Midnight on the Causeway

(originally posted on www.opennasa.com in April 2011)

Couple minutes after midnight. Clear sky of stars above, three-quarter moon just over the horizon, launch tower lights dancing across the river.

I’m the lone person on the causeway, standing on the narrow stretch of rock and road crossing the Banana River between the Kennedy Space Center and the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. It’s really just me here. Not another soul in sight. Not even headlights. White folding chairs are lined up in neat little rows in the grass and tents have been erected over empty tables awaiting crowds who will amass here in two days to view a display of fire and thunder and grandeur—the launch of Space Shuttle mission STS-131.

The Falcon 9 rocket, awaiting its maiden voyage and white like an alabaster statue, stares me down from afar.

I was on my way to work but I had to stop. They’ve got this rocket lit up with these massive spotlights for all the world to see. It’s impressive. Farther up the coast, the Space Shuttle Discovery sits on Launch Pad 39A, lit up by no spotlights. I don’t think the RSS has rolled back yet. That must be why there are no lights turned toward Discovery.

I try to take a picture of the white rocket with my phone, but it doesn’t come out. I get back in my car. Time for work.

Advanced Crew Escape Suits (ACES), ready to fly for the crew of STS-133.

I work in the Shuttle Crew Escape team. We’re responsible for Shuttle astronaut survival equipment and various other hardware, headlined mainly by the orange pressure (“pumpkin”) suits you’ve probably seen once or twice before adorned on spacefarers as they make their way over to and strap into the Space Shuttle orbiter. They’re called Advanced Crew Escape Suits, or ACES, for short.

My team and I flew over from Houston on Wednesday. We have five days of prep work to get ready for this Shuttle launch on Monday morning. We test personal cooling systems to make sure they work. We suit up the crew to make sure their suits fit right and provide survivable pressure in the event of a cabin depressurization. We count all the pencils (yes, literally, like a surgery crew accounting for all sutures and sponges), make sure batteries are charged, clean the boots, attach mission patches, make little bags for light sticks that go in pouches on the astronauts’ arm sleeves to help emergency rescue crews find them in the dark in case all hell breaks loose. We are some of the last people astronauts see before breaking the bounds of Earth’s gravity well to spin around the planet.

And if all hell does break loose, if that day ever comes, we’ll be some of the people responsible for the last line of defense in keeping those astronauts alive.

In this world, emergencies aren’t just unfortunate inevitabilities—they are meticulously planned for and diligently expected. Because we work in a business where strapping seven people astride six million pounds of explosives is not only sane but, dare I say, routine. And I mean that in the very rudimentary aspect of the word. They say there’s nothing routine about spaceflight. Perhaps a better word is accepted. We accept a certain amount of risk during each and every launch and we accept that nothing expected ever happens as expected. In that vein, Crew Survival is our life.

The first four Shuttle crews launched with ejection seats on the flight deck. But ejection seats proved infeasible beyond these flights as crews increased in size and the actual window of survivable situations wasn’t all that large with ejection seats in the first place. Following the Challenger accident, the roots of my job were planted, as NASA began flying astronauts with Launch and Entry Suits (LES) in 1989, replaced by the ACES in 1995. The suit provides a full pressure, self-contained environment around the crewmember that allows for him or her to bailout of the orbiter during controlled, glided descent in the event the vehicle doesn’t have enough energy to make it to a runway.

Our subsystem doesn’t protect the crew in all scenarios, but it was the best that could be done at the time given what was available, constraints to the already-built Shuttle design, and the just plain old dangerous environment encountered in breaking through our Earth’s atmosphere.

The team stretches far beyond technical hardware oversight. We’re concerned with all aspects of crew survival, from emergency egress from the launch pad to in-the-air emergency breathing and bailout. Our efforts are a composite response to each of NASA’s three fatal accidents: Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia. In a perfect world, our team’s work is never needed. In a perfect world, Space Shuttles launch and land safely every time. But we can’t plan for that. We plan for the bad days. We plan for the unexpected.

I’m on my way to work after midnight because Monday’s launch happens to be at 6:21am, meaning our work starts just before midnight Easter Sunday. Now we’re sleep shifting to prepare for it. Plus if the crew needs to change something—say they want to swap out a watch or grab an extra pen or they’ve got a problem with their glove—we’re the ones to make it happen. We’re up when the crew’s up. We sleep when they sleep.

I’m heading to the suit room at KSC, which is just down the hall from the astronauts’ personal living quarters. It’s the same room that Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Mike Collins got suited up in before entering the history books over 40 years ago. It’s the same room John Young and Bob Crippen left to fly a beautiful yet awkward, clunky-looking brick with wings strapped to the side of a rocket for the first time. It’s the same room the STS-135 crewmembers will leave from when they become the final crew to fly that same clunky-looking brick nearly 30 years later.

As I drive on down the causeway towards the suit room, still the lone car for miles, it occurs to me that the causeway is a metaphor (this occurrence may or may not have been brought about by a semi-loopy, sleep-shifted mind-state): NASA’s on a causeway, too. We’re in the in-between space where we’re still connected to the mainland, but also well on our way out to an island on the other side.

I imagine many others in the business have felt a similar sensation, staring out at the waters of change like they’re alone at midnight on a causeway, too. Stuck between two worlds, maybe. Stuck between changing paradigms. Wondering why spotlights are shining in one place and not the other. Feeling the insight and stillness of a star-filled sky while the lights keep flickering and the ground keeps spinning at full speed below.

On that causeway, I think of the history of the suit room I’m heading to, the collective legacy of a space agency still very much in its infancy, carrying a rich, proud heritage earned through fifty years of diligent attention to detail and passion to lift humanity beyond our known world, beyond our known selves, to that other side of the river.

Maybe the nature of our business means we’ll always be on a causeway. Maybe being on the causeway is a necessary step—one that we accept as the nature of our dangerous business where the expected never happens as expected, and planning for the unexpected serves as the creed by which we strive.

Maybe traveling down the causeway—the journey between two places amidst a sea of uncertainty—maybe that’s what it’s all about in the first place.