A Picture

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.