Risk-Based Safety and Mission Assurance: Approach and Experiences in Practice

In 2014, in response to a large volume of feedback from industry, the science community, and internal to Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), GSFC's Safety and Mission Assurance (SMA) Directorate began a transition to a risk-based implementation of SMA, departing from its longstanding practice of being primarily driven by a mostly-static set of Mission Assurance Requirements. The transition started out with a pilot project involving risk-based acceptance of bare printed circuit boards that was enormously successful, continued through a complete organizational transformation in 2015, and culminated with the base lining of formal Risk-Based SMA policy in 2016. This paper highlights five major examples of successful implementation of Risk-Based SMA that have demonstrated not only substantial savings in project resources, but also the ability to operate at the lowest achievable level of risk in developing and operating inherently risky systems