Aero Engineering Student Reports on Space Shuttle Symposium Event

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Given the chance to attend a June 6-8 Space Shuttle Symposium in Atlanta, Georgia, Christine White, a senior aerospace engineering student, knew her participation at the event would require her to complete all spring quarter assignments and exams well ahead of schedule. While the timing might not have been ideal for an Ohio State student on the quarter system, the event proved to be an exceptional opportunity for White. In her own words, she describes some of the symposium presentation topics and impressions she took away: 

 

The Space Shuttle Symposium held at Georgia Tech was a fascinating look into the thirty-one years of NASA's Space Shuttle Program (SSP). It was an honor and a privilege to be chosen as Ohio State's representative to attend the event. At the Symposium, a number of speakers including former and current astronauts, engineers and managers discussed the development, implementation and retirement of the program. Three important themes discussed during the presentations were the importance of effective communication, capturing "Lessons Learned" and the future of human spaceflight in a post-Shuttle Era.

The Mission Operations Directorate (MOD) presentation focused on the importance of effective communication. MOD is responsible for managing Shuttle's mission from the moment that the vehicle clears the launch tower. To accomplish each mission, the communication between the Mission Control team, the flight director and the flight crew must be both timely and concise. In order the demonstrate this point, the presenter showed a video of the Mission Control team in action, working an anomaly. Every member of the team knew his and her role and knew when it was appropriate to speak and when to listen. The major point to take away from the presentation was that simulation and repetition were essential to build rapport among the team.

The second theme that resonated with me was the discussion on Lessons Learned. With the retirement of the program comes the massive retirement of the people that have experienced all of shuttle's anomalies, successes and failures. Collectively, the people who have worked for the program are extremely knowledgeable about space mission design, launch vehicle processing and mission operations for human spaceflight. There are ongoing efforts to capture raw knowledge and analyze collected information to create a searchable Lessons Learned database that will survive program retirement. There is a fair amount of complexity in this task. Lessons Learned captures not only a historical record of anomalies and decisions made to correct them, but also captures options that were considered and not pursued. The goal of Lessons Learned is create a complete synthesis of objectives, options and outcomes. 

Lessons Learned are valuable only to the extent that they are accessed by the team. Steve Sullivan, KSC Chief Engineer of SSP, shared a great example of the value of Lessons Learned. On a recent mission, a team spent many hours working an issue that arose.  They came up with a decision on how to handle the anomaly and implemented the fix only to find out after the fact that if they had just checked Lessons Learned databases, the exact same issue was noted prior to this event, and ironically the same fix was used. This shows that actually using the Lessons Learned database is critical in time/cost savings during all phases of creating and operating a new program.

The final topic discussed was the future of spaceflight in the post-Shuttle era.  The keynote speaker for our departing lunch was Mike Gazarik, NASA Deputy Chief Technologist. He described the International Space Station (ISS) as "a great start." He discussed that NASA leadership believes that the 'Space Race' of my generation will hinge upon technological leadership.  NASA's challenge will be to capture the imagination of the country as JFK's mandate to send a man the Moon and return him safely within the decade. To accomplish this, it is important that NASA develops technology and designs spaceflight missions that have specific destinations. Whether we return to the Moon, Mars or land on an asteroid, it is important that leadership chooses a specific goal. Once the mission is clear, the technological development required will be evident.
 

Hosts for "The Space Shuttle: An Engineering Milestone" symposium were Georgia Institute of Technology and NASA. Additional details about the event can be found at: http://www.gatech.edu/newsroom/release.html?nid=66377
Category: Undergraduate