Shuttle, Houston

by Paul Dye

  In addition to the FAO and the various incarnations of Payloads Officers, there were several other positions that worked in the Shuttle MCC that got little notice outside the operations team. Most of them resided in the back row—which didn’t mean that they weren’t important.

  We usually kept the Flight Surgeons back in the corner, not because we didn’t appreciate or like them, but because in that spot it was hard for anyone to look over their shoulder and see what was considered to be privileged medical data—the vital signs on the astronauts. It was no joke that these were matters of legal privacy, but of course if a medical event came to have an effect on the mission, the Flight Surgeon would share that information with the Flight Director, oftentimes over the airwaves, so as to keep such things off the communications loops. It was the Flight Surgeons’ job to know and understand each astronaut and advise the Flight Director if something was going on that might affect the mission. They could do this just by listening to the crewmember, but a better way to really get a feeling for each crewmember’s health was through a private medical conference, or PMC.

  PMCs were the exception to the rule that everything going on between the ground and the spacecraft was generally available to the public. NASA did not operate Space Shuttles in secret (except, of course, when the mission was being flown for the Department of Defense), and we tried very hard to keep everything decisional out in the open. Reporters who weren’t familiar with us often thought we were hiding something—I think they had simply seen too many science fiction movies—but for the most part it was easier to keep things in the open than it was to try and keep them hidden.

  To conduct a PMC, the Flight Surgeon and a few selected folks (selected by the Surgeon) would set up in a conference room and the air-to-ground loops were routed to that room—and nowhere else. PMCs were scheduled every few days, or they could be called by the crew. A Flight Director could participate, but had to do so from the conference room. Occasionally, mission impacts might be discussed, and when this happened the Flight Surgeon would fill in the Flight Director. Crews were generally very good about not trying to slip things past the team by using a PMC, and the various commanders made sure of that. Commanders and Flight Directors understood the responsibility of keeping everyone in the loop when it came to mission impacts—nothing good could come out of people marching to different tunes.

  The Flight Surgeon was also a welcome addition to any team because if you came down with a headache or indigestion, you couldn’t just call a halt to your work and go home. For this reason, the flight control team was under the Flight Surgeon’s charge as well. They kept a medical box handy—the Surgeon’s Little Box O’ Pills—that gave the staff what they needed to keep controllers on console when they were needed. Generally speaking, most of the stuff in the medical box was over the counter, and it was certainly appreciated when some back room’s spaghetti feast started to have adverse effects.

  In the other corner of the back row, we kept the person who most of the public considered to be the MCC—or at least the voice of Mission Control: the Public Affairs Officer (PAO). A PAO was always on console when we were flying a mission. They didn’t support many simulations, but they were the ones whose voices went out on the mission commentary on NASA TV. Whether they were giving a play by play of the ascent or entry, or occasionally telling folks what was going on during a slow overnight shift, it was the PAO who had to interpret what was going on for the general public. The PAO could choose what video went out—either from the spacecraft cameras or from the cameras in the MCC—and tried to keep everyone out of trouble. They also were a frequent point of contact from the outside world to the flight control team, even if they didn’t want to be.

  I remember one night on STS-95, the flight that carried John Glenn on his second space mission (the first since his Mercury flight), when my PAO walked over and got my attention. It seemed that they had been forwarded an email by the headquarters PAO, who had gotten it from the NASA administrator, who had gotten it from a White House staffer—who had been asked to send it by President Clinton. The message was that the president wanted to send a personal greeting, privately, to John, congratulating him on making it back into space. He didn’t necessarily want the message to be public—it wasn’t about publicity—just a note to a friend.

  The first thing I did when I read the note was, of course, to wonder if it was real. So I tasked the PAO to go back and use another string of people to verify that the email addresses were valid, that the people in the chain were real—and that they were truly connected to the White House. This they did, and sure enough—the message was authentic. So we dropped it into the email uplink to John. These were the kind of things that fell into the PAO’s playbook under the heading of “other duties as assigned.” It was a broad book, and they were often quite busy trying to keep everyone inside and outside the control center happy and informed.

  Of course, I would be remiss if I didn’t also acknowledge the many hundreds of support people who made the MCC itself work. Ground Control (GC), led by an officer who was located in the front corner of the room, owned everything in the MCC building and out into the global communications network. If the data or commands weren’t getting to or from the vehicle—we called GC. If someone’s console was on fire, that was GC’s problem. And if the vending machines were empty on a Sunday afternoon, well, you could complain to GC. But the truth was he didn’t have much pull with the food vendors. However, I knew GCs who cared enough about their responsibility to the team that they would send one of their backroom people to a nearby grocery store to pick up what controllers needed if necessary.

  From the computer and communications technicians to the building maintenance workers, and all the way to the janitorial staff—the MCC didn’t function unless everyone functioned. In fact, I made it a point that when mission patches were handed out to my teams, no one got a patch until Olga—our long-time cleaning lady—got hers first. It was only fair, since she was there when we came to work to launch a mission, and she was there when we went home after landing. No one was unimportant—Mission Control was a team effort.

  Chapter 3

  Being a Flight Controller

  The average flight controller for the Shuttle program started with either NASA or one of the Shuttle contractors right out of college. If they were with NASA, they might have started out as a co-op student before they left school, because for years that was the only reliable way to get an actual government job with the agency. Regardless—anyone starting out as a flight controller started out young, with only a few exceptions. Flight Operations were all-consuming and required a deep time commitment—not just eight hours a day for five days a week. New flight controllers were generally people who stayed late to study, lived in a one-bedroom apartment, and had little else going on outside work, at least until they reached the point where they were certified to work console.

  I started with NASA as a co-op student in 1980, before the first Shuttle flight. I was one of a few hired at the beginning of the new wave of staff expansion to support the Shuttle program. The Johnson Space Center (JSC) had downsized considerably at the end of the Apollo moon program, with many talented people being cast aside through reductions in force (RIFs). This formed what was called the “saddle curve,” with lots of employees in their mid-to late-fifties and a lot of young folks—but few in the middle. I was fortunate to get in at the beginning of the new buildup because it put me ahead of a large number of young engineers who joined the program in the early 1980s.

  Like a few others, I found myself placed in this fascinating organization known as Flight Operations. It didn’t take me long to realize that these were the folks who ran space missions from Mission Control, and that the individuals I was working with had directly served in the Control Center for Apollo and Skylab. Many were veterans from before Apollo, having come aboard when NASA was first learning to fly in space with Mercury and Gemini. I learned the culture and thought processes of flight control
by sharing offices with men who had controlled the moon flights and who had kept humans in space for months on Skylab. I heard the stories of how they essentially created the space program from nothing—making it all up as they went along, making mistakes while figuring out better ways to do things. It was an amazing group of mentors for a kid not yet out of college.

  Flight control, I learned, was about knowing more about the system or discipline for which you were responsible than the people who built it. Oh, there were engineers who understood the details better than you might, and they could be called on for fine-toothed-comb troubleshooting when needed. But most of those design engineers didn’t see the big picture—they didn’t understand how their equipment might be used in space. They often thought in terms of what was good for their system or component, but not how it melded with all the other systems to achieve the bigger goal of a spaceflight. That integrated regime was where flight controllers had to live. It wasn’t just your system or your box that was important—it was accomplishing the overall mission that mattered.

  Like most engineering students, I thought of engineering in terms of discrete disciplines. I was an aeronautical engineer, for instance—I studied aircraft design and operations. Others studied mechanical engineering, and yet others studied electrical or chemical engineering. But in the operational world, we couldn’t afford to be so specialized. In order to be successful within Flight Operations, you had to understand not only your own system but how it interacted with every other system on the spacecraft. More than that, you had to understand your system’s place in the timeline as well as its relative importance in a crisis. You had to learn when it was your time to lead the way and when it was time to follow. And you had to learn to think very, very fast.

  Spacecraft in low-Earth orbit move at about 5 miles each second, and there is no way that you can simply pull over and park it while you try to figure things out. Once you leave Earth, the clock is always ticking. The first rule of thumb was that you always had to have a plan before you lifted off—and if everything went the way you expected, then you executed that plan, and took joy in the fact that it all went well. You met your goals—life was good. But the important part about having a flight controller’s mind was that in an off-nominal situation you could evaluate a wide number of options in the blink of an eye and not only be able to head off in the correct direction but be able to explain why it was the best of all the options—or at least one of a family of options that would take the mission in the correct direction.

  Potential flight controllers either had or developed this quick mind—or they simply didn’t make it. Some likened it to the ability to play chess, a game where you need to look ahead a number of potential moves and try to figure out which set of moves is most likely to achieve an advantage over your opponent. But in chess, you don’t have the same time pressure that you do when you’re hurtling through space. Sure, a timer is involved in chess—but you have minutes, not seconds, to evaluate the possible moves. In the MCC (Mission Control Center), there was nothing more frustrating than having a slow thinker in a critical path between you and what you needed to achieve. It happened though, and the team usually suffered because of it. These folks were eventually weeded out, given office assignments, or moved to jobs where slow, methodical thinking was important.

  Flight controllers also had to be able to learn and absorb new data quickly and be able to apply what they learned in new ways without a lot of shelf life. In training simulations, failures were the name of the game—that is, we had to learn how to manage numerous failures. Any failure could easily interact with many different systems within the vehicle. Power and data bus failures were the quickest way for the training team to throw a grenade in the room. Suddenly, your redundant systems didn’t have the same redundancy that they had before. Where you might have had three ways to accomplish a necessary function, you might now have only two—or one if things got really bad. In effect, you no longer had the same vehicle operating under the same procedures and rules as you had when you lifted off. And you couldn’t lament that fact, wish it away, or hope for better—you had to work with what you had left and move forward.

  Young people learned quicker and had a larger capacity for new learning than those who were older—that was simply a fact we all understood. We piled workbooks and systems drawings onto our new flight controllers until they could recite the connections between their systems and others in their sleep. We then dumped books full of nominal and off-nominal procedures all over them and expected them to know the critical ones by memory so that in a time-critical situation they didn’t have to look them up. The typical flight controller had several book shelves of information stuffed into their brains. Most of them also created their own cheat books—we called them “goodie books”—filled with their own interpretations of the many volumes that they were responsible to know. These notebooks were what they used on console. Although management hated to admit it, it was no use trying to use someone else’s goodie book—each was written in someone’s particular mental language and organized by the way they thought (there was no configuration control on these things). There was intense competition in flight control, but the intent was not to beat someone else—it was to be the best that you could be. That being said, you were eventually ranked against others, so the competition for the best flight assignments and advancement was real.

  An Early Start

  I reported for duty at the Johnson Space Center in late September 1980. With three years of college behind me, I would have been starting my senior year if I was still in classes—but I had elected to take a Cooperative Education Student position with NASA, and that was going to add a year to my college career. As I would find out later, it was probably the best thing that ever happened to me. Even though I was going to end up spending thirty-four years in a hot, sticky, Texas climate (which I did not enjoy), I was also going to get the ride of my life—and do things I never thought possible.

  I was on track at the University of Minnesota to get my degree in aeronautical engineering. My plan had always been to seek a job somewhere close to home designing and building airplanes. Alexandria, Minnesota, was home to the Bellanca Aircraft Corporation, a place I had visited when I was a teenager. I was helping restore J-3 Cubs at an airport near my home as part of an Explorer Scouting program, and we took a couple of field trips to visit Bellanca during those years. It was a chance not only to see how real airplanes were built, but a chance to get there in airplanes; the airport was a short hour’s flight from the northern suburbs of the Twin Cities.

  Bellanca was amazing because of the craftsmanship that went into the wood-wing, steel tube, and fabric Super Viking. This was a place I wanted to work. I had no idea if they would ever be hiring, and I really didn’t know what an engineering job would be like in a place like that, but it was old-school aviation and I wanted to be a part of it.

  Then, just as my junior year of college was coming to a close, I read the terrible news that Bellanca was declaring bankruptcy. I was crushed—this meant that I might have to decide to live in Wichita! No offense to those from Kansas, but Wichita (home of Cessna, Beechcraft, Boeing, and an assortment of aviation supply companies) was not exactly my dream destination. It’s a long way from the lakes and forests of my youth and it just didn’t seem to have the kind of activities I loved—skiing, camping, and water sports. I never really considered going to work for one of the large aerospace firms. I was a small-airplane guy. I wanted to be a part of everything—design, engineering, construction, and, hopefully, flying.

  What I didn’t realize until later in life was that bankruptcy was part of the normal life cycle of small airplane companies. They succeeded, failed, and were resurrected on a regular cycle. Bellanca did, in fact, continue building airplanes on and off for many years after I thought they were gone. But hey—if I’d waited for them, I’d have never gotten involved with NASA, so it’s hard to complain.

  Fortunately, another opportunity pres
ented itself, one from a totally unexpected direction. As I chose my usual seat in the front corner of Professor Stolaric’s class on supersonic flow, I listened to him talk about a sheet of paper he had in his hand. “This announcement came to me from the College of Liberal Arts,” he said. “NASA is looking for some sort of interns. If anyone is interested, I’ll leave this here on the table.” He said this with not a little disdain—I am not sure if it was because the liberal arts college had sent it over, or he wasn’t that happy with NASA, or he just felt that anything learned outside the classroom couldn’t be all that valuable. Our department was heavy on theoreticians and very light on actual experienced engineers.

  In that moment, my life changed. I think that I knew it at the time. I had this sudden realization: “I should look into that!” I was a person who had a plan, a path. But suddenly, I was ready to step off that path, take a right turn, and see where it took me. I didn’t even know what part of NASA was looking for students, or even where these internships might be located. But I remember the idea taking over me like I had turned on a switch.

  As soon as class was over, I was out of my chair, and up to the table—and I took the piece of paper so that no one else could grab it. I don’t know if I had any competition, but I wasn’t going to let someone else have a crack at this opportunity before me. A thick set of government forms took precedence over homework the next week, followed by a trip to the local police station for fingerprinting. Then it all went into a big mailer, and off it went to NASA.

  When the envelope came from Houston, I was shocked to see that I had been accepted, and that I was given reporting instructions for September, coinciding with the start of our fall quarter. Suddenly, instead of being a live-at-home student, I was going to have to move away, find housing, and live on my own. It was a sudden and drastic change—but something inside felt that it was right, and worth it. I showed up in Houston on one of the hottest days ever recorded there, riding my 400cc Yamaha, with a backpack strapped to the seat. I had carefully packed a small box of items before I left Minnesota so that my parents could ship it to me after I found a place to live. I had ridden for a week on a little tour—going out to Salt Lake City to visit my sister, then heading south to the Grand Canyon before angling back across Arizona, New Mexico, and the vast expanse of west Texas. When I hit Houston’s Katy Freeway, my first thought was that all those people in cars were trying to kill me—this really was life in the big city!