Today has been exciting.  It’s been giving people horrible headaches, but it’s exciting.  The shuttle’s up on station, and a situation that should never happened is happening.  It’s really three or four distinct situations that shouldn’t happen, and they’re all happening together. 

At first, I tried to write them all out, but it’s very complicated.  Russian computers down, russian guidance down, shuttle prop burning up fast, bad attitude so bad power config, high roll rate, can’t transition back to US control, can’t rotate the solar arrays, and it’s night in russia, so their prime crew is at home.

Add to this that we just had a false fire in the russian segment, and things get extremely exciting.

Things went crazy.  Things are still crazy. 

The fire was temporary, but the power/control situation is as simple.  They have called up the entire SSTF to support the flight.  The entire ADCO/MCG team are being creative and writing procedures on the fly to try to fix the problem. 

No one’s life is at risk right now, but it’s combination of the scenes in Apollo 13 where Gary Sinise (Lt. Dan) is on his back testing things in a capsule trainer, and when all the engineers get together to make a square peg fit in a round hole.  Except now we’re talking about the entire simulation facility and all the servers, plus the entire Sim team, plus all the momentum people.  Probably 30-40 people and a ton of resources. 

Still… it’s very cool. 

Another interesting thing is the effect the words “fire on station” has on the building here. Normally, there’s so much chatter around here you can’t get any work done in the afternoon… Tom yelled out “Fire on station,” and this place hit silence as people scrambled to throw on headphones and punch up the flight loops. It was disturbingly quiet over here at that point…

overall, an interesting day.