Introduction

¶INTRODUCTION The success of the United States manned space-flight program has been, to a great extent, a direct result of the emphasis placed on safety by NASA management.

¶The basic safety objective has been to identify hazards and to ensure that these hazards are either eliminated or reduced to an acceptable level. With the exceptions of the Apollo spacecraft (SC) 204 fire and perhaps the Apollo 13 mission, the hazards had been adequately identified and properly resolved. Throughout the series of manned space-flight programs (Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo), the safety of the crew was given primary consideration during hardware design, manufacturing, testing, mission planning, and flight operations.

¶The purpose of this paper is to summarize the safety-oriented activities of personnel at the NASA Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center (JSC) (formerly the Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC)) and at major contractor plant sites. Although everyone is expected to be safety conscious, some things that are inherently unsafe under certain conditions are not easily recognized. The identification of hazards requires a dedicated and conscious effort by appropriately trained safety personnel who possess the experience and capability to properly assess the risks throughout all phases of the manned program and to take appropriate action to eliminate or reduce the risks to an acceptable level.

¶During Project Mercury, the Gemini Program, and the early stages of the Apollo Program, a Flight Safety Gffice at MSC reported to the Center Director. The function of this office was to coordinate the overall safety effort at NASA and the major contractors. It had a small staff and acted inan advisory capacity to each program office. Throughout Project Mercury and the Gemini Program, ‘crew safety and mission safety activities were carried out by the Flight Safety Office, the responsible program offices, and the engineering and other support groups at both NASA centers and major contractors. This method worked well because the groups were small enough for the individuals to maintain good communications, were personally known to each other, and had a broad view of the requirements so that the safety efforts were well integrated.

¶As the Apollo Program progressed from design definition to hardware fabrication, substantial numbers of new personnel were added to the program, numerous reassignments of personnel were made, and functional reorganizations were implemented over a period of months. Coupled with these changes, the hardware testing phases brought added activity, and the resolution of test hardware failures absorbed more and more time. During this period, the size and technical makeup of the Flight Safety Office did not grow sufficiently to maintain visibility into the rapidly expanding Apollo Spacecraft Program hardware and procedures activities. All the above resulted in some loss of communication and visibility between the Flight Safety Office and the engineering and test operational elements.

¶After the Apollo SC-204 fire, one of the organizational changes made at MSC grouped most of the Center safety organizations into the Flight Safety Office reporting directly to the Center Director. Another change was the creation of a staff position in the Apollo Spacecraft Program Office (ASPO) as the MSC point of contact with the Apollo Systems Safety Office at NASA Headquarters. This staff position, called the ASPO Assistant Program Manager for Flight Safety, was a position designed to expedite implementation of the MSC Flight Safety Office policies and procedures.

¶This provided a good opportunity to integrate the efforts of the MSC Flight Safety Office and the ASPO flight safety activities. The arrangement worked very well by opening up the communications channels between the various groups working different aspects of flightcrew and mission safety. At the same time, several reliability and quality assurance elements at MSC were also combined into a single office reporting directly to the Center Director. Although these changes in the reliability and quality assurance (R&QA) organizations did not directly affect the Flight Safety Office, they had the indirect effect of making available, on a day-to-day basis, data and information that were essential to Flight Safety Office personnel in performing their tasks. This interchange and coordination was aided by placing both organizations under the direction of one person.

¶A further enhancement of the MSC Flight Safety Office capabilities occurred in late 1967 when additional support (contract) manpower was made available to the Flight Safety Office; this support consisted of experienced engineers trained in safety techniques and procedures. The local MSC group was part of a larger contract covering engineering and safety at MSC, NASA Headquarters, and the other NASA centers involved in the manned space-flight effort; thus, a large reservoir of experienced engineering talent was available to provide assistance when required. These changes, both organizational and personnel, were sufficient to reestablish a planned, orderly, and coordinated approach to crew and mission safety.