Burnout
By Stephanie Osborn
...And How It Came To Be
Dedication
This book is respectfully and affectionately dedicated to Kalpana
There's a loooong story behind the writing of Burnout. For
one thing, it Why? Simple. I was too close to it. You see, I worked in the space industry, civilian and military, for over And here I was, writing about a Shuttle disaster. The exact thing that It messes with your head, that. And then, the unthinkable happened. Columbia went down. And I had a friend aboard her when it happened.
By that time, I had moved out of civilian work into military work, or I had just started working in the field when the Challenger disaster The seeds of Burnout began as a conversation between colleagues But that was the birth of the idea. What if I wrote a story about a And then the idea hit: What if it wasn't an accident? And that was when Burnout was born. More to come... You are visitor number 248 Copyright 2008 Stephanie Osborn. All rights reserved.
Chawla ("K.C."), and the other members of the crew of Space Shuttle
Columbia on her final voyage; as well as to the Challenger
Seven.
They were explorers and scientists, first and foremost, and without
them, and their gallant sacrifice, our lives would be the poorer.
May we always remember that, sometimes, humankind’s advances take
everything we have to give, of our best and our brightest. May
we never take them – our best, or our advances – for granted.
Writing Burnout
took me somewhere between 10 and 15 years between the conception
of the idea, and the book that's now in work with Twilight Times.
"Matchstick"Image copyright Darrell Osborn, 2008
two decades. I constructed and modified astronaut's experiment operation
schedules, sometimes on the fly; I trained them, I trained colleagues,
I wrote crew procedures for those experiments. I memorized safety
considerations and sometimes helped out in malfunction procedures.
One hosed act on my part could have meant an injured, maybe even a
dead, astronaut.
I, as a payload flight controller, did NOT want to see.
my emotional response might have been even worse. But Burnout was
nearly done, at least in first draft, and as it was, I had to put the
manuscript away for a good six months or so - not even look at it. You
see, I'd lost TWO friends at one go: KC, and Columbia; because that was
the Shuttle with which I'd worked the most.
occurred. The program I worked at the time of the disaster was to have
led to a Shuttle mission, and I would have been a Payload Specialist
candidate. Shortly thereafter, the next phase of my project was
cancelled, however, due to the grounding of the Shuttle Fleet. I found
myself moving over into the payload flight contol area, and learned a lot.
and myself concerning certain abilities of the Shuttle. It does have an
autopilot, and a certain very VERY limited amount of remote control capability.
We began discussing under what circumstances a Shuttle could be damaged on
orbit and still manage a reasonably safe descent. (And yes, this did require
considerable knowledge of the guts of a Shuttle. Betwixt us all, we did
manage to possess the requisite knowledge, though no one person had the
whole picture.) I don't know that we ever did come to a consensus of
whether or not it was possible, however.
Shuttle accident, and the ensuing investigation? What sort of accident
should it be? Should it cause merely a dangerous, or a catastrophic,
malfunction?
STS-107 Re-entry
Original image by SOR Employees, source CAIB Report, Vol. 3
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