NASA McCraw, David Lloyd - May 20, 1999
Interview with David Lloyd McCraw
Interviewer: Raymond William Westphal Jr.
Date of Interview: May 20, 1999
Location: Georgetown, Texas
WESTPHAL: 7:00 o’clock PM. I am Ray Westphal I am interviewing David Lloyd McCraw. Mr. McCraw, I wanted to start out with some biographical information form you just to get a little bit of family history, you know, how did you end up at NASA and start from there with your education.
McCRAW: How I ended up at NASA?
WESTPHAL: Yes sir, or how did your career start with NASA?
McCRAW: Okay, I was model builder, model airplane builder in competition and a friend of mine, I lived in Stillwater, Oklahoma at the time, we got calls from NACA [National Advisory & Aeronautics] to [see] if we wanted to come and build models for the government. That was during the war really, and so we both took off and went out. I ended up as a human computer because I’ve had a lot of math. I finally had to tell them that I was going to take off unless they put me, you know, building models. So that worked and I ended up working in what they called the prop shop where they built models and propellers for the wind tunnels, and then I was transferred to the machine shop. I.
WESTPHAL: What year was this sir?
McCRAW: [19]42. Then I did some machine work. We were having some troubles with making tensile specimens, which are to test the strength of the aluminum that we use in an airplane and I had devised a new way of making these tensile specimens. So I went to one of the -- Percy Crane, who it really was he was the head of engineering, and told him I had a gadget that I think I could do it with. He said go ahead and build it. Of course, I had it on napkin, so I made some drawings and I built that and then I built a strain gauge balance, what they call a balance, what they put a model airplane on and it would measure all of the drag and [unintelligible] on the planes.
Then we were inducted in the Army Air Force Reserve at the time, and I worked a while longer on some special projects and then was called and went into the Army and went to Basic Training, naturally. Then I went to B-29 Computer Control School which is the computer that controls [so that] one guy on the 29 can aim all the guns if one of them got killed you know. The war ended and I was then assigned to the Air Transport Command after that training. (laugh) We had no guns at all and I ended up, I got the choice of where I could go, South Seas or Europe. So I choose Europe and I ended up in Paris, and they gave me a grease gun, I was a corporal at the time, and they gave me a grease gun (I didn’t know whether you kids know what a grease gun is but) and said you ride with this French driver that was driving a gasoline truck. Well gasoline was like gold over there (laugh). So I went to the captain and says, “you know I can work the machine shop.” And they had a machine shop with nobody there so I ran the machine shop while I was in Paris for a year and then came home and went back to the NACA. Then I was assigned to PARD [Pilotless Aircraft Research Division] on special projects and the boss happened to be Rue [Robert] Gillruth. I made about, I built the first 70mm high-speed camera from sketches and then they made me a supervisor and I was a supervisor ‘till they became NASA. Then when the Space Task Group was formed they invited me to come over. We were going to set up a shop that could do anything they might need up in Goddard [Goddard Space Flight Center, Maryland]. If you know the story about Goddard, that’s where the Manned Space Flight center was going to be supposedly. I went up there and stayed two years. While I was there they decided, after I got all the shops set up, they decided that Manned Space Flight was going to be in Houston, you know who did that? (laugh)
WESTPHAL: LBJ [Lyndon B. Johnson, former Texas senator, vice president and president of the United States].
McCRAW: And so Jack Kinzler was the division chief and he asked me to come be his assistant division chief and basically from then on it was Manned Space Flight. So, we did a lot of, since we both knew Gillruth we were kinda sore thumbs to our supervisors because he was always calling down and asking us to -- and sent -- that’s how the flag and all of the other stuff hanging up ended up in our division. But we made lunar tools and just anything that any of the divisions around wanted. In the process Jack was -- Jack Kinsler was my boss and I was his assistant. I don’t know, well I guess you guys don’t know him but he’s a real PR man, real outgoing, real well spoken, and so he kinda did that and I ran the rest of the show for him. We set up a, what I thought was a fantastic shop to do whatever was necessary. In our division we had a sheet metal, machine, electronic and model and plastic and wood shop. We had a field test group that worked with the astronauts when they first taught them how para-sail and they did the first scuba diving with the astronauts. We had a hanger up at Ellington Field and we built the first water tank to practice in within our hanger. Course we had scuba divers too so eventually it was turned, turned over to Life Systems Division and the scuba divers stayed with us in field test, most of them did. We were dropping board plate capsules, which were Mercury capsules that were just made out of, oh -- what if you know what bullet train is? It’s just probably, most of it’s 16th inch long hot rolled iron. They were the right weight and the right size and the right, you know, aerodynamics and everything. And the Field Test Group would take them up and drop them at Fort Hood. Now they always dropped a piece of, a heavy piece of metal with a parachute to see how the wind was going. So one day [laugh] they dropped one and it hit right, right in the yard of a rancher there and when they got here he was sitting out there with a 30/30 across his lap, [laugh] wondering what was going on. [laugh] They went to retrieve it, but they never got [it]. They never had a capsule that went on anybody’s private property. Fort Hood’s pretty big, pardon this.
They did all the electronics and the mechanics and everything that went on testing to see --there was mostly parachute testing then. One the deals they had going was they had a, they were going to have a vehicle that probably a lot of people don’t know about, [it] was going to be a land landing vehicle for Mercury. It was going to have wheels and have two rocket engines on the side of it and have a parachute too. But it was a parachute, you know, [that] wasn’t enough to keep it from really buying it in at too many G’s for a human to take. So they, right when they were about to hit the ground, they would fire these rockets. So they did a lot of testing on that and it turned out that Williams went on and you know did a lot of….
The best thing about it was we never did the same thing twice. We had a commercial planning group that contracted out the work that we couldn’t do or if there was a whole bunch of the same kind of things they were contracted out and -- just stop a minute. [cough] I have an asthma problem.
WESTPHAL: No problem.
CHRIS ELLEY: No problem.
McCRAW: It turned out that they were real skittish having the rockets on the, that powerful a rocket right on the capsule, it was right inside the skin of the capsule, so they kinda wrote that off and decided they’d go ahead and shoot for the water. Speaking of the water, they did a lot of flight tests were they dropped, dropped a capsule and retrieved [it], you know The Marines were assigned to pick up the capsule out of the water. Well they had a little problem. Every one they picked up, they dropped. [laugh] And, the worst thing about it, I was on an observation flight over at Wallops Island [Virginia] and they picked it up, and they have a chicken switch that they can hit and drop it if they get in trouble. And they claimed they didn’t hit it, but for some reason it dropped and it…. The observation flight was, it was fairly close to beach. I guess the water was about 20 feet deep, and the capsule hit the water and you could see the sand on the bottom and the capsule sitting there and then the water came back in and of course when the water came back in, it just crushed it like a tin can. Well, then after that they tried again in what they call the Back River behind Langley Field, It was a marshy area. And they had all the wheels down from headquarters to watch another pick up. Luckily they didn’t drop it on them, but they came close. They flew over, picked it up and flew it, fly it around and got back out over the water and dropped it inadvertently again. So that’s when they went to the Navy for people, and I guess they didn’t have any more trouble then. That’s also, our scuba people were working with them then too. One of the worst things that I, we saw at Langley was, going back, we were working on parachute in the big hanger at Langley Field preparing a boiler plate capsule to take up and drop and I had a group of guys in there working on it and they had the press conference when they brought the first seven astronauts on. That’s the first time I’d seen reporters, you know, in that mass and I sympathize with anybody that’s really, cuss they were cussing and pushing and kicking [Chris Elley and I are laughing] and it was just unreal. You know that’s forty years ago nearly now and we stopped with our mouths open wondering what was going on. We thought there would be some real fights. Anyway they made a big deal of the whole thing, course it was great news at that time. But then when we got back to -- you know I transferred back to Manned Space Flight and moved to Houston. Well we went out to the field where we were supposed to build a big building and shop and all that, you know, and chased the cows away; two lane road, I don’t know whether you guys, you guys have been down there haven’t you?
WESTPHAL: I went this week.
McCRAW: What?
WESTPHAL: I went this week.
McCRAW: It must be, we haven’t been down there in a really long time, but it’s a mess you know. Anyway we built shops down there and fairly successfully supported everything. We did one job right after another. We mostly got called up, you know, when they got in real trouble. One of the things that we did, this plaque behind me, is [we] were asked to figure out how to make some extra holes in the slaw adapter, that’s the [cough] excuse me, that’s the shroud that went around the LM while it was sitting on the Saturn. So they came up with the idea of putting a, using a hole puncher, punch a piece of metal through. We worked on that for a while and Gillruth came over and looked at it and George Low [Apollo Program Manager] did too and he said, “looks like a winner.” And so we made that and after we made that they made drawings of it. That’s the kind of shop we were running. It’s just, you know, do things off the cuff. As we went along we ran into a lot of special projects on making lunar tools. We made the $120 astronaut pencil too that got all the good publicity. [laugh] You can’t make anything you know with the man-hours in it for the cheap. It just doesn’t work that way. We had special investigators, prime investigators I should think, these are guys that were studying, like what’s going to happen when you land on the moon. You know, one man came in and, I won’t mention his name. [laugh] He had the idea that when you landed on the moon you’d be covered. Just sink into dust. Of course, they’d already had a lunar probe and they knew that wasn’t going to happen. But he was insisting. So we had to set up a big tub of sand and run air through it so that would simulate, you know, ¼ G type thing and he was dropping mods of the LM into it to see how far it would sink, and it was very interesting. This couple of things. One man came up when they started talking of putting a flag on the moon. He was another one of these prime investigators. They weren’t NASA people, they were just scientists around the country. He wanted to make the flag out of gold thread and then enamel it with all the different colors and weave it special so that it wouldn’t deteriorate. You know the flag is completely gone now, the UV up there is awfully strong. It was an estimate it might last three months, an outside would be six months you know it would just turn to dust. So, we’ve got a flagpole out there with no flag. [laugh] I guess that, a lot of people don’t want to know that, but better cut again.
McCRAW: Manufacturing people is that when they were building the Lunar Rock Lab to take care of the rocks, they were very concerned that they would bring some sort of bug back, back to earth. Not that any bug could live in that environment, but that’s all right. We were called in to see if we could make the system which they had modeled after, I guess it’s that microbiology lab they got some place in Georgia where they take in these bugs like you know, real bad viruses. We had a lot of suggestions on how they could improve the construction and make it easier to build. That’s what, that was one of the main purposes we were there. We had a, I put together a group of guys that were a manufacturing group that went out to the various companies on request to see if they could help them out if they were getting into a problem, and there were a lot of problems. I don’t know [laugh] on this kind of thing whether I should even be talking about them, but its something a lot of people don’t know about.
Anyway this manufacturing group would go out at the request of the engineer that was in charge of the part or the hardware that was being manufactured. They came back and wrote reports to send to the director on how things were going, or how they weren’t going. They were a real, real, real good bunch of guys that. I guess I started the first inspection group to centers before they started QA. We started inspecting the work, especially the work that we got from contractors because when we went down to Houston and tried to find contractors to build stuff for us they thought 16th of an inch was close, you know. [laugh] They were oil field people. Finally there were companies that came in just special to support, you know, the manufacturing that we needed done on the outside. It finally worked out pretty good with the inspection group was going. Then they started, after they had a bunch of trouble with these North American workmanship and stuff, they started QA really hot and heavy. They had their own inspection. They were inspecting their own work, but then they started a bunch of QA. They had a special group reporting to the director then, and they finally took our group away from us. [laugh] It took a while but they did. But they worked in our facility and worked with us that way.
Don’t know how were doing on time, but about the flight -- We made all lunar tools and lunar boxes, they were contracted out finally, the rock boxes, they brought back the samples in. And we made pliers and wrenches and all that kind of stuff, but they had, they couldn’t have any carbon steel in them. They all had to be stainless because they didn’t want to contaminate the rocks with any carbon at all because they couldn’t date them right then. We built the, refurbished the trailer that they brought in that they had on the aircraft carrier that they picked up the astronauts in, the isolation trailer, that the first crew came back in. The field test group again did that. They were just kinda do it all guys. They did everything that was necessary. They also had a battery lab, kept the lunar batteries for the LM in good order. And then we happened to be lucky enough to we were, least Jack and I were, called in too on the moon landing flight to sit in the engineering support group to see if we had any problems with the way they were doing things with our equipment. We sat in front of a little TV and couldn’t tell what it was. I’ve got a picture that shows how bad they were. [laugh] All you had to do was say “I guess it’s all right.” [laugh] You could just go by the spoken word and they weren’t speaking a lot. Then after things came, the rocks came back, the guys got all settled and the moon lab started working. I went over to go through that with Dr. Duke, [who] was head of it, and the first thing I saw was they were cutting a moon rock with a carbon steel diamond blade and it was very obvious because the blade was rusty. [laugh] So we changed that and we built another napkin job. I went to the shop and told the guys I wanted to convert a saw and instead of a regular rock saw that they’d bought, like the rockhounds use, we made a band saw into a rock cutting saw and put it in a cabinet that could be purged with nitrogen to keep the oxygen off of it. Everything was made, you know, either plated it so it wasn’t exposed, the carbon steel wasn’t exposed, or made out of stainless. It didn’t have any carbon in it. After we did that they decided they needed three more so they went out and had a contractor build them all out of stainless steel. [laugh]
McCRAW: [Missing – beginning of tape] …very good friend then, and he was always asking us to do things for the moon rock lab. But we came to a point where we were making a lot of PR stuff to send out. They called up on Thanksgiving, I guess it was Thanksgiving or day before Thanksgiving, and asked us to build some plaques with a little encapsulated piece of moon rock on it to send to every nation we recognized in the country. And so we came up with a design. They had gone to Tiffany’s, and course you know what Tiffany’s would want. So we built them for about 100th of what Tiffany’s wanted for them. [laugh] The one thing that they had second thoughts about, they brought the little pieces of rock over, they weren’t very big. We put them in a little spherical, ½ sphere, and it magnified the rock and made it look real big. One of the first questions that one of the small countries asked when they got their plaque, and I tried to find a picture of it, they wanted to know who got the biggest piece. Well luckily I had foresight enough that we had laid out a chart and one of the branch heads and I laid out a chart and put a little piece of rock in each one and numbered it all and then we drew. I had him draw the countries and which rock they get #1 or #2 so there was no discrimination [laugh] against a little… Then Dr. Duke wanted to have a moon rock display for a bigger -- to go I don’t know what. Japan was having some kind of a centennial or something over there and they wanted to put a rock on display. And so they make a triangular case, and at that time the rocks were being kept completely away from oxygen, so we made a quartz glass triangular case with a low pressure nitrogen in it. We never had realized before the low pressure is as hard to hold as high pressure and the first time I had seen an O-ring that was four sided that we came up with. We finally investigated and found one. It went in those cases. We made a whole bunch of them and finally put them out on contract, we were getting so many requests for them. There’s one at the LBJ Library now with the fairly good size piece of rock in it. We did just untold things like that, every time they wanted something especially in a hurry. The Thanksgiving thing, they wanted in a week so we had to work over Thanksgiving and it happened to be work over the weekend and everything else to get those things out. They went over really well, we got lots of praise about the design and the way they were put together and as fast as they were done. But there was some world wide meeting going on was the reason they wanted [them] so quick. Of course they never think of anything ‘till they need it. [laugh] Glad I don’t work there anymore. [laugh] Take another break.
McCRAW: One of the things we were asked to do by George Abbey, who is now Director, who I worked with real close, was that he was assigned to be the flag man for the Director. He was, I don’t know what his real position was then, he was like administrative assistant for Neer. He was getting together flags for all the flights and we had to get a flag for every nation we recognized plus so many American flags, you know, that they flew and gave out at the end of flight, and they had to all be encapsulated as well, vacuumed packed in a plastic bag so they would be small. Course they were 5x7 flags all of them. One of the things we ran into as time went on, we went all through all the flags that way. We had a company that was producing the flags but the countries were changing their flags and those people weren’t keeping up with it. And I ended up making a couple of them at home myself [laugh] that went to some of the African nations that were, you know, changing all the time. We made, for them we had a real…. Oh I didn’t talk about the plaque that went on the moon landing. They called down from headquarters and said they wanted a plaque to go on the ladder on the LM and they wanted it to be secret what they had on it, they said. This is the plaque. We had a cover over it, it had a stainless steel cover with a quick release on it so that they could release it and read it and show it. Show it on the moon, but you couldn’t see it because of the quality of the transmission from the moon was so poor they had to wait till they got back and then get the real pictures to see what it said. But this is one that said that they came to the moon for all mankind and they had already signed, you know, a treaty that nobody would claim any part of the moon for themselves whoever got there first. I guess we were still kind of wondering if the Russians were going to try. They didn’t even come close evidently. So, I don’t know what else would be interesting, other than one of the things Gillruth use to say when they were asking him about [why] we don’t get female astronauts. Have you heard that one?
WESTPHAL: No sir.
McCRAW: He said well, “we got 120 lb. room for recreational equipment.” [laugh] He regretted that statement all the rest of his life, and that was what it was right over there. [points to a wooden figurine] I had a -- there was a woodcarver that worked for us that that was his hobby, wood carving. I, we had the idea that we ought to have one of those so that’s what we made, that he made and gave to us it.
WESTPHAL: I had a couple of questions that I did want to ask you. Were your transfers, especially like when you started working for NASA, were those mandatory or did you ask to get moved? Did you asked to get moved to new areas or did they just tell you pick up and move like you were in the service?
McCRAW: I blackmailed them one time. [laugh] When I was first there they put in the instrument shop. I had, we were married at the time and she was working in the shop with me. That’s when I took the idea that the tensile specimen machine and went to the head of engineering and said, “get me transferred back to the shop, I’ll give you the idea.” It didn’t take very long and he became a true fast friend. He use to come find out what I was doing all the time, [laugh] and then when we went to the Space Task Group we were asked. Then when it, when things went sour with going to Goddard, I was asked, then Jack called me and asked me if I wanted to come back you know. See, he was going to go up, he went up there for a while and he decided he didn’t want any part of it, and I could say it was because there were so many inept people working in that outfit. They’re the people that put up the Vanguard supposedly. Tried to anyway. I can see why it didn’t work. But that whole group that comprised the Goddard Space Center and Vanguard, they had moved from the Naval Research Lab. Most of those people. That’s who did the Vanguard, the Naval Research Lab. The people that were involved in that were the ones that were the core of the Goddard Space Flight Center. And I was just pining to get out. I didn’t ask him to get out, but I guess he had figured it out. [laugh] And he needed some help. He had some problems so he called and asked and I said yeah. [laugh] I was ready to go, and that’s not the best place in the world to live right outside DC. We were in the country then, like here. But boy when we went back it wasn’t country anymore. It was inside the city. We went back in ’74 or ’75. The city never ended, goes clear to Annapolis, I guess. So I took that job, that was it. I stayed there till I couldn’t stand the smoke. Doctor said, “ you had to get out,” that’s when they didn’t have smoking restrictions. It’s why I had taken so much steroids to stay on the job. That like I said, that’s all I wrote.
WESTPHAL: Did you notice a lot of rifts? When they were laying people off? Were they doing that when you were about to leave at that time, after the Apollo project?
McCRAW: We never laid anybody off.
WESTPHAL: Not like they are doing today?
McCRAW: No, I didn’t know they were laying people off. Are they replacing them with contractors?
WESTPHAL: No, there was a thing in the news that last year NASA relieved seven hundred people.
McCRAW: Oh, well I don’t know how many people they have working for NASA now, tremendous.
WESTPHAL: Why were there so many contractors? It seemed why didn’t hire more permanent staff to keep up with demand?
McCRAW: That’s the question we always asked. We, because the contractors, they say they weren’t cheap. You know they could, they could get the job done cheaper. And it didn’t turn out that way. But, and I think, you know, it is like a lot of these big companies are doing the same thing right now. They don’t have to give them any gratuities or any retirement benefits, no benefits what so ever. And they’re just flesh peddlers is what we call them. You come and work and get so much and hour and you don’t get medical coverage or anything and the government makes out that way because their retirement system is fantastic, at least it was. I don’t know any more what it is now but they, it’s a policy that the government shouldn’t do the work that can be done by a contractor. There was research and development and that’s mainly what we were there for, to support the research people and that’s mainly what we mostly did. We built the first lunar tools and then they were all contracted out. We did it though in our division, we contracted out. By the way our division doesn’t exist anymore. It was transferred over into another directorate. It’s there, but I think it’s probably, now I haven’t talked to anybody recently, it’s probably 100% contracted personnel now. Were we had a, our planning shop was contracted while we were there, but for in house manufacturing people they just didn’t do it. It wasn’t like NACA, you know NACA did contract out hardly anything. Everything was done in-house. But when [unintelligible] took over well -- NACA was a funny organization. They had seventy-five people at headquarters and then they had thousands in the field. Yea, we had Langley Field, Moffit Field, and Lewis Lab in Cleveland, and you know that were two-thousand people working in most of them and they were doing all their own work mostly. And those seventy-five people in headquarters were just there. The centers kind of ran themselves, you know. They had real strong directorates and they kind of ran themselves. We had apprentice programs going, we started an apprentice program there at Johnson and they insisted they go take their training, their academic training at the university and by the end of the time they were trained at whatever you wanted to train them in: electronics or sheet metal machine or anything they had enough to go ahead and get a degree. Most of them still worked there with a degree and transferred over to engineering directorates. I guess the apprentice program is probably dead. I haven’t really kept track of it.
WESTPHAL: Did you guys ever notice, I mean, was there a lot of pressure with you know the Soviets especially after Sputnik? They had launched it?
McCRAW: I can remember the day we heard about it. We were at Langley Field there and we were working at that time on a little, well not our outfit but the center was working on a little satellite they wanted to put up. It was about a twenty-inch ball. And it kind of took the wind out of everyone’s sails. So that’s when they decided there were going to go the whole way going to space, change NACA into NASA, and I don’t know if you know what NACA stands for: National Advisory Committee and Aeronautics. That’s what they were, NACA was. They were just the other way around. They worked for contractors. Yeah contractors would, you know, they had wind tunnels and everything and contractors would have designs and stuff they wanted tested. They would bring them to NACA and they would run them through all the engineering testing and stuff. They had a Tow Base in there for seaplanes and when I first went there that’s where I worked. I worked in the Tow Base as a human computer, breaking down the data they got off testing PT Boats for one thing. They were working on them, PT Boasts, and making them run faster, less drag and stuff. We never, we never had any contract people on base at Langley. When NASA came aboard, the idea was that they were being pressured politically into hiring contractors to do everything. And they said mundane to start with, so they start out with hiring janitors and it just escalated from there to do everything. Next, thing they did which was a real mistake, was hiring security. They should have in-house security.
WESTPHAL: Why is that?
McCRAW: Hmm.
WESTPHAL: Why is that? Why in-house security?
McCRAW: Why have contract security?
WESTPHAL: Right.
McCRAW: That’s like a fox watching a hen house. [laugh] You know, we had some trouble with them.
WESTPHAL: How did your family take it moving to Houston? I mean with the whole, I mean did you work a lot of hours or was it a set schedule like nine to five?
McCRAW: Yea, sure I worked a lot of hours. Well, one time we worked on a para-sail, you know which was a Skylab thing and I don’t know how many times I came home, but it wasn’t many in a week or so ten days that we worked. We had guys that, I took a picture of one of them, he was sitting in the lobby of the test chamber, he looked like was dead. I have to go over and shake him. [laugh] He hadn’t been home either. All we did would go home and clean up a little bit and come back and work on the para-sail. That was an interesting thing. We built that all in-house, real quick. It was just a big umbrella that they shoved through one of the -- they had an instrument package they were going to do some star shooting with. They took the guts out of it. It shot -- it went through the side of the Skylab and had a door on it so it was really made to put something in. So we had to design and build a gadget -- it had rods, they just kept pushing rods out. The fabric on the end rods just like -- started out we were thinking about fishing poles, then we had to telescope them and as they pulled out and pushed the rods out it pushed it way out, long like a closed umbrella. Then when you start pulling back in, well they popped out and you pulled the rods back in and pulled it right down against the Skylab. The Skylab had lost a lot of its heat shield when it took off and they said that when they were inside it the minute that thing went out there, you could hear it cooling off, [it] was popping and cracking. We built all that in not necessarily a clean room environment, cause the last thing I did, and the funny thing about that they took a movie of us all together, and the last thing I did was grab ahold of that can and put my foot onto it and push it in. I took my shoe off at least. [laugh] It wouldn’t go in the can very good, so I just pushed it in. Brute force and it worked. It was a little bit, didn’t go out completely flat, but it worked 100%. But we worked -- just one day I worked seventy-two hours. We were just trying to get everyone to keep going. Now the guys that did the work, they didn’t do that. We worked on shifts. You can’t have them running machines half dead. That was one time they were glad to have a group around to do something like that.
(End of 2nd Tape B1)
WESTPHAL: Did you actually think that was like an accurate portrayed of how things were going at the time? I was kind of wondering because the movies sort of embellish and you know Hollywoodize it?
McCRAW It was pretty good. This last one The Moon Shot was a lot better.
WESTPHAL: Apollo 13 sir? Was Apollo 13 the one you were talking about?
McCRAW: No, that was real accurate by the way, Apollo 13. Who was in the Moon Shot then?
MRS. HILDA McCRAW: Was it Tom Cruise?
McCRAW: Yea, Tom Cruise. You know he is a real buff you know.
MRS. McCRAW: It was a TV series.
McCRAW: He, that’s really good. That’s really well-done Apollo 13 was good too.
WESTPHAL: Do you think there is anything that they should say about? One of the things we were talking about when we went to NASA, and we were talking to so many people; was wondering, do you wish there were other stories that the public knew? That they sort of don’t? What was going on with the program when you were in it?
McCRAW: Did I what?
WESTPHAL: Were there stories like you know, things that were happening at NASA that you wish the public would have gotten to seen that they didn’t see?
McCRAW: [laugh] You want to put me in jail? [laugh]
WESTPHAL: I think you are past the statute of limitations, so I think you are all right.
McCRAW: Well, the biggest thing is contracts at NASA are not let to the best bidder. They are let politically. I don’t know whether you, and I know you know its, its not proof positive, but that’s what it seems like.
WESTPHAL: Hmm.
McCRAW: Especially on the Challenger.
WESTPHAL: Did you, did you guys, we were talking with some of the engineers and astronauts at NASA and some of them seemed really tunneled vision. They weren’t really sure, like of the big picture. Like everything that was going on this is my area and this is what I focus on and this is all I do. Did you get a sense of that where you were working? That you didn’t look at the big picture. Just you know sheet metal?
McCRAW: We didn’t focus. No, it was we felt like we were you know, part of the whole show. We had so many different things we were doing that we weren’t building rockets, but it was just part of it. It was Apollo. We did an awful lot of work for tests you know. That were running on heat shield tests [such as] we made heat shield material, samples and stuff like that all the time. Just every aspect of it.
WESTPHAL: What? I saw a picture when mission control when Apollo 13 landed all of the crew, they were smoking cigars and drinking champagne. What did you guys do in your area? When they landed, or how did you guys find out?
McCRAW: Don’t really know. I don’t…
WESTPHAL: Did they tell you guys when they landed?
McCRAW: Oh, we knew that, yea. That’s one time we weren’t in mission control anyway, but I don’t know what time of day they landed anyway. You know what time it was in Houston then? I’ve forgotten.
WESTPHAL: We been mentioning, could you explain what a Splashdown party was?
McCRAW: What?
WESTPHAL: What’s a Splashdown party?
McCRAW: Never went to one.
WESTPHAL: Really?
McCRAW: No, they were the parties of mostly the top people that went to parties like that were, Gillruth wasn’t one of them. The people that worked in mission control mostly and probably Life Systems people. It was kind of restricted you know. Well, restricted by people not probably wanting to go and we weren’t much party people in that respect but.
WESTPHAL: Where did you live when you worked at NASA?
McCRAW: Friendswood.
WESTPHAL: Friendswood sir?
McCRAW: Friendswood.
WESTPHAL: Okay.
McCRAW: Quaker City, it was made by Quakers. Deke Slayton lived next door and Chris Kraft lived right around on the other side of the street, and I think that whole thing was just mostly 50% on my street which wasn't very long. It was kind of a U-shaped street and, Nichols and Warnorth who was the 8th astronaut. I don't know where you've heard about him or not. He was a, that's what they call him, the 8th astronaut. Oh, by the way, we had a fat astronaut in our division. [Laugh] This is kind of off the subject. We were asked to assign a planner to support the astronauts in what they wanted, and they wanted plenty, and so we picked out one planner, that isn't all he did but a lot of it, and we use to call him the fat astronaut. He wasn't really all that fat, he was just kind of pudgy and he would be an interesting one to interview.
WESTPHAL: What was his name sir?
McCRAW: Whipkey, Bill Whipkey.
WESTPHAL: Okay.
McCRAW: Also the other one, one of the scuba divers is -- they don't live around here, but Whipkey still lives in Friendswood, but lets see which one, Jolly Rodgers.
MRS. McCRAW: Billy Dorman.
McCRAW: I don't know. He was a parachute man. He didn't -- all those field test guys were really chummy with the first seven astronauts; they went places with them and everything else cause they were their guardian angels so to speak. [laugh]
WESTPHAL: I have a question, when they had the first pad fire on the, when they had the first explosion. Did that change anything at your work? Like your work environment?
McCRAW: You talking about explosion or fire?
WESTPHAL: The, I guess the first fire with one of the rockets sir.
McCRAW: Yea, we did an awful lot of testing on what they’d done. We made simulations and ran four tests of what was wrong. The tubing that carried the alcohol through the system was bad, the connections were bad. And they had used a new kind of cold welding stuff. It never came out really, probably is in some technical report, but it leaked and naturally when it hit that 100% oxygen it went off.
WESTPHAL: Umm, did you guys ever want more? I mean were you ever disappointed that they just stopped going to the moon in the 70's? Were you guys I mean, did you have further expectations for NASA?
McCRAW: Well we were kinda of disappointed because there were more flights planned you know, Then again the politics weren't in their favor. I don't really know after looking at it though, all these years afterwards, that they would have gained a whole bunch more about anything. I think what they’re going to do on Space Station is going to be a lot more and better.
WESTPHAL: I noticed on your biographical data sheet you have a patent for the Saturn, right?
McCRAW: That's that emergency escape system I told you about. They had hydrazine fuel on the LM that was the only thing they could really use that had enough power to get them off the moon. They, the guys wore suits, you know, protective suits and stuff, but one drop of that stuff on your skin and you're gone. That's how toxic it is. So they had only two exits from the SLAW which is the shroud that surrounds the LM that goes between it the S4B and the Apollo. The original design was only two exits. So, like I said, I think it was five more exits. All we did, it was like a hole punch you know, and if they had to use it, well a guy could fire it from the inside to get out, then dive out. They had catwalks all around the LM inside when it was fueled and they, we had 1 5/8 inch holes through the skin that when they got it all fueled and everything they took all this stuff out. You know, the little guy that was inside wasn't very heavy. You carry it out and the other one was a hanging, you know, on the superstructure, their catwalk superstructure. And what it was, my boss, who’s on that patent by the way, he and the other guys were working on a saw system that was supposed to saw through the stuff and I came up with the idea of using a hole punching system instead which was in milliseconds instead of minutes. He came to me after it was all accepted and everything and he says, "you want to get a patent on that?" and since I wasn't really interested in it and he said I'll write it up if you put my name on it too [laugh] I said I don't care. I don’t know how much time he spent on it but quite a bit, but anyway, but turned out to be a pretty good system and luckily we never had to use it.
WESTPHAL: Did you guys feel you were paid like adequately for the work that you were doing? I was kind of wondering about that, that it was a government job, but you guys were doing, like, work that had never been done before.
McCRAW: Well, I guess we weren't you know, we didn't worry too much about it. I know some people did. We weren't you know, being paid enough to be really well off if that's what you mean, but like some of the contractors people who were working there but we didn't worry a whole bunch about it you know.
WESTPHAL: Did you ever do things outside the NASA community? How tight was it and mean did you just associate with people/ families from NASA? Or did you guys make friends outside the NASA community?
McCRAW: We associated with people outside of NASA. I was -- of course we knew a lot the people who were NASA people that came from NACA. In fact there is one living right up the street. [laugh] We moved here and they moved in behind us. I don't know how many NASA people are here, not too many.
WESTPHAL: What about when you were working in Houston though? Where you did you specifically um associate with people from NASA? I mean cause you were spending so much time with them.
McCRAW: No, didn't even associate with them.
MRS. McCRAW: Got involved with politics.
McCRAW: Yea, we got involved in the local politics and most of the people were not NASA.
WESTPHAL: Did you ever worry about funding? I mean, you read the books and it was basically the way they explain it was money was just thrown to you guys just to get these projects done. Were you ever constrained with that? Like how were you going to pay for some of these projects and for some of the contracting work that was being done?
McCRAW: Well, our division was, we had real, I was the budget officer too and we had a real easy way of justifying our existence and some of the other divisions in our directorate didn't. So, we would get a lot of money and they would take from us and give it to the other divisions. [laugh] But we still made out okay. We didn't have financial problems in the division itself. We got the buildings we wanted, the equipment and everything. When we justified something, as long as Gillruth was there, we knew we were going to get what we needed.
WESTPHAL: Um, are you guys sad I mean I am not sure how up to date you are with NASA. Are you satisfied with what they are doing right now? Did you expect, did you expect them to be doing more? Like after your retirement this far in advance?
McCRAW: We were actually working on some systems for the Space Station before I left.
WESTPHAL: Wow.
McCRAW: I guess people don't realize that. How far ahead, NACA especially. This little plane that their building now, that they used to call it like a dinosaur or something, we built models back at Langley when it was NACA of that kind of a system. A small shuttle or whatever you want to call it. Not like the big shuttle, small shuttle for personnel. Made models of that back at Langley.
WESTPHAL: Are you surprised that they don't have the Space Station today?
McCRAW: No, no I am not surprised with anything that involves that much money. You know it's a lot of money. I think it will be money well spent when it's all over with. I think one of the biggest things that the government had done is to kill the accelerator up at Waxahachie [Texas]. That was a real crime and that was a political thing to. It's just if you don't have the right politics, you don't get things done. It's what this government is all about.
WESTPHAL: Wow, um one of the other questions I had was how strong I mean did you have a lot of interaction with the directors or was it very top down or could you make recommendations and suggestions and see them implemented?
McCRAW: We had an in with Dr. Gillruth and then I had an in with George Abbey and George Low too. So in my directorate, see there are different directors there are directorates. My director would take great exception, but didn’t have the guts to complain. [laugh] But they use to call us all the time, Low and Abbey and Gillruth would call down and say I want this, thus and so, and never talk to our director. And when we went to staff meetings we would have to tell him, you know, and he'd get kind of frown and get red in the face. He was that kind of guy, but.
WESTPHAL: Did you ever notice any, like, rivalries, rivalries can never pronounce that word.
McCRAW: I didn't hear.
WESTPHAL: Did you ever notice any rivalries between the different groups you know we’re doing better, or we want to do better than another one?
McCRAW: I don't really think so. I think in my division I did. The Field Test Group were my favorite and I got criticized for that. But, I don’t think I really showed favorites because everyone got, you know, just as good a treatment so I thought they were just a bunch of gung ho guys that really wanted to get a job done and that was unusual. You know I didn't know what a government worker was till I got to DC. You know what they call government workers?
WESTPHAL: Hmm, hmm GS.
McCRAW: Then we worked at Langley and went up there and I couldn't believe what I was seeing when we first housed at Naval Research Lab. I don't know, it was just different kind of people. They felt that they didn't have to do much for their money so far as I could see, and we were always, you know, at Langley everyone was pretty gung ho.
WESTPHAL: How did you coordinate so many different groups? I mean how did, I mean you guys worked in the metal sheeting area. How did they coordinate?
McCRAW: We had a planning office and we had about eight people in it and they coordinated. It was a copy of what we had at Langley. We kind of copied our division off the technical services division at Langley and it worked real well there and we figured we didn't have to reinvent it. The only thing we added to it was the manufacturing people, and inspection and course we had plating which they didn't have. And, it was just well run. The planners we got from every place. We got some from Kelly, some from California, some from Langley and they were pretty good guys. They would take the job, figure it out, you know, what they needed to do and then coordinate it around through the various shops. If it had all the different work to be done on it then they would follow the jobs to find out where they are. The one policy that I had that a lot of shops don't have, I don't want anybody working in the shop that does not know what he is working on or what it is for because that gives them some pride on what they are doing. A lot of shops, especially the ones that I found around DC, those guys didn't know what they were working on. They didn't have any idea what it was for, so why should they take any pride in it. But, I would go around and ask the guys and check up on them and ask what they were doing, and the section head was in trouble if they didn't know. [laugh]
WESTPHAL: I guess this going to be two questions. What would be your, your biggest complaint about NASA that you saw while you were there?
McCRAW: Biggest complaint, that they don't have more in-house people. That they contracted everything out and it's become too bureaucratic. I had an awful problem with procurement and the stockroom and stuff. They used the old Navy system, if you don't get a call for an item in ninety days they surplus it. Equipment, machines, tools, metals that they stocked for us at our request and we had to start running our own stockroom. That's just a bureaucratic system that a lot of manufacturers use I guess. If you’re making a product and your making thousands of them I guess it's all right, but when you're working in R&D it's not. You need stuff right on hand right at the time, because the engineer that comes in wants something done. He wants it now because it's important to get it done as fast as you can. But I finally got that straightened out. I had to take it clear up to the director though.
WESTPHAL: What would be your biggest I guess most, your biggest thing your most proud of, the best thing you saw about NASA while you were there? I know it's a general question, but what did you appreciate most about NASA?
McCRAW: Appreciate most about NASA. Well to me it was interesting to the extent that I was enthralled. To me it was [I] couldn't have a better job. Where we where and what we did even when I was working, I was assigned to Gillruth's outfit and back at Langley for special projects. And everyday was you know, something new and interesting and it was nothing mundane. I look back and see the people that have these jobs were they do the same thing day in and day out and I don't know how they stand it. (laugh) But that's how I lucky I am.
WESTPHAL: Wow, the last question that NASA to look at was post-NASA experience. You had mentioned you had to retire for health reasons. You had mentioned you had to retire for health reasons. Did you just retire at the end of that sir? Did you do anything after you left NASA?
McCRAW: No, I didn't work at any job. I couldn't because I had to retire medically.
WESTPHAL: So this was in 1976?
McCRAW: I tinker around and do things. Stay active, but way behind on my work. Don't have enough crew. [laugh] You can ask my wife too. Way behind on the work.
WESTPHAL: Well I appreciate you taking the time to speak with us. This was very interesting. So thanks a lot and I will get you guys a copy of this tape also.
McCRAW: Okay.