Advanced Training in Advance

Kurzfassung

The German Space Operations Center (GSOC) of DLR (the German Aerospace Center) is one of the founding places of space operations in Europe. Over decades we have built up large amounts of knowledge and experience in national and international space missions of all kinds. For a long time, it has also been the mission of GSOC not to keep this knowledge exclusive, but to enable others to participate in its knowledge. Over time, that knowledge had to be adapted and expanded to keep up-to-date and to remain at the forefront of developments. Necessarily, there had to be a diversification of competences across the house, as GSOC is aiming at providing the complete value chain of operations ranging from data protection, to software development, from procurement of ground station hardware to console operations, and hosting a secure data center with world-wide connectivity. This inevitably leads to different perceptions about concepts and priorities and decreasing insight into the working reality of colleagues in neighboring departments. While there are ongoing projects in routine operations, large scale events like a satellite LEOP are rare in comparison. This results in a lessening state of proficiency, especially when over time software and hardware are evolving and new staff members are coming in and experienced people leaving teams. There are ways to mitigate the resulting effects. One of them is to provide access to professional training, but there are limits. You can take a course on how to become a project manager, but where can you learn how to be a space flight director? And how do you spread knowledge to staff that is not directly involved into those fields but whose decisions might influence the way things are handled beyond the control room? GSOC has recently implemented an in-house academy to address this challenge. Already very early, the externally offered Spacecraft Operations Course was used to give basic knowledge to all their employees. A new level was reached when we implemented a house-wide LEOP simulation campaign involving all departments. Apart from the general spreading of know-how, this event was used to directly train future flight directors for their tasks, long before their projects provided the opportunities for this. This paper describes the event and the hurdles to implement it. We discuss the perspectives of the groups involved, and the surprising reactions and results and the lessons-learned identified after the event.