The Proxima mission report is finished. I finished it in April. But it isn't released yet. I'm still trying to integrate the reviewer comments. And I need to get data protection notices to the scientists (and Thomas). This has taken a lot of time within ESA - because the process wasn't very well-defined. But as of this week, the oneness is on me. Unfortunately, I have a ton of other work, so it's difficult to get this out the door.
Today I'm attending the Payload Analysis and Integration (PAI) meeting. This is a once-monthy event where the Payload Integration Managers (PIMs) present the status of the payloads they're supporting. By "Payloads" I mean the individual experiements or demonstration that are performed on the International Space Station. The PIMs are the unsung heros of the ISS. They do all the dirty work to make sure everything's on track, that everybody has what they need, that the payloads pass all the checks. When things go well and the payloads fly without a hitch, nobody notices anything or thinks to thank them. The only time people notice the PIMs is when something has gone wrong - and then the PIMs get the blame (although it's rarely their fault).
I'm not managing a particular payload. Instead, I'm looking at the whole research complement for Increment 68 (starting on 30 September). Today, during the PAI, I sit with the flight plan, my assessments sheets, and resources table, and I listen. This is the time to get the "ground-truth" of what's happening with the payloads. We can spot problems, and adjust our expectations for the increment.
The most recent major change was the slip of the upload vehicle, NG-18. This was scheduled to come up in Increment 67 (the current increment) but it's moved to the right and now it falls in my increment. This means that all the hardware on that flight will now move into my purview. So we have to account for the upload - and all the crewmember activities in Increment 68. This isn't too much of a problem for us at the moment, since we have enough crewtime in the increment to get all the activities done. This is because the Space-X crewed vehicles have seats for 4 astronauts - and this gives us a whole other person on board the station for our increments. When we were using the Soyuz vehicles for crewmember upload, we would only have 6 crewmembers (max) at a time. And of these we could only use the crewtime of the USOS crew.
Our program hasn't quite caught up with the additional crewtime, however. It's not like we can just ramp up science. These programs take years and years to develop. But it's frustrating to realize that we have all this crewtime we can spend and nothing to spend it on. After years of scrimping and saving, our pockets are bursting, but the stores are all closed.
Last summer, during Pesquet's Alpha mission, we had all this excess crewtime floating around. And I imagine this was so frustrating for Thomas. He is a complete workhorse. This is a guy who will do voluntary science in all his spare time. He wants to be of value. And we didn't have any extra science to give him.
ESA's come up with the solution of having "off the shelf" science proposed - so we can use the brains of scientists and the equipment we currently have on the ISS for "just in case" crewtime. They put out an announcement of opportunity - and you can find it here. Of course, it doesn't solve the immediate crisis, but it's a step in the right direction.
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