From Earth orbit to the Moon and Mars, explore the world of human spaceflight with NASA each week on the official podcast of the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Listen to in-depth conversations with the astronauts, scientists and engineers who make it possible.
On episode 377, Three flight controllers from NASA’s Mission Control Center discuss their roles and how they monitor and maintain a healthy crew aboard the International Space Station. This episode was recorded December 17, 2024.
Transcript
Nilufar Ramji (Host)
Houston, we have a podcast. Welcome to the official podcast of NASA’s Johnson Space Center. Episode 377, Mission Control, Crew Health Consoles. I’m Nilafur Ramji, and I’ll be your host today on this podcast, we bring in the experts, scientists, engineers and astronauts, all to let you know what’s going on in the world of human space flight and more. The Mission Control Center, or MCC is the iconic epicenter of space flight operations. A large talented team ensures mission success, whether in low Earth orbit or elsewhere like the moon or Mars. You may have actually seen depictions of Mission Control in the movies or video of it during a NASA broadcast, there are many seats which are called console positions in the International Space Station Flight Control Room, and each one of them has an important job. We are dedicating six episodes to covering the positions in the International Space Station mission control what they do and how they work together to keep the space station operating smoothly. This is our third episode in our mission control series, and in this episode, we will be covering the following consoles, flight Surgeon with William Fernandez, biomedical engineer, or BME with Nancy Bansbach and environmental and thermal operating systems. Or ETHOS with Brendan Lutes together, these consoles cover health related positions in Mission Control Houston recorders to flight speed. Surgeon, go, BME go, ETHOS, go. We are go for Houston. We have a podcast.
Nilufar Ramji
Welcome to Houston, We have a podcast. So let’s start off by going a little bit around the room, and we will begin with Will tell us a little bit about yourself.
Will Fernandez
Well, hi there. Yeah. So I’m Will Fernandez. I’m the flight Surgeon that we’re talking about health today, and I primarily work at the flight Surgeon Council and mission control, and I’m also the deputy crew Surgeon for crew nine right now, currently on the ISS a quick little background about B so on council, a typical day to day is lot of monitoring what types of medical events crew are participating in and working directly with the BME, the biomedical engineer, who knows a lot more of the engineering side, because I’m just the medical doctor, right? I don’t have any formal engineering training. My background is more so in molecular biology, chemistry, and then, of course, med school, and everything from there. But everything that we do in mission control, as a flight controller, especially as the flight Surgeon, it’s very collaborative. It’s very team based. We work a lot with every other console and the flight Surgeon Council. We work most directly with the with the BME in particular, we work with ETHOS. We work with the flight director. It’s a very collaborative approach to really everything we do. So that’s, yeah, it’s a little bit about me and a little bit about just the day to day what we do.
Nilufar Ramji
Thanks, Will. And you mentioned BME, and right beside you, we have Nancy. Nancy, do you want to tell us a little bit about yourself?
Nancy Bansbach
Yeah, I’m a BME or biomedical engineering flight controller. I work with will in the flight Surgeon discipline. And like Well said, with everyone in the flight control team, I was a biomedical engineering background major in my bachelor’s and my master’s, and then I came right into this job. The BME rule is pretty fun. We own any medical hardware on board, exercise hardware, environmental monitoring hardware, radiation hardware, basically anything you could think of that would keep the crew safe or concern crew health. And so we kind of touch a lot of different areas. It’s not just one thing we manage. And then we work with a lot of different teams that aren’t in mission control to make sure, you know, our nutrition lab and our psych talks are all involved with the crew health and the mission. And so that’s kind of what the BME role is all about.
Nilufar Ramji
That’s fantastic. In keeping with the health theme, we have ETHOS. And let’s, let’s hear from ETHOS a little bit.
Brendan Lutes
Hi, so my name is Brendan Lutes. I’m an ETHOS like you said, which is the environmental and thermal operating systems, E, T, H, O, S, big picture, our console is responsible for running all of the machines that maintain a habitable environment for the astronauts. So, you know, as humans, we have inputs and outputs, and in space, it’s really hard to, you know, get those easily. So we try and make a big circle of all the inputs and all the outputs. And we have regenerative ECLSS systems, and we have Internal Thermal Control systems that help keep everything inside of station. Of station a nice, comfortable temperature for the crew. We make sure that the water is on station for them to be able to drink, and that the air is well balanced and like Earth atmospheres, so we scrub it of contaminants and reprovide Oxygen. I went to school at University of Colorado. Boulder and got an aerospace engineering degree, and then came right here out of college. So happy here.
Nilufar Ramji
So lots of early careers. And you folks to NASA, which is really fabulous to hear. And thank you so much for everything that you do to keep our crew safe aboard station. So you provided some insight into your roles on console and a little bit about your backgrounds. And I’m sure these experiences have informed your career overall and so far, really. So now that we have an understanding to the path to your role, let’s get into your console role itself. So let’s talk a little bit about your overall duties from a flight Surgeon perspective. Will?
Will Fernandez
Yeah, so that’s a little bit about the day to day, about how we’re doing a lot of kind of monitoring the medical status of all the crew members on the ISS, and it goes along with a lot of the work that BME does too. So we’re looking at the exercise that the crew members are doing, making sure their quote duty hours are within a reasonable amount, so we’re not working on them too hard. A lot of crew members talk about chasing the line as their schedule progresses throughout their entire 646, or eight month duration mission, they are constantly being planned in five minute increments, so we’re making sure they’re not getting too tired, whether that’s physically and mentally. So it’s a lot of work from that perspective. Another thing that we do on console is we do these called PMCs, which are private medical conferences, and it’s a weekly check in with all of our crew members in the ISS, one at a time, and we just see how they’re doing, making sure they’re sleeping, okay, eating, okay, how they’re feeling. And it’s not just, you know, checking vital signs, it’s making sure they are from a well rounded approach, make sure they’re just overall, doing very well. And the only thing that makes us able to be able to ask those questions and find the time to have a 15 minute block of that incredibly busy schedule is us working with the BME, us working with the ops plan console, a number of other consoles, to make sure we have that time. And all this wouldn’t even be possible without ETHOS doing their job right because, and as he was saying that all he does is, you know, just manage the entire atmosphere of the inside of the ISS, which is not a small thing,
Nilufar Ramji
not a big deal.
Will Fernandez
Yeah, not at all. And so being able to work well with everybody kind of facilitates everyone else’s jobs doing that much better, and that translates to appropriate crew health and just improvements throughout the mission. So really appreciate
Nilufar Ramji
the synchronicity across the team is incredibly important so you can take care of the crew. And I love the emphasis on making sure that the crew members are are doing okay because they are on a extended work trip in some ways, yeah, some extent,
Will Fernandez
Yeah, definitely.
Nilufar Ramji
Thank you so much. Will, why don’t we go over to Nancy?
Nancy Bansbach
Yeah, so the BME responsibilities vary day to day, as do everyone’s operations. You’ll probably hear that a few more times on this podcast, so I’ll just give some examples of what we could see on a day to day basis. A couple hours a week are dedicated to medical activities for crew, whether that is doing an eye exam with our ultrasound or a vision test, to doing maintenance on the treadmill or the weight machine or the bike. Those are crucial pieces of hardware that every crew member uses every single day, and they’ve been up there for 10 plus years. So as you could guess, they wear and tear a little bit. And so there’s constant maintenance, preventative and corrective going on. Other activities that crew is doing that BME is supporting, could include some environmental sampling to make sure their atmosphere is safe, making sure all the work ETHOS is doing is really it’s working the way we’re expecting it to we could also be coordinating conferences so well touched on PMCs, private medical conferences. We also schedule site conferences, special conferences with community outreach groups, schools, etc. Crew could request anyone really. They also have family conferences, which are extremely important. The mental health of astronauts is something that we take, you know, very seriously, and that’s another huge part of our job. And so we’re constantly making sure they have all the resources, teleconferencing abilities to reach all those parties and keep them safe and happy during their mission. So our day to day, you know, we come into console and we’re looking at the crew timeline. We’re following along with the crew. They’re asking us questions throughout their day, like, hey, this isn’t working the way it’s written in the procedure. This looks different today. What’s up with that? So we’re providing support throughout all of that, and then planning the rest of the week. Like we said, there’s a lot of crew activities, so BME does a lot of planning. We look at the entire week, and like Will said, every five minutes of their day is planned out. So it’s a lot of work and coordination amongst the whole team that we’re working on constantly.
Nilufar Ramji
the planning down to the five minutes is really impressive. I wish I could get that to my household. Love to apply that in my house, Brendan, let’s talk a little bit about the day to day with ETHOS.
Brendan Lutes
Yeah. So I think both BME and Surgeon helped highlight how different our job can be on a day to day. It’s constantly something new, which is one of the best parts about the job, but the fundamentals boil down to maintaining our ECLSS systems. So making sure two parts really are water is balanced on Space Station, crews need something to drink, and then once they’re done drinking, they generate outputs. And so we have hardware on station that helps take that output and turn it back into clean, drinkable water. If you think about crew flying around, and basically, what’s, you know, a very sophisticated, isolated metal tube. Everything that comes out of their body has to go somewhere. So think about like when you breathe, if you breathe on a window, there’s condensation that forms. So when they’re breathing out, they have water that’s coming out. So we collect that water out of the atmosphere and then clean that as well so that they can drink it. And then some of the water that we collect, we send to our oxygen generator system, which basically splits the hydrogen and hydrogen and oxygen and makes oxygen for them to breathe. So on the water balance side, we are always monitoring, making sure we have water where we need it to be, water available for crew, and then places for water to go. So water balance is one of them, and then maintenance of the atmosphere and monitoring of the atmosphere. So we are constantly checking, you know, what’s in the atmosphere. We have something called a major constituent analyzer that helps us see what’s in there, and then from there, we can make assessments and adjustments for what needs to be so making sure oxygen is at a good level for comfortable, healthy living, making sure our CO2 levels aren’t too high. I think everyone has seen, you know, Apollo 13 and the classic, you know, square peg, round hole, where it’s really important to be scrubbing CO2 out of the air. That’s something that both BME and Surgeons really care about. So our our CO2 scrubbers are always there working. We have a tracing contaminant control system clean any extra junk out of the air, and then some other interesting things that I don’t think you might think about, but when you’re in microgravity, there’s no there’s no motive force to move air around, and so we have to actively push air around so you don’t build up these gas pockets. So we have what’s called inter modular ventilation, which is basically a system of fans that are just always running. So I’m sure crew is, you know, not always appreciative of how loud it is up there. And that’s something I think Surgeons and BMEs Also think about, is how loud it is, but making sure the atmosphere is composed of what we want it to be, and then is well mixed, so that it’s uniform across the stack. And then finally, we have two more things we do, the Internal Thermal Control System. So we basically, if you think about space, all that heat that we’re generating from, you know, living and working out and exercising on BMEs workout machines. And then all the heat that gets generated by computers has to go somewhere. So we collect that and transfer, transport it and reject it out to our external thermal control system. Make sure everything’s at a nice, comfortable temperature for the crew and for not necessarily the human part, but for our computers as well. So that’s sort of what we’re monitoring in the background. And then, like BME said, day to day, crews always touching something. They always got something on their timeline, so we’re there to help, support and then respond if something breaks, because anything that touches a human often has the tendency to want to break on us, and especially when it’s in as harsh on an environment of space. So when things break, we work together as a console team to assess what we need to do, what are the impacts, what’s the failure, and then from there, we generate a work around that we on the ground can help the team and help the crew fix everything. So
Nilufar Ramji
if I were a cartoon character right now, my jaw would be dropping after listening to the three of you guys explain what you do on a day to day. Definitely very exciting. Brendan, you mentioned five different areas that ETHOS supports, but let’s take it back to the first thing you mentioned, which was the water. I remember, if I recall correctly, earlier, I think it was last year that the space station achieved, what was it? Over 95% water,
Brendan Lutes
up to 98% when everything is working just like we wanted to, we get 98% of our water used on station reclaimed, which was really great, because obviously, every day you have to drink a lot of water, and if we had to re fly that up, re fly that up every time we used it and just, you know, threw it out the air lock, that would be pretty expensive and very hard to sustain for long duration missions. So we don’t always get to a full 98 depending on failures and exactly the configuration of our boxes, but that’s sort of our upper limit is 98% so
Nilufar Ramji
98% so for those of our listeners who don’t know what water reclamation is, can you explain that in more layman’s terms?
Brendan Lutes
Yeah, so it all goes back to the idea of a regenerative circle, right? So when you drink water, that’s the input, and then you create output, and that output is not usable, not drinkable. So we have systems that are urine processor assembly, and our water processor assembly, take that water, and then our common cabinet air assemblies, basically pull water out of the air, and then we collect all of that together, and then we clean it. And so if you think about the inputs being what’s used, we’re able to take 98% of what gets drunk or used, and then get 98% of that back after it passes through the astronaut and we collect it. So it basically just means, on a day to day basis, we’re only losing about 2% of the water on station as it’s, you know, going through that cycle of input and output.
Nilufar Ramji
Very cool. Thank you for sharing that. I always find the water aspect to be so fascinating. I heard when I first started at NASA, I actually heard yesterday’s coffee is tomorrow’s coffee.
Brendan Lutes
That’s a great one. When we finally got the whole whole system up and running and it was finally fully functional, we passed them daily summary words every morning, we give crew a little bit of a blurb about what they can expect in their day. And in their daily summary words, we told them, You are now breathing yesterday’s coffee. So we took some of that water that was yesterday’s coffee, and we now turned it into the water they’re drinking and the air they’re breathing. So brilliant. It’s a pretty amazing system.
Nilufar Ramji
It’s a good way to prepare for long duration missions too.
Brendan Lutes
Absolutely, that’s a big part of I think what ISS is and BME and flight Surgeon both have things that they’re working on as well that I’m sure they’ll tell you about. But a lot of what we do in low Earth orbit is to help us prepare for the next step, which is longer duration missions out to the moon and hopefully eventually to Mars. So proving, the proof concept of all the hardware we’re working on now is what’s really laying the groundwork for the future of space exploration.
Nilufar Ramji
Definitely. Thank you so much for sharing that. I also want to go back to Nancy and talking about the different exercise equipment that’s aboard the space station, and often, because it does get the astronauts, if I remember correctly. Crew exercise for at least two hours every single day so they break so how do you go through the procedures with them? Or what kind of troubleshooting do you do whenever these the equipment does break down?
Nancy Bansbach
What a great, loaded question. I could talk about this all day. So I guess I’ll start with just stating the three exercise devices we have, and then talk about some of the modes of failure that we experience or expect. I’ll start with our treadmill. So we have a treadmill on station. It’s kind of fun. It’s on the wall. So crew is running sideways, and obviously there’s no gravity. We’re in microgravity. So they use bungees to tie themselves down to the base of the treadmill to simulate force and a load on their body, and that’s how they run. So that is a bulky piece of equipment. There’s a lot of power trips that we can experience. And BMEs actually have the ability to command to the space station and power cycle the treadmill or send up any kind of coordination that we might need to change the software, or whatever the experience the issues might be. So troubleshooting could range anywhere from turn it back, turn it off to turn it back on. It could range from, you know, let’s make a new software load and push it on station. It could be, let’s use some duct tape and Kapton tape and just make it work. So the modes of fire can vary, and we prepare for things to break. One thing that’s expected is things will not go as planned. So we have tons of procedures already on board, available to crew. We have malfunction procedures, corrective maintenance procedures, preventative maintenance procedures. So you know, we’re greasing up that treadmill monthly, yearly. We have all these tasks that we’re doing to make sure it stays in tip top shape. And then when it does break like we expect, we either make a new plan or use a pre existing plan to fix that. Our other exercise devices, we have a weight machine called ARED our advanced resistive exercise device that is a weight machine, and it’s a pretty impressive piece of equipment. There are some YouTube videos out there that I recommend looking at, because you can rearrange the device to do bench presses, squats, you have a bar, you can route the resistive force into like a pulley system and do crunches or pulls. If you’re thinking about an exercise you do in the gym, we could probably do it on ARED. So that’s pretty cool. Again, with an advanced piece of equipment, it’ll break. We do kind of a calibration every week. The way we create force on ARED is with an air canister. And you compress that air, which is really hard to do if you’ve ever pushed a syringe with your finger over the tip, it doesn’t really move that much. And so that is on a fulcrum and a bunch of brilliant engineering work, and you can adjust the load so you can make it heavier or lighter. And that’s kind of how the bar or the cable, whatever you’re using on that device gets its load. And so we do a lot of calibration work with that. Every two weeks, crew is making sure the loads are what we expect, so they’re not injuring themselves while using it. And then again, we have numerous procedures to cover any malfunctions that may happen. And our last piece of equipment I’ll touch on is our bike, SEVIS. It’s your typical exercise standard bike that doesn’t move. We don’t have a seat or handles, because you don’t need those in space. You’re not falling down on the ground. So they kind of have a little backpad they can use, and they do have some handles available on the side. It doesn’t look like your traditional bike. But same deal with that. We just got a new one up, actually, last year, which is really exciting. It’s this pretty teal color. So we were pretty proud of that, and it’s been working great so far.
Nilufar Ramji
Well, the space station is definitely an engineering marvel. So let’s go back to Will and talk a little bit about how the health related consoles all work together. You all have different parts that you play. So how do they come together to make the big picture to cover health and Mission Control?
Will Fernandez
Sure, yeah, it’s a great question. I think we, like you said, we all have very specific roles to play when it comes to managing crew wellness, crew, medical wellness on top of that. And so, for example, going back to what Nancy said about having any sort of exercise equipment failure. Well, we have these crew members who are doing two hours of exercise, two hours of exercise, six days a week for the entire duration of the stay up there. And what if one of those devices breaks? Okay, well now that, let’s say your ARED device, your Advanced Resistive Device, so now you suddenly can’t do your bench presses, your dead lifts, those resistive exercises which are really, really good at making sure you don’t have significant bone loss or muscle loss over time. So now we have to think of a plan to mitigate that loss of robustness in the physical training somebody is getting. BME will work with their team to make sure we get that device fixed as quickly as possible, and we’ll look at using the other devices to see what we can do to compensate for that lack of exercise, or what we can do nutritionally to help them. We have enormous teams on the ground and each of our consoles, whether it’s ETHOS, BME or, Surgeon we’re just the tip of the team that is present in control, that mission control, that day. And so from the Surgeon perspective, we have an entire there’s a behavioral health program full of psych doctors and psych specialists. We have nutrition teams, we have bone health teams. We have a numerous other just groups of people who are supporting to make sure whatever goes wrong, we can mitigate that problem. Whether there’s a solar flame, there’s a lot of radiation coming, we have the SRAG team, the space radiation group, who works with BME, works with a Surgeon as well to make sure, well, if there’s a lot of radiation that’s about to hit the space station, well, we can put the crew in a protective part of the space station. There’s a lot of different things we can do just to mitigate whatever might be going wrong. And so working together with every little back room team that doesn’t have a formal console position in mission control, and working with the other consoles themselves and with their back room teams, there’s, I mean, whenever you come to mission control, and you, if you’re on a tour, and you can look down on it from above, you only see 20, 25 people. That’s just a fragment. That’s the tip of the iceberg, of everyone that is actually supporting the mission. And it’s we have, we have so many Thank you ceremonies, just to reach out to everyone else that you don’t see on TV. Everyone else that is supporting but doesn’t really get quote, the the glory, right? Because they’re all in the back rooms who are performing just as it is, just as essential of a job. And so it’s nobody can do this alone. And again, I don’t have the engineering background. I don’t have the ETHOS and environmental control life support system background, and where I need I rely on them religiously to do my job, and they don’t have a medical degree, right? So they rely on me for some of my inputs. So it’s a team based sport, and on the best days, when everyone’s doing their jobs, and it just works out so well and makes everything easier. So
Nilufar Ramji
Very complex yet incredibly simple in some ways too. Yeah, and I just, I love the fact that you gave a little nod to your your team that supports you. Because I think of going to a hospital, or looking at a directory when you’re going to a shopping mall, there are so many things that make up that shopping mall, or how to make that hospital function. Or if you look at the human body and the different functionality we have, from the air that we breathe to our cardiology, to anything else. We have so many different ways that we all work together. And it takes a village. It really does. So thank you to you and your entire team, for all three of you guys for being on today. It’s been, it’s been really great to learn about the health different the different health positions. So Nancy or Brendan, do you guys have anything else that you wanted to add as far as how you work together across the team or with the various backroom folks that support you?
Brendan Lutes
Yeah, I would echo that sentiment. It is a massive team, even in any of our disciplines, like we talked about, we have so many balls to juggle, just from one of us, right? Last time I checked, ETHOS had like 20 different individual subsections or individual boxes that we have to track, and each of those has like a SME team. That’s not even a full backroom position, right? We’re talking like Office teams that are involved, and that information all has to be you have to get individual subject matter experts to be able to, you know, fully understand, and deep dive a single box. And then, if you think even beyond, just like one console, you can’t run an exercise piece of equipment without power, and we can’t run our consoles without data coming from our Command and Data Handling Systems. So the ISS is one of the most complicated and integrated systems, probably in the world. And thinking about all of the different parts that go into it, it’s really not just 20 people, it’s hundreds of people, 1000s of people, day in, day out, making it work. And it’s a 24 hour job, right? Astronauts live up there. 24/7 365, for the last 20 plus years. So it never stops, and it’s always something new. And I think NASA is unique and excellent at making sure we support our people sitting in the room, and we have a. Everyone who needs to be there, and always pushing forward and driving the mission to make sure that we keep the crew safe, we get good science done, good research done for the public, and that we continue our broader goal of space exploration. So it really couldn’t happen, not only just with people from my back room, but without people from every back room. So
Nancy Bansbach
yeah, and I’ll just end echoing the teams for sentiment. Part of being a flight controller is being a leader, and I think part of being a leader is listening to the people around you. And so when I’m on console, I’m listening to the hundreds of people who have provided me inputs, whether that’s the nutrition lab, the radiation team, the engineering teams, various different disciplines. I’m responsible for representing all of them, and so I have to listen to them. And then when I’m talking to ETHOS on console, and we don’t think the same forward plan is the best, we both have to listen to each other and work on a plan that’ll be the best for the crew and the mission. So it’s a lot of listening and knowing, putting what’s best ahead of what you think is best for your particular system. And that’s really what a team sport means. And so that’s a lot of the I think that’s the biggest thing I’ve learned after being a flight controller.
Nilufar Ramji
Thank you for that insight, and I realized that I would be remiss without referring to back rooms. We’ve talked about back rooms across all three of you today, but I don’t know if our listeners know what a back room is. Would one of you be willing to explain that to our listeners?
Will Fernandez
Sure, Yeah. So the back room basically means in mission control on the console, you see one or two people sitting at every given console. The back room is we have multiple rooms in the Mission Control building that are just full of engineers and medical specialists and other SMEs, or subject matter experts, who are there to provide us with real time information, real time data. Because when we’re sitting Mission Control, we can only manage so many things at once. If there’s a problem happening, for trying to troubleshoot anything at all, my knowledge base only extends within a certain parameter set, whereas I have people in the back room who are in other rooms in Mission Control, or might not even be at NASA at the moment. They might be at home on their day off, but that person knows the one thing that I need to know right now. So that person is effectively part of the back room, and they can support whatever troubleshooting operations happening in the moment. And that goes that that applies to really, every console, every console has a depth chart of sorts, of 15, 20, 30 people who can also support that same console, but aren’t there that day, but they have similar skill set to you, and everyone has a somewhat different knowledge base, and some people have far more experience than others. So I’ve only been at NASA for a handful of years, and there are other flight Surgeons that have been here for 20 years. And so we have very different skill sets, very different knowledge bases. So I might rely on somebody else for a specific question I have, and a lot of the other consoles, they function that same way. We always have this background of people who are willing to support and are able to support any additional questions we might have.
Nilufar Ramji
Thank you for sharing that the back rooms are sometimes not necessarily physical back rooms, but there are other offices, other buildings on site. So I have a follow up question to that. What are all the back rooms for each console? Let’s start with Brendan.
Brendan Lutes
Yeah. So we have two active back rooms, so they are in the same building as us. They’re just one floor up in a window, in a windowless room, but they are pouring over the data, doing the exact same stuff as us. We have an analyst who is called the Star console, and they run all of the tracking for all the water that we talked about. They’re pouring over projections for the atmosphere. How fast is crew breathing down our oxygen? How quickly do we need to be generating oxygen? How fast is crew drinking the water? How fast are they breathing water back out of the atmosphere? So they’re doing tons of system tracking. And then they pass that information to the TREC console, who is very similar to the ETHOS console, in that they are also a commanding position. So they can send commands to the space station. They can be remotely operating the boxes that we are in charge of running day to day. And then, obviously, all of those, those two backrooms work together with the ETHOS front room to make the job happen on a day to day basis. So those are our two back rooms that are there during Orbit Two hours and are actively helping us to push a day of space activities, forward
Nilufar Ramji
space activities. So two back rooms for the ETHOS, console. What about BME? Nancy?
Nancy Bansbach
BME has a back room called checks. That is their, um, their call name, and they provide similar support to what Brendan said a lot of the time. If there’s an issue that arises on console, I can kind of manage the situation, ask follow up questions, engage in communication with crew, and my back room is pulling up serial numbers, pulling up locations of spares. They’re getting all the details for me. So they’re allowed, they’re allowed to do heads down work and provide quick details information and push that to the front room so that I can use that information with the team. In addition to checks, we also have. Of the radiation group, and they have a special room. It’s not necessarily a BME back room. I almost want to give them their own like specialty recognition, because they are experts in something that, you know, I have to represent sometimes, but is not my skill set. And so they’re welcome on the flight loop. They are a critical part of the flight control team, and they manage all of the radiation that the ISS experiences. We have lots of devices that monitor that. And you know, there are solar particle events, which is where, you know, there’s extra radiation hitting the space station. And so we might need crew to protect themselves by sheltering, or whatnot. And so, one other back room that I want to put a spotlight on is the mission evaluation room. This is a room full of engineering representatives, and so their job is to make sure everything that’s happening on station that’s off nominal is kind of double and triple checked based on engineering requirements and standards, while we have documented procedures on console. As a BME, I’m allowed to make educated decisions and recommendations based on experience and what we’ve seen in the past and what I think might happen. But if there’s, you know, ever a question of uncertainty, or we’re in uncharted territory and we don’t want to take any unknown risks, then we kind of pull in the MIR and we have them go through their documentation, and we work together as a team to check and balance each other and make sure we’re making a good, informed decision. So between those three rooms, I would say that’s those are the three rooms, BME interfaces with most.
Nilufar Ramji
Fantastic and what about you Will?
Will Fernandez
Yeah, so our primary back room, our primary physical back room, is the IMC, the increment Management Center, and that’s somewhat of a shared back room amongst a number of different consoles. And so within that large room, the flight Surgeons do have their own little cordoned off area, and during any given orbit two or daytime hours flight control shift, we do have a additional Surgeon or two who’s sitting there back in the IMC. Be ready to support us. What we use even more than the IMC is really a combination of Microsoft Teams groups where we have all of the Surgeons that are supporting a given NASA mission, or a group that has the biomedical engineers in it as well. And let’s say I have a certain question that maybe the doctors that are supporting from the IMC don’t know the answer to, because I feel like this is something maybe the BMEs know, and I can reach out directly to the BME Council while I’m on console, or I can reach out to a group chat that has a lot of BMEs and a lot of the other consoles do the same thing. We all have one or two physical backrooms, but we also have, as you mentioned before, not necessarily physical buildings with back room, but just groups of subject matter experts in a given field that can help answer any given question. So we have one to two physical back rooms and numerous pseudo back rooms just full of people who know the answers to the questions we have.
Nilufar Ramji
So 1000s and 1000s of people supporting all the work that you do on a day to day, absolutely keeping the crew healthy and safe aboard the space station. It’s really impressive all right, I have a fun one for you guys. I remember the first time I ever walked into the viewing room in Mission Control Houston, and I saw all the console positions, but I noticed that each console position has a figurine, an item, a mascot, in some ways, that represent their console. I wondered if each of you could describe what you have at your console that represents your console position?
Will Fernandez
Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean all of us on all of the consoles. We are all nerds, and so we all have our own little things for the flight Surgeon console. We have a lot of Star Wars fans, but even more Star Trek fans that are flight Surgeons. And so we have a figurine from Star Trek, Bones, from the original Star Trek. He was the doctor on the original love it Star Trek series. And so we have, if you’re ever in the observation room, our flight Surgeon console is on the right side of that viewing room, closest to the viewing room itself, close to the windows, and you’ll see a bones figurine. It’s about, you know, 10 inches tall, wearing a Blue Star Trek outfit. And that’s a, that’s our console.
Nancy Bansbach
Okay. For the BME console, we used to have these little Lego figurines that represented one of the many systems that we manage. I think a lot of the disciplines in Mission Control have, you know, their specific systems that they can list and we kind of manage, you know, exercise devices, radiation devices, health medical equipment. So we have a lot of things going on. So our little Lego figurines had a hazmat suit on. They were exercising, lifting some weights, running on a treadmill. That was the idea there. And so those are pretty sweet. But one thing, one funny story I can recall is Marshawn Lynch visited the FCR, and he is a NFL player, for those of you who are not familiar, and he. Looked at our BME sign and said, Hey, Beast Mode Everywhere. And that kind of status. So USB kind of joke about how that’s our trademark now, and I like to think of it as we are, hopefully beasts at our work, and we are touching a lot of different systems with all of our hardware that is somewhat unrelated, but all important for crew health.
Nilufar Ramji
So you heard it here first, folks, not biomedical engineer, it’s BEAST MODE everywhere. That’s right. Thank you.
Brendan Lutes
Yeah, the ETHOS console has a thermometer. So we, uh, talk about keeping keeping everyone cool, keeping calm. But uh, for us, it’s just practical. You get a look at, uh, come in. It’s hot outside. See how cold it is in the FCR it’s a little chilly, but no, it really is, just to represent the environmental control system and how we keep things a nice temperature for crew. So
Nilufar Ramji
fantastic. That was really fun. Keep an eye on it the next time you’re in mission control or watching a broadcast. Now, if I were listening to the podcast today, I would be like, How can I do this? How do I get a job here? Or how do I do a job like this? So I’m going to ask all three of you to answer this question, and that is, are there any special areas of study, or courses you took that help you to prepare for this. And then to follow up with that, was there any additional specialized training that you had to go through to sit on your console position?
Brendan Lutes
Yeah. So I can go ahead and start. There is a lot of specialized study that you have to do once you get out of college. Of college, for ETHOS, all we really look for for hiring is a STEM degree of some kind. Engineering understanding is obviously a bonus. But once you get here, no degree in college will teach you how to fly space station. So we have a rigorous training program that you have to do before you’re allowed to get certified to actually sit on console and command the space station. My manager likes to say, before they give you the keys to the vehicle, you gotta show your worth make sure you know all of the knowledge. So our training really boils down to three different phases. It’s a knowledge capture section where we’re studying all of the documentation, learning about all the different boxes. Every box is unique, and so you have to learn all of the technical details associated with that. Flight Control really does live and die off of technical knowledge. And then once you really master the technical knowledge, we as ETHOS, move into a training flow where we’re basically in simulations, where we get all of the people who are training for the flight control positions across the whole mission control center into a room, and we basically sit in a simulation and practice fixing when failures happen on space station. So it could be a box breaking, it could be a power outage or something where you have to assess the failure and then generate the impacts, and then work together with all the different disciplines to work through a workaround. So that can be, you know, much more of a soft skill training thing, right? I think Nancy did a really good job pointing out earlier how the job isn’t just knowing things, it’s about a lot of the soft skills. So if you want to do this job, I think one of the things that you can work on is cultivating some of those, some of our foundations, discipline, confidence, competence, toughness, teamwork and vigilance are sort of the core foundations of flight control. And so in our sims, we get to work on, you know, integrating our technical knowledge, but also honing our soft skills so that we can, you know, on the day be ready to work things, a special feature of the ETHOS consoles. We’re also in charge of working through our emergency responses, and so that’s our time to practice being ready to respond in case an emergency ever happens on space station. We’d be ready to work with the other disciplines, search and BME, to make sure that we get crew safe, get crew home, and then save the vehicle as well. So it’s a lot of training and then a lot of practicing and simulations. And then before you get your final certification, you go through a final which is where they’re sort of throwing everything in the kitchen sink at you, and you gotta sink or swim, and when you’re ready to go sit in the big room, then they hand you the keys to the vehicle. So if you want to do the job, I couldn’t recommend it more, but just come in getting ready to get beat up.
Nilufar Ramji
It’s a lot of work, a lot of practice, but the practice does make perfect and it also keeps you calm under pressure.
Brendan Lutes
Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s a big thing that we we talked a little bit about the different orbits in the shift. There’s three shifts in a day, and one of them is orbit one the night shift. And when you’re on the night shift, we don’t really have that same structure that we talked about during the day shifts, so it’s just sort of you and the people in the room who are there ready to support and so when a failure hits the board, your heart starts racing. You’re like, oh my goodness, but having done all this practicing helps you, you know, keep calm, keep cool, fall back on your training. And, you know, work through assessing the problem and then generating a workaround.
Nancy Bansbach
Yeah, I’ll build off. Of that, the soft skills that Brendan mentioned, I want to just talk about those for a second. During the interview process, we look for people who not only have the technical foundation as a BME, we accept any engineering backgrounds, even some science backgrounds, biochem nursing experience, but you have to be able to communicate to any type of person, because, like, the flight control team is made up of a million different people, and they all different personalities. And it doesn’t matter what their personality is, you have to be able to work with them. So during the interview, you know, we’re really trying to work on problem solving, and how do you work through a problem? How do you communicate the problem to someone who has no idea what your system is and use terms that the whole team will understand and be able to get behind so that’s a critical piece of being a flight controller. If you’re interested, I recommend just putting yourself out there, trying new experiences, get to know different people, do things outside your comfort zone, because that’s what you’ll be doing every single day at this job. So you got to be comfortable with that, and then, yeah, those soft skills are tested every step of the way in The Sims. Hopefully the Sims are much worse than any day we have on orbit. When he says they throw everything and the kitchen sink at you, they really mean that we’ll have a fire. We’ll break lose power, and all, half the modules, all the exercise devices, are meteor hits. Yeah, MMOD strike. You think we’ve probably done it and simmed it so that when you get on console and you know, the first mile of the day happens, you’re like, Okay, I’m warming up. Let’s go. Let’s get it done. So
Nilufar Ramji
I’m just imagining any kind of disaster that were to take place, and having gone through so many Sims of the worst possible case scenario, you are ready to do your job and do it efficiently, effectively and communicate clearly too.
Nancy Bansbach
Yeah, you’ve done a fire response, an ammonia response, a rapid depress response, so many times in your Sims, those are hopefully burned into everyone’s brain, very focused. You don’t you don’t get your let your guard down. Once you’re certified, you just have all the skills and tools that you will need to handle the situation, and so you’re ready to get going, and you’re not you’re not startled, and you don’t freeze. You have everything you need to get going, and you handle the situation
Nilufar Ramji
very impressive. Will,
Will Fernandez
yeah, I think I will also stress those softer skills, the intangible skills, such as even being able to speak the same. Finally, a common language of vernacular to speak to people of very different backgrounds. So with a medical background and no robust engineering background, myself, I had to learn to quote, “speak engineer” like the jargon that I use is very different than the jargon they use. So we need to find a common ground every specialty, whether it’s whether you’re a chef, whether you’re working at a post office, no matter what it is you do, you have a very specific set of language and jargon. And when you’re trying to communicate thoughts, ideas and plans to somebody of a very different background, you have to find common ground in the way you speak. So the medical vernacular is very different from the engineering vernacular, and so trying to find a way to communicate effectively is extremely important, and it’s not something you can just readily take a class on in college. So those softer skills are extremely important for anybody that wants to be a flight Surgeon. It’s a fun road. It’s a long road, going from kindergarten to becoming a flight Surgeon without skipping any grades, and I tried to skip a grade and get sent back. So the entire path is about 28 years. So that got kindergarten, high school, all that stuff, and then went to undergrad at Eastern Illinois University, picked up a couple of STEM degrees there, and then molecular biology and chemistry. It’s I was trying to get into med school, and those were, seems to be the best ones to do. And then I went to med school, University of Illinois, and then after your four years of med school, you have to get your first board certification and a medical specialty. So I went through the emergency medicine route and did a emergency medicine residency with University of Maryland in downtown Baltimore. Then after your primary specialty, now you need to pick up some space medicine training. So I did a second residency in aerospace medicine, this time at University of Texas Medical Branch, which works a lot with NASA, works a lot with a number of other commercial space companies, and we get a lot of experience practicing space medicine, not only at NASA, but at a number of our commercial partners as well, to see what their approach is the space medicine. So through all of that training and schooling, and you get two board certifications in medicine. Mine were emergency medicine, and then space medicine. Now you can apply to work for NASA as a flight Surgeon. And we NASA needs every type of medical specialty that exists, because there’s not just emergencies that happen in space. Everybody has hearts. Everybody has lungs. So you need a cardiologist who’s familiar with space medicine. You need a pulmonologist. Every specialty is needed. And so after you do all this training, you get hired at NASA, and now you have just like they were saying about the other consoles, there’s a very rigorous. Flow to put in a couple 100 hours of training, whether it’s Sims, whether it’s learning the different systems on the ISS. And to be fair, the level of systems knowledge that I have about the ISS pales in comparison to what both BME and ETHOS know, because their knowledge set is more about the systems itself, whereas my knowledge set is more about the human body and how it integrates with those systems, which speaks to why I can’t do my job by myself and they can’t do their job by themselves. It has to be cohesive together as a team. So using all of our skills through all of our decades of training, it ends up working out really well in the end. And this is a time tested approach that NASA has been doing for decades, and it’s beared a lot of great fruit, and we’ve accomplished a lot of science in the process, and everyone’s remained healthy and come home with their families. So it’s been it’s been really great.
Nilufar Ramji
I’m incredibly impressed by all three of you, and my takeaway and from train, from a training perspective, was a STEM degree good vernacular and soft skills, and all three of you are nodding for those of you listening, so great. Read back. Thank you so much for being on the podcast today. it’s been an absolute pleasure, and I hope our listeners are walking away today with more knowledge on the different health positions in Mission Control.
Will Fernandez
Great. Thank you.
Nancy Bansbach
Thank you.
Brendan Lutes
Thank you for having us.
Nilufar Ramji
Thanks for sticking around. I hope you learned something new today.
This is the third in a series of podcasts we are doing to highlight the roles of all the different consoles in the International Space Station’s Mission Control Center. Check out our previous episodes to learn about the other console positions, and you can look forward to more episodes in the coming months. Our full collection of episodes is available on nasa.gov/podcasts and you can also find other wonderful podcasts across the agency here.
On our social media, we’re on the NASA Johnson Space Center pages of X, Facebook and Instagram, and don’t forget to use the hashtag #askNASA on your favorite platform to submit your idea or ask a question. Just make sure you mention that it’s for Houston, We Have a podcast.
This interview was recorded on December 17, 2024. A big thanks to Dane Turner, Will Flato, Daniel Tohill, Abby Graf, Courtney Beasley, and Dominique Crespo. Special thanks to Chelsey Ballarte, Jaden Jennings, and flight director Paul Konyha for helping us plan and set up these interviews. And of course, thanks again to William Fernandez, Nancy Bansbach, and Brandon Lutes for taking the time to come on the show. Give us a rating and feedback on whatever platform you’re listening to us on, and tell us what you think of our podcast.
We’ll be back next week.
