-balettiedotcom-

Random Ramjet Ramblings

Various thoughts and musings that tumble from my brain onto Ye Olde Interwebbes.
Last 4 blog posts:
50 Years

50 Years

The Artemis I mission occurred 50 years after Apollo 17. What will it take to not have this happen again?

Becoming Santa

Becoming Santa

Santa Claus. Father Christmas. Kris Kringle. St. Nicholas. Papa Noel. Me.

Select the button to go straight to the main photo album or choose one of the categories below.

Vacation Photos

Our Family

Random photos

Family Events

Texas Football

Lake Travis

-THE TRENCH-
FLIGHT DYNAMICS OFFICER
MISSION CONTROL
BLOG

-THE TRENCH-

The space exploration advocacy website of Roger Balettie, former Flight Dynamics Officer in NASA’s Space Shuttle Mission Control Center.

Select a menu tab to the left for detailed links or one of the main sections below:

FLIGHT DYNAMICS OFFICER

The Flight Dynamics Officer (FDO, pronounced “fido”) is a Flight Controller in the Mission Control Center responsible for the overall trajectory, or flight path, of the Space Shuttle and all related payloads or other space-bound vehicles associated with the Shuttle.

Read about the:

MISSION CONTROL

"Houston… Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed."

Since 1965, the Mission Control Center (MCC) has been the nerve center for America’s manned space program.

-THE TRENCH- blog

Space- and NASA-based blog entries.

Last 3 blog posts:
50 Years

50 Years

The Artemis I mission occurred 50 years after Apollo 17. What will it take to not have this happen again?

Countdown

Countdown

It’s been 40 years since the launch of STS-1, and the excitement of that day never faded.

The following article was conducted by and published in The Austin Business Journal in February 2003, shortly after Columbia was lost during the STS-107 re-entry. I was honored to speak with them.

This is a reposting of their original article (here) and a PDF copy of this article is available as well.

As a former NASA flight dynamics officer, Roger Balettie knows it takes only one thing to go wrong during flight re-entry to prompt a disaster like Saturday’s tragedy involving the space shuttle Columbia.

Balettie, now a video game producer at Austin-based Inevitable Entertainment Inc., says NASA takes such investigations seriously and will assemble a “fault tree” that examines every possible scenario with the Columbia disaster, not just the most likely scenarios.

These investigations will be thorough and will take a lot longer than people want it to take,” Balettie says.

The disintegration of Columbia over Texas and Louisiana killed all seven astronauts aboard and has prompted investigations by NASA into what went wrong.

Balettie spent 12 years at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, where his responsibilities included evaluation of shuttle flight performance and leadership of the flight dynamics team to compute and supervise trajectory flight planning during shuttle missions and simulations. He was the lead flight dynamics officer for 10 of the 26 shuttle missions he supported.

He started working at the Johnson Space Center three weeks and two days before the Challenger disaster in 1986. After that disaster, everyone was quick to point fingers and jump to conclusions, he says, but NASA continued with its investigation and will do so in the Columbia case.

The period that followed left an indelible mark on my life as I was able to be a part of the recovery as the entire NASA community came together as a family, solved the problems and returned to space,” Balettie writes on his Web site, (https://space.balettie.com).

Before joining Inevitable Entertainment, he was a project manager for the University of Texas’ Applied Research Laboratories. Early in his career, he developed mission control support software for flight dynamics officers.

These days, Balettie also is vice president and director of online operations for a space advocacy group called the Society of Performers, Artists, Athletes and Celebrities for Space Exploration, or SPAACSE. The group promotes space exploration through celebrity endorsements and public education.

The awe and wonder of seeing a shuttle launch, watching old Apollo footage or just staring up at the night sky prove to me, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that space exploration will be man’s last, best destiny,” he writes on his Web site.