The U.S. Army‘s Picatinny Arsenal and NASA have shared practices through the four-month special assignment of Ben Schumeg, a quality assurance engineer of the Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center at Picatinny Arsenal.
The service branch said Thursday Schumeg worked to benchmark ARDEC processes with NASA’s and compare best practices during his assignment in efforts to enhance productivity and efficiency between the two organizations.
“While our mission ‘spaces’ may be different — space exploration and International Space Station versus ARDEC, which traditionally does armaments and weapons systems — the way we get to the solution is pretty similar,” said Schumeg.
“We want to create something that’s reliable, that works when it’s supposed to or doesn’t work when it’s not supposed to.”
Schumeg also conducted process review and software quality assurance work on visiting vehicles that supply cargo to the International Space Station, the Army said.
He also took part in the Commercial Crew Transportation Capability program that aims to employ the help of industry to transport astronauts to ISS rather than use the Russian Soyuz spacecraft, which costs approximately $90 million per head, the Army reported.
An agreement is underway between NASA and ARDEC to let Schumeg continue his part-time software assurance duties with NASA after his special assignment ends and he goes back to Picatinny.
Schumeg performs armament systems software qualifications work at Picatinny Arsenal, the service branch noted.
