Preflight Interview: Mark Kelly

The STS-108 Crew Interviews with Mark Kelly, pilot.

The STS-108 Crew Interviews with Mark Kelly, the Pilot of Endeavour on this mission to the International Space Station. Mark, this mission is designated UF-1; it means Utilization Flight-1. But can you tell me what that means as far as the space station program's concerned, and, in a nutshell, what STS-108 is going to do?

Well, we were designated the first Utilization Flight a long time ago, and it was originally designed to be the first flight that really transfers a lot of equipment and science up to the International Space Station, and swaps out a crew at the same time. As most people know, the crew swap-outs started occurring almost a year ago; we've had a crew on orbit for a year now. But the distinction with our flight, I would say, is, it's kind of like a bridge between the assembly era, or the initial assembly phase of the space station, and now the utilization or the operation part of the space station.

STS-108 is going to be your first mission as a member of the flight crew. What was it like to get the word that you were going to get to fly in space?

Well, the chief of the Astronaut Office, Charlie Precourt, gave me a call at home and I caught him on the, saw him on the caller ID, and I had a kind of an idea that he was about to make a flight assignment so I pretty much knew what it was about even before I answered the phone. So that was a good feeling. And I almost said to him, before saying hello, that yeah, I'll take it. So, it was a good feeling getting a phone call and finding out what mission you were going to be on and who the rest of the crew was. I was really excited about that.

Tell me how you got to become an astronaut anyway. I mean, what did you do to become a guy who was "astronaut material"?

Well, I don't know so much about "astronaut material" per se, but my background, I started out, I went to the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy and then a few days after graduation in 1986, I started flight school with the Navy. And started flying A-6s, A-6 Intruders, and I flew those off the aircraft carrier Midway in Japan. Following that I went to grad school and Test Pilot School after that, and while I was an instructor at the Naval Test Pilot School is when I was selected to come down here.

Did your desire to be an astronaut only come when you were a test pilot instructor, or how far back does that go?

You know, that's one thing that's kind of hard, at least for me, to determine exactly when, you know, I made the decision. It was something always in the back of my mind, even as a kid, but I always thought that it was so unlikely that I should probably concentrate in other areas. And fortunately, you know, things worked out and I wound up doing things I liked, and those were the right things to do to eventually get here.

For instance?

For instance being a pilot in the Navy…all the shuttle Pilots and Commanders are military tactical aviators and test pilots. So, since, you know, that was a goal of mine, independent of ever being an astronaut, and it was something I enjoyed, and, but it also just happened to be, you know, one of the big qualifications to be the Commander or Pilot of the shuttle.

You are coming to this flight with the distinction also of being the first astronaut in history who's had a twin brother who's already flown in space, your brother Scott, who flew to the Hubble Space Telescope. Did that experience, in going through it as he was preparing to fly, help you get ready for your first flight?

I think it does in some respects, in some of the smaller things that you don't get trained on. And I think I probably have a little bit more perspective maybe than your average first flier on the small things and how I might react to "them" just from talking to my brother, you know, pretty much every weekend about it, especially since I've been assigned. You know, there's so much to train on for a shuttle flight and that the training division, even though they do a, you know, an absolutely outstanding job, there're things there that just aren't a lot of time to cover. And those are the things I normally find out from my brother, you know, in the backyard on a weekend. And so that's kind of a, you know, one of the, the good points for me about having my brother also have flown already.

As you look back on your astronaut and Navy career and college and further back, are there particular people that you can see were or maybe still are the strong, significant influences in you getting to where you are?

[Yes.] I think, you know, my parents, both of [them], are, have always been very supportive of my brother and I in whatever we wanted to do, and pretty much gave us a lot of freedom, even as kids in high school to pursue things and maybe the freedom that you wouldn't expect out of that other parents might give their kids. So I thought that that was, that was very helpful. As role models first, actually probably the second commanding officer I had in a squadron, a VA-115 in Japan, who was my CO when we went into combat in Desert Storm, a guy by the name of Terry Toms, who's a retired Navy captain. You know, I look up to him and, as a leader, and one day when I'm in a leadership position, he's the kind of guy, the kind of leader, I think I would want to be.

Members of a shuttle flight crew have to possess a whole range of talents in order to get the job done. Tell me about what'll be your top jobs on this mission, and what it's been like to spend the last year with these three other people learning how to do those things.

Well, first off, my number one job is as the Pilot of Endeavour. I have a lot of responsibility with all the systems on the orbiter: the main engines, the electrical system, the hydraulic system, reaction control system, orbital maneuvering engines…that for launch and landing that stuff's on my side of the cockpit. My other main job as the Pilot is to back up the Commander in the flying of the orbiter. I'll be at the controls of Endeavour for the undock and flyaround portion of the flight so that's taken a lot of my time now. But in addition to that, I'm also the arm operator for part of the mission so I'm pretty busy training for those kind of things. To answer the second part of your question about training with a crew of people in my case, you know, it's been pretty much Dom, Dan, and Linda for a good portion of this flight. We don't get a lot of time with the Expedition crew, the crew we're bringing up or the one that's up there now. But it's been a great experience; they're all very, very talented and really good at their jobs, and it's been a lot of fun.

Let me get you to pursue a point you just started there. You're not only working with three shuttle crewmates, but there's an Expedition crew you're bringing with you, an Expedition crew that you'll be bringing home, the three folks who are already up there. What kind of challenge is it to try to coordinate all your work with some people that you can't really talk to?

It's really a huge challenge. Those guys have been training for a lot longer than we have. I mean, we were assigned in January; Carl and Dan were assigned probably four years ago to this flight, and Frank Culbertson, the Commander that's on the space station right now, was assigned probably about two to two-and-a-half years ago, I'd guess. And they're training for pretty much a four-month flight; we're training for eleven days. So they're spending most of their time training for that four-month increment on the space station. For us to get them to come to some of our training events for the eleven-day mission that we're going to be conducting to bring [them] up or bring [them] back is difficult. And we don't get a lot of time with them, so we try to make the best use of the few number of hours we get to train with these guys. In the case of Frank, Vladimir, and Mikhail Tyurin, that are on the space station right now, we're done training with them, and we're not going to see those guys again until about two-and-a-half months from now, when we meet [them] on orbit.

Do you get any chance to communicate with them now to prepare for those eleven days?

I haven't yet, but our Commander, Dom Gorie, is, will likely, I don't know if he has already, but he'll probably go over to the Mission Control Center and talk to Frank on orbit. And we can communicate via e-mail, too, so that's a pretty valuable tool for us, especially in the weeks coming up to launch.

In order to do this job that we're going to discuss in more detail, the first big hurdle after launch will be to dock Endeavour to the space station. Tell me what your job is as part of the team for rendezvous and docking, and give us a little description of how that's accomplished.

Well, actually, you know, we're going to dock on day 3, but even way back on launch day 1, you know, our launch is, the trajectory is designed for, basically for the rendezvous. And on day 2, we'll do some rendezvous burns to phase correctly with the space station, and on day 3 is when we actually will dock. And early on that day we'll prepare the, actually the day before, we'll start preparing the orbiter for the rendezvous phase: setting the computers up exactly how we'll, we want [them], checking out some tools for rendezvous. And then that morning we'll start into the, what's called the rendezvous timeline, and we have a separate book about this big that, you know, pretty much gives us the procedures for the rendezvous, which will take several hours, and that takes us all the way to docking. My primary responsibility for the first portion of that is to back up the Commander in the rendezvous checklist, and then for the final four burns before we take over manually, I'll be, I'll move over to the Commander's seat and I'll be performing those burns.

Because the Commander will be flying…

Yes.

…from the back.

The Commander will be in the back getting ready to start flying. He moves from his seat to the back after, actually right before a burn that's called MC1, and I'll burn MC1 through 4, and while I'm doing that the Commander, Dom Gorie, will be in the aft flight deck getting ready to take over manually. Now by that point, he can see the space station pretty clearly; it's kind of like a dot, it's pretty far away still but that's where he has a chance to get ready to take over manually. And at that point, you know, which is still probably a good, an hour before docking, he'll fly Endeavour manually all the way to what's called the R-bar, which is right underneath the space station, and then we'll do a maneuver to get to the V-bar, which is on the velocity vector, and then from the V-bar about three-or-four-hundred feet out, we'll fly in and dock with Alpha.

Is that a matter of, once you're up in front of the station, essentially, slowing down and letting the station catch up, or does the shuttle back up to it?

You, you're pretty much backing up to it. You're, I mean, obviously when you think of two things going at 17,500 miles per hour, your backing up to it is really just slowing down a little bit and it's catching up to you. But from your perspective you're driving towards the space station.

After the docking, top priority is going to become the exchange of the Expedition crews. Back on STS-102, the crews were swapped out one member at a time over a space of several days, but in the most recent exchange, in August, all three crewmembers moved over onto the station on one day. What's going to happen on your mission? What, and what's the reason for doing it one way or the other?

[Yes], our current plan is to swap [them] out all at once, and that's to keep the integrity of the crew together, and also maybe in case of an emergency that those three guys are together and we leave the right three guys on the other side of the hatch. Now, that, that's very unlikely and, but it's important to keep those crews together and not mix [them] up. When we do an EVA, it looks like our EVA is going to go out of the shuttle airlock, so we'll have to close the hatch between the space shuttle and the space station for about a day. And we want to keep, especially during that period, want to keep, you know, the third Expedition crew on one side of the hatch and the fourth crew on the other and keep [them] together.

And are you going to be involved with helping them move the Soyuz spaceship equipment that's required to make that exchange?

I might be. It's depends exactly…we're all involved in the transfer of stuff from the middeck and from the MPLM into the station and then back, all ten of us essentially. But when that stuff gets moved on that day, I'm not quite sure if I'm timelined to do that.

Well, it's all, as you say, part of moving things not only from the shuttle but from inside the Multipurpose Logistics Module, which is to be attached to the station on that day after docking. Describe that procedure for us, if you will, and how you're going to be involved in the job of lifting that Raffaello module up and putting it onto the station.

Well, after we dock and open the hatch, and we'll start transferring some middeck payloads pretty much right off the bat, we'll start sending stuff over. And then later on in the mission the next day, we'll take Raffaello, the Multipurpose Logistics Module, out of the payload bay, and Linda will do that with the robot arm and I'll back her up as the R2 or backup arm operator, and we'll install that on the space station. That whole procedure will take a few hours. And shortly after that we'll open the hatch and we'll start unloading the module, and we'll get everything out of it, and we'll temporarily stow it on the space station somewhere, and then we'll start, hopefully immediately if it all works out as we've planned, we'll start moving stuff back into the MPLM and kind of temporarily put it in different areas before we have to reload all the drawers and the racks with all these bags. And a lot of the stuff we're transferring is actually pretty small packages of all different kinds of supplies.

Give us a sense of the nature of what you're delivering.

Well a big portion of it is food and clothing, equipment for experiments-you know, cables, experiments themselves-but on this flight, we're not-as on previous flights, there were large experiment racks that came out of the MPLM, that could be, you know, where you, where you were able to move, even though it was a big, bulky object, you were able to move a good portion of the equipment that's in there rather quickly-in our case we have a lot of small bags of equipment, and it's anticipated that it's going to take a little bit longer for us to unload our MPLM and then reload it later in the mission.

Once it's reloaded later in the mission, of course it's got to be put back because it's reusable; it's coming home. And you get to do that job.

[Yes], that's one of my big jobs as the arm operator, which is really a great opportunity to get to actually move a module around on my first flight-especially being the Pilot…not every arm, not every Pilot gets to be an arm operator. So I feel pretty fortunate to be given that opportunity. We'll basically take the shuttle arm up to the MPLM, which sits on the Node; and after we grapple it, we'll release the MPLM from the space station and then I'll fly it back down on the end of the arm and maneuver it into the payload bay. And once we get it all latched in the back of the payload bay, then we'll ungrapple the arm, and that's pretty much it-it takes a lot longer than me describing it, though.

Well, it's probably a little harder than the way you've described it, too. What are the tricks about it? Is, do you just retrace the steps from when it was unberthed and docked?

It's a little bit different, taking it down than it is bringing it up, and there are different things you've got to be aware of and careful. The arm has restrictions in the angles that certain joints can move in, and that's something you've got to be real, very aware of as you bring it back down, that you don't get the shuttle arm in a position that might be hard to get it out of.

You made mention of the fact that once it's time to leave the station you, as the Pilot, will get to get your hands on the controls. Tell me about what you do, and what it, you imagine it will be like to fly a shuttle in space.

Well, we'll start out back in that same big rendezvous book that I talked about for the undocking and flyaround. And the whole crew will be on the flight deck, the aft flight deck, of the orbiter, and we'll initially start it by commanding the docking system to undock, and when we get physical separation between the space station and space shuttle, I'll start firing some jets, and we'll move out to about four-hundred-fifty feet in front of the space station, and then we'll command through an automatic system, we'll command the shuttle to start pitching over, and when we pitch over then I'll start translating to keep basically the top of the space shuttle pointing right at the space station. And that'll allow us to fly this 360-degree maneuver all the way around the station: we can survey the outside of it, take some pictures, and the engineers can use that later to determine the, you know, the status of certain components and if there's been any damage. And after that initial 360 degrees we'll go another 90 degrees, and from there we'll do a separation burn. And that whole procedure takes a good amount of time; it's a slow maneuver, it's kind of challenging, you don't have all the, all the tools that we use for rendezvous aren't always available for all the portions of the flyaround, so there's a, you know, there's a lot of manual flying involved, and we use a handheld laser for a lot of the data we need to determine the range and the closure or separation rate. So it'll be exciting, and I'm really looking forward to it.

Though the manual flying, as far as that's concerned, it's pretty much why you wanted to be an astronaut, isn't it?

Well, that, no; a lot of reasons. The space shuttle, a lot of things are automated-I mean, launch is pretty much hands off; the Commander lands it, then we manually fly the rendezvous and manually fly the undocking. But most of the time in space is actually spent doing other things, so the opportunities, when you do get to fly the space shuttle, it's pretty unique and I'm sure it'll be a lot of fun.

Let's talk a couple of minutes about some of those other things. On your way home you've got a science payload, a satellite to be deployed near the end of the mission. Tell me about STARSHINE and what you folks do to get it started on its mission.

[Yes.] This is the second STARSHINE that's being deployed, and it's a small payload that looks kind of like a disco ball. It's probably about that big [Kelly extends his arms fully side to side], and it's got a lot of mirrors on it that have been polished by students all around the world. And it's a, it's kind of a science experiment to teach students physics and engineering. And they, they'll use the STARSHINE, they'll track it as it reenters the…as it orbits the Earth and then reenters the atmosphere to determine the density of the atmosphere. Our role in it is basically just to get it into space. So after we undock from the space station, the following day, we'll deploy STARSHINE, and it's a pretty easy procedure: there's a few switches we have to throw, set up some cameras so we can get some nice pictures of it, and then finally Dan Tani, our MS2, will throw a switch, and it gets propelled out of the payload bay with a separation rate, and then we'll track it on our cameras as it, as it goes out of view.

As part of the plan is that there are students, people all over the world, who'll be involved in tracking it.

That's right. [Yes], it's one of the great things about this experiment is it was, it's rather inexpensive for the person who designed it and built it and, but it gets a lot of students all over the world-high school students, college students-involved in something that's in space and flew on the orbiter. So the education value of this payload's pretty high.

On this flight the shuttle crew's also responsible for tending to a couple of space station experiments that will actually be on board Endeavour; one of them's testing a piece of hardware called the Avian Development Facility. Tell me about what goes on with this experiment on your flight, and how what you're doing is designed to help research on the station in the future.

[Yes.] These experiments, a lot of people call them space station experiments but they'll never actually go to the space station. There's two of [them]: CBTM, which is an experiment with mice, and then the Avian Development Facility that you're describing here. But that, I'm not really familiar with that one because that's Dan Tani's experiment. Mine is the one with the mice that I'm more responsible for. But both these experiments are life science experiments that are being flown for, in the case of the experiment with the mice, for a company called Amgen, a pharmaceutical company. And they're both sponsored by Headquarters. And we'll kind of take care of these, in the case of the Avian Development Facility, these Japanese quail eggs while on orbit, and I'll take care of the mice until we…return [them] to Earth.

The experiment that you, that you referred to, it has to do with…it's a commercial experiment aimed at trying to improve some medical treatments, right?

[Yes.] That's correct. The CBTM we're going to fly a group of mice, half of which will have been injected with a new treatment for osteoporosis. And the reason we're flying [them] on the space shuttle is that while in zero gravity humans and all animals with bones essentially lose part of that bone mass while in space so it's really you know, a unique environment where you can trigger people-or, in this case, mice- that you know they're going to lose some of their bone mass. By injecting half of the mice with this, with this treatment, you expect when you, when you bring [them] back to Earth that they will not have lost the same amount of bone mass as the control group of mice. So eventually, you know, this experiment on the shuttle with this, with this drug by Amgen, might lead to better treatments for osteoporosis in people. That's the goal.

That's an awful . . . go ahead.

And that's the goal.

All, that's an awful lot of stuff in eleven days.

It is.

Are you guys going to have any fun?

I'm sure we're going to have a lot of fun, but we are going to be incredibly busy. I mean, our flight plan is loaded with a lot of stuff to do. An EVA; moving a module; unloading the MPLM; science experiments in the orbiter; a satellite we have to deploy at the end of the mission. So we're going to be very busy, working some long days, but I'm sure I'll be enjoying it.

At this point, it's been about a year since the first permanent residents of the International Space Station arrived on orbit. Well, since then we've gotten to where we change out crews and deliver supplies and are already doing science on a station that is pretty much self-sufficient now. So, finally, give me your perspective, if you would, your thoughts, on where you see the International Space Station taking us in the future, in the short term and in the long term.

In the short term, I'm you know, I'm really hoping and I see it getting completed. We have some budget…challenges right now with certain modules like getting a habitation module built, and it looks like we're going to work around that; also getting the CRV built and up there. You know, those are some challenges that we're facing right now. But I see us getting through that, getting the space station all the way out to completion, and what this means to people on Earth, I think, is it's going to improve life, you know the science we'll do over the next couple decades on the space station is going to improve [life] for all people on Earth. We're going to get a lot of valuable science out of this, this very unique environment, and it's something we have not seen before. It'll also be, in the long term, I expect to, it'll be a bridge to other things, you know-other exploration of our solar system, maybe a bridge to going back to the moon, or maybe even a bridge going on to Mars.

Do you want to go?

[Yes], I'd love to!