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Seven Key Risk Factors Examined

• The risk factors considered were: supply chains, dependency on external sources, acquisition costs and schedules, workforce issues, organizational and managerial considerations (e.g., the issues arising from NASA's distributed management between mission directorates and research centers), domestic and international political situations (e.g., partnership instabilities, congressional equities), and technical issues including information security.

Structured Methodology Provides Benefits Beyond Final Calculations

• Considering not only risks but also mitigations at an early stage in the analysis can prompt a structured thinking process that allows for clearer and more-thoughtful decisions.
• The use of a normalization process allows comparison of disparate risk issues that contribute to important decisions. Without such normalization, decisionmakers would be presented with a number of risk factors using different scales (and likely different grading and weighting) with little ability to understand comparisons within or among them or the overall risk burden associated with a decision.
• The result of such an analysis is a graphical representation of normalized relative risks designed to allow for understanding the NASA organizational-level risk associated with its decisions.

Case Studies Validate Suggested Methodology

• Each discrete risk assessment requires that the methodology be changed to reflect the particulars of the issue under consideration.
• Two decisions — one past and one future — were considered as a way to test and partially validate the methodology. The previous decision considered was the cancellation of the Space Shuttle program and commercialization of the transportation to the International Space Station, while the future decision focused on Cislunar habitation.