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On this page we outline the expectations for tome commitments and communication availabilities throughout the team.

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Documentation: Documentation is not fun, but it needs to be done. We would rather one spends a bit more time creating a well-written tutorial, readme file, or technical report, than rush through to the end. As we’ve learned the hard way over the years, it is impossible to build on previous members’ work in the absence of clear documentation.

We are using Notion to store technical project documentation and tutorials, GitHub to store our source code and Sibe to store CAD files (both with version control built in). If you are asked to document your findings on Notion, please produce high-quality written work. Hopefully, the quality of the Payload Team pages inspires you to match the quality standard put forth here.

While we expect all members to produce high-quality writing, we also expect all subsystem leads to take responsibility for maintaining and structuring documentation. At the conclusion of certain projects, we would also expect leads and some senior general members to produce a short couple-page report summarizing motivation + methods + findings, to be stored for future reference.

Progress Updates and Meetings: my goal is to ensure that for every meeting I call as Chief Payload Engineer, ≥ 50% of participant-hours are used productively and/or participation is worthwhile. To this end, we will have more focused meetings to check in with subsystems individually and meetings with several subsystems collaborating on shared projects.

To keep everyone updated on the latest progress, we also maintain weekly PAY-Systems meetings that happen after the UTAT SS General meeting:

• one meeting of every month, we will have a joint meeting with the BUS team, to keep the BUS and PAY teams in sync as we work towards CUBICS 2026
• two meetings of every month, we will have structured progress updates where each subsystem leads prepares a couple bullet-point updates on their subsystem’s work. Alternatively, UTAT SS Leadership provide administrative updates or guides discussion of long-term engineering design & strategy
• remaining meetings can be allocated flexibly, and can be used for seminars, prototype demonstrations, and mission scoping discussions.

Time Commitment: we recognize that as a volunteer undergraduate student team, it may be difficult to allocate large chunks of time to work on research, engineering, project management, and attend all the meetings. What is proposed below is a transparent and historically-reasonable guideline for what commitment levels are typical and desired for different members.

• General Members: should commit 3-5 hours of productive work for every hour of meetings with their subsystem lead. Otherwise, there is excessive burden on the subsystem lead.
• Senior Members: we encourage members to remain part of the team for 2-3 semesters, because the work really starts t get interesting at around the 6-month mark. You will take away more from UTAT (and build stronger resume experience) if you dive deeper and reach a milestone, instead of starting a bunch of projects and quitting midway.
• Subsystem Leads: should commit between 7-14 hours per week, with ≥50% of their time devoted to engineering and ≤50% of time devoted to general member onboarding and management. I (Chief Payload Engineer) will do what I can to reduce administrative burden where I can to enable your engineering work.
• UTAT SS Administration: spend as much time as it takes to keep the team and projects running, which typically ranges from 10-20 hours per week.

Communication: We will use Slack as our primary method of communicating as a team. All members, including leads, should check Slack at least 3 times a week - once on Saturday (when most meetings take place), and twice during the working week (for subsystem updates + direct messages). Subsystem leads are generally expected to respond within a couple days at the latest, but this should not be misconstrued as a reason to contact leads excessively — they have a lot on their plate already. Space Systems administration will generally maintain same-day response time for leads, and couple-day response times to all other messages.

We appreciate all the effort our colleagues are contributing to UTAT Space Systems, and the above-and-beyond efforts that subsystem leads and members are putting in to get the research, engineering, project management, and documentation done. We hope that by making commitment levels transparent to all members of the team, we will respect each others’ time and be more motivated to contribute our fair share to our progress.