Highways Into Space: A first-hand account of the beginnings of the human space program (5 page)

And, finally, many of the miners – some of the toughest stock you can find – died early because of the damage from coal dust to their lungs. This condition took my Dad in 1985 after years of fighting to breathe. We were told that his heart was like a marathon runner but his lungs were simply unable to perform.

This awareness in my early years left me with many feelings and convictions, some of which I can identify and some are just baked into who I am. However, there are at least two occasions, which always trigger a response directly from the legacy of this experience:

First, any news report of a mine cave-in or trapped miners anywhere on the globe, immediately and with an emotional punch, causes me to stop, reflect and pray for their safe recovery and for their waiting families.

Second, much later in my life, and long after my time in MCC, I was occasionally confronted by employees who wanted to talk about the stress of the work in our comfortable offices. Stress? I could never muster any sympathy for the initiators of these discussions. I knew what my folks did for us. I could only guess what their parents and grandparents did for them. I wondered if they really understood and appreciated it.

For finishing my last three years, the University of Detroit co-op program was a great way to earn the college degree. Besides the fine academic preparation, it was also a chance to experience the real world of aero engineering in the nation’s pre-eminent aeronautical research organization. Besides that, the NACA pay was just about enough to live on, and then pay for the upcoming school quarter of expenses. Based on the three-month rotation, I was only in Detroit in summer and winter. That was only three months during the regular University school year. As a result, we did not really attach to the University or its other institutions such as the sports teams or any other students outside of aero engineering.

In attending several of my wife’s high school reunions, I was impressed by the closeness of so many of the men and women in her class. Also, Marilyn’s classmates lived very close to each other at the time, and walked to school, which was all in the same neighborhood as their homes. As a group, they were closer to each other than my Prep class because the Prep students came from a radius of up to thirty miles around the region. There was no common “place” except for extracurricular activities. These were relatively limited and not like living next door. In retrospect, it was the same scene at the University of Detroit, not really connected on the emotional level. It was almost more of a business relationship. The University provided a service and we paid for it. That is not a criticism; it was just the circumstance at the time. Detroit was about a fifteen-hour drive from the Scranton area, subject to car breakdowns. The southern route went via the Pennsylvania and Ohio turnpikes. The northern passage was around the north side of Lake Erie through Canada, a long way to home. I never realized how relatively disconnected I was from high school and college until I witnessed first-hand Marilyn’s class reunions and the experiences of our kids. All four of ours went to Texas A&M and rapidly developed far, far more of a lifelong emotional bond.

Most of the guys, from the Scranton area, and those we met in Detroit were all in the same financial boat, working six months of the year to pay for twelve months of expenses. Nobody else from Detroit co-oped at NACA in Cleveland, although there were a number of other University co-ops represented. Money was tight for all of us. I had two experiences that were memorable in that regard. In my first few weeks in Cleveland, I simply ran out of cash. I had no checking account. Such a thing as credit cards did not exist, and it really wasn’t much of an option to call home. So I went three days without eating any food, just lots of water. Finally, on the fourth day, my landlady may well have guessed the situation and invited me to dinner, the first real food in too many days. Whatever the menu was that night, it was the absolute best and got me over the hump.

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.

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 skiing. 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.