NASA Rose, Rodney - May 27, 1999
Interview with Rodney Rose
Interviewer: Constance Bishop
Date of interview: May 27, 1999
Location Rose home, Wimberley, Texas
BISHOP: This is Constance Bishop. Today is May 27, 1999. I am interviewing Mr. Rodney Rose. This interview is taking place in Mr. Rose’s home at Wimberley, Texas. This interview is a part of the cooperative agreement between the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project and Southwest Texas State University. Mr. Rose, thank you for allowing me to talk with you today. To begin, can you tell me a little bit about your background, your family and you education, and what brought you to NASA.
ROSE: Well, start at the beginning, I was born outside Cambridge, in England. I matriculated from the Cambridge School at [unintelligible] with a scholarship and went on to Manchester. Mainly because I was very keen on aircraft and flying. I built model aircraft. I joined A. V. Roe in Manchester and was able to study at the Manchester College of Technology. I finished up after a five-year so-called gentleman apprentice. It was gentleman apprentice because you didn’t pay, they paid you. Basically, you went through all the, I think I went through twenty-eight or twenty-nine departments. The shops, and flight-testing, design, and aerodynamics and everything else. Received the associateship of the college, the equivalent of a B. S. With that, I won another scholarship to go to the college of aeronautics in Cranfield, which is now the University of Cranfield. I got a Masters there.
From there, I did six years at Vickers Armstrong Ship and Marine at Winchester. Worked a lot on naval aircraft and so on. Angle [unintelligible], catapult take offs, aerial roll, and all that good stuff. Then, in [19]57, we emigrated to Canada to work on the AVRO Arrow Project. I’d been working there about a couple of years and Prime Minister Diefenbaker decided to cancel the program, overnight, on a Friday, the twentieth of February, 1959. We were told in the morning that there would be an important announcement later. That afternoon, we were all told that we were fired. The whole project was shut off and closed down. Thank you very much. I had a group working for me. I was looking after performance. I had to come back on the Monday through Wednesday to supervise my people gathering their personal things. Make sure they didn’t take anything belonging to AVRO Arrow.
Meanwhile, I’d been called by the chief engineer, who said, well, you’re not fired. We need you to work on the supersonic airline project. There were about thirteen of us out of a total of about five hundred and fifty who stayed on with AVRO, and the rest were out of a job. Meanwhile, NASA had been looking for skilled engineers, because at that time, space was not a very--manned space flight, especially, was not a very popular subject. Most engineers thought it was a--like Langley [Research Center, Hampton, Virginia] people said--well, it’s a flash in the pan -- give it six months to a year. I’m not going to risk my whole career for that. We had been using NASA facilities at Ames [Research Center, California] and Langley and rocket firing and so on. They were fairly conversant with a lot of our work. They realized that here was a golden opportunity to get some really experienced help. They asked AVRO, and AVRO put forth roughly about four hundred names of people, which were interested. AVRO winnowed that down to about two hundred. NASA looked at that list and winnowed it down to somewhere in the order of ninety to a hundred, and interviewed them. They offered jobs to, I believe, about four dozen. Of those four dozen, twenty-five of us accepted pretty well right away. Although, personally, I had to have my arm twisted by Jim Chamberlain, who was the chief technical person at AVRO. There was another six joined us later, so we had a total of thirty-one that joined NASA.
What we brought to the table was that we had been using real time telemetry. We’d been flying an airplane, we’d fly by wire with the computers. We had been doing some very advanced aerodynamics and thermodynamics and so on. This was really quite a help, I think, to the program. And I must say that the, there was a Space Task Group, that we joined which was a special group set up, and Bob Gilruth headed that up. There were only about a hundred and twenty-five people, total, in the Space Task Group. All the sudden, they got twenty-five of these weird-talking foreigners arrive. I must say that the reception we got was a lot better than if a similar thing had happened in Canada [laugh], quite frankly. So we muscled in, and that’s how I started with NASA in April of [19]59.
I got appointed as the project engineer on Little Joe. Which was the picture I showed you. We were testing the abort escape system for the Mercury Program from Wallops Island [Virginia]. The first launch, Little Joe One, I probably, I think, set a rather non-enviable record. As project engineer, I also was the pseudo-flight director. Managed to launch the payload and leave the booster on the pad. Not a good thing to do. What happened, was, Langley had designed the thing. They had a three-wire circuit with a common ground. This gave a back-door circuit. We were charging up the batteries, just about twenty minutes, thirty minutes before launch. When it reached a critical capacity in the battery, it went through the back-door circuit, fired the explosive box in the escape motor, and that pulled the capsule off. And off it went, about two, three thousand feet up. It jettisoned the tower, the drogue chute came out like it should do, and then it just needed one amp short fire to have fired the switch for the main chute. And it didn’t. So the thing came down, and we spent the next three weeks picking pieces up off the ocean floor. We learned a lot on that. Like clear the pad before you start charging the battery [laugh].
BISHOP: [laugh].
ROSE: It was--that was quite a thing. So that was my first experience flying. After that, we flew Sam. Actually, it was a female monk, but we called her Sam because it was instrumented by the Scotland Aviation Medicine of San Antonio [Texas]. The first flight was quite an experience because we had her on the pad, she was in a round little container in the capsule. There was a limited supply of life support for her within the capsule. We had a certain area, down the range, where it was going to land. It had to be clear, and we had all sorts of bad weather down there. The captain of the flotilla down there had been radioing back to the admiral at Norfolk [Virginia] that conditions were impossible [laugh]. So finally, we had an airliner fly in the corner of the impact zone, and we gave him ten minutes to get out. We were in the last few minutes of our launch window. Then, we launched. The end result of that was that Sam was quite happy when it landed. When it took off--Little Joe takes off with about seven and a half g, so it goes up pretty smartly, or did. So it was a fair amount of g, and when the escape mode goes off, the monkey gets hit with twenty g. At that time, the monkey suffered what they call involuntary nystagmus, which is rolling of the eyeballs. They roll every which way. Nothing coordinated. That went on until the drogue chute deployed. Then, the monkey’s quite happy punching her buttons to get a banana pellet. Well, the sea state was about eight feet at the time it landed. The monkey was quite happy. That didn’t bother it at all, but the S. A. M. doctor that we had on the destroyer was rather sick. He wasn’t as good as the monkey. So the destroyer captain, afterwards, said to us, “we just established the maximum sea state for recovery for the Mercury program” [laugh]. So that was that one.
By the time we got to Little Joe Five-B, I think it was, we opened it up to the press. Of course, all the major networks were there. They had been used to things staggering off--I say staggering, but--going off at one point something g. One point one g or a little less. Going up fairly sedately. We briefed the people on what Little Joe was like, and said “It’s not like anything you’ve seen at the Cape [Canaveral]. This one goes.” This one cameraman says, “Oh, yeah, yeah, we got that, no trouble.” I was in the control room at the time, and I asked my guys afterward, “Well, what happened?” And they said, “Well, the spacecraft was up there [points straight up], and he was still pointed this way [points straight outward], saying ‘Where did it go? Where did it go?’” I said, well, that’s the difference between seven g’s and just over one [laugh]. It goes off. That was my first experience at that sort of operation stuff.
After that, I got to be the project engineer for the first Mercury capsule that was going through McDonnell [Aircraft Corporation] in St. Louis [Missouri]. That was pretty horrendous, because MAC was working three shifts a day at that time. So you just had one project engineer trying to keep a technical eye on what three shifts of people were doing. Which meant we usually worked eighteen to twenty-two hour days -- that sort thing. Well, it was a learning experience for both them and us. There were several interesting debates going on, on that one. Finally, however, we got the capsule down to the Cape. I was the problem engineer on MR-2, Mercury-Redstone II. This was the one we had Ham the chimpanzee on. We nearly lost Ham, because the flight was all right, but after the capsule landed, I think ninety odd minutes after it landed, the capsule flipped on its side, and it turned out it’d lost the heatshield. All the stability was messed up and it started taking on water in through some of the relief valves on the top of the capsule. Fortunately, the choppers managed to get a hook on it before it sank. We got him back.
Well, [Alan B.] Shepard’s [Jr.] flight was due two months or so after that flight. So I got on the task of solving the problem. We took a spacecraft and put it in the water tank at Langley, and simulated the wave state that we knew we’d measured at the time of the test. Sure enough, we got the heatshield to fail within minutes of the same time it did on the mission. That told us what had happened. Then we had to solve the problem. What had happened was the heatshield was lowered on a rubberized bag, plastic bag, with holes in it to absorb the shock of landing. Then, McDonnell had some flat, stainless steel strips that would help to take the stress of rolling back. Well, those didn’t work, unfortunately, and they failed. That’s where the heatshield went. So what we did, and if you want to see pictures, I’ve got a picture of what we finished up with. Came up with a cable and spring system. Basically, we took aircraft control cables, and I had the guys in the lab run a whole series of twenty-four hour a day tests where we’d bend different diameters of aircraft stainless steel cable over different radiuses in the salt water and see which radius was necessary, minimum radius, to do the job. So we had all these cables coming down, and then, to take the snatch load out of the cable, because when you get several thousand pounds of snatch load when you hit, we just had to use the triangular forces. You just had a little seven-pound spring hooked laterally between these cables, and it would absorb all the shock load. Just the resolution of the triangular forces. That and some honeycomb on the bulkhead was the fix.
We did several drops in back bay and so on, and finally, two drops in the ocean off [unintelligible] Cape Hatteras, which were successful. With that, Walt Williams, who was the head of the whole operations effort at that time, said fine, we’re ready to fly Shepard. That’s how Al Shepard got to fly when he did [laugh]. Otherwise, we would’ve had a problem with it. Because what happened, when it landed, the whole heatshield--when Ham landed, the heatshield came up and punched a hole in the bottom of the bulkhead and let some water in to begin with. That’s why we had the honeycomb. That was Ham and Mercury. That, incidentally, was the last launch I saw from the Cape. Every launch after that, I was in the control center. I just saw them on T. V., like everybody else.
After that, I was put, went over to Gemini. I was looking after the abort and recovery systems. That’s the ejection seats, parachutes, and the para-glider. Because, what we wanted to do on Gemini was land the thing on land instead of in the water. We developed the para-glider concept, which had inflatable booms and deployed like parachutes, but then acted like--it was basically a Rogallon wing. Rogallo was the engineer at Langley that first came up with the idea of a flexible, delta shaped wing. We took that concept and tried to go one farther. The problem is that we were doing a pretty involved research program, tied to a production schedule for the spacecraft. The net result was we were never able to meet the schedule. So Gemini finished up with a parachute system somewhat like Mercury. The para-glider, interestingly enough, the landing system was skids. The best skid system was actually wire brushes. The pads were wire brushes. That was the most stable landing system you could come up with.
After Gemini, I got moved over to flight ops. [flight operations]. I was working flight ops. problems. This was 1962. At that time, we already had started on the space station work and I was the ops. Rep on that work and we were doing some space station work, and things like how many ships we needed in the Mercury networks, and so on. That went on [unintelligible] for some time.
Then, I got over to working directly for Chris Kraft. I became his Apollo technical assistant. With that, early on I got involved in a lot of things. I was very lucky to work for Chris, because he would give you all the responsibility you needed and then back you up. With that, I decided that to do the proper mission operations, we needed to get everybody joined together. Meeting together, going over the whole thing so everybody was working from the same sheet of music. That’s how the Mission Operations Plan was first conceived.
ELLY: Can we pause a minute to change tapes?
ROSE: Sure.
BISHOP: Let me pause this.
BISHOP: All right, where were we?
ROSE: We had just started Apollo. I was then working for Chris Kraft, and setting up what originally was the Mission Operations Plans. This would involve the flight crew, everybody involved in the whole spectrum. The network people from Goddard, manufacturers, the LM [lunar module] manufacturers, the CSM [command service module]. Everybody was represented. Because we’d take the requirements and go over them. Come up with everybody’s input and then put together a flight design. Then keep reiterating and reiterating the design until we had a finished product that everybody could sign off on.
I remember the doctors in particular felt when they first came, there was a lot of grumbling. They felt it was a waste of time. The first meeting they came to, they discovered there was a whole bunch of things went on that was very, very interesting to them, that they needed to know. We said, that’s why were holding MOP. It eventually became FOP, Flight Operations Plan. What it did, it came up with all the trajectory work and stuff that went into the software. All the flight planning, the procedures and all the network integration. Then, we’d hand it over to the flight director a few months before the mission. They would get into the more detailed stuff. Crew constraints, and flight ops. procedures, and mission rules. Meanwhile, Bill Tindall, in particular, would be running the data analysis group, I think he called it. Basically, they were doing all the software design for the mission. We would start with the--we had some twenty-seven constraints on an Apollo--the Apollo Eleven mission, for example, that would dictate the window that you could launch, and when you came back, and so on.
One of the things--I was sitting in an office next to Chris. He had a bad habit--I guess you could call it, or it became very interesting for me, of sticking his head in the door and saying I got such and such problem, will you take a look at it. One of them was--this was in 1964--there was quite a debate going on between the space physicists and the space medical doctors over radiation and etceteras, etceteras, etceteras. Chris said, hey, you take a look at this and see if you can resolve this ongoing debate/argument. So with that, I set up what was known as the Radiation Constraints Panel, which I chaired for the next twenty years. It had crew representatives. In fact, Dr. [Joseph] “Joe” Kerwin was a member, [William] “Bill” Anders was a member for the crew. We had medical doctors, the space physicists, flight ops people, Program Office and so on. We would work the whole spectrum of the mission rules, all the program software we needed.
That, by the way, was where we diverged from [James] Michener, with his Space book. Because he came to Houston [Texas] and talked to us and talked to me. We went over the mission rules that we had. I ought to mention that, because it shows how, at times, with Michener’s book being wrong.
What we found was the more intense the solar activity, well, the solar particles. A solar flare doesn’t matter. It’s if there’s a lot of particles come off, and it’s if they’re coming off of the east limb of the sun. If they’re coming off the west limb of the sun, they go off in deep space. If they’re on the east limb, because the sun is rotating, it will come around, come in the earth and the environment. If it’s a major flare, the guys found out that we had roughly twenty-four hours early warning. They set up a program, this is nothing to do with me, I just said go at it. All these good space physicists and Albert Hardy was one of them, they came up with this technique where they could monitor the sun and start plotting out trends and they could project when we were going to have a major event. This gave us about anywhere from twenty to twenty-four hours of warning.
The procedures for Apollo were, if such a thing occurred when the crew were on the lunar surface, and out in their suits, we would immediately bring them back to the lunar module, get prepared at the right time for a rendezvous, take off, and have them rendezvous with the command service module, get into the CSM, and then turn the module upside down, so the hatch and everything was facing the moon. Then stay in lunar orbit. Because it turns out you could shield about two-thirds of the solar particle flux by staying in close lunar orbit, as opposed to trying to fly back to earth. And with that, you could minimize the dose to well within our operational limits.
Unfortunately, Michener, to make the book, I guess, readable or something, he had the mission rules there, but he was talking about three thousand rads or something like that. Well, you wouldn’t even get that with a major event we--we’ve ever had, which was the one in [19]72. In fact, I have a chart here, that we guys drew up, and it shows the Apollo flights in blue and the red [is] the solar events we’ve had. We, very luckily, had events occur in between the flights, except a minor one on Apollo Sixteen. The major one, between Apollo Sixteen and [Apollo] Seventeen, would not have caused us to abort the mission, but it certainly would’ve given quite a dose to the crew. But again, we were very fortunate in Apollo, that we never had to do that contingency work. That was that one. Michener, bless him, had to have the crew die.
That’s the other thing, of course. With that type of radiation, the thing we were all concerned about was the short-term events, and that was getting nauseous and vomiting. The last thing we wanted them to do was vomit while they were in their spacesuits, on the lunar surface. That’s sort of bad news, because you can’t clear the vomitus. In terms of dying, you’d have to have a lot more dose than that. The other thing was that we wanted to keep the dose so that they didn’t get sick and disoriented on the way back to the earth, because they had some key things to do. That was the radiation constraints work. That went on through Apollo, Skylab, ASTP [Apollo-Soyuz Test Project], and Shuttle. We reduced the dose as we went to Skylab and Shuttle, because people were up there longer and they were up more often. Like Skylab, they were up for months at a time.
The concern there is not so much the natural radiation. The concern is man made radiation. If somebody lets an event off that’s exoatmospheric, for example. It’s not just being in danger in the line of sight, that’s very true, but you’re also in danger if you happen to fly through the electron tube. Because the electrons from the explosion--the electron tube zips around the magnetic field to the nearest pole. If you happen to fly through that, it’s almost like being within line of sight of the detonation.
The other thing of deep concern, a little bit on Skylab, was the French were doing not exoatmospheric, but ground tests or atmospheric tests in Polynesia. We were concerned, because if--in fact, on Skylab, we had what we called a heads down time. Which we would figure out when the French were going to potentially let something off. Then if the ground track went across the sight, we’d have to get the crew to heads down, so they didn’t look out. If they did, and the device went off, they would be temporarily blinded. Not permanently, it was a matter of a few minutes, but if you’re doing something that was critical, a few minutes could make all the difference. We just kind of heads down with that.
Other than that, Apollo Eight went up and we had a Chinese event. Of course, that time, we were zipping through the layers out of the essential earth atmosphere very rapidly, so their dose was quite minimal. Under a hundred millirads. It was way, way down.
In terms of Apollo, there’s a lot of people, I’m sure you’ve asked other people questions like this. They’ve asked me which was the most stressing mission, if you like, of the lot. Not stressing, but what do you think was the highlight. Surprisingly enough, it’s not really Apollo Eleven. It’s Apollo Eight. Because this was the first time that we’d been to the moon. We’d never really checked out everything going there and all. We didn’t have a LM [Lunar Module] as a backup for the propulsion system. So the service propulsion system had to work. Now, as Rockwell Rocketdyne will tell you, it was redundant to the kazoos. Everywhere was redundant, but there’s only one nozzle per engine. Probability of nozzle failure was pretty low, but nevertheless, it was a single point of failure. I got involved, of course, in mission planning for that.
Frank Borman was a lay reader at St. Christopher’s Church in League City. I was on the vestry, and he was on the vestry at that time. I believe it was early October, Frank came to the vestry and said he was due to read the prayers and so forth at the Christmas Eve service. He said, I’m afraid I won’t be able to, I’m going to be on travel [laugh]. I knew where he was going. I took him aside, and said, well, Frank, maybe we can work this. If you read it on the voice loop, I’ll record it in the control center and whip it over to the church and play it at the right time in the service. So we set that up, and he said--well, he was very, very busy because it was a very concentrated training period to get ready. So he said, could you pick a prayer. So I picked the prayer for peace and work, and for my sins called it experiment P-1 for the first prayer from space [laugh]. Something goes with that later that--anyway, Frank had it in his flight book there, and off they went. When they were going around the moon, Frank comes on the voice loop and says is Rod Rose there, I’ve got a message for him and the people at St. Christopher’s and in fact, people everywhere. He read the prayer. The part that, later, got maximum exposure was the reading from Genesis, which we also recorded and were able to play that at the service, as well. I was over at the church at midnight, and I had set up with the guys in the control center to call me and let me know when they had done the successful trans-earth insertion burn to come out from lunar orbit. The timing couldn’t have been better, because that was just before the minister was going to dismiss the congregation on Christmas Day [laugh]. So, I forget, several weeks or months later, the chief counselor at mass, at JSC [Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas] called me and said, hey, you and Frank and the guys of [unintelligible] and George and Chris have been named in a lawsuit filed by Madeline Murry O’Hare. Because this was not a separation of church and state. I mean, it even had an official title, experiment P-1. Fortunately, we had a very understanding judge in Houston, and he dismissed the case. We never went to court, or anything. That’s what happened with P-1. Subsequently, a Roman Catholic priest in New York wrote the thing as an anthem. It used to be performed by the choir for several years at St. Christopher on Christmas Eve. So that was Apollo Eight.
Then, of course, [Apollo] Nine, when we did all that stuff around the earth, with the LM. Then, Apollo Ten. Some people--I pushed for Apollo Ten. It’s an ops mission. It was to do everything except go down and land on the moon. There was an awful lot of arguing in the agency about it. We had been pushing this from the FOP because we knew how complicated the flight was and how complicated the activities were on the lunar surface. Apart from the FOP, I was also running a lunar surface operations plan. That went through all the actions and things the crew had to do to get down to the moon to work on the moon. All the explorations and back and so on. We knew it was very, very complicated and we said, now look, what we’re going to do is an operational flight which goes to the moon, the LM separates, goes down to fifty-thousand feet, around the moon. Everything except that final burn down to the site. We did it for the same area that Apollo Eleven was going to land. Fortunately, we did it. What we wanted was for everything to be SOP, Standard Operating Procedure, except for the final descent and stuff on the moon. In the course of doing that mission, we found out that the lunar characteristics, the mass concentrations on the moon, were somewhat different than had been measured by the artificial satellites. The unmanned satellites had orbited the moon at a much greater height. There were some not awfully strong mass cons, but they were enough to deviate our trajectory on the LM, that didn’t show up until we flew the LM at fifty thousand feet. With that, we were able to modify our program for Apollo Eleven. Of course, everybody knows about it. It was a great mission. That was a close second to Apollo Eight. I’m only sorry that we finished with [Apollo] Seventeen.
By the way, the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiment Packages that we left on the moon were recording data. Then Congress decided a few years later that they couldn’t afford the six million dollars a year to collect the data. We had to shut them down. Now, the power supply would go for years and years and years. The radioisotopes had a one hundred and six-year half-life. We had power for many, many years. It seemed a great shame to me that we lost getting the data. Still, it happened, because there was no switching them back on. It was a one way switch. Once you switched them off, that was it.
Apollo Thirteen was pretty traumatic, of course. That one, the LM lifeboat thing had been looked at. Not in excruciating detail, but we had looked at that as a real worst on worst case backup. That helped us with that one. The movie was dramatized a little bit. When we said they had manual control. They showed the capsule gyrating, CSM gyrating all over the place. A fraction of a degree was a gyration to us in that case, but that wouldn’t show up on the movie. Of course, we had to get the lunar module back in a nice, safe place in deep ocean. I sort of kidded the guy, “Jim” [James Lovell], afterwards. I said there were five aircraft out in the Pacific at the time. I said only one of them were looking for you guys. The others were looking for where the LM came in. So that was fun. It was a good program. I think it really contributed enormously. I’m just sorry it ended when it did. That was Apollo. we carried on for Skylab. I didn’t run Skylab FOP. Another person did that.
Then, I was on to Shuttle, and doing Shuttle flight operations planning, meetings, performance stuff. Communications and data systems integration. We, again, on a similar thing, we took the whole communications system from the sensor of the payload or the Shuttle, whichever it was, and tracked that through the whole system to the user to make sure that everything was matching. We did schematics of the whole thing. [Unintelligible] indicate each stage of the flight, each stage of pre-launch, launch, ascent, and so on. That was a major effort that helped considerably. I looked after range safety. I was manager for that for the Programs Office. This is why I said being next to Chris you get all sorts of odd jobs. I looked after range safety for about six years, I think. Let’s see what else we’ve got.
BISHOP: I notice during your career with NASA, you earned two exceptional service medals. Could you tell us a little bit about those?
ROSE: One was for the Apollo work. The other was for Shuttle work. Yeah, I was lucky. A lot of people who contributed as much as I did didn’t get the recognition that they might have gotten. The other sort of thing that happened, that I was very lucky, for some reason I got known as an expert on some things. I got named as the sole NASA technical advisor to the ambassador for the Gestalt Disarmament Commission, working with the Russians. The Russians had already heard of me, because they had snitched a lot of stuff we’d done on radiation. I found some Russian reports that listed me. The ambassador had to put a short list of his technical advisors who were going to meet with the Russians in Geneva. I was the NASA guy. I think there were about four or five of us, I believe, although I never did see it. That was submitted to the Russians, and they chose not to get into the technical discussions. I have no idea why, but they did. The other fortunate thing I got was to be the US Representative on the FAI Space Records Committee. That entailed going over to Paris once a year to meet with the Russians, French, Germans, [unintelligible], Spanish, English and a whole bunch of them to do the record work. We used to do--we set quite a few records with the Shuttle, of course, prior to that, they’d been doing some for the Apollo. I was not involved at that time. Carl Huss was representative then. That was an interesting assignment.
Then, before we flew the Shuttle for the first time, I don’t know whether it was that I spoke the language or what, but I got volunteered to go to Australia and brief the Minister for Science and Technology on what we were doing about the external tank. The Australians, at that time, were rather sensitive. They’d had pieces of Skylab come down in Australia, and they were a little antsy about it. The first two missions, we set out [unintelligible] the inclination so that the ground track went in the Bass Straits, between Tasmania and mainland Australia. The reason being, that if the automatic cut off of the main engines didn’t occur, and the crew had to back it up, the tank would go a lot further then the Indian Ocean. See, on the Shuttle, the way to get rid of the tank is you put the Shuttle up not quite in orbit. It’s about just under two hundred feet per second shy of orbital velocity. There’s an antipodal point in the middle of the Indian Ocean and that’s where the tank goes. After you separate it from that, you go around to the apogee. The Shuttle can then do a little burn and either circle [unintelligible] can acquire orbit. The tank comes down into the Indian Ocean. That footprint is about 1,200 miles long. The idea was that if you crew had to back up the shutdown manually, if the computers didn’t work for some reason, you only needed a second or a second and a half and the tank was in the wrong place of the footprint. So we put it through the Bass Straits. When I got over to Australia, I discovered that, the first thing they told me was seventy percent of our oil production comes from the Bass Straits and offshore drilling. I said, oh, well, okay. So, of course, we’re going more due east with the third flight. So we came up with a flight--but it turns out that the ground track went over the northern outskirts of Melbourne [Australia]. By this time, I had set up a system with the Australians, so we would notify them when we were going to launch, because they would ground all flight for two hours on either side of when the tank was going to be anywhere near them. They were still that concerned. I said I’m going to move it farther north from Melbourne, because I was used to phoning the--whatever they call in Australia, the Secretary was the principle science officer and the Minister. I said I’ll put it over some valley up--I don’t know, it’s about ninety miles north of Melbourne. He said, good God, man, move it a bit farther south. That’s the best wine-growing district we’ve got. So we moved it a little bit farther south. Now, the ground track on a due east mission goes over central Australia. They provided us with population computer tapes. We found that flying from the west coast to the east coast of Australia, we exposed, I think it was, all of thirty-nine people. Because we didn’t fly over any population at all. It’s an awfully empty country. That was the Australian trip. That was enjoyable. I must have persuaded them that we knew what we were doing [laugh] because they didn’t object too much.
ELLY: We have two minutes before we need to check the tape.
BISHOP: Yeah.
ROSE: Okay. Now, on the Shuttle—by the way, I retired end of September [19]84, and so Challenger happened off my watch. The one thing that has always concerned me and I voiced it very early on. In something like the Shuttle, you design it for a hundred missions. But it requires extreme dedication and concentration in every step of the preparation. My concern was you get flying the fortieth, the fiftieth, the sixtieth mission, it’s going to be awfully tough to maintain that same focus. They’ve done a heck of a good job with it, I must admit, but that’s one of the inherent risks of Shuttle. Everybody’s got to be really on the ball. The Challenger disaster was very unfortunate. That was a bad blow.
ELLY: We can get in a pause now.
BISHOP: Okay, I knew we were probably getting close. [After changing tapes] You were discussing the Challenger. Where were you when that occurred, and what were you feeling?
ROSE: I was working at Rockwell then. I was the senior technical advisor to the manager for Rockwell at the scene, because I was the obvious guy around. I don’t know how that came about. That was a bad day. Rockwell lent me, afterward, back to NASA, temporarily. I was on the range safety investigating panel. Each group had to go back through everything that had been done to make sure that the right things were done and that there wasn’t some place where you could improve things. We did that for range safety. There was no smoking gun in that one, fortunately.
That was a very--that was one of the two traumatic experiences. Having been in the aeronautics and space business for forty-four years, of course, I always kid the crew that we lost a lot more test pilots than we did astronauts. If you started a test program with ten test pilots, you expected to lose quite a few of them before you finished.
The two worst times in the manned space program were Apollo One, with Gus [Grissom] and those in the pad, that was very bad, and of course, Challenger. That’s part of the risk of the business. I always told people, I said look, space is not a friendly environment. It’s not like driving somewhere and something breaks down, you cruise to the side of the road and call Triple A. You’re on your own. There’s a lot of things can go wrong. When they do, it’s bad news. So I think, partially by the extremely dedicated and detailed work that an awful lot of people did and a certain amount of good luck, we only had the fatalities we did. But it’s not a good thing when you lose them, that’s for sure.
Hopefully, Challenger, there were enough investigations made that--I can’t say that it won’t happen again, believe me. If you fly the number of missions we’re flying, it’ll be extremely lucky if something doesn’t happen. Hopefully, not as bad as Challenger, but it’s not a risk-free business. People have to understand that. It’s not one of those things where you say, oh, something crashed, we better cancel the whole lot. The people who are involved in it and the crews, know the risks. That’s something they accept. In the early days, the crew figured that they were really a lot safer in many ways, flying in space, than they were flying test airplanes [laugh]. I mean, test airplanes is a pretty risky business. So that was that. I wasn’t there when Challenger--I was across the room at Lockland. But nonetheless, since I’d been working Shuttle from its beginning, it was quite a wrench when that happened.
BISHOP: When you retired from NASA, in 1984, what prompted that? Was there anything special?
ROSE: Well, I was getting old. Also, I must say, that civil servants don’t make great money. One of the ways to make a retirement nest egg is to retire and take your skills and work for somebody who will pay the appropriate amount. That’s what I did for four or five years. I helped Rockwell on the space station phase-B study contract, and the DOD [Department of Defense] payloads integration contract for the Shuttle. In fact, I was director of that while I was there at Rockwell. Generally, I tried to help them where I could, from experience. After that, in [19]89, I finished--[19]88, I retired from Rockwell and did some consulting work, in [19]89, we also, small group of us, did some consulting for Hermes. You know, the European Manned Space Program. That didn’t go anywhere though, I think they just wanted to pick our brains cheap [laugh]. After that, I retired, retired. Came up here, and I’ve been living up here in the Hill Country ever since.
BISHOP: And what do you do now?
ROSE: Well, one of the things I do, for example, is I have SETI, the search for Extraterrestrial Information, on the computer, there. They’ve got a marvelous program going there. They decided that there’s several hundred thousand high-speed computers sitting around. They can’t afford to process all the data from their receiver. So they portion out chunks of it. I’ve processed one batch, which was about eighty hours of CPU [Central Processing Unit] time. I’m working on the second batch, now. Whoever gets the first intelligent signals are really going to get into the [unintelligible]. The odds of doing that are about a thousand or more times less than winning the lottery. I haven’t won that, either [laugh]. But it’s fun. You can see it going. It’s neat. I think it’s a great idea, actually, because people have got loads of these high powered computers sitting around doing nothing. I use it as a screensaver. It sits there, chugging away, with the [unintelligible] series, going over all that stuff, and when it’s finished, it zips it back to California, and they download me another one and off we go.
I do that, and looking after acreage up here keeps you fairly occupied, too. You’d be surprised how fast cedars grow [laugh]. And the grass, if it ever rains. That, and traveling. We’ve done a bit of traveling. The oldest son is back in England at the moment, heading up a big power station project. We’ve been going over every year to visit him. He’s been there three years, now. Sort of deja vu. Because he was born in England, and he came over--of course he’s a U. S. citizen. Now, he’s gone back there to work. He’s working for an American company, so I don’t know how long he’ll be there. Our other son is working with U. S. A. on the Space Station. Looking after the Y2K [year 2000 computer compatibility] stuff for NASA at the moment.
That’s what we’ve been doing. I keep an eye on the space stuff. There’s quite a few NASA people live up in the Hill Country here. There’s probably a couple dozen of us up here. Most of us keep in touch with e-mail and so on. One or two are building airplanes, raising goats, and all sorts of odd things. After forty-four years, it’s nice to not have to sit in on fifty million meetings. I used to run, with FOP, well, I attended, I was Chris’s rep on all the level three, level two board meetings that the Program Office ran at headquarters, and so on. I think I personally ran an average of eight or nine meetings a month, minimum. With range safety, lots of travel, because we had to work with both the eastern test range and the western test range. At first, they didn’t work together, so we had to integrate all that lot and get it going. So lots of travel. I think I put in about two million miles, traveling back and forth.
BISHOP: I was curious. I’ve heard those meetings where you decided who got what and who wasn’t going to get what they wanted on the mission--I’ve heard them called tiger teams. Do you know where that term originated?
ROSE: Yeah, I suspect--I remember it happening on Skylab. Skylab was a whole different operational concept in that the thing was up there for months on end. So it was a whole different philosophy of operation. What you had to do, they had a payload group, and the scientists and whatever would be involved in it. They would try to decide what, in view of what had happened say the day before, what to do the day after today. People would have to draw up the detail, procedures--well, the procedures were already written, it was a question of stacking them up properly. I didn’t get too involved in that, fortunately, but I understand there was always plenty of discussion with the science community as to who got to do what and who was where on the pecking order.
Then, we had tiger teams on Apollo in terms of when there was a problem, you’d start a tiger team. That was a team that was dedicated to that particular problem. It wasn’t called a tiger team, but the group that we had working the Mercury landing problem was basically a tiger team, because it was a group that was dedicated to just solving that particular problem. In those days, we were given a free hand to do what we needed to do. So we were doing one drop a day out at [unintelligible] airfield, for example, dropping capsules on land to see what sort of g’s we got. Dropping it in Back Bay to see what we got, and dropping it in water, and so on. Then, coming back and modifying the design. Tiger teams, generally, referred to that type of thing.
BISHOP: Looking back on your career with NASA, what do you consider your most significant accomplishment?
ROSE: Surviving twenty-five years, probably [laugh]. I like to feel that the FOP, flight operations plans stuff. The procedures are still going today. The FOP’s are still run today. The Radiation Constraints Panel is still run today. The communications data systems, that’s finished its job, although they wanted me to do the space station at one time, and I said no. I’ve done too much of that stuff.
I think setting up some of the procedures and being able--I was in a fortunate position, working for Chris, there. I was able to look at the big picture and try and integrate everybody to get it all planned together. I like to think that I helped that to come about. FOP, certainly, I think, did a very key and interesting part, because the mission designers would look to that for their input on how to set up the mission design. So you’d get everybody who’s involved in it, and then you can iterate and you’d trade off and compromise. When you’d finally come up with a flight plan, you’d say, okay, this is what we propose to do. Then you’d take it to the program manager and his people and say okay. Because some of his guys had been involved in it, so it doesn’t come as a surprise to him. Then we’d take it up the chain and say okay, here’s how we propose to meet the objectives of our mission.
Had the same with the radiation work. That can get increasingly important. It depends what happens. You don’t have to worry just about the natural environment, although there’s plenty of that. The space station, for example, and the altitude they’re going to be at. They’re going to be flying through an effective part of the South Atlantic anomaly three or four times a day. You don’t want to be doing too much EVA [extra-vehicular activity] when you’re going through an anomaly because it adds up. The other thing, though, that will always be a concern is rogue events. Somebody lets something off that they shouldn’t. That’s always a concern. Radiation concerns are here to stay, I’m afraid. I was pleased to get that on a solid footing and going. Other than that, I contributed what I could, but quite frankly, I feel very fortunate, looking back on it, to have been involved in the first twenty-five years of manned space flight [laugh]. It. was terrific.
BISHOP: You mentioned that they tried to get you to do that again with the Shuttle Program. What was the difference in working for the Apollo Program and working in the Shuttle Program?
ROSE: Money. With Apollo, our basic philosophy was, you come up with a way of doing something, then you’d think of the next best alternative. You’d follow both paths all the way through with money, people, so that you had a viable backup. With Shuttle, we couldn’t afford to do that. You had to make the decision ahead of time, which way you were going to go, and hope that you’d crossed all the T’s and dotted all the I’s. One of the problems is that when you run a tight budget program like that, the spares tend to be a real problem. What has happened in Shuttle is they’ve had to rob Peter to pay Paul. You may have to take a good spacecraft and take something off it because a piece is broken on the one you want to fly. That means you broke the system here, so when you eventually get the piece to replace, you’ve got to test that all over again as well as test the one you put in the vehicle you want to fly. I’d say that was one of the biggest differences. Then, of course, Apollo was going to the moon. It’s a lot different going to the moon than just flying in earth orbit. I remember giving a presentation, a lecture, on space rescue at the International Space Rescue session in Brussels. The Swedish representatives couldn’t understand why I said well, having a crew train for arctic conditions is not really a necessary thing to do in space rescue. The reason was, they were used to people in airplanes coming down in the arctic. There, survival is pretty tricky. I said well, if you’re in space, you’ve got time. Either it’s so short, you don’t have time to do anything, or you’ve got time to hold off for five minutes or ten minutes and you’re out of the arctic zone and you’re in a more temperate zone. That took a little while for them to really think of. They just hadn’t been exposed to it. I said we go around the earth in ninety odd minutes. Five minutes gets you a long way. Doesn’t take long to do that. So that--it just sort of illustrated to the difference between the two. Of course, nowadays, the--try to compare Shuttle to Mercury to somebody in Mercury days. We had the world network, but there were long periods where there was no communication. Or we had HF communication, where if conditions were right we could talk, but if they weren’t, we couldn’t. Now, with TDRSS, the tracking data and relay satellite system, it’s virtually continuous coverage, except for one little blip in the Pacific. It’s a whole new ball game. Going to the moon, of course, at one time we were thinking of putting a satellite on the far side of the moon -- not the far side, but just off from the far side, so it could act as a relay. Then, the expense of that and the time thing got to where we said hey, it’s thirty odd minutes behind the moon, we’ll just have to suck it in and do it. That was probably one of the times in Apollo when people’s pulse rate went up a little because the trans-earth insertion burn was always behind the moon. You never knew whether it was good or not until they came around and regained contact. The other time, certainly early on, was in coming back from the moon. There’s a significant period of s-band communication, no, voice communications black out, telemetry and voice, because the ionized sheath that comes from the vehicle just totally blocks it out. You could string a cable a mile or two behind you and hope that it’s out of the stream and get something. That has some distinct drawbacks to it. So when you do the reentry, that’s always a mess. I hope they made [unintelligible] out of it. Probably, none of them--the first time, when we came back with Apollo Eight, that was definitely--that was the first time we’d re-entered with a manned vehicle at 36,000 feet per second. That was quite a thing. The other one, which was John Glenn coming down, because we didn’t know whether the heatshield was holding. That really was a nail-biter. Fortunately, it was [holding]. Re-entry is always a critical, critical point. In fact, the two most dangerous parts in most space missions are getting up and coming down. In space, other than some major catastrophe, a lot of the things one has to be concerned about is space debris. I was the interface with DOD [Department of Defense] space command for thirty years on that stuff. As far as I know, we haven’t, I think we’ve had something within a few miles. Nothing that would cause us real concern. The thing you have to realize is NORAD doesn’t track everything that’s in orbit. They can only track it down to a certain size. If you have a ball bearing in space that hits you at the wrong time, that can make a heck of a mess. We did have an event that was well reported on the Shuttle. One came back, I forget which flight it was, came back with quite a big gouge in the--it’s actually bulletproof glass on the front of the cockpit of the Shuttle. There was a big gouge in it. Quite a crater. It turned out, with analysis, that it was done by a fleck of paint. That had to be traveling over fifty thousand feet per second, because the Shuttle was flying at twenty-five [thousand feet per second]. This was coming the other way. This was recreated in a hypersonic tunnel in the shop tunnel. Got, I believe basically the same result. Just a very small thing hitting you at a very high velocity is sort of bad news. That’s why the space station’s got micrometeorite and bombproof and all that stuff in it. That’s why there’s an emergency escape lodging in the coming year, assuming the Russian one does its job. The debris is like the dog’s fleas. Each dog has fleas, and the fleas have lesser fleas. All this debris is going in a fairly random manner. Although, most of it was initially set off either due east or polar or higher inclination. The fact is that spent space tanks explode and things like that. Pieces take off on their own, they hit a piece and they break up into pieces, those hit pieces and break up. Soon, you’ve got a whole population out there that’s really quite deadly. It doesn’t all get swept back to earth, either. Some of it’ll stay up there quite a while. It’s always a concern. In fact, most of the space activity nations now, for example, don’t put up spent rocket stages that explode. You design it so it doesn’t do that, so it’ll vent.
There was one thing, by the way, that happened on the Shuttle that might be of interest. Talking about the external tank. We had tried to track it. We had a tracking ship out in the Indian Ocean trying to trail it. I’ve got some pictures. They weren’t taken by the ship. I had a call from a South African Airways 747 captain. He said, I think we saw the Shuttle tank come down in the Indian Ocean. I said, are you going to be in Houston. He said, yeah, I’ll be there in so many week’s time. So I said, if you can bring your log book and your plot of exactly where you were and the time you saw it, and the way you saw it, we’ll take a look at it and see. Because they described it very graphically. They said these pieces came in and the whole ocean lit up with a phosphorescent green as these pieces came in. They were flying from Johannesburg [South Africa] to Perth [Australia]. He said, well, we tried to photograph it, but the flight engineer had slow speed film in the camera, so he didn’t get much. He said, but if you can tell us when each flight is going, because, he said, we fly this twice a week. He said, we’ll load it up with high-speed film, and see if we can get another one. Sure enough, a few months later, they did actually--they’re the only people I know that have, on two occasions, seen the external tank come in. They photographed it, but I hope the flight engineer was a better flight engineer than he was a photographer. I’ll show you the picture. All it is, is a rather blurry thing going on [laugh].
The tank would break up into quite a few pieces. The biggest of which is the endotank on the external tank. It’s a cruciform titanium structure that’s about two feet deep and thirty-three feet in diameter. When it comes in, it doesn’t burn up. Several tons of stuff come in. That’s the stuff that goes farthest down range, because it’s W/CDA [weight over coefficient of direct area] size. That’s the ballistic coefficient. It’ll probably fold up some, because we deliberately tumble the tank. So that it won’t--if it hit the atmosphere flying, then you’ve got real problems, because it could go anywhere. So we tumble it. We use a vent on the tank to vent the fuel and gas that’s left to tumble the tank. It comes in tumbling, and that helps it to break up. That minimizes the footprint. The footprint’s not very wide. It’s not more than sixty nautical miles wide. It’s the up-range and downrange that’s about twelve hundred miles. Which, in the Indian Ocean, by the way, that’s like Australia. It’s a pretty empty place. Statistically, there’s one ship crosses the footprint area, I think, in forty-eight hours. What was done, and I’m sure it’s still done, is notice to mariners go out as to when the thing’s going to be coming in, and all the ship captains get that as part of their procedure.
ELLY: I have a quick, overall question. I have one minute remaining. Yeah, what is--
BISHOP: What is the whole point of going to space?
ROSE: I always get accused of looking too far ahead when people ask me that. Number one, we’ve seen the immediate results, some good, some bad. Communications, that’s happened. We know a lot more about the earth. Probably the biggest thing, one of the big things, that I think Apollo did, except people tend to forget it. It gave them a real perspective of what the earth was, which is a very fragile spacecraft. Unfortunately, people are tending to forget it.
But if you think of it in the long run, our sun has a limited life. I’m not going to see it finish, I mean its quite a few years hence. The fact is, if you don’t start soon, you’ve got to develop--if mankind is to survive, you’ve got to develop the capability of taking at least some of civilization to another habitable planet. That could take quite a few years. We have done an enormous amount. When you think what we’ve done in twenty-five years, compared to the first twenty-five years of flight, the progress is exponential. Whether it’ll take another thousand years or what, I couldn’t say. Sooner or later, mankind has got to realize that the earth is not a forever-type thing. When the sun goes, it’s finished. You’ve got to find somewhere else to go. Hopefully, people want to do that, but it’s like trying to divert a major meteor. You can’t do it tomorrow. You’ve got to plan years and years ahead. Get all your procedures, systems, lined up, and go do it. I think, to me, ultimately, intergalactic travel is the end result.
But that’s a long way ahead. Right now, I still think there’s some enormous potential for all sorts of things in space. We could get into--there’s always a big discussion about unmanned versus manned. I like to remind people that the Hubble space telescope, while that was screwed up by man to begin with. The fact is, it was repaired by man. You couldn’t have done that as an unmanned mission. We saved many, many millions of dollars by being able to go up there and rendezvous with it, and put the corrections in. We’re going to go up again next spring, I think….
[At this point, the tape ran out. Mr. Rose made a few additional remarks concerning the future mission, and the interview closed.]