2015-10-212015-10-212015-07-12ICES-2015-045http://hdl.handle.net/2346/64314Bellevue, WashingtonHarry W. Jones, NASA Ames Research Center, USAThe 45th International Conference on Environmental Systems was held in Bellevue, Washington, USA on 12 July 2015 through 16 July 2015.NASA emphasizes crew safety and system reliability but several unfortunate failures have occurred. The Apollo 1 fire was mistakenly unanticipated. After that tragedy, the Apollo program gave much more attention to safety. The Challenger accident revealed that NASA had neglected safety and that management underestimated the high risk of shuttle. Probabilistic Risk Assessment was adopted to provide more accurate failure probabilities for shuttle and other missions. NASA’s “faster, better, cheaper” initiative and government procurement reform led to deliberately dismantling traditional reliability engineering. The Columbia tragedy and Mars mission failures followed. Failures can be attributed to blunders, normal accidents, or bad luck. Achieving high reliability is difficult but possible.application/pdfengPresentation