Steve Johnson Interviews – Apollo/Saturn Program

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NASA MSFC Oral History Interview

Steve Johnson Interviews – Apollo/Saturn Program

Jack Lee

Interviewed by Steve Johnson

Huntsville, Alabama – Unknown, Circa 2012

Steve Johnson: I am talking to Jack Lee, who worked at Marshall Space Flight Center 

from 1960 to 1995. Prior to that, he worked with the ABMA, the Army Ballistic Missile 

Agency, from 1958 until Marshall was formed in 1960. Jack, talk about your education 

and what prepared you to be in the space program.

Jack Lee: How far back do you want to go?

Johnson: We are assuming you graduated from high school. Was there any education 

in the high school years that prepared you?

Lee: I would say one of the problems I had in my career was the fact that I did not 

properly prepare myself in high school for college. For some reason, I guess I did not 

recognize that was necessary. I got through high school okay, was a good student. I 

really did not think about college until very late in my high school career. I always 

thought I wanted to be an engineer. I have to admit I was not really sure what an 
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engineer did. That is how far off I was. I knew a little about civil engineering, but I 

knew there was mechanical engineering, aeronautical engineering, electrical 

engineering. I was not sure exactly what an engineer did. I interviewed at the 

University of Alabama after I graduated from high school, it was in 1953, and got into 

civil engineering because I understood that a little better.

My roommate, who was also from Birmingham [Alabama], went into aeronautical 

engineering. He did not know anything more about engineering than I did. To follow 

along with this, I switched the first year from civil to aeronautical engineering. My 

interest there was more because of airplanes, not necessarily because of thinking about 

space or designing airplanes. I always wanted to be a pilot, so I switched to aeronautical 

engineering. It was not until 1957 when Sputnik was launched that anything was 

entered into any of my courses that I could relate to space, with an exception of an 

astronomy course I had taken as an elective out of the physics department. It was my 

last semester, it was 1957, I graduated in January 1958, it was not until then that any of 

my engineering classes started talking about space at all. I had no idea about space. I 

still was thinking I would go to work for some airplane industry.
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My roommate in college, who also had been a high school fried, worked at the Army 

Ballistic Missile Agency up here in the summer of 1957. He was going to graduate the 

same time as me.

Johnson: He was a co-op student?

Lee: No, he was actually just a student trainee. Back in those days, you could work in 

the summer as a student trainee. He had worked up here that summer. For that whole

semester, all he talked about in our free time was what they were really doing up there, 

a lot of fun stuff. Again, I had never even heard of [Wernher] von Braun or his team or 

what they had been doing in the missile business. Actually, it was after I had done a 

few interviews close to the end of my last semester, my roommate, who actually ended 

up working for Marshall also, said, “I am going to go up and complete my application. 

Even though I have been in it for a while, for that one summer, I still have to go up and 

finalize it. Why not come up with me and talk to them?” 

I did it, but I had no intention, no real interest in staying. Once I saw what was 

happening, and even after I had signed up to work for the government, I really did not 

plan to stay for long. I always had my idea of going to work for some industry. From 

that day on until now, every day that I ever worked, with the possible exception of 
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maybe two or three, I always enjoyed exactly what I was doing. It was always a fun job. 

My education really did not help me. My education came in the experience I came to 

recognize in working with some every intelligent, educated people over those thirtyeight years I was with NASA [National Aeronautics and Space Administration].

Johnson: Was all your education, as you put it, from working with people who thought 

big ideas or did you learn anything from technicians out on the test stands and places 

like that?

Lee: My first job was in working on modifying Jupiter ground support equipment. I 

worked more with technicians than I did with engineers. That modification required me 

to work with the actual technicians. One of the things I did not get a little education 

about was from an overall missile systems business was ground support equipment. I 

had to choose a career that would expose me to more and more experience. After a 

couple of years when Marshall became part of NASA, I went to work with what was 

then the Light and Medium Vehicles Office. I had been working for Launching and 

Handling.

Johnson: Before we go on with that, what caused you to change from the Army and 

move over to Marshall, to NASA?
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Lee: I do not think I had a choice. 

Johnson: Your lab moved? (Both Laugh)

Lee: One day I was an AROC [Army Requirements Oversight Council] research 

engineer, the next day I was something else. No, they made the transfer.

Johnson: You were not asked. You moved with the team. Of course, not everybody 

moved, some people stayed with the Army.

Lee: There were some key people, the Pershing Program was in development at that 

time. That was also under the von Braun purview. Those people who were directly 

working with the Pershing, I think they were either encouraged or told you need to stay 

with the Pershing. That is how that happened.

Johnson: But you were not in that group.

Lee: No, I was with Launching and Handling, which later was split up and part of it 

went to the Kennedy Space Center. We had a thing called the Missile Firing Lab, which 

is also one of the nine laboratories. That was under Kirk Debus. When we became part 
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of NASA, then Kennedy became a full-fledge center. Part of the Launching and 

Handling group went there. The other part became part of the Light and Medium 

Vehicles Program Office, which was to manage two programs, the Centaur Program 

and the Agena. I chose to go that way because I felt it would give me some management 

experience and also to get more involved in understanding the whole system business.

Johnson: You are at Marshall Space Flight Center, maybe not by choice, but it worked 

out well. (Laughs) What did you do when you first got there, when you first became 

part of NASA?

Lee: I do not know that I did anything the first day. I think shortly after I was given an 

opportunity to make a transition to the Light and Medium Vehicles Office. 

Johnson: You were essentially supporting launches?

Lee: At that time, this new group was to manage those. The Air Force had been 

managing them in the past. The director of the laboratory, Hans Hueter, became the 

head of the Light and Medium Vehicles Office, and his deputy went to the Cape 

[Canaveral, Florida] with the other group. The next big event was I was given an 

opportunity to be in residence in San Diego [California]. This was in 1960. I do not 
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remember what happened a few days after I was transferred, but what I do remember is 

I agreed to be transferred to San Diego to the General Dynamics plant where they built 

the Centaur. I had responsibility for that.

Johnson: Define Centaur for me. What was the Centaur?

Lee: The Centaur was an upper stage liquid hydrogen, liquid oxygen vehicle. It was 

very advanced and sophisticated for its time. It was totally underfunded and did not 

have the attention from a design standpoint that most other vehicles had. It was the first 

four gimbal guidance system. It was the first LOX [Liquid Oxygen], hydrogen upper 

stage. It was the first thin walled pressure vessel, like the Atlas. It was the first 

restartable engine at altitude and it was the first stage and a half. We threw off some of 

the insulation on the way up to save weight. We lost the first one for a lot of reasons. It 

failed. I think Congress and the agency recognized the need for this upper stage, so 

money was put into it to bring it back up to speed. It turned out to be a very, very good 

vehicle that we have been flying for over fifty years now. 

Johnson: How long did you work on that?
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Lee: I was there for two years. During that time period, the Marshall Space Flight

Center, or NASA, determined that Marshall should clearly focus on the manned 

program, and that was the Saturn. The Centaur did not fit into that, so we transferred 

the Centaur Program from Marshall to the Lewis Research Center. I was out in 

residence, so I really did not have to move any place. They recognized that. Even 

though I wanted to stay with Marshall, I got a notice that said, “I, Thomas J. Lee,” and 

there were two blocks there, “I agree to transfer from Marshall to the Lewis Research 

Center on the Centaur Program” or “I agree to seek employment elsewhere.” That is in 

my 201 file. 

Johnson: What did you do?

Lee: I transferred. That was for about eight months and then they contacted me at 

Marshall and asked me if I would head up the resident office on this Pegasus Program 

up in Maryland. 

Johnson: What was Pegasus?

Lee: It was a micrometeoroid satellite. At one time, they had the model of it in the [U.S.] 

Space and Rocket Center. It had a ninety-six foot wing span and was about eight feet 
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tall. It really made a big area. The purpose of that was to orbit Earth and detect 

micrometeoroids. It was done through what looked like a capacitor arrangement with 

big plates with different thicknesses. If a small meteoroid hit one of the smaller inner 

plates, it would get a hit for that. We used that to verify the micrometeoroid model that 

had been developed by a guy named [Fred Lawrence] Whipple over the years.

Johnson: This Pegasus was basically research we needed to do for once we got human 

beings into orbit and even went on to have our first space stations like Skylab?

Lee: That is the way we looked at it. Unfortunately, this was kind of a twist here, there 

were eight Saturn I launch vehicles. Pegasus was identified as a secondary payload, by 

the way. It was not even the primary mission for the last three. Once we got through six 

launches, we were already in the process of developing the Pegasus, in the process of 

qualification and design. We recognized all the objectives for the Saturn I launch vehicle 

design had been verified through the first six launches. The next day, after some 

criticism from outside NASA, we redefined the Pegasus as a primary mission. Then we 

went ahead and launched the last three, all successful.

Johnson: You said these were launched aboard the Saturn I?
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Lee: Saturn I. After some twenty years or so, we turned them all off. They lasted much 

longer than we ever anticipated. 

Johnson: The Pegasus satellites were giving us data for twenty years. Did we learn 

things that made it safer to be on orbit?

Lee: I cannot say that for sure. It did maybe give us some confidence because it did 

verify the models that had been used within the limits that had been identified. It did 

not cause us to change anything in design of any manned or human spacecraft.

Johnson: But it reaffirmed we were on the right track?

Lee: It was a confidence builder, yes.

Johnson: You ended up going to Kennedy after that, am I correct?

Lee: The way I got to Kennedy was I was the resident manager for the Pegasus. Because 

the Kennedy people were all tied up in trying to get the manned system going too, 

which was a change. They said, “Why not bring your team down and launch the thing 

too?” For those three launches, I was resident manager there, and then I went to the 
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Cape during the launch where I was a test conductor for the launches of the last three. I 

ran the countdown for the last ten minutes of those three launches. I was there and my 

then supervisor, Lee James, who was the project manager for the Saturn said, “I want 

you to be down there.” I said, “I do not really know too much about launch operations.” 

He said, “You will learn.” It was a good move and I did learn a lot about launch 

operations. I stayed there until after we launched Apollo 11 and then I came back to 

Huntsville. 

Johnson: A quick interjection here. You are doing pretty well for a guy who did not feel 

like high school prepared him to be an engineer. You had a lot of different jobs. After 

Apollo 11, you came back to Marshall and you became a technical assistant for the 

center director. 

Lee: That happened to be the title. By the way, I became much more knowledgeable in 

the technical aspects of launch. Things like the tour out in San Diego, at the time, I had 

only been here for two years and I thought all the knowledge in the world about launch 

vehicles resided in the von Braun team. I was still young. When I got out to San Diego, I 

got to know one of the young managers and engineers with astronautics, and they 

recognized I was probably biased in my opinion about everything. They were patient 

with me and ended up teaching me things that were different about the Atlas vehicle, 
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where things were. You did not always have to design it this particular way. I learned a 

lot about the systems. I did not get any more intelligent on an analytical standpoint. I 

did not learn any new formulas or that sort of thing. It was more about the system 

education I got there. 

Johnson: You come back as a technical assistant to the center director. This was 

Eberhard Rees. Tell me about what a technical assistant did post Apollo 11.

Lee: That position had been filled by at least three people before me. The way I looked 

at it, the way Lee James looked at it, and the way I think Eberhard Rees looked at it is 

you can do whatever I ask you to do. You are here to learn again. I was on the tenth 

floor. I had lunch with the von Braun group every day. I attended all the meetings. In 

the past, that position had been used to educate, to elevate you to a higher 

responsibility position. Jack Balch had had that job and he ended up to be the director 

down at Stennis [Space Center]. Lee James had had that position and he became the 

program manager. I forget who I followed. That was the plan. The job description did 

not detail you had to do specific tasks. The intent that was unwritten was that you were 

really there to learn. Let us see if you are good enough to elevate you to a more 

responsible position.
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Johnson: Before we get away too far from Saturn, doing the different jobs you did and 

the different places you were located, did you have much occasion to interact with Dr. 

von Braun?

Lee: On the Centaur, I was too low a grade. He did visit once and gave us a little 

speech. When I came to the Pegasus, we had some controversy within the project office 

and the way we were designing and developing it. It was a much more conservative 

design than Marshall had been used to. We got a lot of criticism. They did not pay much 

attention when it was a secondary mission. When it became a primary mission, then the 

center labs got asked to look into it. They gave us a real black eye. The Marshall team 

said, “You guys are really off and it will never fly.” In fact, one of the key guys, who is 

still around, made a prediction that the power system would fail after the first orbit. 

Like I said, we turned it off after twenty years. 

That brought me in contact with von Braun because now we had to make a decision 

between the program office and his technical guys. In that case, we made presentations 

to him, exactly what we knew, what we were doing. As far as I know, he never flinched 

about it. He went with our approach and it turned out to be quite successful. I do not 

know whether this would have driven it or not, but we were looking at additional 

delays in schedule and a lot more money to do what the guys out here wanted to do. 
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That is another area of education I got about there being more than one way to do 

things.

Johnson: Von Braun, it seems in listening to many people talk that, for a guy with some 

distinctly personal ideas about how we should do things, he was very flexible.

Lee: Yes. Flexibility would be one way to put it for sure. He had a good understanding 

of what it took to accomplish an objective. I think he knew there was more than one 

way to do it, even though some of his team believed we had to do it a certain way. He 

was an objective individual.

Johnson: In the different tasks you worked on from 1960 to 1969, before you became 

technical assistant for the center director, did you run into the long work hours, extra 

shifts, six days a week work? In your various jobs, was it like that for you?

Lee: Yes, it started out that way. There are two things that happened, one when I went 

with ABMA. They had a standard fifty-eight hour work week. That was it. All of a 

sudden, you never had an opportunity to work only eight hours a day and be off on the 

weekends. The other thing that got drilled into me because I worked with these people 

for so many years, I think it was a German mentality, it was that the job is there and it 
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has to be done. In some cases, it is the most important thing you can be doing in your

life. They never said that.

Johnson: Did you feel that it was?

Lee: I did not think of it that way. I just said this is the way that it is. There is a job to be 

done and you ought to stay with it until you get it done. Plus, most engineers probably 

would not admit this, but we inherently underestimate what it is going to take to do a 

job. When you do that, you are already setting yourself up to have to work. I do not 

remember ever spending just eight hours a day. I was not the sharpest guy in the class, 

so I had to spend more time doing my job than a lot of other people would have. That is 

just a truth. I already recognized it was going to take me more time to get my task or job 

done. I never thought there was any other way. What also gets you in a bad habit, and it 

stayed with me my whole career, even today, is you never leave the work. When you 

are not thinking of a specific task you are doing here, I am thinking about the work. 

Johnson: You would go home and you would still be thinking about it?

Lee: If you really like your job, in your spare time, you are thinking about that. There is 

no time.
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Johnson: With all these extra hours of thinking about work when you were at home, 

was the work environment good? Were the men and women excited to be there?

Lee: I never had that problem. I hear that morale may be low out at Marshall now, but 

then I talk to some of the younger people and they say we had it during the good times. 

The good times for them are right now, so I get different inputs on that.

Johnson: You were busy spending long hours developing spacecraft and all the support 

systems and everything that goes with putting men into space. It sounds like you were 

having fun doing it.

Lee: No question about it. 

Johnson: When you were working all these various jobs, did money come up? Did 

controlling costs become part of the equation?

Lee: Up through Apollo, I do not remember that ever being a driver. We had three 

things to concern ourselves with, performance, schedule, and cost. Performance was the 

key thing. Performance over all else. Schedule was next, and then the cost. Through the 

Apollo Program in any of my jobs, I did not recognize we were not doing something 
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because of cost. In the case of the shuttle, it got a little more tight because we were back 

into a different mode for NASA after the cold War and after Apollo. Today, they have 

even gone to what we call full-cost accounting. During the early days, Apollo and 

Shuttle, the center’s had some flexibility to handle their institutional capability, civil 

servants, their facilities, that sort of thing. Today, they tie all that to particular program 

costs. I think it is causing the agency and program managers to recognize it is very 

difficult to do that when you have to start trading off those, especially when you are 

looking at trying to control costs and save money.

Johnson: After 1969 when you were technical assistant, were you working on the 

shuttle at that point?

Lee: No, at that time while I was Rees’ technical assistant, it was mostly Skylab at that 

time. I did not have a direct management role in that. I kind of followed Rees around 

and did things for him, made speeches, that sort of thing. From that, I became the 

program manager for the Spacelab. The Spacelab was a separate program from Shuttle.

Johnson: Those were scientific labs carried in the bay of the shuttle.
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Lee: I recognized we had to fly in the shuttle, but the shuttle was developed over here 

and we were developing with a corporation of ten European countries, ESA [European 

Space Agency]. We were developing the Spacelab knowing it had to go in the shuttle. 

The closest I got to the shuttle at that time was interface between making sure we were 

going to be compatible with the shuttle, whether it was weight, CG [Center of Gravity], 

environmental control, avionics, or what have you.

Johnson: Was this something that required a lot of testing? Was it the kind of thing 

where testing had been done for Skylab that you followed on work that had already 

been done? 

Lee: It was all new. The shuttle presented an interface that we had not seen before. I 

think it worked better than I anticipated when we first got into it. Like I said, you were 

developing the shuttle at the same time you were developing the Spacelab and you had 

changes on both sides which effected the other side. We got that well-defined, got good 

cooperation out of other Europeans and the shuttle people. I think we had a minimal 

amount of integration problems with the shuttle.

Johnson: While you were working on Spacelab, how many different shuttle missions 

was it a part of?
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Lee: It was 1980 when I became deputy director. It was not until April of 1981 that we 

launched the first shuttle.

Johnson: Concurrently with shuttle development, you were working on Spacelab.

Lee: It was in full scale development. We built engineering models, but we were still 

away from launching at that point. 

Johnson: When did the first Spacelab fly?

Lee: I think it was in 1982. 

Johnson: After you flew the first one, did you have to adjust, change designs or any of 

that?

Lee: No, the Spacelab was very versatile. We had pallets for outside experiments and 

then inside experiments. We did not make any major changes to the Spacelab through 

the whole program. We made some adjustments in what we got from the orbiter and 

we made some adjustments in the experiment designs a little bit, but the basic Spacelab, 

I thought it would leak, if I were quite honest with you.
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Johnson: Leak oxygen?

Lee: They had a particular designed seal that did not look like it would hold pressure to 

me. It passed all the tests.

Johnson: You still did not believe it would work?

Lee: I thought surely we might have a problem after we go through the launch 

environment of the thing, but we never had any problems.

Johnson: I think what you are saying is that Spacelab, once it was designed and ready 

to go, it did what it was supposed to do. Let us jump ahead to 1986. We have the 

Challenger disaster. What happened to you after the Challenger disaster?

Lee: First off, prior to the Challenger accident, I was at Harvard [University] in my last 

semester in 1985. 

Johnson: You were at Harvard. Were you getting an advanced degree?
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Lee: It was advanced management. As a result of that, ordinarily I would have been 

involved in the flight readiness reviews and all the details, but I did not finish that until 

January. As [William] Lucas’ deputy, I was not involved in any of the decisions, flight 

readiness reviews. Ordinarily I would have been at the Cape for the launch. Because of 

this, I stayed in the HOSC [Huntsville Operations Support Center] during that launch.

Johnson: The operating center.

Lee: Yes, because I had not been involved in any of it. After the accident directly, as I 

mentioned earlier, we had these contingency plans. I had been in the blockhouse during 

the Apollo fire. That was not near as well organized from a contingency standpoint. I 

recognized what you needed to do.

Johnson: Immediately in the Huntsville Operations Center, you started work.

Lee: First thing I did was stop all the phones going in and out. We did not need any of 

them. Then we impounded all the data right now and I called all the leaders of these 

contingency plans together. They knew what to do, I did not have to tell them to get 

started. They started this process. 
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Johnson: Let us stop a second to say the Operations Center is getting all the propulsion 

data and External Tank data from the launch at Cape Canaveral. That is the data you 

impounded, all the data up until the disaster.

Lee: That is right, as far as from a launch processing standpoint.

Johnson: You started the contingency groups. What happens next?

Lee: Those guys go off and start doing their thing. They bring their groups together, 

they start looking at the data available. Form that time, I started to bring in contractors 

to give me inputs on what they saw, what they were finding. I think we probably 

worked close to twelve, fifteen hours a day from that time, nobody took off any time in 

that group that was reviewing this until April. 

Johnson: That was from January to?

Lee: January to April. No weekends were taken off. Everybody was focused on 

evaluating the data.
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Johnson: Before we talk about the process of evaluating the data, everybody is directed 

to find out what happened, I know, but it makes sense that there would be a little 

depression, that everybody would not be real happy. Was it tough to work through 

that?

Lee: The tough part came from outside criticism later. One of the tough things that I 

found myself in was these people who were doing the work, they were not sharing it 

with their families. We had about 3,500 people then, this was a small group of people. 

The rest of Marshall Space Flight Center employees, they were not getting any 

information at all other than what they got through the press. What they were getting 

through the press was something I objected to then and would object to today. The 

team that was put together on the Rogers Commission that evaluate this, they seemed 

to have freedom to go talk to the press, give their opinions, and most of it made 

Marshall look really bad. 

In our case, we had been taught that you do not deal with the press. I always felt I was 

exempt from it. You do not talk to the press about this. That is the convening authority’s 

job. [William] himself did not control that, his team. What was coming out of the press 

really made Marshall look bad. That really exacerbated the problem of the people in the 

Center not knowing what was going on. Somebody finally got the nerve to tell me that. 
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At that point, I started regular meetings, at least internally, to be able to tell people 

where we were going and try to mitigate some of the accusations that made Marshall 

look so bad. 

Johnson: You started right after the disaster and you went up until April. Were you still 

figuring out what happened at that point?

Lee: I think we had pretty well isolated it. I testified before the Rogers Commission two 

or three times. The actions that were given to us were to come up with what you think 

happened. Wayne Littles was my deputy at that time, and we collectively put down 

what we call a red light chart saying this is a possibility, yellow is a possibility, but 

green is clean, red is bad. We had come to the conclusion for probably where the 

accident really happened. 

Johnson: You had figured out there was a problem with the seal?

Lee: Yes. We found also that there was potentially more than just a cold seal. That 

might have been part of it, but there were other areas that could have caused that seal to 

fail other than the fact that it was frozen. We did not know which those were because 

the evidence was not there. There were at least four or five different areas that could 
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have caused the thing, everything from water in there that frozen and lifted the seal to 

other things, not being properly captured or not understanding how the joint actually 

expanded. 

What we did was we established a design team at Marshall, this was after the Rogers 

Commission. We took a group of design people, knowing what you know, and design 

me a seal that will satisfy any of those requirements. They went through everything 

from a heater to a capture feature. At the same time, Thiokol was doing the same thing. 

We kept these two groups completely independent. Let us see what these guys are 

doing, see what these guys did. They converged to a pretty much new design. That is 

kind of the way we went with it.

Johnson: You mentioned the media reports and the things that were being said by the 

Rogers Commission that made Marshall look bad. Looking back on the investigation 

and knowing what caused the disaster, had Marshall made mistakes?

Lee: Let me give you a fact from my impression and then you can draw your 

conclusion. One of the things that Marshall was primarily expert in is liquid rocket 

propulsion. If you look at our organization back in those days, the whole organization 

was set up in making darn sure that we understood everything we needed to know 
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about design and problems with liquid propulsion systems. On the other hand, when 

we decided to go with the solid rocket motors, we said to our self the Air Force has been 

launching these things, the DoD [Department of Defense] has been launching this pretty 

much this same design. We will depend on that expertise and that capability to give us 

assurance. We set up a capability at Marshall to be able to assist these things and review 

designs and so forth. We did not set up an organization to understand enough about 

solid rocket motors even near what we knew about the liquid propulsion systems. That 

today would be a mistake.

Johnson: But you did not know it was a mistake.

Lee: We did not know it was a mistake at the time. That, I would say, was a 

shortcoming of our system. We did not pay the same attention because we did not think 

we had to to the solid side as we did to the liquid side. Just after the Challenger accident, 

Marshall had the best capability in the world in solid rocket motors. I assume they still 

have some of that. We changed that. That was one of the organizational changes we 

made to compensate. We inherently did not have the detailed knowledge, the breadth 

and depth of penetration into the design of solid rocket motors that we inherently had 

in all our other programs. 
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Johnson: You are saying the investigation, the figuring out what happened, the 

redesign, that helped bring Marshall up to speed, so to speak?

Lee: Absolutely. That was too late then, but it helped us in deciding whether to go with 

the Advanced Solid Rocket Motor or what we are doing in solid rocket motors today. 

Johnson: Being part of the group that worked to figure this out, did it give you a 

different appreciation of just how hard human spaceflight is? You had been around the 

Saturn V, so you knew it was complex. Did this change the way you looked at it all?

Lee: No, not really. We had had a lot of failures in propulsion systems. We spread 

engines all over Hancock County down in Mississippi, but we always came back and 

got a team together, recognized where the problem was, worked with the contractor, 

and solved the problem. It was a joint thing. I do not know if this is going to answer 

your question directly or not, but what I did find was after Challenger, in the way the 

Rogers Commission conducted that and the way the country looked at it, somebody 

had to be responsible. In fact, I remember President [Ronald] Reagan’s Chief of Staff, I 

remember him being interviewed when I was in Utah. His comment, “We are going to 

find out the problem and find out who is responsible.” We never worked that way in 

the past. It was we are going to find out what the problem is and we are going to fix it. 
Steve Johnson Interviews – Apollo/Saturn Program

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What happened was contractors would bring lawyers, if you are going to start blaming 

someone. We never indicated or said if there is some individual responsible that we will 

deal with that, but the intent was not to start out looking for that. It was to start looking 

for the solution. That changed my mind about the whole process of manned systems.

Johnson: You were not even at NASA when the Columbia disaster happened, but you 

were there for Challenger. With Columbia, it was the same sort of thing. Somebody made 

a mistake. From what you know, is it the wrong thing to think about individuals and 

maybe the right thing is to think about systems that we maybe did not understand, that 

we needed to know more?

Lee: I do not have a problem with the process. If you find the individual or group who 

were responsible, I do not have a problem identifying that. In Columbia, you cannot find 

one of the details, but during the Challenger, there were management decisions and 

individuals. 

Johnson: Flight rules were violated, am I correct?

Lee: I do not know.
Steve Johnson Interviews – Apollo/Saturn Program

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Johnson: They launched colder than.

Lee: I do not think we had flight rules. There were individuals who made decisions that 

got that tied to “we have to find someone responsible,” not someone individual, but a 

group. In Columbia, there was no way to find that. This could have happened anytime, 

anywhere. It was not that some guy did not inspect that piece of foam that came off. We 

knew foam would come off. We did not know that much and that it would do that kind 

of damage. All the previous information had been it would not do any damage. They

were a little bit different in that respect.

Johnson: In both instances, whether direct link was assigned or not, people lost their 

jobs. Do you think, as a man who had a broad experience in the space program, in 

manned spaceflight, that was right? Should people have been blamed for those two 

accidents?

Lee: Not in my opinion. I know the process they went through. I know the individuals 

who made the decisions. We had gone through a similar kind of rationale, a process, for 

other decisions, not necessarily leading to launch or to tests. There was nothing 

malicious about this. It goes all the way back to our real lack of knowledge on Solid 

Rocket Motors, knowledge that if we had known better, had more detail or knowledge, 
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the decision probably would have been made differently. You cannot blame that on 

what you do not know, too many things. We addressed problems of unknowns, but 

then there is a thing called unknown unknowns.

Johnson: You do not know it, but you do not know you do not know it.

Lee: That is right. That was one of those unknown unknowns.

Johnson: In the not too distant future, you would become center director at Marshall 

Space Flight Center, a whole new way of being a part of the space program, I would 

imagine.

Lee: Yes.

Johnson: Talk about that. What was it like after being a part of programs and working 

on programs and suddenly you are in charge of a big chunk of the program?

Lee: One thing you learn, I first started my experience with Rees and working on the 

ninth floor, is you are going to have a lot of decisions to make and it is going to be a 
Steve Johnson Interviews – Apollo/Saturn Program

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technical decision. Like I said, I was not the smartest guy in the technical area, but

Wayne Littles was my deputy, and I picked him in particular.

Johnson: You had a good technical assistant.

Lee: I had a good technical deputy, so I did not have to worry about that. In addition to 

that, a technical problem comes up, and you are going to find a lot of different inputs. 

The one thing you are going to find is you have 3,500 scientists and engineers out there 

and you have a pretty good probability of at least having one of the best proposals 

given to you and you have to select that. In the personnel area, I never had any problem 

in the personnel area as center director. I found there were some people who liked to 

change certain things. I am probably famous for the first thing I did. We used to have a 

staff luncheon on the ninth floor that was the center director and all the lab directors 

and program managers. I had heard enough coming up through the system that people 

looked at that as we were having gourmet meals and it was this exceptional situation to 

be in, which it really was not. The food came out of the cafeteria like it did for everyone 

else. Probably my most famous decision was I cut out the staff luncheon and caused all 

the managers and lab directors to go eat with the people. Some people liked that. 
Steve Johnson Interviews – Apollo/Saturn Program

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Johnson: You basically sent the managers back down to a little bit lower level. You 

came up under the von Braun team where even the directors were engineers at heart 

and they spent a lot of time talking to the people below them. Was that kind of going 

back to that a little bit?

Lee: A little bit. This staff luncheon thing was misunderstood. If it bothered people, it 

was easy to change.

Johnson: Was that part of your method, to get the higherups going back and talking to 

their people?

Lee: In any organization, you have your formal organization, you have your informal 

organization, and you do not ever have to reveal where the informal organization 

comes up. There are people below you, first line is maybe one or two levels down, who 

you have a lot of confidence in. You get a lot of input on what needs to be done 

organizationally from that. I never considered myself a leader, a manager. I think 

managers can learn how to be managers, but I think leaders have to be leaders and 

managers. Von Braun was clearly a leader. I would say one of the things I contribute my 

own success to in the programs I was responsible in starting was Spacelab. I 

surrounded myself with the very best people that I could get. That was not always the 
Steve Johnson Interviews – Apollo/Saturn Program

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philosophy in a lot of the organizations at Marshall. If you had a good person, you 

wanted to keep him forever. My philosophy was that you first surround yourself with 

the very best people you can get. The second thing you do is you encourage and 

support their advancement. That does two things for you. First off, you lose that good 

guy, but I never had a problem replacing one of those good people with another good 

person. People would be happy to work for you if they knew you were going to help 

them. That was one of my best attributes, that I surround myself with very good people.

Johnson: It was shuttle from basically the beginning of your center directorship until 

you quit doing it. The Shuttle Program, did it proceed, and we had to come back from 

the Challenger disaster, would you describe it as problem-free during your directorship?

Lee: There were always problems and concerns that you had. That is the reason we 

continued detailed flight readiness reviews. One of the things that happened that I 

think was chastised at NASA was the flight readiness reviews, which were not 

supposed to be getting all your people together and making sure you are satisfied that 

you are ready to launch. Those got to be video telecons and they would set them up for 

an hour, a lot of people would not show up. As a result, you were not sure you got the 

best inputs. That happened because we had launched so many times and people 

decided they did not need to go to this. We reintroduced that you had to be involved, 
Steve Johnson Interviews – Apollo/Saturn Program

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you had to sign off on the thing. That caused people to identify concerns early that got 

fixed. 

One of the biggest concerns I had was on the Shuttle Main Engine. We went to a silicon 

nitrite bearing in the turbomachinery. That is a piece of glass. 

Johnson: That replaced a piece of what, steel?

Lee: Yes. I carried one of those in my pocket as long as I was center director. Pratt & 

Whitney proved that is was good. It was a very good thing, but that bothered me for a 

long time. We never had any problems with the Shuttle Main Engines in flight.

Johnson: I do not know if you call yourself lowest of the low, but you were not high up 

when you started at Marshall and you ascended to center directorship, so you had a 

broad career doing a lot of things. When you look back on your career, what jumps out 

at you that you think, wow, I am glad I was a part of that?

Lee: The most fun I had all around was on the Pegasus.

Johnson: The satellite some people thought was a waste of time.
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Lee: I was in residence and we reviewed and approved the sign changes, we approved 

them from a contract standpoint, we did the building of the avionics in the same 

building. I could see the work order go and get the PC [Printed Circuit] board fixed. 

Then that went to another area for superstructure. I was able to follow that. I took it up 

to GE [General Electric] and put it in the vacuum chamber and then I followed it to the 

Cape. I was the launch test conductor. I got the full gamut of what it was like. 

Johnson: It was your baby.

Lee: That was the most fun, the most rewarding. I would say probably the Spacelab was 

the most rewarding, mainly because it was new and different. We started from scratch. 

We had a little task team at Marshall called the Sordid Task Team. I headed that up. We 

looked at the preliminary design and then worked with the Europeans on the 

agreement and made sure we had an understanding. I had a good working relationship 

with the project people in Europe. We brought that thing to the point where I think we 

pretty well solved all the development problems when I became deputy director. 

Johnson: In your career, I am sure you worked with contractors on a regular basis. Was 

the contractor experience good? Did contractors do what you wanted them to do? Was 

it a good exchange of ideas?
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Lee: On which program?

Johnson: Just in general.

Lee: Not all of them were as good as others. Probably the best contractor I ever worked 

with, and I really did not have any direct control or responsibility, was on the Jupiter 

Program. That was Chrysler Corporation. They were very good to work with, some of 

the locals.

Johnson: Some of the locals were not so good?

Lee: No, some of the local guys were all really good that I worked with. We always 

came to an agreement, but we had to give one major contractor almost a zero for an 

incentive award in one period because they were not doing the job. What they did was 

they chose not to accept any fee in the period, so it did not go into record. I would say in 

general, I cannot complain. I do not know how other programs are, how the DoD sees

things, but I would say I always had a good working relationship with the contractors. 

Johnson: Did you notice rivalry among NASA’s various centers? Certainly you 

probably did when you were director. 
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Lee: I have been asked that before and I think it probably was not as bad as it worked 

out. There were some individuals who worked with individuals at other centers that 

were almost combative. They were rivals. You could see that in every center. That is 

individuals. From a center standpoint, the organization that did the Apollo, you had at 

least three of the strongest center directors that you have ever had, von Braun here, 

[Robert] Gilruth at JSC [Johnson Space Center], and [Dr. Kurt] Debus at the Cape. All of 

them were really big thinkers, looked after their system, their design, and their 

approaches. You had George Miller and Sam Phillips at Headquarters who were able to 

bring those guys together. It was not exactly rivalry as much as you had different 

opinions. I think the reason they got the reputation of being rivals is because some

individuals were. I can give you some names of people who were just hard to get along 

with. You just did not like them.

Johnson: From time to time, people would butt heads at various centers.

Lee: Yes, they just disagreed in concept, they disagreed in position. Clearly, there was 

that rivalry. It worked itself out in Skylab, but that created part of these different 

opinions.
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Johnson: Skylab, of course that was between the Apollo folks here and down and 

Houston where they probably had different visions. 

Lee: That had been a role that JSC had had before, a laboratory like that with all the 

human aspects of it. Because we had completed all the launch vehicles for Apollo here, 

JSC tied up most of their center with operation for the future. Ordinarily, that role 

would have gone to JSC if everything else had been equal, I think, but it came to 

Marshall because we were running out of business. That created a lot of this dissention 

between some individuals.

The other rivalry that was with JSC would become a little obvious. After Apollo, we 

had to diversify at Marshall. We got into the optics business, which was not our role at 

all. We were new in this. We did the HEAO [High Energy Astrophysics Observatory] 

Program and then we were assigned the Hubble [Space Telescope] and then Chandra. 

That really got some people at Goddard’s nose out of joint.

Johnson: Marshall is now working on telescopes, moving from propulsion to 

telescopes. 
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Lee: That is like you guys took over part of our role in missions. And we did. From an 

agency standpoint, it was a good move to retain Marshall Space Flight Center’s 

capability.

Johnson: Did Headquarters help or hinder? When you look back over your career, did 

Headquarters do what it was supposed to do?

Lee: I was really impressed with the management at Headquarters during the Apollo 

Program. Again, we had a national objective to get a man on the Moon. You had some 

really good people. I mentioned George Miller and Sharpe [First Name/Spelling?], good 

manager, and then Sam Phillips was on loan from the Air Force. [He was] an 

exceptional manager and had the right attitude. I would say those two guys had a lot to 

do with bringing the whole thing together. The centers probably did not give 

Headquarters the respect that they deserved in a lot of areas. We were down here, we 

were doing the hardware, we were managers with a lot of technical capabilities. Then 

you have these guys sitting up in Washington [District of Columbia] that do not do 

anything but go to parties. 

Johnson: That was the sort of feeling, yes.
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Lee: I spent my last year at Headquarters. I got a real respect for the people in 

Headquarters. They were sharp people. They did not have the hardware, hands-on 

experience we did, but very intelligent people, very ambitious, had the agency’s interest 

at heart. I think a little bit of that not having the respect for their role may have created a 

little bit of a problem between us and Headquarters at times too.

Johnson: When you look back on your career form the time you worked on the Saturn 

Program to Spacelab, the shuttle, did you have a sense during all those years you were 

part of making history?

Lee: No, and I am a little bit sorry I did not. I remember when we launched Apollo 11. 

There were a number of reporters in the blockhouse, in the launch facility, that were 

clearly looking for some profound, great statements. Some of our guys apparently 

thought ahead.

Johnson: They were ready. [Laughs]

Lee: They were ready. Heck, I was standing there, the Moon, this is great. No I did not. I 

thought about that a few times, why did you not think ahead a little bit and prepare 

yourself to enter into history with some of these other guys?