The Tail Who Wagged the Dog - or the Tale of NASA's Mission Ops Directorate

We've all seen the images: NASA employees hunched in front of endless rows of monitors, or watching the array of super-sized screens at the front of the room with laser-like focus etched into their gazes. It's at Mission Control where sleep deprived rocket scientists reign over their technical domains with unshakeable determination, battling on in the face of staggering obstacles and the soul-crushing responsibility to guide the team of intrepid explorers through dangers, and returning them home safely. For the space-cadet in us all, the setting of a mission control room is like the "bridge" on the iconic Starship Enterprise come to life - just a whole lot bigger.

In the real-world version (depending on who you ask), the Mission Control room is both an inspiring symbol of NASA prowess in pushing human activities into the depth of space, and an inflammatory symbol of government wastefulness and inefficiency. If you bring up the topic of "NASA's Standing Army" with any NewSpace entrepreneur, you will more likely than not get to hear a lecture on how to do it better -after all when explorers traveled the US' continent to explore the new frontier of the west, they didn't need no stinking home office to sent them weather predictions either (although they may have wished for them anyway). With transport of crew to the ISS about to transition from NASA to the commercial space entrepreneurs, will there also be a shift from ground commanded missions to empowered spacecraft pilots flying solo in their turn-key launch vehicles?

To be fair, while it is true that during the Apollo program NASA Mission Control employed hundreds in any given mission, things have changed quite a bit since. Today NASA's Mission Control Center (MCC-H), at the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston still manages all manned spaceflight of NASA. However, during a Shuttle mission a crew of 30-80 operates in the control center (depending on mission complexity) and the International Space Station has a team of 5-10. That's a lot leaner than it used to be, but could it be leaner still?

It helps to look at two distinct phases of a space mission, each with different needs: (1) space transport (getting into orbit and back to Earth), and (2) space operations (doing stuff while on orbit). Many good arguments exist while doing work in space is still a very difficult (and dangerous) business that benefits extensively from having real-time ground support; think Hubble repair mission, or ISS construction. On the other hand, why is it that I can hop into my car, punch my destination into the navigation system, and get there (and back) without any help from outside the vehicle, but a crew of astronauts needs a support staff ten times their size to get into space and back? Granted, the car comparison may be a little far fetched, but comparisons with air travel should be a little closer.

The ratio of air traffic controllers to crew in the sky is certainly a lot leaner than for a space mission. Since the objective of "airplane like operations" is an often voiced mantra in the design of any future space launch vehicle, should this not apply equally to achieving an air traffic like operation on the ground? It is difficult to pinpoint the reasons why exactly a Shuttle flight necessitates a group of ~30 people watching data readouts in real time, supporting a crew who themselves are pretty much passengers on an automated system anyway. The technical reasons (complexity, redundancy, etc.) are obvious, but the motivations not so much. Does the system's complexity dictate this way of operation? Or did the decision to operate in this way result in a system that's unnecessarily complex to operate? The answers are buried somewhere in the history and culture of NASA's human spaceflight program

Unburdened by this history - or maybe even determined to go the other way like a sullen teenager refusing to follow its parents' footsteps - the new crop of entrepreneurial space launch organizations are tacking a different approach. While control rooms are still displayed proudly, they are also more clearly seen as a development tool only. The goal is to invest the extra resources necessary during vehicle development, which will then result in a mature system that is orders of magnitude simpler (and cheaper) to operate than the Shuttle is today. From a commercial point of view, this makes a lot of sense. Reduced operations cost per flight encourages higher flight rates, and high flight rates are exactly what's needed to bring down the cost for space access and accelerate the development of launch technologies.

NASA's current crop of mission controllers has also seen this writing on the wall. In a recent article published on NASASspaceflight.com, Mission Operations Directorate (MOD) director Paul Hill has been quoted as hopeful that the new crops of space entrepreneurs will see the value of the experience accumulated within his organization. The aim is to either have commercial contenders such as SpaceX or Orbital use NASA MOD facilities and staff directly to support their missions, or at least employ some of the veterans of the NASA MOD staff after they are dismissed following the Shuttle's retirement. While there is undoubtedly value in their body of knowledge, it remains to be seen if their experiences in operating systems designed 35 years ago will translate to launch systems in development now. It will be very interesting to observe to what degree today's newcomers will be successful in creating truly turn-key space lift solutions. If however, they slip back into employing a standing army of their own, this will undoubtedly imply the loss of one of the biggest potentials for improvement in the current way of doing business in space transportation.