Scheduling as an interoperability service and its security aspects

THE space missions are becoming more complex. This is variously prominent, either for the external matters or only internal, or both. In any case the interoperability between different partners and systems is becoming more important, as managing and financing the complete mission by only one agency or organization is not viable anymore. Previously, often the missions were driven by some national interests, prepared and executed by one national space organization. Eventual information exchange (management, data) to external partners varied, but in principle in many cases the external interfaces were coined each time as new and proprietary. In the best case, the biggest or strongest organization imposed its interface on others, which led to some kind of standardization. We say “kind of” because the effect is that many organizations use the specific standard, but actually nobody is really happy with that because the interface is often old and does not support modern requirements. But because of the inertia of the big organizations, nobody has enough resources and willingness to change things. This is how the space operations world still uses many documents manually set up together, containing not only the management or contractual matters, but also technical content. The interface control documents (ICDs) and detailed mission requirements (DMRs) contain often a lot of strictly technical information, which may be a subject of change. The information is, of course, placed in these documents for a reason, which is in most cases configuration of some equipment. This brings actually another interface into the game, which we all accept more or less silently as given and maybe sometimes even ignore all the issues connected to it: the human. Someone needs to read the ICD or DMR, take the respective