Nick said:

>Interesting that ESA reckons it can train from scratch a mission
>control team for the same cost that NASA can retrain their
>experienced shuttle team . For subsequent ops, ESA budget
>for mission control is far lower. Is this realistic? Well, only if there's
>no problem!

Years ago, it was pointed out to me that the worst sort of people for Mission Operations (Mission Ops) are Ph.D. level spacecraft designers. The best sort for mission ops are technicians with 4 years or less of university training but with lots of on-the-job experience. The problem with Ph.D. level engineers is their desire to intuitively "fix the problem" if something goes wrong (they usually make it worse by missing an obvious simple solution). On the other hand, a technician will follow predefined procedures if something goes wrong. If the system is setup correctly, a comprehensive set of operations manuals are on hand in the mission control center with fault tree charts covering almost every imaginable problem. The mission ops people know how to read those manuals and rapidly diagnose a problem based upon the fault trees. If the problem is really bad and they get to the end of a fault tree with no solution, then and only then do they call in the Ph.D. level designers and ask "What do we do now?". Typically by that time, the spacecraft is vaporized metal.

Gary