Vexing Values and VIPs

I’m hesitant to admit where this picture was taken.

(Ok, it was the drive-thru at Starbucks. I spent far too much time there.)

I’ve spent the past few days busily preparing for the STS-132 launch scheduled for tomorrow afternoon.  This is the 7th launch that I am supporting, and it’s a little hard to believe that I’ve racked up that many launch shifts in only 3 years.  I must be honest and admit that while the first 2-3 were very exciting, each subsequent mission has been a little less thrilling.

Before you think I’m actually complaining about working a freaking SPACE SHUTTLE LAUNCH, let me explain!

I assure you that I thoroughly enjoy working launches!  The part that’s lost its thrill is not the launch day itself, but the 3 days of intense preparation that I am responsible for prior to launch.  I have to take in all of the launch week data and update a list of more than 5000 parameters in our trajectory server database, the huge piece of software that runs all of the Flight Dynamics team’s ground-based trajectory predictors and processors.  It’s a lot of manual work — typing numbers here and numbers there, checking all the numbers that are generated by a handful of automated scripts, and generally making sure that everything is in order.  It’s important and essential work, but it can also get pretty tedious.

This morning we had our final set of checks before tomorrow’s launch day shift, and all went well.  As I left the Mission Control Center to head to a meeting in another building, an 8-10 car motorcade passed us.  In one of them was the Deputy Prime Minister of Russia, who is at JSC today along with the head of the Russian space agency, Roskosmos.  We got an email a few days ago alerting us that they would visiting, that they might have armed guards, and that “if they tell you not to go down a hallway…well, DON’T go down that hallway.”  Out of pure curiosity, I looked online to find out the name of the Deputy Prime Minister, since I assumed he is kind of like the Biden to Putin’s Obama.  Right?  It’s hard to tell, since Wikipedia lists no fewer than EIGHT men who currently hold the title of “Deputy Prime Minister.”  Hmm.

You never really know who might show up at JSC on any given day.  Last Friday I was in the control center working on a data load for this September’s STS-133 mission and all of a sudden, Larry the Cable Guy was on TV on the big board in the front of the room.  He was down the hall in the Space Station control room talking to the ISS astronauts, so I pulled up that voice loop and listened in.  Yes, he sounded just like ‘Mater from Cars.  And yes, he was dressed in a cutoff shirt, shorts, and a baseball hat — definitely the most casually dressed person I have ever seen in Mission Control.  WHY was Larry the Cable Guy visiting JSC?  Apparently he’s doing something for the History Channel.  Really.

I hope you will all be watching the shuttle launch tomorrow at 1:20 pm Central.  There are only 3 left!