The HabForum

I've been reading Gene Kranz's book "Failure is not an Option," where he talks about his time as a flight director during Mercury, Gemini and Apollo. It reminded me how much I hated being in MOCR at ASA. I mean, I seriously hated it. I was Sippy.

My eyesight is pretty bad, and I couldn't read my monitors very well, so that was the first thing. Then, I thought it would be like SA where everything you say is written down exactly. I was totally unprepared for how loose the ASA script is....much more realistic, I know, but very confusing. I was constantly worried about what I was supposed to say next (if I could just read the darn console!) and when. Kranz talks about being "in front of the airplane," on top of it or behind it, and I was constantly behind and trying to keep up.

This year I'll be MS. I'm not sure what MOCR positions those are, but is thre anyway I can prepare for them? Anybody swipe a copy of the script ? MOCR was really the worst part of the week for me. Mabye if I could've read my console I would've had more confidence. Oh well. Nothing I can do about that.

Well although mocr wasnt my favorite part of the week Flight Director wasnt too bad a job. as a pilot. It was actually easy all you really had to do was keep the mission on schedule and aprove anything that was done.

We had the same problem except the guy who was working 2 positions was french and spoke verry little English. So i thyink everyone had a headache after that.

WOW, that would be really hard. Not only are they trying to do many things at once, they are struggleing with the language. I just had to split my attention, not worry about translating.

Thats true. They did get a little help from some of the other campers when they were in mission control. I remember our first 1 hour mission was the first full day of camp and i was flkight director. I didnt realise we had 2 people on the team who didnt speak much english and one of them was working one of those to consels. Then i asked for some information as reqyired and found out the hard way.

Last time I went to camp, half our team was an exchange group from europe. Half of them spoke little to no english. I hate to say it but the language barrior was huge. We never really overcame it. They spoke to each other and the americans spoke to them trough the couple who could speak good english. But, mostly we remained segrigated.

Well if your were taliing to the two french guys face to face you could ussualy figure out what they were talking about. They spoke some english and with habd gestures you could figure it out.

That really helps. And there were only two so they were probably kind of forced to associate with you. In my situation, they could have been one small but complete group, so they really didn't feel the need to associate with us. Especially in the museam hunt; the groups were intirely segrigated. I do though think it is good practice to deal with people from different backgrounds. Its more realistic that way. It also makes you appriciate how hard working on ISS must be. Granted all the cosmonots speak english and most of the astronauts speak some russian, but still there must be some language barriers.

Well i was glad our team was verry close. Rene and the other french guy whos name slips my mind at the moment made every effort to try to fit in and be close with the rest of the teamj. By the end of the week the whole team was so close it seemed like we'd known eachother for years.