Vehicle Upgrades: Flight Support
Boeing performs engineering support for flight preparation and real-time flight support for NASA. During every shuttle flight, Boeing engineers will support the Mission Evaluation Room (MER), the flight operations center that keeps tabs on everything from loading the External Tank (with hydrogen and oxygen) through landing the vehicle at mission end. The flight controllers and the MER engineer team work together and decide what they are seeing, look at the history of the specific parts involved and all the details and then decide on a recommendation for a plan of action should any problems arise.
Boeing also evaluates any anomalies in the flight hardware as they are processing it for launch. Boeing will have teams of engineers standing by to support NASA should any problems occur.