augustmarsblog

  Applied Science and Engineering Altogether, our little research team successfully completed four major projects. The first was described in the previous post. It solved the problem of driving a gas at a useful pressure by the Lorentz force alone. The second project solved the problem of driving a gas by electromagnetic induction; that is, without electrodes which become a problem for certain fluids, such as oxygen and seawater. The third project was a device that simulated a sonic boom signature (an N-wave) on a laboratory scale, by using a helium gun to fire a tiny projectile through a box containing a stratified atmosphere. Schlieren pictures clearly showed the curving of the trailing shock due to the atmosphere gradient. This device could show such effects without the enormous expense of full-scale tests that required a far-ranging distribution of microphones, as well as a supersonic fighter plane and pilot. The fourth project used a condenser generated spark to gene...

Joe Our little team of experimentalists was soon to be disbanded, but it would be thoughtless of me to omit some words about the members of the team. My two primary colleagues were Joe Brooks and Bill Beasley. Joe had been at NACA for about ten years when I arrived. His career had not been impressive because he didn’t have the background for theoretical research and his wind tunnel work suffered from a lack of analytical insight into the significance of the data. H owever, in our lab he blossomed. His enthusiasm for high-tech equipment was unmatched. When we bought the most up-to-date Tektronix oscilloscope model, he took the operating manual home over the weekend and came in on Monday, bubbling over with knowledge of the amazing things that we could do with it. And he was that way throughout our years in the lab, whether he was working with custom made generators or power supplies, or micro-projectiles, or a “home-made” helium gun, he could make it yield its optimum perfo...

  Bill Bill Beasley was the third charter member of our lab research team. He was raised in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, and he never lost his native accent. He was the kind of person that you just had to like. You would have to work hard to find anything bad to say about him. Actually, his family doctor did get upset with him one time. Bill was so devoted to his family (he had a wife and two young daughters) that his doctor complained that he needed to stop bringing his children for an office visit for every minor complaint, such as a common cold. Bill had a degree in Nuclear Engineering from VPI, but so little background in courses relevant to NASA’s needs that he would never have been hired if LRC had not been desperate to fill the drain of personnel to private industry and to Arnold Engineering. He was a dedicated worker with tremendous metabolism. I would watch with awe while he munched down enough sandwiches and cookies to fill his lunch...

  Lee There was one other engineer that spent a brief period as a member of our little lab team. Lee Schilling was another of those minimally qualified professionals that NASA hired in desperation to fill their employment allotment. He wasn’t qualified for aeronautical research, but he may have had a couple of courses in electrical engineering, which would explain why he was assigned to our group. He had a pleasant personality, and he had an enthusiasm for our lab project, but he had one shortcoming that drove Joe nuts. He was accident prone. Almost every day he would accidentally knock something off of a table, or trip over some object, or commit some other bungling antic. Joe wasn’t merely annoyed by Lee’s ineptness. He was worried. The problem was that, at that time, we had high voltage wires all over the lab. We generated the spark for our sonic boom simulation experiments by charging up a powerful capacitor to a very high voltage and then discharging it acro...

  CHANGING NASA RESEARCH CULTURE AT LRC As one might expect, there was a multitude of personality types among the engineers. I got to know many of them personally through casual conversations during coffee breaks and at a lunch table in the cafeteria at lunch time. (I carried a brown bag when I was in the lab, but I ate in the cafeteria when I was working in my office, which was a good two miles from the lab.) In my first few months at LRC, as I got to know many of the other engineers, I was surprised that none of them were really old men. Dr. Katzoff and Ray Wright were still under fifty, as were many of the other supervisors. But most of the non-supervisory, working level, staff consisted of young men in their twenties and thirties. All of the professionals had college degrees, but not all had degrees in engineering. Many of those that actually had engineering degrees were VPI graduates, and had taken practical courses that often included welding and electrica...

  The Light Side of Serious Management The managers in the days of NACA were selected from a class of engineers that had accomplished some meaningful result in his research, and who could also give a public presentation. The NASA managers were of an entirely different breed. Their backgrounds were management. Apparently, they were taught that the way to motivate employees is to set reasonable goals for each one, and then compare his performance with the goals. The goals are deemed to be reasonable if they are arrived at by mutual agreement between the employee and his manager. This system seems to be fair, and it could well be effective for some businesses, but when applied to a research organization, it spells death to innovative research. The problem is that no one will agree to a goal that he may not be able to meet. It is the nature of innovation that its goal is the unexpected – that which is often surprising when its goals are met. When this problem was pointed...

  Neighbors   Many decades ago, when this neighborhood was still under construction; the existing houses being rapidly occupied, and new homes, being built, that this was not an especially friendly neighborhood. We were all new to each other, and were hesitant to ask the kinds of questions that would lead to real familiarity.   But all of that changed when Sam Harvey moved in. He has that kind of natural outgoing personality that makes him eager to meet new people. And so, he became a kind of one man welcoming committee. If the family moving in were not using professional movers, Sam would go and offer to help move the furniture into the house. He would introduce himself, and tell the new neighbors a few relevant facts about the existing neighbors. Then, when the opportunity arose, he would introduce them to each other.   Some of the newcomers picked up immediately on Sam's friendliness, being happy to have a contact in their new environment. Others chos...