TAPE 1, SIDE 1

DR. DEVORKIN: This is the fifth in our series of oral history interviews with Dr. Robert Gilruth. The interviewers today are Dr. John Mauer and Dr. David DeVorkin. The date is February 27, 1987. Also in the room we're happy to have Mrs. Gilruth. John Mauer has worked on your history and will be working with me today in the interview, asking specific questions in areas that we have discussed before, but also a lot of new areas. Just to give you some idea of what we'll be talking about, we would like to talk to you more about your feelings and recollections of the sense of confidence that we could get into space, just after Sputnik, recollections of Hugh Dryden. We'd like to know more about Hugh Dryden and your work with him, more about the transition years from NACA [National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics] to NASA [National Aeronautics and Space Administration], and so on. We have plenty to discuss here, so I'd like to make sure that we have a good voice check before we start, so if you'll introduce yourself?

DR. GILRUTH: I'm Bob Gilruth, and I live in Virginia.

DEVORKIN: That's good.

DR. MAUER: I'm John Mauer. I've been contracted to come and help you with these interviews.

DEVORKIN: Great. That will help the transciber identify voices. Mrs. Gilruth, would you like to say something? Just in case you say something later on. I think we can identify your voice quite well, though.

MRS. GILRUTH: I'm happy to be here.

DEVORKIN: I'll be taking the name list as usual and John will be asking questions. I'll be working in follow-up, if that is all right.

MAUER: Dr. Gilruth, I've worked on a lot of very specific dates over a relatively short period of time, from when Sputnik was actually launched into the hectic period of early 1958, as NACA was rushing to become NASA. What I'm interested in doing is, by refreshing your memory about these dates -- trying to see how you were brought into the picture at NACA headquarters from your job as assistant director at Langley, and what your perceptions were as these events unfolded. They unfolded very, very rapidly, as I can reconstruct important milestones.

GILRUTH: Yes.

MAUER: You've already described in earlier interviews your reactions when you heard that the Soviets had put up Sputnik 1. I don't think we need to go into those reactions because you've already described them so beautifully. What I would like to start with is -- you indicated in your earlier interviews that you had a sense of confidence that the United States could meet this challenge. The Soviets having launched Sputnik in a way made putting a man into space worthwhile. You'd had doubts about it before, as to whether it was just a stunt or not, but this now gave it a meaning. I don't want to put words into your mouth, and if I'm not saying it correctly, indicate what your opinion was at that time.

GILRUTH: All right. Let me tell you that to the best of my knowledge, I had never thought of flying people in space before Sputnik. When the Sputnik went up, it was a shock. And it was not just a shock to me, but it was a shock all the way through the technical people of the United States, including a man who was my "big boss" in Washington. By that time Dr. George Lewis who had been the head of NACA for many many years and was responsible for all the wind tunnels and things like that...Hugh Dryden, who was affiliated with the National Bureau of Standards, was working sort of free-lance at the time after Sputnik went up, trying to help the country get hold of itself and get a program that would do well. The Sputnik went up on October 4, 1957, and on November 3rd they put a second Sputnik up with a dog in it. On that second flight with the dog in it, I said to myself and to my colleagues, "This means that the Soviets are going to fly a man in space. They've got so many accolades from all of the people all around the world. The Soviets' stock, so to speak, went way up, and they began to emerge as the leading technical nation in the world.

    So after the dog went up -- that was on November 3rd -- on November 7th President Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed Dr. James R. Kilian a Special Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, which meant that even Eisenhower was affected quite heavily by this. Then, on November the 21st Dr. Dryden, who was filling in now for NACA, created a Space Technology Committee at the NACA. He was, of course, on that Committee along with

Wernher von Braun, Guy Stever -- who was a member of many committees, a good man, and myself. Also, Jim Dempsey, who was head of the firm that was building the Atlas rocket, and Dr. Randolph Lovelace, who was the head of the Lovelace Institute a doctor who was a very big help to us in our man-in-space programs. There were several other people. So there were quite rapid reactions to the fact that Sputnik went up. Jimmy Doolittle was also very instrumental along with Dryden in talking to the President mostly through the President's Science Advisory Committees. That was pretty much the situation. Early in 1958, the people particularly in the center at Langley Field, worked on a space document for Headquarters that described the activities that we already had going in the space field, showing that NACA was active.

DEVORKIN: Were these things that were building your confidence, or did you have the confidence in the beginning before any of this happened?

GILRUTH: I think that I had confidence that if anybody could put a man in space, we could.

MAUER: Why?

GILRUTH: Because I'd worked with flying machines all my professional life, and I had worked with rockets and electronics at Wallops Island for four or five years. I had a pretty darned good background in what you could do with flying machines and with rockets and with electronics.

MAUER: There had been work going on at Wallops as well as other NACA centers, at least looking at the idea of what it would take to put a man into space. Max Faget had been involved, had he not?

GILRUTH: NACA was flying airplanes, starting with the X-1, going to the X-2, and then the D558, which was the Navy version of X-1. It was a turbojet however, not a rocket airplane. Then there was the X-15, which was built to really be a hypersonic glider. It was flying in the early days of the space program, although it really was not an answer to what the Soviets were doing or planning to do. Max Faget was directly involved in the plan that we evolved to fly our first man in space.

MAUER: In January of 1957, there had been a Lifting Body Conference at Ames.

GILRUTH: That's right.

MAUER: PARD had made a minority report in which PARD people were saying that if United States was going to approach the subject of putting a man into space, the ballistic approach would be the one to be used.

GILRUTH: I think that was our feeling. Max was one of my people at Wallops Island, one of the people at Langley, and we were very close. He was our representative on this committee that met at Ames.

MAUER: What's interesting is -- this is January of 1957. This is quite a bit before Sputnik is put up into space and there are discussions, if we do put a man into space, how should we do it? Am I reading it correctly?

GILRUTH: I don't think you are.

MAUER: Okay, fine. I'm reading books that have been written...

GILRUTH: That is NOT my memory of it.

DEVORKIN: What is your memory, then?

GILRUTH: My memory is that when the dog went up, we said: "This is going to be a national program. This obviously means they're going to fly a man. It will be a competition between the United States and Russia on who will get the man in space first." We hadn't gone beyond that. We certainly weren't thinking of flying to the moon. Goodness no.

MAUER: Okay, so that's the key, putting the dog up into space. That's kind of what put things together in people's minds and said, "This is what the Soviets are going to do."

GILRUTH: That's my memory of it.

DEVORKIN: If I could ask even further bifurcation, that was certainly true in your mind.

GILRUTH: Yes.

DEVORKIN: Do you know that that's how other people felt as well?

GILRUTH: I don't think other people were thinking about man in space.

MAUER: How about Max Faget? Do you think putting Sputnik 2 up was the thing that also keyed his thinking about it?

GILRUTH: Yes, I think that prior, he might have thought -- I don't know what he was thinking about. He never talked to me about it as far as I know.

MAUER: Prior to the launching of Sputnik 2?

GILRUTH: Prior to the dog. After Sputnik 2 it seemed evident to us. We started scheming about, what could you do.

MAUER: Let me ask you about something that happened just before the naming of the Special Committee on Space Technology. You weren't a part of this, but the two seem to be related. I'm wondering if you have any memories about it, because from November 18th to the 20th, 1957, the NACA main committee met on the FORRESTAL.

GILRUTH: Yes, that's right.

MAUER: The decision to create the Special Committee on Space Technology, was it made in that meeting of the main committee?

GILRUTH: I think so.

MAUER: When you were named to the Special Committee on Space Technology, was anything said to you about the discussions held on the FORRESTAL, or were you just told that you had been appointed to the committee and needed to get to work on its job?

GILRUTH: I'm sure that when Dryden came back from that he told us what he thought about everything. He was the kind of guy that was low-key. He would tell you what he thought would help you, what you ought to know. He was the kind of guy that pushed his people who worked for him to give all they could and be as good as they could be.

DEVORKIN: Did anybody ask where the money was coming from?

GILRUTH: Yes. It had to come from Uncle. No other way. That's where the money would come from.

DEVORKIN: There's one thing I wasn't aware of in the previous interviews, the question about competence. I read very carefully your memoir, from Wallops to Mercury. There's a very valuable insight in there, as well as in some of the other notes. It was clear, not directly from what you said, but it was evident from what you were talking about and what other historians have got out, that while the NACA budget overall had been diminishing quite seriously through the fifties, the fraction of the budget devoted to space-related research was increasing. Did you really have the feeling that within the NACA there was support, given that scenario, to put us into space quickly?

GILRUTH: Certainly the amount of work going into high speed flight was increasing, but for anything above Mach I NACA was not able to do in their big wind tunnels. The thing that they had been famous for was their big wind tunnels. Dr. Lewis had through all the years, considered that wind tunnels was what made NACA great.

    I was in the flight section and I was glad to be there, because it was the right place for a guy that wanted to fly things. What we did was make flight tests of things that would show that the wind tunnel was either right or wrong. In other words, free flight was the way you gave the marks to the wind tunnels, how good they were doing. That was the purpose of the flight research division at Langley. It was not to probe ahead of things that hadn't been done, but to show that the wind tunnels were giving the right answers. But it's rapidly changed from that, because pretty soon you got to the speed of sound and the wind tunnels were not able to do that, with the kind that they had. I had invented a thing called wing flow, which was really a stop-gap but it was very, very useful, and industry used it a lot. But it just absolutely made the wind tunnel people ill. Especially because it had a low Reynolds number. Actually, the things that happened around Mach 1 were so powerful that the Reynolds number was a minor factor. In any case, that was where I got started with that sort of thing.

    It was right in the middle of my working with the wing flow that I was put in charge of Wallops Island, which, at that time, was supposed to be some kind of a missile testing ground where we would fly the missiles of the Air Force and the Navy and the Army. Of course, I knew something about that. I knew that the Air Force had their own proving ground and the Army had their own proving ground and the Navy had two of them, because there were two parts to the Navy and they didn't like each other any better than they liked the Army or the Air Force. So I said, "what's Wallops Island going to do?"

MAUER: When you were first given the job at Wallops Island, before the announcement of the actual direction you were going to take, the direction that leads to the creation of PARD, who were you talking this out with? Were you talking with your bosses at Langley, or were you talking with people that were working with you in flight research?

GILRUTH: I talked pretty much with my bosses at Langley, with Floyd Thompson and Gus Crowley. I'd had no secrets from them.

MAUER: No, that's not my point. I'm sure you didn't.

GILRUTH: I told them that I didn't think that there was a place for NACA.

MAUER: You related in an earlier interview that, I believe it was Dryden, was very much relieved when you told him your plans.

GILRUTH: No, that was Dr. Lewis who was still the director of aeronautical research at that time, although he was a sick man.

MAUER: But it was with Crowley and...

GILRUTH: No, he went to Wallops Island along with the whole NACA, which was...

MAUER: What I'm asking about that's not been clear to me from the previous interviews is the timing -- like we talked about before we started the interview -- the importance of the relationship, one to the other. Let me take you back just before Dr. Lewis came out to Wallops, and you had the conversation with him. Who were the people that you talked with about what you wanted to do with Wallops, and came upon the decision to--

GILRUTH: Oh, Okay. Quite clearly that was Floyd Thompson, who was my direct boss and chief of research. Henry Reid was still the engineer in charge, but really the place was run by Floyd Thompson.

DEVORKIN: Were there others, let's say, at a lower level, like Paul Purser?

GILRUTH: Yes, he was directly working with me.

DEVORKIN: Did you talk more closely with them about details?

GILRUTH: Yes, sure. Max and Paul Purser and Paul Hill, a lot of good guys.

MAUER: This is a critical decision. What I'm trying to get at is, how did you go about deciding how you wanted to develop Wallops Island? Because you were handed what was supposed to be missile research you knew that wasn't going to work. You're a relatively junior man, and yet you're coming to very important decisions.

GILRUTH: That's true. It didn't make any difference whether you were junior, you could still think.

MAUER: I know that. I know that.

GILRUTH: I know pretty well how to sell.

MAUER: I understand that. What I'm trying to get at is, how do you go about selling? Who do you talk to? How do you work out the ideas, and then how do you go about selling them?

GILRUTH: What you sold was something that the country needed. The country needed to know how you flew through the speed of sound and how you flew supersonic. You needed to know how to design and make good guided missiles as well. The way to do this was with a place like Wallops Island. It was an ideal place to do it. What we had at NACA and at Langley was some people that were based in aerodynamics and in the principles of flight, but they also were young and they had a lot of imagination on things that you could do. We had a so-called missile range, and we found out that the Navy would give us all of the solid rockets we wanted for free of charge.

MAUER: How did you go about finding that out? Did you just talk to people you knew?

GILRUTH: There was a Navy base over there, Chincoteague Naval Air Station, and they had rockets. All we had to do was ask for them and they'd give them to us.

MAUER: They already had plenty of the rockets at the Naval Air Station?

GILRUTH: They had them. When we needed bigger rockets, we found that you could buy them for a fairly small price. They weren't highly technical things.

DEVORKIN: All of this pre-procurement, finding out, did this all play a role in your developing your case before you stated it?

GILRUTH: Yes, in a way. The other thing we found that we had were some radars that were in existence. There was a Doppler Radar that was just used as a sentry in the military. It would squeal if something moved. They put them up around the camps. But you could shoot a rocket model up and when it burned out and coasted, this radar was so accurate in measuring its velocity that you could differentiate that curve and get the drag acceleration. So just by shooting a rocket -- with a measurement of the air density with one of these sounding balloons, to determine the exact variation of the density of the air with height -- you could get a very accurate measurement of the drag of whatever it was you shot. We conceived the idea of having a basic body, a fuselage that the rocket motor would fit in, with fins on it so it would be stable, and then we put different kinds of wings on that having different thicknesses, different sweepback, aspect ratios and airfoil sections.

MAUER: Now, this was before Wallops ever really got started.

GILRUTH: No, this was part of the starting. We had already done enough of this that we could show results at the time Dr. Lewis and the fathers of NACA came over to Wallops Island. I put up a program. I said, "We're going to do this kind of wings and this kind of bodies and so on." He was pleased, because it was systematic research that was going to be good for American industry. The people in the industry later on passed a resolution in one of their committees that recommended they'd triple our budget, which the Congress did, which was a big help.

MAUER: The Doppler Radar, where did that idea come from? Where did you learn this about the Doppler Radar?

GILRUTH: That was due to Ed Buckley and his people. They were electronic people but they were fascinated by this thing. As I said, they used it for a sentry in the military, but we used to track the research missiles. This radar was very accurate, and we were pretty good at tracking. We said, "Well, gosh, what a find that is, we won't have to even put a telemeter in this for drag tests." They found the radar but we found the perfect use for it. And there was another radar, the tracking radars which we used also, just to find what the trajectory was, so you knew the flight path.

MAUER: You, through your work with airplanes, at times putting models out on the wings, already had experience with testing models.

GILRUTH: Yes.

MAUER: Putting models onto rockets was just a different application of things that you were already doing. Am I correct in that?

GILRUTH: It was just an engineering operation. You had to make them strong enough. There was a lot of high velocity air at sea level, so we did have some problems at first, getting the wings to stay on. I remember, the first time we had Dr. Lewis over there, the wings came off. The head of NACA said, "Well, so your idea is no good."

DEVORKIN: He said that directly to you?

GILRUTH: He said that directly out loud in front of the whole thing, "So your idea's no good."

DEVORKIN: In your memoir you answered him.

GILRUTH: I answered him. I did. I stood up and said, "Oh, no, it's not that bad, we'll just have to make the wings stronger."

DEVORKIN: You didn't say in your memoir what happened next.

GILRUTH: We made the wings stronger.

MAUER: That's one engineer talking to another. When you say no, it's not a fundamental problem, it's just a matter of working out a minor technical aspect, that satisfied him, no problem?

GILRUTH: That's right. He just spoke his mind. I don't know whether he was convinced or not.

MAUER: You were able to continue your work, very obviously.

GILRUTH: Yes.

MAUER: Fairly quickly the Monsanto solid propellant rockets and the other ones that were provided to you by the Navy...

GILRUTH: For the Tiamat, yes.

MAUER: Quickly I get the impression, particularly in reading Schortal's history on Wallops, their performance just didn't keep up with what you needed to do. You had to start getting better rockets.

GILRUTH: One of our first projects was a Tiamat. It was a guided missile that was being built by one of the firms, I can't remember which firm right now. We tried to make a real guided missile, but without the warhead. It had a Monsanto rocket in it, a big Monsanto booster. It had an autopilot and wings and things.

DEVORKIN: I've seen the photograph.

GILRUTH: It was one of the very first things that we did. It wasn't a bad thing to do because it was fairly hard to do and you had to have a lot of things, but it was very evident to me when we finally flew that thing, that we weren't going to get much return from it. We finally made an autopilot work, but you knew you could make autopilots work if you worked hard and right on them. But we didn't have any product from that to give to the industry. All we could say is, we flew a guided missile at Wallops Island and it flew so far and made a turn. So we didn't do much more of that kind of thing.

DEVORKIN: What do you mean, you didn't have a product that you could give to industry ?

GILRUTH: We hadn't really learned anything new.

DEVORKIN: I'd like to keep that sort of a goal in mind. That was the NACA feeling. You were out there to learn basic research.

GILRUTH: Yes. We had to pay our way by getting information.

MAUER: That information, as I understand it, was providing data to industry and to the military that they could apply directly in projects that they were working.

GILRUTH: That's right. Projects or new projects.

MAUER: Right. That's why you were testing the differing shapes of the wings.

GILRUTH: Correct.

MAUER: I want to leap forward in time just a little bit, into June of 1951, the middle, late 1951. The manufacturers on June 14 and 15 of 1951 invited...

GILRUTH: '51 is way back beyond where...

MAUER: Yes, but it's tied into it very directly. Manufacturers of missiles invited NACA to give suggestions on the directions that new research should go. There was a proposal that missiles should be tested at the speeds of Mach 5 through 10. One aspect was industry saying that they just were not as successful as Wallops and PARD at getting data.

DEVORKIN: Who was saying they weren't as successful?

MAUER: Industry. Later in '51 the Atlas program even asked NACA to start looking at speeds up to Mach 20. So by 1951, there is expression of interest on the part of industry and of the military to start looking at higher Mach numbers. I get a sense that this started Wallops into developing new rockets...

GILRUTH: We did. We went all the way to a five-stage solid rocket. We got up to somewhere around Mach 15 or perhaps a little higher than that. I don't remember the exact amount. We put some re-entry bodies on those rockets and measured the heat transfer. It was a good effort because that was high enough so that you got the right answer for what you did with the Atlas and things like that later on.

MAUER: In late 1951, as this expression of interest was coming into NACA, you reported, I think to the main committee, that work at Wallops had progressed so that you were capable of getting speed data to Mach 4 and stability and control testing data to Mach 1.7. So between late 1951 and Sputnik you'd gone from this much slower speed to where you had a five-stage solid propellant rocket and were doing testing at Mach 15. That represents a great leap forward in the development of technology.

GILRUTH: Yes. It was all due to the state of the art in solid rockets. Better aluminum cases and so on, to make them lighter.

DEVORKIN: Was there equivalent improvement in the sensitivity of the Doppler Radar systems for tracking these things?

GILRUTH: Yes, we did, we started...

DEVORKIN: As you were moving into the higher Mach numbers, did you have to worry about all of your sensing and your range data?

GILRUTH: Yes, we got a new Doppler Radar. The first one was this TPS -- I can't remember the number -- that was the sentry. Then we went back to the company that built that and asked them to build a big one, a powerful one with a lot of range. We got that and we used that.

DEVORKIN: So this was all development that was done by industry for you.

GILRUTH: That's right.

DEVORKIN: You didn't engage in improving range testing.

GILRUTH: We did not have the staff to do that kind of thing. We had a few good people that could tell the manufacturer what we needed.

DEVORKIN: Did it ever hold you up?

GILRUTH: Of course, but when we got it, it gave us a chance to do a lot better work.

DEVORKIN: But what I meant was, did you have the rockets ready to go to test, but not the field testing equipment at any time? Or were you always instrumented adequately?

GILRUTH: No, we were not adequately instrumented. We were always glad to get a better instrument. We did the best we could with what we had, and we tried our best to get new and better stuff all the time.

DEVORKIN: Did you always have the money, the procurement power for it, or was it sometimes a question that...

GILRUTH: Well, you never have enough money. We did pretty well but it helped when the Committee said we should have our budget tripled.

MAUER: It was also quite a vote of confidence, too.

GILRUTH: Yes, it was. We didn't spend very much money, compared to some of those big supersonic wind tunnels that cost millions of dollars.

MAUER: When were you appointed to the Committee on Aerodynamics, do you remember? Were you on the Committee on Aerodynamics when it met in June of 1952 and made its statement that it was authorizing the study of "unmanned and manned flight between 12 and 50 miles at Mach numbers between 4 and 10 and a modest effort to problems associated with unmanned and manned flights at an altitude from 50 miles to infinity at speeds from Mach l0 to the velocity of escape from the earth's gravity." Now, this is June 24, 1952, the Committee on Aerodynamics gave...

GILRUTH: Yes, I think I was on the committee then. I'm not sure.

MAUER: That's fine. That's something that can be checked without too much trouble. But do you remember that commitment by the Committee on Aerodynamics, and what difference did it make for you?

GILRUTH: It always was good to have a body of well-thought-of people say that it was important to press forward and increase your coverage of speed and scale and all those things.

MAUER: That reply in some ways leaves me with a sense that a statement of general policy was nice, but more important for you were the practical problems of the jobs that you were actually needing to complete. Am I hearing you correctly? How would you characterize it?

GILRUTH: I don't know quite what you mean now.

MAUER: Sometimes I can get obscure. If I am, excuse me. What was it that helped you determine whether you were going to worry about getting new rockets, determine what type of new projects that you were going to take on? Moving on into hypersonic research in the early 1950s -- supersonic was far beyond what conventional jets were going to do, and yet in the early 1950s here's the indication that there was interest in doing hypersonic research. Why move into hypersonic research?

GILRUTH: It was quite evident that for re-entry, for something like the Atlas, you needed to know something about how heat shields worked through the speed of very high Mach numbers. That was that. I mean, you just had to know how to do that. A lot of people said you couldn't do it. Arky Kantrowitz was very big in that. Wernher von Braun said he was the guy that found the simple way, and that was just using the ablator. He said, "We'll just use an ablator." Kantrowitz said, "Oh, it's got to be a highly polished metal thing with very high heat conductivity." We had these different camps of people. Obviously you had to have some way of finding out what worked. It took the Atlas rocket in order to prove that it worked at the Reynolds numbers and everything, but you had to develop those rockets anyway if you were going to have a ballistic missile. It was when they finally flew the Atlas nose cone that they were sure they had the answer. But we'd already thought that there were ways of doing it. By the time the missile was ready to go, they'd answered their own questions.

DEVORKIN: My dates may be wrong here, but in your memoir you talked about the High Speed Subcommittee.

GILRUTH: Yes.

DEVORKIN: Effectively it seemed to be a lobby to Congress from corporate interests such as McDonnell-Douglas people, at that time, Douglas Aircraft people. You mentioned before, it was great when you got your appropriation increased by a factor of three, and that when you had a confirmation from NACA headquarters and certainly from Congress, that this was a vote of confidence. To what degree, though, was this pressure from industry that you were providing new information, that you feel played a role in this sort of confidence? Was it really a vote of confidence from industry, that they looked to you for R and D?

GILRUTH: Yes, I think it was a vote of confidence. They wanted more of that kind of work done. They got together and said so.

DEVORKIN: Was there ever any pressure or offers to you from any of these industry contacts to consider doing it within industry?

GILRUTH: No.

DEVORKIN: None at all?

GILRUTH: No. I don't think they felt that they could do it. It took a lot of doing. I think they wanted to know the answers. They wanted to build the things that made them money, and that was when they built these weapons for the country. They would never have made much money if they'd tried to run a thing like we did. They were not interested in doing that. They were interested in what we were doing, and they wanted somebody to do a good job, but I don't think there was any idea that they wanted to take over that. Never felt any pressure like that.

TAPE 1, SIDE 2

MAUER: Mrs. Gilruth, you were asking me if Dr. Gilruth had answered my question in a roundabout fashion. It just seems to me that, Dr. Gilruth, when I started asking you about this decision on the part of Committee on Aerodynamics, it really hasn't stuck in your memory. Am I correct in that perception, that that particular decision in 1952 doesn't seem to ring a bell?

GILRUTH: No, it doesn't.

MAUER: And that's in the nature of memory. It's a long time ago.

GILRUTH: Yes.

MAUER: Let me ask you about another specific date which you may or may not remember. You were talking about the importance of Atlas and ICBM [Intercontinental Ballistic Missile] work in stimulating research at Wallops, developing ultimately to the five-stage solid rocket. Another stimulus, as I understand it, was the work being done in manned rocket flight that you've already alluded to. More specifically, as X-15 became more and more real, there was thought about what to do after X-15. And on February 14 of 1957, NACA established a steering committee to study what was being called Round 3.

GILRUTH: Yes.

MAUER: I know you remember Round 3, but do you remember the establishment of the steering committee in February of '57?

GILRUTH: I remember that I was not a member of that committee that worked on Round 3, but Hartley Soul was.

DEVORKIN: What was that name again?

GILRUTH: Soul. He was an associate director there at the lab. At Round 3, Max Faget also went there and gave a paper.

MAUER: But that's later. I think that's the meeting in Round 3 in October, wasn't it?

GILRUTH: I don't know. That's the one I remember, where they sort of came upon it, and some of the boys who were there...

DEVORKIN: Was this the meeting right after Sputnik?

GILRUTH: Yes. My people who were out there sort of said,

"Really, you've got to think ahead. Flying man in space is going to be a very important thing." We started with everything we had to figure out how to do it. Round 3 was about the time when all this was happening.

MAUER: What sort of work -- this meeting, October 15, as I remember, I have the date right down here, October 15 was the conference at Ames, but it had been planned for a long time.

GILRUTH: Yes.

MAUER: The type of work that Faget had been doing, and other people who attended the meeting, what had been the origin of that?

GILRUTH: Here's what happened. When Sputnik went up, when the dog went up, we there at NACA Langley decided that -- and I was kind of the ring leader of it, although Max was, I would say, the guy that did the most technical work on it -- that it was going to be important, and we tried to put together a plan. While we were doing this at Langley Field, Dryden got hold of me and said," How about you and some of your guys coming up to Washington, and we'll try to put together some kind of a plan of what should NACA do if it becomes the space agency?"

MAUER: Asking what day this happened, your memory's not going to be...

GILRUTH: Well, I've got some numbers. It was after Sputnik.

MAUER: After Sputnik, right. You were named on the Special Committee on Technology, November 2lst.

GILRUTH: That's right. I do know this. On August 1st of 1958, I presented to Congress testimony of how we would put man in space, with the whole plan, and we did it exactly like that. I'm amazed at how accurate that was, on how we were going to do it, and that it worked just that same way. That was August 1st.

MAUER: Do you remember the first meeting of the Committee on Space Technology? It met on February 13. Had you been called by Dryden to come up and work on the budget before that February 13 meeting?

GILRUTH: Let me see. I'll tell you. The first meeting was February 13, and Vanguard was launched and Explorer failed and the President on April 2nd sent a message to Congress establishing a new civilian space agency.

MAUER: But when did Dr. Dryden call you to come up and work on the budget? You came up to Washington on February 13th for this first meeting of the Committee on Space Technology. Had you been to Washington before that? Do you remember that trip up on February 13th?

GILRUTH: On January 8, '58, Dryden, Crowley, Gilruth and some others worked on a space document at headquarters describing NACA activities in the space field. It was January 16th that the Special Committee on Space Technology was created.

MAUER: But what I'm curious about, Dr. Gilruth is, you've talked about Dryden calling you up to work on the budget. Can you relate that to any of these dates, as to when he called you?

GILRUTH: That's the date at which Dryden called us up to come up and work there at...

MAUER: Right. I was wondering how that related to your involvement on the Committee On Space Technology, whether it was going on at the same time.

GILRUTH: Yes, I'm sure it was.

MAUER: You went up on January 8th and met with Dryden about the document getting NACA into the space business. Do you remember any of that effort now or not?

GILRUTH: I remember.

MAUER: What was the environment like? What was Dryden's attitude?

GILRUTH: Dryden was great to work with.

MAUER: Why?

GILRUTH: Because he was so bright and also so down to earth. He understood how everything worked in Washington, and he was just fun to work with.

MAUER: Can you remember what he was saying to those of you who were working on this document about what direction you ought to go, and what he wanted for NACA in terms of space?

GILRUTH: He had to think of all sorts of things about the space program. All I was thinking about was man, flying man. I didn't have to know about everything.

MAUER: What were you thinking about flying man at this very early stage?

GILRUTH: We were trying to put together an overall plan. We only had one rocket that was capable of putting man into orbit, and that was the Atlas. Usually about one out of three blew up, at that time, but it had the power to put a man in space. It couldn't weigh over 2000 pounds, and that isn't very much for a craft to fly a man in space. But those were the ground rules, and we tried to put together a plan of how to do that. And we did. Dryden got the go-ahead on it, and almost before the Space Act was passed, we were out selecting contractors and so on.

DEVORKIN: I'd like to ask about Dryden's change of opinion about the ballistic design, the re-entry design.

GILRUTH: Yes, he once made a remark that, what was it? Flying it was like...

DEVORKIN: Shooting a lady out of a cannon.

GILRUTH: Shooting a lady out of a cannon. He did say that.

MAUER: Was this very early on?

GILRUTH: He said this, too, when he heard about Wernher's idea of having a launcher right by a swimming pool with an ejection seat, so that if something went wrong it would eject the man right into the swimming pool.

DEVORKIN: This was on page 32 of your memoirs.1

GILRUTH: That's right.

DEVORKIN: Saying that he was at first skeptical of the ballistic re-entry design, prior to Mercury. That's where you used the term, quoted him as saying, "shooting a lady out of a cannon."

GILRUTH: Yes.

DEVORKIN: You, and certainly Max Faget, were considering the blunt design at that time.

GILRUTH: Yes. Absolutely.

DEVORKIN: What changed Dryden's mind? Because as you said, during Mercury he approved it very quickly, within a few months. Because it was then a buildup phase to orbital flight. He'd approved testing of the spacecraft. I'm interested, considering what you were talking about. You only had the Atlas, you only could loft 2000 pounds, but it indicates that prior to Sputnik, you were in a different mind-set as far as the future of this whole program was. I'd like to know what that term "buildup phase" means, to try to lead you into, without putting the words in your mouth...

GILRUTH: I don't really think that I had any fixed idea of what the program was. It was only when we looked at what we had, and as I say, it was the Atlas or the Titan, and the Titan was not as far developed as the Atlas. The only possible way of putting a man in space was with a blunt body, because a glider was way too heavy, and...

DEVORKIN: Would it have been too heavy if you'd had the time to wait for the Titan?

GILRUTH: The Titan wasn't big enough either. It didn't have anymore power. Now, the Titan 2 did have more power, but it still didn't have enough for a glider. And a glider, you had to say, what do we want to go to space for? Just so you can come gliding in like an airplane? Or what's the difference whether you come in with a blunt body or whether you come in on a wing? If you can do it more efficiently with a blunt body, why not do it that way?

DEVORKIN: I think the point I'm driving at is that clearly there were expedients that had to be made after Sputnik, after you saw that the Russians were in a program and you knew you were in a race. You had the option of a lifting body, but that was too heavy. You had the Atlas to work with. You had the bullet design, well-known. You had that weight restriction. But you also had a different attitude. You had to design a program--in your own words on page 37 of your memoir2 --the Mercury program had to involve a "minimum of new developments," using a progressive building up of tests. You had to get this thing done as quickly and efficiently as possible. Is this part of Dryden's own change of attitude? Was it because you were in a race? This no longer became a developmental program, but a program simply to do it?

GILRUTH: No, it was a developmental program. You just didn't want to take on more than you absolutely had to. It was a terribly tough job to do. If you wanted to make it gold-plated all the way around, you'd never have done it. It wasn't because we were cutting the corners or anything. It was, how could you do this in time to be of any competition in the international space race? Time was important, even though you'd say, well, we're above all of that. You know, you couldn't say that. The American people--they wanted the country to be ahead. They didn't want to be behind.

DEVORKIN: Did you see this as a developmental phase leading to an operational system at that time?

GILRUTH: I don't think we were thinking that far ahead. Although we were concentrating on, how do you make a reasonably safe way to fly a man in orbit and bring him back? That was what we were trying to do. And we cut out everything -- we didn't cut out an escape system. We had a first-class escape system, which we know now is very important.

DEVORKIN: That you did. Absolutely.

MAUER: Yes, I'm afraid that going back and reading over comments that you and Dr. Faget made, when the whole idea of the escape system--and why you developed it--seem prophetic now. Because you looked at the performance of the Atlas, and you saw that putting a human being on top of that rocket in a small capsule, there had to be some way out.

GILRUTH: Yes. You have to give them a way out.

DEVORKIN: That's absolutely right.

GILRUTH: Do the best you can for them.

MAUER: Let me pick up on something that David's been saying, something I think I hear. Once again, if I'm putting words in your mouth, stop me and correct me. But I get a sense that once you determine a goal, once you decide our job is to put a man in space, you want to do it the most efficient, safest way possible. When people start proposing lifting bodies, your tendency is to say, "If it doesn't contribute to the immediate job, why do it." Am I correct?

GILRUTH: Yes. The lifting body was a less efficient way of doing the job.

MAUER: This is a philosophy that I think I see going way back in your career. This is something that is an approach to projects that you had over many years. Am I correct?

GILRUTH: I think any good engineer should do that. Do it the best way.

DEVORKIN: There are plenty of engineers who can never, never give a project over to--let's say somebody who's a user. They would constantly tinker, constantly refine. I mean, we all know the stereotypical German engineer who over-designs. True or untrue, we have these ideas. But your philosophy of engineering, is towards efficiency, simplicity, and getting the stated job done.

GILRUTH: Yes.

MAUER: Not worrying about what this will lead to way in the future, but more concerned, this is the job, let's get this job done.

GILRUTH: You come out with a new car the next year and it's better. You don't take the old Ford and goose it up more. You build the best one you can and use it. You do that with airplanes.

MAUER: But every so often you do stop and goose it up. You do stop and make a tremendous jump.

GILRUTH: Yes, sure, if it makes sense. If it doesn't make sense, you don't do it.

MAUER: You have to have a job for it. Just to run out and do something as an engineering exercise doesn't make any sense.

GILRUTH: That's right.

MAUER: If you have a job that you can't get done with what you have, then you start looking at new ways of doing it.

DEVORKIN: John, are you leading into asking Dr. Gilruth about the new projects?

MAUER: We're heading that way, except in a way, there are other portions I still haven't covered.

DEVORKIN: This is the sort of thing likely to lead on to the new projects eventually, so that's why we're asking these questions.

MAUER: Yes, thank you, David. Excuse me for slipping back into earlier times, but we grab hold of something, then we follow it through, and then there's still information that I haven't covered and we may not. If you don't remember, that's fine. Obviously you remember when Jimmy Doolittle was named to be NACA chair in October of 1956. Doolittle was an important change, looking from the outside into NACA, because--retired military officer, an engineer and not a scientist. Now, for you, working at Langley in charge of subs as well as other aspects of Langley, what difference did the coming of Doolittle make, in terms of the environment in which you were working?

GILRUTH: I would say, very little. Everybody liked Jimmy Doolittle. He was a national hero, a bright man, and had done a lot in aviation. We were glad to see him as the titular head, so to speak. He and Dryden were close friends.

DEVORKIN: That means something now, titular head. Of course we know what that means in the dictionary definition.

GILRUTH: That's right.

DEVORKIN: Was he not concerned with actual operational parts of NACA policy?

GILRUTH: He did his job as the head of the committee. You know, that was the part. He did not spend a lot of hours every week on that job.

MAUER: But let's contrast Doolittle with his predecessor, Hunsaker. Hunsaker was very negative on space-type work.

GILRUTH: And rockets.

MAUER: Yes. Anything relating to space.

GILRUTH: Right.

MAUER: Whereas Doolittle I think had a bit different perspective, didn't he?

GILRUTH: Yes, I'm sure he did. I know that Hunsaker had certain things -- that he didn't like. I always liked him, though, and he liked me. I didn't feel that he hurt the NACA during the years that he was the head.

MAUER: I think those are somewhat separate questions, but in a way, if Hunsaker had been chair of the main committee after Sputnik, do you think that there might have been a difference in the response? That's speculation, I know, and you may not feel comfortable with that.

GILRUTH: I don't know. I think it would have been hard for him. I don't think he would have taken the job at the time when there was so much to do in rocketry and space.

DEVORKIN: Let's go back to Hunsaker and Doolittle. You did say that it made very little difference to you when Doolittle came in, in your work at Wallops.

GILRUTH: Right.

DEVORKIN: And Langley. What does that say? That rings a bell in my mind. The institution transcends the individuals, no matter who they are?

GILRUTH: Well, it was not a big problem. We knew what we ought to do, and we were doing it. The head of NACA -- Hunsaker was not against Wallops Island. In fact, he was the guy who over there had said, "It's no good, it broke." You remember, when the wings came off of the rocket model. But he was just ornery, and he just said that, and I knew he would say something like that. Everybody else knew what he was too.

DEVORKIN: So you were saying that when Doolittle came in, in a way he was a titular head. Then possibly that role of the central NACA committee was very much titular?

GILRUTH: That's right. Doolittle was very helpful at the time of the transition from NACA to NASA, because he was well thought of by all. He knew the Presidents. He knew everybody, and he was well liked by everyone, so he was a great guy to have in charge as the titular head of NACA. He actually did spend a lot of time during the transition in going to committee meetings and talking with the President and all that sort of thing, so he was more than a titular head at that time.

DEVORKIN: Certainly big things were happening post-Sputnik, but so too in '53, with Eisenhower and DOD [Department of Defense] reorganization and the wiping out of some of the statutory agencies, and boards and panels like the Research Development Board disappeared at that point. Was Doolittle brought in to do something to the NACA, to change it's venue? Apparently if he did, it didn't affect you, as you just said, but were there rumblings?

GILRUTH: I never heard of any of those things. But I was in the bowels of the ship, I wouldn't know.

MAUER: You weren't a part of this, but obviously you would have had to have heard about it -- the so-called Young Turks or Doolittle Dinner...

GILRUTH: Yes, yes.

MAUER: Which was December 18.

GILRUTH: Yes. John Stack really did himself in that night.

DEVORKIN: What happened?

GILRUTH: Well, I guess, it's a long time afterwards. He was burning up because he didn't think that Dryden and company got enough money from Congress. They had this dinner in which Stack and a number of people were there. I was not. I was too far down in the bowels of the ship to be there. But anyway, he had too much to drink. He got up and he loved to use swear words and this particular time--of course, Dryden was almost a lay minister, a very, very religious man. He was shocked when Stack told him off; that they were pussyfooting around and they ought to go in and...

MAUER: Called Dryden an old fool, is one account that I heard.

GILRUTH: I wasn't there, but I know he did bad. He did a lot of swearing, and it was too bad because John was really a very great guy, but he was off. That was the end of Stack as far as Dryden was concerned.

DEVORKIN: There was another--at the same dinner, maybe this is what you're referring to in Wally McDougall's book, The Heavens and the Earth. You made a notation that in his book, page 165, where he's talking about the Young Turks' dinner, that even Doolittle said--that here it is. "The timid NACA leaders still held back until internal protests at the Young Turks' dinner."3 At that dinner, December 18, 1958, Doolittle hosted, and Dryden was called an old fogey.

GILRUTH: Yes.

DEVORKIN: Was that by Doolittle or by Stack?

GILRUTH: No, it wasn't by Doolittle.

MAUER: That was Stack.

GILRUTH: That's a cleaned-up version of what I heard.

MAUER: It was much stronger than that.

GILRUTH: That's good enough, though, for a history.

DEVORKIN: But how did Dryden emerge from that dinner? How soon after that did you see him? How was he feeling?

MAUER: Let's not move on just yet. I want to talk a little more about the dinner. It's called the Doolittle Dinner. Was it his idea, or do you know?

GILRUTH: Was it Doolittle's idea? I don't know, but I know he was the man who hosted it, picked up the tab.

MAUER: Earlier that day you may or may not remember, the various lab directors had been in a meeting at NACA headquarters.

GILRUTH: Yes.

MAUER: Those lab directors were basically opposed to moving into manned space, from what I understand. Is that your understanding?

GILRUTH: I don't know. I don't think so but I don't know.

MAUER: But at the dinner, much more junior people were brought in, Charles Donlan and I've forgotten who all.

GILRUTH: Donlan was brought in. I know he was one of them who was there. I don't think that John Stack was ever a great proponent of space. He was a proponent of aeronautical research, and he needed lots of money and lots of wind tunnels and things like that. He was a wind tunnel man.

MAUER: So his comments weren't tied to space, but rather he wasn't getting as much money as he wanted for his budget?

GILRUTH: He did not think that NACA was getting enough money from the Congress to do the job they ought to be doing. I want to make sure that--you know, he was not a bad man, he really felt very keenly that he was not getting the backing from top management.

DEVORKIN: I'm sure that given the circumstances, that it was probably a very comfortable dinner, that he was simply the one who broke the ice.

GILRUTH: Yes, probably so. But that was -- he did things that Dryden could never forgive, in the way he talked. Too bad. Too bad.

MAUER: The next day, on December 19th, Dryden prepared a report for the Killian Committee.

DEVORKIN: James R. Killian.

MAUER: Right, exactly. When did Dryden really start indicating that he wanted NACA to get strongly involved in the manned space effort, that the country was -- ?

GILRUTH: That was when he called me up to Washington to put together, along with Max and the other guys, a plan for Project Mercury, only we didn't call it that. That was right around the beginning of the year. Let's see, it was right around January. I don't have it on this list here, but--it was early in '58.

MAUER: So very early on Dryden was interested in getting NACA an important role.

GILRUTH: No problem with him on the re-entry body.

DEVORKIN: After Sputnik.

GILRUTH: After Sputnik. I had no problem. He was very, very sharp technically. He realized that's the only way we could do it in the foreseeable future, and so he said, "Fine." It was in August of that same year that I presented the whole plan before the Congress.

DEVORKIN: That's right. August 1.

GILRUTH: August 1, that's right. That was the result of our efforts during that early part of that year.

DEVORKIN: I'd just love to ask about that. This was a series of testimonies, this was testimony for NASA.

GILRUTH: Yes, for the budget.

DEVORKIN: For the budget, and you were called. This is the authorization of construction for NASA.

GILRUTH: Yes, that's right.

DEVORKIN: Just for the record, it's HR 13619, hearing before the Select Committee on Astronautics and Space Exploration.

GILRUTH: That's right.

DEVORKIN: Dr. Dryden introduced you.

GILRUTH: That's right.

DEVORKIN: That was just after O'Sullivan spoke. And I'm curious, this is the same William J. O'Sullivan we talked about before, a man that I'm eternally interested in for a number of reasons. He was reporting on scientific work, and then you came to provide the budget for the manned portion. Was there any link between the two or--why did Dryden place you after O'Sullivan? Because he said here, "I think we will reverse the order and take the manned work next." Was it originally intended that the manned work go first?

GILRUTH: I don't know. I don't know. All I knew was, I was supposed to talk about that. I forget what O'Sullivan... He worked with this big balloon that he flew in space.

DEVORKIN: Echo.

GILRUTH: Echo. That might have been what he was going to talk about. Echo.

DEVORKIN: So they were leading up to various--I'm just speculating at this point, and if you could correct me for the record, this is speculation. I'm interested in Dryden's rationale for how he presented the plan to Congress. The most utilitarian things first, such as Echo, which was the beginning of passive communications systems, which were obviously of use for space. Then moving on to the things that maybe were more provocative, such as manned space flight, things that may cause a little more debate in Congress. What do you think? How did Dryden work when it came to dealing with Congress?

GILRUTH: Dryden felt that the man in space was a very important part of the new agency. He had to have that. I think he wanted to get that out of the way, be sure he had a good hearing on that, and that somebody wouldn't dissolve the meeting and put it off to the next week or something like that. I think he wanted to run that off and get it into the record.

DEVORKIN: But he didn't want it first.

GILRUTH: I don't know. But I do know that O'Sullivan was there at the time, and I can't remember, it must have been Echo that he was talking about.

DEVORKIN: Because the person who followed you was Cartwright, and he was to describe the program that dealt with advanced technology, bigger boosters, higher energy fuels, things like that, which are even further down the line. I guess Echo was something that was possible quite quickly. So maybe it was chronological, as to what NASA could do first, then next.

GILRUTH: I don't know.

MAUER: I keep coming back to an earlier time.

DEVORKIN: I hope we're not being too exasperating?

GILRUTH: No. No.

MAUER: We each grab hold of a bit different thing, and run with it a little while. When you were called up to do the budget work, what specifically was your role in developing the budget for Dryden, preparing to turn NACA into NASA and get into manned space?

GILRUTH: I had to put together a plan for doing it. Come up with the first-year costs. Of course we realized that if it were approved, we'd have to do it, so we were pretty careful to put things in that we thought we could do, which was good. This sort of thing didn't happen very often, I'll tell you, to be called up to put together--well I guess it cost 400 million dollars by the time we got through. It was a big program and a very important program for the United States.

MAUER: When you were first called up, were you just to work on a general budget, or did you have a sense that you were being called up to work on a budget for a program that, if approved, you would head?

GILRUTH: I knew exactly. It was not the whole space program. It was a program for putting man in space. I had a pretty good idea that I might have something to do with that. Since Dryden asked me to head up the group... You know, you never know. Dryden did all the good work of getting NASA all lined up, and instead of being the director of NASA, why, they put in Glennan, bam, like that, and made him the deputy, which was a blow to Dryden. I know he felt very, very badly about that. But I guess he didn't have the political clout or something.

DEVORKIN: How did you feel about it?

GILRUTH: I thought it was cruel. It was too bad. But there wasn't anything I could do about it, of course.

MAUER: Before Glennan was brought in, before NASA was created, and as NACA was working to develop a program for a civilian manned space program, Dryden saw himself as a person that would probably lead this effort.

GILRUTH: Yes.

MAUER: When you were brought in, you didn't know but it was a reasonable likelihood that you would be the person to actually head up this manned space program.

GILRUTH: Yes.

MAUER: Who did you work with, not in the most immediate terms, but---am I correct in assuming that you had contact with Bureau of the Budget people who were working with NACA?

GILRUTH: No. I didn't work with the Bureau of Budget people.

MAUER: The Presidential Science Advisor Committee, PSAC?

GILRUTH: We talked to the PSAC. I made a presentation to, I think PSAC or one of their subcommittees. I remember that. This is when I ran into Kistiakowsky, who was the one that said, "That will only be the most expensive funeral man has ever had." Of course, he was not on the same wavelength at all, couldn't understand why anybody would want to do that.

DEVORKIN: Why were you briefing PSAC?

GILRUTH: Because Dryden thought that it was one of the committees there in Washington that was influential, and they ought to know what we were thinking about. That's all. He put all his cards on the table.

MAUER: The NACA had a longstanding relationship with the military. You were working on the budget for manned space, the military has internal --

GILRUTH: They were interested in the manned space program.

MAUER: Did you have contact with them when you were working on the budget?

GILRUTH: We did talk with them, but I don't think they had a plan. They were all mixed up. They'd start something and they'd stop it. They were not sure what they wanted to do.

DEVORKIN: Who did you have contact with, in which agency, was it within ARPA [Advance Research Project Agency]?

GILRUTH: Yes, I talked some with ARPA. But you know, originally there were people in the Air Force that were very interested in something like man in space.

DEVORKIN: Do you recall their names?

GILRUTH: No, I can find them I guess but I can't remember them now.

DEVORKIN: It would be very interesting, I think, for us to have those names, at least the officers. If we were able to trace down records of contact, because they would always have records of consultative services, paper trails of people they could talked to.

GILRUTH: Yes. They never had a concise program of what they thought they wanted to do. Their thrust didn't last long enough in one direction to get that far. They really didn't have a very strong group of people in their organization.

DEVORKIN: Is that because they didn't have a mission, or they had conflicting--

GILRUTH: They didn't have a mission, no. They didn't have a mission.

TAPE 2, SIDE 1

DEVORKIN: We were talking about the lack of mission in the Air Force.

MAUER: Yes, and in ARPA. Was there a sense of competition in this period, early 1958, between the Air Force, ARPA, and NACA, or was it just a continuation of the tradition of cooperation? What was the situation?

GILRUTH: I don't think that they had any feeling of competition between us. Of course I was sent back to Langley Field and told to get on with the project. I had to create, gather a staff. We had to go out to industry and get them going on building the hardware, which meant that we had to write specs and we had to select contractors. I know that the Air Force and the Defense services were just sitting back grinning, to watch how this fledgling group was going to do once they got in the big time. We'd never had anything like this, like they did with their airplanes and so on. They'd have these big contracts. But we didn't do badly. I would say we did very well.

MAUER: Why?

GILRUTH: Because we copied the things that the Defense services did where we could, and where we didn't think they were good, why, we didn't copy them.

MAUER: How would you know what they did was good and what other things were not good?

GILRUTH: Because we could see how they worked out.

MAUER: Was this because you had contacts with the military and with the contractors, and you could see the relationships that they--

GILRUTH: We got some of those people with us. We had people from the Navy, from the Air Force, from the Army, and we had access to all the different things that were around there. We had lots of good help. There were lots of people that weren't all that helpful, but we soon got our ducks lined up.

MAUER: How did you go about lining up your ducks? Can you remember some of the people?

GILRUTH: Sure, I remember the people. I gathered together people. Some were much more helpful than others. It was great because there were a lot of people that would come to work at a civil service salary, as long as they were working on this space program. They would take a big cut from what they were making with industry.

DEVORKIN: Can you remember any names as examples of this?

GILRUTH: One of them was Jim Elms. I don't know whether you know Jim Elms or not. He was a great help to me, and stayed with me for a year or so, and I still see him about ten times a year. We're old buddies.

DEVORKIN: Where did he come from and what did he do?

GILRUTH: He was a Caltech person. He was working with industry, worked for Ford for a while and with General Dynamics.

DEVORKIN: What sort of expertise did he bring that was helpful to you?

GILRUTH: I guess the thing that helped me the most--he was good at many things but he was a genius at organization. He helped me organize. And that was extremely helpful to me. There were other people too. I can't recall these. A lot of good people. George Trimble is another one. He came from Martin, and was my deputy for a while.

DEVORKIN: Did these people show up on your doorstep, or did you seek them out? Did you have connections and you knew who was good?

GILRUTH: A little bit of both. A little bit of both. When Elms left me, I had to find somebody else. I found Trimble. Trimble put in a year or something like that.

DEVORKIN: I know you had plenty of good people you brought with you from--

GILRUTH: Had lots of good people.

DEVORKIN: I'd like to back up again and use your memoir, if I could, then bring you right back to where we are. You said that you made a very interesting deal with Thompson. You went back and you had to get people.

GILRUTH: Right.

DEVORKIN: The only place you could get people in the beginning was from Langley. Thompson was worried that you had been drawing off the best people, so you and he made a deal that for every person you wanted, you had to take someone else they didn't want.

GILRUTH: Yes.

DEVORKIN: Is this exactly how it went? Is that really what happened? What did you do with those people that they didn't want?

GILRUTH: Sometimes they turned out pretty well. They weren't allbad. Somehow or other, if they were real bad, they just somehow went away. They got lost. I suppose they ended up with rather menial jobs somewhere, if they didn't go away.

DEVORKIN: But in the beginning, as a real expedient, you had to look inside what you already had. How long was it before people started knocking on your door, or you had the pick of the crop out there, that people from the outside with greater salaries would come in and volunteer their services -- not volunteer -- but the best people, as you say, the Jim Elms, the George Trimbles. Not that they would be better than what you had, but it was a much bigger field. Can you recall the rate at which this happened? Was this a very quick process?

GILRUTH: No, it wasn't quick. But as you integrated it over a year, it was quite a bit. And of course, we had a very dynamic program. The Mercury suddenly became Apollo, and Gemini was thrown in. We had to have Gemini with it. We had a very, very big program by the time we got to the end of that decade, when we were getting close to the end of the sixties. We had a big program.

DEVORKIN: Oh, absolutely. You mentioned that Gemini had to go with it. What do you mean by that?

GILRUTH: When we were told to fly to the moon, we had only Project Mercury. That was a very bright but not a very learningful program for all the things you had to do in flying to the moon. We didn't have the ability to fly men for two weeks. We didn't have controlled re-entry. We hadn't rendezvoused. We had to learn how to rendezvous in order to go to the moon. We had all kinds of things to learn to do. We didn't know and hadn't trained our people to do.

DEVORKIN: Of course, there were a lot of things going on in parallel here. They hadn't decided upon earth orbit rendezvous or lunar orbit rendezvous. If I recall, from some of the writings, direct descent was still very strong.

GILRUTH: Yes, but we'd be still trying to do it if we had gone that way. Because it was immensely difficult to go direct descent.

DEVORKIN: Yes, but that seemed to be the choice in the beginning.

GILRUTH: It was, because Wernher wanted to build a big rocket.

DEVORKIN: Oh, no question there. But was there ever any talk of sending Mercury to the moon?

GILRUTH: Oh no. Not a chance.

DEVORKIN: Gemini came in, would you say purely as a progressive step toward Apollo?

GILRUTH: Yes, as a training device.

DEVORKIN: Was there a military interest as well?

GILRUTH: No. Well, they had an interest, but it didn't live though. I don't think they had a very bona fide military interest.

MAUER: Can you talk about that, or is that something that's still classified?

GILRUTH: I don't know. I'm sure it isn't still classified, because it never had any real status.

MAUER: What was that military interest then?

GILRUTH: They just wanted to have their men get flight experience. We took a lot of their men and flew them in our programs, very good men.

MAUER: That was still when the Air Force thought they were doing Dynasoar.

GILRUTH: Yes.

MAUER: Getting men into space put them in a much better position for what they were projecting for the future.

GILRUTH: That's right.

MAUER: Can I come back once again, we keep doing this. When you were brought up to work on the budget, were you fulltime here in Washington for a while?

GILRUTH: Yes.

MAUER: Or you were shuttling back and forth between Washington and Langley?

GILRUTH: Well, I'll tell you. We called that the Hot Summer of 19, whatever it was.

DEVORKIN: '58.

GILRUTH: '58. NACA had an old office building, I forget where it was now, but it was over near the White House.

DEVORKIN: That wasn't the Dolly Madison Building?

GILRUTH: No, Dolly Madison came a year later. This was a big tall --I think we were on the seventh floor. It was not air-conditioned, and it was summer. We had a big room there with about ten telephones in it. The people that were working on the space program would sit in this room and call up all the people they needed to talk with and make appointments. We would then go back home for the weekends. We lived at Langley. It wasn't that far. Come back the next Monday. That's the way we worked most of the summer until we got these things put together, and of course we then also had our hearings. It was not very good working conditions. But we were young and we were excited about what we were doing.

MAUER: Do you remember briefing Herb York, the chief scientist of ARPA, in the beginning of April, 1958?

GILRUTH: Yes.

MAUER: What was that briefing about?

GILRUTH: Well, at one time he was working with ARPA, I think, and they were interested in this. It turned out that he wasn't that interested in what we were talking about.

MAUER: Why was that?

GILRUTH: I don't know. I've forgotten. I remember going over there with Gus Crowley and talking with him, but I don't remember just why. I don't think he could see why anybody would want to do that.

DEVORKIN: Here you have York, you have Kistiakowsky, you have of course PSAC people, all--

GILRUTH: Yes, PSAC people were very antagonistic.

DEVORKIN: That's quite right. You first met this antagonism, as you recall, back in the X-15 program. Why manned? Why manned?

GILRUTH: Right. That's right. Why not send an instrument?

MAUER: Isn't that the continuing theme of the scientists?

GILRUTH: I've heard that all my life.

DEVORKIN: Did you ever, when you were preparing for the hearings in the Hot Summer -- and I'm not taking you back or forward, we're at the right time, right?

GILRUTH: Right.

DEVORKIN: Did you have strategy meetings? Did you have hallway conversations?

GILRUTH: Of course. Because here were all these people. We'd go out and eat dinner together and work all evening talking about what we were doing and thrashing things out.

DEVORKIN: I meant strategy sessions specifically to deal with-- you knew that issue was coming, it was already there, manned versus unmanned. That you were going to meet it somewhere. Did you have any memorable strategy sessions or general impressions of how you tried to deal with that or anticipate that?

GILRUTH: We never met that issue. We assumed that it was going to be manned. There were going to be some things, some programs, that were just going to fly a man.

DEVORKIN: So you expended no energy off-duty or on--

GILRUTH: No, we didn't take the pros and cons of manned versus unmanned. There are some things you have to have a man on, just like an airplane.

DEVORKIN: In the world I live in here, I know that if I'm going to try to push a program, I'm going to try to anticipate--even if a program was going to go, I knew it--that I still had to justify it. I'm in that position now. So we sit around trying to figure out what are the criteria for success, that can demonstrate the need. What are the criteria that we have to admit are expensive and could maybe just as well be done in another mode. I know that I'm going through this sort of soul searching procedure, knowing that I'm spending a lot of money doing something that other people don't fully understand. Just knowing they're out there makes me think about it. Now, are you saying that you didn't waste any time worrying about that sort of thing?

GILRUTH: I didn't waste any time on why we had to have a man in that spacecraft, because, by definition, we were competing with the Soviets who, we felt, were going to fly men. We already had seen enough of the reaction of the public to them just flying a dog, that we felt that they were going to ride that horse, and we'd better get going. That's the way Dryden felt, and that's pretty much what the Congress felt. We didn't argue why. We did it. In my testimony, no one said, "Well, why do you want to have a man in it?" Nobody said that. Now, they had said it before, many times, but when I got before the Congress, that Select committee knew perfectly well why the man was in it.

DEVORKIN: Did you go into that committee knowing that they weren't going to ask you?

GILRUTH: No. I didn't have any idea what they were going to say.

MAUER: But were you worried that they--

GILRUTH: I wasn't worried.

MAUER: For the reasons you've just stated.

GILRUTH: That's right.

MAUER: So, here were the scientists on the PSAC committee and other places--

GILRUTH: They always lived in a world of their own.

MAUER: But they also didn't represent any real threat to you, is what you're saying?

GILRUTH: Yes, that's right.

MAUER: You could just ignore this because you knew what was happening.

GILRUTH: When Kistiakowsky did that, and we left there, I said, "Boy, that was really rough." And Dryden said, "Don't worry about it, you did fine. Don't worry about it. That was a good meeting." He knew Kistiakowsky.

DEVORKIN: So he knew it was going to happen.

GILRUTH: Sure. Oh yes, he knew it was going to happen.

MAUER: When you first went up to Washington, was it clear to you that he knew what was going to happen? Did his attitude change in those early weeks and months, or was it clear from the beginning?

GILRUTH: No, I think it was clear from the beginning. And looking through some of his papers, he saw the way things were going to go. That the new agency was going to have to pioneer in things like that.

DEVORKIN: You say looking through his papers, his published papers?

GILRUTH: I don't know if they're published or not. I have some memorandums and things from Dryden.

MAUER: From Dryden?

GILRUTH: Yes.

DEVORKIN: These are in your home?

GILRUTH: Yes.

DEVORKIN: I'm glad this is on the record, because we would like very much to know about those memoranda.

GILRUTH: Sure, all right. They're quite interesting.

MAUER: How much credit would you give to Dryden, as a person, for directing NACA to doing the things necessary to it becoming the core for NASA?

GILRUTH: I give him the highest marks. He was terrific. He was very bright. He believed that what he was doing was important, and he thought these programs were important.

MAUER: Let me ask the question a little tougher way. I don't mean to be disrespectful, indeed I don't agree with this point of view, but let me come back to the man who made the rude remarks, Stack. The polite way is that he called Dryden an old fogey. What is your view? Clearly you're indicating you think that Dryden wasn't an old fogey. Explain to us why you held the opinion. I'm not saying it well because you've already answered that question, excuse me--not only did Stack at the Young Turks' dinner call Dryden an old fogey, but the McDougall book implies that that is what Dryden was.4

GILRUTH: The McDougall book?

MAUER: There's a new book out. So this view of Dryden has been perpetuated. I think it's very important that we get very clearly down your sense of Dryden, because I think you're giving a very different one than this. Indeed, as I read through various sources, I feel very comfortable with what you're saying. But Dryden called you up, and others to start working on this, very early on, because -- what were the reasons for his calling you up to start working on the budget?

GILRUTH: He was in Washington. He was really the man that Jimmy Doolittle had tapped to try to lead NACA into the Promised Land, so to speak, with the space program.

MAUER: Jimmy Doolittle tapped him?

GILRUTH: I think Jimmy Doolittle--he was the head of NACA, the committee, and he was a good friend, a close friend of Hugh Dryden. And Hugh Dryden was in a position -- he was an employee of -- I can't think of the name of the outfit. Anyway, he lived in Washington. He was a man who understood the technical side, and he also understood the political side. He was a very highly "thought" of man. He was a perfect man to engineer and carry out this transition from NACA into NASA. And he did a masterful job.

MAUER: Speak directly to that, he was the right man to make this transition. Why was Dryden the right man?

GILRUTH: He was the right man because he absolutely had the credentials of a scientist. He was a great scientist. He was a very well-thought-of scientist. He also understood engineering. He had built some guided missiles during the war that were successful. So he also had the talent of an engineer. He was well understood and known by Jimmy Doolittle, who trusted him. So that when the time came, Jimmy Doolittle apparently just said,"Hugh, will you try to make this thing happen? I'll help you any way I can." Dryden took the reins, and I think, wasn't he made the director of NACA for a while? I think he was director.

MAUER: Yes, he was director at this time.

GILRUTH: I knew George Lewis, I knew him well, but I can't remember just how the transition was made from Lewis to Dryden. I don't think there was an interim director of NACA. I think it went from George Lewis to Dryden. That should be possible to find out by looking at the NACA reports.

MAUER: So from the very beginning of your work, Dryden was committed to making NACA the core institution for a new civilian space agency which became NASA?

GILRUTH: That's right.

MAUER: This was his goal and his intention.

GILRUTH: That was his goal and his intention. It certainly was. I don't know just when he reached this point, but I know that he did. When he talked to me, he'd already reached that.

MAUER: Let me ask you about something you may well not remember but just on the chance that you might, Dryden gave a speech January 27, 1958, to the Institute of Aeronautical Sciences in New York City.

GILRUTH: Yes.

MAUER: He stated that the goal of the program should be the development of manned satellites and the travel of man to the moon and nearby planets.

GILRUTH: He said that in '58?

MAUER: January '58, he said this. So that this is an indication, I would think, of how strongly he felt. But your reaction is that this is surprising even you a little bit.

GILRUTH: Yes. Well, I thought it was harder than that. I was right, too.

DEVORKIN: Was it something he had to say, do you think?

GILRUTH: I don't know. Well, I think he had to say things like that.

DEVORKIN: Was he good at saying things like that?

GILRUTH: Sure.

DEVORKIN: The kind of thing that I'd like to be able to appreciate about Dryden a little more.

GILRUTH: He was extremely bright. You see, he was right. We could do it. He was right. I was not that smart. I thought it was harder.

DEVORKIN: You were concentrating upon the present project, instead of looking to the future.

GILRUTH: Right.

DEVORKIN: Did he ever come to you, at that time, January '58 or even slightly before, to your knowledge, and ask anyone--that statements like that, that he might make in public, are ludicrous, ridiculous? Did he ever ask your opinion before he made a public statement?

GILRUTH: He made up his own mind. I think so. We were always telling him what we thought, though. He knew what we thought.

DEVORKIN: So he would have been aware of how you felt.

GILRUTH: Yes. I certainly didn't say that I didn't think we could go to the moon. But if he had asked me, I might have said I think it would be terribly hard to do. I told President Kennedy when he said, "I want to go to the moon," I said, "Well, that's very hard to do." "But," I said, "I don't know that you can't." So that was fair and square. I didn't know that you couldn't. And it turned out, it was pretty straightforward. But how we ever did it, and all those things worked, with all those single point failures, in the sequence--there were some people who wanted to keep on flying those things, you know. A lot more of them -- I said "Not me, you get another boy. You'll have to get another guy to handle it. You'll have to get another boy because I'm not going to stay around for it if you're going to keep doing it."

DEVORKIN: Did you have a real strong feeling that with that number of single point failures, no matter how good the system, you were going to have an accident?

GILRUTH: Sooner or later you would. And we had, how many landings? Lots of them. We had all we needed. There wasn't that much difference between the sites we explored. The moon's surface is fairly uniform.

MAUER: So you weren't really upset when budgetary pressures ultimately forced NASA to cut back on the number of scheduled the flights, in order to make sure there was enough money to get the Shuttle started up?

GILRUTH: Oh, I think it was time to quit the flights to the moon. Regardless of money, if we had all the money in the world, I wouldn't have wanted to keep doing that.

DEVORKIN: Wasn't the homogeneity of the landing sites also a function of finding safe sites?

GILRUTH: No. We just picked out sites and went there.

MAUER: To ask another question dealing with Dryden -- and it may be something you don't know about. If so, that's fine. The end of January, January 31st, to be exact, 1958, Lieutenant General Donald Putt wrote to Dryden inviting NACA's participation in the man-in-space program. Putt envisioned that NACA would continue in the same role that it had been playing in aeronautics with NACA being be the supplier of needed research data. This was to cover both the orbit program and also Dynasoar. Are you familiar with that letter that he wrote?

GILRUTH: I wouldn't have thought of it if you hadn't brought it up, but I do know, there was a period of time there when the Air Force was very much interested in picking up the man-in-space program. Don Putt was the head of that kind of work, the research in new programs. I don't know exactly what his official title was, but I knew him quite well. It was a friendly gesture to Dryden, and we had worked very well with the Air Force as well as the Navy in the past, so we were quite comfortable working with them where they had the lead role and set the program, but then we did the research that was necessary. That had been our role all through the past years up to that point. But when the time came for us to take the lead role, we found it was not all that hard to do either.

MAUER: You knew General Putt well, you indicated.

GILRUTH: Yes.

MAUER: Is this because of this long standing relationship between NACA and the Air Force?

GILRUTH: Yes. I'd been on the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board for many years, and Putt was active with the Air Force in connection with the Scientific Advisory Board. He was the director of that for a while, and he was also on the NACA committee, I believe, so that we were well acquainted.

MAUER: Dryden's response to Putt's letter was that NACA would cooperate with the Air Force and Putt, but when it came to actually making a formal agreement, he didn't do that. In fact, Dryden informed Putt that NACA was working on its own designs. He said he would coordinate with the Air Force, but he didn't make a formal agreement. Indeed, it wasn't until May 1959 that in a formal agreement--well after NASA had been created, and your space task group was going. What was happening in January of 1958?

GILRUTH: I think that Dryden had a very good ear to the ground. I'm not sure of this, but I would think that he could see the hand writing on the wall, that probably the manned space program was going to be run by a civilian agency. Of course he was in line at that time to be the head of it, and certainly at least would have a lot of say in it. He didn't want to sign any papers with the Air Force at that time.

MAUER: But that's precisely what I wanted you to say. I appreciate your making that observation, because what I see in it is one thing, because I wasn't involved, and getting you to say what you see in it is, I think, the critical item here. In that hot summer in 1958, you were working on the budget, but also, you realized that once NASA gets going, you're likely to be the person to head up what was going to become the Mercury program. When did you start thinking about what you were going to be doing? What you were going to need to do for putting a man into space?

GILRUTH: I think we were thinking about that all along, but not in detail. Of course, we had to face that detail when Glennan was made the head of NASA, and he called me up to his office, along with other people there, and told me to get back to Langley Field and to get on with the program. Then I found out I had the job of recruiting.

    I would like to mention one other thing. When Glennan called me up there and brought me into his office to tell me to get on with the program, there was a young man there in his office named Wes Hjornevik. He was an assistant to Glennan, a very young man, but obviously very bright. After my meeting with Glennan, Hjornevik came to me and said, "Bob, I would like very much to go to Langley Field with you and be your head of administration." I didn't say yes or no, because I didn't know him, but I told Floyd Thompson, who had been my boss at Langley for many years. He said, "I know him, and you'd do well to get him. He's good." So I called him up and said, "That's fine, come on down when you can." He was our administrative man and kept us out of trouble, with all those contracts that we had to let, all our arrangements with the Defense services. He was a big factor in the success of our program.

DEVORKIN: I'd just like to say that in my experience, administrative officers sometimes can be the bane of existence of the engineers and the scientists trying to get a job done, because they're--

GILRUTH: That's right. But this fellow said, "Just tell me what it is you want, and I'll get it for you."

DEVORKIN: That's procurement. So he was more procurement than in managing internal expenses.

GILRUTH: We didn't have any internal expenses. We just had a few civil service people, and we--I don't know who paid for the building. We didn't build any buildings at that time.

MAUER: What was his background, that gave him the experience to be of such help to you?

GILRUTH: I don't remember.

DEVORKIN: Another tack to take. From the last interview, one of the things we discussed that is of great interest I think to a number of people is the change in your style of activity that was evidently going to happen now. You were not going to be an in-house oriented group.

GILRUTH: That's right.

DEVORKIN: And you brought up this man, Wes Hjornevik -- was he unique? Was there no one at Langley who was familiar with external contracts, being able to administer to a program that was fundamentally a driver of huge contracts with industry? Was it just simply something -- was he pirated in a friendly sort of way?

GILRUTH: No, he wasn't. There was a man at Langley who handled all the contracts, a fellow named Sherwood Butler. We had used him for a while. He took over the procurement of some of the things we wanted, fairly small things. But he didn't want to risk his career on a brand new outfit that was pioneering something that might last only a few months. No, you had to have a lot of faith and a lot of vision in order to want that job that Hjornevik wanted.

DEVORKIN: He certainly was not--and you can correct me, of course, because this will give us a sense of the scale of the operation --was he a one-man operation or did he build a staff? GILRUTH: He built a staff.

DEVORKIN: What grew quicker, if I can ask a question like that, the procurement staff or your in-house technical staff?

GILRUTH: The technical staff. We didn't have that much of a procurement staff. Hjornevik was not an empire builder.

DEVORKIN: Now the technical staff was growing to plan, to design, or to help write technical RFPs.

GILRUTH: We had to monitor all those contractors. We had to bring on board astronauts. We had to select them. We had to train them. We had to set up a world tracking network. We had to figure out how we were going to pick these things up in the ocean. We had to have liaison with the Navy. We had millions of things to do, when we started out with just me, and Max and Hjornevik. We had a tremendous job of recruiting, but it was made easy by the fact that there were a lot of people who wanted to do it. But it was still tough, and it was still hard to keep this organization efficient. But we managed to do it, and we didn't have any real bad things. We didn't goof on our contracting and spend a lot of money, send a lot of money to somebody who was crooked, or anything like that. When you have to spend a lot of money, and you're in a big jam, and you're trying to get a whole lot of things done, it's hard to be precise, and not do something wrong.

MAUER: It seems to me that, going through the history of it, it's not only just hard, period, but you and your groups faced some special problems. You'd been basically researchers, and with the Space Task Group, you were going from research into R and D in which you were going to let contracts and then you were going to supervise the actual building of the spacecraft.

GILRUTH: That's right.

MAUER: All of a sudden you were taking on a lot of responsibilities that you hadn't faced that much before.

GILRUTH: That's right.

MAUER: Yet, in listening to you talk about it, you had a sense of confidence that you could get the job done.

GILRUTH: Yes. That's right.

MAUER: What was it about your experiences that let you have that confidence, getting into this whole new area of dealing with contracts?

TAPE 2, SIDE 2

GILRUTH: I didn't have time to think about that problem, really. All we did was, it seemed to be very straight forward. The people at McDonnell, I'd known before. I knew Mr. McDonnell. Yardley, who is now the president, was a stress analysis man.

MAUER: So you already knew many of the key contractors?

GILRUTH: I knew them. But I'd never had a relationship where they were the contractor, you know, and that sort of thing, but it didn't make a diffrence. I was "Bob" and we could talk about what the problems were. We really didn't have any very bad problems. We had some arguments about how the capsule should be built. And we resolved those on a rational basis, and I think we were satisfied. It wasn't hard to do that, and of course, the Atlas was a little different, because we were buying the Atlas from General Dynamics through the Air Force, and of course the Air Force was really quite concerned that we might give their rocket a bad name, because they weren't sure that we knew we were doing. And especially when we -- the second Atlas we flew blew up at Mach 1 just 60 seconds after it was started, and --

DEVORKIN: But that was prepared by the Air Force for you, wasn't it?

GILRUTH: Yes. But see, it was a case of, we had our spacecraft on the front, and they said, "Well, that came apart and went back and hit the Atlas and caused it to blow." Which it might have.

MAUER: They also had motivation to blame your spacecraft, because if they blamed your spacecraft, then their rocket wasn't to blame.

GILRUTH: Sure. And obviously, there was a case for an argument, and well, we wanted to fly again. And I said, "I believe that the skin of your rocket is too thin," I think it was 20/1000th. The Atlas was a stainless steel balloon I said, "The turbulence from our spacecraft is probably enough to cause that to oscillate and wrinkle and it probably ruptures." So I wanted to put a collar around it of heavier stainless steel with some bands that would tighten it up, and I made the mistake of calling it a "belly band." This was very, very unpopular with the Air Force. But I said, "We paid for this rocket, and we need to fly." They said, "Well, we'll put heavier gauge material on the rocket, but that will take five months to do." I'd already looked into that, and I said, "We can't wait five months. We need to put the belly band on." Nobody in the Air Force would approve it. We finally carried it all the way to the Secretary of the Air Force, who I'd known. I said, "I will agree to take all blame if it breaks," which meant I would be out of a job. I said I was the guy that insisted on doing this -- I said,"okay, I'll take the blame if it blows." Well, we put the belly band on, and I remember very well when we launched that thing. I went outside all by myself, behind a bush there, and watched that thing go. I kept timing it, and when 60 seconds has elapsed, that was the time it went through Mach 1. It kept staying together--and I said I'll go to it was one minute and ten seconds. Then I went back into the blockhouse and I said, "Well, we can relax a little bit. We didn't have that problem again." That saved us four or five months in our program.

DEVORKIN: Did you come up with the idea, or someone on your staff, and you took the responsibility for it, the belly band?

GILRUTH: The belly band? Oh, I don't know. I think maybe it was somebody like Yardley who said, "Well, what we need to do is to strengthen that up," and so we got the idea of the belly band. But it was my idea to carry the thing through the hard knocks.

DEVORKIN: You never asked somebody at headquarters to vouch for you?

GILRUTH: Well, Jimmy Webb was head of it and he knew all about it. I told him. He knew our problem.

DEVORKIN: But you were the one who was ready to take the heat.

GILRUTH: Yes, somebody had to take the heat. I was the logical one to take the heat. And maybe he would have saved my neck, if it had blown up, but I don't think he could have. In any case, that's a true story, that was really an important thing, because we couldn't have stood that four or five month delay.

DEVORKIN: Let me ask, why did you leave the bunker? Why did you go outside to watch it?

GILRUTH: Because I wanted to get the best possible view of what was happening. Inside there, you couldn't see very much. You could see all the instruments and everything.

MAUER: But it sounds like, having put your job on the line, you were also willing to put your life on the line.

GILRUTH: Oh, no, no. It wasn't dangerous.

MAUER: It wasn't, even at launch?

GILRUTH: I wasn't that close to it.

MAUER: A question, in listening to your account now, what comes to my mind is, it strikes me differently, maybe it's in the record and I just didn't pick up on it before--but the failure that prompted you to come to the belly band decision was directly associated with the dynamic forces of going through the sound barrier at Mach 1, as best you could tell?

GILRUTH: I think so.

MAUER: And that's why you went outside, because you wanted to see the rocket's actual performance when it went through the sound barrier.

GILRUTH: Well, you could see the failure better from outside than you could on a television screen inside. It wasn't that good a rendition. You could see better outside.

MAUER: If that problem was going to be repeated, it was going to be repeated at Mach 1.

GILRUTH: Yes. That's where it happened before, and that's where the buffeting was the worst. If you got through that, I thought we were perfectly all right. It turned out that it was. From then on, we had three good Atlases in a row. No, four. I think every one. Glenn and all the other astronauts except Grissom, Grissom and Shepard, flew on that Atlas--Deke Slayton of course, didn't fly.

MAUER: Did they fly Atlases with belly bands,?

GILRUTH: No, from then on, they had the thick skin.

MAUER: So the belly band was a temporary thing to bridge between the very thin one to the new one.

GILRUTH: That's all it was, so you could make your flight without losing five months.

MAUER: In that situation, five months was at a premium because of the intensity of the race with the Soviets.

GILRUTH: At that time, you see, Gagarin hadn't flown yet. We were still hoping that we could somehow or other luck out and orbit a man first, but Gagarin flew right before we flew Al Shepard. The Wiesner Committee held us up for enough time -- otherwise, at least, we could have--

MAUER: The Wiesner Committee held you up?

GILRUTH: Sure.

MAUER: In what respect? I don't remember that part of the story.

GILRUTH: When the Republicans lost and Kennedy took over, the Science Advisor became Jerry Wiesner of MIT, and he was very much against the man-in-space program, and Kennedy had no polarity at all. He didn't know much about it and was not interested. So Wiesner decided to hold hearings on the man-in-space program, with the idea in his mind that it should be stopped. But Jim Webb had been also picked by the Republicans. Jim Webb and I had fortunately gotten to know each other, and he thought that we had a good thing going. He wasn't supposed to administrate a program that lost all of its guts, so he was my friend. When Wiesner had these hearings to see whether or not Mercury should be cancelled--

DEVORKIN: This was in January of '61, along in there, early '61, right after Kennedy became President?

GILRUTH: Yes.

DEVORKIN: And Glennan was--

GILRUTH: Glennan was no longer.

MAUER: That's right.

GILRUTH: Webb was the new man running it. Glennan was the old man. So the Wiesner Committee especially had some doctors on board who would not believe that man could stand weightlessness even for a few seconds. I said, "Well, we can take you up in an airplane and fly weightless, and it doesn't do anything bad to you. It hasn't hurt the monkeys that we orbited. We've already done that." Of course, we were going to make ballistic flights, up and down, like Al Shepard's flight. We hadn't made that yet. And we were trying to get permission to make the Al Shepard flight, and we coudln't get permission from Wiesner that it was safe, not from the point of view of the rocket blowing up, but from a point of view of, was it worth it and could you stand weightlessness? Well, it went on for quite a while, and finally Webb got frustrated, and said that we're going to go ahead and fly, we believe that we've done everything we can do, we have this program and we're going to fly, and if you don't think that that's right, you will have to make your case in the newspapers.

DEVORKIN: This is Webb talking to Wiesner.

GILRUTH: I don't think he talked directly to Wiesner, but he gave him that message. And so that's the way it ended. We went ahead and flew Al Shepard, and when Kennedy saw how the American people loved that flight, it was all over as far as Wiesner was concerned.

DEVORKIN: Did Webb say that indirectly to Wiesner before Gagarin or after?

GILRUTH: Oh, I don't know what he said--

MRS. GILRUTH: They want to know the time sequence, whether he said that before or after Gagarin flew.

GILRUTH: Oh, it was before.

DEVORKIN: This takes me back to that question of, who in the agency could have or did anticipate this kind of interference from Wiesner? Wiesner didn't exist in the Eisenhower Administration.

GILRUTH: That's right.

DEVORKIN: To the degree that, there was Kistiakowsky, there was maybe a little bit of jabbing back and forth, but not anything--

GILRUTH: No, Kistiakowsky had only his own say. He didn't have any power. Now, Wiesner had a lot of power when he headed that commission.

DEVORKIN: That's right, so no one foresaw this? Is this what you're saying?

GILRUTH: That's right. All of a sudden, there he was. And he put that committee--he was Kennedy's Science Advisor, and this was one of the things he was going to advise him on, and he was a great threat.

DEVORKIN: No one warned let's say obvious advocates like Lyndon Johnson or others, to your knowledge at least, there were no boding thunderclouds, once we knew that Kennedy was going to be the President or whatever, after November '60, after the election, what might be in store.

GILRUTH: That's right. And LBJ didn't become a factor until much later. He became a great friend of space.

DEVORKIN: I thought he had been even in the Senate?

GILRUTH: He was. He was a friend of space even there, but he didn't help out any with the Wiesner kind of stuff. I don't know why. We didn't try to get his help.

MAUER: Let me once again go back in time. I feel comfortable the way we're doing things. I assume that you feel comfortable with our following something through and then coming back and picking up something earlier.

GILRUTH: Sure, whatever you want to do.

DEVORKIN: I think he's used to it.

MAUER: There's one detail that we've talked about quite a bit already in earlier interviews, but there's an aspect of it I'd like to understand a bit better. July 2, 1958, you were part of the group (you, Dryden, I don't know who else who went and briefed the Killian Committee, and this was the meeting in which you felt during the meeting that it was going terribly, and Dryden afterwards said it went well. And the part of it I would like to understand better is, what was there about the meeting that made you feel it wasn't going well?

GILRUTH: I really can't tell you that. I don't have much of any recollection of what I said or what I did. What I do know is, I had to have said something about flying men in space, because of Kistiakowsky's remark that it would be the most expensive funeral man had ever had. So that tells a whole lot.

MAUER: Oh yes. And what stuck in your mind was, how different your perception of the meeting was from Dryden's.

GILRUTH: He didn't want me to become downhearted, and he didn't think that Kistiakowsky had any big following, and he didn't think that those remarks were going to permeate all the thinking.

MAUER: So it wasn't so much that he felt the meeting had gone well, he just didn't think it was very important what Kistiakowsky said?

GILRUTH: That's right. I think that's exactly right. He felt that whatever we did at that meeting was going to have very little effect. That's all I would say.

MAUER: And in your experience, that's the way it proved out? It didn't have much effect?

GILRUTH: As far as I know, it didn't.

MAUER: Sometimes it's just important to have the obvious stated directly, and that's why I asked you that question.

GILRUTH: Sure.

MAUER: Now, in August of 1958, Eisenhower made the decision to give NASA the manned space job. You'd been expecting that all along.

GILRUTH: Yes.

MAUER: But when it became clear that that's exactly what the President was going to decide, did that intensify your thinking and your planning for when you'd actually start up the job? At what point did you really start getting oriented, and really begin to think in practical terms about what you were going to need to do?

GILRUTH: I think that we'd been thinking about what we were going to need to do all along. But when Glennan called us in, and told me to go back to Langley Field and get on with the program, then we had to face up, just what we were going to do, in what order. So we just went back there and got to work. We grew out of several buildings. We started out in one office, and then pretty soon we had a floor, and then we had a building, and then we had to go from the west area back to the east area where there was a whole group of buildings that we could use. They were more or less our own, because they weren't being used by the government. We took it in steps. I think we were quite orderly, considering the bad schedule we had to work with. I think it was fairly well controlled. Thanks to a lot of help from the Langley Center, to make people available to us, and with the benevolence that lots of people wouldn't have had. Floyd Thompson was the head of that. He realized that it was very important for the new agency that this program called Project Mercury had to be a success, and he was going to do all in his power to make it a success. So that's why he was so willing to let some of his best people go, and so many of them, and although he did have to say, "You can't go on forever, but if you'll just take some of the bad guys, you can figure out what to do with them."

DEVORKIN: Was he able to keep the slots, or did he actually lose the slots?

GILRUTH: No, I think he kept the slots. But we got some valuable, highly trained people.

DEVORKIN: So he was able to hire to fill those slots.

GILRUTH: Yes.

MAUER: This was at a time when budgets were expanding because they were gearing up. I assume that made it easier for him to facilitate things for you, because even if he lost some of his best people, he still knew that he could get good people in.

GILRUTH: Yes, that's right. He wanted to help us. He wanted us to succeed.

MAUER: Now, it was on November 5, 1958, in which the Space Task Group, originally called the Task Group, was actually officially formed, I believe.

GILRUTH: Yes. I saw that date somewhere. We called ourselves the Space Task Group before anybody knew why we did it.

MAUER: What was the situation before you became official? How much work had you been doing before you had an official place in the -- ?

GILRUTH: We were official from the moment Glennan told us to go back to Langley Field, because we started doing things right away, and nobody saw fit to challenge our authority.

MAUER: That raises a question I--

GILRUTH: We weren't spending a whole lot of money right away.

MAUER: Then when did Donlan become your assistant director?

GILRUTH: I think almost right away.

DEVORKIN: Was it November? When did you make the move back to Langley?

GILRUTH: It was the day that Glennan took over. We had a meeting with him, and we went back to Langley. It might not have been the first day of the agency, but it was one of the very first days.

MAUER: So it was very early October.

GILRUTH: Yes, it was.

MAUER: That's an interesting detail in itself. Now, Donlan had not been working with you. He was, as I remember, originally out of wind tunnels?

GILRUTH: Yes. He was a wind tunnel man. He was an aeronautical engineer. But he helped me with the astronaut selection. That's the first thing he did for me. I don't know whether he had a title or not for a while. He probably didn't. I had a number of good people there with me that were not given a title right away.

DEVORKIN: Something like a premature birth and you don't have a name for the kid for a while, because you have other things to do.

GILRUTH: Nobody was too conscious of what kind of a title they had. They were trying to do things.

MAUER: You say that Donlan didn't have a title, but ultimately he became the assistant director, is that correct? But he was not immediately assistant director of the Space Task Group?

GILRUTH: I'm not really sure when this came to pass now.

DEVORKIN: Do you remember where the term Space Task Group came from, what's the origin of that?

GILRUTH: I think it was the best thing I could think of. A lot of people wanted to call it the Task Force. I didn't think that was a good thing, Task Force. It was a group.

DEVORKIN: Not a Tiger Team?

GILRUTH: Not a Tiger Team, not a Skunk Works. It wasn't any of those things, it was a Task Group.

DEVORKIN: I'd like to get at just that question, following that up. Why is group better than force for you?

GILRUTH: Because force is an adjective that implies you have a lot of strength. I didn't know whether we had a lot of strength or not.

DEVORKIN: Some people, when they build, try to appear as if they have the strength, hoping that then will make a lot of people assume they have it. They basically assume the position, and what they expect. Others build from the inside.

GILRUTH: We had the strength. We had the money. What we needed was a good name, and we didn't want to sound like we thought we were too big for our britches. We were a Task Group. We had a big task and we were a group. It was a very good name. I wouldn't have changed it for Task Force. A Task Force is something you use in the military.

DEVORKIN: Did someone else suggest Task Force?

GILRUTH: I'm sure that that was mentioned, but --

DEVORKIN: Do you have any idea who?

GILRUTH: No.

MAUER: Here's something I realize I meant to ask much earlier, and I did not, and it kind of fits into this. Dryden wanted you to come to Headquarters permanently when he brought you up for the budget work, and for the job that ultimately Abe Silverstein got. You resisted coming to Headquarters permanently.

GILRUTH: Yes.

MAUER: What were the factors of why you resisted coming to Headquarters permanently ?

GILRUTH: I didn't want to live in Washington, DC. I had a sailboat. I was building a sailboat. I lived on the water, and I'd always wanted to live on the water, and I felt that Langley Field was close enough to Washington. I could go there and get there when I was needed. But I wanted to live down in Virginia on the water. I just told Mr. Dryden that. There was nothing really bad about what I wanted to do. I just did not want to live in Washington, DC.

DEVORKIN: That is a reason in itself. It's good enough, and I think we all appreciate it. But was there something else about getting caught up in the Washington, DC, life, I mean professional life, that you did not want? You had seen it in the summer of'58.

GILRUTH: I don't know. Really it was my love for being in a rural atmosphere, particularly one on the water, with my own boat. That was all it was.

MAUER: So this was before you had a sense that you might become the head of manned space. That didn't play a role?

GILRUTH: Dryden had been talking about building a center in Washington, and he did. He built the Beltsville Center, and Harry Goett got to be the director of it. I was held as one who might have gotten it, but I didn't want it. I made it quite clear that if I were being considered for it, that I wished they would not do it. But I did much better. I ended up in Houston with the Manned Spacecraft Center. I was on the water and I had everything else, too.

DEVORKIN: I'm just wondering how strong that is. I mean, Houston is fortuitously on the water. If Lyndon Johnson had lived in Utah--

GILRUTH: I'd have been in Utah. I'd gotten hooked on that program, and I was going to see it through, if it was done out at Timbuctu.

MAUER: I have to pick up on a comment that was made, in an interview you did with E. Emme and Grimwood, 1973.5 They were teasing you in talk about the center going to Kansas City.

GILRUTH: Is that right? I'd forgotten that.

MAUER: Would it have been one aspect of not wanting to go to some place like Kansas City that you wouldn't have had the good sailing? Was that where part of the tease was coming in?

GILRUTH: I imagine so. There's a lot of people that knew it.

MAUER: The information I have is that officially, when you really got going, you started out with 33 people at Langley. That was your initial group. Does that sound about right to you?

GILRUTH: It depends on when you say we "officially" started.

DEVORKIN: That's a good point. Let's go back to the beginning. You have this meeting with Glennan right when NASA gets started, the very first few days, and you go back up to Langley. Who's with you and who are the first people you talk to ?

GILRUTH: Max Faget and Paul Purser were with me. I'm not sure who the others were. There might have been some others. I know Hjornevik was there, but he was not part of my group at that time. There weren't but Dryden and Glennan. I don't think we had a room full. I think we just had a few people there.

MAUER: So you started out initially with people who had been with you at Langley, and come up to work on the budget.

GILRUTH: Who had been working with me in putting this plan together. Those people. I assumed they would continue to be with me, unless they wanted to be, let go. But they wanted to stay with me. Then I talked with Floyd Thompson and told him what I'd been told, that I was to go back to Langley and get on with the project. I had no other alternative but to take some of his people that wanted to come with us. At the same time, we would try to recruit people from outside. We finally built up a personnel group that we used. But right at this time, we didn't have any organization at all except just a few people who had been working with me. We had it all put together. I don't remember the sequence we went through. I just wish I could. It would be fun to know, but I don't know.

MAUER: What I hear you describing is, you just did what you had to do as the situation developed, and you brought in people as you needed them.

GILRUTH: We were aggressive. We knew we had to have a lot of people. And we wanted good people. Believe me, if you look at the time table of the things that we got done, we started right in getting things done. We got the McDonnell Aircraft Company under contract within three months from the time we were told to get on with the job. Now that meant drawing up the complex specifications, advertising them to industry, going over all of the proposals, having the meetings to figure out who ought to win it, and then making them an offer, of how much we'd pay them for it. We didn't necessarily know how much they were going to charge us, and we wanted to have a meeting of the minds. There was a lot of work had to be done just on that one thing. That's three months. We did that in three months, and we started with a handful of people. Now many agencies can't do that in three years. They've got so many people that they can't do it.

DEVORKIN: You made a strong point about the flexibility that you had in the very beginning. You said you did what you did when the group was very young, and you implied in your memoir that you couldn't have done that if your superstructure had already been in place and you were an older organization.

GILRUTH: I think that's probably right.

MAUER: Compare this three months experience for Mercury with the experience you went through with Apollo, because by the time of Apollo you have a large organization. You have a lot of experience but you also have many more rules and --

GILRUTH: Yes, of course, Apollo was much more complicated. You had a lot more. You had the three spacecraft instead of one little one. You had a LEM. You had a Command Module. You had a Service Module. You had, so much equipment in those things, you know. It was a hundred times as big as Mercury.

MAUER: There's a mixture here, if I hear you correctly. On the one hand, you had much more freedom with Mercury because you didn't have as many people and you didn't have a lot of rules in place. You could do it because it was a much smaller project, whereas if you'd tried to take on Apollo that quickly, it was just too complex to allow for it. It had to be worked through more systematically.

GILRUTH: It needed a lot more. It was a much bigger thing to do, than just getting Mercury started. Getting Mercury started was not all that hard. But it took a lot of doing to make it work, beause you had to train the astronauts, what we had to do with the Atlas, and the tracking networks, and the recovery systems. There was a lot of work that had to be done, and we had to have a pretty good sized staff in a hurry. Which we did.

MAUER: Some people are nostalgic for that Mercury period, because of it being so much freer, people making a lot of decisions quickly. How do you feel? How does it compare to the time before, and how does it compare to after you were already at Manned Spacecraft Center? Does it seem to be a better time, or is it just another stage in your career? How do you view it?

GILRUTH: I don't think you could live through many of these Mercury programs. It was something you do when you're young. You couldn't keep on doing that kind of thing. It was a case of working all the time, for the first year or so. But it was rewarding. It was great when Al Shepard flew, and when Glenn, and all the others flew--we were extremely fortunate to have all those things work.

    It was the fact that it was so very successful, I believe, that we went on to the lunar program. Although it is true that Kennedy really got that going before we ever orbited John Glenn. I think the momentum of those Mercury flights had a lot to do with the success of the Apollo Program over those years, because it made it a lot easier to get the money that it took. It took a lot more money to build Apollo than it did Mercury. Apollo was 20 to 30 billion, and Mercury was, I think, closed out finally at about 400 million. We didn't think it would cost that much, but it did.

DEVORKIN: Did you ever have a feeling, during the Mercury Program, that without rules in the beginning, without an adequate infrastructure to monitor the contracts and all of the different phases of Mercury, especially at the point where you were also beginning to worry about building a new center, that things might get out of hand? Did you have contingencies, fallback positions?

GILRUTH: I don't think that we felt particularly bad off in our monitoring of the Mercury spacecraft, for example. Or the Atlas rockets, because we were just buying those Atlas rockets, and we had one or two men there to investigate--when we were worried about the pumps. We routinely took the pumps apart to check the clearances in them, which was not a regular procedure. We thought was worthwhi