Update from Charlotte Beskow at ESTEC for the FAR board meeting – Ed.

So, the moment has arrived. It feels almost unreal. We are all sitting in the Erasmus auditorium at Estec, where the ATV5 FAR Board is in process.

ATV-5 Flight Acceptance Review board team at Estec 10 June 2014. Credit: ESA

ATV-5 Flight Acceptance Review board team at Estec 10 June 2014. Credit: ESA

The Final Acceptance Review is a process that started 8 April with the delivery of the first data pack. More documents have been delivered throughout these past few weeks. They have been assessed by a team composed of ATV project team members at ESA joined by independent reviewers taken from the large pool of ESA staff with extensive experience in all aspects of engineering project management.

This is a very important event, but when I compare the atmosphere today to the tense atmosphere of the FAR meetings for ATV 1 and ATV 2, there is a big difference! This highlights the fact that we have an efficient organisation in place – not surprising since we are on our 5th ATV.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that this meeting is a repetition from the previous four ATV FAR boards, but this is not quite true. Each ATV is different; the cargo load is different; integration issues are different; changes compared to previous ATVs are different… In addition, ATV-5 is flying a set of special experiments integrated in the docking cone that will give us important data during the rendezvous (RDV) with the ISS –data that will be very useful for future space activities.