by KYW's Michelle Durham
When astronauts are in flight, Mission Control in Houston is their lifeline.
Remember Apollo 13?
"Houston, we have a problem."
Gene Kranz was the flight director for that mission, and he managed the team that brought three stranded astronauts safely back to Earth.
Today, Mike Sarafin is a NASA flight director. He said he's has had to deal with some potentially life-threatening emergencies on his missions, too:
"We've had a torn solar array on one of the space shuttle missions. We've had damage to the thermal protection system on the shuttle a number of times."
Flight directors are responsible for shuttle and Mission Control operations, and with tasks such as getting the shuttle safely docked to the International Space Station.
Sarafin takes it in stride but notes that during a mission it can be a more-than-full-time job:
"I was working a lot of hours. By the end of that one week I had 110 hours, and I was getting phone calls in the middle of the night. And I think it was after the second phone call (in one night) my wife says, 'I hate this mission.' I told my boss and he said, 'Tell your wife congratulations -- she's now officially the wife of a flight director!' "
There have been some emergencies no one could fix. He recalls the day in 2003 they lost the space shuttle Columbia on re-entry with seven astronauts aboard:
"That is something that will be with me for a long, long time. I went up into East Texas to help with the recovery effort -- it was very therapeutic."
As he helped to collect pieces of shuttle debris, he resolved to do all he could to prevent another tragedy.
A look inside NASA's Mission Control in Houston for the Apollo, Shuttle and International Space Station missions:
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