Mission Control ‘members only’: NASA flight directors don new jacket

There are fewer of them then there are astronauts and no NASA spaceflight would be a success without them at the helm. Yet, if the public knows anything about them it is likely 50-year-old history, and probably none of them could be picked out of a crowd today.

To address that last point, NASA’s flight directors have taken a page from the crews they support, if not also the Masters Tournament, Hells Angels and even Saturday Night Live’s Five-Timers Club. There is now a flight director’s jacket.

“The astronauts have iconic blue jackets that make them easily identifiable. Having a more uniform look would make it a little easier for us to tell the NASA story,” said chief flight director Emily Nelson in an interview with collectSPACE. “It’s a lot easier to tell a story if people know you have a story to tell.”

“Having a unifying look was something we thought might be valuable,” she said.

There have been 108 flight directors since U.S. human spaceflight began, out of which 30 are active today. They each lead teams who work in mission control, overseeing the continuous complement of astronauts living and working on board the International Space Station, as well as those on commercial spacecraft and preparing for Artemis missions to the moon.

But Houston, there is a problem … the general public either does not know or does not understand the role that flight directors serve. Nelson said that she has been to events where after learning she is a flight director people have mistaken her for an air traffic controller or when she is traveling with a crew, she has been confused for the astronauts’ appearance manager.

“If what we do was a little bit better known, it would be easier to get to the meat of the story of what’s really happening in mission control, what’s happening in space. So to that extent, it would be useful for our role to be better known,” she said. “We represent the hundreds of people on the ground who are instrumental to human spaceflight. Making that more a part of the overall story makes it more accessible to a wider portion of the population.”