NASA Piotrowski, Richard - May 24, 1999

Interview with Richard Piotrowski

Interviewer: Mark Samuels

Date of Interview: May 24, 1999

Location: Kerrville, Texas

 

 

 

SAMUELS:  It is Monday, May 24, 1999.  I am in Kerrville, Texas with Richard Piotrowski and Mr. Piotrowski was with Space Environment Simulation at JSC [Johnson Space Center] for twenty years.  Before we talk about JSC, Mr. Piotrowski, we were just talking about the Texas hill country.  How long have you been here and why Kerrville?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Well, I retired in ’81 and we moved here in ’87.  And so I’ve lived here twelve years.  Primarily because the wife is a native of Kentucky—she thinks this hill country looks a lot like Kentucky, so that’s where we ended up.

 

SAMUELS:  Well, it is the garden spot of Texas, I guess.

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Yes…yeah.

 

SAMUELS:  You grew up in Chicago, Illinois?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Grew up in Chicago, Illinois…spent time in several states…Michigan, Arizona and then Texas.

 

SAMUELS:  You were in the Navy, as well?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Navy.  Navy Air Corps, I guess is the name.  Enlisted in ’43 and got called up in ’44 after I graduated high school.  I spent about eighteen months with the program and then the war in Japan ended and basically the program was disrupted.  When I first enlisted in it, it was supposed to be a nine-month program and you’d have your wings.  But they kept losing fewer people and they kept holding us back and there it was, eighteen months, and just in the primary.  So the only way I could have stayed in and completed the program, I would have switched over to the regular Navy.  Which would have been a four-month…a four-year enlistment.  Wasn’t ready to do that, so I resigned from the program.

 

SAMUELS:  And then, apparently with an engineering career before NASA…

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Yeah…yeah, I had about thirteen years, I guess, in the engineering field.  Worked for various companies. I worked for…

 

SAMUELS:  Were you an ME…is that mechanical engineering?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Yeah.  Oh, yeah.  I was a mechanical engineer.  Got a degree, a Bachelor of Science degree in mechanical engineering and also got my…I’m a licensed professional engineer in Illinois.  And I got the …both the degree and the license in ’53.  But prior to going to NASA, I worked with several outfits and they all basically were aerospace.  Worked, for example, for Hughes Aircraft in Tucson…worked for Lear in Grand Rapids, Michigan.  And then I worked for an outfit that, really, prepared me for the kind of job I was doing at NASA.  This outfit was named Guardite and it was located in northern Illinois, finally.  It started out in southern Chicago, when I first worked for them.  They were specialists, they did a lot of work for both the Navy and the Air Force building environmental test chambers for pilot training and research.  And that’s really the reason I ended up with NASA.  I was a project engineer, in 1961, for a project that we were putting in at the Philadelphia Navy Yard…

 

SAMUELS:  And this is with Guardite?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Yeah.  And it was a pretty sophisticated facility.  It had thermal capability, and they had—which was known as rapid decompression capability.  That simulates a pilot in a cockpit at high altitude and the cockpit opens up.

 

SAMUELS:  That would be rapid.

 

PIOTROWSKI:  That’s rapid.

 

SAMUELS:  That would be rapid.

 

PIOTROWSKI:  So, that that was the kind of thing that we were building at the time.  Then, we had other things.  I was project engineer on a gyroscopic test facility where we had…testing propellers twenty-five feet in diameter and determining what the gyroscopic effects are when they rotate.  When an airplane rotates, there’s some destructive forces applied onto the propeller.  Anyway, the program at Philadelphia Navy Yard was one that was getting about, it was about fifty percent completed and the project manager that I was dealing with at that facility decided to go to work for NASA.  And his name was Ted Hayes.      One day Ted calls me at home and he says, “Hey, how would you like to work for NASA?”  I said, “I don’t know.”  So, he was going to be…he was going to head up this new facility that NASA was trying to put into being.  And he thought I would be a good guy to work with.  So, he recruited me.  I went down and interviewed [with] NASA at Langley [Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in Hampton, Virginia].  In the meantime, Ted was reassigned to another area, so I was dealing with a new guy—Aleck Bond, who was in charge of this particular operation.  I’d interviewed [with] Aleck and in about two days, he came back, and we negotiated a deal and ended up working for NASA.  I went in as a G, the lower level of the G-15 scale, taking a slight cut in salary from what I’d been making in industry.  But I thought NASA…it was very interesting work.  It was the ground floor.

 

SAMUELS:  That’s what I was going to ask you…

 

PIOTROWSKI:  It was very exciting.  So, that was where I ended up.

 

SAMUELS:  Had flight always been something that had captivated you?  In the Navy…and then… before you decided against a four-year hitch, was flying always something that interested you?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Yeah.  Yeah…I don’t know, I guess it was something in my character that…I just recently got a private pilot’s license about five years ago, I guess.  And I was sixty years old at the time. [Laughter]

 

SAMUELS:  Well, you’ve been busy.  You had things to do.

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Yeah.  No, flight was always an interest to me.  That Navy shortcut sort of disturbed me a little bit ‘cause I thought it would end with something good there.

 

SAMUELS:  But then ’61 and NASA comes along?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Here comes NASA, ’61, ’62.  So I accepted a job with NASA at Langley.  I guess, officially I was a Langley employee, reassigned to work in NASA Houston.

 

SAMUELS:  So, briefly, were you with Space Task Group? [the Langley manned satellite project begun in 1958]

 

PIOTROWSKI:  No, the Space Task Group was down at Langley and then they were reassigned.  A lot of them were reassigned and moved into Houston.  And it was a very…

 

SAMUELS:  That move had already occurred?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Yeah.  But we had no facilities in Houston.  We were in…

 

SAMUELS:  That’s what I wanted to get at.  What did you think of moving to Houston, Texas in ’61, down in Clear Lake?  I was born in Baytown, so I grew up in that area.

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Well, we rented a house in Houston and I guess we were there for about a year and then settled down and rented or built a spec house or had bought a spec house that was located in… Nassau Bay.  Which is basically right across the street from the site. [JSC] But we were…in the early days, we were in leased facilities in Houston and then ended up in some facilities in Ellington Air Force Base, temporarily, and I can’t remember when we finally ended up at the site, but I think it was around ’64.  My job when I came to NASA was basically to help create and develop the design criteria necessary for this facility that we were going to come up with, eventually.  So we had an in-house team of people at NASA, in various areas, who were coming in with the requirements.  And then we, in turn, had to collate them and come up with something that we could use to hire an architect engineer to come up with a detailed design.  I was a member of a two-man team.  We co-chaired the meetings for this activity and…we ended up with this design criteria, we selected an AE [architectural engineer], an AE was given a three-month program or project to come up with the design details.  And we, in turn, were monitoring him from the technical management point of view.  The architectural engineer was the Bechtel Corporation of San Francisco.  So we spent a lot of time between Houston and San Francisco making sure we got what we… wanted to get out of it.

 

SAMUELS:  You got down to Houston in ’61?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  ’62.

 

SAMUELS:  In ’62.

 

PIOTROWSKI:  I ended up there in February, actually, it was Washington’s Birthday and I walked in, I say, “Here I am…ready to go to work.”  The guy says, “This is a holiday.  We can’t put you to work, it’s double time, or time and a half.” [Laughing]

 

SAMUELS:  From what I’ve been told, NASA didn’t take holidays back then.  It was…

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Well, they…but you still had to get paid for it.

 

SAMUELS:  Oh, I see.

 

PIOTROWSKI:  I did a lot of free time, but people that took personnel were all shook up about this…here’s a guy showing up on a paid holiday.

 

SAMUELS:  So you got there in ’62…

 

PIOTROWSKI:  In ’62.

 

SAMUELS:  In the middle of Mercury, I guess?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Yeah, Mercury is just phasing out and Gemini was just gearing up.

 

SAMUELS:  Gemini’s gearing up and your job was Space Environment Simulation?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Basically, yeah.

 

SAMUELS:  Which was geared for…already looking ahead towards Apollo?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Basically, this whole thing was geared to handle Apollo.

 

SAMUELS:  So, did anything that you came up with directly impact the Gemini program?  Or, towards the tail end, when it was all basically for Apollo…

 

PIOTROWSKI:  It was all basically wrapped up and then they’re just flying.  We had no involvement test-wise with Gemini.

 

SAMUELS:  With Gemini…

 

PIOTROWSKI:  McDonnell Douglas was prime…project engineer on that program…both on the Mercury and Gemini.  They did the testing and the engineering on the…I guess all…but we had no involvement in that from our standpoint.  So, we were all geared up with this project of coming up with a facility that would primarily, would basically support the Apollo program.

 

SAMUELS:  What did JSC, well, Manned Space—it was MSC, I guess, back then…

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Yeah.

 

SAMUELS:  When you got there, there were what, three buildings?  I mean, they didn’t have much out there, did they?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  No.   Well, they had the Farnsworth Chambers Building, which was the headquarters for the…then we had facilities…the Rice Building, which we were housed in, which is on, I guess, the south end of town…close to the airport.  And there were other facilities spread all around.  We had no permanent facility.

 

SAMUELS:  In other words, Clear Lake didn’t look like it looks like today, obviously?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Clear Lake was a two-lane road going down, which is NASA One, now, and I think it’s an eight-laner, now…when I read about it.  I haven’t gone back to visit that area for some time.  In probably five years, so I don’t…just what it looks like now.  But that was our primary job…getting the Space Environment Simulation Lab built…designed, built, and operational to support the Apollo program.  And that’s how we went about getting it…we had a budget allowance for that facility of 26.2 million.  And that included… at one time we had anticipated probably four chambers, four test facility chambers.  A large one, which was the one you see behind me…

SAMUELS:  Okay.  We’ve got a pretty good picture on the wall here of… [a giant room, in which sits a Command Service Module]

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Now, that thing was 65 feet in diameter and 120 feet tall.

 

SAMUELS:  And that’s a full scale…the picture that we’re looking at right now is a full scale mockup of the CSM?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Yeah.

 

SAMUELS:  So, that’s a pretty big chamber.

 

PIOTROWSKI:  That was one of the first tests we did, was on the mock up.  That’s the main chamber that we came up with.  Then we came up with another, smaller chamber, which is about thirty-five in diameter, about thirty-five feet tall, and…

 

SAMUELS:  It’s only three stories tall…one of the smaller ones.

 

PIOTROWSKI:  [Laughing] And then we had a smaller facility where we had some smaller chambers for small test-specimen testing requirements.  There was another small building off to the side of the main complex and that was the Space Environment Effects Laboratory.

SAMUELS:  Let’s talk about those for just a little bit.  Let’s take the big one that I’m looking at right now, the big picture.  What did you do in that room with a full-scale mockup of the CSM?  What went on?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Okay, the simulation we accomplished…see, we had cryogenically cooled walls which would cool to minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit, we had vacuum capability which simulated approximately 250 miles altitude, and then we had a solar simulator.  And those three elements are the main thing, thermally, that you have to consider on any flight in space.  Now, the chamber was man-rated, too.  It was capable of supporting manned operations in the chamber or within the spacecraft.  And we had both those activities during the Apollo program.  In fact, we simulated the Apollo mission, 17 mission, with three crewmen in the actual command service module lashup and they lived in there for seven days.

 

SAMUELS:  For seven days?  That was simulation…that was part of the testing?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Simulation, yeah.  They were under full test conditions during that time.

 

SAMUELS:  Did all the crews go through that?  Or was that one of those…the first couple of them?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  No, this was primarily a proof test of the prototype…or the first out of the barrel, you know.  After that, they were all considered qualified.

 

SAMUELS:  Once you got it done, it was done and no going back to that testing.  Do you remember when that was…what year?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  I think it was about ’65, I could be wrong.

 

SAMUELS:  So, by ’65 you had a CSM mock up with guys living in it for seven days?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Yeah.  And then after that we checked out the Lunar Excursion Module in that smaller chamber, thirty-five-foot diameter chamber…manned operations.  And manned operations complicate these activities considerably.  We operate on the basis that…re-pressurization of that chamber can be accomplished in thirty seconds.  We have observers and crewmen on the outside, in a lock, which is operating at maybe at ten thousand feet.  They don’t even need to wear anything except their oxygen masks.  But they’re able to get down into the chamber within that thirty seconds and do anything they needed to…either rescue a crewman…doing whatever would be necessary.  So, that was the only man-rated large facility in the world.  And that’s one reason I went to work for NASA. [Laughs]

 

SAMUELS:  To get to do stuff like that?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  To get to do all that.  You know, when I worked for them, I could hardly wait to get back to work the next morning.

 

SAMUELS:  Really?

PIOTROWSKI:  Yeah.  Hated to leave in the evening and I just…a terrific opportunity.

 

SAMUELS:  Seven days a week, maybe?  If you felt like taking a day off, maybe…

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Yeah, sometimes.  But mostly, long days and maybe a half-day on Saturday…that kind of thing.  And we would have test runs running around the clock, and people supporting that test, on a lot of these test programs.

 

SAMUELS:  So it was not unusual, at all, for you to pull into the parking lot there, at 300AM or 400AM or something like that?  Then put in eight, nine hours?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  No, no.  It was called ‘voluntary overtime.’ [Laughing]

 

SAMUELS:  Was it really?  Euphemistically, love of job.  But that’s not unusual?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  No.  I never used all…I never used a sick leave.  I ended up with about two years of sick leave.  I never used all my vacation time.  I lost vacation time because I just didn’t feel I could do it.

 

SAMUELS:  Mr. Bernhard [Marvin Bernhard] said about six hundred hours that he racked up and never got compensated for…he didn’t care.

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Yeah.

SAMUELS:  But everybody was like that?  I mean, for the most part…when you got down to Houston, that attitude pretty much prevailed?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Oh yeah, everybody was gung-ho and…hell, everybody was full of enthusiasm, they just couldn’t do enough to keep it going.  We had one basic problem with this large chamber, the first time it was evacuated—we had some structural deformation, around the door.  Had a sixty-foot door in the thing and the structure was basically, as I remember, half inch steel, stainless clad, on the inside; regular carbon steel on the outside; and then stiffeners, steel structural stiffeners spaced, I think, a couple feet apart.  But when you got to the door, the continuity of the structure was disrupted.  You’ve got this big hole in the thing…and that’s where she yielded when we first took her down.

 

SAMUELS:  First time, in other words?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Yeah. You bet.  So we had…

 

SAMUELS:  Now, “yielded” is engineering for, for exactly what?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Deformation. [Laughing] Permanent deformation.  Well, you can get yielding without going into permanent deformation…you don’t go beyond the yield point.  You get some bending and it comes back.  Well, this thing didn’t come back.  So we spent about six months on correcting that problem, or maybe it was a year, I can’t remember now.  But anyway, we beefed up the area around that door, so it looked like a bridge structure. [Laughs]

SAMUELS:  Were you there the day that it happened?  Were you watching?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  No…yeah, I was there, but I wasn’t at that…

 

SAMUELS:  But you weren’t watching it happen, in other words?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  No, I wasn’t watching it.  This happened about three or four or one or two in the morning—something like that.  We had people that were observing it.  And so on…

 

SAMUELS:  Because with that…I’m assuming, with a six month to a year worth of downtime, to get that little problem taken care of, without being able to use Space Environment Simulation, there would have been some sort of a program problem with that?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  No, apparently it did not disrupt or hold back the program, the test program.  We had enough lead-time in there to take care of this problem and go on with everything.  The engineer—the architect engineer—had a problem because he was sued for lack of performance. [Laughs]

 

SAMUELS:  That’s a problem.

 

PIOTROWSKI:  That’s his problem.  When we…we would closely monitor these guys but our responsibility was basically technical management, not design responsibility.  There was…that was the architect engineer’s job.

 

SAMUELS:  In other words, you knew what you needed, and you knew what you needed to accomplish the mission.  You told those guys and it was up to them to give you what you needed…

 

PIOTROWSKI:  To get it done.  Yeah…and to make sure that whatever was done, was done within…properly.  Now, we had a lot of support in the building of the entire center and all these special test equipment areas by the…of the Corps of Engineers [U.S. Army].  They were given responsibility to provide that technical management.  So, in order…and during the construction phase, we were responsible for the design phase—NASA.  The construction phase was given to the Corps of Engineers.  And they were responsible for getting the thing done properly, on time, and in…everything else.  So they had a pretty important role in the activities.  They were not a welcome element in all the areas of NASA.  They were always kind of forced on us.  You know, by Congress or somebody.

 

SAMUELS:  Was there…maybe it’s my readings or something, was there a preponderance of ex-Navy personnel in your remembrance of early Houston days?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  No, primarily in our lab it would have been ex-Air Force people.  A lot of our technicians, they were all contract people and these crew rescue people and…they were all pirated out of, I think it was Brooks [Brooks Air Force Base] in San Antonio…young guys, you know, in the Air Force.  But we had…we had a few engineers who were ex-Navy, but not…I don’t remember a lot of Navy.

 

SAMUELS:  But there wasn’t a whole lot of, for instance, Army Corps of Engineers versus ‘I’m ex-Navy’…sort of an inter-service rivalry type of stuff?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  No, no it was just primarily a Facilities Division who normally would have had the responsibility for doing what the Corps did…were upset about the Corps being brought in on it.  They said, “We could have done that.  Cheaper.” [Laughs]

 

SAMUELS:  Okay, well, what was—we’ve touched on it already—a normal day for you?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Well, generally about an eight, nine-hour day…nine and a half-hour day.

 

SAMUELS:  Which is, getting up at the crack of dawn and being there before the sun is up kind of thing?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Well, the day started at seven.  I’d get home at 530 [PM] or something like that.

 

SAMUELS:  Actually home with still daylight to spare?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Oh yeah, I was only across the street.  Which I didn’t really like.  I much prefer about a ten, fifteen-minute ride before I come to work or come home.

 

SAMUELS:  Does that give you…

PIOTROWSKI:  Kind of relax me.

 

SAMUELS:  Your time?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Yeah…but the facility supported a lot, a number of other test programs.  It supported some testing on the radiators for the shuttle.  It supported some of the crewmen when they first came back from the lunar trip.  They were put in quarantine. And that facility, which was put in this large chamber, was an Airstream trailer. [Laughs]

 

SAMUELS:  Nice, shiny aluminum…one of those?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Yeah.  They weren’t evacuated.  The idea was to control them because they never were sure what kind of bugs they were going to bring back with them.  And that used to have medical people really upset, but all the rest of us none medical said “Ah, that’s a lot a crap.”

 

SAMUELS:  That’s what I was going to say…were you guys worried about it?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  No, we weren’t worried about it.

 

SAMUELS:  As far as just major moments…looking back on it…are there stand out moments that, for instance, the first time that you said, “This is NASA, this is where I am, this is where I want to be.”  Are there certain highlight moments like that?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  I came in with that feeling.  I had some high points in my career with NASA and that would be the operational check out for this facility, which was a complicated process.  And it wasn’t just a matter of starting up and punching a button, you had to…

 

SAMUELS:  When was that…your operational start up?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Well, if that ’65 time is correct, we would go through a review period… which a committee was generated and it would make sure…it was an operational readiness inspection, which was a duplicate of what the Air Force does when they really get into a major project.   It’s a bunch of experts are brought in as a committee and you make presentations to them and demonstrate to them that you have proper procedures to operate, that all the safety procedures…that your people are trained, and so on, so that when you go to push that button it’s not a bunch of guys running around that’s wondering what to do next.  They’re all geared up for it.  And that would be a highlight in my...

 

SAMUELS:  Was that really your first rite of passage or trial by fire once you were down there?  It was your deal and your name on the line, basically…

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Yeah. So, organizationally we ended up in a kind of, in a nebulous category.   Then we eventually organized, developed an organizational chart and I ended up with a branch chief job.  I had about…in my particular branch, we had approximately forty-five people, three secretaries, the rest engineers.

 

SAMUELS:  And what is that official designation, branch chief of…?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Space Environment Simulation.

 

SAMUELS:  Space Environment Simulation.

 

PIOTROWSKI:  That name changed later to the Facilities Operations Branch.  And there were several other little changes in there.  But the initial designation was Space Environment Simulation Branch, which I liked the best. [Laughs]

 

SAMUELS:  Well, I think it says it.  I understood exactly what you meant there when I first read that bio. [background information supplied to the interviewer]

 

PIOTROWSKI:  But there was a lot of testing done in that lab.  I was back there about five years [ago], got into the building, and they had it all changed around.  They were doing other things, using it for different purposes and I don’t know if they’re using the smart chamber for any particular reason.  I think they’re just taking it and using it as the need requires, the need comes up.  But it expanded.  Once we got into the initial phases of the Apollo program, then we decided, “Well, we’ve got to have an additional facility to be able to support the testing of these spacecraft that are going to be brought in here.  So, we went out and initiated a program to come up with a large clean chamber facility.  It’s one of the largest clean chambers, I guess in the country, and it was able to come down to real clean conditions—five microns range conditions.  And all in all, over the period of time, that facility expanded from the initial 26.2 million to about, I’d say, about 55 million.  We added the large cleaning facility.  There were some modifications to the main facility.  And all together, it turned out to be about 55 million.

 

SAMUELS:  Sooner or later, you guys had to worry about the bottom line.  I mean, was the bottom line terribly important early on, when you first got down there?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  No, no the sky was the limit when we first got down there.    Money was…you got almost any anything you needed.  And it was pretty loose.  But then it started to tighten up.  And then it became hard to deal with in some areas because you didn’t have the money to do it.  But no, at the beginning, when Jim Webb was running it, he had a good relationship with Congress and he got whatever money he thought they needed.  Of course, the whole environment, the whole attitude, atmosphere was “Gotta beat them Russians!”  [Laughs]

 

SAMUELS:  Well, yeah, let’s mention the Russians.  Obviously…you were in World War Two and… the ‘50s and Sputnik—was that a day-to-day sort of thing that was with everybody when they went to work in the mornings or was it just sort of in the background and everybody was aware of it?  Do you understand…?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Yeah…no, I think it was more background…that wasn’t something you worried about daily.  If they put something up and all of a sudden, you hadn’t been aware they were going to do it, you’d say “Damn it, there they go again!” [Laughs]

 

SAMUELS:  Well, here again…competition, I guess.  Do you feel like it would have happened without that kind of competition?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  I don’t think so.  I don’t think Congress would have been that excited about it.  I think that was the driver, competition.  Just like the Cold War was with the Russians, it was driving a lot of programs that…were being excused away…and saying now, “Hold down, now.  The Cold War’s over.  We don’t need to do it.” [There is a pause in the interview]

 

SAMUELS:  Go ahead.  I think we’re set.  But you left there in ’81?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  I left there in ’81 and had an opportunity to leave on an early-out retirement.

 

SAMUELS:  You saw a lot of the program.  You got there…Mercury was still going on, and through ’81 we’ve gone through Gemini, Apollo, Skylab, Shuttle…

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Skylab…yeah, we tested Skylab in our facility.  Did we?  No, it was the American, it was the rendezvous with the Russian spacecraft…

 

SAMUELS:  Soyuz.

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Soyuz.  Apollo…or the Skylab was that tin can they set up in space.  The biggest vehicle, I guess, we launched to date.  They operated it over a period of time with men in it and it was a learning program, I guess, basically.  They didn’t let it go very long and then they let it decay and brought it back and let it burn up in the atmosphere.  And they were real worried about it.  They’d say, “When you bring that thing through, it’s going to be like opening up a can of peas.  You don’t know where it’s all going to go!” [Laughs]

 

SAMUELS:  Parts all over the place?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Don’t know whether we’re going to hit the Russians or the Australians or just who.  But it all apparently ended up pretty much in the ocean. [Sniffs] But no, in ’81 it was becoming a little bit old hat to me.  I’d been there twenty years…went through the exciting phase.  We’d got it all going, it was smooth, it was repetitious and there wasn’t anything on the horizon that I knew I could look forward to…so I said “Well, maybe I’ll just…”

 

SAMUELS:  Is that…maybe…When you got there in ’61, ’62, ’64, ’65, was that a feeling that everybody had…that literally, the sky was the limit?  That it was going to be one stepping stone after another?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Yeah.  Basically, we had to develop the facility and the site and everything and it was all brand new and exciting and there was no end to it.

 

SAMUELS:  The moon was just the first step?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Yeah.  So, I don’t know…it got to the point where it became repetitious and all the new and exciting aspects of it had kind of dulled.  So, that’s when I said, “Well, maybe I’ll retire.  I’ll be fifty-five when I retire.”  I’d been working for thirty-eight years and it’s just…that’s enough to work. [Laughs] So we moved up here after a couple of years of staying in our home area in Clear Lake.  But, no, I’d do it all over again and probably take a cut in pay to go back to work for them.  In that period. {Laughs]

 

SAMUELS:  Obviously, you don’t feel that same sort of attitude exists in the program today?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  I’m not sure.  I’m not that…

 

SAMUELS:  You haven’t been there in a while…

 

PIOTROWSKI:  I haven’t been…I have no idea what the environment there is.  I know it’s a tight money situation.  But they’re doing exciting things, still.  And maybe not altogether in the Space Environment Simulation Laboratory area, but as a program I general.

 

SAMUELS:  Do you still…do you feel part of the NASA family still?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Yeah.  I keep getting the newsletter every month. [Laughs]

 

SAMUELS:  Either they keep in touch or you…are there a lot of people that you keep in touch with, as well?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Only on a sort of casual basis.  The division chief in that organization that I was in came to me one day--no, he didn’t come to me, he called me or wrote me or something—he wanted an eight minute video tape of the activities that I participated in the Aero…the National…no, it was an aerospace symposium and it was the kind of thing where we got a lot of contractors together with facilities.  I chaired one of the committee years and the idea was to get together and trade information and ideas that some people had had and that other people might benefit from.

 

SAMUELS:  Is this while you were still with NASA, or after?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Yeah.  No, he wanted the historical video clip of what my reaction to all that was.

 

SAMUELS:  Well, we all want historical tidbits now and then.

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Yeah. [Laughs] I sent him a copy of an eight-minute video, I guess, and I said, “Well, what are you going to do with that?”  Well, they were going to do, apparently, what you guys are going to do with it, they wanted to all put it together and put it away in a file someplace.  And he said, “I don’t like that.”  He said he didn’t think that was a good thing to do.  So, he kind of buried the thing.  I said, “Why’d you do that?”  Well, he had several things he was videotaping and he was going to put them into a little program.  And I said, “Send me a copy of that.”  Well, I’ve never received that copy.  So I said, “Ahhhh…”

 

SAMUELS:  Well, hopefully, this is going to be…like NASA said, it’s going to be on the web and it’s going to be out there for anybody to punch this up.  So, I think that that’s where this is…the next logical step in archiving is to put it out there and let anybody who wants it get at it.

 

PIOTROWSKI:  I think we made a good contribution to the industry, in general, because we were on the cutting edge of the simulation business…size-wise, man-rating, and rotational capability in the chamber, rescue capability and…I don’t think any other lab in the country, with that capability, environmentally, is man-rated.  It got…some of those altitude indoctrination chambers that I worked on, previously…I guess you’d consider that an environmental test chamber.  But it was smaller.  And it basically was to train pilots.

 

SAMUELS:  Do they have other facilities, that have surpassed this one, that have been built in the last twenty-five years or what not?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  No, no.   JPL has a facility that…

 

SAMUELS:  That’s the Jet Propulsion Laboratory? [in Pasadena, California]

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Yeah…that pretty much duplicates some of the, well, they duplicate all the characteristics, but it’s a fairly small facility.  I can’t remember the size of it.  And some of the NASA sites around the country, Goddard [Goddard Space Flight Center in Beltsville, Maryland] has a similar facility, and I don’t think…

 

SAMUELS:  They’ve been built since this one, though?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  No, about the same time.  All of these are about the same time.  We were all trying to get into the act.  So it was a brand new activity.  And we were all trying to do something along the same lines, but this was the biggest one in the world, I believe.  And it was man-rated.  So, yeah…I think it was the Aeronautics and …AISA? [later clarified as the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics--AIAA] anyway, that committee was pretty helpful to everybody.  We got a lot a good use out of the information that developed as a result of those meetings.

 

SAMUELS:  Is it still ongoing?  Is that something that’s still…

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Yeah, it’s still ongoing.

 

SAMUELS:  Let’s talk about some of the big moments.  For instance, on a launch day, where was Richard Piotrowski?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Watching the launch on closed circuit television. [Laughs]

 

SAMUELS:  Somewhere at MSC?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Somewhere at MSC.  And the first time I got to see a launch, real time at the site [Kennedy Space Center] was after I’d retired.  And that was a thrilling, thrilling event.  That thunder and the smoke and the bright lights was just something that shook you up, boy!

 

SAMUELS:  That was a shuttle launch?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Shuttle launch, yeah.  Oh, I had no occasion, no real reason to get to the launch site in my end of the business.  I wasn’t involved with the launch facilities or anything.

 

SAMUELS:  It wasn’t like they shipped you guys down there free of charge or anything like that?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  We did…occasionally.  Say we had a co-op working for us, maybe we’d send him down there, just to interest him in the activities.  Hopefully, he’d come to work for us after he graduated. [Laughs]

 

SAMUELS:  Use it as bait?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Use it as bait.  I hired most of those forty-four or forty-five people we had personally.  From industry, around the country, other centers—you lure them away.  And then we would get into people who were going to graduate, never worked in the engineering field, interview them.   And we either didn’t do a good selling job, or they went to work for industry… making more money in industry or just what, but…

 

SAMUELS:  When did that shift sort of occur?  In other words, when you first started it up and they gave you forty-five people to go out and find, you were able to use NASA as bait to get them to come to you?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Yes.

 

SAMUELS:  When did that shift occur—people coming out of school didn’t see NASA as the end all to be all?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Yeah, I couldn’t understand that because we were still in a pretty active period.  But, apparently they had experienced other things.

 

SAMUELS:  Late 60s, early 70s, in there, something like that?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Yeah.

 

SAMUELS:  Well…Apollo 11 is ’69, so…Was forty-five people, was that a sort of a typical size branch like that?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Yeah, I think so.  A branch would be about that size.

 

SAMUELS:  About how many people you could handle, as a group, in other words?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Yeah, and they say you can only really manage about eleven people effectively.

 

SAMUELS:  But, then again, that’s not working seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day…

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Well, I had three sections…these people were split among.  Plus, an organization called Manned Operations, who were responsible for the manned aspects of these facilities, the medical aspects, rescue, all the safety aspects.  So I wasn’t managing forty-four people, I was managing four guys.  Hopefully. [Laughs]

 

SAMUELS:  Hire the right guys…and let them do their job?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  If they were doing their job.  And bet they were doing their job.

We had an operation…we had an engineering section, a data section, a facilities operations section, and then this manned operations office.  They were all engineers.  It wasn’t real hard to find people, or try to get them to come work for NASA—early.  And then after several years it turned a little more difficult.  But it was still okay.  Toward the end, it wasn’t easy to get anybody.  The other thing, we were getting into the cutbacks…[unintelligible] couldn’t bring people on.  And when I left, I think our organization had shrunk to about twelve or fifteen people.  So it was kind of an environment that had done it’s job and now was shrinking.  I says, “Good time to get out.”

 

SAMUELS:  And you got out.  And a heck of a ride, I guess.  I’m taking it you’d do it again, in a heartbeat?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Whoa, boy!  Some guy asked me one time, he said, “How’d you become a branch chief?”  I said, “I don’t know.  I guess I was at the right place at the right.”  And he says, yeah, he’d agree with that.

 

SAMUELS:  Well, you had to have some kind of ability, I would assume, or else they wouldn’t come tap you on the shoulder.

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Yeah, because there’s several periods in time where you go through an evaluation period where you can be kicked out pretty easily.

 

SAMUELS:  And I’m assuming that you had, looking back on it, the best people that you felt like you had?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  We had real good people.  I had a few of the foul balls you had to work with, but nobody was perfect.  Generally, they were pretty good people.

 

SAMUELS:  And the folks that you worked with, your superiors and the subordinates and everybody down there at JSC/MSC, what not—stand up folk?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Yeah, other than the conflict of personnel, personalities…which is typical of any organization.

 

SAMUELS:  Any organization, right.  But definitely a sort of a palpable ‘get the job done’ sort of atmosphere?  Not a lot of stand around…

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Yeah, we had…I think, at our peak we had about 250 operational support personnel working for Brown, Root and Arthur [construction company] and a hundred GE [General Electric] personnel taking care of the GE data system.  And then we had the support contractor, the spacecraft support contractor who might have had three hundred people.  Now, my organization was only responsible for data and the operation.  Spacecraft activities were handled by another branch, which was called the Test Operations Branch.  And then that shrank toward the end. [Laughs] I think we had shrunk down to maybe a hundred twenty-five, total--data and operations—and were still able to do the job, so we either were too flush to begin with or we were just on the ragged edge of collapsing with a smaller crew. [Laughs]

 

SAMUELS:  Do you watch the popular… Apollo 13 on TV…and movies and what not?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Oh yeah, sure.

 

SAMUELS:  Do you have some sort of a feeling that there is something that hasn’t been told or something that’s been told incorrectly…or part of manned spaceflight that needs to be told?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  No, I don’t have any…my own personal knowledge is not of that type, so I don’t have anything.  I still think Gus Grissom screwed up and let that thing sink [the second Mercury flight]. [Laughter]

 

SAMUELS:  Really?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  [Unintelligible] They said he got sick, bobbing around when he landed.  And he was looking for a place to puke, I guess, or something, cause he popped the hatch and that was not the thing to do.  I believe that story, rather than the other one…it was accidentally blown.

 

SAMUELS:  Obviously, there were some huge moments in the space program, and as a young person watching them, I have impressions.  Is there anything, looking back over it—a twenty-year career, you saw a lot of manned space flight—are there two or three things that just jump to mind?  We talked about the one of them, where your simulator got tested…

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Yeah, dinged up a little.

 

SAMUELS:  Well, “yielded.”  It “yielded.”

 

PIOTROWSKI:  [Laughing] Well, the other one was that spacecraft fire at the Cape [Cape Canaveral] and that thing shouldn’t have happened.  That damned Apollo spacecraft wasn’t properly designed.  No escape requirements, no escape provisions, they were using a hundred percent oxygen environment, which was proven out in both Mercury and Gemini—that’s what they used in those facilities.  But the Russians didn’t.  They used a mixture of nitrogen and oxygen.  And our concern, medical concern was nitrogen bubble formation when they get into altitude conditions.  That’s why they were using oxygen.  And it was a simpler system.  But it caused that damn conflagration, that catastrophe.  We were out of business for a year.  They come in...and they had to re-do that hatch and switch over the breathable environments system and they pulled out a lot of insulation, which they suspected supported combustion.  They had to re-do the whole thing.  Well, we lost a year, so what did we gain?  We could have invested that amount of time doing the thing differently, probably.  We’re also getting into an environment, now, I think, where present management is taking the approach that we don’t need to do a detailed testing.  A power unit works on the first flight, it’s a good one.  We don’t test that separately over here.

 

SAMUELS:  And you’re talking about now?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Now.  Even when I left.

 

SAMUELS:  Even when you were…in other words, recently?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Yeah, yeah.  They’re taking the industry approach to…like airplanes.  Flight-testing, that’s the first test they do.  It’s okay, fine if it works.  But if you run into a major problem you got trouble.  Of course, they got a lot of redundancy.  They put in three power units, supply’s the hydraulic power to the shuttle.  If you lose one you can operate with two.  Same thing with computers, they got three or four or five computers—they need two and they got three that are redundant.  That’s okay.  It’s a matter of how you want to approach it.  Cheaper that way. [Laughs]

 

SAMUELS:  Well, I guess if the bottom line is bottomless, well, then that’s one thing.

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Well, they’re under screws.  They’re under a lot of pressure now, the screws are being tightened.  They can’t just go out and do whatever they want.  And it was a lot easier and a lot more fun in the old days.

 

SAMUELS:  Basically, was it fun?  You look back on it and the whole thing--twenty years, got up every day…

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Yeah, yeah.  I was very fortunate to run into old Ted Hayes, called me that one day and say “Hey, how’d you like to work for NASA, how’d you like to go to work for NASA?”  And I would have made the same decision.  But, you do things and then after a while, they become old hat.  And I decided “Well, let’s go out and do something different.”

 

SAMUELS:  And then once you left NASA, did you go back to engineering?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  No, I retired completely.  People said, “You doing any consulting?”  And I said “No, I’m retired!”  [Laughs] I worked thirty-eight years.

 

SAMUELS:  Forty years…

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Forty years, what do I want to work for?  I did my…I put my time in.  [Laughs] But it was a fabulous experience.  Fabulous.  Hell, I would have paid them for me to work!

 

SAMUELS:  When you were there and doing it, did you feel like you were making history?  I mean, it’s sort of a simple question because you’re on the way to the moon, but is that sort of how you felt every day?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Oh, sure. 

 

SAMUELS:  Part of something big?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Sure.  I didn’t have the mainstream activities, like [unintelligible] the spacecraft to do that, but I was providing the facility to be able to check it, to make sure it was going to do its function.  That was the main satisfaction I got out of it.  And kept me busy.  And I just could look forward to going back to work the next day, didn’t want to go home that night.

 

SAMUELS:  Clear Lake in the 60s.  Was work pretty much the best that it was, or…what was living in Clear Lake in that area…

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Well, they had a couple of developments that were under work, like Nassau Bay and Swan Lagoon and Timber Cove…

 

SAMUELS:  Did you guys get into Houston at all?  Was driving to Houston…because that’s a pretty good little jaunt, back then…

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Yeah, I didn’t look forward to going into Houston and only if I had to.  So…no, the NASA site at that time was just a couple of cows eating grass. [Laughs] A little two-lane country road going through there.   And Seabrook, on the waterfront…was about the only shopping center, until they started expanding.  It’s a busy place, now.

 

SAMUELS:  It’s big.  It’s different.

 

PIOTROWSKI:  I had a sailboat over in Seabrook for five to ten years and moved it over to Galveston and had that sailboat about twenty-five years.  So, after I moved it out of Seabrook, I kept it in Galveston where I did all my blue water sailing.  It was still handy.  It was only thirty-five miles from Nassau Bay to get down to Galveston.

 

SAMUELS:  So once you left out of Chicago—you got out of Chicago.  You never went back?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Right. [Laughs] No, I did, I did.  When I first worked for Guardite, I worked for them for two years, I believe.  And then I worked for Lear and I stayed in Grand Rapids for about five years.  Then I went to Arizona for Hughes Aircraft for a year and a half.  Then I went back to Guardite, which was back—they weren’t in the Chicago area then, they were in the northern part of Illinois—and so I worked for them for three years.  Before going to work for NASA.

 

SAMUELS:  But once you got to Texas, you were here?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Yeah, this is home.  Hell, yeah, it’s a good place to live.  I like Texas.  I’ve been here thirty-seven years.  I would never…I think I’m going to end up in this same house.  I don’t think I want to move anywhere.

 

SAMUELS:  Well, two or three times worth of moving for everybody, or for anybody, I think is…

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Yeah.  When I was in…first getting into this field, I’d take a job and didn’t worry about moving--then.  Just…anyplace is just as good as the next.  A job was the thing.  So I wouldn’t question, it wouldn’t even enter my mind that I’d have a problem moving, or whatever.  But I need to get back and visit NASA, I just don’t have the requirement to get there and then, to make the trip, just to go and poke around NASA…I don’t know, it just doesn’t excite me that much.

 

SAMUELS:  Are there still guys there, that you knew and that were working with you, who are still there, that you know of?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  No, not that I know of.  Well, yeah, my division chief, Jim McLane, he’s still…he lives in Clear Lake.  He’ probably in one of your lists, too.

 

SAMUELS:  We’re going to track him down, if not.  He’ll go on the list of people to look up.

[Laughter] Well, Mr. Piotrowski, we appreciate you sitting down and talking with us.

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Okay, I enjoyed that.

 

SAMUELS:  If there’s anybody else, Jim McLane-wise, or what not, that you can think of…

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Aleck Bond.  Aleck Bond was the director chief, I don’t know if you’ve got his name or not.  And I think…he used to live in Timber Cove.  If he’s still there, I don’t know.  Then, you got Max Faget, who used to be the director…

 

SAMUELS:  Well, I’ll say, now…Max Faget, he’s somebody that I’ve heard of.  [Knowingly facetious] And is he still in Houston?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  I don’t know, he lived in Dickinson, on the bayou, there.

 

SAMUELS:  Did you know Mr. Faget?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Yeah.  I worked for him.  Personally.  I talked to him on occasion, but he was up in the directorate and there was a lot a way down there to the branch chief. [Laughs] No, I was always under his directorate.  And as far as I know…I don’t…

 

SAMUELS:  Have you read any of the books that have been written over the last, say fifteen, twenty years…as far as the history of Apollo or the history of the program?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Yeah, I’ve got the books.  I’ve got the books and I’ve scanned through them…

 

SAMUELS:  It’s something that you still keep up with and, still, maybe keep an eye out for?

 

PIOTROWSKI:  Well, I’ve got the publications that NASA put out regarding the history of those—they’re pretty thick, with some documents, you know.  So I don’t read them periodically.  I’ve read them, but then I’ll occasionally go back and read them, dig into them again.  NASA is very prolific as far as putting out that stuff. [Laughs]

 

SAMUELS:  Well, we’re hoping to add to this, maybe in a different way, something like that.  But Mr. Piotrowski, I want to thank you again.

 

PIOTROWSKI:  You’re welcome.

 

SAMUELS:  This interview with Richard Piotrowski took place on May 24, 1999 and was conducted by Mark Samuels, as part of the NASA Oral History Project, in conjunction with Southwest Texas State University.