The four space shuttle orbiters, Atlantis, Columbia, Discovery and Endeavour, require specialized handling on a massive scale. To give you a feel for just how massive it is, I dropped in at the Kennedy Space Center to talk with Kelvin Manning of NASA, whose awesome job is to oversee the flow of all work done on Atlantis from the moment it touches the KSC runway until its next liftoff..usually, about four months later. Think of it and count your blessings: unlike our small airplanes, the mighty space shuttles spend almost all their time between flights in maintenance. Contractor teams actually handle the ship's grooming, loading, final joining with the fuel tank and booster rockets, as well as work on the launch pad through countdown. Manning's official job title is "Vehicle Manager, OV-104 "Atlantis." If you're a NASCAR fan, that means he's the "Pit Boss."

JS: You have one of the biggest responsibilities on this base (KSC). You have charge of one particular orbiter, Atlantis.

KM: Right. I'm the NASA representative for that particular vehicle. But we have an outstanding team of individuals that keep that ship flying.

JS: What's a job like that mean? From the time your shuttle touches the runway at the completion of a mission to the time it gets back into orbit, what does that mean to you?

KM: Well, as a government representative, we provide insight into the contractor's processes as they do the hands-on, touch labor on the ship. And every aspect of the vehicle to the nth degree, we're on top of that, making sure we're delivering the astronauts the safest possible vehlcie that we can.

JS: What does that take? How many man hours are we talking?

KM (Right): In the Orbiter Processing Facility, or OPF, (the shuttle's hangar) where we spend the bulk of our time processing, we say an average flow takes about 44-thousand 800-and-some-odd hours of touch labor. That's the majority of your time on, say, an 80 day OPF flow. We come over here to the VAB (Vehicle Assembly Building), where we spend about 5 days..usually leaving ourselves two (extra) contingency days to get out of here..and at the pad, we're out there for just under a month.

JS: Wow. That's just tremendous labor. How many people are involved?

KM: Here, locally, on the 104 team, there's a few hundred people involved in getting the vehicle turned around. But when you look on a national level, both the program at Johnson Space Center (Mission Control & Training Facility), of course the tank and booster project office out of Marshall, the design center now in Huntington Beach, they're slowly moving to Houston..all those Boeing folks..plus you got the NASA headquarters (Washington) contingent, you're talking a standing army.

JS: A 'standing army' to make one flight.

KM: That's right. And the bottom line is we can't afford another accident. Just the visiblity .. like we just went through this MPS (Main Propulsion System) flow-liner crack issue. (Ed: Minute cracks, discovered in the lining of fuel pipes deep inside the shuttles, caused them to be grounded for about four months until all were repaired (NASA photo, below) and cleared again for flight.)

KM: You know, using the colloquial phrase, "no stone goes unturned"..that's absolutely right. We do things to death until everybody's comfortable with the solution in order to fly safely.

JS: That question right there: What did you go through to decide how you were going to fix those cracks? In one scenario I studied, you could have ended up taking all that stuff out of the orbiters.

KM: Right. That was one of the pieces of the puzzle that Ground Ops provided: What would it physically take to remove a feed line, in which the flow liner's encapsulated, from the ship(s)? And the way it was stated, the whole aft end was built around the feed lines so it would have taken months to literally pull these parts out of the aft of the orbiters in order to snake that (liner) out of there.

JS: You would have had to tear down part of those ships.

KM: Oh, absolutely.

JS: How are the orbiters holding up? I covered the space program since the first of Mercury. I've seen all that history develop, and I've seen how meticulous this agency can be. I've also seen, here in the first reusable spacecraft, how very careful you have to be in going back over it for wear. How has this structure held up?

(NASA photo of fully-rigged shuttle leaving VAB high bay, right.)

KM: Well, you know the orbiters were designed..the airframes themselves..for 100 missions. And right now, Atlantis is on its 26th mission, and overall I think they've held up very well. We've done a substantial number of upgrades since the first flight in '81..STS1..and we're looking at maybe flying them to 2020. And in 2020, it's a good possibility (that we'll) invest in a new system. People don't realize how cost-prohibitive that is. You look at parallels like the B52s ..you know we could be in the same boat there.

JS: But when you get down to taking pieces apart and you look at bolt holes, for instance..do you see anything like elongation in those holes?

KM: Well, we've gone through a little of that with engine dome heat shields, for example, we've had some elongation and we've gone through mods (modifications) beefing them up, and I think we'll continually do that. But there's nothing that says, 'Hey, this piece of hardware just won't fly anymore.' And we're learning something every day..with MPS flow liners, you see how we went through that. We notice those microscopic cracks. In fact, they could have been there since day one in the build process. But as we keep flying these things we get smarter and we'll continue to do that kind of thing.

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