Oral-History:James Lovell

About James Lovell

James Lovell, a pioneer in the American space program, participated in the Gemini and Apollo missions, and was the first person to make a second voyage to the moon. Lovell retired from the U.S. Navy with the rank of Captain and later became President of Fisk Telephone Systems, an independent telecommunications company based in Houston, Texas.

The interview describes Lovell’s participation in the Apollo VIII flight to orbit the moon and in the difficulty-ridden Apollo XIII mission. Lovell then discusses his duties with Fisk Telephone Systems, independent telephone companies’ relationships with AT&T, governmental impact on telecommunications, and the future of the telephone industry in general. The interview also examines his opinions about American research priorities.

About the Interview

James Lovell: An Interview Conducted by Carol Lof, IEEE History Center, 1980

Interview # 036 for the IEEE History Center, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.

Copyright Statement

This manuscript is being made available for research purposes only. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to the IEEE History Center. No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of the Director of IEEE History Center.

Request for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to the IEEE History Center Oral History Program, IEEE History Center, 445 Hoes Lane, Piscataway, NJ 08854 USA or ieee-history@ieee.org. It should include identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user.

It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:

James Lovell, an oral history conducted in 1980 by Carol Lof, IEEE History Center, Piscataway, NJ, USA.

Interview

Interview: James Lovell Interviewer: Carol Lof Date: 1980

Future of Communications

Lof:

The space program had drama and excitement. It engaged everyone's attention. Is there any way that the fascinating and startling changes in communications can capture the public's imagination?

Lovell:

Four hours ago I was in Houston, Texas. I just drove to the airport and got on a plane and here I am in Seattle. But I'm not sure this tremendous mobility can continue. Maybe ten or fifteen years from now I'll be in Houston in a room with a bunch of TV cameras; my image will be sitting here, and you will be talking to my image. Actually I won't be here because it may be too expensive to transport me from Houston to Seattle.

Lof:

Don't you see that as dehumanizing?

Lovell:

I don't think it is going to be dehumanizing. I think it's going to be a matter of economics whereby people are trying to do more for less. In other words, it is inherent in a lot of people to want business to be efficient. I would like to be a time and motion engineer who could eliminate inefficient things and do them the easy way. Show me an easy way out instead of going upstream, and I'll do it.

Your question, though, was how to make communications as glamorous as a space program. I think it is an exciting industry. Of course, I don't think many people are as tuned in to the electronics revolution we are going through as they were to the space program because it is not as visible. This is a dynamic industry and is growing because there is so much advancement in electronics even though it is not as visible as the space program. It's really going along at a rapid, exhilarating pace. But it's not visible to people who are not in it. For instance, someone will come along and say, "Well, now you can have a little minicomputer in your home or have electronic mail or two-way television." People will not realize the efforts to reach these achievements.

Lof:

Most people don't know that their voices carry digitally.

Lovell:

I really don't care. I like to see the end result. I think that is what is going to happen. The end result in the communications industry and electronic industry in general is going to be really fantastic for people to see. I recall when I was a young boy going to a science fair put on by GE. They fried an egg on a cake of ice. Of course, now we have microwave ovens. You don't really care how it works. You know that you pop an egg in and hit the button a couple of times and the oven does the rest.

Communications Equipment on Gemini and Apollo

Lof:

Audio File

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When you were going up in space, how did you feel about the communications equipment that you had aboard?

Lovell:

I had four flights — two were Gemini and two were Apollo; we had new communications in both. In Gemini, unless we were actually over a station, we had no communication because we were close to the earth. On Apollo we had S-band communication. Actually, on Apollo VIII, the first flight to the moon, we were worried about the communication out that far — would it work or not? We did have on-board procedures to use if we lost our communication systems to help us get back home again. But we had continuous communication all the way to the moon and it was excellent. Apollo communication was much more sophisticated than Gemini. We had 310-foot antennas on earth: one in Madrid, one in California, and one in Australia. It sounded as if someone were talking to us right in the spacecraft. The quality of communication reception in the spacecraft was better than it was on earth.

Lof:

You never lost contact at all?

Lovell:

No, except around the moon. That is the only time we lost radio communication on Apollo flights because the moon blanked out the signal. On Apollo VIII, just as we were ready to go around the moon, the control center told us the time we were going to lose communications. Exactly at that moment the static came aboard and we lost contact. We never saw the moon. We were heading backwards because we were going to ignite the engine as soon as we got behind the moon to slow us down so we could go into lunar orbit. After we lost signal, the ground had no idea what was happening until we came around the other side of the moon.

Lof:

Was there panic then?

Lovell:

No, but one of the things that they would determine when communication was reestablished was whether we had a good orbit. If the engine burned too long or too short. You could get into some weird orbits about the moon. For example, if the burn were too long you could come around and impact the moon on the near side, or you could go in some sort of butterfly orbit or something like that. So one of their checks to determine whether the engine burn was successful was the acquisition signal on the other side of the moon. They could compare the actual time communication was reestablished with their calculated time and therefore tell just how the burn went. Our computer on board told us the burn was good for some thirty-five or forty minutes before earth knew what the situation was. Meanwhile, we had burned and rolled over and looked down to see the moon for the very first time. It was only sixty miles away. We were like three school kids. Then all of a sudden the earth came up again and they had our signal.

Lof:

A couple of months ago, a satellite was lost and it was just an electrical malfunction. Could you have had an electrical malfunction? Could you have just turned off?

Lovell:

We could have turned off, but we wouldn't be lost; they would have known where we were. First of all, radar would pick us up. Ground radars were following us all the way. Norad can track things in earth orbit as small as a football, so very seldom do you lose anything in earth orbit, and a thing the size of an Apollo spacecraft can be tracked all the way to the moon. We could have been lost from a physical point of view as far as getting back home safely if something had gone wrong. In Apollo XIII when we had the accident, we never actually lost communication. It was the only thing we had left going for us. We turned everything else off — all the exotic electronic equipment, the guiding system, the computer — everything electrical except the radio, so we could communicate back and forth. That worked perfectly through the flight. This was fortunate because ground did all the navigating for us with radars; they knew where we were and they were tracking our trajectory back home.

Lof:

They told you what to do?

Lovell:

Our computer had the capability of doing that, but it used up so much electrical power that we shut it down. We could have run out of electrical power before we got home and we would not have been able to control the reentry. We shut it down and then radar on the earth tracked us and told us how to maneuver the lunar module attached to the command module; that's how we got back.

Fisk Telephone Systems

Lof:

How did you end up running a telephone company?

Lovell:

People often ask me that. After I retired from the Navy, I was looking for something that had a challenge to it, some other career that had the excitement of the space program you were talking about earlier. One of my friends had this small telephone company. He was the president and owner of an electrical company which is where a lot of the interconnect companies really got their start. He invited me to join. Well, before I did anything I went to the library and I read up on the interconnect industry. I started out by looking up the term “interconnect!” It was a fascinating industry and it had just gotten its start. I could see a potential because of the obvious marketing advantage of system ownership, and so decided to join the company. That was in January of 1977. As you know, the whole industry has bloomed tremendously. In 1976 my company had sales of eight million dollars. In 1977 we had twelve, in 1978 we had eighteen, in 1979 we had over thirty-four million. It was an exciting business, so I got in it and learned more about telephones, PBX's, and management.

Lof:

Is that what your function is now mainly — management?

Lovell:

I'm President of the company, so I am in a little bit of everything — marketing, operations, arbitrator between factions — I'm the man who finally gets the trouble calls if the phone doesn't work. The one thing I've noticed about the telephone industry is that there probably is no tool in business more important than the telephone. It is more important to the running of a company than computers because a computer can go down for a day or so and a business can get along without it. I have yet to run into a businessman who, if something goes wrong with his system, hasn't called me up and said, "Look, in my business, the phone is essential." The telephone has made us a more homogeneous society too, because it allows us to talk to people in distant places. In that way it has shrunk the country. Before the telephone, there were a lot of little communities, which very seldom communicated with each other because it took too long to do so. There were different societies all over the place, which, of course, created the regional factions, which are slowly disappearing today.

Civilian Control of Space Program

Lof:

If a space program were going to begin today, what, with 20-20 hindsight, would you have done differently?

Lovell:

There is very little that I would do differently. We set up a civilian agency to do the job. In retrospect we could have eliminated that and let the military do it. However, I think it was essential that civilians be involved in the beginning because we wanted to separate the military aspects of space from a civilian space program. Our objectives are changing now because the shuttle which is being developed has, and will continue to have, military applications as well as civilian applications. We are not building a military shuttle here and a civilian shuttle there. It's the same vehicle and the people will be trained the same way. Looking back on the program as it was structured, I believe it was very efficient and there is very little that someone would change. I'm talking about the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs. There were certain mistakes that we made along the way, which we wish we could have corrected; for example, the workmanship and the design of the first Apollo spacecraft that resulted in the fire.

Government Role in Space Program

Lovell:

One reason for the efficiency was the fact that there was no other agency or interested group involved in space exploration. It is very seldom that one agency has complete domination over a program. There were probably a few. For example, the building of the U2 or the SR71 whereby the government could go to a manufacturer and say, "Build it": a program that virtually had carte blanche. Essentially, NASA had that; the mandate was to go to the moon, but no one else had ever gone to the moon and there was no other interested group working on a lunar flight. People often ask me why we can't use the same expertise or the same approach and the same motivation to find a cure for cancer or to solve the energy problem. You can't use the same approach in other industries or other projects such as medical ones because, first of all, there are a lot of interested people who are also working on those projects. There is a lot of interplay and a tug-of-war for the available funds. NASA is getting into that now and it is necessary to work in cooperation with a lot of agencies — the Department of Agriculture, the Department of the Interior, and the Department of Commerce are all now involved in what NASA is trying to do.

Lof:

Are you implying that this is going to cut down on the efficiency of the program?

Lovell:

I think it's going to cut down on the objectives and goals. What should NASA do? Should they develop a new reconnaissance satellite, or a weather satellite, or a communications satellite? Should we go to Mars, should we go back to the moon, or should we build a space station?

Lof:

Who is going to decide?

Lovell:

Whoever has the most clout — Congress or whoever has the most need at the time.

Lof:

Every year the U.S. is spending less money in basic research. You would probably never have gone to the moon without research that began fifty years ago. How do you see this affecting the future technology of this country?

Lovell:

I'm not sure that we're not spending a lot of money. There is a lot of development going on in this country, certainly in the field that we are discussing — electronics. The electronic industry in the U.S., coupled with the computer industry, is the one last bastion of industrial superiority left in this country. As all-around industrial countries, Japan and Germany have surpassed us. We are going to be a combination information and agricultural country. That is where I think our strong suits now lie. We still have a tremendous interest in basic research. If there is a slowdown in basic research, it will only be apparent because in the past it has accelerated at such a hectic pace. There is going to be a point where the technological progress will slow down and the individual and social aspects of life are going to be a more important part of our everyday living. You see it in welfare programs, social programs, equal opportunities programs, and all the efforts to bring a better life to more people. This cuts into the effort we can spend on pure science.

Pure Science and National Competitiveness

Lof:

It was the pure science, years ago, that made these things possible. If it is not to continue, if the real basic research is not being done, where is the next generation going to be?

Lovell:

It is going to slow down. In our country we have two types of government programs. One I call creative programs, the other noncreative programs. Creative programs are like the space program. The noncreative are necessary, but are not productive. These are the programs, which try to bring up the well-being of people: food stamps, public housing, and just welfare in general. Creative programs create a tax base, which is necessary to support noncreative programs. The spinoffs of the space program have provided tremendous new opportunities in business and industries that weren't there before. We will lose some of that. We are pumping more into programs to better the lives of "everybody"; but without pumping the other part, we are going to run out of funds to keep the other one going, and there will be a general slowdown. There will probably be a recession in technology.

Lof:

That frightens me. This is one area in which the United States has always had the upper hand. If we give it to somebody else, can we get it back?

Lovell:

It worries me too, because I see countries that are more motivated, more dynamic, that seem to have a better handle on what they want to do, and a better handle on the goals they want to achieve. The United States right now seems to be floundering. We don't seem to have any set goals. People tend to get to a certain point where they just don't care. It's the hungry, the poor, the people who want to get ahead, who really are motivated to change. That's how the United States was perhaps in the 1890's and 1920's. Now people seem to have everything and there seems to be a slowdown. Other nations want to build up and they will surpass us in technology unless something else comes along to stimulate our imagination to continue our growth and leadership. Our geographic position and form of government gave us the emphasis to be number one. We were fortunate to have cheap energy for a long time, but this is slowly being ebbed away. A new energy source would be fantastic; that would be the one savior. We are so used to cheap energy and now it's slowly diminishing.

Future of Phone Companies

Lof:

What is going to happen to the telephone companies?

Lovell:

Well, in my personal opinion the telephone companies want to get out of the regulated end of the business with respect to terminal telephone equipment. I think independent telephone companies are going to be one of the prime movers in what we used to call the interconnect business. I believe AT&T will pass the hurdle of the antitrust situation, which is essentially keeping it selling equipment now. That is, the business and industries. Look at it logically — where is the competition in the telephone company? We are always having some kind of hearing on the low Dimension prices in Texas because it is being subsidized by other aspects of AT&T operations — residential, primarily. The residential tariffs are cross-subsidizing Bell Labs and Western Electric to develop commercial telephone systems because that is where the competition lies. A Dimension system is tariffed much lower than its actual cost of manufacture. The old argument in which AT&T says the poor rural guy and the residential guy are really going to get hit by competition, is really false. It was the other way around. It was the residential market that was supporting the competition, because the competitive prices had to be low to compete with the interconnect industry. AT&T built a very good United States telecommunications network. It's the best in the world. All you have to do is go overseas to find out what a nice system we have here. But over a period of time you can see the effects of a monopoly on an industry. My opinion is that when a monopoly tends to become accomplished, the era of the monopoly in telecommunications will disappear just as it did in the other utilities years ago.

Lof:

So much emphasis is being put on selling equipment to businesses: hundreds of lines to each client. What happens to the rural subscriber, the individual client?

Lovell:

We sell to business and industry because that's where the competition is and that is where the market lies. The residential user will be the owner of telephone systems just as the businessman is. But it really hasn't been profitable for the residential person. There is an old argument that all the rural areas are being subsidized by business. In reality it was the residential that was subsidizing business and industry, because in business and industry there was competition, which meant lower prices. The phone company had a captive market in the residential so all it had to do was to show cost and justify a tariff that would give them a reasonable return. That was one of the basic arguments in the New York Telephone rate case some time ago when the Nader lawyers showed that in reality. New York residential was supporting inefficiency. There is no reason to be efficient. It's not competing so it builds a system that will last long and be reliable. It certainly is not going to come out and try to innovate quickly, because AT&T had billions of dollars worth of equipment that they owned. If they develop a new device, a new PBX, or a new telephone with a lot more features, that would obsolete their older equipment; what would AT&T do with older pieces of equipment?

Lof:

There is no market for it.

Lovell:

It has already been depreciated; it's doing nothing but coining money because it's built to last; it's old, but it's reliable and it works. Bell Labs is the most prestigious lab in the world. They built the transistor and they developed many basic electronics. But their marketing department said, "Hey, don't build any new telephones; hold off on telephones because we have this huge installed base."

Lof:

They are undergoing a revolution in marketing right now.

Lovell:

They didn't have a market before. They had order takers. They really didn't know how to handle competition. Now they say, "If you want competition, we'll give it to you." On the other side, that's fine; our battlecry has always been competition. When you are competing against a large company like AT&T, you must have safeguards; it's not like deregulation of the airlines where there are many airlines of the same stature. Then you could deregulate, but to dereguate the telephone industry completely, you pit this monopoly that has eighty-five percent of the business against everyone else. They have the ability to drive everybody else out of business. The real challenge is going to be what happens when the other giants who aren't in the terminal telephone equipment business, like IBM, join the fray. Data processing and data communications are drifting towards voice communications and they are all going to mix. That's where the real battle is going to come. AT&T isn't worried about little independent telephone companies. They are thinking about those giants.

Lof:

Where do you think the small independents can compete with the giants?

Lovell:

The telephone industry is a regional business. Even AT&T has twenty-three operating companies. You have to be regional in the telephone business because it's a very personal business. The one who gives the best service in the telephone industry and has a good reputation is going to win. My company doesn't consider itself only a distributor or seller of terminal telephone equipment. We do that, but we become a service company as soon as we sell somebody a telephone system. If a bulldozer cuts Bell's cables five blocks down the street, and puts our equipment out of service, our customer comes to us, even if there is nothing wrong with the equipment. We become the telephone company and we have to work closely with Bell to get things repaired.

Lof:

Your company has just been bought by CenTel. How does this affect you?

Lovell:

It will greatly improve our ability to sell terminal equipment. Although we are still a small company, we have the backing of CenTel, which is a big help and gives us the financial stability of a big company. I feel sort of funny because I really wear two hats. Before, in the industry, I was always the guy in the white hat and telephone companies were the black hat guys. Now I'm part of a telephone company. However, this is the way I see the trend of the telephone industry. I think all the independent telephone companies are going to sell terminal telephone equipment and acquire companies to help them. The little interconnect company that doesn't merge with a bigger "brother" will be lost in the shuffle and smothered when everybody gets into the act. When Fisk first went with CenTel, our fellow interconnect companies thought we had turned traitor. After being a spokesman for the interconnect industry, how could I possibly be part of a telephone company? The reason is that the telephone industry is changing. The sale of terminal equipment by telephone companies is an established fact. That is the one thing I found in the space program: everything in life is relative, and there is always change. The entire telephone industry is in a tremendous evolution, and I'm happy to be part of it.