NASA Shannon, James J. - May 25, 2000

Interview with James J. Shannon

 

Interviewer: Tara Seibel

Date of Interview: May 25, 2000

Location: Shannon home, Georgetown, Texas

 

 

SEIBEL:  Today is May 25, 2000.  This oral history with Mr. James Shannon is being conducted at 200 John Thomas, the home of the interviewee in Georgetown, Texas.  The interview is being conducted for the NASA/Johnson Space Center Oral History Project in conjunction with Southwest Texas State University, History Department by graduate student Tara Seibel.  Mr. Shannon, are you aware that this interview is being conducted for the NASA/Southwest Texas State University Oral History Project and will be available for research purposes?

 

SHANNON:  That is my understanding.

 

SEIBEL:  So, what were your thoughts on the launch of Sputnik, your own personal feelings about Sputnik going up?

 

SHANNON:  Well, it was just startling that they were able to do it.  Of course, we didn’t know how many times they might have tried.  But here was one in orbit, something that we knew, understood how difficult it was going to be, to get one in space, get an object in space, no matter how small it was going to be.  We had talked to people from the Vanguard program, which was the United States effort to get an object in space.  To see this thing happen, it demonstrated that what we were trying to do could be accomplished.  That was an effort how quick did we get to do it.

 

SEIBEL:  Did it lend an urgency to the Vanguard project?

 

SHANNON:  Well, it was such an urgency for the country that they had the army put one up before Vanguard.  We had to get one up in space right away.  Since the launch vehicle was the problem that Vanguard was having, they had used a, I’m not sure what missile was used, what launch vehicle was used, but it was von Braun’s outfit there in Alabama [Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville] was able to launch one.  Of course, it wasn’t launched from there, it was launched from down at Cape Kennedy, but we did get one in orbit very soon afterwards.  I don’t know exactly how much longer, but it was one.       

 

SEIBEL:  What were your thoughts when Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space?

 

SHANNON:  Disappointment that we didn’t accomplish it first, just like I was disappointed in Sputnik.  But I think it was great that they were able to do it.  It relieved some anxiety that we had about what affect it would have on an individual going in space.  The real thing was the disappointment that our technology had not accomplished it first.

 

SEIBEL:  You had said earlier that after Alan Shepard went up that you were more enthused about joining the program.

 

SHANNON:  Oh, that was just [laughs], that was just coincidental.  That’s what I told everybody.  I had already applied to go to work for them.  And when they asked me, they gave me a date to come, which happened to be ten days after when Shepard flew.  I said, “Well, I made sure that this program was going to be a success.”  When I found that out I decided to go join.”

 

SEIBEL:  Purely coincidental?

 

SHANNON:  More purely coincidental, but it made a nice little joke for my own part so I could always anchor the date to Shepard.

 

SEIBEL:  Obviously the disappointment abated a little bit when Shepard went up.  Did your feelings on the program change?

 

SHANNON:   I still was excited about the program and particularly excited to be able to participate in it.  It was something that was such a, realize was going to be such a significant achievement in the way of science – how we would break through the envelope that we were then living in and the things that we would be able to do. 

 

An example, in the fifties, we had lived in Washington, D.C. and had bought a television up there and could get all of the programs there.  And we moved to Pascagoula, Mississippi, went down there to build an ice breaker for the Navy.  And when we got down to Mississippi, we had this television we had bought in Washington.  Only by erecting an antenna that was forty something feet high and pointed a great big antenna towards New Orleans could we get television.  And the television we got was only local news there in New Orleans.  There was no network like there had been in Washington.  And to get the signal from Washington or from the East coast, down to the cities of the South, they had to lay a coaxial cable, and the cable was about six inches in diameter to be able to carry the signal.  And now today, anywhere, you got your little satellite antenna and you can pick up television.  The advancement in the art, in that short time period, is just well, great.  

 

SEIBEL:  I would just like to find out what your specific on the Mercury project was?

 

SHANNON:  Well, I was working with contractors for different assignments.  One of them was when they launched the spacecrafts with the Redstone missile, which was a smaller missile.  They used a, what they called a cherry picker.  It was one of these tractors that has a long arm that reaches up, and they could sit it up there next to the spacecraft in case a fire or something would happen.  He could jump out of the spacecraft onto this little chair and it would take him down.  But when they went to the Atlas, the Atlas missile was so much larger, and had a larger launch pad that the Mercury just sat on the ground, evidently, but the other one had a launch pad that allowed the exhaust to be directed away.  We had to convert a tower that was there on the pad for a rescue device to get an astronaut out of the spacecraft and that was one of the first things that I did.  We had this platform that lowered down next to the spacecraft and then right at the last minute, like the cherry-picker, they would pull it away, this would go up the spacecraft and we had to build an elevator and it was real interesting.  You would think it would not be a complicated thing but we had to do it fast and as economical as possible. 

 

So, I was the project engineer for that one.  Then we had to run a sled test out at China Lake Naval Station out at the desert at California, and I was one of the project engineers on that.  We had to test the clamp that held the spacecraft to the launch vehicle that one of the unmanned missions, it had failed to release fully, and we’d had no way of seeing that in space, so we ran the test of it on a sled, put it on a rocket sled and got it going real fast, exploded the release, to make sure it would separate, and it did not release.  We had to what they call a pork chop device to mount to the clamps so it would flip away from the clamp. 

 

When we lost [Virgil “Gus”] Grissom’s spacecraft because the hatch exploded and released ahead of time, before the rescue ships were there ready for him, we had to run tests on that hatch, that explosive hatch.  I coordinated with the manufacturer, Corning, to get some rejected windows, that we had rejected, because they had failed and they gave them to us to use in our tests on the hatch to see if it worked for that, and, well, that’s just a few of the things that I did.

 

SEIBEL:  You stated earlier that you didn’t work on Gemini.  You went straight to Apollo?

 

SHANNON:  I went straight to Apollo.

 

SEIBEL:  What was your work on Apollo?

 

SHANNON:  I started out in the test division.  And the test division was an organization [where] one of the things we were doing was working with how we were going to check out the spacecrafts and make sure that they were acceptable for use on a flight.  And we had an office for, I was the technical assistant to the division chief who was Bill Bland, and we had a Command [module] and Service Module office.  We had one for the Lunar Module.  We had five offices.  I right now cannot remember what the five offices, I can remember those two clear in my mind.  I worked with them for about two years, as we were writing the test procedures and everything like that, and doing other jobs as needed to be done by the division at the discretion of the division chief. 

 

By this time, we had already been challenged by [President John F.] Kennedy to get this done in ten years, by the end of the decade, less than ten years.  Originally, we were going to do it at a slow pace.  We had a, I can’t remember what the network was called, but you had a network chart that would go from one step to the next step.  We had a fairly, not a real tight one, but we had one we thought could go, but having a limit on how long we could take.  It required us to put a lot more effort in it.  And the contracts that had been let with the contractors were basically much leaner.  We were overrunning our budget just tremendously.  Of course, where most of the budget was going was to man power to see how we could reduce the man power to be used.  This was one of the things I had to work with the test division for, to go up and work with North American, who was doing the Command Module and Grumman who was doing the Lunar Module, and negotiate with them on how much we needed in the way of personnel to check out the spacecraft and get it done as rapidly.  And evidently the job I did on that was more acceptable than other things because when they had a reorganization they took me out of the test operations and put me over into the program control area, which was the area that dealt directly with the contractors on all matters.  So I went from that phase of the program office over to the other phase.  That’s where I spent most of my career in NASA, was in program control in one sort or the other.

 

SEIBEL:  Was that in the management area?

 

SHANNON:  It was in the management area.  Yes.

 

SEIBEL:  What were your thoughts when Apollo 11 landed on the Moon?

 

SHANNON:  Well, I was just so excited that it had come off so good and everything.  We had done missions up there.  We had done the first mission flying around the Moon.  Then we had flown, after they had done that, that was just the Command Module.  We didn’t take the Lunar Module up on that one, but we had to test the Lunar Module here, we tested here in the Earth’s atmosphere first by taking it away from the spacecraft and flying it and redocking with it and everything.  And we would jettison all the hardware and just recover the Command Module. 

 

And then we flew one mission around the Moon.  And they got in the Lunar Module and went down close to landing, but they didn’t land and then came back up.  That was Apollo 10.  Then Apollo 11 was the first lunar landing.  It was the first time we’ve ever had anybody, anything like that, land on the Moon, especially something with a man in it and controlled by the man.  The man had to do acts himself to get it on the ground, and oh it was just fabulous that all that testing.  We had done proved to be successful.  And then on the first mission to land on the Moon that we took to do was a success.  Oh, it was just great.  That’s all I could think of it and we had done it in the decade.  Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes. 

 

SEIBEL:  Was Apollo 13 as much of a setback as it’s been made out to be later on?

 

SHANNON:  A setback?

 

SEIBEL:  A disaster.

 

SHANNON:  It was a potential disaster.  To recover from that was just fantastic.  That they could develop things on Earth and tell them how to make it with the parts they had on the spacecraft and get the ability to purify the air like they did was, I think, that’s another great achievement by NASA. 

 

SEIBEL:  On the Apollo 11, what specifically were you working on with that?  Were you still in the management area?

 

SHANNON:  I was in the management area and that was under operations and I was under hardware and so I really had nothing to do personally with Apollo 11.

 

SEIBEL:  You just basically worked on all of the Apollo projects?

 

SHANNON:  At that time I was assigned to the LEM, Lunar Module Project Office, so all I was working on was the Lunar Module.  I wasn’t really involved in the Command Module.

 

SEIBEL:  Could you tell me a little bit about your work on the Lunar Module?

 

SHANNON:  Well, it was just in the management area.  It was supporting the program manager and the other managers there we had in the overall effort to manage the contractor and get the work done. 

 

SEIBEL:  Since you worked overall on all of the Apollo projects, was there specifically one that stands out the most in your mind, that gave you the most trouble, or was the easiest for you to accomplish?

 

SHANNON:  One of the things we had to do.  That I was involved in is that the contractors were working under incentive contract.  We wanted to give them a bonus if they would perform this incentive.  We had to come up with how to measure these incentive accomplishments.  And one of the things was the flight to the Moon.  And for the North American contract, for the Command Module, there were things like the launch, the separation of the enclosure for the, and I can’t remember what it was called, that protected the Lunar Module on the launch.  And then the separation and docking with the Lunar Module, both spacecrafts were there.  And then the flight to the Moon, in orbit around the Moon, and then to come back to the Earth again, in circulation.  Get into circular orbit around the Earth, and jettison the [Command] Service Module and the parachute systems working to get it on ground. 

 

Now, the Lunar Module, all of our incentives were based on the landing.  The separation from the spacecraft and the docking and the going down to the Moon and the recovering from the Moon, and back up to the thing.  We negotiated real with both contractors to get this, I didn’t negotiate with the Command Module, but my cohort there for that negotiating, we talked about it.  And on Apollo 13 mission, the Lunar Module was not used for its mission.  It did not go down to the Moon at all.  So all of the objectives we had for the lunar landing were not performed.  But the Lunar Module, if they had not had the Lunar Module, they could not have rescued the astronauts from space.  So here we had to come around after a fact, and somehow to recover that award for the contract.  That was really a unique thing to do and I couldn’t give you the details.  I have no idea, I couldn’t remember them now.  It was always impressive to me that we were so smart in our establish incentive goals.  Yet when a great accomplishment was done none of them were on the checklist.

 

SEIBEL:  Did you do any work on Skylab?

 

SHANNON:  Yes, we did work on Skylab and that was very short.  By that time I was in the division office.  I wasn’t in one of the project offices anymore.  I can’t remember much about my work on Skylab.

 

SEIBEL:  It was mostly managerial?

 

SHANNON:  Managerial, but we did have one problem there.  I remember working hard with it.  I cannot even remember what the situation was.  No idea.  I tell you what it was about.  It was about sustaining the Skylab Module in orbit and the ability to do it with the Command Module.  We worked that out to where that could be done, and we did it for a while.  But the decision to do more effort to keep it up there longer was turned down by headquarters.  It had to finally burn up when coming back into Earth.  And I can remember working on that.  The details are just so fuzzy, I can’t remember.  I can remember many hours we met about it.

 

SEIBEL:  Were you disappointed when NASA didn’t send another mission to the Moon after 1972 or did you just move on to the next project?

 

SHANNON:  Well, we had accomplished what the program had been designed to do.  And I guess I was disappointed that we didn’t utilize the hardware that we had built to do more trips to the Moon.  But it was just a question of money and the desire to get on the Shuttle program, which was a reusable spacecraft to go into space was so pressing that the decision was made not to utilize them, not to spend the money.  And the political climate in the country was we need to stop spending money at the rate we were on space and move one to other things.  We accomplished this.  We got some rocks off the Moon.  Don’t worry about anything up there, just let it go.  I don’t need to say anything more about it.  There were some things that could have been done.  I think it would have been good to somehow or another, to maintain it.  Of course, they destroyed all of the facilities we had down there for launching the Saturn V.  There’s never been another launch vehicle built like the Saturn V.  I was just an enormous thing.  Have you ever seen them?

 

SEIBEL:  I’ve seen the one that they have outside of the Space Center.

 

SHANNON:  Down in Houston?  Have you read how much fuel that thing burned?

 

SEIBEL:  Yes.

 

SHANNON:  I mean carloads in a second.  It’s just an enormous expenditure and that you had to do to launch a weight like that.  I don’t know whether the country or the world would ever want to expend that much to put a rocket up like that.  I know are talking about doing it sometimes in the future, but it’s going to be a while. 

 

SEIBEL:  Did you do any work on the Saturn V?

 

SHANNON:  No.  I was strictly in the spacecraft.

 

SEIBEL:  Did you do any work on the Apollo-Soyuz Mission?

 

SHANNON:  Yes, I was involved in that, in the program control area.

 

SEIBEL:  Through management?

 

SHANNON:  Yes.

 

SEIBEL:  Was there a feeling of maybe the tensions of the Cold War easing a little bit in the joint effort?

 

SHANNON:  Very much so.  [It] broke the secrecy of the two countries as far as their abilities to put humans into space.  It wasn’t totally, but it was such an accomplishment there.  I think it was very well.

 

SEIBEL:  Were you in contact with any of your counterparts in Russia?

 

SHANNON:  No.  Never had anything to do with that.

 

SEIBEL:  Did you want to have a dialogue with them in any way or just concentrating on Apollo?

 

SHANNON:  My area ASTP.  I didn’t have a need to for where I was working and everything.  That was primarily the Flight Directors and the crew.  We built a little adaptor that was used to join the two, the Apollo and the Soyuz.  And worked on that and I can’t remember what I did.  I know I did some analysis on that work.

 

SEIBEL:  What was your work on the Shuttle?

 

SHANNON:  When I retired I was in the Orbiter Project Office.  I was in the in the program control area there.  I was head of that office.  Rockwell was building the orbiter and  [I] helped negotiate the changes in the direction that we made on the orbiter and everything.  And then we were buying new orbiters at the time.  We ordered new ones and worked on that.  We still had problems obtaining funding out of Congress and out of headquarters for the projects we needed, working on that.  That’s about it.

 

SEIBEL:  You said that you had retired in 1986 from NASA.  What were your thoughts on the Challenger explosion?

 

SHANNON:  It was the month I retired.  Oh, it was just terrible.  I was just devastated by it.  Oh, my goodness.  You know it was always known that there was a possibility like that could happen.  I just think it was awful.

 

SEIBEL:  Do you think that NASA recovered from it well or do you think NASA’s still struggling?

 

SHANNON:  Oh, I think they recovered from that problem that they had with the loss of the Challenger.  I think that they did real well to recover from it.  It was such a devastating thing to happen.  When your running mission like that there’s always a possibility of something happening.  I don’t know, having not been involved in anything, I don’t know whether that launch was a forced launch that should have not been made or just what could have been done to prevent the accident.  It was a terrible accident.  I think that was the first launch after I retired. 

 

SEIBEL:  What do you see for the future of the program?

 

SHANNON:  I think it’s unlimited.  Their only limit is going to be how much the country is willing to expend to accomplish it.  To go back to the Moon will require something like the Saturn V, launch vehicles like that.  And to ask the country to pay for those, and the number of those it would take to put a colony up there and the technology available today, I don’t know how we’re going to be able to do it.  There’s going to have to be some sort of breakthrough to let us be able to, you know, to accomplish that.  I think it’s something we will eventually do.  But from where I sit, I don’t know how we’re going to be able to do it – man-wise.  I think to be able to get things done [and] with technology, we’ll be able to put more landers on the Moon for a specific area that we want to find out. 

 

We had such a disappointment here on Mars not getting the lander there to work or other things.  And what they say happened on the reason it failed, about using the wrong conversion factors on math.  I just can’t believe that happened.  If the checks and the balances that we had in Apollo, I just don’t believe that could have happened.  I really don’t.

 

SEIBEL:  Do you think that the same kind of urgency to get to the Moon is just not there anymore, to get to Mars?

 

SHANNON:  No, we don’t have that urgency to get to Mars.  And the reason we don’t have that urgency is the cost of it.  Nobody is willing to commit like [John F.] Kennedy did.  Honestly, we worked on that Apollo program – and I say we I’m not talking about just NASA – I’m talking about the contractors and everywhere just like we did during World War II to get this country ready for the invasion of Normandy.  We worked all of the time.  I remember when Gerald Bolander was the program manager for the Lunar Module and I was head of his program control area.  I’d say, “Rip, I need to have a meeting with you.  Can we get together?”  And he’d say, “Yes, I’m free at six in the morning, can you get there?”  And we’d go out there at six in the morning and we’d be there till ten o’clock at night.  You can ask my wife.  It was just a terrible working arrangement for the people doing it.  All of the contractors and everywhere. 

 

One person I really remember about Apollo was George Low, who came in and became Apollo’s program manager after the fire that happened in ’67 when we lost the three astronauts down there.  He came in and put such a rigor into the management there. [Joe] Shea had been doing a good job in his work, but it was even a more detailed tightening of the system. 

 

SEIBEL:  Do you think that working on Apollo had a negative effect on you, just by taking up so much of your time?

 

SHANNON:  Well, to some degree, yeah.

 

SEIBEL:  On your family?

 

SHANNON:  Yeah.

 

SEIBEL:  Was that something that people were talking about at the time or was that just an accepted part of the program?

 

SHANNON:  You mean the effort you had to spend?  It was just accepted.  That was it.  You just realized it was part of the game. 

 

SEIBEL:  You just moved on from there?

 

SHANNON:  Yes.  And there was very definitely a relaxation after Apollo 11.  I mean the urgency was no longer there.  The pressure of getting this done, in this time frame.

 

SEIBEL:  Do you have any closing thoughts on Apollo as a whole?

 

SHANNON:  I’m so happy to have worked on it.  I really, really am.  It was just a great accomplishment on my part.  I just enjoyed it all.  I guess you want to go back.  Should I have done something else?  Well, I may have, but I’m glad I didn’t.  I’m glad I did work Apollo.  I’m happy that I did.

 

SEIBEL:  You mentioned earlier that you were working in ship building before entering NASA.  Did that experience lend to your experiences at NASA specifically in any way?

 

SHANNON:  Well, I think just the discipline that we had there in the shipbuilding.  When I went to Newport New Shipbuilding and Dry-dock Company we were just starting to build the first nuclear aircraft carrier.  And so I took some courses at the University of Virginia extension, there on the Virginia peninsula, on nuclear engineering, and got involved with that.  We had launched the aircraft carrier and were getting close to the sea trials for it when this opportunity came up to go to work for NASA.  So I had the background of having worked on nuclear propulsion. 

 

In fact, the last sea trials I went on was on the nuclear submarine, Polaris submarine, the Robert E. Lee, a good old southern name.  During the trials I slept on a cot between the Polaris tubes, you know the missiles, so that was my first close contact with launch vehicles.  But no, I think it helped me a lot in my effort to go to NASA.

 

SEIBEL:  Is there anything you’d like to add overall?

 

SHANNON:  No, not right off.  In the fifteen years since I left NASA, Johnson Space Center, has evolved more, you know, things are all right.

 

SEIBEL:  You’re pleased with it?

 

SHANNON:  Well, some changes I like, some changes I don’t.  It’s nothing I can worry about.  I’m not worried about it.  Most of the people I worked with are now retiring.  The people we had there were all just, as a whole, super.  Everybody I worked with.

 

SEIBEL:  Was it a very close-knit group?

 

SHANNON:  Yes, it was.

 

SEIBEL:  Do you still keep in contact with any of them?

 

SHANNON:  No.  Occasionally, we’ve got an e-mail letter that I get occasionally from one of the men that I worked with.

 

SEIBEL:  I thank you very much for taking time out of your schedule to do this.

 

SHANNON:  You think this is going to help you?

 

SEIBEL:  Oh, yes, definitely.  Definitely and we’re very happy that you’re doing this.