David C. Leestma OHP Interview

From The Space Library

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Current revision

David C. Leestma Interviewed by Jennifer Ross-Nazzal Houston, Texas – 26 November 2002

Ross-Nazzal: Today is November 26, 2002. This oral history with David C. Leestma is being conducted for the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project at the Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas. Jennifer Ross-Nazzal is the interviewer, and she is assisted by Sandra Johnson and Rebecca Wright. Thank you for joining us today.

Leestma: It’s great to be here.

Ross-Nazzal: You became an astronaut in 1980. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about the application process and the interview procedures.

Leestma: Okay. I was first getting ready to apply when the first class [of 1978] was picked. I think it was in 1976 that you, [NASA], sent out the applications, or NASA did, for new Shuttle astronauts. I’d seen something about it either in /Av Week/ or something like that, but I was deployed in the Mediterranean onboard the [/USS/] /John F. Kennedy/. I was flying F-14s. My ops [operations] officer had sent in for an application and gotten it, and he brought it to me and gave it to me and said, “Dave, you must apply for this.” And I looked at it, and they wanted everything I’ve ever done in my life and every place I’ve lived since I was two, and all the justification that goes with it, and transcripts from every school since I’d been going to school. I mean, that kind of stuff. And here I am on a ship in the Mediterranean. So I went, “I just can’t do this.” And so I just kind of put it away and forgot about it, and then when the class of ’78 was selected, there were several people that I knew, that I’d worked with and that I’d been in squadrons with. And I went, “Wow. If they ever ask again, I will at least make the application,” so that—it’s better to have tried and failed than to never have tried at all. And so it was shortly thereafter, in late ’78, I think, that they asked for applications. And this time I was on shore duty, and so I had the opportunity to get all the stuff and put the whole package together and mail it in, and then you just kind of sit around and wait. And then I got called for an interview by Greg [Gregory W.] Hayes. I said, “Oh, wow.” So, came down here for the interview and that was in—I guess it was in 1980. Maybe I applied in ’79, but it was in February of 1980. I was in the first group that got interviewed for the class of 1980. After I left that interview, which was a very incredible week that you go through, lots of physical tests and the docs [doctors] spend about four days with you, but you have that interview. George [W. S.] Abbey was the chairman of the board at the time. Carolyn [L.] Huntoon and Joe [Joseph P.] Allen, John [W.] Young, [P.J. (Paul J.) Weitz], those are the ones I remember for sure that were on the board, and there were a few others. And I went, “Wow. I know all these people’s names or I’ve heard of them.” And you’re very nervous and you sit kind of in a corner of the table, and George is there and you don’t know quite who to look at, and you’re very nervous. I didn’t know if the interview went well or not, but it was an enjoyable conversation with them. And then after that week was over, I flew back to California and I remember that it was one of these, “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.” And you wait and you wait and you wait, and you know that different people that you know have been now called in for various later groups, and they’re interviewed. And you think back over the—there were twenty people in the group that I interviewed with, and every single one of them was, “Wow. How did I even get to be interviewed in this group?” I finally kind of gave up, that, if they hadn’t called me, nothing’s going to happen, but it was sure fun applying. And then in late May of 1980, I got this call early in the morning. I was in California, so it was two hours earlier than here. As I found out later, they start calling around eight o’clock in the morning, and it was around six-thirty or something. And it was George Abbey on the phone. Now, I didn’t know that if George calls you, then you’re in, and if somebody else calls you on the board, then you’re not in. I found that out later that the chairman of the board makes the calls of the selectees, and some other member of the board calls all the people that weren’t selected. George asked me how I was, and I said I was fine, and he said, “Oh, and by the way, how would like to be an astronaut and come here to NASA?” Whoa! What an exciting time. So I said, “I’d love to do that.” And he said, “Fine. We’ll be in contact with you. Thank you.” And then he hung up. So I told my wife, and she’s a California girl, or had lived in California a long time, and we had finally gotten stationed back in California. And she goes, “Does this mean we have to move to Texas?” [Laughter] And I said, “Yes.” And she says, “You didn’t say yes, did you?” “Of course I did.” She was just as excited as I was, but that was—so now we had to move, but we were getting ready to move anyway. I was coming to the end of my tour there at the X-4. So that was the process of applying and getting selected, and it was pretty exciting. And then, later that day I got a phone call saying—and here it’s May 20—I should know the date. It’s May 27, I think it was, but it was 27, 28, something like that. And they say, “And by the way, we want you to report to the Johnson Space Center on July first,” or July 7th or something like that. And I’m going, “Wow. One month. I’ve got to sell my house and I’ve got to get orders.” And it didn’t all work, because between selling the house and getting orders from the Navy and that, I ended up reporting a week late, just because I couldn’t get it done. There were several others of us that had that same problem. I remember Ron [Ronald J.] Grabe and Guy [S.] Gardner, and I think one other reported late also. And so we were wandering around like we didn’t know what we were doing when the rest of them knew what they were doing. [Laughs]

Ross-Nazzal: So you actually came a week late. Why don’t you tell us about your training period.

Leestma: Okay. Right away you get—the first thing you do is all the admin [administrative] stuff; you get your badge and that. And then that Monday morning, I think it was July 14th or whatever that Monday was, the first meeting on every Monday morning is there’s an Astronaut Office meeting. They called them an All Pilots Meeting, an APM. And that’s when the whole office collects and they find out what people have been doing and what’s going on. And so, here we all walked out, trooped in, all nineteen of us. We became known as the “Needless Nineteen,” because there were thirty-five ahead of us, plus all the other astronauts that were there from the Apollo days that either hadn’t flown or were still there, and they were all waiting to fly the Shuttle, and we’re way down the line. And they go, “We don’t need you. We have plenty of us to fly the Shuttle missions.” So we were known as the Needless Nineteen. So we trundle in and we take seats. You’re sitting next to people like Al [Alan L.] Bean or Paul Weitz or John Young, people that you’ve read about or watched on TV, and you go, “I can’t believe I’m here.” Pretty soon you get over that shock, because they start feeding you from a fire hose all the things that you have to do [to] get ready. But we didn’t really start training on the Shuttle or anything right away. The first year was an astronaut orientation period, where you visit the various different Centers. You get to know what NASA’s all about. You aren’t even given any technical assignments for about six months. You spend a lot of time learning NASA history, learning what the Johnson Space Center does. You get lots of lectures by engineering directorates, all the different directorates—what’s been done in the past, what they expect to be done. And so you learn an awful lot about the culture and what goes on at NASA. I enjoyed it a lot, I have to admit. I was just fascinated by it, and as much as I could learn about it, it was pretty good. You visit various contractors, you go down to all the different NASA centers. We went down to the Cape [Canaveral, Florida], and I’d never been there before. Most of the other people had been there before. I went to the Cape, and they go, “This is the pad where Mercury was launched.” And you visit another site and this is where the Apollos were launched. And they go, “Some day, you may launch from here.” And you go, “This is really hard to believe.” And you realize how big KSC [Kennedy Space Center, Florida] is. I mean, all the buildings are big, and long distances you have to drive to get different places. So the Cape is a—it’s a different kind of Center, and it’s definitely a launch site. You know that you’re dealing with rockets and spaceships there, as opposed to training and things that you do here. So you just go through all that training, and it’s fairly carefully mapped out. The folks that have put that together have done a very, very good job. I can remember, back in interviews, when I’d met Duane [L.] Ross, and he’s still doing this. Talk about somebody that you need to talk to if you haven’t already for your history, Duane probably knows it. He can remember names of people that have interviewed back in the sixties—maybe not the sixties, but certainly all the Shuttle folks they’ve ever interviewed. He’s an amazing person. So, you know, meeting him. Then our class sponsor was Al Bean, so Al went on all the trips with us. I can remember sitting in an airplane ride one time, and I was talking with Al Bean and he was relating his experiences when he went to the Moon on Apollo 12, and it just absolutely fascinated me. The stewardess came by and served us our Cokes or whatever, and after she left, I go, “She doesn’t have a clue who she just talked to.” I mean, having been fascinated by this. But this man next to me walked on the Moon. It’s one of those experiences that you just remember, something that’s kind of ingrained in your mind.

Ross-Nazzal: You’ve mentioned a couple of times how, when you arrived, you were in awe of these astronauts. Had you always wanted to be an astronaut?

Leestma: No, I hadn’t. I never, ever thought I could be. I don’t have 20-20 vision, so I figured that’ll probably wash me out. And I wasn’t a test pilot, and I’m not a Superman or anything like that. I don’t leap tall buildings in a single bound. And, these other people, boy, just the things that they had done and were able to accomplish, not just in the Astronaut Office, but you read some of their stories and they had done a lot of things before they ever came here. So I knew the kind of people that generally got selected for these programs. So I was very humbled and very in awe to be here.

Ross-Nazzal: So you started out working with Al Bean, and he was your class sponsor, as you pointed out.

Leestma: Yes.

Ross-Nazzal: What were some of your first assignments, once you had gone through that initial training?

Leestma: My first technical assignment was to work on the pocket checklist for the APU procedures, the auxiliary power units that power the hydraulic system. I was under the mentorship of Ken [Thomas K.] Mattingly, and Ken had just been named recently to the STS-3 backup crew and STS-4 crew, so he was busy doing that, but he was also directing a lot of things in the office. John, I think, was in full-time training for his STS-1 flight. He was the chief of the office and he was still trying to do that, but Ken was acting kind of as his deputy at the time. So we got a lot of things. And I remember very clearly, Ken Mattingly always wrote his action items in green ink, and so every time you got a “green zinger,” as I used to call them, you knew that Ken had something that you had to do and get on. And I still have some of these green zingers. Ken kept incredible records and he would have lists of, “Action item number 108. Dave, that’s yours.” Or, “Dale [A.] Gardner, you were working on this one,” or, “Mike [Michael L.] Coats, you were working on this one.” Those were some of the other folks that were working on that at the time, and we used to laugh about them. I still have some of them in some old records somewhere, some green zingers, some that I never did get complete, just because you never had time to do it all. But I remember drawing up the diagram on the APU system, the simplified diagram that goes in the front of the pocket checklist, and I think it’s the same diagram, pretty much, that’s still in there. So that was my first technical assignment. I got assigned then shortly thereafter to working on the first release of the new software that was going to fly the Shuttle, called Release 19 at that time, that was going to be after the OFT [Orbital Flight Test] flights, starting with STS-5. And so I got involved with a lot of people in the Center that worked on the software control boards. It’s amazing how much you can learn about the Shuttle by just following the software around, because it touches just about every system and everything that you want to do. So, working on that was really a learning experience and I was glad that I got assigned that when I finally got to fly, because I think it gave me a big heads-up on the vehicle as itself, because it’s all kind of supplied by wire. The software runs most of the systems, and by going through the operational flight software—Release 19 at that time, or whatever it was called at the time—we were able to learn a lot about the entire vehicle.

Ross-Nazzal: [Henry S. F.] Cooper says in his book that’s one of the reasons you were actually selected for STS 41-G.

Leestma: I wonder who he talked to. [Laughs]

Ross-Nazzal: What was your reaction when you finally found out that you were going to be flying?

Leestma: Oh, boy. For me, it was totally unexpected. I was in the class of 1980, and they had selected the crews through STS-9. I remember that clearly, when they announced STS-7, 8, and 9, I think, together, and Sally [K. Ride], being the first woman to be selected. And then my good friend Dale Gardner was on STS-8 and Brewster [H. Shaw], who had been my officemate, was on STS-9. They were starting to work into the thirty-five astronauts that had been selected in 1978, and they had a whole bunch of them to go yet. I mean, it was going to be a lot of flights before they got to us in 1980. And so I was thinking, “Okay, I wasn’t expecting anything.” And then I got this call on a Saturday morning from George to come on up to his office, he wanted to talk to me. Well, to be called on a Saturday to go see the Director of Flight Operations, it’s either really good or it’s really bad. And knowing that I was not in line for a flight, I was pretty nervous, to say the least, wondering what this was all about. As I got to the building and was going up, I remember Jim [James F.] Buchli was leaving the building and Loren [J.] Shriver and a couple of others, and they had these big smiles on their faces. And they’d just been named the STS-10 crew. So, I wondered why—I don’t know what this is all about. So I went up there and I walked in, and waiting in George’s office and waiting in the outer area were Sally Ride, Jon [A.] McBride, Kathy [Kathryn D.] Sullivan, and myself, and they’re all ’78 folks. So George invites us in and we come in, and there’s Bob [Robert L.] Crippen. He was sitting in the office already. He was already assigned now to a flight, an earlier flight. Well, he was at the same time getting assigned. He got assigned to STS what was 13 at the time. That became 41-C. It was STS-17 at the time. And so we were selected to fly in STS-17, and when we first got assigned, it was an IUS [Inertial Upper Stage] mission on /Columbia/. We ended up flying a radar, the SIR-B [Shuttle Imaging Radar-B] radar mapping mission of the Earth on /Challenger/ is what we ended up on. They always told you, when you get selected for a space flight, don’t fall in love with your orbiter or your payload, because they’re liable to change, especially at that time. There had been some differences in what had happened. We finally ended up flying. But we became the thirteenth flight when we finally did fly, so we moved up quite a bit, a lot of flights, because they were having trouble with IUSs and some upper stages and various things. Those flights slipped behind us, but we stayed with our particular flight, which was very fortunate. So I ended up flying quite a bit earlier than the other people in my class. I don’t know if that’s good, bad, or indifferent, but it was sure exciting to see our flight kind of hold its position while others slipped, because we figured, as they slipped, then we’d slip. But because of the requirements on our payload, we had to fly at a certain time of the year and a certain inclination and that, and so they held us in our place, which was real nice.

Ross-Nazzal: You had mentioned that you were originally going to fly in /Columbia/. It was being refurbished out in California.

Leestma: Yes, right.

Ross-Nazzal: And that was one of your first assignments that Bob Crippen gave you, was to act as the liaison with Rockwell International and let the crew know how the changes were going.

Leestma: Yes.

Ross-Nazzal: Can you tell us some about those?

Leestma: Boy, I don’t remember all of them. I do remember traveling a fair amount, back and forth to California, to Palmdale, where it was, and the things that were going on. And it was progressing slowly, and there were a lot of tile modifications that had to be done to /Columbia/. There were a lot of upgrades to make it like the newer vehicles. They weren’t going as fast. There’s always money problems. And so, my reports coming back were probably a little bit more negative, only because /Columbia/’s not going make our flight time. I just can’t see it possibly happening. It had flown in STS-9 and they just were not going to get it ready for a while. There [were] a lot of difficulties getting it ready. They were making some modifications. They were putting on a new nose cone called the—I think it was the SEADS [Shuttle Entry Air Data System experiment]. It had some holes in it, I think, for air data-type things. They were putting a SILTS [Shuttle Infrared Leeside Temperature Sensing experiment] pod on the back, which is a leeside temperature infrared camera up on the top of the tail. They were doing a lot of different things and it wasn’t going well, and it was hard to come back and be real upbeat when you know that your orbiter’s not going to make your flight date, so you wonder what’s going on. And then they started to have that shuffle. The program realized that the orbiter wasn’t going to make it and they shuffled orbiters around and we ended up on /Challenger/ and with a new payload called SIR-B, and that’s when it really got down to training and started getting really serious about it, which is good. And it was nice to know that we had a payload and an orbiter that we were probably going to fly. At that time I think that /Discovery/ and /Challenger/ were just kind of flip-flopping all the way along, so it was pretty much a two-orbiter fleet at the time.

Ross-Nazzal: Why don’t you tell us a little bit about your training, in particular your training for the EVA [Extravehicular Activity] for this mission.

Leestma: When we got started, we had a meeting with “Crip,” but “Crip” now was assigned to—it became 41-C. It started out as 13 and it was moved up; I think it became the eleventh flight. So now he was on the eleventh flight and the thirteenth flight of the Shuttle. Those are almost like back-to-back flights. We’d never done anything like that before, as the commander of both. And the commander is generally the one that really sets up the training, sets the tone, and does that. And “Crip” told us he was going to spend as much time with us as he could, but until he was back from his flight, he was pretty much committed to the 11 flight. And so we asked Sally to kind of be the training coordinator. She had flown before. The rest of us—Jon McBride, Kathy Sullivan, and I—were all new. This was our first flight. And so she kind of became the de facto commander as such, at least for organizing our training and assignments and making sure that we were progressing and that, and it turned out very well. I think she did an excellent job of it. And so we trained as a crew of four for a long, long time. A lot of our simulators were done. Jon would sit in the pilot seat. Sometimes we’d get a guest commander. We’d invite somebody in to sit in with us, or we’d just do it as the four of us. I think under those circumstances, there was a lot of pressure on us to know what we were doing and not screw up, and that includes in the simulators, because mission ops were looking at us very carefully to see if this is something that could be done or not. Can you train without one of the crew members who is doing another flight? Because they were looking at flying crew members more rapidly; that might be a better way to go. And so we spent a lot of time training and prepping and making sure that we were on time and knew our material ahead of time. I think that helped us as a whole crew, to be ready to go fly. And then about halfway through our training, we got Henry Cooper assigned to us, because he was going to do an article for the /New Yorker/ at the time on what it was like to train to be an astronaut. Henry’s a different kind of character. I didn’t have any objections to him being there. I think there were some folks here at the Center that were worried that it would interfere with our training. He did a very good job, I think, as being kind of as out of the way as he possibly could be. He ended up publishing a book, and I enjoyed the book [/Before Lift-Off: The Making of a Space Shuttle Crew/]. It’s not a real fast-paced read. It’s pretty dry, because that’s what training is. Training is, you go in the simulator, do this, you go to this class, you do this. It’s not a real exciting detective novel or anything. But I thought he did a very good job of chronicling the activity that we did, from training through the final things, and getting ready for flight and going and actually flying.

Ross-Nazzal: I thought he did an excellent job when I went through it.

Leestma: I got to work with him quite a bit. I actually wrote the foreword, I think, to his book, and so that was kind of fun. I got to talk with him a lot about what he thought, really. I think he enjoyed the time a lot, watching how it really is happening.

Ross-Nazzal: Sounds like fun. Well, why don’t you tell us a little bit about the flight itself. Actually, you had quite a few assignments on this flight.

Leestma: Yes.

Ross-Nazzal: You worked with the remote manipulator system.

Leestma: Yes. I worked with the remote manipulator system. I was Sally’s backup on the RMS. I was the lead EVA. Kathy was going to become the first American woman to do an EVA. Actually, at the time we were assigned, she was going to be the first woman in the world to do an EVA. When the Russians found out about that, they immediately sent a woman up and had her do an EVA, and so the Americans didn’t get to be the first women to do—I mean, that’s just how it operated. We weren’t going to move up our flight or do anything to change any of that. Let me see. I’m going to talk about the EVA first. One of the things that I was put in charge of was getting ready to do the spacewalk to prove that we could actually refuel satellites in orbit. Satellites all have these little standard refueling ports that they connect up when they’re on the ground. One at a time, you very carefully have to handle the hypergolic fuels that go into it, because they’re pretty dangerous—N204 and hydrazine. Hydrazine is very much like water, but it’s got a lot of different properties, one of which is that it blows up if it’s not handled right. “Crip” and the safety folks were very, very concerned that we shouldn’t do this with hydrazine. We should just do it with water. The heat transfer properties of water and hydrazine are very, very similar, and that’s what we really wanted to know. They were worried about what’s known as adiabatic detonation, which is, there’s no convection in space, so as fluids flow through ducts and into tanks and things, there’s no real mixing of the temperature. So as a tank is starting to fill up, if you’re refueling a tank, as you remember, in a constrained volume, if you start filling a tank, there’s less volume so the pressure goes up inside the tank. And as the pressure goes up, the temperature goes up. I mean, that’s just one of the relations of—it’s Boyle’s Law or Charles’ Law or one of those. So if the pressure’s going up, the temperature’s going up, and that’s really no big deal on the Earth, because there’s convection and this heat mixes around. Well, in space there’s no convection. It is possible that all that heat will go into one very minute area. Just a few molecules get heated up so that they could rapidly get very hot and reach the detonation point of blowing the whole thing up. So you want to be very careful as you flow the fluid, in that you don’t get to this adiabatic point and detonate this fuel. And so I think “Crip” thought I was a little too cavalier, because I insisted that we should do it with hydrazine or what have we proved. Nobody’s going to care whether—then nobody will know whether we can really do it or not. And he said, “Well, if you want to find out about hydrazine.” He sent me to White Sands [Test Facility, Las Cruces, New Mexico], so I spent about, I think it was about ten days at White Sands, watching them do all kinds of adiabatic detonation tests, watching all kinds of things blow up. And I came back from there with a real appreciation for the capabilities of this kind of a deadly stuff. And not only does it blow up, but it’s really nasty stuff. You can’t breathe it. If you get it on your skin, you can get poisoned. So there were lots of concerns that if we do hydrazine, but if it sprung a leak and even got on our spacesuits, how are we going to get back in the airlock? We don’t want to bring this stuff back in. So we spent lots of time on how much bake-out time we’d have to do, how to get it off our suits. If you get in the sun, can you bake it out so that you don’t bring it in the airlock? And then if we do come back in the airlock, how can you test whether you brought any in with you? How do you get rid of it? So there were a lot of procedures that we had to work out, just dealing with hydrazine. Eventually we were allowed to do hydrazine. I had to go all the way to Aaron Cohen, I think, to give him a briefing on why we should use hydrazine and not water, and he bought off on it. “Crip” finally did. “Crip” probably had the final say-so on that, and he agreed to have us do it with hydrazine, because he had watched me several times in the neutral buoyancy facility to do the whole procedure, and how careful we were, and we had triple containment of the liquids at all times. It’s a very tedious task, using small tools and lots of arm and hand manipulation that you had to do to do this task. The tools were actually designed and built here at Johnson Space Center. The whole ORS, it was called, the orbiter refueling system, was built and designed here at the Center. I remember that one of the young prop people from MOD [Mission Operations Directorate] that was working on the project at the time was a young guy by the name of Bill [William H.] Gerstenmaier, who is now the Space Station Program Manager. John [W.] Griffin was kind of the Project Manager, and his son is now a branch chief or something here. Joyce Seriale-Grush, she’s now one of leads for the Shuttle Integration Office here in the Engineering Directorate. So those people are still around, and it was a fascinating experiment to be involved in. When we finally did go out to do the—well, just before the task, I’d been talking to a lot of folks on the various flights, and little things go wrong on every flight, but we get the debriefs from the crew. And I’d ask them, “Well, why did this happen and why did [that] happen?” And it usually is because some change was made, either an experiment or something, late in the flow, and they never got a chance to test it. This was really brought to light for me, because I remember, just before my last test with the actual flight tools, we were getting ready to use the flight tools with hydrazine out back in the back test area. You can’t use hydrazine back there anymore, but we were using hydrazine to flow it in the system, to make sure that everything was working. And I was going to do the test, using the actual flight tools, so it was kind of a full-up check. And I was talking with the guys that were back there, and we were looking at the tools and they were all bagged up nice. And they said, “Oh, by the way, we read in this magazine, we got this new grease we put on. We’ve had a little trouble sliding the slide down the tools, and we put this new grease on there.” And I went, “New grease? What do you mean, new grease? What have you done to test this?” And they go, “Well, the document says it’s the same kind of stuff, it’s just a little different.” I took those bags of those tools home with me that night, put them in my freezer, came back the next day, and they were frozen, and you couldn’t move the slide. The grease froze. I didn’t know it was going to do that. I showed it to John Griffin, and John then did the same thing, because they had thawed. Put it in the freezer, came back out, and he said—so they canceled that test that day. They went and cleaned the tools all off and we put the old grease back on, and then we went through the tests and the tests went well. But, boy, that is still on my mind, that if something changes, you’d better make sure that those people know that they’ve looked at all the different things that can go wrong. Because we could have gone on orbit and that would have been out in the vacuum of space, and we would have been unable to do the entire EVA because the tools wouldn’t have worked.

Ross-Nazzal: That was smart thinking.

Leestma: I don’t think it was so smart on my part. It was just the training that they put into you to kind of question everything. A lot of people don’t like the astronauts because they’re always asking those silly, dumb questions, but sometimes those silly, dumb questions are appropriate, and that one turned out to be okay. So Kathy and I went out and did the EVA. I remember, as I first came out the hatch, I was coming out this way and Earth was down that way. [Leestma gestures.] I grabbed the handhold and pulled out and when I first—there was the Earth. It was right below me. And my heart rate went real high and the docs later confirmed that, because my EKG [Electrocardiogram] went real high, and they said, “This is when you came out of the hatch.” I said, “Yeah, no kiddin’.” And I had this tumbling sensation. Other people have had that same thing, and I remember in my debriefs, even to Joe Allen and some others, I said, “You may experience this. Just be ready for it.” And they’ve had it. You come out of the hatch and you get this experience that you’re going to fall. Some people have had that when they’re sleeping and they kind of go, “Whoa, I’m falling,” and then you aren’t. I wasn’t falling, but I got that tumbling sensation. So I think my handprints are still in those handholds right there, because I went, “Yow!” and just stopped for a short period of time and had to get my heart rate back down in a minute or two, and then continue on. That was a pretty exciting time, to leave the spacecraft itself and go out and EVA. And followed shortly after by Kathy, and then we just went out and we did the ORS. We actually did it in little bit quicker time than they had predicted us to do it. And then we were asked to do a couple things. One, we had had trouble folding up the SIR-B antenna. The SIR-B was Kathy’s primary experiment, so she went out to check, and it looked like the insulation was just a little bit too thick in the fold areas. And so she could squeeze that down and she could tell that that was—it was just the insulation; there was nothing else binding. And then we also had to do the Ku-antenna. It had failed. Its pointing mechanism had failed. If it doesn’t rotate correctly back, then we would have to jettison that before could close the payload bay doors to enter. The Ku-band assembly, just the antenna itself, is like a million dollars, and the digital avionics. I mean, it would have been a very big loss to the program if we had to jettison it. So the ground had come up with an in-flight maintenance for us to go out EVA and align the antenna by moving it manually, such that the stow pins would line up properly. And then inside the cabin, which we had prepared the day before, Sally and Jon would do the right electrical connections between some wires and pins and some connectors to put power into those pins, just drive those pins down. So [Kathy] and I positioned the antenna and then we told them we were ready and then we watched these things come down. And so we locked it into place and we could visually confirm that it was locked in place, and then we didn’t have to worry about it anymore. Now, that caused us problems orbiter-wise, because now to use the Ku, which the SIR-B antenna required for its high data rate, we had to point the orbiter so that the antenna was pointed at the right place, [toward the TDRS satellite], and make the orbiter rotate; [in these attitudes, the SIR-B antenna was not pointed in the proper direction.] So we’d take data and then we’d do data dumps and we’d point the orbiter at the TDRS [Tracking and Data Relay Satellite], and then we’d go back and do data writes, rather than being able to take data the whole time and point the antenna and dump it. So they didn’t get all the data that they wanted, but the mission was not a loss and we were able to do that for most of the time, and they got almost everything they wanted. Let me think. What else? Oh, the arm. The very first day in orbit, we were supposed to deploy the ERBS satellite, Earth Radiation Budget Satellite, they called it. It was a Goddard [Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland] satellite and it was kind of measuring infrared radiation coming in and infrared radiation leaving the Earth to see if things were in balance, or either heating up or cooling down or what the atmosphere was doing. It was an RMS deployable, and Sally was primed for the deploy and I was the backup, so we trained a lot together, spent a lot of time in the simulators and going to Canada and doing those kind of things. It becomes a little bit of a contest of who can do this quicker, better, or, do it. All those competitive games were played in everything you do. Sally was very, very good at the arm. She had been the arm operator also on STS-7, so I learned an awful lot from her, and just watching how she went through the training. When it came time to deploy the satellite, she had let me actually pull the arm out, do the checkout, and then grapple the satellite. And then she took over to pull the satellite out of the bay, set it up for deployment, deploy it, and then I stowed the arm. Before we did the actual deploying of the satellite, we each got five, ten minutes to play with the arm and make sure that we were comfortable with it. So we deployed it; we got it out for deployment. The first thing we had to do, the solar arrays were folded up to the sides of the satellite, so we were getting ready to—before you deploy it, you put the solar arrays out and the ground checks it out and makes sure that it’s getting current and everything’s powered up and looking good. So we sent the command for the first solar array to deploy, and it goes up. It’s a beautiful satellite. It’s got gold kind of foil insulation on it. The solar arrays are these dark purplish-blue things. I mean, it’s a beautiful satellite, if you’ve seen pictures of it. So the first solar array went up and we go, “Okay, we’re ready.” And the ground says, “Okay. Deploy the second one.” We hit the command and nothing happens. Uh-oh. So what do we do? So we wait, and the ground says, “Well, do the backup command.” So we do the backup, or do it again, whatever it was, and nothing happens and it’s just locked in the side. And we’re going, “Oh, no. Now what do we do?” And they thought about it and they go, “We don’t know what’s wrong. It looked like the current went out, so something either happened to the satellite or it’s stuck or frozen or we don’t know what it is.” So they said, “Point it at the sun for a while and see if that works.” So we did, [to see] if that [thawed] it out a little bit. Nothing seemed to happen. We’d get it up there. We’re talking inside the cabin, of course, about what can we do to see if we can free this solar wing on this satellite. This was a flight back before we had all the TDRS coverage, so we went through long periods of time where we didn’t have to talk to the ground or they couldn’t see data. We were getting ready to come up over Australia and go through the Canberra site and talk to the ground, and then we would [have] about a fifteen, twenty-minute period before we’d talk to anybody, before we’d come up over the States. A big LOS [Loss of Signal] time. Sally and I are looking at each other and wondering, okay, we both had the same idea. And so they said, “Well, we’ll talk to you over the States and see what else we can do.” And we figured we’d given it the thermal thing, so what if we shake this thing with the arm? [Laughter] I looked at Sally and she looks at me, and I said, “We aren’t getting enough rates with what we’re doing.” So we changed the payload ID [identification], which tells the arm what’s on the end of it, and we changed the payload in the software to zero, which means there’s nothing on the end of the arm, so now you can go to the max rates on the arms and play with it. And we said, “‘Crip’, do you mind if we try to shake this thing loose?” And he said, “Go for it. Just don’t break it.” We go, “Okay. We’re not going to break it.” So Sally took the arm and goes to the left as fast as she can and stops it and goes back the other way, which makes the satellite—the rates in the arm are really slow, but it’s putting some kind of force into it. She did this once and nothing happened. We did it, I think, twice, and the second time, I went, “Something’s moving.” So she puts it up to the deployment [position] and we’re watching it, and it slowly moved a little bit, stopped, moved a little bit, stopped, and then it went [whistles], and it deployed. I went, “Whew!” So, she got it all right back in the deploy position, just like that, and we came up over the States, and the ground said, “Okay, we’re with you.” And then we said, “Well, take a look at the satellite. See if we’re ready to go.” I don’t remember the exact quote, but they came back up and they go, “What did you guys do?” And we said, “We aren’t going to tell you, but just check it out, make sure that it’s ready to deploy.” And they said, “Everything looks good.” And so we made our deploy time and the satellite worked. It was supposed to work for a year; I think it worked for three or four years. I mean, it worked real great. And it’s one of those things that you just kind of go, “Whew!” I don’t think we ever would have gotten permission to do what we did, except that we just decided to go do it.

Ross-Nazzal: That’s a great story.

Leestma: It was fun. That was an exciting time. And both of us looked at each other and we got these kind of sneaky grins on our faces as we’re looking, going, “They would never let us do this, but let’s go try it.” And “Crip” let us do it, so that was pretty neat, too. We had a neat crew. The crew was really a lot of fun, because we really melded and meshed well together.

Ross-Nazzal: Let me ask you a few more questions about the mission. This was the first mission in which a woman was supposed to go out on the first spacewalk.

Leestma: Yes.

Ross-Nazzal: And there were two women on the flight as well.

Leestma: Yes, right.

Ross-Nazzal: How did the media react to that?

Leestma: Oh, the media made obviously a very big deal about that. Sally, being the very first American woman to fly; Kathy, now, on this flight, is going to become the first American woman to do an EVA. Two women at one time, how is this going to work? They played it down very well. Both of them were very, very good about it. It was just, “Hey, we’re just part of the crew.” And Jon and I could easily just stand in the background and just be one of the crew. It actually took a lot of the spotlight off of us, which was fine. Since “Crip” wasn’t there most of the time, it was mostly Sally and Kathy being the spokespeople for the crew, which was perfectly okay. And they just fit right in. They were just part of the crew. Sally did a great job of keeping us all together and keeping morale up and letting us know, “Now is the kind of time where, start paying attention to this kind of stuff,” and, “Hey, guys, we’re about three months from flight. This is where the training really starts to peak and you’re going to be spending a lot of hours here, working eighty-, ninety-hour weeks, and just be ready for that. Let your families know.” And, sure enough. So it really helped prepare us and get us ready to go through that. Through the simulations, all of just worked together as a crew. After “Crip” flew, he came back and joined us, and so then through the summer of ’84, then he was there with us. And so we went off and did that. In fact, “Crip” and I and Sally were on the—I can’t remember where we were. I think we were on the roof of the VAB [Vehicle Assembly Building], at the Center, to watch the launch of what was supposed to be about two flights ahead of us at the time, 41-D, when they had their pad abort. And that’s when we kind of held our spot, but the people that were in between us, they moved out into later in the flow. And watching that pad abort, whoa. [Laughs] Not sure that this is something, because you could tell something was wrong, but you weren’t sure what. The main engine started, and then they shut down. The vehicle hadn’t gone anywhere, and since you’re up on the roof there, you don’t have any data or anything. And then all of a sudden you see all the water gushing out. So that was pretty interesting. We went back and talked with the crew after that. That was Hank [Henry W.] Hartsfield’s crew—Hank and Mike Coats, Steve [Steven A.] Hawley. Those guys were on that flight. And then I flew back. I couldn’t stay for much longer after that. We flew back, and that’s when the manifest juggled a little bit, but we held our spot, which was real nice. We knew that our training was going to be hot and heavy that summer. Some of the other crews got—they were pretty disappointed, but they all ended up flying.

Ross-Nazzal: For this mission you actually designed a tool for your EVA. Can you tell us about the tool that you designed?

Leestma: I’m trying to remember which one that was. There were several tools that were all part of this ORS package, and you had to maintain triple containment. And so the question was, how can you undo this valve that you had to take this cap off. Once you take the cap off, you’re kind of open to this valve, and if there was a leak inside, there was hydrazine to spit off. So how can you do that without being seen, and how do you get that cap off? The main tools to take the cap off and all that, and the triple containment, were designed in EP [Propulsion and Power] Division. But one of the problems that we had in the early parts of developing this EVA was there’s this cap that goes on the valve, and it’s a cap that, in a real satellite, would have been tightened very tightly by the mechanic and it’s very tightly safety-wired so that it never comes off. I mean, you don’t want it to ever come off. That’s the first thing I had to do in the EVA was take that cap off, and the first thing that I had to do before that was to take the wire out, the safety wire. In most satellites it’s in about a twelve-inch by eighteen-inch little recessed area. Actually, it’s a little smaller than that, but there’s a recessed area and then this valve compartment’s inside that. And when you have gloves and an EVA suit, it’s very cumbersome to get in there. We didn’t have anything to get that safety wire out, and you couldn’t really see the safety wire. So, I had seen this tool. I think it was at one of the places that somebody was working on my car one time. It had a flashlight and it had a little mirror on the end of it that stuck out, and so you could shine the flashlight into the mirror and reflect in and get light to see what you were doing, and then you could look in the mirror and see what it was that you were doing. And I went, “Oh, man, that’d be perfect for what we’re doing.” And so we actually flew—I mean, we took—this is a bought-off-the-shelf black little flashlight with this little extension with a mirror on the end of it, and we adapted it to get it right so it would be space-qualified and work in space, and I actually used that tool to get it. Also, along with that was a little kind of knitting hook, and we put a cutting blade inside the hook so that I could—it was easier to grab a hook around the safety wire and then tug, to cut the wire, rather than to try to get some snips in there. You couldn’t get any kind of snips in there. So by looking with the flashlight in the mirror, and then the hook, I could get the safety wire off. And then we took a pair of pliers that one of the EVA folks, I think, had suggested, and we just bent the end of it. So we had right-angle pliers, and so I could reach in with those right-angle pliers and pull the safety wire out. There’s a picture of me in the EVA that [Kathy] took [while in the payload bay during the EVA with] this big smile on my face after I’ve [completed the first step of the experiment]. And I’m holding up these pliers with the last little piece of safety wire in it, going, “We got it all, so now we can actually go do what we came here to do.” But that was the hardest part of the whole thing, was getting the safety wire out and getting the cap off.

Ross-Nazzal: So your EVA actually proved that you could refuel that way.

Leestma: Yes. I feel like I could go back up if I had to, and refuel. Now, of course, there’s always the problem of rendezvousing with the satellite and grappling it and getting positioned and all that, and then carrying the fuel up with you. I think they decided that by the time you cost the training and the Shuttle flight itself, it would be cheaper or as cheap to launch another satellite. But it can be done. If we ever decide to do it, it can be done.

Ross-Nazzal: Let’s talk about your next flight. Your next flight was very different from this first flight.

Leestma: Yes, it was.

Ross-Nazzal: It was actually a classified mission with the Department of Defense.

Leestma: Right.

Ross-Nazzal: Why don’t you tell us how it was different, or compare and contrast to the—

Leestma: Let me see. There’s a little interim in there, though, because between this time I was assigned to another flight, which was called the ASTRO-1 mission. It was scheduled to be the twenty-sixth flight of the Space Shuttle, and it was going to be on /Columbia/. I think the reason I got assigned to it is because it was going to be the first flight of /Columbia/ after this period of time when it had been down. It still had been down for an extended period of time, that we never did get to fly the first time. We were getting ready to fly that, and it was going to be the flight right after the /Challenger/ mission, 51-L. And it was called 41-E, or 51-E, I think is what we were called, because we had slipped a little bit because /Columbia/ hadn’t gotten ready. And so I was down at the Cape. Well, actually we were in the simulator when 51-L was going to be launched, and we didn’t think it was going to launch. We had started watching and we saw all the ice and the cold weather, and so we got in the simulator. Jon McBride was the commander assigned at that time of that flight. Dick [Richard N.] Richards was the pilot. Jeff [Jeffrey A.] Hoffmann and Bob [Robert A. R.] Parker and myself were the mission specialists. It was the ASTRO-1 flight. It was an astronomy mission. And so we got in the simulator and they said, “Hey, they gave the ‘go’ for launch. Do you want to come down and watch it?” So we got out of the simulator and watched it and watched what happened. We realized, since we were the next flight, we go, “Well, there goes our flight. Who knows what’s going to happen.” And so we immediately reported back to the Astronaut Office and just waited for what kind of assignments we’d get after that. So there was this down period, and during that down period, that crew, and then this DOD [Department of Defense] crew that I was assigned to, and the crew that eventually flew the next flight, 26, Fred [Frederick H.] Hauck’s crew, were the three crews that basically stayed in training. Everybody else was kind of relieved of all their duties, and we stayed in training. Because I was on two crews, I was spending a lot of time in the simulator and I was getting real tired of it. Then they realized that out of the first several flights that were going to fly, they would not fly the ASTRO-1 mission, and it was slipped to STS-35 or something. But Dick Richards and I were reassigned to the—well, I had already been on the DOD mission with Brewster. Dick was reassigned to that flight. And so then we ended up training for this Department of Defense flight and getting ready for that, which was going to be the first flight on /Columbia/ once we started flying again. So they were getting //Atlantis// ready and /Discovery/ ready and /Columbia/ ready to go fly. At that time they were going to be 26, 27, and 28. /Discovery/ was going to fly first, then //Atlantis//, and then /Columbia/. Again, here I am assigned to /Columbia/ and it’s not going to be ready. They were having a hard time. This was in its big down period to make it just like the other orbiters that had been built, and since /Columbia/ had been built earlier, there were a lot of differences. So it was still in that process of being modified and put back together, so it didn’t make the 28 flight. It slipped, too, when they flew /Discovery/ and /Atlantis/ one more time each before we finally flew in the summer of 1989. Training on a DOD crew was different, because everything was done in a classified mode. Our flight data file was classified. You couldn’t bring it home. You had to check it out. You couldn’t talk about your mission. It’s a whole different experience than being out there every day, and people can talk to you about it and what’s going on. You just say, “Hey, we’re going to go fly.” “What are you going to do?” “Well, we can’t tell you.” So it’s a different experience in that regard, but you get to do some pretty exciting stuff. Every space flight is just as exciting as another, and this one certainly was one of those. Waiting on /Columbia/ was hard, because it almost seemed like /Columbia/ was never going to get ready, but it finally did. And so we were able to launch and go on that mission in the summer of 1989, in August. I remember, we launched on the eighth of August. It was the day before my dad’s birthday, but he was there at the Cape again. I remember, I was able to get him on the—I had some friends that got him to where he could at least listen to what was going on in the air-to-ground. I told them, “After one rev [revolution], when we come back, make sure that he’s in that area in the Cape where he can hear the air-to-ground.” So I wished him happy birthday and said, “We lit some pretty big birthday candles for you.” So he thought that was pretty neat, and that was fun.

Ross-Nazzal: What can you tell us about the mission itself? I know that the mission was classified.

Leestma: The mission was classified. Shoot, I don’t know if they’ve ever told us if it’s unclassified or not. But we had a payload for the Department of Defense, and then lots of in-cabin-type things that we did. Because it was a DOD mission, you did what you went up there to do and then you came back, so it was a five-day mission. They really only wanted us to be gone for four days, but we talked them into one additional day, simply because if you’re going to go to all that effort to get up there, give us some more things to do and we’ll do them. The primary part of our mission was over in a couple days, and so we just finished up with the in-cabin-type experiments and did those, and then we landed. We ended up having to go to Edwards [Air Force Base, California] to land, at the end of that. Actually, we hadn’t even tried to land at the Kennedy Space Center, because the first flight of each of the vehicles after the big down period was always at that lakebed. So we flew /Columbia/ and landed at Edwards. I did get to land at the Cape on my first flight. We were the second flight to land at the Kennedy Space Center. We had a lot of trouble getting flights to land there at first. In fact, just about all the flights ended up going out to Edwards, but a little later in the program we found that that’s, [KSC], probably the best runway in the world to land on, and as long as the weather cooperated, we went in there a lot of times. So my last flight, too, we also landed at Kennedy.

Ross-Nazzal: Can you talk to us about NASA and DOD in these missions, if there were any conflicts, for instance, regarding a classified flight versus NASA’s public affairs interest?

Leestma: NASA’s mission is always very open in the pursuit of space, and it’s very open. The DOD missions at that time were conducted in quite a bit of secrecy, because the Shuttle, though, was such a great space truck. I mean, it could carry heavy payloads to orbit and it would have the attention of people deploying them, if necessary, or operating them, or whatever you were going to do. That was a very big plus to the DOD, because they had probably had some failures before that, that they might have been able to fix if people had been there or they had been able to spend some attention to it. They also were able to get pictures of everything that’s going on, and see that it was configured just right before it was let go or whatever it had to do. The DOD liked it. They did not like dealing with NASA. I don’t think NASA liked dealing with the DOD. It was kind of a constrained arrangement, but it worked very well during the times. I mean, the results that we got of the—I don’t know how many DOD missions we did, but we did about five or six, STS-27, ours in 28, and there [were] some others after that. I don’t remember what they all were. But the DOD missions actually went very well, and I think the DOD was very, very happy with the product that they got in the end. As far as I know, there were no failures or problems with any of those missions. The crews performed very well. I was pleased to be a part of that. I came as a military astronaut. I was glad to be a part of one of those, and was glad to be selected for that and to be able to do that. So I got to do both sides of it. One is more open. It’s a lot easier to talk about it, say what you’ve done. I mean, everybody wants to come back—especially when you come back from a space mission, you want to tell everybody what you did, and when you can’t do that, it’s a little bit more subdued. You don’t get asked to do many public appearances and things like that. So you end up basically going back to the office and training and getting ready for the next mission.

Ross-Nazzal: Were there any specific challenges for the crew in terms of training or the payloads?

Leestma: No. It’s just more the secrecy. Sometimes you had to disguise where you were going. You’d file a flight plan in a T-38 from one place, and you’d go somewhere else, just to try to not leave a trail for where you were going or what you were doing, or who was the sponsor of this payload, or what its capabilities were or what it was going to do. You just had to be careful all the time of what you were saying. But as you get closer to a flight, you start getting real excited about it, because you’re going to do some really neat, exciting things. So it was kind of a half-and-half-type thing.

Ross-Nazzal: I would like to actually go back to /Challenger/. For some reason, in my mind I skipped ahead. You actually served as a member of a committee which investigated the history of the SRBs [Solid Rocket Boosters] at the Marshall Space [Flight] Center [Huntsville, Alabama]. Can you tell us about this committee, and what was the name of the committee?

Leestma: I don’t even remember what the name of the committee was, but about a day—it was about a day after the accident, maybe two days, I was asked to go to the Marshall Space Flight Center. George called me up and said, “You’re going to be on the Marshall team that’s going to investigate the solid rocket boosters.” Nobody knew for sure yet what had happened, and they were assembling teams all over the place. “Crip” was in charge of the recovery team down at the Cape. So, Mark [N.] Brown was assigned with me to Marshall. We went up to that team and introduced ourselves, and immediately got involved with the film reviews and everything that we could possibly do to either—and looking at all the data to either exonerate the solid rocket boosters or find out if something had gone wrong with them. That was this team’s intent. And then if something had gone wrong, obviously then we went on to that, which we did find out. The team was led by Neil [A.] Armstrong, and his deputy was [Major] General [Donald J.] Kutyna from the Air Force, who had been in charge, I think, of the Titan program at the time, so he knew about solid rocket boosters also. He actually had been at one time a fairly strong critic of the Space Shuttle and NASA. He was from the Air Force side. I’d known him from some of the stuff that I’d done with the Air Force before that. Neil and General Kutyna complemented each other. Neil is a very laid-back-type personality and General Kutyna’s a real hard-driving type. So they’re the ones that [ran] the team. And we had lots of different groups, mostly Marshall personnel that are assigned to these, but we were there from JSC to see what was going on and to add any expertise or help that we could to these teams. After reviewing, oh, man, hours and hours and hours of film, we started to see little things that you wouldn’t notice normally, little puffs of smoke and stuff from the sides of the boosters, and we started to really focus on the O-rings and the joints, the field joints of the SRBs. And it wasn’t long before we could pinpoint, in some of the films that we got back from the Cape, that, in fact, one of the field joints had failed in the SRBs, and that was the cause of the accident. And so then it’s—oh my goodness, so you go through all that, and there was obviously a big SRB flap even before the flight, and whether they should launch or not and whether they did. And the coldness may have contributed to this, because the O-rings get very hard and the joint tends to flex a little bit differently in cold weather. I do remember, since I was on the next flight of the Shuttle, I remember on our launch date, which had been scheduled three weeks after the 51-L, I called down to Cape weather to find out what the temperature was at our launch time, and it was below the certified range also of the SRBs. Not as cold as it was on 51-L, but it was still colder than what they had been certified to. So there was a lot of consternation and recrimination going on at Marshall, but, really, the NASA people bucked right up to that and said, “Okay, what do we have to do to fix these things? We’ve got to get ready to go fly again.” So we started looking at lots of different possibilities of what to do. And I remember that Guy Gardner and Dale Gardner, two astronauts that were assigned to the mission that was going to be after our 51-E mission, they were going to be the first flight out of Vandenberg [Air Force Base, California], but they were going to use filament-wound boosters at the time. And I remember some of the briefs that we had gotten on filament-wound boosters, and they had a different clevis arrangement, hanging clevis arrangement than the boosters that we were flying. And so I talked to Bob [Robert] Schwinghamer, who was one of the senior engineering guys at Marshall, and he said, “Yeah, and that’s to prevent this gap opening.” And so then we talked a lot about that, and they went off and that was one of the things that they put into the redesigned solid rocket boosters, was this, a device to keep the joint from flexing or opening when the pressure gets into the case. They did a lot of other changes, too. I think that right now, as far as a solid rocket booster goes, they’re about as safe as you can possibly make a solid rocket booster. We’ve sure learned a lot. Wish we had listened to some folks before on the solid rocket boosters, because that was a great tragedy, that 51-L mission.

Ross-Nazzal: What suggestions did your committee come up with to improve the SRBs?

Leestma: Change the material of the O-ring; add an additional ring. Instead of having just one, put two in. Put this tang and clevis arrangement in. Certify it to the entire temperature range at which you might launch, rather than just at warmer temperatures. We put heaters into the round, the joints, so that the joints are always at 70 degrees, no matter how cold it is [outside]. Then there were lots and lots and lots of process improvements of how they assemble them. They test them and check them out. I don’t know how many came out of the whole committee’s report, but there were lots and lots of changes to be made, lots of attention paid to solid rocket boosters. Not just the hardware changes, but a lot of it was process changes, right from how you attach the propellant inside each of them, and the burn rates, and the materials that are used, the separators and dividers and the O-rings. They have a little flap mechanism now so that when the pressure ignites, this flap goes down and it seals the joint from getting hot gas even in the first place, in addition to having two O-rings—or actually three; two on the inside and one on the outside—and a tang and clevis arrangement. So the joints, in my opinion, are never going to fail. So if it does fail, it won’t be the joint.

Ross-Nazzal: So you’re pretty satisfied with the solution that NASA came up with?

Leestma: I was very satisfied with the changes that they made, and the fact that they had actually put those into production, and test and qualification and certification, and whatever else they had to do, and be ready to fly in two and a half years was quite an incredible accomplishment. Two and a half years, people go, “My goodness.” But two and a half years to basically build—they called them the refurbished or redesigned SRBs, RSRBs, but they were basically a brand-new SRB. To go through all the quals [qualifications] and certification that they had to do, and build them and test them, I think it was a phenomenal accomplishment. Of course, everybody held their breath when Rick Hauck’s—the STS-26 went up, but that was probably the safest flight we’ve ever flown on the Shuttle. [Laughter] That had more attention paid to it than any one that we had ever flown, except maybe STS-1. But STS-1, there was a lot we didn’t know that we had to find out first.

Ross-Nazzal: Let’s talk about your third and final flight, STS-45. This was also a different flight for you. This was actually a Spacelab.

Leestma: This was a science flight, so now I’ve been on kind of an operational-type flight, just to operate this radar and take pictures of the Earth, and then a DOD flight, and now this was a science flight, with a pallet full of atmospheric-related experiments. Kathy was one of the first payload commanders we ever had. I flew again with Kathy Sullivan on that flight. Being an Earth-type scientist, she was a very good pick to be on that flight. And then [C.] Mike [Michael] Foale was on that flight; that was his first flight. And myself. And then Charlie [Charles F.] Bolden was on the flight; he was the commander. And Brian Duffy’s first flight, who was the pilot. Another really good crew. We had two payload specialists. Actually that brings up a point from my very first flight. Very, very late in the flow, they decided that, in STS 41-G, that we would fly two payload specialists. So we became again—we had a lot of firsts on that flight—the first flight to fly two payload specialists, and the first crew of seven at one time. The Astronaut Office viewed this as kind of, “Why are these people on board the flight? That’s our prerogative to fly. They’re taking seats that should really belong to members of the astronaut corps.” And so there was lots of controversy about payload specialists. One was an Australian, Paul [D.] Scully-Power, to study the Earth’s oceans and stuff, an oceanographer. He was the first oceanographer to fly in space, I think the only one to fly in space. And a Canadian, Marc Garneau, who later was selected into the Astronaut Office and has flown a couple of times since, I think. So they became—they were kind of international flavor. It was the start of the series of time through late ’84 and 1985 where we flew a whole bunch of payload specialists, a lot of them from foreign countries. The Russians had done this on Soyuz, and [NASA] Headquarters [Washington, D.C.], I think, thought it was a good idea to do it. I think even presidents at the time thought, “This is cool. As part of foreign affairs, I can promise this country they send somebody over and we’ll fly them on the Space Shuttle.” Eighty-five was kind of a hoo-ha year. “Let’s go fly,” and we flew nine or ten missions, and most of them had payload specialists, many of them international type. But we were the first ones to do that, and we had already designed our patch. Each crew gets to design their own patch. It was a nice round patch with our names on it, and we didn’t know quite what to do. We really didn’t want to redesign the patch. So we came up with the idea of putting the payload specialists’ names on a little sew-on flap that goes on the bottom of the patch, and if you see our patch, you can see that. And that’s been kind of the convention ever since, for payload specialists, that their names go on that flap, at least until a period of time after that. And now I think, because the crews are named so far in advance, they’re able to get everybody’s name on. We don’t add people late. They were adding payload specialists fairly late at the time. Some folks didn’t particularly like the payload specialists on board. I thought, if that’s what the country and NASA want to do, then fine, let them fly. This is great. So we had them on board. We had a crew of seven. Seven makes the Shuttle a little bit more crowded than it would be with five. You have to share your space and share your time at the windows and that kind of stuff, but you learn to get along and I think it went very fine. And so on ATLAS [Atmospheric Laboratory for Applications and Science], again, this next flight, there were seven crew members and we had two payload specialists. They were both scientists that had been selected by Marshall at the time, because they were the ones. Dirk [D.] Frimout from the Netherlands; he was our international. And we had Byron [K.] Lichtenberg, who was the American that was going to be on board. So that kind of finished out our crew. We were operating at that time on twenty-four hours, so we were operating around the clock. That gave me an opportunity to do something that I never thought I’d get, but I got to be, for twelve hours of each time on orbit, I was the commander. That was really kind of fun. Charlie and Brian were on the other shift, and so for twelve hours a day they were in charge of the orbiter on orbit, and the other twelve hours, I was. Mike Foale and I and Byron Lichtenberg were on our shift, and Kathy Sullivan and Brian Duffy and Charlie and Dirk were on the other shift. So, twelve hours on, twelve hours off, back and forth. I got to do a lot of things that, as a mission specialist, wouldn’t normally get to do. I got to fly the orbiter, do the maneuvers. I got to manually fly it a couple of times, because the payload desired a manual slough through things by the orbiter, so I got to do a lot of neat things that I wouldn’t have been able to do normally. So it was a really exciting flight for me. It was a very, very fun flight. I got to do a lot of things that I had never done before on the orbiter. It was exciting because the payload was neat. One of the things in the payload bay was a plasma generator that would shoot these little bolts of plasma down from space back into the atmosphere, and then we’d measure the conductivity through the ion that was created. They tend to spiral down to the atmosphere; they don’t just go straight when we’d shoot these things. So the first time we were firing it, I was down in the mid-deck and I heard Kathy go, “Wow!” So seven heads are now looking down at this thing as we fire—it was in the dark, and we’d fire this little bolt of plasma out of this plasma generator thing that we had. It would fire down, and you could see it leave the payload bay. It looked kind of like a phaser, like a gun out of Star Wars or something. And it’d shoot these little bolts of thing and you’d see them kind of disappear. And then you’d watch, and then it’d hit the atmosphere and it’d glow again, and you’d see this spot glowing down into the atmosphere when it went in, and you’d go, “Wow, that is one of the most neatest things I’ve ever seen.” And then unfortunately, about the second or third time we tried to fire it, it arced and shorted out and we couldn’t fire it again. But I sure remember those first ones pretty well. I remember Kathy’s first—she was in charge of that experiment, so she was doing it. We were down eating dinner, I think, before we went to bed, my crew, when we heard her yell, “Wow! Look at that!” And, man, it takes about three seconds and everybody’s up there with all their faces pressed against the windows, wondering what’s going on. That always goes down to the law, though. I remember we had that—on my first flight, when we had seven people, there’s three people that launch in the mid-deck area. And there’s no windows down there and you can’t really see. The rule always was, for the three people downstairs, that they told the four folks on the flight deck, you never get to say anything that ends in a question mark, like, “What was that?” or, “Did you see that?” Because now they’re, [the mid-deck crew], going, “Uh-oh.” [Laughter] “What is that? What are they talking about?” So we were told you were not allowed to say anything like that at all [from the flight deck].

Ross-Nazzal: You mentioned a couple things that I’d like to go back to and hit upon. First of all, you mentioned that you were operating twenty-four hours a day. Was there any sort of competitiveness between the red team or blue team?

Leestma: There probably is a little bit in the training time frame, because you’re going to end up training as a team, and maybe one day the red team has their sim [simulation] and the blue team has it the next day. When you’re done, you ask you training team, “Well, how did we do compared to those guys?” There’s always that natural competitiveness, but nothing that ever gets kind of vicious or anything, and you’ve all got the same mission, to make your mission as successful as you possibly can. That’s the one thing you want to do. And so we were all working toward that purpose. So that worked out very, very well. I think a lot of attention has to be made into crew selections and how they’re made, and we’ll probably get into that later. Because I think that’s very, very important David D. Ewart Interviewed by Summer Chick Bergen Lagna Hills, California – 6 March 1999

Bergen: Today is March 6, 1999. This oral history interview with David Ewart is being conducted in Laguna [Niguel], California, for the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project. The interviewer is Summer Chick Bergen, assisted by Carol Butler and Rebecca Wright. We're so glad that you're willing to share your history with us.

Ewart: Nice to have you here in not-so-sunny Southern California.

Bergen: Why don't you just begin telling us a little bit about your time at AVRO and how that led to your involvement with NASA.

Ewart: Yes. I joined AVRO in late [19]'53, fresh out of flying training with the Royal Air Force, and it was a great five years in Canada working on the AVRO Arrow. They were making the CF-100 all-weather fighter, but the AVRO Arrow was the one that I was working on, along with several thousand other people. You mentioned Sputnik. That happened in [19]'57. We were fascinated as Sputnik passed overhead on a late evening sky over Toronto, but, of course, we were not in the space business at that time. So it was very interesting, but it didn't have too great an impact. We were busy doing what we were doing. '57 was the time when we rolled out the first prototype of the AVRO Arrow, so that was another milestone that I can distinctly recall, and it was a very successful program in the test-flying phase of the Arrow. We exceeded performance specifications for the interim J-75 engine, 15,000-pound thrust, and we got to Mach 1.96. The spec was 2.0, with the full-up Iroquois engine, which was about roughly 20,000-pound thrust. And it was a great plane, way ahead of its time. It carried the missiles, the Sparrows and Falcons, internally. We haven't seen that design again until the F-22. The F-22 carries the missiles internally. This gives you a low drag configuration for a reasonably economic supersonic cruise. The F-17, I guess, carries its bombs internally. I haven't seen it carrying missiles. The money for the Arrow was—I sent you the information on that—was highly political. I won't go into great depth on that. It did lay off several thousand people. The figures vary between 13 and 15,000, which at that time was quite a percentage of the Canadian aerospace industry. The big ones were just Canadair in Montreal, and AVRO, and deHaviland in Toronto. Fortunately for us at that time, NASA just had started up in late '58. The Space Task Group [STG] had started about the same time, and they were anxious to get engineers. But at the same time, the Century Series [fighters] were being designed and test-flown, and there was a big demand for engineers in the United States, so that's why they came to Canada. I remember Bob [Robert R.] Gilruth, Charlie—I’ve forgotten the name, he was a deputy at the time, and Paul Purser came up—Charlie [Charles J.] Donlan. Charlie Donlan and Paul [E.] Purser interviewed me, I remember. I probably couldn't have created too good an impression because I was flying with the Air Force Reserve at the time, and having been laid off, I was flying more than usual. So I came to the interview in uniform, ready to go back to the airport and pick up a C-45 and fly it to Montreal, and we were running a little late, so I was hopping from one foot to the other, anxious to get off and fly to Montreal. But anyway, the interview apparently went okay because they hired me. Most of us came down in the spring of '59. It was probably late April that I came down to Langley Field [Langley Research Center, Hampton, Virginia], and started May the 3rd, either May 1st or May 3rd, because thirty-five years later I retired on May the 3rd in '94. That sticks in my mind. It was a great experience working on what we called "the flying doorknob" at the time, after working on a plane. The Mercury capsule looked to us like a flying doorknob. We really couldn't imagine why they needed people to work on aerodynamics of a flying doorknob, but later we learned that it's not just a flying doorknob, you had a launch escape tower, you had the launch configurations, the Redstone [rocket], and the Mercury configurations, the Atlas Mercury configurations. So there was a lot of aerodynamics to be done. That was what I worked in initially.

Bergen: How did those aerodynamic studies different from the type that you did with airplanes?

Ewart: Not in how we went about obtaining the data, because you go through wind-tunnel tests, you go through free-flight model tests and full-scale model tests. In that case it was a Little Joe [rocket] off Wallops Island, and then, of course, you have the actual mission to confirm your original estimates. But the kind of coefficients you came up with were very different from a flying an airplane. But I had been down to Langley Field back in '56. We were testing the AVRO Arrow in the Unitary wind tunnel, supersonic wind tunnel, and that was a great experience, too, six weeks. We also came down later and flew a free-flight model from Wallops Island, which is a NASA facility, and that was very successful, too. I remember Wallops. We were put up in billets out there, and it was nice being by the oceanside and the ocean lapping the shore, but the steaks were tough and the mosquitoes were big, and we learned how to avoid the mosquitoes. Anyway, it was a good experience. So I had some experience being at Langley Field, so when I went down to the Space Task Group at Langley, it wasn't strange to me. From there, we all moved down, as you know, to Houston in late [19]'61, early '62, and I guess I had about three months in Houston, but some of that was flying back to Langley because some of us were still back at Langley, Dick [Richard R.] Carley, for example, who ran the analog lab back at Langley, and working for him was Stan [Stanley H.] Galezowski. Stan and I worked together closely on the simulation that Stan put together for a manually guided entry of the Apollo around a rotating Earth. It was a simple manual guidance program, but the idea was to establish that it was feasible. We didn't know at the time. You have a narrow entry corridor coming back into the atmosphere at 36,000 feet per second, and there was a lot we didn't know, but my job was to fly the manual entry simulation, and I guess I flew about 140 or those entries, different angles of approach, different conditions, and it proved to be very feasible, and I think that simulation helped Rockwell, or at that time North America [Aviation, Inc.], in their initial work on similar simulations, more sophisticated. Al [Alan B.] Kehlet, he was appointed engineering manager in the field office at Rockwell. I keep on calling it Rockwell. It's North American Aviation Space and Information Division. He was appointed engineering manager to manage the engineering side of the resident office when working on the Apollo command and service modules. Al, who had been my section chief back at Langley—a real nice guy—he asked me if I'd like to go out for a couple of years in the resident office, which sounded great to me, two years in California and working with hardware. I missed working with hardware. I'd worked at Fairey Aviation in [Hayes, Middlesex,] England on hardware and at AVRO on a lot of hardware, so it was a nice opportunity, and I grabbed it, came out here, fell in love with California and the weather and the ocean being so nearby. That was for a two-year stint, and thirty-two years later I was still here. It was an unexpected sequence of events that enabled me to stay in California. I wouldn't have minded going back to Houston, but you get to like the place and the people and the climate, of course. That was the Apollo Program, and [why] I was able to stay out here towards the end of the Apollo Program was that Skylab was starting up, and they wanted somebody to work as a resident rep [representative] for JSC [Johnson Space Center] at McDonnell-Douglas-Huntington Beach on the orbital workshop, part of the Skylab. JSC had responsibility for the experiments and, of course, the crew interface, astronaut interface on the workshop. So that was my job as a resident rep, to keep things running smoothly for those two areas. Matter of fact, Dick [Richard H.] Truly was assigned out, not as full time, but as a frequent visitor to the orbital workshop for the crew interface, and we got to know Dick real well. He was a very nice guy. We'd adjourn to the—I think the Jolly Roger at Seal Beach for happy hour on Fridays. That's when you get to know people. That was [19]'71, '72. I thought "For sure things are going to wrap up in California. I've got to go back to Houston," but then along came the Space Shuttle Orbiter Program, and I never thought that North American or Rockwell [International] at that time would win the contract, but they did. So they wanted me to go back to Downey and help staff the resident office there. In '73, I was chief of the Systems Engineering Office, we were helping in the design of the Space Shuttle Orbiter, working with the subsystem managers in Houston and, of course, the subsystem designers at Rockwell. The main task of the resident office was to oversee for NASA the manufacture and acceptance testing of each Space Shuttle Orbiter and all its related hardware, the mission kits and modification kits, the ground-support equipment, and other bits and pieces like the tail cone and extended duration orbiter pallet, EDO pallet. Whatever Rockwell had to build, we had to help supervise the manufacturing and participate in the testing, review the test procedures, and approve the test results. So part of the time I was at Palmdale [California]. The job I had at Palmdale was supervising the NASA role in the acceptance testing of Space Shuttle orbiters. So it involved staying up there for about seven months of the year during the week and occasional weekends. My guys would be on station with the Rockwell test engineers. They would, of course, review and approve the test procedures, and then as the testing progressed, they would review and approve any changes to the test procedure and any discrepancy reports that were written on discrepancies that cropped up. So that and a review of the data after the fact constituted our review process for each test. So we incrementally got a warm feeling that the orbiter was built right and was testing out okay. The final test was the final factory test or integrated test. The crew for the first flight of that vehicle would come out to Palmdale and participate in the crew module in the test, and they'd work around the clock with us, just like other members of the team. The last one that I was involved in was the final test of Discovery, and Mike [Michael J.] Smith was the factory astronaut at Palmdale at the time. We were working closely with him and the crew that were to fly Discovery the first time. The thing that impressed me, the thing that sticks in my mind, is how fresh Judy [Judith A.] Resnik looked after thirty-six hours of testing. She wasn't on all the time, of course, but they were working just as long on station as we were, and I was bleary-eyed at the final test, the post-test meeting, but there was Judy, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. [Laughter] She was quite a gal. They did a great job in working with the Rockwell and NASA team, and it was all the sadder when they were killed during the /Challenger/ [STS-51L] accident, sadder for many of us. Well, then, in [19]'84, Bill Wilson, who was the resident manager, wanted a deputy, and he got [Aaron] Cohen to agree to appoint one, so he asked me to be deputy resident manager. So I was probably more at Downey [California] than at Palmdale from '84 to '85. In '85, Bill, to our surprise, decided to retire, so he wanted me to be resident manager. I thought it would be just for a few years, because we had built the last orbiter, the Atlantis, and there wasn't too much more on the slate to build. But, of course, we had another tragic accident, the /Challenger/ accident, in January '86. At the time we were building structural spares. Many thought that this was a kind of unnecessary pieces of hardware to build, but it came in extremely useful because we used those structural spares. The structural spares [included] the crew module, the aft fuselage, the mid-fuselage, [wings], payload bay doors, [landing gear], that together we thought any one of those might be required if we had a forced-landing or damage to the vehicle in a hard landing, and it turned out otherwise. They were very useful as the nucleus for the Endeavor, the last orbiter that we finally did build. So that kept us busy until April '91, when we rolled out the Endeavor, slightly under budget, $40 million, according to Rockwell, and pretty well on schedule with the fewest open items of all the delivered orbiters. Every vehicle we ship, whether it's Apollo command and service modules or Space Shuttle orbiters, when you're tied to a delivery schedule, there's always a few open items that you ship to the Cape [Canaveral, Florida], but Endeavor had the fewest of all the deliverable orbiters. Then we got Columbia back for what they call OMDP, orbiter major down period, which constituted a very thorough physical inspection of the structure, plus making modifications to improve its stay up in orbit, or other system improvements which enhanced its performance or gave it longevity. Columbia came back and—I've forgotten how many months, probably about seven months or eight months we had working on that. Then, as you also know, they decided to use Palmdale as a major mod [modification] site, so each orbiter in the fleet comes back to Palmdale and goes through its structural inspection and any modifications that are needed. So Palmdale has a role in life for the foreseeable future, particularly if they want to keep orbiters flying well into the twenty-first century, and there's nothing on the board that might be available before roughly 2010, so we just hope they keep them flying. In '94, they had that incentive for people to retire in JSC, the first of several packages, and I think five of us in the resident office took that opportunity. So May '94, I retired, and I've been retired five years. So that's where we are.

Bergen: That was a great overview. If I can go back with you to when you came to NASA, what was your impression of NASA and the people there? I know you interacted with them some. What was that work environment like?

Ewart: It was a great working environment. NASA, to me, coming out of industry, was very laid-back, but one shouldn't be deceived by this casual approach. There were a lot of very capable people in NASA, and it's just a combination of the Virginian way of life, kind of a slower paced way of life, and also the different type of work that NASA was doing. It was research, to some extent development, but mainly research. They'd inherited a lot of the know-how and people from NACA [National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics]. NACA, that was their role in life, doing research, writing very good reports that helped the aerospace industry in the United States. It helped us in Canada and probably helped the Russians, too. So that was my main impression. It was a delightful place to live for most of the year. It became a little hot and humid in the summertime, but you had a measure of freedom that you certainly didn't have in industry, but you were still a part of the team, and it was a very good team.

Bergen: In 1961 Yuri Gagarin made his first flight, made the first space flight. What impact did that have on you? What did you think about the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union?

Ewart: We didn't know how far ahead the Russians were. We knew from Sputnik that they had the edge on us, but until Yuri Gagarin went into space and came back successfully, at that point we realized that they had quite a lead on where we were, but we also knew that we weren't too far behind, and it was a good incentive. It was a good stimulus to work even harder.

Bergen: After Alan Shepard's flight, President [John F.] Kennedy announce the goal of sending a man to the Moon and returning him safely to Earth before the end of that decade. What did you think about that, and how was that for you?

Ewart: Well, we thought it was great. It was a real boost, a real shot in the arm, and we felt we had support at the highest level, but also some of us thought it was a little ambitious to work out all the bugs and get to the Moon by the end of the decade, and it was quite amazing how that whole project was pulled together with upwards of 300,000 people all over the country working on it. It was quite a management achievement, apart from a technical achievement.

Bergen: You worked on the Mercury Program for a while and then you moved directly into the Apollo Program. What were your first responsibilities as part of the Apollo Program?

Ewart: Well, the first exposure to Apollo was reviewing the studies made by the various contractors in the period before the request for proposals for Apollo. We were the recipients of piles of documents. They were allowed to produce so many thousand pages, and I think they filled up every one that they were allowed to. I recall there were three major responders to the study contract, and that kept a lot of people at Space Task Group busy reviewing what they had submitted. And then, of course, this simulation I mentioned for the reentry of the vehicle, and then the main role that I had and others had at the resident office was that of the oversight, NASA on-site oversight of the contractor in the design but mainly the building and testing of the Apollo command and service modules.

Bergen: When you went to Downey as a NASA representative, what was the atmosphere like there? What was their state of readiness for production?

Ewart: Downey was building up fairly rapidly in personnel and facilities and equipment. It was a rather rapid pace of build-up, and I guess Houston had the task of keeping a good control, a good handle, on how rapid the build-up was. It was a cost-plus-incentive contract, so the contractor had a natural incentive to—well, he had tendency to build up a little too rapidly, a little too many people, so we had a rapid build-up and then a bit of a layoff later in the program, and then it built up again. The pace was fairly intense, and the design effort was, of course, the most intense. They had some system meetings every two weeks back in Houston where the subsystem manager would chair the meeting, the Rockwell design engineer would be there, and along with any subcontractor personnel who were working on the subsystem. We in the resident office at Downey were asked to go back and support these meetings, too, so we were back there roughly every two weeks, and you got a lot of flying in with Continental Airlines and National Airlines, but it was a very hands-on approach that NASA conducted in overseeing the design. At times Rockwell complained about—or North America at that time, about being micromanaged, but I think it was a pretty good approach. Over the years, NASA has tended to back off a little bit and give more freedom, design latitude, to the contractor, but we were all learning how to do it. So that was the pace that we encountered at North American in the early phases, lots of hardware being built, “boiler plates” [spacecraft] to be flown at White Sands [Test Facility, New Mexico], to be dropped at El Centro in the Salton Sea, and then … boiler plates [spacecraft] to be flown at Cape Canaveral, and then, of course, the dummy spacecraft, the unmanned spacecraft and then the manned spacecraft. So there was a lot of hardware.

Bergen: How were you received by North American personnel as the NASA person? Maybe they might have perceived you as looking over their shoulder. Did you feel that way?

Ewart: It didn't come naturally to North American, because the Air Force had not provided such close scrutiny in the programs that they had been involved in, the Navajo missile and the Hound Dog primarily at Downey. So it was a little different approach, and we had some slight problems in getting the right kind of documentation from Rockwell. For example, putting together test reports of a quality that we needed in order to document the testing and be able to assess the success of the test. But over a period of time we got to working closely with Rockwell, and they had confidence that we were there to help, not to hinder, and this carried over into the Shuttle Program, because they had experience with us on Apollo. The [Space] Shuttle Orbiter Program was smooth sailing compared with the early part of Apollo.

Bergen: During the Apollo Program, were there certain North American personnel that you worked closely with?

Ewart: Yes, but this is where my memory starts to fail me. John McCarthy was in charge of quite a number of people, probably about up to 1,000 people, back in the early phases of Apollo, in North American Aviation, and we worked closely with him. We worked closely with others in my little element of guidance, navigation, and control, worked closely with Bob Antletz. I really have to look at an employee list to be able to remember all the other names.

Bergen: Did you work much with people from MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] in your position?

Ewart: Oh, yes. As a matter of fact, Aaron Cohen—Paul Ebersole was in charge of the guidance and navigation part of the Apollo Program, which was a large subsystem, but important subsystem designed by MIT, and later the manufacturing of the system was awarded to A.C. Electronics. We worked closely with Paul Ebersole. We worked closely with Aaron Cohen, who was the guidance and navigations, I think, subsystem manager for Apollo, and he would come out frequently to Downey, and we'd go back to the subsystem meetings back at Houston. Honeywell had the stabilization and control system, so we would go back occasionally to Honeywell to see how that was going on in support of the subsystem manager. I can't remember who the subsystem manager was in Houston, but they were excellent people. We were really privileged to work with such a good bunch as we had.

Bergen: In 1965, General [Samuel C.] Phillips came out with the Phillips report which was never officially published. Were you aware of it at that time?

Ewart: In '65 a report on what?

Bergen: General Sam Phillips' report?

Ewart: I'm trying to think. I vaguely remember that report, but my recollection of Sam Phillips was at one of our management reviews at Downey when Dr. [Joseph F.] Shea, Joe Shea, was holding forth at the podium explaining how the program was progressing. Sam Phillips was in the audience. At the completion of Dr. Shea's pitch, General Phillips said, "Joe, you should have been on the stage. You'd have been a great actor." [Laughter] There was a certain amount of rivalry between the two. But I can't recall the report you mention.

Bergen: When the Apollo fire occurred, you had a unique perspective because you were a NASA person at Downey. From your perspective, how did that fire affect personnel at that facility?

Ewart: There was a profound effect at the facility, because, as you know, we went into almost a mode of depression about the loss of lives, and then there was the determination between NASA and Rockwell to find out what went wrong and come up with a better spacecraft. So there was a Block II version of the spacecraft that required many thousands of hours of redesign and, of course, refabrication. Frank Borman came out. I think he was resident out at Downey, working in Building 318, which was one of our satellite buildings, and overseeing [for NASA] the redesign phase of the Apollo command and service modules. But it gave us an opportunity to take a fresh look at what had been done and come up with other design improvements, like a Block II guidance and navigation system with a better computer and other improvements, as well as rectifying any deficiencies such as in the wire routing that were considered [necessary] at the time. Matter of fact, one of the outcomes of that, I seem to recall, is that you had a strict segregation of power wiring from instrumentation wiring, and if you had redundant systems, then the wiring path had to be redundant and separate so the failure of one wire in a system would not fail the wire in a redundant system. That may have had some bearing in the—we don't know for sure—in the [TWA] crash that occurred. There has been a thought that there may have been some wire damage in that that caused the tragedy. Anyway, to go back to the Block II command and service module, yes, it had a dramatic effect on the command and service module program at Downey and at Houston, too.

Bergen: Did you participate in any way in the investigation following the Apollo 1 fire?

Ewart: I was asked to take part in a NASA Headquarters quality audit of how the Apollo Program was being conducted at the various contractors' and NASA Centers. It was headed by Admiral [Roderick O.] Middleton. He was Captain Middleton at the time, but he became an admiral. We, as a team, went around the main contractors, Grumman [Aircraft Engineering Corp.], Long Island, Bethpage [New York], Downey, of course, Rockwell, North American at the time. We went around IBM [International Business Machines] on the instrumentation unit at Huntsville [Alabama], and then Johnson Space Center, Kennedy Space Center, and I think we went to McDonnell-Douglas on the S-IVB. They may have gone around the S-II, but I had other work to do at the time, so I couldn't attend that. It was later lead by Will [Willis] Willoughby [Jr.]. The whole idea was to get an overview of how the quality was being designed into and inspected into the whole vehicle. But to me it was a great opportunity to see how all the other elements of the Apollo Program were being designed, fabricated, and tested.

Bergen: When the final report of the Apollo 1 investigation came out, how did you feel about what it said about North American? Did you feel it was a fair evaluation or maybe unfair toward North American?

Ewart: I'm pretty hazy about what all was said in that report. There were many factors that contributed to the tragedy that occurred on the pad, and they've been thoroughly documented. There's no doubt that just one of the factors was the susceptibility of the wiring to damage. In other words, it could have been better protected. We don't know for sure how the short circuit occurred, because it must have been a short circuit which started the fire, but that was merely one factor. The wiring could have been better routed, better protected, but there were other factors, the overconfidence in the kind of test that was run. The kind of test being run with pressure above atmospheric pressure, with 100 percent oxygen, had been successful, apparently, on earlier spacecraft. But you had the other factor of the hatch. NASA had moved away from rapidly jettisonable hatches after the Mercury landed in the ocean. I think it was—

Bergen: Gus Grissom's flight [MR-4, Liberty Bell 7].

Ewart: Gus Grissom's flight. Yes. And the spacecraft sank. He was lucky to get out with his life. So that was ruled out for the Apollo command module, and in a way it was a very unfortunate decision, because that could have saved their lives. Something that took ninety seconds to open was far too slow to be opened. But the policy of testing in a high-pressure, 100 percent oxygen environment was an accident waiting to happen itself. I don't know exactly what was in the report, I can't recall, but those were the main factors that contributed to the accident that I can recall.

Bergen: You mentioned some of the test flights earlier. Did you actually participate in any of those test flights?

Ewart: No. The test flights for the Apollo Program, the Big Joe flights on a General Dynamics booster were to test out the launch escape system at White Sands. We oversaw the results. We helped analyze the results of the test as far as the performance of the hardware, but, no, we didn't participate in the testing there or the drop tests at El Centro. Our main role was to oversee the fabrication of the hardware that was going into those tests and also the boilerplate tests which were flown out of the Cape. Again, our responsibility was for the fabrication and testing and delivery, hopefully on schedule. One of two of us would go down to the Cape to follow up in the receiving and initial work on the boilerplate down there, but it was not in great depth. That was the responsibility of JSC and KSC [Kennedy Space Center] and, of course, the contractors down there.

Bergen: After the changes that were made after the fire and the Apollo 7 spacecraft was completed and ready for the mission, did you feel confident in this new spacecraft?

Ewart: Yes, but bear in mind that we were all working in our specific areas, sort of specialized, limited areas at the time. We were not so involved in the design as in the fabrication and testing, but we did get to become familiar with the design changes made in the course of developing the Block II command and service modules. And, yes, we felt very confident that what we ended up, that eventually flew successfully, [were] excellent spacecraft.

Bergen: Apollo 8 was a great triumph for NASA, for North American, and I imagine for your specific system, since it was navigation, guidance, and control. Can you share your memories of Apollo 8 with us?

Ewart: Well, we were delighted when the mission for Apollo 8 was changed so that it became a circumlunar mission, because it was a bold move and a bit of a gamble, but it allowed evaluation of the guidance and navigation system in one of its most demanding roles and also to come back in at circumlunar return velocity of 36,000 feet per second. That was a great test. We had reentered—I think it was Boilerplate 20, 17 and 20, came in at or close to simulated lunar reentry speed, but this was the first time we were doing it, coming back from the Moon and with [men] inside. So, yes, it was an amazing and a most satisfying result. It was a great mission, and, of course, it had public relations impact, too.

Bergen: Speaking of public relations impact, Apollo 11 was soon to follow. Do you remember where you were for Apollo 11?

Ewart: Yes. I can't remember exactly. I was in and out of—we had a mission support room at Downey, and the role of a mission support was to support the Mission Control Center in Houston. It was in communication with the spacecraft at the Cape and also, of course, the Launch Control Center, the Mission Control Center and the vehicle, once it got into orbit or on its route around the Moon. I can't recall if I was in the mission support room for the actual landing. I really can't remember where I was, but I do remember watching on television either in the mission support room or back at home. We worked shifts in the mission support room, you know, twenty-four-hour work, and you felt you were being closely involved.

Bergen: Did you continue to work in the mission support rooms for subsequent Apollo missions?

Ewart: Either I or others were in it. We took shifts, yes, for all the Apollo missions.

Bergen: But Apollo 12, at launch the vehicle was struck by lightning. Do you remember that?

Ewart: Oh, yes. That was the first and biggest lightning test we had, and I guess there was a lot of uncertainty as to how well it would come out of it. We were all gratified to know it recovered. Incidentally, that triggered thorough—as thorough as we could—lightning tests on the Space Shuttle Program to make sure that we were anticipating a similar kind of problem.

Bergen: The next mission was Apollo 13. What kind of mission support were you involved in for that mission?

Ewart: Well, Apollo 13, it was North American who were manning the mission support room and providing help to Houston, as required for the work-arounds, but the main role in coming up [with] the work-arounds was performed by Houston, the Mission Control Center supported by the subsystem managers and the engineering division down in Houston. Rockwell participated, too, and I can't recall just exactly how. It was [mainly] in the environmental control system, in [confirming] the proposed work-arounds that Houston were coming up with: the control of the carbon dioxide partial pressure and other problems, the heating, how to keep warm enough. It was a great combined team effort, and we were just there in a support role. One thing I should mention about Apollo 13—I think I sent you a copy—after the mission and the safe return of the crew, Grumman [builder of the lunar module] sent an invoice to North American for towing the spacecraft back to the Earth. It was nice to have that little light side to what was a near tragic affair.

Bergen: That's true. After the Review Board investigated the Apollo 13 incident, did that cause any major changes at North American [unclear]?

Ewart: No major changes. There was close scrutiny, of course, of the oxygen tank in which the wire had been damaged, so there was an investigation into the design of that and any necessary redesigns, but after the cause had been thoroughly established, that was the extent. I'm trying to think if there were any other ramifications. No, I think it was mainly control to the cryogenic system, limited to the cryogenic system.

Bergen: Are there any other Apollo missions that stand out in your mind or any impact on you?

Ewart: Well, of course, Apollo 11 was the biggest, 13 because of the near tragic accident. Alan [B.] Shepard [Jr.] hitting a golf ball on the Moon [Apollo 14], and, of course, Apollo-Soyuz, the Apollo joining up with the Soyuz spacecraft. I guess each one had its own element of thrill about it. The Apollo command and service module's docking with the Skylab and their amazing—their repair work, the canopy they put over the separated micrometeoroid shield and making it a habitable successful spacecraft. Technically, it was very interesting and fascinating.

Bergen: For Skylab, you went to McDonnell-Douglas [Corp.] to oversee the orbital workshop.

Ewart: That's right.

Bergen: As you mentioned earlier. How was this experience different than working with North American?

Ewart: McDonnell-Douglas had not worked on a manned spacecraft before. I don't think they had had the close on-site presence of NASA personnel before, looking over their shoulder. So that was a little change. There were some improvements in the way the test procedures were written, and Houston and the resident office at Downey were able to help in that respect. They hadn't worked with astronauts before. Of course, the astronauts they were working with were very smart cookies. They could ask all the questions that needed to be asked, and I think this was a learning process for McDonnell-Douglas. But we got along very well with the contractor, as we did with North American, once they realized that we were there to help, not to be a problem.

Bergen: What were some of the milestones in this development of the orbital workshop?

Ewart: Well, the first [milestone], of course, [was] the recovery from the loss of the micrometeoroid shield and then the progressively longer stays in orbit, I think the milestone was technically the relative sophistication of the spacecraft, the ability to sit at a wardroom table and heat up your food, to have a toilet which was … almost like one on Earth, to have an exercise machine you could pedal away on, and then the innovation of getting their exercise by running around the lockers at the top of the workshop. Technically it was a great step forward.

Bergen: After Skylab, did you have some involvement in the Apollo-Soyuz mission, the docking mechanism or anything?

Ewart: Not really, because—well, other than, as I say, our limited support role in the mission support room for the Apollo-Soyuz. And I say "we." It was primarily North American who were manning the mission support room, and we were there in an oversight capacity, and also I was down at McDonnell-Douglas during the time that [those] command and service modules were being made and tested at Downey. So when I came back, I think it was about to be delivered down to the Cape.

Bergen: And then you went into the Shuttle.

Ewart: [On] to the Shuttle, yes.

Bergen: Did you work on any of the preliminary designs for Shuttle?

Ewart: We followed them, and there were some study contracts that Rockwell had been working on, and again, I think I was down at McDonnell-Douglas when the study contracts were under way. By the time I came back in [19]'72, they were busy on the request for proposals, but we didn't get involved in the evaluation of those. As the design evolved after the contract award, yes, we became familiar with those in the course of the subsystem meetings, which were handled a little differently from the Apollo Program, but they still had meetings, more so at Downey than at Houston, but at both places.

Bergen: What were some of the challenges that you ran into during the development of Shuttle?

Ewart: Design was not our forte, of course. We were in kind of a remote mode, helping as we could in how the design affected the way we could test it and build it. The design problems, as I recall, were the aerodynamics of a very swept-back delta coming in through the atmosphere and the heating of the thermal protection system [tiles]. The thermal protection system perhaps was the biggest unknown. They had the capability to test aerodynamically up to fairly high mach numbers, but there was still a gap between the highest mach number that could be tested and the mach number for entry from orbit. So that was a big unknown, and on the command module it was an ablative thermal protection system and not reusable. In other words, you were burning off some of your protection system as you came in. This was designed to be a reusable protection system, and we weren't even sure if the tiles would stay on, or how many tiles you could lose and still come back in. I think those were the two biggest problems that I recall. Again, we were not design authority. We were just helping out.

Bergen: What were some of the differences between working on the Apollo Program at North American and then working on Shuttle?

Ewart: There was less NASA detailed involvement. They backed off a little on Shuttle, allowed the contractor a little more design freedom, but they still required fairly close scrutiny. It was just handled a little differently. They had all the management reviews, I think, once a month, and we had, of course, the design reviews, the preliminary design reviews, critical design reviews, and then the configuration acceptance reviews once you had built the vehicle, the first vehicle. Those are very similar to how it was handled on the Apollo command and service modules, but the contract was incentivized a little differently, and we were all a little smarter in how to write the contracts, our contracts personnel, and the extent of involvement of the personnel. We were not required, for example—well, let me put it this way. On the Apollo command and service modules, they wanted almost total involvement in all the acceptance testing, and we had support contractor personnel to help the resident NASA in participating in these tests. The test was always analyzed in real time, and afterwards I had a group of engineers to double-check all the data which was not analyzed in real time, and there was quite a lot. This was something we could afford on the Apollo command and service modules. By the time we got to the Space Shuttle Orbiter, there was far greater dependence on the real-time data, and we took the risk of not reviewing the—additional data [which] hadn't been reviewed on real time. In other words, we settled for less than 100 percent review of data on Space Shuttle Orbiter, and it proved that this was an acceptable risk to take. Other than that, it was handled in a similar way. We did not have so many resident NASA people on the orbiter program. That was another way in which we had backed off from micromanaging, if you will, as the contractor claimed, the program. We had learned how to become involved, how our inspection personnel should be involved on the spacecraft. We had a very large contingent of NASA inspectors on the command and service modules at Downey. For Space Shuttle Orbiter, we decided NASA would not be in the inspection business at Downey, so we utilized the DCAS, the Defense Contract Administrative Services, personnel, [quality, and] quality engineering personnel, to perform that role both at Downey and Palmdale. They changed the name from DCAS to DC-something else, but it's another agency other than NASA.

Bergen: In 1986, the /Challenger/ accident occurred. How was the impact of the /Challenger/ tragedy different from the Apollo 1 [accident]?

Ewart: It was in the course of a mission rather than on the pad. It was perhaps so totally unexpected. It had, if anything, greater impact because there were more people involved. I mentioned before that Mike Smith had been the factory astronaut at Palmdale, and so we got to know him very well. That was almost a personal loss when Mike was killed. So there was a way in which we felt that accident very deeply. As for what happened afterwards, the search for the cause, that was very similar to the post-Apollo accident. It turned out, as you know, to be the solid rocket booster, but we didn't know at the time. We thought it might have been something that happened on the orbiter, so there was great concern until that was established as not being the cause. I guess it showed up some shortcomings in the way NASA, the big NASA, was handling the program and certain parts of the program, but that's all been totally recorded and analyzed.

Bergen: What were some of the activities that took place at Downey between the time of the /Challenger/ accident and the return-to-flight mission?

Ewart: As I mentioned, there was this very deeply—this review of anything that could have possibly contributed to the accident on the part of the orbiter, and Rockwell was heavily involved with JSC in that, but, to my knowledge, Rockwell was in a support mode for the return to flight after all the corrections had been made to the SRB. Because of the fact that this was a qualification test of the O-ring that had not [been] surfaced up to upper-level management as to the constraints imposed by the qual [qualification] test on the mission, it did have some effect on people taking a second look at how the information was conveyed in our part of the program. So there was a healthy second look at how we were doing things, but it turned out that we were doing it okay.

Bergen: Over the years that you spent at North American-Rockwell as NASA's representative, what type of change did you see over that period of time in the relationship between North American, Rockwell, and NASA?

Ewart: Not really very much, but that may be because of how closely involved I'd been—[and] it's a long period of time, like the thirty-two years that I've been more or less at Rockwell, except for the nearly two years at McDonnell-Douglas. I think both Rockwell and NASA came to have a healthy respect for each other, confidence in what each was doing, and a better understanding of our respective roles. We all got smarter in how to implement the contracts, how to improve how you tested, how you improved inspection, how you got better value out of your contract, in other words. You backed off where you could from close inspection, even in the contractor. They place more responsibility on the individual doing the job rather than relying on inspection uncovering any defects. In other words, you design quality and you build quality into a spacecraft; you can't inspect it in, because in some respects you just cannot inspect what has been done. Once you've closed out an area, it's closed out. So we all got smarter in how to better design, better build, better test, better inspect the hardware and how to write contracts to get the most for your money.

Bergen: What is your overall view of the Space Shuttle?

Ewart: Of the Space Shuttle? Well, I think it's an fantastic machine. It's an extremely complex machine, and we would have to, for various reasons like reviewing a discrepancy or for other reasons, go through the aft fuselage, and when that was fully built, it was like a jungle gym. It was very difficult to move around, and you had to be very careful not to step on the wrong thing and damage any hardware, but it gave you another slant on the complexity of the vehicle. It was amazing to me that this thing could fly and perform so reliably, being so complex. The miles of wiring, the miles of tubing, and, of course, the thousands of tiles that go on the vehicle, it, of course, did not live up to the expectation or the claim that NASA may have made about the cost to put a pound into orbit, but it has proved invaluable for repairing satellites which are in close enough to the orbit of the Shuttle to be repairable. And I think it served, to some extent, the similar function that Apollo did in being something the country as a whole could be proud of. But obviously we, NASA, and the contractors can build a better widget, a better Space Shuttle, build it smaller, cheaper, and able to put payloads into space for less.

Bergen: Did you have an involvement in the building of the docking mechanism for Shuttle-Mir?

Ewart: No. The latter part of the time I was in the resident office, we were testing out the Russian docking mechanism with the docking module that NASA and Rockwell designed and put together, and we had some Russians who were working with us on that. So it was from a fabrication—overseeing the fabrication of it and the testing and the mated testing that we got involved in. That was the extent.

Bergen: As you look over your career, you've basically been involved in the space industry since the beginning. What do you consider your most significant accomplishment?

Ewart: Well, just making it this far, staying alive. No, I'd like to think that, again, it's not just myself, it's as a member of the team, as a member of the acceptance and check-out team, Rockwell-NASA, helping to produce or confirm the satisfactory production of all the orbiters, the /Enterprise/ and the five space orbiters. I think that was the biggest contribution that I and the rest of the team had.

Bergen: What do you feel was your greatest challenge during your career?

Ewart: Well, I'm not sure I can pin down any one challenge. In a resident office, you have to be adaptable. You move around. I came out first, as I mentioned, as the resident engineer for guidance, navigation, and control, and then you have to fill the roles that they want you to fill as time changes. For a while I was heading up a quality engineering office, test planning and analysis office, and then systems engineering office. Each one was a little challenge in itself, but I honestly can't say that any one was bigger than the rest.

Bergen: Having seen so much of the progress in space, what do you see for the future of space?

Ewart: I think it certainly has a significant future. There's no backing off from participating in space exploration. I think a lot more because of the technological advances that we've already seen with that little robot [Sojourner] on the planet Mars, there's going to be perhaps more advancement in unmanned mission than there are in manned missions. But the Space Station has a definite role to perform. If nothing else, it's this wonderful achievement of cooperation between umpteen nations to help design, to build, and to man it. It will be many years before we get a manned mission to Mars, but I think that's inevitable in the long run. We just have to become maybe a lot smarter in how to build vehicles, manned vehicles, [to] go there, and come back. But it's not beyond the realm of possibility.

Bergen: That basically covers most of my questions. Is there anything that I've left out that you would like to talk about?

Ewart: Well, when you talk to John [D.] Hodge, you might remind him of the time that he put together a cricket team. The group that came down from Canada were half native Canadians and roughly half British ex-patriots. So he put together a cricket team of those of us that came from Britain originally. We played the College of William and Mary on the town green at Williamsburg [Virginia]. That was a memorable day. Even if we did get beaten, it was a nice way of enjoying the environment, you know, the laid-back, simulated colonial town of Williamsburg, and afterwards we adjourned to a steak dinner at, I think, Channing's Tavern. I have a soft spot for Williamsburg. It's one of the places I'd like to go back and revisit.

Bergen: It's a beautiful place. Before we close, I'll see if Rebecca or Carol had any questions.

Wright: I have one. Talking about your early days, when you went to work for AVRO, what did you set for your expectations when you went there? What did you want to be?

Ewart: Well, I was in aerodynamics at AVRO. I guess I could have gone on to structures or something else, but I'd always been interested in aerodynamics. I'd been in the wind tunnel, helped run wind-tunnel tests at Fairey Aviation in England. So that was a natural thing to do. Impressions. It was a wonderful life in Canada, although the weather was a lot colder than England. I arrived in November, and they had an early snow. So that was my first impression, traveling to work in a car, but a heated car. Not too many cars in England at the time had heaters in them. Skidding around on snow, and I wondered how difficult it would be to travel to work. It was about fifteen miles to where I was working, in a typical Canadian winter. But they plow the streets pretty effectively. It was a very ambitious project, the AVRO Arrow. As I say, it was way ahead of its time in many respects, and it had a lot of potential for defending the North American continent, or helping defend. But the other attraction of going to Canada was, they had an auxiliary squadron, which is an active reserve Air Force squadron. We'd had agreements with the rest of the Commonwealth in Britain, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and we could [have] exchange postings. If you got your wings in the RAF [Royal Air Force], you could get transferred to an auxiliary squadron in Canada or Australia if they had an opening, and they had an opening in … [400] Squadron in Toronto. So that was really the other attraction of going to Canada, flying in … [400] Squadron and working for AVRO. But it was a fantastic five years.

Wright: So at the time that you joined, you planned to stay at AVRO, have a career there?

Ewart: I planned to stay, and I had some weird notion, as youngsters do, of staying a while but then moving on and going to Australia and being in an auxiliary squadron there, and maybe South Africa. My goals were a little pie-in-the-sky at that time, but things worked out differently and, it turns out, for the better. [Tape interruption.]

Butler: To tie in with what Rebecca was just talking about and you moving into AVRO and you said at the time you had goals of maybe going on to Australia or South Africa, yet in the end you went off in a completely different direction. Did you ever imagine that you could become involved with the space program or going to the Moon?

Ewart: No way. [Laughter] You get involved in what you're doing, and aircraft was my thing at that time. I just hadn't a concept for space. We didn't know at the time how useful spacecraft could be, satellites or manned spacecraft. No. It was quite a surprise, and it wouldn't have been my first choice. If I'd had the opportunity to stay and work at AVRO, that would have been my first preference, but we didn't have any choice, and I'm very happy that we didn't have any choice. It worked out for the best.

Butler: It did work out well.

Ewart: Oh, yes.

Butler: Throughout the time that you were working with basically the Apollo Program, were you aware of the pressures or the activities, I guess, that was going on with the Soviet Union? Was it a race to you?

Ewart: Oh, yes. We were kept informed as well as one can be through magazines like Aviation Week, and even NASA kept us informed as best we knew, but our intelligence wasn't that good of what really was happening in Russia. So we didn't know the problems they were having in getting a launch vehicle that could safely get them up and to the Moon. So, as far as we were concerned, it was quite a race, yes.

Butler: Here you were racing them for a large portion of your career with NASA, and then yet later, even though you didn't work directly on it, you saw Apollo-Soyuz come, and then even later you saw the work with the Shuttle-Mir Program and us docking with them. So relations certainly changed over time. Again, would you have imagined, while you were working on the Apollo Program, that someone who was our competitor so severely at one point would then be a partner later?

Ewart: No, we certainly didn't. That's why Apollo-Soyuz was such a surprise, and a pleasant surprise, that at a high governmental level they had agreed to that cooperative venture. I think it was a very needed step in the right direction to get over our fears and concern about each other. But working with the Soviets, I personally didn't get involved too much, but it wasn't, even on the Shuttle-Mir Program and the docking system, and in the International Space Station it has not been easy, I understand, for NASA. I know the Rockwell people that I knew who had gone over to Moscow and worked with the Russians, they had various problems in working with a different type of space agency and with contractors who were more used to working on highly secret missile programs, and even some of the components, like the pyrotechnics, I believe, used on the Russian side of the docking system came out of missile programs. So there was a job getting sufficient data that NASA and Rockwell could be assured that they were going to work once we were docked to them and how we could separate from them. In other words, there are different policies and standards between the two countries in degree of safety, in degree of back-up. It's a learning process, but, nevertheless, they are capable of doing some very good work. The docking mechanism that we did get to test was a quality piece of hardware. Getting back to talking about the Russians, it was the greatest form of flattery of the NASA design of the Space Shuttle to find that the Russians had come up with a Space Shuttle that looked very similar. So that was a nice warm feeling, that at least they were thinking along the same lines, if you give them the credit, or else they considered that we had come up with a good design inasmuch as they may have copied it. We don't know.

Butler: Looking at a little bit with your work with Skylab, Skylab was quite a different program for NASA, since up until then they'd just been doing like the Apollo or Mercury or Gemini, sending people up briefly and coming back. Skylab was long duration and a space station of sorts. In our research, we found there's been discussion on making Skylab—the atmosphere, painting it and making it comfortable for the astronauts. Were you involved in any of those discussions on the human aspects, I guess, to make it livable?

Ewart: Not really. I didn't get involved with the design. We were more concerned in the assessment, or the astronauts' assessment particularly, of the features which would concern the most, like I mentioned the ability to exercise and the toilet facilities and the cleats that they wore in order to stay secured to the grid work, which is the flooring, and the kind of foods that they were going to be eating. I think they were tickled with the luxury afforded by Skylab compared with even Apollo, and definitely by comparison to Gemini and Mercury. But we didn't get involved in the—at least I didn't get involved in the design features, but just in NASA's assessment of how adequate they were.

Butler: Looking at the Apollo Program, they were so focused on getting to the Moon and getting to Moon by the end of the decade, that I know it took a lot of time and concentrated effort and many hours. Were you aware also of the other events going on around in the country? Did those affect your work at all, Vietnam and the Civil Rights Movement and—

Ewart: We were, like any other citizen, interested in what was going on, but you tend to get tunnel vision in the aerospace program or parts of it, and it didn't affect us in any way. I can't really—no, can't really say it did. It was a topic of conversation, sometimes a heated topic of conversation, but you could separate out what was going on in the other parts of the world and the country from your work.

Butler: Summer asked you about the most significant moments and the most challenging, but is there a most memorable time for you, even just a little event? You mentioned the cricket match. Is there some event or a couple of events, even, that stick out in your mind from the time you were with NASA?

Ewart: One comes to mind. It was after I left NASA. The Canadian Space Society (CSS)—I've forgotten the true name—but there was an international space development conference in Toronto in May of [1994], and they invited all the, as they called them, NASA Canadians, that had gone down from primarily AVRO to work for NASA in '59. I think about twelve of us turned up, and we were recognized at a banquet during the conference, which was a nice touch. But it was an opportunity to meet some of the other folk—we'd all gone our separate ways—[and] to participate in a question-and-answer session on the stage at one time, and it was a nice little vacation for us.

Butler: Have you been able to have any other similar reunions since then?

Ewart: Well, locally we have a get-together of the retired NASA personnel from Downey and Palmdale, and, as a matter of fact, we have another one coming up in May, and there is a gathering of all the Rockwell—well, now they're Boeing, they were North American, then Rockwell, now they're Boeing personnel. [The] Boeing Management Association at Downey, … invited all the present employees and retired employees and present and retired NASA resident personnel, to a dinner in the design engineering—design engineering—anyhow, DEI room. It's the one where they have the big Shuttle mock-up and the Apollo 14 command module at Downey. There's plenty of space for an audience at a meeting or a dinner, and they're going to have a dinner there on March 18th. They think it's going to be the last get-together to review the seventy years of Downey's existence before it's closed at the end of the year. Boeing is moving all their personnel from Downey to other facilities, Seal Beach, McDonnell-Douglas, what was McDonnell-Douglas-Huntington Beach, is now Boeing-Huntington Beach, and maybe to Anaheim, wherever, but they are moving out of the Downey facilities, so it's the end of quite a historic seventy years.

Butler: While it will be good to be there, I'm sure it will also be hard to see that come to an end.

Ewart: Yes, yes, it really will. It served its purpose, and we still have Palmdale still going. That's run by the United Space Alliance [USA], which is a combination of Boeing and Lockheed. If anything needs to be remanufactured for the Shuttle Orbiter, it'll be done in Palmdale. Now, there will be an engineering support for the missions, and, as I say, they will be moved out of Downey, but I'm not sure where they'll move to, probably going down to Huntington Beach. I know that's where Ed Vonusa, who took over from me when I left, he'll be moving down there after Downey's closed. But it's been a great life for the city of Downey and the people who worked there.

Butler: Along those lines, there has been a lot of merging of the companies, the aerospace companies. Like you mentioned, Boeing is now composed of so many. Do you have any thoughts on that, how that can affect the future of the space program?

Ewart: Well, my emotions are, it's sad to see changes, but changes have happened over the years. You go back to the early automobile manufacturers. There were lots of them, and then they consolidated and merged or just went out of business. It seems to be inevitable in the field of technology that bigger is better as long as you stay efficient. Boeing is going to be our only source of commercial airplanes, big commercial airplanes, and AirBus [Industrie] is the only European source of commercial airplanes. They're it. It's sad, but it seems to be inevitable. And consolidation, as long as it's done efficiently, can keep us a step ahead of the next guy. It's a global economy now, and you have to do that.

Butler: Somewhat along similar lines, the USA [United Space Alliance, Boeing and Lockheed] has taken on a new role with the Space Shuttle. Do you have any views on that and how that affects the way things run? Is that a good way, a bad way?

Ewart: It can be a good way to do things, providing your personnel are well trained. It's another form of NASA backing off a little bit from the close involvement which is their historical way of operating, but I think Boeing (and initially … Rockwell) and Lockheed, they pooled their experienced personnel. It was a good utilization of both companies' trained personnel, and I think it could be—I think it's a good move.

Butler: Well, hopefully we'll see that continue well into the future.

Ewart: We hope so.

Wright: Mr. Ewart, those early days of NASA, things were going so fast and moving ahead so forward to get so much accomplished, one of the common threads that we've heard from people like you is that teamwork is what made it happen. Do you agree with that?

Ewart: You bet. Oh, yes. That's why it's so essential to achieve a level of confidence in both contractor and NASA, contractors, subcontractors, and NASA, that mutual trust and respect and understanding of each one's roles. When you get a team made up of those kind of people with those kind of attitudes, you're pretty likely to succeed.

Bergen: We thank you so much for sharing with us. We really enjoyed it.

Ewart: It's very nice to have you folk here and shoot the breeze.

Bergen: Now that you've retired officially, are you still active, other than going to dinners [unclear] team members?

Ewart: They told me, before I retired, that once you retire, you wonder how you got things done when you were working, because when you retire it takes just about the same amount of time to—you know. For a while I was working on a couple of little desert houses, houses in the desert that my wife has. First of all, repairing them after renters wreck them and then putting them in shape to sell. That's been a nice little sideline that keeps one active. I did a little to help the neighbor who had a temporary hire operation. I sold, of all things, computer software at a Price Cosco for a couple of months, and that was a nice experience in the retail business, but I decided that standing all day was not for me. It gets to my ancient back, particularly if you're standing—[and] they put software tables right by the entrance, and particularly in November and December it gets a little breezy. It was a nice experience, but, as I say, I don't plan to repeat it. Sally and I might—we read where they needed [movie] extras for TV and film movies, and there's a little office in Irvine where they recruit people for that role. The pay is pathetic, but we thought that might be a good thing to keep us out of mischief. But the immediate problem I have is, I had some eye problems, a detached retina which kept detaching in the left eye, and I have to go in for another operation on Monday to have the lens put back in. They'd operated so many times on the left eye that the lens fogged up, so they took the lens out. Now I'm going back Monday, and they're going to put another one back in, like a cataract operation. And then after that, they have to take out the silicone gel they put in the eyeball, and maybe I'll be able to see out of it again. So I'd like to get that in good shape before we go charging around as movie extras.

Bergen: That's right, start your new career.

Wright: That sounds like it would be fascinating to do. [End of interview]