Timothy “TJ” Creamer, who this week joined the ranks of Christopher Kraft, Eugene Kranz and Glynn Lunney as one of NASA’s flight directors, is no stranger to Mission Control.
Over the course of his 20-year career at NASA, Creamer has been certified as a capsule communicator, “capcom” — the flight controller that relays commands to the crew members in space — and for four years, led the team that coordinates science operations on the International Space Station as the payload operations director at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama.
And, oh yes, he also worked closely with Mission Control during his 161 days living onboard the space station as an Expedition 22/23 flight engineer in 2010.
Creamer is the first-ever astronaut-turned-flight director in the more than 50 years NASA has been assigning people to fly into space and others to oversee their missions from the ground.