Now, imagine how hard it would be to know exactly where everything is in someone else's houseżevery pen, every bar of soap, everythingżand to tell them where to find everything they would need that day. Think of how much more difficult it would be if you had never actually even seen the house! That challenge would be a lot like Leelannee Godfrey's job.

Godfrey's job is to help a couple of people keep up with everything in their home, which is the size of a three-bedroom house, but she's never been there. That home, by the way, is the International Space Station (ISS). Godfrey is an inventory stowage officer at NASA's Johnson Space Center.

She works in the Cargo Operations department, which keeps up with all the equipment carried on the Space Shuttle and the ISS.

"My job entails tracking roughly 8,000 items onboard the Station and helping the crew find items they are looking for," Godfrey explained. "We create a 'shopping list,' so to speak, for each day that lists all of the equipment the crew will need to find to perform all of the activities for that day. It helps them know what they're going to be working with."

In order to do that, Godfrey and the Cargo Integration Officer's (CIO) team have to keep an inventory of what is on the Station at any given time. "We are always on call to help the crew or other ground operators find a part that they are looking for onboard," she said.

That means they have to keep up with how much the crew has left of such things as pens, papers, pencils, shampoo, and soap. They have to make lists of items that have been lost. Keeping up with the equipment on the Station involves a great deal of teamwork. Part of that, of course, is working with the crew to find out where things are.

"We will write up a procedure for the crew to look in a certain bag and tell us what they find," she said. Also, while Godfrey's team only maintains the "shopping list" for U.S. ISS activities, they have to work with their Russian counterparts to ensure that the inventory is correct for both the U.S. and Russian parts of the Station.

"They also work with the ISS science experiment group at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center to make sure the stowage information for those experiments is correct. The level of teamwork required will become even more complicated as ISS segments from other nations are added. "Soon, when we get other international partners onboard, we will be integrating with them as we do with the Russians, and we will have even more to keep track of," she said.

Cargo brought by visiting spacecraft also falls under the CIO team's supervision. When a Russian Soyuz capsule or unmanned Progress supply ship arrive, the team tells the ISS crew where to put the items they unpack from the craft.

When a crew nears the end of its time aboard the Space Station, the CIO team tells them which items they need to pack aboard the Soyuz to bring home with them. When the Shuttle visits the Station, it will often bring experiments that are performed on ISS and then brought back on the Shuttle.

The CIO team has to add those items to the ISS database when they arrive, track them while they are there, and then remove them from the database again when the Shuttle departs.

"This creates confusion when you now have to keep track of what supplies goes with what experiment and which ones are staying, and which ones are going back down to the ground," Godfrey said. "It takes a lot of coordination and double checking to make sure what we have is correct."

So, how do Godfrey and her team keep up with items on a Space Station they'll never visit? "Of course it is difficult to picture what is where since we can't see it," Godfrey said.

"But with the help of the mockups and training we have here, as well as video and pictures we get down from the crew, it makes it easier to picture what the crew is seeing." But, she said, they do rely heavily on the ISS crew for help. "The data we have down on the ground and in the database is really only as good as the crew will let it get," she said.

"The crew is the prime stowage personnel. They are responsible for making any updates to the database if they move an item or install it. If they do not update the database themselves, they will let us know that they did, and we'll do it for them. Mike (Foale) and Alexander (Kaleri) who are onboard now for Expedition 8 are very good at making updates to the stowage database."

Very little of this interaction is done through direct communication. During the flight, most of the information exchanged between the CIO team and the ISS crew goes through the CAPCOM, whose job is to talk to the crew on behalf of the Mission Control Center.

When people think of the ISS, it is usually the two or three crew members living there that get all the attention. But, working alongside those astronauts and cosmonauts is a large community on Earth who make it possible for them to live in space.

Thanks to Leelannee Godfrey and her team, an ISS crew member can always find any of the thousands of items on the Station. And, when you're in a situation where every second counts, never having to wonder "Now, where did I put that?" Can be a very nice thing indeed.

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