I wish I could take a picture of where I am working right
now. I am in a large windowless room with
about 24 other people at workstations arrayed in rows and along one side. The workstations have two or three monitors
each. The rows face one wall of monitors that are displaying for all what a few
of the workstations have up on one display.
The displays are of live spacecraft telemetry, schedules, graphics of
spacecraft orbit and ground system status.
The workstations are staffed with people whose jobs are to assess the
performance of this new spacecraft. A
few days ago, it rode on top of a rocket from a standing start to thousands of
miles per hour into orbit around the earth. The first few days and weeks after
such a ride is when if anything is going to break, it will. The team in place tonight is assessing the
performance of the spacecraft in all its subsystems. Are the solar arrays
providing power when they are on the sun, are the batteries taking the charge
they need to power the spacecraft when there is no array power? Are temperatures
staying warm enough to keep the propellant from freezing? Is the attitude control
system keeping the vehicle oriented properly? Is that nagging temperature alarm
serious or just cold fuel sloshing past a temperature probe? Is the orbit from
the last delta-vee what we expected? Is there some brewing problem that isn’t
obvious?
The small patches of boring brown walls visible are offset
by the colors on the screens, maps, and diagrams. The room is a sea of colors on the screens
and of the people. The room is mostly
quiet, some conversations here and there, some laughter, some groans from the
hours of being in one place for too long, for the hour which is 1 am. Every now
and then activity picks up as planned events fire up as the controller’s voice
in Colorado comes over the speakers, announcing the next procedure, calling
involved console operators to ensure they are ready to follow and respond as
required. Most of these events are low
key data collects, memory dumps from on-board processors, small
reconfigurations needed for the current conditions. Some of these events are serious for the continued
success of the mission. None of that
tonight. But if something decides to
break tonight, threatening the future of this spacecraft, there is a team ready
to guide it back to health.
My screens have plots of battery charge currents, reaction
wheel speeds, propellant line temperatures, command counts incrementing, and documents
of schedules, logs, briefing charts for management on that troublesome
temperature. The background on my
windows desktop is a picture of the instrument panel of my plane while flying
over the coast. It shows navigation radios, airspeed and altitude, attitude and
engine parameters. I can only peek small
parts of it in the window gaps, but I know it is there. There is a contrast between flying my plane
and flying this spacecraft. In my plane,
I am by myself with my life literally in my hands. Here I am on a team of
people here and in Colorado who are, around the clock, striving to get this
spacecraft turned on, tuned up, and placed into its final orbit and operational.
The plane is always, gently, trying to dive into the ground for the few hours I
am flying it. This spacecraft is going to be in operation for decades if we can
help it.
