Travis and Michelle Fitzgerald's blog

The next Shuttle mission that I will be working is STS-122/1E. It's a neat mission, because we are taking up the first International Partner module, the European Space Agency's Columbus module. This module's primary purpose is to support all kinds of science experiments in orbit.

The Columbus will be controlled from Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany. Since the standard callsign of each control center is its host city (i.e. "Houston, we have a problem"), the ops community decided to just call the Columbus Control Center by another, more well known and easier to pronounce city: Munich (it's only 18 miles away, anyhow).

Okay, back to the point of this entry. NASA has decided to be very accomodating when it comes to scheduling activities around its International Partners. The ISS crew's work day corresponds, for the most part, with the normal working hours in Moscow. Most of the Space workers in Moscow rely on public transportation, so it is unrealistic to expect them to be able to show up at work at odd hours on a regular basis. The same is true with the Columbus flight controllers (they also have strict labor laws that makes it difficult for them to schedule activities at unusual hours).

We have been doing simulations in which the NASA Flight Controllers, in Houston, practice operating the ISS, with the Columbus module attached, with their ESA counterparts in Munich. Unfortunately that means we have to show up at work at 5:00 am local time in order to set up and run these simulations. We have had two of those this week, on Monday and Wednesday. Needless to say, my internal clock is totally messed up.

But it is neat to know that our simulator, in Houston, is sending data and receiving commands across the Atlantic, and we all take that as normal operating procedure. That does make it a little easier to live with the odd times.

-Travis