Highways Into Space: A first-hand account of the beginnings of the human space program

by Glynn S. Lunney

  In the last two quarters of school in the winter and spring of 1958, I had to stretch the funds to make it. It took a lot of dime hamburgers from the White Tower in Detroit for sustenance. I noticed that after that time, whenever I went close enough to smell the White Tower cooking, my stomach rolled over. People remember different things about college, and one of mine is about a few periods of hunger. While in Cleveland for some of my quarters, I also had a job at Seager’s Sunoco gas station at night and on weekends. That helped, too. Class work and study in my last three years had all the charm of class work and study. But it too passed. The grind of the study quarter was offset by the quarters of work at the Lewis Research center. I worked in five different units there. One of them involved the study of the air cooling of a plugged nozzle used to vary exit area in the jet engine exhaust plane for optimum engine performance. One was jet engine testing in engineering cells. One was to investigate shock tubes and I had several tours in wind tunnels. The most advanced of these was a ten by ten foot test section at speeds up to Mach 3.

  Co-oping brought lasting rewards in beginning to understand technologies, analysis and testing. Jet engine testing relied on extensive pressure (and other) measurements throughout an engine. Today, you might marvel at how we took test points.

  Glynn at College Graduation on left: Mom and Dad on right: Dot and Bernie Ostrowski

  Pressure sensors were fed to a very large vertical board with many manometer tubes, side by side, a room full of them, with a background grid to measure the various mercury levels. As a test point stabilized and was taken, the field of manometers was photographed. This film was then provided to a room full of female data technicians, where they manually read the manometer tube levels in the photos and eventually calculated a pressure for each sensor. This then provided a pressure distribution either inside an engine or over the surface of an engine inlet. This was a very far cry from automated IT systems of modern times, but the process taught rigor, discipline and working with people.

  One of my assignments was the study of shock tubes to create a certain type of photograph, called “schleiren,” of supersonic shock wave patterns. Another was in various wind tunnels, including the ten-by-ten foot wind tunnel, which was unique in all the world. Because of the amount of electrical energy used from the Cleveland grid, it was only operated at night. I was the engineer on duty and did everything the technician, who knew all about facility, told me to do. Respect the source of knowledge, especially when you don’t know zip. Whenever we finished in the morning, I hopped on the back of his motorcycle and went to the Airport bar on Brookpark road for beer and breakfast.

  I really enjoyed my time as a co-op and the lessons lasted all my life. I remember George Smolak, George Wise, Len Obery, Jim Connor, Nick Samanich and Jim Useller, all of whom tried to help this young co-op. So many of the engineers at Lewis were great at what they did and in providing guidance and advice to a young kid. I thank them all.

  Chapter Three: Graduating to the NACA Lewis Research Center

  My brief time at Lewis was fulfilling and a continuation of learning for later challenges. Looking back on my brief time at Lewis after graduation, I see it now as the calm before the storm. As a research center, there was a certain tempo and it was different from what the early manned spaceflight effort was. Lewis had many brilliant engineers engaging the day-to-day problems of our aviation industry and trying to provide solutions, usually in the form of NACA technical reports. They were also working subjects well before their time, such as long duration, low thrust engines for interplanetary trajectories.

  This work was lead by a man with the name of Wolfgang Moeckel. I doubt he ever knew of me but I was impressed with him, his work and the foresight he brought to this subject, many decades before it was ever seriously considered for flight. Lewis and the other NACA Centers, were intellectual property creators for the large and growing field of American aeronautics. The Center had the feel of a well-endowed University research organization. But NACA people were seldom directly involved in the application of their research by US Industry.

  At graduation, in June 1958, I joined a branch headed by George Low. At an early age, George caught the attention of NACA management, both in Cleveland and NASA headquarters in Washington D.C. He was a very talented and highly respected engineer, who was comfortable with both technical and headquarters policy matters. Later in the ‘60s, George became the Apollo spacecraft program manager after the Apollo fire on the pad, which killed three astronauts. This turned out to be a relatively short but very intense period for George, who was one of the group of leaders who made Apollo a success.

  In George’s branch, my section head was John Disher whose hobby was to help with the racecars that ended up at the Indy 500 each year. John’s section was exploring the new subject of the very high-heat loads on entry vehicles into the earth’s atmosphere at extreme speeds. In our small group, our testing was carried out by the air launch of multi-stage solid rocket propellant rockets with a small instrumented re-entry model on top of the stack. The first stage was used to accelerate the stack to higher altitudes and then fire the rest of the stages to propel the model down towards entry conditions of very high speeds. The air launch was from under the wing of a B-57 and flew over the Wallop’s Island test range off the coast of Virginia. There was another group from Langley exploring similar research and using ground launched solid propellant vehicles, one of which became the Scout launch vehicle. I co-authored a NACA technical report with Ken Weston on the heat transfer results on one of these flown models. Writing a NACA report was a rigorous and humbling process, with many reviews of the technical quality and one’s use of the English language to capture the essence of the subject. All young engineers should go through this process at least once.

  As a research center, there were always classes of new graduates coming to work at the Center. And the average age at the Center was on the young side. I roomed with two older hands in Lakewood. One was Jim Useller, older by twenty years and full of experience to pass on to me. Jim was a mentor in many ways, but especially in the lore of NACA and what it took to succeed there. He was also the chef in the house. Pete Wanhainen was the other roommate, and his passion was iceboat racing on frozen Lake Erie. He also liked regular sailing, but that speed was tame compared to his iceboat.

  There was a large group of younger folks still finding their niches. We had a great softball field on the Center grounds and it had a small-truck-size building, refrigerated and well stocked with beer and soft drinks, and a center of competition and fun during the summer months. There was an established softball league and we always had trouble beating the team from the rockets group. Bowling was the game for the colder months. Organized into leagues, bowling competition was a serious business. Some few did not even have a beer till after the frames were done. There were some good bowlers, and then there were most of us who were not so good. One of the friends in our crowd was Pat O’Donnell, who worked at Lewis in fuels and lubes. Her husband, Wally, owned the Fairview Park bowling alley. Pat and Wally hosted parties at their home. And, if you ever wondered what to do with damaged bowling pins, they made great fuel for the fireplace.

  Into this sporting arena came one of the NACA nurses, Marilyn Kurtz. I had already met Marilyn during visits to the clinic and at lunch arranged by a friend. She was the junior nurse of the two at Lewis; the other, Ruth Elder, was more senior by a bunch. Marilyn was much prettier and more fun. Dr. Sharp, who was the center director and a very likable person, often asked Marilyn if the crop of young men was satisfactory to choose from or whether he should hire more. In the winter of 1959, a dozen or so of this intrepid band of bowlers went off to the mountains near Rome, New York, to try their hand at snow skiing. Marilyn taught water skiing as a hobby on Lake Erie, and transferred some of that to snow skiing. Most of the rest of us were complete amateurs. Marilyn was more accomplished with her Stem Christies while we were still snow plowing and trying other poor imitations of sk
iing. On the “one more run” for the day, Marilyn fell, and when her bindings froze up, broke her ankle badly. Gino Bertolli and I found a rescue carrier and dragged Marilyn on it down the hills to the lift area.

  At the clinic, the doctors found the break, set it and put on a cast. That evening we drove off on our return to Cleveland. Maybe as a portent that we could survive together, I was driving the car on the turnpike, with three passengers asleep in the rear seat and Marilyn in the front passenger seat. Hard to see it, but there were stretches of ice. The car started to slide and then to rotate slowly. There was nothing to do but wait and it seemed like a very long time of absolutely no control. The car finally came out of the spin, traveling in the original direction, still at sixty-five miles per hour and okay. Marilyn was in the front seat with her leg propped up on the dashboard. We looked at each other, smiled at our good fortune like co-conspirators and silently thanked our angels. The three folks in the back did not know until later that we had this turnpike ballet. On return to Cleveland and then a check with the hospital, the doctors decided that the break was not set well. They had to re-break it and pin it with a rush nail.

  This accident and recovery had two long-term effects. One is the consistent failure for Marilyn to pass the modern airport screening test and to be subject to special inspections. The other effect of my humanitarian visits to the hospital was the blooming of a flower which eventually became marriage and a full long life together with many wonderful fulfillments and joys. Some skiing accidents are for the best. This one certainly was for me.

  At that time, something began that carried through my working career and even into retirement. And that was the association that I had with the pilots of the NASA aircraft division. Joe Algranti was a leader in the Cleveland aircraft operations and managed to get me back to Cleveland from Langley regularly. On one occasion, I was late getting from Goddard (GSFC) to Butler aviation, the private aircraft terminal at Washington National airport used by NASA, then called National airport and is now called the Ronald Reagan airport. Joe had already departed the terminal and was in line for takeoff. Butler dispatch called Joe, and Joe replied, “Bring him out but be quick about it.” Whenever I travel through Reagan airport today, I wonder how this high security complex would react to a Jeep driver discharging a scrambling engineer and helping him and his bag to climb through the rear open door of a DC-3 while ready for takeoff on the runway. I expect they would not be happy.

  Joe knew that there was a reason beyond work for me to return to Cleveland. By this time, Marilyn and I were seriously dating. Occasionally, Marilyn also had to travel to the new nuclear facility at Plumbrook in Sandusky, Ohio, seventy-five miles or so to the west. And this travel was sometimes by way of the Lewis Navion, a two-seater that Eb Gough of Lewis Aircraft Operations loved to fly. Eventually all of this flying worked out. Both of us thank/blame Joe for keeping us together through those travel times. Afterwards, Joe moved to Houston and ran the MSC/JSC aircraft operations division for many years.

  Over Christmas 1959, I worked up the courage to ask Dad Kurtz for permission to ask Marilyn to marry me. And we did on April 30, 1960. Marilyn loved her local church in Fairview Park, St. Angelas, in part because it was so beautiful. But our wedding turned out to be at the same time as a major repair and almost all of our photos included the scaffolds all over the sanctuary. So much for wedding planning.

  Marilyn and Glynn 1960

  Part Two: Joining The Space Task Group, Projects Mercury & Gemini

  Trenchmen from the Flight Dynamics Branch

  Chapter Four: The Fight Dynamics Branch

  This is the story of a relatively small group of young men, all very early in their careers, most of them brand new college graduates. Each in their own way had been preparing themselves for their adult future when they came to NASA and human space flight. Our astronauts were selected in a national competition from the best of all of our test pilots, and indeed they were. However, we ground operators (and all the other engineers at NASA) actually selected ourselves by showing up to participate in this grand adventure of going to the moon.

  If it takes motivation and attitude to be successful, these young men were already there, even on a project that could easily seem impossible. We knew almost nothing about space flight. We certainly didn’t know what it would take to land people on the moon and return them safely to Earth. But these young men came and they met the challenge. They had to invent it all – the control center, and all the tools of the trade such as orbital mechanics, propulsion and guidance systems, communications, the integration with crew members, the procedures that were necessary, and then the mission rules that we learned to live by.

  Some of these young men had to master a very new and complicated discipline that we called “flight dynamics.” And all of them had to prepare themselves to make decisions in the MCC on any and all of the matters relevant to their disciplines. As pioneers in the field, they faced decisions that had to be made in real time, without consultation or deferral, sometimes in seconds, and of the highest consequence. There was not much time to prepare.

  In March 1962, I was named section head, a first level supervisor with all of two of us. In the summer 1964, I became the chief of the newly formed Flight Dynamics Branch with a total of thirteen of us. By this time, we had finished Mercury and were preparing for Gemini and Apollo. We had seven men assigned to Gemini and needed at least nine – three trained operators on three different shifts by 1965. Plus, much more depth was still necessary to do the planning for the upcoming flights. Apollo had a mountain of work for the five assigned, with manned flights scheduled in 1967, less than three years away.

  This growth came by March of 1968 – the branch had twenty-nine men to begin the final sprint to the moon landings. They were tested and tempered by ten manned Gemini flights, four unmanned Apollo flights and uncounted simulation exercises. They were ready for Apollo.

  In reflecting on the branch, I am not sure how the interpersonal dynamics all came about but there was an extremely strong sense of unity, comradeship and mutual dependence, united by a powerful commitment to make the program a success. They were also competitive about earning the choice – and most difficult – assignments. This was a “Band of Brothers” in the best tradition of that honored term.

  Some of this magic was the sense of coming together to do something really big, something that had never been done before. Some of it was in the mutual reliance of all of these men on each other. This was especially true and even necessary in the operations environment in the MCC. They had to come to an answer, sometimes very quickly, and they had to earn the trust that gave their answer credibility, and the answer had to be correct. They gradually learned what it took to prove their choices to their office supervisors, to their fellow flight controllers, to the best test pilots, to the Flight Directors and, most of all, to themselves. It was a magic time to see these twenty-something boisterous males come to grips with their new responsibility and embrace it. The three flight dynamics operators even adopted a team identity for their three console positions and they called their unit “The Trench.” They were amazing and inspiring. I have always felt privileged to have served with them.

  The outstanding performance that these young men delivered will stay with them forever. They earned it. Today, looking back forty some years to the decade of the 1960s, I am still extremely gratified that these men and I were granted this historic opportunity. We were not necessarily the best and brightest in the whole world. But we certainly were the most passionate and the most committed to making the program succeed. Today, we still gather up on various occasions where the same opinionated comradeship and hassling of each other is the order of the day.

  Chapter Five: The People and Moving Towards Operations

  In October 1957, Sputnik shattered American complacency and changed the world. The U.S. political system responded with remarkable speed and cogency. As has so often been the case in American history, there were at l
east two men in critical leadership positions, President Eisenhower and Majority Leader of the Senate Lyndon Johnson, who were prepared to lead and did so most effectively. As the political process moved through the fact-finding and the seeking of counsel, major legislation began which became the Space Act of 1958, forming NASA with its Space Charter.

  While the national policy deliberations were underway, the same emerging leadership process was occurring at the implementation level. NASA Headquarters (HQ) tasked Bob Gilruth in May to plan a program to put a man in space. Max Faget had already proposed a concept in a conference in March 1958. Building on that concept and with more leaders from the ranks of the Langley Center, such as Chuck Mathews, Chris Kraft and Caldwell Johnson, the leadership cadre of the Space Task Group rose and took command of the response to the Sputnik challenge. Their mission was to invent an American manned space program and to put it into flight safely and as quickly as possible.

  In June of 1958, my first month after graduation, I saw the first line drawing of what became the Mercury spacecraft, prepared by Caldwell Johnson from the Langley Center in Hampton, Virginia, and I knew it was my future. (Later in the ’70s, Caldwell and I would work closely on the Apollo/Soyuz project.) He was part of a group of engineers from the Pilotless Aircraft Research Division (PARD) and other units at the Langley Center. PARD had a similar research focus as the Lewis branch I was in. PARD testing was based on a ground launched solid rocket vehicle, known as the Scout. We both used the NACA range on the Virginia coast, centered on Wallops Island. And the Lewis Center test models were air-launched from a B-57. As a result of this common focus, we were asked to begin some special studies in support of this emerging man-in-space effort, to be later named Project Mercury.