In common with other interplanetary spacecraft, the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) spacecraft spends long periods of time out of ground contact. Even during ground contacts, the speed-of light limits realtime telemetry and commanding. Under these conditions, detection and correction of faults (safing) is a key area of spacecraft design. The goal of the safing design is to detect health-threatening faults, and to keep the spacecraft safe until the next ground contact. Fault diagnosis and correction (beyond that needed to keep the spacecraft safe) is a Mission Operations function.The critical aspects of spacecraft safety are power and communications. Because the spacecraft can operate on battery power only for a short period, keeping the fixed solar panels pointed towards the sun and the spacecraft load below the solar panel output is the first priority of the safing design. The second priority of the safing design is to place Earth within the pattern of an antenna that can be used to communicate throughout the mission. In keeping with the distributed spacecraft design, safing functions are likewise distributed between the Command and Data Handling subsystem and the Guidance and Control subsystem. Simple, reliable coordination of safing conditions and actions are required. Drivers of the safing design are the need to delay finalizing the safing algorithms as late as possible in the system development, to introduce flexible safing algorithms, and to create a testable system.