Over the last two years, NASA and its U.S. This will allow increased facility occupancy by relaxing crew time constraints for facility installation, operations, and maintenance. To ensure maximum use of crew time for research, a set of reserve activities are always available on orbit, and if mission changes allow additional research to be completed, the scheduling of these activities can increase crew time use in a given period to slightly greater than 100 percent.īecause it is a limiting factor, the ISS Program is working to expand the availability of crew time for research through efficiencies, and through future augmentation to seven crew planned with the arrival of commercial crew capability in 2017. This is a minimal number representing the time when a crewmember is specifically scheduled to complete a research activity during the work day. Many experiments require little or no crew time, but it is a constraining factor for research that needs a human operator particularly in the internal research facilities and duty cycles to successfully complete research objectives.īased on the overall program requirements for safe operations with 6 crew, a minimum of 35 hours per week is treated as the US segment crew time baseline for estimating the percentage of crew time used for research. Crew time is used to maintain the ISS systems, for sleep and hygiene, and to complete ISS research tasks. The baseline for estimating the percentage occupancy is the NASA facilities at assembly complete.Ĭrew time for research is the percentage of crew time available for research that was used in a given planning period. A combination of occupancy of multi-user rack facilities at the sub-rack-level, instruments occupying external sites, and facility-class rack use are averaged together to determine the overall facility occupancy. The level of facility utilization is measured by the combination of occupancy of internal research facility sites, occupancy of external research facilities, and the use of available duty cycles of operational facilities. These are measured every six months based on the ISS research planning cycle. As long as transportation is not a limiting factor, the progress toward increasing utilization can be measured in two dimensions: facility occupancy, and use of available crew time for research. Continued funding and development of new research and technology payloads and the continued availability of the commercial cargo vehicles and International Partner vehicles is required to increase ISS utilization.Īt this time, transportation capability is not limiting research use of ISS however actual launch dates and cargo capacity for new research payloads may affect the progress toward increasing utilization if the flights flow into subsequent years. The demand for use of ISS for research is driven by the funding of research by NASA, other government agencies and the private sector. The supply or capacity of the laboratory to support research is determined by the infrastructure in orbit, the transportation system, and the crew availability. Increasing facility utilization (subsequently referred to as “occupancy”) is a function of the demand for the use of ISS and the supply or capacity of the laboratory to support research.
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