Interviewer(s): Kevin M. Rusnak, Jennifer Ross-Nazzal, Summer Chick Bergen
Interviewee(s): Joseph H. Levine

Kevin M. Rusnak: Today is June [12th], 2001. This oral interview with Joe Levine is being conducted in the offices of the Signal Corporation in Houston, Texas, for the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project. The interviewer is Kevin Rusnak, assisted by Summer Bergen and Jennifer Ross-Nazzal.\n\n I'd like to thank you for taking the time out to spend with us today in our project. If we could get started, tell us a little bit about some of your background experiences, your interest in aviation or engineering growing up, going through college, those sorts of things.

Joseph H. Levine: I guess my earlier history started even before I went in the service. I worked for a depot as a hydraulic mechanic. I actually got out of high school at a tender age of sixteen, so I was too young to go in the service at that time, so I worked for Kelly Field in San Antonio, Texas. At that time I specialized in being a hydraulic mechanic and worked on such aircraft as P-38s\n\n [Lightning\n\n ] and B-24s\n\n [Liberator\n\n ] and the antiaircraft of the day. That stimulated my interest and made me determined to go in the Air Force when I got to be the tender age of eighteen.\n\n I did go into the Air Force, and at that time, this was 1944, they had more pilots than they needed, but I did fly. I flew on B-24s and became a specialty in armament. I became an armament gunner and went into several schools to do that. Fortuitously, we teamed up as a crew in March Field, California, at a B-24 base. The crew I was on had a crew of ten. At that time we were to go overseas and be in the Pacific theater of war. We got to shipping out in Washington, and, lo and behold, they dropped the atomic bomb and decided, no, they weren't going to send us over as a crew. I thought, well, this is my opportunity to get out and get an education, which is what I was looking forward to.\n\n Unfortunately, they weren't ready to release me. At that point in time, they had what they called a point system. The point system was how old you were, and whether you were married or not, and how many years of service you had. I didn't have many points. So they decided they were going to send me to Okinawa, and so I went to Okinawa and flew on B-29s [\n\n Superfortress\n\n ] and was there about six months. I ended up being discharged in 1946.\n\n At that time, I elected to immediately go into college and attended college at Southern Methodist University [Dallas, Texas], and before that a junior college, graduated in 1950, and went to work for General Dynamics [Corp.].\n\n At General Dynamics, they were in the midst of developing an aircraft called the B-36. I don't know if you've heard that in the past. A B-36 was a six-engine high-altitude bomber with four turbo jet engines attached under the wings. It would climb to extremely high altitudes, up to 40,000 feet. At that time fighters could not hardly reach it. It was called somewhat of a freedom fighter, but it never really went to war, although they made about 400 of these things. I was in flight test on this particular aircraft, and a good part of my early career was flight test.\n\n Then, later, I ended up at Vought, Chance Vought [Corp.] at the time. Chance Vought was a maker of Navy aircraft. They made an F4U, initially, which was a\n\n Corsair\n\n . The\n\n Corsair\n\n was also modified by the Marine Corps as a support fighter, and I did work in that particular arena. Later at Vought I worked on the\n\n Regulus\n\n missile program, which was an air-to-flight-type program, probably one of the earlier missile programs, although it was not a rocket-type missile. It was driven by jet aircraft-type thing. I worked on the F7U there, which was another high-performance fighter at Vought.\n\n Ended up at Hayes International Corporation. Hayes International Corporation was in the midst of trying to develop an early interim tanker program to be able to fuel aircraft in flight. At that time they really didn't have any in-flight fueling system. So this was an attempt to take initially a B-29, and put fuel drogues on it. Then, later, they used the B-50, and my job at Hayes was to design a control panel to show the type of displays that would be necessary in that particular area.\n\n Didn't stay very long, because I was interested in still pursuing a higher educational degree, so I ended up back at General Dynamics. At General Dynamics, I worked in electronics for a while, but I ended up basically on the nuclear-powered airplane program. On the nuclear-powered airplane program, I worked on that until the time it was canceled.\n\n You probably saw in the film some of the problems of it being canceled was it was safety. As a matter of fact, nuclear power in the United States today, there is a tremendous fear of safety of nuclear power, somewhat unfounded, but on the other hand, we built in the United States something like 100 or so nuclear-powered ground facilities, and I guess we really haven't designed any new ones in probably ten or fifteen years, except for today. Today now there is a tremendous interest in getting back in nuclear power, especially in the California arena. So you'll probably find a lot of interest in that particular area.\n\n Then, after the cancellation of the nuclear-powered aircraft program, I could have stayed there and worked on an advanced fighter program, but my interest began to turn toward space. At that time they were beginning to introduce the Mercury Program and then later Gemini and Apollo, and it was my interest to go to work at Johnson Space Center, regardless of salary or regardless of how we were experienced in the space program. It was large number of people. As you probably know, they had a Space Task Group made up of something like fifty, fifty-five people or so that came from Langley [Research Center, Hampton, Virginia] down to the Houston area to start the program.\n\n As I came here, I came in 1962, in July, and when I came here, there was nothing. There was no Johnson Space Center built yet. We were in rented buildings all over the Houston area, all over. I was located across the street from a building called Office City. It's still there, right across from Gulfgate [Shopping Center]. Gulfgate is about to be demolished and rebuilt now, as a matter of interest.\n\n So, now, at that point in time it was my assignment to be in safety, reliability, and quality assurance [SR&QA]. Am I going too fast?

Kevin M. Rusnak: No, I think you're doing all right there. Since you're on the topic of getting into SR&QA, what in your background had led you specifically into this arena?

Joseph H. Levine: Well, I began to find in my work in radiation effects, which I passed over pretty quickly, at General Dynamics, radiation effects was the study of the effects of nuclear radiation on materials and components, and it was my job at that particular time to do analysis and studies to determine the effects of radiation on these components.\n\n Well, as a matter of fact, once you got into that particular area, you also got into the aspect of reliability of these components as well. My interest, because of the aircraft background, is I was extremely sensitive, having seen in flight-test programs a lot of people killed. I was extremely sensitive to flight safety and probably more so than most people because I had seen many friends of mine that had actually burned up in aircraft. So that made me extremely aware and interested in that particular area, although at that particular time there wasn't a lot of people that had any background in the specialty or the disciplines of safety, reliability, and quality assurance. There were a few specifications that had been put out by the military. I think it was Mil. Spec. 27542, I think the number was, that attempted to try to embrace this area, but nothing unique to the space program.\n\n So when I arrived here in July by myself, there wasn't no one else here, actually, that worked in this particular area except myself, and I was a part of the Apollo Program. The entire area of Johnson Space Center did not have anyone specializing in any aspect of this thing. They did have a group in there that was attempting to do some work in safety, but no one had put anything together in terms of a document.\n\n So one of the first things I got involved in was how to put down on paper what the requirements would be for building reliability and quality assurance at that time. Not so much the safety aspect, but reliability and quality assurance. So there was a document that was put together largely by myself and some support contractors that were around at the time. At that time they were General Electric.\n\n Based on my experience and some of the work that had been done by the military, which was very, very gross, I put together a document that became named as MPC250-1. 250-1 was an early predecessor of a document, a NASA handbook that's 530041-D, and I have a copy of it here. I can show you the 530041-D. But one of the things that became immediately apparent is that we were not building a fleet of spacecraft. We would be building mostly one of a kind, and they would have very little ability to be able to statistically test these components, although there was a tremendous concern on high reliability and high safety and rigorous quality assurance in this area.\n\n So although there was concern in this area, there was no real attitude on the part of people on how to accomplish this particular feat. So I was a pioneer. Those of you who understand the definition of a pioneer is one who gets his rear full of arrows. [Laughter]\n\n So one of the things I got involved in immediately was putting together this requirements document. One of the things I found is that there was several milestones that you had to be concerned about in analysis techniques, and some of these things were the design review process, which required people to gather together and put their best thinking caps on, in terms of being able to evaluate systems and components in that particular arena.\n\n Another thing was, as far as analysis techniques, since statistical analysis techniques were not possible because there was not enough test time and components to be able to demonstrate the reliability that was hoped for on the Apollo Program, the Apollo Program had a number attached to it, and the number was a 90 percent for mission success and 99.9 for crew safety. But the number itself is meaningless in that it could not be demonstrated. It just was, "Go try to do the best you can, guys."\n\n We found out pretty early in time that the best we could is going to be qualitative analysis techniques. So there is one powerful analysis technique called the failure mode and effects analysis [FMEA]. The failure mode and effects analysis postulated failure modes of various components, how they could fail and various failure modes and what the causes were, and what the effects of those failures would be, and whether they could be detected as a failure, and what the criticality of that failure is.\n\n Now, these failure mode and effects analyses were abundant. I mean, when you began to analyze as many thousands of components as there were on the Apollo Program, even though later in the Space Shuttle Program was even more complex, it was a huge number of components with many failure modes that were Criticality 1. Criticality 1 was the effect at which could be a crew safety problem; Criticality 2, a mission success problem; and 3 being all the others. So that became a very powerful analysis technique that we resorted to, although, as I'll discuss later, that failure mode and effects analysis by itself, unless you had the management support behind those particular criticalities, in the sense that they would not want to tolerate a Criticality 1 in a particular problem, it became somewhat an important analysis, but not sufficient in itself unless the management felt that they didn't want to live with that Criticality 1 problem-type thing, and I'll talk about that some more as we get into the Space Shuttle Program later.

Kevin M. Rusnak: What was the origin of this technique?

Joseph H. Levine: It was actually developed probably by the military, although at that particular thing, they were trying to use it in a statistical vein, so they would have failure mode and cause analysis and then try to put numbers to the failure modes themselves. So one of the shortcomings of their use of that technique is that the statisticians basically took over the arena, and statisticians were not respected by the engineering community, so the statisticians were on one side of the fence and the engineers on the other, and never the twain should meet, and they didn't work very well. There was not a strong affinity to do anything with the analysis technique by anyone but the statisticians, and many of them were not statisticians. Some of the management were basically managers who were short-timers. I'll talk about that a little bit later. They were not all that enthralled with the program.\n\n Other techniques, controls, or disciplines were test programs. One of the things that I became extremely interested in was making sure there were sufficient tests, both qualification tests as well as acceptance tests, to give more confidence that the item that we're going to fly was like the one we tested, so that we would feel satisfied that that item would, in fact, give us the necessary discipline to fly because we had tested and qualified that particular item.\n\n Now, that may sound easy to do, but what was happening all the time with things, failures would take place. As a consequence of the failure, then the question would come up, Do we have to go through this whole qualification program all over again because we had the failure and we made a design change? So there were endless arguments of how much of the test program had to be repeated because of failures.\n\n Now, to give you a feel for failures, failures were reported at the beginning of acceptance tests and on, and there was something on the order of sixty to eighty thousand failures during the Apollo Program. Now, all of these were not major failures, but they were failures that had to be addressed. As a matter of fact, they had been preserved by the contractor. I believe at this point in time it was Science Application International Corporation [SAIC] that got responsibility to keep them. They had to be addressed in terms of evaluation.\n\n But one of the questions that came up was, How do you address these things and who signs off and says that that failure had been adequately identified and rectified? They set up an organization at Johnson Space Center, somewhat, I guess, in about the '65-'66 time frame, and one of the organizations was to have subsystem managers. I don't know if you've been around that term. I think you've talked to Max [Maxime A.] Faget. They had subsystem managers that were assigned to each subsystem in the Apollo Program.\n\n So immediately what I did is I assigned reliability engineers as counterparts to these subsystem managers to do two things. One is to participate in all the design reviews and to cause the failure mode and effects analysis to be evaluated and signed off by those subsystem managers as well as the reliability engineers, and also all the failures that took place would be evaluated and approved by these same people.\n\n So all at once what we had then, is we broke that fence, that statistician fence that we talked about earlier, where the statisticians were on one side and the engineers on the other side. Suddenly, this was a team, and a well-respected team. These subsystem people, the reliability engineers, found, even though many of these people were contractors, they were assigned to me. I had a very small number of people, civil service people. If you were to talk to them today, they would feel like they were part of my team, not a contractor team. They really felt that way.\n\n So these people, as a team, began to be a fundamental part of the program, and with a database such as this, we found that all of these techniques, the test program, the failure mode and effects analysis program, acceptance tests, evaluations, all of these things were looked microscopically at by these team of people.\n\n In my own case, I found, because of my background, that I was a microscopic management. You probably heard of people, that term I've been using of microscopic management at Johnson Space Center. Many people took offense to this thing and said, "You guys are a bunch of idiots. You should stand off and let your people do the job."\n\n With a program as important as the Apollo Program was to the nation, I could not take that risk. I had to be a part of the program, and I was a part of everything. Found myself traveling upwards of 80 percent of the time. My wife used to accuse me of using the house as a laundry chute. But it was a romance, actually, of my whole career, because I really enjoyed being a part of that.\n\n You couldn't drive people away from this, from the base, they were so enthralled with the Apollo Program. It was a wonderful thing to be a part of a program of that type. Here was a program that was not a defense program, for the first time. You weren't building something to kill people; you were building something that would probably embrace people from all over the world. As a matter of fact, we did a pretty good job of that.\n\n I'll tell you about a paper I prepared later, that I gave in England, that I had a lot of people come to me from all walks of life, all the way from England to Israel, all of them were so familiar with the Apollo Program, they wanted to talk about it. But, anyway, I'm detracting from that particular area.\n\n Anyhow, the Apollo Program went on for quite a few years. One of the early things that you asked for—and I probably should get into some of your questions that you had. One of the things that you asked for is, should we have done the early lunar program where they took an aircraft and went around the Moon. That was pretty much after the [Apollo 1] pad fire and the concern of showing some demonstration in that particular arena. Actually, I think we were really ready for that particular area. We had the test experience. We had these people who had reviewed and evaluated these components, and they were satisfied that they had a mature spacecraft. So I felt pretty good about that particular area, doing it at the time they did.\n\n Let me go back to the pad fire for a minute, which is Apollo 204. That was probably one of the areas that was a real downtime of my life and a lot of the people in the Center. Three people burned up in a spacecraft on the ground. They didn't even get up in space. One of the things that I and my boss were assigned, Bill [William M.] Bland, one you talked to, were assigned to a panel, a Materials Panel, at the Cape. Everybody had different types of panels that they were assigned to. Some people were rushing around trying to find the cause of the incident, but I wasn't involved in materials at that particular area, even though I had reliability materials wound up in my responsibility.\n\n There was a group under Bill Bland that was looking at materials, but the discipline of control of non-metallic materials really wasn't there. And it became apparent to me, as I worked on this assignment, that irrespective of finding the cause of the problem, they had an array of flammable materials all over the spacecraft, Velcro all over the place that would burn, and then an oxygen environment of 16.4 [pounds per square inch] oxygen, pure oxygen.\n\n If you saw any of the films—did you have an opportunity to see any of the films, the boilerplate films of how those materials could burn in a pure oxygen environment? You'd come to the conclusion right away that there's two big things you've got to get rid of: exposed materials and that 16.4 oxygen environment, although they used it on Mercury and Gemini somewhat successfully. They were lucky.\n\n So the materials program at that particular time was assigned to me. Immediately I put it under the control disciplines of everybody had to sign off, and I made sure it wasn't a willy-nilly type of control program. People who had been working that program had really not had the controls on them. I mean, nobody knew exactly what materials were where, and in that particular case there was a system that was put together at [North American] Rockwell [Inc.] which forced every material, exposed material, to be written down, what it was, its flammability characteristics and controls.\n\n So I found an individual that worked in that arena, and they were assigned to me, and then, later, the R&E, research and engineering people, picked it up under Max Faget. I put out a handbook at that particular time in that particular area to put down some of the controls in that particular area, which I think is in existence today.\n\n One of the things that we didn't do, or I wasn't sensitive enough, we were so involved in exposed materials, that materials inside components that could burn we did not have the same sensitivity and, as a matter of fact, gave rise to the\n\n Apollo 13\n\n incident where, as you know, on Apollo 13 they had an oxygen fire of a component that had been exposed internally to a proponent and gave rise to an explosion and, fortuitously, we had the LM [lunar module] attached, and they were returned to Earth. You saw Apollo 13, the film, on that particular area, so you're seeing a lot of that particular area. That gave rise to, hey, we've got to look at every component that's subjected to that particular area.\n\n So, going back to the Apollo Program as a whole and what did I feel about the Apollo Program, I think it had several significant conclusions, I would say. We had put together a requirements document that forced the marriage of the reliability people and the subsystem people to work together as a team, whereas I did not know of any case in any program where that had taken place where there was a team of that type of people that worked together.\n\n As a matter of fact, when I worked at General Dynamics, and I worked earlier on a reactor and flight-test program, I was assigned to San Diego, so I worked pretty closely with some of the reliability people. Of course, first thing I did, detracting for a minute, at San Diego, on that particular program, was to put together a list of the components and the radiation effects of each of them, and I was alarmed because the reliability people wanted to know where did I get that list of components. They had no idea what was on that spacecraft. So that gives you a feel. That marriage was very necessary as far as understanding the systems in detail and making experts out of various people. By the way, today that still exists. Science Application International still has people assigned to various subsystems in that particular area.\n\n So back to a summary of the Apollo Program, as far as conclusions is concerned. I think the Apollo Program gave rise to a requirements document that, at least for a qualitative approach to reliability, worked well, and I felt very good confidence that that was the best we could have done at that particular time. Later, as I get into the Space Shuttle Program, I'll mention something about configuration management.\n\n Configuration management on the Apollo Program was there in the sense that they had design reviews and milestone reviews like flight readiness reviews and all these types of things, but did not have the top document to the extent that Space Shuttle had. So the Apollo Program was a "Let's do it and do it as rapidly as we can." At that time we felt like we were in a rush to compete with the Russians. We wanted to land on the lunar surface as safely and as quickly as possible, so we were doing things not as shortcuts, but basically there was a no-nonsense, "Let's not do things that are not necessary" type thing.\n\n So I worked with all the contractors. As a matter of fact, I worked with the Rockwell people, I worked with the Grumman [Aircraft Engineering Corp.] people, I worked with the Delco [AC Spark Plug Division of General Motors] people on the computers and that sort of thing, so I found myself all over the country working with all of them. They knew me well and I knew them well. They were picked up on the program as much as we were. I mean they were very enthusiastic, and I felt real good in terms of you didn't have to drag them kicking and screaming, because a lot of these people were brought up in the aircraft programs. Aircraft programs, particularly the reliability people, they had the statistical part, and they weren't a team. The fact that I forced them to become a team on their side at places like Rockwell and at Grumman was quite a feat, because they were used to not working as a team. Although they knew they had to have a reliability group, it didn't mean anything. Reliability group didn't mean anything.\n\n So it wasn't just here that we had people assigned as subsystems people; it was at the contractors as well. They'd never had that before. So that's an important conclusion out of the program is we forced the whole aspect from the ground up, the contractors, the NASA contingent, everybody was a part of that team effort of doing that.\n\n Another thing I found, in my own case, is I felt it very necessary to become very intimate, even though I was a high-level manager, I felt I ought to know everybody on the program, like Max Faget, George [M.] Low, Dr. [Robert R.] Gilruth. At that time we had Joe [Joseph F.] Shea here at one time. I think he's passed away now. A whole raft of people on the program, Bob [Robert F.] Thompson, they all knew me. That, to me, was very important, that they felt like they could get on the phone, or I could get on the phone and talk to them at any time.\n\n In most contracts, that don't happen. You don't easily get on the phone and talk to a vice president, willy-nilly. I mean you just don't do it. But in my case, I felt complete confidence in being able to do that at any time, or if I had a concern at any time. When I attended design reviews, I had no compulsion not to speak up if I had any concern. A lot of people would get very mad at me, but then they would come across most of the time, if they felt I was right, and I was right a good percentage of the time.\n\n So that was an important conclusion. We had teamwork. We basically had good entrée to management. We formed an alliance that I think was good as we entered into the Space Shuttle Program.\n\n So would you like to take about a few minutes' break?

Kevin M. Rusnak: If you'd like to, sure.

Joseph H. Levine: Why don't we stop for just a few minutes. [Tape recorder turned off.]

Kevin M. Rusnak: Since we've picked back up, I had a couple of questions to look back and get a little more detail on some of these points you were making. You've mentioned bringing these teams together that traditionally had probably been more divorced from each other than married, and that combined with the amount of travel and such, you had mentioned before, and also in looking at some of the documentation from then, that some of these trip reports and such that you had produced, seems like that most of these contractors really didn't have much of a grasp on the depth and scope, really, of what the reliability and quality program for Apollo was going to entail. Could you maybe explain what their initial impressions from these contractors, what they were thinking they were going to do, versus what you had in mind, and how you really made this marriage happen?

Joseph H. Levine: That's a good question, because traditionally most of these contractors worked on military programs, where they had the statisticians on one side and the design effort on the other side and "Don't bother me, just go over there and do your job." The reason many of them even had reliability groups or quality-assurance groups is they were somewhat forced on them by the military because of the large number of problems that had developed on military aircraft. So they said to them, to these contractors, years ago, "You will have a reliability and a quality assurance effort."\n\n So they said, "Okay, we'll have one," but they never understand what they really were going to have, as a matter of fact. So with that background on the Apollo Program, they didn't really understand what I was going to force on them. They thought I was going to force a statistical program on them, and they were all geared up for statistical analysis-type programs and this type thing, and trying to demonstrate on paper that they could meet the 999s for crew safety and the 90 for mission success.\n\n I wasn't at all interested in that part. I was interested in looking at analytically how each of these components could fail and what their causes were and their effects, and I was forcing them to become design oriented. They were not design oriented.\n\n I guess I forced several people to leave their jobs, as a matter of fact. At Rockwell there was a manager there that was in charge of reliability, and because of my insistence and my concern with him, they pulled him off the program. On the Grumman side, they had basically the same thing, because the people that were there in charge were not oriented towards the kind of program that I was pushing for on the Apollo Program.\n\n It was quite an effort. As a matter of fact, I won no popularity contest, and they hated me, I'm sure. But on the other hand, the design people at these various facets respected me, and I knew them all. I knew the people over at Grumman in the design effort, and the same thing at Rockwell. I made a point to know them. I would introduce them to their own people and reliability to the people that were working in that arena. So for the people that remained, that could adjust to that particular discipline, they liked it. They thought they were really then becoming a fundamental part of the program, and before that, they did not feel that way.\n\n So I don't know if that answered your question.

Kevin M. Rusnak: No, it certainly does. I don't know if you've had a chance to look at Tom Kelly's new book about building the lunar module.

Joseph H. Levine: No, I haven't seen that. I mean I haven't read it.

Kevin M. Rusnak: He discusses a lot of Grumman's problems with instituting these programs and certainly recognizes the values of them and that they certainly had these growing pains of their own coming in, as you mentioned. Did any of the contractors or subcontractors really stick out in your mind as being particularly recalcitrant or maybe even particularly exceptional in adopted these?

Joseph H. Levine: Grumman probably stood out as being a problem area to me only because of the New York attitude. I don't know how familiar you are with some of the New Yorkers up there, but they didn't really accept me for about five years as being a customer. They were used to having the Navy being the primary customer up there, and they would take the Navy customer and install them in an office over there, a nice office, and say, basically, "Leave us alone," type thing. "We'll do the job. We don't need you." And they thought that they could work that way with NASA. They had a terrible problem adjusting. The whole organization had a terrible problem adjusting to NASA.\n\n As a matter of fact, Joe Shea took a team of people, including myself, up to New York at the time of the World's Fair. At that time we had all reservations at this particular motel, but many of the flights were coming in late because there was a real problem with the controllers, controllers' strikes, and we would overfly New York for hours on end. We got in there about 11:30, 12:00 o'clock. They didn't have any rooms. So Joe Shea would not let anybody take any room if they even had one. He would not tolerate it. He finally got a hold of the vice president of Grumman, or either the president of Grumman, and turned this thing around.\n\n But that's an example. Here's a motel where NASA people had been staying in for some years and was a regular customer, and they didn't care. They had no sensitivity as far as long-term relationships with this particular outfit called NASA. Didn't bother them in the least.\n\n So, yes, I had time, but after we developed a relationship and they knew I was going to be around, and I wasn't going to be like the Navy was, you couldn't install me in an office somewhere, then the relationship was a lot better.\n\n When we first let the Grumman contract, as a matter of fact, just to show you how things were, they were somewhat sensitive to security. We were there fact-finding at the initial LM contract, and we were there. I was used to being able to get up, walk around, and go to the restroom if I needed to go, nobody would bother me. I went to the restroom and here was a guy, and he looked at me and he saw my badge. My badge wasn't a non-escort badge. Everything was an escort badge. All at once, in come the guy, said, "Okay. Come on. I'm taking you over to the front office there."\n\n I said, "What's the matter?"\n\n "You didn't have an escort." So that's an example of that intellect that we had to overcome. I don't know if Tom Kelly's book kind of portrays that particular area or not.

Kevin M. Rusnak: Not in that sense, I don't think.

Joseph H. Levine: People like Owen Morris. Have you talked to Owen Morris?

Kevin M. Rusnak: We did.

Joseph H. Levine: People like Owen Morris would spend the night, all night long, at Grumman, because he had the LM program under as the manager. At one time he was my boss. He had a terrible problem with the New York attitude, but he overcame it and, as a matter of fact, is very much respected at Bethpage [Long Island, New York].

Kevin M. Rusnak: That's interesting, because usually when we have heard of comparisons, I guess, between attitudes, mostly it's between Grumman and North American. Usually the California attitude is maybe a sort of more lackadaisical approach versus the Eastern more hardworking ethic. That's usually what we hear rather than the sort of personal attitude, I guess, in New York.

Joseph H. Levine: As a matter of fact, at Rockwell, the people—you hit a point on the head. The people at Rockwell would say "yes" and mean, "If you catch us, yes." Rockwell, being in the Southern California area, had people there that came to California not to work on the space program but basically to go to California, as a matter of fact. So they had a large contingent of people that worked at Rockwell, who could care less about the space program. But, nevertheless, the team that we finally evolved with turned out to be a pretty dedicated team, the whole team. I'm talking about Rockwell and Grumman and Delco and all the others. So it's an interesting number of people.\n\n You think, well, we're all one nation, but we have various people who have different attitudes. You hit the nail on the head. In New York, people didn't move around very much. People lived in the New York area, in Long Island or Manhattan area. They'd been there for generations. Not true in California. They'd been there a year, last year-type thing. So that does change attitudes.

Kevin M. Rusnak: And certainly the national scope of the Apollo Program brought all these attitudes together into one project.

Joseph H. Levine: What was interesting about the Apollo Program is the fact that we were coming off of the nation needed something, needed something as a national goal. But more important is that in California they were having some pretty bad problems in terms of the defense industry, and the Apollo Program came along at a time for funding that injected a tremendous spike in the whole nation as far as the defense industry is concerned.\n\n I don't know if anyone talked about that particular area, but in the 1960-'61 time period, there were people at Rockwell that told me that they'd been pumping gas. They didn't have any work. So this came along, and this was a tremendous spike. It might be interesting to follow up on that thing from an overall perspective as to what was the state of the nation in terms of the 1961-'62 period as far as that type of people were concerned. Here were people who were engineers who didn't have any jobs, who were working in gas stations.

Kevin M. Rusnak: By the end of the Apollo Program, it was competing for funding on the same type of work, meaning aerospace engineers, whoever, for defense contractors for the Vietnam War. Some people have suggested that because of this, that separate economic draw is one of the reason why Apollo didn't receive continued support for perhaps further missions or whatever.

Joseph H. Levine: Because of the 40 billion dollars a year that was spent on the Vietnam War.

Kevin M. Rusnak: Right.

Joseph H. Levine: Well, there were many of us. The Vietnam War was going on. We worked on the Apollo Program at the same time, and it was difficult not to be concerned about that war that was happening right there in our midst. I guess even historians today have to try to determine the effect of the Vietnam War on the whole nation. Even today it's probably going to take a lot of years to sort out.\n\n I have my own feelings on the thing. I know that everybody else who had been brought up in that era did. I was brought up during the World War II time period, and in the World War II time period, it was clear that the nation was looking for freedom for all people and we were fighting a war. We had something like 16 million people under arms. Everybody, every town, their sons were in the military. The whole nation was behind World War II. Wasn't true in Vietnam. It was a divided nation.

Kevin M. Rusnak: With you spending all the time you did working on the Apollo Program, did you find yourself paying as much attention to these other world events going on?

Joseph H. Levine: Yes, I did. There was a friend of mine, I don't know if you'll ever have a chance to interview him, he later worked for me, he's retired, his name is Harvey Fritz. Harvey Fritz came up through the military, and his attitude was probably pretty similar to mine, is it was very difficult for us to grasp the utility of a war that had no fronts that we could win. Here we were in various camps, and every once in a while they'd slug it out with us, and we'd lose 500 men and people with limbs.\n\n It was difficult because we were used to a war where we had a definite goal, we knew what it took to win. And here was a war that we could not understand. So, yes, it was difficult. But we didn't get involved in it very much. We were so involved in Apollo Program that, as a matter of fact, we didn't go out with Jane Fonda and march on the street. We really didn't get involved in the thing.

Kevin M. Rusnak: In a way, working on Apollo there, you were fighting a war in the sense that you could win. You did have this definite goal. Did you have a sense of the competition going on between the Soviet Union and the United States in the space race?

Joseph H. Levine: Very much.

Kevin M. Rusnak: Was that a motivating factor for you at all?

Joseph H. Levine: Oh, very much. We were very sensitive to that. There is a\n\n Time\n\n series, I don't know if you've seen that, that came out. It was put out by\n\n Time\n\n , which talked about the Apollo Program, the background of the thing, who named the Apollo. I think it was named by [Abe] Silverstein. He died recently. All of the details of the program, and then evolved itself all the way. It's recorded, a bunch of records. Have you had an opportunity to—

Kevin M. Rusnak: No, I haven't listened to that.

Joseph H. Levine: It would be extremely good. It's put out by Time, and it was put out in records as a matter of fact, or tape-type thing. So it might be useful to hear that. I had some recording of that sometime ago, but I may or not have it now. But if you can find it, let me know, because I wouldn't mind a copy of that myself. You will enjoy it, because it goes through the thing in detail, the whole Apollo Program.\n\n One thing I neglected to say on Apollo is that Headquarters, NASA Headquarters, began to involve themselves as part of the whole program, and they had somewhat great difficulty becoming a part of the program in the sense of the controls. I mean, they wanted to be technically in control, but they did not have the staff and they didn't have the capability to really become involved in the program.\n\n So as a matter of fact, there was a lot of movement, managerial movement, and that's one of the reasons that people like Joe Shea came to Johnson Space Center. George Low. They were at NASA Headquarters before. It was immediately evident that they could not run that program from NASA Headquarters. The top people like George [E.] Mueller at the time could do the job in the sense of helping you get funding for the program.\n\n There was a terrible concern, and I felt for them, because they wanted to be part of the program, and they wanted to be part of the program from a technical control standpoint, and it was impossible for them to do that. The top manager began to understand that, and then I'm sure that gave rise to George Low coming to Johnson Space Center in the capacity he did. And also Joe Shea. There was a reason behind that. They could not control the program from that vantage point, and both of them are technically competent people. I don't know if you got involved in that particular aspect of the NASA Headquarters' involvement at that time or not.\n\n One of the things that did happen, in terms of a support contractor, there was a number of people bid on the Apollo Program because it was a tremendous plum at that particular time. General Electric [GE] was one of the major bidders, as was Rockwell International, at that time North American. General Electric did not win the program, but there had to be something for them to get out of the program. So they had a contract called the Tie [phonetic] Contract. Have you ever run into that particular—\n\n The Tie Contract was involved to put a certain—some people thought it was a spy contract by NASA Headquarters. They would put a number of contingent GE people here and every center, and they would have people at NASA Headquarters. They would have probably several thousand people involved. So as a matter of fact, when I first came to Johnson Space Center, I ran right into that particular situation, did not understand it because I was all set to do the things technically. I was not politically involved, and, probably, maybe to my credit, I'm not politically involved today.\n\n But at that particular point in time, there was something like 500 people that were assigned to Johnson Space Center, and most of the Johnson Space Center people here said to the GE people, "You stay over there. Don't bother us," and began to ignore them because they considered them to be a part of a spy for NASA Headquarters.\n\n But then a certain number of these people when I came on—and I had nobody to help me, zero—they came over and they introduced themselves. There was several people, and they said, "What can I do to help you?"\n\n I said, "Who are you?" [Laughter] And they began to explain their fundamental job in life, and I said, "Well, I've got a copy of this proposal from Rockwell."\n\n "You need a copy of that?"\n\n "Well, yes."\n\n "How many copies do you need, a dozen?" These people were installed in places like the Holiday Inn on Gulf Freeway and various places all over town also. I immediately began to see that I had to use that resource. I had no other resource, and that was probably my initial push toward beginning to use a contractor as part of my team, a support contractor. They were most happy to be a part of that because they had nothing to do. They were given no assignments.\n\n I don't know if you remember reading about the White Sands [Test Facility, New Mexico] projects, where they had the early boilerplates like the pad rescue capability of being able to shoot things off the pad and we had several boilerplates. Well, at that particular point, I began to projectize these General Electric people. I said, "You work on Boilerplate 1 and 2," and so forth, and I went to White Sands.\n\n The people who were involved in the managerial spots here and at very high levels said, "The first person that had a General Electric person come on my base at White Sands will get fired." I had one. I didn't get fired. [Laughter] Because I had known them. I had to use them. I made them reasonably competent. As a matter of fact, as a consequence of that, they grew to something like 180 people before we were done, in reliability alone-type thing. So that's the Apollo Program.\n\n Turning a little bit to the Space Shuttle Program, one of the things that came up, what were some of the lessons learned that we had from the Apollo Program that were important to be fundamentally not making the same mistakes on the Space Shuttle Program. I don't know if you've ever heard of the term "configuration management" in terms of what it is. Configuration management is putting together in the document what the requirements are for the whole program and what it takes to meet them. If you don't meet them, the Change Board—they have Change Boards and that type thing—had responsibility to evaluate changes to that document as well as waivers to that document. One of the things that became evident is that many of the reliability requirements really weren't in that document in the sense that it would require a waiver if you didn't meet it.\n\n If you remember earlier, I was concerned in the Apollo Program with making the manager sign off when an item did not get met. For example, Criticality 1, through the FMEA process that could cause loss of crew, there was a requirement that you won't have any Criticality 1 problems of loss of crew, and if you did, it had to be signed off by the program manager.\n\n So there were many, many Change Board or Level 2 and Level 3 activities dedicated to being able to sign off on these Criticality 1 payloads. To this day, a real close friend of mine that's Bob Thompson—have you talked to him?

Kevin M. Rusnak: We sure did.

Joseph H. Levine: Bob Thompson is the type of person who took that responsibility in hand and had worked with it and really took it to heart, and that was one of the requirements in that particular activity, was that Criticality 1 concern had to be met in that particular area as one of the requirements. There was many other requirements other than that, but that was an interesting requirement. So that for the first time now, we've married the failure mode and effects analysis as a part of the program. In the other programs, it was over on the one side, but not really a part of the program in the sense that you had to sign off on it.\n\n Probably the pad fire gave rise to many of these enforcement disciplines and probably evolved itself in terms of the placement of the division. We were at one time a division in the Apollo Program that later became an independent. If you talked to Marty [Martin L.] Raines, he became a director reporting to the center director, more or less as a consequence of the 204 incident. I don't know if he said the same thing to you in terms of how he became director. Did he get into that aspect?

Kevin M. Rusnak: He did talk about it a little bit, about the transition here.

Joseph H. Levine: He was at White Sands as a manager at White Sands.

Kevin M. Rusnak: Right. It was sometime ago, I guess, that we talked to him, probably a couple of years now.

Joseph H. Levine: Been a while since you talked to him?

Kevin M. Rusnak: Yes.

Joseph H. Levine: Well, he's a very, very good guy. I'm sure you enjoyed talking to him.

Kevin M. Rusnak: From a practical perspective, did this mean any changes for you, creating this separate directorate?

Joseph H. Levine: No, not really, because I had my approach, and they had to adopt me or lose me. [Laughter]

Kevin M. Rusnak: I mean in terms of it didn't add any additional authority or change avenues of redress or whatever?

Joseph H. Levine: Not really. Now, it would for some people. Some people would tell you that they can't operate unless they get the right level of management. I say to that, that that's baloney. It's to the person. You can make a person reporting directly to the President of the United States, but if he isn't so oriented and respected, it's meaningless. So it wasn't ludicrous, but it didn't matter. I mean, I was going to do the same job regardless of where my placement was, and it worked that way.\n\n It may not have worked as well had I not been a civil servant and working at NASA. NASA, up until, I don't know, some years back, was, I don't want to say loosely organized, but a person who wanted to work and could work and do a good job and not be put in a socket here and say, "No, you stay in that socket. You can't go out of it. Don't run around. Don't go over there and bother anybody," type thing. So there was a sense of freedom. I had freedom working at Johnson Space Center that I would never have had any other place. I mean, there was fantastic freedom of being able to get the job done, and any ideas that you had that you wanted to promulgate or promote, there was no restriction of that, none. It was amazing. As compared to working at General Dynamics and all the other places, no one had the freedom that I had working here.\n\n So on the Space Shuttle Program, going back to that, that configuration management spec, a lot of the technical requirements were contained in a document called JSC 0700, I think the number was, and there was a Volume 5 that had many of the technical requirements. There was technical requirements that began to embrace things such as checkout. In checkout, one of the things that we didn't do enough on in the Apollo Program in checkout, one of the questions that came up is, "Since it's a reusable spacecraft, do you have to check out everything every time?"\n\n They would get in gigantic arguments, because one of the questions that came up during the Space Shuttle Program is that there was a goal or a requirement of a two-week turnaround, and could you meet a two-week turnaround and be able to check everything out? Well, there was arguments going back and forth, and my feeling was, and one of your questions, as a matter of fact, is that when is a program operational? One of my concerns with that particular answer, even though they'd say after a certain number of flights you're going to be operational, it's meaningless.\n\n Whereas you take a conventional aircraft, like an airliner, they can do a multitude. At Boeing they could have done hundreds of flights well before they released it to the airlines. We didn't have the opportunity. And with multiple aircraft. Here we were with a few aircraft trying to become operational. But I think the operational aspect was more political significance than it was technical. It had no technical significance to me at all, because I thought of it as if it was an R&D program even to this day, because things changed.\n\n One of the requirements in Volume 5 that I thought in the checkout aspect was that aspect that I mentioned relative to do you check out all your redundancy. The argument was, well, if it worked before, why wouldn't it work again? And there were people like Don Arabian, who you met, who we had countless arguments. I said, "That may be true." I said, "But that doesn't necessarily mean anything in an R&D [research and development] program." And, oh, we never had good agreement. You met him, I'm sure.

Kevin M. Rusnak: Yes, we actually talked to him down in Florida.

Joseph H. Levine: Interesting person.

Kevin M. Rusnak: Yes, he is. Since you brought him up, his point that he made several times with us was that a lot of this redundant testing, from his perspective, would cause perhaps premature wear or failure of these parts, so he thought a lot of the checkout at the Cape, for instance—I think that was his big area of concern—would cause more problems than it uncovered. So I was wondering what you thought about how you countered those arguments.

Joseph H. Levine: Well, of course, you counter them because you don't wear these parts out because they aren't used that much. On an aircraft, you use these parts for thousands and thousands of hours continuously, and many of these things are not used that much. They're in a quiescent stage after flight, except for things like fuel cells. But even so, many of these flights were seven, eight-day flights. They weren't that long as compared to, you know, the amount of use on an aircraft that's been around for thirty years.\n\n So I say to that, baloney. But we never agreed completely, and, as a matter of fact, there was Aaron Cohen, who was in charge of the Space Shuttle Program, the orbiter part, and would argue with me his main concern with that turnaround. Of course, he was hearing from the Cape, "We can't turn around because you forced us to do too much checkout."\n\n There's things like APUs [auxiliary power units] that I was concerned about, that here we have an APU where if you had one APU you couldn't necessarily control this spacecraft on reentry. You had to have at least two. That thing, even though the APUs operated a very short amount of time, because you turned them off after you got in orbit, what was the big argument about checking those out? Well, maybe that was okay, they'd say. But there was things like electronic components that wasn't okay.\n\n I said, "Well, my attitude is that since it was a requirement in Volume 5 that things be checked out so at liftoff you knew what your redundancy was, then let the program manager approve each and every one of them." Because that's the power of having something in configuration management, because for the first time there are people that have accountability, not just the program manager, but the Change Board as well. All the representatives of management suddenly have to approve these things.\n\n And are they reliability? Yes, they are reliability, as far as I was concerned. They didn't have the title "reliability," but they are a part of reliability, the fact of redundant checkout.\n\n To detract for a minute, there was a number of things called 8080 standards. 8080 standards were put in there, lessons learned. One of the standards is redundant pass. You don't put all your redundancy in the same area.\n\n And guess what's happened recently to Houston? In Houston, in most of the hospitals that have now gone out, and the Medical Center, where did we put the emergency power? The same place the primary power is located.

Kevin M. Rusnak: The basements.

Joseph H. Levine: And what was the primary cause? Water. So it wiped out all your redundancy. So you had this nice emergency power. Why did they do it like that? Because it was convenient. It didn't make noise, you know, and try to keep the noise level down, put it in the basement, don't make as much noise. Also, by putting it down there, how far away is the emergency lines, power lines from the primary? Close. So it's cheaper to do it that way. But what did it do to the hospital system?\n\n Hermann Hospital, for example, is still not out of the woods as we speak. Some of the others are beginning to come back. Have they learned anything? Is there a lesson learned there? I don't know. I don't know if they really understood what has happened to them.\n\n One of the things that I got involved in during that time frame was consulting. People would come over and they'd say, various people, the pipeline companies, there was one outfit that came out that was concerned about doing things and NASA techniques could do it, could I help them? I said, "Well, I can't help you. I can listen to what you have said and I can give you some tips, but I'm not a consultant to you."\n\n One outfit came over and they had these trucks. They actually did pipeline inspection in Alaska. They have these vans that go around there with these pipeline inspections, and they were having all kinds of failures, and they couldn't complete their work. I said, "Well, what's your problem?"\n\n They said, "We don't know."\n\n I said, "You have failures?"\n\n "Yes, that's it. We have a lot of failures."\n\n I said, "What do you do with the failed components?" Oh, they can't get another new component until they turn in the old one. I said, "What did you do with the component that failed?"\n\n "Nothing."\n\n I said, "You never determined the cause of failure?"\n\n "No."\n\n I said, "Well, then, how do you ever become mature? How do you ever get to the point of being able to have a fairly high success rate in your vans?"\n\n He said, "You know, I never thought of that." So these were some as an aside. We had people that would come over here, and we had people that came over here, if you remember the problem on the nuclear accident, the powerplant accident that took place during that particular time frame where we had the powerplant that leaked. It looked like it was going to be another Russian accident. You remembering hearing about that particular area.\n\n One of the things that would happen is that we'd talk about different things, and a lot of this was just common sense-type approaches, but, again, the vast amount of the country is geared to not thinking that way. They just think in terms of like the guy who had the van. He didn't think in terms of any of the disciplines that would make things better. It's like the thing in the hospitals today. That was an accident waiting to happen, and it did happen.\n\n But back to the Space Shuttle Program. Do you want to ask any questions in relation to that program that I haven't covered?

Kevin M. Rusnak: In relation to Shuttle?

Joseph H. Levine: Yes.

Kevin M. Rusnak: Well, if you want to continue making some remarks about it, that's okay, or I could ask you some specific ones.

Joseph H. Levine: Why don't you ask me some.

Kevin M. Rusnak: Okay. A sort of transitory question from Apollo to Shuttle—

Joseph H. Levine: One thing I didn't cover, and I'll come back to, is the Skylab Program. We'll come back to that. There's a lot to say on that.\n\n In fact, why don't I cover that real shortly. The Skylab Program was, to us, basically an advocation of the Apollo module itself. The LM was not involved in it. It was basically an Apollo-type mission. I'm going to say it's somewhat of a latch-up with the Russians to try to become a little bit more friendly with the Russians and begin to end the Cold War, more than anything else.\n\n Basically, the same discipline that took place on the Apollo was just a continuation on Skylab. There wasn't anything special, other than the latch-up itself and the new equipment that took place, so there wasn't a heck of a lot to add to that. I knew the crew. And it probably contributed something to international relations.\n\n Not a lot more that I can say on the Skylab Program. It was a short-lived program. It was basically a single mission-type program where we rendezvoused with the Russians' Soyuz Program.

Kevin M. Rusnak: In this transition period from where you're going from Apollo and doing these follow-on missions, the Skylab and the Apollo-Soyuz, where you're doing hookup with the Russians, are you at the same time then gearing up for Space Shuttle, are you then running all these activities simultaneously, the end of Apollo, the beginning of Shuttle, and then some of these Apollo follow-on programs?

Joseph H. Levine: Yes. Basically, where there's a new program coming up, even though there was a small contingent of people that were assigned to things like Space Shuttle, I got involved in it, because immediately in configuration management job, I wanted to make sure that some of the problems we had on Apollo would not transition itself over to Space Shuttle. So some of these documents that I've referred to, this 07700 series, Volume 5, I had people reviewing those things to make sure that things like the 8080 standards and all these things were put in there as requirements, not as guidelines.\n\n So that was true, and that was even true on Space Station. Even though you didn't ask the question on Space Station earlier, I spent probably, before I retired, probably a year or two on Space Station-type work. I'll talk more on Space Station before I get through.

Kevin M. Rusnak: You were mentioning the documentation again. That got me thinking about the importance of documentation overall, of all these steps of all the process that you're going through, through the testing and manufacturing and such. Could you maybe share a little bit about the development of that going through Apollo and what stage it was as you were going into the Shuttle Program?

Joseph H. Levine: You mean the stage of development of Apollo versus Space Shuttle?

Kevin M. Rusnak: Yes.

Joseph H. Levine: I think at that particular point in time, Apollo was reasonably mature, as you can make a program of that type mature. I mean, we were going to have several landings on the lunar surface, and we had reasonably great confidence that we could make landings of that type. A number of us were looking forward to other things, but all of our attention—one other important thing is that there wasn't a flight readiness review that I didn't participate in. In other words, my attitude was, is that every flight is unique, and if you lose one mission, that's enough to wreck the whole situation.\n\n So even though a part of your brain begins to look forward to greater visions of the space program, you cannot afford not to keep your attention on the current program. I don't know if that answers your question, but it was important to me and many others not to get distracted to the extent that you didn't look at the current program, and I didn't let my people get distracted that way, either, but I would, in fact, review documents to make sure that the next program didn't create the problems that the earlier program had.\n\n One of the problems that I see with long-term situations of people working at NASA, for example, is the training aspect of these people. How are they trained? Who trains them? I trained my people, but when I left, you know, I didn't leave that legacy, except with the few people that were there. One of the problems, and Chris Kraft—I don't know if you interviewed him—did you have a chance to interview him?

Kevin M. Rusnak: No, he was waiting until after his book came out to talk to us.

Joseph H. Levine: He might probably tell you, but there was, I think, the bad part of NASA and Johnson Space Center is we had a hiatus of no hiring for about fifteen or twenty years, so we didn't bring any people on board. So here was people that were not that far away from retirement, and average age, I forget, at the center was increasing. Every year it increased a year because there was no hiring. So suddenly, people began to retire, and as they retired, they didn't bring any new people on.\n\n Then, finally, I guess they began to allow hiring, but there was nobody to really train them. So even at this point, I'm not critical, but I think if you were to bring these people and sit them down and have the discussion that we're having at this moment, I'm not sure how many people would even be familiar with what I'm saying. And I'm talking about reliability. I'm not sure. It would be interesting to do that, to sit them down and say, "Now, how many of you are actually—do you understand what he's talking about and do you have the training and background for that particular area, and do you have the sensitivity and do you have the dedication?" And who is pushing the dedication? I don't know. That's one of the problems in terms of long-term space programs.

Kevin M. Rusnak: Now, fortunately, they have begun hiring people, and there are a handful of old NASA hands around that were there from the Apollo Program, but the number is very small.

Joseph H. Levine: A few of them. Well, I say a few of them. A good number of them went to work for contractors like Glynn [S.] Lunney, who is one of close friends of mine, who went to work for Rockwell and who was later with USA [United Space Alliance]. Now, he's very sensitive about things, but he's probably ready for retirement. Bob Thompson is retired. So the people who were there when, you know, how many of them can really pass on—that's where the value of this project is very useful. How many of them can really pass on the lessons learned and really pass it on to the extent that it takes?\n\n One of the things, I don't know if I've talked to you about this before—you're the history major?

Kevin M. Rusnak: Well, we all are.

Joseph H. Levine: You all are history majors?

Kevin M. Rusnak: Yes.

Joseph H. Levine: Okay. Well, then, if you study some of the tribal things that took place in the Indian nations, American Indian, they had a tremendous respect for the elder person that survived. Why did they? Well, those that survived had a sense of experience of lessons learned that they could pass on to the brave in terms of, "Hey, you'd better not take on the white man yet. You might all get killed." So they were able to bring on a maturity that would not be present, and then they would welcome these people as chiefs or give them some kind of title, but they kept them around. They didn't cast them off.\n\n In our society today, I'm not sure how many of them are cast off. They're casting off maturity. I think that there's a lot of that takes place in the United States. I don't know if you picked that up in some of your history lessons or really have sensed that particular area or not. Have you?

Kevin M. Rusnak: Yes, a little bit. Do you think that same thing is applicable for NASA specifically?

Joseph H. Levine: Yes, I do. I've talked to—aside from different people, and I'm not sure that they have the same sensitivity. Or is there anyone there to—one of the things I would do is I would have periodic reviews of subsystems. I'd make the guy get up and tell me about his subsystem. I'd quiz him. Oh, they'd hate it, but they liked it afterwards, because it made them sharper. It's like going through a master's or a Ph.D. disclosure. They had to get up and talk, and they knew they had to do it. There's nobody that I know of that's doing that with them at NASA.

Kevin M. Rusnak: It brings to mind an interesting comparison, I guess, with the very early space program with Mercury, Gemini, even the early days of Apollo, where you don't really have any old hands who knew about space because there wasn't any. So do you think that same kind of activity is possible now as then, when you had people with relatively little experience, a lot of young, eager people that got the job done, and maybe what are the drawbacks of that.

Joseph H. Levine: Well, that's a good question. As a matter of fact, having never done it before was probably useful. But what they did do, they brought on board a lot of people who had had a vast amount of aircraft experience, as I did. That aircraft experience, you were able to bring that to bear to the space program almost 100 percent. Had these people who had not had the aircraft background, and many of the people from NASA and Langley didn't have that, had they not brought on board the industrial people like myself that had worked in the industry, it might have been a different situation today.\n\n The early-day program manager was a manager, a guy by the name of Charlie [Charles W.] Frick. I imagine you've run across that name before. Charlie Frick was at Rockwell, and he was in charge of their commercial airline program at—not Rockwell, but at General Dynamics in San Diego. He was a program manager at the time. So there was an attempt to bring on board as many people as they could that they could bring to bear that experience on the space program.\n\n Now, if you run everybody off and said, "I'm going to start over again," they probably would have to use some similar technique of bringing similar industrial experience to bear on the program.

Kevin M. Rusnak: That's interesting. Well, if we can stop to change out our tape here for a few minutes.

Joseph H. Levine: Okay, good. The concern, as we went along on the Space Shuttle Program, one of your questions was, what were some of the concerns on the Space Shuttle Program unique to your arena, or my arena. One of the areas under my purview was the Triple-E Parts Program, which stands for the electrical, electronic, and electromechanical components. We ran into a problem of counterfeit parts. These parts were not born of Space Shuttle, but they were military parts. We used basically military parts, for the most part, of a Level B nature, which were screened and burned in on the program.\n\n Basically, we ran into this counterfeit parts program through the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation], as a matter of fact, who alerted us that some of these parts had been counterfeited and marked as being authentic when they really weren't authentic. Did we have any on our program? Well, how did we know? So we did a large amount of research, and the expectation is that we probably do have some of those parts.\n\n Now, how do we bail ourselves out of a problem of that type? One of the requirements we had was separate screening and burning under those parts. If there's any infant mortality or any failures of the parts, we'd be able to detect it. The other thing is, the parts were degraded. They're not used at the highest level that they're capable of being able to use. And probably just as important is the fact that redundancy and back to the same old failure points. The electronic arena is easy to attain redundancy because you're not talking about large volumes of things, whereas you get into engines, it's difficult to have as much redundancy as we had.\n\n So that's one of the problems we had, was the counterfeit parts program. I was visited by the FBI, and he talked to me at long vein. They found the guy who actually—some of these parts were actually military parts, but they were, for one reason or another, I think, rejected, and this guy would mark them as being authentic. They weren't failed parts, but it's like buying surplus part, actually. This guy, they got him, the guy that had done this particular area.\n\n But here we were, and this is an important aspect of the Space Shuttle Program, is that we were at the mercy of components that we didn't initially design and build from scratch, except for the engine. We basically are at the mercy of buying parts not off the shelf, but military tagged parts. The initial computer was a [Rockwell] B-1 [\n\n Lancer\n\n bomber] computer that was adapted for Space Shuttle use. So the ability to do everything from scratch on the space program was not in the cards, and it wasn't even in the cards on Apollo.\n\n So the uniqueness of it, people saying, "The space program built and designed these things from scratch," they did not. Most of these things had a heritage. Somebody else did. Like the fuel cells, Pratt & Whitney fuel cells, we had used Pratt & Whitney fuel cells on Apollo, and on Space Shuttle we adapted them and used them on Space Shuttle. So many of these components, particularly in the parts arena, Triple-E parts arena, are not unique to the Space Shuttle Program.\n\n I think, probably, if you look around for the APU itself, which is auxiliary power unit, they used them on an aircraft at one time, not the same technology, I mean the same identical item, but similar technology-type thing. Incidentally, that APU on the Space Shuttle is an example of where we had quite an argument in terms of placement of the APUs, because it's useful to have all the hydraulic lines running close together and so forth. But then one of the 8080 standards was separation of redundant paths. That's an 8080 standard. Well, the APUs all kind of bunch up together on a wall there in the aft bay of the Space Shuttle. One of the tests revealed, the APU itself, I think they ran it at full bore, and one of the gears, one of the things came apart, came through the APU and didn't have enough energy to really go very far.\n\n But there is an example of these three APUs, even today, lay pretty much side by side, convenient from a hydraulic standpoint and a line standpoint, convenient to have them locate the same way, but a single incident would be—and the FMEA did, in fact, basically reveal it as a single incident of a runaway APU that could cause you to lose redundancy of the other APUs was still present. And that was a waiver. In fact, that was discussed at length of being able to buy that particular redundant path-type thing.\n\n So many of these 8080 standards—and we'll get back to this technology transfer. I alluded to that when we talked about the medical center here, how much could they have profited by some of these 8080 standards, at least making a decision relative to locating the emergency power right there with the primary power. They could not do any surgery at all. No electric surgery had been done in most of these hospitals. As a matter of fact, they got a team from New Mexico that's come in here to do—you probably heard that on the radio.

Kevin M. Rusnak: No, I haven't.

Joseph H. Levine: A team of doctors that came from New Mexico to visit with patients here. That's terrible. Here we are the medical center of the world, and we bring in a team from New Mexico? I don't understand it. I'm glad they're here, but it makes you wonder, well, what about all these other doctors. And all these rat experiments, you heard about that. All these mice experiments are all lost because they were in the basement.\n\n Well, back to the program. But one of the things that I think does occur as you go through these particular areas, you begin to say to yourself, I wonder if these apply to other people, and how do we advertise this thing? As we went through these programs, particularly regarding the Space Shuttle, they set up a Technology Transfer Office at NASA Headquarters, under a guy by the name of Magavreau [phonetic]. Have you ever heard of that name? Lou Magavreau. He was very much involved, and if you could talk to him, I think it would be useful, because I think there was a Technology Transfer Office that was set up at each of the centers. They still have one here.\n\n The major purpose of this thing was probably a more controlled way of transferring information from NASA to various users, regardless of who they are. I've mentioned the people, the pipeline inspection people that visited with me. I had one visit. They were going to build a nuclear powerplant called the Black Box Project at Tulsa. Public Service Oklahoma was going to design and build that. I got involved with them and talked to them a little bit about that.\n\n One of the advantages I had is because I had a master's degree in nuclear engineering and had done the work in that area and worked on the Apollo Program and all the others, is I had the advantage of that experience that I could bring to bear. I could communicate with them, be it nuclear waste management or nuclear power, and that, I think, is useful for technology transfer purposes, because if you can't communicate with these people, they don't understand you. You've got to be able to communicate on their terms and their understanding.\n\n You had some other questions of me on Space Shuttle. Do you remember any of those?

Kevin M. Rusnak: Yes, I'd asked about some of the systems and perhaps the reusability of the Shuttle, what sort of demands has this placed on them over the previous programs.

Joseph H. Levine: Well, the fact that it is reusable did, in fact, bring to bear the discussion of a checkout. It did not have the same kind of bearing as it did on Apollo. Apollo, everything was checked out, we used it one time, it was a single-shot device. But on Space Shuttle, with the reusability aspect, then you begin to think in terms of making sure that—you couldn't test. In many instances, you could not do enough testing, physical time testing of some of these components to the durations that you would use some of these components up to 100-mission requirements. Some you could, cycles-wise, like switches and that type thing. But some, you couldn't do it. In other words, basically you had to demonstrate a sufficient amount of time, and you would want to make sure that you didn't have a wear-out phenomenon occurring, and that type thing, but then you were really dependent.\n\n That's the reason I argued so fervently in terms of people like Don Arabian in terms of full checkout at the pad, because I did not agree that we were operational after a few missions. I wanted to make sure we had the redundancy at liftoff-type thing. So reusability was a big thing.\n\n Another thing, although we've hit 100-mission requirement recently, as far as Space Shuttle, not on a single spacecraft, but 100 missions, when you begin to think about it, that's quite a feat. And it was quite a feat, but when you think about it in terms of the number of hours, say 100 missions times seven, eight days, and compare that to some of the commercial aircraft, it isn't that big. It's nice, it's great, it's wonderful, but it's not that huge a feat in terms of duration. So that's about all I can say on that particular area.

Kevin M. Rusnak: We had talked a little bit earlier about how getting the contractors to understand the new reliability requirements as such on Apollo was difficult, but now that you're doing Shuttle you've got the same prime contractor, North American Rockwell. How did instituting this program compare with earlier?

Joseph H. Levine: That's a good question, because we didn't know in the bidding process there that we would have the same contractors. We didn't know that we would have Rockwell on the Space Shuttle Program. We might not have had Rockwell. We could have had somebody else. There was a lot of bidders. Grumman was bidding, and I think Lockheed was. We had a number of bidders on Space Shuttle Program. The fact that we got the same contractor and basically the same people was a tremendous help to me, because I didn't have to go through the learning curve process.\n\n There was a few people that had worked on the Saturn Program that had not worked on the Apollo Program that was around, and he wasn't hard to convert, because he had worked on the Saturn Program.\n\n You had had a question earlier on the Saturn Program, on the Saturn V Program, in terms of an all-up program in that particular arena, and I never really answered that question during this discussion. Although I wasn't part of the decision-making, I did have a strong concern in that particular area because of the unmanned work they did on the Saturn IB and the work that had been done before they got to Saturn V. So they had a pretty good curve going in terms of learning curve in that particular area that gave me pretty good confidence that that would be okay. Then they did an immense amount of test-stand work on that particular area, and that, I think, was the thing the convinced people that you could use it for manned work for the first time. Although, still every time you lift those things off, it's still a big risk because of the rocketry involved.

Kevin M. Rusnak: While we're discussing Marshall, with the Space Shuttle, you've got them integrated, I think, more into the program than you did in Apollo where there's very definite interface. In this case, you've got Marshall doing the engines, the boosters, that sort of thing. How did the reliability requirements for JSC compare with how Marshall had traditionally done things and how were those mated for the Shuttle Program?

Joseph H. Levine: That's a real good question, because, as a matter of fact, I found Marshall more quality-assurance oriented that they were reliability oriented. The way Marshall was set up initially under von Braun, he set up labs, and he had a lab called a quality assurance lab under a guy by the name of Dieter Grau. As far as reliability was concerned, I found them more inspector and quality-assurance oriented than I found them reliability oriented. They gradually evolved into a great understanding in this area, but I never found them completely that way. In fact, even to this day, I've worked with them since, I've not found them really—they have the requirements. They have the NHB document and all this sort of thing, and they will follow that, or their contractors will, but the people themselves, I never found a Joe Levine over there, although I hunted for one over there, expecting to find someone that was really pushing that particular avenue. I did not find it. That's a good question. I didn't find it happening there.

Kevin M. Rusnak: That brings up a general question just to provide some clarification for the record. Where are the dividing lines between safety and reliability and quality assurance? Where does one pick up and the other one leave off?

Joseph H. Levine: That's a good question. The safety aspects depend a lot on the disciplines that come out of reliability, except they do things. They have a thing they call hazard analysis, but, basically many of the hazards are devised from a failure mode and effects analysis. That becomes a hazard because it's a Criticality 1 event.\n\n Some of their hazards that they pick up on uniquely is like they'll start with an effect in safety, like a fire. What causes a fire? Then they'll go backwards in terms of an analysis technique, hazard analysis technique, to evaluate that. So there's a kind of a top-down-type technique that they use. They will pick up a lot in that particular activity. Failures that happened that we evaluate and approve, they would pick up also. So there was a degree of overlap. Not a huge degree of overlap, but they were looking at it as a top-down standpoint. But they basically were leaning on the disciplines we were doing to a large extent. They basically did not, other than the hazard analysis. That was their major, major job. I don't know of anything so separate.\n\n Now, in the quality assurance arena, which brings up an interesting area, many of the failures were caused because of workmanship problems. One of the responsibilities of the quality assurance people is basically to address workmanship problems. As you will see later, I developed a technique, which I call the process failure mode and effects analysis, that tries to address this. But I found that for the most part most of the quality assurance people, which I'm not trying to belittle these people, but many of these people were inspectors, they were not engineers. Although some of them were called quality engineers, many of them had the title, but they were not engineers.\n\n Basically their techniques were mostly looking at the last time you could inspect something you see that it's whole, or you have what they call mandatory inspection points, that they call MIPs. So down the line, they'll say, "I'll need an inspection point here to see if in fact that problem is that way," so they'll lay out these inspection points. They don't have hard and fast rules in terms of how many inspection points they have, because if they have too many inspection points, then the complaint goes out of the manufacturing area that "You are slowing us down because you've got too many inspection points." They don't like that.\n\n So my counterpart, Jack [A.] Jones, who we talked about, I told you he had the massive stroke. I was going to communicate with him later. But Jack was continually struggling, I think, for doing some of the things I was doing. So one of the areas that he wanted to take over was the problem reporting, corrective action area, but he couldn't really take it over because all of the work in terms of closeout and so forth was mine. But he could take over the system, the actual data system. So some of that was separated for no good reason, I mean only because he was struggling for a role other than the role he had, which was important role. But I'm not sure that any of them completely understood what that role could be, as I'll explain later in terms of process failure mode and effects analysis.\n\n Actually, the quality assurance area was probably the only area in industry that exists today as an entity. If you go to Firestone and all these other places, they'll talk about quality assurance. You will not see too much discussion in terms of reliability. They'll talk about safety from a standpoint of industrial safety, but you don't see that much aspect other than quality assurance inspection, because people understand that. They'll say, "Has this item been inspected?" and you'll get a "yes" or "no" answer.\n\n "How did they inspect it?"\n\n "Well, we saw that it was together, " or, "We were there during the acceptance test," or that type of thing, or, "We had certain mandatory inspection points," you know, that type thing.\n\n So that's a very good question, and that's about the best way I can break it down in terms of that area, because when I came to NASA, when I put together a document, I put together a document that covered both reliability, test, and quality assurance. I covered all three of these. I didn't cover safety, in the sense that it's covered today, but the NHB 530041D document does cover that.

Kevin M. Rusnak: I think that's an excellent description of how these work together and where the responsibilities lie exactly, and I'm glad you brought up Mr. Jones there and the role of inspectors and that sort of thing, which is something I wanted to ask you about.

Joseph H. Levine: I'm not belittling Jack, because he's a close friend of mine, but one of the frustrations that many of the quality assurance people have is that they want to be professionally on the same level as everybody else. Many of them, particularly when I was at General Dynamics in quality assurance, they did not have the stature, although they wanted them, but they didn't have the stature, but they did everything they could in terms of organizations, professional societies of ASQC [American Society for Quality Control], and everything they could to begin to develop that stature. They've done a lot in that particular area. I think in order to get that stature that I think they're seeking, they have to be a part of the program, fundamentally, as I've tried to develop it in reliability. Then you get the stature. You've got to be a part of it, a team part of it.

Kevin M. Rusnak: That's interesting, because one of the things that this was bringing to mind was something you had mentioned earlier about how a lot of the contractors grew to hate you, or whatever, because of some of these problems, and I've heard some similar remarks about some of the inspectors, so at least in that way they're getting their job, I think, done in such a fashion or with such a diligence that they had to bring contractors around to that point of view.

Joseph H. Levine: One person that I don't know if you ever get, I don't know if he's even alive, that's at the Cape, KSC [Kennedy Space Center], is a guy by the name of Joe [Joseph M.] Bobik. I don't know, have you heard that name before?

Kevin M. Rusnak: I have heard the name.

Joseph H. Levine: Joe Bobik, when we were doing the boilerplates and I went to White Sands, I thought did a real good job, and I learned a lot from him in terms of inspection and evaluation of those boilerplates early on at White Sands. I regarded him as a tiptop inspector, real good inspector. He knew where the bodies where. I mean, he knew how to go in there, and with minimum just horse-sense-type thing, looking at wire lacings and wire layouts and looking at plumbing. I mean, he pretty well could pick out problems, and Jack Jones could also. He was very good in terms of picking out problems that were there that you can see from a top-down standpoint.\n\n One of the problems that many of the quality assurance people is that they didn't have that overall perspective of looking at it as a whole and just go in there and walk through and area and say, "There's something wrong here, here, and here," just by walking through it. They would try to do it from a mandatory inspection point standpoint. I think at the Cape they are doing more of this thing about walking through an area, but there is a degree of maturity and understanding. One guy could walk through there and see nothing, and another person could go there and, say, pick out a thousand different places. I have great respect for that type talent.\n\n If you ever can seek out Joe Bobik, I think he's down at the Cape. He was working for Lockheed at one time. If he's still alive, he'd be an excellent person to talk to.

Kevin M. Rusnak: I didn't know if there were any other remarks you want to make on Shuttle before we looked a little bit at Space Station.

Joseph H. Levine: Well, I guess one of the things that I began to think in terms of as Space Shuttle became more mature, we had a few flights under our belt, that type thing, other than the constant battle of trying to make sure that the spacecraft was not regarded as an operational vehicle, I fought that constantly and looked at it in terms of every flight being a unique flight type of concern.\n\n The Space Station began to become of interest, and one of the concerns I had was how much can we transition our experience that we had on Space Shuttle to Space Station. Now, what's interesting about Space Station is Space Station is not really a spacecraft in the sense of you've sent it up for seven to ten days or two weeks and then you bring it back. Here you have a laboratory, a facility, an ever-changing facility, and one of the things in terms of a lesson learned on Space Shuttle is Space Shuttle, many of its flights were payloads, experiments and sometimes satellites and this type thing.\n\n From a reliability standpoint, my responsibility for those payloads, some of them was nothing. There the safety people took over completely. They had responsibility. In fact, there is a payload safety document that's one of the series, and there you basically looked at payloads from a safety standpoint because they were furnished by the people, various things. Some of them are satellites, you know, that they deployed, and sometimes experiments. And that disturbed me. It disturbed me because from a taxpayer standpoint. I said, "You know, you spend millions and millions of dollars on some of these things, some of which the government was spending, and maybe we were spending, and then the question would come up is, what if they don't work?\n\n "Well, if they don't work, you bring them back and try again."\n\n I said, "Do you realize how many dollars per pound it costs to deliver a payload in orbit, and if it doesn't work, you've got to bring it back and start over again?" I said, "How much money is it worth to make sure it's right and you can use it, use the information?"\n\n So because they knew I was on their back, they developed a document called a payload document that began to categorize payloads into different classes. I forget the name of the document. They had what was called an "A." An "A" document is one just like the spacecraft, got to have everything up. Didn't have many of those. And it had a "B" and a "C." A "C" document—I think it was a "C"—a "C" was everything else, and it had very little requirement other than safety. Get reliability off our back. We don't need them. So they categorized everything for "C," almost everything that I ran into, that the people here and the payloads had were categorized "C." That way we didn't have hardly any involvement at all with that particular area.\n\n But what troubled me, and still troubles me today, is the economics of the thing. Why have an experiment or payload that don't work? So I felt the same way towards Space Station. As it began to evolve into Space Station, I said, "You're going to have literally hundreds, maybe thousands of these payloads, and you're going to spend the money and get them up there, and they're not going to work. You're going to try to maintain them in orbit? You can't maintain them in orbit. Most of the time you have to just package it up together and send it back." In fact, they're struggling now with the arm, you know. They're trying to get that thing operational, which is another story.\n\n But the point here is that I've never really been satisfied that anybody has had a complete understanding and sensitivity toward payloads, the economics aspect. The safety aspect, perhaps, but the economic aspects, no. They're not sensitive to it. And the reason behind it is that many of these payloads are furnished by other people. There's nobody in charge of this whole thing saying the government doesn't want to spend this kind of money on something that don't work. There's no czar over that type thing, is the only thing I could figure.\n\n So on Space Station, one of the things that we began to hit almost immediately is that we were looking toward the number of requirements. As a matter of fact, I put together a document, a briefing for the Associate Administrator over at Space Station at that time at NASA Headquarters, and I hit all the areas. I said, "What is different between previous programs and Space Station?" Of course, the thing you hit is on is you hit on the long-life aspect, you hit on the fact that it's a facility, an ever-changing facility-type thing, and you hit on the aspect of the requirement of in-flight maintenance.\n\n In-flight maintenance aspect began to be the most—we had very little in-flight maintenance on Space Shuttle or Apollo. Some of it was, where they could, they'd bring along another computer where they could plug it in on Space Shuttle and also on Apollo. You could plug it in, mostly on Space Shuttle, or an inertial measuring unit, IMU, where you could take it along and plug it in type thing. But you couldn't do much more than that. It wasn't built for in-flight maintenance. It was built not to be, unless you had a problem like Apollo 13. There was an example of trying to do something as kind of a way of trying to patch things together with materials they didn't even know would work type thing.\n\n So with Space Station, here's a situation that in-flight maintenance is a requirement. My concern is that with a finite crew, how in the world do you tie up a crew to do—the reason they're up there is basically to do experiments and science work, and you tie them all up just to keep the facility going. Are you able to basically do that type of thing of in-flight maintenance, and who is studying that?\n\n It went across very well, and the Associate Administrator from NASA said, "You hit it right on the head." And everybody bragged about how good the briefing was, because although my briefing was a reliability briefing, I was hitting it from a top-down standpoint of the whole program. No one else had done that. So I had hit it from that standpoint. Then even today, I don't think that they are sensitive enough to in-flight maintenance.\n\n Are you about to run out of tape?\n\n One of the problems that people did not really take to heart was the fact that that was going to be an extremely long-life project that could go upwards to ten, twenty years, or even longer, and it would have to be maintained almost completely in space, with a very small amount of workmen. At the most, we were talking about if you combined the combined crew that were up there from an earlier crew of seven or eight people and with a Space Shuttle crew, you don't have a huge number of people.\n\n How much of this stuff could you return to Earth? The ability to return a grappler they had a problem with, boy, that would be something else. The ability to return things to Earth is something else. But, anyhow, one of the things I looked at was I looked at the ability, how long can stuff last?\n\n We let a contract to Martin [Martin Marietta Corp.] at the time. It was a long-life contract. That was the name of it. We were looking at, basically, that type thing. What are their wear-out modes? How long can things last? You're talking about a capability of being able to go for a huge number of hours and time and years without failure. How do you do that? When you think about it in your house, how long do things last? I mean ten, twenty years is a long time.\n\n So we did do that contract with Martin. We picked up a lot of things. Probably the biggest thing they picked up on was that we didn't know much, they didn't know much. We really couldn't really pick out and say something would last ten years or five years or so forth. One thing it did pick out, though, that became pretty evident to me, was that if you housed everything on the outside and caused the crew to do basically EVA [extravehicular activity] in suits on most of the equipment that was put on the outside instead of the inside, then you didn't have a chance.\n\n One of the redesign things that took place on the Space Station would begin to move things in the inside. They still have stuff on the outside, but they've got a lot more on the inside than they ever had before, and I think that took place after I left, as a matter of fact.\n\n One of the things that we had as a reliability and maintainability program on the Shuttle is everything was designed for reuse up to 100 missions and ten-year life requirement. That was the requirement on Space Shuttle, with the exception of external tanks and solid rocket boosters and stuff like that. They had a twenty-mission limitation.\n\n But on Space Station, I don't think there is a time requirement on this. There is no time requirement, as far as I could see. So what I put together years ago, is I said, How is it influenced? It's going to cause interfaces with all of the things like Space Shuttle and orbiter transfer vehicles and unmanned platforms and all this sort of thing, and assigned an indefinite operational lifetime, and its provisional and change-out ability have to remain operational indefinitely as needs demand, that's just requirement. Payloads be optimized in terms of crew involvement. As far as redundancy is concerned, you could put in some rules on redundancy, like the vehicle subsystem can't be less than operational failsafe. So I mean a lot of the rules still apply.\n\n Redundant paths, the things we talked about in terms of redundant paths, you have to be careful that you don't have one single failure that will wipe out all your redundancy. We may have had that problem.\n\n The capability is to perform maintenance and repair on orbit. Overall operation not substantially degraded by selected repair modes. How does one do that? They have five people up there, and, as a matter of fact, they have reduced the number of people on the crew, as I recall, to, what, four or five now, five as a maximum because of the cancellation of one of the programs. So you've got the crew with five people.\n\n How does one do repair and in-flight maintenance while doing all of the sleep modes while doing useful work? That can be very tough. How much can they really do? So in-flight maintenance began giving me a tremendous demand, and even then, here I'm talking about work in 1983. Now here we are in 2001, and I don't have a good answer for it. They don't have a good answer for it. I have not heard of how much useful work—of course, they're in assembly mode right now, slowed down somewhat by the arm-type thing. But they're in assembly mode. When do we see useful work? And how much useful work will you be able to do? It's going to be an awesome problem, in my opinion, to keep going.\n\n One of the things, though, I got into at that time is what about critical spares and hardware maintenance capability? What critical spares, how many critical spares, how big can they be? Right now, you know, I revisit capability of—they could revisit, maybe on an emergency basis they could revisit in a month, two weeks or a month. Not much faster than that.\n\n So meanwhile, it depends on how critical the spare is. If the spare is very critical, you'd better have it there and not have to depend on—or have enough redundancy so that you don't have a problem. So one of the requirements that I had was to provide onboard critical spares and hardware maintenance capability. So I had a lot of questions that I couldn't answer at that particular area. The long-life assurance requirements, how do you do Triple-E parts controls in that particular area, and how do you marry reliability and maintainability together? One of the advantages is we never really had to marry them together, because we never did that much maintainability work out of orbit, like you were talking about.\n\n But now on Space Station, the name of the game of reliability is maintainability, is being able to maintain it, and being able to maintain it in orbit, not on the ground. You don't have that capability like an aircraft. So here we have an example in space that the aircraft industry has not had to worry about. They just land. They have a problem, they land and they maintain. They don't maintain in flight, unless they have some unique thing they could do. I don't know what it is. Ninety-nine out of 100 cases, it's always find a friendly airport and we'll land there. That's exactly what we'll do. We'll do our flight work on the ground.\n\n They have had some experience for doing this. Like on the Space Telescope, Hubble, they were able to do a lot of work in there, but that was quite a unique job when you begin to think of it. The crew had to practice for hours and knew exactly what they had to take up with them. It was a unique mission just for that. They've done tremendous in that particular area, and they're still going to have to do some more work in that particular area.\n\n But when you talk about a facility as large as Space Station, which has the Japanese experiment module, the Russian module, and our own module, it's going to be interesting how much useful science—and that's our whole reason for being there—useful science and the ability of having man on orbit for huge amounts of time.\n\n I don't know if you've had the opportunity to talk to people like the Skylab astronauts, have you?

Kevin M. Rusnak: Yes.

Joseph H. Levine: Who have you talked to?

Kevin M. Rusnak: Actually, most of them, the ones that are still around. Al [Alan L.] Bean, Owen [K.] Garriott, Bill [William R.] Pogue.

Joseph H. Levine: You talked to Bill?

Kevin M. Rusnak: Yes.

Joseph H. Levine: Yes. Bill is a friend of mine. In fact, he was the one that we did some consulting work together. And the one that was on that mission with him?

Kevin M. Rusnak: On Pogue's mission?

Joseph H. Levine: Yes.

Kevin M. Rusnak: There was Jerry [Gerald P.] Carr.

Joseph H. Levine: Jerry Carr.

Kevin M. Rusnak: Ed [Edward G.] Gibson was the other one.

Joseph H. Levine: Gibson, yes. I don't know what Bill Pogue told you about in-flight maintenance, but he will share exactly what I'm saying here, exactly. You did talk to him?

Kevin M. Rusnak: I don't know if he mentioned in-flight maintenance. I'm trying to remember back. It was a little while ago that I talked to him.

Joseph H. Levine: Yes, he should have, because we talked extensively in that particular area on in-flight maintenance. In fact, probably they had to do a lot on Skylab in that particular area because they basically had a failure. They had to deploy ways of trying to keep the coolant down with the umbrella-type aspect.\n\n One of the areas that I ran into and began to develop was software reliability. Up until then, we were pretty much hardware oriented. Now the question was, is how does one do software reliability, basically talking about codes and computers. The computers we could handle, but what about the codes and what about the software as far as this reliability is concerned? Even today, I struggle with that particular question.\n\n I did come up with a technique of doing some work that we adapted from our hardware area, like design reviews. They call them peer reviews-type thing, where they have people who had similar software knowledge, they would look it over, look over the codes, in terms of it. Other techniques they used in terms of software review was just running it to death in different modes of operation. So we put together, I think, a guideline spec before I retired, on software, that even today I'm not real happy with the status quo of software reliability.\n\n People struggle with that. There's a lot of software. As matter of fact, this last Space Station episode is probably software. I don't know where it is, but software is involved in that particular area somewhere. So we are so dependent on software in everything we do now, I think that that's an area that needs a lot of exploration. I confess I didn't get deep enough into that particular area.

Kevin M. Rusnak: Yes, we've talked to a couple of the NASA people who were very much involved with software from the beginning through Space Station, and it's certainly one of the issues that they had to discuss.

Joseph H. Levine: I mentioned this long-life assurance requirements and some of the studies we did. We really created five volumes. One of the volumes was a summary of long-life assurance guidelines, I think we talked about; Triple-E parts and packaging; long-life assurance studies of components; special long-life assurance studies; and long-life assurance tests and study recommendations. This was done in 1972, this work, which I thought was a pretty good look ahead.\n\n We looked at integrated circuits, hybrid circuits, transistors, dials, resistors, relay switches, circuit breakers, transducers, batteries—talking about long life—temperature cycling, bearings, accelerometers, gyroscopes, tape recorders, valves, pressure vessels, pumping compressors, electronic packaging, system design usage factors, accelerated testing, screening, and ratings, at that time frame. So I think it was a good look ahead, unfortunately was not carried forward, to my knowledge, any more than I've included.\n\n I put together a list of things that had to be changed for Space Station. Reliability management. I indicated that they had to incorporate planning, integrate maintainability and reliability approach. That hadn't been done before. That was a change. One reliability maintainability plan, a software reliability approach, I talked about. Numerical trade studies to incorporate reliability, maintainability, in all trade studies as required using numerical probabilistic approaches where credible. Probably still had to use—because of long life, we're talking about years, so now statistical techniques might be useful to work on that particular area.\n\n The FMEA, modify it to incorporate the maintainability requirements of attention rationale. In other words, if the item failed, what do you do? We didn't do that before. What we did before is that if it failed, you would want to make sure could you accept the rationale for that failure. Now if it failed, could you continue by repairing it? That's a different approach in the FMEA than you had before.\n\n On parts control, we talked about what was the level of parts we ought to use for such a long-life program. Do we need gold-plated parts that last longer? We really didn't come up with a huge change in that particular area, nor did anybody else.\n\n Materials control, we talked about trade study to control flammable materials for Space Station. I'm not sure how well that's done. You know, you've got yourself a big facility there and people running around with possible flammable materials. I'm not sure about the hazards of that particular Space Station long haul. It's ignorance on my part, but I'm not sure that that lesson learned has taken all that well.\n\n Maintainability analysis. I thought that special maintainability analysis integrated with the reliability analysis were needed. We're talking a long time ago. We're talking '83, this kind of thing.\n\n Limited life control. In other words, those items that we know are on their way out ought to be incorporated in the maintainability area.\n\n Test control, a trade study to evaluate an overall test approach from ORU, that's orbital replacement unit, acceptance to integrate in module pre-flight and in-flight checkout, including modification. How do you do test control, including usage on in-flight? How do you take a spare up there, and what do you do before you incorporate it? You don't have a checkout facility up there. It's a different breed of cat.\n\n Milestone reviews. I said we need to evaluate the present method of controlling milestone reviews. What is a milestone review? You all have an FRR [Flight Readiness Review], you got a continual Space Station. What do you do in terms of a facility review before you allow something to take place? Who does it? Who's involved in it? Is it strictly the flight control people? Too bad. Yes.\n\n Problem reporting. I indicated you ought to modify the problem reporting corrective action format to ensure maintainability corrective action appropriately. If you have a failure, you always should say, "What can I do from a maintainability standpoint in the future?" I'm not sure that that's included in today's problem reporting system. It should be, but I doubt very seriously that that's in there.\n\n Then, alerts. You know what a guided alert is. They have an alert system that was incorporated by DOD [Department of Defense], and in case of a problem, everybody gets alerted. Like counterfeit parts were a guided alert at one time. You know you've had it, so then you look at your own system to see do I have a problem. I set up a closed-loop system on guided alerts that says on every alert I want a positive approach that I do or don't have the problem, not an open-loop response.\n\n I visited with all the Space Station steady contractors—we had steady contractors back in '83—to try to establish a state-of-the-art and reliability, maintainability, and integration. Didn't do well. Except at Lockheed, they were sensitive to the Space Telescope because it was designed for in-flight maintenance. But for the most part, I didn't see any breakthroughs, you know, somebody that really had a good answer. I was really on virgin ground. I just did not really feel happy with what I saw.\n\n The last point I had in this particular briefing was that studies are needed to ensure optimum approaches for recognition of the high demand on crew time. It's going to be high demand. The challenge ahead is to develop the needed reliability, maintainability technology to fulfill the Space Station's needs. That's '83. I still think it's true today.

Kevin M. Rusnak: I'm kind of struck by how many of those points that you're making are applicable to the Mir Space Station and some of our experiences when we had astronauts on board that, these issues about maintainability, fire hazards, all of that, the time the crew spends doing maintenance. So I was wondering how closely you followed that program and if you found the same kind of parallels.

Joseph H. Levine: I followed it as closely as I could, you know, mostly through the press and that type thing, and it just reinforced my feelings on in-flight maintenance. Even right now, it's because I'm not that close to it, I guess, I don't feel great confidence that they have a handle on in-flight maintenance on Space Station. I just don't feel that way because maybe I'm not close to it, but I don't know that they do. It's going to be a major problem. We've got a huge expense. We started with a program, what was it, $8 billion program, we're up to about 20 or 30 billion at least.

Kevin M. Rusnak: I think it's a lot more than that now.

Joseph H. Levine: Yes. I don't know. We could develop a lot of information there, and it's got to be more than just human demands, you know. A person can live and work in space for a year or two. It's got to be more than that. You've got to have a lot of technology developed out of that program. I'm not sure who the czar is that understands that particular area and has got grips on it. Dan [Daniel S.] Goldin may. I don't know if you can get a little history from him. He may have a handle on the thing or have some sensitivity on the thing.\n\n It would be interesting to interview these guys and say, "What is your feelings on this particular area?" It would be a good interview with a guy like him. He's certainly lived through this mess, and it's been a mess that's gone through I don't know how many evolutions to be where we are today, and how many people have been managers on this program that are not managers today. They've killed off a lot of people, a lot of good managers, as a matter of fact. I don't know how much you've got into that particular activity. Have you been able to get into that?

Kevin M. Rusnak: Certainly not in the depth that we've had on the previous programs.

Joseph H. Levine: There was a guy that was one of the original program managers. I can't think of his name. He's with SAIC [Science Applications International Corp.].

Kevin M. Rusnak: Neil [B.] Hutchinson?

Joseph H. Levine: Neil Hutchinson. Neil would be a really good guy to interview.

Kevin M. Rusnak: We talked to him once, but we didn't quite get up to his Space Station days. He's planning on coming in again to talk about that yet, so we've got that to look forward to with him.

Joseph H. Levine: Neil is a good guy to talk to. He was in flight operations here, and he's still with SAIC, I think. He would be a real good guy to talk to, because he was the original program manager in that particular activity. Since then, I guess they've had I don't know how many program managers in that particular activity. They killed off a whole bunch of them. But Neil would be a very good guy from a look-back standpoint to say what do you think the problem is.\n\n I think, personally, the problem with Space Station is that they couldn't evolve a configuration. There was too many shifts. They couldn't evolve a configuration. And also the contractor, they never really had a really good contractor on that job. I think Boeing had become a good contractor, a reasonably good contractor, in fact, the single contractor. Maybe they had too many contractors there at one time.\n\n The original thought on Space Station was, we're really going to spread the wealth. We were going to give every center a bite of this thing, because we want to keep all the centers technologically adept in this particular area. So we'll give Johnson some of it and we're going to do it from Headquarters, we're going to integrate it from Headquarters. It went to Headquarters and back to the centers and back and forth. We were a lead center and then it went to Headquarters. In my opinion, it's been a managerial nightmare. It's not out of it yet. The fact that they've done as much as they've done is tremendous. George [W. S.] Abbey, you've got to pat him on the back. He's certainly had a part of this, because the fact that they've gone as far as they've done is tremendous.\n\n Here we are, we've gone back to 1983. This thing has been around a long time, you know. When you think about how long it's been around and it's still not operational by any means, will not be operational, if everything works, for probably, what, a year or two, at least, and then how do you do an operational review of that facility, and who does it? How do you incorporate reliability, maintainability into it? And do you use the same kind of techniques that we've used in the past? Do you use flight readiness reviews?\n\n Who looked at the Space Station and knows exactly how it's configured, and who's maintaining that configuration? How many failures have we had on the various components, and who's got a good handle on that particular area? I don't know. I really don't know.

Kevin M. Rusnak: I don't know that I can answer that for you either.

Joseph H. Levine: I don't know. I mean, you've got my state of knowledge on Space Station. I started it, I was sensitive to it, very sensitive to in-flight maintenance, and I think I was sensitive to all the reliability aspects of the thing, but I didn't stay around Space Station long enough to really get either killed or influence it. I'd probably have gotten killed. They'd probably kill me off.\n\n Why don't we take a few minutes' break, and then we'll go on to some of the technology transfer.

Kevin M. Rusnak: Okay.

Joseph H. Levine: One of the major reasons for leaving is, I determined that after a certain point in time that I should try to do other things and try to use some of the experience that I had to do other things other than be a manager at NASA. It did take a lot out of you to be a manager because you basically are dealing a lot with people and people do take a lot out of you when you spend a lot of energy with them. Not that I didn't enjoy it. I do enjoy people. But as a manager, you're constantly under stress. It's like the bank teller that doesn't want to take a vacation because the bank examiner may come in while he's gone. I just basically never really felt at ease even taking leave and vacations and this type thing.\n\n So I determined at a certain time in my career, I would basically leave. Unfortunately, one of the things that happened is that about three months before my departure time, I knew I was going to leave at a certain point in time, the people up at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission [NRC] wrote a letter to NASA saying, "We sure would like to have Joe Levine involved in an incident similar to Three Mile Island," but it was the Davis Besse incident. It was a nuclear powerplant that had almost had a similar incident. "We'd like to have him in on the investigation." I thought, "Ah, this is a good opportunity to do something different, and I'm going to retire in three months," and the Space Shuttle was going pretty good.\n\n So Marty Raines, who was my boss, agreed for me to go up there and be a part of it. The team was not to investigate the Davis Besse incident, but to investigate the people who investigated Davis Besse and also investigate the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and find out are they doing the right thing. So there was a team of people from FAA, and me from NASA, and the guy that was in charge was a former political commissioner from Maryland, he headed it up. There was a guy from NRC. There were several people from NRC. One was actually from the headquarters NRC, and there was about six people in that involved.\n\n As I got up to Atlanta [Georgia], people were looking at their television sets. What were they looking at? It was the\n\n Challenger\n\n accident. I was changing aircraft in Atlanta, and I didn't know what should I do. Should I come back, or what should I do? I called Marty Raines, and he said, "Just go ahead. Just continue on, and we'll call you back when we need you."\n\n So I got up there and met with various people, and they said, "What happened?" Well, I don't know. What happened? I don't know. I have a suspicion of what happened. I don't think it was on the spacecraft. I think we did everything we could on that, and everything pointed towards the solid rocket motor. That's exactly what did take place, as a matter of fact.\n\n So I joined up with the Davis Besse evaluation, and we had a merry-go-round. We went to the contractors. We visited Davis Besse. They have an independent outfit that operates as a tax on the utilities to keep reliability reports of various failures that have taken place at various nuclear powerplants. I said, "Ah, this outfit, called INPO, Institute of Nuclear Power Operations, was similar. They must be doing a great job." I said, "Well, what do you do with the information you gather?"\n\n "Oh, we do studies."\n\n I said, "But what do you mean, studies? What do you do in terms of the people themselves as far as complements are concerned?" It began to dawn on me that although they were keeping some information, the distribution of that information was cautiously kept at INPO. It wasn't distributed very much, so one nuclear power didn't necessarily know what the other was getting. So today's world, and it began to dawn on me, as part of the Davis Bessey incident and looking at all this type of thing and accident investigation, it was a very interesting project, the whole thing, it began to dawn on me that if nuclear power in this country was going to succeed, it had to be a standardized nuclear powerplant. They all look alike.\n\n Lo and behold, in France, 80 percent of the electrical power in France is nuclear power, and they have a standardized nuclear power plant. Instead of having everybody—and one of the lessons I've learned when I was doing a little consulting work on the Black Box Project with Bill Pogue, that's where we became real good friends, was at Tulsa, one of the things that I found in talking with the people there, I talked to them about configuration management, I talked to them about reliability, one of the things I found out in talking with them is that nobody had any experience. The contractor who they had brought on was an A&E [Architecture and Engineering] contractor called Black and Beach [phonetic], good contractor, built bridges and buildings, out of Kansas City.\n\n "Had you ever built a nuclear powerplant?"\n\n "No, but we can do it," you know. One of the things that became very apparent is that where was the experience base. So over and over again, I began to see in my mind, and it crystallized in my mind, is if we're going to—see, we had built nuclear powerplants already in this country, got about 103, I think, or so operational in the country. Many of those have reached their so-called useful life, which is another story, that's supposed to have a thirty-year useful life.\n\n If we're going to have useful nuclear powerplants, we're going to have to standardize, because one of the things I found out while visiting with the utility, I thought I was talking to people who were going to design the plant. No. The people at Tulsa who, basically, had about 150, 200 people there, most of the background at Public Service of Oklahoma and all utilities are operational people. They can operate the plant, but they're not designers. The designers are the A&E companies, Brown and Root, Black and Leach, they're the ones that are designers. But after they design and build it, where are they? They're on another project. They're not around.\n\n So it began to dawn on me, and even today, that you've got to change that intellect, because the utility people think, and that's the way they started doing nuclear power, they started doing it by using the in-house talent to an extent and hiring a contractor. That's one of the problems that happened at various places. You can't work it that way. You've got to have a standardized plant.\n\n So I may write a few pieces of correspondence to our Vice President, who has endorsed nuclear power, and begin to push on this. I think the nuclear industry has wised up to this also. I think you're going to find that they're going to be pushing standardized plants for the whole thing. They ought to be standardized from A to Z. There's no reason why not. The not-invented-here syndrome should not apply type thing.\n\n So anyhow, I spent about two months, three months. They called me back for the\n\n Challenger\n\n accident to testify to the committee that was here, Rogers Committee. Mine was pretty straightforward in terms of our disciplines, and I had no difficulty doing that. Went back and, basically, I guess that three months was spent mostly on the Davis Besse investigation. Came back and shortly thereafter retired. Had a nice going-away party.\n\n Then what did I do afterwards? I wanted to do consulting work. I didn't want to have any employees. One of the problems I had was, how do I do consulting work without having a secretary? I don't want a secretary. I don't want anybody, no employees. But how do you turn out reports? That's when I discovered the computer. The computer in that time frame, we're talking '85, pretty good. It could do word processing, this type thing. First thing I did is I tried to use typing pools. Disaster. Complete disaster. I'd give them a draft, I'd get back there and can't read your handwriting. It would be a mess. I'd send it back, and everything got cold. No good.\n\n Bought a computer, my first computer, and I learned how to use a computer. Up until then, I really didn't know to do word processing. I stayed up until 3:00 o'clock in the morning for weeks learning how to do word processing. No expert, but for the first time, I could change immediately something I said to what I liked.\n\n So the consulting work I began to get involved in. At that time they were doing the post-\n\n Challenger\n\n accident work, and they asked me to work on the project called PCASSS. PCASSS was Program Compliance and Shared Status System. What they did, this was evolved from Level 2. People began saying, "The Rogers Commission had a bunch of findings, and you don't know what the projects are doing, you at Space Shuttle. You just take their word for whatever they're doing, but you have no window into what they're doing." And they're right. We didn't set up a problem reporting system to evaluate what Marshall's problems were and how they rectified them. We didn't do it. We did our own, but we didn't do theirs. We did the orbiter part.\n\n So the PCASSS system was set up to provide that window. I hate to tell you, but they did do a measure of good on the problem reporting area, but it was not—one of the problems is that they hired IBM to do it, basically, and IBM had a sensitivity to an extent, but one of the lessons learned in hiring a software company or that type of company, a computer company, to do that kind of work is they had no sensitivity towards the operational usage of the data. They would work towards trying to gather the data, but they didn't have any sensitivity in terms of problems that evolved out of Marshall or JSC. They were there mainly software. So we did get together most of the problems. In fact, I think they're still playing around with it today.\n\n But one of the things I began to drift into is that one of the requirements was, any problem that was a Criticality 1 problem required Level 2 approval, regardless. They didn't have that before. So I got involved in that for a year or so and got involved pretty deeply in getting them involved in that particular area and forced the projects to basically circuit those. I got a pretty good window into the way Marshall operates, more than I had before, because I was so involved in that particular area. So that was one of the things I got involved in after I retired.\n\n About the time before I'd retired, I began to become interested in the fact that half the failures were caused by quality assurance or manufacturing defects. At that particular point in time, I said, if half the failures are manufacturing defects, these can occur anytime, and these are not design-caused problems, these are manufacturing, but they can kill you just as much as if they're a manufacturing-type problem. What do you do about that?\n\n So I began to explore a little bit with the quality assurance people a little closer on how they operated, I discussed earlier, and one of the things I found is, they weren't all that disciplined in terms of how they looked at processes. I began to discover and I began to think about it as if everything is a process. I mean, if you're doing a TV set, you go from step A to B to C to D to E, you know. Everything is a process. And if it's a process, then it ought to be amenable to a failure mode evaluation through, say, do process A is you're basically taking raw materials. How can that process fail? What are the causes of those failures? What's it effect, and can you detect it right then and there, or will it be detected downstream at the next step, or will it be basically never detected until it's out in the field?\n\n I really got involved in that technique, because it had a lot of capability and you began to think about it and it's useful to everything. Firestone Tires, you know. Everything is a process. Medical procedures. I talked to one guy who was in charge. They have an outfit, I can't think of the name of it, that evaluates hospitals. You may have heard about them. They basically go into hospitals and they certify hospitals. No hospital can be operational without their certification. And it had a lot of problems. That's why this guy and I talked about it. He's a professor over at a dental college here in Houston. I talked to him about it, and none of these hospitals can become certified unless they passed it. But then he became disturbed, because they were cutting off the wrong legs. You heard about some of these things. They've had, it turns out, 100,000 goofs in the country, at least 100,000. I don't know if that's per year. He's worried about is their technique sound.\n\n Well, what is their technique? Their technique is they basically go into hospitals with, who? Experts that are working in the field. So the fox is now looking at the chicken coop. I mean, these are not outside people. And I think today we still have that problem of looking at processes.\n\n How do you look at processes? Well, that process FMEA aspect would take a look and make sure that the right leg is properly—as you look through, how does a guy that is going to have a leg cut off make sure that there is no goofs? You go through each step of that process. And everything is a process, particularly in medical procedures. Everything is a process, be it tires or whatever. Everything has a process.\n\n So the PFMEA [Process Failure Modes and Effects Analysis] I developed, I was able to test it pretty fully on a solid rocket motor. There is a report that's put out by that, and the main thing they wanted to understand is are we on the right path in terms of what we're doing on solid rocket booster. So I got them involved in the thing, and we did do a complete study in that particular area, including Thiokol and the whole group. It was an interesting study to have done. Still believe today that that technique needs to be used. It's not used. It's not a part of the requirements at NASA here.\n\n When I tried to introduce the quality assurance people there, my success was zero. But it's so straightforward. Here I was offering them a technique that they didn't have, that they could adopt in terms of processes, because that's their job. To my knowledge today, they've never adopted that technique. And straightforward, because in the case of a Process FMEA, if you get involved in a potential of an escape, then part of the process was if there's been an escape, then you'd require the manager, much like an FMEA, to say, "I am willing to take that. I don't have that rationale. I'm willing to take that risk." He's not even brought into the process. He doesn't even know there's a problem until there is a problem, and that's a little late.\n\n So here we are, talking at least half the failures, and I'm sure it's true as I talk to other people around the country, it's true of most industries, and yet they haven't used a technique that would have tremendous economic benefits, apart from downstream major problems, shifting bad hardware.\n\n So that's one of the techniques that I developed that I have to say has not been widely accepted, but it's been developed to an extent and used. But, still, I'm not happy with the fact that it's not really an operational thing.\n\n I did run into something from the Ford Motor Company where I think they've recognized it, but I don't know. I haven't talked to them. I saw a document that had the name, so they may have picked up on the thing. Obviously, haven't done too well on Explorer and the Firestone Tire episode, so there's something amiss.\n\n So that's some of the things I've done. In addition to that, I decided my health was not as well as it should be, so I joined Bally's [fitness center] about six or seven years ago and made a determination, much like I did in reliability, that in this case it would be me I'd be [unclear], and I began to go about every day, except maybe I miss a day. This morning I went twenty-five minutes on the treadmill at four miles an hour, and then did about seven machines. Using that to a large extent, that has helped. I'm alive today thanks to working on that type thing.\n\n Any more questions?

Kevin M. Rusnak: I had maybe a couple from things that have come up as we've gone along that maybe I wanted to ask about. I guess not in any particular order, probably.

Joseph H. Levine: That's okay.

Kevin M. Rusnak: Just some couple points. One of the things I wanted to ask, looking at the entirety of your career at NASA, safety, reliability, and quality assurance, all this is getting at one thing, which is what you mentioned at the very beginning, it's the flight crew safety. It's their lives. What role do the astronauts themselves play in doing this? How much interaction did you have with them and how would you respond to their concerns and relay those to contractors, that sort of thing?

Joseph H. Levine: Well, they had crew debriefings usually after every mission where they'd say this didn't work, that didn't work, and so. But you already knew the information. So to be truthful with you, because of the crew debriefings and you already knew the information, you didn't get at them as much as you should have. I knew several of them. Like Bill Pogue, I knew him very well and had him over to my house several times. But you didn't get at, you know, going up at that building, they were somewhat protected because there were a lot of people wanting to talk to them. I talked to John Young a lot.\n\n You didn't get at the crew as much as I think you should have. I should have. As I look back, I'd liked to have talked more with the crew in terms of how did you think that mission really went, or maybe get a different perspective on one-on-one. I didn't do enough of that. I got the data and the problems, so I didn't get as much as I'd like to have gotten.\n\n That's a good question, though, and I think they deliberately had done crew interaction debriefings and this sort of thing, and the FOD [Flight Operations Directorate] people do a lot of interaction with them from an operational standpoint, but from my standpoint, it would have been good. I did brief a lot of the new astronauts. They came in and talked to me, but they didn't come back to me.\n\n Their interest was to fly, you know, the new astronauts, and getting into the operational aspects and the training aspect, it was—I'm not sure how enthralled they are in terms of the detailed engineering aspects. A few are, but they're mostly, you know—a lot of them are, you know, physicians. They're weren't into the operational aspects.\n\n Did you talk to many astronauts other than the ones we talked about? It would be good to talk to some of them and put together some kind of questions. They are involved in engineering to an extent. They come to the reviews and stuff like that. But it would be interesting to see how they view this type of thing.\n\n I think they're mostly oriented toward the operational aspect. So the FOD people, the flight operations people, [unclear]. They're operational. And people like Chris Kraft, he's an operational-oriented person, and a lot of movement between the two of them because they're thinking on the same wavelength.

Kevin M. Rusnak: I knew that each of the astronauts, and I believe they still do this, had a technical assignment where they'd say, "Okay, you're going to go work on environmental control systems, you're going to go work boosters," and so on. So I didn't know if they had ones that were particularly assigned to safety. You had mentioned John Young. I know safety has always been one of the foremost things in his mind. So I just didn't know if through that kind of thing, if any of that trickled up to you.

Joseph H. Levine: After the\n\n Challenger\n\n accident, I was doing consultant work. I can't think of the guy's name—he went to NASA Headquarters and he had a job on Space Station up there. I'm trying to remember his name. He and I would have endless arguments on numbers. He was very number oriented, and was bound and determined that the program would be moved towards reliability numbers. As a matter of fact, they had a contract with SAIC at one time. I did consulting work with SAIC also. The numbers aspect was mostly the logic of putting things together rather than the number itself. And he agreed with me on that. But he was very much determined. He was the only guy that I found that had any interest at all. I can't think of his name right now.

Kevin M. Rusnak: I wanted to offer Jennifer and Summer a chance to ask any questions if they came up with ones. Jennifer?

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: I know that you came in during the Apollo Program, as you had mentioned, and that you had a good sense of what reliability was like when you came in. Can you give us a sense of what quality assurance or quality control may have been like in the Mercury and Gemini Programs and how it changed in the Apollo Program?

Joseph H. Levine: Well, from what I could devise out of the Mercury Program, and the Gemini, they were pretty similar, the same contractor, they had some of the same techniques, FMEAs and this type of thing. But it seemed to me like it was somewhat loose in terms of the rigor, in terms of approvals and this type of thing of people and the managerial aspect. It was almost like they had a special team dedicated to those programs and everybody knew everybody else and they trusted each other and it wasn't as big a situation. They'd been using the same contractor for Mercury, and John [F.] Yardley was at that time—is he alive, John Yardley?

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Yes, he is.

Joseph H. Levine: Have you talked to him?

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Yes.

Joseph H. Levine: He probably had some interesting perspective in this thing. But they were using the same contractor, and I got the sense that it was almost like a family and that they didn't need as much paperwork. They did not have that much paperwork involved and didn't have a support contractor that I know of. So it was a little different kind of perspective.\n\n Here on Apollo, a large program, a lot of people involved, thousands of people involved, large contractors, and you'd better have your data type thing. Where Mercury and Gemini, short program, wasn't that long a program, had the family-type atmosphere, everybody knew each other, trusted each other, used a lot of inspection techniques. You walked around. Joe Bobik, who did a lot of the inspection aspects, the one I told you you ought to talk to, and the Jack Jones aspect, may not have realized what they had there, but when I talked to the guy that was charge of that thing, that's what I got out of it.\n\n He did not take lightly to any criticism, either. This guy passed away that was in charge of that here. I can't remember his name. But he respected me because I had a tendency to speed read. I was on a flight with him one time, and he gave me something to read. I gave it back to him. "You didn't read that."\n\n I said, "Yes, I read it." I had to learn to speed read because every day I got stacks of information, and if I didn't speed read through those stacks of information, I'd die. So I learned to speed read, maybe not 100 percent, but pretty good.\n\n Does that answer your question?

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Yes, thank you very much.

Kevin M. Rusnak: Was that Jim Chamberlin you were talking about?

Joseph H. Levine: No.

Kevin M. Rusnak: Or Chuck Matthews, maybe?

Joseph H. Levine: No, he was in reliability, this guy.

Kevin M. Rusnak: I think we need to change out the tape and then we'll just finish up with our last couple questions, I guess. [Tape change]

Joseph H. Levine: On the LM Program, he was a captain, I guess. Did you talk to any of the early Apollo managers?

Kevin M. Rusnak: Like who?

Joseph H. Levine: I'm trying to remember some of these guys. Charlie Frick. There was a whole raft of these guys. They'd come and go like gangbusters. They were here maybe a year, make their mark and disappear. Didn't make much of a mark.

Kevin M. Rusnak: I think most of the ones we talked to ended up being there for longer periods of time, so I'm not sure if we got any of those guys or not.

Joseph H. Levine: Well, this guy was not bad. This guy was a retired Navy captain. You'll probably run across his name as you run through there.

Kevin M. Rusnak: Sure. I can always check it out, anyway.\n\n Do you have other questions, Jennifer?

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: No.

Joseph H. Levine: I couldn't have answered all those questions.

Jennifer Ross-Nazzal: Well, actually, you know, you answered all the questions that I had written down here.

Joseph H. Levine: More than you wanted to hear. [Laughter]

Summer Chick Bergen: You were talking about people, as we were changing out tapes, and I was wondering if there were any individuals that made a significant impression on you or had an impact on you during your career.

Joseph H. Levine: Well, they all made an impact on me. You always search for a mentor that comes close to that. I think Bob Thompson comes close to meeting that. Certainly I feel that way towards him. I don't know how he feels towards me.\n\n Marty Raines made an impression. He was a different-type person. Marty Raines is a retired colonel, and his method of management was different than mine. I micromanaged. He did not. But very intelligent person. You talked to him, didn't you? Very intelligent person, and I certainly think highly of him.\n\n Dr. Gilruth I didn't know very well, so he didn't come through as a mentor to me.\n\n The contractors themselves, Dale [D.] Myers impressed me, and he was somewhat of a mentor of mine. That's about the ones that come through as ones that I had real—I had respect for many of them. There wasn't hardly any of them I didn't have a lot of respect for. I did.\n\n Bill Bland, I hope you do interview him. Bill Bland is probably one of the most dedicated persons around. He came from Langley, the original space group. I hope he does allow you to interview him. Do you think you will?

Kevin M. Rusnak: I certainly hope so. We've been trying to keep in touch with him to encourage him to.

Joseph H. Levine: Yes, because he's good and he has a very good sensitivity. He worked on the nuclear-powered programs. He worked on Three Mile Island accident. He did a lot of work on that.

Summer Chick Bergen: You mentioned that you did consulting with outside industries. Did you or anyone in your group go to any other outside industries to learn from them and bring that knowledge back to NASA?

Joseph H. Levine: You know, that's a good question. That question of technology transfer, although it was an "everybody should do it" type thing, to my knowledge, in my group I was the only one. Now, Jack Jones, after he retired, did do some work with the nuclear powerplant up in the Dallas area, Dallas-Ft. Worth [Texas] area. But to my knowledge, nobody had a technology transfer bent in terms of "I want to do this. I want people to profit from this" type thing.\n\n Years ago they had a technology transfer conference that I participated in, I gave a paper at, and there was a speaker there that was one of the presidential advisors at the time. I can't remember his name. I think it was under [Richard M.] Nixon. But he did have a good speech that he gave. I remember some of the details today. The speech was, how do you transfer technology today? He said, "If you go to the Library of Congress and you look at all the documents in the Library of Congress, how does anyone penetrate all the data that's in the Library of Congress and make sense of it?" Data proliferation. He said, "How do you transfer technology?" was the theme. He said, "Well, that's one way." Certainly, that is a way. He said, "Another way of transferring technology is people like me. I go to work for someone else, and I take what I know to this other outfit, and that transfers technology. However, it's random. It's not deliberate. You're sure to have it happen. It may not happen. It's random. It doesn't work all the time." So that's the second way you transfer technology.\n\n The third way is, basically, conferences and papers and stuff like that. But none of these had a real positive approach that he was able to come up with. When you think about the problems in industry today that you run into, it's a little surprising that you see the same problems repeated in one industry after another.\n\n I don't know if that answered your question.

Summer Chick Bergen: Yes. One other issue I wanted to ask you about was when we talk about Shuttle, so often what we hear is that there was always a constant struggle with the budget and funding. I was wondering how that influenced your particular area of quality and reliability, in your areas how those funding issues affected you.

Joseph H. Levine: That is a real good question, because in the Apollo Program, I had 180 support contractors. Marty Raines asked me for Space Shuttle, how many people do I want for Space Shuttle? This was no funding problem at the time. I said 53. Well, at that time, the support contractor was General Electric. I thought they were going to have a seizure. It was either them or Boeing. I thought they were going to have a seizure when I said 53. And why did I say 53? Because I thought that was the minimum number, I didn't want to debate it, that I needed to do the job.\n\n One of the problems that happen to you, and I mentioned this earlier, is people can eat up your time. During that 180 people, I had people that would come over where I was and they'd sit down at a table. We were in a bullpen at the time. I'd look up. "Can I help you?"\n\n "No, I just wanted to do some work over here." Pretty soon his supervisor came over with his butterfly net and drug him off.\n\n One of the problems was, is that when they had unlimited resources there for a while, some of these contractors would say, "Let's get rid of old Joe Blow." Where can we get rid of him? Houston. Get rid of him. I had a lot of people that were eating my time up. Part of the problems I had, and I worked all these hours, was they had to talk to me, and I was easy to talk to, and I didn't have any time left. They were literally eating up my time.\n\n So the 53 people was not done lightly. I did that on the basis of, you know, that was sufficient. Do you know, I didn't pick the 53; they picked them. Do you know, I didn't argue with one of them. They knew which ones were the performers versus the non-performers. They knew it already.\n\n Now, my counterpart in quality assurance didn't do that. He had lots of people. But not me. So I was able to maintain that number pretty well. They knew what I had done, and they knew it was a minimal number. I wasn't adjusting. I constantly heard about dollar problems on the Shuttle Program.\n\n Aaron Cohen, who had Space Shuttle at the time, he and I would argue. He would try to say, "We won't want to test this black box because we tested one like it."\n\n I said, "You didn't test the same box."\n\n "Well, but it's similar, and we'll do it by similarity, kind of."\n\n "It's not the same. You either qualify it or say you don't want to qualify it."\n\n "We'll qualify it by similarity."\n\n "No, no." So they came up with some interesting approaches, and they sent me off to Rockwell to talk with the people who developed that. Ed brought over people from the company that was building that black box. I said, "Do you have a technique by which you can qualify by similarity this black box or that black box? Are they not the same?"\n\n "Not really." The guy I was talking to, a guy by the name of Harry Horrey [phonetic], he says, "Well, let's forget this meeting ever took place." The point of it is, is that there had been a lot of dollar problems and Aaron Cohen faced a lot of these things. Did you interview him?

Kevin M. Rusnak: Yes.

Joseph H. Levine: He probably told you about many of the dollar problems-type thing. The problem is that he and I argued about the checkout requirements, but the problem was that he had a hell of a fiscal problem to take place in terms of cutting down on numbers of people and so forth. I think, as I look back at it from a perspective standpoint, maybe it was a lot of which you go from 180 to 53 like I did. You're going to get the job done? Yes, I thought so. I mean, you know, the contractor wants to keep as many people on board as they can. That's the game. I don't blame them. But on the other hand, if you've got so many dollars in your pocket—just like the guy Ed Smith. Did you ever talk to Ed Smith?

Kevin M. Rusnak: No.

Joseph H. Levine: You should talk to Ed Smith. Ed Smith is a program manager at Rockwell. You talk to a guy like Ed Smith, Ed Smith will just tell you that we knew what the pocketbook was at NASA. I knew exactly how much money Aaron Cohen's got. So he knew the pocketbook, and I'd try to adjust within that pocketbook.\n\n Ed Smith went to Northrop and worked on the B-1 program, I think. Yes, I think he worked on B-1. But he was very much involved in Space Shuttle and somewhat of a mentor of mine. You ought to try to talk to him. I'm glad to mention him.

Summer Chick Bergen: I have one final question, just to clarify something in my mind. You talked about processes and developing and testing for the processes. Did you give the contractor the criteria for that and let them develop their testing, or how involved were your people in developing what actual testing that was done and how it was qualified?

Joseph H. Levine: That's a good question. As part of the qualification test, the requirement has always been you want to demonstrate for at least a two-week mission-type of work. That's part of the requirements. You want to demonstrate that and the environments. So you would try to condense 100 missions' worth of requirements if you could, which are the thermal and the dynamic environments. You try to condense that into one qualification test.\n\n So those top-down requirements were given to the contractor. Then when he took those requirements, he translated that into "Here's how we're going to do it" aspect. But he still had those top-down requirements to satisfy. He comes back with "Here's how we're going to do it. We're going to do vibration first and thermal afterwards," and so forth. That had to be reviewed and approved by my people and the subsystem managers to say, "Yes, that'll work."\n\n I don't know if that answered your question.

Summer Chick Bergen: Did they use their facilities or did they use NASA facilities?

Joseph H. Levine: Mostly it depends on the component. If you had the thermal-vacuum chamber, you might use some of the equipment here in the chamber here, but most of what they used in their facilities.

Summer Chick Bergen: That's all the questions I have.

Kevin M. Rusnak: I didn't have any others, either, but I wanted to give you a chance to maybe make any concluding remarks or any other items you wanted to mention or any other stories you wanted to tell before we closed.

Joseph H. Levine: As I mentioned earlier, I think what you're doing here is extremely valuable, because one of the things that has been prepared by NASA Headquarters, but not really, in my opinion, used enough is lessons learned. I think if you could take some of the lessons learned that are depicted in these interviews and encapsulate this in some manner, I think it would be invaluable to the people that are coming afterwards. If you could do that in some manner or get some help to do it, I think it would be very important, because there are a lot of lessons learned that are coming out of the discussions such as this.\n\n The other thing is, while we're still on that subject, it would be useful if you could bring together a handful of the people that you already interviewed and together in a conference and you act as somewhat of a moderator and could go through a subject together and see how that fared as far as collective group is concerned and how many differences of opinions you got in talking to them as a group rather than in an individual person-by-person-type thing.\n\n As to my career and what I've done in the past, I think that the most rewarding part of my career was at NASA, without question. I mean the work I did before I came to NASA was interesting and certainly helped build the knowledge I had to do the work I did at NASA. But the NASA career, without question, I look back at that, and my wife, even today, thinks that given the opportunity I'd go back to NASA. That's about all I have to say.

Kevin M. Rusnak: We want to thank you again for taking up all your time this afternoon.

Joseph H. Levine: Oh, no, it went fast.