Taking Off by Jenny Moss

the instructors glanced around to look at us, but then went back to what she was doing.
    “Shh, Lea,” said her mom. “Don’t interrupt. They’re following a preplanned script for the training session and need to listen to the crew’s reactions, and to talk to them.”
    “Where’s the crew?” asked Lea, her voice only slightly lowered. “Is Christa with them?”
    Mrs. Taylor led us back out into the hallway. “The astronauts are in the simulator, which is in an area behind the instructor rooms along this hallway.”
    “Let’s go there,” said Lea.
    Mrs. Taylor shook her head. “We can’t go back there.”
    “What is a simulator?” I asked.
    “It’s a mock-up of the crew cabin, with all the switches, controls, and displays of the orbiter, and also simulated out-the-window views. There are two simulators in a large open area: the fixed-base simulator, which doesn’t move, but is elevated, and the motion-base one, which can simulate the motions of all phases of flight, from launch to descent. For this particular sim,” she said, gesturing to the room, “the crew’s in the fixed-base trainer.”
    I peeked back in. “What are the instructors doing?”
    “They’re in control of the session. Right now, they’re running a post-insertion ops sim.”
    “ ‘Ops’ is NASA talk for operations,” Lea said, nodding at me.
    “Post-insertion operations?” I asked.
    “Right,” Mrs. Taylor said. “The entire crew is needed for this sim. Christa doesn’t usually do many of these, but she needs to be here for this one. One of the objectives is to make sure the crew is working well together. Each has his own job to do, but it’s also important they manage anomalous situations well as a team.”
    Lea looked at me. “ ‘Anomalous’ is NASA talk for things are going very wrong.”
    “And so these instructors make sure things go very wrong?” I asked, pointing in the room.
    “They put in malfunctions of different systems,” said Mrs. Taylor. “There are thousands of failures they can use. See, that instructor there, touching the light pen to the screen. She’s inserting a malfunction. The crew will see indications of the failure on their displays and will need to figure out how to respond.”
    “But … what kind of failures?”
    “For this training session, they won’t have any issues that would cause an abort or a major change to the mission. They want to take the crew through a complete launch sequence and the preparation for orbit operations. The training guys might fail a sensor of one of the orbiter systems or cause a minor leak that wouldn’t have a major impact.”
    “Do they ever simulate really big failures,” I asked, “something that might go really wrong?”
    Mrs. Taylor thought for a moment. “They train for things the astronauts can do something about.”
    “How long does the training session last?” Lea asked, looking at her watch.
    “About five hours.”
    “Five hours!”
    “Lower your voice, Lea,” said Mrs. Taylor. “They’re at the end of the session now.”
    “Oh,” Lea said.
    It wasn’t long before Christa came out.
    “Hi, Christa,” I said.
    “Hi, Annie,” she said. I was pleased she remembered my name. It’d only been a few days since I’d seen her, but I knew she’d met so many people in the last few months: newspaper reporters and photographers, NASA engineers and astronauts, and even President Reagan, whom she met at a White House dinner.
    She gave us a tired smile and pushed her purse up farther on her shoulder. Her schedule must be draining. I wondered how she was going to play volleyball.
    “Hi, Christa!” said Lea. “You’re wearing normal clothes.”
    “What did you think she’d be wearing?” I asked.
    “Those pretty sky blue flight suits.”
    “Christa,” said Mrs. Taylor, ignoring Lea, “can you take the girls from here? I’ve got to get back to my office.”
    “Sure. I’ve got them.”
    “Thanks, Christa. Y’all have fun.”
    On