.July 20, 2019
What was it like to be involved in the early days of the Apollo project? What were the costs and benefits of the massive effort? Join Desert Les as he recollects exciting days from the early 60s.
Howdie Pardner,
Yup. It’s good to see you again. Desert Les is back. Not because them Peak readers demanded it but because the fool editor told Desert Les to fill this here white space with interestin’ doings.
Well, a few days ago the dang editor bellowed at Desert Les. “Saturday, July 20th is the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. You was around then you old coot, get busy and write about it and don’t forget to include some Apollo 11 videos at the end of the article!”
Desert Les dug further and further back in his mind and after a spell recollected something that he’d tucked away in his saddle bags long, long ago. Pardner, here is what Desert Les recollected and found in a closet in his homestead.
Note written by Les Conklin. a.k.a. Desert Les, on November 22, 1963 at North American Aviation, Downey, California upon learning of President Kennedy’s assasination in Dallas. Apologies for the penmanship. In Kenned’s 1961 Inaugural Address he said “… ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.”
In May 25th 1961 President John F. Kennedy announced before a special joint session of Congress the goal of sending an American to the Moon by the end of the decade. Courtesy NASA.
Pardner, I’m not making this up. An earlier model of Desert Les worked in Downey, California for North American Aviation (NAA), the prime contractor for the Apollo I Command Module.
Desert Les visited the keypunch department to turn-in coding forms for a computer program that he’d written. Them keypunch ladies had a radio turned on. When Desert Les heard that JFK had been shot in Dallas, he tore off a piece of a coding form and scribbled the note above.
“We choose to go to the moon.”
JFK was good at speechifying and on May 25, 1961, he announced before a special joint session of Congress the goal of sending an American safely to the Moon before the end of the decade. Desert Les didn’t know it at the time but that speech would result in Desert Les working for NAA in Downey, California for 3 ½ years from January 1963 until June 1966.
Video: JFK: “We choose to go to the Moon…” Sep. 12, 1962Pardner, don’t misunderstand Desert Les. JFK’s words did not come to mind when Desert Les decided to leave a safe, secure job as a programmer/analyst with Aetna Life, a major insurance company, in Hartford, Connecticut. Nope. It was words from here, there and yonder.
People said that California was the land of opportunity, fun and the Beach Boys, think Surfin’, Surfer Girl, etc. Experienced information systems folks said that with more than a year of business programming experience, I could go “anywhere.” It was also the words of Desert Les’ brother, inviting Desert Les to bunk in his family’s apartment in LA so Desert Les could go on job interviews during the holiday break at Aetna. And Pardner, I’ll never forget the words of my BIG boss at the Aetna when I gave my notice. He said, “I wish I could go with you.” The timing was perfect and Desert Les joined the herd of young people chargin’ west across the U.S.A.
Apollo Next Door
Apollo Command Moduel Reentering Earth’s Atmosphere. Illustration Courtesy of NASA.
NAA surely was an exciting place for a 25-years-old buckaroo to work and learn.
The Information Systems Department’s (ISD) office space was a rehabilitated airplane assembly area with 6′ high partitions dividing the different project groups. i.e. teams. There were a few black and white television sets mounted on the walls. Sometimes the astronauts would show up on them screens and urge us to work hard and real careful-like. We all watched and listened. Yup.
Desert Les could walk into the hanger-like area next to the information systems department and see several command module that were being assembled. Folks worked hard but were casual and relaxed. Nobody wore them dark East Coast suits. Most importantly, it was a place where many technologies were being developed for the first time, an environment that fostered creativity. If you had an idea and could make the case for Desit, nobody held you back. Nope.
State-of-the-art Facility
JFK had set the goal of landing a man on the moon by the end the decade and the U.S. government backed it up with big bucks. When it came to business and engineering systems, NAA had one of the largest and technically advanced computer operations in the world. Yup.
Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin stands on the lunar surface during the first moon landing. Courtesy NASA.
When Desert Les arrived in early 1963, NAA had two brand new IBM 1410 mainframe computers, each with 100K or memory and several IBM 1401 mainframe computers. There were additional computers systems that were used for scientific applications. These were all big, black boxes that stood in the middle of the computer room. By comparison, when Desert Les began programming at Aetna Life in 1962, they had one 1401 computer with 8K of memory.
Input and output media were punched cards, magnetic tape and printed reports. Pardner, managers liked to get big, thick report listings to keep them feelin’ important.
Friend, Aetna and NAA had something in common. It was the RAMAC 350, the first disk drive (think hard drive). Back then it was break-through technology that was revolutionizing business systems.
Imagine an application that has the entire Scottsdale telephone book stored. Given a name, the application has to find the person’s telephone number by starting with the first name in the book and going through the names, which are in alphabetical order, one at a time (the old way). RAMAC enabled applications to get information directly from storage (the new way) without plodding through the data sequentially. Plus, the RAMAC could hold the equivalent of 62,500 punched cards: 5 million characters of data (about 3.75 MB.)
The first footprints on the Moon will be there for a million years. There is no wind to blow them away. Courtesy NASA.
“D.O.E.S. does everything!”
Desert Les was part of a five-person team led by an IBM system engineer. We designed and developed, D.O.E.S. (Disk Oriented Engineering System), the Apollo I configuration management system that used stored engineering drawing data on RAMAC and change orders to keep track of and update the command module’s three million parts and assemblies. The technology that we developed was later used by NAA-IBM to create IBM’s first mainframe data base management system, IMS. And, for the first time, engineering management was able to define their own report content and format. Cool stuff back in the day. Yup.
Compared to the today’s cell phones, laptops, desktops, and iPads, the power of NAA’s processing capabilities was laughable, but 55 years ago it was the latest and greatest. Online processing, multi-tasking, multi-processing, networks, the Internet, terminals, monitors, PCs, software products, software companies, websites, email, hand-held devices and college curriculums were all in the future. Individuals and small companies did not own computers. Nope. Why the field was so short of people that as an evening job, Desert Les was asked to develop and teach the first-ever computer programming class at El Camino College in Torrance, California.
Apollo Cost & Benefits
“The Apollo program has been called the greatest technological achievement in history.” Wikipedia. Only the construction of the Panama Canal and the Manhattan Project compare in scope. Hundreds of thousands of folks across America were involved in one way or another.
So Desert Les, what did the Apollo program cost and was it worth the cost?
Earthrise by Astronaut William Anders. (Courtesy NASA.)
Good questions Pardner. A total cost of $25 billion was reported to Congress in 1973. That cost includes the Apollo spacecraft (Command Module and Lunar Module) and the Saturn V launch vehicle. Yup. It was worth it for many reasons.
First, the success of the Apollo 11 was watched by billions of people on television. The moon landing helped us enjoy a sense of oneness – an ever-so-brief achievement.
As a kid in elementary school, Desert Les had learned to crawl under his desk to avoid them Russian A-bombs. As a college student, Desert Les recollects watching Russia’s Sputnik whizzing overhead, amazin’ and potentially dangerous. Heck, Desert Les wondered if he could still fit under that school desk. Meanwhile, as Russian space craft enjoyed the atmosphere above, our rocket launches exploded or were delayed. It was discouragin’. The success of Apollo restored America’s confidence and demonstrated the resiliency of our people, country and government. It surely did.
Desert Les will bet his horse that you’ve seen the picture credited with helping to boost environmental awareness. The picture shows a very lonely, blue and white, fragile-appearing planet surrounded by a black, seemingly endless void. The photo, taken by the crew of Apollo 8, helped humans everywhere begin to grasp the importance of preserving and protecting Earth’s natural environment. A few cowpokes hope it will lead to another Apollo-like project to plant trees and initiate other programs to save the Earth.
The aggressive push of the U.S. to land a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s drove a very rapid rate of technological advance in our country. Yup. Americans quickly created a huge resource of new knowledge and know-how, which along with thousands of new products, devices and processes. Them folks that do studies say that Apollo returned five to seven dollars into the U.S. economy for every dollar invested. Partner, we can see the returns all around us, new kinds of industries, products and jobs.
Apollo was a VERY LARGE science project. We learned a great deal about the Moon, Sun, Earth. Plus, we expanded our knowledge in geology, astronomy, biology, physics, the evolution of Earth and much more.
And, Apollo has helped us strengthen our relationships with other countries. The data and samples returned from the Moon have been shared with many countries and are still being studied by scientists world-wide. Heck Pardner, the U.S. has even done joint space missions with the Russians, them folks that worried Desert Les with their Sputnik.
Desert Les’ Benefits
Desert Les’ biggest benefit of the Apollo project was that he met and married, Judy, in LA. Yup. And, our first son, Bob, was born there too.
Desert Les left NAA in June 1966, long before the Apollo 11 moon landing. He went to work for a business system consulting company in Boston. In 1968, Desert Les and a fellow consultant founded a systems analysis/programming consulting company that morphed into a small software products company. At least three of the resulting software products were based on knowledge derived from the Apollo project. Pardner, the same thing was happening all over the country!
Friend, what goes around comes around. In the 1970s, Desert Les visited Scottsdale for the first time. He came to Arizona from Boston to present information about one of those products to Tucson Electric, American Express, Valley Bank and Arizona Department of Economic Security- all eventual customers. The rest is history. Yup.
One last thought, ” …ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” Good advice that worked for the Apollo 11 astronauts.
This article is dedicated to Apollo astronauts, left to right, Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee, who died on Jan. 27, 1967, when a flash fire swept through the Apollo 1 command module during a test. Courtesy NASA.
Related Articles, Websites & Videos
Video: Apollo 11 Rocket Projected onto Washington Monument Video (0.0.26)
Video: Apollo 11 Launch Video (0.3.43)
Video: Restored Apollo 11 Moonwalk Video (3:02.31)
Article: Wikipedia, Extensive Information on the Apollo program Website
Article: Apollo Program Benefits, NASA NASA PDF
The Peak Welcomes Your Comment
GPPA Membership Make a Donation to GPPA Peak Advertisements & Advertorials
.
August 4, 2019
Wow, Desert Les, I’m over the moon from this story. What a great personal tale of adventure and achievement — complete with a love connection! I remember those glory days when America dared to define mankind’s greatest achievement (of course, there was the invention of air conditioning). But, perhaps the real pinnacle of the era was that we enjoyed “a sense of oneness, an ever-so-brief achievement.” How sweet it was. Thanks, DL.
August 5, 2019
Rick, Thank you for the kind comment and great articles you contribute to the Peak. We need many more like them. In writing the benefits portion of this article I learned that the rate of technological growth of the Unitied States during the decade of the Apollo was 2 1/2 times the normal rate. No wonder there were so many opportuinites then and later. I also learned that 80% of the investment in integrated circuits (chips) during that period went into the Apollo program. They needed a smaller, faster computers for the command module, Saturn, etc. Of course that led to PCs, iPads, cell phones, etc. On the other side of the coin, in the early 60s, in a limited way, we knew that the business systems we were developing would eliminate and change jobs. Fortunately, I was willing and able to move and adapt to the change. Many were not, which has led to a new problem that will only increase as time passes. I’d love to see another grand national project but remember it took Spudnick and other major space-related embarrasments before we got our act together. Amen. Thanks again. It was a big step forward.