Steve Johnson Interviews – Apollo/Saturn Program

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NASA MSFC Oral History Interview

Steve Johnson Interviews – Apollo/Saturn Program

Jack Stokes

Interviewed by Steve Johnson

Huntsville, Alabama – Unknown, Circa 2012

Steve Johnson: I am talking to Jack Stokes, a human factors engineer at Marshall Space 

Flight Center from 1967 to 2005. Jack, talk a little bit about your education and how that 

prepared you for your work.

Jack Stokes: I knew I wanted to be involved in the space program from the sixth grade. 

It evolved into looking to try to get involved with the astronauts and work with the 

astronauts by the time I got to college. I went to North Carolina State University. They 

did not have a human factors degree, so I got a degree in psychology with a minor in 

aeronautical engineering and did some masters. I was short one course when NASA 

[National Aeronautics and Space Administration] called and asked if I would like to 

come to work. I said yes. I took off and came to Huntsville [Alabama], and I never quite 

finished the masters.

Johnson: Were you attracted to the space program, or was coming to Huntsville and 

NASA just getting a job?
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Stokes: I was attracted to the space program because I was heavily interested in aircraft 

and rockets, space travel, as a child. That is really all I had an interest in doing all my 

childhood, being involved in either airplanes or space. I have always worn very thick 

glasses, so I knew I would not be a pilot. I thought I could possibly be involved as an 

engineer. 

Johnson: Talk about the work you did at Marshall starting in the early days. When you 

joined would have been during the Saturn V years. Talk about what you did as a 

human factors engineer.

Stokes: I must say I fell into probably one of the best jobs that a person could ever ask 

for who had an interest as I have. If you will recall the time, the astronauts had moved 

from Langley [Research Center] to Houston [Texas] to Mr. [Lyndon Baines] Johnson’s 

place down there, which became the Johnson Space Center. They were forming up. Dr. 

[Wernher] von Braun was at Marshall. He had an interest in human spaceflight, of 

course, and he had pushed to have a human factors group at Marshall. He had 

established that with Hayden Grubbs. That was in 1965, 1966. That group was in place 

when I got a call asking me to come down and interview. I came from Raleigh, North 

Carolina to the Marshall Space Flight Center. I had one short interview with the man 
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who was in charge of the human factors group at that time, Stanley Johns, and signed 

up right then. It was exactly what I was looking for and I could not believe it.

The good thing about being at Marshall versus down at Houston was Marshall had a 

single group that was interested in human factors. Johnson Space Center had a whole 

center that was interested in human factors and flight ops [Operations]. As a result, 

theirs was very differentiated and compartmentalized. At Marshall, you got to do the 

whole thing. Marshall, at the same time, was developing the desire to do systems 

engineering. You may have heard this term before, systems engineering, systems 

integration. Human factors at Marshall fell underneath that umbrella. It was a discipline 

that was a manned systems discipline. It was an engineering discipline that fell in 

engineering, not in ops. That was significant. I did not really appreciate that until later.

Johnson: During the Saturn years, what were you specifically doing?

Stokes: I came down with the purpose of being a couple of things. One was become one 

of NASA’s test subjects, which was a role of trying to work the human and equipment 

interfaces prior to the crew having to do it. It was too expensive to ask the crew to do a 

lot of conceptual stuff. They were very busy at that time with Apollo and were not 

looking too much further away. They wanted some grunts to be equivalent to the crew 
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as far as physiological parameters. Several of us in that organization were tasked to do 

that. I walked into a world where I got a chance to go on a zero g [Gravity] airplane. I 

had a chance to learn scuba and be involved in that for simulation purposes under 

water. 

The challenges I had at that time were trying to understand a world I did not know 

anything about, which was NASA, learning a whole new technological thinking 

process, and a whole set of language. Once I got a feel for that, things became a little 

easier. The task they gave me was to start writing crew procedures for Skylab, which at 

the time was called Apollo Applications Program. The Apollo Applications Program 

was a von Braun idea to use a continuation of the Saturn vehicle in another way. That 

was his vision of the first space station that the U.S. [United States] would have. By 

taking an existing third stage of a Saturn V rocket and using some equipment that came 

from Gemini, the hatch and some of the other stuff to create an airlock, and then 

creating some additional equipment, he was able to create a space station that could be 

launched in one launch, which is pretty remarkable. 

The interesting thing in the beginning was learning to think in terms of microgravity, 

zero g. In those days from my world, I had not learned to think in terms of zero g. It 

was a learning experience. Everybody thought they knew the answer and all we had to 
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do was go out and do things. Then we found out by flying in the zero g plane and 

working under water in the Neutral Buoyancy Tank that things were not that easy and 

you had to really plan for motions you were doing, what you were doing with a piece 

of equipment, and how you and a piece of equipment were going to interface and who 

would win. Often, if you put a ratchet wrench on a bolt on a piece of equipment in zero 

g and turn the ratchet wrench, you turned and the piece of equipment stayed still. That 

was interesting. Also, you could in fact work backwards. You could lean all the way 

over and work back behind you. That could be part of the work station, which was an 

interesting approach.

Johnson: Did you come up with any new tools or materials? It sounds like you came up 

with more new processes and new ways of thinking about things. Would that be a more 

accurate question?

Stokes: That is true, but we did develop tools, especially in EVA, extravehicular 

activity, going outside into space. With the EVA world, that community had to not only 

deal with the microgravity environment, but also had to deal with the fat suit, a suit 

that was very difficult to work in, a suit that was in fact a balloon, including the gloves, 

which ballooned to some degree and were very thick. Your dexterity and your manual 

interfaces were compromised. On top of that, vision was compromised because of the 
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helmet design in the type of suit that we had in those days. If a suit did not fit well, you 

would end up working very hard and not get much done because of trying to bend the 

arms or bend the legs. We had to learn to design our work sites for the spacecraft with 

what was known as the null body position, which is a semi guerilla-type posture where 

the eyes are pointed slightly down and the back arches and the legs are slightly bent. 

The arms slightly bend somewhat as well. It is an ape-type position. Our work sites had 

to be designed to accommodate that. We found sitting would not work in that world. 

We found on Skylab, for example, when we were working at the Apollo Telescope 

Mount work station, a control display work station, we started out with a chair that sat 

on a piece of grid that sat in front of a panel. The astronaut would come in, strap down 

on this chair, and sit and operate the panel. They used the seat one time and then put it 

away. From then on, they just stood to operate it because it was much more 

comfortable, less cramping. The body cramps. If you bend forward in space, which is 

quite easy for us to do on the ground, and try to stay in that position for very long, your 

stomach muscles cramp. You have to let the body find its natural position for a 

microgravity environment. That is how you design your work station.

Johnson: It strikes me as a human factors engineer, you are pushing the envelope a little 

bit of what you do, that human factors engineers before you were not trying to figure 
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out the best posture to work in space. Did you know you were doing cutting-edge 

work?

Stokes: Yes [Laughs], and that was by design. I was very fortunate to work for a 

gentleman by the name of [James Robert] J.R. Thompson. He had an approach to life 

that was very interesting. He wanted to get the job done and he very much had an 

engineering approach. As a result when ran into these design challenges, we were sent 

off in the zero g plane, sent under water, or built mockups at work to try to figure out 

what the limits of a human were. As a result, we created requirements and constraints 

that we laid on the program. There was a human factors requirement set that I was 

quite involved in. I can talk more about it later. By going on the air plane and trying 

these things out in the microgravity part of the parabola, we learned that a human can 

input a great amount of weight in the structure. The structure has to be designed to 

take, for example, 185 pounds of load striking it. That meant heavier paneling on the 

closeout panels of pieces of equipment or structure within the space craft. You did not 

want to be denting these things, you did not want to hurt the wall, so we had to worry 

about things of that nature. 

We had to worry about lighting. In microgravity, in space, you lose your sense of up 

and down, so you have to create that artificially. We learned that from flying. That was 
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reflected in the space stations where we had lighting above and air flow above coming 

down and the return ducts were at the bottom at the feet level. The panels all looked the 

same, but it would create an artificial up and down appearance. Those types of 

requirements we had to deal with and come up with numbers that were limiting 

numbers. You could not do this. You could work up to a certain point, stop, and then 

your design, if you continued in your design and let the person beyond that, then you 

were now putting the program at risk, at least that piece of it. It was all about safety, 

risk control, and performance. We wanted the human to be very efficient in 

performance because it was so expensive to put a human in space.

Johnson: Am I correct that one of the hard jobs you had was coming up with the right 

questions to ask? What is the best way to stand? What is the best way to hold a tool? 

You guys were basically starting at the bottom on every one of these things.

Stokes: Right. You will not find it in the records, but Marshall Space Flight Center was 

very much involved in the early days of defining those. The questions arose any time 

the astronaut crew was invited to come and look at our one g mockups, which we had 

at Marshall, and play with them. They would ask questions that would lead to other,

more detailed questions. That is why human factors engineering is an type of systems 

integration. It requires all the disciplines to work together. We would tell the 
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mechanical engineer we want this. We would tell the electrical engineer we would like 

the guy to be able to do this with your power. They would come back and say you 

cannot do that, so we would look for a middle ground, compromise designs where the 

crew could still perform but it would not be so costly that the mission would go away. 

Johnson: Would I be correct in saying many of the things astronauts do now when they 

are working on the International Space Station, or in any future work, will be an 

outgrowth of the work you initially did at Marshall?

Stokes: Yes. That is a good question because Marshall was the first of the centers to 

have a human factors requirements document. It was MSFC-STD-267A [Marshall 

Standard 267A] and it was in existence when I came to NASA. It was basically a copy of 

some work that the Air Force had done and the Navy had done, and was also a spinoff 

of something the military, the TRI-services was suing. It was MIL-STD-1472 [Military 

Standard 1472]. Marshall had gathered requirements together and put them together in 

a package. That is what we went into Skylab with. The Skylab design was done against 

that document. Coming out of Skylab, after it was over with, one of the products was 

now we had three missions of twenty-eight days, fifty-six days, and eighty-four days of 

experience. 
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Outside and inside, we rewrote those requirements and we put out MSFC-STD-512. I 

was fortunate enough to be heavily involved in that. Then we did a second version of 

that, an update to it, MSFC-STD-512A. These documents defined what the human could 

do, what the restrictions on the human were, what the restrictions on the design was so 

the human could operate something. For example, we defined colors. We defined 

connector layouts such that a person in a gloved hand could make a connection. If it 

was too tight, he could not get his fingers in the break and make a connection. Likewise 

with doors, labels, we had to think about how the labels help you define the up and 

down. We did not want them haphazard. We wanted them to be in a position so when 

you looked at it, you thought the label is such that my feet should be down on the 

ground for me to read it. This must be up. We had to think along those lines.

The loads that we found in trying to twist a handle, for example, in space were different 

from on the ground. We had restrictions on those that were greater than what you 

might find in somebody on the ground. We ended up with a set of requirements that 

Marshall put out on the table as a product from the end of Skylab that was then used 

when we went through the world of looking at large space structures. We actually used 

that as a resource, not as a baseline document, as we went into the Space Station 

Program. MSFC-STD-512 is the base document for what became NASA’s human factors 

requirements document, which was NASA-STD-3000. I was fortunate enough to be 
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involved in that as one of the co-leads. That document has recently been superseded by 

NASA-STD-3001, but that was after I left NASA. 

Johnson: Talk about the pace of work. When you were working on all of this, how fast 

did things have to be accomplished?

Stokes: It is better when you are first starting out and you are doing conceptual work. 

Once the engineering world gets involved and you start making decisions about when 

things have to be delivered, then things get very hectic. It turns out that most basic 

engineers in the space program, the classical people, such as mechanical engineering 

and electrical engineering, dynamics, propulsion, they got there first. Human factors 

came in later and human factors was, many times, not taken very seriously. That was 

the one that if you had to save money, let us trim what the guys can do from this 

Cadillac version you are asking for, Mr. Human Factors Engineer. When the time comes 

and something breaks, we will try to fix it real-time. That was a battle we had. 

To answer your question, it started out easy, a nice pace where we could really think 

things through. We could really sit around and talk about the possibility of doing 

things. As the design became more firm, that luxury went away and we were stuck with 

staying with the design if we could. The risk factors started coming with cost and 
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schedule impacts, so things were always hectic in the very end. That was culminated 

with Skylab at its launch.

Johnson: How about work hours and shifts? Did you work any odd hours or extra-long

shifts?

Stokes: Sure, six and seven days a week throughout that time period. We travelled a lot. 

We were down at Houston a lot, down at the Cape [Canaveral, Florida], out at Martin 

Marietta in Denver [Colorado] and out at Huntington Beach [California] at McDonnell 

Douglas, and even up in St. Louis [Missouri] at Grumman, Washington, D.C. [District 

of Columbia]. Yes, we travelled a great deal. Your travel time was off hours, and the 

tests you were involved in would often last a long time into the evening. That was to be 

expected. It was a very intense time from Critical Design Review on. 

Johnson: How about the work environment? In your group or your area, was it a great 

environment, cannot wait to go to work? Was it tough? How would you describe it?

Stokes: I enjoyed going to work every day. I was fortunate in being placed into a group 

that had good management skills, had a mission, had good relationships with our 

counterparts at various centers, at Houston and out at Ames [Research Center], at 
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Langley. It was a heck of a lot of fun to work with really smart people who also had a 

mission, were working a mission, had a focused mission. There were times when it 

would get intense and personalities would clash, but that would pass. It was a lot of 

fun. It was a great place to be. 

I mentioned J.R. Thompson, and he was a man who was trained in propulsion. He had 

gone away to Auburn [University] for a Ph.D. [Doctor of Philosophy] degree. He came 

back and they did not know what to do with him. They had to do something with him 

because he was at a first level management position, so they made him the human 

factors branch chief, which is about as far away as you could ever ask of a propulsion 

person. That was education for him to work with people who were worried about their 

flight crew and education for us to work with somebody who did not care about the 

flight crew. We came to a melding of understandings and appreciations through the 

years. J.R. was the only guy in the world I knew as a branch chief that could pick up his 

phone and call the head of the Johnson Space Center at his leisure. He was the only 

person I have ever heard of who went from being a branch chief to a program manager 

in one step. 

Johnson: How were you able to control costs? Was that a factor in what you did?
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Stokes: Costs were always there.

Johnson: How were you able to control them?

Stokes: The way we addressed that was risk was a problem. Risk would create costs, 

but risk also could create hazards. In the engineering world, we were the proponents 

for the human piece of the story. We would always start out with a Cadillac approach. 

We needed a particular design to have all these features and backup features that the 

astronauts were going to need to do the job. Then the world of costs would arrive about 

late PDR or CDR, Preliminary Design Review and Critical Design Review. The 

managers would start pushing back and we would start giving away a little bit at a 

time. We had already decided what the minimum was that we could not turn away. We 

would hopefully not reach that point, but if we did , then there was usually a battle 

royal with some other discipline. We always had the ace in the hole because we could 

call the crew in if we needed to. We did not like to do that. We liked to try to do it from 

a systems engineering design approach. The flight crew was always a big club that you 

could use, but it was not one that you wanted to use.

Johnson: My assumption is during your work dead ends happened a lot where you 

thought something might work, and when you did it, that was not quite the right 
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approach. How did you recover from any dead ends you may have gone down in your 

work to figure out what exactly astronauts could do?

Stokes: When we reached a dead end, what we effectively did was establish a limit. 

That limit would then be converted to a requirement. Now we had a constraint that we 

could put into our requirement set. We found out you could not do that, but you can do 

it up to a certain point. We drew the line at that certain point and wrote the 

requirement. Good always came from it, we were always able. If the question had come 

up, for example, as I was a test subject for the Lunar Rover early on, we found the way 

the contract had laid out the controls that the driver of the Lunar Rover needed to see, 

which were these little tachometers for the electric motors, they had placed them in a 

place where, when you put a pressure suit glove on and operated the control, you 

totally covered up the tachs [Tachometers]. We were forever bringing up the little 

electric motors on the wheels. That was a lesson learned. We learned that we had to 

reposition those types of gauges such that the hand could not get in the way. You are 

now working with a much heavier volume when your hand is covered up with a mitt 

that has an outside cover on it for a space suit. That is an example, but a requirement 

with a constraint would come out of that.
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Johnson: Name a surprise, something you thought might work one way and it would

just not work that way?

Stokes: I think the thing that was most interesting to me was the fact that the body 

turns, if you are not restrained by your feet, if you are just holding on with a hand and 

you try to twist a fastener, that you will spin your body versus the fastener. The fastener 

has more hold down torque than you can overcome. The other thing that I found to be 

interesting was how much load a human can put into a structure when they fall against 

it. We found out that in a pressure suit, you had to design to 285 pounds of linear 

impact force at one foot, we ended up with one foot, to protect the equipment behind 

that. 

Something that was interesting in Skylab, we never had a serious injury that we knew 

about, until later, except for the air drying out. We had moisture in the air, but there 

was some drying out because of lack of humidity. Otherwise, the only thing I think we 

ever had on there was [Charles C.] Pete Conrad managed to dislocate a finger when he 

was doing his gyrations up in the upper dome of the Skylab and managed to catch his 

finger between two of the storage compartments. At the time he had been running 

around the ring, he was going to do a forward loop, threw his hands down, and caught 

one of his fingers. [Joseph] Joe Kerwin had to put it back in the socket. As far as I know, 
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injuries did not happen because when you fell into a panel, the energy transfer was in 

reactive force. There was very little transfer of energy across the panel, into the panel, 

even though we had a design for that. The body would immediately go back in reactive 

motion, so the body did not get bruised like we thought it would. That was interesting.

Other surprises. This is a tough question. (Laughs)

Johnson: You have given a good example. I have to believe that these things popped up 

all the time working in an environment that nobody had ever worked in before. 

Stokes: I stop and think about the bathroom. Everybody likes to talk about the

bathroom. That was the first successful toilet we ever had and probably was the most 

successful toilet that has ever been built for space in the Skylab. But, it was possible to 

blow yourself right off the seat, so we did have a seatbelt. That was a learning 

experience that we needed that. There were some interesting stories about that, which I 

probably do not need to go into here. (Both Laugh)

Sleep compartments, we had sleep bags on Skylab, each person had their own private 

sleep compartment. We found out through flying on the KC-135 and also on some 

closed environment tests that the air had to flow down across the body from the top. 
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Otherwise, it would blow up a person’s nose and that would tend to keep them awake. 

Another thing we found on some of the crew when we were doing the bunk design was 

we had certain crew members who, as they were drifting off to sleep, had a feeling in 

space that they were falling. We had found this from Apollo. They would jerk, it is a 

reactive force, involuntary reaction. They would jerk and wake themselves back up. 

Sleep became tough for those people. The Skylab sleep compartment had a lightweight 

netting that was available for those crew members who wanted to use it to put across 

their forehead. It forced their head back against the little pillow that was there. That was 

just enough pressure to make the person be able to sleep. We learned that, but we had 

to do it through testing.

Johnson: You have already alluded to this when you said you worked with other 

centers. Were there differences between Marshall and the other centers? Were there any 

rivalries?

Stokes: Of course there were rivalries. NASA is known for its rivalries (Laughs), 

especially in that world. Think about it, Johnson Space Center, who basically owned the 

astronauts, really did not want anybody else in that game. They really wanted to be the 

ones that oversaw what was going on. In the meantime, Dr. von Braun believed he 

could put together a vehicle that would handle anything the humans needed and he 
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wanted to make sure you could do that. He pulled together a very crack group of 

human factor designers, physiologists, and other specialists in this group that looked at 

that human factors design. The rivalries really were not too bad during Apollo because 

we were doing engines and booster. When we got to Skylab, that began. There was 

some rivalry there, but we all worked together, I feel, quite well. We worked together 

on the Lunar Rover quite well. Some of my very closest and dearest friends, we worked 

together on Skylab.

Coming out of Skylab when we started looking for more work and the Apollo Program 

was going away, each center had its own interest. There was interest after Dr. von 

Braun left Marshall to maintain a human design presence because we felt like we 

needed to understand that piece of it in order to design the vehicles we were planning 

on designing. Of interest when we got to Space Station, back in 1984, it was a Marshall 

person who had the responsibility of design activity that was called skunk works. It was 

held at Johnson Space Center, but a Marshall man was in charge. A bunch of us were 

sent down there and I was one of them. I worked with my counterpart at JSC [Johnson 

Space Center]. We got through that part, through the skunk works design, and came 

out with a design that worked pretty well. It was going to require a lot more scrubbing, 

but it would have worked. 
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Then the politics really took off between the centers. As a result of that, it cost the 

problem a heck of a lot of money with posturing and jockeying. In those days, there was 

not just Marshall and JSC, but it was also Langley, Goddard [Space Center], and Lewis 

[Research Center; now Glenn Research Center], Lewis at the time. Everybody was 

trying to get in on that game. That was the big game. The human factors part of that 

story was really interesting because Marshall had the capability of overseeing and being 

the umbrella for all the crew activities, inside and outside, EVA and IVA [Intravehicular 

Activity]. That gave us a slightly different way of looking at it. If you went to JSC, there 

was no one organization that oversaw all these disciplines that came together that we at 

Marshall would say was equivalent to human factors engineering. 

Down there you had the flight ops world. That is a different world. That is basically 

where the crew lives. The crew is supported by a group of people on consoles, so they 

take what the engineers come up with and they use it. You have that faction also at 

Johnson. You have the faction of the flight ops world and then you have your engineers. 

There is a competition between them at Johnson Space Center. We were getting pulled 

to help one or the other from Marshall. Weird. (Both Laugh)

Johnson: Talk about Dr. von Braun’s involvement in what you did and what you were 

doing. Was he involved? Did he visit a lot? Did he ask a lot of questions?
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Stokes: Yes, he was a very special person. I did not understand until later what a 

special person he was. I always thought all center directors must be like him. He was 

fun to be around. He liked to visit our group because we were doing stuff the 

astronauts would be involved in. When the astronauts came to Huntsville, they came 

through our group, basically. We would shuttle them back and forth to the airplanes 

and help them out when they needed help in meetings. As a result of that, if there was a 

crew person in town, they were more than likely using a desk in our area. If Dr. von 

Braun or somebody in that group wanted to chat with the crew guys, they would often 

come down to our area because the crew guy was likely to be at a desk there. 

He was also interested in what J.R. Thompson was doing. As you recall, we had a 

Skylab 1g mockup that, in appearance, looked like flight hardware, completely detailed 

out. That piece of hardware, which was a development hardware, eventually went to 

Houston as the crew trainer. J. R. assembled a second one for us. That is what was used 

to train the flight ops people from Houston and at Marshall. Dr. von Braun and 

company would come in, drop in unexpectedly, to see what we were doing. It was great 

to be able to walk him around and be able to talk about that. We would show him what 

we were doing. He would try out things. If he wanted to go on the zero g plane, he 

would find out when we were flying and he would meet us. In those days, we flew out 

of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. He would come up and join us. When we began to 
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fly in Houston, I believe he had moved on to Headquarters by then. If you wanted to go 

and try something out under water, he was qualified He was a scuba diver, qualified 

for operating in a pressure suit, and he would try out the design. He gave us some darn 

interesting feedback, which was good. People listened when he talked, not only because 

he was a center director, but because he had a great thought process in evaluating a

problem. It was the German in him, I guess.

Johnson: Talk about the integration of all the different parts, projects and designs. What 

you did impacted many things, but did you feel like all the work you did was translated 

to performance on Skylab?

Stokes: For the majority, yes. I am sure there were times when we were probably 

wasting the tax payers’ money a little bit. Nothing comes to mind right now. Yes, the 

whole idea was we were mission-oriented, we had a goal we had to reach, and the 

design part of it was for us to interface with the other disciplines to come up with 

something the astronauts could use. That was always there. It was never out of mind for 

us. It may have been out for some of the other disciplines, but it was always there for 

us, knowing that it had to be safe. Our group really worried about the safety of the 

crew. 
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We also worried about safety for the piece of equipment the crew guy was working 

with. We were always worrying about the crew because it was an environment that we 

were still learning about at the time and still do not know a lot about. We had to worry 

about explosions. We had to worry about spacecraft being out of control. There was a 

period where we worried a little bit about personalities conflicting. That is one of the 

reasons we went down to Tektite II, which is an undersea habitat in the St. John’s U.S. 

Virgin Islands. It was to try out and use some real missions where we had actual 

aquanauts performing actual work. We laid over that some of the things we were 

planning to do for Skylab to see how they would work, to see how these people would 

react to them. 

We also took data every six minutes for a year for ten missions. We had a contract with 

the University of Texas to take data of where everybody was and what they were doing 

every six minutes. That was a lot of data, punch card data. We really found we did not 

have the problems from personality conflicts. We saw a little bit, there were some 

irritations. These people were doing real work, it was not busy work, and as a result, 

they did not take time to let personalities get in the way. We figured that was probably 

going to be the case with Skylab. As it turns out, that was. People had a mission to do. 

Everybody had a mission to do. 
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Johnson: How about the contractor experience in your area? Was it a good one?

Stokes: Yes. By then, I was kind of the old dude. There were not many of us still 

working then in human factors. 

Johnson: What era are we talking about here?

Stokes: When I was working as a contractor, we had completed the design and the 

building of Nodes 2 and 3, which were two of the nodes on the International Space 

Station that were built by the Italians. 

Johnson: This was moving along in years. You actually became a contractor.

Stokes: Oh. Ask me the question again.

Johnson: When you were working from Marshall, in general, the contractor experience 

on both ends, as you have experienced, has it been a good thing?

Stokes: Yes. We had a family in the Skylab days that was a family of civil servants and 

contractors. Nobody really paid much attention to the badge. Once you believed the 
Steve Johnson Interviews – Apollo/Saturn Program

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person on the other side of that table as trying his or her best to do the job and you saw 

he could produce without endangering him or you, then he was brought into the fold. 

In our group, there was no gaming, that posturing of the civil service versus the 

contractor. In fact, we even created a fictitious organization that still lives today in some 

minds called the Bioastronautics Research Foundation, or BARF. It turns out if you had 

experience in the zero g airplane and underwater training, you could become a BARF 

Bonafide Authoritative Game-saver, or BARFBAG. That, in some circles, was a lot more 

important than being a contractor or anything else. If you attain team BARFBAG status,

then you were highly recognized in the industry, even Jules Bergman was a BARFBAG. 

[Both Laugh] We almost got one of our decals on one of the Apollo flights, but it got 

kicked off at the last minute. 

Johnson: Talk about NASA Headquarters for a moment. Did it help or interfere in the 

development process, especially for Skylab?

Stokes: [William C.] Bill Schneider was a really good manager, so yes, it helped. That 

organization helped us a great deal, especially when we had the launch of Skylab and 

the micrometeoroid debris shielding panels were blown off and we thought we were 

losing the mission. Schneider came down, rolled up his sleeves, and gave us all the 

resources we needed. I say us, but I am talking about NASA because everybody 
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assembled at Marshall. For a week and a half, it was incredible the design work that 

went on there. He, at that particular time, was outstanding. He had been outstanding all 

along because he had really supported the program and he believed in the Skylab 

Program. He fought Congress and had gotten the money and kept the program going. 

He was incredible during that timeframe of recovery. As a result of that, I understand 

we got 109 percent of the mission that we planned to even after we had to do the repairs 

to keep it alive. 

As far as the other part of that question of Headquarters, I actually pulled a stint up 

there. [Laughs] It was a different world. I realized that their job is to look toward 

Congress and they did not pay much attention to the guys back in the centers. They 

tended at times to forget the centers even existed. They saw a different NASA. They 

saw a NASA that was more of a research capability who happened to build rockets. 

Their counterparts were over on the Hill. That was an interesting world. That was very 

enlightening to me. I am really glad I had that experience because I needed it when I 

came back. It helped me when we were involved in working on the International Space 

Station on the Nodes Project where we worked with the Italian Space Agency and their 

contract with Alenia [Thales Alenia Space Italy], which was effectively their version of 

Boeing. 
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Johnson: When Skylab first flew, how did you feel?

Stokes: I was fortunate enough not to be working on the console that day, so I was 

down at the Cape and watched it go. That was the second Saturn I had seen fly, we saw 

Apollo 15 fly. Watching an Apollo vehicle take off was incredible. You always thought 

it was going to fall over because it moved so slow to begin with. Then all hell broke 

loose and we immediately had to come back to Huntsville. It was “Katie, bar the door” 

for that time period. Then it was catchup, especially with that first mission. That group 

of crew members, we had really great crew members. They did a lot of work. We 

loaded up the spacecraft to send it up for recovery, found out all the food that had 

launched on the vehicle was gone because it had been living in 130 degree temperatures 

for days and days and days and had effectively cooked all that stuff. We had to carry 

new food up. The water we had, it survived. 

There was a lot of work that had to be done during that timeframe. It was busy, but 

again, we were staying focused, everybody working as a team, not just human factors. 

We were just a little piece of that. We had the crew piece of that, of what the crew had 

to do. Once we figured out we still had one of the solar arrays available, we had to 

figure out how to release it, working that real-time so it actually happened. We got 

power back and were able then to deploy the Apollo Telescope Mount power. By the 
Steve Johnson Interviews – Apollo/Saturn Program

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time we got to the third mission, we were back doing what the Skylab was originally 

supposed to do. It was not quite as exciting. The first two missions were pretty darn 

exciting. I think the issues you periodically read about on the third mission where they 

threw up their hands and said enough is enough, slow down. The urgency was not 

there to keep the mission alive by the third mission.

Johnson: While you were doing these missions and one of the first great repair stints 

there, did you sense you were making history? You were the precursor to the 

International Space Station. Did you sense you were making history?

Stokes: Yes, we knew that it would be history if it failed and it would be history if it did 

not fail. We knew that if it failed we were possibly going to lose NASA. If you recall, 

Skylab was after the first rift, after the first funding cutback, after the decision not to go 

to the Moon anymore. What were we going to do with NASA? Do we really need it?

That was a tough time. Yes, we knew that if we could not pull it off, we probably would 

be looking for work and there would not be a fun organization like NASA around 

anymore. 

Johnson: We know how much recognition von Braun and the German rocket team got 

for the accomplishments during the Saturn Program going through Skylab and the 
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Soyuz rendezvous. Do you feel like the rest of the workforce, including what you did, 

received the recognition you deserved?

Stokes: I do not know about the term “deserved.”

Johnson: Should have gotten, let us put it that way.

Stokes: That is the wrong question for me because the payoff for me was being a part of 

it and watching it happen and work. The understanding that I was a part of that, 

decisions that I was involved in came out with a positive result, and I really did not care 

that much about recognition. I did not even think about that. It was not that important 

to me and it still is not. The important thing to me was, and you alluded to it a while 

ago when you asked me about the contractors, we had a team of people that I miss 

terribly because it was so much fun working with that group. That was not just the 

people that were working in human factors. That was the engineers, the design guys, 

the structures guys, the propulsion guys, the electrical guys, each one had their own 

little world and their own way of looking at things, but we all worked together as a 

team. We had great meetings where neat things came out of it, things we had not even 

thought could come out of that and send you off in a new direction to go look at things. 
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I do not know what recognition means, I really do not. Is that something for now? Is 

that something they are going to put in a textbook and rewrite it in 100 years whenever 

they want to change what happened? I do not know. That is an interesting question 

because I do not think that was a driving force, the recognition part of it. It was fun. I 

have enjoyed the get-togethers we have had since then. We have had several gettogethers and I was fortunate enough to get to sit as a panel member on one of the von 

Braun forums. That was enjoyable, that piece of that recognition, and getting back 

together with these guys after we all got old.

Johnson: You worked on Skylab and later the International Space Station. Would you 

compare the challenges of doing the two different things? I have to believe the Space 

Station was kind of an outgrowth of what you had already done for Skylab. How would 

you compare them?

Stokes: I would say the comparison or contrast, the first one was a technological 

challenge, the second one was a political challenge. Skylab was totally different. The 

Apollo was a spacecraft that was a small pickup truck type of thing and it was designed 

to go on a quick mission. You knew exactly what you were going to do when you 

launched and you knew when you were coming back and everything in between. The 

neat thing about Skylab was it was just a workshop. It was a place that, once we got it 
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going, things happened. We tried different things, the Comet Kohoutek came flying by, 

nobody had ever heard of it. We were sitting up there and could take photographs of 

Kohoutek as it went by. That was neat. We had to look at different instruments we had 

onboard that we could use in a way that we could gather data on that. 

We learned a lot about fire in space and how it burns. It burns in a sphere rather than 

straight up like we are used to on the ground. Different types of materials, a lot that was 

going on on Skylab. The things you hear about now on Station, we tried them first on 

Skylab. That was all brand new. We had thirty-two, thirty-three corollary experiments 

and then there were another nine, I think, on Earth resources, first time we ever looked 

at the Sun through a telescope that you could look at the Sun and see it totally out of the 

atmosphere. It was fascinating. The deep space stuff was really neat. That was the good 

part.

When we got to Space Station, it was Skylab but bigger and better. It was this time we

are going to build it bigger, we are going to have a lot more room. Initially it was an all 

U.S. vehicle and we were going to do all these neat things and we might invite people, 

we might not. Then the cost came in and we became an International Space Station. It 

was the politics of it. By then we had a shuttle. We knew the cargo capability of the 

shuttle, we knew the dimensions of the cargo bay. We knew the emergency landing 
Steve Johnson Interviews – Apollo/Saturn Program

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constraints on that. The center of mass could not come forward except to a certain point 

and could not come forward any more than that. That defined the modules. 

In between that, we were doing Spacelab, so we had already learned a lot from 

Spacelab, a lab that went up inside and stayed inside the shuttle and it came home. Its 

mission was a week or two weeks like the shuttle stay was. We already knew what 

living in a can was going to be like. Station was just bigger and better. All the posturing 

and the gyrations were what made it interesting, if you want to use that term. It is 

interesting. Someone should really write a book on that. They could capture 

everybody’s position, that would really be a story, volumes. It was a way of watching 

NASA turn into a bureaucracy, dissolve into a bureaucracy, which is where it is now. It 

is a full-blown bureaucracy. We lost that craziness, excitement, that was out there 

during the Apollo Applications Program, AAP, which evolved into Skylab. 

It was still fun to come to work. I always enjoyed the development. We were involved 

in working with the Italians very closely and that got us back to what the team feel was 

that we had when we first started out on Skylab. That was the next time I had that 

feeling, [when we were] working with our friends over in Italy. They were brand new 

at it, it was totally new to them. They were looking at it through the rose colored glasses 

that we did when we started. They did not have all that water under the bridge yet. It 
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was really fun to work with them. We goofed off with them too. That was fun. I think 

the International Space Station is an absolutely wonderful vehicle, the capability is 

incredible. What we have not done yet is use it. We have spent all of our time putting it 

together. We are still looking for the mission use and we need to get people creatively 

thinking about how they can use it. You have a lot up there. You can go so far talking to

the kids in the school classes, doing the spherical liquids and things that we have been 

doing since Skylab, or even Apollo, for that matter. I think the contrast is technological 

and political challenges.