by Paul Dye
The Flight Director Selection process continued to be informal into the early days of the Shuttle program. The first few Shuttle Flight Directors related that Gene Kranz simply dropped in to their office and asked if they were ready to take over as “Flight.” Some may not have been given a choice. The Flight Director Office was formed up as an organizational entity about that time, and the active Flight Directors transferred into the office as a full-time job. The first true competitive selection that I recall was in the early 1980s. I distinctly remember several senior guys smiling and moving rapidly through the halls, filled with excitement at the fact that they had been given the nod. This was an early 1980s class—the men with whom I would serve as a front room flight controller in the years before and just after the Challenger was lost. These were the years in which I built some sort of reputation for being a good, common-sense systems guy who understood flight operations and the need to sometimes be quick rather than precise.
I know that I recognized that the way to be a Flight Director was to learn everything I could about everyone else’s systems and operations—not just to concentrate on my own assignment and my own job. I took that idea to heart and studied everything I could. When I wasn’t assigned to a simulation, and had nothing else preassigned to do, I would go to a back room and watch the sim—but not as if I were working in my discipline. I intentionally didn’t punch up any of my discipline’s loops or displays. Instead, I brought up the Flight Director Loop, the air-to-ground channels, and whatever display was on the Flight Director Console (we could tell where things were called up), and listened to the entire sim as if I were training to be Flight. It was an eye-opening experience, and I learned quickly how much I had to learn.
I first applied for the Flight Director position in 1989 or 1990. I was still relatively low on the civil service pay grade schedule, not yet a section head, but a recognized Ascent/Entry and Orbit front room guy who had fought a few battles of note. I had been the face of the Spacelab Instrument Pointing System at many meetings and boards before the Challenger went down. After that accident, I became one of the founders of a new MMACS (Mechanical Maintenance Arm and Crew Systems) position, and served as the Ascent/Entry MMACS for the Return to Flight with STS-26. My real claim to fame was probably in the landing/deceleration world, which I loved because it involved lots of flying stuff—especially in the big Vertical Motion Simulator (VMS) at NASA-Ames. I spent a lot of time with the Shuttle commanders and pilots for the first time (my Spacelab days were spent mostly with Mission Specialists). Again, I became known for a common-sense approach and an encyclopedic knowledge of flying machines.
I was having a great time as a MMACS, and the job put me in a strategic position to learn all I could about the whole Shuttle system and prepare myself for the Flight Director job. Since I started out in a bit of a backwater (the Spacelab Systems group), I had to work hard to get to know my counterparts in all the Shuttle systems disciplines. I did this by working on as many broad assignments as I could. The landing/deceleration improvements exposed me to a wide variety of rules and procedure discussions, and I spent a lot of time preparing for presentations and defenses of the new operational philosophies at many flight techniques meetings. It was a lot like defending an academic thesis for a graduate degree—flight technique reviews were freewheeling, with lots of very smart people trying to find holes in your arguments. It was a great place to learn the craft while making a reputation (for good or bad).
I looked for interesting side projects as well. For instance, one of the things that the program wanted the Mission Operations Directorate (MOD) to demonstrate before we returned the Shuttle to flight was our Emergency Mission Control Center (EMCC) capability. EMCC was an alternate to MCC (Mission Control Center) Houston—a facility that was vulnerable to damage (or worse) from hurricanes. The EMCC concept in those days was developed by the advent of a special portable computer that could decode the Shuttle telemetry stream and provide that decode data to laptop computers running special software that showed flight controllers what they needed to help the crew prepare for, and fly, an entry. All that we needed was a safe facility with access to the telemetry stream coming in from the satellites, as well as good communications capability. And someone figured out that the best place to do that was right at the ground site for the satellite antennas in White Sands, New Mexico.
The concept was simple—in the case of an imminent loss of the MCC, we’d load a team of flight controllers onto our KC-135 aircraft (the infamous Vomit Comet) along with their computers and a pile of checklists and flight plans. We’d fly them to Holloman Air Force Base on the edge of the White Sands Missile Range. There, we’d catch rides on Army helicopters across the small mountain range that separated the missile range from the NASA Ground Terminal, commandeer some desks and communications boxes from the ground terminal, and set up shop in our new digs. On paper, this looked great—the problem was that no one had ever done it. It was time for a road trip!
Flight Director Al Pennington was the leader of the “Great EMCC Migration of 1988,” scheduled for October. We had a full team of flight controllers. Most of them were Ascent/Entry qualified and were assigned to STS-26, the first mission after Challenger, which we were getting ready to fly. We planned the activity to start with a simulation running in MCC, with a crew in the Shuttle simulator. We’d declare an emergency, and everyone and their gear would head for the airfield about 7 miles away, load up all our gear, and launch for New Mexico. The astronauts in the simulator would keep “flying” while we were in transit, and when we got on station, we’d make contact and control them from EMCC as they flew an entry.
This all worked fine, right up to the point when we were landing at Holloman. It turns out that in fleeing a make-believe hurricane in Houston, we’d flown right into a real blizzard in the high desert! After a temporary diversion to Albuquerque, while Holloman plowed their runway, we finally touched down (with some slipping and sliding on the remaining snow and ice) a couple hours late. We then loaded up the helicopters and waited for good enough visibility to launch—which finally occurred after noon. The flight across the highly classified missile range was interesting as we were encouraged “not to look out the windows, and to forget anything we might see.” Over the mountains, we approached the ground terminal antennas bristling with fresh snow shining from the ground. Our landing site was the approach road to the facility, and with six Army Hueys making combat-like approaches, we looked for all the world like a scene out of Apocalypse Now. Trucks and vans met us and our gear, and we were up and running within about thirty minutes of arrival.
It was only after the fact when we realized that about 80 percent of the Ascent/Entry team for STS-26 was participating in this adventure, and when one high-level manager asked, “What would have happened if you’d had a helicopter mid-air in all that snow?” we realized the programmatic risk we’d taken. If we’d lost a bunch of key people in an accident, we could have delayed the Shuttle flight by a year or more while replacements were trained. It was decided that from then on, if we ever did an exercise like that again, we’d make sure we took less critical players… just in case. But it sure was fun, in addition to being educational!
We trained harder and longer for STS-26 than for just about any mission NASA ever flew. We had the time and we wanted to stay current, so the hours piled up. We flew so many cases that they all blurred together, and we finally felt that there was little more the sim team could do for us—or to us. It was a great team to be on, and most of us stuck together in later years as we went on to lead MOD in many different positions.
Despite the fact that I was a grade lower than most applicants (most folks applying were GS-13s with a section head job under their belt and were looking for a promotion to GS-14 that came with a Flight Director selection), I was encouraged to apply when that 1989 selection call came along. Apparently, I had impressed a few people along the way as a flight controller, and there was always an informal (probably unwri
tten) list of flight controllers who were being watched as possible candidates. I spent hours working on my application, trying to get the words exactly right so that I would be among the relatively few who would get an interview. Selections took a long time back then—a half a year from the first announcement to the final selection was not uncommon. And there were all sorts of tallies kept on whiteboards throughout the flight control offices: who had applied, who had gotten an interview, who had been asked back for second interviews, and so on. It was a topic of conversation, and those in the game were usually the ones not talking.
When I got a call from the secretary in the Flight Director Office to schedule me for an interview with Mr. Larry Bourgeois, that was a pretty big deal—just to get an interview, and to get it when I was so junior. I had not yet been a section head, and the section head job was considered a prerequisite simply because it ensured that candidates had received a certain amount of personnel management training and experience—rudimentary leadership credentials, if you will.
If I recall correctly, and this may be colored in my memory, I think that there was a somewhat illicit list of interview questions from past selections floating about that I used to prepare for the interview. I know that for my second and third interview tries (in later years), I had my first interview prep to go by, but I remember preparing fairly thoroughly for the first, so I must have had some idea what would be asked. That first interview was one-on-one, just me and Larry. I think that we had worked together on console once or twice, but not a great deal, so we didn’t have a lot of background—yet the interview was thorough and collegial. I honestly think both of us knew that it was a rehearsal for a later time. There were good, solid candidates who were in line for this selection, and it would have been astounding for me to get it. I saw it as a learning experience, and it was—a good way for me to get an idea of what they were specifically looking for, and a way to calm my nerves by exposing me to the process.
Interviews went on for several weeks, people’s schedules being what they are. When the interviews were complete, the waiting began—and it went on, and on, and on. Back then, the Office Chief made his selections, passed them up the line to the head of Mission Operations (Gene Kranz) who, if he agreed, passed them up the line until they reached some fairly lofty position at Headquarters. Flight Directors are the men and women in the hot seat during human spaceflight missions, and the administrator needs to know (and have faith in) whomever is holding the stick.
Tradition has it that those candidates who are not selected get the word first—usually with a phone call from the Flight Director Office secretary, who informs them that the chief wants to meet to debrief their interview. This call meant that you didn’t get it—sorry, but we’ll tell you what we thought about you. As phone calls went out, and debriefs were scheduled, names were crossed off lists on the whiteboards throughout the building. Finally, only a couple names were left—and the selectees were known. I, of course, was not one of them. I felt sort of like the loser in a raffle drawing. I had no real expectation of winning because the odds against me were too great, but sure, there was a little disappointment that I was going to have to wait a couple years before the next chance. In the meantime, of course, I had a lot to learn—and the MMACS section head job was calling.
And it appeared that I was in line to get that section. Our long-time head was moving on, and I was the senior MMACS Officer, so it seemed like a shoo-in. Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite that simple. It turned out that we didn’t have the depth in the section that we needed, and if they gave me the job, I’d either be a part-time section head because I was needed on console, or we’d be shorthanded on console. The bottom line was that the job came open just a little too early for me, and so I didn’t get it. But I was told to be patient. And sure enough, less than a year later, we had improved our staffing situation and they moved my predecessor out (to another section), and me in. During that time there was another Flight Director selection, and while I once again went through the interview routine, I was once again told, “Not quite yet—get a little more time in the section head role.” When I asked what I should do differently for the next selection, I was basically told, “Don’t change a thing.” It just wasn’t my turn.
An interesting thing happened between that selection and the next—I became a noted expert in Russian space systems. At least, I was noted that way within our organization. I had always been curious about the Russian space program, but not in a way that I went after information. To me, it seemed that what they did was fairly primitive, as were their systems. I was much more interested in the things we had going on in the Shuttle world, and particularly in trying to run the largest section in our division with a certain amount of efficiency. The MMACS section was comprised of two major groups—the traditional systems flight controllers for the Orbiter’s mechanical systems comprised one half, and the experts in Crew System and Inflight Maintenance (IFM) made up the other side. This second group did much more than flight control. In fact, flight control was a small part of their job. They primarily oversaw crew training and operations engineering for all of the many things that occupied the crew cabin—cameras, clothing, seats, suits, the galley—as well as all the tools and maintenance procedures with which the crew needed to become proficient.
The size of the section was such that it was really too big for one guy to handle—twenty-nine people at one point, counting both contractors and civil servants. It was roughly twice the optimum size and, of course, there was no such thing as a deputy section head. In order to manage things, I picked my most senior mechanical guy and my most mature IFM guy, and I asked each of them to lead their respective halves of the section. I told them there was no more pay, more responsibility, and that they should consider it a good training ground for what might come later on. In other words, I delegated. To me, showing trust in people is the best way to get them to perform beyond what they think they can do. And in this case, it worked well—so well, in fact, that I found I had extra time on my hands.
I was known throughout our division management as someone who preferred technical assignments to managerial assignments; if I had a choice, I’d take on a technical evaluation long before I volunteered to come up with a new management process. As a result I was asked to do interesting things. When the new Shuttle Endeavour was being readied for shipment from its assembly plant in Palmdale, California, to the Kennedy Space Center, a team of senior NASA people from Johnson Space Center (JSC) had to go out and perform a Management Acceptance inspection. Jack Knight, then head of the Systems Division, asked me to go because he knew I worked on airplanes and would have a decent chance of finding any issues with assembly or finish work. This turned out to be a great trip. We crawled all through the Orbiter—I even took a caving excursion deep out into the left wing tip. A hatch inside the left wheel well led into the internal bays of the wing. The ribs weren’t built the way you would see in a typical aircraft, with solid metal stampings cut through with lightening holes. Rather, the ribs were made up of individual composite struts acting as a truss to keep the upper and lower skins apart. I had to work my way through the maze of struts, looking at the quality of the work while being extremely careful not to put the slightest side load on any of them. These were paper-thin boron tubes that depended on their perfect cylindrical shape to maintain compressive strength. It was a challenge—much like moving through a cave passage with delicate speleothems (formations) on all sides, none of which you are allowed to touch. Yes, I was glad I had several years of caving experience back in college—and I was probably the only person in the entire organization who did.
The Palmdale trip was interesting, and after it, in early 1992, I got a call from Flight Director Gary Coen asking if I would be interested in taking a special overseas trip. Gary had been the Ascent/Entry Flight Director for STS-26, the Return to Flight mission after Challenger, and I had been his MMACS Officer. That team trained more hours for that flight than any other Ascent/Entry
team ever had, and we grew very knowledgeable about each other. It seemed that Gary had been asked to put together a small team of operations experts to answer a Headquarters call for a trip to Moscow. The Soviet Union had broken up just a few months earlier, and shortly thereafter President Clinton and President Yeltsin had gotten together to talk about many things. One of those things was high technology space workers, and what was going to happen to them in a country that quite frankly had no way to support a space program anymore.
The concern of our government was that these space and missile experts might end up selling their services to the highest bidder for the simple reason that they needed to survive and feed their families. Those highest bidders were countries that wanted to develop missile and weapons capabilities—nuclear weapon capabilities. Our counterparts in the Soviet (now Russian) space program were experts in ballistic missiles. Having them go to work for countries unfriendly to the West was clearly not in the best interest of any nation in the Western sphere of influence. The solution was simple—we needed to give the Russian aerospace community something to do, and the money to do it with. And so was born the idea of cooperation in space. The presidents turned it over to their respective space program heads to figure out the details, but the basic idea was that we needed to come up with something that we could do together in space that would allow the US to contribute money in their direction. The Russian program cost a great deal less to operate than the US program (due to the low valuation of their currency), so a small contribution from our side could make a great deal happen on theirs.
Of course, the heads of the two programs met and talked about cooperation, but they quickly turned it over to their experts to actually figure out what we could do—what kind of a joint program we could put together. The Apollo-Soyuz test program of the mid-1970s had docked two spacecraft—one from each country—in low-Earth orbit as a symbolic gesture. So naturally, we thought of docking. Gary called me because he was taking a small team over to Moscow to discuss the potential for joint missions, and such a mission would need a docking system of some kind. I had been doing some technical evaluations of docking and berthing systems that were being developed for the Space Station Freedom project (another of my “interesting technical assignments”) and, therefore, I was the most qualified person he could think of to go along as his systems expert. It helped that I still had a valid official passport from my Spacelab days, which meant that I could be ready to go quickly.
