by Paul Dye
Up until my selection as a Flight Director, I had been so involved with mechanical systems that in rendezvous simulations, the actual rendezvous itself was simply background noise in my headset. I understood the fundamentals and the orbital mechanics, of course—I had studied all of that when I first arrived as a co-op student. But the detailed procedures were someone else’s responsibility. It was something I never had made the time to study. I do remember watching Flight Directors like Al Pennington running a rendezvous and wondering how a former Instrumentation and Communications Officer (INCO) like Al could ever have learned so much about the details of rendezvous to make critical decisions on what seemed like very complicated scenarios.
Twenty years later, I had come to realize that I was the most experienced rendezvous Flight Director in the world—and I am still not sure exactly how I learned all of that stuff! You learn it one bite at a time. I know I could never write the mathematical equations or read the computer code for targeting software the way the experts in the discipline could do, but I know I could fly a rendezvous as a commander in the cockpit without referring to the twenty-page checklist; and I understand all the failures that could occur that would affect the successful completion of a docking. Even so, it wouldn’t be as pretty as if I had grown up in the trajectory world. Once again, the old idea that I was the orchestra conductor and not a concert violinist comes to mind. I was no virtuoso, but I certainly knew how to run a team so that a magnificent symphony would come out of it.
One of the last things you have to think about when you finish up your training as a Flight Director and get ready for your first mission is your team name, or “color.” As I said before, the tradition of Flight Director colors began when Chris Kraft, Gene Kranz, and John Hodge decided that they would be leaders of the Red, White, and Blue teams (respectively). The team colors were used as a morale-building device, but also for practical reasons—simulations and other activities for each team were scheduled by color rather than the name of the Flight Director. It worked, and it caught on, so the next couple of Flight Directors picked colors as well—Glynn Lunney picked Black and Cliff Charlesworth took on Green when they joined the first three on the center console in the MCC. The simple colors being taken, the next guys chose Maroon and then Gold—which opened up the idea of not only colors but minerals. Eventually, we had Flight Director colors for astronomical objects, gem stones, and constellations.
In the military, fighter pilots generally have nicknames or call signs. They are usually given by other pilots. You don’t get to choose your call sign—it’s given to you, usually to remember something really dumb you did in training. Ask a pilot how he got his call sign someday, and you will often get a muffled response that tapers off to the inaudible. Or they’ll proudly tell you how they got it as part of a great story they tell on themselves. But in the Flight Director world, you got to choose your call sign—and it stays with you forever. Most new Flight Directors spend more time than they are willing to admit picking just the right name for their team—and I was no exception.
Colors didn’t seem right, and neither did stars or constellations. But I did have something I was very proud of, and my team name was suggested by one of my former Mechanical Systems teammates. He knew that Minnesota was important to me, and he’d caught on that my ancestry was from the northeastern corner of the state—the Range. The Iron Range, that is. My grandfather was an iron miner at times—as were most guys who grew up there, at least at times when they didn’t have other jobs. Ninety percent of all the iron ore mined in this country up until recent times has come from the Minnesota Iron Range—an important factor in building a strong and powerful nation. And so I chose Iron as my team name, and I proudly served the space program as the leader of the Iron Team.
I announced my team name at the beginning of my first shift as a Flight Director on an actual mission, and it was a proud moment when I first used the call sign Iron Flight. The color was retired with me twenty years later, when I left the agency—but the name stays with me no matter where I go.
My first mission assignment as a Flight Director was to STS-63, a mission with a primary payload that I would have to go look up to remember—but whose flight plan included the first rendezvous with the Mir space station. I drew the assignment because of my Russian background, obviously. I was assigned to the planning team—the overnight shift when the crew is asleep and nothing happens except replanning the timeline. That was always where the new guys started out—it was quieter and required less dynamic problem solving. The other Flight Directors were the folks I had been working with for several years to get ready for the series of Russian missions, and so this assignment was a good place to break me in.
We weren’t ready to dock with the Mir—we hadn’t finished integrating the Russian docking system into the Orbiter—but we wanted to get something on the books with the Mir as soon as possible. Our plan was to fly a rendezvous and then fly around the Mir taking pictures and getting used to communicating between crews and control centers. One of the big worries we (and the Russians) had was what effect our thruster exhaust plumes would have on their solar arrays, and this mission would be our first chance to see what kind of a problem this might present. There were many, many hours of meetings and discussion over who would be responsible (and liable) should damage occur. We were happy with the idea of joint responsibility, but the Russians liked to say that “if everyone was responsible then no one is responsible.” Interestingly enough, that made sense.
We had developed special Reaction Control System (RCS) jet configurations to allow us to fly in close without pointing jet plumes directly at the Mir. This involved using jets that weren’t primarily pointed in the direction we needed them to thrust, but instead produced just a little thrust in that direction. It was inefficient but it worked. The problem was there were only a few jets that, used in pairs, could provide this capability. There was very little redundancy. Now remember that it was not uncommon for jets to develop a leak—some piece of crud might get in a valve seat, which then caused a slow seep of fuel or oxidizer. This was a problem because if it accumulated in the firing chamber, and then you went to fire the jet, you could get an off-nominal firing (oxidizer rich or fuel rich), which could damage the jet. In simple terms you might blow something up.
In any case the standard response to a leaking jet was to seal it off—and that meant isolating the other jets that lived on the same fuel manifold, since the only way to isolate it was to close that manifold. That meant a single leaking jet could take down three or four others. It was standard ops for a leaking jet, and we used the procedure many times on other Shuttle flights and in sims. But on this mission, the loss of the critical jets meant that we would lose the rendezvous, because without the special jet configurations to prevent pluming the Mir, we weren’t going to be allowed to get close.
Well, of course, right after we got into orbit we had a leaking jet and had to close a manifold. We were still okay, but we couldn’t tolerate any other failures. We were now zero fault tolerant to achieving the rendezvous. For this mission, the ascent team handed over to the planning team about five hours after launch. This coincided with the evening time in Houston. It was probably five in the afternoon when I came in to take my first ever shift as a Flight Director. The “usual crowd” was there. It was somewhat a standard thing for senior management to stop by the Control Center before going home for the day, so as I came in to begin my shift, the back row (behind the Flight Director console) was a brass-rich environment. I recall Gene Kranz was there along with Tommy Holloway—both senior managers, former Flight Directors above me in the chain of command. Randy Stone, head of MOD, was standing next to the Chief of the Flight Director Office (my immediate boss), Lee Briscoe. The office lead for Russian work, Gary Coen, was there, as was the Lead Flight Director for the Mission, Phil Engelauf. The presence of these folks didn’t bother me; we all knew and respected each other. And although I was junior to them, I had proven I was r
eady, so it was just another day. No pressure. I conducted a standard handover briefing with my team and we took over control of the mission, dismissing the previous team who had put the crew to bed. No more than a half hour had elapsed from saying good night when I got a call from the front row… “Flight, PROP, it looks like we’ve got another leaker.” Everyone stood up straight as I asked the usual questions—what jet, what were they seeing exactly, and could they be being fooled by instrumentation or something else. Sadly, this was a pretty straightforward and obvious leak—and, yup, it was going to close one of the manifolds that would make the proximity operations (getting close to the Mir) a No Go. We talked about it for a few minutes, and it became clear that either we closed the manifold or we continued leaking—and we weren’t allowed to get close to the Mir with a leaking jet either. (It’s not as if we were somehow allowed to just let it keep leaking by our own rules.)
Well, here I was. Years of practice and training had come down to this mission-critical decision on my very first shift. Fortunately, I thought, I have a peanut gallery of the finest ex–Flight Directors sitting right behind me. I figured it would at least be a comfort to confer with them before I made such a drastic decision—after all, this was not just a technical decision, it was a decision that had international political implications. So I turned around and saw all of these eyes look straight at me… silently. Finally, Randy Stone, head of Mission Operations, former Flight Director, and the man who took over Gene’s job, looked straight at me and said in a firm voice over the airwaves, “Well, Dye, what the hell are you going to do now?”
I realized in that moment that I truly was the Flight Director. I had signed the logbook, I had signed for the crew and the vehicle. It was my decision, my responsibility, and the august panel arrayed behind me was not going to step in and take that away from me—or bail me out. I paused, smiled, and turned back to the front of the room. I keyed my microphone. “GC, Flight—let’s arm the building for air-to-ground comm. INCO, make sure that we have a good link and let me know when that’s established. PROP, I need your switch throws. And CAPCOM, let’s get ready to wake them up—we have to close a manifold on the overhead panel.”
Yup—for better or worse I was the Flight Director and it was now my job to lead.
Chapter 6
Plan, Train, Fly
Mission Operations—and Mission Control—have lived by a small number of mottos and slogans over the years. The most famous is probably Gene Kranz’s “Tough and Competent”—a description he gave the men of Mission Control in a famous talk following the Apollo 1 fire (in which three astronauts died in a launch pad accident in 1967). He told all flight controllers to go back to their office and write the words “Tough and Competent” on their blackboards and to never erase them—they were now the creed for which Mission Control would be known. If you look carefully through the offices of Mission Control Center (MCC) today you can still see these words imbedded in faint outlines on old chalkboards—and written on many modern whiteboards by those who remember the past.
During the Shuttle era, a time of numerous missions and production processes that saw Mission Ops preparing and flying mission after mission, the phrase “Plan, Train, Fly” became the mantra of the organization—for that in a nutshell was what we did. We planned missions, trained for them, and then flew them. “Plan your flight and fly your plan” is an old aviator’s motto that we took to heart and executed on a daily basis. For much of the Shuttle program, Mission Operations was comprised of roughly six thousand people—both contractors and NASA employees. Every one of them—engineers, managers, and staff support personnel—were dedicated to these three functions. Flight planning was a huge task that was about much more than defining a timeline; it involved trajectory design and analysis, cargo development and integration, and flight rules and procedures development. Shuttle missions might have looked the same to the outside world but each one was unique and took hundreds of thousands of man-hours to plan.
Plan Your Flight—Fly Your Plan
Of course, planning a Shuttle mission involved far more organizations than just Mission Operations. The way NASA was organized, the Space Shuttle Program Office was the top authority with what was done with the vehicles and the missions. They effectively “hired” other organizations within the agency to conduct these missions, with their oversight. For instance, the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) was responsible for preparing the vehicles for launch and processing the payloads, while Mission Operations at the Johnson Space Center (JSC) performed the detailed mission planning, training, and operations. Various mission managers within the Program Office itself managed each flight to make sure that everything came together to make the mission happen—and by everything I mean tens of thousands of little details. They needed to make sure that not only was the major payload and its team ready on launch day, they also had to make sure that the tortillas in the food locker were fresh and packed on time. Like I said—details.
A good rule of thumb for mission planning is that a flight was defined about a year to a year and a half in advance. Generally speaking, the concept of a mission was put down far in advance of that point so that the system knew what was coming. For example, the International Space Station assembly process took ten years, and the assembly sequence was mostly laid out before that began. But detailed flight planning, crew and vehicle assignments, and the actual generation of plans and products started in the year-and-a-half time frame. That is about when we would assign a Lead Flight Director and managers within the various elements of the Mission Operations Directorate (MOD) to herd the planning through the process. A lot of work happened up front to make sure that the mission fit within the capabilities of the program—that we could lift the weight required, carry enough consumables to fly the mission length necessary, and that the payloads physically fit and could interface with the vehicle.
Timeline and trajectory options were numerous at this point—did you need to launch at dawn or at dusk, or somewhere near midnight or noon? What would this do to the lighting for the deploy of a satellite? Where would the sun be relative to the pilot’s eyes during a docking? Did the payload have a need to be over particular points of the earth at particular times in the mission based on their own event schedules? What kind of altitudes were required? These and hundreds (or thousands) of other questions were asked and answered in order to narrow down the options and pick an overall mission plan. It was an iterative process—oftentimes you had to throw away work when you realized you’d headed down a dead end. When that happened, we had to back up and start over.
Most of this work was monitored regularly by the Lead Flight Director as the mission developed. The Lead Flight Director would let the teams do the work and provide leadership to make sure that everyone was marching in more or less the same direction. At any one time a Flight Director might have two missions under development that they were leading, and they would also be assigned to several other missions that were being led by other Flight Directors. This process kept the half-dozen active Lead Flight Directors within the office busy and hopping throughout most of the Shuttle program. Lead Flight Directors wanted to make sure that they stepped in at key points in the mission-planning process to help make key decisions, but they also wanted to let the teams have ownership and do the work. Micromanaging smart people rarely works out well—but sometimes, they could get their heads down and build up a lot of speed in a direction that might not be desired by the program. A smart Lead held lots of status meetings and checked up with the mission planners often enough to effect changes when they were easy to make.
Crew assignments were made when most flights became “real” and the mission was announced. That was also about the time that we tried to assign a Lead Flight Director. These assignments happened about the same time so that neither the Lead Flight Director nor the Shuttle commander had a head start on owning the process. Good Leads worked well with good commanders to make sure everyone was happy with where a mission was g
oing, and the best ones always remembered that it was the program that we were flying for—not ourselves or our organizations. Although we all cared deeply about doing the right thing for the program, NASA, and the nation, within every mission we also had to recognize that overall policy was set above our pay grade. I used to tell flight controllers that unless program direction was illegal, immoral, or fattening, they should be able to live with the requirements that were being given to us. We all had responsibility for doing our individual jobs well, but the final responsibility ultimately rested with the program manager who had to answer to the NASA administrator.
Getting a large army of engineers, planners, and technicians marching in the same direction takes a lot of time and effort, but it’s vital work because changing directions takes a lot more energy than getting them started correctly in the first place. Knowing this, the Lead Flight Director and the program’s mission manager always put extra effort into the early stages of the project. You could then let the designers of the trajectory and vehicle loading efforts go on autopilot to, as we said, “turn the crank.” The result would be products coming out of the planning pipeline.
One of the things that the program mission manager, the Lead Flight Director, and the Ascent/Entry Flight Director kept tabs on during planning was the Ascent Performance Margin (APM). Essentially, if you assume that you know exactly how much the Shuttle can lift to the desired orbit and you are loaded exactly to that number, you have zero APM. Zero is never a good number when you’re talking about margin, of course—so you always want to maintain that as a positive number. The Ascent Flight Director wants it to be a large positive number because that means they have some wiggle room if things go wonky on launch day because it can be used to expand the launch window—the time you have to get off the pad on any given day. The Lead Flight Director is always looking for a large number that they can then convert to a small number by loading more consumables (propellant and cryo) so that they can have the best chance of executing the mission on orbit and maybe extending it, if needed. The program manager wants that number to be as close to zero as possible because that means they are carrying everything they possibly can. I have seen cases where they used it at the very last minute to load mementos for space-flight awareness awards. This is when the rule of “illegal, immoral, or fattening” comes into play. In cases like this you sometimes have to allow for the fattening… after all, it was the Program Office’s vehicle.