Though I am not fluent in Russian, I manage well enough, and we have interpreters available for all technical discussions. In Russia, trust and relationships are built with people, not organizations. Currently, two to three people from our group are in Moscow at any given time, but once the FGB launches in November there will be five of us there. What I like least is all the meetings we attend here in the United States. I started in the shuttle program as a flight controller in the pointing office.
Pointers determine the rotational orientation of the shuttle.
At the end of 1989, NASA was starting to staff up operations for what was then Space Station Freedom, so I was transferred to work in the Space Station Operations Division as a pointer. This ended up being a wonderful career move, though at first I wasn't real excited about the move. For the first five years it was more of a desk job with no simulations. Among other things, I also did planning and timelines for missions. At the end of 1994, the Phase I program needed a small team of engineers to begin learning about the Russian space station systems.