Continued...
BOYHOOD
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<< I'm afraid I did a great many ordinary things. I was a Boy Scout, although I didn't complete my Eagle requirements for a long time, about the time I had started going to Purdue. The small towns, the ones I grew up in, were slow to come out of the Depression. We were not deprived, but there was never a great deal of money around. On that score we had it no worse and no better than thousands of other families. Part of the pattern in those days was that kids got part-time jobs at an early age. I was a freshman in high school at Upper Sandusky when I worked for Neumeister's bakery. I made one hundred ten dozen doughnuts every night. I probably got the job because of my small size; I could crawl inside the mixing vats at night and clean them out. The other thing I remember about the place is that the most appreciated delicacy there was not cake or candy. The experienced bakers would take a loaf of bread, fresh and hot out of the oven, tear out the center and throw it away, put a whole quarter pound of butter inside the remaining crust and return it to the oven. The oven was always hot. After a few minutes, just enough time for the butter to melt and the crust to harden again, the loaf was excellent eating. >>
HIS PRIMARY INTEREST
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<< I think that interest goes back farther than I can remember. My father tells me about going out to the Cleveland airport when I was two years old to see the 1932 air races, so I must have been a staunch aviation fan before I was even conscious of it. It was my father, also, who took me for my first airplane ride. I was six years old and we flew in a Ford trimotor — the old 'tin goose' — which was carrying passengers at Warren, Ohio. We were supposed to be at church, I think, but we sneaked off and later my mother caught us, just because of the guilty, and probably excited, looks on our faces. By the time I was nine, I was building model airplanes. They had become, I suppose, almost an obsession with me. People talk a lot about the
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Depression, about deprivation. They miss the point. People in the Depression — the parents, the children — lived with a lack of money. It wasn't an oppressive thing. You didn't think about it. It simply never occurred to you to be extravagant. I bought airplane models without engines because it never occurred to me to buy models with engines. I bought, and I built, rubber band-powered models. I didn't feel put upon, in any sense. I knew that was what I could afford, and I was very happy with it. Anyway, that was during the Second World War, so engines and gasoline were not available. Neither was balsa wood, so I used straw, paper, hardwood — anything I could find. Naturally I also read everything I could lay hands on concerning aviation — I still get a great deal of enjoyment out of the collected papers of the Wright brothers — and I filled notebooks with scraps of information about makes of aircraft, specifications, and performances.
By the time I was fourteen, the family had moved to Wapakoneta and settled down. I got a job at the West End Market as a stock boy, then at Bowsher's hardware store, then at Rhine and Brading's pharmacy on Main Street. I don't think I ever got paid more than forty cents an hour on any of these jobs. At the pharmacy I swept out the place before school in the morning, then went back after school and on Saturdays — to stock the shelves, clerk, and try to make myself generally useful. When I had a day off, I went out to the local airport for flying lessons. There's another bit of apocrypha here. I am supposed to have ridden my bicycle three miles out there on what is still called 'the old brewery road.' Actually I hitchhiked. I didn't go down there very often, either, because at forty cents an hour it took some time to save nine dollars for a flying lesson. I was fifteen years old when I started doing that, going out first to meet Aubrey Knudegard, who gave me my first lessons in an Aeronca Champion. He also soloed me. Then Frank Lucie and Charlie Finkenbine taught me some of the finer points of flying. I got my student pilot's license on August 5, 1946, my sixteenth birthday. I was pretty skinny then — I probably looked twelve or fourteen. I don't suppose anybody would have rented me a secondhand automobile. I didn't have a driver's license, anyway. >>
NATIONAL ADVISORY COMMITTEE ON AERONAUTICS
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<< In watching the airplane business I had noticed that the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics was doing some interesting things. I was out of the Navy now, and in January 1955 I was graduated from Purdue. I applied for a job at Edwards in California, but there were no openings. Then I got a call from the Lewis Laboratory in Cleveland. I worked there in a free-flight rocket group, and joined the pilot group. I can recall telling Abe Silverstein, then associate director at Lewis, that I thought space travel was going to become a reality and I thought I would like to have a part of it. In those days — 1955 — space travel was almost a dirty expression, but Edwards looked like the place to be. It was about this time that the X-15 was being contracted. Then there was an opening at Edwards and they asked me if I would like to come out. I thought about it all of fifteen seconds and agreed. >>
DOING WHAT HE REALLY WANTED TO DO
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<< As a research pilot, I was experiencing the most fascinating time of my life. I had the opportunity to fly almost every kind of high-performance airplane and at the same time do research in aerodynamics. I first flew the X-15 in 1960, and altogether I flew it seven times. I flew it to 207,000 feet, not a record. [As of 1969 the world record for altitude was 354,200 feet, set in the X-15 by the late Joe Walker. Walker was killed in 1966 when his Starfighter jet collided in midair with the experimental XB-70 and both planes crashed.]
What was it like? That is a difficult thing to describe. You're very busy. The flight takes only about ten minutes and you want to get a lot of informa-
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tion while you're up there. It has taken a lot of time and money to get you there. There's very little time for wondering, but above two hundred thousand feet you have essentially the same type of view that you have from a spacecraft when you are above the atmosphere. You can't help thinking, by George, this is the real thing. Fantastic. You can see the curvature of the earth. And from that mountain house where we lived, Jan could use her binoculars to see what was going on. She could see the X-15 drop away from the B-52 mother ship, and she could see the puffs of dust down in the valley as the X-15 landed. That was quite a house; when we first moved in we had cold water but no hot, and she used to bathe our son Eric in a plastic tub in the backyard, after the sun had heated the water. We worked on that plumbing, and on other refinements to the house, for almost six years; and then it was time to move to Houston.
Meanwhile, at Edwards we had been able to cover a lot of experimental work. I worked on an advanced flight control system that was tested on the X-15 — the idea was to make the airplane handle in the same way in all positions, whether at high or low altitudes, high or low speeds. I thought, and still think, that this sort of thing will lend itself to applications far beyond aircraft. It will be useful in systems governing cameras, tape recorders, automated industry controls, many things. We were not just pilots; we worked as engineers and developers of programs. In fact we spent very little time flying. Most of the time we were organizing and planning, using airplanes as tools to get information. This was the only justifiable approach. The pilot could not be just a passenger on what somebody once called a galactic joy ride; we were using research aircraft like the X-15 to extend our investigative capabilities. If we didn't take that approach, probably we did not deserve to be there.
We even worked on the Mercury project's drogue parachute, which in the early days tended to be unstable at sonic speeds. We rigged up a bomb-like capsule which had approximately the same weight as the old Mercury capsule, and dropped it repeatedly from seventy thousand feet — the highest 'bombing,' I suppose, ever done anywhere. The idea was to test the drogue parachute at approximately the correct altitude and speed, about Mach 1.1. At the time we were doing this, the Mercury project looked like a dark horse to us. We thought we were far more involved in space flight research than the Mercury people.
I judged them wrongly. >>
THE LANGUAGE OF SPACE
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<< The language of engineering has always been a very precise language. Though a lot of technical words were used, a great effort was usually made to define them clearly so that the audience or the reader should be aware of precisely what had been meant by the statement or by the sentence. We used to make a lot of fun about those other professions which were less careful with their phraseology and terminology — particularly the Madison Avenue approach to speech and writing. However I guess that in recent years we have tried to out-Madison Madison Avenue. If we can't find a word to misuse properly, we'll make one up. An example of misuse is our use of the
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word 'nominal,' which most of the English-speaking world interprets as meaning small, minimal — and we usually use it in the sense of being average or normal, for reference value. I think that most of the English-speaking world would say that a nominal tab for dinner would be a dollar or less. To a space scientist a nominal tab would be maybe six or seven dollars. The difference is that most people think of nominal as being small, and we tend to use it as average.
We can degrade further the usefulness of a word like 'nominal' by adding modifiers — for example, 'nominalize,' which might be translated into 'make standard' or 'make normal.' And 'denominalize' might mean make abnormal, or make unusual. This kind of chicanery, when carried to the extreme, might produce such useful words in the English language as 'denominalizationmanshipwise.' We have even become a bit careless in our use of technical terms — for instance the word 'perigee,' which comes from the Greek, means the closest point to the earth in a trajectory. But it is frequently used as the lowest point in an orbit about any body — for example, the lowest point to the moon might be called a perigee even though it is more correctly called 'perilune.' I think the astronomers who originated these terms are perhaps turning over in their graves because of our flippant use of their very carefully determined words.
Then there are those abbreviations. Like CSM for command and service module, LM for lunar module, MCC for mission control center, RCS for reaction control system, ECS for environmental control system — and so on. NASA encourages, in fact practically demands, that such abbreviations be used throughout the system. This has led to literally thousands of phrases and groups of initials, insuring that the newcomer and the layman are going to be confused by the use of abbreviations and acronyms scattered liberally throughout the sentences spoken or written by anyone who is attempting to explain what's going on.
From a talking point of view these abbreviations probably do not help much. CMC, which means command module computer, takes up three syllables. The word computer itself also takes only three syllables, so you don't save much time in speech. It is true that you save some time, or some space, in writing and printing, particularly with respect to written notes back and forth between people at the working level. The problem is that this shorthand is used so much, and so frequently, that it becomes a crutch, and it is difficult to make any point without leaning on it. The computer people are reaching the absolute epitome of short-cut technical English. Of course they must speak in machine language when they are talking with the machines, but they carry over that kind of phraseology into their daily conversation.
And into their writing. In 1968 I received a copy of a memorandum which said in part: 'A small (but interesting) change in the interpreter makes it possible to call from interpretive, using RTB, in general any basic subroutine which may be called using BANKCALL: in particular any basic subroutine which (1) ends with a TC Q, or a TC K if it stores Q in K, (2) does not clob-
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ber BUF2 or BUF 2 + 1, (3) does not clobber interpreter temporaries LOC, BANKSET, EDOP, and of course such erasables as FIXLOC and PUSHLOC and PRIORITY with which no one should trifle. A TC Q from such a routine leads through SWRETURN to DANZIG. This amounts to a quantum jump in the sexiness of the RTB op-code; this change merges the RTB op-code with the larger set of basic subroutines callable using BANKCALL... This immediately opens a large virgin territory to interpreter users; and as TCF DANZIG routines are converted to TC Q subroutines a significant area may be opened to users of basic... [Some] subroutines which have required interpretive interface routines can now do without; for instance the SGNAGREE interface for TPAGREE can be dispensed with... Note that... Q points to SWERETURN: BUF2 to a TCF DANZIG.'
Understand?
No wonder that when they put a little cupboard in the wall of the Apollo 11 spacecraft to hold between-meals snacks they wound up calling it 'the smorgasbord mode.'
Doubtless Robert Benchley could make something of all this if he were alive. So could W. C. Fields. >>
THE ART OF SIMULATING
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<< You'd like to hope eventually to take the art out. There's a lot of ingenuity involved, a creative aspect. The free-flight simulator was conceived back in the days before there was a lunar module on the drawing boards, when I was at Edwards. Some people at Edwards and some others at Bell Aerosystems got their heads together. Long before we became committed to the lunar effort, it was obvious that landing, maneuvering over the lunar surface and taking off from it was quite a problem, and that even without knowing the nature of the configuration of going to the lunar surface, this was a valid engineering problem. We were thinking about this as early as 1958. The primary problem was that dynamics were considerably different over, and on, the moon than they were over, and on, the earth. Since there was no atmosphere on the moon, you couldn't use the techniques of airplanes or lighter-than-air vehicles. You had to have propulsion, a lifting force, to keep any machine flying, and this lifting force had to be equal to the weight of the machine or greater than its weight. It was decided to 'simulate' the lunar gravity on earth by using a jet engine which would support five-sixths of the weight of the vehicle, plus propulsion rockets to lift the remaining one-sixth, the lunar weight.
The problem of walking on the lunar surface was also anticipated. Man's weight on the moon would be one-sixth of his terrestrial weight, but his body would have the same mass. So in order to start walking or stop walking, you had to acquire force at a steeper angle — lean farther to start or stop. If you stood erect, as on earth, you would have little acceleration or deceleration ability. This would be something like trying to walk on the bottom of a pool with some weights. You couldn't get enough traction because of the low weight force you could apply to the bottom of the pool.
Two ways proved somewhat successful in simulating a walk on the lunar surface. One was to use an aircraft flying a trajectory very similar to zero gravity; for thirty-second periods you could walk under one-sixth gravity. Another technique was to counterbalance a man — stand him erect and support him by a cable and pulley system counterweighted with five-sixths of the man's weight. It was a Peter Pan rig. They had one at Grumman, where they were building the lunar module. [There are now several of them,
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improved versions, including one at MSC, Houston.] You had the feeling of being able to jump very high — a very light feeling. You also had a feeling that things were happening slowly, which indeed they were. It was a sort of floating sensation. But the lunar setting will become a very easy place to work, I think, once we have mastered the problems of balance and starting and stopping. We'll adapt to it. We'll be able to lift large loads — one hundred pounds with one hand, for instance — very easily. It's our feeling that the first time we step out on the lunar surface will not be the time to try to develop a technique concerning how much area we can cover or how far we can reasonably go. It will be a kind of dress rehearsal. There's no way we can simulate all the aspects together. There's no way to do that until we get to the moon. But we can take all the different parts and do them one piece at a time.
Then, mentally, we can put them all together and comprehend what the actual problems are going to be. It's like fitting together a jigsaw puzzle. >>
