B30_Tour_-_MCC.pdf

Rev. C Final

6/20/2016

MCC Tour

Introduction

Hello, and welcome to the Mission Control Center. A quick reminder to everyone: Please no pictures, video or audio recording, also silence your cell phones. Be aware that we may enter areas that are being used for operations;

please help us minimize the disruption by keeping any talking between the members of the group to a minimum. Thank you.

A Safety item before we begin today: If an emergency occurs and evacuation is required, please follow your group escort out of the building. Please keep in mind that you might not exit out of the same door we entered. Follow the group to 75 feet from the building and please wait for additional instructions.

Again, Welcome to the Mission Control Center (MCC). This control center was founded in 1965 as the home of human spaceflight excellence. In its storied history, the Control Center has operated more than 300 manned missions into space and supported well over 1,000 astronauts in space. Through these missions, we have accumulated 20+ YEARS of Mission Elapsed Time executing spaceflight operations and 300+ Extra-Vehicular Activities (EVAs), racking up more than 2,000 HOURS of spacewalk time. This is the only control center in the world to lead human exploration beyond Low Earth Orbit (LEO), and we are poised to do so again with the Orion Program.

To meet these demands, the MCC provides word class systems for spacecraft mission design, planning, test, training, command, communications, and control.

In each of these areas, the control center provides advanced ground systems and computational platforms, comprehensive and tightly integrated software applications and services, as well as highly qualified and trained personnel with the expertise to support these functions. The team of people who work in the

MCC are known collectively as worldwide leaders in spacecraft mission planning, training, test, and flight operations.

The MCC is truly an institutional facility – you will hear that word institutional quite a lot as this tour progresses. The control center supports all government human space exploration activities with one integrated hardware/software solution and operated off of a shared set of hardware infrastructure and services. Our current partners include not just the International Space Station (ISS) Program, but the

Commercial Crew and Commercial Cargo Programs which support the ISS, and the Orion and SLS Programs. The control center can also support science, payload, and other free flight space activities.

Physically, the Mission Control Center is situated within what is called the

Building 30 Complex here at the Johnson Space Center (JSC). The Building 30

Complex consists of two main building spaces: Building 30M, the older of the two structures, and Building 30 South or 30S, which is located right behind the silver doors here.

We will begin our tour by walking through the ISS Mission Evaluation Room, or

ISS MER, and then proceeding to the second floor for a brief overview of what we call the MCC’s Operations Suites –we currently have two of them. From there we will move up another flight of stairs to what we call the second floor – mezzanine. Located here is the Viewing Room for the WFCR, or White Flight

Control Room. This is where ISS mission operations are currently conducted. I will talk more about that once we are in the viewing room as well as review some key additional facets of the MCC. After the WFCR stop, we will move further upstairs to the third floor for a brief walk through of two of our Positional Support

Rooms –these are backrooms where additional flight controllers, who support a given discipline in the front room, or Flight Control Room, work. Once we have seen these spaces, we will complete our Building 30S tour with a stop at our 5th floor data center.

After this, we will move back down to the 2nd floor and walk over to Building 30M and visit FCR1, the primary Flight Control Room for ISS Operations, on the second floor. This room is currently undergoing modernization and refurbishment. Finally, we will go to the first floor of 30M for a walk through of our facility support rooms – where health, status, and management functions of the control center facility itself are conducted. Once we have completed this portion of the tour, we will exit the MCC at the main lobby of Building 30 where your time with us will be up.

Now if you will follow me, I will lead you to the ISS MER. We’re going to walk through and we’ll talk about it on the other side.

ISS MER

The ISS MER houses Boeing’s engineering support team for the International

Space Station. Dependent upon the activity of the day, this room may be filled with MER engineers working to understand an onboard issue, performing analysis tasks for upcoming mission activities, or working to prepare the vehicle, flight control team, or crew for future ISS upgrades. To assist in executing these functions, the MER not only utilizes this room, but takes advantage of MCC remote access capabilities for much of their work. MCC remote access allows authorized users to remotely access vehicle telemetry and software toolsets from locations other than the 30 Complex (i.e., at their office, at home, on travel). It is important to note that this remote access capability is only available to authorized and authenticated users, and even then, allows those users to only connect to our moderate security, or mission support, assets (remote connectivity to our mission critical assets is not allowed). The size, scope, and activities of the MER continue to change and evolve as the needs of the ISS Program evolve so the

MCC must be flexible to be able to support those needs.

Now if you will follow me, I will lead you upstairs to the second floor for a quick overview of our two Operations Suites. I will first show you the two Suites –they are viewable from a single glass hallway- and then we will congregate in Ops

Suite 1’s conference room where I can review the rooms and their functions.

Operations Suites

Welcome to the MCC Operations Suites, or Ops Suites, as we call them. This area previously hosted back room Space Shuttle flight controllers, but in 2014 it was refurbished into what you see today: two Operations Suites, each with an adjoining conference room to allow mission management or flight control team members to perform a variety of collaborative activities while maintaining situation awareness and insight into ongoing activities and operations. Since their construction, these spaces have quickly become some of our most heavily trafficked floor space.

These suites were designed with flexibility in mind. Their purpose is to provide highly adaptable floor space to support new or evolving customer needs. They can function as front rooms for smaller mission classes (up to 15 consoles can be supported in each Suite), backrooms for larger mission classes, or special activity rooms for specific flight phases, mission objectives, or even test and checkout of new vehicle FSW or MCC software functionality.

The MCC, exemplified nicely by these Ops Suites, can and does support many varied but concurrent activities, some of them at very different points along their life cycle, on one set of shared infrastructure. This is a key tenant of the MCC architecture. At its essence, the control center is an integrated set of software running on a shared hardware platform. What this means is that tests, simulations, training, planning/analysis, and operations activities can all execute concurrently on the same MCC hardware platform and even on the same integrated software. In other words: the same hardware and network topography that support mission operations can be, and is, concurrently utilized to support simulations and training, software validation testing, and checkout/evaluation of proposed vehicle FSW changes. Based on industry collaboration and benchmarking over many, many years, the MCC is somewhat unique in this regard – all other enterprises tend to dedicate hardware infrastructure to JUST mission operations. This is cumbersome, cost prohibitive, and results in low hardware utilization rates – results which are unacceptable to our customers.

Bringing you back to the hardware within these rooms and the Ops Suites themselves, these suites are designed to be rapidly reconfigurable to accommodate changing needs and/or new customers.

The consoles you see in these rooms are commodity engineering desks that you can order from a catalog. This is as opposed to the Big Blue consoles you saw downstairs in the ISS MER. Those Big Blues cannot be moved, turned, or twisted without first being broken down, then relocated, then rebuilt. This is time consuming, requires on-hand tooling, and training of our maintenance personnel.

By contrast, these consoles can be relocated with simple floor jacks and have templates underneath them to provide standard routing of voice, video, network, and power into the equipment housed within the consoles. Our maintenance teams can essentially treat the console itself as a black box: reposition it, plug data, power, voice, video cables into it, and off you go.

Underneath the floor is a SnakeBus power infrastructure – essentially an industrial strength extension cord which allows us to easily plug in/plug out console hardware without outages for other equipment on the circuit or the need for specialized skill sets or electricians to perform this work. The SnakeBus can even be repositioned or extended underneath the floor without special skillsets entering into the equation.

Most consoles in the control center are provided with 2 or 3 windows PCs, dependent upon customer need. Most typically, 3 PCs are provided. This allows us to provide direct access for one PC to our mission support (moderate security) platform and one PC to our mission critical (high security) platform. The 3rd PC is attached to one or the other platform based on customer requirement and ensures flight controllers can perform shift handovers without experiencing

“discipline downtime.” Shift handover is where one flight controller’s workday has completed and another is assuming their duties for the next shift of work.

When this occurs, our customers require zero downtime of spacecraft monitoring

– in essence, the upcoming controller must be able to log in and begin monitoring the vehicle before the off going flight controller logs out.

If you will notice, the ends of the consoles have smaller flat screen panels.

These are the control panels for our voice system within the MCC – you will find them at every console located within the control center. The voice system used internal to the MCC is called DVICE. It is a digital, hardwired system with its own dedicated networking attached to a voice switch within the building – it is a mission critical service we provide in support of human spacecraft operations. It provides a high number of voice loops, which are essentially teleconferences, with extreme low latency to ensure controllers sitting within close proximity to one another do not hear voice echoes. These voice loops can be individual conferences between disciplines, Space- or Air-To-Ground voice channels with the spacecraft, large team loops, or even what we call patch loops which allow people external to the MCC to ‘call in’. These loops allow our customers to interact, work through and diagnose issues, coordinate onboard as well as ground activities, review and approve plan deviations, and generally keep the entire worldwide team supporting ISS on the same page.

Now, along the front wall of the room you have no doubt noted a truss mount system where communal front screens (flat panel TVs) are located. These front screens are utilized to ensure general situational awareness of mission activities across the team and/or to focus the team on a given issue, topic, or activity. In these rooms, the front screens are mounted on trusses which are bolted into the floor. These trusses, like the consoles, can be quickly and easily relocated to accommodate different customer needs – in fact, they and everything in this room can be relocated by maintenance teams without relying upon any Center

Operations Directorate (COD) personnel to be involved.

Video distribution within the control center is accomplished in many different ways. Our primary video source is downlinked video from the spacecraft. MCC’s internal video system is called HEVS or High End Video Subsystem. It has the ability to process downlinked spacecraft video, ingest video from local ground cameras (for example, cameras mounted in the FCRs), and acquire video from external sources; and output that video to any front screen in the facility, distribute it to select external customers directly or via JSC video services in

Building 8, and even distribute video directly to select internal MCC consoles which have their own fiber optic HEVS connections. The MCC video system utilizes its own separate video network and set of video routers to allow for public distribution of video to external customers and privatization (isolation) of video from external sources when required for data proprietary or medical privacy reasons. MCC Ground Controllers (GCs) manage the video system via desktop interface, selecting which video sources get routed to what destination. In addition to this, the GCs have the ability to designate access controls to certain video feeds and privatization (isolation) of video feeds to ensure enforce proper enforcement of proprietary and medical data.

ISS mission operations are currently being supported out of WFCR, Ops Suite 2 is currently dedicated to supporting ISS Simulations and Flight Controller training/certification. Once refurbishment of the primary ISS Flight Control Room

(FCR-1) is completed, ISS mission ops will move out of WFCR and over to FCR-

1. When this occurs, ISS simulation and training will move from Ops Suite 2 to

WFCR. This will make Ops Suite 2 available for support other/additional customer needs.

That concludes our overview of the Ops Suites; if you will follow me, we will return to the elevators and move up to the second floor mezzanine for our next tour stop. There, you will have a chance to look down into the Blue Flight Control

Room (BFCR).

Head up to the BFCR viewing room.

BFCR was the original flight control room for the ISS Program before the vehicle grew large enough that the flight control team could no longer be accommodated within that size of room. You may recognize this room from coverage of the

Orion EFT-1 mission: command and control of that vehicle was provided out of the BFCR. It is anticipated that Orion’s EM-1 mission will likewise fly out of the

BFCR, unless the vehicle and flight controller needs dictate the use of a larger or different floor space such as WFCR.

After a quick look down into BFCR, please have a seat in the WFCR viewing room where I will provide you with a brief overview of that room and additional

MCC capabilities and services of note.

White Flight Control Room (WFCR) Viewing Room

You may not immediately recognize this room, but it was the primary Flight

Control Room which supported the Space Shuttle Program. As you can see though, we have significantly refurbished and modernized this room from its shuttle support days. Today, ISS mission operations is supported out of this room while their primary flight control room, FCR-1 (which we will visit later) is undergoing the same refurbishment and modernization that was already done in this room. In many ways, this room is simply larger than either the Ops Suites or even BFCR.

Of note from a room standpoint, all of the flexibility improvements we reviewed in

Ops Suite 1 are present within this room except for the front screen truss system.

For this large of a space, the truss system is simply impractical and instead hardwired projectors and a single large front screen fabric (like in BFCR) are utilized for communal display and situational awareness. Riding atop the large screen fabric, its hard to detect, but those are the same flat panel TVs that are available in the Ops Suites. Display to these monitors is provided through the

HEVS system and most typically utilized to display walk clock data and signage for the personnel, teams, programs, etc. operating in the room.

A few additional notes on how the room is set up. Each console is dedicated to a specific function on the vehicle (for example, attitude control) or mission support

(for example, crew timeline development). These consoles are manned by a flight controller monitoring vehicle telemetry, issuing commands, and performing planning activities. Not all the consoles are manned 24/7, which is why some are empty. All of these positions are under the leadership of the Flight Director, a

NASA civil servant who leads the ground and on-orbit teams and has final real time decision authority.

A single position within each front room is provided for the Ground Controller

(GC). The ground controller is a Mission Systems Contractor and responsible for the facility’s services, computers, primary power systems and generators, and data flow into and out of the building including the other centers and the TDRS network. The GC console for a given front room is manned anytime an integrated activity is occurring within that room. For ISS Operations, this is

24/7/365. For Orion operations, this will be 24/7 for the duration of the mission.

For simulation activities, the GC mans the console for the duration of the simulation.

A unique aspect of Space Station operations is that there are multiple control centers around the world managing the vehicle. Each one of those centers has a small team of engineers and a flight or payload director staffed 24/7, similar to how we are set up in Houston. These modules and payloads are tightly integrated and share common power, cooling, and Ku and S-band satellite links which are managed by MCC-H. Because of this, the MCC deploys, manages, and operates real time voice links and protocols to work with these centers in real time.

On the front screens, we usually keep a ground track map showing the position of ISS and the next three revs of ground track. On the bottom of that map is an application called Bird’s Eye View (BEV). BEV shows the position of the articulating arrays, vehicle attitude, and solar geometry. The countdown clocks on the upper television monitors are used to track when we go in and out of scheduled communications with TDRS. The Ground Controller, who is a flight control team member provided by the MCC, is responsible for managing both the front screens and our scheduling and connectivity with TDRS.

Also on the front screen are the ISS Caution and Warning (C&W) and ISS

Command Sentry displays, which are applications we use to track the status of our forward command link as well as individual commands going to the vehicle.

We use a distributed command structure here, which is different from most other control centers that run all the commands through a single console position.

Most of the consoles in this room can and do issue commands, depending on what is scheduled or required to support their systems for that particular day.

Remote centers also issue commands, which we receive and subsequently uplink to the vehicle. Commands are sent both by individual flight controllers executing procedures as well as automatic systems, and it is not unusual to exceed 1,000 commands per day. Most of the commanding of the vehicle systems (attitude control, life support, even robotics) is done from the ground.

To optimize crew time, we execute as much support as possible via the control center to keep the crew’s time devoted to things that only the crew can do (i.e., things that involve crew hands on/eyes on time or instances where the crew itself the subject of a research activity. So as you can see, maximizing availability of

MCC services to the ISS Program is of paramount importance.

In MCC-H we run three shifts to support the crew. The shifts are 9 hours each with a one hour overlap for shift handover. Shift handovers are at 7 AM, 3 PM, and 11 PM and are the same all 7 days per week, although we occasionally tweak the shift start and end times for special events such as spacewalks or dockings so we are not performing a shift handover at a critical time. The day shift is typically when you will see the most people in the FCR, the evening shift from 3-11 PM (when the crew is sleeping) typically sees the fewest on-console team members. There are a handful of consoles involved with emergency and failure response that are manned 24/7, the rest typically man during the Houston workday to manage timeline and plan development as well as normal vehicle commanding and management.

Our consoles consist of Windows workstations with 4 to 6 monitors each to view telemetry, perform tactical planning/re-planning, respond to onboard issues or perform analysis of potential issues, and command the vehicle. Most of the telemetry displays are built and certified by individual flight controllers within each discipline or are re-hosted versions of the onboard displays the crew uses to command the vehicle. In all cases, MCC personnel provide configuration management of these tools and displays.

Each console has access to tools for plan/re-plan development, timeline evaluation, and electronic procedures. The planning system is a custom built web based system maintained by the MCC which is used by all external partners and integrates the output of the distributed ground team into a single execution package that all the ground teams and the crew uses.

A number of these consoles have “backroom” support positions which are located in Positional Support Rooms located in other areas of the building, normally during high activity periods. We will be touring a couple of these rooms shortly.

While most of this tour focuses on the visual, hardware aspects of the MCC, the control center itself is largely a software system, or system of systems really. To maintain and sustain such a highly integrated and large scale software system we provide separate, environment spaces for development, test and verification, and deployment/operational use of facility changes that we make.

Our development environment, called the Mission Systems Development

Environment, or MSDE, provides a wholly virtualized software/hardware system where developers execute nominal software development, change management, and configuration management processes. Within the MSDE, prototype activities, code development, and even unit and unit integration testing are performed. Dependent upon scheduling, and the change being implemented, subsystem verification testing may also be performed in the MSDE.

Two separate environments are provided for formal integration and test of changes prior to their introduction into our operational environments. These environment spaces are known as the Moderate Integration and Test

Environment (MITE) and the High Integration and Test Environment (HITE). As you might guess, the moderate or MITE platform is contained within the moderate security (or mission support) zone of our enterprise while the high or

HITE platform is contained with the high security (or mission critical) zone of our enterprise. In these locations, formal system verification and release testing is conducted and invasive, or failure-mode, testing is performed to ensure the updated systems are properly vetted before deployment and exposure to the operations environments.

We have two operational environments within the MCC called the Mission

Support Environment (MSE) and the Mission Critical Environment (MCE). These two environments are extremely similar, but with specific business rules that govern their capability and usage. The MSE is located within the moderate security zone of our enterprise and can be accessed via remote access through the JSC campus VPN. Spacecraft commanding is actively and strictly prohibited from the MSE. The MCE is located within the high security zone of our enterprise and is not remotely accessible. Commanding of spacecraft vehicles is conducted solely via the MCE.

For security and disaster recovery reasons, the MCE contains all of the functionality required to keep MCC supported spacecraft vehicles, and their crews, safe and secure. Should a sufficient threat or incident occur, the MCC can isolate its networks from the rest of the JSC campus or even isolate our mission critical assets from our own mission support assets. In this way, the control center protects our most critical assets through a layered, defense-in-depth approach, and assures maximum availability of mission critical assets to our customers.

In the event of natural disaster, fire, etc. we have built and can perform spacecraft mission operations out of a Backup Control Center located in

Huntsville, Alabama at the Marshal Space Flight Center. To date this capability has only been activated in response to hurricanes threatening JSC; however, should a fire or other event quickly knock MCC-H offline, the BCC is designed and built to be called up and activated to ensure continued availability of critical services to the ISS program.

For a BCC activation where a hurricane is threatening the JSC area, a team of flight controllers and facility personnel, called the BCC Activation Team, or BAT, are deployed to a pre-arranged and known location in Central Texas. The MCC provides these personnel with specially configured laptops which enable safe and secure remote access from the laptop to the BCC in Hunstville. Should inclement weather force evacuation of MCC-H, the BAT will assume command and control of the ISS through these laptops. If MCC-H suffers significant damage and/or downtime (typically on the order of >7 days), a team of flight controllers will physically relocate to Huntsville where a flight control room is prepped and ready for the team to command and control the ISS vehicle until

MCC-H services are restored.

Let us now head up to the 3rd floor where we will see some front room support locations.

Walking into the MOX and out the EVA side.

This is the MOX Positional Support Room. The MOX is the largest Positional

Support Room we have, it houses our robotics and EVA disciplines as well as our Flight Operations planning team and our backroom trajectory operations team. Notice how we still have the Big Blue console, these have not been transitioned yet to the updated console types. (you might want to add more words here)The MIX is a good bit smaller and primarily utilized for monitoring of

ISS vehicle systems and backroom support for coordination and integration of visiting vehicles to the ISS. In these rooms, you will see the same IT infrastructure and furniture as deployed in the Ops Suites.

The last floor space that we will walk through on the third floor is the POCC. This is a flexible floor space that can be used for various disciplines and functions which need access to mission toolsets and data; however, primary users for this area are payload operators or science principle investigators.

The 5th Floor Data Center

This is our primary data center. In it is housed the vast majority of computational power and storage capability that the MCC offers. As you entered the data center, on the left hand side, is located the approximately ½ Petabyte of storage array networks (SANs) that directly support the MCC. The MCC leverages commodity based SAN infrastructure, in this case predominately IBM storage solutions. We provide both system managed storage and user managed storage for our customers. System managed storage is that for which the control center is responsible for configuration management and data protection of the saved data. User managed storage is storage space which flight control disciplines utilize to suite their specific needs – these teams are responsible for configuration management and data protection of data stored in that space although they may use MCC personnel to setup and manage their data structures. The control center performs routine back up of all its storage, providing restoration services for both inadvertently lost data as well as disaster recovery.

Overhead of the computing equipment, you will no doubt notice large, overhead power infrastructure that has been installed. These power busways allow IT equipment to be plugged in/out without requiring electricians to perform the work and without requiring outages or downtime of other equipment attached to that power circuit. This overhead power infrastructure is the data center equivalent to the snake bus system we utilize in our customer rooms (Ops Suites, FCRs, etc.).

It has been a marvelous system that has aided in cutting down on unique skills and optimizing maintenance schedules around the work instead of around outages.

In the far side of the room, underneath those busways, is located the core of our data center: rack mounted blades which run VMWare virtualization software. Our data center almost exclusively runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Interspersed within this equipment are our network switches and video system equipment.

The control center computing infrastructure used to be driven off multiplevariants of hardware platforms and operating systems. With the virtualized data center though, the control center has now largely separated our software from the underlying hardware, allowing us to swap out/change out or expand/collapse our hardware base without impacting the software that executes on it.

We’ll now head down stairs and across to the older section of MCC.

ISS Flight Control Room (FCR-1)

Welcome to the primary ISS flight control room, or FCR-1 as we call it. This is a historical room that has supported every manned spaceflight program: Apollo, Skylab, Shuttle, and Station – in fact, the first mission flown out of this room was

Apollo 7. As you can see, the room is undergoing refurbishment and renovation consistent with what has already been completed in other areas of the MCC complex. Once completed, this room will be placed back into 24/7/365 mission operations support and the ISS team will relocate back to here from WFCR.

While most of our tour is indeed spent viewing the hardware side of the control center, the MCC is actually, first and foremost, a software system. It leverages

IT computing infrastructure to house, execute, and configuration manage that software, and it provides hardware and furniture for our customers to utilize when interacting with the control center, but the cost center, business knowledge, and unique capability that the MCC brings to the table is in its software.

The software model for the control center is perhaps best described as being broken into two high level parts: the core control center system, which we refer to as MCC Core Software, and the suite of user application software that our customers interact with and contains console, or discipline, unique business logic. We refer to this user application software group as simply MCC User

Apps. As defined within NASA Procedural Requirements for software development and assurance, there exist many different software classes within the control center, including Class A and Class C Safety Critical.

Let me spend a moment describing the MCC Core Software. This software is built and delivered as an integrated set, or baseline. Software teams develop new functions or resolve outstanding problems/issues with the existing functions, perform standardized unit, unit integration, and sub-system release testing for software quality and assurance purposes, and verify that lower level requirements are met. An independent test team is responsible for executing system level release testing, completing formal verification of the new software baseline. Once verification has been completed, our user community typically initiates validation testing of the new baseline. Validation testing is conducted via targeted, tailored testing of changes and through what we call shelf-life testing, wherein the software baseline is utilized on a variety of ISS simulation and ORT activities to ensure it is stable and ready to support mission operations.

Once this step has been completed, the baseline is ready to be used in support of spacecraft mission operations. To use the software baseline into mission operations, a Step Up to it is executed wherein the flight control team logs into a new mission activity wherein the new software baseline is active. Once all flight team members are using this new activity, the old mission activity is deactivated and the older software baseline can be scheduled for archival and removal from the system.

Within MCC core software, several key capabilities and services are provided, these include Session Save/Restore, Operational History, Plot Backfill, Telemetry

Display and Monitoring, and Spacecraft Command and Control. All these functions have been built to be as generic as possible to allow easier integration of new programs and/or vehicles into the MCC.

Last up for the tour, we will move downstairs and visit the MCC facility support rooms where MCC personnel status, control, schedule, secure, operate, and maintain the MCC. There are three main rooms utilized to accomplish this task:

the Facility Support Service Center (FSSC), MCC Voice/Comm Tech Support

Room, and the Mission Systems Security Center (MSSC).

1st Floor Data Center - Facility Systems Support Center

Inside this room is the Facility Systems Support Center, our primary facility support room which monitors and controls the MCC facility itself. Within it, system health and usage monitoring is performed; schedule integration, assessment, and asset scheduling is executed; and data connectivity to the outside world is supported. Should a MCC mission service fail or have difficulty, the personnel in this room, working in concert with the GC, are responsible for diagnosing and resolving the issue as well as returning the element to service.

The FSSC is a recent upgrade to the MCC, coming online in 2015 as part of a large modernization project for the MCC. Prior to this upgrade, scheduling, external communications status and control, network management, and troubleshooting/resolution efforts were all located in various parts of the control center complex. Now these functions are all co-located together, allowing increased optimization and synergies to be achieved across the facility operations team.

To operate and manage the facility with such a small team, the MCC has invested heavily in automation of facility scheduling, system configuration, health and status, system and configuration management, and fault isolation and recovery.

To the right, behind these closed doors, is the Mission Systems Security

Center (MSSC). This is a security center which monitors our MCC systems, performs threat detection, isolation, assessment, and abatement. We will not be touring that facility, but it is a core and foundational capability of this control center – without it, the risk to operate the spacecraft vehicles in the manner that we do would be unacceptable and result in a much more restrictive and higher cost MCC. They also monitor news and World events (may want to add more words…)

Mission Management Team (MMT) Meeting Room

This is the Mission Management Team MMT Meeting room. You may remember this from the Shuttle days when John Shannon would conduct meetings during Shuttle Missions. It was used to discuss mission issue and to ensure crew and mission safety. It has a lot of teleconference and video conference capabilities to allow for discussions with other Center, Agencies and International Partners. It was built for shuttle program, but it continues to be sustained and used by the ISS program today for similar purposes.

Voice/Comm Tech Room

In this room, the voice system, its external connections, and some of our external communications paths are monitored. Due to a labyrinth of networking cables and equipment associated with the physical voice system, this team was not and is not being relocated to the FSSC.

Building 30 Main Lobby

That concludes our tour of the MCC today. Thanks for visiting us, and I hope you enjoy the rest of your day.