NASA Stafford, Donald - May 24, 1999
Interview with Donald Stafford
Interviewer: Beth Tews
Date of Interview: May 24, 1999
Location; Stafford home, Johnson City, Texas
TEWS: This is Beth Tews, a graduate student in the SWT [Southwest Texas State University, San Marcos, Texas] Department of History, and I am in the home of Mr. Donald Stafford in Johnson City [Texas] in the dining room on May 24, 1999. This interview is being done as part of the NASA/SWT Oral History Project. The interview will be available for use by researchers, and Mr. Stafford will receive a copy of the transcription from NASA. Do you agree to these procedures?
STAFFORD: Yes, I do.
TEWS: Mr. Stafford, could you tell me a bit about your biographical background and your educational experiences that brought you to NASA?
STAFFORD: Do you want me to start with where I was born or just starting with education?
TEWS: Where you were born is fine.
STAFFORD: OK. I was born in El Paso, Texas. I went through high school there, and I joined the Navy, spent four years in the Navy, and then when I got out, I decided [that] while I was in the Navy that I would go on to college. It was assumed that I would do that, and I had to, [without] disappointing a lot of folks, I had to go, so I did. I worked for about a year after I got out of the service, and then I went to the Texas Tech [Lubbock, Texas]. I graduated from Texas Tech in 1961 with a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering, and, at the time, I decided that I would go on to graduate school. Tech had started a graduate school for [the] mechanical engineering department about a year or so before I graduated, and I got a job as a teaching fellow at Tech and doing masters work, too. What that meant was I got to teach classes. I taught six hours, and I got to take nine hours. After my first year, I was corresponding with a fellow that I had graduated with who went to work for NASA in Huntsville, Alabama, and he arranged for me to have a summer job down there. That’s how I became involved with NASA.
I worked in Huntsville, Alabama in the summer of 1962, welding fixtures and doing work on designing a fuel tank--or propellant tank, I should say--for what was then to be very deep space missions. The Saturn V rocket was the largest rocket that they were planning on building, and that was for the moon shot. They were designing, and it was all on paper, and they were doing a subscale modeling and then building things for a rocket, [and] it was called a Nova rocket. It was much larger than the Saturn rocket, and by saying “much larger,” the total thrust on that Saturn rocket was seven and a half million pounds, and the Nova was going to be bigger than that. So, that’s how I go my start with NASA.
I went back to Lubbock, started my second semester--or second term in graduate school, and as luck would have it, they didn’t offer but three courses in the department, and I had already had two of them. I was taking a math course, and I was able to take a math course. My teaching schedule and the lack of courses available restricted me to just those two courses, and in the math course, after about a month, it was obvious that I’d already had all of it, and I was just marking time, so I dropped that course, and towards the end of that semester, I evaluated things. That set me back about a year, so I decided that it would be easier to go to work and work for a couple years and then go back to school at that time, so I sent in an application to both Huntsville, Alabama, and to Houston [Texas]. At that time, it was the Manned Spacecraft Center had just started about--it was sometime in 1962 that most of those people came from Virginia to start the Manned Spacecraft Center, and I sent my application down, and in January, I guess it was, or December of ‘62 or January of 1963, I received a call from a fellow that was in the Propulsion Department who wanted me to come down for an interview, so I did. I went to Houston. I interviewed with Spacecraft Technology, I believe, was the name of the division. It changed after that, but they were looking for someone to do heat transfer work on rocket engines for the Apollo program, and my major in graduate school was heat transfer, so I fit right in, and it worked out real well, so I started to work in Houston at the Manned Spacecraft Center in February of 1963, and that was before the site was built out at Clear Lake.
They were still working on it, so there were satellite buildings if you will, throughout Houston. The office that I was in was some apartments that were one of the bayous there in Houston on kind of the southeast side of Houston. It was just an apartment complex, a new one that was taken over--or, leased by NASA, and that was our office space. It was pretty primitive, if you will. Our computer facilities were--there were two of them. One of them was in the University of Houston, a satellite building just off the campus there. There was a couple of smaller sites that were just buildings that held computers, just small computers now, “small” --they were large compared to now, but then, they were the smaller ones, and that’s how primitive it was. We had to go to different places to do that type of work.
Just to give you an idea of the difference and how computer technology has changed, and I’ll just throw this in--this is a freebie--I was doing, as I said, heat transfer analysis on rocket engines for the Apollo. There were three engines, three main engines. There was one on the service module, which was the one that once they separated from all of the Saturn rocket components, that was the engine that kicked them on to the moon, and that was the one that brought them back. The descent engine--there were two stages then, past that, it was the descent and the ascent stages of the LM [Lunar Module], and the descent engine was the next largest engine, and it was the one that lowered them to the moon’s surface, and it was one that was what they call “throttleable” as they could adjust the thrust level so they could ease down and not just bump into something. And then, the smallest engine was the ascent engine, and that was the one that took off from the moon’s surface with that and then they joined the LM back up with the command module and then they dumped it after the astronauts transferred to the command module. And then, the service module engine, which was the large one, brought them around the moon and kicked it back in and came back to the earth. I was doing some programming, and I was allowed to use this one computer. We could go over and just sign up and run it ourselves, and it was called an IBM 1620, and that meant its memory was 16K. It was in a room about 15 [feet] by 20 [feet]. It had the main computer, it had a card reader, and it had a keypunch machine, and it had a sorter-I believe it was. And the complexity of it was, you had to--everything was on cards. You had to punch your own IBM cards for the program. You inserted it into the card reader. It read them and converted everything to machine language, give you another deck of cards back, which was how you ran the program, and then you input that and sent it to the computer. And, it was very slow, and that’s how big it was, and that was one of the smaller computers. 16K was one of the smaller ones they had. The larger ones--they had a 32[K] and a 90[K] and two of them together, that was a 90K in a main building. The size of it was such that comparing it now is--that’s one of the things that happened as a result of the space program was computers used all of these small components that were generated by NASA or through NASA influence, if you will, and they were building all the chips, the transistors, all of those things had their, I guess, their birth came from the space--or their use came from the space program because there was nothing else that wanted to use them. They cost too much then. One of the fallouts of the space program is [that] the miniature components allowed them to build things that, like a desktop computer now.
They were building the Manned Spacecraft Center, and I think the only building that was completed in early ‘63 was the computer facilities. They realized they had to have that. It also housed the Mission Control computers also, so that was a building of major necessity so they could have all of that at one place. I guess it was in April of 1964 that our division, that was at that time the Propulsion and Power Division, moved on site at Clear Lake there on the Manned Spacecraft Center.
We were fully into the Apollo program at that time. Gemini had--I’m sorry--Mercury had completed--I think there was one flight after I started to work for NASA, and then the Gemini program took place, and it was the transition between Mercury and Apollo. That was on going. I did very little work with that. It was mostly done by another group because they were trying to keep the work groups separate, if you will, so that there wouldn’t be any confusion there. The only work that I did for the Gemini program was some engine analysis for some of the small engines that they had. They were trying to find out the life of the engines, and these engines were a relatively new type. They were called ablative engines, and that just meant--basically, to tell you, they were plastic engines. They were made out of fiberglass with resins, and they were laid up, and they were called ablative because that’s a sacrificial using of material to help cool the engine so that it’d burn through. All of the Apollo, Gemini, and Mercury program engines on the capsules and on the space vehicle were all non-reusable. As a result, you didn’t have to have a material that could be used over and over again. For Apollo program, the ascent and descent engines stayed on the moon, so it’s kind of tough to use them. The service module engine was the supply portion of the whole Apollo thing. There was the service module and connected to that was the command module. The command module was the only thing that came back to Earth, and it only had some very small engines there were called attitude control adjusted the trajectory of the capsule as it was coming in so that it wouldn’t burn up or--minor things like that. Anyway, what it came down to was they did not have to have a reusable engine and trying to make a reusable engine out of steel and that type of thing, it was a lot of--it was very expensive, and it was heavy. A lot of those ablative materials were very heavy, too, but they had the advantage of the sacrificial cooling as the engine was burning with the gases coming out of the resins within the plastic, and that was a boundary on the inside surface of the engine which kept it cool enough that it didn’t burn through. So, you had to do a thermal analysis on these things to be sure that the backside temperature of the engines didn’t get so hot that it would cook something else, so that was the job, I guess you would say, that I was doing. I was doing thermal analysis on the engine, doing design work of that type, trying to determine thicknesses that were necessary, and that was one of those areas that you want it thick enough so that it won’t burn through, but you don’t want it so thick that it’s a weight penalty, so one of the first things you find out with space travel is weight is critical. If you have too much weight, you don’t put anything up. Your payload is very small, so they minimized weight everywhere they could, and that was one of the advantages of computer-type stuff then. It wasn’t too widespread in industry, was the being able to analyze things with computers because it was so much faster. You could do it by hand, but it would take you months to find out the results, so the computer could knock it out overnight, and you could do several studies in the space of a week that would allow you to have--well, it would be a parametric study, seeing what you could do here, there, and yonder to minimize the weight of the engine but maximize the effectiveness of it, so that was a very interesting thing. I really did enjoy that because it was new, and it was obviously something that was going to happen that was very interesting. I did the thermal analysis on all three of the Apollo engines at various times, depending on what phase of the program they were in, just to find out if they--if a change came up, testing showed a flaw, they had to do some redesigns.
That was one of the other things that was prevalent in the NASA history at that time was that they did a lot of testing. They didn’t depend completely on analysis, and their thought was--and I know that this was mentioned too many times--is that you have to do a lot of testing to be sure that whatever you’re building works. Safety was a primary concern. They didn’t want to lose anybody. Th[at’s] one of the things you learn in a hurry is if you’re on a trip to the moon and you have a flat tire, there’s not a service truck available, so you want to be sure that everything works well, and during the testing, there was a tremendous amount of testing that took place. We found that changes had to be made, and that’s a normal happening there.
I think the first Apollo shot was the earth orbit one that was Wally Schirra--I think was the commander of that--anyway, that was the first Apollo shot, and they did do an earth orbit. Let’s see, that was in the late ‘60s, so from the time that I started in ‘63, before there was really a manned launch in Apollo, there was somewhere in the neighborhood of five years before there was a manned launch, so it took a bit of time.
One of the things that helped us was the competition with the Russians. They were also trying for a moon shot. [President] John Kennedy had come up with this moon program while he was still alive, and the Russians jumped on their own bandwagon, and they would do something, and that would cause--that would be some incentive for NASA to do more. The biggest help that it was is that it kept funding at a high enough level for the program could continue without sliding behind. And we had a saying that when we were in a tight and something wasn’t working right, we would start talking about maybe we can get the Russians to put a shot off so we can get some more money. But the competition between the two countries is one of the things that provided the incentive for the Apollo, and it’s not too well-known that that was the--in fact, I don’t think NASA really acknowledged that, and the press might have, but the country, as a whole, didn’t really acknowledge it, but there was true competition. It was fortunate and unfortunate. It was fortunate in that the Apollo program would continue at a good pace. It was unfortunate in that they were doing some things--the Russians, that is--that we could’ve used, and we had some things that they could’ve used, and if the atmosphere had been such that they could cooperate, the program would’ve been shortened completely.
The first Apollo shot, then, the first landed moon lunar landing, that was Apollo 11, and at that point, it seemed like the culmination of everything we’d done. Everything worked fine, by the way. There were no failures. The only thing that I can recall on the propulsion systems that seemed to be cause for concern was the descent engine, in order to save weight, had what they called a supercritical helium system on there to pressurize the propellant tanks for the engine. Supercritical helium is -- technically it’s a liquid but it’s a gas at about minus 455 or [4]57 degrees Fahrenheit -- extremely cold. Helium is a strange fluid in that when it doesn’t heat up like a lot of fluids do, and it doesn’t do the same things, but to save space and weight, they had to have something like that, just a pressure tank with gaseous helium in it would’ve been as big as the descent stage itself almost, so you had a situation where you had a supercooled fluid that was heating up and then flowing and then pressurizing, and we had enough instrumentation to know what the temperatures and the pressures were, but then we didn’t have voice transmission all the time, and the astronauts couldn’t follow everything, too. I mean, they were somewhat busy trying to land that sucker--that’s all there was to it. It just wasn’t something you just went out and did as a Sunday drive, so they couldn’t monitor everything, and some of the temperatures were getting higher than what was desired on the supercritical helium, and if it got too high, it would just be--what you would see now is just heating any type of gas--heating air in a container. The longer you heat it, the higher the pressure, and suddenly something goes. It reaches a limit of the material, and we were afraid that might be happening there, but then, it was probably not more than about fifteen or twenty minutes, but it seemed several hours. We were told that all systems were normal, everything looked great, and it was a culmination of many things. It seemed that that was a real high spot because after that, I mean, OK, we proved it. It worked, everything worked, and things went very smoothly until Apollo 13.
It happened to be that the explosion that occurred on Apollo 13--that was some of the systems that our division had. It was part of the fluids that was involved there--that was one of the oxygen tanks, so that created a lot of work for our division. There was a lot of testing that had to be done. I wasn’t involved with any of that, but I was familiar with it, and that set the program back a little while because they had to find out what the problems were.
And then, the next several [missions]--I think they went to Apollo 17--I believe that was the last one--there were no other flaws. There were no shortcomings. All the missions performed extremely well. That was about the time that towards the end of the Apollo program, the press coverage, the people at the cape [Kennedy Space Center, Florida] watching the launches just kind of dropped off. The press didn’t even--they might cover the launch--they would definitely record it and show it at the six o’clock news, but the NASA popularity was dropping off pretty rapidly there.
During that time period, I was pretty much in a transition stage of what were we going to do next, and there was not a follow-on program for Apollo that had been designed, mainly because the administrators really felt like that the program was so great, the popularity was so high that they [hoped that] it would just continue forever. And then, suddenly, the program was shut off, and there were, I don’t recall exactly, but there were less than five missions left to do, and so there was some spare hardware left over that they didn’t have anything to do with. As I said, we were in a transition stage. We had to do something, and the shuttle was then proposed. That was almost a pie in the sky type situation, that is, having a reusable spacecraft, and it would be ideal if everything worked out like it did on paper, but they started that particular program because that was a logical follow-on. However, some folks, particularly administrators in Washington who didn’t have a scientific background--they were politicians, and we needed that--NASA needed that in the early stages because they needed somebody that could work the politicians. Once it reached a mature state, and they needed somebody that knew what one plus one was and they knew what science was, we didn’t have that, so we didn’t have anybody with a scientific background that could foresee and help out with what we were up against. One of the things that you find with space programs is development time is rather long. You can’t do it like it’s a car. You can’t design it today and start building on it tomorrow, that type thing. It takes quite a while because with a manned spacecraft, there’s a tremendous amount of testing that goes on to make sure that it’s “man-rated,” the expression was. So, there was not really any significant knowledge of how long it was going to take to develop the shuttle. The politicians, knowing that money was going to be scarce if it was going to take ten or fifteen years to develop it, had a tendency to sugarcoat the time involved, so that it looked like we could do it a lot quicker. Well, nothing ever worked out that well. There was never a fudge factor, so to speak, that allowed you to have a pad as far as designing something like that and let’s just say it was around 1970 that we really got into the space shuttle design work.
The first concept was to have a reusable booster and a reusable shuttle, as we have now. These things were going to be like airplanes, and they were going to have jet engines so that they could reenter the atmosphere and fly to a landing strip. I was involved with the studies on the propulsion systems, doing thermal analysis, but we had different types of propulsion systems. The Apollo used what we called “earth-storable” propellants, that is, they weren’t cryogenic or very cold fluids. They were just--when they say “earth-storable,” that meant they just had to be pressurized, and they didn’t have to be cold or anything like that, and these were propellants that were satisfactory. They weren’t the most efficient. They didn’t give you the highest performance because that was the nature of them. I don’t know, do you want the names of these propellants? That would be of interest only to somebody that was looking at engines.
For the shuttle, they knew that they had to have higher energy propellants, so liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen were the propellants of choice. There were very few engines that were available for use at the time that used those propellants, so it meant, particularly for the sizes that were needed for the shuttle, so that’s what I was involved with-looking at propulsion systems, the size of the engine, what was available, could we use things that were already developed, and that was one of the goals of the shuttle program was to use, as they said, “off the shelf” hardware. That’s a grand goal. It’s very difficult to do because a lot of hardware that was off the shelf was built for trucks or airplanes or cars, and they won’t perform in space! So, it had to be modified, that type of thing. There were very few engines available that used those propellants, and we had to look at those different types and then try to come up with a thrust level for engines that were needed on the shuttle, so one of the first things that died was the reusable booster because it became very obvious that, after a couple years of studies, that that was not going to fly. The reason was is with the engine availability, the need for a jet engine on the aircraft--or the spacecraft--to allow it to fly safely to an air strip, there were no jet engines that could handle that type of thing, and the cost for development was going to be completely out of hand. It was going to kill the program, so with several studies that went on, they came up with the current manner of launching the shuttle. There is--the solid boosters and the main engines for the lift-off power, and the only thing that was reusable on that is the solid booster casings or housings, so they’re recovered and reused. The external propellant tank for the shuttle is not reused, but that was a compromise, if you will, and that allowed for the shuttle then, the current shuttle, to be developed and have a spacecraft that was returnable, and several things went on that changed also. The fly-around capability had to be done away with, and it was mainly because the development of a jet engine, again, that could handle space, with all the flukes that happen when something’s exposed to space--when the fluid’s exposed to space, to the low gravity, you have a tendency to migrate to places they don’t belong, so the jet engines--the development of that, again, was going to be so expensive that we couldn’t do it. So, they had to face the facts that the landing would be what they called a “dead stick” landing. It was unpowered. They had one pass at the runway, and that was it. If they missed it, well, they at least looked good when they went down. But, that was how the development went, and the main engines on the shuttle were rather large engines, over about four hundred thousand pounds of thrust for each of them, and there were three of them, and they were also called “throttleable” engines because they had to adjust the thrust as they went up. And then, there were smaller engines, about an eight thousand-pound thrust engine that was called the [unintelligible]. I forgot exactly what it was called--that was the OMS, the orbital maneuvering system engine, and that was about an eight thousand-pound thrust engine. That’s what moved the shuttle mostly in space, that’s what inserted it into space, in fact. And then, they had some smaller engines that were the attitude control engines, and they were in the neighborhood of – I can’t remember the thrust level of those but it was like two hundred fifty, I think, two hundred fifty pounds of thrust, and there were thirty-some of these on the shuttle, and they moved it up and down and sideways and things like that. I tell you that because at about that time, when they were starting to develop the shuttle and they were going into main propulsion testing in Alabama and Mississippi because the Huntsville [Alabama] site was the principle contractor. They had oversight on the main engines for the shuttle.
I moved to a test area at Johnson Space Center. By then, it was Johnson Space Center. It had been the Manned Spacecraft Center until somewhere in the very early ‘70s--it might have been 1970--it was after the shuttle program was underway, and we were doing studies on it. They changed it to the Johnson Spacecraft Center. At that point, I moved to a test area within the same division, within the Propulsion and Power Division. I went to what was called the Thermochemical Test Branch. That particular branch did a lot of testing on the small engines for the shuttle, on the fluid systems, the hydraulic systems-various things like that. And, until I retired, I stayed at the test area. The first thirteen years I was in a Primary Propulsion Branch and doing thermal analysis on propulsion systems. Then, I became a test manager for the next approximately thirteen years, which, I enjoyed that more than anything I did because I was testing hardware, and I was able to see it improve and see how it performed and knew what was going to happen. I’ll just tell you some of the things we tested, and then I won’t go into any more detail on that.
The smaller engines that I told you about that were called reaction control engines we tested. We did firings either both at altitude, that is, we simulated an altitude so that they would fire properly, and we just fired them normally at sea level, as we called it, trying to find out the performance of those things. One of the things that we did find out was how they would perform, how well they held up under circumstances. It was a very reliable little engine. There was also a propulsion-type unit. It was called the auxiliary power unit, and you probably heard about those as something being shut down after it got into space. That was a hydraulic pump, if you will. It powered a hydraulic pump, and it was what they called a myo-propellant power unit, that is, it used only fuel, which was called hydrazine, which is somewhat unstable, and they passed it through a catalyst which caused it to decompose. It didn’t explode or burn or anything, but it decomposed with such vigor that it generated high pressures and high temperatures, and it turned a little turban in this auxiliary power unit, which turned the hydraulic pump, which powered the various things on the shuttle, that is, it moved the engines, and it lowered the landing gears, it operated the air foil systems on there. I did quite a bit of testing on that, and one of the things that happened on that is I blew one up, but it was a planned test, so I have to tell you that. They were very concerned about the APU [auxiliary power unit] having to restart suddenly after it had been shut down in space, and in space, hot things don’t cool off very quickly, even though it is cold, because you lose the conduction heat transfer, and just about everything is by radiation, which is one of the poorest forms of heat transfer like that because there’s just not a lot of volume involved. And, they were concerned that it was going to be so hot, it would cause the propellant to vaporize before it got to the catalyst bed, which would cause a pressure surge, or a “spike,” as they called it, and blow the little sucker up. So, I had to perform a test--the whole series of testing, and the last test was--and it turned out to be the last test--was to do what they called a “hot restart,” and I did it, and it blew it up. And, from that, they determined they needed to have some cooling so that that particular test showed that there needed to be a water cooling system on the APU, and they did design one and put it on there, and we tested that, and it performed quite well, and they never had an APU blow up in space because of that compression ignition that took place there.
I did testing on hydraulic systems. It was principally shuttle-type testing. When the Challenger exploded, it shut down all testing to the extent that we weren’t really doing anything until they could find out what happened with the Challenger, and as they started finding out various things that appeared to be the problem, we did some testing in Houston with simulated components, that is, they were certain that it was one of the rubber o-ring seals on the solid booster that failed, and we did some testing with some systems that were made up that had the O-rings on them, and we chilled them and then pressurized them and did things like that to see, and we also confirmed that that did happen like that, and I think the Huntsville center also did a lot of testing, too. So, testing kind of shut down. After they did determine the problem with the Challenger, we did start testing again on various things and proving, and when the flights started again, things did go back to normal, although, from the standpoint of testing, one of the fun things that I did was involved with a propellant transfer system that they wanted to do an experiment in space to transfer the hydrogen propellant from one tank to another, trying to determine if they could refuel satellites and then keep them up there after--so they wouldn’t just losing those expensive things once they ran out of propellant, and we did design--at JSC--a system that was called the over-refueling system, and it used shuttle components and other things like that. I managed the test in Houston to --going through the initial testing, and then when it was installed on the shuttle, when they took it down in the payload bay, I had to go down for that, and I had to write the test procedures to load it and do all that sort of stuff, so that was the only time I was ever involved with a shuttle mission, so to speak, but it did work, and it worked fine. They haven’t refueled any satellites because nobody was really happy with it, I guess. It was too expensive, I think they thought, because most satellites fly much higher than the shuttle goes, and it wasn’t really convenient--it wasn’t efficient to refuel some of them. They find that out with the Hubbell telescope when they had to reservice it. They had to go way out of their normal orbit, which means they can’t do as much because they use all their propellant going up and then coming back. I think that one of the things they were so concerned after Challenger about any other incidents happening that when there was a space shuttle flight going on, we had to shut down testing because if something happened, that was again administration and some politicians not realizing that tests are not meant to be an actual operational situation. You’re always going out of limits, and if you broke something, they would seriously think that was going to compromise a shuttle flight, so we did have to stop testing while a shuttle flight was on, if we had a powered test going.
Towards the end of my NASA career, I got involved with the space station to some degree. They were going to use small attitude control and reboost engines on the space station that were hydrogen and oxygen propellants involved, and these were very small engines, like fifty pounds of thrust, and there were some available that we could test, and I designed and had built [and] supervised the building of a small propulsion system at the test area where we could put two hydrogen-oxygen engines in the system and test them. One of the problems with the space station was going to be supplies. You didn’t want to just use the shuttle up, taking up propellant and food and things like that--you wanted other things. These engines, as they were using hydrogen and oxygen could use--that’s the components of water, so it was determined that if we had something that could break the water down and make hydrogen and oxygen at high pressure, then we could just make our propellant on-board there. We’d just bring up some water every once in awhile, and it turned out that there was an electrolysis unit that makes electricity--that’s what it’s for, and they have those on the shuttle in itself. They have three of them, and they power the shuttle. The by-product is water. You can do a little bit to the water, purify it a little bit, and it’s drinkable. You can do anything you want with it almost, but for the space station, they had to have high pressure, and this meant like three thousand pounds of pressure. There was available a--we called it a “boat anchor.” It was an extremely large electrolysis unit that was used by the Navy to make oxygen for submarines, and it went through the same process of a normal power cell, and they just dumped the hydrogen overboard, and they saved the oxygen. Well, we were able to get one on loan and set it up for that engine test that I had so that another person was watching that one and running that test, too, and we ran the two together to see if that particular concept was feasible. And, it did work, it worked quite well. We made our own propellants, and I did get to run that engine, and then I retired.
At that point, I went to work for McDonnell-Douglas. Everything just kind of fell into place right there. I went to work in the Propulsion and Fluids Group with McDonnell-Douglas in Houston, and they had a space station contract to help the space station go along, and this again was a political thing. NASA had learned by that time that they did have to have follow-on programs, and they had started the [concept of the] space station during the shuttle program, and they were going to have that as a follow-on, but they had several designs that they were working on, and it didn’t seem that any one of them was better than another one. They did go and let contracts to build the space station. But, what they did, and this was the political move, and it was never publicized, but it was well understood by all of us folks that worked for NASA and for the contractors--they had what they called work packages, and they had, I think it was four work packages. They just broke the space station up into four segments and let those contracts out around the country. McDonnell-Douglas had the contract that was doing the propulsion system and a large amount of the structural work. Some of the habitation modules, Huntsville was responsible for that--and Johnson Space Center was responsible for that, and that was called Work Package One--Work Package Two, I’m sorry, and then Work Package One, I believe, was at Huntsville, and Boeing was the prime contractor there, and they were building some more of the laboratory and habitation modules. They had--I can’t remember all the things they had, but they had that. Then, out on the West Coast, Rocketdine was building the solar arrays. They never really built solar array before, but they had the expertise through some method, and then--I think it was the Jet Propulsion Lab in California monitored that, and then the Goddard Space Center in Maryland monitored another work package, which was principally the experiment-type stuff. So, now you’ve got the work packages spread out from coast to coast, and there were so many people and so many states involved that it was going to be politically unpopular to kill that program, so that’s what caused it to fly, and there was a lot of optimism about the space station and very little practicality at the very beginning, and that was just a fact of life, and it did turn out that after I had been with the McDonnell-Douglas for approximately five years that the space station was cut back seriously because of so many cost overruns and things that had not been counted on. It was just--let’s just keep the program going, and we’ll get more money, and the popularity of it became obvious that it was not going to fly because there were other things that had to be done, so it was cut back seriously. And, as a result of that, in the Propulsion and Fluids Group in Houston, which was only four of us, was determined not to be necessary anymore, so that part of the space station was shut down, and we were terminated.
At that point, I wound up being an area manager for them, a lot of scientific controls which made space-type--space application valves and components and things like that, but then I went back to work for McDonnell-Douglas about a year later because at that time, it was in a new field, but it was still something else--it was called contamination, and one of the problems with space travel is that you have to be extremely careful with materials that you use because they all have contaminants in them that are bad for space. The external contamination was very obvious and that was going to be brought on by the space shuttle itself when it brought things to the station and then by some of the gases and the fluids that were discharged from the space station, and my job there was working with those to find out what these contaminants--these fluids--whatever they might be--what they would do to the external surfaces of the space station. The shuttle dumps water--that’s just part of their normal mission. They have an excess both [of] the fuel cell water and some of the lavatory, if you will and stuff--they dump some of those things. Well, water in space is instantaneously freezes because of the low pressure, and it sticks to surfaces, and there were a lot of what they call viewing surfaces on the space station-telescopes, windows, things like that that they did a lot of viewing of things, and if you get water and things like that on it, it destroys your view. So, one of the things we had to find out was how long would water last once it froze--once it was discharged by the space shuttle, and it deposited on the space station--how long would it last? Would it continue to out-gas and things like that, and some of the materials inside the space station, you had to be sure that they were designed and built of materials that would not out-gas in a lower pressure because--it’s like water. Its normal boiling temperature at sea level is two hundred twelve degrees. If you drop the pressure down to, let’s say--that’s at fourteen point seven pounds of pressure--if you drop that pressure down to, let’s say, five pounds of pressure, then it’ll probably boil--and I’m having to guess because I can’t remember--it’ll boil at something like a hundred degrees. And then, if you drop it on down, it’ll boil at room temperature, and it boils so rapidly, it freezes, and in fact, I did run a test like that while I was testing with the new RCS engines. They had problems with some engines not running. They determined that they got rain in them while they were at the cape on the pad, and it blocked a pressure port which told the computers that the engine wasn’t firing because they didn’t get a pressure reading, so they shut it down, and what it was, was water would collect on the injector of the engine. As they lifted off, the pressure dropped--the external pressure caused the water to boil, and it boiled so rapidly, it freezes in about a minute and a half. So, that’s what water does in space, and other things like some of the plastics--I’ll just use the generic term “plastics”--if the pressure is dropped on them, they start out-gassing and then release all different kinds of things, and it deposits other places there, and some of those gases can be toxic, so that was the job that I was doing with McDonnell-Douglas the second time was involved with contamination and the materials involved with that. The reason I say that is was new but it was the same, I had to work with a tremendous number of fluids when I was testing with different types of propellants and hydraulic fluids and other type fluids, and I was familiar with their characteristics, so I did fit in.
I left McDonnell-Douglas in January of 1996 because we sold our house, I got to retire completely. Now, do you want any of my post-work type things, or do you have some specific questions?
TEWS: Actually, I was wondering, what was a typical day like when you were working at NASA, if you could describe a typical day?
STAFFORD: I can--I’ll describe two, when I was doing analysis work and then when I was doing testing because they’re two different things.
Doing analysis work was doing the heat transfer type things. You would be working on a particular engine; you would set up a computer program to do the analysis that you were looking at. It was geared to a certain mission profile, so you set everything up, and that meant that you had to do your own key punching, getting the program ready and then submitting it for a run, and it usually took most of the day to get everything together on that because you had to make changes in the program or do some hand calculations, various things like that, and it would take a while to get that done, and then you would submit the program for an overnight run. And, it was usually run overnight, and you got your data back the next day, and then you reviewed the data, and--did it perform well? And you’d go all through that to see how well it did. If it performed well, you knew that you were pretty close to a good data point, and we’d wind up having to plot different things to show how--let’s say, the thickness of an engine-the wall thickness-you could plot that to show how well it lasted for various thicknesses, so that was just another data point, and you reviewed that data that day, and then adjusted it and made your second next run, and so a typical day lasted about three days in the sense that you were looking at things and then working your way through it. It didn’t happen real quick because you still had to wait on other people. You couldn’t run your own program because nobody had their own computer at that time. That was a typical analysis day.
With testing, just for an example, the setting up for a test was a great deal more involved because we knew what piece of hardware we were going to test. There was a lot of preliminary rain dancing that went on, that is, we had to have a test plan, and that told what we were going to do, it told what we were going to test, what we were going to do, and the results we expected, and then you had to have a test procedure, which told how to run the test, and those had to be put together before the test could be run. Then, the system to do the testing had to be built up, and the technicians put all that together. For an engine test, for a rocket engine test, one of the classical things that we talked about is it took us three months to build up the system and thirty seconds to run the test, so it was over quickly, but, usually, we would have the system all set up, we’d get ready to run in the morning, and we were dependent upon the weather because the weather had to be such that we had a sufficient wind, and it had to be out of a particular direction so it wouldn’t blow any of the combustion products over an inhabited area. That was just safety there. So, that was one of the things that we had to face. We could usually get to start in the morning if we were simulating a vacuum or space conditions. They started a boiler that pumped a big chamber down, and that was started early, by six o’clock. Usually by ten o’clock, it was ready to go ahead and, as they’d say, put the chamber on-line so that we could run the tests. If it was an APU, we usually did a mission profile, and it had two significant burns for that. There was the ascent profile, when the shuttle was lifting off, and that lasted somewhere in the neighborhood of about twenty minutes, I believe, and then the shuttle was in space all that time, and the APUs were shut down, and when they reentered, they started, and that burn was about an hour and a half, so we would simulate both of those burns, and we’d have to wait for conditions in-between, so there would be a high level of activity during the actual tests. While the APU was running, we were watching temperatures, being sure that the hydraulic loads were fine, and it was pretty hectic. We had several people watching things. Then, it would shut down, and we’d just be sitting, waiting for things to cool off, and then it was a wait time. If we were running a full mission profile in one day, then we wouldn’t get started until sometime that afternoon again for the second one, and then we would run on into the evening to take care of that, so that was a typical day then. For testing, it was usually longer days and a lot more exciting, and, occasionally, you would have an incident that would cause you to have to shut everything down and try to find out the problem there, so it was more exciting and a lot more fun. That was a typical day with NASA there.
TEWS: Did you live in Clear Lake?
STAFFORD: I lived in Alvin most of the time. Clear Lake really didn’t have a great deal when I moved down there. Besides, I wasn’t married, so I didn’t need a house. But, that was on the bay, and I had learned that I didn’t want to have anything on the bay, and water problems were just--that was very low ground in there, and there was a propensity for flooding, if you will, so I lived about twenty-four miles away, I think. I lived out in the country. That’s when we first got horses, and it took about an hour to drive both ways. Well, I take that back-it was about forty-five minutes in the morning with heavy traffic and then about thirty minutes in the evening, but I lived out in the country, I guess.
TEWS: And did you have any other NASA employees that lived close to you?
STAFFORD: Yes, I did. I had one that was just a hop, skip, and a jump away. I guess he was three or four hundred yards away. We did carpool some, and we both worked in the test area for a period of time there.
TEWS: Did you feel like, living outside of Clear Lake, that you were missing some sort of community togetherness?
STAFFORD: No. This is one of those times of honesty that I very seldom try to say. I gave them the best forty hours out of the week, and outside of that, I did not do anything regarding my job, I really didn’t. It didn’t bother me not to be around space-oriented people because all they wanted to talk about was space, and I left my job in the building when I left. If I had to work a long day, I worked a long day, but I didn’t do it at home.
TEWS: And you mentioned that the reason that you left NASA [was] due to your retirement?
STAFFORD: I did retire, yes. It was kind of a personal thing, too. I didn’t want to work for the fellow that was going to be a section head in the section that I was in. I was going to transfer within NASA, but I also knew that a fellow--I had worked with a fellow that was with McDonnell-Douglas, and he had taken an early retirement, and he was out for the testing that I was doing on those hydrogen-oxygen engines for the space station, so I asked him if they had any openings, and they did.
TEWS: What job gave you the greatest sense of accomplishment while working at NASA?
STAFFORD: I guess it would have to be when I was testing because I did see some end results. Just for an example, when I was doing thermal analysis, that was something that took a while to do that-I might work a month or two months on one particular engine, and I’d get a lot of plots put together, and I’d submit those, and I might not ever hear anything back from them. I might not know if the work was ever used or not. I know it was, but I never knew anything about it, so I knew I was doing something worthwhile, but I never knew that it ever amounted to anything. When I was testing, I managed the tests, I started the tests, and I completed the tests, and I saw the results as it was happening there, and for example, what I told you about the APU and the one that I blew up, I saw the end result of that, and I know that as a result of that test, the water system was put on it, and it was a safe system after that, so I know something happened, and I knew I had a part in that. And, a lot of the testing that I did gave me great satisfaction because of seeing that something actually did happen. I guess if I had anything to recommend to NASA would be that to let folks know that what they’ve done has really amounted to something, not just a general statement: “You guys have done a good job. We’re real proud of you!” [Laughter] (Occasionally, I revert to slang, my accent, OK?)
TEWS: One other one I wanted to ask you. What do you think about the media assessments of NASA projects, such as the movie, Apollo 13, and other such books? Have you read them or seen them or anything like that?
STAFFORD: I did see Apollo 13. It was quite accurate. It was very good. They tried to follow the actual happenings very closely, and the sweating that took place in Mission Control during that particular mission, I don’t know that you could ever really have that as what really happened, but they did a really good job of showing how many people were involved and how they came to a solution to the different problems that came up. Let’s see, I can’t think of another space program--space movie or something but that was a very good one. I have seen some of the Tom Hanks things that have been on TV [the HBO miniseries: From the Earth to the Moon], those are pretty accurate. They depict a pretty good picture of those things. The Right Stuff was more appealing to people that--it had a lot of actual happenings, and it had a lot of gingerbread, but it didn’t give a really good picture of it. I guess I should qualify that one, the movie Apollo 13. The actual flight happenings were quite good. I have no idea what their personal lives were like, so I don’t know if that was a good representation of them, but the actual flight type stuff was really quite good.
TEWS: I have another question. Was there a lot of grouping as far as the engineers in this department against the engineers in this particular department--was there a certain type of camaraderie that existed?
STAFFORD: Yes, there were two things. There was some camaraderie, as you said, and there was some competition. We did work together quite well at the different centers. One of the things that I saw, and this was particularly emphasized during my space station days is there was a great deal of competition between the different NASA centers, which was not good because for example, the Johnson Space Center and the Marshall Space Center in Alabama didn’t work together well a lot of the time because each wanted to do certain things, and they didn’t want the other one to know about it, so there was some competition that hindered, and once they did away with the work package concept, now then, there was a relatively--I say “relatively” because it will never end--uniform working atmosphere without that competition that “we’re better than you, and we need the money because you don’t.” But, as far as within NASA itself, there was some competition, yes, within the different centers, and the small engine group which was called the reaction--let’s see--the reaction control unit--we had competition with them because we said they had just little engines that didn’t amount to anything, and ours were the big ones--that’s where the emphasis should be, but we did work together also, so it was a friendly competition, and we did help each other.
The only time that I saw competition at the Johnson Space Center that was not truly helpful was when the flight operations people became a little arrogant in their position, and they were rather aloof, and that happened regularly. It did happen regularly and not with a large number of people, but it was there.
TEWS: And, I guess my final question--if you would’ve been doing this interview, what question would you wish that I would’ve asked, and what would be your answer to that?
STAFFORD: What question would I ask you? [Laughter] What’s a pretty thing like you doing in a job like this? [Laughter] I guess I would have to say that--ask you this, and I ask you this because I’ll qualify it. I did not start out thinking I was going to work in the space business. It just happened that way, but there wasn’t any space program to think about when I was in college. It just really wasn’t much. I mean, the Gemini program--or the Mercury program was still very small, and it wasn’t too well publicized, only the flights, so the question I would ask is, “Why would want to work in the space program?” And, the way I would answer that now is because--and I did see this--there are things developed that are so far ahead of the normal working world, that you have access to them and that you see how [they] work and you do wonder why private manufacturers don’t build some of these things or use some of these things, but that’s what I would answer now. It really does give you an insight to what the future might hold for you as far as just things.
TEWS: Great. Well, I appreciate your cooperation.
STAFFORD: I’ll take several copies of that.
TEWS: OK. You were just talking about the attitude of the people living in Houston toward NASA, if you could recount that again.
STAFFORD: That was rather remarkable because when I started with NASA, they didn’t have a site, that is, the permanent site, the Johnson Space Center area now, and so there were--as I said earlier--seven or eight or so satellites throughout parts of Houston. We had to have vehicle stickers on our vehicles to show that we worked for NASA, and that allowed us to get on site and park at the various places so that there would be restricted, but I know in traveling, people would see the sticker on the car, particularly at service stations, and they would ask about that, and they were really interested in it. People in Houston really accepted the NASA people. They just thought it was great to have something like that there, and they would stop you when they’d see you in your car, and if you stopped some place and they saw the sticker, they want to know what you did. They’d always ask, “Do you know so-and-so?” but they really did have a good attitude, and as time progressed, they just got used to it, and they didn’t do that anymore. There was so much NASA around that they just thought, “OK,” but the initial attitude towards NASA was really great. Some of the funnier things--after the site was established and tourists were allowed to come out, and they’d wander around the site out there, and they would stop the employees because they had a badge on --they knew that they worked there, and they want to know where the Apollo launches were taking place because they were interested, but they didn’t know hardly anything, and it seemed like a real contradiction because everything that was always broadcast was from the cape, and they knew that it was down there on the water, but they really thought that a lot of those launches took place right there in Houston.
TEWS: Well, thank you very much again.
STAFFORD: You’re welcome.