1. Risk as an Essential Part of
Technology R&D
Greg Fletcher
Space Science and Engineering Division
Southwest Research Institute
All information contained herein was obtained from
open sources published in print and on the web
All opinions stated herein are strictly the author’s and
not that of any institution or group
February 2012

2. Risk Defined
Risk –
Expose (someone or something valued) to
danger, harm, or loss: ―he risked his life
to save his dog‖.

3. Early Spaceflight
 Sputnik was launched by the USSR
on October 4, 1957
 Ignited the space race, and proved the
Soviet Union had perfected the ICBM
 Identified upper layers of the
atmosphere
 Explorer I was launched by the US
Army on January 31, 1958
 Demonstrated US ICBM capability
 Discovered the Van Allen belts (named
for James Van Allen, who flew the
instrument that made the detection)
 Space Race was on, and the decade
that followed saw an unprecedented
revolution in technology

4. Missile Defense Alarm System (MiDAS)
 In February of 1959, the US government
began a program to put a missile
defense warning system in orbit around
the Earth (MiDAS)
 Humans had only begun to put objects
in Earth orbit
 Infrared imaging technology was under
development and had never flown in
space (was used in the Falcon air to air
missile in service starting in 1955)
 Had to develop automated detection
algorithm, because at that time they
couldn‘t transmit images to the ground
(due to limited RF bandwidth)
Infrared Sensor assembly from
 Battery powered, so they only lasted a MiDAS spacecraft
few weeks in orbit

5. MiDAS
 In February of 1960 the first MiDAS spacecraft
launched
 First launch just ONE YEAR after the program was
initiated!!
 By July of 1963 (just short of 3.5 years), nine MiDAS
spacecraft were in orbit
 Since they were battery powered each one only lasted
three weeks
 Three had launch failures but they succeeded in
proving that it was possible to detect missile
launches from Earth orbit
 Considered a major success at the time
 Launch failures later spurred an effort to prevent future
failures

6. To raise new questions, new possibilities,
to regard old problems from a new
angle, requires creative imagination
and marks real advance in science.‖
- Albert Einstein

7. Fast Forward to
Recent History

8. Building Spaceflight Hardware
 Takes to long!
 Schedules slip and costs grow
 Examples:
 NPOESS
 MSL (finally launched
Nov 2011)
 JWST
 SBIRS (Space Based Infrared
System)
 Many other examples
available

9. NPOESS Overview
 Contract award in 2002
 Program cost was $6.1 billion
 Managed by DoD, NASA and NOAA
 Expected a risk reduction
demonstrator satellite to launch in
2006
 First (of six) NPOESS satellites
intended for 2009 launch
 Intended to replace DoD‘s DMSP
(Defense Meteorological Satellite
Program) and NPAA‘s POES (Polar
Operational Environmental Satellites)
Credit: Some information came from article: F. G. Kennedy,
Space and Risk Analysis Paralysis, AIAA, Nov 2011

10. NPOESS Overview (cont.)
 By 2010 the Demonstrator slipped five years to
2011
 First spacecraft scheduled in 2014 (and reduced
to 4 spacecraft)
 Costs were overrun to $11 billion (that‘s nearly $5
billion overrun
 After eight years, we hadn‘t managed to put one
demonstrator in earth orbit
We put men on the moon in ten
years!!!

11. NPOESS Overview (cont.)
 White House announced in February 1, 2010 that
the NPOESS satellite partnership was to be
dissolved
 Two separate lines of polar orbiting satellites to
serve the military and civilian communities
would instead be implemented
 NOAA/NASA portion is called the Joint Satellite
System (JPSS)
 DoD portion is called Defense Weather Satellite
System (DWSS)

12. NPOESS Monday Morning Quarterbacking
 What went wrong?
 Blame was placed on the inter-agency management structure
 Risk aversion hampered progress
 Processes designed to mitigate risk, hampered progress
 Tri-agency management structure meant that no one was
willing to accept any risk, for fear of being blamed if there
were problems later
 Failure is not an option, means that if you don‘t fly, you can‘t
fail

13. So what happened in
between MiDAS and
later missions like
NPOESS?

14. Faster, Better, Cheaper
 Pick any two!
However:
 First 9 out of 10 missions successful
 Innovative missions that came in on time
and under budget
 Flew 16 missions for less than $3B!!

15. Faster, Better, Cheaper (cont.)
 NEAR (Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous)
 Estimated at $200M and came in at $122M
 27 months of start of funding to launch!
 Took 10 Times the expected data
 Not designed as a lander, but coasted to a stop on
Eros, the first time this had ever been done
 Mars Pathfinder
 First successful rover on another planet
 17,000 images
 1/15th the cost of Viking 20 years earlier

16. Faster, Better, Cheaper (cont.)
And then in 1999 –
 4 out 5 five missions crashed and burned
(some literally)
 Bad press was relentless (maybe rightfully
so)
 Findings indicated that FBC programs that
failed had reduced cost and schedule, but
not lessoned complexity accordingly
 PM‘s of successful FBC missions insisted on
simplicity both technically and organizationally

17. Long Term Result of FBC
 In order to avoid further embarrassment,
programs adopted ‗rigorous‘ risk
mitigation plans
 Fear of failure became so great, missions
delayed in order to mitigate risk, which
then caused overruns
Credit: Lt. Col. Dan Ward, USAF, “Faster, Better, Cheaper Revisited –
Program Management Lessons from NASA”, Defense AT&L, March-
April 2010

18. Risk Aversion –
The reluctance of a person to accept a
bargain with an uncertain payoff, rather
than a bargain with a more certain, but
possibly lower, expected payoff .

19. Innovation
 Innovation –
Something new or different introduced
(from Dictionary.com)
 Three keys to innovation
 Seek out new ideas
 Test these ideas on a scale where failure is
survivable
 Constantly monitor these trials for feedback
Credit: Tim Harford, Adapt – Why Success Always Starts with
Failure

20. “Results? Why, man, I have gotten lots
of results! If I find 10,000 ways
something won't work, I haven't failed. I
am not discouraged, because every
wrong attempt discarded is often a step
forward....”
-Thomas Edison

21. Lessons from Another
Government Agency

22. DARPA‘s HTV2
 DARPA‘s Hypersonic Test
Vehicle 2 is designed to launch
from the US and land anywhere
on the globe in under an hour
 Re-enters atmosphere at speeds
up to Mach 20 (~13,000 mi/hr) withstanding
temperatures of 3500 degrees Fahrenheit
 Quote from HTV-2 Website – ―At that speed air
doesn‘t travel around you – you rip it apart‖
 Quote before second test flight – ―It‘s time to conduct
another flight test to validate our assumptions and
gain further insight into extremely high Mach regimes
that we cannot fully replicate on the ground.‖

23. DARPA‘s HTV2 (cont.)
 CNN Headline – ―Flight failure won‘t stop ‗Mad
Scientists‘
 Quote from Article – ―The failure is not surprising;
permission to fail is what has enabled the agency's
spectacular success over its 53-year history‖
 Quote from Air Force Maj. Chris Schulz after second
catastrophic failure "We do not yet know how to
achieve the desired
control during the
aerodynamic phase of
flight. It‘s vexing; I‘m
confident there is a
solution. We have to
find it.‖

24. DARPA‘s HTV2 (cont.)
 After the second catastrophic failure, CNN
and other news agencies hailed DARPA as
bold, forward thinking and visionary,
daring to do what others would not!!
 What would they have said if it was a
NASA re-entry vehicle test failure?
NASA screws
up again!!!
(even though it may have been years
since a failure of any kind)

25. Headlines from NASA Missions
 Popular Science‘s ‗The Top 10 Failed NASA Missions‘
―In space, no one can hear you screw up‖
 DART –
―Fear and loathing in orbit‖
 Genesis –
Genesis space capsule crashes
Spacecraft carrying solar samples slams into Utah desert
 UARS (Re-entry) –
The Sky is Falling (But We Don‘t Know Where)

26. Setting Expectations
 DARPA says openly and publicly that not
only is failure an option, but it‘s expected
and accepted as part pushing the technology
envelope
 Quote ―We learn as much from our failures as we do
our successes‖
 When NASA says failure is not an option,
that‘s what the public expects!
 There are times when failure is not an option (manned
flight)
 Experimental missions, failure should be an option
(though not a goal)

27. Stigma of Failure
 Stigma of Failure holds many
government agencies back from
innovation
 Internal cultural practices of not sticking your
neck out and just waiting out the latest change
effort
 Warranted in many cases, since some agencies
cannot fail in their primary mission (defending
the nation, or sending social security checks)
 Failure to innovate is a mission failure
for NASA
 Innovation requires pushing the limits and
risking setbacks through failure
 Yet failing at something even if it‘s risky is
viewed a mission failure
Tell me again why we do this?!

28. ―We choose to go to the Moon in this
decade and do the other things, not
because they are easy, but because
they are hard, because that goal will
serve to organize and measure the best
of our energies and skills…‖
-John F. Kennedy

29. Failure is an Option
 Tim Harford states in his book that today‘s world
is to complex for top-down ―big project‖ innovation
based purely on expert judgment
 Best path to innovation is to try a lot of ideas
simultaneously (even if they contradict each other)
 Build in robust feedback loops
 Use the winning ideas to start a new round of trials
 This is not new, in fact it‘s the oldest method
of innovation (think evolution)
 Harford concludes that the organizations that
survive the best are ones that make
incremental changes, and occasionally take
on long-shot ideas

30. Failure is an Option (cont.)
 Harford states that this innovation method
does not work with government agencies
because of several barriers
 There is not enough time for political appointees to
fully see these experiments through before a new
administration comes in office
 Process depends on a large number of failures for
innovation but failure carries a high stigma in
government
This is true, but despite the facts,
occasionally the US Government does some
innovative and amazing work

31. Historically Innovative Government Works
 Numerous government projects that have
been extremely innovative and successful
 Hoover Dam
 Rural Electrification
 Interstate Highway System
 Moon landings
 Space Shuttle
 The Internet

32. "The things we fear most in
organizations—fluctuations,
disturbances, imbalances—are the
primary sources of creativity.‖
- Margaret J. Wheatley

33. Risk and Innovation
 Amount of risk associated with a new
technology depends on the type of
technology and the magnitude of the leap
from what currently exists
 In research, learning from failure often results
in success
 Acceptable level of risk depends on several
factors
 What is the cost of failure (cost can be monetary or
other assets, including humans)
 What is the return if the risk pays off (break
through/game changing technology, knowledge, etc)

34. Individual Risk Tolerance
 Risk tolerance varies quite a bit from
person to person
 Generally, individual people are fairly
risk tolerant
 Groups of people tend to be less risk
tolerent
 Organizations become less and less risk
tolerant as they grow in size
 One way Mars mission (from Jan-2011)

35. Heritage
 Most missions in the last 10 years have
required that components, subsystems and
instruments have spaceflight heritage
 Can‘t fly without heritage
 Can‘t get heritage without flying
 Most proposals are considered high risk if
there is anything below TRL 7 or 8 (TRL 9 is
preferred)
 Explains why we‘re still flying the 386
processors on new missions

36. Heritage (Cont)
 How can we move technology forward if we
don‘t fly new hardware?
 This is one of the major symptoms of an
overly risk averse environment
So what do you do about it?

37. Awareness of the Problem
 Hi, I‘m Greg
 I have a problem with Risk Aversion
 NASA is aware that excessive risk aversion
has hindered innovation
 Also aware that is has caused cost overruns
 You can actually find quite a bit written
about it on the NASA web sites

38. Story about a personal
experience managing a
program that was risk averse to
the point of paralysis (if there‘s
time)

39. What is NASA Doing
 NASA has tasked the Office of the Chief
Technologist with fostering innovative
ideas
 Low TRL
 Game Changing
 Cross Cutting
 NAIC
 Concepts are encouraged to be wild and out there
 Submit a two page whitepaper
 Whitepapers are selected for proposals (10 pages)
for $100k concept study
 Concept can be funded to build hardware

40. Final Thoughts
 Cubesats and Nanosats can offer a low
cost option to fly new technologies
 Free launches are available as secondary
payloads
 Program costs are low (in many cases less
than $200k, depending on how much
development is required for hardware and
payload)
 Drawback is the hardware has to be small
enough to fit the form factor

41. Questions?