Enhancing the Human Factors Engineering Role in an Austere Fiscal Environment 2003-01-2538

An austere fiscal environment in the aerospace community creates pressure to reduce program costs, often minimizing or even deleting human interface requirements from the design process. With the assumption that the flight crew can recover, in real time, from a poorly human factored space vehicle design, the classical crew interface requirements have either been not included in the design or not properly funded, even though they are carried as requirements. Cost cuts have also affected the quality of retained human factors engineering personnel.

Planning is ongoing to correct these issues. Herein are techniques for ensuring that human interface requirements are integrated with flight design from proposal through verification and launch activation. The integration includes human factors requirements refinement and consolidation across flight programs, keyword phrases in the proposals, closer ties with systems engineering and other classical disciplines, early planning for crew-interface verification, and an Agency-integrated human factors verification program under the “One NASA” theme. Importance is given to communication within the aerospace human factors discipline and utilizing the strengths of all government, industry, and academic human factors organizations in a unified research and engineering approach.

A list of recommendations and concerns is provided in closing.