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

Rebecca Wright: Today is February 25, 1999. We are speaking with Mr. Charles Mathews as part of the Johnson Space Center Oral History Program. We are here at the Signal corporate office in Houston, and I'm Rebecca Wright. Helping today are also Tim Farrell and Summer [Chick] Bergen.\n\n Thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule to meet with us. We'd like to begin today and ask you to tell us about the problems that existed in the Gemini Program when you took over.

Charles W. Mathews: Well, there were problems in many areas, but the spacecraft was the element that had the biggest problems and the most effect on the schedule. In fact, the schedule that we revised at the time I came on board was really dictated by the spacecraft, vis-a-vis the launch vehicle or the target vehicle. The spacecraft, it was only logical that it would have the most problems because it had by far the most advanced systems with the least experience behind them, and that was necessitated by the requirements of the Gemini Program for long-duration flight and rendezvous and things like that.\n\n It works out that most of the rendezvous equipment, such as [the] inertial platform and the computer and the rendezvous radar, had their share of problems, but were more easily solved because the contractors involved had similar experiences with airborne equipment, with the military, but things like the fuel cells, no one had any experience with them. It was a brand-new development. The process by which they operated had been demonstrated and validated, but that isn't saying that you know really how to build a working fuel cell that will last a reasonable length of time. So that was kind of expected to be a dominant problem in the program, I think, from the word go.\n\n But another area where there were significant problems was with the little thrusters, the little devices, little jet devices that provided for the control of the attitude of the spacecraft and for precision translation for the spacecraft. That's always a requirement for any spacecraft to do rendezvous operations as well. However, that was somewhat of a surprise, because the feeling was that spacecraft [thrusters] of that type had been tested.\n\n They were so-called ablative thrusters. The ablative principle had been established not only for general heat protection, but had been actually established for rocket devices. But it turned out that the ability of these devices to work satisfactorily was determined with larger nozzle configurations and with a steady-state mode of operation, whereas in the rendezvous operation, you need a very precision pulse type of operation.\n\n So it was with great surprise that these things would burn through very rapidly, and here was a program dedicated to conducting rendezvous that couldn't provide maneuvering thrusters that would work. And so again, just like the fuel cell, it was kind of back to a research program for a while, as compared to a development program. Those were the two things that were [big] problems.\n\n The fuel cells' problems were the type of things like material problems, contamination problems, water scavenging problems, the kind of things that would be very natural. With the ablative thrusters, we tried to nickel and dime it at first, but then decided we had to do something rather fundamental, and we ultimately got them to work.\n\n Another area that I thought would be a major problem was the ejection seats. Again, there was experience with ejection seats in aircraft, even so-called zero length ejections, that is, an ejection of a pilot right on the runway. But these particular seats had to really have a fairly long rocket-propelled trajectory to get out of the blast of a very big launch vehicle in the event of its failure on the pad, and so had to clear that, and then, in addition, not provide too high a G on the [astronaut] and so forth. But it worked out that, really, it was done rather successfully, and I always admired the subjects that tested that, not on a rocket, but on a sled-type device that was propelled at various speeds, and these people had to eject actually during the development program and demonstrate that it would work.\n\n But there was another system that wasn't exactly tied to the spacecraft, called the paraglider, and it was to provide a land-landing capability. When I came on board, I was never very sympathetic with the paraglider in the first place, because I didn't really see the land-landing requirement as anything that was needed in the immediate future, certainly not for Apollo. In fact, there was no contemplation that Apollo would land on land.\n\n That program did create problems, and although it was ultimately demonstrated, I had, by that time, chosen to delete it from the program and go to just a parachute system, as was done [in] the Mercury Program, and then also in the Apollo Program. The reason that the paraglider was of interest, of course, was the land-landing capability, but it seemed to me that having a flexible device to provide that just entailed too much risk. Its deletion from the program had the advantage that it took some content out of the program and helped simplify it, and it also helped the cost problem, too. So in my mind, it's always a good idea to have things that you can remove from a program from time to time. It makes you more honest. It meets your schedules and meets your costs and things like that, you see.\n\n So the spacecraft moved along in an undesirably slow way, I would say, but the problems were solved one by one, and as they were solved, we also injected really new management techniques to prevent certain things from happening. For example, we organized an extremely rigorous change control system, where no change could be made—this applied to the launch vehicle as well as the spacecraft—no change could be made until it was not only reviewed by the contractors, but was brought up to the program office and could only happen if I personally signed [off] for it. And so there was an organization that reviewed each change, and there was a weekly meeting where the changes were reviewed before they happened, and they were either passed by the board or not, as the case may be. This has always been a problem with engineers, because they like to keep improving things, you know, and it's very important to kind of discourage that, but only to the degree in which you also solve your problems.\n\n Another thing we did as time went on is we established a very effective program control organization, involving considerations of costs, schedules, and the technical progress. When I came on board, I found out that, really, the people that had that responsibility knew what the status was in terms of costs, schedules, and technical progress, but they weren't really projecting implications.\n\n For example, there were cases in the McDonnell [Aircraft Corporation] spacecraft build where more work was being created than was being completed, so you were actually making negative progress at various times, and so you had to really very elegantly determine exactly what was going on in those particular cases. What we ended up with was a control room that was updated on a daily basis, and we made the control rooms between the contractor’s, like McDonnell, and our control room, and. ultimately, the headquarters [do] the same thing, and that was applied to Apollo, by the way. So that they had exactly the same information displayed in exactly the same way and so forth. Again, anytime somebody wanted to change the manner in which the information was displayed, they had to change it with respect to all these various places.\n\n There are other things that happened. For example, when you start out in a program, many times you haven't made the analysis that really determines what certain requirements are. For example, the time delay of a pyrotechnic device or the drift rate of an inertial platform, for example. And so the engineer takes this and says, "Well, I'll just specify the state of the art." Well, when an engineer specifies the state of the art, it's well beyond the state of the art, believe me.\n\n So it's very important to review these specifications, and we found in the two cases I related, that as we became knowledgeable about the requirements, in terms of analysis and so forth, that we could relax these specifications, whereas people previously had been beating their brains out, trying to make these things pass an unrealistic specification. Those are the kinds of things that we did.\n\n I guess the biggest thing was the incentive contracts that we established. Again, these are things you have to be careful with, because if you establish them too early in the program, particularly in a highly experimental program like this, and the contractor gets behind the eight ball and can't do the job, it actually produces a negative effect. In other words, he starts losing money, based on schedule losses and cost overruns and things like that. So the name of the game is to have the contractor really make money. So you initiate this at the time where he feels, "Boy, I've got a handle on this and I can really make the contract go and I will make a little bit more profit by doing this," and you'd be surprised what a change that produces in the contractor. A lot of people wouldn't believe this, but it's a fact.\n\n So those are the kinds of things we did, and, as I say, the spacecraft struggled along. It was really always the long pole in the tent, and as a matter of fact, on some of those things like fuel cells and ablative thrusters, we never completely got out of the woods with them. There were problems on the flights which we managed to work around, but there were problems.\n\n The launch vehicle had the advantage of being based on a development program of the Air Force, and the Gemini Titan was actually a modification of the Air Force Titan, and that was a big advantage, but there were problems. The biggest problem was the fact that the launch vehicle—initially, the military Titan launch vehicle showed a very severe pogo oscillation, which is a longitudinal jumping up and down, you might say, during the flight, which could shake an astronaut up pretty good if it got too high. Jim [James A.] Chamberlin had established a requirement for this, and got into a debating match with the military Titan people, and it was one of the reasons he had to leave the program.\n\n When I made my first visit to the launch vehicle contractors, the engine contractor and the vehicle contractor, and various support contractors that the Air Force had, particularly the Aerospace Corporation, it worked out that they had had problems in getting this pogo reduced, which they were trying to do for NASA, but on my first visit, they had accomplished an analysis that not only showed that it could be reduced to the desired level, but it predicted all the other events that had occurred in the past. So I really didn't worry about the launch vehicle that much, even though they had not demonstrated this.\n\n As a matter of fact, in the early summer of '63, they tried to demonstrate the ultimate pogo fix, I'd guess you'd say, and what happened is the vehicle failed for other reasons and so they weren't able to demonstrate it, and that was a result that occurred when there had been two failures in a row. So the Titan program manager for the Air Force, who, by the way, had only an indirect relationship to the Gemini Titan, decided he wasn't going to demonstrate these pogo fixes.\n\n I realized this was going to be a situation that would be solved at high levels, [so] I just tossed it up [to] high level. I knew it was going to be fixed, [but] there was a great to-do over many months, right at the top levels of NASA and the Air Force, about this problem and other purported problems with the Titan, but about the time they settled this, the Titan was demonstrated with the pogo fix.\n\n There was another problem, also, that was regarded with some importance, that the engine people indicated they could probably fix if we needed it, and we did have them work on it. It was called a combustion instability problem in the second-stage engine of the Titan, but they'd never really had the problem. The tests had indicated the incipient problem was there. The engine contractor did take steps to fix that, under the pressure of NASA, but the fact of the matter is, the first six Titans we flew on Gemini didn't have the fix, and we did fly six without it and six with it.\n\n Anyway, the Gemini Titan rolled along pretty well. It had its difficulties, in that, well, first off, a very good decision was made to actually not conduct the assembly operations out in Colorado, where the military Titan II was assembled, but to do it at the Martin [Company] plant in Baltimore, Maryland. So the Geminis were assembled in Baltimore, and this was to avoid any conflict. We had our own people, geographically well divorced, to accomplish this. The tanks themselves were built in Colorado and shipped there, but the complete assembly of the vehicle was done in Baltimore, and it had that advantage, but it had the disadvantage of really having somewhat of a green crew.\n\n So particularly when they got into testing, they did run into some difficulties that slowed it down, and when they got down to the Cape [Canaveral, Florida] with the first Gemini Titan, the GLV-1 [Gemini Launch Vehicle-1], again they had to go through a learning curve there because it was a different crew than the military crew. So the Gemini Launch Vehicle-1 [Gemini I] flight did occur later than we had hoped on the schedule that I had projected, but still much earlier than was going to be available for the second flight because of spacecraft limitations.\n\n When I made out that schedule, [Robert R.] Gilruth [Director, Manned Spacecraft Center—now Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center] insisted I put in this Gemini Launch Vehicle-1 [Gemini I] into the program, which made the program have two unmanned flights instead of just one unmanned flight. And I wondered why he really wanted to do it. I think, in retrospect, I'd say he figured, one, it would keep the pressure on the launch vehicle, because the spacecraft that was flown would be proper structurally, but you wouldn't have all the systems on board, and there was no requirement to have the systems on board. So it kept the pressure on the launch vehicle, it allowed for an early demonstration of the launch vehicle. It also allowed a demonstration of the structural compatibility between the launch vehicle and the spacecraft, which was a problem in the Mercury Program. In addition, it allowed the public and the Congress and so forth to see an early launch. Okay. So I think he was really very wise.\n\n The target vehicle, the Gemini Agena, was also a program operated by the Air Force, but a different group and a different contractor. The main contractor for the launch vehicle was the Martin Corporation and, for the Agena, was the Lockheed Corporation. The Agena target vehicle wasn't going to be used till later in the program, so we didn't worry about it too much in the early phases while we worried about getting the spacecraft along and so forth, and it turned out that probably was a mistake, because it came back to haunt us later on. We didn't pay enough attention. I'll go into that a little more in a moment.\n\n But anyway, the first GLV-1, the first Gemini Titan launch [in April of 1964], was almost, I'd say, a complete success. I can't remember really anything that was wrong with that flight, and of course, this produced, in a way, in my mind, a kind of a detrimental effect, because all of a sudden the Air Force and the associated contractor people, who certainly regarded themselves as kind of an elite crew, and [looked] down at the Gemini spacecraft people kind of struggling along, and this had me somewhat worried.\n\n And then in the fall of [1964], when they had erected the second launch vehicle on the pad, an event occurred that I thought might help simplify the situation in terms of getting the spacecraft and launch vehicle on a more compatible schedule, in that it [the GLV-1] was struck by lightning. The launch vehicle people very effectively and rapidly exchanged out all the electronic equipment, all the equipment, and there was no real concern about the mechanical equipment, but there was concern about the wiring in the [launch vehicle], and I was concerned about it, but I also was affected by saying, gee, if we really make these people change out the wiring—really what they would have to have done was put [GLV-3] on the pad and then rework [GLV-3]—then we would sort of have a compatible schedule between the spacecraft and the launch vehicle.\n\n But the Aerospace Corporation, the Air Force technical advisors, had worked out a testing procedure involving impedance measurements that they felt very strongly would, if the test was made and satisfactory results obtained, they would be able to indicate that the wiring was satisfactory. But I guess maybe because of this desire to get this schedule compatibility, I was insisting that they take the launch vehicle down.\n\n So it went above my head to Bob Gilruth, and Gilruth decided that he would go along with the Air Force on this one. He explained it to me, he said, "You know, they're very strong in their opinions, they have a pretty good analysis, and although we're not sure of it, I'm not going to buck them at this stage." But I was very concerned. I thought now, boy, I might very well be pulling another Chamberlin here of losing my control and stature with respect to these people. But it didn't exactly happen.\n\n The activity proceeded toward a launch in December of 1964, the GLV-2, and now I'm talking about the flight program here, and what happened in the first launch attempt was that the launch vehicle failed to lift off. And it was a problem that the Air Force knew about but really had not really encountered in terms of anything that had produced a problem. Frequently, you'll get into these things where you know something is a problem, but you've not encountered it, so you go along.\n\n This problem, which involved an asymmetric load on the nozzles of the launch vehicle, produced an overload and broke apart a so-called Moog valve, a hydraulic valve. So this is the one time the launch vehicle was the bad party. In fact, though, they turned to and, in extremely short order, diagnosed the problem, redesigned the valve, got the people to remanufacture the valve right over the Christmas season, and we were ready to launch again in January.\n\n But those sort of two events really produced a strong melding of this team, that is, the Air Force and NASA and Martin and McDonnell, and all the people involved really behaved as a team. You really couldn't tell one organization from the other, so that had a very desirable effect.\n\n But anyway, we launched the Gemini…II [mission] in late January, and it was just a ballistic flight intended to produce the worst [reentry] heating conditions that we would ever encounter. It was actually a late abort, very late in the flight of the launch vehicle. Simulated that, and that would produce the worst heating condition on the spacecraft, and it was all very successful. There was a slight heating problem detected. The Gemini [spacecraft] came in at an angle of attack in order to adjust the landing point, and because of the heating problem, we actually had to make a minor adjustment as to what angle attack it actually operated. But in general, the flight was extremely good.\n\n So we're into the flight program. The next flight [in March of 1965] was a flight to test out the man-machine relationships. The Gemini…II was an unmanned flight. The [Gemini III] flight involved two astronauts—an experienced astronaut, Gus [Virgil I.] Grissom, who later, of course, died in the Apollo [1] fire, and John [W.] Young, who was a rookie astronaut. I don't know whether it was true at this particular time, but there was a time in the not too far distant past in which he had flown more flights on more [spacecraft] types than any other astronaut. Anyway, he was a rookie pilot on that flight, did a good job.\n\n Again, the spacecraft worked with really no outstanding problem, so we were really ready to go. Nobody had gotten too excited yet, in terms of the public or anyone else. But it was very satisfactory. The landing point was quite a ways off. I think, because Grissom had a little trouble really following the displays. He was to follow computer-generated displays, but for some reason or other, wasn't able to do it. So I forget, the landing was off maybe 100 miles even, or something like that, but produced no real problems.\n\n So we were ready to go into the next flight, feeling very good about the spacecraft and right after that GLV, the Gemini II flight. No, I've got that wrong. It would be the Gemini III flight, with Grissom and John Young. Gilruth approached me and said, "Do you think we could do an extravehicular activity [EVA] on Gemini IV?"\n\n We had discussed and had provisions for extravehicular activity. In fact, we had discussed having a stand-up EVA on one of the early flights, either IV or V, and so forth, but Gilruth described an activity where the pilots [astronauts] would get out and actually float in space, in a weightless environment, and use a little maneuvering pneumatic gun for control. And although I had some reservations about certain aspects of this, I said, “Yes, I think we can do it,” but it was going to be a fairly hurried-up thing.\n\n By the way, the Russians had conducted an EVA prior to that. I think one time in the early [taping—Roy Neal’s interview] I said two to three weeks; I meant two to three months. But it was before the Gemini III flight. We didn't know too much about it, but that probably was, to some degree, an incentive to conducting an early EVA. So we went ahead with it. The chest pack that was used for emergency oxygen supply and so forth, in case [the oxygen hose in the] tether broke, was an item of concern, in that it was not through its qualification test, but we hurried that up and got pretty well satisfied with it.\n\n Once the EVA was announced—it was discussed whether it should be maintained quiet or not, but the powers that be ultimately decided, well, it'll leak out anyway, better announce it. Well, there was a tremendous interest in it, almost an unbelievable interest in it. For instance, there were more press requirements in terms of people wanting to attend either the launch or the mission than ever before, and about as many as was on Apollo 11, believe it or not. It was just hard to believe how much interest in what I thought was kind of a single aspect of the Gemini Program.\n\n But anyway, we made the flight [in June of 1965], and we got up and we tried to station-keep with the launch vehicle, and that was not successful, and nobody knows exactly why it wasn't. It was either, I think, because they waited till they were too far away to station-keep—some people say we didn't understand orbital mechanics. We understood orbital mechanics, but if you're close enough, you don't need orbital mechanics. Or it may be a case where Jim McDivitt didn't use his thrusters aggressively enough to close the distance.\n\n But anyway, that part wasn't successful, but when we got to doing the EVA, it was very successful. They had a little trouble opening the hatch and they had trouble getting back in the spacecraft, scooching down enough and closing the hatch, because of the pressure, suited configuration and the tether in the way and this type of thing. But the EVA itself was just a resounding success, and it was broadcast on the ground, part of it in real time. That is, people heard it actually going on, and the astronauts were extremely enthusiastic about the activity. We could tell they were pumping a lot of adrenaline. Of course, for the first time, these things were broadcast into Europe.\n\n So after the mission was over—again, there was a computer failure, so we didn't make an accurate recovery again, an accurate landing point, but after the mission was over, everybody seemed to almost go crazy, in my mind. The President came down here to Houston to see the astronauts return from the mission. They had a monumental parade and activity up in Chicago. They decided it was going to be in Chicago. And I can remember all the bridges over the route from the airport were just loaded full of people. Every single one of them the whole town was loaded full of people.\n\n Then a few days later, the astronauts and myself and our families were invited up to the White House to get medals, and then we went to the joint session of Congress, a State Department dinner, and then we went back to the White House and the President had us stay overnight, all the families. I think that's the only time that's ever happened, by the way. And [we] got up early in the morning, took Air Force One over to Paris to the air show, and I was just awed at the same way, in Paris, there were just people all over the place.\n\n The President didn't go, but the Vice President did, and the crowds were so massive that the Secret Service lost the Vice President for a period of time. So that was quite a—there was nothing in the Gemini Program that was anything ever like it, even though, in my mind, some of the accomplishments were more complex and difficult and more important to the program. Not that EVA wasn't important. So anyway, that was Gemini IV.\n\n Gemini V was to go on a one-week mission. Actually, I think I said seven days [in the Roy Neal taping], but it was eight days, and actually accomplished eight days, but it wasn't easy. We launched into orbit [in August of 1965] just fine and the crew was to launch a target called a Rendezvous Evaluation Pod, to practice rendezvous, but shortly after they got it launched, they suddenly saw that the pressure in the oxygen supply to the fuel cells was dropping down very rapidly, and nobody understood immediately why.\n\n As a matter of fact, Chris [Christopher C.] Kraft [Jr.] was making arrangements, really, to bring the spacecraft back in, and he was here in Houston, I was down at the Cape, as I was during all launches. I would come back in a jet airplane to Houston as soon as I could. Anyway, John [F.] Yardley, a very brilliant technical man from McDonnell, who, by the way, ultimately headed up the Shuttle Program for NASA, was available in the VIP room, and I went out of the operations room at the old Mercury Control Center down at the Cape and contacted Yardley with a question about how long could we operate on batteries. We made some quick calculations of how we could, by powering way down, which we felt we could do, we could operate for quite a long length of time.\n\n So I'm contacting Chris, and he also had his people work the problem and concluded the same thing, so they said, well, we would go on. But the important thing that Yardley did, he said, "Well, look, we've got—"—and this is one of the beauties of the Gemini system. Each system was almost self-contained by itself. They would have their own power supplies, for example. They would have their own controls. They were physically integrated.\n\n So all these systems had an operating system at the McDonnell plant. So we called and asked them to start running, at these very low supply pressures, these very low oxygen supply pressures, and the indications were, the fuel cells kept operating. You couldn't operate them at as high a power, but they kept operating.\n\n This data was brought to Chris' attention. He agreed that we could fly for quite a long time, and they ultimately started powering back up. The pressures remained low, but in these McDonnell tests, we found we could run these fuel cells at pretty low supply pressures, something that had never been tried before. And so we kept right on chugging along. We were afraid of it, so we powered up for a while to run some experiments, some simulated rendezvouses, and some other experiments that required a little bit more power than we would like, but we then powered back down.\n\n What we did was run all the experiments sort of in one day that required quite a bit of power, and then the rest of the time in orbit, we spent doing experiments that didn't require much power, like visual experiments and camera experiments and things like that, and the guys drifted along for the whole eight days. Again, there was a programming error, human error, ground human error, wrong input into the computer, and again, we didn't accomplish a [satisfactorily] accurate landing, but we showed that people could fly for eight days.\n\n As a matter of fact, the medical people really were very concerned about these long-duration flights, even the Gemini IV four-day mission, because that was four times as long as [L. Gordon] Cooper [Jr.] had flown on Mercury [MA-9], and they saw these various types of deleterious physiological trends, loss of calcium, calcium loss, and cardiovascular deconditioning and the various other things.\n\n Again, the program office didn't really worry about it too much. We figured they probably could do it, but in each one of these cases it took a lot of convincing of the medical people, and the eight-day mission showed that an Apollo flight indeed could be made. A nominal Apollo mission would be about six or seven days, if you wanted [a reasonable lunar surface stay, you might go beyond that.]\n\n I might mention one other thing, and that is, I'm talking mostly about the main things that happened during the missions, because it would be almost impossible to talk about all the little things that were done. For example, in the whole program, there was something like sixty different types of experiments conducted. They were in the medical area, the technical area, the science area, and then there were special experiments that the military wanted conducted, and we had some problems with those, because some of them were classified, and it was very difficult to keep the press from wanting to know what was going on in certain cases, but we did manage to not create too much difficulty.\n\n But anyway, I should mention one other thing we—I'll go back a minute and mention one other thing we did. We conducted a lot of activities off line, so to speak. The things that weren't absolutely required for the major mission objectives were assigned to various elements of the Center here to conduct. [EVA] Pressure suits were one thing. People in the Environmental Control Group—I forget exactly what it was called—worked the [EVA] pressure suits and the chest packs and the EVA thing, because we didn't have to conduct the EVA [on any particular mission] and it could be inserted at any particular time in the program.\n\n Similarly, it was true of these experiments, and there was a separate experiment program office, and that particular program office handled these roughly sixty-odd experiments. Well, with the exception of the Air Force experiments. There was an Air Force group assigned here that handled the Air Force experiments.\n\n Another off-line activity was a tape input system for the computer, and that proved to be very important because it allowed us to try all sorts of rendezvouses on the same mission. We could program the computer, try one rendezvous, reprogram the computer and so forth. I guess that capability came in about—well, I'm not quite sure. Maybe Gemini IX, but it might even have been earlier than that.\n\n But in any event, that off-line activity was very important because all the other [development] activities did not place any [major] requirements on the Center. We had about a hundred-man office that really handled almost everything in Gemini except for these off-line activities, because the whole Center was so tied up with Apollo. So the hundred-man group worked with the contractors and the Air Force to develop these various things and then ultimately fly these things.\n\n Gemini was also unusual. It was not too much different from Mercury, though, in that only one Center, this Center [Johnson Space Center], conducted the whole program. All the vehicles [and] spacecraft were managed out of this one hundred-man office. Initially, the Agena was given to Marshall [Space Flight Center—Huntsville, Alabama], largely on the basis of, well, gee, they're supposed to be the people doing the rocket propulsion type of activity. But again, they were so tied up with Apollo that they didn't pay too much attention to it, and so it was taken back and reassigned here. Incidentally, that wasn't very helpful, either, because of the schedule relationship that I spoke about earlier, we didn't pay an adequate amount of attention to it either when we got it, and that came back to haunt us, as I said before.\n\n I might mention a little bit about the Gemini Agena. The Agena was a standard Air Force upper-stage, a vehicle that was used to help get things into orbit as the last stage in a stack or to maneuver in orbit, and it was a vehicle that had some considerable development time behind it and considerable operational experience behind it.\n\n But we wanted to do a number of different things with it than were done with the standard Agenas, so it produced modifications to it. We had to have more restarts than was originally available on the [standard] Agena. The auxiliary propulsion, secondary propulsion system was also redesigned because of considerations of operating with a docked spacecraft, and then there were other design modifications, like it had its own display system that the astronauts could look at, out through their spacecraft window, to see how the Agena was doing and so forth.\n\n So there were a considerable number of changes, and because we weren't paying adequate attention, many more changes probably than was really required, because, as I say, once you get engineers working on a problem and they've got time, they're going to make it better and so forth. So there were problems.\n\n And then the Air Force itself provided very poor communications in to us for a long while, particularly the people dealing with the standard Agena, and it created problems. For example, they changed the entire wiring harness on the Agena without telling the people working on the Gemini, so all of a sudden we were assembling stuff and nothing works. So it has to go through a complete redesign. So the Agena ended up to be a real headache for us, probably mostly our fault, though.\n\n So let me go back to the flight activities for just a minute. The [Gemini VI] mission was to be the first rendezvous, and it was to use the Agena as the target vehicle, and the Agena was to be launched on an Atlas, and the Atlas would be launched first, place the Agena into orbit, and then the Titan would launch the Gemini spacecraft and it would perform a rendezvous. Of course, the Agena had a radar transponder so that radar can be used and so forth.\n\n The first attempt to launch the Atlas—and this was in the fall of '65—produced a failure. Initially, there was some thought that it might have been the Atlas, but from telemetry and so forth, it was pretty obvious that it was the Agena that had somehow or other produced an explosion, and so we had a real problem. We had a spacecraft sitting on the pad, waiting to be launched and to rendezvous with a target that no longer existed.\n\n So we were very discouraged, but Walter [F.] Burke and John Yardley approached myself and a fellow by the name of [G.] Merritt Preston, who was in charge of activities for the spacecraft down at the Cape, and suggested that we launch two Gemini spacecraft. The only problem was, we only had one launch pad. Most everyone thought that couldn't be done, including myself, that we could turn something [the launch pad] around.\n\n But it so happened that the spacecraft that was to follow the Gemini VI was Gemini VII, which could fly for fourteen days, so the feeling was that if we could turn the launch pad around and launch two spacecraft within some reasonable period less than, well, I'd say well less than fourteen days, that we could possibly do this.\n\n As a matter of fact, there were a number of studies. The headquarters had done a little—frequently, they would make some side studies, and they had done studies of what they called the salvo launch, which is somewhat similar to that, and then the Martin people down at the Cape had looked at a very rapid pad replacement. Initially, they had told us they really couldn't accomplish this, but they had run a study and they dusted off that study and concluded they could.\n\n But anyway, at least at the outset, the whole idea was very negatively received, except these McDonnell guys persisted and they talked to everybody under the sun, and gradually everyone came around that they couldn't think of any reason it couldn't be done, so we went ahead and did it. But it wasn't that easy.\n\n The existing launch vehicle was taken down and stored, because it wasn't capable of lifting the heavier, long-duration mission spacecraft, and so a new launch vehicle was erected. Gemini VII was placed on top of the new launch vehicle and launched [in December of 1965], and we wanted to get the next vehicle off in terms of about a week, and we could have taken longer but we wanted a pretty short target time. And we did get it ready to be launched in about a week. I think it was eight days.\n\n The attempt to launch it was a failure again. Again, the Titan shut down. What happened was the abort sensing system sensed something was wrong and shut the launch vehicle down before it had lifted off. The difficult part was that a liftoff signal had been sent to the spacecraft, so the spacecraft clock started, so as far as the spacecraft is concerned and as far as the displays in the spacecraft are concerned, it said it was flying.\n\n In retrospect, you know, everything happened so fast that people really didn't think too much about it right at the time, but it was really surprising that the astronauts didn't punch out with their ejection seats. I think part of the reason was, they didn't like the ejection seats any more than I liked them. [Laughter] But anyway, they decided the launch vehicle had not lifted off and they did not eject, and then the erector was erected around the spacecraft and they were taken out.\n\n So we then contacted the Martin people and they had immediately determined, from telemetry, that the umbilicals that went up to the tail of the Titan had been improperly safety-wired and had fallen out, and that's what produced the abort signal. So this seemed very easy, that we just make sure that things were done properly the next time, and we would take off within a day or so.\n\n But just about the time that we solved that problem, an Aerojet engine contractor came in and said the engine's start cartridge started firing, and the engines were coming up to speed, but one of the engines did not come up to speed in a regular fashion. So I said, "Well, I don't think we can launch unless we explain that."\n\n So I can't remember—we worried about this for a day or two without really understanding what was happening, and then an Aerojet engineer came up and indicated that he had found the problem, that a dust cover was left on a port in the start cartridge, and this had produced the problem.\n\n This was a major lesson to us that happened one more time later in the program, and that is, there was a request from the Air Force to dissemble the start cartridges from the launch vehicle for all the Titans, so that they could be inspected. There was some indication that the grains in these start cartridges, the propellant grains, might be cracking, and so the Martin Company, who was the launch vehicle contractor, undertook this inspection, but using the engine contractor's procedures, and the words in the procedures was to place dust covers on all open ports, and then in the reassembly, the statement was made, "Remove all dust covers." It didn't say how many, but because of the unfamiliarity and the fact that the procedures didn't indicate the number, one dust cover was, in fact, left on. So it shows you that your procedures should be very rigorous, but the people that are also the most familiar with the job should be doing the job and not depending on somebody else.\n\n But anyway, it all ended happily, because I guess about four days later, we were able to launch. I think it was eleven days after we first started turning the pad around, that we launched and in time to conduct a very successful rendezvous. The crew had no trouble rendezvousing or station-keeping. Each spacecraft walked around each other and looked at them, and there were some surprises, like there was debris hanging out of the adapter area of the spacecraft that nobody had expected to be there and so forth.\n\n But the other thing that was very positive—the rendezvous was certainly very positive—what happened was, Wally [Walter M.] Schirra [Jr.] very conscientiously trained to do a very accurate reentry and follow the needles very properly, and he did a very accurate reentry, not as accurate as some of them later, but one that was plenty good enough. I think it was like ten miles or something like that. So that was very successful.\n\n The 76 mission [the Gemini VII/Gemini VI-A missions were often called the 76 mission] was very useful to the Gemini VII people [astronauts], too, because it kind of kept their interest up, you know. They were going to be visited and all that sort of thing, and then when the problems happened, they were right with it and so forth. So it probably enhanced their ability to fly for fourteen days. They did have very considerable difficulty in staying comfortable. A special suit was designed for them, but the suit proved to be way too warm, and it was decided that one or the other could remove their suit if the other kept his on, but it really didn't work to the satisfaction of the crew, and ultimately they were allowed to take both suits off.\n\n Then the fuel cell system did give trouble in terms of water scavenging, in other words, too much water piling up and tending to flood the fuel cells, so they had to be nursed along, but operated throughout the entire mission. And there were some thruster failures. There were thruster failures on Gemini VI, the eight-day mission, Gemini V, the eight-day mission, too, but neither really had an important mission effect. Then again, the crew made a very accurate landing. This was just before Christmas, I remember, and it made for a very pleasant Christmas for everybody, I must say.\n\n But we didn't stay out of trouble for long, because on Gemini VIII, the Agena [whose explosion problem had been corrected] was launched by the Atlas very satisfactorily and was performing very satisfactorily while it waited for the rendezvous. The rendezvous launch occurred essentially on time. These had to be very accurately timed launches to conduct rendezvous, and, indeed, a rendezvous was accomplished with no trouble, but this time it gave us also the opportunity to dock. The Agena had a docking collar that allowed the spacecraft to nudge in and lock into the Agena because at some time or other in the program, maybe on Gemini IX, we would fire off the Agena in the docked configuration. This was quite important for Apollo, because they had to do that in terms of the lunar module and the [command and] service module. They had to dock and then they had to demonstrate that structurally, the firing of a big stage in a docked configuration, that the structural analysis was all right and the structural dynamics were all right, and this sort of thing.\n\n So anyway, we got up and docked [in March of 1966]. Most of the people, once they got into orbit and everything was working satisfactorily, took off either for Washington [DC] or for Houston. The Washington people took off because there was a Goddard dinner that same night and George [E.] Mueller wanted to attend that dinner, and the McDonnell people went off to Houston, but I decided to stay around for the docking. After the docking, my people were suggesting that we take off for Houston, and for some reason, I decided not to. I don't know exactly why. I guess I wanted—the crew had gone out of range of stations and were not indicating what their status was.\n\n But when they came back out, they had had a very severe problem. I say that with a smile on my face, but it wasn't a very smiling situation at that particular time, because shortly after they had docked, they had detected a tendency for the dock configuration to roll, and they were able to stop it or slow it down, and it didn't tend to roll too fast, but they immediately suspected there was something wrong with the Agena, because the spacecraft had always performed okay from a standpoint of [not encountering] uncontrolled roll rates or anything like that.\n\n So they decided to undock, and then because of the lower inertia of the spacecraft alone, the spacecraft really spun up pretty badly, and the crew had a hard time really isolating the problem, because with this roll it's sort of like on some of these amusement park rides, if you move your head the wrong way, you get vertigo, you know, and so they were having to be very careful about their head movements. But apparently, very calmly, they were able to establish that it was a stuck-on thruster, and they shut off the whole Orbit Attitude [and] Maneuvering System [OAMS], the system that was used to orient the spacecraft in orbit, and also to do precision translations.\n\n But to get the roll stopped, they would have had to turn it back on and they knew they couldn't do that, so there was, fortunately, a redundant system aboard the spacecraft called the Reentry Control System [RCS], and they used the Reentry Control System to stop the roll, and that's about the time we heard about it.\n\n Fortunately, I was at the Cape so that Chris could call me and ask me if there was anything about the configuration that I knew about that would preclude early reentry. He was somewhat worried about the fact that we had this rather large [Astronaut] Maneuvering Unit [AMU] stowed in the adapter section, and when we jettisoned the adapter, would that give us any problem, things like that, and I was able to assure him that no, that shouldn't be a problem.\n\n So the only problem was when and how to get them down. They'd used about half of their reentry maneuvering fuel, so the idea was to get them down in a hurry. We turned the problem completely over to the flight controllers from that point on, and they determined where to land, and it was not in a normal landing area, but it was in a designated area for emergencies in the Western Pacific, and in a less than an orbit, they retrofired and landed in the Pacific.\n\n It was kind of interesting, because at this Goddard dinner, I was to get the Aerospace Engineer of the Year Award in 1966, and the Vice President was up talking when this was happening, and they didn't want him to finish until they were able to say that the thing was under control, so they slipped him a couple of notes, indicating he should keep on talking, and of course, Hubert [H.] Humphrey was very good at it, he had no trouble talking, so he did, and was able to tell the audience that everything was okay, and they went on to give me my award. Jim [James C.] Elms, at one time, he was Bob Gilruth's deputy down here, accepted the award for me. And that was the end of the Gemini VIII mission.\n\n So we go on to Gemini IX. We hadn't tried an EVA since that very impressive experiment that we did on Gemini IV. Let me make sure I get these numbers right. Yes, Gemini IV. But somehow or other, we talked ourselves into committing to a very major EVA exercise. This involved having Gene [Eugene A.] Cernan exit the spacecraft and move down into the spacecraft adapter area, which is at the open end at the rear of the spacecraft, where this [A]MU, this [Astronaut] Maneuvering Unit, was stowed—it was one that Chris was worried about on Gemini VIII—and don it. That was a device in which the astronaut would then fly free. There was a big argument in advance of the mission as to whether he should be tethered or whether he shouldn't be tethered. Ultimately, the idea was to at least use the tether to get back into the adapter area and so forth. In fact, I guess you had to use the tether.\n\n But when Gemini IX was launched [in June of 1966], again, it conducted a perfect rendezvous. It was a different type of rendezvous than we had used previously. The first rendezvous were rendezvous after four orbits of flight. This was after three orbits of flight. It speeded things up a little bit. But when we got there, we found that there was a problem in that the shroud covering the target docking adapter—incidentally, this was not the Agena on this particular case. It was a backup to the Agena [Agena Target Docking Adapter (ATDA)].\n\n At the time of the 76 mission, I had asked McDonnell to come up with an alternate to the Agena, which they did do, and it was a much simpler version. It had less capability, no maneuvering capability and so forth. But we did use the same shroud that covered it during launch as for the Agena, but again, we hit the same problem. We had the McDonnell people assemble that shroud, whereas Lockheed had always done it for the Agena. There were some electrical wires that were used to provide separation of the shroud [by igniting] of charges to separate it, but they were actually strung in a manner that caught the shroud halfway deployed. This is a thing called the "angry alligator." So the thing was hung up by these wires, half open, and so docking was not a practical possibility in this case.\n\n They did run some additional rendezvous, using these tape inputs that I talked about before, which had the very positive effect of saying, you know, there's a substantial number of rendezvous we can run successfully, there are different types, but no docking. Nevertheless—

Rebecca Wright: Before you start on that next thought, we need to change our tape out, and if we could just take a quick break right here, and go from there.

Charles W. Mathews: There was considerable discussion as to whether anything could be done about this hung-up shroud, like nudging it with the spacecraft or having Cernan do something in terms of either just plain going out or flying over with the [Astronaut] Maneuvering Unit. But I think nobody really felt, you know, that it was very practical. It was too dangerous to try anything like that. But it was intended to go ahead and conduct the EVA and ply the [Astronaut] Maneuvering Unit.\n\n Cernan opened the hatch, installed various camera and mirror devices, as I recall. He did have some limited hand-holds. Well, they were really, I think—what do you call the patching device that you [used to tie] shoes? You know. You would know what I'm talking about. It doesn't make any difference. Anyway, he did have means of sort of attaching himself to the spacecraft as he went down to the adapter. Funny, I can't remember that. But anyway, they did not really provide enough adhesion. Velcro is what I'm talking about.\n\n And he kept wanting to drift off and so forth, having a very difficult time, getting very hot and tired and so forth, but he finally did get back to the adapter and into the adapter and started activating the [A]MU. In the process, his overheatedness produced a fogging of his visor, so he stopped being able to see. At one time he actually went and sat in the [A]MU, and he was in a sufficiently restrained and comfortable position at that time, so the visor began to clear up, but the minute he went back to work, the visor would fog up again. So he said, "Gee, you know, if I'm out there flying around and my visor fogs up, how am I going to be able to see to do anything?"\n\n So they called the EVA off, and he went back in the spacecraft, but he did spend a very considerable time outside. I guess in a way we did not appreciate the difficulty that he really experienced, at least enough to really start dealing with that particular problem.\n\n But anyway, I'd say that mission was somewhat the low point, I guess, in my estimation of the program. Again, they did a satisfactory reentry and did a lot of other experiments, but in the main, a lot of the things we were intending to accomplish weren't really accomplished.\n\n So on Gemini X, we decided, well, we'd go back to square one as far as EVA is concerned, and use the same equipment that Ed [Edward H.] White [II] had used in his Gemini IV experience, make it a little more complicated, but not too much so. What we did, after the Gemini VIII experience, even though some of the flight controllers were dealing with how to get the astronauts landed, others were dealing with what to do with the Agena, because Agena had experimental patches on the outside for purposes of determining the effect of the space environment on certain surfaces and looking at micrometeorite impacts and this type of thing. It was with the idea that we could some day go back and get these things, because we knew we could rendezvous.\n\n So they ended up maneuvering the Agena very satisfactorily and parking it in a relatively high-altitude orbit so it wouldn't decay too rapidly, and leaving it there. So on [Gemini] X, we decided that will be the EVA exercise, we'll rendezvous with that Agena, and we'll get those patches back, those experiments.\n\n The rendezvous that we envisioned at that particular time was probably the most complicated rendezvous we did in the whole program, in that it was a double rendezvous. We launched the Agena connected with Gemini X [in July of 1966], and then Gemini X went up and rendezvoused with it. Then they [the astronauts] used the Agena propulsion to change the orbit into relatively high-altitude orbits that allowed it to catch up with this old Agena that we left in space [from Gemini VIII], and it all worked extremely well. There was a number of concerns that we were able to eliminate prior to the launch and that we wanted to make sure that a retrofire would get us back down from these higher orbits and things like that, but we found we could, in fact, maneuver on down if we had to.\n\n So over an extended period of time, these various maneuvers were conducted, and, of course, the old Gemini VIII [Agena] was without power, so it had to be a rendezvous [where] there was no transponder. So the rendezvous was really conducted primarily by ground control, this second rendezvous, but was done quite successfully. The crew was within station-keeping distance.\n\n Then the problem was to get in quite close to this Agena, which was uncontrolled, but fortunately not rolling at a high rate, it was rolling at a very slow rate, and getting sufficiently close so that with a—I guess it was about a fifteen-foot tether, Michael Collins could go out and snatch these experiments off the Agena, while John Young's station kept. So Mike—well, first you'd say he initially—I can't exactly remember when this occurred, but he did perform a stand-up EVA, an EVA where he just opened the hatch and stood up there and kind of got used to being outside and in a pressurized suit, and John Young in an unpressurized spacecraft.\n\n But then when it came to getting the experiments, he got out and made a grab at the experiments and sort of bounced off [or] drifted off, but he had this little gun with him, so he just maneuvered back to the spacecraft and reconnoitered. None of this involved very high [heart] rates on his part, though. He was a very cool customer, even though he seems like kind of a nervous individual when you see him. But then in the next try he went and got them and came back.\n\n That was the main element of that particular mission, again, [they] had a very accurate reentry, and a lot of other experiments were accomplished…[on the mission.] But it, again, showed that all sorts of rendezvous sequences and ideas and so forth, if they're properly planned out, can be conducted very successfully. This was giving the Apollo people a lot of confidence about lunar-orbit rendezvous, of course.\n\n Okay. On Gemini XI, we thought, well, we'll get a little more sophisticated with the EVA, so we launched Gemini XI [in September]. The other thing that was interesting about Gemini XI was, we used a one-orbit rendezvous. This is rather difficult to achieve because you almost have to know what you're doing, almost like a shot out of the gun. There's no chance to really make mistakes. You have to give them the parameters to adjust [the] orbit to the rendezvous orbit almost as soon as separation takes place from the launch vehicle. Of course, this was given from the ground. A lot of people indicated that they didn't think it could be done, but I don't know how many times, whether you could do it two out of three or ten out of ten or what, but the first time we tried it, we did it. So that was, again, a helpful thing.\n\n The other thing that was done—let's see, was it before the EVA? I believe it was. We went to a very high altitude, considerably higher than Gemini X, where we had to use the high altitude for a catch-up. It was around, I think, about 1,000 miles, probably something a little less than that. Of course, that would be broken by a long shot by the Apollo missions, but that was the record for the day.\n\n By the way, going back for just a minute, Gemini VIII created a duration record. Of course, it didn't last very long because—I mean Gemini [V] created a duration record. The mission, the Russians had not flown that long. So we had started to do things that the Russians hadn't accomplished—certainly by the time we were through with the rendezvous and the fourteen-day mission. We had done a more sophisticated EVA. We had done these rendezvous that they had not done, accomplished much longer flights.\n\n And there was reason for that. When I went over to that Paris Air Show that I mentioned after Gemini IV, we saw the long-duration Russian spacecraft, and it was just loaded full of gaseous oxygen bottles. You know, there were just bottles…everyplace they could put them, they had a bottle because they had to use gaseous oxygen. We used cryogenic oxygen. In talking to Roy Neal [interview on 1 May 1998], I mentioned that this oxygen was stored in a special cryogenic state, where the fluid was supposed to be kept at the triple point of the fluid. Fluids have a triple point where they're neither gas nor a liquid; they're sort of a fog, I guess you'd say. And they maintain a high [density] under those conditions, but they're homogeneous so they're easy to extract.\n\n When that failure occurred [on Gemini V], the loss of pressure in the oxygen cryogenic tank, it was because a heater failed. I didn't mention that. But that didn't allow us to keep the liquid at the triple point, and so that's why the pressure dropped. What happened, I guess, is that fluid flashes into liquid and gas with blobs of liquid bouncing around in a weightless state and so forth. Anyway, I gave Roy Neal a technical presentation that wasn't totally technically adequate, but that is what the story is on that.\n\n So, anyway, going back to Gemini XI now, we went to the high-altitude mission and accomplished that very successfully again, waiting with bated breath, to perform the EVA. And sure enough, when Dick [Richard F.] Gordon [Jr.] got out, he got into all sorts of problems. Again, we had somewhat better hand-holds. He was supposed to go forward and perform some tasks at the nose of the spacecraft, and then he was supposed to go back to the adapter area. Even before he got out, he began getting quite tired and had difficulty positioning cameras and mirrors and so forth. When he got out to the nose of the spacecraft, he was not sufficiently supported by any means, and so he had a difficult time just keeping his position, particularly with the restraint of the pressure suit. Every time he'd make a move, his body would move in another direction, you know, and he had what he called a floating-up tendency that he described.\n\n He did manage to connect a tether. We carried a thirty-meter tether on the Agena target vehicle, and he did attach one end of the tether to the spacecraft before he came back, but he had all sorts of trouble. He suddenly drifted back to the adapter unintentionally, and finally, you know, his exhaustion and everything else caused Pete [Charles C.] Conrad [Jr.] to say to him, "Get back in. We don't want to carry this any further."\n\n It did give us the opportunity, though, to conduct a tether experiment, which was to take and have these spacecraft separated while connected to this tether and then rotate the spacecraft to have this system stabilize, keep the tether tight. You know, there was some difficulty in doing that. They did manage to do it and even managed to spin it up at progressively higher rates, which demonstrated not only the principle of station-keeping with a tether, but also the principle of artificial G. They never got enough rotational rate to feel any G, but they did conduct some experiments that showed that the G field was there. A small G field was there.\n\n Then they again conducted a very satisfactory reentry. I think this was the one where they got within about half a mile or something like that. But anyway, all these spacecraft from here on out were coming very close to the aiming point.\n\n But people became very unhappy with us in terms of our EVA performance. The deputy administrator, Bob [Robert C.] Seamans [Jr.], a very good friend of mine, I'd known him ever since about 1950 or something like that, he was on a committee with me in the fifties, but he was very unhappy with us. He had already set up a group right after the Cernan thing to kind of look at what was wrong with the particular mission objectives that we weren't achieving, and it was just a very small group. I was on it, by the way.\n\n My friend Jim Elms was the chairman. He, by that time, was Deputy Associate Administrator for Manned Space Flight, a position I subsequently held. He had left the deputy's job down here to go back to industry, and then had some health problems and ended up deciding to come back. So he ended up in Washington [DC]… Well, anyway, he chaired this particular group.\n\n They began looking at EVA, and I think it wasn't so much…the things they came up with, but the fact that they motivated us, you know, we'd better solve this problem or we're going to have our management on our neck. Not that they weren't already.\n\n So what to do. Well, in the first place, we designed for Gemini XII some very carefully thought out experiments to be done that represented the kind of tasks that you would expect people [EVA astronauts] to really do, and then we began looking at the kinds of restraints and so forth that really seemed to be involved in helping [the astronauts] conduct these particular kinds of tasks.\n\n But the most important thing was that we decided that Buzz [Edwin E.] Aldrin [Jr.] would train on these tasks and evaluate restraints in a water tank, in a swimming pool. People had suggested this before. The astronauts were, I'd say, reluctant to try it, for whatever reason. I think they instinctively thought, well, it really wouldn't be that good a simulation of weightlessness. And it turned out it's not so much a simulation of weightlessness, because you're certainly not weightless, you're buoyant and floating around like you do [in space], but you're not weightless, and furthermore the viscosity of the water makes operations difficult. They have to be done very slowly [and under proper restraint] or, as you know, in a swimming pool, you start moving in another direction and so forth.\n\n So Cernan tried it out after his experience, and he said it had some merit, so Buzz Aldrin was trained in this particular activity, and he did this very willingly. So Gemini XII [launched in November 1966], as far as main operations were concerned, was largely devoted to EVA. There was a lot of other things that were done to clean up the experiment program. In fact, it was lengthened to a four-day mission so that a lot of things that were left open could be completed. But it was an EVA mission, and we actually had them involved in three EVAs, one an EVA that was a stand-up EVA to acclimatize him. He was out there, just standing there, observing and so forth, for a long length of time, a couple of hours, I think.\n\n Then…he tackled the second EVA, which was the tricky one, but when he did that he had proper restraints, he had waist tethers and hand-holds, and in the adapter he had some shoes that were kind of harness type of shoes that he could fit into. He went out and did the EVA, and nothing to it, kind of thing. It really turned out to be fairly easy, which gave us a lot of comfort, because we had a lot of EVAs to look at and to accomplish. In Apollo, of course, that was in one-sixth G, [but] it was EVA. Then the Wet Workshop, which I guess I have time to get to, talk about in a minute, [as initially planned,] involved a lot of EVA activities.\n\n [James A.] Lovell [Jr.], who was the commanding astronaut [Gemini XII], was kind of disappointed that we didn't do a lot of other things, I think, in the end [he] agreed with us that it was probably best that we focus on this [EVA], and it caused Gemini to end on a very positive note with just about everything that we set out to do concluded and feeling very good about it.\n\n But as we started to phase down, several decisions had to be made… [The Gemini Program Office] was truly an elite group, I'd have to say, and would we keep the group together and what would they do, and if we didn't, what was the best use of these people? It really didn't take any of us very long to say, well, yeah, this is an elite group, but these other programs need the experience, and the best way to transfer experience is not by sending memos back and forth or instructions or procedures, but to transfer the people.\n\n So we all agreed, but we also worried about the fact that we had to keep people on the ball, so to speak, right to the end of the program. So, in conjunction with a group that Gilruth set up [we] very carefully schemed out, the transfer methods and so forth, one of the things that we did was to take on additional jobs, too, as the program phased out, so we didn't have these people coming down too fast or with time on their hands. They might still be working on Gemini, but they could be working on something else.\n\n There was really two things. The Air Force had always been interested in using Gemini in some way, shape, or form. I think I indicated that in the first taping [Roy Neal interview]. But they became very interested in it in terms of a transfer vehicle for what they called the Manned Orbiting Laboratory [MOL], which was their new program. Dyna-Soar [Dynamic Soaring] had fallen by the wayside and so forth. They were planning to use Gemini as the vehicle to do that, so-called Blue Gemini. So we helped them in developing the modifications, [so they] could operate from a higher orbit, the reentry and so forth, and also furnished them all the [used] spacecraft that they could have McDonnell refurbish to be used in the early phase of their experiment program. So that was one thing we did.\n\n The other thing we did was—as I told you at lunch, we'll repeat it for the taping here—we got involved with a program called the Wet Workshop. A man from [Marshall Space Flight Center] had suggested that because of the EVA problems, it would be a good idea to take the upper stage of a Saturn V that had been used in a launch activity and was [in orbit, but] spent, to purge it and to reconstitute its environment into a living oxygen-nitrogen environment, and have the astronauts go in there, where they're not really worried about floating free, and you could check effects of different amounts of suit pressurization and all that sort of thing. And, furthermore, there would be simple structures in there that didn't interfere with the tank function for its launch purposes, that could be used sort of as a jungle gym to try various actions.\n\n And everybody thought this was a pretty good idea, and they gave Gemini the job of coming up with what they called an airlock module. An airlock is a device, an intermediate device, it's used in diving, or was used in diving, too, in which you transferred from one environment to another environment in an intermediate device. For example, you transfer into this device, which is under pressure, and then you allow the pressure in space to reduce, and then move out. In fact, the [Soviet] astronaut [Alexei A.] Leonov used that airlock principle in his first EVA.\n\n So we were to [procure] this airlock. It also contained tankage by which the spent stage would be purged and also the environmental reconstituted. And McDonnell accepted this contract, accepted this activity as a part of the [Gemini] contract—we were actually saving money at that particular time—and undertook this and [McDonnell] was doing a very good job on it.\n\n We went up to the McDonnell plant up St. Louis, at the request of George Mueller, …our boss up in Washington, who asked to talk to McDonnell about this Wet Workshop. We didn't let our bosses, any more than McDonnell let us talk to their subcontractors, [without] them being in [present], we wouldn't let George Mueller make a visit to McDonnell without our being present, you know, for obvious reasons, and he understood it, too. But anyway, he wanted to go out there, so we went up there.\n\n The so-called Wet Workshop program and the airlock program in particular was reviewed, and then George started talking in what I call his "Best of All Worlds" speech. He talked about, "In the best of all worlds, we can maybe fly this for thirty days or maybe even sixty days." Now, you would have to [put] an environmental control system and everything else in there [using an EVA], you know. Remember this was a spent stage. That was in the context of a spent stage, the so-called Wet Workshop.\n\n There was a program in which this was a part, called Apollo Applications, in which there were individual flights using Apollo hardware, command modules and Saturn IB launch vehicles and so forth, in which various technical and scientific experiments would be performed, and there was a large number of these. Well, he talked about, “In the best of all worlds, we could actually put these in the Wet Workshop [using EVA] and carry these experiments out there.”\n\n Well, I'll be frank with you. I couldn't believe I was hearing what he said, you know. It seemed so far-fetched to me. But we went along and let it [go by]—well, he later got talking to the Marshall people, and the Marshall people kind of accepted the idea, and, indeed, they started designing a system that with EVA and so forth you could do this, you know. Well, the Wet Workshop, actually many generations hence, or evolutions hence, became the Skylab, but at that time it was just what I described. I really thought, well, people would change it, which they did, you know.\n\n Anyway, there was a concern about this in Houston here, because this was the first time Marshall ever was involved with a spacecraft. The Wet Workshop was a spacecraft and now it was going to be quite a big, fancy, elegant spacecraft. Marshall had only been doing launch vehicles up to then. So there was a concern here and a real concern about the practicality of this. The two things were put together.\n\n Anyway, as the program phased down, we started transferring these people, and just as we had judged, it served a very useful purpose. Some very key activities in Apollo ultimately could be credited to some of the Gemini experience. And, of course, we trained a lot of astronauts. In fact, every Apollo lunar flight except one had at least one Gemini astronaut on board. That particular one, Apollo 14, happened to have a Mercury astronaut on board, Alan [B.] Shepard [Jr.]. By the way, he was the only Mercury astronaut that flew on Apollo.\n\n The majority of the astronauts in the Apollo Program were Gemini-trained, but the training of the flight controllers was [also very] important, because this had become a very sophisticated operation involving gathering global data and then converting it into a display of information and having backup people ancillary to the Control Center also taking this data, specialists in each system taking this data, solving problems or looking for problems, as the case may be.\n\n So there was a training of the flight controllers in this very sophisticated type of operation, and the flight control activities [in] Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo, because of the training that was done, always was a very professional-looking operation, and it's because it had these kinds of experiences and this kind of training. As I've said before, you know, the problems that occur are not the ones you anticipate, particularly, but you've trained on enough problems so that you can take a very professional approach to what's going on.\n\n But I think one other thing, this is a little bit of a diversion, but I firmly believe that that was the very beginning of the Internet activities. See, it was a global activity involving things being sent back [close to] instantaneously and displayed in kind of an optimum way so people could use them, and that was really the first time, to my knowledge, that that had happened, that people had been able to do that on a global basis, at least. So it's, I think, a very good ancestor of the Internet activities. I've talked to the IBM people, for example, and they say the same thing, or even volunteer it, that this is true.\n\n Well, anyway, we began shifting these people and then, of course, the flight controllers began moving into Apollo, and we not only trained the detailed flight controllers, but we trained the whole corps of Flight Directors. Chris [Kraft] kind of backed off. The Gene [Eugene F.] Kranzes and Glynn [S.] Lunneys and Cliff [Clifford E.] Charlesworths of the world, you know, took over the flight control, and it was because you had to. There was a shift problem. You couldn't keep these guys up day and night, so you had to have people, extra people.\n\n But anyway, I guess, as for myself, as it wound down, I decided probably I didn't want to transfer into another program, particularly an ongoing program. Bob Gilruth wanted me to become the Deputy Director of the Apollo Program at that time, bring that experience in. I don't blame him a bit, you know. But I felt two things. One is, I was aware that nobody, including headquarters, was looking at any program beyond Apollo. And down at Houston, I again can see the logic in this, that Apollo was such a complicated, difficult thing to achieve, that Gilruth and [George M.] Low just didn't feel comfortable with diverting anything off this now that Gemini was over. And Jim [James E.] Webb up at headquarters felt the same way. He wouldn't let the people up there—there was no advanced program activity to amount to anything at that particular time period.\n\n I approached Bob down here to take on an advanced program with some of the Gemini people, but he really didn't want to do it. So in the end, we disagreed on how I would be assigned, and looking at this Apollo Applications Program [AAP] involving the Wet Workshop, I said, "That's the closest thing to an advanced program that I can find, so I'll go work on that and try to make it do right." But that's another story. [Chuckles]\n\n The main point I would be making is that it is very important to transfer the people, and what I did was not necessarily the best thing for the [Apollo] program. I really felt, you know, I had had enough stress in the [nearly four]-year period. I was running [Gemini], too, and my family, although they reaped benefits of it in terms of going to parades and stuff like that, it was very stressful on them. I know at the end of Apollo, George Low—not even at the end of Apollo, when the Apollo landing was successfully conducted, he was very eager to get back to [being] the [Center] Deputy Director. He bugged me on that. I was up in Washington at the time, and he bugged me on that all the time to try to get him out of [Apollo]. I'm sure it was the same feeling on his part, you know, a tremendous strain trying to be program manager of these programs with so much at stake and so much risk involved.\n\n [Oral History 1]

Roy Neal: …Which brings us, I guess then, Chuck, to a final question. You’ve described for us in detail the Gemini missions. What was the overall importance, as you see it—looking back now—of Gemini in the scheme of manned spaceflight?

Charles W. Mathews: Well, I think as a number of people have said before—Glynn [S.] Lunney wrote a little article for the Alumni News talking about how important Gemini was and saying that he felt that Gemini had really made it possible to conduct the Apollo mission on the time scale associated with the presidential directive to conduct it in the sixties—before the decade of the sixties was out. I feel the same way; and I give great credit to Chamberlin and Gilruth for this. The fact that the critical mission functions of Apollo were identified—such as flying for 14 days; such as docking two vehicles together and lighting off a large propulsive stage associated with them; such as, of course, rendezvous—all these things were done in Gemini, and done in such a way that it gave great confidence that they could be accomplished in a mission such as Apollo. If it had not been done in Gemini, there’s no question there’d have to have been additional flights in Apollo in order to verify that these things could be done. And I think, therefore, Glynn Lunney is absolutely right, that they would not have made it in the decade of the sixties if Gemini had not existed.\n\n The reason I give Gilruth a lot of credit is he recognized that there was a tremendous step between Mercury and Apollo, that there were a tremendous number of unknowns, [and that] there were a tremendous number of systems that had to be created in order for [it] to be successful. And he, more than anybody else, pushed to get a Gemini Program in there, even though some of the bright people in Apollo said, “Oh, we don’t need a Gemini Program, you know.” The other one [who] deserves great credit is Jim Chamberlin, who, in his conceptual work, put the proper systems in Gemini. Now, they weren’t necessarily one-to-one relationships [with Apollo]. Some of them were. [In] the cryogenic tanks, for instance, there were problems with stress corrosion of the titanium tanks. Titanium was a material whose properties were not too well documented. When we solved that problem in Gemini, we solved it for Apollo. The same is true with the ablative thrusters that were used in Gemini. We had all kinds of problems with ablative thrusters initially. A solution ultimately presented itself that could be immediately applied to Apollo, because they literally were getting those thrusters from the same [contractor] as we were getting them from, but at a later date.

Roy Neal: As you think back across those years, from that very crude beginning to the end of Gemini and on through Apollo and into Space Shuttle, what are your thoughts?

Charles W. Mathews: Well, I really think a tremendous amount was accomplished in that particular period, that particular decade. I’m a little concerned with the fact that the program ended up to be somewhat dead-ended; that is, there wasn’t an easy follow-up to it. And there was quite a struggle in terms of coming up with what the next thing would be. So I think there are both negative and positive aspects. We moved the program very fast, went way beyond the normal curve of progress in accomplishing Apollo, for example; but, we had a situation where it was more difficult to be creative in the next programs. I think, as it stands right now, the program probably should have had a Space Station somewhat earlier than it did. But that was one of the problems, because there was really not a good spacecraft to provide logistic support for a Space Station at that particular time. So the Shuttle, or something like that, had to come along in order to get the Space Station in there. So in a way, our learning in terms of having people up there for very long periods of time and having plenty of time to understand, look, and feel about space and what it all means, has to await the Space Station. And it will be very interesting to see how that all comes out.

Roy Neal: Chuck, tell us about, if you will, what happened in the aftermath of the Apollo 1 tragedy.

Charles W. Mathews: Right. I moved up to Headquarters in January of ’67. I’d been going up there for some time, and was supposed to be working on what became the Skylab Program—it was called Apollo Applications in those days, but that’s sort of beside the point. When I got up there, it was on a Tuesday—in terms of physically moving into our house—and the fire occurred on Friday. I was home hanging pictures or something; when I heard about it on the radio, it was in the evening. I went down to Headquarters, [but] there was nobody there. It was the day of the—I guess it was the Wright Brothers’ dinner, I’m not quite sure. But everybody had gone to this dinner. And, of course, the word of this came out and there was much confusion, much discussion, and so forth about this. But, as I understand it, Jim Webb made the decision that we had to proceed with all possible speed in getting an investigation going or it was likely to be taken out of NASA’s hands. Anyway, I wasn’t privy to that; it’s just something I’ve heard. But the next morning I got up fairly early, I guess. I arrived in my office, which [was] adjacent to George Mueller’s office—no, down one floor from George Mueller’s office—I’m confused there.\n\n But I went up to George Mueller’s office and found [him] and Bob Seamans there. We, naturally, did not know too much about the exact details of the fire at that time; but we pressed immediately on how to get an investigation going and who to head up that investigation. And I guess this—I think this probably had also been discussed that evening before. But anyway, it was decided the guy who was my original boss in the Flight Division at Langley, Floyd [L. “Tommy”] Thompson, who was head of the Langley Laboratory at the time, would run that investigation; that I would take a NASA airplane to fly down and pick him up, and whoever he wanted to bring with him; and that we would go down to the Cape. Which we did.\n\n We went about trying to decide who would participate in the investigation activities; and Thompson was very strong in his desire that a good many of these people would be non-NASA people—people from the Bureau of Mines, other people that had safety concerns about them. And in just a few days, these people were organized and down at the Cape. I was sent down there largely to be representative of the manned spaceflight organization, to make sure that, in as far as possible, the program was not impacted in a major way or any more than it had to be by this particular event. Thompson was not only aware of, you know, the need for that but he was [also] very much aware of the need to bring these people on board, [get] them to understand the situation, not let them think he was railroading them in any way; and, frankly, it made me very impatient. I got together—John Yardley was one of the other people [who] was assigned to the investigation. He was not involved in the Apollo Program at all otherwise. But he came and was involved in the investigation.\n\n What we did was to set up a schedule of activities that could be used in terms of conducting this investigation and making sure we had all the things that were appropriate to [an] investigation involved there. At that particular point, I did leave the investigation per se. I was responsible for the Skylab activity; I felt I had to actually go back. But, a couple of important things did occur. One was that the Deputy Administrator, Bob Seamans, was—well, he resigned. But he still retained a very strong friendship with Jim Webb the whole length of time between the time that he resigned and the various activities that he was involved with subsequently to the fire activity. But the other thing that I think is important—at least from my point of view—was that Joe [Joseph F.] Shea, who ran the Apollo Program—and a very brilliant man [who] did extremely good works for Raytheon subsequently—was very unnerved by this event. He was a systems engineer, not too used to the kind of environment, say, a flight test organization involves; and he found it very difficult to deal with this particular problem. As a result, he more or less had to be relieved of his particular duties. The decision was made by Gilruth in Houston that I would become the Apollo Spacecraft Program Manager. And when I got word of that—I would like to go into this in more detail, but I can’t at the moment—I did not think it was a good thing to do.\n\n There had been somewhat of a rivalry between Gemini and Apollo in Houston. There was also a feeling, on my part, that we were not doing enough work in determining what should follow Apollo. So, one of the reasons I left Houston and moved to Headquarters was because I really felt I wanted to work on advanced programs. I had proposed to Gilruth that I do that in Houston, but he, at that time, wanted me to become Deputy Manager of the Apollo Spacecraft Program. But anyway, I did move to Washington. I was in—this is all happening in the Washington scene. But anyway, he and George [M.] Low, who was his Deputy, came up to Washington with the idea that I would take on this job. And it wasn’t the only reason. I had just moved up to Washington, and my family was reluctant to move back. But, my feeling was that George Low was the very best man to take on this job, because he had been the Deputy Director of the Center, [was] well respected, and didn’t have any rivalry problems. And furthermore, he had contacts where he could motivate and muster the entire resources of the Center.\n\n So, they came up to Washington, and I guess Gilruth had told Jim Webb what his intentions were. But I had already talked to George Mueller and told him that I thought George Low should do the thing. So when they came up, I had George Mueller in a position to say, “No, it’s not going to be Chuck Mathews. It’s going to be George Low.” And, George [Low] is the kind of person who always likes to have control of his destiny. In fact, that’s one of his strongest capabilities, and a very desirable capability. So this is one of the first times he was caught completely short. He had no idea he would—it was actually a demotion for him. And he and I and Bob Gilruth ended up in a Georgetown hotel that night; and he said, “Chuck, I’ve got the worst headache I’ve ever had in my life. Let’s go take a walk.” But anyway, that’s how George Low ended up being the Apollo manager. And, one other thing about that: See, in a way, Bob Seamans was the fall guy for that. Joe Shea, I don’t think you could say, was because there was—he had had problems. Bob Seamans was the fall guy. But, in a way, George [Mueller] had created some very natural problems in that he’d always approached Jim Webb as being—he was very optimistic about how Apollo was going, you know, pre the fire. He’s that kind of guy; he’s a very optimistic type of person. And it’s very natural, particularly with industry people, I’ve found, that they’re reluctant to tell you about their problems. They think they’re going to get their problems solved before you find out about [them], you know.\n\n Well, this bothered Webb I’m sure; but George Mueller had very strong contacts and very strong friendships in the Congress—for example, Tiger [Olin] Teague and so forth. They really liked him. And Jim Webb was wise enough to know that he should not really ruffle any congressional feathers. So he decided [that], no, it would not be George Mueller that would be moved out, it would be Bob Seamans. And, later on, he put another man into the Deputy position under George Mueller who he hoped would provide better information flow. But it really didn’t work out. So in the end, he put me into that position; and he told me that he really wanted George to stay in that program and leave, as he put it, “with all flags flying”; and that I was to help George on the program. So I became George’s Deputy at that particular time [February 1968]. I guess [that is] a little bit rough, in terms of skirting a lot of things. But because of time, I’ll let it go at that.

Roy Neal: Very good, Chuck. Thank you.

Charles W. Mathews: Okay.