Anyone who has spent time around flight training, aviation or spaceflight knows the rhythm of the checklist. Read the item, verify the item, call it out, move on. It works because it is dull and repeatable. The trouble starts when a team keeps repeating the dullest items by hand for years, or when somebody rushes to automate everything before they understand what the list is really protecting. This audit is a practical way to automate routine checks without losing the human attention that space operations still depend on.
The order matters more than the tooling. Run the check by hand a handful of times, write down what stayed identical every time, and only then hand that part to a script, a template or a pre-filled form. The judgment calls stay with people. That is the whole method, and the rest of this piece is a checklist for applying it.
Step 1: List every check you perform more than once
Start with a plain inventory. Walk through a normal week of work, whether you are a student pilot, a ground-systems volunteer for a hobby satellite project, or someone preparing observation sessions with a small team, and write down every check you repeat. Do not filter yet. Include the tiny ones: confirming a radio frequency, checking that a data file arrived, making sure a time zone is set correctly, verifying that the right version of a document is open.
Most people are surprised by the length of the list. A typical working week produces dozens of micro-checks that nobody ever wrote down because they live in muscle memory. That is the first benefit of the audit: you discover how much invisible repetition is eating your attention.
Step 2: Do each one by hand at least three times
Resist the urge to build anything yet. Perform each check manually three times, and after each run note two things: how long it took, and whether anything about it changed. A check that looks identical three times in a row is a candidate. A check where the inputs, the source or the acceptable answer shifts every time is not, at least not yet.
This is the same reason low orbit and geostationary orbit are taught as separate topics. If you read a beginner explanation of how a satellite can appear to hang fixed above one point on Earth, you quickly learn that the same physics produces very different operating routines depending on altitude. A routine built for one regime does not transfer to the other. Doing the work by hand first is how you learn which parts of your routine are truly constant.
Step 3: Mark the unchanging parts
Take your three manual runs and highlight the identical bits. In practice these fall into four buckets:
- Fixed lookups: values that are copied from the same place every time, such as a frequency table or a contact sheet.
- Fixed formatting: the same headings, fields and ordering in every report or log entry.
- Fixed comparisons: checks against a threshold that has not moved in months.
- Fixed reminders: things you must do at a regular moment and forget when you are busy.
Everything else, the odd reading, the unusual weather, the ambiguous message, is the part that deserves a human. Write those items in a separate column titled “needs a person”.
Step 4: Automate the smallest safe slice first
Pick the single fixed item that costs the most repeated minutes and carries the least risk if it misbehaves. For many hobby and training setups that is a log template: a pre-filled form with the date, the station, the equipment list and blank fields for the readings. For a slightly more technical team it might be a short script that pulls a file, checks that it is not empty and prints a one-line result.
Keep the slice small enough that you can explain exactly what it does to a colleague in under a minute. If you cannot, it is too big. Aviation has long used the idea that automation should reduce workload on routine tasks while the crew stays responsible for monitoring and decisions, and the same sensible division applies at much smaller scales.
Step 5: Keep a person on every judgment call
A good automated check reports, it does not decide. Let the template surface that a reading is outside the usual range, then let a person decide whether that is a sensor quirk, a real problem or nothing at all. Add a plain line to every output saying who reviews it and when. If a result is never read, the automation has only moved the problem somewhere quieter.
It also helps to keep a manual fallback. Print the checklist, or keep a copy that works without any script, and do the full manual pass now and then. That keeps the skill alive and gives you a way to notice if the automated version has quietly drifted.
Step 6: Audit the audit every few months
Automated routines age. Equipment changes, a new member joins, a frequency is retired. Put a recurring reminder on the calendar to rerun the manual pass for one check and compare it with what the script reports. If they differ, fix the script or retire it. Treat a template as a draft that earns its place by staying accurate.
A short worked example
Imagine a small team tracking passes of a low-altitude satellite for an amateur outreach event. The first week they do everything by hand: check the pass times, note the elevation, write down the equipment setup, log the result. By the third session they notice that the equipment setup section is identical every time and the log layout never changes. Only the pass time and the observed result differ.
They turn the setup and layout into a template, which removes about half the writing. They leave the pass assessment manual, because cloud cover and local obstructions change the picture every night. Later they add a tiny script that reads their list of upcoming passes and prints the next three as a reminder. That is all they automate, and it is the right amount. For a refresher on the orbital basics behind that kind of planning, a primer on satellites that circle low and fast around the planet makes a handy companion.
When the repetitive chore is paperwork, not hardware
The same logic applies to the administrative side of any technical hobby or career: enquiry emails, application forms, document bundles. If you have ever sent the same introductory email five times with only the name changed, you have found a template waiting to happen. Some people who work across borders for training or events use a medical tourism website such as HipHospitals, which lets international patients browse hospitals and doctors by country and submit free-quote and appointment requests, as a reminder that structured request forms are exactly the kind of repeated step that benefits from a clear, reusable format.
A quick audit sheet you can copy
- List all repeated checks for one week.
- Run each manually three times and record time and variation.
- Highlight identical parts and move the rest to a “needs a person” column.
- Automate the lowest-risk, highest-repetition slice.
- Add a named reviewer and a fallback manual copy.
- Re-run one manual check every quarter and compare.
Follow that sheet honestly and you will end up with fewer chores, clearer logs and more attention left over for the moments in flight, in the field or at the console where a person genuinely needs to be thinking. Automate the repetition, protect the judgment, and keep checking that the two are still in the right places.