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Reliability and Failure in NASA Missions: Blunders, Normal Accidents, High Reliability, Bad LuckNASA emphasizes crew safety and system reliability but several unfortunate failures have occurred. The Apollo 1 fire was mistakenly unanticipated. After that tragedy, the Apollo program gave much more attention to safety. The Challenger accident revealed that NASA had neglected safety and that management underestimated the high risk of shuttle. Probabilistic Risk Assessment was adopted to provide more accurate failure probabilities for shuttle and other missions. NASA's "faster, better, cheaper" initiative and government procurement reform led to deliberately dismantling traditional reliability engineering. The Columbia tragedy and Mars mission failures followed. Failures can be attributed to blunders, normal accidents, or bad luck. Achieving high reliability is difficult but possible.
Document ID
20160001189
Acquisition Source
Ames Research Center
Document Type
Conference Paper
Authors
Jones, Harry W. (NASA Ames Research Center Moffett Field, CA United States)
Date Acquired
January 27, 2016
Publication Date
July 12, 2015
Subject Category
Quality Assurance And Reliability
Report/Patent Number
ARC-E-DAA-TN24214
ICES-2015-045
Meeting Information
Meeting: International Conference on Environmental Systems
Location: Bellevue, WA
Country: United States
Start Date: July 12, 2015
End Date: July 16, 2015
Sponsors: American Inst. of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Funding Number(s)
WBS: WBS 387873.04.99.99.99.99.21
Distribution Limits
Public
Copyright
Work of the US Gov. Public Use Permitted.
Keywords
accidents
failures
reliability

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