By The Numbers

The crew of Expedition 17 is currently in Earth orbit, going through the usual two-day rendezvous sequence before they can dock at the Internation Space Station. Cool enough on its own, but as I was inhaling coffee through my nose and reading press releases, I was struck by the fact that the importance of a person's job in any given spaceflight is inversely proportional to the number of letters in the job description.

For example, let's look at "Pilot". Five letters, short and crisp, and pretty dang important. Even though modern spacecraft are typically under computer control all of the time, someone's got to make sure the computer is running properly and that all the million-and-one checklist steps have been completed. And, in the worst case, someone has to take manual control when the computer burps up a hairball and land or dock the sucker.

How about "Commander"? Nine letters by my count, and thus according to my schema the pilot is more important than the commander, but not twice as important. And what, really, does the commander do except dominate air-to-ground communications? I suppose it's good to have someone who is unequivocally in charge. Heaven knows what sort of Haight-Ashbury chaos might ensue if there was no commander, after all. But I'm comfortable with the idea that the commander isn't as important as the pilot.

Now we have that staple of the ISS, the "Flight Engineer". That's fifteen letters plus the whitespace, and exactly one third as important as the pilot. What does the Flight Engineer really do? Lots of technical stuff that doesn't involve piloting or commanding. The Flight Engineer is usually seen on NASA TV wrassling with veritable Sargassos of plastic tubing, though I'm not sure why.

Then there's the equivalent in the Shuttle world, the "Mission Specialist", which is 18 letters and presumably somewhat less important than the ISS Flight Engineer position. Is this fair? In the shuttle program, the title "Mission Specialist" is usually given to people who are neither commanding nor piloting, and who have no specific technical training for a given payload. The mission specialists are the EVA guys, the flying schoolteachers, and the "guest astronauts" flown as part of a patronage program, so yeah, in general I'd say they're a little less important than the ISS Flight Engineers who keep the hardware ticking over for months and months at a time.

Then what about the "Payload Specialist"? This is another Shuttle-only job title, in this case referring to someone who has specific training in and responsibility for a specific payload. Still 18 letters, and thus on par with the Mission Specialist. Fair? I guess so. I would personally tend to think that the Payload Specialist should be one rung lower on the totem pole than the guys who, say, repaired Hubble or tacked another truss segment onto the ISS, so maybe I'll lobby to have them redesignated "Payload Specialiste".

And then there's is the bottom of the rung, the "Spaceflight Participant", which is 22 or 23 letters or so (it's so long I ran out of fingers). What's a Spaceflight Participant's main function? Making a very large deposit of cash into the nearly derelict Russian space program. Past that, they might vacuum out the air filters and change the CO2 scrubber cartridges, but don't count on them making dinner. I'm also told that a major part of the Spaceflight Participant job involves being spacesick on a grand scale (consult the book Riding Rockets and its discussion of the "Garn" as a unit of spacesickness).

Thus we again see how Apollo was superior to everything else. All the crew members had crisp three-letter acronyms for their job titles - CDR, LMP, CMP - and thus nobody had to feel insecure for having a clumsy job title. Those were the days! Now it's a seething minefield of jealousy and hatred.