Integrating Employee Health: A Model Program for NASA

The mission of the first NASA project, Mercury, was to learn whether humans could survive in space. Subsequent mission projects included Gemini during the 1960s, then Apollo, which ultimately landed the first astronauts on the moon in 1969. The Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz Test Projects were initiated in the 1970s. The Space Shuttle Program and the International Space Station developed from these initiatives during the 1980s and 1990s. NASA has launched several unmanned probes, such as Pioneer, Voyager, and the Hubble Space Telescope, in addition to its manned missions, and space science programs have been carried out to Earth’s moon and all planets in our solar system except Pluto. Together, these projects have yielded NASA many successes with few tragic failures (Table 1-1) (http://www.history.nasa.gov/).

TABLE 1-1 Draft Timeline of NASA History

Chronology	Policy Events	Mission Events
1958	NASA began operation	Pioneer 1: NASA’s first launch
1960		Mercury 1: Mercury-Redstone Capsule-launch vehicle combination. Unoccupied test flight
1961	President Kennedy announced that he was committed to landing a man on the moon	Mercury Astronaut program: human space flight initiatives to see if humans could survive in space, 1961-1963 Mercury 2: Chimpanzee Ham was sent into suborbital space for 16.5 minutes Alan Shepard became the first American to fly in space: Mercury spacecraft Freedom 7
1962		John Glenn becomes first American to orbit the Earth: Mercury spacecraft Friendship 7
1965	Project Gemini is implemented: Flights, 1965-1966	Gus Grissom and John Young: first operational mission of Project Gemini with Gemini 3 Ed White became the first American to complete a spacewalk: Gemini 4
1967	Project Apollo is implemented: Flights, 1967-1972	Apollo-Saturn (AS) 204 (Apollo 1): First death directly attributable to U.S. Space program. Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee died as a result of a fire on the launch pad

Table of Contents

Front Matter R1-R16

Executive Summary 1-18

1 The NASA Worksite 19-33

2 Occupational and Preventative Health at NASA 34-52

3 Workforce Health, Performance, Readiness, Resilience: The Case for Change 53-76

4 Organizing and Managing Employee Integrated Health Programs and Policies 77-101

5 Implementing Integrated Health Programs 102-149

6 Data Integration and Health Management 150-170

Appendix A: Glossary of Terms and Abbreviations 171-175

Appendix B: Open Session and Workshop Agendas 176-179

Appendix C: Committee Member Biographical Sketches 180-184