This week has flown past, although I’m not actually sure where all the time went. I’ve been busy at work going through the pre-flight review process for the next Progress and Soyuz launches, and trying to get up to speed on one of the commercial cargo vehicles so that I can support a large flight operations review at the end of September. Two months is not a lot of time to get ready for that when I know almost nothing about their vehicle right now, so I’ll be busy.
Now that my move to ISS Safety is official, I’ve finally begun the process of packing up my old desk. I never moved most of my stuff when I started this job last fall because it was just a rotation, so for months I’ve been sitting at one desk in one building while most of my stuff remained at my old desk. Yesterday I finally began the process of both packing up and weeding through years of papers and documents. There’s quite a bit of shuttle stuff that I’ve been carrying with me for years that I no longer need, both because I’m moving but also because the shuttle program has ended. (My timecard still shows the shuttle mission operations charge code that I used for years as an option for this week. But next week it just says “NA.” Sad.)
(Please ignore my unsightly cuticles.)
I found a lot of cool things though, little trinkets and certificates that I’ve picked up over the years. A recent addition is the pin above, which I got because I served as an “astro-not” many times over the past two years. The astronaut office stopped supporting generic orbit simulations a couple years before the shuttle program actually ended, so several instructors and flight controllers like me got to work sims in the cockpit as if we were crewmembers ourselves. It was a fun thing to do, and although everyone joked about it (hence astro-NOT), I heard that by using flight controllers and instructors as crew, sims were able to continue long enough that an additional 82 people were certified as shuttle flight controllers. That’s a pretty impressive figure.
