If you’re fascinated by the idea of humans traveling through space and curious about how that all works, you’ve come to the right place.

“Houston We Have a Podcast” is the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center from Houston, Texas, home for NASA’s astronauts and Mission Control Center. Listen to the brightest minds of America’s space agency – astronauts, engineers, scientists and program leaders – discuss exciting topics in engineering, science and technology, sharing their personal stories and expertise on every aspect of human spaceflight. Learn more about how the work being done will help send humans forward to the Moon and on to Mars in the Artemis program.

For Episode 145, we get to know NASA astronauts Douglas Hurley and Robert Behnken, the first Americans to launch from American soil to the International Space Station since the space shuttle retired in 2011. Plus, Zebulon Scoville, the lead flight director from NASA for the Demo-2 mission, gives us a glimpse into this end-to-end test flight before Doug and Bob’s launch aboard the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft and a Falcon 9 rocket on May 27. This episode was recorded on May 1, 2020 with Zeb Scoville and April 17, 2020 with Bob and Doug.

Transcript

Gary Jordan (Host): Houston, we have a podcast. Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center, Episode 145, “SpaceX Demo-2.” I’m Gary Jordan and I’ll be your host today. On this podcast, we bring in the experts, scientists, engineers, astronauts, flight controllers, all to let you know what’s going on in the world of human spaceflight. Humans are about to launch from the coast of Florida for the first time in almost nine years. The last time humans launched from American soil was July 2011 on the final space shuttle mission, STS-135. Since then, even before STS-135, NASA has been working with commercial companies on a development of a new generation of spacecraft under a completely new model. In 2014, the spacecraft development was narrowed down to two companies — Boeing and SpaceX, with the goal of certifying their vehicles for transporting people to and from the International Space Station. In 2015, a cadre of NASA astronauts were selected to aid in the development and certification process. Among them, Bob Behnken, Doug Hurley, Eric Boe and Suni Williams. Over the next few years, they would help these two companies develop the spacecraft with the added perspective of being experienced astronauts who had flown space vehicles before, all with flight testing backgrounds. Eventually, in 2018, nine astronauts were selected for the first flights of these commercial vehicles. SpaceX is about to fly their first test flight with humans onboard on a mission called Demo-2. There have been a number of test flights to get to this point, namely a demonstration flight without humans onboard to the International Space Station called Demo-1 and an inflight abort test to check out the escape engines in the event of an abort during ascent among a number of other tests. The two astronauts flying Demo-2 are Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, both members of the original commercial crew cadre. Behnken had flown on shuttle twice, logged a number of spacewalks and has a background as an Air Force flight test engineer and a doctorate in mechanical engineering. In the Air Force, he helped with the development of new aircraft from the engineering side. Doug Hurley has a background as an expert pilot, racking up more than 5,500 hours of flight time in 25 aircraft, include time as a test pilot. At NASA, he flew shuttle twice as the pilot and himself was on that last flight from American shores, STS- 135. Behnken and Hurley are a superior duo for this flight test, providing an incredible amount of experience in developing and flying aircraft and spacecraft. As you can imagine, over the last few years, they’ve spent an incredible amount of time together developing the SpaceX Crew Dragon and training to fly it. And with that comes a certain dynamic both in terms of relying on each other to ensure the safety and success of the mission and having a powerful camaraderie. I had a chance, before their flight, to ask them a variety of questions about their mission but wanted to include the more fun side so you really know who these guys are and how they get along. So, on the first part of today’s podcast, here’s the segment with Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley answering questions about each other. We’ll come right back after and dive into the intricate details of Demo-2. Enjoy.

[Music]

Host: So, we’ll start with you, Doug. I want you — how would you describe your crewmate in three words? How would you describe Bob in three words?

Doug Hurley: In three words, I would just say he’s pretty sharp. [Laughter]

Host: He’s pretty sharp.

Bob Behnken: Perfect.

Host: Bob, how about you? How would you describe Doug?

Bob Behnken: Strong, bold and predictable.

Host: Bob, what is Doug’s worst habit?

Bob Behnken: Doug’s worst habit is — I don’t know. He’s got a tighter sense of hygiene than I do, I think, is probably his worst habit. So just trying to make sure that I keep up to his expectations kind of going forward. So, do you really want to clean that well? Yes, I do.

Doug Hurley: Yeah. [Laughter]

Host: Doug, how about Bob?

Doug Hurley: His — what was the question again?

Host: Worst habit.

Doug Hurley: His worst habit. I don’t — he doesn’t have one other than —

Bob Behnken: You can’t chicken out like that because I didn’t chicken out.

Doug Hurley: Yeah. What I would say is he — I know almost instantaneously when I’ve not done something correctly. Just put it that way. He doesn’t have a good poker face.

Host: Now in the same vein, Doug, what is Bob’s greatest quality?

Doug Hurley: It would be hard to mention just one. I would say his greatest quality is just his — especially related to this is his thoroughness. I mean, there is nobody in our office that comes close to him as far as just understanding everything that needs to go into a project this size.

Host: Now, Bob, is Doug an early riser or a night owl?

Bob Behnken Doug is an early riser. I think that’s required from the United States Marine Corps, right? You can’t not be an early riser.

Doug Hurley: They turn you into one.

Host: Is he always late, early or on time?

Bob Behnken: Doug is always on time.

Host: Doug, is Bob — or I’ll pass it over to you, Doug. Who do you think is more organized out of the two of you?

Doug Hurley: Oh, that’s me. No question. But I have — I’m borderline OCD, I think, in a lot of ways. So, it’s more managing that. But yeah, it’s me.

Host: Bob, would you agree?

Bob Behnken: Yeah, definitely, Doug is more organized than I am. But I think there is a balance. You know, I think that he’s organized with the set of information. I think I have a wider set of information. It just takes a while to find it.

Host: Bob, what’s something that Doug always has on him?

Bob Behnken: Something that Doug always has on him is money. [Laughter]

Doug Hurley: Or a credit card.

Bob Behnken: He never gets to that situation where he can’t reach his wallet like a T-rex.

Doug Hurley: Yeah.

Host: Doug, what is Bob’s favorite snack or even favorite meal?

Doug Hurley: Diet coke. [Laughter]

Host: Bob, of the two of you, who drinks more coffee?

Bob Behnken: Doug drinks more coffee.

Host: Or more diet coke, rather.

Bob Behnken: I drink more diet coke. Doug drinks regular coke, just like NASCAR.

Doug Hurley: Yeah. Regular.

Host: Doug, what is Bob’s favorite pastime?

Doug Hurley: His favorite pastime — I think nowadays, his favorite pastime is hanging out with his son. And I think that’s kind of for both of us. But Bob definitely, that’s his. If he has a hobby, that’s what it is.

Host: Bob, of the two of you, who would win in a foot race?

Bob Behnken: It’s kind of an interesting question. I would bet on me.

Doug Hurley It’s a distance thing, right?

Bob Behnken: I would bet on me, but I think it’s deceiving.

Doug Hurley: Yeah, Bob is deceptively fast. But maybe over a very short distance, I could beat him.

Bob Behnken: Yeah, definitely. If, like, you’re chasing a ball in a baseball game, that’s Doug’s job. But if you need to do a little bit further distance, it’s probably me. I don’t know.

Doug Hurley: Yeah.

Host: Alright. Now I’m going to see how well you know each other from a history standpoint. Doug, do you know what Bob’s first job was?

Doug Hurley: His first real job?

Host: First real job.

Doug Hurley: Oh, I don’t know. He probably had to mop floors somewhere.

Host: Bob, what’s the answer?

Bob Behnken: I think the answer for both of us is really something that our dads made us do. And so, those were the real jobs for us. And, you know, that’s probably the hardest boss that you ever work for is your father. And I think we both kind of grew up that way.

Doug Hurley: And it’s not fun work usually. It’s cleaning up, picking up, carrying the good stuff.

Host: Bob, what do you think Doug’s favorite music is?

Doug Hurley: He likes Country and Western. [Laughter]

Bob Behnken: No, his favorite music is kind of in the alternative rock kind of category. You know, we both kind of grew up with the ’70s and ’80s music, probably a little bit more toward the ’80s music category. So, we kind of have the same, probably, lexicon of music that we’ll probably listen to on orbit.

Host: So, you think you would agree on a wake-up song?

Bob Behnken: Yeah, I think we’ve — I think, I may have even picked one of his wake-up songs or coached his wife into what it should be for one of his shuttle missions.

Host: Doug, if Bob wasn’t an astronaut, what do you think he would be?

Doug Hurley: He would probably be running a large corporation, if I had to guess. Or he’d be a general in the Air Force.

Host: Bob, what do you think Doug loves most about his job?

Bob Behnken: I think Doug loves most the — kind of the excitement and the opportunity that’s in front of us. I think if you ask either one of us or any of our classmates back when we were test pilot school students, what our dream or career or opportunity would be, it would be, you know, being test crew on a new spaceship. And we would have all probably been looked at as if we’re a little bit crazy if we started talking like that was really going to happen. And so, I think this is his dream job.

Host: Alright. Now for the hard questions. Bob, what’s one good thing about the Marines?

Bob Behnken: I think — my dad was a Marine. And so, I think that the best thing, I think, for me, my exposure to the Marine Corps was kind of a sense of discipline and that focus and that personal responsibility that I think he got personally from his upbringing, but also was definitely part of what the Marine Corps taught him when he was enlisted.

Host: Doug, one good thing about the Air Force?

Doug Hurley: I would say based on my experience as an astronaut is the Air Force flight test engineers, which is — you know, Bob is one of those. I flew with — I was fortunate enough to fly with Rex Walheim on another flight. And those guys just bring so much to the table from an astronaut perspective. They, in general, make the best astronauts that I’ve seen in my 19 plus years here. And so that program within the Air Force is a tough one to beat as far as getting somebody ready to fly a spaceship.

Host: So, Doug, name a time where you relied on Bob for something and he went above and beyond.

Doug Hurley: I think I would be lying if I said that didn’t happen probably once a week. You know, Bob is just one of those guys that is — he’s as competent, as smart, dependable. Whether it was in an airplane, you know, Bob and I probably have a thousand hours together in an airplane. So just backing me up in the front seat many times or helping make a decision, a weather decision or another decision. And then just, especially, this particular experience where the last two years, working — you know, the two of us working directly with SpaceX, just what he brings to the table as far as the things we need to think about and make sure we have ready to go when we actually fly this vehicle. It’s just — on a weekly basis, it just has really helped us get to this point where we’re going to be flying in a month or two.

Host: Now Bob, what do you think part of this mission that Doug is better at? Maybe skill-wise, communication, recalling obscure procedures, something like that.

Doug Hurley: Obscure procedures. Obscure anything. [Laughter]

Bob Behnken: Obscure things out. If we had to get some useless information, Doug is always the repository for that just as a fun thing. He’s the trivia master between the two of us. But, you know, I think that one of the things that definitely is Doug’s strong suit and I think he brings to the mission that’s a little bit more challenging for me is that, you know, he really is always focused on being ready for the exact next event that’s in front of us. And so, there’s going to be a lot of firsts. And we got to be ready to step into them as we go and accomplish this mission. And so, I always know that Doug is going to be one step ahead of me and ready for whatever is kind of coming in front of us. And so there might be things that I remind him out there, like, “Hey, let’s throw this into the mix because we’re going to have to consider it.” But he’s going to be the one who’s ready a second and a half before I am.

Host: Now we’ll end with both of you answering this last question. What is one thing you’re looking forward to doing with your crewmate on this mission, Demo-2?

Doug Hurley: You want to do that one first?

Bob Behnken: I think that the thing I’m most looking forward to is actually ending up in the water safely at the end of the mission and seeing how we both go through that experience of — I’m expecting a little bit of — a little bit of vomiting, maybe, to happen in the end. So, when we get to that opportunity to do that in the water together, it’s kind of a weird thing to say. But that’s the — I’m looking for that kind of celebratory event for both of us in the water at the end of the mission.

Doug Hurley: Yeah, for me, it’s just actually getting to fly the mission with Bob. You know, we’ve been close friends for — since we started as astronauts almost 20 years ago. So, you know, being lucky enough to get to fly with your best friend is kind of a — I think there’s a lot of people that wish they could do that. And we’re lucky enough to do it. We’ve spent a ton of time together. And as we’ve talked about before, we could have gone two directions with that. We could have got to the point where we didn’t want to be around each other, or, you know, we’re closer. So, I think just the whole experience for me is what we’re looking for. And then yes, the celebratory vomiting at the end of the mission will be excellent. [Laughter]

Host: That’s all I had. Thank you so much for indulging me. That was wonderful.

[Transition sound]

Host: I hope you enjoyed. I know I had a blast with them. Godspeed Bob and Doug. Now the Demo-2 mission itself. I mentioned before that it was the first test flight with humans. Yes, this flight is the final flight before certifying the vehicle for regular transport to and from the International Space Station. So, with it being a test flight come a few extra objectives that wouldn’t be part of your “normal operational flight.” But more importantly, this is a chance to test a fully integrated, human spaceflight operation between NASA and SpaceX. Now this is not completely new. SpaceX flies their cargo Dragon spacecraft to carry scientific experiments, equipment, food, supplies up to the space station and also back down, being the only cargo vehicle with return capabilities. And of course, NASA and SpaceX work very closely throughout that operation. Human spaceflight is a whole new ballgame. You have new systems to look at, whole new set of flight rules, which we’ll get into, and new communication loops, mainly from the crew themselves. There’s intricate coordination between SpaceX and NASA. But it goes deeper than that. NASA Kennedy and SpaceX are looking after launch in Florida. Houston is monitoring the mission after launch and integrating with the International Space Station. And SpaceX in Hawthorne, California, watching over the Dragon vehicle and communicating with the crew. So, to go deep into this coordination, the mission profile and all the work and training that’s been done to lead up to this mission is Zebulon Scoville. He goes by Zeb. He’s a flight director here in mission control, Houston, and the lead for this Demo-2 mission. He’s been deeply embedded in the operations of this mission and literally writing the rules for the operation. So here we go. The mission profile and integrated operations behind the SpaceX Demo-2 mission. Enjoy.

[Transition sound]

Host: Zeb Scoville, thanks so much for coming on the podcast today.

Zebulon Scoville: Thank you. This is awesome. I’m really excited. This mission is really going to blow people’s socks off. So, I’m happy to be here and tell you all about it

Host: It really is. And I’m excited to have you here specifically because this is — this is the — this is start to finish, the intricate details of the mission. That’s why I’m so excited to do this. And you’re the person. You’re the person in mission control. You’re the lead for Demo-2, right?

Zebulon Scoville: Yeah. I’m the lead flight director for the Demo-2 mission. And so, there’s all phases of flight from the prelaunch through the launch. So, we’ve got a team of people. There are several flight directors that are on this Demo-2 team. We’ve all been training on the various — from launch to docking, undocking, landing. So, it’s a team effort. But I’m lead flight director for this mission. It is an honor indeed.

Host: Well, let’s dive a little bit into your background to understand what it takes to be the lead for Demo-2. I want to understand a little bit about where you came from. I know when you came to NASA, you were in — I don’t know exactly where you started. But I know at some point, you were an EVA flight controller. Is that right?

Zebulon Scoville: Yeah. My first full-time job here was in the EVA group. So actually, coincidentally, my first exposure to NASA was at the space academy in space camp in high school. Came and got an internship while I was in college at Stanford University. I was studying mechanical engineering. I’ve got a master’s in aeronautical engineering and astronomical engineering. But during the internship at NASA, one of my first assignments was working on the X-38 Assembly. So here, we were building a spaceship in my office that was designed to bring crew members back from the space station as a crew. You know, that particular vehicle got cancelled. But it’s pretty great to be working on a similar capability now with the Crew Dragon. As I got hired on full-time, I worked in the EVA operations group. So, I was doing crew training and writing procedures. Actually, I was one of the lead flight — lead EVA officers for Bob’s first flight on STS-123 —

Host: Oh, how about that?

Zebulon Scoville: — trained him on all the EVAs he did then. So, come full circle.

Host: Very cool. Now, what got you from there to becoming an International Space Station flight director?

Zebulon Scoville: So, in 2014, I was selected as flight director. So, the flight director job basically requires you to basically be the lead and head controller in the mission control that oversees the mission risks, the mission execution at any given time. So, there is sort of a structure that is set up to define how the chain of command works within mission control. But in the International Space Station, that has to incorporate leadership across the various control centers, whether it’s in Tsukuba, Japan or Munich, Germany, Moscow, Russia. We’ve got our payload center in Huntsville. And so, the Houston control center is the lead control center. And so as a flight director, you’re over — you have the oversight to basically make — the responsibility to ensure that all those different elements are coming together and working as a team to effectively, you know, accomplish the science, get the cool stuff done, the space station, complete the EVAs, do the maintenance when it’s needed and get the crew home safely.

Host: You summarized it really nicely. But what was going through my head is what a massive responsibility that is. What made you want to pursue such a big responsibility, such a leadership position?

Zebulon Scoville: What makes you not want to pursue that? Right? I mean, you know, it’s actually one of the things I enjoy most about the job is, you know, there is an enormous amount of prep work that goes into everyone’s job getting ready for a mission like Demo-2, from the engineering teams to the program management to the operations folks to the manufacturing groups. All those leading up to the readiness reviews and the vehicle preparation. But, you know, once that vehicle lights there is the control room, the flight controllers in Houston and in Hawthorne and in Florida that really get the decision-making capability when that call may be on the line. And just being able to own that responsibility and revel it and know that you’re prepared for it with the training you’ve had. And you will find the unexpected that can certainly happen in that seat. But that’s what makes it fun.

Host: Let’s zoom in on your responsibilities, your normal responsibilities as an International Space Station flight director. What are you focusing on? What are you looking out for, listening to and making sure is happening in the room in the International Space Station flight control room?

Zebulon Scoville: Yeah. So, we’ve been flying the International Space Station in various stages of assembly and through operation for two decades now. And at this point, it is still teaching us. We are still learning from that machine. And we’re at the point where we really have gotten many, many years of reliable science and utilization out of it. You know, there are parts that are always speaking to you as they get older and might need to be replaced. You’re looking for what is the worried bead in the room, who’s dancing in their chair a little bit. They might be watching a system. But as a flight director, you can’t be an uber flight director. I cannot be an expert on every system. I really have to be able to count and trust on my team and be able to hear their concerns, be able to look at the flight rules that we may have established that help us define how to balance risk in some cases and basically bring all that together to be able to make the best balance of decisions to be able to execute the mission, get the objectives done, but at the same time, know when we have to give up the objectives because something may be affecting safety. And we have — in the flight operations director, we have sort of have a mantra of, like, you know, crew safety, vehicle safety, mission success. And those are — you keep those as sort of your guiding beacons that helps you define how you’re going to wade through any situation that can come your way.

Host: I think what’s nice about the position you’re in is you have a lot of other flight directors to pull from their experiences, from their knowledge on how to run. What have you learned on just what it takes to be successful at that job?

Zebulon Scoville: Wow. You know, since I was selected in 2014, I still feel like the new guy on the block sometimes. There is just a legacy and experience within the flight director office that has established a culture, a capability, a mantra. And this goes back to Chris Kraft. You know, I got to meet him for a while after I was selected and had some good conversations with him before he recently passed. And, you know, a lot of the same methodologies, the expectation of excellence and preparedness, readiness to sit in that room. That is our guiding principle. And so, as we go on console, every day, we show up prepared. And we have that expectation for the people in our room. But also, it extends off console. So, we talk about our readiness reviews of knowing that the cultural expectation that people will speak up and be able to make a statement about our readiness even when that is a hard statement to make. But that collectively has been enforced through the NASA agency, especially within the operations and flight director’s office. And we see that happening on the SpaceX side as well, so that we know when we say we’re ready to launch, we are ready to launch.

Host: Yeah. It’s supporting that culture to make sure those three things you talked about. You said crew safety. You said vehicle safety. You said mission success. That’s part of the culture that you’re trying to lead.

Zebulon Scoville: And, you know, you can’t defer a decision in terms of responsibility to someone else that’s not in the room. You can’t defer the hard choice that you might have to make. You have to — you have to be able to make it yourself. And you need to be able to defend it. But at the same time, you know, Malcom Gladwell has written books about, you know, the instinct that gets trained over time. And untrained instinct can be very dangerous. But the years we spend in simulations and understanding and the systems and being able to tell the inflections on a flight controller’s voice and so forth. Those things make you know that when something doesn’t feel right, it may not be. And listen to that. But if something feels right, and you feel like the response is right, and you base it on the background, you can trust that instinct. And that is a great feeling —

Host: Is this background that I’m loving to explore right now, because I know we’re really excited to go right to Demo-2. But I know there’s a history with taking this culture, these ideas, these values that you’re describing and integrating them with SpaceX. Tell me about some of your first days, first weeks working with SpaceX and trying to come up with integrated operations on how you can run this mission together.

Zebulon Scoville So, I, my first — some of my first interactions with SpaceX were actually before I was assigned to Demo- 2, before Crew-1 flew. I was in charge of emergency operations joint operations panel. So, this is an operations board that looks at the ISS, emergency capability. So, we have three big things we look out for on the space station from an emergency perspective — fire, depress and toxic atmosphere. And so, we have extensive procedures and flight roles developed for these scenarios. We do extensive training. This needs to be the kind of training where crew doesn’t need to look it up in a procedure as well. They have a memorized response to be able to get themselves going safely. We want to make sure that we’re doing that right, because there could be variability in how emergencies might unfold. We need to be able to be expecting that from anyone. So as a lead of that emergency [Joint Operations Panel] JOP, this was in the 2015 timeframe, we were looking at the onboarding of these commercial crew vehicles and companies. And we wanted to make sure that as they developed their software, as they developed their hardware, as they come and dock to the space station, it is now not the space station and a Dragon. It is a space station. They are essentially for a period of time, they’re a module on the space station and a life boat on the space station. And so, we had to look at how to integrate our procedures and make sure that they were able to understand the types of emergencies we have to deal with and being able to, you know, in some ways, mold and effect the software requirements, the hardware capabilities that they had. But at the same time, as much as we were helping them understand that, they have experience. They have a new way of looking at things. And so, we’re trying to also go into it with the open perspective of what can we learn from SpaceX’s way of looking at a problem? So, we definitely adapt on the NASA side to try to find the right compromise of efficiency, of sort of taking advantage of, you know — the technology of late 2020s here. We don’t need to go back to methodologies that we may have had when we started space station. There are other ways to be able to reach the same safe result. But leveraging the technology, leveraging the software capabilities, leveraging the personnel capabilities to be able to make an efficient system. And that evolved — from there, I had further interactions with SpaceX. I was the lead for one of the cargo missions. This was a CRS-10 mission. And so, this was — actually, the mission director on that mission, Brian Coffee, is sort of the equivalent on the SpaceX side of a flight director. We were both leads for that mission together. That was my first opportunity to work with Brian. And that was a very successful mission. You know, we had some challenges along the way. In fact, as — coming up and rendezvousing toward ISS, the first time, it actually had an abort and broke out. We had to re-rendezvous, which is basically this scenario where it flies away from space station and has to go up and over space station and come up and came back the next day. And we were able to capture it, install it. From there, I got assigned to help out Scott Stover, who was the lead flight director for the Demo-1 mission. And so, I sort of followed on his coattails and learned the Crew Dragon aspects of it through that. I was one of the flight directors supporting him during the Demo- 1 mission involved and followed from the Demo-2. And it’s been a ride.

Host: Wow. There’s a lot there. I mean, I think the main thing that I took away was the fact that NASA is a little bit in a teaching role. Like you said, there’s this culture that you’re sharing with SpaceX. It sounds like it’s kind of a two-way street though, where SpaceX has this maybe more lean and agile or maybe new, more technical, thinking about 2020, thinking about the future. And you’re having this back and forth on how to work together based on the experiences of NASA and based on some of the new ideas and framework, I guess, coming from SpaceX to make this mission come together.

Zebulon Scoville: It is definitely two-way street. Right?

Host: Yeah.

Zebulon Scoville: You know, I hate to sort of group us both into buckets of, oh, SpaceX is the lean and agile one, because that’s absolutely not a universal truth. It goes both ways where there are some cases where the experience we have with flying space station, we may be able to have solutions to know that we have experience making this work. Everyone is — you know, it’s not a competition. It’s not us versus them. It is really how do we come together? And sometimes, it’s sort of the you know, there is some tension there. But that is really, in any partnership, I think, what promotes the end result of being a stronger capability. And so, we challenge them. They challenge us. You know, we may have more human spaceflight experience. At this point, they have more rocket launches than any other company. And so, they have a lot that they’ve learned through that that has been able to work. And so how do — you know, being able to work with their culture which has a lot of benefits. Also working with the NASA culture. And everyone has really tried to innovate and be lean and try to make this still stand to our gold standards of safety but be able to make it so that it’s something that we can do repeatedly, something we can do with reliability and with excitement. It is — you know, you look at this vehicle. You look at the excitement of the crew. The excitement of the flight control teams. And it is there.

Host: So, let’s go into that. Let’s go into the preparation, what it’s taken to actually work together and get ready for this particular launch. There’s a lot to it. What goes into the preparation? What are you actually doing to get ready?

Zebulon Scoville: So, as a flight director, our main focus is on the operational aspect. And so, we might not be the engineering team that’s building the hardware. But we might be on the team that’s looking at the requirements and then is like determining how a piece of hardware might get used or then trying to integrate that into its testing and certification with the engineering teams. Then we’ll use that to write the procedures for how a piece of hardware might get used. You know, I’m using a piece of hardware as an example. But in some cases, this may also be an operation like a rendezvous on a docking. And how do we use the capabilities of the vehicle and write the procedures that have the checks and balances in there — as an operational team on console, prepares us for things that could go right and things that could go wrong? And so, you never know what the problem is going to be. Every flight is going to have some issue. Right? And so, we want to be able to have things, not just for today’s team that’s going to fly Demo-2. But we want to be able to take the experience we’ve written, codify some of that knowledge and some of those risk traits that we’ve had discussions about into our flight rules, into our procedures, into our training so that five years from now, we’re on, you know, the eighth or ninth crew mission or what have you. Those teams that weren’t as intricately involved with the development and demonstration, they have that background. They have that guidance on some of the things we’ve thought about as a starting point rather than having to learn that from the beginning again. So, we’ll write those procedures. We’ll write the flight rules. Flight rules, as I mentioned before, these are documents that determine how we respond to certain situations. They help define what level of risk we have in agreement with the Commercial Crew program or agreement with the ISS program on what the operational team can do. Certainly, we know if it comes down to a safety situation, the team on console can do whatever they need to. We actually have a flight rule that says this. If you need to do anything, you do. Do what you have to do to keep the crew and the vehicle safe. But beyond that, it sorts of defines, you know, these are our priorities. These are the risks that how we’ve defined them. And that’s the contract we’ve built with the program to allow us to execute within those bounds. So, we’ll then go and practice. It’s simulation after simulation. And so, we look at the launch phases. And this would be on launch day, we’re going to have a group of NASA flight controllers at Fire Room 4 at Kennedy Space Center. That’s the same room that launch the space shuttles out of. SpaceX is using that. That’s where they’re going to be controlling the F-9 booster itself. They’re going to have their — out in Hawthorne. And we’re going to have a team of controllers out there in their room with them as well. And that’s where they are controlling the Dragon. And so similar to shuttle, the countdown is led out of Florida with the tie-in from the Hawthorne control center and the Houston control center, as they hit T-0. A lot of the Falcon-9 operations are largely automated at that point. And so, the Hawthorne control center takes the lead at that point as it goes up through the ascent phases. Through that ascent, there’s a number of calls we’ll be looking for. And we’re going to be practicing these. We really want to make them so that they are — there’s muscle memory with these calls. We know the timing of a call that might be there. We know what that call should sound like, when it’s supposed to be coming so that if it doesn’t come right then, you know, we can start to look at what might be causing that. Or if we’re getting a call different than what we expected that sounds different, we can dig into what the vehicle might be trying to tell us. As that proceeds through the ascent, there’s a series of steps through the ascent that’ll affect different sort of escape modes. And this would be if there’s a problem on the F-9 booster or with Dragon, there’s a number of software triggers that are looking for events that may indicate something going wrong. It’ll automatically escape the Dragon off the top of the booster. Those have different stages based on the atmospheric pressure, based on the speed, based on the parachute capabilities, based on thrasher capabilities, all the way up through the ascent where it reaches the final, what’s called the stage 2-E abort mode, which is they’ve gotten up high enough so if they haven’t escaped, they can actually escape into a safe orbit. And so, beyond that, you’re in a nominal sequence. None of those escapes are realized. And they have the nominal engine shut down called SECO. And then they have separation. And from that separation, they’re off of that booster. After the second stage booster, they go to the activation mode. So, then we’ll have other sims. They’ll practice this phase of the flight with the free flight. Then as they go through that free flight, there’s a variable period of burns they’ll do to sequence towards ISS. We’ll practice the stages with a separate team controlling for the rendezvous and docking phase. And so, we might have, you know, 10 or 15 simulations on each one of these phases. We have a set of trainers that always sit in their evil backrooms with their pencils and trying to figure out how to trick us and how to get us off guard. And really, what they’re doing is they’re poking on those flights because they’re trying to say, “Hey, have you thought about this? How does this flight role play out, challenge with this scenario? How do your procedures line up when faced with this situation?” They help us find holes that we may have. We then go back and fill those. In some cases, it may not just be our procedures. Maybe we have to make a software change. Maybe we need different voice access. Maybe we need a different set of telemetry on our displays. That’s what we’re really reining out of those things. You know, I tell the team when we have these simulations, I want — you know, this is a place to fail. In these simulations, this is where it is safe to fail. Go do it. You know, we have the mantras of, you know, failure is not an option. Absolutely, in a simulation, failure is an option. That’s what to expect. That’s what makes us find our holes and so we can plug them and fill them. We’ll do these for all the phases, attach phase operations. When we get attached to ISS, we’re not — you know, we’re flying ISS 365 days a year, 24 /7. So, we have to have the entire flight control team, not just the Demo- 2 specialists on console. We can’t simply fill that many shifts. So, everyone, whether they’ve been involved with SpaceX or not, now needs to get trained on how to use SpaceX as an emergency lifeboat. If there is an emergency, we have to be able to get them safely into the Dragon capsule, be able to keep them safe and then be able to potentially even undock in that it could be in the middle of the night on a Sunday, you know, 2 a.m. And so that’s been an effort. And as I said, going into the undocks and free flight away from station and the entry, ascent, landing. We’re splashing down in the ocean. For the first time, we haven’t put people in the ocean since the Apollo Soyuz landing. And so that’s a new operation in terms of the rescue and recovery process there. So typically, when they land, they’re going to land on the east coast of Florida. There’s a backup location. They can land near Pensacola. SpaceX has their recovery vessels out there. And they practice, and they’ve gone through training to be able to pull the capsule out, to be able to assess the situation of the crew, being able to provide them medical support. If there’s an injured crew member after landing, we have medivac capabilities to be able to get them to a hospital. You know, there’s also situations where if they were to land off target or if they had to come down in an emergency in some place besides those planned landing locations, we work with the Air Force. They have a detachment three, which is responsible for rescue and recovery, basically globally. The Dragon can land anywhere in any body of water, within reason. And so, we’ll be looking at where the forces are that can recover them, what the weather is like around the globe. And we’ll be able to help direct the crew to the nearest safe body of water. And so, we have to practice with the Air Force to make sure they know how to get this, get the crew out of that vehicle and pull them out. So, it’s really a global effort across multiple government agencies and companies to get this right.

Host:I feel like a lot of people zone in on just that launch, right? Yeah, I want to see the smoke and the fire. This is a big deal to launch. But there’s so many different parts of this mission that you have to think about. There’s efforts here, that’s going on in California, it’s going on in Florida, it’s going on in Houston — you have to think about the globe. You have to put the Air Force here. There’s just so many different considerations. And what you were describing before was you were describing simulations. You were describing ways to practice all of that and fill in the gaps of all these details that you’ve spent so much time writing, all these procedures, these step by step instructions on every phase of flight, on what to do and all these flight rules. Maybe I might be oversimplifying this, but I like to think of flight rules as, like, if/then statements. So, it’s like if this is the scenario, then you’re go or then you’re not go, you know, depending on the scenario. Maybe I’m oversimplifying.

Zebulon Scoville: There are many cases where flight rules will do that. There are some cases where we know that you can’t simplify it that much. And we have to say here are considerations for the risk —

Host: There you go.

Zebulon Scoville: — because we can’t define exactly how it’s going to feel for you in space. So, think about this before you make a decision in some case. That really puts you in the area of gray. But in the clean cases, if/then certainly is good guidance.

Host: Yeah. So, I’m guessing it’s taken a lot of time to get to this point, just based on what you’re saying. There seems to have been a massive amount of planning. And even when you come up with a plan, there’s just little things along the way that you didn’t think about that you have to fill in those gaps. So, just going through that process, through — how many years was that? I mean, when did you actually start this process of thinking about all these different elements?

Zebulon Scoville: Yes. So, me personally, as I said, we were thinking about that back when I first started working on the emergency operations. That was in 2015. But really, this goes back before that. I was a latecomer to the Commercial Crew program with Dragon at that point. And people had been looking at that for years before that. So that is — this has been a development effort since then and throughout. Then it sort of evolved as the vehicle maturity improved, as the hardware became more defined. We then would have to — we’d be able to have an extra level of fidelity and understanding of exact operations to be able to improved that the products — in there. But it’s been years and years. And it is extensive, the brain power, both on the SpaceX and NASA side and the exhaustiveness that people have put in and the dedication. It’s inspiring.

Host: Now there’s a couple milestones from the time of this recording that we have to get through. And a lot of them, they’re called readiness reviews. So, it’s, like, I guess there’s a lot of people coming together. And really verifying, like, are we ready? So, what are those about?

Zebulon Scoville: We actually just completed what is our stage operation readiness review with the International Space Station Program on Thursday, April 30th. And this was a review basically looking at the operations as they pertain to the interaction with the space station. We also looked at the outstanding risks that we have with the vehicle where there’s open work, where there’s forthcoming testing that we’re expecting, where we expect that to close out. How is the Dragon going to interface with the space station? Are the procedures ready? Are the players ready? All that was discussed in those cases. We also go back and look at previous anomalies on the space station and see how that may apply to the vehicle coming up. We look at how this is going to be compatible with the crew members that are on space station. Are there unique aspects we have to interplay there? And so, we’re looking at the fact that once Bob and Doug come up the space station, we’re also trying to get some spacewalks done during that time. There would be a Japanese HTV cargo mission that’s coming up and bringing some batteries. And we’re going to take advantage of Bob’s time there as a trained EVA crew member to supplement with Chris Cassidy and go get some of these new batteries installed. So, in addition to all the test, objectives, the demo mission, we’re trying to weigh in also the priorities of trying to be able to accomplish other objectives, the space box, robotic operations, see what we can do to get Bob and Doug up to be able to supplement the science capability on the space station during that timeframe. So, looking at the other readiness reviews going forward we’ve got a flight test readiness review with SpaceX on the 8th. We have a Commercial Crew program flight test readiness review. So, this is looking at the certification paperwork. This is looking at the Haber processing and any of the open issue tickets that have come up throughout the development and certification process and making sure all those are closing out. Then we go into agency readiness review. So, this is, you know, with the NASA agency as a whole and with SpaceX coming together on the 20th to be able to say, yes, we’ve got our stamp. We’re ready to go, — or if there is an open issue and we’re not ready, we’ll say we’re not ready. We need to add some time to make sure we got this right.

Host: Wow. OK. Yes. So, a couple of those milestones. Let’s go into the mission. You’ve already laid out a nice framework and some of the simulations, just practicing all of these different parts of the mission. I want to dive right into the details. Going with, I guess, following the crew, the time that they’re walking out, at this point, they have been quarantined for some time. And they’re going to be walking out of the building, going to the pad. What’s that like?

Zebulon Scoville: They’ve spent some time in quarantine in Houston. They then get on a NASA jet, takes them to quarantine at KSC. They have an astronaut crew quarters at Kennedy Space Center. They wake up that morning. They have breakfast in the crew quarters. They get a weather briefing. So, this is about five hours prior to launch. And so, SpaceX will look at the latest weather, give them a briefing about what their ascent is going to look like, what the probability is we’re going to be going to launch this day, talking about where they’re — where there is other good weather sites around the globe, if they have to have a reentry after they get to orbit, if there’s an issue with the initial activation. And tell them, Hey, maybe the Bay of Biscay. Maybe Cabo is looking good. Basically, fill them in on that. Then the crew leaves crew quarters. They go down and get suited up. So, this is where they’ll have their space suits. They’ll get put in those. They’ll do some lead checks. They’ll do some comm checks making sure everything is set there. Then they’ll come out of the [Operations and Checkout] O&C building, get in some, some of the transport vehicles. These are Tesla Model X’s, that then take them out into Pad 39 Alpha where they go, and they’ll ride the elevator up and across the launch entry get into the — get strapped into the vehicle. And so along that way, as the crew is sort of following through, there is a series of checks that’s going on the ground with the control teams, as I said, in Florida and in Houston and Hawthorne. And so, we’re looking at the preparedness of the Falcon 9 and the Dragon capsule. So, one thing that’s sort of unique about how SpaceX is able to launch their vehicles is they’ve — in order to maximize the performance of the Falcon 9, what they do is they actually put the crew members in the capsule first and arm the launch escape system before they fuel the rocket. They then put the fuel in the rocket at point that lets it get in and stay super cool, intensified, which allows them to get just a little bit of extra performance to be able to get up there. And from that point, we follow the countdown. That launch escape system arm and final fueling within the last 45 minutes or so till we count down to the final T-0 where they have the launch. As they’re coming up, lifting off the pad, they’ll go through — you’ll hear a series of standard calls from the crew. They’ll hear the, you know, Stage 1- A, Stage 1-B. Those are referencing the different escape modes that I talked about earlier. There’ll be calls from the SpaceX team talking about the performance and the trajectory of the Falcon 9 as it goes up hill. We’ll hear a staging call. This is basically after the first stage of the Falcon 9 with the nine engines burns through its fuel. It will then separate. And they’ll light the second stage with the [Merlin Vacuum] MVac engine, the single MVac engine. And that will continue from there up through the ascent. We get SECO or second stage engine cut off. At that point, the boosting part is done. And the Dragon will then separate from the second stage. It’s now in a safe orbit. So, at this point, in some missions, you sort of have the initial ascent phase and what’s called your apogee, which would be sort of the highest point of your orbit. And it puts you up there. But the perigee, which would be the lowest point of your orbit, that may, in some cases, not even be above the atmosphere. So, you’ll have to do another boost burn to be able to maintain a stable orbit. On this mission, the engine cut off is at a stable orbit. So, we have an apogee and a perigee that’s both above the atmosphere and in a stable orbit. So, we’re watching the initial activation. So, this is turning on some of the systems. We’ll be activating the solar panels, looking at how some of the radiators are working, they’ll established communications with the [Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System] TDRSS satellites and so forth. We’ll also then begin ready for a burn called the phase burn. And what the phase burn is going to do is that’s going to set it up on a path to come to the space station. The phase burn is going to be something that’s going to sort of help it arrive at a certain time at the space station. And how that phase burn works is if you think about it, the International Space Station is orbiting around the Earth and it sort of has an orbital plane. So, it’s the plane that’s drawn by the ellipse of the space stations’ orbit. Well as the Earth is rotating around it the distance between that plane and Florida is going to change throughout the year. And so, with that, what you will have to do on some days, it may be very close. And so, as you launch into that orbital plane, you will find that you don’t have that — the amount of distance you have to get to catch up to the space station is small. And you can get there quicker. In some cases, the space station may actually be on the other side of the world. And so, you have to phase to catch up. And so, what this means is you’ve got to be able to ride at a lower orbit. And that lower orbit causes you to catch up on a vehicle on a higher orbit. One of the interesting things — I don’t know — to sort of visualize this, when you got to the zoo or you go to the museum or something like that, sometimes, they’ll have those charity things where you drop a quarter in. And it sort of rolls around this spiral thing. And it sort of drops down through the hole. On the outside of that spiral, it seems like that quarter is moving much slower. And as it drops down lower, it’s moving faster and faster and faster and has a quicker way to get around the orbit. So, the same type of things happen here. As you’re closer to the Earth, it’s moving faster. It gets around — completes an orbit in a faster amount of time. Up at the higher altitude of the space station, it might be going slower. So, by staying in a lower altitude, they’re able to then catch up with the space station. And then they’ll do some final burns to get close into the space station. We get the — what’s close to — what’s called the integrated operations that happens at about — it’s about one to two kilometers away from the space station. And with that, that’s where the near phase rendezvous begins.

Host: OK. Yeah. That’s a lot of — there’s a lot of steps there. And I know — so you mentioned for launch specifically, you talked about — you did mention Hawthorne, and you mentioned Florida, looking at the Falcon 9. What are you doing in mission control Houston? What are you looking for prior to launch to make sure that it’s — are you looking at the phasing or different parts of the International Space Station, making sure that it’s ready to receive Dragon?

Zebulon Scoville: Yeah. We have a series of launch commit criteria. Launch commit criteria is a flight rule that basically says we need these conditions to be just so in order to launch. So, some of them are dependent upon the space station. So, we need to make sure space station is ready to receive Dragon. Are its power systems working? Are its life support systems working? Are its communication and navigation systems working? Those all will be checks. And we’ll be able to give to SpaceX a verification the space station is ready for launch. Other than that, there are also SpaceX internal rules that have a similar launch commit criteria. So, this might be what is the readiness of the Falcon? What’s the readiness of the Dragon to be able to do this? What is the weather launch commit criteria? So, we’ll be monitoring their systems with them. We’ll be listening to the calls their making on their internal loops. We’ll be comparing them to their internal flight rules. We’ll also be making sure we’re assessing the readiness of the rescue forces on any given nominal launch date, we also need to make sure we’ve got forces positioned with aircraft and helicopters around the world to be able to be prepared for a stand by rescue if necessary. The trajectory part is all kind of mapped out well in advance. We know that’s not something we really have to watch in real-time. We are making sure the trajectory is clear. So, there is not a lack of orbital debris in low-Earth orbit. And so, we have help from our trajectory officers that work with the Air Force and monitor orbital debris. And we’re able to then make sure that, hey, on today, we’re not tracking any debris in the ascent trajectory or in the orbital trajectory paths. So, we’ll make sure that’s clear. And we’ll report that to SpaceX.

Host: OK. Now uphill, going up into orbit, you’re following along every step of the way, even from mission control Houston because you want the latest data at every step of the way.

Zebulon Scoville: Yeah. So, we’re following and watching along. Early during the ascent, it is SpaceX that is operating the vehicle. So, we’re listening to the calls they’re making. We’re listening to the risks we are having. If there was anything that was going off, we’re not going to be able to respond to, you know — during an ascent change, change the calls that SpaceX might be. We sort of have to be prepared for eventualities that may come. If we have an escape, we have to go help rescue the crew. On a launch escape, that isn’t a place where they’ve got the SpaceX recovery forces positioned to be able to recover the capsule. We’re counting on the Air Force and attachment three to be able to get them — prepare for those. We’re looking at where they’re going. Listening to, you know, anything that may sound off with any hardware that may be performing as expected or not. We’d be listening to that and then basically just making sure that yeah, they got the orbit that we were expecting.

Host: Yeah. Now when they got to orbit, you mentioned something called activation and check out. What are they activating? What are they checking out?

Zebulon Scoville: So, what you do, once you get to space, you have — the Dragon is now having to maintain a close loop. Life support system, it’s already done that since the moment you put them in the vehicle and close the hatch. But now all these systems have just gone through the violent shake of launch. And so, you’re making sure, did everything survive and work throughout the launch? You know, has Dragon been able to establish and verify its navigation system? So, it’s able to look at the GPS. It’s got a good lock on the GPS. It’s got a good lock on the TDRSS satellite. TDRSS are the communication satellites that NASA has out in the geostationary orbit. And so that’s one of their prime communication paths for telemetry and for voice. They’ll be looking at communications over with the ground stations as well. The crew, after ascent, they’ll be able to get out of their suits. And they’ll be able to still the cabin for on-orbit operations. So, they’re wearing their suits for a couple critical phases of flight. Basically, during the ascent phase, prior to docking, they’ll put on their suits. When they get ready to undock, they’ll put on their suits. And then during the entry, ascent and landing, they’ll wear their suits. And so, getting that stuff — so they have some footrest they use during the ascent on their feet. Once you’re in 0-G in open space, those footrests are really just sticking out in your way a little bit. So, they’ll take them off and stow those. You make sure the fans are up and running. If necessary, there’s a toilet they can use. Maybe it’s been a while, a long countdown day for them to get food, they’ve got a chance to get some food and drinks and so forth.

Host: So, what is it about the suits? You know, what is it about that part of flight that they actually have to have the suits on? What are the suits doing for them?

Zebulon Scoville: The suits are assistance, really integrated with the Dragon vehicle. And this is something that goes back. Historically, looking at some of the tragedies that have happened in human spaceflight before, they’ve been caused or could potentially have been survivable if crew members were able to wear pressure suits during some of these critical phases of flight. So, lesson learned from that. They’re providing protection. If there was a loss of cabin pressure, they can hold pressure. They can keep the crew members alive. Beyond that, they’re also providing integrated communication. So, they’ve got radio headsets in them. Also, if something were to happen, if there were sort of, example, a fire onboard the Dragon, inside, they’re going to have a couple of things. They’re going to have, obviously, the flames themselves. The suits are made out of a fire-resistant material. But additionally, they also have the ability to provide clean nitrous gas or even oxygen. And so that’s protecting them from being exposed from a smoky, contaminated environment as well.

Host: So after, I guess, that part, the launch, you said they are able to take off their suits. They’re able to kind of stretch, maybe use the bathroom, do a couple of these checkouts and activations. There is, I think, at some point in the near future of this part of the flight, a demonstration. And that’s part of the test that is this mission. Demo-2 is a test mission. So, what are they doing?

Zebulon Scoville: Yeah, exactly. That’s a great way to put it. It is a test flight. We say that over and over again. And I think that, you know, anytime you do something first, you’re going to learn something as much as we — are going to learn stuff. So, one of the things we really want to demonstrate and get some stick time with it was flying the vehicle manually. This is — SpaceX has done an incredible job building a vehicle that otherwise is very capable of autonomous flight. In a normal mission, it would do all of the burns and rendezvous autonomously with the assistance from the ground monitoring those performance systems. The crew could in theory not have to do anything to adjust their trajectory or so forth. And the vehicle could almost ride them into the space station. On a test flight, we need to be able to demonstrate the capability for the crew to do these things when that system doesn’t work. And so, SpaceX — NASA, when we develop the requirements for the Commercial Crew program, one of the things we said is we want the capability for the crew to have manual piloting capability. So, we built this in. And what we’re going to be doing as far field demonstration, the crew is going to take manual control. And on their touchscreen displays, they have a software interface where they will be able to control the roll, the pitch, the yaw. And they can do finite thruster input through those inputs to be able to get clean rotational axis. And so, what they might start doing, maneuver to basically realign the spacecraft with what’s called the local vertical, local horizontal reference frame. So, if you think as the Dragon is circling — orbiting around the Earth, the circular nature of that orbit causes the Dragon to pitch about four degrees a minute as it goes around the Earth. And so, they’re able to establish that local vertical, local horizontal as basically, you know, level with the horizon. That’s essentially the way to —

Host: Level with the horizon.

Zebulon Scoville: Yeah. And so, they establish that. And this would be a continuous capability that they might need. For example, if some of the navigation equipment went down and Dragon didn’t know its orientation from left, right, up, down, this allows the crew to say, hey, here’s the horizon. This is — you know, I’m pointing forward or pointing backward, the direction of my velocity. And so, they then lock that into the computers. And that will be able to let the Dragon know where it is. Then it can then navigate on its own. In this case, we’re not going to actually commit that to the guidance system. But we’re able to show the capability to do that, reorientation, get lined up.

Host: And far — you mentioned far field. This means it’s not close to the International Space Station. Is that what that means?

Zebulon Scoville: Right. That’s what it means.

Host: OK.

Zebulon Scoville: So, this is in the — as I mentioned, it’s probably going to be a two-day rendezvous to get to the space station. It could do it faster. It could be as short as six hours. Typically, we expect it to be somewhere around the second day of flight that they’ll be able to dock. So, in that first day, there’ll be sometimes where they’re sort of coasting through between a few maneuver burns. We’re going to take advantage of that time to do this test and so since it is away from space station, which is called the far field.

Host: So, they’re going to do that test. I don’t think there’s much until — this is — like you mentioned, this is a longer rendezvous. I think at this time, we’re looking at about 19 hours. So, there’s a sleep period in there or something, right?

Zebulon Scoville: There is. There is. Yeah, the — because of that phase angle between where the cape is and where the space station might be in within that orbital plane, we have an opportunity where we know we can’t keep the crew up for 30 hours and expect them to be sharp when they need to be executing the docking. And so, we planned to say if the rendezvous is so long, you need to put in a crew sleeper. Again, this goes back to flight rules. Flight rules say you don’t want to keep the crew up and doing a docking when they have been up for 20 hours on their duty day. And so, we put in a sleep period. Basically, the crew is able to put some window shades on the cabin. They put on some earbuds, provide some white noise, let them go to sleep. They get eight hours of sleep. Wake up in the morning. Have their coffee. And then go dock to the space station.

Host: Alright. Dragon has coffee. Not bad.

Zebulon Scoville: They better.

Host: They better. [Laughter] Is there anything happening during the sleep period with the vehicle? I’m sure it’s being monitored the entire time from the ground. But is there anything happening?

Zebulon Scoville: The vehicle, as it goes through its rendezvous profile, we have to be watching where those burns are. They need to raise its altitude, so it doesn’t stay at that lower altitude as described and sort of skip by and miss the space station. So, in some cases, it’s just unavoidable. We’ll have to do some delta V burns which raises altitude to sort of slow down its arrival at ISS. Some of those burns might happen during the sleep period. It comes down to what the trajectory looks like on the day of launch. But we’ll try to separate them, let the crew get some good night sleep. Those thrusters can be a little bit loud. But in some cases, it’s just unavoidable, we prepare them for that. And so other than that, the vehicle has got its life support systems, its fans rolling and its computers watching its trajectory and so forth. And that’s what’s going on.

Host: What’s nice is that they get a full eight hours though. That’s — in the plan, at least. [Laughter]

Zebulon Scoville: Yeah. I’m sure they won’t spend any of that looking at the window.

Host: Yeah, exactly, right? So, at some point, you got to wake up. I know wake up music is a tradition in SpaceX — in NASA, wake up music. I don’t know if anyone has talked about it. I know I’ve asked the crew. They have — they are actually in sync when it comes to the music that they like. So at least, they’re thinking about it.

Zebulon Scoville: Yeah, on the shuttle days, we used to wake up the crew from mission control with wake-up music. It would be a song that may have been picked by the crew and by their family members. On this mission, I’ll just have to leave you — leave people guessing on that one.

Host: Good. Alright. Yeah. Leave — no spoilers here. What are they doing as soon as they wake up?

Zebulon Scoville: So, they wake up. You know, there’s a period sort of post sleep, they get up and they’re able to get their meal in the morning, check in with SpaceX. They’ll get a vehicle status to understand what’s going on. And that’s where at that point, looking at getting ready for the rendezvous to the space station. So that’s going to be coming up soon. So, we’re going to be — the crew is going to be putting on their suits again as they get closer to the space station, doing — repeating their leak checks, making sure that the suits are tight after they’ve redonned them at this point. They’ll then begin the preparations for the integrated operations. So, we have a series of procedures that SpaceX runs, and NASA runs, and the ISS and the Dragon vehicle run together. It’s really sort of a four-operator input to this procedure. And all of the steps have to interface with each other just so. As they come up, they’ll come up from behind and underneath the space station. They’ll reach — we have these different waypoints along the rendezvous trajectory. And so, the first one is going to be Waypoint 0 as it enters integrated operations. So, this is directly below the space station, radially underneath the space station. And that — there is a burn there that will have the Dragon begin an arc upper round and in front to intercept the docking access of the space station. This is on the velocity vector. As the space station is flying through space, it’s got a direction that’s going to screen a vector for that velocity. The Dragon will come up and intercept — basically be looking at it eye to eye.

Host: Right in the front of the space station.

Zebulon Scoville: Right — yeah. It’s going to be 220 meters out in front of the space station. It’ll intercept that. And it’ll start moving automated towards the space station. After that motion towards the space station initially begins, the software then causes an automatic extension of the docking mechanism. The docking mechanism has a soft capture ring. It sort of extends. And that extends. So, it has some damping capability with the contact, so it doesn’t put too many loads into the combined vehicle. That thing gets extend. The hooks get ready. And then we’ll have — SpaceX will command a hold. This will stop them in that position there. We’ll get ready for the second part of the manual flight testing. So, this test is really — if you think about a pilot trying to fly a test vehicle. And if you were going to do an aircraft carrier run and do a landing there, this is giving you that visual reference on the runway with that option there. You have a good view of distances. You’ve got navigation systems that are tuned in and now communicating with the space station. They use what are called lidars. These things are basically lasers that have a reflective beam. It bounces off some prepositioned reflectors, and we know where they are on the space station. That tells us both the range and what the rate of closure is. And it can also calculate geometrically what the angles are to know whether the orientation is right, that the distance is right, that the range is right. So, we’ll have that all locked on. Now the crew is able to take back over on those displays, that manual piloting. And they’re able to do that, that sort of canned series of maneuvers to say, you know, how does this feel? I trained this a bunch on a computer on the ground. Does it feel like that? Does it look like that? If I put in two pulses to the left, do I get the same punch out of that as I got out of it on the ground simulator? Did I use the same amount of fuel? Did my inertial navigation system measure the same acceleration? They’ll do it in multiple axis to see if they’ve got that right. Then as that comes to a complete, they’ll put it back into a hold state. And we’ll do another go pole and resume the automated approach towards the space station. So, this is as they come in. At this point, they’re maybe 170 meters from ISS when they start to resume the automated approach. They’ll move therefore to about 20 meters away from ISS. The vehicle comes to a last pause. We’ll do our final go/no go at that point, making sure ISS, yep, we’re still right. The lighting is looking good. The communications is looking solid. The crew has good visuals. The Dragon systems are healthy. We give the final go. And then they’ll resume the approach for docking. That’s when we get the contact mechanisms drive together. The hooks drive and get a hard mate of the two vehicles. And we’ve got a new spaceship on the station.

Host: That’s going to be an exciting time for sure.

Zebulon Scoville: Yes. It is.

Host: Yeah. Now there’s a couple technologies on the space station as — I think that are helping with all of this. You talked about the hooks being driven. There’s a docking adaptor right at the front of the space station where Dragon is aiming towards. That’s the international docking adaptor. And that’s been designed specifically to fit Dragon.

Zebulon Scoville: Yep. So, the international docking adaptor on the space station is designed really to be a universal docking adaptor, to be compatible with a standard for the docking mechanism. It’s a common standard for docking vehicles. And so, the Boeing vehicle will have a comparable docking system. It’ll go to it. SpaceX built their own docking decker on the Dragon side to interface with the common interface on the space station. I was actually one of the lead flight directors — I was the lead flight director for the spacewalk that went in to install this docking adaptor.

Host: Alright. Cool.

Zebulon Scoville: So, this is all really coming full circle to me to have that docking adaptor installed on one of the EVAs I got to work with Jeff Williams and —

Host: Kate Rubins.

Zebulon Scoville: Kate Rubins, yeah. And so, as they come together in contact with the soft capture mechanism I talked about, that’s going to damp it out. And that base will retract that soft capture mechanism. We’ll see some indications that they’re driven together. They then drive those hooks, which means they’re hard mate. They’ll then repress that vestibule, the space between the Dragon and the ISS. The ISS crew, Chris Cassidy will come down and open up the ISS side of the hatch. The Dragon crew will open up the Dragon side of the hatch. And they’ll come out. There’ll be some big hugs and a few shared high-fives.

Host: I know from the [Public Affairs Office] PAO perspective, we’re looking to get all of that. We want to see all those hugs and high-fives for sure.

Zebulon Scoville: I’ll do the best I can. [Laughter]

Host: So, from the docking perspective, the docking adapter you talked about, it was designed a certain way to fit multiple different vehicles. And SpaceX had to design the docking system to make sure it fit. So, it just seems there’s a couple things at play there. There was the size of the docking ring. There was, I guess, the shape where the hooks align. Like, everything had to kind of match up. That’s how that technology really works.

Zebulon Scoville: Yeah, correct. Exactly. So that talks about the structural interface. I’ve already talked about the lidars to be able to give alignment range. Other systems that come together, there’s a communication system that’s called C2V2. It sounds sort of like a Star Wars droid. But it’s a common communication for visiting vehicles. So, this is the radio beacon that will be able to transmit both data telemetry, voice and then even video. And as the Dragon comes up and as the signal strength gets stronger, we sort of up the bandwidth and up the telemetry rate to be able to get the adequate capability voice and the video. So, we’re going to have a great view in the control center of this centerline video looking right down the nose of Dragon as it comes towards ISS. We saw the same thing on Demo-1. It was a great view.

Host: Also, a fantastic view. Yeah, yeah. So that’s what that — so it’s like — you talked about TDRSS before. You said the Dragon is talking with TDRSS through a lot of this flight. But there is this part where it’s close to the International Space Station, where it’s talking with the International Space Station, sharing data, video, audio.

Zebulon Scoville Yeah, correct. So, the C2V2 is how they talk to the space station. We have S-band that allows them talk to the TDRSS satellite or to ground stations to be able to do that. The ISS is then talking back to Dragon through the C2V2. The ISS has its own S-band. It also has a Ku-Band, which is able to give a slightly higher data rate. So, we’re able to get a lot of the video from ISS to get that to work. Both of these all have GPS systems. They’re able to take the relative GPS signals along them and calculate the distance from each other. And we’ll be able to have both the absolute and relative GPS as they are farther away and as they get closer.

Host: So, what’s Cassidy going to be doing inside the space station throughout this whole docking procedure?

Zebulon Scoville: So, Chris Cassidy is going to be in the Cupola, off of Node 3. He’s going to be set up where those windows are. There’s a robotic workstation that has some of the camera displays. And we can take in the ISS views of Dragon as it comes in. We’ll be able to look at — he’ll also have a view from Dragon looking at station the same way we’ll be able to look at. And on Demo-1, the crew members were responsible for — primarily responsible for monitoring the approach and the final rendezvous. So, if they saw something wrong, there’s these things called approach corridors, which are basically these geometric boundaries that we placed to say the vehicle has to be flying down this corridor. If it gets too far to the edge of this corridor, the software is going to kick it out, and it’s going to fly away. But we also have a crew member watching that. And if they see that happen, they can also send a command that would send it away. So, without a crew on Dragon — on Demo-1, that responsibility really fell on the ISS crew members. On Demo-2, the crew, Bob and Doug, have that prime responsibility. They’ve got the direct interface to the Dragon vehicle. We also have Chris who’ll be monitoring from the space station. And he’ll have sort of a backup monitoring capability. He’ll be trained. He’ll be ready to send the commands to hold or retreat if necessary. But as a general philosophy, we’re going to let Bob and Doug be the prime in charge of their own spacecraft. And only if they had a problem would Chris have to step in.

Host: I’m sure they would prefer it that way. [Laughter]

Zebulon Scoville: Yeah.

Host: Very cool. Alright. So, they will have help along the way. It docks. You talked about pressurization. Does that pressurization happen from the space station side or from the SpaceX side?

Zebulon Scoville: We use space station gas for that. We really want to preserve the Dragon consumables to be able to not spend it repressing the vestibule. We’ve got a lot on the space station. It’s just a much bigger capacity, the gas on our side. So, we’ll come through on the — as the two hatches — as the two vehicles come together, Dragon has its hatch and the ISS has its hatch. So, Chris will come in and open up a valve which will flow ISS gas into the space between the two hatches. That will repress it up to about 5 PSI. And we’ll just wait. We’ll sit there. As that gas is flown in, it’s been — it’s expanded rapidly or contract — sorry — expanded at the lower pressure. It’s also the surfaces that had previously been exposed to vacuum. So, it may be cold. We’re expecting as that temperature — as the gas warms up, that it’s going to have a pressure fluctuation. So, we’ll let that stabilize. It’s really hard to get a leak check when these temperature transients are causing the gas pressure to change. So, we wait for a while for that to stabilize. Then we do a leak check and make sure that those seals are tight, that the structure is hard. And we’re not going to open up the hatches and blow our gas overboard. When we see that that’s stable, then Chris will remove a docking target off of the apex hatch once it gets open. This was one of the targets that the Dragon crew will be monitoring to make sure they’re aligned as they’re coming for the docking. We’ll get that out of the way. And the Dragon crew then opens up the hatch. And it gets it open. They come onboard.

Host: Alright. Now once they’re onboard — I like the way you described this. You described Dragon as, like, part of the International Space Station, sort of an extension or a module. What are Bob and Doug going to be responsible for with the Dragon while they’re onboard?

Zebulon Scoville: While they’re onboard, going back to the fact that this is a test flight, so there’s going to be objectives we have throughout the mission to really demonstrate its capability to serve not just the Demo-2 crew, but also every crew that’s going to come after them and want to use this. And so, what can we learn during this mission to be able to enhance the capability for future crews? Is the emergency equipment set-up, right? Are the handrails in the right space? Are we stowing the equipment in a good way? Do the communications systems work? So, there’s a series of tests. Some of them will happen over the first day or so. Some of them will happen throughout the docked timeframe. Some specific things we’re going to be looking at is we want to make sure that we have good communication from Dragon all the way down through the U.S. segment, through the Russian segment to Soyuz. So, we’ll have some of the Russian crew going to Soyuz. They’ll power up their radios. And we’ll make sure, is the audio signal across all those interfaces still strong? Is it loud and clear? That’s important if there was an emergency on ISS. Both crew members will go back to their own respective vehicles and then prepare for responding to the emergency. In some cases, that may even involve undocking. You want to make sure they’re able to talk to be able to work through the situation together. They’ll do that. They’ll bring in a space station laptop and plug that into Dragon. And we’ll want to verify that it has good data connection and good command capability. There’s some situations where the Dragon crew may need to send some commands to ISS. This will make sure that those laptops are getting good communication. We’re going to be looking at things like, does the — do we get good Wi-Fi? You know, there’s corners in your house that sometimes the Wi-Fi extension may not get there, and you get a dead spot. And so, we’re going to — we have our [Wireless Application Protocol] WAPs in Node 2, which is kind of the adjacent module. We’ll go and put some devices — put some iPads in Dragon, make sure they’re able to get good signals strength. There are some files we update on those periodically, just knowing we can do that from within Dragon. It makes this a little bit more efficient. We’re going to do some suit donning and doffing evaluations. And so, making sure these suits — your practicing experience — so far has been done in these suits on the ground in 1-G. So, what can we learn? Is there different techniques for doing it in 0-G? Is it something you can do by yourself? Do you need help? We’ll be looking at that. We might be doing some sleep evaluations on the way up. There would have only been two crew members. In future missions, there’s going to be as many as four crew members on these vehicles. So, we might get some of the ISS crew to come say, “hey, you know, if you were to have four of us sleeping in here, where are you going to put your sleeping bag? This is my spot.” So, they’ll try that out, see if that may work. Other things would be testing where they store hardware so that it’s accessible, but not in the way and so forth.

Host: OK. Yeah. There’s a lot just to do with Dragon. And then you already mentioned that they have some space station duties as well. They have experiments. They have spacewalks that they can do. So, they’re ready to be onboard for all of this. That’s awesome.

Zebulon Scoville: The vehicle traffic pattern is full. So, the HTV- 9 mission is going to be docking just a few days prior to the Dragon arrival. And having led one of the HTV missions in the past, I know that typically, when you have a full ISS crew, it is a busy time getting racks transferred, getting the science experiments to offload and so forth and then the EVAs with the batteries that they’re bringing up. So, doing this now with the, you know, the three ISS crew members, now Bob and Doug added to it, it’s going to be a busy time, making sure Dragon is looking healthy, doing all the tests I just described. And in addition to that, there’s going to be looking at the ability to do the spacewalks, get these new batteries installed if we can fit that into the timeframe rendition. Just the station maintenance and science experiments. They’re going to be going on a rolling basis.

Host: Yeah. It’s going to be a very busy time.

Zebulon Scoville: It is.

Host: Now focusing on the Demo-2 mission, of course, there’s the whole aspect of coming home. So, what does getting ready for undocking look like?

Zebulon Scoville: So, we have to — getting ready for an undocking, we have to look at a lot of the weather. And so, I talked about how the locations that are the prime splash on locations are off the East Coast of Florida and then a backup location near Pensacola. Well, you may have noticed that sometimes in the summer, the weather around Florida can be a little variable. And so, we don’t want to bring the Dragon home in adverse weather conditions. So, we’re going to be looking at good eye on what the winds are doing, what the rain is doing, really try to pick the best day so that not just our prime location has good weather, but also our backup location has good weather. And we’ll be looking at those forecasts. We’ll be doing some checkouts of the vehicle, as Dragon would’ve been in sort of a quiescent state for a lot of the dock timeframe. We’re going to do these weekly wake ups where, you know, it goes into a semi power-down state for the week. And then every Wednesday, we’d power it up and look at some of the systems, make sure that those were looking good, put it back to sleep. In preparation for undocking, there’s some emergency equipment that lives on — that was temporarily stowed on Dragon. We’ll have to still that back on ISS for the next mission to come along. They’ll do some tests of their seats. The seats are actually this variable actuator that makes it change the angle for whether you’re descending or when do you, whether you’re — the angle you want to be at for splashdown.

Host: Oh, cool.

Zebulon Scoville: Make sure that mechanism is working. Power up and make sure the navigation systems are all working, the power systems are all looking good. Then, you know, that morning, the crew will, get up, put their suits on as they did on the on day of launch and do their leak checks and basically undo and back out of the sequence for the docking that I talked about prior. So, this will be, you know, getting undocked from station, releasing those hooks, doing a series of burns to get away from space station. And that starts phasing them back towards the Cape where they can splash down. A lot of those checks that I said are driven largely going to be on — based on the weather. The amount of time to get from the space station to the water, that’s another variable. It depends on the phase angle between where the space station is and where the splashdown location is. And so, some days, that may be something that can happen in six days — in six hours. Some days, it may take two days to be able to get down to the ground. You have extra capability on the Dragon to be able to accommodate that variability. And even if they have to spend extra time in the water to get them pulled out, we’ve got extra capability there as well.

Host: OK. Very cool. Now is that whole thing automated, or are they doing some of those manual tests again?

Zebulon Scoville: We don’t have any manual tests planned. They certainly have some capabilities. But the sequence is automated for those phasing burns. I would say, you know, the phasing burns are, are — to say automated, it’s also automated with augmentation from the ground to be able to verify burn timing and trajectories and so forth. The reentry sequence itself is an automatic sequence and the parachute deploy. The crew is able to monitor the performance during reentry. And if they don’t see the parachutes deploy when they’re expecting them, they have the ability to deploy the parachutes as it comes down and splashes down. There’s an automated system which is supposed to cut the parachutes. So, the parachutes don’t drag the capsule across the top of the water. If that doesn’t happen, the crew can fire some pyros, which will jettison those parachutes. They have the ability to re-upright the capsule with an operating system if that hasn’t happened automatically. And then, you know, they’ll basically wait rescue in the capsule until SpaceX is able to come up. They have this — have a big vessel called the Go Navigator off of the Cape. That — will be pre-positioned out there. And they’ll be able to get that close to the crew. And they may send out some fast boats with some force that come out, get the hatch open and get the crew out of the seat, make sure that they’re good, hoist the Dragon up onto the deck of the Go Navigator and get them out of the came out of the capsule at that time where they’ll get hugs from your flight docs and start motoring back to port.

Host: Yeah. And I know — just listening to some of the briefings that happened today, everyone said — there was pretty universal that was saying everyone is going to be — I know there was even something about their heart being up to their neck right until splash down and you see that the crew is safe. That’s how long this thing is. It’s not like sigh of relief whenever they get to station. It’s really the whole time.

Zebulon Scoville: It’s really, you get them out of the capsule, on the deck of the boat, right?

Host: On the deck of the boat.

Zebulon Scoville: There’s been a lot of effort for — even for that period post splashdown to make sure that we’ve practiced the sequence and the choreography after splashdown to be able to get them up. You know, you sort of — you hear — I’m a mountain climber. And there’s a lot of times we talk about people will go and climb and get on the top of this big mountain. And, you know, they’ll be halfway down and that’s where the accident happens. Right? And so, you never want to, you know, lighten up at the last minute when you think you’re safe and then find that something goes wrong there. So, you keep your radar up all the way till the crew gets out of that vehicle and they’re safe.

Host: Now, you talked about the undocking and splash down, the whole deorbit sequence. You said it’s mostly automated. Are there emergency scenarios, or is it really kind of based on location?

Zebulon Scoville: There are emergency scenarios where the crew can re-designate where they’re landing. You wouldn’t typically do this for a nominal ranch burn to one of their plan locations. But if there was a problem with Dragon and the crew had to pick a place to come down, as I said, it can land anywhere in any body of water around the globe. And so, they have the ability to re-designate a landing target. They can say, OK, you know, maybe, you know, I need to get down. The best place along my trajectory is going to be, you know, off the coast of Spain. And so, I’m going to try to target that spot, maybe. And they’ll have a series of tables on a tablet that tells them locations based on weather and trajectory capabilities. But also, SpaceX on the ground is continually monitoring and sort of picking out their preferred emergency landing sites. And they’ll be able to communicate with them and say, “Hey, the weather’s looking good here. This is a good spot to get to that you can reach. So, target this spot.” So, they have that capability to choose lane location, execute the burn there on their own if they need to.

Host: OK. Very cool.

Zebulon Scoville: Yep.

Host: Now all of this work, this is — there’s a lot that goes into this. And we’ve gone through, really, an excruciating amount of detail for this mission. And I absolutely loved it. This was — I was so excited to just —

Zebulon Scoville: Sorry, I can nerd out a little bit.

Host: Yeah. No. I loved it. I was asking all these other — all these — great questions. But really, if you pull back, it’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of work from a lot of different people. We have mission control Houston. We have the Florida teams. We have California. We got to work with all these different places. I know one of the — I think one of the abort scenarios for even a launch is the crew might end up like somewhere close to Ireland or something like that. So, working, just thinking literally across the globe with all of these different people, what does this mean for the future of human spaceflight? What are we really trying to do here?

Zebulon Scoville: You know, if we’ve done our job well, then what people will see is a mission that looks easy. And in many cases, you know, I’ve seen this throughout my career in spaceflight, nothing about it is easy. But if we do it right, it looks easy. And so that’s what I’m hoping people are able to see. But just know, that there are people that have spent a lot of time and effort. And it is their life’s honor to be able to do so and to be able to inspire, you know, whether it’s, you know, the kids or the grandparents on what we can do when we come together and put our differences aside. And whether you’re a new company or an old agency, or, you know, you’re fresh out of college or someone who has decades of spaceflight experience with you. You know, everyone has got something they can add. You don’t have to be a mechanical engineer. Whether it’s teachers or scientists, everyone come together. We can unite. And I mentioned this earlier, like, you know, it’s a challenging time certainly for people. There’s people that are going through hard economic times, certainly health issues and so forth. And so, here’s a point where we can all sort of — you know, we’ve seen the best of the people in this world lately, overcoming adversity. And I’m inspired and humbled by that. And I hope that this can be one more thing that people can look to on May 27th and be inspired in a similar way of what we can overcome when we want to. And then you look forward to with the Human Lander contracts that were just — that were just announced by NASA. And what this means to be able to go to the Moon. I mean, this is absolutely directly in path to be able to enable that capability, show that we can have these partnerships with these companies, that we can launch rockets with people on them from America, go up to the space station, keep the space station going, and now like, use those same partnerships and those relationships to be able to demonstrate how we make those things work, so we can go to the Moon. We will be on the Moon in this decade. Right?

Host: I love your excitement —

Zebulon Scoville: That is what it’s about.

Host: Yeah. I love your excitement. This is awesome. So, what I love about talking with you is you’re so involved in the details and, you know, every aspect of this meeting. But you’ve also seen an evolution. You’ve been within mission control for a long time. And I’m sure it’s not been the same this entire time. I’m sure you’ve seen things change. What are some of those things that you’ve seen? And maybe in a positive, maybe in a negative, maybe in just — maybe it is scaling up to this grand endeavor. What have you seen in mission control specifically?

Zebulon Scoville: You know, when we — I laugh about this. When I first started working in EVA some of the computing power with the consoles that we had, and what we had, sort of tools in mission control at that point versus what we have now, it’s really just a different ball game. I remember, you know, we had a calculator that actually literally someone got when they opened up a free checking account from a bank. And that was the calculator we’re using to determine the consumables remaining for an [Extravehicular Mobility Unit] EMU on a spacewalk. And now you look at the different capabilities we have on consoles with, you know, the modeling of orbital parameters and being able to, you know, run these Monte Carlos scenarios that play out, all the different variabilities with — to three sigmas of what could go this way and that. And ultimately, what it comes down to is regardless of how many much tools you have, it is still — there is a human in the loop. And, you know, the role, whether it’s the role of the flight director, the mission director, the capcom, or the core, which is the SpaceX equivalent of a capcom, the flight controllers. You know, it is people that have prepared for that this is sort of the universal constant, people that are prepared to be in that role and to know their systems as well as they do and to know their weaknesses, know their strengths and be able to make a judgment call on what is the right way to do, because, you know, we’re doing things that have never been done before. So, it’s not like you could fall back necessarily onto this experience from the past. So, this feels that way, I do this. We may — we will see things happen for the first time here. And we’ll have to sort of write the book on how to do some of these things. And so, the human element is what I look at as the constant in human spaceflight. As much as we — as we automate things and put more capabilities in the technology and [artificial intelligence] AI and self-driving cars, you know, we are a race of humans and we like to explore.

Host: You talked about — if someone is watching this, maybe the goal is to make it look easy. But maybe, if you had to pick one or maybe a few things that you think would be important for people to know while they’re watching, to talk about all the effort that’s maybe going in or has gone in to this moment, what are some of those key takeaways you want people to remember whenever they’re watching to show the amount of effort it’s taken to get to this point?

Zebulon Scoville: Yeah. Let me give you a great example. This is a great question. This is an example. I’ve actually listened to some podcasts talking about spaceflight and some of the challenges that people have had. So, something that is, as a technology, you think that’s been around forever. And then you think like this is something that we should not be learning about. You know, parachutes — parachutes are something that have existed for, you know, para jumpers in the military going back, you know, back to the World Wars. And these are things we had for the Mercury and Gemini and Apollo. And we know how to open up a piece of fabric and slow down a vehicle, so it can splash into some water. You think that that’s pretty simple. Let me tell you the complexity that goes into designing and testing a parachute system to have this trailing deployable thing go out and have it always go out more or less the same way, to have it be able to inflate and take loads in a way that is going to decelerate this capsule to be able to slow this vehicle down from, you know, from the super high speeds as it’s reentering the atmosphere to be able to get it to, to gently kiss the water. That is complex. When you’ve got fabrics flowing with highly dynamic flow, you have this thing inflate, slightly asymmetrically. This low — this line is going to take more stress than this line. And it could break. You have one parachute inflate before the other one. It’s now going to take more of the load. And so, getting them to inflate in a uniform way and the complexity of the materials, even like the stitch pattern you use to weave these pieces of fabric together, may mean the difference between them ripping open and not. And so, to say, “hey, we’re just taking — this is a technology we had back in Apollo. What’s new? Why is it so hard?” This is why it is hard. And this takes repeatability. And, you know, there may be cases where you may drop a parachute 20 times. And on the 21st time, it fails in a way that you realize your design needs to be fixed. And so, this is something that shows, you know, what makes something look simple. But there is actually an enormous amount of effort and complexity and engineering that went in to make sure that this is right. And so, we just found out that SpaceX completed its fifth system test today. So, this is a big, big milestone to get to this point. They — this is a great example. They were testing a design of these parachutes on the Mark 2’s for a while. And they’re showing success with these parachutes. But there were some corner cases where we were starting to see some failures. And this was late in the game to be able to consider redesigning. And so, they looked at being able to, you know, do some patchwork on the Mark 2’s. In the end, it just came down to that design needed to be redone. And to be able to have the integrity to recognize that such a complex system, you have to now redesign within a year before flight and be able to get that test campaign out. Really hats off to SpaceX to be able to shift course, you know, incorporate some modifications, test the heck out of it and be able to complete the fifth. When I say fifth systems level tests, this is the complete integrated system. There’s been component tests matching up through measuring the droves and the individual parts of the mains throughout this point. But, you know, this is sort of our last big test of the integrated systems. And this is a huge accomplishment to get us ready to launch.

Host: What was really going through my head was if you’re watching the parachute, right, if you’re watching this Dragon-2 splash down in the water, the difference between your average viewer just watching this thing — oh, look at that come down. Really cool. Oh, those parachutes look pretty. Look at that splashdown. Awesome. And the same exact view, but a parachute, maybe, designer or engineer watching that, just like please, all my work, you know, just like, hold together, come on. It’s taken so long. Please work. And it’s just — just imagining those two different people watching the same exact moment with completely different emotions. It must be — you can tell just that emotional feeling and just trying to connect with that, how much work has gone into just that one aspect of this entire mission.

Zebulon Scoville: Yeah. But that’s one of the great things about this kind of mission is that you can look at it with the eyes of someone not in the industry. And you can look at a rocket launch and still appreciate it and still get the excitement out of it as someone who might be an engineer, who may have designed a throttle valve on, you know, a fuel line that’s going into one of the engines. And each one of you can look at that and still see — feel like the base emotion of the liftoff, of the landing, of the docking. And it’s all there. It’s really every person’s event to watch.

Host: Now, I want to end with this, because at this point, I think we can say — you talked in the beginning about you feel like one of the rookies, maybe one of the new guys. But you’re leading this mission. You’re a leader now. And you’re in this position where you’re working with all of these different flight controllers. And I’m sure there’s a lot of people that want to be a part of this, maybe sometime down the future. And I think it’s going to even be a little bit different from now. We’re working together with SpaceX. That’s totally different from how we did things 15 years ago, which is totally different from even before that. There’s going to be a future here of how these things work. What lessons do you want to pass on from your experience to those future flight controllers that might want to be part of this down the road?

Zebulon Scoville: Well, if you look down the road, NASA is going full throttle, just pedal to the metal to get us to Mars. Mars is a destination. And that is going to take — anyone who has something to add, there is a place. And so, you look at the partnerships with the [Human Landing System] HLS contract, whether it’s with Blue Origin or with SpaceX or Dynamics and the companies that support them and are part of those contracts. You know, that is an incredible effort to be able to come in and be able to get these — the expertise from multiple sources and multiple vendors. And this is going to take people not just over the next three years, not just the next five years. This is a long haul. We’re going to the Moon to stay. We’re going to Mars. We’re going to go to Mars to stay. And so, you know, if there’s — if I look back at what we’ve learned and what has gotten us to this point, and then when I look forward, you know, some of the things that will be universal. There’s a human element, right? Don’t forget about the human element. You’re going there to bring humans. We’ve brought rovers to Mars. We certainly have been inspired and amazed by what those have been able to do. But putting a human on Mars, putting a human on the Moon, being able to reach down and pick up that, you know, that rock or that thing, or be able to find that discovery, that’s going to take the human creativity. That’s going to take the ingenuity. Don’t listen — don’t turn a blind eye to your gut. A lot of times, if something feels wrong — you know, this has gone back to, you know, going back to my Malcolm Gladwell, you know. Listen to your gut. It is telling you something. And as you have your passions, you’ve dived in, and you’ve devoted the time to learn something, the 10,000 hours — if something feels wrong, it might be wrong. So, don’t — when the hair in the back of your head stands up. This is what — these things we tell new flight controllers and I share with other flight directors is like listen to that. Listen to what that’s telling you. And be part of it. But then also, don’t be afraid to change. Don’t be afraid to fail. And that’s one thing that a lot of times, we can be afraid of what a failure might mean to be to the program, what it might mean from an optics perspective, what it might mean politically, what setback this might mean to schedule. Who cares? You know, you fail, you’re able to push the envelope. You’re able to find the weaknesses in your systems and find where they’re not working much faster by trying it, testing it, working it out and then go redesign it, versus pencil whipping something to death with the requirements and the PowerPoints and the engineering. You know, those are all needed. And there is absolutely a place for it. But don’t be afraid of failing. But fail in the right way. Fail in a way that makes you better and stronger as a team going forward.

Host: Zeb, I love your passion. Best of luck to you and to the entire team, really, for this mission coming up. There’s a lot of hard work. And we’ve gone through every intricate detail today. And I really — it’s — I’m rooting for you. I’m going to be right there with you in the room. And I — and I’m very, very excited. Zeb, I really appreciate your time today.

Zebulon Scoville: Absolutely. This has been so super fun. So, thank you. Giddy up. Let’s go do it.

[Music]

Host: Hey, thanks for sticking around. Fascinating conversation we had with Zeb Scoville today, going into every intricate detail of the Demo-2 mission. Really enjoyed myself. I hope you learned something too. Make sure to watch this mission live. Go to NASA.gov for the latest TV schedule on the Demo-2 launch. You can watch live and engage with us during the broadcast using the hashtag #LaunchAmerica. We’re going to be live throughout the entire duration of the flight to and from the International Space Station. So, make sure you stick around. If you like podcasts, we have a lot of them. Go to NASA.gov/podcasts to check out the latest. I know Rocket Ranch has a podcast over at the Kennedy Space Center to talk about what they do there. There’s a new season of Gravity Assist, if you’d like to check out more on life in the universe. That’s what their new season is about. And of course, there’s a new podcast called Curious Universe. Make sure you check that one out as well. We are on the NASA Johnson Space Center pages of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. If you have a question for us, use the hashtag #AskNASA on your favorite platform. Submit an idea for the show. Just make sure to mention it is for Houston We Have A Podcast. This episode was recorded on May 1st, 2020 with Zeb Scoville and April 17^th, 2020 with Bob and Doug. Thanks to Alex Perryman, Pat Ryan, Norah Moran, Belinda Pulido, Jennifer Hernandez, Paul Wizikowski and the whole team that helped support the crew filming of Bob and Doug on April 17 ^th thanks to the whole team there. Thanks again to Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley for their time in the studio to share their knowledge and thoughts with the world prior to launch, Godspeed. And thanks again to Zeb Scoville for taking the time to come on the show and for his leadership to make this all possible. Give us a rating and some feedback on whatever platform you are listening to us on and tell us how we did. We will be back next week.