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Patricia
"Patti" Moore Operations Lead, NASA Increment 6 |
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Patti Moore was NASA's Operations Lead (Ops Lead) in Russia during the Wolf Increment. Her duties included coordinating communications between Mir astronaut David Wolf, NASA, and Russia from the Russian Mission Control Center.
As an Ops Lead, Moore was in charge of the Mir Operations Support Team in Moscow, where she managed a group that included a flight surgeon, a payload engineer to troubleshoot science equipment problems, a mission science representative, a systems engineer who kept Johnson Space Center officials informed about Mir hardware problems, a timeline engineer for scheduling purposes, a public affairs representative, and a biomedical engineer.
Ops Leads such as Moore followed crewmembers through training at NASA and at Star City, Russia, enabling a good rapport with the crewmembers and a solid knowledge of the experiments the Mir astronauts would be performing on-orbit.
Prior to her Moscow assignment, Moore worked on Spacelab projects in the Payload Operations Control Center at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
In her Oral History, Moore commented on the expectations she had concerning her duties in Russia: "I'm from Spacelab world, and when you're working a Spacelab mission, you come off console totally drained, mentally and emotionally, basically, because for 14 days you're just really running and going.
"When I started this I was going, 'I'm going to be bored. You only talk to the crew twice a day.' I mean, there's only contact with the crew 10 minutes per orbit. That's really amazing. I thought, 'Wow. There's too many people over there; we don't have enough to do. We're going to be sitting around a lot.' That was not the case at all.
"We were all busy every minute from the time you walked in the door until the time you left in the evening, and sometimes it would get a little overwhelming, but really the workload was steady. It was like piecing together a jigsaw puzzle sometimes."
Patti Moore Oral History (PDF)
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Curator:
Kim Dismukes
Responsible NASA Official: John Ira Petty |
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