Human Factors and Success in Space Transportation
- Paper number
IAC-05-D5.2.02
- Author
Mr. Sebastian Rothammel, European Space Agency (ESA), Germany
- Year
2005
- Abstract
Engineering is human Why human factor is important in the space sector? Easy question, difficult answer... It is difficult because commonly "Space industry" is considered almost equal to "high level technology" which leads to create an entirely automated launcher whose function can be considered as opposite to "human action". Then, where is the sense of studying the effect of people on an automated technical environment... This argumentation is obviously wrong, but why? When you are considering, for example, an aircraft crash it seems quite easy to find "human errors" which explain failures, because there is a crew directly involved in the decisions taken at the moment of the accident. But, what happens when there is no pilot or operator? Then you should change you point of view, open your mind and consider that the whole system is designed by engineers and engineering is human... And that is why human factors are so important even in the aerospace field, because we, engineers, are humans and we err. The only way to fight against this fact is knowing the problem and trying to analyse and prevent it before launch. Design is like a coin with its two faces: on one side you have to do your best design in order to reach perfection but, on the other side, you can make mistakes, so you have to guess them and mitigate them. Learning from the past, and most of all, learning from the past mistakes can help us to improve our actual projects and lead to a better understanding of how procedures and organization structures might be to avoid falling into the same mistakes twice. From human factors to human errors It seems reasonable to start working with human factors giving a former definition of them. For example the ICAO considers human factors as: "Human Factors is about people: it is about people in their working and living environments, and it is about their relationship with equipment, procedures and the environment. Just as importantly, it is about their relationships with other people. Human Factors involves the overall performance of human beings within the aviation system; it seeks to optimise peoplesystem; it seeks to optimise people's performance through the systematic application of the human sciences, often integrated within the framework of system engineering. Its twin objectives can be seen as safety and efficiency." Although it is a bit difficult to say what a human error is, we can consider it is an out-of-tolerance action due to one or more persons. So it becomes clear that all human errors are human factors but not all human factors are human errors though sometimes we tend to treat them as equal. Therefore the study or human factors involve a lot of different kind of fields such as psychology, physiology and engineering.
- Abstract document
- Manuscript document
IAC-05-D5.2.02.pdf (🔒 authorized access only).
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