McDonnel Aircraft [before Douglas bought it]
After getting my BS in Aerospace Engineering, I went to work in the Propulsion Department and was assigned to NASA’s Project Gemini for which McDonnel had the contract for. This was a two-person space vehicle. I did a lot of “busy work” proofreading and correcting test reports for propulsion system components.
NASA did the first rendezvous in space with Gemini 6 and 7.
I was assigned to the Gemini B propulsion system. Gemini B was the crew vehicle for the Air Force’s Manned Orbital Lab (MOL). Tom Schweikert had written a FORTRAN program that simulated the first 12 inches of the abort maneuver. This was to be accomplished by firing a flexible linear shaped charge that would cut the skin of the adapter and separate the Gemini from the launch vehicle followed simultaneously by firing the six retro-rockets and explosively activated guillotines to cut wire bundles. The thrust from the “popgun” was the effect of firing the rockets into a closed space inside the 10-ft diameter adapter. That program was written for the Gemini spacecraft and not the Gemini B. Besides Tom, I was the only one in the department who knew anything about computers, so Tom passed off the program to me and moved on to other projects. At the beginning none of us thought this was a significant part of the project. I would never have gotten this assignment with so much responsibility had I not had a class in FORTRAN programming in college.
As time went on, the popgun effect became a cause for concern. After all, men’s lives were at stake in the event of a launch failure. The popgun effect established the initial conditions for a trajectory analysis being done by the Aerodynamics Department. The presence of a crew transfer tunnel would cause an asymmetry in the forces produced by the build up of pressure inside the adapter. The information I sent to the Aerodynamics people was predicting that the space capsule might do loop-de-loops rather than going high enough for a good decent by parachute. There was a question about whether the crew transfer tunnel would collapse and the asymmetry of the center of pressure in the adapter would shift.
The program was full of empirical factors and a whole lot of really wild assumptions. I started asking for tests to be run to validate the computer model. I eventually proposed four tests to evaluate the model under varying conditions. As time went on, we had more meetings and the management at higher and higher levels got involved. The Air Force’s
Manned Orbital Lab (MOL) program began to have problems getting funding and all four of the validation tests I had designed and planned were cancelled one by one. Henry Overall was my boss then and the best boss I ever had. Every time we went into a management meeting we had one to “get our ducks in a row” on what I would present. Henry always let me do the presentation but he was always there to back me up.
My question to Henry became “How can management be so stupid as to cancel such important tests?” His response was profound. “You can bet management knows something we don’t know.” I consider this one of the most profound truths I learned.
The MOL project ran on for a few months but was eventually cancelled due to lack of funding and the Air Force’s belief that a manned space station was not needed. I think there was a battle for funding and NASA beat out the Air Force for the money. I had a really hard time continuing with the popgun simulations with no test data to refine the model and I found another job with the Flight Systems Division of Emerson Electric in St. Louis.
Emerson Electric
At Emerson, I worked on solid propellant rockets and a little later helicopter armament systems.
I did not get along well with my boss when I was working on the rockets at Emerson. I did, however work on a concept of the Recoilless Rifle Rocket Launcher for the company’s Aerodynamcaly-Neutral Spin Stabilized Rocker (ANSSR). This project was a simulation or math model of the interior ballistics and kinematics of this system and was to become the study used for the Thesis for my Masters Degree.
The main product of the department where I worked was gun turrets mostly installed on the Huey COBRA helicopter gunships used extensively in the Viet Nam War. My job at Emerson was to do mechanical analysis in support of designers who were not engineers. I did analysis of the workings of ammunition handling systems and wrote tests to be done on Emerson’s underground firing range. It was also my job to look at the test results and to interpret what the results meant.
After the end of the Viet Nam war, there was a huge cutback in defense spending that hit Emerson really hard. I was able to keep my job just long enough to finish my Masters Degree and to qualify for tuition reimbursement. Getting my Masters Degree in Mechanical Engineering was just enough for me to get a job at Halliburton in their Railway Equipment Division.