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NASA Deep-Space Mission Resource Planner

Product Design · advanced

You're the Lead Product Manager for Mission Operations at NASA. Design a novel software tool to assist deep-space mission planners in optimizing resource allocation (power, bandwidth, crew time) for long-duration missions, where communication latency is a primary constraint. How would you approach its design to ensure mission success and crew well-being?

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Community approaches

Pavlo’s approach

The structure and functionality of such software is definitely very complex and should be created for the specific tasks. We need to gather and structure all the requirements from the planners and other participants. The things which are clear from the question are:

  1. Planning isn't just an one time process, it's an ongoing thing. Situation can be changed and the resources allocation might be adjusted.
  2. There are multiple users of the tool - planners and consumers.
  3. There are different types of resources which will need different structures for planning

The main issue is the communication, it should be addressed by using preplanned scenarios which don't require the connection. Additionally the data structure should be minimalistic with subportional downloading.