Richard L. Holt

How does a guy like me jump from one of the most exciting programs in the history of man, putting man into space,  to this side of the aerospace spectrum, unmanned space?  The unmanned program, sending satellites into outer space to find out more about God's creation.  Wow.  This was really opening up the entire universe for me.  After the deaths of our three astronauts on Apollo One, many of our people  had lost some of the enthusiasm for the time being for further testing.  It hit us hard.  We knew these guys.  I even coached a Little League baseball team with one of them, Ed White.  I had just gotten Gus Grissom to sign a photo for me that my Uncle Frank in Florida wanted to hang up on his office wall. 

I had learned years before that you don't quit when the going gets tough.  We were all tired. And we didn't really know how long it was going to be before we would fly again.  There wasn't a darn thing for we in the ground support systems to do.  Everything was working.  Reminded me a little bit of the time after all our dolphins died at the Naval Missile Test Center, when a void in the schedule showed its ugly head. 

I didn't quit. I took on a two year assignment as the Assistant Division Chief of the Systems Division at Cal Tech's Jet Propulsion Labs (JPL) to help improve their mission control center and tracking system so that as the new manned effort began again, some time in the near future, hopefully, that the unmanned programs would contribute valuable information to allow for better plannning for the manned missions.  We needed to get good data on the moon, and good photos as well. We needed to be better able to actually picture the exact landing spots for the Lunar Lander of Apollo. I agreed to a two year assignment, knowing that it was going to be at least that long before Apollo flew again with a completely redesigned space vehicle.
 

My new boss was an old friend of mine, a retired Air Force Colonel with whom I had been friends for years.  He was very sharp and I respected him a lot. The Systems Division was the largest Division at JPL, and the one responsible for all the computer systems, the SFOF (Space Flight Operations Facility), all the communications, and the DSN (Deep Space Network) tracking stations spread around the world.  These were the components that were essential for successful flight to distant locations in the near and distant future.  The moon was first as far as the Manned Spacecraft Center was concerned, but other goals had been set by NASA to go further out into space.

My technical world was ready to expand in a way I had not imagined.  Now I was to be involved in deep space, trajectories for spacecraft yet in the concept stage, sensors on board these spacecraft that were still being thought about and designed, technology for communicating all this data including detailed photos from outer space back to earth and then preparing all that information so that it could be interpreted and used.  A real growth opportunity for me.

We knew already that the near-earth tracking stations were going to be obsolete very soon except for those that gave us a fix on the entry trajectories going from inner to outer space.  We needed a better way to track in distant space.  We needed a better means to communicate both ways, the data necessary for both the manned and the unmanned program vehicles.

One of my many assignments was the task of taking the existing Mission Control Room at JPL and expanding that facility so as to be better able to take direct control of deep space flight missions of the future.  Tied into that facility was a huge computing center which would be the heart of data being gathered from spacecraft enroute to or at their final destination in space.  The latest of display systems were installed to give the flight controllers the best representation of the date they needed.

NASA engineers had long been working on the problems associated with keeping in touch with both manned and unmanned spacecraft when the orbital path took the vehicles into outer space.  Not only was the distance to be much greater, but the coverage needed to be improved.

The consequences of this planning and design effort was the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System which was to be built by TRW Space Systems Division in Redondo Beach, California.  Not entirely by accident, TRW was to become my employer in the not-too-distant-future, and the wonderful company from which I eventually retired in the year 2000.  TDRSS became the global and universal tracking system, and to this day remains so for manned and unmanned flight.

Tracking stations such as this one located at Goldstone, California, out in the desert, had long been the mainstay of JPL's tracking system.  When the TDRSS was incorporated into the system for NASA, all this data was brought into NASA through JPL and its support systems.  Mission Control for JPL became and still is an important part of the nation's space program.

Please go to my next section in professional positions I have held, TRW Space Systems Group, Redondo Beach, California