“OH MY GOD, IT WORKED! WHAT DO WE DO NOW?”

It’s a sad commentary on the seemingly cursory nature of our interest in the universe around us, and specifically in the magnificent solar system in which our small planet floats like a gleaming blue marble, that the retirement of William O’Neil isn’t front-page news. By all rights, O’Neil should be a household name. His decision to withdraw, at the age of 63, from professional life should probably be the occasion of public tributes and high-profile commentaries in major mass media. Instead, the chances that a given reader would even know his name is vanishingly small. Despite the scientific-technical foundations of our way of life, he’s simply not a public figure.

And yet there are very few people who have had as much impact on the course – the “trajectory” – of space exploration as O’Neil. His career at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) spans the entire history of the robotic exploration of space. His resume places him in a leading role, or the leading role, for most every single noteworthy ‘first.’ The first soft landing on the Moon by an American craft? O’Neil designed the flight path. The first insertion into orbit of another planet? O’Neil was lead designer of the trajectory and was at the board when Mariner 9 was captured by the gravity of Mars in 1971. The first successful American robotic landings on another planet? It was O’Neil, as head of a team of navigators, who ‘flew’ the Vikings to the Red Planet. What about the first mission to orbit one of the huge, gaseous outer planets – in this case Jupiter, the biggest of them all? O’Neil was the project director of Galileo for a whopping 18 years, and that indomitable probe only recently called it quits, with a swam dive into Jupiter’s raging clouds in September of 2003. [For more on that mission click here.]

If our once thriving interest in space exploration continues to founder and diminish in a kind of self-referential, cyber-spaced haze, it’s just possible that William O’Neil will go down in history as a person of diminishing importance – a name attached to an era that is of interest mostly to specialized scholars and devotees of roads not taken. But I don’t believe it, because in that scenario, the human race will remain solitary and stranded on its tiny dot in space for eternity. (Maybe I should say I “prefer” not to believe it.)

In late March of the year 2000, I met O’Neil in the lobby of the Paris Hilton for two discussions finally totaling three hours. Square jawed, silver haired, and given to humorous asides, O’Neil always underplayed his own contributions, preferring to place himself within the context of a larger fraternity of scientists and engineers.

-- Michael Benson

[This is the first of a 3 part interview.]

Q: Let me say that I’m one of those people who believes that the human race will eventually colonize the solar system, and maybe even the stars. Especially if we can eventually find a way to go faster than light, which seems increasingly possible. Do you remember that research which seems to say that this alleged maximum speed, the speed of light, is actually an illusion?

A: Yeah. That Einstein might not be right after all. I would only comment on that to say that faster than light travel won’t happen anytime soon unless some higher intelligence finally takes an interest in us, and comes by, and comes and takes us to those places! [laughs.]

Q: And says ‘here’s a drive system, it’s free! You pay later.’

A: [Laughing] Kind of like the first airplanes landing in the middle of an Indian reservation and saying ‘hey, you want to go for a ride?’ Because I truly believe, based on my own logic, that there’ve got to be higher forms of intelligence in the universe, and the fact that we’re not part of that means that we’re just not interesting enough, we’re not unique enough. There’s some star out there that has something much more advanced than we have, and they’ve got the whole universe to look at, but we didn’t make the cut. Maybe they’re going back and forth between the galaxies, for all we know.

Q: Yeah, for the weekend. It’s possible. Anyway, in a few hundred years when they look back at the 20th century and they look at JPL I think it’s going to be a legend, I think it’ll be very much like the way we look back at Columbus. And so, since you were really there from the beginning, and now you’re retiring, I’m wondering if we could start off with you painting a picture of the early days, how you’ve seen JPL grow, and what’s different now – obviously everything’s different now.

A: Everything is not different now, and one of the outstanding features of JPL which was there when I joined and is still there, and is argued by some to be better today than it was then, is individual responsibility. It was astonishing to many of us, perhaps all of us, when we came in that you got so much responsibility as a junior engineer. And another thing that hasn’t changed is the size. When I joined it was about five thousand people and today it’s about five thousand people. And so it remains relatively small, certainly compared to an aerospace company, and it remains very much a place where individuals, especially at the more junior and mid-levels of their career, have an unusual level of responsibility and authority to make things happen.

Q: So when you came in you were almost immediately working on the first soft-landers on the Moon.

A: Not ‘almost’ immediately. Immediately.

Q: And they were called the Surveyors.

A: Right. That was the original Surveyor program. And so I came in, and – we do projects in one of two ways, basically, either in ‘systems mode’ or in ‘sub-systems’ mode. In systems mode you have a contract with an aerospace company to produce the entire flight system, basically, and you work with them as partners in the operating system. The sub-system mode is the in-house mode, where we make contracts for elements of the system, we design the entire system at JPL and we contract for the elements per our specifications and then we bring them in to the technical divisions – we have eight technical divisions – and they procure the stuff, they check it out, they bring it to the assembly facility, and it’s put together.

Surveyor was different, that was a very big project and from the outset it was determined that that should be a system contract. And it was system-contracted to Hughes Space and Communications, in Los Angeles. Hughes was a mammoth company, of course, but this was the division that specialized in communications satellites and things like that.

Q: And that was the first attempt to soft-land on another sphere.

A: Yeah. And so they had the sub-contract. We were very much in a partnership, and my assignment coming in, totally green from Lockheed, was, I was given the assignment of being the trajectory and performance engineer, at JPL, for that mission. So it was my job to go over and watch the people and direct the people at Hughes in that assignment, although many of them knew more than I did. [laughs] Because they had been working on it. So I literally had to do on-the-job training, to learn what was going on and get to the point where I could really contribute and add value to the thing. It was in the space of a year after I was accepted that I was playing a real value-added role, including helping prepare the targeting specifications, deciding exactly where the craft was to go on the Moon, and approving those and working with Conveyor – General Dynamics Conveyor at the time – who were doing the Atlas Centaur. And the Centaur upper stage was the first high-energy hydrogen-oxygen upper stage… It started out as a military vehicle and it got the highest priority, at one point, because all of this was part of the Apollo mandate. And that’s what made it succeed, because as soon as Kennedy made that mandate, if there was anything that you were doing where you could write ‘Apollo’ on it, and say ‘this is for Apollo,’ then the check was blank.

Q: You got the money.

A: And away you went. And we had that. So the Rangers and Surveyors, and Lunar Orbiter, all had that mandate, because those missions were all to certify landing sites for the Apollo missions. And Surveyor in fact was crucial to demonstrate…

Q: That Apollo wouldn’t sink, under the sand.

A: Exactly. Exactly. In the dust. In 20 feet of dust.

Q: I don’t remember about the Surveyor, was the first launch successful in landing, or did you have some disasters and then land? How did it work?

A: It was truly amazing, because – first I just want to give you a little piece of background. The Rangers were the first lunar missions by the US. They were the lunar impactors. And you had a whole series. The first six failed, we had guidance problems and errors of that nature. And then we got to the point, it was just about a month or so before I came to JPL – I came there in November of ’63 – that the sixth one finally got to the moon, it did everything perfectly, a perfect impact on the moon, everything perfect – except the camera failed to come on. And it turns out there was some procedural error, I think in fact it was made at the launch site, a last minute adjustment in the figuring of the camera. It was a dumb simple error, it wasn’t that there was a design error in the camera, it’s just something that was wrong with how it was configured before the mission. And boy was that a dark day. So what I wanted to say was that the Ranger failures resulted in a congressional investigation of the laboratory. And that has only happened once. And the result of that was they put a retired military general in the laboratory as the deputy director for operations.

So, I’m getting to the answer of your question but I wanted to set the background to make it as impressive as I can. When Surveyor 1 was launched at the end of May 1966, a three day trip to the moon, landing on the moon I think June 2nd, it was launched in a mode where everyone in NASA, the people at Hughes, the people at JPL, everyone engaged in this, thought ‘We have to start launching these things.’ It was launched in the context of ‘Let’s launch this thing and see what’s wrong with it.’ Nobody thought it would work! And it landed perfectly. And the great irony of this – and the proof of what I’ve just been telling you – is that nobody had a plan for what to do with it on the surface of the moon! [laughs] The thing was perfect! ‘Oh my god, it worked! What do we do now?’

Q: But what were your feelings when you got those live pictures from the moon? You were 27 years old. You must have been absolutely euphoric, no?

A: It’s hard to remember. [Long pause] I was numb, I think. It was a numbing sensation. Viking was different, but we’ll get to that in a minute. So, and the further irony in this scenario, was that then for Surveyor 2, grand plans were made for what would be done on the surface – and we lost it at the first mid-course maneuver. What an irony! For the first one we had no plans, for the second one we had all the plans but it didn’t work!

Q: Why do you think you were numb? It reminds me of people who made it to the top of Everest who reported that they couldn’t enjoy it – they were too exhausted.

A: There might be some of that to it… [pause] I think it was just hard to comprehend. It was just hard to comprehend. And I was less aware of all the details of it than I was later, I had a broader understanding of Viking because I had matured. I was at a higher level by the time we did Viking... So I had a relatively small, important but small role to play in Surveyor, and it was as you said, the trajectory part, so once it was there, my job was over. And it was kind of, ‘Is that all there is?’ So it was like Everest, yeah: ‘Is that all there is? Now what?’

And five of the seven Surveyors were successful, and we had some pretty remarkable successes, with some pretty heroic accidents.

Q: Heroic accidents? Like for example what?

A: Well, particularly in Surveyor 5, there was a leaking regulator in the propulsion system, and the folks that I was working with from Hughes were extraordinary in figuring out a very daring solution. On the other hand there was no choice but to be daring, I mean there was nothing to loose anymore because in the situation we were in, the mission was going to fail. The circumstance was that we would have lost most of our pressurization gas through this leaking regulator, so before we got to the surface the pressurization in the tank would have been lost, and the engines would have flamed out and it would have crashed. And what they figured out is, they did a lot of calculations, and this was in real time – remember there were three days to the moon, it’s not like the stuff we fly now, where it take a year or more – or six in the case of Galileo! – to get to the target. They figured out that they could do a total of five maneuvers on the way to the moon, many of them self-canceling, so as to use up as much propellant as we could, so as to make as much volume as we could in the tanks for the gas. And it worked. And in many respects there was more of an elation than the first one. Because with the first one it seemed like a dumb fluke that it worked. But this took some fabulous real-time engineering and flying on the way.

And ironically we had to do the same thing on the first Viking mission, but at least in that case we did it in a way that was less wasteful, because in this case we did retro-maneuvers. So we took energy out, slowed down, so it wouldn’t take as much to get into orbit. But we had a very analogous problem. We had to relieve the pressure, we had a leaking regulator and we had to relieve the pressure in the tanks periodically so that they wouldn’t explode.

Q: Should we cut forward to Viking? Or was there something in-between? Oh, yeah, then you sent probes to Mercury and Venus. Not a small thing!

A: Well, OK, so JPL in the 60’s did the first mission to Venus, which was the first inter-planetary mission…

Q: The first in human history? The Russians didn’t get there first?

A: They did not. So there was Mariner 1, which failed. Mariner 1 and Mariner 2 – we launched them in pairs for redundancy, and particularly because the launch vehicles were relatively unreliable in the early days. So 1 and 2 were the pair we launched to Venus, the first one failed, the second one was hugely successful. And 3 and 4 were the first to Mars, the first one was a launch vehicle nose-fairing failure, the second was fully successful. Five was the first single mission, it was using the left-over parts, basically, from the 3-4 series, and was the next mission to Venus. That was fully successful, and then 6 and 7 went to Mars, both of those missions were successful in 1969. This is planetary, and in the meanwhile we did the Rangers – the kamikazes to the moon – and the Surveyor series, and working with Langley and Boeing we were doing the lunar orbiters. The navigation was always at JPL.

So OK, we’ve now completed the decade of the sixties, the first decade. And of course Apollo landed in ’69, and all the technology for the navigation to the moon was developed by JPL for Apollo. And in the tail end of the sixties we were beginning the Mariner 1971 project, which was my next assignment after Surveyor. I was the project engineer within the systems analysis section, including mission design and navigation.

Q: Mission design means trajectories?

A: All elements of the mission. And in those days the central theme of the mission was the trajectory. How do you get to the place? And what is the geometry when you get there, and how do you aim the cameras and things like that. So – this was the first orbiter of another planet. Up until then we had only done fly-bys of other planets. And we had, again, a dual launch, two spacecraft, two launch vehicles, for the original reasons of reliability, and using the same vehicle the Surveyors used, the Atlas-Centaur. We used two Atlas-Centaurs to launch the two Mariner ’71 spacecraft to Mars. And with the first of those the Centaur had a problem and went into the Atlantic Ocean. But the second survived, and in-flight we re-designed the mission to Mars to better capture the objectives of both missions, which had been complementary but not identical. It was a fabulous success, it was the first planetary orbiter.

The Russians went into orbit of Mars within weeks of this mission, I think a week or two before, but they never produced any useful data, as far as I’m aware. But I remember – I was at that time, as chief of navigation and operations, on the console – people giving me over the phone, literally, the parameters of the Russian orbit, so that we could construct it. Actually draw it, in those days… We did have some limited cooperation with the Russians in that we provided our ephemeridies, which were the best. Meaning the orbits of the planets, very precise.

Q: Oh, I see. So you were giving them that information.

A: We gave them that information and helped them, in a limited way, with what they were doing. Ephemeris is the path that bodies take through space. That’s the fancy word for trajectory. And the plural is ephemeridies. So JPL has been the source, and still remains the source, for the ephemeris of the planets. So if anyone wants to fly a mission, they take our ephemeris. Because we have a group at JPL that does nothing but take all the information that exists – including optical data over the last century, when the first optical astronomers were looking and taking measurements – to incorporate that, to fit exactly how each of the planets has moved around the sun, and then extrapolate.

Q: So you’re heading for Mars, the Russians just got there, you don’t know that their probe isn’t producing data, in a way it doesn’t matter…

A: It doesn’t matter, we were looking forward. Again, because I was then at a higher level, had a broader view of things, it was more exciting for me than it had been with Surveyor. I had more responsibility. So pretty much in parallel, but slightly later, was the Mariner Venus-Mercury project, which was the last of the Mariners. And that again was a derivative of the Mariner ’69 and the Mariner ’71 spacecraft, and that was the first sling-shot – the first gravity-assist mission. Because to get to Mercury it had to be flown past Venus, and Venus was used to take energy out, to continue to fall towards the sun, to actually get to Mercury. And of course these missions were all kind of overlapping… The Viking project started in 1969, just about the time Apollo landed. It was originally targeted to fly in 1973, which would be the first landings on a planet, the first soft-landings. And the Russians of course were attempting this. I think even in ’71, they attempted a landing on Mars. But it was a failure.

Q: They had a landing where I think there was something like 30 seconds of data and then it failed.

A: Pretty useless data. That’s the one, I think. They were using clam-shells, I think, clam-shell landers. The kind that was semi-hard, and popped open. Ok, so now we’ve got to Mercury, and Viking was underway and parallel and overlapping all these things. And of course Mariner ’71 was sort of a precursor to Viking. Because unlike recent Mars missions, Viking took the lander into orbit, surveyed the surface, picked a landing site, and then descended to the surface from orbit. Mariner ’71 was the pre-requisite to doing Viking. With Viking, Langley was in charge. And under that umbrella, with the project manager at Langley, JPL had the responsibility for the orbiters, and for the navigation. And Langley contracted with Martin Marietta in Denver for the landers. And it became, I’m happy to tell you – and everyone will tell you this – a badge-less enterprise. We all worked together. Some of the best friends I ever made, and still have, are people from those other places that worked on this mission called Viking.

Originally they were to fly in ’73, but like most of these things ambitions were too high and it got delayed to ’75. They both worked fabulously, but it was the first Viking that had that problem that I described earlier. We had the regulator leak as we went in, and within ten days, we were getting ready to do our last trajectory maneuver, and we had designed the maneuver and were ready to go and then we found this leak. Which meant ‘Whoa, this isn’t going to work!’ Because of a problem with the propulsion system, not the navigation. So we re-designed and did two massive maneuvers. Typically the maneuvers that we needed to do were about four meters per second. And we wound up doing 110 meters per second in the last nine days before arrival. This was unheard of, this was outrageous. Because it was such an insult, if you will, a perturbation to the trajectory. And it was totally unplanned. And you know it’s estimated that in today’s dollars that program was three to four billion dollars.

Q: What would the current probes cost, I mean let’s say some of those ‘cheaper faster better’ Mars missions?

A: Well, those missions are in the one to two hundred million range. Point one to point two billion compared to four billion. But the Vikings were huge undertakings. And they were first, you know, we hadn’t done it before, so there was a lot more development and research involved. So anyway, they were fabulously successful, and as we were doing this of course the Voyagers were overlapping…

Q: But before we get to the Voyagers, can I ask you… So you landed on Mars. Where were you? How did you feel, and what was the scene like?

A: This I have very clearly in my mind because they landed, the first Viking landed early in the morning in California time, it was four in the morning or something like this… We were in the navigation room, at the console, the main control console, watching events, listening to the engineers for the landing system read off the telemetry, the speed and the altitude and so forth, right down to a perfect touch-down. The thing that I remember most was that having landed on the moon, I never anticipated that the sky would be light. And I remember that first image coming in, and seeing a horizon with a light sky… And it just dawned on me, it never had occurred to me that we would see a sky. A bright sky, on Mars! [laughs]

Q: That’s fantastic. It’s as if you were there, isn’t it?

A: Yeah. I expected to see the surface, as we did, but I never expected to see any light above the horizon.

Q: You thought it would be black. Is that partly because those early Mariner photographs showed all those craters – at one point everybody was saying, ‘well, Mars is kind of disappointing, it looks a lot like the Moon’?

A: No, no, it had nothing to do with that. I just hadn’t thought, it had never occurred to me to think, that that atmosphere is going to produce a sky. A lit sky.

Q: So, euphoria, you got the image, you were on the ground. What did you do, party all night? It was already three in the morning!

A: Well, I don’t want to go real far with this, but in those days you could consume alcoholic spirits without getting terminated. [laughs] So I’ll tell you a funny little story. It turned out that my navigation team was in an adjacent building to where the main operations were, where all the spacecraft people were. And they were passing around the champagne bottle. And we had these, we called them ‘survey TV cameras’, which were like surveillance cameras – they would show the scene, you could see who was doing what in these areas. And what we were doing, I guess we were more hillbillies over in the navigation area, because we were drinking the best whiskey in the country. It’s called Wild Turkey. And we had cameras on easels, so that you could display a chart or graph, or something, if you wanted to send it to another area. And so as a kind of ‘back at you,’ I put an empty bottle of Wild Turkey under the camera. So our display on the television circuit, from the navigators, was a big empty bottle of Wild Turkey. So it was a great morning.

And then we went off to party. And at seven o’clock in the morning it’s pretty hard to party. So we just couldn’t get it going. [laughs] But we tried. And for some people the job was just beginning. But for us navigators, the job was done. Nothing could hurt us then, we were on the surface, properly.

Q: Very properly.

A: Very properly.



[Interview continues with Part 2]