Vince Lombardi

Coach, Green Bay Packers

1959-1967

[89] One of the many lessons of World War II was that air supremacy could be the linchpin of military victory. As nuclear warheads emerged as the "ultimate" weapon of the Cold War, the development of guided land- and sea-based ballistic missiles took on a special urgency in the U.S. military establishment. Not yet chastened by the protracted land warfare of Vietnam or the complexities of undeclared local warfare in the Middle East, most strategists assumed that strategic security would go to those who commanded the skies. Impelled by the sheer weight of its role in the allied victory over the Axis powers into an international arena divided into the "free world" and "iron curtain" countries, the United States belatedly entered the race to conquer space.

But what did it mean to conquer space? A nation's ability to send guided missiles into space, or to orbit objects of whatever size and function, served as an ominous announcement to a contentious world that the ultimate penalty for "aggression" might be close to unthinkable. Was there no peaceful purpose to which we might put the capacity to loft objects into space, to view the heavens-and Earth-with unprecedented visual clarity and perspective?

American scientists, too, had a strategic interest in space. Having tasted the brew served up by military patrons during the national "emergency" and the Manhattan Project, the scientific community sought to remain at the table with an ongoing menu of government-funded "basic" research. Yet consciences had been troubled by the uses to which science had been put in "winning" the surrender of Japan; many in the scientific fraternity were eager to explore the next frontier of space under civilian, rather than military, support.¹

Thus it was that, while the NACA (later NASA) and military engineers began to transfer the new technologies of hypersonic flight and ballistic missiles to vehicles that could lift ever heavier payloads into orbit (even sending some of those payloads on interplanetary trajectories), the payloads themselves were parceled among [90] competing interests. Among those interests, shrouded in ideological assumptions, were the proponents of "manned space flight" and of "space science"-or science in space. The former combined the heroic, romanticized aura of human flight, inherited from pioneer aviation days, with the new romance of space travel into exotic and alien realms. The romance of aviation knew few geographic boundaries, but the romance of space travel was largely an import from Europe, never wholly adopted by a country whose ideology presupposed that its own wondrous landscapes, its own pluralistic culture and institutions, and its own free-wheeling politics constituted the only last frontier that mattered. The notion that the survival of democracy required an expanding frontier (a notion easily associated with the ignominious attempt of nineteenth century Europeans to extend cultural and political hegemony over the rest of the world) would come back to haunt advocates of expanding the space frontier as opponents of costly manned space programs remained indifferent to appeals to an American "manifest destiny" in space.

Claimants to space as the next frontier for scientific observation had no such ideological difficulty. But they had their own rhetorical problem, which was the alleged priority of disinterested, or "basic" research (science "for its own sake" ) over applied research, an increasingly costly kind of research which, by virtue of its largely military patronage, could be misapplied. It would be difficult to sequester the disinterested pursuit of science in an organization that had to respond to the mixture of constituencies necessary to sustain a large publicly funded technological enterprise. That there might be powerful sociological tensions at play in the contest between the cloistered secular priesthood of the academic science establishment, and the engineers and technicians who served the country's bidding, whether as industrial or government workers, is also probable. The scientists' handicap- much of what they did seemed arcane to a public relentlessly bombarded with novelties and rarely encouraged to reflect upon them-was compensated for by the fact that most science in space could be accomplished with automated spacecraft, normally cheaper than spacecraft designed to launch and sustain human beings.

The maelstrom of political and ideological interests that surrounded NASA as it broke ground in 1959 and 1962 for its new space centers at Beltsville, Md. and Houston, Tex. would have much to do with the shape of the agency and the careers of the roughly ten thousand engineers who flooded its portals, and those of its contractors, during the Apollo decade. The scientific adventure, riding on the success of the first U.S. satellite program, staked out the initial claim. Although The Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory and the U.S. Army and Navy had both begun to launch sounding rockets ² during the decade after World War II (the Army using captured German V-2 rockets, the Navy using its more powerful Viking), the Department of Defense in 1954 pronounced the satellite of no military value. In this the department was echoing the Rand Corporation's conclusion in a 1946 report that an orbiting satellite was unlikely to be of much military use -- but could be useful in meteorology, communications, and astronomy.³ Rand also noted that the country that launched the first satellite could reap as its reward strategic psychological and political advantages.

[91] As the military services continued their missile development programs, scientists from around the world began to make plans for the Third International Polar Year. The First International Polar Year of 1882 had inaugurated international scientific cooperation in the study of Earth's polar regions; a Second International Polar Year in 1932 continued the enterprise. While the Third International Polar Year would not come due until 1962, the prospect of geophysical investigations during a period of maximum solar activity anticipated for 1957-1958 both accelerated and expanded the scientists' vision. In 1952 the International Council of Scientific Unions gave its blessing to an International Geophysical Year during 1957-1958, inviting all nations to cooperate in the study not only of the polar regions, but of the entire Earth.

Within the next three years the American Rocket Society, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Army and the Navy proposed launching a small satellite during the International Geophysical Year. The White House adopted the idea, and by midsummer 1955 the United States had committed itself. The Department of Defense would launch the satellite; the National Science Foundation (created in 1950) would fund it; and the National Academy of Sciences would decide what kind of scientific instruments it would carry. Each of the services was ready to offer its own rocket: the Air Force its Atlas, the Army its Redstone-derived Jupiter C, and the Navy its Viking. Noting that only the Viking had been developed as a space research vehicle, while the country's nascent ballistic missile program required the Atlas and the Redstone, a Department of Defense selection committee gave the nod to the Naval Research Laboratory's Viking.⁴

The Naval Research Laboratory's successful entry, renamed Vanguard after the addition of its Aerobee second stage (a solid-fuel third-stage rocket) and a 1.5 kilogram scientific satellite, missed its first cue in an unfortunate pyrotechnic display,⁵ but the Naval Research Laboratory group prevailed to become the nucleus of the first new space center created after NASA was established in 1958. That center was Goddard Space Flight Center, established in 1958 on land acquired from the Department of Agriculture's Beltsville Agricultural Research Center. ⁶ Joining the Naval Research Laboratory group were personnel reassigned from the Army Signal Corps' meteorological and communications satellite activities at Fort Monmouth, N.J., as well as atmospheric balloon research from Fort Monmouth and the former NACA Langley Research Center, and the Naval Ordnance Laboratory at Dahlgren, Va.

Twenty years later Goddard's visual character-its low-slung, predominantly red brick buildings settled amid generously wooded, rolling hillsides-suggests, more than any other NASA installation, a college campus. A shaded park for picnics and outings and signs of solicitude for resident Canada geese create an atmosphere of academic repose and collegiality. Goddard's mission focused increasingly on space science, especially after the Space Task Group, assigned to manage Project Mercury, moved from Langley Research Center to the Manned Space Center in Houston in 1962.⁷ The institutional separation hinted, correctly, at a cultural separation. NASA would become predominantly an organization that accomplished its work through "out of house"-nongovernment-organizations. Since scientific research has been, in the United States, largely a university enterprise, Goddard's [92] external associations would become, more than any NASA installation other than the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (and notwithstanding industrial ties necessary for the fabrication of instruments and satellites), those of the university science community.

Among the early arrivals at Goddard in 1959 was Henry Beacham, who came from the Naval Ordnance Laboratory in White Oak, Md. Beacham had several years' experience working in the camera research laboratory of the Eastman Kodak company and a master's degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Rochester. During his seven years at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory-now called the Naval Surface Weapons Laboratory-he worked in operations research, or weapons analysis. However, calculating the most efficient ways of destruction held no special charm for him, nor, for that matter, did the space program. What did excite him was the novelty of the engineering research problems that accompanied the emerging satellite programs of the early 1960s.

En route to Goddard, Beacham spent a few months working with the Project Vanguard group at the Naval Research Laboratory at Anacostia Naval Air Station, Washington, D.C., forming associations that may partially account for his early rise in Goddard's management ranks. Upon joining the Goddard group he began work on the environmental testing of satellites, soon moving on to major management responsibilities for Goddard's Nimbus and Landsat programs.

To those critics who questioned the practical value of the Apollo manned lunar landing program, NASA could, in the late 1960s, point to its "Earth applications" programs that placed satellites in Earth or geosynchronous orbit to serve as platforms for global communications and remote sensing instruments to study Earth's surface, weather, and upper atmosphere. The prospect of being able to detect global environmental changes, receive near-instantaneous television broadcasts from abroad, or make reliable and long-range weather forecasts, would become, for the ordinary person, one of the more invisible but important legacies of the space age.⁸

For example, the sophisticated Nimbus series of five meteorological satellites, launched between 1964 and 1972,⁹ relayed over 3,000 weather photographs daily. Landsat, a later designation for a series of Earth resources satellites first launched in 1972, allowed worldwide monitoring of land masses from desert to forest, glacier to ocean, as well as accretions and movements of atmospheric pollutants. The first Landsat (Earth Resources Technology, or EATS-A) satellite photographed the entire Earth with 500 pictures, one-thousandth the number required to photograph Earth by high-altitude aircraft.

Achieving such a dramatic increase in the scale of the world's information about its own environment depended on the reliable functioning of light-weight motors and sensitive instruments far distant from the tender care of terrestrial technicians. The first Nimbus, for example, an 830-pound spacecraft stabilized on all three axes, carried an advanced vidicon camera system, an automatic picture transmission [93] system, and a high-resolution infrared radiometer. The next Nimbus, launched in 1969, carried a SNAP-19 auxiliary nuclear power system."¹⁰ The first Landsat carried a multispectral scanner, return-beam vidicon camera system, two wide-band video tape recorders, and a data collection system.

Ensuring that remote sensing satellites operated as intended required an understanding, earned through systematic testing and an accumulated appreciation of the space environment through data from successive satellites, of the conditions to which each assemblage of instruments-its materials, electronics, and optics-would be subjected. Beacham, his contemporaries from the naval research and ordnance laboratories, and newcomers to Goddard plowed this virgin territory. Beacham's personal progression from satellite environmental testing to systems reliability engineering reflected a logical accumulation of critical technological know-how.

The influx of German rocket research and engineers into the United States after World War II has become the stuff of American space lore.¹¹ Less well known is aeronautical work done not only in Germany but also in Italy during the 1930s and 1940s,¹² work which laid equally important foundations for modern aerospace technology. In 1911 the romantic Italian nationalist and poet, Gabriele d'Annunzio, took to the Italian skies in a Curtiss aircraft. Twenty-nine years later, Romans craned their necks for hours as two Italians established the world's duration flying record, circling the Eternal City for 67 hours and 13 minutes.¹³ A measure of the quality of aeronautical research being done in Italy during the 1930s was the keen interest shown by the U.S. Office of Strategic Services in the Italian aeronautical research center at Guidonia.¹⁴

During the turmoil of World War II, one of the most bitter struggles for the Italian peninsula occurred at Capua, Italy as the German Wehrmacht fought to hold the Volturno line against Allied forces. In the summer and fall of 1943 the Allies had begun their successful advance northward through the difficult and rain-sodden terrain of the Campania. As British and American troops landed at the Port City of Salerno after the Italian-Allied armistice of September 3, the Germans began a systematic campaign of imprisonment and evacuation to labor camps of Italian troops and Allied prisoners of war. War-time memoirs tell of thousands of Italians and Allied prisoners escaping into the protective hillsides of the Apennines, seeking refuge among frightened Italian villagers, who risked their lives and the demolition of their towns by their defiance.¹⁵

One of those prisoners was Frank Toscelli. Born in the little town of Vitulazio, near Capua, Toscelli was inducted into the Italian Army in 1943. Seized by the Germans for deportation, he escaped with two of his buddies, was captured, and escaped again. Although one of Toscelli's buddies was wounded during an artillery barrage, the trio managed to find what they hoped would be the Allied line. Initially fearful that they might have stumbled into German hands, they were relieved, [94] remembers Toscelli, when they noticed the "shape of the shoe" worn by one of the strange soldiers: "it was different." They noticed as well "a piece of chewing gum and ... a cigarette paper." They were safe, and they were free.

Toscelli's father had emigrated to the United States in 1907, only to return nine years later when his Italian-born wife became ill with what the doctor diagnosed as an advanced case of homesickness. The elder Toscelli operated a small taxi business in the town of Vitulazio; as he repaired his taxis' engines and the townspeople's bicycles, Frank had watched, captivated by a curiosity about how mechanical things worked especially airplanes. Monoplanes flying overhead fascinated him as well. His father wanted him to be a doctor, but Frank would become an aeronautical engineer. After World War II he went to the University of Naples, earning his diploma in engineering in 1949. Through his father echoed America's siren call. "Go to America," his father had insisted; that "is the land of [the] free." In 1950 Frank moved to Pittsburgh, where he lived with an uncle and worked as a busboy and construction laborer while he attended the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon University) on a scholarship. By 1953 he had received a bachelor of science degree in mechanical engineering.

Sharing the experience of thousands of former Axis nationals eager to emigrate from war-torn Europe to the land of opportunity, Toscelli played a game of cat and mouse with U.S. immigration officials as he tried to obtain an immigrant visa Neither a new American bride nor a $1,000 bond posted by his uncle could relieve him of the necessity of traveling to Honduras, Canada, Mexico, or any nation bordering the United States where he might get an immigrant visa so he could reenter the United States to stay. Finally, a friend of a friend arranged for him to go to Cuba. With ninety dollars in his pocket, he boarded a Greyhound bus for Key West, Fla. After a few months in Cuba he was broke, but he could get a visa. He managed to scrape together enough money to return to Pittsburgh, where Westinghouse Airbrake (which had first hired him in 1953 as a pneumatic engineer) made a place for him He remained with Westinghouse until 1960, working with airbrake and switching signals.

By 1960 the space program was gathering steam, and Toscelli became "an enthusiast, like everybody else." Drawn to what he felt was the sheer "adventure" of space flight, he took a job with Westinghouse Electric's Astronuclear Laboratories, where work was under way on the NERVA nuclear propulsion engine. He got "involved then in ... shock and vibration and dynamics." His work gave him an opportunity to see something of America's wide open spaces when he had to accompany a simulated reactor on a train trip to Jackass Flats, Nev. for testing. "I rode the train reserved for us.... We had to measure the forces, the excitation applied to this instrument.... So I saw the country-the vastness of the country.... After we got to lowa, there was nothing else, although the route was chosen to avoid any place of habitation, any cities or concentration of people." Toscelli also managed to continue going to school at night at the University of Pittsburgh. By 1960 he had his master's degree in mechanical engineering, and when he left Westinghouse in 1964 he had risen to the rank of senior engineer for shock vibration and dynamics.

[95] Toscelli was recruited by NASA in 1964. "They were looking for people to get involved in space [and they were] looking for" engineers with masters' degrees. Toscelli's specialty, gas dynamics, appealed to NASA's recruiters, who interviewed him in Pittsburgh; by the end of the year he had moved to Greenbelt, Md. to work at Goddard Space Flight Center. "I was in the test evaluation area where we have all the equipment testing and the chambers.... I was at that time in ... advanced research and technology because of my considerable experience, and the variety of subjects that I was familiar with." Goddard was in the midst of designing spacecraft that would carry sophisticated instruments subject to damage in the environment of space. Toscelli's work drew him into "the assessment of molecular and particulate contamination of spacecraft" and the auto-effects on satellites' space environment "generated by material outgasing, particulate releases, propulsion, and venting." Of necessity he soon became expert in "vacuum technology [and] internal gas flow" in spacecraft, material outgassing, contamination, lubrication, and propulsion problems. Meanwhile Toscelli remained the restless student, eager to add to his growing experimental grasp of space-induced phenomena an intellectual mastery which, ~n the European tradition, could only be confirmed through university work. For five years after arriving at Goddard he continued course work at the University of Maryland and Catholic University to complement the thesis work in vacuum technology and gas dynamics and contamination he had done at the University of Naples. In 1969 he traveled to Naples to defend his thesis, returning to Goddard with a doctorate in mechanical and aerospace engineering.

The nature of his work enabled Toscelli to contribute to virtually every Goddard satellite program. For example, as any satellite travels through space, its materials release gases "either because of diffusion through the material or because they are attached to the surface molecules." Satellites had to be designed so that the release of gases and pressures internal to the instruments could be closely controlled to "prevent the problem of voltage breakdown, or contamination of a mirror or other critical devices which may be degraded by environmental conditions which are not appropriate." Those conditions would have to be accurately predicted, and one of Toscelli's accomplishments was the development of a computer program which could "calculate, given several volumes with different gases," the pressures within a satellite. The problems with which Toscelli worked were and remain common to all spacecraft, manned and unmanned alike.

Toscelli speaks proudly of being consulted on the design "parameters" of the space shuttle and the space station, and he remains puzzled that the authority he had earned in his engineering field has not translated itself into more than one promotion since he arrived at Goddard. When he arrived at Goddard in 1964, the center seemed to some to be largely an extension of the Naval Research Laboratory group "These guys were in the management area already. [They] had the previous experience, [they] knew each other." He has watched, frustrated, as those "with less education, or less production," have been promoted beyond him. "Some ... [get promoted] because of buddy-buddy ... and also, [there's] my age." [96] "We were young and full of enthusiasm ... the work was interesting ... a brand new facility and all the people, we all had an ambition to move ahead, to do the best we could in this new adventure.... It was very satisfying and very interesting-the prestige, the respect, and of course the fact that we were doing something never done before ... and we all were contributing very much to the field."

From the time he arrived at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in 1966 until 1985, when he began working on studies of possible science laboratory modules for NASA's new space station program, Hank Martin worked in the thermal analysis and design of satellites. "That essentially involves making the spacecraft run at the right temperature when it's in orbit, which is an interesting set of problems." He was fresh out of Catholic University when he went to Goddard, with a degree in engineering and, as engineering curricula go, a fairly broad education that emphasized conceptual ability. "I wasn't particularly trained or suited or excited about heat transfer initially. I could have been in the dynamic structures or propulsion or a whole lot of different areas ... but this was what looked good."

Radiation heat transfer was "an emerging discipline.... There had been a little bit of work done in the gas turbine industry because they were dealing with such hot temperatures. But lo and behold, when you get into space that's all you've got- there's no air to cool things ... you've got to transfer everything by radiation." Engineers tried various approaches to the problem, "developing computer models .. to predict" heating and radiation, or doing "supporting research" such as investigating "thermal control coatings: you paint something white so it's going to reflect a lot of heat. But it gets out in space and the ultraviolet energy makes it turn brown and the thing gets too hot and you blow out batteries.... We've lost some things because of high temperatures on spacecraft."

Goddard's engineers also explored "different kinds of hardware to control temperatures [like] these louvers, like venetian blinds, that open and close and let heat In or out of a particular system. [Or] the development of heat pipes, which are extremely efficient devices for making things run under constant temperature- and various permutations and combinations of heat pipes. Heat transfer technology ... developed some sort of maturity and sort of leveled out in the development area ... within maybe ten years or so.

"I think probably . . . why I didn't . . . burn out on it was the fact that, working heat transfer for flight projects, I worked in-house programs and out-of-house programs no manned stuff, but all free flyer scientific type missions. Everybody else who had anything to do with that satellite had some sort of a temperature requirement. The data system guy, he had a radio transmitter, he had some sort of digital onboard computer. If they didn't run at the right temperature, they wouldn't work right. The scientist who was running some sort of energetic particle detectors ... if his experiment didn't run at the right temperature, his data wouldn't be right. The solar cells had to run at the right temperature. The battery ... every single piece on that [97] spacecraft had a temperature requirement. And as a result, l got a little bit of information about what everybody else was doing. And l got very interested m some of the other ... subsystem disciplines... the power, or the electronics, or t e science end of it. lf nothing was particularly interesting... in my particular area of controlling temperature, l'd be finding out, 'What's this guy doing? . . . How does his little box work?'... So there's always something to learn ... some knowledge to accumulate about what other people were doing."

By the nature of his work, Martin was also drawn into satellite flight operations. "I've got all this data coming back from everybody's stuff, and folded in there is this temperature stuff. How do you set up sort of an overview so that I can look at some sort of a computer printout and in a very rapid fashion be able to tell flight control whether something had to be done or not? ... So it was .. . this end-to-end approach, which I think I probably only got by being here at NASA, that was extremely interesting. I wasn't really confined into a specific discipline, and part of that was because the opportunity was there, and part of it was because I'm an inquisitive type of person.

"Everything back in those days was kind of an experiment. If it didn't work, at least you learned something. [Whatever it was] in the small project kind of environment ... it was something that needs to be there to develop the kind of overview engineering that I was fortunate enough to have. . .. In those days . . . we had satellites you could carry in the room.... You could get half a dozen guys in a room sitting around a table ... and those half a dozen people knew everything, knew that system inside and out."

Throughout his NASA career the most exciting work Martin remembers doing "was actually working with the satellite that I helped build just before it was launched. I worked the S-cubed [small scientific satellite] which was launched out of San Marco over [west] Africa.... I'm talking about the actual physical hands-on kinds of interaction with the hardware.... A lot of people from top to bottom really get emotionally involved with that sort of thing. I knew people that were responsible for the thermal control coatings, for example.... The satellite would be launched and they'd stand on the beach and watch it go and they'd cry."

When Elizabeth Mueller went to work at Goddard Space Flight Center in 1963, the year she received a bachelor's degree from Emory University, no one had recruited her. In fact, had she not insisted on being interviewed, NASA would have turned her away. Lured by the prospect of working near the nation's capital, Mueller came close to accepting an offer from the Naval Weapons Laboratory at Dahlgren, Va. until, that is, she looked at a map and discovered that it was not (as a been advertised to her) a suburb of Washington. "But Goddard did look like a suburb of Washington, so I came up ... got off the [Baltimore-Washington] parkway, walked into the main gate, and said, 'I'm here to talk about a job."'

Goddard's personnel people, "with their usual enthusiasm, said 'well, I'm sure you're not qualified, and you can't do this and you can't do that.' And I said, we, [98] I sent you an application and I believe I am qualified."' As it turned out, "to be hired by NASA with a degree in math you had to have twenty hours, or something like that. And a science other than biology ... physics or chemistry. And I had that in addition to all the math courses that one could possibly take and good grades.... So they took the application. I just insisted that I was there, I was from Atlanta, and I wanted to talk to someone.... So they said, 'all right.' They sent me around to four people and all four of them wanted to hire me ... and I didn't understand one word of anything anyone said to me.... I'd never even seen a computer."

Mueller's career began in high school, where she was a good mathematics and science student. Her mother, a college graduate in mathematics, worked at home doing office work for her father, who was a divisional sales manager for a national shoe retail firm. Mother and daughter had two young women friends, "not long out of college [and] into the early stages of a career [who used to visit and] talk a lot about job opportunities. Apparently at that point in time math-this was ... '57, '58- math graduates could get jobs anywhere.... So I remember listening to them talk." Mueller's parents had insisted, as she grew up, that she go to college and have a career, even if she never needed to work. They had learned at least one of the depression era's lessons: a woman might have to support herself, not to mention her husband and her family. "You have to eat, and so you have a job because you want to eat. So you may as well get one that gets you a lot of money."

Mueller was so keen on getting out and working that she turned down a graduate fellowship at Emory. "The other thing is that I had made a definite decision I was not teaching. And my parents were going crazy, because they were convinced that was the only thing for a woman to do with a math degree. I took one education course and it was horrible.... My parents couldn't imagine what I was going to do without teaching. And I couldn't either, but I got one of these guide books [that tells] who hires people with certain degrees, wrote a bunch of letters, and the next thing you know, I had all kinds of offers for jobs. IBM at that time was offering one-third less for women than for men. And they had two pay scales-they had it published and that's what they would say.... The federal government was one place where women could get equal pay."

Mueller's first assignment was with an orbital mechanics group, where she worked documenting programs for a large IBM 7094, one of the last large mainframe computers used by NASA before IBM developed its 360 series, available in the mid-1960s. The IBM 7094 provided the initial data processing for Project Mercury, which with two suborbital and three orbital missions between 1961 and 1963, gave the United States its first manned spaceflight experience. (Goddard had served as the mission control center for NASA's Space Task Group, responsible for Project Mercury, before the Manned Spacecraft Center opened in Houston, Tex. in 1962.) By current standards the machine was as large as its memory was small. Filling the space of several rooms, and with only 64K memory, the IBM 7094 was a noninterachve machine that could only batch process from cards or tapes.

Mueller did not linger long with the orbital mechanics group. For orbital mechanics "you need a lot of astronomy. I'd never taken an astronomy course, and I really didn't like astronomy.... Second of all ... the computers were choked ... you [99] would write a program and submit it and it would be a week before it would come back.... They gave us work to do documenting programs that other people had written. They were using a compiler on the 7094 which didn't allow you to learn much about the machine. Everything was done by the compiler. And I just got bored." Along with two co-workers also frustrated with their work on the large mainframes, Mueller transferred to the Goddard office that was programming a small satellite control computer for NASA's Orbiting Solar Observatory (OSO) series. Between 1962 and 1975 Thor-Delta boosters launched nine OSO satellites during an eleven-year solar cycle, returning unprecedented photographs and invisible spectra observations of the solar corona, and solar flares and streamers, as well as observations of the influence of solar activity on Earth's atmosphere. Six months before the first OSO launch "they didn't even [have] as much as . . . a manual for this computer.... In six months we wrote a system and-oh! it was great fun! ... I was single, and I would sleep maybe five hours a day and work all the rest of the time. [Since Mueller was] programming close to the machine ... [with] data comma in, processing in real time ... it was a good way to learn.... You just had to learn how the machine worked."

In time Mueller became so competent at her work that she was chosen to head the control center software group with which she had been working. NASA "was launching about every year" while she and her group developed the control software for each new satellite. "What you would do was develop the software for the new satellite; you'd work in a fury when you didn't have passes to take from the one [satellite] that was up there. So your work schedule would process with the orbit. Then you'd be working around the clock.... But ... after a few years of that, it began to be very old-to work these long extended hours and late hours." In the meantime Mueller met her future husband, who had come to Goddard in 1964 to work on the Orbiting Geophysical Observatory satellite (six were launched between 1964 and 1969), hoping for something of a normal life, she transferred to Goddard's project to "develop the first flight computer, the NSSC-1 (NASA Standard Spacecraft Computer)." The project's aim was to "develop the box in-house.... It was not slated to fly on any particular mission; [their purpose was] just to see if we could develop [what was] originally called the onboard processor." That processor was successfully developed and flown as an experiment in 1972 on the Orbiting Astronomical Observatory-C (Copernicus), which operated for nine years partly because, as hardware began to fail, the processor-actually an experimental computer-could be reprogrammed.

NASA's Standard Spacecraft Computer was inspired by two developments - one particular to Earth-orbiting scientific satellites. By 1966 it had become evident that NASA would be laboring under persistently constrained budgets. Standardization and reusability became engineering design watchwords throughout the agency. For instance, the Space Transportation System, with its reusable solid rocket boosters and shuttle orbiters, was initially conceived as a less costly alternative to the "throw away" launch vehicles of the early space program. At the same time, expanding possibilities for scientific satellites in Earth orbit heightened the desire for autonomous controls on spacecraft which would be beyond the reach of direct [100] commands from earth through portions of their orbits. Moreover, scientific satellites would be more versatile-and hence economical-not only if their on-board controls were of a general purpose character which could be reprogrammed for different missions, but also if instructions to their instruments could be changed during a mission, in response to unforeseen situations.

Unmanned as well as manned satellites had to be provided with devices for attitude, communications (telemetry), and receiving and carrying out commands either directly from the ground or through "stored command processors" which execute certain sequences of commands triggered at regular instants of time. The appeal of developing a digital computer-as distinct from a processor-was that, unlike it's "hardwired" cousin, a computer could be reprogrammed during the spacecraft's flight. NASA's Standardized Spacecraft Computer would also have to draw a minimum of power, notwithstanding memory expansion, and be radiation resistant.

The NASA Standard Spacecraft Computer-1 "was originally called the onboard processor. But . . . after it flew on OAO-C . .. NASA made it a standard computer and they gave it that name. I got involved," recalls Mueller, "on the ground floor of that [because of] my software expertise. That was the first flight of the onboard computer on a Goddard satellite. And we had to beg for people to give us work to do with that computer." When Mueller completed the onboard processor and advanced onboard processor (earlier versions of the NSCC-1) everyone was afraid to use it. "Now, of course, the problem is how to cut down on the number of requests that you have. They never have enough memory or CPU [central processing unit] to support everything that people want to do." The core memory ¹⁶ on the computer grew from 16K in 1972 (for OAO-C) to 48K for the Multimission Modular Spacecraft (MMS), a generic spacecraft developed to service a number of different Earth and stellar observations, and first flown on the Solar Maximum Mission observatory launched in 1980, ¹⁷ to 64K for the MMS flown on the Landsat D mission launched in 1982. Excepting changes in the flight software, the Multimission Modular Spacecraft used on the Landsat D Earth observation satellite was essentially the same as that used on the Solar Maximum Mission, proving the concept of a standardized central onboard computer.

"By the time I finished ... the NSSC-1 on the Orbiting Astronomical Observatory, I had both flight software experience, ground software and a lot of engineering type experience, so ... I really could do any kind of work in the software area. And software tends to be very specialized-you find people who program orbit determination . . . for life." Mueller was assigned to project management for both the Multimission Modular Spacecraft and the Solar Maximum Mission (which used the MMS), for which she was responsible for flight software as well as ground software. "That was an interesting managerial experience: to work for two project managers, to have budgets for two projects that I had to merge together, to do software that for MMS had to be common and usable for other than just one mission.... I had a conglomerate of contractors and civil service staff."

Once the Solar Maximum Mission with its Multimission Modular Spacecraft was safely launched, Mueller was reassigned to NASA's Large Space Telescope (renamed in 1983 the Hubble Space Telescope after astronomer Edwin P. Hubble).

[101] She was moved "pretty much against my will.... At that time we were a functional organization ... the engineering directorate. They had recognized that there ... was tremendous amounts of software [talent] on this team that I was managing, so they just said: 'there you go."' Goddard shared with Marshall Space Flight Center responsibility for the space telescope, and the "not invented here" syndrome may have affected the space telescope's early history at the Greenbelt center. "There was no real team here.... The environment was one in which you were just constantly jerked around.... New management came in and replaced almost everybody. I was about the only one of the people that were here that didn't get sent off somewhere." Mueller toyed with a possible transfer to NASA Headquarters to work in advanced systems planning for the Office of Space Science and Applications. Ultimately she decided the family upheaval would be too great. Besides, a favorite colleague of hers with whom she had worked well before returned to Goddard after his own tour at Headquarters. In 1980 Mueller decided to stay with the Hubble Space Telescope project to work closely with ground systems and operations development, one of the two principal space telescope development areas-the other being hardware development (e.g., instruments, and communications)-for which Goddard has assumed responsibility.

"All the way along the line, even though my background was in math, [I worked] in engineering oriented areas ... just learning it on the job as I went along.... I was very fortunate in that I just moved from place to place around Goddard, and at will.... Sometimes I'd have to say 'this is what I want to do,' and if you're good enough, they'll let you move.... [NASA has] not been very good about looking out for people and insuring that people get to try a variety of experiences or move up in an organization. Only a few people-the ones that may be recognized or may be good friends with or otherwise attached to someone else who's moving up-get the opportunities to move around ... in a planned kind of way."

The claims made by "manned space flight"¹⁸ on the new space program were more complex. If all we wanted was scientific knowledge of the heavens or cosmic views of Earth, robot spacecraft could provide both. Some argued that space was a new frontier, and mankind would not have breached that frontier unless men themselves physically crossed into it. (The presumption that space was, in fact, a man's frontier persisted until 1979, when NASA saw fit to admit women to the astronaut corps, taking 17 years to respond to the hue and cry raised as the astronaut groups selected for the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs failed to include any women.) Besides, once the United States had set a man on the Moon, to the amazement of television viewers everywhere, and as long as the Soviet Union persevered with its own manned space program, to do less than persist could be perceived as a national surrender-unless, of course, the whole business was dismissed as spectacle.

Others insisted that automatic robotic space systems could not provide the active, onboard "trouble-shooting" frequently necessary to deal with the inevitable [102] glitches that occur with nearly one-of-a-kind, sophisticated technical systems. Less apparent from the rhetoric that surrounded every successful American manned space venture was the fact that two generations of engineers were represented in NASA in the 1960s, many of them schooled in aeronautics and the design of high-performance aircraft. Those engineers (over 95 percent of whom were men)¹⁹ identified their careers with the triumph of human-piloted flight, an achievement which readily lent itself to the view that humans were destined to explore the high reaches of outer space. Designing for all the dynamic possibilities of an aircraft with a man at the controls had been one of the challenges of high-performance aircraft engineering, to which the military experience of combat flight added its own aura of valor. It was not for nothing that the media seized on the first seven American astronauts, former combat or test pilots all, as exemplars of "the Right Stuff." ²⁰ Whatever the mixture of motives that sustained NASA's manned spaceflight program (the U.S. Air Force having opted out of manned spaceflight as a strategic necessity), the continuing venture imposed on aerospace engineers the added challenge of designing for human life support, in-flight human control of space machines, and, most of all, safety and reliability.

Born in the depths of the depression in 1932, John Robertson grew up in Baton Rouge, La., where his father drove a school bus for the high school system. He had had a thing about airplanes from the time he was a boy. "The big interest came ... back when they used to fly airplanes in and land them in the field, and for twenty-five cents you could get an airplane ride." His fascination with airplanes was fueled by the proliferation of aircraft during World War II, and, as would become true of countless other NASA engineers, an early career in aeronautics readily leant itself to the transition to spaceflight. As a youngster Robertson had also been busy with the Boy Scouts and with the Air Scouts, "an old scouting organization that doesn't even exist any longer." While he was in high school he went with the Air Scouts to "summer encampments, where we went to Air Force bases." Robertson's father, a scout master, shared his son's enthusiasm for airplanes.

Robertson's real ambition was to become a manager, and he recognized early that one could enter a career in management as readily from engineering as from a college course in business administration. "I really went to engineering school to become a manager," he acknowledges, "because I knew there was [sic] going to be some years that I had to work as an engineer. [But] the thing that I was interested in of course, was aircraft. And I decided that I was going to go out and design the world's best airplanes.... I knew I had to go through the nitty-gritty-I had to be an engineer.... But then, I was looking from the standpoint of not always working as an engineer."

At Louisiana State University (LSU), from which he received his degree in 1952 Robertson studied mechanical engineering rather than aeronautics, which was not available as a major program. "The school did that purposely because they [sic] didn't know" how the aeronautical industry was going to fare. Within the mechanical [103] engineering minor field of aeronautics, students could concentrate on design or performance. Robertson chose performance, "developing performance characteristics of the airplane for planform design.... We had a wind tunnel ... made of ... sheet aluminum. Every time we turned it on, it would ... beat like a drum, so we didn't get the chance to use it too often.... But for a school that's just trying to teach engineers how to use wind tunnels ... it was adequate.... We couldn't do any research projects on it, but we used it . . . to get some ideas of how you would go about testing different aircraft in the tunnel."

When Robertson graduated from LSU he looked for "the best engineering job [he] could get ... in aerodynamics, rather than in actual designing of hardware, or being on a drafting board." Meanwhile, the United States was again at war, this time in Korea.²¹ Robertson knew his draft number could come up any day. Still, he had to go to work. He took a job with Chance-Vought Aircraft, entering the company's training program in aircraft design. That lasted only "two and a half months. The day the course ended and everybody went to their departments, I went out the door to the U.S. Air Force." Robertson had been in the U.S. Air Force ROTC program at Louisiana State University and spent the next two years as an Air Force explosive ordnance disposal officer.

Old LSU connections helped him find a job in 1958 with Convair Aircraft at Fort Worth, Tex. "I enjoyed the work there. To start off with, I was on the B-36 program.... We were working with throttle settings. If a pilot was flying along with a clean aircraft, he would have one throttle setting. But if he came into a combat situation and he started dropping turrets ... then he would have to go to a different throttle setting to maintain the same altitude and same speed [because] dropping a turret into the airstream is the equivalent of adding weight to the aircraft.... I had to ... do some calculations on the weight changes to determine what the different throttle settings would be at different weights and ... at different configurations of turrets into the airstream.... You draw a set of curves so that the pilot would have a handbook in the aircraft with him, and as he got into combat he'd have to go back and find out what his throttle setting would be and change his throttles to maintain his altitude. [We] used Friden calculators. What would take three hours today took two weeks, eight hours a day-once you got to a calculator."

Robertson also worked on an experimental nuclear-powered bomber project: "Jet engines were used for take-off, [while] the nuclear engines were started in the air.... We had a floating, folding wing tip with a droop-snout configuration. The plane ... was so long because you had to have your ... nuclear source further back from the crew.... It had to drop the nose [in order for the pilot] to see the runway coming in." The floating wingtip design was a solution to the need for good cruise characteristics as well as high-speed threat evasion: "Once you got into combat, you'd blow those [wingtips] off and then dash in at mach 3, drop your payload.... When you dropped your payload and got out of enemy territory, you'd fold out what was left . . . a small wing to increase your aspect ratio for getting better cruise capability."

When Robertson was working at Convair, the nuclear bomber work "was all in the preliminary dynamic stage.... [Convair] was trying to come up with a propose [104] for the Air Force as to how it would be built and how it would fly ... [that is,] developing the planform for the aircraft." However, before he had spent three years at Convair, the bomber project was canceled. Convair had to lay off many of the company's engineers after the Air Force discovered that "the aircraft companies were padding their engineering billets by adding more billets than they needed." Robertson was out of a job. But, equipped with the more versatile mechanical engineering degree, he was confident that he could get another job. He considered entering the General Motors Institute. He considered going into safety engineering. Then, while visiting in Baton Rouge he learned that the Army Ballistic Missile Agency was interviewing candidates to work with Wernher von Braun's missile group. He had studied a bit of rocketry at Louisiana State University with a former German Air Force "ace". He had even tried, while still at Convair, to move into Convair's missile program in San Diego, Ca. (but had been turned down because he lacked a master's degree). He had also read, as a matter of personal interest, reports "on the V-2 and, knowing that von Braun and that team had been brought over here ... I thought it was a new ... interesting challenge." Intrigued by the differences between the hardware he had worked on before and missiles-"the fact that you really had only one chance in these missiles we were shooting, because if it didn't go the first time, there was no second chance"-Robertson applied for a job with the ABMA. The ABMA hired him and, because he had done some field service engineering at Convair, placed him in its engine reliability organization.

Robertson's new work-reliability testing-exposed him directly to the engineering for the Redstone, H-1, and Jupiter engines. "We knew that they were using the Redstone as a vehicle for carrying unmanned satellites into space. We knew the Jupiters would later be used if we went into a manned program.... How would you go about testing-put a man on the top ... sitting in a capsule-of a rocket?"

When the ABMA's space-related development programs were transferred to NASA in 1960, "we wanted to go to NASA.... There were people in the Army who kept trying to get into R & D because they wanted to go to NASA too.... We were all looking forward to space travel, and we wanted to be part of it. This was the beginning, and we wanted to be in on the ground floor." Robertson shifted over to the Marshall Space Flight Center along with many others. Ironically, until he transferred again to NASA's Johnson Space Center in 1967, he spent most of the intervening years not at Marshall, but at NASA's Michoud Assembly Facility near New Orleans, La. ²²

The first Redstone, and its derivative the Jupiter, had been built at Marshall Space Flight Center. During the 1950s the federal government (reflecting the political philosophy of the Eisenhower administration ²³) gradually abandoned the arsenal or "in-house" system of military manufacture historically practiced by the U.S. Army. NASA contracted out virtually all of its development and production (see chapter 6). The Chrysler Corporation, which had been manufacturing tanks for the U.S. Army at Michoud, "was given the contract for the Saturn-lB [launch vehicle] and Boeing was given the contract for the Saturn-lC [launch vehicle] ... being built at the Michoud Center Facility." Robertson was sent to Michoud to develop a reliability organization to watch over the contractors' work. There he "had four [105] engineers working for me to do the job-two on Chrysler, two on Boeing.... our job was just like our government jobs are now-managing what the contractor was doing-but we were managing from the technical standpoint.

"I enjoyed Michoud probably better than any other place.... I had a real good relationship with what was going on in industry as well as what was going on in NASA itself.... One of the interesting things at Michoud [was that] while we were there-more so than here [at Johnson Space Center]-as problems developed that we couldn't work, there was a number of professors at colleges around the country that we could call and get advice from.... They would have a chance to find out what was going on in the space industry, and ... so they were happy to do it.... That gave us a broader view ... an independent opinion.... If necessary, we would send [them] design drawings ... reports-whatever it took.... We ... just made the contacts and talked with them on the telephone and set up a working relationship with them.

"As time progressed ... I was reaching my other goal of being in management.... Working in a reliability organization, we have a broader view of the total program than somebody that's working in an isolated design section.... We have to be familiar with the total vehicle ... we deal with every organization here." By the beginning of 1967 Robertson "could see our program was kind of tailing down. We had boosters stored, enough probably to have completed the total program already, and things were slowing down at Michoud." He looked around for another challenge and found it at Johnson Space Center, then in the midst of a reorganization following the fire in the Apollo 204 spacecraft which killed three astronauts on the launchpad. ²⁴ Robertson was attracted to the enhanced safety, reliability, and quality assurance organization established at Johnson, and transferred to its engineering reliability branch in October 1967. He became "responsible for the reliability of all the major vehicles that we were flying.... At that time we were flying the Apollo and the LM [lunar module]. Then, later on, we went to Skylab and we went to ASTP. ²⁵ I also, at that time, had responsibility for ... electrical, electromechanical, and electronic parts."

Succeeding with his career "game plan," Robertson rose into the management ranks of safety, reliability, and quality assurance at Johnson, where he took part in setting the requirements for the Shuttle (Space Transportation System) program. "We dealt with all the programs. We dealt with the quality aspects of inspection: of quality engineering, of evaluation, of contamination control, of process control-all the gamuts that would cover assuring the quality of the vehicle.... We were responsible for the failure close-out. We didn't do any math modeling because, with just a few vehicles, we don't have the statistical average to do any modeling. So we ran a technique where we made sure that all failures were closed out prior to a flight. And we still do that. Any time we fly Shuttle, we review and make sure that all failures have either been explained, so we have a confidence that they're not going to reoccur on that flight, or that they have been closed out through some design action-or some procedural action."

In 1984 NASA won what may prove to have been an uncertain victory when it received President Ronald W. Reagan's endorsement of a new space station initiative. The idea of placing in Earth orbit a permanently occupied space station had been one [106] of the oldest aspirations within NASA. Various space station concepts had been included in the agency's plans since it was founded,²⁶ but it took twenty five years for political circumstances to present the agency with a president willing to endorse its vision with a budget request to Congress to begin a program. First Langley Research Center, and then Johnson Space Center (as well as Marshall Space Flight Center), NASA installations dedicated to the development of manned space flight technology, carried out tentative space station design studies intermittently throughout the two decades.

"Before Space Station ever became a program," remembers Robertson, "there was work going on in space station concepts." At the beginning of 1984 he was assigned to a team developing the technical requirements necessary for NASA to issue a "request for proposals" to the aerospace industry to engineer and develop a space station, then configured as a central power-carrying "keel" to which were attached living and laboratory modules as well as instruments for Earth and space observations. (NASA engineers artlessly referred to the configuration as a "power tower;" both configuration and name would change.) "I had a quality, reliability, and safety man colocated with me ... a representative from the Cape [Kennedy Space Center] ... from Marshall, from the SR & QA [safety, reliability, and quality assurance] area, and ... from Goddard. We . . . developed a requirements document that identified the SR & QA requirements that would be imposed upon a space station. We took a different tack this time. Instead of writing these requirements down and ... saying, 'this will be it,' I said ... 'the government hasn't built anything in years."' That inexperience meant that Robertson and his group would have to go back to the aerospace industry, which had been doing most of the actual engineering and building for NASA's program, and solicit its views on the most appropriate safety and reliability requirements.

Thus Robertson remained sensitive to the need of an engineering organization to admit to the need of additional expertise and to draw on that expertise wherever it could be found. As one "gets older," reflects Robertson, "you start bogging down with your own techniques.... I think that all over ... people are ... going back to the fact that . . . quality, reliability, safety are not the responsibility of a quality, reliability, and safety organization; it's got to be the responsibility of the engineering organization or the designers. They draw from that organization for support and for technical advice.... We look at our automobiles and see them falling apart, while the Japanese cars are still running. I don't know if it's outside quality circles.... But the Japanese are very willing to tell anybody that, when they are asked where they got their quality techniques, they got them from America. We gave away the techniques and didn't follow them, and they did. Now it's coming home to us."²⁷

NASA engineers had always been comfortable with hardware. However designing a spacecraft so that its human occupants could not only survive, but work effectively and return ready to readapt to Earth's gravity and environment, meant [107] that NASA researchers would have to venture into the biomedical realm as well. Biology and medicine-fields which, like mathematics, had attracted somewhat more women than had engineering-became one route through which women with scientific inclinations could find a place in NASA.

Like so many of NASA's engineers, Pamela Donaldson was born in a small southern town, Leesburg, La. Her father was a plumber and pipefitter who did well enough to build a plumbing appliance and contracting business for himself in Leesburg. As a young girl Donaldson had become interested in science-especially medicine and biology-but she rejected the conventional pathway for young women of nursing. Her older sister was a nurse, and Donaldson "didn't particularly like what she did." An alternative that appealed to her was medical technology; when she entered Northeastern State College in Louisiana in 1958 she began a major program in biology. Donaldson was a bright, straight A student in high school, but her father was struggling to keep four children in college. Northeastern State College had the particular distinction of being "the cheapest state school in the United States.... Mainly known for turning out education majors, teachers ... its tuition was $7.50 a semester."

After three years of college classes she entered a medical technology program in a New Orleans teaching hospital. In 1962 she graduated with a B.S. in biology, obtained certification as a medical technician, and traveled to Houston, Tex. to begin work as a medical technician in a hospital. She worked in the hospital's clinical chemistry laboratory for six years. Donaldson worked hard but was still able to find time to take some graduate courses at the University of Houston. She did so well that in 1968 she competed successfully for a National Research Council research associateship at NASA's Johnson Space Center.

1968 was an exciting time to enter the field of space medicine. After the disappointing flight of Apollo 6 (unmanned) in April, when the Saturn suffered "pogo" oscillations, and burn failures on its second and third stages were followed by a splashdown of the spacecraft 50 miles off target, NASA successfully orbited Apollo 7 in October with its three-man crew. ²⁸ Two months later astronauts Frank Borman, James A. Lovell, Jr., and William A. Anders were lofted into lunar orbit from which they confirmed planned manned landing sites, reported that the Moon's surface appeared like "dirty beach sand with lots of footprints in it," and broadcast Christmas greetings to a watching and listening world. ²⁹

Anticipating the physiological changes to which the Apollo and later astronauts would be subject, and ensuring that the spacecraft that housed them and the suits they wore would adequately protect them was partly the work of biomedical specialists like Donaldson. When she began work at Johnson Space Center, she "started working in ... endocrinology and ... the physiological changes with spaceflight." After her research associateship expired in 1970, she stayed at Johnson, where she acquired ever greater responsibility for the biomedical work done for all of NASA's Apollo, Skylab, and Shuttle missions.

"When we started out the man in space program," she recalls, "we picked up ... Army Air Corps flight surgeons. And National Academy [of Sciences] panels ... all predicted that when you go to put people in a weightless environment-shoot them [108] off on top of rockets-you're going to have ... a lot of medical problems.... As it turned out, after we flew a few flights, some predictions ... just went away altogether. Things like: Man wouldn't be able to swallow in weightlessness. Well we soon found out they could. They wouldn't be able to eat up there. Well, we found out they could; it could be messy ... you had to contain the food, but they could eat.... A lot of things that had been initial concerns ... you look back on them now they seem kind of foolish.

"Some of the things we had not predicted exactly.... One of them was the effects of weightlessness on the physiological responses of the body . . . some of our Gemini astronauts were coming back from space flight with altered body chemistry.... My own area of interest from my graduate education was in endocrine control mechanisms, and specifically those that control salt water in the body, metabolism." Donaldson was able to develop a number of experiments that were done on the Apollo astronauts, and the results of those experiments, along with some medical data collected during the Gemini program, enabled Donaldson and her co-workers to "put together a picture of what we most often saw with astronauts. It was not normal.... While they came back and sat up and walked and talked and waited and made speeches and all, their chemistry showed that there were still some pretty dramatic things going on in the body. Not pathology ... [or] anything that would cause you to medicate them or put them to bed.... But it was ... physiological changes, interesting science.

"Other folks were working in various fields with the same issues.... You immerse somebody in water [or] ... to bed rest and they have certain changes that look kind of like what we were seeing, but not just like it.... I was able to put together a pretty complete flight experiment for the Skylab missions, looking at the endocrine control mechanisms during weightlessness.... We were able to put the crews on controlled metabolic diets and collect blood and urine and fecal samples throughout the pre- and post-flight [period!. That represents what is the sum total of the information on man in space in that area. Those [Skylab] missions gave us the foundations that we are now working on.

"Basically what we think is happening [is that] as soon as the human body goes into weightlessness, the blood that we're used to pooling in our lower extremities... is redistributed throughout your body because there's no gravity pull. Your body senses then that it's got too much blood because .. . the sensors are in your neck and great veins of your chest.... The brain says, 'we've got to unload some of this fluid,"' and the body begins diuresis. In the process, "not only do we get rid of the plasma volume portion of the blood, but we also get rid of our blood cells.... And it occurs pretty fast after you get into space. What else happens? . .. When you lose water, you also lose salt. And when the body loses salt ... we keep pumping up the hormone aldostrontium that controls sodium.... The hormones don't seem to work up there like they do on the ground, and why? We don't know.

"When you land back on Earth ... just the opposite happens. All of a sudden blood pools in your lower extremeties you feel faint. You sit down or drink something to make up the volume difference . . . your heart, great veins, neck sensors are all saying, 'hey! where's all the blood?' So . . . you retain fluids, you retain salt, and [109] you build back up the blood volume over a two-week period. None of these things ... are pathological.... But they are all interesting, and the mechanisms are particularly interesting.... We need to know about those mechanisms because some of them need to be corrected.... Shuttle astronauts, after being in weightlessness for a week . . . had to operate the landing controls. They did not need to have any feelings of queasiness.... We started giving them a liter of salt water before they came back in because you will retain the salt water immediately.... That would build up their blood volume."

Donaldson's studies of the effects of weightless on body chemistry led her into hematology as well as endocrinology, and other biomedical fields as well. "In the early flights we found" the body also loses red blood cells in space "because of oxygen. But we don't use 100 percent oxygen anymore.... So right now we're theorizing that it is sequestration of the cells of, probably, the spleen. It's another way the body has of reducing the blood volume quickly." She also worked in toxicology, exploring the permissible components of a spacecraft's atmosphere as well as what sorts of filters would be needed for its water system.

By its very nature Donaldson's work crossed over the organizational boundaries separating different projects and programs at Johnson Space Center and enabled her to survive the chronic reorganizations which seem to afflict all large organizations trying to cope with changing demands. She enjoys repeating an observation attributed to an ancient bureaucratic sage: "'We got all together and got ready to work and just as we got ready, our job got reorganized."' As NASA's manned spaceflight program grew, so did Johnson's biomedical program and Donaldson's responsibilities along with it. In time, during the mid-1970s, she realized that she had probably crossed the threshold from research to management-although until 1984, when she was managing full-time, she was "still conducting research, still having projects, planning experiments and everything." She thinks of herself as a scientist and not an engineer, but the work she has done has been an essential part of the subtle engineering necessary to transport men and women safely through space.

Like many NASA engineers, Ronald Siemans began working with NASA as part of a cooperative work-study program. Born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, Siemans completed a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering at Cleveland State University at the same time he began working during alternate quarters at Johnson Space Center. When he first went to Johnson in 1969 he was assigned to environmental control systems for NASA's manned spacecraft. By the time he settled in on a permanent basis in 1972, Johnson was heavily involved in the development of the environmental system for the Shuttle orbiter of the Space Transportation System. The Shuttle would be the first spacecraft that offered its human occupants an atmospheric environment truly similar to what they normally experienced on earth.

Earlier manned U.S. spacecraft-the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and Skylab spacecraft-averaged an atmospheric pressure of around 5 psi (pounds per square inch), similar to the atmosphere of military aircraft. The air circulating in them was [110] also very high in oxygen (the air in the Apollo spacecraft was 100 percent oxygen) which, as many realized to their sorrow after the Apollo 204 fire, was an extreme fire hazard. Pre-Shuttle astronauts had to wear special suits during ascent into orbit and return in order to adjust gradually to the extreme change in environment they would experience in space.

With the advent of the Shuttle program, astronauts could look forward to experiencing an Earth-like atmosphere of 14.7 psi and breathing air with a nitrogen-oxygen mix of about 78 percent to 21 percent. ³⁰ While the Shuttle was in its early design and development phases, about the time that Siemans went to Johnson, "there was an air communication system requirement ... that no one had really thought too much about.... The traditional systems that are available out in industry were quite expensive. They were going to require a lot of power and ... the integration costs would have been terrible to think about." Siemans had done some work in catalysis while he was completing a graduate program at nearby Rice University and was able to design a small air purification system for the Orbiter. "I knew how to do that ... [by] just adding a little cannister onto the side of the environmental control system. It was a comparatively cheap model to make.... That knowledge probably saved the government ... a couple of million dollars."

Human comfort and safety onboard spacecraft demanded not only a proper mix of atmospheric gasses (not to mention carefully controlled temperature and humidity), but protection from toxic carbon dioxide, a byproduct of respiration. During the Mercury flights carbon dioxide had been successfully removed from the capsule's atmosphere with a filter containing lithium chloride. When Siemans arrived at Johnson "we had a fifty percent performance out of the chemicals that we were using." He tried to persuade his superiors that NASA should do some more research to improve the systems that chemically purified the air in manned spacecraft. He succeeded, and to good effect. "On this last orbiter flight [STS-51I Discovery, a seven-day mission launched on August 27,1985] we had an EVA [extravehicular activity] on there where one of the astronauts put in the same cannister twice by mistake, and we got 90 percent out of that one."

Siemans was able to transfer the know-how he had acquired to improving the environmental controls on the space suits developed for extravehicular activity "which picked up in importance in the Shuttle program and is becoming more prominent in the space program in general." NASA's first extravehicular life support system, used during the Gemini program, was a cumbersome chest pack containing a jungle of hoses and connectors to maintain suit pressure, provide metabolic oxygen, remove heat, and ventilate gases. Astronauts found the suit a real nuisance and stiflingly hot after only a brief amount of exercise. If astronauts were to move about on the Moon, they would need something better. This they received-a more compact backpack apparatus.

"You look at a man out in deep space, you see the arms and legs moving around. But if you look at his back you see a big box. The big box has an environmental control system in it, just like the vehicle has-it's just miniaturized. You've got the same kind of problems that you've got in the vehicle out there, except that you've got the difficulties of vacuum compatibility and deep space environment ... like vacuum [111] and radiation, solar energy impinging on the fellow, ultraviolet light on the eyes- a lot of different . . . problems because you're outside rather than inside." The Skylab, Shuttle, and Space Station programs, with their extended stays in orbit, would further challenge NASA's life support researchers and engineers.

When Siemans first worked with NASA in the late 1960s as a coop student "there were . . . teams looking at Moon bases and Mars missions and Space Station." He was assigned to "trade studies that were involved in the Space Station-mass and energy balances, essentially.... You have to evaluate what the benefits are for a particular system. You select an approach to do a particular job. You go through a series of evaluations to see what that decision does to you from a power standpoint, from a weight standpoint, from a volume in the vehicle standpoint. Any one of those ... can wipe you out by itself. And you look at the collective integration of all those items and you compare systems to similar systems."

After NASA's Space Station program won the endorsement of President Ronald Reagan in 1984, Siemans returned to the problems of providing adequate onboard life support for Space Station crews. "There are a number of research questions about the Space Station. It's the first time in the history of man that he's going to be going into space for a long period of time. The Russians are a little bit ahead of us in this area.... Are you going to live in space for a long period of time, or are you just going to send somebody there for three months and . . . return them? And we'd better start thinking about leaving people up there forever.

"In the past one crew would go up and do EVAs maybe twice in an ... entire career. Now we're talking about one crewman doing EVAs three days a week for his whole career, which may be ten years long. That's a significant change.... A lot of issues have to be answered in the medical area.... There's lots of research that needs to be done involving radiation, for instance. [During the pre-Apollo era] everyone was afraid . . . you'd go to the Moon-you can get so much radiation the guys wind up with cancer." Continued monitoring of the Apollo astronauts seemed to indicate that the spacecraft's radiation shielding, combined with their limited exposure, protected them from any long-term radiation damage. "However, you talk about going up there, building Moon bases, you're going to revisit all that . . . all those same old issues that we just gave a cursory look at back in the old days."

New England-empty of NASA installations save the short-lived Electronics Research Center ³¹ -has contributed few engineers to NASA's ranks, notwithstanding the significant role played by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in developing the computer and guidance systems for the Apollo program. ³² Bostonian or "down East" patterns of speech strike odd notes in corridors and offices in which one hears the laconic voices of Texas or Alabama, where vocal energy is normally reserved for bursts of temper or enthusiasm. Old Greenwich, Conn.-one of the enclaves of the Eastern establishment-is even more remote from the restless space frontiers of the American South. But the space age has been an age of many minor [112] wonders, and one of them was the migration of Richard Williams, born in 1941 in Old Greenwich, to Kennedy Space Center.

Few NASA engineers, when asked about their parents, mention their mothers first. Williams does. "My mother is a concert pianist, a graduate of Julliard [who played] professionally at Carnegie Hall.... She has two baby grand pianos so that [she and her pupils] can play at the house.... Music made my mother's life." Williams's mother finally despaired of teaching her son, one of three children, to play the piano and settled for basic instruction in the rudiments of music. "I think I had a repertoire of two simple tunes that I could play on the piano." Williams's father embodied the social mobility of many Americans in the early twentieth century. The son of a purchasing agent for the Boston and Maine Railroad, the elder Williams was able to go to engineering school and "worked his way up" from a machinist at the Shick Electric Razor Company to a production management position at Conde Nast Press-publisher of The New Yorker and House and Garden magazines. An avid sailor, Williams's father crewed regularly for numerous ocean races, among them the Bermuda and Trans-Atlantic races. The family "had boats.... I had a sailboat when I was young, a little Cape Cod knock-about, 16 feet.... We spent an awful lot of time not only on Long Island Sound, but up the Hudson River into Lake Champlain, up into Canada."

From his family Williams inherited not only a love of boats and the water, but a love of all things mechanical. "My grandfather on my mother's side was a Swede.... In Sweden he was a railroad engineer." After he came to the United States "he somehow got in with the Rockefellers and was the head chauffeur for John D. Rockefeller, Sr. They had their home in Greenwich, Conn. And the Rockefeller boys at one time were going to build a U.S. version of the Rolls Royce.... They tried to set up a manufacturing line in New Haven. The first car rolled off the line and it was so heavy that you couldn't steer the thing. It took two men and a boy to steer the thing. And so my grandfather wound up working . . . to change the geometry of the steering mechanism. He got it to steer, but ultimately the whole idea folded." Williams was fond of his grandfather, "who lived in the country and had a four- or five-car garage. He had a small shop in there, and I would go and spend time with him."

So Williams grew up working on cars, his own and those belonging to the patrons of the local garage and filling station. When he graduated from high school in 1957 and it came time to go to college, he balked at Old Greenwich expectations and tried to enlist in the Navy. Although he had been in the Naval Reserve, the Navy discovered traces of asthma and sent him on his way with an honorable discharge. He found a job with a company that made electromechanically operated quotation boards for the New York Stock Exchange and magnetic memory devices for airline reservation systems. There he got not only several years' experience in product development and field engineering, but a mentor who persuaded him to return to school, to Clemson College in South Carolina. Four years later (in 1966) with a good bit of mechanical engineering and lots of football behind him, Richard Williams went to Florida.

Williams's Swedish grandfather had preceded him to Florida in 1949, and it was there that the two generations had met during the summers to toy with machinery. [113] "I saw this area as it was, and how it changed.... My grandfather was the one that talked me into coming out here [to Kennedy Space Center] for an interview while I was in college." A friend and neighbor of his grandfather's had excited him about the work NASA was doing there, and when Williams was given a job offer, he took it. "Pay-wise, it was the lowest offer; it was around $5,200 a year around 1966.... Everybody, including my parents, told me I was absolutely nuts because I had an offer from General Motors that was over $8,000 a year. But it was in Flint, Michigan.... I said, 'aw, I don't want to go to Flint, Michigan."'

Williams's start at NASA's Kennedy Space Center misfired. He had been hired to work in a new materials test laboratory, but the laboratory was never built, so he decided to go to work for Pratt and Whitney, which had made him a handsome offer to work at a plant in West Palm Beach. But in 1966 "NASA was having so much trouble recruiting people that they weren't about to let me get out without a fight.... Back in those days contractors were coming in and offering whole offices jobs.... Whole offices were leaving NASA one day and going to work for contractors [the next]." Since NASA had paid his moving expenses to Florida, Williams felt somewhat obligated to look around the center for something else, and, just when it seemed that nothing would appeal to him, he paid a visit to the flight simulation organization "housed in the Air Force side [Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, adjacent to Kennedy Space Center]." The supervisor "took me out to the simulator and ... gave me a 'ride'.... We went into orbit right there, and it really sent me 'into orbit!' I said, 'Boy, this is absolutely fantastic!'

"It was not a KSC position; it was a Manned Spacecraft Center [MSC; renamed Johnson Space Center in 1973] position. So the government retained me, but KSC lost me, and I joined MSC. [Williams] hired in with that group and trained the Gemini 9,10,11, and 12 crews in the simulator. I continued on in that capacity through the Apollo program. [The Manned Spacecraft Center had] built a building on the Kennedy Space Center side, called the flight crew training building, in which we had two Apollo Command Module simulators and one Lunar Module simulator ... for mission training purposes. The crews would come down here and by the time they got to this point ... they would have been selected for a mission and would know all of the basic systems. Our job was more of putting it into a mission time line and firming up that time line.³³

"MSC had (and still has) astronaut quarters over in the Operations and Checkout building at Kennedy Space Center. We had the flight crew training building and ... use of a beach house out here on the ocean . . . for R & R [rest and recreation] purposes. It was actually for security as well as ... quarantine.... In the earlier days of the Apollo program, the crews would all be down here from Houston, and they would be staying here full time because of the schedules.... We socialized with them. We had, in the afternoons, ball games.... They did come out to parties with us.... We had a group-we called it the 'lucky 100'-of people down here that ... had to have close association with the astronauts.... We were asked during this period not to frequent public places, [to] eat at home, stay at home.... As a relief mechanism-the crews, obviously they stayed out there-we got to using this beach house, and WE would have after-work parties.

[114] "I worked with the contractors that built the simulators, the old trainers . . . some of the early aircraft simulators that pilots used to train in.... We worked with those people quite closely in order to assure fidelity of the simulation. At the same time, we coordinated quite closely with the home base back in Houston.... I spent a good bit of my time [going] back and forth to Houston.... We supported the crews right down to launch.... Any last-minute changes to their procedure they would put in [their books] in pen and ink ... and they carried that whole file of books for those missions.... During the missions we would go, one or two of each group, to Houston to support the mission . .. from a console in one of the back engineering rooms off of the Mission Director's center at Johnson Space Center."

Fifty-five hours into the flight of Apollo 13 [launched April 11,1970], when an oxygen tank explosion in the service module forced NASA to abort the mission, "we were on the consoles that evening ... the crew had just ... bedded down for the evening. This fellow that was with me knew the command module and service module systems very well; [after the tank exploded] he said, 'Gee, you know, things don't look right.' He was actually the one that [sic] pointed out to the front room at the Mission Control Center that 'hey ... something's looking funny here. I'm not getting proper signals back on this flight.' This fellow ... started breaking out systems schematics and what not, looking at things.... We spent the next five or seven days now almost working around the clock. We brought some other people in to help us, working out procedures, and we acted as a go-between. We would work up a procedure out there [in Houston], then I would phone it in to our people back here because this simulator at KSC was in the configuration that that mission was in. It simulated the whole nine yards.... It was fortunate for the crew that Fred Haise was on that mission because he had spent a number of years working with the Grumman [Corporation] people on that vehicle. So he knew the vehicle inside and out and knew what it could do. As it turned out, the Lunar Module served as a lifeboat.³⁴

"In December of 1970, at the end of the Apollo program, we shut this training facility down. We were all offered jobs back in Houston. Well, I had spent enough time in Houston during my tenure with the Manned Spacecraft Center that I knew that I did not want to go live in Houston.... I was very well situated here, I loved the area, loved the water, and every time I went to Houston-they have a little lake that's called Clear Lake.... I don't know how they came up with the name Clear Lake; that water is the dirtiest water I have ever seen in my life.... I wouldn't even put my foot in the water down there at Galveston. You'd come out in the morning and the stench from the refineries in Texas City would bring tears to my eyes! ... I refused to transfer to Houston.

"I thought my Christmas present was going to be a layoff notice. The Apollo program was winding down; this area was becoming a very, very tough area in which to find a job because of all the layoffs.... I had several neighbors in the area where I lived ... [who] knew I was NASA and they were contractors, two of them being Boeing people, and they were offered jobs with Boeing in Seattle, in the aircraft end of it, if they could get themselves at their own expense to Seattle. You couldn't give a house away here, and they begged me, 'take over payments, just take the [115] house, do anything with it.' And I said, 'here I have an infant son and my wife wasn't working ... and gosh, I'm looking at a layoff too; I can't do anything.' Well, I made the decision to stay here, and it was looking grim."

Williams had the good fortune to have gotten to know many KSC people, and one of them put him in touch with a top-ranking KSC manager who offered him a job in the center's design engineering group. He persuaded the Manned Space Center people to keep him on their payroll for a month until he could officially begin work at Kennedy. In the meantime, he had little to do besides "picking things up and cleaning things out and housekeeping." When Kennedy Space Center closed down the Apollo operations, "the contractor [Singer-Link] literally just walked away and left everything-just walked out of there on a Friday like they were coming back on the Monday. All of the logistics and spare parts, everything, was just left.... The people just walked out and at the work benches the little soldering irons were still plugged in. There was still food in the refrigerator. It was just incredible. So I spent that month trying to straighten up things and figure out what we had left.... There were literally thousands and thousands of dollars of useable parts.... The outfit that I went to work for at KSC [was designing the building for the] launch processing system [for] the upcoming Shuttle program. So I was able to get some people together, and we ... were able to salvage a lot of the equipment and the parts and pieces that were left and transformed it into a development laboratory from a simulation facility."

After spending about a year with the center's design engineering group, Williams began to suspect that he had stumbled "off the beaten path into a deadend position." He began to look around and found himself a job in unmanned satellite launch operations "on the Cape side again-a NASA organization-and [I] got back into the spacecraft area," where Williams has remained. "In those days we were called spacecraft coordinators.... We had the Delta launch vehicle program ... and the Atlas-Centaur launch vehicle program. And each one of us was assigned various satellite groups that were coming through to launch their satellites on one of these launch vehicles. We would go out and work with the manufacturer, the satellite owner, to integrate their satellite with the launch vehicle. For the most part, a lot of our satellites were built by three standard manufacturers: Hughes, RCA, or Ford Aerospace. It was somewhat routine, but each one required its own changes. It was, once again, dealing with different people and different situations, and it was quite interesting.

"The thing that has kept me here was . . . that we-about '73 to '77 or '78-dealt with a number of foreign entities and launched satellites for these foreign countries. The first one that I really had any association with was a French-German communications satellite called Symphonie.... I did spend quite a bit of time in Munich, Germany and Toulouse, France, working with these organizations.... From that we went into an English project called OTS (Orbiting Test Satellite).... And then there was a number of French satellites. And we got into an Italian one called SIRIO [a microwave propagation satellite!.... Since then we've done a number of trips throughout Europe dealing with various satellite companies.... I've been to India [116] twice now, meeting with the Indian government. We've launched several satellites for them."

However, Williams's new-found pleasure in the increasingly cosmopolitan character of space missions can not erase the dark memories he shares with so many NASA engineers of the consequences of the collapse of public interest in space after the successful flight of Apollo 11-memories which constitute for him "one of the lowest points in my career.... We had all been so hyped on this thing of going to the Moon. And then, to all of a sudden wake up one day with the realization of 'there's no more'.... Why didn't we plan for something further on? ... I was just devastated Of course, this whole area, with layoffs ... was just very [hard hit].... There was no diversification for these guys that had just finished launching the Apollo launch vehicle, which was probably one of the greatest engineering marvels of its time. They would [end] up on the streets, out of work, with no place to go. I knew a couple of engineers that were actually at the gas station pumping gas.... One of the engineers . . . got into real estate and has left the area. He said, 'I wouldn't go back for all the tea in China. Just because of the heartbreak'.... If you went around this center and carefully asked everybody what was the most important experience in their careers here, I think they would all agree that the collapse of support, the collapse of the program, the collapse of the money after [the] Apollo period, was the biggest single event.

"One of the highlights of my career," reflects Williams, "has been my association with people from all over the world ... with the astronauts.... I wouldn't have missed it for anything in the world.... [But] I look forward to the future with mixed emotions, I guess. I hope that we can come out of this Shuttle disaster, the Challenger accident of January 28,1986, with some direction. And that direction, I hope, is a mixed fleet.... I hope we can afford to ... carry on with both programs.... The people that I talk with throughout the agency feel that we've made our mistake with trying to put all of our eggs into the Shuttle basket."

Throughout the Shuttle era NASA continued to launch spacecraft with unmanned, expendable rockets. The small Scout, with its limited payload of 150 pounds, continued in production and routinely launched small scientific satellites into Earth orbit from Wallops Island, while NASA used its remaining inventory of Delta and Atlas-Centaurs to launch heavier unmanned payloads from Cape Canaveral. During the two years following the Challenger accident, when U.S. space policy and NASA's own programs underwent an agonizing period of reappraisal, the White House modified a decision made during the administration of President Richard M. Nixon that the Shuttle would be the nation's principal launch vehicle and the use of expendable launch vehicles gradually phased out.³⁵ While the U.S. Air Force began to procure Titan launch vehicles again, the Reagan White House (adhering to its general philosophy of "privatizing" much of the government's activities) directed in February 1988 that "federal agencies ... procure existing and future required expendable launch services directly from the private sector to the fullest extent possible," and announced that in the interests of "assuring" national "access to space . . . U.S. space transportation systems that provide sufficient resiliency [117] to allow continued operation, despite failures in any single system, are emphasized." ³⁶

NASA's Apollo generation of engineers was, above all else, a generation caught in an era of transition. During the immediate postwar period the country's engineers, working for NASA, the military, and the emerging aerospace industry, mastered the fundamental problems of designing and building the vehicles needed for controlled flight beyond the atmosphere. During the Apollo decade programmatic emphasis, federal funds, and career opportunities expanded to embrace the technical problems associated with the objects that would be sent into space-automated scientific spacecraft and piloted spacecraft to transport human crews to the Moon and eventually beyond. Engineering secure spacecraft environments-whether for delicate instruments or human crews-became as important as flight dynamics and, as a result, men and women with backgrounds in mathematics, biology, and chemical and mechanical engineering were as likely to find careers in NASA as were aeronautical engineers.

The careers of the seven men and one woman profiled in this chapter embraced as well a revolution in engineering in which the slide rule and mechanical calculator were replaced by the high-speed electronic computer, a now ubiquitous and indispensable device that refines the designs of all modern air- and spacecraft, controls telecommunications, and has begun to supplant the intuitive guesswork essential to the creative genius that the engineers brought to aeronautical and rocket research in the first half of this century.³⁷

Only two of these engineers began their careers doing work that was a direct byproduct of World War II-John Robertson, who worked on bomber engines before joining the Army Ballistic Missile Agency in 1958, and Henry Beacham, who worked in weapons testing for the Navy before transferring to NASA's new Goddard Space Flight Center (with numerous other Navy personnel) in 1959. The rest, except Frank Toscelli, were born during World War II, and by the time they were ready to seek out careers, the kinds of engineering work offered by NASA had expanded far beyond the initial phase of launch vehicle development. They might have as readily gone to work in other engineering fields, but NASA was where the opportunity was- especially for the young woman, who would have suffered the most transparent discrimination had she sought work with a large private computer firm.

Their personal histories and professional lives embraced as well profound changes in the American social landscape that would unfold after the children of the Great Depression entered college and later joined the salaried middle class, or what sociologists of the 1950s proclaimed the new "organization men." Only three of these eight engineers came from large urban areas, and only two were born in the Deep South; five of the eight were educated in public institutions. Two were the children of salaried professionals, the others were children of either small businessmen or service workers. The institutionalization of both science and engineering, and the increased role of government in the national pursuit of scientific research and [118] technological innovation, for which NASA had become during the 1960s a principal agent of change, would prove to be one of the most pervasive forces in their careers.

1. For the best surveys of federally supported science and engineering, see A. Hunter Dupree, Science in the Federal Government: A History of Policies and Activities, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987) and W. Henry Lambright, Governing Science and Technology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976). The volume on the military and peaceful uses of nuclear energy is enormous; its range is suggested by Vincent C. Jones, Manhattan: The Army and the Atomic Bomb (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Army Center for Military History, 1985), Richard G. Hewlett and Oscar E. Anderson, Jr., The New World, 1939-1946 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1962), Spencer R. Weart, Nuclear Fear: A History of images (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), and George T. Mazuzan "Nuclear Energy-A Subject in Need of Historical Research: Review Essay," Technology and Culture, Vol. 27, No. 1 (January 1986).

2. Sounding rockets enable scientists to obtain vertical profiles of Earth's atmosphere as well as measurements of radiation, plasma, and micrometeoroid flux, from above the atmosphere. The sounding rocket's measurements, however, are for brief periods at high altitudes above the launch site.

3. R. Cargill Hall, Early U.S. Satellite Proposals, in Eugene M. Emme (ed.), The History of Rocket Technology (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1964), pp. 74-79.

4. For varied accounts of the U.S. inauguration of the space age, see Homer E. Newell, Beyond the Atmosphere: Early Years of Space Science, NASA SP-4211 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1980), Bilstein, Stages to Saturn (loc. cit.), and Constance McLaughlin Green and Milton Lomask, Vanguard: A History (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1971).

5. See chapter 3. The first successful American satellite in space was Explorer developed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of the California Institute of Technology. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory was also responsible for the fourth stage of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency's Jupiter C rocket, which launched Explorer into orbit on January 31, 1958.

6. The installation was originally (January 15, 1959) designated the Beltsville Space Center. On May 1 it was renamed Goddard Space Flight Center in honor of American rocket pioneer Robert H. Goddard. See Alfred Rosenthal, Venture into Space: Early Years of Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA SP-4301 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968).

7. The Space Task Group was located at Langley Research Center, but administratively it was assigned to the Manned Satellites Directorate at Goddard Space Flight Center under Robert R. Gilruth. Until the first permanent buildings were occupied [119] at Goddard in late 1960, the Center existed more as an organizational entity than a physical location, its components housed largely at Langley Research Center and the Naval Research Laboratory. The Manned Spacecraft Center was renamed for Lyndon B. Johnson in 1973.

8. NASA's Earth applications satellite programs promptly embroiled the agency in controversies with other federal agencies such as the Department of Defense (with its military interest) and the Departments of Commerce, Interior, Agriculture, and State. The agency would discover again and again that demonstrating the technical feasibility of any space venture was only half the battle. See Pamela Mack, "The Politics of Technological Change: A History of Landsat," University of Pennsylvania Doctoral Dissertation (1983) and, for a brief overview, Newell, Beyond the Atmosphere: Early Years of Space Science, chapter 19.

9. The Nimbus series served as the second generation of U.S. meteorological satellites, following the Tiros series, first launched in 1960, which provided weather images from above Earth's cloud cover.

10. See chapter 3, footnote 13.

11. See Frederick I. Ordway, III and Mitchell R. Sharpe, The Rocket Team (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1979).

12. For recent accounts of early aerodynamic and engine research, see Robert Schlaifer, Development of Aircraft Engines and Fuels (Cambridge: Harvard Business School,1950), Edward W. Constant II, The Origins of the Turbojet Revolution (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University, 1980), and James R. Hansen, Engineer in Charge: A History of the Langley Aeronautical Laboratory, 1917-1958, NASA SP-4305 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1987).

13. The feat was accomplished in 1930 by Maj. U. Maddalena and Lt. F. Cecconi. See World Aviation Annual, 1948 (Washington, D.C.: Aviation Research Institute, 1948).

14. See chapter 3, footnote 7.

15. G.A. Shepperd, The Italian Campaign, 1943-1945: A Political and Military Reassessment (New York, 1968), pp. 67-156.

16. For a history of the computer hardware and software developed for NASA's manned and unmanned spacecraft, see James E. Tomayko, Computers in Spaceflight: The NASA Experience, Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Technology, Vol.18, Supp. 3 (New York: Marcel Dekker, Inc., 1987).

17. The 5,000-pound Solar Maximum Mission satellite was launched into a 354 mile high Earth orbit to take continuous observations of the Sun in wavelengths ranging from visible light to the highest-energy gamma rays during the current sunspot cycle. Its attitude control devices were disabled by the failure of undersized fuses six months into its mission, and the satellite was placed in a "survival" one degree per second roll around its solar-pointing axis by the reprogrammed NSCC-1. During the [120] 1984 mission of Shuttle flight 41-C, the satellite was retrieved, repaired in the Shuttle's cargo bay, and lifted into orbit, where it resumed operations.

18. During 1988 the gender neutral term "human space flight" began to appear in some NASA pronouncements and publications.

19. See table 7, appendix C.

20. The expression came into popular usage after it appeared as the title of Tom Wolfe's trenchant account of the Mercury Seven, The Right Stuff (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1979).

21. North Korean troops crossed into South Korea on June 25,1950. Three years later, on July 27,1953, an armistice ended hostilities in a war that resulted in over 54,000 American troop deaths, almost as many as the War in Southeast Asia, which claimed the lives of slightly over 58,000 American servicemen.

22. NASA selected the unused government ordnance plant at Michoud in 1961 for the industrial production of Saturn launch vehicle stages under the direction of Marshall Space Flight Center. (The facility was called Michoud Operations until 1965.) The Michoud Assembly Facility was later used as the manufacture and final assembly site for the large external tanks for the Space Transportation System.

23. See Hans Mark and Arnold Levine, The Management of Research Institutions: A Look at Government Laboratories, NASA SP-481 (Washington, DC.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1984), chapter 3.

24. The fire occurred on January 27, taking the lives of the three-man crew for NASA's first manned Apollo spaceflight: Virgil I. Grissom, Edward H. White II, and Richard B. Chaffee. For details, see Ivan D. Ertel and Roland W. Newkirk, with Courtney G. Brooks, The Apollo Spacecraft: A Chronology, Vol. IV, January 21, 1966-July 13, 1974, NASA SP-4009 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1978).

25 Project Skylab (Apollo Applications Program), which flew in 1973, and the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, a joint American and Soviet on-orbit rendezvous and docking mission, which flew in July 1975, used Apollo-Saturn hardware. See W. David Compton and Charles D. Benson, Living and Working in Space: A History of Skylab, NASA SP-4208 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1983), and Edward Clinton Ezell and Linda Neuman Ezell, The Partnership: A History of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, NASA SP-4209 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1978).

26. See Sylvia D. Fries, "2001 to 1994: Political-Environment and the Design of NASA's Space Station System," loc. cit.

27. Robertson was interviewed in September 1985, four months before the Challenger accident, which occurred on January 28, 1986.

28. Walter M. Schirra, Jr., Donn F. Eisele, and R. Walter Cunningham. For summaries of all the Apollo missions, see Courtney G. Brooks, James M. Grimwood, and Loyd S. Swenson, Jr., Chariots for Apollo: A History of Manned Lunar Spacecraft, NASA [121] SP-4205 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1979), Appendix C, Apollo Flight Program.

29. Not everyone watched and listened willingly. Two thousand viewers called into television networks in New York City, complaining about the interruption in the broadcast of the day's football game. (The Economist, December 28, 1968, p. 112.)

30. At, or near to, the surface of Earth, the air contains about 78.09 percent nitrogen, 20.93 percent oxygen, and very small amounts of other gases such as argon, carbon dioxide, neon, helium, krypton, hydrogen, xenon, and ozone. For an account of this and other biomedical issues during NASA's manned spaceflight programs, see John A. Pitts, The Human Factor: Biomedicine in the Manned Space Program to 1980, NASA SP-4213 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1985), p.20-23 passim.

31. Established in 1964 in Cambridge, Mass., the Electronics Research Center (ERC) assumed the functions of the NASA North Eastern Office, which had administered NASA contracts for electronics research and development in the northeastern United States and served as a liaison with the electronics industry in the region. The center conducted programs in aeronautical and space-related electronics research. Because of budget reductions, NASA closed the ERC in 1969 and transferred the facility to the Department of Transportation.

32. See James E. Tomayko, Computers in Spaceflight: The NASA Experience, NASA CR182505 (Washington, D.C.: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 1988).

33. For an intimate account of astronaut simulation training (although for the later Shuttle program), see Henry S.F. Cooper, Jr., Before Lift-Off: The Making of a Space Shuttle Crew (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987).

34. The crew of Apollo 13 (Fred W. Haise, Jr., James A. Lovell, Jr., and John L. Swigert, Jr.) relied on the Lunar Module's systems for power and life support for their return to Earth. See Henry S.F. Cooper, Jr., 13: The Flight That Failed (New York: The Dial Press, 1973).

35. In a letter to NASA Administrator James C. Fletcher, written two days before President Nixon's resignation on August 9, 1974, Deputy Secretary of Defense William P. Clements, Jr. assured Fletcher that "the Department of Defense is planning to use the Space Shuttle ... to achieve more effective and flexible military space operations in the future. Once the Shuttle's capabilities and low operating cost are demonstrated we expect to launch essentially all of our military space payloads in this new vehicle and phase out of inventory our current expendable launch vehicles,, (NASA History Office) Defense Department policy became national policy when the Reagan White House announced on July 4, 1982, that the Space Transportation System "is the primary space launch system for both United States national security and civil government missions." ("United States Space Policy, The White House Fact Sheets, 4 July 1982." NASA History Office).

[122] 36. "The President's Space Policy and Commercial Space Initiative to Begin the Next Century," White House Press Release, February 11,1988. (NASA History Office)

37. For some reflections on the implications of the computerization of engineering design from a veteran engineer, see Henry Petroski, To Engineer is Human (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1982), especially chapter 15, From Slide Rule to Computer: Forgetting How It Used to Be Done.

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