<Begin Segment 14>

TI: How many years were you in Japan?

HM: A little over two years.

TI: Okay.

HM: Yeah. It was a very exciting two years, it was a very busy two years.

TI: Yeah. It reminds me of...

HM: Never worked that hard in life.

TI: ...some of the software startups that I've...

HM: Yeah, yeah.

TI: ...seen.

HM: Just about the same way. Yeah.

TI: Interesting. Okay, so we're -- we come back to the States.

HM: Yeah. Okay.

TI: You -- financially, probably aren't doing very well because you just quit your job, and you didn't get your stock or stock options?

HM: And they wouldn't pay for the freight of all the stuff, household furnishings and all that kind of stuff, back from Japan. So it cost us quite a bit of money to come back.

TI: And did you go back to San Diego?

HM: No, I didn't. I was so ticked off at those guys. I said, "I'm coming back." And I came back to Seattle. And I screwed around for a couple months trying to get my ulcers under control. And then my brother says, "Hey, they want some people for..." My brother comes back in the scene again. He says, "They want some people for this Dyna Soar program. And if the program goes, it's going to be a real nice program."

TI: And so you called it a Dyna Soar program?

HM: X-20 program. And the thing that was interesting was going to be launched with a Atlas Missile. And they were going to mount the Dyna Soar vehicle on top of the Atlas Missile, and that was the launching mechanism. So I knew something about Atlas. So, well, my brother gave this guy in the personnel department my name, and they called me up --

TI: So how were you feeling at this point? Here you had gone through this incredible two-year experience, and essentially burned in some ways, physically.

HM: Yeah, yeah.

TI: But then was it a sense that you had to get a job to support your family?

HM: Well, yeah, because the economics dictated that, see, because --

TI: And were you bitter at this point?

HM: No, no. I wasn't bitter. I knew -- I had hoped that they would not have been merged a second time around because that was of the end of our stock option thing and our stability and the, the organization that we were involved with. Now, we were compounded second-level, and we kind of diminished, diminished in our importance and responsibility. And instead of improving on the ultrasonic equipment, they just stagnated the design. They froze the design and said, "Oh, we're going to keep buying this stuff." And eventually the relationship with Cho-Onpa and X-Onics Corporation (Interstate Electronics) just broke down. And the company in Japan says, "Well, we have come to the end of this contract that we have signed with you. We no longer will even exercise any options for extension of it." So that was the end of that. But they have made some very interesting products since then, but nonetheless, X-Onics wasn't part of it. They killed their own goose. So I was kind of, kind of burned out with San Diego and X-Onics, so I came back to Seattle.

TI: Okay. So you're at Boeing, and this is about what year?

HM: Well, okay. '63.

TI: '63.

HM: Yeah. And so I go on the Dyna Soar program, first of all because they wanted some people with Atlas experience. The vehicle itself was important to them. And I got into systems engineering there. And the program lasted -- let's see, when did they kill it? MacNamara got on the scene, and he says, he wants to know what the military requirements for this vehicle is. And it was a hypersonic test vehicle. It was to gather hypersonic test data, so that they can go on a hypersonic mission and go as many times around the world as they want. It was a sub-orbital platform. And it was a very efficient way of doing the job. And they wanted to get hypersonic aerodynamic information. And they wanted to use it as a test vehicle for materials and things of this nature. But when MacNamara came down and said, "I want to determine the military requirements," and he changed it from a experimental data gathering system to one that had a military criteria on it. And there wasn't, it wasn't designed for that thing.

TI: So that killed the program.

HM: Yeah. So we worked like Thanksgiving weekend, we just worked 'round-the-clock to try to get the thing out because it had to be finished and be submitted to MacNamara. And when he looked at it he didn't like it, and they killed the program right after the beginning of that year. But, that wasn't a problem. I learned a lot in that program because the hypersonic era was a lot different from subsonic and transonic stuff, that -- it was a era where I was just getting into the Boeing scene, back into the Boeing scene. And they were trying to figure out what they're going to do with some of us after the Dyna Soar program got cut.

TI: It must have been a very different environment. Here you went from a very small, entrepreneurial situation to Boeing?

HM: Yeah. It was a very relaxing-type environment for me because yeah, I was working double shifts. And here I had to just come work from 8:30 to 5:00. And it was easy. So I was feeling pretty comfortable until the program got cut. And then we got put on the lunar orbiter program. And that was the first satellite system they put around the moon to determine the landing -- possible landing sites for the future programs. And that, I spent some time on that program. And then, then they threw me into this proposal effort because Boeing was trying to get the manned orbiting laboratory at that point, and they were getting, they wanted to get into the supersonic low-level missile program.

TI: Now, how did things work in Boeing for you to go from program to program? Do they recruit internally to get to, pull together teams, or...?

HM: Yeah, normally when they make these teams, they put the teams together, it's because the team director knows the individuals that he's going to place in different responsibility positions. And these guys in turn have to go and scrounge for people and pull them into his organization to make sure that they could get their job done properly. So it becomes a situation where people, by reputation and by being able to implement certain capabilities, and show performance, that they are kind of becoming a, magnets to these other individuals because they're responsible for carrying out their functions.

TI: And what would you say was your reputation during these early years at Boeing?

HM: Well, first of all, that, they said, "Well, here's this guy from," -- formerly I worked for the Astronautics and Convair -- "and he knows this stuff. Why should we try to train anybody else? Well, he's got the basic information. He's been in launch programs. He's been out on the Cape." So that became a very interesting item to them. And the first thing they did was, they said, when I went into that group, he says, "I'll give you a couple of days to prepare a presentation on Atlas Missiles." And that was the first thing I did. That was my first assignment. Got out my old Atlas books that weren't classified that I still had, and I went through the description of the vehicle. And they were kind of -- from that point on, they said, "Hey, that guy knows the Atlas." So anything that happened to do with the Atlas vehicle performance, they used to come to me. So that kind of started the whole procedure off.

TI: But then as they went to the lunar orbiter and those other manned space stations, you didn't have the background necessarily for those?

HM: No. But they wanted somebody that had some data and experience with liquid-fueled propulsion equipment. No matter what vehicle it is, be it Atlas or Titan or, they have almost the same type of equipment. Different manufacturers make it, and might be different levels of performance, but basically it's a Rocketdyne engine, which is adaptation of the V-2 engine, really, if you want to get back down to it.

TI: And so your knowledge base was good, but I also imagine as they're recruiting, they're also looking for a sense of teamwork too?

HM: Yeah. You got to be able to work as a team. And the proposal efforts -- it doesn't make a difference where your rank is. It depends upon how much effort you can place into the situation collectively and work together and make a good proposal. So the whole nature of working in the proposal team is different.

TI: And so you must have had a pretty good reputation as a good team player to be --

HM: Well, like in the wind tunnel team, you work as a team. It's, you do instrumentation, if somebody has a problem you have to help 'em. If it's a model work, you have to do model work for him because you've got to get that thing into the tunnel to be tested. And you guys at -- I mean, the tunnel time is like 2,000 bucks an hour minimum. And right now probably it's about $15,000 an hour the way, the way it's going. But the tunnel time is so expensive compared to the labor function of the employees. And you got a limited number of people on the team, like maybe ten people on a team. And you're covering everything from the electronics to the remote control systems to the instrumentation functions to the flight control mechanism, data readout system. Everything has to be done in coordination, otherwise you're not going to get the job done.

TI: So you're used to, you were, as an engineer, very used to working with these very well-coordinated, specialized teams.

HM: Yeah.

TI: That could do things very quickly.

HM: They're willing to give themselves to the project. So if we have trouble in a certain area, even though you're not a specialist, you become the, the peon and you follow the guy's orders and you try to implement the process. So the proposal teams get very culturally oriented because they have certain individuals that keep being put on the next proposal because of what they have done in the past. And in the system engineering you try to integrate the whole vehicle. So, like in the X-20 program, Dyna Soar program, it's a combination of the air vehicle, the booster vehicle, the systems that relate to telemetering the data, the instrumentation side, the test vehicle, all these kinds of things, ground stations. Everything comes into play. So the more general knowledge you have and you can get down to a specific detail, the better off the team is.

TI: The proposal team...

HM: Yeah.

TI: ...or the...

HM: Yeah.

TI: Right.

HM: Yeah.

TI: Now what, in your mind what makes a good team member for some of these proposal teams where, where the --

HM: Well, the guy that could work twenty hours out of a 24-hour day and don't have to worry about bringing his kids to a ballet practice. Don't worry about eating. And if you need him, and you're putting together the end proposal, like the system engineering department's supposed to do, you want him to be able to work from Friday morning at 7 o'clock all the way 'til Monday morning at, to the time you start delivering all these different documents and get 'em off to the airplane to Washington, D.C., or wherever it's supposed to go.

TI: Well, under those criteria were you a good team member? Was that sort of how you were?

HM: Well, because we had that practice in the wind tunnel. I mean, it was just second nature to me. So, but it's, you kind of suspend operations of the family because you're not there anymore for a while.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 1999 Densho. All Rights Reserved.