Preflight Interview: Daniel Tani

The STS-108 Crew Interviews with Dan Tani, mission specialist.

The STS-108 Crew Interviews with Dan Tani, Mission Specialist 2 on this trip to the International Space Station. Dan, your mission is designated UF-1, for Utilization Flight-1. Tell me what that means as far as the space station program is concerned and in a nutshell, what you and your STS-108 crewmates are going to space to do.

Well, the utilization flights were originally designed as the flights where we, primarily, bring up science and crews and exchange the science modules and exchange the crews. It's meant to be really the turning point from assembly to the real utilization of the station. And, although we have done, obviously, crew transfers and brought up science modules in the past year and a half this is the first flight that is designated and designed to be primarily with the prime purpose of doing crew exchange and exchanging science. So, we see it as an exciting point in the program where the focus of the whole space station program turns from assembly-getting the Laboratory up and operating, checked out-to really trying to utilize the Laboratory, the incredible science platform we have in space, and putting the focus now more on really using this laboratory. So that's what's really exciting about UF-1.

STS-108 is going to be your first mission as a member of the flight crew. What's it like to hear the words that you've been assigned to fly in space?

It's unbelievable; unbelievable! I remember when I got the call that I was chosen to be an astronaut, and there was a lot of buildup to that-I had interviewed, we were waiting, day by day, waiting for that call; I got the call and hearing the words that I was going to be an astronaut were just thrilling, obviously. But when we got here we knew the wait was going to be a long time: there are forty-four of us in our class all of us can't fly first, there're a lot of other astronauts in the corps. So, I knew the wait was going to be a long time, and when you get into becoming an astronaut candidate for a couple of years and then being an astronaut, a staff astronaut working at the Johnson Space Center here you kind of get into this routine of accepting your job as a ground job. And I got the call on a Sunday morning and when the chief of the astronauts gave me a call and asked me if I was doing anything for the next year and if I wanted to fly in space it was obvious that, it was, it was shocking to me, and I remember walking around in a daze for a couple of days, realizing that even though I knew that my job was to train to go into space here I was and I was really going to do it. And it was more shocking than I would've thought, and, I was a, it was certainly a highlight. It was an incredible event, and I still remember the feelings and the emotions that went through me.

Tell me how you got to be an astronaut anyway. What did you do to become somebody who was "astronaut material"?

I really think there are two types of astronauts. I think there are astronauts that know from an early age that they want to be an astronaut, and they're fascinated with space and that's the way they want to steer their career and they get very fortunate and get selected to be astronauts. I'm not one of those people. I certainly did like space, I liked rockets, I liked machinery, I liked engineering, but my first job in space was with a space contractor right out of undergraduate, and I chose them frankly, because they were a great company that was located really close to a beach. And I figured, I, I've been going to school, a place where it snows four or five months of the year, and I think I can spend some time at this, at the beach. And at that job I actually got to work with some astronauts, and that was my first kind of foray into manned space learning, learning what it was like to be an astronaut and seeing them work but I still didn't think I'd, really could become an astronaut. I went back to graduate school and got a master's degree and worked for another aerospace company, and just decided well, we had heard that they were taking applications to be astronauts and I thought, well, that would be a great job to have: I mean, I now know a couple of [them] and I've worked with them, they seem like great people, and might as well send the application in. So -kind of on a whim, frankly-and I guess two-and-a-half years after that I got a call for an interview, and after that the ball was rolling, and, boy, here I am and it seems just like yesterday when I thought, boy, wouldn't it be fun to apply to be an astronaut.

So, it wasn't for you a boyhood dream.

It really wasn't. Certainly if you would ask me when I was a boy if I wanted to be an astronaut I would've said sure; but, you know, who doesn't, in my mind. So I didn't think it was a realistic kind of dream. And you know, when I applied to be an astronaut I looked at … everything I had done-the schools I'd gone to and the jobs I'd had-and I thought, well, you know, I think I have a good enough résumé here to send in, and at least get an interview. … Not in my wildest dreams would I have thought that I would've been selected.

As you think back on it who, Dan, for you are the people that have been or, or still are the, the most significant influences in your life.

Well I would really have to say it's my family. And that's probably a pretty pat answer but I get a lot of inspiration from my family. I've got three brothers and a sister; I'm the youngest…they're all sort of parents to me. …I look at my parents-my parents were born in California, and during World War II, because they were Japanese or Japanese-American, even though they were born in the United States, they were relocated to Utah for two-and-a-half years, and I think, boy, here I am one generation later I get to represent not only the United States but the whole world by going into space, and yet just a generation ago my parents were actually interned during the war because of their nationality. So that's, it's a real point of pride, not only for my country, that enables me to do that, but for my parents that sort of went through that process and still here I am able to go into space. My brothers and sisters are just great. They helped raise me because I'm younger than they, so much younger than they are, essentially. And I got a lot of influence about interests in science, interest in music from them. So I continue to draw inspiration and support from my whole family. So I really have, would have to say that they're the biggest influences in my life.

So, you are just the second Japanese-American astronaut ever.

That's right, yeah. El Onizuka who was on the Challenger on that awful day, was the first Japanese-American astronaut, and I'm very proud to sort of follow in his footsteps by continuing to be a representative for the Japanese-American community here in space.

As a member of the shuttle flight crew, you bring a range of talents; you, as a group, have to have all the talents that it takes to get the job done. Tell me what'll be your top jobs on this mission, and what it's been like for you to spend this year working with these three other people to get ready to fly.

Well, my big jobs on this flight, as the MS2, are to be, to act as the Flight Engineer. So, essentially the four of us in the cockpit-and that would be Dom and Mark and Linda and myself- are the folks in charge of ascent, getting the orbiter into orbit, and landing, bringing it safely home to land. As the Flight Engineer position I sit right between Mark and Dom, the Commander and the Pilot and I have a good overview, visual overview, of the cockpit. And in that role I also am sort of the procedure keeper, making sure I know what procedures they're in and what situation the orbiter's in, and so, but frankly Dom and Mark are so good I find myself often trying to figure out what they're doing and keeping up with them. But really as my role, and I do concentrate on making sure I understand the big picture of what's going on in the orbiter and what procedures need to be followed up. My other roles on this mission would be to be one of the spacewalkers: it looks like right now like we'll be doing an EVA, and to go outside with Linda as the lead spacewalker will be great- she's been out on an EVA before, and I'm really looking to her for her experience and her insight. I'm also in charge of the computer network on board the shuttle: we have, we carry seven or eight laptops, and we network all them, and that network has to be up and operational for us to get our files and the procedures and for them, for people on the ground to get all their science. I have all sorts of other little tasks, …I take care of one of the on board experiments. So, you're right, there are a whole mix of talents and a mix of abilities, and hopefully, I'm bringing the strengths to the team that they need. And I, I feel like we've got a really good team.

That team, over the time that you've been training, you've had to coordinate what you're doing with two other crews: the Expedition crew that you're bringing to orbit as well as the one that you're bringing home, the folks who are up there right now. How do you deal with the challenge of trying to keep up to speed on all the jobs that you're going to have to do when some of the people who are involved can't spend their time doing that with you?

Yeah. That's an excellent point. It is very difficult, especially since the three, you're right, that we're going to bring home are already in orbit, and they're very busy and they were training, they've been training for their mission for years. So, one of the things that Dom, our Commander, did is as soon as we got assigned, he started trying to get as much of their time as possible. And then also incorporating the time of the increment four people that we're bringing up. You do the best you can because all the Expedition, the increment crews, are very busy in their training-they have [another] whole vehicle they have to learn how to operate. And to fit in the training, the combined training that's going to be required for the joint operations is a real challenge. I think one of the things that we did early on is socialize with them: we had parties, and dinner parties, with both increment crews to get to know them as people; obviously, we know the American astronauts better than the cosmonauts, but it was great to get to know the cosmonauts in a social atmosphere, feel comfortable, consider them very good friends, and it makes the working atmosphere much better. So, I think that was important to do early on. now we'll start e-mailing and conferencing with Frank and Mikhail and Vlad on orbit and keep them up-to-date with our training and find out how they're doing. So hopefully when we go up there, it won't be like we've been out of touch for, for four, four or five months; it'll be like a continuation of our working relationship.

In order to do all of this job, your first big hurdle after the launch is going to be to dock Endeavour to the International Space Station. Tell me about, first of all, your role on the team, and give us a description of how you accomplish the docking.

Well, my role in, during rendezvous will be the procedure keeper. [It's] similar to my MS2 role during ascent and landing; I'm the one who sort of has the overview of the procedure. Dom is doing the flying, Mark is working the computer program that shows us the relationship between the shuttle and the station and what the path will be. Linda is working the cameras and a thing called a handheld laser, to get range rate. I'm the person to make sure that all those players are following the procedure, that we're doing all the right things, that we're talking to the ground at the right time, so that's my role. Rendezvousing two vehicles, two massive vehicles that are going seventeen-and-a-half thousand miles an hour each is a real challenge, and it's when I, as I've learned about rendezvous I think it's incredible that they had this figured out thirty years ago. But basically we get behind the station a couple of hundred miles, we do a series of burns that bring us closer and closer and closer, and it gets real critical around forty miles away: we do a burn that gets us within eight miles away, and then we creep in at we creep in under it at a couple thousand feet, we come up what's called the R-bar from-which is the line between the center of the Earth and the station-and then at about six-hundred feet we do a semicircle so that we're in front of it now, and then we come in and we dock these two vehicles going seventeen-and-a-half thousand miles an hour, we bring [them] in at .1 feet per second. And it's just amazing to me but the crews that have done it show that it can be possible, show that it can be done, and our, in our sims with Dom and Mark at the controls they bring that thing in to a docking every time.

Now after the docking happens, the real docking happens, the top priority of your mission becomes the exchange of the crews. The first time crews were exchanged, on STS-102, they exchanged one at a time over several days, but in August the Expedition 3, Expedition 3 crew all transferred over on the same day. How's it going to happen on this mission?

It's similar to the last crew transfer where we will transfer the whole crew on one day. The first transfer was a little different because the increment crew, the Expedition crew that was on the new crew, was actually involved in some of the EVAs. So, since the EVAs came out of the shuttle, they had to stagger their transfer so that some of the crewmembers could be doing the EVAs out of the shuttle while the others were transferring over. The preferred way, I believe the preferred way, to do it is to do it all in one day. That way each crew has a home ship as a member of a crew. If you stagger them and let me, I should explain when, when we do this crew transfer the thing that makes the crew transfer official is when the space station crewmember puts their personal seat into the Soyuz return vehicle, because that's their emergency ride home, so at any moment in time they know exactly whether they should be going home in a Soyuz or they should be going home in a shuttle. So, as soon as that happens, that's their home, so if they put their seat liner in a Soyuz then that person has the station as their home. We want to do that all three in one day so that the crew stays together so that in a case of an extreme emergency, where we have to undock the shuttle from the station, the whole crew can stay together in the station or in the shuttle. So that's our plan, to do that all in one day, and that way the crews can stay together in their home vehicle should an emergency happen.

Along with delivering a new crew to the station, your mission is delivering supplies and equipment, and much of that's being carried out inside the Multipurpose Logistics Module, Raffaello. First of all, describe, if you will, what you're going to be doing on the day after docking when it's the shuttle crew's job to install that MPLM onto the station's Unity module.

Well, while Linda is lifting this, the MPLM out of the payload bay and berthing it to the space station, I'll be running a piece of equipment created by the, actually it's a program using the shuttle equipment created by the Canadians, the Canadian Space Agency called OSVS, Orbiter Space Vision System. And that's a visual backup and a confirmation, of the exact location of the MPLM relative to the space station so that we can ensure a precise docking. So that's one of my jobs is to run the SVS, the OSVS. Immediately after the MPLM is mated to the space station my job is then to go into the space station and outfit what's called the vestibule, and that's the area between the MPLM and the space station hooking up electrical and air connections between the two, the MPLM and the station.

And both of these jobs, both the, the use of the shuttle robot arm to move the module itself and the outfitting of the vestibule, sound relatively straightforward but they take quite a while. It takes most of the day, right?

Yeah. It'll take most of the day after docking. It's the MPLM probably weighs, it weighs thousands of pounds-I don't know exactly how much it weighs-and you just don't want to whip this thing up and plug it in and, nor is it a very simple mechanism that mates both the MPLM to the shuttle and the MPLM to the station; those aren't, those are not trivial little mechanisms. So we certainly and obviously take our time when we do that; it's a fairly long procedure to pull this thing out of the payload bay, and it's a fairly long procedure to mate it to the station and then tighten the sixteen bolts that are required to create an airtight seal there. So, it will take most of the day, we dedicate that whole day to the MPLM.

Have you gotten any tips from the crews that have done it on the missions before you?

We sure have, yeah. One of the things they really emphasize is passing down knowledge, and in fact just today we were talking to the Commander of the 105 flight, getting his insights on transfer ops. I mean, we even though we have very difficult objectives the-the rendezvous and the EVA-most of our time is spent in transfer operations, so we have to do that efficiently. Basically, this MPLM is a moving van, and we're going to move one family into a house and move the other family out of that house in three or four docked days. And if you think about how long it takes you to move into a new apartment, new house you have to really plan, you have to plan ahead, be very ready, have everything ready to go, and know exactly where everything needs to go. So, you know, we'll spend, we'll spend a lot of our time, most of our time docked, doing transfer operations.

Well, it's, four or five days in your timeline that are set aside to unload the items that are in the MPLM and then to pack it up again. Give us a sense of the kinds of supplies and logistics that you'll be delivering-and recognizing the fact that what's actually in there when you launch may change between now and then, depending on what's needed-what are the kinds of things that you're going to be delivering and what do you bring back down?

Well again similar to the moving analogy, we're bringing lots of supplies that the crews will need to live there: their clothes, their food, their personal items, so that's probably the majority of items that we'll be bringing. We're also bringing science and science modules: we're bringing equipment for their CHeCS racks, which is the health, environmental, or the health evaluation system; we're bringing up some exercise equipment to help keep the increment crew in shape and ready for life back on Earth. There's all sorts of miscellaneous things that they need to run the station. You know, I'm sorry I can't talk about the specifics because I don't know the specifics of every item that we're bringing but again, if you think about everything that you need to live in a house move, pulling the van up to the front and moving it all in there's quite a few, there's an enormous number of items that you bring up that we need, not only to live there but to start running a full science a full laboratory to run science experiments.

The plans for the spacewalks on your mission have changed during the time that you've been training because of a change of circumstances on orbit. Dan, what are the current plans for EVA on STS-108, and what are the circumstances that have driven the changes?

Well UF-1 was always designated as a flight where repairs could be slipped in at last minute, depending on how the station was acting, you know, all the particulars. So instead of having particular EVAs laid out for this flight, it was kind of left open and sort of what was really needed. And a couple of months ago, six months ago or something, it looked like what was really needed was to replace these things called BMRRMs-they're the beta motors that move the solar arrays. They've been acting up, the engineers don't quite understand exactly what's going on with them, and the initial thought was we'd replace them. So we've been training to replace one of these BMRRMs for several months now. Well they, with a lot of analysis-these engineers have been working very hard-analysis they think that the more conservative way to go for right now would be to protect them thermally because it may be a thermal issue. So what they've developed are blankets that we'll, we will put around each one of these BMRRM, or at the beta gimbal housing, actually to see if we can stabilize the thermal environment, and it, maybe that will solve this issue that they're seeing, this fluctuation in currents that they're seeing. And that would be a lot less intrusive than actually going in and replacing a whole large, heavy, expensive, and complicated piece of machinery like the BMRRM.

The BMRRMs, as you said, are in the, inside the Beta Gimbal Assemblies, which are at the business end of these giant solar arrays, with thirty kilowatts of direct power. Are there special safety precautions involved for you and Linda to be working up there?

Well, aside from all the safety precautions of a typical EVA you're right: we're out there where a lot of power is being generated and transferred, and unlike the, the BMRRM replacement and that we had been training for, which is very complicated because you're actually unplugging all of the power, no power will need to be interrupted. We will have to have the solar arrays stopped from moving, since we're putting a blanket around them, around the motor, and we obviously don't want it turning while we're up there. So they'll have to stop the motors from turning, but no other special electronic or electrical power precautions are really going to be required other than the typical EVA kind of precautions.

If you would then, take us along out the airlock with you and walk us through what you and Linda are going to do for these, scheduled to do in these four hours.

You bet. Linda and I will go out of the shuttle airlock hatch, and Linda will be first, and I'll follow. We've got a really snazzy system of getting up to the work site, where we'll climb up to the sill of the, or the edge of, of the shuttle's payload bay, where Mark will have the robot arm waiting for us; we'll clamp, we'll safety-tether onto the arm and hold onto the arm, and Mark drives us up to the P6 truss where we're going to be doing our, our work. So we're looking forward to a fun ride there with a great view. We'll jump off at the P6, and we'll climb another thirty feet or so up to the BMRRM work site, or the very tip, and Linda and I will work together on unrolling and installing each one of these blankets on each one of the two BMRRMs. And then we'll come back and get back on the arm go to another work site called the Z1 truss, or Z1 structure, and then we have a bunch of tasks that we have planned where we can help future crews out-get-ahead tasks, we call them, and we have a little laundry list of those get-ahead tasks… picking up some tools and taking some pictures. And we'll go ahead and do those at the Z1, get back on the arm, get the free ride back to the shuttle come back in, and go inside, and that'll be a long day. That'll be, it's a four-hour EVA, but it'll be a lot of work, a lot of coordination, and I'm really looking forward to it.

It also will be your first spacewalk; can you describe your feelings as you look forward to getting to walk outside in Earth orbit?

Well, you know, I've looked forward to this for a long time, and until I'm really out the door, I really won't probably appreciate how great it'll be. You know, EVA's are very complicated, and but the thought of being pretty much my own satellite out there- when you're EVA, we're not, we don't have hoses of air and power that go back to the space shuttle, we have a little, thin cable just as a safety tether; everything that we need is on our backs: our water, our cooling, our power communications, everything. So, for a while there I'll be my own little satellite and that's really exciting to me, and it's quite an awesome thought. So, I can't really tell you what it's going to be like. I certainly have some thoughts but I'll let you know when I get back.

During this flight the shuttle crew has got a few science payloads of its own on board Endeavour; that includes a satellite that's going to be deployed near the end of the mission. Tell me about STARSHINE and what it is that you folks do to send it on its way.

Well, I think STARSHINE's a great payload. It's basically a nineteen-inch disco ball, is how most people can identify with it: it's an aluminum ball with hundreds of mirrors glued on to it. And those mirrors not only…well, those mirrors represent thousands and thousands of schoolchildren around the world. The person that puts the STARSHINE project together mails out small, unpolished mirrors to schools that want to participate; the schools polish these mirrors and send them back and then they get glued on to this disco ball. And the reason the satellite exists is so kids, and even adults, can get involved in the science of space at almost all levels. What we'll do is we will deploy the STARSHINE out of the payload bay. It's a, we'll put the payload, we'll put the space shuttle in a particular attitude and we throw a couple of switches and springs will eject this ball out of the payload bay, and a couple of minutes later it'll start slowly spinning because it has on-board thrusters. Well, since it's a highly reflective ball of mirrors every time it comes up over the horizon, anybody on the ground should easily see it. Since it's spinning, it should sparkle, almost, as it goes across the sky. You can go to a website and find out exactly when you can expect it to come over your horizon, and in fact kids can sight it, tell it, figure out when it goes by a particular star, for instance, write that into the website, and they can track exactly the orbit of the STARSHINE around the Earth. it has no purpose other than to be seen and to be observed, and, for primarily schoolchildren to learn about orbital mechanics, about drag, about taking data-basic science. It's a terrific satellite and I'm really excited to be a part of that.

There are a number of other experiments riding on the Hitchhiker carrier out in the payload bay; tell me about the goals of some of those investigations.

Well, there are many. We carry what are called GAS cans-Get-Away Specials, g-a-s cans-and the GAS can program is terrific because it allows small colleges, even elementary schools to get involved in microgravity science by creating payloads that fit in these cans. Frankly we're probably carrying fifty or sixty experiments in probably about a dozen different GAS cans. And our interface, the crew interface to those is usually very limited to switching on some heater power, maybe camera power or sending them basic, very simple commands through a computer. I know of a couple that I can think of right off the top of my head. One is called COLLIDE, and it will actually impact a particle into a little bed of sand and see how the, what the dispersal pattern looks like for some basic geology types of research. Gosh, others are just samples that they want to see how microgravity affects you know, ten days of microgravity affects them. So there're very, very many experiments-unfortunately we have very little insight into exactly what they're researching. We look forward to talking to the principal investigators as we get more payload training and finding out exactly what's going on inside of [them], but again, it's a terrific way for people to access microgravity science.

On this flight the shuttle crew's responsible for tending to a couple of space station experiments that are going to be on Endeavour's middeck; one of them's testing a piece of hardware called the Avian Development Facility. Tell me about what's going on with this experiment during your flight, and how that's to contribute to future station research.

Actually the Avian is one of the things I'll be responsible for. It's an experiment using Japanese quail eggs, and unbeknownst to me Japanese quails develop their neurological system as eggs, develop in a very predictable way. And the question is, how will they develop, how would they develop, in a zero g environment? So, they've developed a module that we'll carry in the middeck that has eighteen eggs that will obviously experience zero g for eleven or twelve days; on top of that is eighteen more eggs that they will spin to simulate the acceleration of one gravity; and then they will also have some controls on the ground. And, the question will be, how do the neurological systems of the eggs in zero g develop differently over those eleven days than the neurological systems of the spinning eggs and the ones on the ground? And, this is just basic research for creating life in a zero g environment and seeing what are the issues, what are the, what are the questions that we need to ask about basic cell development, basic neurological development in space. So I think it's one of these very small, early stepping-stones to some significant research on the station.

Also on the shuttle middeck there's a commercial experiment with a goal of improved treatment for osteoporosis and bone cancer. Tell me about that one, again, and what you and your crewmates do to tend this experiment.

Sure. One of the big challenges of spaceflight of living in zero g, is that your bones have very little forces on them. Here on Earth as you stand and you walk your bones are stressed or they have forces on them, and your body is smart enough to regenerate and make those bones stronger based on how much stress you put on [them]. Well, in the absence of gravity you don't have forces on your bones and so your bones actually tend to wither away. One of the commercial, one of the companies that is looking into this is, has created this experiment, and for this experiment we'll be using mice. And they will give them they'll give a subset of these mice, a particular drug and expose them to the zero g environment for eleven days, and they'll look at the effects of this bone loss over those eleven days. And this is something we're really going to have [to] investigate eventually for humans because to go to Mars, right now it takes about nine or ten months, and if you lose one-and-a-half percent of your bone mass in nine or ten months you could be in, you wouldn't be in great shape once you got to Mars to get out there and do a lot of science on Mars. So we want to get on top of this and figure out how to prohibit this bone loss, and this would be again, a great piece of basic research towards that goal.

That is an awful lot of stuff crammed into eleven days or so; you going to have any fun?

Well, we certainly plan to. We look at our flight plan and it is packed, and, but you look at our training schedule for the last year, and it has been packed, too. And I'll tell you: working with my crew- Dom, Mark, and Linda and the Expedition crews-has been so much fun; we manage to pack our fun in regardless of how busy we are. I believe I couldn't be happier to work; I couldn't be happier with a crew I really enjoy every single one of [them], and we generally have a good time together. So I certainly anticipate, no matter how hard we're working and no matter how busy they've got us that we'll be really having a great time.

It's been almost one year now since the first permanent residents of the ISS arrived on orbit. And in that time we've gotten to the point where we're now routinely swapping out crews and delivering supplies and conducting science on a station that can almost take care of itself. Dan, finally, give me your perspective from that point of view now on where you see the International Space Station program taking us into the short-term future and into the long-term future.

Well, I would say that the short-term future is to continue the final additions to the space station; in the next couple of years, we're going to see the truss being built, and the truss is the big backbone where we'll be able to hang huge solar arrays; we'll increase our power by four times. And that will give us all the power we'll need for some of the most complex experiments that we'd like to run up there. We'll learn, get all the bugs out of the system and we'll have a fully functional, very sophisticated, high-powered laboratory that we can use for incredible types of science. I would say for the long term we're going to look at this; we're going to look back at this time of science exploration, or space exploration, as a, as the first stepping-stone to learning to live off of our planet. Of course we'd all love to go back to the moon or off to Mars, explore places that no humans have ever seen before. But in an equally important role we're doing it as an international endeavor- this is not the Americans going to space, this is the world living, learning to live together and work together, hard building very complex machines overcoming barriers of language and culture to create something incredibly difficult but incredibly rewarding. So we're taking the first baby steps here but I see nothing but a very hopeful future for exploring the rest of the universe and becoming a stronger community as a world.