From his vantage point in the crew procedures division, Scott Millican ’64 saw most of Americans race to space first hand. Today, he brings 37 years of experience in preparation for human space flight to the member nations of the European Space Agency (ESA) as they participate in the International Space Station program.
From Gemini 10 to Apollo 17, Apollo/Soyuz to Skylab 3, Millican was a part of the Johnson Space Center. Along the way, he helped train America’s astronauts in the procedures that spelled success in space and, in some instances, helped avert potential disaster.
Now, Millican is director of HE Space, a company specializing in providing professionals to work alongside ESA staff in mission operations and support, science operations, life and physical sciences research, payload safety engineering, administrative support and astronaut training.
When he graduated from Jesse H. Jones High School in 1959, neither Lamar nor space was in his plans. His father, a staunch Methodist, had hoped his son would go to Southern Methodist University, but the resources weren’t there. “My friends were going to Lamar,” Millican said, “and my parents supported me in my decision.”
With no real goals, his early college career lacked thrust and vector. “I was floundering, with no real drive or direction,” he said. But, as he neared the three-year point, he began to “see the end of the tunnel.” The encouragement of his physics professor launched him on a path of lifelong learning, and, with the goal of finishing his industrial engineering degree, “I buckled down and really began to enjoy my engineering classes.”
Dormitory life was a lot of fun, Millican recalls, and he shared time with some of Lamar’s basketball players. He got to know then-freshman coach Billy Tubbs. Millican, who played ball in high school, was recruited to work out with the team, scrimmage, chase down balls and help officiate the practice sessions.
After graduating in 1964, Millican served two years in the Air Force at Kelly Air Force Base in San Antonio where he helped organize maintenance operations supporting the service’s B-52 Stratofortress bombers. After his tour, he returned to Houston and took a job at Johnson Space Center where “the space race was in prime time.”
There, Millican found himself using the engineering disciplines he had learned at Lamar and honed in the Air Force to design missions and train astronauts. In working with the flight crew, flight planners and other trainers, he prepared procedures and timelines – all laboriously scripted on IBM typewriters – for each flight crew.
Like steps to the stars, each mission built on the experience of the one before. “We would practice launch, recovery, docking and separations,” Millican said. “These were very complex in those days.” Gemini 10, his first mission, set up a docking target – a module in orbit – and demonstrated that NASA could send a crew up, rendezvous with a target, dock, undock and return to Earth.
Developing the procedures and teaching the use of the space suit and its portable life system during extravehicular activity (EVA) was one of Millican’s main tasks throughout his NASA career. “That’s where the engineering comes in – knowing how to operate the system and teaching others how to use it,” he said.
Gemini 4 was the first mission to conduct an EVA, and subsequent missions sought to practice EVA procedures. The crew of Gemini 10 completed a 1 hour 29 minute EVA.
Millican, who recently met many of his former NASA colleagues at an Apollo operations team 35th-anniversary reunion in Houston, remembers that the pace of operations was incredible, with a launch about every 2 to 3 months for the earlier flights. Even the later Apollo missions that reached for the moon came at a furious pace; Apollo 11 launched July 1969, Apollo 12 launched November 1969 and Apollo 13 launched February 1970.
Millican was in mission control, at his station next to the Capsule Communicator (CapCom), when an arc in an oxygen tank crippled Apollo 13 as it neared the half-way point to the moon. With the crew’s life in peril, flight director Gene Kranz led the JSC team in finding a way to bring the crippled craft home. The JSC team was able to work through the critical power shortage, solve a life-threatening build-up of carbon dioxide and execute a carefully controlled burn to use the moon’s gravity to give a slingshot boost back to Earth. Millican’s intimate knowledge of the lunar lander, gleaned by months of preparation, enabled him to quickly direct others to parts the crew could use to build the C02 scrubber.
His know-how also helped during another difficult day in NASA’s history, this time with the first Skylab mission. After Skylab was launched, it was clear from the data received that two significant problems had occurred. Of the craft’s two solar wings, one had been lost and the other was unable to deploy. Further, abnormally high temperatures inside the craft indicated that a significant portion of its thermal covering had been torn away.
Clearly, an EVA would be necessary to correct the problems before the spacecraft could be used. Teams from JSC and Marshall Space Center in Alabama raced to develop solutions. It was spirited competition, Millican recalls, and the results were different, but equally viable, approaches to the problems. He recalls how representatives of the local telephone company demonstrated the equipment they used to clear lines – and how NASA engineers adapted this ground-based technology to the higher-level problem.
After a 10-day wait, three astronauts launched with plans to rectify the problem. In their hands were not only new tools, but also procedures Millican helped script. With the Apollo capsule “station keeping” alongside the much larger Skylab, the hatch was opened, and with one astronaut flying, the second held the legs of the third as he grappled with the pole, trying, unsuccessfully, to remove the debris preventing the solar panel’s deployment. In Zero G, each tug on the pole threatened to send the capsule crashing into Skylab and necessitated a counteracting thrust away. Already up for more than 24 hours, NASA decided the crew needed to rest overnight and ended the EVA.
But, as the crew attempted to dock with the Skylab, something went wrong.
“Fortunately, a friend had written a procedure – a ‘what if’ section – and using this procedure on another EVA, the crew was able to successfully dock.”
Later, the crew would perform two more EVAs to free the solar arm and repair the thermal covering on the craft. “We saved the mission by being able to do these things,” Millican said.
Millican left JSC in 1980. At that time, he was taking classes at the University of Houston in software engineering and was in the pipeline to be a flight director. He had begun working on specifications for the space shuttle program – then anticipated to fly as many as 60 flights a year – sizing training facilities and staffing accordingly. He wrote the operations for the shuttle’s EVA airlock based on experiences in the preceding programs.
In his career at NASA, he had participated in the later Gemini flights, the entire Apollo program, Apollo/Soyus and the three Skylab missions. “I couldn’t imagine anything more exciting than what I had done with Apollo, and I was eager to get into the world of entrepreneurship.” He left JSC and went to work for David Scott, commander of Apollo 15, who had a company contract to train Air Force astronauts. During this time, he heard from a former JSC colleague, Mike Hernandez, who was eager to establish a business in manned space flight support.
In 1983, he and Hernandez co-founded Hernandez Engineering in Houston. Their first customer was the German Space Agency, and they provided the initial training of Spacelab D1 astronauts. Within a short time, Hernandez Engineering GmbH was founded in Germany and continued to grow as it provided expertise to the ESA.
In 1987, Millican left Hernandez Engineering to become a principal at Booze Allen Hamilton in their space segment. “I found after time that I didn’t have any heart in it,” Millican said. “I was wanting to get back into space.”
“Mike called about that time,” Millican said. “He had grown the company to about 700 employees but wondered if I would be interested in taking over the operation in Holland. It was about to die from lack of attention.
“I took it back. We had only one Ph.D. left, but we picked it up from there and jump started it,” Millican said. Today, HE Space is the largest contractor in the human space flight directorate in Holland.
In 1997, Millican became the chairman, and the name was changed to HE Space Operations BV with offices near the European Space Research and Technology Centre in Noordwijk, Holland. In addition, HE Space Operations GmbH was founded in Cologne, Germany in 1998 near the European Astronaut Centre, and in 2004, moved to Bremen. HE Space Operations Inc. is near JSC in Houston. The three companies form the nucleus for providing support for the ESA at ESTEC, EAC and JSC on programs for the space shuttle and Spacelab, the ESA contribution to the International Space Station program.
Fifteen countries are partners in the European Space Agency, with Germany, Italy and France being the largest contributors. Awards of contracts tend to parallel the contributions, so doing business in these member nations makes the most sense, Millican said.
Today, HE Space has about 50 people supporting ESA’s role in the International Space Station, primarily in operations engineering, although some are scientists working with principal investigators from industry or institutes. HE Space employs more than a dozen people with doctorates in material, physical and life sciences.
“We take care of our people, we are easy to do business with, and we hire the very best,” Millican said. HE Space is a “values-based company,” he says, meaning that its core values are derived from a biblical perspective, one he is not shy in sharing. Concurrently, while he expects his employees to share and practice the company’s values, he “fully accepts that not all employees share my Christian faith, nor do I expect them to.” He often works with other Christian businessmen in discussing business principles and practices and hopes some day to chair a Christian CEO Roundtable, such as those offered by the C12 Group and similar organizations.
With a goal to become the largest space contractor in Europe, HE Space is working to expand its support beyond manned space operations into science technical support and communications, like the Galileo system that will be similar
to the Global Positioning System put in place by the U.S.
For the man who ran 12 marathons during “my compulsive behavior days at JSC,” the space race has not ended. He is looking ahead to pass the baton to the next generation. HE Space is at work supporting the ESA’s effort to increase interest in space among Europe’s youth. With a declining number of high school students pursuing science and engineering degrees in the universities, ESA has begun funding to enhance study of these subjects in public education. Some of the experiments aboard the ISS are designed to capture the imagination of Europe’s youth, and HE Space is at work helping plan an interactive museum and education center similar to Space Center Houston.
