The Final Shift

Well, i'm sure you've seen the news by now. We have successfully completed all the tasks that were outlined for the STS116/12A.1 mission. After a fourth spacewalk, the folding map issue had been overcome. The solar array is resting nicely in it's blanket box. No doubt, lessons learned from this mission will be applied to STS117/13A mission which will retract the other half of the problematic solar array. But we know how to do it now...the only objective left is to perform undocking, which will occur later this afternoon.

Well, I am done with the mission. I just completed my final shift. And the final shift didn't come without a failure...I guess I had to finish my first mission as an ADCO with some minor drama. This time the failure was a Russian computer, a computer that interacts with our motion control system computers. The Russian's have three identical computers that process the exact same information. This is their redundancy system...only one computer is "primary". Before tonight, only two computers were operational. One of the three had dropped offline a while back. Tonight, one of the remaining two computers failed and dropped offline. Now, we are operating on just one computer. This isn't all that critical and we are not terribly concerned with this...but it started to remind me of the simulation world where failures like this would happen routinely. My shift ended without incidence and I left the plan in good order for the next two shifts. Undocking will take place later today and that marks the end of the mission for the International Space Station team. The Shuttle team's mission will continue until Friday when Discovery is scheduled to land.

I must say that I thoroughly enjoyed working this mission. It was a lot of fun, despite the crappy hours and less than problem free mission. I am proud to be a part of the 12A.1 team. I'd like to congratulate Lisa on a well planned mission. Lisa work really hard to make sure this mission went off as smoothly as it did from the ADCO position. I'd like to thank Melissa Green for all her hard work in Moscow. I'd also like to thank my backroom (Christina) for her hard work from day to day. I'd also like to thank Christina for planning some of the social events that we had along the way. And I'd also like to thank all my OJTs (Erin, Ann, and Elizabeth) for the work they contributed on those tough days.

Again, I absolutely enjoyed this mission. The last two missions I was not able to enjoy due to the heather situation...hell, this was the first mission that i actually completed in full. My first mission LF1.1, i left early, and i filled in for a few days on the 12A mission. Both of those missions i supported from the backroom...as best as i could.

I look forward to my next mission (STS118/13A.1) which i am leading for my group. That mission is slated to fly in the summer of '07. Planning has already started on that mission and I hope to do as good a job as Lisa did on this mission. My mission will be a high profile mission -- the second launch of an Educator Astronaut and we'll be getting a new CMG. The first launch of an Educator Astronaut was Challenger in 1986.

Well...I'm gonna take a short nap so that I can start sleep shifting back to a normal schedule.