A Conversation With: Chuck Knarr

Charles (Chuck) R. Knarr is USA’s Vice President, Flight Operations, and is responsible for the day-to-day operations and overall management of the Flight Operations support, including mission planning, training and real-time mission support. The USA Update talked to Knarr about the challenges and changes ahead for Flight Operations.

UPDATE: How has Flight Operations changed over the last decade?

KNARR: The basic functionality of what we do – which is mission planning, crew and flight controller training, and the actual execution of the missions – hasn’t really changed a lot. What has changed is how those different pieces are put together within the company.

When all the smaller contracts were consolidated under the Space Flight Operations Contract (SFOC), it made sense that some of the Flight Operations functions, like the reconfiguration of data that we did prior to each mission and the testing of flight software in the Shuttle Avionics Integration Laboratory (SAIL), should be done in other places. So we took the reconfiguration function and the SAIL facility and moved those to Flight Software, which is where they currently reside. Putting USA together allowed us to make these kinds of adjustments to allow for better synergy among the elements that support the program. That’s really been the biggest change.

I think the most notable thing that happened from an operational standpoint is process improvement and streamlining. When I joined the Rockwell Space Operations Company (RSOC) prior to the formation of USA, one of the first charts I saw in one of Glynn Lunney’s (RSOC General Manager) management reviews was a projected staffing profile for the Shuttle and Station programs as we flew them out. It showed the staffing levels rising to the order of 4,000 people to fly these two programs to do what we do today. Even allowing for content changes in the organization, I think the most notable thing is that we are doing both programs today at over 1,000 people less than that original projection. We’re doing all that work today and doing it as well – by any measure – as it has ever been done, and we’re doing it much more efficiently than was originally projected. It was a significant win for both the company and for NASA.

UPDATE: What have we learned from the Shuttle Program that we will be able to use to improve flight operations in the Constellation era?

KNARR: The Shuttle Program came onboard and started on heritage Apollo (systems and procedures). Operations today are very people intensive and require a high level of training and skill. They very much rely upon a large number of talented people to succeed. One of the things I think we know as an imperative – not just something we’ve learned – for future programs, including Constellation, is that we can’t continue to operate that way. We’re going to have to work smarter. That means automating a lot of things that can be automated, making smarter software tools, and training more efficiently while maintaining the quality and safety of what we do without needing so many people to do it. We need to move the data processing and trend analysis types of functions out of the human brain and put them into flight support systems. We can then concentrate on using our people to exercise their judgment and make decisions instead of using them to process and analyze data.

There are a lot of people who have thought about how to work smarter with fewer people, and some of those things have already been implemented. I know in my time in Flight Operations I have seen many things that have contributed to that. There was a lot of manual data entry when I first got here. A lot of that is now electronic and automated, and people aren’t involved any more. We’ve learned a lot about how we need to do flight control, crew training and mission planning, and we know how to do that safely and successfully with a lot less folks. We need to build that into the next system. It probably isn’t cost effective to do that for a lot of our existing systems, but it’s certainly something we can do for the future.

UPDATE: This last mission has been called one of the most complex missions we’ve ever flown. Looking at the missions ahead, what do you think is our biggest challenge as we fly out the Shuttle Program?

KNARR: We’re not out of the woods yet. The last flight was the second of a set of three – STS-115, STS-116 and STS-117 – of the most complex missions. You need to view those three as a group, and we have another one (STS-117) still out in front of us. We also have the Hubble Space Telescope repair mission, which by many measures is as complex as anything we’ve ever done. The challenges are still there in terms of mission complexity, but we have to remember that flying safely and successfully is our business and even the simplest flight is very complex. Just because one mission may be more complicated than another doesn’t mean that it doesn’t take as much focus to ensure its safety and success. It may be easier from a preflight preparation and support standpoint to support a logistics mission over one of the more complex assembly flights, but you never know in our business what’s going to come our way that you didn’t plan for.

The big challenge is going to be maintaining our focus on safety and mission success at the levels that we now have right up to the end of the program. We have to be as focused on flight last as we are on flight next.

UPDATE: What Flight Operations role do you see USA having with the Orion program?

KNARR: With the current Lockheed Martin contract to build the Orion vehicle, our role in Flight Ops is not very large. We are primarily consultants; there to bring our operational expertise to bear whenever the design team needs it. We are also providing some skilled people to other USA elements when they ask for help.

Now in the long run, as an operations organization, the role that we are targeting to capture is continuing what we do today for Shuttle and Station for the CEV and other Constellation elements. That role is to plan, train and fly space missions. That’s what we do, and we want to continue doing that for the future program as well.

UPDATE: As we transition from Shuttle to Constellation, what will be our challenges as we manage ongoing ISS operations?

KNARR: I’ve heard some stories that there are people in the general public who aren’t even aware that the Space Station is up there with people on it all the time. That just amazes me. How could you not know that?

Regardless, I think there is a distinct difference between public awareness about what’s going on and the focus of an organization like this one, whose job it is to operate those systems. We never lose our focus on ISS operations, regardless of what else is going on around us. We’ve got people in the Mission Control Center 24/7/365, and when things go wrong, we’re right there. We’re just as engaged with the Space Station as we are with anything else we do. The transition from Shuttle to Constellation will certainly be a distraction, so our primary challenge will be to retain our focus on ISS operations throughout the transition.

Space Station is a very large part of what we do. It doesn’t get lost, and it never has gotten lost in the shuffle because of other things that come along that are higher profile from a public awareness standpoint.

UPDATE: What is our biggest challenge as we transition?

KNARR: There are two challenges. One is keeping our safety and mission success focus for Shuttle right up to the very last flight, and that it’s just as intense then as it is now. That is critical. The NASA and USA management teams can make this happen. It is the most important aspect of our jobs.

The other big one is successfully transitioning our people from one program to the next. We need to have all of the right kind of smart people to operate this new system.

I don’t have an answer to the second one of these. I just have questions: How do you identify and retain the critical skills that you need? How do you carry them over the gap between the last Shuttle flight and the first operational flight of the new vehicle? Answers are hard to come by at this point in time, but we have a lot of people working on them already, and we have the time we need to come up with a good plan.

The people or “human capital” challenge is the biggest one. All the hardware and software in the world
isn’t worth much without the right people to operate it. Hardware and software are things we can get our arms around and do cost, schedule and technical assessments on. The people issue is not anywhere as crisp, but is every bit as critical for the transition. That is the major challenge as we move into the Constellation era. It’s a tough problem.

UPDATE: What do you think Flight Operations, as an expertise and function, will look like in 2020?

KNARR: We’re going to be leaner and meaner and just as good at what we do today. The ultimate measure is safety and mission success, and we have to figure out how to do that more efficiently for future programs.

Let’s take ascent for example. The Ares I-Orion vehicle is simpler than the Shuttle. It’s not going to take as much detailed design work to operate that system as safely and successfully as we do the Shuttle. So, there are efficiencies that we will inherit from the simpler nature of the new system.

In 2020, we will have less people. They will rely on automation to do the data processing and analysis, and people will focus on making the critical judgment calls. We will have transitioned the data processing distillation process out of the brain and into the support systems. When we are flying the first Constellation Low Earth Orbit missions, I think you’ll see a significant reduction in the number of positions needed to safely plan and operate that new system.

All bets are off when we start flying the Lunar missions, because I don’t think the operations requirements are well enough defined to know exactly what kind and how many people it will take, especially when you consider a permanent human presence on the moon. That’s all out in front of us.

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