Granville Paules Lived His Dream

Granville and Diane Paules

Granville Paules, a long time and very active member of our Rockville community died at Shady Grove Hospital on January 4, 2011 after fighting bladder cancer for two years. His involvement in the life of our community and his accomplishments with our nation’s space program will be long and fondly remembered by all.

His demeanor was always calm and patient. Everyone knew him to be soft-spoken, caring, and positive in all that he did and the list of his endeavors is quite extensive.

In Rockville he served on the Planning Commission and the Board of the Sister City Corporation. He was Scoutmaster of Troop 1450 at College Gardens for a few years until his son, Skip, earned his Eagle Scout award. At the same time he earned a MBA from the University of Maryland in Baltimore.

Granville also served as Senior Warden of the Vestry of Christ Episcopal Church, where he was active with outreach efforts. Christ Church’s minister, John McDuffy, described Granville as “a kindly, generous man, who was greatly compassionate.” The community recognized this and he received the Good Neighbor Award from the City of Rockville for joining together with others to help a neighbor. These same neighbors have been wonderful during his illness, demonstrating the true sense of being good neighbors to each other.

Many in Rockville might not know of his extensive career with the space program. After graduating from the University of Texas, Granville Paules became a missile officer in the Navy while dreaming about the stars. This technical background prepared him for work in the space business. During the NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project, Granville was interviewed extensively and demonstrated his excitement about the space program:

I was a naval officer on the ship down in Australia when [John H.] Glenn [Jr.] flew over in the first Mercury capsules, and we were over by Perth, Australia, where the tracking station was, and we saw some of the NASA support people and astronauts that went out to that tracking station. That just kind of got me more hyped.

In 1964, he wrote a job description and handed it to a friend who worked at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston. At that time the Johnson Space Center hadn’t even opened and offices were spread all over town. When they received his description they called and made an offer for a job. The write-up turned out to be really close to what officially became a Guidance Officer’s position dealing with analysis, real-time analysis, command and control. Imagine writing down your dream and receiving the opportunity to make it a reality. He resigned from the Navy but continued his Naval Service through the Reserves and retired as a Captain.

Granville was a NASA Flight Controller at the Johnson Space Center Mission Control Center and was the Primary Guidance Officer during all of the unmanned Apollo missions and all but a couple of the manned missions. He was in “The Trench” for the moon-landing of Apollo 11. During the Apollo 13 crisis he served as a member of the flight operations team and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom for bringing the astronauts home safely.

As for landing on the moon, during the Oral History Project, Granville was as amazed as anyone about the timing:

I made it my whole lifetime to be dedicated to getting to the Moon by the year 2000. That was what my goal was. I figured we could probably do it, and reading all of the Willy Ley and all of the science fiction guys, they figured you could make it by 2000. Here we were back in the early 60s. ―Yeah, we’ve got 40 years. We’ll make it.‖ Made it by [19]’69. [Laughs] But it was a really compressed schedule.

Although the story is long, here is Granville’s full account of situation in The Trenches during the moon landing:

Well, the landing on the Moon, now, we’d gone through [Apollo] 8, and that was really exciting, so you were kind of past the really hype of the first time around the moon. [Apollo] 10, everybody was pretty confident that the LM was going to work well, so you weren’t as nervous about things not working well. But there’s nothing like that first time when [Neil A.] Armstrong goes down to land, you know.

I had launched it. I was the lead Launch Guidance Officer, and I was really paying a lot of attention all through the phase till it got to the Moon, making sure when they did comparisons between the spacecraft guidance system and the LM guidance system that they were still working well; we didn’t have any problems with the LM, and it was going to work well when they took off. Then when you separate in orbit, after you get to the Moon and they separate and you start doing maneuvers with the LM, you’ve got a lot of chances to look at it and make sure the systems are going to work right.

Well, I was on with Stephen Bales for the actual landing cycle. I was what was called Yaw then, and again I worried about the commanding to the LM, the loads, the landing site information, all that sort of stuff. As they started landing, the alarm—you’ve probably heard about all the alarms going off and so on. Kranz has probably talked a lot about this. It’s been documented in many books, the sequence of details.

But what happened is we had run into this in simulation where the computer software actually behaved the same way in a simulation similar, not exactly, but similar. What happened is the computer is trying to do too much, and it gets overloaded in this internal minor loop, and it got locked up, and it sends off this alarm, which says, ―I’m too busy. I’m going to do this.‖ So what they had to do when that happened—it actually happened on Apollo 11 as you were coming down that a similar alarm went off.

So what we had checked out with the simulation, and we’d done a lot of work after that sim kind of blew up on us in the second week of June, we had MIT run a whole lot of other checks to see if we had to fix the software on the spacecraft or do something differently. Well, by that time it was too late to really make any changes that anybody was going to be confident you’d get in and get right without screwing something else up. So we flew with it that way.

What happened is the alarm went off as they were coming down; they had the same thing. The radar was trying to do this, and the com [communication] system was trying to do something else, and so all they had to do was flip a switch that turned off the search for a particular function, and that relaxed the computer, constrained the computer settled down and was doing the right thing. So everything was going real well as they came in

Now, the really exciting difference was, of course, the actual landing, but what I always remember when I’m sitting there—and now by this time I’ve been through a lot of missions and was feeling pretty confident that you can get through anything. But Armstrong comes down to land, and you’re sitting there and you’re listening to it, and the guy behind us is counting out the number of seconds of fuel left before abort.

Now, there’s something as they’re coming down where their velocity coming down toward the Moon is so high—it is at a certain level or higher—that if they were to abort at any point in that stretch, if they had to abort at any point in that stretch while they’re going this fast, then that fuel left in the spacecraft to take them back up—they abort and drop the bottom part and fly back up with the LM module—they don’t have enough fuel to actually make it back into orbit, and so it’s called a little stretch of the ―dead man’s curve.‖ You really don’t want to get down into that stretch. So you really want to slow down. It’s just kind of a curve. You try to keep them above that curve, so their approach velocity slows them down, and then they sort of hover. They’re not really supposed to hover much. They’re supposed to go down and slow down and stop.

Well, Armstrong goes down, and he sits there, and then you hear him just hovering. He’s wandering around the spacecraft just above the surface of the Moon, and afterwards it turned out there were boulder fields and all kinds of things. He wasn’t sure he wanted to put the wheels down on that and have it tip over on him or something. So he just hovered around; it’s like he’s humming away. You didn’t hear him humming, but you could just sort of sense that must have been what was going through his mind after it was all over.

The guy behind us is counting the fuel down, and it was down to the point now you’re past all this threat of dead man’s curves and everything else, but he hadn’t landed, and we were down to like eight seconds of fuel left—eight seconds. Well, it turned out when they finished measuring it, it was like more than that. It was thirteen or fourteen seconds, which seems like an eternity when you’re doing some of this stuff. But it didn’t seem like much to all of us in the Control Center while we were listening. So the only voice you heard was the guy behind us counting the thing down.

In that Control Center there’s usually a background hum of voices talking, people talking, you’re talking to the guy behind you. Not on the loops, but it’s just kind of quiet talk between people, flight controllers, while you’re doing things. Or somebody talking on this loop to a guy, not the Flight Director loop, but to one of your support guys in the back room. So there’s always the hum of voices; not loud, but there’s something going on.

Not during this phase. When he was landing, it got so quiet in there that it was just like they had turned off all the electricity and all the people, and everybody was holding their breath, literally. Everybody held their breath; I did. And Charley Parker was sitting behind us at that point. He was our Branch Chief, and he was sitting behind us, and we were all sitting there in that last probably 20 or 30 seconds. I’ll bet you nobody breathed, and this guy, the only thing you heard was this monotonous, ―22, 21, 20…‖

Finally when he said, ―Touchdown,‖ you could hear everybody breathe. [Laughs] It was really funny, like a big inhale. [Demonstrates] It was a real experience. So that was really important to all of us. Then you go through the quick countdown to make sure that the LM’s working right. You don’t want to abort right then if you don’t have to. They got settled in, and everything went fine after that. That was a pretty straightforward mission. That was a good mission. Enjoyed it. And, what do you for an encore after you do that?

If you have ever wondered about whether the movie, Apollo 13 was accurate, here’s part of Granville’s thoughts about it and Apollo 13:

I did the Apollo 13 launch, got it on its way, and then was off the console. I figured I was done. Then, they had NASA Select, which was always either a radio channel or a TV channel you could watch or listen to, and I always had it on when I was home. Well, I was home when I heard that something had happened. Then I listened to it for probably 20 minutes, maybe, as soon as something had happened.

They usually had the public affairs guy talking about what’s going on, and I was listening to what—they actually played the crew loop. You could hear part of it. Then I would hear the interpretation of, ―Well, the crew was asking are we going to be able to go to the Moon, and ―Well, we’ll get back to you.

It was clear from what I was hearing there was no way. These guys, it was serious, and quit worrying about going to the Moon, guys. You’d better start worrying about getting back, seriously. You could tell if you’d been in the business at all, that there was a really serious problem. So I called the console over there. They have an outside line, and you can call. I called over, and Charley Parker answers the phone. He said, ―Why don’t you just come on over.

So I came over, and then by that time they had pulled Kranz’s shift off, and they were all locked up, starting to debug what they thought happened and figure out—he just created that standalone team that stayed with that, that sort of offline team, throughout the whole mission, for the rest of the mission timeline. Bales was on that group; John [W.] Aaron; the usual—Kranz’s first-line team was already pulled off to do that.

So they took all the flight controllers and put them into the three other operating teams. So you were mixed with people you’d probably never worked on a particular mission with, necessarily, although generally the procedures and all that sort of thing were identical. You knew what to do, and you knew what they were talking about when they talked about this, that, or the other. So it didn’t matter. It was just a matter of you’d end up with—I think I ended up with [Milton L.] Windler’s team as the Flight Director. We ended up with different phases, each of us working—you’re always worried about making sure they stayed on a safe return trajectory. On the trench; that was our worry.

Other people worried about systems problems, things that would run out of resources. You probably read the book or saw all the specifics of how people came up with very creative ways to extend life support systems and that sort of thing. Well, just the way I remember it, I guess maybe I put it in here.

People ask me a lot after the Apollo 13 movie came out, ―Well, how close was that to what really happened?

To me, the movie was really well done, in terms of being factual about things, but I said the only reaction I could have if you asked me that is, ―It did a really great job of recreating what really happened on the mission, but in the case of when you’re sitting there, we just didn’t know how it was going to turn out.‖ Nobody wanted it to go badly, but you just didn’t know. You thought, each time you got something fixed, ―Ah!

But then something else happened. It was just amazing how many strings of things caused a problem.
But one that didn’t show up much in the movie, that I thought was really important, was the fresh water situation. Remember, a couple of the crew got sick. Well, one of the problems was they had bladder infections, and the doctors were really after them to drink water. Well, it turns out water is also the coolant for the electronics, and when they turned all the electronics off to the bare minimum, where you had one radio that was turned on, but all the rest of it was turned off, so the spacecraft starts cooling down, and it gets colder and colder and colder.

Because the electronics are usually on, and there’s’ enough electronics going on that it keeps the spacecraft warm. So that was part of it; it was kind of a closed cycle. What happened, they were getting cold, and they couldn’t talk. Now that was pretty well done in the movie, I think, but actually, they had to bite their tongue because they couldn’t talk. Their teeth would chatter. I could hear [James A.] Lovell. You could just tell he’d just bite his tongue so he could talk without having his teeth chatter. They were down in the low 50 and high 40. They were all really cold. But they refused to drink water. The doctors started saying, ―Look, guys.

They were preserving the water, because they knew as soon as they turned the electronics on, they only had so much water. The fuel cells created water, and when the fuel cells were gone, you lost all your water supply on the spacecraft side. On the LM side, it was only designed to handle two people for a shorter period of time. Well, they stretched it out into days of living there. So they knew, Lovell and the crew, knew that as soon as they started turning things on to warm up, they were going to boil off the water, and then they wouldn’t have any more water to cool the electronics so then they really needed them. That water normally would have been their water supply to drink and mix food.

Well, they weren’t drinking it; they were preserving it. What happened is—that’s why I think the movie didn’t really pick that up very well—is the doctors got on it. Dr. [Charles A. ―Chuck‖] Berry, he actually got on the loop and was chewing out Lovell that they had to drink more, because as soon as you get dehydrated, you start getting delirious, and then you can’t do anything. You’re really in trouble. So he really had to lean on Lovell to get him to drink water.

They finally agreed to drink more water, and that turned out to be a good thing, but everybody was—they were looking at the water profile. How much water is left, and are they going to have enough to do what they had to do? So that never showed up as much of a big deal, but it was a really big deal. Everybody in the Control Center knew that if that water level kept going down, they were going to be in trouble with the electronics or they were going to be in trouble with delirium or whatever. So water was a real problem, and it didn’t show up that much in the movie, I don’t think. But everything else was pretty well done.

After leaving NASA, Granville worked for the Department of Transportation in 1971 where is advanced the state of transportation systems planning using emerging desk top computer capabilities. Then in 1985 he returned to NASA, The Washington Post obituary details his extensive work on several projects which earned him the NASA Exceptional Service Medal. Altogether he served as a senior level manager for the federal government for over 40 years.

When he retired from NASA in 2006, he took a position with the Kelly, Anderson and Associates as a Principal for Aerospace Services, served as a board member of the Open Geospatial Consortium, and Director of the Institution of Electrical and Electronic Engineers Geospatial Remote Sending Service.

When my Cub Scout Pack 928 held its first Space Derby a few years ago, Granville came to speak to the boys about how to design their spacecrafts, hoping to usher in a new generation amazed by outer space and the engineering possibilities . We will all miss him greatly.

His wife Diane and children, Skip and Allison, invite the community to a celebration of his life at Christ Episcopal Church Rockville this Saturday, January 15, 2011 at 3 PM. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made in his honor to Christ Episcopal Church’s outreach and social ministries.

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