ZONE BLANCHE

Meet Our New Flight Directors!

We just hired six new flight directors to join a unique group of individuals who lead human spaceflights from mission control at our Johnson Space Center in Houston.

A flight director manages all human spaceflight missions and related test flights, including International Space Station missions, integration of new American-made commercial spacecraft and developing plans for future Orion missions to the Moon and beyond. 

Only 97 people have served as flight directors, or are in training to do so, in the 50-plus years of human spaceflight. That’s fewer than the over 300 astronauts! We talked with the new class about their upcoming transitions, how to keep calm in stressful situations, the importance of human spaceflight and how to best learn from past mistakes. Here’s what they had to say…

Allison Bollinger

Allison is from Lancaster, Ohio and received a BS in Aerospace Engineering from Purdue University. She wanted to work at NASA for as long as she can remember. “I was four-and-a-half when Challenger happened,” she said. “It was my first childhood memory.” Something in her clicked that day. “After, when people asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said an astronaut.” 

By high school a slight fear of heights, a propensity for motion sickness and an aptitude for engineering shifted her goal a bit. She didn’t want to be an astronaut. “I wanted to train astronauts,” she said. Allison has most recently worked at our Neutral Buoyancy Lab managing the daily operations of the 40-ft-deep pool the astronauts use for spacewalk training! She admits she’ll miss “the smell of chlorine each day. Coming to work at one of the world’s largest pools and training astronauts is an incredible job,” she says. But she’s excited to be back in mission control, where in a previous role she guided astronauts through spacewalks. 

She’s had to make some tough calls over the years. So we asked her if she had any tips for when something… isn’t going as planned. She said, “It’s so easy to think the sky is falling. Take a second to take a deep breath, and then you’ll realize it’s not as bad as you thought.”

Adi Boulos

Adi is from Chicago, Illinois and graduated from the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign with a BS in Aerospace Engineering. He joined us in 2008 as a member of the very first group of flight controllers that specialize in data handling and communications and tracking systems aboard the space station. 

Most recently he served as the group lead in the Avionics Trainee group, which he loved. “I was managing newer folks just coming to NASA from college and getting to become flight controllers,” he said. “I will miss getting to mentor them from day one.” But he’s excited to start his new role alongside some familiar faces already in mission control. “It’s a great group of people,” he said of his fellow 2018 flight director class. “The six of us, we mesh well together, and we are all from very diverse backgrounds.” 

As someone who has spent most of his career supporting human spaceflight and cargo missions from mission control, we asked him why human spaceflight is so important. He had a practical take. “It allows us to solve problems we didn’t know we had,” he said. “For example, when we went to the moon, we had to solve all kinds of problems on how to keep humans alive for long-duration flights in space which directly impacts how we live on the ground. All of the new technology we develop for living in space, we also use on the ground.”

Marcos Flores

Marcos is from Caguas, Puerto Rico and earned a BS in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Puerto Rico and an MS in Aerospace Engineering from Purdue University. Spanish is his first language; English is his second. 

The first time he came to the Continental US was on a trip to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida as a kid! “I always knew I wanted to work for NASA,” he said. “And I knew I wanted to be an engineer because I liked to break things to try to figure out how they worked.” He joined us in 2010 as an intern in a robotics laboratory working on conceptual designs for an experimental, autonomous land rover. He later transitioned to the space station flight control team, where he has led various projects, including major software transitions, spacewalks and commercial cargo missions! 

He shares his new coworkers’ thoughts on the practical aspects of human spaceflight and believes it’s an expression of our “drive to explore” and our “innate need to know the world and the universe better.” But for him, “It’s more about answering the fundamental questions of where we come from and where we’re headed.”

Pooja Jesrani

Pooja graduated from The University of Texas at Austin with a BS in Aerospace Engineering. She began at NASA in 2007 as a flight controller responsible for the motion control system of the International Space Station. She currently works as a Capsule Communicator, talking with the astronauts on the space station, and on integration with the Boeing Starliner commercial crew spacecraft. 

She has a two-year-old daughter, and she’s passionate about motherhood, art, fashion, baking, international travel and, of course, her timing as a new flight director! “Not only have we been doing International Space Station operations continuously, and we will continue to do that, but we are about to launch U.S. crewed vehicles off of U.S. soil for the first time since the space shuttle in 2011. Exploration is ramping up and taking us back to the moon!” she said.” “By the time we get certified, a lot of the things we will get to do will be next-gen.”  

We asked her if she had any advice for aspiring flight directors who might want to support such missions down the road. “Work hard every day,” she said. “Every day is an interview. And get a mentor. Or multiple mentors. Having mentorship while you progress through your career is very important, and they really help guide you in the right direction.”

Paul Konyha

Paul was born in Manhasset, NY, and has a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Louisiana Tech University, a Master’s of Military Operational Arts and Science from Air University, and an MS in Astronautical Engineering from the University of Southern California. He began his career as an officer in the United States Air Force in 1996 and authored the Air Force’s certification guide detailing the process through which new industry launch vehicles (including SpaceX’s Falcon 9) gain approval to launch Department of Defense (DoD) payloads. 

As a self-described “Star Wars kid,” he has always loved space and, of course, NASA! After retiring as a Lieutenant Colonel in 2016, Paul joined Johnson Space Center as the Deputy Director of the DoD Space Test Program Human Spaceflight Payloads Office. He’s had a rich career in some pretty high-stakes roles. We asked him for advice on handling stress and recovering from life’s occasional setbacks. “For me, it’s about taking a deep breath, focusing on the data and trying not to what if too much,” he said. “Realize that mistakes are going to happen. Be mentally prepared to know that at some point it’s going to happen—you’re going to have to do that self-reflection to understand what you could’ve done better and how you’ll fix it in the future. That constant process of evaluation and self-reflection will help you get through it.”

Rebecca Wingfield

Rebecca is from Princeton, Kentucky and has a BS in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Kentucky and an MS in Systems Engineering from the University of Houston, Clear Lake. She joined us in 2007 as a flight controller responsible for maintenance, repairs and hardware installations aboard the space station. 

Since then, she’s worked as a capsule communicator for the space station and commercial crew programs and on training astronauts. She’s dedicated her career to human spaceflight and has a special appreciation for the program’s long-term benefits. “As our human race advances and we change our planet in lots of different ways, we may eventually need to get off of it,” she said. “There’s no way to do that until we explore a way to do it safely and effectively for mass numbers of people. And to do that, you have to start with one person.” We asked her if there are any misconceptions about flight directors. She responded, “While they are often steely-eyed missile men and women, and they can be rough around the edges, they are also very good mentors and teachers. They’re very much engaged in bringing up the next generation of flight controllers for NASA.”

Congrats to these folks on leading the future of human spaceflight! 

You can learn more about each of them HERE. 

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

FREEMA LIKED THIS!!!!

The hunt is on. Arcane, the final season coming this November to Netflix.

Big Thunder Mountain Railroad at Magic Kingdom in the Walt Disney World Resort

Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, based on the Red Rock Canyon in Nevada, is located in Frontierland in the Magic Kingdom at the Walt Disney World Resort.  The attraction was designed by Imagineer Tony Baxter and ride design engineer Bill Watkins. The concept came from Baxter’s work on fellow Imagineer Marc Davis’s concept for the Western River Expedition, a western-themed pavilion at the Magic Kingdom, designed to look like an enormous plateau and contain many rides, including a runaway mine train roller coaster. However, because the pavilion as a whole, was deemed too expensive in light of the 1973 construction and opening of Pirates of the Caribbean, Baxter proposed severing the mine train and building it as a separate attraction. The Big Thunder Mountain Railroad project was put on hold again in 1974 as resources and personnel were being diverted to work on constructing Space Mountain in Tomorrowland, but this delay may have ultimately produced a smoother ride as the use of computers in attraction design was just beginning when the project was resumed. Big Thunder Mountain Railroad was one of the first Disney rides to utilize computer-aided design. The attraction first opened at Disneyland in 1979, with the Magic Kingdom’s larger version in Florida opening in 1980.

The story goes: During the Gold Rush in the late 1800’s, gold was discovered in Big Thunder Mountain and boomtowns sprung up nearby.  A Mine Train system was established to transport the ore, but what the settlers didn’t count on was that Big Thunder was sacred ground for local Indian tribes. The spirit of Big Thunder was not pleased with the gold being removed from the mountain and the towns and mining company suffered accidents from flooding. The trains themselves began operating on their own, possessed by mischievous spirits. Though the towns promptly became abandoned, adventurous visitors still arrived to ride the haunted trains. Source: http://disney.wikia.com/

They Will Never be Another Cartoon Like... Over The Garden Wall

LOver The Garden Wall is a cartoon masterpiece and I don’t say that often. Despite being only 10 11 minute episodes long series, it sucessfully tell it story from beginning to the end. The show breaks the cartoon trope that I don’t believe that they’ll never be another cartoon that mimics the masterpiece. 

Autumn 

Usually, cartoons are bright, colorful, and have a hyperactive environment,

 Like the The Amazing World of Gumball 

The Ghost and Molly McGree

But for The Over Garden Wall, it’s quiet, not a trace of neon color, and the main colors you see are brown, red, orange, and other autumn colors. 

Sometimes making you feel eerie of the world. Although there’s no sign of danger, but it doesn’t feel quite right.   

It isn’t just the environment that is quiet, it’s also the music. Instead of being poppy, energetic, and being catchy, the soundtrack is folkier. 

Such as Potatus Et Molassus, Prelude, Foward, Oneiro, and Come Wayard Souls 

Then look at cartoon openings

Star vs The Forces of Evil, 

Steven Universe, 

Gravity Falls 

and every other cartoon show openings, have the protagonist doing wacky things with hyperactive music playing

But for Over the Garden Wall, it’s slow and calm and doesn’t show you even you the main characters but shows what will the characters encounter in their journey with very calming music. 

Unlike any cartoon that’s hyperactive, it’s more calming than the rest which is such refreshing to see especially it’s a kid cartoon. 

Into the Unkown

The selling point of the show is the unknown. The protagonist of the place is set in the mysterious land without a clue of how and why they got in the first place, but their one goal is to find their way by pressing forward to the unknown. The world of the OTGW is built-in fantasy but doesn’t have witches, amphibians, and humanoid gems, but more on folktale tales such as

Pottsfield Harvest Festival.

Adelaide the “Good” Witch

The Ringing of the Bell

Making each adventure feel like it’s came right out of brothers grimm fairy tale. Each having it’s own unique story, own setting, and be unfamiliar to one another. So much wonder and mystery is what makes the show so interesting. 

The Pilgrims 

To make it the journey more enuring are the characters. The protagonists, Wirt and Greg, seem to be one note with Wirt being the more mature but timid and obedient, and Greg being the happy go lucky and naive kid. 

However, they grow as the progress through the woods. Having them have chemistry, bond, falling out, and reconcile. Making them have a perfect dynamtic. 

What I also enjoy is that theirs more depth into their character, making them more believable. In chapter 9: “Into the Unknown”, Wirt want to take a girl out to a date, but a womanizer will ask her out. Instead of going the hated dork asking the popular girl in school, it’s actually all in Wirt’s head, being paranoid.

People actually likes him, especially Sarah

and Jason Funderburker is more of a dweeb than Wirt. 

It just Wirt overthinking about it, making him more a believable protagonist. 

Their story of two brothers wandering into the unknown to find their way home, perfecly encapsulate to a fairy tale. 

Influences and References 

What makes this cartoon so different from other cartoons is its references and influence. Most cartoons will reference movies and animes 

Such as Amphibia reference Jojo 

The Owl House reference Dragon Ball Z 

But with the Over The Garden Wall, their references are much older that not many have heard 

Such as the school children are based on characters of Beatrix Potter

People were actually afraid of the nightly air for it may contain poison before the plague was explained in the 1700s. 

Characters from “Babes from the Woods” are references to 1930s to 1940s cartoon characters. 

While it’s a minor praise to the show, but you don’t see that a lot of cartoons making references to older cartoons. 

Beware the Beast 

The antagonist of the series, The Beast feels different than your standard cartoon villain. Instead of him taking over the world or bringing chaos, he plays more in deceiving to get what he wants by manipulating. 

He isn’t even that powerful, but use words instead of action such as he manipulated the Woodsmen by telling him that his daughter soul is in the lantern and the only way to have her stay alive by chopping edlewood tree and grinding them to oil, which is made out of children that turns into trees.

His design is simple but very terrifying for blending in the shadows. 

Reminds me a lot of the wendigo or Herne the Hunter

Then when the light shines on him, his true appearance is horrific for his body is made out of edlewood with twisted faces and holes covering his entire body. 

What I truly love about it is how he was defeated. Instead of a big epic battle, good vs evil like every cartoon has done, they instead have Wirt didn’t fall for the Beast words and his threats, he even revealed his soul was actually in the lantern. 

Wirt gave the lantern back to the Woodsman for he has his own business to deal with. Making the Woodsman realize that his daughter wasn’t in the lantern and blows out the lantern, ending his terror forever. 

It’s clever how they’ve defeated the antagonist. 

Conclusion

Over The Garden Wall is the greatest achievement in western animation history. Being only 10 episodes, but it was able to tells a very satisfying story. It didn’t need multiple seasons to tell its story, no sequels, no spinoff shows or a movie, but just a simple and short story. It is filled with childlike wonder with horrific moments, mature themes, and feel melancholy. Truly a masterpiece that can never be mimic.   

The fluidity of the animation was so satisfying.

Thank you, James Baxter

Kingdom Hearts III → ”Hail, Sora!”

This describes my life.

characters in dark: recite verbatim things they said to each other anywhere between a year and 66 years ago

me: forgets what i said half-way through saying it