NASA McBryar, Hoyt - May 31, 2000
Interview with Hoyt McBryar
Interviewer: Jeffrey E. Brooks
Date of Interview: May 31, 2000
Location: McBryar home, Flatonia, Texas
BROOKS: Today is May 31, 2000. This oral history with Hoyt McBryar is being conducted at the home of the interviewee in Flatonia, Texas. This interview is being conducted for the NASA/Johnson Space Center Oral History Project in conjunction with Southwest Texas State University by graduate student Jeff Brooks. Mr. McBryar, are you aware that this interview is being conducted for the NASA/Southwest Texas State University Oral History Project and will be available for research purposes?
MCBRYAR: Yes. You want me to start at the beginning and ramble on with the experience I had?
BROOKS: Well, I think we’ll start with a few general questions.
MCBRYAR: Okay. Go ahead.
BROOKS: Tell me about your college education.
MCBRYAR: I went to three universities. Started out at the University of Chattanooga, in Tennessee. I transferred to the University of Tennessee in Knoxville after the first semester at Chattanooga. I had an interruption in my education after a couple of years. I was taking premedical at the University of Tennessee. At that time, that constituted two years. It was just getting a transition to where it had to go to four years. Well, I was unable to enter medical school because of the transition, I guess. Otherwise, I’d qualified. I had a break after two years at the University of Tennessee, for a few years, and then reentered college at the University of Georgia, the state where I’m a resident, and for tuition purposes that was an advantage.
I was heavily involved in the chemical discipline in the premed work- it was strongly chemistry- and that being what I had most of in my background, I chose that as my major. And that’s what I graduated as, at the University of Georgia, as a Bachelor of Science in chemistry.
BROOKS: How did your college experience prepare you for your work in NASA?
MCBRYAR: It apparently prepared me quite well, because educational and choice of a major was judged to be a prime essence in the technologies that I was involved in, which was materials chemistry, the spacecraft coating’s development and also, later on, in the fuel cell electrical power generation discipline. So without the chemistry background I probably could not have made the grade with NASA. That is to say, I would not have been hired. Not being an engineer, NASA being heavily loaded with engineering requirements of disciplines, and I was not. I couldn’t have gotten it without an engineering degree. I did not have an engineering degree.
BROOKS: How did you feel when you first heard about the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957?
MCBRYAR: I was alerted, just like everybody else. I was in school at the time. Of course, as you know, that was what spawned our race to do likewise and exceed what they’d done. But the threat of Soviet antagonism was great in those years – that was the mid-fifties – mid to late fifties. And I suppose from the end of World War II until that time, the Soviets were feared.
Of course, this gave them a leg up on everything. It was envisioned that they would rain hell and destruction upon us. So yeah, I was alerted, and I don’t know that I had any great patriotic motives by going to NASA to participate in the defense of that, but that was a career choice.
BROOKS: And shortly after, you were approached by NASA recruiters?
MCBRYAR: That’s what led me to NASA, is the recruiters sent out from Langley Air Force Base [Virginia].
BROOKS: Can you talk about your initial work in NASA, in the first few years?
MCBRYAR: Yeah. In space, of course, you’ve got a lot of phenomena that goes unnoticed on the surface of the Earth. You have materials that have to withstand the intense heat of the Sun on one side and the intense cold on the opposite side, when it’s facing deep space. The material that the spacecraft is constructed of, or coating with, has to do with the management of that extreme differential temperature that the spacecraft is involved.
So I was involved in materials coatings development – oxide coatings, nitrate coatings, electrochemical coatings such as oxide of aluminum. And the oxide of aluminum is porous, and you can coat or fill those pores with color, with dye, and that will give you various things, very beautiful stuff. So those are the sorts of things that I dealt with- the treatment of materials. The various steel materials as well as aluminum and preparing them for the rigors of the space environment. I did that for about three years at Langley.
BROOKS: And that was in the late fifties?
MCBRYAR: In `59, I went in work ‘59, in January. And I left Langley in September of `62. So it was almost three years there, two and two-thirds years. I joined what was then known as Manned Spacecraft Center. It was really at Langley. In order to get men into space, the powers that be in the agency envisioned another center for that particular activity. So, they formed Manned Spacecraft Center.
It was initially Space Task Group. That is what put Mercury up. The first unmanned thing and then Mercury. Men were going into space, so therefore a center was developed for them. It was started at Langley and was off in some corner of the air force base. It was a large air force base. They had the facilities there.
Well, I went over and interviewed because I was interested in that part of it. I had no idea exactly what I would do when I got over there. But I did go over to interview to see what they had and what would interest me. I was hired at Langley before Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston was built and the person who hired was insightful as to what this particular technology needed. It was a chemist, not so much as a chemical engineer, although he could have done it, probably, but not with the proficiency, perhaps, as a skilled chemist could.
At any rate, that’s where I was hired on to, [the] Manned Spacecraft Center. Then, when Houston was selected, it was built after about six months or nine months. We began the transition in moving to Houston. So the government moved us down to Houston. So I took up residence in Houston and worked in the fuel cell technology. That’s the discipline I was hired for.
The fuel cell – I don’t know if you’re familiar with it or not – is a device that will convert chemical energy into electrical energy. It gives you the same output as a flashlight battery. It’ll burn a light bulb. It will turn a motor of sorts. At any rate, it’s an electrical device. But you put chemicals in it, oxygen and hydrogen, or a number of other things you can do. But we use oxygen and hydrogen because of the ease of doing that and, also, in the environment of space, there was lots of advantages for them.
So that’s what I was put to work on – to assist and manage a number of development projects leading toward what powers the spacecraft. And that device is on the [Space] Shuttle at this time, that I worked on. Now, of course, I worked on the previous ones, too; this is the third generation. I worked on the first, second, and third generation fuel cells. They got to be more exotic, more efficient, much lighter in weight, much greater in power. It was essentially a new technology. It has not been used on the surface of the Earth, except as experimental purposes. But when space comes along, looking for ways to power the thing; you got a battery in your car, you can’t put enough batteries on the Shuttle to fly it, or you wouldn’t be able to lift off.
BROOKS: So you were involved not only in designing alloys for the spacecraft, but also power generation?
MCBRYAR: In the power generation was my primary responsibility, in power generation. I had nothing to do with the design of any aspect of the spacecraft, except to the extent that my materials development work was incorporated. But that is a feature that’s added to the materials, the design that’s already there. It just controls its ability to manage the environment that it’s exposed to.
But I only had three years in that. So I don’t know whether any of my work ever found its way into spaceflight or not, on the materials development. In fuel cells, it did, because it’s there now.
BROOKS: Well, that’s wonderful. In May of 1961, President Kennedy challenged America to land a man on the Moon within a decade. What was your reaction to his announcement?
MCBRYAR: I suppose, as most people, our hearts began to race a bit because that was a tremendous challenge and I don’t really believe that most of us, including Kennedy and all of his cohorts, understood the depth of that challenge. Because there were of those things that we didn’t know how to do. The scientific community didn’t know how to do. We had to invent them.
The fuel cell, as I said, that was just a freak. That was an oddity. That was something that they attempted to develop it, even to power automobiles. One of these days, there may be a fuel cell powering an automobile, but it would be after many years of development for it. There is a tractor in the Smithsonian Institution that it powered by fuel cell. That was built by Alice Chalmers, a farm implement and a heavy equipment manufacturer. They thought, back in the fifties, that a fuel cell may be an idea for a tractor. They built a tractoR&Demonstrated it and it appeared in Movie Tone News, that sort of thing. Well, it’s in the Smithsonian Institution. Whether it’s presently on display, I don’t know.
BROOKS: Why wasn’t it ever developed further?
MCBRYAR: Well, it’s too costly. The internal combustion engine is very, very complex compared to the physical design of the fuel cell. But to get the materials required to make this chemical reaction take place and produce the electrical output that you’re after. These are very costly materials, for example, platinum. This is a key ingredient in activating the materials that you’re reacting, oxygen and hydrogen. You can bring those together and nothing will happen. Now, if you light a match, you’ll have an explosion, or if you have another source of ignition, you’ll have an explosion. Well, you don’t want an explosion. You want it to react gently and produce electricity.
Well, the device it takes to do that is very, very costly. Of course, volume would reduce that cost tremendously, but you’ve got to have it practical before you could ever get the volume. It’s not uncommon for General Motors to produce several million cars a year. If they had such an order for fuel cells, you could bring those fuel cells down to a tenth the cost, probably. But there’s a transition. I may not live to see a fuel cell-powered automobile, [but] you may.
That thought I was embarking on as a result of your question. I’d forgotten what the nature of your question was.
BROOKS: We were talking about Kennedy and his announcement.
MCBRYAR: Oh, Kennedy. Yeah. That was just an example of the lack of the ability to do the job. The coatings that protected the spacecraft coming back into the atmosphere- you get about seven- or eight-thousand-degree Fahrenheit coming back in. How do you keep these guys from frying?
Yeah, it was a tremendous challenge, and I don’t believe too many people really understood the depth of it. Certainly I didn’t. But, as you go through it, and develop methods to do these things you need – to condense oxygen. The oxygen in the air is quite nice to breath and we live right happily. But you’ve got to take enough of it up there because there’s none up there. How do you make concentrated oxygen? Well, okay, you make it very cold. Well, how do you keep it cold? That’s the job.
Yeah, it was a tremendous challenge and I remember that speech very well. He visited, shortly after that speech, this facility that I worked in in Houston. This is probably the greatest decision that he ever made in office, was the challenge placed before the nation to put a man on the Moon and bring him back. I think it elevated the intellectual quotient of the country, maybe by orders of magnitude. I don’t know.
But it was a very good decision. He had enough support to push it through and, fortunately, it did go. As far as a specific reaction, I remember it happening. I remember, “Boy oh boy, this is going to put us all to work – quite heavily involved in whatever we do.” And everybody bellied up and did a tremendous job. To do that thing, in retrospect, to do that in ten years – it’s really a little less than ten years, around eight, between eight and nine I think – it just makes me wonder, “How did that happen?”
Look at World War II. It makes you wonder, “How in the world did that challenge, was that met by eighteen, twenty-year-old kids?” Probably the oldest only about twenty-five. But at any rate, it was a tremendous challenge and we were all fortunate to be there.
BROOKS: Of course, the Apollo program was a huge undertaking, and everyone involved in it had to work eighteen, twenty hours a day.
MCBRYAR: Absolutely. There were several thousands of them, too. There was probably on the order of two hundred thousand people involved in that project. I don’t know for sure, I seem to remember. Now, they may not have been involved directly. It’s probably closer to ten to twenty thousand that were directly. But all the other elements of NASA were supportive in that. Even before I got involved in the fuel cell work, what I did back at Langley for metallic coatings was a contribution to that. While I wasn’t involved directly in the Apollo program, the work that I did was supportive of it. And even the secretaries and the janitors. They were supportive. It may take all those to constitute the two hundred thousand.
It was a tremendous job and lots of people were involved. It was a program the likes of which the Earth had never seen. Even the exploration of Columbus probably couldn’t lay it in the shade.
BROOKS: Of course, the 1960s were dramatic for a lot of other reasons, with the Civil Rights movement, the Kennedy assassination, and the Vietnam War. But with all the effort everyone was putting into the Apollo Program, were you able to keep track of everything else that was going on?
MCBRYAR: Well, those other things were a part of life. They were on the news. Obviously, there’s not a thing that we could do about it. We could vote. We could write Congressmen. We could agonize among ourselves. But we had our job. The Defense Department had their job. The universities had theirs and many of those rebelled – a lot of misbehavior on the campuses across the nation. And I believe California, Berkeley, was probably among the worst.
But we wondered what was in the mind of people like that. Don’t they have anything more useful to do? You kept track of it, but I guess, more or less, at arm’s length, considering the nature of what we were doing.
BROOKS: What was your reaction to the fire in Apollo 1, which killed astronauts Grissom, White, and Chaffee?
MCBRYAR: Well, it was an oversight. The cause of that fire was an oversight. People just didn’t recognize what they were dealing with. They had that cabin pressurized with oxygen, 100% oxygen. The reason for that was they wanted to respiratory system saturated with oxygen before they left. They had a source of ignition in this thing, and of course where you have all sorts of other materials, whether metals, plastic, fabric, there’s a number of things that will serve as a fuel. And if you’ve got oxygen, which is what, of course, the nature of fire is, that’s oxygen and a fuel of some sort. You have a potential disaster.
Well apparently, if I remember correctly, there was something dropped. Like a loose wrench, or some metal object, dropped, and created an ignition source that set off the reaction of oxygen with other fuel. That was a tragedy. And some of us wondered why in the world they have that thing 100% oxygen. They later on changed it to just normal atmosphere and they gradually increased the percentage of oxygen. But to put that 100% oxygen seemed to me like an oversight of the designers. They just didn’t recognize the potential hazard that existed with that.
Of course, all the mistakes in the space, or any other place, that’s the basis of education. You really can’t learn anything if you do everything right. You already know it. If you learn something, it’s because you did something wrong. Well, three people lost their lives because of something that was done wrong, purely by not being recognized by the designers.
It was a tragedy. It did us all in, to a certain extent, to envision those people in that craft there. They could not get out. They didn’t have a design feature that they could open from within. It to be from without. They changed that. But to put yourself in their shoes, at that time period, it was really devastating. And I can imagine the families of those people – how they were impacted by the thought of what happened there.
We were a stronger agency after that, considerably. But we’ve lost few lives. Those are the only three. So I think that’s a good record.
BROOKS: I certainly think so. Did you ever worry that the Soviet Union would beat America to the Moon?
MCBRYAR: Yeah. Yeah, I did. We didn’t know much about the Soviet Union. We knew that they had many, many people, and they could do tremendous things. And they were a very highly technical society. For example, many of the things that I worked with in chemistry were designed in Russia – like the periodic table. That was designed by Mendelev in, I believe, 1869. The Soviets weren’t stupid. They were tremendously smart, since they put up the first Sputnik. They also had ambitions and that was an example of their ambition.
So yeah, we were concerned that they would be ahead. They were ahead of us. We had to catch up and then exceed them. But America’s a unique country – give them the freedom. Freedom is the most valuable commodity we have. And with the freedom to do those things, you can make great achievements. Russia didn’t have that freedom and we surpassed them.
BROOKS: Speaking of great achievements, where we you and what were you doing when Apollo 11 landed on the Moon?
MCBRYAR: I’m kind of sorry of this, because I really didn’t expect it to go on its schedule. That was, I believe, in August of `69, and I was on a trip. I was on a vacation. We’d planned the thing for a year, and we were on a motor trip, of three week’s duration, around the country.
I was, I believe, somewhere between the Black Hills of South Dakota and Yellowstone National Park. It was very poor radio reception, but I did get some news of it. So I was on vacation when that happened.
BROOKS: When you think back to the people you worked with, what stands out most? What kind of people did you work with?
MCBRYAR: I hadn’t thought of it in that way before, but they were all highly disciplined. That is to say, they were educated in the discipline that they were involving themselves in. Of course, you had the people that weren’t, like the support groups. You had what they call wage board employees. They were kind of hands on, like machinists and carpenters and electricians and that sort of thing. But in the design and development of the space technology – that’s the type of people that I was around – was like myself. They’d gone many years to school and they were mostly very good at what they did.
It was like a club. We just mingled among ourselves. We didn’t have too much association outside this particular area that we were involved in. For example, the minimum you had was a B.S., a bachelor of science or a bachelor of arts or whatever it is, aeronautical engineer, this sort of thing, mechanical engineer and so forth. Then you had a step above that, in the Master’s, the graduate degrees. And then, of course, the doctorates. You had three levels. I was in the second there. So we were all essentially at about the same level as far as scholastic achievement was concerned.
That’s the type of people we dealt with, and I guess, in my discipline, I could recognize lack of understanding. I might, at the time, have referred to it as stupidity in their understanding of what I was doing. By the same token, I was equally void of understanding, maybe even stupid, in what they were doing. But we complimented each other. We did what we had to do, as our own ability permitted us to do it. And together we got the whole thing.
BROOKS: In the years after the Apollo Program drew to a close, the focus of the space program seemed to shift, at least somewhat, to the unmanned programs run by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Did you think that was a mistake?
MCBRYAR: I did. I did for a fact. There is a very definitely a place for unmanned spacecraft. You can do so much without the risk of a man with the instrumented spacecraft, but you’re limited. If anything goes wrong, you can’t do anything about it. If you’ve got a man up there, it’ll cost you ten times as much to create an environment for that man that he can exist. But when he’s there, he can do something about the problem.
You need them both. But the emphasis, I think, should be more or less equal and not for one to supersede the other. I always favored unmanned spacecraft, but not at the expense of manned spacecraft.
BROOKS: No one has been back to the Moon since 1972. How does that make you feel?
MCBRYAR: Bad. I think it’s a tremendous mistake that we haven’t exploited that. If Columbus had gone home and rested on his laurels after his first visit, who knows what might have happened. You go to a fork in the road, you don’t take it, you have to take a fork. Just like Yogi Berra said, “You come to a fork in the road. Take it.” Okay. We don’t know what would have happened had he not come back. We do know that he came back and we’re where we are partly as a result of that.
We should have had an outpost on the Moon, I believe, and, of course, many thousands of other people believe also. It’d be a good launching platform for deep space planetary visits and so forth. I did a good bit of work on the establishment of a lunar colony – developing the power for it – using available materials on the Moon to extract your hydrogen and oxygen from. So there’s work that was planned, I’d say I guess ’69 through about ’75 or something like that. I was involved in some of the programs that were oriented towards the establishment of a base on the Moon.
BROOKS: When did you envision that taking place, at the time?
MCBRYAR: I would have thought it’d have been very soon. We had- how many landings did we have? We had [Apollo] 11, went through [Apollo] 18, skipped [Apollo] 13. So it’s about six landings I think we had there. About twelve people only on the Moon. Had we still had the collective energy for exploration, in the country, we could have been there in fifteen years. We could have done it a lot sooner than that if we’d had the energy behind the Apollo Program – to go to the Moon and back. That took a lot more effort than to have established the lunar colony, the lunar base.
We’ve got bases in Antarctica. That is a hostile place. It’s not quite as hostile as it is in space, but it does require a lot of ingenuity, a lot of development. You don’t have anything there. You have ice to build an igloo on and you have oxygen in the air, but everything else you have to take. We had to do that on the Moon.
Fifteen, twenty years, not at a leisurely pace but a dedicated pace, could have done it. Now, a race like we were in when we were going to the Moon, that will produce marvelous things, but it’s very costly. And there’s nobody to challenge us. So we don’t have the challenge to get to the Moon and build a place there. If we ever do, we could do it. We have the technology at this point to do it.
BROOKS: So the end of the Cold War was actually disadvantageous to the space program?
MCBRYAR: As far as space development, it was a disadvantage. It’s hard to get the voting public to agree to such expenditure as required and even the expenditure required is a very small portion of the national budget. I’d forgotten the numbers now, but 1.5%, maybe 2%, was what the NASA budget was, of the annual federal budget. That’s pretty small. But take a trillion dollars, take 1% of that, that’s still a lot of money.
I think about six billion a year is the most that I remember being granted the agency to do the work – all the work: support ten centers, plus operate the Shuttle, plus design and develop the spacecraft. Six billion a year is the largest number that I can recall. What it is right now I have no idea.
BROOKS: A lot of people see Mars as the next objective of the manned space program after the International Space Station is completed. Do you think that’s wise?
MCBRYAR: If we’re ever going anywhere else in space, that has to be the second step. The Moon the first, Mars the second. We probably can’t go to Venus nor Mercury, it’s probably too hot. The environment is just too hostile, so we’ve got to go outward. Mars will be the next planet. It’s the logical step, of course. Then we’ll get to Saturn, we could populate some of the moons of Saturn. It’d be about the same, except for the distance, that it would be to populate the Moon. Not populate it, but put a base there.
So, Mars. It’s inevitable. The only question is what is going to catalyze us to do it. I don’t know that there’s another power potential in the world that would challenge us like Russia did. I don’t know whether there ever will be or not. But if we had a challenge, we could go to Mars. Of course, we’ve already sent many unmanned craft there. We know precisely what it takes to support a man for long duration spaceflight. And, of course, the Station is going to prepare us for that. People will be staying up there, first three months, then six months, and then a year. They’ll develop whatever technology is required to condition the body for long spaceflight.
So, yeah, it’s inevitable and I’d like to live to see it happen. I don’t really believe I will, though. Don’t believe I will.
BROOKS: Of course, we were talking about the International Space Station. Now, instead of being competitors, we’re actually working with the Russians. Do you think this is helping or hurting?
MCBRYAR: It’s probably hurting, because we’re having to pick up the slack that they’re unable to do. The equipment that they’re supposed to provide, they’re really behind schedule. I believe the next flight is to be a Russian flight for a particular module, I’d forgotten what it’s called. And the last thing I heard, a day or two ago, was that it’s likely not going to come off on schedule. Long about October or something like that.
I think it was a mistake for the country to join forces with them. Now maybe England and France and Japan, but not Russia. While they may be the most capable as far as space technology is concerned, their economy is in such bad shape that they can’t really support us. We are going to have to pay the bill in any case. I don’t believe they can.
BROOKS: Is in interesting, though, to see our former enemies now trying to work with us?
MCBRYAR: Well, that’s happened throughout history. One power will conquer another and assimilate them into their society and, ultimately, they’re friends. We had a little unpleasantness in this country about a hundred and fifty years ago, or a hundred and forty. We were very hostile, at that time, but we finally assimilated. And now, you can’t tell us apart, except some of us still prefer to be Southerners rather than Americans.
So, in any case, that’s not really a strange thing. But we were so hostile with each other. We were allies during World War II. Why they had to be so aggressive, thinking that they could impose their will upon the rest of the world, you’ll have to examine Lenin and Marx and so forth. Stalin. They were just power hungry. So, while we were former allies, we were then enemies, so it’s not strange that we’re back together. Not at all.
BROOKS: When you look back on your career with NASA, what are you most proud of?
MCBRYAR: The development, the participation. I didn’t invent it and I didn’t do all the work. There were hundreds of us involved in it, and NASA really funded the development work and managed the contractors’ efforts. That was the role I played. So I had to define the effort that I wanted these contractors to do. That is to say, the agency wanted the contractor to do. So I was at the core of the management of the development of those three fuel cells. Since it is not a obscure device, something that just was useful then it’ll fade away. It is something that is absolutely essential, not only now but forever will be essential to spaceflight.
I was at the core of that development. I don’t know that even I can now realize the importance of such things. Maybe fifty years from now, somebody might. But I’m very pleased to have been a participant in that effort. And one of the few in NASA, because you don’t find too many chemists in NASA. At least in the engineer firms, like JSC and Marshall [Spaceflight Center, Huntsville, Alabama]. You don’t find too many there. I was kind of alone in that particular educational difference.
BROOKS: What do you see as being the future of fuel cell technology?
MCBRYAR: I believe that within five to ten years, we will have automobiles available that has a fuel cell aboard. It will probably be a hybrid. It’ll be a fuel cell that will take most of the burden to power and propel the automobile. But, it will also be a combustion engine in there – to take up as a supplement, to get you out of trouble, to recharge certain things about the fuel cell, to produce a boost of power when the fuel cell is inadequate to do it. So, the future of the fuel cell, I think, will be on the highways of this country within five to fifteen years, probably beginning by 2005. I believe that General Motors or one of the Japanese firms, has presently gotten pretty close to reality a hybrid fuel cell car.
I would be very glad to see that. I made speculations in a lecture once I was doing at NASA. Someone asked the questions about its application to automobiles. Yeah, it should be a device would power an automobile. When do you think it might be available? I thought ten years. I was very naive. That was twenty or so years ago, thirty, I guess. I didn’t realize at the time just how difficult it was to bring this thing to fruition and, also, lower the costs so that you could put it in a car. Course, at that time, the time period I’m talking about for that speculation, a Chevrolet would cost you three thousand dollars. I doubt it you can get a Chevrolet for less than fifteen now. At most cars, the average price is twenty or so thousand dollars. Well, with the price of the car getting like that, it kind of narrows the gap a bit in the fuel cell being applied to it.
I’d be glad to see it. It would be such a great benefit to the country. If, indeed, the environmentalists are accurate about the automobile being the greatest contributor to pollution. Of course, this will produce no pollution. None whatsoever. Well, not exactly. You’ve got rubber tires and those things are going to scuff and they’re going to fall along the wayside and get into the air and what not. You’ll have something like that, but it won’t be any combustion pollution.
That would be great. And also it’s a renewable source of energy. Oxygen, the air’s full of it. You can always get that. Water, 70% of the Earth is composed of water. Hydrogen to oxygen ratio’s about eight to one in water. So you’ve got a lot of oxygen to extract from water, which can be done fairly easily, fairly straightforward. It’s expensive but it’s straightforward. So there’s lots of oxygen. Also lots of hydrogen because water’s made of hydrogen, too.
So, it’s altogether a renewable source. And not only that, but when it powers an automobile, it makes water. It dumps that as a form of vapor. So, it’d water the grass alongside the roads and what not. It would be a great thing, from an environmental standpoint, if we could make the transition. That’s a fifty-year deal. We’ve had automobiles now for a hundred years as common commodities. They’ve gone through a tremendous evolution, but basically they’re the same. They’re internal combustion. They use hydrocarbon in the form of gasoline or kerosene or diesel, something like that. They’re basically the same. They just look different.
Well, the fuel cell is going to have a physical configuration. And a fuel cell car is going to have a physical configuration very similar to what we have. But, the power source is going to be tremendously different. It’s not just an evolution; it’s a quantum jump. And when it happens, it will benefit the environment tremendously.
BROOKS: That will be wonderful.
MCBRYAR: It will be.
BROOKS: Can you talk a little about how your career with NASA ended?
MCBRYAR: Yeah. We were just at the beginning of the Shuttle program. I was involved in the development of the fuel cell for that. And the Shuttle, of course, was in the process for something like ten years. I’ve forgotten when. But long about `73, I believe it was, the fuel cell concept had been selected for the Shuttle. I continued work on that until about the tenth flight. I think it was ten flights, were already under our belt when I retired.
Well, I believe that was the test flights. After that it was operational flights. That was just by definition, the first ten flights were test flights to verify, wring out everything. Well, I remember very distinctly the first flight. It was a tremendous thing. I happened to be at Lewis Research Center [Cleveland, Ohio] in a meeting of fuel cell development at the time, and we heard it on the radio, TV, at the time, about its flight and its landing and so forth.
I stayed around for the additional ten flights. I worked considerably on power systems for the Space Station because we’ll have a fuel cell there, very likely. At least on the sort of aircraft that will be docked to it and go off.
In any case, we were confronted with a transition from the Shuttle program to the Space Station program. And I decided that it may be the time for me to end my career. So, I didn’t do it because I was tired of space program. I did it because of this break in the advancement of space technology. And also because I had an opportunity to go into something else immediately. So I retired to something rather than simply retired from the space program. In other words, quit while you’re winners. Like a quarterback, you shouldn’t ever quit with a broken back in the hospital. You should quit while he’s won a game, the Superbowl, for example.
Well, that same mentality might have my motivation, too. We’ve done all this. We’ve made mistakes. They’ve all been corrected. We’ve got an operational system. I was part and parcel of it. Not altogether displeased with it. So, I decided it might be a time to let somebody else fill my shoes, if they indeed needed filling, and go to something else. So I retired in `82. And I believe that there was ten flights at that time.
BROOKS: What was it that you then began doing?
MCBRYAR: You might not remember that precious metals began to be very attractive as investment opportunities. Gold got to be over $800 an ounce. Silver got to be $50 an ounce and so forth. I was acquainted with some investment technology people in Houston that were involved in the extraction of gold and silver. So, as a chemist, it lends itself to that technology as well.
So I was enticed to come with them and help to develop the technology to extract the precious metals from their holdings throughout the West. Arizona, Nevada, Utah, California, several installations. So that’s what I went to, precious metals refinement.
Now, of course, the price of gold didn’t last, and silver. The Hunt Brothers got caught up in price fixing things. So silver’s down to about $5 an ounce, I guess; it was $50. Gold is probably about $300, maybe $350; it was about $800. And it’s hard to mine gold at a profit now. It takes a very, very large firm, in order to have the volume to pay the costs of mining. And the firm that I was with was not that large. So they could not mine gold at a profit. It cost more to get it out. At a tenth of an ounce or five hundredths of an ounce per ton of material, that’s a very small amount of stuff to dig a lot of earth for.
So, I stayed into that, I guess, for about five years, and got out of that. And went to space technology for another contractor, support contractors, at JSC. So we did, I did additional work on the International Space Station with that. Eagle Engineering is the name of the firm that I went with. I stayed with them until about ’92 or `93, something like that. So it’s about seven or eight years I stayed with Eagle Engineering.
BROOKS: And then you retired?
MCBRYAR: No, not yet. I went to sea then. I had a friend who had a tugboat business. It transported barge traffic. Hydrocarbons, gasoline, oil, diesel fuel, a lot of chemicals in barge work. He got me to come to work for them, to help to manage some ships for the Maritime Administration. The Maritime Administration maintains ships in a state of readiness, in case we have a national emergency that you have to activate them. Well, he had a contract for two ships, tankers, both of them fuel tankers. And he needed somebody to manage that work. Well, I happened to be stuck in the doorway of his office, when he needed them. And he tapped me to do it. So I worked with him for about five years.
Then, I guess about March of ’98 is when I finally retired and come here. And I haven’t done nothing except work since.
BROOKS: We’re going to have to be wrapping up pretty soon.
MCBRYAR: Okay.
BROOKS: When you think back to your NASA career, is there any moment, any day, which stands out as something particularly interested to you?
MCBRYAR: As far as the space program, I guess the lunar landing was the most spectacular. There’s many steps along the way. I had a father who didn’t even believe we could go into space. Well, lots of people were of that ilk. Well, I never shared that belief, but at any case, knowing something about the difficulty of getting there, each step along the way to going to orbit. Of course, the [Alan] Shepard flight, which was just a trajectory that wasn’t too spectacular, although that proved that we could do that. But to go into orbit, like John Glenn, I guess that was a very signal achievement – that we could send somebody up there, spin him around the Earth about three or four times, and then bring him back. That was a small step for man, but a giant leap for mankind, which was said on the Moon, of course.
That was the first one. Then, we had this flight of two weeks, in this two-man spacecraft, Gemini. I was very intimately involved in that one with the fuel cell effort. And to keep those guys up there, in that cramped environment for two weeks and to do all the things they needed to do, like the bodily functions, and the eating and the sleeping, and all those. It is amazing that the human can adapt to the conditions that we have to adapt to to go through this life. Well, that was a signal accomplishment. Course, first we had a seven day. Most of them are two. One of two of them is four, I think. One is seven and one is fourteen.
Well, all that was was a rehearsal to go to the Moon. And we docked in Earth orbit. That was to develop the technique to make this docking for the Apollo, when we had to go to the Moon, because they had to turn around in Earth orbit, and then redock. They had to undock and then redock back in lunar orbit. So, even those events, like the docking of the Gemini in Earth orbit as an experiment for the upcoming Apollo. Then, of course, since we knew had to do it with Gemini, it was no problem to do it with Apollo. But to get to the Moon, and slow down, and get into orbit around that, no great shakes. We could do that. But then, to knock that thing loose, let them go down, and find a place to land that they’d never been before. And he only had about twenty seconds of fuel left when that thing landed. That was a spectacular day. Well, one equal to it, would be, of course, they were able to launch, leaving part of the stuff on the Moon, go back up there and join up with this craft.
So there’s very many, and I really am unable to select the most important one. But the landing on the Moon and a man getting out and walking around, leaving a footprint and planting a flag there. That’s probably, I would put it, the apex of the whole space program that I was involved in.
BROOKS: Well, we’re just about out of time. Is there anything that particularly want to add?
MCBRYAR: I think we about covered the bases. Of course, there’s lots of detail anyone could lace up such things with. But historians won’t particularly care to go through that detail. I think your questions have been rather profound. It’s just to sort of scope out the area of activity that I personally was involved in. You probably touched upon the major portion.
I feel that I was very fortunate in being where I was at the time. Had I not had a break in my educational career, I would not have been ready to go with the space program. I wouldn’t have been there. I’d be doing something else. I would probably have been opposed to the space program. I doubt that.
But in any case, I had this misfortune with having to shut down my education for a while and being available to visit the recruiters at the time. It was a blessing that was in disguise, really. So, even though a little late start with developing the education to be ready, I feel very fortunate to have been where I was.
I don’t know that I could have made a better selection. I didn’t miss anything. Of course, I would have preferred to be a doctor, as I started out to be. I might have been dissatisfied with it, but that was what I really planned to do. But maybe this was second best, but it was also all right.
BROOKS: Well, thank you very much, Mr. McBryar. This has been an excellent interview.
MCBRYAR: Well, I’m glad to do it. I hope that someone finds it useful. I wish I had something so profound in there that I could use one of George Patton’s statements. In his diary he wrote a particular point. “Future historians please note.” He thought it was so important. I don’t know that that exists here, but I hope they have fun.