Contact Me
Like many people, I have a number of email addresses but the one that readers here should use is my Gmail account Send Me Mail At GMail
Please allow me LOTS of time to reply, this is just a chance to dig back into web pages and distracts me from my actual work. If you are very polite, and ask good questions, you might get an answer faster.
And just because I want to use it somewhere, here is a photo of me and two of my colleagues. This is Gerry Lewis (front), Gary Renfro (middle) and me (in the back) in the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) Payload Operations Control Center (POCC) during the STS-40 (Spacelab Life Sciences 1) mission. Gerry and Gary were our two Crew Interface Controllers (CICs) who were responsible for talking to the payload crew during the mission. Normally only one of them would have been on console, and Dr Bob Phillips (our Alternate Payload Specialist, no relation) would have been there instead of one of our two CICs. Dr Bob sometimes showed up late and so the second CIC would stay until we could find him.
I was the lead Operations Controller for the mission, we supported the payload from the MSFC POCC.
There are several odd things about this story - first they start by identifying it as "Space Center, Houston" when it is a Huntsville, Alabama paper and we were in the MSFC POCC. We were not at the Johnson Space Center at this time though we all were there in Huntsville on temporary travel. We all did live and work at the Johnson Space Center. The rats were not white as well. And I don't recall why Dr Phillips was not there - he LOVED getting on camera and would pop up whenever a news camera was in the room. This was the only mission where I was able to talk to the crew on Air-to-Ground, that is an interesting story to be told one day.
As another bit of historical information, here is a NASA photo taken on a simulation before that mission - it does show (from left) Dr Bob Phillips (Alternate Payload Specialist), Gerry Lewis (Crew Interface Controller), and me (Operations Controller). You can see that the background is different, it is in our simulated POCC (in Houston) and not in the MSFC POCC.
Here is another photo, not that it is related to this web site; but it is a good memory. This is a colleague of mine (Karen Svetaka), Shannon Lucid, and me in a local establishment. They were polite enough to laugh at a story about preparing for Shannon's flight to the Mir Space Station. It was neat to work with Shannon (and my other colleague) on Spacelab Life Sciences and the Mir program.
Well if I put that one this page it's companion needs to go on it as well. This is on that same day, Dave Wolf was talking to me about Spacelab Life Sciences-2 and his stay on Mir. I was a verification engineer for the Space Portable Spectroreflectometer (SPSR) that Dave used on Mir and there are MANY funny stories about that experiment.
Thanks for visiting!!
Charles Phillips
Houston, Texas