NOVA; To the Moon; Interview with Adelbert "Del" O. Tischler, Director of the Chemical Propulsion Division at NASA, and Director of the Shuttle Technology Office, part 1 of 2

What was the original vision, who had the original vision, Kennedy's always credited with being the guy who was going to go to the moon? Where did you first hear about it? You mean in the old NACA days? Okay, that idea was bandied about by a group of people who were directed to do so by NACA headquarters. In the spring of 1958 at the Lewis Research Center other people were doing the same kind of investigations but the basic ideas were beginning to gel back in those days. The final formulation or the more complete formulation of the lunar program began in early 60s

under the direct search of George Lowell. That program was accepted about a year and a half later by President Kennedy who didn't originate the program. Obviously he picked up the ideas it was proposed. What kind of vehicle were you going to use to get to the moon? What were they thinking about in those days? The vehicle hadn't been that comprehensively defined but we did have vision of sending an expedition that would land on the moon with the entire system to bring men back from the moon's surface as a fairly difficult undertaking. We ultimately elected not to go that route but instead to use lunar rendezvous as a mechanism for leaving a part of the system in orbit and landing only the part of the system that brought two astronauts down to the surface from which they would return to this larger system in orbit,

lunar orbit now, and then returned back to the Earth. That enabled us to do the whole job with a much lighter system. Right. Now let's talk. Let's go one step at a time though. The original launch vehicle was going to be the Nova rocket. Now describe that. The audience has never heard of this. This Nova audience has never heard of this. What was that Nova? How big was it? What would it have been like to watch that thing go on? The Nova rocket was essentially an eight engine Saturn instead of the five engine Saturn that we ultimately built. When I named the number of engines I'm talking in terms of F1 engines which produced one and a half million pounds of thrust the piece at takeoff. The eight engine vehicle would have been fatter heavier than the Saturn V ultimately. It probably would have been shorter rather than taller. The perceived difference in size would not have been that great. But the proportions of eight engines to five engines fell out the mass ratios of the two vehicles fairly comprehensively,

all other things being essentially the same. You described that F1 engine just watching one go off at a time. What was it like to watch an F1 engine? What kind of power did that thing have? You described it pretty dramatically before. Well, I've been there many, many times. Of course since I was responsible for the development of that engine initially. And it's an experience you can't describe except to say it's somewhat like the shuttle flight on takeoff. The noise is tremendous. The F1 engine being tested in the desert at Edwards Air Force Base and threw up off a lot of rock and dirt and other things. It wasn't entirely pleasant to stand there with your clothes flapping in the wind. Well, I think roared. My hearing is deficient ever since, I believe. Okay. Remember, keep looking at me. I've heard about how much power would have had had they built the Nova.

Somebody once said to me, it probably would have sunk Marin Island. It would have sunk the island it took off with. That's how powerful it was. How powerful would it have been? Put it in layman's terms. The idea that it would have sunk the Marin Island is ridiculous. Eight to five ratio, as I said, is almost hard to perceive from a distance. The mass of the Saturn system with the spacecraft mounted and all the other equipment ready to go was about of the order of six million pounds. The engine configuration would have been about eight fifths of that waiter about in the order of nine million little less pounds. We could have handled either one. That wasn't the problem. The problem was one of the total economics of the system. And how could we do this job in the shortest time with the least money? Describe that to me. What made you finally decide against the Nova as a vehicle? We didn't decide against the Nova so much as we decided for a lunar orbit rendezvous.

That method of landing a small vehicle on the moon and bringing the men back with still another stage of that vehicle to the system left in orbit and able us to take off with a system, a total system weight that was significantly less than would have been required for direct flight. And consequently, a decision was made to build a somewhat smaller launch vehicle, one with five engines instead of potentially eight. The characteristics of the system and many other respects would have been about the same. There's the size difference, whichever it is spelled out approximately. And that's about all there is to it. Describe the problem of trying to take the Nova directly to the direct asset to the moon. What was the problem with that? With that method of going there? Why was it less attractive than lunar orbit? The least attractive part of it is we never built that one. We could certainly have built that vehicle. It would have cost more money.

One can argue in retrospect, would it have been more useful? And the answer is probably not in the long run since we abandoned Saturn V as well after the lunar mission was completed. Okay. Cut. Second. Good. Very good. How big was the debate between lunar orbit and Earth orbit and direct asset? That debate was not primarily conducted by Fun Brown. It was conducted among the people who were going to be responsible for the spacecraft into it. And although they had accepted pretty largely the idea of a direct flight system with a direct flight return. A man named Hubolt of Langley Research Center came up with an idea that by conducting a lunar orbit rendezvous leaving a considerable mass of return vehicle in that orbit and going down with a small vehicle, then returning to the larger mass in lunar orbit and returning from that orbit to Earth orbit. That idea, ultimately, he was able to sell because you could use a much lighter system. Well, it wasn't that much lighter, but it was five-eighths roughly of this weight of the other mass of the other system. Weight in space means nothing. Weight is a force.

How was Hubolt's idea received initially? Not too well. There were a lot of people who had their minds made up that we already knew how we were going to do it. And he had considerable discussion and argument. Some of it pretty heated before our decision was made that ultimately swung in his favor. What really did it, I think, was the economics of the lighter vehicle. Now, how did you guys refer to Bunn Braun and the guys at Marshall? What was your nickname for them? Oh, I didn't have a nickname for them. Since I spoke German, I was able to speak to them, so they were compared to it's of mine. Most of them spoke pretty good English, although they never quite got rid of the accent or the dialect.

I thought you referred to them as the Bridge and Ironworks. Chicago Bridge and Ironworks? Oh, well, that has to do with the vehicle they built. All of their vehicles were very conservatively designed with safety factors that I think were probably excessive by today's standards, at least, even by the standards at that time. And so some of us, some of the people in the headquarters, referred to Marshall as the Chicago Bridge and Ironworks for the additional mass that they carried in some of their vehicles. However, there's one thing that has to be acknowledged. They worked. Good. That's good. Okay. Just grab Lunar Orbital. How does that work? Earth Orbital, rendezvous, we had in a sense that we reunited the Lunar Landing Vehicle with the Command Module in Earth Orbital before we departed to the moon. The Lunar Orbital rendezvous had this purpose. We put the entire system landing vehicle as well as the Command Module, which was to return to the Earth in the Lunar Orbital at about 50,000 feet altitude.

We then detached the Lunar descent and ascent stages with two astronauts having put themselves in it through a hatchway. They descended with a much lighter vehicle and returned ultimately with the ascent stage to the Command Module. By, we saved the problem of using propulsion systems to descend this entire Command Module and return it back to the Lunar Orbital position for launch toward the Earth. Now, it's a matter of physics here. Newton's law prevails. And you can do that with a much lighter system than taking the whole system directly to the surface. Good. Where are you going? Again, that's it. I can't hear my question. Describe the note, but what would it have been a huge undertaking to proceed with direct descent using an overrocket?

Yes, but so was the Saturn V and the system that we used for the spacecraft systems. One can make the sound as though it would have been too great a problem to handle. Undoubtedly, people said the same thing about the Golden Gate Bridge, but it's there. We could certainly have handled it. It would have taken a little additional time. It would have taken perhaps a lot of additional money. And that's about the only real problems of an engineering nature that it faced. Technically, it's the same thing. Okay, let's talk about the Saturn and the Saturn all up test that when George Miller first said, wait a little while and we're going to do this is to test this whole thing at one time. Did you think that was a fairly bold move on his part? It was a very bold move on his part because it went against all of the plans that had been already put in place by those people who were in charge of the program up till his time.

And it really happened to be one of two fellows who was assigned to study what we could do to shorten the schedules that we were holding for the Saturn V and the missions. And with my partner who was not dead, unfortunately, we decided we had to cut out all redundant flights. We never repeated the same flight again. And by doing so, we cut the number of flights that would be necessary down to a significant degree. And in fact, Miller's idea was we would set up the systems in such a way that when we went, everything would be in place and we would go until we encountered a problem, then we would return. And we would keep that up until we successfully landed on the moon. Now, that didn't actually happen because for some of the flights, for example, Bourbon's flight on Apollo 8, he didn't have a landing system. He couldn't have landed if he had wanted to.

And so it went. As parts were available, however, there were assembled and tested one time only. And ultimately, we got to Apollo 11. Some number, in fact, five vehicles before we'd otherwise would have landed on the moon. And flew it all the way. Neil took care of the rest of it. Just an anecdote about Neil Armstrong. You said before, what was it specific to Neil Armstrong? You thought he made him so good at his job? Neil was not only a pilot and a very, very good pilot with unbelievable reaction time. He was also a very, very good engineer. Very shy in some respects, but a guy whose capabilities were really never measured. And he turned out to be an admirable guy to make this first landing. Because his judgment, for example, on landing was that the bolder field that he was flying over was going to prove to be too rough to land on.

And so he elected to manually overfly that vehicle. He was the only astronaut we had who had enough experience to do that, in my opinion. He had the wiped out two practice landing systems and getting that experience. I parachuting out safely in each case. Okay. Describe, were you there for the Saturn all up test? What was it like to see that rocket go off? Yeah, I've seen Saturn take off. I don't know what you mean exactly by all up test. Oh, then when they first tested it. Well, it's an impressive vehicle, but the shuttle is about equally impressive. In fact, the two vehicles are of the same thrust level, actually. And except that they look different, the impressions are substantially the same from three miles back, which is as close as you can approach as a visitor. Talk about the power of the F-1 engine. They had five. The Saturn had five F-1 engines.

Could any of those have failed and the emission continued? Within the first few seconds up to about 20, the loss of an engine would have been pretty troublesome, because the vehicle did not have a great acceleration at the takeoff point. Consequently, a loss of one-fifth of your thrust would have put you in a very tough situation to fight your way out of. After those 20 seconds, we probably could have flown with four engines and made the mission. Just a word about the Soviets and their technology. And take me back to that time, not looking back behind site. Did you feel constantly like we're being pushed by the Russians, by the Soviets, in terms of their technology? I know they have a big propulsion system on the board as well. Well, one can say that the biggest feat that the Russians accomplished was to launch the United States into space in the first place. Thereafter, they had a series of accomplishments, flying men, women, dogs, and other things earlier than we were ready to fly.

However, in the longer run of landing men on the moon, our economic systems and the infrastructure we had in place simply overtook their capability to stay a pace. And they ultimately gave up on trying to land men on the moon, although they had landed vehicles unmanned on the moon surface before we did. As you look back on the Apollo days as an engineering feat, what do you think of it? How do you think it will be remembered? Well, I remember it as probably the most magnificent single engineering feat of all time up until now. That isn't going to be the end of it. Civilization moves on. We learn more and more. And there will be other great accomplishments as we come. But that was a combination of engineering funding that is political and financial support from the people of the country through their taxation systems.

The necessary infrastructure in the terms of school and education and training. All of these rolled up in the one large ball and made the work for that particular mission. Did we stop too soon? We may have. We may have. We abandoned three viable Saturn V vehicles. I think, for example, we probably could have launched the very significant payload in the direction of Mars. We're still talking about that as a mission. We could have taken a very large step in that direction at that time. We probably were not ready to fly men at that time simply because that's a long duration mission of the order of 18 months minimum. I think we're ready now, but we don't have that Saturn V to do it with. Okay.

Any else? I'd like if we can just give him a run over rush when he wants to get facilities. I know of the size of the operation. You know, I know that. You're going to take that apart and rearrange the sequences. I know that the VAB building in the vehicle is made. What kind of a describe what kind of an effort would have taken to support the NOVO, to build it and support it? Well, the facility problem, which you brought up a moment ago, would have been a little more difficult. The principal change in the vehicle, other than thrust and mass, is the diameter change. The VAB, which is a very large building for housing the assembly of the Saturn V rocket originally, would have had to be wider, in my opinion. It probably did not have to be any taller than it already is. These are simply engineering problems of no large scale. You just build it bigger, that's all.

Again, I don't think that there was any barrier in doing that. What about moving that thing? It would have taken a bigger moving vehicle. Perhaps not, that moving vehicle is a pretty capable device, even as it stands today. How was it where it was made with that? It's moved on a big tractor. Yeah, that's a big, it's crawler. It's called the crawler is, because it doesn't move very fast. The bigger diameter probably would have made a bigger target for the people who took potshots at the darn thing on the way down the rivers. On the other hand, I don't think that would have been a problem again. I cannot address the question of, were there any bridges that would have been barriers? That might have been a possibility. It had to go down the Tennessee and ultimately the Ohio and then back down the Mississippi to the Gulf and around Florida and back up to the Cape to get there, you see. Yeah, describe that to me.

I never was ever told me that. How did you get the thing from Huntsville to the Cape? Those stages that went through Huntsville, all of them did not, were put on a barge, and they literally were just transported by barge, commercial traffic barge. Down the rivers, through the system and back around the Gulf and into the Cape and I've rolled port. There they were all floated and assembled at the Cape, or what we call the Cape, actually the Kennedy Space Center. I still refer to that as the Cape. That's a name that goes back to the days of the Spaniard, Gallians, literally. That was there to a departure point in going to Spain. Great. Great. That's got it. I think we've got it all then. What about Germany? We didn't touch on that at all. Do you have...

Just the main difference of rush one to get to is... The issue here that we discussed right now was why was the Germany mission undertaken? And I explained the reason for that, which is basically to get the experience of doing rendezvous. We've got that in space. Okay, just the one thing is that on LLR, when you went away and changed from direct to center LLR, on direct to center, no one's explained that you didn't use your document. You didn't use your document, which is going to go literally direct. Once you've chosen LLR as approach mode, you have to get into document. It's just that bridge between direct to center LLR. That's okay. Okay, great. Well, the docking maneuvers are always touching and going until they've done them. Mitchell... Conrad's flight, yes, I believe. Jean Mitchell. No, Jean Mitchell had one hell of a time docking there.

On the Mitchell Shepherd and Rusef flight, 14. Okay, Mitchell was a command module pilot. And he had a hell of a time getting the system to dock in Earth orbit. And the reason was he was being too gentle. Spring loaded system, you had to clang it in there and get the spring to pop. If you didn't get it in far enough, couldn't pop the spring. He did it four times a week. We can turn the lights on. You didn't get hurt too much there. You would have a rover to get more mobility. The lunar module was modified in some ways to increase the payload and so forth. So a great deal went into the program after Apollo 12 when the decision was made that there would be a lunar exploration program. And after that, there was a good relationship between the science and the engineering folks

because of the purpose of that follow-on program was science. Good. I'm going to have you do next. Show me this. What are we looking at here? Don't put your glasses on. Have you do that in the shot? What we have here is a Apollo 17 landing site. This is tip-ass. The answer is probably not in the long run since we abandoned Saturn V as well after the lunar mission was completed. Okay. Cut. Second. Good. Very good. Good point, too. What stage did the building get to? It was never complete. I'm trying to get a clear idea of, look, the novice presented problems to us like taking one vehicle up there, landing it and bringing it back. Wasn't that a pretty big engineering problem versus...

One vehicle? Yeah. No, no. The system I had worked out personally for the purposes of giving a talk to a graduating class at a engineering school and used that method. And it was up to the order of the size of the Saturn V. However, I used hydrogen and fluorine in the upper stages, which are very good proponents, but also very dangerous. And we made a decision, which I helped to make, that we would not use fluorine on a manned vehicle. But consequently, we would have been forced to have a bigger vehicle if we had gone to the direct flight route. There's nothing technically infeasible about doing that. All right. Let's talk about direct versus the other methods of flight. What did Bun Braun think of all this, right? That's what I was talking about. You are versus LOR. Okay.

And, you know, I want... What's there a lot of battles about this? I want to turn it in. Ready to go? Oh, sorry, thanks for the second sticks. Okay. How big was the debate between lunar orbit and Earth orbit and direct descent? That debate was not primarily conducted by Bun Braun. It was conducted among the people, the people in the headquarters, referred to Marshall as the Chicago Bridge and Ironworks for the additional mass that they carried in some of their vehicles. However, there's one thing that has to be acknowledged. They worked. Good. Terrific. That's good. What do you have for this one? Okay. We didn't really get into UR. What are the advantages of UR? Yeah, okay. Let's do that with the initials. What did Bun Braun? Why did Bun Braun not direct descent? Was he afraid of it? Well, that was on Bun Braun's end of the responsibility.

That belonged to the Johnson Space Flight Center. What happened to EOR? I mean, there's a difference between LOR and EOR. One is an astronaut. Earth orbit rendezvous. Yeah, Earth orbit rendezvous. Well, we actually had an Earth orbit rendezvous in... Polonite. No. No, no, no. We detached the lunar landing vehicle from the rest of the vehicle with the Apollo command module still attached and reunited them in Earth orbit. That was an Earth orbit rendezvous. Of course, those vehicles never got more than 40 feet apart. Right. Well, I guess the question is, why did you decide Earth orbit Earth lunar orbit over Earth orbit? Can you address that? Yes, because Earth orbit does not accomplish what you're referring to. The lunar orbit idea was this. You put the whole system into a lunar orbit rotating around the moon at an altitude of roughly 50,000 feet. You detached the lunar landing vehicle two stages,

one for descent, one for ascent. Decented to the Earth, to the lunar orbit. You did not take the command module. Or did it? Oh, I'm sorry, I was alone. Yeah, right. Right. Okay. You want that to go over again? Yeah, I described that. That's okay. That's okay. I didn't know that you didn't know I was rolling. You were rolling. I knew you were. Okay, sorry. But describe that with your hands, just the way you did it. All right. Where are we? Lunar orbit. Lunar orbit. We're starting over on that one. Yeah. If you want to roll in, there we go. Okay. Yeah. Just describe that. Question. Yeah. Just describe lunar orbit. How does that work? Earth orbit rendezvous we had in a sense that we re-united the lunar landing vehicle with the command module in Earth orbit with the command module in Earth orbit.