NASA Shuttle-Mir Oral
History Project
Edited Oral History Transcript
Isaac W.
Moore
Interviewed by Rebecca Wright
Houston, Texas – 19 June 1998
Wright:
It's June 19, 1998. We're talking to Caasi Moore of Phase One Program
Office. This is part of the Shuttle-Mir Oral History Project. Rebecca
Wright, Carol Butler, and Mark Davison.
Thanks for taking time out of your busy day and your busy schedule.
I know that one day just kind of goes into another, and that's why
we're here to talk to you. We'd like for you to start by telling us
what your current roles are with Phase One.
Moore: Currently I'm a technical manager in the Phase One Program
Office with specific emphasis on the operation of long-duration space
flight. There are other members in the office that handle mission
planning and preparation, logistics, etc. My interface and my expertise
has to do with the operations of the spacecraft, the operations of
Mir, the operations of the science, and so I've been kind of an interface
facilitator between the program office and those people actually out
doing the work.
I've been doing this particular role since--gosh, how far back can
I go--probably [unclear] was in January 1997. I've been working with
them since November of the previous year, but formally detailed to
the office in January '97. So I've been working the increments since
then, starting with Increment Three, the end of Increment Three, and
on to the end of the flights.
Wright: And prior to this, were part of your duties still with Phase
One?
Moore: Prior to working in the program office, I was actually one
of the working grunts. I had been, again, assigned for mission operations,
although not formally detailed--I just kind of hung out--to go work
with the Life Sciences Directorate to help them out with long-duration
mission operations in TsUP, in the Russian Mission Control Center
outside of Moscow. I had been manager of the Mir Operation Support
Team, the MOST, as an operations lead for the end of Increment Two
and the beginning of Increment Three. That job entailed preparation
before the increment started, the increment execution and some after
my return from Moscow.
That job was extremely challenging. It was great to lead a good team
of people. There were considerable adverse conditions to operate in,
a new facility, a new way of doing business. My experience prior to
that was not long duration, and therefore I had to learn the nuances
and the changes between my previous experience and what it was going
to take to run a long-duration mission. All we were concerned about
was essentially the payload operations at that time. We had some interest
in how the Mir systems were doing, but our job was very much focused
on making sure that the U.S. science and the joint science was executed
properly and we got the data back, that the crew member on board was
appropriately supported as best we could, and that we maintained a
contact between the U.S. and the Russian programs at that point.
I'm not sure exactly where to go from there.
Wright: Well, let's kind of break it down into increments. What were
some of the first duties you were involved with from the very beginning?
I know Increment Two wasn't Thagard, so that wasn't the first one,
but were you on hand for that as well?
Moore: Yes, and prior to my ops lead job and while I was still in
the training division, mission operations, I took on some additional
duties that got me associated with the Phase One Program. We had flown
STS-60 with a Russian cosmonaut on board. We had flown 63, and during
another job while I was in the control center, I happened to be in
the control center working a Shuttle flight at the same time that
Norm [Norman] Thagard docked with Mir. So that was the NASA One Increment
start.
Then during STS-71-74, I began working as a Groundhog, which was a
console position title that we had. Actually what we were doing, we
were essentially assistants to the Moscow consulting group, the group
of Russian engineers, flight control engineers, that come to the control
center and work in our control center during a joint mission. We have
their representatives with us. We find it very beneficial to assign
U.S. personnel to this group to facilitate their operations, just
not only getting in and getting out, getting in touch with the right
people when they have a question, facilitating people getting to them
to ask them questions about Mir operations.
So while this is a back-room position and relatively low key, it was
extremely fascinating to work with the Russians even in this regard
in our own control center and our own environment, trying to educate
them as to what to expect and where to look and what to do, at the
same time listening to them and to their interaction with our flight
control team. So groundhog is a back-room position for the Russian
Interface Officer position, RIO, and I worked that for a couple of
flights. That's essentially my first formal involvement with the program.
In that same time frame, we had, as we were gearing up for operations
in Star City, had assigned a crew member to be the Director of Operations,
Russia, the DOR, in Star City. They determined that the DOR needed
a deputy. That tour was going to be long and hard, up to a year living
in Star City. At that time no provisions were made for taking your
family, and after a long and hard discussion, I went and interviewed
for that job. Didn't get it; some other highly qualified people did.
But I began to try to play actively into the Phase One Program.
It seemed that the direction that NASA would be going in the next
ten, fifteen years would be international involvement, long-duration
space flight, this was going to be a key step in that regard, and
that I needed to get educated and get involved, and so I began playing
into opportunities that were presented to me relative to options and
how to get involved. That was the [Phase 1 Program] Increment One
involvement.
As we were selected to be operations leads and we learned from Increment
One with Norm that we needed more expertise in Moscow, not because
they were short on technical expertise, but they were short on operations
experience, the familiarity with having to make a decision, even if
it's not a perfect decision, go on with it and have this ops team
move from day to day and actually get operations done, the science
folks that were doing that for Increment One had a very difficult
time with it because they didn't have people with real time, what
we call real-time operations experience in this regard. They had always
supported the life sciences missions and back-room positions, but
they'd always been behind some other operations leader, which kind
of kept the ball rolling. But when they went over to support Increment
One, they were a little lacking in that regard.
So, after increment One and from debriefs with Norm, we said we need
to get some more people involved in the TsUP, we need some more NASA
presence in the TsUP. So they went out to interview for operations
lead position. This was to be a NASA position. So after not making
it into the deputy DOR position in Star City, this job looked a little
easier. It was going to be shorter and still be involved in the long-duration
space flight and getting my fingers firmly entrenched in that regard.
So I and a number of my cohorts interviewed for the operations lead
job, and there were five of us selected in the initial group. It dropped
down to four soon thereafter, but there were five of us selected:
Bill Gerstenmaier and myself, Tony Sang, Keith Zimmerman, Tim Baum.
We went off trying to figure out what an ops lead job was going to
be, what it needed to be, and how to improve the situation. We didn't
want to make it worse by our involvement, and we definitely thought
we could help move things along. It was a very diverse group of operations
leads. Bill Gerstenmaier had been a manager in MOD, with considerable
experience in Shuttle operations and real-time operations on the floor.
I had been involved in the training division for fifteen or so years,
always involved in simulated real time and training, but never having
a real-time console position out front. Tim Baum had been working
in the payloads area for Shuttle and had been a payload lead for,
I think, a couple of flights, maybe more. Tony Sang had been involved
in the Space Station world, I believe Space Station Freedom, but hadn't
had any foreign experience. Keith Zimmerman had been a back-room support
for the flight activities officer, so he had some real-time experience
but not out front.
So we had all this diverse background, and we needed to come together
and each be able to perform this job in a somewhat consistent and
improving manner. Bill got the first increment, Increment Two for
Shannon [Lucid]. The original intent for increment support was we
would always have two operations leads in the country. We would have
the lead who owned the increment, owned the performance, and he would
have a back-up, someone to work the alternate shift to facilitate.
Bill was going to be that, the Increment Two lead with a back-up,
and there was a rotating schedule for the rest of us to go in and
rotate through and support Bill.
Then I was picked to do Increment Three, and I would always have a
back-up in country. Tim Baum was going to be Increment Four. I don't
remember whether Keith or Tony was Increment Five or Increment Six;
it kind of got all fouled up in the end. But we had an operations
concept where there would be two of us in country.
Bill went off to learn Increment Two, and the rest of us went off
trying to learn Russian. Bill never really got a chance to learn the
Russian language, so he was off trying to blaze a trail for us all
to follow. During the time frame where he spent considerable time
in Russian working agreements with the Russians, working some of the
science, actually working operations for Mir 20 before his increment--excuse
me. I can't remember. Was it the Mir 19? Yes. Excuse me. It was end
of Mir 18, Mir 19--it was Mir 19, I guess, where he was first involved.
I didn't get the dates here right, because we went into December.
No, I guess it was all in Mir 20. Because we had some science being
executed on the Mir 20 flight, which was also a long-duration, a European
space flight. So he was involved with getting his feet wet with Russian
operations at that time.
While he was going off and getting his feet wet, we ended up with
a change in plan. The change in plan was, "Gee, we don't have
enough money to send two of you over there all the time, so we're
going to pull you back, and there's only going to be one of you, and
we'll occasionally send over some support." Instead of us being
two to help with the team, there was one with an occasional second
ops lead, and that was kind of a sad decision, because as we were
trying to ensure carry-over from group to group and trying to minimize
the amount of relearning we'd have to do for each person restarting,
that it really handicapped our ability to transfer knowledge from
one ops lead to the other.
So by the end of Bill's increment, I had been over there twice. We
had Tony Sang over there once helping out with Bill's--just giving
him a little bit of time off, but we hadn't had a lot of time for
the operations lead to actually capture the key aspects of what Bill
was doing, doing right, and what he had done wrong and knew not to
do again, but all his lessons learned. It was very difficult to pick
up.
As I saw, both from that side of the ocean and this side of the ocean,
that we were going to need to execute increments differently than
we started--than we were at that point. Bill was forced to keep a
lot of the decision-making and the rationale in his head, one, because
he didn't have time to write it down, two, he didn't have time to
communicate it. We weren't there to pick it up, so it was difficult
to know what Bill knew and why he did it. So I felt I was going to
end up relearning a considerable amount of things that Bill already
knew.
I went over before the end of his increment to assist, to start a
handover. It was fortuitous; Bill needed to come back before the end
of his increment due to personal reasons on two occasions, and I was
over there to facilitate that handover. At the same time, I was kind
of thrown into the cold shower, because when Bill left, Bill left
and took Bill with him, and there was a bit of a gap in his increment
execution and what the team knew to do in his absence. So I had already
figured out that long term I was going to have to make some changes
in how it operated and how information was passed and how to conduct
handover briefings, etc., between the two shifts so that information
would be more widely available, we'd be less exposed to someone getting
injured or sick and having to come back and there being a real hit
to the operations over there.
So I began to operate the team in a slightly different manner, having
made change in operations in terms of conducting a handover briefing
between the two shifts of the day. The operations in the TsUP consisted
of two shifts with kind of an overlap in the middle, but there was
never a coordinated handover briefing between the two shifts, and
they almost operated in isolation from each other. There were a number
of times when the ball would be dropped or at least shoved along for
a while until Bill would get back and fix it. That wasn't going to
work, particularly wasn't going to work for things Bill was doing
in his increment and that I was going to have to keep doing in mine.
He was going to take a considerable amount of history with him, and
it wasn't going to be transferred to the next guys.
So I did a lot of work before the end of Bill's increment and then
after the start of mine to try to capture as much of what Bill new,
get the individuals on the team operating in a less autonomous, more
integrated fashion, making sure that we coordinated not only better
within ourselves, but better back to Houston so that we could call
in more support, we didn't have to do everything in isolation.
Those changes were unnerving to people who had gotten used to the
way Bill was doing business. They also knew that Bill was leaving
and therefore Bill wasn't going to be there, so therefore they were
nervous. The changes that I instituted to kind of mitigate that were
also nerve-wracking because I was calling on people to do more than
they had been doing in the past. So it made the start of Increment
Three considerably nerve-wracking.
To back up and look at the start of Increment Two, when Bill went
over there and we did our first increment with Shannon, they were
doing a lot of things for the first time, and Bill had quite a task
in front of him to integrate this team of talented individuals, but
they weren't really operating as a team when they were over there,
and he made a team out of them. But he was only able to take them
so far during the course of his increment in terms of their development
on console and what they could do and what the expectations were and
to make a lot of things that were seemingly unique into routine. Bill
took it as far as he could, and I tried to pick it up from there and
tried to advance the team and the operations to the next level so
we could be more and more productive.
We also, from Increment Two to Increment Three, had to do something
unique on orbit, and that was to hand over a mission from one crew
member to the next. We had never done that before. We've always had
the Shuttle flight come down, we give the Shuttle back, a few weeks
later we put a new crew on the Shuttle and it goes off again. We'd
never handed over a mission in progress from one crew member to the
next.
So we tried to plan for a smooth transition between Shannon and John.
We worked it, we thought. We knew we had some holes. We knew, and
we ran into things we didn't consider, and there was considerable--well,
it wasn't so much friction as it was uncertainty about what to do
next. Shannon, being a scientist, had a way of operating that the
team was comfortable with. They would give Shannon procedures that
weren't quite complete but they were enough that a scientist could
say, "This is what you want done? Okay. I'll go do it."
When you turn that around and you give the same type of a procedure
to John Blaha, who's a pilot not a scientist, he sees the holes in
the procedures and he wonders what's wrong here. And there is something
wrong. The procedures that we gave him in many cases weren't entirely
correct, but things that Shannon was able to make do, John was having
more trouble with because of their background and experience.
And that was another kind of change. Not only did we have to hand
over a mission from one crew member to the next, but we had different
crew members on board to deal with. Even though we might have the
same operations team or, in many ways, the same people on the ground,
we didn't have the same people on board so we kind of had to rewrite
the book.
That was unnerving, and I think it was unnerving to John, too. He
had a very tough two, three, four weeks, the first weeks that he had
getting started in his mission, and it was evidenced in the air-to-ground
and it was evidenced in the things we were able to get done. We tried
to second-guess him in a number of cases, and we second-guessed wrong,
and instead of making things better, we made things worse in terms
of his loading, in terms of the expectations, and I think that was
also kind of hitting between the eyes in those first two weeks, not
knowing whether he was being successful or how successful he's being,
how he's being perceived, that we didn't do the kind of support that
I wish we had. I'm not sure what better we could have done, but I'm
sure we could have tried something different. What we tried in many
ways didn't work.
But NASA-3 got off, and the mission was pretty rocky due to a number
of reasons, some technical, some personal. I didn't stick it out to
the end of Increment Three. There were enough changes going on back
here at JSC [Johnson Space Center] with the organization, the ops
leads, and expectations, what we wanted the ops leads to do. Couple
that with the fact that I was trying to make changes over in Moscow
from Increment Two operations with Bill to Increment Three without
Bill, this is what we need to do and how we need to handle it from
increment to increment to increment to increment, that a number of
things were not well accepted back here in Houston. So I gave them
the opportunity, and they said, "Sure, let's send over some more
help."
So we sent over some additional people to handle the job, and when
I came back, they replaced me with seven people, which was kind of
fun. It was fun from my perspective; it was very hard on the seven
people who went over to do the job that I was doing. They did a pretty
good job of picking up the Increment Three and running it through.
Again, this was another change to John on orbit, which I don't think
he understood at the time. Maybe he did. I'm not sure. But it didn't
help things smooth out from a, if you will, start-of-mission jitters
to an end-of-mission smooth ending. We kind of installed some jitters
along the way just to keep things stirred up, I guess.
But all in all, Increment Three and the Mir 22 mission were very,
very dull. I mean, we didn't have a decompression; we didn't have
a fire. We had science that was going on; some of it worked and some
of it didn't. It was a cake walk compared to the things that came
after that.
Wright: Before we get off that, when you were talking about your team
members, this was before you came back and seven went, could you give
us some of the other duties? You were head of this team. What were
the members of your team? What were they doing?
Moore: The Mir Operations Support Team is composed of single people
doing a broad-based job. I had a member representing long-duration
science. This person was responsible for helping the flow of the time
line to make sure that the science that we wanted to conduct during
this increment was being scheduled, that we were going to still, by
the end of the increment, accomplish what we needed to accomplish.
They also were the primary interfaces with the scientists outside
of the team, to try to integrate their wants and wishes back into
the team. They played a very large role in the--I call it week-to-week
time-lining of our long-duration crew member operations, and it was
at that time limited almost entirely to science operations. There
were very few Mir systems operations that our crew members were doing
at that time.
We had a hardware engineer, or payload engineer, who was responsible
for the operation of the science hardware and any anomalies that hardware
might have and its interfaces into the Mir system: power cooling,
whatever. So we had a hardware engineer with us as well. We had a
Lockheed-Martin lead who was the contractor lead on site, and except
for the flight surgeon [the biomedical engineer (BME) is also a contractor]
and the ops leads, everyone else was a contractor. Most of them worked
for Lockheed-Martin, and the BMEs worked for the Krug [a contractor
working in support of flight medicine].
We had a flight surgeon, who was the other NASA civil servant in place.
The flight surgeon was supplemented by a biomedical engineer so that
they would be essentially on alternating shifts, although it didn't
quite work out that way, but the idea was to keep a medical personnel
in the TsUP during the crew's awake time, make sure that they had
somebody available.
Occasionally we had a data person, a data engineer. That position
went away pretty quickly. When we needed them, we needed them pretty
badly, and when we didn't need them, there was an awful lot of dead
time. So that support position essentially evaporated.
This was the composition of the team during Bill's increment. During
my increment we added an additional person, a kind of a crew interface
person. One of the instructors that had been working with John Blaha
here on the ground, we pulled him in to work the air-to-ground com
during one of the shifts so that John would have a familiar voice.
John was worried about being able to associate with this person on
the other side of the microphone, and we said, "Well, it's not
cheap, but this is a relatively easy way to bring in somebody that
he's more comfortable with." And so we brought in that for my
increment, and that stayed there essentially for the duration of Increment
Three and disappeared for the subsequent increments.
Public affairs. We had the public affairs point of contact who worked
two doors down, but was still a member of the team in handling the
U.S. public affairs interfaces to the Russians. That's essentially
the composition of the team.
Wright: What was the duration of your team members? How long were
they there?
Moore: Well, that rotated, and it went from forty-five-day tours,
to thirty tours. The minimum was maybe as small as two weeks, depending
on how their rotations or how their vacation schedules were supposed
to work out. But generally they were there for one and a half to two
months during their tour. So they were rotating out more frequently
than the ops leads were intended to.
Wright: You mentioned earlier that when you had applied for the DOR
you didn't get it, and then when this opportunity came, you thought
you'd apply, and it was going to be for a shorter duration and maybe
easier. Now that you were in that position, do you think the DOR would
have been easier than what you went through?
Moore: No, different. No, and I don't think it would have been easier,
because although depending on when you became the deputy DOR, because
subsequent DORs have been able to take their families over. So, things
are different. There's no way to really compare.
The difficulties with living in Star City versus living in Moscow,
depending on your lifestyle, one or the other is easier. It depends
on what it is you're going to cling to. If you really like walking
in the woods and spending time in the snow and solitude, Star City
is very easy to handle, but you cut down your options. If you've got
to hit the streets and you want to eat dinner out lots, you want some
other entertainment, socialization, there's a whole lot more socialization
opportunities inside Moscow. So, again, I think it goes back to personalities
as to what it is and what your background is.
I have a memo that was written by the flight surgeon during my increment,
because he was concerned about the number of hours we were working.
He was concerned about us making mistakes on console. We were asking
people to essentially run at the limits of their endurance daily,
and that we weren't getting sufficient time off to recuperate. Well,
you can do this reliably in a short term, but over a long-term aspect
your judgment can be impaired and you'll make a silly mistake that
will be very costly or you'll make a very important mistake.
So he wrote this thing up, and he, being a single guy, what he wanted
to have for time off reflected the fact that, well, you expect people
to come over here and do this job, you expect to get qualified people
to come over here and do this job, you can't tell them you're going
to come over here and beat them to death, because qualified people
won't come over here and do this. Well, as a single guy, he occasionally
wanted the chance to travel out of Moscow, go up to St. Petersburg
for a two-day weekend. That is not an unrealistic request, to have
two days off in a week or a month, but he put these things in his
memo.
I read this memo, and my family was back here without me and thinking,
you know, if I have too much fun over here, I'm dead. So I'm not really
interested in the types of things that are motivating him, a single
guy, because of my background. It has absolutely nothing to do with
whether he is right or wrong or whether I'm right or wrong. What's
important to you, just like living in Star City versus living in Moscow,
drastically affects whether or not this is hard or easy or what perturbations
are important to you.
So I can't really say that the Star City job would have been easier.
It would definitely have been easier if I could have taken my family
over there. Working in Moscow would have been a little easier having
taken my family over there, but due to the work schedule, I'm not
sure how much they would have seen me or would have wanted to.
Wright: Was there a typical day which you were ops lead with that
increment that you could tell us about or kind of what was the typical
schedule?
Moore: Well, it was more like a week. You didn't start a day; you
started a week. The way it worked for Bill, and then we changed it,
and I have to start somewhere in the time line and describe it and
then describe the delta. During Increment Two, and because they were
so short-handed, Bill realized that having a lot of handovers from
team to team, from shift to shift, was going to induce more mistakes.
So he looked at it and tried to implement a scheme that minimized
the amount of times you transferred responsibility for the mission
from one group to the next. And what that meant was you had a rolling
schedule. One shift would work the morning and get off at three in
the afternoon. The evening shift would come in about one. There'd
be a handover. The evening shift would work one until ten or eleven
at night, get on a van, go back to Moscow, catch a van back at seven
o'clock in the morning and come back in and essentially hand over
to themselves because there'd be nobody there overnight. So the evening
shift on one day was the morning shift on the next day.
Then the crew that had been on the first morning comes in on the second
afternoon, there is a handover of sorts between morning and afternoon,
then that afternoon shift works the afternoon and the next morning.
So there's one handover a day instead of two, and you slept in the
middle of your shift. That had some real strengths and it had a couple
of real weaknesses, but it was a trade, and it's what Bill could do
with the team that he had at the time, and it worked in that environment.
But in minimizing the handover, you also minimized the communications
between the shifts, so actually there was less opportunity to pass
information. So some information didn't get passed, and it got to
the point where certain things only happened when certain individuals
were there and the other shift was incapable of doing those things
until that person got back. And it wasn't just Bill; it was because
the handovers didn't occur daily in this manner that there was not
as much job-sharing going on.
You can tolerate that for a while and to a certain level, but it's
very difficult to come in from the outside of that increment and learn
that increment and that operation and then take over for somebody.
The handovers were from person to person as you were handing people
back and forth across the ocean was more--my perception--was more
difficult. So, as you were doing this rotating schedule, you could
essentially say the schedule started Monday morning, and you'd do
these rotations until you got to Friday night.
On Friday night, that crew would come in and work Saturday, work the
entire day Saturday so they would get Sunday off. The crew that worked
Friday morning would get Saturday off, come in and work Sunday morning.
I don't remember whether they got--anyway, we had it so that you rotated.
If you worked Monday morning of one week, you'd end up working Monday
afternoon of the second week. So that you were going through this
constantly changing scenario, and you got a day and a half off every
week. You either got Friday evening and Saturday off or Sunday off
and Monday morning, I guess it was. So you ended up with a day and
a half a week, but you were working fifty, fifty-five hours, sometimes
plus [unclear] times, and so it was long.
During the week you had to be very diligent about getting your laundry
done and getting your shopping done. There wasn't a whole lot of time
just to sit around or to write letters or watch the news and try to
figure it out in Russian. It was something that, if you want to lose
weight, it's a great way to go.
Wright: Great diet plan?
Moore: Because you don't have time to snack. You're always on the
move and on your feet, and in order to build up the stamina week after
week you have to--I had to establish and exercise plan. Bill already
had one. I had to establish an exercise plan where, on the mornings
off, I went down to the embassy and used the recreational room, the
basketball court, and the swimming pool every other day. I was getting
out and doing about an hour and a half, two hours' worth of exercise
with thirty minutes' travel time either side, just so I could build
up the stamina to keep going. And you could really tell if you missed
one of those days. If you missed that exercise period, the next two
days were just horrible. Then you could pick it back up again, but
you had to do that to keep the blood flow moving that fast. It was
hard.
Pat McGinnis writing this memo about--his little informal note to
me that we had to be worried about overwork is right on target, had
its own bent to it, but his concerns were right on target. We were
working people very, very hard. But you didn't really have a day in
TsUP; you really had a week. That was your schedule, and once you
got started, you were on this train until you got to the end. Maybe
on Saturday you had enough energy to go out and do something, and
maybe you just needed to do laundry.
Wright: How about your counterparts that were in the TsUP, the Russians?
Did you get a chance to know them well while you were there, or were
y'all pretty much isolated and doing your own work?
Moore: Well, I would say we were isolated, but we got to know them.
The way the TsUP was built, we were intended to stay in one area and
to be sufficient, to operate out of this one area. So we didn't go
to the working area, if you will, of many of our counterparts. They
came to see us. So in some ways we were isolated.
However, early on in the program, we made contact with our other operations
personnel. We didn't really have issues that were U.S.-Russian issues;
we had issues that were operations versus scientists. Ops guys wanted
to get this stuff done, and the scientists wanted to sit there and
look at the data for a while. So all our issues were not that we couldn't
work with the Russian operations personnel; it's that whether it was
a Russian scientist or American scientist, our problems were trying
to get them going in order to pull off a day's worth of execution.
So we ganged up that way as our operations counterparts tried to find
ways to make our life better and we tried to find ways to make their
life better, because it was us against them and it had nothing to
do with flags. It had very much to do with the motivation of the people
involved. The scientists were, "I've got to look at this. I want
to make a better decision." I said, "You've got to make
a decision and just stick with it. Just give me one, or I'm going
to make one for you." And we did sometimes.
But that's what real-time operations are. So we got to know them from
working shoulder to shoulder, but I had no time to spend with them
socially. Some of the people that we worked with worked every fourth
day. They'd work a day, have two days off, then come back and work
the next day. So this was their planning cycle. Others we worked with
worked every day for a normal shift, and they did long-term planning.
But the folks who actually did the real-time operations were on for
twenty-five hours and they were off for two days, came back on for
work twenty-five more hours. So we saw multiple shifts of them because
we supported every day. But there was not much time for me to get
to know these people socially.
Wright: And you came back.
Moore: Yes.
Wright: Talk about that part, after you got back and the seven people
went and replaced you. What was your next part of the role?
Moore: I'd learned an awful lot in the handover from Bill and then
in the execution of John's first days, and I saw a lot of potential
for repeats, that people were going to fall into some of the same
traps. I had one or two things that I thought I did right, and there's
probably six or seven things I knew we never wanted to do again.
So I took it upon myself that I've got something to say and I need
to say it to these people and pass on some lessons learned. I did
so in the form of a couple of long-winded e-mail messages that occurred
in the November-December time frame to Tony Sang, who was about to
start Increment Four. I also did so in terms of a memo that I wrote:
"Lessons Learned from My Experiences." I had been sending
out summaries of lessons learned by discrete events all during this,
but I felt that it was really important that I help train the next
guy. I spent fifteen years in the training division, and I knew that
it was sometimes hard to learn something the first time, but it was
really painful to learn something and realize the guy next to you
already knew it, he just didn't bother to tell you.
So I felt it was extremely important, even if somewhat embarrassing,
to say, "You need to do this," and, "You don't want
to do that, because that doesn't work." So I fired off a few
things in the late '96 time frame, specifically in that regard and
working with the follow-on ops leads to try to minimize relearning.
They were going to learn their own things, more and more things that
they were going to learn that I didn't get a chance to. But there
were things that they should not have to repeat. With each new crew
member we learned one whole new set of data.
Wright: They were all different, all the increments. Is that an easy
statement to make?
Moore: Yes, but in much the same way that you can say you shoot a
shotgun shell at a target and it scatters and hits the target in all
different spots, so each one hit the target but each little pellet
took its own path to get there. Flying a scientist--flying Norm up
front just as a trailblazer, "Please, Norm, just get through
this," then Shannon, as a scientist, and then we shipped her--we
flew Priroda [new module] up during her increment, "Here, Shannon,
we're going to send you your laboratory. Oh, by the way, it's not
there yet. Stand by." Then we sent up John as a pilot, and we
gave him science things to do, but he was really interested in Mir
as a system and Mir as a vehicle, and so he pushed us in directions
that Shannon didn't push. Jerry Linenger was going to go do an EVA.
He was pushing us in that direction. We were going to send up the
doc who had flown before, and get him out and let him do an EVA in
a Russian suit. Mike Foale, another scientist.
Then early on in the program we were going to send Wendy [Lawrence]
up, all right, we were going to send another pilot. And then Dave
Wolf another doc, and kind of the science bent. So we were sending
all these different people with all these different backgrounds, and
each one a different personality trait, each one taking different
care and feeding for what it is they need to be trained, what it is
they need to be happy. And all those things had to be taken into account.
So each time we were stretching to make the envelope big enough to
incorporate all these people. Not to mention the care and feeding
of the people who were on the ground, because while we think of the
time that the crew member spent in Star City getting ready for these
missions and the trips to and from, separation from family, and then
actually going and executing the mission, we have people that worked
on the MOST from Increment Two or before all the way through this
last increment, and they had been rotating to and from Moscow constantly
through the whole time, their families seeing them go and coming back
and being able to take things, being able to adjust to the "you're
here," "you're not here." The single folks having to
take care of, you know, "Who's going to take care of my apartment?
Who's got my cat?" The trouble that they have to deal with and
the support structure that they would put together. It was all very
loose. I would have hoped that we could have done better for those
people. We learned a lot, and I hope we can continue to capture that
because we're going to send more people like that over for ISS.
Wright: I guess so much was going on at the same time, everything
had to run parallel, and at the same time you had to anticipate what
was going next. It was never a relaxing time at all when you were
there? Did anything ever get routine?
Moore: That depends on your perspective. Chaos can be routine. If
you practice it often enough, you know, it begins to look familiar.
But, yes, over the longest time frames, things could get to be routine.
For instance, the preparation for the arrival of the Shuttle flight
began with the departure of the Shuttle flight prior, and it had a
flow, you know. The crew member got all his gear out and he worked
on it, and then over the course of the increment he began to put his
gear back away in support of the Shuttle flight. The Shuttle would
arrive, and his gear would come across.
If you looked at that as an event that you could see, it got routine,
because you knew halfway through the increment you need to have a
plan for how you're going to get him back on the Shuttle, and then
you had to keep refining it. Where's the stowage? Where's stuff stowed?
What's in what bag? And you have to keep refining it on down to the
end of the increment. You could kind of get away with it for the first
half of that increment, kind of keeping tabs on it, but not being
too concerned about it, but halfway through the increment you've got
to begin to clamp this down. And so each increment began to get routine
if you looked at that aspect of it. If you looked at the aspect of
science operations, after an experiment that worked well had been
done two or three times, you could consider that operational and routine
until it broke, and then your routine was all screwed up.
Some things never worked as we intended them to and were never routine
because we were always trying something new to see what is it really
going to take to get it done. So the definition of routine, if you
consider all those things as routine, that's a routine increment.
Things work, things don't work. The Shuttle comes, the Shuttle goes.
Progress comes, Progress goes. Soyuz comes, Soyuz goes. Mir goes on.
It's routine, and if you can handle that, it's okay. But that's long-duration
space flight.
Wright: Many lessons learned. That was something that it sounds like
you can attest to.
Moore: Many lessons to learn. Some lessons learned. Some lessons learned
by people who are not going to get a chance to use them, and other
lessons that could have been learned have been missed and will have
to be learned again.
Wright: So what is your job now with the Phase One? You mentioned
all the details of it. Can you give us some examples of what you do
as you interface with all these folks?
Moore: Right now we're working on program close-out. [STS-] 91 has
landed. Andy's [Thomas] on the ground. He hasn't started his debriefs
yet with the groups, but we're getting ready to. The working group
that I work with, schedules his post-flight, is responsible for his
post-flight. He has a schedule that actually does the detail. We're
responsible for the content of what's in that post-flight plan. We've
got that content defined. We've got a schedule laid out. It's running.
It's in work. It's our job to make sure that debriefs go off, that
the documentation of the debriefs is appropriately handled, that we
write a final program report. We have a part to play in that and some
other program close-out activities, but right now our concentration
is on the fact that with no more crew members on board and no more
in training to go to Mir, that we need to finish out Andy's increment
with his post-flight activities.
We need to support the science that is continuing to go on on-board
Mir. Even though we're not there, the cosmonauts are still doing some
of that science, and our POSA (Payload Operations Support Area) is
still in operation in Building 30. The subset of the MOST team is
still in the TsUP working with the Russians while we don't have a
crew member on board, and they're working to get that science done,
and we're still here representing their needs, to make sure that they
aren't forgotten. We need to finish out the science and close it out.
So that's my current set of responsibilities, is still targeted toward
making sure the real-time operations occur, and in our translations
to Phase Two that we don't pull the rug out from the people that are
still trying to finish out Phase One.
Wright: Is there a time in these past few furious years that you felt
the highlight of what you were doing, something that you'll always
remember, the reason you're glad you were where you were at the time?
Moore: The answer is not, "No, I can't think of one"; it's
"I can't think of a discrete event." I mean, this is all
kind of an amalgamation put together. I'm very happy to have participated
in Phase One. I've learned quite a bit, both about long-duration space
flight, how the Russians do work, strengths and weaknesses on our
side. So it's been an education process from end to end, and I think
it has been for everybody that was involved. Whether they liked it
or not, they learned a lot. It's been a great opportunity being involved
in the Phase One program.
There were many times in the TsUP, talking about discrete little events,
that you'd be very happy that something simple went off so well. Very
detailed things, it was difficult to know when they were done, so
you never really felt that they were over because your time with the
crew was so spotty, you weren't sure all this was getting done just
right. So even if it was going great, going very well, the absence
of communications made you bite your nails. That wasn't pleasant,
but knowing, seeing little things go off well, seeing somewhat the
friendships form actually, what you see are the alliances form between
individuals, and you'll see people join up and fight for something
that you wouldn't have thought they would have formed a team and worked
together. And that was fun to watch, to see two people that you thought
would have been at each other's throats, standing side by side fighting
for something. You'd sit back and say, "Just let 'em have it."
Geez. They've already overcome the obstacles of getting something
done, they both believe in it, get out of their way and let them do
it, and that was fun. It occurred on multiple occasions. I can't think
of one particular event.
There were a lot of plateaus. There were a few valleys, but there
were a lot of plateaus and not one specific thing. It was fun being
involved with the end of Shannon's [Lucid] increment, particularly
when she was setting her long-duration space flight record for a woman
in orbit, because she's a real character and a very level-headed individual
for flying around the planet. She was a pleasure to work with, and
there were a number of times on air-to-ground when she'd crack a joke,
and you'd just sit back and say, "Oh, this is great."
I do have one particular experience with the Russians which set me
back, which deserves mention. I don't have the date written down in
any of my notes, but I was working in the control center, and I was
down on console on com, getting ready for the next pass for the crew
members. In the control center they use one of their communications
loops, and they just play music on it, background. So you might hear
Russian news, and you might hear something else going on on this other
communications loop, and people are busy working on the control center
and all's fine with the world. You have this big, big console sitting
in front of you, so you really can't see the guy in front of you until
you get up on the TsUP console. So I'm sitting back here, and I'm
hearing "La Macarena" play, the music, just over the headset,
and I'm hearing it kind of from speakers, and headsets that have been
set down so it's kind of coming from the room.
Then I realize that what I'm hearing is not coming from the voice
loop. I mean, the music's there, but some of it's not, and I'm trying
to figure out what's going on here. It's a little bit like the twilight
zone. I look around, and I look over the console, and most of controllers
in the room are doing the Macarena. I didn't have a camera, and I
didn't have a camcorder, and I just calmly stood up and looked over,
and it was all I could do not to fall out of my chair, because they
were singing the Macarena and were doing the Macarena in the control
room for Mir. Now, I was trying to imagine that over here in the control
center in Houston, and I can't. That's just not a vision that I can
do. But here are these people working, they've been working hard,
they've worked for months, they've worked for years in here, the Macarena
is played, and so they're going along with it, sitting on console.
And, you know, you just sit back and go, "There are different
things between the cultures." And I tried not to make an international
incident by falling out of my chair.
Wright: I've always heard music is the international language. Maybe
it was just proven in your eye.
Moore: Well, and the Beatles are a great one for that, too. But this
one particular event was just something that kind of sat me back as
being so different, seemingly funny, but maybe not to them, but very
funny to me. Because I had worked over here in our control room, I'd
worked over here not on a console, but I'd worked in there. I know
the decorum. I know what's expected. And this just it was good to
see. I learned from that experience.
Wright: Well, that's good. I'm glad at least you had a light moment
to get you through.
Moore: Oh, there were a few, but that one there wasn't anybody I didn't
have anybody sitting with me that I could have shared it with, another
American. I was down there by myself. This was going on. Who do you
turn to? You don't do anything. You just sit back and just admire
the moment. It was fun.
Wright: I'm glad you were the sole observer. It was worth being on
that shift at that moment.
Moore: Well, yes, I guess, but it was like I said, it was eye-opening
to see the difference. It was fun.
Wright: Well, it was an experience I'm sure you'll always remember.
And your family, I'm sure they were always glad to see you come home.
Moore: Well, I have to be careful of being sarcastic here. There have
been times when my wife has said, "Why don't you go back."
But, yes, I think so. I had, I guess, four trips in 1996 to Moscow,
short ones, short in our time frame, ten days, two weeks, twenty-one
days, then finally seventy-one days, the last one, and trying to get
them ready for what could be a four- to six-month stint. I had planned
to have them come over toward the end of my increment and have Christmas
in Moscow, and I wasn't there to execute that, but they were having
to make the adjustments.
It was hard all around. It was hard on my wife. It was hard on my
eldest child, who was fourteen, fifteen, now sixteen. She became the
second adult for some of the things because she was the second oldest
in the group, so some things fell back on here responsibility. That
was difficult and unfair to do. The middle child is pretty much bullet-proof.
The youngest, who was four, turning five that year, never understood
where I was or what I was doing, and I didn't predict this, and I
don't have the interpersonal skills to predict this, but she took
it very hard. There were a number of things that kind of showed up
having to do with the longest trip. And she knew that Shannon Lucid
was coming home, and there were pictures of Shannon Lucid on TV, the
astronaut that I was working with was going to Mir, going to space,
and she, at the age of five, turned to my mother and said that she
didn't want me going to space. She thought I was going. I'm not going.
I'm just far away. She can't associate with that. But she knew. She
was trying to put two and two together, and the person that I was
working with was going to space, and if I was working with them, I
must be with them.
I don't know how you explain to a five-year-old the concept of a wire
or radio or what that means to distance. If I'm working with somebody,
I've got to be there or I'm not working with them. And she got quiet.
She stopped talking for a while, just got really quiet. After some
period of time that I was gone, my wife realized that she was drawing
pictures and bringing them in and sticking them in my underwear drawer,
thinking that I would see them at night, because, you know, you come
home at night. So she was trying to communicate with me by leaving
pictures in the dresser. So, things were really hard on the youngest.
Her birthday's in June. One year I was out of the country and we didn't
celebrate it until after July Fourth. She didn't know it wasn't her
birthday yet. She was really confused about it. People would say,
"When is your birthday?"
"June 11th," she'd say.
"Oh, how was your birthday?"
"Well, it's not June 11th yet." Because we were trying to
keep things going so that I'd be home and we could celebrate her birthday
when I got back. So we delayed it a month, which was not real cool,
but it's the alternative, I guess. So there were some difficult things
associated with the separation. Did a lot to try to mitigate the separation,
but it's not only a physical separation, it's also a separation in
time, the difference in time zones, that your day starts over there
at midnight here.
So, toward the end of my work day, the beginning of their day, there
was some time when we could communicate. We were provided with good
access to telephones, good phone service, also relatively good access
to e-mail so that things that we couldn't handle verbally with the
time shifting, we could send a lot of data across the ocean what to
do if, what to do when, "I'd like this to happen," or, "These
are my thoughts." I can capture those and put them in an e-mail
message and then she could read them whenever she had the time to,
and she can stop at the end of her day, which was like two in the
morning, and write me kind of a summary, "This is what your family
did while you were away." So that helped, in some ways, to keep
contact. In some ways it made things harder because you were involved
in the day-to-day that you couldn't do anything about.
That's one of the things that John Blaha was talking about, that he
had to come to grips with the fact that he'd stepped off the planet,
and whatever happened on the planet, there was not a thing he could
do about it. So he finally had to distance himself from the people
that he cared about because he couldn't do anything about it. That's
a part of the long-duration space flight.
Wright: Did he talk to you about that when you all conversed, when
the two of you conversed back and forth, or is that just something
that -
Moore: No. It came up post-flight in some of his debriefings, and
I heard his comments. We never talked about it so much. I tried to
compare his notes to mine, understanding what he was having to deal
with, flying with a couple of guys that he hadn't trained with during
his increment since they changed out the Mir crew just before launch.
So he was having to deal with similar problems, in some ways extremely
much more difficult, because he never had the option to say, "Let's
get some more support over here. Send me some relief." That was
never his option, so he had to come to grips with that change. There
was a lot of changes going on back here administratively, which also
made things hard, but they went on.
Wright: You've all gotten through it, and now it goes on to the next
phase.
Moore: We hope so.
Wright: I imagine you'll be busy until the next phase or in the midst
of the next phase. What was that about your organized chaos or continual
chaos?
Moore: There's a certain familiarity with chaos. You just don't let
it get you down.
Wright: That's right. At least it's never boring.
Moore: No. A couple of other things I thought of when I went through
my e-mail.
Wright: Please share.
Moore: I've already discussed the work schedule. I sent a letter to
my family, including my sister, and it had to do with traveling in
Moscow. This is written after a particular trip to work during an
afternoon traffic jam, and I titled it "An Update on Moscow Driving
Techniques." I'll just kind of read it. It follows on in the
following manner, "An update on the number of driving lanes available
on a Russian road. We got stuck in traffic coming out to work today,
four lanes going one way all stopped. I thought it was a four-lane
road. Next thing, I see a car straddling the curb, buzzing by on the
right, most of it on the sidewalk but two wheels in the street. It
swerves into the street to get around a parked car, also straddling
the curb, and then back up on the sidewalk. We all laughed. We were
in the van at the time, not walking on the sidewalk.
"Next we see a car on the opposite sidewalk, a big Lincoln Town
car, also straddling the sidewalk, but backing up at a good rate of
speed to get back to an alley that was just in front of us. It whizzes
into the alley, followed by a stream of cars, those in front backing
down the street and on the sidewalk and some from behind. Our driver
follows suit. Okay, now we have a stream of cars whizzing down an
alley between apartment buildings. The stream of cars comes to an
abrupt stop as we get to the end of the alley, and it's fenced off,
seriously fenced off, with a concrete fence, with a three-foot drop
to the street. Our driver looks around, finds another cross alley,
and takes it, and we restart the stream of cars in another direction.
Okay, now we have a stream of cars, and our van is in the lead. A
few more twists and turns, and we get back to the real street. We
rejoin the traffic jam one block further on. With this I learn there's
six usable lanes in a four-lane Russian road. Moral to the story:
Don't play in alleys or walk on sidewalks."
I think I didn't put in there that one of the places we passed through
was the middle of a playground with swingsets on one side and a jungle
gym on the other, a stream of cars on the way to that fence. So, yes,
it's like "pay attention."
I had another experience with a new guy on his first trip to Moscow,
and the driving habits of our drivers were getting to him. There are
accidents in Moscow, and when there are accidents they're usually
serious because there's very little margin. People drive very close,
very fast. This young guy was having difficulty being calm in the
van. He was nervous. The rest of us were trying to just kind of keep
the discussion light, and you don't pay too much attention to it or
you will get an ulcer. So he finally has enough of it, and he reaches
up to tap the interpreter who's riding with us on the shoulder who's
riding next to the driver, and says, "Tell the driver to chill
out."
The interpreter looks back at him, and it took me a while to figure
out the puzzlement, but he was kind of puzzled. So he reaches over,
and he says something to the driver. The driver shrugs his shoulder,
reaches over, and turns the air-conditioner down colder.
At that time we said, "You've got to believe that your van is
in an impregnable shell. Nothing can come inside this van to hurt
you. That's what you've got to believe. You can't believe anything
else. It doesn't do any good. You've got to believe you're in an impregnable
shell." I was never in a car accident.
Wright: Do you have any more tidbits to share with us out of your
stack of goodies?
Moore: I couldn't find them. I couldn't find them. I had a couple
about the actual flights over, where I'd write a summary of what it
was like to go through the airports and sit on the airplane and come
through Russian immigration for the first time, which is a real shocker.
I went over at the end of January before Shannon launched, to work
with Bill as he got the team ready for the start of NASA 2. So it
was cold. I remember it was cold. It was minus-fifteen degrees Celsius
in Red Square. I got out one time to go walk around with a group of
folks at Red Square, and I learned that knit stocking caps are the
most useless pieces of attire known to man, and that a twenty-dollar
rabbit fur cap is worth its weight in gold.
But on that trip over, never having been into Russia before I've been
international, but never to Russia arriving at the airport, which
is an interesting architectural achievement, and then descending down
into the bowels of the terminal to be processed through immigration,
they have essentially decorated that part of the airport and they've
remodeled it some since then, but they had decorated that part of
the airport in what you call early American tin can. The ceiling tiles,
as you would see here, looked like three-pound coffee cans mounted
this way with occasional lights in the top of the can, meaning that
there was this stream of light down to the spot, but everything else
was dark around it, so there was a light here, light here, light here,
light here, light here. It was painted in kind of a dark I don't know.
It was almost like it was finished in dark cherry or mahogany. It
was very dark, not shiny appearance, very dark. The whole area was
dark and dim, and for the first time you go into Russia through immigration
to this dark and dim environment, you wonder what it is that you're
going into. But it was a real eye-opening experience.
Things have gotten a lot more user-friendly than they were when I
first went over there. It was a whole lot more user-friendly when
I went over there than when the first guys went over in support of
the Spektr launch and the initial negotiations for the Shuttle-Mir
Program. So it just made a real impression on me, getting off the
airplane, with a very American bent to the airplane, and descending
into Russian culture over the course of about 200 yards.
It was good that I traveled in a group. It was kind of fun to be able
to ask questions, "What's this?," and, "What's that?,"
as opposed to trying to figure it out on your own. That was a very
worthwhile activity, but it was kind the first part of a culture shock.
I mean, the cold weather was one. Living here in Houston and working
in Moscow, my increment was going to be largely centered on the winter
months, that I had absolutely no use for the clothing I had in here,
in Moscow, minus the blue jeans, because what you needed was totally
different. So, on my first couple of trips over there when we got
an apartment established that we would operate out of, I began to
stash things in the apartment. I bought a coat that I don't need here
that I took and left there, bought boots, left them there, a lot of
big things it would be difficult to transfer with the airplane, just
get them over there once and just think about, "Well, I've gained
all this. I'll just abandon them. I don't need to take them back."
But essentially I had to go out and buy a whole new wardrobe. I don't
snow ski. If I snow skied, if I had some winter sports like that,
then I could have transferred some gloves, some boots, and things
like that into this. I had absolutely nothing. So I had to go out
and buy, essentially, clothing for middle Canada to add to what I
had.
It was a culture shock and a bit of a physical shock, but it was fun.
I'd traveled to Europe during high school, at the end of high school,
so I had traveled subways and I had traveled where the language is
something else, and worked in different monies, always within a group,
never solo. So I had some idea as to what all that was to be. A lot
of what I was doing would be solo on this trip, so that was another
rough experience, but I had some idea going into this what that was
going to be like. But you throw some of the Russian culture and their
way of doing business on top of it and the length of time, it was
a real growth experience.
Wright: Do you have any new favorite food from living in Russian?
Maybe it's favorite because you missed it from back here.
Moore: No. A couple of things. The work schedule did not permit the
work schedule plus the things I was trying to do for the next day
did not permit me to go out and spend much time eating out. So if
I didn't get we brought food in and I cooked food in the apartments,
but I only had two or three places that I ate because I knew I could
eat there quickly and get out, go into a submarine sandwich shop or
McDonald's or a diner that specializes in Western food, omelets and
hamburgers and things like that.
I did not take the opportunity to grow into the Russian cuisine. I
wish I had, but our trips to Russia were unique compared to, or different
than, the operations for the people who came over just for the short
the docked missions or those in support of Phase Two, just supporting
meetings, because they actually had an evening to themselves, and
even if one day things ran long over the course of the trip, they
had many evenings that they could go off and do things. In the course
of a month I wouldn't have as many evenings as they had to go off
and try different things. So I came back with a totally different
experience, even though I spent more calendar time over there.
We would travel over, over a two-day period, you'd depart on one day
and arrive the evening of the second day Moscow time. You'd start
work the next day. And because of the way the handovers were, you
worked up until the day before you left. The day you left, you had
to spend all leaving. So we did not get the same kind of experience
that people did supporting either just the short-duration missions
when they came over for a Shuttle docked phase or the Phase Two meetings,
where they would have their meetings with the Russians in the morning
and may have a tag-up in the evening and go off and do something.
We never had that much free time. And it was demoralizing to see those
people blow in and blow out. The experience they had, it really wasn't
available to us, but we knew, both from personal experience and from
just in the wind, management thought that's the way we were operating,
too, and there was no real way to show it to them. We got a chance
later on to show it to them. I mean, as people came over and sat with
us, "Oh, I didn't realize that you were doing all this."
But for the longest period of time they thought our experience was
like one of these short experiences drawn out over three months. It
didn't work out that way. We weren't staffed that way. It was a little
demoralizing.
Wright: Did you have to explain to them why it was “Caasi”?
Moore: No. The Russians didn't care.
Wright: I just was wondering if they asked.
Moore: No. In fact, to keep things simple, I signed things with my
nickname instead of my given name. I considered it binding, but if
I'd signed something else, they wouldn't have known who it was. So
I signed with the nickname that I was using in TsUP that they would
then associate with approval by the NASA official.
Wright: How is your Russian now?
Moore: Very poor. It was never good. I went over with a crew in April
for ten days, and it took me three days to begin to get the Russian
back, and I got back maybe 20 or 30 percent of what I had when I left,
just in terms of being able to use it and do things quickly. It would
take a while. It's not a hard language. A lot of it is cognates. They
all sound the same as the American word. It's just the letters are
different, and you can converse without being correct. I was never
correct in the Russian language, but I was able to get across what
I needed to get across. Whenever dealing with technical details that
had to be specifically correct in coordination, we always used an
interpreter. It was only in joking around or in light conversation
that we would attempt to exchange in each other's language, which
was fun. It was fun. I had a number of people on the Russian flight
control team over there that I have the highest regard for and respect
for. We had a relatively good time together, and they were very helpful
in us getting our job done.
Wright: I certainly appreciate all that you've shared. I'm going to
ask Carol and Mark if they have any questions.
Davison: I just want to ask one question. What was your favorite thing
to do in Moscow? I know you said you didn't have much free time, but
. . .
Moore: Favorite. The problem with using the term "favorite"
is because you imply with that the opportunity to do it or not do
it. You do it because you could and you wanted to. One of the things
that I found very important were these trips to the Embassy to work-out
and to swim and then to go by the diner and get a big breakfast and
go out to TsUP and go to work, and I relied on those so heavily to
get me through that evening shift the first day, that morning shift
the next day, da-da-da-da-, that it comes under the category of "favorite,"
but it also came under the category of "required." So there
wasn't the opportunity of choice. I developed this because it worked.
I got relief from it. I dropped twenty-one pounds in seventy-one days.
I got it all back. But -
Wright: Well, that was going to be my next question. How good is the
exercise program now?
Moore: I don't know. It's individual. But, you know, I was over there
for the work, and I knew that this work was costing us a great deal.
I mean, I wasn't over here working with my cohorts on whatever it
is they're working on, I wasn't with my family helping out at home
or experiencing those things. What I was doing was very, very expensive,
so it was very important that I do it to the fullest extent possible,
or why am I there? I mean, what a waste.
So I wasn't trying to expand my free time, because that would have
been counterproductive. It sure would have been fun, and I could have
done some things and experienced I'd like to go to the Bolshoi. I've
never been to the ballet. Okay. I would have liked to go listen to
concerts. I would have like to walk around Moscow and see a lot of
the history. There are museums that are literally just a few blocks
away from the apartment that I never got to. I would have liked to
have spent time with one of my cohorts at their dacha, and I would
have liked to see them with their hair let down. It seemed the hair
was never that far up to let down, but I would have like to have a
chance just to bum around and relax, and I didn't because that wasn't
the reason I was there, and it certainly was costing too much to go
off and do this, and if I ever did, I'd be darned if I'm going to
tell my family I did it, because forget that, because they're having
a hard time. So I guess I feel missed.
But I don't have a thing that you would call a favorite. I expanded
by daily activities in a different way to be more productive, and
I found comfort and the ability to be more productive as being a justification
in itself. So I can't answer the question I think you'd want answered.
Davison: Let me turn it around and maybe make it a little easier for
you. What did you miss the most when you were in Russia?
Moore: Well, I know the easy answer. I'm trying to figure out the
hard part. I missed the family. I was experiencing a lot of things
I wish I could have shared with them, and I'm not sure that they'd
have wanted to share it for the duration, but there were discrete
events, there were particular time frames when I thought, gee, how
much they would have grown had they been able to be there and say,
"Oh, geez. Look at this other culture struggling with their problems,
their way."
I end up telling stories that are not mine. I end up telling other
people's stories. A gentleman that I worked with, his job was at the
embassy working for the Moscow Technical Liaison Office, MTLOS office
in the embassy. His family was there. They're an international family.
She's Belgian. He had kids. They lived in the same apartment building.
So their living and working in Moscow was different. He had an office
job with some extended hours. Family was there. They had more like
an eight-to-five work day, and the wife had to run an apartment with
two little kids.
When walking down the street in Moscow, you don't make eye contact
and there's a lot of bumping into each other just because things are
so tight. And when you're in the subway, you're mashed flat and people
are bumping into you, and that's just the way it is. They're not trying
to be rude, and they're not shoving you around, "I've got to
get through the door. It's going to close." Nobody's going to
put them through the door except them, so they're going to make a
path and get through the door. So you have this kind of interpretation
of a very separated and isolated society, people not interfacing with
each other.
But they've been through a lot, I mean in the last hundred years,
and every once in a while it comes out. This lady tells the story
that she was trying to get on a trolley bus, electrical bus, and the
drivers are notorious for pulling up, opening the doors, counting
to three, shutting the doors, and driving off. You're either on or
you're off or you're halfway in between. They've got a schedule to
keep. She's standing there with the stroller, the two toddlers, her
grocery bags. Objective: get on the bus. A crowd of people all trying
to get on the bus. Doors open. Mayhem. She has no idea what's going
on. Next thing she knows, she's sitting on the bus, her kids are at
her side, the stroller is next to her and the groceries are lined
up in front of her. The people behind her had scooped up her family
and deposited her on the bus, because that's the way you do things.
People don't survive in Moscow unless they pull together. Boom! This
family needs to get on the bus! Bam!
When you come through immigration at the airport, everybody scrambles
off the airplane and gets in this kind of mangled up line to stand
behind the yellow line waiting for their turn to go one single file
through there. A family will come up and kind of linger around the
back side trying to figure out what line to get in. One of the immigration
officials, a lady, will come marching out, and you'd think somebody
had stolen the Kremlin. They march out. They come over here, and they
take the wife by the arm, and they start dragging her off. And they
don't drag her forward; they drag her off to the side. And so they're
trying to get the kids along and this and that. They drag her up front,
and she marches in front of everybody in line, and nobody goes through
until that family has gone through immigration. They will not let
that woman with her kids stand in line.
These are not things that you think about as being Russian, but if
you think about how hard their life has been and what they had to
do to survive World War II, all the troubles, they had to pull together
as a community, and the community is there and very tight, but you
don't see it except in certain things, where -BOOM! -you'd better
get out of the way because there's customs here that you do not want
to cross.
This lady tells another story. She's been riding, the family's on
the bus. The bus gets to the point where the bus driver is supposed
to take a break, so the bus comes to a stop, the bus driver gets off.
Everybody has to get off the bus, get on the next bus that's going
by, and go on. Well, you're supposed to get another ticket, because
your ticket just expired when you got off the bus, but she doesn't.
They get on the bus, and it's a very loose system. The bus driver
doesn't care whether you've got the ticket or not; the transportation
police care. So everybody gets on, and this transportation police
person comes over and asks for a ticket. She shows the one that she
has from the previous bus. He says, "No. That's not going to
do. Get off the bus."
The people in the bus start yelling at the officer and giving him
grief for throwing a family off the bus. Never mind that she's blonde,
she's not Russian; she doesn't look Russian. They are giving this
guy what-for, because that's not what you do in Moscow.
These are just interesting you know, you think about this, and you
think, "This is really strange, and I'm very much among strangers."
You are in many cases, and for a guy you definitely are. You could
be on the sidewalk and nobody care. But for the family, they have
a very strong ethic. And it was interesting to hear these stories
and to see some of them take place, particularly when I saw the things
in immigration. And you could see the families panic, "What did
I do wrong?" because nobody said, "Please let me take you
to the front of the line." No! "Gotcha."
Wright: Thanks, Caasi. We appreciate it all.
Moore: I talked too much.
Wright: No, you didn't. It sounds good. I'm sure there's more. If
it comes to you, just let us know, and we'll come and get some more.
We wish you the best of luck in the next whatever happens, the next
chaos.
Moore: It would be nice to have a next chaos.
Wright: Thanks again.
[End of interview]