Notes made during the 7A EVA3 sim...

Yesterday's phone conversation has left me with that awful poleaxed feeling that's impossible to shake on command, despite the fact that - on an intellectual level - I know there is no reason (nor any benefit) to feel that way.

Feeling bad about something that happened so long ago (or more exactly, something that didn't happen as a result of other things that did) doesn't accomplish anything. I should not feel bad.

So then why in the name of all that's holy do I?

If you were to demonstrate to me a failure on my part to cash in a winning multi-million dollar lottery ticket back in my youth, I think...I know...I would not feel as bad.

I think it is because I am lamenting the "loss" of something that never really existed, and so I am free to embellish the magnitude of the loss, as well as its general description, until it shines much brighter than my own life, such as it has become.

Another possibility: I'm not terribly excited to hear about my faults, such as they are, or were, or might be. I've got 'em, and I've got my hands full trying to deal with them. And just as I have to make allowances for the foibles of those around me; those around me must make allowances for mine, while they are "in work."

Put paid to it, man. The Moving Finger has done writ.

Cheers...

P.S. By the time I get home after the sim, I feel I have put paid to it. I don't know how or why...maybe it was just the fact that I got it out of my system and onto phosphor ...but the negative feeling is gone.

Sim-mering...

I was supposed to spend a relatively quiet day doing the Execute Package today. Instead, I got paged shortly after 7 am to come fill in for someone who called in sick. The job involved interpreting for the RIO during a sim that featured an EVA from what will be the new ISS airlock, once it is installed during flight 7A, currently scheduled for the middle of June.

I got to the MCC a little after 8, and left just over 12 hours later. This had to be about the most heart-pounding sim I've worked, as things got pretty hairy, and then got worse from there.

The fact that the EVA would occur from the station airlock gave a new twist to the sim. For as long as the Shuttle has been flying, EVAs have been conducted from the Shuttle airlock, and consequently, the EVA team has worked out of the "white" flight control room (which controls the Shuttle while it is flying). This sim was the first time, apparently, that the station control team had EVA specialists on console with them, and the challenges were also slightly different.

In the course of a typical sim, you'll see a number of events occur (malfunctions, or "mals" for short) that are designed to distract the flight team from its primary purpose. Of course, the distractions must be (and are) dealt with in an expeditious and safe manner, all the while keeping the end goal in sight.

Today, for example, the goal of today's simulated EVA was to mount a set of oxygen and nitrogen tanks on the exterior of the airlock with the help of the station's new robotic arm. Early on during the sim, some of the Shuttle's vernier thrusters failed due to I forget what. This limited the Shuttle's ability to maintain station attitude, should the gyros on the U.S. orbital segment fail. Those gyros provide an efficient way of keeping the station pointed in a particular direction, and are the preferred resource for doing so.

Well, the folks directing the simulation threw in a malfunction that caused those gyros to fail. This forced the control team to have the Shuttle assume attitude control. No big deal, but since the vernier jets were disabled, this could only be done in a way that, it turns out, limits the way you can use the station robot arm.

Which failed later anyway. It turns out that the arm has two redundant "strings" of avionics that are computer controlled, and different components had failed on each string. The control team came up with a plan for fixing the arm and getting on with the work. There was even time to come up with a revised plan that saved a bunch of time.

Unfortunately, the EVA crewmen never got a chance to fix the problem, because one of them started to develop symptoms of decompression sickness (the bends), probably the result of overly rapid decompression back at the start of the EVA. Do we see a pattern emerging, here?

It was beginning to look like the only thing that wasn't going to happen during the sim was to have a Klingon Bird of Prey uncloak off the Shuttle's port beam.

Anyway, shortly after the EVA crew members regained the interior of the airlock, the mated "stack" (consisting of the station and the Shuttle docked together) sprang a leak. A big leak.

At this point, my recollection gets a little fuzzy as by this time I am interpreting pretty much continuously. Message and audio traffic is flying around the room like a swarm of gnats, everyone is trying to talk at once, and in the middle of this brouhaha, I pause to reflect that I'm wound up like a spring, participating in something that feels real, with real lives and a real station and a real Shuttle at stake.

The end result of this kind of training, and the lessons learned from it, will be a performance that will look smooth and effortless. You know why? It will be because the sim organizers will have thrown everything at the flight control team but the kitchen sink until the whole lashup operates as one well-oiled mechanism.

There are days I just love this job.

Tomorrow, I get to sleep in a bit, as I'll be doing the air-to-ground simultaneous interpretation for the station. It's the day that the visiting crew of Musabaev, Bukharin, and Tito will button themselves up in Soyuz 205, undock it, and bring it home. I am told it is going to be a long day for station commander Yuri Usachev, too, which means it'll be a long day for me. Right now, my shift is slated to end at midnight.

Lee and I tried out the Ruby Chinese Restaurant here in Pearland tonight. I can't give the place a rave review (does anybody in Houston know how to make a decent hot-and-sour soup?), but the main course was edible and half of it is in a take-out container in the fridge. We had a good conversation about Life, the Universe, and Everything.

But now it's late, and time for rest. Good night.

Cheers...