Ten months out from Increment 65

I'm focused on planning for Increment 65 which, according to NASA's 15-June Flight plan, is scheduled to start on 01-April 2021 when the crew of the 64 Soyuz comes up. At this point, the flight plan is super uncertain, so it's difficult to plan. This is particularly true when planning for human physiology. For example, the flight plan currently lists no names for the 64 Soyuz. This doesn't mean that crewmembers aren't targeted for this, it's just that there's enough flux that we don't know for sure who these might be.
At the moment, the flight plan tells me that between April and October 2021 there will be as many as six crewed vehicles. These are:

• 63 Soyuz (3-person crew) - returning just after Increment 65 starts (within the first two weeks of April 2021)
• 64 Soyuz (3-person crew) - The up- and download of this vehicle currently defines the boundary of Increment 65 - coming up in April and down again in October 2021. 
• SpaceX-Crew-2 (4-person crew). At the moment this is projected to come down some time in the summer months 2021.  
•  Boeing Crewed Flight Vehicle (3 person crew)- currently projected sometime in this increment
• US Commercial Vehicle -Crew-3 (4-person crew). It isn't known whether this will be Space-X or Boeing. This will come up a little while after Crew-2 comes back down. 
• 65 Soyuz (3-person crew). This will come up at the end of the increment, right before the 64 Soyuz heads back to Earth.

As you can see, we're looking to have between 7 and 13 people on-board the ISS at any given time. Also (fingers crossed) we may have two ESA crewmembers in this increment (one on Crew 2 and one on Crew 3). This is really awesome for us space scientists because it means more people able to do science for us. But it's also complicated because the space on the ISS is limited. This means a challenging work/living environment for a lot of people. It may also impact the science. Sometimes a payload will take up the entire space in a laboratory like the ESA Columbus module. For example, ESA has a payload called "GRASP" which requires that the crewmember be suspended in the center of the laboratory wearing a virtual-reality headset, and complete tasks while his/her movements are tracked by cameras (this is actually pretty cool).  You can imagine that nobody else can be in the lab while this equipment is set up. 

This is ESA Astronaut Alexander Gerst performing a science session of "Grasp" in Increment 56. We were having trouble with the tracking cameras - because they were picking up too much ambient light - so Alex spread out the German flag to absorb the reflected light. The crazy thing is: this worked. We got good science out of this session. (Source: NASA). 

Another interesting problem is that there are payloads which are extremely sensitive to movements and vibrations. ESA has a payload called Electromagnetic Levitator (EML) which suspends metal alloys in a magnetic field and subjects them to rapid melt/cool cycles in a furnace. It's a really neat experiment but it's also super-sensitive. So we can only run this during the night hours when the crewmembers stop moving around the station. Will payloads like this be affected by the extra crew on board?

Okay, so I couldn't find a picture of EML science - but I did find this comic I worked on with the brilliant Ed Grace and ESA public affairs folks during Increment 55/56 (Source: ESA Twitter) which gives EML a personality. Hey - this may be a science blog, but I don't mind anthropomorphizing space equipment. 

I know there are a ton of other complications with having so many people on board (such as where to sleep, toilet use, etc...) but I'm not going to worry about those in my planning. NASA has those covered, and our ladies and gents upstairs are incredibly professional, so I'm sure they'll figure out how to manage gracefully. I mean, they agreed to have a rocket strapped to their back and to not shower for months at a time while we boss them around to do our science for us, so they're pretty rugged. 

The Increment 65 Manager wants me to put together some slides for a Friday meeting to summarize our planning situation and strategy, our milestone dates, and to identify watch-items as the uncertain future comes more into focus. So...back to work!