Downloaded from www.worldscientific.com by MCGILL UNIVERSITY on 02/09/15. For personal use only.This paper outlines a Decision-Maker's Tool (DM Tool), designed to guide practitioners and their inter-disciplinary teams through a typical strategic environmental assessment (SEA) process. While SEA properly includes post-decision follow-up, the DM Tool covers the SEA process up to the creation of a Briefing Note for the decision maker. Together, use of the DM Tool and the Briefing Note should facilitate positive contributions to sustainability through well considered and aligned policies, plans and programmes (PPPs), by enhancing the comprehensiveness, consistency, clarity, accessibility and credibility of decision making information.The discussion presumes that the SEA is central to the PPP development process, rather than being a separate exercise. The DM Tool and Briefing Note are designed to recommend PPP action based on clearly stated needs and purposes, addressing the key issues, and application of explicit sustainability criteria in the comparative evaluation of feasible alternatives. Particular attention is paid to recognising trade-offs and residual risks, and presenting all this information concisely for the decision maker. devote to individual cases and decisions. For SEA practitioners this means that much depends on the Briefing Note, or its equivalent: the document that takes the core findings of the sustainability-based assessment work and summarizes, translates and conveys them to the decision maker. To be effective, the Briefing Note must be carefully tailored to meet the decision-maker's needs, and be concise, clear, sufficiently comprehensive and credible. The presentation of information can help meet these requirements, but much depends on the quality of the SEA work on which the Briefing Note is based.The Decision-Maker's Tool (DM Tool) outlined here is meant to guide SEA practitioners and their inter-disciplinary teams through a typical SEA process, in order to arrive at a concise and easily accessible message that meets the priority needs of decision makers. It uses a number of steps and questions that enable the process to recommend the optimum alternative, taking due account of trade-offs associated with different alternatives, and to support and produce an effective Briefing Note for the decision maker, focused on crucial sustainability issues. Morrison-Saunders and Therivel (2006) acknowledge that the issue of trade-offs in sustainability decision making is a key factor that must be explicitly acknowledged and proactively addressed in the sustainability assessment process. As such, the DM Tool could be of value to both SEA practitioners and decision makers.The approach described is not tied to any particular legal or policy requirement (e.g., the European Union Strategic Environmental Assessment Directive); it is sufficiently generic to be applied in a wide range of contexts where sustainability is the desired outcome. As a generic tool, the DM Tool can act as the starting point and catalyst...

No abstract

The suitport concept has been recently implemented as part of the small pressurized lunar rover (Currently the Space Exploration vehicle, or SEV) and the Multi-Mission Space Exploration Vehicle (MMSEV) concept demonstrator vehicle. Suitport replaces or augments the traditional airlock function of a spacecraft by providing a bulkhead opening, capture mechanism, and sealing system to allow ingress and egress of a space suit while the space suit remains outside of the pressurized volume of the spacecraft. This presents significant new opportunities to EVA exploration in both microgravity and surface environments. The suitport concept will enable three main improvements in EVA by providing reductions in: pre-EVA time from hours to less than thirty minutes; airlock consumables; contamination returned to the cabin with the EVA crewmember. Two second generation suitports were designed and tested. The previously reported second generation Marman Clamp suitport and a newer concept, the Pneumatic Flipper Suitport. These second generation suitports demonstrated human donning and doffing of the Z1 spacesuit with an 8.3 psi pressure differential across the spacesuit. Testing was performed using the JSC B32 Chamber B, a human rated vacuum chamber. The test included human rated suitports, the suitport compatible prototype suit, and chamber modifications. This test brought these three elements together in the first ever pressurized donning of a rear entry suit through a suitport. This paper presents the results of the testing, including unexpected difficulties with doffing, and engineering solutions implemented to ease the difficulties. A review of suitport functions, including a discussion of the need to doff a pressurized suit in earth gravity, is included. Recommendations for future design and testing are documented.

No abstract