Managing to the Metric: An Approach to Optimizing Life Support Costs

The ALS Element (Program) has established the ALS metric as its means of measuring project performance. Programmatic goals are to drive the metric upward by a factor of 3 by 2014, thereby reducing the cost of keeping people alive in space. To assess the feasibility of achieving the metric goal, the contributions to the metric of ISS life support items as required for a Mars mission have been identified and sorted by size. Options for dramatically reducing the larger contributions have been identified. In this way, significant improvements might be achieved,. Although the implementation of such achievements is not identified through this process, this approach does identify where development effort is needed, and the magnitude of improvement that could be achieved.