CHANGING NASA RESEARCH CULTURE AT LRC

 

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 electrical wiring. But many of us had minimal qualifications for aerospace research.

Casual lunch hour conversation largely centered around NASA – which research would receive high priority, potential reorganizations, etc. Some of it involved current research projects that we were working on. No one discussed his personal life in group conversations. Among professionals that subject was usually confined to private tete-a-tetes; although there was no secret that a secretarial gossip grapevine existed. One theme that often arose in these relaxed talks was that of the unexpected, the surprising, the counter-intuitive.

One day, as we were settling into our chairs at a lunch table, Claude Patterson, one of Dr. Whitcomb’s assistants, walked up and said excitedly, “Say, did any of you watch that episode of NOVA last night?” Receiving no positive response, he continued, “Well, it turns that you can actually make some really nice jewelry out of bird droppings!” he went on enthusiastically, describing in detail the technology that made all of this possible, including the chemicals involved. When he finally paused and we began asking questions, a slight, sly grin gave away the joke that he had pulled on us.

After that, I enjoyed carrying on straight-faced technical conversations with him about bogus science. He and Dr. Whitcomb were studying the possibility of altering wing tip vortices so as to reduce induced drag. I walked into his office and inquired, “What’s new in the wide, wild world of tip vortices?”

He replied, “Well, it turns out that they’re actually square.”

I said, “That’s surprising. All of the photographs that I’ve seen show that they’re circular.”

“Sure, and that’s why it’s such a popular misconception,” he explained, “but that’s just an artifact of the photography. What the camera sees is not actually the air in the vortex, but the visible smoke that is caught up in the swirl, and it’s the difference in density that causes that appearance of rounding at the corners”. And this went on for a good fifteen minutes, as he gave crazy technical explanations for each of my questions.

Another interesting young engineer was Charlie Hussan, who had been one of the students in an advanced math class that I had taught. He was rather swarthy, with dark eyes and hair, and gave every indication of having been foreign born. One day, as a small group of us were sitting at a cafeteria table, he sat down at the other end of the table. Then he solemnly bowed his head and uttered some words in a language that I didn’t recognize, while passing both hands slowly over his food. We were wondering just what kind of religious rite we were witnessing, when he looked over at us and calmly explained, ”If you do that just the right way, it takes away all the calories.”

To be truthful, many of the LRC engineers possessed very little sense of humor. When I took a course in “Oral Presentations”, each class member was required to prepare talks of various types. Some of the presentations were purportedly of a technical nature, presented in a serious, straight-faced way, but actually bogus material generated by a lighthearted mind. There were always a few members of the class who would take the lecture seriously right up to the end, and even argue that it wasn’t funny at all but actually a legitimate subject that shouldn’t be taken lightly.

There were a few that seemed to be totally lacking in a sense of humor. One engineer (who had a doctorate in Aeronautical Engineering) prepared a talk to a panel of managers in hopes of being considered for a promotion. He wanted to introduce the talk with a joke, so he memorized one. But he clearly didn't understand the joke himself, because he misquoted the punch line so badly that the joke didn't make sense and just left his high level audience confused.

Of course there weren't many who completely lacked any sense of humor, but there were many who took themselves far too seriously, especially those on some management level. Some of the management antics were so bizarre that they actually became funny, in spite of having destructive consequences. I have such a long list of those stories that I will save them for a separate post. But dealing with such self-important individuals was so frustrating that it became even more of a delight to know those lighthearted guys like Claude Patterson and Charlie Husson, who brightened up the workplace.

I knew several who had a kind of sense of humor that was mostly confined to playing practical jokes on other engineers. Some were funny, but too often they were merely meant to cause the target of the joke a maximum of inconvenience. For example, a few pranksters removed all of an engineer's furniture from his office while he was away on his honeymoon.

The incorporation of NACA into NASA and the formation of the Space Task Group at LRC had a significant affect on the cultural atmosphere at the center. This little-known out-of-the-way collection of basic research aeronautical engineers suddenly became the focus of national attention. Just being identified as a NASA engineer and a member of Langley Research Center conferred on each of us a certain prestige, which none of us NACA engineers would have predicted when we first entered on duty. But the members of the Space Task Group attained a status, even an aura, that went far beyond any prestige that the rest of had gained. They were, at least temporarily, the focus of national attention, as our nation raced to catch up with, and exceed, Russia in the conquest of space.

In some ways the Space Task Group operated almost as a separate unit. Their members handled the basic calculations and contracting that were required for space vehicles, but certain problems required the expertise of aerodynamicists. As just one example, the extremely high speed flight through the thin upper layers of the atmosphere was relatively new territory and not strictly a space flight problem.

The former NACA engineers welcomed these developments for a rather interesting reason. Many of the problems of conventional subsonic flight had been solved, and many engineers, especially theoreticians, were having trouble finding a problem to solve. They were happy to see the new class of problems created by the potential for transonic and supersonic flight due to tremendous power of jet engines. And now, in addition to that development, new problems were generated by the need for vehicles to fly through the atmosphere to and from outer space.

But the list of exciting basic research possibilities that had now opened up to us was almost endless. For example, it was obvious that outer space is an extremely unfriendly environment for human existence. That fact opened the door to research into robotics. But there would have to be a way to control the robots remotely, which should lead to developments in remote control, which would also lead to advances in pilotless aircraft development. Pilotless aircraft offered huge advantages for both military and commercial uses. The cockpit bump required for pilot visibility had always been a problem for high mach number airplane design. Now it could be solved with the use of fiber optics.

One space related problem was that of the heating that occurs when a space vehicle reenters the atmosphere at hypersonic speeds like a meteor. What combination of design and materials is required to keep the vehicle from burning up? And that problem is similar to the one involved with a ballistic missile reentering the atmosphere.

The concept of using a moving magnetic field to propel charged particles could be adapted to the use of such a field to accelerate a projectile to a higher speed than a conventional gun. A similar rail gun device could be used to launch airplanes or rockets. Magnetic levitation would make possible higher speeds for ground based vehicles by eliminating the need for wheels, whose rotational speeds are limited by centrifugal force considerations.

Aircraft research also took a leap, as jet engines and materials developments made supersonic flight possible. The possibility of sustained flight through the thin upper atmosphere introduced the possibility of developing an electromagnetic engine that would ionize the air entering the engine and then accelerating it electromagnetically, by the same principles utilized in DC or AC motors.

And those possibilities represent only a sample of the tremendous variety of projects that invited our efforts. One might think that these new types of problems would represent a frightening challenge to the engineers who had entered on duty with a basic knowledge of mechanical or aeronautical engineering, or a degree in applied math or applied physics. They would be required to study and understand areas of physics that they had not studied in college. But once one has been introduced to research and has developed a research psychology, he understands that innovative research, by its nature, involves continual study, and he accepts the study as simply part of his job. This work style, of continual study, caused a problem for many engineers who accepted temporary assignments away from research. For example, some became NASA representatives or consultants with other research agencies or at Washington Headquarters and then returned to LRC when the assignment period ended. They found it very difficult to “catch up”. One of them mentioned the problem to me. I said, “I understand that it's very hard to return to research after six months away”. He shook his head . “No,” he said, “It's more like six weeks”.

And so we jumped into this exciting new environment, worked on the theoretical problems that needed to be solved, and designed experiments to validate the theories. We continued happily along in this basic research atmosphere for a few short years (the early 50's to the late 60's), and made some progress, and then disaster struck. A new wave of management took over the center and changed its direction away from basic research and toward project management. Some semblance of research had to be maintained because our official name was Langley Research Center, but management made it painfully clear that its real interest was in big money projects that had to be carried out by aircraft companies and other contractors. We did not have the resources or the congressional mandate for such projects, but we could act as middle-man to dole out the money for the projects.

However, many of those exciting research concepts that we had worked on in the incipient years of NASA were eventually brought to fruition by other organizations - some within the military, others in private industry, and some by other nations. But they came decades later than would have been possible if NASA had maintained its original role as a research agency.

All of these major changes occurring over a relatively few years unsurprisingly had a pronounced effect on the relationships between the personnel. In the pre-NASA days I could have a technical discussion with almost any engineer and learn something helpful. After the formation of the space group, there was less technical discussion, and much less informal chat, between the members of that group and the aeronautical engineers. There were also certain ramifications among personal relationships, some that intruded into the lives of family members. A few new housing developments became popular with the younger NASA employees, and they tended to settle in those colonies. Consequently, many of the social relationships that developed among NASA engineers included their families. In such a situation there inevitably arises a certain degree of “soap opera” activity. Personally, I had little knowledge of those affairs until the time came for the space group to be moved from Langley to Houston Texas, when many things that should have remained strictly private became public knowledge. Some of the wives of the space group engineers chose not to go to Texas. Some of the engineers chose for their wives not to go – because they had made other arrangements. What was more interesting was that many secretaries and other female support personnel opted to make the move. The natural result of this social chaos was a plethora of divorces and alimony negotiations.

The news of this somewhat scandalous behavior came as a surprise to me, but it was no surprise to the secretaries who maintained an under-the-table gossip grapevine. One of those secretaries often ate lunch with our little group of lunch-buddy engineers. She had a kind of dry wit that feasted on the revelations of the “hanky-panky” that had been going on in the space group. And I have to admit some of her comments were at least entertaining, if not outright hilarious.

But my interest in the matter was mostly psychological. It was to be expected that temptation would arise when individuals would work overtime into the night along with a member of his female support staff. But there was another force that came into play in that situation. Most of those engineers, who had previously been just typical, probably rather boring technical professionals, suddenly gained a kind of aura – a magnetic attraction because of the national attention on their work. It was a kind of “groupy” attraction that overlooks any physical or personality imperfection but sees only the image of a superior being; an image projected onto that person by the lens of the media.

My interest in psychology found another object of fascination in the private lives of the engineers. In private chats with those engineers that I knew on a friendly basis, I found that a surprising number of them had a kind of unexpected role in their marriage. While their marriages were happy and there were children in the family, the man had a significantly greater nurturing nature than his wife. Whereas the wife took only a minor interest in “raising” the children, he willingly accepted that responsibility. He was not only the one that helped a child with his/her homework, he drove the daughter to her ballet lessons and his son to soccer practice, he attended the PTA meetings and met with a teacher on any matter concerning one of his children. He listened to the children's complaints about their friends or teachers, and sympathized or advised.

And then there was one couple that had a different kind of role reversal. This couple both worked at NASA, both had nonprofessional positions, and they had no children. From what I gathered they had a perfectly normal physical relationship, but at home she preferred outside work and he preferred inside work. She mowed and edged the lawn, maintained the flower gardens and ornamental shrubs, and took care of some minor house repairs. He cooked the meals, cleaned the house, did the laundry, and made some of their clothes with his sewing machine.

As the focus of management moved away from basic in-house research toward contract research and project management, the entire culture was affected. Many promotions and other awards became based on the dollar amount of the project work that was being overseen by the engineer, and not by the practical value of the results, and not by the degree of actual involvement of the project manager in the actual work. Basic lab research of the type that I had been involved in became impossible because of various management manipulations, and experimental wind tunnel experiments became more difficult because of the organizational changes.

There still remained two areas in which we could conduct meaningful basic research. LRC had a big investment in its many wind tunnels, and they were not fully occupied with routine testing for private companies and the military. It was still possible to conduct some experimental research with them in spite of the red tape involved. Also, it was possible to conduct theoretical research simply because it was inexpensive and did not require a long series of approvals. In fact for a while theoretical work flourished because of the advent of electronic computers with their amazing speed and storage capabilities.

However, the rapid growth of computer technology had adverse effects, as well. For one, enormous sums were spent at each of NASA's research facilities in the attempt to acquire or construct the biggest and best computer possible within the current technological capabilities. But by the time each of these projects was completed it was outdated, because the technology had advanced so rapidly. The other, far worse, effect was that so much emphasis was placed on computing that it began to dominate the faculties and course requirements of college aerospace departments, the new hires at NASA, then both the in-house and contract research staffs, and finally the management.

The initial consequence of this computer revolution was that it was no longer necessary to solve the many fluid flow problems by accepting approximate solutions obtained by simplifying the differential equations governing the flow. This simplification involved a procedure termed “linearization”, and a good theoretician could often find analytic solutions (that is, solutions in the form of a mathematical expression) to the linearized differential equations. Such solutions were desirable because it was relatively easy to calculate physical variables such as pressure distributions, and to calculate the forces from the pressure distributions. But with the new computers there was no longer a requirement to find problems that could be linearized or to learn the often difficult mathematical techniques that could be applied to solving them. All that was required was a finely spaced grid of points in the space exterior to the body, and including the body surface itself. Then the computer was turned loose on a monster algorithm that computed the flow variables at each of these points by solving the differential equation through a brute force process.

This kind of work did not require a detailed knowledge of aerodynamics or flow physics, and consequently the aeronautical engineers who truly understand what makes an airplane fly became a vanishing breed at LRC. The wind tunnels were gradually eliminated because of the conjecture that computers would be able to predict aircraft performance better than wind tunnel data. That decision proved to be a tactical error, because no other research center had such an impressive collection of aeronautical test facilities. But other labs did have programmers. Consequently, LRC became vulnerable whenever budget concerns required the government to start closing facilities.

The center was rapidly becoming primarily a facility that passed government money along to private companies, who could and would conduct the research, and design the equipment, that was required to fulfill the missions authorized by congress. Long gone were the days of the crack team of NACA theoreticians and wind tunnel test engineers that had made LRC the world's premier aeronautical research facility. And gone were the days of the enthusiastic group of young engineers and scientists that had eagerly embraced the exciting new basic research opportunities introduced by the space initiative. They have become the stuff of memories, of anecdotes told at NASA retiree get-togethers, and of blog posts.

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