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ORAL HISTORY TRANSCRIPT
ONES W. "JOE" ROACH INTERVIEWED BY CAROL BUTLER HOUSTON, TEXAS ­ 24 JANUARY 2000

J

BU

TLER

: Today is January 24, 2000. This oral history is being conducted with Joe Roach, as

part of the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project, in the offices of the Signal Corporation. Carol Butler is the interviewer and is assisted by Kevin Rusnak and Sandra Harvey. Thank you so much for joining us today.

R

OACH:

Pleasure.

BU

TLER

: To begin with, if maybe you could give us a brief introduction of your early career,

what you did before you came to NASA.

R

OACH:

I graduated in 1955 from Virginia Military Institute, and went to work for Union

Carbide, or a division of Union Carbide, Linde Air Products. I worked there about eight months and then went to flight school. I was called into active duty in the Air Force and went to flight school, went to navigator training, finished navigator training in 1956...and then was there for a year. Then went to Biloxi, Mississippi, where I went to electronic warfare school. I met my wife to be there, and we were marred in November, and in January we went to Alaska, Elmendorf Air Force Base, where I replaced a crew that was killed in an air crash. We stayed there for three years, and then got out of the Air Force and went back to Virginia, which was my home. My dad had passed away at a young age, so I felt like I needed to go back.

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I wasn't really happy being in Virginia, and a year later I got called back into the Air Force due to the Berlin crisis... I heard about that while we were out shopping one day. At that time we had a daughter and a young son. And served almost a year. The base, we were real close. Richmond, Virginia is real close to Langley [Reseach Center], where the Space Task Group was, and I had occasion to go down there frequently to deal with some of the problems we were having with the airplanes. I just stopped in and they said, "Hey, this is great. You're just who we need. Come to work for us." Well, then I couldn't get out of the Air Force until the situation in Europe settled. We were the only wing in the Air Force that flew three hundred planes to France and Germany without a mishap. We had never trained to fly over water; we trained over the U.S. It was pretty exciting. It kind of interrupted my life and family, but we did a good thing, and I think because of that, we stopped encroachment by the Russians. But that was kind of a good deal. As soon as I got out, we came to Houston, which was in 1962. That's when I came. I guess it was the middle of September, 1962, and we've lived here ever since. So that's how I came. I went down, got the job, and then couldn't take it for several months. It was kind of frustrating. Came to work in the Mercury Program, worked for Gene [Eugene F.] Kranz and John [D.] Hodge right from the very beginning. [Christopher C.] Kraft [Jr.] hadn't been here but a short period of time and went to Mercury 8. We had a training site at Corpus Christi [Texas], went down there as a capcom [capsule communicator]. In those days, most of the capcoms were folks like me [rather than astronauts as they were later]. On Mercury [9], I was a primary capcom at Hawaii. That was [L.] Gordon Cooper's flight, where we flew for twenty-four hours. We had one crew and we carried along astronaut [M.] Scott Carpenter and a doctor who was stationed there in Hawaii and a couple of systems guys. I was on the [air to ground] when he called and said he got the 0.05G light. So we asked him if he could see any clouds. He couldn't see any clouds, so we knew that it was a bad light, but he had to fly the thing back. It was exciting time.

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But I was gone, and in those days when you left you never knew when you'd come back. We'd just built a home and moved in it, no carpet on the floor, and the wife had to deal with two little kids and the overflowed toilets, you know. [Laughter] You stayed. I was gone for six weeks, and it was kind of hard for her to understand why we could go and have a great time in Hawaii. But we worked hard. Things paid off, because when we came back, things worked out really well. We started the transition at that time reviewing the specs for the new Mission Control Center. But people don't realize we worked--if you've driven up Gulf Freeway [I-45], right there at Wayside is where we were. We were in the Houston Petroleum Center, but we worked in the old Oshman's warehouse. The E&D [engineering and development] guys, were in...a building on Telephone Road. The Farnsworth Chambers Building, the place was where all the heavyweights were, except for Kraft and [Sigurd A.] Sjoberg and those guys. We had a good time. The thing that was really exciting about Mercury is that we had a lot of, I would call them mavericks. There were no rules. We wrote our own rules, we wrote our own systems book. I should have brought you a copy of the Mercury Systems Handbook, which was like a little address book. You may have seen it. I still have one of those. We worked really hard to get things done. We had a lot of creative people, and since we didn't have any rules, we could be creative and we didn't have a lot of problems. We had a lot of folks that moved from England, because England had a real problem, they moved to Canada and worked for A.V. Roe, [a] big-name airplane company, but their airplane that they had built that was so great, wasn't sold, so they lost that company. And a large number of Canadians came [to the U.S.]. A funny story, we had Morris [V.] Jenkins. I don't know whether you've ever met Morris. Morris always had a headache and we could never figure out why. The problem was, he wore his shoes too tight, because he got the Canadian and the English size, so he always had tight shoes and a headache. Finally he realized that, got rid of the headaches

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overnight. There were a lot of funny things like that that happened. People were really comrades in arms. It was a really good time, a good time to work. You don't have that experience anymore, I don't think. Mercury was exciting, but we went right on into the Gemini Program. We went to the Cape [Canaveral, Florida] for the control center. That time I went down after Gemini I and Gemini II, and took the family, was going to take them another time, but...our son Joe, ended up with chicken pox, so he couldn't go, so the family stayed here. On Gemini II, which was unmanned, we lost the plug and the thing didn't go. In the Mercury days, the flights just didn't work. The Mercury Atlas finally was a big deal between, and they used to call the Atlas, "At Last." [Laughter] The Cape was a different place then, not as built up as it is now, but a lot of good people at the Cape, we came and started here. Gemini III--was it Gemini II or Gemini IV-- we backed up the Control Center at the Cape, and then for Gemini V we worked here. My biggest job during the Gemini Program was to lay out the design for the Mission Control Center. We did all the requirements for the Mission Control Center and worked with Philco, who won the contract. It was Philco Ford, I guess, at that time. We had problems with people leaning over the consoles and touching buttons and switches, and so we wanted a cover on the command switches. We had a good idea, but people didn't know how to do it, so guys would take the plastic home and cook them in the oven, and that's how we made the first ones. There was a lot of creativity by people like that... Gemini IV, we had fuel cells on that--Gemini IV was when we had the first spacewalk. That was an exciting time, because there were ten of us that worked every day our regular shift and then we worked at night preparing for a spacewalk. You can't imagine, we had no computers, we had only the old way--I can't even remember what it was called-- paper had about sixteen copies in it. You'd type a deal, and then if you made a mistake, you

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had to pull them all apart, change them. We had one secretary and about ten of us worked on the ops side, worked with the flight crew every night, Jim [James A.] McDivitt and Ed [Edward H.] White [II], who lived a couple of doors from me and my family. We worked on IV doing that... We had another set of young people building the pack, they took a bail-out bottle and [made the life support] flight-rated that where he could go in and be outside. We worked on that probably four to six weeks, got everything ready, and were prepared to go, and a week before the Russians did a similar thing. But we pressed on and did that and it was exciting in the Control Center. Gemini III, I guess, we backed up what went to the Cape. I was here with John Hodge and Glynn [S.] Lunney to make sure everything was right. We had fuel cells on III, and fuel cells had a problem. We were kind of excited, because our guy caught the problem with the fuel cells. Rod Loe caught that problem. We kind of one-upped them and were really excited about that. But we got through that. IV, we did it here, we had the big spectacular of the space walk. The President [Lyndon B. Johnson] came after that and promoted them, you know, and it was an exciting time. Huge crowd where the duck ponds are. I don't know whether they even have the duck ponds anymore.

BU

TLER

: They sure do.

R

OACH:

But it was an exciting time. He came and was very gracious to the crew. That's

when we started getting the patches for the people who worked in the control center. We knew we couldn't pay them for the long hours that they worked. Spent a lot of nights in the control center, sleeping in the horrible dormitory that we had there and eating the bad food. I remember taking my daughter's Girl Scout troop through the control center. One of the kids' dads worked in the control center, too, and she was so excited and said, "They've got

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the greatest machines." Of course, he thought it'd be the computers. He said, "What kind?" She said, "Well, there's a Coke machine and a candy machine." [Laughter] So you can see where the kids were from. We worked hard on the Gemini. We worked a lot working on the operations for Gemini 76 [Gemini VI and VII rendezvous mission]. There was a big change in the

philosophy. Mercury, you would go and you'd wait and you'd work and you'd wait and you'd work and you'd wait, and it'd finally go. Bill [William C.] Schneider became one of the leaders up in Washington, and he made a decree one time that we're going to launch ever six weeks, and we did. From that first EVA deal we had, we went on and we flew Gemini 76, where we had the first rendezvous. We'd had a problem with one. One flight was up, so we sent the other up pretty quickly, but in a sense, we had two missions and we worked around how to figure that out so we could keep track of both. Had people sleep over and that ran for a couple of weeks. One was quick, the rendezvous was quick. I believe Wally [Walter M.] Schirra [Jr.] did the rendezvous, and Frank Borman was the commander on the other. He and Tom [Thomas P.] Stafford, I think, flew. But we started working real close with the flight crews in the early days, probably from Gemini IV on. I credit Chris [Kraft] and Deke [Donald K.] Slayton for it. We were responsible to make sure that the checklists were all right, but we never saw them. I went and complained to Kraft one day, and said, "You know, we can do it, but we never see them until after the flight starts, and you can't do that." The next day Deke called and said, "Hey, what do you need?" Told him what we needed, and we never had a problem from that time. That's what I'm saying; you didn't have to write a letter or have a briefing. It was more one-on-one and people responded. The other thing that flight ops people did and we were instrumental and we developed some trainers that were cheap. We had a couple of training guys and we got old hardware

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and stuff put together, made some single-systems trainers that went on and worked for Gemini and for the [Skylab] space station. It really helped the people on the ground, and it was pretty exciting. You talked about--I think you asked the question, when did the back-room support start. That started in the Mercury Program. It started with just a small group of people because we only had one spacecraft. That was McDonnell Douglas. McDonnell [Aircraft Corporation] made the Mercury and the Gemini. And a lot of sad faces when Apollo came along, because McDonnell wasn't involved, because everybody thought they were the only ones that could make it, but [North American] Rockwell [Corporation] made the command and service module. Then we had Marshall [Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama], who build the booster. The early boosters were just kind of leftovers, the Mercury--the Redstone, and the one from the Atlas, they were things that were used in the early days for the military. Then, of course, the Saturn I and the Saturn V were developed and tested and done by Marshall. That created another interface. There was a lot of duplication at that time. But we got through Gemini and we did everything in preparation in going to the Moon. We had a lot of clever people that were in the front rooms, a lot of good folks who were in the back rooms. We had some real problems during Gemini, and thinking of one, when Neil Armstrong was flying [with the Agena] and the rocket didn't do very well and so they came down early. We had some other problems, but they were mostly personal, personality problems. Went into Apollo, and we flew Apollo 1--Apollo 501 and 502, and they were fairly close together. 501 went well, 502 went into orbit backwards. We had a problem because the engine people put wires incorrectly and one cut off one engine and the other one cut off, so we went in backwards. So the next flight, of course, was 503, where we wanted to go up around the Moon, a tremendous, bold step. You think of gutsball. I would think Chris Kraft

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probably had the most influence in getting that to happen, but you need to remember that we had done the rendezvous, we had really looked at the orbital mechanics, and that was a new science for us. [Howard W.] Bill Tindall [Jr.] was a real heavyweight in that, and he started these mission techniques meetings, where he was the king and he listened to everybody, then he wrote the minutes and really controlled the procedural process. And then we put them in the change control, and that's the way it was, and then we froze the programs and it worked well. We got that done. I remember going to--it was a weekend, I remember going to the 503 final review for the engines at Marshall. I was the Johnson [Space Center] rep, and I got there, I had to fly to Atlanta and then catch a gooney bird to Huntsville, you know. It was horrible weather. Got there Saturday night, there's like one place in town, so I stayed there. But it was so interesting, [most of] the people were all German. I was the only one practically without the dueling scar, but I thought this must have been the way it was in Germany during World War II, all the blonde ladies and their dueling scar husbands, and there I was eating dinner alone, which was fine. And then went to the review and then came home that day, and we made a "go" to fly 503. Another exciting time where we worked really hard together to make sure that things would turn out right, and everything did. That was after we had had the 502 thing and got that done. The next one, of course, we were ready for the--and that was, of course, after the fire. The fire was a devastating time, but several good things came out of it. Number one, we got rid of the environment. Number two, the hatch was redesigned. The biggest thing that happened was the discipline that had to happen that wasn't there when we had the fire, and we never changed from that time. We used to do a lot of things where people really didn't watch the systems as close as they did. People at the Cape had watched them, but from a different point of view than the ones in flight.

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But we had lots of good people that rededicated themselves to do it by the numbers, and that came from the crew side, from the people at the Cape, and from the people here, both in the engineering and the operations sides. The safety folks really got on the horse, too, and worked really hard. If you've ever been to the beaches in France and you've seen how the Normandy invasion was done, it was the same kind of effort by all the people that worked on Apollo. Apollo was an exciting time. We flew 503, and then a month later we flew Apollo [9], and [9] was when we had the lunar module. We were really concerned because the lunar module didn't have a heat shield, and so what we did then was we built some procedures called lifeboat procedures. We were so proud of them, we took them to Kraft and he said, "You guys are crazy. You're nuts. I don't ever want to see them again." Well, we completed them, kept them, didn't have to use them to rendezvous on, 7 was good, and then we flew--I guess, 503 was really Apollo 8. I can't keep the numbers straight. Apollo 7 was the guys flew around the [world] three days, I guess. Then we had the lunar module flight and then we flew the lunar module with the command and service module. I think that was Apollo [9]. Jim McDivitt flew, was the commander on that one. He and Rusty [Russell L.] Schweickart separated and we had the lifeboat procedure. We flew Apollo 8, which was 503 launch vehicle, which went around the Moon, and then we had 9. I can't remember the numbers. Nine, I guess, was the flight with the two vehicles together, and then 10 we flew around the Moon with Tom Stafford and Gene [Eugene A.] Cernan and came real low [over the lunar surface]. There again it paid off, because when we flew the guys on board, put the wrong switch and then swore they didn't and we knew they did, but we told them what to do, you know. But it's got to be nerve-wracking when you're 250,000 miles away and you think everything's going, and the wrong planet's coming at you, and then you know that everything's going to be okay, and they came back.

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[Apollo] 11 was another big deal. We had some young folks in the control center. We had four situations during the lunar landing when we could have called an abort. We had a young guy who had done a slosh model, and, of course, as you move the lunar module, the fuel uncovered a lot of the sensors, and when you did that, you'd get a bad warning. But we had had a guy who had watched the slosh work, had developed his own little model, and he was the expert and he kept saying, "Keep going. Keep going. Keep going," when we had the alarm problem, and everything worked out. So then we got them back and everybody was a hero. Big parties, all that good stuff, and we were really confident and cocky, Apollo 12's going to be a piece of cake. During the launch phase, we were struck by lightning. At that time a couple of us were in the back with the Spacecraft Analysis Group, and one of the things that we wanted to do was to marshal all of the engineering talent, but do it in a way that it was controlled. So we were the focal point to all the contractors to the mission evaluation room and to Marshall. MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology], we had a guy named Steve Copps who was with us. I don't know whether Steve was there that day or that shift, but the platform was ruined on the spacecraft, so we did the same thing. We had a backup at MIT and we dumped the platform. The whole plan was to bring it back, get it straight and fire at the end of the first revolution. Well, the Marshall people were dragging their feet, dragging. They needed not three nines, but ten nines to make sure, because they didn't know how bad things were. But we had the guys at MIT who did that, and we worked that through and got the data to Kraft, and we pressed on. So then we were really cocky because had had two successes. Of course, Apollo 13, probably the only time in my life that I've ever seen people put away their own motives and work together. In fact, my wife and I were so confident, our daughter was in the hospital to have her tonsils removed. [Laughter] I called and told her that we'd had a really bad problem and I didn't know when I'd be home.

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It happened right at a critical time, we had two choices, we could either press on and go around the Moon, or we could fire the command and service module. We probably had enough to bring them in the Indian Ocean, a long wait. We didn't know what the damage was to the command and service module. Kraft had just gone home and was taking a shower, and he got the call and, of course, he came right in. First question that he asked, "I guess you've got your lifeboat procedures." [Laughter] "Roger." We did.

BU

TLER

: It's great that he remembered that you had them.

R

OACH:

Well, we were just thankful. He was a guy that challenged a lot of people, but he

did it in a kind way, and he allowed people to grow and really be exceptional. The thing at that time, it was really critical because we had run--you know, the lunar module is supposed to live for three days, and we had to make it live for six. There were lots of problems that if you've seen the movie Apollo 13, which was probably as realistic as it could be, but there were a lot of things that went on, like Ken [Thomas K.] Mattingly [II], it showed in the movie, where he went and did a reswitch to make sure that everything was good, made sure nothing happened. But we had got the first thing to press on, that was the first big deal. The next thing was, how do we conserve the power and the water in the lunar module so the guys could live and how we keep them warm. Then we had the CO2 problem, and the guys from the environmental systems came through. There again, I guess we had a couple of hundred problems that we dealt with from the analysis to the different controllers and the different evaluation teams.

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I remember we had gotten to the--we ran a simulation. I got a call from one of the directors. I was in the SPAN room at that time, and that stands for Spacecraft Analysis, you know. It was from Bob [Robert A.] Gardiner, and he said, "You're going to kill the guys." I said, "What are you talking about?" He says, "We've just run a simulation and the docking ring is going to break, and they'll die, and we won't hear from them after we made the maneuver to come home." See, we were ready to fire and as soon as we fired, we were thirty minutes in no communications and then they would either come back or we'd never hear from them again. So I said, "What weights did you use?" He said, "I don't know." I said, "Well, we've just run a simulation with the weights that are on board," and in the background you can hear ten, nine, eight, you know. I'm about to die, but one thing we learned in this space thing was if you don't know what happened, don't do anything. We had done the best we could. They were ready. They were all ready to go, and they did. Well, I sweated bullets for thirty minutes and then the first thing it was, "Apollo 13, this is Houston," and they said, "We're coming home." Well, I was a happy dude, to be very honest with you. Then as we came closer, we went through another series of problems. An exciting time, got them home, and really was a neat experience. Then we started, we flew Big Al [Alan B. Shepard, Jr.] the next time. That was an interesting flight, no problems. Then we had our first experience with the Marshall folks, not only with the rockets, but with the lunar rover. We had had one our guys go to every training session that the flight crew did with the lunar rover. He was a contractor, Harry Smith, Jr.--no middle initial-- from Poplarville, Mississippi. Harry was one of the smartest people I've ever known without a formal education. Poplarville's claim to fame was where they had Inspector Number Eight

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that did the underwear. [Laughter] That's all I can remember of Poplarville. But Harry would say, "You're wrong," like that. They could not get the lunar rover right and they had these big tethers, or tabs, that you had to pull--if you didn't pull--and we were running out of time, running out of time, and the Marshall people kind of gone duck dead in the water. We were working with them. They were now in the Spacecraft Analysis Room, but they couldn't get a response from the Boeing people at Marshall. Harry finally said, "Pull this tab," and the people at Marshall wouldn't come through, and finally he said, "Do it," and they did and the rover popped out and we were back on the time line. Well, the people at Marshall went bananas. [For each mission,] we had given patches and little deals to the guys [as] a little memento. They didn't even want Harry to have one of those. That's kind of the problem. But in the meantime, to give you the different ways--the Director of the Marshall Space Flight Center was there, and he was just kind of watching over things. People were so busy, and we have, of course, the pneumatic tube system and you sent stuff, and somebody said, "Here, take this and send it to station number nine." The old director, good old German guy, took it, stuffed it in the thing, dialed it up, and sent it. And that shows you that nobody was wearing their stripes, except a few people, but that started the differences, I think, between the Marshall people and the Johnson people. But that was not a big deal, it was just kind of a healthy competition. But we got that flight done, and then on [Apollo] 16 we had a real problem again. Ken Mattingly flew the command module and John [W.] Young and Charlie [Charles M.] Duke [Jr.] [were] the lunar module pilot[s]. There again we worked with a problem. We made a maneuver when we separated and the command and service module engine didn't work right. So we were really concerned. Of course, the guys had separated, and we needed to argue it a bunch of times and we needed to bring it back together so they could all come home.

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In that same period of time we went through all the records at Rockwell. We had all the Rockwell engineers, we had all of our systems people from E&D, and we found out that the engine was good, so they separated again and then landed, and that was a really successful flight. Of course, Apollo 17 was. In the meantime, we started working on--in that same period of time, flight operations and flight crew operations were joined together, and Kenny [Kenneth S.] Kleinknecht, who was one of the best, Kenny had been the Mercury project manager and the Gemini project manager, and a really wonderful guy. He became the head of flight

operations and that had both the flight crew and the mission operations folks. Gene Kranz was his deputy and I was underneath Gene. I worked for Gene as his assistant for about sixteen or seventeen years, I guess. As he went up, I don't know whether that was good or bad, I went up. Then Kenny moved over to the Shuttle Program Office, and then George [W. S.] Abbey was brought in to...head [our] that group. One of the really neat guys in the Apollo Program was George [M.] Low, and not George Low, Jr., who's the astronaut, or used to be an astronaut, whatever it is, but George Low was one of the most brilliant managers I've ever known. He had--I can't think of Judy's last name, Judy was his secretary, and he would dictate his letters and never read them. That's how confident he was with his dictation and she was with recording it, and then he would sign them the next morning. George put the discipline in the Apollo Program, and we had some real problems early days getting the discipline in the Apollo Program, because it was a gigantic program. The Cape had to be redone, the Mission Control Center had to be redone. A lot of different things happened. George and Chris must have had a blood oath, but they worked so closely together and they brought things together. We had a really good working relationship with those two guys and they really supported us in what we did. In the Apollo situation, very

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little second-guessing went on with what happened in the Mission Control Center during the flights. At that same time, Gene and I started a thing that we called Marvin Manpower. We started figuring out how we could track how much energy it took from our people to get ready for a flight. Flight mission rules were really important. They grew from just a few pages to a document that big, and that's what we used to train our people with. The operations handbooks that we had, of drawings of all where people took the logic drawings and recreated them, they'd cover the wall, and they were all hand-drawn at that time. Had to be checked, because that was what you saw. I remember taking, when we got ready for the Shuttle, I remember taking John Young and Charlie Duke, and we showed them what we watched. We had problems with the pilots to get and use electronic stuff rather than the meters and the dials. We showed them we had two screens with all the lunar module data, not the trajectory, but all the systems. Even though we played the tape, the descent tape to the Moon, listened to the voice, watched the systems burn, they didn't believe it. Here are the guys who landed on the Moon, they wouldn't believe it. But we were trying to convert them for the Shuttle system to get rid of dials, because they only show one thing. The cathode ray tube can s