What is the status of NASAs human biological risk mitigation plan?
In 2005 NASA’s Chief Medical Officer asked the Institute of Medicine to evaluate NASA’s Bioastronautics Roadmap, the comprehensive plan to document and reduce the biological risks to human spaceflight. Despite the alarming data I just described to you, we found that concern for these risks varied widely among astronauts, flight surgeons, and mid-level management. None of the 183 proposed risk mitigation strategies had been implemented for spaceflight, and approximately 2/3 of these strategies were considered to be so incompletely developed that they would not be addressed further. In his 2001 book, Enlightened Experimentation: The New Imperative for Innovation, Harvard Business professor Stefan Thomke offered the following four rules for enlightened experimentation: organize for rapid experimentation; fail early and often, but avoid mistakes; anticipate and exploit early information; and combine new and old technologies. While these principles are recognizable in NASA’s Constellation S
