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 187, experts of NASA’s Mission Control Center in Houston recount what it has taken to support 20 years of continuous presence on the International Space Station. The panel discussion in this episode was recorded on November 4, 2020.

Transcript

Pat Ryan (Host): Houston, we have a podcast. Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center, Episode 187, “The View from Mission Control.” I’m Pat Ryan. On this podcast, we talk with scientists, engineers, astronauts, all kinds of experts about their part in America’s space exploration program. Today, we’re going to give you a peak at the operation of the International Space Station flight control room. Every single American spaceflight with an astronaut onboard, starting with Freedom 7 in 1961, has been run by a team of specialists in a Mission Control Center, which has been located here in Houston since 1965. Rather than make astronauts responsible for coordinating all the aspects of the spaceflight while they are flying it, engineers with expertise in all the relevant systems work together in one location to move a mission towards its goals. A team is on console in the flight control room any time there is an American mission in space, which has been the case since the launch of the first element of the International Space Station in 1998 and the arrival on orbit of the first permanent crew, a little more than 20 years ago. And NASA has sponsored a series of panel discussions in recognition of that 20th anniversary of continuous human presence on the station. We brought you the first of those, our episode 184 last month. And today, we bring you a talk focused on the work done by Mission Control Houston. The moderator is NASA public affairs specialist Brandi Dean, from the Johnson Space Center in Houston. She’s also a mission control commentator. And she’ll introduce you to the Deputy Director of Flight Operations here at JSC, Norm Knight, the Chief Flight Director, Holly Ridings, and the Deputy Chief Flight Director, Emily Nelson, Flight Director Pooja Jesrani, former Flight Director, David Korth, and International Space Station Deputy Program Manager, Kenny Todd. For a great look at an element of American spaceflight you don’t always get to see. So here we go.

[ Music]

Brandi Dean: Hello and welcome to our ongoing celebration of 20 continuous years of human presence onboard the International Space Station. I’m NASA Public Affairs Specialist Brandi Dean. On November 2nd, 2000, the very first expedition crew arrived at the International Space Station and since then there have been an unbroken string of 241 astronauts from 19 countries onboard supporting science experiments, performing spacewalks, and teaching us how to live long term in space. But although the crew members in space might be the most visible piece of that puzzle, they are only a tiny percentage of the many, many people who have to work together to make sure missions are safe and successful. We’re here today with some of the people that work on the ground, and in particular, through our Flight Operations Directorate, and we have a few International Space Station program stowaways here with us as well. I’m going to let each of them introduce themselves and tell a little bit about what they do, and then in honor of the anniversary we’re celebrating, I’d love for each of you to also tell us where you were 20 years ago — when Expedition 1 was just beginning. And we are going to start first with Norm Knight.

Norm Knight: Well, let’s see, Brandi. It’s really an exciting day, and it’s great to be on this panel. A little bit of my background. I’ve worked in Flight Ops for many years. I’m currently the Deputy Director of Flight Operations. You know, thinking back 20 years ago, which some days it seems like yesterday and some days it seems like a long, long time ago, I had been group lead for one of the shuttle groups that managed the main engine, solid rocket boosters, and external tank, and was recently selected as a flight director, so I was really transitioning from shuttle to station. So exciting times, exciting memories, and I look forward to the rest of the panel discussion today.

Brandi Dean: Definitely. Thank you, Norm. Now we’re going to go to Kenny Todd.

Kenny Todd: Hey, good morning, Brandi, and good morning to the rest of my esteemed colleagues on the panel. It’s good to see all of you. I’m the deputy program manager for the International Space Station. Have been for a number of years here. But, work very closely with the entire Flight Operations community and have done so for close to the last 20 years now. When I think back to where we were — where I was 20 years ago, obviously I wasn’t in this position, but at the time, my focus was over in avionics and software. And one of the biggest challenges for a program such as this one, where you have hardware literally being built all over the United States and other parts of the world by different countries, one of the challenges was trying to figure out how to integrate all that hardware and software, and it was a big effort in that time frame back ending the last century when we were really starting to get this program off the ground, and in orbit. And so at that time, I had one camp working real-time operations on the avionics and software side, making sure everything was going OK on orbit as we — as we started to bring up these different systems, and at the same time I was off trying to figure out the next flight in the queue, and how to make sure that we were all going to be good to go and trying to find problems on the ground so we didn’t have to find them and give them to these — to these flight directors later on when they have to deal with them. And again, good to see everybody.

Brandi Dean: I’m sure they appreciate that early work. Next up is Holly Ridings.

Holly Ridings: All right, well, good morning, everybody. I’m Holly Ridings. Today, I am the Chief Flight Director in the Flight Operations Directorate and it is pretty exciting to sit here today, you know, after 20 years and look back. You know, see some of the same faces on this panel, and really have an opportunity to celebrate everything that we’ve done, and so today, I’m the Chief Flight Director, but if you go back 20 years, I was just starting out at NASA as a Flight Controller, just newly minted, and was able to sit console for the very, very beginning of space station. And so for a while, I would tell everyone I had the entire history of space station in my head, and now it’s gotten so complicated, I don’t think I can remember it all, but for a while I could — I could go flight by flight by flight, and that was how I organized my whole life. Not birthdays, not holidays. Space station flights for the milestones, and really still are, actually. That’s kind of how we mark time in our world, so super exciting to be here, and I hope you enjoy what we talk about today.

Brandi Dean: Thank you. Next, let’s go to Emily Nelson.

Emily Nelson: Good morning, and hey to everybody. So, let’s see, right now, I’m the deputy Chief Flight Director in the Flight Operations Directorate, and we’re still also Active Flight Directors. 20 years ago, I was also starting out as a Junior Flight Controller. The Expedition 1 launch marked a transition where one role that we had early on was going to retire because the space station, which had actually been in orbit for a while was going to have people on it, and so we were going to retire one position and move into a full team, so I was excited to be transitioning into additional responsibility and getting maybe to become a little more senior as a Flight Controller someday, but I was a pretty baby Flight Controller back in that point in time.

Brandi Dean: That’s so cool. How about we go to David Korth next.

David Korth: Hey, good morning. It’s good to be back among friends. I hung up my Flight Director spurs several years ago, so now I’m the Deputy Manager of the ISS Avionics Software Division, what Kenny was doing 20 years ago. 20 years ago, I was sitting console in what we call the blue FCR, a much smaller version of what’s behind Emily right now, and I was the Lead Planner for Expedition 1, and so, you know, I looked back, and I was reflecting these last couple of days on what we’ve accomplished since then, and thinking how much preparation went into Expedition 1. And as Emily mentioned the uncrewed station that existed for a year and a half, two years before the Expedition 1 crew showed up and how much work effort we all put into working with the Russians trying to come up with what the plans were going to be, how we’re going to integrate things together, and when we finally cut our first plan and uplinked, that’s when, you know, this is real. This is actually happening. So, and clearly a lot has transpired both with all of our partners, and the vehicle itself, and the evolution of operations, so I’m glad to be a part of this group today.

Brandi Dean: Must have been such an exciting time. Finally, we’re going to go to Pooja Jesrani.

Pooja Jesrani: All right, good morning, everyone. I’m happy to be here with all of you. Like Brandi mentioned, my name is Pooja Jesrani, and I am a Flight Director. I was selected in 2018, so I am one of the newer flight directors in our office. I was selected with five others making a class of six. And so, I am, you know, one of the baby flight directors, you would say, but have had a lot of experience now at NASA. In 2011– sorry, I should say in 2000, I was in 11th grade. I was in 11th grade and had a lot of space posters in my room, and it’s — you know, I was very inspired by space, and wanted to be where I am today. So very excited to be here. Thank you. I saw a lot of heads shaking with the 11th grade, but…

Brandi Dean: Yes, this is already so much fun. So, now we’re going to back up a little bit. Although a lot of this group supports Flight Operations in mission control, that’s not everything that Flight Operations does by a long shot. So, Norm, since you’re the deputy director of Flight Operations, why don’t you give us an overview of what Flight Operations Directorate is.

Norm Knight: OK, Brandi, and 11th grade. Goodness, that’s a shocker. So, Flight Operations, we live in a lot of acronyms, so you hear FOD, it’s synonymous with Flight Operations, it’s Flight Operations Directorate. And really, what we are, is a service organization for all the major programs. For development and mission execution. And so, what I’ll talk a little bit about and give you an overview today is really for station, but it does support all programs, and you know, the program is our customer. We’re an org of about 2,500 people, and we have three major functions within Flight Ops. You can think of us as kind of like a tripod. One leg of that is our astronauts. We have about 47 active astronauts today. The other leg is Aircraft Operations. We call it AOD, and we have about 60% of the aviation assets for the agency within Flight Ops. We have 19 T-38s that are used for spaceflight readiness training. We have a cargo transport, the big guppy you’ve probably seen flying around. We have some high research aircraft, used for science and training, and then we have a Gulfstream III and a Gulfstream V, which are used to transport the crews home after landing and get them back reunited with their family. And then we have the plan, train, fly part of the organization, which is really the biggest part of FOD, although it all works together, but really that plan, train, fly is what we do for the program. We really start planning and training each of these ISS increments, which are about six months long, about a year and a half out, and the teams work very hard to take the program requirements, metabolize those into a plan, a very detailed plan of how to accomplish this. We train the astronauts, we train the flight controllers, we integrate the teams, and we get ready to go in and execute that in the real-time environment, and that plan really starts from when the astronauts leave their families to go to launch all through all activities on orbit to the time that they come back to Earth and are reunited again with their families. Where you see a lot of this really culminate is in the Mission Control Center. Many of you have probably seen mission control, whether you’ve seen it in person or in photos. That’s the command and control center for the International Space Station. These teams work 24/7, 365 days a year. The Flight Director is really the conductor in these real-time teams, managing all the systems onboard, and the purpose of the teams in there is to manage the systems and also to provide crew safety for this orbiting laboratory in real-time. The teams typically send about 30,000 remote control commands from the ground to the space station a month to manage this platform. So, it’s very interactive, it’s hands on, it’s tactile, and it’s very rewarding. You know, Flight Operations, we’re very rich in tradition, we have our foundations of what we call foundations of Mission Operations. They’re leadership tenets, not unique to FOD, as we say, but really, for any effort that requires leadership. It’s discipline, confidence, competence, toughness, teamwork, vigilance, and responsibility, and to see leadership attributes that define our culture. And this culture, in addition to the flight rules and procedures, is really what provides the framework for the critical decisions and the operations that are ongoing, as you see in real time today. The teams are trained to expect the unexpected, to improvise and overcome, and to work with a lot of other team members, both here at JSC and other centers, to always ensure astronaut safety, vehicle safety, and achieving the mission objectives that are set forth by the program. And FOD is a little bit unique in that as a support organization, we can knit this together across major programs with international partners, with cargo vehicles, with crew vehicles, and payloads, integrating them all together in both the development and real time environment, again, making it work in support of our customer, the program.

Brandi Dean: I think that sets us up now for maybe Kenny Todd to come and tell us, I think, it might be confusing to people that the people you see supporting flights, sitting in mission control and flying the space station don’t actually work for the space station program, so maybe you can explain kind of that relationship between FOD and the space station program.

Kenny Todd: Sure, Brandi. Yeah, you know, the part that everybody sees on TV is mostly astronauts and flight controllers and flight directors, I mean, that is the face of human spaceflight. That — those are the people you see, and quite frankly, those are the people that we the program have entrusted with this $100 billion international asset, and so, as Norm said, they had the responsibility given to them by the program to train our astronauts, you know, make sure we have a flight control team that’s certified and ready to go, and multiple levels deep in failure response, and I think through the course of the history of not just this program, but all programs, you can see that the tenets that Norm laid out today have really been the foundation, which has been used in all human spaceflight programs and been executed very successfully, so anyway, yeah, Flight Operations is from a programmatic perspective, there are so many different facets of the program when you look at the engineering, the safety, you know, the people who manage our spacesuits. It’s a huge program. But somebody has to have that responsibility to operate the vehicle day in and day out, and we look to the Flight Operations Directorate to do that, keep the crews trained, keep the vehicle safe and flying in a good way every day. Now we have a control center over in Huntsville, Alabama that their primary focus is going to be making sure that while Flight Ops is taking care of the vehicle and keeping everything safe, that they’re working with the principle investigators and getting the science done onboard station. So, there’s a nice sharing of roles there, but at the end of the day, we look to the Flight Operations director to make sure that we take care of the vehicle, take care of our crews. And again, we compliment that with a large work force of folks that make sure that we hold each other accountable from the standpoint of the technical requirements or safety requirements, keeping our suits healthy. And so anyway, that’s kind of where Flight Operations sits in our bigger, overall program.

Brandi Dean: Thanks, that was a really good explanation. And I think it brings up that you know, this space station isn’t the first program that FOD in some form has supported. We’ve been — you guys have been working with all the human spaceflight programs pretty much since the beginning. But I think, probably, the space station’s first — that first expedition was kind of a turning point for you guys because, among other things, it meant that mission control had to be open 24/7, 365 days a year. I think Holly and David, you guys were already flight controllers at that point, so maybe you remember a little bit about what that transition was like.

Holly Ridings: Yeah, so maybe I’ll go — I’ll go first, and then I’ll hand to David because I think our perspectives are maybe a little bit different. Right, so I came in right when we were building up the team of folks, the flight control team, that would work with space station. And so, you know, I didn’t start on the shuttle side and then transition over like Norm, and Dave’s got some experience as well. So, to me, you know, the 24/7, 365 is really the only world I’ve ever known. And we supported from the space station side, you know, round the clock. And then, obviously, when the shuttle came up and docked and we did joint missions together, really laying the foundation for so many ways that we partner with all of our international partners and then now our commercial partners as well, and so, you know, I was lucky enough to come and be some of the very first people to get certified on the space station side and learned the ropes from that perspective. And you know, Expedition 1, any time you do anything for the first time, right. You know, there’s always excitement but also trepidation because you’ve spent so much time trying to anticipate and consider how it’s all going to work together and then you sort of go live, and then you know, some of it works and some of it doesn’t, and actually that’s probably the best part of our job, is getting to solve all of those problems, right. That’s what all of us love to do after all of the hard work’s been put in to prepare. So that’s kind of my, you know, perspective on it. You know, you’re at the starting gate and you hit the go button. In station, you hit go and you never stop. It just goes. And so, again, you know, after 20 years, that’s the only world I’ve ever known, but I know that Dave and Norm had some more experience on the shuttle side before that than I did, so I’ll hand to one of them.

David Korth: Yeah, thanks Holly, and I, when I first got hired into NASA I came in as a — in the space station operations planning area and we were always 52 months away from launching something. And so, our management said, “Hey, you know, it might be good for you guys to get some flight control experience if you’re going to be part of the flight control team for space station early on.” So, I got to spend four years doing shuttle flight control and flight planning. And so, for me, I got to see, you know, the heritage of NASA at least when I was young, you know, maybe even as young as 11th grade back when I remember shuttle, and the fact that, you know, I could make a flight plan. And if I wanted to change the flight plan, I took out a pencil, I erased a couple of lines on a piece of paper, I drew some new lines, and then we faxed it up to the shuttle and voila, there’s the plan. And that was the change. And then all of a sudden, this new era of international cooperation and, you know, jointly agreed to operations and coordination’s — all these different words that were, like, you know, certainly we coordinated, and we had international partners fly on shuttle. But now, if I wanted to make a change to a plan, I had to go call the Russians, and then after — you know, years later, it was the Russians, the Japanese, the Europeans, the Canadians, we all had to agree on what the plan change was going to be. So, cooperation and mutual agreement on how we’re going to do things really became important. And so, for me, that — I saw that transition. And the other aspect, and I know Norm’s got some — he saw this thing, transition in mentality from the U.S. perspective of lot of experience flying short duration missions. You know, and we were even very proud of ourselves with our 16-day extended duration orbiter missions. And then we go talk to the Russians about this new space station project, and they’re like, you know, we’ve been flying Salyut, we’ve been flying Mir. We know long duration spaceflight. And so, we had this ideological sort of conundrum where we both thought we were right and we both thought we had the right approach, and it was really sort of a meeting of the minds, where we both had to come together. And we brought in some new technology and some new approaches. They brought in years of experience dealing with long duration crews and how to operate something continuously. And so, Expedition 1 was kind of the culmination of all that discussion and began the adventure that we kept learning. And things have changed quite a bit, and the relationships that we’ve got with the Russians have changed and evolved quite a bit. And then we brought on all of our partners, so I saw that as kind of one of the main benefits to me of being part of the station is opening your mind to a different approach on how you can do things. And, you know, relying on your heritage and your experience, but using that to build something jointly together.

Norm Knight: Yeah, Brandi, I’ll add to that a little bit, what Dave and Holly said. You know, the fulcrum was really on the shuttle side initially, and so, like Dave said, you know, our big, long duration missions were 16, 18 days backs on the shuttle. And so, we had shuttle teams up working shuttle. We had station teams working station. And it was a paradigm shift for a lot of the organization to go from these sprints on shuttle really to this marathon on station. And you could see over time it was — shuttle was, you know, king, per se, and that’s the way things were done. But slowly and surely you know, evolution of human spaceflight was really transitioning to station and beyond. And so, the shuttle you could see starting to fade. And even though it was bringing up the cargo, that mentality was, hey, this is the new way for the evolution of human spaceflight. And so, that mentality of marathon is really, it’s exactly what we’re doing today. It’s what we’ll use today for lunar and Gateway and Mars. And it really, I think, has provided a good proving ground for this. And we have changed significantly from when we started the station to now. Our whole flight control team model has changed, because, you know, before if we took that shuttle model, you have a lot of people on console and you’re running those folks 24/7, it’s not efficient. You burn folks out. And so, really, what you see today in the station flight control room from a Flight Ops standpoint is what you get. It’s a very small agile team working, again, to make sure that the astronauts are safe, and those mission objectives are being met. And we continue to evolve. So, it’s been, it’s been fun to watch.

Brandi Dean: Well, the word marathon is a good one. Because the next thing I wanted to talk about was Emily is, I think the record holder for most times spent in — basically in that room at mission control. She has the — I think the most shifts for a flight director. So, I think we’d love to hear from her on kind of what a regular day on console is.

Emily Nelson: Yeah, it’s maybe a dubious honor. The flight director I took the honor from told me I shouldn’t be too proud of having so many shifts in this room. So when I think of, you know, what a day in the life of space station is like, I think all the way back to my — when I first started working console for space station was actually 1999 as a shift duty officer about a year before the first crew showed up. And so back then, this was an uncrewed ship and you had fairly junior personnel, obviously, keeping an eye on it in the wee hours. And that was really just — like, I can remember back then, the whole shift was really just about making sure that the — we acquired comm every rev and that the comm was still working and that nothing looked funny. And that occasionally we’d end up getting a call from our trajectory officers warning us, “hey, there’s a piece of debris that might be heading towards the station. You should call everybody and get them working that.” But, you know, super simple operations. And then over the years, you know, you get through the assembly phase. By the time Shep and company were onboard, we — you know, that was just a little while before the lab showed up. So, then we started doing research. And we started really shifting through the years, you know, through assembly, where you’re doing a lot of things for the first time. And any time you do anything for the first time, you’re going to learn, maybe, a lot. And you’re putting new systems onboard and you’re learning about those systems, and you’re building this space station one piece at a time every couple of months until you get to a point where you kind of call it assembly complete. At that point, now, for many years, we’ve been using this amazing platform for research. This is our orbiting research platform. And so, a normal day today looks really different from a normal day on any one of those 21 years along the path. We are supporting our crew members as they’re executing a lot of research projects. Those research projects are different every month. We have a seemingly never-ending stream of new research that’s coming online and getting to orbit and then coming back home and getting replaced by more. Occasionally, we’ll have some systems that aren’t behaving themselves, and so our teams will have to sort through those things. Occasionally, research doesn’t go exactly as we planned, and so our team in Huntsville will have to work with the crew to sort out why it’s not working the way it’s supposed to and see what we can do that will still accomplish some science while working around whatever challenges we have. Occasionally, our international partner friends will have issues on their sides of the space station, and so we’ll coordinate with them as they’re working through the challenges to get their systems back online. Like last night, we had problems with a valve in one of our CO2 removal systems, so we had to work around that. We had our JAXA friends, we’re operating their robotic arm on the outside of the space station to get ready for a satellite deploy tomorrow. And we were installing some radishes in a plant habitat so that we can grow some radishes onboard. I mean, it’s a really diverse set of activities that are going on every single day, and it’s just different every day of the year for 21 years. I don’t know how many jobs out there, when you show up for work, you just don’t have any idea what it is. You know, it’s going to be totally different from the day before. And that’s really what has just been so fun about getting to work on space station for all these years.

Brandi Dean: And I love that you haven’t even left today yet. So, great background.

Emily Nelson: Yeah.

Brandi Dean: I think Holly had something to add.

Holly Ridings: Yeah, it was only color commentary, right. So, you know, we are all engineers, and so we have this giant sheet of metrics, you know, spreadsheet of metrics. And so, Emily watches the numbers go up and down, and, you know, so last week, she’s like, “Hey, I need to work some console,” you know, so when people need help, she pitches in. So, she’s been actually on the night shift for the last couple of days. And she has to keep the very serious, very fancy trophy for the more shifts on console, which happens to be one of those number one foam fingers like you get at a ballpark. So, you know, we all have very serious jobs, but we also, you know, try not to take ourselves too seriously. You know, we live and work in mission control. All of us are there, you know, almost every day, right. So when you see us do a panel like this, it’s easy to hear the stories and think about 20 years, but, you know, we’re here because we love it, and we still spend, you know, time in the building on console. You know, Kenny is — I think Kenny sleeps in his office in mission control sometimes. So, you know, anyway, I just thought I would throw in a little bit of color commentary, so that’s it.

Brandi Dean: That’s perfect. I love that, a foam finger for your trophy. So, for those who would aspire to such greatness, earlier this year, we had a call for applications for new flight directors. And I know based on the many emails that I got, there is a lot of curiosity about what it takes to be a flight director and then kind of how you learn once you get there. And since Pooja is the most recent addition or one of the most recent additions to that group, I thought maybe you could tell us a little bit about how that worked for you.

Pooja Jesrani: Sure, absolutely. So, my story for becoming a flight director was that I actually interned at NASA back in 2006/2007, and then came back on full-time in one of the flight control groups for the International Space Station. I worked in the [Attitude Determination Control Office] ADCO group, which is in charge of the way the International Space Station basically flies around the Earth. I was in that group for about ten years before I was selected to be a capcom, which is a capsule communicator. A capcom is the person that talks to the astronauts onboard the International Space Station. I did that role again then for a few years and then applied to be a flight director for the International Space Station. I was selected in 2018. Once I was selected, we went through about a years’ worth of training to get certified to sit on console. In that years’ worth of training, we took a myriad of classes. Basically, all of the classes that the astronauts actually take before they fly on station. As well as we did a bunch of simulations. I know simulations really tested the worst day ISS scenarios. And we really hope that those scenarios never happen in real time, but those scenarios really prepare us for those days on consoles where things don’t go as smoothly as planned. So, once we got to go through all the training classes, as well as the simulation, we sat on console and did real-time OJT to really learn the ropes of what happens every day on the International Space Station. And after that real-time OJT was complete, we were signed off by our Chief of the Flight Director Office to sit our first shift on console, which was a really memorable day for me because I was able to invite my family and friends to attend my first shift and sort of naming ceremony.

Brandi Dean: So, you’ve got to tell us now, and then probably we should go around the group, what name did you give your, I’m not even sure what you call the noun there.

Pooja Jesrani: Yeah, sure. Our team name. So, I — my team name is Unity. And I am the 94th Flight Director in the Flight Director Office. I’ll let you go around the horn.

Brandi Dean: How about we’ll go — we’ll go kind of in reverse order, David.

David Korth: Yeah, I’m Odyssey flight.

Brandi Dean: And how did you pick that?

David Korth: Well, I’ve got to relive this moment on console again. For me, it seemed very appropriate because it kind of highlighted the journey that I took that sort of went through a lot of different turns, twists my own Scylla and Charybdis, so to speak. And ended up where I wanted to be, when I started, when my boss asked me when I first got hired, where do you see yourself in ten years, it was a little more than ten years, but that’s kind of — it kind of related to me and personified where I was. Where I — how I got there.

Brandi Dean: That’s great. Emily?

Emily Nelson: Yeah, I’m number 70 and my team name is Peridot. I had — let’s see, there’s — one Christmas, my mom had given me some peridot earrings and I was not familiar with the stone, so I go look it up and come to find out it was a — it’s a gemstone that you have to have an iron rich environment to develop the gem stone. And they’re frequently found in meteorites. And so the image I had in my head was of somebody landing on some planet somewhere, someday, and turning over a rock and seeing a familiar stone, you know, a stone that we have at home and then they find it on some planet far, far away. And so, I thought that would be a good kind of reaching forward name for my team.

Brandi Dean: That’s a great story. Holly?

Holly Ridings: Yeah, so, I’m realizing that we’re going to leave Kenny out, so I’m sitting here trying to think of an honorary name in real-time, but we may just have to take inaction because —

Kenny Todd: I’ll just be Kenny. How about that?

Holly Ridings: You’re just going to be Kenny? Awesome. OK, so, I — Viking flight is my name. Flight Director number 62 there’s been less than 100 in the entire history of human spaceflight. Less than 100 flight directors, which is why we all know our numbers with this new class that Brandi mentioned coming in we might — we might break 100, we’ll see. Maybe not, but we are getting close. So, I’m number 62, Viking flight. The reason I picked it is before I came to the Johnson Space Center, I actually worked at Goddard Space Flight Center for a little while. And my mentor when I worked up there was a man named Gerald Soffen and he was the project scientist for the Viking landers that landed on Mars. And so, as a tribute to him, by the time I was selected as flight director, he was not alive anymore. Also, as a tribute to thinking ahead, going to Mars, which we all want to do someday. Headed to the Moon with Artemis and then onto Mars. That’s why I picked — I picked Viking.

Brandi Dean: Very cool. And Kenny, yes, sorry about that but if you have a — if you have one that you want to throw out there now, we can take it.

Kenny Todd: No, I’m good. This is a special group of people and no, I don’t want to tread on that tradition for sure.

Brandi Dean: All right, and Norm.

Norm Knight: Let’s see, I’m number 51 and my color is Amethyst. And the reason I chose Amethyst, no surprise with the color of the tie here, is I’m a traditionalist more. And so, colors were chosen as team names early on with the first set of flight directors, and so, if you take the first three flight directors Chris Kraft, Gene Kranz, John Hodge — they were red, white and blue, accordingly. And I’m very patriotic. And so, you mix red, white, and blue together, you get amethyst. And so that’s how it came about. So, there you go.

Brandi Dean: That makes total sense. Well, so speaking of kind of the origins of flight directors and going back a little bit in history, I think one of the things that most people think of when they think of a flight director is that, “Houston, we’ve had a problem” line. And dealing with that, the square peg in the round hole. I know that this is a job that can — that can get your blood pressure going up. So, I think you probably have some good stories and maybe we can start with David, because I know he has a pretty interesting one.

David Korth: Yeah and actually got to share it with Norm. So, we were in the control room at the same time. Yeah, one of my interesting stories on console was certainly the U.S. EVA 23 back in July of 2013. It was a pair of EVAs that we were doing. The first of which was July 9th, so just seven days earlier. And we had — and we learned through this, we don’t have enough time to walk you through the whole series of events that led up to it, but there were a couple of key things that I took away from the experience. First and foremost is to build on what Pooja just talked about. You know, when you get certified as a flight director, you go through rigorous training. Especially rigorous simulations. And the intent of the simulations both for you as a flight director and as an upcoming front room controller is to, you know, quote, throw the kitchen sink at you. Make you — give you the opportunity to experience those really awful days where a lot of things are going wrong. How you prioritize, how you make decisions. How you lead a team through, navigate through those problems to come out the other end where everything is stable. You know, that’s at least the minimum goal. Everything stable. But what I found, you know, you certainly aren’t going to have the opportunity to simulate exactly what’s going to happen. But what it does do is it prepares you mentally to deal with things that are unknown because you fall back to your training. You say, “Hey, I’ve gone through all these things.” You’re thinking this stuff through your mind. I’ve gone through many scenarios where bad things happen and you can’t just freeze up. You can’t lock up, you got to keep thinking. And so, falling back on the training that Pooja had to go through to get certified. And that when we go through for all these different dynamic events, whether it’s EVAs visiting vehicles, any other kind of major event that we do on station, we try to simulate and spend time building team, so you understand how you and your team are going to react. Building that kind of trust. And building confidence — self-confidence in yourself that you can get past a tough situation. The other piece of that is the reliance on team. It’s not one person that’s going to solve a problem. You have to rely on a team. And to extend that, you know, this particular EVA we had two astronauts outside. Chris Cassidy, who just returned home from a second expedition. And Luca Parmitano, an ESA Italian astronaut who also came back from station for his second tour not long ago. So, kind of the end of the story was it all ended well because they went back. But at the time, what we learned is that, you know, our international partners, we had an EVA with two people. One international, one U.S., and they had absolute and implicit trust in the U.S. flight control team to lead an EVA and to resolve problems. And somebody asked me in the press conference shortly after the EVA you know, did you — how was the communication with the ESA flight control team and were they concerned? Were — you know, what did they ask you and how did you communicate with them? And, you know, it made me think and realize that, you know, this partnership that we’ve created is based on a lot of trust and mutual trust and that we didn’t — you know, other than them following along and understanding that we were running this EVA and we had the best interest of all crew the safety of everyone regardless of what badge or flag they flew under really hit home to me. So the event itself, it took a, you know, we terminated the EVA in an hour, just over an hour into an EVA with something that did not appear at first life-threatening and after — it was after we declared termination that the event started to go downhill quickly and, you know, there was a little luck involved that we terminated when we did. And that the EVA itself was set up to where the astronauts were not as far away from the airlock as they could have been had this event occurred late in that EVA, where parts of the station would have taken them longer to get back to the airlock. It was certainly traumatic and then certainly when we got back into the airlock and got the helmet off, an hour and 41 minutes PET, or Phase Elapsed Time, you could see all the astronauts on the station, our Russian colleagues, everybody in the airlock doing what they could to help get that helmet off. The goal was get that helmet off as quickly as you can. A liter and a half of water in a helmet when you’re in space is, you know, putting your head in a fishbowl. And so, it was great to see the international cooperation there at the very end. I also had the pleasure of working HTV-3 with Holly. That was the Kounotori 3 Japanese cargo mission that ended up aborting when we released it. It was one of those that we berthed, we brought it in and berthed it to the Node 2 Nadir and then we released it with a robotic arm. And a number of different events transpired such that it went forward instead of down. And then that sort of caught our attention there in real-time. But that was working with the Japanese control team. And a lot of communication back and forth. And again, it fell back to the mutual training that we did with our Japanese colleagues to build trust, the cooperation, the understanding of how each of us was — to react in tough situations. So that when something unforeseen happened, there wasn’t, you know, a multinational panic. It was, “hey, we can deal with this and get through this together.” I think I’ll stop blabbering on at this point.

Brandi Dean: Yeah, I would imagine there might be some other good stories out there. Anybody want to share kind of the most heart-stopping time on console that they’ve had?

Holly Ridings: Yeah, I’ll do a quick one, right. So, was on console early on. I was a flight director and we were bringing a progress vehicle into the space station. And so, typically that’s an uncrewed cargo vehicle the Russians built. It comes up, flies up to the space station automatically. Normally what happens is it has an antenna that moves out of the way when it gets close, such that then it makes room for the docking mechanism to mate with the space station without any interference. And unbeknownst to us on the ground, that had not happened correctly. It had not retracted properly and so, the progress is coming on in and of course that antenna created some structural interference. And so, when it tries to dock with the space station, it didn’t — it didn’t work correctly. When you have two vehicles in space and you try to put them together, you do what’s called free drift, right. You don’t want firing jets moving around on either one of them. They don’t go together nice and neat. So, we’re in a position where the progress was coming in and the space station is drift. We’re trying to put them together, and of course, it doesn’t work quite right. So, then we had to figure out what to do. And this is our Russian colleagues trying to figure out how to go ahead and get what we call, you know, structural mate such that now we can start firing the thrusters again. You know, have attitude control of the space station. And so, you know, that story may not sound you know, sort of adrenaline pumping. Maybe when I tell it very technically like that, but this is not something that happens. Typically, we rendezvous lots of vehicles to the space station. It usually goes really well, and so having one where you’re unable to finish completing the docking, but also not being able to get off the space station because you’ve kind of got this incomplete mating. Now you’ve got your space station in drift. If you stay that way too long, you’re not pointed in the right direction, you don’t have power, you don’t have communication. And so, that situation can start to start to go badly fairly quickly. And so, you know, as Dave was pointing out it’s a team thing. And in this particular case, you know, our Russian colleagues worked closely with us to figure out what to do. You’ve got the safety of the crew onboard, and that’s the most important thing you’re thinking of in that situation and wanting to get the space station, you know, back to a place that’s safe for them in terms of power and consumables. And obviously, this structural mating that’s going on. So, sometimes things go wrong, and you have to figure out what to do. In that particular case, we got, we got enough structural mating that we were able to do that. There’s hooks, clamps that kind of pull the two vehicles together and get back into a safe state. But it was very sort of adrenaline-inducing for a period of time while we figured out what to do. And you know, Brandi, you always ask these questions and we’re all trained to tell them in these, like, super dry, boring voices. You know, because that’s what we do on console when things go wrong. And I’m not sure it quite conveys you know, the situation to folks out there. But, you know, I decided I’d try a little bit, so hopefully people understand that you know, that’s our equivalent of heart-pounding, where we have these very calm faces and sort of monotone tones, because that’s what we’re trained to do.

Emily Nelson: Yeah, and just to add some color-commentary to that one, I remember that day because I was with a team that was doing a training run upstairs. And word spread that, because it was pretty unusual for us to not dock totally normally. And so, word had spread upstairs of this. And we pretty much just, like, everybody took a pause and we moved our data from our simulation training data to the real-time data to just kind of follow along, you know, with bated breath from upstairs to see what are they going to do? How are they going to solve the problem? You know, we had a whole team that was following along that really — it was — yes, when you describe it technically and, in the moment, you can’t get all, you know, we don’t make it a big, exciting event. But I will tell you that from another room in the building having nothing whatsoever to do with the op, we were all watching because it was a, kind of a really scary event.

Kenney Todd: And I’ll, let’s see. Brandi, I’ll jump in kind of from a program perspective. I don’t sit and do the actual console work. But you know, I look at it from a programmatic perspective. We’ve asked the Flight Ops team to, you know, take care of the crew, take care of the ISS. And if something goes wrong, you know, my perspective is get us through the shift. Get us stable. And then, we’ll step back as an integrated group, take a look and see what our options are. Try to figure out how to go — how to go forward. And at least one of the examples that I can think of, and maybe one of y ‘all can help me remember. For some reason, I think it was 12A or 13A. We had a shuttle dock to station. And for whatever reason, the Russians had a computer failure. And we thought, “Oh, no big deal.” And then, they had another computer failure. You know, like, well that’s unfortunate for those guys. And then you realize, well, that’s really unfortunate for all of us because — we need them in order to be able to stabilize the station so that shuttle can leave. And we had absolutely no clue as to what happened with the Russian computers. The Russians didn’t really have a good understanding. There was — there was a lot of concern. I’ll put it that way because we were really in a situation where we couldn’t keep shuttle forever trying to figure out what to do. We were concerned about overall maintaining attitude control should we try to undock and not have these computers that could control the propulsion systems. Pooja, you probably remember this. But anyway, so anyway, I just remember that was a very concerning time for us at the program level because we were still building station. You know, we were still quite a ways from being done and to have a problem like this where you’re really looking at each other going, “How are we going to get out of this?” I mean, this could you know, be a step in a very bad direction if we try to let shuttle go and not have a good way of ensuring that we can clear it from the station without any kind of contact. So, it was at least over a period of days. It was something I think a lot of us lost sleep over working with the entire team, engineering, our operations team, our safety communities, our partners, our Russian partners trying to figure out, because it wasn’t just as simple as rebooting that computer and bringing it back up. It was a much more involved technical issue that again, kind of felt like it brought us to our knees there for a period of days and I assume some of you might have remembered that one.

Holly Ridings:Yeah, so I’ll pick up for just a few minutes because I was actually on console. I worked that — I worked that mission from the Flight Director Console. It was actually my very first joint, you know, joint mission. So, I’d been certified before that and I worked space station shifts, but that was my first joint mission on the ISS flight director team. So, I came in, I was the crew overnight shift. We put the crew to bed, and I came in, and the lead of our team said, “Well, we’re in free drift and we can’t figure out how to get out of it. We needed the computers on the space station to work and then be able to hand back and forth in terms of the shuttle taking overall control of the combined space station/shuttle. But we were trying to get back to where the space station, you know, took control of that. Like Kenny said, we couldn’t have the shuttle do that forever. And so, I came in and we’re free drift and we don’t know how to get out of it. But here’s the lesson I learned, right. So, one of the more senior flight directors was the lead. And she looked at me and said, “OK, so while we’re figuring out how to get out of free drift, you know, what else can you do?” We actually needed to move the mobile transporter which is a piece of equipment where the robotic arm can ride up and down the length of the space station to set up for an operation the next day. So, you know, as a new flight director you’re just — your kind of like, “OK, here’s our problem.” You know, she was looking up and out. Like, “Hey, let’s keep moving forward safely while we’re still solving this really bad problem over here.” You know. And it was in my early flight director career, one of the most important lessons that I’ve learned. What can you do to move forward even when faced with a problem that, right now, you don’t know how to solve. How do you move forward, you know, safely, of course. And so, we move the mobile transporter, because we had to be free drift to do that anyway. We happen to already be free drift, while we’re over here trying to figure out how to solve the problem. The other piece of that is when you have a problem that big, everyone just shows up. Like, it’s amazing. You don’t have to make phone calls. People just know, like Emily was saying earlier. The team in the other room’s looking at the data, everybody’s at home watching NASA TV, you know, people are getting things on their phones now more than they used to because phones are a little more prevalent now. But the data just gets out, and people just show up. What can I do to help? And we formulate what’s called a team four where you have another set of folks go really, really focus on that problem. Leaving us in the control room, again, to continue flying the mission as much progress as we can make safely. So, you know, those are like, two of my biggest flight director lessons that I carry with me from that specific incident that that Kenny brought up.

Pooja Jesrani: I’ll just add one quick thing. So, I actually started at NASA about two weeks after that shuttle flight and it was the biggest buzz in town. I mean, the amount of conversations that happened after that shuttle flight and all the things that the team had done to recover, I mean, that was sort of my — getting my feet wet and really learning all about what FOD does. It was a great experience to start learning from.

Brandi Dean: Yeah, that’s so cool. I feel like we could listen to your battle stories for a long time, but I know you’ve got other things to get to today. But I did want to wrap up a little bit by talking kind of about how Flight Operations Directorate is still evolving as we have new programs coming online. I know Holly, you supported the first SpaceX cargo mission and Pooja I think is getting ready to support the first Boeing commercial crew mission as well. So, maybe you guys can talk a little bit about how things are — how we’re adapting to those new demands.

Holly Ridings: Yeah, so you can probably do an entire panel on just that topic, right. Kenny was there as well, Norm was sitting behind me. So, I was the flight director, the NASA flight director sitting in the ISS, you know, flight control room responsible for the very first Dragon that came to the space station. So, this is 2012. To put that in perspective, we’ve now done over 20 of those, if you count that demonstration headed into the 21st under the space station cargo contract. So, I mean, two-ish a year for the last, you know, almost ten years now. So, amazing to see how far we’ve come. You know, when you sit through the first time, we’ve talked about this when we talked about Expedition 1, right. You put in all this blood, sweat and tears planning, trying to figure out how to do this. Again, Kenny remembers all of this. And then you go live, and it doesn’t work exactly like you planned. And that’s where we really get to do our jobs. That’s what they pay us for, right. Is to figure those things out. And so we got about, you know, 120 meters from the space station and our navigation sensors that communicated with the SpaceX Dragon didn’t look quite right, so we got to sit there for a little while and figure out how we were going to manage that in order to get the two vehicles to communicate and navigate in — navigate in safely. And ultimately, we did figure it out. It’s another one of those stories we’re like literally heart pounding. But, you know, when you tell it afterwards it’s like, OK, well, we sat there and calmly worked through it. You know, we had our engineering support. We had the program folks, you know, Kenny was in the other room. Norm sitting behind me, and we figured out what to do and do it safely and were able to bring the vehicle in. We did have to sit, you know, 120 meters from the space station for a while making sure navigation sensors were working correctly between the two vehicles. And so, you know, from my standpoint you look back. And now, where we are with commercial is really amazing. You know, a tipping point in human spaceflight for us to be able to incorporate a commercial partner and bring them safely into the space station. But to us, right, who started, you know, at the beginning of the space station, it was just another opportunity, right. We had done Expedition 1, we figured out how to incorporate, you know, over time, all of our international partners, add their modules and their vehicles to the space station. And this was just one more in a continuum. And so, we look forward now with all of the pieces that we continue to do on space station and, you know, on into Artemis. And for us, that’s, you know, continuing to build on the skills and the culture. You know, at the end of the day it’s all about relationships, and teamwork, and trust. And you go and you figure out that combination with every partner, with every provider, with every team that we interact with. And, you know, that’s really the amazing thing to me about the International Space Station. One of the most amazing things. And so, again, I could talk forever, but you know, Kenny and Norm were there, as well. So, I’ll hand to them.

Norm Knight: Well, I’ll provide just one aspect of it that Holly hit on. And it’s the teamwork, and it’s relationships. And, you know, it was a fantastic day to give Dragon birth. But if you look at the journey to get there, that was really what made it special. Because, you know, the commercial cargo came on the heels of the Constellation program being canceled. NASA diverting funds from government type work into more of the private and commercial industries to where NASA buys the service instead of actually building the vehicle. So, that was the forefront of that. And I’ll tell you that the — dynamics between commercial and NASA and government at that point was pretty toxic. It was — you know, NASA funding has gone down. It was given to commercial; it was just — the timing was bad, and the environment was not great. And it really took, you know, Holly and her team and Kenny and the programs to really start helping build trust, as Holly said. Because we were doing a lot of finger-pointing back and forth. And it was getting us nowhere. And until, you know, those relationships started to be built, the trust started to be instilled in that you need us, that NASA recognizes that we needed them as well. We’re not the enemy, we’re the solution. So, are they, and we have to work together. So, we started focusing — instead of pointing at each other, we’re pointing now at a common goal. That common goal of successful commercial cargo. And that is the foundation — and the success of that is the foundation we’re resting on today with commercial crew, it’s what we’re going into with the Gateway and Human Landing System. And it all goes back to that. So, leadership matters, relationships matter, and people and trust matters. So just a great success story.

Kenny Todd: Let’s see, and Norm, absolutely, I agree with you and Holly both. I mean if we look back at when station started, did we know that we were going to end up in this model? Not necessarily. I mean, we sort of had to adapt the mission along the way based on the guidance and the direction that we had been given. And again, that brought some new people into our circle that we didn’t know about when we started this. But, one thing I talk to people about up and out a lot is the fact that we have a space station culture. There’s not — every partner, every — whether it’s commercial, whether it’s international, everybody brings their aspect of how to do things and how to look at problems and how to look at challenges and how to accomplish things in their own way. But, at the end of the day you have to figure out how to make that work with everybody else. And what ultimately comes out of that mixer, if you will, is a space station culture. And we understand each other. I like to tell people, you know, the technical problems don’t really know international boundaries. They don’t know contractual boundaries. They are problems you know; you solve them the same way. The physics doesn’t change just because you talk a different language. And so, you have to get together, you have to figure out how to work together to do that, and we did it early on with the partners, our international partners. And I think with our commercial friends, we’re starting to see that same thing as both Holly and Norm talked about. You know, the early part that storming-forming-norming thing that there was a little bit of storming early on and it took us a little bit, but I think in the end, you know, we had arrived at kind of a cultural understanding of how to get things done, and it’s been extremely successful, and, you know, I think it’s going to carry us forward, as Norm said, as we start to not just work with our international partners, but also commercial partners and trying to go live around the Moon and go do some work on the Moon.

Pooja Jesrani: Yeah, and Brandi — oh, yeah, I was just going to mention that I think this is just a very exciting time for younger generations. You know, the last time we flew off of U.S. soil was in 2011 for our last shuttle flight. And so, to get to see DM-2 this summer fly, I mean, it was the buzz around town, it was the buzz around the world, you know, to get to see these astronauts go to the International Space Station and fly off of U.S. soil. And I think the SpaceX team is doing an outstanding job and we have, you know, a flight coming up in the next few weeks as well as Boeing working really hard to do the same thing. So, I think the next few years are going to be super exciting.

Brandi Dean: Definitely. A lot of excitement these past 20 years and a lot more excitement to come. I think we are just about pretty much out of time, but I do want to give Norm a chance to just kind of wrap up for us a little bit what we’ve talked about, today.

Norm Knight: Well, Brandi, great discussion, great panel. And, you know, I don’t know how many folks have had the opportunity to go out and see an ISS viewing. Where you go out, look at the night sky, early morning sky, and see a station fly over. But if you’ve not had that opportunity, go do so because, you know, the station didn’t happen on its own. It was, you know, one vote in congress, it took a lot of teams to put this orbiting outpost in orbit. And so, when you look up at this magnificent laboratory that’s the size of a football field, it’s nearly a million pounds of mass in orbit orbiting the Earth about every 90 minutes. You realize it’s real. There’s human presence onboard, there’s been human presence for the last 20 years and, you know, it really is an engineering marvel. And to me, miracles you know, miracles do happen. When you have a vision, you provide the leadership, the perseverance, the political support, and teams that manage this thing day in and day out and have been doing that for the past 20 years. It’s incredible. And, you know, it’s a great orbiting laboratory for science and research. And it’s also being used as a great, platform for developing hardware that’s going to evolve us to the Moon and Mars and beyond. So, this is amazing. 20 years has gone by in the blink of an eye, but the relationships and the teams that have made this all happen are what’s going to evolve us to getting on the Moon by 2024, making that a reality as well. So, I think I can speak for all of us that, you know, being part of this is just really special. And just really glad to be here today with our friends and see just what this has become and how it’s evolving even into the future. So, I’ll leave you with that.

Brandi Dean: Thank you so much, Norm. That’s a great idea. Definitely go out and wave at Kate, Sergey, and Sergey as they are flying over. And then later this month you’ll get a chance to cheer on the Crew-1 crew as they launch for the space station on their SpaceX Dragon, as well. This is just the second in a series of six panels, so you’re going to want to watch out for the rest of this series. Coming up is going to be all about science. That’s the next one that we’ll be holding, so you can watch out for that. Thank you so much for joining us today and here’s to 20 more years.

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Host: Well, that was an interesting discussion. I hope you had some insights into the way human spaceflights are managed here on the ground. It was also a nice trip down memory lane for me. I was the commentator on Holly Ridings’ planning team during that loss of station control event she described. It was summer of 2007, shuttle mission STS-117 was visiting the station during Expedition 15, it was every bit as riveting as she says. Also, an update for those of you who keep track of these sorts of things. This discussion was recorded prior to the arrival of the astronauts on the SpaceX Crew-1 mission. As of now, there have been 242 different human beings who have passed through the doors to the space station. There’s more to come. The celebration of the space stations’ 20th anniversary continues. Our next discussion focuses on the benefits of science research on the station. We’ll hear from the people leading the science and research efforts on the station as they talk about the importance of that work and the benefits it’s already generated, for those of us who are stuck here on the ground. I’ll also remind you that you can go online to keep up with all things NASA at NASA.gov. You can find the full catalogue of all our episodes by going to NASA.gov/podcasts and scrolling to our name. You can also find all the other exciting NASA podcasts right there at that same spot. NASA.gov/podcasts. The panel discussion in this episode was recorded on November 4th, 2020. Thanks to Alex Perryman, Gary Jordan, Norah Moran, Belinda Pulido, and Jennifer Hernandez in pulling together this podcast. And to the NASA JSC External Relations Office for assembling this great group to give us some insight into mission control. We’ll be back next week.