NO PHOTOS OF MR. WILLIAMS …………………………………………………..
Oswald S. Williams Jr.
September 2, 1921 – September 2, 2005
SCIENTIST
Aeronautical Engineer
Inventor and Designer of a small rocket engine
Developed an airborne radar device for locating downed aircraft
Education: New York University, B.S., 1943, M.S., 1947; St Johns University, M.B.A., 1981.
The first Black Aeronautical Engineer to be hired by Republic Aviation, Inc. during World War II. Within four years he was promoted to Senior Aerodynamicist.
CAREER SUMMARY
Republic Aviation, design engineer, 1942, steadily promoted to senior aerodynamicist, 1943-46; Babcock and Wilcox, design draftsman, c 1947-48; U.S. Navy Material Catalog Office, technical writer, c. 1948-50; Greer Hydraulics, Inc., design group project leader, c 1950-56; Thiokol Chemical Corporation, Reaction Motors Division, small rocket engine designer, 1956-61; Grumman Aerospace Corporation, propulsion engineer, 1961-c. 1973; Grumman International, marketing department, 1973, vice president, 1974. St. John’s University, marketing professor, MID 1980’S.
BIO
He was an American aeronautical engineer, businessman, and academic. Williams worked on a number of notable engineering projects, and eventually became the vice president of Grumman International. According to some sources, Williams was the second African-American to earn a degree in aeronautical engineering.
Ozzie Williams is an African American who received his Bachelor of Science and Master of Science in Aeronautical Engineering. His father was Oswald S. Williams, a postal worker, and his mother was Marie (Madden) Williams, He grew up in Brooklyn, New York He has made history for being the first Black Aeronautical Engineer to be hired by Republic Aviation, Inc. during World War II. Within four years he was promoted to Senior Aerodynamicist. Later he joined Greer Hydraulics, Inc. where he became the group project engineer from 1956 to 1962. At Greer Hydraulics he helped develop the first airborne radar beacon, useful for locating crashed aircraft. In 1961 he joined Grumman International, where he was in charge of developing and producing rocket control systems as a Rocket Propulsion Engineer. These control systems were used in guiding lunar landing modules during NASA’s Apollo moon landings. Williams was fully responsible for the $42 million effort for eight years. William’s rockets are credited with saving the lives of the Apollo 13 astronauts.
Ozzie Williams was vice president of Grumman International, in charge of trade and industrial relations with emerging African nations. In 1973 was part of a Market Survey Mission to West Africa to establish the Grumman African headquarters. His work with trade and industrial relations includes the application of solar and wind energy to African needs. After leaving Grumman he became a marketing professor at St. John’s University in Queens, New York, where he completed an M.B.A. in 1981. Williams was a member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, as well as an associate fellow and past chair of its Liquid Rockets Technical Committee. The second African-American to receive a degree in aeronautical engineering, As a mentor he served as Task Force Leader in activating students in black colleges to prepare for business and technology careers.
Williams married Doris Louise Reid in 1942. The couple had three children. He died in 2005 in Jamaica Estates NY. His name is present on the National Air and Space Museum’s wall of honor.
Williams was a member of the American Rocket Society and the Nigerian-American Chamber of Commerce.
He was awarded an associate fellowship from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics for his work in the 1950s.
He was a lifetime supporter of the NAACP
This article from the Johnson Space station indicates Ozzie then list will be Bibliography
NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project
Edited Oral History Transcript
Joseph G. Gavin, Jr.
Interviewed by Rebecca Wright
Amherst, Massachusetts – 10 January 2003
Wright: Today is January 10th, 2003. This oral history is being conducted with Joe Gavin in Amherst, Massachusetts, for the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project. Interviewer is Rebecca Wright.
We thank you for taking time today for this project. Mr. Gavin, you were with the Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation when the nation first began talking about sending men to the Moon. What were your duties with your company at that time, and how did your role transition from the chief missile and space engineer to the space program’s director?
Gavin: You have to go back a little bit before that, because I really had two careers. One was in naval aircraft, and then when the space age came along, there was a rather different interest and requirement.
During World War II, I was a reserve officer in the Bureau of Aeronautics and was the project officer on the Navy’s first jet airplane, which was very interesting, being quite young at the time, but I think they figured that a bright new graduate might understand this new propulsion better.
At the end of the war, I went to Grumman and began as a design engineer, eventually got into preliminary design, and eventually became an engineer on their first jet fighter and [project engineer on] their second jet fighter.
Then the space age dawned on us, and the first effort that Grumman made was a canister for the Echo balloon. Then came the Orbiting Astronomical Observatory; it was at the point where I was called chief missile and space engineer. I did not run the project. The project was run by one of my colleagues, Walter Scott, but I supplied consulting and arranged for the experts that he needed to work on the job. That project really was the groundwork that made it credible when we bid on Mercury. [For] Mercury, I think we had a fairly decent proposal, but the Navy said we were too busy at Grumman with some of our airplanes.
I have to speak a little bit about those airplanes, because Grumman was one of the first of the aircraft groups that got into designing to the mission. In 1950, the Navy had a problem finding submarines, and a competition was held to design not just a flying machine, but a whole system for finding the submarines, including radar, magnetic anomaly detection, and sonobuoys. We won that competition, and that airplane was one that had a lot of my fingerprints on it. So [it was] the systems engineering that was developed, this was before people talked about systems engineering, but it was systems engineering, and that plus the background of the OAO [Orbiting Astronomical Observatory] provided a reasonable chance to bid on some of the space programs.
After the Mercury competition went by, we kept our preliminary design group working toward the future, and when the Apollo business came along, we first started out to bid as an independent contractor, and we had lined up TRW [Corporation] and Douglas [Aircraft Company, Inc.] to be on our team, but then the General Electric [Company] management got together with our senior management at the time, and out of that came an agreement that G.E. would be the bidder. They, of course, had been involved in Air Force satellites and had something really to contribute in the way of background.
So we entered the G.E. proposal effort, and we spent a lot of time commuting to Philadelphia [Pennsylvania] and moved people down there to carry that out. Needless to say, we were disappointed when North American [Aviation, Inc.] got the nod, but at that time, or almost immediately after that award was made, we were invited to come down to Langley Field [Langley Research Center, Hampton, Virginia] and talk about the idea of lunar-orbit rendezvous. That was one of the most significant things that came up. John [C.] Houbolt has been adequately recognized, I think, on that score, but he deserved it, because he really carried the ball on that.
We determined that within our own R&D [Research and Development] money we would run a study to try to validate the concept. Tom [Thomas J.] Kelly was the leader of that study, and that was a very important study, because it proved conclusively that lunar-orbit rendezvous was the way to go.
If you look back at the sequence of events, Houbolt submitted his study almost at the time that North American got the award for the command and service module, but it took until the following June, from November to June, for NASA to thrash out the question. I was never privy to those debates, but one hears through gossip that there were some pretty heated arguments about whether they should stick with the original [Wernher] von Braun approach, Earth-orbit rendezvous, or whether they should go to lunar-orbit rendezvous. That decision wasn’t made until, I think it was June, the following June, and that led to a competition in the fall.
So we decided we were going to bid that, and we did, and it was an interesting competition, because it was unlike any other competition we’d seen, because it wasn’t a call for a design; it was a series of twenty questions. “Answer these twenty questions, and we’ll see if we think you know what you’re doing.” And you had to do this within a limited number of pages with a limited type size. Typically in proposals, when you answer questions, you try to show why you picked the solution you did, and that all other solutions are inferior. This was pretty hectic, because the time schedule was short, and I think the Labor Day weekend was ruined for a lot of people, but we did write a proposal that was good enough to be selected.
Then we were invited to send a team to Houston [Texas], and at that time they had rented an unfinished apartment complex up on one of the bayous, and the NASA team, and we sent down, I think, about maybe twenty people. So we lived there right through Thanksgiving. I’ll never forget that we got to the pre-Christmas point, and we were in a negotiation and we didn’t finish it. We had to go catch an airplane, and believe it or not, the two of us who stayed to wind up the conversation couldn’t find the keys to the rent car at that point, and it took us another twenty minutes to chase them down. Of course, we were late getting to the airport, but the airplane was late, so we did get home for Christmas. Then, of course, we resumed right after the holidays and signed the contract in January, and we were off and running.
We thought they had bought our design. NASA hadn’t really bought the design. They thought they’d bought an engineering service. Anyhow, this is the design we submitted. [Gavin shows model.] This is typical of what we did in preliminary design in those days. As soon as we had a few drawings, the model shop would make up a miniature quickie model with [wood and] paper clips.
But it has all of the components of the eventual design. It had a descent stage and a descent engine. It had an ascent engine on the ascent stage. It had two hatches, and it had good visibility. In fact, the initial concept was something like—I remember saying to the group that we need something that’s more like a helicopter so you can see where you’re going. The study that Tom Kelly had run hadn’t really defined this area in great detail. It just considered a certain mass and certain characteristics.
So anyhow, we thought we had defined a design. NASA said, “No, we just effectively hired a bunch of engineers,” and that led to almost two years of thrashing out the details. It was a learning process, because Grumman had an interesting culture which probably differed from almost everybody else. Roy [Leroy Randle] Grumman, who had been a naval aviator trainee in World War I, had one basic direction to all of us, and that was, “You bring the pilot back one way or another.”
So anyhow, we knew, understood very clearly, that it was our responsibility to be satisfied that this thing was going to work. Sure, NASA would have a role, but we weren’t going to do something just because NASA said, “Paint it pink,” or whatever.
So it took about two years with several iterations of mockups to determine the configuration, and that was the period where we got rid of the seats. Our initial concept was, the pilot has to have a seat. Then we thought, well, gee, for twenty minutes you really don’t need it. So we got rid of the seats.
Then [we] began to look at how heavy the transparent material would be for this basic arrangement and said, “Can’t do it that way.” So in effect, [we] turned the front end inside out and pulled the transparency right up to the astronaut’s face, and that’s what produced the little triangular windows that are characteristic of the ascent stage.
But it took us only two years to really settle down what the configuration was going to be, and in the course of this, there were also meetings about the schedule and the cost. The contract that we’d signed was, I think, a unique attempt by a procuring agency to incentivize the contractor. The contract was set up to emphasize mission success, the schedule, and the cost. There was a complex three-dimensional relationship that said you could trade off between these. It didn’t take us too long, maybe two or three months, to recognize that there really wasn’t any tradeoff. You couldn’t afford to trade anything away from mission success.
The schedule was obviously critical because of the other parts of Apollo that were moving along more or less in step. So that came number two, second priority, and the costs came number three. Now this, of course, made a number of people unhappy. The contracts people weren’t happy with this, and that was true inside the company as well as at NASA. But that’s the way it was, and we had to face it.
At one point, we came to a, I guess you’d say, a dead end in talking about the contract costs, and finally went on, “Look, we’re going to spend so much a month, and that’s it.”
The other thing that was happening at the same time had to do with the schedule, and that was that NASA was saying, “Well, you’re not getting people on the job fast enough.” Now, in looking back at it in hindsight, I don’t think we could have put people sensibly on the job much faster than we did. Maybe today [when] we have computerized databanks, you could accelerate the number of people involved. But in those days, a group leader, when he had a new man, had to introduce him to the group, explain what was going on, point out where he could get information that would affect the task assigned to him. I think that in that paper that I gave you, I commented on the fact that the rate at which staff was added was about as good as you could do without just having people sit and wonder when it was going to be my turn to find out what I’m supposed to do.
So the early days were difficult because of the fact—well, because of the lunar-orbit rendezvous decision, we were starting about a year behind the command and service module. We still had to make the same end date, and it was a continual struggle.
Also during this period when the design was being decided and fixed, we had to arrange our major subcontractors, which involved running competitions, making selections, and NASA’s view on this was very clear that Grumman was to make the selection, but NASA was to have a little finger in it on approval. And running competitions takes time. But we did, I think, quite well in picking the people we did.
In the case of the descent engine, we treated that rather specially because it was going to be the first throttleable rocket engine that [would] throttle over a wide range, say, from something like 10,000 pounds down to 2,000 pounds. This had never been done, so NASA said, “Well, get two people going on it, and we’ll make a decision after they’ve worked on it for a year.”
So we selected TRW and Rocketdyne [Division of North American Aviation, Inc.], two separate approaches. TRW had—what I think of as the shower-nozzle approach, a mechanical nozzle that effectively worked just like a shower nozzle. And Rocketdyne worked on a scheme for introducing helium into the propellant line so that not as much propellant got into the combustion chamber. Of course, what happened was a year later both of them looked like they could do it, so then we had the problem of how do you select one.
NASA said, “Grumman, this is your job, but we want to be privy to it.” So we set up a committee, and the leaders of the committee were myself on the one hand and Max [Maxime A.] Faget on the other. That’s a name you will know, I’m sure. I think each of us had two assistants. We spent a day at each of the factories looking at the test results and talking to the people and so on. Then we got to the point of making a decision. Well, Max was very sensitive to the fact that NASA was not supposed to make the decision, so I made the decision, and he said, “Fine,” and that was that.
Now, that story is not complete without telling you about what happened when we were going back to the motel after visiting Rocketdyne. We had picked a motel up in Beverly Hills [California] that was about equidistant between Rocketdyne and TRW. These were long days. We got back to the hotel about nine in the evening. As we walked into the entrance, this man came running out, full flight, with a crying child in his arms. So we sort of watched that go by. We went into the lobby, and there was the security guard trying to calm down a woman at the top of the stairs, black-haired, terrycloth robe, with a pistol, raving that “That man has stolen my child!”
Well, the next morning we read about it in the papers. It was Marlon Brando retrieving his child after his estranged wife, Anna Kashfi, had spirited him away. I tell you, we got out of that lobby so fast, because this woman was distraught and screaming and waving this pistol. Anyhow, we disappeared. We may have [made] some good technical decisions on that trip, but none of us will ever forget that evening.
So anyhow, that’s how TRW got picked for the descent engine.
The ascent engine was a little easier because it was supposed to be a derivative of the Agena engine, which had already been in space. I guess the reason I’m getting into this propulsion as much as I am is because I spent a lot of time dealing with the propulsion subcontractors. You know, when you look at an organization chart, you see a program director and then a bunch of lines and other people, but it really doesn’t work that way. You tend to spend more time, in my case, where I thought it was more critical. But the members of the team—and we had a great team—all had specialties in their background that made them spend more time in different places, which you would never guess from the organization chart. So I spent time with the propulsion people. I spent a lot of time with RCA [Radio Corporation of America], which was a major contractor for communications and the rendezvous radar and so on.
You ask, well, what does a program director do. Well, it’s like being the chief cook and bottle washer. You do whatever has to be done. You deal with the subcontractors one day, you deal with your own internal management the next day, because in a company there’s always a competition for talent, and senior executives can become impatient about the schedule not being met or the cost overrunning. So it was a balancing act where the program director tries to keep the program on the right track despite what the internal management might think, and to some extent despite what NASA might think, because, after all, if [the product] doesn’t work, it’s our fault.
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. But by and large, we had a cadre of people who had worked together, and this is true of the relationship between, say, engineering, contracts, and manufacturing. All of us had been involved in the manufacturing end of the business, because that’s the way Grumman worked. Typically, in the Navy aircraft days, we had the engineers on one floor and the manufacturing was on the ground floor. We were not quite able to do that in the LM [Lunar Module] Program, because we eventually moved into a separate building because of the size that things grew to. But it was easy to get to the manufacturing floor, and the leaders in the manufacturing area were people that we had known for years.
Grumman was a peculiar company in some respects, in that nobody paid any attention to the organization chart. If somebody wanted to talk to somebody, [he] picked up the telephone and called, and it didn’t make any difference who the person at the other end was. People felt free to do that. From a program director’s point of view, that was great, because I’d get a call from almost anybody, saying, “Joe, do you realize what’s going on down here?” or over there. So with this kind of communication, [I] could really keep track of where the difficult points were and then be able, perhaps, to do something about helping them out.
Bibliography:
Black Contributors to Science and Energy Technology.
U.S. Department of Energy (Washington, D.C.: Office of Public Affairs), 1979
DOE/OPA-0035(79) .
NASA Profiles
encyclopedia.com
Schomburg