My Conversation with Dr. John Junkins
Mentorship, Apollo, and the importance of scholarship
Dr. John Junkins is a Distinguished Professor of Aerospace Engineering at Texas A&M University, director of the Hagler Institute for Advanced Study, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He’s recognized as a prolific scholar and mentor in the astrodynamics and space vehicle GNC community, primarily via the production of more than 58 PhD graduates (about half of them are professors themselves) and his books on Analytical Mechanics, Optimal Estimation, and the Dynamics of Flexible Structures.
Q: You were a football player in high school. Your coach, coach Clegg, made one of the most prophetic statements of the 20th century; that, “God’s plan for you has nothing to do with your body, but all with your mind.” How important was that statement?
Well, I had a number of mentors, but I think he was the first on two levels. He was my homeroom teacher for all four years, and he was a science teacher who played college football himself. I think he saw something in me that was a reflection of decisions he made early on and potentially regretted. I had the possibility of walking on at Georgia Tech and a scholarship offer at Clemson. But, I was fascinated by space from ‘57 forward when Sputnik went up. I was in a rural high school with not a lot to offer. I was not prepared to be sitting where I am today.
Football was a religion in Georgia those days. This was Appalachia, and becoming a professor was not in my wildest dreams. But, listening to Kennedy’s speeches, I had been fired up about the quest to send humans into space. I naively thought I could play football and do academics. Coach, in the spring of ‘61, let me visit the University of Tennessee Chattanooga to watch spring practice. After the third day of watching these guys, I wasn't sure I could compete here, and it wasn’t even division one ball.
On the way home that night, I announced out-of-the-blue that I am not going to do this. He pulled the car beside the road and told me that was the most intelligent thing that had come out of my big mouth since he had known me. That was when he told me that, “I don’t know what God’s plan for you is, but it doesn’t have a damn thing to do with your body.”
18 months later, I shook the hands of Wernher Von Braun. And here’s that story:
I didn’t immediately go to a named brand college of engineering. My first year was at Berry College. After that, I had an acceptance letter from Georgia Tech. During the summer of ‘62, my roommate at Berry, a decathlon champion from Greece, was also transferring to aerospace engineering but at Auburn. He was curious as to why I was going to an all-male university in a concrete jungle instead of to a small college town that was co-ed. He asked me to go with him to Auburn and help him get situated. I borrowed my dad’s car and drove him to Auburn. I saw beautiful oak trees and rolling terrain.
I looked in the Auburn telephone book and called the registrar on a Sunday. I told him, “sir, I know this is highly unusual, but I want to study at Auburn.” He asked me, “where are you, young man?” And I told him, and in five minutes, he picked me up. We went to his home and, after a conversation, he gave me an application and said, “If your transcripts are consistent with what you’ve told me here, you’re admitted.” And three weeks later I was at Auburn.
They were on a quarter system. After the first quarter, I went to NASA as a co-op student. That was 18 months after that conversation with Coach Clegg. The thing that is really important about being a great mentor as he was… he measured his worth in people than he did anything else. He saw potential in me, and told me something I needed to hear.
That was really important because I developed people for a living. My PhD descendants rounds off to well over 200. So, in one sense, I’ve run a lot of equations, sent things to orbit, done experiments, but the most important thing I’ve done is develop some great people. Coach Clegg was an important man because not only he helped me organize my life, but he set an example that I’ve been paying forward ever since.
Q: In your book, Engineering Your Academic Career, you talk about the benefits of pleasure reading for research. What are you currently pleasure reading?
I have a book i’m about halfway through that is tough sledding. It’s about a particular band of Eskimos that lived essentially in total isolation until the 1950’s. An anthropologist in the 30’s had lived amongst isolated tribes in South America and the Congo. He spent a year with these Eskimos, eating their food, learning to hunt, sledding dogs. He’s coming to appreciate these people that were very rough and culturally quite different from the modern Europeans at the time.
The book was a gift from my good friend Paul Motheral. He was the first person that I gave the Frank J. Malina Renaissance Medallion Award to. Paul was a civil engineer who built about 25% of the interstate system in Texas. But, he’s also in the Jazz Hall of Fame. He was a musician here at Texas A&M, played in the jazz ensemble as a sax player. I became acquainted with him during my interim presidency. He made a $20M gift to help build the music building where the band practices in. And, he didn’t name it after himself, which is interesting. We became friends, and he comes to the gala every year where I give the Malina award to.
Malina is another not-very-well-known Aggie. Malina was a mechanical engineering graduate in the 30’s. Before we even had aerospace, he was in propulsion, and was a talented artist and musician. He went to graduate school at Caltech and studied under Theodore von Kármán. Malina was a prize student who ended up co-founding Jet Propulsion Labs. Malina was one of the first people to really prove you could send a rocket to space. He wrote a paper in 1947 that mathematically showed that a multi-stage vehicle could not only get to orbit, but could escape Earth orbit.
Malina left aerospace in his 40s because of the atomic bombings. He almost had a nervous breakdown. He didn’t want to be in the business of inventing the delivery mechanism. He moved to Paris but also founded Aerojet General, which did a lot during the war. The stock was booming, and in today’s market would take away a healthy fraction of a billion dollars. He didn’t feel so bad that he couldn’t take some profits. He founded an art journal, and did art for the rest of his life except for a very brief consulting gig for NASA during the Apollo program.
He’s not well known at A&M. He’s certainly in the top five most impactful engineering graduates from here. I managed to get an auditorium named after him and created a lecture series after his name.
Anyway, this Eskimo book is from Paul Motheral. He has an impressive library.
Q: Speaking of Apollo, you worked on the J-missions (Apollo 15-17). What was that like? Did you feel the importance of it at the time?
Oh, absolutely! When I joined NASA, the Gemini program was about to kick off. The Saturn 1B and Saturn V were all on the drawing board. I had just finished the first quarter of my sophomore year, and my first day was pretty amazing. I was in a branch called the Dynamic Analysis branch. This branch wrote simulation codes and control algorithms for stabilizing the rocket by gimbaling the engines while you’re flying. It’s like balancing a broomstick on your finger, but while pushing it several Gs vertically. Here was my first day on the job:
I went into a small office with a chalkboard, we didn’t have white boards in those days. It had one guest chair. This guy stood up behind the desk, he was the branch chief and his name was Helmut Bauer. He was one of the original Peenemünde boys that came to the US with Von Braun that was flying the V1 rockets in the 40’s. He said, “ya, ya, ya, nice to meet you. Please sit down. I see you come from Auburn, you look like a good student. You know Bessel functions?” I said, “Well, no, sir. I know sines and cosines.” He said, “ya, you have to know Bessel functions. You know Saturn V is going to weight 6.5 million pounds and have 7.5 million pounds of thrust. Over 90% of the mass of that rocket is liquid. It’s just a flying tin can with sloshing fluid. If we have a big gust of wind and it aligns with the first sloshing mode, we may lose Florida. Ya, we have to suppress the slosh and understand it. The most important thing of all is stability.”
I thought, my gosh, this guy is an animal. He said, “Take this handbook. On this board, next week, you’re going to give me a lecture. I want to know what Bessel functions are. I want to know what differential equation they satisfy. I want to know how to use them. You need to read the first two chapters of this book. You need to own Bessel functions.” That was my introduction to German rocket culture. I went down the hall and saw my section chief. He looked at me and said, “You went to see Dr. Bauer haven’t you?” I said yes and he told me, “Boy, he either likes you or he hates you.”
The next week I started my lecture and about 15 minutes in he said, “ya ya ya, you do well. Go back to your section chief, he’ll give you your real job.”
That culture was brutal, but awesome. You had to be contributing to solving the problems. That was a great time for me. It confirmed that yes, I love this field. I remember asking Bauer about a month later when I went back to Auburn, “This problem you have me working on. I’m taking the best theory and experiments, and on a good day we have 10% agreement between theory and experiment. How can we fly people to the moon with that?” He said, “ya, answer this. You have a 57’ Chevrolet? Good looking car by the way. Do you have a simulation for your car's dynamics? How do you get back to Auburn?” I said, “Well, I know the way.” He said, “You don’t have a math model for the whole thing. But you know what things look like locally. Your brain is a computer, and it has a model for what happens when you turn the steering wheel and put on the brake. You can predict what will happen in the future. The car’s response is very fast compared to your prediction horizon, and that is what allows you to drive the car. So the highway is your nominal trajectory, and you’re constantly trying to stay on it. That is how we fly the rocket. We make the nominal trajectory based upon our best understanding of the dynamics.” He said, “That’s how we’re going to the moon. If you wait for a mathematician’s permission, we’re not going to the moon. You don’t have to have closure on everything. It just has to be good enough.”
He told me I needed to know control theory. I decided right then and there that I wanted to own control theory.
Q: In your book, Engineering Your Academic Career, you reference a big study done by the National Academies about the state of research in America. Did you ever consider going into public policy to bolster research?
I haven’t. I have a lot of ideas about it, but it’s tough. We brutalize good people when they go into politics. One of the best people I have seen in the public arena, Bob Gates, made a huge difference and stayed true to himself and avoided partisan politics. One of the few people that worked for both presidents and both parties. I have to tell you a cute story about Bob Gates and myself.
I chaired the search that brought us Bob Gates to be president. He’s a good friend. He was late for a meeting with distinguished professors. I was the one who invited him. He was late and I had to entertain the professors. He’s a shorter guy. Somebody in the audience said, “Junkins, you do impressions right? Why don’t you be Bob Gates until he gets here?” They begged so I listened. I stepped up to the mic and said, “Now I want you to listen to me, I am far too short to pull this off.” Right then, Gates walked in. He came up and said, “John, I want you to remind me to never, ever, turn my back on you again.”
I think I am doing, and have done, what I really love to do. Mostly, I haven’t strived to be obscure, I have strived to be productive. I never wanted to be department head, or dean, and certainly not president of A&M. I coaxed myself into taking on this institute for advanced study (Hagler institute) because I thought it was a very important thing that I could timeshare with being a professor.
I’m working on book number eight, and I’ve got six grad students. I will finish probably my final crop of PhD students, not because I want to quit but because of the chronological facts of life will probably catch up to me by the time I am 85. I’m slowing down a bit, at 81, but I think it’s probably time to call it when I finish this crop of students and find somebody better than me to replace me as director of this institute.
I think this institute will change this university in a big way. An author is writing a book about it right now. That study you referred to in my book about the state of American research—it’s worth reading. It has an incredible assessment of the state of research in the early 2000s. It has actually gotten more depressing over time. At that time, we were graduating 75,000 engineering graduates per year, almost exactly the same number as South Korea. We compete because of our market economy. We have a national trend of wanting to advance the ball, mostly because of market fortune.
There are a lot of incentives for the son, myself, of a sixth grade educated welder father and fourth grade educated mother, to be the first PhD from my county. Having that kind of a social transformation is in the DNA of America. If you want to talk about the American dream, it’s not being able to buy a house, it’s about the ability to, in a single lifetime, move mountains. I’m not an industrialist, but I am very proud of my trajectory. I am proud that it is possible to have that kind of a life. We need more of our children to know that, and appreciate how much can be accomplished by being focused. Focused does not mean miserable. I am a very happy person. It means you cultivate things that matter. The answer to most of our woes are not legislation or political leadership, it’s the individuals rising.
My wife and I have managed to raise two productive children, and it is possible to hand down your values through parenting. Of course, the state of family is an issue in our nation. I started my family while in graduate school. My wife was incredible, but she worked full time until she had our son. After that, she just held things together until I could escape graduate school.
Dr. Junkins and I talked for a bit longer, but it was mostly him showing me his collection of gifts, letters, and photos of the graduates he mentored over his career. He allowed me to share a few “Junkins quotes” that one of his graduates wrote in a Christmas card to him.
“I have got to tell you this one cute story…”
“I get paid to make guesses and you do all the work!”
“Sometimes you have to court the equations for a while before you can woo the result.”
“Naughty; all of those sick people who wing it with direct methods of optimization, making use of someone else’s black box to iterate and pray.”
That is all for my conversation with Dr. John Junkins.
Thanks for reading,
-William Fife