Work: March 2010 Archives

I'm the backup Rendezvous Officer for the upcoming STS-131 mission, which means I'll be working the rendezvous and undocking as backroom support. My shift hours are horrible, as per usual, but at least I'll be working the shift when the crew is awake and doing interesting things!

The primary job of the backup person in my area, in addition to the real-time flight support, is to be the Book Manager for the flight. The Book Manager is in charge of all the rendezvous and undocking procedures -- maintaining them, correcting them, etc. It's a lot of paperwork (both real and virtual) and it can be a headache sometimes, but it's a necessary part of the job to ensure that the rendezvous goes exactly as planned. The "rendezvous book," as we call it, is only one of dozens of books of procedures, checklists, and cue cards that make up the "flight data file" or FDF.

(What, you thought the astronauts just magically remembered how to do everything that has to be done over a two-week flight? They're smart people with good memory, but not THAT good!)

(Also, if you are curious for a closer look at some of the FDF flown each mission, you can view many of the documents on the NASA website.)

The final edition of the book gets published a month or two before launch, and my final act as Book Manager is to go over to the FDF office and check each of the actual flight copies of the book -- the ones that will be packed up, shipped to Florida, loaded onto the space shuttle, and launched into orbit with the crew.

For this flight, there were 6 identical copies of the rendezvous book, along with two sets of cue cards (which are concise checklists for certain activities that are velcroed into place in orbit) and overlays (which are transparencies that they tape over the camera monitor on the flight deck to help them judge their approach rate to the space station). This means 6 separate books to go through page by page to check for errors.

Three of the copies will be flown in space, and the other three stay on the ground as backups and for archival purposes. They're color-coded -- a prime and backup book each for the commander (red), pilot (yellow), and one of the mission specialists (purple).

It's a tedious process to be sure, but it's necessary. In the past, we've discovered pages that are missing, pages with print errors, graphics that didn't come out right, and overlays that are the wrong size. Much better to discover that type of thing on the ground than to be surprised by it in orbit!

I declare these books ready for flight!

I'm in the first day of a three-day class about Simulink and Stateflow. Those are two software/coding/simulation tools that have gotten a lot of use around NASA lately as we are (or were) designing flight software for a new vehicle. They're part of Matlab, which is a coding language I used extensively in my old job down the hall, but haven't touched in the four years since I moved to the Rendezvous office.

I'm encouraged to find that I haven't completely forgotten all of my Matlab skills, and that I'm pretty good at picking up Simulink. Simulink is all visual -- as in, you drag blocks around that represent equations and functions and inputs and outputs -- and I'm pretty good with all things visual.

I'm not really sure why I'm in this class except for the fact that they needed a civil servant to meet their headcount requirements. (As a cynical aside, the fact that I'm a civil servant seems to be all I'm good for these days.) I don't have any immediate use for these skills. But it's been more fun so far than I thought, and it's always good to have a new skill. Right???

Now for a complete topic shift, and to give the non-engineers reading this something that they actually care about, I will show you what I made for dinner last night: Pioneer Woman's meatloaf. I haven't had meatloaf in a very long time, and after we finished, Jose said "that was major comfort food." And it was. Meatloaf with a side of potatoes.

Meatloaf is totally easy to make. You just put everything in a bowl and mash it up.
We were generous with the parsley, yet I still wish we'd added more.

In addition to that stuff above (meat and cheese and spices), you also add eggs and bread soaked in milk. Then you get to mush everything together, which is easiest to do if you use your hands. I suppose this part would suck if you don't like touching meat. I'm not a huge fan of touching raw chicken, but for some reason ground beef really doesn't bother me.

The only hitch was that I couldn't find my loaf pan. I KNOW I used to have a blue pyrex bread pan. It matched the blue pyrex baking dishes I have in 2 different sizes. But last night it was nowhere to be found, and the only thing Jose could find was a small aluminum loaf pan that was not nearly big enough for all that meat. Let's just say we will be eating meatloaf for the next couple days as leftovers. See, something I have quickly realized is that Pioneer Woman's recipes make a TON of food. Enough to feed her family of 6 plus a few guests, I suppose. I really need to start cutting them in half.

So we used one of the baking dishes and had "meatloaf brownies." That picture shows the situation after I'd covered half the meatloaf brownies in sauce. Don't worry, I finished covering it with sauce before I baked them.

Meatloaf brownies. Try it.