NASA Smith, Emery E. - June 8, 1999
Interview with Emery E. “Ernie” Smith
Interviewer: Bryan N. Mann
Interview Date: June 8, 1999
Location: Smith home, Sunrise Beach, Texas
MANN: Today is June 8, 1:30, 2:00 o’clock in the afternoon. I am interviewing Mr. Emery Ernest Smith, Ernie Smith, in his home. My name is Bryan Mann, conducting this interview as part of NASA Oral History Program through Southwest Texas State University. Mr. Smith are you aware that you will be provided with a copy of this transcript and that NASA will put it on the Internet for historical use and research.
SMITH: Yes.
MANN: Let’s begin. If we could, could you discuss a bit of your background, educational and family history?
SMITH: I guess we will start with family history. I was born and grew up until about the age of 14 in the state of Alabama. My father was a minister and we moved to the state of Tennessee when I was 15, to Memphis Tennessee. I finished high school and went to Christian Brother’s College in Memphis, Tennessee. From there I graduated summa cum laude and had an opportunity to go work for NASA at the Manned Spacecraft Center at that time. So, I came to Texas in June of 1964. In 1968, I married Linda Lee Rutherford. She was from Denison, Texas. We lived in Dickinson, Texas at that time which is just south of the space center [Johnson Space Center]. In 1972 we had twin daughters born, Kendall and Whitney, and we stayed in Dickinson throughout their high school and college careers. Kendall graduated from Texas Tech [University] and Whitney graduated from Austin College. They currently live in Ft. Worth, and Dallas, and we stayed in Dickinson until December of 1995 at which time I retired from Johnson Space Center and we moved to Sunrise Beach, Texas which is where we live today.
MANN: Why did you choose to go to work at NASA?
SMITH: Well basically when I got out of college there were a lot of opportunities for engineers and I wanted to work in research and development, and at that time it was primarily going on in the NASA world. Another factor was, I had worked for almost three years when I got out of high school before I went to college and I worked for a corps of engineers, so I had a background in the government and saw that that was a good place to continue, so I went to Manned Spacecraft Center at that time in Houston to work in research and development.
MANN: If you could, go through a few of your positions and summaries of the duties while you were at JSC [Johnson Space Center].
SMITH: One factor I left out I guess, my degree from Christian Brothers College was a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering, and my background there was primarily looking at automatic controls. I ultimately in 1968 got a Master’s Degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Houston, also with automatic controls as a background. The reason for putting that preface on this is when I went to work for the Johnson Space Center, or Manned Spacecraft Center as it was at the time, I went to work in the Engineering Directorate in the Guidance and Control division, which was at that time responsible for developing the automatic stabilization and control systems for the Apollo vehicles. At the time I went to work, I went to work looking at the automatic controls for the on-orbit powered flight phases of the Apollo vehicles and had an opportunity to participate in the design review and verification of those systems. One of the things that is important out of that particular aspect is at that time the fly-by-wire (computer automated stabilization and control systems) technology was not as well accepted in the flight community as it is today. We had an opportunity to bring online not only fly-by-wire analog systems, but we did the design and development work on some of the first digital computer managed fly-by-wire systems in the Apollo vehicles. I worked in that area and worked on that program until we brought those systems online and flew them, culminating with landing on the moon.
Actually, before we landed on the moon, in this particular group that we worked in, we actually started working on the predecessor of what is now the Shuttle vehicle. If you look in the literature, you will see something called an ILRV, an Integrated Launch and Recovery Vehicle. We actually worked on that before we ever landed on the moon. That was a concept that Dr. Max Faget brought forward, and the Engineering Directorate worked on that and we had some real opportunities with that to develop some new technologies and new capabilities in the guidance and control world.
I guess I worked in the Engineering Directorate for about sixteen years and over those years I went from a junior engineer to senior engineer in that design world, and we went through the Apollo and the Shuttle programs taking both of them through the verification phases. It was very interesting, enlightening, and we developed a lot of new technologies with respect to fly-by-wire systems, and control of vehicles that were not inherently stable.
In 1980, I had an opportunity to move from the engineering world into the operations planning world and I took that opportunity and I worked in Operations Planning for five years until about 1985 at which time I had the opportunity to take the operations planning into the operations world. For the next ten years, from [19]85 - [19]95, I worked in Operations Planning and Operations for the flight dynamics systems. The group that we worked with did all of the flight planning and execution for the dynamic phases of flight for the Shuttle. In 1995, I had an opportunity to retire, and I did so in December of 1995, and since that time I have been in retirement and traveling and enjoying the world.
MANN: So your retirement was a personal decision to just enjoy traveling rather that any other dissatisfaction or any other decision with NASA?
SMITH: Well not entirely, NASA had evolved from the point of being a research and development organization until about 1990, I would say, and most of it brought on by, I would say, a political change at the top. NASA was no longer a research and development organization in the sense that I believed it should be. It was a fine organization. It was doing an excellent job of operations and still is, but what NASA is doing now is building a space station and the technologies to build a space station we had before we ever flew the Shuttle. So it is a job that needs to be done and their doing an excellent job of it, but the primary goal of the space station is not research and development, it is providing a permanent presence in space which has more, I would say, political overtones than it does research and development tones. And I thought that it was best that I moved on and let the people that were interested in doing that type of program, do that type of program and I got out of their way to let that happen.
MANN: Has there ever been any point where you thought about getting back into the engineering sector through some of the contract work that NASA does, to do more of the pure R&D [research and development]?
SMITH: Well, no. I really never considered seriously going to work for the contractors that work for NASA. They do an excellent job of what their contracted to do, but their primary goal is not research and development.
MANN: Still not, Ok.
SMITH: I think research and development is a very personal gratifying type approach to things, and you can do research and development in aerospace, but you can also do it in other areas. You could do research and development associated with developing and building a capability in the oceans of the world. We could learn to mine and harvest the oceans and manage them a lot better, but we haven’t decided to put money into that activity and somewhere along the line the government needs to put research and development money into the world and make it happen -- because the technologies that come out of it benefit us so much in everything else we do. The benefit of the money that has been put into NASA was not going to the moon and not in building a space station, but the technologies that came out of it that helped us in our everyday life and we need to spend more money in research and development.
MANN: What were some of your most gratifying experiences working in the programs that you worked on, some of your most gratifying accomplishments that you had?
SMITH: Well, I think in the Apollo program the most gratifying thing, and I ended up summarizing some of this activity in my Master’s thesis that I did at the University of Houston, is we developed the capability to design digital systems with digital computers. We took the tools that we had for analog system designs and built on them to allow us to do digital designs for automatic systems, and for people that understand that, they will understand what I am talking about there. The group that I worked with made a lot of strides in that, we helped build all the simulators that NASA had at Johnson Space Center. We helped the people that build them develop the techniques for building digital simulators that were good reproductions of what was going on in the real world and they were stable. And that was one of the main contributions I guess that came out of my particular technology in the Apollo program.
In the Shuttle program, it was really interesting to me because I tackled a problem that I knew very little about and that was the control of the Shuttle during the entry phase of flight. I was not an aerodynamicist, but I learned aerodynamics. We modeled the Shuttle and built the aerodynamic models of it and we worked with all of the aerodynamicists and propulsion folks to develop the models that had to be controlled. The Shuttle is a control-configured vehicle; it is not stable by itself because of the flight phases it goes through. So I was personally gratified that what we learned and designed worked, and it had to work the first time or we would not have had a vehicle. But it was really a new approach to fly-by-wire systems and we really put a lot into it ourselves and the other people that developed the capabilities that we used to develop our tools put a lot into it.
MANN: What was the environment like at JSC during your first five years, six years there towards the culmination of the Apollo program?
SMITH: The first five years that I was there were really an excellent environment and I guess I would be in trouble for talking age these days, but we had a team of folks that average age was about twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old, and everybody had a lot of energy and was willing to learn and try and do new things. The first five years that we were there, we just went at it, there wasn’t anything we couldn’t do, and we just tried to do the best we could with what we had. We had some excellent leadership from some of the older people that were at NASA at the time. It was just a lot of high-energy things and it culminated with the landing on the moon, which sent everybody into a major high.
MANN: From [19]64 to [19]70 was a really politically active and controversial time in American history. Was there really any sense of that at NASA and in your group or was it more focused on the jobs that you were doing? Did any of that really seep in? I ask this because…
SMITH: No, I understand the question. I’m trying to think back of whether it did. There was a (cough) lot of understanding of it. We were concentrating on what we were doing but we were aware of it because most of us were eligible for the military, but we were not in the military because we had job deferments. Yes, we were aware of it, and there was a lot of discussion of it. There were a lot of people that didn’t think we ought to be in Vietnam, there were a lot of people that thought that we should. There were those that said it didn’t make any difference whether we should or shouldn’t, we were there so we had to go support it. So I think everybody was aware of it. I don’t think it affected our work with respect to satisfying our goals to go to the moon as maybe it should have, but I don’t think it did.
MANN: What was the town of Houston like? You said you lived in Dickinson?
SMITH: (laugh) I was single when I first got there so, and didn’t get married until 1968, so I would have to say that we watched Houston grow up from a somewhat small town in the sense that it was small in [19]64 to, I was there until 1995, until it grew to an enormous town. In the sixties it was still kind of a small, I’d call it, I wouldn’t call it a cowboy town, but it was more cowboy than a lot of places. (laugh)
MANN: Did you ever have any run-ins with the astronaut corps. Did you go out to some of the local bars and did you ever see any of them while you were single?
SMITH: We used to run into them occasionally, but I had more contact with them on the job than I did off the job.
MANN: What was some of that contact like?
SMITH: Most of the, like in the Apollo program and especially in the Shuttle program, we were designing flight systems, so we had to work with the astronaut corps to not only get in their requirements, but make sure that what we produced was something that they were willing to go fly. So, like I say, my contact with the astronaut corps was one of professional contact and not so much social.
MANN: For people who were not involved during this time or who were not even alive at this time, what are some of the best stories, some of the best anecdotal information that no one has ever heard about that you were privy to as part of the Apollo, the early Shuttle days and even the late Shuttle days?
SMITH: (laugh) Gosh I don’t really know how to answer that. I know there are a lot of stories out there about things that went on. I guess I’m not much of a social fly here in the sense that I didn’t pay too much attention to a lot of that kind of stuff going on. I know there were a lot of stories told about wild parties and there were a lot of stories told about astronauts, but I really never paid that much attention to them. I didn’t party so much at work as I did away from work.
MANN: What about interesting problems that come up on the job that you had to fix on the fly, during flights. Anything that happened, because the only reason I ask this is because I have heard that NASA does do large debriefing meetings afterwards where some of these stories then come out, some of the interesting things that happened during the flights. Was there anything in that respect?
SMITH: I really have not been that much privileged to some of that stuff. Like I say, the first sixteen years there, I was somewhat sheltered from most of that detailed debriefing from a personal standpoint, we did a lot of debriefing from a technical standpoint, and I really didn’t get involved in that. I’m aware of why you would be asking that question, but I really don’t have any firsthand knowledge of any of that kind of stuff.
MANN: From a technical standpoint, what were some of the interesting little things that go wrong during a typical flight, during the Apollo stuff?
SMITH: Well, obviously the worst thing that went wrong during the Apollo stuff, was what happened on Apollo 13. We were scrambling on the ground to figure out how in the world to get them back, so we did a lot of work associated with using what was left available like doing the burns to get back home with the Lunar Module as opposed to the Command Service Module, so we used a lot of the background that we had to help support doing those thing in the Operations world. The operations world carried out that scenario, but the engineering world supported it. I guess I always relate to the different organizations there since, like I say I was in all three of the organizations, is Engineering takes a set of requirements and builds that set of requirements with margin in the design as per the specs [specifications] say. Then the Operations Planning takes that design and plans the missions inside the design. Now you’ve got a vehicle design and a mission design that is inside a design envelope, and the Operations world, what they do is they take that vehicle design and the mission design, and they play it to the boundaries of what capability is there. In other words, Engineering designed the vehicle to operate in a normal envelope with three sigma dispersions. Operations goes and trains to operate that vehicle at the envelope of the three-sigma dispersions. So when something happens, they know where they can move inside a bigger envelope than the design envelope, and basically with Engineering’s support, they have taken the vehicle several times beyond its design boundaries because they knew what the disperse capabilities were and had trained to do that. And that was the kind of case of what happened when we had to use the Lunar Module to get back home. We didn’t study something blowing up the CSM [Command Service Module], but we had studied things to understand what happened when you fired those engines with the CSM attached.
MANN: What branch were you at, were you working under when Challenger occurred, the Challenger accident occurred?
SMITH: I was in the Mission Operations Directorate at that time, and I was on a console in the backroom when it actually occurred.
MANN: Did you have a personal involvement with any of the people that were involved in that accident?
SMITH: Are you talking about the astronauts?
MANN: Yes.
SMITH: Yes, I had worked with most of them over some period of time. We worked with the astronauts to work out the details of the mission as well as training and those aspects of it. So yes, we were familiar with those people.
MANN: How gratifying was it when the Shuttle did finally return to flight?
SMITH: It was really exciting, it was almost as exciting as the first time that it flew because we had been down for several years and not so much from a technical standpoint, we were down from a political standpoint, as far as I was concerned. We should have gone and flown the next mission after Challenger happened, and it would have been flown safely. But at that time NASA management was in somewhat disarray. We didn’t have an administrator, Johnson Space Center didn’t have a center director with any experience and the whole agency was somewhat in disarray, so we didn’t do what should have been done and so we let politics drive us to the point of rebuilding the Shuttle essentially and so it took us several years to get back to a flight status.
MANN: As an engineer, is NASA’s safety record remarkable to you, or is it a testament to the skill of the engineers put in?
SMITH: I think the NASA record is a testament to the skills and of the people not only the engineers but the management. We built the systems to operate within certain envelopes with certain protection for what we call, unknowns, and the design is there and the design is safe, and where we have had problems has been in the assembly phases of putting the hardware together and actually getting it flying. And my experience there is that it is not so much the people doing it, is that it may be the management and the schedules behind getting done that puts it in jeopardy. But the designs are adequate, and we know the design envelopes, so it is a matter of assembly and operations and managing that operations. Most of the problems NASA’s had has been management problems, they were not technical problems.
MANN: This is sort of an unusual question, but if you would have had the chance to become an astronaut, would you have, given the risk involved?
SMITH: I thought about that at one time and decided I didn’t want to tackle it, not from a stand point of the risk involved, but the politics involved. There is obviously a lot of risk involved with a new program, but to me the risk associated for instance with flying on the Shuttle is not any greater than going out and getting in a military aircraft and taking off. I won’t say it is as safe as getting in a commercial airliner because that is a whole different world. But I think it is as safe as getting on a military aircraft, and certainly I think its safer than taking off and landing on an aircraft carrier.
MANN: Are you surprised at how much the people take the Shuttle for granted now? The news coverage does not even cover the lift off and landings; it has become very routine. Does that surprise you?
SMITH: It doesn’t surprise me, it disappoints me. I think the news media has a tendency not to cover anything that is not exciting, from a standpoint of, Did it break? They are looking for the negative reporting as opposed to the positive reporting, and I think that is where we have ended up with news reporting on the space program. Now on the new activity of assembling the space station, I think they will get a lot of press out of that because we have got an international P R [public relations] job going on here. Space station should actually belong to the State Department and not NASA. (laugh) But I think the press will cover it because we will end up with astronauts from multiple nations working together in space, and they will cover that for a while. But it won’t be day-to-day excitement for them so they will quit after a while.
MANN: Has the news media, in your opinion, given the space program more trouble that they are worth over the course of Apollo and throughout with the negative reporting?
SMITH: I don’t think so, like I say, they get hyped up on negative reporting, but the space program really has come through most of the time with a positive input. We have had some negatives, obviously the Challenger was a negative and there was a lot of negative reporting on that, but there was ultimately a lot of good that came out of that. But I don’t have a problem with what the press report, I do have a problem with the fact that they don’t stay involved and keep people informed about what is going on.
MANN: By that I meant, by reporting so much on the negative, and taking the day-to-day successes for granted that all people ever hear are what went wrong and they never hear about the hundreds of other things that go right every day.
SMITH: Well, that is true and they really don’t hear about the benefits. I hear people talking about how much money NASA has wasted; well NASA really hasn’t wasted a dime. All the money that NASA spent was spent right here on Earth to stimulate the economy and all the benefits of the NASA programs and the development of new technologies are benefiting Americans and people in the world every day. So, I think the average person on the street doesn’t realize how well their tax dollars have been spent by NASA and the research and development world.
MANN: Do you think NASA should get a larger budget in that respect to do more R&D that you’d like to see.
SMITH: I would like to see NASA reorganized to where it could do R&D and get some additional funding to go do that, yes, but with NASA’s current administration I don’t think that that will happen.
MANN: What would be your advice? What kind of a new administrator would you like to see? His background?
SMITH: I would like to see somebody who has a background in research and development that has worked in NASA and there were people available that could have done those kinds of things, but NASA right now, like I say, is more of a political, State Department-type organization then it is an research and development. And I am not sure that the only way to do it would not be to form a new agency and start from scratch again.
MANN: What is the one thing you miss the most about working there, now that you have been away from it for four years.
SMITH: I miss working with the people, the young people. The Organization that I was responsible for when I left there, I had over thirty senior engineers that worked for me, and most of those people were people that I had hired and trained and they are still there operating the Shuttle, most of them are, and I miss working with them, being a part of their team and making things happen.
MANN: If you were conducting this interview of yourself, what would be the one question you would like to ask?
SMITH: (laugh) I guess, the one question I would ask would be, "Did you enjoy the thirty years?" And the answer has to be yes.
MANN: Is there anything else you would like to add to this? Anything that we have overlooked?
SMITH: No, like I say, it was a lot of positive and I had a lot of fun for the time I was there and I have some negative feelings relative to the way the current organization is being run, but all in all I think the space program and research and development programs in general have something to offer to American society that most people don’t understand is out there. And that is what NASA did, I will say for the first twenty to twenty-five years that I was there, they offered the American people what an R&D organization should be offering back to the country. To that end they accomplished what their goals were and should have been. My frustration now is I see the agency becoming something other than an research and development organization and I don’t know how you turn it around because of the politics involved and that frustrates me, so I’d just stay out of it. (laugh)
MANN: Well, Mr. Smith, we thank you very much.
SMITH: Thank you.