Black History and Space

Many articles could be written about the intersection of Black History in America and the Space Race going back to the early days of the U.S. Space Program. Margot Shetterly's book, “Hidden Figures: The Untold True Story of Four African-American Women who Helped Launch Our Nation Into Space” introduced many to this interesting part of American history. Other stories abound, such as Dr. Wernher von Braun’s misadventure in 1952, when he took seven Alabama A&M University (an HBCU) students to the all-white Butler High School in Huntsville, Alabama to help him conduct what we would call today a STEM demonstration [1]. Let us just say that this incident did not end well ...

For Black History Month, I chose to look at an inspiring story, that of the late Oswald “Ozzie” S. Williams Jr., a senior Grumman engineer who led the Reaction Control Subsystem (RCS) design for the Lunar Module, who was also very active in the AIAA. Despite the adversity he faced during his era, such as overt racism and at times being second-guessed, he had a remarkable career as an engineer whose design decisions were instrumental to all the successful moon landings and also played a part in the return of the Astronauts during the Apollo 13 incident.

Oswald “Ozzie” S. Williams Jr. (Sept. 2, 1921 – Feb, 20, 2005) was the Reaction Control System (RCS) Lead Engineer for the Lunar Module, which was designed by Grumman Aerospace. He was one of two African-Americans who were "Section Heads"/Technical Leads on the Grumman Lunar Excursion Module, also called the Lunar Module (seen on the right). The other African American was his close friend George Henderson, who was the Lunar Module Guidance and Navigation Lead. Ozzie Williams worked under the Lunar Module Program Director, Joseph Gavin and Grumman Chief Engineer, Tom Kelly. He is noted as the first African American hired by Grumman in 1961 [2]. As the Lead Developer for the Reaction Control System on the Lunar Module, his role in the Apollo project was significant, though he is not widely known.

His father, Oswald S. Williams Sr., was a trained pharmacist but worked as a postal worker and his mother, Marie Madden Williams, was a housewife. He was born in Washington DC and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. As a child, he displayed an early interest in model planes and trains. He enrolled in New York University’s School of Engineering to study Aeronautical Engineering in 1938. At that time, he was only one of two African Americans studying Engineering at NYU, the other being Douglas C. Watson who was one year his senior, and was a close friend and mentor. Graduating in 1942, he later obtained a Master’s Degree in Aeronautical Engineering in 1947 from NYU [2]. His first aerospace job was shortly after he first graduated in 1942 and was with the AGA Aviation Corporation (Pitcairn Autogyro) [3].

In 1943, desiring a job with Republic Aviation, he talked his way past a security guard and got a face to face meeting with famed aviation designer Alexander Kartveli [2], [3], [4]. Whatever conversation transpired, Kartveli, an immigrant from Russia hired Williams, and he found himself working on the Republic P-47 Thunderbolt. He eventually became a Senior Aerodynamicist specializing in jet aircraft.

Ozzie Williams encounter with Alexander Kartveli is remarkably similar to another pivotal encounter that a young engineer named Laurence Mizell (more famously known as Larry Mizell) had with Russian emigre and Grumman Microelectronics Pioneer Edward Keonjian in 1967. Mizell, an Electrical Engineering who had recently graduated from Howard University had a chance encounter with Keonjian in the Grumman lobby. A conversation transpired which led to a full-time position in the Grumman Microelectronics Group. Mizell would later design a “Glitch Detector” device that would be used to isolate troublesome electrical transients on the Lunar Module and along with Keonjian, develop Microelectronic verification standards for NASA. But I digress ...        

One of Republic Aviation’s more interesting aircraft of that era was the Republic XF-91 Thunderceptor (designed between 1946 and 1949), which was an experimental rocket-jet hybrid using a Reaction Motors (RMI) XLR11-RM-9 liquid-fueled rocket engine [6]. The design drew some inspiration from both the German Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet and Messerschmitt Me 262C (experimental rocket boost variant). Ultimately the XF-91 proved to be operationally impractical due to the rapid advances in turbojet technology [6], but it was perhaps a foreshadowing of the future uses of small pulsing rockets.

The next ten years saw a series of job moves for Williams. From 1950 to 1956 he worked at Greer Hydraulics, Inc as a group project leader, where he was responsible for the development of an experimental airborne radio beacon, the AN/ART-27, a dual-band HF/UHF device which was designed to locate crashed aircraft [7].

Image 2. A description of the AN/ART-27 Radio Beacon from the Development Plan Report for the Special Reconnaissance Airplane Weapon System 118P Contract AF33(600)-31243 (E.O. No. 55-C 118L), 1958

In 1956, another job move took him to Reaction Motors, Inc. where he worked on liquid-fueled pulsed rockets. Thiokol Chemical Corporation acquired Reaction Motors, Inc., and the company became a division of Thiokol Chemical Corporation. His paper “Performance and Reliability of Attitude Control Rocket Systems. ARS Paper 952-59, Nov. 1959” was published by the American Rocket Society (which later became the AIAA) during this period [2].

In 1961, Williams was recruited by Grumman Aerospace as a Technical Lead and was appointed as a specialist in small thrusting rockets. Joe Gavin discussed him in an interview with the NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project ... “I should explain a little bit about our staff. We were fortunate in having a group of people, most of whom had worked together for ten or fifteen years. I think that’s true in all but one or two of the key spots. One of the exceptions was Ozzie Williams, who came from Reaction Motors in New Jersey. He was in charge of the reaction control jets that controlled the lunar module and made it maneuver and so forth” [8]. The Lunar Module Request for Proposal was issued on July 25, 1962, and Grumman submitted a response based on their prior studies of the Lunar Orbit Rendezvous (LOR) concept.

Two months after President John F. Kennedy had given the “We Choose to go to the Moon” speech (on September 12, 1962), at Rice University, the Grumman team arrived in Houston to finalize the Lunar Excursion Module contract, having submitted the winning proposal. The selection of Houston set the stage for one of many collisions of the space program with the ongoing civil rights struggle. For one, the charter of Rice University forbade the admittance of minorities. The institution was founded to provide free education to “the white inhabitants of Houston, and the state of Texas” [9]. This clause would prove to be an obstacle to the founding of the Manned Spacecraft Center (later known as Johnson Space Center) since the discriminatory statutes made it difficult to participate in federal programs, and the Federal Government had recently received a land grant from Rice University. After much internal debate and turmoil, Rice University would eventually change its charter to allow for the admission of minorities and started charging tuition for the first time.

It was this environment of segregation that the Grumman team met in Houston. No hotel would accept the entire team because two of the team members (Ozzie Williams, LM RCS Lead, and George Henderson, the LM Guidance and Navigation Lead) were African American. Imagine the irony of trying to help your country get to the moon, but being unable to book a hotel in your own country because of your race! This was the reality these two men and their company were faced with. The heads of the Grumman Lunar Module project (Tom Kelly and Joe Gavin) vehemently refused to split up the team. After much searching, they found one hotel that would accept the entire team, the Sheraton Lincoln Hotel in downtown Houston. Ozzie Williams did not mention the specific racist aspects in a Grumman Plane News article, but did recount it in more detail in the biography written in “Distinguished African Americans in Aviation and Space Science” by Betty Kaplan Gubert, Miriam Sawyer, Caroline M. Fannin, and Caroline M Fannin. Tom Kelly mentions the incident in detail in his book "Moon Lander: How We Developed the Apollo Lunar Module” and Joe Gavin recounted it as well in a video interview many years later given to MIT. The accounts tell several aspects of the story, and Joe Gavin said that the decision to keep the team together in the same hotel welded the team together. This episode made a lasting imprint, and it can be imagined that the unity that resulted, could very well have saved lives.

Image 3. Accounts of the Grumman experience in Houston (Sources, Grumman Plane News, July 20 1979 and Moon Lander: How We Developed the Apollo Lunar Module, Thomas J. Kelly)

In interviews, Ozzie states that many hours went into the design of the RCS. “Grummanites knew and accepted the fact they would have to put in long hours because no one was really sure how the LM was actually going to come to fruition. In his eight years on the program, there were only about a half dozen weekends he did not work” … “six-day and seven-day workweeks became routine” [2], [4].

Image 4. System Engineering Notes (1965) on the Reaction Control System showing the names of both Ozzie Williams and George Henderson. Source: Heritage Auctions [12].

One key design of the RCS was the high level of redundancy. The LM had double the number of RCS rockets that it needed. Another design decision was the idea that the RCS system may be called upon in the event of a real emergency. The RCS design was tested on two critical moments:

1. During Apollo 11 - The RCS was joystick-able and would allow the Lunar Module to avoid obstacles. A note in the May 17, 1965 entry of the Grumman Apollo Lunar Module Engineering Dynamics Log, noted this type of contingency. The entry shows “the LM's projected fuel consumption and thrust profile if it should happen that the pilot sees large boulders and other terrain hazards in his path and must vector on final approach to an alternate landing site (as actually occurred with Apollo 11 four years later)” [12]. The Guardian recalled this account in an interview: “When Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made their descent aboard the Eagle to the moon's surface, the on-board computer had intended to put them down on the side of a large crater with steep slopes littered with huge boulders. ‘Not a good place to land at all,’ said Armstrong. ‘I took it over manually and flew it like a helicopter out to the west direction, took it to a smoother area without so many rocks and found a level area and was able to get it down there before we ran out of fuel. There was something like 20 seconds of fuel left’ ” [13].
2. During the Apollo 13 - Where the over-design (redundancy) of the RCS helped save the lives of the astronauts. Williams recalled in the September 1970 issue of Ebony magazine, “From the beginning, we designed the lunar lander control system with 16 engines for just such an emergency as Apollo 13's, says Williams. For the lunar landing itself, we could squeak by with only eight engines. We always felt that in an emergency there were various uses for my engines, but we were hoping it wouldn't happen” [4]. His comments on this were also recorded later in the July 20, 1979 edition (see Image 3.) of the Grumman Plane News.

It is somewhat unfortunate, that the Grumman role in the Apollo 13 movie is perhaps a scant few seconds that employed some unflattering artistic license. The scene involving Grumman engineers should have been portrayed in a more respectable light. Gene Kranz says this specific scene (shown below) did not happen [16], which is a reason we should not get our history from movies. In reality, Ozzie Williams recounted that the Apollo 13 astronauts came to Grumman in Bethpage, New York, to thank the Grumman team [2][17].

After the Apollo Project, Ozzie Williams became a vice president at Grumman International starting in 1974, heading trade and industrial relations with emerging African countries. He traveled throughout Africa, and travels through Africa seemed to trace the path of an earlier African American figure in the space race, Col. Vance Marchbanks, MD (who traveled through Egypt and West Africa) [18].

Much of the information comes from the following sources:

[1] Another Hidden Figure: Clyde Foster Brought Color to Nasa, By Michael A. Fletcher, July 8, 2019 - https://theundefeated.com/features/another-hidden-figure-clyde-foster-brought-color-to-nasa/

[2] Distinguished African Americans in Aviation and Space Science, By Betty Kaplan Gubert, Miriam Sawyer, Caroline M. Fannin, Caroline M Fannin

[3] Oswald Williams Obituary, Jamaica Estates, NY - https://www.pettitdavisfuneralhome.com/obituary/Oswald-Ozzie-Williams/Jamaica-Estates-NY/192277

[4] Steven Morris, "How Blacks View Mankind's 'Giant Step.'" Ebony, September l970

[5] The Triumph and Decline Of the "Squares": Grumman Aerospace Engineers and Production Workers in the Apollo Era, 1957-1973 by David Hugh Onkst

[6] Republic XF-91 Thunderceptor -https://www.militaryfactory.com/aircraft/detail.asp?aircraft_id=1230

[7] Subject Index to Unclassified ASTIA Documents, Volume 1, Defense Documentation Center (U.S.) 1960, Distributed by the United States Department of Commerce, Business and Defense Services Administration, Office of Technical Services, Washington DC

[8] NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project Oral History Transcript, Joseph G. Gavin, Jr. - https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/JSCHistoryPortal/History/oral_histories/GavinJG/GavinJG_1-10-03.pdf

[9] Rice University Exhibits - https://exhibits.library.rice.edu/exhibits/show/between-decisions/race

[10] Moon Lander: How We Developed the Apollo Lunar Module, Thomas J. Kelly

[11] Joe Gavin video interview (MIT) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALu1jiAPWN4&t=81m17s

[12] Heritage Auctions - https://historical.ha.com/itm/transportation/space-exploration/grumman-apollo-lunar-module-engineering-dynamics-log-1964-1965/a/6052-41172.s

[13] Guardian Newspaper - https://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/may/23/neil-armstrong-accountancy-website-moon-exclusive

[14] Apollo 13 Excerpt - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLMDSjCzEx8

[15] Grumman Plane News, 07/20/1979 - https://www.grummanretireeclub.org/wp-content/pdf/grumman-plane-news-1979-07-20-vol-38-number-14.pdf

[16] Apollo 13, We Have a Solution: Part 2, by?Stephen Cass - https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/space-age/apollo-13-we-have-a-solution-part-2

[17] Grumman Plane News, 05/11/1970 - https://www.grummanretireeclub.org/wp-content/pdf/grumman-plane-news-1970-05-11-vol-29-number-9.pdf

[18] Grumman Plane News, 09/27/1974 - https://www.grummanretireeclub.org/wp-content/pdf/grumman-plane-news-1974-09-27-vol-33-number-17.pdf