jamesmontalvo3

Stinger Ghaffarian Technologies in Houston, TX is looking for Flight Controllers to support human spaceflight operations at NASA Johnson Space Center. See the official job posting here [1]. This posting is looking for people to support various International Space Station disciplines, however I personally am within the Extravehicular Activity group. I am not directly involved with hiring at all; I'm purely interested in getting more people with software development experience into my group.

About my job: I work at the NASA's Neutral Buoyancy Lab (NBL)[2] and Mission Control Center (MCC)[3]. People in our group are in charge of Extravehicular Activities (spacewalks)[4], such as the one going on right now[5]. This group plans on-orbit activities, trains astronauts to perform spacewalks (at the NBL and other facilities), and assists astronauts with execution of missions from MCC. This is one of the coolest jobs on the planet. In addition to working on projects that you get to see played out in space, you get to do things like SCUBA and work in the spacesuit in the NBL.

While not officially part of the job posting, having a background in software would be awesome; there are huge portions of our jobs begging to be automated. For example, I've long wanted to improve EVA procedure building [6].

[1] https://cw.na1.hgncloud.com/sgtinc/loadJobPostingDetails.do?...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutral_Buoyancy_Laboratory

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_C._Kraft_Jr._Missio...

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extravehicular_activity

[5] http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/#.VPM1YPnF-So

[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5585535

I believe it's marked as "NASA" because NASA is responsible for it on orbit.

I have not been notified that anyone has been selected. I'm not sure if they're going to ask my opinions at all on the candidates (I hope they do).

Seeing as this thread seems mostly dead, if you'd like to talk more about the position feel free to email me at my HN username -AT- GMAIL -DOT- COM.

I'll do my best to respond to your points. Your post has made me realize I didn't do a very good job explaining...thanks for pointing it out.

First: this post has nothing to do with the company and whether it does or does not have its shit together. I posted this as an individual because I was excited that I was told we were getting an intern and they'd be working with me...which is something that's never happened to me before.

Whether or not the wiki aspect is secretarial work is entirely dependent upon the intern. If we end up getting someone with no CS background then yes, that aspect of their work will likely be secretarial. If we get someone with a strong CS background then I'd give them a list of things we've considered building and tell them to go for whichever one they want (or come up with their own). Some examples of projects off the top of my head: bi-directional syncing of ground-based versions of our wiki with a version aboard the ISS, building web services to communicate between various databases and mission critical tools, working on methods to suggest content to people who may not be aware of it, etc.

The NASA headline is not intended to be misleading. The intern would work onsite at Johnson Space Center, not at a contractor offsite. Within our group the fact that some badges say "contractor" and others say "civil servant" is irrelevant; we all work on the same stuff. And, quite frankly, what we work on is pretty awesome: developing EVAs, responding to on-orbit failures (think the "square-peg-into-round-hole" scene from Apollo 13 [1]), SCUBA diving and working in the space suit in the NBL...and on top of that, and because I've found a niche for myself, developing software to smartly fix our knowledge management problems. I don't know anyone with a job cooler than mine, except the astronauts I work with daily.

I'm sure there are lots of companies that give interns work that extends the classroom. This is not one of them. There are two reasons for this: (1) there are no classrooms teaching EVA, and (2) our group does not focus on software development. If a rockstar developer ended up getting this internship then they would have a lot of freedom to work on projects of their choosing, but they would not get oversight from Peter Norvig. That is probably a deal-breaker for some; it probably sounds awesome to others.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2YZnTL596Q

It can't hurt to inquire. It may not be possible for this particular opening but perhaps you can set yourself up for future openings. If you get more information please post it back here afterwards. Thanks, and good luck.

I'm not certain. However, given that the intern would have access to NASA IT systems they would have to pass a background check which can take a long time for non-US citizens. The internship may be over by the time the background check cleared.

Unfortunately at this time there isn't one. Instead I've provided an email address for the person in charge of the program.

Regarding your question on replanning: On the fly we won't generally have time to completely redo the procedure, and there's a lot of overhead to setup an EVA, so once outside the airlock we'll avoid scrapping the plan entirely and coming back inside unless there's no way to accomplish anything useful.

We almost always have extra tasks, which we don't consider part of the nominal procedure. These tasks can be used if for some reason we couldn't do part of the nominal procedure, or if we get the nominal procedure done vastly ahead of schedule and want to use the EVA time we already had book kept.

If, say, EV1 is 30 minutes ahead of EV2 and would otherwise just be waiting for EV2, we could send EV1 to do one of these extra tasks. In those cases normally we won't rewrite the procedure in anyway. A voice call will be made to the Flight Director (which everyone in mission control can here) saying something like "After EV1 completes step 45 he will have to wait for EV2 to complete step 56. We estimate that EV1 would be waiting 30 minutes. As such, we suggest he procede to Get-Ahead procedure 'Install Widget' on page 33"

As you said, we only do 2 EVs currently. However, we do have more than two entities working in parallel. For a hypothetical example, during a joint Space Shuttle and ISS EVA, there would be EV1 and EV2, but there might also be the Space Shuttle robotic arm and Space Station robotic arm (each run by at least one crewmember). Also, there may be a crewmember inside coordinating the EVA (reading procedures) who may have some tasks that need to be done to support the EVA, and there is commanding done from mission control. So that's 6 entities.

From an EVA planning perspective, we generalize that to three entities: EV1, EV2 and everyone else. That is, we have three columns in our Word document, and steps in the "everyone else" column will specify who is performing them, i.e. "Station Arm: translate to hardware pickup location"

We currently use Semantic MediaWiki for knowledge management. I've been considering creating an extension for it to handle procedure writing, but as you said I can't imagine getting it perfect. I feel like it would always be somewhat of a hack.

As for "these procedures will be used once and then discarded": that's not really an issue. Most procedures would not be used just once, since we'd reference a procedure for installing hardware if we ever needed to remove it. Procedures used to fix something will be reused if it breaks again.

Thanks for this reference. I'll definitely take a look at Asta. As for Excel: yes there are some advantages to Excel, but it is not particularly easy to handle numbered lists within it. We need to be able to easily over voice communications explain where the crewmembers should go as the plans change on the fly, i.e. "EV1 must perform page 36 steps 15-27 prior to EV2 performing page 34 steps 1-10."

I've met Pete. Unfortunately their solutions don't handle the parallel nature of what we're doing. They have essentially written an Eclipse plug-in if I recall correctly.

There are several different "pre-breathe protocols" used prior to US spacewalks to avoid the bends. Some involve taking the airlock down to 10.2 psi (as opposed to 14.7 psi for 1 ATM) and sleeping there overnight. Also the crew may hang out in the suit while still in the space station for several hours before the spacewalk. The suit is pressurized with pure oxygen and is at a 4.3 psi.

All of this does make for a long day. Even though the spacewalk may only be 6 or 7 hours, entire day with preparations and clean up afterwards is exhausting.

I can't speak for Russian EVAs [1], but in US EVAs we always have a long tether reel attaching us to station. If we need to get further than that tether reel allows, we attach another tether reel before releasing the first. Additionally, we have a sort of jetpack called a SAFER [2] in case a tether (or the user) fails.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extra-vehicular_activity

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Aid_for_EVA_Rescue

Both you and the servers you're pulling the content from are stationary on the ground, and any satellites used are in geosynchronous orbit. ISS is travelling 17000 mph. So while it may have clear line of sight to a ground station in New Mexico one minute, the next minute that same line of sight is in Texas.

Also, for a spacewalk the video source is from a space suit, so the video signal is sent wirelessly from the spacesuit to ISS, then sent to a TDRS satellite, then to the ground. The spacesuit camera is admittedly not as good as I'd like it to be, but considering all the architecture supporting it started being put in orbit over 10 years ago, and was designed before that, it's pretty good.

The Russian Orlan suit [1] is pressurized higher than the US EMU [2], and gloves are not as dexterous. I don't know a lot about Russian spacewalks, but US gloves have caused fingernail delamination in many people, including myself (I'm not an astronaut, but I work with this hardware a lot).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orlan_space_suits

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extravehicular_Mobility_Unit

Depending upon the Beta Angle [1], the spacewalk could be in sunlight the entire time (though that's rare). It could be in darkness up to about 50% of the time.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_angle

I'm wondering, as a fairly inexperience programmer with most of my time in PHP: is there any good reference for "How to start web development in ___ with previous experience only in PHP". I would love a tutorial that explained how to accomplish in another language all the things that PHP makes simple for newbies. I'd also be totally willing to help an experience person develop such a tutorial.

"Take in fewer calories than you burn, put yourself in negative energy balance, lose weight"

Join a fitness/nutrition website to provide accountability (and to educate you that the presumably healthy food you're eating is actually highly caloric).

Any recommendations on how to start?

I, too, take notoriously long showers and find them to be one of the best places to think.

In regards to your question about listening to music being considered consumption: I think it really depends what type of music listener you are, or what your particular motivation for listening while running is. Listening to instrumentals for the purpose of increased concentration is probably not the norm. Most people who listen to music while they run do so for the reason frederickcook stated: they'd be bored otherwise.

Or at least they'd claim it was boredom. Really I think it's the complete awkwardness of the absence of some sort of distraction, and it's just easier for people to say "I'd get bored" versus "I'd feel so awkward". However, on the other side of that initial awkwardness lies a new level of clarity. For me, the 45 minute mark on a slower-paced run is the only time I have better obvious-in-hindsight solutions than in the shower.

(that being said, working a demanding day job while planning my exit strategy into a startup leaves me no time to run...at a time in my life when I need that clarity most!)