Travis and Michelle Fitzgerald's blog

Atlantis has left the station. I have worked my last shift of this flight. And what a crazy 11 days it was, too.

As Travis mentioned, my group went crazy trying to keep up with all of the Russian segment problems and what we might do to fix them. Personally, I didn't have a whole lot to do with the brainstorming, or testing, or procedure writing that went on 24 hours a day for at least 3 days. Five other teams of OSOs did that. My job was to sit my shift, help organize the different teams, and keep the plans moving. And, when I looked up one evening to find four OSOs, a power systems flight controller, a power systems engineer, a flight director, and an astronaut they'd just pulled out of bed at 4AM behind my console--I kicked them out. They went to find a conference room, so I could keep working on tomorrow's plan.

That was a little disappointing. The one maintenance class I teach deals with diagnotic equipment: a power supply, oscilloscope, data bus analyzer...all stuff these teams were developing ways to use to figure out what was wrong in the Russian segment and how to fix it! (And we actually used the oscilloscope!! You may have seen clips of the screen the crew sent video down for us to analyze. They played it on CNN.) And this was the class everyone told me, "We've never used most of this hardware, and probably won't have to anytime soon." Ha.

Anyway, my shifts are over, and I'm catching up on some sleep! For a bit. My next task is Sunday, currently scheduled for about 4AM, to inspect the mechanism we plan to use to move a docking port. That inspection may extend onto Monday. Then on Tuesday, they've scheduled my final front room evaluation. And I have two flight directors wanting presentations between now and then.

Excuse me, I'm going back to bed.