Brendan Byrne has a story on the latest nonsense. What does “solidify [NASA’s] risk tolerance process mean”? I guess I have to read the GAO report (as though I don’t have enough to do).
7 thoughts on “Commercial Crew”
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Brendan Byrne has a story on the latest nonsense. What does “solidify [NASA’s] risk tolerance process mean”? I guess I have to read the GAO report (as though I don’t have enough to do).
Comments are closed.
It means what it always means. The old boys club doesn’t want to let in new members. They are afraid of losing a share of the pie to the newcomers.
I have to agree based on the phrase. Most organizations/industries develop a risk management process.
Can you imagine a business, not indemnified by the federal government, announcing the development of a risk tolerance process?
I’ve always gotten the impression that with commercial crew NASA is like a pouting child. It knows what it has to do but really, really doesn’t want to so it shuffles it feet to waste time. Maybe it will all go away.
Maybe things will speed up once Boeing sells off those Soyuz rides their holding.
Quoting the report summary (as posted by ParabolicArc on 11 July): NASA has not identified a consistent approach for how to assess loss of crew. As a result, officials across NASA have multiple ways of assessing the metric that may yield different results. Consequently, the risk tolerance level that NASA is accepting with loss of crew varies based upon which entity is presenting the results of its assessment. … [Recommendation 3:] The NASA Administrator should direct the Chief of Safety and Mission Assurance, the NASA Associate Administrator for Human Exploration and Operations, the Commercial Crew Program Manager, and the Commercial Crew Program Contracting Officer to collectively determine and document before the agency certification review how the agency will determine its risk tolerance level with respect to loss of crew.
So, having reported to many of those various entities for SSP and ISS for S&MA; I understand what that means. Do you?
I ask, because being removed from the day to day and reporting requirements, I see it in a much different light. NASA had for ISS and SSP a specific tolerance level (1/400 might be 1/200, it doesn’t matter because…). It turned out in hindsight to be rather useless, because the real incident rate was worse than what they supposedly tolerated.
When I read that statement, I suspect there is still a specific requirement, but that each entity has there own model now for determining the assessed risk. At least that is how I decipher it.
If they take the training wheels off the goalposts how will NASA be able to move them?