Travis and Michelle Fitzgerald's blog

It's been requested that Travis and I post our job descriptions, so friends and family can at least tell their friends, "I'm not sure what it means, but she says she does XYZ..."

So, what do I do? I'm a flight controller. You know Mission Control? There are actually two of them in Houston (yep, Houston, as in "Houston, we have a problem..."). One is for the space shuttle, and one is for the space station. I am currently training to sit in the space station Mission Control. Mission Control is divided up into consoles; each console is responsible for a different part of the station. My console is called the Operations Support Officer, or OSO (pronounced "oh-so", as in oh-so-cool!). We are responsible for mechanisms and maintenance.

Mechanisms are how we assemble the space station: every time a new part (a module or a truss) is brought up, the robotic arm moves it into position so that a mechanism can latch onto it and bolt it into place. Maintenance is, well, cleaning and fixing things. If something goes wrong, you can't just land the space station in the garage; you have to have spare parts, or ways to fix things.

Yeah, yeah, yeah; this doesn't tell you what I do all day. I study the different ways to fix things or work around problems that we have on station. I write and edit procedures for both flight controllers and crew (those are the astronauts!) to use (both mechanisms and maintenance). I participate in simulations, sitting at our console and dealing with the problems the training team puts into the computers. I go to Kennedy Space Center (Florida) and Alenia (Turin, Italy) to make sure our tools fit onto parts we may have to fix someday (and I know where to find those parts!) and to watch testing of the mechanisms that haven't launched yet.

Wow, that's a lot of text, and I haven't touched on the instructional aspects of the job, or any of the paperwork, or the testing... Suffice it to say, it's a big job! Good thing there's 30 of us...

Is there a short form of all of this?
I'm a contractor at NASA.

I'm (one of the people of) the Houston, of "Houston, we have a problem."

I help to build, maintain, and fix the space station.

I love my job. :-)