by Garry McGuire NASA Handbook Task Group 301-731-8625 garry.mcguire@gsfc.nasa.govThe NASA Handbook (NHB) Technical Committee (TC) held its semi-annual tabletop working session at the Johnson Space Center from April 24th to April 27th, 1995. The mission of the TC is to maintain the integrity of the NHB series of workmanship requirements by issuing new NHBs in response to emerging technologies or reviewing and updating each of the existing NHBs periodically to incorporate new technologies and "lessons learned" from each of the NASA centers, as well as any other users.
The TC is a team that includes a representative from each of the NASA centers. Each member is responsible for gathering information from experts at their center pertinent to the NHB under draft or revision. This compilation of data, from so many valuable sources, ensures NASA's leadership role in the development of innovative electronic/electromechanical hardware. The challenge for the TC is to ensure that the NHBs keep pace with hardware designers in order to make the words "innovative" and "reliable" usable in the same sentence (at times, a seemingly insurmountable task).
By mid-summer, the TC will have submitted three new NHBs to NASA Headquarters for approval. They are:
Concurrent to all of these efforts is a task to comply with Secretary of Defense Perry's Acquisition Reform Policy. The TC is researching various industry documents to identify which of those may be adopted for use without increasing the risk of personnel safety or hardware safety and reliability. There are many options, but until each is identified and deemed acceptable (some are being recommended for limited QA/Reliability projects as an avenue for compiling reliability data), the TC is committed to maintaining the NHBs to provide the highest level of reliability for NASA's spaceflight hardware.