NASA Waters, Clyde - June 2, 2000
Interview with Clyde Walters
Interviewer: Patrick hogan
Date of Interview: June 2, 2000
Location: Waters home, Marble Falls, Texas
HOGAN: Today is June 2, the year 2000. This oral history with Clyde Waters is being conducted at 309 Crane Drive, the home of the interviewee in Marble Falls, Texas. The interview is being conducted for the NASA/Johnson Space Center Oral History Project in conjunction with Southwest Texas State University, History Department by graduate student Patrick Hogan.
HOGAN: Mr. Waters are you from Texas?
WATERS: Yes
HOGAN: Where about?
WATERS: Clarify?
HOGAN: Where were you born?
WATERS: A little place called West.
HOGAN: What year?
WATERS: 1935.
HOGAN: Where did you go to college?
WATERS: Texas Tech in Lubbock.
HOGAN: Did you receive your masters?
WATERS: At Texas Tech, I received my Bachelor of Science in engineering. I did graduate work at the University of Houston. [I] didn't bother to complete it.
HOGAN: Did you go directly from college to NASA?
WATERS: No, [I spent] four years, U.S. Navy, District Public Works Office, New Orleans Louisiana.
HOGAN: What was your job with the Navy?
WATERS: I was an industrial engineer, basically working in the facilities bureau of yards and docks area. Our responsibilities were for the naval shore establishments and the facilities thereon. That is all construction, maintenance, operations of those entities.
HOGAN: You did this for four years?
WATERS: Four years.
HOGAN: After the four years, you went directly to NASA?
WATERS: [I] came directly to NASA in Houston.
HOGAN: What brought you to NASA? Why did you pick NASA or did they pick you?
WATERS: I was looking for a relocation from New Orleans – back to the state of Texas, closer to family. It was more home. Primarily though, was the interest in the space program. Because I could see that this was going to offer many challenges, opportunities, both professionally and personally. And it being a new organization, I felt like there would be a lot of freedom to work, to expand, develop professionally. Whereas in the Navy, we had a quite of few years old, we have quite a few manuals on how you do everything and, if you want to be a clerk, and read all the regulations on how you do everything, then this is the job for the right person. I like creativity.
HOGAN: Is that what made you want to major in aeronautical engineering?
WATERS: No, industrial engineering. Yes.
HOGAN: When did you know that you wanted to be an industrial engineer?
WATERS: Basically, this determination was after I had matriculated at Texas Tech, my freshman year. I decided that working with electrical components or designing mechanical components, things like this, was not what I wanted to do. I had more of an interest in a broader base of engineering and, as such, the industrial engineering curriculum offered one additional year of school where by you went into the business administration college for courses in accounting, speech, bookkeeping, government law, and things of this nature, which I felt was a more rounded stepping stone to an engineer, unless you want to come out and be a design engineer, design components or things of this nature. This didn't appeal to me.
HOGAN: Anything in your four-year career in the Navy that helped you in your NASA career?
WATERS: Quite a few things actually. Number one, the Navy had an excellent junior engineering training program. They rotated us. There was a group of eight of us that came into that program in the eighth Naval district headquarters in New Orleans in ‘58 as I recall. They would rotate each of us, no matter what our discipline was in engineering, through an architectural area, through a mechanical area, through an electrical area, through such areas like agronomy, horticulture, and other specialty areas of engineering, where you would go and work with a senior engineer in that arena for maybe three weeks or a month. As I recall the total program was a year of rotation. And I had done this back whenever I was in college. My plans at that time were to go work for what today its known as the Exxon Corporation. I had worked each summer office as a roustabout doing pipe fitting work as a roughneck on a drilling rig and as a survey party crew chief. So I had a broader base of the training program. And I thought this was very helpful in rounding the education, exposing you to various elements. It gave you a little bit of an idea of each one of them did. Not necessarily how they worked together, but you got the idea they had to work together. From that standpoint this was very helpful in understanding where I came to at NASA and the department.
Originally, I was hired to begin to set up the concepts and how we NASA would go about maintaining and operating the facilities in Houston once they were built. This is 1962 [and] NASA was just beginning to branch out, employ people. We were at one time, approximately twenty different physical locations in Houston scattered throughout the city, various types of warehouses, various types of office buildings. The first NASA office in Houston was a contracting office who leased an old abandoned Tom McCann shoe store over in Gulfgate. That was the first physical plant, at that time MSC, Manned Spacecraft Center, had in the Houston area. And they began to look for places to rent, to relocate people from Langley [Field, Virginia] in Houston.
HOGAN: 1962 was your first year?
WATERS: Yeah, I moved, August ‘62, somewhere along there. And what we were doing at that time in the background, which helped me was those four years with the Navy traveling around all their different facilities, seeing different kinds of facilities for ships, for airplanes, and for reserve training Centers. And at that time the White Sands [New Mexico] test facility was under the Navy's supervision. So we got a pretty good cross section of exposure of seeing what these people were doing, what types of facilities they had, what some of the unique requirements were for maintaining, designing, preparing operating procedures, maintenance procedures for some these facilities because in NASA, a lot of the that things we were going to do weren't exactly straight from anybody's drawing board. There were no existing blueprints other than laboratory models and things like this on some of these things because I think that most people realized that once they visited some of the NASA Centers that the scale magnitude of some of those facilities or various things is a quantum leap from a laboratory. For example, in years back in vacuum, cryogenics, vibration acoustic test, some of our ablative test laboratories for the heat shields, these were all new technologies. NASA was pushing the envelope to get these engineering things, these feats completed against a pretty tight schedule on occasion. But this was just a part of what was so interesting and so challenging.
So I think that the background experience gave me a broad enough base to work in the arena and some of the experience that I gained in the Navy had to do with contracts. The Navy as an example, like most military branches, they have a public works department or the equivalent thereof base civil engineer, base engineer, whatever for their facilities. And quite often, they had the luxury of having enlisted personnel to do some of the work. They have civil service to do some of the work. And then, they have contracts, maintenance, or operations contracts. And of course, contracts with the various utility companies. So this exposure gave me a pretty good background to begin to understand and to work in the arena in the facilities world, which I was hired to do.
HOGAN: What was the first program that you worked with at NASA?
WATERS: Let’s see, August of ’62, we were still flying, I guess we had just begun to fly Gemini, if I remember correctly or maybe it was the last of the Mercurys. I guess it was the last one. The first program that I worked with there was.
In the facilities world, it was a little bit unusual. We worked with every program because we were three to five years ahead of the curve for a facility to accomplish a specific requirement. So we worked with all the programs to, first of all, assist the project in developing requirements for facilities. Then translated that into facility world, architectural engineering requirement documents, put those out on the street for an architect engineer or the old Corps of Engineers, at that time most that work was done to get a design for a unique facility to accomplish a specific program requirement.
And I guess some of the facilities. I apologize for the interruption, first of all. I guess I was saying, we had worked with the various programs and offices to develop the requirements for the various facilities. Some of those [were] unique. Long lead times, I think I had said. But one of the requirements from a facility standpoint was how to maintain some of these.
Early on in the program, some of the facility requirements that we had worked with the projects, program managers, users. As an example, the space environmental simulation laboratory, the Mission Control Center probably the more notable of the facilities located in Houston, I had quite an extensive and long history working on this project with the folks who had the requirements, transferring those requirements into design requirements for our facility and the selection of Kaiser Engineers in Oakland, California to do the design of this facility. Working with them for about a year and a half to two years while we were designing this facility. Then another year after that of writing operations and maintenance manuals and procedures for just the facility side of the Mission Control Center and, ultimately, being the coordinator for this facility when we first spanked life into it back in August, September, October of ‘64. It was the Gemini type 4 mission. The control that flight was through Goddard [Test Flight Center] up in Greenbelt, Maryland. We paralleled their flight control and, then on GT-5, this was the first time that the actual Mission Control Center in Houston functioned as the Control Center for the Manned Space Flight Program.
So the parallel there is for all of the facilities where they need test facilities for the various components that JSC [Johnson Space Center] was responsible for, MSC at that time, whether it was coordination with the other NASA Centers. We were only one piece of the program. Rather unique.
Quite a political history behind Houston being selected and the expenditure of, I think, our original budget was somewhere around two-hundred million, between two-hundred and two-hundred and fifty million to design that Center and build it. And it was, is a pretty good bargain in the facilities world. I think back on it [as a] very interesting time. [A] very creative time. An excellent career to get in on the ground floor of something, where the purpose of a meeting was to develop a plan or solve a problem. It wasn’t a meeting to schedule another meeting.
HOGAN: Could you explain something that you specifically did for a program, like Mission Control?
WATERS: Specifically, I was in charge of making sure that all those facilities were constructed right, put into operation, training people in a world which they were not familiar with. As an example, we had an emergency power system there in Building 48 as it’s referred to. The power systems in that building were designed so that you did not have any power fluctuations under any conditions, excluding acts of mother nature or God. The power was extremely critical.
The power systems in Building 48 were extremely critical to the operation of all computers in the Control Center. Most of the things that made a flight successful was based on the capability and capacity of those computers as we today generally know and understand. Today's PC on your desk is larger in capacity, faster in speed than one of the old main frames that we had in the Control Center at that time. [The] temperature of those machines was extremely critical, the cooling requirements. So these were some of the things that I worked with. And turn arounds for different missions requiring different support type crews, organizational changes, unique requirements, short notice, different power requirements for displays.
Remember as you review this from a historical perspective. A lot of this was almost like design on-the-fly. Well thought out in most cases, but then again, we had no history to compare the programs to. And these folks, these men, these women, in the early days were extremely conscientious. They were dedicated. They worked hard. The hours were unbelievable. Most folks, you had to have it, I guess that’s why they says the right stuff for the seven that were out front. But there were quite a few that were behind those who had the right stuff also. Commitment, dedication, willingness to be there at any and all hours. Sometimes be there for two weeks and not go home. Your wife brings you clothes because of the requirements of the program because of what we were doing. An example is GT-7 to 6. We launched seven before six because of technical problems. It was a two-week flight and we had a dormitory set up in the Control Center. Where some of us, because we were so early in the program, because we were so early in the facility and because we were facility. Key personal were expected to be in the sight twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. And that particular one, I remember because my wife had brought me clothes about every three days. We had a place to eat, we had a place to sleep, take our showers, clean up but we were right there if there were any problems. Behind the scenes, we were just as dedicated as the airline pilots so to speak.
HOGAN: Was there a lot of job pressure?
WATERS: I think most of your job pressure was what you allowed to build up. Self-induced in some folks. We knew what the job was. The schedules were doable – history records that for us. But you had to have commitment, the individual commitment. I think most of the people in that arena from a professional stand point was better than average in most corporations or entities. A lot of the pressures that I recall were from the outside.
HOGAN: Such as?
WATERS: Well, media pressures. I will give the Congress and the boys in Washington their kudos. I think they were better visionaries, had a better overall understanding of this particular program than a lot of programs they may have dealt with prior to and since our particular time in history.
It was also good PR, a new frontier, exciting. If you did something wrong, expect to read your name in the newspaper, we the agency and individually. Because these guys, it was a big thing. It was a very big thing, world-wide attention. Let’s face it, we were in a race with the Russians at that particular point in history and we were behind. No ifs, no ands, no buts. So, some pressures from those arenas.
But I don't think we had to many that went to the nut house as a result of being over worked from a job or commitments and things like that because you didn't spend a lot of time dwelling on those things. Your hours were basically hooked up, solving problems. I mean this is the hard-core engineer in the agency. Kind of like the test pilot was to find out what this thing is made of. Will it work and do what we want it to do?
HOGAN: Did you interact with any of the astronauts?
WATERS: Yes. In the early days, the astronauts were a voice in all design requirements, meetings, or facilities. Basically, this is what we need to think about guys. They had a voice. They had an input. And pretty average guys in a lot of ways. Unbelievable how they stood up to all the pressures. Of course they also had some release valves that some other folk didn't have which are recorded for history and a little bit of flamboyance about them. Who blames them? Who cares? I don't. I think they earned it. They put themselves in the hot seat. You got to give them a little bit of latitude for the jobs that they took on.
HOGAN: Any particular one that you were closer with or friends with?
WATERS: Deke [Slayton] was a hunting buddy back in the early years. We used to go out to Eagle Lake and places like that and hunt geese and ducks, etcetera. His deputy was a very, close, personal friend of mine. We still maintain our relationship today. We meet each other every year in Nebraska to hunt pheasants.
Gus [Grissom], very personable. I liked Gus. Easy to work with. Very clear, very concise fellow to work with. He was a good representative of the astronaut office and developing, stating their requirements, their concerns, their considerations for these test facilities that we were designing. Not only to us, but to the guys who were actually generating the requirements for those test facilities as to what they wanted to be able to do in that facility. Our job was very simply to get that facility designed and get the equipment and systems designed in the facility, [so] we could get it in operation for the program offices and the astronauts to use or the test engineers, whoever, whatever the program requirement was.
HOGAN: When problems arose in your field such as the Apollo [1] fire that killed the three astronauts, how did that effect you personally and professionally?
WATERS: Personally, it was a downer, just simply stated. Ed [White] , Roger [Chaffee], Gus, we were all friends. Tough day. Tough two or three days because we’d seen these guys with their families. NASA was a pretty close, a good, tight, little organization in a lot of ways even though, I guess, we had probably some thirty-five hundred employees, NASA types, not counting our contractors at maybe the height of the Apollo program by early ’69. Probably had fourteen, fifteen thousand contractor employees down there in the Houston area. Must have been thirty-five hundred NASA bellybuttons, as we called ourselves. Gray beards and dinosaurs. Tough day.
Impact on the program? No more than your engineering, management, personal considerations with the [inaudible] program. Hey guys, something happened here. It wasn't good. We better go find out what the problem was. And for us in the facilities world, it was not a large and or significant impact. It was the guys on the hardware side of the house. The flight personnel. Now those were the guys that were really thrown into the pressure cooker. Managerials, the same thing, them and their support contractors. We probably helped them out in some areas to help put together some test program packages or capabilities in various labs. But the pressure was on them and not so much on us.
And as I recall it got into a hibernation. Redouble your efforts, capable of what your doing. Reinforce all the troops and, and hey, just like anything that's built mechanical or electrical, it will have a failure and the consequences will vary. Our particular case, loss of life. But Detroit builds all their automobiles and a lot of people die every day. Medical doctors.
Recently, I was reading of interest, Readers Digest article. Somewhere around four times as many deaths in the United States are caused by medical errors than any other form of death, which kind of tweaked my interest. My God, there is a problem here, in that there is no quote senior review board adequately staffed with the powers to police themselves or as statistics indicate, quote, “Houston we have a problem here.” Basically stated.
HOGAN: When did you retire from NASA?
WATERS: January 3, 1992.
HOGAN: So you worked on the Space Shuttle program?
WATERS: Yes
HOGAN: Anything different that you did during those years than your early years.
WATERS: My individual career had a change in about 1983. After about twenty years in the facilities world and being on call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, leaving your itinerary even while traveling overseas, pretty soon you get a little bit uptight about all these hours. Things were beginning to change.
About ‘84, I was brought on as the Director of Center Operations staff as a technical assistant. I got tired of all the weekend night phone calls. And I was willing to do that but after a while you say, “Wait a minute. I better get a life here sometime, some place.” So I went up on the directors staff and chaired a few source boards. And basically, had a career path change.
One of the boards I chaired was for the new telecommunication system whereby we were designing that system to go to fiber optic. Ultimately, to rehost all the main frame computers on the Center. Ultimately, to expand the base of PC's to every desk on the Center. Ultimately to integrate voice, data, fax, and video over broad band capabilities, fiberoptics. Basically, to move all the main frame computers into one new facility. So I had a learning curve there [when I] transferred from the facilities world to the computer world.
Started over there as manager of telecommunications services. Which started out kind of small and we just grew into. Ultimately, the old man told me, he says, “I want to get an arm around all of our computers out here. I don't know what I'm spending for computers. I don't know what were doing. Our telephone bills are off the charts.”
So we went and bought a new digital switch, put in a new system. Got rid of Southwestern Bell telephone and all their old cabling systems. And of course, I was kid of very well equipped for that job because I knew the Center. I knew all the people. I knew the facilities. I knew how to get work done in that arena. We had the technical people that understood the telecommunications stuff. I was sent over there as manager to get this job done because we were going to have to work with senior management, middle management, secretaries, you know, super management, to go into every office and change this, that, and the other and go change every black phone into a new digital. And I did a lot of hand holding for a lot of senior management posts on how to use, etcetera, etcetera, because this was change in the mid-eighties. A lot of people weren’t, they hadn't thought about. And it was beginning to get real well to the average or to the layperson. Some of the poor thinking folks were beginning to think about computers designs and cad systems and chart using. Most people weren't. Good works have come along ways in the last fifteen years, very fast as a microcosm over time.
HOGAN: What would you say is your greatest accomplishment at NASA?
WATERS: Don't even think about it. I think I contributed significantly for a sustained, approximately thirty-year period. I never hesitated to any challenge laid down in front of me and was reasonably, technically competent. Some of us were folks that were people who got jobs done. The result is what counted. Did you get the damn job done? Was it on schedule? Was it under budget? Like a lot of folks, I got a lot of things that I can hang on the wall as awards, bonuses, or things of that nature. I keep most of mine boxed up.
HOGAN: So you don't have a favorite award?
WATERS: No, I really don't. I like to look back at all of it and say, “I think you did a pretty good job.” Some you could have done better. The engineer, not the public relations type, get the damn job done then we'll go party.
That was kind of a blast. Everybody knows about the old splashdown parties. They would block off NASA Road 1 after we dropped a bird back into the pond some place around the globe. Everybody would go out and have a few sarsaparillas, mix and raise hell, and relieve stress.
HOGAN: Do you still keep up with the program?
WATERS: Not as much as say some people. I'm a person who does not look back very often. I'm looking forward, trying to think what's interesting, what's next. Retain old friendships, contacts and things like that, on a personal basis. I communicate with the guys. But I'm not a couch potato.
This is the reason I bought the ranch. Sixteen hundred acres up here. Shortly thereafter I said, “I'm going to develop a part of that into ranch heads, little ten-acre ranch heads and have some fun.” There was a personal family medical situation in which required that I be home for awhile. And I wasn't going to sit here and watch As The World Turns or General Hospital.
So I decide to go along another career path and its been very rewarding. I've had a lot of folks here in Burnet county. Because when you do something like that, you have to find out who the politicians are because you got to get their approval, their blessing, and sanctions, and work with these people. Continuing learning education about county regulations and various consumer state regulations for the federal government.
At NASA, we didn't have a lot blueprints. We kind of wrote our own regulations. I mean most people don't realize that. But after fifteen years, the book outline had been pretty well documented on how successful programs run, what the requirements were. Then you move over to the bean counting side of the house, as I call it, where time and budgets and personnel matters and you begin in management matters. You begin to lose your technical edge, the thing that got you to where you were and your supervisor’s management career. What I use to call the fun part of the program – solving the problems.
HOGAN: Do you still make it down to NASA?
WATERS: I get down about once a year. Going to Houston is not my favorite thing to do. Our children are located in that area, except one who is overseas. So we get down there to see the kids and the grandkids.
But I’m just liable to pick up the phone at ten o'clock at night and talk to one of the old buddies for two hours rather than e-mailing. Pick up the damn phone and talk. That's my way of keeping up with some of the old guys. And we go back for some of the special occasions and invitee things. But its not one of my favorite things to do.
I like being out on the ranch, going up on top of the mountain. The ranch we own has a ridge on it. The highest point in Burnet county is up there on the ranch. I've got place up there with a full 360 degree view where I can look over several counties. And I go up there and light up a cigar, drink a cup of coffee, prop my feet back, watch the Sun rise, watch the Sun go down. Simpler, but enjoyable times in life.
HOGAN: Is there anything else you would like to add, historically for NASA?
WATERS: Well I guess that in retrospect for me, most of it was very enjoyable. There was always some bad times in ones career, life. More peaks than valleys. A good program – essential, educational, promote progress. I think that probably NASA drove a lot of technologies faster than they would have ever been self-generating, if you were waiting on the car manufacturers or the steel manufacturers or food product, nutrition, or medical type things. Because our requirements were very broad based in every one of those areas and you unique, compressed time frame of programmatic requirements generated placed on some of those people.
I hate to think of how many meetings where somebody stood up and told us we were absolutely nuts. It couldn't be done. I guess one of our speeches back with some of those folks is “Don’t tell me we can't do it. Go figure out how the hell we’re going to get it done.” So simply stated. “Don't tell me I can't do that,” used to be one of the things I’d tell some of our contract officers, even some our legal folks. Tell me how in the hell can we get it done. That's what I want to hear. Were not in the business of failure, were here to get the damn job done boys. So forget that negative, we can't do it because you go figure out a way to get it done.
So I think the agency is probably pressed the envelope on several arenas. Probably the one that’s spread the widest, the fastest was in the computer arena. I think in product items, I remember some of the very early ablative material things for firefighters, etcetera. Micro devices, optics for surgery, for lasers. Many arenas have gone into the medical fields and allowed those people to do things that. I'm sure that bioengineers would have eventually gotten to them but some of the technology [inaudible] the scale because we didn't exactly travel on a Greyhound bus when we went up there. Things had to be light weight, new materials, compressed dimensions. So I think the agency probably in many years will get a good evaluation for their technological compression. The revolution that it caused.
Henry Ford I still think gets kudos for the automobile. And I think eventually when people will look back on NASA, they will give a broader base of kudos for the things that we wrote the requirements for in America. And I mean this in the broadest sense. The people went out and solved. The challenge was laid down. And we didn't do all that problem solving. We laid down the challenges. We had ideas. We had concepts. The folks out in corporate America solved those problems and we were a total team from top to bottom.
We could look both directions, down the line and up the line, up to the presidency, and out to the small, single American engineer out there working on some unique piece of a problem. Everybody was a contributor. We were just in the food chain. But probably a focal point from personal interest, news, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. But I think we'll get good marks. I hope that it doesn't change too much in objectives and goals. We were set up as a peaceful explorational space agency. So I hope we don’t lose that.
HOGAN: Good. I believe that will about do it.