The Martian

Yesterday we watched the movie "The Martian" and it stimulated a flood of memories from my past that took place in the 1960's. I graduated from high school in 1963. Spent the next 2 years on full football scholarship at Sam Houston State in Huntsville, Texas. In the middle of this 2 year period Donna and I started dating. On June 12, 1965 we were married and I took a job at Control Data's Core Labs during the day and enrolled as a full time student at the University of Houston night school. Core Labs started out as a data center providing computer processing services to the huge Houston oil industry. Slumberger, a worldwide provider of oil field services, would use sound waves to log drilling sites, collecting data as the sounds reflected from levels in the oil well. Core Labs would use it's supper computers to turn this sounding data into contour maps depicting a picture of underground that reviewed the probability of finding oil and an indication of how much oil; thus Core Labs produced Core Maps. During 1965 and 1966 the NASA Johnson Space Center was being built. 

First NASA used a Core Labs application, Critical Path Method, to manage the construction of the Johnson Space Center. The entire project was finished in record time. NASA had its own computers, the same computers used by Core Labs. During the Mercury and Apollo launches NASA would just take over our data center to process all data they collected during the mission. A few of the Core Labs' employees were processed through secret clearance including me to help. We would work non-stop for the duration of the missions. I learned a lot about how NASA works, we would fill many boxes of computer printout, you know the big pages. These boxes would be transported to the Johnson Space Center to be stored in a large warehouse. Weeks later some engineer would come in and dig through the carefully marked boxes and rip a few pages from some box and scurry away to his office.

The most interesting and emotional experience was during the Apollo 13 Launch. Everything was normal until the spacecraft exploded on its way to the Moon. We hosted a number of telemetry engineers including a 16 year girl who we called the blond genius; I think she had an advanced college degree at 16 years of age. Long hours of tension ended when the experts left to return to NASA with a solution. The solution had a lot in common with the one used in The Martian movie.