


Teams - Philip L. "Phil" Engelauf, Co-chair, Flight Operations and Systems Integration Working Group, NASA

NASA's Phil Engelauf was the co-chair for the Flight Operations and Systems Integration Working Group. This group developed flight programs and crew work schedules for Phase 1. The group also devised the requirements for control, communications, and systems integration.

The Shuttle-Mir Program allowed NASA to experience some of the differences in long-duration missions as compared to the shuttle missions. In his Oral History, Engelauf said:

"[W]ith short Shuttle missions, we'll work the full nine days or ten days of the flight, with hardly any time off for the crews; they [crew] work long days. I think we have gotten into the habit of giving crews a half day off on anything over about a nine-day flight.

"The Mir crew works on much more of a five-day week, with a steady schedule and they have recreation time available to them. So there's a little bit more of a normalcy to those kinds of operations and feeling that you get up in the morning, you have some time to yourself. You have a work day. Then you're off in the evening, and you have your weekends to yourself.

"Obviously, there were hardware failures and there's overhead tasks, just like the equivalent of our mowing our lawns and doing our laundry on the weekends, that still have to be done by the crews, but it's much less a sense of having your day totally structured for you the way we do in the Shuttle, where we've pretty much planned the crew's time down to the minute.

"Again, this is sort of a mental attitude that we had to get used to in planning the day for the Mir crews and something that we'll carry on into the station program," said Engelauf.

Phil Engelauf Oral History (PDF)


Graphic version available

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Curator: Kim Dismukes
Responsible NASA Official: John Ira Petty