Jet Propulsion Laboratory - portaldagestaoderiscos.com

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6 In en the those t with ayers 110-031 Jet Propulsion Laboratory 2 money spent for nothing. In the early 1990s, the political and public mood demanded reforms to the space program, which led to the appointment (in 1992) of Daniel Goldin as the new NASA administrator. Goldin, formerly an executive at aerospace contractor TRW, believed that new management techniques and technologies, along with accepting more risk, would dramatically reduce the cost of NASA s missions. In a 1992 speech, he challenged JPL to adopt faster, better, cheaper techniques so that it could do more without spending more money.

7 He asserted: Be bold take risks. [A] project that s 20 for 20 isn t successful. It s proof that we re playing it too safe. If the gain is great, risk is warranted. Failure is OK, as long as it s on a project that s pushing the frontiers of But the new strategy did not reverse the incidence of major failures. The Mars Climate Orbiter disappeared during orbit insertion on Sept. 23, 1999, due to a navigation error; analyses had been performed and communicated using English units (feet and pounds) rather than NASA-mandated metric units (meters and kilograms). The Mars Polar Lander disappeared as it neared the surface of Mars in December 1999.

8 To save money, the Lander did not have telemetry during its descent to Mars, and subsequent analysis suggested that the failure was probably due to a software fault that shut off the descent rocket too early, causing the spacecraft to fall the last 40 meters onto the surface. These two failures ended the faster, better, cheaper management philosophy for Mars Landers. NASA s manned space program experienced another tragic failure with the loss, on February 1, 2003, of Space Shuttle Columbia and its seven crew members 16 minutes before scheduled touchdown. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board concluded that the accident was not an anomalous random event, but rather.

9 Rooted in NASA s Space Shuttle history and culture, including the original compromises that were required to gain approval for the Shuttle, subsequent years of resource constraints, fluctuating priorities, schedule pressures .. and lack of an agreed national vision for human space flight. Cultural traits and organizational practices detrimental to safety [included] reliance on past success as a substitute for sound engineering practices; organizational barriers that prevented effective communication of critical safety information and stifled professional differences of opinion; lack of integrated management across program elements.

10 And the evolution of an informal chain of command and decision-making processes that operated outside the organization s Implementing a New Risk Management Culture at JPL In 2000, NASA s new Mars Program Director, Scott Hubbard, asked Gentry Lee, a former JPL employee, to return and help develop an architecture for a new Mars Mission Program. Hubbard wanted the architecture to include a risk management program that would significantly increase JPL s mission success rate. Lee, a graduate of the University of Texas and MIT, had worked with JPL from 1969 to 1976 as part of the Viking project team that engineered the first successful landing of a spacecraft on Mars.