by Paul Dye
Chapter 7
Shuttle-Mir
It was a gray day, with heavy smoke hanging in the air as six Americans stared out the window of a small Nissan van when it left the Sheremetyevo airport outside Moscow, headed for the center of the city itself. I couldn’t help but think just how improbable it would have all seemed just a few short years ago for me to be here—guests of the Russian government, in a place that I had grown up thinking of as a target for our country’s nuclear forces. Moscow! Sure, NASA had worked with the Soviet Union on the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in the mid-1970s—but nothing had really happened since then. Here we were, a decade and a half later, about to sit down with our counterparts in the Russian space program and figure out what we could do together in space. The gray buildings matched the gray skies, and the colorless cars and trucks, all looking like a dirty version of a European city. No smiles—I had noticed that already, and even though I had been prepared for it by paying attention in our cultural briefings, it was so noticeable for one who has lived his life in America. The thing is, Russians aren’t sad all the time; they are much like us. Russians just considered it idiotic (literally) to walk around with a smile on your face for no particular reason. It was going to take some getting used to.
As mentioned previously, the Shuttle-Mir Program grew out of a need to work out a way of keeping the post-Soviet rocket engineers working on peaceful projects rather than letting them be hired by countries interested in developing nuclear missile technology. Once the decision was made to fly the Shuttle to the Mir space station, we had to figure out how to do it—and what we would do when we got there. The “how” was solved by pulling out a Russian docking system that would fit both their vehicle and ours (but had not had a chance to fly). The “what we would do” was solved when we created a series of missions to bring astronauts to the Mir for long stays. We eventually flew to the Mir ten times—one of those was a nondocking mission—and traded out a long series of crewmembers who lived and did science aboard the Mir over several years.
As important as the science performed by the crewmembers was, what we really gained was years of joint operational experience working with our Russian counterparts. This became much more important as the Shuttle-Mir Program morphed into Phase 1 of the new International Space Station (ISS). The original stand-alone program became a part of the ISS when the Space Station Freedom was redesigned into the ISS and brought in the Russians, Europeans, Canadians, and Japanese. It became clear that the way to a large station in space was to make it international, and to use both Russian and US components and modules to form the majority of that station. To make that work, we were going to have to develop long-lasting, detailed working relationships based on experience and trust.
When we first sat down across the table to talk with our Russian counterparts, it became apparent that while there were some differences, overall we found that our two programs were a good example of parallel development. Our goals when we sat down to fly a mission, for instance, were pretty much the same—accomplish the mission and bring our crewmembers back safely. Those of us raised in the days of the Cold War might have had some preconceived notions about the Russians’ motives and methods of operation, but any thought of evil intent on their part evaporated when we got down to discussing the nuts and bolts of what we both did. The laws of physics and engineering are universal—not nationalistic. Trajectories worked because of physics, and so did the strength of materials, and how fluids and electronics worked. While the US systems tended toward electronics and computer sophistication that at the time had not yet been reached by the Russians, the solid and robust nature of their structures and systems served them well when it came to reliability.
The Shuttle program had never been classified, so we didn’t have to worry about sharing what we knew from a legal standpoint. Sure, there was a natural reluctance on some folks’ part—on both sides—to open up about things that we felt were our top developments. But we eventually shared most of the design data necessary to dock our spacecraft and share astronauts. Operationally, when one of our astronauts was on board a Russian spacecraft, they played by Russian rules, used Russian techniques, and spoke Russian. Likewise, in the other direction when they were on the Shuttle, they worked the way a Shuttle astronaut worked. Russians were responsible for anyone on their spacecraft, and we were responsible for anyone on ours.
While it was obvious that the astronauts and cosmonauts were going to have to spend a significant amount of time learning each other’s languages in order to work on either side of the interface, we faced challenges of our own on the ground with communications as well. We started off with the assumption that both sides should be able to work in either language, so we signed up a group of us for Russian language lessons. It was pretty easy for us to observe that more Russians already spoke English as a second language than there were Americans who spoke Russian, so we felt we should catch up. Although most of us were very experienced and educated engineers, it proved to be quite a challenge to fit the language training in with all the other work we were doing. A few flight controllers learned a great deal of Russian, but most of us had to admit that we were going to have to rely on interpreters for years to come.
The interpreters we used in the US were mostly Russians who had immigrated to our country. They were generally highly educated people with advanced degrees and outstanding academic records, but not a lot of them had space industry backgrounds. They could speak both English and Russian very well, but the problem was that much of the time we didn’t speak English—we spoke “NASA.” Half the words we used were acronyms, a shorthand language that had developed because using entire phrases was just too cumbersome and took too long. If we had to say “Reaction Control System” every time instead of “RCS,” we simply wouldn’t have had enough hours in the day to finish a discussion.
So before we could really use these outstanding interpreters, we had to send them to our own language school to teach them a lot about space systems and trajectories. Fortunately, they were quick studies. Once they had picked up the jargon and the science behind what we did, they could then figure out how to translate what we were saying into Russian. Of course, this worked both ways, so the Russians had to teach the interpreters their own jargon, and those terms had to be translated into their equivalent English (or NASA-speak) terms. I am quite certain that if an outsider who spoke and understood both Russian and English had listened in on our conversations, they would have been just as confused as a layman listening to a pure NASA-speak exchange.
Because it took a fair amount of time to conduct business through a translator, we quickly figured out that having the Russian Flight Director talk directly to the American Flight Director in real time, while events were happening in space, just wasn’t going to work. There was just too much overhead in the communication to execute real-time operations. So we created a new console position in the MCC (Mission Control Center), the Russian Interface Operator (RIO). Originally, the O stood for Officer, but some felt this sounded too military—so it went back and forth over the years, with either usage being acceptable at some point in time. The RIOs were senior flight controllers drawn from their own disciplines to serve temporary duty as RIOs. “Temporary” turned out to be for the duration of Shuttle-Mir for many of them—or at least until they were selected to be Flight Directors. Indeed, several of the early RIOs found it to be a good path to the Flight Director Office because it gave them such a good insight into the overall operation, as well as tremendous visibility among the Flight Directors already in the office.
A typical discussion between the Russian Flight Director in Moscow and the American Flight Director in MCC began with the Russian calling their own version of the RIO, the PRP (which was a Russian acronym), who then called our RIO. The translators would be listening for such calls and would translate for the RIO. The RIO would then call the MCC Flight Director and pass along the Russian message. The American Flight Director would then formulate an ans
wer, pass it back to RIO, the translators would turn it into Russian for the PRP, and the PRP would pass on the response to the Russian Flight Director. You could sometimes go get coffee while waiting for this whole loop to come back with the next response.
Of course, the RIO served more than just the Flight Director. They were there to pass information and questions back and forth between any MCC discipline and any Russian discipline, so they were very busy and constantly in demand. Their loop was a constant barrage of English and Russian, with conversations going on about trajectories, jet configurations, consumables, cabin pressures, and timelines. There were always failures being discussed and plans to change as a result. Overall, the coordination worked well because of the preparation and relationships that were built before the missions, in countless hours of meetings, both in Houston and in Moscow. These meetings began as soon as the joint program was approved, and continued well past Shuttle-Mir. In fact, they continue in some form to this day with the ISS.
We found that once we started putting crewmembers on the Mir, the normal interaction we built from the MCC to the Moscow Mission Control Center (TsUP) wasn’t enough—we actually had to have around-the-clock presence in Moscow, and the Russians needed the same thing in Houston. A small control suite was set up for the partners in each control center, and from the mid-1990s until now, there have always been American operations teams in Moscow, and Russian teams in Houston. We developed an entire apartment building in Moscow to house our teams, modernized and equipped to European standards; and the Russians had a constant presence in a set of accommodations in the US. Our teams were in Moscow to support the astronauts on the Mir, and the Ops Lead was a very experienced MOD (Mission Operations Directorate) person assigned to be on the ground in Moscow. They were in charge of making sure that everything was done in a safe manner that resulted in a successful flight for their astronaut.
The first astronaut aboard Mir, Norm Thagard, flew to the space station on board a Russian Soyuz vehicle. He and his support team pioneered the joint operations concept so that by the time we sent the first Shuttle to dock with the Mir, drop off Shannon Lucid, and return with Norm, we had a good working relationship with the Russians. We could solve major problems quickly while effectively negotiating things that required less immediate action. We learned a few things during these early days, probably the most important being the Russian way of doing business.
We developed a saying: “Nyet [the Russian word for “no”] does not mean No… it means Not Yet.” It was a tongue-in-cheek phrase, but it really turned out to be a truism. Any request that popped up from the American side that required the Russians to do something was usually met by a nyet. But it didn’t really mean that they were saying no. It meant that they needed more information, that they wanted to think about it, and that they probably wanted to negotiate. Russians, we learned, are outstanding negotiators. Despite the fact that most of the Russians we worked with grew up in a Communist system, they are probably better capitalists than most Americans. They start from no, and then make you give them concessions to get to yes. It’s a powerful technique, and one that we were rarely able to use ourselves with the Russians, because we were generally told to make things happen no matter what it cost us in terms of giving things away.
I do remember one time in which I beat their nyet. I was leading a team that was trying to set up a Y2K test between our system and theirs. For those who don’t remember, Y2K was the big worry that when the clocks and calendars all rolled over from the year 1999 to the year 2000, there would be major computer outages and failures due to shortsighted programming. Although many predicted global chaos as the interconnected computer systems collapsed at the stroke of midnight, it turned out to be a pretty big yawn (as most who understood technology expected) when it happened. Nevertheless, we were directed to test the combined MCC-TsUP systems to make sure that the rollover occurred without incident. Conceptually, this was easy—just set the clocks ahead and watch it make the transition—the computers only knew the time to be what the humans told them it was.
Our team spent a week in TsUP negotiating the tests—it was going to cost money because it was going to take time. I let the folks who actually knew the details of what was going to be done really do the talking. I was there simply to make sure that the team was making progress. The Ground Control personnel worked well and diligently, and they came up with an agreement that was ready to sign by the Friday session—we were leaving on Saturday morning. The head of the Russian organization we were dealing with was well known as a tough negotiator. He was gruff and well connected (which in Russia generally means operating both over and under the table with government and quasigovernment organizations). As we were beginning to wrap things up, he took control and stated that, unfortunately, everything that we had talked about and agreed to was going to have to be reviewed because he felt that it was going to take too many resources and cost more than he had available. It’s worth noting he was in charge of the ground facilities—we rarely had this type of difficulty with our in-flight counterparts.
It was clearly a play for more concessions on our part, or more money—or both. I had been on the receiving end of this kind of thing often enough that I was tired of it. I asked the interpreter for the floor, and I basically said that it was too bad we couldn’t come to an agreement, that we simply were not authorized to give any more resources for the tests, and that when we got back home I would have to report to my superiors that we were unable to sign a protocol. I bluffed a little, saying that I would report this back to the NASA administrator directly and he would let the White House know. Now, I knew that my Russian counterpart was under pressure to make the tests happen, and that failure of the talks were really not an option for him. I was calling his bluff—and frankly, I really was ready to walk out. It wasn’t going to cost me anything, because we frequently came up empty. Losing a point or simply tying was about the same on the scorecard.
I told my team to pack up their things and said again to my Russian counterpart that I was sorry, we would be back in touch, and our superiors would have to give us more direction. Now I knew that he considered himself to be the ultimate power in his fiefdom and that he didn’t want to have to admit that he could be ordered to change his mind or give concessions by anyone. As we were walking out the door, I heard him address me directly, in English (the first time he’d spoken in English all week). “Paul, Paul… please come back, we can sign, we can sign… I think this is important, and I will find the money in my budget somewhere.” He’d blinked, and I can’t say I felt anything but good about it. It was not often that we “won” in this game—not that we really lost, it’s just that often we felt that way. In any event, I was glad to feel like I hadn’t let them push my team around.
It was on a different trip to Moscow when things were really put to the test, and it revealed how the Russians reacted to a true emergency. I was in Moscow for just a few days, negotiating the final form of the flight rules for an upcoming Shuttle visit to Mir, for which I was the Lead Flight Director. Mike Foale was the astronaut on Mir at the time, and things were going fairly well—well enough that while I visited with the American team and the Ops Lead supporting Mike, I really wasn’t plugged in to the day-to-day operations of what they were doing.
At one point in our small group meeting, Victor Blagov, the overall Lead Flight Director for the Mir (he was essentially the equivalent of the chief of our Flight Director Office) said that we should take a break and go into their control center. They were about to dock a Progress supply ship to the Mir, and he wanted to be there for the procedure, which was going to be done manually instead of using the usual automatic system. The Progress vehicle was essentially an unmanned Soyuz used to haul cargo up, and then burn up trash on reentry. Since it was unmanned it had no manual controls, but the Russians were working on a “radio control” mode where the crew in Mir could fly and dock it remotely. He suggested that I watch from the balcony with my interpreter. W
e settled down just as they were getting deeply into the procedure, and it quickly became apparent that something was not going right. There was a cluster of people standing around the Flight Director console, and the discussion was quite animated. My interpreter was trying to translate the air-to-ground loops, but said things were happening too fast and the phrases didn’t make sense. There were comments about “seal it off, seal it off” and “where is it going?” “We can’t see it, we don’t know where it bounced.”
There was a problem. That was clear enough. Then I heard, “The pressure is still dropping.” That could only mean something very bad had happened, and that the Mir had been punctured. I concentrated on finding the atmospheric pressure on the displays on the big screens in the front of the control room, and I listened to my interpreter as he tried to sort things out. Eventually, it became clear that the Progress ship had bounced off the Mir, hitting the Spectre module (where most of the US science experiments were stored and conducted), and had put a hole in it. The crew had managed to close the hatch but had not saved much of anything inside the Spectre. The pressure in the rest of the Mir stabilized at a low but livable value. The next thing I knew, I was being ushered in front of a large array of TV cameras, as it was discovered I was the senior NASA operations guy in the building.
I really didn’t know a lot at the time, of course; the Russians were still trying to figure out what had happened themselves. But I knew that the pressure was stabilized, and that Mike was okay. As always with the Mir, they had a Soyuz attached. It could be used to evacuate if the Mir became uninhabitable. The Soyuz was fine too; they’d checked that right off the bat. The emergency was over. I said a few things for the cameras about having faith in our Russian counterparts, that they understood how to fly their vehicle, and that they would be coming up with a future plan—with our teams included—and we would be following closely. In essence, I really didn’t say much except that we would stay involved and that we were happy that the crew was safe. It turned out that there was a tremendous amount of work to do. It required an internal spacewalk to try and find the leak, and all sorts of different procedures were needed to work around wires that had been cut in the haste to close the hatch. It actually was a good lesson in dealing with the aftermath of a space emergency, and it was an outstanding lesson for our teams to be involved in.
