NASA Leadership Assessing Mission Impacts of Coronavirus
The world has come to a standstill and is in the grasps of the COVID-19. The world stock markets have come crashing down 30% as supply chains and companies attempt to deal with government response and public fear. Airlines and hotels have had to contend with decreased travel and lodging requirements. Logistics is impacted as factories in various countries deal with increased difficulty and requirements to obtain goods. Factories are closed leading to shortages for truckers, material movers, cargo agents, and other occupations directly involved in moving goods. Companies shift to working remotely in an attempt to comply with government guidance in attempts to minimize the impact of the virus. One Mars mission has already been sidelined because of COVID19. NASA also needs to contend with these challenges.
NASA has made several statements regarding the recent coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Like many American companies, NASA leadership has stated employees will work from home.
“We are going to take care of our people. That’s our first priority,” said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine.
NASA has implemented what they call NASA Response Framework. The framework starts at Stage 1(least severe) and increases to Stage 4(most severe). Although most of the NASA remains under a Stage 3 status, with mandatory telework for all employees with limited exceptions for on-site work. Ames, Michoud, and Stennis are at Stage 4 with personnel on-site to protect life and critical infrastructure only. As a result, much of NASA is working from home. Contract employees in many cases will be also working from home when their activities are non-essential but are being coordinated with their contracting officer’s representative. NASA Facilities are closed, except to protect life and critical infrastructure.
“NASA leadership is determined to make the health and safety of its workforce its top priority as we navigate the coronavirus (COVID-19) situation. To that end, the agency’s Michoud Assembly Facility and Stennis Space Center are moving to Stage 4 of the NASA Response Framework, effective Friday, March 20.
The closure of these facilities to has a major impact on NASA missions. NASA leadership is reviewing options to keep work underway across all missions, projects, and programs. NASA’s goal is to identify tasks into groups:
- Can be done remotely by employees at home
- Mission-essential work that must be performed on-site
- On-site work that will be paused
The agency has defined mission-essential work as that which must be performed to maintain critical mission operations to ensure the schedule of time-sensitive mission-critical launches, or work to protect life and critical infrastructure.
With over fifty years of experience in space missions, NASA has seen what works and what doesn’t work. For example, there is a long list of missions to Mars that have failed completely or partially. Some missions have failed from what would seem like issues that could have been predicted or stopped easily. Usually, those types of failures are predictable and preventable.
The relationship between complexity, risk and cost for space missions has been well documented with the lessons learned from past spaceflight successes and failures. A good book that touches on these risks is Douglas Hubbard and his book The Failure of Risk Management. In the book covers an evaluation of the NASA risk framework was completed and showed some very interesting relationships.
A plot of mission complexity against schedule distribution showed that all of the partial or complete failures occur in the bottom third of the distribution indicating a strong correlation. (a partial failure means that the mission was able to continue or complete some of the original objectives)
Establishment of a ‘‘no-fly zone’’ can be done defining criteria where based on the complexity of the project the sufficient time or money to develop a system was not allocated. In short, when NASA did not allocate sufficient time and or funding in order to offset the increased complexity there was a much higher likelihood of partial or complete mission failure.
In review of the failures for these past mission failures, under budget or schedule constraints, projects tended to bypass best practices such as testing. The bypassing of tests and best practices translates into higher risk since the testing could have detected and allowed NASA to correct the issue before it impacted the mission.
Testing is key piece of a system defense layer and if ignored will degrades and manifest as a weakens which can result in a risk being realized. The approach NASA took in the late 1990s and early 2000’s reinforced the challenge of effective project management. Assessing the issues with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s programs to explore Mars from that era resulted in the general conclusion that pressures to conform to the agency’s recent credo of “faster, cheaper, better” ended up compromising ambitious projects.
To meet project timelines , project managers apparently sacrificed needed testing and realistic assessments of the risks of failure. A great example of this was the loss of the Mars Polar Lander mission on Dec. 3, 1999. Although investigators had very little evidence to analyze the loss of the the spacecraft, the probable cause for the loss was determined to be the premature shutdown of the spacecraft’s engines.
Instead of the spacecraft being near the ground for engine cutoff, it was actually was more than 100feet in the air. The Mars Polar Lander slammed to the surface at 50 miles an hour instead of having a smooth landing.
Problems with the missions software could have prevented the loss of the spacecraft and were easily correctable with a software change. The actual Mars Polar lander was tested this way, but not after a major change was made to the spacecraft. A unrelated wiring problem was discovered and required rework of the spacecraft. After the wiring had been corrected, testing was not redone.
Feedback on the project explained the true root case. The Mars projects were underfunded. In order to make up for the funding shortcoming, corners were cut resulting in unnecessary risks to save money and meet deadlines. NASA isn’t alone in loosing missions.
Several NASA efforts are still underway and attempting to cope with life with COVID19. This includes work to supporting US national security and mission-essential functions.
NASA’s Mars 2020 mission is quickly approaching the launch window which only occurs every few years. (Article on how long it takes to get to Mars)
The newly named Perseverance Rover and Mars Helicopter are in the the pre-launch verifications stage. NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover has nearly daily pre-launch milestones to complete the rover pre flight activities at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. Much of the work is being done by employees and contractors geographically dispersed across the country. Working remotely for those individuals should not pose as much risk since they were working remote to the final work being done in KSC.
The rover however did have some components removed prior to being shipped from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California to the Cape in early February. In March 2020, Perseverance’s assembly, test and launch operations team integrated two components(Adaptive Caching Assembly and the Bit Carousel) slated to play key roles in the collection, containment and eventual return to Earth of humanity’s first samples directly sampled from another planet. MARS 2020 plans to bring samples back from the planet Mars.
NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine. “Technology allows us to do a lot of what we need to do remotely, but, where hands-on work is required, it is difficult or impossible to comply with CDC guidelines while processing spaceflight hardware, and where we can’t safely do that we’re going to have to suspend work and focus on the mission critical activities.”
On a complexity scale, The MARS 2020 Rover is by far one of the most complex Mars missions ever completed. The added complexity of the COVID19 work restrictions may result in unexpected risks to the program. Typical work that is done or completed at a workstation may be done with other computers, or may have additional distractions. The added stress for people to adjust to new types working conditions can also distract employees. Open, frequent communication with keen attention to detail will be required to overcome these potential new risks.
Another super complex project is the James Webb Space Telescope. NASA reported that team in California is suspending integration and testing operations. With the impact seen already in China from COVID19, expect at least a two month delay to project work as NASA and the US Government continue to assess the situation. NASA has continued to commit the safety of the workforce while the multi billion dollar observatory remains safe in its cleanroom environment waiting for COVID19 concerns to quell.
Also in California, NASA and Lockheed Martin are continuing work on the X-59. X-Planes have a rich history with NASA, however the X-59 is NASA’s first large-scale, piloted X-plane in more than 30 years. Never heard of X-59 QueSST, don’t be surprised. The X-59 is shaped to greatly reduce the effect of a sonic boom. If successful, the boom reaching the ground would be that of a gentle thump at most. The plan is to run test flights above select U.S. communities to generate data from sensors and people on the ground in order to gauge public perception. In the past supersonic air travel has been limited above land because of the impact the sonic boom has. The X-59 will help generate and collect data useful in establishing new rules to enable commercial supersonic air travel over land.
NASA oversight and inspections will continue, but NASA shared that the advances of telework have improved enough that work will now be conducted almost exclusively virtually. The X-59 was cleared in December 2019 for final assembly and integration of its systems following a major project review. The review, commonly known as Key Decision Point-D (KDP-D), was the last major programmatic hurdle for the X-59 Quiet SuperSonic Technology (QueSST) aircraft to clear until again in late 2020 to approve the airplane’s first flight in 2021.
NASA also is supporting mission-essential operations for all operational spacecraft.
- The Hubble Space Telescope
- space communications network
- as well as satellite missions that support the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and Department of Defense, including those that provide critical weather and GPS data
The Ames Research Center is maintaining the NASA’s supercomputing resources online, as well as the NASA IT Security Operations Center and in-flight spacecraft operations.
NASA has shared that all work associated with supporting International Space Station operations will continue. NASA Flight controllers are working in the Mission Control Center at Johnson Space Center in Houston, however a number of additional measures went into effect in early March to reduce the risk of exposure to the team and ensure the wellness of the team.
Astronaut preparation and training continues. The next crew rotation for the ISS is due to launch April 9 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome launch site. NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy along with two Russian cosmonauts are still due to launch, but NASA and its international and commercial partners are taking precautions to prevent the crew from bringing illnesses like the cold, flu or COVID19 to the International Space Station. For all crewed launches, the crew are in quarantine for two weeks before they launch anyway. This two week quarantine ensures that the crew are not sick or bring with them an illness that could impact the health or safety of the mission. Crew have in the past been rotated out due to illness or concerns of illness. (see also the article on Soyuz final two seats)
Part 2 of the Life in Space with COVID19 we will delve into Crew demo-2 where NASA and SpaceX are planning a launch within two months. There are a lot of pre-launch milestones and activities to cover to ensure a safe flight for the Astronauts. If anything goes wrong, there are lives at stake. Now NASA and SpaceX have to contend with another potential setback, COVID19 pandemic.
About The Author
Bill D'Zio
Co-Founder at WestEastSpace.com
Bill founded WestEastSpace.com after returning to China in 2019 to be supportive of his wife's career. Moving to China meant leaving the US rocket/launch industry behind, as USA and China don't see eye to eye on cooperation in space. Bill has an engineering degree and is an experienced leader of international cross-functional teams with experience in evaluating, optimizing and awarding sub-contracts for complex systems. Bill has worked with ASME Components, Instrumentation and Controls (I&C) for use in launch vehicles, satellites, aerospace nuclear, and industrial applications.
Bill provides consulting services for engineering, supply chain, and project management.
0 Comments
Trackbacks/Pingbacks