The above post reminded me of an old war story of mine, which I'll relate if no one minds... no objections?
Back before the first Shuttle launch, one of the initiatives at that time was to cut down on the length of the countdown which actually started a few days before launch. Various parts of the S0007 Launch Countdown procedure were being critically examined to see which activities really needed to be done that close to launch day or could be moved out to earlier in the pad flow or even eliminated.
So one day I got a call to come up to the Launch Director's (LD) office. I had never been there before. The LD was the person in charge of all the activities for that flow once the orbiter was mated to the stack, and it was a pretty high and mighty position. The first and at that time current LD was George Page (
link* to PDF of the Shuttle Launch Directors). Now Page was an old school boss, gruff, short tempered and rather intimidating.
I was asked by Page about a certain test that we ran twice, first just after the stacked vehicle was brought to the pad and mated, and then again during those S0007 launch preps. This test remotely cycled all the solenoid valves in our system sequentially. Those that had feedbacks we verified at the launch consoles, those that did not we verified by the tech actually placing their hand on it and verifying it was warm. Why, he wanted to know, were we running the same test a few weeks apart? Didn't we have confidence in our initial testing?
Now I had been working on the program (and actually in any post-college job) for less than four years, while Page was an old space veteran. But somehow I sensed something about his question. I replied that while we did have confidence in the initial run of the test, we also didn't want to go into cryogenic loading without being able to do a final confidence check as close as possible to the actual loading. After all, I said, I'd rather spend the several hours running the test than risk having to postpone the launch due to a failed component we could have easily found.
Page didn't say anything at first, then nodded and said OK and I left. Afterwards I figured out (at least I think it was true) that is wasn't so much what I said as much as the confidence I had in the reason for it. And for the rest of the program we ran that test twice each time the vehicle was at the pad, and honestly I don't remember us ever having a component that didn't work
Page was a good guy however, as I found out not too many weeks later. Minutes after STS-1 launched, just after engine shutdown, a NASA Project Engineer stopped by our launch console at which we were doing our first ever post-launch securing. He motioned for my boss and I to follow him and we climbed the stairs to the fourth floor of the LCC and were ushered into the Launch Director's office, me for the second time ever. We walked over to Page's desk, he stood up, shook our hands and thanked us for the hard work. And then he invited us to partake in the open bar which mysteriously had been set up in his office. A couple of the SRB guys were already there, since their boosters had finished their jobs two minutes after launch. I noticed that there weren't too many folks invited up from the firing room, so being invited there was quite a compliment
We stood up there for a while, long enough for the initial opening of the payload bay doors to be shown live on a monitor in his office. The camera looking from the aft cockpit windows showed something pretty shocking, a bunch of tiles were missing... that video feed was current restricted and we were asked not to mention anything till NASA officials had briefed the press across the road.
Not quite best day ever, but close
*If you're interested I'll tell you which Launch Director was part of our Rotisserie Baseball League
. Hint, not George Page