Adios, Outpost

Good riddance to an old standard. The Outpost was a wonderful place in its day, but the generation of heroes who inhabited it need to stand aside so my (younger) generation can achieve its own greatness.


I'd venture to say that the biggest impediment to progress at JSC is the crew office [2], and The Outpost stood as a monument to that office. I only hope that as this and other monuments to the Test Pilot era of Astronauts crumble, we're actually allowed to innovate, create, and engineer to come up with spacecraft, space missions, and results that are truly worthy of America.


I blogged about it in my blog. http://www.imp-detail.org/archive.php?apid=110#110 .
--
Elliott

[2] There are other big impediments. I name them in the blog post.

How symbolic.

Sometimes good things can rise from the ashes, however.

Folks:

Buildings may burn but may the spirit live on.

tinker

The same place astronauts used to hang out?I think it's sad, but appropriate, given that we wont have astronauts soon.

Outpost Tavern Building Destroyed In Fire

http://www.click2houston.com/news/25412129/detail.html

"Good riddance to an old standard. The Outpost was a wonderful place in its day, but the generation of heroes who inhabited it need to stand aside so my (younger) generation can achieve its own greatness."

I just want to say, thank you Elliott, for an insightful post, and the related comments on your blog. The Outpost was a true piece of history that embodied the heroism, spirit and determination of another era. An era when exploration meant "hands on the stick", and when those hands were, by default, attached to men who were at the pinnacle of power, influence, and media attention. That was perhaps a defensible way to begin human space flight, but is no longer appropriate in an era in which space exploration has matured to the point that "space cowboys" are no longer needed.

Perfect blog post (and just reweeted by me)! We really need to move on from the past and build the next amazing thing the way our generation builds things, with out technology, and not the last generation's way and tech. Sad about the Outpost, but extremely symbolic.

Bookends....

http://www.colapublib.org/cgi-bin/colapl/history/showpic.cgi?c=antelopevalley&p=images&file=31.jpg

EEP;

I wish your younger generation the best of luck. I hope they can set aside their video games, cell phones, and tweets long enough to concentrate, and take the United States to NEOs, and other planets. I hope they can recreate, with all their technology, what a group of people did with slide rules and elbow grease.

In disparaging the Outpost, it is clear you do not know what this place, and the places that came before it, were in the 70s and 80s. How could you? You are too young.

The Outpost was a place where all level of contractors and civil servants (the janitor and the senior managers) came together to share a beer. Everyone was approachable, and opinions were shared. People argued, and laughed, and eventually came to work toward a common goal.

You are right that that level of comradeship does not exist anymore. We don't listen anymore. In the past 4 years, I've yet to sit in a meeting where the participants weren’t playing with their computers, or cell phones or iPads. Constellation was the absolute worst technology abuser. Certain meetings were designated as no technology meetings, so that management had to listen to the topic being discussed, instead of playing with their gadgets. And when was the last time you went to a meeting and participated 100% in the subject.

I do agree with you about the astronauts. NASA's incompetence began with the selection of astronauts as senior managers. Astronauts are "the greatest bastion of the Space Ego, where test pilots, sports heroes, and other mythical creatures can take refuge in perceived greatness". They make great senior bobble heads (smile, nod head up and down), but they typically have little or no managerial experience, and so fail miserably at their assignments. Recent examples are Bolden, Coats, and Cabana, but you can pick any astronaut in a management position, and 90% of the time you will find their organization in shambles.

I also agree that: “The leaders at JSC - the ones charged with moving the center towards its supposed Core Ideology of advancing human space exploration - cower in the darkness of the past; shortsighted and outmoded ideas that will doom the future America to mediocrity. Their unwillingness to seek out the new ideas within their organizations, to lead the future's charge with their as-yet untapped resources, hampers not only NASA's immediate goals, but America's (and our world's) future. “

However, the creation of this elite society is due to the death of the spirit of the Outpost, and not because of it. These days, if you fall below a certain GS level, you are no longer allowed to address senior management. If you do, you will be retaliated against, and you won’t even know it. It could be why you've been moved from project to project.

This is what happens when the classes are no longer allowed to mingle. It is what happens when Outposts don’t exist.

The "Space cowboys " are still needed. I think their accomplishments are important, but still needed to move things forward in a sane manner. I believe that we need to go back to the moon for many reasons. We have only looked on the front side in equatorial regions. Thia "been there-done that" is a convincing argument to the short sighted, but I think that we need to really take a good hard look at the repercussions of being short sighted. I believe that the managers involved in the SRB o-ring decisions for the Challnger were being short sighted. To the people with the longview the only thing to do in order to leave the earth, is to start where we left off. I also think that 3 days away from home while we learn how to function on another world,is the only prudent and sane way to go.

I believe the astronauts had deserted the Outpost a long time ago already. Too many people knew about the place. I visited 2/3 times in the 90s and it was "emotional" indeed but I never saw "anyone" there. The Outpost if of a long gone era. I am glad I visited and I will miss the "monument" but that is about it.

Those who say we should do it the old fashion way do not understand that the new way does not and will not get it in the very same way that the 60s did not understand the 30s. It is a generation thing. There are new technologies, new means of communication and it's all about taking advantage of those rather than disparaging them.

A manager, or anyone for that matter, not listening in a meeting has nothing to do with the cell phone technology but everything to do with the personality of the manager. Cell phones do not select managers, people do. So if you are not happy about them say something. Don't blame the phone.

Am I alone in seeing a parallel between this and yjr loss of Pancho's Happy Bottom Riding Club in 1953?

Holy smokes! What's with all the venom and paranoia?!

The Outpost was a friendly little place with the best burgers in any NASA town and a lot of important history. It met a tragic, unfortunate end and that is sad. It's silly and reflects poorly on those making antagonistic comments to try to read anything more into the situation or to exploit this tragedy for presumed political gain.

Shame on you.

The best way to make smores and toasted mashmellows. The most delicious of foods. Thanks for the post!

Did everyine miss the irony in that the Fire Station is about 100 yards down the road?
What do you bet the new "owner" who shut this monument down had a ton of insurance on the place that he was going to move somewhere else and re-open as a "family-style" restuarant---sure he was!
RIP--the alcohol-soaked planks went quickly---maybe with help from other more recent cumbustibles!

We Can't Get There From Here:

Thanks for the thoughtful comments. We may be more in agreement than you think.

I should start off by saying that despite the tone of my original post here (which, in retrospect, comes off as rude and disrespectful), I wasn't intending to disparage The Outpost, nor specific people who frequented the place. I made it to The Outpost a few times before it closed, but it didn't really excite me, and I certainly didn't see any of the camaraderie you mentioned. Given my (comparably limited, but at least recent) experience I'd say there are other places one can go to and happen upon co-workers and astronauts, e.g. Boondoggle's or Carlos' Beer Garden, but you don't see impromptu meetings or general camaraderie at those places either.

To take another jab at astronauts - in addition to the notable failures at management that you mentioned, some of them seem to be ill-suited to their astronaut duties as well. After being selected based on military duty, flight experience, number of PhDs, and so on, they're called on to be mechanics, plumbers, electricians, and computer technical support. With insufficient and poorly directed training for these tasks, and no personal experience or competence to fall back on, they sometimes fail at tasks that should be simple. When their skill sets don't match their job requirements, the result is lost time, damaged hardware, and missed opportunities. I would venture to say that an EE with a bachelor's degree and 5 years experience in industrial controls would be better qualified for ISS duty than someone with a Ph.D. and 10,000 hours piloting fighter jets. When will that piloting experience be relevant? Defenders speak of skills in split-second decision making, but that's not really relevant either; what's needed is sustained creativity under stressful conditions with limited resources and a lack of specific training - not a skill that is learned while flying or writing a Ph.D. dissertation. Then, we ask these people to provide their input for design decisions, and the results are disastrous, expensive, inefficient, and generally inappropriate.

But I digress, and I hope that people forget that little rant before the next time I have to be involved in a crew evaluation :)

I definitely agree that attitudes and culture need to change among ground-level engineers - people don't take any initiative to work together across disciplines; many young engineers that I know at JSC couldn't even name 5 ISS or Shuttle projects that their branch or division works on. I think that's shameful, and it's a definite problem for this generation. "Kids these days" (I use the phrase in all seriousness) will tweet to the world that they're having lunch, but would never think of spending 10 minutes to chat with a technician about how hard it will be to assemble and test their design. To me this seems to be more a fault with the way engineers are trained and educated; the problem isn't just limited to NASA.

So clearly, the 20- and 30-somethings here have yet to earn the respect and trust of the organization. We'll have to become less self-righteous and self-absorbed, and more aware of the world around us, before we're capable of any feats of engineering; wondrous or not. The technology we cling to could be used to enhance the social fabric of the Center, provide new means of collaboration between disciplines, and enable more efficient work processes. Or it could be a constant, crippling distraction. So far I'd say it's been the latter.

So one part of the "old" NASA - collaboration, motivation, initiative, a sense of shared purpose - has been lost, to the detriment of all of us. But I don't think that's a generational thing; I think it's a personal thing. My upper management, despite their decades of experience, is no more communicative or creative than the "fresh-outs" who have never turned a screwdriver but feel qualified to design hardware - and they spend just as much time pecking at BlackBerries and iPads as my counterparts. 30 years of experience means nothing if it's not put to productive use.

The "old" NASA that I rail against is a combination of things. It's the notion that a spacecraft needs to center around a Commander and a Pilot, and that its most important function is flying. Every day I worked on Constellation, I was freshly appalled at the shortsightedness of it all; there didn't seem to be any recognition that we were supposed to be designing a spacecraft for a multi-month voyage that shouldn't require *any* piloting. Endless meetings, telecons, and contractor-supplied garbage (extremely expensive garbage) did nothing to ease this. In what world is it OK to start talking about lifetime buys of obsolete hardware before a design has hit PDR? Ours, apparently.

The death of the original spirit of the Outpost (if I may co-opt the notion) also led to the unthinking aversion to "risk" that leads to excessive margins, missed opportunities, and lowered capabilities. I say "risk" because people aren't worried about mission success or crew safety; they're worried about covering their own butts in case something doesn't work. It's apparently always safer to say "no, that would never work" or "no, today the rules don't allow that" than to be a creative problem solver, think rationally about degrees of risk and payoff, and take personal risks to further agency goals. This is probably more a "mid-life crisis" NASA than "old" NASA, but the outcome is the same - uncreative designs that lead to barely capable spacecraft.

The worst thing the younger generation can do is to be dismissive of wisdom and experience. We absolutely, desperately need the people with 20-30 years of experience to serve as mentors and advisers and designers. Instead, we find them paraded before us to give speeches about the Good Old Days, answer a few pointless questions, then be shuffled back to the legacy projects that they've been relegated to. This is a failure of management, for not taking advantage of a priceless resource, and it's a failure of young engineers, for not seeking out those resources on their own.

I would agree that the culture at NASA is broken; I also see a stark divide between contractors and civil servants; another between contractors working for different contracts; another between branches and divisions; another between centers; another between projects. I see hoarding of and competition over scarce resources instead of sharing and collaboration. I see young engineers who are unable to see past their own tiny corner of a project, and I see people overlooking wisdom and experience for (at best) shortsighted self-preservation.

So the "old standard" I spoke of may only be partially correct - the Astronaut-centric, hands-on, single-mission slant of spacecraft design is definitely a holdover from previous design experiences, and that's something that needs to be changed. The other part of the "old standard" I spoke of related to grumpy old engineers, who don't share relevant experience, and are far too quick to say "no, it can't be done; we tried that in Skylab and it didn't work." Perhaps it's closed-mindedness, or a failure to keep up to date with technology, or perhaps it's just a manifestation of the frustration of watching NASA crumble before their eyes. If it's the latter, I'm afraid I don't have anything hopeful to counter it with, other than to say: there are actually some of us who came to NASA to imagine and create and explore, not just for a brag-worthy job. We want to combine creativity and knowledge with elbow grease and practicality (though maybe not slide rules). And we want the benefit of your wisdom and experience - not as boundaries and limitations, but as guiding principles and lessons learned.

With that in mind, the loss of The Outpost is, in fact, regrettable - that kind of learning is done best over a beer or two, outside of work. Maybe someplace a little newer and less shady than the Outpost?

It had also been disconnected from all utilities and was pad locked since they moved it many months ago. It's hard to think of anyway for it to have caught fire by itself. The skies have been clear for days, so it certainly wasn't lighning.

I am all for using today's technology to build the next generation of space vehicles. My point is that the NASA of the 60s and 70s established a firm set of requirements and used a single set of standards before they built the vehicle that went to the see moon.

Today, NASA picks the cool technologies before they completely understand the requirements and have established a firm set of standards.

http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msp98/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_X-38
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ares_I
(the list goes on)

Sometimes the result is a failed project or program, other times it is stove piped applications that do not meet the needs of the end user. How many NASA groups are off creating apps for the iPhone that only a small percentage of NASA employees are allowed to have? I'm sure they are really cool, but the working guy will never see them.

As for the statement below, the managers were told to stop playing with their phones, and the compromise was the non-technology meeting.

"A manager, or anyone for that matter, not listening in a meeting has nothing to do with the cell phone technology but everything to do with the personality of the manager. Cell phones do not select managers, people do. So if you are not happy about them say something. Don't blame the phone."

I am relatively new to the program(and currently laid off!) but I have never heard of this place.Of course, I wonder what will happen to other space facility hangouts, such as the token one at Michoud that served literally tons of New Orleans seafood in its day.Maybe someone should do a photo documentary book of such places around all the facilities across the country.I bet there are some that go back before the fifties, along the lines of the famous bar/riding club of Tom Wolfe fame.

I understand what you mean, I think about the meetings and the managers. However you have to come to the realization that there is an advantage to having cell phones and other such gizmos. It is the person holding the gizmo who is responsible for using it wisely. People may need to know something right away and cannot wait for the info to come in after the meeting (e.g. cash saving, life threatening event). Again the technology is not responsible for the user and the usage.

As for the requirements that is a totally different issue where all sorts of politics are involved. It has nothing to do with the people's generation. Once upon a time in the 60s and 70s maybe all politics used to converge? I doubt it but... All the failures since Shuttle cannot be imputed to technological advances on the communication front though.

Perhaps game-changing technologies and breakout concepts will allow us to build a new, commercially operated bar? One that we can get the burgers we order in seconds instead of minutes?

Oooh, or we could start by visiting NBOs (Near-Bar Objects--things like a convenience store, which also sells alcohol), and work our way all the way out to eventually visit a new bar.

Of course, we can't really lift any heavy drinks, like mugs, for at least five more years--it will take us that long to design the heavy lift mug.

And of course, some people wonder why we need bars at all, when there's so much alcohol at the store.

But farewell, Outpost. I really did enjoy drinking in you.

"The leaders at JSC - the ones charged with moving the center towards its supposed Core Ideology of advancing human space exploration - cower in the darkness of the past; shortsighted and outmoded ideas that will doom the future America to mediocrity. Their unwillingness to seek out the new ideas within their organizations, to lead the future's charge with their as-yet untapped resources, hampers not only NASA's immediate goals, but America's (and our world's) future. “

Great example of this: look at the "new" Front Control Room (FCR), where they run ISS out of, which is modeled after the old hulking console model. Completely outdated concept. Yet, it clearly fits the mold of the nostalgic incompetence that pervades the center. Heck, there's even some that still have flattops in that room. It's time to shovel these space camp weenies out the door and move on to folks who can reinvigorate our space program with a new and effective approach!

Complaining about FCR-1 is easy. What would you propose that would have meet the same budget and schedule constraints that FCR-1 was built under? I find it a much better place to work then the BFCR.

Complaining about anything is easy :)

But are cost and schedule the reasons that FCR-1 looks the way it does? Or is it because that's what a Flight Control Room is "supposed to look like?" Huge screens in front, banks of computers, same DVIS consoles, MER downstairs ... Shuttle was designed around that concept, and so was ISS (and Apollo). Because ISS was designed around this traditional concept of Mission Control, there probably weren't many options in terms of what to do with it.

But when designing a space exploration mission - one to go to Mars or beyond, with significant communication lag times, different requirements for reliability and maintenance, and so on - this concept doesn't work nearly as well. You can't expect to treat the crew members like children, not allow them to think and repair on their own, and only feed them information as they "need" it. They can't call mommy every time they stub their toe; they need all of that information with them, and Mission Control can be MUCH smaller and it should look a lot different. No realtime monitoring - what's the point, if all of your information is 10-20 minutes old? There are no conversations, and if something breaks, the crew may need answers NOW - they need drawings and assembly records, and to be able to fix things on their own - everything with them in their spacecraft.

And to belabor an old point: "Flight" Control Room? Even the nomenclature conjures up old images. Where are they Flying? It's a conceptually outmoded design, but what do you think Orion's mission control was going to look like?

Yes, certainly there's a need to move on, especially with modern collaboration network concepts and interfaces. The FCR layout for Apollo was highly constrained by the technology of the time (back-projection screens, easier to wire consoles in rows, etc, etc). We simply don't have those constraints these days. Also, systems are far more complex, so the real knowledge is in the warren of cubicles in Bldg 30 and out at the contractors' sites. We've done a lot of work at our lab at trying to understand how we transition to "Lights-out" mission management in a modern ICT world. There's certainly little need for more than basic functions in a front room, and all those functions should be capable of being distributed. Even emergency operations centres and NOCs (similar history) are gradually evolving away from this format. Even with big screens, if needed, a long thin room often makes more sense, but with most of the interaction and video being concentrated around each Operator.

ex_navy, you seem to want to defend FCR-1. So be it. While I can't disagree that it's better than BFCR, it isn't as optimal as it could be. So, you just go on believing that what you have there is the best it could be given cost and schedule. It's best this way.

How interesting that something as innocuous as he burning down of a deserted shack could have instigated such an interesting discussion on how change is past due. Its very exciting.

Maybe the idea is that instead of placing a bunch of flight directors in charge of the next program, no one that had anything to do with flight directing or flight crew operations in the past ought to be allowed anywhere close to program management? They seem to keep wanting to do it the old way.

I hope management reads this stuff.

letsroll - I am not defending, just hate seeing complaining with no solutions and as I expected, that's what I got. At least eep and Warp offered up some ideas on a different way of doing things. Also I don't think FCR-1 is optimal but it's better then what we had before and good enough given the budget we had to work with.

eep - Cost is a big reason FCR-1 looks the way it does. There was originally no funding to build a new FCR despite the fact that we had outgrown the BFCR. For very little money we were able to take existing components or designs and configure one of the old Apollo control rooms to meet our needs. There was no money to fund new ways of doing buisness, this was just a matter of re-hosting our existing capabilities in a new room. While your comments on deep space missions are correct the ISS is not a deep space mission and so your comments aren't really relevant to how we do buisness today. If you are arguing that we should be using ISS to test out BEO flight techniques, I agree and maybe someday we will get there but the ISS was not designed to be autonomously operated for long periods of time and can't be safely operated that way. With major software improvements to the vehicle and new capabilites added we could do it in the future but we are talking about major cost upgrades to do that and it would have to be funded by NASA HQ as a major science objective. Last what do you call moving through space? Flying still works for me. You can call the room anything you like as far as I am concerned. It's just a name. Last I have no idea what the Orion control room was going to look like. It wasn't something I worked on.

Warp - Lots of nice buzzwords but I would like to know how " modern collaboration network concepts and interfaces" translates into actual systems that let me do my job. MCC is actually pretty distributive already. We can do our jobs from any console in MCC and also from some other buildings at JSC and routinely move operations to other rooms when FCR-1 needs maintance. Have to disagree with you that the real systems knowledge resides in the MER and out at contractors sites. With the downsizing at Boeing and the inevitable turnover at smaller contractors the ISS program has lost a lot of corporate knowledge on ISS systems. Not infrequently its the flight controllers who have preserved the detailed technical knowledge and history on how ISS systems work. So please don't fall into the "flight controllers are just console monkeys" mindset. We need the unique skills and knowledge of both flight controllers and the MER to operate safely.

Enjoyed eep and We Can't Get There From Here's stream of comments. Let me see if I can add insight to them.

There is a need for experience as well as fresh insight, a respect for what has been done alongside the challenge of doing things differently to gain a previously unreachable advantage. The constant interplay between the two forms a kind of isostatic balance necessary for the health of any organization.

For various reasons, these have been deconstructed in our current culture out of the picture. In replacement, there are forces that take the place - "old school" overreach's with past doctrine to hold off as long as possible ignorant attempts to dismantle proven processes and subsystems, while their perceived opposite numbers play the reverse game of evasively moving the definitions/standards/mechanisms to allow greater autonomy of action to NOT deal with surely curmudgeons. And the empire builders use what ever works for them to serve there needs.

People are too compartmentalized now and not truely interdependent - this is seen more as a risk than the reduction of risk it was before. It even influences team dynamics, no matter if run in the ruthless leadership style or consensus style, they both have respective organizational pathologies. You can't force the necessary team dynamics - they must be there from the start.

Many times in the past decades I've watched great team dynamics on great projects, be destroyed for tiny budget advantage, and opposite conjugates be rewarded for a perceived advantage that wasn't real (someone was a better "salesman" or "lawyer"). The point is that the value of this quality was deemed uninteresting to be preserved (it was specifically bought up by some of us explicitly).

Again, deconstruction up/down the management chain. Soe the wind, reap the whirlwind.

Some have thought to insert other means to fill this vacuum (often ideologies) - it just doesn't work. My suggestion is that having deconstructed "common sense", we will be forced to reconstruct it from scratch, pulling in all the components instead of cherry picking them as before, and becoming dedicated to the true concept of teamwork as much as the project. Like attempting to start a uncooperative motorcycle, it will take many "kick starts" with the engine misfiring before we get it running again. This is how you fix a dysfunctional organization.

You're right about needing mixing top to bottom - but its only a fraction of a larger picture. The root cause is deconstruction of all human elements.

We did this to ourselves. The astros are a symptom as well. They were heros of necessity of the past.

ex_navy:

Cost and schedule are finite resources, just like mass and volume or floor space and HVAC loading - and when resources are limited, we have to compromise in order to make a workable solution with what we've got. That's sort of how I see FCR-1 coming about. To be creative and come up with new solutions to old problems, you need more resources (though not necessarily a lot of them) and a lot of courage, motivation, and conviction. FCR-1 was in place before I got here, so I don't know why certain decisions were made about it, but what I see is that it looks like a control room "is supposed to" - based around the notion that all control, and ultimately mission success, rests on the ground.

For ISS, as you point out, that made sense - ISS was designed with that paradigm in mind - it was based heavily on how the Shuttle ground/flight systems were done, which was based in turn on Apollo. Given that it only orbits the Earth, as well as other competing interests at the time, that makes sense.

Where it breaks down is when we start talking about Constellation as a program that takes us beyond Earth orbit, beyond Earth's moon, and on to other places. Mission success can no longer rest so squarely in the hands of the people on the ground; the crew of the spacecraft need to have that control and information. That's not where I saw Constellation mission design going (at least not from my vantage point - can someone prove me wrong? I'd love to be wrong on this).

It's an unfortunate thing about the ISS - I do make the argument that the ISS should be used to prove technologies, whenever possible, for BEO missions. Given that it's an Earth-orbiting spacecraft, I don't think that it should be designed or refitted to act like it isn't, but I do feel like there have been missed opportunities for testing new ideas there. Data management and mission control are one of those areas, because even though it's in Earth orbit, it is designed for long-duration missions and that makes it a unique and valuable resource that can't be matched by other crewed spacecraft.

I'll also agree with you that at least for ISS (I have no experience with Shuttle ops) the resources and competence really are concentrated here at JSC for the vast majority of things. Between the FCR and the MER there is a great deal of flexibility and the standardization of ground systems has represented a huge leap forward. The leap stopped at "we're treating this like all other Earth orbiting spacecraft," but to go farther really would have required a lot more farsighted thinking and investment in the future. That is where I view FCR-1 as a disappointment. The notion that "we don't have to do any more than the bare minimum." That's not a fault of the designers so much as the people who authorized the project, who made the requirements, and who crippled it with inadequate resources.

As for "flying through space" - I looked up "flying" in the dictionary and sure enough, flying through space is apparently a common way of looking at it. I suppose it fits, though I wish there was a less Earthly way of viewing it. The crew of a spacecraft that's spending a few months getting to another celestial body are going to have less in common with aircraft pilots than they do with cruise ship captains; the constant focus will be more about the craft and what's going on inside it, not navigation. So maybe my beef is with "piloting" rather than "flying."

Great comments and no real disagreement.

I did support some of the Orion software development work and their definitly was an awareness of the need to do things like fault detection and recovery differently with an emphasis on eliminating or minimizing the tether to the ground. In fact we were teaming with experts from JPL to tap into their experience with deep space missions and how you build in fault detection, fail safe modes, and recovery. Lots of very interesting and productive discussions from the two different perspectives and experiences.

I also agree that ISS should be used as a proving ground for BEO hardware and ops concepts as well. I have seen at least one pitch from so folks in MOD to do just that, i.e. to try fly like we would for a BEO mission and get away from a dependence on ground control. It had lots of managment interest but it went nowhere for lack of funding.

Last I agree with you that the ships captain model is far more applicable to ISS and other long duration space vehicles. They just aren't dynamic like an aircraft. I think thats why you see some changes in the types of people being selected for astronaut, like Steve Bowen who is a submariner and has loads more relatable experience then most pilots. There will still be a need for some test pilot types because, having been one, there are some unique skills you learn that are broadly applicable to any vehicle development program, but not near as many as were selected in the past.