Since its creation in 1968, ASAP has been charged with two main missions: reviewing NASA’s safety performance on proposed or existing facilities and operations, and also advising the Agency on how to improve it. Regarding the report itself, it aims to address issues and concerns identified by the panel or raised during its activities over the past year.
“The panel believes how NASA manages human space flight programs and other vital agency priorities will have a significant impact on mission outcomes” – Dr Patricia Sanders, ASAP chair
This year, ASAP focuses on three specific recommendations offered back in 2021, being NASA’s Strategic Vision and Guiding Principles, Agency Governance, and Program Management. On top of this, the report is beneficial to spot both the Agency’s progress achieved in 2022, but also the remaining challenges.
Overall, the 2022 report reveals that NASA “has made great progress” last year, when it comes to addressing the three recommendations above. The Agency indeed developed a strategic vision, communicated clearly intentions both internally and externally, managed Artemis as an integrated program – among others.
“The report is based on the panel’s 2022 fact-finding and quarterly public meetings; insight visits and meetings; direct observations of NASA operations and decision-making processes; discussions with NASA management, employees, and contractors; and the panel members’ own experiences”
These achievements will be partly essential in order to solve the existing problems. For this reason, the 2022 report has notably the objective of providing a set of details on concrete actions it should take to fulfill the 2021 recommendations. For now, the Panel looks forward to the findings of the Artemis I test flight and the corrective actions necessary to address risks prior to Artemis II, on strides in Enterprise Protection, as well as on the execution of Boeing’s Crewed Flight Test.
Find the full ASAP report here.
