Finding Aid for the Harry T. Briggs Papers (HSF-68)

Date

2023

Authors

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Publisher

UHCL Archives staff

Abstract

The Harry T. Briggs Papers is composed of personnel records, certificates, correspondence, training and operational manuals, handbooks, workbooks, specifications, reports, binders, plans, notes, documents, contracts, presentation slides, memorandums, handouts, booklets, brochures, telephone directories, and miscellaneous materials, documenting the entire career of quality assurance and control engineer and officer Harry T. Briggs at NASA Johnson Space Center largely between 1963 and 1991. Briggs worked as the NASA Manned Spacecraft Center quality control engineer at the Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation in Bethpage, New York, for Grumman’s construction of the Lunar Excursion Module (later the Lunar Module) for the Apollo Program. Briggs also would become the one of the chief quality control engineers who worked for JSC on the development of the Space Shuttle orbiter in the 1970s and early 1980s. Eventually, Briggs became the chief of the Requirements and Compliance Branch of the Quality Assurance Division, specifically assigned to the Safety, Reliability, and Quality Assurance (SR&QA) Office in that Branch. He was the chief quality control officer partnering with West Germany on their Biostack experiments for Apollo 16, Apollo 17, and the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in the 1970s. The bulk of the collection is composed of Briggs’ personal copies and drafts of quality assurance and quality control guidelines, manuals, contractor contracts, and other records, that he used in his role developing JSC’s quality control standards beginning with the Apollo Program through the initial design for the United States’ planned Space Station Freedom in the late 1980s. These records show the progression of quality control planning, standards, and design implemented by NASA and JSC as the various space programs developed from the 1960s through the 1980s. Briggs’ most important records are his copies of original manuals, handbooks, and other records, he created or used while assigned as NASA’s quality control engineer for the Lunar Module at Grumman Aircraft between 1963 and 1969. The other set of extremely important records in this collection are Briggs’ copies of the original West Germany Biostack experiment projects design, implementation, and report records—many in German.

Description

Keywords

NASA, Human space flight, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, space history

Citation

Harry T. Briggs Papers, HSF-68, University of Houston-Clear Lake Archives and Special Collections, Alfred R. Neumann Library, 2700 Bay Area Blvd., Houston, TX 77058-1002

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