JAXA Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency

You cannot avoid safety and reliability issues in manufacturing. With this in mind, raising awareness of these issues is a key to more consistent space development.
It is said that a mature culture values reliability, and it is important to think about how awareness of the value of reliability can be nurtured. Waiting for such awareness to flourish on its own, on an individual basis, is not enough. Success lies in the creation of an environment where everyone can work efficiently, and at the same time be fully aware of, and respect, the significance of reliability.
Only a competent expert can do reliability inspections, but experts are not made in a day. Training and building experience takes time. That does not mean, however, that you should give up on high-quality production because you do not have the right human resources. You can design a system that makes up for a lack of individual expertise. To do this, you need a deep understanding of the individual skills of each engineer, which ensures the best use of all the available skills within the system. This is called "organization power."

An efficient way to increase reliability is to have a third party perform regular inspections. Nobody deliberately produces inferior items. In design and development, people who are in charge of a project do their utmost to ensure better performance and high reliability. However, it is sometimes difficult to see problems in something you are deeply involved in. And of course, everyone makes mistakes. As such, it becomes valuable to have the greater objectivity of third-party inspections, which can uncover things that might otherwise be overlooked by your own team. Having the activities of a project checked by an outside specialist is invaluable in increasing reliability.
Once a wall is plastered, you cannot see what is underneath. If you wish to inspect it, you have to do it before the wall is covered. The same is true of efforts to improve reliability: you need regular inspections right from the earliest phases of the project.
Maintaining close contact with the project teams, our mission is to promote a system that allows a third party to objectively evaluate and support projects in real time.

With the technology we had 30 years ago, humans were able to go to the moon. That tells us that it is not always necessary to have the latest technology in order to build a system to maintain reliability. Raising the level of every engineer's ability is one basic way to raise reliability, but this takes a very long time. In my opinion, the skills of individual engineers, and the organization's overall level of engineering, are like the wheels of a car. Nurturing the ability of engineers is fundamental to an organization, but it is also important to understand their current technical level, and with this in mind to build a system that helps the organization accomplish its goals. With this ethic, we will continue to help JAXA improve its reliability.
Aside from efficient project management, the measure of an organization's engineering quality also includes the capability to collect rich technical information and data, and the ability to develop and apply new methodologies. With these in place, evaluation can be done much more efficiently, which ensures greater reliability in the system.

Raising awareness, training, accumulation of technical data, development and application of methods of evaluating reliability - we see these as JAXA's agenda, and we are engaged in helping the organization to achieve them more efficiently.