Litta Bitta Life: Meet Dextre the Robot

Recently on the Moth podcast I listened to On Approach to Pluto by Cathy Olkin, a scientist who worked on NASA's New Horizon's mission to Pluto. It brought back some memories of my own flight support experiences when I was still working as an engineer for MDA, the company that built the Canadarm. My job there for the first five or so years was focused on systems integration and testing of the Special Purpose Dexterous Manipulator (SPDM), or Dextre, which was supposed to be more media-friendly. Note that no one called it Dextre.

The SPDM is a two-armed robot equipped with various tools to perform repairs on the International Space Station and can be operated while attached to the end of the Canadarm. Below you can see it at the tip of the Canadarm on the newest Canadian five dollar bill. No, it didn't make it onto the twenty but it's still pretty awesome. A cool and little known fact: Many of us at MDA who worked on the SPDM were allowed (informally?) to sign our names onto the hardware just prior to it being shipped down to Florida for launch. You can't see the signatures as they are covered by the white thermal blankets but it's a pretty neat thought to know there is something out in space with my signature on it.

Five dollar bill showing the SPDM on the tip of the Canadarm

The SPDM launched on March 11, 2008 on STS-123 and a handful of us from MDA supported the assembly and commissioning of the robot on that mission. I was used to doing flight support for the Canadarm from the Canadian Space Agency from Montreal but it was my first time supporting operations from the Johnson Space Centre in Houston. At that point I had yet to see a shuttle launch and the Space Shuttle program was coming to an end in 2011. Four of us from MDA were being sent down to Houston to support the mission - one to cover each shift, and our chief engineer was a floater to be on whichever shift had the most action on a given day. We pleaded with our managers to let us fly to Florida first to watch the shuttle launch before heading down to Houston but we were denied permission. Launches were frequently delayed due to weather and they couldn't have us hanging around Florida when we needed to be answering last minute questions about the mission back at home. In the end STS-123 did in fact launch as planned without delay (fist shaking at our managers) and we flew down to Houston to begin what was ultimately a successful and very eventful mission to assemble the SPDM and perform all initial checkouts.

Below is an email I dug up which I wrote from my hotel room to family and friends towards the end of that mission. I got a kick out of reading it again today almost a full decade later.

************ Monday, March 17, 2008 ********************************************

Hey guys,

Just thought I'd share some excitement with you. I'm more than half way through the SPDM 1J/A launch mission where I'm doing flight support from the Mission Evaluation Room (MER) in Houston. If you've been paying attention to the news at all you'll know that we've been having loads of problems launching and installing and powering our robot SPDM (that I've tested since I started working at MDA).

Yesterday I pulled a 15 hour shift trying to analyze data for multiple brake failures we experienced. It got to the point where everyone involved in the mission was calling on the phones and voice loops at once wanting an explanation. I have a headset but wasn't the person who talked on the voice loops, however I supported our chief engineer from the neighbouring console. Then the Flight Director, Dana Weigal, requested a meeting with MDA Engineering (that's us!) because she needed to be convinced there wasn't a problem before she would allow the ops to continue. This doesn't normally happen because there's another level of engineering at NASA that separates us from the Flight Director but our chief engineer and I are supposedly the "experts" for this brake test on this specific robot.

We were told we had only 40 min to put together a short presentation...and then our chief engineer and I got called into the Flight Control Room! It was SO COOL...but my hands were a bit shaky and I hadn't eaten or slept in hours. People doing flight support from Houston and Montreal said they saw me on NASA television talking to the Flight Director. I'm going to see if someone can get that part of the video for me since they record everything.

After that we stayed for meeting after meeting after meeting, went back to the hotel to sleep for 4 hours and had to come back for 6 hours of more meetings to convince the Station and Shuttle managers that we were good to go and there was no impact to the mission.

Check out the email below, from the manager of the SPDM program at the Canadian Space Agency. Pay attention to the last sentence :D This was sent out to a wide distribution in Houston, Montreal and back at Brampton. That experience was well worth the lack of sleep over the mission so far. I should be coming back to Toronto around Good Friday.

Danielle

*********************************************************************

I then attached an email of congratulations from Dan Rey, the SPDM program manager, who had mentioned the chief engineer and me by name for our "amazing work done in short order to avoid any impacts to the mission timeline."

A few things I still remember from that mission:

1. When it was time for the chief engineer and I to present to the flight director (recall, this doesn't usually happen as the Flight ROBO typically is the middle-man between engineering and the FD) I assumed we were being led into a small meeting room and was floored when we stepped into the Flight Control Room where (obviously) the FD would be. Flash to Apollo 13 with Tom Hanks - we later toured the actual control room for that mission.

2. While meeting with the flight director our chief engineer did most of the talking with minimal support from me. However we happened to be standing in the path of one of the NASA cameras in a way which only had the flight director and myself in view (I later heard from colleagues who saw me on screen). It looked like I had had a private meeting with the FD! They never were able to pull the footage for me to see unfortunately.

3. We had a great time riding rollercoasters at the nearby amusement park on our days off.