Harvey S. Liszt, interviewed by Kenneth I. Kellermann on 6 July 2016.

Kellermann: 00:05

It's July 6^th [2016] and we're here with Harvey Liszt.

Bouton: 00:11

That guy. [laughter]

Kellermann: 00:13

And Ellen Bouton and Ken Kellermann to talk about the GBT construction and following litigation. I don't know, Harvey, do you want to just relate your experience, or how you got into this, and how it evolved rather than ask specific questions?

Liszt: 00:36

Well, okay, let's see how I do. Okay? So I became involved with the GBT in September or so of '95. I was asked to--

Kellermann: 00:46

Oh, that late, I see.

Liszt: 00:47

I was asked, yeah. I had very little to do with it before that. Jay Lockman was the immediately previous Project Scientist but he had gotten cross-wise with some of the more powerful outside users. Carl Heiles, especially I think. I'm not going to pull any punches here. Okay? And they agitated against Jay, and so I was recruited to be the lipstick on that pig which is pretty much--

Kellermann: 01:11

That's because Jay was advocating-- well, it had already been decided.

Liszt: 01:18

Jay has largely advocated for the design of a telescope, right?

Kellermann: 01:22

Yeah, in the off axis design.

Liszt: 01:23

Off axis, yeah.

Kellermann: 01:24

But that had already been decided long ago.

Liszt: 01:28

Oh, by '95 the thing was under contract in Green Bank.

Kellermann: 01:29

I know. Right, yeah. So what was the problem that Jay had?

Liszt: 01:33

I have no idea.

Kellermann: 01:34

Oh, okay.

Liszt: 01:36

Those were his problems b,ut in any case--

Kellermann: 01:38

And Carl would have certainly supported the [inaudible].

Liszt: 01:41

And the telescope was being built at that time.

Kellermann: 01:43

Yeah.

Liszt: 01:44

The telescope was being built.

Kellermann: 01:45

Sure.

Liszt: 01:45

So it was just some personality problem.

Kellermann: 01:47

Okay.

Liszt: 01:48

And anyway, so Paul [Vanden Bout] recruited me and I began in the fall of 1995. It was a very superficial kind of involvement that I had because Bill-- oh, God, name block-- no, Bob--

Kellermann: 02:06

Hall.

Liszt: 02:06

Bob Hall was very unaccepting of me. Okay. And at the same time, Jay was very resentful and Paul was a totally hands-off manager. So I was just kind of left to my own devices and tried to figure out what was going on in this project. On the day that I introduced myself to Bob Hall--

Kellermann: 02:24

Excuse me, I've lost track of-- was Jay the Site Manager at the time?

Liszt: 02:31

Jay was the Site Manager, yeah.

Kellermann: 02:32

Okay.

Liszt: 02:34

On the day I went over to Bob Hall's office which was not in this building actually I think at that time. Wherever it was it was in some different office than he finally landed in. Okay, maybe it was in this building but in a different room, or maybe I saw him in Green Bank. He showed me--

Bouton: 02:51

He spent a lot of time in Green Bank.

Kellermann: 02:53

Yeah.

Liszt: 02:53

He showed me the thick notebooks that had just come in because the arbitration had just been launched. The claim against NRAO had just been initiated. And he told me about what he thought my role would be, which would be that I would like an ambassador to the community of philanthropists. And I would go out in the community and I would get money to support his telescope, grant money. And I looked at him and said, "Look, that's not my intention, that's not my capability, but what's more, you know, people don't give money to public observatories. Politicians get their names on these telescopes, not philanthropists."

Liszt: 03:35

And then I looked at him and I said, "You know, if what you're saying is true and there's this huge claim against the telescope, no one's going to give money to this thing." And that sort of set the tone for my interaction [laughter] with Bob Hall for the next few years. He told the Green Bank staff not to allow me on the site without checking with him. I wasn't allowed into the property during the day, but.

Kellermann: 03:56

The construction site you mean.

Liszt: 03:57

The construction site, yeah.

Kellermann: 03:57

Not the Green Bank site

Liszt: 03:59

He stopped holding meetings of the project. It was quite something. He and Lee [Lee King, NRAO structural engineer] would talk about the project, but I was pretty much excluded. And I was some kind of weird interface between the project of which I was learning very, very little, and the user community that I was really beholden to reporting to. Jay was very unhelpful. And it just went on like this. And so now, what can I say? Eventually in the summer of 19--

Kellermann: 04:32

What did Paul have to say about this?

Liszt: 04:35

Paul just seemed deaf to my concerns. Paul was deaf to my concerns, to the point where one time during the Visiting Committee meeting, I actually asked to speak to them. And they sat down with me and I let out this litany of complaints against the management, Bob, Paul, and anybody who was involved with this. Okay? In the summer of 1996, you know, when the project was way, way late, and Bob Hall was-- I discovered that Bob Hall was lying about the progress of this project. One night while I was in Green Bank during the summer of 1996, I paced off the area that was actually completed of the surface. Okay? And it was an immense area, right? I was pacing off hundreds of feet just to circumscribe this. But when I got done and I did the sums, I discovered that only about a quarter of the surface was actually complete.

Liszt: 05:29

And Bob was saying that the majority of it was done. And that was the kind of thing that was going on in this project all the time. Bob Hall was a terrible dissembler. And at the same time, there were just these crazy things going on in the project. There was this dysfunction in the steel mill that was creating these things. They didn't weigh anything that they ever created and shipped onto the site. And these things were just being put onto the telescope without being weighed. At the same time they were being welded. And the weight of the weld is also a very important contributor. And the weight of the welding material that was on the telescope wasn't being recorded. It was just this complete picture of dysfunction up to the point where these gigantic so-called box joints that support all the weight of the telescope were shipped to Green Bank.

Liszt: 06:22

And when the people on site looked inside, they saw that these things were basically stuffed with cardboard. These gigantic box joints where so many members come together and channel the forces are these huge, gigantic, right? Gigantic containers that are full inside of baffles. And the baffles actually channeled the forces in the proper directions. And these baffles were just not there. Okay? These things were shipped to the site like empty boxes or something like this. So anyway, they had to make this up as they were going along. And the whole project was just like this. It was a litany of things for years on end.

Kellermann: 07:08

Back to the weight, and this may have been an apocryphal exaggeration, that even the paint added significant [crosstalk].

Liszt: 07:19

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. It's a lot of paint.

Liszt: 07:21

Everything does. Yeah, in the end, Dave Parker, right, was working on the ultimately failed metrology system. The last thing that he did at NRAO before leaving, because, I guess he was fired in the face of the inability of the metrology system to function. He actually weighed the telescope, right? And we found out for the first time how much it weighed. He was good at that.

Kellermann: 07:53

How much over? I remember 10% or something.

Liszt: 07:55

Oh, really it has a moving weight of 17 million pounds. The track was designed for 12 million and there's 17 million rolling on it, and that's why it failed. Which was something else that happened right afterwards. And the lawyer had to go back to Lockheed Martin, and he cadged another $6 million that we used to fix the track after the fact.

Kellermann: 08:15

Yeah. I remember the track.

Liszt: 08:16

Yeah. The joke of that was, what he said was that the hardest thing about getting that money was finding the right person at Lockheed Martin to talk to.

Kellermann: 08:27

That's partly because, if I remember correctly, the foundation was built before design was finished.

Liszt: 08:35

Right, right.

Kellermann: 08:35

They didn't know how much it was going to weigh.

Liszt: 08:37

They were design building, yeah. Well, that was another pretty thing. They stiffed the contractor for the concrete. When they found that the foundation had been designed for a 12 million pound telescope, and they were at 16 or something like that, million pounds in the design, they halted the pouring of the concrete for the-- and they faked the series of tests that purported to show that the concrete was under spec. Okay. And they forced the contractor--

Kellermann: 09:06

Who's they?

Liszt: 09:07

This is the RSI.

Kellermann: 09:09

Okay. Not NRAO.

Liszt: 09:11

No, it's RSI. It's RSI. And they forced the contractor to beef up and rebuild at great cost. Something like they lost a half million dollars on this. So the foundation actually would support the final weight, but only because of this ruse that RSI played on the contractor. They cost them a half million dollars.

Liszt: 09:33

We saw all this, actually. We saw RSI doing all this when we did the discovery and we got their paperwork. And we saw them pulling this stunt. But of course, the concrete contractor that lost the half million dollars never learned of this. That was one of the amazing things that happened during the year.

Liszt: 09:57

Yeah. Okay. So I got up to 1996, right, the summer of 1996 when I walked off the surface and discovered that Bob Hall was just totally faking the progress of the telescope. But I managed somehow to live with this for another year, and I finally resigned in September of 1997. October of 1997, after one of the-- the Green Bank committee had an advisory committee that would meet once a year.

Kellermann: 10:23

Yes.

Liszt: 10:24

And immediately after that I had a little talk with Jay and, who was its chief of staff at the time? It was Mark McKinnon. And they told me that I wouldn't be allowed to talk to the Green Bank staff anymore because I was making too many demands on them. And at that point I came home to Charlottesville and just resigned. I just said I can't stand this anymore. And then I became involved with the arbitration.

Kellermann: 10:50

Yes. How did that happen?

Liszt: 10:52

Well, what happened was that the lawyers were insisting that--

Kellermann: 10:56

Excuse me. When did the first-- when were the first claims made?

Liszt: 11:02

Well, as I said, the first time I introduced myself to Bob Hall in September or October of '95, he showed me these thick notebooks and said they had just arrived. So that was the autumn of 1995.

Bouton: 11:19

So it would have been in the works a bit before that for the note--

Liszt: 11:23

These were big thick notebooks.

Bouton: 11:24

For the notebooks that size.

Liszt: 11:25

Bob must have known for sometime it was happening.

Bouton: 11:29

So beginning of '95 maybe?

Liszt: 11:29

The claim was initially launched in the fall of '95. And I became involved because I wanted to know what was going--

Kellermann: 11:38

Excuse me.

Liszt: 11:39

Yeah. Go on, go on.

Kellermann: 11:40

But what was the claim, that basically NRAO kept putting in refinements to the design that increased the cost?

Liszt: 11:50

Yeah. Yep, in essence. Yeah, yeah.

Kellermann: 11:53

And what was our counter-position?

Liszt: 11:57

Well, in detail, I think the meatiest issue in the claims was that they had not understood the fatigue issues of the telescope, and that it had been designed for a much lower fatigue class than was necessary, which basically would've allowed a much lighter weight structure.

Kellermann: 12:20

I saw something in the stuff there referring to cycles, cycles--

Liszt: 12:23

It's called the peak cycle.

Kellermann: 12:25

Slewed?  The number of times that the telescope is slewed?

Liszt: 12:29

Yeah. Well, basically, yeah, the number of times it just goes up and down. And they tried to say that the number of-- that the thing had been designed for fatigue class 1, which was some number-- thousands of cycles, when in fact, it needed to be fatigue class 4, which was hundreds of thousands of cycles.

Kellermann: 12:48

Yeah, I remember seeing something about that. But--

Liszt: 12:51

Yeah, it was--

Kellermann: 12:52

--why wasn't that in--?

Liszt: 12:54

If you're--

Kellermann: 12:54

--the contract?

Liszt: 12:54

My joke was specs. No one ever thought that fatigue was an issue. In fact, it never was. It's not an issue.

Kellermann: 13:01

It's surprising [after the?]--

Bouton: 13:03

Yeah, after the 300-foot, yeah.

Liszt: 13:05

Yeah. Well-- [laughter]

Kellermann: 13:09

This is hindsight. But I mean, it seems--

Liszt: 13:11

Well -

Kellermann: 13:11

--kind of obvious. [laughter]

Liszt: 13:14

I don't think that fatigue is a big issue for that telescope the way it is for all the extra weight on it. This was their most plausible claim, which eventually was rejected by the arbitrators. Yeah. If you looked at what they were-- I used to joke with the lawyers that they thought we-- they thought they were designing a drawbridge, which goes down in the morning and up at night. [laughter]

Kellermann: 13:45

Okay. Sorry.

Liszt: 13:45

Okay. So I resigned. And Dave Heeschen had just been—had recently been brought in to lead our defense because the-- of the arbitration, Dave Heeschen and Dave Hogg.

Kellermann: 13:59

Okay, because Dave Heeschen was initially the-- until Bob Hall was hired, our project manager or something.

Liszt: 14:06

Yeah, maybe--

Kellermann: 14:06

Really early, very early on -yeah- it was during the design phase or something. Yep. You don't remember that? No?

Liszt: 14:14

No. I couldn't remember it because I just wasn't involved.

Kellermann: 14:17

Well, neither was I. But I do remember it.

Liszt: 14:19

Yeah. Anyway, Dave Heeschen had been brought back, or it was maybe he was still employed [and around?].

Kellermann: 14:25

I think--

Bouton: 14:25

I think--

Liszt: 14:25

I mean maybe he had retired. He had retired [inaudible].

Bouton: 14:27

He retired in '91.

Liszt: 14:28

He was still around.

Kellermann: 14:29

Sorry, what?

Bouton: 14:30

I think he retired in '91 or '92. And so--

Liszt: 14:33

But in '97, he was brought back to lead our defense.

Kellermann: 14:36

Some of his memos refer to coming “up to Charlottesville.” So apparently, he was in Florida--

Bouton: 14:40

He was in Florida. Yeah.

Liszt: 14:41

Right. He was in Florida. Yeah. And I volunteered to do this. Heeschen didn't have much use for me. But Dave Hogg realized that somebody else was going to be needed. And so he convinced Heeschen to take me on. And eventually, I was the guy who [inaudible].

Kellermann: 14:56

Yeah.

Liszt: 15:03

Yeah, it was quite an experience being with the lawyers and doing the arbitration, during the discovery process, going around to all of these places here, living for 10 days in downtown Dallas [laughter], a soul-searing experience. [laughter]

Kellermann: 15:20

So you're essentially going around trying to collect--?

Liszt: 15:23

Yeah, we--

Kellermann: 15:23

--records of--?

Liszt: 15:24

Every place that was involved in any material way had to cough up all of its records. And they were placed in front of us. And then, we went through them. We scoured them and went through them. It was Dave and me typically. And they were two lawyers and a paralegal. So there was a small group that would go around. It was not just me and Dave there. We had at least two other people, I think two paralegals and a lawyer with us, maybe four or five people. It was a big job. And we would just spend eight hours a day combing through the papers that we saw trying to figure out-- it's kind of an interesting process. Because when you start, you don't exactly know what you're doing. And then you start seeing things and you become a little more aware. But initially, you just cast a very broad net. And you bring home as much stuff as you think might you possibly might need. And that stuff all had to be copied and brought back.

Bouton: 16:19

Yeah. Did you copy it on-site and brought home the copies or brought home--?

Liszt: 16:24

No, no, we didn't do any of that. It was all marked. It was all marked and then sealed legally because there had to be some traceability for what you selected and what you got, right, and some claimed probity, yeah. So we would just select it and that stuff was put aside and it was all handled legally afterward.

Kellermann: 16:44

Through some commercial company.

Bouton: 16:45

Chain of evidence.

Liszt: 16:46

Yeah. Yeah. And it was all copied and indexed. Everything was given a header. Because that's where the millions of dollars went.

Kellermann: 17:02

That's what I was going to ask you if you knew how much was--?

Liszt: 17:05

I think the legal costs eventually were something like $6 million.

Kellermann: 17:09

That's out-of-pocket cost, or.

Liszt: 17:12

Yes, and I mean, at the time NSF was not reimbursing us. This money came from AUI.

Kellermann: 17:17

Well, that a separate--

Liszt: 17:18

This money largely came from AUI. It's my understanding that the total cost of the arbitration was something like $10 or $11 million, $6 million in legal costs, and then the $4 million that we actually paid.

Kellermann: 17:31

What about, well you were getting paid at the time, and Dave Hogg, and all the travel and everything?

Liszt: 17:35

Well, now I'm just talking about money. Our salary and presumably everything were included.

Kellermann: 17:42

Oh, Okay. Yeah.

Liszt: 17:48

Yeah. We went to Dallas, we went to [inaudible], where else did we-- we went to Sterling right, where RSI was headquartered near Dulles. We [inaudible] a couple of times.

Kellermann: 17:57

So AUI had that kind of money then?

Liszt: 18:00

Absolutely.

Kellermann: 18:00

No. No. No, when was the Brookhaven?

Liszt: 18:03

'97. They lost Brookhaven in '97. So they were still probably pretty flush. Eventually, they were made whole.

Kellermann: 18:14

Sorry?

Liszt: 18:14

Eventually, they were made whole. They were reimbursed. You're not remembering this, the NSF--

Kellermann: 18:21

Oh, that was going to be one of my questions. Thanks.

Liszt: 18:24

NSF eventually reimbursed by slipping the date of our calendar year.

Kellermann: 18:28

Oh, that's right. I do remember that.

Liszt: 18:30

Remember that little slip, that three months, that quarter of a year?

Kellermann: 18:31

Yes. Right.

Liszt: 18:33

Yeah. That covered the extra expenses, not accounting for--

Kellermann: 18:36

And the $4 million-- and the $4 million?

Liszt: 18:40

Well, we--

Kellermann: 18:42

Or did they pay that out?

Liszt: 18:44

The $4 million, it was something like we owed them. We gave them $10 and they owed us $6. So the net was $4 or something like that.

Kellermann: 18:48

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. but how was that paid?

Liszt: 18:53

I mean, that was long after-- that was long after I was materially involved. The last session of the actual arbitration, I think was in February of 2000. And the decision was handed down about a year later.

Kellermann: 19:10

That late?

Liszt: 19:11

Yeah. Yeah. It took a long time.

Kellermann: 19:15

So what year was that that they slipped the calendar?

Liszt: 19:20

Oh, that was several years afterwards.

Kellermann: 19:22

Oh, Okay.

Liszt: 19:24

It was years afterwards.

Kellermann: 19:26

Early 2000s?

Liszt: 19:27

Yeah. Sometime. Okay. So where did I get up to? I got up to-- yeah, so the arbitration-- actually, the hearing was delayed. It was supposed to begin six months or so earlier than it finally did. But it began eventually in October of '99 at the Reston Hyatt where I lived for three months or so. And I would come home on every other weekend and Mikki would come up, my wife would come up, so we split the chores. And it was just every day, just in the session.

Kellermann: 20:15

How long?

Liszt: 20:16

Well, it was a normal 8-hour day with breaks.

Kellermann: 20:20

No, I mean, how long did it continue [inaudible]?

Liszt: 20:22

Oh, well, it started in the middle of October and continued pretty much nonstop until Christmas with a couple of days off for Thanksgiving, but not much. And then it reconvened for another few weeks in January and February.

Kellermann: 20:45

And that consisted of presentations from the lawyers on the two sides?

Liszt: 20:50

No, it was like a trial. It was like a trial with questioning the witnesses.

Kellermann: 20:56

Who were typically--?

Liszt: 20:59

Well, I mean, the other side brought the engineers on.

Bouton: 21:11

Their engineers or engineers from the different manufacturing companies?

Liszt: 21:13

There were engineers who had designed and built the telescope.

Kellermann: 21:19

From our side?

Liszt: 21:20

There were consulting engineers who were brought in as expert witnesses to give opinions on the fatigue issue. We had some experts. They had some experts. Their main expert was a guy named Fisher at Lehigh, who was the God of Fatigue, who had written all the books on fatigue. And our guy was his prized student, a guy named Carl Frank from the University of Texas.

Kellermann: 21:44

And they get paid to do this?

Liszt: 21:48

Yeah. I assume that they would get paid. And another thing that really amazed me about the arbitration was how hard the lawyers work, even the junior lawyers. I mean, they worked so hard, and the paralegals. No astronomer worked that hard. No astronomer ever worked that hard. It was like being on a 3-month long observing run, but you're away from home. I mean, it was just unbelievable how hard they worked when we were on the deposition. I mean, it was just an amazing thing to me. It was really impressive. I mean, I will never stop being impressed by how hard they worked.

Kellermann: 22:22

You read about this, 60-80 hour a week-- 60 to 80 hour a week yeah. No they--

Kellermann: 22:28

Junior lawyers--

Liszt: 22:28

They just did it. And they didn't have my motivation.

Kellermann: 22:33

Well, my daughter doesn't work that hard.

Liszt: 22:35

Okay. So let me backtrack about one thing which I think needs to be gotten into the record. As the trial went on, there was actually a little more discovery going on. As the trial evolved the discovery was brought up-to-date. And we eventually learned and prognosticated that on a $55 million contract to build the telescope, they lost $75 million. They would have lost something like $75 million.

Liszt: 23:08

The total cost was $120 million finally extrapolated. It's an amazing thing that the telescope was actually built. But what happened was that every time the builder went under, it was snapped up by a bigger company with deeper pockets, right?

Liszt: 23:23

So RSI really, really was about to go under when they were bought by COMSAT, and then COMSAT was stuck with the bill. And then COMSAT was bought by Lockheed Martin, and so Lockheed Martin eventually wound up being stuck with the bill. And if this hadn't happened there's no way the telescope would've ever been completed.

Kellermann: 23:41

That's what I vaguely remember and what I saw in the stuff there. COMSAT actually had a subdivision. It was something called-- it was something called COMSAT RSI.

Liszt: 23:58

Yeah. They had bought RSI.

Kellermann: 23:59

Right. And it was a subdivision.

Liszt: 24:01

You probably knew John Evans.

Kellermann: 24:03

Of course.

Liszt: 24:03

Who was the head of COMSAT Lab.

Kellermann: 24:05

Yeah I know. Yeah. He’s a radio ham, by the way.

Liszt: 24:08

Yeah.

Kellermann: 24:09

Yeah. But from what I was reading there, it says that they formed-- they formed a sub-company called--

Liszt: 24:19

COMSAT RSI.

Kellermann: 24:20

COMSAT RSI.

Liszt: 24:20

They just rebranded RSI.

Kellermann: 24:22

Yeah.

Liszt: 24:22

They just rebranded RSI.

Kellermann: 24:23

Right, right. But then at some point, COMSAT, and maybe that was where Lockheed Martin came in, I never saw that name. John wrote to Paul or somebody saying they were going to sell the company. But the new company didn't want any part of the GBT. And so COMSAT would retain that responsibility.

Liszt: 24:53

Well, this must have been the sale of COMSAT to Lockheed Martin.

Kellermann: 24:56

Yeah.

Liszt: 24:56

But eventually Lockheed Martin did finally wind up being responsible.

Kellermann: 24:59

Oh, yeah. Okay.

Liszt: 25:00

Yeah. They did, they did in a big way.

Kellermann: 25:02

Well, that's--

Liszt: 25:04

Otherwise. The thing about that was Lockheed Martin was really susceptible to political influence, and I'm sure that Byrd leaned on them. And prodded them to keep building this thing when any other project might have been abandoned.

Kellermann: 25:26

Yeah. Because at one point, because as I said, John wrote to somebody in NRAO--

Liszt: 25:30

Well, the story was--

Kellermann: 25:32

He didn't name who--

Liszt: 25:32

--the story was that the RSI guy, whose name--

Kellermann: 25:36

Dick Thomas.

Liszt: 25:37

Yeah. Okay. Was next door neighbors with the head of COMSAT. And over a barbecue one night they cooked up this deal and just did it.

Kellermann: 25:44

Which deal? To sell the company.

Liszt: 25:45

To sell RSI to COMSAT. Yeah.

Kellermann: 25:47

I dealt with him because they built the VLBA antennas.

Liszt: 25:56

Right. And they were a descendant of the eSystems group that built the VLA antennas. Yeah.

Kellermann: 26:01

He impressed me as somebody who you wouldn't buy a used car from.

Liszt: 26:07

So how we actually wound up accepting their bid.

Kellermann: 26:11

Yes.

Liszt: 26:12

The thing was that their bid was a lot lower than the other people. The other [crosstalk] the other people--

Kellermann: 26:15

Which should have been a signal.

Liszt: 26:17

--the other people were Brown and Root.

Bouton: 26:20

Brown and Root.

Liszt: 26:21

Brown and Root.

Bouton: 26:21

I remember their red trunks that they brought the bids in.

Liszt: 26:26

Yeah. Brown and Root, this big old Texas company that used to build nuclear reactors and makes--

Kellermann: 26:30

And TIW.

Liszt: 26:32

And somebody else, yes.

Kellermann: 26:34

TIW.

Liszt: 26:34

TIW. Yeah. And TIW or TRW? [Inaudible name] just--

Kellermann: 26:39

No. TIW.

Liszt: 26:40

I know, I know. I know. But [inaudible name] just died--

Kellermann: 26:42

Yes. Yes, yes.

Liszt: 26:42

--a few days ago, at the age of a hundred and three.

Kellermann: 26:44

Oh, is it--?

Liszt: 26:45

A TRW guy.

Kellermann: 26:46

I saw that. Yeah. I didn't realize he was that old. And those bids--

Liszt: 26:50

So why did we take the--?

Kellermann: 26:52

But those bids, as I remember, went up to $100 million or something.

Liszt: 26:56

Yeah, there were three of them. There were three of them, and--

Kellermann: 26:58

Yeah. Well, do you remember what they were? Or I could probably find them.

Liszt: 27:01

Oh, there was, well-- I mean, the contract-- our contract, with RSI was $75 million.

Kellermann: 27:09

No. $55.

Liszt: 27:10

Well, I mean, the total--

Kellermann: 27:12

But we had $75.

Liszt: 27:13

I mean, the total contract to build the telescope was $75. We gave RSI $55, and then we wanted to keep the rest of it for ourselves. And the others were even over the $75, which would've been-- and we would've had less than zero to build the laser metrology system.

Kellermann: 27:26

Yes. Yes. Yes, yes, yes. Yes.

Liszt: 27:29

And that laser metrology system that ultimately didn't have a chance of working was the thing that really sold the off-axis design to many people. [laughter] The astronomers really thought that it couldn't work without that.

Kellermann: 27:41

Oh, I was one. Certainly. I was against it, for that--

Liszt: 27:45

And the GBT violates the laws of physics.  Because we correct the surface according to the finite element model.

Kellermann: 27:53

Yeah. I was all for that.

Liszt: 27:54

But the telescope--

Kellermann: 27:55

Because that was not a--

Liszt: 27:56

But the telescope wasn't really built according to the finite element model because it's got all of this extra unaccounted-for weight that's not in the model. So I joked that the GBT really violates the laws of physics because we apply a model to it and it seems to work extremely well--

Kellermann: 28:08

No, but what--

Liszt: 28:09

--but the model is not of the actual telescope.

Kellermann: 28:11

But wasn't that model refined afterward? I mean, it took a long time before that--

Liszt: 28:19

No. No. I think the model we're using is a pretty early model, and--

Kellermann: 28:23

Really?

Liszt: 28:24

Well, I'm sure it has the pieces, but it doesn't have the weights.

Kellermann: 28:30

Yeah.

Liszt: 28:32

Yeah. Anyway, I think there's only one more thing I want to say, which was that, the thing that was a revelation to me-- when I started digging into the material-- well, when we first started gathering this material, we first accumulated a large quantity of it in the summer of '98, okay? And I dedicated the summer-- my own summer of '98 to digging through this material to understand how the bid had gone wrong. How the-

Kellermann: 28:58

Yes.

Liszt: 28:59

Because one of the reasons that the telescope ran into such problems was that, on the day the contract was signed, they really didn't have a good idea of how to build a telescope. They started pouring the foundation at a time when they thought the telescope was going to weigh-- a telescope was going to weigh 12 million pounds. They designed the track on that basis. So how did things go that wrong? Well, they had given a contract. RSI had given a contract to a company whose name I don't remember in California to design the telescope. It was a well-known company. And the idea was that NRAO had given them a prototype that was nearly final.

Kellermann: 29:38

Prototype design?

Liszt: 29:39

A prototype design. Yeah, that had been optimized for homology. And the idea was that all they had to do was tweak it, okay?

Kellermann: 29:46

But they were responsible?

Liszt: 29:47

They were responsible. They were responsible. But the lore that NRAO, okay, was that they have been given a nearly working model, an almost final model by NRAO, and this really took most of the heat off whatever company was going to get the bid because all they had to do was tune this model.

Kellermann: 30:07

But they had. Precisely. That's the way we've always done it.

Liszt: 30:09

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. No, they--

Kellermann: 30:10

They could use it or not. But you say it was homologous?

Liszt: 30:14

Yes. Yes. It had been partly optimized for homologous, which was the-- it's the only way to make the telescope work. It had--

Kellermann: 30:21

Well, not if you have an active surface.

Liszt: 30:23

No. The specs on the telescope-- there were specs on the telescope entirely independent of the active surface. This had to be like a 20 gigahertz telescope, Independent of the active surface. And when I dug--the engineers in California who were designing the telescope, who had this contract. We're meticulous about documenting everything we did. They kept records, just wonderful records of all their weekly meetings. So over the however months they had of these weekly and more frequent meetings, the minutes there was a guy who took wonderful minutes of these meetings. And so I was able to go and actually it was like reading history. Really getting into the diary of this telescope. And what I realized immediately was that the model they had started with was not the NRAO model. They basically started from scratch. And so the question that I had to answer myself was, where did they get the model from which they started if it wasn't the NRAO model? And the answer actually was in their bid.

Kellermann: 31:30

The RSI bid.

Liszt: 31:31

The RSI bid. If you look in the RSI bid, there are engineering drawings of a telescope that looks like a bridge. It's not an off axis homologous telescope. It's a bridge. Everything has been regularized. Everything has been--all of the sophistication has been wrung out of this telescope to make it easy to manufacture at a profit. And that's the way the bid was. If you look at the engineering drawings of the pieces, the ribs and struts in the bid, you just say, "This is not a homologous telescope. It's not an off axis telescope. This is a symmetrical structure. This is not this is not anything that looks like a final GBT."

Kellermann: 32:12

Of course. But so as I recall, the RFP called for a default conventional telescope and the picture on the cover was a symmetric antenna.

Liszt: 32:27

So I took these drawings to Lee King and I said, “This was their bid that you accepted. What were you doing when you accepted this bid?” And he said, “Well, we never thought that was what they were going to try to build.” But in fact, that was what they started out trying to build and they started out trying to get from this structure that had been regularized back to where they started and they couldn't. They didn't have the optimization software to start from this thing. They would have been better off starting from scratch than starting from what they did. And so they floundered for the first six months until a guy named Roy Levy, who had written the original homology optimization program at JPL, was brought back in and a version of his program was somehow run or he ran it. That allowed, finally, them to recover the NRAO model, finish the optimization of the NRAO model, and then begin to build it. As opposed to what they tried to do. And that was fatal. That was fatal. They never recovered. They never recovered from this initial starting from-

Kellermann: 33:38

Why should that have been fatal? I can understand that--

Liszt: 33:41

Because they lost the first six months or a year.

Kellermann: 33:44

Yeah. But so what?

Liszt: 33:45

So what? But they poured the foundation. So the foundation. And they designed the tracks. So what?

Kellermann: 33:51

Right. Good. All right.

Liszt: 33:53

Yes. This was the mess they were in. Basically Lee involved knew that with enough time they could bring the design in. And they thought that RSI was much more amenable to working with them than they in fact were, because once RSI had let the contract to design the telescope to the people in California, there were influences, there were stakeholders whose interests were not aligned with NRAO's anymore.

Kellermann: 34:36

I don’t know if we should turn this off. But I remember--

Bouton: 34:42

Harvey was frank. You can be too.

Liszt: 34:43

Yeah. I haven't pulled any punches.

Kellermann: 34:44

I remember wondering at the time whether there was-- because you weren't involved, you probably wouldn't know anymore-- whether there was some under-the-table dealing and agreement with RSI. Because there were issues about the VLBA antennas. And I remember, I wasn't part-- into the smoke-filled room, but I was right outside. And I had the impression that in return for a deal on the VLBA antennas, that they would get the contract for the GBT.

Liszt: 35:24

That wasn't even at the same time.

Kellermann: 35:26

Yeah, I think it--

Liszt: 35:27

GBT wasn't even a gleam in anybody's eye at that time.

Kellermann: 35:30

No, no, no, no, no, no. Construction of the VLBA was in the early '90s.

Liszt: 35:36

Oh okay. Okay. Really?

Kellermann: 35:39

It finished--

Liszt: 35:40

I thought it started in '85? I thought it finished in--?

Kellermann: 35:43

Oh, they had the contract and everything. But no, the dedication was in '94 or 5, when it was finished. And they were, again, they were-- I'm just vaguely remembering all this, that they were running into problems and the antennas were costing more--

Liszt: 36:02

The really creepy thing about all this, the steel fabricator in Texas, there was this-- I mean, it was just-- to go down there, it's just really amazing. Right? The place looked like a junkyard. [laughter] They had actually fabricated the ALMA antennas. They became Vertex and that same place fabricated the Vertex antennas for ALMA. When I heard that they were going to do this, I went into whoever was managing the telescope project here and I sat in his office and just I said, "I couldn't believe it." I just couldn't believe that we were employing the same people.

Bouton: 36:34

Are they the ones that did the VLA antennas too?

Liszt: 36:38

The VLA--

Kellermann: 36:38

No.

Liszt: 36:39

--was originally done by a company called E-Systems.

Bouton: 36:41

But no, the--

Kellermann: 36:42

But the people--

Bouton: 36:42

--fabricators--

Liszt: 36:44

Yeah. It's all the same. It's all the same group of--

Bouton: 36:46

Because the--

Kellermann: 36:47

There's only about--

Bouton: 36:47

--work of Texas is--

Kellermann: 36:50

There's only about three or four people in the world who build radio telescopes and they all-- they move around and change their names.

Liszt: 36:57

Yeah. What he says. They became--

Kellermann: 37:02

I was involved in the VLBA antenna contract and it was my impression that TIW was far more competent. At the meetings and everything they had detailed answers to all the questions and they really seemed like they understand everything. Whereas RSI says, "Oh yeah, we can take care of that." I think RSI was 20 million dollars and TIW was 21. And so there was just a small committee. It was Hein, myself, Ted Riffe, [inaudible], I guess. And I argued for the-- we had so much money and I knew that a million dollars would have to come out of something else, instrumentation or something, but I argued for the-- to go for the extra million dollars. 5% for the TIW. And Ted said to me that, "If you can show me where in the RSI bid, they don't need the specifications that you made. And if we can't do that, we have to go with RSI." But even then I thought they were kind of flaky. And so I guess I was prejudiced, but somehow I had the impression that there was some monkey business going on with that. Paul would be the only person that would know if you get him drunk sometime. But going back to homology. My understanding is that a homologous antenna is expensive because each member has to be certain cross section in a certain way. And you can't buy the steel off the shelf. So I'm a little surprised.

Liszt: 39:02

The telescope was expensive because it was such a big off axis structure.

Kellermann: 39:06

Yes, that's a separate issue.

Liszt: 39:07

Losing the symmetries--

Kellermann: 39:09

I don't even see how you can have a homologous asymmetric structure.

Liszt: 39:14

It is.

Kellermann: 39:15

Yeah.

Liszt: 39:16

The Bell Labs 7 meter, which is also an off axis telescope, has homology designed into it.

Kellermann: 39:23

Well, all antennas turned out to be homologous even before the word was thought of as a concept. In practice, they are.

Liszt: 39:31

Adjusting the focus.

Kellermann: 39:31

Yeah, exactly. And we all discovered that as observers independently. Parkes, certainly and the 140 foot--

Liszt: 39:42

It made a huge difference. They could not meet-- the design, they could not meet a telescope that was speced to operate at 20 gigahertz without homology. And they didn't know how to get there. It was a big deal for them. It was a huge deal for them. I watched them flounder. They kept trying to make it stronger. They just didn't understand the most basic concepts, right. They tried to make it stronger, and then they watched the weight grow. And then they watched it sag--

Kellermann: 40:07

That's not the way homology works.

Liszt: 40:08

--and then they watched it sag. No, they were clueless. They were clueless, which mystified me, because Bob Wilson specifically told me that more or less the same-- got the same bunch of people designed the 7 meter at Bell Labs and added some homology just gratuitously, because it was interesting from an engineering point of view. But when it came to doing the GBT, which was later--

Kellermann: 40:31

So was the 7-meter-- was it Bell Labs [crosstalk]--

Liszt: 40:33

That was built in the late '70s.

Kellermann: 40:34

Yeah, was that the largest off axis antenna built prior to the GBT?

Liszt: 40:41

Oh no, I'm sure they were communications antennas [inaudible].

Kellermann: 40:45

They weren't all--?

Liszt: 40:47

Off axis, oh yeah, many, many communications antennas are off axis.

Kellermann: 40:49

They're real small. They're real small?

Liszt: 40:52

They vary in sizes.

Kellermann: 40:54

All the satellite antennas that I’m aware of.

Liszt: 40:59

I don't think we invented off axis designs.

Kellermann: 41:01

No, of course we didn't, but they're [crosstalk]--

Liszt: 41:04

We only invented the idea of the 100 by 110 meter off axis design.

Kellermann: 41:06

Exactly. Yes. But no, I mean--

Liszt: 41:09

We decided to supersize it.

Kellermann: 41:11

Consumer TV antennas are all off axis, but they're one or two feet.

Liszt: 41:18

Right. Right.

Kellermann: 41:19

And the Bell Labs was 7 meters.

Liszt: 41:20

Well, they're just stamped out, right, they're just--

Kellermann: 41:22

Yeah, Bell Labs is 7 meters. I'm asking if-- I'm not aware of any.

Liszt: 41:28

But there is homology built into that. Bob told me that they actually did it, and he was impressed by the fact that they just added it.

Kellermann: 41:38

Okay. So I had some questions, a lot of which we've covered. Oh, I was going to tell you though, very early on, like '90 or '91, when Heeschen was the Project Manager before Bob Hall was hired, he wrote - maybe it was afterward - but he wrote a memo to Paul pointing out that we weren't managing the contract appropriately and we were going to get in trouble, roughly five years before anything.

Liszt: 42:37

Well, I mean the GBT was the last telescope that NRAO tried to do without the current, the current style of management, right?

Kellermann: 42:45

Yeah.

Liszt: 42:46

It was total seat of our pants. Yeah, but it all worked-- it always worked for us.

Kellermann: 42:52

Well, except for the 300 foot, it was always a problem too. I mean the 36 foot and 140 foot were management disasters.

Liszt: 43:04

Well, [inaudible].

Kellermann: 43:05

Well, the 36 would.

Liszt: 43:07

I wasn't aware of that.

Kellermann: 43:09

Well, among other things, the-- when they were grinding the surface, there was a-- well, they had the wrong surface to start with or something. And then they realized, in order to get the right surface, the places where it had negative thickness. And so they sprayed on some metal on the back, but it's a different kind of metal. That partly was cause of the thermal problems that we had. And when they were grinding the surface in San Diego-- it was near a freeway or something and the cars going by actually caused enough of a perturbation that they could only do it at night. But then the-- I mean, I don't remember all the-- me, Findlay, and Hvatum were constantly dealing with issues. And the dish itself sat at the base of Kitt Peak for six months or something while they were negotiating to get it up the mountain. And somebody had to guard it. Otherwise, the people coming by with their shotguns, I mean, they would've taken a shot at it. So we had to pay for a guard.

[silence]

Kellermann: 44:36

I guess we’ve covered everything. Okay. Thank you.

Liszt: 44:49

You're welcome.