NASA Joerns, Jack - May 26, 1999
Interview with Jack Joerns
Interviewer: Beth Tews
Date of Interview: May 26, 1999
Location: Joerns home, Sunrise Beach, Texas
TEWS: This is Beth Tews, a graduate student in the SWT [Southwest Texas State University, San Marcos, Texas] Department of History, and I am in the home of Mr. Jack Joerns in Sunrise Beach, Texas, in the living room on May 26, 1999. This interview is being done as part of the NASA/SWT Oral History Project. The interview will be available for use by researchers, and Mr. Joerns will receive a copy of the transcription from NASA. Do you agree to these procedures?
JOERNS: Of course.
TEWS: Mr. Joerns, could you describe your educational experiences and how you came to work at NASA?
JOERNS: Well, the educational experiences - you mean the various places I went to school? I have a bachelor’s degree in aeronautical engineering from Parks College, a part of St. Louis University, and additionally, I took part-time courses over the years at Illinois Institute of Technology, University of Detroit, San Diego State College, Texas Christian University, and Olympic College. They were usually just one or two courses at a time that I thought I needed and wanted to take.
TEWS: And, how did you end up working at NASA?
JOERNS: I ended up going to work for NASA through a friend of mine when I returned from an expedition with the National Geographic Society in Peru. I ended up back in Houston, and I was there, waiting for the weather to clear up for a big parachute meet to start, and I just happened to remember that a friend of mine I had worked with at Bell Helicopter in Fort Worth [Texas] was now in Houston, and I looked his number up and called him. He was working at NASA, which was just starting up there, and he insisted I come over to his office the next day. The next day, it rained again, so I went to his office because the parachute meet was canceled. There, I met some people that were working with the flight crews--the future flight crews at NASA, and they were looking for somebody that had some knowledge of parachutes to work on the program of testing parachutes and stuff like that, so [I] just kind of fell into a job.
The next day, I went to an interview and, subsequently, after my clearances cleared, I was offered a job at NASA, and then I started working in the Flight Crew Support Division, which was involved mostly in tests, at that time, on ejection seats and the crew station area and the personal parachutes.
About that time, I was sent out to California to observe and report on the parachute tests being done in El Centro in southern California and up at China Lake in the northern part [of California]. I spent several months out there, working on those tests, and those were on the Gemini program. At the time I was out there with these tests, the Gemini spacecraft hadn’t flown, and actually, they were more or less waiting for the completion of these tests - they were kind of a lagging area.
The tests done up in China Lake were done out of a high-speed sled using dummies. The sled would run down a--it was rocket-propelled, and it would run down a track, like a railroad track, at about, I think, about MACH 8 was the fastest we ran the sled at which time the ejection process on the Gemini would [be that] the doors would open, the process would start, and the seats would eject, and then the dummies, all rigged up with a parachute and all the equipment, would eject out of the seats, and we’d go find the pieces, if they worked [or] didn’t work and put them together and do it again. [Laughter] And, we had a lot of things go wrong, but in the end, everything worked out all right.
That was at China Lake, and down in El Centro, the tests were done by airdrops from a fairly high altitude. It was still visible to see, and there, we used live jumpers from the Navy test area, and they mostly just made jumps with all the equipment on that was used in Gemini. They used the space suit, and they had a life raft, and the parachute would come out, and then the life raft and one thing or another. I kind of liked that because I got to hob-nob with the test jumpers, and they were really a good bunch of guys, but NASA would never let me do any of those tests myself.
TEWS: How come?
JOERNS: I don’t know. It was their policy. They kind of didn’t want to cut into the military’s thing. We struck up some great friendships there with the other jumpers.
After we finished that, I went back to Houston and started working on the other crew station. We went through a period there where the time in space was so limited in early flights, and the crews had a lot of things to do, so time lines were written up very carefully with people very skilled in doing that.
Then, often, I’d be called on to learn the same procedures and do them in a zero-g[ravity] airplane. In the beginning, we used the Air Force zero-g airplane. It was based at Wright-Patterson Field. So, we’d go up there and fly parabolas, usually up to about eighty [at] a time and check and see how many got sick. That was always fun because--I was very careful not to eat very much for a couple of meals [or] miss a couple of meals before going up there, so I was very proud of the fact that I never got sick in the airplane. [Laughter]
We went through a period, then, after that--well, actually, I kept crewing on the airplane on and off. NASA finally bought one and then another and then another. They were kind of short-lived because of the structural problems on those airplanes. They figured out how many parabolas they would stand before they [would] retire the airplane. But, eventually, NASA bought their own airplanes and based them in Houston, so we didn’t have to make that trip up there.
And the, in the beginning, they always took the astronauts on the zero-g airplane to see, I guess--we did a lot of exercises on the different procedures. We’d have models of the Gemini spacecraft that [were] carried in the airplane, and they would open and close the hatches and operate all the switches and that sort of stuff in these trainers to make sure that they could do all of that under zero-g.
We got through with the Gemini program, [and] things started right in on the Apollo program. I did very little on that. Mostly, when the Apollo program got started, we had another program that followed it, and I got to working on that, and that was the Skylab program. A lot of us who were working with the flight crews at that time were working alternate, like every other program, and it was kind of the way it worked out. [I] got to working pretty far ahead. In the Skylab program, one of the interesting parts of that, as far as the training went, [was that] we had three astronauts in an altitude chamber for thirty days. They were strictly confined in there, and it was a pretty interesting test to see if they could stand being in small quarters for a long time, and they seemed to stand that very well, medically and physically. I think one of [the] nicest parts of that job was that I was CapCom [capsule communicator] in the daytime for the guys inside the chamber. Their food was sent in through airlock, and that’s the only thing that went in there. The rest of them, they never got out, and they didn’t really go stir-crazy.
At that time, when they were first put in the chamber, they weren’t put in there very long before we had a bomb threat that somebody was going to bomb the building the chamber was in. I can remember there was a lot of high-powered thinking going on: ‘Do we advise them inside that there’s been a bomb threat, or do we not say anything?’ and it was resolved not to say anything. Although the threat couldn’t be taken lightly, the whole building was lit up at night. Of course, they didn’t know it inside that [it was lit] with floodlights. How they explained that away, I don’t know. [Laughter] There was standing guard duty on top of the building all night long and in the daytime, too, and so, it was kind of an interesting secret. [Laughter]
Then, after that program, I went to Ellington Air Force Base and worked on designing equipment for Earth Resources airplanes. We had several airplanes that flew over the corn fields in Iowa, and at different stages of the corn-growing, they could determine from infra-red and other photography whether there’d be a good corn crop or a bad corn crop. So, we figured that was probably useful information for people that were interested in trading in corn and importing corn, exporting corn, that sort of thing. That program worked out that information was obtained from satellites, and at the same time, on a satellite pass, information was obtained by airplanes. We had two high-altitude RB-57 bombers that flew extremely high, and they got information over a wide area, and then that information was correlated with information from airplanes flying five or six miles up, and that, in turn, was compared to information obtained from helicopters that were flying several hundred feet in the air, so it would balance all this information out and compare it to the satellite. At the same time, the satellite was flying over Russia, checking their corn fields, so we would know, kind of on the corn side, how the world’s corn supply was going to be before it was actually ready to be harvested. Anyway, that was another program. [Pause] I’m trying to think what did we do after that. [Laughter. Pause]
I remember we went back from Ellington after a couple years to work at the Center [Johnson Space Center] and worked on several different things with the shuttle program before retiring for NASA there. [Pause] On the shuttle, I got into the food area. They used freeze-dried food on the shuttle, and we ended up with the problem with a vendor designing a method to serve food. It was in little packages, and at that time, I worked in an area that was interested in that. I came up with an interim design that they used on several shuttle flights until the main one was ready, and it was just a little cigar-box-sized thing that would put the correct amount of liquid in dried food.
(Shut it off! I can’t think of anything else! My brain is going!)
TEWS: Of all of your positions, which was your favorite? Which one did you enjoy the most, and why?
JOERNS: Well, let’s see. [Pause] I guess--[phone rings] I guess the part that I liked best of all of it was in the beginning of the program, working with the first two or three classes of astronauts. We seemed to do a lot of good work together, and it was most enjoyable. I don’t think anything happened after that that really compared to the beginning of the program. A lot of that was just because of the enthusiasm for the program in the beginning, too. It was new, and [there was] an awful lot of freedom involved.
I remember when I was working tests in El Centro in southern California, and they decided when I was out there that I needed to work some tests in China Lake. I got out there, got off the airplane in Los Angeles. The first car I got was a little car from the rental agency to El Centro, and I got halfway down there in the desert when the car blew up, [Laughter] and so, I slept alongside the road and hitchhiked the rest of the way the next morning when it got bright, and I got the job OK.
Then, somebody took me to a car rental place, and I rented a brand-new Mustang. It had twenty miles on it, and I think it was ten or eleven days later--because they decided that day that I’d have to go every other day up the desert to work at El Centro and then, the next day, come back, so every night, I went back and forth - one day at El Centro, the next day I worked at China Lake, the next day at El Centro, back and forth. When I went to turn the car in, it had thirty-five hundred miles on it. It missed all its checks and everything else. [Laughter] [When] I got back to Houston, the travel people went out of their mind. They’d never heard of such a thing! [Laughter] I was directed to do it. They figured they could have bought the car a whole lot cheaper. But, that was kind of interesting. I’m sure that a whole bunch of new rules came out of that about how far you can drive a car. [Laughter]
TEWS: You mentioned that you were in the astronaut office. Were there any of them that had a significant impact on you personally?
JOERNS: Oh, yeah, I had several real good friends. Because I was an active weekend sky-diver, several astronauts thought they’d like to do that, but they soon came up with the notice that that was not to be done, so there wasn’t any more of that going on. [Pause]
I worked a lot with Al Bean on some things that were done in the Neutral Buoyancy Tank over in Huntsville [Alabama] at Marshall Space Center. They actually had built a facility that was a lot better than the one we had in Houston. [Pause]
Well, there is one thing that I’ll always remember is during a Gemini ejection seat test in Huntsville, Alabama, they had a dummy Gemini spacecraft mounted on a tower up--it probably must’ve been a hundred feet in the air, and this was a final test of the ejection sequence, and they had two dummy spacemen in their suits and all inside in the seats. I remember there were nineteen sequences to the ejection thing - that is, nineteen pyrotechnic devises had to go off in the correct order for that to be successful. When they operated the thing, the doors would open first. Then, the igniters would ignite the rocket on [the] ejection seat. Then, when that was firing, the ejection seat would release and go flying out of the vehicle, and then the dummy would eject from the seat, and the parachute would come and the rest of the stuff. So, it was kind of a timing exercise. Everything had to work right. Jim Lovell and Frank Borman were out there, observing this test with me, and we’re standing alongside this car, and the time came for it all to work, and they threw the switch and directly, one door flies open, and the dummy with the rocket motor goes, and the seat comes flying out with the dummy and all this fire and smoke and everything. The chute opens, and, immediately, Frank Borman says, “Uh oh, Jim, you didn’t make it!” One of the chutes was all white, and one was orange and white, and Borman’s was the orange and white one, and that’s the one that inflated, and the big dummy floated down to Earth, and the other one just stayed up there and burned up. [Laughter] We had a pretty good laugh about it because he was so quick with it, though. He instantly picked that up. I guess I’ll always remember that. But, in the real world, they didn’t have to use it.
TEWS: I noticed on your resume, I think in 1972, you had the Superior Performance Award. Do you remember what that was for?
JOERNS: I don’t have any idea. [Laughter] No, sorry.
TEWS: Well, was good work recognized often?
JOERNS: Oh yeah, I have probably fifteen or twenty awards upstairs. At first, they give you [an] award for--they give an awful lot of awards. Some guys put them on their walls. At first, they didn’t give you a frame with them, so nobody ever put them up, and then they started giving you a frame, so then all you had to do was stack them. [Laughter]
There were group awards and individual awards. If you were in a certain organization and they got an award, well, then, you would get one and that kind of thing. [Dogs barking]
One patent was applied for on a food rehydrator. It was similar to some dentist thing. I can’t remember what the dentist thing was, but it was similar to that, so [I] never did get the patent for it that was applied for.
TEWS: Mr. Joerns, did you live in Clear Lake when you were working at NASA?
JOERNS: [I] lived right next door to Clear Lake. I actually lived in Webster, and it was about a mile and a half from work. At first, there wasn’t anything out in that area when I first went there, but, eventually, we had a house built, and I knew that I needed to be close to work because I already had gone through an experience before, working in an airplane factory that was on one side of town, and I lived on the other side of town. That wasn’t so bad in the beginning, but every year, more stoplights appeared between the two places, and so you had to be real careful, always have to be close to work. [Laughter]
TEWS: How was the community like where you lived? Were there all NASA employees?
JOERNS: The whole place was just--there was just a real high concentration of NASA people all around. It was like most all your neighbors were, about everybody, had settled in the same area, so it ended up with so many people there. And, of course, the whole area--there was nothing out there in the beginning to speak of. In ‘64, there were a couple hotels and a restaurant, and now it’s just everything is there. It doesn’t take long.
TEWS: Were there splashdown parties?
JOERNS: Yeah, they had those right down the street from where I was. A lot of the people work with different launches to begin with, and they’re the ones that seemed to be the ringleaders of the splashdown parties and that sort of thing, and the other people are just working on jobs, and their work isn’t as directly related to a mission as the people that worked--the flight controllers and people like that. That’s where their big work is during a mission. The other people that are doing just general engineering work and that sort of stuff are always working on things that are downstream somewhere.
TEWS: And, why did you leave NASA? You mentioned you retired?
JOERNS: [Laughter] Well, I could retire, and at the time I left, I had just gotten transferred to a job that I didn’t think was as challenging or would be as interesting as what I could walk into the next building and get from a private contractor that paid as much money or more, and so, that’s what I did. I ended up working for me instead of working for somebody else. [Laughter]
Also, the other reason for leaving when I did was I needed to get some more time in on social security because I’m what they call a “double dipper.” I get government retirement and social security both, and I needed to work three years to get my social security up to the maximum because I started paying into social security when it started, and then I went back to school, and then I went to war, and then I’d missed several years, so I worked three more years and got my social security to the maximum, and then I retired.
TEWS: And now, I just have a few questions about--not specifically about your job, but just your own reflections on the time period that you were living through. What was your personal reaction when President John F. Kennedy announced to the world that the U.S. would send a man to the moon and bring him back safely within a decade?
JOERNS: Well, that was [a] pretty tall statement to make. I was trying to think, he did that around 1961, ‘60 or ‘61. I thought that was [a] pretty bold statement to make at the time because it didn’t seem to me that we really had the technology to do that, but he did. It was a massive effort, and I guess probably a quarter of a million people were involved, somewhere like that.
TEWS: Do you remember what you were doing when Apollo 11 landed on the moon?
JOERNS: Yeah, I was watching it on TV! [Laughter] And, I was interested in it, but I wasn’t in the Apollo program then. I was on the Skylab program.
TEWS: Do you remember your thoughts about the “space race” between the Soviet Union and the United States?
JOERNS: Well, not really too much. I remember watching Sputnik before I went to work at NASA, and I thought that was pretty impressive really that they could do that. Just sending a little ball around the world is a little bit different from sending a person. It was kind of an eye-opener because it was the thing that got us started. Otherwise, it probably wouldn’t have happened for a long time. Kennedy did right by directing the effort that way. I’m sure it’s paid off by now.
TEWS: What do you envision for the future of manned or unmanned space flight?
JOERNS: Well, manned space flight’s always going to be more expensive. Human beings are pretty delicate compared to packaged electronic package or something like that. I think human beings will always want to go to the farthest places they can - it’s just kind of human nature.
TEWS: Looking back to when you first became involved with NASA, did you ever think that things would go as they did?
JOERNS: Well, it was pretty difficult to foresee exactly how things were going to work out. I remember I couldn’t quite visualize how they could fly the shuttle piggyback on another airplane, and I thought I pretty well proved that to the fellow that came up with that idea, [Laughter] but he turned around and a made a model airplane that did it, and from there they went! I thought they’d have all sorts of separation problems, but they still haul that shuttle around as much as they want to. [Pause]
TEWS: And so, if you were in my place, and you were the interviewer, what question do you wish I would’ve asked you, and what would be your answer to that?
JOERNS: Well, that’s a good thing to have in your list of questions, but I really can’t think of--well, yeah, I could. I think you should’ve done the interview about twenty years ago. [Laughter] That would’ve been in a good timeframe because that’s about--those things--well, I know a lot of people are still down there that retired when I did, and they’re still down there, and they socialize together, and they remember all these things, and you would get some good interviews out of those people that are still there. We have two here from NASA in this town, and there’s several more in outlying areas around here. The vast majority of the guys, their wives, and they’re real homebodies. Wives are homebodies. You plant them in an area, and they’re going to stay there forever. The guys would like to come here or get away, but the wives have all their social activities that they do, and they don’t like to leave, so there’s a lot of them living in Houston, which would be the last place in the world anybody’s want to live. I hated [it], and as far away as we were from Houston, I still didn’t like it anywhere near as much as I liked Fort Worth, and that’s the same with everybody I knew. Your job not always is just in the nicest places. You sometimes have to make a little sacrifice on that. Otherwise, everybody would be in Acapulco! [Laughter]
TEWS: So, I guess the last thing I have to ask is just about your post-NASA activities and experiences.
JOERNS: Well, about the only thing I have is a few contacts left, and I still get their House Organ, their paper that they put up.
WIFE IN BACKGROUND: It’s the Round Up, isn’t it?
JOERNS: I don’t remember, but they changed the name, I think, of it or changed the whole format on it the other day. But, actually, there isn’t a whole lot in that that means too much. I’m pretty far removed from it all.
TEWS: [What are your] hobbies and interests now?
JOERNS: Way back in the ‘50s, I got involved with high-speed racing at Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, and I crewed on a motorcycle one year, and I crewed on a car the year before that. The motorcycle set a world speed record. So then, about umpteen years go by, and in the early ‘90s, I started going back up there with a friend of mine. He bought a racecar, which we fixed up, and I ended up driving it. We hold a record for that class car - it’s an old, vintage race car, and I built the engine for it, and we’ve run that for five or six years now. Two years ago, I started building another race car with a bigger engine - [it’s] what they call a “lakester.” Last year, we made two runs on it, and then the rain came, so we got washed out. One run, I ran a hundred twenty-five miles an hour, and on the second run, a hundred seventy-five miles an hour, and we think it’ll probably run about two hundred fifty miles an hour, and so that’s what I’m doing now. [Laughter] This year, we’ll have both cars back up there. Outside of that -
TEWS: Is there anything else you’d like to add?
JOERNS: No, I can’t think of anything. Just something else to do. [Looking at a photograph of the car in progress] That looks like a pile of junk! That was a picture of what it looks like [in] the shop - all the tools on the floor, all that sort of stuff. It’s kind of a mess. But, that’s what we have in the airplane hangar - two airplanes and that.
TEWS: Well, I appreciate your time here.
JOERNS: Well, thanks.