Speaker
Description
Risk is inherent in human spaceflight. The Human System Risks are a special category of risks that National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), as an Agency, has to contend with when engaging with the challenges of human spaceflight. While programmatic and institutional safety risks are often tied to a specific program or activity, Human System Risks are designed to inform NASA Technical Standards, to protect human crews independent of any specific spaceflight program. Risk management in the context of human system risks can be viewed as a trade-based system where the relevant evidence in life sciences, medicine, and engineering is tracked and evaluated to identify ways to minimize overall risk to the astronauts and to ensure mission success. NASA’s Human System Risk Board (HSRB) manages the process by which scientific evidence is utilized to establish and reassess the postures of the various risks to the human system during all of the existing or anticipated crewed missions. The HSRB uses Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAG), a type of causal diagramming, as visual tools to create a shared understanding of the risks, improve communication among those stakeholders, and enable the creation of a composite risk network that is vetted by members of the NASA community. The knowledge captured is the Human Health and Performance community’s knowledge about the causal flow of a human system risk, and the relationships that exist between the contributing factors to that risk.
