NASA Townsend, Neil - May 27, 1999

Interview with Neil Townsend

 

Interviewer: Kristina C. Koenig

Date of Interview: May 27, 1999

Location: Townsend home, Wimberley, Texas

 

 

KOENIG:  My name is Kasey Koenig.  I am a student at Southwest Texas and we are here today in Mr. Townsend’s home in Wimberley in his living room.  I need to reiterate that this interview is being conducted as part of the SWT/NASA Oral History Project Cooperative agreement.  These transcripts and tapes will be the property of NASA, available for research purposes.  He’s [Bill Larsen] going to archive them.  You will receive a copy of the transcript from NASA.  I just want to make sure you understand all of that.

 

TOWNSEND:  All right.

 

KOENIG:  OK, I want to start out basically with some brief biographical background kind of information.  Kind of like we were discussing. [Prior to interview] I’d like to know first of all just a brief history of your education and then I think I want to roll over and to see what brought you to NASA from there.

 

TOWNSEND:  Well I graduated from the University of Oklahoma in 1959 with a degree in mechanical engineering.  I first went to work for the Air Force as an engineer.  I worked for the Air Force for 5 years, working on the SAC [Strategic Air Command] Bombers and re-fuelers, tankers they were called in those days.  Then I came to work at NASA in April of 1964. In the Apollo program at that time.

 

KOENIG:  As a mechanical engineer?

 

TOWNSEND:  Mechanical Engineer.  I was called the Assistant SPS [Service Propulsion System] Subsystem Manager and SPS stood for Service Propulsion System.

 

KOENIG:  [Clock chiming] Since you came to work on the Apollo program, then you didn’t work specifically on Mercury and Gemini?

 

TOWNSEND:  Right.

 

KOENIG:  O.k.  Can you tell us more about your, specifically about your position, your responsibilities?

 

TOWNSEND:  Well each of the sub-systems of the Apollo program, and what we had in Houston was the, go up the stack of the launch vehicle.  Start with the lunar excursion module which was which was used to, for the men to land on the moon and then part of it stayed there and part of it brought back from the moon to rendezvous with the command and service module, which were in orbit around the moon.  Each of the systems of that stack up were divided up amongst several sub-system managers, and I was one of those.  We were responsible for managing the contractors’ efforts for that sub-system.

 

KOENIG:  In your experience then, with that, can you maybe, chronologically kind of go through what y’all went through?  Goals?  Expectations?  Failures?  Disappointments?  That type of thing.

 

TOWNSEND:  Of the development of that sub-system?

 

KOENIG:  Sure.

 

TOWNSEND:  O.k., well [laughter] we were all learning a whole lot at that time.  Even some of the performance information on the system was classified still by the Air Force because that was Cold War days.  Thinking of disappointments that we had at that time.  We ran into one real serious problem with our pressure vessels.  We were kind of pushing the state of the art on the design of our pressure vessels and we discovered that the oxidizer that we were using was not compatible with titanium under certain conditions, and it took us a while to work our way through that and find out what was causing the failures.  We had just sent a big pit down in California where we were checking out the vehicles and had some serious failures there that we didn’t understand for a while.  And that set us back a good deal.  Then in [19]67, I think it was, we had the fire that killed the three astronauts.  That didn’t really have any bearing on my sub-system, but it stopped the whole program, and actually allowed us to do some changes.  We were, and uh, design the propulsion system for a mixture ratio of 2.  Meaning 2 to 1 mass flow over oxidizer to fuel.  So our pressure, we had two pressure vessels for each propellant.  We discovered that at the low chamber pressure, we were operating at, we needed to have a different mixture ratio.  We didn’t really have the time to fix that by changing the tank problems.  Then the fire came along, and we did.  So we changed to a 1.7, I think it was, which gave us a little bit increase.

 

KOENIG:  Can I ask you about the pad fire?  Just in the sense of where like were you when you heard about it?

 

TOWNSEND:  Where was I?

 

KOENIG:  Yes.

 

TOWNSEND:  I was playing poker in my dining room with a group of guys and it was probably about, oh nine or ten o’clock.  And I guess that was probably a Friday.

 

KOENIG:  I’d have to look it up.

 

TOWNSEND:  I think it was a Friday.  One of the guys got a phone call to tell him about the fire.  That’s when I found out.  It really, it didn’t have any effect on my sub-system.

 

KOENIG:  Did the word spread officially or was it a word of mouth type of?  “Oh, did you hear?”

 

TOWNSEND:  That was word of mouth.

 

KOENIG:  Word of mouth?

 

TOWNSEND:  One of the guys that was playing poker got a phone call and said, “hey have you heard about the fire at the Cape?” [Kennedy Space Center, Florida]  I don’t really know who called him.  But it wasn’t anything official.

 

KOENIG:  Did it affect how, I mean you said it slowed down and it gave you time.  Is that basically the biggest effect that came out there on your…?

 

TOWNSEND:  For me.

 

KOENIG:  As the program is progressing, how did your work progress?  You have Apollo 1, were you with the Apollo program all the way through the [19]70’s?

 

TOWNSEND:  I was with the Apollo program all the way through, oh I don’t know, probably the first two or three lunar landings.  And then I went to work on the Shuttle Program Phase 8, I think it was probably the feasibility and general design.

 

KOENIG:  How long were you with the shuttle program?

 

TOWNSEND:  I was with the shuttle program, I worked on the main propulsion system until [19]79.  It was just before, about a year or two years before the first launch, and then I changed from working on the propulsion system in the engineering department over to the project office.  And I managed the certification of tests for the order.  We went through kind of a [skip in tape] three-phase certification for the first launch.  And then for the first five launches, and then for what we were designing for a hundred missions I think.  So the second phase would get you through a hundred missions.

 

KOENIG:  Quickly, when did you retire from NASA?

 

TOWNSEND:  O.k. that was in [19]79.  In [19]83, I went to work on, I was working mostly check out activities on the Orbiter, trying to reduce the turnaround time so we could get our launch rate up.  In [19]83, I left that project and I went over, there was a change in the way we managed the space suits and the stuff that was called flight crew equipment.  And I started managing that activity.  And then, I did that until [19]87 when I retired from NASA.

 

KOENIG:  So can you describe some of the stuff that you’re talking about with the equipment?

 

TOWNSEND:  The space suit?

 

KOENIG:  Uh, huh.

 

TOWNSEND:  Was part of it.  That was a contract with Hamilton Standards in New England.  Also, the man-maneuvering unit, which was the thing that Bruce McCandless flew around, you know the “lonesome man” out in space?  And then the EVA [Extra Vehicular Activity] equipment tools.  As well as the even the food.

 

KOENIG:  What are some of the challenges that y’all found in that work?  Did the Challenger [I kept saying Challenger when I meant Shuttle] present new challenges, I mean the Challenger, the shuttle missions because you have more people in the shuttles.  What are some differences in the programs?  Either from your end or just anything; the equipment design?

 

TOWNSEND:  Between Apollo and the shuttle?

 

KOENIG:  Um hmm.

 

TOWNSEND:  Well, Apollo was a whole lot different than the Space Shuttle.  When I came to work at Houston, I was thirty years old and the average engineer working on the program in Houston was thirty years old.  And five years later when we landed on the moon we were all thirty-five.  [Clearing throat] and that was a real privilege to work on the Apollo programs.  I always thought it was kind of being like; if some of the sailors that Christopher Columbus shanghaied to crew his ships had known at that time they were going to go and make history, because they were going to discover a new continent.  Well that was kind of like, well we got to declare beforehand what we were doing.  That was really a fun program, and I’m privileged to work on it. 

 

We had the fire and we had the Challenger, and it seemed like to me that we got more and more into a mode of instead of “can do” it was kind of “what could possibly go wrong here?”  Instead of solving a problem and implementing it we were solving the problem and trying to implement it with all these people looking over your shoulder saying, “this might not work.”  So it became less fun.  The oversight I guess became, it was double, triple, quadruple.  They [became more concerned] with what you were doing than they were people doing it.

 

KOENIG:  When you say “Christopher Columbus,” so y’all did have an idea of the sense of history, or did you?

 

TOWNSEND:  I did, and I think most people did.  Because, in any organization you have people that work harder than other people, and people that are goof-offs.  We just didn’t have any goof-offs.  Everybody was really dedicated.

 

KOENIG:  You mentioned earlier too the Cold War.  How do you think that drove your efforts?  NASA’s efforts?

 

TOWNSEND:  Well, from my perspective, I felt like it was a way we could compete with the Soviets and show them, that well we’ve got a better system.  It works better than their five-year plans.  I think in those days they always came up with these five-year plans and it was kind of a joke that they had a five year plan every two years because they never would achieve their goals.  From my perspective I was thinking well this is a peaceful way to compete.  And during the early parts of this, you know, I can still remember Kruschev pounding on the table with his shoes, saying we’re going to bury you.  And the Cuban missile thing when we discovered that they were importing missiles into Cuba, that could land in American cities.  It was a pretty serious thing.

 

The fall before I graduated I think, the Russians launched their first satellite.  The last stage of their booster stayed in orbit with the satellite, and it was a pretty big, vessel.  I went running out in the fall and I think it seems like it was October, November, something like that because it was coming over just about sundown, and you could see it going over Norman, Oklahoma.  It was, you know, we were blowing up our attempts to launch satellites regularly in those days.  We had, I think it was a Navy program.  It was a Vanguard program if I remember right that was officially going to launch our first satellite.  And it got to be that, what’s the similarity between a government employee and the Vanguard program?  Neither one will work and you can’t fire ‘em. [Laughter]  So it was serious business.

 

KOENIG:  When you graduated with your degree then, was it your vision to work the way you did, in the space type of program or did you just sort of…

 

TOWNSEND:  I wanted to work on the aircraft and you know there wasn’t a space program or anything like that at the time.  NASA was formed sometime about the time I graduated I guess. [Clock chiming]  I was kind of lulled into going there because it was more advanced aeronautical activities than working for [unintelligible].

 

KOENIG:  Did you apply or were you recruited?  Were they recruiting at the time?

 

TOWNSEND:  I applied.

 

KOENIG:  This is a question that’s been asked before.  With the way that things were driven during Apollo, what is your opinion of the way things are driven now, and do you think we could do the same thing now?

 

TOWNSEND:  Well for a while after I retired, well first let me say when I retired from NASA, then I went to work on the European Columbus Program.  And then I came back over here and worked as a sub-contractor working on the Space Station Program.  So I’ve got, and then I worked as a consultant for a firm trying to find business in Houston.

 

I didn’t, I don’t think that the sense of dedication or; people just don’t seem to be as conscientious now.  And maybe that was just because… I was conscientious about doing what I was doing when I was twenty-five or when I was thirty-five, and I didn’t see that with people.  It was a hint, it kind of seemed like to me a lot of this was the result of the Challenger where we kind of got out, instead of, “we were going to do something that had never been done before,” to a “you can’t do that because it’s never been done before.”

 

KOENIG:  Oh gosh.  Then, I want to go back a little again to … can you walk us through some of the Apollo missions, because obviously there were so many milestones.  There was the first time to orbit the moon.  There was the first time on the moon.  Then there’s Apollo 13, and then there’s the fall off where there is, I think you might have mentioned it, the beginning of the lack of interest by government, citizens, and that type of thing.  For instance the first successful mission of Apollo.

 

TOWNSEND:  Well the first one that we had that I worked on was Spacecraft 9.  The service propulsion system didn’t work real good on that mission.  It was a, not an orbital mission.  It was a heat shield check out and they were supposed, the SPS was supposed to fire and drive the spacecraft into a steep entry.  And it didn’t work very well and we had a lot, that was a lot of work, figuring out what had happened in that what caused the malfunction.

 

The second mission was Spacecraft 11, if I remember that right, and that one was a shallow entry.  And that was successful for the SPS.

 

All of those were real exciting, and of course it was the first time through for me.  Practically [unintelligible] Apollo, uh, change the numbers.  I think one was the one with the fire.  The one, the next, the one I’m thinking about was, I think they called that Spacecraft 7, and it was Wally [Walter M.] Schirra, and Gene [Donn F.] Eisele and [R. Walter Cunningham].  It was an earth orbital check out of the Apollo spacecraft without the lunar excursion module.

 

Our next mission was Apollo 8 where we orbited the moon, and the SPS didn’t work real good.  We had a check out firing on the way to the moon.  It was called a mid-course correction.  It was about a three-second firing.  It didn’t work right, and we spent a couple of nights and days consecutively, figuring out that, you know, team of people, that the problem was that we hadn’t bled all the gas out of the system, during the servicing.  So we were o.k. to go ahead and go into orbit.  This was, the firing was on the way out, and we... In Missions decided to just go out and come around and then back to earth, but if, there was a problem.  And that was my big, biggest mission.

 

KOENIG:  What was your involvement, or if nothing else, a kind of where were you when we landed on the moon?

 

TOWNSEND:  Where was I?  Well it was about 2:00 or 3:00 it seems like to me in the morning, and I was on the sofa at home watching the watching it on TV and I worked the mission.  We had a group of engineers that were the systems specialists that worked in the back room, that if there was a problem, then we were there to resolve the problem for the flight control people.  I worked all of those missions back in Mission Support.  OK.

 

KOENIG:  Kind of where were you and what were you feeling?

 

TOWNSEND:  It was a big deal, to me.  I took my binoculars and went out and looked at the moon.  It was mind boggling to think we’d put somebody there.

 

KOENIG:  Where in Houston were you living at the time?

 

TOWNSEND:  Clear Lake City, just a few miles from the Space Center. [Johnson Space Center, Houston]

 

KOENIG:  So you lived among, where most of the NASA employees lived?

 

TOWNSEND:  Oh yes.  When I first moved there, everybody on the street and the block worked either for a contractor or worked for NASA.

 

KOENIG:  So what was that community like then during, say the moon landing for instance?  They talk about Splashdown parties?

 

TOWNSEND:  Oh yes.  Every year, there was a big thing.  Of course we were all young enough to go to parties [laughter] and party.  At that time, we had a Splashdown party after every successful mission.

 

KOENIG:  You see some of these images on television or on movies like Apollo 13 where they have the big party during the lunar landing.  How accurate do you feel these portrayals are?

 

TOWNSEND:  I did not have any parties during a mission.  I didn’t intend – the parties were after the splashdown.

 

KOENIG:  How accurate do you think overall many of the portrayals we see, out of these movies, are of the experience?

 

TOWNSEND:  Well, not very.  They, you know that’s movies and showbiz.  Doesn’t make it, appear not to be… some of them have been surprising to me how accurate they were really.

 

KOENIG:  Like which ones?

 

TOWNSEND:  Oh, like some of the competition and bickering that went on, you know, behind the scenes between the different organizations.  I can’t remember exactly names.  Usually it seems to me they glamorize whoever it is they are making the hero of that time’s really depicted as doing a whole lot of things that he really didn’t do.

 

KOENIG:  I’m curious, if they had Splashdown parties; since you don’t splash the Shuttle down, did they have celebration parties for successful missions for those?

 

TOWNSEND:  Well.

 

KOENIG:  Or did they become routine?

 

TOWNSEND:  I can’t remember.  When the Shuttle landed, I’m sure we had some kind of a Splashdown party but I probably by that time was not, you know, in the party mood like I had been when I was younger.  We had a name for it but it wasn’t called Splashdown parties anymore, it was called some landing party or something.  I really don’t remember.  I wasn’t going to them [laughter] like I was in Apollo.

 

KOENIG:  Can you tell us a little bit about what Houston was like in the early days; how you saw that area develop and grow, and revolve around NASA?

 

TOWNSEND:  Let’s go back, one comment.

 

KOENIG:  Sure.

 

TOWNSEND:  About the I think that the younger people still had probably as much of the celebration mood after a successful landing, as we did.  It’s just that I had matured beyond it. [Laughter]

 

Now as things developed around the Space Center in Houston?  The area I lived?  Well it became more and more that everybody wasn’t working on the Space program.  A lot of different business people were living in the Clear Lake area where I lived.  And of course it just kept building up, and building up.  When I moved down there, there wasn’t a, there wasn’t a motel or a decent restaurant anywhere close by the Space Center.  And you know it’s completely changed and now it’s all more urban sprawl, and McDonald’s and Burger King and so on.

 

KOENIG:  So on that note then, can you tell us a little bit about where you were and your experiences with the Challenger?

 

TOWNSEND:  When the Challenger occurred, I was in a conference room at the Space Center.  I was, at that time I was working on the flight crew equipment area.  And when it, when we saw the replays, where if you could see this explosion occurring between, it looked to me, like between the Orbiter and the external tank.  It occurred to me that well that could have been some of my equipment that I had managed earlier, in a previous job.  But it turned out, you know, there isn’t anything you can do about that, but let the failure team go about their business, and just, you now, find out what [clock chiming] caused the problem.  It was something else; I was relieved that that was the case.

 

KOENIG:  You retired not long after that then?  You retired in [19]87?

 

TOWNSEND:  Yes. We went through a period of switching from the; we consolidated all of the flight crew equipment processing under one contract.  And we did that during that time while we were down finding out what the problem was and then resolving it.  That was what called Flight Crew Equipment Processing Contract, and so we went from having a whole group of different sub-contractors that processed the equipment, to one.  And so we devised simulated missions and so that the people could train again.  On Apollo when we had the opportunity to change the mixture ratio, well in this case we had an opportunity to train some people, new people to do a job they hadn’t been doing.  So we took advantage of that.

 

KOENIG:  Did you have children going to school at the time of Challenger?

 

TOWNSEND:  My daughter was still going to school at that time, and my oldest son was in college.

 

KOENIG:  Because I’m curious of how the city and the community handled it, since so many people were connected to NASA at the time.  Were they watching it on TV? at school?

 

TOWNSEND:  No, she didn’t, trying to think.  She was not going to school in Clear Lake area at that time.  She was going to school in Pasadena.

 

KOENIG:  O.k.

 

TOWNSEND:  And she didn’t have much to say about that.  She was [unintelligible] She wasn’t around people that were involved.  My son was going to Baylor at that time.

 

People in the community, how they handled it?  I don’t know.  They probably had to get on with it.  Not any different I don’t think than any other community.  When you had like the people in Oklahoma City or when they had the building blown up or the hurricane, or tornadoes just recently, or the Littleton, Colorado thing, it’s just people tend to pull together.  That’s just the way we are.  It’s my [unintelligible]

 

KOENIG:  A little bit afterwards there was a change in the director of Johnson Space Center?

 

TOWNSEND:  We went through several different directors if I remember right at that time.  The guy that came down there.  I can’t even remember his name.  He was somebody that was working in Washington.  There seemed like he was only there for a few months, and then left.  And I assumed that he was thrown to the wolves, so to speak, because he had to take part of the wrap for the failure.

 

KOENIG:  Was that the perception of many of the employees?

 

TOWNSEND:  Yes, that’s what we, yes, I would say so.

 

KOENIG:  Were there other changes in management?  Do you think that’s another step in the increased bureaucracy and paper signing, things like that that you were talking about?

 

TOWNSEND:  Well some of it was, the maturing of the agency.  I think some of it was, like after Challenger, all of a sudden the reliability people who had always had the responsibility for assuring that things were done reliably, suddenly became more responsible and had more people as part of the thing I talked about, about having more inspections looking over your shoulder, and fewer people doing work.

 

KOENIG:  What do you see for the future of manned or unmanned space flight?

 

TOWNSEND:  What I would like to happen would be that we would get a space station functioning, along the same kind of reliable lines that the Orbiter does.  From what I know the benefits of just in the medical field seems to me would justify the space station – accelerating cures for cancer, and diabetics, and so on.  I would like to see us have the laboratory orbiting the earth on a full-time basis, being manned and doing something, for medical research that was real, not something that was just [unintelligible] I think a lot of the Russian accomplishments were really building squares to make it, provide propaganda.  And we do the same thing, and I don’t think it’s bad.

 

KOENIG:  Going back to Russia, during the [19]60s, especially.  I think now there’s knowledge that they weren’t as advanced and in the race as perceived.  At the time, what was your perception while y’all were working on these projects?  Were they in the race or were they out of the race?

 

TOWNSEND:  Well in 1960, maybe 8, I went to the World’s Fair in Montreal and the Russians had a big space exhibit there.  And I spent like a half a day looking at their equipment.  And the thing that struck me about their equipment was well you could see a very early natural evolution from their early spacecraft; they just doubled it or tripled it until their capabilities for launching heavier spacecraft came along.  They were very crude.  The welding for example, on their engines – never pass inspection over here.  I mean it was crude, hand welds.  Their shock isolators looked like old… there’s a old army cot, had these coil springs in it that, it looked like they’d taken three or four of those and put them together to make a shock absorber.

 

Their stuff was really very crude, and I didn’t think that they were, from a standpoint of, the maturity of their technology, anywhere close to us.  But they were a whole lot ahead of us in just plain old common sense, about the way they do things.

 

And they probably didn’t value an astronaut’s life the same as we do.

 

KOENIG: I’m wondering what do you consider to be, maybe a personal milestone or your contribution that you made to the program.

 

TOWNSEND:  Space program?

 

KOENIG:  Either, in your whole career at NASA.

 

TOWNSEND:  In my whole career, both as a NASA employee and as a contractor, I think what I contributed was that I was honest and I was always one of the people that, it kind of evolved this way it seemed to me that where you had ten percent of the people doing 90% of the work and I was one of the 10% because I was all in the spirit of changes.

 

KOENIG:  That reminds me too, now that you say that, we talked a little bit before, and I’ve read about the work environment at NASA.  What was the work environment like when you have many, many engineers and many, many minds working towards this goal of going to the moon?  You talked about long days.  Can you tell us a little bit about that?  When you say long days what are we talking about?

 

TOWNSEND:  Well, when I was working on like the problem with Apollo, on Spacecraft 9, and then Apollo 8, I worked as long as it was necessary, to solve the problem.  We had a schedule to meet because of the mission time.  I think I worked forty-eight hours straight on the Apollo 8 thing, and I did about the same thing one time on a, where we were servicing the spacecraft for the – that might have been the second Orbiter flight, and we had a problem with an oxidizer spill on the pad.  It did a lot of damage.  The tiles fell off. [Laughter] I was at the Cape at that time, with, my assignment was to find a way to service the vehicle in less time.  I worked on that probably for thirty-six hours, whatever it took.  But during the programs we didn’t, you know it seems like we didn’t work; I didn’t work an eight-hour day.  It was always more than that, and there was a lot of travel involved, when I was thirty-five, I could work all day and travel all evening, and get up and go to work the next day, and we did a lot of that.

 

KOENIG:  What is your…

 

TOWNSEND:  But now, just a minute.

 

KOENIG:  I’m sorry.

 

TOWNSEND:  You said, you asked me about what was the work environment like?

 

KOENIG:  That too, yes sir.

 

TOWNSEND:  When I worked those hours, I worked them because I wanted to.  There wasn’t a, you know I felt that I should.

 

The environment – well I came from the Air Force where there was three-hundred engineers sitting in one room, and here we had four desks; there were four engineers, and then there was a little walk-way, crammed four more.

 

We came down here, and gee whiz, we had offices, you know, with on, two, or three guys in it.  The work environment always was real good at NASA, and I don’t have any feeling of [unintelligible] toward anybody.  We might have disagreed but it was, that was all it was.

 

KOENIG:  What are your memories about the effect of these hours on family life, either in your family and what you saw in other families?

 

TOWNSEND:  I wish that I had spent more time with my children when they were younger, than I did, but at that time I thought I was doing the right thing.

 

KOENIG:  Is that something that you saw from many of the people that worked there?

 

TOWNSEND:  Some of the people, yes.

 

KOENIG:  What was the let down like on family life, say after the big push was over, after we finally landed on the moon?

 

TOWNSEND:  Well, it was a period after we landed on the moon, and I don’t remember how long this was, but it wasn’t very long.  It seemed like to me it was, you know, here we had worked so long and so hard to accomplish this mission, and all of a sudden we were a bunch of bums because we didn’t have a plan to go to Mars, right now.  At the time I had thought that there had been a lapse in NASA management, in that they hadn’t foreseen this and had something, you know, at least in the beginning phases.  So it was a kind of a disappointing thing for me and for the other people that I worked with that were working on Apollo.

 

KOENIG:  Were you already working on Challenger [Shuttle] when Apollo was...the last few missions?

 

TOWNSEND:  No, oh yes, yes. [Clock chiming] I was working on Challenger, on the Orbiter.

 

KOENIG:  I keep saying that, [Challenger for Shuttle] I’m so sorry.

 

TOWNSEND:  I was working on the Orbiter program.  I was not working on the Orbiter Program when Apollo 13 happened.  I think Apollo 13 was the first, so I would have worked through Apollo 12 which I think was Pete Conrad’s mission.  Apollo 13, I was, had gone over working on Space Shuttle.

 

KOENIG:  Do you have any memories of Apollo 13, since you weren’t working directly with it?

 

TOWNSEND:  Well not a great deal.  I knew a lot of the guys, the fuel cell guys were part of the division that I was in, and I knew all those people.  They were working their fanny off. 

 

KOENIG:  Were there any people that you worked with that made a significant impact on you?  Do you have any vivid or outstanding memories of the people that worked there?

 

TOWNSEND:  Well, I can list off a long list of people that were people that I admired; their dedication, [tape skip, unintelligible] that they were working on, which was the same thing I was working on.  Very few people would I classify as being, really having an impact on me.  George Low was one who I thought was the premier manager of people and projects. 

 

The astronauts, in general, I would say were, they were all very opinionated over achievers.  A few of them [astronauts] were good at what they were doing and what they did.  Frank Borman was one that comes to mind first off.  I had a great deal of respect for him.  His first comment to me when he came back, I thought this was interesting.  We didn’t tell them during the mission that there had been a problem.  They didn’t know it.  And after we spent all this time deciding, well it was a bad bleed.  It’s o.k. now.  We got all the helium gas through the engine, and it will be fine.  They fired and were put into orbit around the moon, and then the one after that brought it back.  I guess someone had told him afterwards about that, and his comment to me just before the debriefing was he says, “I understand we had a little bit of trouble with a bubble in the engine.”  I said, “yes,” and that was the end of it.  [Laughter] It was his life that was, you know…

 

KOENIG:  Do you have any specific memories like that?  Anecdotal memories of, I know you didn’t really work closely with the astronauts, but anything interesting around those times?  Interesting people that you met, or experiences that NASA offered that, you know you could say “experience of a lifetime?”

 

TOWNSEND:  I’m not sure exactly what you’re looking for.  There was a guy that I worked with, that a, he worked at Rockwell, Bob Field.  That is a person that I had a great deal of admiration for.  He was the crankiest, most obnoxious person there ever was, and he and I considered each other friends.  I worked with him on Apollo and I worked with him on Shuttle.  [He was] not a very well-educated person but he was very articulate and very logical, analytical.  On Apollo, he was my counterpart as the Service Propulsion System Manager at Rockwell.  Then he was promoted to Director.  On the Shuttle Program he was director of basically pipes and tubes, and propulsion hydraulics, the APU’s.

 

KOENIG:  I want to go back to the Shuttle for just a minute.  It occurred to me that the excitement surrounding the first say Apollo missions; was there that same excitement around the Challenger [Shuttle] missions?

 

TOWNSEND:  I don’t think so.  There wasn’t for me.  There may have been for other people.  I’d already been there, done that, and so I think that was probably…[tape skip, unintelligible] had not been part of Apollo, wouldn’t have been as excited.

 

Now however, when the Orbiter appeared on the TV screen coming in at Edward’s Air Force Base, [California] that first time, there was a lump in everybody’s throat I think at that time. Because there’s no communication, and when that little speck shows up on the TV, there was some [tape skip].

 

The guy that was the Orbiter Project Manager, Aaron Cohen, he’d been a project engineer on Apollo, and he was the Orbiter Manager for the program.  He was, I guess it was shortly after the Shuttle became what we call operational, he became the Director of Engineering at the Johnson Space Center.  When he was saying good-by to everybody, he was talking about the [tape skip] Guppy, when we brought, I can’t remember now whether that was the Orbiter on its first return to the Cape.  Anyway, it was on the back of a 747.  I don’t remember now whether that was the, after it had flown one mission or if it was the delivery.  I know he felt like that was a big, big moment in his life, and it was, for all of us that had worked on it.

 

KOENIG:  Do you keep up with the shuttle missions today?

 

TOWNSEND:  Not a great deal.  I know there’s one next week, I think.

 

KOENIG:  Thursday.

 

TOWNSEND:  Thursday?  Something like that, yeah.

 

KOENIG:  I thought it might have been today actually.  Delayed?

 

TOWNSEND:  Well I think it was supposed to have been today.  Is today…

 

KOENIG:  Thursday.

 

TOWNSEND:  I think it was supposed to be on Friday.  Now it’s put off until next Thursday.

 

KOENIG:  Did you watch the John Glenn launching back in the fall?

 

TOWNSEND:  No.  I didn’t [tape skip, unintelligible] I thought. 

 

KOENIG:  I think I’ve got just a few wrap questions.  I don’t know how much he has on the tape, but I might need to go over just a little bit, depends.  But looking back over your career, when you first became involved in aerospace, would you have ever imagined when you graduated and started working for the Air Force, or your first years at NASA, that you would have gotten to do what you do?

 

TOWNSEND:  Never, never, and I think that working for NASA was a privilege, and it sure was a privilege to work on Apollo.

 

KOENIG:  On that, what brings such talent as yourself and others?  What brought y’all to the program?

 

TOWNSEND:  Well I can’t really answer that for all the other people.   But you know if you look at the makeup of the people that I went to work with down there, and in Apollo, there were guys like me that had just been out of college for a few years.  And there were, of course, there were quite a few of us.  And then there were a mix of people that had worked in a, like I remember one of the senior guys there had his own engineering firm somewhere.  And then there was, you know there was just a mix of people coming from both industry and the government, and you know military as well, to make up that group of people.  I think all of us probably were enthusiastic about aeronautics and that’s why, what brought us together.

 

KOENIG:  Why?  Why go to space?

 

TOWNSEND:  Well I answered what I thought my vision was for the space station which I really, I think that’s important and I think eventually some…

 

After Space Station, a continued exploration into, like into the rest of the solar system.  Seems like to me, it really makes a whole lot more sense to do that with machines rather than man.  Now there are some propulsion techniques that are extremely – the technology’s not developed at all – that could give us the velocities to do that with man.  But we’re not spending any money on developing that technology. 

 

As a matter of fact, if you look at the Space Station…I went to a seminar where we had these guys up from Washington [D.C.].  They were down telling us how they were going to make the next generation of Orbiter so much better to operate, and it was all déjà vu.  It was the same damn stuff that we heard at the beginning of the Orbiter Project.  How we were going to make turn arounds in nothing flat and we were going to have a launch every payday, and da, da da, da da. 

 

The problems that keep us from being able to do that haven’t had any technology assist.  The reason it takes so long to service the vehicle is because you’ve got valves, and seals, and operators that are…They’re the best we can make them but they’re not a whole lot different than they were forty years ago.  As a matter of fact, if you look at, we got to a point on the Shuttle Program where we were trying to do this cheaper and cheaper, and it got to be, if it was good enough for Saturn, it was good enough for Shuttle.  Well if you follow that kind of logic, then you’re not going to get it down to the point where you can, you can launch something for fifty dollars a pound.  It’s going to take a long time to do the turn around.  You can’t get it, and your ability to lift the equipment isn’t going anywhere if we don’t start developing the technology to allow that. 

 

KOENIG:  And they’re not?  It’s stagnant?

 

TOWNSEND:  It’s not.  NASA doesn’t spend anything on technology.

 

KOENIG:  Is there a difference from what the experience was in the earlier to…

 

TOWNSEND:  Well yeah, it was, to some degree it was.  Now, however, I remember we also got into this phase on Apollo where we don’t want a Chevy, correction, we don’t want a Cadillac, just a Chevy will do.  That was kind of a; that was a cost saver.  And that’s the same thing on it was on Shuttle. 

 

And I went through some of that on Space Station.  We were going to have this computer that was going to just do everything.  Boy, you just ask it something, punch a button, it'd give you the answer.  It was going to control all this stuff.  When you got through designing it, we couldn’t afford all the sensors that it took to operate it.  So then we started reducing sensors, which we lose capability somehow.  We’re back to…

 

Advancement is not fast enough also just in to implement a new technology.  We [Mr. Townsend and his wife] just bought a new microwave.  The old microwave is ten years old.  It works fine but it doesn’t fit in the redesigned system.  [They are renovating their kitchen.]  I’m in there reading the book to understand how to operate the new microwave.  It’s got a button on there you can punch says “baked potato.”  That’s all you have to do.  It senses the moisture coming out of the potato [Clock chiming] and turns off when it’s done.  [Laughter] NASA won’t have that on the Space Station for twenty years.  [Laughter]

 

TOWNSEND:  [Beginning tape 2, talking about his dog] She’s a fraidy cat.  You ready?

When I was working on the Space Station, I was working on the new, there was a time when we had a new spacesuit.  It was, we were going to start all over with the spacesuit and it was going to allow the astronaut to just put it on and go EVA [Extra Vehicular Activity].  There was no pre-brief which is what they have to do to prevent dents.  There was going to be a high-pressure suit that they could, from zero time to go EVA.  If you had a problem outside you needed to go work on, you put the suit on and go out. 

 

We were looking at ways to make this suit regenerate its consumables.  Well there’s a thermal electric, little device that will either heat or cool and we wanted to look at using that as a heating and cooling technique for the spacesuit.  Couldn’t do it.  Too expensive, not to develop it.  Now I have one in a Coleman ice chest.  [It] operates, I can use the ice chest; I can use it either as a cooling or as a heating device.  It cost forty, fifty bucks.  NASA isn’t doing anything that I know of trying to implement that kind of technology in the spacesuit.  And if they did it’d take ten years to get it there.

 

And the same thing happened on the, we were going to put in a heads-up display in the visor so that the astronaut could be, he could be given instructions.  You know like, he went out to repair something and he wants to see it right here.  [Showing how it could be seen in front of the face.]  We couldn’t implement that because it was too advanced technology.  It cost too much.  You can get it in Cadillacs and Buicks.  They’ve had it for five or six years I think.

 

Taking that everyday technology and implementing it into our space program doesn’t happen.  In my opinion it doesn’t happen because of what I call cone headed engineering.  At NASA, instead of trying to take it and implement it in a commonsense way, the way the Russians were doing their thing back in the [19]60s.  We don’t do that.  We gotta make a big deal out of it.

 

KOENIG:  Do you have a thought of why?  The increased bureaucracy?

 

TOWNSEND:  Oh, I think it’s mostly bureaucracy, and it can…It would be better done if it was done by contractors rather than government employees.  The government employees that I know now, they want to make big deal out of things instead of make it work.  And I think if you would, if they spent their time defining what their requirements were, and quit trying to tell the contractors how to do that, then let the contractors go figure out how to implement that technology.  And they may come back and say, “you can’t do it, your requirements are too extensive.”  Ok.

 

KOENIG:  With that in mind then, how do you see the future?  I know you have a vision, but how do you see the reality of the future? 

 

TOWNSEND:  Well it’s still gonna go on.  It’s just going to be a, the Corp of Engineers is still building dams, and diverting rivers.  It’ll go on, it’s just going to go on slow.

 

KOENIG:  What is your vision, or how do you see the Space Station as a reality, to continue and actually accomplish its goals?

 

TOWNSEND:  Well I think we’ve had a pretty significant setback because it was called Freedom Space Station, and now it’s called the International Space Station.  Because when [President William J.] Clinton got in there he had to have his mark on it.  I think that bringing the Russians into it has slowed it down.  Now maybe that’s a good thing because of a, their…I think in some areas their, have some benefits in that they’re more practical than we are.  But the, you know the delay that we’re incurring now is because of a I think it’s their, they call theirs the service module.  I think it’s coming later.  I’m not sure about what they call it.  But I know that we’ve had about a twelve-month delay because they were late.

 

KOENIG:  Are they going to accomplish their goals?

 

TOWNSEND:  Oh I think so.  I think we should do it.  Further exploration, I don’t know about that. That’s, you’ve got to be too much of a visionary, I think for me.

 

KOENIG:  What have you been doing?  I know that you haven’t been retired for that long but what have you been doing since your retirement from NASA?

 

TOWNSEND:  From NASA?  Well, ok. I worked one year in Europe on the Columbus Program as a consultant to the Italian company that is building the spacecraft. 

 

I came back over here and then I worked [19]89 to [19]93, I worked on the Space Station as a contractor, sub-contractor.  Then I married and I worked about two years part time as a [tape skip] aerospace firm.  I only worked a few days there.

 

Since that time I haven’t, that would have been, let’s see [19]95.  Then the last four years I have been working with my hobbies, I’ve got quite a few hobbies.

 

KOENIG:  Is NASA still part of your daily life?

 

TOWNSEND:  No I don’t think so.  No, I’ve pretty well retired.

 

KOENIG:  Unless I’m forgetting something or leaving something important out, that you might want to add.

 

TOWNSEND:  The criticism I would make that I wish NASA would correct.  I ran into this when I was working as a rep., that information that I know and I knew that supervisors at NASA knew it was not being transmitted to younger people.  They’re still inventing the wheel again.  It’s the supervision.  [Unintelligible]

 

They have a, I know I ran into a lot of young people I’ve thought were good, hard working troops but they weren’t, they weren’t getting the training that they need.

 

KOENIG:  On that real quickly, do you think NASA has to offer young engineers what it offered to you?

 

TOWNSEND:  I don’t see how it could because of the, just the difference in the way things were then and the way it is now.  If I was a young engineer now I wouldn’t want to work for NASA.  I’d want to work for one of the prime contractors. 

 

KOENIG:  [I think we’ve hit] all the major points.  I do very much appreciate the time you’ve spent with me.  It’s been a pleasure.

 

TOWNSEND:  Well it’s been a pleasure.

 

KOENIG:  Thank you.