NASA Brought in to Advise On Reducing Offshore Drilling Risk

The commonalities between drillers and astronauts sounds like the beginning of a bad joke.

But offshore drilling government inspector, the Safety Board and the application environment, announced Thursday that NASA has agreed to advise on reducing the risk of accidents.

"Both BSEE and NASA work in harsh environments without compromise, based on advanced technology to go further and deeper than you thought possible," said Director Brian Salerno BSEE in a statement.

Last week, the office offshore drilling was taken to task for not doing enough to improve safety on drilling platforms in Horizon spill following deep water in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.

The Government Accountability Office said it was still following many of the same protocols in investigating incidents as it did in 2010.

At NASA, the office itself found a partner with a long history of studying the risks and rewards.

The aerospace agency, which trains astronauts and performs the tasks of the Johnson Space Center in Houston, uses a modeling technique that uses quantitative risk in the likes of Orion deep-space program.

"Whether the task takes a deep space, or in the deep ocean, the analysis of environmental factors, staff training and risk mitigation are similar," Jack James, transfer strategist technology in the Johnson space center, said in a statement.