NASA Workmanship Project Activities and Future Issues
Plante, Jeannette
NASA GSFC

The NASA Workmanship Project provides technical advice to NASA Headquarters Office of Safety and Mission Assurance for policy formulation for quality requirements applied across the Agency. It maintains five NASA requirements documents for Workmanship for printed wiring assembly and cable harness manufacturing processes and quality. In an effort to support a Federal mandate to convert to industry equivalent standards where practical, the Workmanship Project is re-evaluating its core technical requirements and looking for opportunities to adopt industry-maintained standards in place of the NASA Standards. The Project also seeks and facilitates opportunities where NASA can leverage existing or newly developing resources available through other Federal Agencies or Industry. This approach provides NASA Programs and Projects with requirement sets, inspection techniques, lessons learned, experts, databases and research data over a wide range of topics related to electronics subsystem manufacturing for high reliability applications. The rapid pace of technology development in the electronic industry continues to broaden and enrich that scope. Resulting issues for the Workmanship Project include methods for ensuring high quality area array interconnects, inspection criteria for new Pb-free solders, hand-soldering techniques for parts designed for machine soldering, and electrical inspection techniques that compliment printed wiring board coupon analysis for high density features. This presentation will describe the Workmanship Project process, recent accomplishments, short and long-term goals, and opportunities for information sharing between NASA, JAXA and ESA.