A Maintenance Work Station for Space Station 860933

The new and extended challenges presented by the NASA Space Station Program require different approaches from the current Shuttle Program. The twenty plus year life span of the space station itself will necessitate that maintenance and repair of critical items occur on-orbit. In order to conserve crew time there should be a central location for maintenance and repair activities which contains the needed tools, equipment, and support functions. This centralized location would be a Maintenance Work Station (MWS) applicable to maintenance and repair activities which would take place onboard Space Station. Maintenance tasks could range from card replacement to a complete disassembly of a unit in order to locate the problem. This MWS must be integrated into an overall space station data management subsystem. In particular, direct communication with the inventory control management subsystem is important. Maintenance and servicing tasks often involve replacing parts in equipment; therefore, the crew must have real time access to the inventory in order to perform the tasks efficiently and properly. A MWS should provide the level of maintenance for a particular piece of equipment to keep it operating, to bring it back to an operating mode, or to allow it to be removed for further work and/or to be replaced the MWS must incorporate the operational and human characteristics of decision making and problem solving to facilitate human productivity and decrease crew task time. The MWS design should therefore provide a hardware/software/workbench configuration that allows the crew to efficiently and safely perform maintenance and repair activities.