Shuttle, Houston

by Paul Dye

  That first trip to Russia was amazing. We all had the same feeling—we were headed into the enemy camp. Everyone on the small team had grown up in the 1960s with the imminent threat of nuclear confrontation hanging over our heads. We talked about that, and without an exception, we had all grown up expecting that the world would end in a nuclear confrontation. Russia was the enemy—an unknown and dark enemy who couldn’t be trusted. Russia was a mystery, made more mysterious by the fact that we didn’t speak their language, and they often didn’t speak ours. Interpreters were the rule. We’d all been raised on East-versus-West spy movies and we suspected that there would be KGB agents watching us every moment—would they suspect us of espionage and whisk us away to some basement prison cell? It was an uncomfortable feeling, but it proved to be an adventure, and our fears were unfounded. The Russian space people were just like us in the end—and not, as those of us raised on Star Trek assumed, like representatives of the Klingon Empire.

  On our first few trips to Russia, we always stayed in a fancy, modern, Western-style hotel built specifically for European and American guests—the Pentahotel. Since I was used to staying in Holiday Inns or Best Westerns on official travel, this place was amazing. I’m sure anyone who travels extensively to large cities would have just found it to be normal accommodations. I believe that we were told that Lufthansa owned it at the time, and all the food and drink were brought in from Germany every day so that the cooks could work with the finest-quality foodstuffs—not what was available locally. Aside from the lavish fit and finish of the place, I was impressed that there were large, fit men in black suits with little ear phones and coiled cords going down into their collars stationed in the lobby. I mentioned this to my translator one day, that I thought it was interesting that the government was supplying security for us. “Oh, nyet,” he said, “those men aren’t from the government; they are from the Russian mafia. They are here to make sure that the people with money, foreigners, aren’t inconvenienced by petty criminals or locals who might harass them.” I thought it odd that our security was being ensured by the dark side of Russian culture, but I was pretty sure that no petty thug was going to take a chance messing with us.

  The building where they drove us for our first meetings was something that we would refer to as an “off-site conference center.” We drove for quite a while getting there and, at one point, we passed a sign that clearly showed a pictorial representation of a shooting range in one direction, and an office building in another. We were just happy that they turned toward the office building the first time we went past it. We still sometimes referred to the place as the Rifle Range, though. We had big meetings in lavish conference rooms, and if we asked for someone to make a copy of a piece of paper so that everyone could see it, that was a big deal.

  Apparently, they had only one copying machine in the entire facility. We later found out that they had one, almost original, IBM PC in a little office—and that was all the computer power they had to support our meetings. We soon learned to bring laptops—but always special ones we checked out just for Russian travel. There was concern that we might bring back viruses (which did, in fact, happen), and they wanted to be able to wipe the laptops clean and keep them isolated from the rest of the JSC computer network. Later on, when thumb drives became popular, because of the threat of computer viruses we were warned to never put a thumb drive we obtained locally into any computer we had. This was a wise piece of advice, and a best practice that was proven to be correct more than once in the years people went back and forth.

  By the time spring of 1993 rolled around, I had been to Moscow two or three times. Space Station Freedom was stalled and the funding future was cloudy. Freedom had survived a funding battle in Congress by something like one vote, and the writing was on the wall that it wasn’t going to survive forever if its only purpose was science and engineering experimentation in low-Earth orbit. And so, as always happens, politicians got involved. While we had been diligently working to prove that, yea verily, we really could dock an American Space Shuttle to a Russian space station, forces in Washington were busy coming up with a strategy that was bigger than that. Freedom was to be rescoped and redesigned—that was a given. Virtually the entire program office in Reston, Virginia, was reassigned or let go—the program was effectively over. Freedom was done—but the idea of a space station was not. A new set of offices was set up in a tall building in Crystal City and a tiger team was created. Their purpose: come up with a space station that we could afford, an International Space Station that included the Russians.

  As luck would have it, the spring of 1993 saw an announcement that a new Flight Director selection was going to take place. I once again pulled out my folder of application paragraphs and interview questions and submitted my paperwork by the deadline. Based on previous selections, we figured that interviews would not be until late summer or early fall. In the meantime, we had to keep busy doing what we were doing, while waiting for the wheels of the process to turn slowly. Because my unofficial deputies were doing such a great job taking care of the section on day-to-day business, I was able to spend my extra time looking at the potential docking mission with Mir, the Russian space station. And then I got a phone call from the Directorate office, asking if I could head up to Crystal City for a few weeks. Crystal City? Hmm… I had been studiously avoiding work on the space station for several years—why did they want me to go to Crystal City, home of the “Freedom Redesign”?

  Well, I was told, they were going to be bringing in the Russians for some preliminary meetings, and I was the closest thing we had to a Russian system-operations expert at the time. Besides, they had asked for a Flight Director, and they had thought of me.

  Hmm… what the heck did that mean? I wasn’t a Flight Director. I had simply sent in my application! I mentioned that fact on the phone, and I was told again they needed someone who could represent the Flight Director Office, everyone in the office was busy, and they wanted me to go. It would be four months before the selection process was over, and having been disappointed by unhatched eggs before, I didn’t really want to think that I was a shoo-in, but I took it as a positive sign and headed for Washington.

  When I got to Crystal City, I found a typical tiger team situation—lots of people living in hotels close to the office space, sixteen-hour days, schedules that assumed everyone was available at all times of the day and night—and a very troubling sign on the door of the office they had assigned me. The office itself was pretty nice, in that it had a view that stretched from the Pentagon out toward the National Mall, and we were way up high. It was nice. The troubling sign? My name was already engraved on a plaque—not just written in marker on a piece of paper. This was a bad sign in my book. I had planned to come to Washington for a week or two of meetings with the Russians—I had not planned on staying! Working in Washington has never been a goal of mine; in fact, quite the opposite is true. Oh, it’s a nice place to visit—but live and work there? I’m sorry, there really isn’t any kind of work that I enjoy that is actually done there. It didn’t take long until I was on the phone to Randy Stone, the head of MOD, telling him that while I was happy to stay for the Russian visit, I wanted to make sure that he was ready to get me the heck out of there! Whether that would hurt or help my chances of being part of the office, I really didn’t care. All I knew is that Washington was not for me.

  The meetings with the Russians were interesting because I knew them and they knew me. Not well, mind you, but I was a familiar face, and they understood who I was and what I knew. That made me a person who they listened to, and in small sessions it seemed I had more clout than I officially did. The Russians came to Crystal City with a sound idea of how they could help the effort to get the new International Space Station kick-started and off the ground—and what they proposed turned out to be very much where we ended up. Give it to the Russians: while their equipment might seem primitive, they generally have simple ideas that work. And after we have run around tryi
ng to come up with complex solutions, cost and scheduling realities often drive the program right to where the Russians started.

  The summer rolled on, and I was rescued from Washington. I continued to spend much of my time working Russian issues with the small group within MOD that was looking at the docking mission. There was a lot that needed to be done to make it work—not the least of which was modifying an Orbiter to handle a docking system. That was Engineering’s problem. Ours was figuring out how best to rendezvous and dock without blowing the solar arrays off the Mir in the process. We held regular weekly teleconferences with the Russians, each one starting early in the morning our time and late in the afternoon for the Russians. I guess that from 1992 on, I lived on a global clock, working hours and shifts as necessary, but rarely working a week of normal hours.

  By late October the Flight Director selection process was still not wrapped up. Most of us involved had reached the point where we were fed up enough (almost) to the point of not caring—so long as it came to an end. In early November, we held yet another set of joint meetings with the Russians, this time on our turf. Because of the nature of security and bureaucracy, we held these meetings off-site, just out the side gate of JSC at the leased Regents Park building, a nondescript two-story, smoked-glass structure where we could reconfigure rooms to meet the number of splinter meetings we had scheduled. There was always a meeting or two going on, but most of us were only needed about half the time, so we’d drift in and out of empty offices and back and forth to our offices on-site when we had an hour or more. It was a different, separate world from our normal jobs, and time seemed sort of suspended. Every day seemed the same—the topics were the same, the arguments the same, the details of going over protocols… the same. Translation followed translation, and it seemed like every day we started and ended at the same place; progress was slow enough so as to be hard to measure.

  It was about this time that the operations people working the project adopted the movie Groundhog Day as their theme. The movie featured Bill Murray as a news reporter stuck in a small town, forced to live the same day over and over again—until he learned the key to life and happiness and broke out of the time warp. We had no such lesson to learn, and things just kept on going slower and slower. Coupled with this was the knowledge that the Flight Director selection process was actually supposed to be coming to a close, which made things even more excruciating. Rumors about names being crossed off whiteboards were flying around, but it was all happening a half mile away, back in our on-site office, while I was trapped at Regents Park.

  What we were waiting for was “the call.” We didn’t want to get it too soon, of course. But without a copy of the scorecard, I didn’t know where they were in the process. Thanksgiving was coming. In fact, it was the day before Thanksgiving, and we were trying to wrap things up with the Russians so that everyone could have a long weekend. I couldn’t believe that we were going to have to suffer through four solid days of limbo—knowing that we hadn’t been dismissed, but not knowing who had been chosen. I think the holdup was that some of the nonselectees couldn’t be found. Well, of course not—it was a holiday week! I distinctly remember leaving the Regents Park conference room the day before Thanksgiving with no call, and telling myself that I just didn’t care anymore. I really had given up. And then—one of the secretaries assigned to the building handed me a note saying that Lee Briscoe wanted to talk to me. Lee was the Chief of the Flight Director Office. And he actually didn’t want me to call; he wanted to know if I could be in his office at 2:00 p.m. that day.

  Nonselectees didn’t get a call asking to be in the Chief’s office at a particular time; they got a call from the secretary to schedule an appointment for their debrief. It was noon when I got the note over at Regents Park, and I was fairly certain I knew what it meant. I also knew that folks back in the office had been keeping score on those ubiquitous whiteboards, and I really didn’t want to run into anyone to talk about what everything meant until I knew for sure one way or another. Seeing as how it was lunchtime, I figured that the best chance not to run into anyone was to head back to the office right away, then hide out with my door closed. To even further avoid folks, I didn’t walk the long way through the building to my office (which was on the far end from the parking lot)—I walked around the building and came in the short way. I later found out that a couple of my friends had seen me, and, noting how absolutely intent I was on staring straight ahead and not pausing, they had a pretty good idea what was up.

  I got to my office an hour before the meeting, and I can’t for the life of me remember what I did for that hour. The WWW part of the internet hadn’t yet been invented, so I couldn’t have been surfing the web. I probably just stared out the window and waited for the clock to come around to the appointed hour. When the time came, I headed up to the third floor, corner office, and when I came out of the stairwell, there were Flight Directors standing in their doorways, smiling and looking at who was headed to see Briscoe. It was then that I knew for sure—I was getting my chance to prove I had what it takes to sit in the center seat.

  Chapter 5

  Becoming Flight

  I walked down the short hall to the office of the Chief Flight Director, and when I turned in there, I saw two other faces that I recognized—John Shannon, of the Guidance, Navigation, and Control (GNC) section, and Bryan Austin, a Simulation Supervisor. I knew John—we’d flown on teams together, but Bryan I really hadn’t spent much (if any) time with. As we entered the secretary’s office, there were handshakes and congratulations. It was clear by then that we were the three lucky selectees to make it through the process. We were the Class of 1993.

  Sitting down with office chief Lee Briscoe and his deputy, Gary Coen, our joy was short lived. Lee began with something like, “Gentlemen, congratulations—you may have been the cream of the crop, the top picks within the Directorate, but now that we have you here in the office, you’re lower than whale shit on the bottom of the ocean.” Okay, so it didn’t really dampen our euphoria that much; we still knew that we were now on the road to the center seat. But we also knew that we had a lot of work ahead of us, and part of that work was to prove to the office and to everyone who worked in MOD (Mission Operations Directorate) that we were worthy of the job.

  Logistics came first, of course. Transitioning to the office was not an overnight job. Frankly, the fact that the selection ended up at Thanksgiving gave us about a month between that holiday and the Christmas holidays to get ourselves extricated from our previous roles and move up to the third floor so that we could effectively start fresh in the new year. December has always been a lonely time in the MOD buildings. Unless we had a reason to be flying a mission, it was rare for anything important to be on the schedule. This was mostly because we all worked so hard most of the year that everyone needed a break. It was also a good time for folks to use up their accumulated “use or lose” leave and comp time. With lots of people gone, it was a quiet time for us to pack our old offices and move to the new ones—three freshly equipped rooms next to each other on one end of the Flight Director Office. I can’t remember who picked theirs first, but it might have been me—the only differences between them was who had the thermostat that controlled all three rooms.

  Previous Flight Director Selectees had shared an office during their year of training, usually because the office didn’t have that much room to spread out. We, however, were blessed (or cursed) with the fact that the office was expanding and had moved into the space previously occupied by the Astronaut Office (which had been located there since the founding of Johnson Space Center). The blessing was that we all had our own private office—for me, one I would inhabit for the next twenty years. The curse was that we were all going to be training together, and a common room could be advantageous in terms of training and reading as a team. I don’t know for sure which model is better (subsequent classes shared offices at times, and some liked it, some didn’t). I personally liked the privacy for readi
ng and researching—plus we could always all go to one office for briefings and study sessions.

  That first six months was designed as academic study—we needed to get up to speed on all the systems that we weren’t expert on, and we had to do it quickly. We did this by reading the training workbooks, the operations manuals that gave the details of the procedures, the procedures themselves, the malfunction procedures, and the rules. We had briefings by the systems experts (many different ones every week). We finished up by doing the crew lessons in the part-task training devices and simulators. Finally, we’d have a briefing from each discipline on “rules of thumb” and other tricks they had that weren’t really in any of the other documents. For my pilot friends, I described this period as the Type Rating from Hell—we had to learn everything there was to know about the spacecraft so that when a flight controller told us about a problem, or asked us for a procedure, there was no mystery behind the request.

  The tricky part about being the Flight Director is integrating the knowledge of all of the various disciplines, thinking about how everything fits together to accomplish tasks. No matter how much we emphasized integration, and no matter how well our flight controllers worked with other disciplines, there was always a bigger picture that only the Flight Director really held in their head. After all, we had the ultimate responsibility for mission success and crew safety. The big picture was ours. Someone once described the Flight Director as the conductor of the orchestra: we might not know how to play all the instruments well, but we could probably make noise with any of them—and we knew what they should sound like when played well.