Apollo Guidance Computer Activities

AGC - Conference 1: Agenda for future meetings

Apollo Guidance Computer History Project

First conference

July 27, 2001

Agenda for future meetings

DAVID MINDELL: I want to wrap up, but before we do, get any of your thoughts about, as part of the agenda that we skipped over this morning to get into the things, about as we go forward, now you have a sense for the kinds of things we're interested in, and the kinds of things that you all remember. Even just brainstorm level, what sorts of questions might we be asking that we haven't been asking? What is there that you might want to know about the history that you don't know?  Who else should we be talking to? We can get names and contact information from you off-line.

For example, we'd like to do a special session, really, on the manufacturing side of things, and get the Raytheon Delco people here, and have a little more focused conversation about that. We've nicely had a sort of software emphasis here which is very good, because that's one part that in what we've seen has been really under-attended to?

What other questions, issues, topics, areas, organizations, might we be looking at that you think would be valuable?

JOE GAVIN: I think the biggest and most important decision made in the Apollo program, I think was made by Eisenhower. It was that this was going to be an open program. It was not going to be secret. It was not going to be run by the Air Force. I think that much of the success came from that, and certainly the impact that it had as far as America's reputation around the world, stemmed from that decision. I still see this when I go overseas.

DAVID MINDELL: And having had experience with both the Air Force and secret programs before, and open ones, you can see the contrast.

JOE GAVIN: It's not that the Air Force couldn't have done a good job, but the impact --  I remember being at the University of Rome for an IAF meeting. I have forgotten which year this was. It was probably '73 or '74, somewhere around there. And the Americans put on a great show and tell. The Russian delegation huddled behind their table at the foot of the auditorium when their turn came.

For every question, the answer was, our expert on that subject is back in Moscow. Or no, that is classified, we cannot discuss it. Pretty soon the whole audience was laughing. It was a very dramatic demonstration.

JOHN TYLKO: That's pretty fascinating in light of the recent stuff that has been published on what was happening in the Russian program, particularly this history that the NASA history office published called "Challenge to Apollo."

Basically the free and open society had a centrally controlled approach to executing Apollo. Whereas the Russians had a decentralized approach where the resources were spread among several competitors, Sergei Korolev always had to look over his shoulder at rival groups. The Chelomei group had, in one of their claims to fame was, I think, hiring Nikita Khrushchev's son, so they got more resources to compete against Korolev. It's such an interesting contrast.

FRED MARTIN: I was going to suggest that you might as historians,  think about the sociological effect of a national goal. Perhaps this was something very special, and perhaps I'm rather prejudiced about it, but the fact of the matter is that you could get this kind of energy, and focus, and dedication amongst so many people towards this goal. 

And perhaps it was because it was the moon. I don't know if you'd get it with Mars. I don't know if you had it on the Manhattan project. I really don't know. But there was an element here --

And you probably would be hard put to find anybody who worked on this program who doesn't have these very fond, nostalgic memories about their contribution and so on. It would be interesting to try to actually understand that.

CLINE FRASIER: To just pick up very briefly on what Joe said though, one of the secrets to success inside the program was openness. So the inability to hide problems for any length of time, no matter how much people wanted to. Because if you don't have that, the tendency of everyone is if they get a problem to cover it up, and it will either go away, or we'll work it out before anybody finds out about it. And when people find out, it's too late to do anything about it.

Hugh Blair-Smith adds:

Much is made of the openness of the project, and rightly so. But there was a period, mercifully brief in retrospect, when the design of the computer and all its software were classified Confidential. I and everybody I knew howled in protest, knowing that security procedures would plunge everything into molasses -- just about guaranteeing a disaster. One of the documents I saved, from the time the classification was removed, has heavy black smudges at the top and bottom of every page. That’s because we weren’t allowed to go on using a formerly classified document without taking a Magic Marker and totally oblitering the word CONFIDENTIAL wherever it appeared.

DAN LICKLY: Yes. In the early years of this program, NASA was very thin. They were busy with other things, so we didn't have a lot of direction. They gave us a lot of rope, actually. And we started the summer of '61 through '62, '63, '64. And the only direction I had in my group, and there are a number over there, Norm Sears, Dick Battin's area -- We had panel meetings. In my case it was Aaron Colon that ran one every month or two. And he collected a lot of people from all over. It was very open. People from Ames, from Langley, from here and there, from Rockwell all came. You told what you were doing, you got a lot of criticism, you had comments. And then you went back and looked at it, studied it, put together something, came back in another month. But it was very non-bureaucratic and gave you a lot of chance to do the engineering development and design without all of the stuff that came in the later area when it said okay, shut it off, you're done, stop.

So we had a germination period, more than the LM people who had to wait to start. Because we were Command Module, we got to go right from the opening gun. And actually, we were all done in '64. We pretty well knew everything we wanted, and so forth.

They added the autopilot. I forget when that came on, but we had all of the ideas -- And because there were flights coming up, I forgot when was the first one, but we had to have it ready for, when were those first --

__: The first one was '66.

DAN LICKLY: -- the first unmanned flights. They weren't that far away. 

ELDON HALL: My comment is when they worked back to schedule, the computer was supposed to be designed and ready to go before we even got the contract. (Laughter) People had to go to production.

DAN LICKLY: People couldn't believe that scheduling worked in those days. They'd say, "Well, what do you have for computer automated design to help you?" 

RAMON ALONSO: I know. That was the first time I saw an electrically driven eraser. I was blown away by that. (Laughter)

CLINE FRASIER: But Dick Battin didn't believe we were going to go to the moon with Block II for a long time. Because I can remember the summer when we found out about the interlayers, too much capacity in the interlayers. Dick still believed then that there would be a Block III before we went to the moon.

DAVID MINDELL: Well, great. Thank you very much. We hope to, we'll be in touch with you by e-mail, both about continuing this discussion on the Web, and also about getting a similar group together probably in another month's time or so.

__: I was going to say, I would suggest that you, even though you can do a lot with the Web, you still need to have these kinds of meetings. 

DAVID MINDELL: Absolutely. 

__: Face to face. 

DAVID MINDELL: Every one of the five groups here are taking different tacks. I said look, we want to get these people's input. It's an open question how well it's going to work on the Web. We know we can get it if we get people in the room, and then we will hopefully build some conversations that will spin over the other way. We have a whole set of things on the Web which we'll point you to by e-mail, which are really a purpose-filled set of discussion forums. And we can create digital time lines, and digital time lines can spin out discussions. We hope to continue, especially with people who are not as easily accessible as you folks were in the area, and we can bring them in. I mean, we're biasing our study already to people who (A) were at the Instrumentation Lab, and (B) who stayed in the Boston area.

RAMON ALONSO: Remember, who writes history? 

DAVID MINDELL: Historians. 

RAMON ALONSO: The survivors.


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