NASA Moser, Thomas - June 11, 2001
Interview with Thomas J. Moser
Interviewer: Georgia A. Ruiz Davis
Date of Interview: June 11, 2001
Location: Kerrville, Texas
DAVIS: Today is Monday, June 11, 2001. This oral history with Mr. Thomas Moser is being conducted at 511 Ranch House Road in Kerrville, Texas. The interview is being conducted for the NASA-Johnson Space Center Oral History project in conjunction with Southwest Texas State University’s History Department by Georgia Ruiz Davis.
First of all, I want to thank you for letting me, for letting me come interview you. And one of the first things I’d like to ask you is about your background, where you grew up and went to school.
MOSER: Okay. Well thanks. I appreciate the opportunity to do this. I think history for the Johnson Space Center and NASA is important because it’s, I think the manned space program in particular has been—there’ll never be another one like it and I, we’ll probably go into that a little bit more but I appreciate this opportunity. I grew up and was born in Houston, as a matter of fact, on the north side of Houston and was raised on the north side of Houston and went to, in the Heights, and went to Jeff Davis High School and went to the University of Texas. And then went up to the Northeast to work a little bit, and then came back to Houston when the Manned Spacecraft Center was announced it was going to be there in 1963. So, native Houstonian and have been there most of my life.
DAVIS: Let’s see and I guess, for your educational background you said—
MOSER: Yeah, educational background; the University of Texas with a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering and then the University of Pennsylvania with a masters. And then I did graduate work on a Ph.D. at Rice as a graduate study program through, through the NASA Johnson Space Center and completed that all except the thesis. And so, that’s been my formal education.
DAVIS: All right. I guess and along those lines if you would describe the path that led you to NASA.
MOSER: Well, when I left the University of Texas, I went to work at RCA Missile and Surface Radar division in New Jersey. And I was always very interested in space because when I was at the University of Texas is when Sputnik went up in ’57. So, that got my attention as it did a lot of other students at that time. I thought, as I was making career decisions, I saw the aircraft industry go through big swings in employment and unemployment, same way with defense, but I thought space would be something that I really liked and space would be there forever. So, space has gone through a little bit of a downturn, but I was right in 1963. So, that’s the reason I chose the Manned Space Program and the opportunity to get back to Texas, and it’s just been a love affair ever since.
DAVIS: So, you think it was Sputnik that kind of spurred you on?
MOSER: Yeah, that’s what got my attention and a lot of other people’s attention. And then in the early follow on with the Mercury and the Gemini programs and the excitement there. It was just the ideal place for a young engineer to be.
DAVIS: Tell me about when you first came to NASA, what it was like, what the environment was like?
MOSER: Well, it was a bunch of young people, okay, comprised NASA, and it was just getting its legs underneath itself. It had been crawling and now was beginning to walk and beginning almost to run from the old NACA [National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics] days. When I got to Houston there was not a Manned Spacecraft Center per se, it was spread all over Houston, all over the Southeast side of Houston probably in about eight or ten different locations. In apartment buildings and old abandoned warehouses and eventually we sort of organized and got gathered up at Ellington Air Force Base, which had been abandoned by the Air Force. Barracks were renovated, and we all worked in old modified and upgraded barracks until the Manned Space Craft Center was completed. So, for the first few years that’s the way it was. But it was very much a can-do, high-energy group of young people.
DAVIS: Tell me what your, your first, when you first came to NASA. What was your position and your responsibility?
MOSER: Well, when I first came to NASA I was in the mechanical design and test branch in the mechanical design section. And I was an engineer, period. One of my first assignments was working on a test, a small-scale test for the lunar landing program. We were trying to determine the dynamic characteristics of the lunar module as it came down on the surface, and what the landing gear characteristics needed to be. So, we made scale models and tested those. So, that was one of the early things. And then, also about that same era, we are beginning to look at the getting into the details of the Apollo program, and I was working on the launch escape system for the command module. The Shuttle today doesn’t have a launch escape system, but the Apollo program did. In it there was a tower sitting on top of the very apex of the launch comp—launch system and that was a rocket. One of the problems that we found out early in Apollo was that if there had to be an abort where we pulled the astronauts, the three astronauts away from the rest of the launch vehicle, then this escape tower did it. It just literally yanked it away, and then the launch escape tower was jettisoned, and then the command module came back with the parachutes. But there was a problem in that because what would happen is the command module is like a cone and would come back with the cone first and would stay that way and that’s where the parachutes were, and you couldn’t get the parachutes out. So, it had to be flipped around. So, one of the very, very early things within the first year that I was there, the first Thanksgiving that I was, I remember it well, was at NASA, we designed a set of wings that no one has ever seen because of, the test engineers see it but you’ve never seen it in practice, so that when the launch escape tower pulled the command module away, then a set of wings would deploy from the launch escape tower and turn the entire module around. Then the tower was jettisoned and those were like, were called canards. And my first Thanksgiving, I spent two weeks at Langley Research Center [NASA facility in Langley, Virginia] testing the full-scale deployment of these set of canards, or wings, on this tower, and it worked. And, so, that would have—that was a system that was designed built and ready to go, but fortunately never had to be used during any of the actual flights. It was a redundancy; it was a safety system.
DAVIS: And you’ve held several positions at NASA.
MOSER: Yeah, after that, after being an engineer then I got very interested in the management of subsystems in the Apollo program. So, later I became the manager for the structural system of the Apollo command module and launch escape system. And after that, the Shuttle became—and then I stayed in that position all through the Apollo program. And that was through the development of the structure of the thermal protection system the command module structure where the astronauts were and to some extent in the lunar module, but not so much in that, more in the command module. And then the Shuttle program came along. I started working on the Shuttle program in 1969. So, that’s when we were doing a sketch a day of what the Shuttle should look like. So, I was involved in that program from, literally from ’69 to ’86 in various positions. And I got into the management of the programs at that time and later became—worked my way up through the Shuttle program to become the deputy project manager on the Shuttle. During that phase of working my way up, I was responsible for the structural integrity of the orbiter and the thermal protection systems and all the mechanisms, and everything associated with it.
And then, still, after the first Shuttle flight and after being deputy project manager, I became director of engineering. I guess I need to back up one. After I was an engineer and during the Shuttle time I became the head of the structural design section, and then the project, deputy project manager in the Shuttle orbiter project, then director of engineering at the Johnson Space Center. I was in that position when the Challenger accident occurred, and then I was asked to go to Washington D.C. to be the deputy associate administrator for the office of space flight. So, I took that position in Washington D.C. in 1986. And then a year later became the program director for the space station. So, I was the first program director for the space station, and I took that position in early ’87, and held it until I retired from NASA in ’89. So, got the space station program off to the development start.
DAVIS: I guess I was going to ask you to elaborate then on the, when you were program director for the—
MOSER: For the space station?
DAVIS: Yes.
MOSER: Let me go back one if I could. The Shuttle program was one, as I said, I had lived with from ’89 to ’86. So, that was, I mean from ’69 to ’86. So, that was seventeen years of really a lot of challenging times and extremely frustrating from the standpoint of it was a program that had to be redefined and re-planned almost every year because—and that was frustrating to me because I didn’t know better. But then I later learned that most all government programs [background noise] are that way. The funding is not always there unless there’s a real crisis and a need for it. So, the funding was never there. So, we had to re-plan the program with the current year funding, and, and—we made it! Okay, so we made it and it’s been successful and la-dee-da. We didn’t cut corners beyond anything to compromise safety.
Then the space station program when I was, became the program director, it had not been approved by the Reagan White House or by the US Congress. Being the program director, one of my jobs along with the associate administrator at NASA headquarters, was to convince the Reagan White House and the Congress that this was a worthwhile program and something that the nation should do. It turned out to be, in all programs, NASA programs, there’s a large element which is politically, in the political environment, and you can’t ignore that. And a lot of—I think that’s one of the things that probably even to this day a lot of the engineers in the field centers at the Johnson Space Center probably don’t realize the key role that is played by the political systems engineering, if you will. You can have the greatest systems engineering or aerospace engineering program in the world, but you don’t have an advocate for it, advocates for it in the congress and in the White House, and a lot of other agencies, it won’t happen.
My early job was not only to organize the program and how it would be managed and run. And the administrator at that time, James Fletcher, decided he wanted the space station program to be managed from Washington D.C., as was the Apollo program. But the Shuttle program was managed from the Johnson Space Center. So, Dr. Fletcher made the decision. He wanted it to be managed from Washington. So, that was my job, was to organize it and to do that, but at the same time get the program underway, was to deal with all this political stuff. I was spending about a hundred hours a week working, I think. And probably fifty hours a week was doing the management and the technical stuff getting the program going, and fifty hours a week was working with the politics of it—convincing the Reagan White House and the Congress that this was a program worthy of the taxpayers’ money. And, low and behold, they agreed, and we know where it is today, it’s being assembled. That was 1987. So, that was fourteen years ago. Things don’t move too quick unless there almost is a crisis.
DAVIS: One of my questions that I wanted to ask was about some of the biggest challenges that you faced.
MOSER: You can separate them into different categories, you know. There are technical challenges, and there are political challenges, and there are budgetarial-financial challenges, and they’re all three equally important. I think one of the early challenges—now, Apollo didn’t face that so much, that’s an interesting aspect of it. Apollo, and I said things had to be re-planned and restructured and all, Apollo didn’t—was a different program. It was almost, I’m going to say crisis even though it wasn’t a crisis, but it was, it was a race with the Russians. They had done something and we were racing for the moon. So, it was full speed ahead. Usually the budget was there. The budget was fully appropriated what was needed to execute the mission. The politicians were fully behind it. There was not a lot of in-depth oversight like there is in programs today. So, it was different than the Shuttle.
One of the frustrating things or challenges, let me call them challenges, for the Shuttle program as I alluded to a while ago, was the constant re-planning of the program. Early on in the program, the Shuttle program after it was approved, about the second year, there was a $100,000,000 shortfall just in the orbiter project itself. So, myself and a group of other people determined that we could save the program $100,000,000 if we did not do the classical structural test on the orbiter airframe. When you fly around the country or the world in a commercial airliner, they’re tested both for endurance, for fatigue, and also for their strength, and are usually taken up to 150% of the maximum expected load and demonstrate that it can withstand those loads. Well, we thought that we knew enough about the program that we could pre-predict the response of the structure to loads. So, we said, “What we’ll do is we’ll take it to less the 150%. We’ll take it to 110 or 120% of the load, pre-predict the strain response—I don’t want to get too much technical detail to you but—how the metal is going to react to a given load. We could measure that and predict it. And if we could measure and predict it all the way to 120%, okay, then we said we could extrapolate to 150%. And, therefore, we didn’t have to dedicate an airplane, an orbiter for that. So, an orbiter costs $100,000,000 just for the structure. So, we said, “We can do it.” And so, we challenged ourselves technically. And then we had to be reviewed by all these outside committees and all this kind of stuff, well we convin—and that’s okay. We convinced all these outside committees that, made up of industry representatives and college professors and so forth in aerospace engineering, that we knew what we were doing. So, we succeeded. That was an early challenge.
A later challenge probably that got a little bit more publicity and took all my hair off the top of my head and turned everything gray, was the tiles. The thermal protection system tiles. Remind me, and I’ll show one here in a minute. There are 22,000 tiles on the orbiter, and a large number of those 22,000 tiles are so critical that if you lose one you lose the vehicle. I mean you lose the entire vehicle. It was not so much a thermal performance thing, we worked, we solved that problem, but we didn’t early on address the integrity of the tiles. They’re a material like a very fragile ceramic, and I mean fragile like—eight pounds per square inch and you break ‘em. Okay, that’s—you don’t even have—I don’t know of anything sitting around here that will break at eight pounds per square inch. That’s very low strength.
So, what we had to do was understand all the forces acting on these 22,000 tiles. And not only that, but we had to—it was a people process dependent thing to glue these things on to the aluminum airframe. So, we had to make sure that the people process was also perfect. So, we had to figure out a way to gently test each one of these 22,000 tiles, and prove that it was, the integrity was okay to protect the vehicle. So, that was a challenge— that was a technical challenge. It became a political challenge somewhat, too, because that was the pacing [unintelligible] then for launching the Shuttle. Then we were under a lot of political scrutiny to get that thing going. Those were a couple examples of some both technical and political challenges.
DAVIS: How do you make a glue that would—I guess I can’t even fathom—
MOSER: Well, you know, sometimes things are not as complicated as you think. The glue that was used then, and I’m sure the glue that is used today is something that’s called RTV 560 and it’s a GE [General Electric] product. RTV stands for room temperature vulcanized rubber, and all that means is its bathtub caulk, okay. You can go to your hardware store—as a matter of fact, when we were, when we were adhering the tiles, or gluing the tiles on the vehicle, the first vehicle, we literally went down to the hardware store in Palmdale, California [large aerospace manufacturing area near Edwards Air Force Base] and bought cases of it, okay. It’s just RTV 560. It’s the same thing people put to caulk their—it’s the rubber caulking material used around the bathtubs. So, believe it or not, that’s what those tiles are put on with, and it will withstand 600 degrees and it’s the adhesive.
And there’s a lot of other things that go into it, there’s—since the aluminum expands and contracts and the tiles are a very fragile material, it couldn’t withstand that. So, you can’t bond it directly to the aluminum. So, there was a strain isolation pad that was just like a very loose felt, if you will. As a matter of fact, it’s the same felt that’s used in Stetson hats. But it’s loosely, loosely woven, so that you put the adhesive, the bathtub caulk, on the aluminum. Then you put the strain isolation pad, the felt, and then you put another layer of adhesive, and then you put the tile on. Then you apply pressure so that you can see—you got to have the temperature right, the humidity right, the pressure right, the cleanliness right—all these kinds of things. And once you get done you’ve got to make sure that tile is really attached the way it’s supposed to be without hurting it.
DAVIS: So, you’ve got people applying these tiles?
MOSER: Yeah.
DAVIS: One by one.
MOSER: Individuals. Humans. Human beings apply them, one by one. One by one. The human beings were good, but humans make errors. So, we have to, you know, with a vehicle of that type and so critical, we had to make sure each one of those six inch by six-inch tiles were properly bonded.
DAVIS: One of the impressions that I’ve gotten from hearing previous interviews, oral history interviews, is how immense the amount of stress that NASA employees were under.
MOSER: Yeah. Yeah, true. It’s a—when I, when I said “frustrating” a while ago not knowing that government programs go through this re-plan, re-plan, re-plan, re-plan, that was—that causes a lot of stress. And then that gets overlaid onto the stress of doing something that’s never been done before. I mean, let’s talk about a couple of programs, and then I’ll talk, let me talk about the Apollo program, the Shuttle program, and the space station program.
The Apollo program was, was not—didn’t have the frustrations associated with it, but tons of technical problems because that had never been done before. There was a lot of pressure to do it within when President Kennedy said. So, it was done in nine years. Return—send a man to the moon and safely return him to earth, back to earth. Never been done, okay. So, that the technical challenges there we could spend days and days and months and months talking about all those. There’s been lots of books and everything. There was a lot of stress there that was technical and time related, not so much money related or politically related.
The Shuttle program was stressful from the standpoint of—it, too, was a very large technical challenge. A vehicle—think, think about a Shuttle. It's an airplane, it's a rocket, it's a spacecraft, and it’s a landing system. So, it’s all of those things, and it’s, and it’s all of those things in different environments from the very severe atmosphere of going through extremely fast, of going uphill into space and coming back where the surface of it is 3000 degrees Fahrenheit. Then the space itself which is, you know, one side of the vehicle is minus 250 and the other side of the vehicle is plus 250 degrees Fahrenheit. There were a lot of technical challenges there. The thermal protection system had never been made that would do that, so we had to invent it. The propulsion system had never been made, so we had to invent it. The avionics system and the computers had never been made, so we had to invent them. Those were the big technical challenges in the Shuttle, but now intermingled with that, the politics.
Now all of a sudden in the Shuttle program, the US Congress decided that they need to have more oversight in NASA. Which is good for the taxpayers, but some of the members of Congress and some of the members of the staff tried to be the program manager, and there they’re not qualified. And, so, they caused a lot of stress. And then just the normal development problems that occur. And then as it finally got down to, “Now we need to launch this thing because it’s critical.” Then you get the additional stress of having to deal with the, with the time and schedule related things.
I think another extremely frustrating thing was, or stressful thing was probably a year before the first Shuttle launch. We were about ready to go. We had a lot of things to do before we lit the fuse on that thing for the first time. And it was decided to have an outside oversight committee made up of industry representatives and college professors and all. There were hundreds of them that came in and looked at every aspect of the Shuttle program. At the same time managers and engineers like myself were dealing with, “Let’s get this vehicle and make sure we’re doing everything right.” We were having to educate a whole other group of people and explain to them in infinite detail why we were doing it. And I don’t think there was anything changed as a result of their oversight. That, that was very, very stressful.
I often reflected back, I started jogging in, I don’t know—twenty something years ago, just because some of my neighbors jogged, and they were doctors and they knew something I didn’t know. So, I decided to jog. But, I think with the stress of the Shuttle program, I probably, it just felt like I wouldn’t have been able to survive had I not done that jogging. There’s a mental thing in jogging that people learned about later that really helps to deal with stress. So, it was extremely stressful.
And then the space station program. I left that program in 1989. It was really, really stressful to then because it really began in about ’85, where we were looking at different configurations, and how to manage it, and the politics of it, and “Do you manage it from a center?” “Do you manage it from Washington?” “What to we give to Marshall [Marshall Space Flight Center, Alabama], and Johnson [Johnson Space Center, Texas], and Lewis [Lewis Research Center (present day Glenn Research Center) Ohio], and Kennedy [Kennedy Space Center, Florida], and duh, duh, duh, duh, all the other centers?” And, so, you had to fragment it. But someone had to be in charge. And then you have internationals in it and how do you do it with the internationals? And someone’s got to be in charge. So, the political systems engineering in that was probably the most stressful thing.
I’ll say something some of my colleagues wouldn’t agree with—old colleagues. Space station is not a technical challenge. Yeah, putting something in space you got to plan out all the operations, but there’s not a technical challenge in the space station. Nothing had to be invented. Apollo, a lot of things had to be invented. In the Shuttle, a lot of things had to be invented. Space station, nothing had to be invented. It was current technology. So, it was, so it was, let’s see I think I used to say something we—think what it was—every program like that has a conservation of complexity. The Apollo program was technically very, very complex, was not very complex politically or anything else. So, it was, it was about all you could handle, the technical complexity. The Shuttle program was kind of a mixture of technical and political complexity. The space station program is pure political complexity, okay? You know, again, people aren’t going to like me saying, but that’s, space station’s not a technical challenge. It just isn’t. Yeah, you got to figure out how to do it safe and how to manage all this stuff you’re sending to space, but that’s the logistics. It’s not technical issues. So, the conservation of complexity.
DAVIS: Well, you talked about jogging for stress relief and a lot of things that I’ve read and heard or about the toll that the stress took on people’s personal lives, but it sounds like you were able to handle it pretty well.
MOSER: Yeah. I guess I’m as proud of that as anything. You learn how to—sometimes you just have to learn how to shut down or else you have to get very, very strong to be able to accommodate stress. But we never had any formal stress management stuff. We just learned to deal with it. And I think you know, the thing that enabled it too was, let me talk about the—[tape ends]. Okay, you ready? The Shuttle program, one of the things that was unique about it and that also helped to make the stress management more efficient was, the management team of the Shuttle never changed. The guy who was responsible for the engines was there from beginning to end. The guy who was responsible for the orbiter was there beginning to end. The overall program manager was there. Me and the tiles, and the structural—was there. So, we knew how to work together so that helped eliminate—alleviate some of the stress, even though some of the individuals were stressful, but at least you learned how to work with them.
The—NASA hasn’t been able to enjoy that in the space station program. They’ve had many, many changes of management, many, many changes of configurations, many, many changes in international partnerships and so forth. So, I guess all that’s goes back is probably God or somebody’s looking after this, “These guys can only handle so much complexity. Let’s make it simple in Apollo, except for technical.” All the way to the other end of the spectrum, “Let’s make it simple technically in space station, but let’s make it as tough as we can [laughs] in as far as the politics and the management is concerned.”
DAVIS: This may be kind of redundant. What do you consider to have been some of the milestones of your career with NASA?
MOSER: Well, clearly, the [background noise] biggest milestone of my career was the first flight of the Space Shuttle. I mean that’s, there’s no doubt in my mind, again, from 1969 to 1981, when it was launched was twelve intense years. And the, the mile—the reason that was a milestone, too, is that vehicle was flying under conditions that had never been able to be tested on the ground. We did everything we could analytically [dogs barking] and everything else, but you couldn’t test in the wind tunnel some of the conditions. You [background noise] couldn’t test in the thermal facilities some of the conditions that the vehicle was going to see.
So, I was at the Cape [Kennedy Space Center, Florida] for the first launch, and I was, had a viewing vantage point so that I could see just the tip of the nose of the Shuttle and the external tank actually behind the launch complex. And the engines ignited, and it was like something saying, “I’m ready, I’m ready to be born,” you know? “Release me.” And boy it took off. So, clearly, that was the greatest milestone. And of course then, Apollo and the first lunar landing was clearly a major, major milestone but, personally the first flight of the Shuttle was clearly mine.
And then, another important milestone was getting the Reagan White House to approve the space station program, because I did a lot of selling and, can’t say lobbying, but educating, Congress and other government officials that that was a good thing to do. So, those were the three, I guess the three big milestones—and a hundred other little ones.
DAVIS: This is actually the redundant question—the very best thing about your career with NASA?
MOSER: Just the opportunity to be able to experience challenges and accomplishments. I’m kind of an accomplish driven person. There’s always, there was always a clear goal of what to do, and, not how to do it, but there was, there was a lot of support within the organization for everybody, mutual respect and so forth. So, I’d say that that was it.
The other thing is that there will, and I’ve talked about this a number of times, when I moved back to the, to Houston in ’63, after being gone for a couple of years, and the Manned Space Program was beginning it began—it began down in the Clearlake area. Well, Clearlake’s where I used to go as a kid when I was in junior high school and high school because it was just a summer resort area. And here it was a bunch of ranch lands and a few weekend houses and things like that. But coming into this area was a nucleus of people, okay, and a group of people that were isolated because there were no grocery stores down there. I mean there were none. When I moved there there were no homes in Clearlake city, there were no homes in Nassau Bay, NASA Road One was a two-lane road, period. But all these people were there working for a common objective of the Apollo program. The world’s, at that time, the biggest challenge humans had ever faced technically. Now I’m not talking about the challenges of World War II and all that kind of stuff because those were undoubtedly much, much larger challenges, but technical challenges faced in a very, very short period of time, it was the greatest thing.
So, all of a sudden you have this major cause and objective and a group of people coming together. So, now they’re working through their personal lives, they’re working through their culture of living in a somewhat isolated community. Raising families, as again, as I said, very young, most people had little bitty kids, probably age of your kids. But we were working long hours, and, so, that will never happen again. That will never happen again in the world, I don’t think. There will never be a challenge like, “Put a man on the moon.” There will never be the opportunity to have a group of people as a family come together. So, it was—that was a very unique and extremely rewarding opportunity.
DAVIS: Tell me about those interactions the, the NASA community there were very few minorities, very few women.
MOSER: Well, I never thought about that. I don’t know how many minorities there were. We were a group of people. Gosh, there were females there. And now you’ve asked me something I hadn’t even reflected back on because it didn’t matter. It wasn’t an issue from my perspective. Everybody that was, you know, we had the most qualified people doing the job whether they were white or black or Hispanic or male or female. It didn’t matter.
As a matter of fact, you know, another culture was, there was always, and I think this was pretty unique about the Johnson Space Center, there were civil servants and there were contractors. But we didn’t, that group of people didn’t pay any attention to that. I mean, yeah, you have to do your contractual thing now. But when you had a problem to solve the engineers at NASA had some expertise that the contractors didn’t and vise versa. So, we just all came together, it was kind of a badgeless environment, so there was not discrimination. I don’t think that exists today. I think back in those days the management, or the contractors had the attitude, “Let’s go do what’s best for the program.” They really did because I saw Rockwell [Rockwell International Aerospace Corporation] leave money on the table on a number of occasions where they could have finessed it and, “Let’s go work on this longer and do more testing and all.” But that wasn’t the right thing to do for the program. They said, “No, we’re not going to do that.”
For instance, talking about not testing the airframe. Well, they signed up to that in a hurry and the guy who was head of that operation’s short shifts signed up to it in a minute. It cost them a lot of money, but in the long term it paid off. So, I think the contractor management today in general, don’t have that attitude, “Let’s don’t”—they don’t do what’s best for the program, they almost have to do what’s best for the bottom line. They’re a bit more greedy then they were then. Make me prove that, and I probably couldn’t. It’s just a sense that I have.
DAVIS: Because it’s more political now?
MOSER: It’s more political and it’s more driven by the finances of the company than it is by the technical accomplishments, let me put it that way. And I guess, again, it kind of goes back to Apollo. My god, you could only handle so much, so you had to technically solve those problems. With the Shuttle you had to technically solve those problems. Maybe space station today, that challenge isn’t as great, so you could afford to think about the cash flow a little bit more than, than the bottom line of the business and return on investments for the corporations than you could then.
DAVIS: Any stories or anecdotal information that you—that are part of your reflections?
MOSER: I’ll tell you a story that a—about the first lunar landing. It was about, I don’t know, a month or so before the first lunar landing in July of ’69, and I was an engineer in the structures and mechanics division in Johnson Space Center. And the guy, my boss, the guy who’s head of that division, a guy named Joe Kotanchek came in late one afternoon and he said, “You need to work on a project but it’s a project that you can’t talk to anybody about.” He said, “Congress has decided that they want to put a flag on the moon, the United States flag.” Because up to that date there had been a lot of discussion at the United Nations and all that, you know, it would not be the sovereign right of any nation that gets there [the moon]—is going to be, is going to be a free and open, any country that got there would not declare rights to it. So, this was a little bit political, so he says, “Congress wants to put a United States flag on the moon.” And he says, “You’ve got to figure out the following. You’ve got to figure out where to put the flag in the, on the Apollo spacecraft. There’s no room in the command module, there’s no room inside the lunar module for the thing, so it has to go outside the lunar module. It has to be such that the astronauts can easily get it. It has to be, you have to tell them, how far away to put it from the lunar module, so that it doesn’t burn up when the lunar module lifts off to return to earth or its venture to earth, its journey to earth. And you have to tell them how far to put into the lunar soil so that it doesn’t blow over. So, other than that you can work with one other group and that’s the technical services division. And go do it.”
So, went off and did it, okay. Myself and some other guys and technical services did that. Jack Kinzler was running that operation, so he and I, I was the engineer and he was the guy that was going to make it. So, we designed it to put on the ladder of the lunar module, so the astronauts could easily reach it. And we had put a thermal shroud around it so it didn’t get overheated during the landing with the rocket engines firing. And they could reach up off the ladder rail and pull it down, and I put some red stripes—and then it would unfold and telescope out. And then the flag would unfurl and then there was some red tape put on the staff of the flag so it says, “Put it in the ground at least this far.” And I told them how far to put it away from the lunar module.
So, that night I was watching with my family and a lot of other people the lunar landing, and Neil Armstrong came down the ladder. And you’ve probably seen the movies, the videos of that a hundred times. Well, when he got down to the last rung he jumped off the—he didn’t step on the last rung. He sort of jumped off. Well, in my mind, I thought the ladder had broken because we had put this mass hanging on the rail of the ladder and it went through my mind as, you know, how they say when people die their whole life goes before them. Well, my whole life went before me because I could just see the ladder breaking, a sharp edge cutting the space suit, Neil being killed because of that and the whole program was over. Just because of this one thing I was responsible for. But fortunately that was not the case, he jumped off with being full of vigor and aggressiveness and energy and excitement. But that almost caused, you talk about stress, my heart almost went through my throat in that case.
So, survived that and then if you’ve noticed, the flag always looks like it’s waving. Well, there was an error made in the coating of the little telescoping rod which stretched the flag out and they couldn’t pull it out all the way to be fully extended. So, as a result, the rod was shorter than the flag and it looks, so on all the subsequent flags we did it purposefully that way so that they all looked like they were blowing in the breeze. So, not a thing, but a little—it’s those kinds of little things that, you know, there are a thousand stories like that.
DAVIS: That’s real interesting, have you ever seen the or have you heard about that documentary that FOX—I don’t know who did the documentary, but FOX put it on, or FOX—it was on the FOX channel—about how that the whole, you know, that we never really landed on the moon?
MOSER: Oh! No, no!
DAVIS: Then they talk about the different—it’s because of this and this and this, and one of things is that the flag looks, at one point the flag looks like it’s waving in the air—
MOSER: Oh, you’re kidding!
DAVIS: There’s no atmosphere up there, so it’s not supposed to wave.
MOSER: See, now! See! I know that I could help disprove that, okay. As a matter of fact, I’ve written a little history of the, and someone else has, too, but I have a—when we packed the flag, after we did all the design, we, Jack Kinzler and myself and couple of other guys, personally packed the flag and rolled it up and put it in its thermal shroud, and it was taken to the Cape and put on the lunar module. And we trimmed off all identifications of who made the flag and we had to trim a little extra on the flag, and so all that scrap was thrown away. So, I saved a piece of the first flag that went to the moon, and, so, I still have that to this day. So, I’ve written a little history on how this whole thing came about. I’ll send you a copy of it. But I’ve never heard that before. FOX [laughter]. But it was, it was, technically it was called—the aluminum was anodized, and they put the wrong anodizing on the, the little, on the aluminum and where one tube slid inside the other in the vacuum of space the little, it’s called the vacuum of space, it adhered. So, they couldn’t pull it apart, so it only pulled apart so far. But then we cheated on all the others. We wanted them to look the same. We didn’t want them to see our mistake. We hid our mistake.
DAVIS: Anything else you would like to add about your NASA experiences?
MOSER: Well, I think we kind of hit on all of it. I can get melancholy and all that kind of stuff and say great group of people and all that kind of stuff. Because it was, I think you mentioned a while ago, stressful. And it’s true a lot of government employees don’t get a lot of credit for working hard, but I tell you what—there’s, I don’t think there’s, there’s a harder working group of people in the United States then there are for most of the NASA people. They take their jobs very, very seriously and they work very, very hard and they’re very dedicated. As a matter of fact, I think some of the people that have come from industry and academia that have taken positions at NASA of, where they’ve had a lot of responsibility, said they’ve never worked so hard in all their life. I think that that’s true. But it’s working hard because you want to as opposed to—and you have to—but you also want to.
DAVIS: Post NASA experiences. What you’ve done since you left NASA.
MOSER: Well, let’s see after I retired from NASA in 1989, and I stayed in aerospace business. I’ve been vice president of aerospace systems for a number of companies—Fairchild Space and Defense and Analytic Services, mostly in the Washington D.C. area. They were in the non-manned space business. I purposely did that. I purposely wanted to do something other than manned space because I had done that in my entire career. It was commercial communications satellites and ballistic missile defense or the SDI [Strategic Defense Initiative] type of work which is using space assets. And it, it gave, gave a different perspective on the space programs, and that was challenging and rewarding but not as fulfilling in accomplishments in the feel that ever was there during the NASA stuff.
I came back to Texas in 1997, so I was in Washington D.C. for eleven years. I went there in ’86, and returned to Texas in ’97 to retire. And then I guess, I failed retirement after six months, and I ran the aerospace commission, executive director of the Texas Aerospace Commission, for George W. Bush for almost three years until last September [clock chiming]. And that was an opportunity to bring all this stuff back together. My career has been very fortunate in the fact that, I won’t say it was really planned, but every piece has fit together and there hasn’t been a lot of redundancy or wastefulness in it.
Now, when I came back here the Aerospace Commission has the charter and objective of promoting and advancing the aerospace business in the state of Texas. Well, I’d been in Washington in the political scene for eleven years, and it’s a political job. I’ve been in the private sector for ten years and, or almost at that time, and so I knew the industry. The aerospace industry is a very small knit group of people, but they have big dollar projects. So, you have to know the people, you have to be technical oriented, you have to be politically sensitive to do the job. So, I thought I brought all that to the table. I thought that when I was asked to do that, also from a Washington perspective, I could see that Texas was getting its butt beat really bad in bringing in the aerospace industry. They were getting beat by Alabama, by Colorado, by Virginia, by Arizona, by California, by everybody, because Texas wasn’t aggressive. So, I thought that I could help. I knew I could help. I thought Texas was serious, and I thought I’d have a good time and as long as all three were constantly, “Yes,” then I would agree to do it, because, the pay was not much but it was a cause. So, I thought I needed to go help my old state of Texas do that. And working for George W. Bush was just absolutely fantastic. Great leader. Good person. What you see is what you get. And that’s what people are beginning to see now, and that’s exactly the way he is.
When I took that position, I—commercial space is where the activity is now. Texas doesn’t have anything in commercial space, nothing. I mean, just essentially nothing. In the space program there’s manned space and there’s unmanned space. There’s commercial space, there’s government space. Texas has one little piece of that. It has manned space operations, period. None of the other full spectrum. So, we got a little bitty piece of the total space thing. So, I thought, “Well, if commercial space is the growth industry, what can Texas do?” I thought that Texas could be an operations point including launch and recovery of the next generation launch vehicles, which are called reusable launch vehicles. And they’re reusable in the fact that they fly to space and they come back and they refuel them and they go again, in a very simplistic way. Whereas the Shuttle flies to space and you throw away, you throw away a third of it or half of it on every flight. Expendable launch vehicles, which everybody else is flying—the Shuttle’s the only one you even recover part of it—are expendable launch vehicles or ELVs—expendable launch vehicle. And they’re all thrown away except for the payload. So, it would be like getting on an airplane and flying from New York to California. When you get there you throw the airplane away. It gets to be pretty expensive.
So, reusable launch vehicles are going to happen, and so, we did a—I kicked off this study of looking—who are the viable launch vehicle companies. Identified the best. Proved to them that Texas could serve their need and convinced the legislature that they needed to pass legislation to form space port authorities, which they have done. And, so, the industry in the state is poised and ready to move as soon as some green lights turn on. And, right now, again, it’s kind of back to politics, technical and business. Commercial space is all of those. Right now it’s in the political arena of the United States Congress to give the green light to the private sector to go raise the funds to build the multibillion dollar launch vehicles. And Wall Street will do it, but they’re afraid the United States Government’s going to compete and therefore no investor’s going to invest in that. So, loan guarantee legislation or tax incentives or something like that will send a signal that the government’s not going to compete. So, that’s being worked through the Congress right now, and I’m doing some consulting with a couple of companies, helping them to accomplish that once we’ve put Texas in the position. And I want to help Texas to be the world’s leader in space operations in this millennium, and it has the potential for doing it.
DAVIS: Looking around here, this is kind of a silly question, but it—why do you think so many people have chosen, so many people from NASA have chosen the hill country to retire?
MOSER: Same reason people from petrochemical industry, and from banking investments, and everything else have chosen the hill country—is because it’s a unique area. It’s the reason Lyndon Johnson loved it so much. It’s probably the cleanest air in the United States. There are not a lot of people here. It’s cooler than the big cities and the—it’s less humid [laughter]. I think it’s just, it’s a unique thing. I think it’s probably just the natural beauty of it, and the lack of a lot people is the thing that attracts people here [dogs barking].
MOSER: You’re about out of time [referring to cassette tape].
[While the tape was being changed, the Ms. Davis and Mr. Moser talked about the work he had been doing since he left NASA. The following is a result of that interaction. The question was not caught on tape.]
MOSER: Okay, I was talking about the commercial space industry and just to make a point of, in the last several years there’ve been more commercial launches then there have all of NASA and DOD [Department of Defense] combined, just as an indicator. The other aerospace challenge that the United States of America has today is that we build 80% of the commercial satellites that are launched in space. Last year the United States, based on revenue of launching things into space, the United States had 11% of that revenue. The French have got most of it. The Russians and the Chinese have got the rest of it, essentially. And then the United States has got a very small percentage. The rest of the world is using expendable launch vehicles. In my judgement, and I think a lot of other people’s judgement, only the United States today has the capability to build a completely reusable launch vehicle and I have, I feel very, very strongly that this needs to done and that Congress needs to enable the private sector to do it along the lines that I was saying. Step back, encourage, and enable the private sector to do it. Don’t fund them to do, but enable them to do through loan guarantees and some other things, which, if you want to build a ship or build a shrimp boat or whatever, the government will give you a loan guarantee because that’s part of transportation infrastructure. So, they need to do the same thing for space and that will happen someday and hopefully it will happen very soon in Congress.
But the thing that the Johnson Space Center can do—the Johnson Space Center is the center of gravity of the world for reusable launch vehicles, thermal protection systems, propulsion systems, operations. The expertise resides at the Johnson Space Center, and if the Johnson Space Center would embrace and endorse, encourage these entrepreneurial companies to come into partnership with them, which they can do legally, it advances not only the nation and the world for developing and capturing more of the commercial launch industry, but it positions Texas to be a leader in the world in that because companies have indicated they will come to Texas, they have committed to. They will come to Texas, and they will build their multibillion dollar launch vehicles, and they will hire a lot of engineers.
So, now the nucleus of technical capabilities that reside at the Johnson Space Center can be working with the private sector and those which are retiring can go to work and work with the companies that are trying to build these launch vehicles, these reusable launch vehicles. And that is a very, very unique opportunity that’s probably only going to last for a couple of years because every year we wait, and I can show you some articles sitting over there five feet from where we’re sitting right now, that are in Space News, the Russians are looking at it, the Europeans are looking at it. But we are, we are ten years ahead of them, but they’re probably catching us at the rate of one to three years per year. So, we’ve got a few years that we can do this.
There’s been some resistance by some of the management at the Johnson Space Center to embrace this for whatever reason. I don’t know if it’s lack of ownership or power or whatever, but that needs to, that needs to be curtailed and to take those resources and apply them to this new thing because what it—diversification means longevity and continued operations. And no one would ever even want to say anything about another Shuttle accident, but if you fly it long enough it’ll happen. Hopefully, it won’t, you won’t fly it that long, and it never happens. But if it were to, today, okay, the thing that’s at risk is the whole Manned Space Program.
The only good thing, the only lucky thing, okay, related to the Challenger accident—it was an easy thing to determine what caused the failure. And it was a fairly easy thing to fix. The politics caused it to take two years or so to do it. But if something were to happen and you couldn’t identify what it was it may take you a lot longer, and I’m not sure Congress will tolerate that. I think what they would do is they would challenge, “What is the real value of the Manned Space Program and show me why.” And when I was trying to, quote, sell the space station program, many members of congress who were not supporters of it said, “Prove to me that there will be a good return on investment.” Well, that’s impossible. You can’t. You just say, “Well, 1957, the United States didn’t know what it was getting into when Sputnik [unintelligible]—we went full force, full speed ahead to develop the space capabilities that we have. What do we have today? The Cold War ended because of space assets and being able to look down at the Russians in defense associated with satellites and all. That helped to end the Cold War significantly. Global positioning systems help airplanes navigate and cars and everything else.”
And the other thing I always relate to, since I grew up in Houston and went to Galveston as a kid and lived close to it most of my life—in 1900, 6000 people perished because they didn’t know there was a hurricane out there. Now with weather satellites you know they’re there. If two people die in a hurricane it’s amazing. So, I used to tell congress I said, “None of us were smart enough to know what the benefits were in 1957, but look what has happened. So, if you had stock in a company you could invest in, and it was doing that well, you’d continue to do it. So, all I can say is, ‘Congressmen, keep investing, because I don’t know what’s going to come out of the space station program, but it’ll be good.’ And if it’s not we, it’s a bad investment. But I can’t prove to you a return on investment.” So, that’s the kind of thing that I think that with the diversification [background noise] of the industry in Texas and the Clearlake area, would be very, very important because now you have another industry there in case something were to happen to the government Manned Space Program.
MOSER: Anything else you’d like to add?
MOSER: No, I think that’s kind of the top level of where that is today. I’d just like to see exploitation of the capabilities that reside there and diversification.
DAVIS: When we visited NASA—when we visited the Johnson Space Center, we had kind of like a debriefing, sort of, session with Bill Larson who told us about several things about the possibilities of the future. China’s going to probably put someone up in space here pretty soon, is what he said. He mentioned something about some spacecraft or parts that had been in, had been part of the Soviet Unions’ inventory that are now, I guess through satellite surveillance, that are now in the Middle East?
MOSER: I think in Iran. ,Comment on all that?
DAVIS: Would you feel comfortable?
MOSER: Yeah. Again, I think it’s—talk about the Chinese thing. I went to China not as an official NASA person but just as an individual in 1985, so that’s when they were first opening up. But I got to see some of the, a little bit of the stuff and their technical areas and all. They’re way behind us but they’re catching up fast. They’re smart, hardworking people. And they’re, as individuals, I really enjoyed meeting the people. I’m not fond of their government at all but, they will do it. I thing that they have so much to do in infrastructure development that I don’t think they’re going to move aggressively that way. They will continue to move in that direction. I can see them forming partnerships with European countries even with the Russians where there’s more technical capabilities exist. And they’re learning very fast, so they will do it. They will have a program.
I think that in any country moving into the manned space program or humans in space, there’s great pride associated with it, and that’s what there has been. And there’s great motivation for young people to get educated because it’s such an exciting thing. So, those are real benefits. They may question it, some of the leaders of the country may question it based on the cost of it relative to pride, so it all, you know, there I have no visibility. By I—someday they will have somebody up there. How soon? I don’t know. I don’t think anybody knows, but it could be very fast if they thought it was a national, if that national pride was that important to do it, they’d have the resources and they’d do it. And they may have few failures and they probably would, but it wouldn’t hinder them from doing it. The technology’s there. They can do it. They can, I mean, they have the launch capability to do it with rockets. The—having people and the human systems in space, it’s all in the open literature, so they can do that or they can go join forces with some other—the Italians, or whomever, that have launch capability. And the Italians are building a lot of capability in that area right now. So, that could happen.
The Russians in transporting missiles and things to the Mid-East and to Iran and wherever, that’s brought about in my judgement, and I’m not an expert on this by any stretch of the imagination, that’s brought about just by virtue of the fact that they, they’re hurting economically. They’ve got some really good systems and these other countries do not. And developing—doing the engineering development on aerospace systems is long, and it’s expensive, and you encounter a lot of failures along the way. So, the Russians have done that and they’ve succeeded. So, they have something to sell and they have a need for economic resources. And these other countries have a need for the technical capabilities, so it’s going to happen.
Now, it was the thought, I think that—help alleviate this need by bringing the Russians into the space station program and that will be a way of keeping some of those things from going out, but that’s not going to be sufficient. So, that’s going to happen too. So you, I don’t think we’re going to, you can’t put all sorts of political roadblocks in the way, and it’s a higher peg-grade that I am, or was, politically. But I don’t think you—I think both of them will continue to happen, so you have to assume it’s going to and that the United States has got to do what it can to stay ahead. And that’s critical—the commitment to stay ahead.
DAVIS: Tell me how you feel about tourists in space.
MOSER: Absolutely, 100% for it. And let me tell you why. I’m really disappointed NASA’s taken the attitude that they have. When I was deputy associate administrator for the office of space flight, I really wanted there to be—when we were recovering from the Challenger thing, getting the Shuttle flying again. There needs to be more private citizens, and let me tell you what I think those kinds of people should be—ought to be poets and song writers, and people that, newspaper, or writers, or historians, people that can express themselves and capture that experience to people on earth better than, I can say it, than a bunch of engineers. We’re not good at that. And in all due respect to my astronaut friends, most of them are engineers or technical people. They’re not good at that. Besides that they’re too busy doing their thing of what they’re supposed to do. So, they need to take other people up. And when I was doing this aerospace commission and trying to generate a lot of enthusiasm, which there is in Texas, a lot of enthusiasm for commercial space, I had the opportunity to make a lot of speeches around the state. And, I, for the last three years, as I addressed, whoever the audience was, I said, “There will be tourists in space, in my lifetime and in your lifetime.” And almost everybody in that audience I could say that. Well, lo and behold, one has already happened, and I was saying it three years ago. And I didn’t even know about Tito [American who paid the Russians to take him into space].
There needs to be more, and there’s some more going on by an individual out in Arizona. He’s serious about it. And as soon as the thing which, it will happen really, really quick, if you can get to space more cheaply than you can now. And we were talking about reusable launch vehicles a while ago and expendable launch vehicles just rule of thumb, orders of magnitude—$10,000 a pound to put something in space today with an expendable launch vehicle. Like $1,000 a pound maybe, for reusable launch vehicles. It’s something like that, and it’ll get there. So, one tenth of the amount. As soon as you get that cost down there’ll be more people wanting to go into space. Then all of a sudden, the Hyatt hotels, and the Hilton hotels, or entrepreneurs, will be building facilities up there for people to go spend a few hundred thousand dollars to go into space for X number of days. People pay almost $100,000 right now to go climb Mount Everest and kill themselves, most of them do. So, there’s people that are willing to spend that for adventure. I mean it’s going to, I promise you, I promise you, within the next twenty years there’ll be a lot of people, tourists in space. I’ll say twenty years. There’ll be a lot. You’ll see more and more, but it’s going to be a bunch in twenty years.
DAVIS: Well, this has been really great. Thank you, thank you, again.
MOSER: Okay, you’re quite welcome. My pleasure.