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ORAL HISTORY TRANSCRIPT
DEAN F. GRIMM INTERVIEWED BY CAROL BUTLER PARKER, CO ­ 17 AUGUST 2000 BUTLER: Today is August 17th, 2000. This oral history with Dean Grimm is being conducted for the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project at his home in Parker, Colorado. Carol Butler is the interviewer. Thank you very much for talking with me today and letting me come out to your home to visit with you.

GRIMM: You're quite welcome.

BUTLER: To begin with, maybe you could tell me a little bit about your background leading up to you becoming involved with NASA and the space program.

GRIMM: How far back do you want me to go?

BUTLER: Maybe how you got interested in aviation and aerospace.

GRIMM: I think I was raised on the farm with six brothers and a sister. When I first recall being interested in aviation was prior to World War II and I'd see airplanes flying over our farm every so often and had an interest on what kept them up there and where they were going. Then during the war, we got cards in our cereal boxes about identifying airplanes, and then we'd get

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little devices sent in other cereal boxes on how to identify enemy airplanes and how to call in and so forth. So that was the very first interest I had in the aerospace industry. Later, of course, after I graduated from high school I went to the University of Kansas. I originally enrolled in electrical engineering, but the Korean Conflict, as they call it, came around in '50 and I enlisted in the Air Force at that point in time. A lot of my friends were getting drafted, and I decided to choose my own branch of the service. Since I was still interested in aviation, they give you aptitude tests. During the aptitude tests they said I would be a good candidate for an aviation school. I think it was because they had a shortage of aviation candidates. So I went through a nine-month airplane and engine (A&E) mechanic school in service. Graduating from that school, my grades and aptitude were such that they said I would make a good instructor. So they sent me to a helicopter A&E school and then to an instructor school. Then I instructed in that area for the remainder of my time in the service, except for a period of time when I went through pilot training in the service. So coming out of the Air Force I was quite interested in conventional airplanes and helicopters and actually in having gained my pilot's license during that period of time, obviously. I came out of the service, and then worked for a short time with Boeing in Wichita on the line, working as a mechanic. I decided that there must be better things in life to do than to work as a mechanic, and so I reentered the University of Kansas after a five-year hiatus. You asked as a question here, why I picked this field. Well, the reason why I got into aerospace or my aerospace degree was because my background in the service they gave me onesemester's credit. So in engineering language I said, "I are now an aero engineer, rather than electrical." So that kind of explains how I got into that field. Because at that point in time, my

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age was such that I wanted to get through school as quickly as possible and get some gainful employment, try to make some money. Upon graduating from K.U., I went to work for Convair, which is General Dynamics [Corporation] now at Fort Worth. Well, it's not even General Dynamics; it's Lockheed Martin [Corporation] now. I went to work for them as an aerospace engineer, flight-test engineer on the first Mach-2 supersonic bomber, the B-58 as a flight-test engineer where I was responsible for doing some of the flight planning and on the various flights on a couple of the airplanes I had assigned to me while they were flight testing. As the flight-testing program wound down and it transferred over to the Air Force out at Edwards, I wanted to stay in the aerospace fields, so I applied for a position at [The] Boeing [Company] in Seattle. I had worked for G.D. for about a year and a half, I think. So I went to Boeing in Seattle and started in their flight certification area. But because of my interest in flying and the fact that our particular unit developed all of the initial charts and graphs and planning for the experimental flight testing that was being done to certify the first jets for airline use, the pilots over in the flight test area and the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] pilot in charge of the Boeing certification activities asked me to fly with them and to sit behind them to give them the test points which they had to fly. Then later I would be responsible for reducing that data into certification data, which would then be presented back to the FAA for certifying that airplane for airline use. So as a result of that I did a lot of experimental flight testing with various airplanes while I was at Boeing, hundreds of hours of actual flying experimental flight testing because the airplanes were experimental up until the point that they were given an FAA certificate. That data, of course, that we generated we used as guarantees to the airlines. They bought the

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airplanes, and then we did route certification to prove the airplane could do what we said it could do. So that was kind of the background up at Boeing. After about a year and a half, the work was starting to get repetitive, and I was interested in doing something more challenging so I applied for their supersonic work that they were doing at that time. They were proposing to build a supersonic jet aircraft. This was in '62. Just as Boeing was getting started, [Richard M.] Nixon [?] canceled the supersonic transport project, and I decided that there had to be some things of interest elsewhere. So I applied at the FAA, Federal Aviation agency, in Oklahoma City, as an instructor, and I taught air carrier inspectors jet certification, air route certification, and all of the things that you do to certify an airline to operate out of airports and for route structure throughout the world. Each one of these air carrier inspectors is assigned to an airline to make sure that the airline follows proper procedures in determining their route structure. So I did that for two and a half years, plus was involved in accident investigations because early in the operation of jets there was a number of accidents. So from an aerodynamics standpoint and from a certification standpoint, I was involved in that aspect of the accident investigations and actually developed the planning and flew a number of the profiles that duplicated the crashes, except for the final part.

BUTLER: Must have been hairy at times.

GRIMM: It was interesting, because the airplanes at that time, the engines were not what we have now. They were very low-thrust engines, and our thrust rate ratios on those aircraft were very marginal, like 1.01 sometimes. In some cases we had some near crashes while we were

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doing some of the duplications of the accidents to actually see what was happening. This happened also at Boeing as well as at the FAA. During the later part of my stay with the FAA, the Langley [Space] Task [Group] force had moved to Houston. NASA Headquarters made a decision to enlist the help of LBJ, [Vice President] Lyndon Baines Johnson, to move the Space Center there. One of my cohorts who had known me both at Boeing and at the FAA had transferred to NASA from Oklahoma City, and he called me and said they had some job openings there that he thought I might be interested in. So I rented an airplane and I flew down to Hobby [Airport] and went out to NASA and interviewed several people and was hired on the spot in a group which was called [the] Operation Support Section, which doesn't have much meaning as far as function is concerned. But that particular section was set up to have a number of people who had piloting for flight-testing backgrounds to come in and actually work with the various contractors and NASA in flying all of their simulators and developing procedures that we were going to use for Mercury, Gemini and later on Apollo and Shuttle. So there was about six of us, and we went to LTV [Ling-Temco-Vought, Inc.]--we went to Grumman [Aircraft Engineering Corporation]-- we went to McDonnell Douglas [Corporation], we went to [North American] Rockwell [Corporation], we went to the Navy, we went to the Air Force facilities to evaluate and to fly their simulations to determine which ones were good, which ones were not so good and also to start developing procedures for the various parts of each flight segment that were involved in, initially Mercury, and then later of course Gemini, the various types of missions we were involved in. In many cases, inputs to the design of the cockpits, control displays, navigation aids, software, hardware, instrument scaling and those sorts of things.

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One of my very first tasks when I went to Houstonand we were not out at NASA at that time, our division flight crew operations division was in the Franklin Apartments there in the south part of Houston. My first job was to take the Apollo reference mission, at that time, which was a large stack of books and to look at the lunar part of the mission. At that time, even though we didn't know what the vehicle was going to be or look like, that I was to review the mission profiles and determine what kind of instruments that this lunar landing device needed for the translunar part, as well as the descent and the ascent and then to provide a scaling for all of the instruments that would be needed for that flight.

BUTLER: That must have been challenging, as you said, not knowing about the spacecraft.

GRIMM: That's right, but an interesting characteristic of my personality is that I have never, ever had a job or taken a job where I felt threatened. I always felt at ease because I said that if there was somebody in this job before me, I was sure I was just as smart as he was and that I could learn the job. If there had not been anybody in this job prior to me, then I had the responsibility to learn as much as I could to do that job. I've always taken that approach on every job I had. It's always a challenge to me, and I enjoy those kinds of challenges. Some people get very nervous when put in that position, but I've never, ever been nervous in those kinds of positions. I love that kind of a challenge.

BUTLER: It's always good to be challenged.

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GRIMM: I offered jobs after I got to NASA to a number of friends that had similar experience to me, and they said that the job that I had was too stressful. Of course the job was stressful. Everybody at that time at NASA had stressful jobs, but some people accept the challenge and then some people don't.

BUTLER: Each person is different. How did you determine what instruments? What were some of the factors that you looked at to determine what would be needed?

GRIMM: You're asking me something that's almost forty years ago. But when you look at the reference mission and see the speeds that the vehicle is traveling after it separates from the command moduleI said after it separates from the command module, but at that time, it wasn't decided that this vehicle was going to separate from the command module. At one time we had a vehicle [design] that was called a Nova, which was about 500 feet tall, versus the Saturn V, which was 300 and some feet tall. The part that separated in Earth orbit went to the Moon, landed on the Moon, and came off the Moon and came back and then separated from the part that was going to land back in the water. So you had to look at what the characteristics of a particular part of the flight were and look at the velocities and look at your rates and look at your control characteristics and thrust levels that you had to maintain and what types of instruments that you would need to not only evaluate the situation that you're in but be able to control that situation at the same time. That's about as near as I can explain to you what we looked at, because there were very few numbers in this reference mission.

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So after that project was completed, I and basically one other individual by the name of Ed Smith and Hebert Edward Smith was the person who had enticed me to NASA and then who I was with him in his group. We worked for a Captain Brickel who was the section head at that time, who is now a retired three-star general. I think he's up at Fairfax, Virginia, and has his own consulting firm as all those retired generals do. So we ended up going to all these places that I previously mentioned, flying various types of simulations that the contractors had developed, determining whether those were valid. We looked at the visuals, we looked at the instruments, we looked at their procedures, to see how these things might be melded together to actually perform an operational function. Once we determined that there was an operational function to be performed with those procedures or with the simulator, then we would recommend that the crews then use those devices to gain some familiarity with what they were going to be expected to do in the future. As they got closer to flight, we picked the systems that we thought provided the best capability. Of course the astronauts were quite capable in their own right of evaluating these systems and then we'd use those systems for functional training for the flights.

BUTLER: Would you make recommendations based on these different systems around the country devices that NASA should then build?

GRIMM: Oh, yes, oh, yes. We'd also tell the contractors what we felt needed to be done to improve their simulations. Can you tell if I'm recording or not?

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BUTLER: I believe you are.

GRIMM: Okay. I was just wondering here.

BUTLER: Yes. Everything sounds good.

GRIMM: I didn't want to be doing all this blabbing here and not have it recorded.

BUTLER: Oh, yes. The good thing about this [recorder] is it actually has two different reads, for both of our mikes on it.

GRIMM: Now the next question I had is do you want me just to go right on through to the projects that I did?

BUTLER: If that flows well for you.

GRIMM: Are you interested in those sorts of things?

BUTLER: Oh, absolutely, absolutely.

GRIMM: Okay. Because I could jump to major things like LLTV or the Gemini rendezvous or the first Shuttle payload that we developed in my division or a number of things like that.

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Then subsequent to that in applying these simulations, I started looking at the Gemini docking because we knew that one of the requirements for the Apollo Program was going to be a rendezvous and docking somehow and someplace. So Gemini was put into the program specifically to validate the capability to be able rendezvous two vehicles in space and to physically dock. At that time, there was a number of issues. One, we didn't have any rendezvous procedures that worked. Two, we had a docking training vehicle down in, I think it's 227, the big tall building, I can't remember now. I think it's 227, 225, down on the north end of JSC. The whole building inside is painted black, and we had the Agena on rails that would go forward and aft. Then we had a Gemini cockpit that would go left and right, up and down and pitch and roll and yaw. One of the things that I did was to do a handling quality study with that docking trainer because at that time we hadn't really decided what characteristics we needed in the control system to allow us to control the Gemini space craft adequately and to dock with the Agena vehicle, which was a passive vehicle, and stabilize with that. During this exercise, we did a handling quality study and I used Wally [Walter M.] Schirra [Jr.] and Gus [Virgil I.] Grissom and several others of the first seven astronauts including myself and one of our other pilots in our group in our section. We actually did a handling quality study and used the Coopers Rating System, which is a system that pilots use to put numbers on a system on how well you can control a device in certain--as you vary the characteristics of a control system, you get a different feel for how the vehicle is controlled, and that's called a Coopers Rating, and you can just assign numbers to it. You always like to have high numbers. Anything above a five is nice. Anything down towards zero is unstable.

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So we did a handling quality study there to define rate command, attitude, hold, direct, breakout forces, the jet logic, cycling of the jets. I can't think of the word I want to use, but it's the on-off characteristics. I guess maybe it's cycling. Anyway, we defined the characteristics that we felt were good and then we provided that to the manufacturer to put into the software and to the hardware because the hardware was adjustable and the software could be changed as well. As a part of that study, I found that first of all the docking lightwe had an acquisition light which was a flashing light on the Agena, which you could see from far off. It's like an aircraft flashing light that you see at night flashing. But once you got up closer to the vehicle, they had a light in the cone that lit up the cone, but in space that cone was so bright that it just blinded you with the reflection. We had a COAS optical sight. The COAS means Crew Optical Alignment Sight, which is an infinity focus device where you look through it but the reticle pattern that's inside of it is transposed to the target so that the target and reticle pattern look like they are superimposed on one another in the infinity focus device. That way there's no parallax and your eye doesn't go from looking at the actual thing right in front of you to the target, which was the Agena way out in front of you. They all look like they are at the same point. It turned out that the COAS was not designed properly so I took it upon myself to redesign, with the manufacturer, the COAS and the reticle pattern and the lighting in the [Agena] cone so that the crewwe redesigned it so that the crew did not see an apparent difference in the brightness between the reticle pattern and the vehicle he was looking at. We also adjusted the lighting on the Agena so that we didn't have a glare there. Then the last thing I did was there was no reference to the vehicle, and you couldn't tell whether the vehicle was pointed up, pointed down, pointed sideways. All you could see was the

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cones. So I recommended to my division chief, Warren [J.] North, who I have a great deal of respect for. He's kind of one of my heroes at NASA, always was. I don't know whether you've interviewed him or not.

BUTLER: We have.

GRIMM: He's a very interesting individual, and I love him to death. He would probably be embarrassed if he heard me say that.

BUTLER: We had a good oral history with him.

GRIMM: Good. I'm sure he had a lot to offer. If he didn't, then you were shorted. But I told him that we needed something on there like running lights that we have on aircraft, and he agreed with me. So I then instituted a lighting study. I had a mockup built of the Agena and we put it on a trailer and we picked the time before the new moon when we had no moon on the backside of NASA. There used to be a road down there along that fence, but I think there's a highway there now. I and another engineer went down there at night, and I put little lights with LEDs out off of a computer, an old analog computer. Took those lights and put them at the appropriate places on the vehicle, front and back. I put green on the right and red on the left and orange on the bottom, front and back, so that you could not only see the orientation of the vehicle, but be able to as you were coming up and rendezvousing with it in the real case that you could tell what your orientation was to the vehicle and be able to know your velocities out and then have a perspective in terms of depth or distance from the vehicle so you could

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actually slow your approach speed down to a reasonable level so that you could come down and actually engage the docking cone and dock. So that was another little project that I had that I enjoyed. Actually I did the same thing again on Apollo, because we had [another] COAS [with a different problem] and COAS problems. In addition to that, we didn't have a good docking target. So I worked with Grumman initially and then with [North American on] Apollo to develop aand I actually did the design of that docking target that we used on Apollo, the target itself and the same amount of work on the COAS so that the crews could accomplish the same thing, the docking part and the rendezvous part. My lighting, my little lights, were carried over, except in this case we got a little more sophisticated. We had a contractor this time, used little LEDs, and because if you put the same power into an LED, red, green and yellow have different intensities just because of the spectrum. To tell you the honest truth, I've forgotten which is which now, but at the time I knew. They put the proper number of LEDs in each color segment so that each one of them would have the same intensity when looked at by the crew. We put those on on Apollo. As a matter of fact, on that docking study back on Gemini, I found that we needed a light when we got up close on the Gemini. So I came up with a light that almost looked like an old fender light off of a '37 Dodge, and I forget what it actually came off of. I think it was a wingtip light off of an aircraft that was modified and put on the top of the Gemini OMS [Orbital Maneuvering System] system, not the Gemini itself, but the OMS capsule behind it that it was attached to. Put it right up over the pilot's head so that when we got close to the Agena that he could turn that light on have an even better perspective.

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That worked out quite well. The little running lights, the docking lights, the overhead lights, worked on Gemini so well that we did the same thing on Apollo and developed these lights and had them installed on Apollo because as it turned out the command module [CM] was going to be the passive vehicle in orbiting the Moon and the LM [lunar module] was going to be the active one. So with those lights on there, and then if need be in an emergency, the pilot in the command module could, with these lights and so forth, dock with the lunar module because the lunar module didn't have lights on it as I recall. Now I could be mistaken about that. That's been so long ago that we put lights on there, but I don't think we did.

BUTLER: That's something we could look into. That's interesting. There's so many pieces of all of this that had to come together to make everything work. Lights wouldn't be a normal thing that you could think of right offhand as a critical requirement for going to the Moon, but yet it did play such a big role in the docking and making it successful.

GRIMM: All these little things add up. So I think that was one of the things. Of course, one of the interesting things I found out about it is where Rockwell had put the target on theor the target was put on thethey actually put a target in the lunar module--I mean in the command module, so that the lunar module could dock. It turned out that somebody had miscalculated the angles and so if they were lined up exactly, the COAS, the reticle, with theI don't know if you've seen the target. Have you seen the target?

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BUTLER: Yes.

GRIMM: If you've seen the target, if they were lined up perfectly and they tried to dock, the docking cones were misaligned. So it took me quite a while to convince a certain contractor that they needed to correct this. So I actually proved to them that they were wrong, and finally we did reorient the targets so that we did have a match.

BUTLER: Very important consideration.

GRIMM: Right. So that we could actually get a hard dock and latch. During this time, Captain Brickle had left, and I was given the section by Warren North. When I came to NASA, one of the first, along with some of these other things I was doing, the LLRV [Lunar Landing Research Vehicle] project was coming into being between MSC [Manned Spacecraft Center, Houston, Texas], now JSC [Johnson Space Center], and FRC [Flight Research Center, Edwards AFB, California] now Dryden [Research Center], and [NASA] Headquarters and Bell Aero Systems Company. I'm not sure how I was picked, because there were several other people that had similar backgrounds to mine, flight-test background, airplanes certification, and so forth. But in any case I was given the project and said it's mine and I had it from almost the time I came to NASA within three or for months until '69, from '63 to '69. I was the program manager during that period of time for the RV. Then the RV was passed off to the operational group at Ellington [Field, Houston, Texas] after I had set everything up, and then I was the program manager on the LLTV [Lunar Landing Training Vehicle]. Then we had the accident

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with Neil [A.] Armstrong, and then I was brought back into the picture after that. I had the program again totally until right after the lunar landing. But that's another subject. I'm just saying that was another task I had.

BUTLER: Actually, while we're on that, maybe we could talk a little bit about some of the details of the LLRV and TV. What were some of the differences between the two?

GRIMM: There was a lot of differences between the two. They looked almost identical. If you were to go out to Dryden and look at the FRC, or the LLRV they have hanging up out there, and I guess the other one [LLTV] is in the lobby of Building 2.

BUTLER: Building 2, right there by the Teague Auditorium.

GRIMM: You'd think the vehicles were almost the same. The structure looks the same, but it's different. The cockpit is totally different. The engine has changed. The avionics were completely changed. The amount of actual lift rockets on the vehicle from the RV to TV were changed. All of the instruments were different. The hand controller and the T-handle were from the lunar module and not from model shop rework, because those were Gemini controllers that I got, actual ones for the spacecraft that were flew on. As I told the gentleman here the other day that was interviewing me for the LLTV because he's writing a book on the LLRV/TV, I told him I either lied then in '71 or I'm lying now, and I don't know which, because I told him the hand controllers that were used on the LLRV 1 and 2 were Gemini VI and VII flight controllers. In my interview with [Ivan D.] Ertel,

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I said they were off of VII and VIII flight vehicles, which that's probably more correct since that was very shortly after the program that I did that interview with Ertel.

BUTLER: I'm sure that's something that we can find in the records somewhere.

GRIMM: The ejection seat was upgraded. We put a top on the vehicle and then later cut a hole in it. Our avionics were completely different in terms of their functionality. The jet logicthe RV was designed basically by FRC to conduct handing qualities, to determine how a nonaerodynamic fly by wire vehicle could be controlled. As a result, their main emphasis was on handling qualities and with some considerable amount of thought on how those handling qualities could be transferred to a lunar vehicle if there were going to be one, which at that time hadn't been defined. So they built in some variability. So they basically wanted to do a variable stability handling quality study, which they actually did. But as we got further downstream, the Apollo Program translated from a Nova type vehicle to an Apollo type vehicle with a lunar module or a LM as they called it at that time. As a result, we knew that it was going to be a smaller vehicle, and that it was going to separate from the Apollo command module in lunar orbit and that it had to have certain handling qualities to go down to the lunar surface and certain handling qualities to come back because it was being staged from the descent stage. As a result of the initial definition as a lunar module, and then I began to get some appreciation for the masses of the LM, and it's moment characteristics, if you're familiar with that. We're talking about the inertias, the moment of inertias, about each one of the axis, the pitch, roll, and the yaw axis. Once you gain an appreciation for that and you're trying to design

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a vehicle to train the crews in 1G gravity, to have that vehicle fly like it's in 1/6G gravity, which you'd be in and around the Moon, and then to have this vehicle that was going to fly in Earth's atmosphere fly with the same control characteristicsat that time we didn't know what all those characteristics were going to be. So I had to build even more variability into the control system than FRC had. Of course the lunar module had fore and aft RCS [Reaction Control System] jets, one right up in front, one in the back and one on each side. The LLTV, and the RV in that case, had it on left right on each side of the cockpit in front and left right on each side in the back. So we had to devise a different jet logic to control the vehicle, even though their thrusters on the LM were fore and aft and off to the side and ours were here and here. So we're off forty-five degrees in terms of when you fire a system, you've either got to fire in pairs, where they fired front and back, we'd fire two off over here and two off over here [Grimm gestures] to give you the same pitching roll as an example. Then we put a set of backup thrusters on just in case we needed those or needed the extra thrust in case of a problem in training. So those were the major differences. We had differences in tankage. We had

differences in t