ROOM
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Astronautics
risk of human error that could jeopardise the
entire mission, and extensive studies have been
conducted to model human behaviour and to
predict the probability of people making errors as
a result of internal and external factors.
‘Human Factors’ (HF) as a discipline has
a particular focus on human performance.
Traditionally, the human operator was seen as a
liability within an otherwise perfectly designed,
safe system, and this is still the case in many
industrial contexts today.
NASA’s Mercury programme, which was the
United States’ first man-in-space programme,
had been designed for fully automatic control – a
controversial engineering decision, which reduced
the astronaut’s role to little more than a passenger.
During the flight of Faith 7, the final spaceflight
in the Mercury series, there were mission-
threatening technical problems. After experiencing
power failure in the capsule, pilot Gordon Cooper
took manual control and successfully estimated
the correct pitch for re-entry into the atmosphere
using just his wrist watch and his knowledge of the
star patterns outside the window. He then fired
the retrorockets at the right time and splashed
down close to the recovery ship.
His actions brought about a re-thinking of the
design philosophy for space missions and from that
point on the human component was no longer seen as
a liability but as an improvement of overall reliability.
However, humans are not perfect and mistakes
will inevitably be made in any system that involves
people, be it in the design, development or operations
phase. Many studies are currently taking place around
the human ‘system component’, identifying ways to
improve human-machine interfaces.
At the European Space Agency (ESA), interest
in what is termed ‘human dependability’ has been
boosted in recent years as the scope of ESA’s space
activities has expanded.
Human dependability
Human dependability is about the contribution
of a crew member in a space system to safety
and reliability. Machines can fail but so too can
‘people-in-the-loop’ of space systems, sometimes
with catastrophic consequences.
ESA’s Dependability and Safety Section therefore
has a longstanding interest in the subject of
human dependability: how the incidence of human
error can be reduced and its effects minimised.
Topics relating to the human element are at
the centre of discussion in the framework of
Human Dependability (HUDEP) at ESA. Initiated
in 2009, together with partners from the French
and German space agencies (CNES and DLR),
HUDEP serves as a forum to give space agencies
and industry the opportunity to discuss HF topics
across a project’s life cycle, and it has grown into
an inter-agency community of experts.
Human dependability relates directly to the fields
of Human Factors, Human Systems Integration,
Human-Centred Design and Human Behaviour &
Performance in that it addresses the contribution of
the human in a space system to safety and reliability.
In the late 1980s, ESA used the term in contractor
studies and policy work. At that time the focus was
mainly on human error in the product assurance,
safety and knowledge management context, as well
as root cause analysis methodology and human-
machine interaction design guidelines. More
recently, it has been used to describe an extension of
safety and dependability of technical systems, again
in the product assurance domain.
Top: ESA astronaut
Thomas Pesquet installing
the MARES machine in
Europe’s Columbus space
laboratory.
Above: ESA astronaut
Tim Peake during his 4
hour 43 minute spacewalk
to replace a failed power
regulator and install
cabling.
ESA
ESA/NASA
