NASA Kimball, Garner - May 27, 1999
Interview with Garner Kimball
Interviewer: Constance Bishop
Date of Interview: May 27, 1999
Location: Canyon Lake, Texas
Note: This interview was simultaneously filmed by Chris Elly, a graduate student in the Mass Communication Department at Southwest Texas State University. At one point, the need to change videotapes and technical difficulties resulting from the break caused Mr. Elly to interrupt the interview. Some of the transaction between Mr. Kimball and Mr. Elly has been omitted from this transcript for the sake of brevity and appearance. Nothing of importance to the material presented by Mr. Garner Kimball has been omitted. Further, all of the omitted conversation has been preserved on the cassette tape.
BISHOP: This is Constance Bishop. Today is May 27, 1999. I am interviewing Mr. Garner Kimball. This interview is taking place in Mr. Kimball’s home at Canyon Lake, Texas. This interview is a part of the cooperative agreement between the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project and Southwest Texas State University. Mr. Kimball, thank you for allowing me to talk with you this morning. To begin, can you tell me a little about your background, your family, and education.
KIMBALL: My early history, real briefly, is I was born in Houston, Mississippi, in 1938. My father was in college in Mississippi State and became a chemical engineer. We moved around a few times to New Jersey and stuff when he got out of college and when I was in the first grade we moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Which is where I grew up and spent the rest of my life until I finished college at L. S. U. [Louisiana State University]. I graduated from Baton Rouge High School, in 1957 and the following semester, started at L. S. U. I got my Bachelor’s Degree in Physics and went on to get a Master’s Degree in Physics at L. S. U. in 1965. In April of [19]65, I was finished with my thesis work and I went to work at NASA, at the Johnson Space Center, in Houston, Texas.
I went to work at NASA for a group, an organization, that was headed by Lynn Dunseith, maybe fifteen or sixteen people. By that time, I had two children. Anyway, I went to work for Lynn. Lynn, in turn, reported to John Mayer, and John Mayer reported to Chris Kraft, who was head of the flight control division. At that time, it included all of our group. What Lynn Dunseith was responsible for was designing the computer programs for the Mission Control Center to meet the flight controller’s requirements. We worked closely with the flight control team to determine what kind of trajectory calculations they needed and what kind of displays they needed to assess the information that they got back from telemetry. Lynn was responsible for all of the programming that went into the Mission Control computers.
At the time I came to work there, they were in the final throes of getting the software checked out for the Gemini [19]67 rendezvous, which was the first rendezvous mission that the United States had ever done. There were a lot of unknowns involved and the software was becoming somewhat overdue. There was a big rush to finish that. So all of my cohorts in the office and my supervisor were busy, busy, busy twenty-four hours a day on Gemini. They told me to go off and work on Apollo navigation and guidance which was something that the software was going to be coming along, starting in a few months. They told me to get ready for that. They showed me a big stack of books and gave me a list of names and phone numbers and said goodbye [laugh]. I was pretty much self-directed for the first few months. I studied all I could on the navigation and guidance and orbital mechanics and how the computers worked and how to work with IBM to write the requirements and specifications, and how to work with the flight controllers to understand what they wanted or thought they wanted. So I started working on Apollo right off the bat and that was, again, in [19]65.
The first Apollo, Apollo One, was due to be coming up, I believe, sometime in [19]67. I did that work, with the Mission Control computers, for about nine months. At that time, the responsibility for the Apollo onboard computers was given to Lynn Dunseith. He brought in a couple of people from another organization who had been working on the Apollo onboard computers and established a small office called the Apollo Guidance Program Section, under Tom Gibson, who they brought over from Engineering.
Our responsibility was to, again, work with the astronauts and the flight controllers to establish what the onboard programs needed to do, what kind of displays the crew needed, what kind of telemetry that the ground needed from the computers, and then to work closely with MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to develop and test these programs.
That was quite an experience, because the MIT guys, and there were only about a dozen or less who were working on this, they weren’t typical computer programmers. In fact, their programming was something that came along as a necessity. What they really were, were mathematicians and physicists who had, from the beginning, worked out the equations that had to be solved in order to do the trajectory calculations and control the vehicle.
They had actually designed the computer hardware, itself, an inertial measurement unit that determined what the orientation of the vehicle was and kept track of the navigation, the onboard navigation. All the various electronics that were connected to it. So they kind of had the whole thing that they had designed, and started from a clean sheet of paper, and now they were at the point where they had to translate it into onboard code. Which they had to code in Octal, I’ll call it machine language, I guess it may be assembly language. At any rate, it wasn’t a Fortran-type language or a Unix-type language. It was almost ones and zeros. We traveled up--I spent about--for the next few years, I spent probably a third of my time in Boston, commuting back and forth to Boston. Working with these guys who were, I think most of them would almost qualify for the genius category. It was very inspiring to work with them.
At the same time, the future Apollo astronauts were making visits to MIT so they could learn about the computer and how to operate it. MIT had a small simulator, cockpit simulator, that the crew could play with the computers and learn that. So I had close contact with all those people who were working together up there. So that went on until we got the Apollo One software developed and tested.
Of course, you know that the Apollo One software, computers, never actually flew because they had the tragic fire on the launch pad there at Kennedy [Space Center, Florida]. I knew all three of the gentlemen who died in that. Not socially, but very closely from meetings at NASA and MIT. I felt pretty close to them, so that was a real low point.
But then, we kind of had to start over because they went to a new generation of computers. I mean they went from 16,000 bytes to 32,000 bytes. You know, we thought we had the world by the tail because we had all that memory to work with [laugh]. You know, now your little hand-held Atari games have a lot more capability than that. But we had to start all over with Apollo One software and rethink it and re-code it for the new hardware. We did that, and of course, the early Apollo missions were all successful. The software worked like it was supposed to.
Then came the lunar mission itself, which was very exciting. Actually, by the time they landed on the moon, I was a spectator at home, watching it on T. V. I had just, we actually finished the development, and worked up to a point where it was more maintenance. Some of my friends in the office actually sat in a little support room in the Control Center. You know, back in the back halls, and they were in communication with the, what they call the front room, the room that all the tourists see, with all the consoles and computers. So some of my friends were heavily involved in actually supporting that flight. Jack Garmon and some other guys. But I had finished that and started to work on some other programs, ASTP [Apollo-Soyoz Test Program] and other programs that involved Apollo equipment. Skylab. So, again, I was watching that. Of course, they had the excitement when the computer overloaded because they, a switch had been left on and it was trying to process some information that it didn’t need to at that point in the game and got overloaded and started giving alarms, and Jack Garman happened to be on shift at the time, and he worked closely with Steve Bales who was the onboard computer guy in the front room. And together, they figured out what, well, they and MIT were sitting back there in the Staff Support Room with Jack, and they were smart enough to figure it out in a few minutes time. I’m sure it seemed like an eternity to them, they figure out what the answer was, and said we’re still go for landing. Just, you know, to turn off that switch and the computer will restart itself. Sure enough, everything went fine. The rest of Apollo, again, I was a spectator for most of it. I watched it on the T. V., but didn’t spend a lot of time on it.
Apollo 13 was, of course, I’m sure you guys have gotten a lot of stories about Apollo 13. And again, a lot of my buddies were still working on Apollo flight support and were involved in trying to figure out what effect the loss of power would have on the computers and sending up data to correct data that might have been overwritten or compromised and checking it out and making sure all the right [unintelligible] was in there. They were worried about how well the computer flight control and stability programs would work with the lunar module being used as a source of energy to get the combined vehicles from lunar orbit. I mean from, they weren’t in lunar orbit, yet they were in a trans-lunar orbit which is in a loop around the moon, and head back in the general direction of the earth.
But there were a lot of corrective burns and burns to either reduce or increase the orbital energy to keep them on track for the right entry in the earth’s atmosphere. They weren’t sure, and the lunar module computer programs had never been fully tested for that capability because it was not an official capability. There was no conceivable mission requirement which would make it have to do that. But some of the guys at NASA and MIT, you know, they just couldn't resist the temptation to play around with it, and make it be able to do that, they thought. But since it wasn’t official, they never really, they never really checked it out. So it was largely an unknown. So we guys who knew how the computer and navigation system worked, we were all worried from that standpoint. Because there’s only a matter of a few degrees, a few degrees in angle, in entering the earth’s atmosphere, and a few miles per hour in speed, that if you miss it, you’ll either skip out of the earth’s atmosphere and never come back again, or you’ll dig in too steep and overload the heat shield on the Command Module. As it turned out, everything worked out okay. People like myself didn’t even understand the extent of the problem, other than what we heard on T. V. [laugh]. That the guys were freezing in there, and the air conditioning system wasn’t working. They didn’t have any power, and the whole NASA team just did a tremendous job of sorting that out and getting them back.
BISHOP: You said that you weren’t directly involved with the computers or the program planning at that time. What were you involved with?
KIMBALL: I was doing, for a brief time, I was doing some work on things like ASTP that involved Apollo software. The Skylab Program, I think it was called, where they had this big, this big kind of laboratory up in space that was built by Marshall Space Center [Huntsville, Alabama]. But it was the transportation to and from there, and the replacing of equipment and so forth. That was done using Apollo, it was using the Apollo with the old Apollo One [B] type boosters, not the big Saturn Fives, or Saturn Ones, or whatever they called them. But it was used as a kind of a ferry vehicle and so there was a little bit of software work to be done on that. Make sure that the docking and everything worked okay.
About early [19]70s sometime, I went to a little special office that they had set up to work on Earth Resources. Something totally unrelated to Apollo, or even related to manned space flight, for the most part. NASA, the other NASA centers, had put up some unmanned satellites that were mapping satellites and terrain recognition. They had what they call multi-spectral scanners that took pictures of the earth in different color bands and the degree of light intensity with that color band formed what they called the signature for like if you took a picture of pine trees, you could design a computer program that would look at that digital image that was sent back to the satellite. And you could take a small section that you happened to know was pine trees, and tell the computer, that’s pine trees. And it would use that as a training sample and figure out the signature of pine trees. Then it could go off and look anywhere, in the United States, for instance, and say here’s all the pine trees in the United States. Or corn, or whatever. So it was that type of information coming back from these satellites, and being a digital image, it was a huge amount of information because they formed what you might call a picture, if you can envision an eight by ten picture, or whatever size you wanted. It was roughly a thousand pixels wide by a thousand pixels high. And so, they got a million pixels in one picture. Each pixel has information about these different color bands. So you can figure that out. It was a whole bunch of bits just to process one image.
NASA got that job from NASA headquarters largely because we had the computer. We’re one of the few places that NASA had access to that had the number-crunching ability that was needed to handle this data and to process it and give the scientists displays and the ability to control the software. You know, adjust the statistics and play with it until they got it to do what they wanted. So it was a research project that needed a lot of computer power. And also, we had some spare resources at the time, people that had been freed up from Apollo and weren’t, like myself, fully loaded up with other work. So we had some people who knew how to design the computer programs. The scientists would tell us what they wanted, we could translate it into specification that we could give a software programmer. And they would program up the program.
We actually used some of the computers, the same computers, that were used in the Mission Control Center. During spare time, when they weren’t flying flights and stuff, we had access to those to develop and test the software. And it was a small office, of course, about three or four guys, headed up by Leroy Hall, who had been a prime mover in Gemini rendezvous. A real smart guy. Good guy. Good guy to work for. So I did that for about three years, and that was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun because of the science involved and my physics background kind of fit right in with it. I understood the optics involved, and the light, you know, the spectral properties of light and what they were doing. It was fun from that standpoint, and it was fun from the people we got to meet. There were some interesting people from academia, different PhDs from around the country. Jet Propulsion Lab [California] who had done a lot of work with image enhancement for their, the programs that they had done with satellites, like interplanetary and lunar surveys and things. They had done a lot of work with enhancing computer images to get, extract information from them. [We]Worked with them and Goddard [Maryland] and other centers. So we got to meet all these scientists that weren’t computer people they were researchers. It was a lot of fun. That was, other than Apollo itself, probably the most fun that I had at NASA.
We also got to meet people from other government agencies [laugh]. It was very interesting, because they had a kind of mixture of wanting to support us because they wanted, they eventually wanted to be able to use the capabilities that we developed. Like, for instance, the Department of Agriculture was interested in crop surveys. This would give them the capability to do, potentially, to do better crop surveys, much cheaper than they could by guys walking around with measuring tapes or flying over in helicopters. So they had a vested interest in wanting it to succeed, but they also had a vested interest in not wanting it to succeed so well that NASA might get into their turf, you know. So that was kind of, we had the Departments of Agriculture and Interior, I think even Urban Planning was in there so they could use it. You could look at the images and tell which ways cities were expanding and stuff like that. Working with all these agencies and kind of trying to figure out what their rules were was fun. A big education. That project was one that was intended to self-destruct. And it did, you know, for the very reason that I said. It’s not appropriate for NASA to get into the corn-counting business. That’s not their game. So it was intended to, once we got these prototypes developed and proved that they worked fairly well, that we would take the stuff and turn it over to other people. And we did that.
So by the time that was over, I started working on the Shuttle Program. Back to onboard computers again. The office I went to work for first, I guess in 1975, was under Sid Jones. It was a program office, and I’m sure if you’ve been to JSC [Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas], you know the Building One, six story building. They’re kind of headquarters for the Center there, and house all the Budget and Schedule and top management for what the different NASA organizations do. Our particular office had management responsibility for the Shuttle onboard computer. Software, initially. Not only software, but hardware. I just couldn’t work in the hard end of it. But Sid was responsible for, really, everything that they lump under the term Avionics. For the Shuttle, Avionics means the computer and everything that the computer is connected to, like the different excelerometers, and sensors and the machinery that moves the wing surfaces and engines. Really, practically everything that moves or makes the Shuttle fly falls under the term of Avionics. He was in charge of all that, but I was only in the software end of it, or primarily in the software end.
And at that time, the software development for the early Shuttle flights was really in its beginning stage. Other people had been working on it for awhile, developing this whole bookshelf full of software requirements. Which is -- requirements is just a term for a very specific language that tells what you expect the final product to be able to do. Our office was in charge of approving those requirements and doing the top-level management for getting different organizations to work together. There was the software development organization, the engineering directorate, and the flight control people. All of the people who had an interest in how the onboard system worked would lobby for their requirements and we were in the business of having to prioritize those, because everybody’s wouldn’t fit. I mean, the first set of requirements people came up with, when we finally got it to the point that IBM could look at it, and say this is how many words of memory this takes up and how much CPU [central processing unit] time it takes to do it, lo and behold, it was three times what the hardware would accomplish. So we had these periodic what we called scrubs, where we’d go and we’d have to get all these people that just dearly loved the requirements that they had put in, and just fought like hell to keep them. Everybody is, you know, it’s a contest, and we had to call the shots and say this goes in or this gets thrown out. We had these scrubs periodically because there was just more things for the computer to do than would fit. So that was a big part of the job.
BISHOP: How did that work? Did you gather everybody in one room?
KIMBALL: Yes, one big room, one big shop. Sometimes there wasn’t even a room big enough at NASA. We would go out, frequently, out to--Rockwell in Downey, California was the prime contractor for the computer itself, and for the, really, for most of the software requirements. Especially the software that controlled the Avionics hardware that was directly hardware related. They were actually responsible for writing a lot of those requirements. So we’d go out to Rockwell and sit in one of these big rooms that used to be a place where they built Mustang fighter planes or something. Just sort of a big warehouse. Chairs spread all over the place and microphones and loudspeakers. I mean, there would be two hundred people in there, all of them talking at once [laugh]. And it’s just a big negotiation process of stripping down to what you think will fit, and getting IBM to look at it, and say yes, it will fit, or it won’t fit. Of course, all of this was carefully documented, by the change control process, with Change Request forms. Those had to go to a Software Control Board and be approved or disapproved. So it was a real active process for a long time.
On one of the first major scrub teams, major scrub efforts that we had to have, when we found out that there was three times as many requirements as the computer could process, they gave Fred Haise the job of putting together this little tiger team, to come up with recommendations for how to either streamline some of the requirements where they could do the same thing or almost the same thing with less resources or to prove that you could fly the mission without them. That they were nice, but not mandatory and we could get rid of them. I was on this team for several months, that Fred Haise led up. Got to know him fairly well. He's the only astronaut that I've ever known semi-socially. For the most part, the astronauts kind of were a tight-knit group. Not too many people outside got to visit with them other than talking about work, so it was a good opportunity.
Fred was a unique individual. I'm sure everybody knows that he was on Apollo Thirteen. He survived that, so a little time after that, I forget how long, he crashed an antique airplane. He flew World War II airplanes and things as a hobby. He crash landed one and ended up upside down with gasoline all over the place and caught on fire. He had the presence of mind to cut his seat belt and get out of there. He ended up with severe burns on his legs and back and--
ELLY: Can we pause for just a second?
KIMBALL: Sure.
BISHOP: Yeah, lets--[tape reached the leader]
KIMBALL: Okay? I was talking about Fred and having an opportunity to work closely with him. And what a unique individual he was. After he survived Apollo Thirteen, I never talked to him about Apollo Thirteen, I didn't think it was appropriate to bring it up and he never volunteered. I mean, it didn't seem like it would be right to say, "by the way, Fred, how does it feel to think you're going to die [laugh]. . .
ELLY: Can we pause again? I think you might have lost your microphone.
KIMBALL: Yeah, I did. I wonder when.
[Discussion follows concerning where Mr. Elly needs Mr. Kimball to start.]
KIMBALL: I had the opportunity to work with Fred Haise on the early software scrubs. For a period of several months, quite a few hours a week. I came to appreciate what a unique individual, he had, the guy had more guts than anybody I've ever seen. On top of getting through Apollo Thirteen, and surviving that trauma, and still wanting to fly, and still wanting to be an astronaut, he crashed an antique, a World War II fighter plane of some kind, I believe, either that or an acrobatic plane. He flew stuff like that for a hobby. Ended up upside down on the runway, with gasoline pouring all over him. Caught on fire. Got severe burns over a good part of his body, especially his legs and back. They told him, Fred, you'll never fly again. Well, he proceeded to prove they were wrong. He would go out, and I mean, I didn't see this, but people told me about it. He would go out at the quarter-mile track at the high school close to where he lived. First, he would walk until he fell down from the pain and couldn't stand it anymore. Then, he would get up and walk. Then, he progressed to where he was jogging. He would jog until he pain knocked him down. Then he would lie there till he could get up. He just forced himself back into shape. He ended up re-qualifying as an astronaut. Flying on, I believe, the first Shuttle flight. The glide flight. Where they dropped it from a large airplane, a converted 747, and flew down and landed at Downey, California. Anyway, I always thought it was amazing that a guy could make that comeback. I really appreciated working with him. Later on, he left NASA and went to work for Grumman [Technical Services, Inc., Titusville, Florida], and I haven't seen him in a long time. That's a good memory.
I continued working on the Shuttle onboard software until the time I retired. It went through different phases. Then, later on, probably after Sid Jones left the office, and several people headed that office. I won't go through the sequence of them. The office all ended up with the responsibility for program-wide shuttle software, which meant Kennedy [Florida] and Marshall Centers as well as the Johnson Center and onboard software. In most cases, for onboard software, we were very intimately involved with the technical details. For the other software, we were just responsible to see that they had the right levels of documentation and the right kind of procedures in place that met the standards for the development of critical software. To verify to a millionth of a percent that it was going to work like it was supposed to. Because if it didn't, it could do serious damage and kill somebody. It was an interesting job, working with these different centers and sharing with them our experience in developing critical software, and seeing which things about that applied to the environment that they worked in. I continued to do that until I retired. It was mostly very interesting work.
You know, there's one thing I'd like to go back to. In talking about--all this has been personal history. It's probably pretty standard stuff. But there's one aspect of my job, or of NASA in general, that I don't know how many people have talked about. That was the trauma that set in after Apollo. As I said before, during Apollo, the environment was very fast, and fairly unconstrained by budgets. The rule was, it's easier to get forgiveness than it is to get permission. So what that meant was if you saw something that you knew needed to be done, you'd check it out with your boss verbally and say look, I think this needs to be done. Most often, he would say well, go off and do what it takes to get it done, just don't screw up. So you could go off and bend the rules. In fact, there weren't any written rules. I mean, somebody had them somewhere, but you never even looked at the rules. You just went and did what you thought was right. Get the job done as quick as you can for the least amount of money, and make damn sure it worked right. If you were successful, you were fine. If you messed up, your career was probably going to go into pause for awhile. But that environment not only nurtured but encouraged people who were what you might call eccentrics. One of a kind individuals. Free wheelers, freethinkers. Smart guys, you know? But crazy. Crazy as hell, some of them. Fun crazy, good crazy, but still crazy. So you had this whole environment during Apollo, with that. Go do the job and forget about rules and regulations. Throw the book away, just go do it [laugh]. Splashdown parties, and all during this time, the flight controllers and everybody else were working, routinely, sixty, seventy-hour weeks. It was emergency all the time, every day. They were running on adrenaline. All of us were living on adrenaline.
When Apollo, after the lunar landing, and then especially after Apollo Thirteen, it became a little bit more routine. The public kind of lost interest. When the public loses interest, Congress loses interest. So all of the sudden, your kind of working in a vacuum. Not only that. There's just not as much to do as there used to be. It gets to be a routine job. And guys started dropping like flies. When the adrenaline wore off, there were heart attacks, ulcers, nervous breakdowns, divorces. This is all subjective, you know. Some people at NASA might have had a different observation. But I think if you could go back and talk to all the social workers in the area and the doctors and divorce lawyers, that the statistics would bear me out. Everything would show a big peak coming about early 1970s [laugh].
I was lucky in that I kind of rode that. That was during the period I had the special assignment with Earth Resources. So I kind of got put off to the sidelines, which was good, because I was insulated from that kind of talk. But a lot of guys really had it hard. Then, on top of that, the whole NASA culture changed from forget the book to the new rule, by the book by God. And if the book didn't work, you'd just write a bigger book. That was the solution. More rules, more regulations would fix everything. Write it. Everything in writing. Go through five levels of management to get some little, dinky thing done. And a whole different breed of managers took over. Some of the Apollo managers like, notably, like Gene Kranz and Chris Kraft, made the transition fine. They became super managers in this new environment. There were other people who became managers who would not have become managers in the Apollo environment because they were more back row types. The guys who liked to do things by the rules and more conservative. They kind of rose to the top, and the guys who were golden-boys in Apollo, a lot of these crazy guys, kind of got, they didn't fit anymore. So they were in this environment where they were working for the guy who they were used to seeing sit in the back row and not say anything. All the sudden, he's their boss, and they feel like they're more qualified than he is. There was a lot of, from friends and acquaintances, I know there was a lot of personal discontent.
But it is to NASA's credit that they rode that out without any loss in quality or performance. These guys, even though they were unhappy, they gutted it out and they did not let their standards be compromised. NASA's tradition of excellence that they're so proud of continued through that time. After a couple of years, things settled out, and there was, the guys who just couldn't stand it went other places. The guys who stayed adapted to it. People settled into this new, more routine type of work environment. But nobody ever forgot how it felt to be in Apollo if they'd ever been there. And there will probably never be anything like that again. NASA, the kind of guys that went through Apollo, and some of whom NASA still has, are the type of guys who only really thrive when they're breaking frontiers. Doing something new. They're not happy running an airline.
Which is what you have when you've got a shuttle that's all built and developed and working. You just sit in the Mission Control Center looking at data, and then planning for the next mission. It's just like running an airline, except more complicated. There are guys who do well at that, and like that, but there are others who don't.
I hate for NASA to lose those guys. You know, they need, Spacelab maybe brings a little bit of breath of fresh air into it, but I'm not, I never was closely involved in it. Had some friends who went from Shuttle work over to Spacelab work. I don't think it will stay exciting for very long because it's still going around and around the earth, and nothing. There's going to be a lot of good science and things like that, but my type of guy does not get a chance to work in a medical experiment. That's somebody else's excitement. NASA really needs something new to come along periodically, to keep that fire burning. Unfortunately, I think there will be a long time, if ever, before we send men to Mars, because there are so many obstacles and the cost is so high. And it's real hard to figure out a reason why to do it. I mean, that's the key thing. You'd have to. There was a, the reason for going to the wasn't to pick up rocks and bring them back. The reason for going to the moon was to beat the Russians to the moon. That's what the guy on the street was excited about. And that excitement, I mean, we personally thought about beating the Russians some, but that wasn't at the top of our minds. But all that excitement trickled down to the budget and the schedule. The Russians are not trying to go to Mars, so there's nobody to beat going to Mars. And going to Mars and picking up rocks just didn't get it.
They need to fly a lot of unmanned survey missions to find something on Mars that's a reason to go there. Like maybe there's a big reserve of underground ice,or maybe there’s some special mineral resources that would give the opportunity for a few people to go colonize it. Although, colonizing Mars is not, nobody should get the idea it's like colonizing Australia, where you take all your convict and send them there. It's just too expensive. Nobody's ever going to live there for very long and that's certainly not going to be the solution to Earth's overpopulation problems [laugh]. And for better or worse, NASA and Johnson Space Center had bet heavily on the assignment of manned space flight. That has been a blessing in the past. It could be a curse in the future because of the fact that it's so expensive. It costs so much more to send a couple of guys to Mars than it does to send a very smart robot. And robots are getting smarter and smarter all the time. I guess one of these days, NASA will have to make the decision whether to get really excited about the unmanned stuff, or not. They do a lot of good stuff now in JPL [Jet Propulsion Lab, California] and some of the other centers. They do wonderful things. But when it come to budget discussions, they're catching the crumbs that fall off the table. But for the foreseeable future, I kind of think that's where the new science and the new frontier is, is in robotics. Maybe NASA will get into the spirit of that.
As much as I love manned space flight, it's just going to be real hard to keep an interest in it. I don't even watch it anymore when the Shuttle lifts off or pay too much attention to what's going on in orbit. Unless they're doing something new, like the first people to go up and power up Spacelab and actually live there. Or some of the Mir flights, that was real interesting, watching them then. But for the most part, I know it's happening, and I pray that they'll be safe, and get back safe, and wish the best for them, but I would rather read a good book than watch it on T. V. I'm sure most people are the same way. Some young people, like my sixteen-year-old grandson just follows everything that happens in space. I'm sure there are a lot of young people that are excited just because it's happening. But probably not enough of them are. And they're too young to pay taxes. So that by the time they get old enough and busy enough and working hard to pay taxes, they're probably going to lose interest. That's kind of my story. I didn't mean to end it on a down note, because to have, in my twenty-nine career years, for at least twenty-six of those years, I just wouldn't have been anywhere else for anything. I loved going to work everyday. Three years, kind of so-so. That's not a bad lifetime average for a career. I'll take that and run with it. I'm real proud of NASA, and proud to have worked for NASA and all the good people I met there. I'd love to go back there sometime and visit and talk to the guys. Right now, I'm busy and happy with what I've got here in Texas, in the Hill Country. That's kind of the end unless you have any questions. I'd be glad, you know. I hope I haven't screwed up too bad. I'm camera-shy and I've got a speech defect, but other than that, I'm ready for prime time [laugh]. So any question you have, ask. Otherwise, I'm through talking.
BISHOP: Just one more. You did work for NASA for twenty-nine years. What is the one memory, either good or bad, that stands out in your mind during your time there? When you think of NASA, what do you think of?
KIMBALL: The two best memories I have are, number one, working on Apollo with these brilliant guys from NASA and MIT and industry. Really a mentally stimulating and challenging environment. Second best thing was with, oddly enough, the work on the Earth Resources Program. Which was kind of a scientific research thing and was able to bring back some of my scientific background more so than the space stuff did.
My worst memory, of course, I've already talked about the Apollo One fire, that was certainly a bad one. But maybe my worst one is the Challenger disaster, because when that happened, I was in a critical care unit in the hospital in Houston. I'd had an almost ruptured pancreas and was in very bad condition. On painkillers, kind of half-dozing. Marilyn came and told me it had happened, and I just couldn't absorb it. Then turned the T. V. on, and they showed the scene. The fireworks scene. Well, I had to live through that about four or five different times because every time it would go away, and I would think it was a bad dream that did not really happen. Then I'd have to see it on T. V. and relive it again. So that was really a traumatic time. Traumatic not being there to share the suffering with my buddies at work. Because I knew what they were going through. Even though the computer system wasn't part of it, wasn't implicated. Everybody who worked on the computer system, I know from talking to them later, when it first happened, their first thought was [laugh] please, God, don't let it be us. Really. Because it could, the way the thing tumbled and went could be a symptom of the whole computer system going haywire. It had the capability to tear the vehicle up if the software wasn't right. So for a few hours, everybody was, on top of the grief, there was a concern that maybe they had done something wrong. I guess for, by the time I got back, I was in the hospital for three months. I got back to work in late April of that year, [19]86, and people were still recovering from the shock. But it had, most of the worst had already happened. I really hated being off. I mean, there was nothing anybody could do after it happened, but it was just a desire to be back there and share it with somebody. It was hard then, stuck off in the hospital. I knew some of the people, Judy Resnick and all the crew. I knew some of them from meetings. I had never had spoken much personally with them, but just across the conference table. It was enough that they were a part of my daily life. To know that they weren't there anymore, and what had happened, was traumatic. So those are two real high and two real low points.
BISHOP: Thank you very much Mr. Garner
ELLY: Ah, Mr. Kimball.
BISHOP: [laugh], Mr. Kimball.
KIMBALL: That's okay [laugh]. Long as you really got to start dropping the Mister part and call me either Garner or Kimball. It doesn't matter.
BISHOP: There you go [laugh]. Thank you very much. I appreciate you time.
KIMBALL: You're welcome.