Couple minutes after midnight. Clear sky of stars above, three-quarter moon just over the horizon, launch tower lights dancing across the river.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m the lone person on the causeway, standing on the narrow stretch of rock and road crossing the Banana River between the Kennedy Space Center and the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. It\u2019s really just me here. Not another soul in sight. Not even headlights. White folding chairs are lined up in neat little rows in the grass and tents have been erected over empty tables awaiting crowds who will amass here in two days to view a display of fire and thunder and grandeur.<\/p>\n
The Falcon 9<\/em> rocket, awaiting its maiden voyage and white like an alabaster statue, stares me down from afar.<\/span><\/p>\n I was on my way to work but I had to stop. They\u2019ve got this rocket lit up with these massive spotlights for all the world to see. It\u2019s impressive. Farther up the coast, the Space Shuttle Discovery<\/em> sits on Launch Pad 39A, lit up by no spotlights. I don\u2019t think the RSS has rolled back yet. That must be why there are no lights turned toward Discovery<\/em>.<\/p>\n Right?<\/p>\n I try to take a picture of the white rocket with my phone, but it doesn\u2019t come out. I get back in my car. Time for work.<\/p>\n I work in the Shuttle Crew Escape team. We\u2019re responsible for Shuttle astronaut survival equipment and various other hardware, headlined mainly by the orange pressure (\u201cpumpkin\u201d) suits you\u2019ve probably seen once or twice before adorned on spacefarers as they make their way over to and strap into the Space Shuttle orbiter. They\u2019re called Advanced Crew Escape Suits, or ACES, for short.<\/p>\n My team and I flew over from Houston on Wednesday. We have 5 days of prep work to get ready for this Shuttle launch on Monday morning. We test personal cooling systems to make sure they work. We suit up the crew to make sure their suits fit right and provide survivable pressure in the event of a cabin depressurization. We count all the pencils, make sure batteries are charged, clean the boots, attach mission patches, make little bags for light sticks that go in pouches on the astronauts\u2019 arm sleeves to help emergency rescue crews find them in the dark in case all hell breaks lose. We are some of the last people astronauts see before breaking the bounds of Earth\u2019s gravity well to spin around the planet.<\/p>\n And if all hell does break lose, if that day ever comes, we\u2019ll be some of the people responsible for the last line of defense in keeping those astronauts alive.<\/p>\n In this world, emergencies aren\u2019t just unfortunate inevitabilities\u2014they are meticulously planned for and diligently expected. Because we work in a business where strapping seven people astride six million pounds of explosives is not only sane but, dare I say, routine<\/em>. And I mean that in the very rudimentary aspect of the word. They say there\u2019s nothing routine about spaceflight. Perhaps a better word is accepted<\/em>. We accept a certain amount of risk during each and every launch and we accept that nothing expected ever happens as expected. In that vein, Crew Survival<\/em> is our life.<\/p>\n The first four Shuttle crews launched with ejection seats on the flight deck. But ejection seats proved infeasible beyond these flights as crews increased in size and the actual window of survivable situations wasn\u2019t all that large with ejection seats in the first place. Following the Challenger<\/em> accident, the roots of my job were planted, as NASA began flying astronauts with Launch and Entry Suits (LES) in 1989, replaced by the ACES in 1995, which provides a full pressure, self-contained environment around the crewmember that allows for him or her to bailout of the orbiter during controlled, glided descent in the event the vehicle doesn\u2019t have enough energy to make it to a runway.<\/p>\n Our subsystem doesn\u2019t protect the crew in all scenarios, but it\u2019s the best that could be done at the time given what was available, constraints to the already-built Shuttle design, and the just plain old dangerous environment encountered in breaking through our Earth\u2019s atmosphere.<\/p>\n The team stretches far beyond technical hardware oversight. We\u2019re concerned with all aspects of crew survival, from emergency egress from the launch pad to in-the-air emergency breathing and bailout. Our efforts are a composite response to each of NASA\u2019s three fatal accidents: Apollo 1<\/em>, Challenger<\/em>, and Columbia<\/em>. In a perfect world, our team\u2019s work is never needed. In a perfect world, Space Shuttles launch and land safely every time. But we can\u2019t plan for that. We plan for the bad days. We plan for the unexpected.<\/p>\n I\u2019m on my way to work after midnight because Monday\u2019s launch happens to be at 6:21am, meaning our work starts just before midnight Easter Sunday. Now, we\u2019re sleep shifting to prepare for it. Plus if the crew needs to change something\u2014say they want to swap out a watch or grab an extra pen or they\u2019ve got a problem with their glove\u2014we\u2019re the ones to make it happen. We\u2019re up when the crew\u2019s up. We sleep when they sleep.<\/p>\n I\u2019m heading to the suit room at KSC, which is just down the hall from the astronauts\u2019 personal living quarters. It\u2019s the same room that Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Mike Collins got suited up in before entering the history books over 40 years ago. It\u2019s the same room John Young and Bob Crippen left to fly a beautiful yet awkward, clunky-looking brick with wings strapped to the side of a rocket for the first time. It\u2019s the same room the STS-133 crewmembers will leave from when they become the final crew to fly that same clunky-looking brick nearly 30 years later.<\/p>\n As I drove on down the causeway towards the suit room, still the lone car for miles, it occurred to me that the causeway was a metaphor (this occurrence may or may not have been brought about by a semi-loopy-sleep-shifted-mind-state): NASA\u2019s on a causeway too. We\u2019re in the in-between space where we\u2019re still connected to the mainland, but also well on our way out to an island on the other side.<\/p>\n I imagine many others in the business have felt a similar sensation, staring out at the waters of change like they\u2019re alone at midnight on a causeway, too. Stuck between two worlds, maybe. Stuck between changing paradigms. Wondering why spotlights are shining in one place and not the other. Feeling the insight and stillness of a star-filled sky while the lights keep flickering and the ground keeps spinning at full speed below.<\/p>\n On that causeway, I thought of the history of the suit room I was heading to, the collective legacy of a space agency still very much in its infancy, carrying a rich, proud heritage earned through fifty years of diligent attention to detail and passion to lift humanity beyond our known world, beyond our known selves, to that other side of the river.<\/p>\n Maybe the nature of our business means we\u2019ll always be on a causeway. Maybe being on the causeway is a necessary step\u2014one that we accept as the nature of our dangerous business where the expected never happens as expected, and planning for the unexpected serves as the creed by which we strive.<\/p>\n Maybe traveling down the causeway\u2014the journey between two places amidst a sea of uncertainty\u2014maybe that\u2019s what its all about in the first place.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Couple minutes after midnight. Clear sky of stars above, three-quarter moon just over the horizon, launch tower lights dancing across the river. I\u2019m the lone person on the causeway, standing on the narrow stretch of rock and road crossing the … Continue reading