In January 2004, following the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003, the President announced a new exploration policy entitled A Renewed Spirit of Discovery: The President’s Vision for U.S. Space Exploration. The President’s vision calls for retiring the Space Shuttle upon completion of the International Space Station in 2010 and creating a new family of exploratory vehicles for human spaceflight that will allow a return to the moon and voyages to Mars and points beyond. To implement the President’s vision, NASA embarked on a major study and made recommendations for technologies and potential approaches for vehicle design. NASA incorporated these recommendations into the Constellation Program along with exploration activities called for in the President’s vision. NASA’s newly created Exploration Systems Mission Directorate manages the Constellation program, which will oversee three major projects—Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle, the Ares I Crew Launch Vehicle, and the Ares V Cargo Launch Vehicle. Figure 1 shows the general design of the Constellation vehicles and how they differ from the Shuttle. The Space Operations Mission Directorate manages the Space Shuttle Program. In order to support the 5 major projects—orbiter, Space Shuttle main engine, solid rocket booster, reusable solid rocket motor, and external tank—that comprise the Space Shuttle Program, NASA has 654 facilities that utilize more than 980,000 line items of equipment and employs over 2,000 civil service and more than 15,000 contractor personnel. NASA has several space centers, but the three that hold the majority of this workforce are Johnson Space Center in Houston; Kennedy Space Center, in Cape Canaveral, Fla.; and Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. The Space Operations Mission Directorate also manages the International Space Station. NASA has developed plans intended to help the agency sort through a myriad of decisions relating to transition and retirement, with some aspects focused on NASA’s transition management structure and others specifically addressing the supplier base. NASA has an overarching agency-level transition plan, a joint acquisition plan, and a Space Shuttle Program Transition Management Plan, which demonstrate an initial effort to establish a strategy for managing change. Monitoring risk at different levels of the agency is one of the issues addressed in the plans. Also addressed, in general, is the decision-making process related to transitioning the supplier based from the Space Shuttle Program to the Constellation Program. In response to a legislative mandate, NASA developed the Human Space Flight Transition Plan. This agencywide plan describes the overarching strategy for transition from the Shuttle to the Constellation Program’s new exploration activities and discusses desired outcomes, processes, roles, responsibilities, and certain program-level requirements. The plan also includes a range of issues that NASA will need to address to achieve a successful transition—budget, acquisition, human capital, and property and environmental management. NASA expects the Human Space Flight Transition Plan to serve as initial, top-level strategic guidance and a governance framework for the development of lower-level directorate, program, and project transition planning guidance documents. NASA officials say they are revising the plan to incorporate guidelines that the inspector general recommended with respect to program and project management. The Space Operations and Exploration Systems Mission Directorates are developing a joint acquisition road map to avoid substantial duplication of acquisition costs. For example, the Constellation Program has begun work under a current NASA follow-on contract for Shuttle-related support to the Constellation Program and intends to begin work on the engine that will be used in the Ares V Cargo Launch Vehicle through an interagency agreement with the Air Force and National Reconnaissance Office. NASA also recently approved the Space Shuttle Program Transition Management Plan, which defines how the Space Shuttle Program should organize and manage its retirement and transition activities to support the agency-level Human Space Flight Transition Plan and overall Vision. The plan describes the organizational structure, management approach, processes, products, and tools used to manage the transition and retirement of Space Shuttle Program capabilities. The shuttle program’s five project offices are developing separate transition plans, as are three of NASA’s space centers. Figure 2 shows the various plans and the NASA organizations affected by the plans. In addition to the plans mentioned above, NASA has developed a communications strategy to keep the Shuttle workforce informed about the activities, intentions, and goals related to retirement of the Shuttle and transition to new exploration activities. Weekly teleconferences, monthly reports, quarterly newsletters and magazines, and Transition Quarterly Program Manager’s Reviews will strive to lessen confusion and frustration in this environment of change. NASA and the prime contractors are conducting supplier visits to better inform the subcontractor workforce about transition activities and the opportunities available for future work. To measure progress on Shuttle retirement and transition, NASA has identified a collection of metrics that can be used at an agencywide or program level to assess cost, schedule, technical, and risks. NASA officials say they intend, on a quarterly basis, to analyze progress made and to look ahead for opportunities to, for example, save money, mitigate risks, and see what decisions need to be made about which suppliers. Key metrics at the agency level include cost avoidance, schedule variances, and government personnel time charges for work on single versus multiple programs. Various tools will be used to track risks related to transition and retirement activities. Such risks include loss of critical Shuttle personnel, transfer of facilities funding from the Space Shuttle Program to the Constellation Program, and cargo transportation shortfalls for the International Space Station after 2010. NASA has developed a new decision-making process to manage supplier decisions related to the retirement of the Shuttle and transition to the Constellation Program. The new process defines key areas of authority and responsibility and lines of reporting. Control boards, comprising representatives from the Space Shuttle, Constellation, and International Space Station programs, are expected to provide guidance and facilitate decisions on important transition issues. Transition managers have been appointed at the directorate, program, and center levels. Table 1 provides an overview of the various processes. To make better informed decisions, the boards obtain supplier assessments, known as Space Shuttle Management Resource Transition (SMRT) documents, usually completed by the project offices, which provide rationale and potential impact for recommended courses of action. Shuttle capabilities with potential use for the Constellation Program are usually elevated to Transition Control Board for coordination and review. NASA is using the Critical Single Source Supplier List and the new Strategic Capabilities Assessment database to manage its supplier base through the retirement of the Shuttle and transition to the Constellation Program. The Critical Single Source Supplier List existed prior to the announcement of the Shuttle’s retirement and is used to monitor the unique capabilities provided by critical single source suppliers and note any supportability issues that could arise. NASA considers a supplier to be a critical single source supplier if it is the only known or only certified source of particular hardware or services and has received hardware or services from them in the past 5 years or expects to do business with them again in the future. The list contains over 230 suppliers identified by each of the five major Shuttle project offices (see app. II for a list of NASA’s critical single source suppliers). NASA can exercise various options to ensure that certain key capabilities and the critical suppliers associated with those capabilities are maintained until no longer needed. For example, a skills retention contract can be put in place by Shuttle program officials through the prime contractor to ensure that a subcontractor will maintain the minimum skills necessary to perform failure analysis until the end of the Shuttle Program. The Strategic Capabilities Assessment database, created after the Shuttle’s retirement was announced, provides an initial review and categorization of Shuttle’s assets and is used for tracking, controlling, maintaining, and updating information associated with Shuttle capabilities. Each capability comes bundled with property, personnel, suppliers, contracts, and Shuttle last-need date, which together produce a product or service, and the database tracks risk associated with each capability. Using the information gathered in the database, NASA can generate a master schedule that provides the basis for transition plans and adds insight into the progress of transition and retirement activities. The Transition Program Requirements Control Board plans to use the master schedule to estimate how many decisions need to be made each quarter. The Shuttle Program has identified most of the last-need dates and release dates for the 300 or so capabilities that are contained in the Strategic Capabilities Assessment database, according to NASA officials. Constellation Program officials have completed in the spring of 2007 a preliminary assessment of which capabilities will be needed in the future, but acknowledged that further requirements refinement and definitions are needed. Whether NASA’s transition plans and processes will be effective is unclear because NASA has not set requirements for Constellation’s supplier base needs and few decisions about suppliers have worked their way through the new processes. While the Shuttle is, in some cases, ready to release or transfer certain suppliers, its ability to do so has been impacted by the lack of detailed requirements from the Constellation Program. According to NASA officials, because the Constellation Program is early in its design cycle, it is not able to “pull” suppliers to Constellation as a counter to the “push” from the Shuttle Program to release or transfer suppliers. For instance, according to the Space Shuttle Main Engine (SSME) project manager, even though his office has identified, to the best of its abilities, the suppliers that could be needed for the J-2X engine (which will be used on the Crew Launch Vehicle), the Constellation Program is still working on the requirements for the J-2X and has not made any determinations about which Shuttle suppliers will be needed. The SSME project office was able to identify suppliers that could be used for new exploration activities because the same prime contractor that produces the Shuttle main engines will produce the J-2X engine.