NOVA; To the Moon; Interview with George Mueller, engineer and associate administrator at NASA, part 1 of 3

Dr. Miller, take one. So how did it look to you when you first took the job? It looked like a challenge. And in fact, it was because first of all, there were three programs going on almost simultaneously or in parallel. And it was clear that no one of them would be able to carry it through much less, have all three of them. And so it was a management challenge in the first instance to sort out what needed to be done and what didn't need to be done. And then there was also the question of how much it was going to cost, and that was almost an unanswerable question at the moment because no one had really finished the design. So the first thing we did was to make sure that we had the right mission profile and understand what the performance requirements were for carrying that out and then tried to guess whether or not we could build a vehicle that would meet those requirements.

And that was the process it was going on at that time. What were you told about your prospects of making it by the end of the decade when you first took the job? What we did a small independent study to try to find out what the likelihood was that we could succeed. Conclusion of that study was that it was highly unlikely that we would in fact be able to carry out the program in the decade unless we did something dramatically different. And that was the genesis of making the decision to go to all of testing because it was clear that if we were going to get to the moon in the decade, we had to do something different than was normal at that time in the way of running programs. So when you took over a man's spaceflight and I got this out of a book that I was reading, when you took over a man's spaceflight, what was the public's attitude about going to the moon? You know it was interesting, they were enthusiastic about the idea, but the Congress was beginning

to wonder whether we were going to be able to do it. And therefore their view was they didn't want to be backing a losing program, the same thing they have today. That led us to make some real effort to convince the Congress, first of all, that in fact we could do it. The media at that time, they believed that you could do it. But the President's scientific advisory committee had great doubts. And so we had the problem of the scientific community saying, look, this is not going to work. And at the same time, the Congress was saying, how much is it really going to cost and can you do it? And the media was saying, well, are you endangering people's lives in doing this? So you had all sorts of side things to worry about. That's less trying to decide what the program ought to be.

And so we were really fighting a battle on about three different fronts. One was the first one was a set of a management system that could in fact manage the program because the three centers were rather independent hierarchies at that time. And so we had a set of different management system, which led to the development of a program office structure throughout the program. And then the second thing we had to do was decide how we're going to build it or what we were going to build. And so we made several decisions in trunking. I mean, with all the other pressures, the Congress, the public. How important was Gemini? That is a good question because it's played a very real role in keeping public interest in the program up.

And each one of the flights was a different and more challenging flight than the last one. But could we have gone to the moon without Gemini? Yes. And at one time we thought we would take that course because Gemini was absorbing time and energy from a relatively small part of our organization, but nevertheless a significant part. But we did develop a program that would provide some of the basic technological requirements to making the lunar program possible. That was particularly true once we got to the question of using lunar rubber rendezvous. And we needed to be sure we could, in fact, run the group that we could transfer people between vehicles. And that we could also do work in space. And those were the two major things, Gemini, permitted us to test prior to the Apollo program.

How do you think we could have actually gotten to the moon without Gemini, though? I always thought Gemini was essential, an essential step. It, not really, because we could have done the same thing. But we would then have had to use a number of Apollo flights to accomplish the same set of requirements. And we did, of course, do several developmental flights in the Apollo program. Apollo 9 and 10 were such precursors to the actual carrying out of the lunar landing. Good. Now, Gemini helped us to solve some of the medical unknowns. What kind of medical unknowns were in front of us? I mean, Gordon Cooper had been up there for 36 hours, but what did we know about going into space for long duration and so forth, were we concerned about that? We were concerned about it, but the biological community was even more concerned. And in fact, at one time, they had a picket. They were threatening to file an injunction to keep us from flying Gemini for any length of time.

But because they were afraid that we would be killing the astronauts because of the microgravity or the zero gravity environment, and so that was an interesting experience. But really, a couple of the challenges in Gemini were actually figuring out how people could work in space and how we could carry out rendezvous in space. And the case of the working in space, we had three or four EVAs before we finally were able to do something that we had pre-programmed to do before the flight. And that was when Buzz Aldrin actually went out and played with the ticker toy set that we had for him to see what. Miller, roll 73, take one. Well, what of the major things that the Gemini program provided us with was some understanding of how one could live and work in space. And you know, starting from Mercury, we had very little real experience in that.

And it turned out that the biological community was divided on whether or not it was safe for people to stay up in space for any like the time. They felt that the organs of the body would not work properly and you'd be confused and you might not even be able to de-arm it. And so there was a group of scientists, of biomedical people who piled an injunction to keep us from flying on the first Gemini flight. And that was an interesting experience for everybody concerned. Our own doctors felt it would be perfectly safe and in fact it was. The other thing we learned was that it's very difficult to work in a spacesuit space, whereas one could do it rather easily on the ground because you had something to work against. In space you're working, you don't have gravity or the earth to cold you in place.

And so therefore you really have a completely different environment to work in. And it took us until the fourth EVA to really have learned enough so that we could actually do something that we pre-planned to do on when we were out in space. Buzz Aldrin was a pioneer in that and in fact he was the first person who really started the neutral buoyancy testing which were the training ground which made it possible later on to carry out the work on the moon itself. Now we discussed early on when you first took the job but as Gemini moved along, was there anything about the Russians that was concerning you then? Is there anything they were doing that you were looking at and saying that's a little scary. They're getting good at this. Well they were always good at it and we did in fact spend some time thinking about the Russians and what their program might be. We didn't have all that much visibility into their program though and we did not, when

I started the program, know that they were also going to brace to the moon and it wasn't until about the 10th Gemini flight that we had good evidence that they were actually building up to do it. What evidence did you have by Gemini 10? This was the reconnaissance photographs who were getting out of the satellites. What did they tell you they were doing? What were they up to? They were building a big launch vehicle and that was of course a key to going to the moon when we were building a big launch vehicle. In fact when I started we had two big launch vehicles being built and it turned out that what they came up was about the same size as our vehicle. The N-1 was not that different except it was quite a different construction. Good. I want to take you back to January 27, 1967, the fire. Where were you when you heard about the fire?

We had a major meeting of our contractors and our management in Boston to discuss what would come after Apollo and then we were about halfway through dinner when we got a call from the Cape saying we had a problem and we really did have a problem and Jim Webb made the instant decision to set up a review committee under Tommy Thompson Donald Langley and so that was set up almost simultaneously with our knowing of the fire and Sam Phillips then went down to see what was going on and so did Joe Shetty. Our first information was that we had a problem. That wasn't until later we learned the extent of the problem. With things just going along too well Dr. Miller up to that point with Gemini successes

we were looking at the first Apollo, was there a sense of maybe this is all just too easy? I don't think anybody's letter was too easy but the case of the fire was one of simply doing what we'd done before without having realized the full problems associated with pressure-rised oxygen at earth pressures. Turns out when you're in space you're at a much lower pressure, the partial pressure of oxygen in space is essentially the same as his here on earth which is about 20% oxygen and in space we had in this case we had 100% oxygen and anything that will burn will burn in 100% oxygen at atmospheric pressure. We had done mercury and Gemini testing all the same way. Was it just happenstance that we didn't happen to have an accident?

Yes, looking back that's true. In fact it was just an unlucky chance that that happened, it did however assure us that we wouldn't have that problem anymore because we then redesigned actually all of the wiring in the vehicle and did a whole lot of other things with a limited Velcro for example which turns out to be highly flammable. It was an interesting and very soul-searching time however to for the whole organization to recover from that kind of an incident. Do you think that the review process and so forth actually made us get to the moon on time? I don't know that it helped us make get to the moon on time but we sure helped in making sure that what we were building would be able to do the lunar lights and in fact it proved

to be and that sets very useful. Now the crew of Apollo one led by Grissom were they concerned about the block one vehicle had they expressed concern about that? Not particularly, in fact I don't know of any real concern on their port. They had been working with it in in it for a long period of time. This was the final test before they got ready to fly. In retrospect we would not have done that test and we never did again. Now let's go to the Saturn all-up test. How crucial was that? That was your baby. That was your idea. How bold the move was to test everything at once as opposed to one stage at a time. Tell me about that and then I want to ask you how people like Bonn Braun felt about it initially.

Well I think that you know we went when we first started to see how we could get to the moon in a decade it became apparent that one had to do something different than we had done before and the only way that we could convince ourselves that we could get to the moon was to change the way our test program was run. When I came to NASA we were running, we were testing or at least the proposal was to test the first stage alone, the second stage alone and then put them together in viral. As it turns out you don't learn a great deal from testing a single stage because it's a different configuration and you have to do a lot of different software for it. You were much better off in my view at least to say look we're building a number of these vehicles let's test them all all up and if the first stage fails well we've only lost the second and third stages in a capsule but we've at least gone forward and if the first stage works then we can prove that and we can go on and try the second stage.

If the second stage works why then we've done that when we showed we were doing it right and of course in the event everything worked properly the first on the first flight wasn't until the second flight we had a problem. What was the reaction when you proposed that I mean it sounds so logical but you know it was not business as usual so what was the reaction you got when you said let's do the all-up test? Well there were about three meetings with the groups both in Marshall and David at Houston and their reaction was that you must be out of your mind you wouldn't do that with you and that literally was what they said. Everhart Reese was particularly vehement about that and I can understand that this was so different that they're normal of course of doing things that would have been a challenge. Actually Kurt Debus thought it was a good idea because he'd been through this test program before.

What about Von Braun what did he think? Werner was listening to his troops and trying to decide what would be the best thing to do. Finally after we looked through the schedule several times and tried to see how you could do it his way and still get to the moon he came around and decided that they were going to support it. And Bob Gilruth eventually also decided to support it. Tell me describe that first Saturn V launch for me physically. Where were you watching from what was it like to watch that thing I mean it must have been dramatic as hell. Oh yes it was in fact and there's a you can see the triumph in some of our faith faces when it actually went off properly. I was of course in the blockhouse in the control center and everything was going according to the countdown.

You know in order to understand that you have to go back to Gemini because there used to be a whole series of...