To the Moon and Beyond

Facts: 1) Humans are going back to the moon — and beyond! 2) KBR people are helping make it happen. 3) We’re here to talk about it in our second episode featuring KBR’s ongoing support of NASA and the Artemis lunar missions. We sat down with Kelsey Livesay from KBR’s Science and Space business to talk about her and her team’s involvement with Artemis and other crucial missions at this incredible moment in spaceflight history.

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IN ORBIT: A KBR PODCAST

Season 3, Episode 13

To the Moon and Beyond!

INTRODUCTION

John Arnold

Hello, I'm John and this is In-Orbit. Greetings and welcome to the podcast. Whether you found us and are tuning in for the first time, or if you are obsessed with us and can't get enough, we're glad you're with us and staying in our orbit.

And speaking of orbit, if you've been keeping up with your space related news, you may have heard that NASA and the United States Navy recently completed a practice run of retrieving a person crew after a spacecraft splash down in the ocean near San Diego, California. Pretty cool, right? This was of course in preparation for when they do the real thing with the Artemis 2 crew sometime next year. This is just one simulation of many that goes into ensuring the Artemis 2 lunar mission goes off without a hitch. But before Artemis 2 could happen, they had to get Artemis 1 right.

Back on episode six of this current season, we had a chance to speak with ground controller and KBR team member, Patrick Ream, about Artemis and his and his team's involvement. Well, if you're like me, you can't get enough of this kind of thing. So we decided to take a little deeper dive.

With us to talk more about KBR's role in Artemis 1 and our ongoing support of NASA and the Artemis program is Kelsey Livesay. Kelsey serves in several critical roles, including SPARTAN instructor, and SPARTAN stands for Station Power Articulation and Thermal Control. She's also a mechanical and power officer instructor and has the very cool title of International Space Station Expedition Lead. Kelsey is a member of KBR's Science and Space Team, which is part of KBR Government Solutions United States, and she works out of NASA's Johnson Space Center.

Welcome to the podcast, Kelsey.

Kelsey Livesay

Hi. Thanks for the welcome.

John Arnold

We're very, very glad to have you. We love talking about space on the podcast, in addition to all the other stuff, but this is just a personal favorite topic of mine. We'd love to learn more about you before we really dive into that and how you got to where you are today working as a mechanical and power operator, an instructor for both ISS missions and now the Artemis lunar missions.

Kelsey Livesay

Well, so I am a little bit of a strange duck to the flight operations division, in that my bachelor's degree was actually in civil engineering. There aren't a whole lot of us civvies here. Most people have a aerospace or mechanical or electrical background, but I was the one that wanted to build a moon base someday, so I went civil for structural. But I have a master's in space systems, and I did a bit of environmental engineering work around Kennedy Space Center when I first got started out of college. I did a brief stint as a physics teacher and actually got certified to teach. That was around the time that shuttle was winding down in Florida. And after that, I really missed engineering, so I got back into it with a missile defense agency, where I can't tell you everything I did or I'd have to kill you, but I can say that I worked on some pretty cool analysis, research, and I did several years of console operations for the missile defense flight tests.

John Arnold

I'm always blown away by the variation of our guests' background. That's extraordinary. Sounds very, very cool. Well, tell us a little more about your and your team's duties in the mechanical and power operator group.

Kelsey Livesay

So the MPO group, for short, we are in charge of the electrical and mechanical systems on the vehicle. So that includes your batteries, your converter units, your switch boxes, your solar arrays. We basically keep the power flowing. We are in charge of positioning solar arrays for various different events and protecting those. We're also in charge of the windows, the hatches, heaters, parachutes. Kind of important to get the vehicle and the crew back safely, as well as the module uprighting system, basically those big bags that pop out at the end, that inflate so that the vehicle will flip back upright.

John Arnold

It's lots of very, very important moving parts that you and your team are dealing with.

Kelsey Livesay

Yeah.

John Arnold

We had a great conversation with Patrick Ream — he's a ground controller [KBR employee working at NASA] — on season three, episode six of the podcast, and he spoke with us about the broader goals of the Artemis missions, putting people on the moon again, eventually using it as a stopping point on the way to locations like Mars. But before we get to Mars or elsewhere, we really needed Artemis 1 to go well. So would you tell us about your experience with that first mission?

Kelsey Livesay

It was phenomenal. There's no way to really do it justice. It was phenomenal. I got to do three sets of five-day shifts and experienced a broad range of the activities on that mission. Everything from sort of your basic everyday stuff to doing a survey of the vehicle's exterior. So the solar arrays are essentially selfie sticks with cameras mounted on the ends. So we use those cameras to take pictures of the vehicle. You've probably seen some of the gorgeous photos of the Earth and the moon that we took all along the flight. So the MPO group, we get to move the arrays, figure out where to put them, so that you can capture some of those really cool pictures, et cetera.

Configuring and verifying electrical pathways in the vehicle is another thing that we're in charge of. So sometimes that configuration changes and we're the ones that put that into action. We have a number of, we call them burns. They're basically the thruster firings that you have to do to keep the vehicle on course. And for each of those events, there's a whole slew of things that we do to make sure that we're not going to burn up an array or something. We have a lot of coordination that we do for each event, so I got to participate in some of that.

I can't understate how much coordination there really is on this vehicle. There's so much coordination just with the other flight controllers, both in planning the upcoming days events, making sure that everything is all buttoned up and good to go, and just passing information back and forth, and using all of our various console tools to make it happen.

Of course, a lot of that work happens before the mission. Before the mission, I don't think you really can fully cover the amount of work that, I will say KBR folks, but it's really everybody under that contract, that puts in to come up with the flight plan, all of the products that go into how do we run the vehicle. There's a lot of prep that you do just in training. We do simulations, we do a whole lot of work just making sure that whatever happens with that vehicle we are ready. So as an instructor, there's a lot I do there with simulations, et cetera.

But one thing I will share that was definitely somewhat of a surprise, I think none of us really thought about it beforehand, was we had all these little events for like, "Oh, by the way, in the midst of all this testing and other cool stuff you're going to do, we want you to take a break and take a picture of the moon." And we're like, "Ah, pictures. Pictures aren't that important." But as soon as the vehicle launched and we were getting out there and we got the arrays out and we got to our first picture taking events, we were like, "It's beautiful." It was almost comical how much we were all just blown away by the sheer immensity of what we were doing, and really seeing it on the screen just makes it real for you. So we ended up taking every chance we could to be like, "Hey, we got plenty of power right now. Can we off 0.1 of the arrays and just ..." Because there is someplace we can stick it out and take a nice pretty picture and stream the moon for a while or stream Earth? So we really had a great time throughout the mission just capturing those pretty photos. And I think there's folks on the internet even that have streamed those together into some really cool videos.

But it takes a team, I'll tell you, to get those, those Kodak shots. One group has to figure out where to look because in space, nothing's simple. You have to figure out where you are, where's everything else? How can I position something from the ground? Tell it where to go look so that it will actually see what I'm looking for. So there's a lot of coordination there and tools that folks use to figure that out. And then we do the actual moving of the arrays, and it takes another group to remotely control the cameras because I don't think they're GoPros, but they're basically something like a GoPro just stuck out on the end of your selfie stick. And it's a whole another group just to get all that data to the ground. So it was amazing experience.

The team really pulled together. We had a lot of fun on that mission. I won't say everything went perfectly, but I will say that the things that didn't go perfectly we learned so much from, and the team really pulled together and responded well to all of them. So it was a phenomenal successful mission.

John Arnold

Yeah. It's a real team-of-teams approach. Coming from a performance background, something that teachers and coaches always talk about is practicing the way that you perform, making sure that you're prepared for every possible eventuality. So if something does go wrong, and I'm not saying that being in a play or an opera is anything close to putting out the array on the selfie stick to take a stream of the moon or requires that much sophistication, but it's really impressive to hear about that cross discipline collaboration that goes into that. And then, as you said, a true team-of-teams approach, with KBR and all the other people under the roof making that happen. That's incredible.

Kelsey Livesay

Yeah.

John Arnold

So you were also the Artemis 1 training lead and reading a little about that list of responsibilities, that sounds like no small task. So would you tell us more about that role?

Kelsey Livesay

Sure. So there were probably two main aspects of the training that I was largely in charge of. The first was the, as you'd expect, the background knowledge, the technical lessons, and then the other would probably be the sims or the simulation events that we do where it's all bottled and you're not doing anything with the real vehicle because we really want you to get comfortable with it before you command to the real vehicle.

So yeah, the lessons, it might sound simple, but if you think of it from the perspective of we are working with NASA and with a vehicle that was not designed by NASA, it was designed by Lockheed. So we had to pick their brains, pick our subject matter experts brains about, okay, what are all these boxes? What's in the boxes? How do they work? How are we going to operate them? And then putting all of that together into a lesson. And that just gives you your basic technical knowledge that you're going to need to operate the vehicle.

And then the sims are where you work on what we call soft skills, such as your communication and your teamwork. So doing those sims basically meant becoming an expert, not only on the vehicle itself, but then also how to run the model, because models are never exactly the same as the vehicle. There's always some quirks there. Plus the interface is just different. So training the other instructors in our team to do so, which for some of these teams, the same people that are running the sims are the people that will either have already been in sims as a flight controller or will be in sims as a flight controller. So it's a very dynamic phase of things where you're running sims at the same time as you're creating lessons and delivering lessons and coordinating for people to go teach these lessons to the group. And just a lot of different ducks in the air all at once.

Let's see. Sims themselves are actually quite fun and exciting. No matter what seat you're in. If you're the instructor, then you have basically an instructor team that will meet together and come up with what our objectives are for that training event, come up with planned ways to make their day very messy and break things. So we'll come up with scenarios that we're going to throw at them to see how do they respond to this really exercise, the different procedures we've come up with and see how they can react if we break something right in the middle of a procedure. Where are they going to go? What are they going to do?

Sometimes they'll go in a direction you never thought of, and you have to do what we call scripting on the fly where you come up with a whole new script of things to do, which is always very dynamic because with most of these failures, it's a very integrated thing. So you can't just say, "Well, for MPO, I want to do this." You have to talk it out with the other instructors in real time and figure out, okay, if I do this, will that help you guys with this thing over here? So it's a very dynamic setting and quite a bit of fun because at the same time, you're listening to your flight controllers on the loops and you're running the model and you're putting stuff in as you go. So it gets to be a juggling act to be really fun. It's a great challenge.

Of course, when I was actually in the sims for my training as a flight controller, it was, I love it. You treat it like it's the real vehicle and something goes wrong and you get to fix it. So at the end of every one of my sims, I was just like, "Do we have to stop? Do we keep going? This is so much fun. I just want to keep going."

But yeah, it's a great experience. You get to give a lot of really good feedback to your flight controller trainees as an instructor. You have to be educated on how to give feedback in a way that people will accept it, but also make it really useful feedback so that they can take it and put it into action right away to get certified as quickly and efficiently as possible.

And I will say that everybody on the team is an expert in something, but we all have to be knowledgeable about the entire suite of systems that are our responsibility. So part of my job was just to make sure that we were able to really work as a team to accomplish that mission successfully and had the base knowledge and skills to do that.

John Arnold

It's wonderful to hear about the fun and the passion that go hand in hand with even just all the trainings and simulations. That's wonderful.

Kelsey Livesay

Yeah. It's a great group.

John Arnold

It sounds like it. So we know that Artemis 2 is scheduled for 2024. This will be the first crude mission of NASA's Orion spacecraft, which is expected to perform a lunar flyby and then return to Earth. Also, be the first crewed spacecraft to travel to the moon or beyond low-earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972. Would you tell us about your involvement in getting Artemis 2 ready for primetime, and how you and your team are feeling as you prepare for that huge milestone?

Kelsey Livesay

Oh gosh, how we're feeling? We're excited. We're very excited. We've been starting work on the crew classes, the fundamental classes for the Artemis 2 crew. And any time I say crew, of course, I'm referring to the astronauts that will be flying that mission. Everybody is really hyped up and enthusiastic about it. I'm the Artemis 2 Flight Controller Training Lead currently, but I also am working on the crew displays, our caution warning systems that will let the crew know kind of the state of the vehicle, where they're at in the mission as things happen, just let them know if there's an anomaly or something. We have to make sure we have all of the caution and warning messages that will pop up in such a way that the crew can figure out very quickly, what do I need to go do to fix the solution or fix the situation and safe the systems, et cetera.

So it's a lot of sort of forward-thinking about, how are the crew going to fly the vehicle? What are they going to need when they're up there in space? How is that interaction going to work between the crew, the vehicle, the ground teams, our flight controller teams working with them? So there's a lot of moving pieces here that everyone is just pulling on their shuttle experience or their experience working with the ISS astronauts, and trying to figure out, okay, what really makes sense? What can we do for all these different sort of situations that might come up? And it's not even just situations that come up, it's just your nominal stuff, too, and figuring out how that dance is going to work.

We've got something called e-procedures, which are a little bit new to us because it's a very fancy way of doing procedures that is smarter than just like a Word document type of thing. That's all very exciting. We're using our lessons learned from Artemis 1 as a springboard for those Artemis 2 products, and really pulling on that knowledge base that we developed from Artemis 1 to build up Artemis 2 and get it rolling. So yeah, how are we feeling? Super excited.

John Arnold

Well, on behalf of millions of other people who are like me, we're all hyped and excited for you. I can't wait to see how everything develops over the next year plus. Between working with flight controllers, astronauts, astronaut candidates, and all the myriad teams behind ISS missions, and now your experience with Artemis, personally, what's been the most rewarding part of your role?

Kelsey Livesay

Gosh, do I have to pick one?

John Arnold

No, not at all, not at all. Throw out a few.

Kelsey Livesay

Perfect. Oh, there's so many rewarding aspects of this job. Goodness. Well, for ISS crew, any time you've trained a crew, and you see them go up into space and see them put your training into practice on the real vehicle, that's a huge pride moment. Seeing the earth and the moon on the big screen after sending the commands to get the arrays into position for Artemis, that was... Got a little choked up, not going to lie. Working with international partners, that's been pretty exciting on the ISS side of things. There's so many different cultures that you can really get a lot of benefit from seeing how they approach a problem versus how we do, and what their sort of perspective is. That's a of a lot of fun.

Getting certified. Like I said earlier, being on those sims is just ... Any day that's on a sim console day or just a real-time mission day is a good day. Those days are really rewarding. Just seeing how the team pulls together and gets you through the scenario, whatever it is, you have so much fun working with the team because everybody is so dedicated to getting this done, and doing it well, and getting as much as we can from these missions, so that for the next mission and the next mission and the next mission, we're even more prepared and more knowledgeable about what's coming. So yeah, there's so many rewarding aspects. I could go on for a while.

John Arnold

Well, I'll fill in a blank for you with this next question, because between you and some of your colleagues, one of the most rewarding things that we've heard about apparently has been the snack spread during training exercises. I have to say that just, I feel personally ashamed of myself for letting my snack game fall off, but I was wondering if you could tell us more about that. What's on the menu for these training exercises?

Kelsey Livesay

Oh, goodness. Well, I'll just say that KBR, NASA, all of it, we're just one big family in the Flight Operations Department. So any time we get together, there must be food involved. Basically, if you need a reason for it, you need food to function, right?

John Arnold

Absolutely.

Kelsey Livesay

Blood sugar is important. Brains operate on good blood sugar, so we always bring treats. Any time we've got, shoot, we had a series of meetings to talk about caution warning development, and there was food. We have sims that go on for, depending on the sim event, some of them are longer than others, but it's multiple hours or multiple days even. And so, we all chip in. Of course, this is Texas, so there will typically be some breakfast tacos. I highly recommend the brisket.

John Arnold

Alright!

Kelsey Livesay

Oreos. We love Oreos. I tried Moon Pies for the first time during the Artemis 1 mission, and they're okay, they're okay.

John Arnold

Yeah, a southern staple.\

Kelsey Livesay

There you go. Donuts, of course. Pie. Somebody made some really good, I think it was, pecan pie. Oh, it was so good. Pizzas, of course. Somebody brought pizza on a semiregular basis. Kolaches, which is, again, sort of a Texas thing. It's basically a pig in a blanket, but sort of morphed with a donut. I'm not really sure how to describe a kolache. It's meat inside bread with cheese and jalapeños.

John Arnold

Yeah. Exactly, yeah.

Kelsey Livesay

Starburst. Some of the guys used to joke that if they needed somebody to sign off on a flight note or something, they'd be like, "I'll give you a three orange Starburst." And they're like, "Oh, sweetening the deal. Very nice." And so, yeah, we celebrate pretty much every time we come together for stuff because everybody is just so excited and honored to be there that it is a big celebration, so we bring in food.

John Arnold

I love to hear that, about that family aspect of it. And for our listeners, sorry for the ... I should have given a trigger warning. If you're on your way to work or home right now, and are hungry, I'm sorry for that question, because I know my stomach is growling a little bit.

In recent news, speaking of being excited about things, you've been a part of KBR's Integrated Mission Operations, or IMOC, II contract with NASA. And it was very recently announced that KBR has been awarded the IMOC III contract to continue supporting NASA's spaceflight programs to the tune of nearly $2 billion. How's everyone on your team feeling about that?

Kelsey Livesay

Oh, we're very excited and proud. That's a big congratulations to KBR. I think I just found out in the last day or two actually, but gosh, I'm not surprised that we won it. It's a great team. We get the job done and we do it right and we do it well. So I'm always glad to see space flight programs keep going, keep getting funded and supported.

Gosh, everybody on this team has such a passion for what they do. In previous jobs, I will say, if you've ever heard of the, it's called the 80/20 rule where 80% of the work gets done by 20% of the people. That is not a thing here. Some of the new kids that we hire straight out of college are just like, "Oh, this is nice." I'm like, "No, you don't understand. This is such a great place to work. Everybody here pulls their weight and then some."

We are so supportive of each other. It is such a great company to work for. It's a great group to work with. I mean, no joke, it's like a big family. It's not just within your group, right? It's across divisions here. You need something from somebody in the OSO group. They do maintenance, that kind of thing for the vehicle, so you might call them up and be like, "Hey, buddy over there, what can you tell me about this?" And they're more than happy to work with you. And we just bend over backwards for each other to get the job done because everybody is so dedicated to the mission and getting to space and getting to the moon and then onto Mars.

And it's a really close-knit group. We've got a wide range of just age and cultural backgrounds too, that there's never a dull moment, but everybody is so, I don't even know how to describe it, but we're just really good at working with each other. So yeah, I'm just glad to see that keep going.

John Arnold

Well, I've only got a couple more questions for you before I let you go. So in thinking about lunar missions and thinking about the possibility of being responsible, of helping set feet on Mars, you were just talking a moment ago about the concentration on the mission, but how each mission before informs the next thing. And I imagine you have to be very task-oriented and concentrated on what you're doing, because you want what you're doing to go well. What does it feel like to think about in a few years down the road, however long it ends up being, to be a part of these historic missions and furthering space exploration? What's that mean to you?

Kelsey Livesay

I was born at the right time. That's my first response. It's a deep gratefulness. I'm so honored that I could be a part of the team. There's such a great responsibility that comes with it, but it's also that desire to not let them down, to not let the astronauts down, to keep pushing those boundaries so that we can really achieve these great goals. I mean, space flight in general is such a complex, challenging thing that for mankind to be continuing to pursue these historic missions and really pushing forth into space, it's the final frontier for reals.

I'm just so thankful, one, that I'm alive in this day and age to be a part of man space flight, two, that we have so many people who are so dedicated to it that we can do this, and three, that we are achieving those goals. We are getting there. We are going to the moon and we're going to go to Mars, and we're going to make it happen. And I know that every member of the team is just pulling with all their weight and focused on the goal. And like I said, it's an honor. It's an honor to be a part of that team.

John Arnold

That's incredible. Well, before I let you get back to work, is there anything else you'd like to add?

Kelsey Livesay

Oh, goodness. Well, I'll just say that everybody in FOD has friends and family that are all rooting for them. So if you know somebody who's working in FOD, give them your full support and really root for them because we are going to make this happen. And keep on encouraging the younger generations too to go for those STEM [science, technology, engineering and mathematics] fields and really pursue that, because they're the ones that are going to pick up the torch after us. They're going to take us all the way and even beyond. Who says we stop at Mars?

John Arnold

Absolutely! Exciting to think what could come after that. Well, Kelsey, thank you so much for your time and for this amazing discussion. I've enjoyed it immensely. I know our listeners had to have as well. And we'll look forward to talking with you again in the future, I hope.

Kelsey Livesay

Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me.

CONCLUSION

John Arnold

What a blast, pun intended, it was to speak with Kelsey Livesay about her work with KBR, with NASA, the International Space Station, and now the Artemis lunar missions. It's enough to get anyone excited about what's coming with these lunar missions and the possibilities that they'll unlock for humankind. So a big thanks to Kelsey again for joining us.

Also, many thanks to my friend and KBR colleague, Rachel Lytle, for helping coordinate and getting this episode off the ground. Another pun intended. And as always, a big shout-out to our producer, Emma, for her excellent work on the podcast. If you like what you heard today, be sure to share this episode with your friends on social media. If you have an idea for a future episode or just want to drop us a line, please email us at inorbit@kbr.com.

And that's it for me. Thanks again to all our listeners for spending some of your time with us today and for keeping us in your orbit. Take care.