NOVA; To the Moon; Interview with Steve Bales, former NASA engineer and flight controller, part 1 of 3

Excellent. Steve, how did you get interested in space? I was interested in space because of a film I saw. It was a Walt Disney films made in 1956. And they talked about how to fly to the moon. It turned out to be exactly the way we did it, but it was close enough and it was exciting. And from that moment on I started to study and decided that I wanted to be an aerospace engineer and that's what I did. Now how did you get to Houston? Tell me about that. Where did you come from? How old were you? Yeah. I went to school at Iowa State, engineering degree and just thought that I would go work for a big major aircraft manufacturer in company. But I was really lucky and Houston hired me to be a summer intern. Went down there and they were just building mission control and I met people like Glenn Loney, I saw Gene Kranz, heard about Chris Kraft, and said, I am not going to go any place else but Houston. This is where the action is really going to be for the next 10 years. And what were they working on at the time? What was it? Gemini? Tell me about that. When I was first there they were just getting started. They hadn't flown Gemini. There'd been a long dry spell for them which was two years between the Mercury program and the Gemini program.

They were just building mission control but it wasn't ready and they were going to fly out of the old Mercury control center for the first two Gemini flights. And no one had been in space for three years and this was going to be a two-man flight. The Russians had made some great successes and America was worried and the atmosphere was we're going to do something but we're somewhat behind. It was really challenging atmosphere. Now how old were you and what did all this mean to you? I was 21 years old when I first set foot in Houston and I thought maybe if I'm really lucky I'll get a chance to work somewhere in one of the back rooms and mission control center when they fly the next ten years. I'll be allowed to work at a monitor some instrument or make some calculation or do something. Never in a world dreamed that they would need people to be working in mission control and to quickly learn what the business of flying to the moon was all about. The thing I didn't realize is nobody knew what the business of flying to the moon was all about.

So they needed people that were willing to take on anything or try anything and work in a control center. Describe the environment. Were there a room full of people like you? How young were the people? How invasion? Yeah, it's interesting. When people would come to visit mission control they would walk in and we'd be doing a simulation or training exercise. And the first thing they would say is where are the grownups? Or were the old people? Because we were all 24, 25, 26. We thought the flight directors such as Gene Krants or Glenn Lenny were somewhat older. They were in 30. They were really old old people. And astronauts, my guys, they were 40 years old. There was a great range of difference between the people monitoring and mission control and the people flying in a spaceship at the top. How did you think about those guys like the astronauts and those stuff? How did you get along with them? Did you ever have any interaction with them?

We had interaction on things such as mission rules which is here's the way we're going to conduct the mission and if certain things fail this is what we're going to do. And usually it was information exchange but sometimes it would be different. It would be conflict because you had the astronauts who were willing to, I think, press farther than maybe you would be on the ground because you were perhaps more conservative. It wasn't your life. You weren't there in that spaceship and you were more concerned about being absolutely safe and they were more concerned certainly about being safe but also perhaps stretching the envelope a bit farther than you were. So we would get discussions about that but it was at that time more of a relationship of professional, not of friends. I was never a really close friend to any of these people at that time. They were a bit older, they'd done a lot more things, they had a lot more publicity, notoriety, and also at the time they did a lot of the training out of Florida. Now of course it's all done

in Houston but at the time much of the training was done in Florida so we were separated geographically quite a bit too. Now how sophisticated? Talk to me about the workload there. I've talked to Kranz. I've talked to Kranz, talked to Lenny. I know about the broken marriages and all of that stuff. Give it back to me from your perspective. How much of a workload did you have? How talk was it on you guys? Well I think we were lucky and many many of us were single. My good friends at least that worked in the trench. We were in the flight dynamics and they worked in the first row and that was called the trench. Most of us, although not all, many of us were single and that helped tremendously. I would have not have liked to have been married. I was working 60, 70, 80 hours a week and loving it. I got to work 120 hours a week, loved it, except I had to go home and sleep sometimes. I would have worked for free for NASA. All they would have had to done is pay me room and board. Not even that. Just give me something to eat in a place to say in a dormitory there and I would have worked for NASA for 10 years. And I think most of the other people I was working with would have done the same thing. All the single people all we did was we would go to work. We would

quit work at 6, 7, 8 at night. We would go out to the local restaurant or the local pub and we would sit and then we would talk about mission, mission, mission, mission. That's all we would talk about. Talk and mission all the time. There wasn't anything else that was interesting to us. That's terrific Steve. How described Nixon's reaction when it came to JST for the first time? He was the guy that said we're all the old people. When the President, Nixon came in 1968. He walked into the control center and he said we're all the elderly people. They're just young people here. I can't believe it. In every room he would go in be the same thing. The young people, there's nothing but young people. He absolutely, I think, was taken aback by the fact that this was a young person's control center, a young person's game and that these must have looked like to him kids were going to decide how the mission was run and where it was going to go. I think

it really surprised him. I think later when the mission was a success, he remembered that. In fact, I know he remembered that because he even commented on a couple of times. Most of the people in this control center, you're impressed by their youth. It's terrific. Gemini, what did it mean to you engineering wise, as a prelude to a poem? Could we have gone to the moon with that Gemini? I think you would get arguments on both sides whether we could have gone to the moon or not without Gemini. I think clearly the big reason for Gemini was the rendezvous mission and the long duration. We might have done the long duration some other way, but the rendezvous and understanding how to do that and especially the last 200 or maybe 100 miles on in was something that we had a little bit of difficulty with at the first and some of the practice missions. But after we hit our stride, it was done perfectly every time and gave a lot of confidence because that was a big, doing a rendezvous was a huge argument early in the program. Should we do rendezvous around the earth orbit? Should we do rendezvous around lunar orbit?

Could we do rendezvous around lunar orbit? And could we do it primarily from the onboard instruments, not from without much ground assistance? How much information? Tell me about the sophistication of the computers you were dealing with during the Gemini program? The Gemini program hardly had a thing called a computer. In fact, by today's standards, you even hardly had a computer on the Apollo program, although it did let a lot of interesting things. The Gemini computer maybe had a handful of readouts. We had 50 parameters maybe from telemetry. It would do when the ground told it where it was and told it where to start and told it a lot of information, then it could perform the last 20 miles of rendezvous in docking, for example, or it could perform the reentry maneuver. But it was a very limited machine. I mean, Kate, can you compare it to anything? I'd like to compare the Apollo machine. It's that much easier. The Apollo machine, the Apollo

computer, ran at about 800 instructions per second. Of course, everybody knows what their home computer runs 200 million instructions per second and you can buy one for a thousand dollars. But then, the Apollo computer, which ran at about 800 instructions per second, did a number of miraculous things. It flew the descent all the way from 50,000 feet down to 4,000 feet, the four manual takeover. It took in radar data. It helped communicate. It helped control attitude of the vehicle. And did this all with 64,000 words of memory at this slow memory cycle of 830 words cycles instructions per second. And the only way it was able to do that was every instruction was hand coded by people at MIT and worked in and worked on and worked on. Now, they could fit all those guidance equations and all that control logic and all those instructions into that 64,000 words. What was even more remarkable, I think, is we had a backup computer

that, while it couldn't do the landing, could do an abort or an asset, and it was had 8,000 words of instruction. Then, separately by TRW, the same thing. Every line was hand coded, every instruction was thought about, done, tested, thought about again, put together in an 8,000 word program that does things that today people would take a million words or more to do. I need to get just the end of that. Excellent, just excellent. Good description to the early day.