Analog Science Fiction and Fact - June 2013

has flown seven times, and we installed a flat
platform that made entering and exiting the
round hatch easier. Equipment started coming
out—parachutes, helmets, gloves, you name
it. I carried them back into the vehicle and
stowed them. Then the first astronaut exited.
They had been weightless for 13 days, and so
were not used to gravity. My biggest job was
to make sure they didn’t fall or trip. (This is an
inner ear problem when coming back to gravity.)
All of them walked out unassisted. In fact,
Dan Tani (an MIT graduate like myself), who
had been on the International Space Station
for four months, had no problem walking. We
were all impressed.
Suit technicians helped them out of their
orange launch and landing suits. They got into
their blue suits, had some water, maybe some
food, and sat in chairs for a while. Doctors
and nurses examined them briefly. They
talked about the landing, how great it was to
be in space, whatever came to mind. They
were excited and you could feel it. Everyone
in the CTV was excited. At their request, I had
marked some stuff used on the space walks
with letters or numbers using a flight-qualified
Sharpie marker. I ask the three who did
space walks if what I had marked helped
them. “It was great, I don’t know how I could
have wrapped that around the quick disconnect
without the markings.” It is good to be
useful. And yes, my handwriting is on the
space station.
The next thing they did was the walkaround.
This is the tradition where the crew
walks around and under the shuttle to take a
look at it. Afterward there are photo opportunities
and speeches. The commander of the
shuttle told his crew that they shouldn’t look
up at the tiles on the bottom of the shuttle because
when they tilted their heads back, they
might fall over. I now had a new job—to accompany
them and make sure they don’t fall
over, or trip on the big cables and other
things on the ground—and there were a lot of
things on the ground. The tile was still hot,
but there was no smell. We walked around
the vehicle and there were cameras everywhere.
We had a German astronaut, so the
German press was there in droves. I was talking
to one of the astronauts and there was this
video operator filming us. We ignored him
and continued our discussion. Sure enough,
WORKING ON THE SPACE SHUTTLE
JUNE 2013
I’m on the nightly Orlando news that evening.
We drove back to the Astronaut Crew Quarters
and unloaded all the gear. Later on we
had lunch with the shuttle astronauts and all
the support astronauts and medical people.
One of the many astronauts I met saw my
brass rat (MIT class ring) and said that he
went to MIT too.
When I wasn’t helping the astronauts off of
the shuttle, I was in the crew quarters taking
care of their families. After the family watched
the landing at the Shuttle Landing Facility,
they were put on busses and taken back to
the crew quarters. It took an hour or so for
the astronauts to get back to the quarters.
One time I had to figure out how to use the
new big screen TV to make sure that the kids
could watch Harry Potter while waiting for
their mother or father to come back to the
quarters. It took me, a coworker, and an astronaut
to figure out all the remote controls.
We got it working, and the kids were happy.
Life can be rough. I rewarded my hard work
by grabbing a couple of cookies that the
cooks had made for the astronauts and took
them to my wife. Astronaut cookies!
That’s what a shuttle landing is like.
The workers at KSC were, in a word, dedicated.
Imagine all the different jobs. There are
the normal ones, like manager and secretary,
which are important. But there were jobs that
are not anywhere else. There are people who
applied the heat resistant tiles on the shuttle.
People who lifted a shuttle and attached it to
the external tank, and this is after they lifted
pieces of the external boosters, loaded with
highly explosive fuel, stacked these, and then
lifted the tank between the two boosters.
Other people drove the shuttle out to the
launch pad at a staggering one mile per hour
on the same crawler that they used on the
Apollo missions. People had to make sure payloads
and the shuttle were very clean. People
made sure that there were no sharp edges
that would cut the spacesuit during their Extra
Vehicular Activity (spacewalk). Then there
were software writers, software testers, and
numerous other jobs needed to propel X
pounds to 17,500 mph into orbit.
All the jobs were important. Everyone was
concerned with the safety of the shuttle and
the astronauts. They were dedicated. They
worked long hours. Of course some were
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