NASA Mangieri, Dan - June 2, 1999

Interview with Dan Mangieri

 

Interviewer: Gabriel S. Head

Date of Interview: June 2, 1999

Location: Mangieri home, Clear Lake, Texas

 

 

Head:  It is June second 1999 and I’ll be conducting an interview with Mr. Dan Mangieri.  Okay, it is 6:30 p.m. and we are in Mr. Mangieri’s living room [with his wife and son Dan Mangieri Jr.].  I would just like to start off by making sure you understand that this is being conducted as part of the NASA/SWT oral history project.

 

Mangieri:  I do.  I understand that.

 

Head:  Okay.  Well first I would like to thank you for sharing your time with us, and we’d like to start with a little background information, where you’re from, and things like that.

 

Mangieri:  Okay, Well let me start back I my youth.  I was born in the Bronx [New York].  The home of the Yankees of course, the New York Yankees.  I went to school . . . I don’t think you care about public schools or anything like that.  I graduated as an engineer in 1954 from City College of New York, it was then called City College of New York, it is now called City University of New York. [cough]

 

At the time . . . going back a little earlier than that.  My first inclination toward engineering started back in junior high school actually.  Back up there you know, prior to going to high school you had what they called a session of two or three years where you spent [time] at junior high school.  It was there that I was taking electrical shop and so on and so forth.  I had an Uncle Tony.

 

Head:  Ummm Hmmm.

 

Mangieri:  I can remember he mentioned to me, “you know, you ought to be an engineer.  You ought to go to be an engineer.  That’s a good job.”  Back then I wasn’t quite sure what an engineer did, but I always had interests and hobbies in these things to do with your hands.  And, you know I built a lot of electrical toys if you will.  So I had . . . I walked into college fully knowing where I was going.

 

Head: Yea?

 

Mangieri:  In other words, I went to city college engineering school and knew that’s what I wanted to do.  I didn’t know how hard it was going to be to get there [laughing] but I finally ended up achieving my goals; at least with respect to that. 

 

I was already courting my current wife prior to that time.  In fact, right out of high school pretty much.

 

Head:  Yea?

 

Mangieri:  We waited until I got through college to get married.  So, I graduated in [19]54.  In [19]55 I was still living in the Bronx when we got married.  We had a little apartment and that’s where my first child was born, in the Bronx.  But after he was about a year old we decided we’d move out to Long Island, [New York].  We bought a home and lived there for about thirteen years.

 

My first job, out of college as a matter of fact, I went to work in the Navy Department in the Brooklyn, [New York] Navy Yard where I was designing installations on ships for radar equipment and communications equipment.  So I wasn’t in the space business yet.  I was in the electronic business but not the space business.  In a couple of years I transferred, since we moved out to Long Island, I transferred from the Brooklyn Navy Yard to another job with the government [cough], which was at the Naval Training Device Center out on Long Island.  Which was a very interesting job because we built training devices for the Navy.  I in fact was a project engineer on a couple of devices you might be familiar with.  Like the ejection seat trainer.

 

Head:  Oh yea?

 

Mangieri:  Where they have a tower and they have an ejection seat and you pull a trigger and BOOM!  So you go for about twenty feet.  I have a couple patents as a matter of fact that I obtained while working there.

 

Head:  What did you get patents in?

 

Mangieri:  One of them was a parachute release-in-water trainer.  We had requests from the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery because they did most of the training somehow or another.  I don’t know how medicine and surgery got involved in physiological devices like I was in charge of.  They came to us every once in a while, and said, “you know we haven’t got something to teach these people how to get out of a parachute harness when they hit the water and the wind is still taking their parachute away with them.”  So I went over to the shop and spent the next year or so working with some of the technicians.  We put together plans and built a parachute release-in-water trainer which was installed at a pool.  Where you had a tower about twelve feet off the water.  We had a man stand backwards, and we had an overhead line which just pulled him and yanked him off.  [Laughter]

 

I’ve got pictures somewhere here because one of the principles that we believed in at that time was if you invent it, you had to be the first one to try it [laughter].  So I actually had to get in the pool, in New York, in November [laughter].  And it was cold.  I mean I got pulled into that pool, [pause] and you learn to release your harness while your floating in the right position because they pull you at a certain rate of speed.  That was one of them.

 

I had a full pressure suit.  When I first worked for them, they already had ejection seat trainers all over the country at different naval air stations, at Pensacola, [Florida] or Norfolk, Virginia.  But what they didn’t have was . . . They were coming into the use of full pressure suits in many of the fighter planes that were at higher altitudes.  Training someone in a full pressure suit was a whole different world because it was much the way a guy gets into a space suit now.  He has to be able to handle the gloves and various and sundry things and fly with them at the same time.  Be able to reach up and pull the face curtain so he can eject.

 

So what we did, we built a portable unit in the seat pack that would inflate the suit and allow the man to communicate [while] at the same time be able to operate an ejection capability when fully deployed and inflated.  So I have a patent for that.

 

Eventually after about eleven years, what happened was, there were base closings.  And see that was considered a naval base even though it was a training device center.  And they decided they wanted to go down to Orlando, [Florida] and offered me a good job down there, as a matter of fact, a promotion.  But at the time [I had] young kids, wife, family.  You know it was one of those things where I really wasn’t interested in going to Orlando if we had to tear the family away from New York.  So I started thinking about what is there available out there and I did have a definite interest in the Space Program. 

 

I got a call from a friend of mine who said, “hey they are putting together a test team over at Bethpage, Long Island at Gumman’s plant where they’re building the lunar module [LM].

 

Dan Mangieri Jr.:  Who was it?  Do you know who it was?

 

Mangieri:  Pardon?

 

Dan Mangieri Jr.:  Who was it that called you?

 

Mangieri: Ya. Bernie, Bernie Goldberg.

 

Mrs. Mangieri:  Wineflash.

 

Mangieri: Wineflash, Bernie Wineflash.  He gave me a call and told me this was happening.  And a friend of mine, Frank Pagello who worked with me over at the Naval Training Device Center, both of us went over there and interviewed with a guy named Russ Clickman who had come up from here, JSC [Johnson Space Center] Houston. . .

 

Head:  Ummm Hmmm.

 

Mangieri:  . . . to man a team of engineers probably somewhere around twenty of us, or twenty-four of us as I recall.  And he was gathering up people from all over the country.  He had gone down to Cape Kennedy [Space Center, Florida] and picked up a few people there who eventually became buddies of mine.

 

I was one of the rare exceptions out of the twenty-four, probably twenty of us, who were from all over the country, different places. Some [were] from St. Louis, some from Cape Kennedy, some from Houston, [and they] came up to join the test team.  But I was the local inhabitant [laughter] I was the Yankee.  So I joined up with them, as a matter of fact, I used to be with this guy Russ Clickman and immediately I had had what I would say an interest.  I was an advocate, a space advocate.  And I said, “gee, if I can get involved with the Space Program, work for NASA," and it was called RASPO (Resident Apollo Space Program Office).  It looked like we had a future for five or six years.

 

Head:  Ummm Hmmm.

 

Mangieri:  [Grumman] where all the lunar modules were going to be built and tested and then brought to the Cape [Kennedy Space Center] and we would transfer back and forth, do testing down at the Cape, do testing at Bethpage.

 

Uhmm, let me think.  We got a very close relationship.  It’s surprising but we had . . . we were undermanned with only twenty-four people.  So what happened was they, Boeing [Aircraft] at that time, actually provided some people to work with us [cough].  They became a part of our test team.  So we were up to a manning of forty or fifty at various times.

 

Grumman was very accommodating too.  So we worked in an environment that couldn’t hardly tell the difference between the NASA’s, the Boeing’s, and the Grumman’s.  You know that it was almost like a relationship that I hadn’t seen exist in many many years lately.  It was an environment that was very camaraderie, if you will.

 

Some of the disappointments were I had to learn to work nightshift, which I never did before with the kids and home and everything.  I’d get home at six o'clock in the morning after working from six the preceding evening, you know through a twelve-hour shift.  Because we had to man . . .  You see when the lunar module starts to get built to a certain extent they put power on the BUS.  What we used to call monitoring the BUS.  In other words, even if there was normal activity going on, we had to have some NASA folks available in case something went wrong so he could sign the proper paper work and make the proper decisions you know, to take care of and correct problems.

 

Like I said, we started to go to what they call twelve-hour shifts.  In other words, we’d form a test team of four people.  And what would happen is this week me and my partner would work, lets say twelve hour shifts day time, he’d work twelve hour shifts night time.  The next morning, I would come in and relieve him.  The following week, you know I would, we would switch around.  Therefore, he would work the nightshift and I would work the dayshift.  And the transition between nightshift and dayshift is what really got to be a bothersome thing.  Because I would come home, like I said, at six-o-clock in the morning trying to get to bed by seven or eight-o-clock.  By that time the rest of the world is up making noise, especially with all the kids on the block.  This was a young community that we were in.  So I installed a window air conditioning [laughing] in my bedroom and tried to drown out the noise.  Learned to handle that.

 

We worked long hours during special, what I’d say, special phases of the building of the vehicle because we had to go through several months of subsystem testing.  Then we had what was called a FEAT, Final Engineering Acceptance Test.  Where the astronauts came up.  As a matter of fact, the astronauts came up even prior to that on some of the subsystem testing. I got to be familiar with quite a few of them.  In particular Fred [W.] Haise [Jr.], for instance, came up with up with [James B.] “Jim” Irwin and I can remember one of the first things that happened when we met with them.

 

They were quite young, we were pretty young ourselves, and they wanted to know what they could do in their spare time.  You play handball.  Both of them were very enthusiastic about playing handball.  So we used to take them up to Stoneybrook University [New York] and go up there and play handball for a couple of hours.  So we kept in shape, they kept in shape.  They kept out of trouble.  We kept out of trouble [laughing].  So that was the nice part.  We met almost every astronaut that eventually flew the LM.  They’d come up there and at least join up with their vehicle and do a final engineering acceptance test.  So you know, that was a very, what would I say . . . uplifting experience.

 

What happens is when you get involved with a program like this, to be able to touch the hardware, to be able to meet the people who are going to fly this thing to the Moon!  I started to become a, I mean it wasn’t just anymore becoming a space advocate.  Now I was the guy whose fingerprints were on that lunar module and you were gonna land it on the Moon and leave it there.  Leave the descent stage anyway.  I got quite an education.

 

My background, you know, was in the field of electronics and I was working on a vehicle that was highly electronic but at the same time it was a space vehicle.  In fact, if you know the lunar module, it is the only real spacecraft.  No wings, you can’t fly it in regular atmosphere.  It was made to fly in only one configuration and that is in outer space.  Everything that was designed for it was designed for that [space].  Therefore, the testing was complicated by that.  In other words the vehicle itself was a very, what would I say . . .  Standing on its’ pods in one-G [one degree of gravity], it wasn’t designed to do that.  It was designed for one-sixth G.  Another thing is, think about it, most of the time when you’re testing something here on Earth, what you do is you plug it into the wall, you get 110 volts A/C and you use that power to go ahead and power up your vehicle.  Well, this vehicle wasn’t designed to operate that way.  It was designed to operate on batteries.  Fuel cells as a matter of fact.  Which are very very stable batteries.  So when we did our final engineering acceptance test we did it in two phases.  We did a test that we called “plugs-in."  Where what we did was we hooked up to what was called ground support equipment, GSE, which supplied power to the vehicle.  Now, that power is not pure.  No matter how hard you try, you always have some ripples in that power.  And sometimes those ripples create problems, anomalies.  So we eventually went to a “plugs-out” test for the final test which is when you take you take all ground power off and what you do is supply it with batteries.  We couldn’t use the fuel cells because they were prohibitive in that environment.  But that “plugs-out” test that we did was as close as you’re ever going to get . . . what we had done . . .as close as you’re ever going to get to a space environment and configuration.

 

What we had done was build some software that would also simulate and stimulate the vehicle to give you a simulated flight.  So we would actually be able to do a landing on the Moon and come up off the Moon.  And each of these stages were tested so that all of the operating systems would be operated in their natural circumstance.

 

As a matter of fact, I’ll tell you a little story about early in the program when we were running a “plugs-in” test, in other words using not the battery power.  For some reason or another, every once in a while, we’d get some jets to fire on their own without . . . See we had gas in the system, not hypergallic, so you wouldn’t get a fire.  But what you’d get is you’d get pressure.  And we’d have all these things recorded in great detail on time recorders.  And we’d sit down and try to figure out why in the hell are we getting these extraneous firings.  Because in space you’re flying around, you didn’t want that to happen.  We had significant problems for about a month, month-and-a-half. We kept realizing though that it was periodic.  It seemed like it was always happening around midnight.  And so we tried to figure out what the hell is going on.  Why are we getting these kind of spurious firings?

 

Until finally we realized.  To get into the area where the lunar module is you had to go through doors, you had to have lab-type clothing on, if you had a beard you had to wear a beard cover, you always had to wear a hat and a white suit, and you had to wear booties over your feet.  Well before you came in, they had what they called shoe cleaners, which were these brushes that would revolve and clean you shoes, and then you put the booties on over them.  And you wouldn’t believe that fact that when we found out that we were getting environmental radio noise that was being transmitted [from the shoe cleaner] into the lines, the power lines, so that through the GSE we were actually picking it up and it was kicking off the jets.  I mean this took a month, month-and-a-half.

 

Dan Mangieri Jr.:  From the shoe cleaner?

 

Mangieri:  Ya, the shoe, the boot cleaners were actually causing those to happen.  You know these are the kind of mysteries that if you don’t solve, you fly the vehicle with suspicion.

 

Okay. There is, in fact with each vehicle goes a one-time anomaly list or unexplained anomaly list if you want to call it that.  But if it happens [the anomaly] and you don’t explain it that vehicle is always under suspicion.  It gets down to the Cape, it may reoccur, but if it doesn’t reoccur before you fly, you’ve got to get Dan Golden’s [the current NASA director] signature to say you can fly because that probably didn’t happen, or if it did happen, it was just a one-in-a-million chance that it would happen.

 

But I can remember, there were the significant [problems].  Like when we went to look at the vehicle, you always . . . You know how NASA is.  NASA does reviews, after reviews, after reviews, after reviews.  And people from all over the world come in and throe questions at it, “why did this happen, did it happen, didn’t it happen?”  And you actually had to close out these things.

 

Every time an anomaly occurred, an anomaly means we had sat down for months and months and months with Grumman and wrote test procedures.  Like for instance, you would throw this switch and it would test if it could put you in a new configuration.  You would then have to record all the values that changed at that point-in-time.  You had to predict them in this test procedure.  If anything deviated from what you anticipated a thing was written called an IDR, an interim discrepancy report. 

 

I’d say 90% of the time you would disposition that by checking your configurations and finding out that there was something that was out of configuration because the vehicle was quite complicated.  I mean switches and breakers all over the place.  And you may have been out of configuration and therefore, you got the wrong value.  So what you’d do is you’d go back and test, getting back into the right configuration, making sure you had the right numbers.  Then you could disposition that particular one.  If you couldn’t, then it was converted to a DR, a discrepancy report.  Now once you had a discrepancy report it almost took an act of God to close this thing out [laughter].  I mean you did a lot of work and research.  And I would say that probably better than 50% of our test on those vehicles was to do just that, resolve discrepancies.  Because once a discrepancy is written, if you cannot give it an engineering explanation, then both NASA and Grumman had to sign off on those explanations.  If you couldn’t do that, you had to report all of those to the board. 

 

When you were selling the vehicle off anyway, but at least they were dispositioned.  The ones that weren’t dispositioned.  Those things were hard because those were your one-time anomalies, your unexplained anomalies.  And if you did get it down to the Cape with that situation, you better damn well hope that it happens again so you can find the real cause and make it go away.

 

I’ll tell you a story about something that, ah, that I thought (and I’ll never forget this because I became really good friends with Fred Haise).  The reason was Fred Haise was going to be the pilot on a lunar module.  He was very very – he was young, very enthusiastic, and very intelligent and I was, I was actually in the flight controls section.  I was in charge of AGS, abort guidance system.  For one reason or another, Fred became very interested in AGS.  Probably because the PrimeNav Guide, the primary navigation guidance system being . . . if it failed for any reason the only other way you were going to make it out of that situation was to go to AGS, which was the abort guidance system.  That was the backup guidance system.  And without guidance you’re going nowhere.

 

Anyway we, both of us, I in my world got as much training in AGS as I could get.  The contractor who built the AGS and built the software gave training programs that I went to.  And so Fred and I, he’d be on the vehicle sometimes when I’d be on the dayshift and he’d be on the night shift.  And I’d get a call at two-o-clock in the morning, “hey Dan, you know we had this problem occur.”  So we got very chummy over that whole thing.

 

One night I can remember coming in I was on the midnight shift.  For about a week we had an open discrepancy report, an interim discrepancy report.  It seemed foolish but they were looking at the radar altimeter.  If you know what a radar altimeter looks like in this particular case.  What it was, was a rectangular display that had increments on it and it had a tape inside.  What we did was we programmed this to assume that they were going to the Moon.  So therefore, you wanted to know how far off you are and everything.  What we would do is actually input the controls section, controls electronics, to move that tape at a nominal rate.

 

I can remember him calling me up and saying, “hey Dan there’s something wrong here.”  He says, “I’m getting jitter on the tape.”  I said, “well wait a minute now.  You know the program we got in there gives it a smooth transition.  You know it’s a smooth rate.  It’s not step functions.”  He said, “naw, this thing is stepping.”  And I can remember about a week had gone by and we still were seeing what he called jittering in the cabin.

 

Now of course, now we’re not in the cabin.  We eventually got smart and put cameras, video cameras in the cabin so that they could show us, you know, what things looked like in the cabin when they were in there.  Because it was quite a confined area.  That night I said, “I’m gonna do it.  I’m gonna go down there and I’m gonna get in the cabin with him.”  I went down got in the cabin.  And I remember, I went down with a flashlight.  And so when I got in there he showed me the jitter.  I looked at it and said, “gee you’re right.  It looks like it’s stepping.”  I say, “there’s something wrong.”  We talked to the contractor.  [He said,] “that shouldn’t be happening.”  And so I said, “let me check it out one more time.”  I put the flashlight on it, and the jitter stopped.  I says, “wait a minute, wait a minute.  Turn off the light above.”  We had a fluorescent light in there.  Not the lunar module light, but a fluorescent, what they call GSE, again ground support equipment.  It gives them light in there but it was a fluorescent light.  We were getting a sixty-second harmonic from the fluorescent light [laughter] that caused the thing to look like it was jittering much the way you see a car on….

 

Dan Mangieri Jr.:  You mean you watched the wheels and it’s like a strobe?

 

Mangieri:  Ya, it’s strobing.  So you know we solved the problem almost by accident.  But nonetheless, we realized that every time you did something that was slightly out of nominal configuration for the design you could always expect something unusual to happen.  It wasn’t designed for those configurations.  In this particular case, it was a simple thing.  But nonetheless, we could have easily thought that we had a bad altimeter and gone through thousands [of dollars].  You never go through hundreds of dollars’ worth of expenses.  Everything is in the thousands of millions.  You know, it’s that simple.

 

I can remember as a matter of fact, in those days I used to listen to Johnny Carson.  And every once in a while I’d get a little PO’ed.  I can remember the one night he gave us the Golden Goose Award because we were doing research on a space toilet.  And he said, “look at this, two hundred-fifty thousand dollars.  Can you imagine two hundred-fifty thousand dollars for a toilet?”    And I said to myself, “what the hell does he know about a space toilet?”  I mean you’re in zero G, your dump [laughter] is not gonna just fall straight down if you know what I mean.  It’s a whole different environment.  You need a vacuum to suck it down.  You need to be able to evacuate that area. 

 

It is a whole different configuration.  We had, I don’t know if your old enough to realize, we went through hell with our space toilets.  It was probably on of the most critical things on the [space] Shuttle that we went through.  For years, no matter how many times we redesigned it or tried to reconfigure it, [we] always had some problem with it.  And there is a reason.  We are earthbound.  We build things with a thought of space but we build them on Earth and test them on Earth.  And when you get them up there you just haven’t taken everything into consideration.  So you know, you come up with some problems.

 

Head:  Well since you did have this relationship with Fred Haise . . .

 

Mangieri:  Ya.

 

Head:  What were some of your feelings when the whole Apollo 13 [situation] started going down?

 

Mangieri:  Ohh!  Let me tell you what was really a major problem for me.  They gave awards every year.  One of them was the Manned Flight Awareness Award.  This Manned Flight Awareness Award came with a significant payoff.  They invited us and our wives to come down to Cape Kennedy and see a shuttle launch.  They throw a couple parties with the astronauts.

 

Dan Mangieri Jr.:  Apollo launch.

 

Mangieri:  Oh, Pardon?

 

Dan Mangieri Jr.:  Apollo launch.

 

Mangieri:  Apollo launch, yea.  By this time we were moving to where we are sending these things aloft quite frequently.  So for Apollo13 I got the Manned Flight Awareness Award, for JSC.  Now even though we were up there [in Bethpage] we were supposedly members of Johnson Spacecraft, uh Space Center, at that time called MSC, Manned Space[craft] Center.  I can tell ya that there was a little bit of a feeling between us up there, in such a remote location, and the guys down here [Houston].  As to say, you know, all the guys down there seem to get all the big promotions, all the good rewards and everything.  We seemed to get very little up there.  We were kind of out in left field.  The reasons were that it was obviously because [location].

 

Head:  Okay.

 

Mangieri:  Anyhow, one of the few things that we did get awarded.  Every once in a while they would find somebody in one of these remote locations, and I was very honored that they offered me the opportunity.  We came down to the Cape for about a week.  I remember they put us up in a hotel, had the big prelaunch party with the astronauts, and all the big wheels came down from Washington and all that.  [They] sat us in a special section.  It turns out it was Apollo 13.  So I came down to see that launch.

 

Head:  Ya?

 

Mangieri:  And there my buddy Fred Haise is on that spacecraft.  And they took off.  [A bird cooing] And of course. . . and by the way that’s my clock.  [Laughter] So don’t think we have a cooing pigeon in here or anything.  But they took off and obviously we left.  As a matter of fact, wasn’t it Apollo 13 I believe that [Thomas K. “Ken”] Mattingly [II] was supposed to fly?

 

Head:  Yes sir.

 

Mangieri:  As a result of him being exposed to German measles, I guess it was, they removed him from the flight.  And there was a slight delay in the flight.  There was a bunch of things that did happen.  But finally, this thing went off the pad.  And I was totally impressed with being there.  Because I had seen launches on video and I had seen them on TV, but there is absolutely nothing like being present.  And we were sitting in the VIP stands as close as you can get.  And I had even done the walk arounds on the launch pad prior to that.  I was really uplifted, spirited for that.  And it wasn’t but a couple of few days later that I’m home and this great accident occurs.

 

And we didn’t have pictures of the accident, that particular accident.  We obviously knew [what happened].  You know, I was called into mission control and I was spending a lot of time, you know, trying to analyze the problems, looking at the data until we were able to really hone in on what appeared to be the cause of the problems somewhat.  When the lunar module [command module] was actually able to look at the problems that had occurred on the command module [service module] and you saw that whole side blown away, and we realized we were in deep . . .yogurt.  And the data had indicated that we were in deep yogurt because what the hell were you going to do.  That command module was the only thing that could bring you back.

 

We were losing, in fact we lost, the better part of our oxygen our consumables and what not,  We had realized that the only way we could keep these guys alive was to turn down all the equipment that would be using up all these consumables and get into the LM,  since the batteries in the LM were still fresh, and use it.  We called it a life boat.

 

And it started to get where . . .  Here it was.  I was still up at Grumman and you think about it.  We had our own missions control room up there.  And we were passing on information to these guys down here [Houston].  Telling them, you know we think maybe we ought to do this, maybe we ought to do that.  And you’ve got to be part of one of those kind of scenarios because nobody would go to sleep.  I mean it was one of these things that if it meant staying up seventy-two hours, you did it because there was that much spirit.

 

As you realize if you’ve seen Apollo 13 the movie and if you’ve really gone through the writings of it, it was almost a miraculous event bringing them back.  Actually, we had to fly them to the Moon.  They were well on their way to the Moon.  And finally used the propellants, and things like that, on the lunar module to get everything back into a circular orbit back down towards Earth.  In other words, boomerang them around the Moon.  Eventually, we were in, like that last two hours were super critical because we had seen that we had probably no more than two hours and maybe ten minutes of consumables left to keep them alive.  If anything went wrong at all then we were going to lose these guys in space.

 

To see those parachutes finally open and that lunar module [command module] coming down with those guys.  And Fred by the way was in pretty bad shape.  As you realize, he had a urinary tract infection and they were practically frozen up there because they couldn’t use the power to heat up the vehicles to any extent.  So it was really an emotion filled period of time for most of us.  Even though I was particularly friendly with Fred, I think the rest of the test team felt the same pains.  You know there’s always that association.  First of all we built the vehicle.  Second of all, we were using the vehicle well beyond the specifications that it was intended for.  So it was a special moment for most of us.

 

Well anyway, we got through that.  We got through the basic part of the Apollo Program.  Now of course, see when we get finished with the delivery of the lunar modules up there, there was still a period of time that they were going through tests down at KSC [Kennedy Space Center, Florida] and still flying them.  What happened was they sent Owen Morris (at that time the Apollo Program manager) [he] came up to Grumman Bethpage and they called us in one by one into a session.  And I told you there were twenty-four NASA people.

 

Head: Umm hmmm.

 

Mangieri: And they told us in advance that they had seven positions available.  So you know, seventeen guys were going to be told that’s it.  You’re out of a job.  And I remember us going into the meeting and the first guy that came out . . . we had hand signals.  We figured if a guy gave a thumbs up they offered him a job, thumbs down they didn’t.  And you know after several guys I went in and they offered me a job.  And I thought to myself, “gee, I’m pretty lucky.  But there’s only one problem.  My family doesn’t know this yet, [Laughing] and how do I go home and tell them, hey they offered me a job down in Houston now. Do we want to go down to Houston after I refused six years earlier to go to Orlando with the Navel Training Device Center.”

 

By that time I was so entrenched in the space business and Grumman was about the only contractor up there.  And they were losing their force faster than we were losing ours.  So I came home and we talked it over.  I said. “gee, I really think we ought to take this opportunity to go down there.”  I can remember telling my wife and she says, “but we’re going to leave the family up here.”  And I said, “we’ll think of it as a vacation.  We’ll go down there for a couple of years.”  I said, “Grumman’s likely to get another NASA contract.  They’ll probably open up another resident office, then we’ll come on back.”

 

But here I am twenty-eight years later, twenty-nine years later telling you this story.  And you know, we moved in down here, I can tell you we took six days to come down.  The government has a funny way of allowing you to travel. At the rate, when you’re making the transition, at the rate of three hundred miles a day.  That is you have to do at least three hundred miles a day to get to your destination.  So they allowed us basically six days.  It was eighteen hundred and twenty miles or something like that.  And so I told them [the family], “look we’ll take a nice slow trip down there.  Take all the six days to get there.  And we’ll stop at Monticello on the way, and we’ll stop here, and we’ll stop there.” 

 

And so that time I installed in my car an eight-track tape player. I can remember that. There was only one problem, every day I put a tape on to play a song my wife would start crying.  And I kept asking, “what are you crying about.”  “Oh, that reminds me of my sister.”  I said, “okay I’ll play another tape.”  “That reminds me of my mother.”  [Laughter] She kept doing this to me.  She drove us nuts for six days.

 

We got down here, and I can remember coming in on [highway] 146.  And I said, “well we’re in a couple of miles now of the hotel.”  And she says, “but I see oil wells pumping over here but were are the guys riding horses with guns and everything?”  And I finally had to tell her. “You know we’re coming into Houston.  This is a big city.  This is not just Waco, Texas or whatever.”  I don’t know where you would find guys riding horses.  Maybe in your town [laughter] down where you live. 

 

We got down to the Nassau Hilton.  No not the Hilton, no.

 

Dan Mangieri Jr.:  Nassau Bay Hotel.

 

 Mangieri:  Nassau Bay Hotel.

 

Dan Mangieri Jr.:  That was closer.

 

Mangieri:  That was quite popular at the time because it was right across the street from JSC.  They were very gracious to me because they told me when I went to work . . .  I went to work for a guy named Jess Paree.  And we had, at that time, he headed up . . .  in the project office, the experiments project office.  So we were in charge of the experiments that were going on the Apollo spacecraft at that time.

 

I was given the assignment of the largest ever experiment called the lunar sounder.  We called it C-SAR, C-S-A-R, coherent synthetic aperture radar.  It was a whole new-fangled thing about a penetrating radar that could look at subterranean deposits of water [and] various other ores.  There were several universities, University of Michigan, for instance was one that was carrying on research.  We were in the world of recording.  We had three different contractors, I can’t remember the one in Canada that builds the robotic arm [for the international space station].  But they built two antennas for us.  One was a high frequency and the other was a low frequency antenna and had to be unraveled in space.  It was one of these things – it was a very thin filament and had to be unraveled in space.  We were going to be looking for water basically.  The thing was installed.  The radar was built by RCA.  So here I was traveling back and forth up to Philadelphia where RCA, Camden, where RCA was and I’d be going out to Phoenix, Arizona where the recorder was being built by Goodyear.  Then I was going out to Rockwell-Downey where the contractor for the integration was.  So you know, I was back and forth, on the road quite a bit at that point in time.  After all those years sitting in Bethpage where they would bring the hardware to us and we would test it.  We were going to various contractors [and] had to pull that whole thing together.  Eventually we flew the lunar sounder.  The data was taken.  It was a success but they’re still reviewing the data I swear it, from Apollo 17, because there is oodles and oodles of data that was collected during most of those missions.  That one was particularly sophisticated and they’re still looking at data in regards to that.

 

After that, I’m trying to think.  I moved into the Shuttle Project.  Funny as it seems, the boss that I worked for up at Bethpage, a guy named Andy Hoboken, ended up hiring me to go to work for him on the Shuttle Program.  I actually became the test project engineer at that point in time.  [I] worked on test requirements and various and sundry tests that went on out at Pondale on the Shuttle.

 

The program started to change.  I think this is important for this thing.  From a political sense you started to feel the pressures coming from Washington.  Whereas, in the Apollo Program, I don’t know if it was just the fact that I was in a remote location working on the hardware that was so critical that they stayed out of our hair, but I could see it coming.  As we went further and further into the Shuttle Program, I started to get the politics of things.  You know, congressman making their pitches saying, “you’ve got to do some contracting in this state because I need that to boost my ego.”  I was watching that happen and at the same time we were getting cancellation of funding and they were getting us, the engineers, to do more and more other changes to reduce the budget.  Now you can’t get an engineer to think like that.  I hadn’t yet run across a really good engineer who would like to cut back on his engineering thoughts because some accountant said do it.  There was a little lessening of spirit de corps, if you will.  It wasn’t quit the same.

 

And then we jumped off into another program which turned out to be the Space Station, and that really became a problem.  Because you see, we had another major incident as you realize, when we had an SRB, solid rocket booster, explode on us and we lost the crew [of the space shuttle Challenger].  That, probably Apollo 13, the landing on the Moon, and then that accident, are the most burned into my memory.  The landing on the Moon obviously. 

 

We were all sitting around the television set, even though we were at work or not at work, watching this.  You know, gathered together, we’d all be drinking beer [saying,] “hey look at this.  We got a guy on the Moon and everything.”  While some idiots in the background are saying, “hell that ain’t really happening.”  I’m sure you heard that story before.  I had, [motioning to his wife] her father by the way used to give me a hard time about that.  He was… he couldn’t…I tried so hard many times to talk about orbital engineering to him and let him know why a thing can orbit.  Never was able to get it across. 

 

But again, those three incidents are probably most burned into my memory.  Mainly because of the impact of them.  To sit there and have worked with these astronauts, and then to have seen them get blown out of space.  That is an emotional picture I’m sure for anybody.  But to be somebody who literally worked on that hardware and knew these people personally draws a little bit more emotion out of you.  It leaves some scars, it really does.

 

As a result of that particular incident, what happened was Washington got even more involved.  What happened was a lot of time was spent, was used as ammunition.  [People] started talking, “well maybe we ought to cut down on the Space Program, maybe we ought to not do so much of this.  Maybe we ought to take the money back and give it to welfare.”  They were talking a pittance.  We’re talking three percent of the budget.  When the defense program was spending zillions of dollars, we were spending a little bit and getting a lot in return for the money.

 

We never had good enough PR [public relations] I think to sell that whole idea.  And the space station started to get even more entrapped.  No question about it, we started to get a lot of demoralization because of budgets [and] schedules.  Things that engineers don’t appreciate.  If somebody else did the schedules and the budgets and left us off to ourselves that would be one thing… but it didn’t happen.

 

They wanted us to justify to them why we couldn’t spend 20% less money this year than we did the year before.  So we go to change boards with changes and we’d have to justify what they told us to do!  This always became sort of a funny cycle.  We’d spend six months out of a year working on changes and we didn’t have time enough to do the true engineering that needed to be done to get these programs.  Although like I said, we continued to get things done; but at a slower pace.  We should have probably been long finished with the space station now.

 

Head: Ya?

 

Mangieri: At a cost probably one-tenth of what we’re spending now.  Yet, you get criticized for delaying it and spending all that extra money when you were really forced in it by those circumstances.

 

As a test engineer, one thing that was always uppermost in my mind was reliability.  You knew that you were flying people.  And so, you never wanted somebody to tell you you gotta cut back on your testing.  And there were periods during the program that we were challenged to cut back on our testing.  I think we kept alive the major goals, to test at least to the degree necessary to make sure it was a manworthy program.  And that’s probably why they’re still successful.

 

Of course, now we got a whole new involvement.  You know Russia went off and got into the program by hook or by crook.  A lot of people were disappointed in that.  I guess it was a good political move on the part of the administration because Congress was getting very very harsh.  They were really crashing down.  Every year as a matter of fact there was at least one congressman who was going to float a bill to shut the space station down.  And we dreaded it you know.  Because every year we’d have to work our asses off to get it put down by the rest of these congressmen.  And some of those votes came damn close.

 

A political coup was when Russia finally gave up on communism and tried to go democratic.  What they did was finally uh, the administration said, “hey lets do this.  Lets bring them into the picture.”  Now we knew that you were going to have to throw some tax money at them to help them through their problems.  And I guess it was decided that maybe this was the way you could get a dollars worth of something back for a hundred dollars spent, or something like that.  Of course, we’re paying a few penalties right now because they’re obviously not keeping their schedules.  And the space station requires, since it’s an activity that’s an integration of a whole bunch of things; you’ve got to put those things into some order.

 

Head:  Umm hmm.

 

Mangieri:  And their up front some of the pieces that they’re building.  The one that is going up in November, I guess is something that was delayed about a year now.  So, you know, we’ve held off and done other things in its place.

 

But anyway, I think the Space Program . . . I’m still a space enthusiast.

 

Head:  You are?

 

Mangieri:  Oh definitely!  No question about it.  Dan [Jr.] and I both went to an Apollo 10 banquet the other night.  [Eugene] “Gene” Cernan gave a talk that was quite inspirational.  There is no question about it.  It is still a thing you’ve got to do.  Space exploration is not something you do because you want to.  You do it because you have to and you want to.  If you don’t, you’re sitting in the limbo.

 

In other words, things continue on the way they are. They are not suppose to.  If you think about it, go back to nineteen hundred.  Think about all the things that happened since then.  I mean look at airplanes; okay Space Program, what we’ve done in the Space Program.  Look at computers.  I can take you into my room back there and show you three different computers over a period of time.

 

When I first got on the Shuttle Program, Rockwell came and made a presentation to us, I can remember.  And they were telling us about the computer that was gonna operate the whole shuttle.  You’re not going to believe this, but the hard memory for in that thing was 16K, sixteen thousand bytes.  I’m trying to live here and say, I’ve got gigabytes in there now [pointing down the hall].  How could we have possibly thought we could have lived on that.  Well eventually, before we flew the first one [space shuttle] we got it up to 64K.  But we flew with 64K in the first one.  But you can see the progress that gets made is a result of a continuing momentum.  Now if you were to cut off the Space program now, I don’t think you’d ever get it back.  I really don’t think you can get something that large and that important to stop.  In fact, a perfectly good example, we probably stopped to soon on lunar exploration, and you can’t get back there.  To get back out to lunar exploration is going to take many many years to go where we could have gone ten years ago, okay.

 

And now we’re talking about Mars.  You know Mars is still about twenty years away too.  So the planning effort for Mars is, you know, probably beyond my life span.  I’d like to be around when they do it, I’ll try to hang on, but I don’t know if I’ll make it.

 

Head:  Well when was it that you left NASA?

 

Mangier:  Okay, I told you that in the Space Station I was the engineer in charge of test verification.  I had a total of thirty-nine years of federal employment.  Things were getting a little bit disillusioning.

 

Head:  How come?

 

Mangier:  Well again, budgets, schedules, and arguments with people up in Washington.  Some of those people were our own people.  Some of the people up in Washington now were sent up from JSC and KSC to man a group calls the program office in Washington.  At that time they distributed . . . see on the Space Station program they had a thing called work packages.  We here at JSC were work package two.  There was work package four, that was out in Cleveland [Lewis Research Center].  That was the research center I believe.  There was Marshall [Space Center, Alabama].  [It] was package one.  Work package three.  Oh, that was Goddard.  And then there was KSC .  So there was really five of us.  And the competition for the biggest job, the biggest amount of the jobs became quite impacting.  Continual battling to grab what I would say, the largest piece of the action.  Things continued to happen with budgets.  We kept getting hit by budgets from level two.  Which was the guys up in Washington.  We’d have to go up there and battle.  And I guess I became a little bit weary if you will of that kind of an atmosphere.  But I said to myself, “there is still a Space Program going on and the guys who are doing this work are contractors.”  So what happened was I said, “let me take my leave from NASA and see what there is on the outside world.”  So what I did was I retired from NASA back in [19]89 and went to work for McDonnell Douglas.  Who was then work package two contractor.  They gave me a job as the Associate Director of Test Verification here in Houston. 

 

They were located out at Huntington Beach and we had a building and a whole bunch of people working directly with NASA right here.  So I took on what I thought was a very important job.  A very revealing opportunity.  It gave me the opportunity to see what the other side of the action is like.  You know, what does it feel like to be a contractor, I’m going to use words I probably shouldn’t, being pushed around by NASA.

 

See NASA has a tendency to be different than a lot of other government agencies.  The Air Force and some of the other agencies give out a spec and tell the contractors go ahead and build, then they get called in for tests here and there.  But NASA never lets go.  NASA is in the contractors knickers from day one until the end.

 

And so while I was over at NASA I felt that that was the thing to do because that was the thing to do.  But when you get over in the contractors plant you begin to wonder, “geez, if they would leave me alone, I might be able to get things done for them a lot faster, you know.”  But there was the constant changing.  And again, we were still in that atmosphere that bothered me a little bit.  The work package two, we had a lot of overlap.  Somebody would say, “we’re building the node.”  “No we’re building the node.  What do you mean your building the node?”  “Well we got the contract for building the node and the interface between the node and the truss is ours.”  “No it can’t be yours because we’re building the truss.”  It would be a constant battle.  It is very hard to separate these things.  So, over in work package two with McDonnell-Douglas, I felt as though I had again, almost like at Bethpage, a piece of the action that I could put my arms around.  Work on it and feel as tough I’m accomplishing a certain end.

 

Of course that came to an abrupt halt five years later when they finally decided, “hey it don’t work.  This whole integration business, it doesn’t work.  We’re gonna give the integration to a contractor, one contractor.”  Boeing won that bid.  And as a result Boeing took over the integration.  And it was no longer in NASA’s hands to do the integration even though, you know as well as I do, NASA never gives up any responsibility.  So there is still integration going on there.

 

But as a result, I felt, hell at sixty-two, I had as much as I need of all this.  I am still a space advocate.  But I can be a space advocate [patting his chair] from here.  And every once in a while, somebody like you comes around and says, “what do you think?” [Laughing]  And you know, I give them my piece of mind. 

 

What might we not have covered in all of this?

 

Head:  I guess if there is anything else, if there is maybe one thing that you think should be said.  Like if you were asking the questions.  What would that question be?

 

Mangieri:  That’s tough.  That’s tough.  I’ve pretty much bled out my heart here in this interview. [Laughing]  I could never repeat the message that Gene [Cernan] gave, but what he tried to put across I fully believe in.  And that is you know a lot of us have grown old and are off the program, but still have a big interest in it.  We probably need to turn over the reigns to the younger folks.  People like you.  And get them as interested in it as we were.  That is going to be difficult.

 

It is going to be difficult because the environment has changed.  Like I said, when I first got into the program, I got in because we were going to the Moon.  This was a demanding relationship between me and what I was going to do.  Now I think what happened is too much of it has become expected.  People look at it and think, “aw hell, we went to the moon,  There is not going to be any problem putting up a space station,” right?  Well, there are challenges out there.  We need young people to get deeply involved, engrossed in this job.  Not just bring a paycheck home.  It has gotta be more than that in order to accomplish this kind of feat.  I think that is an important message.

 

I think there is another message that I felt, and I may be wrong, but it seemed to me that NASA never really did a good job of selling.  They never really got out there and marketed.  Now all the contractors have tried to help.  I’ve seen great things come out of Rockwell and McDonnell Douglas where they’re tooting their horn and the Space Program, and they’ll put NASA up there in bright lights.  But there has got to be some way of getting the message across to the people out there who think of their tax dollars as being ill spent.  There are a lot of space advocates out there who still say, “I love it, but I don’t want to spend a penny on it.”  There has got to be a way of proving to them that that penny they spent they are going to get back multi-multi-multi-dollars.  I recognize the truth to that but I’m no sure there’s too many people out there that have been given the message. 

 

I’m very spirited whenever we do something and I see people all over the place clapping, applauding, and jumping up and down saying, “great, great, great.”  But as soon as you ask them, “would you spend your tax dollars doing this?” [They say,] “No. But we got other priorities, we gotta build up the schools, we gotta.”  Hey!  I know you gotta do those,  But you gotta know that you’ve gotta do this too.  Or these people who are coming out of these schools are going to find themselves in a benign environment.  We’ve just go to go on with this exploration.  We’re human beings, that’s our nature.  I really think that’s an important message.

 

Head:  Well thank you, thank you for spending your time and reminiscence.  I appreciate it.

 

Mangieri:  Okay, I enjoy blabbing every once in a while.