a_v_bw_o_n (unnumbered, 1968 World Book Sci. Svc. photo)
“LEFT: Harold Johnson reduces his weight from 240 to 40 pounds by means of the Pogo Simulator strapped to his back. The device, which he invented, enables astronauts to find out what it is like to walk on the moon, or any place else with less gravity than Earth, by providing a controlled amount of lift.
RIGHT: Johnson, a NASA engineer, demonstrates how an astronaut on the moon can bound up an eight foot ladder on his spacecraft in one leap. Astronauts on the lunar surface will weigh only one-sixth what they do on Earth, and will have to learn to walk, jump and fall all over again. Johnson’s invention gives them practice in this.”
Both photographs credit: Del Borer
Mr. Johnson, not only innovative, possibly brilliant, but also dapper. I mean…check out those stylish socks & likely patent leather shoes. He even sports the hardhat with panache! Mr. Johnson was Head, FCSD Advance Planning Engineering Division, at least as of ca. 1965. Bottom line: the real deal.
The following are excerpts from one of the many excellent JSC Oral History transcripts. This one, from 2002, with Stanley Faber, no slouch himself:
historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/o...
Granted, the oral history collection is based on the recollections of human beings and thus may be embellished here or there, even sometimes wrong; however, the admirable effort humanizes the incredible collective effort & accomplishments that constitute human spaceflight. The NASA folks at least got this right:
“I was in what we’ll call a fairly high-powered office. To show you the staff in that office, the Assistant Branch Chief was Chuck [Charles W.] Mathews. He was a big wheel in the space program. The Section Chiefs were Chris [Christopher C.] Kraft [Jr.], who was the [Johnson Space] Center Director, Sig [Sigurd A.] Sjoberg, who was the Assistant Center Director, and Harold [I.] Johnson, who also came down here.”
“Trader was the fourth member of our team. When we came down here, Harold Johnson and Art Trader did build that first gun that Ed White used to fly. [They] corrected a lot of things that we had on ours. For instance, the one I built, you pushed it that way and you went that way. The one that they used in flight, the thrusters were that way, so at least you went in the direction you pointed at. [Laughs] But it did demonstrate the human could very easily control all those attitudes. And that was, as I say, long before we had ever thought of the Project Mercury.”
“I guess we always were trying to stay ahead of the game. And I can remember this well, Harold came up with the idea—Harold Johnson was a tinkerer and an idea man.
commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wobbleboard_NASA_man_19...
Credit: Wikimedia Commons website
He came up with this idea, and we went up to the directorate to get money, and the director said, “No, but come back in three months and tell me how you’re doing.””
“Johnson and I co-authored a chapter. There was a book written after Mercury on Manned Space Flight Engineering, and Harold and I wrote a chapter on training. We did have, after the Apollo Program, a NASA technical note on the simulation systems that were used, that a whole of bunch of us are listed as authors on. We all contributed this, that, and the other to it. I can’t speak of today, but I’m [not] there. But we didn’t really do a great deal of documentation of what we were doing when we were doing it.”
“Rusnak: In the Gemini Program, did you have to work on EVA [extravehicular activity] simulation, particularly for, like, Ed White?
Faber: No, we did not. Now, I’ll go back to back to Harold Johnson and Helmut Kuehnel. When we came down here, we prepared a paper on what we thought was required to train astronauts. One of the items we had in our list of things was a water tank. We got thrown out of [the Headquarters Building]. [Laughs] They couldn’t see any function of that at all… We had been trying to figure out how to simulate zero gravity. We had study contractors and so forth, look at it, and the general consensus that we had come to was that underwater was the best simulation of zero gravity in a pressure suit. We hadn’t figure out how to do it without the pressure suit, the pressure suit restricting the motions and so forth. That’s why the water tank. But we did not get to build that thing when we first came down. Somehow or other, the people at Marshall came up with the idea, and I don’t know where they got it from, and they built a water tank.
The phone rang. “Build a water tank now.” [Laughs] So we had a little water tank. It was not under my jurisdiction, though. It was in Building 5, but it wasn’t under my jurisdiction. I don’t know who ran it, to be honest with you. I know Harold Johnson was one of the leads on building it.”
historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/o...
Credit: NASA JSC Oral History Transcript/Stanley Faber Interview by Kevin M. Rusnak
Finally, from the following:
“A FIRE TO BE LIGHTED: THE TRAINING OF AMERICAN ASTRONAUTS FROM 1959 TO THE PRESENT
A Dissertation by TYLER DAVID PETERSON”:
“Just a few months after Gemini received approval from NASA Headquarters, and right after John Glenn became the first American to orbit, Harold Johnson of the FCOD was already thinking about how to simulate these next generation missions. He circulated a March 1962 memo that called for the contractors at the Link Trainer Company to assemble, as they had for Mercury, a mission simulator that could give astronauts, flight controllers, and remote site teams practice in normal and emergency conditions. But just as the real Gemini spacecraft would be upgraded from Mercury, so would the simulator designed to mimic it, as Johnson expected the machine to provide the advanced visual display out the windows that Mercury astronauts had lacked. He also called for a docking trainer, which would mimic all the displays a crew would have before them and simulate a view of the Agena moving in on them for a docking. Johnson also called for training in the landing sequence. Since Gemini engineers envisioned the vehicle descending onto land under a paraglider, he believed crews would need experience with this via a boilerplate spacecraft.14 NASA made Johnson’s wish list official in 1963 by awarding contracts for the simulators he mentioned, with one addition. Link manufactured a Gemini Mission Simulator and a Translation and Docking Simulator. Dallas contractor Ling-Temco-Vought, Inc., provided the addition: a Dynamic Crew Procedures Simulator (DCPS).”
At:
oaktrust.library.tamu.edu/bitstream/handle/1969.1/161476/...
Credit: Texas A&M University Libraries/OAKTrust Digital Repository website
a_v_bw_o_n (unnumbered, 1968 World Book Sci. Svc. photo)
“LEFT: Harold Johnson reduces his weight from 240 to 40 pounds by means of the Pogo Simulator strapped to his back. The device, which he invented, enables astronauts to find out what it is like to walk on the moon, or any place else with less gravity than Earth, by providing a controlled amount of lift.
RIGHT: Johnson, a NASA engineer, demonstrates how an astronaut on the moon can bound up an eight foot ladder on his spacecraft in one leap. Astronauts on the lunar surface will weigh only one-sixth what they do on Earth, and will have to learn to walk, jump and fall all over again. Johnson’s invention gives them practice in this.”
Both photographs credit: Del Borer
Mr. Johnson, not only innovative, possibly brilliant, but also dapper. I mean…check out those stylish socks & likely patent leather shoes. He even sports the hardhat with panache! Mr. Johnson was Head, FCSD Advance Planning Engineering Division, at least as of ca. 1965. Bottom line: the real deal.
The following are excerpts from one of the many excellent JSC Oral History transcripts. This one, from 2002, with Stanley Faber, no slouch himself:
historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/o...
Granted, the oral history collection is based on the recollections of human beings and thus may be embellished here or there, even sometimes wrong; however, the admirable effort humanizes the incredible collective effort & accomplishments that constitute human spaceflight. The NASA folks at least got this right:
“I was in what we’ll call a fairly high-powered office. To show you the staff in that office, the Assistant Branch Chief was Chuck [Charles W.] Mathews. He was a big wheel in the space program. The Section Chiefs were Chris [Christopher C.] Kraft [Jr.], who was the [Johnson Space] Center Director, Sig [Sigurd A.] Sjoberg, who was the Assistant Center Director, and Harold [I.] Johnson, who also came down here.”
“Trader was the fourth member of our team. When we came down here, Harold Johnson and Art Trader did build that first gun that Ed White used to fly. [They] corrected a lot of things that we had on ours. For instance, the one I built, you pushed it that way and you went that way. The one that they used in flight, the thrusters were that way, so at least you went in the direction you pointed at. [Laughs] But it did demonstrate the human could very easily control all those attitudes. And that was, as I say, long before we had ever thought of the Project Mercury.”
“I guess we always were trying to stay ahead of the game. And I can remember this well, Harold came up with the idea—Harold Johnson was a tinkerer and an idea man.
commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wobbleboard_NASA_man_19...
Credit: Wikimedia Commons website
He came up with this idea, and we went up to the directorate to get money, and the director said, “No, but come back in three months and tell me how you’re doing.””
“Johnson and I co-authored a chapter. There was a book written after Mercury on Manned Space Flight Engineering, and Harold and I wrote a chapter on training. We did have, after the Apollo Program, a NASA technical note on the simulation systems that were used, that a whole of bunch of us are listed as authors on. We all contributed this, that, and the other to it. I can’t speak of today, but I’m [not] there. But we didn’t really do a great deal of documentation of what we were doing when we were doing it.”
“Rusnak: In the Gemini Program, did you have to work on EVA [extravehicular activity] simulation, particularly for, like, Ed White?
Faber: No, we did not. Now, I’ll go back to back to Harold Johnson and Helmut Kuehnel. When we came down here, we prepared a paper on what we thought was required to train astronauts. One of the items we had in our list of things was a water tank. We got thrown out of [the Headquarters Building]. [Laughs] They couldn’t see any function of that at all… We had been trying to figure out how to simulate zero gravity. We had study contractors and so forth, look at it, and the general consensus that we had come to was that underwater was the best simulation of zero gravity in a pressure suit. We hadn’t figure out how to do it without the pressure suit, the pressure suit restricting the motions and so forth. That’s why the water tank. But we did not get to build that thing when we first came down. Somehow or other, the people at Marshall came up with the idea, and I don’t know where they got it from, and they built a water tank.
The phone rang. “Build a water tank now.” [Laughs] So we had a little water tank. It was not under my jurisdiction, though. It was in Building 5, but it wasn’t under my jurisdiction. I don’t know who ran it, to be honest with you. I know Harold Johnson was one of the leads on building it.”
historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/history/o...
Credit: NASA JSC Oral History Transcript/Stanley Faber Interview by Kevin M. Rusnak
Finally, from the following:
“A FIRE TO BE LIGHTED: THE TRAINING OF AMERICAN ASTRONAUTS FROM 1959 TO THE PRESENT
A Dissertation by TYLER DAVID PETERSON”:
“Just a few months after Gemini received approval from NASA Headquarters, and right after John Glenn became the first American to orbit, Harold Johnson of the FCOD was already thinking about how to simulate these next generation missions. He circulated a March 1962 memo that called for the contractors at the Link Trainer Company to assemble, as they had for Mercury, a mission simulator that could give astronauts, flight controllers, and remote site teams practice in normal and emergency conditions. But just as the real Gemini spacecraft would be upgraded from Mercury, so would the simulator designed to mimic it, as Johnson expected the machine to provide the advanced visual display out the windows that Mercury astronauts had lacked. He also called for a docking trainer, which would mimic all the displays a crew would have before them and simulate a view of the Agena moving in on them for a docking. Johnson also called for training in the landing sequence. Since Gemini engineers envisioned the vehicle descending onto land under a paraglider, he believed crews would need experience with this via a boilerplate spacecraft.14 NASA made Johnson’s wish list official in 1963 by awarding contracts for the simulators he mentioned, with one addition. Link manufactured a Gemini Mission Simulator and a Translation and Docking Simulator. Dallas contractor Ling-Temco-Vought, Inc., provided the addition: a Dynamic Crew Procedures Simulator (DCPS).”
At:
oaktrust.library.tamu.edu/bitstream/handle/1969.1/161476/...
Credit: Texas A&M University Libraries/OAKTrust Digital Repository website