Michael Stites, NASA,

NASA has a facility inventory of over 5,000 buildings and structures, with an asset value over $53 billion. The majority of NASA’s physical assets date back to the Apollo era, with approximately 83 percent of those facilities beyond their design life. NASA estimates an annual maintenance requirement of over $900 million, which has been consistently underfunded by an average of $250 million per year. Over time, this has led to a $3.0-billion maintenance backlog. Additionally, unplanned maintenance can consume up to 30 percent of the maintenance budget in a fiscal year, due to unanticipated disruptions, failures, and natural disasters, creating more unaddressed maintenance issues and failures. Coupled with multi-fiscal year national economic downturns and ever-increasing inflation rates, to include NASA’s Maintenance and Operations (M&O) budget concerns and flatlined fiscal allocations, NASA has implemented an Agency led initiative to reemphasize the importance of utilizing Reliability Centered Maintenance practices and elements thereof across the agency’s Centers and multiple satellite sites.

In the last two years, NASA has taken a multi-pronged approach toward emphasizing RCM implementation at each Center. First, the Agency has begun an introductory Maintenance & Reliability training program to ensure each center has trained RCM practitioners. Second, due to limited budgets, NASA has utilized facility mission relevance as a way to guide maintenance investment toward the most mission critical facilities and third, NASA has begun analyzing each Center RCM program identifying best practices and opportunities to improve their programs.