Playing Astronaut

My job does not often run on an even keel. There are weeks that are very dull, when I have little to do but sit in the office and use the downtime to clean out my email inbox. Then there are weeks when I have so much to do that I barely see my desk. Contrary to popular belief, it's the busy weeks that are the fun weeks. The satisfying weeks. Lately things have been very slow, as I lamented last week. Yesterday, however, was awesome.

The very cool space shuttle pilot training that I've been doing since June is sadly coming to a close. I am going to miss all the classes because let's face it: learning how to fly the space shuttle is like one giant video game. And I get paid to do it! If that weren't enough, the training has actually been hugely helpful in preparing me to do my job as a rendezvous flight controller. See, unlike most of the people in the control center, rendezvous doesn't own a system. We're not in charge of the computers, or the engines, or the life support, or any of that. Our system is the crew themselves. We "own" the people who are actually flying the vehicle, and we have to know what they're doing in order to do our job properly. That's why we go through the same pilot training as the crew.

Up until now we've been training in the dome, which has a copy of the aft cockpit of the shuttle and visuals of what you'd see out the windows. It's an excellent simulator, but it still doesn't feel completely real, and it's basically run by a couple desktop computers that simulate what all the actual shuttle hardware does. We've also been training in bits and pieces, concentrating on one small phase of flight per session.

Yesterday, all of the training came together and we did one huge session in the real simulator. We flew the entire rendezvous, all 5 hours from the final big course correction burn to docking. And we flew it in one of the best simulators we have: a full mockup of the shuttle flight deck, with real hardware and real wires and the same computers that the real vehicle has.

Flying a rendezvous requires a minimum of two people, and we had to divide up the tasks accordingly. The commander does the majority of the actual flying (i.e. hand on the stick), while the pilot makes inputs to the computer and ensures that everyone is on the timeline and that the checklist is being accurately followed. On an actual mission, there would be a third person handling the tools and preparing the docking system, but in training the commander and pilot shared those tasks. Yesterday we decided that Jose would be the commander and I would be the pilot. (Yes, we work in the same group. We did not work in the same group when we started dating, but we do now. No comments from the peanut gallery please. It has not been a problem thus far.) It worked really well. Jose is a little better at the flying and reacting quickly to failures, but I am the checklist queen. I am great at being a stickler for the procedures and making sure we stay on task.

Jose sitting in the commander's seat. The first few hours of rendezvous are flown from the forward cockpit.

Me sitting in the pilot's seat.

The center console between the commander and pilot seats.

The aft cockpit, aka where the magic happens. The last two hours of rendezvous are flown here, from the back of the flight deck.

It was a good day indeed. I have only two more lessons, both unofficial quizzes to test my knowledge, and then the pilot pool training will be done. I still have many sims to go before I am certified, but the pilot training in particular has been one of the most fun things I've done here.

(If you are interested in finding out what some of the zillions of switches are, there are notes on the photos if you view them on Flickr.)