NASA Huntley, Maynard R. - June 1, 1999
Interview with Maynard R. Huntley
Interviewer: Scott Nelson
Date of Interview: June 1, 1999
Location: Huntley home, Georgetown, Texas
NELSON: This is an Oral History Interview with Mr. Maynard R. Huntley. Today is Tuesday, June 1. We are at his home in Georgetown, Texas. This is an interview sponsored by the Johnson Space Center Oral History Program. Thank you for consenting to this interview.
HUNTLEY: Quite all right.
NELSON: [I’m] looking forward to seeing how this works out. Okay. We’ll start with just some background information. What brought you to NASA? How did you get to work for NASA?
HUNTLEY: Well, I started out from college going into a job with Western Electric on air defense of the nation. It was called the SAGE [Semi-Automatic Ground Environment] project. It had the biggest computers at that time. And I was on that program for five years, and it was sort of terminating. I was going to go to Cape Cod as an instructor with about one hundred thirty-five dollars a week as expense money, plus my salary, and I thought I could live pretty good with that. About two months prior to the time I was to go, they came and said, “No, we’re moving you to 220 Church Street,” downtown New York. [There was] no expense money, and no raise, and I thought “Boy!” You know, I had two kids, and one of them was going to start kindergarten, and I didn’t want to go to New York. So I quickly applied to NASA. With my background in large computer systems, what NASA was bringing in, they quickly hired me. The day that they were going to move me to New York, [when] they were sending the truck, is the day I accepted the job with NASA.
NELSON: How did you hear that NASA was [hiring] . . . It was 1964, was it?
HUNTLEY: Yes. The rumors were getting around, you know, that NASA had some flights and they were hiring big in Texas. The word got around the aerospace business. A lot of these aerospace companies [were] in it. So that knowledge was available. I forgot. There was a little paper that we used to all take. [It] may have been Electronic News, or whatever. And that’s how I made the contact.
NELSON: Okay. Then you moved to Houston?
HUNTLEY: Yes.
NELSON: Where did you live there in Houston?
HUNTLEY: Pasadena, which is just north. At that time there weren’t a lot of houses in the Clear Lake area. I always had outside interests, so I wanted to be closer to Houston to meet two suppliers I could use.
NELSON: You had two small children at the time?
HUNTLEY: Yes. Two daughters.
NELSON: So your family lived there with you in Pasadena. Was there an adjustment process? There always is, but being involved in a project the size of NASA, was there a . . . Did your family enjoy the move?
HUNTLEY: Well, yeah it was a lot closer back to Nebraska. It was about half as far. It was a challenge, you know. Something new and exciting. [Of] course the adjustment to Houston weather was something awesome. The first Christmas it was eighty-five degrees. We always played in the snow at Christmas time, and so it was tough letting the kids wear shorts on Christmas. I mean we really had a problem with that. Or I did, at least. The work now, was, well people were working over-time all the time. And so the work was very fascinating. There was a lot of learning new things and new acronyms. Everything at NASA was an acronym. And so, for me it was probably a lot easier than it was for my wife and family. But we had a good neighborhood, and we got active in the church, and that integrated us very well into the community. So it was very easy for us.
NELSON: Okay. Just as a frame of reference. You started in 1964 at NASA. Do you remember hearing about Kennedy’s mandate for the moon in 1961?
HUNTLEY: Absolutely.
NELSON: Do you remember where you were?
HUNTLEY: Yeah, I was in Moses Lake, Washington at the time, and I remember hearing that just as plain as could be. I didn’t know that we would achieve it, but that was his goal. Like all the politicians back then, you know, they would a lot of times make comments and never be able to carry them out. But that was one that we did achieve.
NELSON: And the space race? You were conscious of it?
HUNTLEY: Oh yeah, very much so. In fact, I was a Physics major, and I remember there was a conference at Iowa State. I forgot the guy’s name now. It escapes me at this time, but they came back and said that the race was on because the Russians wanted to get to the moon. This conference, probably classified information at that time, but the Russians wanted to move the moon off the orbit because all of their seaports were inland. And if they could raise then tide of the ocean just thirteen feet it would flood all the major US seaports: New York, LA, San Francisco, and all the others. So that was sort of the reason they thought that the Russians wanted to go to the moon. So that was a big push. Van Allen was the guy’s name. Dr. Van Allen. The Van Allen Radiation Belt, and he was the one that had that in Iowa State. And so that was talked about a lot in our physics classes back in [19]57, ‘58, and ‘59.
NELSON: Okay. A little bit more toward the specifics of your work at NASA, starting [with the] early years. What program/department did you begin with?
HUNTLEY: I began in the Real-Time Program Development Branch, RTPB. . . I still can’t say it. [laughter] Anyway, the purpose was to validate the aspect of the program, the software, in the control center there at Johnson Spacecraft [Center]. Then it was called the Manned Spacecraft Center. And since I had all this . . .basically testing software doing that job on the SAGE program it was very easy to put in that kind of an effort on the software in the MSC, the Manned Spacecraft Center, [Mission] Control Center, MCC. At that time we were not operating out of Houston yet. They were just bringing that facility, in fact all the buildings were not done. The control center was not done. In fact, I can tell you an interesting story about that later on. So it was in development.
NELSON: Well, you can tell me now.
HUNTLEY: Well, I was there for three weeks, and the control center was not done, you know. And they were looking for somebody to take the center Director [Bob Gilruth] and [Werner] Von Braun to the third floor of the control center. So, since I was just a peon that didn’t know what I was doing, they said, “Maynard, you go operate the elevator. All you got to do is punch the button, and the elevator will go up to the third floor. You let them off, and you stay there and hold the door open. When they come back, you take them down.” So, Dr. Gilruth and Von Braun got on the elevator, and I punched the third floor. They were talking and we went up to the third floor and it didn’t stop. It just hit and turned around and started right back down. I was punching every button, and there was a door on one side because the control center was on a different floor level than the administrative side. I was punching buttons and everything, but we didn’t do anything. We went back down to the first floor and hit. But going back up towards the third floor, and Von Braun said [German accent] “Well, I am sure glad we can launch rockets better than we can run elevators.” And I thought, “Boy I got the shortest career with NASA. I’ll be here three weeks and that’s it!” [laughter] Finally, the thing stopped and they got off, and I was red-faced. And they never came back to get on to go down. [laughter] I never will forget that. I can hear him saying that. I just close my eyes and I can hear those words. [laughter]
NELSON: That was obviously the Center Director Bob Gilruth. Did you have much interaction with the high-up personnel like the Center Director, or were there middle management positions that you were more directly related with?
HUNTLEY: Well, early on I did. I did not have much contact with the upper management. But, when I quit, you know, I was on a staff, Gene Kranz’s. We interfaced with all those guys, and the top level of the contractors also. In fact, I was on a source board, and I would give pitches to the guy that was head of the space-station program at the time from headquarters.
NELSON: Source Board? What is that?
HUNTLEY: Source Selection Board. Selecting a new contract. It was a ten-year contract for 1.2 billion dollars. [It was] one of the biggest contracts outside of the spacecraft contract ever awarded at Johnson Spacecraft Center. And being on a directorate staff, I interfaced with the directorate, whose boss was the Center Director, and often we would go up there and make contractor evaluations. I sat in on a lot of staff meetings with Center Directors. So, I had a lot of exposure and met a lot of great guys.
NELSON: So as your career developed at NASA what sorts of promotions do you recall specifically leading toward that level of involvement?
HUNTLEY: Well, as we got into validating the software, you know once its validated then you’re constantly making changes, but it’s not big changes like the first time you issue a software program. And so we had IBM that was operating the control center for us. We had the computers and doing the maintenance and all that. We had a big contract. We had Philco Ford, then, that took care of the rest of the equipment. And that was all in this branch that I was in. Or section that I was in, and it was under this branch for all this effort. Soon they were going to have some contracts and they needed a contract manger. And they asked me to move over to that area, and so I did that very early in my career. From that time it just kept growing, and kept getting more responsibility.
NELSON: Obviously the program was a team effort. Do you remember specific employee relationships that developed early on that lasted throughout your career? Did people get promoted with you? Or did you end up working with different people at each step along the path?
HUNTLEY: No, it was a team effort. Contractor, NASA . . . One of the things I always remember is that early on, before we had the first fourteen-day mission, we had to validate where the spacecraft would land. We did that by simulation, and we would run thirteen hours a day or so, and we would come back in on a simulation. We were always fairly close to that, and I had to sign off on that program. IBM had a new onboard computer that they had developed. So they came in with a photographer and wanted to get some pictures of the control center and they were going to run this ad in the Wall Street Journal. So they caught just about a quarter of my face. They couldn’t pay NASA, but they had to give you something to get a release from you. So they gave me a brand new one-dollar bill. It turned out that as we came in that we missed the landing spot by one hundred fourteen miles I believe it was. Boy, that really created a big stir and a lot of problems. Of course, IBM didn’t release anything then.
It turned out the problem was that, in all our calculations, and everybody verified [them] and I signed off on the program, that in a day the earth spins 360 degrees. But it doesn’t. It spins 360 degrees plus a little bit. That plus a little bit for fourteen days is a hundred and fourteen miles, or a hundred and twenty-one, whatever it was. [laughter] And so I didn’t get my money, and my boss at the time had to go to high levels of Washington to explain why our recovery ships were in the wrong place, and how we could miss the landing. And it was because we made that false assumption. We never ran a fourteen-day mission to verify it. So that was a time that I remember a lot of teamwork, a lot of joshing going back between IBM and NASA employees. It was interesting.
NELSON: And which flight was that?
HUNTLEY: Oh, let’s see. It probably . . . the fourteen-day mission. That probably was McDivitt and White. But I am not sure. It was Gemini, probably five or six. Something like that. Six was the rendezvous, so it was probably the one before that. Four or five, something like that.
NELSON: Okay. Your boss. You just mentioned, do you remember his name.
HUNTLEY: My boss was Len Dunseith at the time.
NELSON: Len?
HUNTLEY: Lenwood.
NELSON: Dunseith?
HUNTLEY: D-U-N-S-E-I-T-H
NELSON: Okay. So that was the Gemini program. Do you remember your job changing significantly when they moved to the Apollo program?
HUNTLEY: Yeah. Before that . . . Well, with Apollo I was still in that area, working the control center. I remember the night that we had the disaster, the fire. I was at home. It was my wife’s birthday, and the guy called and he says, “Hey! You need to get out here.” And I said, “Well, what’s going on?” and he says, “I can’t tell you. Just think of the worst possible thing you can think of.” The only thing I could think of is the computers were down and we’re trying to run this simulation. I just never once ever even thought that we could have a fire and kill the three astronauts. And of course, we got out there and we had to redo all the data, and de-log all the data and try to find out what was wrong. From then we had a lay-down, or a time that we were off, and we looked at all that. Then I worked as a contract manager, and then during the Apollo-Soyuz program, which was the Apollo and Russian program, I went back into the control center and worked shift as a computer supervisor. After that I went up to a staff level. Len moved up to Assistant Director of the Directorate, and I went up on his staff. [William] Tindall was his boss, and I was on Tindall’s staff, and then [I] stayed on that staff, which was on the ninth floor. I had a ninth-floor office, with carpet and everything, and I was the lowest grade. I mean I had it kind of plush up there, so that was kind of nice.
NELSON: Do you remember Tindall’s first name?
HUNTLEY: Bill. William Tindall.
NELSON: William Tindall?
HUNTLEY: I think its S. I don’t remember that for sure, but it was Bill Tindall.
NELSON: Now. You said you worked in the mission control room as a computer supervisor. Now would that mean you would be actually in the mission control room during the missions?
HUNTLEY: Not in the control room. The control room was the second and third floor. The computers were on the first floor. So I would be on the first floor, but we were in contact all the time with the flight director.
NELSON: Did you actually get to hear the astronauts talk?
HUNTLEY: Oh Yeah. That was on the loops all the time.
NELSON: Was that just amazing? How was that?
HUNTLEY: Well, the most amazing thing to me. Two things that I think of that were really amazing to me. I don’t know why. I remember one time we were testing the Perth Australia site. And we were going to send a command over there, and the guy was on the phone with me. He says, “Okay, I’m ready when you are.” I punched the button and he says, “I got it.” That quick. [snapping fingers] I don’t know why that floored me because our voice communication was going that far, you know that fast, too. But it amazed me that I pushed the button and he said he got it, and he was in Perth, Australia. I thought it was going to have to be a delay or something, I guess. I don’t know. That really was amazing to me. The other thing that was amazing to me is during the Skylab program, I was on the console and the astronauts were running around the compartment that had all the equipment in it. And you could actually, on the display, see the wobble that that was causing as they were running around that thing. And that amazed me that you could see that spacecraft being affected by them running around like a cyclist would on the wall of a pit. That was just hard to imagine.
NELSON: Obviously there were different components in each of the spacecraft. From the propulsion to the command modules, the moon landings, the lunar modules. Did you oversee computer programming for all of those, for separate ones depending on each mission, or was it mainly the mission control computers?
HUNTLEY: Well, the first thing I was responsible for was the launch abort. During a launch phase if something happened, you had to verify that you could predict where that spacecraft was going to be in recovery and all those things to get it there. And [we] spent a lot of time in every launch. I am sure there still doing it today during a shuttle preparing for a mission runs through launch aborts. And we never had one. Never had one in all these years, but you still run through that simulation in case you do have one. I guess the closest thing, of course there was no return on that one, was 51L. But, we had to verify that, and it was more like phases. You know there was an orbit phase, there was a rendezvous phase, there was a lunar landing phase, so there would be different phases rather than missions. Astronauts were assigned missions, but basically you were assigned a program. Now if there was something special on a mission, where maybe you’re going to add [something]. The first lunar landing we had photography, or video, coming back down. That was special to handle, but most generally it was a phase you were responsible for.
NELSON: You mentioned 51L?
HUNTLEY: Yeah that was the one that the seven were killed in.
NELSON: Oh. Challenger. Do you remember where you were when they landed in the moon?
HUNTLEY: Absolutely, I was in the Control Center.
NELSON: Were you down on the first floor?
HUNTLEY: Yeah. Down on the first floor, sitting right behind this computer. I wasn’t on duty then, but we had two in case something was going to happen. I remember too, going into that mission, not very long before that, we weren’t sure that we could compute landing data fast enough. We had a guy named Quentin Holmes, and he was an Air Force, I think it was a first lieutenant, or maybe even a second lieutenant. But he had a Ph.D. in mathematics and they tried to do all this computation to make sure we could land, and we couldn’t do it fast enough. With the techniques we were trying to do, it was trying to get very accurate, and he said, “Why don’t you use . . .” and it took us about two minutes to make that calculation, but we just kept planning. We were going. Just probably two months, or a month and a half before the real launch Quentin says, “Why don’t we use this approximation technique that I can come up with?” And we used it, and that cut that calculation from two and a half minutes down to forty-five seconds. And we did that, and I remember my boss John Mayer, later on he moved up to the staff too, was telling that Chris Kraft was asking “John, do you think we can make it?” He said, “With this calculation, we can make it.” He said, “I’m going to give the go for launch then.” And they did. Later, Quentin had the chance to re-up with the Air Force, and they talked him out of it. We were in a freeze, but somehow, they hired Quentin to stay with NASA.
NELSON: Just from my experience, my knowledge, Apollo 13 is the one event that a lot of people say almost validated the space program and all of the people that worked there. Do you remember how you felt when the Apollo 13 problems began, and then how you felt when the astronauts returned safely to earth?
HUNTLEY: Oh yeah. Even when Apollo 11 landed on the moon, that was a goal that the President set for you to accomplish, and we did that. I believe if you look back, the average age of the NASA employee was less than thirty, or right at thirty. This was all a new, foreign area. You know to get that thing back up there, and connect with the LM, and then be able to get the astronauts transferred, and the thing firing off after being shut down. That was awesome and it was really a lot of stress. And the same thing with Apollo 13. What I remember the most about Apollo 13 is the long hours people were working, you know they worked two or three days straight, and they didn’t even seem to be tired. It was so much. And we had to get them back. We had to get them back.
And of course, what I remember a lot, was all the helicopters and press flying in. And they just sort of demanded that you talk to them. Well, you didn’t have time to talk to them, you know, you were busy de-logging. We just de-logged tons of data. That’s the other thing I remember tapes printed out trying to decide what we could do. And the movie Apollo 13 really is a good depiction of most of what happened. There were guys in the simulator all this time, and we did tons of stuff. There were a lot of meetings. You just didn’t work your job and try to figure out what was wrong. You had to go to meetings to say, with other groups, “Hey! We think we can.” And there were experts flown in with spacecraft ability, and all that. So it was a stressful time.
The other thing was the foreign press. If you go to NASA now you see all these letters from all these different countries saying, “We’re praying for your astronauts.” You know it sort of interesting that man turned back to prayer to solve a technology problem, but that’s the way it was.
NELSON: Knowing that the goal of Apollo was met virtually half way through the original planned missions, there were supposed to be twenty, and they landed at the eleventh. Do you remember how it felt when you realized the Apollo program was ending? That the moon had shifted from a priority. Do you remember what it felt like to go through that change from such a focused goal?
HUNTLEY: I don’t think it was Apollo 11 that got me on that. It was later on, after we put the ALSEP, the Apollo Lunar Excursion Space Package, or Support Package, or whatever it was. We had this generator up there. It was an atomic generator that was supposed to provide electricity for a year. At the end of the year it was supposed to drop dead. But it kept running, and so we were getting this data in. Finally, we had so much data that the scientists said, “Hey, just shut that baby off, because we can’t process all this data” Now that to me was the most elating thing about that whole program. We thought we knew how our equipment was going to act, but we didn’t. And finally, the scientists said, “Hey, we give up. We got more data than we can shake a stick at. Let’s forget about it.”
NELSON: Do you remember all of the pressure after the moon landings? Do you remember issues about funding having an impact in your area, or the people you saw?
HUNTLEY: Oh yeah. Definitely. We had probably close to 10,000 NASA employees and probably 15,000 contractors, and in the contract area, we were cutting back. Big cutbacks. People that were field advisors and things. I remember a guy, I can’t think of his name right now. He smoked a pipe, [and worked] with RCA. He was no longer needed and his job was terminated, and a lot of jobs were terminated at that time. Until we built back up for the shuttle program. Yeah, I remember those days of cutbacks.
NELSON: Skylab. I know what Skylab was intended for, and I also remember hearing about Skylab falling. And I don’t really know much about that. Do you remember when Skylab fell, and what the problems were?
HUNTLEY: I was on the staff at the time, and the guy that was the head of that program was Robert L. Carlton. He was on staff to Dunseith at the same time. It was noon hour, and an Austin radio station called up there, and everybody was gone except me in the Directorate office. Or at least I answered the phone. They wanted to know if Bob Carlton was there and I said “No.” He says whatever the radio station is, and he says, “Well what I would like to know is when do you think that spacecraft will land or come back into the atmosphere. I’ve got a bunch of mental telepathy guys and we want to think that thing into a higher orbit.” And I remember saying to him, and I don’t know why I did this. I said, “Do you think mental telepathy will work?” And he said, “Yes. I think so.” So I said, “I tell you what, I haven’t had a raise in a couple of years. If you guys just want to practice, why don’t you think my salary my up higher?” I remember the guy saying to the other guys I guess, “I think we have a smart-alec on the phone.” He said, “Would you have Mr. Carlton call me when he gets in?” And I said, “Yeah, when he gets back from lunch I’ll have him call you.” So my raise didn’t go up, and the thing came down, so I don’t think their mental telepathy worked on it. But yeah, that was a big thing. We had a lot of meetings on that as a staff. Being on a staff position up there, worried about the budgets, and where that thing could fall, and what it could take, and what was going to happen. [We] spent a lot of time with that.
NELSON: When you refer to staff, does that mean administrative staff?
HUNTLEY: It was technical staff, at the Directorate to assist them on special projects and budgets, basically. We overlooked big budgets. At that time the budgets were probably running 256 million [dollars] a year for contractors, and that was then split out into five divisions, and those five divisions put a budget up to the Directorate. We integrated all those budgets to make sure we had the right fund codes and available fund codes to meet the objectives of the Directorate, and the center, and of NASA. There were about four of us that would work in that budget area.
NELSON: That seems to me a more secure position, as far as job security goes. Its not tied in to any specific program, but more of a . . . END OF TAPE.
HUNTLEY: . . . tell you about the training that we had. That was when Gus Grissom went up in the Gemini spacecraft. I’m sorry, the Mercury spacecraft. We had a simulator, and you would move your joystick, what you call it, and the simulator would move, so you’d feel the motion that you moved. You felt that. So, we sent Gus Grissom up, and the first time he tried to maneuver his spacecraft his heartbeat just went sky high. We thought, “Well that’s strange. What’s going on? It never happened in simulation.” That happened all through his mission, every time he’d try to maneuver, his heartbeat would just go up. So when he came back down we debriefed him, and said, “Hey Gus. What’s going on?” He said, “Well, in the simulator, when you move the joystick you feel the motion. But in space, you hear the loud roar of the thrusters. You never heard that before.” So his heart would go way up. Actually, what we were doing is we were giving negative training. So we had to go out and record the sound of thrusters firing and tie it in to the joystick, so that when he moved then, he’d not only feel the motion but he would hear the roar of the thrusters. And the guy that followed him, and I don’t remember who that was. In think it was Alan Shepard. But whoever that was his heartbeat didn’t move at all. It was just something you had to learn on simulation.
We had another situation like that. We had the doctors. We had the backup crew and the prime crew. If the prime crew was ill or not feeling right, they weren’t in the spacecraft. The backup crew was in. And so the doctors were out there and they just sat around, with their feet up on the console, and everything else, because they knew everyone was healthy. So a couple of us were in the simulation room. Pete Segota, and I forgot the others. Jim Miller was probably involved in that. Or Harold Miller. We looked out there and said, “You know those doctors are not getting training, and we ought to go down to MD Andersen and record a heart patient’s heartbeat. And so we did. We told Chris Kraft, who was the flight director, “Hey Chris. We’re going to kill the live data on this, and these guys are going to see that one of these astronauts are having a heart attack. It’s simulated data, but we want the doctors to realize that they need training too. So the simulation was going and they’re horsing around and all of the sudden we kill the data. And after what seemed like was five minutes; I’m sure it wasn’t that long, but it was a long time. And all of the sudden the doctor got up and ran over to Kraft and said, “We’ve got to get him out of that simulator. He’s having a heart attack!” Kraft says, “We can’t get him out of there.” And [the doctor] says, “Well why not?” [Kraft] says, “Well he’s up there in space. Two hundred and fifty miles up in space. We can’t get him out of there.” “Oh! He’s going to have a heart attack! He’s dying!” [Kraft] says, “Is that what you’re going to do during a mission? Or are you going to try and take care of this guy in space?” And man, those doctors got back there, and I don’t remember what they did, but I remember after that, we had all kinds of symptoms we recorded from hospitals and played in for those doctors. Because again, we were not training them like we should. So those are good memories, you know. To think you were a part of that.
NELSON: If I could get you to discuss a little bit about Chris Kraft, and what you remember about him. He’s a name a lot of people recognize.
HUNTLEY: Well, there’s no question that when you’re in a meeting with Chris Kraft, you know who is in charge. There was no question. It didn’t matter if headquarters people were there, or higher-level ranks than him, you know who was in charge of that meeting. I remember one time we had in the control center this emergency power off. [We] said we could get power up in forty-five seconds if power goes off. We can switch it over. And during one of the simulations Kraft just went over pulled the button and just stood there and watched his watch. It was like eight minutes before we had the power up. He said, “If you guys can’t get it up in forty-five seconds, don’t be advertising that.” Man, we had that powerhouse working overtime to get that power up.
The other thing I remember about Chris Kraft, a very dynamic guy. As I told you, I was on the ninth floor, which was the level the Center Director was on. I was just one hundred eighty degrees from his office. I am looking out over Clear Lake and they had a big boat coming in there. They were dredging it out, so they had the biggest boat that was owned by an individual coming up there. Anyway, I was sitting up there kind of watching with my feet up on the desk, and I sort of had this feeling someone was watching me. I turned around and Craft was looking at me. And I put my feet down real quick and he says, “Aww. Press on. That’s all right.” He was just seeing our new office complex there. But he was a very dynamic guy. Very interesting, and he had a lot of good people behind him. He was a very interesting guy.
I remember one meeting, we had this smooth-talking IBM guy. I probably shouldn’t use his name, but I guess you can audit it out. But his name was Dick Hanrahan and he was a smooth talker. He could talk down at the programmer’s level, or he could talk to high management. What really impressed me was one time we were trying to get IBM to commit to a launch date and they wouldn’t do it. They were pushing Hanrahan, and Hanrahan said to us, “Well I can’t commit the IBM Corporation to that kind of a date.” That was kind of impressive to think that this little guy couldn’t commit a big corporation.
But anyway, he was making a presentation, and I don’t even know why I was in there. I guess I was [the] manager on that contract. But anyway, he gave this pitch to Kraft, and all of the sudden Kraft just gets up, and this guy’s talking, and walks out. I mean he’s got all this big staff there, a big U-table up there on the ninth floor, 961. And Hanrahan looks to his [Kraft’s] deputy, who was Sig Sjoberg, and he says, “Should I continue?” And [Sjoberg] says, “Yeah. Continue.” So pretty soon Kraft opens the door and comes walking back and he says, “Dick, I just want you to know I thought I knew what that word was.” And I cannot remember that word right now. I think it was like “forthright.” But whatever it was, he says, “I thought I knew what that word was. I just went out to the Dictionary, and I know what it is. Now, don’t you ever use that word in my presence again.” And this guy come up from a very fluent, impressive speaker to a bumbling . . . He couldn’t say a word without thinking. [mocking] “Ah. Yes. Uhh. Uhh.” I mean it was really something. He just tore him down something terrible. It wasn’t very long thereafter that Hanrahan was moved out. But Kraft had no qualms about letting people know what he liked and what he didn’t like. It was very impressive.
NELSON: Would you mind talking about what he said about going to the moon and what that was like? Trying to hit the moon?
HUNTLEY: Well yeah, I remember one time this pitch that Kraft made. I just realized what you were driving at. It was. . . and I’ve copied this down. But it was a talk and he was describing how much it takes to get out of the earth’s atmosphere. It’s like 400,000 feet and you’re basically out of the atmosphere, or 99% of it. And he said that, we used the Saturn V to get going to the moon, to get basically out of the atmosphere, that was the only purpose. It had five engines, developed seven and a half million pounds of thrust, and had five seventeen- inch fuel lines. And he said that would burn, those engines would burn one hundred twenty-five train carloads of kerosene in ninety seconds. Now that was pretty impressive.
Then the question that came up during that same talk was, “How difficult is it to get to the moon? To hit the moon?” And he said he had the mathematical branch of the mission planning and analysis branch do a study for him, and he said they told him it would be like standing a mile away from a train track with a high powered rifle, and trying to hit the keyhole of the lock on the door from a mile away, with a high powered rifle. The only difference was [with] the moon we could make mid-course corrections to get there. [With] a high-powered rifle you couldn’t do that. But that was his analogy on those two things.
NELSON: Well, so far we’ve focused primarily on the earlier space program You said you did some work on the Apollo-Soyuz program. Do you remember what you did there and how that was?
HUNTLEY: Yeah. At that time I was working in the directorate office again. What I remember most about that program was the humanness of the Russian astronauts. They were always kind of our enemy, or our competitors, yet when the first group were together, and the name of the guys escapes me. And they would just laugh and cut up. In fact, I remember that after the mission they had a debriefing, and I went to that debriefing. And it was kind of funny because there was something else going on, and most of the people that were there were secretaries, and ladies. The guy got up and he started laughing. He said, “This reminds me of . . .” whatever day it is, “because that day the women get to do what they want. And it looks that’s this day today that everybody is here rather than working.” They were very impressive to me. I saw one of the guys with Cernan. Gene Cernan. I had some friends down from Nebraska, and he wanted to get his picture taken with Cernan. Cernan went over with this Russian astronaut and they got this picture. And he’s got this picture taken between them. This boy, David Ward. Or David Marsh, excuse me. He was very impressed by that. And he’s shown that many times throughout his school years. So they were just neat guys.
NELSON: So, move from Apollo-Soyuz. When did work on the actual Space Shuttle begin?
HUNTLEY: Oh. Probably in about ‘82 they were thinking about that. You know, as we talked about the cost of launching a Saturn V. You know, basically a Saturn V was three hundred sixty-seven feet tall. Interesting thing. One of the astronauts was asked, “What do you think about when you’re sitting up on top of that three hundred and sixty seven foot stick of dynamite?” And he says, “Well, what I think about is everything below me is nothing but an explosive, and it was built by the cheapest contractor.” Which I thought was always very cute. But basically, what comes back, as all that other stuff is just thrown away: escape, launch, and it’s just the Apollo module. All the other is wasted, expensive toss away. So we had to have something that we could re-launch, and that’s why we had to have something like a shuttle. So we basically recovered the tanks and the rockets. The solid rockets. We’d just loose the external fuel tank. And all the rest comes back, and we can re-fly it. So that work probably even started before that. But, about ‘82, sometime in that time frame, they had a re-organization, and the Mission Control Center went under the Flight Control Division because they were the controllers. And the other guys were going out looking at starting to build the new shuttle control center. And at that time is when I moved over to the Simulation Division, and that directorate was run by Gene Kranz.
Gene Kranz was the guy in Apollo 13 with the vest. And he had a budget of seventeen million for his whole division, before our division was put under him. I sat in a branch . . . I’m sorry, in his directorate, and I sat in the simulation division and ran personally a budget of fifty-three million. So, when that transition went over, and we became, and that, I believe, happened after Apollo 51L. I believe it was about that time. Just before that time. Yeah it was before that time. That was in [19]86, so it was probably in the ‘82 [or] ‘83 time frame. I don’t remember. Time gets away. Anyway, when we went over under Kranz, he realized he had to have somebody look after budgets, and I applied to go on that staff. And we had, as one division, probably over three hundred thirty million dollars a year under him. And he sat up there and worried about his seventeen million-dollar budget. I remember sitting one time in his office and they were arguing about something that was like fifty thousand dollars’ worth. And John O’Neil and Don Putty were his deputy directors, and I had come out of this other division. I was not part of flight control, so I was sitting on a couch. I didn’t get up close to the table. And they were arguing back-and-forth, back-and-forth, and finally after about forty-five minutes I said, “Can I say something?” And they said, “Well, what do you have to say?” And I said, “Well you’re spending a lot of time for fifty thousand dollars. You know, we round that number. We don’t even mess with that, and you guys have spent forty-five minutes discussing whether or not we ought to spend it.” And Kranz looked at Putty and he said, “What is he talking about?” And he said, “I don’t know.” [Kranz] said to O’Neil, “What’s he talking about?” And he said, “I think he’s right. We got a lot more money now.” And after that I was able to move up towards the table most of the time. Gene would always, sort of, when I’d frown he’d kind of listen. We ended up spending five hundred and seventy-six million dollars a year. A little more than half a billion dollars from Gene’s office under that directorate. I worked for Gene, I guess, ten years, nine years. As a staff person, running budgets.
NELSON: What was he like to work under?
HUNTLEY: Oh he was an interesting guy. I remember one time I was on this Source Board and I had a real problem. Some things that were happening that shouldn’t be, and the lawyers were after me, and so I had to go tell him. I wanted to make sure that he knew what was going on. So I told him I’d be over at his office at seven o’clock and I walked into his office and he says, “Don’t say anything! Don’t say anything! Don’t say anything [un]till this tape goes off!” And he was listening to Sousa’s March. When he came to work he listened to marching music on the way to work and after he got in his office. He said, “That’s how I get primed up to start my day.” So he was an interesting guy. I liked working for him. The only problem with Gene was if you came in and said, “Gene, we’ve got a problem in this area.” It didn’t matter whose responsibility it was. You had to work it. [laughter] So it was kind of interesting to not have to work some of those problems.
I remember one time he had a wedding, he went to a graduation, and I think there was something else. He went to a confirmation for one of his kids. And he came in. That was on . . . We worked late Friday night, and on Monday morning we had like seventy-six action items as staff members we had to go and work for him. And I never understood how he had time to even think about those things. He was a very interesting guy. Demanding but interesting. [I] loved to work for him.
NELSON: He was the flight controller in the movie Apollo 13. Do you recall him ever having a conversation with you personally, or overhearing a conversation, of him discussing that event? That whole process? Those several days of anxiety?
HUNTLEY: Yeah. Gene was a pretty open guy. In remember I went over for something in his office. I was in a separate building, building 30. It was across the campus. And it was right at noon hour, and it got really dark. It seemed like there was a bad storm always coming in. And Gene said I couldn’t leave. I didn’t have an umbrella or anything. So I was just sitting around. He had a couch out in front of his office. His complex, and people waited there to get in to see him. So I was sitting there and he got his lunch out of the refrigerator and he said, “Well come into my office, Maynard.” So I said, “Okay.” And he said, “Well don’t you want to share my lunch?” And I said, “No Gene I don’t want to share your lunch.” So we just sat down and talked. And we talked about a lot of interesting things. How much...again we talked about the people putting in the hours. That was always . . . he was a people person. And he said there was only one other time that he wasn’t sure what was going on. That was one time he was sitting down in Webster, as you come down NASA Road One, and then you take a left to go down Dickinson, where he lived. He was sitting there at that stoplight right by the railroad tracks, and lightening hit. A bolt of lightning. Bang! And his car quit running, and the radio went off. Everybody else’s car quit running. And he said couldn’t get the thing started, and all of the sudden it just started up. And he said, “You know, I was really bewildered.” He came down with some kidney problem, and he researched that thing, medical books. He knew more, I think, than the doctors knew. He was a go-getter on anything like that. Contractors never really pulled punches with Gene. He was really good about that. He backed his people up, too.
NELSON: It’s real interesting to hear about a personality that you have seen on TV. I love that movie, but to realize the personality behind that is real interesting.
HUNTLEY: And I like the way Ed Harris depicted him. He smoked all the time, and Gene was that way until he decided to give it up. I remember the time when he said in a meeting that one of our guys has got leukemia, or cancer. And he says, “He won’t be in the position anymore. I think if you feel like you need to pray for him I think he would appreciate that.” So he had a spiritual side, and he was very active in his Catholic Church. It was just not a one-sided guy, he was multi . . . And the funniest thing I ever think that happened. He was reroofing his house, or reworking his house, and he kept seeing these squirrels, or woodpeckers, and wondering what the heck those woodpeckers were doing. He went over to the other end of his house, and on the fascia board they had made a nest in there, and he had to go in and replace all that. He said he worked all day and he kept wondering about those woodpeckers, and where they were making those sounds was on the other end of his house.
NELSON: I heard a story that woodpeckers caused damage to a spacecraft at some point. Do you remember hearing anything about that?
HUNTLEY: I seem to remember that too. In the shield. Yeah. I can’t tell that story. But we did lose a couple of astronauts, Elliot See and, I don’t remember the other one, to a goose that got sucked into the intake engine. They were flying a training jet, coming back, I think from St. Louis. [It] sucked it in and killed them.
NELSON: I’ve heard about . . . You said you lived in Pasadena, and not Clear Lake City. Do you ever remember splashdown parties?
HUNTLEY: Oh yeah. I never was the big splashdown partier. The only one I remember is [when] I got interested in the Huntley name, and Chet Huntley at the time was with David Brinkley at NBC News. And so the Nassau Bay Hotel is where they had their complex, up on top of that building. So I went over and made reservations to see Chet Huntley, and went over and spoke to him a little bit. He had to hurry and get down to this splashdown party, and he got in late, so we didn’t have a long visit. But we found out we weren’t related, unless it was through one of the uncles that we lost. Yeah splashdown parties were wild. They were a big thing. And again, it was young people. Se it was stressful and that was a release for those guys. Yeah, a lot of stories about splashdown parties. Somebody had thrown a piano in Nassau Bay swimming pool. Gene was very active, and the flight controllers were more active that the outsiders.
NELSON: Well, were kind of nearing the end, I think. Have you done anything since your retirement from NASA? Or you mentioned you had outside interests while you were working at NASA. Would you mind talking about those a little bit so we’ll know?
HUNTLEY: Well, they were nothing to do with the spacecraft, but I always had businesses on the side, and I out kids through college, two girls through college because of a camper business that I ran. I sold and rented campers. And since I retired I’ve been very active. I still go out and lecture a lot. Oh, probably five or six times a year, minimum. That would be big classes. And I’m talking about a day you go out and maybe meet all the seventh-grade classes. This year I’ve been to Leander. I’ve been to Cedar Park, Georgetown. Three different schools in Georgetown, and I was going to go to Pflugerville, but school got canceled that day. We never rescheduled. But every year I go out . . . I mentored five kids this year.
NELSON: How did you get involved in that?
HUNTLEY: Well, when I retired, I retired in September, and my wife had made a commitment to this bible study that she would teach it or be a leader in this group of fifteen ladies for the nine months. And she said, “I don’t want to move until that commitment . . . I made that commitment.” And I said, “Well that’s okay.” We bought this house, and we did some work on it, and we said, “Well that’ll take six months.” We bought the house in January, so that would take us up to May. But anyway, one of the teachers in this South Houston elementary said, “Why don't you come over and help our third graders in a reading program?” Well, I [wasn’t] sure I wanted to do that. I may [have wanted] to do some consulting, and I was looking after some investments for some people and stuff. But anyway, I said, “Well, I’ll do that.” So I went over, and I had one little boy. And golly, it was fun. I spent half an hour a day, and pretty soon one of the other guys that was doing it got transferred and the leader of that, Dr. Carter, said, “Will you take this other little boy?” And I said,” Yeah. I’ll take him.” And there was another little boy, and so I ended up with three boys. And instead of going over there once a week, I went over three times a week. They were little Spanish kids, and they were having trouble with reading. I just really enjoyed it.
So we took the Georgetown paper after we decided we were moving here, and I read about a mentoring program they had. So we moved in June, and in July I went over to the administration office and said, “Hey. I’m interested.” I thought it was going to be like a reading program. But it was mentoring, and it was mentoring kids, and you do different things with different levels. You sort of judge what your going to do with what the kids are. So they said, “Well, we’ve got an alternative High School and we always are needing men to go over there and mentor some boys that are there. So I said, “That’s fine. I’ll go over there.”
I took two boys. [It was] kind of neat. One of the boys was very quiet, but you didn’t have to do much to get him to set goals. You always try to set some goals, and then work toward your goals, and know what you want to try and do. If your goals change, that’s fine. But know where you want to go. This kid was always that way. He wanted to play defensive back for the University of Texas, and he’d work out, and not a problem. [I] had a great relationship with him. And he graduated and didn’t go to the University of Texas. He went to ACC, [Austin Community College] a community college, and he kept in contact, and Father’s Day I would get cards from him. And, low and behold, just this year he told me he wanted to be a car salesman. He always was interested in cars. And he went to one of the garages downtown, Leif Johnson. You’ve probably heard of it in Austin. One of the big dealerships, and they sent him to salesmen school, and he came out as valedictorian. He’s selling like, he’s twenty-one years old, selling two cars a week, making about seventy thousand dollars. They wanted to promote him, but he didn’t want it because he just got married. He was going to get married. He’s married now. That’s a real success story. That was one of my first ones.
Of course, most of these kids come from broken homes. One little second grader watched his grandparents being murdered by an uncle, and he’s struggling through school. You’ve got a lot of different ways to mentor these kids, and I love it. I had, like I said, five of them. Last year they asked me to go over to the elementary school that I was mentoring in because they had three third graders that were operating on about seventh grade math. I went over there and mentored those kids for two months. It was right at the end of the year, and the teacher said, “Hey I need some help.” And these kids were sharp kids. We had them doing square roots, and square of numbers from one to a hundred in their head. It was awesome. It’s really been rewarding for me.
NELSON: That’s really great that you can get involved in something like that. It really makes a difference. What do you think, since you have so much experience with it, what do you think the future of spaceflight holds? Do you think it will continue to expand?
HUNTLEY: Well, I think it’s getting to be routine. I mentioned I was on this big contract, and as a source selection. I had to give a presentation to a guy from headquarters, and all of NASA’s top management was in this presentation that I was giving, and the guy stopped me. I can’t remember his name, but he stopped me. And I was not a high level, I mean, I was up in NASA, but I was not in the top echelon by any means. Anyway, he said, “Let me ask you a question, Mr. Huntley. If you were going to do this program, what would you do?” And I said, “Boy! You’re kind of putting me on the spot. I’ve got to answer this now. I tell you what I am going to do, but this is my answer. I don't know what these guys would say, all these other managers here. They probably [would] not agree with me. But what I would say, is I would not let anybody over thirty-five years old work on it.” And he said, “Why would you do that?” And I said, “Well, we went to the moon with guys that age. What you’d find out is that guys older than that have all the reasons you can’t do something. While you take the young kids, and they will do it.”
About that time was the time that IBM came out with the decree that nobody could break into their security system. Within two weeks some high school kids, three of them, broke their security system. I said, “That’s a good example.” You know, you tell some kid you can’t do it, and they do it. That’s what I think we need in the space program. New ideas. Were too slow to get to those new concepts because older people have already got prejudices, or tried those things and say, “It won’t work.” It might work if you’d just try it. I think the space program is going to continue. I hate to see some of the things that go on in the space program. Especially with the Russians. I know the Russians sort of use the space program as a welfare thing and it cost NASA some money. But I think it’s a pretty good program. END OF TAPE 1.
HUNTLEY: . . . When you start having kids tell you they’ve got the same picture you have in their history book, then you know you’re getting old. So that’s interesting.
NELSON: Well, Mr. Huntley, we are coming to the end of our interview here. The only thing I can maybe think of is, did you ever think your career at NASA would last as long as it did? When you got started did you think, “Well maybe this could be something I’ll do for the rest of my career?”
HUNTLEY: Well, I did . . . I only had four jobs my whole life. I was a paperboy, I worked for a truck garage, I worked for Western Electric, and I worked for NASA. So I am not one that changes jobs a lot. But, I guess it was right after the Apollo program, they had what they called a RIF, a reduction in force, and low and behold, I got riffed. You know, I though anybody doing a good job didn’t have to worry about it. But I didn’t have any military credits, and so the position I was in, somebody else from another area, a higher deal, or that was with NASA longer, and so they moved me out of that position. And Len Dunseith, who was my boss, said, “Okay.” You know I was really upset. He called me in one Friday afternoon and said, “I got something I got to tell you.” He told me I was riffed. Boy. The other thing I remember him saying was, “I don’t want to do anything until you come talk to me on Monday. And he went on and on just talking, but my mind was racing because I had to go tell the wife that I thought I was going out the door. I didn’t. I was just going to a different position. A downgrade, if you will. Downsizing, I guess is what they call it now. But, at that time I had a lot of concerns about that. In fact, I had just got a promotion, and I told Len, “I wish I wouldn’t have got that promotion if this is what it’s going to cost me.” And he said, “Well Maynard. I can’t hold you back in case something like this is going to happen.” Of course, he had never been through a RIF either. He said, “I want to tell you something.” I guess I can tell this. He’s dead now, and my career is over. He said, “I’m going to paperwork your RIF, but you’re not in that position. I’m not going to move you. You’re going to do the same job you’ve been doing. You can help Ben,” who was the guy that moved in, “learn that job. But I’m not moving you. My neck’s on the line. If you go complain about this, it’ll hurt me more than it’ll hurt you. [clock ringing] So I just stayed there, and did my job as contract manager for the contracts, and running a little office, and I was treated well.
My dad died a month before he could of retired at sixty-five, so I set my goal to retire at fifty-five. And after the big source board, I got such a raise that I had to stay around for another three years, [or] two and a half is what stayed, to make a difference in my retirement. So I left at fifty-seven and a half. Never regretted it. I haven’t starved. I never made a lot of money, but I haven’t starved.
NELSON: Well, thank you very much. I’ve really enjoyed it.
HUNTLEY: Sorry we took so long.