and Goddard Space Flight Center (Maryland) and Lewis Research Center (Ohio). All of those people had good communications people. And I think together, the different communications systems that we see today came out of that total activity of the whole agency. Probably the communication satellites are the number one spin-off of NASA in my mind, in terms of benefiting people. Not only in terms of the value to people, but from a commercial standpoint, a moneymaking standpoint. So, when we went into the shuttle system, that’s the type of system we used there. Of course, that helped to popularize the system and equipment manufacturers that worked for us could spin that off into their commercial divisions.
The shuttle program was a very complex program. The spacecraft was extremely complex. It was the first spacecraft that could be termed an aircraft in the sense that it could land and it had a lot of capability in terms of the payloads it could handle. We put the remote manipulator on the big arm that you see out in the payload bay. That was a very interesting project because we had to have feedback to the crew from the TV cameras located out on the end of the arm. That turns out is the main way they controlled it. It’s about sixty feet long, double-jointed thing; it simulates your arm. We were involved in designing the camera that was on that, and especially in developing the parameters for it, the tests over in our big lab where we would have the big arm and we would simulate actually picking up tools, spacecraft, and you name it, in actual full scale. The Canadians were selected as the developer of that arm and we provided the TV equipment. But that was part of the thing that we ran into, and everybody that’s been with the space program has to realize it’s always been heavily politicized and one of the ways that you can make it a success is to involve as many people as you can. And the Canadians were interested in developing the arm. They had some good capability up there, and that off-loaded some of our costs. It was good to have those people along. One of the problems that I worked on, because we always had budget constraints, including our travel budget. The travel budget, amazingly enough, was handled out of a separate budget, different from the program budget, because it was civil service people travelling. So it came out of the same budget as our salaries came out of. Naturally, we would like to have more salary, but we needed to travel, too. So, travel budgeting was a continuous problem for management all through the program. Probably still is. And I decided to try to find ways that perhaps we could reduce that and it seemed like video teleconferencing would be a way to go. And so in my group, we developed a video teleconferencing capability. We put together conference rooms with camera locations. We looked at--because, again it was a bandwidth problem, at that point in time you didn’t have your COMSATs [communication satellites] and things. It was a few of them beginning to come along, but it was still expensive to do video teleconferencing, especially in the wide band commercial TV format. And so we tried various techniques of capturing a frame or two and then just sending that frame in slow motion and then picking it up and transferring it back to regular motion, and things of that nature. To try to make it justifiable that with video teleconferencing we could beat the cost of airplane trips and that sort of thing. What comes to mind is the first time that we tested that system was while we were working on the remote medical aid system for the Shuttle up in Canada and we held design reviews using the video teleconference system, as an experiment. And I was the co-experiment leader on that. We conducted that and it was very successful. But we had a heck of a time convincing anybody that they could get their job done by TV. They always wanted to be face to face. Nowadays, and eventually, it became different I think. But one thing you have to realize, in the initial years, we had a lot of budget. We developed a lot of what you might call, extravagant habits, and until we got into the early 70s, we had enough budget that we weren’t worried that much about it. But at that point and time, they began to come down on us and the squeeze began to happen. And I think it’s because we accomplished the mission, we got to the moon and all. As far as anything -- any organization that gets moving has to keep going. So everybody’s trying to keep their empire going and that required budget. Mean time the government says “well, we’ve done that, we’ve won the race to the moon, we can cut back.” So from that point on, until this day with the Space Station, you see all the tremendous arguments over budget. Travel budget was one that we tried to attack that time and I think we were successful, but we couldn’t sell it on a daily basis. But I think it did set the stage for the video teleconferencing that’s done now. It’s getting more and more commonplace. And people, once they find out that they can do just about everything they might do in a face to face situation, especially technical things, when you can look at drawings, look at schedules, you ought to be able to get your job done. So that’s one of the things I worked on during that period.
Everything, I thought, went fairly smoothly during the Shuttle program. In 1984 I was elevated in the division. I might explain a bit about – I was in the Engineering Directorate and this was a result of what we started way back in the early 60s, to build an organization to support all these programs. And it consisted of about eight to ten different divisions, each with about one hundred civil service people. They would have different technical specialties. The one that I came out of was called tracking and communications. We had a division for guidance and navigation, for structures, propulsion, for aerodynamics, for suit systems, which was space suits and crew equipment, a full gamut of organizational entities to cover each technical area. And I had interfaced with a lot of these other technical divisions. For example, when we developed the TV camera, we had a significant thermal problem on the moon, in terms of the heat that we generated, keeping the camera cool enough during the daylight when we had direct sun and we had no atmosphere and the temperature could reach 250 degrees F. And at night, all the heat radiates out though space and it’s minus 250 degrees. And so I would interface with our thermal people over in the structures and thermal division. And I would interface with other areas and I got to the point where I understood the whole directorate, in working with different people. It gave me enough insight that I was eventually considered to come up to what we called the directorate level, which was over all of these technical divisions. I think that was about 1984 when that happened. I began to work across the line there, and that culminated my mid ten years, so to speak. I was the Deputy Director of Engineering at that point. Actually, that particular organization included another scientific directorate, so we had a Director for Science and Engineering, and then a Director of Engineering under that. Later on that was split off, and I remained the Deputy Director until I retired. But at that time, as we were getting into the Shuttle program, and flying as many flights as we were, (unintelligible) were pretty straight forward, we would try to do more things on each flight, we would try to improve our equipment and phase in different types of equipment. Already, we were working our conceptual thinking of the Space Station at that time. And that was really looking at large, configurational concepts. Our guys in systems engineering came up with a number of different versions. Some of them were circular, some of them were triangular, and some of them were the extended truss-thing that we finally ended up with. And we were trying to think in terms of what kind of technologies we might need for that time, because we’re talking about long periods in orbit, so different types of systems would be required. And from an engineering standpoint, we were working the shuttle and crew when they were flying, we were supporting the program, we had our full cadre of people that followed the problems that might occur at the Cape or wherever. Had people that were doing equipment, making sure that was provided. Those types of things were going on.
And then in ‘86 we had the Challenger explosion. That brought things to a stop. I was telling you that in engineering we had a back-room facility that supported the operations. And generally, when we had a launch, we would go over there. We always had our guys, in all the different levels, on stand-by over there. They had a set of their own monitoring equipment, their consoles so they could read back all the telemetry from their subsystems. (unintelligible sentence) (CLOCK CHIMES) When we have launch flight deck that was one of the critical times, and management would go over and monitor the situation. We were in our support room over there with all those guys – I could tell that something was wrong because people started scurrying around. (stop for CHIMES) Well we were in our support room over there with all those guys and I suddenly noticed our propulsion (unintelligible). Fellow named Henry Pohl, that I would eventually work for because he became the Director of Engineering a few years later, he started moving from console to console with me in the propulsion section and we could all tell that something was wrong. And Henry made a comment as he passed by me, he says, “it’s gone,” or something to that effect. We knew at that point that we had had a terrible accident and that we had lost it. So, of course, people started organizing immediately to decide how to figure out what had happened. And the director of engineering and another group of managers got together to try and understand what they had in the way of data. They didn’t have much but they realized very quickly from the little bit of television that we saw, from the ground tracking cameras- that a key element of the data we needed would be an exact analysis of the TV pictures, and other photographic and tracking cameras that we had in other locations around the Cape [Kennedy Space Center, Florida] that looked at the spacecraft from different angles as it went up. Since I had a television background, I was put in charge of the group to gather all the photographic and video data and begin to put it in some chronological form and establish our ability to analyze all of the visual information that we had. We had that and we had the telemetry information, but we really didn’t have as much as you might think, in terms of real data, to decide what caused the problem. Everybody at the Center in every area stopped whatever work they were doing and was placed on teams for every possible area of information that we needed. I set up my team to obtain all the videotape and any debris we could find in any location and then began to sort it out, analyze it, look at it. We eventually got the key tapes that showed exactly the time when we had the leak from the solid rocket motor and the little plume that came out from the side that located it for us. We finally were able to get all that and put it into sequence. We must have spent days looking at this same thing going up, slowing it down, watching it, seeing a little, almost like a little propulsion plume, coming out from the side where the solid rocket seal broke loose. Just almost like having a rocket coming out sideways. Eventually it expanded and of course, it threw the spacecraft out of control and when you’re going that fast through the atmosphere it begins to break up. So it depends on keeping the attitude of the vehicle in exact alignment so that the aerodynamic pressures are such that the vehicle will go up and will not have forces that will kick it off and eventually destroy it.
That whole period was kind of day and night, studying all the information, reporting to upper management above that, and headquarters had to have status information constantly. I had to go down to the Cape to understand where our cameras were located, what other information they had. They had some processing equipment over at Marshall [Space Center, Alabama] that seemed of interest. We developed some of our own processing equipment there to really dig into the video that we had. It was really months of work there. And then we had to document everything we had. Finally, when they established the outside committee, NASA had a few people on there, then there was their demands for information. We had to explain everything we knew about the situation. So, it took us months just to finalize what had happened and lay out a plan on how to recover. So the shuttle was down for two years before we flew again. And in that period we put some improvements in, we fixed the problem, a lot of testing. And finally got everything rolling again. That was where I started my last ten years, if you will. Went up to the directorate level, initially with all the problems with the Space Shuttle and getting that going again.
It was an interesting time for me because I was now in an area of responsibility where I had to understand all the space craft systems and their problems, and disciplines that I had not been initially trained in. I had to learn aerodynamics, structural, and thermal, navigation, you name it. So it became a very educational period for me, it was very interesting. One of the things that came out of the Challenger accident was a very rigid process for clearing a flight for launch. I don’t know if we overdid it or not, but it was probably reasonable at the time. But the recommendations that came out of the committee report and our management desire was to make sure that there were no safety concerns anymore. And that meant that we had to involve a lot of manpower, a lot of reviews, with a lot of management attention at each level. We were not able to delegate as much as we might have in the past. You’re always responsible, but you could do a certain amount of delegation and that meant that all levels of management had to take responsibility and be involved in the review process. Every little anomaly that had occurred during the buildup of a spacecraft to the next mission would have to be cleared. There was an enormous amount of work involved in doing that. And you had to also consider what had happened on previous missions to other spacecraft to see if a problem they had could apply to the latest launch to make sure there were no safety concerns there. I served on a number of review boards that cleared spacecraft to be on the next mission. That was very interesting and very educational.
In the meantime, we were involved in trying to get the Space Station going and we came to a point there where we had done all our conceptual work. There’s a lot of competition related to Space Station in terms of what each Center would be responsible for. And I think that headquarters management tried to spread it out to each Center. You have to realize that in the early days, each Center had built up a lot of people. And each center thought it could do anything. But generally, we had been doing most of the manned spacecraft work. Marshall Space Flight Center was responsible for all the propulsion systems, the big Saturn rockets and everything we had on the Shuttle. The Space Station was a different kind of ballgame because we only had some on-orbit propulsion systems and Marshall wanted to get into the manned space flight vehicles in terms of the on-orbit equipment. So, we had competition there. Lewis Research Center had always had a capability in the power area and they wanted to do the power systems, the big solar arrays and things of that nature. So, there was a lot of competition. Finally, it was divided up, Lewis did the solar arrays, Canada again was responsible for the manipulator arms, Japan and England were involved with experimental modules. It was very political in terms of spreading these assignments around. But Johnson Space Center was assigned a big chunk of the overall integrated truss, and assembly activity as well as many of the manned modules that ended up in place, some of the on-orbit propulsion, a significant, probably the major portion of the space station design. And at that point, we get into the procurement process again. I had a lot of experience in procurement with the television equipment that I had been doing. So, they asked me to become the Source Board chairman. Now, the Source Board is a significant government activity, especially for a big project. I had done projects that had run ten-to-twenty-million-dollar range, but the responsibility that we were assigned to in the station was going to be in the ten to twenty billion dollar range. And that meant that we had to go through the same process to procure that type of activity as in the smaller activities.
(END OF TAPE 1, SIDE 2)
I was talking about the Space Station source evaluation board, which I was made the chairman of. A very large system. It took probably about a year of my life to do that job. With that kind of cost involved and the complexity of the system, you first have to turn out a statement of work that sets specifications and encompasses everything. Especially one that the contractor can understand well enough that he can prepare a proposal to do it. A proposal for that sort of thing usually consists of the technical aspects of his proposed design and his development program, his costs, schedules, personnel, all kinds of things that allow you to decide which contractor would be best for the job. It turns out that you can not do it on cost alone. Especially when you consider that most government contracts are cost plus time contracts. They are not fixed price. Very rarely during my career I was able to get a few fixed price contracts but that’s only when you’ve got very well defined systems that you want. Everything is so clear that you ought to be able to price that out to the contractors.
Most everything that NASA has done, in spacecraft development at least, it’s got too many unknowns and even the actual technical concept quite often is not well developed, so the specifications and description of what you want there is critical. And in particular the Space Station specs, which was a very large document, to say the least. In addition, we have to tell the contractor how we are going to evaluate it. In other words, put weights on different criteria for evaluation. So, it was my job to shape up that procurement document to start with. It wasn’t in particularly good shape because it was early in the program. And we had been so busy selling the program and getting some initial technical concepts out that we really had not had time to do the business part of it. This was the start of the business work, so that took quite a bit of time. That required a cadre of people. Also, the other thing about a Source Board is, because you don’t want any leaks to get out to the contractor to give him any type of advantage, you actually have to go into seclusion. We went into a different building, maybe a building across the street from the Center to get all our people together and have enough facility there just to develop all this and then have room to write it. We had to house our different engineers and cost people, quality people, safety people. All aspects of the program to get this written. And, then establish evaluation criteria so the contractor knows how he is going to be evaluated. We finally got that document together and with something of this magnitude it takes a lot of review. We had to carry the review processes all the way up to headquarters [unintelligible]. In the mean time, we had some preliminary contracts with the two most likely contractors. And these were to develop some concepts further to get them ready to bid on this contract. In this case, it was Rockwell and McDonnell Douglas. Which added a little bit more of a problem in making sure that our basic procurement contract was not revealed to these two guys while we were trying to work with them. So we had to separate our activities. That was another drain on manpower but that’s what we had to do. We went through the process of building that and then issuing it to contractors.
Typically, the contractors were given anywhere from a month to three months to build up their proposal. The proposal has to cover all of these areas. It was like a stack that high for each contractor. Just one copy of everything they had to respond back to us. And whatever embellishments they wanted to put that would make their proposal seem better than others. And these finally came in and we started an evaluation. That was a pretty hectic thing because, I guess we had about 115-120 people over there involved in things. A number of specialists and board members with a broader focus and each of these committees would cover an area and had to prepare their reports. One of the things you have to realize is that, because of the possibility of protest, the contractor feels that somehow or another the process wasn’t done properly, he can protest. Well, a protest ties up the whole process for another year because you have to answer it to the satisfaction of lawyers. So you want to avoid protests at all costs because that’s going to cost you schedule and money. So you have to very carefully document your opinions of each proposal. And you have a number of different people, of different types. The guys who really want to be on the floor designing stuff which you need because of their technical expertise. They’ve got to somehow know to document their thinking. So a lot of paperwork they generate, it all has to come together and then be presented. And we have to make sure, as a board, that our responsibility there, that they are fair in their evaluation, not biased in anyway. Maybe they like a particular guy’s technical approach, to the point where they give it more points than they really should just because they like it better. They have to prove that it’s better. So it’s quite an involved process. It takes a lot of time, and really takes a lot of experience. It was pretty much the kind of thing that I had always done well; I enjoyed it and felt real good about what we did there.
We made the selection and we had to justify it not only in terms of archival type of documents, but also in presentations that we made to upper management and on to the director of NASA. Which we did, I presented these types of things and it went well, in my opinion. Our work was well received and we selected a contractor. One of the problems though, that we ran into, that occurs just about on any competitive contract of a large magnitude like that, is that you have to make a technical evaluation for the main evaluation, but when it comes to cost, contractors try to take advantage of every little loophole in your procurement specification to reduce their costs. In other words, you say you want something with a certain characteristic about it. If they can visualize that in their own minds as something less than what you probably want, they will bid it that way. And so, when it comes down to is what does it really cost, and did this contractor propose a reasonable cost. We had a lot of problems with that. What we ran into on that procurement was the same as we’d run into on most others. Contractors claim it so close in order to have the lowest price – will under bid significantly. These contractors did that. Now, we can take that and try to say well, if they had bid it correctly, what would be the real price, the probable cost of this thing. And that takes a big effort for our people to come up with what we think is really the probable price, but the bid is there and we selected these people. And we did that and I would say we did a very good job of that. But for the program – after I finished this job I go back to my regular job where I’m involved in helping the program managers manage from the technical standpoint, what they’ve got. The program managers have to deal with a bid that’s probably less than it’s really going to cost. And sure enough every program, you name it, probably any military program has the same problem. You start getting into cost overruns. And, I was involved in trying to help the program managers understand this probable cost, trying to work with our headquarters people in terms of establishing a reasonable cost budget, which is very difficult to do when they have something from the contractor saying it’s going to cost this much. It must be right. But it’s not. And trying to somehow convince management of that is a problem because they think the contractor’s bid is good. But good program managers know that; eventually it comes home to all of them.
So that was a big problem on the inspection program that we had to deal with. So these cost over runs began to occur. Politically, we were under a lot of pressure. So, very quickly in the game after we awarded the Station contract, we were being asked to figure out a way to get the costs down. And it was very difficult to do. Eventually, I think, after we determined that within the configuration we initially came up with, there was no way to get into the kind of cost targets they were talking about, we were asked to come up with new configurations for the station. A lot of our engineering people had to be involved in looking for different approaches. And we got into the things about can we use the Russian spacecrafts that were already on orbit, their space station? Can we use elements of that or anything they had to cut our costs by bringing them in as a partner on certain things? And that became a real purpose in life, the administrator of NASA that had taken over some years before, was a very political minded person, a very sharp fellow, and he began to look into those kind of things. That began to change our whole approach to the space station. What can we do in that regard? In our engineering directorate, we did set up what we called a skunk works, if you will. It’s an old term that came out of some of the work with the aircraft companies. We set up a group of really good people off to the side and say dream it up. Whatever you come up with, we want something different. Our guys did that kind of work and came up with some pretty neat techniques. But it’s very difficult once you’ve established a configuration, you’ve bid it, you’ve got the wheels going, to change. And the only thing we could ever really come up with was using the Russian equipment, reducing requirements, sizes, various things. So, the space station has been—you know we were supposed to – when [President Ronald] Reagan announced this back in ‘84, he wanted the space station built in ten years. By ‘94 we were just … (CHIMES). And the first flight to start assembling the station was in the last few months [1999]. So we’re already that far behind. Most of it has been because we just had to cut the money off and try to figure out a cheaper way to go.
So the station was a big concern for me, during the latter years of my career. In fact, it was in the last year of my career that we were working the skunk works trying to come up with new configurations. The other thing that involved me probably in the late 80s through the last couple of years when I was at NASA, was fighting the problem of budgets, in terms of how could we get the space shuttle operational costs down? And in our directorate, our budget consisted of dollars for what we call support contractors. From day one, we had to have a limitation, from all the way back to the 60s, on how many civil service people we could have. Ideally, we would have liked to have had enough civil service people that we could’ve done all of our design and development that we needed to do in house, with just our civil service people. But they put limitations on that. There’s always Congress and the administrative side of government and their desire to keep down the government workforce. It’s a given. Hold the line. So we were stuck with that. In the early days we established a budget for what we called support contractors. That allowed us to get a contractor who would provide manpower, who would work in our labs. And we could assign work to them that we would normally do ourselves, just because we need the augmentation of our total workforce. And we kept these kind of contractors until they became part of our family, years and years of the same people. Every now and then we would have a competition for these people and occasionally a new contractor would win that, but in that case, they would always take the people from the other company and hire them and so we would end up with the same expertise. You’ll find support contractors that were with us for twenty or thirty years, part of our basic engineering family, a couple of them retired out here in Lakeway.
KOCHAN: Do you keep in touch?
ENGERT: Well, I play golf with one of them. Some of the others I see every now and again. Anyway, when we get into the budget crunches, and a lot of my activity was concerned with that, we tried to cut back on those people. I was involved in trying to reorganize our directorate, trying to get rid of any kind of overlap or duplication. But we also had to worry about new technology. One of the things that became obvious to us was that we really didn’t have a discipline for what we call automation and robotics. The standard subsystems and the spacecraft we had pretty well covered. But then we got into things like the manipulator arm, and then we’d begin to think of other devices we might need that could be remote control and began to think of virtual reality for training and that sort of thing, we felt like we needed that kind of capability. So, I was involved in reorganizing our whole directorate so that we could have a division for automatics and robotics. We had to do a little bit of pulling from this division to make up the disciplines that we needed. We pulled a very good division chief out of our crew systems division and organized that thing and that has gone really well. A lot of good stuff has happened there. But we had to figure out a way to, that was just part of our activity in terms of streamlining to reduce our budget. We would cut back on civil service people. We had to realign and do things like that. That, again, involved a lot of my time. A lot of my time was selling our people on some of these new organizations.
I never will forget this one young guy that comes in one time, and I tell him, “Hey we’re going to transfer you to automation and robotics and here are some good reasons why.” He stormed back at me and says, “well, that sucks.” That’s his very words. I had never even heard the term before. But I think I know what he meant, and I was able to explain to him the benefits, and to this day he has never regretted the fact that he changed over, really happy there. But I had to deal with a lot of people and that sort of thing, with division chiefs who were losing part of their resources and responsibility, that sort of thing. A lot of personnel type things you had to deal with.
One thing I’m proud of is that we, of course we were instructed to get our equal opportunity program in place, it had to do with sexual harassment, hiring minorities, women, and I think we did a super job of that. We got so many good minority engineers and women engineers. Tons of them, and we initiated all that activity during my time there. About the only way I keep in touch with NASA anymore is we have a house newspaper that comes out about every two weeks and they send copies to the retirees. I can see if these young people that I got in place are making such good progress. Usually in the pictures, about half of them are women. Most of them are pretty good looking, too. So that just shows that engineers can be good looking, too. Good people.
I think we put in one of the tightest programs related to sexual harassment. We sent all of our managers and potential managers to special courses in that regard. A lot of them were like therapy things, you know. You sit around and your innermost thoughts are revealed, that sort of thing. So we took it very seriously. Excellent record in that regard.
The other thing that I became deeply involved in the last few years was something called Total Quality Management. That was kind of new and we thought, well, that is going to help us. We can be better managers, it may help us reduce our costs. I became the spokesman or motivator for our directorate for that area. I arranged a lot of special courses and seminars, where I brought the guys in. I set up teams to test different things and there were some technical areas too that the Japanese had come along with that we thought were pretty neat. That whole endeavor was a very tough selling job because it meant change to the people in terms of how they operated. The whole gist of it in my mind was making everybody realize what they contributed to the end product and how they all related together. The fact that they could help each other, no matter if they were in different disciplines. I thought we did some pretty good work there and I think eventually it has come to the point now that JSC has a separate organization for total quality management. And I remember the guy who heads it up now because he was on one of my committees, and he was in the program office and he didn’t much believe in this kind of stuff at all and now he’s the head of it.
KOCHAN: What is his name?
ENGERT: If I could remember it I’d give it to you. I understand that they have an organizational chart. Nice guy, and a sharp guy, but like many, many people, had their doubts that this type of change was necessary or would be better. Because everybody at NASA, especially at JSC [Johnson Space Center], thought they were top notch. We already know all that management stuff. You can’t teach us anything. So, that was an interesting thing, and I felt pretty good about what we accomplished there.
Let’s see what else I can remember here. I think that’s about the major things that I’d like to talk about. One of the things that I’m glad to see has happened, in fact we were working on that while I was still there, that was a major problem in terms of the Shuttle program. As I mentioned from the earliest days, our engineers had always been involved in the operations in terms of the backroom activity, as well as installing equipment and working problems in process of going down to the Cape, being integrated. Our guys were on duty to the point that many of our engineers were no longer doing design work or even monitoring design work. They were almost like, in the field. And that’s not what we thought the directorate was set up to be. In the early days everybody felt that they had to contribute to the program. But, these people are civil service manpower, support contractors, they had their travel budgets, so they’re part of the problem in terms of how you cut the shuttle operations costs. So, while I was still there, we began the process of trying to wean these people from the Shuttle program and that slowly beginning to happen. In fact, by the time I was ready to leave, they were thinking about, and they have since implemented, turning over all the activity at the Cape to a contractor, pulling the civil servants back to very upper level oversight. More or less giving the contractors the responsibility to get the job done. We’re not going to tell you how to do it, we’re not going to get involved in your day-to-day activities. So that process has slowly evolved to the point that I gather it’s working well. It certainly should have allowed us to reduce costs, especially overhead labor involved. It is my understanding now that the Engineering Directorate is primarily concerned with in-house, hands-on design and are doing real well. That’s how we started out. That’s what we should be doing. It’s the most satisfying thing if you’re an engineer. And then to see the stuff finally fly is the most rewarding thing if you had the hands-on experience. Well, that is an overall view of how I worked at NASA.
KOCHAN: It sounds like now, looking back, you have a real good idea of your contributions and the importance that all of it played. And I’m wondering, when you first decided to go to NASA, at the very beginning, what was your idea or motivation in going to NASA originally?
ENGERT: Frankly, I just looked upon it as an interesting new area for actual engineering design. I didn’t think much of the big picture. A lot of people did, they were emboldened with the idea of going to the moon and things like that. That is good, but I think if you’re an engineer you have to be careful if that’s what you think about and not about your design. You really have to bury your nose in it. In fact, that’s the way I was for the last few years. The big picture was generally out there, but I was so buried in my little area there, that it didn’t concern me at all that much. It’s like when we finally had the lunar landing and the TV picture came back, I didn’t feel anything other than, “hey, it did work”. And I expected it to, so on to the next project. That’s the way I felt.
(END OF TAPE 2, SIDE 1)
KOCHAN: Just a couple of wrap-up questions. I was wondering why you decided to end your career when you did.
ENGERT: I had spent thirty years and I really didn’t see how I could possibly get very deeply into the space station program. I knew it was going to be a long drawn out thing, it was going to be a long haul. And I’ve always felt that there comes a time when it’s better to let the younger people take over and I really felt that I was at that point. But, I was also tired of sitting. One of the problems when you get hired in management is that you are sitting in meetings all the time. I really wanted to get out and away from that environment. I loved it, I loved any of the problems whether it was human engineering, personnel, technical, or whatever. Solving the problems was great. I did feel that there came a point where the problems were, covered much of the agency. Some problems I couldn’t have solved very directly unless I was the administrator or something of that nature. I thought that’s where most of the problems were. I could suggest and – but they were fundamental things that were going to take time. At my age I felt like it was time for others to take it over. I had a lot of good memories. So, that was part of it. And basically, I love the retired life.
KOCHAN: What are you doing in retired life?
ENGERT: I am playing golf.
KOCHAN: Are there any problems there?
ENGERT: Well, yes, I had to have my hip replaced in January, but I’ve gotten over that very well. I think that sitting in so many meetings actually led to my hip problems. You don’t get enough motion and exercise. We worked long days. There’s so many things involved and you end up working long hours and Saturday and Sunday. You just couldn’t get away from it. But, I probably could’ve contributed more but I felt like I had done enough. It was time to retire. Actually, I probably extended my work about a year longer than I intended to. I’ve always said that we had so many good people, it was time to give them a chance. We even thought about, NASA, having older managers assume some sort of emeritus position, but I looked at that and it said to me, that’s just another consulting job. I’ve never cared much for consultants. To me, consultants come in and they talk to all your people, and they tell you what your people say and you ought to be able to find that out yourself. So I never believed much in consultants. I felt like it was better to get out of the way and let these people do their job. A lot of good, young people are there. And, a lot of managers have been around a long time, and deserve a shot. Once you’ve accomplished so many things, it’s just more of the same. But I love to play golf and I love to work in my yard. I love to wash dishes with my wife. That’s about all I can tell you right there.
KOCHAN: Well, thank you very much for sharing this with us.