Preparing Flight Equipment

Right now, we're dealing with a lot of stress with getting flight equipment out that's eventually going to take up a beetle experiment. It's a really exciting thing about sending up a native Russian Black Body beetle. It will launch on the shuttle next May. So, we've developed a system for housing the beetle and monitoring its activity. The experiment involves looking at circadian rhythms, which is the body clock. We have to have the hardware ready and delivered to Houston to sit with the Russians. We'll again start up the process of showing to bring it over to Mir. So that process starts up again in November.

Basically, about seven to eight months before each shuttle flight we take the hardware to Houston, show the Russians and work through any issues they might have with its design or operation. So most of my job has been trying to make sure that we will be delivering on time, that we're in synch with management's, NASA's and Houston's schedules, that we have all the paperwork ready for the Russians.

A Challenging Program

The challenge of this program is in juggling so many different aspects that, typically on any Shuttle program, happens linearly. On the Mir program, you can be dealing with, all at one time as we are right now, post-flight analysis of quail eggs that came back on STS-79, support of the wheat experiment that's going on right now, responding to any questions or problems that the crew has, getting hardware ready for launch in January on Shuttle, which is the hardware we just finished doing for the Russians in Moscow, and building hardware at Ames now to ship to Houston for launch next May. All of these things are going on simultaneously. Whereas, typically, on a Shuttle or Space Lab mission, it's stepwise -- you build the hardware, you deliver it, you do the mission, you get the data, you do the analysis, and you write reports. All of these things are going on at one time right now, and that's been a real challenge to try and manage all of that. It's stressful, it's exciting at times, and everybody is working with smaller and smaller numbers of people available.