Cool Your Jets, NASA, a Review Panel Urges
Recent failures in two Mars missions suggest that NASA is pushing too hard to do more with less money, and jeopardizing success by paying inadequate attention to the risks of things that could go wrong, reviewpanels said today.
NASA's recent philosophy of conducting more "faster, better, cheaper" space missions instead of a few large ones appears sound and should continue to be a part of future planning, experts on the panels said. However, they said, this approach has limits and many of these projects need to be more closely managed to assure success.
In a second report to the agency, the review board that previously examined the failure of the Mars Climate Orbiter mission last year said lessons learned from that mishap and other failures with the quicker, cheaper approach indicate there may have been too much emphasis on cutting costs and doing missions quickly.
"The success of 'faster, better, cheaper' is tempered by the fact that some projects and programs have put too much emphasis on cost and schedule reduction," said the Mars Climate Orbiter Mishap Investigation Board, a group of NASA experts led by Arthur G. Stephenson, director of the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama. "At the same time, they have failed to instill sufficient rigor in risk management throughout the mission life cycle. These actions have increased risk to an unacceptable level on these projects."
This group issued a report last November that said the Climate Orbiter perished when it flew too close to Mars on Sept. 23 because the spacecraft contractor and NASA engineers failed to catch errors in converting from English to metric measurements. After the initial report, in which the panel blamed poor communications and teamwork for the failure, the group was charged to look at similar projects to see if the same problems existed.
In a separate report, also released today, Tony Spear, a retired NASA project manager who supervised one of the greatest successes of the new approach, called for training better, more experienced project managers who are willing to say when a mission cannot be done properly under certain schedule and cost restrictions.
Source: New York Times
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