This page is intended to be a more detailed account of my activities
and responsibilities while working with United Space Alliance, for those
who want to know more and those interested in employing me.
I started with United Space Alliance in the Environmental Control and Life
Support Systems (ECLSS) training group at the end of August, 1996.
During my first 6-9 months on the job, I received a lot of
training.
On my arrival, I was assigned a mentor, Ginger Kerrick. (Ginger
is a truly amazing individual - cheerful and outgoing, she is extremely
intelligent and very hardworking, and NASA is her life. She would make an
excellent astronaut, and even made it pretty far through the selection
process before discovering that she has kidney stones, which are currently
a lifetime disqualification from US space flight.) Ginger put me to
work right away studying manuals and working on mini projects both to help
out and help determine where my skills lay and what tasks I should be
given to start with. Our group was given a lot of autonomy by our NASA
manager, Dennis Beckman. This worked well for us, as he deflected the
inevitable mountain-sized molehills so that we could do the work that
really needed to be done. USA manager Bill O'Keefe stepped in when he
needed to and made sure that the USA folks were being taken care of, but
mostly let Dennis let us run ourselves.
The first formal training was a two-week course introducing NASA and
the Shuttle and Station programs to new employees from across the
center.
Then there was a two-week course on how to be an instructor. In that
course we learned instructional development techniques, learning patterns,
test question development, and other important education skills. We then
applied those things to classes of our own and presented them to our
peers. I gave a short lecture about stellar evolution, taught the class
how to sew counted cross-stitch, and led a discussion about an assigned
topic that escapes me now. Repeatedly during this course I received
compliments on my "natural teaching ability" and detailed lesson plans
(which make the next instructor's job easier).
Finally, there was a 6 week course delving into the details of the
fledgling Station program, where we learned about everything from the
electrical generation and distribution systems to the communications
systems to the air conditioners keeping the air from getting hot, humid,
and stale.
Throughout this initial batch of training and learning about working in
the real world, my colleagues were busy assessing my skills and aptitudes
and introducing me to the various aspects of the job.
Ginger took me to meetings regarding the development of the Space
Station Training Facility, or SSTF, the integrated real-time simulator
where Mission Controllers and Astronauts are presented with flight-like
training scenarios in order to perfect their operations and
trouble-shooting skills. At that time, however, the models were still in
the early-to-mid development stage, so the primary tasks involved math
model reviews, development status assessment, and preliminary model
functionality testing (which I also sat through).
Brad Sharp took me to meetings regarding the preliminary development
of Part Task Trainers, or PTTs, where individual Astronauts and Mission
Controllers learn how to operate the Station systems in a relaxed
one-on-one environment.
I was assigned to take ownership of the Water Recovery and Management
subsystem from Susan Torney and I spent some time gathering information on
it and learning the nitty gritty details of it. I soon qualified to teach
a course on it, taught groups following mine through the long Station
training.
Brad also introduced me to X-Windows instructor display development
for the SSTF using a program called SAMMI.
I was also lucky to have two other fledgling instructors, Katie
Martinez and Chris Schmitt, to work with.
In mid-to-late 1997, Ginger was officially assigned to follow the first
and third Station crews through their training (much of which was in
Russia). This effectively took her out of our group, and I ended up
assuming many of her responsibilities. I also took on a number of
other responsibilities throughout my time at NASA.
Because of my great attention to detail, demand for excellence in
products, and ability to handle a large and politically charged task, I
was chosen to take over Ginger's responsibility for the Environmental
Control and Life Support Systems SSTF working group, where I met with
Hughes Training (now Raytheon) software developers and systems engineers
and a NASA contract overseer. As part of this task, I also worked with
the group responsible for creating the hardware mockups and audio cues for
the crew station, the Extra-Vehicular Activity System (which was nominally
trained by the Shuttle/Station Mission Control group, who did not have
time to work on early SSTF development) working group, our display
developer (Brad), and other system instructors in working groups similar
to mine. Over the next three years, this became my largest and most
involved task. I: studied vehicle hardware specifications and software
documents to help the modelers understand how the real world items work,
defined model functionality and malfunctionability requirements, wrote
many detailed acceptance test scripts, conducted interim model reviews,
tracked model problems, assisted in troubleshooting model problems, and
conducted a few thousand hours of acceptance testing. During my last two
years, the contract overseer, Maury Minette (who had been an instructor
during the Apollo program), was so confident in my abilities and
attention to detail that he rarely attended testing sessions unless there
was a particular hot-button area being tested. Throughout the project, we
also had to deal with a high turnover rate of our Hughes/Raytheon
modelers, as well as the fact that we were working on the most technically
complicated model of the most physically diverse system on the Station.
Because of the complexity of the ECLSS models and my experience in SSTF
development, I was also chosen to represent the Environmental, Thermal,
and Electrical systems in working groups with Japanese and European
developers of simulator models for the those agencies' components of the
station. In that position, I helped establish required minimum
functionality and malfunctionability requirements for the models that
those agencies would be sending to the US for integration with the SSTF
models for use in multi-segment training, particularly of emergency
scenarios such as atmosphere leaks and fires.
I also took over Ginger's place on the team doing Station training
for Station flight 5A, or Shuttle flight STS-98. As part of this team of
instructors, I helped ensure that SSTF and PTT development were proceeding
apace, identified particular portions of the flight timeline that needed
to be run as part of the nominal timeline simulations, defined major
Station functionality additions that needed to be simulated with major
malfunctions, established a Station curriculum for the STS-98 Shuttle crew
and the Expedition 1 Station crew, and performed or assisted in much of
the Lab module-specific training for both of these crews. We were also
responsible for running our share of the generic simulations Mission
Controllers needed before starting flight-specific simulations. On this
team, my primary responsibility was training the Environmental Control and
Life Support Systems, but I worked closely with another instructor to
train the Thermal and Electrical Systems as well.
Before my time, a massive effort had been made in the Mission Control
group to develop reference schematics that could be used by people on
console and Astronauts on the Station as part of troubleshooting
procedures. However, there was no standardization between the system
groups regarding drawing orientation, format, or even symbology, and the
drawings often differed greatly from the graphical displays being
developed for the Station computer interface (which were subject to some
standardization). Instructors used pieces of these drawings or their own
non-standard drawings in classes and training manuals. The Astronauts,
and Bill "Shep" Shepherd of the first Station crew in particular, really
didn't like this system, and wanted a standardized system developed.
Because I had experience drafting and expressed interest in the project, I
became part of the working group that created training schematics
standards. We developed a system of 9 drawing types (forming a grid of
three detail levels by three styles) that incorporated different levels of
detail and different types of drawings that instructors could then create.
Drawings could be either functional (i.e. a block diagram of subsystem
functional connectivity), physical (i.e. pipes running through standard
depictions of modules), or one of those combined with inter-system
connectivity (i.e. a physical drawing of the system with extra indicators
of electrical power channels affecting the equipment), and ranged from
simple to detailed levels. Mission Controller drawings were informally
assigned to the fourth level of detail, reserved for highly detailed
system schematics or detailed schematics of individual components. The
standards established in this group were incorporated into the standards
used to develop control displays and international partner products too.
In addition to helping establish the standards, I also developed and
drafted the ECLSS schematics, first in Visio, and later in AutoCAD LT95
when it was made available. Information was pulled from hundreds of
Boeing drawings used in Station construction and boiled down into one
combined detailed schematic which was then simplified for introductory
lessons or broken down into subsystem or module views to teach details in
certain areas. We worked with professional drafters employed by Hernandez
Engineering who handled cleanup, configuration control, and distribution,
but I chose to do most of my drawings myself, as it was often easier than
explaining what I needed done. When Shep and the other astronauts saw the
completed schematics, they found them so useful that they were requested
to be formal flight reference products. Mission Controllers were then
asked to verify the drawing validity (I actually identified several errors
with the Controllers' own schematics), and the drawings are being flown as
part of the Shuttle and Station crew reference packages.
See the main detailed drawing I
developed.
(You'll need to install AutoDesk's WHIP!
Viewer, which works best within Internet Explorer.)
More coming another evening...