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Forum:	Mercury - Gemini - Apollo
Topic:	Remembering Mercury-Atlas 6 (2.20.62)

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Your Reply: HTML is ON UBB Code is ON Smilies Legend	[QUOTE]Originally posted by Robert Pearlman: [B] [QUOTE]Originally posted by dss65: [b]When heroes were still heroes -- and still are to this day![/b][/QUOTE] I asked space shuttle program deputy manager and mission management chair LeRoy Cain to comment on the state of the United States' on-orbit capabilities in light of today being the 48th anniversary of the first American orbital spaceflight. Here is what he said... <BLOCKQUOTE>[i]We have tremendous capability on orbit. If you look at the space station, I think a lot of people don't really realize what we have in orbit and how it got there. At the same time I would tell you that we are still in our infancy relative to working even in low Earth orbit. I have mentioned this before, this team from coast to coast and the international team where the space station is concerned, if you look at the shuttle missions alone, if you look at the shuttle-station docked missions, we've gotten to the point where the performance of the vehicles is so good and the team understands the job and the tasks and the preparation is so good that we make it look easy. The team makes it look easy, to the extent that it concerns me because then people actually begin to think it is easy and that couldn't be farther from the truth. It takes an extreme amount of vigilance to be able to pull off these missions: The preparation of the team as individuals and organizationally, the training that is required; the planning that is required to put together the time lines and the execution of the mission; and then you have all the hardware preparation, the payloads, the cargo, not to mention the vehicle flight elements, the orbiters, the SRBs and RSRMS, and the tanks, all of that coming together in Florida a couple of months before the launch, and being assembled and processed and rolled out and checked out; the teams on the ground with their respective training and planning and preparation that they go through -- it is highly complex. It takes the type of team we have right now, a highly professional, very talented, very, very dedicated, extremely resilient team to be able to do this and we have a team like that right now and you see that demonstrated pretty clear in these missions that we have executed over the past several years. But it isn't easy and it is not routine by any means and we have a long way to go I think as a space-faring nation, as a space-faring population if you will, before anything becomes routine, whether it is low Earth orbit or beyond. So, it is all kind of relative. Certainly we have made great strides and I think we are extremely proud of the space station. I think in a lot of ways it will be one of the, if not the premiere legacy of the space shuttle, the space station will certainly be a significant part of the legacy of the space shuttle. Folks that have worked on station and shuttle are extremely proud of that, as well they should be. But we have some work left to do and everyday we are here we are focused on the challenges that are associated with that work and then we get to enjoy the successes that we have from one mission to the next. As I said earlier, we're very focused on getting Endeavour home safely, and that it won't be very long after that that we will be very focused on getting Discovery put together and launched back to space station and then the mission after that and so on and so forth. But it's not routine.[/i]</BLOCKQUOTE>[/B][/QUOTE]
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