by Paul Dye
I did two total tours as a co-op student and accepted a job in the Flight Operations Division as a junior flight controller upon graduation. I arrived in Houston the day after the fourth Shuttle mission landed and President Reagan declared the Space Transportation System fully operational. It was a stretch to call any flying machine that had only flown four times fully operational but, hey, we just put our noses to the grindstones and made missions work. I picked up where I had left off training to be a backroom controller for the first Spacelab mission, where I was responsible for the Subsystem Computer. I spent countless hours in the Control Center training for the job. I spent many more hours in the office building learning procedures and flight rules, drawing and studying schematics, and learning how everything worked together with other systems and the timeline. For the first time, I was introduced to spending hours in the simulators where we tested our procedures to see if they worked in both nominal and off-nominal situations and configurations. And then I got to spend an entire mission working to understand how the Spacelab CDMS really worked—along with everyone else who thought they had understood it before launch. Nothing in the real world works quite the way it does in simulations, you see—the only way to truly figure out how the real thing operates is to use it in space.
With Spacelab-1 successfully behind us, I was called into the office and told that I had flown my last mission as a backroom flight controller—because I was needed in the front room for the next one! I was shocked but obviously smiling inside—all the extra studying and work had paid off, and I was going to get to play in the big leagues sooner than I expected. What surprised me at the time—but what I understood later on—is that this was not uncommon. When I looked around the room on my first front room simulation, I saw others of my “class” who had also studied hard and been moved up quickly. It was clear that hard work got you noticed and doing well got you promoted. I knew then that the folks who had joined the organization at the same time I did and were putting in the time to excel were the ones who were going to be moving up with me on the way to the center seat—the Flight Director chair.
My first mission in the front room was also the first mission of the Instrument Pointing System. I had built my thick goodie book, and I had flown so many simulations that it was hard to keep track of them all. I was considered the expert on the system in MCC—to the point that when the crew had significant questions, they asked for me to be put on the console with the CAPCOM (Spacecraft Communicator) so that I could help them understand all the procedure changes we had developed during the mission to overcome faults in the software that were only found after launch. As I recall, I was at home watching the mission on the NASA TV channel when I heard them ask for me by name—and suddenly the phone rang. It was the on-console Flight Director, himself, telling me I had fifteen minutes to be in the front room—and I’d better have a tie on!
That mission was exciting, exhilarating, and terrifying all at once. The system had its problems for numerous reasons relating to how it was developed and our inability to test it “all up” on the ground, but we were able to overcome them with hard work and numerous software patches that we uplinked to the computer. It went from being a basket case to a working pointing system in just a few days, and the team used it to conduct good science for the rest of the mission. I looked forward to our next IPS flight when we’d have a much better system right from the start. We trained for the flight—a solar pointing mission—for months and we were next in line, in the on-deck position, when I stopped by the lobby to watch the Shuttle launch that was immediately before ours. It was the Challenger on mission STS-51L. When I saw the forked-tail plumes of rocket exhaust as the solid rocket boosters flew out of the expanding cloud of gas that had been the Orbiter and our friends, I knew we weren’t going to be flying anything again for a while. Having been involved in aviation since my teens, I had experienced the loss of friends in flying machines before, but it still gave me that awful, empty feeling of helplessness that can leave you feeling lost. For many of my young coworkers who didn’t grow up in dangerous activities, this was a shocking, sudden lesson in the reality that what we did could cause real death. I could see that on the faces of others, and I could feel the shock inside myself. You deal with it, but you never get over it.
I was at a point in my career when my management and I recognized that it was time for me to broaden my experience once again, so it was during the two and a half years of downtime after Challenger that I changed disciplines and moved over to the Mechanical Systems Section. I became deeply involved with the improvements to the landing and deceleration system—the tires, wheels, brake, nosewheel steering, and the development of the new drag chute. It was my kind of thing! This was airplane stuff—the stuff I had been born to do. While I assumed that I would be the junior flight controller in the section (and that is how I started), before I knew it I had been promoted to the front room and was flying the key Ascent/Entry shift on the first flight after the Challenger accident. It was again an exhilarating and terrifying position, but learning to suppress fear was one of the important elements of flight operations—and I was getting good at it. Fear doesn’t help you make good decisions; it just gets in the way. You learn to work through it, think of your options, and do what you can to support keeping the vehicle intact, the crew alive—and see the mission through to its end, if you can.
Training to be a backroom flight controller is all about learning the systems, procedures, rules, and interfaces to a level of detail that boggles most people’s minds. We expected a good system controller to know every telemetry bit, the meaning of every digital word in a command string, and what size wire was used in the wiring harness of a black box. They needed to know exactly how it operated and how it was tested; they had to know where the official limits were and where the unofficial limits were—and just how much extra performance was available beyond that. And they needed to know, technically, how it all worked with any other system that it touched.
A front room flight controller had to know all of that—but more importantly, they had to serve the overall mission with the equipment for which they were responsible. While the back room could concentrate on what was best for their system, the front room had to know what was best for the mission—and sometimes that meant sacrificing their own equipment or system functions for the greater good. The only way they could make informed decisions was to know as much about the overall vehicle as they could. Those folks who kept looking inward at their own systems when they transitioned from a support position to the front room simply didn’t last very long.
So what, exactly, does a flight controller do? Well, system controllers (those responsible for specific Shuttle systems) watch data to make sure that there are no faults and that procedures being executed by the crew are done correctly and on time. They keep tabs on all their interfaces and they contribute to the planning process, for instance, by checking procedural references in flight plan revisions. Those systems controllers with consumables (like fuel, oxygen, water, and so forth) are always keeping tabs on usage to make sure that something isn’t going away faster than planned and that there will always be enough of everything to complete the mission. In the case of failures, the systems controllers are responsible for troubleshooting, following the crew through procedures when appropriate, and creating new procedures when needed.
Systems flight controllers are engineers for a reason. A person who knows how to execute canned procedures is a technician, and technicians are valuable contributors to a team. But when a problem arises and a technician reaches the end of a procedure and hasn’t solved the problem, they call an engineer. This is because an engineer understands the system well enough that they can create new procedures, thinking and working outside the box.
Other systems flight controllers are busy during nominal operations—for instance the Instrumentation and Communications Officer (INCO) is always busy tracking communication plans, switching and operating recorders, and send
ing commands for other flight controllers. They operate the systems directly so that the crew doesn’t have to—that way the crew can concentrate on payload or other mission operations.
Trajectory flight controllers are always looking ahead to make sure that they know where the vehicle is going, based on where it is. They are tracking the vector, building burn and rendezvous plans, and—for ascent and entry—monitoring to make sure that the vehicle is going to get to orbit, or a runway.
Operational flight controllers are busy tracking the crew’s execution of their plan as well as the execution of payload operators, who might be working remotely. The team of the Flight Activities Officer (FAO) is constantly keeping track of what has been accomplished and how much time it took, so that they can know what is left to be done and what needs to be rescheduled. Payload Officers are constantly in touch with the customer community to make sure they are getting what they need from the crew, the vehicle, and the ground team. The MCC is a busy place, and even when it seems quiet there is a strong undercurrent of activity. We always said that if you didn’t have something to keep you busy, you were obviously missing something!
It generally took about two years for someone to become certified in a backroom flight control position. A new hire would start by studying all the basic material on the Shuttle as well as on their area of responsibility and how to operate in the Control Center environment. This might sound simple, but it was like drinking from a fire hose. All new hires looked at the mountain they had to climb to certification and were stunned. But you climb a mountain one step at a time. Before you knew it, a new hire would be sitting in on simulations and getting the feel for how things worked. In a few more months, they would be working the console position during simulations—as well as taking classes in the simulators for their particular area of responsibility and working on procedures, rules, drawings, and other documentation in the office. This office work not only reinforced what they were learning in sims but created new reference material for use on console. Another key element of learning was going to meetings—sure this sounds boring, but meetings were where flight techniques, rules, and procedures were ironed out—as well as where vehicle problems and changes were hashed out and argued over by program management, engineering, and the flight ops team. Meetings were where young flight controllers learned to understand logical argument supported by data—always supported by data! It was where they learned to sell their ideas to colleagues who were looking for any weakness in risk analysis and logical thought.
When a flight controller had reached a level of competence where their superiors felt they were ready for certification, they were examined by the section members who used a variety of tests—written and verbal—to check their knowledge. They then had to go through a certification sim where the script was specially designed to put them under pressure, and they had to pass not only technically but with poise and confidence. Only then could they be assigned to a mission—where the training would continue.
Front room flight controllers were trained in the same way, but to an even higher standard of abilities that enabled them to communicate and play in the give-and-take environment of the integrated space operations world. It might be painful for an Electrical Generation and Illumination (EGIL) controller to have to “ride a short” (watch a bus that is likely overloaded and smoking its wires), but if the bus was essential for keeping a critical piece of equipment operating to landing, then they had to bite the bullet and sacrifice their system for the good of the vehicle. It was common in the MMACS (Mechanical Maintenance Arm and Crew Systems) world to burn up an auxiliary power unit or to pump the hydraulic fluid out of a leaking system in order to maintain control. And nothing was as nerve-racking to an EVA (Extravehicular Activity) Officer as having to feed a suit leak so that a crewmember could button up a critical piece of equipment rather than leaving it exposed and scampering for the airlock. But if leaving the equipment exposed meant you had to do another EVA, well… there was always a risk trade involved. Oh—and if you think that these were the only operators (flight controllers were, for some reason lost to the mists of time, referred to as operators) who were nervous in these cases, remember that the ultimate responsibility always lay on the Flight Director’s shoulders—and they were the ones asking the controllers to take these risks.
When it came right down to it, all the training, all the learning, all the education was merely building a library in each flight controller’s mind and laying a foundation in their experience base so that they could make good risk trades. Controllers were there to execute, but they were mostly taught how to troubleshoot and manage risk. No decision was ever made in a vacuum (please pardon the play on words)—they were always made in the context of an immensely complex vehicle and operation, where even the smallest decision could have a rippling effect on everything that followed after. A minor change to a maneuvering jet configuration could impact flying procedures on rendezvous day, just as the decision to use up precious gas or cryo could affect the ability to lengthen the mission down the road.
We always trained people to think and work quickly, but at the same time to never make the right decision “too early.” There is an old pilot expression that goes, “When something bad happens, the first thing you should do is to wind your watch.” It means that instead of reacting instinctively to a situation you think you understand, unless the result is immediate loss of control or death, you should take a few seconds to think about what is happening and make sure you have properly identified what is going on. More often than not, you have more time to solve a problem than you initially think. Like pilots, flight controllers needed to be taught that being fast is not always the same as being right.
On the other hand, there are times when fast is the only way to react—and the most important thing was learning how to tell the difference between having time to think things through and needing to react immediately. One thing was for certain, no one ever got it right all the time, and no one could ever stop learning.
Chapter 4
Getting Selected—The Chosen Few
I don’t know for sure when I decided that I wanted to be a Flight Director. I certainly knew of Chris Kraft and Gene Kranz from a young age, but I simply knew them as guys who had something to do with being in charge of space missions. I never really thought about a hierarchy in Mission Control, never really thought about it from an organizational sense. I guess it was obvious that someone had to be in charge. I think I was always enamored with the characters in the 1950s and 1960s low-budget sci-fi movies who were clearly the lead scientists in charge of saving Earth when aliens or natural forces threatened the planet and/or the human race. There was always some virile senior engineer or scientist who cut through the BS being spouted by world leaders and politicians to lay bare the problem and what needed to be done about it. People looked up to this leader who knew the answers and they followed him because of his knowledge, understanding, and charisma. To me, that was the essence of the Flight Director—a take-charge individual who knew the answers and inspired people to follow him.
But I am sure that when I first walked into the Control Center as a co-op student, I didn’t recognize the Flight Director for who he was—that leader from the early sci-fi movies. I was introduced to backroom flight controllers and understood that they worked for their front room person—but at first, admittance to the front room was a rare and holy event.
Flight Director selections are an occasional thing. In the early days of NASA, there was one Flight Director—Christopher C. Kraft, the man responsible for setting the standards and establishing the culture of the job. Kraft came out of the NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, which was superseded by NASA) flight testing tradition. He organized the original Mercury Mission Control around the concepts learned in atmospheric flight tests. Missions were put together around a set of objectives and a flight plan was built. The pilot and team trained around the mission plan, flew according to the plan, and deb
riefed what was learned—according to the plan. The flight plan was everything, and how well the mission held to the plan was often the criteria for success. The early Mercury missions were short. They consisted of suborbital lobs that lasted less than an hour, or short orbital missions that lasted a few hours and were conducted by a single flight control team—and a single Flight Director. As the later Mercury missions grew in length, additional Flight Control teams—and additional Flight Directors—were required, necessitating the first Flight Director Selection. The details are lost in bureaucratic history, but legend has it that Chris simply used his authority to ask his assistants—Gene Kranz and John Hodge—to train and take the other teams. The three of them decided that for the sake of scheduling and comradery, they would each pick a team color that would identify them and their crew on schedules. Naturally, the three of them picked Red, White, and Blue as those first colors, setting a team-naming precedent that is still used today (although teams are hardly fixed, and the idea is now simply used for the sake of tradition).
When the Gemini program came along, additional Flight Directors were necessary, with Chris stepping off console entirely to manage the much larger aspects of the growing program. In those days, selection was again a matter of appointment—good people were chosen to move up and take over more responsibility. As often as not, the “promotion” was done informally. There was no Flight Director Office until the beginning of the Space Shuttle program, and those who served as Flight Directors had regular jobs as members of Flight Control Division management. Some were assistant Division Chiefs or Branch Chiefs, and their console duties were in addition to what they did in the office. It was quite common for section heads to serve on console in those days as well, the idea being that everyone had an office job but also served the mission in the Control Center. It was a concept that kept managers intimately involved with the day-to-day operations for which they were ultimately responsible.