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Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel 


2. Safety and Mission Assurance Funding. ASAP members are particularly sensitive to the need to balance safety and mission assurance (SMA) funding with associated objectives. 

NASA should develop the constellation SMA budget by defining SMA tasks and budgeting for them - including supporting rationales, safety impacts, and risk tradeoffs if not funded - rather than just accepting without negotiation a fixed SMA budget. If the funding does not match the necessary tasks, explicit mitigation should be required. 

The ASAP stresses that the NASA budget is the most obvious statement of management expectations and priorities so, SMA funding should be consistent with safety priorities. 

F. Stability of Agency Management Approach

1. Governance Structure. The ASAP has observed the implementation of the new strategic management and governance model at Headquarters and the NASA Centers. The long-term effects are not immediately obvious, but the ASAP reports several important developments. 

Progress. This new structure is evolving positively and is working relatively effectively during a complex transition period (Shuttle to Constellation). Senior managers and program managers increasingly understand the management approach and its advantages, but the integration of SMA at all program development and implementation stages has not yet permeated NASA.

Emphasis on Institutional Requirements. The ASAP observed a new management emphasis on institutional requirements for safety, engineering, facilities, and personnel in the planning process and indeed, the entire project life cycle. 

Technical Authority. The Panel is impressed with the new organizational emphasis on NASA-wide independent TA, accountability, and dissenting opinion processes. For example, technical or organization decisions with SMA implication must have the formal concurrence of cognizant engineering, SMA and health, and medical TAs. 

Risk Assessment and Mitigation. The ASAP recognizes that risk assessment and mitigation are standard practices in the modern management of complex, long-term, cutting-edge projects, particularly those with life-and-death implications. At NASA, risk cascades through all Agency actions. However, risk is a complicated and poorly understood concept, so the ASAP is focusing on the identification and mitigation of risk and on the consistency and effectiveness of risk-related communications throughout the management and personnel chain and to external stakeholders such as Congress and the Administration.

Human-Rating Requirements Standards. NASA recently revised the long-standing Human-Rating Requirements (HRR) standards, which will apply to the Constellation program and future NASA (or commercial or foreign) spacecraft that will cart a NASA-wide 

After several briefings, the Panel is just beginning to fully understand the changes (e.g., in failure, tolerance, inadvertent actions, redundancy, and integrated design analysis) and the implications for future system development- an index of the challenge facing NASA. 


                Annual Report for 2008