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Work takes its toll...
Aug. 25th, 2000 11:57 pmA scant three-quarters of an hour after yesterday's post, I found myself back in the SSTF, for the final nine hours of the joint simulation with Moscow. The sim played out pretty uneventfully, I suppose, with a nominal number of mistakes.
And it's surprising what you might think of as a mistake. When a leak was identified while the crew was in the simulated FGB (a mockup with all the same equipment, panels, etc. of the real FGB that's on-orbit right now), they performed the requisite "egress" operation (fancy term for "exit"), but forgot to turn off some lights. Heck, I do this kind of thing all the time, but on the space station, where opening a hatch is, as yet, a non-routine operation that takes a non-trivial amount of time (this isn't Star Trek with the fast-opening, squeaky doors), it means that the precious electrical power being captured by the solar panels is being wasted. Therefore, leaving the lights on was a no-no. The good news is: between realizing it happened and figuring out why and how to prevent it in the future, it won't happen again, not when it counts.
One thing I have observed watching astronauts and cosmonauts train for space travel: As a rule of thumb, everything you know about everything must be questioned and reevaluated, even something as simple as putting a tool down in the course of a minor repair. I recall some observations made by David Wolf, one of the astronauts who spent time on the Mir space station, to the effect that if you put a tool - say a screwdriver - down without velcroing it in place, it will have a tendency to move away from where you placed it. When you again direct your attention to where the screwdriver was, you not only won't see it because it's moved away from where you left it, but you won't see where it went, because your brain - trained as it has been for several decades to expect things to stand still, or at least pay serious lip service to the law of gravity - can't find it; often not until the drifting screwdriver bumps into your face. There's undoubtedly a Ph.D. thesis in cognitive science to be written on the basis of this phenomenon.
At any rate, I got back home around 10 pm, after an entirely too-long debrief, and fell to sleep around 11. I got up at a fairly normal time, but by the time I got to work, I had become very tired, I had no idea what day it was, or what time of day it was. It didn't feel like morning; heck, it didn't feel like anything. I didn't even want any coffee, which, once I forced myself to realize it was morning, I took as a danger sign. After spending an hour or so putting out fires and gathering back some physical strength, I retuned home, lay down, and had no problem sleeping another few hours in the middle of the day. Right now, I feel I'll have little trouble falling asleep for a normal night's rest, but we'll see.
Cheers...
And it's surprising what you might think of as a mistake. When a leak was identified while the crew was in the simulated FGB (a mockup with all the same equipment, panels, etc. of the real FGB that's on-orbit right now), they performed the requisite "egress" operation (fancy term for "exit"), but forgot to turn off some lights. Heck, I do this kind of thing all the time, but on the space station, where opening a hatch is, as yet, a non-routine operation that takes a non-trivial amount of time (this isn't Star Trek with the fast-opening, squeaky doors), it means that the precious electrical power being captured by the solar panels is being wasted. Therefore, leaving the lights on was a no-no. The good news is: between realizing it happened and figuring out why and how to prevent it in the future, it won't happen again, not when it counts.
One thing I have observed watching astronauts and cosmonauts train for space travel: As a rule of thumb, everything you know about everything must be questioned and reevaluated, even something as simple as putting a tool down in the course of a minor repair. I recall some observations made by David Wolf, one of the astronauts who spent time on the Mir space station, to the effect that if you put a tool - say a screwdriver - down without velcroing it in place, it will have a tendency to move away from where you placed it. When you again direct your attention to where the screwdriver was, you not only won't see it because it's moved away from where you left it, but you won't see where it went, because your brain - trained as it has been for several decades to expect things to stand still, or at least pay serious lip service to the law of gravity - can't find it; often not until the drifting screwdriver bumps into your face. There's undoubtedly a Ph.D. thesis in cognitive science to be written on the basis of this phenomenon.
At any rate, I got back home around 10 pm, after an entirely too-long debrief, and fell to sleep around 11. I got up at a fairly normal time, but by the time I got to work, I had become very tired, I had no idea what day it was, or what time of day it was. It didn't feel like morning; heck, it didn't feel like anything. I didn't even want any coffee, which, once I forced myself to realize it was morning, I took as a danger sign. After spending an hour or so putting out fires and gathering back some physical strength, I retuned home, lay down, and had no problem sleeping another few hours in the middle of the day. Right now, I feel I'll have little trouble falling asleep for a normal night's rest, but we'll see.
Cheers...
