ESA Planning and the Increment Requirements Document

A few weeks ago, the Increment Requirements Document (IRD) for Increment 65 was released by my boss, Kirsten MacDonell, the Utilization Planning Team Leader. This is the official way for the European Space Agency to declare what we intend to do during a particular increment.

"What's an increment?"  you say.
Glad you asked.
Okay, maybe I should back up.

An increment is how the international space agencies define a particular period of time aboard the space station. Back in the day it was defined by flights. For example, the period between a Soyuz flight bringing crewmembers and taking them back down. For a long time, an increment was about three months - so you would have an increment management team managing an "increment pair".  For example, last April I finished up working (in my role as Requirements Planning Team Lead) for the real-time work for Increment 61/62. This ran from 03-OCT 2019 through 17-April 2020 and was in line with the launch and download of the crew with the 61 Soyuz.

This is a snapshot of the flight plan for Increment 61/62 (source: NASA) so you can see how we divide the increment pair. Incidentally, the flight plan never ends up executing how we think it will initially. This is from a flight plan early last October - and a lot of things switched up when we actually executed.  For example, you can see that the SPX-crewed vehicle was initially thought to fly in January 2020 - but it didn't get launched until May 30. This is just the nature of working with complicated things like rockets and space stations. You need to have a lot of flexibility and a lot of patience.  

It makes a lot of sense to divide things into increments. That way, you can plan for certain chunks of time - not everything at once. Having increments defined like this also means that you can switch out management teams. Managing space station activities can be pretty intense. So you can have a group of people working on "real-time" operations and all the urgency and craziness this implies - but then they get to hand off after a while. One advantage of this is that it prevents everyone from getting burned out and hating our jobs. It also makes sense in terms of allocating resources (like crewtime) and balancing the budget. I don't think it's any surprise that the increments also tend to line up nicely with the end of the U.S. Government Fiscal year (end of September).

Anyhoo...we try to get things on the plan pretty far left of boom. So the IRD comes out a year before the increment starts.  In April 2021 we will be starting Increment 65.  Hence the recent release of the IRD.

Before the IRD is released, Kirsten and her team do a lot of work - looking at the crew composition, the flights, the state of all the payloads in the development pipeline, the national stakeholders, the commercial goals, etc. And then this is kluged together into a no-kidding look at "here's what we think we can do for increment 65".  This is the IRD. This is pushed up the chain-of-command to the Research and Utilization Group Leader who gives it his blessing and says, "go forth and do." And we do.

Industry and Operations professionals who are working on ISS payloads use the IRD as their bible. If the IRD says we're going to do something, we're going to do it, and everything needs to be put together on time. Because this is an official ESA document, there's a formal process for changing things. If the flight plan has changed and this pushes an activity out of the increment, or if we've decided not to do a particular activity, I'll put together a "Change Notice". This is presented by the Increment Manager to the Research and Utilization Group Leader and discussed by the stakeholders. If the changes are agreed to, then the IRD is amended.

Of course, that's just the first phase...more on this stuff later.