NASA space missions have a high failure rate and its “Faster, Better, Cheaper” philosophy should be revised to focus on “Mission Success First,” two reports by independent commissions said Monday.
“The current Mission failure rate is too high and must be reduced,” said the authors of the first report on the risks of the “Faster, Better, Cheaper” paradigm, which has been defended for the past few years by NASA administrator Daniel Goldin.
“Most failures over the last decade can be attributed to poor communication and mistakes in engineering and management,” the authors said, adding that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration needs to be re-tooled for the coming century.
“We must remake the NASA institution to match business in the 21st century information age,” they said.
The report outlined the NASA’s most important tasks as: acquiring, motivating and keeping good people; bringing in advanced technology; and incorporating new methods on a project mission team.
The second report on the Mars Climate Orbiter (MCO), which failed to orbit the red planet in September and wound up burning in the planet’s atmosphere, “presents a vision and recommendations to maximize the probability of success for future space missions.”
“The charter for this second report is to derive lessons learned from that failure and from other failed missions — as well as some successful ones — and from them create a formula for future mission success,” the authors said.
The authors concluded the MCO mission lacked “sufficient discipline in the processes used to develop, validate and operate spacecraft” and strong leadership.
Failure to convert English measures to metric was the key mistake that caused the 327-million-dollar satellite to burn up in the Mars atmosphere.
“This second report puts forth a new vision for NASA programs and projects — one that will improve mission success within the context of the ‘Faster, Better, Cheaper’ paradigm. This vision, ‘Mission Success First,’ entails a new NASA culture and new methods of managing projects,” the authors said.
Goldin said in a statement that this new strategy “represents a fourth element of the ‘Faster, Better, Cheaper’ approach, and that is, doing our job smarter.”
“It means picking the right people, giving them the right resources, infusing the right technology, holding the right people accountable, and doing the right kind of risk management,” he added.
On Friday, an independent panel released another study commissioned by NASA which found that the US space shuttle program has “significant problems” in management and personnel matters.
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