Florian Sellmaier - Spacecraft Operations

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Timing is everythingthis is especially true for spaceflight operations. 2014 is a special year for the European space community, the year that started with the wake-up of ROSETTA, ESAs comet chaser, with Philae, the German comet lander, which is on its extraterrestrial voyage since 2004. It has been awoken from his hibernation and is providing us with data during its carefully planned first approach on a comet67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

In November 2014, the mission culminates in the descent of the lander PHILAE to the surface of the comets frozen nucleusthe resulting measurements may help us answer some of the fundamental questions about the evolution of life on earth. Comets are considered as veterans of our solar systemtheir analysis provides insights in the early days of our galactic home.

Another fact which makes 2014 quite special for the European spaceflight community is the mission of two Europeans to the International Space Stationnever before have we seen two long duration ESA missions within one year. Alexander Gerst has the chance to beat Thomas Reiters record of logging the longest time in one space mission for a German. Samantha Cristoforetti is only the second ESA female astronautand the first Italian woman in space. During their stay in orbit, both will collect data for many months of scientific research and definitely awake the public interest in spaceflight in their home countries.

In this fascinating year falls the publication of the book Spaceflight Operations. It discusses important principles and aspects of the operation of space vehicles. Designated experts of the DLRs German Space Operations Center (GSOC), ESAs European Space Operations Center (ESOC) and the University of Southampton have put together a handbook for operations, which provides not only a good overview but also the expert background information, to make the book not only a theoretical description, but a vivid testimonial of many years of experience. Both the GSOC and ESOC spaceflight operations centers were founded in 1967 and GSOCs manned spaceflight history dates back to 1985 with the German spacelab mission D-1.

The authors of this book are involved in many of the most exciting space missions and projects currently ongoing: Columbus and the International Space Station, ROSETTA and the lander PHILAE, TerraSAR-X and Tandem-X, the European Data Relay System EDRS and the space robotic mission DEOS. They have worked during the preparation and execution phases, acting in their roles as managers, engineers, planners, subsystem specialists and flight controllers. It is inspiring to read their articles and to listen to their lessons learnt.

It is my desire that the book will provide both an interest and stimulus for future missionsand may help to improve subsequent operations concepts.

This book originally grew out of the Spacecraft Operations Course, a 1-week lecture and exercise series that has been held annually at the German Space Operations Center (GSOC) in Oberpfaffenhofen for the past 21 years. The handout, which was a collection of slides in the very beginning, changed into a book over time. Still, we realized that there is currently no book that deals exclusively with spacecraft operations, so we expanded our project by adding to and detailing the chapters so that we could complete it in book form. As before, most of the chapters are based on lectures from our current Spacecraft Operations Course. However, the target audience of this book is not only the participants of the course but also students of technical or scientific courses, as well as technically interested people who want to gain a deeper understanding of spacecraft operations.