Mir Space Station (photo courtesy of NASA RSA website)
The following passage is from Dragonfly - NASA and the Crisis Aboard Mir by Brian Burrough in our club library.
We highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the real world of space operations and the history of NASA's
experiences on the MIR Phase One space station program.
This passage highlights the actions of one of SMU's engineering
graduates, Mr. Mark Severance, to overcome obstacles to achieving good communications with the MIR space station, despite
errors in technical specifications and other systems engineering problems.
The importance of Mr. Severance's amateur radio hobbyist background
is clearly highlighted in his experiences in making improved communications with MIR possible. These improved communications
came too late to help out during the exciting and potentially deadly fire on-board MIR (read the book!).
But his efforts did provide the clear communications capabilities which were
critical to saving MIR during the in-space collision with the Progress resupply craft and subsequent decompression of the
MIR space station.
This section also highlights many elements of good engineering trouble-shooting and an open mind in
problem solving...
One of the most frustrating things for everyone aboard Mir is the deteriorating quality of voice communications with the
ground. That Sunday, even as Kaleri, Korzun, and Ewald undock their Soyuz and return to Earth without incident, comm drops
in and out all day long. In midafternoon Tsibliyev snaps at the ground about the "ratty" comm, demanding that the TsUP [Russian
Mission Control] fix
this "comm circus" or stop communicating altogether. The station normally bounces its radio signals off a pair of Russian
satellites, but transmissions to one satellite, called Altair, were shut down in January when a transmitter aboard Mir
overheated and was shut down.
For all the Russians' problems, the rattiest comm comes over the two American relay stations, at Wallops Island, Virginia and
Dryden, California. NASA had volunteered the use of Wallops and Dryden early in the Phase One program, hoping to free up
more personal time for the astronauts to talk with their families. It hadn't worked out that way. In time the Russians
began using passes over the two American facilities for operational communications, especially during the two to three week
period every two months when the station's orbit sent it increasingly over North America. The problem was, neither station
had been rigged for anything other than occassional use. At Dryden, near Edwards Air Force Base in the California desert,
two six-foot-long antennae had simply been clipped onto the side of a satellite dish. "It was a really fast-and-dirty
setup, really kind of thrown together," recalls Mark Severance, the thirty-five-year-old NASA engineer who volunteered
to work on improving the system in the fall of 1996.
A team of engineers from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland had been examining the problem for months when
Severance arrived on the scene. But the young Texan had unique experience to bring to bear: He had been conducting ham radio
sessions with Russian spacecraft since the mid-1970s, when as the thirteen-year-old son of a NASA contractor he caught
the space bug following the Apollo-Soyuz missions. As a teenage hobbyist Severance rigged an antenna on the chimney of his
family's Forth Worth home to listen in on communications between Soviet spacecraft and the tracking ships that zigzagged
the Caribbean from their base in Havana harbor. Severance began taking Russian-language classes in high school - the only
school in Fort Worth that offered them - so he could better understand what the Russians were saying, and by the time he
enrolled in Southern Methodist University in Dallas had chatted with scores of friendly
cosmonauts, all of whom seemed pleasantly amazed to find a cheerful Russian speaker to talk to as they crossed North America.
That fall, while working as a NASA engineer in Houston, Severance heard of the difficulties with Dryden and Wallops and
volunteered to look into the situation. Analyzing the signal between Mir and the two ground stations, he quickly recognized
two problems that should have been obvious to any amateur ham operator. For one thing, the NASA receivers at Wallops and
Dryden weren't adjusting the signal to account for a simple auditory concept called the Doppler Effect. "This is
something that ham guys correct for on every pass, and yet we weren't doing it, and I didn't understand why," remembers
Severance.
The second problem was even more basic. The NASA receivers were rigged to catch a signal broadcast at the very narrow
level of five megahertz, the width of a standard ham radio signal. But Severance knew from years of
hobby experience that the Russians broadcast a much broader signal, on the order of thirty megahertz. This difference
in "bandwidth" meant the two NASA stations were only receiving a fraction of the Russian signal. Severance measured
the signal and found he was right. The Russians were broadcasting at thirty megahertz. This was something any fourteen-year-old
hobbyist could have seen, but for some reason NASA hadn't.
Pleased but confused, Severance presented the bandwidth problem to a group of a dozen Goddard engineers at a meeting in
Houston in January. They didn't believe him. The Goddard men, mostly NASA veterans in their forties and fifties, showed
Severance a piece of paper called a technical specification that said the Russian signal was at five megahertz. "Look
at the requirements documents," one of the Goddard men told him. "It says five megahertz."
"Forget the docs," Severance said. "Look at the performance. You're clipping the audio."
But the Goddard men didn't believe him. If a technical spec said the Russians were broadcasting at five megahertz, they
were broadcasting at five megahertz. No one had thought to question the piece of paper, which was clearly in error, and
no one had thought to independently measure the width of the Russian signal.
Nothing happened. Severance waited while the Goddard engineers returned east to pore over the data. For a month they
kicked around a variety of technical remedies that Severance just knew wouldn't fix the problem unless the basic issue
of bandwidth was addressed. From Houston Severance bombarded the Goddard team with memos that he felt were being ignored.
He complained to friends and to at least one former astronaut. Still, nothing happened. Up in space Linenger and his
Russian partners could barely hear anything through the static over Dryden and Wallops.
Finally, on Valentine's Day, Severance went directly to Culbertson and Van Laak in an effort to cut through the red
tape. Culbertson, chagrined, immediately freed up $300,000 to begin rigging a new set of antennae that would clear up
the signal. The Goddard team belatedly climbed on board, and on the Monday morning after the fire, just hours after
Korzun's inability to talk to the TsUP during a Wallops pass, Severance began work on the new antennae. The new setup
won't be ready until June, but by then it will prove very useful.