Rocket Scientist

So, this week, it’s a second installment of Thieving Thursday because I promised JD at I Do Things that I’d tell her how I got my Silver Snoopy .  I’ve been wracking my brains trying to figure out how to tell the story without sending everyone to sleep.

What’s the Silver Snoopy Award?  Whatever I say here, I don’t want anyone to think I don’t take this award seriously and am not desperately proud to have received it.  The Silver Snoopy is the award given by the astronaut corps to those who have made an appreciable contribution to safety (an over and above thing).  You can read more about it here and here .  It is a limited prize and much coveted.  And, I will be honest, there isn’t an award NASA gives that I could have been prouder to get.  To me, this is the one that means the most of all the awards NASA has.  I am not alone in thinking that.

I wish I could tell you I threw myself in front of a inadvertently fired rocket, saving three bystanders and a straying kitten.  But I didn’t.  I wish I could tell you I devised a solution that solved our most pressing safety issue, made entirely out of recycled bandaids, duct tape and #8 brass screws, but I didn’t.  I don’t believe there is a magic pill that will make it all work, but if there were, I haven’t found it (with the possible exception of the philosophy: “Do it right the first time .”)

Nope, I got the award doing what I do best.  Being a pain in the patootie, raining on people’s parades, bursting bubbles, etc.  Now, I know some of you are going, “Sure, that’s helpful!” - well, you’d be surprised.  Technically, of course, I got it for the work I did in support of Hubble Space Telescope Servicing Mission 3A as the EVA Safety Lead, but that was all part and parcel of the way and extremes I work, just what made me so good at what I did (and I was good).

Let me tell you why.  Human spaceflight is tough, challenging and risky, and that’s before you factor in the year by year politics, the politicos that want their stamp on something so dictate non-technically driven changes, or want more work in their district and force work from one center to another, that’s before factoring a budget for 20 year projects that gets tossed up for grabs every freakin’ year or impossible demands and too few resources to do them.  There are ulcers all over NASA from trying to do the impossible with next to nothing and I don’t envy any of those folks their jobs.  I wouldn’t take a program manager job for love or money because they have to juggle so many conflicting constraints: schedule, resources, money, availability of hardware, public relations, mission success, science objectives and, yes, safety (not necessarily in that order).  In fact, a great many jobs at NASA are like that, including nearly all the folks in Mission Operations who have to juggle impossible schedules, the needs of the crew, conflicting consumable issues, an endless array of must-have and nice-to-have tasks and the health and well-being of the crew.  That’s a lot of balls.  So, as a safety engineer, I understand perfectly well that they’ll fly off handle when some safety upstart comes up and says, “You shouldn’t fly in the middle of November this year.  There’s going to be Leonid storm.”  That’s the kind of thing that can get one chewed out for pages of e-mail as if one had invented the Leonids just to irk this individual, but, as a safety person, you have to say it anyway.

In my opinion, the luxury and the heck of being a safety person is the same thing: your focus is the one damn ball, safety.  If all hell breaks loose and the only way to save the crew on orbit is to throw everything in the payload bay overboard, priceless science or not, no one will hesitate to do so, even if it only increases their chances by 50%.  Safety’s got to push for painful costly risk reductions long before hell’s broken loose.  We know everyone’s got a safety ball to juggle and they’re doing their best, but someone, someone, has to be looking out to make sure it doesn’t get lost or that little increments of risk don’t add up to too much.  Or, if they do, that we aren’t accepting the risk because we lied to ourselves on how much risk we’re taking.  Either make it smaller or own up to it in all it’s ugliness.  That’s what safety does.  We’re the Jiminy Cricket and just as annoying.

If the Shuttle, heaven forbid, came down in seven big chunks but everyone walked away, safety is thrilled.  Mission accomplished.  Everything else is just stuff.  And someone needs that perspective.  I truly believe that.  I believe that, when someone signs on with safety, they are responsible for the health and well-being of those lives up there.  It is, in my opinion, a sacred trust and we must accomplish it because we can always build a new spacecraft, a new robotic arm, a new science experiment, but no one can give back a mother, a father, a son, a spouse.  The crew will do it.  If they weren’t brave and willing to risk their lives, they wouldn’t be in that business, but they take those risks on the understanding that we have done everything reasonably possible to ensure their safety and that, what we couldn’t fix, we told them honestly about so they can know what risk they’re taking.

Unfortunately, safety has really no power.  We can complain and we can bring issues up, but the people and programs we “oversee” are the same ones that determine our worth.  And they are the ones that, in the end, who decide no matter what we think.  That makes it dangerous to be noisy, but program managers can’t make informed decisions if no one says anything.  I can tell you, for many, it’s awfully tempting to be quiet, to not rock the boat, to not look like a troublemaker.

And that’s how I got my Silver Snoopy.  I was an absolute pain in the rear for many people involved with HST, made things difficult, made them change things here and there to either fix a risk or at least not cover it up. I was noisy and I was stubborn and, in the end, I got my way out of sheer stubbornness and pestilence more than any other reason (when I got it).  And many people didn’t appreciate that, but the crew knew it, saw it and did appreciate it.  Because I was doing it for them.  (So they wouldn’t have to).

I have to add something here.  For most of the time in safety and during all my time in EVA, I never let myself be silenced.  I didn’t always get my way, but I always made sure they heard me. Except once.  I mean I had been noisy, boisterous, determined and pushed the issue all the way to the top, but then I faced being fired and I was directed to back down.  And I did, transferring to EVA Safety.  I let myself be silenced.  It was five years before STS-107.  I will have that on my conscience until the day I die because, although it wasn’t directly related to what happened to STS-107, the changes that came from it, if they’d heard me, might have made a difference.  I will never know.

But I will never be silent again.  If anyone else ever dies in space, it will not be because I was quiet.  That, at least, I can promise you.

Someday, perhaps, I will tell you more about STS-107, which was also my flight for EVA, but not today.  It still hurts me too much.

I meant for this to be lighthearted.  Sorry.  I’m proud of the work I’ve done, seriously proud.  But I have also learned I’m not perfect.  I’m sorry for what I didn’t do.

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