21 DAY IN THE LIFE: LIVING AND WORKING IN SPACE AND ON THE GROUND CHAPTER 2 arrives. The pattern of launches and the number of crew members on board at any time will change when the new commercial crew vehicles being built by the United States are ready to rotate crews around 2019 (see Chapter 14). ISS operations are managed in periods called increments, which are defined by the on-board crew complement: an increment is the period of time in which a dedicated crew of astronauts and cosmonauts are on board the ISS under a specific commander. Each new increment begins when one commander hands over to another before departing the ISS. Before 2009, each increment lasted approximately 6 months – the full duration of each Soyuz crew’s stay on orbit. Today, each increment corresponds to the period of overlap between two Soyuz crews, so each increment lasts about 2-4 months, and each ISS crew member serves on two increments. As discussed in Chapter 1, preparation for flight begins years in advance. A team of flight controllers is assigned to manage the increment. Depending on each discipline’s involvement in crew training and mission planning, flight controller assignment may happen a year or two before the increment begins. A lead flight director is assigned to manage this team and lead the overall operational mission integration and preparation. The flight control team follows the six crew members through their final training as they transition from generic skills to lessons more closely tailored to the specific tasks and research that will be performed during their time on orbit. The two different Soyuz crews will launch 2 to 4 months apart, and each will be part of two increments. Therefore, each crew may work with two different lead flight directors and teams during its time on board the ISS. This chapter describes how the team of flight controllers in Houston, Texas, their international partner counterparts around the world, and the ISS Program, engineering, safety, and medical support teams work together to manage day-to-day operations of the most complicated international laboratory ever built. Before the Crew Reaches Space Mission integration and preparation is organized through a Joint Operations Panel (JOP), chaired by the increment lead flight director. All of the assigned flight controllers, instructors, ISS Program representatives, engineering and safety team members, along with partner teams supporting payload operations and international partner teams are members of the JOP. This team will review new operations, priority adjustments or requests from ISS Program management, new candidates for complex tasks such as extravehicular activities (EVAs) or vehicle relocations from one docking port to another, and new data on ISS systems performance. The team also reviews any significant changes being made to crew training and, in some cases, participates in the actual training events. For example, each crew of six holds one emergency scenarios training event during a time when both sets of three crew members are in Houston. The lead flight director, along with his or her lead training team, will observe the event (Figure 1). Figure 1. Expedition 49 astronauts and cosmonauts discuss an emergency scenario exercise with the training team and the lead flight director. From left to right: Andrei Borisenko, Interpreter Ksenia Shelkova, Sergey Ryzhikov, Shane Kimbrough, instructors Amy Holloway-Margiolos (standing), Bobby Fard, and Elisca Hicks, and Flight Director Amit Kshatriya (standing). The flight director and flight controllers assigned to lead that activity might also observe other significant training events, such as EVA training in the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory or rendezvous training on the simulator for visiting vehicles. Flight control team members take