NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project
Edited Oral History Transcript

Burton G. Cour-Palais
Interviewed by Jennifer Ross-Nazzal
Canyon Lake, Texas – 1 March 2004

Ross-Nazzal: Today is March 1st, 2004. This oral history with Burton Cour-Palais is being conducted for the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project, in Canyon Lake, Texas. Jennifer Ross-Nazzal is the interviewer, and she is assisted by Sandra Johnson and Rebecca Wright.

Thank you so much for inviting us to your home today. We really appreciate it.

Cour-Palais: You’re welcome.

Ross-Nazzal: We’re looking forward to talking with you. I’d like to begin the session today by talking with you about your experiences with Avro [A. V. Roe Aircraft, Ltd.]. Can you talk to us a little bit about your work there?

Cour-Palais: Yes. I originally worked in England for ten years on an aircraft project. I’m an aircraft design engineer, aeronautical engineer. When the chance came to go to Canada in 1957, we emigrated there, ostensibly to work on the new plane called the Avro Arrow, which there’s a picture over there [gestures]. This plane was the most advanced fighter that either the U.S. or Britain had developed at that time, and it required some people that they did not have in Canada, so they went around the world, and particularly to England, to recruit people, and I was one of them.

We arrived there in May or so of 1957, and I went to work on a portion of that plane. That’s the way it was done in the aeronautical field, where you only get a part of a wing or a part of a fuselage to design. So I worked on that. The Avro Arrow was a Mach 3 fighter at that time, extremely, shall we say, advanced, and it was part of my job then to bring my expertise from what I had in England to this thing.

After a while, the Canadian government changed. They had an election, and the new party that came in decided they did not want this plane anymore, so they canceled the whole project and went so far as destroying all the planes, so I don’t think they have any left.

So one day we were all working there in our office, and we were told to go home, and that’s it. So we were all fired. We’d been in Canada for two and a half years at that time. My Section Chief at that time, Mr. Bob [Robert E.] Vale, he was apparently taken with me, for some reason, and we had a small splinter group formed from the people who had been fired, and I was taken on for a little while, doing odd jobs, gave us time to breathe. Rowland, my son, was in school at that time over there.

Then we found out that people were start[ing] to come looking to hire this rather large pool of very expert people. They ranged from the very senior designers of that plane. They’d been in contact with NASA, particularly, and so NASA came a-calling. They were just starting up the Space Task Group in 1960 or thereabouts. I was fortunate enough that Mr. Vale, my Section Chief, was one of those who was instantly selected by NASA as one of those that they wanted on the project. He really was a brilliant man. He was a Canadian.

Along came my old company, the company that I’d left in England. They, too, came to try and get some of their people back. So my wife and I were left with this question. Actually, I hadn’t been offered a job by NASA at the time. But anyway, through Mr. Vale and some of the other Canadians that had gone down to NASA, I was offered a job to join NASA. In every case, because we were British citizens, those who were British citizens and the Canadians were asked to become American citizens as soon as they could, which was a five-year process. I agreed to that.

So once I had an offer of a job from NASA and an option of also getting my old job back in England, from the company that I’d left, well, I had this dilemma, wondering which would be best, and I suddenly decided that I had taken the bold step of leaving that company to go in search of something new; I’d better carry on, follow my nose and do the next most exciting thing, which was space.

So in January of 1960, I joined Space Task Group. I went down there on my own and left my wife and son behind in Canada for a little while till we found someplace to live. I immediately got involved with the Space Task Group. At that time, Mr. Vale, Robert Vale, had already started up a portion of the Mercury Engineering Group over there, and I was assigned to his group and worked on Mercury. I think the question is asked over here, was my former line of work relevant. It was highly relevant because both of them are what we call aircraft structural type of design systems, and the portion that they gave me specifically to work on was the part that joins the escape tower to the capsule. There was a clamp? that required to be really strong enough for [lift]off, but then if they had to use the escape tower, it should be strong enough to lift the Mercury off the space vehicle, and also it had to be discarded at the appropriate time. So I worked on that [in Mr. Vale’s group that included many] Americans. By that time we had quite a big group there in Space Task Group at Langley [Research Center, Hampton, Virginia].

Then along about the time when they decided that they wanted to do Apollo, I got involved with that. The same group was then put on the design team for Apollo. There were two lines of approach to the Apollo capsule; one was the one in which I was most familiar with, which is based on aircraft design, which is what they call frames, skin, and stringer, where you have a frame and you have these long pieces of aluminum that make the shell and put aluminum on the outside. That was one design that was being considered, and I was on that line. Then my colleague was on another design, which was what we called the honeycomb design, which was the one in which you have aluminum honeycomb with two face sheets of aluminum [on] either side. That makes a very rigid structure as well. So both of these were being considered at the same time, so that the designers could check their relative merit, weight, and all that kind of stuff.

While I was busy on that, and because we were going out into space for the first time, they began to worry about space hazards outside the atmosphere. Apart from radiation, which everybody knew about, they knew very little about the meteoroid population. That was definitely going to be an unknown.

One of my other colleagues in that group was given the task of looking into the meteoroid problem, what the magnitude was, and how we could best protect against that, and what would be the probability of us getting through it. He, to my great surprise and, I guess, ultimate joy, didn’t want the job, so he asked me if I would like the job. It’s just serendipitous, I guess, that I said yes, and I started from scratch at that point, knowing nothing about meteoroids, nothing about protection, but going into the whole process of learning about it and following up the leads.

The first thing I had to do was to find out about meteoroids in general, and I found that the center of all of this stuff was in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory had been doing this work for thirty years. What they were doing was taking pictures of meteors? as they enter the Earth’s atmosphere, recording them, and getting all the information they could about what times of the year they appeared and how brilliant they were, but they used the term magnitude, which compared the brilliance of a meteor [with a reference star]. Have you all ever seen a meteor?

Ross-Nazzal: I think maybe once or twice.

Cour-Palais: Well, you can compare that against a known standard star [as] they [did], and they [gave] it what they call a magnitude number. Well, we designers couldn’t do anything with a magnitude number. What we wanted to know was the number of meteoroids and how heavy they were, what was their mass, what was their speed, and what was their mass density; that is, how solid were they. And they had none of that kind of data, so I spent a long time working with those guys up there, pushing them on the envelope to do things that they’d never done before.

Dr. Fred [L.] Whipple, who was a very well known astronomer, a physicist, he had been in this game for a long, long time. They eventually started to assign what we call mass levels to these magnitude numbers, so that they could then allow us to know how heavy these particles were. They already [knew] how fast they went.

So in time, working with them, pouring some money into them to have new ways of measuring. What they’d been using over the thirty years was optical telescope [systems]. They had one [such system] in New Mexico [and another] one in Harvard [Massachusetts], and they’d get pictures of [meteors] on these huge cameras. With the onset of radar, we pushed them into [this] area, where they could pick up the whistle of meteors as they come through the atmosphere, and this allowed them to extend their knowledge beyond what they had before and into a realm, which was of more importance to us for Apollo.

The Apollo mission was going to be three and a half days to the Moon, a couple of days on the surface, three and a half days back, so not really a long time outside the Earth’s atmosphere, so we were always working on the probability of impact, and we needed to know [what the probability was], and we ended up finally with that being the baseline for our work.

You mention this a little later on here, but it all comes in the same context. At the same time NASA was sending up satellites to measure the even smaller ones, so eventually we got a graph, what we called a flux mass [plot], of meteoroids, their number per unit area per unit time, which is what we needed, and their size. So we eventually were able to put together what we call a mass flux curve for the [meteoroids], and we had to be able to describe how dense they were.

Now, most meteors, from just observation, if you’ve ever looked during a meteor storm, they break up very high in the Earth’s atmosphere, which told everybody that they’re very, very fragile. They really are pieces of ice. But occasionally there are some of them which are more dense than that, that can come through and hit the Earth. So across the lake over here is a peninsula [gestures]; you can see it. Before the Apollo, we used to go out there [with] our observation truck, and my group and myself would sit out there all night, recording meteors and looking at the number density and also looking at—we had a camera which would tell us how dense these things were. So, putting this all together, we had eventually put together our knowledge of what we were facing once we left the Earth’s atmosphere.

The next thing to do was to try and find out how we could protect against this stuff, having known what the problem was, we had to then come up with the solution. Here again, I had to start from scratch. The Ames Research Center in [Moffett Field] California was the leader in what was called hypervelocity impact research. They had a gun, specialized gun, that could fire very fast. Now I’ll throw some numbers at you. These [meteoroids] could hit our spacecraft at anything between eleven and twenty kilometers per second. The guns that they developed could only fire up to about eight. So we were never able to fully, even with the very best one we had at that time, able to get the speed of the test device to equal the speed of the object.

So this is where a lot of physics came into the game, and it’s where my expertise came in, too, and the group that I worked with. We had to do our research at the best speed we could, and then extrapolate into the meteoroid business. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The guns that I saw at Ames were very impressive. We at NASA Johnson—at that time Manned Spacecraft Center—did not have such a gun.

One of the questions you asked over here I skipped over—an important social question. In other words, what about coming to Houston, and did anybody come and show us what it was like. I know they had many people come to Langley to tell us about how wonderful this area was and all the rest of it, but we did our own research, my wife and myself and Rowland here. We drove down and found ourselves a little home in La Porte, Texas, in a place called Bay Colony, and we lived there for several years. But that’s something you can add in later, since you did ask the question. Nobody pressured us into doing that, but the Chamber of Commerce did come to tell us how wonderful the place was. But we were coming here inevitably anyway. [Laughs]

Our first office was in the Rich Building on Telephone Road, an old warehouse, and there was no place for a gun over there, but I continued my visits to Ames, and by that time there was another defense contractor, General Motors Defense Research Lab, in Santa Barbara, California, that was also doing the same thing. They sent a representative out to see us, and I got to go and see their gun, which was even more exciting than the one at Ames.

I was in a branch that was studying spacecraft design under [Joseph N.] Kotanchik in the Rich Building, and I persuaded my Section Chief [Leslie St. Leger] and my Branch Chief [Bob Vale] that we needed such a device if we were going to keep up with what the contractors were going to do. I was able to talk General Motors [in]to sell[ing] us a copy of their gun, the exact one, and with the diagnostic equipment, and come and train us how to use it.

Around about that time, we moved to Ellington Air Force Base [in Houston, Texas and], in a remote part of the field in one of the old barracks buildings we set up this gun, and I hired one lead engineer [Tom Lee] who I had done some work with at the Utah Research and Development Corporation. [Tom] took over the gun and trained some of the local contractors, under the supervision of the General Motors people, to learn to operate this thing. So we had an operating gun while we were still at Ellington, sometime between 196[2] or ’6[3] and whenever the new space Center was built. So we had that gun there for many years and did a lot of our early research work there.

Amongst the things at the time we were researching was basically with the knowledge we now had of the meteoroid, is to try and duplicate what we thought the meteoroid would look like, little glass beads, and fire them as fast as we could, which was about 7 kilometers a second, and just start building up the basic research that we, NASA at Johnson, did not have, but relying very much on the stuff that they had from the West Coast.

So that was my main goal at that time, having worked and got the environmental side of it done. Not only me, but the other NASA Centers. We had a chart which we could use for the meteoroids [that] could calculate the probability of impact during the seven-day, ten-day journey, and decided what size was going to be the most lethal, and then decided to try and protect against it.

A question you also asked about Mercury, what did Mercury do for us. I was there for the first launch of Mercury because I was at Langley, and followed the whole program through, and I think the very last Mercury we started to examine in the Mercury [Program], in our ignorance for pits when we recovered them, for impact pits. The design of the Mercury outside shielding was corrugated and was very difficult to find anything, but we found something from our impact research and also from looking at glass windows [that they] made the perfect detector. You could see an impact on a window because if you’ve seen somebody who’s kicked up a stone chip against your car, you can see a tiny little thing would make it big. Well, this happens the same way with meteoroids at high speed.

So we were able to then decide from now on we’d only scan the windows. The first one we ever found an impact on was Mercury-[Atlas] 7. I don’t know if it was [M. Scott] Carpenter or who it was, but anyway, that provided a lot of excitement to us, because it was totally unpredictable, it was outside the realm of probability for that short mission, and yet when it was scanned electronically, it showed very interesting iron deposit. So it’s one of those sneaky ones that was not a cometary particle; it had come maybe from the Mars zone, a stony or metallic type of meteoroid. Outside the realm of probability, it hit that window. But that became a showstopper for many years to come. It would be trotted out and shown to many people. But we used that.

Later on when we put that on our curves and looked at it, it was an anomalous event; it wasn’t what we would really expect. But it led us to do the same for Gemini, so whenever Gemini started flying, that was the rule of the day. We always examined the windows, and as the missions got longer and longer, it became more possible, and we did detect meteoroid impacts on Gemini windows, which later on became part of our flux curve, and yielded some important research for some other people.

The first Gemini in which they opened the hatches and the crew sat out there in the open, we felt sure we’d see some impacts on their suits, and later on when they did do EVA, that’s the other thing we started doing, was to examine their suits for traces of little black dots and things like that. I should say we didn’t see anything that was very conclusive on that, because the actual time they were out, and all the shielding from the spacecraft itself, the windows and things, the hatch and doors, prevented real impacts. But we were very cognizant of the fact that we had so many different tools to try and find out what we were against.

The particles we were talking about were very, very small, especially for spacesuits, but enough to puncture a spacesuit, to get into the outer layers. The outer layers of a spacesuit are designed to protect them against heat and radiation, and then as the meteoroid people, we used that thickness to allow us to see what it would do, but nobody wanted them to puncture the pressurized rubber bladder suit that they wore inside. So that was our very earliest research on that.

The very earliest spacesuits were very thick, and the first one we had to deal with was when I was at Ellington, we didn’t have an appropriate gun, but we did have a 12-gauge shotgun, so we shot at that, just to see how this kind of material would react. Later on, we replaced the shotgun with what we called a low-velocity gun; it could fire small particles, [and] was also at Ellington.

But that spacesuit was so immobile, the astronauts would not be able to bend. Too thick. So this led us into another area which eventually I would have to deal with, would be spacesuit design. Spacesuit design belonged to the spacesuit engineers, but from the meteoroid aspect, what protection could we get from it.

So we were at Ellington, and eventually around about that time the Apollo was getting geared up, and they appointed me the Subsystem Manager for Meteoroid Protection, which is not in your list over here. That actually allowed me to work directly with the Apollo Program Office, and yet be a member of the Engineering Division, the Meteoroid Space Physics Group, the Meteoroid Technology and Optics Branch, it was called.

But I had the option then to work with North American Rockwell [Corporation], who were my counterparts, and through my representative on the Apollo Program office, Dick Collona, and that started, I guess, my real work in hypervelocity impact theory. We did a lot of research work, and I actually found something which was a very important advance in the application of this work, which was that even though we couldn’t fire at 8 kilometers a second with the kind of projectiles we were using, there was a gun at North American which worked on an entirely different principle, [plasma-physics] principle, in which they fired very, very small [projectiles]—the kind of glass beads you see [on] reflectors on the ground, you know, tiny little things.

But people were skeptical about the results from that, because it was hard to really define what was happening, but I found that I could take their results and combine them with the results that we were getting and come up with a definite correlation that would allow us then to use this man’s work, Scully’s work at North American, which allowed us to move our entire projections up to 15 kilometers a second, which really doubled the amount of the verification that our extrapolations could be correct. So that was an important thing that happened during that time.

I continued to do most of my work—the stuff that was being done on the meteoroid work after I’d got what I needed was more as redefining some of the smaller portions of it. You mention Pegasus over here. I knew about Pegasus and followed the results and used their data p