Alumni Profile

First in flight: AA alumnus leads NASA’s flight directors

Phil Engelauf (MS ‘81 AA) is the chief of the flight directors at NASA, meaning that the people on the ground responsible for directing space shuttle and International Space Station missions report to him. If you haven’t already, you can see the job depicted in Ed Harris’ portrayal of Gene Kranz in the 1995 movie Apollo 13.

Currently, Engelauf and his team of flight directors are focused on two major missions: finishing construction of the International Space Station before the three-vehicle shuttle fleet is retired in 2010, and successfully returning to the moon and going to Mars. How do they plan to do that? With lots of training and a grounding in solid engineering fundamentals.

We’re hoping to launch shuttle mission STS 121 coming up here in the July timeframe. The mission involves a couple of spacewalks to make some repairs to the space station. The station is still under construction and we have a ways to go and we also have ongoing maintenance and repair work that needs to be done. In addition we’re gearing up a large logistics resupply module which provides the crew with a number of supplies for their ongoing operations on the station— food, clothing, experiments, and hardware.

We will also be returning [from space] a number of pieces of hardware for refurbishment as well as some scientific samples and results from the ongoing science work on board the station.

It’s hard to really quantify that but I’d say halfway done is a good rough hack. We have quite a bit of work to do to bring up a couple more large components of the station. The bulk of the larger modules, habitable modules, are already present. But we still have to deliver the modules from some of our international partners. There is a European laboratory module called the Columbus and a Japanese Experiment Module (or JEM), called Kibo, that have yet to be delivered. In addition a few other large components of the electrical power and photovoltaic array systems are to be delivered. It’s going to take us another 16 to 18 shuttle flights to finish the assembly and position the large spares before the shuttle is retired.

How long will it take to make those 18 flights?

Even when we had four vehicles we often had one in a major “refurb” period about every couple of years. We take one of the vehicles out of the fleet and spend a significant amount of time going over it with a fine-toothed comb inspecting the air frame and a number of other things. So typically we had three vehicles in active service and when we were flying four or five flights a year, each vehicle would fly every second or third flight, just depending upon the logistics at Kennedy Space Center of rotating the vehicles around.

How do you decide who flies next?

Most of the vehicles are very, very similar but each one has subtle differences in terms of lift capability, performance capability. Each of the engines is slightly different as they roll off the assembly line, and we have flight history for each of the engines. Depending on which combination of which engines get assigned to each vehicle for each flight you get different lift capabilities to orbit and so forth. Then there are minor differences in the mass properties and the capacity for ballast, and other subtleties. We match the mission complement to the vehicle or change the vehicle assignment to match the mission as appropriate.

How did this figure into the most recent flight?

Actually the last mission was not scheduled to carry any compnent that drove the vehicle assignment, so it was more driven by the readiness of the vehicle. After the Columbia accident we made a number of modifications to the vehicles. It just simply turned out that one of those was going to be complete with the modifications prior to the other vehicles based on where they all were in the flow at the time. That sort of determined which vehicle was going to fly the next flight.

What is involved with simulating a mission?

For my flight control teams and flight directors that’s really the core of our business. We sum up our lives by ‘Plan, Train, Fly’. The shuttle program office takes care of most of the vehicle hardware. My responsibility with the flight control teams and the flight directors is mission preparation and training. And we do two types of training. We do what we call generic training in which we put flight controllers and flight control teams in mission control, and we put crews in the simulators here at Johnson Space Center, and those two are tied together with an elaborate system of computer networks in simulating and math-modeling the performance of the vehicle. We have the crews and flight contro teams execute phases of the timeline, and then we have a group of individuals who we call simulation supervisors who insert malfunctions and failures for the crew and the flight control teams to deal with.

Then there’s a type of training we call specific training. We rehearse specific phases of missions, the timing and the decision making processes, and evaluate the procedures we’ll be using. In a particular simulation we did recently, we simulated a couple of days out of this upcoming mission from July. We had a shuttle flight control team, a space station flight control team, and crews in the shuttle and station simulators all going through a portion of the timeline. In addition we had a large engineering staff and management team available to rehearse the decision making processes for significant failures that could occur to the vehicle and how we would respond to those. It’s extremely realistic training and it’s characteristic of the kind of work we’re doing between shuttle missions.

I should add that it isn’t just about the Shuttle missions - we are constantly flying the Space Station mission, 365 days a year. We train the flight controllers for that continuous operation in the same way doing generic simulations to train on the systems and responses, and to build the flight control team skills. The ‘flight specific’ training for the continuous operations is really OJT (on the job training).

What’s an example of a failure or malfunction you induced?

Most of the systems on the space shuttle or on the space station for that matter are redundant. But if you lost an electrical power bus for example, that would have wide-ranging implications for all of the things that were powered by that system. One of the failures we simulated in this exercise was an AC power bus failure on the shuttle. That had effects on many of the motors and systems we use for closing the payload bay doors on the shuttle, or operating a number of other pieces of critical equipment. It limited the electrical power we could generate because that AC bus controlled a cooling pump that supports one of the fuel cells. So we had to shut down one of the three fuel cells, and then we had to determine the impacts on the rest of the mission because of the loss of redundancy for the rest of the systems.

How are you preparing for the moon missions at this stage?

My generation of folks, those of us who came into the workforce after the last time we landed on the moon, have spent our careers with the shuttle and station and we have developed a large wealth of operations experience, but it has been quite a while since we designed a new launch vehicle and a new crew vehicle for growing into and returning from space. We are already deep into the throes of working on the design issues. We’re trying to apply the operational experience we have accrued to make smart design decisions and mission architecture decisions for how we are going to back to the moon. But it’s quite interesting because very few of the folks here had any involvement in the Apollo program, and while we are doing something that looks quite similar to that we have a wealth of new technology and a lot of operational experience since that time. So we’re spending a lot of our time looking at ways to apply our current knowledge base to re-solving that problem with the new tools that we have today.

Well they got it pretty much right.

Getting to and from the surface is largely the driver for most of the engineering decisions you make. We’ve spent a lot of time doing studies to look at different ways to design the vehicle by emphasizing different characteristics, or what influence different propulsion technologies would have on the overall design. And folks have commented in the media and in the industry that the crew exploration vehicle we’ve come up with just looks a lot like the Apollo vehicles. The interesting fact is the guys that designed Apollo got it right. They were a smart bunch of folks and given the laws of physics and the technology they had to deal with they derived an answer. Those laws of physics certainly haven’t changed in the intervening years and some of the technology that’s available to us today is a little bit different but it’s unsurprising that using the same conditions and the same objectives you wind up with an answer that looks a lot the same.

You were a graduate student when moon missions had ended but the shuttle was still quite new. How has your Stanford education served you in your career?

The thing I point to is that good, solid technical fundamentals are always applicable, even though the job that we do with the shuttle or the way we operate the station or the way we’ll ultimately operate the vehicles going back to the moon may change as the result of a specific design. The underlying engineering and the problem-solving mentality and techniques really will be very much the same. So the skills I learned at Stanford largely were the fundamentals of orbital mechanics and good solid engineering skills that have their application to all these different kinds of solutions.

Do you recall any professors in particular?

I spread my Masters degree out over a three year program because I was working full-time at Ames Research Center and doing the masters degree part-time through the Honors Cooperative Program. I do have a couple of professors I remember quite well. I had a professor named Holt Ashley from whom I took a course on design of flight vehicles. He was a pretty colorful character but really made an impression on me. Another one was Dick Shevell who taught an introductory course. It was the way they tied the overall design process, incorporating all the characteristics into evolving a final solution, that really impressed me. You can take any individual technical specialty and that’s one piece of the overall solution or design problem. It’s being able to tie all of those pieces together in the end that give you a successful end product.