NASA Headquarters Oral
History Project
Edited Oral History Transcript
Joseph
H. Rothenberg
Interviewed by Rebecca Wright
Houston, Texas – 12 March 2004
Wright:
Today is March 12th, 2004. This interview with Joe Rothenberg is being
conducted in Houston, Texas, for the NASA Headquarters History Office
Administrators Oral History Project. The interviewer is Rebecca Wright,
assisted by Jennifer Ross-Nazzal.
We thank you again, Mr. Rothenberg, for taking your day to spend time
with us and share details about your contributions to the advancement
of space exploration.
You began working for NASA in 1983, for [NASA] Goddard Space Flight
Center [Greenbelt, Maryland], as the Hubble Space Telescope Operations
Manager, but you previously were associated with NASA during your
work for Grumman Aerospace and Computer Technology Associates. Could
you share with us your background in those positions that led you
into your job with NASA?
Rothenberg:
Yes. Let’s see. Right out of school, I went to a two-year school
for an associate’s degree, and that’s what I could afford
out of the [United States] Navy, and I got married in between, while
I was there, so my wife helped me finish it. But I went to work for
Grumman and then went to school for the next thirteen years at night
for a bachelor’s and master’s degree. So that’s
sort of my educational background.
I started working at Grumman. I was hired as an instrumentation engineer,
and I, having a technical degree, didn’t quite know what that
meant. When I went there, I didn’t know, on day one, whether
I should wear a white shirt and tie or coveralls. So I opted for the
white shirt and tie and I guess it got it right.
Fundamentally, my first job was as an instrumentation engineer, applying
transducers, strain gauges, pressure transducers, all kinds of instrumentation
to test vehicles. The very first one was a Gulfstream II airplane,
when it was in its first corporate jet to be developed, and Grumman
pioneered that with the Gulfstream, and I was lucky enough out of
school to do the instrumentation on that for the wind tunnel testing.
I learned a lot from that experience. I made a lot of mistakes and,
in reviewing the mistakes, I’ll never make those mistakes again.
Also during that same period of time—this was, like, the first
six months out of school—I got to work on what was called the
environmental control loop for the LM, the lunar module. Again, it
was doing instrumentation to actually measure the pressure drops as
they tested the system. That was interesting because, number one,
we were all learning and I was learning, and we had built this large
photo panel and it had a bunch of tubing and that tubing was going
to mate to the vapor cycle, the environmental control loop test stand.
They were built at two ends of a large hangar [subsequently converted
to a clean room], which was ultimately the same hangar, if you have
ever seen the photographs of all the lunar modules lined up in a row,
that’s the hangar they were all built in, converted to a clean
room.
The day we were going to mate this huge photo panel, which stood about
eight feet by sixteen feet and had forty-eight gauges and ninety-six
tubes that were going to mate to ninety-six equivalent tubes on the
other end, we were working at one end of the hangar, and this hangar
was probably a couple hundred feet long, and at the other end, they
had the environmental control loop. We invited the NASA folks in,
who were paying for this, and the quality-control inspectors, as we
were going to mate the two. If you can picture, on the back of the
vapor test stand, that we neatly lined up all of the outlet plumbing,
which was basically two pieces of tubing from each gauge with a connector,
like copper tubing, all along the bottom. And there were ninety-six
of them in a row.
And as we brought up the vapor cycle test stand, we discovered that
they created theirs in a matrix of like sixteen-by-eight. Therefore,
the two wouldn’t mate, and we suddenly realized that there was
no way we could ever tighten the inside [connections] one or check
it for leaks. So very early in the game I learned the value of interface
control and coordination across interfaces.
That was very important to me, because that little lesson taught me
in the future a skill that turned out to be very valuable, and that
was to try to make sure I understood what I was getting into and what
the other side of the interface was. …
Obviously, it was a big embarrassment for everybody involved, because
neither side was wrong; everybody did the right thing from their perspective,
but we never talked to each other, and it’ll go a long way [to
prevent problems by] talking to people. So that was [one of] the first
thing[s I learned].
I also worked on a number of other things during that time frame,
such as ejection seats. We were testing Martin Baker ejection seats
and doing ordnance tests, where we would fire the seat off. We had
an instrumented anthropomorphic dummy that sat in it and had [transducers
to measure] cranial pressure, acceleration on the spine, [and] sound
levels [at] the ear. We’d ride down the runway in a truck and
we’d fly it off. First, we’d do it at sixty miles an hour.
We were trying to get zero-zero—that means no speed and no altitude—ejection
capability so a pilot could eject on the deck of an aircraft carrier
in an emergency or at any time in the flight path.
Then I also had worked over that period of time, in [1969], as a test
engineer on a device called the PX-15, which was a deep submergence
submarine that we built for Jacques Picard on company money as an
investment, because we saw the future of the aerospace emerging into
being undersea technology. So we built this, and I actually got to
go out in the ocean and make the first dive on it, with all the strain
gauges on it to test it and make sure it wasn’t going to come
apart.
But backing up a little bit, in the middle of my first year, I picked
up an assignment where I was to go to my first space program, the
Orbiting Astronomical Observatory [OAO]. Grumman built a series of
four of them. The fifth one was a prototype and I got involved right
at the initial prototype testing. My first job was as an electronics
expert. [My supervisor] called me that, not me. [My assignment was]
to develop all of the electronic readouts for all of the testing they
needed to do, environmental testing and clean-room testing; all the
acceptance testing; development testing; the consoles that they would
use to monitor the spacecraft and to do integration testing; breakout
boxes that allows you to breakout signals from cables to actually
measure prior to mating two connectors at an interface. So the interfaces
started to play in again. All the interfaces between a spacecraft
and a launch vehicle, I got involved in those and became the one who
developed a way of making sure that they were compatible to each other
when we plugged them in. Again, from my first lesson, I knew there
were a lot of things you needed to do. So I contributed to all that
as an engineer, and that started in October of 1964.
In January, about, of 1965, the group leader for that little group
suddenly got promoted. His name is George Albright and he worked for
Grumman for many years, and today he works at NASA Headquarters [Washington,
D.C.], which [is] interesting. In fact, he got promoted, and there
were five engineers and they all had degrees and advanced degrees,
and I was just six months out of school, struggling to go to school
at night. And he turned around and said, “You’re it. You’re
the new group leader.” There I was handed the responsibility
for the project, with all the money, and to manage a variety of things
that I knew nothing about, of course, of people who knew far more
about it than me and were also getting paid twice as much. A couple
of them, actually, literally, were twice as much as me.
But we worked together, and I guess we were successful. We developed
all of the launch equipment. I got to actually sit in a launch blockhouse,
two years after school, at the first launch. That was quite thrilling.
I actually pressed the button that put the spacecraft on internal
power. Now, that [is] not a big deal today, but then, for a young
person two years out of school that was a big deal, and to get to
say it on the radio, because spacecraft on internal was one of these
things that were reported out on the countdown and it was heard on
the radio. So we flipped a coin on who would actually say it, between
myself and another engineer and a technician who was with us, about
three of us, and then we had five countdowns before we finally launched,
so we each got a chance to do it once. And we would rehearse “Spacecraft
on internal.” Trying to sound like Walter Cronkite. [Laughs]
In any event, so that was successful. We had a lot of problems with
the first spacecraft. That was one of the first telescopes ever put
up. It had a lot of high-voltage electronics on it, and as a consequence,
we, in three days, lost the spacecraft and learned a lot, though.
Once again, as a team, we learned a lot. Our customer, NASA, was learning,
too. None of us expected some of the things that happened there.
Going along, the second one was [sent to] Goddard for final integration
and tests. We actually moved the operation out of Bethpage [New York]
down to Goddard, so I spent a lot of time at the Center at Goddard,
got to know a lot of the people. In fact, I was one of the few contractors
who were actually part of the Goddard integration and testing, mainly
because of my knowledge of the ground support equipment. At the same
time, the company gave me all of the flight instrumentation in addition,
so now not only did I have ground equipment, but I had the flight
system onboard. So I got to learn a little bit about flight hardware
and, again, interfaces between flight and ground and telemetry systems
and operations. So that continued.
Then I became in charge of [the Bethpage support for the] entire [Grumman]
operation down at Goddard. At Bethpage, [I] represented it back to
the program office and I was like [an] Assistant Program Manager for
the fieldwork. So there I got to learn integration and test even more,
learn NASA, obviously, Goddard very well. Learned operations, because
now I had the responsibility of ensuring that the operations got the
proper support from the factory and resources, the technical support,
the engineering support, the anomaly resolution support.
And finally, the launch operations, still I continued to go down to
the launch site, spend two months, activate the equipment. The hangar
[Building] AE clean room, for example, is still there today at [NASA]
Kennedy [Space Center, Florida], and that was a famous clean room
for processing robotic spacecraft. It’s still the biggest one
they have for that on the Cape [Canaveral, Florida] side. One of my
jobs was to make sure that was always ready. In fact, the very first
time, before the first one came down, to work with the building contract
to make sure it tested to all the specs [specifications, Grumman assigned
me to certify] it simply because it was our spacecraft, we were delivering
it to the government, and they wanted to make sure we were satisfied
that it met our requirements.
And each time I’d go back down and make sure it was properly
cleaned and ready for some testing, as well as all the cabling on
the gantry, and when we put the spacecraft up [on the pad], we had
all of this validation equipment that, once again, tested all of the
interfaces before you actually mated them, and including the flight
ordnance and all of the installation of the pyrotechnics that allowed
the solar panels to deploy, allowed us to separate from launch vehicle.
That ultimately became my responsibility to actually supervise the
installation and make sure that at launch they were all still ready
and had integrity; we hadn’t “duded” any of them,
we hadn’t opened any circuits, they were all going to work properly,
and they did. That’s a whole other story about learning that
business.
In any event, my responsibilities kept growing because I kept learning
more and more, and another thing that I always felt, to this day feel
is important, [is that] we sat as a large project in what we called
the bullpen, a sea of desks, rows of desks. The first row was all
of the power equipment people. The second row was all, if I remember,
the thermal people, and the third row was the stabilization and control,
etc. These were like six [rows of] desks back to back. Well, you always
knew what went on. You learned a lot because you knew about problems
[each of the technical groups] were having and you would overhear
how they solved them. Everybody knew about everybody’s personal
life also, but as far as the work life, it really worked out well.
In fact, in personal life; we were all young engineers, buying houses.
We’d hear someone bought one; we’d find out about mortgages.
We didn’t know anything about getting a mortgage, and you’d
go talk to somebody who just went through it and get some good advice
out of it.
But the bullpen environment really allowed you to learn from a fire
hose, because if you were at all listening, there was so much going
on that you could learn all of the—and it allowed you to do
a better job yourself because you didn’t have to go to a meeting
to find out if some change was going to affect you. You’d start
to hear about it and somebody would just yell across the room, “Hey,
instrumentation, do you know we need more transducers?” “Huh?”
[Laughs] Good communications is what it fostered and good learning
for young engineers like myself.
The project lasted until 1972. We launched four spacecraft. During
the same time, we did a lot of work on what today has become the heart
of being able to service Hubble Space Telescope. We did a lot of work
on satellite servicing for Goddard, looking at different ways of servicing
spacecraft. How should we do it? Should we make them modular and change
an entire module? Or do we change out a black box at the component
level? How do we change out instruments? What’s the right design
philosophy? What’s the right test philosophy? So all of that
led up to us becoming somewhat recognized as understanding not only
space astronomy, but, as a company, having some capability in servicing
the satellites, and we were doing it under contract for Goddard and
we were looking at the evolution of OAO into what in those days was
called the Large Space Telescope.
Then we were doing studies that looked at, ”Okay, what is the
way to maximize the observing time on the telescope when it’s
on orbit? Is it servicing it? Is it building in reliability? Is it
replacing it? If I take a ten-year period and want to look at the
sky and survey it, what is the most cost-effective way of doing that,
but getting the maximum number of photons collected?” And that’s
where the concept of reliability versus what we called up time, and
then you could increase the reliability by servicing, because you’d
now restore failed components and sort of start the reliability curve
going.
The reliability curve simply says, if I build this much redundancy,
etc., and design a spacecraft a certain way, it will last so many
years without a failure. There are several ways to do that. If I don’t
have redundant equipment, then I could have a means of replacing the
equipment on orbit, and by replacing the equipment on orbit, I then
compensate for failed components.
Well, it will be cheaper to build the spacecraft, but it does cost
you something for servicing. So you take and you look at all those
things and you do what we call trade studies and determine what the
best profile is. Do I just build a higher-reliability spacecraft,
and if it costs so much and has such sized optics and has such a size
to launch, do I make it ultra reliable and that’s the lowest
cost and gives us the most observing time, or do I have one that I
build at a certain level of reliability and plan on servicing? And
the government concluded, after looking at that, that Hubble, or what
in those days was called the Large Space Telescope, would best be
maintained by having the ability to service it every three [years]
and/or bring it down every five. The initial specifications were to
return it to Earth, as you know, every five years.
Let me just look here before I jump to this, and make sure I’ve
covered everything. A couple of other things before I get on to Hubble,
but that was the kind of support we did to Goddard as part of our
project work that laid the foundation for not only Hubble, but servicing
the satellites on orbit while I was at Grumman, and I’ll get
to how that affected both Hubble and my life later. In fact, part
of it will come out some more of my Grumman story.
So that was up till 1972. That was the kind of things I did. The one
thing that’s sort of a little out of sequence was that submarine,
and that really occurred in 1969, the first couple of months, but
I was so interested in getting involved in what was going on, that
I actually did this on weekends, at night. I used to fly down to Florida,
West Palm, where we were testing it on weekends, and only took two
weeks where I had actually to be away from work.
Meanwhile, we were getting one spacecraft ready for launching. We
had another one operating. We were getting one started to get into
[the] test flow. I was going to school two nights a week, and also
President of the Instrument Society of America, Long Island section,
and had a wife and two kids at that time; later on, we had the third.
I still have the same wife and three kids. But I had a couple of busy
years where I bit off more than I could chew, but I really was doing
everything I could in those couple of years, except sleep, I think.
Anyway, I was commuting from New York—we lived in Long Island—I
was commuting down to either Florida or Maryland literally every week
and every weekend. I would come down on Monday to Maryland, as one
example; stay there till Tuesday; take a plane back at five o’clock
on Tuesday to get to school Tuesday night. Wednesday morning I’d
go in to work at Grumman. Thursday I’d go back down to Maryland
then fly back sometimes Thursday night to go to school again. Then
Friday I would decide where I was going, depending on what I had to
do.
Anyway, after I finished up the OAO project in 1972, Grumman was getting
ready to bid on the Space Telescope, so I was part of that team. At
that time, I left the project and went over to the Engineering Directorate.
But in my transit over there, I had a couple-of-month holding pattern,
where I had to go back to my old instrumentation group. The way Grumman
was organized, it was a matrix of disciplines—instrumentation,
thermal engines—and we got allocated to projects. Then you worked
on the project and when it was completed, you went back to your home
functional area and they theoretically had your next job lined up
or had some work.
Well, when I went back there, they were just kicking off the Shuttle
Program in the agency. Grumman had [bid] on it and lost. In fact,
I was going to be part of the operations team on that, I had some
job they put in there, but they lost it. But they won a lot of work,
subcontracts, and one of them was to build all of the early wind tunnel
models. We had an excellent wind tunnel and, again, if you remember,
I started doing instrumentation in wind tunnel work. They had just
delivered a bunch of wind tunnel models to [North American] Rockwell
[Corporation]. The wind tunnel model, the ones that I was working
on were stainless steel. I can’t tell you how big in scale,
but if I could think about how big the Shuttle is, they were probably
[2]00:1, at best, scale models. The goal was to put them in the wind
tunnel and measure the airflow. You measured the friction and [and
heating to model the flow], in this particular set of models [by]
temperature on thermocouples. There are a lot of ways to instrument
models, with pressure and other ways, but this one was temperature.
Grumman had purchased the thermocouple wire. Normally, when you get
thermocouple wire, you test it to make sure it really is a thermocouple.
Thermocouple is nothing more than two pieces of wire of dissimilar
metal. Electricity flows relative to the temperature [at the] junction
[of] the two dissimilar metals. So it’s important that the metals
are dissimilar, and they’re very different kinds, iron constantan,
copper constantan. They all have different temperature ranges and
different costs. So you pick the one that’s right for the application.
Well, the wire they bought was not real thermocouple; it was just
copper-copper wire, and they inadvertently went and built these things.
They used 36-gauge wire, which is a little bit thicker than a human
hair and had to install the thermocouples under an electron microscope.
So some technician installed all these; [Grumman] delivered them;
and we found out, of course—the customer—“Oh!”—blew
up, and they were our competitor in many areas, so they loved to point
this out.
So my boss said, “Hey, I’ve got this little assignment
for you. Go make them happy.” He said, “Go fix it. Go
fix the problem.” So I looked at it and I discovered that the
wires weren’t thermocouples. That’s why none of them worked.
So I then built the process by which we screened the wire at the company
[receiving dock] level [and again in the laboratory]. That was important
for the company [progress] in general; it [was not] with just this
one.
Then the Rockwell people came in and I showed them—I set up
a test program and [did] every other thing [needed] to show them that
this would never happen again and here are the steps we put in place.
Then I ended up learning how to solder a 36-gauge wire and work under
an electron microscope, because I never did it before, so I wanted
to try it. So one of those models that they used to evaluate the Shuttle,
I actually did all the soldering on. And Grumman was a great company
in that it didn’t have a union, so there were engineers doing
what techs [technicians] should be doing occasionally, and more often
than not, techs bailing out engineers, and so you could really learn.
So I did that and, again, it was an interface problem. It was somebody
that didn’t look at what they were doing and test prior to turning
it over to a customer, test the wire prior to building it, and it
took a lot of time to build these things. They were not cheap [to
build]. Grumman was pretty good about that; they rebuilt them on their
own nickel, and they paid for the rebuilding.
So when I finished that, I was casting about for my next assignment.
I could hang around in the thermo lab and play with models or something,
and that wasn’t real interesting. The Project Manager on [OAO]
had just been made the Director of Engineering Operations and Test,
and he came over and approached me, asked me if I wanted to go over
and become a Project Engineer. What that was, was a staff position,
for the most part, that either went out and solved the problem or
went out and actually ran a test or went out and worked the proposal
where they developed a test program to support a particular kind of
mission. It was everything from spacecraft to aircraft. It included
mission operations for spacecraft. We didn’t normally get into
operations for aircraft, because that was basically a military function.
It came with an operations concept already from the military, or it
was developed by people who were experts in that, and certainly that
wasn’t mine.
But we developed how to test it and how to do structural test and
life test prior to deploying to the fleet. My experience came back
again on the Gulfstream where NASA was wanting to buy some aircraft
to simulate the Shuttle in flight. They put out an RFP [Request For
Proposal] and Grumman proposed on it and won the proposal, and I was
the guy who developed part of the test program, the ground test program
for that Shuttle training aircraft, and they are the Shuttle training
aircraft they fly today. So another connection with the Gulfstream
II and the Shuttle. And, of course, fast forward to 1998, when I took
over the [NASA Headquarters Office of] Space Flight, here were the
Gulfstream Shuttle training aircraft again.
… I teach courses in NASA now—little tidbits that make
a difference in getting the job done, that people don’t realize.
Things that I fought, that I had not wanted to do and I was made to
do. Go to a class. Why do I want to go to that class? I’m not
going to learn anything. It’s just taking away from my job.
And it wasn’t going to the class for two weeks; it was meeting
the people [that I later realized was important]. I had a problem
later on and some of these same people, [who I would not have met
if I had not gone to NASA Senior Executive Service Training for 2
weeks], it [helped me prevent] a disaster. I mean, a big disaster,
and I’ll talk about that specifically. One that, in hindsight,
the whole agency would have come down.
I mentioned that I was working proposals, so global positioning satellite,
Teal Ruby [Satellite], a number of satellite proposals for the Air
Force. We weren’t successful on any of them, really. We were
on one, and it turned out it was one I didn’t work on. There
may be some corollary there. The company had not a lot of success
in those days [on bidding new space programs in the early ‘70s].
There was a lot of people bidding on them. On the other hand, we won
a few things; [for one] myself and another guy wrote a proposal to
build a beam builder that could build trusses, like they have on [International]
Space Station today, on orbit. We actually developed the test article
that built it and we actually built a beam. It was going to fly on
the Shuttle right before [the Space Shuttle] Challenger [accident]
and then, obviously, [after] Challenger [NASA] rethought the whole
program.
It was made out of commercial rolling machines, but it was kind of
fun. I did that as this staff job. I was a troubleshooter in a lot
of cases. There were problems where customers of us for ops [operations]
and tests—we had all the test facilities at Grumman, the wind
tunnels—were not happy with what they were getting or there
were problems, and I would be dumped into it and, [in most cases],
solve [the] problem.
That was another little aspect—I’ll retrogress just slightly—during
my the last OAO spacecraft, it was about nine months—no, it
was less than that, it was about nine months before launch—it
doesn’t really matter exactly how much—we discovered that
we had a set of defective solar arrays. These were very large. They
were [over] a hundred square feet of solar arrays, if I remember that
right. There were eight panels [actually the total area was] probably
two or three hundred square feet. They were fairly large solar arrays.
Anyway, the point was there were eight panels, honeycombed, 88,000
solar cells laid on them, and we discovered that the solar cells were
lifting, and Goddard directed us to build new ones. Period. They didn’t
care. “Build new ones. We want to hold the launch date and we’re
not going to count on these things working. You fix them.”
So it comes up—we used a TWX in those days; which was a teletype
message—it came in. The Vice President said, “Make it
happen,” and passed it on to the Program Manager, who looked
around the room, and I guess I was the only one standing there, and
he handed it to me and said, “This is it. Go build these things.”
I said, “I don’t know how to build solar [arrays]—I
don’t know anything about them.” We hadn’t built
any in six years. All the ones we built were six years old. So my
job was to go figure out from day one—and not only that, I had
to have them by next May and every set we built in the past took two
years to build.
So I’m starting to think—I got a list of who had worked
on them in the past. I found one guy who was still there, and I grabbed
him. His name was Pete Fugaro, I’ll never forget it. I said,
“Pete, we’ve got this—.”
He loved it. He said, “Oh, I’ve got a chance to build
something again.” Because the program was coming to an end.
It wasn’t clear what his next job was going to be.
Between he and I and a couple of people, we pulled that off. We got
the solar cell manufacturer to make 88,000 cells. [We sent him the
blank panels and he mounted the cells.] We got tooling that was rusting
behind the hangars up and going again. Every morning I would go into
the machine shop and start off and say, “Where are my parts?”
I’d say, “Okay. I can help. I can carry them over to inspection.”
Whatever it took to get it going. We laid out a detailed schedule
and tracked it every day.
But the ironic part is the day I took this TWX and went with the head
of manufacturing down into the shop at Grumman and said, “Hey,
we need help,” and he was sitting there—and his name was
Angelo Galgano. My brother was a manufacturing engineer who put in
place a lot of the automation at Grumman. That was his whole thing.
He was putting all the automation in place. He was on a special project
for the President for about three years, went all over the world,
buying automation machines, getting them in place. That’s important;
not an aside.
So I went to see Angelo, who was this rough-and-tumble guy who now
has two thousand employees out here on the shop floor, with this thing,
and I said, “Hey, Angelo, I need help. This is what I need.”
And he sits and he looks at me and he said, “I don’t even
know why I should talk to you.” He says, “This morning
we just got directed from the same Vice President,” who was
the Executive Vice President of the company, Ralph Tripp, “to
demote everybody one level.” He said, “I am no longer
the plant manager; I am this,” and he went down every lead man
is now who is the lowest level of supervision, is now on the bench
again. And he said, “Had you want me to go through hoops to
build something for you?” He said, “Rothenberg. Are you
any relation to Ed Rothenberg?”
I said, “He’s my brother.”
He said, “He’s the G.D. cause of this whole thing. He
automated this place.” [Laughs] That was what I walked into.
And he was dead serious.
I said, “This may not be a good time to talk.” [Laughs]
He said, “We’ll talk about it Monday. Come back Monday.”
He sort of cooled off. He really wasn’t blaming me for what
my brother did, but he, in essence, saw a connection. They just demoted
everybody. They said they didn’t need as many people, not as
many supervisors.
And we pulled it off. We actually delivered the solar arrays and we
went through every obstacle you can imagine. Things didn’t work.
One day we’d come in and it would look like a disaster and we
were never going to get there. We worked through those problems.
I always tell the story, there’s a game down on the boardwalk
down in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, which is sort of our closest beaches
in Maryland, called Whack a Mole, and it’s got a table and there
are these moles, like the guys in Caddyshack, who pop up out, and
you get a big rubber hammer. Your trick is—a mole—you
whack him down. Another one comes up—and you get to do that
for five minutes and you relieve your frustrations and it’s
over. I always kid that project management is exactly that, and the
name of my talk, one of my talks I give is “Why is Project Management
Like Whack-a-Mole?” And I wait until the end of the talk and
then I tell them.
But it is. You walk in in the morning and you’ve got three problems
that are going to bring the whole project—whether it be the
Hubble repair mission, the Space Station, or building these solar
arrays—how am I ever going to solve that? Some company just
went out of business, the only one in the world to build the part.
Okay? Or something. Those kind of things really happen all the time.
And you’ve got two more that are lurking in the background,
but they all look like they’re solvable, and three that you’ll
have finished by the end of the day, or by the end of the week. And
by lunchtime, two of the unsolvable ones are solved. The other one
looks like it might be solved. Those two that were no problem at all
have now become loomed as—and by the end of the day, one of
the three that were going to be solved by the end of the week has
totally come off the track and you’re never going to solve it.
And that’s your job every day, is to look across at your problems.
And they come from all flavors. Whether Headquarters calls you and
says, “I’m going to cut your budget by 50 percent,”
or, “I want you down here. I want you to have a review tomorrow,”
or whatever, the Project Manager is continually dealing with these.
So you learn that pretty quick [up] front [that it is important to
understand the people or organizational interfaces]. If you [understand]
the other half and know what his[/her] problem is, you may be able
to solve [the] problem in another way than the way [the person is]
asking you to [and better for both sides]. …
[After OAO]—along the way, in the area of doing proposals [at
Grumman], I picked up the responsibility for all of the new business
or business development at Goddard. I always wanted to be in marketing,
and a marketing guy said, “You’ve got a great technical
talent. Why do you want to join us?”
I said, “Well, I just like it.”
[As a staff project engineer at Grumman], I [also] got to work on
[a program during the mid 1970s] that set the stage for [one approach
to satellite] servicing. [It] was a study that, I [recall] was called
Landsat [Land Remote Sensing Satellite] D and E, if I remember. Landsat
D and E came out of Goddard, and its principal purpose was to develop
the multimission spacecraft bus, a multimission spacecraft bus that
satisfied not only Landsat D and E, but presumably they gave us about
a dozen other missions. They said if this one standard spacecraft
could do that—and they laid a couple of other things. They said
it ought to be serviceable [on orbit].
And we won one of the studies. And we won one of the studies in an
interesting way. Our differentiator from the other two guys was, number
one, we did a lot of the work on the MMS [Multi-Mission Spacecraft]
design. In fact, I personally did the wiring [design for] the power
system. I designed that on the [drafting] boards. One summer, we had
a slow summer, I just said, “Instead of getting one of the draftsmen
to do it, I’m going to do it. I’m going to do every wire.
I don’t need an engineer and a draftsman; I can do both.”
I tried it. Well, I didn’t do too good at drafting, but I did
design the whole thing and it worked, and we actually built the model
of it, and [the design was close to what] actually flew later on.
But the point is, we had done a lot of work preparing to get ready
for this proposal, because we really wanted to win Landsat D and E,
remote-sensing satellites. That was a big deal for us.
We proposed in it a concept called design-to-cost [which I dreamed
up]. We said, “What we’ll do is we can give you a certain
capability for 100-million-dollar program, for 200 million, and 300
million.” We decided in systems engineering the thing called
a figure of merit. That says, what do I get out of the system for
each increment of cost? We measured that in number of scenes per day,
first in color and then in black and white, that we could get to the
ground per day. For 100 million you could get so many, 200 million
you could so many. It involved an onboard tape recorder of this size,
whether I used TDRSS [Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System] to
relay it. Each one of them had an increment of complexity and cost.
So we actually won because of that design-to-cost concept. We actually
proposed three designs, we went through, and out the other end came
a specification for the multimission spacecraft. We actually, again,
submitted the drawings, we were so confident. Landsat D and E ultimately
got kicked downstream, but [the Multi-Mission Spacecraft] became the
bus that they were going to procure for Solar Max [Maximum Mission
Satellite].
[It had designed] into it satellite servicing at the module level.
You could replace a power module, a communications module, and/or
an attitude-control module totally, or change out the experiments.
We had some other concepts built into it that made it [into NASA design]
when we did the systems engineering, we discovered that all of the
spacecraft that needed onboard propulsion, rather than reaction wheels
to control its pointing, were of a certain type and we found out we
could satisfy them with a propulsion module.
Originally, the design had the propulsion system integrated with the
spacecraft, but by having a separate propulsion module—and this
was a Grumman innovation—you suddenly could build it cheaper.
You didn’t need to carry propulsion for every mission, so you
decided what the basic capabilities you needed, and propulsion wasn’t
one of them, for all of the missions, and you built one that the common
denominator, if you could think about it that way, that was attitude
control and common-data handling, and then the size of that varied
from mission to mission. So if you built it modular, that you could
add another battery when you needed more power, you could have a common
design, you didn’t have to repeat the design, a common test
program, and, again, you’re just testing for different configurations,
but you qualify the basic structure and everything the first time
and you don’t have to pay the same costs over and over again.
Anyway, that whole modular spacecraft, that was this concept, and
then the design implementation that made it the most cost-effective,
we believe came out of the Grumman approach, and that was the one
that got specified [by NASA for implementation]. But we really don’t
know what the competitors did either, so it could have been an amalgamation.
But to us, we could see enough of us in it.
In fact, I just had breakfast this morning with the father of the
Multi-Mission Spacecraft, Frank Ceppolina. He’s the father of
satellite servicing on orbit, and he and I were here on a business
meeting this morning and I just happened to have breakfast with him
this morning also. Just left him when I came here.
But the bottom line on that was the RFPs came out. I led the proposal
[programmatic] team for the power module. … [NASA was buying
the MMS in pieces.] They had one [RFP] for the spacecraft integrator,
one for power, attitude control and data handling, and one for the
propulsion module, and we elected not to bid the whole thing. We elected
to bid the power module and then we were going to bid the missions
[that flew on the MMS as these RFPs were released]. Landsat [was one
we targeted] later on when it was going to be reconstituted.
We did the whole design and, if I remember right, five of them. So
I said, “Well, the logical thing is we deliver one per year,
so that we’re around to support the customer when he integrates.”
This would be the logical thing. We came in with this bid and, if
I remember right, it was 2.3 million dollars for maybe the nonrecurring
[and] the five modules. I just don’t remember [precisely]. I
just remember that number.
Somebody else bid on it, too, and they said, “No, I’m
going to deliver more in year one, and I don’t keep this marching
army for the next five years, so I can do it cheaper.” So the
government obviously bought that one. … Fundamentally, we lost,
and it was my strategy to spread it out. Another lesson learned: read
the RFP. Give them exactly what they want, and then give them options
for better things. But give them exactly what they want first, and
we didn’t do that. We gave them what we thought was the best
thing for them in the long run.
That was a trait at Grumman, by the way. … We did that with
our aircraft and everything else. We would always come out with what
we thought was the best thing [for the customer], and that cost us.
We learned a lot. We lost a lot of proposals [due to cost]. Anyway,
but the bottom line is, we lost that one.
… At that point I was responsible for all of the Goddard work.
We won a thermal canister to fly on the Shuttle, which ultimately
did, a major test article, and a couple of other things.
Goddard came to Grumman and asked Grumman to put together a team to
be the flight operations team for Solar Max. Solar Max was the first
one that used the multimission spacecraft. That was one of its characteristics.
The other was being procured in pieces. They were procured in a module
and then integrated, and they were doing the integration at Goddard,
with Fairchild [Aerospace], who was the integrating contractor, as
the primary support contractor. There were a lot of civil servants
working on it. So normally, a mission contract would provide the operations
theme.
In this case, they didn’t have a mission contractor, so they
came to Grumman. I don’t know whether it was out of consideration
we did a lot of design work or whether they really felt we had good
ops [operations] people. So my job was to go find somebody to run
this thing and help build the team and do the ops.
I had just finished my master’s degree at that time and the
school was trying to ping on me to go back for a Ph.D. They said,
“Free. Teach one course and you can—,” and I said,
“No, I don’t want to do this anymore. I’m done.”
Anyway, I talked to my wife and I said, “I think we want to
move. I’d like to move. I’ve been commuting to Maryland
for ten years. I wouldn’t mind moving there.” And the
company heard this and they dangled a job right down the road from
where I happen to work now, in Newport Beach, California. They were
opening a new plant and I was a candidate for the Deputy Manager of
the plant. So it was live in California or live in Maryland. But I
said, “We’re going to move.”
Finally, my wife said, “Okay. I’ll give you two years.
We’ll go for two years.”
We had a family powwow and the kids, “No, no, no.”
“Two years.”
The kids didn’t want to go, and she said, “No, no, I think
it’s time.” She said, “Let’s try it.”
She isn’t real adventurous, but she said, “We’ll
try it.”
So I kept poking around trying to find a guy to head this thing, and
I was debating whether I wanted to do the California job. I really
didn’t want to do ops. I really wasn’t an expert in operations,
and for me to go down there and try, that was scary. I knew nothing
about operations. I knew more about building solar arrays now than
I did about operations, and I didn’t know a lot about that.
So I finally decided, after evaluating California, looking at the
cost of living out there, the traffic and everything, it wasn’t
the place for me. I’m a California fan now, but not for raising
kids, I don’t think. So anyway, I said, “I’m going
to sign up and go down and see if I can do the Maryland job.”
The one guy I really wanted didn’t take it.
So we went down and the Project Manager said, “Okay. We’ll
give you a shot.” This was, like, in April. “But,”
he said, “I don’t have a lot of money in the front end,
so what I want you to do is the first six months, I want you to spend
defining how the job is to be done, writing the spec. Then the last
year, staffing up, training the people, etc.” That’s a
short period of time for operations to build up, but this was all
he could afford. We were hungry [for challenging work], and I decided
I wanted to move, so I said, “Okay.” …
But in any event, the point I want to make about this is, in doing
that six-month study, during that period of time, the budget kept
getting less and less to do the one year of operations, and we started
out with seven people per shift, three shifts, but you need four teams
to cover three shifts, and that’s twenty-eight people. Then
we needed about seven or ten people on day shift, so it was about
a forty-person job. Let me think about it. It was more than that.
It was forty or fifty people, and that was down about twenty people
from how we flew OAO.
He kept coming back and saying, “Hey, I got a problem with money.”
And he kept coming back to me. So finally, he kept coming back with
a lower and lower number. So finally, one day—the significance
of this; it’s not just an anecdote—but one day, it got
to a point where I can only afford to have four people where I thought
I needed seven, and actually it turned out to be three people—yes,
three, because he gave me back one later—but three people.
So I said, “Hmm. I’ve got to think of a whole new way
of doing this job because I can’t do it the way it’s been
traditionally done with seven people.” So I said, “I’ll
tell you what. We’re going to find out, having one [or two]
screens come up [for the operator to look at].” We called them
CRT [cathode ray tube] pages. “I’m to look at those. [I
want the operator from these two screens to be able to determine that]
the spacecraft is okay. If it’s not okay, I want [the data to
indicate] who to call or how to get it safe, that’s all I can
do [with three people]. I can’t [have them] do any analysis.”
First, I had to convince a couple of people who worked for me that
we could actually produce in two screens what had been looked at in
maybe twenty screens, and computer technology wasn’t real sophisticated
in those days. They could only limit it to two columns of sixteen
numbers in a column, and they were numbers, pretty much. You couldn’t
put a lot of fancy stuff in there, and it was very fixed. And I said,
“Well, the world is in three columns,” like three axis,
pitch, roll, and yaw, other spacecraft, so it would be nice to have
three, and three batteries … [but we were stuck with two columns].
So I went and got my guys and I got them in a room. I had a small
office, probably [six feet] wide [and twelve feet long]. I had a conference
table, and no windows. It was just in a hovel. When we first moved
into this office, we didn’t even have a phone—there was
a payphone outside—and I was trying to hire people. I came down
from Grumman, Long Island, myself and two other guys, who I convinced
[to join me]. … We [brought our families and rented] nice homes
and a pretty nice deal. And I’m saying, “Okay, now I’ve
signed us up for this [and we need to figure out how to safely operate
the Solar Max spacecraft with three people using two CRT pages].”
They said, “What?” It had never been done before. Typically,
you had many pages. So I said, “We’re going to figure
out what thirty-two parameters [per] page we can look at in the first
one minute of [a ten minute] contact as the satellite comes over,”
[that would tell the operator everything was operating or what action
he needed to take]. In the first minute, you’d like to know
if everything’s okay, and if it is, then you can go on with
your normal operations. If it’s not, then you have to get it
safe or issue commands, and that’s sort of the way you fly a
satellite in low Earth orbit to this day. There are some variations
on it, but that’s the way they fly many of them.
So what we did is, we looked, and I began hiring my team, and they
used to come in every day and sit around my table and analyze the
spacecraft to try to find out what [sixty-four] parameters would tell
them everything unambiguously.
They used to leave, many times, “It can’t be done.”
And sometimes they wouldn’t come back the next day. “Time
for the three o’clock meeting.” And I would sit there;
I wouldn’t get in the middle of it. I just kept probing them
on. Finally, it took about, I don’t know, I say nine months
now. By nine months, we were ready to fly. It took probably less than
that, but it took some time, a fair amount of time.
They finally said, “We don’t need [sixty-four]. We can
do it in [thirty-two].” Then they came up with these clever
things where column one was the number and column two told you who
to call or what to do, in just plain English. …
Then I went and bought myself one of the first PCs [personal computer].
It was an Atari computer, not the game, but it was a computer and
it had [great] graphics and that’s why I bought it. I spent
800 dollars, which was a lot of money, especially [since] between
my wife and [I we didn’t make a lot of money]. And I sat home
and I programmed the thing to take those [thirty-two] parameters and
make a star such that if … I could [look at] this eight-pointed
star, and if it was symmetrical and green, everything was okay. If
one of the arms was collapsed, that meant the battery voltage was
low or something, and it was a graphic way that you didn’t have
to look at numbers. I was convinced that the gate guard could monitor
that.
I wrote some papers and gave talks on it, and we actually [operated
Solar Max] not using the star, but just the thirty-two parameters.
It flew for ten years and never did those parameters not tell you
the status of that spacecraft. It really worked. But it became the
beginning of like an expert system, using the computer instead of
people to convert data to information that somebody could act on.
Previously, the engineers only wanted to see data and they weren’t
interested in pseudo data or something that represented it, and we
made this thing foolproof enough where it worked. And the star became
interesting in that—I left a little later and made a lot of
money with the star, when I left and went to CTA [Computer Technology
Associates, Inc.] the first time.
But going back, Three Mile Island [Nuclear Station accident, Pennsylvania]
happened at the same time, and then the [United States] Nuclear Regulatory
Commission [NRC] sent out a team of people to NASA and, I presume,
every other industry, but they really were interested in how NASA
monitored satellites and how they knew when an operator needed to
do something. They also wanted to know how, on the launch pad, when
a spacecraft was about to launch and something was wrong, we shut
it down. How did we know to do that? Was it automated? Was it a human?
And how did we do it sometimes in milliseconds? So they looked at
that, if a nuclear reactor was going awry, they could intervene, use
the same kind of technology to contain the problem.
One of the things they looked at, because of what we did on Solar
Max—not my star—because what we did on the pages, NASA
brought the Grumman team on Solar Max, we showed them what we had
in there, and they liked it so much, I said, “Hey, I’d
like to talk to you some more. I’ve done a little more to this
[that] might even be more useful.”
And what they were going to do, is they wanted to build—and
they did build—a situation room over in Silver Spring [Maryland]
that had on the wall something representing every nuclear reactor
in the country that was up and running, and they could know in an
instant that there was no problem. They had a mandate to do this from
the [United States] Congress. Again, you didn’t have the Internet
and all sorts of things you have today.
So they liked the idea, when I showed them the star, because then
the operator didn’t have to read numbers, he didn’t have
to know anything. And I had this dream that the Center Directors at
Goddard would love to have that on the wall. In hindsight, when I
became Center Director, I found out the last thing I worried about
was how the operations was going. I had so many problems, that it
didn’t matter. [Laughs] But I used to think that the Center
Director cared. When I got there, I found out he didn’t. Anyway,
he cared, but it wasn’t his biggest problem by far. He’d
rather have other things on his wall; anything but that.
But the point is, [the NRC] looked at that technology and they took
a variation of it. Instead of the star, they came up with the Chrysler
symbol, and they had a reason for doing that. Nothing to do with Chrysler,
just that shape meant something to their technicians; it was used
in other technology. They actually built a situation room, and I actually
helped them later on in life.
But that all came out of that. It wasn’t me; it was just the
notion of using the computer to give you information instead of using
the human to convert the data to information. Heretofore, most operations
weren’t run that way and spacecraft operations, and it started
a whole change. All of a sudden, because we were operating with only
two or three people per shift—in fact, we went down to two people
per shift, from four. We went up to four when we added the responsibility
to watch the experiments, and we did the same thing. We said, “What
two parameters,” and we analyzed every one.
But that started [the trend to put] more and more pressure on the
operations part of the contracts to [use] less and less people on
them and come up with more innovative ways to monitor spacecraft,
and that applied at Hubble later on when I ran operations for Hubble.
Anyway, so that was the first part of Solar Max. We got it up and
running and we had a flawless operation up until the fuses blew onboard,
and that ultimately led to some real heroic work by some of the Goddard
people in developing software to allow us to keep it pointed at the
sun and spinning and safe for two years while it took to mount a service.
I’ll never forget, I came in on Thanksgiving Day to see my troops
that were on the console, and there were the civil servants working
on the special software. I wouldn’t have expected them to even
be in on a Saturday, let alone a Thanksgiving Day, but a couple of
guys really put in a lot of work, [Tom Flatley and Henry Hoffman].
They were just a couple of individuals that stood out in those days
that helped us.
We then went into the safe mode. To me, I did what I wanted. I wanted
to build the team, develop the operation, learn it, and get it running,
and then turn it over. So I decided that I wanted to do something
different and I actually got a job offer to go to work for the government.
Well, I was to start—it was one of these things where the paperwork
took months and months, and it sat there, and finally it got through
the system.
I was very open. A fellow named Fred [W.] Haise, who was [an] astronaut
on Apollo 13, he came to Grumman and Fred was my boss the last year
I was there, at launch, Solar Max. I worked directly for Fred and
he said, “Okay, when this is finished, I want you back up north
to help me with proposals. I want to chase some work,” etc.
I had mentioned my wife didn’t want to go. The end of the two
years was up. What I didn’t mention, we were in Maryland three
weeks and my wife said, “Your job is to figure out, if you can,
how we don’t every have to go back to Long Island.” She
liked it so much, and the kids were totally immersed [with their new
home, school, and friends]. And to this day, [we]’re still friends,
close friends, in fact [with the families we met during those first
two years in Maryland, so we decided to stay]. … And we’ve
lived up the road a little bit, three or four miles from where we
lived then, but they are all still close [friends].
But the point I want to make is that I had signed up to come to the
government, and [President Ronald W.] Reagan announced there was a
hiring freeze on the 20th of—it was the day, the 20th, which
was Tuesday, which was inauguration day, if I remember—Monday
was the 19th and I was supposed to start on the 26th of—whenever
Reagan got elected—1980. I was supposed to start. I guess it
was ’81 when I would have started. The election was in ’80.
Anyway, I was due to start. I had told Grumman way back, when I started
thinking about it, that [if] I got an offer from the government it
would probably take four or five months. [So I began to train] my
replacement. Picked him out of my group. [By the time I received my
offer letter from NASA], he was running it and I was just sort of
doing odd jobs, waiting for this to happen. I didn’t have any
interest in monitoring the spacecraft day in and day out or dealing
with the people anymore. [I was excited that I was finally going to
realize a long-term dream to be a part of NASA.]
So when the time finally came, and I remember they knew I was leaving,
they all supported it. Fred Haise understood my decision, in fact,
endorsed it. I decided I’d [give the company two weeks notice,
even though I had in effect already given them several months. This
put my start date on the 26th of January 1981.] In the middle of this
[was] Inauguration Day, [January 20]. The President, [in his speech],
announces he’s freezing hiring in the federal government. Personnel
says, “Not to worry. They never make these things retroactive.
You’ve already got a bona fide offer in hand.”
Well, we go through the week. That Friday, we’re having my second
going away luncheon of that week, and I’m there and the Project
Manager, who originally got me out of Bethpage, Pete [Peter] Burr,
who later on became the Deputy Center Director. … But the point
was, Pete said, “At staff meeting this morning, they’re
talking like that hiring freeze is retroactive.” He says, “Has
anybody talked to you?”
I said, “I talk to them every day.”
He says, “I’d call them one more time.” He says,
“I’ll call when I get back.” He says, “Let
me see what I can do to try to make sure you got the right answer,
but I don’t think they can hire you.”
And three o’clock, lo and behold, the same guy that had been
calling me every day, Jerry [W.] Simpson, who’s now the head
of Personnel at Goddard—I made him the head, in fact, when I
was Center Director—he called me and said, “We got a problem.”
He said, “You’re going to get a fax—,” a telegram
at that point—“delivered to you that says we rescind the
offer indefinitely. We don’t rescind it, but it’s on hold
indefinitely. You can’t start Monday.”
Fred Haise said to me—I called him up and I said, “Well,
it looks like—.”
He said, “No problem. If things change, go to work there. Don’t
worry about it. I’ll take care of you. We got some things you
can do.”
And I said, “Well, I’m not really worried about it. It
was just kind of something I really wanted to do. I wasn’t worried
about working; I had my heart set on working for [NASA].”
So that didn’t happen. The government, of course, said to me,
“Hey, we can give you a contract to do the same thing.”
And I said, “No, I really wanted to work for the government
and I don’t want to let you off the hook. You guys have got
to figure out a way to get me through the door or not. I don’t
just want to go as a contractor.”
That’s when I ran into the owner of CTA at a conference. I gave
a talk on [space operations] and he called me up and said, “Hey,
would you like to [come work for CTA]?”
I decided, well, let me go out and seriously look for a job. I went
to every company that was in the area and I lined up, in the end,
seven job offers: Lockheed [Missiles and Space Corporation], Fairchild
[Corporation], OAO Corp. [Corporation], you name it. I had seven of
them all lined up. The one that was most intriguing was this one with
this new start-up company, CTA. They were doing the kind of work,
systems engineering, which I had somewhat of a background in, and
that was always the way I looked at [engineering].
… I went there and actually helped build up a third of [the]
company [by the time I left to join NASA about 20 months later]. We
won the planning for the Solar Max repair mission. We won what I call
the independent test and validation contract for Hubble, integrating
the Hubble flight and ground system and operations and science ground
system. It was [just] me when I came there and I just started to be
able to get some work. We did the science operations ground system
user interface for TRW [Incorporated] as a subcontractor [to] TRW
for the Science Institute. I had [brought into CTA] a lot of interesting
work and I had [built my part of CTA to] about twenty-five people,
[which was one-third of the company].
Well, as one example, they went on and [supported the planning for]
the Solar Max [repair] mission [in 1983]. What happened is, we were
in the middle [of a lot of NASA projects. In early 1983], there was
a big shakeup in [the Space Telescope Program at NASA]. They needed
more money, like to the tune of 300 million dollars more. It was run
out of Marshall [Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama], managed
out of Marshall, [but Goddard had a major role for both science and
operations]. At the same time, they changed out the management at
Marshall, they changed out a bunch of the management at Goddard, put
in new management. Well, most of the new management they put in were
people I had worked with on Solar Max and knew from other work, and
when they came in, they decided they wanted to get a new ops manager.
It turns out, the ops manager that was there was interested in leaving
[earlier], and I actually interviewed him and hired him at CTA. I
said, “But I’ve got to tell you, I might be taking your
job.” I hired him and I hired a second guy. I hired a guy out
of Martin Marietta [Corporation], named Ken Ledbetter, to run the
office out in Denver [Colorado]. He was going to be my ops guy in
Denver. We were doing some work out there with the Air Force. And
I hired John Martin out of Goddard, who was the [Goddard Space Telescope
Operations Manager]. I [told him at the time], “I’m interested
in your job.” He just laughed. He didn’t take me serious,
but I said, “I’m serious. I might not be here in six months.”
He said, okay, he still wanted to [join CTA].
And, lo and behold, the government came after me and asked me did
I want his job, and I said, “Yep.” They knew I would like
ops, and so I went through another process. In fact, [Dr.] Noel [W.]
Hinners, who was the Center Director at the time—[Dr. A. Thomas]
Tom Young was the Center Director when the process started, but when
it finished Noel Hinners was the Center Director. Noel called me in
one morning—it was a snowstorm and I got up at I don’t
know what time. He wanted to do an interview with me because he was
hiring me in as a GS [General Service]-15 and that’s a high
level. At least that was my interpretation of why he wanted to talk
to me. So I got in at six o’clock in the morning. We had breakfast
in his office and he said, “I just want to hear why you want
to come to the government.” I went through why, then we talked
about mutual acquaintances, and we finished and he said, “Okay.”
He didn’t say one word or another. He just said that was it.
So I didn’t think anything of it and we went through the process.
Again, I gave my boss the lead time. Well, I mentioned that guy I
hired, Ken Ledbetter, for a reason that will come up [later]. He’s
now the Program Manager for Hubble at Headquarters. I had an opportunity
when I was running Hubble to endorse hiring him over into the government.
He applied. He’s an amateur astronomy and wanted to work on
Hubble all his life, like we all did in the telescope business, one
way or the other, and he really wanted to do it. So he actually left
CTA and went back to Martin Marietta and did the Viking operations
and then [left Martin to join the Hubble Program at NASA] Headquarters
and he’s still down there. He and George Albright, the guy who
gave me the first job, that promoted me [at Grumman], they’re
both at Headquarters. They’re probably ready to retire, but
they’re there.
But going back, so I started and about a month after, I was flying
to Marshall with Noel Hinners, and Noel was sitting next to me and
I said, “I guess I passed that interview with you.”
He said, “Oh, that wasn’t why you were there.” He
says, “I was trying to figure out why you would want to leave
this up-and-coming company that’s doing real well, to come to
work at NASA.” He was trying to understand why I would leave
this great job.
And I said, “I had a good job, but I was going to the greatest
job in the world here.” He understood it, but he was trying
to see why I was leaving the one company, and understanding why would
someone leave industry, and I was trying to say, why wouldn’t
someone want to go to the government? We were looking at it from a
whole different perspective. Anyway, so we had that neat discussion.
I’m still friends with Noel. He and I are on a number of committees
together today.
So I joined Hubble. At that point, I was the Operations Manager. We
started very early in the game. A couple of interesting stories about
Hubble. It was designed pretty much by Lockheed on Marshall specs,
but there was no systems engineering, so it was build a spacecraft;
build an optical telescope assembly, that was Perkin-Elmer’s
[Incorporated] part; put the pieces together; do operations at Goddard;
build science instruments. Put the pieces together, but no one stepped
back and looked at it as a whole system, and that was one of the big
changes in [19]’83.
I got the opportunity to look at operating it. And one funny anecdote,
which was I created—even to this day, in my company I’ve
created—Goddard uses it, even the Space Station—I created
a top ten. I said I always want to know my top ten problems and make
sure everybody knows them so we all know where we should focus our
energies and solving. I learned that from my Grumman days; I learned
it from one of the Project Managers that I worked for, in fact, the
guy who became the Director of Ops and Tests [at Grumman] that I mentioned
I work[ed] for. So I kept the top ten spacecraft operations problems
and I said, “But five of these have to be fixed before launch;
[the rest are efficiency problems we can fix later].”
And Marshall said, “We can’t put any more money into it.
We’re not going to fix it. We’re happy the way they are.
It’s your opinion versus ours.”
I said, “Well, I’ve got to fly the thing.” …
I would go down to Marshall every opportunity I got [and try and make
my case that the top five had to be fixed before launch]. The [number
one problem] was—let me try to put this in a way you can understand
it. We had onboard a flight computer, and in order for the spacecraft
to be able to talk to the ground, you needed to have that flight computer
on and running, okay? In order to be able to have it on and running,
you had to put software onboard. If the software worked and it ran,
no problem. If you loaded the software up and it got corrupted in
transmission, which is not unusual, it wouldn’t work. You would
not know whether it got onboard and it was bad—if the design
was wrong or it got corrupted in transmission or what. You have no
idea why it’s not talking back to you, and it can’t talk
back to you.
So my first observation was, how is this going to work? You’re
not even going to be able to do this on the ground when you try to
load it, let alone when it’s on orbit. Then you’re really
worried. You don’t know what’s happening for as long as
it takes to figure out. Marshall said, “It’s designed
to work; it’ll work.”
I said, “No, it won’t work.” I said, “One
day it’s not going to work.” If I know something from
the test programs I’d been through, that sort of testing you
learn pretty quick. You’ve got to think about what happens if
it doesn’t work. Do you have the ability to recover it? And
a satellite on orbit, you’d better, because if you don’t,
it’s over.
So that was one. And the anecdote there is I was so convinced of that,
I’d stand up in front of the Center Director, who was a tough
old guy, a German, one of the Germans who came across with Dr. [William
R.] Lucas, Bill Lucas, down at [Marshall], who turned out to be a
good guy, it just—getting us to have a relationship took a while,
because he was a cold fish. And I’d stand up there with these
top ten and I’d finish [my quarterly reviews to him and the
Marshall team with them]. Well, since I was from another Center, they
couldn’t tell me to sit down and shut up. They’d listen
to my spiel, but that was the end of it. It never got anywhere. In
the past, I had [this] happen until I proved my point, then I was
suddenly given a “Go fix them all” kind of thing.
On this particular case, I said, “You guys are not even going
to be able to load the computer and turn it on in integration and
test.”
And Marshall, “Yes, we are,” and, “Lockheed guys
[think you] are nuts.”
“Okay. I don’t know. I’m just an ops guy.”
So the first time they tried to turn it on, we had these quarterly
meetings [as part of the Hubble spacecraft integration and test at
the Lockheed plant in Sunnyvale, California]. It was right before
the quarterly, and [they loaded the software and], and they tried
to turn on the flight [computers]. I told my guys in the [Goddard]
control center, “Plug in. … Let’s watch what they
do.” And they [also] were Lockheed employees back east. And
they looked at it, and [laughed], and [as predicted], they never could
[get the flight computer running]. It went on [for the next three
months].
So we got to the quarterly, which was like a week and a half later,
and they reported, “Well, we got the flight computer in; we
turned it on, we loaded it up; but we haven’t got it running
yet, but it’s only a week. That’s not unusual.”
I got up and gave my spiel. I said, “My guess is, you’ll
never get it running.” [Laughs] And I got beat up. In fact,
the Project Manager took me in the woodshed after the thing. The Goddard
Project Manager thought this was funny.
Three months later, another quarterly. They still haven’t got
the flight computer turned on. “Dr. Lucas,” I said, “I’m
not being facetious this time. There is a fix. It’s really simple.
You just load up a very short piece of software that enables you to
talk. Then you load the brains up and all the rest.” I said,
“Then when you get that thing loaded once, you leave it there.
You never change it. You always leave it there forever so you’ve
always got a way to talk to it.” I talked to the Lockheed software
engineers and they already had it, because they know you need it.
They know someday they were going to need it to test. They were not
thinking of flying it.
So he looked at me. He just looked at me funny and he said to the
Project Manager, “You fix his problem,” meaning mine,
“and you’ll fix yours, I’m willing to bet.”
We had the little huddle. [They] took me to the woodshed again. I
said, “I’ve been telling you every month. I mean, nobody’s
listening.” It was fixed overnight, once they [put in the simple
software fix I suggested].
But the real point here is, had we launched in that configuration,
it would have been over. We could have never talked to it again, and
we would have been trying to troubleshoot it for months. As it is,
they had enough embarrassments when they launched it, and we would
never have found out about the mirrors. [Laughs] They would have launched
a 1.5-billion-dollar mute. There was a number [of other similar] things
in the top ten.
[A] second one was, it took [about sixteen] commands in order to just
turn [Hubble] on the very first time, while it was in the Shuttle
bay, and the reason was that they interpreted the Shuttle safety constraints
in such a way that they had three or four layers of safety and then
they threw a few more in for good luck. So I said, “Well, that’s
probably not a problem, but it could be. But I’m going to have
procedures on the ground that issue every one of those sixteen commands
in every combination they can possible do, even if it takes two days,
so we have backup,” because if something gets in the wrong sequence,
then you’ve got to unravel—it’s like one command,
then you open one door and then you’ve got to open a second
door and third. Well, if the second or third door is opened, the next
command might close it after you opened all the other doors, and you
don’t know where you had a problem.
So the point is, you shouldn’t have something that complex for
something as critical as that. It’s got to be foolproof. So
my standard joke was, “I’m going to issue all the sixteen
commands in every combination and then I’m going to issue the
seventeenth command, and that is, print 1,800 résumés,
because that’s all we can do, guys.” [Laughs] But I went
down [to Marshall] and finally got all the top ten fixed. All the
ones that were really important got fixed, but it took [these ways
of getting the Project’s attention to accomplish].
It was tough because there was such a distrust between the two Centers
and the two cultures. Sometimes one culture was right and sometimes
one was wrong. The Project Manager, I think, was super, Jim Odom.
You couldn’t ask for a better Project Manager, but he couldn’t
always figure out which guy’s horror story was really real and
which was just a worry and which one was over-dramatic. So there were
some times we were right and some times we were wrong on something.
[Many times] they said, “Just do it our way,” and we did
and they were successful.
So that was what it was, the distrust of the cultures, the suspicion.
And some of that was built up in the early part of the project. [In
the beginning], it wasn’t [a] Goddard project, [so] Goddard
didn’t put the first team on it, and [it appeared] all they
were doing was trying to get more [funding] for Goddard [because Goddard
didn’t have the experienced folks who could technically convince
Marshall of their needs]. They kept bringing things up and everything
cost money, so after a while, the Project Manager just couldn’t
take that anymore, so he just didn’t trust them anymore. “They’re
just going to ask me for money; they’re not going to solve my
problem. They’re just going to tell me they need two more people.”
[Later on], anyway, I turned it around, I think. I built up a trust
with them and that worked out well.
The other thing I did on Hubble, I started out by looking systematically
at operations. Then we did the same with the ground system. If you
remember, when I was at CTA, we won that independent test and validation
contract I mentioned. Well, I made that the centerpiece of pulling
together the ground system, and we put in place a whole bunch of what
we called ground system tests, [which tested the ground system and
operations procedures together with the spacecraft in a systematic
fashion]. The first [system level test] was to be run [with the spacecraft]
in thermal vacuum and got dubbed the ground system thermal vacuum
test. That became a joke. Somebody thought we were putting the ground
system in a thermal vacuum [chamber]. However, its function was to
be able to run the spacecraft like you were flying it, while it was
on the ground, from the control center back east, through TDRSS and
everything [while the spacecraft was in thermal vacuum test]. We had
everything set up to do that, and no one believed it the first time
that you could do that. You want to do everything right, so it was
a great time to [test it like you would operate the Hubble on orbit,
but] on the ground while you could solve [problems].
Leading up to that were a bunch of tests like issuing one command
and seeing if it reacted to it, then issuing a group of commands,
then loading the computer, dumping. You did a whole bunch of things
over a couple-year period, getting ready to do that. Once again, don’t
ever put all your eggs in one basket.
I’ll one more time regress back to Solar Max. When we were developing
Solar Max operations, the one thing we put on the wall is we said
we wanted an opportunity for one day in the life of the spacecraft
to have the spacecraft for a whole day. We really wanted it for a
whole week, but we knew it was a short schedule, so we said we wanted
it for a day, and the Project Manager said, “No way. I’m
not going to let you do that.”
I said, “Well, we’ve got to verify we can talk to it.”
He said, “You can have one hour, and you’d better get
it right.”
So we said, “How about giving us two half hours?” So the
first time, we verified we can talk and listen to it, and the next
time we do something more complex.
He said, “Okay. We’ll give you two hours.” We left
it at that. The first command we tried to send didn’t work,
and when we troubleshot it, we found out the reason it didn’t
work is there was a problem with the spacecraft design. It was the
receiver; not the ground system, not our procedure; it was the design.
It was actually a design flaw, and there would have been [real] trouble
[if the spacecraft was launched with the problem]. It probably wouldn’t
have been a mission failure, but there would have been problems talking
to that spacecraft continuously. It would have been an operations
nightmare. And when [the Project Manager] saw that, he said, “Okay.
How many days do you want?” [Laughs] He suddenly realized the
value, because I had a whole list of what we ought to do and [each
was logical to be tested by my operations team since] there was no
place else it was done [in the test program]. I wasn’t just
going through an exercise. We found that two pieces of the ground
system couldn’t talk. A lot of things we found from running
those kind of tests. So when it came to Hubble, the first thing I
did is, I went and staked my claim out on the schedule for these periods
of time. People weren’t real sure they were going to leave them
in there, and I kept telling them this horror story about Solar Max.
It’s amazing how we debugged that ground system, but leading
up to it, we developed a simulation of that test where we did it on
paper on the wall. We had everybody stand up and say exactly what
they would do in this day in the life of HST. We found things like
the onboard flight memory wasn’t big enough and all sorts of
things, just by walking through a day in the life of. So that became
another model of the way to do business is do a systems engineering
analysis of the system.
A lot of this was [the result of] what I told you originally; there
wasn’t a systems engineering group that started the program
and evolved the system in a certain vision of how I’m going
to operate it. It evolved in pieces, and many pieces [had small incompatibilities
with each other]. So this test program we put in place and the steps
of the analysis leading up to it drove out a lot of [the flight-to-ground
operations problems] we wouldn’t have found until we were on
orbit and spent a long time debugging. It would have been a series
of nightmares, because the debugging there would have been in line
with trying to take observations. When [we] finally [got on orbit,
we] found the mirrors skewed, and that took [two months] to find that
out, it would have been even a bigger fiasco than it was. …
Then you asked a question about Challenger, and you said, how did
Challenger impact. Well, the ground system thermal vacuum test was
run after Challenger, and it took a while to fix all the things. Many
of them were efficiency questions, but efficiency would have manifested
itself in data not coming back and people not knowing why, and it
took much longer, days instead of hours, to get imagery back and stuff.
We were able to use the next two years of delay of really getting
all the bugs out of all the procedures in the ground system. So when
it launched, the thing operated flawlessly. There were no questions
about how it operated. You knew how to command it. Therefore, they
were able to understand what it could and what it couldn’t do
really quick, and they got the spirit of collaboration, as probably
most people remember. Within sixty days, they declared that they knew
exactly what the problem was. My point is, had we not had Challenger,
there would have been so many other things they would have been debugging
and masking, that the whole thing would have looked kind of chaotic.
As it is, they had a couple of little problems on deployment, but
I was off now as Division Chief.
I left in [19]’97, when they asked me if I wanted to take over
all Missions Operations Division, and I said, “Gee, taking some
little ops guy and giving him that job, that’s neat.”
So they told me I had to apply for it and I went through that process.
They actually had a committee and I got selected and did that. That
was probably the best job I ever had, [well] almost the best one,
running a division.
[Pause]
Rothenberg:
The final end-to-end test that we did on Hubble, the first one of
the ground system integrated test to demonstrate that the operations
procedures, the spacecraft-to-ground system, all played together was
an unexpected resounding success. Nobody expected it to work the first
time. We went twenty-four hours, I think, we operated it flawless.
Everything worked together. It was the buildup of getting to do that
test that debugged, all of the little tests we did leading up to it
that did all the debugging and all the little analysis and all of
that. That happened on a—I want to say on a Monday. No, it was
a Friday we ran. We ran Friday, the end of the week, and then the
following Monday was when I was to start the new division job.
So that was the deal; I wanted to get that test [in before I left
the project]. I had worked so long on it. It was the kind of thing
where we had to convince the instrument people we weren’t going
to break the instruments; we had to convince Lockheed that we weren’t
going to compromise the spacecraft; we had to convince Marshall—we
had to build up a lot of confidence along the way, and all the little
tests and the analysis, and there were so many things that became
team-building.
Every week we had a team meeting, and I would get on an airplane usually
on Monday night, fly out to California, go to the West Coast team
meeting, the spacecraft side, talk to them, tell them what we were
going to do, and generally get abused because, “It isn’t
going to work,” and “Why are you trying this? Why are
you making my life miserable? We don’t have time to do this,
too.”
Then I would get back on the two o’clock flight and fly back
in time for the Wednesday meeting on the team on this end, and I had
to get all the contractors—this thing was built, the ground
system, by at least five different teams of people. The Science Institute
people were doing the science operations. The ground system that we
used for the science was a multiple-part ground system, and that was
built by TRW. The command planning and operations management system
was a software system called PASS [Payload Operations Control Center
Application Software Support] built by CSC [Computer Science Corporation].
The real-time command and control system that took the offline science
data, the command management system, and uplinked all of the results
up to the spacecraft and did the real-time monitoring was built by
Ford [Aerospace], I guess Loral [Corporation today]. It changed names,
but Ford or Loral at that time. I don’t know which name they
were. Same people. And, finally, the operations to operate the spacecraft
to operate the spacecraft, in fact, were run by two different groups;
one, the people who actually communicated with the spacecraft and
that was run by Lockheed, and one that operated what I called the
backroom, which kept all the computers running that they used, I guess
was called Allied Signal [Corporation] at the time; now they’re
Honeywell [Incorporated].
And all of these people had different leads, so one of the things
we did with these tests, we pointed to different—this event
here, we’re going to test loading memory, and that forced people
to make deliveries. The fact that we’d built a team, nobody
wanted to be the one holding up the thing, and I had my top ten, and
nobody else wanted to be at the top of my top ten. We never made it
pejorative; we never made it we were beating them up. We just stated
a problem, the impact, and what we were doing about it, that was all,
but nobody ever wanted to be up there. They liked to be not on the
list at all.
So we used that whole thing. That was another little thing on the
side. If you picked these things that are non-threatening or non-visible
and use them to build a team and force people to deliver things, it’s
a way of pulling together pieces of a system. There’s no other
way. You can’t do it contractually or any other way. You’ve
got to have something like this. Their senior management, I looked
them straight in the eye and I said, “This is what we need.”
And they said, “Okay, I’m on the team,” and they
bought in and they made their troops do things that they would normally
not have done to produce on my schedule rather than whatever other
schedules they were committed to, and then we’d try to put it
together at the end and we’d have a disaster. I needed it delivered
incrementally.
The Division Chief—that was an interesting challenge, because
I took over a division that hadn’t had a lot of young people
hired in years. [One branch in the division, for example], hadn’t
had what I call a fresh-[out], someone out of college, hired in somewhere
around fifteen years. In one of the branches in there, the guy who
preceded me was retired in place for the last two or three years,
and I knew that. I knew him. He was retired in place and they had
a lot of old systems that he was afraid to change out because, “New
technology. Why should I learn it?” or, “It will never
work, because I’m retiring.” That was his mentality. He
told me that in plain English.
So the first thing I had to do is [learn my job]; I came from the
customer, the project side of Goddard, not the institution. This was
an institutional division. [Fortunately] a lot of [the staff] knew
me because they worked with me over at [Hubble and Solar Max], so
that wasn’t my worry. I didn’t know much about running
an institution. I knew roughly what this division did, but not exactly,
and I found out kind of quick that there were five branches in the
division, each about twenty people, and they didn’t know what
each other did across branches. They were all in the same building.
They were all on two floors. They owned the whole building and they
didn’t know what each other did. They just had no idea. And
there were people who wanted to leave and go on to other jobs, but
they just wanted a change. They didn’t ever think there was
an opportunity [within the division to do something different] because
they didn’t know what the [rest of the division] did. Some groups
did a lot of on-the-floor testing, and they came in in jeans all the
time; the others came in in white shirts and ties. And they looked
at each other funny because they didn’t know whether these guys
were the maintenance men [or engineers].
So I had to first establish what we wanted to do with the division
and then I had to build [the] team. So I did everything. The first
thing I did is give them a chance [to recruit staff]. There was no
hiring. At that time there was a hiring freeze on, and [I] gave them
a chance to recruit from internally. So [I told each branch of the
division] they could have a two-hour on-stage open house, which they
told all the other branches what they did for one hour, and viewgraphs
and song and dance, whatever they wanted to do. For the second hour,
they could take them on a tour of their labs, their operations centers,
their facilities, their antenna ranges, whatever they wanted to do,
like an open house. And we ran this till each of the five branches
did it. One branch brought over its communications trailers and parked
them on the lawn and had walk-throughs.
Then the second thing I did, I told them they could invite anybody
else from the Center that they wanted. This was great for recruiting
people. Then they could talk about announcing they had job openings.
I said, “You get five minutes that you could talk about jobs
that might be available,” because if I openly made it a recruiting
thing, everybody else would come down on me, all the other divisions
in the Center and everything else. But it worked. People changed.
Then we restructured the division to do the work better. I eliminated
some things we were doing that I thought were antiquated. And we got
some hiring, just enough to sprinkle enough fresh thinking in there,
and that really changed the thing.
Then I got them to form [the] team in a different way. I decided that
we’d have an Olympics and a Halloween party. We had all sorts
of prizes—oh, the other thing is, the day I took over the division,
I wanted to have an all-hands meeting that Friday. So this one woman,
who was my financial analyst and I knew her socially, I told her to
stock the conference room with beer and wine. I never thought about
[inviting the head of the directorate, my boss, but] because that
was the only complaint I had. But I had the meeting at three o’clock
in the afternoon, and it turns out—I had taken over the division
on Monday. That was that Friday, and the Director was going to come
over and he wants to talk to me at three o’clock. He comes in
my office and I’m sitting there with a glass of wine on my desk.
[Laughs] He says, “What’s that?”
I said, “Wine.” It didn’t even dawn on me, [when
I heard he was coming over].
“Wine,” he said. “What’s going on?”
I said, “Well, we’re having a get-to-know-you little thing
in the conference room here in about a half hour and I’m testing
the wine to make sure it’ll be okay.”
And he said, “I’ll stick around.”
But I did things like that that were nontraditional. And projects,
we always had wine and cheese probably one Friday a month at least.
And the big Friday month [after a milestone] was no screw-tops, no
cartons; real wine, corks. That was the joke, the standard joke. “Is
this the screw-top Friday or not?” For the screw-top wine bottles,
or is it good wine. But in the institution, they really didn’t
do those kind of things, so I [changed] that.
A Halloween party—I mean, everybody participated. I still have
photographs that we took of the innovative costumes people came in.
One guy came in wrapped as a mummy. We had no idea who it was and
he did the whole party as a mummy and was drinking through a little
opening. Another guy was in a box and he would just put out a sign,
“Give me a sandwich. Give me a beer.” Another guy had
[what looked like] three people together, all in jeans. They all moved
together with boards and flannel shirt. He had a head on them and
a wig. We still have a picture of this thing standing at the three
urinals. The three urinals, we had them spaced so they just looked
like there were three. He actually had to go to the bathroom and somebody
followed them in and took a picture. Nothing wrong with the picture.
It’s just a funny picture.
Then I had pictures of everybody in the division taken, in their work
situation, hung on the wall, all the contractors and the civil servants.
It turns out, people were bringing their families in to show their
picture was on the wall. I had a professional photographer come in
and spend two or three days doing it. … [We] hung them, and
people [brought their family] in to show their [picture]. Everybody
else in [for] Flight Projects had pictures of spacecraft hanging on
the wall. I said, “Well, our asset is our people. Let’s
put our people on the wall,” and that’s what we did.
[Back to] the Olympics [we held]. We took each [of the] five divisions
and told them they could do whatever they [needed to]. We were going
to have ten events: basketball shooting, Jell-O-cube sucking, toilet-paper
wrapping, watermelon-seed spitting, softball. Some conventional things
and nonconventional things. I guess if she was a day, she was fifty-five,
the fifty-five-year-old secretary won the free throw, ten straight
baskets from the foul line. Her husband got killed in Vietnam [War]
and so she was a single parent, so she did all the sports with her
son and she became pretty adept, I guess, at basketball. Because she
was not athletic at all, not fit, not in shape, but she went out there
and shot ten.
But with the Jell-O sucking, the watermelon—and I participated
in all of the silly ones, just to [take] part [in] it. But it got
everybody talking. They trained. They found out who could spit the
watermelon seed the farthest. They put them in.
But I turned this division from one that didn’t have any morale,
they were not hiring; they sort of didn’t know where they were
going, and then I built a team. Then we took the team and turned around
and we actually changed the way Goddard does business with operations.
You can have fun, but you really need to produce something, and that
was a good system.
Then we actually put in place the first missions to fly little workstations,
using little workstations rather than large computer complexes. We
actually took all the weather satellites and we put them on a PC and
they took up rooms worth of equipment, but space was my biggest problem.
Then I had another notion. I said, “Well, the other problem
is, if I didn’t have to operate them on my Center, I’m
not interested in operating them day-in and day-out,” and I
met with the local universities and we actually moved, later on in
life, moved some control centers out to universities and have students
operating them, and not because they’re cheap labor. We made
it actually part of a curriculum. They developed a curriculum. We
put one of them, when I was Center Director, over at a historically
black university, and they didn’t even have an Engineering Department.
They did a great job. They built a facility in their library. And
we weren’t paying them. They paid for everything. We paid 50,000
dollars to report the software; that was it. Everything else they
took care of. One of our contractors brought in an instructor to teach
at the school, and now it’s part of their curriculum. Some of
the kids are actually going on to engineering school, which before
they were dead-ended.
We did that there. We did it out at a university out west in Berkeley
[California]. They wanted to put it in the Science Department; I made
them put it in the Engineering Department. We then formed a partnership
with the University of Colorado [Boulder, Colorado] and I had myself
as a Division Chief and all the other Division Chiefs going out there
once a month—we rotated; not all together—out there and
actually spending a day with the students, teaching a class on satellite
operations, and they were operating some satellites out there already.
In fact, that’s what gave me the idea.
So the workstation technology allowed us to eliminate a lot of facilities
we had. We freed up a lot of space. We were looking to build a new
building. We didn’t need it. We didn’t need power. We
didn’t need air conditioning. We didn’t need false floors
anymore. I got Headquarters to commit to build the first one and we’d
fly it for the first small Explorer mission. It was nothing. We just
said, “We’ll do it. Now we’ve got to figure out
how, but we’re going to make this date,” and I made it
real visible and championed a bunch of people, and they did it.
Put one company in business which is now an 80 or 90 million-dollar-a-year
company. It’s [even] on the New York Stock Exchange. They were
the guys who came up with the idea [to use work stations in place
of large computers for spacecraft operations], and we gave it a try,
and between the NASA folks and these guys, they put the first system
on and they turned it into a business, and they’re international
now. In fact, that’s one of the people I’m going to go
see Monday. Time to do some business with us now. “Remember
me?”
But we changed that whole thing. Originally, when the engineers wanted
to look at how a spacecraft was doing, not the operators, but the
engineers, to see how the power system was, they would have to go
to the control center. Well, when we got finished, they could do it
from the PC on their desk. They could get access to the spacecraft
data either daily or weekly or trend data or whatever, where previously
they had to come to the control center, request data. But we changed
the whole way, over the two years, the way they did business.
At the end of two years, I put in sort of a strategic plan for the
division. They never heard the words before. “What are we going
to do? When are we going to change over these workstations for all
the missions coming up?” I had people that did the analysis
that said, “This is the right time to do it,” and that’s
when we picked the way to do it. So I put some vision to them, made
them a team, and had a lot of fun.
And I really had fun because I had young people we were bringing in
out of school and we put them through a real neat two-year training
program. We had people who were retreading, who had whatever they
used to [was no longer needed] and we were teaching them how to do
new things, give them new opportunities, and we were paying attention
to them, rather than just waiting for them to retire. I couldn’t
afford to, because I had more work than people. We made partnerships
with some of the other divisions, where we were originally competing
for people, and we exchanged people. We developed an exchange program.
There were some things that backfired, but there were a lot of things
that worked. One exchange program, the really fresh-outs I put in
place, I lost probably the best guy that I’d ever hired, because
after about eighteen months, he said he wanted some stability and
found a place where he could go have stability, and I was making him
change just like he was in college, and that’s the way he told
me in the end. I said, “Well, we could have stopped that.”
He said, “Yeah, you could have, but I didn’t realize what
I didn’t like until I found this other job,” and he said,
“I’d really like to do this other thing,” so off
he went.
I was having fun, and the director of [the Mission Operations and
Data Systems Directorate, my boss], left and his Deputy and I were
in contention for the job, and I didn’t want the job. I really
wanted to stay in this division. I had a wonderful office suite with
my own shower, the only division in the place that had a shower. I
wasn’t allowed to use the shower because that’s where
we stored the Xerox paper, but, nevertheless, once a year we took
out the Xerox paper and turned it on to make sure it still worked.
But a nice little facility. It used to be a higher-level office and
then when they reorganized the Center, it became available as a Division
Chief office. My predecessor snagged it and I got to take advantage
of it. And we had our own building and it was all self-contained.
We had all the control centers, flight software laboratories, everything
all in one building, so it was the whole MOD [Mission Operations Division]
kind of thing for Goddard.
They picked the other guy, [Dale Fahnestock], who had been a Deputy,
and he would have been passed over a second time, to take over the
directorate, and that didn’t bother me in the least. [Once in
place, he called and said], “I want you to be [my] Deputy.”
I said, “No, I didn’t want the [job],” and I told
[him] four times no. I went away on vacation, came back, walking by
his door, going to the staff meeting one day, and he said, “Rothenberg,
come in here.” He said, “I just got off the phone with
[Dr. John W.] Jack Townsend [Jr.]. You’re it. You’re over
here tomorrow morning. You’re it.” He said, “I need
you.” Jack was the Center Director. He said, “Jack was
a little hesitant, but finally he agreed.”
I [wondered], “Why would he be hesitant when he talked to me
about running the thing?” …
Then Jack called me up and he said, “Are you going to do it?”
I said, “Yeah.”
He said, “Don’t worry. Just go in there and do it and
everything will be fine.”
I said, “Well, I really liked the division.”
He said, “Well, I knew that, but I really wanted you to go head
up the EOS [Earth Observation Satellite] ground system.” He
said, “I’m in trouble there and that’s what I was
trying to convince Dale, and Dale said he needed you, so you weren’t
staying in the division no matter what.”
I said, “Oh.” I would have done the ground system, too,
but I said, “Well, okay.” So I’m here.
Unfortunately, [Dale] got sick and he was out for six months and then
I got a chance to run the [directorate]. … [I had a lot to learn
about what the directorate did.] The first thing I found out is we
were getting on to the next-generation TDRSS. I didn’t have
anything to do with the GOES [Geosynchronous Operational Environmental
Satellite] at all, other than we were building a ground station to
support it during launch, but had no involvement with the GOES satellite—the
GOES H and I, the ones that had trouble—whatsoever. I did later
when [Goddard procured] the next-generation GOES [for the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration]. We can talk about that [when
we talk about my] Center Director [experience] because we did some
things differently there [for GOES H and I].
But I guess the main aspects of what went on, they were building what
they called a customer data operations system, and this was the Holy
Grail, that they wanted to have a control center that would operate
all satellites. [The prior head of the directorate] had fought for
the money and got the money. And I never agreed with that, and when
[they] gave me the keys to the car, I cancelled the program and I
gave the money back. I said, “It’s not needed. It’s
the wrong program. Ten years ago, that was the right program. But
today’s technology, [decentralized operations centers using]
workstations is the way is the way to go.” And I convinced my
boss [of that] on his sickbed. He really just had a back problem,
but, nevertheless, he couldn’t get out of bed for three months,
then it turned into flu. It was one thing after another. He was having
one problem after another. He got over it and he’s healthy as
a horse now. He’s not much older than me, and I think he’s
still working.
So I changed the way [the directorate systems engineers] were thinking
about how they were going to put in the [new] systems. [Until I cancelled
it], they were really going to revert to [a Central Data and Operations
System (CDOS). It] was going to be the be all to end all for the Earth
Observation mission [operations], and I said, “You need a different
kind of system.”
The second thing that happened is the White Sands ground terminal
[White Sands Test Facility, Las Cruces, New Mexico] was being upgraded
and was called a Second [TDRSS] Ground Terminal—[STGT]. The
point is that they had put in place a plan to build the software for
that, the scheduling software, in-house, and the [STGT] was built
by General Electric. They kicked that off and we were to build the
software.
When I first took over the job, there was a problem. [The STGT software]
had just missed [a development] milestone. They came in and explained
to me why, [and] it was a major visible one. We all went down to Headquarters
with a new plan. A new plan. This was in August, and we had [the annual]
Christmas party [in December], and the head of [the software project]
comes over to me and said, “You know the January delivery?”
He said, “Going to be late.” [For months he had been holding
firm to the January date.]
I said, “How much late?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe a week, two weeks. I don’t
know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know?”
“We haven’t started yet.”
I said, “Wait a minute. You had a three-month schedule laid
out.”
He said, “Well, it got bigger. It’s going to be five months.”
I said, “So that means it’s not even going to be three
months.” So I had gone down and prostrated myself in front of
the AA [Associate Administrator] the first time and said, “We’re
going to straighten this out.” Well, the second time, “[What
am I going to say].” So I thought about it for about thirty
seconds and I said, “Okay, let me go back to the beer machine
here and get my head together.”
In the morning, we got together and I said, “I’ve got
to come up with a radical plan,” so I did what all NASA managers
do. I called up the AA and said, “The software’s in trouble
again.” I said, “Look, I’ve now instituted—,”
by the way, I’ll talk about—one of the things I instituted
during that time was a monthly meeting where [my boss and] I went
down and met with [the AA] and just talked about—no problems—whatever
he wanted to talk about and whatever I wanted to talk about, for one
hour. The first time I tried to do that, he—“Why do we
want to do this?” Da-da-da-da-da-da. It was before my boss was
out with the bad back, and my boss and he didn’t get along.
And he said, “I don’t want to go.”
That’s when I said to the secretary, “Schedule it.”
So I scheduled it. “We’re going with Dale.”
“I don’t want to go.”
“We’re going.” I said, “Charlie wants us to
do this.” So both of them are reluctant why we were there, and
his Deputy and me are sitting there and saying, “Okay.”
We started talking and immediately got into an argument. The AA wanted
to shut down the Guam Ground Terminal. He had some reasons. My boss
said, “This is nuts.” And they stood there and argued
for the first fifteen minutes.
I said, “That’s it. Round one. Now let’s get on
to other topics.” And we got into some real meaty stuff, which
was why and thinking. At the end I said, “You guys can schedule
an hour on your own. You get your boxing gloves, swords, whatever
you want and you can go fight about that. It’s history. It’s
done.”
Well, as we’re leaving, the AA says to me, he said, “Go
get with her and make sure you get next month and two or three months
in a row and lock them up. This was a great meeting.”
And of course, the other guy, [my boss, is saying], “Don’t
ever schedule another meeting like this.”
And I said, “Hey, we really have to do this. We’ve got
to build this relationship.” Well, then he got sick and I was
down there every month with them. So [when I called the AA up] when
I got [news about the missed STGT software January delivery schedule],
I said, “Hey, here’s what happened. I’m just telling
you out of the blue, I don’t even know why they’re late
or anything, but I want to stop everything and personally spend the
next whatever it takes, bring in a team of people, find out what’s
going on, what they’re doing wrong, and how do we straighten
this thing out [based on the trust we built during the monthly meetings].”
He said, “Okay. [Come back to me when you understand and have
a plan, rather than react.]”
I said, “I’m probably going to need like two to three
months, because I got a real job, too, but I want to lead this thing,
because it will help me understand if I’m going to be in this
position. I don’t know anything about this stuff.”
So I dug into it, and about a month into it I realized, “You
know what? I have a bunch of plumbers doing electrical work.”
They really didn’t know what to do and they didn’t know
how control their requirements. They’d never built software.
They were really ops guys who built little patches. So I said, “I’m
taking this whole job away from you and I’m giving it to this
other division.” I had to convince the Division Chief he was
going to take on this problem. And he did. He stepped up to it.
And then I went and I said, “Now I want this other division
to lay out the job and how we’re really going to do it.”
So I called him and I said, “Another thirty days, and here’s
why. Here’s step one.”
He said, “Great.” He said, “I probably could have
told you that, but you wouldn’t have believed me if I told you
that you had the wrong guys doing the job. …”
So we moved it over there, and then they came back and the job was
like 30 million dollars to start with. These guys came back with an
estimate of I want to say 90 million dollars for the same job. I took
1 million dollars and put it over and left it with the old division
for some help. Then I went and got all these guys the right clearances
so they could—this was a classified project—get all the
stuff cleared. So then I’ve got to go make the pitch downtown
and tell them that this job they had budgeted [10] million is now
going to be [27] million. So I had to put this story together and
work on a story.
Then I went off to school for two weeks. This is when they forced
me to go to one of [the NASA training classes]. My boss came back
and I said, “Well, you can go give [the presentation to the
AA]. I’m not going down there and telling them the story,”
[maybe] because he didn’t believe it. …
So I had to come back from school, drive all the way back from Wallops
[Flight Facility, Wallops, Virginia], to go give the briefing. So
I had really worked it, so I pre-briefed a couple of the people, and
I get there and I give the briefing, and when I finished the briefing,
I expected to be stoned. And he said to me, “Why are you leaving
the million dollars in that other division?” That was his only—he
asked a lot of questions along the way, but as far as the [27] million
dollars, he never even reacted. The budget got put in place, and we
did the job, and they delivered.
But it was just one of these things where I was proud of what I did,
because we straightened out a long—by the way, [the original
division doing the work] had a ten year history of [software development
management] problems, which I didn’t know about until we dug
in, that they never delivered anything on time, [in some cases] they
were years late. I think [the AA] felt that [27] million was far better—he
probably had a different budget in mind all along.
But, seriously, it showed the value of this whole directorate. This
directorate was 500 people, civil servants, and another 2,500 contractors,
and it showed them the value of getting the right people on the job
and doing it right, and these guys delivered it, and that software
development wasn’t something you did casually. You had to freeze
the requirements. It set a whole tone for it. So I did that.
We also took back—TDRSS at the time was owned—and we leased
it, and at that time we actually—I was there to take the keys
when we took it back from the contractor, or they gave it to us. We
bought it back for a dollar or whatever it was. I didn’t really
initiate it, but I was there to do that. We started closing down ground
stations when I was there, because we were now using TDRSS more.
[In closing down ground stations there were] always some interesting
problems [to deal with]. We learned a lesson there. We took the Bermuda
tracking station over. The Navy had an annex, but we were connected
to it, and on it was a little drawbridge, actually, and the Navy was
moving out of Bermuda, so we said, “Free land? Free facility?”
and they gave it to us.
Well, the first thing we learned is they left us an environmental
mess, and the second thing we learned is we had to maintain the drawbridge.
So I was spending money maintaining a drawbridge in Bermuda, which
I never could go to see, I never had time to go to Bermuda to go see
the thing. So we learned never to take something for free. A little
like when the Navy gave us [some of] the [current] Ames [Research
Center, Moffett Field, California] facilities and [later] we decided
we didn’t need them anymore. And when they closed down the hangars
[they] found out that big balloon hanger—if you’ve been
out to Ames, they have this huge dirigible hangar. Well, that’s
a historic landmark and you can’t tear it down, so you’ve
got to maintain it. And the county didn’t want it; the state
didn’t want it; nobody wanted it, so we’re stuck with
it. So that’s when they turned it into [an academic, commercial,
and government] research park. They just did that. That was a Harry
McDonald brainstorm. “How do I get this thing off my bill?”
The only way we got Bermuda off our [roles] is close it down completely
and give it back to the Bermudans, after we [environmentally] cleaned
it up. We also did that with Ascension Island. We had a tracking station
there, and the tracking station, behind it was a big crevasse and
they were dumping waste material down there for thirty years. Ascension
Island was owned by the British, I think—I forget—and
they said, “Well, we’ll take it back, but you have to
do the environmental cleanup on it.” And we started to evaluate
what it was, so we brought in a company that does environmental cleanup.
We went back there and we found an American LaFrance fire engine,
pickup trucks, you name it—those were some of the big items—were
dumped down there over the years, and we had to get all that stuff
off the island. It cost millions and millions of dollars just to clean
up the Ascension Island site. …
I was only [in the Deputy Director of the Mission Operations and Data
Systems Directorate position for] a year and was at one of my monthly
meetings with the AA, and somebody called me up and said, “Hubble—they
discovered spherical aberration.” I knew that. Everybody read
that in the paper. And they said, “We’d like you to come
back [to the Flight Projects Directorate] and run the repair mission.”
And it was like a demotion in a way. I was now a Deputy Director of
a directorate, and now I was being brought back down to run a project,
only it wasn’t such a little project. And I didn’t even
think about it; I thought about it for about thirty seconds. It was
about that much, and I said, “Hold on one second.” I said,
“Dale, I’m about to tell you I’m leaving.”
He looked at me. I said, “They’ve asked me to go over
and fix the Hubble, and I’ve been watching it and I think I
can go over and help them.” I wanted to go over and just help.
I didn’t care whether I—“But they’ve asked
me to head the thing up and I think I’m going to do it.”
He just smiled and he said, “That’s a challenge.”
He said, “You’ll like that.” Apparently, he and
everybody else but me knew about this. They had all worked all the
traps with the Congress. I didn’t know that. I had no idea whatsoever,
but he didn’t tell me that at the time; I figured that out later.
I said, “Pete, I’ll do it,” [to Peter Burr who was
the Director of Flight Projects at the time].
He said, “Can you come over tomorrow morning and we’ll
talk about it?”
I said, “I’ll be there at eight o’clock.”
And he said, “[Dr. John] Klineberg, the new Center Director,
is going to fly in from Cleveland [Ohio] to meet you at noon.”
And by noon, I had the job and I had it straightened out with Headquarters.
I said, “I want all the money sent to me. I don’t want
to have to call Headquarters for reserves. I want the project moved
from Marshall to Goddard immediately, not in nine months or six months
or three months. I want to take over starting tomorrow morning. I
don’t want to operate that way.” And they agreed.
And even Marshall, I called up the Project Manager down there and
said, “This is what I want in order to do this.”
And he said, “Okay.” Then he called me back and he said,
“Look, I talked to the Center Director. In order to make this
appear that you’re not yanking it out of Marshall, could we—I’ll
let you run it day in and day out; I’ll give you everything,
but let’s not make the official transfer date until October
1st.” He said, “ And we’ll announce now when we’re
going to do it.”
I said, “Sure. I don’t care. I just need to get my arms
around it.” And that sort of led to a whole new thing, because
this happened from a Wednesday to a Friday. By Friday morning, I was
in the chair, I was actually sitting at the conference table with
the original Project Manager, at his desk, cleaning out his desk—and
he’s a personal friend, still is, to this day—but he wasn’t
up to this job mentally. He believed that because Marshall screwed
it up, we should not take it. They felt strong, and his Deputy felt
the same way, and I wanted his Deputy to stay. He was very important,
to me, anyway. And I convinced him, because I had hired him into the
government, so he was somebody I knew, and he was the guy that was
needed in that job. So he agreed to stay.
Then I sat down and said, “Okay, the first thing we’ve
got to do is find out what’s wrong with it. The second thing
we’ve got to do is find out what it can do the way it is now.”
Everybody knows what it can’t do—David Letterman [television
talk show host], the paper, Congress, and everybody. Meanwhile, I’ve
got the press calling me every hour on the hour. I had my whole staff,
they did nothing but deal with the press. The Deputy, not [Richard
H.] Truly, but [James] J. R. Thompson, [Jr.] wanted to hear, “Isn’t
there a way we can bend the mirror with actuators when it’s
up there right now and fix it so the problem will go away?”
He sent me out of the office. “Go look at that. Come back, talk
to me about it tomorrow or next week, but just take whatever time
you need, but I think you can do it that way.”
I said, “I don’t think so, but smarter people than me
have been looking at this for a month.”
But we laid in place a strategic plan. The first thing was, make sure
we fully understand what’s wrong with it. The second is, spend
whatever it takes to find out what it can do today and start getting
the best we can out of it, [is] what we have to do. The third, knowing
what’s wrong with it, decide what it takes to fix it. And the
fourth thing is, fix all the engineering problems it had besides the
optical. It had a number of engineering problems. Then the [fifth]
thing and final piece was preserve the follow-on servicing mission
and instruments. We laid out that and then we said, “We’re
going to have the first servicing mission in June of [1993]; the second
servicing mission in—,” and we picked a date, and I don’t
know what it was, three and a half years later. And we set these dates,
and they were important because we had instruments being built for
those follow-on missions. It’s pretty easy to go steal [all]
the money from [these] to solve [today’s problems if you forget
you committed to preserving follow-on missions].
And the science community didn’t trust us at all, so I had to
go see the science community and [build trust]. I said, “Here’s
[the plan I have and budget]. … These are my goals.” I
said, “And I’m going to give you the keys that you can
tell me whether I can take a nickel from [the future instruments]
to solve problems. I’m going to make you involved in everything
I do.” At best, I got a little bit of trust. I worked with a
couple of them previously, but they didn’t trust NASA. They
were real unhappy. The Science Institute was there and they were viewed
as part of NASA in that time. And Congress didn’t trust anybody.
You know, “techno turkey,” all those kinds of names were
being—all over the country were looking at the Hubble as a big
joke and NASA as incompetent.
So then we started with—the committee found out what as wrong
with it, then we put in a program to measure and verify what was wrong
with it that was consistent, that could verify that the numeric discrepancy
was consistent with the one that was predicted on the ground, and,
lo and behold, we found that out.
Meanwhile, we set in place an early observation program that was out
doing images. Well, I would kid, because they were producing spectacular
imagery—we found out that it just took longer, because a blurry
mirror just means you got to wait a little longer to collect more
photons, because you’re not as focused. For certain kinds of
observations and in other kinds, you couldn’t get as clear,
but we found out you could have some ground software to make a fairly
good correction on that. They used it in the military and we were
able to get that, but it took a little while to get all that in place.
Meanwhile, every observation we produced was spectacular, and it’s
with this flawed system. And they started to change from the first
whole paragraph being about the flaw to, “In spite of its flaw—.”
It started to change, little by little, but we had our press conferences
two or three times a week. I became first-name basis with most of
the reporters in the industry, and still am with a bunch of them,
but the point was, we were very guarded, but they were always still
beating on us. We didn’t get off the hook. There was an event
that got us off the hook, and I’ll talk about it in a minute,
in a funny way, but the fact that we were getting credible observations.
Then the scientists went off and came up with a plan to correct [the
optics]. We already [planned for] the next instrument, [the Wide Field,
to] put in a [correction] lens, and we would get clear images, which
was the one you see most Hubble images from. It’s the one that
gives the prettiest pictures. It would correct one out of five instruments.
To me, that wasn’t real satisfying, but one good image from
it and the public would have gone back to sleep and we could have
said, “We did it,” and we were heroes, and that was all
we had to do.
The science community said they wanted to go off and look at what
can we do with the rest of them. And I said, “Great,”
and they went off, and three weeks later they came back with a thing
called COSTAR [Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement],
which said—the instruments sit like four telephone booth-sized
boxes, in a square like this [gestures], one, two, three, four, and
in the center is where the light comes in from the telescope, and
what they said is, we take out one and in the other three, put in
three monocles, [one] in front of each one of them, or whatever you
want to call it, eyeglasses in front of each one. We can correct the
other three; we only have to remove one instrument. And the principal
investigator [Robert C. Bless] for the one instrument, [the High Speed
Photometer], agreed to do it, which is—he worked on that thing
for fifteen years of his life, and he saw the greater good. In exchange,
they allowed him to have a lot of observing time while it was up there,
because it would be ending, and it was only reasonable in his theme.
So they came back—well, the fact they came back in still said
I had to find 25 to 50 million dollars. So they came in; one of the
companies, Ball [Aerospace], came in with a proposal to do [COSTAR
for 25 million dollars], and they had a reason they could do it. They
[already] had [an instrument] structure. I doubled the number [to
be sure we planned for enough money] and I said, “Okay, now
I’ve got a 50-million-dollar problem [to solve].”
So I played around with my budget, and Headquarters grabbed me and
said, “This is great. We gotta do this, but you can’t
have any more money,” and that was about all the guidance they
gave me. … “We’re going to need this, but we won’t
give you more money.”
So I said, “Okay. I’m going to commit to do it and I’ll
figure out how to get the money.” I don’t know how I’m
going to do this.
So I went back up and talked to the science community. I said, “We’re
going to commit to do it, but I want to have a review. We’re
going to take some money from the follow-on instruments, but the principals,
I’ve already talked to them and they agree they’ll give
us this much money on the margin.” [We went to the follow-on
instrument developers and identified the sources of money. We called
in] the science community, and I said, “I want to you to review
[the COSTAR progress] in three months, six months, and nine months,
and verify that we’re still on track, we can do it, and we’re
not stealing money from any other place. Here’s how we’re
dealing with all our issues.”
And they put in place a committee, to their credit, of university
people, and said, “Okay, we’ll go along with your little
game.” Because you have to understand the history of building
instruments is they take two or three times longer than ever predicted,
and cost four or five times the price, because they’re all pushing
the state of the art in what they do. Otherwise, you wouldn’t
be flying them. So these guys are always pushing the state of the
art.
So the science community believed that [was] what was going to happen,
I was going to steal all the money from the follow-on instruments.
I said, “I won’t violate that strategic plan.” And
to this day, that’s the strategic plan we followed.
But what we [also] found out is it was going to take six months longer
than I had to meet the schedule. So right before we ever got committed
to building it, I went back to the community and said, “Instead
of June, I want [to launch in] December.” I think it was December
1st or 2nd. I don’t remember the date right now, of [19]’93.
“That will be the target date,” I said. “And that’s
the only thing I’m asking. I don’t need any more money
to make that date; that’s the date.”
They bought it. Everybody bought the date change. Headquarters was,
“Oh, that means we’re not going to have this clear picture
and get the public off our back for six more months.”
I said, “Well, we’re starting to get some images that
are making them happy and they’re making all the newspapers.”
So everybody bought into this thing and I committed to it and we did
it. Bottom line is, again, [playing the Project Managers] game [of]
Whack-A-Mole, monthly, weekly, I can tell you one story after another
about problems that [we had to beat down]. One story that came out
of this that is quite interesting, remember I mentioned these little
mirrors. Well, they’re called aspherical mirrors. As far as
we know, very hard to make. The major optical houses in the country,
Perkin-Elmer, [Eastman] Kodak [Company], UTOS (United [Technology]
Optical Systems)—I don’t remember; there’s one or
two others—all, when they looked at it, “This is very
difficult.”
We did a little mini search of the industry. Found a little company
out in Oakland, California, [Tinsley Laboratories] who said, “We
can do things like that.” So we put out three contracts. There
were three sets of mirrors we needed. Six mirrors. We put out three
contracts and told each guy to start a different set of mirrors, and
we gave the little guy in California the easiest set, we thought.
We gave the one in Utah, Perkin-Elmer, they came in for a proposal
for a million dollars; the little company in California came in for
one for 600,000 dollars; and UTOS came in for one about a million-three.
So we start the [contracts] going, and about two months later, almost
like in the mail, comes—it was a little more formal than that,
but comes first set of lenses from the little guy in California. Meanwhile,
UTOS and Perkin-Elmer are still trying to figure out how to attack
the problem, and they spent like a quarter of a million dollars or
something. They spent a lot of money in the first couple of months.
And the little guy says, “Let me know about the mirrors.”
Well, our optics guys look at it and say, “These are the best
mirrors we’ve ever seen in our lives.”
The little guy comes back and says, “Hey, we didn’t spend
near all the money. You want us to build the rest of the mirrors?”
“Okay. Why don’t you give it a try.” Two months
later, the rest of the mirrors come in.
Two months later, Kodak and those guys are saying, “Well, we
think we got a way of doing it.” [Laughs]
We get the mirrors, the guys look at them and say, “These are
perfect.”
And the mirror guys say, “We don’t know much about your
business, but you probably want a set of spares. We could give you
back the rest of the money, or we could build a set of spares.”
And [within the] 600,000 dollars they did that, and we actually we
needed a set of spares. They built a set of spares.
For all I know, Kodak and UTOS and Perkin-Elmer are still trying to
figure out how to build those mirrors. They spent all the money and
produced zero.
And this company, Tinsley [Laboratories], we then got them into building
these mirrors for a [microcircuit etching] device and a whole bunch
of other things. They had credentials now, because they did this.
We got them awards and [national recognition].
There’s a whole other story about some of the contributions
Hubble has made to the biomedical industry. We just heard a talk—in
fact, heard a piece of it this morning repeated, about a talk that
they just gave about—a symposium, where these women came up
and brought in letters why they feel they have a life now because
of the biomedical stuff that came out of the Hubble instruments. Breast
cancer [detection for example]. They can do a nonintrusive look with
the imaging device that was developed with the Hubble detector technology,
but the resolution is so fine that they can actually pinpoint when
they just go in with a needle now and can pull out the affected cells.
My wife actually just went through that not too long ago. That’s
a direct result of [Hubble]. And in some cases, they’re detecting
stuff that they would not have any way of detecting with past technology.
And there’s a guy—if you ever want to hear those stories,
talk to Frank Ceppolina. He’s the actual Project Manager who
ran … the servicing side of Hubble, because we had the science
and service. He developed all the instruments and is still there running
the project. He stayed. That’s what he wanted to do for the
rest of his life. But he gives talks all around the country on this
kind of stuff; what came out of Hubble. He was just the Inventor of
the Year for inventing satellite service; National Inventor of the
Year, congressional-level award. The guy is super. Anyway, but he’s
a Project Manager at Goddard still. He’s sixty-eight years old
and this is his whole life. That’s all he’s ever done.
Anyway, so we defined the strategic plan of what it could do. We initiated
COSTAR. We formed a team. We [still] had the same [public relations]
problem on Hubble. When you went home and told your neighbor you worked
on Hubble Space Telescope, right after they found out about the spherical
aberration, it was a joke. People were embarrassed to go home. I hadn’t
thought about that when I accepted the job. I knew I didn’t
cause the problem, but I hadn’t really thought much about it.
But we needed to get people—we couldn’t get people to
work on the project. They fled like lemmings. So I bought them with
[civil service] grades. We got them some nice positions [and] grades.
I had to fight—this was the largest number of civil servants
on one project at Goddard ever, so [the Center managers] were not
real happy about—and I kidded. I said, “I’ve got
the number one priority in the agency. First, I’m going to take
your people; then I’m going to take your money.”
I put on a recruiting campaign. I did things like—and I got
a state license plate [for] HST, and it was Hubble Space Telescope,
and it was numbered, [HST] [0]001, [0]002, [0]003, and people took
a lottery out to see who got what number and they went and got them.
And still, to this day, you can still apply and get a Hubble state
license. I have number one, my wife has number two, and my Deputy
has number three, and I think his wife has number four, and [the rest
were] lottery drawn. …
But anyway, the point is—and you can still see them. They’re
probably about a hundred of them. But we did things to make a team.
We got into the wine and cheese things and the no screw-tops and all
that stuff. By the time we finished, we had about 180, 170 civil servants
on it and lots of [contractors and university personnel], there were
about 1800 people.
A couple of anecdotes that are technically interesting. One of them
during that period—let me see if I covered what I wanted to
talk about in that side of things. The COSTAR was the [first] big
[addition, but in addition] we had gyros fail and we had to understand
about gyros, and there were lots of things along the way that the
mission kept growing bigger and bigger.
Two things were happening. Number one, [the mission was] getting more
and more complex. The second is, JSC [NASA Johnson Space Center, Houston,
Texas] was treating this just like any other EVA [Extravehicular Activity],
[assigning] a team the year before launch. And what we were saying
is this [mission is far more complex, and the crew needs to be assigned
now], not a year [before launch]. And I would [go] down [to JSC] and
I’d see the Deputy Center Director—the Center Director,
[Aaron Cohen], was up in Washington at the time. … Then [Paul]
P.J. Weitz was covering the Center.
I’d go and see [the head of the Astronaut Office] and they’d
make a promise, “We’re going to go to work [on getting
the EVA crew assigned very soon],” and nothing would happen.
They’d change [out office heads] and I’d come back and
have to sell all over. …
So finally, in comes one of the infamous review committees, the Stafford
Committee. So anytime a review committee comes in, I said, “if
I’m going to have to put up with three days of dog-and-pony
show for these guys, I’m going to get something out of it.”
So I made the theme, “We need the astronauts named now.”
That was the theme. So every one of my guys who presented had some
reason why, “Well, if we had the astronauts—.” We
had some assigned to us, but we knew they weren’t going to be
the guys in the end. Because maybe the guy in the end is a left-handed—maybe
he or she is a left-handed, not a right-handed person, and that would
be a different procedure. Or maybe they don’t like this type
of tool, or they’re different heights. That means we got to
put the foot restraints at—all of these things you’re
orchestrating. It’s a ballet; every little piece of it has to
be in place, and in order to do that, you have to have [the people
who are going to do the job on orbit helping to developing how on
the ground]. We didn’t, [for example], find out till six months
before launch that we had all the backup tools stored inside the Shuttle,
which meant if you had a problem, you had to go back into the Shuttle
and get the tools. That meant another airlock, up pressurization,
depressurization, and that was the constraining thing on the number
of days, and therefore, you would never have completed the mission.
You wouldn’t have been out there without—for want of a
Philips screwdriver, to pick something simple.
Tool temperatures. We had to deal with the fact that we didn’t
know whether the particular repair activity was going to occur in
the light part of the orbit; we had no way of predicting that at the
time. We had to accommodate that also. We had ratchets that were sized
for hot, normal, and cold, so they would pick the tool, the temperature.
It was that complex, everything we did.
So to learn all that, [the crew] wasn’t going to do this in
a year [and we needed their experience to develop the right plan].
So I used that chant [throughout the review], and [Thomas P. Stafford]
came at me, when he sat me down [after the review and said], “It
sounds like your recommendation is that we need a crew [named now].”
And I said, “Like already, yes, tomorrow.” He called back
up the Administrator at that point and said, “I need a crew
named,” and he said, “Here’s why, and I validated
this, and this is their number one need, and if they don’t do
it, they’re going to fail.” And we had a crew named within
a week. … [In reality, JSC already] had some picked [most of
the crew] and, actually, they were arguing about one or two, and they
were going to [assign them] to us probably about fifteen months [before
launch], and [after Tom’s call to the Administrator] we got
them about eighteen months before. [Without Tom Stafford’s help,
they would have continued to wait] in making a decision and then we
would [have lost valuable] training [time]. They would have been undertrained.
And training has paid off on [when] had a number of [on orbit] problems.
…
The second review we had was the same thing with the number of EVA
days. Typically, we only allow one. We said we need two. We finally
filled up two and then some. So we used the second review to point
out how it’s mandatory to make these fixes [to HST], and this
is how many days we need to do it, and go find out how we can do that.
We knew [the Shuttle program was] holding EVA days in their pocket
as reserve, so we [convinced Joe Shea, the chair of the second review
to recommend four EVA days as our critical need, which was the number
we ended up getting].
So we had eighteen independent reviews. We used every one of them
to get something out that we needed. Never money; we never needed
money. We met the schedule in the end. In fact, we tried to launch
one day early and the weather came in and it held us up. And I said,
“See? I told you we weren’t going to get off until the
1st of December,” or the 2nd or whatever it was.
So we met [all the mission objectives]. We had some interesting problems
on orbit, which I can talk about in a minute, but there was a couple
of other little things. One is probably little known, but it’s
real. The gyros needed to be replaced.
Well, let me go back. When we first started planning on what we needed
to do, to do the servicing mission, we decided we wanted to put on
the ground an electrical and a mechanical simulation of Hubble, in
the clean room. One, for a lot of reasons, it gave the team something
to rally around. It gave us something to test against and test anything
we wanted to bring up and make sure [electrically and] mechanically
it’s going to work. It gave us the opportunity to have the astronauts
to come in and see exactly what they were going to see on orbit. And
most of the equipment was available. We didn’t have [the space
money] to spend—but it was still like a 17 or 18-million-dollar
decision I had to make. So I looked at it, “I want the pros
and cons,” and I committed to doing it.
Now I had to sell it to the science committee I made as a partner,
because I did make [promises I would run by them any decisions which
might impact the program in the future. They thought these simulators
were a waste of money.]
I finally had to overrule them. I said, “I’m going to
put 25 million dollars out of the budget for this. I can’t tell
you all the things it’s going to do for us, but it’s clear
that my team wants it; I believe it; and I want to support it.”
So I got booed off the stage [by the science community] and I took
the 25 million anyway and we built it.
Now, fast forward. We’ve got to change gyros. We want to test
the first set of gyros. So we bring them to the clean room, plug them
in, and the next thing I know, I hear, “Hey, they blew a fuse.”
I said, “I blew fuses plenty of times as a tech.” They’re
probably backwards connectors, but find out what caused it and make
sure the procedures are such we don’t do it again. Well, two
days later. Blew a fuse. “What was wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“Well, what’s the size of the fuse?” Stick a penny
in. You have to be old to remember putting pennies in fuse boxes.
They used to have these screw-in fuse [in homes], and if you ever
blew a fuse and you didn’t have a spare fuse, the tendency was
to take a copper penny and put it in there, which obviously the house
would burn down before that ever blew. So sticking a penny in was
always the answer when you blew a fuse.
Anyway, so continuing on. So [the team] went and looked at the drawings
and said, “You know, that fuse is undersized.”
“It can’t be. It matches exactly what’s on orbit.”
Because we had to spend a lot of time making sure we understood what’s
in orbit. That was another thing we did [to make sure we built these
simulators right, not just look at drawings; we] went out and talked
to the engineers and technicians [who built the HST].
So we went and did a little test and we said, “That’s
the wrong size fuse.” We looked into it and we found, I don’t
want to say all, but a large majority of the fuses on the spacecraft
that was flying on orbit, were not sized for bringing up a new piece
of equipment, plugging it in, and turning it on. Well, it turns out
it was designed—we’re back to every five years—it
was designed to bring it to Earth, replace the components on the ground
in a perfectly benign environment. The fuses in a vacuum—if
it’s a one-ampere fuse of current, when it blows, if it exceeds
one ampere in a vacuum, you derate it by 50 percent, because in air,
it uses air to take away the heat, so that helps the fuse function
as a fuse for one amp. In a vacuum there isn’t any air, so it
will only take a half amp to blow that fuse, so you’ve got to
make it twice as big. And if you bring it back to Earth, you don’t
have to think about it that way.
So what did we find? We found that there were some areas where they
either added equipment later or [just sized buses wrong]—we
do not know. … Why else would it be that they’d have them
designed that way? This wasn’t an accident. [We redesigned the
fuse modules and replaced them on orbit as part of the first servicing
mission.]
But what would have happened, had we not had built [the simulators,
we would not have discovered the buses were undersized and] we would
have went up their on orbit, plugged in the new instruments, turned
it on, blew a fuse, [and we would have failed to fix Hubble]. You
can imagine the agency would not be an agency today. It would have
been the embarrassment. A lot of people viewed Hubble as a make-or-break
for the agency. [Something as simple as blowing all the fuses] would
have been an extreme embarrassment, and we only [avoided] it because
we [made the decision to build the simulators and more importantly
test everything no matter what it took before we brought it to orbit].
I am not the hero on this; this guy Ceppolina, who wouldn’t
let me sleep at night unless I funded [the simulators is the hero].
The [instance in which the HST simulators paid off] is [when] we were
testing, replacing COSTAR. We had the astronauts come in and we had
the real COSTAR plugged in, and they stuck it in and they said, “This
doesn’t feel right. I don’t want to push it any further.”
We said, “Why?”
They said, “Well, we’ve been training with the mockup
you sent us from Ball, sent us one or the other instruments in the
water tank for six to eight months now, and this is not the same feel.
It feels like it’s binding.”
So we didn’t know what was going on, so we pulled it out, we
looked at it, and after a little while we found that there were two
different instrument designs. One had a little lip on it and one didn’t,
and the one they were testing with didn’t have the lip. …
Technically, they just had to push the instrument and it would have
went in, but on orbit we wouldn’t have done that, because we
would have said, “What’s going on? Something we don’t
understand.” We were always worried about insulation, [for example,
blocking the instruments].
But again, having it in the simulator, finding out, and then using
that to [fully test the flight operation which led us to discover
that] there’s two different [instrument housing] designs. …
[We avoided what would have been another major] problem.
But I guess the biggest one was the fuses. There would have been no
escape from that. Everything we plugged in would have blown the fuses
and then that was it. It was over. Over to the point where Hubble—we
couldn’t even have released it. We would have put it out and
it was dead. I mean it was over. We couldn’t come back again.
We could have released it, but we couldn’t have come back again.
I’m not sure we could have released it safely, because we couldn’t
fire up the gyro to know it was going to be stabilized when it went
off, it might start doing this [gestures]. But I don’t know.
That’s stretching it, but on the other hand, the real point
is that it would have been a dead spacecraft and the agency—I
don’t know if it would have survived from that embarrassment.
Wright:
Where were you when the crew was doing the servicing?
Rothenberg:
I was in the mission management room [at the Johnson Space Center
Mission Control Center]. I had to approve anything that was outside
the nominal plan. For instance, I was the one who, when they had to
kick off the solar array—I [knew that once the old array jammed
during rollup, it posed an EVA hazard and schedule risk to try to
unjam it. I decided] that I didn’t want [the crew] to fiddle
with it anymore; let’s just get rid of it. The Europeans were
furious. Everybody was pounding on my desk. “You can’t
do that.”
I said, “ (A), I don’t want to spend any more time fiddling;
we’ve only got so much time up there. There’s no reason
I need to bring that back, and I don’t want to take any chance
of even remotely tearing an astronaut’s suit, even put a little
perforation, sharp edges and everything else. I’m getting rid
of it and that’s it.” So that was one.
Another was—only a couple, two or three decisions I really had
to make. That was one and it was minor. The other [I always needed
to ensure that] was at the end of every day, [after] we shut up the
observatory and the astronauts went inside, that if during the night
there was a Shuttle problem, we could release the observatory and
we could come back to it another time; it was safe.
[As an example], one of the other problems we had was they couldn’t
close the doors back up over one of the instrument compartments after
changing out an instrument. Story [F.] Musgrave was out there and
he said, “Hey, I’ve got a come-along,” which is
a very high-torque device. They use them in auto shops. He said, “I’ve
got a come-along up here. I can put that on and I think it’ll
work. I’ve practiced it [in the water tank at JSC].” He
did, and a lot of people didn’t want to do that; they wanted
to go analyze it.
And I said, “I want to leave that thing so I know tomorrow morning,
if I wake up and the Shuttle’s gone, it’s out there safe.”
So I said, “Let’s do it.” And you don’t just
do it that easy. You’ve got to bring the team together, hear
all the things, and they say, “Do it,” and you’ve
got to do that in rapid time. You’re out there for only so much
EVA time.
But other than that, it was pretty benign. I did the press conferences
and I would just sit there and watch every little step. And then periodically,
actually, there were a couple of other things I intervened on, too,
but I don’t remember. But in general, that’s what it was,
and if I needed to talk to the crew, I went into the MCC [Mission
Control Center] and did what I had to do from there, but I never did.
Anyway, that was kind of the Hubble servicing. I don’t know
if you have any other things.
Had a great team. My job was really to deal with Headquarters and
Johnson [Space Center] and the outside. Inside, my goal was to balance
the ongoing science program and the money we were putting into that,
taking money away and making sure I kept feeding Hubble.
One other minor thing. We were on the front page of the newspaper
all the time. Hubble this and that. The thing that got us off the
front page of the newspaper, [Operation] Desert Storm. We were just
reminiscing this morning. We were driving back from Perkin-Elmer and
it was snowing. We were supposed to fly out of an airport in New York
and couldn’t get off the ground, so we took the rental car and
kept on driving. There were six of us packed in this car, because
originally we turned in one car, and realized what was happening and
we kept the other one. We piled us in the car and we drove south.
They announced we were now actively bombing Iraq. My first reaction
was, “That’ll get us at least below the fold, if not off
the front page.” We did not surface again for about five months,
in the paper, actively, until we announced our service mission with
[moving] forward, “NASA’s planning this high-risk fix,”
and all that stuff, rather than “in spite of,” an embarrassment,
[which prior to Desert Storm was typically] the leadoff [for Hubble]
articles. So [the] diversion [of the press from Hubble problems to
Desert Storm, was a relief for our tired Public Affairs Team].
That’s really what made me laugh, if you think about what went
on with a couple of incidents when [President William J.] Clinton
was having problems with—what is it? Wag the Dog. That’s
so true. You create a diversion. We didn’t quite create the
war, but at that time, if you remember, he was going to bomb some
place or do something at the same time he was having trouble, and
it sort of took him off the front page of the paper. Well, that helped
us in Hubble, that same little—so that made my life a little
easier, because if you get in the paper, then the Congress and Headquarters
keeps calling. If you’re not in the paper, they forget about
you, for a little while, anyway. For at least a week.
Wright:
Soon after the Hubble reservicing mission was over, you left Goddard.
Rothenberg:
Yes. What happened is, at the end—and I’ll talk to that
and then we can pick up the next chapter in a minute. What do you
do next after you do [a HST]? I wanted to do something fun. I just
didn’t [want to] run another project. The Administrator talked
about one day maybe—when [the Goddard Space Flight] Center Director
retires, certainly he’d like me to step into that job. …
So I casted around, and CTA had bought this little spacecraft company
called Defense Space Systems, DSS. They bought DSS from a combination
[of owners]. TRW owned 20 percent of it and the company itself. And
when [Daniel S.] Goldin was with TRW, he was the guy who bought the
20 percent of [DSS]. It was a small company, 200 people. It had built
twenty spacecraft at that time and they had five in the queue, and
it was just neat.
… I knew some of the people there. And when [CTA] took them
over, the President wanted to retire. He and I had talked one day
at dinner about me actually coming to work for them a couple years
before, but I didn’t want to leave the government; I was doing
the servicing mission. I said, “Maybe later on we can talk again.”
[He] called me as soon as the Shuttle [landed] and said, “Okay.
[I] want you to come and take the company over. I want to retire.
We’ll work together for a year or so and then I’ll step
down and you’ll take it over.” And that was kind of an
opportunity that I couldn’t refuse, and I [also] became President
of [CTA] International, which has since sold a big communications
satellite, and Executive Vice-President of [DSS].
Well, [I went] there and then restructured the company [for pursuing
high technology satellites and] had fun. … One guy built the
company, had everybody reporting to him. Really wasn’t much
of an organization. They had some overhead management problems because
[the President] was picking and choosing who he put on what program
personally, and when he didn’t have time to do it because he
was wrapped up in technical problems that people didn’t charge
overhead for weeks.
So I went in there and the first thing I did is I looked and we were
about ten people over [budget], so I said we had to get rid of ten.
I got rid of ten and then I told everybody else if they were charging
overhead more than an hour [a week], they had to come see me—two
hours in a two-week period—they had to come see me and tell
me why. I wasn’t going to fire them, but they saw these ten
people that were let go and they said, “Hmm.”
So then I structured the company to have other people [than the President]
who could evaluate who should be on what job and who was worrying
about “Do you have a job charge?” kind of thing. I actually
cut their overhead down. I renegotiated the lease, and that was a
surprise. I was renegotiating to keep the same price, and the landlord
came back and offered us at least 25 percent less than we were paying,
so we took it. In fact, as we hesitated a minute because we were flabbergasted,
he dropped it a little more. He said, “I forgot. There’s
one other thing I can take out.” And he did it by showing us
how he could do it, not just “I’ll make it cheaper.”
So we signed up for five years.
Then we had a company that owed us, in my mind, 3 million dollars,
and in their mind they didn’t owe us anything. I went up and
saw them and I said, “The contract didn’t say that because
we overran the budget by 3 million dollars, you don’t pay us.
It’s a cost-plus contract. Cost-plus.”
And they said, “Well, we don’t have a cost-plus with the
government. We had a cap.”
And I said, “Our contract doesn’t have a cap.” And
we had delivered our spacecraft to them and they weren’t paying
us for it. I said, “You’ve got our spacecraft. If I really
thought about this [before] I wouldn’t [have] let it leave the
factory.”
They said, “Don’t worry. You’ll get your money when
we get it with the government.”
I said, “But you’re not going to get it from the government
[soon]; maybe never,” and I said, “You still owe it to
us.” This was Westinghouse. So I said, “I’m going
to do something. I don’t know what I’m going to do, but
we can’t let you have the spacecraft. I want my merchandise
back.” There’s a mechanic’s lien—a guy does
something on your house [and you don’t pay him which has him
paid first when you sell the house], and we found out we could get
a thing called an injunction, [which did the same thing for our spacecraft].
So I had the [CTA] attorney get an injunction.
What an injunction meant is [Westinghouse] couldn’t sell that
spacecraft to recover their money without paying [DSS] first. I had
like first mortgage on the thing. And, son of a gun, if they didn’t
sell the spacecraft. So, (A), they paid us the money; then, (B), the
guy who bought the spacecraft gave us 2 million dollars more to modify
it; and number three, I talked Westinghouse out of a bunch of equipment
that they had, that could we borrow it, and it was so much easier
for them to give it to us. Well, when they give it to you, it goes
on your books. So not only did we recover our [lost] money, we made
a huge profit associated with it. Now, write up a profit. The company
went from being in the red into the black. In fact, when I left, they
gave me the [larger cartoon] check for 2.4 million dollars, the upfront
check for the spacecraft. I still have it someplace in my junk in
the basement.
Anyway, I had a lot of fun and I got them into the high-tech business.
We won a prime contract building a high-tech spacecraft, which they
never did, which we pulled together a team with Lockheed Martin and
we were the prime and did that. We also won the small spacecraft contract
at Goddard, which was a 200-person contract to be their small spacecraft
builder. And it was only a 200-person company, so I doubled the size
of the company and also got them into high tech. That was a great
year. All these things I didn’t do alone; I did it with a lot
of good people, but it was what happened while I was there and running
things.
Then Goldin came after me and said, “I got a deal for you.”
Originally he talked to me about being the Director, but he said,
“I really would like you to come in as the Deputy Director and
help me find a Director who’s a scientist. I want you to run
the Center and I want a scientist.”
I said, “Great. That makes sense to me.” I really wanted
to go back to NASA anyway. I really liked having a mission. Making
money was one thing, but having a mission is fun. And after three
months, we interviewed a lot of people. We couldn’t find somebody
who wanted to take the job, and I took over the Center. I’ll
talk about that, the reorg [reorganization]. That was whole process.
The reorg was—the first thing we did was lay out a strategy,
what we wanted to be when we grow up. What business are we in now?
The environment has changed since the Goddard Space Science Center
was formed in the last thirty years, and we can talk about that after
we—
Wright:
Okay. Let’s take a break.
Wright:
We left off when you were getting ready to accept a job as the Director
of Goddard.
Rothenberg:
Yes. Let’s see. As I mentioned, I came back, and the first thing
[I found was that] the agency was going through tremendous changes.
They just had gone through the zero-base review, which you probably
have reams of stuff about. They declared that Goddard—Goddard
was at that time the largest Center in the number of people, and zero-base
review concluded, or was asked to conclude, however you want to think
about how they got there, that Goddard was too big and they ought
to reduce the size of it. So that was point one. It was at 3800 people,
and about 3000 people was the target. So that was a fair [drop]. I
became Deputy Director; the Director and I talked for one week, and
he left and that was it. Although I had access. Even to this day,
he and I are friends. That’s not the point.
But there was no Deputy; it was me up there. So that was a little
scary, a little bit, because you’re going from a Project Manager—I
did a little of the institutional stuff for about three years and
then suddenly become Director of the whole [Center], it’s kind
of a big jump. Usually you come in and you have a Deputy and a staff,
and I really had to start from scratch. That was the first part.
So I spent a fair amount of time deciding what was wrong with Goddard
and what was right with Goddard. I came in with the focus that I was
going to make change. I never even thought about leaving it the same.
I don’t know why. To this day, if I look back, I don’t
know what gave me the [idea that Goddard needed change]; it may have
been the discussions during my interview with Goldin. …
So I came up with what I thought was a plan, and that was first to
go survey all the people that deal with Goddard, walk around and find
out what do they think about Goddard. I started even before I came
onboard, as soon as it was sort of public knowledge, and I came to
the conclusion that people thought [Goddard was] insular. You hear
that about Johnson, too; they were insular. That they thought that
the world revolved around them and that nobody else out there could
do what they could do; therefore, they were [a national] mandate.
So I had to remind [my staff] that the cold war was over. [We needed
to ensure that we remained relevant to the nation]; we were a luxury,
and plenty of people can build spacecraft and fly instruments, and
they don’t need us, and they build launch vehicles and they
don’t need us. That [came as an awakening to the Goddard staff].
You can say that till you turn blue; [at first] they don’t believe
it. The first point.
The second thing that was wrong with it is they were not forward-thinking
and it was part of the same result. [The Goddard scientists] were
an exclusive club in the following sense: when there was a scientific
investigation, they wanted to lead it, and if they couldn’t
lead it they, [if they didn’t], in many cases, wouldn’t
play on the team. And in many cases, that led them to losing the competition,
the scientific competition. Therefore, in essence, the best science
and the best scientists should win a scientific competition and the
team should be made up of the rest. They didn’t view it that
way, so they were continuously trying to win and they were spending
a lot of time just bidding, writing scientific grant proposals and
not really as high a percentage of wins as you would expect if you
do a sanity check with a world-class institution. So the second thing
is, they had to find a way to partner and engage the external community.
The third thing is, there were many fiefdoms in the Center, where
they built up, for a lot of reasons—in fact, I was probably
as guilty as any of building a fiefdom up at Hubble, where instead
of going to the Center Engineering Directorate and getting engineers,
[projects] went and hired their own, and they formed many engineering
groups all around [the Center], and [in] the Sciences Directorates
[also], so there were many engineering groups. …
Number four, there was no way of prioritizing the work for the [Center]
workforce [as a whole], because every fiefdom prioritized against
their own funding source instead of prioritizing it against the Center
[needs]. …
Then the next [challenge] was that technology had changed. Not only
had the environment changed, but technology had changed, and there
were technologies now that actually allowed us to do things or buy
things commercially that we were [still] doing ourselves. NASA had
a belief that if we wanted to go to High-Definition TV [HDTV], we
had to develop our own; we couldn’t just go buy a commercial
one. I actually got in the middle of that, because they tried to do
that on my watch. The TV guys came to me [and proposed a plan to develop
a unique NASA approach to HDTV] and I got in the way of that and forced
them to do something different. Actually, I wrote some notes down
about that, because I’d forgotten about that until I started
to think about the whole way I started this thing.
They weren’t buying commercially available stuff. They didn’t
have a systems engineering [approach], they were attacking things
piecemeal and coming up with “This is the design,” without
thinking about the big picture. In that case, they weren’t building
as good a product as they could or buying as good a product as they
could. It didn’t matter whether they built it or buy it; they
didn’t apply the right thinking process to it and we had a lot
of trouble with some of our satellites because of it. They worked
on orbit, but it was more costly to get there.
So I sat down and I laid down [some strategic transformation guidelines].
I had seven things, and each week at my staff meeting, I [rolled one
of them] out [for discussion]. First I rolled out all seven of them
and I said, “Here’s what I think is wrong. We’re
insular, we’re this, we’re that.” Then I said, “I
can say what’s wrong, but here’s what we’re going
to do about each one. We’re going to become viewed as an enabler
by the community. We’re going to get rid of all of the infrastructure
[for] the things that can be replaced by [commercial] technology,
and then buy things commercially. And we’re going to put together
a strategic plan that recognizes the current value [of Goddard] to
the community and what we need to do in the future [to increase our
values], and they’re going to either like it or we’re
going to change.” In other words, they’re going to drive
us instead of we’re driving them.”
I turned it around and said, “We have a customer, and you can
look in the dictionary. There really is a word. It’s spelled
with a C, not a K, and that’s why you never could find it before.
But the science community is our customer and we’re going to
service them. Therefore, we’re going to respond to them rather
than inviting them to help us when we run out of ways to do it ourselves.”
I went through these things and I became a drumbeat. I did this from
day one. I became Deputy Director. I was going to run this place and
I told them that, no matter what happens, this was going to happen,
and I kept trucking down that [path].
Then I got involved with the Administrator in putting together the
project management approach for the agency. He saddled each one of
[his direct reports] with some kind of [agency-wide assignment]. That
diverted me on one day a week or something, but, nonetheless, that
actually turned into being the 7120 document came out of that, which
is NASA’s strategic project management plan.
[At Goddard], I commissioned a bunch of young people, the [potential]
next generation [of senior management], who offered to come up with
a Center strategic plan, but I told them they had to get everybody
to buy into it. In other words, they couldn’t just go off with
twenty-five people in a room. They had to form teams and [having Center
wide] focus sessions and lunches and, “Don’t worry. I’ll
buy food,” even if I have to by it out of my own [pocket] to
get people to come so we get the whole Center engaged in this activity.
So that got them to thinking about it, and we didn’t really
give them a lot of guidance as to what did they think we needed to
be in the future. Then they’d come back and present to us and
we interacted with them. It was interesting, because we had them put
together a set of Center values. In fact, we didn’t [ask] them
[to] put together a [set of] Center [values, but] the first thing
they did is establish a set of values. What did they think the employee
values were? They came back with “Integrity, partnership, a
balance between your work,” and a whole bunch of things.
Then we said, “Okay. If that indeed is the value system of the
employees, we’ve got to change the reward system to match the
value system,” as an example of where this one avenue took us.
That was just this little piece of it. And ultimately, we put in place
a different promotion system. We put in place a different [set of
criteria for] Goddard awards [to reflect these values]. I couldn’t
change the NASA awards, but I could change the Goddard awards. [One
example is “teamwork.”] The guys who got rewarded were
the ones that formed partnerships and teams—you got an award
for that—rather than being the best inventor of the year. [As
another example, we changed] supervisory awards to be for mentoring
employees versus [the past where it was for] having the technical
strength and being the technical leader. It’s got to be the
[people] who develop. The guy can be dumb technically, if he’s
great at mentoring and developing people, but he needed to know his
business really well, because we were a technical organization.
Anyway, [as we reformed the Center organization along with the new
strategy plan], I started out with eighty branch-head-level people.
Forty of them disappeared. I took forty out of the eighty and said,
“You guys are the branch heads [in] the new organization. Take
it from there.” The other forty, I put together a team [which]
normally [would have had] the Division Chief [doing the] interviews.
I said, “No, I want people outside. Here’s the criteria
they’re going to select them from. You can have someone on the
team who can understand the technical qualifications, but I want someone
from HR [Human Resources], not who’s just a cop, but somebody
who really is an HR person, not just a clerk. I want somebody from
Programs,” the ultimate customer. I made different people form
these teams, and we actually came up with forty new branch heads who
all were people-[oriented not just technically focused]. … And
I had not one EEO [Equal Employment Opportunity] complaint. Had not
one complaint against—I worked the unions and everything else
to do this. I removed a bunch of Directors of and I just changed a
bunch of people. They were [in the] wrong [jobs and needed to be reassigned
for the future growth of the Center].
[Some actually] came in and volunteered [to be reassigned]. They saw
where we were heading. They said, “You need somebody different.
I’ll help you, but I’m not the right guy to do that.”
I convinced everybody we had to turn it over to the next generation,
is what I really did. I took one of my bright young guys and told
him he’s the Director of this new directorate. That didn’t
work, by the way. He did it. He stayed there [for two years], but
he didn’t have all of the skills necessary to make him an effective
Director. Eventually it got absorbed by another one because it didn’t
work out for more than one reason, but [only] part of it was the leadership,
that was a mistake on my part.
But going back, I had [the seven guidelines], and the first thing
I had to do was get everybody onboard. It was clear I wasn’t
going to get anybody onboard easily. They all listened, they did what
I said, but they didn’t feel it. They had to feel it. If they
didn’t internalize it, we were never going to get there, because
I couldn’t make every decision day and night. That wouldn’t
work. That never works.
So I spent from April till September [of 1995 when I returned to Goddard],
then in September we went away on a [senior staff] retreat and I gave
each one of them, each of my Directors, I think I gave each one one
or two of the seven items, and I said, “What would you do to
go from where we are today to where I think we ought to be?”
And they came back in and we came out with a plan. That’s where
change the value system came into play, and the strategic plan and
all that.
Then the strategic planning activity went on for the better part of
a year, maybe even more, maybe eighteen months before we actually
published it. So that was going on in the background.
Then at the end of the strategic plan—I was going to reorganize
around the strategic plan, and I then needed some immediate early
wins. The only way to get something like this to work is have some
things that are early wins, such that everybody sees the value and
the benefit of change. That’s a textbook approach, but that’s
what we did, and we picked three areas.
One, when a scientist needed a spacecraft to support his mission,
he generally had to [go through a six to nine month procurement process
just to get a study contractor for the spacecraft] even though he
was only going to propose against an announcement of [competency against]
forty other [teams for one or two studies]. But he needed to have
a spacecraft contract agreeing to build for a price, so he could submit
a [study] with a price [to implement his science investigation]. So
he had to go through a regular formal government procurement process,
which is a waste of time [and money at this stage of the process].
And having come from this little company, [DSS], we were getting ten,
fifteen, twenty requests for bids, to submit bids where we knew they
might at best only one would win, and I [didn’t have the bid
and proposal resources to support that many proposals] in a small
company, so I’d pick three [to respond to]. And I’d say
to the other fifteen, “I can’t support you.” And
I was just spending the government’s money, because it was bid
and proposal money, which is in your rates, which is charged back
to the government. So we’re throwing the government’s
money away by doing this. So I wanted to [fix] that.
Then the second [piece of the same problem] is, it takes too long
[to procure a spacecraft and it doesn’t have to]. It takes six
to nine months to run a government procurement process. So I formed
one team [to work on the spacecraft procurement process to reduce
cost and simplify the scientist’s task in both the study and
final proposal phase]. I said, “Okay. I want you guys to go
look at this and tell me how—.” Before we did that, we
set a bunch of metrics for the Center, and we almost pulled them out
of our ear, but myself, my Deputy, Center Director, and a couple of
other people, [looked at the problems and said], “Today it takes
us nine months to buy a spacecraft and get the contractor on the contract,
even if we’re not buying it, we’re only buying a paper
design, to get a proposal in and select one. I want that to be three
months by the year 2000, and I want it to be one month by the year
2005. The second thing, it takes us thirty-six months to build a spacecraft
now. I want it to be twenty-four to thirty months, depending on the
complexity, average by 2000, and eighteen to twenty-four months by
2005.”
And there were a bunch of other metrics [we set for the Center to
improve our processes and customer support. We set goals for the Center
and published them.] … Then I formed teams to start to look
at how do we [achieve] them. One engineer, one Project Manager, and
one procurement person [formed the spacecraft procurement team to
figure out how to achieve the metrics we set]. I’ll just take
that one example. I’ll give you two. There’s probably
four good ones, but I’ll give you different depths on each one.
…
[In the midst of this, Dan Goldin called me and told me I was his
selection for Center Director.] I got the Center on the pipe and just
said, “Hey, you’re stuck with me.” See, that was
one thing. I’m one of the few Center Directors at the agency
that grew up at the Center. I did every imaginable job; support service,
prime contractor, every kind of job there, Division Chief, Ops Manager,
Project Manager, so I knew a lot of people. So that helped, because
I could make changes and I knew how to do it without doing the wrong
ones, in most cases, like anybody. Not all cases. I didn’t know
everything. In fact, I learned a lot that I never knew that I should
have known when I became Center Director, about what we did and other
things, and probably a lot I didn’t learn that’s still
going on that I don’t know about.
[Back to the Spacecraft Procurement Team], this little group came
back to me and said, “Well, we looked at it and we found it
takes three to four months to write a spec and four to five months
to run a competition. Two months to get the proposal in and three
months to do the selection evaluation. So if we made the spec [time]
go to zero, no engineering, it would still take us five [months];
we can’t get from here to there, [buying a spacecraft in three
months].”
And we said, “Try again.” It was like what we did when
we were doing that propulsion modular spacecraft that I talked about
earlier. The same thing. The designers kept coming back in with more
complexity and we kept sending them back. They finally came in with
an answer that made sense and they were happy and we were happy.
But in this case, I said, “Try again,” and we sent them
off. Meanwhile, a couple of vendors were coming in, and contractors
were coming in and saying, “Hey, we’ve got these standard
spacecraft. Have you ever thought of buying these things?”
And our engineering people, “No, no, no. Every mission we have
is unique. You must never do it.”
So Al and I had a little chat and I said, “What if we told them
that they could buy a whole bunch of standard spacecraft or have a
catalog of them, and what they would do when a PI [principal investigator]
wanted a spacecraft, is just say, ‘What changes need to be made
to this standard bus?’ And if we had five of them, there’s
bound be one that’s close to what they need.”
So we talked to these guys. They came back and they bought into the
idea. They figured out a way—and we had procurement regulation
issues and every other thing to overcome, and they came up with a
proposal [approach to being able to pre-qualify spacecraft contractors
and use a simple task order competition to select s/c as needed].
And we had criteria for how anybody who had a spacecraft could qualify
it, and put it in a GSFC [Goddard Space Flight Center] catalog and
we would publish [the] catalog and we would give them a chance to
update it every six months or a year. … They couldn’t
have a paper spacecraft; it had to have gone through environmental
tests, okay, and have some level of credibility. And there’s
an on ramp, by the way. If you want to submit a proposal and say,
“But I recognize I’m not going to be in the catalog until
I get to this point,” you can do that. … We weren’t
trying to exclude anybody. [The team who] looked at doing this [also
ran the procurement that] put it in place; [it’s called the
“Rapid Spacecraft Catalog” or something close.]
Well, the first space spacecraft got bought [from the catalog], it
went from “I need a spacecraft” to having it under contract
in thirty-two days. It went from “I need a spacecraft”
to launching it in thirteen months. And the [initiative was] a success.
It’s got written up—but it stemmed out of saying we’ve
got to do things different, environment changes. So there was a win,
but the value of that win wasn’t to be seen for about another
year and a half or two years from the time we figured out what we
wanted to do. But we kicked it off, and it’s changed the way
industry supports Goddard. It’s changed everything. So that
was one of the things of the strategy that worked successfully.
The other thing we wanted to do is [reinforce the] new value system,
so we wanted to change the promotion system, and one of the things
is there was only so many GS-15 slots and GS-14 slots the Center had,
and there was a lot of people encumbering them and who really weren’t
working at a GS-14 and –15 level. They were retired in place.
Some of them we inherited from other Centers, Headquarters, and things
like that.
So I sent off a team to look at the promotion process. Everybody considered
their promotion process like naming a pope. We went into a room and,
white smoke and you got elected; black smoke and it wasn’t your
turn. It was a negotiation. We had a process; it was a pretty good
process, I thought. I inherited it and I continued to support it.
Then I looked at it and said I can’t think of a better one,
and no one else could, but the employees had no belief in it. They
believed that somehow it got into favorites [promoted]. Generally
I really looked at that hard. I looked at all of the names. I looked
at the ones they brought forward and all eligible at the Center. I
spent some time trying to understand, and, yes, there was some selectivity
based on time in grade and stuff that we didn’t allow people
who were too quick, no matter how good they were, just because there
was enough good people at the next level up that we—we had some
way of screening them and filtering the process.
So what we did is, we changed the system. I got, again, a bunch of
employees, [including] secretaries [together], and said, “Build
me a new promotion system.”
Anyway, they went off and they came back with—well, all they
wanted to do was make more GS-15 slots available. That was what the
whole thing—we knew that. Everybody knew that. That’s
what we all wanted to do. There’s nothing wrong with that. We
had a number of deserving people. We called this the promotion reengineering
team.
Oh, by the way, I had everybody go to reengineering school, and whenever
we started up a new project or process—I believe in reengineering,
as a former systems engineer, and I’ve been doing it all my
life and I’ve seen it done all my life, and somebody called
it reengineering, packaged it for management, and it’s really
thinking about things as a systems process. In fact, it’s one
of the things I teach occasionally now.
So all the senior management [also went to reengineering school].
We all went and had our fun. At that particular school, you make this
little solder thing. [We learned to] make it better and faster and
cheaper [than our first try]. So everybody understood the process
[and I continued to encourage Center employees to learn about reorganizing].
… And we got that going to the point where, when I formed [a]
team [to deal with a problem], they knew how to approach the problem
in a reengineering sense.
Well, [the Promotion Reengineering Team] laid out the problem analytically
and [worked through a process] and they came in with [a] recommendation.
And here I am, with all my directors, and they said, “Well,
we got the [solution to the promotion] problem. What you’ve
got to do is we’ve got to make sure the promotion process is
fair and everybody sees the grade structure is fair at Goddard.”
And they said, “Clearly, the first thing you have to do is demote
all of these [retired in place GS-14 and 15s],” so it became
known almost in a microsecond as “Oh, they’re really going
to love this. We told the entire workforce that senior management
was going to go off and work and put in a better promotion process,
and senior management got it wrong; they made it a demotion process,
and it was going to be named the demotion process.” Suddenly,
the word started leaking out what was going on, and we cut that off
at the knees. We said, “Okay. That’s not going to work.”
We actually had them go back, and they did came up with a better [proposal],
and they came up with a [process that involved] a lower level [of]
employees [in the promotion recommendation process]. Previously, the
recommendations all went up to the Director. Now we put in some lower-level
committees that actually looked at them [first]. There’s a lot
of reasons why people would argue with that also. You can look at
that, and it also gets into a favoritism, but senior management is
not omnipotent, so they make mistakes, too. So you could argue either
way.
But they put in a system where there were—and it was the same
with the award system. It was the same thing we put in [reengineering
teams which proposed new committees and rules for] the award process,
and I sat through a few of them, and it was surprising that people
got awards that normally wouldn’t even have gotten visible.
We put a secretary on all the awards committees, and that made a difference
because she looked at things from a secretary’s viewpoint. And
we changed some awards where administrative people could get awards
on the same par with technical people. Their contribution might not
have been as directly recognizable, but their contribution was there,
clearly.
So we did things, but those were the kind of things that we went through
[at the same time]. We went from 3800 or 4000 down to 3200 [employees].
Didn’t have a layoff. Didn’t have to do anything. We were
able to do it by attrition, by watching our attrition, and selective
hiring, allowing the attrition to exceed hiring by the right amount.
And I made some deals. I brought in some new work that I knew that
would take care of a certain group of people [whose current jobs were
being outsourced].
Then I tackled the organization. I went through a whole bunch of reengineering.
I got a strategic plan. The strategic plan centered around enabling
the external community; we becoming recognized as the experts, but
we enabled the external community. We formed joint centers of excellence
with universities, where we jointly pursued research, and that really
worked out well. We got fifteen or twenty of them in place with major
universities in the country. It became a real model for a way to do
business and also made it inclusive instead of exclusive. I had to
get all the advisory committees and all the science groups and talk
to them and tell them why we were doing this, because otherwise they
[would be] beating on [our] scientists for operating differently.
The scientists began to hate the word enable. You say enable, and
they say Rothenberg.
I took apart one division that was building spacecraft in-house—they
thought that was the only way to build a spacecraft—and said,
“No, we’re actually going to buy them,” and they
couldn’t understand how you could do that. That’s the
division my daughter-in-law was in, [and she heard more than once],
“Oh, what’s your father-in-law doing now?”
But I actually sat down with that whole division, face-to-face, more
than once. One time I was down [at JSC] during one of the follow-on
servicing missions, just being on Center in case there was a problem,
and I spent every night answering e-mails. [I] remember my twelve
hour [shifts]. I wrote personal e-mails to everyone in that division
who wrote to me, explaining to them why. They bought in after a while.
I had Senator [Barbara] Mikulski to deal with. “Why are you
doing this?” And she listened for about two minutes and she
said, “You’re doing the right thing.” And I felt
good. She said it in front of 500 people at dinner, because one employee
stood up and started questioning it, and I wasn’t about to debate
it. She listened and she thought about it for a couple of minutes,
and she looked at me, and she said, “I think you’re doing
the right thing, Joe. Keep it up.” And she said [to the employees],
“I think you ought to talk to him, not me.”
And I said, “We’ve talked.”
I had union problems. I could tell you some of the union problems
I had were not over that. I formed a—I’ll call it a partnership
council. I don’t know what I would have called it, but every
once a month I met with the union guys and said, “Tell me what’s
bothering you.” I made them partner the whole reorg, and that
all worked out well.
I had some union problems that were caused by one particular individual.
They weren’t union-related, but he tried to turn them into union
problems and fizzled. He ultimately got voted out. But that’s
an aside. It has nothing to do with running the Center.
Let’s see. I’m trying to think of what else in that whole—well,
the strategic plan was such that it [was timeless, and is still the
basis of Goddard’s plan today]. It wasn’t a budget-driven
one. It said “This is the business we’re in; this is one
we’re not in.” I restructured everything, having spent
time in a small company and having spent time in industry a couple
of times, I knew about full-cost accounting. [In my view Goddard had
to get ready for full cost as part of the restructuring of the Center
we were undertaking.] … So what I had to do was look at, okay,
how does that apply? How do we get ourselves ready for full-cost accounting
in a government situation?
Number one, typically, one of the things you can do in industry, is
when you don’t need a group of people, some people, you can
downsize. You can’t do that in the government. You’re
stuck with the civil [servants]—so you have to have a system
that accommodates the variation of [budget] or workload, but deals
with the workforce fluctuation, and that’s where support service
contractors can—but in order to take advantage of that, you’ve
got to be smarter than the [contractor workforce to be a smart buyer]
you’ve got to keep the resident expertise, and we didn’t
do that. A lot of it was in the support service, so we had to recognize
that and we weren’t going to change that overnight, if we changed
it ever.
Then we had to allow our scientists to be competitive. So when I set
up how I was going to set up the overhead structure for the Center,
I had to make sure that we could keep the [Center overhead] rates
[competitive]. So I found out what everybody else’s overhead
was. They didn’t even know what their overhead was. We went
and figured it out. I sent a bunch of analysts off, even contractors
off, to go look at the books at the other Centers and find out how
much they spent on infrastructure each year, how much they spent on
program budgets, then made some assumption about how much the Center
Director is ripping off for his own funds, which I knew how much I
took. We went in and figured out how we could be competitive with
other scientists and other Centers and universities, what overhead
rate we had to have on our science work.
Then we structured the rules on how you charge and what you work and
what gets charged direct and indirect in order to get [the overhead
to be where it needed] to be. Now these guys didn’t understand
it. They’re government employees. They don’t understand
that, but I was able to each week get people in and [explain it] to
them [in small groups]. And I didn’t understand it all either.
I learned a lot [in the Center Director position]. I knew what I wanted
to do, but I didn’t always know how to do it. Al Diaz, my Deputy,
worried about programs and I worried about restructure. That was the
division of labor. That’s what I wanted to do.
So every little piece had to all fit together. I started this little
flowchart. If I thought about it, I had all these things written down.
This is not something—there was a little logic chart and it
said, I’m working on the workforce here, I’m working on
the procurement process here, I’m working on the organizational
structure here, and this is where they intersect and when I have to
deal with both of them. And I kept that up and I used to explain it,
and people ultimately didn’t understand it, but I thought I
did, so after a while, they began to believe I was crazy. “You
don’t have a plan.”
And I said, “Sure. Here’s my plan,” and I’d
show these bubbles up there and they’d all look at them. They’d
turn it upside down and they’d make a big joke about it, but
we generally followed that plan. It led us to the point where we had
a strategic plan.
The point I want to make about—employees used to be able to
[pick and choose what they wanted to work regardless if it was a Center
priority] with full-cost accounting, they no longer could pick and
choose what they wanted to work on. It had to be consistent with what
was core business for the Center. We put in place a core process.
We said this is the process of our Center. We get inputs, [i.e. customer
requirements to support a science investigator], we system-engineer
[them]; we define the best way to [meet the requirements], and then
we apply the technology, buy, apply, steal, or develop, whatever,
the technology [is needed] to do it, and we supply that to the [science]
community, [our customer]. … Everybody bought into that, and
that was another thing that went into the strategic plan, our process.
What was happening, though, was we had to call—I’ll take
one example. It’s probably one of the most that makes sense.
The [United States] Marines [Corps] came in to us and said, “We
want you to give us some help designing the next-generation amphibious
vehicle. We want to use lightweight aerospace structure technology
composites, and we know you guys do that all the time.” Well,
this would have been a dream [job for our engineers]. The guys would
have loved to go off and divert themselves and go play with Marines
and go down to [Marine Corps Base] Quantico [Virginia] and all that
stuff.
I said, “Okay, guys. Is it in the book? Is it in our business?
Is this what we’re going to do or not?” So this is the
[U.S.] government [asking for help]. We can’t just toss them
out, out of hand, and say, “Hey, go fend for yourself.”
We needed to help these guys. So we said, “Okay. We’ll
give them four hours. Let them come. Four hours is our budget. Let
them come in and we’ll talk for four hours, and at the end of
four hours, we’ll decide what we’ll do or not, and I’ll
go talk to the Commandant, if I have to, and tell him why we can’t
do it.”
So we listened for four hours and then we came up with a bright idea.
We said, “What you need is not us; you really need access to
the right—and we can help you there—contractors who really
know how to do this. They’re not building amphibians and they’re
not already polluted and doing it the old way,” and we hooked
them up with the right contractor. The Marines loved it, our guys
didn’t get diverted. In the past, we wouldn’t have done
anything different. They would have come in; we would have put ten
guys; they would have told the projects who needed these engineers
they took, “Go hire them.” The projects would have cost
more money, and that was the way they operated. That was the [old]
way the Center operated.
I then made a couple of other rules. I said, “One Engineering
Directorate and we’re finished. Not fifteen little fiefdoms.”
And that took a lot of selling, because these teams were around for
years together. I said, “They’re all going to work for
somebody different. I won’t move them from doing what you’re
doing now if you have work for them, but if you don’t have work
for them, I’ve got to have another job for them.” Full-cost
accounting. I brought that where I needed it. That was not my only
reason for doing it. I wanted cross-fertilization of people. But full-cost
accounting was as good a reason as any.
Then I set the organization. Well, I didn’t really know how
I wanted the Center organized. I knew I wanted one engineering [directorate
to manage engineering]. I wanted a systems engineering function, so
I again formed teams. “Go off and come back in with some recommendations
on how to organize.” Well, I wasn’t getting anywhere.
I was getting back the same organization. Turned sideways, upside
down, it was the same organization.
I had one wise guy who came in and gave me a package of organizations
at Goddard ever since it was—forty years. He says, “Here’s
every organization we’ve ever had. Pick one.” He says,
“You want me to pick one?” He says, “It doesn’t
matter. We’re doing the same thing.”
I said, “Well, function ought to follow form,” and I said,
“I want a systems engineering organization.” So I finally
just one night went home and drew out an organization on a piece of
paper, came in the next morning, and the biggest guy that was impacted
was the Director of Engineering. I said, “I want to take apart
your directorate.” His name was [Allan] Al Sherman. I said,
“I want to form this systems engineering.”
He said, “That’s exactly what’s needed.” He
says, “I’ll help you. I want to head that new group.”
And I couldn’t have a better guy step up and say that. About
a month later, he realized he shouldn’t have done this, [he
gave up a great job], but anyway, he agreed to do it.
So now we started to—and I said, “I want to take this
Code 500 that does all [Mission Operations and Data Systems].”
I said, “Eighty percent of that we could buy.” I said,
“I want to disband it. It’s gone.” I said, “Here’s
want I want. I want to create jobs for these people to go to. I want
special provisions that even though they’re not doing that job,
they can go in and apply for a GS-14 job that has some skills, and
learn on the job.” I forget what we called them. We had a name
for them. It became an agencywide—I forget. It was Job Opportunity,
or Opportunity Jobs, or something, or Career Opportunity Job. It had
a unique name that distinguished them from a normal posting where
everyone was just going up the chain in a technical discipline and
applying for the next job. We worked with Personnel, we worked with
PAO [Public Affairs Office], we had a job fair [to recruit for these
new opportunities in the] auditorium. … I was trying to create
a “go-to” rather than a “push-them-out” [flow
of employees to new jobs that were more in line with Goddard’s
future]. I wanted people to run to new jobs rather than push them
out. We were[n’t] offering [civil service] grades. We were offering
a chance to do something new.
So we published the [job listing], and it backfired. Everybody that
applied were in jobs that we wanted to keep them in. [Laughs] But
it turned out that we went through with it and we moved them. It turned
out that took a little longer [to move the right people], but it caught
on. … The problem was that their—this directorate, rather,
with [the] 500 people [I was disbanding], the problem was the Division
Chiefs were saying, “I need you. Don’t go to a new job,”
and, “Don’t go looking for a job,” because he still
had work to do, and [the Division Chief couldn’t see how a]
transition [to having their work outsourced] was going to happen.
So we had to help that, and once we did, people more and more—we
actually reprogrammed almost all of the people. We never had to lay
anybody off. We [reduced the 500 people] down to a group of 80 people,
which is what we needed, and the other 420 either retired or went
on to other jobs. And again, we didn’t fire anybody; we didn’t
make anybody feel uncomfortable, although they got the clue that I
might have put them all in one big corral and abolished that division,
and therefore could lay them off. I sort of let that out as a hint,
but I wouldn’t do it. I probably wouldn’t get away with
it. But I might have to abolish some of these things.
Well, abolishing something, some people can get good financial benefit
out of that in terms of early retirement. We got special early-out
provisions. All the kinds of carrots you use to get people to change.
So we set the reorg in place, we set the teams in place, to say, “Okay,
now that we know the big chunks,” and I fought through all the
engineers [in fiefdoms around the Center] who didn’t want to
move, and again, I met with all of them many, many times, and we finally
got them to agree that they [would] all [move into] one directorate.
Then I took Wallops, which was a remote site—I’ll talk
about Wallops separately in a minute—and we said, “There’s
one Engineering Department, even Wallops. Wallops is now part of Greenbelt.
But, by the way, to make them feel not as the outpost, I will have
the branch head—a couple of branches are down at Wallops, so
the branch is headquartered down there.” So there was this two-way—some
of the guys got really clever. They bought collaborative engineering
tools so they all used the same tools [to make the Wallops and Greenbelt
staff to be able to work our design together as if they were in the
same location]. …
Then we set in place what’s the next level of organization :
[the Center, the directorates and the divisions within directorates].
It was kind of not one I would have chosen, and still to this day
I’m not sure it’s the right one, because, [in one case],
it put a lot of power in one organization in the Center. However,
it’s there and it’s still working.
Once we did that, again, we established focus groups. Every afternoon
we had two or three hours. People could come in and just talk or we
scheduled and invited people. We made sure that we brought along as
many people as we could so when it actually came out, it wasn’t,
(A), as bad as their wildest fears; and, (B), they had heard a lot
of it already. “So what are you telling me new?”
Continuing on, we put that in place. Then we had to go to the union.
After some fits and starts, the union finally rolled over. They spent
the first three months—one guy in particular. It wasn’t
the union. It was one guy, the union leader, and he was a problem.
He was trying to give me a hard time because I closed down his [auto]
club. Well, I closed it down. I reopened it, but after he took down
what I didn’t like what he had hanging up in there—not
what I—what the employees didn’t like what he had hanging
up in there. … We shut the thing down. He had a bunch of stuff
hanging up in there that we thought was inappropriate. We told him
to take it down. He said, “No, you can’t. This is my own
wall.”
And I said, “On my property, endorsed by my council, and I’ll
shut the whole club down.”
“No, you won’t.”
“Yes, I will.”
“No, you won’t.”
“Security, put locks on the place.” Senator Mikulski and
[Congressman] Steny [H.] Hoyer got intimately involved with that one.
[Auto club members] went to their congressman.
“You got my son’s car in there.”
“You can move the car out.” I got special keys for people
to do things to get one out. I wasn’t going to open it until
they took down what they had in there, and I wanted an apology.
[The union and auto club president] put out a newspaper [for] this
club and had me hung in effigy on the cover. Eventually, he did what
he had to do, signed in red, as a sign of defiance, and then immediately
the membership voted him out, because he didn’t even tell them
he was having this loggerhead with me until I closed the club, and
that’s when they figured it out. I gave them a lot of latitude
to get their stuff out.
But he was also president of the union, so now—and this was
all going on simultaneously. I put the reorg out in September. My
goal was to get it in place the first of the year. I shut the auto
club down at the same time. So this is not good timing on my part,
but I can’t let this other thing stand. The other thing was
too serious, in my mind.
So I went through this process. We’d sit at the table and he
would argue about not the reorg, but a bunch of other lists of things
he had that—we were talking about the size of the table, before
we could get around talking about the reorg. We went through this—so
[we hired] a lawyer. I got myself a labor relations lawyer, attorney,
and asked him what my options were.
He said, “Well, the only thing you can do is try to get him
to negotiate. If he refuses to negotiate, and he says it, and he doesn’t
show up after you tell him there’s two negotiation sessions,
you’ve got two weeks, if he doesn’t come in fourteen days,
it’s over.” …
So one day we decide we were going to rile him up, we said, “All
this stuff is stupid. We’re going to either put this reorg in
place without you and you’re going to take us to court or whatever
you do, or you’re going to negotiate.”
He said, “I won’t negotiate with you guys.”
His lawyer told him, “Listen to what they’re saying.”
“No.” His ego got the best of him.
We said, “Okay.” Meeting ended. Scheduled a negotiation
for Monday. Scheduled one for Wednesday, one for Friday, one for Monday,
Wednesday, and Friday, and go in the room and sit down. I sent my
negotiating team. These were all SES guys, these people, and my labor
relations lady, and they’d sit at the table. He doesn’t
show up. They leave. Sit at the table. Okay. It’s now—one
week’s gone by. I said to Personnel, “Get all the forms
ready for transferring everybody. Just work on it. Quietly work on
it all next week.”
Next Friday was the deadline—and this was right before Christmas—at
four o’clock in the afternoon, he hadn’t made any negotiation
sessions. At four o’clock in the afternoon, we sent him a telegram
saying the reorganization is approved and effective Monday, and it
was like four o’clock. We knew he left at four o’clock,
but he hadn’t shown up. Monday morning came and we had a fax
on his fax machine, an e-mail on his machine, and a letter through
the door. And we never heard from him again. About four months later,
he got voted out [as union head]. I don’t know what happened,
but we never heard from him again.
But that’s the kind of thing you have to put up with. The personnel
issues you put up with as a Center Director are incredible. Things
you wouldn’t believe people do. And these are sometimes find
out that somebody who’s a very very—great employee, straight
in every aspect, and has some weird thing that they do, and they become
offensive or, in some cases, criminal.
Wright:
You spent three years as the Center Director?
Rothenberg:
Just about, yes. Okay. We can jump on to the next one. But, anyway,
that’s sort of the whole thing. In that time, we had basically
no mission failures. We had a great set of programs. We changed how
the Center did business. They’re buying spacecraft now rather
than building them, for the most part. We put in place an in-house
program for employees to do some in-house work. We got us out of the
ops business in a big way and turned it all over to contractors, which
do [the] work anyway. We put more control centers at universities,
[established university] partnerships, and [left a] good strategic
plan.
If you ever get to Goddard, the strategic plan—one other thing
I did–I wanted to get buy-in when we first told employees, so
I hired a guy—I wanted everybody to have a poster on the wall
of the strategic plan. I got a guy in and I told him roughly what
I wanted. I said, “I don’t want it to be too traditional;
I just don’t want it to be a list.” I didn’t know
this, but this guy was a pretty accomplished cartoonist, professional.
He came and worked this immense cartoon that depicted our—he
went around an interviewed people, not a lot, but he got enough to
get the flavor, and he came in with a cartoon of the whole strategic
plan. But it wasn’t a cartoon with cartoon characters; it was
just cartoonish in the way it was drawn. To show that we were taking
down—we were no longer insular, we had bridges over the moats
between organizations on the Center and outside the Center. We have
geese and deer—geese population. They were spread around. We
had scientists who were always teaching in the classroom, but we had
the new strategic rules for what they were doing written on the blackboard.
This is an immense poster.
When he brought it in, I looked at it and I said, “My god, what
did I ask him to do? I’ll never be able to show—.”
I had some pretty stoic scientists there, who didn’t like to
be viewed as a cartoonish organization. They looked at this and said—I
looked at it for about five minutes and how do I tell this guy—and
I spent I don’t know what for this thing. Then I said, “Let
me get the people that I think are not going to like this the most.
Let me get them to go and look at it, but let me tell them what I
want to do with it.” I said, “What I want to do is, I
like it. I really do. Let me get and put a border around it. I’m
going to have every employee sign it and then make it into something
they can—,” and I brought over the Sciences Director.
He is a really good guy, but he’s just very formal. He looked
at the thing, and I told him what I wanted to do with it.
And he said, “I like it.” And that was it.
I said, “Okay.” One more time I got the key people who
I knew, if I don’t get their buy-in, I’m going to hear
forever grumbling. They control most of the workforce. Got them in
and they bought it. And it’s hanging up all over. It’s
still hanging in the Administrator’s office down at NASA, in
his conference room.
One other [institutional] thing we did [during my tenure], and I’ll
get off the Center Director. We decided [after] I had been at JPL
[Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California] one day and they
were having a Multicultural Day. They had ethnic foods being cooked
out on the quadrangle out in front of that big building, and all the
employees came out to get free samples of all the ethnic food. People
were dancing and [singing ethnic] songs.
So I said, “We’re going to have that and we’re going
to call it Celebrate Goddard Day. We’re going to do that. We’re
going to do the same thing.” So I got a bunch of employees in
and told them what I wanted to do. It was an employee [multicultural
advisory group]. I had a bunch of employee [advisory groups].
[As an aside, these groups were highly motivated and achieved things
that represented NASA and their heritage well. One group] put in place
remote mentoring for the Hispanic population up in a couple of parts
of the country, where they could call in and get mentoring, the Hispanics
who wanted to do something. So we tied in this remote mentoring, and
that became a hit. We actually got a congressman to change his vote
because of it. He couldn’t believe what we were doing for his
community, and he never voted for a NASA budget; he was totally against
it. Union City, New Jersey. In fact, the school board came down and
gave us a recognition award, they were so thrilled at what we were
doing with kids there. Anyway, beyond that, it was a heavy Hispanic
area. Beyond that.
[But to celebrate Goddard Day], I told the employees what I envisioned
[based on my JPL multicultural experience]. I didn’t think anything
of it. The next thing I know, I get calls [from my staff], “Did
you authorize—they came looking for 2,000 dollars from me, out
of my budget, to do something about celebrating Goddard Day.”
I said, “Two thousand dollars? What are they doing?”
He said, “I don’t know, but it sounded good.” I
gave the money.
So people started asking me what was going on, so I said, “I
just want to have a day when we take time out to do a lunch.”
Period. That’s what I wanted. Maybe late in the afternoon and—it
became, after a while, it took on a life of its own. I get [a request
from] one of the facilities guys who wants to run major [conduits
for electrical wiring] from one of the buildings out to the grass
mall in front of my things. “Why?”
“Well, they got an electric band.”
Bands coming in. I said, “Well, no, I’m not ready to dig
up the road for [Celebrate Goddard Day] yet.”
He said, “Okay. We’re going to have to do it with temporary
cables, but that means we’re going to have to close that street
that afternoon.”
I said, “Okay.” It got out of hand. I can still remember
the day before, looking out my window, and now I’m on the sixth
floor, and I see this red and white striped thing being erected. They
rented an immense tent because they heard it might rain. A tent that
200 people could—no, more than that—could get under, [maybe
as much as 500]. … They had bands from every nationality out
there playing. They had vendors coming in with trucks selling stuff
as well as people giving away stuff. They had art. Not only that,
[there] were [sessions of some form] in rooms all around [the Center].
They had lecturers coming in. I started to get the gist of this thing
[earlier], but the tent I didn’t know anything about [until
I saw it being erected]. I didn’t realize how big it was going
to be, (A), the whole thing. I knew they had various things, and they
had films that talked about—they got into EEO stuff, how people
were treated, and I got into one group—I had a little refereeing
to do there. But it’s now become a tradition. It’s Celebrate
Goddard Day, they [still hold it annually].
We did another thing where we did that with technology. Again, people
didn’t know what technology was, right on the Center. So I had
[a] technology [fair] come and show you technology. We had a three-day
technology fair. It became such a big hit, we were inviting people
from outside the Center in. It was open house. People from other Centers
were coming. And they were down to the nitty-gritty technology, and
people walked away and found it useful. The attendance we got was
tremendous. [Again this is still an annual event.]
We then decided we were going to go for the President’s Quality
Award. There was only one [other] Center that ever became even a finalist.
It was Kennedy, and they won some kind of a second-tier award and
nobody had ever got even in as a finalist on the first try. This took
engaging the whole Center, including [a week long series of all-hand
activities in the auditorium]. I, [for example], had [one normally]
very formal Director, up on stage in a hula skirt dancing in front
of all the employees and singing some jingle [to raise employee awareness
prior to the award committee visit to GSFC]. I didn’t tell him
to do that. Every day for a week, we were getting everybody sensitive
before the committee comes in and spends a week with you, going around
and finding out all your processes and every other thing. So I said,
we’ve got to get everybody to [participate in these prep sessions].
So, what do you do? I do the one thing you need to do to get people
to come to a meeting at Goddard, serve food. So every day we had food
and then we had a skit on stage.
Well, the people heard about it. The auditorium was packed. It was
on the TV. People stopped work for two hours every day to look at
this for the week. Every Director of got up there and did something.
They didn’t have to do a skit. They could just get up there
and do “rah, rah, rah.” Well, a bunch of them banded together
and got up there in hula skirts and sang. It was funny. It was a funny
show every day. By Friday, it was “Can you outdo this?”
We had that, and then we had a serious panel discussion, and we sensitized
everybody to it. And we actually became one of their finalists and
recognized as the only one that had ever did it on the first shot.
Then we decided it was too much money to do it. Actually, the committee
said to us, “You didn’t have to take the whole Center
and try to sell it to us. If you just took this little piece of it,
you’re doing more than most.” We didn’t think of
that. We were having so much fun. So that was my life at Goddard.
Then the Administrator called me one day and said, “Hey, Will
Trafton just retired, and I need a head of Human Space Flight, and
I hadn’t thought of you [since you already have the best job
at NASA, but] would you like to come down to [Headquarters to head]
the Office of Space Flight?” That was like a big jump for me.
He said, “All the Center Directors know you because you did
a lot of work with them.” I spent a lot of time down there at
Johnson and Kennedy. I spent two years at Kennedy when I was with
Grumman and they were getting ready for the first launch of that satellite.
But it took me again about overnight [to say yes]. I said, “Well,
let me let you know in the morning.”
He said, “You don’t have to do this. I know you’re
having the most fun you ever had in your life. I’m asking you
to leave the best job you ever had to maybe take on the worst one
you’ll ever have, because it’s a tough job.”
In the morning I said, “Time for a change.”
My wife said, “I knew it.” She said, You weren’t
getting up at five o’clock every morning going to work anymore;
you were not getting up till six some mornings.” She said, “I
could tell.” So then I went downtown [to Headquarters].
Wright:
Did you have any hesitation, since you hadn’t had direct management
experience in Human Space Flight operations?
Rothenberg:
No, the only reason I hesitated is it put me further away from where
the [actual] work was done, working in Headquarters. There were two
things I always said I’d never want to work in Human Space Flight
and I never want to work in NASA Headquarters. I used to say that
because Headquarters, to me, was just a paper-pushing place at best;
not a lot of value added in my simple mind, from my view. And the
second thing was Human Space Flight was the formalisms and the processes
were so rigorous that your impact on the whole thing was kind of small
and, as one person, I really—that wouldn’t be fun. I couldn’t
see the result of what I did, right or wrong, good or bad. That was
my only hesitation.
But I got really tired of hearing all Human Space Flight getting all
the credit for everything, and I decided to go down and get part of
the credit, or something, or get in the middle of it. Seriously, I
got tired of hearing all the problems about Space Station and all
this and all that, and I said, “Maybe I can go do something
about it.” That was part of it. When he asked me what went through
my head, I said, “Well, maybe I can go down and help.”
And, of course, he was into sell mode. No matter what I said, “Yeah,
that’ll work.”
Wright:
You walked in at a very interesting time. Could you share with us
when you took the job in January 1998, some of the first issues that
you were tackling?
Rothenberg:
Well, clearly the image of the Space Station at that time was that—there
were two things. The image of the Shuttle that was going down the
tubes because we were turning it over to USA [United Space Alliance]
to operate. And the Space Station image was that the Russians sort
of had some rusty hardware they were trying to put together to become
a space station. They had this other rusty hulk up there called Mir
that I had to send people to and risk their lives.
Then the third thing was that the U.S. was building things, but they
were so far out of whack in terms of schedule and cost, we’d
been working on them for fourteen years or so, from when President
Reagan said we’ll build a space station in 19[8]4.
When I got there, I found that nothing was further from the truth.
There was a well-organized team building Space Station in the United
States. I went to Russia. Right away, they were committed to building
it. Yes, they didn’t have enough money, but by hook or crook,
they were moving forward. And a lot of the rhetoric you read in the
paper was because they do things differently than us. So the third
thing, they had just come off of a major overrun on Space Station
and they were just waiting for a report out on the committee on what
went wrong and what can you do. Well, that’s always an opportunity
to get well, so I wasn’t worried about that one.
But I didn’t understand all of that, the implications of it
all. All this is hindsight. The first three I certainly understood.
The one to get well, I really could have gotten even weller. I could
have asked for more and I should have, in hindsight.
[One of the first things I needed to do was set a first element launch
date for the Space Station or a visible committee goal.] Unless you
have a visible goal that everybody is working to, you’re never
going to move forward, because nobody—I’m not going to
come in on Saturday or Sunday if I don’t know that I’m
going to have a launch or something at the end of—if somebody
says, “Well, if it launches Thursday or next week, it doesn’t
matter.” Well, why am I going to give up my personal time and
put in that extra effort to go do it sooner. I’ll do it when
it’s needed. If no one cares, then I don’t care. It’s
just human nature. So that’s why you always need a launch date.
That’s why, even when I did the Hubble, I said, “I don’t
care what happens with the Shuttle, we’re going to have a launch
readiness date on this date, and that’s when we’re going
to shoot for. And if the Shuttle manifest changes, that’s okay.
We’re going to be ready for that date.”
And when I told George [W. S.] Abbey that, we did that on Space Station.
He said, “That’s a great idea.” They started calling
things launch readiness dates. So it was independent of what was happening
on any other device—the Russians, the Shuttle—your job
was to get that ready for that date and that was your target.
So having said that, once I got the lay of the land, I went and did
my thing. I had to testify in front of Congress right off the get-go.
Budget time, you know. Got that behind me. And I took that very seriously
the first year. I didn’t by the third year, because I found
out it nothing ever changed. It was a theater. You went there, did
your thing, they got credit for beating you up if you were doing [bad],
giving you credit if you were doing [good], and you went [home and]
you went on with your lives, and that was it. Nothing changed. The
boss tried to tell me that, but I took it real serious. I really thought
I was representing what we were doing, where we were going, and I
wanted them to understand it, and if they were going to beat me up
for it, that’s okay, but [I also expected that if I needed help],
they were going to help me. … [In practice], when [hearings
were] over, [committee members] shook my hand and said, “You
have a tough job.” And they’d go home and we’d go
home and we’d get on with our [jobs].
Anyway, so after I got through [my first set of congressional hearings]
I said, “Okay, now I’ve got to figure out when we’re
going to launch the first element.” So I assessed everything,
and I said I was going to pick this date—I think it was November
of [19]’98—for the first element, which was the FGB [Functional
Energy Block], built in Russia, but we paid for it. Well, the one
faction of the Russians, Energia—it’s like a Center, but
it really is industry, in Russia, had no desire to launch it, because
they were operating Mir, and the minute we started putting up Space
Station, you started to have shut down Mir. That was sort of the rules
and the agreement we made. And the Russians kept saying yes, but their
culture—it was really tough shutting that down. We had to keep
a lot of pressure on them and we had to weave a lot of politics over
there. And of course, we had people like [F. James] Sensenbrenner
[Jr.] who would just say, “Get rid of those Russians. Why do
you have them on the program?” Or “Tell them what to do.”
Everything. He’d say it publicly. Privately he’d say,
“Boy, you’ve got a tough job.” I used to [pre]-brief
him and he’d be okay. Then he’d turn it right around on
us at the hearing, but again, he’d do it for rhetoric, and then
he’d go home.
So we picked a launch date and Energia comes into play, because they
don’t think it’s going to be ready. The [FGB] was going
to be ready to be launched. But it meant that we had to be ready with
our [first piece, “the Node”]. The minute we put a gauntlet
down [by setting the first element, FGB, launch], it [signaled to]
everybody, “No fooling. You can’t just have one piece
up there. … You’ve got to keep putting pieces up.”
And it set the [pace for the next two years].
So first I had to convince the Administrator and he said, “Go
for it.” Then I had to go over and sit and convince the Russians,
I mean really convince them, even though it was our thing, that we
were ready to launch. And it took me three hours in a restaurant out
in California and a lot of vodka one night to finally convince [Energia’s
President Yuri Semenov that] they had no more arguments; they had
to launch. We picked a launch date and I said, “I’m telling
you when it’s going to be.”
He said, “No, I really want it to be the sixth—”
I said, “No, it’s got to be here. Here’s why.”
And this was through an interpreter and with a guy who had no motivation.
I don’t know whether I convinced him or he gave up. I filibustered
him, but the next day we made the announcement. He [took] it back
to the Russia, and I told all of [the ISS Program] that we succeeded
[in setting a date] and that was it. That set the gauntlet down and
then after that, it was figuring out how to make sure everything worked,
and the program did an outstanding job. It [was a tremendous credit
to the ISS Program that everything] works as well as it has. Different
cultures, different countries, never talked to each other. All the
interfaces were different. Being built and all coming together and
working the first time up there is a big deal. I don’t know
how you do that. I talked about this sort of thing with ninety-six
pipes at the other end of a room. You could look at it and figure
that out. And in this case, we had multiple partners build the multiple
pieces, internally to each box as well as each major node, and it
all worked. So they did a [great] job.
The second set of challenges I faced is we had John [H.] Glenn [Jr.]
to launch, and that was interesting, because that was a thrill for
me to meet him. Then he tells my son I’m his newest employee
when he meets my son at a social event. He, coincidentally, met my
son and my daughter, who was getting an award, and he was there to
give it. He said, “Rothenberg. Are you any relation to—?”
“That’s my father.”
He said, “I’m his newest employee.” That’s
the first time in my life my son thought I did anything useful. He
was impressed, he said. That was the only time he’s ever said
that, and the last time.
So that was somewhat of a challenge in that it was the whole media.
It was not the mechanical—well, defending why we should fly
him was always interesting, because whether it was political or not.
I thought it was something we owed him. I thought that from—we
didn’t fly him because we didn’t want to lose a national
hero before. I thought we owed him an opportunity if he was up to
[flying again]. I think it was good for the space program and good
for him, but the media kept poking at it, [claiming it was because
Senator Glenn supported the President]. I knew nothing about the politics,
[but I for one was glad to see him get the opportunity to fly in space
again].
Then as we were closer to launch, all the preparations we had to make,
all of the dealing with the White House security because the President
was coming, and every other thing. I learned a lot. …
[Then we had the Chandra launch commanded by the first female Space
Shuttle commander, Eileen M. Collins.] Then the problems we had on
that launch. [On launch], we lost one pin out of the engine that was
a wakeup. We had a short in the wiring that was a wakeup. We put in
place a review process, which started really looking, a hard look
at the aging of the Shuttle and came out with a bunch of recommendations
[for actions], which we put in place. Some of them still have to be
completed to make it better, but it still [remains that there are
an] inherent set of risks [in flying] the Shuttle, as we’ve
seen from Columbia. No matter what you fix, there’s always something
outside that will bite you. They’re dealing with the problem
on the wing right now, but there’s a [lot of] other ones that
can bite them next time. And they’re not going to find them
all. Hopefully, it won’t result in the same thing [as Columbia].
There’s nothing we can do about that. That’s space flight
and the Shuttle is complex. Even a replacement vehicle is going to
have inherent risks.
What else? The other thing, challenge that I had when I took over,
the Friday before I took over, OMB [Office of Management and Budget]
in its wanting to deal with the Space Station budget zeroed-out the
budget for both people and money for any exploration work. Now, what
that did is it took a bunch of people and told them they weren’t
going to be able to work on what they really wanted to work on in
developing the exploration technology. That was one thing, and maybe
that’s okay.
But the second thing it did is it told the rest of the people that
there is no future for NASA. There’s no exploration work being
done, so there is no future. This happened Friday. Monday morning,
I got a—in fact, I called all the Center Directors Monday morning
to kick off how we worked together, and they told me about what happened
Friday and they told me the implication. I said, “You’re
right. We’ve got to do something.” So I immediately decided
that I’ve got to convince OMB that I need some level of civil
servants, and they—like 200 out of the whole [9],000 that work
[in Space Flight], and I need some small money, 10 million dollars
for the year, just to give them some inkling that they can get some
work done when they need help.
So I called them up and they said “Okay, but—.”
They didn’t want to give the money.
So I said, “What if I just find the money someplace in my budget
and do it?” They didn’t say anything, so I just went and
did it. Well, when I submitted the budget, they, of course, took [the
10 million dollars I had carved out to continue exploration] and used
it for something else instantly.
Second point is, I said, “Okay. I’m going to do it again.”
Not getting it the first time, so I pumped in 10 million dollars in
from another place. Oops. They took that, too. And I said, “I
got it. I got the message.” So I had to keep it in 2 million
dollar chunks and call it different things and tell my guys how to
get at it, but I got the 10 million in there, because I needed it.
I had to do that for morale. I had to do that to save us a future
and so we didn’t lose some of the bright young people.
Then about a year later, the Administrator called myself and Ed [Edward
Weiler]—[Dr. Wesley T.] Wes Huntress, [Jr.] who was the Associate
Administrator for Space Science, when he left, he made a presentation
to the Administrator, myself, and a couple of other people on where
he thought the future of space science was and how important humans
were to help them build large observatories in space. …
[About that time], we laid out a strategic plan for OSF [Office of
Space Flight], and it was the first time, [they had a credible one
in many years]. When we published that thing a year and a half later,
it was one that was believable, because it didn’t say I have
to have a new program. It said this is where I want to go. This is
how I get there in very small steps, until the budget frees up, or
I make enough headway where I can say, okay, now I can take this next
big jump. …
So we developed [the OSF Strategic Plan], then the Administrator took
that and he told [Ed] Weiler [the AA for Space Science, who succeeded
Dr. Huntress,] and I, “Why don’t you guys get together
and figure out an [integrated] plan for Space Science and Human Space
Flight.” And that’s what we did. We actually had our strategic
plans woven together. We worked with a bunch of bright young people
for three years and put together the makings of this exploration plan
that the President announced with the Moon, except our destination
wasn’t the Moon. …
But everything else is the same. It wasn’t a destination; it
was a process by which one gets there. It was pay as you go. It found
ways of getting to the [Mars] in thirty days versus the six months
it’s taken traditionally. It built in overcoming some of the
limitations of the medical care. It built in a way of dealing with
that, because you got there faster and got back faster. It had a way
of engaging the public and formed the base of the way we presented
it to the new administration. It’s teamwork, done it for three
years.
These people—[the team Ed and I assembled], first there were
some that were totally against human space flight at all, and some
totally for science, and never the twain shall meet. And they came
up with a plan that was far better—it’s what started this
whole thing the President just announced, except it wasn’t the
Moon. It went to a place called L-2, which is where the gravity of
the Sun and the gravity of Earth are equal, on the far side of the
Earth, away from the Sun, and that turns out to be a place where you
want to build large observatories.
So what we wanted to do is to get the tools humans need to live and
work in space longer than away from low-Earth orbit, send them to
L-2, build a habitat there, and that was easy to do with some technology
that existed, and have them build these observatories. And the money
was already there [for some of the Space Science missions that needed
humans in space to assemble the spacecraft on orbit]. And [the plan
was that] by the time we were done [with these missions in the next
decade], we were getting science [as well as] on the way to learning
how to do—[the plan was that] the next step was to Mars. And
all the technologies [that need to be developed] were identified and
it was [an integrated plan]. …
Anyway, I [hope the current exploration plan] will morph back to that,
because it’s the only logical plan. By the time we’re
finished going to the Moon–if we keep on going to the Moon,
it’s going to cost far more money [and for less scientific return
than the original plan]. When we get [to the Moon], we’re going
to find out we’ve been there and we haven’t learned—for
what we’re going to spend in the end and the time, it’s
going to disappoint people, I think. I don’t know. That may
not be true, but right now, that’s my view of it. Something
could change my mind, but I haven’t seen anything yet.
Why don’t I take a break.
Wright:
Sure.
Wright:
Can you talk to us some about that and how you were involved in some
of those negotiations?
Rothenberg:
Okay. Let’s see. Some of them are a little sensitive, but let
me start with—they had sent us a letter saying they were considering
sending an American up. I think it was the first one, the American,
[Dennis] Tito—may have been the journalist, but anyway, they
sent us a letter saying they were considering doing that, and they
said in the letter, “We ought to get together and talk about
it.” We took the letter and said, “Okay.”
I looked at it and, to me, I almost looked at it as there’s
no policy we have against it. It’s their business and they need
money, and we ought to figure out a way over time that makes sense,
to do it, but let’s not make it get in the way of the operational
mission.
Well, there were certain people in NASA who didn’t believe that.
They merely said, “Can’t be done. The taxpayer will look
at that as a folly. They spent all this money to fly tourists.”
Well, if we didn’t give away ownership of the Space Station
with the Russians when we brought them onboard, in effect, that would
be true, but we gave away an awful lot to get them to engage. So they
are a sovereign country and they did own the rights to do certain
things and they could do them unilaterally, and anything we wanted
them to do differently was going to have to be negotiated, not mandated
and not entitlement. So we spent a lot of time, first, trying to convince
them, “No. This is dumb.” Secondly, saying, “Okay.
Maybe it isn’t so dumb, but you’ve got to pass these criteria
before you’re ready to do it.” Then third, when they passed
the criteria, said, “Never thought they could.”
So we—I say “we” as an agency collectively, although
a lot of people had quite different opinions—were polarized
[against flying Mr. Tito at that time]. We spent a lot of time going
over, line by line, what the safety rules were and all that stuff,
and a lot of time ignoring it and saying, “Nope. We’re
going to go back and fight one more time not to fly. This is too hard,”
and we kept getting sent on a lot of missions to go fight that. In
the end, we had no leverage. They were going to do it. Period. We,
in the final analysis, figured out a way to save face and go let them
do it, and that’s what happened.
Wright:
Right before you retired, there was a report that came out, one that
the Administrator had commissioned to study the Space Station Management
Cost Evaluation Task Force. Could you give us some background how
that came about? Was that something that came out of the Administrator
or based on the Administration?
Rothenberg:
No, no. Well, what happened is, going about eighteen months before
that, there started to appear a bunch of new work needing to be done
that was unfunded. Nobody planned on it. Everybody thought it was
done; didn’t know it was needed. What we found is that it rolled
up to about 4 billion dollars and it rolled up right at the change
of administrations, so that made it very sensitive. Did the old administration
fail to disclose that? Did we just find it? What was the truth? That
was part of it. Then, how did it get there? Well, the bottom line
is we looked at pieces and it got there like any money, typically
it crept up on the guys and it crept on. And part of it was OMB took
about a billion and a half to two billion dollars away from us, between
OMB and Congress. So it really wasn’t 4 billion; it was 2 billion,
but that was last year, when you didn’t look like you needed
the money. See it was hard [to defend against OMB and Congress looking
to use the money they saw as unspent by Space Station to solve other
problems].
What happened is the program—well, let’s stick to the
trail. So we went and I formed a team to go down and start to understand
it and we found out it was about 4.8 billion, I think, at the end.
Then we brought back about a billion or so in savings. Then we always
said we wanted an outside committee—you’ve got to do it
in something like that—and we—[with] the Administrator—we
sat down and we formed the committee. We picked the list of people
that we thought were the right kind of people; ran it over to OMB;
ran it to the Congress; they said okay. We asked [A. Thomas] Tom Young
to head it up. I was involved in that. Then we went and had them look
[at the program and overrun].
They concluded that the way the [program] was capped in the first
five years, by Congress, at 2.1 billion [per year], forced things
to be kicked downstream in reserves, and content to be moved, because
you couldn’t fit them in the [2.1 billion dollars annual cap],
and [the] reserves ([budget] margin) they had [with the cap for unforeseen
problems was actually spent to accommodate new requirements such as
bringing the Russians into the program]. That led you to not knowing—and
not a set of good project management tools to keep track of that [work]
as it moved [into the out years]. That was what they concluded in
a nutshell, I think, is the essence of what the problem was.
They also didn’t like the idea that we managed to an annual
budget, but unfortunately, I don’t think they got it, because
that’s the only way you can manage a large [federal government]
program, is to an annual budget. You don’t have a lot of flexibility,
because from year to year they take money away. You can’t save
money and say, “I’m not going to spend it this year.”
That’s when they take it away. They say, “Well, you don’t
need new budget. I’ve got other problems.” Well, they
only live from election to election, so you really have to consider
that. I don’t think the committee ever did get that one. Many
times I said it, and they said, “Nobody can manage it.”
They all fundamentally came from industry, “Nobody can manage
a program like that.”
I said, “There isn’t any other choice. You don’t
have any other choice. Give me another choice.” That was [our
push] back [for which they had no answer]. This was in the closed-door
sessions, when I was inputting the report. I was the sanity check
on their conclusions. I was the one they went to and said, “Okay.
Here’s what we think we heard.” And where I saw things
where they were coming out of whack, I’d throw my two cents
in, but it didn’t always change them.
Wright:
Then you retired in 2001, three years after you took that job.
Rothenberg:
Four years. Since the 1960s, I’m the only person to hold it
for more than two years.
Wright:
What prompted you to retire at that time?
Rothenberg:
I wanted to retire the year before. I had always said I wanted to
retire at sixty years old and [and pursue my sailing and photography
hobbies as well as spend more time with our grandchildren and travel].
That was always my goal. I had a sailboat, and really had that intention.
We had a sailboat for thirty years and I loved the bay. Anyway, I
still go to Italy and I have family there. So I planned it. And the
Administrator asked me to stay until he [understood whether he] was
leaving or not.
And [at the same time the] Space Station problem started to pop up
and I said, “ I think we’re going to need help getting
through this. I don’t want to leave in the middle of it.”
So I decided to stay around about another year, and that was it; it
was time. Simple as that.
Wright:
Currently you serve—
Rothenberg:
Also—one other little minor thing—I was also being considered
for, in my mind, [by] the Administrator, if he stayed on [for] the
Deputy Administrator—that’s what he told me; and I was
told by the incoming administration, when the new Administrator came
in, I would be high on the list for Deputy. I wasn’t sure I
wanted that as a political appointment. I wasn’t sure I wanted
to go through that hassle. But, on the other hand, that was another
reason I stuck around, to see [what I might do next in NASA] but it
became apparent to me that the new administration wanted a new breed
of people, a different kind of people, and if they brought in who
I thought they were going to bring in—not the person, but the
type of person—they wanted somebody else besides me as Deputy.
They’d want an astronaut, because there’s going to be
somebody [as Administrator] that really has no space flight experience
at all, and [certainly] no human space flight experience, so they
need the most credible one in that second slot, in case anything ever
happens, and that’s what they did. That was just common [sense].
Then the other thing, Tom Young is a personal friend. He was the Center
Director at Goddard for a while, and I talked to him about an exit
strategy relative to that.
He said, “Well, I can only tell you that if the new administration
wants you, they’ll get you no matter whether you’re there
or not. Don’t hang around waiting for the new guy to be named
and come in.” And that just cemented it. My wife and I went
off and spent some time in Italy at the end of that summer. That’s
when I really made that decision. Even before the Young Committee
had started, or just about the time, I made the decision that this
was it; this year was going to be it.
Wright:
During your decades with NASA, there was always a lot of discussion
about privatizing and/or entering into commercial ventures with private
companies with NASA. Could you share with us some of the issues that
you faced?
Rothenberg:
I was a champion of commercialization, privatization. In fact, one
of the things when I was Associate Administrator is, I developed the
plan, got the bids, and signed the first agreement where NASA and
a commercial company went into a partnership, where NASA actually
had 25 percent ownership, and would get 25 percent of the revenue
of this company—what the heck was the name? Dreamtime was the
company and they were going to publicize NASA’s data archives.
In exchange for that, they were going to give us 100 million dollars
and they were going to give us HDTV, which is why I said, I said there
is no way—I got HDTV for it.
Then we got something out of it. They got nothing out of it. They
had about 5 million dollars invested. The rest of their investors,
who I met, were all DotCom [Web-based business] people who made a
lot of money. Unfortunately, they lost it right about the time we
started this. But that was one piece.
The second thing is I put in place a commercialization plan for Space
Station, and this was a piece of it, in fact. That was my direct doing.
I believed in it. I went over and sold it to Mark Uhran, went over
and sold it on the [Capitol] Hill and everybody else, and I was into
advertising—there were a lot of things we wanted to do that
I felt were doable. It also involved commercializing the Shuttle in
some ways. We actually tried that.
In addition, [I was pushing to get in place], much like the Space
Telescope Science Institute, the [International] Space Station [Research]
Institute. In fact, the RFP was about to come out [this past] January
[but after the Space Station science was curtailed by NASA], they
put it on hold. But I, even as a consultant, worked on that thing.
But myself and Mark Uhran [championed a Space Station Institute] and
sold it [to the Space Station community, Congress, and the Administration].
It took a tough job to sell it.
The Shuttle [commercialization, privatization] was the toughest one
[to get industry interested] in that the infrastructure to operate
Shuttle is very expensive, and the rules on what you can fly as a
government payload commercially, there are some rules about what you
can actually fly. Then the question is, does the commercial guy pay
full cost? Does he pay for one-sixth or one-fifth of the annual operating
costs, including the infrastructure, or does he just pay the marginal
costs? Well, if you’re paying for the annual operating costs
for the total thing, you’re talking about six to eight hundred
million dollars a Shuttle flight. If you only have four flights a
year, it’s even more—now it’s at five. If you’re
talking about the marginal costs, you’re talking about 90 million.
That’s competitive with conventional launch vehicles.
We put together a plan that closes—a business plan on that,
the USA could never do it, so we ultimately scrapped—well, we
didn’t quite scrap it. We were still looking at a few things
when Columbia happened. They were still looking at it and then they
just—at this point, it’s been neither scrapped or—just
so far on the back burner that—
Wright:
You touched earlier on the challenges of Centers working together
and the different cultures meshing. How was it different for you when
you were in the Associate Administrator’s job directing the
work of four Centers, where you were not trying to work as a partner,
but you were directing those Centers? Were you able to make a difference
on how those cultures meshed?
Rothenberg:
That’s a tough thing to do. I did. I believe I did [achieve
some inter-Center collaborations], anyway. I did some things in place
that forced them to work together. I moved the Delta Launch Vehicle
Program out of Goddard. I agreed to do it while I was Center Director
and I finished it up when I was AA, and moved it to Kennedy. Then
I forced Marshall to be the engineering arm of that, which Kennedy
was going to try to go it alone, but I made a partnership there. They
actually have collaborative engineering tools between Marshall and
Johnson, so that the engineering expertise of each other are tapped,
because they don’t have the same expertise. Little inroads like
that, but they were all small. There is such a suspicion between Centers.
It’s a little kids, “He got three extra ceiling points;
I want three extra ceiling points.”
That’s the other thing I did as AA. I made the case, and won
it, to stop downsizing. We were downsizing. In fact, if we continued—we
started out at 11,000, we went down around 9,000, and we were heading
toward 7,000. We were probably at 8,500, and I was able to finally
convince, through data, that this is a disaster. We stopped and turned
it around, and now they’re probably at 9,000, 9,500. But I bring
that up because it was all part of when we did that, who got more
slots, who got less slots. Everything was a big negotiation. You can’t
do it unilaterally. You can’t just say this is—you can
do that, but then you’ve got to be prepared to defend it, and
that’s what the negotiation is all about.
Wright:
Through your years with NASA, and even back when you started with
Grumman, through the years as you’ve worked with the space industry
and space agencies, is there a time you would consider to be one of
your most challenging?
Rothenberg:
Each in a different way. That’s hard. Most enjoyable—every
one was challenging. If you think about it I’ve always been
dumped into—ever since I was dang solar arrays, or even the
very first thing, when I went to the wind tunnel on the Gulfstream,
that was a disaster, and somebody handed me a rat’s nest of
wires and said, “Make it work.” But I’ve always
been dumped into a problem, so unless I have a problem to work on,
I lose interest rather quickly. So each one was challenging.
Hubble was obviously the one that made the most impact on the agency,
I think, clearly, and the one that I grew the most in, in managerial
skills—well, I think so, yes. I was always building on something
I learned in the past. I just found different ways to apply it. But
certainly that was the thing that enabled me to be the Center Director
and all those other things.
Wright:
You mentioned earlier, too, some little tidbits that you learned as
you went through the line, that you feel is important to get the job
done. Would you like to share some of those little tidbits with us?
Rothenberg:
They're just little things, like the top ten. That’s just little
tools. Things that people, unless you tell everybody what your priorities
are and think about them and write them down, sometimes you don’t
know what they are. Everything is in chaos and high priority.
Oh, get well. Look for opportunities to get well. When you’re
managing a project and the leader, and you don’t—every
time you start to see money problems or something like that—panic.
You look ahead and say, “Are there going to be opportunities
up ahead or am I running out of runway to get well?” “Is
there liable to be a schedule slip and I can use that to add some
money or save some money?” You know, “How can I get well?”
And “get well” isn’t always brand-new things. So
those kinds of things.
The third thing is, go in there, even if you don’t know what
you’re doing, but you’ve got to act confident or everybody
else is going to follow suit, so you’ve got to always be—sometimes
you’ve just got to just play the leader and say, “We’re
going to succeed,” and not even knowing how, then go in and
help figure out how. Because once you commit to it, your brain goes
into a whole different level of working, and you figure out some ways,
“If I don’t do that, I’m going to embarrass myself
big time.”
There are some that were impossible. When we were trying to find 4
billion dollars to make the shortfall up; that one I determined was
impossible at some point. I finally went and told the Administrator,
“It ain’t gonna happen.”
Wright:
Before we close today, I was going to ask Jennifer if she had any
questions.
Rothenberg:
One other minor thing—not so minor. It was important at the
time, but the other challenge when I took over at Goddard was that
they had decided to close down Wallops right before I took it over.
Senator Mikulski got over there and said, “Over my dead body.”
Stood up on the cafeteria table and said, “We’re going
to duke it out with those newcomers on the mainland. We’re not
closing Wallops.”
The Administrator called me up and said, “Go find a mission
to make Wallops useful and make the Center happy.” We spent
a fair amount of time going to Wallops. I liked it down there; it
was fun. They have a great bar and a great pool table. But other than
that, I’d go down there. I appointed a person—there was
Navy on the base there, so I had a woman Navy captain that worked
for me and I suggested that her job was to figure out a mission for
Wallops, and I gave her some [new] work for [Wallops] when I reorganized,
I took the attached Shuttle payloads and moved them down there and
I said, “They got an airfield. They can fly into the launch
site. They’re great for that. They used to working with universities.”
So I made this the centerpiece and then I built this—I think
it was called Mission 2000—for Wallops. But basically, it had
some meat, but it [unfortunately wasn’t a lot of new work for
Wallops]. We didn’t have a lot to give them. …
The Administrator [had] me present it to Senator [John] Warner and
Senator whatever— [Charles] Robb, and [Senators] Mikulski and
[Paul S. Sarbanes from Maryland]. And everybody thought this was the
greatest thing since canned soup, and Wallops had a vision. …
As part of that I got the [Virginia] spaceport licensed, helped them
get their license because that was languishing, and we put [the spacecraft
into Mission 2000 for Wallops]. But right now they’re in exactly
the same throes. People are [trying to close] down Wallops again.
Wright:
You have retired from NASA, but currently you serve as President [and
a member] of the Board of [Directors for] Universal Space Network,
a company that has a history and future connected with the space agency.
Can you tell us some of the projects that you’re working with
and how they do tie back in?
Rothenberg:
Let’s see. We own [a Spacecraft Tracking Network of ground stations
and network operations centers]. We [used commercial investment for
their development], and clearly, what we’re doing is [pioneering
the outsourcing of] a function that used to be done by the government
[and by spacecraft builders with their own private networks]. …
The government used to have the whole ground network of antennas which
collect data from satellites and relayed it to the users. NASA has
agreed to outsource, get rid of their own. They’re not investing
in them anymore. [Neither are the spacecraft manufacturers; both the
government and the spacecraft builders are learning it is more cost
effective to buy tracking devices commercially.] … We’re
one of the few companies—there are only two in the country that
[provide the service], so we’re in great shape for that. And
the other company works with us because they fill a hole we can’t
fill, or they fill it better than us—we’ve tried to fill
it—and we do the rest. …
We’re now looking to get into the operations business, where
we’re going to be the [satellite] operators for some commercial
satellites. We’re negotiating with multiple ones simultaneously
and don’t know if any of them will ever come to pass. …
Wright:
We thank you for spending the day with us. Are there any other areas
or anything else that you’d like to add before we close? Any
other thoughts about the great pictures that Hubble just released?
Rothenberg:
I haven’t seen them. Are they the ones the ultra-deep space
field? Yes, the first time we pointed the camera out into deep space
was in [19]’93, ’94, the deep space [survey]—no,
I’m sorry. It was about a year after, and that one alone was
just startling. For all intents and purposes, from the ground, everything
they ever looked was, at best, sparsely populated. They looked at
it and it looked like we were looking at our own galaxy, it had so
many galaxies. We weren’t just looking at solar systems; we
were looking at galaxies out there. This [survey] was even more [scientifically]
interesting [than anyone imagined].
See, I don’t believe we [on Earth] know very much at all. In
fact, we’re certainly not alone, in my mind, as a living thing,
but we’re certainly not alone maybe as a universe. I think there
are other universes out there. Whether they’re just like ours
or totally different, I don’t know.
Wright:
I guess we’ll just have to wait and see, won’t we?
Rothenberg:
Unfortunately, I’m not sure it will happen when I’m around.
Now, maybe you young people. [Laughter]
Wright:
Thank you again.
[End
of interview]