NASA Perez, Jose - May 20, 1999
Interview with Jose Perez
Interviewer: Stephanie Ulrich
Date of Interview: May 20, 1999
Location: Perez home, San Antonio, Texas
This interview was conducted by Stephanie Ulrich on May 20,1999. It was conducted at the home of Mr. Jose Perez in San Antonio, Texas.
ULRICH: This interview is with Jose Perez and this is conducted as a NASA oral history for research and is only going to be used for research and for NASA’s purposes. Do you agree with this?
PEREZ: Yes.
ULRICH: Okay. I would like you to give a brief me biographical information about yourself and your family.
PEREZ: Okay, I am originally from Laredo, Texas. I went to school there. I went to junior college there and then I came to San Antonio, Texas and went to school for about nine months at night while I was working during the day. I finally got enough money to go to Texas A&M (Texas Agricultural and Mechanical University in College Station, Texas) for one year. I went to Texas A&M for one year, [then] dropped out.
I joined the Army. The reserves and went on to training for about six months or so. Came back. Worked some more. Got enough money to go back to Teas A&M and graduated from Texas A&M in 1959.
In 1959 I started working for a new product company in Houston, which didn’t last very long. I joined the government, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). I worked for them about five years. At that time NASA was just starting to set up their offices in Houston and Clear Lake City and I went and applied, and I got a job there.
At that time the complex was just starting to be built so we were working out of Ellington Air Force Base, which is a base about two or three miles from where the center now sits. And finally, they built the building and we joined the rest of the group that was just starting out in 1966 at NASA at the Johnson Space Center (JSC). In those days it was the Manned Spacecraft Center. (MSC)
ULRICH: Okay.
TERRY (the video guy): Excuse me, Amanda, (wrong name) could you scoot back just about a foot, I’m getting a little bit of your notepad in the picture?
ULRICH: I’m sorry.
TERRY: That’s alright.
ULRICH: What were your positions and responsibilities at NASA?
PEREZ: I started out as a contract negotiator. Of course, NASA does not build things—the spacecraft or all the other equipment is utilized in the space program. There’s companies that build the projects, the hardware and software and so-forth. We needed contract negotiators to contract with the companies to build all the equipment and the tools that were needed to continue with space exploration and the space program.
And so we were a team probably of close to one hundred people that were contracting with different companies and we would let out a procurement. A lot of times we didn’t know what needed to be built. We knew what we wanted it to do but we did not know how to get there. So we relied on companies to give us their ideas. We want to go to the moon. How do we do it? We don’t know. We had companies that put together proposals of how best to do that. Of course there had already been a lot of research on rocketry and so forth, but never a man in space. What do we need to do to put a man in space?
We got all these ideas from different companies. A team was formed to evaluate these proposals. The team would be composed of engineers, scientists, and people involved with life support systems and so forth—all the different parts to it. We took the proposals and evaluated them and then went with those ideas that seemed to be the most feasible. We were inundated in the sense with all these wonderful ideas from different people and different companies on how to do things. A contract was let then and sometimes we let out more than one contract to do the same thing. There was so much that was unknown that we didn’t know which was the best idea. It was a wonderful project in helping develop what eventually turned out to be the best program in the world for space exploration.
I worked in that department for about five years. Then we decided, right after [Lyndon B.] Johnson became President and started thinking more about the human part of all that the government was doing, to give equal opportunity to people. We decided to start a minority business program to get minority businessmen to develop their skills and bring in their ideas. We put together a program and I was asked to head that project. It was done nationwide at all the different centers. I worked at that for about another five years.
Then I went into the human resources area. They set up a department to look at employees and make sure that employees were given equal opportunities within. We had very few minorities and very few females--very, very few. Most of the females were in secretarial positions. An effort was made to go out and recruit people for all the other areas--the scientific, the engineering, and the administrative areas. We would go out to universities or wherever they were having job fairs and let them know that there were positions available at NASA for people with scientific, engineering, and administrative backgrounds. That was the early seventies when this project was started to bring in people with equal opportunity to NASA.
ULRICH: Was there a lot of discrimination being a Hispanic male in a white Anglo environment?
PEREZ: I think there was some, but it was more a sin of omission—not thinking of going that extra step to let people know that there was positions available, that there was work available for others. Like everything else, when you start out you bring in your friends, people that you know, people from your school. It was obvious to NASA management that we needed to have a better representation of the whole make-up of the country and so efforts were made. I think one of the good things about NASA and its management was that they saw the need to do that—just to give the opportunity, not to lower the standards or anything like that. And that was done. In the astronaut group, you look at the first groups, it was all Anglo males. Again, we thought its time to start bringing in a good representative group because there is a lot of talent out there and we’re not utilizing it. Because of that NASA is suffering. It’s not bringing in the best minds or varied backgrounds, which helps always to bring in new perspectives. We started an effort to do that.
ULRICH: What was the town like you lived in while all this was going on with NASA?
PEREZ: If you look at the early pictures of NASA, it’s a cow pasture. The surrounding area was nothing more than agricultural areas. It just started developing. Clear Lake City wasn’t a city, it was just a little town. Because of the space program it started growing. A lot of companies once they started contracting with NASA had to be very close to the to the engineers and scientists because there was a day to day exchange of what was being done and how it was being done. So they had to have their own people there. It grew in a matter of a few years by probably a thousand percent in population, commerce, and in everything. It just sprouted like a flower—all of a sudden. It was very exciting from that standpoint. You saw things coming into work and when you left it was completely changed with all the construction going on.
ULRICH: Did you ever go to any splashdown parties?
PEREZ: Well we had a few of those.
ULRICH: Tell me about them.
PEREZ: It was a time for celebration. The work was very, very intense—tremendously intense. We had a project and we had a deadline. Things needed to be done by a certain time. As I was saying you were contracting with hundreds if not thousands of contractors to do something. To bring in all these component parts together, at the same time, so they would fit together, was a tremendous project and a tremendous effort. I think during that time I saw statistics one day that there were more divorces in that period of time not just at Johnson Space Center, but throughout NASA, because the people that worked there were never home. It was very intense, so when you had a splashdown it was a time for celebration and we celebrated.
ULRICH: What did you do at the parties?
PEREZ: Well, there were things to eat, drinks [laughter] social, very social. It was a family atmosphere. We knew we were in it together and we felt very proud of the achievements. So it was a big party. A big party if you will. Of course, some of us, well I don’t know that I count myself that, but people had to go to work the next day. So some of them participated of course, but sometimes we went on for quite a while.
ULRICH: How did you and your family cope with the long hours and the stress?
PEREZ: We moved within a couple of miles of the center. So there were times when I would go home and take a few naps and come back. And the other thing that helped there was a lot of people that worked there so the wives were home. They would form a support group, if you will, to keep the thing going. It was kind of difficult.
We did not have, like you do now, the scrutinizing of every step of the way. You didn’t have that control. We had a mission and you justified [it] afterwards. You did not have time to justify to go through and of course safely was always a big issue with us but we did not have the time we did not have the experience, a lot of thing were lack that we have now that we did not have then. We tried to accomplish things. So we went as best we could and as fast as we could. After the accident, shuttle accident, I think that’s when things really started changing. Safety took a top very top priority which we had it before, we did not have the control system to really scrutinize every step of the way.
ULRICH: What was the typical day like for you? How many hours did you work during the day?
PEREZ: Most of the work was done between eight and five. Now when we had a launch, that’s when the activity got very intensive. I am not saying that we worked all the time through the evening. Now some people did but during launch, or meeting deadlines. You just never knew when you we going to have to work harder and longer. It was open twenty-four hours a day. And we were learning how to train astronauts. We were learning so many things. So many things were new that there were just enough hours in the day all the things that needed to be done.
ULRICH: What was it like working within a group, the group mentality, and working with peers? You are not just by yourself, you are working with the group.
PEREZ: It was, I don’t know that I know a word to describe that. [We] had some wonderful minds there. It was a very elitists group in a sense. That we felt very proud, I guess, not superior, but very close to it. Me being one of the first Hispanics to join the organization, I felt wonderful that I was a part of the team, was fully accepted and it was like a team that wants to get to the playoffs. You support each other and you work with each other. There were a lot of anxious moments and there were some very hard moments. It is very, very difficult when you are in that situation and you don’t agree on things. But they were fought very hard. Here you don’t know what is right and what is wrong--and that is the difference. One person may think this is the best thing to do while the other person may think that this is the best thing to do and there is nobody in between that knows the difference—that knows which way to go. There were some disagreements, a lot of disagreements. Finally someone would say, “Well I don’t know but this seems to be the best way to go.”
We went with it, without justification—without there being any proof what-so-ever. In a sense when you look back, I don’t know if it was luck or what, but there could have been a lot more accidents, a lot more loss of life, a lot more loss of things than we had. I don’t know what to attribute it to other than that unity and that support we felt. There was competition but it was a teamwork competition. Everybody wants to do it the best.
Now I’m talking about the project. There’s two sides here. The project itself where everybody works towards the goal but then I have my own personal goals. When it comes to that, being human as we are, we want the best for ourselves and we fight for that. There were some people that went by the wayside that shouldn’t have. They didn’t get the promotions, they didn’t get the opportunities that they could have gotten otherwise. It’s very competitive from that standpoint—very competitive. There were new projects going on all the time—new things. You started one before you finished the other. Who was going to run it? Then whoever was going to run it had to put a team together. They may take this person here over there and those people that are working at something else need those people, it was those kinds of things. It was competitive; it was very exciting [laughter]. It was very exciting.
ULRICH: Do you feel that you got paid well at that time?
PEREZ: I think so.
ULRICH: Okay.
PEREZ: I think when you look at the standards of other government agencies, NASA had slightly higher grades. Well, I think so.
ULRICH: In your opinion, have events been portrayed accurately in the books and movies about the Apollo, or any space program? Do you feel that way?
PEREZ: Oh I think that to make it more interesting you have to glamorize things. You have to exaggerate some things. I think the thing that came through in some of the movies that I have seen, like the one about Apollo 13, the spirit of accomplishment the spirit of teamwork was portrayed pretty accurately, pretty accurately. There were some people that develop into leaders in a different sense, almost, I don’t want to use the word religious, but you know how sometimes there are some people that are so charismatic that you see their achievement you hear what they say, you admire the way that they think. You think of them as invincible, and you follow them and you believe them. And there were some people that got to that status and for whatever reason they were leaders, in the old sense of the word, that people followed them. You did what they say what they would want to do and you just followed them. Not blindly, but almost, because you trusted them, you trusted their intellectual abilities and you had faith in them. That is one situation I think that is very different from any other experiences that I have had.
ULRICH: What would you put in the books or movies that haven’t been put in? Now, if you were the producer.
PEREZ: Well, I think, what we had talked about earlier, the loss of family loss of relationships outside of the workforce. The human aspect and the families. I think would be one thing and I don’t want to exaggerate that, but I know some people who just could not handle it anymore--the stress, the tension, the loss of family life. There was some of that.
ULRICH: What type of celebration did you and your family do when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon? You had to have been so excited.
PEREZ: Oh my God, yes. We sat up that night watching TV and jumped up and down and cried. It was that kind of feeling. It was just a tremendous feeling. I was working on the contract with Rockwell International and they were building what was called a SBASI. These were explosive devices. You know the Saturn 5 goes in different stages, and these explosive devices would separate each stage. There were 168 SBASI in the rocket. All of them had to activate at the same time, in the same manner, so that each stage could accomplish its mission. I was responsible for that. When they finally got home it was quite a relief for me. It was just like having a baby. I guess I learned a little bit about how a woman feels when they have a baby after that project. It was a wonderful experience.
Yah, we felt very good. But it was almost a religious celebration. It was not a go drinking [celebration]. It was more of a very quiet, very meditative type of celebration for ourselves.
ULRICH: Can you spell SBASI?
PEREZ: S-B-A-S-I.
ULRICH: Alright. I’m a bad speller. [laughter] Under what terms did you leave NASA?
PEREZ: I forgot to mention that I also worked in the customer service center. When the shuttle started doing commercial work, going up into space with experiments, we were experimenting with new biological materials, new metals, a lot of new elements, there were a lot of companies interested in taking up experiments. We decided to put together a customer service center to help them develop the equipment and all the things needed to take their experiments up into space. We were doing that for several years. When Ronald Reagan became President, you may not recall [laughter], but he changed the focus to Star Wars—a more militaristic type approach. So then we said well, what are we going to do with the customer service center. We were putting up communications satellites along with a lot of other experiments. We were trying to also work with different metals to see what would mix better in space. As you know with gravity, the metal that weighs the most goes down and you can never have a perfect mixture. In space we could do that. We were doing a lot of experiments. Then all of a sudden, we said no, we are going to be working with defense. The Defense Department is going to have a larger role in space programs now. We had to make a decision about what to do with the customer service center. I was given the opportunity to either go work in another department or take an early out. I’ve always liked to explore things also, so I took an early out and went to work with another agency, a non-profit agency, to work with developing people and their employment skills. So I left the space program in December of 1988.
ULRICH: Is that what you are currently doing now--working for the non-profit organization.
PEREZ: No, no. I retired from that organization a couple of years ago. I’m doing something different now. I’m doing seminars for parents trying to help them cope with relationships with their kids, relationships at home, communications, and those kinds of things. I work with the school district and we have meetings with the parents. I have a seminar and we talk a lot about relationships, about self-esteem, about problem-solving, goals, and those kinds of things.
ULRICH: How do you think the Cold War affected your drive to help NASA get to the moon or your patriotic duty to join NASA?
PEREZ: The U.S. has never been second in anything. It was exciting from many different aspects--to try and be part of something that is building the road that everybody follows. Going into space was new. It had never been done before. It held a tremendous appeal for some people. I felt that. By the time that I joined NASA in 1966, we had already had Allen Shepherd and John Glenn in space. I came a little bit after that, but the goal was to do more now. We’ve got to get better now; we’ve got to be first now with anything else that happens in space. So that had something to do with it but the excitement of going with an agency that is not doing routine things was very, very appealing.
ULRICH: Are there any other ways you and your family and friends coped with the stresses of working with NASA?
PEREZ: There were other ways of releasing some of that tension. I recall a couple of people that played the guitar—I played the guitar and said I wonder if there are any more people out there that play the guitar. So we put an announcement in the local paper and set up a meeting time. We had about twelve to fifteen people that showed up with their guitars. So we formed a group called the Bay Area Guitar Society—in other words, we called ourselves the BAGS. [laughter] We had a wonderful time getting together once a month or so, everybody with their guitar. We would enjoy music and get to know each other. That was a wonderful way of relaxing with other people, too.
ULRICH: Were they at the splashdown parties or was this something totally different.
PEREZ: This was something totally separate. There were times when we had up to thirty people. After they found out about us, they would just come, sit, and enjoy it. The thing about it is that there were some excellent classical guitar players and there were excellent flamingo players. Now we go to another stress level because you have to prepare for them and make sure you that you do well for them. So you started practicing more. It was a wonderful, wonderful group. I still have some very pleasant memories of that. We did that for I guess about ten or fifteen years—we would get together. Then people started moving out, but I understand that from time to time people still get together. In fact I was invited to one meeting about two years ago which I made a special trip to Houston just to go listen to some of those players.
ULRICH: Wow! Do you feel that I left out any question or do you have a great story that you would like to tell us?
PEREZ: Well, there are so many stories. One of the things that I would like to mention is that we decided also at an early point that is was a good idea to go to the schools and tell people about the space program. Tell the children about the space program. We went into the Valley, we came to San Antonio, Texas at Kelly Air Force Base and we would invite astronauts also to come and address the group and we would work with all the school districts within the area and they would bring the children, the youngsters, to this celebration, if you will, to hear about the space program and we probably had, I remember, something like 30,000 40,000 children from all of San Antonio to go to Kelly Air Force Base and we had astronauts such as Judy Resnick and others that came and gave their time to talk to the children to tell them about engineering to tell them about science. To tell them that there were careers and there was a wonderful future for people that studied mathematics and science and so forth. So we did that around the country and I think that was one thing that probably got us to where we are right now, encouraging kids to pursue careers in engineering and science.
ULRICH: What was your most memorable experience at NASA?
PEREZ: The most memorable one . . . I guess Apollo 13 [11] had to be the top one. When we stepped on another part of this solar system. When we knew that we could do it, that it could be done. It was a tremendous achievement not only of the landing on the moon but also it was very emotional. So it wasn’t just a scientific fact, a scientific achievement—it was an emotional achievement also and it gives you some new confidence. The doubt, that maybe it cannot be done, goes away. Now things become possible—the space station, going to Mars—it’s not just a dream anymore. It now becomes an idea, a very possible idea. That kind of feeling is something that I think we are lacking. In a sense, we don’t have that element or that something that gives – it’s an intangible, it’s a feeling that when you accomplish something -- like if you have ever won first place or you have achieved something. That feeling that you get, I get that kind of feeling that I mentioned is something that I think is missing. That’s something that we had then, and every now and then it happens through history. We need to have one of those kind of good feelings again--something happens that makes all of us feel good about ourselves, our country, and the future.
ULRICH: Do you think present day society could do what y’all did back in the sixties and seventies? Do you think we could do that now?
PEREZ: Oh, I think that and more. With all the new technological advances that we have now but it is like everything, that it is hard to compare what we have now as to what we had then. Someone said that we are standing on shoulders of giants and I think that is what every generation feels as they take the best and develop it further. I think that’s the goal.
ULRICH: You mentioned that we have the technology, but do we have the camaraderie and the togetherness you had mentioned that y’all had thirty years ago.
PEREZ: Do we have it now? I don’t think so--not to that level, not to that level. [horn honking] That is why I’m saying that I hope that something happens—something develops – that we develop something as a nation that will bring us closer together. It’s like a wave that goes in and out, it goes in and out, but the strength that comes from that unity from that idea is so tremendous that even tragedy can bring you together now. But it is so much better when it is the achievement of something new.
ULRICH: Do you mind talking about the Challenger? Or is that too painful.
PEREZ: I rather not.
ULRICH: Oh that’s fine, we’re done. Thank you
PEREZ: Thank you.