‘Triple T’ Part of a Long Line of Teams Ensuring Safe Missions

By Bob Granath

During the 30-year history of the Space Shuttle Program, many important payloads were launched. From the Hubble Space Telescope to the International Space Station, history was made. However, the most crucial cargo was human. The team assigned to ensure crews were safely sealed into their spacecraft before they rocketed into orbit was the Closeout Crew led by Travis Tod Thompson.

Known to his friends and colleagues as “Triple T,” Thompson had been working at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center for 32 years when the final Space Shuttle landed in 2011. While the Closeout Crew’s work was the final actions with the astronauts, he insists they were not special.

“There are thousands of people out there with thousands of jobs, each one is equally important,” he said. “The only unique thing about us is we have the last hands-on job before the ‘bird’ flies.”

Ensuring the crews fly safely and successfully is paramount. An example of the concern members of the Space Shuttle processing team had for the astronauts shows in Thompson’s recollection of his early years as an orbiter technician.

“About two days before launch of the fourth flight of the shuttle Columbia, I was at the pad in the crew module using an antiseptic cloth to make sure all the interior surfaces were as contamination free as we could make it,” he said. “While cleaning the seats, I remembered a story my pastor once told.”

In the anecdote, a woman cleaned pews in her church. While doing so, she would pray for whoever would be seated there on Sunday. While the lady didn’t know who would be there from one week to the next, she knew God did.

“But, I knew exactly who would be in the seats I was clearing,“ Thompson said. “So I took that opportunity to pray for each or the astronauts who would fly on that mission.”

‘I wanted to be him.’

Thompson was born on Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. His father was a chief master sergeant in the U.S. Air Force and his mother worked for the McDonnell Aircraft Corporation that later became McDonnell Douglas.

“I got to see my first rocket launches there,” Thompson said. “When I was in the first grade, they let us outside to see a launch.”

When Thompson’s father retired from the Air Force in 1966, the family moved to Titusville, Florida.

“My dad went to work for McDonnell Douglas and mother became the company’s director of HR (Human Resources) and Security,” he said.

That same year, bus tours began allowing visitors to see Kennedy up close. The sights included the mammoth Vehicle Assembly Building, or VAB, where Saturn V rockets were stacked at the time for Apollo missions to the Moon.

“In 1968, I went on a bus tour with my grandmother and my two cousins,” Thompson said. “We were allowed to go into the VAB and I saw my dad walking across the transfer aisle in his McDonnell Douglas coveralls. I just started hollering, ‘Dad!’”

McDonnell Douglas was the contractor for the Saturn V’s third stage that provided the final boost to Earth orbit at liftoff and later fired again sending Apollo astronauts on the trajectory to the Moon.

“When my father walked up and started talking, everybody in the bus group was listening,” Thompson said. “Then I knew, I didn’t want to fly in anything, I wanted to be him and I grew up to be that.”

Thompson followed in his father’s footsteps in 1979 when he began working as a technician for Rockwell International, the company that built the Space Shuttle orbiters. His first assignment as a member of the Closeout Crew began with the STS-8 flight of the shuttle Challenger in August 1983.

The Closeout Crew works in room at the end of an access arm extended from the 195-foot level of the Space Shuttle launch pad’s fixed service structure tower. At the end of the arm is the climate-controlled White Room that was attached to the orbiter’s crew hatch.

“That was my office,” Thompson said.

During preparations a few days before the launch of STS-8, Thompson had a memorable experience.

“I was in the White Room on a Sunday, second shift, as a contingency monitor with an orbiter integrity clerk,” Thompson said. “We were just sitting there and all of a sudden this lightning bolt hit the pad’s MLP (mobile launcher platform). It was the loudest boom I’ve ever heard in my life.”

The strike put a 20-foot crack in the MLP three quarters of an inch wide.

“For the next three hours we had to stay in that White Room with lighting, thunder and the wind blowing,” Thompson said. “They couldn’t send anyone to retrieve us or let us leave until this storm rolled out over the ocean.”

Closeout Crew

The Closeout Crew includes a team lead, known as the Pad Leader, two other shuttle contractor technicians from Kennedy, a NASA quality inspector, two suit technicians from NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston and an astronaut support person.

“We were the only seven people on the pad that weren’t flying,” Thompson said. “We all had different duties.’

The Closeout Crew is responsible for safety at the launch pad, as well as evacuation training for astronauts and others who work there. The team performed final checks of the astronauts’ launch entry suits, assisted crews into their seats and strapped them in for launch. Thompson and his team also ensured the interior of the shuttle’s crew module was properly configured for flight. When all was ready, they closed and sealed the hatch.

“They are the last people we see before that door is closed,” said former astronaut Pam Melroy, a veteran of three Space Shuttle missions.

However, the Closeout Crew’s most important role is to make certain the astronauts fly safely.

“I want to look them in the eye and ensure them that everything going on is good because they’re getting ready leave the Earth,” Thompson said.

According to Melroy, astronauts appreciate the care the Closeout Crew takes with their jobs.

“The Closeout Crew had an awesome set of responsibilities,” she said. “Assisting the crew getting inside and getting us strapped in is complicated. The shuttle is in the vertical orientation. You’re getting ready to closeout a huge spaceship.”

In 1984, Thompson and much of the Space Shuttle workforce at Kennedy transitioned to Lockheed Space Operations Company. As NASA’s Shuttle Processing Contractor, the company took charge of all ground processing of the Space Shuttle orbiters, external fuel tank and solid rocket boosters.

Another transition took place in 1996 when United Space Alliance, or USA, was awarded the Space Program Operations Contract. Working for USA in 2001, Thompson became the Closeout Crew’s Pad Leader during the final ten years of the Space Shuttle Program.

A limited liability company owned equally by Lockheed Martin and Boeing, USA was responsible all Space Shuttle operations not only at Kennedy, but also Johnson and the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

‘You’re the only sir.’

One of the most high-profile Space Shuttle mission was the STS-95 mission of the shuttle Discovery in 1998. The seven-member crew included legendary astronaut John Glenn. Flying in space at age 77, it was 36 years after he became the first American to orbit the Earth in 1962. He also was about to retire after 35 years in the U.S. Senate representing his home state of Ohio.

“I got to put him in (the shuttle) on his second flight,” Thompson said. “What was cool was on launch day he showed up at the pad and he kept calling me ‘sir.’ I said, ‘you’re the only sir in this room.’”

The closeout crew not only assisted astronauts as they climb aboard for launch, they were on hand at the Shuttle Landing Facility to help following the orbiter’s return. After Discovery’s hatch was opened when STS-95 landed, Thompson saw that Glenn looked like he wasn’t feeling well.

“I couldn’t let Mr. Glenn out of the ship in the condition he was in,” he said. “I also couldn’t let the other six out without Mr. Glenn, because of the way the news media would have reacted.”

After about 45 minutes, Glenn said he was ready to get out and walk around the shuttle.

“If you’re sure, let’s go,” Thompson said.

During the Space Shuttle era, several movies were produced at Kennedy about various aspects of spaceflight, including Space Cowboys. Produced and directed by Clint Eastwood, it stared Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones, Donald Sutherland and James Garner. They portrayed four older ex-test pilots recruited to fly a Space Shuttle mission to repair an aging Soviet satellite.

“That was one of the fun things I got to do,” Thompson said. “I was Clint Eastwood’s technical advisor for Space Cowboys and I was in it.”

Thompson took his father to see the film after its release in 2000.

“We’re sitting there watching the movie and the crew comes out of the (crew quarters in the) O&C (Operations and Checkout) Building and in the scene I’m right behind Clint Eastwood,” he said. “Then, right in the middle of the theater, dad says, “Trav, there you are! There you are!”

Thompson remained with United Space Alliance through the end of the Space Shuttle Program and he is proud of his team’s contribution to safe and successful missions.

“This is all I’ve ever wanted to do,” he said. “I’ve loved every minute of it — every bit of working here — we’ve grown to be a family and it’s been a great experience.”

‘A long line of space workers’

Thompson continues to work with his space center colleagues at the American Space Museum in Titusville. The facility is a program of the non-profit U.S. Space Walk of Fame Foundation working to preserve the history of the U.S. Space program through exhibits, educational programs and tours conducted by former space center workers such as Thompson.

Last summer, Thompson donated his Closeout Crew coveralls to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia.

Thompson says that behind that uniform, “there’s a long line of space workers.”

“I take a lot of pride in that,” he said. “I’m happy that I can say that many of them are my friends.”

Melroy, who now is NASA’s deputy administrator, was on hand for the July 9, 2021 ceremony. She presented Thompson with a photomontage of the White Room to commemorate the addition of his Closeout Crew suit to displays surrounding the Space Shuttle Discovery.

“Travis exhibited the best characteristics of technical excellence including leadership,” she said. “The Closeout Crew had to work well together and they needed a good leader to do that. He’s very special, but he also represents all those special people at the Kennedy Space Center who helped prepare the Space Shuttle for launch.”

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