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Ross-Nazzal: Did you follow the mission while she was up?

McDougle: I didn’t watch everything because she wasn’t doing any spacewalks. I hate to say I was only interested in what she was doing. I can’t remember if they did an interview with her or not while they were up in space. I did hear an interview with her on the radio. I called in and was able to get through and I was like, “Hey! This is Sharon.” She told the interviewer, “That was my suit tech!” I think she had written a book she was promoting.We go down to KSC about four days before launch. At TCDT you already have everything ready for launch, so the reason you go back four days prior is they have fit checks two days before launch again.


We do things over and over just to make sure. Any time they’re doing any kind of event with the suit, like when they fly the STAs and they put their suit on, when they come back we have to inspect it and test it again, because anything could have happened between going out to the plane and coming back to the lab. So it’s tested again to make sure they didn’t damage it or anything.For TCDT you go out about five to seven days before, because you have to prep everything. You’ve got to do all the com [communication] checks, which is preparing for the launch flow too. Once the gear goes down for TCDT that means it’s ready for launch also. And if anything happens we can always bring it back home if it’s extensive repair. If it’s just something small we can fix it there.


McDougle: Yes. It’s not a mandatory requirement to sew, but majority of them can sew on the sewing machine. That’s just for the orange cover layer and sometimes sewing labels on the harnesses and things like that. We have about three techs that are great at sewing. One in particular is a master fabricator. A lot of us are prior military here—majority of us are Air Force—so we have a very solid foundation. A lot of them retired from the military, so they have 20 years or more experience. Lots of experience with the suit before they began working here.


Ross-Nazzal: Tell me a little bit more about the tests that you conduct during that terminal countdown demonstration test. You’re there for five days. So what do you do in terms of com checks and things like that?


McDougle: When you first get there, you unpack the gear. You have to inspect and test it again. You never know if something may have happened during the shipping process so we perform the tests over again, which is called a vacant test. During the vacant test you test the dual suit controller to make sure it’s functioning properly. You have exhalation valves in the suit and a breathing regulator also. You have to put the ACES ensemble together because if you don’t have the gloves attached it’s just like having a hole in the suit. You have to attach the gloves and the helmet to the suit, and it’s lying on the table.


You hook it up to the tester, pressurize it, and perform checks. It gets real firm. You test it to see if it’ll hold pressure when it should, what the leak rate is, and the Magnehelic differential pressure. You test the Anti-G [gravity] suit pressure control assembly, which controls the G suit pressure. They wear the G suit only when they’re coming back into the Earth’s atmosphere, so you test that to make sure it’s working properly. Then the oxygen manifold is tested to make sure it’s working properly. The com checks are performed ahead of time before the vacants, because you don’t want to use a helmet that might have been faulty when you perform when you perform the vacant. Then you test the ensemble once they’ve donned the suit and during their fit check. You have to perform those tests, and that’s called the manned suit testing, of course, because somebody’s in it, instead of a vacant suit test.


You have to ask them to hold their breath to get your leakages, because if they’re breathing you can’t get a good reading. Of course when nobody’s in there you don’t have to do that because you just control the switches, but when they’re in the suit their movement and their breathing will affect the readings.Usually you take a breath with them, so you don’t have them sitting there holding their breath forever, because it’s easy to forget. Especially because we get a little nervous, even though we perform this test all the time. On actual launch morning it’s like, “Okay, this is it. Take a breath and hold.” Of course not at fit check. Sometimes people get nervous at fit check. Depends. But I tended to shine under pressure.When you pressurize the suit you dial in the controller, which is the heart of the suit. The dual suit controller, that silver circle right there [points to suit]. This is their emergency oxygen green apple. That’s how they would activate the two bottles of emergency oxygen, about ten minutes’ worth of oxygen. When they bail out they would activate that, not just here at home.


The parachute attaches to these two frost-fittings right here, and this is where their life preserver units are stored. If they submerge in water it will automatically inflate for them, but if it doesn’t they just pull these tabs and activate them.When performing the manned suit test, we only test System 1. There’s a System 1 and System 2, which is the backup. After we test it, we take all the helmets, gloves and CCAs down to the Astrovan. When they get out to the pad and get strapped in, the insertion techs will check the gear again to make sure nothing happened on the way out to the pad. There hasn’t, that I can recall, been a case where anything was bad once they got out to the pad. Well, we’ve had like communications cap concerns. We take out spare helmets and CCAs and gloves to the pad. So far so good, it’s been a real good run. We’ve been very very fortunate not to have had any incidents.

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