Rocket City U.S.A.

I flew from Houston to Huntsville, Alabama on Tuesday night to spend the rest of the week meeting with some of my counterparts at the Payload Operations Integration Center (POIC), which is located at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. The POIC is basically another mission control, but they control the experiments and science onboard the space station instead of the station itself.

This is the first time I’ve been to Huntsville, and only the second time I’ve spent more than a few hours — i.e. more than the time it takes to drive from the Georgia border to the Mississippi border while en route to Houston — in Alabama at all. It’s nice! It reminds me a lot of North Carolina, with plenty of trees and rolling hills. It’s obviously a much smaller town than Houston, and feels a lot quieter and slower and calmer. I like it.

Many of the people who work at Marshall grew up in the Huntsville area. That also feels different from JSC, where it’s highly unusual to come across a native Houstonian. (Native Texans are more common, but I still feel like most of the people I know are from elsewhere.)

This week we’re talking about how we (ISS Safety in Houston) interact with them (Payload Safety in Huntsville), the processes each team uses, and where we can make improvements and gain efficiencies. The ISS is still in a transition period, moving from 10+ years of being built to the next 10+ years of being an orbiting national laboratory. Payloads are the whole reason NASA built the space station in the first place — so we can do science and learn more about our world!