When I passed my ARD

When I passed my ARD Support cert sim on the day before Thanksgiving, I actually only finished half of the job.

A flight controller's on-console skills -- detailed technical knowledge combined with good communications -- are the most visible and vital piece of the certification puzzle. If you're bad on console, you will find yourself hard-pressed to ever get certified and thus work an actual mission. On-console skills are the one piece a flight controller's job that can't be entirely taught. Everything else is just knowledge. With the proper training, anyone can learn the off-console tasks.

But then there's all this off-console stuff. Answering questions, completing tasks, and learning all the background work that goes into preparing for a flight.

ARD Support involves a lot of off-console tasks. In fact, once certified, an ARD Support Officer like me will spend 99% of her time supporting a mission doing off-console tasks. Eight minutes of real-time operations are backed up by hours and hours (and hours) of pre-flight checks.

Because such a large portion of this flight control position involves tasks that can only be done when preparing for an actual mission (as opposed to the sims we run so frequently), I still have to follow all the prep for a mission before I can officially be certified.

STS-116, launching on Thursday night, is that mission. Marc is ARD Support, and thus I have been Marc's shadow since at least last week, and will continue to follow him like a lemming until we launch. Today, for example, I spent an hour reading numbers while Marc checked them off a printout. Every single one was correct. And yet every single one had to be checked. Teeeediiiious.

I spent all day indoors, with no windows, in the dull and dim lighting of Mission Control. Because I've only done ascent sims thus far in my flight control career, I'm used to being in the control center for about 4 hours. Today I was there for almost 9, and I'll be there for the same amount of time, if not longer, over the new few days.

In the control center, with no windows, time starts to do some very funny things. It slows down. It speeds up. It ceases to matter entirely. I found myself repeatedly looking up from my monitor with the sudden thought: "What time is it? What day is it? Where am I again?"

Of course I wouldn't have it any other way, but at the same time, I think there's a reason we don't see this stuff until the of our training flow: if we saw it any earlier, we might re-think whether we wanted to do it in the first place. ;)