#sts-81

[gregorygalloway]

John Blaha (born 26 August 1942)

[gregorygalloway]

John Blaha (born 26 August 1942)

[gregorygalloway]

Marsha Ivins (born 15 April 1951)

[gregorygalloway]

Michael Allen Baker (born 27 October 1953)

[gregorygalloway]

John Blaha (born 26 August 1942)

[everybittexas]

Two astronauts are floating in a module roughly the size of a small camper van, trying to stuff a drawer's worth of supplies into a bag, and somewhere down on the ground in Houston, flight controllers are watching the whole thing on their screens in real time. This is the unglamorous middle of spaceflight that nobody talks about. Not the launch. Not the spacewalks. Not the dramatic docking maneuvers. The packing. Commander Michael Baker and mission specialist Jeff Wisoff are working inside the Spacehab Double Module during STS-81 in January 1997 — a pressurized commercial module tucked in the shuttle's payload bay that gave crews extra working and storage space. Think of it as an add-on room bolted to the back of the house. Practical, a little awkward to get to, absolutely necessary. What gets me about this image is what's invisible in it: the logistics chain stretching between low Earth orbit and a room full of people at Johnson Space Center in Houston who need to know exactly where every piece of hardware is. Because in microgravity, "I think I put it in the blue bag" is not a system that works. Things drift. Things hide. Things end up wedged behind panels in ways that defy explanation and Newtonian physics equally. So the crew photographed their own packing job with an Electronic Still Camera, and that image got downlinked to Houston. Documentation of documentation. A photograph taken in orbit so that people on the ground could verify that a bag had been properly packed. Bureaucracy achieved escape velocity. There's something quietly profound about that, though. The whole endeavor — the international space station program, the shuttle missions ferrying supplies and crew back and forth — ran on exactly this kind of meticulous, uncinematic work. Someone had to know where the drawer was. Someone had to confirm the bag was secured. And someone in Houston, staring at a downlinked image on a monitor, had to sign off on it and move to the next item on the list. Spaceflight is mostly this. The glory is real, but it rests on an enormous foundation of people making sure the bags are packed correctly. Who do you think does the packing at your job that nobody ever takes a photo of?

[lightthiscandle]

STS-81 pilot Brent Jett is photobombed by Mir, looks cool while doing so.