NASA Lake, Michael - May 31, 2000
Interview with Michael Lake
Interviewer: Patrick Hogan
Date of Interview: May 31, 2000
Location: Lake home, Austin, Texas
HOGAN: Today is May 31, the year 2000. This oral history with Michael K. Lake is being conducted at 800 West 38th Street, the home of the interviewee, in Austin, Texas. The interview is being conducted for the NASA/Johnson Space Center Oral History Project in conjunction with Southwest Texas State University, History Department by graduate student Patrick J. Hogan Jr.
HOGAN: Sir you are not a native Texan?
LAKE: No, I was born in Whittier, California.
HOGAN: Where did you attend college?
LAKE: I went through the Naval Academy and graduated in 1949. Then I went to the University of Texas and graduated in1958, aeronautical engineering.
HOGAN: And you received your masters at UT?
LAKE: Two Bachelors.
HOGAN: What made you decide on UT-Austin?
LAKE: I was stationed in Texas, in Beeville, when I decided to get out of the Navy. And I qualified as a native Texan, as a resident, with cheap tuition so it fell to going to school here. And UT has a pretty good engineering school and I wanted to get my degree in aeronautical engineering because that kind of follows with being a pilot.
HOGAN: Why did you pick the Naval Academy?
LAKE: I think prestige was one thing. Prestige meant something to me back then. Free education and I wanted to make the Navy a career, I thought.
HOGAN: When did you know you wanted to study aeronautical engineering?
LAKE: When I got sent to places that I didn't really want to be in and they would send you to duty station because you were a bachelor that they wouldn't send families because of the harsh living conditions. I thought, gee, that’s not a reason. So I kind of decided it was time to get out. And that’s a dangerous job – flying off an aircraft carrier is a little dangerous. A lot of my contemporaries are just not around anymore.
HOGAN: How or when did you decide to pursue a job with NASA and the Johnson Space Center?
LAKE: When I got my second degree I went to work in Oklahoma City for the Federal Aviation Agency. And I had a good friend there, who moved to Houston to the Space Center and he said why don't you come down and join us. I said it sounded good because it was new, where things were happening, and brand-new stuff. And it just sounded like a great place to go.
HOGAN: It sounds like your experience in the Navy may have prepared you for what you wanted to do career-wise.
LAKE: It did indeed. Those qualifications were what they were looking for. They were looking for people that who could say they were operationally oriented. That means your not a bookworm. You've done things with airplanes and operations is the key word with those guys down there. You put operations in your resume and, bang, you get hired in that particular area where the flight crew is.
HOGAN: What program did you begin with at NASA?
LAKE: First, simulation. We worked in simulations and I was an aerospace engineer, that was my title. And I joined MSC, that's the Manned Spacecraft Center, in 1964. And from 1964 to 1974, I was in the flight crew operations directorate. That's where the astronauts are. And I worked totally, completely on the Apollo program. Nothing else. No Gemini or anything. And that included not only in the Moon landing, but Skylab and ASTP, which is the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project that was in mission with the Russians. And the reason I was on those is that they used the same hardware that the Apollo program did.
I transferred to the engineering directorate in 1974 and was there until 1979 on the Shuttle program and I retired in 1979. Behind you are two photographs of the Enterprise. The first one is signed by the astronauts and that was completely unexpected. I didn't think they'd do this for me, but they did. The second one they do for everybody, that's your office guys. So it was really kind of an honor that they did that. So I retired in 1979. And I might mention the organization down there as – a directorate is the big group. The director of a directorate is right under the Center director and within a directorate are divisions, branches, sections, offices. So the big breakdown is the directorate and you may move around with that, within that directorate, your under the big guy still.
HOGAN: Why were you solely working on the Apollo program?
LAKE: Apollo, that's were I was assigned to and we did a little bit of Gemini stuff. Gemini was in progress at this time and the real purpose of Gemini was to prove rendezvous and docking. Each one of these missions had programs, had a purpose, and the main purpose of Gemini was, Gemini being twins, two people, two people on board, was rendezvous docking. That's what they were proving because in Apollo you have to do this. We'll get into that. You have to do that, and Gemini proved that.
But people were assigned to projects. I mean you weren't a Jack of all trades. You had to specialize in something. That's where they wanted you and they put me on the Apollo program. So I didn't touch Gemini or Mercury at all.
HOGAN: What did you specifically do preparing for the Apollo program?
LAKE: I was an operational person. That's what they were really looking for. My first job was in simulation in support of the LEM [Lunar Excursion Module] lunar landing. LEM is the LM Lunar Module. And the simulation we were looking at was manual control, landing maneuver, using an out the window visual reference, not cockpit, but out the window. And we used a helicopter at Ellington Field. And we had a NASA pilot. NASA has an organization of pilots, not the astronauts, but the pilots that fly the NASA aircraft, the executives that go to Washington for meetings. So we had a NASA pilot, good friend of mine, in the left seat and I was in the right seat. And we had a target on the ground, a canvas X on the ground. And the pilot was directed to hold a specific altitude and he used his altimeter to do that. We picked fifty feet, a hundred feet, two hundred feet above the ground. And the pilot was directed to hover over that target on the ground. And the hover maneuver is pretty much what your doing on the lunar landing, pretty much the same thing. Hover means your right above something that you want to be above, and your lateral velocity is your velocities across the ground or as low as you can make them, which is what you want on the lunar landing.
So when the pilot say’s I'm going to hover now and I'm as good as I'm going to get you call out mark. And we had cameras trained on the helicopter, high speed cameras so we could measure not only position, but we could measure velocity and we would measure how close he was to zero. And the engineers were interested in this so we would pass this on to the engineers. And off course as you might suspect as the altitude increases, the hovered degraded, the higher you get, of course, the less you can do this. But the engineers want this information so they can build the gears strong enough. This was all test stuff and you pass this on to the engineers, the guys who were really designing things. Test work, it was all test work, you see.
The next thing we did was lunar landing simulation with cockpit displays. And this is a fixed space sitting in a chair with hand controllers and display. The display was two cross pointers on the Lunar Module panel and the vertical cross pointer was velocity or position left and right. And the horizontal needle was horizontal position backwards and forwards or velocity when you were selecting one. Now the computers that we had that in those days didn't have a lot of capacity compared to what they have now. And the information they had on those needles was not continuous. When you drive your Camry, you got a speedometer and you got a read out of how fast your going all the time, right? But that didn't happen on the Lunar Module. You have sampling rate and the computer would update the information on those needles and then you didn't see anything. And the sampling rate we looked at first was once per second. Didn't work. Its just not fast enough. And we would try that once for half a second and then ten times a second, once every tenth to a second, and that's the only thing we could live with.
Well, that takes space from someone else. We've got one computer and if you use tens times as much as they wanted you to use, why that means that somebody else, something has got to give. That's one of the things we looked at was this discreet update of displays.
And another thing, along the same line, was the sampling rate on a hand control. You got a rotational hand controller that controls your attitude. And you got a translation control that controls your translation velocity. And the same thing was happening with the controllers. The computer was limited, and it would sample a position of that hand controller every discreet period of time. When you make a correction on the needle, move the hand control out of detent and then you move the controller back into detent, if the computer wasn't working at that time, nothing happened. So you had two things that were working against you because of the limitations of the computer. And that's what we looked at on that simulation: sampling rate of the controllers and update rate of the displays.
HOGAN: What you were doing here, your career in the Navy, did this help?
LAKE: Yes it sure did. I think operational people look at things a little bit differently. They look at what you have to do, the job you have to do. Can you do it with what you got? When you put too much icing on the cake it makes something that'll break. So you want something that'll do the job and that's it. And when you’re looking at sampling rate, you don't care about the computer. You don’t care. If it doesn't work right, you make it work right because I can't land this thing with an update rate of once per second. I can't fly this thing if you want me looking at my hand controller once per second. You fix it. Well the engineer would say you got to live with that. And I’d say no I don't. So you look at things differently. You look at things a little differently. You look at a mission you have to do and you have to have something that you can do it with.
HOGAN: What was next in line?
LAKE: We made a lot of trips to North American Rockwell in Downey, California. North American builds the Command Service Module. The Command Service Module is the one that the three guys are in. And the Service Module is the big propulsion system behind them that's attached to it called the CSM together or the Command Module, CM, or the Service Module, SM, if there separate. And the maneuvering unit of the Command Service Module was called the stabilization and control system, SCS. Stabilization, holding an attitude. Control, maneuvering to some other attitude. And you had a bunch of gyros and electronics in the thrusters out there.
And we looked at failure. Somebody must have said were going to have failures because we looked at failures very much. A lot of time, gyros failed, a thruster failed to open – that's a tough one. Your sitting there, you don't know something's wrong. So how do recognize? What's wrong? And you have something that you can do for a backup. Now you have a lot of redundancy in the program. You got things, rate gyro fails, you got a back up that you can use. Sometimes that back up though drives [inaudible], you don't have anymore because you've used it now to replace a failed gyro. Things like this were handled.
So you have to recognize a failure. You tell the guy in the control room would say we have a rate gyro failure and I'm switching to the back up and the guy says fine. We have these kind of failures that you studied to death. We just really spent a lot of time on failures.
We also went to Minneapolis Honeywell a lot, that's Minneapolis, Minnesota. And they were running the same kind of simulations of stabilization and control system failures. And sometimes you get two failures. This really complicates things when you got two things going wrong. And we spent a lot of time on this failure analysis, a lot of time. Somebody, the managers must have said, we got to look at this very carefully and we did.
When we would get back to the office, we’d write a little trip report. We went somewhere. We figured somebody ought to know what we did so we'd write up this little trip report and always send a copy to the astronauts because they were always interested in this. Anytime you do man in the simulation, they’re interested in it. And a lot of times, they couldn't make these trips because they had commitments to do other things. So we kind of helped them out that way in that regard with traveling and seeing things. They didn't have time to do all or lower priority things.
We would go to MIT [ Military Institute of Technology], Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT made the primary guidance. Sharp guys up there. They wrote the equations and the hardware that goes with the guidance. We have an inertial measurement unit, IMU, that has gyros and accelerometers in it. Gyros measure your test position, accelerometers measure any movement in the axis. You had an SCT, a scanning telescope. These were optical instruments. And you had an SXT, a sextant, which is like the telescope only a much narrower field of view, much more precise.
In the computer memory on the on-board Command Module, there is a computer memory of the 37 Apollo stars. There are thirty-seven stars in the heavens and there in the computer in terms of declination and right ascension, that's the coordinate for a star system. And the number of a star, one through thirty-seven. And these stars are kind of selected more for coverage than recognizability. You don't have the luxury of stepping out and looking at Orion. Do you know anything about stars?
HOGAN: No
LAKE: Big Dipper. You have Little [and] Big Dipper. But there are certain parts of the sky where there are very few stars, but you may be pointed that way. It takes two stars to determine where you are and you have to, I mean a poor part of the sky, you have to make the stars out of a nova, rather than the bright one's. So they pick more for coverage than for recognizability. You have one there and one here and one over there and so forth. And believe it or not, some of these stars move enough that occasionally they would update, MIT would update the coordinates of a star. And you think of the stars, there it is. But some of these that are close to us have apparent motions that’s enough to change that coordinate in the computers. So we would update it.
Back in 1967, we had a very unfortunate fire on the pad at Cape Kennedy [Florida] where three astronauts were killed [Apollo 1 fire]. Back in 1967, we had a very disastrous a fire on the pad in the Command Module of the first Apollo and three astronauts were killed. Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee, who was a good friend of mine, and Ed White. And somebody at NASA got the idea of naming stars after these guys. Now a star is usually a Greek letter plus the constellation. You got Alpha Orion, that's what you call that star. Sometimes it has a popular name like Polaris. So there are three stars in the thirty-seven that didn't have names. So we went to the, or somebody did at NASA, went to this international committee that named stars. When you find a new comet, these guys give it an official name or a moon around Uranus, when we find something.
And the three stars that actually have the names of these astronauts. It’s still there and they’re official and they’re recognized. Gus Grissom’s first name was [Virgil] Ivan. There's a star out in the sky called Navi. That's Ivan backwards. Roger Chaffee, there's a star out there called Regor. That's Roger backwards. There's a star up there called Dnoces. Ed White was Ed White the II. Dnoces is second backwards. And these are in the catalog. These stars are up there. I thought that was kind of [a] nice gesture to do this.
HOGAN: You mentioned that you were good friends with one of the astronauts?
LAKE: Roger Chaffee and I would make these trips to Minneapolis that I talked about. He was interested in what was going on up there.
HOGAN: How often did you interact with the astronauts?
LAKE: Not a whole lot. Officially yeah. But socially, they were a distinct separate group. They kind of maintained like the loyalty in England. That's a bad example. But they had their group and that was that. They were very much into their own group. And they related to other people in the business sense, but socially not so much. But some of them did.
HOGAN: What was next on your program?
LAKE: We’re still back at MIT now. We talked about the three stars that are names after the astronauts. Now when you first power off your IMU, that's your inertia measurement, unit, you have to tell the computer where you are. It doesn't know. And the way to tell it is you make two star sights, so I just mentioned. You find the star centered in the sexton, push a button, and then you enter the star code, one through thirty-seven. The computer says, well you marked down Regor. Do the same thing for Dnoces. Put the button, mark it, and then enter that number for Dnoces. Did you mark the right stars? You tell the computer to drive to a third star. And you tell it to move to that star. And you tell the computer to do that and you drive the telescope and the sextant run, you look in the eye piece and you better see that star. Because if you didn't, something's wrong. That's your check.
And as long as the IMU is powered up, and it usually is, you have a little bit of drift even though these are very precise instruments. You still have a little bit of drift precession and you'll have to update that IMU. And you look, you call for a star sight, you can look in the sexton, it moved over a little bit. Mark it again. So it’s easy after that. But on Apollo 13, for example. You remember Apollo 13?
HOGAN: Yes, I do.
LAKE: Okay, on Apollo 13 of course, that was the aborted landing. The astronauts had to power down everything. They were running out of power. Did you see the movie?
HOGAN: Yes sir.
LAKE: The movie was good. That was a good movie. NASA blesses that movie. A lot of them, NASA does not bless, but NASA blesses that one.
HOGAN: So it was historically correct?
LAKE: Pretty much so, yeah, petty much so. You remember the sequence where they show the instruments exploding in the Command Module?
HOGAN: Yes
LAKE: That couldn't happen. But that was a dream I think. He was dreaming, wasn't he?
HOGAN: I don't recall.
LAKE: I don't recall either. But these were all servos. They’re electrically driven instruments in the Command Module. They couldn't explode. They couldn't. If they were real gages, then they probably could. But I'm not so sure that that’s really an error. I think he was just dreaming something that happened, and it really did happen. It really did happen. I thought Apollo 13 was very well done.
You know a case in point on Apollo 13, the managers tried to play that down because it represented a failure. But really it was NASA's finest hour because they brought three guys back, using stuff that nobody ever thought they were going to do and what they were going to do.
HOGAN: While this was all happening, Apollo 13, where were you?
LAKE: We were running simulations. We were doing something with the Command Module propulsion that you would never do in a real flight. That is you'd be firing the Lunar Module engines with the Command Module attached. You never do this. You’re using the Lunar Module propulsion system to bring the Command Module back home. You never do this. The Lunar Module propulsion system is to power the Lunar Module – period. So, when you put the Command Service Module sitting on top of it here, the Service Module, you’re imposing stresses in the control that you never do. It was never designed that way. So we ran simulations to see if it worked.
HOGAN: Did you have time to know what was going on with Apollo 13?
LAKE: Not so much. Not so much. Not so much. No. Not so much.
Now we mark on the stars and the computer knows where we are. We update as the computer drifts. If we power down like we did in Apollo 13, when you bring the IMU back up again, you have to go through the sequence all over again.
Star recognition. You got to recognize these stars, so we went to classes. And there were classes conducted at Burke Baker Planetarium in Houston in Hermann Park and Morehead Planetarium at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. And the astronauts participated in them and we did too. And the astronomers would say well tell us how do you recognize a star when you can't see anything else? About five degrees field of view and they had little blinders that they gave us. And recognize Dnoces. How do you find Dnoce? That's pretty hard. That’s pretty hard.
Stars have colors, that helps. Spica is white. Antares is red. Arturus is yellow. But a lot of them are just plain old stars sitting up there. How do you recognize them? So we spent a lot of time there in the planetarium, learning stars. Because you had to know this.
HOGAN: Sounds like you could have a minor in astronomy?
LAKE: I thought it was pretty interesting because astronomy is kind of a hobby of mine. Astronauts are so competitive. It’s funny watching, even there, they strived to be the first guy to recognize the stars. Very competitive bunch of guys, very competitive. Friendly, but competitive.
Next is docking. In the Apollo program, there are two docking maneuvers. On the way to the Moon, it’s called transposition and docking. The active Command Service Module docks with the Lunar Module. Pass it and they continue on to the Moon.
Lifting off from the Moon, there's a maneuver called lunar orbit rendezvous and docking. That's for the active LEM, lifts off, and docks with the passive Command Module. So you have two separate docking maneuvers. You got the same docking ring, but in one case, one ship is the active and the other is the target. And in the second one, it’s just the other way around, backwards. In our system, docking is always a manual maneuver. It’s just too tight. Like driving you car in the garage, when you got no clearance. There’s too much that can go wrong, dangerously. Our system, the American space program, this is one of those things that is a manual maneuver – period.
Now the Russian idea is that the human being is just along for the ride. And why they do this, I don't know because he's not doing anything. But our system is that the astronaut is a part of the control system. He's a part of it. And why this philosophy is so different, I don't have an idea.
HOGAN: You mentioned the Russians. How much of what you were doing was competing versus the Russians as far as the Cold War was concerned and trying to get ahead?
LAKE: I was in school here [The University of Texas at Austin] in 1958 and, in 1958, there was something that went over the sky and it was going beep, beep, beep, and it was Sputnik I. And when I was trying to interview for a job, getting my degree here, nobody talked to me, nobody. Very tough job market. Beep, beep, beep went over and I had so many offers, job offers, that it was funny. So almost overnight, there was a reversal in the complacency in this country that we were the best. Hah. It turns out, we were the best, but we just weren't doing the public relations type stuff that the Russians were doing. And when that Sputnik went over head, it changed overnight the philosophy of this whole country. We’re falling behind. Something wrong here. So that, one event I think, is what started everything. It was, that was Sputnik I.
HOGAN: When we finally made it to the Moon in 1969, were you able, unlike Apollo 13, to enjoy that, to realize what you had accomplished?
LAKE: I think so, yeah, I think so. We all had a part. You know back in those days there was very little office politics, very little back stabbing because everybody had a job. And you did your job and you were kind of happy when you did it right. There was very little politicking, very little back stabbing.
HOGAN: What kind of job pressure was there?
LAKE: Very intense. And certainly, when I get into some of this stuff, there was a lot of stuff that had to be done right then. There was one job in particular, that I’m going to talk about when we get to it, that was a high pressure.
Okay, docking maneuver is always manual in the American program. And if you recall not too long ago, the Russians sent up a cargo spacecraft to the Russian space station and it crashed into it. That was an automatic maneuver because that was their way. And the guys watched this coming in and there wasn’t anything they could do about it because it was an automatic maneuver. We don't do that and that proves that we’re right. That proves that we’re right. We do it our way and nothing gets broken. They do it their way and bang.
We did Command Service Module active docking at North American Rockwell and Downey [California] and that’s where the transposition and docking maneuver, where the Command Service Module is active. And you have a Lunar Module target and it’s a manual maneuver, manual control. You had a stand-off cross on the Lunar Module, that's just maybe a foot in diameter across that’s mounted on a pole and you look at that and you can tell kind of where you are coming in. Don’t look at the docking face because you can't see it. So you look at this cross and if your on, the docking interface is on too.
In the window you have what is called a crewman optical alignment sight, COAS, C-O-A-S. It’s like a telescopic sight on a fire arm. Very simple thing. When you need it, you put it up there, and when you don't need it, you just put it back, and you come in and dock with the target as gently as you can. Zero error is as much as you can, zero your errors. And you read those in conditions. And you send those in conditions. So the engineers because they have to build this stuff strong enough for the worst pilot. So the end conditions are what you really look at because the hardware has to stand this impact. Of course its always a manual maneuver.
The second docking is the lunar orbit and rendezvous docking, from the LEM lifts off from the surface and the CSM is orbiting the Moon. And the Lunar Module is active for that. And we did that at Langley Research Center in Virginia. And we had a full-scale moving base simulation. This wasn't sitting at a desk like we are. This was a full-scale spacecraft and a full-scale target and fifty feet to go to it. And we did this in an aircraft hanger that they moved the planes out of, of course. And you have an overhead crane in the hanger that moved things around and they suspended a Lunar Module cockpit with wires and pulleys from this crane. So you could move this crane left and right and backward and forward and up and down with the cables, moved the Lunar Module, up and down with the cables. And you were doing all this in the cockpit. You were moving this crane around and it was really what you were doing.
And they had the mockup in gimbals, so that you could do the rotational. So you had six degrees of freedom for each translation and three, rotation. And we got in the Lunar Module and now, instead of looking out ahead, like you are for landing, you looking over your head because that’s where the docking hatch is. And you’ve got a window up there. Like the controllers are here and the window is up there.
And I got in that simulator, and I was all over the place. I was all over the place. I said, what's wrong? [They] said, well I don't know. So I said, get me out of here. So they got me out of there and I sat and looked at that simulator and I figured out exactly what I was doing wrong.
Normally you looking out ahead, right? Well, when you turned up, turned into the parking lot here, you were essentially doing a yaw maneuver. When you turn your car steering wheel, you’re doing a yaw maneuver. What would it look like if looked out the sunroof? It would look like a roll maneuver, wouldn’t it?
HOGAN: Certainly.
LAKE: By the same token if you did a roll maneuver, of course you’re not going to do this in your Camry, but if you did a roll maneuver and you looked out overhead in the sunroof, it would look like yaw. Pitch is the same. We drove up the ramp, right? That's pitch. You look out ahead, it’s pitch. You look overhead, it’s still pitch. So you had logic reversal in roll to yaw and yaw to roll, pitch was the same. And that's what the problem was.
And everybody had that same problem. They get in this thing, they bang around for a while. And they said, what's going on here? Because your not use to this and this. And the engineers actually thought about putting a switch in the cockpit that would change that logic, so it would be like you expect it to be. And the astronauts said, no, we can train for that and they did and I did. I got in that simulation that afternoon. No problem. Piece of cake.
And again, you had a cross on the Command Module. On the wall they had a mock-up of the Command Module on the wall with a stand-off cross and the COAS again. And you drove up to fifty feet or so, something like that, and they'd give your failures and so forth. And then you would measure that end condition because that's the same docking plane, just a different vehicle. It was active now. And the engineers say, we got to build this thing strong enough to withstand that impact.
But the reversal in the control system logic was something that got everybody. It got everybody because you don't, you don’t expect that. If you could take your controller and do this, then you might not have a problem. But the controllers [is] here and you’re this. And you have that reversal in logic that kind of trips you up. That does that on the second docking maneuver.
My last job at FCOD, Flight Crew Operations Directorate, was probably the most important job I had. The crew in the space craft, they have check lists. They have a check list for launch. They have a check list for rendezvous or docking, like we just talked about, and reentry. And I was the reentry check list book manager for the Apollo program.
And this check list is by itself. If you had them all together you'd have something as big as the phone book. So each particular mission phase had a separate check list and you pull it up. What ties these check list together is with the flight plan. The flight plan has a time line, minute to minute to minute of what you’re doing. And here, it says pull out the entry check list because that's when your stuff is coming up. And the check list is strictly the crew. That's their baby. Nobody touches it. The managers don't monkey with it. They monkey with everything else but they don't touch that.
So the book manager, and I was a book manager for the entry check list, he is responsible for that book. The accuracy of it. The changes that are made. He is responsible for making sure those changes get in and republished. Type-o errors, you [are] always checking for that. Accuracy is absolutely essential and every time these guys get in a simulator, now we’re down the line in the program, we’re not looking at simulation failures anymore. We’re training now. End of the game there is training.
And every time these guys would get in the simulator, they'd change the check list. You just had to live with that. They would change it. They say, Mike do this, do that. And Mike would do this and do that. And there's only one person that was allowed to do that and that's the book manager because you don't want a cast of thousands making changes to the check list because something might get in there or might get in there wrong.
So every time these guys got in the simulator, there were changes to make. If a launch slipped, and they usually do, you get bad weather or something breaks and they have to fix it, a lot of times that will change the check list. So you have two things that change the check list, the crew and the simulators because they train and they want certain steps in there and change the wording or whatever. And then if the launch date slips well some of your operations are dependent on the date.
HOGAN: What year were you working on this?
LAKE: This was right at the end, maybe 1974, ’70 to ’74, yeah.
HOGAN: And then after ‘74 you were there for another five years in the Shuttle program?
LAKE: And then I transferred over to the Shuttle. I think it covered everything there. So now we move over to the Shuttle and that's the Engineering Directorate. I'm leaving the Flight Crew Operations Directorate for the Engineering Directorate in 1974.
I was assigned to a facility called the SAIL facility. NASA's great on acronyms. And the SAIL facility stands for Shuttle Avionics Integration Laboratory. It’s the electronics, making them all work together, integration, and it’s a laboratory sitting in the computer room.
In the laboratory are all the orbiter black boxes. All the computers. The cockpit is complete. It’s a real cockpit. This is real stuff now. This isn't simulated. We have the actuators come in the lab that move the aerodynamic surfaces, move the flap, move the L-arm, the ruder. The harnesses that connect these black boxes are the same ones that are in the actual Shuttle and the position of these boxes is the same as it would be in the Shuttle in case they interacted with each other. You know, you turn on you electric razor and it messes up the TV or something.
And all this stuff was flight qualified. That means it went through all the rigorous quality control procedure – cockpit, the actuators, everything. And a stamp on it of flight qualified. It was the real stuff. Real stuff. And the reason we did that, we could simulate the environment in our laboratory. We could fool the spacecraft into thinking it was somewhere else. And that enabled us to run the software and the hardware, on the hardword and make sure that everything worked. We had the real stuff there now. Real programs, real hardware. And you'd see if things worked together.
And what we used for a test plan was the contract. The test plan or that test facility was the contract with North American Rockwell and NASA agreed to. Step by step by step. NASA says, we want the orbiter to do this, we want the ruder to move at five degrees per second. We went step by step through that contract now and made sure that the contract was followed. So we were kind of contractual verification as much as anything. Verifying the contract. If something didn't work, why you wrote it up and somebody had to figure out whether you [were] going to fix it or live with it.
HOGAN: This is what you did for about the last five years?
LAKE: Yeah, that was the last five years.
HOGAN: And you retired in1979?
LAKE: Correct.
HOGAN: You were relatively young then?
LAKE: I retired when I could first retire. You can retire when you have thirty years’ service at age fifty-five. You have to have both of those. And generally, if you go to work for an organization, you’re going be done pretty close with both of those at the same time. And that's full retirement. Full retirement means you immediately draw pension. You immediately draw a pension. You don't wait until another age or something like that.
Let me do one more thing here. The mission phase that we were simulating in the SAIL was ALT, the approach and landing test. And that is proving the aerodynamics of the Shuttle. You do this before you ever put it into orbit. And the way they did it was they modified a Boeing 747 to carry the Enterprise. The Enterprise was the aerodynamic test shuttle. And they would take it up to twenty, twenty-five thousand feet and release the Enterprise and the Enterprise would glide to a landing using the aerodynamic surfaces now. And that's what we were doing on the SAIL was all this aerodynamic test phase.
The actual orbiter didn't launch into Earth orbit until 1981. That was the first flight. So I retired two years before that and what we were doing on the SAIL was the strictly aerodynamic part of it.
HOGAN: Do you ever make it back to the NASA, the Johnson Space Center?
LAKE: When you retire they treat you very nice. They give you badge and they say come back. And I came back once a week. Then once every two weeks. And maybe once every month. And then you walk the halls, and you’d see somebody and you say hi. You couldn't remember the guy’s name. And he would say hi. And he couldn't remember your name.
But the thing is they let you drift away in retirement, very gently. So you’re always welcome to come back and most of the areas are not classified. So that you can go just about any place you want. The early phases of Apollo were classified because there were boosters and boosters could carry things besides spacecraft. So we had classified badges in the early program. Now you don't see that much anymore.
HOGAN: Well I know you still get the newsletter there from NASA. Do you still keep up with the space program?
LAKE: They say, do you want a renewal? I go ahead and renew.
HOGAN: What was your greatest, personal accomplishment?
LAKE: The check list. That was your baby. If it was right, it was a pat on the back. If it was wrong, you were in deep trouble. Because if anything was wrong in that, it could cost somebody his life, especially on reentry or on any of the maneuvers really. Reentry was pretty critical. You got to have things just right. So I think that was the single, big point, even though, it was a pain in the neck. It was really the single, most important thing I did down there.
HOGAN: Well I believe that will do it.
LAKE: I believe it will.
HOGAN: Thank you very much. I appreciate it.