CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- A NASA flight director on Monday went where none have been before and became part of a crew serving on a different sort of risky mission.
Along with veteran astronauts Scott Kelly and Rex Walheim -- as well as space station support scientist Jessica Meir -- NASA flight director Paul Hill plans to spend the next five days about 63 feet (19 meters) underwater off the Florida Coast near Key Largo.
Wearing full dive gear, the quartet swam down to the Aquarius undersea laboratory Monday afternoon to begin this year's third NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO) exercise -- a week-long event that is meant to mimic aspects of a stay aboard the International Space Station.
"The difference between being in a simulator in Houston and being here is that this is a real mission," Kelly told SPACE.com before the mission. "We're using it as a training analog, but we're actually conducting a real mission underwater."
Located three miles (4.8 kilometers) off the Florida coast at Key Largo, the Aquarius laboratory is about the size of the Russian Zvezda service module and serves as home for a variety of different ocean research projects. It is owned by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and operated by the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.
Two technicians assigned to the Aquarius facility will live and work with the NASA crew underwater to help take care of the habitat.During their stay on the ocean floor, the NASA crew will work on experiments, conduct "extravehicular activities" by diving outside to simulate building segments of a space station and learn to work together and solve problems as they happen with little help from people on the surface.
"The time we spend underwater is very analogous to a shuttle flight," Hill told SPACE.com. "We only have a few days to get the entire mission done, to get all the dives done and the various medical tests that we're doing."
The challenges also go beyond the effort to complete the timeline.
"A lot of it is the interpersonal relationships you have with crew members living in an enclosed space that's in a hostile environment," said Kelly, who served as pilot of the 1999 shuttle mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope.
The psychological aspects of a mission will get a lot of special attention from Hill, who for this adventure is getting a first-hand look at what it's like on the other side of the Mission Control microphones.
Normally it's the astronauts who make the trip into space while it's the flight directors who are responsible for safely managing the mission.
"It certainly feels different being on the crew's end," Hill said. "If somebody is going to make a mistake, or fail at something that the control center gave them to go do, it's going to be the crew member. It's one of those things we just need to make sure we're thinking about."
Hill says he plans to take that renewed sensitivity back to the Flight Director's office.
"We've been doing this business long enough that we have a pretty good idea of the different stresses on the crew and things we can do on the ground that would make the crew's life more miserable, or make things easier for them," Hill said. "Sometimes we lose sight of those things, even though we learn those lessons over and over."
When asked if based on the NEEMO experience it would be a good idea to send a flight director all the way into orbit aboard the space shuttle, Hill enthusiastically agreed -- but for admittedly selfish reasons. The chances of that really happening are probably remote, he said.
"We have a lot of time and money invested in (flight directors) doing what they're doing. It would probably be a tough sell for one of us to have an opportunity to go on board," Hill said. "If it were to come up at all it would only happen if somebody thought there was something particular that one of us could get done in orbit."
The underwater mission was supposed to begin on Sept. 16 but during the early life of Tropical Storm Isidore forecasters weren't completely sure the cyclone was going to miss the Florida Keys, so the dive down to Aquarius was put off.
For the NEEMO crew, the delay felt a lot like a weather-related hold for a shuttle launch.
"It's very similar," Kelly said. "You have to just really put it all into perspective knowing that we have rules that we follow to make sure we do the right thing and be safe, and we have no control over what the weather is doing. As long as you maintain the right attitude and right perspective, it's something that's fairly easy to deal with."
But on Monday the weather was clear enough to allow the crew to begin their dive. It took them about 10 minutes to reach Aquarius, which they quickly entered to run through a safety drill, begin unpacking their gear and set up shop for their shortened stay.
A nine-day mission was the original plan, but now the NEEMO crew will remain five.
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