By Kim Smiley
A previous blog discussed a shortfall in the National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA) budget. The lack of funding put NASA’s organization goals in jeopardy, including a planned return mission to the moon. Then-President George W. Bush had tasked NASA to return to the moon five years ago and NASA has been working toward this goal since.
President Obama announced his vision for NASA during a speech Kennedy Space Center on April 15. He canceled plans for a moon mission and redirected NASA to focus on sending astronauts to an asteroid and work toward an eventual Mars landing. The proposed budget would boost NASA funding by six billion over the next five years.
President Obama’s plan calls for private companies to fly to the space station using their own rockets and ships, freeing up NASA resources for basic research and development of technologies for trips beyond earth’s orbit. The final space shuttle mission is scheduled for September 2011 after which the US will depend entirely on Russia to carry astronauts to the space station until a replacement for the space shuttle is developed. Additionally, the space station’s life would be extended by five years as part of the Obama plan.
The planning necessary to achieve a goal of this complexity is mind boggling. There are many new technical issues to consider and brand new equipment will need to be designed. There are many, many potential problems that could arise during this design process and mission.
Cause Mapping is often used to perform a root cause analysis of an incident that has occurred, but it can also be used to proactively approach a problem by building a map that captures failures that could happen. Identifying potential problems before they happen would allow NASA to mitigate risks and allocate resources efficiently.
Cause Maps could be built to any level of detail that was deemed appropriate. Cause Maps could be developed to capture all potential failure modes for something as small as a single component or for something as large the entire mission.