Shuttle, Houston

by Paul Dye

  “Badge on the Table” Moments

  With great authority comes great responsibility, and the Flight Director Office expected its members to take that responsibility seriously. From the very first day, we have to be aware that at some point in our leadership career we might very well be faced with a “badge on the table” moment—one of those cases where you are asked (or told) to do something that is contrary to your core beliefs regarding crew safety and/or mission success. It is imperative, in those cases, that a Flight Director be willing to simply say, “No—I won’t do that!,” knowing full well that it can or will cost them their position or their job. Everyone who takes on the title of Flight Director has faced, or will face, moments when they must stand up for important ideals, regardless of the personal consequences.

  It is also important to know that I have only seen a few cases where a senior leader has been forced to step aside because they refused to do something that was against their conscience and technical beliefs or understandings. But it has happened. We demand honesty and integrity of our leaders, especially those who are given authority over important projects and people’s lives. And we would be disappointed if those people didn’t live up to the ideals that they set for themselves. Bad things happen when you break the trust of others in a high-risk environment, and frankly, we can’t get rid of people like that quickly enough. But it is sad when a man or a woman of high principles has to take the path of resignation in order to make a point.

  In the aviation world, pilots who fly for a living need to have the courage to stand up to their bosses and managers and be willing to say, “No sir, I won’t fly this airplane today.” Whether it is a maintenance issue, an unsafe load, or bad weather—it does you no good to keep a job if you’re going to be dead because you did something unsafe. The same thing is true of those involved in Space Flight Operations at the highest level. If you want to be given the authority and responsibility of a Flight Director, then you have to be willing to publicly walk away from it if the situation demands it.

  Spaceflight Is Hard

  When it comes right down to it, although humankind has made it to the moon and has spent close to sixty years with the capability of flying in low-Earth orbit, spaceflight is still hard—and for the foreseeable future it will remain that way. The energy it takes to blast someone off the planet and return them to Earth is so large that the margin for error is razor thin. Until we can create an entirely new method of getting people into orbit, we must face that fact. Creative, critical thinking and robust design will be the driving force for our ongoing forays into this environment. Good leadership will be essential too, because without inspiration who will put forth the effort to take the risks?

  The Space Shuttle flight program lasted slightly over three decades—longer than the average human generation. There were many flight controllers at the end who weren’t born when STS-1 left the pad for the program’s first flight. They had never known a time when humans couldn’t get on a Space Shuttle and take it to space. Then the program ended. It ended not because the vehicles were no longer capable of doing the job, not because we couldn’t really afford it, but because we, as a nation, lost the vision, the leadership that had made the program work for so long.

  Yes, there were immense risks. Over the span of 135 missions we lost two Shuttles and their crews. These are very poor odds when you compare them to the safety records that we expert of modern transportation systems. But space transportation today can’t be compared to the safety records of airliners, or ships, or any other type of terrestrial transportation. The energy involved in going to space is a couple of orders of magnitude greater, and therefore the risks are much harder to contain. Besides, those safer modes of transportation have millions—or billions—of miles behind them. Many lessons had been learned along the way, leading them to be incrementally safer all the time.

  Early aviation had a dismal safety record. Most pilots died young, after only a year or two of flying. Fast forward to the early airliners—they had just as many problems, with crafts going down in bad weather or over dangerous terrain. Many lives were lost, but we didn’t ground all the aircraft and turn our backs on flying. Instead, we recognized that if we made air travel reliable and relatively safe, it would add immeasurably to the human experience. Indeed, aviation has shrunk the globe to the point where we think nothing of shipping a few dollars’ worth of silicon from one side of the planet to another so that we can watch cats doing funny things on little screens.

  Space travel can be as revolutionary as airline travel—we simply don’t know what we will find to be its real potential until we play with it awhile. Aviation was a novelty until men and woman did the hard work to make it useful. And now we can’t dream of being without it. Yet we walked away from thirty years of flying winged, reusable spacecraft because the national sense was that it was simply too dangerous, that there wasn’t enough benefit for the risk. That assessment was so very wrong. The benefits of space exploration are seen in every hour of every day by anyone who lives in a technological world. Microelectronics, remote communications and sensing, our knowledge of the planet that allows us to make fuller and better use of our resources—these all come from the space program.

  Yes, there are multiple ways to fly into space. We started out sealing humans into the nose cones of ballistic missiles. Then we added ways for the humans to control those nose cones and maneuver in ways that allowed them to accomplish interesting and useful missions. With the Space Shuttle, we developed the ability to put wings into space to allow us to bring back a huge vehicle—and huge payloads—on a runway. Then we turned that vehicle around and used it again—over and over and over. The Shuttle was a magnificent machine, and it taught us a great deal about how to routinely access space. And then we retired it in favor of small capsules that are little more than space taxis for humans.

  The real shame of retiring the Shuttle is not that we moved on to something else; it is that we moved on to something less. The technology of the new commercial crew vehicles is far better than what we had in Apollo, and the safety of ballistic reentry is solid. But the capability of returning large payloads—be they scientific experiments or products made in space—has been lost. Humans have always explored new lands not just for the wonder, but for the new resources. Cargo ships laden with exotic trade goods spread civilization across the planet. You couldn’t have done the same thing with row boats.

  The day that we stopped flying the Shuttle was the day that the knowledge base for flying winged, reusable spacecraft into, and back from, space began to erode. The people who knew how to make that happen drifted off to other endeavors—many of those outside the space program. Sure, we still put people into space using expendable launch vehicles and small crew compartments that come back on parachutes, and that is far better than not having access to space at all. But it is far from the space freighter that we had in the Shuttle, and a far cry from what any fan of predictive science fiction has looked forward to throughout their life.

  I am a fan of the commercialization of space transportation. When I get on an airliner, I am fully aware that it doesn’t belong to the government. I know it belongs to a private, for-profit corporation—a commercial entity. And I believe that we need to head that same direction in space travel. In order for commercial companies to get going, they seem to have to take the same learning steps that NASA did: starting out with capsules and hopefully moving onward to fully reusable spacecraft that can carry cargo both into and out of space. Commercialization is a good thing, and if that is where the leaders go with their visions, then we will follow—and ride their ships off the planet.

  I am also a believer that exploration is a good way for humanity to cooperate as we push back the boundary of the unknown. The established way of doing this has always been through governments. I believe that space exploration is too risky and too expensive for a commercial entity to take on alone—not that I wouldn’t welcome the wealthiest people in the word putt
ing their money in the game and go to Mars. But wealthy people tend to get that way because they are fiscally smart, and the chances are that the first expeditions to the planets will be money-losing propositions. Or better put, these expeditions will be investments that may not pay dividends until many years in the future.

  But I do believe that those dividends will come—eventually. If humankind wants to progress, we have to move into space. We probably will not be forced to leave Earth in any sort of time frame we can imagine, but we need to expand our realm to other planets that can give us more resources and the capability to live off of the home world. This realistically won’t happen in my lifetime—I know that now. When I was young, I think I expected that we’d be on Mars by now. But the reality of global and national politics, coupled with changing desires and wills, has made that goal more distant. I am not even sure what language will be spoken by the first humans who step on to the Martian surface—there is no reason to believe that it will necessarily be English.

  But I do believe we will eventually hear a human voice from the surface of Mars, and again from the surface of the moon, and hopefully from other planets as well. These voices may come from people who are funded by great government efforts, or they may come from people who are funded by commercial entities. Regardless, I personally hope that they will be there for the good of all humankind, because no matter who funds the project, just getting there will be the big triumph. I believe that because I believe it is in our nature to explore, to grow, and to push the boundaries of what we know. If we stop doing that, we will stagnate. We need to push ourselves out of this little valley in which we live, climb to the ridgeline, and look out across a broader expanse at challenges we have yet to see. There will always be frontiers—we simply need the will to go out and find them.

  I was privileged to work my years as a flight controller, and my first several years as Flight Director, in the old Mission Control that was used for Apollo. We were encouraged by the spirits of those that had gone before.

  We always tried to encourage our flight controllers to remember the missions of the past—in this photo, our on-console team celebrated the Apollo flight control teams on the fortieth anniversary of the first moon landing.

  The old Mission Control consoles and systems were used until the mid-1990s to control Shuttle missions. The consoles featured black-and-white monitors and hardwired event lights. It actually matched the 1970s-era Shuttle design well, and improvements to MCC came along with upgrades to the vehicle technology.

  The NASA Flight Director Insignia used only by those who have been responsible for a crewed spacecraft in flight.

  Being the Flight Director meant keeping up with a huge amount of information from the vehicle, flight controllers, the crew, and the management team. Every shift was packed and required a lot of engagement.

  The Spacelab Instrument Pointing System on STS-51F—my first major system responsibility in Mission Control. The rectangular box on the right with the protruding tubes is the Optical Sensor Package, which tracked stars to keep the system stable.

  The “goodie books” I built during my early years as a flight controller served as shortcuts to the many thousands of pages of documentation and schematics for the systems I watched over.

  Left to right: myself, Bryan Austin, and John Shannon (the Flight Director class of ’93) during crew escape activities in our year of Flight Director training. It was the intent of such training to make us familiar with just what our crews would be going through in flight—including the limitations of wearing the bulky orange launch and entry suits.

  Here I am experiencing what it is like to work on a spacewalking zero-G simulation rig used for astronaut training. This rig allowed us to understand just how every action created an equal and opposite reaction—so if you turned a wrench on a bolt, you moved instead of the bolt.

  You can only live on pizza and cookies for so long on console—sooner or later, you need a healthy snack. Without the ability to leave the Control Center for meals, we tried to have reasonable food during missions whenever we could.

  The Flight Director job included doing press conferences during missions, like this one in 2009. We were sent to a weeklong “charm school” during our year of training to better understand how to work with the press. This training drummed the phrase “no comment” out of our repertoire.

  It took a great team to fly a Shuttle mission, and one of the most important relationships for a Flight Director was working with his or her CAPCOM. Here I shared the last Space Shuttle Mission with my frequent CAPCOM, Shannon Lucid, one of our most experienced female astronauts, whom I worked with for many years.

  A large group of current and former Flight Directors gathered in April 2011 to help dedicate the Mission Control Center to Christopher C. Kraft (front row, center)—the founder of MCC and the very first Flight Director. Kraft was a mentor to every Flight Director who ever held the position.

  I was proud to see the Shuttle docked to the Mir Space Station on STS-71, and to be a Flight Director on that mission. It was a culmination of years of preparation, and the beginning of a lasting relationship between the United States and Russia in space exploration.

  STS-71 Shuttle Commander “Hoot” Gibson shakes hands across the hatch with Mir Commander Vladimir Dezhurov during the STS-71, the first docking mission. It took years of work by thousands of dedicated space workers to reach this moment—and US/Russian relations were improved because of it.

  The SRTM mast canister was mounted in the payload bay, and the mast extended out over the port side of the Orbiter. The radar mapper created an accurate and detailed topographical map of the earth that will serve as a baseline for all mapping for the next century—a satisfying mission for everyone involved.

  I took some informal time during the last Shuttle mission to talk with my young flight controllers about the early days of the program. It was inspiring seeing such talent still with us that would continue to pursue human spaceflight well into the future.

  It’s sort of an honor to be memorialized on the cover of an Execute Package—even when they are poking fun at you. In this case, the young flight control team had a laugh at the length of my service as a Flight Director.

  Flight Directors, controllers, and instructors often served as surrogate crewmembers during simulations. Here I was the commander on the final Shuttle generic simulation of the program, an eight-hour training session that kept our crew—and Mission Control—hopping from start to finish.

  During STS-131, I took time to go over the Shuttle Rendezvous Checklist and compare notes with Apollo 13 Commander Jim Lovell. Lovell helped develop rendezvous techniques for Gemini and Apollo that made the moon landings possible, and it was an honor to catch him up on how we used his work in the Shuttle program.

  The International Space Station viewed from the Shuttle during STS-132. The last ten years of the Shuttle program were dedicated to building and supporting this million-pound laboratory, a crowning achievement for everyone involved in human spaceflight.

  Execute Package humor was often aimed at Flight Directors. Flight Directors rarely do anything themselves—rather, they direct others to do things. Sometimes, those other things aren’t even human!

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