Paul Dye
Monday November 11, 2024
7:30 p.m.
Minnesota might’ve been the best of times for a lot of aviators who once called the state home, but the rocketship-like career of Paul Dye, the longest-service NASA space shuttle flight director in history probably has pushed those years down on the list a bit.
Still, when he spoke to EAA Chapter 54 on November 11, one could almost hear a touch of wistfulness in his via-Google Meet voice.
“I started very early and I got a chance to play around with the J3 (Cub) and flew that a lot and we polished airplanes and cleaned airplanes to raise money,” he recalled about learning to fly here for a grand total of about $500.
“It was a great time to grow up, and, and I've always figured that I was going to be in aviation, but I was never quite sure how I was going to do that?” he said.
He was also in a confession mood.
“The last time I think I landed at Lake Elmo was probably a few decades ago back before everybody had Mode S transponders. I had a mode C, but I was flying my RV-8A and I was flying up from Houston and I and it’s very possible that I nicked the corner of the TCA coming downhill. I said, ‘Oh this is a problem.’ So rather than going straight to Anoka County, landing and getting busted, I just landed at Lake Elmo and I sat on the ramp for 10 minutes because nobody could tell if it's the same airplane.”
The statute of limitations has probably run out, but just in case, mum’s the word!
Here is his presentation:
When I retired from NASA, I got to take over Kitplanes Magazine. So, I ran the magazine for about seven years. The real problem with running a monthly magazine, folks. They seemed to expect you to do one every single month. It gets tiring after a while. So, I engineered a promotion for myself and we brought back Mark, Cook to be the editor-in-chief. And all I get to do now is go around the world and fly really cool airplanes and write about them. And I also do consulting for companies where I’ll test their airplanes and give my ideas.
Back in the day, we had the five of the largest fastest mainframe computers in the world running Mission Control. And today, I have more competing power in my cellphone than we did in the entire building back then at the beginning of the Apollo program.
In the control center, we had pneumatic tubes. And if you needed to send something to your back room, you'd put three ounces of paper, no more in a tube. And then you push the button and tend to send it off to your back room. It's piped down a different floor. But of course, being engineers, we had to test the system. We’d ask back room for some wooden pencils, they then grabbed a handful and put them in a carrier and send it off. Twenty years later, they were picking chunks of wood graphite out of the tubes. And then there's the infamous, ham-and-Swiss sandwich that got lost in the P-tube system. And you'll have to read my book to hear that story.”
“I was assigned as the flight controller. My degree was in airplanes - wings and tails and flight testing and stick and rudder and silk scarf and goggle stuff. And they said, ‘you're perfect. You're just what we need. We're assigning you to the space lab computer system.’”
The space lab was a set of hardware that was used to support to mount in the payload bay of the shuttle and used to support experiments. And so suddenly, I had to become an expert on computers and fortunately the computers were power were based around a Motorola 6502 microprocessor. Now, this was 1980. Remember, the 6502 was Infamous for its use in such advanced computers as the Commodore 64 and the Atari 400 game console. So, I took the money that I got for moving, and I went out and bought myself the most expensive thing I'd ever owned, which was an Atari 800 computer and I taught myself machine language programming so that I understand how this thing worked.
And then after the Challenger crash, on Day 1, I was assigned to operate this big monster which was the space lab instrument pointing system. The long thing here is a telescope which mounted on the pointing system and it sat in payload bay and it rocked and rolled. It had star trackers. It had solarimeters, it had gyroscopes and I had to learn all this stuff. And of course we flew it. And we had a great time flying that a couple of times. We flew it a few times and then and then it disappeared from program. And back when I was flight director, I went by the Udvar-Hazy, the Smithsonian Museum in Washington. And there behind the shuttle that was on display, was the pointing system.
After the Challenger crash, I was moved over to the mechanical systems group, where we were responsible for anything that moved -- the payload bay doors, the vent doors, the hatches, the latches, we're responsible for the landing gear, the brakes. I was one on the team that helped develop the drag chute, which was not on the original orbiter; we added that after Challenger. We also did crew systems, which was everything from the galley, to the suits, to the seats, to the toilet. And then we did in-flight maintenance where we had to fix things that we're never intended to be opened up and fixed on orbit. That was a lot of fun. That was a lot of jury rigging and like you, if you've ever watched the movie Apollo 13, you saw where they had to dump a bunch of stuff on a table and they had to make round filters fit square holes and that was in-flight maintenance and we did a lot of that. And after a number of years, I was doing a lot of ascents.
Eventually I became the section head for this group, and I got a call saying, ‘we're selecting flight directors and we'd like you to apply,’ and I said, ‘you know, I don't have the experience requirements for it,’ and they said, ‘Paul, we want you to apply.’
I applied and I got an interview and I obviously didn't get the job because the purpose was to give me experience through the process because they knew I wasn't ready. And then a couple years later there was another selection and t was obvious that I needed to apply and I did. And again, I didn't get it because they had a smaller number of selectees. There were just two and I was the third choice.
And then a funny thing happened. The Soviet Union collapsed and Russia had a lot of very smart rocket scientists and rocket engineers. My counterpart as a flight director was driving a taxi cab at night to feed his family; they didn't have any money and those people were headed to the highest bidder: countries that wanted to build nuclear chip ballistic missiles that were not friends of ours and so it was to our great advantage here in the United States to develop a way to work, with the Russians, to keep those people working on ae peaceful space program.
And so, I was happy working with whomever happens to be in the job, whomever is the flight director on the day you work with them, it's not a problem. Russians don't work that way. They want to work with Paul because they met Paul and they had Paul over to their apartment and they drank vodka with Paul and they ate with Paul and they and they went to airshows with Paul and this gave me a great advantage.
The next time a flight director's selection came along because we were going to be flying a lot of missions for the Mir (space station). And they really wanted to work with Paul. And so, I was selected as a flight director in 1993. I was very, very happy that I was able to actually work in the old Mission Control Center, before we switched to the new control center, as a flight director, and stood at the same console as Chris Kraft and Gene Krantz.
When you're selected as a flight director, you go through a year of training. You go through about six months of academics and classroom training. You come into it with leadership skills, demonstrated skills and the ability to think very fast. But you need to learn all the other disciplines that you didn't know and you do that with a lot of self-study and a lot of classroom time. And then you spend about six months on console doing simulations.
So, I have two classmates. We were selected at the same time. Once we started our on-console training, we were in the control centers three times a week; one of us would be sitting and the other two would be watching. You've got one sim and two watching things a week and those are eight-hour days. They're a lot of fun. But they are really hectic because if you go over to do a simulation, you have the flight control team and Mission Control. You have a crew in the cockpit. You have all the ground systems running so that you can't tell the difference.
If every person in the front room, all 12 of them, gets one failure to work during the day, it's a complete and utter waste of their time to go spend eight hours there. But the flight director is working 12 failures. If every flight discipline gets two failures for the day, it's still a complete waste of their time. So, the flight director is working 24 failures. You can see where this goes: most disciplines only get four or five failures plus there'll be some timeline things and the flight director is busier than one-armed paper hanger. It's like playing tennis against a machine and it’s a lot of fun. It definitely keeps you busy. And it tires you out and you lose your hair. Like I said, it takes four flight directors to fly a mission. We have about 10 flight directors in the office at any one time because you’re frogging missions.
About three months before the mission, two more flight directors get assigned for the other orbits. Each of those has their own lead that they're working on. At any given time, I'm working the lead for my mission. I'm working somebody else's orbit, and then you cycle in and out of the assent entry for a couple of years at a time. It was a very, very busy and exciting job all the time.
Now, the very first time we flew to Mir was my very first mission as a flight director and we didn't dock. We weren’t going to rendezvous; we didn't have the docking capability yet. We were going to rendezvous and fly around the Mir, just to make sure it all worked before we committed to knocking.
The ascent was powered around noon early in Houston time, and the crew went to bed about five hours. And I came on board because I was the overnight shift for the crew. When the crew was asleep, it's called the orbit three ship. This is my very first shift as a flight director, and the first thing I did was I name my team. We each flight director has a call sign. And that that follows them through their entire career. You're allowed to choose that and I was known as Ironflight because my ancestral home is the Iron Range of northern Minnesota. So that's what I chose to honor my grandfather who was an iron miner. We took the handover and everything was great.
It was about 5:30 in the afternoon, but going uphill on the ascent, they had lost a couple of maneuvering jets and the problem with that was that we needed a lot of special jets in order to rendezvous with the Mir because the Mir was a no-wake zone. You could easily blow a solar array off of that thing if you pointed a jet at it in the wrong place. We have very particular set of jets that we could use and the rest of them we couldn't use.
When I got on console, we were failure-critical to obtain more jet leaks. Now the other interesting thing about this was that at 5:30 in the afternoon is when all the senior managers stopped by Mission Control before they go home for the day, right? The crews go to bed and they're going to go home, everything's going to be happy. There was a whole array of guys behind me. All of whom have been flight directors.
Here was Gene Krantz. There was Randy Stone, the successor to Gene. There was the chief of the flight director office. Lee Briscoe was the lead flight director for the mission. Gary Cohen was the two other flight directors for the mission that were experienced. And I was the rookie, and I just taken a handover and just then my propellant officer called me up and said, ‘flight, we've got another leaking jet.’ I knew that if we had another leaking jet, we were going to scrub the rendezvous with the Mir.
We talked about it a little bit and I'm finally going, ‘Wow, this is this is going to be ugly.’ This is first day of the mission, and we're going to lose the primary mission objective. And I thought, ‘well, you know, I've got this big brain trust standing behind me; all these senior guys. So, I'm going to see what they have to say and I stood up and I turned around and they were all staring at me. Motionless.
And this went on for about 10 seconds until Randy Stone, who was the chief of shuttle operation at the time looked me straight in the eye and said, ’well, Dye. What the hell are you going to do now?’ And I realized that they'd all been in my seat and they all understood the fact that it was my decision and not theirs, and they weren't going to take it away from me and they weren't going to do it for me. And I turned around and I looked at the rules and I said, uh, the rules say we got to close off this jet and we'll deal with it later and I said that GC, let's arm the building, Capcom, let's get ready to wake the crew up. Prop, what switches do we need to throw to isolate these jets? That's what we did.
At that point in time, I was exercising, my full authority as flight director. Now, fortunately, we were able to get those jets back in a couple of days. But what we really did was we negotiated with the Russians. We had a flight director in Russia who was a real good guy who really could hold his liquor.
And we learned a great deal about how to operate space stations and how to put our people on board and frankly just how delicate that space station, the Mir, was. There's a book written about it called Dragonfly. It's a very interesting thing.
After we had flown all the Mir missions, we were going to get ready to start building this International Space Station along with the Russians and the Europeans and the Japanese and the Canadians, and a few other folks. And I said, ‘I need a break. I'm tired of listening to Russia. I learned it. I don't speak it.
But I was a little bit tired. I said, ‘I'd like a non-space station mission and they said ‘Great, we got one for you. It's called the SRTM, the space radar topography mapper SGS.’
It was basically a large radar antenna in the payload bay and another antenna that went out on this extendable mast about 200 feet out. It came out of this canister and it gave us binocular radar vision and we could map the topography of the earth. Every single square meter of dirt between 62° north and 62° South, with an accuracy of 1 meter on a 9-meter grid. Now think about that. Humans have been trying to map this planet since humans have been around and there were still areas that said, ‘here are dragons,’ until this map was made. This map is Google Earth. This is the database, which will be used for the topography of this planet for the next hundred years.
In order to close the doors, you had to jettison the full canister and the mast and everything else. And we had planned the mission that this was built by a very, very, very smart group of people at JPL. It was their payload. I was just giving it a ride. They needed 131 orbits in order to get the complete map and we planned to be 131 orbits which was the full length of what we could do. We had to stow the mask and come home that day. So, we were not going to have time to jettison it to troubleshoot it and jettison it if we couldn't get it to close and management was not very happy with me on that.
I'd planned mission that way because that's how we need to do to get the mission done. And they said, ‘we're not going to allow you to do that. You got to stow it a day early.’ I said, ‘well, the JPL guys won't get the map.’
‘But they'll get their hardware back.’ And I stopped and I said, ‘gentlemen, JPL never gets their hardware back. It's outside the solar system with Voyager. They don't want the hardware back. The only thing they're going to do with this hardware is look for a place to store it.’
Well, this insert up here in the corner (shows picture). That's the SRTM mast, canister and antenna hanging from the ceiling in the Udvar-Hazy Smithsonian Annex.
My flight controllers were smart enough to figure out how to save enough gas to make us go the full time and give us an extra day.
So let me take just a little bit of time out here and talk about this, the Rockwell space shuttle orbiter, and give you a little pilot report on it because it’s pretty fascinating machine.
We'll take a look at the basic dimensions. The shuttle Orbiter is the thing that looks like an airplane. The space shuttle is the whole system, the external tank and the SRB (solid rocket booster). So now, when you're out there talking to people in the world, you'll know that this is not a space shuttle. This thing looks like an airplane.
When we used to have fun with our Russians and they would downgrade us for some reason, we'd simply say, ‘hey, you know guys, if you ever have a problem with your Soyuz booster, we can carry two of your Soyuz spacecrafts in our payload bay for you. No problem.’
Pretty big payload bay: about 60 feet long and 12 feet in diameter. And here's the cockpit (shows picture), it was originally was all steam gauges. We upgraded it to a glass panel basically about halfway through the program because we had all these fabulous steam gauges that were, you know, eight ball HSI's or AEI’s and the like, and all the people who knew how to fix those things hadn't just retired, they'd all die. I mean, this was old stuff. So, we had to go to glass and we just basically duplicated the instruments that we had; it was going to cost too much to upgrade the software and give us all fancy stuff.
But the pilot, the commander, sat on the left. The pilot sat on the right. The commander did all the flying. The pilot was the co-pilot but no self-respecting test pilot astronaut is going to allow himself to be called a co-pilot. We always had a commander and a pilot. Mission specialists sat behind or on the mid deck.
Main engine thrust was one and a half million pounds, half a million pounds each for three engines. So, we had seven and a half million pounds of thrust coming off the pad.
Empty weight, the Orbiter was specked is 175 000 pounds but we all know aviation manufacturers. They usually weighed about 200,000 pounds empty because everything's heavier than you think.
Max landing weight was 256,000. So, you had to burn off some fuel before you could land. And that was not the fuel on the big tank. That was fuel used for orbit maneuvering. But we had ways of dumping that if you had to come back and land.
These are these are old prices - 1991. Price is about two and a half billion dollars for an Orbiter and with boosters and an external tank about 4.5 billion.
Some performance numbers: take off ground, roll was zero feet; over a 50-foot obstacle, again, it was zero feet.
When we would lift off and the Cape was in charge of it, you'd hear, ‘Tower clear,’ which Tower clears when the tail is above the top of the tower. ‘Clear and Houston is controlling,’ the Cape realized after a while that they had no contact with the vehicle once it exploded off the pad. And so, they couldn't see the data and if it ran into the pad, they didn't want it to be their fault so they handed it over to us to lift off.
So, it a rate of climb on ascent was 132 000 feet per minute. That's pretty good. Fourteen, thousand eighteen hundred knots, we talked in feet per second so it was 25 000 feet per second or about 18, 000 miles an hour. Orville altitude lowest that you could fly was about 100 nautical miles because you start dragging hitting molecules of air and starts dragging you back down. 315 is as high as you could get it through East from the cape and that's where the that's where the Hubble Space Telescope is.
Landing roll average about 10, 000 feet, minimum was 1000 feet. But boy, you better get out quick because your brakes are going to be on fire. Your tires are going to be on fire, even your drag chute's going to be on fire.
Max crosswind component, 15 knots, and believe me it was a nice flying vehicle until about 12 knots crosswind. It became really difficult to fly with three more knots crosswind and you couldn't control above, 15.
Best glide speed is 185 knots. Best maneuvering speed is 185 knots. Max gear extend was 312 knots. Talk a little bit later here about how you land this thing and we're talking about high Mach numbers, but you have to recognize that 312 knots is well over Mach 1 at 50 to 60, 000 feet. It's the old true air speed versus indicated thing on max gear, operating there's 312 knots. You just needed to remember 312 knots. That's basically, they never seen was 333, and the stall speed was listed as 150 knots. But nobody ever dared try it.
When you go ahead and launch one of these things, you came off the pad, like a jackrabbit. The main engines lift off, they’re tilted forward a little bit because it was off center and then that was called the twang. So, the tip went forward about 3 feet and then it would rebound. And when it rebounded, just straight up, the SRVs, would fire. Then you'd be off to the races. If the eight hold down bolts which were about 4, in diameter didn't fracture, it was just going to rip my other pad anyway. So, you were on the on your way; you were doing Mach 1 at about 45 seconds.
You're going up upside down, so to speak. So, you pitched over, your head down. And then at about four and a half minutes, you rolled the heads up. We had our antennas pointing at our satellites, and you looked out to your left and you were passing the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. In about eight and a half minutes, your main engines cut off. You were on your way in orbit, and you looked out and you were off Cape Cod. So, eight and a half minutes from the Cape from the east coast of Florida, to Cape Cod. I don't think Southwest Airlines can do that.
In orbit, l you did all sorts of really cool, space things. But I'll tell you a little secret here, folks, I'm really an airplane guy. Yeah, I operated spaceships for 30 years, but really, I'm an airplane guy. And so, we're just going to skip back to entry and talk about entry, and there’s all sorts of neat stuff that we did on orbit.
When you want to come home, you had to slow down. So, you'd point yourself backwards, so that orbital maneuvering systems engines were forward. You'd fire those you're about 8,000 pounds thrust each and you fire them for about three minutes and they slow you down just enough so you get captured by the atmosphere. That's about 8, 000 miles before landing and that would be over the Indian Ocean. If you were near Australia, if you were headed into Edwards and then you would come on down, you'd get captured by the atmosphere around 400,000 feet doing Mach 2.5.
Slow down all the way until you come down into the runaway environment. And frankly, we didn't need very big, a very big restricted area around the landing area because you were basically falling into the area. You crossed over midfield at around 50,000 feet, descending or at 10,000 feet a minute. So, you were above all your traffic until you were right in the traffic pattern almost.
And a typical landing would be to cross over just short of midfield. And then a big sweeping turn to the left, a 270 degree turn to final. If you, if you were low on energy because it's a glider, folks, there's no engines at this point, you could just do what we call a straight-in, which was just to do a base-final turn.
And if you were really low on energy, you would just aim for the runway and make a tight turn when you got down in the flare, but it was it was difficult airplane to fly.
So, when you came over the field you were at Mach I and uh, 50,000 feet. Over the threshold, you make this turn and you're down to about 30, 000 feet at low G. Essentially, I'm down with 20,000 feet when you were on the equivalent of base and you'd intercept your glideslope at around 12,000 feet, a couple miles out. You'd come down to 19-degree glideslope.
We always told people this is a big sweeping turn out there. There's nothing big about it. You were just dropping it in a spiral. The wings don't do anything except help you flare when you get down low.
The final approach was at 19 degrees. So, we all know, typical ILS Glide slope is two and a half to three degrees. 19 degrees is steep enough. You're coming down at 300 knots 297 knots, and as you get down, close to the runway, the runway disappears out the top of the windshield because you're aiming short of the runway. You have enough energy to flare, you do what we call a 2000 feet pre-flare. That pre-flare puts you on the inner glideslope, which is about a half degree. You cross the threshold at about 265 knots, and you want to be pretty much in Touchstone attitude at that point because you do not want to be playing with pitch. It’s a delta wing vehicle, and if you pitch up the elevons come up. And when the elevons come up, the instantaneous reaction to that at decreases. So, it starts to sink faster. Now it starts pitching up and you make that back up but that first millisecond seat of the pants feel is that you're you've pitched up and you're sinking faster. So, then you push forward because that's not what you wanted to do. And now you're galloping down the runway.
You have to be very, very conscious of how that that handles. It's called a negative wide slope response. And it takes a little time getting used to. I did a lot of demo flights for us in the simulators. The best people, the people who would most successfully land on their very first landing were 12-year-old kids who've been used to playing video. The pilot’ pilots usually just flew it into the ground.
I'll tell you a little secret that if we had somebody that I was flying, you know, a king and prince, the senator, somebody who could affect our funding and we want leaving feeling really good about themselves, I just tell them, ‘now, this is a very, very sensitive vehicle, and so you're going to look at the HUD and you're going to put the little wing thing, inside the little diamond, and you're going to just fly it right there and keep that in there and follow that all the way down, but it's very, very sensitive. So, you want to very, very small, stick motions. Just brush the stick a little bit, just don't move it hardly at all, just a little pressure.’
And they make a perfect landing and they'd be very happy with themselves and leave and we get our funding renewed, but I didn't tell them that if you didn't move the stick at least two degrees, it stayed in “auto.”
You pop the drag shoot at about 180 knots after touching down and then you de-rotate and you get the grass, you break down the runway but not use up too much. You have to let the drag chute go at about 65 knots, otherwise it would drape down over the engine and if you did that, it was going to cost $20 million for a new engine bell or an inspection.
The interesting thing about the landing at the Cape is you have these moats on both sides and alligators lived in those moats. And before a landing, they had to have a group of volunteers walk the runway. It's a 15,000 feet runway. So that's a pretty long FOD walk and more often than not, they found alligators out there.
We had a lot of good times. In mission control, it's a very serious place to work, but we do interesting things. On the Fourth of July. If you were working overnight, we put a fireworks show together, some of the best firework shows you could have video of, we’d splice them together, we put them up on the big screen so we'd watch fireworks, artificial fireworks.
I've worked every holiday there is on the calendar at some time in Mission Control. Thanksgiving, we usually have a big turkey dinner brought in and the whole fixings
This was a typical Memorial type day (shows picture). This was probably the 30th anniversary of Apollo 11. We were flying a shuttle mission and I told everybody the night before that it was going to be white shirt, skinny black-tie day because we were going to honor our Apollo veterans and everybody came appropriately dressed. We had a good time. We took a picture of that.
Of course, we did black and white. The nice thing is we actually had had young ladies on our team by that time - they didn't have them in Apollo.
This is a really fun picture because every once in a while, the bat signal shines on the clouds, and somebody calls a meeting of the ancient and honorable Society of flight directors, and we will have a gathering in Houston. This one was held when we, when we named the control center for Dr. Chris Kraft, the very first flight director red flight. So, the first three flight directors are Chris Kraft, Gene Kranz, John Hodge, and they chose team colors to identify themselves. A red white, and blue naturally. This was a 1962-63.
The next couple of flight directors came along and they picked green and black, nobody wanted to be yellow, somebody chose gold silver and that got us in the minerals, which is why I ended up as iron.
By the time I did, this was a typical reunion with a bunch of folks. We have Chris Kraft right there in the middle. We lost Chris a couple years ago -- old age.
Over here on the right, I have two interesting fellows. The second from the right is Glynn Lunney. He was one of the original Apollo flight directors. He was actually the lead flight director for Apollo 13. It was not Gene. Gene just happened to be on console when the oxygen tank exploded.
Glynn came in about an hour later and said, ‘Gene what did you do to my mission?’
Glynn was one of one of the best managers I ever had; an incredible guy. What's interesting about this picture is the guy standing next to him is Brian Lunney, his son, a second-generation flight director. He was the first second generation flight director and he didn't get in just because his dad had been a flight director; Brian was really, really talented too.
Kind of interesting days in the end of the shuttle program. We were training all the time, whether we were training for a mission or we were training new flight controllers or getting keeping people current. We were running the control center 40 hours a week with shuttle simulations, which meant we always had to have astronauts over into control.
The last two years of the shuttle program, we only had about five more missions, four more missions to fly and everybody who wasn't assigned to the mission was off looking for a job or training to fly Space Station. So, we ran out of astronauts to fly our generic training simulations.
So, we formed up two crews of flight controllers and instructors. And I was the commander of one of those crews, and sitting here in the left seat because I was left-seat qualified for the shuttle and we had a one of our sim supervisors was the commander of the other one. We called ourselves the Astro-not Corps. And we had a great time.
Those are some of the funnest two years of the program for me, because I'd spend Monday overnight control center as a flight director, being beat up on by the sim folks and training flight controllers. Then the next day, I'd go to the simulator and I'd sit there and fly it as a commander for eight hours and eat space food and have a lot of fun. And the next day, I had to go back over to the control center and I evaluate or I teach or I do something. Then I just had to figure out how to stay out of my office for two more days because nothing, good ever happened in the office. That was no fun at all but it was a great time.
Control center also was a magnet for important people who would come to visit. And this is a good example. I think, was the last the second to last shuttle mission, and I'm there with Gerry Griffin, who was one of the Apollo flight directors. For those of you who know anything about Texas, but there's a great institution of higher Learning called Texas, A&M; they're the Aggies. And then and just like I used to tell ethnic jokes in Minnesota about folks on the Iron Range. In Texas, they tell Aggie jokes and, the good one is, ‘did you hear the one about the Aggie flight director that launched a Saturn V into a thunderstorm?’
They got hit by lightning right off the pad. It was Apollo 12. The entire spacecraft shut down. Fortunately, the rocket kept burning and the guidance system in the rocket ship.
Gerry was the flight director and nobody had any data and suddenly one of his flight controllers came up and said, ‘Flight, Eagle, I need him to take SCE to Ox.’ This was an obscure switch in a quarter of a panel that nobody had ever trained on except that Eagle.
Gerry had never heard of it before, but he trusted his Eagles so much because that's how we train. There was only one of the astronauts who knew what that switch was. It was right in front of him. Pete Conrad didn't know what it was but he threw the switch and they got their data back and they flew uphill. And that was a great, great lesson in leadership. You train so hard with your teams that you learn to trust one another implicitly.
The second part of that leadership lesson is, they were on orbit for an hour and a half, and they had an hour and a half to figure out whether this spacecraft that had been hit by lightning was going to be safe to send to the moon. And if they decided it wasn't, then they were going to dump the whole mission in the ocean, bring the crew back and waste the whole spacecraft stack.
And Chris Kraft was now the director of mission or operations, came up behind. Gerry, put his hand on his shoulder, and said, ‘young man, you do not have to go to the Moon today.’ And I always thought that was an incredible lesson in leadership because he basically took the responsibility of the program off of Gerry's shoulders and said, ‘do the right thing,’ whatever that might be.
They managed to go to the Moon that day. It was the right thing to do. But those are the kind of moments that we have in Mission.
We flew 36 missions to build this thing (shows picture). This is the International Space Station. It's the size of a football field that weighs a million pounds. It goes around the Earth every hour, every 90 minutes for many, many years.
I would get people coming up to me and saying, ‘when are we ever going to send an American in space again?’ And I would say, ‘you realize there's one up there right now; we've had an American in an in-space continuously for 22 years,’ not the same guy, right?
We went on the Soyuz a lot and now we go on the Dragon. It is a magnificent achievement of the Aerospace industry who built this thing. Many of these very large components were never made it on the ground. They had to fit perfectly a first time on orbit because they they couldn't support themselves on the ground. A lot of components weren't built until some of the other parts had been launched. And when we went put it together up there, everything fit. It was a triumph for computer-aided design.
I flew the space station for about a year and a half after we retired the space shuttle. And I realized at that time, that that my gift to Mission operations was the same gift that was given to me by the guys that flew Apollo, which was that before they left, they passed on all the knowledge that they had developed of how to fly spaceships to me.
And before I left, I needed to do the same thing. This (shows picture) was the last shift of the orbit teams of STS-135, the last mission of the space shuttle. The crew was asleep. The spacecraft was buttoned up. There was nothing for us to do and the entry team was coming in in a couple hours to bring it home. And since there was another do, I walked around the front of my console – that’s me there in the center - and I started talking to the couple guys right in front of me about what the old days were like and looking at my shoes because that's what engineers do. You know how you tell an extroverted engineer? He looks at your shoes when he’s talking.
But I looked up all of a sudden, I realized that the entire team had gathered around to listen to the old man talk about the lessons we learned in the old days and that's when I realized that it was my goal before I left, to take every simulation I could for the space station teams, the young flight controllers, who were coming in, let them work with the old man, and, and pass on, not just the technical lessons, but the leadership lessons and how you think about space flight and it was very, very rewarding to do that.
Then I retired. I went to work putting out this aviation magazine and I've had a great time. I get to fly airplanes all over the world, I get to go fly some pretty unique stuff. And eventually I wrote a book about the about the shuttle days. It's called Shuttle Houston.
It's out there; it's available. It's been out for a few years. If you're interested in buying it, that'd be great. And if you run into me at AirVenture and you have a copy, I'm always happy to sign a copy of the book.
It' been a great life. We're still flying and still doing a lot of flying right now. We're building an F1 Rocket. Today I was working on the tail and I bought an engine that's been pickled for 20 years in Iowa.
Today I dared to put more scopes in the cylinders and it looks good so I'm pretty happy with that.
It's been a pleasure chatting with you tonight, sharing the accomplishments of a space shuttle team is always rewarding. It was hundreds of thousands of people that did amazing things. When the space shuttle program was conceived in the early 1970s, we had the administrator who was very smart. He made sure that there was a piece of the shovel being built in every single congressional district of the country. So, we had complete support by Congress and and it was an amazing achievement by our nation to do that.
I want to thank you very much.
Related:
Listen to an interview with Paul (MPR NewsCut 2011)
January 2024:3D printing aviation applications (and Lake Elmo noise complaints)
February 2024:A fireside chat with Marlon Gunderson
March 2024:Mark Schaible, owner and president of Sonex
April 2024:Joe Harris, MAC director of reliever airports
May 2024: Sim pit design with Jeff Dale
June 2024:Annual picnic and hangar tour
August 2024: Your Oshkosh experience and fly-in breakfast debrief
September 2024: Dale Seitzer's Sky Ranger
October 2024: The Ups and Downs of Building an RV
