Really tired, despite a nap...

The sim went well today, though I probably should have paid more attention to the list of participants, as space-to-ground was complicated by the fact of having Endeavour docked to the station and preparing to deliver another section of truss, which just made life that much more talkative for me.

During the sim, I got a call asking if I'd be willing to fill in for a couple of hours after the end to cover for an interpreter who went home sick, and I agreed.

After getting home, I took a 90-minute nap and Galina and I waited for Natalie to come down after work for dinner and The Good Shepherd, which Galina thinks is the cat's meow and quite a feather in DeNiro's cap, and though I don't believe this movie falls into my "favorites" category, I agree it was well-crafted..

I need to get up fairly early tomorrow to finish off the words due tomorrow at noon, which will just about give me enough time to get ready for and report to the MCC for Yet Another Sim.

Today, in the middle of all the action, I was struck on a gut level (as opposed to intellectually) that these sims represent - for all intents and purposes - actual coordinated responses to some kind of off-nominal situation on orbit requiring remarkably little suspension of disbelief, i.e., basically, people are doing what they'd be expected to be doing if the problems were real. In other words, in my role as interpreter, I have participated in responses to a number of on-orbit crises, so that life is not simply an endless stream of quiet, uninterrupted boredom.

In rereading the previous paragraph, I'm not sure I'm getting across what I want to say, so let me go about it in a different way.

One of the first games I bought for my IBM PC XT back in the day was something called GATO, a game where one played the commander of a US Navy sub in the Pacific during WW II. Naturally, your job was to sink enemy ships. In real life, it took some number of days to get from Pearl Harbor to the target area; in the game, it took seconds. In real life, attacks were relatively few and far between, separated in time and varying in terms of conditions; in the game, one could engage the enemy in short order under a broad range of conditions.

Of course, with all that, the game designers made allowances for "weekend warriors" who, for example, didn't care to receive intelligence messages via real Morse code or worry about carrying out repairs at sea. There was no claustrophobic submarine to deal with, no limits on the number of torpedoes carried, no question as to their operability, etc. (Keep in mind that, for a while, in the actual war, US torpedoes routinely failed to explode after hitting their targets.)

In the MCC however, we are in pretty much the same environment as when working an actual flight (the room is physically in a different location), although the interactions we experience - e.g., talking over loops, reviewing telemetry, etc. - are the same interactions. Sometimes, rarely, the computers cannot simulate some kind of situation, which then requires a so-called "green card," or stipulated condition, but for the most part, the control team experiences whatever the training team wants them to experience.

I obviously need my beauty sleep, as little of this makes sense, either, I think.

Cheers...