CHAPTER 1 SYSTEMS: INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION PLANNING—A ROADMAP TO GETTING IT ALL DONE 16 tied into replanning discussions to obtain the benefit of their situational awareness and experience. They are involved in the planning, even at the OOS stage. During increment execution, crew and ground operators conduct daily planning conferences. The morning conference focuses on describing unique supplementary information for that day’s schedule, whereas the evening conference concentrates on reviewing that day’s accomplishments and reviewing the next day’s detailed plan. An additional lesson learned from the Mir, Skylab, and early ISS flight planning experiences was that crew flexibility can lead to increased crew productivity. Crew timelines today include many activities marked as “flexible,” allowing crew members to perform them whenever they want during the day. These activities have no constraints (e.g., a strict deadline, or when resources such as power are needed). Allowing crew members to perform many of their routine activities such as exercise, the midday meal, and on-board training modules when it makes the most sense for them enhances productivity (e.g., multitasking). In addition, some astronauts—especially those who have flown to the ISS previously— may be more efficient in completing tasks than have been estimated by the ground for a “typical” crew member. Original ISS planning, which was based on Space Shuttle planning heritage, consisted of hard scheduled plans for the crew each day. These activities were to be performed in a linear fashion at prescribed times, thus leaving no option for flexibility based on crew situational awareness or multitasking. Derived from both Skylab and Mir, the notion of a “job jar” or “task list” of additional unconstrained activities folded into ISS operations planning. A task list activity is something that needs to be done at some point, but which doesn’t make it into the estimated time on a given day or week. If the astronauts get ahead on the timeline, which happens if the planning is done well and/or crew members are highly experienced, they may have a few minutes to complete one of these activities. Today, daily crew plans are highly populated with flexible activities and contain a robust task list. This shift in planning philosophy from more-optimized plans to more- flexible plans leads to more crew autonomy. Crew autonomy is seen as necessary for further crew exploration beyond low-Earth orbit or to Mars, where astronauts will be exposed to significant time delays and will thus be required to manage their plans and vehicle more autonomously from ground teams. The ISS has also seen an increase in crew productivity and efficiency with the expanded use of flexibility and task lists. The arrival of new crews to the ISS creates an opportunity for an operational dichotomy where new crew members, who are adjusting to life in space in an unfamiliar environment, are matched with a veteran ground team that operates at a high level of efficiency. To prevent this dichotomy, a throttling-back effect is imposed on the ground team while, at the same time, providing time for the on-board crew to acclimate. Through Gr&Cs, schedulable crew time during the first 2 weeks on orbit is reduced to permit time for adjustment and settling in. This allows the crew and ground to jointly arrive at an operations pace for the increment. This process is repeated with the start of each increment. However, considerations for particular crew complements to account for crew experience are made to increase ISS science returns. For example, the day after Peggy Whitson arrived for her second stay on the ISS, she called the ground team to report completion of all activities on her timeline as well as everything on the task list, and that she would appreciate additional tasks. Another complication is that the ground controllers, who work on weekly shifts, are not tied to specific crew arrivals and departures. As such, those ground controllers will achieve a level of efficiency independent from ISS crews. Lead flight controllers from every system are assigned to each increment to help mitigate this problem. Their task is to ensure uniformity from week to week for a given crew. Over time, the flight controllers and crew members have learned that staying synchronized is crucial, yet doing so non-intrusively is key. Asking a crew member repeatedly whether a task is done can get annoying. The OPTIMIS tool was modified to allow the crew to add crew notes (i.e., brief messages to the ground) in each activity, which will provide additional information about the execution of a particular activity (e.g., stowage information after completing a task, equipment- identifying information such as serial numbers or barcode numbers, or comments about the execution of an activity—how long it really took, procedure issues encountered, etc.). The flight controllers and crew found that this nonverbal means of communicating certain information, as mentioned above, is highly effective and frees up the