How NASA Kept the ISS Flying While Harvey Hit Mission Control (theverge.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: In the days before Harvey hit Texas, flight controllers at NASA's Johnson Space Center outside of Houston had a decision to make: should they evacuate or ride out the storm at the agency's Mission Control Center? The dilemma wasn't just about the safety of the flight controllers. These personnel are tasked with flying the International Space Station -- a round-the-clock job that can't be done just anywhere. If there's a gap in ground communication, it could put the astronauts in danger. [...] On August 22nd, three days before the storm hit, the mission team was briefed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and decided the best plan was to stay put. They realized that whatever hit Texas would likely hit Round Rock, too, which is located outside of Austin. Plus, Harvey's real danger looked to be the water rather than the winds. The building containing the Mission Control Center is designed to withstand flooding incredibly well. But the team also knew they had to prepare. "Where you don't want to find yourself is just a single flight controller in any position who can't leave because there's no one to replace them," says Scoville. So the flight controllers were told to come into work early and to make sure they had a way to both enter and leave the center safely. Many showed up Friday night with "big, monstrous climbing backpacks," says Scoville. Meanwhile, cots were set up in a nearby room and in a building that serves as an astronaut quarantine facility, where astronauts quarantine before launch to avoid getting sick in space. "We have training rooms that are a mere copy of the flight control room," says Scoville. "They have the same consoles and same screens, but we turned off the lights and put some cots in there. It was interesting to see these rooms usually lit up with all these screens blacked out for people to sleep." Throughout the weekend, Mission Control operated with the bare minimum essential personnel needed to keep the ISS working safely. Normally, flight controller teams work in nine-hour shifts, swapping out three times a day. During the storm, only about six flight controllers worked each shift, and some stretched their shifts to 12 hours. Because the flooding made the roads impassable, everyone had to spend a couple of nights at NASA.

Comments

Re:Why not just move operations to another facilit

[Strider-]

Most of the communications with the ISS are done through the TDRSS system, which is up in geosynchronous orbit. That is what gives MCC near continuous communications capabilities to the ISS, no matter where it is in orbit. To make that work, there are a set of ground stations at various points around the globe that have dishes aimed at the (stationary) TDRSS birds. These are then networked back to MCC in Houston.

There is a backup, the russion control centre near Moscow. However, given the construction of the building in Houston, its buttressing against flooding, and the overall situation, camping out in that building was likely the safest place for the controllers to be during the storm and its aftermath.

To me, it's a testament to the design and quality that they were able to maintain connectivity throughout the situation. From that room they are reaching out globally, and were able to do so.

Re:More money

[Anonymous Coward]

NASA consumes less than 0.1% of our nations resources ($18.6T GDP vs $18.4B NASA Budget). We literally spend far more on far less useful things, alcohol sales for example are in excess of $200 Billion per year, the lawn care industry is in the tens of billions, the luxury part of the automotive industry likely around $300 Billion and we could trim $400 Billion from the defense budget and still spend more than any other country on earth. If you're looking to "spend better" there are a lot of other things to trim before we get to NASA.

Re:50,000 commands. What exactly are they?

[Strider-]

Much of this is to reduce the load on the Astronauts and Cosmonauts on board the ISS. Mission controllers are constantly watching power systems, cooling systems, data systems, the various experiments, and so forth, so that the humans on board can spend as much time as possible on things that can't be done from the ground.

The commands likely range from requesting appropriate sensor data, to tweaking the cooling system, to starting and stopping experiments.

The ISS is an incredibly complex machine, in an extremely hostile environment. It's also a hugely expensive research outpost, with a limited crew. Experiments are booked years in advance, and are tightly scheduled. It's the job of the people on the ground to make sure they happen.