If you’re fascinated by the idea of humans traveling through space and curious about how that all works, you’ve come to the right place.
“Houston We Have a Podcast” is the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center from Houston, Texas, home for NASA’s astronauts and Mission Control Center. Listen to the brightest minds of America’s space agency – astronauts, engineers, scientists and program leaders – discuss exciting topics in engineering, science and technology, sharing their personal stories and expertise on every aspect of human spaceflight. Learn more about how the work being done will help send humans forward to the Moon and on to Mars in the Artemis program.
On Episode 167, Anthony Vareha, the lead flight director at NASA’s Johnson Space Center for NASA’s SpaceX Crew-1 mission, details the first crew rotation flight on a U.S. commercial spacecraft. This episode was recorded on September 30, 2020.
The launch date for NASA’s SpaceX Crew-1 has changed since the recording of this episode. For the latest updates, visit: nasa.gov/commercialcrew.
Transcript
Gary Jordan (Host): Houston, we have a podcast. Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center, Episode 167, “Crew-1: The Mission.” I’m Gary Jordan and I’ll be your host today. On this podcast we bring in the experts, scientists, engineers, astronauts all to let you know what’s going on in the world of human spaceflight. We are continuing our conversation on Crew-1, the first crew rotation mission to the International Space Station on a U.S. Commercial spacecraft for NASA and for SpaceX. Last week, we got a chance to hear from each of the astronauts onboard the SpaceX Crew Dragon, NASA astronauts Mike Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut or JAXA astronaut, Soichi Noguchi. On this episode, we had a chance to chat with Anthony Vareha, the lead flight director in Houston for the Crew-1 mission in the International Space Station Flight Control Room. Vareha takes us through the story of getting us to this point from the aftermath of the successful landing of Demo-2 through the certification process of Crew Dragon. He then walks us through the Crew-1 mission, painting a picture of how these Crew Dragon flights will work for the foreseeable future, as well as what’s different about this mission compared to Demo-2. So, here we go. The details of the Crew-1 mission with flight director Anthony Vareha. Enjoy.
[ Music]
Host: Anthony Vareha. Thanks for coming on Houston We Have a Podcast.
Anthony Vareha: It is fantastic to be here, Gary.
Host: Wonderful. This is a very exciting mission we have coming up. How are you feeling? We’re really close to launch.
Anthony Vareha: It is an extremely exciting mission. And yeah, I’m feeling great. You know, I’ve been working Crew-1 for most of this year. Before that I worked Demo-2 and before that I got to work on Demo-1. So, this has been a combination of seeing all the SpaceX stuff come together in their crew campaign. And it’s really exciting to have what they are calling their first operational mission, though for, I mean, in the ops world, everything’s a test flight. So, we are treating it as such, but it’s exciting to see a fully staffed, fully functional, fully armed and operational Dragon with four people on it.
Host: What an exciting time. It’s got to take a lot of work to get to this point, you’ve already mentioned, you’ve had some work not only with this mission, but missions beforehand, Demo-1 and Demo-2. Had to take a lot of work to get to this point. Tell me a little bit about yourself and your history, what it took to become a flight director and then start working on some of these SpaceX missions.
Anthony Vareha: Sure. So, like any reasonable American, I was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Host: My man. [Laughter]
Anthony Vareha: Gary, where are you from?
Host: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Anthony Vareha: Well, gee. That’s interesting. OK, yeah, so I, you know, I didn’t, there’s not really at the time, there wasn’t really a space industry up there. But my brother, who’s a little bit older than me, he went off to Penn State to become an engineer and I decided, well I should be an engineer, not quite knowing what that exactly meant. I got into flying, got into, you know, I’m just going to be a pilot. And then I realized that was really expensive. So, I went to school for, a school for pilots called Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. But went there to be an engineer, and they had great connections with the Kennedy Space Center. And one of the contractors down there, got an internship in college, worked solid rocket booster, and then applied for an internal transfer within that company. And came out here, to the Johnson Space Center working as a thermal officer on the space station starting in 2007ish. Did that, moved over to the electrical system as a Spartan a few years after that, and then became a flight director in 2015, as part of the class of 2015.
Host: Tell me about your journey from working on the thermal side, looking at that part of the space station to thinking I am ready, I think I can become a NASA Flight Director, what was that transition like?
Anthony Vareha: That’s a great question. So, the thermal system is, I think, a great place for somebody to start if they have, if they want to see, kind of a whole system work because everybody needs their stuff cooled. And the thermal system was great, because when it was working, everyone said, you’re doing great. And then when it would break, it would be a really big deal. And then you’d fix it. And everyone would say, you’re doing great. And so, it was a good way to see how your system kind of interacted with the bigger picture. And the same with the electrical system. Everybody needs electricity onboard the International Space Station, from the payloads folks who don’t even work at JSC, to everybody who’s sitting in the room with you in the flight control room. So, it’s a good way to get a big integrated picture and a good preparation to be a flight director. Though, I would say, nothing can prepare you to be a flight director fully.
Host: So, tell me about some of the skills, some of that mentality that you bring every day that you’re leading that control, that flight control team.
Anthony Vareha: Well, the kind of the top line stuff never changes. Number one, is safety of the crew. Number two, is the safety of the vehicle. And then once you’ve completed those two objectives, then we can start looking at what are the mission objectives? That doesn’t change any day, whether it is an off-duty Saturday, or you’re doing a spacewalk. In terms of what’s the mentality of the flight director sitting there, it’s all about risk management, you know, you’re often trading different risks against each other. Some of them are known, some of them are unknown. And you are using the collected opinions of the team, engineering, educated opinions, to chart your way through to meet the mission objectives and keep the crew safe and the vehicle safe. You know, the flight control room, mission control, is a building that is physically designed to move information to a point. And that point is the flight director. And it’s a really, I mean, that’s a design that goes back to Chris Craft. And there’s a reason why, you know, the SpaceX Flight Control Room kind of looks a little bit like ours, there’s a reason why the control room at the TsUP [Russian mission control center] in Moscow kind of looks a little bit like ours. It’s a — it’s a standard of how we move information around. And so, I’m there to accept that information in a succinct fashion from the crew, or from the, from the team, and make decisions based on that.
Host: And you make it sound so easy. But what you’re doing is you’re leading, you’re gathering information, you mentioned about inquiring, you get information, and you want to ask the team, different team members, the information that you need to know, to make that good decision. So, there is, there is a logical flow to it. And like you said, that structure makes a lot of sense. But it takes, it takes some, a good person, it takes the right person to think through that calmly and strategically to make really good decisions. That’s really the job I think, is making really good decisions.
Anthony Vareha: You have to, the base requirement is judgment. And you have to know when you’re not getting a full story, or you have to be able to tell that somebody is uncomfortable in the answer that they’re giving you. One of the former flight directors, Paul Dye, I think he was saying on his way out during his retirement, he said, “you know, the first five years you’re working NASA mission operations is all about technical knowledge. And then after that, it’s all about people. It’s all about understanding how people work and how people make decisions, and when you are being sold a rosy story or when you’re being given the truth.” And so, being able to discern which one is which is an art form and just kind of takes experience. It’s very hard to teach.
Host: It seems that way. Absolutely. Let’s fast forward to some of the SpaceX mission. You said you worked on Demo-1, Demo-2, now, Crew-1. Let’s set a little bit of context and see how these things have evolved. So, for folks that may have not been following along through this whole mission, let’s start with SpaceX Demo-1. What was that mission? What was it representing? What were you doing?
Anthony Vareha: I will go back even earlier than that. I will say that, you know, we learned a lot from the [Commercial Resupply Services] CRS-1 cargo missions. So, all the Dragon-1 missions that brought us, you know, food and science experiments, to the space station, I got to lead the CRS-15 mission from the flight director side. And that was a good kind of first intro into the world of SpaceX. Don’t ask me what year that was, maybe 2017, 2018, something like that feels right. But they, you know, they learned a lot, SpaceX did in that program. And you see a lot of that reflected in as they got to the Dragon-2, what they call Dragon-2, which is a you know, a crew or cargo variant. Demo-1 was an un-crewed demo flight. This was, oh, March of 2019. And that was a great learning experience to see how the vehicle worked. It wasn’t exactly the same vehicle we flew Bob and Doug on, the DM-2. But it was a good first step to understand how the vehicle flies, what’s the vernacular, how the teams work together. And but, the step function leap from that to Demo-2 cannot be overstated. The making a vehicle work without crew in it, that’s one thing, when you’ve actually got, you know, two humans, depending on the vehicle and the decisions being made about the vehicle, it just ups the gain on everything. And so, Demo-2 was a great, you know, there’s a reason we fly these demo flights. And we learned a lot from it. We learned a lot from Demo-1, and we roll that information forward into the capsule that’s going to fly on Crew-1 and we’ll be smarter after Crew-1 and have a better capsule for Crew-2. We look at, you know, not just things that went badly on Demo-2 or Demo-1, you know, components that didn’t hold up or whatever. We also look at things that went well and what do we want to carry forward and how do we want to augment them going forward?
Host: Well, then let’s zoom in on Demo-2. First, you said this, adding this whole human element is just a huge thing just by itself. What are those considerations? As soon as you add the human, what changes?
Anthony Vareha: When you have a cargo flight, you don’t have to keep the cargo informed of what’s going on. Because the cargo is not there to make decisions. You know, the astronauts onboard a spacecraft are a real asset, they are not just an end product. They are part of the team, they’re part of the telemetry, they’re part of the system, you know, they can tell you things on the ground that looking at some numbers or a line graph isn’t going to tell you. And so, watching the folks at SpaceX go through that learning experience of understanding that they have a great new asset up there, and how to work with them and how not to work with them. That’s useful. And you know, all the complexity that comes from the humans is, you know, humans are a nonlinear input into systems. You know, they don’t, they don’t urinate an exact amount of liters every time, they don’t breathe out a certain amount every time. And so, you have to understand that your vehicle is now a flexible environment with a bunch more variables. And that’s also the interesting part of what we do in human spaceflight.
Host: That’s the human element. We’re all unpredictable.
Anthony Vareha: Absolutely. Yeah. And you know, I often come back to the human and human spaceflight because there, you can get really sidetracked by all the doodads and gizmos and all this, you know, and you know, that SpaceX capsule is a beautiful, beautiful capsule, and just the engineering know how that goes into it. But at the start of it, a human decided to build the capsule, a human decided to start SpaceX, a human decided that we should go to space. Those are human decisions that get stacked up on one another that get, you know, you see the end goal of that at the end form of that in the form of the capsule. So, it’s not just about the astronauts being the human element, but everybody who got you there is the human element.
Host: Very insightful. Very nice.
Anthony Vareha: It is very insightful. Thank you.
Host: Well, OK, so we’re zooming in on Demo-2. You mentioned, adding this human element, you mentioned, looking at the things that went well, and the things that didn’t go well. For Demo-2, what went well, and what do we want to repeat?
Anthony Vareha: So, things that went well, on Demo-2. I think, over time, we have built up a really good working relationship with our counterparts at SpaceX. And they and us know how, like the planning process works and how we communicate information to one another. And that’s still because they are an entity outside of NASA, you know, there are roadblocks and sometimes there are hiccups along the way, but it’s getting a lot better. I’d say that, you know, other things that went well is the actual vehicle design itself was, you know, did what we needed it to do, I think we got a few lessons learned about hey, this could be better, you know, move this thing over here, we could, we could use some more handholds, that sort of thing. But overall, the vehicle did its job and what we needed it to do. You know, things that we learn out of the mission that, you know, we want to fix going forward, are some of the things that, you know, as we’re recording this, we talked yesterday in a conference with Benji Reed from SpaceX, the heat shield, the, we saw some degradation on heat shield, we didn’t like nothing, you know, nothing terrible, but enough that, especially around here, we turn up the gain on that, and we want to make sure we get that right. And we made it clear to SpaceX, we got to get that right. And we dumped all of our resources onto it. And we are not going forward unless we have a really, really, really good answer, a really solid answer. We saw some interesting performance on when the drogue chutes came out. They just came out a little bit low. And we had to learn why that happened and what we do about that. You know, things that we see like that, we see can we fix the hardware, can we fix the software? Should we do both? In that case, we did kind of both. And so, you know, those type of things are what you roll into make your next vehicle better. I will say that after the uphill portion going up from ground to station at the beginning of Demo-2, I was very impressed and pleased with the lack of anomalies and lack of real like must fix type items. And I was especially pleased with that, because as the Crew-1 lead, I knew that was going to eat up my summer, if there were a whole bunch of problems. Luckily, most of the things we saw were at the end of the mission, and we quickly addressed them and hopefully we’re getting a good vehicle ready to go.
Host: That’s awesome. See, what you’re talking about here is I like the way you worded it. So, what can we improve upon? It’s just things, you’re zooming in on things that you know you can do better. And you identified that because ultimately you want the mission to be successful. Yes, you want the crew to be safe. But really, I mean, from start to finish, this was a successful mission. You’re already starting the improvement process and you’re already saying even after Crew-1, that’s going to continue.
Anthony Vareha: Absolutely and with these vehicles, especially doing direct handovers, the time between missions is pretty short. From the — splashdown of DM-2 was, what, eight weeks ago, seven weeks ago? And here we are getting right into Readiness Review season for the Crew-1 vehicle. And meanwhile we’re taking that Demo-2 vehicle, cleaning it out, making some upgrades, and getting it ready to fly at Crew-2 at the end of the Crew-1 mission. And so, it is, and we’ve got this cadence here where we’ve got not just one vehicle coming down the pike, but you got like three vehicles that you — we need to make this change. Can it get there in time for Crew-1? Well, no, but it’s improvements. Let’s get it there for Crew-2. Well, what do we do on Crew-1 differently? All that’s — you have to look at it not just as a point solution for one mission, but what does this mean for the Commercial Crew Program going forward?
Host: I see. So, Crew-1, specifically Crew-1, there is, what we’re referring to it in, at least all the things that we’re writing and putting out is we’re calling it the first crew rotation mission. And we’re talking at the post, post certification mission. That means you, this Demo-2 mission that we’ve been talking about, that was a test flight. We wanted to — it was the first time we put humans on it. And we wanted to make sure all the components from launch through splashdown worked. What is this certification process? And what does that mean? When you certify a vehicle that says this is ready for operational crew rotation flights, what does a certification mean?
Anthony Vareha: I would, so here’s the, the self-centered ops guy answer. Certification means that the vehicle has met the programmatic requirements of when we went to, when we went to the rocket ship store five or six years ago as a Commercial Crew Program and said, we would like you guys to take our astronauts up to space and back. And here’s how we would like you to do it. And we’ve dumped off, you know, a sheet of 10,000 pieces of paper and said, make it be like this, and, you know, meet these requirements, and then make it look nice if you can. And so that is certification, that you say I have met the requirements, or I have varied the requirements here, and you know, all the hazards are controlled and all that. And that’s great. That gives us a baseline of understanding of what this vehicle should be. So then going forward, we can say, well, how is this different than what we certified? And that’s very useful, I think that’s a useful thing. From my ops standpoint, I care that this vehicle is safe to fly. And so, you know, yes, there’s a certification element to it. But it’s also, how was this vehicle made does, you know, every vehicle is going to be different, each vehicle is going to see something weird or different in its build up process. And we will look at that and each one individually and understand what that means. So, when I think about signing for certification of flight readiness, yes, there’s a certain process that helped us get here. But, we just like we do for Soyuz, just like we do for any vehicle, we’re going to put our people on or any, any launch from, you know, a cargo mission, we are attesting to the safety of this mission. I think cert gives us a framework for that. When you talk about it being a first crew rotation mission, well, that’s now, OK, now I’m getting excited, because that is, you got four people on there, the vehicle is doing finally what it is really meant to do, what we’re paying for it to do. And that vehicle is taking four crew members and putting them up there for six months, just like the length of time of the Soyuz, but with one extra person, which is nice and allowing us to expand the capabilities of the International Space Station, which is what you know, as somebody who helps run the space station, that’s what I want to see, do more science. More people up there is more science, and that’s great. That’s what we want to do. And it’s exciting, especially with Crew-1 being, you know, the first time we’ve ever put four people on a space capsule ever, as humans, like that’s pretty cool. It’s also the longest mission of a crewed U.S. capsule ever. Skylab 4 lasted 80 days, we’re going to have to add 100 days on top of that. So, it’s exciting to be doing the first crew rotation and set all those standards and all that, set all those records, which will probably be broken pretty quickly. But it’s exciting to see the vehicle do what it’s meant to do.
Host: Well, let’s go into this exciting mission. But first leading up to just before launch. We’re recording this, as you say, the day after the briefings. We still got a couple weeks until it actually launches. What is going to happen leading up to launch day, from the crew side, from the operation side, everyone getting together and getting all this work done.
Anthony Vareha: Sure. So, from the crew side, the crew will be closing out their training for both the SpaceX and NASA refresher type training, making sure that we’re giving them adequate up to date information on what they’re going to be seeing when they get up on orbit. They are certified to fly on Dragon at this point, but they will get kind of proficiency runs. They’ll do, we’re going to do a launch sim tomorrow with the whole team in their positions, you know, folks are flying out to the Kennedy Space Center, they’re going to be the firing room, it’ll be a good test. We’re not actually going to put the crew on the rocket, but we will do that on the dry dress, which is a couple of days before the launch. But it’s also, they’re going to get some time off for their with their families, which is good because they’re about to go to space for six months. And they will be following along with technical issues that come up. They are, you know, it’s important to keep them informed on what’s going on. It’s one of my jobs, to make sure that they’re happy with the vehicle that they will be riding on. On the ground team, non-crew side, the things we’re doing are, as we’re in what we call Readiness Review season, closing out open issues. “Hey, we need to fix this.” “Well, how big of a deal is it?” “Well, it’s a pretty big deal.” So, you know, you sign at a color, you sign at a level of urgency. Can we fly with it? “You know, can we — are we good to fly without this being fixed?” “Well, yeah, I think we could.” Those type of decisions are being made. And that work is being closed out, so that when we go to the agency FRR, which is like a week before launch, we can stand up in front of the agency, in front of international partners and say this vehicle is ready to go, we believe it is safe, we attest to its readiness for flight. And then we are getting into the fine count where we are looking at like, you know, launch readiness reviews couple days before launch. And then we’re starting to wake the crew up on launch morning on, right now, the 31st of October, we’ll see if that holds by the time this gets published. But it is getting into the real busy season. And we’ve got some sims that we’re going to do, you know, we’re closing out a few. We’ve got a dock — like I said, the launch sim tomorrow, we got a docking sim next week, maybe we’ll add another sim onto there if we get the time. But we’re ready to, we’ve done all these sims before. We know how to do it, but it’s polish. A little polish doesn’t hurt.
Host: Yeah, it sounds like it’s a lot of, you got some things to close out, you want to get some last-minute training in there. And then of course, the crews going to spend some time with their families. And then it’s launch day.
Anthony Vareha: Right.
Host: So, on through launch day, the crews going to get ready, they’re going to follow a lot of the same cadence that Bob and Doug went through that we saw on TV. Is there anything that changes with that launch?
Anthony Vareha: Well, it will be at an obscenely early hour. And it will, and I’m in a room with a bunch of PAO folks. And on behalf of the trajectory, folks, I’m going to say sorry, because this is not going to be fun for you guys. Because we are launching it, right now be like 2am. And that is, that is purely a function of when the space station flies over Kennedy Space Center. Sorry. I will be awake with you. And it’s, we’ll just all have to deal with it. But what was the question? Sorry, I just need to complain about Bob and Doug got the sweetest hours for their launch.
Host: They really did.
Anthony Vareha: And this is going to be exciting. I’ll just say exciting.
Host: I know, PAO can drive a launch time. And if we could, we’d say primetime, you know, but —
Anthony Vareha: It’s primetime in Japan, so you know, Soichi will have really, really good ratings.
Host: That’s right. That’s right. Launch day. So, anything that changes? I mean, so we talked about it changes, definitely because of the time of day that you’re watching, but what else is changing for that crew that’s going to be following this, preparing for launch?
Anthony Vareha: Things will take just a slight bit longer. You know —
Host: Because four people?
Anthony Vareha: — and I don’t even know, because of four people.
Host: Yes.
Anthony Vareha: We’re, we’re loading four people into the vehicle. You know, honestly, we learned a lot on Demo-2, maybe it won’t take longer, maybe we’ll and that’s one of the things we’ll assess out during the dry dress rehearsal a few days before launch. We call it dry dress, because we’re not actually fueling the rocket. Sometimes they will do a wet dress where they would actually fuel up the rocket so that the crew members can experience, you know, the sights and sounds and the cadence of that. We’re not, we’re not doing that. We we’ve got confidence, we understand that timeline. And we will do a static fire a few days before the launch anyway, to make sure the rocket itself is good to go. We don’t need to put the crew on for that. But in terms of the day of, yeah, it’ll take a little bit longer to load four people on there, but they’re going to wake up the astronaut crew quarters in at the Kennedy Space Center. They’re going to have some breakfast at probably 6pm and they are —
Host: Midnight snack.
Anthony Vareha: Exactly. And I’ll be doing the same and they will move out the paddle three or four hours before launch and get situated. The folks will get cleared off the pad, the white room crew and about 30 minutes before launch, we will give a go for fueling. The vehicle will get fueled up and then they go and that’s you know, mid-day for them. They’ll get on orbit. They’ll turn the vehicle into a working space vehicle. They will, you know, take off their suits, settle in for a night’s rest. Because on a 10/31, October 31st, launch date, that’s a Flight Day 2 rendezvous. They’re going to be up there for about 25 hours. So that’s one-night sleep, wake up the next morning, come dock to ISS.
Host: OK, so that’s — I guess there’s, there’s a couple factors there, you’re launching in the middle of the night, because that’s when, you know, you have the time it so it lines up with the space station, because that’s your destination. But it sounds like there’s an element, there’s a human element to that long rendezvous time.
Anthony Vareha: Right.
Host: 25 hours, you want to make sure they get some rest.
Anthony Vareha: Exactly, you know, honestly, we, for that particular launch date, we could get to station, I think in about 17 hours, but you, the crews already been up for six or eight hours before they’ve launched. And if you want to extend their day to, you know, be awake for 32 hours, that’s not great. And so, we worked with the SpaceX team, and we are purposely extending the rendezvous time, so that for that day, and the next day, it’s about the same time and allows them to get some sleep. You know, we could do a launch and arrive on Flight Day 1, if you luck out enough with the trajectory, then you could actually get to station and get there before you go to, you know, wake up on Earth, go to bed on station that night.
Host: Alright.
Anthony Vareha: Kind of like what we do on Soyuz, but, and some of the launch opportunities may carry with it that capability, which would make a lot of us, I think, particularly the crew, very happy.
Host: I think so now, you mentioned getting the capsule in a I think you said work configuration for this 25-hour journey. There’s a nap in there, what else are they going to be doing? I think for the most part, Dragon kind of drives itself.
Anthony Vareha: I mean, they’re monitoring the system. But yeah, they’re up there making sure that you know, the cabin systems are online, that all the environmental systems are working. But it’s a lot of monitoring and making sure that the vehicle is doing what it’s supposed to be doing. Kind of like when they come in for docking, a lot of that is handled from the ground or from the onboard electronics, but they are there, as only they could be, to monitor because they understand these systems at a very, you know, at a high level of expertise. They know when it’s going wrong and how to do something about it. We don’t expect that to happen. But we’ve got four great resources sitting there in the cabin, especially commander and pilot, who are there at the displays who can make it, you know, identify problems early, perhaps earlier than we’d see on the ground. But yes, hopefully it’s not too much care and feeding that the Dragon will need when it’s on orbit.
Host: Yeah. For Demo-2, Bob and Doug took a couple of instances on the way to the station to turn off the automatic pilot and have some stick time. Fly around, test that system, that was part of a manual flight test.
Anthony Vareha: Correct.
Host: What came of that? And why are we not doing it this time?
Anthony Vareha: That’s a great question. What came of it? We know how a Dragon can fly manually. We know how it responds to touches on the, on the display and how, you know, what is the, what is the capability of a human to be able to hold a fixed point in space on, with this vehicle. You know, relative to the International Space Station, that’s good to know. And going forward. So, we’ve tested that, now we’re looking on the ground and before Crew-1 and during Crew-1. OK, now that we know that, what can we do with it? Can we set up a way that we can get comfortable with a manual docking, knowing all the things that can go wrong to, you know, if your display faults out or something like that. So, coming up with those processes, those are not as, let’s say, as important as understanding and making sure the automated processes go well, so you don’t have to do that. But certainly, folks in the operations world are very interested in making sure that we have that capability to do manual dockings or manual port relocations and other activity that we’ll be doing. On the, on the Crew-1 mission, we’ll do a port relocation.
Host: Oh, cool. Yeah, that’s actually one of the things I did want to get to. But I want to zoom in on your job for this part of the flight. We’ll call uphill, launching from the ground and docking with the station, you’re sitting in mission control, Houston.
Anthony Vareha: Correct.
Host: What’s your job?
Anthony Vareha: So, as we — flight operations has kind of two roles when it comes to working with SpaceX on the crewed missions. We are there when the vehicle comes to the ISS, I am the dock master, you know, I, once it’s in what we call joint ops, the vehicle, if it wants to move a little closer, move a little further away, you know, change the way it’s flying, as the lead flight director for the International Space Station at that time, that goes through me because it’s happening in my neighborhood. I want to make sure that the vehicle, I know what everything is happening, especially with the multi ton vehicle that’s firing rocket engines near my beautiful space station. But we’re also there in sort of an advisory oversight role because we’re the customer. We’re paying for this Dragon rocket. We want it to go well. We want the mission to go well. And so, we work with them both. And it’s a great relationship, we are, you know, we’re not sitting on their shoulders and saying, “you sure you want to do that.” But it’s a lot of, oh, let’s understand what trades are being made. How does that affect space station? How does that affect the long-term mission, and we are a technical resource for that? And there’s also capabilities like, you know, the TDRSS satellite system that comes from NASA, the Dragon communicates by that. It also has its own SpaceX ground stations, but they’re using a government asset, so we’re point of contact on that. If there is a, an emergency deorbit where they need to get, you know, the Crew-1 crew lands in the water, and they need to get pulled out of the water. Well, we work with our friends in the Department of Defense, to make sure that that happens. We have position here in the flight control team called [Landing Support Officer] LSO. So, they work with the DOD to make sure that OK, our guys just plunked down in the ocean here. SpaceX is, SpaceX has a lot of cool stuff, they do not have the 82nd Airborne. And so, our ability to get our working with Air Force and search and rescue forces to get out there. We work with them on those sorts of, you know, bad day type scenarios. So, we’re there both in an advisory role. And also, because we are running the space station. I mean, the whole time. I mean, I would bet on the day that we launch, we’re probably going to, you know, it’s very well possible, depending on what day it is, Kate might be doing some science while we’re doing launch. So, we’ll be, you know, overseeing a payload while the launch is happening, something like that.
Host: A lot of multitasking.
Anthony Vareha: There’s some multitasking.
Host: So, there are things called flight rules during the mission and even joint flight rules that you and SpaceX have developed, that NASA and SpaceX have developed. When the Dragon is getting close to the International Space Station, what are some of those rules you want to make sure that are being followed before you say, yes, you can go ahead and dock with my space station?
Anthony Vareha: The basic mentality, when you get really close to station is, let’s make sure that we have enough protections in place so that these two vehicles don’t collide into each other, or that we don’t have — we lose the ability to deorbit or something. We want to make sure that we can always have enough fuel onboard so that we can get back down to the water. And once you’ve accomplished that, then if you got fuel left over, you should go to the International Space Station. And we’ve got prioritization built into these rules of how you want to protect, you know, certain capabilities over others. But a lot of the flight rules for once you get really close to station are, do you have enough of your navigation systems, so that it’s safe to come in? You probably just need one of them to be able to get out of the area. But if you have two of them, then you’re what we call one fault tolerant. So, I can continue docking, but the next failure is going to mean I need to get out of here. Because then if that one fails on top of that, maybe I don’t know where I am. You know, these are, a lot of these systems are duplicate, triplicate, for those reasons. And we just, these flight rules lay out how much of those redundant systems or what can break or what can go wrong and still allow you to dock. We did a sim a couple of weeks ago, where, when the Dragon was on its approach one, which is getting right close to the station, one of the major power buses inside of the International Space Station failed. And so, my first thought is, well, this, this is going to be annoying. And it quickly, with the team, very quickly determined you know what, actually, this is not that bad. We’ve lost our Ku video, but we can fix that pretty quick. And other than that, everything on the space station size redundant too. So yeah, we can keep going. And we docked right on time in the sim.
Host: How about that?
Anthony Vareha: How about that?
Host: Sounds like an important part of human spaceflight, maybe spaceflight in general, is having plans, yes. But having backup plans, backup systems, redundancy, all very important to make sure that you have that one fault tolerant. If something goes wrong, you still have the capability to get the mission done.
Anthony Vareha: Paranoia and anxiety are the cornerstones of our business. Yeah, absolutely. We — are vigilant and we will always look at, well what if, you know, what — the mentality of what if we’re wrong? That colors a lot of what we do. It’s not because we’re, you know, feel like we’re imposters or anything like that. It’s things go wrong, and we want to make sure that there’s nothing that could really hurt somebody if they went wrong at the worst possible time. And so, the mentality, you know, that’s the mentality, you know, why? Why do we have manual piloting capability on the Dragon? There’s such redundancy and their systems. Why would you need that? Well, the answer I’ll give you is, are we really as smart as we think we are? Like, do we really have all the redundancy we have on paper? Yeah, absolutely. And but, you know, it’s one of those things where there’s a bunch of reasons we can come up with where you need it, but it’s mostly for the things we can’t come up with, like the failures that’ll get you on a really bad day that you just don’t, you haven’t had the foresight to think of.
Host: I’ve actually experienced some of that myself just following along in the sims and trying to do commentary through all these problems that you guys are working out in simulating just some things that, you know, they just kind of surprise you like, oh, yeah, OK, that’s something we need to consider. And then you talk about it afterwards in the debrief.
Anthony Vareha: We should have more PAO sim ride along by the way. I’m a big proponent of this. You know, these simulations we do, especially these, you know, these generic ISS sims, where, you know, you start the day and immediately there’s an ammonia leak. And then there’s, you know, two power buses have gone down, you know, something in the cabin is, you know, spraying acid. And I just would love to hear you or Dan Huot or Navias try and get through that. And with your, with your standard NASA level measured calm of like, you know, crew members are currently troubleshooting issue in the urine system that is impacting operations. And I would love it, I would love every minute of it.
Host: We’re doing it, we’re not doing it in the room.
Anthony Vareha: I know and that’s a shame.
Host: You want to do it in – [Laughter]
Anthony Vareha: I really like some entertainment. [laughter]
Host: Alright, we will set that up. Anthony, you have a wonderful way of describing such complicated ideas and systems and in such a very consumable way. So, I got a challenge for you. Because this is something, I’m going to take with me when I do the commentary for on the way from launch to docking.
Anthony Vareha: That’s a very nice way of you asking me to do your job for you. But OK, keep going.
Host: You didn’t have to translate it for me. But so, there’s these things called burns on the way up, and they all have different purposes. Yes, there’s a phasing burn. There’s an approach initiation burn, there’s this thing called waypoints. Different, I guess, areas that you pre-identified that you want to either reach, pass through, stop at. Can you describe those burns, those waypoints from after launch, through docking, and what they mean?
Anthony Vareha: Sure, well in in generalities, how you get from the ground to the space station. So, the first thing, you got to get off the ground, and the rocket, you know, people see the rocket, they think it’s mostly going up, but really, it’s mostly going sideways. It gets, it goes up to get above the atmosphere, and then goes sideways to speed up to the 17,500 miles per hour, that just happened to be orbital velocity. And so now you’re in orbit. Well, if you’re in an orbit, and you’re below the thing you’re trying to rendezvous with, you’re going to actually lap that thing more often than you know, it’s, you’re going to do an orbit faster than they are. Not speed wise, but like number of orbits per day, or how long it takes you to do an orbit. And so, the art of rendezvous is to do burns to tweak your orbit, to make it a little bit higher, a little bit lower, such that your speed relative to one another, gets you within the same region. And so, these burns are raising your apogee or perigee or lower, should be raising when you’re coming up. But you know, tweaking your orbit so that you get where we want to wind up is a few hours, but you know, maybe an hour before docking, you’re right below space station and maybe a couple kilometers, from then when you get into the proximity ops. So, everything I’ve described up until now is rendezvous, the art of using your orbital mechanics to get you near the thing you’re going to, and you’re using the gracefulness of math and, you know, orbital equations get you there. Prox ops is when your kind of fighting all that, you’re saying I just want to go there to that docking port. And so, now you’re doing all these burns to pull you up onto a line, that imaginary line coming out from the docking axis. And that’s the first you know, you start from below point called waypoint zero, that’s a couple hundred meters below if you made more than a couple hundred meters below station but point below station. You do a burn, you come up and around. I know I’m on a podcast, but I’m going to use my hands to describe this.
Host: Very, visual.
Anthony Vareha: You come around to the front of station. In particular for this mission, we’re going to Node 2 forward so we’re going to be on the what we call the V bar, the velocity bar. So, you’re right in front of station at about 220 meters, that’s waypoint one. And then from there, we’ll decide OK, the systems are looking healthy, you can come on into what we call the keep out sphere, which is an area of station where within a couple hundred meters where you’re close enough that hey, we’re really, really concerned and we want to make sure you’re doing the right thing. So, you were like, OK, the vehicle looks great. Come on into the keypad sphere, come on into waypoint two, which is at 20 meters. And that’s the last, that’s a nice hold point where the crew can look and make sure they’ve got good visuals. You know, which are very highly desired, not required, but highly desired. Make sure the systems are working well. And then we go right on into docking after that. It’s a very fast process. I say that from an operation standpoint, if you’re watching on TV, probably it looks pretty slow. But it is, in terms of how we’ve done other vehicles, it’s relatively quick.
Host: Now, after docking, this is where I think it changes a lot for, from Demo-2. Demo-2 brought Bob and Doug, they were there only for 62 days on orbit?
Anthony Vareha: Something like that.
Host: They did a lot of things that normal Expedition crew members would do. They did science, they did maintenance. But this is different. This is — you mentioned at the very beginning, we’re bringing these four, Crew-1, that SpaceX Dragon is the transportation to their mission, which is a long duration Expedition. So, what is that long duration Expedition? What are they doing?
Anthony Vareha: So, when they get up there, you know, we open up the hatch, there will be some requisite hugging, and they will quickly configure the vehicle, the Dragon to be a lifeboat now, so in case of an emergency onboard space station, they want to make sure they have you know, breathable bottles of air and the right emergency equipment such that, if there was some sort of a toxic event or a fire or something on station, this is now we treat in the same way we do the Soyuz on the Russian segment, you go there. And if you might need to punch out if and you know, so we call it the SpaceX guys who are normally on call during the dock phase of the mission and say, “Hey, you guys we’re coming home, get — your vehicle ready to go.” The crew could actually do it themselves, we just prefer not to. But in terms of the long duration configuration of Dragon, most of the time, it’ll be off. It’ll have heaters keeping its prop system alive. And every week or so they’ll turn some stuff on and make sure it’s working well. Every month or so they’ll turn even more stuff on. But it’s mostly in what we call acquiescent config. And that config is, lights off. There’s no displays on and stations blowing some air through there, just in case you’re in the Dragon, you won’t, you know, get a CO2 pocket there. But it is essentially just there ready and waiting in a standby state. Meanwhile, the crew, the four crew members of Crew-1 will be doing spacewalks and science and human research and all the things that normal Expedition crew members do. Bob and Doug were primarily, you know, their mission focus was the Dragon. But we kept them up there for a long time because we saw an opportunity to take two season space fliers and use them on station. In this case, for Crew-1, we’re using the more classical model of we’re going to train these guys for an increment crew as an Expedition crew. And while they’re on a new vehicle, they’re still you know, their primary job is to do the mission.
Host: So, what is nice about, you’d mentioned, this is the first time we have four crew members in a capsule. This is going to kind of change what we’re used to for long duration crews. You know, we’ve been we’ve been putting up three at a time. Three up, three down, usually six, this is going to change. Now we have four going up, we might look at maybe a regular rotation of seven.
Anthony Vareha: That’s right.
Host: Maybe more. So, what does this mean?
Anthony Vareha: That means crew member arguments might have the ability to have a tiebreaker vote, which I think would be useful. Though I imagine the commander just wins anyway. What is the change? So, it changes a little bit, you know, we’re going to use more food, we’re going to use more water. But in terms of the day-to-day, you know, the things we worry about in the operations world are OK, now we have one more person to de-conflict with the other people. We have to make sure that we have enough time on the exercise equipment so, that they can all use the exercise equipment. It becomes a little bit more packed, not crazy. So, it’s very manageable. But it will be, it’ll — learn some things from having seven people up there for a long time. We’ve had 13 people onboard station back in the shuttle days for a couple weeks at a time. We’ve done direct Soyuz handovers with a couple of weeks at a time of nine people that would happen as recently as last year when Jessica Meir and Hazza and Oleg launched while there were still two other Soyuz’s there. So, that’s not a new problem. But the duration of it will be interesting. The habitability of this space station that’s has one extra person, what does that mean for the line at the toilet? Well, we’ll find that out. Part of the reason why this week on NG-14 we were watching another toilet.
Host: [Laughter] Alright, great. Yeah. So, you guys have another toilet, you got to figure out the food situation, you got to figure out the sleeping situation.
Anthony Vareha: That’s right.
Host: Who’s going to draw the short straw?
Anthony Vareha: Right. So, you know, we’ve got — there’s plans in the work for a, an additional sleep station to be added to the, you know, one of the kind of the supply racks that we have can be converted into a sleep station.
Host: Cool.
Anthony Vareha: So that’s a project that’s ongoing that we’ll have in place for early next year. But yes, for the first part of the Crew-1 mission, that won’t be in place. So, we’re having active conversations about where the seventh person will go. We’ve got a bunch of options, anything from you sleeping on a rack front, to sleeping in the Dragon and we will, we will do what works. Because, again, it comes back to, you know, we — put a lot of value into this space station. We do a lot of cool stuff to make sure it is running well, so we can do human spaceflight. That is very important that we also keep the human happy. It does not make a whole lot of sense to spend a series of spacewalks, fixing a power system that is going to power the lights for a bunch of miserable astronauts. Because then you’re still not going to do any good science up there, we got to make sure that folks are comfortable. The engineering mentality around here sometimes forgets about that. And I’m a big believer that a comfortable astronaut is a productive astronaut.
Host: There you go. and productive they will be. I know one thing that is always a battle, particularly for us in PAO, because we always want them to do PAO stuff, but everyone else is pulling at them for their own stuff, for science, for the maintenance. In terms of crew time, what is nice about having extra crew up there?
Anthony Vareha: You’ve got, you’ve got more crew time. You’ve got, you know, you can, you don’t have to shut down your science operation to go, you know, fix the food pantry that, you know, it needs to be restocked or something like that, you can walk and chew gum a little bit more often. And so, having five USOS crew plus two Russian crew, you will see more ability to simultaneously schedule stuff. And it’ll be a little bit more exciting, you know, not to say that having one USOS crew member like we do right now with Chris Cassidy onboard. We’re getting a lot done, largely due to the Chris Cassidy nature of Chris Cassidy. But it is good to have, you know, gosh, 10 sets of hands in the, or 10 hands in the in the U.S. orbital segment doing science. That’s great.
Host: Very nice. You mentioned —
Anthony Vareha: Don’t get me wrong. Part of it’s going to be a super pain, but —
Host: A lot to manage.
Anthony Vareha: But I mean, if it was a bad space station, nobody would come to visit, so we’re taking it as complement.
Host: What a great way to describe it. Earlier, you mentioned something during the mission called a port relocation. This is another thing. You mentioned that Dragon for the most part, you’re going to check up on it every once in a while, but for the most part is going to mean it’s in this thing called a quiescent mode. But there is this thing called a port relocation.
Anthony Vareha: Yeah.
Host: What is that?
Anthony Vareha: So, this is going to be a first-time thing on Crew-1. This is something I’ve been spending a lot of time on this, we’ve got two international docking adaptor ports on the International Space Station. We’ve got the Node 2 forward port, which is what DM-1 went to, which is what DM-2 went to. And then we’ve got the Node 2 Zenith port, which is going to be utilized for the first-time plan to be utilized for the CRS-21 Dragon cargo mission. So, Crew-1 Dragon is going to go to Node 2 forward. The CRS-21 Dragon is going to go to Node 2 Zenith and then the CRS-21 Dragon is going to leave. And then the OFT mission is currently planned to happen late this year, early next year. That’s the, those are other guys, I don’t care. No, I very much care. But I —
Host: But it’s not your mission.
Anthony Vareha: It’s not my mission.
Host: You’re Dragon.
Anthony Vareha: That’s it. So, I, we would — they need to go to Node 2 forward. It’s just one of the constraints on this particular mission, they need to go Node 2 forward. So, we got to move. And that means we undock from Node 2 forward. This will right now for the schedule what will happen in December or January. Undock from Node 2 forward, go out to about 60 meters, move up to 60 meters out from the top port and come on in. The whole operation is going to take half an orbit, 45 minutes. It should be relatively quick. And you know, the ground controllers will be frantically sending commands to make sure their attitude control is good. And making sure that are — that the Dragon is doing the right things, but it should be a relatively quick operation. And then the Dragon will live at Node 2 Zenith for the rest of its time on orbit. It’s a great capability to have because it allows us to do things like what we’re doing where it say, you know what, actually this vehicle can only go to this port. Or, you could say well, now we have to wait for this mission to be over to start the next mission or we could just move and get better parking somewhere else. That’s what we’re doing with the port relocate.
Host: Very good. Now, all four crew members have to be on Dragon for that move. Right?
Anthony Vareha: Right. I mean in standard emergency protection type of stuff we do. You never want to have a hatch closed between you and your escape vehicle. So, for four of our crew members, this is their escape vehicle. If we’re going to move it, they’re going with it. And so, they will spend their day, it’ll be a full day, they’ll suit up. They’ll get inside the Dragon, kind of like they’re getting ready to come home. And we’ll give them the go to undock, come around, come up top, and re-dock. It’ll be, you know, a standard undocking, a standard docking just with a short thing in between where you move, where your access is.
Host: Now, at the very beginning, you were getting really excited when you were, when we were talking about Crew-1 first crew rotation mission. We’re talking about breaking all these records, and then breaking them, you know, continuously as you go down the road.
Anthony Vareha: And their logo is very nice. It’s one of the better spaceflight mission logos.
Host: Yeah.
Anthony Vareha: Some of them, I will say, are ugly. This one is not.
Host: It’s got a pretty yeah, it looks really cool.
Anthony Vareha: It looks really cool. Yeah.
Host: What, exactly, is so exciting about it? I mean, you could say it’s a new era. But what are we, what are we starting here? What does this mean? What does this mission signify?
Anthony Vareha: It signifies that what we’re doing. And the kind of the dream of what we’re doing to open up space to not just giant governments, is starting to become a thing. You know, the Commercial Crew Program, the goal of it, the idea of commercialization of low-Earth orbit, is a really, really important thing. And if you can give them some, you know, give some companies some seed money to build a capability, and then they can turn around, you know, they’ll sell it to us, great. But if they can sell it to other people, then that’s building an industry. Building a space economy, that’s a great thing. Because then that’s going to allow you to take advantage of some of the efficiencies, the private sector, to get you out further. And maybe take some of the stuff that we know how to do. I mean, space is super hard. But there are aspects of it that we are learning a lot about and have learned a lot about that maybe are ready for commercialization, and then we can refocus on going further out.
Host: So, I’m going to end by asking you a couple of things that I asked Zeb last time he was here for Demo-2. And they’re, they’re sort of broader questions, because you have this unique perspective of being a flight director for one of these missions. And you’ve worked so hard, you’ve even mentioned doing a lot of missions leading up to this Demo-1, Demo-2, even SpaceX cargo missions. And then, gosh, a bunch of other–
Anthony Vareha: Expedition 61.
Host: Expedition —
Anthony Vareha: The greatest Expedition that has ever been done by anyone.
Host: [laughter] You’ve done, you’ve done all —
Anthony Vareha: You heard about the all-female spacewalk? We did that.
Host: That’s [laughter] —
Anthony Vareha: Pretty exciting.
Host: Just list off your accomplishments, Anthony.
Anthony Vareha: We did nine spacewalks. It’s awesome. It was awesome.
Host: It was. It was a very dynamic time.
Anthony Vareha: You see a bar chart over the years of how many spacewalks we’ve done on each Expedition, there’s a giant spike at the end. That spike is 61. It was amazing.
Host: That’s yours, that’s your spike.
Anthony Vareha: Well, I mean, I didn’t do all the hard work. You know, Drew, Luca, Christina, Jessica would probably get some of that credit. But I printed the bar chart.
Host: I love it. Leading up to this moment, to Crew-1, there, you know, it seems like this has been such a long time coming from the outside. You know, I think there’s a lot of people saying finally, you know, finally, this is something we’re doing. But there were a lot of challenges to get to this point. What are some of those challenges that people may not know about, how hard it was to get to this point of the first regular operational crew transportation on a U.S. Commercial Vehicle?
Anthony Vareha: Human spaceflight is incredibly complex. It’s not, you see the end product. But going into that, you’ve got a bajillion engineers, who had to design the vehicle, not just design a vehicle to get to space, design a vehicle that would get to space. And then the ops guy runs in and says, “hey, what happens when this thing’s breaks?” And then the engineer has to say, “well, I can add this redundant thing.” OK, well, and then it’s just this iterative process of design and how you manage a project like that, it’s gargantuan. And to know that all of these equipment, all these pieces of equipment don’t just have to work, they have to work. And then they have to work when that system has failed. All of the complexities in making sure that the humans are not just kept alive, but kept comfortable, kept informed, making sure that the software does what it’s supposed to do. And that it’s, that as you’re making changes to that software, which you most certainly will, that you understand the changes you’re making, you’re not causing other problems somewhere else, you know, there’s this, there’s a ton of unintended consequences that can come from any change you make to a spacecraft. Because at its core, a spacecraft like the Dragon is not terribly big, it would fit in the studio that we have here, you know, that we’re sitting in right now. There’s a lot of stuff going on in a very small amount of acreage. So, you have to know that everything’s packed in there pretty tight. Any change you make to this piece over here, that checks, you know, affects that piece over there. And so, asking yourself the question, how could this change bite me? How could this philosophy of operations, you know, does that work? Is it still meeting the intent of the mission? Are we still going to do what we want to do? Having asked those questions the whole way and continue to ask them as the mission is operational, I mean, there’s just so much thought that goes into these missions. It is staggering to see it all, I mean, at all, I get to be at the luxury, I’m in the luxury, I have the luxury of being able to inherit all that and being at the pointy end of the spear, you know, the astronauts are at the very point of the sphere, we’re right behind them. But we understand that there’s so much work that got us to this point where we can say, “oh, that pump failed, turn on this other one.” But that is something that took foresight. And, you know, a lot of advanced thought about what could go wrong and the importance of integration, oh, the integration, it’s amazing. And it’s, it’s stunning and staggering. And — to know that everything, everybody has a role, you know, everybody got the vehicle to this point. It’s, it’s remarkable. And I’m so proud of the operations team. And I’m so proud of everybody who came before them both on the SpaceX and the NASA sides. It’s a real pleasure to see it all come together. And it’s a luxury that we have in this industry, that when we do something like this, the reward of seeing smoke and fire coming out the back end of a rocket is pretty cool to see too.
Host: Anthony, I think there’s a lot of people listening that may want to do exactly what you’re doing. And you’re already kind of selling it with that this is actually happening, the commercialization is actually happening. So, you know, you got you as a NASA Flight Director, you come from a long line of few flight directors, but there’s going to, I feel like this, this work is going to expand. It already has, right. You got, people can join SpaceX, people can join Boeing, and there’s more, there’s more coming out. This is, this is an industry that’s going to grow. Some advice, some wisdom that you and your experience, would like to pass on to that next generation of, of flight controllers, of operations folks that want to be a part of this world that you’re so passionately describing.
Anthony Vareha: Be curious, you got, you got to want to know how things work. And then add the operations perversion on top of that of I want to know how I can break this, and how I could keep going. Ask the questions the whole way. There will always be a space for that. There will always, even though, you know, I’m lucky I was born in 1983. I’m born at a particular place, particular spot in time, where the vehicles we’re sending to space still have a substantial human component to their everyday operations. At some point, they will almost become fully automated in their operations. And maybe the mission control is going to slowly shrink down to being not as many people and you see that with SpaceX, you know, and what they’re able to do with their, you know, efficiency of onboard computers. But there is always somebody has to run the mission, and somebody has to think about what could go wrong with those computers. And there’s always somebody has to think about what is the real space environment like? And so, understanding not just spaceships. You got to understand, I didn’t study spaceships in college. I got a degree in Engineering Physics, like Applied Physics, but it’s really about how you think. And so, what you will need to be able to do is not just understand the rocket, but understand the programming that goes into the rocket, the material science that makes the capsule and also understand how people work, especially if we’re going to be launching more and more people, which we will. Understand how people go, understand team dynamics and how that is essential to spaceflight and understand psychology too. There will be a point that I’d say, humans are not prepared for where we fly to Mars. And one day that crew looks out the window and doesn’t, can’t tell exactly which one is Earth. And I don’t know what’s going to happen on that day. We wouldn’t have experienced anything like that since we first went over the horizon from you know, you know, docks in Europe, to come to the new world. That’s going to be a really interesting and I’d say, traumatic experience for us as a species. And I’m very curious to see how that plays out. So, it’s not just about the, you know, bolts and bytes, it’s about the people. So, people who do really well in this industry, understand people.
Host: Anthony Vareha, that was awesome. Thanks for coming on Houston We Have a Podcast.
Anthony Vareha: It was a pleasure to be here.
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Host: Hey, thanks for sticking around. I hope you enjoyed this conversation with flight director and fellow yinzer, Anthony Vareha as much as I did. This is the last episode on Crew-1 before it launches. So, I hope you’ve enjoyed these past couple of episodes. Check out the launch itself at NASA.gov. Go to check out the launch schedule there. For Crew-1, you can watch live and engage with us during the broadcast using the hashtag #LaunchAmerica. And for more on the mission, go to NASA.gov/commercialcrew. So, next up is two straight weeks of double episodes. That’s right. For the next two weeks, we’ll be posting two episodes per week. And these bonus episodes are in celebration of the 20th anniversary of continuous human presence on the International Space Station. That anniversary comes up November 2nd. You can check out our full collection of space station episodes at our webpage. That’s NASA.gov/Johnson/HWHAP. On the left there, there’s a collection of space station episodes. You can talk with us on social media. We’re on the Johnson Space Center pages of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Use the hashtag #AskNASA on your favorite platform to submit an idea for the show and just make sure to mention it’s for us, at Houston We Have a Podcast. This episode was recorded on September 30th, 2020. Thanks to Alex Perryman, Pat Ryan, Norah Moran, Belinda Pulido and Jennifer Hernandez. Thanks to Anthony Vareha for taking the time to come on the show and for his leadership to make this mission possible. Give us a rating and feedback on whatever platform you’re listening to us on and tell us how we did. We will be back with two episodes next week.