Of course, what you don’t know is that ST5 had always been the mission where if something could go wrong, it would. Launch day was no different in that regard. The state vector that we received indicated that our initial formation was all screwed up: the spacecraft were in the wrong order, were separating more quickly than expected, and the rocket body was in the middle of it all! The sun sensors were telling us that ST5 had managed to discover a second sun! Oh, and all the tracking data were either in an unexpected format or completely unusable, and radar passes couldn’t distinguish one spacecraft from another!

Talk about a bad day… it was really just the latest in a long series of things that went wrong with that mission. Yet, I would not trade that experience for anything. There was nowhere I would rather have been on that day than there in the MOC, playing my role and using my knowledge to solve all those problems that stood between us and a successful mission.

So what’s the moral of the story? Well, here I am two years later, preparing for a launch this fall. The mission has changed and the team is different, but I feel so much more prepared. I’ve been here before - I know what to expect, and know what kinds of things may happen between now and launch. I was lucky - I’m prepared this time because I had an incredible opportunity to learn first-hand what can go wrong and build an experience base that is absolutely vital to what I’m doing now.

However, I can’t help but feel that I am the exception rather than the rule. I had a chance to put my skills to the test and to learn from the mistakes that I made along the way. Does this happen where you work? Are you given responsibility and allowed to learn from your own mistakes? Or for the more experienced folks out there, how did you learn what you needed to know to do your job successfully?