Interviewer(s): Roy Neal
Interviewee(s): Charles W. Mathews

Roy Neal: All right, come back with me now in time. You and I are going to go all the way back to 1958. And you were with NACA, the [National] Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, when it turned into NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Tell me about that transition, from your point of view.

Charles W. Mathews: Well, I’d actually have to go back to 1957, because at that time I became personally interested in whether men could return from space safely. I knew that somebody was going to orbit a satellite very soon, and that the ICBM [Intercontinental Ballistic Missile] capabilities were such that a man could probably be put up there. And as I said, as soon as they decided that a man should go up, the question was: Could you bring them back safely? So I drew on some work that a fellow by the name of Harvey [H. Julian] Allen out at the Ames Lab [Ames Research Center, Mountain View, California] did that established that very blunt shapes were the shapes to be used for reentry. But up to that time, it was applied to missiles, warheads that entered very steeply; and a man, in order to keep the accelerations down and so forth, would come in at a very shallow angle, just brushing the atmosphere and reentering much more slowly. That would produce a much greater heat input; the heating rate itself would be lower, but the heating would be higher.\n\n So I took these formulas that Harvey Allen had developed and calculated reentries with the shallow reentry angles that were for man and found out that, yes, it did seem practical; that the g’s developed were about 8 g, which with a properly positioned man could [withstand]. And the heating rates and total heat input [were] such that you could protect a very blunt body with something like a beryllium heatshield, something that could very easily absorb the heat. I didn’t do anything with that. That was back in February of 1957.\n\n But, NACA was working on a new high-speed program. They’d already, of course, flown the Bell X-1 airplane at supersonic speeds, and they were just about to fly the X-15 airplane that would go up to about 5 times the speed of sound. They began investigating the possibilities of flying an airplane that would go up to about 12 times the speed of sound, and this they called “Round Three”; X-1 being Round One, X-15 being Round Two. This would be the Round Three situation. Both Ames and Langley [Langley Research Center, Hampton, Virginia] were working on this type of thing; and Ames, where Harvey Allen was, decided it should be somewhat of a blunt shape. They more or less used a cone sliced in two as the type of body that they were looking at. The Langley people decided they were going to look at a highly swept delta wing with a flat bottom emphasizing the fact that a large lift-to-drag ratio would be a good thing to do. And the reason they did that was because they were envisioning trajectories [in] which the craft would come in and then skip out of the atmosphere any number of times. A low drag was very important for that particular maneuver.\n\n But, they intended to go to the Ames Laboratory—the Langley people intended to go to the Ames Laboratory—and try to settle this situation. And before they went, they decided to have a meeting to really discuss the pros and cons of the two approaches. And they always would invite somebody from the Flight Division, which I was a member of, over—even though we were not really supposed to be dealing with space; we were supposed to be dealing with airplanes. But, we were the only ones that had manned flight experience, so we always would be invited. And, I was invited over to this meeting. Near the end of the meeting, it was discussed, and I think this was just after Sputnik flew; it was either just before or just after, but a discussion took place about a return from orbit. And I spoke up and told them that once you’re in orbit, lift-to-drag, high lift and low drag, didn’t mean a thing because, in orbital flight, the flight is capable of sustaining itself and drag is minimum anyway, because you’re really outside the atmosphere; and that what you have to worry about is getting the man back safely. And there you wanted the most drag possible. So they somewhat (shall I say?) ignored that input. But they did go out to Ames; and I believe Harvey Allen presented a very similar argument.\n\n But meanwhile, I really hadn’t developed what kind of a body or what kind of a configuration [I was] talking about. And I thought it over and ultimately came up with the idea that we should have a winged vehicle that came in at very high angles of attack, almost broadside—very similar to the Shuttle, but even higher angles of attack, because at that time heat protection was more difficult. [I] went over and talked to my boss about this, and he agreed it was [a] fairly good idea. But when the Langley people came back, Max [Maxime A.] Faget was a part of the committee that went to Ames, and when he came back, he had the idea of the Mercury capsule shape, which is really a conical section of a sphere, as [it was] originally envisioned. If you envision cutting a conical section [out of] a sphere, this is the type of shape you would get. There was a considerable argument about which of these approaches would be best. And then the man [who] was in charge of the Round Three [John Becker] still wanted to maintain his approach. So in early January of 1958, the laboratory hierarchy decided they’d have a design competition. And so my particular group from the Flight Division [FRD] worked on this delta-wing, high-angle-attack approach. Max and his people from Pilotless Aircraft Research Division [PARD] worked on his approach [the capsule], and Johnny Becker, the fellow [who] was really pushing the Round Three, worked on that approach. And, regardless of what we did, the wing configurations came out weighing two to three times as much as the capsule. And it became apparent that we didn’t have the launch vehicles, at that time, that [were] capable of lifting a winged vehicle. So, [Dr. Robert R.] Bob Gilruth, who was charged with making the decision on that, opted for the so-called capsule; and the winged vehicle sort of dropped by the wayside at that particular time.\n\n Johnny Becker wanted to continue the argument and came over to see me about it. But, I told him, “No,” I thought the decision was right. So I really kind of dropped out of the space activities for a short period of time, just telling Gilruth if some true activities did develop in space—and in particular in manned spaceflight—I would appreciate being brought into that particular activity. But I had some important airplane-type projects, so I went back working on those particular projects. And after, I guess, a period of about a month—a month-and-a-half, the Deputy Center Director [Floyd Thompson] came up to me and said, “Chuck, we’ve got some people [who] are working on the capsule, and they’ve been working for quite a few months now. But we’re worried about not really having anybody that has manned experience, and we’d like you to head up that group and end up with a specification for a manned space vehicle.”\n\n So I went over and reviewed the work of this group, and it was surprising how much they had done. They had come up with a contoured couch to protect the human, for example. They had come up with refinements of the shape. They had initiated tests up in Johnsville [Pennsylvania] on the centrifuge to demonstrate that man, indeed, could withstand the g-forces if he was positioned properly in this contoured couch. There were a few things. I never really was happy with the structure that was involved; not the front heatshield part of it but the afterbody, which still would obtain considerable heat. But as a matter of fact, that really wasn’t resolved until after the McDonnell Corporation took on the job and came up with the structure that ultimately was used in Mercury some, oh, I guess 9 months later.\n\n But in any event, we did write a spec; prepare a spec. The people had all the material; they hadn’t put it in spec form. I got them to put it in spec form. I went up and briefed the people in Washington—and, by the way, Gilruth and Faget had moved up to Washington, briefly, during that time period to fight the battle of what NACA should do in the space effort.

Roy Neal: Was this before or after the Russians launched [Yuri] Gagarin?

Charles W. Mathews: Before.

Roy Neal: Before?

Charles W. Mathews: Yes.

Roy Neal: All of this is pre-Gagarin?

Charles W. Mathews: Yes. That’s right.

Roy Neal: That, to a degree at least, prompted action, didn’t it?

Charles W. Mathews: That’s right. This activity was in the spring of ’58. And [Sputnik had been launched roughly 7 months before]—

Roy Neal: This was leading up, then, to the formation of NASA [National Aeronautics and Space Administration].

Charles W. Mathews: Yes, it was leading up to the formation of NASA. And as I say, Gilruth and Faget and one other person—Charlie [Charles H.] Zimmerman—were key people in the fight not only for NASA, but in the fight for a manned spaceflight program. Even within the NACA group, there [were] questions about how important a manned spaceflight program might be. Many were much more interested in a pure science type of program.\n\n But, in any event, I went up and briefed them with this spec. And as a result, Max was able to show this spec to the President’s Scientific Advisory Committee—the PSAC committee. The Air Force, who was our chief competitor, didn’t have a spec at that time. And, although they had been doing work on it in advance of the work that we had done, they hadn’t bothered to really end up having a true detailed specification. And that was a significant [point] in getting a manned spaceflight program and having it put in NASA.\n\n The reason why NASA, I guess, was formed in the first place as a civil agency is that’s what Eisenhower wanted. He did not want to have a military activity in space other than for military purposes itself. He felt that if there were space activities for other purposes, that should be headed by a civil agency. Well, after it was pretty well decided that there would be a NASA and that NACA would be the nucleus for developing a NASA, Gilruth, [Zimmerman,] and Faget came back. We went to work on preparing a work statement for the purpose of letting contracts for the so-called Mercury spacecraft. That was also about the time the spacecraft was named “Mercury,” by the way.

Roy Neal: By this time, was the Space Task Group yet in place?

Charles W. Mathews: That was the start of the Space Task Group. At this point in time, when we started working on a work statement, the Space Task Group was formed. Gilruth was assigned the job of heading it up. Faget was given an assignment that really was the technical head of [an engineering] group, which [had] yet to be formed, called the Flight Systems Division. And, Charlie Zimmerman came back from Washington; he was an older man, and he was assigned to head up a group called the Contracts and Administration Division. I continued working on the work statement and other preparations for putting out a request for proposal from the industry. But, I wondered what my role in this would be.\n\n After about 2 weeks, Gilruth came up to me and said that I would be in charge of an Operations Division; and I regarded this as quite [an] input, because we really hadn’t worked very much on how this vehicle was to be operated. We worked on the vehicle. We had worked on the worldwide network of tracking and data receiving stations that would occur, but we really hadn’t worked on how to operate the spacecraft. At that time I went over, Chris [Christopher C.] Kraft [Jr.] was in the same [Flight] Division that I was in and had done work for me in the past at various times. And, I felt he was the guy to really start working on certain aspects of the operations. So I went over and got him and gradually brought in a few more Flight Division people. Max did the same thing with the Pilotless Aircraft Research Division, augmenting his group.\n\n The first thing I asked Chris to do was to look at launching, because we realized this would be rather dangerous. These launch vehicles at that time were quite unreliable; there were failures all over the place. And yet we were talking about putting a man on board. So he began working with the Huntsville people, here; it was not a NASA group at that time. It was called the Army Ballistic Missile Agency [ABMA], but it was the same [Wernher] von Braun group that ultimately came into NASA later on. And working with the people in the Ballistic Missiles Division and General Dynamics, or Convair, on the Atlas, which it appeared that we would use—we might use the Redstone indefinitely [at that time]; [but] we’d have to use the Atlas to achieve orbital flight.\n\n Coming out of that came the various abort detection systems that are used to sense whether a missile was operating properly. We knew that something would have to be done. As a matter of fact, Gilruth came in some time before that—I’m going back a little bit—and said, “We need some means of escape from the booster.” This is really before NASA was formed. And Max in his inimitable way came up with the escape rocket that was part of the Mercury system. And, that was incorporated as a part of the specification, this escape rocket; but no one had figured out exactly what to do about [it]. Would the astronaut make the sole decision of getting off the booster, sort of like a pilot using an ejection seat? But the feeling was, there wouldn’t be time; so that there would have to be an automatic abort system in which various critical measurements were sensed, and that would automatically cause the escape rocket to fire and pull the capsule away from the booster.\n\n So that’s the first thing that was done by that group. Then I had another group. The powers-that-be decided that the Flight Division at Lewis—there was a Flight Division also at Lewis [Research Center, Cleveland, Ohio]—would come under my wing; and at first it was somewhat undecided exactly what role they would have. But I began feeling that probably they would have something to do with the launch preparation of the spacecraft. And that was pretty well firmed up because in November of ’58, Max came to me and said, “Look, we are already in weight trouble with this capsule, and if we could use an ablation heatshield instead of a beryllium heatshield, it would be much lighter.”\n\n Now, we had discussed that when we were writing the spec some time earlier but decided to go with the beryllium shield because we knew it would work. We were worried about the ablation shield because, with this long heating that would occur in this shallow reentry, we were afraid that the plastic material might melt and slough off, and the heat protection would be lost. But anyway, I agreed with him that if we could convince the management of this that we would rewrite the spec to put in this ablative type of heatshield. Well instead of agreeing with this, they said we should carry on a parallel program of both the beryllium heatshield and the ablative heatshield. And by the way, the ballistic flights that occurred on the Redstone [including] the ones that [Alan B.] Shepard [Jr.] and [Virgil I. “Gus”] Grissom flew [used] a beryllium heatshield, where all the rest of them used the ablative heatshield.\n\n But anyway, they came also back and said, “Well, you’re going to have to demonstrate that ablation will really work.” So Max suggested that we fly a spacecraft—not a production spacecraft but a test spacecraft—on an Atlas very early. And because we didn’t really know what we were doing—this was, as I say, in the November/December time period—we set the flight date for the next 4th of July; just 6 months [later]—

Roy Neal: A boilerplate model?

Charles W. Mathews: What did you say?

Roy Neal: A boilerplate model?

Charles W. Mathews: A boilerplate model, right. But it wasn’t that simple because it had to be stabilized; it had to have an attitude control; it had to, of course, have instrumentation so we knew how the heat protection was performing; it had to have a parachute system; and so forth. And, by the way, the [tests] of the parachute system, that’s one place where the Flight Division had gotten into the act very early. A fellow by the name of Jerry [Jerome B.] Hammack, from the Flight Division, began dropping boilerplate spacecraft of the Max Faget type and landing them using a parachute system, and that was done well before NASA was formed.\n\n But [in] any event, it worked out that because Langley was familiar with the parachute recovery system—rescue beacons and the other parts of the recovery system—they would do the afterbody of this boilerplate spacecraft; but the Cleveland Flight Group [Lewis] would do the forebody with the ablative heatshield, the various temperature [measurements], and the attitude stabilization and so forth. It was a program called Big Joe.\n\n So, a man by the name of Scott [H.] Simpkinson headed up the group that would do this Big Joe spacecraft. And the man [who] was assigned to me as my Deputy—Chris Kraft was one of my Deputies—a fellow by the name of George Merritt Preston [“Pres”], was my other Deputy. He would be the one that would take this down to the Cape and, incidentally, the people would go with him and probably stay there and form the group that would check out subsequent spacecraft. So we started to work and all sorts of things happened; for example, when Scott went out to General Dynamics to check on the Atlas, they told us, “Well, we would have to have some kind of a blockhouse system to verify that the spacecraft was operating properly,” something we hadn’t even thought about. So I ended up saying, “Well, gee, I know a fellow that’s working for RCA down at the Cape. He’s a very good instrument engineer. We’ll put him to work designing these blockhouse consoles.” So [those were] the first blockhouse consoles that were ever designed for the manned spaceflight program.\n\n But perhaps even worse, we made arrangements with the Vanguard people that were launching the original [U.S.] satellite to make use of their hangar—Hangar S—down at the Cape to check out this boilerplate spacecraft. So, sure enough, in June we brought the spacecraft down. We brought it down in bits and pieces. We were, in fact, behind schedule; it was almost a miracle that you could do that much in the time period. But anyway, I began receiving some complaints from a representative that Max had down at the Cape that things weren’t really being supported very well down there. But I would ask Pres, my Deputy in charge of this, and he’d say, “No, things are going okay.” But, the spacecraft ran into problems of [an] electronic nature called RFI [Radio Frequency Interference] and EMI [Electromagnetic Interference]—I won’t go into the details of that; you probably know what that is—but, in combination with the reports of not being supported very well and the problems with the spacecraft, Gilruth decided to go down and look himself. I had been down to the Cape [only] one time before—and I’ll go into that—but we went down there and the Hangar S people had roped off about a 30-foot square area where we were to check out the spacecraft, and they [had given] us one office. The hangar had offices on either side, but they gave us one office meant for about 4 people; and we had about 8 or 10 engineers crawling all over each other in that office. And, Gilruth was pretty darn unhappy. So he sent the Cleveland people back to Cleveland to solve their technical problems with the spacecraft and immediately approached the powers-that-be within NASA to get the support down there straightened out. And, indeed, it was. We were given, really for the time, ample office space. I guess there was nothing in the hangar, so we had plenty of space. Why they roped off a 30-foot space, I don’t know. But anyway, that’s the way the manned space program started its flight program.

Roy Neal: It seems to me, Chuck, that where we’ve been talking along the lines of Mercury, you had that spacecraft designed just about to that point where it is ready to fly.

Charles W. Mathews: Right. Let me go back a little bit, though, and talk about the first trip that we made down to the Cape. Bob Gilruth, myself, Merritt Preston, [and] several other people decided we would go down to the Cape. This was again in November of 1958. General Yates wanted to meet us and find out, you know, what we were really up to.

Roy Neal: That’s Donald Gordon Yates, the commander of the Eastern Test Range.

Charles W. Mathews: He was the commander of the Atlantic Missile Range [AMR], right. And we, of course, wanted to find out, you know, what support he could give us. We went down there, and we ended up staying in a very unusual place called the Tradewinds Hotel. I don’t know whether you’ve ever heard of it—

Roy Neal: It’s where the Navy stayed, too.

Charles W. Mathews: That’s right. And the ABMA people also stayed [there]. Well, the man that managed that motel was tremendously enthusiastic about manned space. There wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do for us; and on those first visits down there, he would have crab claw hors d’oeuvres and all sorts of things just to make sure that we would stay at his place whenever the opportunity came about for us to go down there. Anyway, the first day we were down there, we just [toured] the Cape and the Patrick Air Force Base facilities to find out what was down there. And then we found out that General Yates had been called away and would not be available; so Bob Gilruth, who had other things to do, said, well, he would like me to stay down there and wait for General Yates to come back, which was a few days hence. But he would have to go back and do some things in Washington and so forth. The next morning, I got up very early and went up to the Cape to see an Atlas launch. And the Atlas fired up, and before it got a foot off the pad just fell right over and burst into flames. A group of us were outside the blockhouse, which provided the best view, and there was [an] area between a kind of a facility building and the blockhouse, a covered area that you could run to in case something happened. And, I watched this happen and was wondering, “Now what on Earth would happen if a man was on top of that?” And, I noticed everybody running toward this [building], but I stayed and watched. But then the shock wave hit, and so I turned and ran into that area. It turned out with the distances, it was just about a second or two, but it seemed like an awfully long time. So that was our first experience with an Atlas.\n\n A day or two later, one of General Yates’s Deputies, a Colonel Cooper, called and said he would like to talk to me in advance of my talking to General Yates, and he came forward and discussed several things. One was a worldwide satellite system, low-altitude satellite system, of multiple satellites that would form the basis for communication back to a central control area. The other thing he talked about was creating an armada of small oceangoing vessels that would be used to recover the manned spacecraft. Now, the Atlantic Missile Range did have a small recovery fleet already, [with] which they recovered things immediately offshore. But I was really worried about both of these propositions because I could not see us putting in place a satellite complex of this type—a communications satellite complex of that type—in the time period we were talking about, that we’d have to use some other means. And I couldn’t see creating an AMR Navy, so to speak. So I was really worried when I went the next day to see General Yates. Cooper described his communications satellite configuration, and I guess Yates could tell that I was not very enthusiastic about it. But then when Cooper began describing this navy, Yates blew his top, and said, “What have we got the U.S. Navy for? We don’t have to develop the big capability. We can ask the Navy to do it.”\n\n So, I was really impressed with General Yates. And meanwhile, of course, the other thing disappeared, too. But it did bring up the question, “Well, how are we going to get all this [data] back to some place, some central place? And what are we going to do about it if things go wrong, or if—even if things go right, how do we know what’s going on, as we say, in real time?” So I put Chris Kraft on that activity, and he worked at [it]. I kept after him saying, you know, “When are you going to come up with something?” And so forth. Ultimately, he did come up with a plan—a very basic, rudimentary type plan—but he also suggested that he would like to be the Flight Director at the centralized facility. This was before Walt [Walter C.] Williams came on board, by the way, considerably before. And I said, recognizing Chris as the type of person that would be very good at that, “Yes, as we develop this, if it turns out to be as you describe it, then you will be the Flight Director.”\n\n The other thing that happened in that regard was, we got word from Headquarters that the Canadian government would be willing to provide us with engineering capability. The Canadian government had developed a very fine, two-place fighter airplane called the CF-105; better than anything the United States had at the time, and already demonstrated to twice the speed of sound. But the Canadian government had decided that after many overruns and so forth that they couldn’t really afford to build this fighter. So even though they had, I think it was, like 10 flight test airplanes flying and demonstrating this tremendous performance, they scrapped the program. The government said to A. V. Roe [AVRO], the company that was building the airplane, “No, not only are you not going to do this but we are going to actually break the airplanes up.” And a couple of men, realizing that, you know, there would be thousands of engineers out of work, began looking at where these people could get work. And one of the places was in the space program. And many of these people had flight-test experience, or at least had, you know, good, solid, industrial airplane experience—both from England and from [Canada]—[so] the powers-that-be at NASA deemed that was a very good thing to do. So, Gilruth and I and two other people—Charlie [Charles J.] Donlan, who was Gilruth’s Deputy at the time, and a fellow by the name of Paul [E.] Purser—went up to Canada on a cold February day in 1959 and spent, I guess it was 2 days interviewing people, just one right after another, one right after another. And out of thousands—we didn’t interview thousands; we interviewed, perhaps, several hundred —but out of the thousands of engineers that expressed an interest, we picked 40—30 or 40, I can’t remember the exact number, and brought them down. I had picked a certain number to be assigned to the Operations Group; and they really had operations experience. These were primary flight-test engineers. And, Chris used these people largely to develop the concept of the Control Center that was to be implemented down at the Cape. And—

Roy Neal: Down at the Cape, the old Mercury Control?

Charles W. Mathews: Mercury Control.

Roy Neal: So, in other words, that was the predecessor of all the more modern control rooms.

Charles W. Mathews: That’s correct.

Roy Neal: With such things as flight dynamics—

Charles W. Mathews: Well, we had all those. We had flight dynamics officers and it was much more rudimentary, of course. But we had all those things. In fact, Chris had set up this Control Center organization; and some very key people—there was a fellow by the name of Tec, Tecwyn Roberts, who was a Welshman, who in a way, as far as Flight Control was [concerned], was Chris’s right-hand man. Very low profile. He did operate in the Control Center, but he was much more low profile. But he, in many respects, was the brains behind a lot of the things that went on. And then there was a Scotchman who ultimately went back; I think he went back to Great Britain. But he did an awful lot of work on the design of the Control Center itself. But there [were] a considerable number of people, like John [D.] Hodge was another Flight Director, and so forth. And these were either Canadians or Englishmen or Welshmen and Scotchmen and what-have-you. So that was the international impact on the Mercury Program.

Roy Neal: And right about that time, when all of these things were beginning to go into place, is that when Walt Williams came aboard with his X-15 experience?

Charles W. Mathews: Just about. I mentioned the fact that we had this problem down at the Cape; and we were coming up to a—we didn’t launch in July, but we launched in September, just a few months later. And, at the time of the launch, Gilruth came up to me and indicated that Williams would be coming on board. I really didn’t understand why he was coming on board, but I suspect it was related to the problems we had had down at the Cape. But, in any event, the flight went off; and it was sort of a comedy of errors that proved to be very successful. The Atlas failed [to] stage, for one thing. And the base manager for General Dynamics would stand on the top of their hangar and call out staging, which he did. But it was called out on the basis of the booster engines shutting down and him being able to see it, which they did. But instead of jettisoning the booster engines, they didn’t jettison. So the Atlas was carrying extra weight along on this flight. But it shows how crude some things were. People depended very much on MacNabb’s callout, even though they had telemetry and so forth.

Roy Neal: That’s B. G. MacNabb you’re talking about.

Charles W. Mathews: Yes. Never before had anybody really thought of a need to do much in what we call real time; that is, call out things as they really happen from telemetry records and from other types of data that are received. Because, they were flying things in which there wasn’t much that could be done anyway; and you could look at whatever happened later on. So there was no great real-time capability. But anyway, because the booster engines did not stage, unknown to us, the vehicle didn’t get up to total velocity and it also went to propellant depletion; instead of having a normal cutoff signal, it just ran out of fuel. And because it didn’t have a cutoff signal, the retrorockets that would back the Atlas away from the spacecraft didn’t fire, because it was fired on the basis of that cutoff signal. So, although the separation system for the spacecraft took place—the spacecraft was separated, [but] the Atlas with this residual propulsion—just dumping residual [propellant] out—kept nudging the spacecraft. And the spacecraft kept fighting it, trying to control its attitude and so forth, because it was activated, and ran out of attitude control fuel. So the spacecraft finally got away from the launch vehicle and started a slow tumble. This is all in retrospect, by the way; we didn’t know this in real time. [It] started a slow tumble. But it just happened as it entered the atmosphere [it was] going heatshield forward. A great fortune.\n\n And meanwhile, Chris was not down there. There [were] no Flight Control people involved in this. We did have recovery people involved; we did have connections between the downrange recovery people that operated out of places like Antigua and Puerto Rico, and so forth—had communications with them—but we never heard from them. We were aware that something was wrong. We didn’t know if the booster had over-sped and the spacecraft had got into orbit, or under-sped. So Big Joe, in retrospect, came in properly; but we didn’t know that. And we waited around, probably Bob Gilruth waited around for at least a half an hour. And because there had been so many failures, General Yates was always very insistent on having a press conference in a very timely fashion after any flight. They always took place down at Patrick Air Force Base, which is about 30 miles, I guess, removed from the Cape. And Bob said, “Well, I guess General Yates wants me down there, so I’ll go on down. But you wait around and see what might have happened.” We didn’t have the slightest idea what had happened to the spacecraft.\n\n What had really happened was, some observers on one destroyer downrange in the vicinity of Puerto Rico had seen the flash of the spacecraft reentry going over its bow, and then, when [one positioned] further [downrange], going over its stern, approaching from the stern. So the recovery force deployed from Puerto Rico, very shortly had the spacecraft in sight, and moved their destroyers at flank speed, you know, to recover the spacecraft. But they didn’t bother to tell anybody about it. So I waited another half an hour, I guess, and very reluctantly got in the car and drove down to Patrick. And as I was entering the building, the man in charge of the recovery fleet—Destroyer Flotilla Five, [Admiral Harry Smith] I guess it was, or Destroyer Flotilla Four—was coming out of the press conference and said, “Chuck, someone’s told me there’s a phone call.” And so he took the phone call and turned to me and said, “The spacecraft’s been recovered.” So it was a very successful thing; but half the Press had already left; so some of the newspapers came out and said the thing was a failure; others came out and said it was a success. It turned out to be very much of a success, because the Atlas didn’t quite make the speed and it produced a trajectory that was similar to an abort trajectory, where the Atlas would not make it to orbit. It was more critical from a heating standpoint than if we’d reentered from orbit. And we found out the conical afterbody section on the spacecraft was almost plastic; it had already hardened, but it had given evidence of flowing. And we had to make a complete redesign of the production spacecraft in that particular area. Fortunately, that’s where the parachutes were; but the parachutes came through it fine.\n\n But anyway, Walt Williams came on board. He was there for the Big Joe operation; he took no part in it, but came on board. [He] had a difficult transition in the sense that the X-15 was just about flying. So he had to spend probably more than half his time initially back at Edwards, where the X-15 was flying, and a lesser time at Langley Field, where the Space Task Group was located. And the time that he spent back there was not very much time anyway, because he had been made the single point-of-contact with General Yates and he was in the process of negotiating that agreement and other aspects of an agreement of support from the Atlantic Missile Range. So, the various activities went along. The first production spacecraft were delivered. One of the production spacecraft—I forget whether it was the first or the second one—was sent down here to Huntsville. I think we were ordered to send it down to Huntsville for some structural tests; they had some facilities down here. But I think the real reason was that it was for them to take a look at it. Well, we already knew the spacecraft quality was very poor as they were being delivered out of the White Room at McDonnell Douglas. And it was reinforced by feedback from the people down here in Huntsville, that the spacecraft quality was very poor.

Roy Neal: In what respect?

Charles W. Mathews: Almost generally poor. It wasn’t the structure or anything like that. It was tied in with things like the wiring and so forth, aggravated by the fact that you had to get inside the spacecraft to check it out; and it was very small, and people would kick things or step on things and break wires, and so forth. It was a real problem. But anyway, it was decided that the spacecraft would be delivered in spite of their poor quality and that a group of McDonnell and NASA people at the Cape would rework the spacecraft. I objected to that. I felt that McDonnell ought to be required to deliver flight-worthy spacecraft. It was their responsibility, and the minute [it] went down to the Cape, they could get rid of some of the responsibility. And furthermore, they could get partial payment on the spacecraft once they delivered it. So there was a fair argument developing about this, I have to say; and that was at the time of the MA-1 flight, which [was] a year after Big Joe. And, the MA-1 flight was again scheduled to take place on the [August] time period of 1960. And, even in those days we had a flight readiness review activity.\n\n Well, I had gone down to the Cape several months prior to launch—I actually had my family go down [there] and stay in a hotel so I could be down [there]—because of the fact that I wanted to make sure that the Cape people, this time, were really on the ball and doing things right and so forth. And I had not had a lot of contact with Walt. Whenever I was back at Langley Field, he would come in to talk to me and sometimes ask me for data.

Roy Neal: Mercury-Atlas 1.

Charles W. Mathews: Right.

Roy Neal: Oh sure.

Charles W. Mathews: This was to fly a production spacecraft; not necessarily with all the systems on board, but the structural thing and some of the production systems as well. And I had gone down to the Cape, I guess, about in June some time and really just stayed down there to make sure this spacecraft would be truly flight-ready. Just about every day it would rain. And the afterbody of the Mercury spacecraft had shingles made out of a high-temperature material called René-41 and then some super insulation inside of that, which is sort of like a fiberglass insulation but much better. And because of the shingled nature of this, this prevented the heat from producing any breakage structurally because the shingles could slip, they also provided for leaks. So when it rained—and we had no White Room aboard the gantry at that time; it was just open—the shingles would leak and the super insulation—a kind of cottony material—would get wet; and we’d go in there and take all the shingles off and put dryers on, dry it out; and the next day, one of us would do the same thing [again]. One day, one of the fellows decided that the thing to do would be to put a plastic shroud around the spacecraft, and connect this shroud to a cable that when the spacecraft lifted off, the cable—really a line, a lanyard line—would pull the shroud away.\n\n Well, Walt came down for the flight readiness review, and when he heard about this he blew his stack and said, “Geez, I don’t want to have this plastic thing aboard the spacecraft.” And we talked to him, at length, about the fact [of] how much it rained and convinced him that it could be very reliably pulled off. So, he ultimately gave in. The day [before] the flight was a relatively sunny day and then, in the evening—or late afternoon—it became overcast; and then it started raining a little bit, a little kind of drizzly rain. And the rain then over time—I think that the launch was like at 4:00; it was in the early morning—over time, the rain increased a little bit and a little bit more; but it never really became too serious. And Walt and I would check with the Air Force about what their feeling was, and their feeling was that, well, this is a ballistic missile and we can launch ballistic missiles under any weather conditions. So we kept going; probably both Walt and I having a little bit of “go” fever.\n\n But at the time of the launch, almost within seconds of the launch, a gale hit us. You couldn’t see—they tell me from the blockhouse, you couldn’t see the launch. And, it was really a very bad storm; a tremendous rain. The launch took place. The launch [vehicle] went up to about 30,000 ft and something happened. It was obvious that the launch vehicle had disintegrated; and it was augmented by the Range Safety Officer blowing it anyway, to make sure no big pieces fell anyplace, and most of it fell off shore. Well, Bob Gilruth was not only disconcerted by the fact that the launch took place under the conditions it did, but he also, I think, felt the program was probably over at that time, at least for a day or so. No one had fed anything back to him or anything like that, but he came up to me and said, “Chuck, I’m going to go over and see my dad and mother,” who lived on the other side of Florida, “and if you find out anything, here’s my phone number—here’s their phone number, and give me a call.” And he left.\n\n So, what I’m going to tell you now is in the [background] of that failure. I had previously said that we had this debate going about whether we should make McDonnell deliver flight-ready spacecraft or not. And Gilruth had told me that if I could convince Walter [F.] Burke, who was the Vice President in charge of the Mercury Program for McDonnell, that this was the thing to do, [then] that’s what we would do. I talked to Burke—he’s a very good friend of mine, we did a lot of things together during the Gemini Program—but couldn’t convince him. And I don’t exactly blame him because it wasn’t at all in McDonnell’s interest, either financially or any way, to not get those spacecraft out the door, okay? So I lost that argument; and I maintained it very strongly to such a point that Gilruth later called me in and said, “Chuck, you’re no longer going to be involved with the checkout down here.” He obviously felt, you know, if I was taking a position I couldn’t really be very conscientious in what they were planning to do, which was sort of to rebuild the spacecraft down at the Cape—which was done by the way. So Walt then put a fellow [who] later became my Deputy on the Gemini Program, Kenny [Kenneth S.] Kleinknecht, in charge of the Mercury work, although Preston still maintained his position as the guy down [there]; permanently down there. And I was left with just the Flight Control operations.\n\n [Those] operations proceeded very efficiently and expeditiously. I think one of the main things that was important about it was the fact that we developed a very major simulation program; that is, we not only had the astronauts flying their simulators, but we had all the flight controllers in their positions, monitoring the flight of the spacecraft. And we not only simulated normal flights but all sorts of malfunctions. Now, the malfunctions that [occur] never are the ones that you’ve simulated. But it injects a certain discipline and professionalism; and I am sure Chris takes great pride in the fact that right from the word go that flight control operation was regarded as a very professional operation by anybody that observed it, including the news media. And, it was largely due to this simulation effort that we initiated.

Roy Neal: During that period of time, also, were you not concerned somewhat with Apollo and lunar orbiting, with rendezvous, that sort of thing? Were you not beginning to consider those various items? You were working part of that, too, weren’t you?

Charles W. Mathews: Yeah. Actually, after Grissom’s flight, I didn’t really follow the day-to-day operations of Mercury at all—because I thought the Flight Control operations had already demonstrated that they could be done very satisfactorily—and [I] started working just as an individual with some people on advanced programs. Now there were two programs: one was headed up by a fellow by the name of Jim [James A.] Chamberlin, who was a Canadian [who] came down here with the [AVRO] group; in fact, he was the lead guy. And, by the way, going back for just a minute: he was put in—Charlie Zimmerman, who I mentioned before, was head of the Contracts and Administration activities. Being an older man, he decided he would go back and work research at the Langley Research Center. And, Gilruth replaced him with Jim Chamberlin; not on the administration aspects—they got another fellow by the name of Wes [Wesley L.] Hjornevik to come down from Washington and take on the administration—but he took on the contracts activity and he also took on the engineering because—what happened, really, was that Max and his group, with a background of “researchy”-type of activities, had produced a situation at McDonnell where there [were] all kind of changes being put in all the time. And, Gilruth thought that a guy with the industrial experience, that Jim Chamberlin had, would be better at getting a more disciplined activity.\n\n So Max then moved over to working on advanced programs like Apollo, and Chamberlin took on the Mercury development activity. And, out of the Mercury development activity, there were a number of problems that came up initially—just with the spacecraft, as I sort of implied already. And, Jim Chamberlin and a number of McDonnell people came forward and said, “You know, in the next spacecraft, we should really be doing it this way rather than the way on Mercury” and so [forth]. One was an obvious one: We really should have two men instead of one man, because one man’s got his hands full. He can hardly do anything besides just monitor the spacecraft. But there were other things, like a [spacecraft] where most of the equipment was outside the cockpit rather than in. I mentioned the fact that checking the spacecraft out—the Mercury spacecraft—they had to get inside and stepping on things and kicking things and breaking wires, and so the new spacecraft was designed with most of the equipment outside the pressurized cockpit; so the cockpit was relatively clean. It had only the displays and the controls that the astronauts absolutely needed. All the support equipment, environmental control, communications equipment; [these were] all outside.

Roy Neal: So you then had really begun working on the second-generation spacecraft—

Charles W. Mathews: He had begun working on it; right.

Roy Neal: Right.

Charles W. Mathews: And I started working with him on it, largely to bring in the operational inputs again. And at that time I spent most of the time on that spacecraft, which turned out to be the Gemini spacecraft. Later on, as things developed more completely, the Gemini spacecraft went well beyond that because, as you know—as everybody knows—the President decided to go to the Moon; and as we determined what things might be required to do that—like flying for a week or two, or rendezvous, or extravehicular activity, and so forth—these things were injected into the Gemini spacecraft.

Roy Neal: According to my notes, too, they even had something called parasail, which they wanted to work with—

Charles W. Mathews: Right.

Roy Neal: —and introducing the Titan rocket rather than the Atlas.

Charles W. Mathews: Yeah, that’s correct. And I’ll get to that eventually in just a minute.

Roy Neal: Okay.

Charles W. Mathews: But anyway, Gilruth was very strong in this, that there should be an intermediate spacecraft between Mercury and Apollo that could demonstrate that the things that were being specified for Apollo, in terms of mission specifications and other things, could really be accomplished. And as a result, the Gemini spacecraft was subsequently approved. And as a matter of fact, Gemini and the Apollo command module, the contracts for those two were let within a month of each other—one for a short-base program to get information in a hurry, and the other for a much longer program, which ultimately would land on the Moon.

Roy Neal: And somewhere in there, somebody had to decide how do you pronounce the name. Was it Gemini [long e] or Gemini [long i].

Charles W. Mathews: Right.

Roy Neal: Which way would it be?

Charles W. Mathews: Well, I gave a talk just recently down at the Cape. They’re putting in a Gemini memorial down there, [and] they had a banquet. They raised that same question. And I told the audience that I’d like to have them vote. So I told them that I would like everyone [who] favored Gemini [long e] to say “Aye,” and after that I asked the audience that everyone [who] favored Gemini [long i] to say “Aye,” and of course there were ayes on both sides. And I said, “The ayes have it.” And, it’s really pronounced Gemini [long i], okay?

Roy Neal: [laughs] Well—

Charles W. Mathews: Frequently, I call it Gemini [long e], but—

Roy Neal: I noticed you’ve been calling it Gemini [long e] throughout this interview.

Charles W. Mathews: Right.

Roy Neal: So do I. Walt Williams told me to call it that.

Charles W. Mathews: Right.

Roy Neal: He said, “That’s the way it’s going to be.”

Charles W. Mathews: Okay.

Roy Neal: He made an instant decision. I don’t think it’ll ever get fully resolved, do you?

Charles W. Mathews: No, I don’t.

Roy Neal: I’m sorry I interrupted, but I—

Charles W. Mathews: Oh, that’s okay.

Roy Neal: —had to go with that, so that for future reference, future generations will probably call it Gemini [long e] or Gemini [long i].

Charles W. Mathews: Right. [laughs]

Roy Neal: All right, sir. Go ahead.

Charles W. Mathews: Okay. About the time I was working on that, I was paying very little attention to Apollo, but President [John F.] Kennedy had already made his pronouncement, and people were working on that. And the only thing that I did was, as I say—was to look at what people were coming up with for mission requirements for Apollo, and making sure that they were going to be put into Gemini. And Jim Chamberlin was a marvelous conceptual engineer; he knew exactly how to get these things properly incorporated in the spacecraft.\n\n But in [September] of ’61, I was very surprised to find out that—the decision had already been made that we were going to move to Houston and set up a major Center down there. [Later] I was very surprised to find out that Gilruth had assigned me to another division other than the Operations Division, called the Spacecraft Technology Division. And, in a way, it was a blow to me because Chris was raised to a Directorate position in the new Center organization and Max Faget was raised to a Directorate position, and a Division Chief was one level below that, and I was wondering, you know, what was going on, sometimes even wondering whether I should go to Houston or not.\n\n But, Gilruth came in to Max and [me] after that had happened and said, “I’d like you to write [an] article for the Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics about how to land on the Moon.” So, we set to work on writing that article; and Max was quite strong on—the standard mission at that time was called “the direct [ascent].” You came off the Earth in a direct translunar run to the Moon, and you made a direct landing on the Moon. And Max had really embraced that idea to the extent of trying to get his people to design a spacecraft that could do everything; that is, go to the Moon, land on the Moon, return, and reenter. And his emphasis had been on that. But there had been this activity, within Langley actually, that was promoting the idea of a thing called lunar orbit rendezvous. And they started promoting that, I think, way back in the early sixties some time or other. But it kind of dangled in place. Max had one group sort of working on that, but [he] hadn’t embraced it.\n\n So anyway, we were to write this article and, because there was no real decision made as to what [the mode] really should be, the article was not a good article, a very poor article. I’ve read it since, and it just treats lunar landing in a very general way. But Gilruth told me one day that he would like me to go up to Headquarters. The Langley people were up there giving a discussion of this lunar orbit rendezvous. And Gilruth, at that time, was starting to be somewhat positive about it, as was [D.] Brainerd Holmes, the guy [who] was running the manned spaceflight program at the time, but not, you know, to the point that a decision would be made or anything like that. Gilruth asked me what I thought of it, and I said, you know, I thought it was probably something really worth fairly strenuous study. And he said, “Well, Max has got this group studying it. But he’s got another group that’s studying the direct [ascent] type of approach to the thing. And part of [your] organization will be involved with working with both these groups to see what you ultimately think about this.”\n\n So I had these groups—Spacecraft Technology Division did a lot of other things—but these are the groups that I really focused on, and they had moved down to Houston in December. I started going down there in January and following this activity and talking to both these groups. And the group that was working on the direct [ascent] suddenly started also looking at lunar landers of the lunar module type. And, it was pretty apparent to me that at least all my people were … integrated in coming to the conclusion that the lunar module and lunar orbit rendezvous [were] the way to go. So, I’ll give you a little side story.\n\n Subsequently, I don’t know sometime in 1962—early 1962—I went back up to Washington where there was a further discussion of lunar orbit rendezvous. Meanwhile a fellow by the name of Joe [Joseph F.] Shea, [who] ultimately took on the Apollo spacecraft activity, was up there as one of Brainerd’s Deputies; and he was really charged with making this particular decision. But Joe was away on a trip—I don’t know; maybe it was a familiarization trip, I’m not quite sure why—but, anyway, the President’s Scientific Advisory Committee had informed Holmes that they wanted to go down to Huntsville here. Huntsville was espousing Earth orbit rendezvous. The two are not exactly compatible with each other. Things are done for slightly different reasons. But one place they are compatible is the fact that [they both] could utilize a much smaller booster, if you use rendezvous either in Earth orbit or lunar orbit. The direct [ascent] thing took a very big booster called a Nova; [with rendezvous] the Saturn was big enough, but that was a much smaller vehicle and, of course, it was the one that was ultimately used.\n\n The discussion up in Washington following this information was pretty serious because PSAC told us they didn’t want anybody to attend this meeting but the Huntsville people. And Brainerd said, “Well, we can’t do that. We’ll at least want to know what’s going on. So, Chuck, will you go down there and attend that meeting?” Now, I want to inject that [there’re] a number of stories that [came] out about the lunar orbit rendezvous decision that are not compatible with what I’m going to tell you; but this is what actually happened. I called the fellow that was working on the lunar orbit rendezvous thing down at Houston and had him come up, too: a fellow by the name of Owen [E.] Maynard. And we sat in the meeting here in Huntsville with the PSAC people. One of the Huntsville people made this presentation about Earth orbit rendezvous. Incidentally, the [Houston] people had come to Huntsville about a week before that, and I was with them, to present lunar orbit rendezvous to them. And, there wasn’t a strong argument that ensued, but it was just a “Thank you very much” and then we went back, you know, kind of thing.\n\n So anyway, I went down and Owen Maynard showed up. And, the first day of the meeting took place, all about [Earth] orbit rendezvous. We didn’t say a word. Then they had the usual dinner and cocktail hour. And Owen and I got into some discussions with some of these people about Earth orbit rendezvous and lunar orbit rendezvous, not thinking too much about what we were going to get into. So, anyway, the next day, again in the morning there was a discussion about Earth orbit rendezvous. And then in the afternoon, after lunch, the head of—well, he was [the] Deputy—I can’t remember his name; Wiesner was the head of PSAC at the time, but he didn’t show up at this—

Roy Neal: That’s Jerome Wiesner.

Charles W. Mathews: Who?

Roy Neal: Jerome Wiesner?

Charles W. Mathews: Yeah. Wiesner was the head of it, but he didn’t show up at this meeting. It was his Deputy, and he ultimately became head of it, but I can’t remember his name right now.

Roy Neal: As we left off, we were talking here about lunar orbit, Earth orbit, Huntsville vs. Houston—

Charles W. Mathews: Right.

Roy Neal: —and the whole thing was a big Magilla.

Charles W. Mathews: Right.

Roy Neal: How did it work out?

Charles W. Mathews: I had mentioned the fact that we had discussed lunar orbit rendezvous. We had fun with all these people at a cocktail hour between the 2 days of meetings, and then in the afternoon of the second day, the fellow that was chairing the meeting said, “I understand that there’s somebody here [who] knows something about lunar orbit rendezvous. And I wonder if Mr. Mathews would get up and tell us about it.” So I [got] up and, of course, these PSAC people were very brilliant people and great debaters and everything else, and they were literally cutting me to ribbons, I’m telling you. [Every time] I’d bring up something, there was about five different reasons why the idea was no good, you know. And I was very miserable. But, there was kind of a pause, and Wernher got up and said, “I’ve been thinking about lunar orbit rendezvous, and lunar orbit rendezvous is the way to go.”

Roy Neal: This is Wernher von Braun?

Charles W. Mathews: Wernher von Braun. Now that story has been told other ways, like Joe Shea being involved with it. And I think he was subsequently involved with—not with the PSAC meeting but with a discussion with the Huntsville people. But that’s really what happened at that particular time.

Roy Neal: PSAC is what? The Presidential Science Advisory—?

Charles W. Mathews: Committee.

Roy Neal: Committee. Just for interest.

Charles W. Mathews: And it was in existence for a very long period of time; well before the Mercury—well before NASA. And then, oh, up to at least to the seventies, I’d say; maybe even longer. But, in any event, there was one other aspect of that story which I wasn’t involved with. But, during a visit that Kennedy made to the Marshall Center, the PSAC people again brought this question of Earth orbit rendezvous up, and von Braun told them, “No, NASA has already decided it’s going to be lunar orbit rendezvous.” And, of course, that pretty well ended [it]. There were some other formalities, you know; reports to be written and things like that—

Roy Neal: The essence of this, as I gather it, Chuck, is: that during this period of time, you were looking ahead and then the real essence of what you were doing at that time was to figure out what did you need to know before you could ever possibly move on into Apollo, and what it would entail. And that seems to me to be squarely centered on Gemini, which was the interim program, was it not?

Charles W. Mathews: Yes.

Roy Neal: Well, how in the world did you get to be head of the Gemini Program?

Charles W. Mathews: All right. Well, as I say I was working in the Spacecraft Technology Division, and we had fought the battle of lunar orbit rendezvous and the lunar module. And, just like on Mercury or any of these programs, we’d sent out a request for proposal with a specification and got proposals in and had, in fact, selected Grumman as the developer of the lunar module. This occurred just before Christmas in 1962. And that pretty well ended my involvement with the Apollo Program. The groups that I [was] working with went on to other things, even doing some work on the Space Station and things like that.

Roy Neal: It’s remarkable to me that Space Station was being seriously discussed and considered all the way back in time, into the early sixties. It took a long time to come to fruition.

Charles W. Mathews: That’s correct.

Roy Neal: Meanwhile, I’m sorry I interrupted.

Charles W. Mathews: No, that’s fine.

Roy Neal: It was just a thought.

Charles W. Mathews: Well, in February, I had somewhat followed other aspects of Apollo, but not that carefully, because I was working pretty much just on this lunar mode and the lunar module preliminary design. But, a new man had come in as a Deputy for Bob Gilruth—really the Engineering Deputy—a fellow by the name of Jim [James C.] Elms. Charlie Donlan, who was the [Engineering] Deputy … in the time of the [Mercury] spacecraft, chose not to come to Houston and became the Deputy Director for the Langley Center shortly thereafter.\n\n But in any event, the new Deputy and Bob Gilruth—Gilruth’s new Deputy and Bob hit it off very well and immediately became very trustful of each other. I had had really no meetings with Elms at all. But he called me over to his office, and I think it was right near the end of February of 1963, and asked me various questions about Apollo: what I thought [its problems were], and this, that, and the other thing. I couldn’t imagine why he was really asking me these questions. And, it turned out it had nothing to do with what he was really wanting to know. What he was really wanting to know was: Was I qualified to become the Gemini Program Manager? As I mentioned, Jim Chamberlin had ended up with some difficulties in that job. Part of it was political; part of it was some personal problems he had at home; and part of it was, as I say, a difficulty in communicating. But be that as it may, the powers-that-be had decided that Jim would no longer continue in that job.\n\n So, some time in March—probably early March—Gilruth called me and said, “I want you to take over the Gemini Program.” Well, I hadn’t even worried about the Gemini Program for about 18 months or so; meanwhile it had gone along great guns [but] had gotten into considerable difficulties, financially and technically. So, I really wasn’t too happy about it in a way, because I didn’t really know what I was getting into. In fact, Gemini was located in [an] old GSA building in the middle of Houston. At that time there was no Center, and the people in Houston were located all over the place—[about 20] different locations, as a matter of fact.

Roy Neal: They were still working out at the cow pasture, just starting to cut the ground.

Charles W. Mathews: Yes.

Roy Neal: Build the foundations.

Charles W. Mathews: But, I think in a way we did our best work at that particular time. Anyway, it was the only [program] that was really downtown and in a rather poor district. So I went down there and spent about 3 hours trying to find it; I couldn’t even find where it was located. Finally [I] found it; it was operating on the 4th floor of this GSA building. Only one other floor was occupied; the rest of it was rat-infested, I guess you’d say. But they sent me over there with the idea that I had to determine, within 2 weeks, whether to continue the program or recommend to disband it. One of the reasons behind this was the fact that—I didn’t get to talk about Dyna-Soar; but that’s another manned spaceflight program that the Air Force put into being, really based on this Round Three concept that I mentioned a long time ago. It was a winged vehicle; and the program was being developed by the Boeing Company. And the Secretary of Defense—

Roy Neal: [Robert S.] McNamara?

Charles W. Mathews: McNamara, right. Every once in a while, these things slip me these days.

Roy Neal: Yup. It was McNamara.

Charles W. Mathews: But anyway, McNamara had decided that the Dyna-Soar Program was going to be way too expensive for the Department of Defense; and he wasn’t even sure that there should be a manned program in the Department of Defense. And sort of as throwing a bone to them, when he decided he was going to cancel it, he gave them the option of picking up some aspect of the Gemini Program—either running [a] program in parallel with it, but using Gemini spacecraft or Apollo, or what-have-you. There apparently [were] quite strong arguments between McNamara and [James E.] Webb [NASA Administrator] about Gemini and the interference that the Air Force might make with it. But because the program was in problems anyway, I was sent over to decide, you know, whether to continue it or let it go and possibly transfer it to the Air Force. When I got over to the office and worked on it for the first week, it was a tremendous opportunity because I had a chance to—I didn’t have a chance to correct the [myriad of] technical problems—not that I could—I had a chance to really evaluate where the program stood and I had a chance, as a new guy on the block, to change things and make new cost estimates and new schedule estimates and so forth. Which I did.\n\n One of the first things I did was to come up—they’d had a very optimistic schedule that kept slipping. I came up with a schedule that slipped it even further but sustained a very high launch rate once the program got flying; and I based that on having McDonnell, who was also the contractor, deliver flight-ready spacecraft. And I developed a plan of how this would be done, which we implemented. It involved—I knew the Cape people would not be satisfied, no matter how good McDonnell did, with it unless they had some hands-on aspect. So I arranged for two things. I arranged for a fellow by the name of John [F.] Yardley, who was [McDonnell’s] Base Manager at the Cape, to be transferred back to St. Louis to become—we already had an Engineering Manager. So we had to create a new name, and he was called … Technical Manager. And this was sort of over Walter Burke’s dead body, but he really didn’t have any choice in the matter. As the new guy on the block, I was calling the shots this time and so forth. So, John transferred back.\n\n But over and above that, for the first two spacecraft that would go through the White Room checkout at McDonnell, I had a team of Cape government people go up, with [a] government [man] being—the man being—John Williams being the test conductor, and checking out the spacecraft at McDonnell, along with the McDonnell people. So, that was the plan and typical of some of the changes I made. We bumped the program cost up considerably, too. I think it—the numbers may not be right, but I think we had the program cost coming out about $1.15B. And, at one time, it did oscillate above that to [$1.2B] later in the program; but actually it ended up lower than that. We actually gave money back. It’s one of the few programs that that ever happened to. But, it was because I had this opportunity to get the right margins in the program.\n\n The next thing that was done: I made a trip to most of the subcontractors, but particularly to the people involved with the Titan launch vehicle. The Air Force had responsibility for two things in the program: one was the Gemini-Titan, which was a modified version of the Titan; and they had also a responsibility for the target vehicle, the Gemini-Agena, which is again a highly modified version of an upper stage that Lockheed built for the Air Force.\n\n Well, in traveling around to these various places, [I found] there was a strong argument between the man that was head of the Ballistic Missile Division and Chamberlin. I don’t think it was head-to-head, because I don’t think they did that much—if any—talking together; but there was a pogo problem with the Titan, a longitudinal vibration of fairly large magnitude. And the contractor that was involved, the engine contractor, Aerojet, and the vehicle contractor, Martin, had gotten to work on this and brought the pogo down quite a bit; I think down to half a g or something like that. But Chamberlin decided he wanted it to be two-tenths of a g, and this produced this big argument because the military people saw no need, really, for anything they were doing with the Titan to eliminate pogo oscillations down to that level; and it was just because there was a man in there that there was a requirement to do that—if there was truly a requirement to do it. But anyway, in traveling around I found that the Aerojet and the Martin people not only had been hard at work on this; but, in spite of the fact that the Air Force had told them not to work on it, they had worked on it and could guarantee that it would get down to that [.2g] level. So in a way, it was an artificial problem; I mean, the problem was already solved. And so, in a way it was unfortunate that Chamberlin fell prey to that situation. But it was not true in a lot of other situations. I immediately got into a, you know, very good relationship with all the contractor people and the military people [who] were involved with the Titan. And, the Titan proceeded fairly smoothly on. [In] the spacecraft systems, there were all sorts of problems that continued for a long time.\n\n But, by going out and working directly with these subcontractors and … McDonnell gave us permission to do this, which is very unusual; [because] a company doesn’t usually want you to monkey around with their subcontractors. But they gave us permission that we could go visit them. There were strict rules on what we could direct them to do without going through McDonnell. But, it was an ability not only to find out what the problem was but also to give the subcontractors a feeling, you know, of the importance of what they were doing and so forth. So gradually, those problems over the subsequent year-and-a-half before launch were pretty much resolved…\n\n