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Phase Three of the Oort project's training course was what they called "snake-handling." It was an important one, for the most skilled workers on the Oort program weren't the comet controllers or the pilots who went out and found the comets in the first place. The hardest job there belonged to the snake handlers, who were the people faced with the task of tagging and priming a comet for capture.
To capture the desired comet and send it on its way, it first needed to be threaded with a long, loose chain of instruments, Augensteins, and machines. That was not easy. It was like sculpting dust. That's what comets are, dust and snow; the snow is frozen gases and it has no more structural strength than a Popsicle. Driving the chain through it by remote control from thousands or even millions of kilometers away took skill, not to mention the fact that somehow the whole fragile mass of the comet had to be reinforced enough to stand the thrust of an Augenstein drive. The chain of instrumentation was called a snake, and the people who stitch those chains into the comets' crumbly cores were the ones called snake handlers.
The snakes they handled were probably the hardest in the universe to deal with. Handling cobras would have been a good deal less trouble.