The Application of Resilience Engineering to Human Space Flight

There is a concern that mishap reporting systems track information about previous anomalies but do little to protect against future failures. In contrast, the term ‘resilience engineering’ has been coined to describe techniques that identify the thousands of everyday positive actions that prevent accidents from occurring. This change of perspective poses significant theoretical and pragmatic challenges. Just as it can be difficult to identify the causes of previous failures, it is equally difficult to determine what went right and why. We cannot always be sure how close our successes came to failure. Resilience engineering has not previously been applied in any sustained way to space missions. This paper, therefore, uses resilience engineering concepts to analyse the many different ways in which successive crews responded to engineering challenges on the International Space Station (ISS).