The Human Research Program (HRP) is a NASA program established in October of 2005. The HRP is located in the

Johnson Space Center The Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center (JSC) is NASA's center for human spaceflight in Houston, Texas (originally named the Manned Spacecraft Center), where human spaceflight training, research, and flight controller, flight control are conducted. ...

. Its main focuses are

Research and development Research and development (R&D or R+D), known in some countries as OKB, experiment and design, is the set of innovative activities undertaken by corporations or governments in developing new services or products. R&D constitutes the first stage ...

specifically for employees of NASA.

Goals

The stated goals of the HRP are to provide knowledge and technology in order to mitigate risks to human health and performance. The Human Research Program also aims to educate the public on the challenges of human space flight.

Human Research Roadmap

The Human Research Roadmap (HRR) is a web-based tool that is used to communicate the content of the Integrated Research Plan (IRP). The IRP is utilized to identify the approach and research activities planned to address risks to human health and performance in space which are assigned to specific elements within the program. This tool is designed to help users search for items such as gaps associated with risks, the tasks associated with a given gap, the cross-integration of a task across multiple gaps or risks, and deliverables associated with a gap or risk.

Evidence

Reviews of the accumulated evidence from medical records, space flight operations, and research findings are compiled into evidence reports. This evidence provides the basis for identifying the highest risk to humans in space exploration, which comprises the risk portfolio within the HRP. It also provides the basis for identifying gaps and tasks in the research plan.

Risks

The program identifies risks related to the

physiological Physiology (; ) is the science, scientific study of function (biology), functions and mechanism (biology), mechanisms in a life, living system. As a branches of science, subdiscipline of biology, physiology focuses on how organisms, organ syst ...

effects of radiation, weightlessness, terrestrial environments as well as unique challenges in medical support, human factors, and

behavioral Behavior (American English) or behaviour (British English) is the range of actions of individuals, organisms, systems or artificial entities in some environment. These systems can include other systems or organisms as well as the inanimate p ...

health support. Risks are identified in the Program Requirements Document (PRD) and assigned to an element within HRP to quantify, mitigate, or monitor.

Gaps

For each risk, the HRP attempts to identify gaps in knowledge about the risk and the ability to mitigate the risk. The degree of uncertainty in understanding the likelihood, consequence, and/or time frame of a particular risk are the major factors that drive the gaps. Gaps in knowledge or risk mitigation often appear in multiple risks, and many of the specific research tasks address multiple gaps.

Tasks

Tasks partially or completely close a gap by better defining a risk or developing mitigation strategies to reduce the risk to an acceptable level. In some cases, a task can address multiple gaps across multiple risks.

Deliverables

Each task culminates in a deliverable or otherwise agreed-upon end-product such as recommended standards, flight rules, processes, countermeasures, and new technologies.

References

External links

Human Research Project
{{Webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20221207072616/https://www.nasa.gov/exploration/humanresearch/index.html , date=2022-12-07 website Human spaceflight