The new Associate Administrator for Safety, Reliability and

The new Associate Administrator for Safety, Reliability and

¶Quality Assurance must assure that any pressures to increase the

¶101 Ibid., Volume I, p. 170. 102 Ibid., p. 174.

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¶Shuttle flight rate do not adversely influence mission preparation. The Associate Administrator must have the authority not only to stop a particular flight, e.g., at a Flight Readiness Review, but to stop the whole mission planning process if necessary.

2. Where appropriate, NASA should take steps to make the mis- sion planning process standard and routine to reduce the time and resources needed to plan a mission. Before requesting more re- sources for the existing mission planning process (manpower, facili- ties, equipment) NASA should identify ways to improve the proc- ess. Discussion

¶There is no doubt that operating pressures created a n atmos- phere which allowed the accident on 51-L to happen. Without oper- ating pressures the program might have been stopped months before the accident to redesign or at least understand the SRB joint. Without operating pressure the flight could have been stopped the night of January 27. This is documented in the Rogers Commission report in Chapters V and VI.lo3 Specific manifesta- tions of launch pressure and the resultant atmosphere in the agency are described in detail in Section VIII of this report.

¶Nevertheless, it has become clear that the Shuttle launch system was not functioning well and was becoming increasingly unsafe as flight rate was increased. This is documented in Chapter VIII of the Rogers Commission report. l o 4

¶Mission Planning.-Mission planning refers to the process of de- fining and preparing each Space Shuttle mission. It is important to understand the mission planning process in order to understand why pressure to achieve a given flight rate could have adverse im- pacts. The process is lengthy, complex, and tightly interrelated. That is, many steps must be done in sequence, and many different flights have to use limited resources and facilities.

¶Mission planning begins at NASA headquarters with the custom- er services manager in the Office of Space Flight. Both financial and policy agreements between NASA and the customer are nego- tiated and signed. Technical documentation begins at this time al- though the level of mission-specific work is low.

¶After flight assignments are made by NASA Headquarters and the mission is defined, a process of continual review begins. Pay- loads are assigned to a particular flight 33 months prior to launch. At this time a Payload Integration Plan (PIP) is developed which includes a preliminary analysis of the mission.

¶Payload safety is the responsibility of the payload developer. He must be throughly familiar with NASA safety requirements and must certify that his payload meets them. NASA audits the certifi- cation process but performs no visual inspection of the payload for conformance to safety standards.

¶Once the cargo of a particular mission has been defined, or "baselined", the significant engineering work of mission processing actually begins. NASA refers to this as the "production process". The product of the process is the launch of a particular mission,¹⁰³¹⁰³ Ibid., pp. 59g-97. Ibid., pp. 82-151. lo4 Ibid., pp. 164-77.

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¶but there are many other intermediate products such as flight and training software, crew activity plans, and handbooks and check- lists for the crew to take on the flight.

¶The launch production process template is displayed schematical- ly on Figure VI-2. The template begins 15 months before the sched- uled launch date (L-13, at which time a Flight Definition and Re- quirements Directive (FDRD) is issued. This marks one of seven de- fined "freeze points" of the 15 month mission-specific pre-launch activity. A freeze point simply means that a particular activity is norminally defined so that no time changes can occur without a formal process to authorize and document the change. In theory, non-mandatory changes are not made after a freeze point. As noted below, significant changes do indeed occur after the various freeze points in the schedule.

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