Shuttle, Houston

by Paul Dye

  Now the P-Tube system had strict rules about what could be sent. It was two ounces or less of paper, per carrier—and nothing else. Paper only. Of course, flight controllers were engineers, and engineers love a challenge. They especially love to challenge limitations. As a result, many items other than just paper were sent through the P-Tube system. Now, of course, I never sent anything other than paper you understand, but there are stories…

  Way back in the day, someone in the front room needed some pencils, so he asked his back room to bring some up. For some reason, the backroom operators decided that was too much work, and besides, there was a quicker way! So they loaded up a P-Tube carrier and hit the dispatch button. No one knows why, but the carrier door opened up en route and pencils spilled into the tubes. Legend has it that technicians were picking splinters of wood out of the system for years afterward.

  Then there was the time that the legendary Ed Fendell, Captain Video himself, was working the Instrumentation and Communications Officers console and asked his back room for a ham and Swiss sandwich. His back room replied that they’d send it via P-Tube. I wasn’t there at the time—but I have read the transcript of the ensuing conversation on the various communication loops. Apparently, annoyed that his sandwich hadn’t shown up, Fendell asked his back room if they had sent it. Assuring him that it had gone, Ed began hunting for the sandwich by talking to other rooms throughout the Control Center. This meant that he had to punch up the appropriate comm loop for whomever might be by the various P-Tube stations throughout the building, and giving them a call.

  What Fendell didn’t know is that his back room was following him on the loops and recording all the conversations. Each time Fendell called someone new, he had to explain about the sandwich, and then ask if it had shown up there. What he didn’t know was that it was all a setup—the sandwich had never actually been sent! The “Great Ham and Swiss Hunt” went down in the historical lore of MCC, proving that you have to be careful when talking on a recorded communications system.

  Ya Gotta Eat!

  Food has always played a significant part in MCC operations. The onsite cafeterias apparently supported a snack bar in the Control Center back in the early days, but this did not survive the down years between Apollo-Soyuz and the Shuttle era. What we were left with was vending machines. While you could make it through a shift with a candy bar and a soda if you had to, you could almost always find food (if you looked hard enough) that had been brought in by flight controllers to share with their teammates. Morning simulations or shifts that started at dawn, Houston time, were always a good time to look around for kolaches. Strongly reminiscent of pigs in a blanket, the kolache was food that you could pick up at a local bakery by the dozen for a few bucks and share with the team. It became almost traditional that if you were being certified on a particular sim, you brought in kolaches—or donuts—for the team to enjoy in exchange for them suffering through a script that was heavy on items for the discipline being tested and light on everything else.

  Some disciplines were well known for particular “feeds” during a mission. Some might have a pasta night, or bring in several pans of lasagna. Of course, cakes, pastries, and cookies were usually in abundance as well. A person could gain a lot of weight wandering around the Control Center during a mission if they weren’t careful. Food was less plentiful during simulations, but you could find it if you knew where to look. There were also a couple of fast food joints just outside the front gate of the space center, though it was considered bad form to sneak out to pick up lunch if you had a gap in your work—unless, of course, you offered to pick up something for those around you.

  It was no secret around Mission Operations that I was a fan of pizza. I took it on myself to always try and have a pizza night for my team during a mission. This was hard to do if we went on console before midnight and got off at the crack of dawn, but if the timing was right we tried to pick a day near the end of the mission, when things had gone well and there wasn’t a lot going on. I’d usually have a cohost (or coconspirator) in my CAPCOM, and they’d offer to split the bill for pizzas for the entire team. We’d find one of the disciplines that didn’t have a lot going on and ask if they could be a clearinghouse for orders—then give everyone a deadline for providing their needs to the coordinator. We’d ask for status light colors and set timers counting down to the pizza order (just to make sure everyone knew when they had to have their requests in). When the deadline came, the order went in. At one time, there were certain pizza restaurants that had a delivery driver with a JSC site badge. Those drivers could bring the pizza all the way to the Control Center. Other times (particularly post-9/11), we had to send someone out to the gate. It usually took about two dozen pizzas to feed a flight control team, so it was no small task to get it all delivered up to the front room. If we ordered an extra one for the gate guards, things seemed to go smoother…

  When the pizza arrived, we’d make sure that the front room cameras were not going out to the world—we’d have the PAO go to a playback or a recorded feature—as we didn’t really need to advertise for any particular pizza brand on international TV… on a US Government feed. Executed properly, we’d have everyone fed and the boxes cleaned up in an hour, with the leftovers out of sight by the coffeepot for continued snacking. And it should be noted that while pizza is probably not on the “health food” list, I never saw our flight surgeons (or their support teams) turn down free pizza.

  PAO’s Atlas

  Although the Shuttle flight control teams occupied a number of different front rooms over the decades of the Shuttle program, one constant followed us wherever we went—a large and detailed Earth atlas, kept at the Public Affairs Officer (PAO) console. I don’t remember the date on the cover, but it clearly went back to before the Shuttle. PAO kept it handy in case they needed to figure out what they were seeing on downlink TV when the crew (or ground) was panning down to show Earth. It was the final arbiter of discussions over “Which lake is that?” or “Is that the Danube or the Rhine?” As useful as it was for things like that, it needed to be carefully used when looking up the names or borders of countries—especially small African nations. They had a tendency to change. And even though the atlas went on a shelf when Google Earth came along, it was still referred to now and again by those who loved the old ways. Sometimes, you just want to have a real book in your hands.

  Visit from “Space”

  It was not uncommon—in fact, it was probably the rule rather than the exception—that any Very Important Person visiting the Johnson Space Center ended up in the front room for at least part of their tour. I have hosted princes, kings, and presidents. I have chatted with singers and sports figures. And I have shown off what we do to teachers and their young students—the most rewarding tours of all. In general, most of these folks were friendly and engaging, many of them memorable—but one visitor, in particular, was simply a delight—and special in a nostalgic way.

  It was late one afternoon or early in the evening on a Shuttle mission, with the crew already in bed, when I was told that we had a visitor coming, a friend of the Administrator’s. When I heard the name, it wouldn’t have made any difference to me if she was an enemy of the Administrator’s—actress June Lockhart had played such a special role on television during my formative years in the 1960s. Lost in Space was a three-year-long science fiction show that, in retrospect, was more than campy and had very little science. But the tale of a family, their robot, and their spaceship running around the galaxy trying to find their way home was captivating to a young boy enamored by all things that flew. Ms. Lockhart played the mother of the family, Maureen Robinson, and was always the voice of reason and steadiness—a true Midwestern mother in my book.

  Ms. Lockhart’s visit was fun because she really was a delight—a genuinely nice person who seemed to really be impressed by what we were doing. I spent some time explaining the control room and what the Shuttle was doing in space—how we were watching over the crew and th
e vehicle while they slept. She spent quite a bit of time with us, and I am surprised that I don’t remember that she had any handlers with her—she was just comfortable being with us by herself. At one point, we were sitting together by the Flight Director console, and I told her just how much I had enjoyed the Lost in Space series when I was a kid. She sort of laughed and said something about just how silly it was in retrospect—and I must admit, the plots got pretty goofy when they ran out of the obvious space-genre action scripts. She seemed proud of the work but didn’t think it was anything special.

  At that point, I paused and said, “I understand what you’re saying. And in light of today’s more sophisticated take on science fiction, and television, and given what they can do with special effects, it does seem like it was a pretty low-budget, simple show. But if I were to ask the team here, right now, how many of them watched Lost in Space, either during its first run or later on [in reruns], and then ask how many were inspired to be a part of the space program because of it, I am willing to bet that 80 percent of the men and women here in the room would raise their hands. You see, early learning is strong learning, and we grew up with the idea that people could live and work in space because we saw TV shows like yours. Don’t ever feel bad about what you did then—it was inspirational, and paid dividends far beyond what you might have ever thought.”

  I think that I might have seen a glint of a tear in her eyes as she thanked me for that perspective. It truly is hard to know just how our actions will inspire others, and what effects we’ll have on the generation that comes after us. And in the end, that is really what the space program is all about—inspiration. June Lockhart inspired a generation to get into the space business, and that generation will inspire others to do the same thing. It all rolls into the future, and while we can’t tell exactly where our efforts at NASA will lead, we bet that sometime in the future those efforts will lead the way for young people to leap beyond our mere beginnings.

  Execute Package Humor

  The Execute Package is the crew’s morning newspaper—it tells them what they need to know about the coming day and includes timeline revisions, procedural changes, and various news items such as consumables quantities, the weather at emergency landing sites, and the like. It also oftentimes contains a little actual news from the world (submitted by the Public Affairs Officer—something to keep them awake on the overnight shifts). The Execute Package is put together by the planning team, based on inputs from the previous day’s Orbit 1 and Orbit 2 teams, plus necessary materials submitted from around the mission ecosystem.

  It generally took the planning team most of their shift to pull together the inputs, format them, check them for accuracy, edit the resulting pages, and then review everything in time to have it uplinked. The Execute Package could be relatively short, or it could be a whole “special edition” that included massive rewrites of procedures. The first thing the planning shift Flight Director did when coming on console was to get an idea just how big of a job the team had ahead of them and adjust the pace of the shift accordingly.

  Now for much of the Shuttle program, the Execute Package was distributed to the team as paper copies and slipped into the console inboxes about the time the crew woke up. The crew got theirs via an uplinked teleprinter message early on, then via a printer connected into the computers later, and finally, by direct uplink to the laptop computer network with no attempt by the ground to figure out what the crew wanted printed and what they did not. In those later years, the flight control team went paperless as well, with the package available on the Control Center computers for easy access. Some printed certain pages, but in general we worked from our screens.

  Notwithstanding the actual form of delivery, the Execute Package was still referred to as a package, with a cover sheet that listed all the messages contained in that day’s edition. And it became traditional—no one I ever talked to could trace down the exact time when it started—to put a cartoon on the cover of the Execute Package to give just a little levity to the morning read. The cartoon usually played off something going on in the mission: either making a little fun of a Control Center discipline that had something going on, or of a payload that was either having trouble or was performing in an outstanding way, or oftentimes having a little fun with the crew. The funny thing about that was, until we entered the digital uplink age, the crew never saw the cartoons until they got home—we didn’t have picture uplink capability! It was always a little unfair to pick on someone who didn’t know it—kind of like putting a “kick me” sign on their back—but we judged who would take it in stride and who might get angry… and it was well known who would react in which way.

  Flight Directors were always given a choice of Execute Package cartoons, just to make sure that the Flight Activities Officer’s (FAO) back room (who were responsible for generating the cartoons) didn’t go beyond the pale of reasonable taste, or make a faux pas because they weren’t aware of political, social, or personality characteristics that might be going on behind the scenes. Being a fan of edgy (but not over the edge) humor myself, I always told my FAOs that if I didn’t reject at least three or four cartoons during the mission, they weren’t dancing close enough to the cliff. Somewhere in all my boxes of memorabilia, I probably have a folder of rejected cartoons. I’ll have to look for them someday.

  One of my favorite cartoons poking fun at me and my fellow Flight Directors was a simple one. It depicted a person standing in front of the coffeepot, arms folded, with a badge that said “Flight” on it. The person was staring at the machine and barking out, “Make Coffee!!” It was a commentary on the fact that Flight Directors never actually do anything themselves—they direct others to make things happen.

  If the FAOs didn’t have a reasonable artist in their back room for a mission, they would often pull a cartoon out of one of a large stack of cartoon books they kept (The Far Side, Calvin and Hobbes, Peanuts, Bloom County, and others were the likely donors) and alter the text to make them appropriate to the situation. Another favorite was a Bloom County cartoon featuring Bill the Cat in which the other characters were preparing him for a press conference. Bill was wearing a football helmet and pads. Bill had a name tag that read “Flight,” and as one character asked a question in the nature of “So, Flight, can you comment on the report that the crew reported seeing a UFO?,” another character swung a baseball bat and clobbered him right on the helmet. Yeah, I have seen press events like that…

  It was, of course, a great honor to be lampooned on the cover of the Execute Package—and an event to be cherished in your Control Center career.

  The TLI Memorial PAD

  A PAD is a form used to transmit information by voice from the ground team to the crew in the most efficient manner possible. There are many different types of PADs, but they work on the principle that if both the sender and the receiver have the exact same form, then all you have to do is read up the information without having to read up explanatory things like what each piece of information means. A Burn PAD, for instance, contains information that the crew needs to perform an orbital maneuver. It consists of the vehicle attitude, the amount of thrust in each direction, special notes, and so forth. So, instead of the CAPCOM having to read up “Roll equals 045, pitch equals 137, yaw equals 067,” he looks at his PAD that has the information with the exact roll, pitch, yaw order. Knowing that the crew has the same PAD, he tells the crew which line they are starting on and simply says, “045, 137, 067.” If you have a lot of information to get through, this process can really speed things up.

  The Shuttle had a standard maneuver PAD for exactly this purpose, and even when we could uplink the information later on, we still read up the critical data in case an uplink went bad and a wrong number went up digitally. It was a cross-check on our own work. The standard Orbit Maneuver PAD could be used for anything, really—big burns, small burns, altitude corrections, plain changes—whatever was necessary.

  So it came to pass one late night in July 2
009 that I was working the overnight shift on STS-127. They had launched on July 15, one day earlier than forty years since Apollo 11 left for the moon. There was much discussion about this historic event, of course, and as I recall, STS-127 was going extremely well—there were few changes for the planning team to work, and our biggest problem was keeping everyone awake. I hadn’t heard anything from the Trench for a while, so I pulsed my FDO. “Hey FIDO, have you got any idea how much propellant it would take to send the Shuttle to the moon?” It was a physics question that involved a little engineering to account for the characteristic of the rocket engines being used, and I figured that such a question might keep his team busy for a while.

  “I don’t know, Flight—but I bet we can find out! We’ll get back to you.” That was my FDO, either grateful for something to do or just humoring the old man’s odd request. I let them go chew on it for a while and decided to bother someone else.

  In a little while, I got a call back from my FDO. “Flight, FIDO, we’ve been looking into your question regarding a Trans-Lunar Injection (TLI) burn for the Shuttle and, believe it or not, we still have targeting software that can solve that kind of problem. We blew the dust off it, and at the Orbiter’s current weight, it looks like it would take about 240,000 pounds of prop to get us on a free-return trajectory around the back side of the moon. Of course, we’d need some more to keep us in lunar orbit and then to get us headed home. Would you like us to work up a Burn PAD for the TLI? We can do that!”