It’s just not the work. Somebody built the pyramids. Somebody’s going to build something.
Pyramids, Empire State Building—these things just don’t happen.
—Mike Lefevre, from Working,
by Studs Terkel
No truer words could have been said, especially when it comes to working on one of NASA’s space shuttles, in this case, Discovery. Since its return to flight in July 2005, almost every aspect of this orbiter was inspected, removed and replaced where appropriate. Then it was monitored, inspected and reinspected— section by section, piece by piece, like its three main engines, hydraulics, landing wheels, crew compartment, cockpit windows and some of the approximately 24,000 external tiles.
But these things just don’t happen.
 Over the years, I have wanted to photograph what I felt was the gap between the hardware of human spaceflight and what is seen ascending the skies over the Kennedy Space Center toward low Earth orbit. So in my view, this gap—mostly behind the scenes—is the collective effort from the day-to-day workforce that inspects, replaces, integrates, tests and prepares a preflight shuttle orbiter for human spaceflight. As a result, I wanted to portray the people whose day job is to work on a spaceship in an Earth-based hangar at the Kennedy Space Center.
In January 2006, months away from its familiar vertical launch pad configuration— before it was attached to its stack of orange fuel tank and white solid booster rockets—Discovery was horizontal, encased within a maze of scaffolding, electrical tubing and clean-room compartments in what’s called its Orbiter Processing Facility (OPF)—a spotless industrial-like hanger illuminated by a combination of yellowish sodium vapor lights and numerous red racks of florescent lights.
With access afforded me by both NASA and the United Space Alliance (USA), I caught the better part of the first shift on a Wednesday in mid-January. And although New Horizons was on a launch pad poised for its tenyear, four-billion-mile journey to the planet Pluto, the men and women in the high bay (the area where the Orbiter is parked) of Orbiter Processing Facility 3 were preparing Discovery for a summer 2006 launch for its 122 nautical miles up to the International Space Station orbiting planet Earth.
In the areas surrounding the Discovery, I met and photographed individuals who are both veterans and newcomers in the more than quartercentury life of shuttle operations. People like orbiter operations manager Elizabeth “Betty” Muldowney, first hired by Rockwell International as a quality control supervisor on Columbia in late 1979; Chad Kruger, an aerospace technician since 2001, working on the reinsertion of the orbiter’s three engine bells; composite technician Danny Haynes, who since 1990, has worked on the thermal protection system that surrounds the Orbital Maneuvering System (OMS) thrusters; Melanie Moon, a lead orbiter integrity monitor; and Nancy Patskoski, an aerospace inspector working within the aft engine compartment of Discovery.
And so it goes: people so far behind the typical scenes of launch and landing that it’s difficult to recognize they make their living working on a spaceship.
I guess you can say things just don’t happen.
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