This is historical material “frozen in time.” The website is no longer updated and links to external websites and some internal pages may not work.

Home
Agencies
Goals
Initiatives
Programs

API
About
FAQ

You are hereHome

Primary tabs

View(active tab)
Show Changes

Strategic Objective

Ensure sustainable technical capabilities for NASA's future missions.

Strategic Objective

Ensure the availability and continued advancement of strategic, technical, and programmatic capabilities to sustain NASA’s Mission.

Lead Office: Human Exploration Operations Mission Directorate

Themes:

General Science, Space, and Technology

NASA.gov

Facebook Twitter Linkdin Mail RSS

XML

CSV

Overview
Progress Update

Overview

We identify and prioritize our essential assets and implement strategic investment decisions to sustain, enhance, replace, modify, or dispose of them based on NASA and National needs. We ensure that our key capabilities and critical assets will be available in the future to support the missions that require them. For example, we provide launch services to NASA and civil sector missions, as well as an uninterrupted, reliable space communications network to allow data transmissions to Earth from space. Both of these capabilities are critical to making space missions

Progress Update

NASA, in consultation with the Office of Management and Budget, has highlighted this strategic objective as a focus area for improvement.

Through the Strategic Review and Agency’s other performance management processes, NASA reviews recent accomplishments and near term plans for Agency’s strategic objectives and programs. Under Strategic Objective 3.2, multiple NASA programs provide critical services and strategic technical programmatic capabilities for the Agency. Recent examples of progress include the successful launches of missions such as the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission and the Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission via the Launch Services Program (LSP), and the Rocket Propulsion Test (RPT) program has completed 368 successful tests with 98.4% test stand availability. Over the next several years, NASA’s critical next steps are to complete the second new 34-meter deep-space antenna at Canberra by the end of FY 2016, continue development of the Space Network Ground Segment Sustainment (SGSS) project, provide valuable propulsion data to the SLS and Orion programs as they prepare for Exploration Missions 1 and 2, and continue to successfully launch the assigned NASA and civil sector robotic missions plus acquire new launch services for future NASA missions. Specific performance measures for the next two years can be found in NASA’s FY 2016 and FY 2017 Annual Performance Plans.

The Strategic Review also addresses long-term strategic outcomes, alignment, and key management challenges for each strategic objective, as well as across NASA’s portfolio of activities. The NASA 2015 Strategic Review noted that areas for improvement for this strategic objective include challenges within the Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) portfolio. These issues constitute significant budget and programmatic challenges to the Agency’s critical network and communication activities.

For more information, highlighted achievements during FY 2015 are detailed in the FY 2015 Agency Financial Report. Additional details on the FY 2015 performance for supporting Performance Goals and Annual Performance Indicators are provided in NASA’s FY 2015 Annual Performance Report. Information on the strategies for achieving this strategic objective can be found in the 2014 NASA Strategic Plan.

Expand All

Strategic Goals

Strategic Goal:

Serve the public through excellence in NASA's workforce and assets.

Statement:

Serve the American public and accomplish our Mission by effectively managing our people, technical capabilities, and infrastructure.

Strategic Objectives

Effectively manage NASA's diverse assets and workforce.

Statement:

Attract and advance a highly skilled, competent, and diverse workforce, cultivate an innovative work environment, and provide the facilities, tools, and services needed to conduct NASA’s missions.

Description:

NASA’s workforce and institutional capabilities enable us to successfully conduct our missions. We are dedicated to innovation, bold ideas, and excellence, which enable us to provide the day-to-day operations required to support and achieve our missions.

People are our most important resource; without them, no mission can be achieved. We have a workforce that is skilled, competent, and dedicated. Our workforce is committed and passionate, and brings many dimensions of diversity, including ideas and approaches, to make our teams successful. To conduct our missions over the next 20 to 30 years, we must focus on attaining an increasingly diverse workforce with the right balance of skills and talents and provide an inclusive work environment in which employees with varying perspectives, education levels, skills, life experiences, and backgrounds work together and are fully engaged in NASA’s Mission.

Learn More

Ensure sustainable technical capabilities for NASA's future missions.

Statement:

Ensure the availability and continued advancement of strategic, technical, and programmatic capabilities to sustain NASA’s Mission.

Description:

Learn More

Provide secure, effective and affordable IT for NASA.

Statement:

Provide secure, effective, and affordable information technologies and services that enable NASA’s Mission.

Description:

Information technology (IT) is critical to NASA’s infrastructure and mission success. To support NASA’s missions effectively, we must inspire excellence in IT planning and service delivery across organizational and functional boundaries. We must find ways to use information technology that supports a more collaborative, geographically diverse and mobile working culture, keeps our IT skills and capabilities up-to-date to serve NASA’s missions, and protects those missions from ever-evolving IT security threats.

Our approach to IT planning and service delivery emphasizes responsive innovation, transparency, and accountability. In planning, we take an agency-wide view that considers NASA’s diverse mission needs to guide IT policy, investment decisions, and management practices. At the same time, our approach calls for rigorous assessments of investment trade-offs and sequencing to balance the cost, quality, and timing of our IT capabilities to optimize value while limiting mission risk. We will collaborate with NASA leaders to prioritize and sequence our information management investments to deliver the right blend of capabilities over time to effectively and affordably support NASA.

Learn More

Ensure the safety and success of NASA’s missions.

Statement:

Ensure effective management of NASA programs and operations to complete the mission safely and successfully.

Description:

Safety and mission success programs protect the health and safety of the NASA workforce and improve the likelihood that NASA’s programs, projects, and operations will be completed safely and successfully. NASA’s commitment to safety and mission success extends to the American public, our employees, our commercial partners, and our contractors. We do this through an environment of trust and ethical behavior using diverse multidisciplinary teams that foster equal opportunity, collaboration, and continuous learning. We promote technical excellence and competence while ensuring safety, reliability, maintainability, quality engineering, and project management within NASA.

Learn More

Download
Featured Report

Agency Plans and Reports

Agency Strategic Plan

Accessibility
Privacy Policy