by Paul Dye
It was a lot of work doing the academics, even with our long and extensive backgrounds of interfacing with all the disciplines. Nevertheless, we had a lot of fun too. For instance, we took several tours of various centers. Seeing as how the Flight Director needed to interface with all the NASA Centers (and Headquarters) at various times, we planned trips to go and meet the people and organizations, check out facilities, and let others know who we were. John, Bryan, and I took several trips to the East Coast sites, hitting Headquarters and Goddard on one, Kennedy and Marshall on another. For some reason, we never did make a good West Coast trip that I can remember. But I had spent a lot of time at Ames flying the Vertical Motion Simulator, had visited Dryden for landing and deceleration work, and of course, the Great EMCC Migration of 1988 checked off my square for visiting White Sands. I think I’d been to Downey as a fill-in representative for a program review one time. Nonetheless, we did our best to hit most of the highlights of Shuttle centers.
Headquarters was an interesting tour. We had a visit with the NASA Legislative Liaison—essentially NASA’s chief lobbyist to Congress (although such a position title would have been illegal). We were interested in the fact that the year before our selection, the Space Station Freedom program had survived in the House by a single vote. The year we visited, the new ISS had survived by what could only be called a landslide. We asked the Liaison (whose name I don’t remember) if he could give us an idea how many of the votes that had been “swung” were changed because the ISS, and space exploration in general, was the right thing for the nation, and the right thing for mankind. “Oh, that’s easy,” he said, “the answer is none!” That was the purest view into the political legislative process I have ever had. Not one vote was changed because of a moral imperative for the future of mankind—the changes were all for political reasons, many of which were not obvious because of the amount of vote trading that goes on. A congressman doesn’t really support something, but votes for it in exchange for someone else voting for something he wants but can’t be seen supporting. It convinced me once and for all that Washington was not the place for me!
Another enjoyable aspect of our academic training was a little something I cooked up with my old section mates. I felt that if we really wanted to be able to understand and empathize with the crew, we needed to take as much of the crew systems training as possible. In other words, the training that astronauts go through. We needed to know what it was like to suit up, un-suit, use the galley, work the camera gear—and go to the bathroom in space. Crew systems training and in-flight maintenance training were always fun. While I had done it all in the past, I figured that doing it again would get us out of the office once in a while and allow us to get our hands dirty. It’s funny that it can be the mundane things that a crew has to do on orbit—like cleaning filters or cleaning the toilet—that can make or break the quality of life on board. And make no mistake, these small things have a huge effect on morale and performance. Knowing what they are going through when we asked them to do these tasks—and why a radio response might be delayed because they had their hands full of floating garbage—would make us better able to understand what we could expect from the guys hurtling around the planet.
I always enjoyed suited crew escape training, and I was happy to go through it again. For John and Bryan, it was a first. I had helped out as a test subject (that is, I was a guinea pig) during the development of the crew escape systems in the post-Challenger time frame. Because I was going to be responsible for the systems as a MMACS (Mechanical Maintenance Arm and Crew Systems), I wanted to be able to understand the systems from the inside out. It also reminded me a lot of my days as a professional diver—encumbered by lots of heavy gear that restricted movement and made you hot. This training would provide good insight into understanding what was possible and what was not. I was already fitted for a suit, but John and Bryan had to go through the measurement process out in the Boeing building to get ready for these exercises. NASA didn’t build a suit for each astronaut—rather, they had several different sizes of suit that could be fine-tuned for leg and arm length, limb diameter, and torso fit using lacing cords. A suit fitting consisted of a session where they picked your initial size, and then tailored it to fit using the various adjustments. When they were all done, and you had good mobility, they’d write down everything they needed to know to make the suit fit you well. When your name came up for a training exercise, they’d put one together using your “spec sheet,” seal it up in a box with your name on it, and deliver it to the training site. These fittings included choices of things like glasses holders, kneeboards—all the equipment that was personally chosen by an astronaut for their ascent and entry kit.
The Suited Ascent and Entry egress class was a great example of the expense that NASA would go to for training. John, Bryan, and I dedicated a day in the mock-up facility. This meant we needed suits made up to fit, and each of us had a suite of technicians who basically followed us around for the day. (Well, actually, since they were responsible for those expensive suits, I think they were following the suits around—we just happened to be the squishy parts inside.) In addition to the suit techs who got us in and out of the orange bags, there were the mock-ups themselves. In this case, both a Crew Compartment Trainer (CCT) and the Full Fuselage Trainer (FFT) were needed for the class. The CCT had to be put in its vertical Launch position. This took a number of hours of prep and handling time to make sure that when it was tilted to the vertical position, nothing went “clang” inside. Meanwhile, a Flight Data File had to be prepared and installed to mimic the launch configuration. As for the FFT, it had to be set up for Entry and Landing configuration, so that we could practice bailing out, and also escaping out, of the overhead window after a presumed intact (and upright) crash landing using our rappel devices. Oh yes—we also had to have a crane and gym mats dedicated to us in order to practice using the rappel devices before going out the overhead hatch.
Such a session was representative of the kind of training that we went through. Our goal was to know what the crew was going through so that we could know every aspect of procedures and the consequences of our decisions and actions. Getting out of the pilot’s seat in full gear on the launch pad—or during a gliding bailout—was not a trivial task. Sure, you could get that idea by reading or watching, but nothing equaled the experience of actually having tried and done it. We got to strap in for launch, then we tried to get out of the Orbiter in a hurry after the Launch Control Center (LCC) or pad leader declared an emergency. We got to go down the emergency escape slide after “landing” at a runway that was not prepared to handle us. We got to hang from an escape rope and descender that was hooked to the building crane and hoisted 20 feet in the air. Fortunately, we had a gym mat to break our fall if we did anything wrong. We got to experience that line in our job descriptions that said, “Occasionally, physical exertion is required in training devices and simulations.”
Wearing a Launch and Entry Suit is a great lesson in patience. Just like the experience I had with a diving dry suit in Minnesota, any extra effort was not useful. It just heated up the suit. If you weren’t required to do a task, you quickly learned to simply stop moving. You consciously decided not to move your arms or legs. Even moving the head was a deliberate act. After suiting up, I’d move my head all the way around and try to touch my chin toward my shoulders in each direction to make sure that the wires to my comm cap (inside the helmet) weren’t restricting my motion. But then—I’d become still and wait for each task.
In the early years of the orange Launch and Entry Suits, the crew wore heavy Patagonia underwear that was designed to keep them alive in the event of a North Atlantic bailout. There was not, however, much of a way to keep the crew cool—a shortcoming that was discovered while training in the heat of a Texas summer. It didn’t take long for that to be rectified. This was done with the addition of water-cooling tubes that were sewn into the underwear, and the use of chilled water circulation. During our tr
aining exercises, we didn’t have the cooling units that were normally attached to the crew’s seats. As a result, we would still get warm during the exercises in the cockpit if we moved around too much. When we got outside for a break, the suit techs would be waiting with these big coolers filled with ice and circulating pumps that had been scavenged from an aquarium. These pumps circulated water through hoses that could connect to the suit’s cooling fittings. After an exercise, while we waited for technicians to set up the next scenario, we’d sit on folding chairs next to the ice chests, hooked up and cooling down.
Getting out of an Orbiter on the launch pad was always a bit surreal. We spent so much time training in simulators with the Orbiter in its horizontal position (like an airplane sitting on the ground), that when it was tilted to point at the sky, you’d swear that it was a completely different space. You had to think hard after sliding out of your chair: “Which way is the hatch?” When you climbed through the “floor” (now a wall), which way did you turn to find the way out? This training gave us a good appreciation for what the crew might have to do on the pad in case anything went wrong—and made us certain that we didn’t want anything to go wrong. Of course, this was all the responsibility of the launch team at Kennedy Space Center, but knowing what our colleagues in the orange suits had to go through was important. Although we would never actually feel the jolt of the Shuttle leaving the pad, we wanted to have as much of a feel for what the crew had to go through as we could.
Training was not without its hazards. In the years I was involved, I know of at least two people who broke ankles while taking the ride down the escape slide. You had to remember that all that equipment weighed quite a lot, and it wasn’t like going down a playground slide as a kid in grade school. You hit the bottom like a ton of bricks. Plus your motion was significantly restricted, making reaction times slow. The Crew Systems world had a special set of helmets (one size fit all) set aside just for these kinds of ground training exercises, because they knew they’d get beat up during this training. Escaping out the top of the Orbiter and using the rappel device to lower yourself to the ground was an exercise full of bumps and bruises. There was no way to be graceful about it (like a rock climber). If the crew had to do it after two weeks in space, we always envisioned there would be a pile of inert bodies at the bottom of the ropes, laying there and waiting for rescuers to come pick them up.
Getting an appreciation for the day-to-day lives of a crew in space, despite the difficulties, was a lot of fun. But the hours spent in this type of training were simply piled on top of the pure academics, making for long days while we prepared for the second phase of our training—the time in MCC (Mission Control Center).
This second phase of our training started as soon as we had enough of the basics down from our academic studies to not embarrass ourselves. After six months out of the Control Center, we were about to make the MCC our home for three out of five days every week. And for a Flight Director, the MCC—and the center seat—is where the rubber meets the road.
The second six months of our training year included more study, but most of our time was spent in the MCC doing simulations. We took full advantage of the valuable sim time, always cognizant of the fact that hundreds of people were spending their time running the sims, supporting as flight controllers, and running the buildings. There were generally three generic orbit sims per week at the time—and since there were three of us in training, each of us got one. But that didn’t mean we only had one day in the MCC—no, it meant that one day we were in the hot seat, and the other two days we sat behind so that we could watch our compadres and evaluate their performance. You could learn almost as much by watching as by doing. In some ways you could learn more, because you could see the big picture a little better. It was a great time, to be honest—we cut our teeth on Spacelab’s Instrument Pointing System (IPS) mission simulations (because that was the generic load available) and doing rendezvous. I’d bet that a third of the sims ended in emergency deorbit cases—something that pretty much went away in later years, as the scripts for generic sims became what we called “kinder and gentler.” Folks complained that when the sim team piled on too many failures, they couldn’t take time to learn the actual procedures—they mostly had to resort to broken field running. Ultimately, the powers that held sway dictated that trainers could only work us two failures deep.
The fact that the Shuttle was designed to pretty much absorb two failures and still be operational made it hard to get into really nasty cases—but not always. The really good Sim Sups still knew how to rattle our cages and put us in precarious spots, and that was actually where the fun lay. We missed those cases in later years—the job became less of a challenge, less of a battle of wits with the sim team, and more of a “fill the square” exercise in trying different canned procedures. But that was all in the future for us during that first summer of training—John, Bryan, and I took the full force of what the sim team could dish out, and we had a ball.
One of the funny things about becoming a Flight Director was that you could always tell where a new trainee had come from. As a rule, when the going got tough folks tended to run home to what was familiar to them. That meant they’d spend more time working problems in their old disciplines, the things they understood better. The fact of the matter was, new Flight Directors were a pain in the butt to their old disciplines, because they almost always knew more than the poor trainee sitting on the console they came from. Those trainees couldn’t catch a break. The Flight Director trainee might not know anything about how other disciplines systems worked, or how they handled problems, but they could sure show their old discipline a thing or two! So it was easy to see where the selectee came from—except in my case.
I was, at the time, a rare bird. This is because I had switched flight control disciplines after moving into the front room. Having started with the Spacelab Command and Data Management System (CDMS) and the IPS, I moved over to the MMACS group after the Challenger accident. So folks expected me to ride the MMACS position pretty hard. But in reality, you never know your second (or third) discipline as well as you know the systems you grew up with. I had learned how to be a MMACS operator from the guys who built the procedures and rules in the early days—I didn’t build them myself. I had never spent any significant time in the MMACS back room, and I depended on good MECHs (the MMACS backroom position) to be an active part of the team and feed me what I needed to know. Although I was pretty good at being a MMACS, my real depth of knowledge was in the Spacelab CDMS and IPS world. And that, coincidentally, was what we spent our time with during that first summer of sims.
Now the funny thing was, most of the folks training as flight controllers at the time that we were training to be Flight Directors were young enough to only remember me as a MMACS operator—they really didn’t know about my old IPS position. In fact, the IPS group had been absorbed by Guidance, Navigation, and Control (GNC) after I left, and the console position had changed considerably. The systems hadn’t changed much, and neither had the procedures or rules, so they were very, very familiar to me. We did activations, pointing, and deactivations. We had problems with getting it up and operating, problems with runaway gimbals, and problems stowing that led us to jettisons (frequently). During all of this IPS work, we had the usual problems with Shuttle systems, and I was often complimented on the fact that I wasn’t riding my “old discipline” (the MMACS Officer) any more than the other Shuttle systems. People were actually amazed at my self-restraint and willingness to let them do their job, instead of micromanaging them. The reality was, none of those people knew that, in my heart, I was really an IPS guy—and I was riding them for all I was worth! I’d written and tested the procedures, developed the rules and displays, and even been part of the development operations team for the system. I was sure no one could stump me on it. What was really funny was that the training team didn’t know my relationship with the system either—so I really looked better than I might have been.
For me, one of the most amazing transformations in becoming a full-fledged Flight Director was learning to fly rendezvous. Finding another object in space and either grabbing it or docking with it is fundamental to any space program that wants to accomplish things in orbit. Mastering it was essential for us. Up until the time we were selected into the Flight Director training program, all rendezvous with the Shuttle had ended with station-keeping (stopping close to an object, and flying formation with it) or grappling the target using the Remote Manipulator System (RMS). But we knew that the days of docking to space stations were coming. In fact, I had been preparing the way for this in my work on the Russian docking system used by Mir—and slated to be used on the ISS.