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I adored Star Trek Voyager and saw the International Space Station being built in Primary School – I knew I wanted to work on that and learned the word Engineer from Star Trek – they were the people who made everything work in space so I decided that being an Engineer would be the best way to work on ISS – and it was! I’m a Mechatronic Engineer working at the European Astronaut Centre as an ISS Flight Controller.

We have to have a good technical overview of all of the experiments and also be good friends with the astronauts, which is easy because all the crew are awesome! When the astronauts call Earth, we answer, listening to the question on space-to-ground and at the same time the specialist of each experiment is listening on the Flight Director loop to give us a detailed answer to the astronaut’s question. We listen to both question and answer at the same time, summarise a 1-2 sentence reply in astronaut language and voice that back up to space. We can’t know all the experiments and rely on the experts at the ISS Science Control Centres. We choose our words very carefully to summarise the technical response back to the crew – you need to be accurate and concise.

It’s also a bit of pressure because it all has to be done immediately and everything we say can be heard by all the astronauts and the Mission controls in the world and it’s broadcast live on the internet and NASA TV! Even if you’re having a grumpy day or there is an emergency, you cannot have that show in your voice – we have to sound calm, keep operations going, keep crew safe and be confident and reassuring in all circumstances. If you ever hear a small gap between an astronaut talking and the response, it’s not a satellite delay (our communications are amazing and instant), it’s the Eurocom listening to the answer and thinking about the final wording before replying!

The European Astronaut Centre where the astronauts from Europe, USA, Russia and Japan all train in these life sized modules. Most awesome place ever to work and sometimes I help take school tours. This one was very special because it was my old school!

I sign on to console and check in with the Flight Control Team in Europe and my counterparts around the world at the other Mission Controls. We prepare the first astronaut meeting of the morning when they call down to start their day on orbit. The daytime is very busy with talking to the crew for all the back to back science experiments packed into the busy astronaut ISS schedule. Then I hand over to the afternoon shift who continue experiments and they close the 12hour workday with a similar all-hands evening meeting between all the astronauts and Mission Controls.

There’s more than just Houston like the movies, there are actually five ISS Control Centres! When astronauts call Earth they say Houston, Huntsville, Munich, Moscow or Tsukuba and the CAPCOM, PAYCOM, EUROCOM, Glavni or JCOM answers – the position is the same – we’re just called different names based on our geography.
You can see Tim’s day and the experiments and satellites and other amazing things we are doing in space on the Principia Blog. I am not a natural writer but I stretched my skills a bit and have also written some of the blog posts! http://blogs.esa.int/tim-peake/ . There is also a really good blog post about the Eurocom job at http://blogs.esa.int/iriss/2015/09/10/the-team-behind-iriss-eurocom/. Actually the CAPCOM/PAYCOM/EUROCOM/JCOM are mostly astronauts but in rare cases they are normal humans like me. Tim is also trained as a Eurocom, but he’s rather busy right now doing other things.

My console at the ISS Columbus Control Centre.