23 DAY IN THE LIFE: LIVING AND WORKING IN SPACE AND ON THE GROUND CHAPTER 2 talk through in the morning DPC. On some mornings, crew members are also busy with life sciences and medical data collection—e.g., drawing blood samples, etc.—in which case some post-sleep time is blocked for them after DPC to make up for their early activities. Once the DPC is complete, the crew day begins. A video camera is turned on, and is usually in the US Laboratory module, Destiny, which is generally a thoroughfare for most of the crew. If science or other work is planned in other modules, cameras will be used in those places, as well. The ability to see the crew members, sometimes looking “over their shoulder” to follow their activities, helps the team on the ground understand the situation on board, anticipate questions, and turn around answers more effectively (Figure 2). But the video is treated with special care. After all, the ISS is not just a laboratory: it is where the crew members live. Cameras are not used outside their scheduled working week, or in areas where a private activity such as a family conference, medical checkup, or exercise is taking place. Figure 2. Flight Engineer Kjell Lindgren is photographed in the US Laboratory as he prepares one of the lockers for installation of the Common Communications for Visiting Vehicle hardware that will be used by the new commercial crew vehicles (Chapter 14). Morning DPC occurs around 1:30 a.m. in Houston—basically in the middle of the night for the flight controllers. Mission Control is quiet at this hour. Usually, only the flight director, core systems team, and any specialists needed to support the crew’s morning activities are on console. On a good day, the increment team is at home and asleep. As the increment team starts to wake up in Houston—around the crew’s lunchtime—they start checking in with the real-time team to see how things are going. Unless they got called in overnight for a problem, or came in early to watch a particular activity, the increment lead flight controllers will start by reading their discipline’s console logs from the past few shifts. This tells them what has happened in their system, maybe what agreements have been reached with their international partner counterparts, or what questions have come up from the crew or other team members. Some mornings, everything checks out as expected. However, most of the time, something unexpected is documented in the logs or on the crew’s timeline, which means the flight controller’s first order of business will be to figure out what went wrong, or what needs to be replanned. The increment lead flight director also hits the ground running by reading the console logs. He or she checks