NASA Headquarters Oral History Project
Edited Oral History Transcript

Ruben F. Mettler
Interviewed by Carol Butler
Redondo Beach, California – 7 April 1999

Butler: Today is April 7, 1999. This oral history with Dr. Ruben Mettler is being conducted by Carol Butler at the TRW Space Park Facility in Redondo Beach, California.

Thank you for joining us today.

Mettler: I'm pleased to be here and pleased to participate.

Butler: Thank you. To start with, can you tell us about your roles and responsibilities at Ramo-Wooldridge [Corporation] in the mid-fifties as the ICBM [Intercontinental Ballistic Missile] program was coming about?

Mettler: Yes. I came to Ramo-Wooldridge [RW] in 1955, having just previously been in the Pentagon and in the White House for a year, working for Don [Donald A.] Quarles. Before that, I had known Si [Dr. Simon Ramo] and Dean [Wooldridge] when they were [at] Hughes [Aircraft Company], so I was at Hughes Aircraft Company for several years before that.

My first task there, arriving in 1955, was as an assistant director of what was then called the Guided Missile Research Division [GMRD]. Ramo-Wooldridge had, in the prior year, received an Air Force contract to do the system engineering and technical direction for the Atlas and subsequent ballistic missile programs. My first assignment there was to begin an analysis, along with an Air Force group, of the feasibility of a rapid development of an IRBM, an Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile, which would be aimed at achieving a 2,000-mile range, whereas the ICBM was aimed at a 6,000-mile range. So that was the first task.

We worked during the rest of '55, studying this and analyzing it and did conclude that it was possible to use technology and components and all kinds of learning that had gone into the ICBM for the easier problem of the 2,000-mile range. We got authorization in the fall, actually early December, and I was appointed as the TRW [Thompson Ramo Wooldridge, Inc.] system engineer and program manager for what turned out to be the Thor missile.

Butler: Before you came to Ramo-Wooldridge, had you been aware of the programs to establish the ballistic missiles, and had you been aware of the Soviet progress on that?

Mettler: Yes, indeed. I was certainly aware of it when I was in Washington [D.C.] for a year. I spent my mornings in the Pentagon and my afternoons over in the old State Department Building, and it was very clear, particularly when the United States tested its first nuclear weapon in '52, and when the Soviets then tested their first nuclear weapon in '53, and when it was known that a number of the German scientists had been taken over to the Soviet Union, and when a radar that the United States put in Turkey pointing up over the mountains caught the top of a trajectory, of a ballistic trajectory. If it's ballistic, if you just see part of the arc, it's possible to know where it came from and where it went, so it was known that they were working on it. In fact, actually the Soviets publicized it a little bit, that they were working on a long-range ballistic missile.

So that was very clearly known and understood, and this early nuclear shot by the Soviets in '53 helped to create a great sense of urgency, and that's why the special arrangement was made for the Air Force and General [Bernard A.] Schriever and the whole group to come out to what was then called Western Development Division [WDD], to initiate a crash program which, of course, over the years turned out to be exceedingly successful, and reversed the missile gap, if you will.

Butler: Was it quite a surprise to American engineers and scientists, and even the government, to see that Soviet ballistic program going? Because in America, the ballistic missile program hadn't been considered as a real possibility at that time? Is that correct?

Mettler: Yes, it certainly was, and it was a surprise and it created an alarm. At that point the U.S. missile program, and there were a series of air-breathing missiles and they generally were low-altitude missiles, patterned really after aircraft, and the idea of doing a long-range ICBM was simply not in the program at that point in time. It was that study of the feasibility of that, that General Schriever and Dr. [John] von Neumann and his committee asked Si and Dean, who had just started, started in a barbershop, as a matter of fact, in West Los Angeles, just started the Ramo-Wooldridge Company to do an analysis of it.

The analysis indicated that although there were significant advances, technological advances, that would be required because the technology was not all in hand, it was feasible if an aggressive program that included some new science, some new engineering, some new technology to do a long-range ballistic missile. And that is what stirred it all up and created the crash program.

Butler: As the program was coming under way and as all this technology was developing and the methodology for building it and the different materials needed, was there early discussions or thoughts on applying them to space?

Mettler: It was very clear to everybody that if you could achieve a 6,000-mile ballistic missile, a little more velocity would miss the Earth on the other side and, hence, go into orbit. So it was very clear that a 6,000-mile ICBM, if the payload was reduced or if an additional stage was added, could, without any doubt, be a launcher for a satellite. I used to try to explain that by saying, well, now, [Isaac] Newton, in the seventeenth century—I guess it was seventeenth, yes—had the analogy that if you imagined that there was a tower that was twenty miles high, you threw a rock out, it would land. You threw it a little harder, it would go farther. If you threw it hard enough, it would go around and hit you in the back of your head. So there was no mystery about the fact that some additional velocity and additional technology could become the launcher for satellites and for space.

Butler: When did you first learn that the Soviets were going to make an attempt to apply the launchers to space or was it after they did launch Sputnik? And when they did, what was your reaction?

Mettler: Well, I think, of course, Sputnik, because it just happened and burst onto the scene, was the first demonstration, it surprised many people, as you know, that they'd already done it, but there were precursors. There was evidence that they were working in the long-range ballistic missile program, and there was some talk about, well, maybe in ten years or maybe in five years there'll be space shots. What was not anticipated is that the crashing urgency for the military purposes accelerated the schedule from what had been generally thought it for by—I can't say how many, but four, five, six, for a number of years.

Butler: When Sputnik did go up, were there concerns then that reflected on the programs that you were working on with the ICBM and the IRBM, with America not being able to catch up to the Soviets, and even with the size of Sputnik?

Mettler: Yes, indeed. There was no question that Sputnik changed the attitudes and a number of the decisions in the Defense Department and really all the way up to the President, President [Dwight D.] Eisenhower, because it was a demonstration that they then, the Soviets, if you recall, then tried to advertise as a rationale for having a superior economic system, and this propaganda, what it really was, was quite effective and surprised and affected many people around the world.

There's no question that it stimulated the urgency, and schedules were shortened. I can recall clearly one trip that General Schriever made to Washington at that time. He came back and he said, "Your schedule is now one year earlier than it was," and that went through the whole program. Also it was one of the rationales for the IRBM. It was clearly an easier problem to do a 2,000-mile ballistic missile than a 6,000 mile. The idea was that an early, quick, really very crash program for a short-range weapon could then, in emergency, be deployed forward in England or Italy, even Turkey, if necessary. So Sputnik was an accelerator. It was a catalyst, maybe is the best way to say it.

Butler: As this catalyst did come in and spur things forward, at that time were there discussions on manned space programs?

Mettler: There were some. The Air Force had some papers and RAND [Corporation] did some studies about space. There was not an active, immediate program, although the Air Force did initiate a space program for unmanned surveillance satellites. They called it the 117L, I think. But it wasn't advertised as to what it really was. [Laughter]

Butler: Were you involved at all in those types of studies at this time, or were you still working primarily on the Thor?

Mettler: Once I started at Thor, I was so involved in it, I did nothing else. We went into 60-, 70-hour work weeks, Saturdays, Sunday. It was just amazing what could be done with that kind of urgency. We received—the Air Force received, and Ramo-Wooldridge received then, the system engineering technical direction responsibility in December of '55. By the end of the year, contracts were let, and while it was clear that system engineering deals with the integration and making an efficient integrated system, we did a broader kind of system engineering, because knowing that we had a very, very crash program, we took a very conservative—for example, separated the autopilot from the guidance system so it would be possible to fly the vehicle even when it had no guidance system yet.

One half of the engine that was planned for Atlas, which was to have two barrels at 150,000 thrust, we took one of them, cannibalized from that program, derated it to 135, to be on the conservative. Turned out it did produce 150 and all that. We knew that with this kind of a crash program we would need to be as conservative as we could, but also very, very aggressive. The Air Force and the Defense Department decided on what was then called concurrency, going immediately to production drawings, even for the flight test vehicles. So that led to a good thing, which was there were enough vehicles, test vehicles, to have a very intensive flight test program, but it meant also that there was a very, very short development period.

The sizing of the missile, I remember, with Douglas Aircraft [Company, Inc.], with the Air Force, Ramo-Wooldridge, with the other contractors, took place about six weeks after go-ahead. Based on the studies that had been made in '55, rather than a whole new development program, it was just rushed right into construction.

Butler: And it all seemed to come together.

Mettler: Well, it did, but there were some dramatic moments. We had the first Thor missile on a pad read to test within a year, which is just astonishing.

Butler: That's great.

Mettler: And because of the crash program, there were no test facilities, so it was necessary to use the launching facility as the test facility for the propulsion system. That meant, then, that it had to be designed in a way that could hold the missile down as it would in a test site before launch, and that little issue, that little problem, became a very, very important thing about a month later when the first flight test—we had what we called flight readiness tests. Those were just tests of the propulsion system.

When the first launch was really scheduled and ready to go, it was on the pad, the launching structure had been designed to hold the missile down, then release for launch. At that first launch, the missile went up about eighteen inches, fell back, exploded, and blew up not only itself, but the first launch pad.

Butler: Oh, that's not good.

Mettler: That's not good. We absolutely couldn't find anything wrong. I was in the blockhouse. The Air Force leaders in the blockhouse. Lewis [G.] Dunn was in the blockhouse. We were at countdown, countdown. Everything was okay. There was no problem. The telemetry was perfect. But it blew up. So all the pieces were taken, we laid them out. Every scrap of film that anybody had was used.

And one day about—took about a month, we were looking at a film and there was a Douglas aircraft technician, two of them, pulling a liquid oxygen hose, with the back of it in the dirt. Even a few grains of sand in a percussion, under pressure, in liquid oxygen can be an explosion, and there was, because of the requirement that to shift the fuel from a ground tank to what was in the missile itself, there was a great big valve there, and that was reproduced after it was tested and some sand was put in, an explosion was created. You could then see that the pieces of the valve could only go together if they had broken outwardly, and that led, then, to a conclusion that what caused the failure was a fire and explosion of dirty— [Laughter] Naturally, that changed the procedures. But after all that work, all the work, it was a dumb thing. [Laughter] And luckily, the next one flew.

Butler: You learned lessons from the first one and were able to apply them.

Mettler: That was kind of an exciting time. [Laughter]

Butler: A very exciting time, overall.

Mettler: Now, Si Ramo, who, among all of his other characteristics, has a fantastic sense of humor, said, "Well, we've shown it can fly. The only problem is, it has a 1,500-mile CEP [Circular Error Probable]." [Laughter] It was aimed to go into a spot down range, which it never got to. So we missed that.

Butler: Only missed by 1,500.

Mettler: By 1,500 miles. Maybe he told you that story, I don't know.

Butler: He mentioned it briefly. He did. So it's good to hear.

Mettler: I saw it from the other end.

Butler: As you were doing these programs and beginning to flight test the missiles and having successes and failures, how much was the public aware of what was going on? And if they were, what was their reaction, do you recall?

Mettler: Generally, I think the public was not aware of very much of what was going on. Obviously, once the missiles got to the launch stage, the test stage, and they were there, it was known. But in the earliest period, there was pretty good security.

Ramo-Wooldridge, as Si may have mentioned, started in a barbershop, chairs were moved out for office space. But then the next facility was a Catholic church, and the pews and the choir loft were emptied. The computer was put there, and that was the next office building. And General Schriever, who was across the street in a building, had his officers and his headquarters there. After a little while, there was a question among some of the local residents, "Why are these Air Force officers in civilian clothes cashing checks here?" [Laughter] But it was not known what precisely they were doing. So for, I'd say, probably for the first year and a half, until the launches began, it was pretty well held.

Butler: As the program began to move forward and as Sputnik was going up, and then the Americans began to make efforts for launching our own satellite, were you at all involved in discussions on that, on American response to Sputnik?

Mettler: Yes, yes. Our principal role, and my own principal participation, was really on the question of the ballistic missiles as launch vehicles. That, after all, is what we were doing. We also had some early opportunities, when NASA [National Aeronautics and Space Administration] was just beginning, to bid on some—TRW did. By that time it was TRW. There was a merger between RW and Thompson Products, which was a Cleveland [Ohio] company, [that] financed Si and Dean in the beginning of Ramo-Wooldridge.

There was an opportunity to be a contractor for the spacecraft, and so one of the things that we did at Space Park was began the construction of a spacecraft design and testing facility, which is about 200 yards from where we're sitting here today, before we had any contract. There was a gamble that it would be possible to win work, and we, indeed, did. We won the design of what was called an Orbiting Geographical Observatory, OGO, it was. And that then put TRW into the satellite part, in addition to the boosters. I became the president of what is now Space Park at that point, and I finished what I had been doing on the boosters.

Butler: You mentioned as NASA was beginning to form and that was when you began to be involved in the satellite side of things. The formation of NASA, did you expect that? Was it a surprise? Did you feel it was a logical extension of the way the future of the space program should go?

Mettler: I certainly felt it was a logical way to divide the program between a civilian program that would be focused first on science objectives and then on communication and other civilian-oriented from the military program. By that time, the military had a substantial amount of effort in surveillance systems, and I think it was simply very clear that NASA couldn't—NASA made a very quick start, partly because of the Sputnik and because of the general acceleration, the U.S. really decided to demonstrate that our industrial system really could surpass what the Soviets had. I don't know the exact number, but my memory is that something of the order of perhaps—it must be a matter of record—several hundred Air Force officers that had experience in the ballistic missile program, and certainly some that had experience in the Navy program, were secunded to NASA in various jobs. Turned out that several of the senior TRW employees were hired and put into jobs by Jim [James E.] Webb, who was a very effective NASA Administrator.

I think one can make the general point that without the launch vehicle and without the industrial base—this is very important, the fact that during the ballistic missile program, the largest and most effective companies in the United States were contractors, so Boeing [Airplane Company] and Rockwell [International] and Bell Labs [Bell Telephone Laboratories] and General Electric [Corporation], so they were there, having worked with the Air Force on the ballistic missile, they were then there and ready to go as contractors for NASA when the NASA programs, and particularly Apollo then, was able to turn also to those contractors for support.

So I think my sense is that the impact was such that there would not have been a space program of the kind that the U.S. had in the seventies, just wouldn't have been, without the precursor of the ballistic missile and particularly the leadership of General Schriever and, I'd say, Si Ramo also. Schriever was an exceptional Air Force officer, a great leader, and he cooperated totally with NASA and helped wherever he could to get it going.

Butler: The evolution of the relationship, I guess, between Ramo-Wooldridge and the Air Force first, and then bringing in NASA and the Air Force, then the contractors that you talked about, was that a comfortable relationship? Did it evolve naturally?

Mettler: Well, a very clear part of the arrangement that the Air Force had for ballistic missile program was that Ramo-Wooldridge, and then TRW, in the role of system engineer and technical direction, would do that and were not allowed to bid on any hardware or any particular subsystems for ballistic missiles, so that the objectivity of the system engineering and technical direction could not be questioned in terms of any self-interest. That arrangement, by the way, continued for another couple of decades with TRW not bidding or participating in any way on any of the ballistic missile hardware.

When NASA came along, TRW was eligible to bid, again not on the boost vehicles, but on the spacecraft or on engineering generally. And that's then when we were allowed to bid on things like OGO, and subsequently became a contractor for Apollo, but for non-booster aspects of the Apollo Program.

Butler: Looking back on the boosters, NASA and the Air Force were working on bringing up a manned space program and needed boosters to make it possible, and so began to look at the Atlas and the Titan. As those discussions were beginning, what were your thoughts about putting a person on top of something that had been meant to explode?

Mettler: The kind of thoughts you think at four o'clock in the morning. [Laughter] Clearly—and the ballistic missiles, as you know, during the test program had a number of failures. Thor did for a particular problem in a turbo pump that destroyed a number of the test launches at the end of the launch. The missile would take off and go, and go about 1,500 miles and then it would explode. So there were those failures, and a very tough decision had to be made whether the flight test program should be stopped, because it was clear that there was a need to redesign that pump. It was a part of the Rockwell engine, and it would also be the turbo pump that the ICBM would use. So very intensive program was focused on that. But that certainly kept in our minds, going back to your question, that reliability is important in any event, but if those boosters were to be used, we knew they would be used to send men into orbit, that we needed to double-check everything.

Now, it's true that by that time Thor, the Atlas, the Titan had all had a record of successful flights, but even so, it was a difficult, tough kind of a feeling. And as you know, luckily—I say luckily; maybe it's more than luck—they were very successful in those early flights, even though the astronauts then that rode those flights were themselves knowledgeable and fully informed about what the gamble was, and turned out that none of those boosters failed to do what they were supposed to do.

Butler: Very good thing.

Mettler: Excuse me for a minute. [Brief interruption]

Butler: Were you involved with taking the steps to ensure the reliability on these, that they could be man-rated? Were there certain things that had to be changed for the Atlas and the Titan, to ensure that they be safe?

Mettler: The answer is yes, there were some things. By that time I was no longer really working on the ballistic missile part of the program per se, so I was not personally involved in the man rating, so to speak. Generally those requirements went more to escape mechanisms, ways of testing more thoroughly perhaps than previously was the case, reviewing everything that was known about the ballistic missiles that failed, to get whatever learning was possible. But I personally was not involved very deeply in that.

Butler: How did your role change and evolve with Ramo-Wooldridge and then into TRW as the programs were progressing? You mentioned you started working on the Thor.

Mettler: I worked on the Thor, and when we were deep into the flight test program and it was clear that it was going, I was asked to become the program manager for Minuteman. Even though there was an Atlas and a Titan being developed in parallel, with some common subsystems, the urgency of the program and the importance and the difficulty, going back to the beginning where it wasn't obvious that the technological advances could be done as quickly as what was desired, so there were two parallel programs.

The Atlas vehicle had, from a deployment point of view, some disadvantages because of its propellants, which would then have to be maintained in a military circumstance. Titan had propellants that were more stable and then the solid propellant technology that went into the Minuteman became the precursor for some of the large solid rockets that were then developed for the Shuttle some years later. So I became the Minuteman program manager for—gosh, I can't remember how many years. [Laughter] For about eighteen months or so, to get it going, and then was asked to be the chief project leader for the whole group, for Thor, Atlas, Titan, which was a broader administrative management task, but no longer directly responsible or applying my energies to one or another of the missiles.

About that time, Lewis Dunn, who had been the president of the Guided Missile Research Division, and the president of Space Technology Laboratories [STL], had a health problem, and I was asked to become the president of Space Technology. I did that and we went on into both NASA and military satellites and spacecraft, then became a participant in the Apollo Program, particularly for the landing vehicle.

One of the particular things that NASA needed to land on the moon was a throttleable rocket engine. To that point, rocket engines started and they went until the fuel—they were either shut off or they went until the fuel was gone. Then the solids, there was no way of shutting off the propellants, so they naturally had to just burn completely.

So TRW invented and developed a throttleable rocket engine, which is what the astronauts used then when landing on the moon, to decelerate their descent. As you may recall, in the first landing it was lucky they were able to do it, because there was a big hole where they were going to land. They were able to move sideways and then come down using this throttleable engine.

But we were very delighted and excited as a contractor in the Apollo Program. And a very exciting thing that is almost still emotional, the astronauts came here and shook the hands of all of the people that had been on that program. [Mettler has tears in eyes].

Butler: That's wonderful. They really appreciated the work that you had done, that they needed to be able to do their jobs.

Mettler: We had the ad that said "The last 100 miles is on us." [Laughter] Had an advertisement that was broadcast of that. And it worked.

Butler: It did. It worked great.

Mettler: One little incident. I don't know if you want these kinds of stories.

Butler: Certainly. Absolutely.

Mettler: But in about 1967 or '68, I hadn't gone, myself, to Cleveland yet at that point. I was still here on the West Coast. I had a call from the chairman of TRW. He said, "My God! We're responsible for this. The whole world's going to be watching. Oh! Is it too late to get out?" [Laughter] He was kind of kidding. "Is it too late to get out of it?"

So the answer was, there was great apprehension everywhere. We had it, but the astronauts, I'm certain, had it more, about whether they could actually accomplish, and there was a question how would it be when the blast out of the engines stirred up the moon dust, and could they even see. It was just a complete adventure into new territory.

Butler: It must have been so rewarding to see it work.

Mettler: It was.

Butler: Do you remember where you were when they landed?

Mettler: Oh, I absolutely do. [Laughter] I know exactly where I was. I was in Cleveland that day, and I was in a building and took an elevator down. There was a woman in the elevator who was talking to a friend, and she says, "You know, they say they're going to land on the moon. That's ridiculous. That can't happen." [Laughter] That's what this lady thought.

I went to where we lived. No point in being down at the Cape [Canaveral, Florida]. We watched it on television.

Butler: And it worked wonderfully.

Mettler: It did.

Butler: In fact, it even worked for Apollo 13. The engine was critical in that.

Mettler: Yes, it was. It was.

Butler: Were you involved with—

Mettler: Yes, indeed. The minute that happened, we were on line continuously, and anybody that knew anything in TRW about that engine or anything about it was immediately available. We had a large group of engineers in Houston [Texas] on a program that was designed, I think very wisely designed, by NASA to try to anticipate things that might go wrong, so that what if this occurs, what do you do? What if this occurs, what do you do? What new software would be needed? Or whatever.

So that while no one anticipated Apollo 13, there was a background there of several years of work at Houston, and we and other contractors—we were not alone in this—worked on the "what if" questions. And there's no question in my mind that that kind of preparatory information and thinking helped the people who really made the decisions when the Apollo 13 accident happened.

Butler: It must have been good to see that all come to a successful conclusion, getting back.

Mettler: Absolutely.

Butler: Going back a little bit toward the early programs as the missions were progressing for the Mercury, first was Alan [B.] Shepard [Jr.]. He actually went up on a Redstone, and right after his launch, President [John F.] Kennedy came out and said, "Hey, let's go to the moon by the end of the decade. Let's do it safely, bring them then back to Earth," which then led to Apollo. What did you think when you heard that announcement, that challenge?

Mettler: [Laughter] My first thought was, this is a great thing, but at the moment it seemed more like a clever political move than the real knowledge that that could, in fact, be done in that time period. There's no question that it was an acceleration and a stimulating and really, as it turned out, a fantastic program, and it certainly had the result, it certainly did result in this incredible Apollo Program, and it was in political terms and in international U.S.-Soviet Union relationship terms, a clear indication that not only was the missile gap reversed during the fifties, but that the U.S. industrial system and technology and system of governance, basically, was superior to what the Soviet Union was able to do and, of course, as we know, they never were able to do that.

So it had a huge political impact, I think, a foreign policy impact, as well as simply the programmatic impact of actually putting someone there successfully and bringing them back.

Butler: You talked about the buildup of the programs and the importance of the programs, and you talked a little bit about General Schriever and Dr. Ramo. It seems that to have such a successful program come through, and such a challenge to be able to go from not having any missiles, ballistic missiles, and building that all up so quickly, that it really took people that had a drive and a focus and energy like that. Can you tell us some more about some of those folks?

Mettler: No question at all that it took people all the way—I think General Schriever, as I've mentioned, Si, who was the leader for those programs, for Ramo-Wooldridge and then later, but also in the Pentagon and going all the way to Eisenhower. He created the opportunity for us to have priority access to virtually any type of materials or contracting requirements, and a direct-line system was set up that changed the way in which the Defense Department and the Air Force administered their programs, a streamlined system that went directly from the Secretary of Defense through the Air Force to Schriever, and there was a set of special procedures put together. I remember they were called the Gillette Procedures because a Mr. [Hyde] Gillette was the one that developed them and got them approved, so that General Schriever then had extraordinary authority for an officer on a program as distinguished from other programs that the Air Force ran. So it was really top to bottom.

What Schriever did couldn't have been done without the authority he was given, which was rarely available, almost never previously available, and, of course, Si and Ramo-Wooldridge and all the contractors couldn't have done what was done without the kind of leadership that Schriever had, because he was strong enough and clear enough at what he wanted to do and how to do it, that the more senior people in the Air Force had confidence, because, after all, they were giving him a huge amount of authority. It was very extraordinary.

Butler: And he did an extraordinary job with it.

Mettler: He did.

Butler: As the program progressed and the manned program continued, were you able to go down and see some of these launches?

Mettler: Oh, yes, absolutely. Many of them. [Laughter] I was in the blockhouse on many, in the '56, '57, '58 time period, but also was able to go down to the Cape and see the launches much later.

Butler: It must have been interesting to see, having seen the launches first as a flight test to get the missile active, and for such an important part of national security and then to see them applied in such a different way, but yet the space program itself must have had some impact for national security as well.

Mettler: Yes, indeed, and politically for foreign policy circles. I think it was a clear demonstration, as I said earlier, of the American industrial system that was noticed and known around the whole world. So it did have broader implications.

But to your question, it was very exciting. [Laughter] And to know what our hardware was going there and, of course, all of our contractors knew that and felt that, I'm sure, not just we.

Butler: Exciting to be a part of such a program.

Mettler: Yes.

Butler: Over time, and as NASA grew, as TRW grew, and as the Air Force, how did the relationships change and the involvements in the programs? Did that continue to evolve?

Mettler: Yes, because there was a change made in about—oh, gosh, roughly 1960 or '61, where, as I mentioned earlier, with TRW not being able to bid on any of the ballistic missiles, there was then a continuation of the system engineering and technical direction for what was called the MX ballistic missile. It had the name Peacekeeper, which then became the most advanced of the ballistic missiles in military service. The Atlases were relieved of service. They were taken out of service. And then the Titan. Minuteman and the MX became the principal—in fact, the total ballistic missile force.

We continued that program relationship with the Air Force for the MX system, and then in the early—oh, not early. In the middle eighties, there was a competition to create a prime contractor as a more efficient way of—what was thought to be a more efficient way to coordinate the program, because at that time it was mature. Then principal technologies had been developed and TRW was able to bid on that contract and became the prime contractor for the MX missile, and still is. So our relationship continued, but in different ways.

Butler: You mentioned the MX and actually the Minuteman previously, as well, and that the Minuteman was based on a solid fuel technology, whereas Atlas and Titan had been liquid. It would almost seem a contrast of—or actually to look at the contrast between differences and why was liquid gone with first versus solid, and it would seem almost that a solid approach would be a little easier in that there wouldn't be the turbo pumps and intricacies of the engines and so forth. Can you touch on that a little bit?

Mettler: Yes. Well, clearly the rationale for Minuteman was precisely to the point that you were making. It was much simpler, didn't have all that machinery, was less expensive, could more easily be protected. The Minuteman, from the beginning, was designed to rise up out of a silo, and it was possible then to “harden” the silo as a tough, hard target if anyone wanted to shoot at it. So that all the complexity and expense of maintaining liquid oxygen in a military environment, maintaining the liquid propellants for Titan, would become just plainly too expensive if one wanted to really have a large force. So a decision was made to focus on Minuteman.

But up to that point in time, before the beginning of the Minuteman program, there was also a precursor period when intense set of analyses and studies were made about whether it would be possible to go reliably and effectively from small solid propellants, which at that point were maybe that big around [Mettler gestures], to something big and large. Again, the Air Force had a study program for—gosh, it must have been a year or so. I remember Colonel [Edward N.] Hall, who was a specialist in propulsion, led a study program for the feasibility of a large ICBM-sized, so the reason that it wasn't earlier is that technology just didn't exist for solid propellants in large sizes. Solid propellants go back to the Chinese in a few centuries before Christ, in tiny little sizes. [Laughter]

But again, the Minuteman required an advance, and that solid propellant again created contractors who had the facility to do the large vehicles, the first stage, the second stage, the third stage. The Minuteman was a three-stage vehicle, which is more efficient than a one- or two-stage, but it was three stages of solid propellant.

Butler: And the solid propellants eventually continued to evolve and now are being used with the Shuttle Program.

Mettler: Right, and even bigger ones.

Butler: Even bigger, yes. Looking back over your career with the ICBM program, with TRW, involvement in the space program, what was the biggest challenge for you?

Mettler: That's hard to answer. [Laughter] I'm not sure. It seemed—well, clearly I had the opportunity to go through and had a really exciting set of jobs, from Thor to Minuteman, to the four of them, then become the president of Space Technology Laboratories, then turned into TRW Systems, kept changing names. And then in 1960, I guess it was, I was invited to become president of TRW, went to Cleveland, and then in '77 I was the CEO [Chief Executive Officer], and then I retired in '88.

What was the most challenging? I think clearly the biggest step, I think, was at the beginning, in terms of Thor. I was very young and had never at that point—I had a period of program management at Hughes, but I'd never had a project that had that urgency and that crash aspect, and suddenly to be, overnight, almost, responsible for something like that was certainly a very big challenge.

I guess the part of it after the first missile blew up was especially challenging. [Laughter] But continuously I had the opportunity, which I think was fortunate, to have larger and larger responsibility, being CEO of a worldwide company. By that time we had operations all over the world. I think it was in nineteen countries. But it was a continuation of things that I thought I understood, and there was staff support. So in many ways that was less difficult, less challenging than the very beginning.

Butler: In contrast to that, what would you consider your greatest accomplishment or achievement or success?

Mettler: [Laughter] I guess—well, I don't know. I don't know. I wasn't one that sat around and worried about that or sat around and thought about it. I didn't think of myself as working hard to advance in a career. I just thought, well, if I can do what I'm doing and do it well, then maybe someone will have me do something else. So I guess I'd have to say that it was successfully completing a variety of different types of jobs and functions from an engineer to a program manager, to a leader of a small organization, to a leader of a bigger organization.

Butler: And that certainly is challenging in and of itself, to move up and do it successfully. When you first got started, would you have ever imagined where your career would lead you?

Mettler: No, not at all. I went to Stanford [University] in 1941 as a humanities and history student, and I had an advisor, Rick Snyder, who was later the registrar at Stanford. He said to be literate in this day and age—that's 1941—to be literate in this day and age, you should know something about science and engineering. So although my—they had a program then called Independent Study, and the student could elect to do that if the advisor would accept them. You were not required to take the standard courses, but you had to take the standard exam. So I had flexibility about what I could sign up for as a freshman, and I took calculus and chemistry because that's what he advised.

When Pearl Harbor occurred that fall, that changed things completely, and early in the following year I was still seventeen years old, but I applied to the Navy. They said, "Well, we can't take you. Stay where you are. We know where you are. We know when we want you. Just stay right there." So I switched as much as I could to engineering at Stanford.

Then about—oh, gosh, a year or so later, they said, "Now's the time. Let's go." [Laughter] So I became an apprentice seaman in the Navy, but I was selected for a training program, and we were sent to Caltech [California Institute of Technology] for a short, very intense technical program, and I kind of liked it. I thought, well, there's nothing bad about science and engineering. So in a way, I was an accidental engineer because I really was thinking of history and humanities.

I was in the Navy for four years, and when the time came after the two peace accomplishment, Europe and then Japan, I was ready to come home, believe me, but I was tapped on the shoulder to go down to Bikini [Atoll, Marshall Islands] as a part of the instrumentation team that set up the instruments for the tests that were made. That took another four or five or six months.

But it really, really had an enormous impact seeing those two, witnessing those two explosions and the enormous effect certainly emphasized the point that when the Soviets could duplicate that, when the Soviets could duplicate even the nuclear weapon, which is even bigger, that there was no doubt the U.S. needed, and would have, and should have, a superior defense capability. So I can't say that seeing those blasts from about twelve miles or thirteen miles, I guess—we left in the morning on a fast boat and got out on a ship about twelve miles away before it blew—I can't say that seeing those two blasts is what motivated us, for example, on Thor or on the ballistic missile program, but it didn't hurt.

Butler: How did the threat of the Soviet response or the Soviet programs throughout just the ballistic missiles and then even into the space program, was that a driving factor? And how serious was that threat at that time? How much did that impact your daily work?

Mettler: Clearly it was a driving factor in our government, and so since we were a defense contractor and we had other defense work other than ballistic missile engineering and system engineering, and other than components of the space program, clearly that was a driving factor, because our customer in that regard—and TRW is a worldwide automotive manufacturer, automotive components, and about 25, 30, 40 percent of the total of TRW is the space and military component, so we had a customer that was driving very intensively, as you know, to maintain a balance and a defensive position and, if necessary, a standoff position with the Soviet Union. So that clearly was an element. The rest of our business was normal commercial manufacturing and engineering and distribution, but there was a component through the whole time period, and still exists today at TRW, about 30 percent of the company is in the military and space program.

Butler: Purely speculating, and just based on your experiences and thoughts, if the American program, ICBM program and space program hadn't been able to respond and build up and be successful in light of the Soviet threat, how do you think that would have affected the later outcomes, and where would we be today? Just speculating.

Mettler: Well, it's hard to speculate, and certainly nobody knows, but a good example is the Cuba situation. Consider the differences in 1962 if the Soviets had the long-range ballistic missiles and the United States did not. It wouldn't have been possible then for the President to do what he did, because it was clear that since neither party obviously wanted to be lobbing ballistic missiles with nuclear weapons, for God's sakes, that the U.S. was able to defeat [Soviet Premier Nikita] Khrushchev's idea of putting—well, he did—putting short-range ballistic missiles into Cuba. Consider the difference in the political relationships if they had missiles in Cuba and had long-range missiles and the U.S. did not. You can certainly say, I think, without any question, the circumstances would have been different.

Butler: Absolutely. Things did progress forward, and Americans did have a response and built up the programs. As the programs were building up, in fact, and then moving into NASA, were you involved in working with the NASA personnel? I know you said a lot of Air Force personnel did transfer over to NASA, and TRW personnel. But were you involved at all in training some other NASA personnel for like the launch facilities or anything to that respect?

Mettler: I personally, no, was not. Some of our employees were, but I wasn't. I was deeply involved during that whole period from the middle fifties to about 1970 or so in working with governmental groups in trying to understand what the Soviets were doing, and in the middle fifties, because the government itself really didn't have employees—the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] really didn't have employees or the Air Force had a few that knew how missiles worked, we had what was called an all-sources contract with the CIA set up here at Space Park, a group of people who had designed and developed and had been on the ballistic missile program, to intersect the telemetry programs that the Soviets had. After they launched a vehicle, they would have telemetry as the U.S. did, and that telemetry could be intercepted. But not knowing what the codes were, the question was, okay, here we have this telemetry program. What is this? It was possible then for the engineers that actually worked on similar programs to say, "That's got to be the record of a gyro," or, "This has got to be something else."

So we were able then to monitor the Soviet launch program and provide that information, and I was asked to be the chairman of what was called a strategic intelligence panel for three or four years, providing—and we did then assist the CIA in training and developing and in hiring some people who were qualified, so they had an in-house group that could do the work that we previously had done here.

Butler: With that group, were you then able to observe their efforts for the space program as well, and their lunar program?

Mettler: Yes, but—the answer is yes, to observe, but we didn't have the same role in that, what we had done was for the military program. So we observed it, continued to work on advisory panels and groups that were related to that, and would meet with NASA people when I could, and be helpful, but we did not have an ongoing responsibility of that kind.

Butler: Now, of course, in current programs, the relationship between the United States and what was the Soviet Union, now Russia, has completely changed. In fact, there's now cooperation in the space program. In light of your experience and your buildup, is that a surprising evolution or does that seem a logical eventuality?

Mettler: I don't regard it as surprising, because I think it was, in foreign policy terms, an opportunity, after the breakdown of the Soviet system, an opportunity to make common cause in something where one should imagine the opportunity to have common objectives. So I think it was useful and should turn out to be useful, even with its difficulties, because, as we all know, their system is currently beat up and not very effective. And they have not been able to carry out their obligations on schedule and so forth, as you know better than I. But it was an opportunity to work on something after the long Cold War that was so difficult and so dangerous, I think, it was an opportunity then to do something together. And I think it has helped in the relationship between the two countries.

Butler: Speculating for the future and looking at your experience as a contractor, but working with both the military and NASA, how do you see the roles evolving into the future as we do become a more global society and then as NASA is branching out, the Space Shuttle, to USA [United Space Alliance]? How do you see that changing, and what are your thoughts on that?

Mettler: [Laughter] I think I've learned that trying to predict the future is a loser's game. I think over and over and over again we look backwards, we say, "Look at all these changes that have occurred in the last fifteen years. My goodness." Then we tend to project the future as a continuation of the past, but when we look backwards two or three years from now, it's going to be almost certain that what was predicted was wrong.

I think it's clear that there are certain trends in the world that are probably not changeable. I think the global economy is here and it's going to stay. I think national security is going to be needed in the current environment, in different form. I think it's clear that the advancement of technology will continue. There's just an explosion of new scientific results in biology, in materials, in physics. And so what we should see, I think, and imagine and expect is continued unexpected results, new inventions, new discoveries, and we need to adopt a pattern, a mind-set, to anticipate change and recognize that it's going to change and change and change, so that we can't sit on our haunches and say, "Well, now we've got it made. Here we are." I think we have to continue, as a country and as a company and as individuals, to move forward in an exploratory way.

Butler: We'll have to look forward to see what does happen. Is there anything that we haven't covered that you would like to expand upon?

Mettler: No, I think I've probably not answered your questions as well as they could be answered.

Butler: No, it's been fine.

Mettler: But I do think that—I would say this. I really don't—the reason I mentioned to Dan [Daniel S.] Goldin, when we had breakfast here whatever it was, six weeks ago, that I felt General Schriever, who is now in his high eighties, had just never, ever, in my opinion, received the recognition that I would hope he would have for his role as a foundation stone for the space program. He's well known for the ballistic missile program.

So I would just say again that I think it's clear that without that precursor of what the Air Force and Schriever did, we just wouldn't have the space program that we have now. I guess I've said that before, but—and so I'm hoping, and I know Dan is thinking about it—maybe this shouldn't be on your tape—that NASA will give to Schriever a Distinguished Award while he's still alive and still able to know it, and for the country to know it.

Butler: Absolutely. Well, he certainly has played a critical role, as you said, and that is an important thing to emphasize. Absolutely.

I want to thank you for your time and information.

Mettler: You're welcome.

[End of Interview]