Aerospace Memoirs by Art Lowell
2001
allowell@juno.com

INTRODUCTION

This book is a narrative about a man's varied, productive, prolific, but not altogether satisfying career during the span of what historians may well call the golden age of aerospace research and development. This period began in the latter part of the 1930s, when military adventures by what would be called the Axis Powers brought forth a buildup in military preparations by those countries who would be called the Allies, and who soon would be locked with the Axis in a second World War. Production of weapons of existing designs was accelerated, and research and development of new weapons was intensified on both sides, with large increases in national budgets for this work.

Greatly heightened R activity continued side-by-side with huge increases in production of weapons throughout the War. At the War's conclusion, R work in the United States continued at a very high level, even as production of war materiel was cut back, because of the perceived threat to world peace from the Soviet Union, and because of the hostilities in Korea and Vietnam into which the U.S. was drawn. Until the threat from the Soviets was seen to be diminishing, in the late 1980s, military expenditures remained high on both sides.

Advances followed advances in the capabilities of aircraft, and then missiles, for tactical and strategic missions, and space activities began, initially for strategic reconnaissance purposes. All these had spillover into civilian uses, including air transportation for the masses, and space exploration for reasons of national prestige as well as for science.

Coincidentally, I entered engineering school in 1937, and after graduation worked continuously on aerospace projects, mostly military, until my retirement in 1987. In one capacity or another, I worked on a great variety of projects, from the very large Navy Fleet Ballistic Missile program, through a spectrum of other significant programs, some which went to fruition, others which didn't survive the concept stage, and one which, many years after I worked on it, is now a subject of international debate. That, of course, is the proposed missile defense program.

So, I have good cause to assert that there was a golden age of aerospace research and development in which I was an active participant for much of its duration. I held positions of substantial responsibility at numerous times, but I often felt not in control of my own destiny. I was frequently required to make long-range plans, but I made them for programs, not for my own future. Fortunately, there often was joy in specific accomplishments, and there was always humor. I hope that these become evident in my narrative.

AT M.I.T. IN CAMBRIDGE

After a marginally satisfactory childhood and youth, in the fall of 1937 I was sent to M.I.T., to study aeronautical engineering. It was M.I.T. because my secondary school advisors felt that the heavy homework would keep me out of the pool halls, (to borrow a phrase). Aero engineering, because I had enjoyed working with model airplanes as a hobby, and because the profession sounded romantic.

After a first year of basics, one of the aeronautics professors tried to talk me out of the idea of trying to work in the field. Aero engineering, he said, was a nomadic life, moving from contract to contract, unless one went into teaching, or government service and he wouldn't recommend that to anybody. But I was stubborn, and this was a time when even people in the Economics Dept., a generation ahead of its subsequent greatness, were talking about subsistence farming. Talk about nearsightedness, with a major War only two years away!

I had joined a local fraternity, with the distinction of having Richard Feynman as one of its resident members. I didn't know in advance that he was there, or even after I got to live with him that he was a genius, destined to become one of the greatest physicists of this century, a Nobel prize winner, a legendary teacher and unforgettable personality. All I saw was a very sharp young man, who as a sophomore was helping physics seniors, who was pleasant and tolerant of lesser brains, at least of mine, and a great joker. I saw him performing some arcane experiments in our common rooms with simple things, and was careful not to sit too close to him at dinner, because of his gravity-defying manipulations with full glasses of water. I¹d like to be able to say that knowing him at school influenced my life, but I really was more impressed by his beautiful and adoring intended, who came to visit him at school, suitably chaperoned by both her mother and father. Dropping his name did help me later on from time to time, when I had to deal with some excessively self-important scientist.

Pressing on, from the outset, I loaded up on all the liberal arts electives I could (I even played Caesar in my Sophomore English class's production of Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra, against some graduate student's wife. She embarrassed the hell out of me by cuddling up to me on stage in a very filmy tunic‹obviously a set-up job) I got A's (or Tech equivalent, H's) in all these non -engineering courses, against more modest grades in the rest, so I ended up graduating with an honors grade point average, and membership in Tau Beta Pi, the national engineering society.

I believe this rather strange election may have been fortuitous since soon after graduation it became evident that, in a large organization, a literate and articulate so-so engineer had a big advantage, success-wise, over the usual mechanical or electrical whiz with the presentation skills of Grog. At least at that time. I think that in today's high-technology world, this distinction may not be as applicable.

For extra-curricular activities, I was involved in the management of the M.I.T Glee Club, and was its baritone soloist. To drop another name, the 2nd tenor next to me in the Club's Octet was the kid brother of Dorothy DeLay, who even then was legendary as a teacher of future great musical soloists.

I was in the ROTC and learned to fly Piper Cubs under the Government's prewar Civilian Pilot Training. Program. The singing just faded away. The flying, too, as soon as Pearl Harbor day came. (I¹d been called up in the preceding August as a non-rated ''chairborne'' Air Corps type.) I picked up flying again in 1974, and went on to become instrument rated, and to do a lot of recreational flying, That stopped about ten years ago, when I started getting just a tad absent minded (I switched to building and flying radio-controlled models.)

We ''Tech'' students weren't just greasy grinds, as the Harvard men liked to tell their dates. We had our moments. For example, there's this little episode:

Because I had so badly subverted the grade-point average system by loading up in my Freshman and Sophomore years on easy liberal arts subjects, I was elected to Tau Beta Pi in my junior year. (Of course some of the real engineers scored even better) I was active in managing and singing in the Glee Club. My management duties included negotiating joint concerts with women's colleges and schools in the vicinity. We¹d usually show up with 40 to 60 men, to more than 100 girls. . That made the balance of voices about right, and the women to men ratio at the formal dances which usually followed just peachy.

Now the only obligation we Tau Beta Pi foot soldiers had was to show up at the induction of new members into the Society. Well, it came to pass that we had such an event on an afternoon in which we had scheduled a joint concert with the Kathryn Gibbs School for Girls in Providence that evening, and it was to be a high point of our performance year. I was to do a little solo in the middle of the program. I couldn't cover the afternoon event and then drive to Providence in time for the concert. What a dilemma!

It turned out that there was another man with the same problem. He was a Dupont, and had his own light plane, A Stinson Voyager, hangared at Logan Airport . So we both showed up at the Tau Beta Pi induction in formal clothes, patent leather shoes and all, which undoubtedly impressed the inductees. As soon as we could get away gracefully, we made a mad dash to the airport, to find a nice strong wind right down the runway. This made for a stiff cross wind at the right-angled taxi way, wet with afternoon drizzle.

Well, the Voyager had a very large vertical tail which made for a vicious tendency to weathercock into the wind. Guess who was dragged by the wing tip, over the wet pavement and through the grass verge, so we could get to the runway and line up for take off?

We made it to the concert just in time for me to walk to the front of the stage for my solo. Our professional conductor glowered fiercely at me, and then laughed with everyone else at the sounds my wet patent leather shoes made. And about the following dance. I squished through one set, and became a wallflower until the event was over.

My rich friend flew home alone. I took the Club's bus, with my feet on the heater all the way

IN THE AIR CORPS AT DAYTON

About that call up‹Six weeks after graduation, 13 of us aero engineering grads with ROTC 2nd Lt.'s bars were activated and ordered to Wright Field , Dayton, Ohio. 6 of us with CPT program Private Pilot's Licenses got together and bought a 1924, OX-5 powered biplane. I have a short piece later about what some of us were doing with that airplane on Pearl Harbor Day.

Probably because I was the first reserve officer to arrive on the scene in the Aerodynamics Branch of the Aircraft Laboratory, I was assigned to assist the Branch Chief, a warm and understanding Colonel, Frank Moyers ,and two veteran civil servants to ride herd on what rapidly became a largish, mixed bag of civil servants and officer and enlisted draftees , with secretaries and technical aides, some of them cute little girls from West Virginia who could run a Friden calculator, to leaven the mixture.

As I remember the mission of the Branch, it was, in general:

To become and remain cognizant of the state of the art of aerodynamics, and of its practice in aircraft design and development. To assist the program offices ''down the hill'' in reviewing for correctness and accuracy the written reports submitted by aircraft development and production contractors.

To assist in solving operational problems which developed in the field. To recommend, and occasionally perform research and development projects in the aerodynamics field. To keep in touch with our counterparts in the Navy Bureau of Aeronautics and with the National Advisory Committee of Aeronautics (later renamed NASA) and with various other government agencies government agencies, laboratories., test facilities and the Universities. To keep abreast of available information on developments in our field, in the forces of both allies and enemies. To assist the program offices in evaluating competing designs and proposals for new aircraft.

What you see above is what I remember was the substance of our reason for being there. Tires you out just looking at it, don't it!.

To try to do all that, our collection of educations and experiences was organized into specialty groups, like ''Performance'', ''Stability and Control'' ''Aircraft Loads' and the like, adding ''Compressibility'', (a misnomer, should have been ''Incompressibility'') when some of the fastest aircraft started getting weird effects as they approached the speed of sound, (once called the Sonic Barrier, remember, you fellow oldsters?)

As for my own work, the new kid on the block got to do a lot of paper shuffling, and screening of official directives and notices.

Until our gates were shut after Pearl Harbor Day, any taxpayer had the right to come in and see us about any invention or contribution to the aircraft or weapons field he thought he could make. It was my job to screen them Here are a couple of sample encounters I had:

One of the good taxpayers who came to see us at Wright Field in the few months I was there before the War shut our gates declared with great sincerity that we could obsolete long range bombers by simply burying a number of rockets in fields in our Midwest and launching them at those across the sea with whom we might have a serious falling out. Sounds weird and far-fetched, doesn't it. He had a solution to the rocket energy problem by burying and launching the missiles at a 45 degree angle. He would thus be able to utilize the Tangent Law, which he could demonstrate by simple geometry would yield 1.4 pounds. of thrust in the desired direction of travel, for every pound of thrust the rocket motor put out.

Then there was the suggestion that we could lighten up our aircraft by filling the wings with compressed vacuum. This one came by mail, but I still had to answer it.

Then there was the visitor who stared at me for a while, and then declared that he was not going to say one word about his invention until we paid him $10,000, up front.

FLASHBACK

I began this book by noting that in the Fall of 1937 I went away to study at M.I.T, after what I termed a ''marginally satisfactory childhood and youth''. Now that we are about to embark on a civilian career, let's go back and look at those earlier years.

.My Mother was born in North Adams, Mass.of immigrants parents. My grandfather, I was told, had been a horse-trader. I barely knew my maternal grandmother, who was very old when I was very young. I got to know well my mother's two maiden sisters. The older one had a promising career as a singer cut short when she became profoundly deaf. She never lost her interest in public affairs, and I remember how as a teenager I would be at the receiving end of a rather loud discourse on weighty matters of which I had little knowledge and less interest. The older sister became a very fashionable milliner on 5th Avenue in New York. I remember that the two ladies would travel to Paris each year or two to pick up the latest fashions in hats, which was my milliner aunt's premiere offering to the ladies of New York. They lived together, and made quite an interesting couple.

My mother was a social worker when she met and married my father. Observation of the misery caused by misbegotten marriages had led her to become an early advocate of what she called ''trial marriages'', cohabitation before marriage. Generations were to pass before this became socially acceptable, and, as of today, the norm.

My father came to this country at the age of ten, or at around 1909. He became a lawyer through night school, and became well known as a writer of impeccable and incontrovertible legal briefs. He was a personal lawyer, a stock-holder's lawyer, and an estate lawyer, acting in the last capacity until well after one might question whether he would outlive his clients. (He and my mother each died at age 96, which gives me hope that at age 81, I may still see this outpouring in print). He was part of a large brood, the matriarch of which was, as I remember her, a regal figure, quiet and dignified. She had a beautiful face, and a coif of snowy white hair, which my father inherited, and I also.

I had one sibling, an older sister who grew up to be a beautiful and talented young woman. After graduation from college and The American Academy for the Dramatic Arts in New York, she played ingenue parts in several off-Broadway stage productions. She met and married a young advertising executive, and then he switched her acting focus to the less-demanding, immensely popular field of ''soap opera'' radio. For 7 years, Dorothy Lowell was the female lead in ''Our Gal Sunday'', which became the longest- lasting soap opera in radio history, brightening the lives of New York housewives for 15 minutes each day, five days a week, for 21 years.

My sister's career on that show was cut short tragically when she died during childbirth, at age 29. Even a fine New York City hospital could not get the penicillin which she, a civilian, needed, during wartime Her two surviving children and their children still play parts in my life and that of my second wife, Norma. As do some of the children of my father's siblings, and a nephew of my first wife, and his family.

Although not himself a literary man, except for legal matters, my father bought from some of the estates he administered, complete sets of the works of Kipling, Stevenson, Teddy Roosevelt, Defoe, Lewis Carroll, Shakespeare, and a set of the l921 edition of The Book of Knowledge. Written for children, this set interposed, stories, poems, legends, games, and other interesting things amongst articles on science, history, mathematics, history, geography, and other useful subjects. This, as you will see later, proved my salvation.

My parents tried to educate me and my sister as well as they could afford. I was sent for preschooling and kindergarten to the Ethical Culture School in New York, supposedly a model of the then-modern beginning education. I was sent to boarding school for several years, to Mrs. Burt's School for Tiny Tots, in Peekskill, N. Y. The family then moved to Long Beach, L.I. for two years. Teachers at the small public school there apparently thought they had something special in me, although my classmates didn't necessarily agree. By the time we moved to Brooklyn, I was two years ahead of my age group, academically, but not emotionally and socially. I was entered into the vast public school system there, at PS 193, at 6th grade level. Classes were divided into 3 sections, ''bright students'', ''''dull students'', and just plain students. To try me out for a semester, they put me into the just-plain-student section. I couldn't stand the culture shock, and the sudden lack of special status. My academic wiring system just shut down and remained so until graduation from Erasmus Hall High School, 6 years later.

I had the library my father had assembled, particularly the Book of Knowledge volumes, which I read from cover to cover, at least three times. I also roller skated to the public library frequently, (in between bicycle trips to the various airports around.) Those books saved me. Passive in the schools, I home-schooled myself.

Still only 16 years old, I was sent by my parents to a fine preparatory school for two years. It was the Polytechnic Preparatory Country Day School, across the bay from Fort Hancock ( where once a year, when the coastal defense guns were rolled out to be test-fired, and notice duly published, the appointed date was followed by claims for broken windows from damaged householders, whether the guns actually were fired or not )

Poly Prep was run on the English system, so that I entered in the Fifth Form and graduated from the privileged sixth form. On the day King Edward abdicated, we were all called to chapel, to hear his abdication speech. Tears rolled down the face of our kindly Headmaster, as the former Prince of Wales spoke.

The good and caring teachers at Poly Prep straightened me out as well as possible, and led me to apply to M.I.T. for college. I think that the school's excellent reputation is what got me in.

DAYS AT McDONNELL

Titles can be deceiving. This story starts out as if it's going to be limited to the almost 10 years I spent in St. Louis, but it'll reach out and bite you later on, even in California. I may have to break it up into several stories, but then again, I just may ask you to struggle on under this title. If it gets too long and confusing, just stop and move on to the next Story.

I got the job at McDonnell Aircraft Corporation because Vernon Outman, Chief Aerodynamicist of that relatively new fighter airplane company, wanted someone to take over the chores of seeing to the needs of the new Missile Engineering Division.

Both Vernon and Mr. Mac himself had been in Engineering at Martin Mr. Mac broke off during the war to pursue some innovative ideas in fighter aircraft design. After one twin-engined experimental fighter contract with the Army Air Corps, Mac got a breakthrough with a contract to design and build the Navy's first jet-engineered powered fighter, and the rest, as someone may have said, is history.

Outman left Martin to join McDonnell early in the company's history. I heard that it had to do with the dihedral his office had recommended be built into one of the early Martin transports. It turned out to be excessive, and the airplane had a ''Dutch-roll'' characteristic that was so pronounced that the pilots, way up front, complained that the motion made them airsick. The passengers, nearer the airplane's center of gravity, didn't seem to be bothered by the motion so much. The only items way behind the c.g. were the galley and the lavatories, and nobody had to sit there for long stretches.

Oh yes, MAC also got a war time Air Corps contract for the XJ-85, a very stubby little fighter that was to fit inside one of the bomb bays of the huge B-36 bomber. This was a take-off from the experiment involving the Navy's prewar airships. Trapezes were slung under the Akron and the Macon, and the biplane Navy fighters of the day could, and did take off and land from the devices, to do recon, fight off attack, do beer runs, or whatever

There were two fundamental differences between the two experiments. First, the dirigible's babies could come back and hook onto the mother ship. The B-36's single baby could not. One launch, perform your mission, and then find a place to land. The other difference was that the XJ-85 had to fit into a very short space in one of the B-36's bomb bays. It was impossible with the technology of the day to make that design directionally stable enough to be of any practical use.

I had met Vernon when he came to Wright Field to discuss some extension that had been proposed to full-scale wind- tunnel tests that were being conducted on a prototype. Vernon didn't want to spend the money on more tests. I agreed with him, but for a different reason, unspoken. Nothing could help that design, I believed.

On my release from active duty, Vernon offered me a job to head up the Aerodynamics and Thermodynamics department of the new Missile Engineering Division. Rumor had it that Bob Hage, who had headed up Wright Field's Aerodynamics Dept. just before me, and who had been discharged before I was, had been offered the job before me, had accepted, and then changed his mind en route, perhaps while entering St. Louis on old Route 66. He had just kept going and returned to Boeing. He had come to Wright Field from there, perhaps 4 years earlier, and had an older brother who was a well-known and highly respected expect in the field of aircraft design, as Bob became also, I'm sure.

But my memoir and these additional Stories are supposed to reveal the real Me, not ramble on about other guys. I accepted the $6500/yr offer, (paid weekly at $125 a week) and reported for duty in October, 1956. I had no business civilian clothes, so had to let a Famous-Barr salesman sell me a suit, which had wide white stripes on a medium brown flannelish background. Still on Air Corps terminal leave, I wore my uniform for a while longer, and a big butterfly bandage over one eye, where I had walked into an auto lube lift at half mast, in the dark, during the drive from Dayton. My arrival was well noted, I'm sure

The real Me was much influenced by his surroundings and coworkers, of course. First. as to the physical surroundings. We were housed in an unairconditioned wing next to the parking lot for the MAC building. That environmental fact did not really register until the first summer after my arrival, when the noise from large, standing fans intended to keep the heat inside barely tolerable, made the room so noisy that telephone conversation was very difficult, and even thinking sometimes a trial . The large room was a big bull-pen. We sat in rows, all facing one end of the building, except for the new Chief Engineer of the aggregation, whom I have referred to in my memoir as Captain Queeg. I remember his full name, but prefer not to use it, just in case some kin of this fine southern gentlemen comes gunning for me, if I should say something unkind about him. Let me just say at this point that he had been an Officer in the Navy Bureau of Aeronautics, specializing in aircraft structures, before joining MAC. When I think of him now, which I try to avoid, I think of the warden in ''Cool Hand Luke''. I may not have had the presence of Steve McQueen, under this man's piercing eyes, but the Warden he was, indeed.

The Chief Engineer sat, in a row by himself, sans secretary, facing the rear of everybody else. Perhaps this was to insure that the draftsmen maintained the approved posture, with only asses and elbows showing. Periodically, his stentorian voice would call one of us Department Heads to join him, to sit in a straight chair at the right of his desk. On the corner of that desk we could see a stack of 3 or 4-inch strips of ruled paper, on which he had made hand-written notes at prior audiences he had held. After conversations with us, and after making more notes on a ruled, legal sized pad, he would put a straight edge under what he had written, and tear off that strip of paper, which contained, usually, a note as to the assignment or instructions he had just given out in the interview, due date prominently featured. He did not lunch with, nor socialize with the help.

This was the environment I had brought myself and my family into, in a metropolitan area which we found unattractive, and no other aerospace employment opportunities within many, many miles. It was, moreover my first real civilian job, at poor pay and with no savings to fall back on. I could not imagine what the consequences would be if I were to acknowledge failure at my first job, by leaving. So I stayed on, for almost ten years.

Things did get better after a couple of years, when ''Capt Queeg'' left, and was replaced by Ben Bromberg, as I have described earlier in my memoir. I don't know where Queeg went, but after a while, back he came, looking for a job again. Mr. Mac hired him into his executive suite under a one-year contract, and, no small tyrant himself, gave the guy absolute nothing to do. Queeg somehow busied himself with nothings, saved his rather good salary, and left again for good. He had made himself an expert on the theory of yacht construction and supply. I heard he bought the Cadillac of companies in the yacht fixture supply business, someplace in Michigan

I must tell you about someone else at MAC with whom I actually had little dealings. His name I really don't remember. He would be completely forgettable were it not for the strange ways he would cross my path in the future This man bore the title of Executive Vice President of the whole Company, a position which, under Mr. Mac's sway and the company's small size at the time, was meaningless. When later I had a small office in the Executive wing of the building, doing marketing of new business projects, I heard Mr. Mac dictate, using the speakerphones in each of the two offices, the precise configuration and equipment the Executive VP was to order for Mr. Mac's company car. I can only assume the poor man's other duties were of a like nature.

This gentleman left, to become President of Universal Match Company, whose business included making missile launch systems. I met one of his subordinates when we both, in 1966, were sent by our respective companies, in my case Lockheed, to ''Charm School'' at Columbia's School of Business, at Harriman House He said that this person had been as ineffective at UMC as he had been at MAC.

Later this person went to the Pentagon, where he was the principal author of a study that said that, since defense contractors made such obscene profits in the production phase of a weapon system procurement , they should be required to bear a more substantial part of the cost and risk of the development phase. This was just as the Air Force was preparing to call for bids on the huge C-5 transport airplane design and development. Lockheed bid low, overran the cost, and lost lots of money. Together with the disastrous effects of the Rolls Royce jet engine company's bankruptcy on the Lockheed 1011 commercial transport's development progress, this nearly broke Lockheed financially. (This was while the Missile and Space Company, with its military space and FBM missile projects, was going great guns, and making money for the Corporation in large amounts)

A final irony. It was a time when a company I believe was Textron was thinking of buying out the weakened Lockheed company. The gentleman of whom we are speaking shows up in Sunnyvale in the entourage of the potential acquirer. The group goes to our Executive Dining Room for lunch. I am there. This man greets me like a long-lost cousin. Immediately after lunch Herschel Brown, our Executive VP at the time corners me. Have I been up to something, he asks? I assure him that I have not, that I have had no contact with the man since those days at MAC. To show my good faith, I tell him, for his use in a any subsequent discussions, that from my own personal observation, the man is dumber than he looks, but persuasive enough to be dangerous

I really must tell you about one more, really interesting person with whom I dealt while at MAC. David S. Lewis, a handsome, charming man with a beautiful and gracious, wife, whose name, Dorothy, was the same as that of my sister, and later of one of my daughters, was head of the Aerodynamics Department of the large airplane engineering establishment at MAC, in theory my big brother. We didn't socialize much, and we really did not have much interface at work. He and his people considered my department as very junior associates, but they were very glad to come around for advice when our work on the Talos missile got us into the aerodynamic heating business ahead of the airplane company .

David left Engineering, and went into Mr. Mac's suite, where he became the one-man project office for the Navy F3H fighter, the beginning of MAC's really big time, in fact, dominance of the fighter aircraft market. The airplane was in initial production, in Fleet Trials in fact, when it was discovered that it had a curious characteristic. If rolled rapidly to the right or left, the wing stayed bent in the direction of the roll. It course, be made straight again by rolling the plane in the opposite direction Somehow, the Navy would not accept that as an adequate solution. Through magic, charm , and influence, Dave convinced the Navy to let the production line continue, with temporary fixes to the airplanes already produced, while permanent fixes were worked out.

Dave was instrumental in selling the next MAC aircraft, the tremendously successful F4H, to fill both the fighter and ground attack roles. Finally, and this was a severe blow to Lockheed's L-1011 transport, he personally convinced the Chairman of American Airlines to buy the by-then McDonnell ­Douglas company's DC-10, reversing a previous plan by American to buy the Lockheed product. By this time, David had been made President of then MacDac. Reportedly, he couldn't get the old man's commitment to anoint him as Chairman, when he, Mr. Mac retired, So Dave left to do a great job, we heard, as Chairman of General Dynamics.

To show you what a fun guy Dave was, when I saw him later, one time only, I saw him in the line at the Executive Dining Room. (no, it had not become my hang-out: I just liked the luncheon food and conversation there ) He was looking at the Lockheed stock price quotation which was posted there, until the C-5/L-1011 shambles made the subject unnotable. I go up to say hello. He fixes me with his piercing one gray, one blue-green eye and demands to know why the price of his stock, then MacDac wasn't posted there. What could I say? ''How's Dorothy ? didn't seem appropriate''

Mr. Mac wanted to keep the top job in the family. First, he selected a nephew, Sanford L. McDonnell, a fine and competent man, who had cycled briefly through my aerodynamics dept, during his on-the-job training. MacDac prospered during ''Sandy''s administration. When he retired, Mr. Mac's son, John S., Jr. took over. For whatever reason , the company's fortunes declined. John Jr. presided at the dissolution of the empire. Boeing bought the MacDac company, and dropped the name forever.

AT LOCKHEED IN SUNNYVALE

I really started to think about going to work for Lockheed about a year before I actually made the move. The company seemed like a good bet for a still-young, hopefully entrepreneurial engineer. They were late getting into the missile and space business. I knew of nothing they had besides a winged vehicle for testing ramjet engines, and a towering, five-stage rocket by which they were able to test model reentry bodies at hypersonic speeds without violating land test-range boundaries, (3 stages up and 2 down was the way I heard it) But there seemed to a turf fight going on between Willis Hawkins, the renowned and innovative aircraft designer, and a Dr. Louis Ridenour, head of a new and well supported Research and Development organization in Lockheed, as to who would control missiles and space work. I knew Hawkins, but I had never met Ridenour. I was leery of walking into a catfight.

But Lloyd Wilson had gone from McDonnell to Lockheed, on Ridenour's side of the fence, followed by Larry Edwards on Hawkin's side. Larry pressed me to join him, so I wrote out an application in longhand. In the meantime, there was a Director of Long Range Planning at the Convair-operated Navy plant at Pomona, California , who was looking for a replacement for himself . Convair. Pomona. produced STV/Standard Missiles for ship-defense. I've mentioned this missile before, as the first output of the Navy's Bumblebee program. So I made application, and flew out for an interview.

After I arrived, I realized why the departing Director wanted out. The plant didn't need a long-range planner. The Navy would do most of that in the successive Standard Missile improvements they called for, and all Convair had to do was to make the changes needed and keep building.(No mission studies or other creative work was called for in the job description) Maybe Convair San Diego was doing creative work, but that wasn't the job offered.

When I was taken to see the plant's General Manager, I was warned that I must not tell him my MAC salary as weekly pay, as it was. The Admiral,(he was a retired Rear Admiral and preferred to be addressed that way), just despised anyone who mentioned pay as anything but monthly. I immediately sensed a potential crap-to-pay problem in working close to a man whose vision was so limited.

Finally, the whole plant was too neat, and too well laid out. There was no sense of anything new about to happen.

I thanked them kindly, and drove out to see Larry Edwards in Van Nuys. Willis Hawkins was there. We talked. Without my asking, he told me that he and Louis were getting along just fine. He made me an offer of a Staff Engineer's job, whatever that was, at one-third more than MAC was paying me, I accepted on the spot, and agreed to report for duty 3 weeks hence, in April 1956. That would allow me time to give MAC two weeks' notice before I drove out, and time for Larry to have my application typed up so that the personnel people could read it, after the fact.

It was September, 1969 before I found out what it was that bugged me about the Pomona plant. That's when C. Northcote Parkinson published an article that postulated and demonstrated that ''A Perfection of Planned Layout is Achieved Only by Institutions on the Point of Collapse.'' Well Pomona didn't collapse, it just went on and on. And nobody could describe the modified half-hangar at Van Nuys Airport that the Lockhheed missile effort first occupied as neat, or well laid out.

Since Lockheed's infant Missile and Space activities were scheduled to move to the San Francisco Bay Area late in the summer, I left my wife to put our house in Ferguson, MO up for sale, and to pack up and drive herself and our then three kids to her parent's home in Mississippi, to wait until the latter move was accomplished. I flew out alone to our new promised land, where I was met by Larry Edwards, who graciously offered to share his living accommodations with me. He had a very fine, former chauffeur's apartment in a fine old home on Bellagio Dr., in a nice section of LA. It was a short drive over the hill to commute to work each day at the hangar work spaces at Van Nuys Airport. Larry helped me find a car to use for work, a clunky little Willys Aero, which I now remember as a cheapened up cousin of a beautifully restored show car I bought, over the internet, in the summer of 1999. That was, and is, a cute little 1961 Nash Metropolitan hardtop. Norma, my second wife, had had a convertible version of that car, but new, 40 years ago, when she lived on Hawaii with her parents. Larry was a good friend to me, and initially my boss in his preliminary design unit.

Within two weeks of my arrival, a Request for Proposal came in from the Air Force for a turbojet-powered, small cruise missile, to be carried by the B-52. In an organization with a good sales force, one usually does not respond to an RFP, particularly one with a short response time, as this one had, unless one has known that the project opportunity was coming, and has put in a lot of preparatory effort into discovering the customer's needs and in preparing a preliminary design.

Nevertheless, our management decided to take a chance on this one. Looking around for someone to lead the proposal effort, they found out that I was the only person handy who had any experience in writing formal proposals to the Air Force, gained in my time in marketing at McDonnell. So, I gathered up a team of people I had never met before, and told them, with a great show of confidence, ''Fellas and gals, this is the way it's going to be!'' A proposal team rarely has time to vote on anything.

You see, quick examination of the performance requirements had shown me that the propulsion needs could be well satisfied by the GE J-85 engine we at MAC had just finished putting into the Green Quail. I reasoned that, since that bird was also going to be carried by the B-52, a cruise missile with the same engine would provide a very favorable logistics and support situation for the customer. I reasoned, probably naively that at least some of the other bidders would not know about the Green Quail and it's new engine, and that we therefore would have some advantage over other bidders.

Within the allotted time we had a fine design and a good development proposal, but it was not to be. Management came down, told us that Lockheed was about to receive two major projects, one from the Air Force, (actually from a secret agency) for a satellite development, and one from the Navy for a sea-launched ballistic program. Our proposal would not be submitted, because management could not see us manning up fast enough to handle three new projects at once. Two would be, and turned out to be, quite tough enough. So, my first big job for my new employer was a bust, but I been noticed.

When the first work did come in from the Navy, it was on a six-plus-one experiment, in which a cluster of 6 existing large solid rockets as a first stage, and another as a second stage was to be tested as a potential ballistic missile booster. I was put in charge of overseeing the marrying of the Army Jupiter missile's guidance system to a new missile control system we were to put on top of that 160,000 pound rocket stack. I knew nothing about inertial guidance systems, but then nobody else we had on board then knew any more. Brashness, and a quick-study trait was supposed to carry me through this job. And I did a pretty good balancing act with a committee formed with the guidance contractor, GE, Navy, (by then Strategic System Project Office) personnel, and a few Lockheed types as member.

By this time it was late summer, and we had made our move to the Bay Area. The M.I.T. Guidance and Control Laboratory, under Dr. Charles Stark Draper, (who had lectured to my class over 15 years earlier), came in with a splendid new, lighter and more accurate guidance system design, using wonderful new sensors and a digital guidance computer. This, a and a whole new set of guidance equations replaced, with some arguments from members of my committee, the analog computer techniques they were used to. That done, I was relieved of my guidance chores, my last official act being to write to our then subcontractor for this effort, GE, an instruction to do henceforth what the MIT group told them to do. In parallel, Dr. Edward Teller, the sometimes controversial developer of the hydrogen bomb, had come up with a small bomb that fit very nicely with the two-stage, fresh rocket design Lockheed had laid out. This was late 1956. By early l957, approval had been given by the Chief of Naval Operations to proceed with all haste, top priority on people and massive funding available, to the development and early operational deployment of a ballistic missile system carried in and to be launched if ever necessary, by specially modified submarines already on the builder's ways. 31/2 years was the allotted time, 1500 nautical miles was the specified range, accuracy required, about one mile. Sputnik had gone up, and had shaken the military and civilian authorities. Polaris, as the new system was to called, was to be the third leg of the triad of ''deterrent'' weapon systems, bombers and land-based intercontinental-ranged missiles, the other two legs. Its targets would be large, urban-industrial targets, hence the loose accuracy requirement.

I was put in charge of a new unit, responsible for missile test plans, test and analysis and instrumentation, and given the title of Asst. Development Manager, Polaris Missile Systems, one of four such positions reporting to Frank Bednarz, the Chief Engineer of the new Missile Systems Division (MSD)

Fine books and papers have been written about how the complex and demanding development program, of the original submarine-launched ballistic missile, was organized and carried out, how the many state of the art problems encountered were solved, at the same time as a contractor structure was built up, manned with qualified technical people, and engineering, test, and production facilities created, all with the utmost speed and highest national priority. I won't go over the same ground. Instead, I will tell you about some of my personal experiences during what, in retrospect, was the most productive period of my career. All of these stories are interesting; some of them are funny.

To begin, here's how my first contact went with the new U.S. Navy Strategic Systems Program office:

When the real Polaris had been anointed as a full project, Adm. Raborn called some technical people from the various prime contractors in to Washington, to meet with the Branch Heads, military and civilian, who were in charge of the various aspects of the work. Capt. Levering Smith was there, as head of the Missile Branch, SP-27, as were military and civilian leaders of the Guidance and Fire Control Branch, SP-23. The latter had had GE under contract for quite a while, in connection with a short-lived plan to fit the Army's liquid-fueled Jupiter missile to the Navy's fleet. I attended for Lockheed, as did George Kinghorn, a quiet man who for a short time was my boss. The Lockheed program organization was still being created at that time

During the course of the meeting, the SP-23 representatives argued that the interface between the missile and the guidance system should be set at the hydraulic actuators which drove the control jetavators. Practically speaking, this would have made GE the dominant contractor, with all the good electronic stuff, and Lockheed the ''structures'' contractor only. I responded immediately that Talos experience had shown me the vital importance of keeping the ''inner loop'' that is the missile, including its ''flight control'' box together,as an integrated design, lest missile instability occur. Adding the Guidance platform and its computer would make the total into an ''outer loop'', (speaking the new language of servomechanisms).

That, of course, was perfectly true for an anti-aircraft missile, like Talos, which had to make rapid course changes throughout its flight. It didn't necessarily hold true for a ballistic missile, whose course changes could be relatively slow. Nobody present knew enough, or was quick enough, to challenge my claim, and the moment of danger to Lockheed's major position in the program seem to pass.

When George and I got back to the Lockheed Washington office, I composed, he approved, and we sent back to the West Coast a report of the day's events. To be sure to catch their attention, I put the report in rhyme. I don't remember any of the words, but the gist of the ending was to assure the folks back home that we had repelled the invaders.

Early next morning, Willis Hawkins, then our General Manager, and Herschel Brown, our AGM, arrived unshaven on the redeye, to make sure our defenses would hold. They could have slept in. Levering Smith had quietly put the tigers of SP-23 back in their cage, and we were never after to be worried by such talk.

Another anecdote tells how I discovered the most important rule in the new Polaris program play book: The first part of this story appeared originally, in much abbreviated form, as a short interview with me. It was a note in a glossy Lockheed publication which celebrated the 25th anniversary of the FBM Program. (It's up to 45 years now, and counting)

The story illustrates the cardinal rule that Adm. Raborn and then Capt. Smith established for the FBM program, with its initial great time urgency and its need to invent new state of the art as we progressed. That rule, possibly never written down, was, ''Tell the truth, only the truth, and tell it quickly) I actually found out about that rule when I fell right into an applicable situation and from ignorance, did the right thing.

Here's what happened. I had just been named the head of a new organization, called ''Test Plans, Analysis and Instrumentation.'' Our first job was, with the advice and consent of our new Chief Engineer, Frank Bednarz, to plan a series of flight tests of full scale Polaris test missiles, equipped with actual first and second stage motors and their controls starting at flight 1, other subsystems and features to be added as we progressed.

In the meantime, someone before my time had planned a series of subscale tests to investigate critical technology features. One, called FTV-6, to be launched from a temporary launch pad at the Air Force's Cape Canaveral test facility, was supposed to determine at small scale whether it would be possible to snuff out, or maybe provide a reverse component to the thrust of a rocket motor, so that we could control the velocity buildup of the missile. This was to be the first test for Polaris at that Air Force facility, and there was great anticipation.

I won't go into details, but the test went off, appeared to the naked eye to have occurred at the right time and to have succeeded. The jubilant Navy representative at the test facility put out a press release that the Polaris program had had its first flight test at the Cape, and it had been a success!

Then came the dawn. Data came in quickly that showed that another phenomenon.had occurred, On ignition of the test article and separation from its booster, the booster had quickly come up and creamed the test article, just at the time that the ''thrust termination'' would have been triggered. What was seen at thrust termination time was the destruction of the test article vehicle.

We quickly told our bosses and the Navy what we believed had happened, and that we had a no- test of the principle we were trying to investigate. The Navy sent - consultants, including Dr. Derald Stuart to check out our findings (and us). He concurred and we were given to understand that we had gotten the message right. We were always to strive to get to the truth of each test as correctly and quickly as we could, and the chips were to fall where they might.

Dr Stuart subsequently joined the FBM team at Lockheed, became head of the propulsion program, and then, for 17 distinguished years, the General Manager of the Missile Systems Division, and leader of our Fleet Ballistic Missile Program effort.

I'm aware of only one violation of the ''only the truth'' policy of the FBM program. That was when someone released to the press a photo of the first launching of a Polaris test vehicle from the deck of the USNS Observation Island. It appears from the photo that the first-stage motor is burning away merrily. Indeed it is! The entire rear end is burning!

You see, the early Polaris motor cases were made of steel, with forward and aft end caps bolted in place. Somehow, one of the ''launch stowage adapters'' that fitted the missile into the launch tube had gotten cocked out of position. When the ship's launcher system delivered the launch pulse, the adapter apparently squeezed the joint so hard that it popped all the bolt heads. The aft closure came off, and the entire rear of the motor propellant grain began burning.

The thrust pulse which resulted was brisk indeed, but short, since the large exit area reduced the combustion pressure to the point that the motor snuffed out. The missile made a short flight up and over the side of the ship, but was still headed up when the enterprising photographer got his shot!

Then there was the interesting problem of full-scale test vehicle nomenclature:

It was the duty of my group to design the flight test program, under the close supervision of our Chief Engineer. As I noted earlier, there would be a series of full scale, meaning full-size-motored-flight test vehicles, made progressively more complete as major subsystems were developed and tested in the lab, and then added to the ''bird''.

We needed a way to designate each test vehicle in the series. The Navy had already picked the name, ''Polaris'', and the initial model letter, ''A''. So, in keeping with standard military aeronautical practice, we would have called the first test vehicle, ''Polaris XA-1''. But XA was the new Lockheed designation for our sister Sunnyvale project organization, the Space division, just as XN was the designation of our missile division.

Well, I for one would not want our have our naval pride and joy named after an Air Force project division, so I proposed we put the X after the A, as in AX-1, 2 , 3 etc.. The Chief Engineer liked the idea and the Navy went along.

Then there were my balloon watching mornings:

In the first days of Polaris flight testing, which we were scheduled at do at a rate of several flights a month, we encountered a problem which we called ''jetavator'' sticking . A jetavator was a thrust deflecting device by which the 4-nozzled rockets motors were controlled in pitch and yaw. Telemetry was telling us that the jetavators, sometimes during first stage flight, developed an apparent resistance to movement, and caused loss of missile control.

We knew that our rocket motors' propellant contained a lot of aluminum powder to provide extra energy to the combustion. We reasoned that an unburned portion of this aluminum was gumming up the jetevators and restricting their motion. We further reasoned that the more exposure to the exhaust the jetevators had, the higher the probability of sticking.

Control was most required right after launch, and then at high altitude, where ''wind shears'' of great magnitude sometimes occurred. In other words, the wind velocity increased and decreased very rapidly and jaggedly within a small altitude range. The jetevators would be called upon most in such a regime. Until a basic solution to the problem could be worked out, we needed to avoid flying on days when wind shears would be highest, and jetevator exposure to the rocket exhaust would be greatest.

A digital computer program was devised which would take wind-velocity variations with altitude, compute from them the probable cumulative exposure of the jetavators to the rocket exhaust, and indicate whether it was wise to fly under the particular conditions that prevailed. This computer was in Palo Alto.

And so, in the wee hours of the morning of a launch day, a test range employee would launch and track a weather balloon, and feed the wind-velocity data to someone from Lockheed who would transmit it to Palo Alto, wait for the computer to grind out its conclusions, and then communicate that decision-forcing data to the launch crew. Since, on the days I visited the range on launch days, I had no specific duties to perform except to watch and stay out of the way, guess which Lockheed employee watched the balloon go up. You got it!

Let me tell you about a duty I enjoyed particularly. Every two months SSPO Missile Branch leaders gathered together with Lockheed and with our associate contractors and principal subcontractors, in Sunnyvale, for a two-day project review. Leading off this review would be a film summary of principal program events, mainly tests, which had occurred since the preceding meeting, Working with documentary film sent back from the flight test facility at Cape Canaveral, and from around our plant and those of the other contractors, the head of my film group, Mike Beigler, would put together a 30 minute film. I would then write a narration, to be given by Frank Bednarz, our Chief Engineer. At one meeting , Frank could not be present, so I did the narration myself. From the back of the room comes this low-voiced mutter, ''The ghost speaks''. Frank heard about it when he returned to the plant, and I don't think he was pleased.

Here's a story about one film that had a much longer run and a much wider distribution that I ever intended:

In the Spring of 1960 we began to see signs of daylight in the Polaris development program. Our flight tests, with gradually increasing objectives, were starting to be successful. I figured we all needed a little comic relief, because of the extreme tension of the preceding three years. So I got together with Mike Beigler and we put together an 8 -minute film, to be shown once only, at an upcoming bimonthly gathering of the program leadership, to be held in Sunnyvale.

For this film we strung together the worst looking of our ground and flight test disasters, and used them in a context of a blockhouse full of people waiting, and waiting, for a launch to be released. (Weather problems or some other nonsense) These are their idle thoughts, while my commentary, with great sincerity, extolled each pictured calamity as if it was a milestone toward ultimate success, (Which in a sense it was, since we sure learned a lot in the process). In all this time, the '' head'' (Navyspeak for restroom) is outside the iron door to the blockhouse), and many of us are in great pain.

Finally, the bird is launched, and achieves its limited objectives, and the iron door is opened at last. In the last sequence I recite solemnly what that flight taught us, ending with the words, "---and the next time we build a blockhouse, we'd better put the head on the INSIDE of the iron door!" 3 seconds of water seeping out from under the door, CUT

Well, we did build another blockhouse, and it had a head inside, and my little film got snatched up and shown about everywhere in the program for a long time thereafter. I heard that the head in Blockhouse 25B was named, briefly, ''Lowell's Lounge'', in my honor.

Footnote: My bladder has always had a short fuse. When I was still in the Army Air Corps, I got sent on a technical intelligence mission from Wright Field to Tokyo, arriving soon after after the Japanese surrender. A buddy of mine who was a rated pilot wangled the use of a small two-seat plane, and took me on a tour of Tokyo Bay, chock-full of our Pacific Fleet. Maybe I just imagined all those AA guns tracking us as we sauntered by, but suddenly, I had to go real bad. No relief tube aboard, so we had to land briefly at some small airstrip just inshore, so that I could relieve myself at the side of the runway.

Finally, the Polaris A-1 development program is completed, on schedule. I get to ride along on a DASO. This is the acronym for Development and Shakedown Operation, which is what the Navy calls a series of instrumented flight-test operations performed on a new missile system, and/or a new or overhauled submarine by its crew(s), to demonstrate that they are ready for operational deployment

The submarine is the USS Patrick Henry, SSB(N)-599, the second boat to have the Polaris A-1. It fell to the USS George Washington to make the historic first launches a couple of months earlier. My day was on the 22nd of September, 1960.

The boat was packed, not with a lot of missiles, but with many, many human bodies. There were the full Blue and Gold crews aboard, or so I was told, the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Arleigh Burke, Rear Admirals Raborn and Smith, a Vice Admiral, SSPO reps, shipyard reps, and a bunch of us contractor reps.

In due course, a launch command was given, we heard and felt the eject pulse, and then, silence, until we heard something bumping on and along the deck. Seems that we had a "wet match", no rocket firing, so the missile just slid down to where it started, cushioned, fortunately by a lot of water. (It later was determined that the safe-arm device on the motor ignition circuit was somehow in the safe position at launch )

After much conferencing, aboard and ashore, we were cleared to launch a second missile----Launch command, eject pulse, and then we heard the rocket fire, above the surface of the water---actually TWO rockets, since the head end of the 1st stage motor opened up and ignited the second stage motor.

The people aboard the support ships were treated to the sight of a lit 2nd stage, porpoising in and out of the water, fortunately endangering nothing afloat.--I'm not sure what happened to the 1st stage, burning at both ends. Non-propulsive as it probably was, the motor apparently drifted down to the sea bottom someplace.

When we got back to shore, looked at the initial data and films, and talked things over, it looked like something in the 1st stage motor let go, although the motor contractor insisted that the problem just had to be with Lockheed's ''destruct'' system, an explosive system by which the Range Safety could command-''destruct'' an errant vehicle

There was plenty of embarrassment to go around, but the high, (or low) for me was when the CNO asked me to recalculate for him, in the submarine's wardroom, the reliability of the A-1 missile after the two aborted shots.

Almost as an anticlimax, we had a successful ''flat pad'' (land ) launch the next day. Adm. Smith seemed to be especially nice to me in the blockhouse, perhaps because he had been a little testy to me when I argued against the motor contractor's snap judgment.

In general, the company liked my work during those frantic, maddening, joyous first years of the FBM program. They paid me well, and when in 1964 about a dozen of us Lockheedians were chosen to be among 50 Navy and civilian workers from the many thousands all over the program to receive a special award for our work on the Polaris project, I was among the chosen ones.

The award was the John J. Montgomery award, named after an aviation pioneer of the Wright Bros era, and was presented jointly by the Society of Aerospace Professionals and the San Diego Museum It was a wood and silver plaque, suitably inscribed, and it hangs proudly on our wall. I had never heard of the Society, and have not since. There was reported to be a fire later at the Museum, which destroyed many of their artifacts. For whatever reason, when I visited the San Diego Museum many years later, there was no mention anywhere of the Polaris project. They did have a lovely Gemini space capsule.

The awards dinner was a gala affair, much like a Navy League dinner, with much pomp and circumstance, including a splendid performance by a special Marine honor guard. My wife was especially thrilled at getting to meet, and to talk to, a 4-star, Medal of Honor wearing, Marine General (ret.)

After the Polaris A1 was deployed, work continued on an A2 Model, and preliminary studies began on an A-3 model. The objectives of succeeding models, over the years, were first, to increase the range, so as to give the submarines more ocean in which they could patrol and still reach their targets (A2), then to further increase the range and increase the penetrability of the reentry system (A3); then, starting with the Poseidon (C3) to increase the range to intercontinental and add MIRV (multiple independent maneuvering capability), to be able to strike multiple targets with the same missile . Finally, with the Trident Series , Trident I (C4) and Trident II(D5), the mission was changed, from ''urban/industrial'' targeting, with a low requirement for accuracy, to a ''counter force'' mission, with high accuracy required. On a later page, I'll enlarge on the ''stealth'' reason why increasing the missiles' range was always such an important objective for each successive model.

In 1960, we were still a. long way from Trident II, but a reorganization was needed. Frank Bednarz was promoted to Technical Director, to give him oversight over more of the system's major elements. A new Chief Engineer was chosen from among us four Asst. Development Managers. It was the man who had been in charge of Design activities. I was designated Asst. Chief Engineer, a totally unnecessary position. I was happy to accept a new assignment to begin some new business work, operating from the same office, next to the new Chief Engineer.

Now if some Headhunter came looking for an 81-year old potential CEO with a lung problem, and some limitations in energy, he would probably want to see my resume, and might well be interested in the various jobs I had held in the 28+ years that remained for me at Lockheed. (Before I showed him anything I would of course insist that his target position involved an immediate IPO, with a very short lockup of stock which I would receive at the outset). The Headhunter would then read:

1956-60 -From Staff Engineer, Preliminary Design to Asst. Development Manager, Polaris Missile Systems.
1960-64 -Program Manager to Director of Advanced Programs, Missile Systems Div.
1964-65 ­Manager of Advanced Development, Research and Development Div.
1965-66 -Director of Product Development, MSD
1966-69 -Asst. General Manager, Tactical and Defensive Systems, MSD
1969-70 -Asst. General Manager, Polaris Program, MSD
1970-71-Special Assignments, MSD
1972-82 - Manager, Test Plans and Analysis, MSD
1982 ­87 (retirement)- Manager of Sunnyvale Test Engineering

Your practiced personnel man would immediately detect what looks like a bell-shaped curve. For isn't an AGM of higher status than a Director, and isn't that higher than a Manager? And yet we have AGM spots in the middle, and Manager spots at each end. And what's this Special Assignments business? An explanation is called for.

Now comes the part which is so difficult to write, lest pain, frustration, and anger show through too much, anger at myself as much as at others and at the circumstances. But, without regard to job titles here's what happened

Out first new job was a small study contract from Capt. Robert F. Freitag, who appears elsewhere in this book. We were to see if the allowable orbital weight of the Transit satellite , an early satellite navigation system for which Freitag's office was responsible could be increased if we used the two propulsion stages of the Polaris A1 in place of the corresponding stages of the NASA/LTV Scout booster. Quick answer, this undoubtedly could be done, rather easily, and it would provide a use for fleet-returned ''Veteran'' Polaris A1s as they were replaced by A2s. And other applications of Polaris came to mind. Ultimately, Freitag led us to conceive a Polaris A3 modified to perform a highly classified Bomb Damage Assessment mission, in which the missile, with a small, spherical third stage motor and a remote-transmitting sensor system fitted neatly inside the A3's bullet-shaped nose fairing, would be launched from a submarine and quickly go into low orbit. It would provide data by which our intelligence people could determine speedily how much and what damage had been sustained by either or both sides after a nuclear exchange. And there were several other applications in which the ability of a modified Polaris to be launched from selected areas of the ocean made the resulting mission more useful We even got the BDA version so far along that we had a motor designed, the interfaces with the payload and with the rest of the missile booster worked out and mocked up, when the roof fell in. The office from which Freitag had gotten the funds with which to proceed so far, discovered what he was up to.The project was canceled on a Friday afternoon, and I had to find jobs for 26 people by Monday. That experience is what prompted me to make up the Certificate of Unrequited Virtue which is reproduced as the Frontispiece of this book.

To all this, the Strategic Systems Project Office, our masters for the FBM program, MSD's only business to that point, was hostile. They did not want their hardware associated in any way with a project that might fail in flight, lest it tarnish the reputation for quality and reliability which the FBM program rightfully enjoyed. And I am guessing that the idea that an FBM submarine might be diverted from its patrol to perform a BDA mission horrified them.

Furthermore, they did not want Lockheed talent distracted from the huge, ongoing FBM development, production, and support activity for such, or probably any new project diversions.

Except for Stan Burriss, MSD's General Manager, the line organization followed SSPO's lead. No engineering help was given. We, myself and loyal lieutenants like Claude Lievsay , Ben Edelman and Bill Harlan had to find our engineering support where we could. In effect, we created our own engineering organization, alienating Lloyd Wilson, the MSD Chief Engineer. We were allowed to undertake some small projects, such as the flight of a few Polaris test vehicles to high, close-in trajectories to test out a new transponder for the range safety people at the Cape. We got another small flight test program to investigate certain aspects of stellar tracking, which, later on became a means to improve the accuracy of all the ballistic missile, including our own Trident series. We were even allowed to undertake a $100,000,000 program for the Army, SSTTP(Safeguard Systems Target Tracking Program) In this program we developed and ground and flight- tested candidate decoy systems to be mounted on missile targets for the intended Safeguard anti-ballistic system. Some of these decoy systems may still be in use today, in ongoing anti-ballistic missile flight testing, but the boosters are always Minuteman surplus. FBM fleet returns are never used.

For this substantial project, MSD engineering was pleased to provide support, their work load having eased off temporarily.

In the 4 years involved, I behaved very badly, alienating some of my former FBM colleagues, both in Washington and Sunnyvale, with my single-minded pursuit and defense of my projects. I failed to maintain any life-line back to the main body, the FBM program, unlike others who, years later, ventured, some briefly, into the new business area.

Reprieve for me came when, from the Lockheed Missiles and Space Copany front office came a directive that all new business projects, except those involving classified military space programs, were to be transferred to the R Division, which was renamed the Advanced Development Division. I was sent over to be ASD's Manager of Advanced Development. Here's a little story that speaks to my introduction to that ongoing, diverse organization:

When I was sent over to ASD to become the head of its new business-seeking activities, I noted that there were in the organization a number of retired, higher ranking military officers, principally from the Air Force and Army, presumably to provide the ''we bin there'' authenticity to our studies and designs. A few were very good and effective, others not so.

I noticed the rank and file of the organization considered our specified business hours a suggested , but not a required operating mode. .

Without thoughtful consideration, I blurted out to my Deputy, a retired Air Force Colonel with a distinguished history and obvious great present value to us, and to our similarly distinguished retired Army Col. who was in charge of administration, that it appeared that we needed less colonels and more sergeants. Attendance and promptness improved profoundly overnight.

I had a wonderful time for 2 years, working on a wide variety of kinds of programs, including Jim Wenzel's Deep Submergence work. This led to an experimental deep diving vehicle, the Lockheed Deep Quest, and two DSRVs(Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicles). These are still available for deployment, by air, host submarine, or surface ship to the scene of a survivable submarine sinking, where their rescue hatches can mate with the escape hatches of any US or NATO submarine.

Jim's work was with direction and financial support by the redoubtable Dr. John Craven,. by title Chief Scientist of SSPO, but whose duties recently have been revealed to have been much broader than was public knowledge. Their work together quickly went beyond my security level, and included the modification of the Glomar Explorer ship into the so-called Hughes Mining Barge. This was used in a covert, partially successful effort by to raise a sunken Soviet submarine and its nuclear missiles.

In late 1965, LMSC headquarters changed its mind about the proper locations for new business efforts I was sent back to MSD to take back responsibilities for its new business efforts. Here's a story that deals with my welcome back:

I relieved Bob Gibson as Director of Product Development. He was on his way to a stint in the Defense Department's office of the Director of DDR, (Defense Director of Research and Engineering). It was common at that time for qualified contractor and military personnel to cycle in and out of that office.

Bob turned over to me a project that was already underway, the HBM project, for Heavy Bombardment Missile) which was in the study phase, under contract from a Navy Bureau of Ordnance personage, not connected with the Fleet Ballistic Program. Aware of the terrible casualties which were being inflicted on our attack aircraft in their strikes against North Korean and other heavily defended targets, the personage conceived the idea of using a 200 mile range missile, based on the Polaris missile first stage. It would carry, in place of second stage and warhead, a canister containing 14,000 pounds of Blue 26B bomblets, 4000 in all. It would be fired from a surface ship by a deck launcher such as the pair on the USNS Observation Island. Launched from an appropriate body of water, the missile's little bomblets would wreak havoc over a wide area of defenses surrounding our targets, so that following aircraft could safely fly in to bomb the targets themselves.

The study report was nearly completed when Bob left us, and it showed that the concept was technically quite feasibly, and could be executed at low cost and quickly, time being of the essence. But when I brought our final report to Bob, in whose area of DDRE it happened to fall, he was stone cold on the idea. He gave me some weak reasoning, based upon relative cost effectiveness, considering the cost of the aircraft to be sunk costs, against the new funds which HBM would require. Of course, the project died right there.

It wasn't until months later that it dawned on me that there was another, totally valid reason why the project should die, which Bob never mentioned. Had the US launched something looking like a Polaris missile anyway in the vicinity of Russia or China, it could have signaled to them that we were starting World War III.

It was either in this, or in my earlier stint in MSD new business that I became involved with the Royal Navy's( the Brits never add a prefix to that designation, believing from their glorious history that everyone should know to whom the Royal Navy belongs) program to adapt the Polaris A3 to their fleet. They built 4 submarines similar to ours, to carry them. They used their own warheads, and developed and added other features to the missile's front end. Lockheed of course was tasked to help them in all this work, and I was permitted the honor and pleasure of being one of those shepherding their Lockheed experience. It was a wonderful time . I have some great stories in my memory about those days, but I will tell none of them. I dare not risk in any way inadvertently damaging that special relationship that has existed between our two countries since the Brits stopped burning down our nation's capital.

I was also supposed to be going after Tactical and Defensive Weapon System business. The answer to the Tactical part came quick. No Way! Too many contractors with extensive experience in the field, and with appropriately tailored facilities, and much lower overhead than ours, controlled the field. LMSC set up a separate, low-overhead operation in Austin, Texas, to snag some of that business, and they were modestly successful. But for many years LMSC and other companies in the Corporation had to spoon-feed them with small pieces of business to keep them going

In the defensive field, we were more successful, but it took a long time to mature, and like Moses, I never got to go there. It began when we won from the Pentagon's Advanced Research Project Agency a small contract called ''LORAH'', I forget what the acronym spells out, but the gist of the project was to determine the feasibility of intercepting and destroying by collision, an incoming ballistic missile ''exoatmospherically'', that is, outside the earth's atmosphere. That would be after the incoming missile had separated from its booster, but further away from our shores than in the case of the close-in, ''endoatmosperic'' intercepts the Army was concentrating on, notably with its proposed Safeguard system.

Outstanding proposal work by L. David Montague, whom we had borrowed from MSD Systems Engineering, won us the contract, and continued outstanding work led him through a string of following contracts, including HOE, for ''Homing Overlay Experiment'', in which he ''hit a missile with a missile''. ERIS, which I believe was a study of practical applications, was a contract which followed , followed again by the current THAAD contract. This is a contract to develop a ''theatre'' defense system, a concept less open to conflict with our ABM treaty with the former Soviet Union than the national defense system which is the subject of so much argument now. THAAD had troubles in demonstration flight tests, but seems to be back on track now.

Dave prospered as what became his line of business grew. Unlike me, he maintained good relations with the FBM mainstream people. He was promoted, and finally retired as General Manager of the Missile Systems Division.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, or the line shack, however you wish to view it, I got a subcontract from Hughes to work on a ship-based ABM system. Don't laugh, it still may happen. And, on our own we studied a system to be launched from a B-52 airplane (The preceding page was written in late September, 2000. Now, all three of the modes I worked on 40 years ago have become part of our country's missile defense program!)

Somewhat outside my charter, we almost got us a subsonic cruise-missile contract. Here's what happened:

In the middle 60's the Air Force was still relying on the B-52, as now, to do its heavy lift bombing, and to do this with ''gravity bombs'', which required the aircraft to fly over the target, in considerable harm's way on the flights in and out. They were selling Congress on the costly new B-1 bomber, as a way to reduce the risk to the aircraft, by flying in and out at low altitude and very high speed, minimizing thus their exposure to detection by enemy radar, and their subsequent time under attack .

The B-52s were carrying internally the Short Range Attack Missile, and the Green Quail decoy missile, the former a rocket propelled flying bomb to give some stand-off capability, the latter a turbojet-powered cruise vehicle designed to simulate the B-52's radar return and thus decoy the enemy's air defenses. (Remember, I helped design and sell the Green Quail to the Air Force while I was working for McDonnell.)

Kelly Johnson's SR-71 had introduced some of the ''stealth'' techniques which later became the solution of the year to everything, through the F-117A Fighter. The Air Force then switched their attention to the new technique for the B-2 bomber. But at I time of which I'm writing, the battle with Congress was over funding for the B-1. Nothing could interfere with that.

Jim Loos, one of the brightest and most tenacious new business project leaders I had working for me at the time, happened to see a small, light-weight jet engine being developed by a new company called Williams. They had a contract to deliver a few to the Canadians, for use in some experiments intended to make soldiers individually mobile. Jim had the idea that he could he could design a small cruise missile, so powered, and nuclear- bomb carrying, to fit inside the same B-52 internal racks then used to house the Short Range Attack Missile and the Green Quail decoy cruise missile.

Preliminary design work and mission studies bore out his belief that an effective standoff bombing capability could be thus provided to the B-52, increasing its operational effectiveness and probable service life. This work caught the eye of some influential Air Force officers, but the Air Staff would have none of it. In their eyes, the possibility of this development weakened their pitch for B-1 funds. We tried to disguise the project somewhat, by calling the beast a Subsonic Cruise Armed Decoy, instead of Subsonic Cruise Attack Missile , but the disguise was thin. Congress saw through it and actually some members pressed the Air Force to undertake the project. They demurred, and ultimately got their funds for the B-1.

But ultimately is a long time, and the Air Force now carries Tomahawk cruise missiles under the wings of its, (extended life), standing-off, B-52s, in one of the previously rare instances of hard-fought, no doubt, Army, Navy, Air Force commonality.

Years later, when I was long gone from the new business arena, I was sent with a group to an off-site, one week retreat, where we were treated to talks from many national and international notables. Dr. Teller, of hydrogen bomb fame was one, an international expert on oil was another. A third was a distinguished former member of the high councils of the Pentagon. He had retired and joined the Lockheed Corporation as an adviser on future program directions. He had just finished a review of new business efforts in the entirety of LMSC. The most glaring deficiencies were in the Missile Systems Division, where; We were trying to sell the Army an exoatmospheric missile system to a customer who obviously wanted only an endoatmospheric system. We were being unresponsive to the customer's obvious desires. We had failed to exploit our solid rocket missile experience, particularly the opportunity to utilize rockets from that program.

I was able to restrain myself only partially. From the audience, I responded to the first accusation by pointing out that the Army already had all the contractors they needed for their close-in defense work. Needs and systems concepts had a long gestation period, and we were therefore working on what the country ultimately would recognize as needed, with not much competition in that part of the arena. (Few people in the group knew of my involvement in that decision, years earlier, and so were puzzled by my apparent agitation)

I chose to say nothing about his second, even more painful accusation. At lunch,. the notable gentleman chose to sit by himself. I had to restrain myself physically from taking my lunch tray up to him and saying, ''Sir, where the Hell were you when I needed you?''

As soon as I could get away I phoned Dave Montague and told him what this man had said about what was now Dave's product line . He thanked me for the information, which forewarned him of possible trouble at Hq. the next morning when Dave was up for a review of his new business budget.

But now, I've given the plot away. After wandering for 9 years in at what times seemed an Eden, and at more times a wasteland of new business opportunities and denials, I was drained emotionally. Stan Burriss, still our General Manager, saw this and in 1969 he brought me back into the FBM line organization, although at a level of influence far below what some of my contemporaries, through their own good efforts , had achieved. On the surface, it didn't look too bad, my title was still Asst. General Manager, but my job was not exactly in the forefront of the battle. I was named Polaris Program Manager, for the last years of its production

But first, how had the FBM program been doing during my 9-year absence? Quite well, thank you! Let me explain the long ­term plan SSPO and all its contractors had been working on. The first and most challenging element was the development and operational deployment of the Polaris A1 within the 3-1/2yr.time span allotted, creating new state of the art at every step, simultaneously developing all the elements, (or major subsystems).from lengthened submarines, launch systems, navigation, checkout, and fire control systems, testing and assembly facilities, logistic plans and logistic pipelines and everything else the missile itself had to be compatible with. This was accomplished, but the needed missile range fell short, by 300 nautical miles. 30 inches in the launch tube had been reserved for an elevator, in case underwater launch hadn't worked. But vertical, underwater launching, as advocated staunchly by Willy Fiedler, did work. Willy also was the inventor of the jetavator, our first device to control the rocket's direction. This is the same German who was wartime Chief Engineer of the pulsejet-powered V-1. For most of the years I worked at Lockheed, Willy was a principal innovator in our FBM work, and retired as MSD's Chief Scientist.

The first order of business in improving Polaris was to get the 300 miles of range back, and this was done by lengthening the first stage motor's length . Along the way, many changes were made to the electronics and other boxes in the missile, to increase the operability and reliability of the missile as a whole. The result was the Polaris A2, and it was rather quickly developed, produced, and operationally deployed..

The next step, also done by the time I returned to the main ranch, was to further extend the range, and to improve the penetrability of the reentry(warhead)system. Why the pressure for range? Simply, the system had to be not vulnerable at its source in order to be an effective deterrent to others. This meant that the submarine had to be very difficult to find Every additional mile of missile range capability added geometrically to the area of the sea in which each submarine could patrol, reducing corresponding the probability that our potential adversary(s) could find us. (I have no specific knowledge, but I doubt that the Soviets ever had a broad undersea submarine detection network as we have in ''SOSUS''.)

Why the emphases on penetrability? Because we knew that the Soviets could and would deploy rings of anti-missile systems, of varying capabilities, around their principal target(s). In the A-3, the range was doubled, to 3000 nautical miles by improvements in rocket state of the art, improved sold propellants, and a great reduction in motor case weight, by developing and using more sophisticated materials and construction techniques, as well as by reductions in the weights of other non-propulsive parts of the missile, structure, electronic components, and so on. Lockheed engineers, led in the effort by Lloyd Wilson, developed a novel 3-body reentry system, in which 3 warheads fanned out at the proper time and separated from the missile's second stage, eliminating incidentally the need for the troublesome motor thrust-termination system. The 3 bodies flew along separately for most of the exoastmospheric flight, coming together by some magic as the target area was reached. Remember, our required accuracy was still one nautical mile, for urban/industrial targets. All of this fitted inside the originally sized Polaris missile launching tube. Unfortunately, Lloyd turned out to my bitter enemy, beginning when, as head of Polaris Missile Test Plans, Analysis, and Instrumentation, I had to deny him an excessive share of available telemetering bandwidth for reentry system flight tests. His enmity toward me only increased when I went off to do new business, and he had become Chief Engineer. He resented bitterly that I did (had to) set up my own engineering services, since he would provide me none. His hostility towards me continued even after he left Lockheed to become an important figure in DOD's DDR office. I remember him coming back to Lockheed in this capacity to be shown what we had been doing, and having to listen to him dismiss one of my new business projects, which had some merit, as a ''Missile looking for a Mission .'' With Lloyd, as with others I crossed swords with, I handled myself poorly, and had no power base, no network of supporters except those within my own band of new business activists. I could look to Stan Burris, the man who set me on the new business trail, but he eventually he couldn't and didn't avoid promotion up and out of MSD,

Even while Polaris A3, and its sister missile in the United Kingdom (British) program were in full flood, work was well on its way on a major step up in FBM missile capability. This work was led brilliantly and convincingly, as always was his way, by Bob Fuhrman, who later rocketed up the top of MSD, was sent by the Lockheed Corporation to head up another of its aircraft companies, which was in some difficulty, and eventually became President of the Lockheed Corporation. After early retirement, he became President of a bank in San Jose.

Bob became, or I made him become, not my friend also. During my second tour of the new business world, my ''Second Coming'', Bob brought in an absolute con man from some place and set him up to do new business work in the land-based missile area ''just to keep Boeing honest''. He split my new business budget with this man, who spent an excessive time in my office, bad-mouthing my projects. He stayed with Lockheed for a time, making many presentations, which to my eye and ear were illiterate, ignorant garbage. One day he went off on vacation and never came back I learned later that he had popped up at the Air Force's major systems engineering contractor for strategic missiles and done his thing there, complete with disappearing act at the end He was single, and I guess, attractive to some women. Perhaps he found and married some rich widow. At any rate, I never heard of him again.

Sorry for the long digression. I just had to get it off my chest.

Back to the Poseidon or C ­3 as it was called, (The B designations got used up in a long series of studies and computer simulations which preceded settling on a design) Poseidon went for a range of over 4000 miles , and no longer fit into the Polaris launch tubes, requiring therefore a new class of larger submarines. Cycle times between the ultimately 6 models of FBM missiles had become so great that there was in fact enough time to design and build several new submarine classes. To keep its length for submarine tube installation as short as possible, Poseidon had a blunt nose. To avoid excessive aerodynamic drag during its ascent flight within the atmosphere, it had an ''aerospike''. This popped out of the center of the nose fairing as soon as the missile cleared the water on launching. The aerospike was a long, slender, collapsible contraption, which mechanically resembled nothing so much as the thin, collapsing metal cups we used to carry as Boy Scouts, only much thinner, and much longer. When deployed, it made a fine oblique shock wave generator in the supersonic flight regime, greatly reducing drag, as wind tunnel tests showed. With training and experience as an aerodnamicist, I was afraid that the thing would flutter and break off, but it and its attachment were so beefy that this never happened. Me a pessimist! Must have been getting old! But I did object to, and was listened to by Dan Tellep, who at that time was Chief Engineer, about one concept of marrying a 3rd stage motor to the reentry-bodying carrying ''bus'' which was at the heart of the Poseidon concept. Another type of design and interface was used instead, which would not jar the ''bus'', or 4th stage, as it lifted off to do its thing

The bus was at the heart of the MIRV, (Multiple Independent Reentry Vehicle) system, which may have been conceived at Lockheed first, or simultaneously by the Air Force. It soon became standard throughout the ballistic missile community, including the Soviets in that technical category. In Poseidon, it permitted many small warheads to be carried, guided to separate targets, sometimes rather widely separated., and then released gently toward each of them, making for a very small error to target. By Kissinger State Dept. fiat, SSPO was not permitted to have such accuracy in its FBM,. for fear the Soviets would believe that we were preparing for a first strike against them. By the time of Trident, however, the FBM system had been released from this restraint, its mission defined to include ''counterforce'', and SSPO was permitted to make improvements in its submarine navigation systems, and add stellar tracking to the Trident's guidance system (:we¹d had a stellar observation window in Poseidon all along, but were not allowed to add the tracking components.) The Trident II (D5)system's accuracy, from launch location to target, was 300 feet.

Before I pick up my duties as Polaris Program Manager, I have to tell you more about SSPO's organization and operating mode, which were devised originally by Admirals Raborn and Smith, and by a civilian named Gordon Pehrson. These three men, and those who supported and followed them, were directly responsible for what long has been recognized as the finest government management for large projects the US has ever had. It was, and possibly remains, too large and expensive for smaller, lower priority projects. For what had to be done here, SSPO and its long-standing team of prime contractors did it better than anyone else. And that's a fact!

There were many parts(''subsystems'') that made up the whole Fleet Ballistic Missile System. The missile was one, and SSPO had a ''Branch'', SP-27, headed by a Navy Captain, with highly capable Officers and civil servants supervising the Prime Contractor, Lockheed. Propulsion was considered a part of that subsystem, and development and supply of rocket motors was done by major rocket makers under subcontract to Lockheed. In actuality, SSPO themselves picked Aerojet-General to be the systems's first rocket supplier. For later models, Lockheed ran very formal, very thorough competitions, watched very closely by SSPO, and its Sunnyvale-stationed representatives. And Aerojet didn't always win; in fact, beginning with Polaris A2, Aerojet started dropping out of the contractor family, literally rocket stage by stage. Lockheed had responsibilities for reentry systems development and warhead integration, for support systems ashore and afloat, such as checkout systems, responsibilities for ground and flight tests of the assembled whole, and other responsibilities supporting SSPO's retained function as the FBM's systems integrator and long range planner. In effect, Lockheed was first among equals in prime contractors to SSPO. SSPO had other technical Branches, SP-23 for Guidance and Fire Control, with Prime Contractors for different portions of that, SP-25 for Flight Test, with Lockheed again Prime Contractor, and on, and Offices for relationships with the Bureau of Ships for submarines, and a program management office. In all, SSPO was a good-sized and very capable office, and had the pick of the best technical officers and civilians in the Navy, Adm. Rickover's prerogatives to the contrary notwithstanding. (Of course he wasn't contrary in this case. I'm sure he was very cooperative and supportive of the FBM program's needs, I guess)

When more than one missile model was in development or operational, and this happened very early in the program, Program Offices were established by Lockheed for each missile model, to look after the particular interests of that model throughout its development, production, and operational service. Special contracts provided for support to the fleet for technical problems that came up, for post-deployment Flight Tests, DASOs(1) and OTs(2), for periodic return of missiles from the fleet for disassembly, examination, and nondestructive tests of critical components and motors, followed by reassembly and reissue to the fleet. It was the Lockheed Program Manager's job to provide overview of all of the activities performed in behalf of his missile model, depending on which phase of the life cycle it was in, from development, through production, and operational deployment.

Notes:

DASO---Development and Shakedown Operation‹A series of instrumented flight test operations performed on a new missile model and/or a new or overhauled submarine by its crew(s), to demonstrate that they are ready for operational deployment. OT---An occasional series of flight tests simulating war conditions. For these tests, an operational submarine is recalled to its base where a certain number of its missiles have their operational reentry bodies replaced by instrumented , unarmed reentry bodies. The missiles are then test flown, with only the amount of advanced notice they would be given if we were at war.

When Stan Burriss brought me back to the fold in 1969, to become Polaris Program Manager, the A2 model and the A3 models were deployed, and production had been completed on the A3, except for one little thing, an extensive set of modified cables and connectors for the A3. These were to be installed on each missile as it came back for periodic examination and servicing. These items were hardened against ''electromagnetic pulse'' a phenomenon which had been discovered earlier. It seems that if a nuclear blast occurs at high altitude, it sends out a very high pulse of energy which can destroy electronic components, even at great distances. The effect is particularly severe if the receiving components are at high altitude. Transistor type circuits, which we used, are much more vulnerable than the vacuum tube circuits which the Soviets were using at the time

So what's my problem? I discover within my first few days as Program Manager that the ''learning curve'' of cost on this job, which was nearing its end, was trending sharply up, instead of down. Why? Because Manufacturing had experienced much more losses than anticipated of the many different, complicated connectors, to damage during assembly of the modification kits. So, they had had to order more. But you couldn't just order two of these, and three of those. Each order to the vendor for a particular connector model was a Lot. Each Lot had to go through qualification testing, which meant that perhaps, 40 extra connectors had to be built and tested for each of the two or three we needed of each model. And the costs of the interruptions to our mod kit assembly line were substantial. According to our contract, the Navy had to pay for all this.

So, at my first monthly meeting in Washington with the SP-27 Branch Chief, a Captain I had never met, I had to tell him what had happened, trying not to throw blame on anyone for the goof. The Captain somehow forgave me, and in the year or two that I worked with him, things went along pretty well. He once confided in me that he firmly believed that all men are either horses or riders. I wondered which category he had me in.

A short time after the splendid men on the moon flights, Bob Freitag came to town. For old time's sake, I took him for a few drinks and dinner. By this time, Bob had retired from the Navy and had taken a civilian job with NASA. (Double dipping, jealous civil servants used to call it). Bob was in charge of planning major new missions for NASA.

While we are waiting for our steaks to arrive, Bob suddenly says, ''Art, you¹re a man on the street. Would you be willing to pay X billions of dollars to send astronauts to Mars and back?'' I resisted the urge to belt him, realizing that he was asking me to act like a man on the street, and was only running a public opinion survey As calmly as I could, I said, ''Bob, you got to be out of your bleeping mind! Do you remember how the TV viewer ratings dropped out of sight when the Westinghouse camera failed on one of the early flights, and how they continued to drop until Shepherd made his golf swing.? You got to keep your astronauts in sight all the time, as in earth orbit. Let them get out of sight for a 7-month transit, or whatever it takes, and you've lost the public! Their attention span in practically zilch.''

Well, beyond-orbit manned missions never came up thereafter, I believe due in large part to the public's reduction of interest in space, followed of course, by a reduction in congressional funding, which prevails to this day. I firmly believe that the Challenger disaster was precipitated by low funding, which reduced ground testing .(Remember Feynman's little demonstration to the Congressional investigation into Challenger, showing with a glass of water and some ice cubes that the booster O-rings couldn't handle the cold outside environment on that fateful day?)

Now, as regards the public's short attention span and burning need to see what they are paying for, note the popularity of TV ''reality'' shows, like ''Survivor'', and ''House''. Someday, soon I hope, someone will invent means by which TV can feed the senses other than just sight and sound. Then we will be able to feel the bugs, smell the sweat, and taste the grubs and rats. After that day, I will stay in my chair, glued to my TV, and never write another line.

In 1970, Stan Burriss had been promoted to the LMSC presidency. The MSD General Manager at that time, (I don't remember who) pulled me off the Program Management job and gave me a series of special assignments, personal jobs requiring an extensive knowledge of the FBM program, and facility at writing papers on complex programmatic matters. Working alone, I was to prepare materials that would help SSPO, in which Adm. Smith , who had risen steadily from SP-27 Head, to Technical Director, to overall Director of the Program, to repel boarders. Congressman and their staffers, egged on by other weapon system prime contractors who wanted a chance at the action, were asking forcefully why the Navy didn't just compete out each new model as it came up, instead of sticking with the same old team of primes. I assisted people in SSPO do studies and write papers showing why the present way was best for the Navy and the government. Adm. Smith didn't need any of that. I heard he just stood up and told Congress that he could not give his personal guarantee as to the reliability of any future FBM model which was not developed by the contractor team he had built up over the years. So great was his reputation, and by that time the reputation of the program as a whole, that the boarders just folded their whatever's and silently stole away.

The second task was more difficult and tricky, and for this I was teamed with a very astute partner, capable of working in very fine detail. The Congressional question was this: ''Were we, the missile prime contractor, subcontracting out, by competitive bidding, at least half of each program's dollar value?'', as some directive somewhere required. This one took a lot of creative bookkeeping, and going down through multi-tier subcontracting but we got over that hurdle somehow, without Adm. Smith having to stick his neck out again.

And then there were the two proposals to NASA. The Lockheed corporate fathers decided that Sunnyvale just had to have a big contract from NASA in part of its manned space program. The first one they (we) went after was the first stage of one of the NASA giant boosters. They assembled for the bidders conference at New Orleans a team consisting of Dan Haughton, who then was Lockheed's Chairman, several of the top corporate executives and a few others from our Missiles and our Space Divisions whose resumes said they had worked on well-known and successful programs. I was invited along Many other major contractors also sent teams.

We were shown drawings of a big booster stage that we were to bid on. But that was not how the design actually would be, they said. They were running the competition to see who had the best skills to develop and build a booster the NASA way. Later on in the bidders conference was made clear that meant doing what the NASA engineers told us to do, no more and no less, and doing the program's administrative aspects NASA's way. They didn't care a fig about what we might have learned from our prior programs

We went back and a team was put together that included Roy Anderson, a financial type who later would replace Haughton at the Lockheed helm, and me, in my former testing role, and I forget who else. And we lost, for which I was very grateful.

And there was another proposal to NASA for something else, in which more of our MSD heavy hitters were added, but that didn't win either. So, in 1972 I was brought back again to Bldg. 181, the Navy FBM program headquarters and I was given back my old job as head of Test Plans and Analysis. This time the instrumentation part was long gone, since it had become a large part of the design effort, but a large and sophisticated test data reduction facility and software engineering group was added.

Why did I not just quit at that point and go somewhere else? Partially because of inertia. I really was tired and needed a ''warm place'' as Dan Haughton used to say as he pulled some comer from a job and place he was comfortable in, to move him to some other assignment and location. I knew and liked the people I would be working with. Next, I was 53 years old, too young for early retirement, and I had no idea where else I might go. Besides, I needed the pay and benefits, which had remained quite good, although the raises had not been as high recently. And I still had my Executive Dining Room privilege. That never had been taken away, and never was. When I finally retired in 1987, I knew that, because of other people's retirements, promotions and transfers, I held the record for longevity in the Sunnyvale Executive Dining Room. I bet I still do, if there is s such a place there now..

In 1972, the Branch Chief of the MSD Test Branch (which I was never to be) was in general charge of the FBM flight test facilities and crews at Cape Canaveral, for both land launch and submarine launch; of a base in the mountains east of Santa Cruz for development and testing of non-nuclear ordnance, and of 6 departments in Sunnyvale. These were the Tests Plans and Test Analysis Department; another Dept which had designed and now operated a sophisticated data reduction facility and associated software engineers; a beautiful mockup facility which was a required stop for every new official visitor; a large ground test laboratory; and another Dept concerned with special kinds of tests, chiefly dealing with missile vulnerability to nuclear exposure.)The actual tests were conducted elsewhere.

When I came back, I took the first 3 Departments as a ''Division''. My old friend Claude Lievsay, who had been with me on the second abortive stab at a big piece of NASA business, took the remaining three Departments. All activities were busy with Trident I testing, and would be later with Trident II testing, and with supporting the ongoing DASOs and OTs I noted earlier. When I finally retired in 1987, we had just completed Trident II's ground launched tests and were about to start the sub-launched phase.

The activities I had left in 1960 were in fine shape; I needed no big changes there, just to continue the good work. When in a few years, Claude took early retirement to continue to make a fortune in real estate, I took over his three departments, and now I was a real bureaucrat, constantly concerned with budgets, personnel assignments, ratings, promotions and raises. I served on committees which selected candidates for promotions to Dept Head status in other Branches, served on Red Teams for new proposals, and performed other useful bureaucratic functions. ''Red Teams'' were committees convened to review, very critically, proposals for important new projects before their submission to the customer. On the 31st of August, 1984 I began leading a Red Team on a proposal on a subject on which I had a great deal of familiarity from my previous new business-seeking activities. Several of the other committee members outranked me considerably, but were without my background in the field. Some of the committee members were rather unruly on that first day.

Driving home after that first day, I wondered how I could recapture control of my committee, when on the car radio I heard that, in this first year in which major storms were given male names, and on this day, tropical depressions and major storms had developed in the Atlantic and Pacific. One, off Baja California, was named ''Lowell''; the other, off North East Africa, was named ''Arthur'' .I pointed this out to my committee members on the next morning, and remarked that, if they didn't simmer down, I was going to cloud up and rain all over them! I later had a large color chart made of the weather map of that situation, just in case, but I never needed it again.

I have the feeling that this long narrative about my work and woes at Lockheed may be getting a little heavy. Let's have a little relief, in the form of non-heavy stories about recreational light-plane flying I did after I picked up that avocation again in 1974. If this departure from the main theme is disturbing, the reader can always skip to the next heavy reading.

The first story deals with ash dispersal from the air:

While I was still working the new business bit in MSD, for a second time, a retired naval personnel assignment officer who had joined us as a sales assistant did me a great personal favor. My associate retired ultimately from Lockheed and then died. His son-in-law, whom I had not met, called me to ask if I would consider flying him and his father-in-law's ashes out to sea, as the gentleman would have wished. (This, children, is not the same as ''hauling his ashes''). ''Sure'', I said, and looked over the roster of flying club airplanes for a suitable vehicle. I found that the only airplane we had that had a window that opened up and out in flight was our little Cessna 150 trainer. So we made the date.

On the morning of the appointed day, our club's chief pilot warns me that the engine on the 150 was running a little rough. Possible a little carburetor icing; if it happens just use a little carb. heat. The son-in-law shows up with the box of ashes. He must weigh 225 lbs; we¹re probably way over allowable gross weight. But what can I do, my associate and benefactor, in sailor's heaven, is depending on me. So I decide to press on!

I choose the longest runway available, 8000 and some feet, taxi out, and when cleared, start my taxi-off. Yes, the engine is rough, and no, this not the usual spot for carb ice, but doggedly, and pigheadedly, I continue my takeoff. We clear the ground, and I manage a rate of climb of about 150 feet/min. I continue this climb and head for the hills between San Jose and the coastline. We manage to clear them, and there is Santa Cruz and the ocean dead ahead.

The usual way to bury ashes at sea from an airplane, I had been told , is to go a decent distance out, swoop down low, and gracefully strew the ashes over the waves. No way! As soon as were are barely ''feet wet'' .I tell my passenger to let her rip. The ashes stream back, probably landing over Reno, which I believe would have been my old associate's second choice anyway. Treating my altitude like the golden resource it was, I head back to San Jose, land, taxi to our tie-down , and ground the airplane. But wait, there's more exciting stuff!

It turns out that we had a cracked cylinder. After that jug was replaced, our chief maintenance member, without refueling, went out for a nice, long, fuel-mixture-rich, engine run-in. He ran out of fuel on final approach for landing. With great skill, he avoids a school yard, and came down crosswise in a residential street, with the airplane's nose resting comfortably against the base of a telephone pole. No injuries, no property damage except to the airplane, which was totaled by the crew who loaded it aboard a flat-bed truck for hauling away. The FAA accident investigators were so impressed by our pilot's skill in getting the airplane down the way he did, that they forgave him his unforgivably poor preflighting and fuel management. No citation!

And how did the Lockheed corporate fathers react to this first-time accident in a company-authorized, Bay-area employee, flying- club airplane? They never knew they were involved. We told the press that the airplane belonged to a few friends.

Now, there is a very interesting preamble to all this:

My former associate's great personal favor had to do with my first daughter's new husband. Mike was a tall, good looking, sun-bleached guy, the son of a college professor (and Air Force Reserve Brigadier General). Mike had a good education, including prep schools and a military school. When Kasey met him, he spent his days cruising around in the Bay Area sunshine on his motorcycle, and earned his living at night by singing and guitar playing in small cafes, which he did very well. Kasey thought enough of him to drop out of UC Santa Barbara to marry him.

These were Korean War days, and in order to avoid the draft, Mike enlisted in the Navy. Well, the folks in charge of the boot camp in San Diego saw that they had something special. They made him battalion cadet Sergeant Major, and designated him a the battalion's outstanding cadet. He was awarded a prize for an essay he wrote for the Heritage Foundation. Small wonder that on graduation day, my daughter was invited to San Diego to the ceremonies, and introduced to the Chief of Naval Personnel, who happened to be visiting, and who commented to my daughter what a fine young man she had for a husband.

Mike had asked for the Army Language School in Monterey as his training assignment, so that it was with some chagrin that we found that his orders were to report to a Naval station in Kodiak, Alaska . Two weeks after his arrival there, we got a letter from him saying that he been assigned to duty in the warehouse.

Kasey was understandingly disturbed. Having had some experience with military logic, I though that there had to be some good reason for this. But Kasey vowed to drive her little Honda Civic straight through to Kodiak, but first, she was going to call up the Chief of Naval Personnel and tell him, ''The next time you think to invite me to lunch, forget it!''

I mentioned all this to my sales associate, who was on his way to a Navy League function, for which he was going to set up one of our displays. He said he¹d look into the situation, while he was there. He told me on his return to Sunnyvale that he had related the story to his former opposite number, who dealt with enlisted personnel. The Capt recoiled in horror at the thought of my daughter phoning in; he said that the Admiral would rocket through the ceiling. The Capt. said he would look into the matter. Two days later, Mike got orders for electrical technician training at Glenco Naval Air Station, near the plush resorts communities of Sea Island and Jekyl Island, Georgia, convenient for him to pursue his lounge entertainment career during off-duty hours. Mike said that the Kodiak naval base commander phoned him before his departure and said , ''I understand you'll be leaving us.'' When Mike said ''Yes, sir'', the Captain said, ''When you pass through Washington, put in a good word for me!''

Here's a short, work-related flying story:

Sometime in the early 80s we had a ground test of some kind going on at the Naval Ornaance Naval Station, in the desert at China Lake, California, and I thought it would be nice if I visited the crew that was sweatin' in the sun, setting things up. The approved Lockheed way to China Lake was by commercial air to Los Angeles, followed by a long rental car drive to the site. But it was only a hop-skip-and a jump by light plane, direct from San Jose. So against all (tacit) rules, I took one of the flying club Cessnas and made a quick trip there and back, putting auto mileage on my travel expense form.

Nobody noticed how fast I must have driven, and I got away with it

The next guy, also a manager, wasn't so lucky. When he used a private plane for a business trip he got caught and fired. Maybe the fact that he took his pretty secretary with him had something to do with it.

I feel refreshed , so I'll go on with my career.

In my service as a bureaucrat, I occasionally had a creative thought, but usually managed to stifle it, lest it get me into trouble again.

The hardest thing I had to do was the physical challenge, at Christmas, of walking through all the buildings where my 800 people worked, to shake the hands of as many of them as I could. Sometime around 1985, it was discovered that I had a larger number of people in my domain than were in any other ''division'' in MSD. This could not be allowed. Sunnyvale Test Engineering, as I then called it, was again split in two. I kept the part I liked best, and my friend and associate Rod Elliott got the rest.

I was almost, but not quite successful, in staying out of trouble, I did a couple of dumb things I'm too ashamed to write about. I did a Good Thing in the Trident I program and got a pat on the head. I tried to do a Good Thing in the Trident II program, but my reason for wanting to do so was misinterpreted by some one in SSPO, and I almost got into trouble again. An Adverse Event, shortly after my retirement showed that I was right in the Why of a major change I had proposed in the Trident II. Later, I realized that I had had it in my power to have started a process by which the Adverse Event itself might never have happened. To find out what I'm talking about, you'll have to wade through a rather long story about the ''matrix''.No, this isn't about some computer generated, virtual world populated by people with evil intent It's about the framework within which we did the summary planning for the Trident I and Trident II flight test programs .It resembles somewhat a mathematical matrix format.

This differed from the way we conducted all the Polaris AI, A2, and A3 test flights, and the Poseidon C3, With the possible exception of the A2, each missile model had plowed new ground, had required creating and exploring new state of the art, and verifying the program's application of that new art. Flight tests were planned a few steps at the time, so that we could solve each problem, by analysis and ground test, in theory before further flight testing was done. But there were many tests planned, and the program schedule required that they occur so frequently, that we sometimes hadn't really solved a particular problem before we had to fly again. Particularly for the first Polaris, the AX/A1, the flight test program was built up as the test vehicle was built up, one component at a time. An exception, of course, was the rocket motors, which had to go all-up, from the first flight to the last. Naturally, since much of the new state of the start in Polaris had to do with the directional control of the rockets' thrust, and for second stage, thrust termination, that was where we had our first difficulties and flight failures. These had to be solved, of course, before we could add other elements which were to make up the complete missile. Of course, there were many ground tests as well, before and during flight tests, but there was no substitute for the flight environment .

I remember reading a year or two ago a declassified history of the Corona Program and its flight test troubles, at just the same time we were having ours with Polaris. This was a secret Air Force program, the first US intelligence satellite program that I am aware of, that was first given the unclassified name of Agena. Lockheed got the contract to do that development at the same time as we got started on Polaris. Both had top national priority, and essentially unlimited funds. There was one big difference, President Eisenhower kept his personal eye on the progress of Agena/Corona, and I later heard, was so fed up with the initial string of failures that he considered canceling the program. But Polaris had a different political environment. The Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Arleigh Burke, had given Rear Adm., ''Red'' Raborn the '' con'' on Polaris, with only one stipulation, that Raborn would tell him if and when he came to a technical program-stopper. Eisenhower and others in chain of command were kept at bay by Burke, and by Raborn's frequent progress briefings, even though our initial string of failures was happening at the same time as Agena's.

Gene Root was General Manager of LMSC, over both projects, and you can imagine the heat he was getting from Lockheed corporate management then. No wonder he seemed a little twitchy at times.( Side light. During my second tour of duty in new business in MSD, it was one of my responsibilities to keep Gene informed at to what was going on in related areas in our and other companies, and in the government, in preparation for his weekly meetings with the corporate fathers in Burbank. For some reason, Dan Haughton, who was Lockheed Chairman at the time, took particular delight in catching Gene unawares about something Gene hadn't heard about, and he took it rather hard, I understand. More than once, Gene gave me a piece of his mind when he got back from his Monday trip to Burbank, but that was the Crap that went with the Pay, for each of us.)

But I have digressed. When we came to the Trident series, there really was no new state of the art to develop, except for improvements in materials and construction in every area of the missile, and addition of the star tracking guidance elements that made it's newly authorized high accuracy possible. We flew each missile completely built up, from the first flat-pad launch (ground launch) on. We did not expect many failures; in fact we were coming into a time when the public, and therefore Congress, was not very tolerant of failures.

We showed to all hands, in the cafeterias at lunch time, documentary footage of the flight of C4X-1, the first Trident I. My vocal commentary was done on the film footage. And so, when the films were shown, I was first heard explaining what the audience was expected to see in the first few seconds of flight, which were going to go by rather quickly, even in slow motion. The screen would be dark as I would note that the missile would come off the launch pad heading straight up, then quickly pitch down, heading out to sea at a rather flat angle to the horizon, so that the direction and the flight path angle would combine to get this assemblage of high energy materials away from Florida as soon as possible. Then, the missile would pitch up to the flight path angle appropriate for the test trajectory that day. We would then be heading for Bermuda, which was not our intended target, so soon the missile, still in first-stage flight, would turn toward the real target area. (I'll bet you¹d like to believe that I recorded all that before I saw the flight film! But I did not, remembering that my freshman chemistry Professor in college would never announce what we would see when he mixed one chemical with another, until he actually had done it)

The pictures would start, we would watch these events happen, and then I would be heard describing what we were then seeing in slow motion film footage as the missile went through first stage flight, tailed off and separated, went into second-stage flight, and then slowly faded away from the view of the cameras on shore, leaving a long rocket exhaust trail which became distorted into a strange shape by the winds at the various altitudes the ''bird'' traversed. At this point I'm reminded of what Ray Munson, Trident I program manager at that time said when he showed to a smaller group a short clip of that successful first flight.. The clip consisted of just the first few seconds of flight, but from several different camera angles. Ray was silent until after the first three views . Then he commented, ''Works good every time, don't it!)

But I have digressed again. Now to the subject of the flight test matrix format used in planning Trident I and II flight tests. All you people out there with airplane flight-test experience will remember ''testing the envelope'', which later became perverted to use in explaining questionable personal behavior? Well, that's what we did. In a series of 20 pad launches, with heavily instrumented missiles, and reentry bodies, we explored the ''V-Gamma'' map. We tested the missile to various combinations of velocity, and initial flight path angle which might occur in different kinds of missions to targets at different ranges . For example, it had been postulated that a low, flat, trajectory would be most difficult for a defense system to counter. That kind of trajectory would involve the most flight inside the atmosphere, hence the most aerodynamic heating of the missile's structure, hence the most stress on that structure and its materials. A long, arched flight would give the most range and bring the reentry bodies back into the atmosphere at the highest velocities, and hence under the most stress for their materials and design. And there were other V-Gamma points which were of particular interest to us. The number 20 was chosen to provide for this survey, allowing for a guessed-at number of flight failures we didn't expect, but which might occur, as some did. The pad launches would be followed by 10 submarine launches, using PEM's, Performance Evaluation Missiles, which were the first missiles off the production line, again with instrumentation added.

Not only did we have flight failures for minor reasons rather early in the Trident I program, but they were more than we had allowed for. I got a personal assignment from Ken Malley, who was a Captain at the time and head Of the Missile Branch of SSPO, SP-27, to determine whether we would be able to achieve all our remaining objectives for the pad launches with the test missiles available. I was not to consult with the Lockheed Program Manager; he might be influenced to say ''Yes'', since additional test missiles would cost both the Navy and Lockheed money, and the program could be delayed.

I borrowed the services of two of the brightest and best analysts our Test Analysis Department had and we set to work. Using some innovative analytical techniques, we were able to demonstrate to our satisfaction that we could indeed satisfy the important objectives which remained, even if we had another flight failure, or two. Off I then went to Washington, to meet the Lockheed Program Manager, and the Lockheed Vice President who supervised all the FBM Program offices, to meet with the Captain, and with three of his key advisers, and give my report. He and they accepted it, and then asked the Program Manager his judgment on the matter. He said that he had arrived at the same conclusion, by a different route.

At the next meeting of the Steering Task Group which SSPO's Director relied on for advice and counsel on important matters, Ken used my materials and my name to recommend that the program proceed ahead without change. And so it came to be. We did indeed finish the land-launched program on schedule, with all important objectives accomplished within the number of test missiles originally allotted. That special task probably was my major Good Thing in the Trident I program

For Trident II the flight test program prescribed in our contract followed the same matrix pattern,.allotting 20 Xs and 10 PEMs. Something nagged at me, however. The Trident II was considerably longer than the Trident I. It could not be ''back fitted'' into the larger class of submarines, which had been equipped to carry Poseidons, ( The back fit included installing even larger diameter launch tubes than were needed for Poseidon.) Trident II had to wait for the even larger Ohio submarine class which had the depth increase needed to accommodate Trident II's same diameter as Trident I but longer first stage. I just felt intuitively that we were more likely to run into trouble in the submarine-launched phase of testing then in the pad launched phase. Furthermore, our experience with Trident I made me feel that, unless we were really cursed with bad luck, we didn't need all of the 20 X birds planned.

So I wrote a memo or two recommending that we build and fly two or three less X birds from the pad, and fly more instrumented PEMs from the submarine. My recommendation was ignored. In fact, I was told privately that some of the people in SP-27 thought that I was acting as a Trojan horse in a Lockheed plot to save money on building the missiles for and flight testing the pad shots, since the submarine shots came out of a different pot of money. So, since my fears had no real focus in demonstratable facts, I quietly dropped the subject. The 20 flat-pad flights went on and accomplished their objectives.

I retired near the end of the pad-launched program, and went on my way to Kansas City.

A few months later, I was shocked to hear over the radio that the first sub-launched Trident II had failed immediately after launch. The grapevine said that the back end of the bird was hit and damaged by the ''reentrant water jet'' produced when the missile came out of the water. Later news stories said that the Navy had quickly found the cause and a solution, but needed a few months time and some extra program funds to implement it. This would make the program miss its promised operational date, for the first time in its then 30 year history, and Congress would have to provide supplemental funds. This was at a time when failure in flight test was not considered an acceptable option in the defense program

It was a tribute to the program's splendid history of accomplishment, and to the forthrightness and competence of its leaders that Congress gave the Navy the extra money needed and nobody quibbled about the extra time to operational deployment . But the Adverse Event showed that I was right in my fears and recommendation, right? Well, not exactly.

Any one who hasn't seen a reentrant water jet can make on for himself or herself, just as easily as Feynman showed how Challenger failed. It just takes a little more water than the glassful he used. Recipe, fill a bathtub fairly full of water. Put a bottle in it, part way, closed side down. The bottle can be either full or empty. A long can of beer will do, also. Wait until the ripples have died down. Then pull your bottle or can out of the water rapidly. The water it has displaced will come roaring back in to fill the hole you have left in the water. The returning water will meet at the center of the hole, and cause some of the water to jet upwards some distance.

I was retired, I had no clearance, and no access to what Lockheed actually did to fix this problem, but I'll bet they did several things at once, like strengthening the nozzle actuator mounts, maybe reducing the time the emerging missile coasted in the air before the motor was fired, things like that. I bet they did them all at once, to shorten the time and ultimate expense of solving the problem.

Why wasn't I right in my recommendation to re-balance the flight test program? Because, having this vague fear, I should have thought it through more. I should have suspected reentrant jet; we¹d seen that from the first submarine launch of Polaris A1 on, but it never seem to bother the bird. But as the missiles got bigger, the holes they left in the water got bigger, and we should have expected the reentrant jet to get stronger and fly higher.

There was plenty of time for me to have had my test analysts look at the aft-end surface pressure data we had from many, many flights from Polaris on, looking for some increase as the missile models progressed in size. I should have my documentary photo group look for increases in water jet size and visible impact on the missile after end. After we had found such increases, and hindsight says we would have, then Engineering would be have been able to work out a solution to the problem long before the first Trident II was flown. The Adverse Event need never have happened!

But, as someone once said, ''All's Well that Ends Well''. In late 2000, the Royal Navy conducted a successful Trident II DASO from the last of the 4 Trident -equipped submarines it has built as its strategic deterrent, replacing the 4 Polaris-equipped submarines which previously had comprised that force This was the 90th, successive successful, Trident II flight test since 1989. That's damn good!

Why didn't I retire in 1983, when I had reached the ''normal'' retirement age of 65? For one thing, my first wife had just divorced me, and I needed time to recoup my fortunes. Secondly, I had not yet met Norma, which we will now do:

It was early in 1986. I was 67, divorced for two years, still working at Lockheed, and living in a one-bedroom apartment in Santa Clara. I received a freebie offer from my frequent flyer contact at TWA, an overseas trip to anywhere TWA flew, provided I completed the trip by March 15th. The same offer was made to Norma L. Boyer, a lady 20 years my junior, who had accumulated her many frequent flyer miles as a consultant to industry. She was also divorced, childless, and lived alone in a duplex apartment near the Country Club Plaza shopping district in Kansas City, MO.

Coincidentally, of course, we each picked the same two-week period for our solo trips, and Vienna as our destination. Norma happened to sit on a seat in front of me on the leg from Frankfurt to Vienna. We bumped into each other several times during our few days there; even had a drink together after we met at a performance of the famous Volksopera. No particular sparks. Well, I was standing in line for a tramway ride up a mountain outside Innsbruck, when what to my wondering eyes did appear, but Norma. She practically fell into my arms with relief, because she had just spent a miserable morning trying get non-English-speaking natives to understand her poor German, and now she had someone she to talk to.

We spent the rest of the day together, including a late lunch , and then I dropped her off at her hotel, going on to my own hotel. She went on to Salzburg, I with border Germany first planned, but switched to Venice after I left Norma, was unable to contact her to see if she might like to go to Venice, and so drove over the Alps alone.

We had the same very early AM flight home from Vienna's airport. At my suggestion she had made reservations at the same airport hotel as I. but didn't know the time she would arrive. I got to the hotel, had an early dinner, and am about to pop into bed when I get a call from Norma. She's arrived! I suggest that she get something to eat and get to bed, since our flight was so early. How's that for hot pursuit!

It turns out that Norma had a business trip to San Francisco within two weeks. I pick her up and take her around her old haunts there, and drop her off at the Fairmont with a chaste kiss on cheek. Doin' any better now? I then discover that Eastern goes through Kansas City on its way to Washington from San Francisco, vice TWA's route through St. Louis, and that these airlines are teamed for frequent flyer credits. Got the picture? So I arrange to visit Norma occasionally, and she comes to see me in the Bay area, and one thing led to another. We sometimes wonder how the romance would have progressed if Norma had not had that San Francisco business trip scheduled, and if I had found out sooner than I did that TWA didn't honor Eastern's mileage, on trips through Kansas City.

One more thing. My seatmate on the way out was a younger, also single Lockheedian, who regaled me with his stories about his exploits as a ladies man. As we approached Kansas City, I told him that there would be a lady waiting there to see me briefly. Sure enough, there's Norma. My Lockheedian absents himself discreetly, and Norma gives me a flat box, and a kiss. As we taxi for take-off, I tell my seat mate that since I travel so much, I have a girl at each destination. I like this one particularly, since she does laundry. He reads for the rest of the flight.

A year later Norma and I were engaged to be married. I took her with me on a business trip to the Cape, along with some my associates, I to attend meetings, Norma to see the sights. Norma asked me, ''Won't your associates think it odd that you've brought a woman along with you on this trip?'' ''Only if your name was Norman'', I replied. Now, 13 years later, I think that either name would have done just fine.

On the other hand, 30 years earlier, I had chaired a meeting with Washington visitors. My assistant at this meeting was a bright, not shy, lanky young man, whose speech bore the signs of his Main Line Philadelphia upbringing, I unconsciously fell into my little trick of mimicry, at one point addressing him as, ''dear boy''. There were flinches from several people in the group. I immediately fell back to a business-like, if not brusque manner of talking to him.

TO RETIREMENT IN KANSAS CITY

In 1987, at age 68, with 31+ years of Lockheed service, single, but engaged to be married to the lovely Norma , I retired from Lockheed. My fun loving boss had hurried me along a tad by, each morning, secretly making off with the fresh pad of personalized memo pages that I had put on my desk the night before. I, also fun loving, previously had remarked to my secretary that I would retire when the last of my memo pads had been used up.

At my lavish retirement ceremony, (we called them ''go-away parties''), someone played ''Kansas City here I Come'', incessantly. Norma and I were given splendid gifts and mementos, and the Executive who spoke recounted my career as if it merely had been a long extension of what I was doing when we had first worked together on the initial Polaris flight tests. ''Mr. Test Plans and Analysis'' he called me. In my heart I forgave him, and spoke to those in the audience who knew better. I awarded Certificates of Unrequited Virtue to some who had been of special help to me in my various, sometimes nefarious adventures in the field of special programs and new business efforts. I also awarded one to my son, for his forbearance during my frequent absences on business trip, and my inability to tell him much about what I was doing at the office.

And so I left my apartment, moved to Kansas City, bought a house near the Country Club Plaza, and Norma and I were married in that house in Sept 1988. Norma has been the rock upon which my ''afterlife'' has been built. The very prototype of a people-person, she has an ever widening circle of friends, from Hawaii eastward, whose comfort and well-being , like mine, are always in her thoughts. Since she had no children, and mine and my grandchildren live at a goodly distance, she has taken on a group of rent-a-kids, 4 in number, who are beautiful, talented, and exceedingly well behaved children of a dear friend, an artist. When Norma feels grandmotherly, she calls on them to visit, or to go places and do things with us, sometimes as a group, but more frequently one at a time, for special treatment, She took the oldest child, a lovely 16 year old girl, on a visit to the island of Roatan last Spring, just to visit friends in that Honduras bay island. Norma is a Missouri Master Gardener, active in the Master Gardener outreach program and in our church's community outreach affairs. (One year we distributed Christmas baskets from the church to a particularly disadvantaged neighborhood, and noticed at last that a police car had been discreetly shadowing us, for our protection , they said.) Norma and I for five years were active in fund raising for the Kansas City Hospice.

A teacher from Head Start onward for many years, a consultant to companies, Norma is now a personal coach for career and life. Lord, how I could have used her when I was still working!

For me, I continued recreational flying for a few years, then switched to radio- controlled model airplane flying. (Believe me, it ain't easy for oldsters to learn). I had to give that up when a lung disorder forced me to forego the fumes and chemicals inherent to that hobby. I still have hobbies, but we'll save that for another time.

When it was discovered in 1996 that I had an extremely low oxygen level in my blood, with accompanying physical symptoms, lung specialists in Kansas City had a hard time determining the cause.(They now believe it is caused by a vascular malformation, probably congenital, whose effects appeared slowly over the years. They sent me to the national center for research and treatment of lung disorders for an intensive week of testing, which ruled out the scarier, quickly life-threatening possibilities. At that time they didn't find a plausible source of my trouble. The prescription, just continue to use supplemental O2 at a good clip night and day, and see my local specialist every few months for a progress check On my exit interview, I reminded the chief specialist on my case that my parents each lived to be 96 years old. ''How much of that longevity could I expect?'', I asked. ''About 75%'', he replied. Since I was 77 at the time, I hoped that he was speaking about a differential, rather than an absolute number, that I might still have 75% of the difference between 77 and 96. (Oddly I hear that 96 is the age at which most insurance companies are sure you¹re dead). So maybe I have time left to publish this, my first book-length writing, and maybe a sequel or two.

One more thing My good friend Dave Manley, and my wife, Norma, say that there's not enough about Me in this (supposed) autobiography. Not enough about my joys, sorrows, pride in accomplishments, agonies of defeats. I have to tell you that in 9 years running new business activities at Lockheed, sometimes contrary to the wishes of our big customer, there were many of the latter.

I had hoped that the reader would pick up some of these feelings, by osmosis, in reading the book and its many stories. Perhaps you recognized some of the feelings of enthusiasm with which I went into most of my early work, and with which I managed to infect many of the people who worked for, and with me. Undoubtedly you noted that this gradually transitioned into compulsiveness, and finally into a relatively placid state of resignation. ''Bloody but Unbowed''; ''I Did it My Way'', come to mind, but really just pass on by. The fact is that I hoped I wouldn't have to tell more about my perceived failures in my personal relationships, with my first wife, with my children, with my bosses and peers. And I won't, in any detail. Even now, it's just too painful. Somehow, I managed to retain my sense of humor. Somewhere I have read that many (other?) comics have tortured souls

My wife gave me a nightshirt with three sorrowful-looking penguins on the front, and ''I Shoulda'' as a legend underneath. It might have been labeled just ''Regrets'', because dreams about what I did wrong, in many areas of my life, and what I should have done instead, disturbed my sleep, and hence hers, for a number of years after our marriage. Such dreams have faded now, but I'm still not the carefree, joyful person she, and I would like me to be. Maybe when you get to be my age, that's too much to expect, but a little peaceful acceptance of the past as past, and more appreciation of the pleasures available in the present, and, with hope, in the future, would be nice.

MORE STORIES FROM THE PILGRIMAGE

FUNNY, YOU DON't LOOK IRISH

One of my classmates at M.I.T. was a young Chinese-American who bore a probably familial resemblance to Genghis Khan His name was Payson Tseu.

Early in the 60's, he shows up in the FBM work force at Lockheed. We talk over old times, and events since then, and he tells this story: On the preceding evening he had attended a cocktail party in San Francisco with a racially mixed crowd. One blond young woman described animatedly and protractedly to him her activism towards what we call today, ''Diversity''.

To interrupt the flow of her words, Payson says, (he told me), ''You know, my name really isn't Tseu, it's O'tseu. I come from Boston and I'm Irish, and you know how prejudiced they are in Boston against Irish people. So I just dropped the ''O''

She looks carefully at him, and says, ''Funny, you don't look Irish''.

Thereafter, that's how I greeted Payson whenever we met in the hallway.

I tried that line a couple of times on obviously Scandinavian waitresses, with no reaction, not even an extra dessert.

THE WIRE THAT BINDS

I was asked to look at a problem that the parachute development people were having with the test on an AT-6 of a prototype spin-recovery parachute system. This was a small parachute pack mounted on the side of the vertical stabilizer, whose function is was, when released, to pull the tail up, to help the pilot come out of an otherwise unrecoverable spin. (Not the AT-6, that was just a test platform for the system). There were new aircraft designs that had, until corrected, some very nasty spin characteristics.

The parachute pack was flat and aerodynamically shaped, intended not to change the stability and control characteristics of the aircraft under test. The pack was secured by 4 fabric flaps with grommets in their corner, through which a conical pin was passed. A hole through the pin held one end of a long flexible wire, in a wire sleeve, that was snaked back into the pilot's cockpit. If the pilot pulled the pin, aero forces were supposed to cause the flaps to open up, over the conical pin. Worked smooth as silk on the ground.

But when our test pilot tried to release the chute in the air, nothing happened. I looked at the system, and noticed just a little friction between the grommets and the conical pin, and between the hole in this retaining pin and the end of the ''Bowden wire''.

I went up to watch the operation from the back seat of another AT-6, as we spiraled, more tightly than I would have wished, around the spinning, slowly descending test airplane( I bent down to retrieve something from the floor of my cockpit, and almost didn't make it up against the 2 or 3 G's we were pulling.)

Well, we figured out that aerodynamic forces were indeed pulling the parachute pack flaps up against the conical pin, making it difficult to withdraw the Bowden wire from the hole in the conical pin. Got all that? But the real culprit was the routing of the Bowden wire cable. It was put through so many bends on its way to the cockpit that there was too much friction at too many places between the wire and its housing. No real problem so long as nothing was trying to retrain the end of the wire. But if the wire was restrained, we showed on the ground, the frictional load accumulated through all the bends made it very hard for the pilot to pull the pin out..

The wire routing was cleaned up, and the problem went away.

The same sort of thing happened while one of the Labs was testing an ejectable canopy on a fighter airplane, the P-38, I think. The idea was to test the ejection releases a number of times, but not to lose the canopy each time. The release was to be pulled, but the canopy was supposed to be moved up by its aerodynamic lift only a few inches, restrained by 4 wires. But they needed to make sure, the first time, that the test pilot really could get rid of the canopy in a hurry, if he needed to. So, they had to test a release system for that restraining set of wires.

Need I go on? It took a major cleanup of the cable runs, but they were able to make a one-time successful flight test of the secondary canopy restraint system.

DAYS AT McDONNELL

Titles can be deceiving. This story starts out as if it's going to be limited to the almost 10 years I spent in St. Louis, but it'll reach out and bite you later on, even in California. I may have to break it up into several stories, but then again, I just may ask you to struggle on under this title. If it gets too long and confusing, just stop and move on to the next Story.

I got the job at McDonnell Aircraft Corporation because Vernon Outman, Chief Aerodynamicist of that relatively new fighter airplane company, wanted someone to take over the chores of seeing to the needs of the new Missile Engineering Division.

Both Vernon and Mr. Mac himself had been in Engineering at Martin . Mr. Mac broke off during the war to pursue some innovative ideas in fighter aircraft design. After one twin-engined experimental fighter contract with the Army Air Corps, Mac got a breakthrough with a contract to design and build the Navy's first jet-engineered powered fighter, and the rest, as someone may have said, is history.

Outman left Martin to join McDonnell early in the company's history. I heard that it had to do with the dihedral his office had recommended be built into one of the early Martin transports. It turned out to be excessive, and the airplane had a ''Dutch-roll'' characteristic that was so pronounced that the pilots, way up front, complained that the motion made them airsick. The passengers, nearer the airplane's center of gravity, didn't seem to be bothered by the motion so much. The only items way behind the c.g. were the galley and the lavatories, and nobody had to sit there for long stretches.

Oh yes, MAC also got a war time Air Corps contract for the XJ-85, a very stubby little fighter that was to fit inside one of the bomb bays of the huge B-36 bomber. This was a take-off from the experiment involving the Navy's prewar airships. Trapezes were slung under the Akron and the Macon, and the biplane Navy fighters of the day could, and did take off and land from the devices, to do recon, fight off attack, do beer runs, or whatever

There were two fundamental differences between the two experiments. First, the dirigible's babies could come back and hook onto the mother ship. The B-36's single baby could not. One launch, perform your mission, and then find a place to land. The other difference was that the XJ-85 had to fit into a very short space in one of the B-36's bomb bays. It was impossible with the technology of the day to make that design directionally stable enough to be of any practical use.

I had met Vernon when he came to Wright Field to discuss some extension that had been proposed to full-scale wind- tunnel tests that were being conducted on a prototype. Vernon didn't want to spend the money on more tests. I agreed with him, but for a different reason, unspoken. Nothing could help that design, I believed.

On my release from active duty, Vernon offered me a job to head up the Aerodynamics and Thermodynamics department of the new Missile Engineering Division. Rumor had it that Bob Hage, who had headed up Wright Field's Aerodynamics Dept. just before me, and who had been discharged before I was, had been offered the job before me, had accepted, and then changed his mind en route, perhaps while entering St. Louis on old Route 66. He had just kept going and returned to Boeing. He had come to Wright Field from there, perhaps 4 years earlier, and had an older brother who was a well-known and highly respected expect in the field of aircraft design, as Bob became also, I'm sure.

But my memoir and these additional Stories are supposed to reveal the real Me, not ramble on about other guys. I accepted the $6500/yr offer, (paid weekly at $125 a week) and reported for duty in October, 1956. I had no business civilian clothes, so had to let a Famous-Barr salesman sell me a suit, which had wide white stripes on a medium brown flannelish background. Still on Air Corps terminal leave, I wore my uniform for a while longer, and a big butterfly bandage over one eye, where I had walked into an auto lube lift at half mast, in the dark, during the drive from Dayton. My arrival was well noted, I'm sure

The real Me was much influenced by his surroundings and coworkers, of course. First. as to the physical surroundings. We were housed in an unairconditioned wing next to the parking lot for the MAC building. That environmental fact did not really register until the first summer after my arrival, when the noise from large, standing fans intended to keep the heat inside barely tolerable, made the room so noisy that telephone conversation was very difficult, and even thinking sometimes a trial . The large room was a big bull-pen. We sat in rows, all facing one end of the building, except for the new Chief Engineer of the aggregation, whom I have referred to in my memoir as Captain Queeg. I remember his full name, but prefer not to use it, just in case some kin of this fine southern gentlemen comes gunning for me, if I should say something unkind about him. Let me just say at this point that he had been an Officer in the Navy Bureau of Aeronautics, specializing in aircraft structures, before joining MAC. When I think of him now, which I try to avoid, I think of the warden in ''Cool Hand Luke''. I may not have had the presence of Steve McQueen, under this man's piercing eyes, but the Warden he was, indeed.

The Chief Engineer sat, in a row by himself, sans secretary, facing the rear of everybody else. Perhaps this was to insure that the draftsmen maintained the approved posture, with only asses and elbows showing. Periodically, his stentorian voice would call one of us Department Heads to join him, to sit in a straight chair at the right of his desk. On the corner of that desk we could see a stack of 3 or 4-inch strips of ruled paper, on which he had made hand-written notes at prior audiences he had held. After conversations with us, and after making more notes on a ruled, legal sized pad, he would put a straight edge under what he had written, and tear off that strip of paper, which contained, usually, a note as to the assignment or instructions he had just given out in the interview, due date prominently featured. He did not lunch with, nor socialize with the help.

This was the environment I had brought myself and my family into, in a metropolitan area which we found unattractive, and no other aerospace employment opportunities within many, many miles. It was, moreover my first real civilian job, at poor pay and with no savings to fall back on. I could not imagine what the consequences would be if I were to acknowledge failure at my first job, by leaving. So I stayed on, for almost ten years.

Things did get better after a couple of years, when ''Capt. Queeg'' left, and was replaced by Ben Bromberg, as I have described earlier in my memoir. I don't know where Queeg went, but after a while, back he came, looking for a job again. Mr. Mac hired him into his executive suite under a one-year contract, and, no small tyrant himself, gave the guy absolute nothing to do. Queeg somehow busied himself with nothings, saved his rather good salary, and left again for good. He had made himself an expert on the theory of yacht construction and supply. I heard he bought the Cadillac of companies in the yacht fixture supply business, someplace in Michigan

I must tell you about someone else at MAC with whom I actually had little dealings. His name I really don't remember. He would be completely forgettable were it not for the strange ways he would cross my path in the future This man bore the title of Executive Vice President of the whole Company, a position which, under Mr. Mac's sway and the company's small size at the time, was meaningless. When later I had a small office in the Executive wing of the building, doing marketing of new business projects, I heard Mr. Mac dictate, using the speakerphones in each of the two offices, the precise configuration and equipment the Executive VP was to order for Mr. Mac's company car. I can only assume the poor man's other duties were of a like nature.

This gentleman left, to become President of Universal Match Company, whose business included making missile launch systems. I met one of his subordinates when we both, in 1966, were sent by our respective companies, in my case Lockheed, to ''Charm School'' at Columbia's School of Business, at Harriman House He said that this person had been as ineffective at UMC as he had been at MAC.

Later this person went to the Pentagon, where he was the principal author of a study that said that, since defense contractors made such obscene profits in the production phase of a weapon system procurement , they should be required to bear a more substantial part of the cost and risk of the development phase. This was just as the Air Force was preparing to call for bids on the huge C-5 transport airplane design and development. Lockheed bid low, overran the cost, and lost lots of money. Together with the disastrous effects of the Rolls Royce jet engine company's bankruptcy on the Lockheed 1011 commercial transport's development progress, this nearly broke Lockheed financially. (This was while the Missile and Space Company, with its military space and FBM missile projects, was going great guns, and making money for the Corporation in large amounts)

A final irony. It was a time when a company I believe was Textron was thinking of buying out the weakened Lockheed company. The gentleman of whom we are speaking shows up in Sunnyvale in the entourage of the potential acquirer. The group goes to our Executive Dining Room for lunch. I am there. This man greets me like a long-lost cousin. Immediately after lunch Herschel Brown, our Executive VP at the time corners me. Have I been up to something, he asks? I assure him that I have not, that I have had no contact with the man since those days at MAC. To show my good faith, I tell him, for his use in a any subsequent discussions, that from my own personal observation, the man is dumber than he looks, but persuasive enough to be dangerous

I really must tell you about one more, really interesting person with whom I dealt while at MAC. David S. Lewis, a handsome, charming man with a beautiful and gracious, wife, whose name, Dorothy, was the same as that of my sister, and later of one of my daughters, was head of the Aerodynamics Department of the large airplane engineering establishment at MAC, in theory my big brother. We didn't socialize much, and we really did not have much interface at work. He and his people considered my department as very junior associates, but they were very glad to come around for advice when our work on the Talos missile got us into the aerodynamic heating business ahead of the airplane company .

David left Engineering, and went into Mr. Mac's suite, where he became the one-man project office for the Navy F3H fighter, the beginning of MAC's really big time, in fact, dominance of the fighter aircraft market. The airplane was in initial production, in Fleet Trials in fact, when it was discovered that it had a curious characteristic. If rolled rapidly to the right or left, the wing stayed bent in the direction of the roll. It course, be made straight again by rolling the plane in the opposite direction Somehow, the Navy would not accept that as an adequate solution. Through magic, charm , and influence, Dave convinced the Navy to let the production line continue, with temporary fixes to the airplanes already produced, while permanent fixes were worked out.

Dave was instrumental in selling the next MAC aircraft, the tremendously successful F4H, to fill both the fighter and ground attack roles. Finally, and this was a severe blow to Lockheed's L-1011 transport, he personally convinced the Chairman of American Airlines to buy the by-then McDonnell ­Douglas company's DC-10, reversing a previous plan by American to buy the Lockheed product. By this time, David had been made President of then MacDac. Reportedly, he couldn't get the old man's commitment to anoint him as Chairman, when he, Mr. Mac retired, So Dave left to do a great job, we heard, as Chairman of General Dynamics.

To show you what a fun guy Dave was, when I saw him later, one time only, I saw him in the line at the Executive Dining Room. (no, it had not become my hang-out: I just liked the luncheon food and conversation there ) He was looking at the Lockheed stock price quotation which was posted there, until the C-5/L-1011 shambles made the subject unnotable. I go up to say hello. He fixes me with his piercing one gray, one blue-green eye and demands to know why the price of his stock, then MacDac wasn't posted there. What could I say? ''How's Dorothy ? didn't seem appropriate''

Mr. Mac wanted to keep the top job in the family. First, he selected a nephew, Sanford L. McDonnell, a fine and competent man, who had cycled briefly through my aerodynamics dept, during his on-the-job training. MacDac prospered during ''Sandy''s administration. When he retired, Mr. Mac's son, John S., Jr. took over. For whatever reason , the company's fortunes declined. John Jr. presided at the dissolution of the empire. Boeing bought the MacDac company, and dropped the name forever.

WILLY FIEDLER

In the rewriting of my memoirs, the story of this remarkable ex-German engineer got compressed..He deserves a full treatment. Incidentally this is one of the Sea Stories I sent to Howie Burnett's Old FBM¹ers' web site. It is what triggered my ''write'' switch, after years of procrastinating.

Willy A Fiedler, who died in 1999, made at least two program make-or-break contributions to the early development of Polaris and its match with the submarine. He also had an effect on my own work and career that started 10 years before I ever met him at our first Bay -area temporary quarters in San Jose, and that lasted for the ensuing 25 years or so that I worked with him. Here's how it all happened:

In Oct., 1946, I left the (formerly) Army Air Corps R facility at Wright Field to take a position as head of the aerodynamics and thermodynamics dept. of the new Missile Engineering Division of the McDonnell Aircraft Corp. I found the place a hotbed of work on pulsejet engines and on applications of these engines.

I don't know who invented the pulsejet engine but Willy was the guy who hooked it to a bomb and made the V-1, the first terror weapon to bomb London. It's said that Willy even fitted a cockpit to an experimental version and did some test flying. He never denied doing such a dumb thing.

Getting back to MAC in St. Louis, the company had already developed a target drone, (that the customer didn't order into production) using a scaled-down version of the V-1's 14in diameter original, and had built these relatively simple, reed-valve propulsion devices in sizes from 8 inches to 17 inches.

Where we came a cropper was when we promised to develop and build for the Navy an air launched, 500knot!, anti-ship missile, powered by a semi-submerged, 11 inch diameter pulsejet engine. What we didn't know was that the pulsejet was limited by its acoustic compression cycle, to about 150 knots for useful thrust production. The higher the airflow over the tail pipe, the lower the thrust, until finally, 0.

How we discovered this, and the gyrations we went thru to try to overcome this phenomenon make an exciting and sometimes hilarious, story, but I have covered that in my memoir.

Suffice it to say that MAC's pulsejet guy finally took his designs to Southern California, where the engine's high heat producing capability and large surface radiation area made it look to him as if he had a gold mine in orchard heaters. At that time, 1950 or so, there weren't enough people living in citrus orchards to be bothered by the noise these things made

Back to Willy Fiedler--He was picked up from the Germans in Operation Paperclip and put to work for the Navy at Pt. Mugu. I understand that he started preaching vertical underwater launching of missiles, even in the early 50s, so in late 56 he was sent to work for Lockheed, where I first met him.

Some folks in the Navy doubted that underwater launching would work, so 30 inches were left below the missile in the launch tube design, just in case an elevator were needed to permit surface launching.(which would have been the kiss of death for the project.) We were able to use those 30 inches later, in the Polaris A-2, to get the full 1500 n.mile range we had promised .

Willy and his idea prevailed, with a aid of much analytical work, model launches from his LUMF tank. (Lockheed Underwater Model Facility, and a tube in the sand off San Clemente Island. Using that, we fired a dummy missile with a full- scale, ''cut ­grain'' motor through the wave produced by a heavy cruiser steaming off shore at 30 knots. . The Navy also installed a gimbaled launch tube in the sand at Cape Canaveral, and two surface- launch tubes in the USNS Observation Island.

Willy's other main contribution was the "jetavator", sleeve -like devices that projected into the stream of each of the 4 rocket nozzles, to give a means of thrust -vector control without extending beyond the circular contour of the missile. They gave us problems, but they enabled the program to go on, while more complex and effective rotating nozzles were developed.

I could go on and on with the output of Willy's brilliant mind, persuasiveness, and stubbornness, even to his "Turtle" idea, a sea bottom dwelling launch facility, which mercifully was killed by an international treaty not to place nuclear weapons on the sea floor, but that would take another book Another time, perhaps.

WORKING TOWARD THE HEAD OF THE DOG

One of the nicest guys to talk to in the Navy's roster was a civilian employee named Roy. E. Danielson. I first ran into Roy, who was many years older than I, when the Missile Engineering Division of M.A.C. undertook the development of the Model F Kingfisher missile. Roy was in the Bureau of Ordnance¹ s program management staff for that project.

When the Kingfisher project aborted, and we were invited into the Bumblebee Program for Talos development, there was Roy again. And once again, when I joined Lockheed for the new FBM program, there was Roy, helping to integrate the system, until he retired a few years later.

There were quite a few civilian employees in the Navy's Bureau of Ordnance. I once asked Roy about the coincidence of our frequent meetings on new programs. Simple, he said. An old civil servant always smelled out where the program money was going next. Roy said that he was like a flea, working towards the head of the Bureau of Ordnance dog. And so, quite accidentally, and for a time was I.

LES MAJESTE

I'm on a vacation cross-country flight with my first wife in the Lockheed Missiles and Space Co.'s employee Flying Club Cessna 182, a sturdy old machine, fixed gear and a 120 knot economy cruising speed . The plan involves a leisurely route from San Jose to many points east and south, visiting family, old friends, Disney World and even witnessing a Polaris A-3 submarine launch, from a support ship, of course. Our route takes us to Jacksonville, from where we will cruise south along the Coast to Cocoa Beach .

As we approach Jacksonville from the West South West, flying Visual Flight Rules, the tower informs us of a DC-3 coming in to the airport from due South, for an approach and landing. The tower must have had not much else going on, because he kept informing each of us of our relative position, from his approach radar sweep. Dutifully, I acknowledge each transmission from the tower; the DC-3 says nothing. Finally, the DC-3 is cleared to land and I am instructed to turn in for my approach, For the first time, I see the DC-3, and rather close, I thought. ''I see him'', I tell the tower, ''I'm going to have to slow down or I'll overtake him!''

The DC-3 pilot speaks, for the first time. In a deep voice of command he says, ''There will be no more of that. We may be slow, but we¹re proud!''

PROTECTED SPECIES

During my last years at Lockheed, another manager of managers, whose office was close to mine, and who had become over the years, like me, venerable deadwood, occasionally walked with me to lunch in the Executive Dining Room. Frequently he would volunteer, ''Art, you and I are protected species. We've been around too long for them to get rid of us. ''One day, a competent and well-connected subordinate was promoted into his position, and my friend took immediate early retirement.

It's a good thing that I retired when I finally did. Very shortly thereafter, the rapid adoption of computers, and the terrible cost pressures the whole aerospace industry was exposed to made my organization level completely redundant and the very concept of upward and downward loyalty became an historic artifact. Further, I have been assured , by an impeccable source, that the crap-to-pay- ratios everywhere in the industry went completely out of sight. Except for Chief Executive Officers, of course.

SUPERCAVITATION

I had just wrapped up, I thought, writing a draft of this supplement to my memoirs, when I was referred to the feature article in the May 2001 issue of Scientific American magazine, which is called ''Warp Drive Underwater'', and says that ''by traveling inside drag-cutting gas pockets, new subsea systems can move much faster underwater than their conventional counterparts on the same amount of energy''

This improvement is caused by a fluid-mechanical effect, called ''supercavitation'', which occurs when bubbles of water vapor form in the lee of submerged, fast-moving objects. When these bubbles are enlarged so as to surround the whole object in an envelope of gas, the liquid wets very little of the body's surface, and its drag is drastically reduced.

The article goes on to say that, in 1977, the Russians secretly introduced a rocket-powered torpedo, called in English, ''Squall'' capable of 230 mph underwater, that they are believed to have sold some to China, at least, and that they are offering to sell some to other countries. It was reported that an improved version was aboard the Russian submarine ''Kursk'' when she sank last August.

The reason for a Story for my history is that I now realize that I been involved (quite unknowingly) in weapons development using supercavitation since the latter 1940's!

Remember my description of the air-launched, anti-ship missile that I worked on at McDonnell, the project that failed because we had used the wrong kind of propulsion system? Remember that I described its final maneuver as a dive to the water at an angle, a few yards away from the hull of a destroyer, or other thin-skinned vessel. A 500-lb warhead was then to shear through all the light electric gear and missile structure, plunge into the water and proceed straight to an area underneath the ship's keel, it's most vulnerable place.

I imagine all the James Bond fans snickered at this point. How could the scheme possibly work? Don't we all remember how our hero, swimming away from a successful mission, always avoids his pursuers' bullets by merely diving a few feet deeper and continuing to swim away? The bullets, of course, after entering the water, slow down rapidly and just mill around. How could our bomb do any better? In fact our specially-shaped bomb, designated the EX-1 Plunge Bomb, sometimes didn't do any better. We heard that in Navy test firing of prototypes from a tube pointed at the lake below Morriss Dam, near Pasadena, one of them came out of the water and skipped over the dam, landing somewhere below. But most dove straight as intended, I heard

The EX-1 was shaped like a cylinder, surmounted by a cone, each end terminating in a flat surface with sharp edges. The sharp edges are what were supposed to produce the gas bubbles and the gaseous envelope which allowed the bomb to go deep and straight, most of the time.

Later, in underwater launching of the Polaris and its successor designs, all with large, flat, rear ends, underwater movies showed the missiles bolting upward, each surrounded indeed by a gaseous envelope. Part of this came from the ejection pulse from the launch tube, part from the missile's front end shape, which was particularly blunt starting with the Poseidon model, and additional gas was supplied throughout the dash to the sea's surface by air venting through the missiles' seams. The missiles had, of course, been pressurized in the launch tubes to correspond to the water pressure at launch depth, before the launcher hatches could be opened.

So, before I read the Scientific American article, I couldn't spell, ''supercavitator''. Now, I find, I wuz one.