Long before a mission began, planners and engineers would go through a rigorous process of collecting information about the experiments and other activities which were going to occur during the mission.
Each scientist on the ground whose experiment was chosen to fly on the mission submitted information about all the steps, procedures, and resources which were necessary to perform their experiment. The steps included things like taking a photograph or stirring the contents of a test tube. The resources might have included the use of astronauts, equipment and even communication satellites.
This information was discussed and negotiated until a complete set of requirements existed. Then, this information was entered into the data collection software that we called the activity model editor.
ESP provided a full toolkit of model editing capabilities including copying, importing from ASCII files, etc. The model editor ran in a terminal emulator and was primarily form-based.
The display below shows the form for editing a step.
