We're here today for our second commentary
on the Ascent production, and we're sitting
with two representatives from Kennedy Space Center Photo
and Media Services Team, Ken Allen, who's the tracking lead
for the group, and Tim Terry,
who's the camera instrumentation lead for the group.
Guys, thanks for taking the time to come in
and share your knowledge and your stories with us,
and welcome to the production.
Thanks for having us.
Our pleasure.
We probably should start out with talking
about why you guys exist.
You know, what's the reason that you're here to begin with,
and of course, you guys are the core group that generates all
of the film in Ascent, and everything that we're going
to see in this production comes from your group
and ultimately feeds out to the other program elements.
And the reason you exist is to capture all aspects
of a launch process and try to make sure that any anomalies
in the flight are noted and dealt
with by the engineering teams as we go forward.
And all of this, of course, gives us a direct view
into the health of the vehicle and ultimately the safety
of the vehicle and the safety of the crew on board.
You said it very well, Matt.
You know, the imagery is visually stunning,
that's obvious.
As we go through, the audience will be very moved
by just the impact of those images.
We work hard to make those images look the way they do
so that we could give the engineering teams all
of the tools they need to determine the health
of the vehicle, and thereby protecting the astronauts.
That's why we do what we do in a nutshell.
Well, you guys do it very well.
I've been a fan of the footage that has come out of program,
and in particular, there was a very significant improvement
in the quality of the film after Columbia.
We'll talk about that perhaps as we get further into this,
but the film and the quality of the film is second to none.
The people who work out here,
most of us have devoted our careers to this, or a large part
of our careers to this, and it is personal,
and we're quite proud of what we do.
And it's fun, and it's unique.
This is not done anywhere else in the world
and we recognize how unique it is, and we enjoy it.
And I used to say years ago quietly, heck,
I'd do this for free if I could.
And I still say that, to this day.
This is a privilege to have this job and do what we do.
It all starts out, of course,
with the space shuttle main engines firing,
the sparkers turn on, the engines are getting ready
to spool up, and there's an amazing process that comes
into play when everything turns on here, right.
You guys are -- there's 170 cameras or so
around the vehicle, and there's an enormous integrated network,
or process, taking place.
Why don't you guys talk about that a little bit.
That's a fact, Matt.
This particular view happens
to be a 16-millimeter Photosonic camera.
It's running at 400 frames per second.
It's got a 200-foot film load,
which gives an approximate run time of about 22 seconds.
There's a lot going on in the imagery that you're seeing,
but in the photo world, there's a lot going
on in the launch pad right now.
We have 22 MLP cameras, mobile launcher platform cameras,
in and around looking at various elements
of the vehicle and the structure.
We have nine cameras
on the fixed service structure doing much the same thing.
And then we have a number of other cameras
around the perimeter doing the same thing.
It's all built in concentric rings.
So this is controlled primarily
by a system called a photo optical control system
that sequences all of these camera starts,
primarily the ones inside the fence,
inside the perimeter events around the pad.
And then we have multiple tracking sites
that you'll see imagery of later, as far as Kenny, what,
75 miles away, imaging different elements, as well.
Ken, right about here you're out in the field a couple
of miles away sitting on turret somewhere,
but your heart is starting to beat a little bit now
because you see the steam coming up over the horizon
and you're waiting to look
for a vehicle that's coming off the pad, right?
This is where it gets exciting, right here.
At this point when you're sitting
on a tracker miles away, this takes forever.
It's almost like you're watching this film in your head
because you're ready to go.
You want this thing to fly.
You're holding the joystick.
You're wanting to lift off the ground and it's not moving.
It's lit. There is steam, there is smoke --
There's an enormous cloud of steam coming up, right?
Yeah, and it's not moving yet.
It's still sitting there.
It's an amazing few seconds of time when you're sitting there,
and if you watch some of the tracks,
you'll see the operators actually go up and go up and no,
come back down and wait because, you know,
you really get the sense that it's lit, it's going somewhere.
But shuttle is one of the few things that lights
and sits there for a second before the solids ignite
and it actually starts moving.
The anticipation of what's about to happen,
what you're about to hear, the sound waves hitting your chest,
everything, it's just, it's awesome right here.
This is all brought on by weeks and weeks and weeks of setup
and planning that what you see is just the final product.
You really can't understand or fathom what goes
into getting this, what we do.
We go through a lot preparation to get to launch day.
It takes about -- from start to launch day is
about a six-week process of servicing equipment
and doing our procedure checks and deploying all the assets.
Launch day is actually, it has kind of a party atmosphere.
You kind of breathe a sigh of relief that, okay, we're here.
It's very hard to imagine the extensive network
of cameras that you guys have.
There's all of this complexity,
and the more complex a system gets, the more prone it is
to having failures or breakdowns.
You guys have had an absolutely stunning success rate during
your history, and it's a testimony to the quality
of the team and the individuals that work for it.
That's a good point.
And I have to tell you, one of the things that attracted me
to this job 20 years ago was the quality
that has always been here in what we do,
and it's only gotten better over time.
Keep in mind that a film camera is an electromechanical
moving device.
And these particular cameras that we use,
the Photosonic models, are Cadillacs in that industry.
But they are still electromechanical moving devices
that are prone to failure.
Our success rate has always been in the upper 90th percentile,
but since return to flight, we have been in the 98, 99,
and in some launches, 100 percent successful,
and that's no accident.
Even though the equipment I would consider to be Cadillac
in the industry, it's due to the dedication and the work ethic
of the people here in this small organization
that has given NASA all of this great imagery
for a very long time, very consistently.
Twenty-six people work directly together in photo,
but obviously we have support.
The timing that you see is a separate group.
They're just responsible for timing.
They make sure that all of our signals
to us are good at the right levels.
We have generator people that, while they're outlying sites
where we have trackers, they provide a generator.
Timing, there's no cables, we have GPS antennas,
but those systems have to be tested that they're right
on time with all the rest of the cameras,
because it's real critical
that each item has the same timing on it.
So if they're looking for a specific event,
every single film item is on at the same time.
So we have a lot people that support us,
but our direct group right here is 26 people.
One of the things I want to point out real quick is
in this view that we're looking at right here, you can see,
on the right-hand side, one of the our camera enclosures.
That is a half-inch steel box surrounding another half-inch
thick aluminum box.
The pressures impacted on that location, and here you see it
on the left side, are phenomenal.
There's two levels of nitrogen purge going
into the internal enclosure.
One's at about 7 psi to create an ambient atmosphere,
a nonexplosive atmosphere, and another one is at 750 psi
that will be directed across the face of the port
to below away any debris.
But because he put dry nitrogen purge inside that box,
that film that we load in that camera can only stay
in that environment for so long.
It will actually dry out and crack.
We put sponges in the enclosure to add a little moisture back,
but we only have about a three-
or a four-day window before we know from history
that that dry nitrogen will impact that film.
So if they scrub launch for whatever reason,
we have to find a window where we can get back out,
open up those boxes, and replenish the water
in those sponges, otherwise,
we know that film is going to break on start.
This is one of the on-pad camera enclosures showing this view.
Right. But you guys also install cameras, and you have to climb
up that ladder; is that correct?
Right, that's exactly right.
That ladder that you see there in that structure at the top
of that ladder is a door, and inside that door is this camera.
We're looking to make sure everything disconnected
like it was supposed to.
We make sure the door closes.
We're looking at -- not me, the engineers -- flame blow by.
They're looking at all that.
There's a lot going on here that's
of interest to the engineers.
Yeah, and look at that door rattle around, I mean,
there's a whole lot of shaking going on outside
as that vehicle clears the pad.
The height of those tail service masts,
which is holds these umbilicals, is probably what?
35 feet, maybe from base to top.
Yeah, it's up there, it's up there.
It's very big when you stand next to it.
It's a huge structure.
They have this camera and this lighting system inside.
They want to make sure they know what's going
on with the umbilical disconnect.
And so you guys are responsible for both the lighting
and the cameras inside.
We are, and as a matter of fact,
I'm glad you brought up the lights.
The lights that you see there illuminating the scene have been
transitioned to LEDs.
I'm not sure if they were LEDs in that former view.
But prior to that transition, there were incandescent bulbs,
and the G-loading from launch almost 100 percent
of the time blew those lamps before we ended our film run
and it became quite an issue around Return to Flight
and we did a lot of work, Engineering came in
and helped us, and we solved the problem, and we've got a system
that now is real reliable.
Do you have guys have a sense for how many feet of film we go
through on any given launch on a rough basis?
I couldn't give you a final number, I'd be guessing,
but it's probably in the order of, because we,
they use thousand-foot loads on the 35 tracking items.
Right. And there's 15 trackers,
so that right there is 15,000 feet of 35-millimeter.
I want to say it's somewhere in the order of 20,000 feet.
Wow. And I'm off a little bit there,
but it's in that neighborhood.
So that's an enormous amount of film.
Right after the launch,
and everybody shuts their cameras down,
what occurs with the team as a whole?
What do they do?
Well, I can start first, because on the tracking items,
when you're sitting on the tracker, the camera is
within two feet of your head.
Yeah.
So immediately after launch, you download your film
out of the camera, whether it be a 70-millimeter or a 35,
where you just take the magazine and you start your track back
to a rendezvous point where we have a film downloader
that will ready it for shipment.
The pad stuff, which Tim is the lead for the pad stuff,
is a little bit more difficult because they have
to safe the pad before we can get in there.
Well, that's true, Ken's exactly right.
We work as teams, so the pad is divided up into sections,
and we have basically four teams or groups, and my job is to work
with the Safety Office and the NASA Test Director
at the assembly point to send those crews
out as the areas are safed by the safing team as quickly
as possible, but as safely as possible, as well.
We generally get the perimeter items first,
and we work from outside in, and then we will work up the FSS,
the Fixed Service Structure, and then the MLP,
Mobile Launcher Platform,
and the last items we get are camera sites one and six
that are near the LO2 and the LH2 fuel farms.
It takes about, I would say, an average shuttle,
it takes about five hours to pull every film item down.
To take you back a few years, we used to process all
of our own film right here in the building we're sitting in.
Right.
So the turnaround time was very minimal.
It didn't take long.
We could process it, print it, and get it right
over to image analysis
so the engineers could start their analysis of the flight.
So now we have to fly our film to Atlanta
to a processing company up there,
which takes a little bit of time.
That's where the HD video came in.
The engineers needed something to look
at immediately after flight.
When I say immediately,
within 20 minutes they're looking at our HD video.
It takes about 24 hours, and this is an amazing thing,
for all of our film in two flights usually to be flown
to Atlanta, to be processed, scanned into HD and flown back
to get to the imaging analysis people in VAB
to start looking at it.
In the meantime, they're looking at all the HD footage.
It's not as high resolution as the film,
so if they see something in the HD, there's a mirror image
in film and they'll go to that film item and then bring that up
in the same amount of time.
You can see the timing on the film.
Right, the time code grounds everything to the same --
That's how they find where they want to look at
and they can compare the HD item, okay,
we saw something we want to look at closer,
they go to the film item.
But all of that film turnaround, again, 24 hours for us
to retrieve it, for us to offload it into canisters,
to fly it, to process it, to scan it, fly it back and get it
to them, that's an amazing feat.
There's actually two film review processes that take place
after the launch and after the films start to come back,
and one of them occurs with your group
where you guys are reviewing
from a quality assurance standpoint.
And then the other group, which is reviewing the films,
is reviewing it from an engineering standpoint to look
at the vehicle, and the health of the vehicle,
and what has occurred during ascent.
So your group sits down and looks at it and critiques it
from a quality assurance standpoint, correct?
That's a fact, and you know, inasmuch as we are proud
of our success rate, we are constantly looking
at the potential for issues.
As instrumentation lead, I'm the first line
of defense with a camera issue.
So I may be looking at things when I do film review,
that timing display on the right,
are all the digits accurate, are they,
have they dropped any segments.
Is the frame line clean?
Do I have any technical issues with the film?
Is the exposure right?
Do I have a mechanical tick mark that's a tear in film anywhere.
And this is a lot of film moving through large mechanical devices
when we're imaging, but also when we process.
And there can be technical issues there.
There can be film processing issues, color timing,
as Ken pointed out before.
The accuracy of that color, is it real?
You know, we're not Hollywood, we don't care
if it's visually stunning for visually stunning's sake.
We want accurate representation of what's going on here
and we want to see as much as detail
as possible in that imagery.
So, and just to give the listeners sort of a sense
of the room that you're in.
It's kind of a little miniature movie theater, very small.
Exactly.
Very cozy.
It has what, 25, 30 seats in it, something like that,
and slanted up just like in a movie theater
so nobody's head is in the way of the guy behind him.
It is a projection room where, before we had HD scans,
we actually ran projectors, which we didn't get to see a lot
of our film because of how difficult it was to show it.
And also when you run film
through projectors you could damage it.
You could burn it if you stop at a still frame, you know,
you could burn up frames.
So we didn't get to see a lot of our film back in the early days.
Now that everything is scanned to HD, we get an immediate copy
of all of this, which is great, because we get
to see things that we haven't seen.
Even though we've been shooting this for years,
a lot of this stuff we've never seen before.
And with the advent of HD scanners and all,
it's a lot better for us.
Ken makes a good point.
That ability to look at it as quickly
as possible has dramatically increased our quality, because,
you know, if you can't see it,
you don't know it's a problem, you can't fix it.
And it's given us that tool to increase our quality
and to fix problems before they become a bigger problem.
Right.
And the engineering community, when they're looking at this,
they're not looking for camera problems, they're looking for,
you know, orbiter issues.
Right, right.
So a lot of times we never heard that there was a hair
in the frame or that the timing, one of the segments were out,
or stuff like that so we didn't know.
That camera may be lubed and cleaned and put right back
into service not knowing that there was an issue.
Now that we see those things we take
out the little tiny problems
that are not major problems, but they bug us.
You know, we see and it's like, wow, that shouldn't be there.
Obviously during the film review process, some of the things
that go wrong are mechanical or setup problems that can happen,
but oftentimes with the manual tracking, of course,
you have the human, sort of component to it all.
You guys effectively are operating a joystick,
and in some manner of speaking you're playing a realtime
video game.
You're tracking this vehicle with a joystick through a scope,
and there's a lot of excitement, your heart's beating,
a lot of pressure to keep on target with this thing,
and it's like looking at a little point
of light pulling away at three Gs going thousands
of feet per second and accelerating even faster.
And if this thing falls out of frame,
it's really hard to get it back in.
And so I suppose at some of these film reviews,
when you guys quite aren't on your game on a particular launch
and maybe lose frame, that there's a little ribbing
that goes on, perhaps, in the review team?
It's extremely fraternal, it's all good natured, and it's all,
there is some hilarity to it, but it's all very serious.
We take our job very seriously,
and we're always constantly trying to improve.
When we put in a film and we start to play it,
the first thing that comes up is, oh, this is UCS-15.
Kenny, this is your track, you know, and so everybody
in there looks and you either get a good job, great track, or,
hey, come on, put it back oh, oh, oh.
And so, it's critiqued, but it's critiqued in a fun way,
and you definitely learn from it.
One thing that we notice is the position of the cameras,
the bore sighting that's on the mounts, because that's,
we have more than one camera on every tracker.
As a matter of fact, we have multiple cameras
on every tracker.
And they've all got to be looking at the same thing.
It's not an easy task, but that part is critiqued.
Again, exposure.
We look at the different exposures because the sun angle
from all of our different sites is a different angle, you know.
Some might be looking into the sun, some might be backlit,
so we also talk about exposure, you know, what did you use.
What exposure did you use, and by years and years
of experience, we've got it down to
where can pretty much pick exposure just
by the time of day.
We know what it's going to be.
You know, you brought up bore sight on those trackers,
and I think Kenny kind of downplays it a little bit.
His group takes care of that.
I'm in awe of their ability to do what they do
with these long systems.
These lenses, these 400-inch lenses that we use
in our long-range tracking sites, are usually,
typically used in a fixed position, fixed site,
because they are so long and so difficult to bore sight.
And Kenny's crew has developed the tools and techniques
on their own -- they really invented the --
and it's my knowledge that they're the only group anywhere
that has been able to take those long systems,
put them on a KTM tracker, bore sight them to the guide scope,
and make them accurate all the way out to the horizon.
It's just phenomenal.
Well, let's talk about that, Ken.
The tracker itself, of course, has several platens on it
that sits on either side of the operator.
The operator sort of sits in the middle with their control panel
in front of them, and then you've got these platens
in which you can attach various lenses and cameras, correct?
That's correct.
And what comes into play is the parallax.
You sit in the center of the tracker and 3 feet
from each side are the platforms.
So that makes the cameras 6 feet apart.
Trying to point those cameras to a specific point in space
that they're looking at the same thing is very difficult.
Each film item has a different portion of the orbiter
that they're responsible for tracking.
South Beach tracker is,
they have to track the engine sections.
It has to be centered in the frame.
UCS-8 tracker has to have the tip
of the ET centered in the frame.
UCS-15 where I track, I have to have the center
of the orbiter in the frame.
And so I know if I'm tracking that point
and I'm watching the film, if the center of the orbiter is not
in the film, if it's up too high or to the left,
of course that needs to be adjusted.
Each one of our cameras has a specific point in time
for an event that is going to occur at that time
that that camera is primed to capture.
And each one is different.
We have those times, we focus for those times,
and I have to make sure that my bore sight is
in bore sight at those times.
It may be a little off on the pad because it's real close.
It may be a little off at infinity, but during our point
of interest, we have to make sure
that our cameras are bore sighted perfect.
You cannot bore sight on something close to you,
because if it's close to you
when you've got the cameras bore sighted,
as the image projection goes out, you're missing your target.
It's going to be way left in one camera and way
to the right in the other camera.
In Florida, our atmospherics are such that any ground targets
that we can see, plus it's flat, there's no mountains,
anything that we can see on ground level is usually
so highly distorted that it literally looks
like it's moving in the image.
Because of the heat shimmer.
Because of the heat.
So you really don't know -- you're guessing, almost.
So what we do is we'll pick a ground target, maybe a tower
or the VAB is the largest building that we have around.
Maybe it's a condominium down the beach,
depending on what site we're at, and we'll pick a corner
of the building or the top of the tower,
or sometimes even a flashing light if we can see a light,
and we'll get it close.
We'll use that target and we'll look through the film camera,
we'll look through the HD, and we'll get it real close.
And then the only other thing that we have
that can simulate a shuttle launch is a high flying
aircraft, a commercial aircraft.
They're flying over constantly.
And we go up and get on an airplane
and we track the airplane.
And we're looking in dual monitors, and we'll say,
hey the HD is a little high and a little
to the right in the frame.
The film is right on.
So we'll come back down to the ground target, we'll go to that
and we'll move the HD camera a little low and a little
to the right, whatever we may need, and then we'll go back
up to the airplane and we'll track the airplane.
And we'll do this 15 times until we are tracking an airplane
in the nose, and the nose is exactly the same in each frame.
The tracking operator is tracking the nose,
and we'll say, all right, we've got it.
We'll lock it down and we'll call that mount ready.
This could be a week, two weeks prior to launch.
But it's a heck of a process, very detailed.
And I think, like Tim says, over the years we've --
we make it look easy, but if anybody was to come up
and we'd tell them to bore sight that,
I don't think they could do it.
They couldn't do it.
I don't think they could.
And what Kenny's talking about, really, is using tools that --
there's video pickup on a film camera
that you can just plug a B and C cable to and get that imagery.
What we developed here, amongst ourselves, we sat around
and we talked about how we were going to do this,
and we took a bore sight tool that goes up on the film camera
in place of the magazine,
and we've put specialized cameras inside those tools
so that it could see the film plane.
Oh, so it feeds the video signal back?
Absolutely.
I mean we did that here.
Nobody taught us how to do that.
We did on our own.
And there's no other way to do it.
Our little tools that we've developed make it a lot easier
for us to do what we do.
And again, it's one of the most difficult jobs.
How do you get someone proficient and into the flow
of actually doing tracking?
How do you train to be a tracker?
They don't have tracking school.
I mean, you guys are the tracking school.
So how do you bring somebody in and do that?
We have, we've set up several times when we've had an influx
of people, we set up a tracker here
in the facility at the hangar.
We go through the tracker controls, how to power it up,
how to turn on each axis, azimuth, the elevation axis,
stow pin removal, stow pin storage, brakes.
Each one of these different functions can shut the
mount off.
If you have a brake on, you can't turn it on.
If you have the stow pin out and it's not in the holder,
you can't turn the mount on.
So it's real confusing when someone new gets up in the seat
and they can't get anything to work,
but there's all these steps that they have to do prior
to make sure it's safe to turn it on.
Once we go through, you know, how do you turn it on,
how do you get it to move, what do you look
for in balance and stuff like that.
We'll go outside.
We'll put the tracker either out on a tracking site
or we've done it here just out in the parking lot.
And I mentioned earlier that part of our test setup,
launch setup, is to track high flying airplanes.
That is the closest thing we can get to an actual launch.
So we'll take the people out on site
and we'll get them accustomed to tracking airplanes.
One thing that that does is it gives them the opportunity
to acquire something on the flight, which we alluded
that that's one of the hardest things you can do is see it
in the air and then get it in your scope to track.
And once it's in your scope, obviously it's in your cameras.
We talked about critiquing film review.
When we take new people out to track,
we always put a video camera on board,
and we always record their track.
And that's not to go back and laugh at them, it's to go back
and so they can see progress.
At first, it's going to go zip, zip, in and out
and on either side, up and down,
and sometimes they don't even get on it at all.
But then towards, you know, when they get more proficient,
obviously, the airplane, hey, track the nose,
and they'd go right up to the nose.
Okay, track the tail.
And our telescopes are such that
when a high flying air craft goes over at 35,000 feet,
we can look at different parts of the aircraft.
I mean, it's not like it's a little speck in our view
like you see from your eyes.
So you can actually read the tail numbers?
Yep. Oh, yeah, absolutely.
That's really impressive, at 30,000 feet?
Yeah, that's the easy part.
We put out trackers on ELV launches
to where we don't have the requirements such as the shuttle
where I have 15 trackers; out on an ELV,
we may have three or four trackers --
Right. -- which I take out of the hanger two or three extras
for people to practice on a live launch.
You know, something, a live launch is obviously different
than an aircraft because aircraft is moving
at a constant speed.
A launch starts out very slow and can continue
on to a high velocity.
Some of the launches, the smaller rockets,
we used to liken it to it would be easier to stand
on Coke bottle boxes, and at T-zero kick the boxes out from
under you and that's how fast it goes up.
But, you know, we don't do too many of those anymore.
Most of our stuff is fairly slow off the pad.
You know, and then once we get, people get comfortable,
there's always that fear factor when you got
on a launch that, oh, my gosh.
After 23 years I still get it, it's butterflies, it's,
you know, just you want to make sure you do everything right.
There's a function in a launch that you don't get
at an aircraft to where it goes up in elevation
and then it almost, in reality, it stops moving in elevation
and then it starts coming back
down where it goes over the horizon.
So you have to transition in your tracking you're going
up for a while and then you have to slow down, slow down,
slow down, and actually stop in one axis
and then start going back the other way.
And it's just a skill that you have to practice.
And I've never seen anybody get in the seat the first time,
second, you know, there's quite a learning process.
But once you get it, you've got it.
Some get it better than others.
Well, and the further away you get from the pad, at some point,
it just disappears and you can't see the pad any longer.
That's a fact.
So you have, as a tracker,
you're guessing where this thing is.
Now, of course you're guessing based on years of experience.
We call what you're describing catching it on the fly,
which is one of the more challenging jobs we do.
I have done it from a couple of different sites,
and I have to tell you, it is very unnerving to listen
to the launch count, go to T-zero, and then you kind
of hold your breath because you know what's coming.
And in some locations it's about 40 seconds from T-zero
to acquisition, and that is the most nerve-wracking 40 seconds
of your life.
Because you know it's fine, but you don't know
if you've actually missed it or not and if you're looking
in the right direction.
Now is this because it's over the horizon?
It's because it's over the horizon and behind some condos.
Okay. So we've got condominiums somewhere along the line.
We have two tracking sites that are really,
really obstructed by condominiums.
Like I said, you pick a spot you know where the angle is
to the pad, and if you sit there long enough, you're going
to see it come over that spot.
And then the next part is trimming you're tracking mount
to the same trajectory, to the same speed as the shuttle,
and then slowing your track down to track it.
This is the first of our tracking shots.
Now is this remote, is this a remote tracking shot?
This is, and the reason that you only see half of the orbiter is
because on this same tracker we have another film camera
that is bore sighted just below this
to see the bottom of the orbiter.
The operator is tracking the very center
and one camera is bore sighting up top,
and one's bore sighted down low.
That way we get a tighter view, but we get the overall
if you look at both film items.
You know, I want to point out, again, Ken's group very modest.
This is one of the toughest tracking jobs there is.
It's short, it doesn't last very long, but you're sitting
on console looking at a monitor
and you're remotely controlling this thing,
and it is tough to do well.
Yeah, because it's a completely different tactile experience
looking at a monitor and actually being
out in the field looking through a scope.
Absolutely.
It's much less intuitive, I would guess.
It is, it is.
And you guys have shared the experiences
of working in-site, as well, right.
Have you guys worked the remote?
Absolutely.
So I'm guessing you would prefer to be on a turret.
One thing with this -- I would definitely prefer to be
on the mount -- I know it doesn't mean anything,
because he's three miles plus away inside a building,
but he's actually facing away from the rocket.
Really?
That's true.
And he's sitting at a console, but his back is
to the launch pad, but he can't see it anyway except
for his monitors.
One thing about this, we've already met our requirement.
So this is now all icing on the cake.
Right. Right.
The pad perimeter trackers requirement is to 1200 feet.
Once we reach that point, this is all gravy
for the engineering community.
And the reason our requirement is met is because now,
once it clears it's structure, our midrange has picked it up,
which is all the those get it off the pad, anyway.
But their requirement is a little bit higher up.
Right. And then their requirement goes on up
and then the long range pick it up.
Now, Ken, where's this shot from?
This is CS-2.
Oh, okay, so this is inside the perimeter.
We have three trackers inside the fence.
Inside the fence they're called camera sites, CS.
Outside the fence they're called universal camera sites
because we share those sites with metric optics
and other range assets
that anybody could pull there and plug in.
There's multiple power disconnects,
there's multiple communication --
It's actually really important to realize
that you guys support all the unmanned missions, as well.
Correct. We have done historically the Delta,
the Atlas, the Titan.
We've done an Ares launch, we do the Falcon launches.
We we've done a lot of Taurus, Athena.
We did all the Trident missile launches from,
not only from land, but we've done Trident missile launches
from sea, as well.
The Ascent production is all daytime launches, but I wanted
to touch a little bit on the differences in tracking
between a day launch and a night launch.
How hard is it to do?
Do you guys wear sunglasses when you're doing this at night?
Absolutely.
And what's the difference with night and day tracking?
Real quick, the guide scope that we use has a series
of filter wheels that you can put in place.
You can put neutral density, yellow, or blue.
And it just depends on the operator how they choose
to deal with the issue.
And it is an issue.
You can dial in a little neutral density.
It makes it tougher to acquire
and it's a little nerve-wracking.
Some people wear sunglasses, some people squint.
Some people kind of look away.
It's up to the individual.
But, you're right, it is an issue.
It's very difficult.
First of all, you're out there at night,
you're out in the darkness.
You don't want any lights on you, around you, because of,
you know, it affects the cameras, glare in the lenses.
So, you're sitting there in complete darkness
where your pupils have opened up 100 percent.
And you're sitting looking through a tracking scope
and your pupils are wide open.
And that thing lights off, and you're blinded.
You really go from --
it's almost like you're looking right straight into the sun.
It blinds you to no end.
I always wear sunglasses, as dark sunglasses I can get.
You will be blinded.
And once you're blinded, you can't tell where the center
of the image is anymore.
You just see a spot.
And these lenses are so tight, it's critical
that you track the exact same thing
that you're supposed to be photographing.
And when you can't see that, you're lost.
The down side to wearing the glasses and the filters
and all that, as it gets up and gets away,
it's not as bright anymore and you can hardly see it.
So at some point you reach up and you pull your sunglasses off
and you just kind of throw them on the ground so that you --
you know, you've got
to concentrate on what you're doing.
It's hard to do at night, it really is.
Anyone who's been in the area during a shuttle launch
at night knows that when it launches -- It's daytime.
It turns daytime for a brief, I don't know,
10, 15 seconds whatever.
One of the first return-to-flight launches
that I worked at night was at Ponce Inlet,
which is roughly 35 miles north, something like that.
At least.
Okay, so I can recall, and I'm actually trying
to catch the vehicle on the fly about 45 seconds after T-zero is
when I first see the vehicle.
What struck me about it,
that far away it lit up like daylight.
It astounded me.
I didn't expect it to go that far, but it does.
You know, tracking at night for me is,
as opposed to Kenny's experience, is easier.
Kenny is close in.
He's less than two miles away from the pad.
I'm, you know, what 18 miles away, whatever I am,
and I have to catch the vehicle on the fly.
So it's more difficult to do that during the day
because I can't see it as well.
Well, at night, it's super easy,
because when it lights off, it's right there.
I can see it.
You know where it's at on the horizon.
You know where it's at.
So I kind of breathe a sigh of relief.
I don't have to go find it, it's going to come find me,
and you know, so, I like night launches for that reason.
And actually I think it's notable, Ken, that you're one
of the few people that's been with the program
since the very beginning.
You have actually tracked
in some capacity every single shuttle launch.
Absolutely.
I was on the Island of Grand Turk for STS-1 tracking
with the telemetry antenna, and it was very exciting back then
to see STS-135, it's still exciting.
It's all part of the space program
that America is all about.
Yeah, yeah I mean it's amazing.
So you were 19 years old doing your first telemetry track
and so here we are, 30 years later and you're still at it.
Kenny, why don't you take me through when we hit T minus nine
and the count down is now starting
as you're preparing to do your job.
Sure. And tell me how the, you know, what you're doing mentally
and the switching that you're clicking,
and sort of what you're sensing as you go through all this.
On a typical launch, we're on site four hours prior to launch,
and through the first three hours it's making sure
everything works, reporting back to our controllers
that we're 100 percent operational.
We go up and track some high fliers.
There's some helicopters that fly around and different things,
and just for practice to make sure we're 100 percent
operational, we do that.
Getting down towards 30 minutes, I start checking
to make sure my camera settings,
which I've checked 25 times before, but I make sure
that the frame rate is correct, I make sure the shutter speed,
shutter degree is open correctly.
I'll disconnect the film and do a camera start
and make sure it still starts.
But again, I've done that 20 times already, but it's just
that I want to know again that everything is good.
Because we focus these 150-inch telescopes via computer output,
that's something I have to start well in advance.
I put a 15-second delay so I've got time so start that
and get it out of the way.
I have a Canon still camera on my mount.
I've got to start that late in the count, maybe T minus one.
My film camera has to start at T minus six or seven seconds.
So I'm thinking about all these things I've got to start.
I've got audio recording, I've got focus data,
I've got film camera, I've got digital still camera, oh,
and by the way, I've still got to track.
Now when do you physically hop in the seat?
About four minutes.
There is a critical part in that countdown,
and they can go into another hold.
So about four or five minutes I actually climb into the seat,
turn everything on, I know it's working so I'm ready to go.
And then I just start thinking
about my sequence, what I have to do.
So as the count progresses I'm looking at the shuttle.
Everything is perfect, I'm ready to go, and I mentally go
through my countdown in my head.
At T minus 15 seconds I have to reach up and throw the switch.
Okay, my next thing is I've got
to start the camera at T minus seven.
I've got a mental count in my head.
At T minus one second, I've got to go over here
and start this digital still camera.
And they're all individual switches.
This is not, I don't have foot switches for this,
I don't have a computer starting it.
When you're out on a tracker, everything is manual starts.
So I've got three things to start, and oh, by the way,
I have to grab the joystick with both hands and look
through the scope at lift off and track,
so you forget everything else around you.
And when it lights off, it's such a powerful vision,
and then the sound waves hit you in the chest like a,
almost like somebody is sitting there pounding on you,
maybe like an ape pounding his chest,
but you start feeling it, it's hitting you.
There's nothing that you can imagine
that makes you feel that way.
You've got the sensation of wow, there's a launch going on, wow,
there's people on that.
Oh, my God, you feel it, you know, and is everything working?
In my brain, I'm tracking it.
I've got it, I've got it, perfect.
I've got it, I've got it, I've got it.
Wow, and then, with you get down five minutes later,
six minutes later after a track, you go in there
and the first thing you do is rewind that, I want to see it.
How did I do?
You know, and so you get that self-gratification.
It's like, yes, you walk away
with this feeling like, yeah, I did it.
I'm really, really happy.
You kind of look over at the pad.
The pad is on fire.
The water is always spraying on the tower,
which kind of looks smoky and you can see,
sometimes you can see flames, but typically, just smoke,
but the feeling is like no other.
It really is.
It's -- there's, I'd say the biggest sense of pride
after the launch when you know that you did good, you know.
Obviously, if you made a mistake, you're not real happy
with yourself, but we try not to do that, but there's a big sense
of pride that, you know, I did my job, I did what I was asked
to do, and I did it good.
And so.
Each of you as trackers have contingency plans
for what you're supposed to do in the event of a malfunction.
The first thing we're tasked to do is see if we're safe.
If the rocket blows up and we see a big orange cloud
or pieces are coming towards you, you don't do anything else.
You vacate the area, you're done, you're PPE,
you go to your safety area or you just get in your vehicle
and go as far away as you can.
In the case of an anomaly, we have specific orders
of what we're supposed to track.
Most unmanned rockets, it's grab the biggest piece,
grab a piece, lock onto it.
For the space shuttle, it's a little bit different
because of all the different components.
Some track the northern SRB, so some are the southern SRB.
Most, I think are the crew compartment.
If you can make out what would be the crew compartment,
they want you to track that.
My particular site, I'm tasked to track, in case of an anomaly,
the return to launch site
where the shuttle would abort the launch
and turn around and come back.
You know, so I have to be prepared,
which I take my launch film off, thousand-foot film,
and I reload another thousand foot of film
in case of an emergency.
And then, again, they have a once-around abort which is,
they'll go around the earth for 90 minutes, which it takes
to do one orbit, and they could come home again.
Guys, it's been a great pleasure today having you take your time
to share some of the stories and educate us a bit
about the process that goes
on for this business that you're in.
But when I produce this film, I dedicated it to your team,
and actually all the people that,
some of them not here anymore
that have spent their lives documenting launch vehicles
for the benefit of the program and the safety
of the crew and the vehicles.
That kind of leads in really well to what I wanted
to mention to wrap this up.
The legacy -- what we do and how we do it, we didn't invent.
Kenny and I inherited what we do from somebody
who came before us, and these are bright fellows.
When they established the space program in the late 50s
and early 60s, you know, these guys got together
and they looked at the job and they built it.
They invented, you know, our documentation, our PADD,
our photographic acquisition document.
They invented that process.
They created, you know, the concentric rings
that we put our cameras in.
And we just picked up with that when we came on board,
and we followed along and we expanded on it.
What we do and how we do it was created literally 50 years ago.
And you know, my hat's off to them,
because it has served us extremely well.
And it's served this country extremely well.
No, it's fantastic that all
of the lessons learned have been carried forth and not lost
with this group since its very inception.
Have you got anything else you want to add?
I just want to give kudos, I've got a group of guys that work
in the tracking department, and without them,
none of this would be possible.
They are super people.
I would echo those comments with my own department, as well.
Well, thanks, you guys, because without you and your team,
Ascent wouldn't exist.
So go forth and do good things, guys.
Thank you, sir.
Thank you, Matt.