Aviation Gallery Page Five
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Our Trip to NASA: Flying the Space Shuttle
When I was a kid, we lived in Clear Lake, TX. That's the real Mission Control town, as the Johnson Space Center is actually in Clear Lake - not Houston. But, y'know, it sounds better when Jim Lovell says "Houston, we have a problem."
Anyway, my Mom worked for years at NASA as a technical writer. That means she translated engineer speak into English for manuals. She wrote - among other things - the manuals for the computers on the first Shuttles. When I was a kid, she brought home everything, from the PAO office, that she could get her hands on for me. I had the 8x10, glossy NASA publicity shots all over my room and - when I was about 12, I think - she took me to the simulator building and I got to fly the actual astronaut training simulators. Last Thanksgiving, I got to do that again. But this time I was all growed up - mostly - and had a pilot's license...which, as it turned out, hurt more than it helped!
For Thanksgiving '06 Gaylene and I went to Houston to visit my family. My Cousin Amy is an aerospace engineer for NASA and runs the sims for the astronauts. She is involved in mission planning every step of the way; and she sets up and runs the mission profiles for each for the astronauts to fly. For years she has told me that - if I'd give her notice - we could go and fly them. And that's what we did this Thanksgiving.
We flew both cockpits (every Shuttle has two). Pictured above is the cockpit for flying the Shuttle like an airplane (more or less) and pictured below is the stand-up cockpit used to dock with the Space Station. Each of us flew three approaches, docked the Space Station a few times, and manipulated the GIANT cargo arm. One approach profile was a "straight-in," and one involved a giant U turn over Florida. Each started us at 64,000 feet - and we were on the ground in about three minutes!
The astronauts call the Shuttle "The flying brick" and I soon learned why. Kevin, the engineer who set up our approaches, said that he had an Eastern Air Lines captain in the seat a week before who crashed three times before landing successfully. That made me feel a little better because Gaylene flew the approaches better than I did, despite my experience.
The glide slope on this thing is STEEP. It looks all wrong to a pilot. And if you try to "hit the numbers" on the runway, you will land short until you learn to do it the Space Shuttle way because there is NO ground effect at all. I landed short more than once before I got it. Gaylene had no such trouble. All her attempts were successful. I was really impressed with her too because she flew well even when she had to do the U turn over Florida manually and when she had to keep all three dimensions of flight stable on her own - without the computer. Seems there's nothing she can't do.
Amy at work
The joystick in the picture above costs $100,000. The window to the up and left from the stick looks aft out into the payload area. To dock, you use this cockpit and the whole shuttle "flies straight up" (relative to itself) as it approaches docking. I don't have any pics of us flying the payload arm. Above us in a huge projection dome that makes you feel - in an IMAX sort of way - that you are in space. The lighting of the projection screens makes a picture nigh impossible.
Below is one of many simulators that the astronauts can use any time they want - without coordinating with people like Amy and Kevin. These are less realistic - as the ones we flew are the exact cockpits in the actual Shuttles - but the frequency of training makes up for any shortcoming in realism.
We actually had to get done with our adventure by 2pm because the astronauts were due in that day. The whole Space Center was buzzing with preparation for mission STS-116. It was cool a few weeks later to be at my sister's house in Mansfield, TX watching NASA TV on cable as STS-116 landed. They flew the same mission profile and approach to landing that Gaylene and I had. I really enjoyed seeing the cockpit view on TV as they came in to land. It all looked familiar to me.
Below right is a picture of the computer bank that is dedicated to running the simulator projection screens. Each tower runs only one projector.
Thanks Amy and Kevin for giving us a rare familiarity with one of man's greatest achievements, sharing your amazing jobs with us, and for giving us one of those "coolest-day-of-my-life" experiences. Click here for more Space Shuttle stuff.
MORE....
NASA links
NASA and The Space Shuttle on Wikipedia
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