NASA Houck, O. Karl - May 25, 1999

Interview with O. Karl Houck

 

Interviewer: Bryan K. Mann

Date of Interview: May 25, 1999

Location: Houck home, Austin, Texas

 

 

MANN:  My name is Bryan Mann.  I am conducting this oral interview as part of the NASA Oral History Project through Southwest Texas State University, interviewing Mr. Houck today in his apartment at 2:00 in the afternoon. 

 

Mr. Houck are you aware that this interview and transcript will be available for historical research and will be placed on the internet by NASA for historical use and you will be provided with a copy of the transcript.

 

HOUCK:  Yes, I do, and we may mention that today is May 25th. 

 

MANN:  Thank you sir.  We would like first of all to start off with a brief family and education background, if you could.

 

HOUCK:  Family and educational background?  Are you referring to my immediate family? 

 

MANN:  Your immediate family, childhood, growing up all the way through college.

 

HOUCK:  I am originally from Richmond, Virginia.  I went to high school there, Holland Springs High School.  And my schooling ended up at Virginia Tech by way of Roanoke College as a freshman and Richmond Professional Institute which was a branch of Virginia Tech, and then the final two years at Virginia Tech where I got my Bachelor of Science degree in 1958. 

 

After graduating, well I should mention that I got married when I was a junior in college.  We had one child before I graduated.  Subsequently we had three more children over the years.  After graduation, I went to work for the Air Force at Wright-Patterson (Air Force Base).  Most of my courses I took in college were aimed towards rocketry, which was my immediate interest.  However, when I got up to Wright-Patterson where I was told that there was rocket work, I found out that they were all packing their bags to move to White Sands (New Mexico).  So being a Virginian and having a wife from West Virginia, I thought White Sands, New Mexico was a little too far to go.  So instead we stayed and worked at Wright-Patterson for five years.  I got involved in power systems for space. 

 

When the Vietnam War came along that type of research was one of the things that got cut to budget the . . . to pay for the Vietnam War.  So then I transferred to NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia and lived there until 1972.  And then I was able to transfer to Houston, the Manned Space Center at that time, later became the Johnson Space Center. 

 

So that’s kind of a bird’s eye view of my background in terms of education and where I have been. 

 

MANN:  If we could go through position summaries mainly through your involvement with NASA. 

 

HOUCK:  Ok, with NASA.  When I left the Air Force I was involved with solar concentrators.  These are devices that you could conceivably put into space and concentrate the sun’s energy into a small area and produce heat and then you could utilize the heat any way you’d like to for power sources. 

 

So, when I went to NASA I went to work, gosh, I’m not being able to recall the exact name of the branch, but it was a structure division, and their charter was to look at the different manufacturing techniques that were available to produce solar concentrators that could work in space.

 

So, I worked in that area and then Langley Research Center started becoming involved in a life support program which really struck my fancy because I felt like I would like to get some post graduate work done and perhaps get a doctoral degree in bioengineering.  So I was able to transfer over to the group that was looking at life support.  Unfortunately, the program that was at the Medical College of Virginia, post graduate program, faded away into the sunset, so I never got that bioengineering doctoral degree.  But I was very pleased to work in the life support area.  At Langley we had a test chamber built for us that contained life support equipment that would recycle the necessary substances to maintain life. 

 

That was, unfortunately I can’t recall all the names of these various sections, but I worked there and we regrouped and reorganized a couple of times.  Still the same work objectives and same type of hardware we worked with but we got reorganized and restructured.  We ended up getting a building made for us that was a specially prepared building to allow tests on life support items. 

 

Then in 1972, NASA made a decision to downsize, I guess you’d call it now-a-days, and since we were in competition in the life support area with the Manned Space Center in Houston, our life support work at Langley got canceled which meant that 48 of us who were working in that area also were being terminated or being put in other positions.  So since I had experience in life support and Johnson Space Center, Manned Space Center at the time, needed people to pick up the ball there in that area, since that we had all of that work to do, I was able to transfer to Johnson Space Center.  I started out, again, working in life support at Johnson Space Center under Frank Simansky’s branch.  My immediate supervisor was Richard Gillen.  One of the things I had done up to this point was to help develop an analytical simulation of a life support system using high speed computers that were available at the time. 

 

So one of the things that Johnson Space Center had to do was to come up a space suit to be utilized on the shuttle.  The space suit that was used on the moon, I am calling it space suit I think the real name for it is Extra Vehicular Mobility Unit, but space suit sounds better, I guess, for an interview.  The one that they used on the moon did not have all of the functions and the things that you’d need on a spacecraft such as the orbiter, so we needed to redevelop the suit.  With my computer background, I was asked to do the thermal control simulation for that space suit.  So then I went to another branch and I worked in that area until that program was produced and then they wanted me to get back into testing life support equipment.  So I was put into the test branch at Johnson Space Center and I became a manned test director and I was able to train some of the earlier astronauts, in the orbiter program on the use of their space suits in a simulated vacuum. 

 

Then from that point I made a decision that I wanted to work on Space Station, so I got into a Space Station office at Johnson Space Center for, oh four or five years.  Is that what your kind of looking for?

 

MANN:  Absolutely.  Could you give us some examples of how the work specifically you were doing effected the program, specific details of some of your work affecting real hardware and real plans up in space?

 

HOUCK:  Ok.  Unfortunately, some the work or a vast majority of my work was in you might refer to as advanced life support.  A lot of the work we did then on these systems was the things you’d need to go to Mars.  So, they did not, per say, directly impact any of the on going space programs or manned missions but they did produce some of the background and support that we’ll be using, quite likely, for a trip to Mars.  As an example, I was a project manager on two programs that I don’t think are planned to be developed for Space Station, they could be but they might be used on Mars.  And these two programs, one of them was a zero gravity, whole body shower.  The thought was that if you were going to be in space for long periods of time, it would be nice to have a shower.  There was a shower on board Skylab, but it did not use the same concepts that we used in the zero gravity, whole body shower, that was developed by Martin-Marrietta in Denver.  And then another program I worked on, as project manager was a device to launder clothes in space.  You have a choice of carrying everything you need, getting it dirty and keeping it or washing clothes and recycling them and of course depending on the parameters of the mission one of the techniques or the other would be better.  So that has never been flow either, but I was fortunate enough to work on that program and we came up with a lot of good information that should somebody want to actually develop that hardware for space flight, they could reach back and pull some of that out of the files. 

 

The work I did on training the astronauts, of course that is directly applicable to the space program.  What we did there, the astronauts needed to have time in the space suit to, let us say, appreciate how it would perform, to understand and appreciate how it would perform in particular how it would keep them cool if they were working hard.  So we had two distinct tests that we ran, one test involved walking on a treadmill which would simulate working of course, and building up a sweat.  We actually had profiles of treadmill speed to not only let the astronauts experience that aspect of the suit but also to allow us to check the performance of the suit, because the suit was made for the astronaut, and the suit that he trained in was the suit that was shipped to the Cape (Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral, Florida) that he flew with.

 

Now each flight, no matter whether there was an EVA, Extra Vehicular Activity, planned or not there is always two astronauts that need to be trained.  Unless things have changed since I have worked there, because the cargo bay doors if they were to jam you’d have to go out and manually close them.  So you’d have to perform an EVA, or you don’t come back home.  Simple as that. 

 

So, we had the treadmill test, then we had a second test, which we had a test chamber, it’s probably still there, that is a facsimile of the geometry inside the orbiter.  It had a flight deck, and a mid-deck, very same size, air-conditioning system and so forth.  And we have an air lock, same size with the same interfaces, electrical and mechanical that they use to put on their space suits, check it out, open the hatch, the whole schemer.  And we actually used flight procedures, so they learned flight procedures in that facility.  We double-checked the space suit before we shipped it to the Cape (Kennedy Space Center, Florida).  So I really felt I was part of the team because was doing something directly that influenced the flights.

 

MANN:  I guess it would be while you were at Langley, did you have any sense of what it was like for the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs starting up?  Was there any sort of interaction between the two?

 

HOUCK:  Yeah, when I first went to Langley, the Space Task Group was packing up to leave Langley, this was the Mercury program, to go to the Manned Space Center in Houston.  So that is about as close as I came to the Manned Space Program at Langley.  I have an interesting story that I’ll tell you later about my encounter with John Glenn at Langley Research Center.

 

MANN:  We’ve heard some stories from previous interviews of how it was such a shut-off world, unto itself working on some of these projects.  Was your work that way, was it rushed and hurried and on a deadline?  Did you have that sense of pressure that some of the other programs had? 

 

HOUCK:  No, and the reasons for that is because I was in basic research and development.  Yeah, we had schedules, but they weren’t critical to a launch.  When I went to the Johnson Space Center we had programs there, training the astronauts, that if the test facilities were not ready in time to support the first flight, we could have actually had to slip that flight because of our work at Johnson Space Center.  And I was fortunate at that time to be assigned to this test chamber I was refereeing to, that had that airlock and all that in it.  I was assigned to that to make sure we got it finished on time, and that was probably the most hair-raising part of my whole career was having that hanging over my head, so to speak, to make sure it got completed in time.  We were able to do a few things here and there, work late at night, this that and the other to make sure that schedule was met. 

 

MANN:  But not necessarily a sense of a race to the moon or like some other programs had. 

 

HOUCK:  No.  I never was caught up, other than as an American, being part of that race, but as far as my career is concerned with NASA I was not a “moony.”  I think we can look back now at that space race and realize that that was probably the beginning of the collapse of the Soviet Union because of the dollars that they really could not afford to put in their program. 

 

MANN:  What have you done since NASA?  What have you been involved with?

 

HOUCK:  Ok.  Since NASA, I took, so called early retirement, age 55 retirement from NASA because I had an offer to join Grumman who at the time were the contracted integrators for the Space Station.  Their office was in Reston, Virginia, so it was a chance to go back to my home state.  So, I went back there and pretty much performed the same types of duties that I had been doing at NASA in terms of the Space station.

 

Unfortunately, that work at Reston was terminated after about eleven months, so I was subsequently laid-off and rather than try to get back in the space program, I elected to move to Austin.  I had heard that Austin was like fifty square miles surrounded by reality, so I thought it might be a good place to come and land.  But more seriously, all of my children went through the University of Texas with the exception of one, and they settled here in Austin, so coming here would be a place to reside where the children are.  In addition to that, I looked at Austin as a possibility of carrying out a concept that I’m working on, dealing with automating home air conditioning systems.  Eventually, if I complete the development like I envision it, I would end up wanting to have a specially made microprocessor chip and I felt like this would be the place to do that sort of thing. 

 

So since I’ve moved here, I’ve been working along that project kind of in the background and I’ve also been needing to pick up other streams of income while it was going on.  But the first door that came open to me here was to be able to tutor and teach at Austin Community College with my, not a math degree per se, but I’ve used math as a tool.  That’s been very enjoyable to me, and I’ve also had a chance to teach air conditioning for a couple of semesters over at ACC (Austin Community College).  Presently I’m a security officer here at one to the high rise student dorms at the University of Texas.  I’ve taken that job not only because of a stream of income, but also it’s a night job, so I can have the days to work on these other projects that I hope to follow to fruition.

 

MANN:  You mentioned early retirement?  Was that because of cut backs or was that because of a personal choice?

 

HOUCK:  That was a personal Choice, yeah, personal choice.

 

MANN:  Any disenchantment with the way the programs were being run, or just wanting to move to different things. 

 

HOUCK:  Well, I would say that if I were more than just a worker bee, if I were in a position of management of something, I probably would not have sought early retirement.  Several times during my career, I was just inches away from a promotion, but things happened, and I didn’t get the promotion.  So I kind of looked at early retirement as a way of perhaps getting back some of the things that could have happened to me if I had been promoted.  Does that make…come across making sense?

 

MANN:  Yes Sir, absolutely.  If you had the chance what are some of the stories about your work experience, the anecdotal information that you would like to share with people coming up who weren’t involved?

 

HOUCK:  Oh.  That’s a wide range, interesting question.  I mentioned earlier my encounter with John Glenn.  This was after Glenn, of course had been selected for the Mercury program.  I don’t recall how old that program was at this particular time, but at Langley we often times needed to fly up to NASA headquarters in Washington D.C., and at that time we had a little shuttle plane that NASA owned, and it was a C-45 sometimes called a “gooney bird” or whatever.  But, it was a little two-engine airplane, and it kind of flew down in the weather.  Well, I had to fly up to Washington and there was a storm hanging off the East Coast, snow and so forth.  Well, I got on the plane and then John Glenn came on the plane with a very large box of books on his shoulder and he sat about three seats up in front of me. We took off and the plane was going through some fairly violent gyrations, some folks had to pick a sick bag.  Everyone was kind of white-knuckled, including myself.  John Glenn was sitting there reading textbooks like nothing was going on, so I think that he’s got the kind of stuff that makes an astronaut, I guess.  

 

One other incident I remember in my career that is very humorous.  Morton Dean is a newscaster, I forget which network he worked for, when this particular story happened, when the particular incident happened.  But NASA as a public relations type of thing would occasionally invite, I don’t know whether they invite or respond to a request, but anyhow, Morton Dean showed up at the test center to actually put on a space suit and experience what goes on the space suit.  Now, we don’t of course allow a newscaster to come in and put on a flight space suit, he puts on a prototype space suite.  Which in all respects it is like the flight suit, but in some respects it doesn’t have a few things.  So we actually put him in a test chamber, I don’t recall whether we took him to vacuum, probably we didn’t but I know he walked on a treadmill and he did the sort of things astronauts do.

 

Morton was friends with one of the astronauts, Dr. Fischer [William F.].  So, Dr. Fisher acted as the intermediary between the test team and Morton Dean, and Dr. Fischer did most of the talking to Morton Dean.  Well, one of the things that the astronauts do in this test chamber, they become aquatinted with drinking and eating in the space suit.  The space suit has a little fruit bar that they pull up with their teeth and eat.  Well the prototype suit does not have a fruit bar in it, it has a piece of rubber the same size as the food bar.  As the test went along and the procedure went along, Dr. Fischer who was not aware that we did not have the actual fruit bar in the suit, told Morton to go ahead and take a bite of that fruit bar.

 

So, Morton actual chewed the end off of this thing and, he said, I really don’t know why you guys like this, it’s kind of leathery.  Of course, we were all rolling over in the test control room, and we finally told Dr. Fischer what was going on.  But Dr. Fischer thought it was best not to pass the word along to Morton.  That was a very humorous situation.  I might think of some more things as time goes by, but those two things really made an impact on me. 

 

You mentioned the moon being, going to the moon as a race, and I guess in a lot of aspects it was.  I think the question is often asked since we did not put up permanent colonies there, what did we really get out of it?  And that’s a good question.  To me I think one of the more significant things when I reflect back to the moon was seeing the Earth just as a tiny ball out in space, and actually if you were an astronaut, you could hold your thumb up and blank out the whole Earth.  And I think that has a lot of connotations relative to our protection of the environment.  I think there is a great lesson to be gained there.  If you were to take a golf ball and call that the Earth, in comparative size the golf ball has a real thin film placed on it, and if you look at the ratio of sizes, that’s about the thickness of our atmosphere.   If you whack the thing improperly with a golf club you have lost it all. 

 

MANN:  As a fellow golfer I understand. (Laughter) The fact that they didn’t establish a colony on the moon or that you didn’t really seem to have anything lasting out of the trips, and given your type of work and research in extended stay, is that particularly disenchanting?  

 

HOUCK:  Yeah it was.  It was disenchanting.  And perhaps it was disenchanting to other taxpayers.  It is a shame to develop this heavy lift capability that we had at that time, the Saturn rocket, and then watch it go into mothballs when we could have taken the next step.  But on the other hand, we were heavily involved in Vietnam, so you know it’s a tanks versus butter type of thing, I guess. 

 

And then I think a similar thing with Skylab.  Skylab could have been the beginning of a space station, yet we elected to let it fall back to Earth.  So I have to be disenchanted relative to not being able to have done some things in my career and have seen them reach fruition on extended space flights when it could have happened.  On the other hand, I am not the person that makes those kinds of decisions.  I just have to lie back and take the flack as it may occur. 

 

Of course, you mentioned earlier, perhaps not in out interview, but you mentioned earlier about the politics in the space station in particular.  Yeah, there’s a lot of politics there, we are working closely with a lot of other nations.  We’ve let the Russian come on board, and it’s been difficult getting things built and obtained on schedule because of that.  When I was in the program, each year you had to justify your NASA budget with Congress and usually, well, it’s been approved with slight changes here and there.  But it’s usually approved at a cost. 

 

As an example one year one was approved, Congress dictated 20% of some of the funding had to be spent for robotics.  The thought being that we’d like to cut back on the maintenance tasks that an astronaut would need to perform extra vehicular in the suit.  Which is a good thing because every time you are out there you are exposed to radiation and so forth and you might get a meteorite puncture.  It is hazardous, defiantly hazardous.  The more often the more you go out, the higher the probability is that something could happen.  Whereas if there are routine tasks that a robot can do and do it well then you are not risking an astronaut’s life to do it.  So it made sense in that aspect but it caused a lot of redesign, a lot of requirement redefinition, so forth and so on.  We have to go through that, the agency has to go through that because it is a dictate of Congress.  But every time we go through that it means that we are not getting the job done, it means we are spending money on some things that we hadn’t planned on originally.  Yet down the road we get criticized for spending all this money, so maybe I am sour grapes but that is the way things are. 

 

And I’ve often thought as a taxpayer that why is NASA in the appropriation that it’s in?  The money for the NASA budget comes out of a pot that is used for other things so to justify our budget we have to go through a lot of sub-committee hearings that have nothing at all to do with technology.   And I’m hopeful that someday, the American government can set up a Cabinet position that’s for technology, or everything that deals with the technology can be placed in that Cabinet position, and things that are in EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] and so forth that deal with technologies can also be placed there.     

 

MANN:  Well maybe they will listen.  On a little different note…You came to Houston in 1972.  What was Houston like at the time living there?

 

HOUCK:  Houston was booming at that time.  There was probably four or five less skyscrapers there then, that there are there now and we had a little shuttle airport out there by the space center (JSC) that we could fly in an out of to the main airport and there were not as many freeways around.   So I mean there was, I really saw a lot of differences, or excuse me, a lot of changes take place in Houston during my nineteen years there.

 

MANN:  So at the time, the area around Johnson Space Center was still a microcosm unto itself?

 

HOUCK:  Oh yeah, we bought a home, second owner home, in Clear Lake City.  When we bought that house there was only a little stub of a street that we lived on.  At the time I that moved out of there, it developed all the way over to Ellington Air Force Base.  Everyone that hears this tape might not be familiar with that geography, but there is a lot of building that took place there and it really grew by leaps and bounds.  The space center grew too.  We put in seven new buildings while I was there and it’s just everything was grow, grow, grow.   Interestingly enough the petrochemical industry kind of went down a little bit, but there were enough things that were taking place there to take up the slack.  And Clear Lake City is close to Johnson Space Center, in fact, I’ve walked there, rode my bike there, and jogged there besides drive there when I worked there.  But that whole community was not Johnson Space Center.  We had folks that worked in many other different professions that lived out in that area.  Which always kind of astounded me.

 

MANN:  As an Engineer, did you find it interesting or curious that the work you were doing goes fairly, largely unrecognized, whereas the astronauts receive much of the praise?  Is that justified, in your mind given the risks that they are taking?  How did you feel about that?

 

HOUCK:  That’s an interesting question.  I think NASA goes out of the way, which they should, to make everyone feel part of the team.  When the astronauts take a flight, as an example, a few weeks after they are back, we’ll have an auditorium full of employees and so forth that get a debriefing on that flight, and you’ll hear and see a lot of things in that debriefing that do not make the local press.    So, like I say, I think the agency goes out of the way to make us feel part of the team.

 

There were times in my career when I felt like I was more remote than others.  When I worked in the life support area, and its just a matter of doing advanced development that maybe would not find a place in the space program missions, or that sort of thing.  That was kind of bleak from that outlook, but on the other hand, it was, there was a lot of, trying to search for the right word, there was a lot of ego reinforcement, as an engineer to know that you’re working on a project that was the only one of its kind, that had no precedent for a lot of engineering principles that you had to work out yourself, or work with a contractor to work out yourself.  That kind of compensated for the fact that we weren’t put on a pedestal, so to speak, like the astronauts were.  So from a personal standpoint, I really didn’t find that to be a big problem.  In particular when I got involved with training the astronauts, I actually got to meet a lot of them and exchange stories and that sort of thing.

 

MANN:  If you could share some of the stories that did happen in these debriefings that didn’t make it to the local press, is there anything that stands out in your mind in those?

 

HOUCK:  Oh gosh…. Yeah I forget, I shouldn’t name names or flights anyhow, but one of the flights, they came back and the containers that stored their urine ruptured, or one of them did, whatever I don’t know exactly.  But that was never brought out in the press and it was most interesting to listen to them, as to things they did to try to clean up the mess, so to speak.  And often times when you have a flight, the things that make the press are, of course and as they should be, are things that are real “biggies” in terms of anomalies.  But for every flight there is usually a book prepared of things that went wrong, and of course your dealing with a vehicle that has millions of components in it, so you could expect that no matter, you could do the best engineering job in the world and still you’re putting these things in an environment where it is more likely that they would fail than in an Earth environment.   But to us in the engineering profession, we needed to try to figure out a way fix all of these things.  That was always interesting to see that when they came back from a flight.

 

And of course (Cough) excuse me, some of these things that I’m referring to would be discussed in the debriefing because we would have a question-and-answer session.  In particular if a flight came back and they didn’t have the debriefing until after we had read some of the anomaly reports, we would fire these questions at them.

 

MANN:  Having said that, as a layperson, I’m always struck by how safe the program runs.  Given the fact there are these numbers of single, catastrophic errors that could occur, do you find the safety record that NASA has remarkable?

 

HOUCK:  Yeah, I think it’s remarkable, of course we give an awful lot of attention to safety.

 

MANN:  A testament to the engineer’s skill that are working there?

 

HOUCK:   Right, a testament to the engineer’s skill, but also I’m thinking perhaps even more of a testament to the management structure that is put in place for all of the checks and so forth that are made in the program, to hopefully prevent catastrophic failures.  But bear in mind the shuttle is mixing together some very exotic fuels, hydrogen, liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen.  I think perhaps in my opinion one of these days the lessons we learned from working with those fuels, we someday might see hydrogen used as a fuel in automobiles or some type of vehicles because when you burn it you make water, you don’t make these toxins that you get from gasoline.   So, I think that might be a fallout from the space program that sometime in the future we’ll see that’s just a personal opinion without any verification. 

 

MANN:  What aspect of your job working for NASA are you most proud of?  The single achievement you would point to when someone asks.

 

HOUCK:  Ok.  We had a flight, I think it was, it might have been the first time the space suits were used, the orbiter space suites I am eluding too, but anyhow.  There was a flight were they did not operate properly, and at the time I was a test director.  It was a question of what can we do on the ground to try to recover as much as possible from this flight, even though the suits are not performing like they should.  So I was most familiar with this particular test facility that I referred to earlier, so I was kind of on call for that flight and I was able, while the flight was in progress to take the flight procedures and change them around and so forth, and meet with other people and as a group we put together some procedures that we could check out and I think we saved the agency a lot of money because we were able to meet some mission objectives.  So I am quite proud of that.

 

MANN:  Solving a problem on the fly?

 

HOUCK:  Right.  Solving the problem on the fly, “real time” we called it at NASA then.

 

MANN:  What is your fondest memory of working there?  Not necessarily in a work sense, maybe in a people sense.  What is one of the aspects you miss the most about working there?

 

HOUCK:  I guess I’d… you hit me with a question that I haven’t really thought that much about prior to you asking it, but I am going to have to say without further thinking that just the people that I worked with and the team work there, I enjoyed a lot.

 

I also was on what’s called special duty, or special tour, which meant I came in a half-hour earlier and left a half-hour late but I had a hour and a half for lunch.  I used the hour and a half several days a week to go over and play basketball with a lot of folks.  So from that standpoint I miss that, the comradeship of getting together and having fun together.  But yet it’s having fun, but you still have goals and objectives that you are meeting out on the basketball court, like you’d meet in the engineering sense.  It was another way of meeting these guys and seeing what they were made of besides being an engineer.

 

MANN:  Any last comments you’d like to do, like to say before we wrap this up?

 

HOUCK:  No, I don’t think so, other than the fact that I felt like I have learned things during my career that are going to be useful to me as I pursue some of these engineering development projects that are personal to me right now.  And I feel like I have worked with some very good people, who I will continue to hold in high esteem for the rest of my life.

 

MANN:  Thank you very much Mr. Houck.

 

HOUCK:  Thank you.