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TI: So here's a question for you, because right now we have the luxury of hindsight.

SA: Yes.

TI: When you were a young man, and all the things you talked about in terms of what fosters innovation is a strong need and having the resources, maybe an unreasonable deadline, strong team...

SA: Take a risk.

TI: Taking risks, failing, learning, was it clear to you back then that's what you were doing, all these things? Or was it something that you have, in hindsight...

SA: Well, as a young engineer fresh out of school, to me it was totally exciting. I mean, we worked day and night just like a startup does today. We worked weekends, and that's the way it was. And we knew it was totally important for the government because Eisenhower was... in fact, the program manager that I worked for had to go to Washington every week reporting on every failure and what corrective action we were taking. And he, after many trips, he was looked at as a bum coming into town every week with bad news, and it was on the verge of cancellation. And then when we finally succeeded, he went to Washington and he got this hero's welcome. So the reward was very, very recognized when the success came. So out of this I really learned that, number one, you have to set dates tightly, you got to have high priority, you've got to take risks, and you've got to really learn from every failure and take corrective action, and you have to be very persistent. And the other thing that we learned out of that was the need for systems engineering. Because it's one thing to have a bunch of black box engineers, we had great black box engineers, but we bundled together and flew it and it didn't work. Well, a lot of it was because it was lack of systems engineering. So we developed the whole systems engineering process by succeeding in Corona, we also succeeded in systems engineering.

TI: This is helpful. You're providing a little more depth to the first interview that we did.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.