- [Interviewer] Well Rod, thanks for joining us today.

- You bet. Hope we can help a little bit here.

- [Interviewer] I'm sure you can. You came to NASA in 1964.

- 1964, yeah.

- [Interviewer] Yeah, tell me a little bit about how you got there.

- I went to, I'm born and raised in Beaumont, Texas. Went to Lamar University over there, it was Lamar State College of Technology at the time. Graduated and got married in December, I mean in January of '61. And took a job with Boeing aircraft in Seattle. So my wife Tina and I moved to Seattle. Was up there for I guess almost two years. I had been selected to be on what Boeing called a engineering development program where they'd take young engineers and they move them around different parts of the, different parts of the company. And I had seen everything except test. I had been in customer service, I'd been in research and development, I'd been in engineering. I had not been in test though, which is where I sort of thought all along I'd like to end up. Boeing by then had won the contract to build the Saturn 1C, the first stage of the Saturn V. So they had a test facility that was gonna open up in Stennis, Mississippi. And that was offered, that was a possibility. I could go there and fulfill my test, check that off my card. So we took that opportunity. We'd loved the Pacific Northwest, but also we thought we'd see the US, maybe use the aerospace business to see the US. We'd seen the Northwest. Back in those days it was very common to move around every three, four, five years and change jobs. Theoretically you kept advancing each time you did that. Anyway, we got to Boeing, and got to New Orleans, and they weren't anywhere close to being ready to take anything over to Mississippi, so I missed out on my test. But I was at home on a Christmas and ran into a, an old college buddy of mine. He and I used to study together a lot. And he had, he was over here in Houston working on, I was in Beaumont, he was over here in Houston working, working for NASA. And my mom had passed away and so that, moving from New Orleans to Houston would give us an opportunity to be closer to my dad. So I came over for an interview, and ended up talking to Gene Kranz and that was quite an experience, and I was sold on the whole idea. I've accused Kranz since then of setting this whole thing up that I walked into a... We were up in the old Stahl-Meyers building, which was the old Oshman's warehouse up by Highway 90 and the Gulf Freeway. And I remember Gene had this narrow, narrow office, very deep office. But in the end of the office, behind his desk was a, I guess you'd call it a whiteboard. But he had all these different remote sites listed. And he was on the phone when I came in, and he was saying things like, okay I've got so-and-so and so-and-so headed to Zanzibar, I need them to get passports. I've got this and that, and you know, he was talking to all these overseas remote sites and stuff. That just sounded fantastic to me. Plus the job we were talking about was in flight control. And to me that was sort of the ultimate test. I thought man, this really sounds good. So they made me an offer and I accepted and came over here. My interview was probably in January and came over here in March of '64.

- [Interviewer] And did you go right into flight control?

- Yes, no right in, right in. Seemed like I remember I had a choice. I was offered either Gemini or Apollo. And Gemini 1 had just launched. I don't know, in my mind I was thinking that's the thing going right now, let's get on Gemini. So I said I'd like to do Gemini and that's where I ended up and that was a great, great guess on my part I'd say, 'cause that's where I, you know, I was working for Arnie Aldrich. And of course for Kranz like I said, so all that worked out great.

- [Interviewer] At the time, before you got there had you given much thought about, to the space program?

- No, not really, not much. You know, I had worked on, when I was in R&D up at Boeing we were working on something called a nuclear space transporter. And they were preparing a paper to send I think to the Air Force. And it was gonna be, if I remember right it was a huge tank full of hydrogen with a nuclear reactor engine at the back and the theory was you'd keep pushing that hydrogen out past that nuclear reactor and that was heating it up and that was gonna be your thrust, your propulsion. So I'd been exposed that little bit to space. My main job at Boeing when I hired in up there, I was on the Bomarc program, which was the IM-99, interceptor missile 99. It was a anti-aircraft missile that was designed to take out whole fleets of airplanes. And then also in my moving around at Boeing I got to work on the, the Boeing proposal for the lunar landing module. They were bidding on that. Grumman eventually got that contract, but I was able to, I was able to do that. One of my favorite stories about that is that, and this is just my recollection, but in the very end before the proposal was submitted we were desperately, desperately trying to save weight. That was a big thing, trying to save weight. And then we submitted our proposal. After I got down here, at some point, even though I wasn't working on the lunar module, I was exposed to it a little bit, and the Grumman model didn't have seats. And I thought, why didn't I think of that when I was with Boeing? You know, something so simple. We didn't need seats if they were gonna be in one-sixth gravity, but I was always impressed, I always wanted to meet the guy that said somewhere, hey why don't we take the seats out, that'll save some money. I mean, what a common sense smart guy he must have been, so.

- [Interviewer] That is really funny. So it seems to me like you kind of tumbled backward almost into like the greatest adventure of the 20th century, becoming a flight controller.

- That's probably a good way to put it, yeah. Lucked into a good position, yeah.

- [Interviewer] So you did Gemini. And I'm interested in Apollo 1 fire, I know you weren't on console, but I think you and your wife maybe went and picked up John Aaron. Talk about that evening for you.

- I was actually supposed to be on console. That was gonna be, my team was gonna be, and it was gonna be a monitoring the test down at KSC, and we were strictly in a monitoring mode. So many of those tests back then we would come in and we might send the command to turn the telemetry on from our console. And we'd go through the whole test and then we might send a command to turn the telemetry off. And other than that we had no function at all. But our team was, was due to monitor that test. January 27th is mine and Tina's anniversary. And she had invited friends over to have a bridge party. And I had asked John if he would do that shift for me, and he said yeah. 'Cause if I remember right the test was gonna go until sometime in the evening at least. So John was on console and I came on home. Got a call at some point that evening. Best I remember it was before the, the bridge party started. It was Cheryl, John's wife. And there had been, I don't even remember how she put it. But I needed to go out to the control center and pick up John, so I went out, and best I remember he was outside the building and I met him outside and picked him up and took him home. He was telling me what happened. The next morning if I remember right, we were out there again looking at telemetry data, listening to the voice tapes and stuff, seeing if we could pick anything out that might help. That was Saturday. And then I think Sunday I was on the NASA Gulfstream headed to Florida to be part of the investigation team. It was my first ever ride on a Gulfstream. I was on Jim Lovell's team, and Jim had a team as part of the overall fire investigation, he had a team that was looking into how would we have handled this if we'd have been in flight. So that's what I was doing there, helping out on that. Because it would have been a EECOM kind of a job to try and fight that fire as best we could have.

- [Interviewer] Those were hard tapes to listen to, weren't they?

- They were, yes. Another hard thing to see, I remember walking into a, a building down there and it was refrigerated, I remember it being very cold. But the three suits were laid out over here with tarps over them. But I mean, you could tell what they were, you know, it looked like, had the human form to them, laid out there, and that was sort of a gruesome sight.

- [Interviewer] So I wanted to know about how you found out that they were gonna make that kind of a mission for Apollo 8.

- As I mentioned to you all ago that as you progressed in management there within the flight control division, the more your managerial duties took over, the less time you had for simulations, the less time you had for doing all the things that flight controllers need to do. So you started easing out of the actual, out of the control center, out of the MOCR anyway. Arnie Aldrich, who I mentioned, Arnie was the branch chief. I had been promoted to section head by then. Arnie grabbed me one day and said, we got to go to Kraft's office. Or, come with me, we're going over to Kraft's office, I don't remember exactly what he said. But we walked over to Chris's office, and I remember, I can picture it was like a person maybe from each discipline. I was there as an EECOM, Arnie was there as a GNC, Jerry Bostick was there as a flight dynamics guy. Frank Borman was there from the crew. He's the only crew guy I remember there. But anyway, I remember Chris saying, can anybody come up with a good reason why we shouldn't go around the Moon on Apollo 8. And I remember nobody could come up with a good one right off the top of our head. And so I think Chris said, okay go think about it. And then get back to me if you come up with one. I think we were told to sort of keep this under your hat for the time being. Don't go talking this up a lot. So as I said, they were trying to get me to get out of being an EECOM and to go into SPAN, and I can remember walking back over to the office with Arnie after that meeting, I said, hey you let me be your EECOM on this mission, and I'm out of there, I'll never ask to do another one. So, yeah that's my recollection of that. I actually did, so I got to do Apollo 8, and then we were still in the process of bringing new guys on and so I did Apollo 9 also as an EECOM, and then I was out of there.

- [Interviewer] What was your initial reaction to the idea of going all the way around the Moon on Apollo 8?

- Yeah, I guess hesitant at first, but then the more you think about it, we're gonna want to do that here pretty quick anyway and why not, there's no good reason not to. Wouldn't that be neat to pull that off, so.

- [Interviewer] Do you think that was the most special of the Apollo missions?

- To me it was. Probably to the CSM guys it was because that was where we did our thing. That was our design mission, if you want to call it that, to go up and orbit the Moon. Of course the LEM guys, their design was to, design mission was to go down and land, but no to us that was a biggie, that was the biggie. 'Cause it's the first time, absolutely first time.

- [Interviewer] Well, I mean was it the Christmas Eve Bible reading, what was sort of the highlight for you during that mission?

- Oh that's the one that really got everybody. I think brought tears to everybody's eyes. You know, the highlight had to be probably the burn headed home. When they appeared from behind the Moon and we realized, when they came around on time and so knew they had made the burn, and they were headed home. So that, that was had to be... You could relax a little then I guess. I mean, we still had to go through entry and everything, but you can relax. I can remember that night, I was on the shift that came on right after that and we had a rule beforehand that we were not gonna let the, the crew was not gonna go to sleep all at once. Somebody was gonna stay up. Back in those days the EECOM sent the on-off commands for the telemetry, they changed the antennas, they ran the tape recorders, they did a lot of the management of the communications system. And it had gotten complicated enough on Apollo that we had moved one of our backroom guys out to the frontroom and he would sit there next to the EECOM and do the commands. And Dick Brown, our INCO was sitting there with me, and after Apollo 8 had made their burn behind the Moon and had come out and was headed home, it wasn't too long after that that we thought the crew, everybody was asleep. And that wasn't supposed to happen. And I don't remember if it was a flight surgeon, if they were hooked up and the flight surgeon could see it, or what but I think, we thought the crew was asleep. And I think the CAPCOM maybe even tried to call them and couldn't get an answer. So we had a command on our console that we could send that was the master alarm, it would light up and sound the master alarm in the cockpit. And we had agreed beforetime that if the crew went to sleep we'd send that alarm and wake them up, so. I remember telling Dick Brown, let me send it. 'Cause I hate like heck to wake those guys up they've been so busy, but yeah I'll send it. And so I did, I sent the master alarm and I woke 'em up. That was the only time we had to do that. Somebody stayed awake the whole rest of the time. And I don't recall ever even, maybe I did talk to Bill Anders afterwards about that, but. Anyway, yeah we caught 'em asleep I think.

- [Interviewer] What was it like in mission control when they went behind the Moon and you lost, you know, you just didn't know what was going on.

- Oh very, very apprehensive, very nervous. Very quiet. Probably everybody just thinking their own thoughts and not doing a lot of talking, just sitting there. Yeah, just not a joyous mood.

- [Interviewer] You had faith in the math though, like you knew what was supposed to happen.

- What's that?

- Said you had faith in the mathematics of it.

- Oh yes.

- You knew what was supposed to happen.

- Yes.

- [Interviewer] So we're talking 8. Was there any, so in the control room, on the outbound leg, the crew was getting sick, right? I mean, I think it was, maybe it was Anders, one of them had like a stomach bug and they were getting sick in the capsule, right?

- Boy, I don't remember that.

- [Interviewer] Believe it was, okay, well if that's not something you experienced then no worries.

- Well you know, it could have happened and, the flight controllers might not a known anything about it. Now on Apollo 7 the crew got sick with colds and there was a lot of air-ground discussion about, about saliva and clearing your sinuses and stuff like that, but I don't recall any sickness talk on 8. So if there was any, they talked in code or something where we didn't know about it, so.

- [Interviewer] Hold on one second.

- Or I didn't know about it.

- [Interviewer] Was the party especially long and loud after that 8 landing?

- I think it was Apollo 8, I remember John Aaron and I standing, we were at the Flintlock Inn, which was a, a two story place. And I remember John and I just standing down by the front door and the cars going by and I think Milt Windler came up and said, why aren't you guys upstairs? And I think we're just, I think I said, we're just standing here proud to be Americans. I think that was 8, I definitely remember that happening. So I bet that was Apollo 8. As far as that, I don't remember any big special things about, about the party, the splashdown parties had grown back then. Back on Gemini it was just us control center guys who went over to the, back then it was a place called the Singing Wheel in Webster. And we'd go over to the Singing Wheel and have a few beers. On Gemini, what was the last Gemini, Gemini 12?

- [Interviewer] Yeah.

- On Gemini 12 somebody invited the secretaries. That was the first time I ever remember there being any girls at those things. But by the time Apollo rolled around I guess word had spread throughout Houston and there were people from all over coming down, so. But I don't remember any real biggie about Apollo 8 party.

- [Interviewer] I don't know if Eric has mentioned this, yesterday we had Sy Liebergot in here, another EECOM. And he talked a little bit about the Singing Wheel and some of the traditions that you guys had, some of the traditions that developed over the course of the program. Just off hours stuff, horsing around, the splashdown parties. Can you talk a little bit about what you guys would do, what the controllers would do kind of to blow off steam post mission. I mean, I've heard about like volleyball games and judo and all kinds of stuff, what were you guys into?

- Boy, some of the guys were into judo. Kranz was in the judo, Llewellyn was in the judo. I don't recall that being tied to any missions or anything. I don't recall volleyball games. You know, I can remember being at the Singing Wheel and somebody standing in a chair challenging, you know, an EECOM challenging a flight dynamics guy, or. You know, you messed up here, or you used up there, and. But I don't recall any athletic events or anything.

- [Interviewer] Did you find there was kind of a competitiveness maybe between like that systems guys and the tech guys up front?

- And the what guys up front?

- [Interviewer] Like the Trench guys, the systems guys and like the folks in the Trench. Any kind of like competitiveness in the control room?

- After a sim, you know, you'd run a simulation, be it a launch sim or what. And then you would debrief it. And unless the EECOM had had a problem EECOM didn't have much to say usually in a debriefing. But the flight dynamics people, they could go on and on and on about the trajectory went this way and the trajectory went that way, and this happened here. And we used to joke that we had to sit and listen to all their debriefings and how it didn't interest us in the least. One of our EECOMs, Charlie Dumis, Charlie wrote a poem. And the name of it is The Debriefing. Charlie was an ex-professor at, he had taught out at Texas Tech before he came to NASA. He was a super good EECOM, good engineer. But his poem started like, "Be quiet, my arse," and he spelled it in old English, A-R-S-E I think, be quiet, my arse, don't moan and seethe, or something like that for FIDO. Something "himself endlessly," I don't know. It's a long poem, and Charlie supposedly wrote it during a debriefing while the FIDOs were, were speaking. But yeah, there was some competition within the control room for, between the factions.

- [Interviewer] What was it like to work ultimately for Kraft. There's a great story in The Race to the Moon where Kraft puts his arm around you and says, "What do you think, Rod?"

- Yes yes.

- [Interviewer] Yeah, what was he like?

- You know, I didn't even realize what he was doing when he did that, but later on it dawned on me, that son of a gun. He was just a great guy to work for. But you had to, you knew you ought to perform, you ought to do right, you ought not BS him. If he asked you something and you didn't know, you ought to say, "I don't know, but I'll find out." I recall, it was probably in my first ever simulation. It was a launch sim and Chris was the flight director. We had three flight directors back then, red, white, and blue, Kraft, Kranz, and John Hodge was blue flight. But Chris was my flight director and during the launch sequence you had come to a point where the flight director would poll the room for a go-no go, 'cause if you're gonna abort you had an abort point coming up. And he would, he would go through and he would say, you know, RETRO, FIDO, GUIDO, everybody's go, go, go. CAPCOM go, EECOM go, GNC go. But in this first ever poll that I was a part of, and I knew it was coming, but Kraft said, "EECOM," you know, as he was going through the room, and I didn't know if I was go or not, but I knew I, I felt I wasn't no go so I knew I wasn't gonna say that. So I said, "Go," and some guy in the polling said, "Stand by." And I just remember at the time, you know, that's probably not what you want to say, that's probably the wrong thing to say. You got to be one or the other, you can't be stand by. And that guy never showed up back in the control center again. And they may have been his idea. A lot of, there have been guys that came over there and when through some simulation and said, that's it, I don't want this anymore. I don't like it, I'm not cut out for this, I don't want to do this any more. There's a great story about Arnie, this is not Apollo, this is back in Mercury, but, but it's another Kraft thing. But, and this is a legend I guess, I don't know if it really happened. I never asked Arnie about it. But Arnie was down at Guaymas, he was a CAPCOM down there on one of the chimp flights, I think it was Enos. And they had lost communications with the Cape. Back then the head control center was at the Cape. Kraft was there and Arnie was out at Guaymas and the Mercury came overhead and if I remember right Enos had pulled his catheter out and was in some sort of trouble. And Arnie couldn't talk to Kraft, he couldn't ask what to do so he ended up sending a, sending a command to deorbit the thing. And the story goes that when they got communications back between Kraft and Guaymas Kraft got on the loop and said, "Good job." Said, let me talk to Arnie and they said he's not here, he quit, he'd left and he had walked off the console and off the tracking station and said they don't pay me enough to do this, I'm out of here. I don't want to do this. Like I say, I never heard if that was true or not but I thought it made a great story. But it sort of shows you what Arnie went through, but it shows you a lot about Kraft. 'Cause I hear Kraft told whoever it was, said well go find him and tell he's now a GS-13 or 11 or something like that, I don't know what it was. I don't remember what his grade was back then, but.

- [Interviewer] So you guys... The thing that dominates Apollo in my head is how prepared the control room had to be for everything. You guys simulated and simulated and simulated and simulated just over and over and over again. Did it ever feel during the run up to Apollo as you guys were going through all these multiple simulations that, like there was gonna be no end in sight. Did you ever kind of get tunnel vision into the simulation and never think this is actually gonna be real, it's just we're gonna sit here doing this forever and ever and ever?

- No I don't recall ever feeling that. You know, you might do launch sims one day, you might do entry sims one day, maybe a rendezvous sim another day. Then maybe you'd have a test down at the Cape where you'd get to see telemetry from a real spacecraft, and so no I don't recall that much sim burnout or any, if that's what you would call it.

- [Interviewer] But you had to be deep into the knowledge of the spacecraft. For EECOM you guys had to know deep level stuff like what is the affect on the spacecraft if this circuit gate fails. Like, you had to get deep into the knowledge of the systems, right?

- Yeah. That's where John Aaron was so good. John was able to, because EECOMs had the electrical system and the power generation system and the distribution system. But John understood it even down into the guts of the other systems, the propulsion and the guidance system and stuff. He was able to grasp all that, he was super, very smart. And he had a photographic memory I think.

- [Interviewer] So you moved to SPAN after Apollo 9. What was your job there?

- Well I have to go back to Gemini a little bit. Back in Gemini, SPAN was run by McDonnell Douglas people. And they would talk directly to the EECOM and they would have, and these McDonnell Douglas people, or people, the people actually on the console were people that were in our office, worked with us day to day, they actually live down here. But then during a mission, the big shots, the vice presidents and stuff from McDonnell Douglas would come down. And they would sit back there beside our McDonnell Douglas people, our SPAN guys. And so it was very easy for them to ask questions more from an engineering standpoint rather than a, mission operations standpoint. So in Apollo we put a flight control guy in between the engineering people, be it NASA engineering or, in Apollo now it's Rockwell, Rockwell engineering. We put a flight control guy in there to sort of be able to filter those questions. And the filter worked both ways. The flight controllers out in the frontroom, they might have had a piece of data that they had wanted to know something about on one of their systems, and they hadn't been able to get it out of Rockwell, or maybe Rockwell's subcontractor. And they could ask it during a mission and send it back through SPAN and that would force the contractor into coming up with this answer. And you know, maybe it was a very expensive answer to go get. You know, they might ask a question that would cause the contractor to go run a bunch of tests and spend an awful lot of money to get the thing, so we were acting a filter both ways. Both from the engineering input into the flight ops part of it, and as a filter from our guys going back to engineering.

- [Interviewer] So for Apollo 11, during the Moon landing, where were you for that?

- I was in SPAN for the actual landing. And then if I remember right, I asked John about this the other day but I think John and Kranz and I went over into Clear Lake City and got something to eat and then came back to the control center and I went back up, we had a we called it the flight controllers lounge. It was a room up over the, it was over the lobby of Building 30, if you can, familiar with the control center. We had the operations wing and we had the office wing over here and in the lobby there was a room on the third floor that was the flight controllers lounge, and we had some easy chairs, we had the, had TV, had the flight director's loop up there on a speaker box. There were bunk beds across the hall 'cause in the early days some people even stayed out there during missions. But I went up there and watched the EVA from there. I'm sure Gene went back in the MOCR. I don't know what John did, I don't remember.

- [Interviewer] What'd you think as you watched that?

- I just, amazed. Just in awe. That was one thing as, as a CSM person that we had not had to pay a lot of attention to what was gonna go on on the lunar surface. 'Cause our spacecraft's up there just orbiting the Moon, so all that was, best I remember all that was pretty new to me. And I was just, I was in awe I guess is a good way to put it.

- [Interviewer] Can I ask about, on the landing, the Apollo 11 landing specifically, when you're in the SPAN room. So famously during landing, the LM's computer threw the 1201 and 1202 alarms as Armstrong was trying to set down, that they handled in the frontroom. But did that generate any SPAN room activity after everything was kind of settled, was NASA asking either Grumman or MIT, like what's going on with these alarms. Did that generate any activity for you, I guess is the question.

- Not that I recall but here again I was a CSM guy, my counterpart would have been a LM guy. So all the LM questions would have gone through them. I can just... During the landing I could not hear... I could hear my guys, backrooms, I could hear the EECOM talking to his SSR. I could not hear the LM guys talking to their SSR. Or I couldn't hear FIDO talking to flight, FIDO or GUIDO talking to his SSR, so I couldn't hear what Bales was saying to Jack Garman in the backroom, all I could hear, I could hear what Bales was saying to the flight director, to Kranz, but I couldn't hear what was going on between Jack and Steve.

- [Interviewer] Can you believe that was almost 50 years ago?

- That's hard to believe isn't it? It is. It's hard to believe, but yet it seems not too long ago, so.

- [Interviewer] And here we are, you know, this is 2017. Is this where you expected kind of the world to be? After doing all of this work on Apollo you hit it and then there's a trajectory for the rest of the program. And then it kind of falls off, right. Here we are 50 years later. We don't have a lunar colony, you know, we're not on Mars. Are we where you thought we would be now.

- No, probably not. And I can't say that I've thought a lot about where we should be. Or where we're gonna be, but. You know, we've done Skylab. That was super interesting from a operations, from an engineering standpoint, learning how all this stuff worked for long duration. And then after that of course we were right into the shuttle. And that was all new, I mean, we had new systems. John Aaron reminded me the other day that, I saw him, he and his wife were in town for the premier of that movie we were talking about. And had lunch with them the next day and John was reminding me I was branch chief by the time Skylab rolled around. John was a section head now. And John was, we were both working in what was the Skylab SPAN, which was FOMR, and John reminded me that I had come over to the office at one point and caught him, he was supposed to be on the console in SPAN but he had gone off the console and he was over in the office reading up about shuttle. This new spacecraft was so fascinating to everybody. It had all this new stuff on it, it had hydraulics, it had landing gear, it had all these new things we'd never messed with before, so it was... Yeah, so you know as far as looking way ahead about should we have a colony on the Moon or something like that, I guess I never really thought much about that back in those days. Looking at it now it seems like yeah, that's probably what we should have done.

- [Interviewer] How do you think the role of mission control will change if NASA does ultimately send humans beyond the Moon toward Mars, be it for a flyby or a landing mission and you've got the time delay in communication.

- That's gonna be interesting. 'Cause yeah, what was our time delay to the Moon, six seconds or something like that, and it was... But man, you're talking a long time there. You know, I don't know. The crew is gonna have to have a way to somehow get to all the knowledge that's gonna be here on the ground, here on Earth. And there's gonna have to be some way to get that knowledge back and forth. So that's where mission control will fit in. But boy, when you're going to somewhere like Mars, that spacecraft's gonna really need to be almost autonomous to... Not gonna be able to get a lot of help from the ground.

- [Interviewer] Yeah a twenty minute delay one way would be really difficult to have a reasonable conversation.

- Yeah.

- [Interviewer] What's the advice if you talk to, to younger people in mission control. What's your advice to them who, you know, would like to do something significant like you guys did.

- We didn't do anything significant because of us, I don't think, we did something significant because we just happened to be the guys that are at the right spot at the right time. I don't think we were anything special, or I don't think we did anything special to make, make Congress or whoever decide to, to go to the Moon. So I don't know what I could tell people they could do that might push them towards, push them towards something new and great in the future.

- [Interviewer] I guess the people today would be just as capable as you were back then, you think?

- Oh probably more so, yeah. They got a lot more data at their fingertips than we did, that's for sure. And they know how to use it. When we started building this control center we were gonna have computers for the first time generating our data. And we were scared of that. We were scared, back on Gemini, we had, back on Mercury, they had meters, hard meters. And on the Gemini remote sites we had hard meters. And now so we're gonna have this control center here that's gonna have computer generated displays. And can you believe, and we were in charge of okay, tell us what you want to see on these displays. We actually had the computer draw meters and looking back on it now, how dumb is that? But we thought that's the way you look at data, you look at it in meters and you know what's supposed to be lined up here, and what's lined up here. So we had meters for our displays, computer generated meters. And then we went to tabular displays and had the data displayed digitally to us finally. But the new guys now, they have all this data and they know how to use it a lot better than we did, so.

- [Interviewer] If you were addressing a young engineering student just about to be out of school, and this person had the opportunity to work at either NASA or like a Space X or a company like that, a new space company, what do you think your advice would be for that person. Is NASA still a place to take your talent and go, and engineer space stuff with, or is the future in your opinion commercial oriented.

- I don't know, that's hard to say. You know, I came to NASA as I mentioned earlier, Tina, my wife and I had decided we'd sort of use the aerospace industry to see the US. We'd seen the Northwest, we'd seen New Orleans. We came over here to NASA with the idea of just staying a couple of, three or four years. And we were headed off maybe to New England or maybe to Florida. And in fact the guy at Boeing, personnel guy at Boeing had told me that NASA would look good on a resume. So that was why we came here, it wasn't to go to the Moon or anything like that, it was just we came here looking for some interesting work and something to learn and further our career. I can say, we lucked out. At the right place at the right time. To get back to your question, I'd be hard pressed to tell somebody, you know, what they ought to do, whether it be NASA or, or whether it be one of the commercial outfits. Probably where the best money is.

- [Interviewer] Were you working Gemini 8 when they had the problem with the thrusters?

- Yes.

- [Interviewer] What's your recollection of that?

- I was not in the control center when the incident happened, when the thrusters stuck on. I guess I was at home. Maybe I was on an earlier shift, maybe I was on the launch shift or the rendezvous shift. Maybe they were one and the same. I remember hearing John Aaron talk about it, that he had just gone off shift but had not left the building yet and was walking back through the SSR. That's something you usually did, you got off shift then you went back in the SSR and talked to the guys and just found if there's anything they were working on. But anyway, John had walked back through and found out there was something going on and that we were probably coming down. Gemini 8 was battery powered, because it was such a short mission, the Gemini was battery powered. And battery power, we were very short on battery power. And so we were turning on and off tracking beacons and stuff. And I guess the, the new EECOM had not realized that, I'm sure he knew we were coming down, but did not realize that Retro needed a certain beacon on to track. It was a beacon that would normally be tracked you know, right during reentry I guess, reentry prep. And that beacon was not scheduled to be on and had been turned off, had been off for quite a while. So luckily John was through and realized what was going on and was able to get that beacon turned on and so Llewellyn was able to get his tracking that he needed. But no I think I was at home when all the action happened. Yeah, I was gonna say, yeah I'm sure I was in the control center, I had been in the control center for every launch until Apollo 12. And I thought, I've done this enough. You know, these guys can handle this. So I was sitting at home watching Apollo 12 on TV, watching the launch, and that's the one we get hit by lightning. And I can't hear what's going on. I can hear the air to ground 'cause that's on the TV, but I can't the flight director loop or anything else, so. I don't know what's going on and it drives you crazy, so after 12 I was back out for every launch.

- [Interviewer] Well it turns out you didn't miss much 'cause all that was said on the flight director loop was, what the hell's going on? And John Aaron said, "Give me a minute, SCE to AUX." That's all he said.

- Yeah.

- [Interviewer] So at the end of '68, you guys have Apollo 8 happen. Did it, obviously you guys were close to the missions, you're running them, you're involved in it, but did that kind of put kind of a happy capstone on the end of a rough year? Or was it for you guys down in the trenches was it simply, this is the next step and now we move on to the next step.

- To me Apollo 8 was we beat 'em, we beat the Russians. 'Cause we were definitely in a race with those guys. I think somebody and don't remember who it was. One of the flight director wives, it may have been Milt Windler's wife had made some flags. And if I remember right they were pennants and they were maybe red and blue and with a white number one on 'em. Those got handed out and we were gonna wave those. You know, indicating we're number one, we won the race and stuff. But word came down we couldn't do that, so after the landing we broke out our American flags but we couldn't break out our number one flags, so. Mine's probably still at the house somewhere.

- [Interviewer] Were you part of, did you work on ASTP?

- Yeah.

- Were you part of the team that got to go over on one of the trips to Russia to, for coordination. I was gonna ask what that was like to finally go and meet some of those people.

- No, some of my guys did. You mentioned Sy, I think Sy went over there. Guy named Steve McClendon who was an EECOM went over, I think he was the EECOM there during the mission. I guess Sy was our prime EECOM on 8 and he had gone over in preparation. I got to meet some of the Russians when they were over here. It was all socially. We'd get them out to parties and drink beer with them. I'm not even sure I ever talked to them very much on a technical basis. As I said I was a branch chief by then and so my guys were doing that.

- [Interviewer] Was that odd?

- It was odd, I remember of course, back then they were still, I guess not our best friend would be the way to put it. I remember getting the impression, excuse me, that they were learning a lot more from us than we were learning from them. Looking back on it now and reading some about it, they had developed the big boosters and so they were able to go brute force where we didn't do that, we developed the miniaturization and the smaller stuff, so. Smaller spacecraft, lighter spacecraft. So we approached it in different ways.

- [Interviewer] You say that as if the Saturn V is not a big booster.

- No, well, I say that, yeah, but I think the Russians from what I understand their, they were more cast iron brute strength kind of stuff where we were aluminum and finesse. But no, that Saturn V was huge; I can remember going in my office building in New Orleans when we were working on the first stage, standing up there and I don't remember what floor we were on now, but looking down and saying, this is how big that booster is we're working on, so.

- [Interviewer] Well thanks very much for coming down. We really appreciate it.

- Oh, you bet.