NASA Wood, Herschel J. "Jim"- May 29, 1999

Interview with Herschel J. “Jim” Wood

Interviewer: Beverly Tomek

Date of Interview: May 29, 1999

Location: Wood home, Lago Vista, Texas

 

TOMEK:  Today is May 29, 1999.  This is an oral history with Hershel James Wood for the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project.  The interview is being conducted by Beverly Tomek, a graduate student at Southwest Texas State University, in the home of Mr. Wood in Lago Vista, Texas. 

 

How about we start with a little background of what brought you to NASA – your education, that interest you had talked about.  The lifelong interest in --

 

WOOD:  My route to NASA, you might say, started when I was a child.  When I developed an interest in electronics.  I think I was five years old when I got my first crystal set, the little tiny, old-fashioned things you may be familiar with where you don’t have any, really electronics to it but its simple little stuff that you could receive a signal with.  And played with those as a little bitty kid.  Worked on that, built a bunch of different kinds of them -- moved into the next couple years of building little one two radios. Little battery-operated radios.  And then in junior high school I started building larger radio receivers and radio transmitters and got into radio amateur activity, hamming as they call it, where guys build these radios and talk all over the world.  So I developed some skills in electronics there.  Fortunately I had a couple of good mentors who had helped me along the way.

And then, in high school, I had – one of my jobs was working with a geophysical exploration company, and we designed and built electronic equipment for oil exploration.  So I got some good hands-on experience with the real world there, and then in college – oh, in the high school thing we were instrumenting these vehicles and the process of exploring for oil, geophysical exploration is an exploration thing where they set off charges in the ground and you instrument the vibrations that come from it.  The – in college then, my major initially was electrical engineering and then I moved on into physics to get into more electronics and to get in nuclear physics.  And there I did some instrumentation work on scientific devices.

 

After college I went to White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, and my job there was instrumenting guided missiles, artillery, military guided missiles, artillery pieces.  So that continued my instrumentation.  That field is called telemetry, measuring things at a distance or remotely.  And the – these names and so forth are spelled out in the handout I gave you.  The – while I was at White Sands I also got into a couple of other fields of instrumentation.  We designed equipment to instrument the atomic bombs which were still being tested in the atmosphere.  One of the main things I created there was a system for evaluating the performance of radar signals which passed through a nuclear bomb explosion.  And so I designed the – figured out how to do it – and designed the equipment that they used for years after that.  Another field of instrumentation there is basically I got in a project where we instrumented the whole missile test range.  We built, designed and built, a state of the art, really really early day microwave relay where we could bring the telemetry signals which were sent by radio from the missiles, bring those back to –as they were received way down range, 100 miles or so down range, relay those back to our main recording stations in our lower portion range.  Before we had to send trucks and people out there and so forth to do that.  So we built a relay system that would bring all the signals back.  We had to engineer all that from scratch.  And, so that was another form of instrumentation.

 

Then in 1960 we moved to Houston, and I started my own little company – well actually I’d already had a little company going and I expanded it to do some instrumentation of chemical processes, industrial plants and so forth.  The – in 1962, during the time of John Glenn’s first flight, [on 20 February 1962, Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth] I decided to take the big step and join NASA.  They needed somebody to head up the development of telemetry instrumentation for the development of the Apollo spacecraft, and so that fit right in with my scheme of things.  So I did that.  So, that’s when I joined NASA.  It was in ’62.

 

I’d had an opportunity about 1958, when they first started NASA.  They were changing NACA [National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics] to NASA [National Aeronautics and Space Administration] and changing its missions from airplanes to space.  Or expanding its mission from aeronautics to space.  At that time we were testing a big booster for the military, and we had never successfully gotten one of these boosters off the ground.  Every time we fired one it blew up on the pad or just after it left the pad, or got its signals mixed up and went to Mexico instead of northern New Mexico, and we’d have to blow it up in midair.  And, so, on any of those vehicles of that day, if they got off the ground successfully, they didn’t come down with any finesse.  It was a big bundle of crashed metal.  So, a fellow came out from Langley, Virginia, where NASA was headquartered [Research Center, Hampton, Virginia] and said “Jim don’t you want to – wouldn’t you like to come to work for, for us?  We’re going to create this great space agency, and we’re going to put a man on one of these things that you’re testing right here and shoot him around the world.”  And, I said “You guys are out of you minds, have you seen how these things come down?  And worse off, we’ve never gotten one off the ground without blowing it up.”

 

So that – it turned out though, that they had perfected things somewhat by ’62, when I joined.  And in the meantime – actually, the – they had virtually no successful flights before they put men on them, and it was a really exciting adventure for Al Shepard [launched on 5 May 1961 in the first Mercury flight] who went first and on through -- John Glenn was the first one to go all the way around the Earth.  The first ones, the first couple, were just ballistic flights.  In other words, they went to orbital altitude, but they didn’t have enough velocity to go into orbit.  John Glenn’s was the first to go around the world and truly be an orbiting spacecraft and, so, fortunately they had perfected the vehicle by then.  I was awful glad of that.  I was pretty skeptical up to that point.  But, then I – so that’s what got me to NASA.  It was my interest in instrumentation and telemetry.  So, how do you want to direct the question further from there?

 

TOMEK:  When you got there, what was your role?  What did you do there?  For example, with the Apollo XIII, what was your role?

 

WOOD:  Well, let’s take it step wise a little bit more up to that.  My role initially was to head the organization in the telemetry section, which was responsible for creating the instrumentation, or the remote measuring devices that would allow us to evolve the command module, service module, and the lunar module for going to the Moon.  We had many, many measurements that you make during the development of a vehicle, where you have -- oh, things like tests of the heat shield.  Where you have maybe 1000 thermocouples, or sensors, buried in the heat shield.  We had to take those signals then and multiplex them together and transmit them by radio to ground and then demultiplex all of that stuff, spread it all out and log it in such a way that they could tell what the temperatures were all over the vehicle and so forth.  We had things like vibrations, voltages and currents and altitude and pressures.  Everything you can imagine.  Different parameters of that sort were all -- the engine parameters, too, for example.  In the vehicles, like in the lunar module, in the staging – in the – well, the lunar module engines.  Those things we had to instrument and get the data back, so that was my job to develop that stuff.  To do that job.

 

We didn’t do the specific instrumentation of the big booster itself.  That was Marshall Spaceflight Center’s [Huntsville, Alabama] job, but the – we were dealing with the manned portion of it.  At that time it was the Manned Spacecraft Center, MSC.   Throughout my early years there we -- everything was – throughout the whole time everything was oriented towards the equipment, the instrumentation, the telemetry equipment especially, the multiplexing systems, which added all these many things together and then transmitted them to ground.  This equipment, that went on the spacecraft.  So our job was to fundamentally decide what was going to be needed and to develop the techniques and pull together all the different techniques that existed around the world for doing that kind of thing.  Use and pick out the right ones and refine them for our purposes and decide specifically which pieces of hardware to buy and design those things that were special, that weren’t available on the market and test everything very very thoroughly, and then get production quantities and do qualification tests and integrate that stuff into the vehicle.  And do everything that had to be done to see that it worked.  And then to process it.  In the early days we had the equipment at the ground station which processed the telemetry data when it came back from these tests.

 

So, we moved through from Apollo and then the lunar surface activity and then to Apollo-Soyuz test program where we rendezvoused with the Russians and we did – there we did the television and the voice systems for that.

 

Let me back up a little bit.  During the Apollo program, I was able to expand our scope of activity from just the telemetry work to include all the voice communication equipment that went on the spacecraft and all the television equipment that went on the spacecraft, and the television processing equipment that went on the ground.  So we then developed all the headsets and microphones and special audio gear and the astronaut backpack radios which had telemetry in them to monitor the well being of the astronauts and the life support system.  And to provide two-way voice communication with all these redundancies and backups and all that.  Developed those systems and got them manufactured and tested, integrated and all.  So that tied the voice and the instrumentation together, and we had the development of TV systems, and we’ll talk about that some more.  So we developed the old black and white stuff that we used in the earliest days and then the color systems that were used later and then finally for the last missions on the lunar surface we had color camera mounted on the front bumper of the rover.  And that camera, we designed into it a remote control, so from Houston we could do zoom and pan and tilt and focus adjustment and light control, and all of that kind of stuff.

 

In that device I had the pleasure of proposing the concept and identifying the way we would do that whole thing of providing lunar surface communication for the astronauts when they were away from the main spacecraft.  Basically, they – the radios in their backpacks talked to a radio on the front bumper of the rover, where the camera was, and that talked through a microwave link up to Earth, which was essentially overhead all the time.  And, then we could talk two-way through that.  That was a microwave, microwave link.  Looked like an umbrella turned upside down.  For when we were handling a television.  When there was just voice, we could use a thing that was roughly equivalent to a coffee can with a helix coming up out of it.  And that was pointed up towards Earth.  Then the – mounted there also was the TV camera, and through this radio link then we had – it was a two-way radio link.  Voice went both ways, and the TV went up to Earth, and the command control came back from Earth so we could control the TV camera.  Well, the concept of all that, and the way it all worked and – well, I proposed the concept and my guys built the prototypes of how it would work, and in fact we built the little total system at both ends to demonstrate it to the top brass and put it --.  It was about a three second time delay at that time for the geometry of Earth to Moon, and so we put in a little delay link in there to make it all appropriate so that the head of the Johnson, or Manned Spacecraft Center at that time was able to sit there at his conference table and wiggle a little joystick, and seconds later the camera would move.  And seconds later the picture would be back.  So we could demonstrate the whole process to him and, that’s kind of the way we had to go through, so, engineering was part of it.  Selling it – things -- we would identify needs and then we had to sell the, sell the world on the fact that that was really going to happen.  That really was going to be needed in order that we could start the thing a year or two ahead of time, in order that we could have it ready by the time it was really needed.

 

An interesting aspect to me of all our work was that as the flight was going on and we were handling the, processing the television that came back and monitoring the voice for any irregularities in the processing and all.  While all that was going on for a flight, we simultaneously in the back room were designing stuff that would be used a couple of years later.  So we were kind of schizophrenic in that way, we’re doing all today’s work but always working on what was going to be years downstream.  Because the lead-time on doing that sort of thing is very long.

 

Then we moved off to the Apollo-Soyuz test program, which was the first docking of two manned spacecraft in space.  It was the Russian Soyuz vehicle and the American Apollo command module.  And, I had my TV crews go to Russia, and audio guys and stuff and work out the interfaces so that we could interface with them once we docked up, because it had to be all figured out ahead of time so that when you docked it would work.  Those were interesting days because that was during the Cold War days and things were kind of difficult. 

 

Then we had the Skylab, which was America’s first space station.  A really neat thing.  We did a lot of instrumentation, all the voice and the television and so forth for that.  And, then along in there we had started designing a space station, really.  A real space station, which has just now started happening.  But we were doing that far back, the original conceptual work on the space station, and we began an earnest program for a reusable pickup truck to go to space, which became the Shuttle.  And, so then we did again, the development instrumentation.

 

I’ll differentiate here between two kinds of telemetry and instrumentation.  One is the development phase where we telemetered the performance of the vehicle during its evolution.  And then we used a different set of equipment for the operational phase.  And, generally you turned over the operational phase stuff to another organization.  Since we – and then we remained pretty much in the R & D [research and development] end of it.  We’d move on to the next project.

 

For Shuttle then, we had a great deal of instrumentation and telemetry of all kinds of stuff.  You can imagine, the development of a space airplane, a reusable space airplane, was a – the thing took a lot of measurements, so that gave us our big challenge there.  And then we refined the television systems and put in different kinds of remote control for instrument packages that would be used in flight to be able to control things from inside the cabin.  And, then we – along the line we did a lot of different kinds of little instrumentation projects.  The earliest days we’d instrumented the astronauts running on the beaches in Florida, and their exercise programs and so forth. 

 

And, in fact, that stuff led to early day telecare stuff.  In other words the remote measurement of what’s happening inside humans.  There was an old TV program, called, I think, 911, which was – I don’t know, that might not have been it.  But at any rate, it was a program about EMT [emergency medical technician] guys who would go out and handle emergency cases.  The whole concept was new to the world at that time – of these medical technicians outside the hospital in a vehicle running around saving peoples’ lives.  Well, the telemedicine, radio packages and stuff they used for defibulation and radio telemetry and stuff were things that we had worked out using that program.  As a matter of fact, through the years I lost some good people to industry.  They moved out to develop for the civilian population these medical instrumentation systems.  And, some of them are still involved in it today.

 

Then in the latter portion of my time there – well, the first portion I was in the telemetry section, then I had the Flight Telecommunications Branch.  And I’ll use that name for it because that was the last of the names.  It had different names.  Government organizations change names all the time.  It’s part of the ritual.  But that was the last and probably the best name.  The most descriptive name, Flight Telecommunications Branch.  And, that encompassed the telemetry and the television and the voice and all of that..  Then I became the technical assistant to the director of engineering, basically the chief engineer for Johnson Space Center, Dr. Max Faget.  Super guy.  And, there I became involved in the technical activities of all of the divisions of – all of the development and research work going on at Johnson Space Center.

 

After I left NASA, then I was involved in – I had my own small engineering company and then it was involved in some industrial instrumentation again and some medical instrument development.  In fact I developed a telemetry system that was the smallest I had ever developed.  This particular telemeter was designed to instrument the core temperature of the human body, the temperature of the GI [gastrointestinal] tract, all points of the GI tract throughout the body.  And, it consisted basically of an instrumentation package that was basically the size of a vitamin pill, and you swallowed it.  And it monitored the parameters, initially it was temperature, latter versions of it would incorporate pressure and pH, but it would measure the parameter as it passed through your GI track.  It came out – you wore a little vest that had a little cigarette pack-sized instrumentation package and it received the radio signals.  We didn’t have a battery in the unit.  We transmitted a pulse of radio power into the pill, and the pill used that power to run itself long enough to make the measurement and transmit the signal back out.  And outside we stored digitally that data.  This little instrument package had two little packages, a battery on one side and a, like a deck of cards-sized package that received the signals and stored it.  And, so, and then you could plug that into a telephone line and dump the data to the doctor’s office, RS232, through a modem.  That was kind of a neat development.  My little company did that for NASA, Goddard Spaceflight Center.  In fact John Glenn used, not one of our radio pills, but another, brand X, at his last recent flight.  But that was years and years and years after we had developed the initial one.  So, but that indeed was the smallest telemetry system I ever built.  Other medical instrumentation things, and then I did a number of contract jobs with McDonnell Douglas and Northrup and back in Horizon Engineering working for NASA again as a contractor.  Specifically in the area of medical instrumentation for the space station.  I evaluated a great number of techniques and methods of using commercial, off-the-shelf medical instrumentation in the space environment to determine the practicality of that and – and the means for gathering that data up, again instrumentation -- gathering that data up and logging it, storing it, displaying it and transmitting it back to Earth.  So that developed sort of the database which they’ve had available to evolve the, this medical instrumentation.  The biomedical instrumentation that’s on the space station today. 

 

One of the reason’s it’s not as much fun today as it was then, back in the early days, is because they keep doing that stuff over and over again.  They don’t ever read their homework.  They – I can’t imagine how many times the station itself was designed over and over, and the – a lot of good data was thrown away.  As a matter of fact, the Skylab itself was a superb little space station.  And, but it was not politically – they thought not preferable to maintain the Skylab in orbit and build on it, add multiple ones together, which would have put us up in space years and years ahead, because they wanted to go for broke for a great big space station.  They allowed the Skylab to come out of orbit, and then they had to go build a new space station.

 

Then I worked with Eagle Engineering, and they – with Eagle we did a number of projects for NASA, investigating different aspects of –developing the space station.  We also -- there we did some projects to activate the, let’s say explore the concept further, of telemedicine, which is instrumenting the human body and transmitting the data to some remote location where real doctors are located.  The doctor makes some decisions and transmits the information back to technicians in the field.  And they might be hundreds of miles away.  We’d had a project like that a number of years before, working with the Indians in New Mexico and Arizona.  And, the whole proposition in operation now.  You can have clinics around – in remote locations that are supported extensively by a great skill base at some remote hospital.  We kind of did really neat stuff.  We were exploring projects of this sort for use in this country and a number of places overseas.  A lot of interesting little projects.

 

And I’ve been involved with my own little company in development of instrumentation for a number of different things.  I’ve gotten into aviation and avionics systems and aircraft instrumentation.  In fact right now, I have on the drawing board back there plans for about 11,000 square feet of airplane hanger and laboratory space and offices up here at our little airport where I’ll be building myself a new office.  A new place to pursue my development projects.  We have several instrumentation and other devices on the drawing board at the moment.  So, that kind of gives you the scope of it.  Where would you like to go from here?

 

TOMEK:  You mentioned a schizophrenic work pace when you were with NASA.  How did that affect your family life?  Were you gone a lot?

 

WOOD:  Well, I wasn’t out of town a great deal.  I had as many as a hundred people working for me, and so we had a lot of people moving around to different sites all the time, but the hours – we were gone from home, not necessarily on the road.  Long hours, yeh.  A lot of hours.  And, the – we were pretty close by so we stayed in touch and integrated home life into our work.  Trying to – part of our management style was to help guys stay in touch with their families and to always express great appreciation to the wives for their patience and indulgence and so forth.  It just was an axiom of mine that you had to keep the family in loop to keep the guy happy, to keep the work flowing.  So, that worked well, and – but we did have long hours.  There was a sense of excitement and enthusiasm in NASA in the early days.  I know people used to jog or run up and down the halls [last part of sentence cut off by end of tape].

 

I was saying that the level of enthusiasm was high, and the sense of urgency was great.  We had a mission to do.  It was a mission that nobody had done before.  We were going to go to the Moon, and we were going to see to it that we beat the Russians there.  So there was this excitement of – that the challenge and the patriotism and everything together, and people were really pressing hard to do what had to be done.  Everybody was in their 20s and 30s.  A few old hands were 40 or so, and – but everybody had a common experience of having – well, so many of the people had been in the military or the Korean War and so forth, and everybody there had real experience from somewhere.  We hired guys that had been involved in real honest stuff.  We had really a high level of skill and a great variety of competent experiences, even though the folks were young.  But, folks would jog down the halls and when the time wasn’t great enough to get back home before some all night test or something, I had guys sleeping in the office, and ordering pizza in and all.  About like some of the guys developing software these days.  But, we had a high level of excitement and enthusiasm.

 

While the similarity in their ages and all was great, they had a huge variation of backgrounds and personalities.  They came from Ivy League colleges and little bumpkin colleges you never heard of, and their homes ranged from Houston to Pie Town.  Pie Town.  One guy came from Pie Town, New Mexico, which had been a tent city, and some lady there made pies for the miners in New Mexico, and in this particular mining community, and this is where one of these guys was born.  And it turned out to be a real challenge to get a security clearance for him because – he’d had the military experience and a degree from the University of Houston and stuff in the meantime, but to go back and try to find his birth records and so forth in a town of tents.  So, the variety was very very great.  Lots of great skills though, and a lot of neat personalities, and a huge number of really hard workers.  The mission was our common goal, and, different from working for some company.  We had a sense of the destiny of mankind, and we were going to go do something that nobody had ever done before, and we had to find ways to make it happen.  So there was an entrepreneurial aggressiveness, and – in the search for our solutions.  We were comfortable in going anywhere in the world to find some way to do what had to be done.  We used all the conventional approaches, and if something didn’t exist we’d invent it and just do it.  You’d search across the world for somebody that had perhaps done this problem and you’d do it fast.  And if it was good you’d use it.  If it wasn’t you’d improve it or, like I said, invent a new one.  But the solutions had to be clean and robust and you had to be absolutely certain that the thing was going to be dependable and going to do its job.  Close wasn’t close enough.       So we developed elaborate ways of designing and building things, we can talk about that more, to ensure the reliability.   Where do we want to go?  Did that touch on what you wanted to hear there?

 

TOMEK:  That’s good.  How about the famous splash down parties?  Did you go to those?

 

WOOD:  Well, I went to a few of them.  They were probably kind of like kids’ parties.  There’s always a lot more anticipation that there is the real thing.  But, the early crews were pretty energetic womanizers in the early days.  The engineering guys didn’t – when I said crews, I meant flight crews – The engineering guys were in a different world.  There were thousands of us engineers out there.  There were a few crew persons and a few flight operations, flight controllers, and the world had only heard of flight operations, flight controllers and astronauts, and they somehow missed a few thousand other people in the deal.  So, we had our own get-togethers pretty much, and our own thank you parties for the families that put up with us while we were away designing and buying and building and testing and installing and monitoring and, so.

 

TOMEK:  That was one of the ways you brought in the families was with your gatherings.  It was more of a family thing.

 

WOOD:  Yeh.  In fact they still have meetings over there.  I missed one of them last week – I had a bad fuel pump and was here instead of there.  And, down there at the center they still have a barbecue a couple of times a year and a get-together.  Force down a couple of beers.

 

TOMEK:  Do you remember any anecdotes, any funny things – or strange or just – what are some of the memories that stick out – stories you’d like to tell?

 

WOOD:  Well, first let me say that I have a lot of memories of a lot of neat things that we developed.  And we developed ways to ensure that it always worked.  And, the problems we had were adjustments and tweaks.  We didn’t have massive failures of our hardware, fortunately.  But there were some things that we were involved in that were massive problems, and the – our failures were incremental.  They were numerous little failures and adjustments and tweaks in the equipment.  Incremental steps in the design you might say.  Because you learn more from your failures than you do from your successes really.  But, the whole trick is to learn how to get those failures over with before you solidify the design and build the flight hardware.  So we pretty well solved that thing.  And we made progressive improvements in the flight articles as the applications changed.  I mean we were doing a job – the astronauts were doing a job that nobody had done before.  So we had to guess ahead of time what they were going to need, and, as they actually did it for future flights you knew better how they were going to use things and what they were going to need, so we were able to factor in new features and refine the designs.  So there was continuing engineering there.

 

But, there were some really bad experiences though.  One of the worst ones was when the oxygen-filled Apollo Command Module burned up on the ground [the Apollo I pad fire, 27 January 1967].  And, of course we examined everything in our equipment in extreme detail to determine if it had contributed to the source of the ignition.  They were inside of an oxygen-filled chamber and everything went, totally.  To our relief our equipment was found not to be the cause of it, but since our audio development labs contained elaborate sound and speech analysis equipment, we became responsible for determining exactly what was said and what sounds were present during those horrible brief moments when the three astronauts, our friends, burned to death.  The instruments could tell us a lot, but our brains processing endlessly repeated bits of anguished speech yielded the best information.  This knowledge was gained at a real high cost for the engineers that had to listed to all those sounds and voices.  But, we got the information.  That was a bad period.

 

Years later, an elaborate frame by frame analysis of the in-flight destruction of the Shuttle spacecraft Challenger [28 January 1986] was performed by television development laboratories.  And that tragedy occurred so rapidly that this time there was – the audio personnel were spared the agony of speech analysis because there wasn’t any to analyze.

 

The – I guess one other thing that comes to mind, in the bit of being the boss you’ve got to go do things sometimes that are hard.  One of the really scary ones was – one gentleman that worked for me had a nervous breakdown and he was in a – he was holding the fort with a loaded deer rifle, standing on the balcony of his apartment in Clear Lake City holding off the world and the bad guys that he thought were coming to get him.  And I had to walk right straight up into his presence between two buildings where there was nothing to duck behind.  Staring right at him and he was staring right at me, and quietly talking to him as I walked for about, I don’t know, a couple of hundred feet up to him standing there with his deer rifle pointed my way.  And, fortunately I was able to quietly talk him into going with me.  I took him to the hospital and got assistance for him.  But that was one of those tense moments that’s more than a failure of the computer or something.  It – that wasn’t too much fun.

 

Boy there were some good times, though.  The -- perhaps the most, the finest of my experiences, one that gave the greatest pride and sense of accomplishment was having developed and provided TV and voice equipment for the entire world to see and hear the first human to set foot and explore –set foot on and explore the Moon.  More people around the world listened simultaneously to the voices we relayed from the Moon than have ever listened to any other event in all of history.  I get all emotional when I talk about it.  It was exciting.  That was a high point.  And, then near the end of the Apollo program we developed a very special TV camera I mentioned earlier that was on the –

 

that it and its microwave link were on the front bumper of the rover.  And, so that allowed us to let the world participate vicariously in what the crew was doing on the lunar surface.  And, then, in fact, that allowed the – allowed us to televise the departure for the last time of the crews from the lunar surface.  I don’t know if you remember the picture of the lunar module taking off.

 

TOMEK:  I saw it yesterday.  There was a still photo at Mr. Hannigan’s [James Hannigan, another participant in this project].

 

WOOD:  All right.  Did you notice all the little red, green, blue dots of stuff flying out?  I don’t know if that was the same picture.  At any rate the lunar module departing.  There was a real interesting aspect to that.  Since the time of – well, radio waves travel at the speed of light, 186,000 miles a second.  At that time the Moon was about three seconds away, the geometry of Earth to Moon.  The – it took time from the time you gave a command on Earth for a TV camera to do something until it arrived there and then time for it to do it and then the same time again for the TV picture to come back.  So the camera had to be panned up and zoom – panned up and yawed to the right to track the lunar module as it departed.  But the lunar module was under control, manual control of an astronaut pushing the button to go.  So you had to get yourselves pretty well together so about three seconds before the astronaut pushed the button to go, you had to start operating the TV camera.  The thing you saw on the screen you were looking at was a thing just sitting there, and it would sit there for another three seconds after you started panning and tilting and all.  And, but you had to give these commands and start tracking before to get the radio signal out there to start the thing, so that it happened at the same time the astronaut actually pushed the button to go.  And by the time the picture came back if it wasn’t right you were dead.  There was nothing in the world that you could do.  It worked.  That was an exciting thing.

 

And of course it was a proud moment to assist in getting the guys back safely on Apollo XIII.  And there we were just part of the big team that – of course we were concerned primarily with ways to reduce the power and still maintain communication and select the proper antenna patterns and the proper transmitters and which vehicle you were going to be in, transmitting from, and all where we could keep the power down to the lowest.  And how you could – everything you could do to shut down parts of the system to minimize the use of the power because that was -- for a major portion of the time the shortage of electrical power was the main thing.  The Apollo XIII movie was pretty darn good.  It represented faithfully the event.  We were glad of the happy outcome of that.

 

The team was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.  That’s that little piece of paper I showed you [copy attached].  From President [Richard M.]Nixon.  That’s the highest possible achievement award given by the United States of America.  All right.  What’s next?

 

TOMEK:  All right.  And you’re working with the NASA Alumni Organization that’s collecting – are you working with that or --?

 

WOOD:  No, I haven’t been – I’m a little bit too remotely located at the moment for that now -- working with that program at this time.  Let’s see, you know it might be interesting if we talked about the kind of challenge that was involved in developing one of these pieces of equipment without getting into terrible detail.  Would that fit in with --?

 

TOMEK:  That sounds good.

 

WOOD:  The television camera represents a pretty good example of a typical engineering challenge that we had.  There were a number of obstacles with the camera – there were things it had to be able to do and a number of things it had to be able to survive.  First, now this is the camera that initially was going to be used on the first flight.

 

Let me back up a moment here.  We had a little black and white camera on the first flight, we had – eventually then we got into some colored cameras, a better black and white camera, and then a better color camera, and then eventually the remote-controlled color camera.  So, but these problems I’ll describe apply to the first one as well as all the other ones.  But new problems coming up as you went.  The camera had to be small and consume as little power as possible.  I’ll give you these.  [Mr. Wood is referring to the attached list].  It would be designed to operate in the lunar day or the lunar night without external light.  And, you have to keep in mind, the lunar night is black.  The lunar day is incredibly white, bright, O.K.  The sun comes in through no atmosphere.  You don’t have – here you look out and you see clouds and light – scattered light.  There aren’t any black blacks and there aren’t any white whites here.  It’s kind of, kind gray, because of the scattered light.  So, on the Moon, though, the light came in in parallel columnated rays from the sun.  It was intense, super intense.  It wasn’t scattered.  So it created shadows that didn’t have any light scattered into them.  The shadows were black.  And the sky was black.  And everything else was white.  And so, this created a light range that was extreme in the daytime.  If you tried to look at something in the shadow it was almost like operating at night.  So the camera had to have an extreme light sensitivity range, yet it had to operate over a temperature – because it would be sitting out on the lunar surface day and night, it had to have a temperature operating range of plus or minus 250 degrees Fahrenheit.  It had to operate in the humid spacecraft on the trip to the Moon, but it had to operate in super dry conditions of hard vacuum and one sixth g [measure of gravity] – zero g in flight and one sixth g on the lunar surface.  On the first trip to record man’s first step on the Moon, the camera had to be mounted on an equipment shelf on the outside of the lunar module, the LM.  The shelf was folded up in flight, and then after it landed it was deployed and came down.  So we had to locate the camera on that shelf in such a way that it looked down so it would see when Neil Armstrong stepped down off the ladder – see him on the ladder.  The field of view had to encompass him and the lunar surface, and so that when he stepped on the lunar surface then the— you’d see the event, and it had to have the right exposure setting and all that stuff, and we’ll talk about that in a minute. 

 

So then -- those are good technical challenges.  Then there was a big political challenge.  For various reasons, the astronauts were hot shots at that time.  They didn’t want anybody watching them make a mistake or something.  So they didn’t want television.  Some of the other organizations didn’t want television because they were afraid they’d get – have to pay part of the bill and so forth.  So, several times television was off of the Apollo program. And of course we were just frantic to have it on because we were convince that the taxpayers needed to vicariously share this experience.  Well, fortunately, Chris Kraft, who was the center director, saw to it that TV was back on the Apollo program, and that was a great move because obviously it’s been a major feature. 

 

But TV came into the program so late officially that we had virtually no bandwidth left for it and the radio link to come from the Moon to the Earth.  We had about half a megahertz of bandwidth available that we could use.  The normal little black and white TV picture was somewhere in the order of six megahertz wide.  To get a six-megahertz picture in a half a megahertz bandwidth we had to do something.  We needed to do some serious band width compression.  We’d anticipated this problem through all of these cycles of on the program, off the program and so forth we could see what was happening.  So we’d done some research.  We always were doing research, as I said, what was going to happen two years from now, we were in the background trying to figure it out.  So we had some techniques up our sleeve that we were able to use and so, one of the first things we did was, we cut the number of pictures per second down.  The typical TV picture coming in you have 60 new pictures per second.  Well, we cut it down to 10 new pictures per second.  Then subsequently, I’ll explain it later, but on the ground, we stored those 10 and we reiterated them so that we’d eventually have enough pictures you could feed it into the system and people would see it.  But it would make it jerky because it didn’t flow.  But it cut down on, six to one on how many pieces of data you had to describe what’s coming down.  And then we had to reduce the resolution of the scene by about two to one so that cut down on the bandwidth to where eventually we could get into the half megahertz.

 

Well, that gave us the little black and white TV picture you saw for the first lunar landing.  And it was crummy, but it worked.  And, my God you were there.  And that really turned out to be great.  We did have it pointed in the right direction and so forth.  It was a challenge to get it pointed and to get the lighting set.  Nobody had any idea what the lighting value should be and so forth.  We had to guess on that pretty well.  We didn’t have any remote controls on this for sure.  The crew couldn’t control it or anything else.

 

We in fact simulated the lighting setup to get the angles pointing right and everything.  We borrowed a full-sized lunar module mock-up, a training mock-up.  Put it in a huge airplane hanger.  Covered the floor with lamp black, which is a carbon –it’s like candle smoke.  You get that on the bottom of a spoon or something, and it’s totally black.  Covered the floor with that stuff.  And then, up in the rafters of the hanger we put a couple of airplane searching spotlights, World War II kind of search lights, like you have in the opening of a shopping center or something.  Put those suckers up in the rafters and pointed them down at the lunar module.  This was the sun coming in.  Columnated parallel light.  Black, black floor.  And then had a guy dressed up in a white spacesuit climbing up and down the ladder.  And we then moved the camera around to different locations and so forth.  Determine where to put it and everything.  It worked.  But, anyway, the rest of it’s history.  Had a poor picture for the opener, but you were there.  You got to see it.

 

So then we progressively improved the camera as we went along, and we got more bandwidth.  Management at that point could see what we needed.  But to evolve the color cameras we had a great challenge.  The color camera of that day was a monster on a tripod with wheels that rolled around in a studio.  And it was about a foot wide, a foot and a half high and three feet long, and it had handlebars, almost, to steer it around with.  We had to put all that – had to put something into a box the size of a shoebox.  To do the same job.  But again, plus or minus 250 degrees, zero g, hard vacuum, all kinds of stuff like this.  And had to be able to withstand long vibration and shock and everything on the trip up there.  Well, that was the challenge.  We did succeed.  We had been searching the techniques and so forth and looking at all kinds of methods and really did a lot of good head scratching on this one.  And we ended up going back and using an old technique that came from the dawn of TV.  Back in New York, 1940 or so, Dr. Goldmark, [a pioneer in the television industry] I think, used a technique of rotating a colored wheel in front of the TV image sensor.  And so we ended up using a small, very precision, high-tech set of color filters, rotated in front of a really high quality image sensor, a small image sensor with all the dynamic light range we needed and all that stuff.  But, then we could synchronize the color wheel with the scanning of the picture.  Well, the picture consists of many scan lines.  All that had to be synchronized with the rotation of the wheels.  At this time in history, we could do things electronically that Goldmark couldn’t do, and also then we could do things in displaying and on the ground that he couldn’t do.  But, we used one image sensor – well, let me digress for a moment.

 

That big TV camera on the ground had three image sensors in it.  They had a big lens system up front and a set of, I think, dichroic prisms that split the light into different color components.  So one image sensor, a great big thing, got a red picture.  Another one got the green picture.  Another one got the blue picture.  Those components, color components, of that scene were separated into three pieces.  So, what we had – we had a red, green and blue filter spinning in front of this thing, so we took three pictures in sequence, instead of three simultaneously, as on the ground.  We took three in sequence, a red picture, a green picture, and a blue picture, RGB.  You hear RGB all the time now on TV monitors -- on computer monitors and stuff.  Nobody ever heard that back in those days.  But, anyway, we used that color separation by sequentially, having a red, a green, and a blue, a black and white picture which represented the components of red, green and blue.  Then we transmitted this series of pictures in the – just like they were little black and white pictures, back to the Earth.  We stored those on the ground and sequentially stored them on a big hard disk.  Like the early-day equivalent of a hard disk.  And we read them in in sequence, and we read them out in parallel just a microsecond later – well, a few – a bunch of microseconds later we read them out in parallel.  So that then we could take those signals just like they had come from the big camera and go to a thing called a NTSC encoder that converts it from this format into the thing that puts the color picture together so that you receive it at your TV set in that format.  So we brought our series picture in, converted it to parallel and then went through the encoder and then we could dump it to the networks.  So we did this processing in our labs, on all those pictures that came in.  And so, this gave us a way to do away with two of the three image sensors.  We used a more modern, small image sensor.  We did a lot of really good work of squashing electronic circuitry into smaller boxes.  So we ended up with a color camera that was used for years. 

 

[end of tape one]

I mentioned that we were – our whole team was kind of aggressive and entrepreneurial, and we used routine, existing techniques where they were suitable.  If they lacked something we improved them, changed them, reinvented them.  Invent something from scratch.  Go get a good idea from somewhere else.  Whatever – we just did whatever you needed to do to get ideas.  And in many instances – as a general rule we would design – get the concept.  We would do a prototype, a concept – proof of concept model in the laboratories.  We’d build in the unit, test it and run it in conjunction with all kinds of other equipment.  Actually maybe work it through microwave links that went to a satellite and back to the ground, and work it in conjunction with other things that would have to feed signals to it or get signals from it, and make sure – and test all kinds of compatibility.  Then we would write up a specification and then we would procure a device.  Manufacture it out in industry to make a production quantity of it – how ever many we needed.  And then we’d bring things in and go through a qualification test to really shake them and bake them real hard.  And then all the flight items would come in and we would run those through a test that was not so rigorous, but it was good enough to find out if it was doing what it was supposed to.  So, generally we did that with American manufacturers.

 

But we ran into a problem on the TVs.  We couldn’t get anybody who would build a special lens systems for us in this country.  They wanted – they were used to building them for the – if they were real good they built them for the military, and the got a jillion dollars for it and the built thousands of them.  Well, we didn’t have a jillion dollars, and we didn’t need thousands of them.  And, so they didn’t want to do business with us.  And, so we ended up finally – the little guys didn’t have the skills we needed because it had to be a very, very special lens system.  And so we finally ended up going to France and getting them from a company, I think, named Engenue, that made them for newsreel cameras and that sort of thing.  And we started with that design and then we refined it for our purposes.  And they worked with us very well.  And, this was part of our thing of “go anywhere in the world you need to get it.” 

 

This particular – the camera lens was another typical challenge.  Again, it had to work in zero g in the hard vacuum, high temperature range.  And you learned some things pretty quickly that in those environments, everything is different.  For example, this lens was a motorized lens that handled the zoom and the focus and all this stuff, and we had to be able to remotely control it and all.  So this said, you had little motors and gears and things moving.  Metal moving on metal.  Well, normally they put some lube in there, and some grease in there, and it made the little parts run smoothly.  Well, you quickly find if you put grease in a thing like this and you put it in a hard vacuum in zero g, the grease wanders out onto the lenses, and so you’ve got a halo across the lens of grease on the lens.  So you couldn’t use regular grease.  And also, the grease would propagate out, and it had to work over this huge temperature range.  So, we had to go get a process, a dry lubricant process from Ball Brothers Company that was used in military stuff at that time.  Some of the processes we used were classified at the time, and so it made it a little more difficult too.  But we would use this dry lubricant to make these little elements in the lens be able to move.  Well, these were the kinds of things you had to learn and had to factor them into the manufacturing and the testing and so forth.  So it made it an interesting challenge.  And the extreme temperature ranges too.  You had to have --different types of metal and glass and what not expanded at different rates as the temperatures changes, so you had to have that all taken into account so you wouldn’t break a lens with a metal frame around it contracting or expanding at a different rate.  These made many interesting challenges.

 

All these things were happening simultaneously, and we were fighting today’s problems of – Well, a today problem: A TV camera on the lunar surface, I guess Alan Bean [the fourth man on the Moon; member of Apollo XII mission].  Nancy, [Mrs. Wood] wasn’t Alan Bean who was the artist?  He’s got a TV camera on the lunar surface, and he’s going along in his one sixth jogging along thing, “ta, ta da, ta da” – he’s kind of singing along.  Somewhere I’ve got a tape of it.  And then he says “hmmm, pointed the TV camera at the sun, they say that’s bad.”  About that time the TV camera had gone [fuzzy].  It just disintegrated because – you’ve taken a magnifying glass and set something on fire with it and the sun?  If you take that super sun we’ve got coming in, nothing in the way, bright as possible.  Image that through our beautiful lens system, down on the poor little electronic guts of the camera.  He just smoked them.  It vaporized them.  The picture went away.

 

Well, we spent all that night on the ground showing management what happened, because they wanted to know “why did that picture go away?”  Well, on the lunar surface – well, the flight controller says “hey Al, what did you do to that camera?  The picture went away.”  He [Bean] says, “I don’t know.  The thing must have quit or something.”  And he took a geology hammer and he starts beating up the poor camera.  Well, you know how it is, the TV set goes bad, you kick it.  In this case it had been smoked.  There wasn’t any hope, but it kind of illustrates several things.  We had an interesting relationship with the crew. 

 

First, we really couldn’t talk to them much.  Because we had a very formal system, I’ll say, between the engineers and the flight crew.  Because you couldn’t have just everybody in the world bugging the crew.  So they had – the flight controllers were the guys that talked to the crew.  And they had a number of support panels out there – guys with consoles and stuff that were monitoring different things.  And each one of those – the life support system, the propulsion system, the electrical system, the communication system.  So they had their computer screens and stuff.  Through telemetry they could see what was going on, and they could give quick answers.  They had great books of what was supposed to happen when, and if something was strange, then they would be on the telephone over to backup offices that had more experts in that particular area and more -- during a flight you had teams of experts just sitting around in back rooms waiting to give answers.  And then, another level beyond that, if things really got rough, well they would call over to the labs where we were working on the project to fly a few years from now, or monitoring our TV pictures and processing those, and monitoring the audio to see if anything went crackling or something you had to fix.  So, with that hierarchy you couldn’t -- here we are looking at this TV picture that was – and as this guy starts swinging to the moon we can’t say “hey, Al, don’t swing it any further towards the moon.”  It was hopeless. You couldn’t get that signal to him.  So, it created an interesting thing because -- again, this was – the little pinnacle of the iceberg sticking up on top that the public sees, and all these thousands of guys out in the background making things happen.

 

So, that kind of gives you an insight into the culture there, that was interesting.  So, there was – we did have some astronauts that came over later in the program.

 

As years went by astronauts would start being assigned to work with some particular segments and all.  We had a great working relationship with guys like [Thomas K. “Ken”] Mattingly [astronaut who was originally scheduled to fly on Apollo XIII but was grounded after being exposed to measles] on audio stuff, and Tom Stafford [astronaut on Apollo X] was a real supporter of our developing the color television systems, and a number of guys that worked with us were real good to work with.

 

Early fellows were neat guys but were kind of prima donnas.  With the exception of guys like John Glenn.  Super man.  Really, he was just a perfect gentleman.  All the other guys in the early days were hot-dogging it around and John was the scoutmaster, sort of.  He was maybe a couple of years older than they were.  Gosh, big difference then.  And, but he was always such a gentleman.  He had a dear wife and he always respected her, and, so, guys like him were really great to work with.

 

Of course, another really neat guy was Neil Armstrong [first man on the Moon; Apollo XI].  He was an excellent gentleman.  There were many, many neat folks through the years to work with.  Real characters like Deke Slayton [member of the Original 7; grounded due to irregular heartbeat; became director of Flight Crew Operations] and [Charles] Hoot Gibson [Shuttle pilot], who flew an airplane.  In fact, Deke Slayton and Hoot Gibson both had little racing airplanes like mine.  Hoot got in trouble racing his one time.  He had a mid-air collision, and the other guy got killed.  And NASA grounded Hoot for a while because he wasn’t supposed to be doing anything that was hazardous to life and limb while he was signed up for a crew.  But, he became a Shuttle pilot and chief astronaut and all kinds of good things, so he was quite a flyer.

 

Let’s see, what do we need to talk about?

 

TOMEK:  Did you know the ones who were on the Challenger?

 

WOOD:  On the Challenger?  Well, yes, but not real personally.  We were pretty far, let’s see, isolated.  The engineering team was isolated somewhat from the flight teams, except in cases where we had occasion to work specifically on some things and, of course, we were following the teacher in space and all that kind of good stuff, so it was – it wasn’t as -- let’s say, I personally didn’t have as close a relationship with those particular ones as some other cases.

 

TOMEK:  How did you feel about a civilian going in space?  Did you think it was safe?

 

WOOD:  Yeh, it was fine, as far as I was concerned.  The safety didn’t change because it was a civilian, or not.  She went through all kinds of proper training, and the kinds of tasks that she was assigned and all were consistent with her training and her background.  We have science specialists going on the Shuttle regularly that are from different countries and different science specialties and different levels of skill and different languages and everything that that doesn’t really represent a significant problem.

 

The space station will be a very homogeneous bunch of characters of different languages and backgrounds and skills. That aspect though, is interesting to me about long-range space flights.  Trips to Mars.  Building the equipment and making it work is going to be a lot easier than getting crews that can survive each other inside of a tin can for a year or two, all the way to Mars and back.  The psychological challenges are huge there.  It really makes our hardware jobs look pretty simple by comparison. 

 

TOMEK:  Do you think that the lack of competition, the lack of Cold War, is going to slow progress?  Or do you think it’s good to have that lack, you know, the working together as opposed to -- ?

 

WOOD:  Well, we definitely benefited in the early days from a well-defined challenge.  President [John F.]Kennedy had said, “We’re going to go to the Moon and return men safely by the end of the decade.”  That was a really nifty, neat challenge.  A package deal that gave us the latitude to do whatever we had to do to do that.  Most of the money we needed and an awful lot more political help, at times, than we needed, but that was a good challenge.  The – as you get into – the race there was with the Russians, so if you didn’t have anybody you were racing against, several things change.

 

One is that the political climate changes and the money is not there to do it, because, here we were racing with our dire enemy, so the chance for political and monetary support was strong.  If you don’t have that kind of, some kind of a unifying challenge, then you find that you have for example a battle royal develop between the people who want to send men on a mission and the people who want to send machines only on the mission, send robots instead.  That’s an ongoing thing today, of exploration of space.  Some people really believe it should be done by machines only; some people think that there’s great advantage to sending men even though it complicates things greatly.  We have some wonderful Mars observers – the picture in the paper yesterday, you probably saw it, that shows the crater on Mars that’s -- one of the craters is 30,000 feet deep.  Those kinds of scientific measurements are made by an automated, unmanned thing.  And that’s superb.

 

When you get into some of the more subtle things, having a human present is very, very valuable because you can – for one thing you can fix things that go wrong.   Probably.  Maybe.  You can alter the plan.  You can adapt.  You can – scientifically you don’t always know ahead of time what you’re really going to find out.  Some of the greatest discoveries were things that people weren’t looking for that.  They were looking for something else and they found this great thing along the way.  And if a machine is there only, you have less chance for that.  If a man is there, you get this good old brain processing stuff and you take into account unexpected, unscheduled things that the machine was not programmed to observe.  And, you would have missed it.  In this case the man senses it.  The old brain’s a pretty good correlator and sensor.

 

But, I think this is really a wonderful opportunity to use both kinds of, manned and unmanned.  You certainly run into this kind of conflict.  And if you can send an unmanned probe a lot cheaper than you can send a manned probe, the man may never get to go.  So, unless you have an overriding challenge like a Cold War or something, it’s a little harder to – I don’t know, perhaps it’s a little harder to have a unified goal there.

 

When I look back over my career, I find that there are some things about myself – stop me if I get – if I start repeating myself anywhere.  But, you know, I’m sort of a technically-oriented person with moderate dept of skill in a whole lot of areas, a very broad spectrum of things, and for me that’s been a particularly useful thing.  As a manager in these kinds of things I had to be able to handle everything from electronics to hydraulics to materials to objects to communication to human factors to going and getting people with rifles pointed at you, you know.  So, a broad spectrum of fields for me was very useful.  I’m a person who enjoys getting on into something, getting his hands dirty. 

 

I like to talk about things and plan things, but then I like to go do them.  That would be for me a great frustration of today’s space program is that there’s a lot more talk than there is doing.  I’m pretty skilled in conceptualization, getting an idea of – like how we communicated to and from the astronauts on the rover when they were away from the – just getting that whole concept and then converting that to an idea that can be implemented.  I like to do the background research and see what other people have done and the technology and so forth.  And I like to get my hands dirty in the design.  And, actual implementation.  And then, it’s interesting to me to get the utilization of devices.

 

All the way back in high school we took the geophysical equipment that we built out into the field and tested it.  I had some interesting little sidelights there.  As a kid in high school I was testing equipment out there, and one of the things you have to do is set off these little explosions in the ground and so we used nitroglycerine and Fuller’s Earth for that purpose at that time.  So I was driving an old iron truck that had a big water tank on it for backfilling these holes to get a shaped charge.  It had nitroglycerine and blasting caps and all kinds of stuff on it, and I drove across an old wooden bridge out in the country, and the bridge collapsed and I went in the river, or into the river bed many feet below and crashed down there with that super-heavy old truck.  And I though I was a dead guy.  I didn’t know whether I wanted to be alive or not.  Fortunately the nitroglycerine didn’t go off or I wouldn’t be talking to you today.  That was a little sidelight.  I like to get out in the field and see how it works too.

 

But, anyway, then my fields have included electronics and mechanics and thermodynamics and optics and energy and power and biomedicine and communication and instrumentation and materials and manufacturing and fabrication and, I don’t know.  I get into all kinds of stuff.  But being sort of a jack of all trades let me monitor well what was being done for us by industry, and get it out to them and get it back and so forth.  It gave me the opportunity to see all the facets of it.  I’m most comfortable with projects where I really have control of the projects and I can get into all these different facets and be able to control them.  It’s really frustrating when you see something going wrong and you can’t get your hands on it for whatever reason.  But I’m a person that doesn’t feel any compulsion to do it the way it’s always been done.  I’m perfectly happy to go – well, I’m perfectly happy to use the techniques that have worked successfully.  If it’s appropriate for the job.  If it’s not, I’m perfectly comfortable in inventing something new or going and getting some other technique that somebody else is using to do it.  I’m a guy that likes to improve things.  Everything I look at I improve -- get my mind on it.  I’ll go to a trade show or something and look at their brand new products and ask them hard questions about “wouldn’t it be better to do this or that?” 

 

Then on the other hand, I’m a guy that knows kind of when to quit.  I used to have a little motto on my wall in the office.  Which was a frustrating one to engineers because engineers – everything – they’re designers.  They look at something, and a new design from that jumps into their mind,  It just – everything – you’re whole – everything – everywhere you go you’re looking at things and you just tweak it, and you make a change of it.  Just – people do this who are artists, who are clothing designers, what have you, – house designers, everything.  They’ll look at something and think “Yeh, but it would sure be neat to do this.”

 

The other end of that thing is a guy that had to – once you had a pretty good thing created – now we’ve got to build umpteen of them.  We’ve got to test them.  We’ve got to make sure they fit into all this matrix of other things around us.  And once all that confirmation has been done, if you change something you’re in big trouble because you might have overlooked some implication of it.  You probably for sure overlooked some implication of changing something in such a complicated environment.  So, the motto said that “Better is the enemy of good.”  Because a guy who has to build a product and get it out the door and keep it working has to use that.  Otherwise, too, people will keep changing things and here you are trying to make 500 of them – we never built 500 of anything in the space program, but – five or ten, but for a production guy in industry trying to get stuff out the door and people keep changing things, it will drive them nuts, as well as break the bank.

 

Well, in the space program there are very superb reasons for not changing things once they get going.  I’ll kind of digress on that for a minute because it is significant.  And a lot of people in the world don’t realize that.  We were building something to fit into a very complicated environment where it had to have a certain footprint.  And every one of them that came out of storage that had to go into the spacecraft had to exactly fit those holes.  Had -- the connectors had to fit exactly and had to be the right kind of connector.  Had to have exactly the right things on all the pins.  Signals coming and going, the voltages, the frequencies, the digital codes, the software, everything had to be precisely right to mate up with all your neighbors.  You had to give them the right stuff and get the right stuff back and respond to the things that they gave you in a certain way.  You had to emit – you had to ensure that you didn’t emit carbon monoxide or mercury fumes or – I mean I had a medical thing, you know, the doctors wanted a microscope and they had a mercury vapor light.  Mercury vapor light in a spacecraft environment is a no no.  If the thing implodes and releases mercury into the environment that people are breathing, it’s not like here on Earth where the mercury will drop on the floor and everything.  This mercury is floating around and you’re eating it and breathing it and stuff.  So, there are little subtleties like that that my lateral thinking background would get – but, in terms of our interfacing with the world around us, we had to take that kind of subtlety into account.  And, so, we had to factor all this stuff in and run all kinds of exotic tests.  And with all these guys – we had laboratories where we hooked it up to the stuff around us and we’d make it all play together.  And then once we nailed it all down it had to stay.  You didn’t want to change it because you’d mess up something for sure.

 

An example:  There was a little satellite that flew on the Shuttle.  It was built by the Italians, and it was to reel out a little heavy lump on the far end, a barbell, at the end of a long wire, 13 miles long, I think.  And, this would trail along below and beside the spacecraft.  It’s literally in a different orbit.  And, this wire is cutting through the Earth’s magnetic field.  You run a wire through a magnetic field and it generates a current to flow in the wire, or a voltage across it, and if you close the circuit, you’ve got a current flow.  The experiment was to see if you could use this thing of just trailing a wire instead of a solar panel to generate electricity.  Well, so they had this reel.  I don’t know if your old-fashioned fishing reels had a little level winder they called it, the thing that went back and forth and it would mindlessly feed the string into just the right spot on the reel so that you got a nice level wind.  Well, with 13 miles of wire to reel that sucker back in you need something like that so they had that.  So here’s this beautiful little spool of wire, and the machinery to run it and all the controls and things to measure and everything mounted in the spacecraft.  And the guys that mounted it in the spacecraft decided “Well, it needs one more little bolt over here to keep this thing from flopping around.”  So they put in one more little bolt.  They didn’t take into account that the level winder was going to go over there, and so there was a conflict.  The level winder and the bolt couldn’t coexist in the same spot at the same time.  The bolt won.  So the level winder jammed when it went over there.  In other words first time it paid out one level of wire and then zop, it was stuck, and they couldn’t get it back in, couldn’t get it out.  Had to cut it off.  A million bucks or so down the drain.  All the logistics and everything, building the experiment, getting it on the Shuttle, and it cost a million jillion dollars per pound to take it into orbit and just to have your one shot in history of – anyway.  That little bolt sticking in there, taking up that space was the definition – it just proved the definition that “Better is the enemy of good.”  The bolt made it secure, more secure, better, but it ruined the program, so.  Those kinds of little things keep you from changing things at will in the space program.

 

As a matter of fact, there’s a big push today to do everything cheaper and quicker, and you’ve heard all these famous phrases.  Simpler, cheaper, quicker.  And certainly you want to have that as sort of an underlying philosophy, but in—I personally believe in the space business you’ve got to do things right.  And you’ve got to do them precisely and exactly the same as you planned to do them, as everybody’s expecting you to do them.  And you – my problem with all the cheaper stuff – you go buy stuff off the shelf, there’s no reason in the world to expect that if you go buy two TV sets of the same brand, sitting side by side on a shelf.  You buy them both and you start comparing.  You find that one was made in Mexico – and they’re both Panasonic, they both – same model number, everything, one’s made in Taiwan and one’s made in Mexico.  They’re made with different parts, and they – or maybe one of them was made in this batch and the other was made in that batch, and there was a change made in between to buy something a little bit cheaper to do it – to make another two cents on it.  There’s nothing in industry to constrain them not to do that.  Everything is there to lead them in that direction.  So, if you do qualitests on a particular unit you’ve bought, you have no assurance whatever that the next one you’re going to get is similar.

 

The only areas where this doesn’t necessarily apply is if you’re using parts that were designed for airplanes.  There you do have constraints on the manufacturers to do the same thing over again.  For these good reasons we talked about.  In medical electronics there are similar things.  They have to go through a qualification program and it has to be – the units need to be very similar to those that were tested in the hospital to prove the efficacy and the safety.  So they don't just arbitrarily go change things.  But these are only a couple of things in the whole spectrum of the world of commercial off-the-shelf hardware, which is COTS, the big hot phrase these days.  But that’s an area where you have to be real, real careful.  Maybe you can use just any old hammer from a hardware store --[end of tape].

 

Looking back there are some things related to career, kind of generic things that give me a lot of pleasure.  I like to create new things, a device, or a circuit or a system or a concept.  And, I prefer a really proper design.  It’s kind of funny.  You know, my wife can’t quite imagine why I can look at a piece of machinery and think that’s it’s really a pretty sexy piece of machinery, but in design stuff you get a certain sense of it.  I’m sure people have the same thing for a mathematical equation, or a chemical reaction or something.  But in my case, systems and designs, you get a sense of a proper design.  And, what I call “elegant simplicity.”  Something that is a very clean, beautifully clean, way of doing it with perfectly related elements.  Everything fits together and it just goes “tickety, tickety.”  You know, really, mentally it fits together, psychologically it fits together, technically it fits together.  And that’s the kind of design I really like.  They’re not all that way, but that’s what you strive for.

 

And I like to find new ways to use proven technologies.  That was always especially important to the space program.  We tried to use things that had already been proven to work.  Because if you’re trying to do something in a hurry, you don’t have the opportunity to prove out everything, every idea you get.  So, if you can reuse good ideas, that’s a good thing to do.  But I also like to, you know, factor in brand new ideas and new ways of doing things.  Very frequently in a design I would, I would look at some outlandish, far-out stuff and, not worrying about how expensive it’s going to be and whether you could actually implement it.  But look at that far-out stuff and then pull back in to a doable reality.  But that way you kind of were sure that you had not excluded something that was pretty neat, you know.  And, so that was kind of an approach I used to truly new concepts, was to explore out there in the never never land.  Now and then something really, really neat came along.  Just a whole, totally fresh way of looking at things.  Turned the whole works upside down.  We often times had brainstorming sessions where you could throw any idea out on the table, and you weren’t going to be held to task whether it was smart or dumb or how it would work or anything.  Get them all out there and sometimes you came up with some – you had to be a little careful.  You could waste a lot of time if you weren’t careful.

I especially enjoyed working with a team of creative people.  Folks that I have a lot of respect for.  You get just a synergism that’s tremendous.  You can get multiple ideas coming together, merging and things just go off like popcorn.  It just happens.  It’s fun.  I especially like doing something that’s never been done before.  And, that’s – in industry, other than the things like software industry, it’s pretty hard to be in a job where you get to do a whole lot of things that have never been done before.  We had a lot of that, and it was fun.

 

And, I like doing something that’s significant on mankind’s journey.  Sounds kind of hokey, but it’s really true.  When you look at man evolving up out of the ocean and finally moving off the planet.  It’s pretty neat to be in that sequence.  And to know it.  I’ve enjoyed the experience, and the beauty, and the exhilaration, of flying my little airplane through four dimensions of space and time.  And being physically and psychology totally uncoupled from any other human in the world at that time.  So, that aspect of flying I really enjoy.

 

I like feeling the presence of God and the totally unified workings of all things from the components of an atom, through the profound span of space, to the outer reaches of the cosmos.  It’s amazing, the same mathematical equations that describe the orbit of the electron in its tiny tiny scale describe the orbit of a planet.  And, for me it is no accident.  The probability of all this stuff fitting together that well is not high, not good.  I think there’s a power behind it.  And, I don’t have difficulty with that at all.  And I enjoy helping somebody who really needs it, even if they don’t know I helped.  And that’s fun stuff.

 

These days I’m helping a lot of small churches with their audio systems, installing audio and revamping, the audio systems for little churches that couldn’t afford big hot shots to come in and do it.  So, that’s fun.

 

I’m into a couple of projects now.  I’m rebuilding old aircraft, airplanes – big ones, and building one of them from scratch.  And I’ve got two flyable planes sort of on opposite extreme.  One of them is a four place, pretty good size Cessna that I can use for going around the country, Cessna 182.  And then I have the opposite end of the extreme, a tiny little airplane that can sit right here in front of us.  Fifteen foot wingspan, 15 feet long.  The same kind of airplane that chief astronaut Gibson and old Deke Slayton used to have, a Cassut racer.  Formula I pylon racer like they race at Reno air races.  It sounds like a toy because it’s small, but it’s a very fire-breathing, wicked machine.  It cruises at 200 miles an hour and is redlined at 300 miles an hour.  Stressed for plus or minus twelve g’s.  It’s rugged.  It’s got a roll rate that really gets your attention.  Three hundred and sixty degrees a second.  That’s ten times the roll rate of a Cessna.  So – Hoot used to call his his private rocket ship.

 

But, I’m building one that’s a fairly good-sized thing.  About the size of a Piper Cub.  But it’s an old-fashioned-like thing.  It’s got one wing up high, on Cabeen Struts [?] like the top wing of a biplane, and two open cockpits, and it will be on amphibious floats so that you can land it on the water or on a runway.  Sort of a white scarf and bathing suit.

 

And as I mentioned I’m – I’ve got a couple of hangers, laboratory and office and so forth on the drawing board to be built up there at the local airport.

 

TOMEK:  Do you mean the Bergstrom?  [new airport in Austin]

 

WOOD:  No.  At our little – here in Lago Vista.  Bergstrom is a very – will be a very commercial airport.  Unfriendly to general aviation.  They refer to little airplanes, non-airline stuff, non-military as general aviation.  All the corporate planes, but Bergstrom is not oriented towards them at all.  Priced way out of sight, and attitude wise, they’d rather there not there.  In fact, Austin’s got a problem.  They’re closing the Mueller, and they’re closing the executive air part.  And our little airport will be the last general aviation facility, other than that at Bergstrom, left in Travis County.  So, as a matter of fact we’re trying to upgrade our little airport.  I’m kind of spearheading a project to get surplus equipment from, as they close Mueller, the runway lights, beacons and communication equipment and strobe lights and all kinds of stuff like that, weather reporting equipment – to relocate that from the airport down there that they’re taking apart, up to our little airport.  So, we’ve been negotiating.  We’ve got an agreement now from the city of Austin to let us do that, and working on agreements with the Federal Aviation Administration for some of their equipment, and working on agreements with TEXDOT, Texas Department of Transportation, for some money to help us do it all.  So, that’s an active project.  And, it takes a lot of time. 

 

I hope soon we’ll have that facility going so I can get back to our design work.  Medical electronics, aircraft electronics.  A little something to keep us off the streets.

 

I don’t know whether you – this, material is a proper place to inject something which is kind of a lesson to pass on to the next generation, you might say.  This is related to how we maintained compatibility.  I poke earlier of how things had to fit together into a huge matrix of a lot of other things.  We evolved a system that I think is applicable to not only space work but to industry as well.  As to how you can design and build something that will eventually fit into a huge complex system with absolute certainty that it’s going to be compatible.  If you think that would be good to inject?

 

TOMEK:  Oh, yeh.

 

WOOD:  I don’t have any notes on this that I could pass on to you, but I can send them to you later.  But basically, the objective is to create a method that allows us to maintain absolute compatibility to achieve our goal.  To have it do everything everybody agreed it should do after it’s designed and built and tested.  So, basically, the way we did that was we would – we used the technique for the TV cameras.  We used the technique for telemetry transmitters and for telemetry multiplexers and different things of that sort where we would go out to have equipment built for us by industry.  We used the technique once for a – equipment to go be built in Germany by a consortium of French and German outfits and to come and be installed in the Shuttle and to do a particular instrumentation of a satellite.  And then it worked so well that we got a telegram from the CEO [Chief Executive Officer] of, I think it was GNBH, the biggest, one of the biggest electronics manufacturing outfits in Germany, saying that never, ever had they ever designed and built something that would fit into, even their own equipment, as perfectly as this had fit into the thing that they – every aspect of it matched perfectly.  So, I feel like it’s something neat to pass along.

 

We would want to build something, typically a TV camera.  We did our homework as to what the problems were going to be.  Earlier I identified a lot of things in a TV camera: the environments, hard vacuum and deep space and light and all that kind of different – We’d identify all of this.  We did our homework and we would look at all the different ways that you might go about addressing these problems.  Candidate techniques.

Then we would call a requirements definition meeting.  Requirements Definition Meeting.  In that meeting you would have people from adjacent organizations that were going to use this thing.  They were going to have to live with it.  They were going to have to feed stuff to it and receive stuff from it.  People who wanted a product from it, let’s say.  If it’s a medical instrument or whatever.  So you had these people come to this little convention and express their needs.  We took all their needs into account and we would have long discussions of refining the requirements of what it’s going to do.  Not how it’s going to do it, but what it’s going to do.  You see what I mean?  So, then we got the best compromise.  You couldn’t do everything everybody wanted to do.  And you had to keep in mind that some things were just going to cost too much or take too long or be too big or whatever.  And so you had to create a set of limits.  So you created this definition of what it was going to be and what it was going to do, and you got everybody to sign off on it.  This is really important because people change their mind.  Later on they say “No, it was supposed to have done so and so.”  Uh-uh, you signed here.  Very important.

 

Then we retreated back and we went through a review of all kinds of techniques.  We’d already done our homework on this, but we reviewed all these things to find which of these things would best accomplish this – what was to be done, so we could devise a document.  Well, we’d devise techniques now to say how we were going to do it.  And, we would build a working model of it in the lab.  And we would actually interface it with all the other systems that were going to have to work with it.  And, with prototypes of them, or we would simulate those guys.  Fake it all out, make it all play together.

 

Then we would draw schematics and write documents and document the performance of this thing.  And so that we could generate an Interface Control Document, because this, as I’ve said, this was going to interface with a lot of things around us.  Electrical power in, signals out, mechanical footprint, the thermal, the load we put on things, the stuff we heat up, the amount of heat we put into the air that’s circulating in the cabin, the amount of space we take, the amount of noise we put out.  The Russians just violated this hugely.  The Russian spacecraft is so noisy that the crew is going to have to wear earplugs 24 hours a day in the thing that’s up there right now.  They’ve just carried up some sound deadening stuff.  But, the Russians didn’t meet their ICD, interface control – they didn’t have one probably.  But this is the reason – I mean finding it out in space is a lousy deal.  We set up these documents, and again, everybody had to sign them.  Those people that you were going to interface with defined what they were going to give you and what they were going to get, and we signed them off.  So it was a set of legal documents.

 

Then we wrote a Specification.  That was a thing we would buy the device with.  And this specification not only told what it was going to do but told exactly how it was going to do it and what the – all the numerical parameters were going to be, and how we were going to test it to make sure it did that.  So there wasn’t any misunderstanding with the vendor.  And then, in fact we supplied probably a two-inch-thick book with it that described exactly all the schematics and measurements and everything on those prototypes, the laboratory bread boards that we had done.  Bread boards and brass boards.  So we gave them all that information and we said “O.K., now here is one way to do it and we want you to use your best skills, your best knowledge, your best techniques.  You’ve been doing great things.  We don’t want to prevent you from doing something smart, but don’t give us any bull as to how hard it is to do this thing.  We’ve already done it.”  “So don’t give us any hokey prices on this thing, keep it straight.”  And that really worked well.  Also, it allowed us to utilize the best techniques that industry – we’re going out to all of industry – could propose back to do it.

 

So then we would have, after the spec – well, we would release this specification with a request for proposals, and they would.  Various companies then who were interested in building the thing would propose to do it their way and to meet these specifications, or come back with a request to change a specification if there was some extenuating circumstance there and they would propose schedules and prices and all this stuff.  And we would generally buy several kinds of articles.  We would buy a qualification test set, one or more articles to be tested.  Test to destruction, practically.  And we’re going to test it really hard.  And we want to know everything about it.  We want to know where things fail.  And then we would buy – we would have specified they would produce for us a series of qualification units.  First we had these super rugged test units.  And then we had units that would be qualified to flight specifications.  I’m getting this a bit messed up.  Qualified to more rugged specifications, then we’d test it to flight specifications which were not destructive.  Then we had some spares.

 

Digressing briefly, today’s thinking is you test your flight articles for qualification.  You don’t buy any separate qual[ification] units.  And you usually don’t buy any spares.  That’s cheaper and quicker.  Also, it leaves your little tail out in the breeze when trouble comes because if you didn’t test it more vigorously, you don’t know where it fails.  You may be right at failure limits on the flight article and you don’t know it because you didn’t go beyond that point.  So we designed things so that we would know how far – how good it was, really, in absolute terms.  That’s – it’s a little bit different from the philosophy today.

 

So we got, we had their requests for proposals, and they came back in and we would evaluate them very methodically according to an evaluation criteria that was written down and established ahead of time to avoid legal hassles with companies that say “You treated them better than us.”  And then we would procure these units in this competitive procurement.  This gave you the best price advantage because guys were competing with each other.  And, so then we would test the qualification units to this high environment, and we would test the flight articles, every one of them to the lower limits.  You’d fly this stuff and you would check things after flight to see if they could be reflown.  Flight articles are very holy items.  They were kept in locked rooms.  They were kept in usually, double-sealed bags filled with argon or nitrogen gas to keep things from corroding and oxidizing.  And people didn’t handle them with their bare fingers.  They used gloves and stuff to keep the grease in their fingers and acid and stuff from causing corrosion.  So, these flight articles were treated with great respect and  -- because you didn’t ever want to ever do something to a flight article, use it in a lab or something in some way so that it was maybe damaged without knowledge and might, therefore, fail in flight.

 

So anyway, this sequence of getting these definitions of what it’s going to do, so that nobody’s disappointed later on that it didn’t do something else – they had no room to gripe because they were there.  They signed it off.  And then the interface definitions – interface – ICD – Interface Control Documents and the thorough testing.  Those were things that allowed us to have a highly predictable product.  It’s not cheap, but the six failures on the pad lately aren’t cheap either.  And when you fit thousands of things together in a very complex vehicle, statistics are going to eat you lunch if you don’t get every one of them as good as you can.  Anyway,  that’s my message to the future.  I hope they can use it.

 

Nancy, [Mrs. Wood] do any things come to mind that I should inject?

 

MRS. WOOD: I haven’t heard all that you’ve said.   But, you’ve said a lot.  Anymore questions that you have that haven’t been covered?

 

TOMEK:  No, you’ve done a good job.

 

WOOD:  Well, thank you.  You’re a great listener.  I love a great listener.