One of the best things I did with NASA was… I told — when I first accepted the job, there was a kind of press conference at NASA headquarters in Washington — and I said, look, now, you scientists, you wrote these applications, what, about a year-and-a-half, two years ago, and it's going to take you a few months to, you know, to get cracking and get everything going, and those were good applications because, you know, we approved them in a highly competitive environment, I don't expect you to do what you said you were going to do. So you go ahead and do what you think you should do now. If you want to write and tell me about it, it's okay. If you don't, you don't have to. If you need extra money, you know, if you're starting a new program that you haven't budgeted for… we had a kind of competition, actually, we had a fair amount of money so we awarded most of those who were competing, so if you want to start something new, we'll… we'll help you get cracking on that. That was the best thing I could have said, you know, because most of these grants… people, there's a kind of deceit, you know, there's a sort of cynicism, people write a grant for something they've already done and then they go ahead and do more or less what they want to but they… but they're constrained by the fact that they have to somehow fit in what they're reporting to what they said they were going to do. It's a terrible... I mean, I think it's a terrible situation. So I… it took them a year or two to realize I really meant it, but I did. Okay, we had, it's a little hard, well, we had about 700 to 800 people in 16 teams. And to say somebody was in a team, I told the principal investigator, I said, ‘You tell us who is in the team and that's what the team is’. So they included a lot of graduate students, undergraduates in some cases, and then… then a fair number of independent scientists. So I'd say altogether we estimated we had maybe 100, 150 principal, you know, co-investigators, that is people with their own programs, so senior guys, people who would be eligible for National Academy. We had 23 members of the National Academy of Science out of 150, let’s say. I... you know what I mean, that's like Caltech, you know, or… or Stanford or Harvard.
[Q] And you hadn't selected based on that?
Maybe. The selection was done by... I know I appointed a very high quality committee, so there was an exhaustive review process and then… and I wouldn’t say I entirely took their recommendations, but I'm saying 90%, and again, you know, they knew more about it than I did and I realized that. Then I finally had to present it to the Director of Science at the… at headquarters, and… because he had the budget. I always managed to cadge an extra million bucks or so. You know, I remember once we had… we had… we were looking for five new teams and there was one team that was really outstanding but they were ranked sixth. So we… and we only had enough money for, you know, for five, so I presented all six of them and I said, ‘There's no way we can leave this number six off’. So they said, ‘Okay’. So I… you know, I've learned a lot about how headquarters operates. A lot of it is... well, they listen to reason but somebody has to present it, you know. So that was, the organization itself was good, and then the other thing that I did is I visited, I think, all but one of the teams, which was a lot to do because they're spread all over, and I'd usually go to, like, they made it a real… for the most part, they made it a really formal thing. You know, people would present their documents, they had slide shows, and… and it was… it was an exhausting time because I was seeing all sorts of stuff that I'd never seen before, but totally stimulating. I mean I was on the — and also it was new things — I was on the edge of my mental capabilities most of the time. I was skirting on the edge of what I could encompass.
[Q] That's saying a lot, too.
Well, you know, it's wonderful when you're in your 70s, you know, to be stimulated that way. But, you know, in retrospect, my, you know, I'd been trained, my undergraduate degree is in physics and in math, I mentioned that early on, and I had a lot of engineering, we… in this small program that we ran, engineering was… we took courses with the engineers, so I had… I had some kind of appreciation for… for engineering issues, and I've always been interested in technology — not good at it myself, but, you know, fascinated by it. And I… and boy, did we have toys, you know… you know, NASA, you know, some of the equipment that's made, all, you know, hand-crafted essentially, and all particularly for this task, and with very novel engineering because you're operating in a totally demanding environment, different than — things like protection against radiation. For example, NASA tends to use old computers and some of the computers on the space ship and on the shuttle and the satellite are quite… well, we can't… we can't risk… NASA can't risk some using some kind of new program that nobody’s tested. You have to have space-tested stuff; it's got to be protected against radiation, against the space environment altogether. So, we, you know, you can't use the most advanced stuff, you have to use something that's been fully… fully tested.
