NASA Irwin, Ray -June 3, 1999

Interview with Ray Irwin

 

Interviewer: Scott Nelson

Date of Interview: June 3, 1999

Location: Irwin home, Austin, Texas

 

NELSON:  This is an Oral History interview with Mr. Ray Irwin.  We are at his home in Austin, [Texas].  Today is Thursday June 3, 1999.  My name is Scott Nelson, and this is an interview for the NASA/ Johnson Space Center Oral History Project.  Thank you for being with us today.

 

IRWIN:  You’re welcome.

 

NELSON:  I would like to start with just a little background information.  The best place to start, really, is maybe your education, how that prepared you to work at NASA, and how you actually got hired at NASA, if you wouldn’t mind.

 

IRWIN:  Well, I got my Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering at Texas Tech in 1949, or 1950.  I moved to south Texas shortly after that because of family problems.  I had my mother and dad to support, and I wasn’t in a position to leave them and get married.  My dad and I did start a little business there in South Texas.  It was a Dairy Queen type of operation, but it didn’t look like it was going to be sufficient to support us.  I say us because during the construction of this little operation I met and married a south Texas girl.  So in that fall I did start teaching math and science at the local high school for two years.  During that time, while teaching, I was taking night classes at Texas A&I Kingsville and I got my Master’s in Physics.  At the end of that the business was going okay and it seemed to be sufficient to support my folks.  By then we also had my wife’s folks working in the little operation.  We kind of called it the old folk’s home. 

 

She and I packed up and moved to New Mexico.  I had accepted a job with the missile range concerning the planning and development of ground instrumentation for all the missile testing that was being done there.  I did that for a few years and in 1963 NASA was starting a little operation at the missile range.  [clock ringing]  I had become interested in the space program from having done a little star gazing out in the desert air and talking to people like Clyde Tomball, who discovered the planet Pluto and happened to be one of my work associates at that time.  He didn’t stay there very long [because] he went to work on a project NASA was coordinating.  But for a while we did work together. 

 

I was working on the ground instrumentation, and I generated the electronic timing signals in all the ground instrumentation recordings so that they could closely correlate pictures that were taken in widespread ground location of missiles that were under test for developing position velocity data.

 

Sputnik flew over about this time and whetted my appetite even further in space work, so when NASA started there I decided maybe I would like to try to be a part of that.  So I applied and they accepted me, and away we went. 

 

NELSON:       [Do] you remember when Sputnik flew over?

 

IRWIN:  Oh Yes.  I don’t remember the day, but it was during the early sixties as I recall.  [clock ticking]  It seems like. . .

 

NELSON:  1957.

 

IRWIN:  1957?  Was it that far back?

 

NELSON:  Yes.

 

IRWIN:  That’s one reason I gave you this write-up, because I had researched it quite a bit and it’s better than my memory. 

 

NELSON:  So you recall the sense of a space race between the US and the Soviet Union?

 

IRWIN:  Oh yes.  It was really resting on me.  I don’t remember exactly when Kennedy made the promise that we were going to the moon that decade, the decade of the sixties, but I wanted to help do that.

 

NELSON:  You really felt like you were a part of that whole process from the beginning?  Was that part of the decision-making process?  [Did that] seem like something that was important, that you wanted to become a part of?

 

IRWIN:  Yes, and it just sounded like interesting work.  It was partly selfish.  I wasn’t trying to be heroic or anything.  But it just sounded fascinating and I wanted to learn more about it and hopefully be an integral part of it.

 

NELSON:  So you started there at White Sands?  I’ve always wondered if at that point were you aware of the role that White Sands had played prior to that in the nuclear development program?  Did you know it was part of that?

 

IRWIN:  Oh Yeah.  You’re talking about the Trinity site where the first atom bomb was detonated?  Yes I visited that site several times driving around the missile range planning where to put instrumentation signs.  [I was] right there in that radioactive area, still low level radiation.  I picked up melted sand and it was just glass off the surface from the heat of that blast.  It is a lonesome spot where it happened.  [It was] right out in the middle of a very smooth area between mountain ranges at the north end of the missile range, between the Oscurra Mountains and the Sacramentos and the Black Range and the San Andreas Mountains.

 

NELSON:  Did you live in Alamogordo?

 

IRWIN:  Las Cruces.  A twenty-eight-mile drive over the San Andreas Mountains.

 

NELSON:  You did that every morning and every evening?

 

IRWIN:  Oh yes.  For almost twelve years. 

 

NELSON:  I’ve heard stories that during the space program, especially the early phases of it in the mid-sixties, that some of the hours people worked were just outrageous.  Do you remember long days and late nights?

 

IRWIN:  Oh yes.  A little bit of that.  You get into a test program you go when it’s necessary in the preparations for the test and we maintained a tight schedule.  It took some long hours.

 

NELSON:  Your work there at White Sands was primarily ground instrumentation?

 

IRWIN:  That was prior to going to work for NASA.  Since I knew all of these range people and had worked with them for years before going to work for NASA at the missile range on their project, I was well acquainted with them and how testing programs were done there.  I seemed to be the most qualified one that was in the NASA bunch to deal directly with the rest of the people.  They set me up as the contact, go-between, between the NASA people mainly out of Houston, the Manned Spacecraft Center it was at the time, of course it’s now Johnson Space Center, between them and the missile range to arrange the test that they wanted conducted there.  Of course, NASA started another facility there as well as the test program for the missile [launch].  Really [it was] not the missile testing.  What we did there was develop the launch escape systems that they would use to get the astronauts out of the spacecraft should a catastrophic situation arise during a countdown or early during a flight.  [papers rustling] 

 

They developed another facility there for testing the engines of the Lunar Landing Module and some of the other engines.  This was not on the part of the missile range that was used for testing anti-aircraft missiles or surface missiles and this sort of thing.  It was across a mountain range, on the western side of the range, but it was still within the geographical bounds of the missile range.  It was called the WSTF.  White Sands Test Facility, [for] testing rocket engines.

 

NELSON:  Was this a military base primarily?  Was it primarily run by military personnel?

 

IRWIN:  No, not really.  It [was] mainly contractor personnel testing surface to air missiles.  The one’s that fired the missiles were contractors that developed them, and not the military themselves.  Of course, the work was for the military, so in that sense it was a military installation.  It was definitely a military installation, even though the military was not the one that was directly doing the testing in most cases.

 

NELSON:  I’m going to mention some of the landmark events in the early space program, and maybe get your feelings as they were happening.  Maybe you had some contact with some of the people involved?  Or what was your involvement in them?  The first American in space was Alan Shepard.  Do you remember when he went up and do you remember what that felt like and were you a part of it in any way?

 

IRWIN:  No that was the Mercury program, and I wasn’t really directly involved in any of the Mercury testing.  Of course, then you had John Glenn who went a little further.  Not just an up, and over the hill, and down again like Shepard did.  I certainly kept up with it and I was interested in it, even though I wasn’t directly involved.

 

NELSON:  So when the Gemini program began, what was your relationship with the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston?  Did you travel there? 

 

IRWIN:  Well, the operation at White Sands was an integral part of the space center in Houston and I did travel back and forth some.  It wasn’t too often, but to some extent.  On the Gemini, I again set up some testing of some of the Gemini components at the missile range with the rendezvous radar and the Lunar Landing radar were developed on the Gemini program so they could rendezvous with the Athena missile in space.  Of course, these were similar to the rendezvous and landing radar that were used in the lunar landings as well.  But I worked with the missile range to define an area and a test program that could be used.  With the ground simulating a space vehicle, for example, we were able, by applying the radar component from an aircraft helicopter, we were able to successfully test and demonstrate the feasibility and the operational ability of the rendezvous radar.

 

NELSON:  Did you ever get a sense that [clock ringing] . . . When I look back on it I think that all of these things were new and you were trying to do something that had never been done before.  Did you get that sense of accomplishment that every step along the way it was, “Okay, we’re a step closer to the moon?”  Was that in your mind with Gemini, even out in the desert?  Was that always in the back of your mind that this was the goal?

 

IRWIN:  Oh yeah.  We felt a part of it.  Everything we did was just one more step along the way toward accomplishing that goal.  We saw the light at the end of the tunnel there, but it was a long tunnel.

 

NELSON:  As NASA moved into the Apollo program do you remember the first thing that happened, the terrible fire?  What do you remember about the Apollo program, the early stages, that maybe I don’t know about?

 

IRWIN:  Right there is one of the things that I was looking for.  This was something that never had to be used, but it was the launch escape system for the Apollo.  At the mission launch the three astronauts, always three with Apollo, were in the command module on almost the top end of the vehicle.  But above the command module was this launch escape system, which was a series of rockets, three different engines that in an emergency situation could take the command module and launch it off of the Saturn boosters, fling it up into space at a high enough altitude where it could separate this launch tower and all these rockets. deploy parachutes, and safely land the crew.  That was one of the things that the public never saw, really, because it never had to be used.  But we did that development at the missile range.  The first one was called the pad-abort, which is what I just described, where you had to safely launch the crew up high enough to land them by parachute.

 

Then there were another series of tests where we had a big booster called Little Joe II, which simulated the Saturn launch vehicle and would get the spacecraft high enough.  There were two different situations.  The high-altitude situation was one configuration, where it could be separated similar to the pad abort.  It would blow explosives bolts that would separate the command module from everything below it and ignite the launch escape system rocket, get the thing up high enough and away from the boosters to open the parachutes to land them safely.  Another situation was at a lower altitude, under the maximum dynamic pressure that it generated as it thrusted through the atmosphere.  Of course, the higher you went the faster it was going, but the thinner the air got, so at some point there is a maximum pressure situation, maximum force on the skin of the vehicle, which is called Max Q, or maximum dynamic pressure.  They wanted to make sure that the escape system could safely get them to a recoverable situation with the parachute.  None of those three situations ever arose, so it was a backup system that we never had to use for the whole program, but it had to be developed.  We tried to foresee every situation that we could to make it as safe as humanly possible.

 

NELSON:  That’s one thing I have always been curious about.  Was the underlying concern safety, or accomplishment? It seems that NASA always tried to make things conservative, and yet, at the same they were doing things that had never been done.  They wanted to be as safe as possible.  Was safety testing that much a part of the job?

 

IRWIN:  Oh, absolutely.  The goal was to go there and come back, and do it safely.  It wasn’t just to go to the moon.  Safety was always a concern.  In the schedule bind, you did hit a point where you felt like if it hits the goal, you had to cut a few corners.  Unfortunately, [although] I won’t say that’s what caused the Apollo 1 catastrophic fire, but as a result of the way things were being done, that did happen and it became apparent that things had to be done differently, in a safer manner, because we couldn’t allow that situation to happen again.  So there was a concern about safety, and flammability testing with all the materials that went into the spacecraft.  Of course, when that fire happened even though they knew that there were flammable materials in there, they never felt that there would be any situation arise that would ignite the material.  But after that they wouldn’t allow anything flammable.  If it burned at all, it had to be at a very slow rate where it could be put out safely.  No more flash fires. 

 

NELSON:  Working as a liaison between NASA and contractors, what was the relationship like between the contractor employees and some of their leaders and NASA personnel?

 

IRWIN:  Well of course, the show was run by NASA.  Contractors did the work.  In my situation I was the go-between between NASA and the contractors and the missile range people.  I would say they had a very good working relationship.  They knew, the contractors that provided all these components like this Little Joe II, and built the command module and all these other little things, they knew they had to please NASA in addition to building something that would do the job.  If they didn’t keep their bosses happy, well they didn’t get paid.  It was pretty simple motivation there.  Even though there was a boss and worker situation, there was still a mutual respect.  Like the people that built this Little Joe II rocket engine, that’s a pretty good size vehicle, It was the biggest thing ever launched at White Sands.  It was thirteen feet in diameter, and had big solid propellant engines.  Up to seven of them.  You could almost launch something into space with one of those.  The ones that built that were Convair.  General Dynamics Convair.

 

Toward the end of that program, I happened to be the only one that was left in the blockhouse that had been in the blockhouse on every mission up to that point.  I coordinated all the range support and talked to them on the intercom.  I gave the range people the countdowns for the missile launch.  But the manager of that program came out there and personally chased me down, because I was the only one that hadn’t been given one of these little jobs by him, a model of the vehicle.  He spent almost a day tracking me down on the missile range to locate me and personally shake my hand and thank me for all I had done to help them get the program taken care of, and he handed that to me.  There’s not many of those around.  I bet you’ve never seen one.  They made a very limited number and gave them out to people.  I can’t even remember his name now.  He was a real nice guy.  Jack something or other.

 

NELSON:  Well, do you remember what went on at White Sands during a launch, during a space mission, while they were up?

 

IRWIN:  There wasn’t anybody up.  These were unmanned tests.  They were conducted as if there were people in there.  [We were] trying to do it safely.  What the range support did on all this was to make sure that it was done in a safe manner.  There were range safety people just like there was range safety people when we launched in Florida.  There were tracking instruments, floodlights, and such.  A telescope that would track the missile at launch time and take pictures all simultaneously so that knowing the orientation of these you could compute the position in space when those pictures were taken, and from that you could differentiate it and get the velocity.  With the telescopes you would take pictures that would develop the roll characteristics as it traveled through space.  Or course radar tracked it to make sure it was following the course that was predicted and not veering off and creating an unsafe situation.  Because if any unsafe situation developed, the range safety people would send a command that would destroy it.  All you had to do to destroy a vehicle like this, which had solid propellant engines in it, is blow a hole in the side and it would all burn at once, very rapidly, which most people call an explosion.  It would blow everything to very small bits.  I don’t know.  That’s kind of rambling.  Is that what you meant?

 

NELSON:  Yes.  Why don’t we take a break?

 

NELSON:  What happened as the Apollo program developed and they got into the manned space missions?  Apollo 8, 11, and on?

 

IRWIN:  Well, of course we dwelled a little bit on the first one, Apollo 1, which was quite unfortunate.  That’s Ed White right there, from the Gemini program.  He was in the Apollo 1 capsule.  He and Gus Grissom and Roger Chafee.  Chafee just lived right around the corner from me.  It felt pretty close, that loss.  It was very unfortunate, but it happened so we regrouped and forged ahead.  [This is] the one that personally oversaw the rework of the capsule to make sure that all the materials were not flammable, or if they did burn at all it would be a very slow burn that could be extended.  This was one of the astronaut crew that oversaw all that.  That was Frank Borman. [holding picture] The program didn’t move very much until that whole thing was reworked and we felt much more confident about the safety of all the materials that were used in the capsule.  It slowed the program down a bit, but it was necessary. 

 

NELSON:  Did you work with Frank Borman at all?

 

IRWIN:  Well, [I had] several meetings with him, but we weren’t personal friends, just business associates.  He was a respected person.  He was like most of the astronauts in that his attitude was that this was a test vehicle, not a scientific exploration vehicle.  So we kind of butted heads about that, because by this time I had been transferred down to Houston, and assigned to work on the scientific experiments hardware that would be used on the lunar surface.  The attitude of most of the astronauts, including Borman, and I can’t blame him for feeling that way, was get that scientific crap off of this thing.  If not all of it, at least we don’t want it in the way or slowing us down from flying this machine and accomplishing the main task, which was just to go there and come back.  Of course, we didn’t feel that way, but we found a compromise.

 

NELSON:  How did your transfer to Houston come about?

 

IRWIN:  My use had pretty much come to an end when we finished the flight tests.  My part to do with the test facility on the western side of the range, where testing rockets was done, had to do strictly with . . . I was head of the physical measurements and standards group in this laboratory that we built up there to calibrate all of the test instrumentation, and make sure all of the measurement equipment was calibrated to National Bureau of Standards accuracy and traceable to the Bureau.  The laboratory had been finished and built.  We signed contracts with two different contractors to operate the laboratory, and all of us engineers that had gotten it to that point, they felt we’d make a better contribution in Houston, where the main test programs were being planned, developed and what have you, rather than stay out at the missile range just to fill out a report card on the contractors so they could get paid.  So they transferred me to Houston.  They sent me down there with my billet, my job position, in my hand so to speak, and essentially said find out where you want to work, or where you think you could fit in the best.  So I went around and talked to people, and this lunar surface experiments stuff really appealed to me and sounded interesting.  I hit it off with the people I interviewed with there.  So I went to work for them.

 

NELSON:  Do you remember what year that was?

 

IRWIN:  It was 1966.  December of 1965 they interviewed me, and we moved in January of 1966.

 

NELSON:  As far as surface experiments, did you work with any of the geologists, or were you more on the equipment side?

 

IRWIN:  Well we were in meetings with all of the scientific community really.  There were a number of different experiments that were on the experiments package.  There were seismometers.  Even such simple things like an experiment to measure the accumulation of dust on the lunar surface.  How much dust will settle on this sensitive collector, and what is the temperature of all this?  There were two types of seismometers that measured the gravitational force, and if meteorites hit in the vicinity, [we would] be able to know where they hit and their velocity.  A number of different characteristics.  How deep was the dust on the lunar surface.  Geology sort of work. 

 

I guess my first job with the Lunar Surface Experiments Office, that was the main group that I worked with, they assigned me as the lead engineer on the development of the tools for taking the lunar samples, to pick up the rocks and put them in containers, and stow them in what was called a sample return container.  Most people called it just the rock box, and that’s really what it was.  Not knowing what this material was that the moon was made of, never having had a sample of it to analyze, they didn’t know what there might be noxious gases that would boil out of this material once it was taken inside a vehicle that had a breathable atmosphere in it.  So they had to put all of these samples in containers that were tightly sealed, and they had to have a container that was sufficiently rigid and sufficiently attached to the space vehicle so that during all these jars from rendezvous and what have you, that it wouldn’t cause such a jolt it would make the thing burst open and spill out all this material and dust inside the vehicle.  It was a pretty good trick to get that built.  We ended up having those built by the Atomic Energy Commission at Oakridge, Tennessee, taking a huge block of a very special alloy of aluminum, and building that whole thing out of one big ingot of aluminum. 

 

We had a lunar drill that Black and Decker built to drill down into the moon and drive tubes down in there to take core samples several meters deep into the lunar surface, and bring all of these back in the rock boxes.

 

NELSON:  Now all of these experiments and equipment was vital to each mission.  Did you or any of your colleagues work closely with the astronauts instructing them on how to use this equipment and the goal of the experiments?  How were the astronauts briefed on this? 

 

IRWIN:  As you can imagine, this was a complicated project.  All this had to be done in space, with space suits on, and there were very certain constraints from human beings, of course, and also from human beings being confined in a tight, restricting space suit.  So during the development phases we had to have a design team that would go around to the contractors that were trying to design all this hardware.  There were team members that were specialists, and they were the direct interface with the astronauts.  They would speak for the astronauts, and sometimes there would be [clock ringing] an astronaut present in the design review also, and he would have his say-so.  I said I was the lead engineer, well that was for design purposes.  I was far from being the only one, I didn’t have sole charge of this.  You had to have the sign off from several people on the basic approach and the design.  Was something else needed to make it safer, or more manageable with the hand that’s inside the restricting space suit?

 

NELSON:  Do you remember where you were when Apollo 11 landed on the moon?

 

IRWIN:  Oh yeah.  I was right in what was called the mission evaluation room, the MER, along with quite a few other people.  There were of course specialists there for every piece of hardware involved in this thing.  When a question arose [like] you can’t do it exactly as it was planned, what do we do, and how do we adjust, you suddenly realize you’ve got to have a representative of everything that’s involved in the operation that can answer in-depth questions from experience, or create an answer.  There were always a few unknowns.

 

NELSON:  Do you ever remember a specific time where that was the case?  When they came to you or one of your colleagues, [and said], “Hey, this is a problem. What do you think about this?”

 

IRWIN:  On Apollo 11, during the EVA’s [extra-vehicular activity], for example, where they picked up samples (this was two in the morning, our time, so we were kind of bleary-eyed), but they went out onto the lunar surface and started gathering materials.  They said they brought back fifty or sixty pounds of lunar samples, and this other guy was sitting there, and we had worked on these tools and containers and knew what their volume was.  We had a pretty good estimate as to what the weight of the lunar rocks would be, so we quick-like did some back-of-the-envelope calculating there as to how much, with the core tubes that they had from drilling down, and all this hardware and the way it had to be packed in there, we told them that there couldn’t be more than twenty five pounds of lunar sample material.  It couldn’t be fifty or sixty pounds like they suspected, but they didn’t pay much attention to us.  It turned out they had around twenty-four pounds, so that was a good estimate.  That was Apollo 11, which really went very well as far as the activity was concerned.  It was pretty exciting.  We didn’t mind staying up all night for that.

 

NELSON:  I heard something about a lightning strike.  Was one of the craft struck by lightning during a launch?

 

IRWIN:  I remember nothing about that.

 

NELSON:  Maybe it was just a story I heard.  Because of the movie and its significance. . Oh, is that the first step there? [holding picture]

 

IRWIN:  No, it was the second step.

 

NELSON:  I guess it couldn’t have been the first step, or there wouldn’t have been a picture of it.

 

IRWIN:  The first guy out there took this picture of Aldrin, the second guy [that] came down.

 

NELSON:  Did I read in your report that you lived down the street from Buzz Aldrin?

 

IRWIN:  Yeah.  In fact, just about a month before this picture was taken of him stepping onto the moon, his boy and he and my boy and I, along with several others scouts and scout dads were out on a camp out.  Our boys were the same age and in the same grade in school.  We were acquainted through scouts.  He was a very pleasant guy.  Just another scout Dad.

 

NELSON:  Do you remember what was going on in your job during the Apollo 13 problems?

 

IRWIN:  Yeah.  Of, course it started out like an ordinary mission.  NASA has a nice little telescope down at JSC [Johnson Space Center], and one of my friends was tracking Apollo 13 as it was heading toward the moon with NASA’s telescope, and he happened to be looking right at it when this brilliant flash of light happened.  That was the explosion that blew the hole in the side of the service module that brought about the extremely touchy situation that caused the mission to have to be drastically altered.  The lunar landing being given up for that particular mission.  In fact we were lucky to get them back.

 

Now I personally wasn’t in the support area at the time that accident happened because our part of it didn’t really become active until they were set down on the moon and were ready to start setting up the experiment hardware on the surface.  After it did happen, we got involved right fast because it was decided they would have to give up the idea of landing on the moon and have to come back – use the lunar module to furnish the air for them to have enough oxygen to even circle the moon and come back to the earth.  So the lunar module was going to have to come back, and they had to figure out what to do with it.  You can’t land it on the earth.  So the plans were developed.  Of course, I didn’t have anything to do with the flight dynamics of trying to figure out the trajectory and exactly how this would be done, but when they reached back to the earth’s atmosphere, they would have to separate the command module from the lunar module and essentially find a place to dump the lunar module in the ocean.  But there was concern about that because what powered the lunar surface experiments package was a radio-isotope electric generator with a radioactive capsule in there, and we didn’t want to dump something that would give off radiation right in people’s lap.  So we had to figure out how and where to dump it in the ocean safely. 

 

Even though I wasn’t too directly involved in that, I was just so concerned about it that I just took every opportunity I could to be a part of what was going on there, and seeing how I could help and get them back.  I think I wrote a little note there.  When they did get back, a few days later they called all of us support-types together in this Mission Evaluation Room, and the three crewmen stood up there in front of us and thanked us for getting them back alive, because they didn’t expect to come back alive after the situation arose the way it did.  But they were all very grateful that we did get them back.  There were quite a few other people in the room, besides me, that had a whole lot more to do directly with effecting their safe return, but I was very glad to be a small part of it.  It was a very touching scene.  Of course, one of them was Jim Lovell, the commander, that just lives out in Lakeway now.

 

NELSON:  Do you remember a change around NASA toward the end of the Apollo program?  You hear about funding cuts and a shift in people’s interest away from the space program around that time.  Do you remember noticing that in your life?

 

IRWIN:  Well, of course Apollo wasn’t the end of things.  There was Skylab.  It was quite a program.  It did a lot of good.  My next-door neighbor was involved in Skylab.  Owen Garriot was involved in that.  We went down to see him get launched.  Well, the Skylab II wives had their own [patch] made.  There were only a few of these made, and Helen, our next-door neighbor gave me this one.  But this was after they landed -- they spent sixty days up there in Skylab.

 

He was a radio amateur, and as they flew over Jordan, he talked to King Hussein on his Ham radio.  His hand-held Ham radio.  Hussein was a radio amateur also.  But Skylab was exciting, and I enjoyed that.  After that was ASTP.  Of course, this is still Apollo hardware that did all this.

 

NELSON:  ASTP? 

 

IRWIN:  Apollo-Soyuz Test Program.  It was a cooperative effort where they rendezvoused with the Russian Soyuz vehicle.  Then there was the shuttle.  I did a lot with the shuttle.

 

NELSON:  That’s actually the part of the space program I am most familiar with. 

 

IRWIN:  You can remember that.

 

NELSON:  Yeah, the other stuff seems like history to me.

 

IRWIN:  I had a little flag that actually flew on the ASTP.  It was right here. [papers ruffling] It’s kind of small.

 

NELSON:  This is the actual flag that was flown on the space mission?

 

IRWIN:  Yes.  I mean, there was more than one.  They had a little package of them, so there were quite a few of us that got one.

 

NELSON:  Its pretty nice though.

 

IRWIN:  Yeah.  It’s kind of nice to have something like that.  Now, whether or not I felt discouraged about the declining interest in space, yes.  I would have to say there was a feeling of waning interest.  That was one of the reasons I did retire from NASA when I got eligible to retire with full benefits.  January of 1984, I moved to Austin and went to work for Lockheed.  I worked for them for twelve years.

 

NELSON:  You did have some experience with the shuttle program.  What was that like?

 

IRWIN:  It was interesting.  We had what we called the. . . Oh gosh, the memory is the second thing to go.  In something like the shuttle there is always instrumentation that was there just for the purpose of developing the flight hardware itself.  Engineering experiments.  That’s what I worked on.  The people that were designing the vehicle wanted to know how much stress was placed on this particular membrane, so you put a strain gauge there, and an instrumentation package to record all of these measurements.  Well my job had shifted again.  When you worked for NASA you had to be kind of flexible and willing to do anything they asked you to do.  Like after that Lunar Experiments Hardware thing, and the geological hardware, they made me the configuration manger.  I told my boss, “What is that?  I don’t know [what that is]” He said, “You do now.  By definition you are the world’s foremost leading expert.”  So I had to start learning something about configuration management.  How do you set up design reviews?  How do you create a drawing system?  You can try it and make sure you know exactly what changes are made in the hardware, and is it made to this vehicle and the one that follows it and the one after that, or is it just in the last two?  And you had to track all of these design changes.

 

So that lasted quite a while.  Regarding shuttle, I had to shift gears again and become an expert on something else.  Everybody was learning computers by that time, so they asked me to set up a little computer lab to process the data from these engineering measurements, and we did that.  So that was how I was directly involved with the space shuttle.  Of course, I was kind of directly involved in it in another way too.  Another neighbor was Joe Engle.  Our lot was something like this [drawing] but I don’t remember exactly how it was shaped, but there were seven different families whose lot adjoined our lot where we lived because it was large lot.  This lot right here was Al Worden who was the command module pilot for Apollo 15, and right next to him was Owen Garriot.  Right on the other side of him was Joe Engle, so I am not lying when I say they were next-door neighbors, but we had kind of a strange lay out.

 

NELSON:  Was this in Clear Lake City?

 

IRWIN:  It was Nassau Bay, which is a municipal entity all its own.  There was a post office.  It’s right across the street from NASA, but it was in the Clear Lake area.  In fact, to get to my house you had to drive right along the road that went to Clear Lake.

 

NELSON:  I’ve heard of splashdown parties after a mission in lots of neighborhoods around there.  Do you remember any of those?

 

IRWIN:  Well, I never went to any of those.  I wasn’t much . . . This was mainly the flight controllers who felt like they wanted to get zonked. [laughter]  Their part of the mission was over and they were under stress.  I’m not faulting them for that, but I didn’t go to any splashdown parties.

 

NELSON:  So as you decided to retire from NASA, in 84 you said, and you moved on to Lockheed here in Austin.  What did you do for Lockheed?

 

IRWIN:  For them I did . . . First of all it was a very highly classified program.  What we did was develop a very special purpose computer system, including the software.  That was what was classified was the software.  It was all military contracts.  Most of our systems went into large mobile set-ups.  I did all of the electrical power design for the system.  They had to have a very special steady electrical power to run computers, so they had to have monitoring equipment to make sure the electrical power was up to snuff, voltage wise, because if it wasn’t within specifications, they had to shut everything off.  I had to design that sort of thing that did the monitoring, and the layout, and shut the power off if it was under unacceptable conditions.  I did that for almost twelve years, and I had gotten into that at NASA because when we set up this lab we had to it in a hurry, and we couldn’t go through the normal approval cycle for construction of facilities.  We had to do it right now, and nobody else seemed to know anything about how to do that sort of thing, so I just very quietly, while my boss turned his back, went up and got the materials and wired up all the stuff to run the computer lab.  So that was how I got into it, and why Lockheed put me to doing that when I got here.  They needed somebody with that kind of experience, so I did it and they kept me busy for twelve years.

 

NELSON:  We are drawing to the end here.  You retired from Lockheed in ‘96?  Have you done anything since then?  Have you been relaxing, or traveling?

 

IRWIN:  Oh, we put an addition on the house.  I’m retired, I don’t worry about all that stuff.  I don’t lack for something to do.  I haven’t been bored.

 

NELSON:  What do you think the future of space flight holds?  Do you think it will ever expand on the level it used to?

 

IRWIN:  It will probably rock on about like it’s doing.  There will probably be more done on unmanned than manned exploration, because it can be done riskier.  So you lose a spacecraft.  What’s a few million bucks, if you don’t lose any lives?  I would like to see us go to Mars while I am still around.  Which may be another thirty or forty years.

 

NELSON:  Well all right.  Thank you Mr. Irwin.  This is definitely going to make its place, I think.