NASA Watkins, Glenn - May 28, 2001
Interview with Glenn Watkins
Interviewer: Erika Galan
Date of Interview: May 28, 2001
Location: Watkins home, Georgetown, Texas
GALAN: Today is May 28, 2001. This oral history with Glenn Watkins is being conducted at his home in Georgetown, Texas. The interview is being conducted for the NASA-Johnson Space Center Oral History Project in conjunction with Southwest Texas State University, History Department by Erika Galan.
I would like to begin by having you tell me a little bit about yourself personally—where you are from, if you and your family have lived in Texas your whole lives. Just a little bit about yourself.
WATKINS: Yes Erika, I’m a native Texan. I was born in the big city of Marlin, Texas, just a little south of Waco, about 7000 people when I was growing up. It was a good place to grow up as a young man. One of the things that impacted me while I was in high school was the Russian Sputnik, and that galvanized the whole world. It really lit a fire in me that working in space might be a very fascinating place to go. So, I went from high school to Texas A&M, and Texas A&M at that time was one of the few universities that had an aerospace engineering degree. I entered that program and worked about three different jobs and was a roughneck in the summers in oil fields to get through college. I did graduate. My parents came. My parents had never been to college in their lives. As far as they knew I was the first graduate of a university in the family.
I interviewed about ten different aerospace companies along with NASA, and when I went to the NASA interview and saw people at work that were excited about what they were doing, and even though it was the lowest paying job offer I got, I took it because I liked the excitement that the people had.
Now, thirty-four years later, I have retired. This is the second year of my retirement. We live in Georgetown, my wife and I. My wife is from Washington, D.C. She came from Peru when she was seventeen years old and worked on Capitol Hill on Congress and committees for a large period of that time. And, after I’d gone to a project for NASA up there, I met my future wife and ended up spending seven years in Washington. Then she came back to Texas with me. She has a son. We have two grandchildren that live in Pflugerville. We have a daughter who’s a psychologist in Brenham, and she’s running an office and going to graduate school. And we have three dogs.
GALAN: Wonderful. Can you tell me a little bit about, a little bit more about your educational experiences—what you did once you decided to go to A&M, and how that all played a part in the background leading up to your career in NASA?
WATKINS: Well, I knew I wanted to be an engineer, and the Sputnik launch really did galvanize a lot of people and scared a lot of people; we were really behind the Russians at that time. I had looked at electrical engineering and that just wasn’t as interesting as something I was going to do the rest of my life. And aerospace engineering looked like something very, very interesting to me, and it turned out it was, and, so, I applied myself. Like I said, I had to work three different jobs to keep going because I put myself through school, and I did graduate. Later on I developed an interest in psychology, so I took courses off and on at the Jungian Institute of Psychology in Houston, Texas, from ’66, ’67 and maybe one or two years later. So, I kind of combined this interest in psychology that I have, which I hope helps me with people skills, and engineering background.
GALAN: Great. It seems from what you are saying that during this time in history, the ‘50’s and 60’s, with the U.S. and Russia being caught up in the “space race” to be the first ones to put man in space, would you say that these factors influenced directly your choice to pursue something in aeronautics?
WATKINS: Well, it turned out more specifically that I went from aeronautics to the aerospace part. I interviewed quite a few aeronautic companies, and it was just a job, most of those places that I saw. And [at] NASA, everybody I saw was really excited about what they were doing and, and they went to work early and came back late, and they were enthusiastic. And I really liked that. This was the kind of thing that I wanted to be involved in.
GALAN: What was your first position with NASA, and can you describe to me in layman’s terms the nature of your work and the nature of your responsibilities?
WATKINS: Well, the very first position I had as a very young aged engineer, I came in, and the Gemini was still going on, and they had made a vehicle that they docked with called the Agena. And it was an unmanned vehicle. I was trained as one of the propulsion engineers on Agena. Like I said, I was a very young engineer, and a lot of things NASA was trying to discover at that time, including how they were going to do the operations on the ground to monitor these things and understand them. So, that’s when I first got my feet wet doing that. I remember the most exciting thing I probably did was I figured out the calculations to put in to burn the engines to put it at that time, I think, the highest height above the earth a vehicle had been up to that point. I felt that was, that made me feel a little good; I was part of that and I got my feet wet and basic training on that particular job.
Then that went into the Apollo phase right after that, and there again, I was in the propulsion section because I had majored in propulsion technology at [Texas] A&M in my degree, so I naturally gravitated towards that area. I was in the lunar module section, and the lunar module was the spider-like vehicle that landed on the moon with the astronauts and then, of course, they would come back and rendezvous with the Command and Service Module and transfer back, and the lunar module was left there. That was very, very exciting to me, and it was all new because people really didn’t know how, how they were going to monitor and control those type of things. There was really not much of a blueprint before that for people to, “How do you do this kind of business?” So, we were inventing things as we went along because there really wasn’t a pattern, so to speak, before that and there was a lot of excitement in our section working on these things and it was very competitive. We used to play games and ask questions because if we could ever find some question that someone couldn’t answer. And it was all to put us to the best level possible.
The lunar module had several—had one unmanned flight that we had called LM I, and LM I was an unmanned flight that was using was called a, what they called, a program reader assembly, which is basically a tape recorder used to send all the commands. I learned my first big lesson, in what you would call systems integration because we were sitting on the console and everything started off fine, and the lunar module shut down the engines in three seconds and no one knew why at first, it was unbelievable. It turned out a software engineer had put the wrong number in, what they call, a Delta V counter, which computes how much velocity the engine has been able to give. They had it for a pressurized engine, which will give you a little bit more velocity than an unpressurized engine. Unfortunately, the software thought we had an engine failure and shut us down, and then it was like a stack of dominoes all matching together. After that and no one was prepared for this one failure, and so it was really a mess trying to make that thing come off and work together. But that showed me how important it was for the integration of systems, even the smallest little thing, to make this thing work. It was like the nail that was lost in the horseshoe, and the horse shoe made the horse to where he couldn’t run, and the horse couldn’t run so he couldn’t deliver the message, and he lost he battle. So, that was the first huge [laughs] impression made on me.
Then later on we had the first manned vehicle lunar module, and it was called LM III flight. And I was working in the back control room at NASA, sitting on the console, monitoring propulsion systems and the crews and the vehicle. The first time they fired up the engine, the descent engine was one they fired up with the crew in there, then the one they used to land on the moon was a throttable engine that could change the throttle and the thrust. And when they started to throttle it up the astronauts were saying, “This thing is really vibrating, really vibrating. Should we shut it down?” Luckily, I had studied all of the test information at White Sands [Air Force Base, New Mexico] where they had tested it, and I knew it was a little helium bubbles coming through the engines before everything got settled. So, luckily, I said, “Just hang on!” And sure enough they throttled it up a bit more, and it worked out and it was smooth, but my heart was in my throat at that time.
Later on, we progressed until we got to Apollo 11 to land on the moon. And that was one huge event, you know. Of course, everybody in the world was looking forward to. At that time the whole United States was in a what I call a ‘funk’ because of the Vietnam War, and this country needed some kind of injection of optimism and hope. We were hoping that Apollo 11 would do that as well. We trained for that just like when I was playing football. and we had many, many simulations before we, of course, ever got there. It was all one huge team—the simulations people, all the systems people, all the flight controllers, and all the other engineers working in other areas supporting—really it was thousands of people trying to make this work. It was one of those things where the weakest link could get you, so everybody’s job was very, very important.
Coming up to Apollo 11, we had, we had two teams on the lunar module because one team couldn’t do all of the training to do everything. So, we had basically one that would be the descent team, would land on the moon, and another separate team that we called the ascent team, that would take care of lifting off the moon and making it come back and rendezvous with the Command Service Module. The ascent team, which I was also a part of, we actually stayed in the dormitories in the control center, which they had at that time, because there may be an emergency and they’d have to lift off at any time, and the other team wasn’t trained to do that. We were there in dormitories, which they no longer have, but at that time there were bunk beds and we had speakers going in there telling us what was going on in the control center in Houston. So, when we got ready to land on the moon, I was sitting on the console beside Bob Nance, and Bob was the propulsion flight controller working on the descent engine.
And when you do something for the very first time there’s always unexpected things, because you cannot predict anything like this totally in advance. We didn’t know—there was fear that even the lunar module could sink into the sand once it landed on the moon. We thought maybe there’d be so much dust that it would be kicked up from the engine plume, that they couldn’t even see to land—had those worries. What we didn’t know is that the propellant would be sloshing around so much in the tank of the lunar module that it would really mess up the readings of how much propellant was in there, and because of that it uncovered what we call a low level sensor on the propellant which said we have a 120 seconds of hover time before we can land on the moon, and if you don’t make you’re gonna have to abort. And so this light came on early and it was never supposed to, it was a big shock. Then we had to monitor the hover time, and we were very close, within thirty seconds, we thought, of running out of propellant at that time. We did make it down, and we had our hearts in our throats, and Bob Nance did a very good job in his position. I was riding what was called ‘side saddle’ right by Bob next to the console trying to help him if I could.
As soon as we landed there was a lot of excitement, but there was still a lot more excitement going on that people don’t know about today, and probably forgotten, those that may even have known. The crew was very excited, which we could understand, and they messed throwing switches on the lunar module. They were supposed to be able to bring the pressure down on the pressuring tanks, and because of the excitement they didn’t do the sequence right, and because they didn’t do the sequence right they ended up freezing a propellant line and trapping the fuel in there on both ends, and the heat from the engine was coming back and the pressure in the tank was building to a very high rate. We didn’t have any malfunction analysis that would tell you this would ever happen, so we were having to deal with something totally unexpected that wasn’t supposed to happen. We pulled out the drawings on it, and there was a, a bellows in the fuel line, that’s like an accordion, it can give under pressure. And we bet upon that, and we gave the, we gave the ‘go’ to stay. Otherwise, we could have lifted off almost as soon as we landed. We were close to that, and if we hadn’t been able to understand the situation as well as we did with the bellows and everything we could have panicked and aborted that thing.
So, there was a lot of excitement that very few people knew that was going on at the same time we were about to lift off. That was a huge thing on the landing. And of course, the whole world was watching, the very whole world. Unfortunately, my dad had passed away by that time, but my mother was alive and my brothers, and it meant a lot to them. They sent newspaper clippings to all the hometowns of people who were participating in Apollo, and we were proud, and they were proud as well. The whole world had to look to the United States for doing something that was just almost like a miracle. I thought it was the greatest shot in the arm of optimism and pride that the country could have got at that time.
Of course, the second phase, we had to get men off the moon and bring them back safely, and I was on the ascent team for propulsion for the lunar module. And I think, I don’t know, I think we stayed maybe only a couple of days, maybe a little longer before we decided to come back, and that was a very exciting thing to be there and be part of that. I had written so special computer programs to monitor things on the engines coming off and one of them didn’t work, which we weren’t prepared for at that time, [it] kind of surprised me, but later on we learned how to fix those things. It was all a first, it was, nobody had ever done this and didn’t really know the best way to do it, so we were really finding our way as we was going along, and people were all inventing ways. So, we did get the crew back safely and they returned and there was a tremendous feeling of optimism, I think, and pride, with us, as well as with the whole country. I consider this the greatest engineering achievement the world had ever had, and maybe building the pyramids was number two. I was proud to be a part of that, but there were thousands, thousands of people all doing important work on that. We rolled along through Apollo.
Unfortunately, the interest started to die down until we got to Apollo 13, and Apollo 13, which a movie was made about a couple years ago. My own daughter asked me if I knew anything about this Apollo 13 stuff, and I said, “Well honey, I was a part of that, and she was kind of surprised.” She never even realized what it was. But I was still a fairly young engineer, and we—at that time, the lunar module people, did not come into control center until the command service module was orbiting the moon. However, we had a little problem on our pressure and helium system on the lunar module and at the Cape [Kennedy Space Center] in loading it. So, we came on the way to the moon and we had the crew turn on the instrumentation, so we could look at the pressure to see if it was OK. And if was gonna to be high, then we had decided we would light the engine up to reduce the pressure. Well, lo and behold, the whole lunar module team was there, and we turned on the instrumentation and everything was fine. So, we thought, “Well, we just coming in here was a waste of time.” However, most people were there when the service module blew up, and because they were there, they were immediately able to go to the consoles and start doing their business and allow the transfer from the command service module to the lunar module, as the life boat to save us. So, I always thought that it was just a huge stroke of luck that most all the people were there at that time.
The other thing that I had remembered about Apollo 13 is in our training for it—we always many, many simulations for it to try and hone our skills and be as sharp as we could. It turned out towards the end of all our simulations they put in a problem, a massive electrical problem in the command service module. And we started working on that problem and it became very complicated; it went across all systems, and it affected everything. So, after an hour and a half the head of simulations said, “We’re going to call this off because this is totally unrealistic and is too complicated.” Well, that’s exactly what happened on Apollo 13.
The one we couldn’t work and was too complicated turned out to be the one we really had to work. Then the fact that the people were there accidentally was another stroke of luck. So, those are two things that are not too well known for Apollo 13.
After that, people in the control center were given the Presidential Medal of Freedom from the president, and we all prized having that, but everyone did a magnificent job. People actually, they didn’t sleep on cots as in the movie, they slept up on the floor, under consoles, short-recorders, and they worked tremendously long hours without going home or showering because there was so much to do and so little time. We had to re-write procedures that had taken months and months and months to be written and to be certified, to be corrected, and we were writing those and they were being passed up to the crew almost instantaneously, without all those rigors of checking and everything. And to have done that and no major mistake was just an amazing feat I thought. I think we probably had a little help from God there, too, to make this thing really work right, because it was really looking like long odds to ever get anything like that back. So, that of course, that mission stands out hugely in my mind, and you felt like this was an even greater feat that Apollo 11 was. It was just, just tremendous team task and something to be proud of, for the United States and for NASA.
Of course, we went on to Apollo, we had I think Apollo 14 had lightening hit it shortly after launch, which opened up a lot of excitement, but everything worked out. And then Apollo 17, I believe was the last mission to the moon, and I worked that particular mission and I have a couple of flags, well actually I have three flags, that have been to the moon and back, one of them was from that last mission. So, I’m proud to have that, that little piece of an artifact there. So, that’s an overview of Apollo and then the next big program was the Space Shuttle.
GALAN: How did your job change when you moved to section chief in 1975, and what exactly led to the change in your in position?
WATKINS: In the Shuttle, OMS/RCS [orbital maneuver systems/ reaction control system] propulsion systems was that particular section, my boss served as the head, had moved on. And, so, I started into that job. It had about twenty-five people, which was contractors and NASA people. You were not only responsible for developing something, again completely new, because you had a reusable spacecraft—the Space Shuttle was going to come back, developing all of the monitoring systems and procedures for that. You had to oversee that, and you also had to be responsible for all of these people at the same time, managing them and motivating them and working with them, and also there was some recruiting involved.
I will say that you never know what you’re going to encounter with people, because I had one young engineer working for me, that I cared about quite a bit, that had just been married to a Japanese girl from this university. He came in one Monday, and he just went over the edge. He, mentally, just flipped out, and I was in his sports car trying to take him home at that time, and he almost ran that sports car to kill both of us. I got him back to the office and told my boss at the time to get the people with the straight jackets, and they came and hauled this young fellow off. I went with his wife down there to check him in the mental institute, and that was something you never anticipate you’re going to have to deal with. You have those kind of things, and you have people with marital problems. I had one fellow whose wife was a heavy alcoholic—it really influenced his life. So, you had a lot of things to deal with besides the technical type things in making this thing work.
GALAN: You mentioned OMS/RCS systems. Can you just explain to me exactly what those systems are?
WATKINS: Yes, on the Space Shuttle, these are the two orbital systems for propulsion. You have three main engines and two solid rocket engines to get you to orbit, but once you get there, basically in order to get around and control the vehicle and be stable, you need two OMS engines, orbital maneuvering system, to move you to different orbits and to help you de-orbit, and you have forty-four jets, which is called the reaction control system, on the Shuttle. This is a huge number of engines to monitor and to make sure they’re operating correctly, and in Apollo we only had sixteen RCS jets that we had to monitor. I knew from experience that no one man could monitor forty-four of those engines real-time and make it work. So, I worked on specially developing a monitoring system that would go on the on-board computers that would detect a jet that failed on and shouldn’t be firing, and one that failed off and should be firing, and then if it was leaking to shut it down. It ended up working quite well, and that was all based on our experience with Apollo to make that work. Those were the two main different types of systems, and they mostly came into play once you got on orbit.
GALAN: Can you tell me a little bit about the Shuttle software mode team? What that exactly was and your part in that?
WATKINS: Yes, before the first Space Shuttle flight, the software in the Space Shuttle was going to be an order of magnitude more complicated and detailed than what we had in Apollo. Many things were gonna be done in the software. They went across many of the systems, all the systems in the Space Shuttle. We had a team that went to Rockwell [plant in Downey, California], at least on a monthly basis, and we stayed about a week each time. We had representatives from all the different areas of the Space Shuttle. Guidance, we had propulsion, which I represented, the environmental control, all the electrical, all the different systems, and we would go work on the software. They had a lot of sequences that were programmed in the software to operate, and they would do things like when you flip one switch it’d open a whole set of valves, you could cross the propellant over. They would have sequences in there if you had to abort the Space Shuttle right after lift off to come back to the Cape. It was a lot of software, and a lot of systems involved.
So, we had this mode team that went out and spent a lot of time at Rockwell. The head of our mode team worked so hard, and it was really too much of a job for one person, and eventually he had to leave NASA because of health reasons. And they replaced him with three different people in order to make this thing work. Everybody was very afraid this software glitch would get us, and there’d be a problem. So, we had to work very hard on this team to make sure that the software and the system all matched up.
GALAN: Would you say that that was one of the major challenges that you encountered in this position?
WATKINS: Well, that was a major challenge, of course the software, but coming up with the systems and everything, how you would monitor this type of reasonable spacecraft with so much going on was really more complicated than the Apollo. And, like I said, this was new ground that was being plowed again, and it was all a challenge—not just that part [laughs]. That was just one of the many, many pieces of this thing that had to go together to make it work right. I developed a system, I remember, that would monitor the jet activity on orbit and compute how much fuel he was using, because our fuel sensors didn’t work when you’re just floating around. So, this thing would take the fuel rate and the time that it was burned, and it would compute and give you new things. All the things we learned on Apollo, we had to put in effect, plus a lot of new wrinkles, in order to make it work.
GALAN: I want to go back just a little bit when we were talking about your experiences in the Apollo program. As it came to an end in 1972, how did this play a part into how you progressed to your position as section chief?
WATKINS: Of course, I went to—we re-organized after Apollo and then we had people that came from the command service module area. Their propulsion systems were united with people from the lunar module propulsion engineers into one large section, say of about twenty-five people that just worked on the Space Shuttle and developing the procedures on how you’re going to operate that. We all came together, and my boss was the section head there, and eventually he moved on, and I took over to lead that for some period of time. It was a larger section than we had even in Apollo, there were quite a few people. This was very complicated on us all.
GALAN: How did your job change when you moved from section chief for the Shuttle to senior systems chief for the Centaur?
WATKINS: Well, it was a completely different thing. The Centaur was a vehicle, that was going to be in the payload bay of the Space Shuttle and it was planned to put planetary probes on top of that. One was the Galileo that would go for planetary exploration. The Centaur had been used as a basic rocket in other programs. Our task was to take this vehicle and change it or adapt it so that it would fit in the Space Shuttle, which was kind of a force-fit type of thing to make it work, because it really wasn’t designed for the Shuttle as such. It ended up it was very complicated affair trying to force fit the Centaur to really work in the Space Shuttle, and eventually the project was called to a halt because it just got too complicated. It didn’t seem feasible, but what it did do, it did open up opportunity at that time.
They had a new group that was forming in Washington [D.C.] called the Concept Development Team, 1983, and they had about probably twenty-two, twenty-three engineers from all the NASA centers, including the one in Houston, to come together to form a concept and an operation and an understanding of how a space station would operate and show one could be practical in this design. I went to Washington, and I worked on it for one year, and they had other engineers from other centers, and it was successful. We got funding from President Reagan; he endorsed it and approved funding for it, and Congress approved it as well, a science advisor. This opened the door for many years later because now we’re actually building a space station in space, one piece at a time. It all goes back to that one Concept Development Team. If it hadn’t been successful, I don’t know if we’d have a space station being developed at this particular time.
GALAN: You mentioned that President Reagan provided you with funding in ‘83. Would you say that there was still the same amount of enthusiasm as you experienced when you first started working with NASA?
WATKINS: Well, I would say on my part there was still a lot of enthusiasm, but I would say after landing on the moon, the public’s enthusiasm probably waned quite a bit after we had done it one time, unfortunately. But for me, the space station was a brand-new thing just like the Space Shuttle was when I worked on it. I always liked to work on brand new things in the beginning, because if you’re there to do it first it’s a lot more fun than being there to do it thirty-first.
GALAN: Do you have any neat stories to tell me about your experiences so far working with NASA? I’m sure you have encountered quite a few interesting challenges.
WATKINS: Well, NASA is like any place [with a] large amount of people—there’s always going to be some people problems associated with NASA—some conflicts, and some different management styles that go along with it. I have seen everything from the young fellow losing his sanity and ending up in a hospital and not really having a friend because he was a perfectionist. Working at NASA you constantly re-do things over and over. There’s no right one answer like you have in a university when you work a problem; you work it once and that’s through. But [at] NASA you’re constantly refining everything you do to get a little better and better and that type of thing. It was very disconcerting for a young man that’s a perfectionist. So, I’ve seen that type of thing.
Like I said, the head of our software mode team, he had a very difficult problem mentally with all of the responsibility that was replaced on his shoulders. It was a very difficult time with that heavy responsibility on him. He left eventually there were three different people that took that man’s job. So, we did get a little bit smarter on dividing up those responsibilities, because you just can’t put it all on top of one person no matter how good they are. I’ve seen those types of mental problems.
I’ve seen marital problems. When I worked in flight control division at that time it was always said that the flight control division had the highest divorce rate of any division, at NASA in Houston anyway. We felt like that was attributed probably to the stress of the job at that time. So, you do see a lot of those things, but you do see people able to conquer those things and continue on. I always did see that kind of spirit at NASA, and it worked out. In fact, this young fellow I talked about that had the mental problem; I didn’t hear from him, years, he went, for years, because he went back to Washington where he grew up. And many, many, many years later, one of the astronauts called me and said this lady wanted to know if I knew this particular fellow, and I said, “Yes I did.” “Well, then that’s his mother and he’d like to get in contact with you.” He did call me, and he was very successful many, many years later, but he said he never ever forgot NASA, and constantly followed it.
So, you have quite an array of personal problems that people have to deal with. NASA is like any big organization: if you have a good idea that’s not enough, you have to be able to sell the idea, as well. So, people figured out that they had to develop those skills of developing their presentations and been able to win or it didn’t do any good. The real world came in then, that you had to learn those, or you didn’t make it.
I’ll never forget the first big presentation I had to make to one of my high NASA bosses, and I just a young engineer. I had to make a presentation on a very complicated thing, my boss stopped me in the middle of my presentation and said, “Well let me ask you something, if you’re mother was here could she understand it.” And I said, “ What do you mean?” He said, “ You have to make this simple enough that your mother could understand, because if you can’t, you don’t understand it.” I never forgot that, I thought that was pretty good advice. I tried to guide, later on, through all my presentations that kind of philosophy—to make it where anybody could understand it if possible, even my mother.
GALAN: You mentioned some of the challenges that you and your co-workers were experiencing. How exactly did teamwork play a part? I mean, I know that teamwork is crucial in every environment, but it sounds like because of the high stress that teamwork perhaps played an important role?
WATKINS: Well, to me, I sort of equate it to a football team. Every member on that football team is very, very important. If you have a weak link on a football team, like you have a defensive tackle that’s not strong, well, the opposition will take advantage of that and run to that side, and you’ll end up defeated. A team, like flight operations that manned the consoles during these key missions, was the same way. Everybody on that team was very, very valuable and very important. You never knew when a problem could come, you never knew what area it would impact, and so everyone had to be equally strong. There was no one individual more important than any other. They were all very, it was all a chain linked together that had to work, and it all had to be strong. There were many, many people behind the scenes that contributed to the success of that team. The teams were all drilled just like you would in football, having scrimmages and practices. We had many, many simulations where the simulation people would try to invent problems, introduce them in and see how fast the team could respond and do the appropriate action. So, there again you had the simulations people, although not involved during the actual mission, were critical to making this team respond and be trained in the right manner. It was all one huge team, working either in front or behind the lines to make it work. No one ever knew where some problem may be, and then if someone made a mistake in here developing procedures in the first place that could be a problem. All team members had to be strong.
GALAN: What exactly led to your, to move you to your next position as space manager, space station maintenance manager?
WATKINS: Well, I’ll tell you what led there was when I went to Washington [D.C.] for the concept development team, I met my future wife, Martha, there. Martha had worked on Capitol Hill, in Congress, for quite a few years, since she was seventeen years old in coming from Peru. I was there for that year, and our relationship grew quite strong, but Martha was not ready to come to Texas at the end of that year. I had to go back to Texas and so a real key thing in my own mind is to still work for NASA but find a way to work for Washington—NASA in Washington. It took me about a year to make that transfer. That particular job turned out to be space station manager, maintenance and servicing manager for NASA at that particular time. My first job back at Washington on a permanent basis was that particular job, but it was driven also from personal reasons.
GALAN: What were your responsibilities as space station manager?
WATKINS: Well, you were—we were looking at the concept that would define what kind of methodology and processing would you do to maintain the space station. We had never had a vehicle, like the space station, where you have to maintain it 100 percent in space. You have the Space Shuttle that is reusable, but it comes back to the Cape and is worked on by many, many people and refurbished, and fixed, and getting ready to go for the next time. But here is the space station, a spacecraft that’s flying 365 days a year, [that] doesn’t come back to the earth. So, you have to design everything that can be fixed and maintained in space. That was a brand-new thing we had never done before. It was a significant challenge to come up with concepts that would work on the space station that would be practical and also fit in with the design of the space station and fit in with operations. That was a huge, huge type of thing to be able to come up with that and work on that. That basic philosophy and concept that I developed at that time is being used right now on the space station, and it is built where all the pieces can be repaired and replaced in space. There are enough redundant systems on the space station, that even though you have some in repair and they’re not operating, that the space station will still continue to operate in a safe manner. All those things went together. To me it was a very interesting thing to work on, because here again it was something [that] never before had been done. We were there to try and figure out a way to do it.
GALAN: I read in your resume that you said you wrote the program “white paper.” Can you tell me a little bit about that?
WATKINS: Yes, white paper is kind of a generic term that NASA uses, and a white paper covers a—usually some specific subject, and they’re usually developed to address some problem or some methodology. Most of the time they would come together on a front end of a program, when you’re starting to do things. White paper will detail out your philosophy of how you’re going to work that problem, your concept, how your going to make it work, and the process of how you’re gonna make it work. It is enough there that, that at once read, the whole philosophy can be laid out and understood. And from that white paper you will go on and develop all of your detail documents, specifications, processes and everything, to reinforce that. So, it’s kind of like the big top level philosophy that ties everything together.
GALAN: Sounds very interesting. I have here that you were a level B technical maintenance manager. What exactly is level B?
WATKINS: Well, level B was the organizational element of the space station at that time frame, and it was in Houston of course. Level A was the top-level management in Washington [D.C.]. Level B was where organization would really do the design and the operations of the station in Houston. At that particular time the space station was really—all the detail work was going on in Houston, so that’s what level B means. Now the space station was there initially in Houston. Later on it got moved to Reston, Virginia, outside of Washington. That had some problems on cost overruns and management problems. Eventually it came back to Houston again, where it presently is, and is being—the design has gone on and the launching and the building of the space station and process ends. So, level B was the first time that it was in Houston.
GALAN: How did you position as space station maintenance manager prepare you for your next position with NASA?
WATKINS: I think each position that you had always adds and builds on to the experience, the skills that you develop, and this was another one. Developing all of these initial concepts and laying out the detailed plans that fit in, and then working with all of the different people from all of the different centers to make this happen was sort of a new challenge to me that I had never done. That gave me experience in this process that would help all of those people skills, especially bringing—integrating people from the other centers. It always goes in your pocket as another thing that you build on to help you in all your jobs.
GALAN: We were talking a little bit about the position you held after you were space station maintenance manager. What exactly was your position after that and what were you responsible for?
WATKINS: Well, this was the main one in Washington, was the servicing manager. At that time, we were looking for concepts and ways that we could service the satellites for the construction, assembly and maintenance of, that we would hope we could bring to the space station and be able to work on that. Now that—since then has kind of faded out [and] is not one of the objectives of the space station anymore. But, at that time, that was one of our main things. We were also trying to bring all of our servicing and maintenance things together so we could use the same resources on the space station. We also had, in development at that time, something called OMV [Orbital Maneuvering Vehicle], which would be an unmanned vehicle that would be controlled from the ground. This vehicle would be used to go up and grab satellites and possibly do servicing with it, and I worked on that as well. It was a very neat assignment, but it never came fully into fruition. That passed away so we don’t have that vehicle now. Maybe sometime in the future [there] may be a need to develop something like that. There’s, [as] far as I know, there’s no big plan to service, assembly, or repair satellites on board the space station, because now I think its come to the point that its just cheaper to put a brand-new satellite in space than repair an old one. They were interesting things to work on. It always gives you good experience even though it didn’t happen. That’s about the main thing for that area.
GALAN: So, the two positions went together pretty well?
WATKINS: Yes, servicing and maintenance are like the left hand and right hand. They go right together.
GALAN: How did your career progress with NASA after that sort of phased out?
WATKINS: Well, [it] ended up that Bob Crippen came to Washington and I was—I’ll never forget this, the day it happened—it all relates to Crippen, but I’ll get to that in a minute—but I was giving a briefing to the administrator, associate administrator for the space station, John Hodge, on this new concept, idea that I had. The briefing was going real well, and then someone ran into the room as white as a sheet, and they said the Space Shuttle just blew up. You could have heard a pin drop. I turned to Mr. Hodge and said, “Should we discontinue this briefing?” And he said, “Well we can’t do anything right now; just continue on.” So, I continued on with my briefing and no one in that room [was] absolutely paying one bit of attention to what I was saying. And I knew I was going through the motions, but I did—but I do remember that everybody says on these critical things in life you remember where you were and what you were doing. So, that’s exactly what I was doing the day that the Space Shuttle blew up.
Well, Bob Crippen, who was the pilot on the first Space Shuttle, came to Washington from the Cape to head up the Space Shuttle. It turned out that Bob knew me all the way back to the Shuttle. We had worked on this software mode team together. He was the astronaut representative to the team. Bob hired me to be his chief for JSC operations division at NASA headquarters, which was responsible for the policy, the plans, the budget, for all the Shuttle operations out of Houston, and other top-level type things and requirements. I went back from the space station over to Shuttle because it just seemed like the right thing to do. Shuttle was in a very, very difficult position after that. Bob was the right man to be leading this effort, because I went with him almost every week across Washington to the National Research Council, engineers and scientist that were overseeing the rebuilding of the Space Shuttle become safer. Bob was very, very good with people, being able to make them feel comfortable, to know that we were going to work out all these complex problems. I learned a lot being by his side watching all this process with Crippen. It was critical that all that all that confidence be there. It did turn out that all those things were corrected; the Space Shuttle [was] much safer after that. It was a pleasure to work with Bob through that period and everything. So, it was the next step, I guess.
GALAN: What was your personal reaction to the Space Shuttle blowing up, and how did it influence you in your position there at NASA?
WATKINS: Well, I was tremendously shocked, of course, by the Space Shuttle blowing up. There again the things that come up are the things that you just never foresee. Everyone always assumed that if the Shuttle would blow up it would be some problem in Space Shuttle main engines, the three main engines used to lift it up off the ground, because they are very complicated. And everyone always assumed that would be the weakest link, and of course it turned out that wasn’t the weakest link. It was the solid rocket booster that got us into trouble. I was shocked that happened, and I was shocked that it wasn’t one of the main engines; it was completely different. I knew it was another critical point, milestone at NASA, on NASA’s future, because [if] we didn’t have the confidence with this and work things out, NASA’s future was going to be very limited. The same as earlier in my career with the Apollo fire when we lost 3 astronauts at the Cape—another critical point. I knew that this was going to be a point that NASA could be made or broken, and that it probably wasn’t going to be a quick fix. And it turned out that its was quite a while before we got back to fly the next one.
GALAN: Where did you see—did you personally believe that NASA was going? Apparently by this time you had a couple of setbacks. Were you worried at all as to the future of NASA?
WATKINS: Well, I was after the Space Shuttle because I knew with that disaster, if we had another one blow up anytime in, quote, “the near future,” which I considered five years, you could probably shut NASA down. So, not only are you at your critical point, but you know that you couldn’t make another error or the whole agency probably would be gone.
GALAN: So, there was a lot of, would you say, pressure, perhaps?
WATKINS: There was a lot of pressure not to let this happen, of course, in the safety and the personal reasons, but everyone also knew that if you had another critical failure anytime soon that that wouldn’t be tolerated.
GALAN: Can you explain to me a little bit about what it was that you were in charge of as chief of JSC operations division?
WATKINS: Yes, we were primarily concerned with the Shuttle operations and the ones associated with Johnson Spacecraft Center. We had oversight of the Shuttle operations contractor, which is very large. We had oversight to develop the policy for JSC Operations and the plans, and the budget, to the resources to do JSC Operation. Since I had worked in operations, I understood a lot of these things, and I knew the people that were there. So, we developed a pretty good relationship for working together to get the most important things accomplished. And then, of course, there were management plans that went along with that. We had Congressional questions that would come up quite a bit, and they would be related to the Space Shuttle. We would have to carry those out and help work those with the Center to make sure that the right answers were developed and given back. So, that was the working relationship with Congress that I’ve never had to do before.
So, you had Congress that you were working with. You had the centers, especially JSC in Houston, that you had to interface with and you had to have some level of trust with those people. Luckily, since I had worked there, I knew the people. That helped establish the confidence on both sides to make things work a little bit better.
GALAN: What was it that led to your next position with NASA after you served as chief JSC operations division?
WATKINS: Well, I had really wanted personally to come back to Texas. I’m a native Texan, and at that time my daughter, was in—I think was in college, and I wanted to be closer. My mom was still alive, but she was by herself. So, personally, I did want to come back to Houston. It just so happened, at that time, that the Congressman my wife was working for didn’t run for re-election, and she didn’t have a job right at that moment, so it was a window of opportunity to make a change. I convinced her to come back to Texas because we had such a moderate climate here, and we didn’t have any roaches or mosquitoes, or anything. So, she believed me and came back to Houston. She’s still kidding me about those roaches though and the climate.
So, that was one of the main drivers and that was a good opportunity to come back and work at the space station, on the space station again. And it was something I’d never done, and it was trying to develop the integration of what they called distributed systems on board the space station. All that meant was that the electrical systems had to tie together in each module, and they also fit in with environmental systems and navigation systems. There were like eight of these different communications, eight of these systems, and they all went across the different modules aboard the space station. My job was to try to develop the architecture, which ties all these together where they work properly.
Now, this was not in operations it was the program office. And, at that time, we had a small group of people in Houston working, and the main body of people were in Reston, Virginia. But I had opportunity to come back and work in that office and that was something that I had never done before, and I thought it would be an interesting thing. It involved working with all of the centers, because they all had different parts of the space station, and also working with the contractors trying to resolve problems across these different interfaces.
GALAN: What were the main differences you saw working, going from working in operations to working in systems integration?
WATKINS: Well, there’s a lot of things that you learn in operations that will help you doing any other job, because there are such things as integrations in operations and working across things. So, that did carry over. At this particular job it was the program management, so, your main thing was to identify problems, identify the people that needed to work those and the plans, and make sure they were done. So, you didn’t always get in the real details like you may have to in operations, but you had to make sure that the problems worked, and the right people were doing it.
GALAN: By this time in your career at NASA did you—were you still working—not just you I guess, you and your co-workers—were you still working the long hectic hours, and did you still feel the same amount of pressure and enthusiasm that you described during the Apollo program and a few years after?
WATKINS: I don’t think the enthusiasm was quite as high as it was in Apollo. It would be very difficult to reach that summit again I think, because it was such a huge event and working towards, and it captured the excitement of the people and the NASA workers and everybody else as well. So, it wasn’t the peak you had with Apollo, but we also knew that for NASA to have a future it had to have a space station. That was the next step after the Space Shuttle, or there just wouldn’t be very much future or growth for NASA without it, so we all knew it was important and it was key to make it work. And I had worked off and on, on the space station several times, so I wanted to make it a reality before I left NASA. But it didn’t have quite the enthusiasm that Apollo did, but it was a necessary thing.
GALAN: Where exactly did your career take you after you served as systems integration manager?
WATKINS: Well, it was very interesting because right after, about two years I got into the job back in Houston, lo and behold, they dissolved the management structure at Reston, Virginia, for the space station. Now, we were a satellite group in Houston, but we were working under the management in Reston, and that was all resolved. There were conflicts with the administrator of NASA at that time between that particular group and cost overruns, so that whole group was dissolved; so my job went away, so to speak. I had to find a new job at that time in the pretty near future.
It turned out that I went to work for the safety and reliability organization there at JSC. They were starting their early work on the space station, and they had to be involved in the operation and real-time monitoring of the space station. They knew it was going to be different from show but they didn’t know exactly what. I came in, and this was a great opportunity for them, because they needed someone with that expertise, especially [someone] heavily involved [in] operations but knew the space station well. It was an opportunity for me to step in and, again, try and develop something brand new that was not done up to that point. And I had pretty free rein to start doing that.
I started with no assistance at all and built up a very nice organization. We developed a concept of operations for the space station for safety. The safety organization in Houston is not only responsible for their part, but they are the managers for all of the safety for the space station program, including all of the international partners involved. You had to link yourself together, not only with Houston but the international partners to make this thing work. We also knew the space station was going to be up there twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, unlike the Shuttle that just went up there seven days, maybe more, and then it came back. So, this is a very different ball game for safety at that point, as how do they respond to the new environment.
GALAN: What do you feel were your greatest contributions to NASA during this particular time?
WATKINS: Well, like I said, during this particular time I think coming up with the groundwork, the baseline for how the safety organization would interface and become part of the space station operations during the flight, I think, was a big process. Also, at that time, I had to go to bat for the budget funding, not only for that year but many years out in the future for the space station. I had to forecast by how much resources and manpower would be needed to do this job many years in the future. I, along with the others, built manpower models that detailed this out and that worked real well, and now they are commonly used because they work so well. But I’m glad to say that the forecast that I made, and we got funding for well in[to] the future, is working out to be what they need right now. It’s pretty close to the lines to what it has. So, getting the dollar resources, getting the concepts and the protocol for working with the Russians and the Japanese and Europeans and all that, that again was a brand new problem that I’d never done before and NASA hadn’t either. So, that was a proud thing.
GALAN: Can you tell me of your experiences in working with the Russians?
WATKINS: Yes. The Russians are very proud people, I think. They are very good people. My experience when I went there, in Moscow, that—we had one experience on a Russian subway. A friend and I was on there and a drunk got on and was making a lot of noise and pointing at us and he stumbled off. And when he did, the Russian women all moved over and made places for us to sit on the bench as their way of apologizing for that kind of behavior that they didn’t approve of. So, that gave me a little insight into the people. Then I saw many women selling their baked goods and things on the street. I also saw many soldiers that were missing limbs that were in the subway trying to get a little bit of money.
I thought the people had a lot of hardship. I think they were tough people because they’ve gone through a lot of history in their country, trying to be invaded, and they’ve been able to withstand that type of thing. When we were in the technical meetings, I glanced out of the room and I could see engineering buildings behind me, [unintelligible] facility, and I could see the Russian engineers working on draft boards instead of computers and working on those draft boards is something we had done in years and years ago and then moved up to computers. So, they had to work with primitive tools to do their job, but they were able to do their job. They had a lot of experience. They had, really had a space station, the Mir, a lot longer than we had, and it had worked, and they had to do it on the shoestring sometimes, but they were very innovative in getting things done with a little amount of resources. I was impressed with that.
I did notice though the lower engineers were very reluctant to speak out in public on anything the management above them said. They always kept quiet even though they knew it might not be quite right, but in private they work with you and they were very nice. We always tried to be as nice as possible to them as well. I remember going in the control center in Moscow. I’d always wanted to be there in their control center, and I was turning around and I noticed a little chandelier shop in their control center in the hallway. And this thing was not much bigger than a phone booth, but it had crystal chandeliers, and I was amazed at why in the world something like this would be in a technical control center. I knew to ask the Russian engineers after we were alone, and I asked him I said, “Why in the world would you have a crystal chandelier shop in the control center?” He said, “Well, I hate to say this but we’re so desperate for money that we rented it to a Czechoslovakian chandelier company.” So, they were—he was ashamed that they had to stoop to that level, but they were very desperate for money.
But they had a lot of things that they had learned. They did things a little differently than we do, but they understood a lot of things. They understood that you cannot give the crew in a space station too much to do, that you had to give them leeway on carrying out their jobs. On the Space Shuttle we’re used to compacting everything down to the minute and the tests to be performed, because they’re not there that long in space, but on a space station you’re there all the time. So, psychologically, if you give the crew too much to do and without much freedom on how you execute those things, you have a problem. I think they probably understood better than we did. So, that’s one of the big lessons that I think we learned from them, as well as others.
GALAN: Can you tell me about your next and last position and how you sort of came to that position? And what made you want to retire thereafter?
WATKINS: Well, the next position I had was as space station chief engineer for safety and reliability. What this did—I had in training other people to take over the safety operations for the space station. I had a young engineer that I’d been training, Perry Benett, to do that job. Perry was just about ready to step up to the challenge of that, so I went on to service and still give them assistance to get things done and this would be kind of a transition period. I knew this would be my last assignment before I retired. And so, in this particular job, I helped, of course, in the operations when they needed it for guidance, and also for the budget. I still usually presented all that which was very key, because if you don’t have the money you don’t have the job. We had to bring together the operations part of NASA with the safety organization, and, for the first time, we had a liaison between those two big organizations. Since I had worked in operations and had worked in safety, I was a pretty good fit for that. So, I went to all their high-level meetings and everything, and we tried to make things work a lot better between the two organizations to resolve problems before they went up higher than that, and to make things work smoother. I think that was a good thing. After I left, they continued to do that, because they found it was a very good thing to make organizations work together and resolve those problems before they become too big.
In that position I also had special studies or problems that would come up. One of them was, “What type of units would you use during the operation of the space station?” We had two different sets of units at that time. We had the Europeans and the Russians operating on the metric system. We had the U.S. still wanting to operate in the English system, pounds and feet. There was a big reluctance at NASA, in Houston, to change to go from English, because they’d used that for years and years and of course the internationals were all on different systems.
And I did a pretty good study on this, what would happen if you had two different systems, and what would happen if you had the same type of units used across the board. We presented that to the center director and head of operations, and it was immediately shown there with the study that it was much, much safer to have one set of units that were common. We did select the metric units, and we were able to present that where it was very easy to see and understand you needed to go with that. So, they did go that way and we are operating in those common units today. I think it was a very good decision, because someone later, JPL [Jet Propulsion Laboratory] with their Martian probe, they had two teams working through different systems, English and Metric, and something got loaded accidentally, and we lost a multimillion-dollar space probe just because of that. I’m glad we brought we had that study and we brought about that change. I bet there were other type of things, like how do you use control EVA [extravehicular activity], or the crew being able to go out and work on systems, and that was not controlled that well up to that point, so we made it as a resource to be controlled.
GALAN: Having been a part of NASA for thirty-four years, the time and the energy that you spent there had to have been enormous. How would you say that your career at NASA affected you and your family personally?
WATKINS: Well, I would say there are some points in time that the career can affect the family quite a bit. When I was in operations and working on the console, you had to work many off hours; we had our simulations very late at night because that’s when we had access to the computer, so you’re away from your family. You had these missions you had to be there; it took you away. That was an impact on your family. Then, of course, later on you go into another positions, you have to travel quite a bit. You travel to Washington. You travel to other centers as well, like Marshall Spaceflight Center in Goddard [Alabama], and there again you are away from your families. So, those kind of things do impact your family to some extent depending on how good your marriage is and how you work problems out. But they do put stress and working long hours sometimes can also put stress on you, because you come back [and] you’re wound up and a little bit tight, and I’m sure that type of thing affects your spouse as well.
GALAN: What did you consider your most challenging milestones in your career working with the space program?
WATKINS: Well, landing on the moon and getting on back was a huge challenge because it was so much into the unknown. We really—it was still pretty early in the space program, and we didn’t have everything understood very well, and everything had to be developed new. We knew there could be a major mistake, or we’d have a huge problem. I was a very young engineer and full of energy and it took all of that, and it was definitely in a new area. That was a huge challenge. The Shuttle was a challenge, a huge challenge as well because [it was] the first time we had a reusable spacecraft that would come back. Being able to develop the monitoring procedures for the spacecraft, which was really a lot more complex than the lunar module that I had worked on and had many more things to monitor, developing that baseline to do that was a huge, huge challenge that we had to face. It was a different kind of challenge from Apollo, because in our particular—there were a lot more engines that had to be monitored at the same time. We developed a lot of software monitoring programs that went on board the Space Shuttle to do this, because it was too much for any person to be able to look at and do on their own. So, there were a lot of software things that were really brand new for us that went on board the spacecraft, and they eventually worked out real well. And that’s always a challenge to be the first one to do something. It’s a lot better to be the first one to do something than the thirty-first, as I said.
Then the space station—the fact that we keep the space station there 365 days a year, twenty-four hours a day, and we have to maintain it. And the part of that process to come up and develop a concept that was workable for maintaining it, was something brand, brand new. That was very interesting to be a part of that. The last part was bringing the safety organization in to work on the space station, to a new environment. There again the station was there all the time unlike the Shuttle, which they had never done. So, it was a very interesting thing to bring that together and develop that.
GALAN: What do you consider your own personal most significant accomplishment working with the space program?
WATKINS: I really would say it was probably Apollo 13, because everything that we had produced before that had gone through months and months of review. And to be able to come down and change things almost instantaneously, and be set up to prove without error, was a tremendous amount of pressure on all the ground team. And to be able to pull that off and respond under that stress and those long, long working conditions without an error, or big error anyway, was a significant thing. It’s like an old coach of mine used to say, “It’s how you show up at the showdown that counts,” and that was the showdown that was a critical point. The whole team produced, and I felt like I produced, as well. So, that was a very satisfying experience.
GALAN: At that early point in your career, did you feel the nation could actually meet JFK’s [President John F. Kennedy’s] challenge to land a man on the moon and return him to earth by the end of the decade? Did you feel that was actually something that was feasible and could be accomplished?
WATKINS: I thought it was going to be extremely close. I really—I thought everything would just about have to work perfectly all up to that point to pull it off. I thought it’d be very, very close. There wasn’t much room for error. Then when we had the Apollo fire at Cape Kennedy, and we lost three crew members. At that point I didn’t think it was possible. I thought that was such a huge development on the program, that we had to respond to and would delay things. I didn’t really think we would recover enough to able to meet President Kennedy’s challenge. But as it turned out, NASA is very resilient and is able to confront these changes and problems and overcome them and come back. It was really satisfying a huge thing like this overcome and still end up meeting the challenge President Kennedy put on us.
GALAN: Were there any people with which, with whom you worked that made a significant impact on you personally?
WATKINS: Oh yes, there were a tremendous number of people that were very capable, very responsible and very high-class individuals. These people would have done well in any endeavor in life. Some were very good teachers to me. John Wagner, who was one of my first bosses from Louisiana, John was very able teacher and good person. Of course, I worked for Eugene Kranz, who was the head of flight operations. Gene is pretty well known around now for Apollo 13. He’s written a book on that subject and is known all over the world as one of the real space pioneers that we have. He came in and really helped develop everything, even before I got there, from Mercury on up, to what it was. Gene was a model for us because he was very efficient. He would have a large work ethic and he was a good leader. He was a very good role model. He was an inspiration to us as well.
People like James Hannigan, who was my branch chief at one time during the lunar module, was very good. Jim knew exactly how to work with people and to give you a compliment [background noise] and the right encouragement at the right time. We had people like that. We had Christopher Kraft, who was JSC center director, and he had been the head of operations initially. He’s known as one of the space pioneers, along with Gene Kranz, for making NASA what it is today. So, there are a lot of people that went along. A lot of my peers were also inspirational to me as well for what they put in and for even—not even receiving the recognition probably that they were due but doing a tremendous job. So, I think there are a lot of people that affect you and inspire you.
GALAN: Looking back to when you first became involved in aerospace/aeronautics would you have ever imagined that it would lead you where it would lead you exactly?
WATKINS: No, you really—it’s a hard time to see down the road. When my dad was still alive, when I graduated from college and for about a year after that, and when I was going through all these job offers I had, he’d said, “Well, NASA is going to be here for a very long time and these other companies are going to come and go.” So, he probably had a little bit better insight that I had that NASA was going to be here for a very long time. But as I got that later on after Apollo, then I came to believe that a lot more, that NASA would have a future after Apollo. But you never know what path you’re going to end up going down, when you go down any of these things, where you’re gonna end up.
GALAN: What do you see for the future of manned and unmanned spacecraft or spaceflight?
WATKINS: Well, there was a big article I had read yesterday in the Austin paper, and I concur with it; I thought this for a long time. Unfortunately, I don’t think that we will ever go back to the moon in my lifetime. I think I’m privileged to have been present and part of that when we did. So, I don’t think that’s gonna happen again for quite awhile. And I think even longer it’s going to be before a manned mission to Mars. It doesn’t have the political and the popular backing right now to make that very feasible. So, unless there’s some huge unforeseen thing that effects that path, I’m afraid it’s gonna be, maybe be my children or great-grandchildren before that possibility comes back up.
The manned part of flight is going to be near Earth orbit, like in the space station, for many, many years to come. Man is going to be confined to Earth’s orbit for a long, long time, until there’s either some huge breakthrough or there’s some political consideration or something that makes it possible to go to Mars. The unmanned part of spacecraft, which I didn’t really work on that much, but I really see there’s a lot of possibilities for unmanned because it costs less money, you don’t have to worry about the loss of a crew. So, I think the future is probably going to open up that you’re going to have many more explorations out of near earth orbit and to planetary systems, solar systems; they’re gonna be unmanned. I think the unmanned part of NASA is going probably even expand.
GALAN: How do you feel about your experiences at NASA?
WATKINS: Well, I think it was a privilege to work at NASA. I think I was very lucky. I was there at the right time and the right place in order to come into that. I think it is very gratifying to yourself, that you know that you have accomplished some of these things that have never been done before that are a part of history, and that they will build on. And maybe 300 hundred years from now children of the children of our children will look back and see this tradition in history, and I feel like I had some small part of that.
GALAN: Are there any other funny or interesting or unusual stories of your experiences with NASA that you would like to share with us?
WATKINS: Well, let me see here. Well, NASA is—has some very interesting people and some of them have a lot of humor. I have a lot of humor myself. And there were a lot of practical jokes that were played on NASA, NASA people and the contractors from time to time, which I’d never done with intentions to hurt but that did have a lot of humor.
I remember one of our young military engineers, on loan from the military, was named John Essing. John’s a very good engineer from Harvard. John had developed the drawings on the reaction control system for the lunar module, and one of the pranksters called John up and said he was he head of this—of the engineering organization—and he needed to talk to whoever had produced this terrible set of drawings and everything, [that] it was just the worst thing he’d ever seen and who had done that and looked like something that had come out of the military—that kind of stuff. Poor old John was just really sweating all through that because he was the one who had done it and they were really even assaulting the military. So, they had John pretty nervous for that.
I remember one of my other friends was getting married. He was a good Atlanta boy and he was leaving that weekend to get married, and they called him at the last minute on Friday, and said, “We’re gonna need you for a Saturday afternoon meeting,” and there he was scheduled to get married in Georgia. He was pretty uptight. They enjoyed little jokes like that from time to time.
I remember a very early set of computers, of course, we have personal computers all over the place right now. But the earliest set there were very few and far between, and we had this one working, and we had interns and college students working [for] the summer. They had one that was going to work on this computer and do some computations. And one of our buddies had put a plastic tube into the thing, and he was behind the divider, and he was blowing smoke up through it. And this thing [computer] went up in smoke the minute he started doing calculations. He ran over there and said, “Oh, this thing cost $7,000!” And this is a poor college student trying to make it through school, thinking they had just burned up one of the key computers there.
There was always the possibility of that kind of a practical joke that would come in, especially in-flight operations. We had a lot of people with a very good sense of humor to pull off stuff like that. You had a lot of those things that still went on to relive tension, and to make things a little bit more pleasurable if you weren’t on the bad end of the joke.
GALAN: Is there anything I haven’t asked you that you think I should know?
WATKINS: Well, I was thinking about one thing this morning. I got dialed up on my computer and lo and behold another one of peers had just died, Ed Marzano. I lost contact with Ed, but I remember him real well, and this is not uncommon. It seems like every few weeks we get an e-mail message that another one of our peers had died. The people are dropping left and right that experienced this great thing. And, when we come up on the thirty-fifth anniversary of the Apollo landing, there’ll be far less people there than there were before. It won’t be long that people that can go back and actually remember these things, or part of it, is going to be just about like the soldiers that were [at] Pearl Harbor. They’re going to be few and far in between.
GALAN: Thank you very much for this opportunity. I commend you for your contribution to NASA; I think it was a wonderful thing. I enjoyed this interview very, very much.
WATKIN: Thank you.
GALAN: Thank you.