Shuttle, Houston

by Paul Dye

  Around the back and in the corners of the building were freight elevators, staircases, air conditioning rooms, and power supply rooms—and the occasional janitor’s closet. It was fun to wander around the building during quiet times, trying to guess what the humming machines and boxes behind the many closed doors were really doing. There were building people you could ask, of course, but the place was big enough that few knew it all. Flight controllers just needed to know that what happened on the first floor made everything they did possible. So long as the many technicians and engineers down there were doing what they did best, the controllers could concentrate on their spacecraft. Lots went on to support them—it was many years later that I learned of the secure room where classified communications could come in and go out. In truth, there was so little interaction with the “black” (classified for national security) world that most flight controllers didn’t need to know the room was even there.

  While the first floor operated in anonymity, the second and third floors were the stars of MCC. They were conceived as carbon copies of each other, with the main Flight Control Room (FCR) in the center and staff support rooms surrounding them. In actual practice, the back rooms never matched each other floor for floor. The MPSRs were located in different places. Some very specialized disciplines only had a single support room that served both floors. These were practical arrangements because voice loops and the P-Tube system made it easy to operate from anywhere in the building. Core disciplines generally had dedicated SSRs for each FCR. This allowed them to perform multiple activities at the same time, like a sim for one flight on the second floor and a sim for another on the third.

  The original Control Center architecture was centered on the RTCC, which fed data to what today would be called dumb consoles. There were no computation capabilities built into the consoles themselves; they were merely repositories for switches and other input devices, plus lights and screens to show data outputs to the flight controllers. It was figured out early on that some local computational capability was required, so small calculators and computers were added to the back rooms. A few were added to the front room area too. As the Shuttle came along, more complexity was needed, so special terminals (MEDS Terminals) were added to the back rooms so that the controllers could communicate directly with the MOC (Mission Operations Computer) to update limits and constants and the like. In the 1980s, minicomputers came along (this was still before the age of PCs), and these began appearing on consoles in both the back and front rooms.

  Computer-savvy flight controllers began writing software that helped them better monitor and command the vehicle. They managed to hook themselves up to data and command streams. It was almost a pirate operation at times, but management knew what was going on and, seeing the benefits, encouraged it. Eventually, enough work had been done to create an entirely new Control Center based on the new technology. The result was a distributed architecture. No big central mainframe was required—data flowed into the building and was distributed to all consoles. The flight control disciplines created their own displays and processing to serve their discipline. Commands worked in the same way but in the opposite direction, heading from console to communication systems, and up to the vehicle.

  The distributed processing concept called for a totally different building architecture, so a new MCC wing was added to the old MOW, with new control rooms and new back rooms. Those of us who grew up in the old MCC never felt quite the same in the new building, but we flew the Shuttle there for longer than we did in the old place, and it gave us tremendous capabilities that we didn’t have with the original system. The new software also gave us faster and better monitoring, plus the ability to write smart code that enabled fewer flight controllers to do the work. As a result, flight control teams began to shrink. Back rooms that once had three or four people went down to a single individual, with smart and simple artificial intelligence (AI) systems helping to watch for anomalies and recommend solutions.

  Regardless of all the technology, the “humanware” always remained the same. They were bright, fairly young individuals with quick minds and the desire to do what was best to advance humanity into space. At the same time, when you spend much of your life in a place like this, and it becomes your second home, a lot goes on that is not directly related to the job of flying the spacecraft. You must communicate with others, you have to store and sort information, you have to eat, you have to drink—and you have to create an environment and a culture that promotes excellence without being grim. Mission Control was not just awe-inspiring, it was a fun place to be, and there was humor along with the square-set jaws, laughter along with the occasional tears. Thirty years of Shuttle flights, built on the legends of the twenty years of space flights that went before, created a lot of new stories. Some of them were mostly true, some of them became altered with time, but all of them are acknowledged canon for those who called themselves flight controllers. What follows is a collection of remembrances of those good times, those interesting times, and those times where things just got a little weird. Life is like that—no matter where you might live it.

  Doctor CAPCOM

  There are many people who assume that the stress of being a Flight Director must be off the scale when there’s a Shuttle in flight. In one way, they’re right—there is a lot riding on every decision and how we do the job. But the people selected for the job generally learned to cope with the stress to the point where it really didn’t register in our minds for the day-to-day business. You either had the right temperament for the work or you didn’t. In other words, if you are given to reacting negatively to stress, then you might not be well suited to the job.

  There are, however, times when stress can get to even the most steady among us. It usually hits in subtle ways. Some experience little personality changes. Others have trouble sleeping. In my case, the buildup of stress during a complex mission registered as a tight spot between my shoulder blades, in my upper back. It didn’t happen often, but when it did I’d notice a sore spot that bothered me when I moved my shoulders, progressing to a point where it hurt every time I moved my neck. On a bad day, it got to the point where I didn’t want to turn my head at all!

  On one of my early missions as a Flight Director, I started to get stiff on day one. By day three I was not having a good time—and it was evident to those around me. I could function, I just didn’t want to move. My CAPCOM was the legendary space walker and astronaut Story Musgrave… Dr. Story Musgrave, to be precise. Story was a fascinating guy. We usually assumed that he was an alien, visiting from another planet. Overachiever was probably his middle name. He had multiple bachelors degrees, several masters, and was an MD and surgeon. Hired as a science astronaut during the Apollo program, he had been sent to flight school to learn to fly T-38s, and near the end of his career he was the highest-time T-38 pilot in the world.

  Story was always into something interesting, always exploring new ideas in science and philosophy. For several years, he carried around a bundle of note cards that he was using to develop an entirely new system of keeping track of information. He was also well known in the Control Center for his oatmeal box. It was one of those round Quaker Oats boxes, and he used it to hold whatever it was that he was eating. As I recall, it was dry, and he ate it with a spoon. It obviously worked to keep him healthy, because at the age of eighty-four he is still incredibly active.

  Story walked into the MCC for handover on the third day of this mission. He saw me hunched over the handover notes, obviously not smiling. After we had both taken a look at the notes from our off-going counterparts, we exchanged a few pleasantries as the rest of the team was catching up and getting ready for the handover briefing that I’d conduct on the private AFD (Assistant Flight Director) Conference loop. He asked me how I was doing, noting that I seemed to be looking a bit like a hunchback. Good observation there, Story!

  Well, I allowed that my neck and back were really bothering me. I figured that if all went as usual, it’d
go away in a few days and that there wasn’t much I could do about it until then. “Would you like me to fix it for you?” Story asked.

  “Well yeah—if you can do something, that’d be great!” was my response. I’ve never had any luck though. I usually just let it go away on its own; the muscles would eventually relax.

  “No,” he said, “we can fix it. Lie down on the floor on your back.”

  “Hmm… this is going to be interesting,” I thought as I found a clear spot on the floor behind the console and lay down. The old carpeting was clean enough, and hey, the lighting was low enough in the room that no one would notice if I got anything on my shirt. Story kneeled down by my head and told me to relax. The next thing I knew, he had put one hand under my chin and the other behind my head. He asked me if I was ready. “Sure,” I said, not knowing what to expect. I felt a tug, then a pull—as he dragged me along the floor by my head about 3 feet!

  “There now,” he said. “Get up and see how that feels.” I gently sat up and noticed that the off-going Flight Director was now staring at me, as was the off-going CAPCOM—as was, in fact, just about anyone in the room who was nearby. Everyone was speechless as I slowly turned my head and flexed my shoulders. Sure enough, the pain was reduced to almost nothing, and I had complete freedom of movement! “Wow,” I said, “that’s amazing! I feel great!”

  “All you needed was a little traction,” Story said in his small voice. “I just lined up your spine and straightened it out a bit.”

  I couldn’t thank him enough, but we were ready to get started on the handover brief. It wasn’t until we got going that I realized just how funny that must have looked to the two full teams in the room—the oncoming CAPCOM dragging the oncoming Flight Director across the floor behind the console. I turned around to my PAO (Public Affairs Officer) and asked if any of that had been caught on camera and gone out to the world. She just smiled and said that she figured it came under the category of medical privacy and had switched to a recorded feature. No need to let the outside world know that we weren’t supermen and superwomen after all.

  The Coffeepot Abort

  The first time I was taken to the Control Center as a co-op student, I felt like I had walked into a cathedral. There was a simulation going on—a rehearsal for the long-delayed STS-1 mission—and I tagged along with one of my officemates who needed to drop something off with a backroom flight controller. I forget the details now, but I remember being amazed at both the unusual nature of the building’s hallowed halls and the normalcy of it all. People didn’t just do momentous things in this building, many of them spent large portions of their life here.

  Among the high-tech consoles filled with blinking lights and CRT screens were book cases filled with mountains of technical documentation. Tables were taken up with primitive computer terminals, and over on the side of each room a station for pneumatic tubes spit out and took in cylinders filled with all sorts of paper that needed to be shuffled around the building. That was the wonderful stuff that let you know you were in the cathedral. The normal part was just as interesting. Mr. Coffee makers sat precariously next to the computer terminals, the trash cans were filled with empty fast food bags, and a wide variety of refrigerators sat hiding behind doorways, almost as if they were trying to hide from critical eyes. Half-emptied packages of paper plates and plastic tableware were scattered about in odd corners, and some rooms even sported early microwave ovens—all signs of habitation by engineers who were spending large portions of their lives dedicated to the religion of spaceflight.

  I remember that first visit because I was almost afraid to speak. With everyone wearing headsets and talking softly, it seemed a transgression of some unwritten code to make noise in this place—especially when flight controllers were clearly doing important things. Or at least I assumed they were doing important things—without a headset of my own, it was hard to tell exactly what was going on. As my mentor gave me a quick tour of the building, I quickly lost my bearings. The place was all odd-shaped rooms and consoles strewn about in odd orientations. It didn’t help that doors were placed in strange locations, and we moved from room to room without going out into the halls. Only later did I find out that, as programs changed through the years, the Control Center was modified to fit new requirements, but a clean sheet was rarely used. Rather, things were moved a little here, functions changed a little there. Trying to figure out why there was a window in a wall that had been painted over was folly. Someone might remember why they had needed glass there, and then decided it was easier (and cheaper) to paint it rather than construct a whole new partition, but finding that person could be difficult.

  I do recall, however, ending up in a hallway with half a dozen doors along one side, and only one on the other. My mentor put his finger to his lips, signaling quiet, and then slowly pushed open the door to reveal “the room.” At the time, inexperienced as I was, I only knew this as Mission Control—a place I had been seeing on TV and in books for most of my life. When I was young, I assumed (like most other people) that this room was the entire Control Center. It wasn’t until that day of my first tour when I realized it was but a small fragment of the entire building, and that many more people were sprinkled through those tangled back rooms, contributing their expertise to make spaceflight work.

  I peered into the room I had seen so many times, not quite believing that I was really there. The cathedral of spaceflight—the nexus of missions past and those to come. With carpeting on the floor and the controllers concentrating on their displays, speaking softly into their microphones, the religious aspect was magnified—it really did feel like I was in church. My mentor looked around and then signaled me to step inside the room. For the first time I stood in the Mission Operations Control Room (MOCR)—a place where I would spend so many years of my working life. We walked across the room in front of the consoles, across the lower level of the stadium seating, and I felt so conspicuous there in the focus of all those eyes. It was only later that I realized that everyone was too busy to notice. In fact I often paid no attention to what was going on down in front of the Trench (the front row of consoles). Sure, controllers were looking at the big screens on the front wall, but anyone walking across the front of the room was below them.

  Swinging around the last console, turning right to go out the rear door, we passed the king of all coffeemakers—not a Mr. Coffee, but a commercial unit with two pots to fuel the energy needs of the people in the front room. There may have been a box of donuts or kolaches on a table nearby, or some leftover cake or cookies. This was, after all, a place where people lived—just like in the back rooms. The front room was more formal—ties were always required for men staffing the consoles, and there was a similar level of professional dress for the women—but that didn’t change the fact that life goes on, even when you are doing something extraordinary.

  That was back in the old Control Center. Later on, I was a Flight Director in that same room, sometime in the early to mid-1990s. Back then, the coffeepot for the FCR was in the little entrance tunnel on the right side of the room. It was located back behind the tiers, which was out of the way but convenient because you didn’t have to leave the room to fill up. Now I must admit that I was of a generation that didn’t drink a lot of coffee. Caffeinated cola filled that need just fine. I think that part of the reason I never picked up a strong coffee habit was because I never felt like I needed warm beverages in Houston—any time of the year.

  Nevertheless, we had quite a few folks who partook of the community coffeepot, and the FCR had a good one—a double burner unit where one side brewed and the other side kept the spare pot warm. Redundancy in all things is important to flight controllers. When you needed to brew a pot, you poured a measured amount of water into an opening on the top and let it do the rest of the work. Unfortunately, the top of the coffeemaker also sported a cooling vent of some sort, and you could see the wiring through the vent if you were tall enough to look at the top directly.

&n
bsp; One night during a mission—it was very late, probably after midnight—we were putting the crew to bed and getting ready to start the planning process. All was quiet until suddenly, there came a loud BBBRRRAAAAAPPPPPP!! sound from the right rear corner of the room, accompanied by a noticeable flash of light. The noise was followed by some sizzling, and intermittent flashing, as you’d get from an electrical device giving off sparks. The room was quiet no more!

  The Ground Control (GC) operator was situated in the left front corner of the room. Concerned about his building, he made a sprint across the front of the room and around the corner. Some rustling and banging around ensued—all of this occurring in a few seconds, of course. The GC emerged from around the back corner with the call, “It’s all right, Flight, I think the fire’s out!” Sure enough, someone was making coffee and had managed to pour the water into the electrical cooling vent instead of the reservoir opening. Dumping a bunch of water on hot, live electrical wiring is never a good thing, of course, and the results were spectacular. The GC had quickly pulled the unit away from the wall and pulled the plug, solving the immediate problem. But now we had another.

  Could a Space Shuttle mission continue without coffee? There were controllers already nervously fingering their coffee cups, wondering what they were going to do on this long night without any java. It wasn’t quite an Apollo 13 moment, but there were traces of angst in the eyes of the team! About that time, the crew called down, and CAPCOM told them to stand by a minute because we were sorting out a ground problem. He added that it had to do with critical equipment, and that we were evaluating. (The way he said it made it clear that if this were a real emergency, we’d probably be letting the crew know the specifics quickly.) In the meantime, what could we do for them?