The New NASA Approach to Reliability and Maintainability

The new NASA technical standard on R&M has moved away from requiring specific R&M activities during each of the traditional project phases to instead developing and planning the implementation of the R&M requirements to meet the top-level project R&M objectives. The emphasis is on providing the evidence to show that the R&M requirements are met, rather than on conducting specific prescribed R&M activities. The technical standard on R&M defines a comprehensive hierarchy of specific R&M objectives and identifies particular strategies to implement them at each level. That is, the top level R&M objective is defined and then one or more design strategies to implement it are developed immediately before the next lower objectives are defined and the strategies to achieve those are designed. The objectives are the R&M requirements, and the strategies are the hardware designs or operations plans developed to meet these requirements. The new R&M process is aligned with the systems design process and helps ensure that the methods to meet the R&M requirements are built into the design.