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01

Mission operations team preparing at their consoles before the shift begins

MISSION ONEORIENT · ASSIGN · OPERATE

Mission One

ORIENT, ASSIGN,

OPERATE.

“Before you fly anything, your team needs to know who runs what.”

Assign the three roles, then go and find the spacecraft on the console. Ten questions are scored in the platform, and seven of them are about the fleet rather than the crew.

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02

Brief

BRIEF THE MISSION

Mission One puts your team on nine identical Microsat spacecraft in low Earth orbit, with three ground stations holding continuous contact and forty minutes of run time at real speed. Nothing is scripted to go wrong, and that is deliberate: this is the only mission where the platform does not act on you. Identical is the word that matters. A reading you take off one spacecraft is a reading that should hold across all nine, so anything that does not match is telling you something.

▷ Scenario

Spacecraft: Nine identical Microsats
Orbit regime: Low Earth orbit, circular
Altitude: About 722 km
Inclination: 40 degrees
Run: 2400 seconds at 1.0x
Ground stations: London, Dubai, Singapore
Scripted events: None

▷ Your objective

Orient the team and run nominal operations.

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Mission One · what each role works

THREE ROLES, NINE SPACECRAFT

Nine identical Microsats, three ground stations in continuous contact, and nothing scripted to go wrong. The work splits three ways and it is not an even split: Satellite Operations carries the spacecraft and the link, Payload Operations carries the power chain, and the Mission Lead carries the authority calls. Click a role to see what it holds this mission.

▷ MISSION LEAD

You direct. You do not work a console.

Focus: authority on a quiet flight.

· Own the objective for the window
· Declare go for payload operations once comms checkout is complete
· Name who commands the sun-pointing manoeuvre and who verifies it
· Take the first call when downlink quality will not carry the tasking
· Call go / no-go on commanded actions

A mission lead standing at a supervisory console directing the team, with overview screens behind

TEAM SHAPE · Assign the three names now. You hold these roles for every mission ahead, no swaps. If you are flying solo you hold all three and move between them.

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04

Method

READING THE SPACECRAFT

Five reads carry Mission One: where to look, where the spacecraft are, what they are making, where they are pointed, and how well they are heard. Nine identical vehicles means a reading that holds on one should hold on all nine, so each read is also a comparison. Click a step for the reasoning behind it.

▷ The five reads

Eight surfaces, and they are not interchangeable.

Controls, Images, Schedule, Telemetry, Messages, Plots, Map and Timeline. Two of them can hold the same quantity in different forms, so before you go looking, name what you need: a value, a trend, a position, or a time. The surface follows from the kind of question. An operator who skips that step searches instead of reads, and a contact window does not wait.

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05

Simulate

FLY THE MISSION IN ZENDIR

Zendir, the digital twin and mission simulation platform Kestrel procured, replicates your satellite operations center. Everything you rehearsed here you now do for real inside it: one mission objective and ten scored questions. The ten questions land on the console reads and the authority calls you just walked. Run it in three steps: take your assigned consoles, fly the one objective and answer the ten questions in platform where they are scored, then note the score and come back here for the debrief. Your facilitator provides Zendir access, and two things must be true before you fly.

▷ Before you fly · your attestation

▸ Attest to both before you fly

▷ Scored in Zendir

This mission is worth 100 points, scored in-platform. Points accumulate across Missions One through Five, and the highest cumulative team finishes as the Top SCOR Team.

▷ Consoles ready

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Return

NOW THAT YOU ARE BACK

Zendir scored your mission out of 100 toward the Top SCOR Team standings. Note where you landed, then run the debrief while it is fresh. Work these three questions in order; the last one is the one that becomes an engineering update in the quarterly SCOR exercise, the standing review where SCOR and Satellite Design & Engineering act on mission findings.

▷ Debrief · 01

What did the platform show you that the deck did not?

The gap between rehearsal and a live console is where the real learning sits.

▷ How to run it

Go around the crew once, one observation each, no discussion until everyone has spoken. Write the observations down before debating them; the first answer is usually the honest one.

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END

Mission One complete · Mission Two next

FOCUS.

Mission One is complete: you flew it in Zendir and your score is on the board. Mission Two takes the same crew into a working Earth-observation flight, where the windows are short, the tasking is real, and there is a product at the end that somebody downstream will act on.

CARRY FORWARD

The three roles you assigned, and the console reads you learned. Mission Two runs both against a live tasking.

IN MISSION TWO

The pass lifecycle, acquisition to loss of signal, over two tasking regions and four ground stations.

⌂ COURSE HOME MISSION TWO

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