Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be an Astronaut, flying high above the earth? Well, in my estimation, that would be pretty darn cool. However, the criteria for being an astronaut are many and restrictive, and they start with the physical. Since some of us aren't put together quite well enough for NASA's standards, or are otherwise disinclined or disqualified, we do the next best thing to being an Astronaut: training Astronauts. And Flight Controllers (the folks who answer when Astronauts call out for "Houston"). And anyone else that needs to know anything about a manned space vehicle and its operations.
Welcome to the world of Space Flight Training. My name is Amy Lin, and I'll be your instructor for today's briefing. I worked in Space Flight Training at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, USA, between August, 1996 and November 2000. More specifically, I worked as an International Space Station Environmental Control and Life Support Systems (ECLSS, say "ee-kliss") instructor. Whew! That's a mouthful. And that's the first thing you learn when working at NASA. Acronyms. Lots and lots and lots of acronyms. We use them because they make our meetings a lot shorter and keep us from tripping over our tongues. J However, all of the acronyms can be very confusing to a newbie. Consequently, I'll try to keep them to a minimum on this page.
Before we start, let me just get a small disclaimer out of the way: This site is NOT endorsed by NASA, United Space Alliance, or Barrios Technology. The statements reflected herein are mine alone, and do not represent the opinions of NASA, United Space Alliance, Barrios Technology, or any of my coworkers. However, most of the images appearing on this page are attributed to the official websites of NASA, United Space Alliance, and Barrios Technology. If you have a complaint regarding any of this page's content, please email me.
With that out of the way, let's start today's lesson with a quick background of the program. Space Flight Training was formerly known as Manned Space Training. (They changed the name to make it more politically correct a few years back.) To my knowledge, Space Flight Training has been around since the beginning of NASA's manned (and it was all men back then) space flight program in the 1950s. It seems that every group formed at NASA has some sort of patch identifying it. The Training Division's patch is the background of this page. And these patches aren't just pretty pictures - they tell a story and every element has a meaning. This is what the Space Flight Training logo means:
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Description of Elements
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That's a lot to live up to! But we do the best we can.
With all of the different and very complex vehicles in the human space flight program, Astronauts and Flight Controllers have to learn a lot to do their jobs well. The Training Division essentially runs the school where they learn. There are two main sections in the Training Division now. The first is Space Shuttle Training, which has been around since the mid 1970s, or about as long as the Space Shuttle program has been around, and the second is Space Station Training, which has been around since the late 1980s, when the Space Station Freedom program was first started. We'll talk more about the Station program a little later.If you want to learn a little more right now, check out this animated movie that was created by the folks at Johnson Space Center.
Both training programs have several types of training platforms. The first thing required in any school is a curriculum. As instructors, we decide what subjects should be taught, in what order, and on what platform. Every school also has textbooks, and Space Flight Training is no exception. As instructors, we learn all about the systems on our vehicle and write it down in training manuals that the students (Astronauts and Flight Controllers) need to read as part of their education. An example of a training manual that I helped to write (Section 6) is the Space Station Familiarization Manual on NASA's Space Flight website (you'll need the Adobe Acrobat Reader to download that, and beware, because it's 6 MB of Space Station goodness). NASA is also moving into the future by developing several Computer Based Training lessons that any student can take from the computer on their desk. Most schools use lectures and other classroom lessons to supplement the material in training manuals, and Space Flight Training is no exception. A lot of higher education classes also have laboratory classes, where the students try things in a more hands-on environment. Space Flight Training has its own version of labs. In Space Shuttle Training, students may take a lesson in the Single System Trainer, which is a mockup of the Space Shuttle Flight Deck (where the Commander and Pilot sit). One or two students sit in this "cockpit" and learn how to read displays, enter computer commands, and flip switches as they learn about the procedures they should follow to perform an action or respond to a malfunction. Similarly, in the Space Station program, students sit in Part Task Trainers and work on laptop computers just like those they will use on board the real Station. Flight Controllers also have trainers that are set up just like their consoles in the Mission Control Center. Both programs also have high-fidelity mockup training facilities. In these mockups, students can learn how to perform physical tasks and move around in an environment very much like their on-orbit environment. The capstone of both training programs, however, are the multi-system simulators. The Space Shuttle program has several different instructor stations and crew stations to serve various purposes. One of them is a full Shuttle cockpit mockup mounted on hydraulics which provide realistic motion (like all of those ride films, but so much better!). The Space Station program, however, only has one primary instructor station and crew station. The two multi-system simulators can also talk to each other and to simulators in other countries like Russia, Germany, and Japan, to run multi-segment simulations.
As you can see, that's a LOT of training capability. In addition to creating the manuals and lessons and performing the training, instructors have a number of other jobs. We must work with people from other countries to develop international training standards, work with contractor companies who build and program our simulators, help Flight Controllers develop procedures and displays which will be used both for training and for actual flight operations, draft schematics and create other reference materials that students can use when performing their jobs on-orbit or in Mission Control, and track any number of program issues that may impact training on a day-to-day basis. This is not a job for the faint of heart. There are a lot of long hours and a lot of strange hours, particularly when we're running multi-system simulations, or sims, during which we listen to 5 to 15 conversations at once on our headsets while putting various malfunctions into the simulator. If you're a Flight Controller or Astronaut, Murphy's Law is the rule of every sim. If anything can go wrong, it probably will. As an instructor in the multi-system simulation environment, I liked to think of myself as a professional gremlin. It was my sole purpose to break things and watch how the students reacted.
In recent years, NASA has started to contract out a number of its tasks to private companies in an effort to save money, among other things. Consequently, I was not a civil servant of the United States. Instead, I worked for a company called United Space Alliance, or USA. USA was formed in 1996 as a joint venture of Rockwell International and Lockheed Martin, and in 1997(?), Rockwell sold its half of the company to Boeing. USA's entire function is to provide space flight operations services to NASA. USA provides Shuttle servicing and Solid Rocket Booster and External Tank transportation at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and Shuttle flight software design, Shuttle simulator development, Space Flight Training, Flight Control, and other services at Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. USA employees work side-by-side with NASA-employed civil servants, Barrios Technology contractors, and other contractors to provide all of the various needs of NASA's Space Flight Training Division. The Space Shuttle Training program has been handed over to USA almost in its entirety, and is overseen by high-level NASA managers. The Space Station Training program is still very much a shared responsibility, however, and I worked under both a USA manager and a NASA manager, which occasionally made prioritizing tasks a bit challenging. J
As I mentioned before, Space Flight Training is not for the faint-of-heart. It's a lot of hard work, but the job is its own reward. If you're looking for a career, you might be wondering how you can be a Space Flight Instructor. In my personal case, I've always been interested in flight. When I was 6, I wanted to be a trapeze artist. When I got a little older, I thought about being a test pilot or commercial pilot. After realizing that my eyesight was far too poor for either of those professions, I became more interested in the Space Program. My mother was able to send me to Space Academy Level 1 (Space Camp for junior high kids) in 1987. That was one of the best weeks of my life, and after that week, I had determined that I HAD to do something with the space program when I grew up. I knew that my best bet to get into a job like that was to take lots of math and science classes, and probably to become an engineer. The next year in school, I read a book for a class project. That book was called Before Lift-off: The Making of a Space Shuttle Crew, by Henry S. F. Cooper. The author had been allowed to follow a Space Shuttle crew from their naming through a whole year of training before their flight. That book convinced me that Space Flight Training was The Job that I wanted.
As I went through high school and learned more about the engineering fields, I decided that Mechanical Engineering was the specific field that I wanted to study, because I like to understand physical systems and how they work and how to make them better and design new ones. After much research during my junior and senior years of high school, I chose to attend Iowa State University to study mechanical engineering, with a German minor to increase my marketability skills (and because I like languages). While at school, I met another mechanical engineering student who also wanted to work in Space Flight Training. Kimberlee and I kept in touch throughout school, and when she graduated, she got a job with Rockwell International doing...you guessed it...Space Flight Training. I thought that if she could get a job in Space Flight Training, I surely could too, so when it came close to graduation time, I sent in my application. A few weeks and three telephone interviews later, I had the job! Kimberlee actually started a small mafia of Iowa State students in Space Flight Training: 5 of us in Training, a couple more in Flight Control, and a number at other contractors in the immediate vicinity. And after working for a year or so, a coworker and I realized that we had both been at Space Academy the very same week in 1987!
So the moral of this story is: if you want to work in Space Flight Training or some other aspect of the space program, you can. You need simply work toward your dreams. Math and science are great backgrounds, but not just for engineering! We also have a number of professional educators, former military personnel, and pilots among our ranks. Teamwork and hard work are two important skills, and languages and other international exposures are also very helpful.
Now I get to talk about the really cool stuff, the meat of my job. I worked in the International Space Station program. It's an international program because the US builds several modules, Russia builds several modules, Japan builds a couple of modules, Canada contributes a robotic arm, and Europe builds a few modules. They tell me that Brazil is involved too, but I've yet to find out what it is that they provide. Because of the international nature of the program, we get to go neat places and meet lots of great people. My coworker, Ginger, spent much of her time in Russia, following the first Space Station crew (Expedition 1) through their training and providing assistance with whatever they needed both at home and abroad. In January of 1999, she got to meet actor Tom Hanks (Apollo 13, From the Earth to the Moon, and many many others) and give him tours of some of the Russian training facilities in Star City, Russia. She says he's just as nice in person as he seems in interviews. I worked with the Japanese Space Agency (NASDA) and got to go to Germany to start working with the European Space Agency (ESA).
As part of my job, I was assigned to train the Shuttle crew (and Station crew) for International Space Station Flight 5A, which is known in the Space Shuttle world as flight STS-98. I got to watch the launch on February 7, 2001, which was the 102nd Space Shuttle mission ever, and the 7th Space Station Flight (NASA assigns numbers and things subsequently move around, getting everything all out of order...). The crew installed the US Laboratory module, which has been given the slightly overblown moniker "Destiny", onto the fledgling Station. The pictures below show how the Station looked after Flight 5A. The shaded portions of the first image indicate the pieces added during Flight 5A.
In early November 1998, I had the opportunity to travel to Huntsville, Alabama, and the Marshall Space Flight Center, where the Lab underwent much of its construction (it was moved to Kennedy Space Center in Florida for final processing). Our primary job that week was to take three of the first four Space Station crews through the Lab and point out and explain all of the hardware that they might need to use. As a perk, we were allowed to take a great number of digital photos of hardware. This is always very nice, because obtaining any Station information, much less photographs, is a teeth-pulling operation most days. My favorite photo of the bunch, however, was a photo taken of me and two of my coworkers, Scott and Rob, sitting in the forward end of the Lab, all neatly dressed in our bunny suits and properly grounded.
When completed sometime in 2005 or beyond, the International Space Station will look like the image which started this section. For more information on the International Space Station, please visit the NASA Space Flight Station website.
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