My sim last night was

My sim last night was crazy. The first two runs were easy for me, but hard for the FDO (that’s my “boss” in the control center). The second two runs were crazy for me.
I realized that if you’ve been reading my blog for a while and hear me talk about work, you’ve been hearing me talk about “sims” for four years. What I may not have made clear is that there are two different kinds of sims.
First, there are the trajectory sims that I run on my computer to do my analysis of various things. These are usually Fortran simulations. You give ’em your initial conditions, they model your vehicle flying from up in the sky down to somewhere on the ground, or at least somewhere above the ground far enough to pop out your parachute. Sometimes that ground is on the Earth, sometimes it’s on Mars. These are also the kind of sims I run when I’m making the infamous debris footprints.
I’ve been running that kind of sim for the entire time I’ve worked here. This is also the kind of sim that has the ability to drive me absolutely crazy because they never work right the first time. UGH.
But recently I have begun to train for a backroom position in the control center. I work an ascent position for the shuttle, meaning my job lasts a short but heart-stopping 10-minute period (plus or minus a minute or two depending on what’s going on) and then I’m done. This training involves not running sims, but working sims. In this case, the sim is of the shuttle during launch, and there’s a group of people who throw malfunctions into the sim, and we as flight controllers deal with them. I’m not putting in any inputs, and I’m not doing analysis. We’re pretending that the shuttle is actually launching, and dealing with the problems that crop up; we’re simulating a launch. A normal ascent sim is 4 hours long. Since ascent is so short, this means that we usually have time to simulate 4 launches, which is what I mean when I refer to different runs.
I’ve been working that kind of sim for almost two months now. They make my brain feel like mush at the end, but they are very, very fun.