CHAPTER 14 DAY IN THE LIFE: VITAL VISITING VEHICLES—KEEPING THE REMOTE OUTPOST CREWED AND OPERATING 244 items to be disposed off or to be returned to Earth. See Figure 10. Figure 10. Astronauts Karen Nyberg (center) and Chris Cassidy (left), Expedition 36 flight engineers work inside the ESA ATV-4 “Albert Einstein” while docked with the station. ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano (right), flight engineer, is taking the selfie. Timing is Everything As noted above, a great deal of planning is required to orchestrate the coming and going of visiting vehicles. Even with so much planning and training, the flight control team has to be ready at all times for problems and replanning. For example, a timing issue in September 2013 between the ISS and the first Orbital ATK mission affected how the Cygnus calculated it’s relative position, thus causing an automated abort of the rendezvous. The rendezvous could not be immediately resumed since it took the flight control team some time to determine what had happened but also to allow for the docking of the Soyuz that carried the Expedition 37 crew. The uncrewed cargo vehicles have the ability to loiter for several days, whereas the priority is to get the crew to the ISS as quickly as possible. Similar flexibility with a twist was required in September 2008 when the first ATV, called “Jules Verne,” was preparing to be undocked from the ISS. It was scheduled to undock on September 5 and a new Progress vehicle was scheduled to launch on September 10 and dock to the same port. However, MCC-H was in the process of shutting down to prepare for Hurricane Ike as it headed for Houston. The NASA flight control team worked quickly to safely complete the undocking. This scenario was never expected to occur during a hurricane, but the tight schedule required the team to adapt. Five days after conducting the successful undocking, NASA dispatched flight control teams to two different locations to set up one temporary (undisclosed location) and a more permanent (Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama) backup ISS control center in advance of evacuating MCC-H. Both were used. One to several months after arriving at the ISS, the visiting vehicle will depart and conclude its mission. The crew uses the SSRMS to grapple the vehicle and unberth it from the ISS. The crew then manuevers the SSRMS to the release position and releases the vehicle. The vehicle performs a short jet firing to initiate a flight trajectory away from the ISS, followed by a series of manuevers to either destroy itself upon reentry or safely land in the Pacific Ocean for retrieval. As elsewhere in the ISS Program, visiting vehicles have also evolved. Initially, it was envisioned that only one cargo vehicle at a time would berth to the USOS during a given period. It soon became apparent that as schedules shift, sometimes due to launch failures as noted