NASA Hector, Garland Dean - June 12, 2000

Interview with Garland Dean Hector

 

Interviewer: Laura West

Date of Interview: June 12, 2000

Location: Hector home, Temple, Texas

 

 

WEST:  Today is June 12, 2000.  This oral history with Garland Hector is being conducted at 5353 FM Road 1237, #60, the home of the interviewee, in Temple, Texas.  This interview is being conducted for the NASA/Johnson Space Center Oral History Project in conjunction with Southwest Texas State University, Department of History by graduate student Laura West.  Mr. Hector, are you aware that this interview is being conducted for the NASA/ Southwest Texas State University Oral History Project and will be available for research purposes?

 

HECTOR:  Yes, I am.

 

WEST:  Thank you for participating.  I see on your Biographical Data Sheet that you were born in Austin, Texas and that you were educated partly at Southwest Texas [State University] and then at Texas A&I.  Can you tell me something about those experiences?

 

HECTOR:  Well, at Southwest Texas I was in a pre-engineering curriculum and I spent two years there.  Then a year in the workforce in between.  Then went to Texas A & I in Kingsville, Texas in the Double E program [electrical engineering] under Dr. Guinn.  I graduated in September of 1962.

 

WEST:  What was the work experience you had in between the two?

 

HECTOR:  Oh, that was interesting.  I got a job with a contractor that was a family friend and I think my mama told him to really work me hard because I was out in the cold and digging a hole though solid rock and that's when I decided it was good idea to go back to go back to college.  I did as soon as I had a chance.

 

WEST:  I understand that.  And I see here that your professional career lists you at Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia first.  Can you tell me something about your experiences at Langley?

 

HECTOR:  Yeah, I was recruited at Texas A&I by a NASA fellow from Langley.  That would have been the spring of  ’62.  That was the only job I wanted, the only job I applied for, and I was lucky enough to get it.  I went to Langley in September.  First time away from home, first time on an airplane, lots of firsts for a country boy from Texas.  Then I went to, entered their … I guess it's a program all first year engineers go through.  Your first raise at the end of the year is contingent upon it.  My job was to develop a cross section measurement laboratory.  That was a scaled version.  It didn't measure it at the actual RF [radio frequency carrier wave] frequencies.  So for the radars it was at a higher frequency and therefore the models could be smaller than you measured.  We did this under a project called RAM, which was Radio Attenuation Measurements. 

 

And let's see, I worked in Instrument Research Division under Bill Mace [who] was the branch chief, Bill Moyer was section head, my mentor and the engineer that they assigned me to was Bob Faust.  After I got the lab running for cross section measurements, we started developing a radar acquisition system for telemetry antenna, which used an L band radar as its primary source.  So, we integrated an L band radar into a VHF telemetry system to support some of the reentering vehicles programs such as Trailblazer and RAM and a variety of others.

 

WEST:  Okay.  When you were working on that, were you married at that time?

 

HECTOR:  The first two years I was single.  I spent four years at Langley.  The first two years I was single and then I got married in ‘64 to a Texas a girl.  We bought a, lived in an apartment a year, bought a house for a year, and then whenever we started our family, we thought it would be a good idea if our family was raised where they had grandparents and where we had a support system.  So, I applied for a job in, well, actually I was asked to apply for a job at Johnson Space Center.  Jim Setterfield was my section head at that time at Langley and Jim had gone to take over the System's Engineering Branch in the old White Support Division at what was then the Manned Spacecraft Center.  So, it was about February of ‘66, I guess, when I showed up at Johnson.

 

WEST:  And when you showed up at Johnson Space Center did you notice that it was a set up, ready to go kind of place or was it still being built?

 

HECTOR:  No, everything was still being built.  The Control Center was, the whole Center was in a state of flux.  There were new buildings being built, still being built, and the Control Center was continuously in a state of flux because they were finishing up the Gemini project and starting to build for the Apollo program.  It was not a smooth running, stable organization or center at that time.

 

WEST:  I heard that there were buildings all along the highway.

 

HECTOR:  No, the Gulf Freeway?

 

WEST:  Yes.

 

HECTOR:  I actually arrived a little bit after most of the people.  That's the old Stall Mars building down off the Gulf Freeway which was actually kind of a warehouse that was turned into office buildings for NASA when they first moved in there until facilities could be built at Clear Lake.  But, I arrived a little bit after that.  The only place that I recall that there were offices external to the Center itself were out at Ellington.  [Air Force Base, Houston]  I guess there were offices there that housed major NASA efforts through the Apollo program and, still, there’s some aircraft operations that are running out of Ellington or what was Ellington at the time.

 

WEST:  Okay.  What were your choices that led you to your interest in engineering and working on the kinds of things that you have at Langley and at NASA?

 

HECTOR:  Oh, I don't know.  I think that 'choices' more is a '80s and '90s word.  In the '60s, the choices were to get a good job for a male, and most engineering graduates were male.  Very, very few females were in the workforce when I was there.  In the '60s it was, first of all, to get a job.  Second of all, you were interested in whether or not a draft deferment went along with it.  So, times were different.  I don't think the choices thing is the same and your interest thing is the same as jobhunting in the '90s or '80s for that matter.

 

WEST:  I understand.  What was your first big project at NASA and can you describe how you got involved in it?

 

HECTOR:  Oh, first big project?  Well, let me kind of work my way into that one.  Well first, I wouldn't describe any of the projects that we worked on in Langley as big projects.  It was a research center and most of the efforts that were going on there were research based.  As far as what I had to follow, they were small projects. 

 

When I went to the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, I was in the system engineering branch in one of the sections.  I don’t remember the name of the section.  But the purpose of that division was to develop and operate the infrastructure of the [Mission] Control Center, which is a very historic, very volatile project.  My first job was to design, not design as much as develop, interface documentation for all the tracking data flow all over the world.  And that developed over time to include telemetry and commands and television – all of the different kinds of data that was gathered from the spacecraft to the ground and had to be transmitted back to the Control Center for flight control and for other purposes, scientific purposes as well as flight control.

 

So, I sort of became, over a period of years, the resident expert on the data acquisition systems all over the network.  Those started off with small antennas scattered all over the world and did later on develop into a relay satellite system that gives near continuous coverage rather than the fifteen to twenty per cent coverage that was afforded by the ground stations that were scattered all over the world.  So, it was an interesting evolution that I was able to participate in.

 

WEST:  When you worked on those systems, and you said that you became the resident expert, what kinds of software or programs were you developing, specifically, that you might have the  claim to fame on?

 

HECTOR:  Well, I don't think I developed very much.  My job was usually what I describe as integration.  It was more of a develop a set of requirements, make those requirements known to other agencies that are responsible for providing those requirements, and then following through on the design and development of those capabilities and then checking them out, testing, verifying.  So, it's an integration job.  The major providers of the data acquisitions systems were Goddard Space Flight Center, another NASA Center in Greenbelt, Maryland and Department of Defense Tracking Systems.  I guess we were there customer, I guess you could say.  And we had to give them a good set of requirements that were doable, and they had to understand them.  We had to follow through.

 

WEST:  So, that would be something like giving them a system that works and saying, "This is how to make it work?"

 

HECTOR:  No, it's more like "We need a certain capability and what do you guys have to provide that capability?" or "What can you develop for a cost to provide that capability?"

 

WEST:  So, on the television bands, for instance, when you were changing from black and white to color, you had something to do with that?

 

HECTOR:  Well, in a way.  In a nutshell, my television experience through the program set up.  In Apollo the Lunar Module television was a very narrow-band black and white system.  The color TV had something called field sequential color TV that required a color converter back in the Control Center and it was kind of a narrow band system as far as data acquisition, data transmission for the spacecraft to the ground goes. 

 

The development for the requirements for data acquisition was my job.  Also, the first television that we saw from the lunar surface had a lot of, well, first of all it had a lot of noise because it was an air band.  Second of all, it had a lot of shadows and double images.  What you're going to have to understand is that in those days intercontinental TV was a rarity.  It wasn't something that was done every day and a consortium of NASA facilities and AT&T and other foreign carriers patched-worked together a data system – cable, RF, and satellite.  Actually, there weren't very many satellites.  It was a patchwork kind of thing to get the data back to the Control Center so it could convert it and use it in our white control functions. 

 

Well, I was given the responsibility to develop a test team that consisted of all these different elements to kind of fine tune the television transmission system which includes spacecraft, the ground receiving systems, the transmissions systems back at the Control Center, and the Control Center processing systems.  So, over about a six-month period, we had a series of meetings that culminated in, I guess, Apollo 14 was the first time the fruits of our labor were noticed.  See, everything was moving so fast that development of, the rover came in, the lunar rover, and it had a new television system on it and it was color.  And we were able to get a whole lot better TV out of it when the rover came.

 

WEST:  Did that eliminate a lot of the shadows and the double images that you talked about before?

 

HECTOR:  No, we put some special processing at both of the remote sights and at the Control Center that filtered out the unwanted signals or cancelled them out.  And we were able to tweak that up fairly, in about a three- or four-month period.  First of all, we identified the sources that that could occur at and all of the translation system.   Then we, in a laboratory environment, optimized each one of those different elements and then developed tests that we would run pre-pass and some of them during the pass that allowed us to make sure that those operating elements were still performing in a way where the signals pass unimpaired.

 

WEST:  Did it work the same way with telemetry?

 

HECTOR:  No, not really.  Telemetry is a more of a ones and zeros.  Once it decided what's a one and what's a zero, it's more of a straightforward thing.

 

WEST:  It's more like any other computer program [because] you’ve got yes and no and that’s it?

 

HECTOR:  As far as each individual bit goes, yeah.  It's not a composite picture.

 

WEST:  How did the Cold War attitude affect your work?

 

HECTOR:  It didn't.  I always hear this Russian thing, the Russian element of competition being a big factor as far as the nation goes, of approving the Apollo program.   In fact, we were able to keep the national interest up.  But as far as working on the program at all, from where I sat, we didn't worry about what the Russians were doing.  We knew we had enough to worry about.  Flights were coming fast and furious during those days and major reconfigurations had to be done between flights.  Well, between ‘66 and ’69, we went from the very first Apollo flights to landing on the Moon.  So, that's amazing.

 

WEST:  Yeah, that is.  When you were working at NASA on these projects and the tragedies of Apollo 1 and later the Space Shuttle Challenger and the difficulties of Apollo 13 occurred, what changes could you see?  What changes did you see?

 

HECTOR:  Other than the obvious national public relation kind of changes.  In each case, I believe there was a, you could see a general resolve in the workforce to do their job better, to work harder at making sure that your product, the product of the whole organizational element that you were a part of was done properly.  NASA in those days, really, it wasn't good enough to have one design going in, you had to have a couple to choose from and you tested the results and then you tested them again and then you tested them under operational conditions.  That was the difference between developing something for a manned spacecraft program and developing something just for general use was the very involved testing.

 

WEST:  Can you give me an example of one type of thing, one design that might have been done in two or more ways that you might have worked on?

 

HECTOR:  Nothing comes to mind.  It was just a general rule.

 

WEST:  What forces do you feel led to the high performance or the cohesiveness of NASA at that time?

 

HECTOR:  The feeling that the program had an importance to the nation.  The feeling that your work was part of that big program that was important to the nation – that kind of thing.

 

WEST:  Would you say that there was a sense of patriotism behind it or a sense of dogged determination behind it or a little bit of both?

 

HECTOR:  Well, probably a little bit of both.  I don't know about patriotism.  Yeah, I guess patriotism is the right word for some.  Just determination to do a job well because it was, however small the job was, it was still important, and that your product was going to get used as a part of this big project.  The whole operation depended on it.  So if all your job was to develop tracking data flow that doesn't sound too important except that, in a lot of cases having tracking data in a timely matter, was very important.  So, you had to design in systems that didn't have delays in them.  You had to design in systems that were redundant in the right places.  Just a whole slew of things.

 

WEST:  When you were working with tracking data flow and you say that it's important that it be developed in a timely manner, can you give an example?

 

HECTOR:  Well, the biggest thing there is launch.

 

WEST:  I'm sorry, what?

 

HECTOR:  Launch, during launch the data had to be in the Control Center and provide an answer in a couple of seconds, so therefore we couldn't do something.  We had requirements on the launch processing system down at Kennedy [Kennedy Space Center, Florida] to process the data in a certain amount of time and then we did things in our data transmission flow that like rather than rig it on satellites instead of on landlines because the delay was less.

 

WEST:  You were talking about Kennedy and getting information to the ships during launch?

 

HECTOR:  No, tracking data back to the Control Center during launch. 

 

WEST:  Okay.

 

HECTOR:  Well, you asked for examples about time and this and that.  Well, that's the best examples.  Telemetry data and command data didn't have quite that stringent of requirements because decisions to be made were, weren't as stringent as [inaudible] depended on that tracking data.

 

WEST:  I can understand where that would be important to the men's lives who were sitting inside the spacecraft.  What activity or project that you were involved in gave you most personal satisfaction?

 

HECTOR:  Oh, lots of things.  The involvement in the test and verification of the TV float for Apollo for ASTP.  I developed the requirements for the television loop for ASTP that came back through.  The first time we communicated from a manned spacecraft to an orbiting relay satellite and then back to Control Center, that was one of those cases where you just saw an opportunity to use a research satellite for a little bit different purpose than what it was intended.  And during the development of the Space Station, I developed the interface control document, a bit more than that, we developed the protocols and the integration effort that I was responsible for between the ground and the spacecraft and that was all new stuff.  So, I guess, my name on that last document as the developer, well, that's a satisfying feeling.

 

WEST:  How did do you get the idea to do something like that?  Where did you get the knowledge?  Was it a group effort or was it just something [like] an "ah-ha" moment?

 

HECTOR:  No, it's a need.  Program development cycles when you bring in a new program and you're developing new spacecraft technology, you have to develop complimentary stuff on the ground.  So very early on in development, some element of ground planning has to be done.  So, it's an evolution of that that shows the need for a detailed interface description between the two because you have to talk to each other in the same language or complimentary language to be able to communicate.  And that's about what it all amounts to is command formatting, telemetry formatting, how the voice is formatted, TV is formatted.  It all has to be, first of all, specified, then built, and then it has to be tested, and that whole integration cycle is where I really had a good time.

 

WEST:  In what way, would you say?

 

HECTOR:  Oh, what’s really neat about my job from about in the mid-seventies on was that I was involved in almost all of the phases of the development cycle.  I would get involved early in the program and do the planning and then be involved in the development of both the spacecraft systems and the ground systems to provide those capabilities that we developed the requirements for in the planning phase.  And then we tested them and then we operated on them during missions.  Now, I didn't, my job would be, for the largest part throughout my career, was over before the actual flight flew.  At that point in time, I would only get involved if there were a problem that the real time operators couldn't handle.  And so they had to call in people, the development team, to see if the problem was an operational one or was one if the design had failed or the equipment had failed.  So, that kind of describes that.

 

WEST:  Whom do you think did the best job of running the Johnson Space Center?

 

HECTOR:  Bob Gilruth, no doubt about that.

 

WEST:  And why do you say that?

 

HECTOR:  In tough times, and, well, he and Chris Kraft both did a good job.  They kept headquarters out of our knickers and kept the money flowing.

 

WEST:  When you noticed that the money was starting to dry up, I guess toward, was that toward the end of the Apollo program that that started happening?

 

HECTOR:  Actually, from my perspective, first time that we ever saw it, was at the end of Sky Lab.  That's the only time that I remember any layoffs at the Manned Spacecraft Center.

 

WEST:  How many layoffs were there in your division?

 

HECTOR:  Oh, I don't know, probably ten to fifteen percent, I guess.  There was a lot of reorganization going on then.  Our organization had pretty much stayed intact.  We'd changed division chiefs, but our roles and missions were still the same up through the mid-seventies.

 

WEST:  Which one of the Apollo flights was the most exciting to you?

 

HECTOR:  As most memorial is probably, as far as just what I remember best or what I remember warmest was [Frank] Borman's reading of the Bible from the Moon, orbiting the Moon.  The first, of course, you remember the first lunar landing, but then I had more irons in the fire on the first mission that we had, the lunar rover with its communications unit on it called the LCRU, Lunar Rover Communications Relay Unit or something like that.  That was a real short-fused project that had Westinghouse, NASA engineers, RCA, and Goddard Space Flight Center.  Just a whole bunch of people came together and made that thing work.  Then when we were able to take a picture of the Lunar Module as it took off from the Moon, which is not something that was thought of six months ahead of time, but we were able to do it.  That was really neat.  I guess that whole process there was my earliest, most satisfying moment. 

 

Later on, I was the, in the early development in the Orbiter Data Systems, Data Flow Systems, we were building two brand new systems simultaneously.  First of all, the Orbiter Data Systems which had S-band and KU-band systems.  And then Goddard Space Flight Center, at that time, was developing a relay satellite called the Tracking Data Relay Satellite System, which put geo-sync satellites into orbit and with a common ground station at White Sands, New Mexico.

 

And the purpose of that is to, cost effectiveness, but it also essentially gives you near a hundred percent coverage, rather than that seventeen to twenty percent [that] I talked about earlier, fifteen to twenty percent.  And so, there's a lot of coordination that had to go back and forth, not only for the capabilities for the spacecraft and the ground systems, but the data flow systems.  And for the very first time, they let the design call for the Control Center to be able to change configuration of the ground systems through, to schedule the ground systems and change configuration through control messages that were issued out of the Johnson Space Center. 

 

So, we actually had lots of pieces all being developed at the same time that had to be, the requirements had to be written, the interface definitions had to written, the testing sequences had to be written.  I was put in charge of an inter-center group to verify that all of that was ready for the first Space Lab flight.  And it was the first time it was ever used at all.  And we developed a test program that, we not only, that tested it prior flight using simulators, but then tested it in flight prior to being used by Space Lab.  And it all worked good.

 

Just as a general comment about these interviews as a whole, one thing that after our last interview that occurred to me, was that you'd get a whole lot better information and in a much more freewheeling form if you were to arrange for two or three or four or more of us to get in the same room and get that discussion going.  And it would be a whole lot more interesting than these.  You could take, we could take particular events.  All you'd have to do is kind of throw the bone in there and everybody would pitch in and start talking and you would probably get a whole lot more candid information as well.  So, if you all ever decide to do that.  One thing you ought to do is have a network data flow discussion if you do that and involve the people from Goddard Space Flight Center that were involved in all these programs as well as those at the Control Center.  They were involved in data acquisition.

 

WEST:  I'm not sure if NASA is interviewing the people at Goddard.  I hope so.

 

HECTOR:  Not that I know of from my contacts with them.  I'm in contact with past division chiefs, branch chiefs, and they're not, and this is something that's unique to Johnson [Space Center] as far as I know.

 

WEST:  Well, good idea.  What do you think should be, now, a NASA priority at JSC?

 

HECTOR:  Well, that's a really tough one.  Really, there's a couple of elements to that.  They need to reestablish their excellence in spacecraft systems design and develop some of the organization over the years, dictated by NASA headquarters, has wrestled that away.  They need to – that's a really hard question.

 

WEST:  Do you think that funding might be an issue?  How to inspire the American people might be something like that?

 

HECTOR:  Oh, I don't know.  I think that's too big.  I don’t think the people at Johnson can do a whole lot about that.  What people at Johnson can do is do their jobs more efficiently and get them done.  And then, see in NASA does a lot of "hurry up and wait" that's happened because of what I would call, ineffective leadership.  That don't mean at Johnson, but primarily at headquarters.  We were, we've been ready to fly the Space Station now for probably a couple of years, and we're still really not doing it.  Poor Bill Sheppard is sitting there as an astronaut and waiting.  And he's going to be so old that by the time we get to flying, get men up there that.  And a lot of that's been ineffective leadership involving NASA and I don't know where, I guess you call it foreign policy, involving the Russians in there in developing that capability when we should have gone ahead and developed that ourselves.  And then, involve the Russians in not in more of a, not a supportive role, but a partnership role instead of an in-line function role which we did.  That was the biggest mistake that we made – was putting them in an in-line function role.

 

WEST:  Do you mean as far as building part of the equipment?

 

HECTOR:  Yeah, part of the equipment that you had to depend on for sustaining the purpose of the program, rather than life support equipment, power and all that other stuff, rather than a partnership on the operation.  That was supposed to be done.  We told Congress that was supposed to have been done to save money, but we didn't save a dime.  It ended up costing us.  It certainly cost us in schedule.

 

WEST:  I understand.

 

HECTOR:  Often said that we ought to get money from the State Department to fund that program because it's more of a foreign policy decision, I believe, to involve the Russians, and kept all those engineers busy developing our kind of space gear rather than developing something bad for the Chinese to use or something like that.

 

WEST:  Do you keep in contact with any of your former colleagues?  I know you said that some of the people at Goddard you still keep in contact with.

 

HECTOR:  Oh yeah, I keep in contact with a lot of the people I worked with at Johnson.   Jim Stokes and Ray Lorrie and [I] still communicate with people like Jim Brandenburg, who is still, who are still employed, Tom Onersarge.  There's very few people that were managers and colleagues that are still working now.  That was part of that big hump of people that were brought in from 1962 to 1970.  NASA hired a just a lot of people. They were all the same age, pretty much raised in the same era, were educated, well, at Johnson, we came from all over the world really.  But, we were all pretty much all the same age.

 

WEST:  You mentioned in the previous interview, which we are trying to reconstruct now, that you have a favorite story about an Englishman.

 

HECTOR:  Oh.

 

WEST:  Could you repeat that story for the tape?

 

HECTOR:  Well, maybe.  That was Techwin Roberts.  Tech was, when I got to know him, he was a directorate, director of networks at Goddard Space Flight Center.  He had multiple divisions that worked for him.  They were primarily in business to support the Manned Space Flight Program for data acquisitions.  But Tech's career went way back.  He had actually been in the first group of people that came to Johnson, and he was a flight controller, and he was a flight dynamics.  They called [them] Fidos.

 

And, Tech had a very pronounced English accent to the day he died.  And he really worked at it.  He spoke Gaelic and he kept at it.  In fact, periodically a television crew from England would come over and interview him in Gaelic, even after he'd retired from NASA.  So, the story he tells is, one that I always thought was pretty good, is they were in the control room simulating, running sims [simulators] one day, and things weren't really going all that well.  The simulator was up and down as a simulator would tend to do.  And not only that, but when it was up the flight control team wasn't really handling the problems very well.  So, things were really tense.  And about that time, as public affairs people announced to the Flight Director, he was called Flight, that they were about to have a visitor, a congressman from Oklahoma.  And, this congressman was on the committee that determined NASA's funding, so he was going to be brought into the Control Center under a red carpet kind of thing and give him a prime tour.

 

So, they said, behind the scenes to the Flight Director, "Do you have anybody from Oklahoma on the flight control team that can speak to the congressman as a boy from back home?"  So, the Flight Director called out over the open loop, "Is anybody here from Oklahoma?"  And there was silence on the loop, which was kind of strange because probably fifteen to twenty percent of everybody at Johnson was from Oklahoma in those days.  And out of the blue, there was this drawling voice that says, "Flight, Fido’s from Oklahoma," which broke up the whole flight control team, got everybody back on track.  I believe that Jerry Bostick was the lead Fido, at that time.  I don' t really recall.  That's been too long.

 

WEST:  Do you have any last comments about NASA and the Johnson Space Center?

 

HECTOR:  Oh, last comments.  No, I think that one of the things that I've haven't been able to tell you under the structured part of the interview was how lucky that people of my generation in NASA feel, in general, about having worked at NASA during this time frame.  Where else could you have worked in that part of time where you were a part of history for fifteen, twenty years?  I mean, you were part of the significant NASA history in the last half of the century, not NASA history, the history of the United States and the world – landing a man on the Moon, first orbiting communication relay satellite.  It's just been one interesting thing after another and there’s very few careers that people can have that you could say that about.  So I believe that unique feeling that we have about that is really hard for people to grasp because in most people's work experiences they weren't afforded those kinds of opportunities.

 

WEST:  What are you doing now?

 

HECTOR:  Oh, primarily, I'm having a good time.  I'm sixty years old.  I live in Temple, Texas.  I have a ninety-acre farm.  I raise grass and I watch it grow, but I don't get involved in cutting it or selling it.  So, I've got that contracted out.  I raise a large garden.  And I'm doing some occasional consulting and it's in the education field not the NASA field.  The wife [Sara] and I travel all over the United States setting up conferences that educate teachers on how to educate those that were raised in poverty.  It's a means to travel and a means to do something interesting and worthwhile all in one ball of wax.  So, again, I'm fortunate. [laughter] Have a good career and then have a good retirement.  So, I don't see how that could be any better.  I encourage all those people who are still holding onto their jobs to chuck it all and retire.  Everybody's got their own thing.

 

WEST:  Thank you very much for taking the time to participate in this interview process.

 

HECTOR:  I would just encourage the people to think about, even about to setting up an interview process where there's more than one interviewee in the room.  That would be just an interesting thing that you might want to consider.  I know I used the people at Goddard as an example because I worked with them a lot and I really respect them.  The last time you asked me some of the key people that I worked with and I wanted to make sure that those people, and I mentioned some of them here today, but I'd like to kind of go through that again.

 

WEST:  Sure.

 

HECTOR:  At Goddard Space Flight Center, of course, there was Techwin Roberts, Bob Owens, which is probably the most complete engineer as far as his knowledge and capabilities that I've ever met in my life.  Paul Pashby, Danny Dalton, Tom Underwood, Walter Bradley.  And later on, Gary Morris and Bob Sperring are the people that come to mind.

 

At the Johnson Space Center, Pete Clements and Jim Stokes are really, super division chiefs; they kept us on track, kept us, kept our money.  Jim Satterfield is really, good engineer, good manager.  Jim Mager, Ray Lorrie, Tom Sheehan were just all good colleagues.  Some of them were bosses and some of them were just colleagues, but they were really interesting, interesting people to work with and to work for.  Need to mention Jack Seyl, s-e-y-l, and Don Travis.  [I] first knew them when them were over in the test laboratory.  Later on, Jack came over to be our division chief in the ground data systems division.  Oh, and Jack Stoker.  Got to mention those guys.  Anyway, I just wanted to get their names down in case this interview process may need to go somewhere else.

 

WEST:  Well, it's an on-going process and there will be more interviews next year, so some of these fellas that might not have been interviewed may be again.

 

HECTOR:  Well, Jack Syle [has] been there since day one and he'd be an interview.  He's still there at NASA as far as I know.  He's still in Building 1 there at NASA.

 

WEST:  Good.  Okay.

 

HECTOR:  I have enjoyed it.  I hope that this met your expectations.

 

WEST:  It told me a lot of things about NASA that I didn't know even though I was growing up during that time and listening to the media broadcasts.  There so much behind the scenes that I didn't hear.  I really appreciate hearing your viewpoint of it.

 

HECTOR:  Well, there were other people that were more involved in the missions themselves would probably give, hopefully, you are interviewing those people as well, because they will give more perspective of the objectives of the mission and the kinds of problems as well with the conduct of the mission and how they were solved.  If you all aren't, oh, there's another guy that you've really got to interview, and that guy's name is Rod Rose.  He lives near you in, inside of Canyon Lake, in Wimberley.  He lives in Wimberley.  He is another Englishman and he remembers everything about everything.  You couldn't, you'd really have to have a long-playing tape recorder to interview him because it would take at least a half a day.

 

WEST:  Okay.  Well, he sounds like a good subject, if he hasn't been approached already.

 

HECTOR:  Well, I certainly hope so.  Thank you very much.

 

WEST:  Thank you, sir.