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Astronauts, flight controllers, engineers, scientists and flight directors. These are the people who make up a successful space mission. A diverse collection of men and women who channel their passion for space into their work. Astronauts are the most visible members of this team but for every person in space, for every hour of crew activity, there are dozens of people on the ground working to make sure everything is executed safely and accurately. In addition, when we talk about the International Space Station, we must keep in mind that there are teams of people working in the U.S., Russia and many other countries.

I am the lead flight director for Expedition 15 - the 15th team of astronauts and cosmonauts to live permanently on the International Space Station (ISS) since the fall of 2000. Few people realize that we have had a permanent presence on the ISS for that long. Various expedition astronauts have reported their experiences through journals. Two Expedition 15 astronauts, Sunita “Suni” Williams and Clayton “Clay” Anderson, are continuing this tradition. In fact, Suni has already started documenting her life on board the ISS, and Clay has been detailing his road through training in preparation for his stay on ISS beginning next June.

+ Sunita Williams' Journals
+ Clayton Anderson's Training Journals

Few also know what a flight director is. In fact, the best way to tell people what I do is to refer them to the movie "Apollo 13" depicting the legendary flight director Gene Kranz who uttered the famous “failure is not an option” and wore a white vest. Hopefully, I will never face anything quite so dark. I am responsible for the crew’s safety and direct the team of flight controllers as they support the station's operations. I will try to explain what a flight director does through my own journal entries as I work with the Expedition crew over the coming year.

While the space shuttle is NASA’s visible support vehicle, the Russian Soyuz is the station lifeboat or emergency return spacecraft. Unlike NASA’s orbiter which can stay in space for about 2 weeks, the Soyuz can last a little over 6 months. Typically, the increment corresponds to the 6-month interval when a crew is launched on a new Soyuz to the ISS. The crew manning the increment is known as the ‘expedition’. Russian cosmonauts and American astronauts generally comprise the expedition crews with the commander’s role alternating between the United States and Russia. Recently, NASA has begun rotating their astronauts primarily on the space shuttle while the cosmonauts always travel in the Soyuz.

One of my assignments was to be the NASA lead for Increment 15. Like every aspect of the ISS program, I have a counterpart on the Russian side, in this case, Raphael Ashimov. In early 2006, I knew little about the Expedition 15 crew other than the crew names. Fyodor Yurchikhin will be the commander and Oleg Kotov is the Flight Engineer (FE-1) and pilot of the Soyuz. These cosmonauts will begin their on-orbit residency of ISS in April of 2007. They will join Suni Williams (FE-2) who made the ISS her home in December of 2006. Currently, she is part of the Expedition 14 team. When Fyodor and Oleg arrive in April, she will become a member of the Expedition 15 crew. She will remain the third expedition member until Clay arrives in June to replace her. Finally, Clay will also be replaced by Dan Tani in September. Confused yet? I was at first.

Although I had been at the Johnson Space Center working on ISS for 9 years as a flight controller, I had not worked so closely with a crew or directly with any cosmonauts. The first challenge was getting to know the team. The crew go back and forth between the U.S. and Russia for training. Therefore, the cosmonauts are only in Houston for a few weeks at a time every few months. Therefore, when they are in town, and they are all in town together, I try to observe as much training as I can. This way I have been able to get to know the crew, while learning the tasks that they do, and how they think when they are doing them. This helps me guide the team in preparing the procedures and timelines for the crew.

The next step was determining the objectives of the increment and who would be my leads among the flight controllers. Flight controllers are the system experts, usually engineers, who are what we call “front room certified.” For each system - power, thermal, computer, life support, etc. - there is a team of approximately 20 controllers who operate that system. During busy mission time, such as when the space shuttle orbiter is docked to the ISS, there is one such flight controller working in the front room who is supported by one or more back room controllers. The controllers in the Flight Control Room (FCR, pronounced “ficker”) work under a flight director who leads the team to achieve the day’s objectives. Three teams, working 9 hour shifts, operate the ISS 24/7.

During an increment, one person from each area focuses on just that 6-month period. They will develop the procedures the crew or flight controllers will execute. There is a lead flight director, in this case me, overseeing the whole process. Already my team has spent 9 months preparing and planning for the increment. For every hour in the FCR, many hours of preparation have occurred.

Likewise, there is a similar team of instructors who have been helping train the crew. For each system, there is a primary instructor who is supervised by the Station Training Lead (STL) Lucia McCullough. For most of the last year, they have focused on training the crew but are now starting to train the controllers for the more difficult tasks during the increment. More about that later.

The final leg of the team comes from the Space Station program office. These people are responsible for the big picture of the ISS - what goes where and when and in what priority -- to ensure a successful assembly and scientific utilization of the station. For increment 15, this is led by Susan Brand.

What a lot of people may not realize is that most of what we do is plan. Plan and prepare. Prepare and plan. The program office tells me what has to be accomplished during the 6-month increment and I, along with my team, figure out how to make it happen. We will plan how to install new software, or lay plumbing for a new oxygen generation system, or conduct a space walk. And while we work very hard to make sure everything goes smoothly, we have to spend just as much time and energy, if not more, trying to plan for problems. What if a space suit leaks during the EVA or new software has a serious bug?

For example, we will be loading a new operating system to a number of key ISS computers. This means that we need to figure out how to load the computers while not interrupting their control of the critical systems. In addition, this means a lot of procedures need to be updated and tested to reflect the new software. This in turn means that the flight controllers and crew need to undergo training using the new software. This means a lot of meetings. The team discusses the timeline for these activities to ensure everything is ready at the correct time. Discussions also cover the inevitable problems that crop up. For example, the crew only recently began working with the new Command and Control Software (CCS). As is the case with any new software, there are always features that don’t work as they should. We quickly ran into a problem in how the CCS talks to the crew’s laptops. This is a very critical interface and we were faced with a tough choice: Should we try to understand the quirks and train the crew to work around them or find a way to deactivate the software that was causing the trouble? A number of meetings ensued with various experts: the ODIN flight controllers in charge of the computer systems, the folks who designed and built the interface, the instructors who teach the crew and of course, some of the crew who would use the laptops. Ideally, we would have liked to fix the software but that would, unfortunately, take too long and would not be ready for the crew’s flight. So after much discussion, we decided to have the crew turn off the buggy feature whenever they booted up their laptops. This may seem like a small issue but it took many hours and a lot of people to work out the best solution. My days are filled with trying to solve a myriad of “small” problems while trying to plan the 6-month timeline. And we are still on the ground!

And ISS is always changing. We are still in the assembly phase which means if the space shuttle is not bringing food, clothing, spare parts or other supplies, it is delivering a new piece of hardware or module. Even when the shuttle is not there, we are busy performing assembly tasks. For example, during Increment 14 the crew performed 3 space walks to hook up the power and fluid lines to the permanent external cooling system (previously, cooling was performed by a system that was only temporary until all the necessary parts could be installed). But I also said spare parts because just like anything in your home, things break. So while we are still expanding the station we also need to maintain the equipment. Throughout these operations, which can be very challenging and time consuming for the crew, we are still trying to perform as much scientific research as possible. Routinely, the crew are performing various experiments ranging from soldering of different metals to see how they behave in space to measuring numerous physical parameters of the crew to study long term space exposure in preparation for missions to the moon or Mars.

Over the next few months I will try to describe these experiences as they present themselves.

- Bob Dempsey, Expedition 15 Lead Flight Director