National Aeronautics and Space Administration 

Academy Sharing Knowledge 

The NASA Source for Project Management and Engineering Excellence | APPEL WINTER | 2010
 

Inside 

Rocket + Science = Dialogue 

the gReening of oRbital DebRiS 

big facilitieS, haRD leSSonS 
 Photo Credit: NASA 

ON THE COVER 

Turning vanes inside the racetrack bend of the rebuilt 

12-Foot Pressure Wind Tunnel at Ames Research Center. 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ASK MAGAZINE | 1 

Contents 

5 19 49 

DEPARTMENTS INSIGHTS STORIES 

3 14 5 

In This Issue Sharing What We Know Rocket + Science = Dialogue 

By Don Cohen By Jean engLe anD Brent fontenot By BruCe morris, greg suLLivan, anD 

4 

From the APPEL Director 

By eD hoffman 

58 

The Knowledge Notebook 

By LaurenCe Prusak 

Johnson’s knowledge management 

program builds on existing practices. 

19 

The Greening of Orbital Debris 

By niChoLas L. Johnson NASA and the 

international community are cooperating 

to solve a problem as old as the space age. 

martin Burkey Engineers, designers, 

and scientists jointly explore the potential 

of a future launch vehicle. 

10 

Planning for Learning 

By karen m. mcnamara The author 

proposes a new NASA office to identify 

60 

ASK Interactive 

29 

Interview with Rob Strain 

and support learning opportunities. 

22 

and Lesa Roe Featured Invention: NASA Modeling 

By eD rogers Center directors Strain and Innovations Advance Wind-Energy 

Roe talk about the role of frank and frequent Industry 

communication in successful partnerships. By Bo sChwerin Developed in the eighties, 

33 

The Revolution of Social Innovation: 

a NASA engineer’s aerodynamic model 

guides the design of today’s wind turbines. 

Emerging Lessons for Large, 25 

Complex Organizations Getting to “Yes”—The Flight 

By Brook manviLLe Organizational leaders Readiness Review 

can learn from recent innovative approaches By matthew kohut anD Don Cohen 

to solving social problems. Technical rigor and open communication 

37 

Phaeton: Learning by Doing 

By Johnny kwok JPL’s program gives earlylead to the successful conclusion of a 

challenging FRR. 

40 

career hires end-to-end project experience. Rocketing from Past to Future 

45 

Still Learning from Columbia 

By matt meLis The work of the Columbia 

impact-analysis team contributes to the 

safety of new NASA spacecraft. 

as toLD to traCy mcmahan anD matthew 

kohut By PhiL sumraLL Reflecting on a 

long NASA career, Sumrall sees similarities 

and differences between NASA today and 

during the Apollo era. 

49 

Big Facilities, Hard Lessons 

By miChaeL osPring Ospring describes 

lessons learned from three decades of 

project work. 

54 

Classes and Spacecraft Operations 

By Leigh gatto anD toDD watson Bowie 

State University students learn from handson satellite operations—and help NASA in 

the process. 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

-

Issue No. 37 

Staff 

APPEL DIREcTOR AND PubLISHER 

Dr. Edward Hoffman 

ehoffman@nasa.gov 

EDITOR-IN-cHIEf 

Laurence Prusak 

larryprusak@gmail.com 

MANAGING EDITOR 

Don Cohen 

doncohen@rcn.com 

EDITOR 

Kerry Ellis 

kerry.ellis@asrcms.com 

cONTRIbuTING EDITORS 

Matt Kohut 

mattkohut@infactcommunications.com 

Haley Stephenson 

haley.stephenson@valador.com 

SENIOR KNOwLEDGE SHARING 

cONSuLTANT 

Jon Boyle 

jon.boyle@asrcms.com 

KNOwLEDGE SHARING ANALySTS 

Ben Bruneau 

ben.bruneau@asrcms.com 

Katherine Thomas 

katherine.thomas@asrcms.com 

Mai Ebert 

mai.ebert@asrcms.com 

APPEL PROGRAM MANAGER 

Yvonne Massaquoi 

yvonne.massaquoi@asrcms.com 

DESIGN 

Hirshorn Zuckerman Design Group, Inc. 

www.hzdg.com 

PRINTING SPEcIALIST 

Hanta Ralay 

hanta.ralay 1@nasa.gov 

PRINTING 

GraphTec 

The Academy of Program/Project and Engineering Leadership (APPEL) and ASK 

Magazine help NASA managers and project teams accomplish today’s missions and 

meet tomorrow’s challenges by sponsoring knowledge-sharing events and publications, 

providing performance enhancement services and tools, supporting career development 

programs, and creating opportunities for project management and engineering 

collaboration with universities, professional associations, industry partners, and other 

government agencies. 

ASK Magazine grew out of the Academy and its Knowledge Sharing Initiative, designed 

for program/project managers and engineers to share expertise and lessons learned 

with fellow practitioners across the Agency. Reflecting the Academy’s responsibility for 

project management and engineering development and the challenges of NASA’s new 

mission, ASK includes articles about meeting the technical and managerial demands 

of complex projects, as well as insights into organizational knowledge, learning, 

collaboration, performance measurement and evaluation, and scheduling. We at 

APPEL Knowledge Sharing believe that stories recounting the real-life experiences 

of practitioners communicate important practical wisdom and best practices that 

readers can apply to their own projects and environments. By telling their stories, 

NASA managers, scientists, and engineers share valuable experience-based knowledge 

and foster a community of reflective practitioners. The stories that appear in ASK 

are written by the “best of the best” project managers and engineers, primarily from 

NASA, but also from other government agencies, academia, and industry. Who better 

than a project manager or engineer to help a colleague address a critical issue on a 

project? Big projects, small projects—they’re all here in ASK. 

You can help ASK provide the stories you need and want by letting our editors know 

what you think about what you read here and by sharing your own stories. To submit 

stories or ask questions about editorial policy, contact Don Cohen, Managing Editor, 

doncohen@rcn.com, 781-860-5270. 

For inquiries about APPEL Knowledge Sharing programs and products, please contact 

Katherine Thomas, ASRC Management Services, 6303 Ivy Lane, Suite 130, Greenbelt, 

MD 20770; katherine.thomas@asrcms.com; 301-793-9973. 

To subscribe to ASK, please send your full name and preferred mailing address 

(including mail stop, if applicable) to ASKmagazine@asrcms.com. 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ASK MAGAZINE | 3 

In This Issue
 

In his Knowledge Notebook piece (“How Organizations Learn 

Anything”), Laurence Prusak says that most effective learning 

comes from hands-on experience combined with reflection 

on that experience. He notes that many organizations give 

short shrift to the reflection part. Pressure to move on to 

the next assignment and distrust of the “soft tools” used to 

think about work (for instance, conversation and storytelling) 

stand in the way. 

NASA is certainly not exempt from the demands of tight 

schedules and too much work, but it finds and makes many 

opportunities for reflection and the kind of experienceplus-reflection learning Prusak talks about. Johnny Kwok’s 

description of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Phaeton 

program (“Phaeton: Learning by Doing”) is a good example. 

The program gives early-career hires the experience of 

planning and carrying out small payload projects; mentors and 

milestone reviews guide their reflection on that work. Bowie 

State University’s Satellite Operations and Control Center 

(“Classes and Spacecraft Operations”) similarly combines 

hands-on work, teaching, and mentoring to prepare students 

for jobs as NASA employees and contractors. 

Karen McNamara views NASA’s commitment to learning 

from another angle, arguing that the agency needs an Office 

for Planned Learning to identify knowledge opportunities at 

the start of projects and give them financial support. 

Michael Ospring looks at what he has learned from thirty 

years of project experience in “Big Facilities, Hard Lessons.” 

In his case, too, the thoughtful advice of more-experienced 

project leaders helped develop his skill and understanding; 

he is now in a position to pass on what he knows. Ospring 

suggests that the things that go wrong are especially powerful 

spurs to thought and learning. That has certainly been true 

for NASA as a whole, the Columbia tragedy being the most 

recent driver of reflection and reform. In “Still Learning from 

Columbia,” Matt Melis details some of the hard work of the 

team that analyzed the impact of foam on the leading edge 

of the shuttle’s left wing and the continuing value of both 

their findings and their multicenter collaboration. Nicholas 

Johnson’s “The Greening of Orbital Debris” tells the story 

of international cooperation and ingenuity applied to the 

problem of the millions of pieces of space-age refuse that 

pose a danger to orbiting satellites and spacecraft. 

Two articles in this issue of ASK are about learning 

from people outside your own area of expertise. “Rocket 

+ Science = Dialogue” considers the fruitful results of 

conversations among engineers, designers, and scientists 

about potential science payloads of the Ares V. And Brook 

Manville discusses what organizations can learn from recent 

innovative approaches to solving social problems. 

Any learning that does not come from direct experience 

depends on good communication. In this issue’s interview, 

Rob Strain and Lesa Roe discuss the essential role that 

open and extensive conversation plays in successful 

partnerships between their centers. Jean Engle and Brent 

Fontenot (“Sharing What We Know”) describe knowledge 

management work at Johnson Space Center that includes 

storytelling as a way to share fifty years of human spaceflight 

knowledge. And the success of the Flight Readiness Review 

process (“Getting to ‘Yes’”) depends absolutely on full and 

open communication among those deciding whether a 

mission is safe to fly. 

Don Cohen 

Managing Editor 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

4 | ASK MAGAZINE 

From the APPEL Director
 

The Shuttle: Image of an Organization
 

BY ED HOFFMAN 

The shuttle has been the dominant image of an 

entire generation of human spaceflight, shaping 

NASA’s missions, organization, and self-image for 

nearly thirty years. 

When I came to NASA in 1983, missions 

couldn’t get to space without the shuttle; 

everything had to fly on it. To make the most of 

its reusability, the agency discontinued support 

for expendable launch vehicles. The shuttle set 

the technical requirements for everything NASA 

launched into space. Its payload bay and orbit 

bounded the designs of a generation of spacecraft. It 

transported communications and science satellites 

and Department of Defense payloads to space. It 

enabled on-orbit servicing of modular spacecraft, 

most notably the Hubble Space Telescope. It 

defined the parameters for the construction of the 

International Space Station. 

The shuttle’s failures changed us. The Challenger 

accident forced us to ask hard questions about who 

we had become and confront behaviors like the 

“normalization of deviance,” identified by sociologist 

Diane Vaughn. We recognized the risk posed by our 

dependence on the shuttle as the nation’s only launch 

vehicle. Missions designed for shuttle launch, such 

as the Cosmic Background Explorer, had to find 

alternate routes to space. 

NASA made changes in roles, responsibilities, 

processes, and procedures, and the failure affected 

the organization in myriad indirect ways. To take 

onesmall,personalexample,DeputyAdministrator 

J.R. Thompson’s initiative to strengthen the 

agency’s project management capability led to 

my work with the Program/Project Management 

Institute, a fledgling project management training 

program. Today’s Academy of Program/Project 

and Engineering Leadership is a descendant of the 

agency’s response to Challenger. 

After Columbia, we again redefined roles and 

responsibilities, and set up new lines of authority 

to ensure that dissenting opinions would be heard. 

We also redoubled our efforts to make better use of 

lessons learned and best practices. 

Attending an STS-119 Flight Readiness Review 

last year, I saw a process that was thorough, inclusive, 

and respectful. Among the participants I spoke 

with after senior leaders decided not to fly until a 

technical problem was more fully understood, there 

was disappointment about the short-term outcome, 

but also a sense that the process had worked well. 

The entire shuttle community learned from the 

rigorous investigation that had taken place. 

Perhaps the highlight of my career to date was 

receiving a Space Flight Awareness Award, which 

included the opportunity to see a shuttle launch. It 

remains one of the most moving experiences of my 

life. There is no greater motivator than the aweinspiring sight of a shuttle launch coupled with the 

knowledge that it represents the cumulative efforts of 

thousands of individuals working millions of hours. 

We are now preparing to imagine NASA 

without the shuttle. What will shape our missions, 

our organization, and our self-image next? The 

answer will depend on the challenges that define 

the agency’s vision and mission. When President 

Kennedy challenged NASA to send a man to 

the moon and bring him home by the end of the 

decade, he said that goal would “serve to organize 

and measure the best of our energies and skills.” 

The next phase of human space exploration will 

also demand the best of our energies and skills. 

Whatever we do next, it will be grand. ●
Title

By

Intro

BY BRUCE MORRIS, GREG SULLIVAN, AND MARTIN BURKEY

It’s a cliché that rocket engineers and space 

scientists don’t see eye to eye. That goes double 

for rocket engineers working on human 

spaceflight and scientists working on space 

telescopes and planetary probes. They work 

fundamentally different problems but often 

feel that they are competing for the same pot 

of money. Put the two groups together for a 

weekend, and the results could be unscientific 

or perhaps combustible.

Image Credit: NASA

 Rocket 

 + Science 

= Dialogue

Artist’s concept of the Ares V heading into 

orbit with a see-through image of an 8-meter 

monolithic telescope beneath the payload shroud.

STORY | ASK MAGAZINE | 5
Fortunately, that wasn’t the case when NASA put heavylift launch-vehicle designers together with astronomers and 

planetary scientists for two weekend workshops in 2008. The 

goal was to bring the top people from both groups together to 

see how the mass and volume capabilities of NASA’s Ares V 

heavy-lift launch vehicle could benefit the science community. 

Ares V is part of NASA’s Constellation program for 

resuming human exploration beyond low-Earth orbit, starting 

with missions to the moon. In the current mission scenario, 

Ares V launches a lunar lander into Earth orbit. A smaller 

Ares I rocket launches the Orion crew vehicle with up to four 

astronauts. Orion docks with the lander attached to the Ares V 

Earth-departure stage. The stage fires its engine to send the 

mated spacecraft to the moon.

Standing 360 ft. high and weighing 

7.4 million lbs., NASA’s new heavy 

lifter will be bigger than the 1960sera Saturn V. It can launch almost 

60 percent more payload to translunar 

insertion together with the Ares I and 

35 percent more mass to low-Earth 

orbit than the Saturn V. This supersized capability is, in short, designed to 

send more people to more places to do 

more things than the six Apollo missions. 

That kind of heavy-lift capability, the 

Constellation program believes, would be a 

national asset potentially useful to endeavors 

other than human spaceflight. 

Ames Research Center Director Dr. Pete 

Worden seized on ideas presented in some early 

papers and background discussions, recognized what 

heavy lift could mean to science, and volunteered to 

host a meeting of vehicle engineers, scientists, and payload 

designers at his field center. An organizing committee 

representing key organizations and players was set up to work 

out the details.

Participants believe that both the venue and format of the 

meetings were important to their success. Worden’s “weekend 

workshop” format had already proved successful and was 

adopted for these important summits: one for astronomy, 

another for planetary science. Scheduling a weekend meeting 

Image Credit: NASA

Concept illustration of the Ares V payload 

shroud, large enough to house eight buses.

6 | ASK MAGAZINE
was probably the only way to quickly bring together busy key 

managers and scientists whose calendars are always full. And 

it guaranteed the commitment of attendees. “As Pete likes to 

say, only serious people come to a weekend workshop,” said 

Dr. Stephanie Langhoff, Ames chief scientist and head of the 

organizing committee for both workshops.

Meeting of the Minds

The first workshop, April 26–27, 2008, was devoted to 

astronomy. Ares V designers from the Marshall Space Flight 

Center spoke first on Saturday morning, giving an overview of 

the Constellation program and a detailed look at the Ares V 

and its capabilities. Astronomers followed in the afternoon, 

presenting eight concepts for observatories to study the universe 

in several regions of the electromagnetic spectrum. After a full 

day Saturday that ran into the early evening, the discussion 

continued unofficially at a nearby restaurant. Sunday was 

devoted to breakout sessions to determine what breakthrough 

astronomy might be enabled by Ares V and what kind of payload 

environments developers would need from Ares V.

The exchange was uniformly congenial, perhaps partly 

because the stakes were not very high. Ares V was early in its 

concept-definition phase. The science community was making 

no commitment to a launch vehicle; it was merely invited to 

discuss the possibilities for a heavy-lift launcher.

“It’s easy to be agreeable and collegial because there’s no real 

money being spent,” mused Harley Thronson, associate director 

for Advanced Concepts and Planning at Goddard Space Flight 

Center. “And astronomers recognize astronomy is a small field. 

We cannot be a significant player in how launch vehicles are 

designed. The commercial and military interests are much 

more important to determine how launch vehicles are built. 

Astronomy has to be opportunistic.”

Nonetheless, there is natural tension between the two 

groups, telescope designer Phil Stahl said. Astronomers want 

to launch ever-bigger telescopes, which requires a large-volume 

payload shroud, while the Constellation program, which is 

funding heavy-lift development, needs large payload mass. The 

fundamental problem, Stahl said, is that the larger shroud would 

reduce payload mass for the lunar mission, and the total height 

of the Ares V is limited by the height of the Vehicle Assembly 

Building at Kennedy Space Center.

“Right now, neither side is in a position to say that they can 

modify their baseline designs,” Stahl said.

The basic question posed to scientists attending was 

what they could do if the existing limits on mass and volume 

were removed: Does Ares V enable breakthrough science 

not possible with any other launcher? What demands would 

large telescopes and planetary probes place on the Ares V 

and associated launch infrastructure? What technologies 

and environmental issues need to be addressed to facilitate 

launching such large payloads?

The advantage of heavy lift was easily illustrated. The 

revolutionary Hubble Space Telescope’s main light-gathering 

mirror is 2.4 meters in diameter. The forthcoming James Webb 

Space Telescope is 6.5 meters across and relies on a complex system 

of folding mirrors for deployment. The Ares V 10-meter-diameter 

shroud would permit a simpler, monolithic 8-meter aperture 

without complicated deployment mechanisms. The payload 

community made clear it would like the same environments 

and capabilities—cleanliness, venting, temperature control, 

continuous nitrogen purge, vibrations, G loads, acoustics, pad 

access—inside a heavy-lift shroud as it has in the Space Shuttle 

and expendable launchers, explained Langhoff, who co-authored 

the final reports from both workshops.

Image Credit: NASA

The Ares V lifts off in this artist’s illustration.

ASK MAGAZINE | 7
“The purpose of the workshop was not so much to solve 

those problems, but to find where the problems lay,” Thronson 

said. “Early on, all sides need to know what the opportunities 

are, what Ares V potentially could deliver, and there were 

clearly some limitations; but before you solve them, you’ve got 

to find them.”

The planetary sciences workshop followed on August 16–

17, 2008, again at Ames. The payload community’s concerns 

were much the same as those of the astronomy community, 

but with an added desire for accommodating capabilities 

such as radioisotope generators and a cryogenic escape stage. 

In the planetary science arena, the Ares V capability enabled

deep-space, planetary sample-return missions impossible on 

existing launch vehicles. Most tantalizing to Jet Propulsion 

Laboratory planetary scientist Tom Spilker was the idea of 

a sample-return mission to Saturn’s moon, Titan, to look for 

organic and prebiological molecules. For such a mission, 

cleanliness from payload shroud encapsulation to the launchpad 

would be a hard requirement.

Stahl posed perhaps the most thought-provoking question 

of the workshops and led a breakout discussion on the subject of 

whether the mass and volume capabilities of Ares V might reduce 

payload complexity and thereby reduce the usual development 

and operational risks associated with big, so-called “flagshipclass” space science payloads.

“We spend a lot of time making very small, high-performance 

science instruments,” explained Gary Martin, director of the 

New Ventures and Communications Directorate at Ames. “In 

theory, you could use more off-the-shelf components and not 

have to spend so much making science instruments so small, if 

you had the volume and mass margins of an Ares V.”

Dan Lester, an infrared astronomer with the University of 

Texas at Austin, could easily visualize that theory becoming 

reality with heavy-lift capability. His concept for an infrared 

telescope requires it to be folded like origami inside an existing 

launcher. Ares V would change that, he said.

“Now it requires a lot of pieces and a lot of folds and a lot of 

actuators and a lot of latches,” Lester said. “And all these things 

have to work in order for your telescope to deploy. All the tests 

for all the folded stuff adds up to a quarter to a third of your 

cost—perhaps a billion dollars. The simpler you can make your 

telescope, the fewer things that have to be tested.”

For scientists, it was an unusual chance to tell rocket 

designers what they need instead of designing to the constraints 

imposed by existing vehicles.

Insights and Connections

“It really is a sort of novel management tactic to do something 

like this, to get people who don’t necessarily normally talk to 

each other talking,” Lester said. “It’s kind of a culture change for 

the science community to do stuff like that. We never thought 

about having the opportunity to give advice to people designing 

a new space-transportation architecture. They weren’t making 

any promises but they were saying, ‘As we’re doing this, we want 

to make sure we don’t do something really stupid and design a 

launcher that works fine for going to the moon, but has only 

98 percent of the capability for launching big telescopes.’ I think 

we came away with just a little better understanding. I think it 

was really very fruitful.”

Participants in both the astronomy and planetary science 

workshops felt they gained useful insights that will help optimize 

a new heavy-lift capability. The Ares team’s main performance 

standard is mass, Lester observed. It “opened their eyes” to 

learn that many of the astronomy ideas for Ares V used only 

40 to 70 percent of the mass capacity but 100 percent of the 

Image Credit: NASA

Illustration depicting booster separation from the Ares V. 

8 | ASK MAGAZINE
volume. Ares Projects Planning Manager Phil Sumrall agreed, 

saying that, while lunar studies indicated an increase from 

27.5 ft. in diameter to 33 ft. was desirable, the advantages to 

“other uses” helped finalize the decision at the expense of payload 

mass. Sumrall, notably, can now tick off payload requirements 

PARTICIPANTS IN BOTh ThE ASTRONOMy 

AND PLANETARy SCIENCE wORKShOPS 

FELT ThEy GAINED USEFUL INSIGhTS 

ThAT wILL hELP OPTIMIZE A NEw hEAvyLIFT CAPABILITy. 

as easily as he does rocket jargon like “Isp” (specific impulse) 

and “delta V.” Lester was heartened to learn that it wouldn’t be 

a huge obstacle to change the shroud, perhaps with modular 

components, to accommodate the largest scientific payloads.

During a breakout session at the planetary workshop, 

Spilker was surprised to learn that the Ares V Earth-departure 

stage engine was designed to operate for 500 seconds and would 

be tested to that standard. “For a planetary spacecraft, you 

might need to back off on the thrust and run it for a longer 

time,” he explained. “Going in, I had no idea that was going to 

be a consideration. We started learning all the nuances of design 

that need to be thought about.”

There may have been some skeptical scientists in the 

audience, Lester said, but none who wanted to be left out if 

heavy lift becomes a reality. The workshop format ensured 

certain topics were surfaced and then allowed participants to 

explore them in detail.

“In some ways, it’s serendipitous,” Spilker mused. “Like 

anytime when you start a large project, it takes a while to wrap 

your arms around all the things that need to be done. Rather 

than thirty minutes for presentations and five for discussion, 

there was more time for open-forum discussion. Then there was 

time for panel discussions and breakout groups to discuss in a 

less structured format various aspects. We had several breaks and 

lunches where we all stayed together. If you wanted to talk to 

somebody and didn’t talk to them, it was probably your fault.”

Less tangible but perhaps more important impacts may be 

found in the business cards scientists and engineers exchanged 

during the unusual meetings. “Now we know who to call if we 

have a question,” Sumrall said. ●

Electronic copies of the Ares V science workshop final reports 

can be downloaded from event.arc.nasa.gov/main/index.

php?fuseaction=home.reports.

Martin Burkey supports NASA’s Ares projects as a technical 

writer with the Schafer Corp.

GreG Sullivan, an aerospace engineer and a principal with 

the Jefferson Institute, has more than thirty years’ experience 

in program management, flight testing, and technology 

development. 

Bruce MorriS manages the Exploration and Space Systems 

Office at Marshall Space Flight Center, and he leads Ares V 

project activities for assessing Ares V use for non-exploration 

applications.

ASK MAGAZINE | 9
Title 

BY 

 

 

 ’ 

- 

 

 

 - 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

10 | ASK MAGAZINE | STORy 

Planning
 

BY KAREN M. McNAMARA 

When I started at NASA, I never dreamed of being responsible for the science preservation and 

recovery of a mission, let alone something that even NASA had never attempted before. I didn’t 

expect the assignment as Johnson Space Center mission lead for Genesis to come just two months 

after I’d located my new office in Building 31. And I didn’t expect to be asked to take up Stardust 

immediately on the heels of Genesis. But it happened, and I accepted both. The first—with its 

reentry problem—was a dramatic, heart-wrenching experience. People have penned volumes about 

what should, could, and may have been learned from the Genesis experience. Thankfully, I haven’t 

been asked to add to that lot. In fact, I want to shift the focus here away from “lessons learned” to a 

consideration of what I call “planning for learning.” That concept can be understood by examining 

the circumstances of the Stardust sample-return capsule and, more specifically, its heat shield. 

In early 1999, NASAs Stardust spacecraft was launched on a 

seven year mission to collect interstellar dust and materials from 

Comet Wild 2 and return the samples to Earth, where they could 

provide information about the early evolution of the solar system 

and the composition of comets. In 2006, the capsule containing 

this precious cargo entered the atmosphere at just over 28,000 mph, 

the highest reentry speed of any man made object. At peak heating, 

the nose of the heat shield was required to withstand temperatures 

as high as 2,500 ̊C. It was one of the most amazing sights I have 

ever seen. The shield was made of Phenolic Impregnated Carbon 

Ablator, or PICA. Developed at Ames Research Center, the 

material won the 2007 NASA Government Invention of the Year 

award in recognition of its performance on the Stardust mission. 

In addition to its ability to effectively manage the effects of high 

reentry temperatures, PICA is much lighter than the Avcoat shield 

used on Apollo spacecraft. 

Given its performance and light weight, PICA has tremendous 

promise for use on other spacecraft. It is a potential boon to 

engineers who always struggle to limit the mass of their designs. 

Thesecharacteristicsmadeitanearlycandidateforheatprotection 

on the new Orion crew capsule. After considerable study, the 

Thermal Protection Systems Advanced Development Project 

at Ames recommended Avcoat over PICA for the Orion heat 

shield because significant technology development was required 
’ - 

ASK MAGAZINE | 11 

learning
 

Photo Credit: NASA 

NASA s Stardust sample return capsule is seen with heat shield intact after 

it successfully landed at the U.S. Air Force Utah Test and Training Range. 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

-

12 | ASK MAGAZINE 

before the successful implementation of PICA could be assured. 

Specifically, the large size of the Orion capsule would preclude 

using one solid PICA casting for the heat shield, as was done 

on Stardust. The added complexity of casting PICA in sections 

and developing adhesives that could meet the thermal and 

mechanical requirements of reentry were identified as important 

long-term goals, but the risk that additional development 

posed to the Orion project cost and schedule was too great. 

Still, it has been acknowledged that PICA does have a 

promising future in spacecraft design. (It is scheduled to fly on 

the Mars Science Laboratory mission in 2011.) The Stardust 

mission provided an opportunity to develop good technical 

data that could have supported the use of the material on Mars 

Science Laboratory and future missions. In some regards, it was 

an opportunity we missed. After reentry, the Stardust heat shield 

was in fact carefully retrieved, preserved, and studied in great 

detail. One of my many unexpected responsibilities at NASA was 

to “curate” the returned Stardust spacecraft hardware. In that role, 

I was able to schedule the postflight analyses in the order of leastto-most destructive—in effect, planning for learning. 

There was and is much we can learn from the study of the 

Stardust heat shield and capsule. Unfortunately, the information 

we could obtain from it was incomplete because detailed, accurate 

measurements of its thickness and surface characteristics were 

not obtained before flight. The preflight verification test for 

shield thickness consisted of micrometer readings taken at only 

two points on a shield 89 cm in diameter. This was sufficient to 

ensure adequate performance but not to get reliable information 

on recession (the amount of material burned away during reentry), 

which of course requires accurate data about the original as well 

as the final thickness of the shield. 

Not Part of the Mission 

Why wasn’t that potentially valuable preflight analysis done? 

Simply because learning about the performance of the shield 

was not part of the mission plan. Stardust was a science mission 

under the Discovery Program. Budgets and schedules for such 

missions tend to be tight, and no time or money was set aside for 

research or engineering endeavors external to the scope of the 

mission. No one had responsibility for that kind of learning. 

About a year before launch, people from NASA’s thermalprotection community did suggest that the Stardust team install 

active instrumentation on the shield so they could monitor 

PICA’s performance. If they had made their request years earlier 

and the instruments had been built into Stardust’s design, budget, 

and schedule at the beginning of the project, it probably could 

have been done. But at that late date the added cost and time it 

would have required were not available, and the risk of adding 

mass, complexity, and making design changes so close to the 

launch date was unacceptable. Not adding instrumentation was 

Photo Credit: NASA Ames Research Center/Dean Kontinos 

NASA Ames researchers at the Johnson Space Center curation facility 

with the recovered Stardust sample return capsule heat shield. 

the right call by mission management. But even low-cost, norisk data gathering (for instance, photographing the shield to 

have a record of its surface characteristics) was not done before 

flight. No one thought of doing that or had the responsibility to 

see that it was done. 

Project teams sometimes are responsible for capturing 

lessons learned at the end of missions; sometimes a small 

fraction of the budget is set aside for that mission requirement. 

Those lessons have great value, but the learning they provide is 

retrospective and often reactive. Postmortem reflection misses 

important knowledge that could be gained by planning for 

learning at the start of missions. The key to such planning is to 

ask and answer the relevant questions—What can we learn from 

this mission that could be useful to future programs? What do 

I wish I knew now?—early on and then devote thought and 

resources to the task of devising the technologies and processes 

that would make that learning possible. In the case of Stardust, 

for instance, that would have meant doing better preflight heat 

shield measurements. 

An Office for Planned Learning 

I have already mentioned an important reason this does not 

happen: people understandably focus on their primary mission 

and devote their limited time and resources to ensuring its 

success. Another factor is that team members often lack the 

broad perspective needed to understand which elements of 

their projects might provide knowledge that other programs 

would find valuable. They may not even know what missions 

are being planned at other centers under the auspices of other 

mission directorates. (Stardust was, of course, a Science Mission 

Directorate project; Orion is part of an Exploration Systems 

Mission Directorate program.) Orion’s high visibility means 

that probably everyone at NASA knows about it; the Stardust 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ASK MAGAZINE | 13 

SELECTING MISSIONS AND PROGRAMS whERE ENhANCED TEChNOLOGy POTENTIAL 

wARRANTS INCREASED MISSION OR PROGRAM INvESTMENT REqUIRES CALCULATIONS 

ABOUT ThE POTENTIAL vALUE OF ThE LEARNING AND ThE RISK TO MISSION COST, 

SChEDULE, AND SUCCESS. 

thermal-protection system team would be excited to share 

what they learn with Orion. But most project team members 

are not likely to spend much time thinking about how they 

can contribute to another mission directorate’s program. They 

already have to contend with too little time and money! 

What we need, I believe, is an Office for Planned Learning 

(OPL): a new small organization at NASA Headquarters that has 

a global overview of past, current, and future work throughout 

the agency and is responsible for supporting the development of 

program knowledge that can benefit other programs, projects, 

or directorates. This would be more rigorous than so-called 

“cross-pollination,” which assumes the transplanting ideas or 

individuals will somehow ensure that valuable knowledge 

is preserved and shared. This office would be responsible for 

detailed knowledge of organizational and program technologies, 

with the ability to synthesize the detail into a larger image of the 

agency and its goals. 

Selecting missions and programs where enhanced 

technology potential warrants increased mission or program 

investment requires calculations about the potential value of 

the learning and the risk to mission cost, schedule, and success. 

Where that calculation favored an investment in learning, OPL 

would provide financial support and a dedicated liaison to help 

the program build learning-related activities and technologies 

into its initial project goals, schedule, and budget. Of course, this 

needs to be done in the earliest phases of mission development. 

The kinds of things that did not happen on Stardust because 

they were “no one’s job” would happen because they would 

be the shared responsibility of the OPL liaison and designated 

project team members. Planned learning would become one of 

the project’s explicit requirements. 

Good communication between the agencywide office 

and individual programs and projects would be essential to 

make this work. People working within projects would be the 

source of information the office needs to develop its perspective 

on what knowledge will have broad value. Once the office 

synthesizes and prioritizes these opportunities, it will be OPL’s 

responsibility to communicate that perspective to the project 

teams to make clear why the knowledge-gathering activities are 

worth their time and effort. Some of the communication from 

project teams may be appropriate “pushback” to establish the 

limits of learning-work that might threaten the mission’s success. 

It is likely that such an office would have a small full-time staff 

and numerous rotational openings to provide the most timely 

infusion of technology awareness both within the programs and 

within the office. 

In a perfect world, there would be would be enough money 

and time to make planning for learning an important part of 

almost every NASA project. We don’t work in that world. We 

will continue to miss some learning opportunities because we 

lack the resources to take advantage of them. But I believe the 

kind of attention to learning I have described here will repay our 

investment in it many times over. Planning for learning early in 

the lives of our projects and programs can produce knowledge 

that will contribute to the success of our most demanding and 

ambitious future missions. Planning for learning is proactive, and 

proactivity is critical to the success of our mission at NASA. ●

karen M. McnaMara is currently the New Missions Space 

Exposed Hardware curator at Johnson Space Center. She served 

as the Johnson mission and recovery lead for the Genesis and 

Stardust missions, and she was the Genesis curator from 2001 

through 2005. 
 

 

14 | ASK MAGAZINE | INSIGHT 

Sharing What We Know
 

BY JEAN ENGLE AND BRENT FONTENOT 

In the fall of 2006, Center Director Michael Coats created the new position of chief knowledge 

officer at the Johnson Space Center. The purpose of the position was to develop a comprehensive 

knowledge-management program that would identify and capture fifty years of human spaceflight 

knowledge and make it readily available to current and future generations. 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ASK MAGAZINE | 15 

Johnson was the second center to recognize the need for a chief The two centers are different and so are their approaches 

knowledge officer. Dr. Ed Rogers has been the chief knowledge 	 to knowledge capture. Goddard has focused on case-study 

officer at Goddard Space Flight Center for the past six years. 	 development and pause and learn; Johnson began with the capture 

Rogers openly shared Goddard’s knowledge management	 of lessons learned and an infusion process along with a centerwide 

program and learning philosophies with us at Johnson. 	 knowledge-management assessment. As the Johnson program 

developed over time, however, the centers recognized that their 

approaches are complementary and their ultimate goals are the 

same—to use a variety of means to facilitate knowledge sharing. 

Creating a Program 

We were reluctant to define a knowledge management 

program without knowing what was already working well. 

To identify existing knowledge-management activities at the 

center, Johnson did a comprehensive knowledge-management 

maturity assessment in the spring of 2007. The four-month 

process included interviews and focus groups across all Johnson 

organizations to determine maturity in three key areas: people, 

technology, and process. 

The results were encouraging. Knowledge sharing was deeply 

integrated into several parts of the organization. The center as a 

whole saw the importance of managing organizational knowledge 

but did not necessarily know how to do so effectively. 

In parallel with the assessment, the chief knowledge 

officer spent months benchmarking knowledge management 

at twelve organizations, including government, commercial, 

and aerospace entities, searching for best practices, lessons 

learned, and driving forces for knowledge capture. What we 

learned dramatically changed our perception of what our own 

program should entail. Rather than imposing one centerwide 

process for capturing and sharing lessons learned, for example, 

we followed the lead of the Department of Energy’s distributed 

learning methodology, allowing organizations to capture, 

share, and infuse lessons in ways that worked for their particular 

cultures. We also learned that information technology can be 

an enabling capability for knowledge capture and sharing, but 

should not be the primary focus of a successful knowledgemanagement program. The most effective knowledge sharing 

happens person to person. 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

16 | ASK MAGAZINE 16 | ASK MAGAZINE 

Guided by the assessment and benchmarking, we defined 

the Johnson Organizational Learning program and put it in 

place in May 2008. Key goals included the following: 

• To foster a culture of sharing of information, knowledge, 

and best practices 

• To recognize that learning is not uniform 

• To capitalize on proven processes and methods

• To appreciate the value of shared collective knowledge 

Along with the goals, we established key requirements for 

each organization: 

• Establish expectations for knowledge sharing

• Promote knowledge transfer and collaborative sharing

• Establish local learning processes and procedures for lessons

learned, best practices, and transfer of tacit knowledge 

• Develop an organizational learning plan consistent with 

local processes, procedures, and practices 

• Identify, document, validate, infuse, and disseminate 

lessons learned into critical processes 

• Provide a point of contact for each organization’s learning 

activities 

Theintegratingbodyfororganizationstoshareandlearnfrom 

each other is the Knowledge Management Steering Committee, 

comprising representatives from each organization. We carefully 

considered how to create a structure formal enough to support 

sharing but not so rigid that it might stifle the flow of information. 

Encouraging sharing of best practices from group to group is an 

ongoing challenge. Participation varies depending on the topic for 

the meetings or information being shared. In general, we see less 

participation from organizations where knowledge capture and 

sharing are more ingrained. As at all NASA centers, sharing for 

the sake of sharing is not part of our day-to-day work. Making it 

integral to work requires time and focus. 

Key Concept 

To measure progress, we developed a simple concept to allow 

us to focus on specific areas and give us an easy way to explain 

the knowledge management program internally and externally. 

Three interconnected factors allow for the maximum transfer 

of knowledge and learning: what you know (tacit knowledge 

gained through experience, training, etc.), who you know 

(your social network), and what everyone else knows (explicit 

knowledge that has been codified and made available in 

knowledge bases). 

We have developed and implemented specific projects for 

tacit and explicit knowledge. Future plans will focus on the 

social-network aspects of our program as we explore agency and 

center collaboration tools such as NASA Spacebook. 

Sharing What We Know Through Storytelling 

Although codified knowledge is valuable, the people-to-people 

transfer of knowledge from subject-matter expert to learner 

provides essential context, filling gaps that explicit knowledge 

always leaves. Storytelling is one of the most powerful ways to 

communicate context. 

At Johnson, storytelling happens in a variety of ways, 

under names including “brown-bag lunches” and “lunch and 

learn.” Although valuable, most sessions have been publicized 

only by word of mouth, local fliers, or e-mail within a specific 

workgroup or team. Few are recorded or documented for future 

use. We wanted to develop a centerwide program that would 

feature experienced individuals in technical and institutional 

programs and projects telling stories that are applicable to a 

large cross-section of the center. Each session includes questions 

and answers and is videotaped to be available to the center (and 

anyone else with “nasa.gov” network access). 

Associating storytelling with another center or a NASA 

milestone is one way to increase relevance. In May 2009, just 

before the beginning of hurricane season, three individuals 

from the emergency response team at Johnson did a storytelling 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ASK MAGAZINE | 17 

session on preparing for, riding out, and recovering after the 

devastation of Hurricane Ike in September 2006. They shared 

and expanded on lessons that had been captured in the center’s 

Hurricane Ike report earlier in the year. About fifty-five people 

attended this event and 225 have downloaded the electronic 

version of the session. 

In July, our storytelling program focused on the Apollo 11 

fortieth anniversary events and included multiple sessions with 

panel discussions featuring subject-matter experts from many 

Apollo systems and subsystems. Over a three-day period, more 

than two thousand attended and over a hundred more accessed 

the online sessions. In August, nearly two hundred people heard 

Maj. Gen. Joe Engle, NASA astronaut and X-15 pilot, share 

lessons from the X-15 that were applied to the Space Shuttle—a 

session presented before the fiftieth anniversary of the first flight 

of the X-15. This e-mail shows the kinds of valuable connections 

between people the sessions can create: 

First, thank you for your presentation yesterday. It was great 

to hear you mention the STAs [shuttle training aircraft]. 

I was the project engineer on the STAs from 1985 to 

1995. Anyway, if you have the time, I would like to talk 

to you about your experiences as they relate to my task to 

determine crew survival methods for the new Orion and 

Constellation program. In our case, crew survival starts 

after all the hazard controls inherent to the design and test 

of the vehicle have failed, much like an Apollo 13 situation. 

I start with a bad day and assess what we can do to get the 

crew home safely given what is available. If this is of any 

interest to you, please let me know and we can schedule a 

time to talk at your convenience. 

To obtain speakers for our sessions, we have tapped the rich 

field of experts in the Johnson NASA Alumni League chapter 

for several of our sessions. In addition, requests for topics and 

speakers have gone through JSC Today, a daily e-mail with 

information and tidbits from around the center sent to more 

than ten thousand recipients. 

To help ensure that we are providing a valuable service, 

we have established an online feedback form that can be used 

by attendees or those who watch videos of the sessions. The 

feedback has been excellent and has suggested valuable changes 

IN JULy, OUR STORyTELLING PROGRAM 

FOCUSED ON ThE APOLLO 11 FORTIETh 

ANNIvERSARy EvENTS AND INCLUDED 

MULTIPLE SESSIONS wITh PANEL 

DISCUSSIONS FEATURING SUBJECTMATTER ExPERTS FROM MANy APOLLO 

SySTEMS AND SUBSySTEMS. 

such as adding an outline, moderator, and structure, especially 

for events with multiple participants. 

Although we keep tabs on how many people attend each 

session and download video or MP3 files, we measure success 

by how we connect current employees to experts, many of them 

no longer at the center. After the first session in March 2009, 

“Wisdom and Lessons Learned from the Johnson Propulsion and 

Power Division,” the chief for the current propulsion division, 

William Hoffman, invited the participants back to Johnson to 

share their knowledge with his entire division. Connecting the 

newer generations with individuals who were at NASA when 

the early manned spaceflight programs were being developed is 

an opportunity for invaluable knowledge transfer. 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

18 | ASK MAGAZINE 

ALLOwING ORGANIZATIONAL vARIATION IN hOw LESSONS ARE CAPTURED AND 

ShARED whILE INTEGRATING SEARCh CAPABILITy hAS PROvEN TO BE MORE 

ACCEPTABLE TO ThE USER COMMUNITy ThAN TRyING TO FORCE TRANSFER OF 

LESSONS FROM ExISTING SySTEMS TO A CENTERwIDE ONE. 

Sharing What Everyone Else Knows 

Responsibility for the center’s lessons-learned program was 

transferred from the chief engineer to the chief knowledge officer 

in the spring of 2007. Local learning and sharing were happening 

more than we had thought. Surveying existing lessons-learned 

activities at Johnson, the Center Lessons Learned Data Manager 

identified twenty-seven separate repositories and processes. 

Collection methods, verification and storage processes, and 

outputs were often specialized for the division or branch they 

supported. Rather than change existing practices, we want to 

support and leverage them as much as possible. 

Experience had taught us that a lessons learned process that 

is separate from how an organization or team learns or operates 

will not work. During benchmarking, we found anecdotal 

evidence suggesting that 95 percent of lessons learned are 

applicable only at the local level. The challenge is to identify 

and collect the 5 percent that have wider applicability. To 

capture and share that 5 percent, we created criteria to guide 

organizations. In the case of the center’s report on Hurricane 

Ike lessons learned, for instance, we were able to identify, 

codify, and share broad lessons from organizations including 

procurement, center operations, and information technology. 

Submitted to the agency’s Lessons Learned Information System 

(LLIS), this material was voted the number-one “lesson” in the 

LLIS for 2009. 

An integrated search function lets a user search the more 

than thirty-five internal and external lessons learned and casestudy collections in the lessons learned library at once. In the 

past, a user would have to identify and search each collection 

individually or do a global search at the center level, which 

would return results from hundreds of sources—processes that 

were too laborious to be of value to most users. 

Allowingorganizationalvariationinhowlessonsarecaptured 

and shared while integrating search capability has proven to be 

more acceptable to the user community than trying to force 

transfer of lessons from existing systems to a centerwide one. 

Where Do We Go Next? 

On the horizon, though in its infancy, is an activity modeled 

after National Public Radio’s StoryCorps project, which we 

are calling “JSC Voices.” It will give our workforce a chance to 

produce their own ten- to twenty-minute movies about their 

NASA experiences. We will provide the platform for sharing 

firsthand personal experiences by hosting the DVDs on our 

Web site and advertising them to the center. Our goal is to find 

new ways to inspire people to record and preserve the stories 

that matter to them and capture the courage, humor, trials, and 

triumphs of an incredible range of voices. 

Additionally,weteamedupwiththeCenterShuttleTransition 

team to capture memories and experiences of the final flights of 

one of our greatest programs. During each Space Shuttle launch 

viewing in the Teague Auditorium, we ask employees to take a 

few moments to share shuttle memories on camera, telling us 

about the first launch they saw or the feeling of accomplishment 

that came from seeing the hardware they helped build turned on 

in space. They provide the memories, and we provide the camera 

to record them and a way to share the memories with others. 

Over time, we have seen that learning and sharing happen 

differently across a diverse, innovative, and creative workforce. 

Allowing individuals and teams to transfer knowledge in ways 

that have meaning to their culture is the 

most effective path to success. ●

Jean enGle is the chief knowledge officer at Johnson Space 

Center, a position she has held since 2006. Her previous 

experience includes chief information officer from 2000 to 2006 

and deputy center information technology security manager, 

both at Johnson. 

Brent Fontenot has been an aerospace engineer at Johnson 

Space Center for thirty years. Currently he serves as the lessons 

learned manager at Johnson, where he also manages the 

storytelling program. 
 

 -

 

 

INSIGHT | ASK MAGAZINE | 19 

The Greening of Orbital Debris
 

BY NICHOLAS L. JOHNSON 

Like most technological advancements, the space age has left a sea of refuse in its wake. Spread 

throughout near-Earth space, this man-made orbital debris, ranging from micron-sized particles to 

intactlaunch-vehiclestagestensofmetersinlength,hasaccumulatedtoapointwhereitnowthreatens 

the safety of human spaceflight and the reliable operation of hundreds of robotic satellites. 

This computer generated 

orbital debris graphic displays 

currently tracked debris objects. Image Credit: NASA 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 - 

Photo Credit: NASA 

During 2009 both the International Space Station and the Space 

Shuttle had to conduct evasive maneuvers to avoid colliding with 

orbital debris. NASA’s Cloudsat satellite, part of a multisatellite 

Earth-observation network to monitor the planet’s environment, 

also had to alter course to prevent a potential collision, as did 

several commercial spacecraft. 

Due to the extremely high relative velocities of space objects, 

typically 10 km per second or more in low-Earth orbits, even 

small debris can impair or terminate a spacecraft’s mission. Most 

robotic and piloted satellites are vulnerable to debris as small as 

5 mm in size. Today, such debris number in the millions. 

In response to the growing threat of orbital debris, NASA 

pioneered the development and implementation of orbital 

debris–mitigation guidelines and requirements, starting in 1995 

after more than a decade of elaborate orbital debris measurements 

and projections of the debris population’s evolution. Each NASA 

space program and project must prepare a detailed orbital debris– 

assessment report in conjunction with its preliminary design 

review and critical design review milestones. This process seeks 

to minimize the generation of orbital debris during deployment, 

operations, and post-mission disposal. 

At the direction of the White House, in 1997 NASA teamed 

up with the Department of Defense to create U.S. Government 

Orbital Debris Mitigation Standard Practices, based upon the 

existing NASA debris-mitigation guidelines. The principal 

elements of these standard practices seek to 

1. control debris released during normal operations, 

2. minimize debris generated by accidental explosions, 

3. reduce risks to operational spacecraft via flight 


profiles and vehicle designs, and
 

4. plan for the safe post-mission disposal of spacecraft 

and launch-vehicle stages. 

After a multiyear coordination with the U.S. aerospace 

industry, these practices were adopted in February 2001. Since 

orbital debris is a problem for all space-faring nations and 

organizations, however—and one that cannot be solved solely by 

the United States—international agreement to limit the creation 

The main propellant tank of the second stage of a Delta 2 

launch vehicle landed near Georgetown, Texas, on January 22, 

1997. This approximately 250 kg tank is primarily a stainless 

steel structure and survived reentry relatively intact. 

of orbital debris is necessary. Consequently, NASA took a leading 

role in establishing the first set of international orbital debris– 

mitigation guidelines, which were produced in 2002 by the 

Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee (IADC), 

an association of the national space agencies of ten countries as 

well as the European Space Agency. In 2007 the United Nations 

adopted its own orbital debris–mitigation guidelines, consistent 

with the U.S. and IADC standard practices and guidelines. 

Implementing these mitigation measures can be simple or 

complex. In the initial decades of the space age, little thought 

was given to the release of miscellaneous hardware in orbit, 

particularly during launch and deployment phases. Springs, 

covers for sensors and motors, spin-up yo-yos, remnants of 

explosive bolts, and similar objects were frequently left in Earth 

orbit. Today, many missions are debris-free by design. For 

example, sensor covers are hinged or attached to the vehicle by 

short tethers. When instances of unexpected debris occur after a 

launch, an investigation is undertaken to identify the source of 

the debris and to institute corrective measures. 

Prior to 2007, accidental explosions of abandoned spacecraft 

and launch-vehicle stages were the principal source of hazardous 

orbital debris. Residual propellants and pressurants were found 

to be a leading cause of the fragmentations. Battery explosions 

were also the source of numerous debris. To prevent these 

explosions, passivation—the removal of all stored energy—of 

spacecraft and launch vehicles at the end of a mission is now 

widely practiced by the international aerospace community. As a 

result, this source of orbital debris has been markedly curtailed. 

Since the 1970s, NASA studies have shown that in the long 

term the principal source of orbital debris will be accidental 

satellite collisions. This assessment was underscored in 

February 2009 when a collision between an operational U.S. 

communications satellite and a defunct Russian communications 

satellite produced more than two thousand large and tens of 

thousands of smaller, yet still hazardous, debris in the worst 

accidental satellite collision in history. 

To reduce the potential for future accidental collisions, the postmission orbital lifetimes of spacecraft and launch-vehicle stages in 

low-Earth orbit (below 2,000 km altitude) should be limited to 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

Photo Credit: NASA 

Window pit from orbital 

debris on shuttle mission 

STS 127. 

ORBITAL DEBRIS IS NOT ONLy A POTENTIAL 

hAZARD TO SPACE OPERATIONS; REENTRy 

CAN ALSO POSE A RISK TO PEOPLE AND 

PROPERTy ON EARTh. 

ASK MAGAZINE | 21 ASK MAGAZINE | 21 

twenty-five years or less. This guideline was first devised by NASA 

and later adopted by the U.S. government and other foreign space 

agencies. In 2005 NASA maneuvered its Earth Radiation Budget 

Experiment Satellite and its Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite 

to lower orbits to accelerate their fall back to Earth and to reduce 

their potential for being involved in accidental, debris-producing 

collisions. In 2008 the Department of Defense performed similar 

maneuvers for its GEOSAT Follow-On satellite, as did France 

with its SPOT 2 satellite in 2009. 

For satellites in very high orbits, maneuvers to low altitudes 

are not feasible. Geosynchronous satellites at an altitude of nearly 

36,000 km should be placed in disposal orbits that will remain 

at least 200 km above the geosynchronous orbital regime. Such 

maneuvers, which normally require less than 10 kg of propellant, 

are now performed by the majority of geosynchronous spacecraft. 

Orbital debris is not only a potential hazard to space 

operations; reentry can also pose a risk to people and property 

on Earth. On average, one known man-made object falls back 

to Earth each day. Most of these objects are small fragments and 

burn up during reentry. Components of spacecraft and launchvehicle stages that do survive are statistically likely to land in the 

water or on large, sparsely populated areas, such as Siberia, the 

Australian Outback, or the Canadian tundra. 

However, by encouraging or requiring space system operators 

to limit satellite stays in low-Earth orbit, the number of reentries 

of spacecraft and launch-vehicle stages will increase. Again based 

upon NASA analyses, NASA, the U.S. government, and some 

foreign space agencies attempt to limit human casualty risks from 

reentries to 1 in 10,000 per event. 

For vehicles that might pose greater risks, two options are 

available: directing a controlled reentry over a broad ocean area 

or designing the vehicle to be more completely destroyed during 

reentry. This is normally accomplished by component redesigns 

and material selection. For example, lower-melting-temperature 

materials like aluminum are much less likely to survive reentry 

than higher-melting-temperature materials like titanium, stainless 

steel, or beryllium. 

NASA strongly promotes a “design for demise” philosophy 

when developing or procuring new satellites. Satellite survivability 

is first addressed by the preliminary design review milestone, at 

which time surviving components are identified and modified, 

if feasible. The Goddard Space Flight Center leads engineering 

effortstodevelopsatellitecomponentsthatwilldemise,including 

propellant tanks and reaction-wheel assemblies, objects which 

historically have survived reentry. 

Green engineering and operations are essential to preserving 

the near-Earth space environment for future generations. The U.S. 

and international aerospace communities have been proactive in 

addressing the threat of the increasing orbital debris population 

and the risks to people and property from reentering debris. NASA 

has led this activity by first devoting resources to thoroughly 

understand the technical issues and then by developing effective 

and acceptable policies and guidelines. NASA has also worked 

closely with the international community to ensure that the U.S. 

aerospace industry is not placed at an economic disadvantage as a 

result of implementing orbital debris–mitigation measures. 

In the future, remediation of the near-Earth space environment 

(that is, the removal of large spacecraft and launch-vehicle stages) 

mightbenecessarytopreventtheuncontrolledgrowthofthedebris 

population due to accidental collisions. In December 2009, 

NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency 

jointly sponsored the first international conference on the removal 

of debris from Earth orbit. The technical and economic challenges 

of orbital debris removal remain daunting, but NASA scientists 

and engineers are up to the task. ●

nicholaS l. JohnSon is the NASA chief scientist for orbital 

debris at Johnson Space Center. 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

’ 

 

Title 

BY 

featured 

Invention: 

22 | ASK MAGAZINE | STORy 

Photo courtesy NASA Spinoff 

Aerostar s wind turbines 

are stall regulated, a feature 

enabled by the Viterna model. 

NASA Modeling 

Innovations Advance 

Wind-Energy Industry 

BY BO SCHWERIN 

One morning in 1990, a group of Glenn Research Center 

employees arrived to find their workspace upended by an 

apparent hurricane. Papers were scattered, lights blown out. All 

eyes turned to the door connecting the office to its neighbor: a 

20-foot wind tunnel. 

The employees did not know it, but they had Dr. Larry 

Viterna to thank for the state of their workspace. An innovation 

by the NASA researcher may have led to the accidental trashing 

of their office, but it would go on to benefit the entire field of 

wind energy. 

Viterna joined NASA in 1977, when growing anxiety over 

fuel costs and environmental impacts led the U.S. government 

to explore alternative and renewable energy sources. Prior to the 

formation of the Department of Energy, the government turned 

to other agencies to develop solutions. Glenn had a history 

of energy research stemming from its work in fuel-efficient 

aeronautics during World War II and in alternative fuels and 

related aerospace engines at the start of the space age in the 

1950s. When Viterna joined the center, it had already assumed 

the lead role in the nation’s wind-energy program. NASA’s goal 

was to develop technology for harnessing the wind’s power and 

transfer it to private industry. 

“Our center had an expertise in propellers, propulsion, 

rotating equipment, and power systems,” making Glenn a 

natural choice for the job, explained Viterna. The center’s 

efforts, he said, ultimately laid the foundation for much of the 

wind technology and industry that exist today. 

Glenn constructed its initial experimental 100-kilowatt (kW) 

wind turbine at the center’s Plum Brook Station facility in 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo courtesy NASA Spinoff 

ASK MAGAZINE | 23 

For more than twenty years, 

NASA’s 4-megawatt WTS-4 wind 

turbine held the world record for 

maximum power output. 

1975. The Mod-0 turbine was a two-bladed, horizontal 

turbine. By 1978, the 2-megawatt (MW) Mod-1, the world’s 

first multimegawatt wind turbine, was developed—capable 

of providing electricity to thousands of homes. Successive 

experimental models (thirteen in all) were built throughout the 

country. Viterna noted that these were also record setting in 

size and output; the 4 MW capability of the WTS-4 turbine, 

built in 1982 in Medicine Bow, Wyoming, was not surpassed 

for about twenty-five years. 

“That’s how far ahead the program was in terms of 

developing this technology,” Viterna said. 

NASA’s efforts led to other industry innovations that are 

standard today. As Glenn researchers explored ways of reducing 

the weight and cost of turbine structures, they developed steel 

tube towers that replaced the rigid truss towers traditionally 

used. “Today, virtually every large wind turbine uses a 

steel, tubular tower, which was novel technology at the time,” 

said Viterna. 

Despite the advances made by the NASA-led program, 

there were still significant challenges. “One of the key things 

then and now is to accurately predict the forces exerted on a 

wind turbine,” Viterna said. On a basic level, wind turbines use 

the same forces that allow airplanes and helicopters to fly. Wind 

blowing over the turbine’s blades, or airfoils, creates lift that 

turns the blades, spinning a shaft that connects to an electricityproducing generator. When engineers first began to model the 

impact of these forces on wind-turbine airfoils in high-wind 

conditions, they would produce results that were off by at least 

50—and sometimes as much as 100—percent. 

The problem was that wind turbines, unlike most other 

airfoil-based systems, operate at a high angle of attack—the 

angle formed between the chord of an airfoil and the direction 

of the airflow. (A chord is an imaginary line through an airfoil’s 

cross-section, joining the tip of the trailing edge to the center of 

the leading edge.) In airplanes, when the angle gets too large, the 

laminar air flow that typically hugs the wing begins to detach 

and become turbulent, reducing lift and increasing drag; at a 

certain point, the plane stalls and drops out of the sky. Wind 

turbines, especially in high-wind conditions, can routinely stall, 

limiting the ability of the turbine to produce electricity. The 

inability to properly predict stall behavior, actual aerodynamic 

loads, and the relationship between wind speed and power in 

wind turbines led to inefficient designs and costly failures. At the 

time, there was a significant lack of research and data in this area, 

Viterna explained, as well as “three-dimensional effects going on 

that we had no way of calculating or even measuring.” 

In 1981, using data previously collected from an old Danish 

turbine, coupled with test data gathered by fellow NASA 

researcher Robert Corrigan from the Plum Brook turbine, 

Viterna developed a model that took into account threedimensional effects and predicted stall behavior with far greater 

accuracy than previous methods. 

The model was not well accepted by colleagues in the windenergy field, Viterna recalled. “I almost got laughed off the stage 

when I presented it,” he said, explaining that the model violated 

existing theories that used two-dimensional airfoil data. Viterna, 

however, continued to employ the model, even using it in 1991 

to improve Glenn’s Icing Research Tunnel, designed to study the 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

24 | ASK MAGAZINE 

By shaving the Icing Research 

Tunnel’s wooden fan blades 

according to the results of 

Dr. Larry Viterna’s model, 

Glenn engineers boosted the 

tunnel’s top wind speed by 

more than 130 mph. 

effects of ice buildup on aircraft. Based on the model’s results, 

Viterna suggested that slightly shaving down the wooden fan 

blades could boost the tunnel’s 299-mph capability. During 

a nighttime test, the wind tunnel’s pressure release door flew 

open, sending 400-mph winds ripping through the adjoining 

work area. (The tunnel’s new upper limit after implementing 

Viterna’s model: 430 mph.) 

The surprise Viterna’s coworkers encountered the following 

morning was on par with what Viterna experienced during a 

random Internet search nearly twenty-five years after inventing 

his model. In 2005, long after the easing of the energy crisis and 

shift of the wind-energy program to the Department of Energy, 

Viterna, now in Glenn’s Office of Strategic Management, was 

searching the Internet when he began to come across multiple 

references to the “Viterna method” by experts in the windenergy field. He discovered his initially criticized model had, 

within a decade of its creation, quietly become the established 

method of modeling the performance of wind-turbine airfoils 

under high angles of attack—stall conditions. 

“It had become, and still is, the most widely used stall model 

in the United States,” said Viterna, who along with Corrigan 

recently received a “Space Act Award” from NASA’s Inventions 

and Contributions Board, as well as the Agency’s inaugural “Blue 

Marble Award” at its Environmental and Energy Conference. 

Among the many who use the Viterna method is 

the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy 

Laboratory’s National Wind Technology Center (NWTC), 

located in Boulder, Colorado. In 2005, the center added the 

Viterna model to its design-code software suite for horizontalaxis wind turbines, the most popular variety of turbines in use 

today. 

“Viterna’s model does a very effective job of estimating stall 

behavior on inboard sections of the blade and how it varies along 

the blade’s span,” said Dr. Sandy Butterfield, wind program 

chief engineer at the NWTC. “Even though it was invented 

in the 1980s, it remains a model used by engineers predicting 

performance and loads for wind turbines.” 

The NWTC suite—which offers design and analysis 

software tools for use in achieving worldwide certification of 

Photo courtesy NASA Spinoff 

wind turbines—incorporates Viterna’s model in its FoilCheck 

preprocessor. FoilCheck allows users to generate airfoil tables and 

compute dynamic stall parameters for use in NWTC’s AeroDyn 

software library, which enhances the center’s YawDyn, FAST, 

and ADAMS turbine simulators. The entire suite is available 

to private industry for free, which has enabled wind-turbine 

manufacturers like Westport, Massachusetts-based Aerostar 

Inc. to use Viterna’s method to help craft their products. 

The Viterna method is finding applications beyond 

horizontal wind turbines; Viterna has discovered his oncemocked model is now employed for vertical wind turbines, wind 

tunnels, and even underwater turbines that make use of tidal 

energy to produce power. In the meantime, NASA continues 

to be involved in the advancement of wind energy; Glenn, for 

example, is supporting the plans of Cuyahoga County, Ohio, 

to establish on Lake Erie the world’s first freshwater, offshore 

wind-turbine site. 

The agency can also expect to see its early work experience 

a resurgence, predicted Dr. Butterfield of the NWTC. “As 

the industry moves forward and becomes more competitive 

and broad, you will see efforts to explore lower-cost, more 

structurally efficient machines, and that’s when people will 

begin to capitalize again on that good work NASA did in the 

early 1970s and 1980s,” he said. It seems likely that Viterna’s and 

NASA’s pioneering work will continue to play a significant role, 

given the nation’s ambitious energy goals: the Department of 

Energy has outlined a plan for generating as much as 20 percent 

of the country’s energy from wind power by 2030. ●

This article was originally published in NASA’s Spinoff 2009. 

Bo Schwerin is an award-winning author and works at the NASA Center for Aerospace 

Information as a senior science writer for NASA’s annual Spinoff publication. 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

- 

 

 

 

STORy | ASK MAGAZINE | 25 

Photo Credit: NASA/Jim Grossmann 

After sunrise at the Shuttle 

Landing Facility at Kennedy 

Space Center, the wheels 

on space shuttle Endeavour 

are lowered before its move 

to the Orbiter Processing 

Facility. On December 19, an 

X ray of the orbiter showed 

evidence of a problem with 

a poppet, a kind of tapered 

plug that moves up and down 

in the valve to regulate flow. 

GettinG to “Yes”
 

The FlighT Readiness Review
 

BY MATTHEW KOHUT AND DON COHEN 

As its name suggests, a Flight Readiness Review, or FRR, gives teams responsible for various 

elements of a NASA flight mission an opportunity to ensure technical questions raised at earlier 

reviews have been adequately dealt with and to raise concerns about anything else that might affect 

mission success. Typically held about two weeks before a scheduled launch, the reviews gather team 

members in one meeting room, where they report on their areas of responsibility and, at the end of 

the session, express their judgment in a “go” or “no-go” flight decision. Most often, technical issues 

that could affect the flight are studied and resolved by engineers before the meeting; their work is 

reviewed and discussed and the session usually ends in a unanimous “go” decision. 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

GH2 flow control valve and poppet. -

Photo Credit: NASA 

26 | ASK MAGAZINE 

STS-119, the March 2009 Discovery flight to the International 

Space Station (ISS), was an exception. Getting to a positive 

launch decision took three FRRs, including a marathon second 

session, where frustratingly incomplete technical data led to 

uncertainty, some disagreement, and, finally, the decision that 

STS-119 would not be declared ready for flight. This unusual 

experience vividly demonstrated that the FRR process worked as 

intended, providing an open forum for voicing and examining 

concerns about flight safety and success and a focal point for 

rigorous technical work. 

A Broken Valve 

On November 14, 2008, as Endeavour rocketed skyward on 

STS-126, flight controllers monitoring data noted an unexpected 

hydrogen-flow increase from one of the shuttle’s main engines. 

Since three flow-control valves (one per engine) work in concert to 

maintain proper pressure in the hydrogen tank, one of the other valves 

reduced flow to compensate for the valve that malfunctioned. 

Understanding the causes and implications of the failure was 

essential to the safety of future shuttle missions. Management 

would have to promote and ensure open communication among 

the multiple organizations involved in the shuttle program so 

that all relevant information would be available to decision 

makers with the responsibility to approve or delay future shuttle 

flights. 

“We knew at least on paper the consequences could be really, 

really bad, and this could have significant implications for the 

orbiter fleet and, most urgently, the next vehicle in line. Depending 

on where the vehicle landed, we wanted to get these inspections 

done and some X-rays done as quickly as we could,” said John 

McManamen, chief engineer of the Space Shuttle Program. 

Shuttle and ISS program managers preferred launching 

STS-119 prior to mid-March so it would not interfere with 

the March 26 mission of the Russian Soyuz to transport the 

Expedition 19 crew to the ISS. If the launch was delayed until 

after the Soyuz flight, interdependencies in the schedule would 

require a reevaluation of other future launches. 

STS-126 touched down at Edwards Air Force Base on 

November 30 after unfavorable weather conditions at Kennedy 

Space Center led flight controllers to divert the landing 

to California. This delayed work until December 12, when 

the shuttle was ferried back to Kennedy aboard a specially 

equipped 747. 

A December 19 X-ray showed evidence of a problem with a 

poppet, a kind of tapered plug that moves up and down in the 

valve to regulate flow. Inspection determined that a fragment 

had broken off, the first time such a problem had occurred 

during flight, although there had been two similar failures in 

the early 1990s during testing of a new set of flow-control valves 

for Endeavour. 

There were a total of twelve flight-certified valves in 

existence: three in each shuttle, and three spares. Simply buying 

more was not an option—these custom parts had not been 

manufactured in years, and NASA had shut down its flowcontrol valve acceptance-testing capability. 

The FRR 

With the launch scheduled for February 19, the program 

scheduled a Flight Readiness Review for February 3. At that 

review, it quickly became clear that the engineering and safety 

organizations felt that significant work needed to be done before 

a sound flight rationale could be established. Steve Altemus, 

director of Engineering at Johnson Space Center, summarized 

the knowledge gap from the Johnson engineering community’s 

point of view: “We showed up at the first FRR and we’re saying, 

‘We don’t have a clear understanding of the flow environment; 

therefore, we can’t tell you what the likelihood of having this 

poppet piece come off will be. We have to get a better handle 

on the consequences of a particle release.’” The most important 

outcome of the meeting was the establishment of new lines of 

inquiry that could lead to better understanding. 

On February 6, the launch was delayed until February 22. 

Technical Analysis 

Analysis of the cracked valve showed that the failure resulted 

from high-cycle fatigue (in which a material is damaged by 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ASK MAGAZINE | 27 

BILL MCARThUR, SAFETy AND MISSION ASSURANCE MANAGER FOR ThE SPACE 

ShUTTLE AT ThE TIME, SAID, “ThE FACT ThAT PEOPLE wERE wILLING TO STAND 

UP AND SAy, ‘wE JUST AREN’T READy yET,’ IS A REAL TESTAMENT TO ThE FACT 

ThAT OUR CULTURE hAS EvOLvED SO ThAT wE wEREN’T OvERwhELMED wITh 

LAUNCh FEvER ...” 

numerous cycles of stress). This raised several questions. Had 

STS-126 presented an unusual environment, or was another 

valve likely to break in normal flight? What would be the worstcase consequences of a break? Engineers needed to determine 

the probable size and the maximum size of a loose particle, 

understand how it would move through the propulsion system, 

and what the system could tolerate without experiencing a 

potentially catastrophic rupture in its lines. 

Teams worked on the problem from multiple angles, 

including materials, structural dynamics, computational 

fluid dynamics (CFD), and fracture mechanics. Initial efforts 

relied on visual inspection and nondestructive evaluation 

(NDE) techniques, including scanning electron microscopy. 

The microscopes could see small cracks only after the poppet 

was polished, however, and polishing invalidated the flight 

certification of the hardware. “A polished poppet could upset 

the flow balance of the valve, rendering it unusable for flow 

management. In this case the valve could get stuck in the highor low-flow positions, which could cause a serious issue in flight,” 

said Steve Stich, the orbiter project manager. “In order to ensure 

that a polished poppet was properly balanced required testing 

using the system that had been shut down at the White Sands 

Test Facility in the late nineties. So we were in a bit of Catch-22 

situation with respect to performing the best possible NDE.” 

The Orbiter Project authorized impact testing at Glenn 

Research Center, Stennis Space Center, and the White Sands 

Test Facility to learn more about whether a fragment of a broken 

poppet would puncture the pressurization lines downstream 

of the valve. The data from these tests and other analyses 

contributed to a probabilistic risk assessment of the entire flowcontrol valve hydrogen-repress system. At the same time, the 

CFD analysts figured out the velocity and spin of a given-sized 

particle as well as the probable path it would travel through the 

elbow-joint turns in the pipe. 

As data began to come in from these tests, the program 

decided to convene a second FRR on February 20, although 

some members of the engineering and safety organizations 

expressed doubts about the timing of the review. 

One NDE technique that was initially dismissed was an 

eddy-current system, because the size of the probe head was too 

large for the valve. 

The Marathon FRR 

The second FRR for STS-119 lasted nearly fourteen long hours, 

and the outcome was not clear until the end. “It was much more 

of a technical review than typical Flight Readiness Reviews. 

There was a lot of new data placed on the table that hadn’t been 

fully vetted through the entire system. That made for the long 

meeting,” said FRR Chairman Bill Gerstenmaier. 

Well over a hundred people were in the Operations Support 

Building II at Kennedy Space Center, seated around the room 

in groups with their respective organizations as technical teams 

made presentations to the senior leaders on the FRR board. Some 

participants believed that the analysis done on the potential risk 

of a valve fragment puncturing the tubing that flowed hydrogen 

from the external tank to the shuttle main engines showed that the 

risk was low enough to justify a decision to fly. Others remained 

concerned throughout that long day about the fidelity of the data, 

and that they didn’t know enough about the causes of the valve 

failure and the likelihood and risk of its occurring again. 

Despite the tremendous amount of analysis and testing 

that had been done, technical presentations on the causes of 

the broken valve on STS-126 and the likelihood of recurrence 

were incomplete and inconclusive. Unlike at most FRRs, new 

data, such as computations of loads margins that couldn’t 

be completed in advance, streamed in during the review and 

informed the conversation. A chart reporting margins of safety 

included “TBD” (to be determined) notations. 

Doubts about some test data arose when Gene Grush 

received a phone call from Stennis informing him that the test 

program there had used the wrong material. “I had to stand up 

in front of that huge room and say, ‘Well there’s a little problem 

with our testing. Yes, we did very well, but the hardness of 

the particle wasn’t as hard as it should have been.’ That was 

very critical because that means that your test is no longer 

conservative. You’ve got good results, but you didn’t test with 

the right particle,” he said. 

NASA Chief Safety and Mission Assurance Officer Bryan 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

-

28 | ASK MAGAZINE Space Shuttle program and mission managers meet 

for a Flight Readiness Review of STS 121. 

O’Connor remarked, “Gerst [Gerstenmaier] was absolutely 

open. He never tried to shut them [the participants] down. 

Even though he could probably tell this was going to take a long 

time, he never let the clock appear to be something that he was 

worried about.” 

Toward the end of the meeting, Gerstenmaier spoke about 

the risks to the ISS program and to the shuttle schedule of not 

approving Discovery’s launch. A few participants perceived his 

comments as pressure to approve the flight. Others saw it as 

appropriate context-setting, making clear the broader issues that 

affect a launch decision. After he spoke, he gave the groups forty 

minutes to “caucus,” to discuss what they had heard during 

the day and decide on their recommendations. When they 

came back, he polled the groups. The engineering and safety 

organizations and some center directors in attendance made it 

clear that they did not find adequate flight rationale. 

Bill McArthur, safety and mission assurance manager for 

the Space Shuttle at the time, said, “The fact that people were 

willing to stand up and say, ‘We just aren’t ready yet,’ is a real 

testament to the fact that our culture has evolved so that we 

weren’t overwhelmed with launch fever, and people were willing 

to tell Bill Gerstenmaier, ‘No, we’re no-go for launch.’” 

As the participants filed out of the meeting, Joyce SerialeGrush said to Mike Ryschkewitsch, “This was really hard and 

I’m disappointed that we didn’t have the data today, but it feels 

so much better than it used to feel, because we had to say that 

we weren’t ready and people listened to us. It didn’t always used 

to be that way.” 

New Information 

Charles Bryson, an engineer at Marshall Space Flight Center, 

used his eddy-current probe equipment with a relatively large 

probe head to inspect a poppet and his inspection, confirmed 

by other analysis, indicated that the eddy-current inspection 

technique showed promise in finding flaws. Propulsion Systems 

Engineering and Integration Chief Engineer at Marshall Rene 

Ortega told colleagues from the Materials and Processes Problem 

Resolution Team about Bryson’s eddy-current inspection results. 

Ortega helped arrange for Bryson to examine several poppets 

at Boeing’s Huntington Beach facility. Bryson then worked 

collaboratively with a team from Johnson led by Ajay Koshti, 

an NDE specialist with expertise in eddy-current investigations. 

Koshti brought an eddy-current setup with a better response than 

Bryson’s, and together they arrived at a consistent inspection 

technique. 

“Once we were able to screen flaws with the eddy current and 

there wasn’t a need to polish poppets with the process,” Ortega 

explained, “we had a method by which we could say that we ... 

thought we’re pretty good at screening for non-polished poppets.” 

Engineers had found that some of the smaller flaws identified 

in the poppets didn’t seem to be growing very fast. “Through that 

exercise, we came up with the suggestion that, ‘Hey, it doesn’t 

look like these flaws are growing out very rapidly in the flight 

program, and with the screening of the eddy current we can 

probably arrive at a flight rationale that would seem to indicate 

that those flaws being screened by the eddy current wouldn’t 

grow to failure in one flight,’” Ortega said. The eddy-current 

technique was not a silver bullet, but in conjunction with the 

other techniques and test data, it provided critical information 

that would form the basis for sound flight rationale. 

The Final FRR 

With the results from the test programs all now supporting a 

shared understanding of the technical problem, there was wide 

consensus among the community that the third Flight Readiness 

Review, on March 6, would result in a “go” vote. 

“By the time we eventually all got together on the last FRR 

the comfort level was very high,” said O’Connor. “For one thing, 

everybody understood this topic so well. You couldn’t say, ‘I’m 

uncomfortable because I don’t understand.’ We had a great deal 

of understanding of not only what we knew about, but what we 

didn’t know about. We had a good understanding of the limits 

of our knowledge as much as possible, whereas before we didn’t 

know what those were.” 

The FRR board agreed and STS-119 was approved for 

launch on March 11. After delays due to an unrelated leak in 

a liquid hydrogen vent line, Discovery lifted off on March 15, 

2009, and safely and successfully completed its mission. ●

Photo Credit: NASA/Kim Shiflett 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

INSIGHT | ASK MAGAZINE | 29 

INTERVIEW WITH 

Rob Strain 

and 

Lesa Roe

 BY ED ROGERS 

Ed Rogers, chief knowledge officer for the Goddard Space 

Flight Center, recently sat down with two center directors— 

Rob Strain of Goddard and Lesa Roe of Langley Research 

Center. He asked them about collaboration, partnerships, 

and how their centers are learning to work well together. 

ROGERS: Both of you come with some Kennedy, and now Langley—which gives 

industry experience and knowledge of me an interesting mix in that it includes 

other NASA centers. What do you bring both space and research centers. I have 

to the center director job that can help also worked in industry. So I, like Rob, am 

NASA and your respective centers meet able to think about multiple perspectives 

the challenge of complex partnering? when I look at a challenge. I also see 

the tremendous value that the diversity 

STRAIN: I think that our missions in of different organizations brings. Their 

the future will all entail partnership solutions to problems are far superior to 

involvement because of the size of the ones provided by isolated thinking. 

missions, the nature of international 

research, and the capabilities that industry STRAIN: I agree. Say, for example, we’re 

and academia bring. The fact that I’ve having a difference of opinion with 

had different sorts of roles in different somebody—another center, a partner 

organizations might help me see those in academia, a big-name PI [principal 

multiple perspectives a little better. investigator], or an international partner. 

I start with, “What do you think they’re 

ROE: My background includes working thinking? If you were in their shoes, how 

at multiple NASA centers—Johnson, would you view this?” I would push to 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

30 | ASK MAGAZINE 

SAY, FOR ExAMPLE, WE’RE HAVING A difference of opinion 

WITH SOMEBODY .... I START WITH, “WHAT DO YOu THINK 

they’re thinking? IF YOu WERE in their shoes, HOW WOuLD 

YOu view this?” 

the point where I’ll ask people to make 

the case for the partner. If we have an 

external PI, for instance, I want them 

to think about, why do you suppose he’s 

angry, or why do you suppose she has 

this issue? Or if we’re debating issues on 

performance with a contractor, are they 

having problems with us? Often the 

answer is, “Hmm, I didn’t think about 

that.” Well, if you were them, what would 

you do? They go through this process, 

and then they say, “Okay, now I know 

what to do.” 

ROE: Rob and I have a very similar approach 

when someone brings a problem up, 

especially a problem with another center 

or a partner. You have to put yourself in 

their shoes to find the best way forward. 

It is very easy to wallow in how bad the 

other organization is, but that gets you 

nowhere fast! It is very important to me to 

get all perceptions out in the open, jointly 

come up with a plan, and hold ourselves 

accountable to the plan. 

ROGERS: It seems that there is some 

competition among centers, but it’s also 

in their best interest to cooperate. How 

do you deal with the competitive nature 

of NASA work? 

ROE: We are always looking to develop 

partnerships with other centers on projects 

whether there is competition or the work is 

directed to a particular center. Just as with 

industry, centers will sometimes partner 

or be competitors depending on the 

requirements for a specific opportunity. 

In either case, we are trying to assemble 

the best team and contribute in a way that 

will make the project successful. Mission 

success is NASA success—everyone really 

believes that inside. We just need to make 

sure we don’t let the way we organize 

ourselves get in the way of the commitment 

our people have to mission success. 

STRAIN: It’s important to remember that 

we’re not only competing intramurally 

within NASA, but also with industry 

and academia, and that keeps us sharp. I 

think if we didn’t have some component 

of competition, we might wake up one day 

and not be on that leading edge. I wouldn’t 

argue that we should swing down that 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ASK MAGAZINE | 31 

continuum too far, because competition 

has an unproductive side, too. The place 

we’ve arrived at recently, where a good 

portion of the work is assigned and a 

smaller portion is competitive, strikes me 

as about the right balance. 

ROGERS: Partnering between Goddard 

and Langley is not new. How have you 

approached Goddard in your current 

partnership on CLARREO [CLimate 

Absolute Radiance and REfractivity 

Observatory]? Are you applying lessons 

in this area of cooperation learned from 

past missions and, if so, how are you 

applying them? 

ROE: Carefully [laughing]. We have had 

some hugely successful partnerships 

with GSFC [Goddard], but after our 

CALIPSO [Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and 

Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observations] 

experience—where many lessons were 

learned the hard way—we wanted to start 

outrightwiththe nextjoint mission.When 

itcamealong,RobandIdecidedweneeded 

some face-to-face discussions followed up 

with a memorandum of understanding 

defining roles and responsibilities. We 

had some sessions with both centers’ 

senior management teams, where we put 

all the concerns, fears, perceptions on the 

table. The teams worked to negotiate each 

center’s roles and responsibilities, with the 

focus on using each center’s capabilities 

to maximize the probability of project 

success. We documented them in the 

MOU [memorandum of understanding] 

between the centers, which was 

reviewed and signed by both centers’ 

senior management teams. We are also 

committed to holding all team members 

fully accountable for implementing the 

partnership agreed to in the MOU. 

STRAIN: We actually wrote case studies 

on CALIPSO and STEREO [Solar 

TErrestrial RElations Observatory] 

that focus on the team-management 

aspects of the project, and we’ve learned 

some important lessons. CALIPSO, a 

mission jointly managed by Goddard and 

Langley, was marred, like STEREO—a 

mission run with APL [Applied Physics 

Laboratory]—by interorganizational strife. 

So when Goddard and Langley ended 

up in a partnership again, I called Lesa, 

and we had our organizations spend an 

entire day together to let it all hang out. 

I think it was therapeutic for everyone, 

if a bit awkward, but that’s how the real 

lessons get applied and not buried in halftruths. CALIPSO and STEREO are both 

successful missions, but everyone agreed 

that the way we got there left much to be 

desired. I’m sure we won’t get it perfect this 

time, but we’re certainly going to try to 

apply as many lessons as we can up front. 

ROE: People at Langley and Goddard are 

applying the lessons we learned from 

CALIPSO, but this is not a situation 

where you can assign an action, check the 

box, and you are done. It is going to take 

focus by Rob and me and our leadership 

teams to make sure there is no fallback. 

During our Langley/GSFC meetings, 

we specifically discussed challenges we 

faced in our collaboration on CALIPSO. 

These ranged from unclear roles and 

responsibilities to poor communication 

between center senior management and 

with Headquarters. In the past, unclear 

roles generated confusion within the 

project team and mistrust between center 

leadership. We worked extremely hard 

to avoid these unproductive situations in 

crafting current partnerships, particularly 

for the CLARREO mission. We have had 

a fully integrated team leading up to MCR 

[mission concept review] involved in the 

design of the mission. Specifically, we 

organized the science team with a deputy 

project scientist at GSFC and scheduled 

biweekly telecons between the Langley 

Science director and the Goddard Earth 

Science Division director. This already 

has paid off during the discussion of a 

sensitive decision concerning adding an 

instrument to CLARREO. By working 

closely with GSFC management ahead 

of time, we were able to reach a joint 

recommendation that has been accepted 

by Headquarters. I sincerely believe we 

have established a strong partnership on 

CLARREO where everyone is focused 

on mission success. Both organizations 

have worked hard at clear and frequent 

communication at all levels, and we have 

made tremendous progress. 

ROGERS: The lessons you two are talking 

about are not the usual lessons learned; 

you are talking about teaming and 

communication. Are people receptive to 

paying attention to these “soft” lessons? 

STRAIN: Totally. When we actually got into 

how to execute this new mission, Langley 

brought their team up, and at first it was 

“you did this” and “you did that” and “we 

didn’t appreciate that.” Like I said, we 

really let it all hang out. And at the end 

people said, “Oh, I see your point,” and, 

“Well, yeah, I wouldn’t do it that way but 

I see your logic.” Our MOU includes a 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

32 | ASK MAGAZINE 

behavior clause. Lesa and I put in a clause 

about how we expect people to behave so 

that when the project gets into the thick 

of things, people will say, “The agreement 

wasn’t just you do this and I do that,” but, 

“This is how people ought to behave and 

follow some protocol.” There were some 

hard feelings left from previous missions. 

We said, “We can relive this, or we can do 

it differently.” I think we all decided to do 

things differently. 

ROE: I agree with Rob. In addition to 

specifying the roles, we had to replan the 

project as agency requirements evolved 

and changed—the CALIPSO project 

began during the “faster, better, cheaper” 

era at NASA. What Langley proposed as 

a PI-led mission with limited insight and 

oversight of contractor activities and a 

partnership with CNES [the French Space 

Agency providing the spacecraft and one 

instrument] began to change after the Mars 

Polar Lander and Mars Climate Orbiter 

failures. One thing we are trying to apply 

with CLARREO is that the proposed 

resources must match the project plan, 

which must be consistent with current 

agency policies and requirements. Another 

lesson is recognizing the resources needed 

to manage a complicated partnership 

itself. With CALIPSO, we probably 

underestimated the added complexity 

and challenges of the partnership with 

CNES. Cultural differences, time zone 

differences, communication issues, ITAR 

[International Traffic in Arms Regulations], 

etc., led to many long telecons and 

meetings between the NASA and CNES 

teams to develop requirements and ensure 

they were met. That effort takes resources, 

and we want to plan for that kind of 

need in future partnerships. Although 

CLARREOmaynothaveaninternational 

partner, we will be partnering with 

Goddard and maybe other centers, other 

government agencies such as the National 

Institute for Standards and Technology, 

universities, and industry. We must 

ensure that the project organizational 

structure and staffing plan account for the 

complexity driven by these partnerships 

and contracts and budget for them. 

Finally, leadership must focus the team 

on mission success beyond just center 

success. With CLARREO I believe 

the senior leadership at both centers is 

working very effectively and paying great 

attention to ensure each center is focused 

on mission success. We bring the best, 

most appropriate capabilities from each 

center to bear in order for CLARREO 

to be successful. We are committed to 

building a dedicated, highly motivated 

Langley/Goddard CLARREO team. 

ROGERS: Where else do you see exciting 

partnerships shaping the future for NASA? 

STRAIN: I’m excited about what Wallops is 

bringing, not just to Goddard—though 

that is great—and not even just to NASA, 

but to the broader community, because 

they will do commercial, scientific, and 

military missions at price points we don’t 

have access to today. Orbital Science 

picked Wallops to be the place where 

they’re going to develop their new rockets 

for crew resupply and also for Taurus 2. 

ROE: We’ve had numerous successful 

partnerships with Wallops, including the 

recent Max Launch Abort System test for 

the new crew exploration vehicle. We utilize 

the Wallops Unpiloted Aerial Vehicle 

runway and range to conduct important 

flight controls research for the Aeronautics 

Research Mission Directorate. We also 

recently had a highly successful flight of 

a first-of-its-kind inflatable reentry vehicle 

on a sounding rocket from Wallops. This 

was the first flight demonstration of a 

technology that could enable the landing 

of much larger systems on Mars or 

returning spacecraft to Earth. So we have 

collaborated with Wallops to utilize their 

flight-test capabilities for research- and 

technology-demonstration activities. This 

is a great example of taking advantage 

of the capabilities at both centers to do 

something neither could do alone. 

STRAIN: Lesa is absolutely correct— 

Wallops is a great example of getting more 

done by collaboration. Wallops could be 

for NASA, the commercial community, 

and the military the resource for cheap, 

midsize access to space, at price points 

of $50 million or $60 million, not the 

current$200million.They’vealwaysdone 

good work with balloons and suborbital 

missions. They’re very clever—they can 

do more with a dollar than anyone else, 

I think, at NASA. They pride themselves 

on it, and I love what they’re doing. It’s 

great being connected with Wallops, 

Virginia, and Langley. I think together 

NASA is a better place by having different 

ways of doing things all for the same goal: 

to better understand our Earth, our solar 

system, and ultimately our universe. ●

The CALIPSO and STEREO case studies 

mentioned are available on the Office of 

the Chief Knowledge Officer Web site at 

www.nasa.gov/goddard/ocko. 
 

 

 

INSIGHT | ASK MAGAZINE | 33 

The Revolution of Social Innovation: 

Emerging Lessons for Large, 

Complex Organizations 

BY BROOK MANVILLE 

Finding new sources of inspiration and creative ideas is easier said than done—mandates to just 

“start thinking outside the box” are hardly the answer. The innovating organization looks constantly 

to often unfamiliar models and sources of inspiration, challenging itself to understand when and 

how someone else is “changing the game”—and what it might mean for them. Breakthrough ideas 

come when someone dares to look beyond the predictable boundaries of “how we normally work 

in our industry.” One source of new thinking still unfamiliar to most organizations is the emerging 

field of “social innovation.” 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

34 | ASK MAGAZINE 34 | ASK MAGAZINE 

The Rising Tide of Social Innovation 

Social innovation has captured the imagination and enthusiasm 

of legions of young, new professionals and is drawing millions 

of philanthropic dollars to its pioneers. It is spawning thousands 

of new Web sites and bloggers; some state governments and 

the Obama administration are authorizing special funding for 

it; colleges and universities are establishing new degrees and 

academic programs about it. It is generally shaking the traditional 

assumptions and operations of the nonprofit sector. Some fresh 

thinking from this rising revolution may be an opportunity for 

others who are not themselves “social innovators”—even leaders 

of major enterprises not necessarily in the business of “saving the 

poor.” So what might be learned from this evolving phenomenon? 

Are there lessons about innovation for any organization? 

Social innovation is a developing set of new approaches 

to solving social problems, born out of the frustration and 

persisting shortfall of traditional nonprofits’ efforts to address 

the problems of society. Social innovators believe that such 

problems can be tackled by bringing entrepreneurial thinking 

and market-based problem solving to social issues, novel and 

transformative approaches to change the status quo, and strategic 

efforts to spread success. Some social innovations—the charter 

school movement, microfinance, the “fair trade” branding 

movement are examples—have become well known, but there 

are also now thousands of smaller organizations capitalizing on 

new approaches to solving social ills, creatively bringing to bear 

business strategies or new uses of technology or some “turn-iton-its-head” new process to tackle homelessness, declining crop 

yields in the fields of Kenya, shortages of supplies in U.S. urban 

schools, or the lack of sanitation in rural villages in India. 

For leaders seeking new sources of creative thinking and new 

ways to create value, social innovation can be a promising arena 

from which to learn. Like the social innovator, leaders of large and 

complex organizations face seemingly intractable problems they 

need to solve despite barriers such as the morass of bureaucracy, 

too little funding, and a shortage of motivated people. Imagine 

your own organization today: are your challenges any more 

pressing and difficult than motivating underpaid teachers in an 

urban school, providing clean water to poor villagers living in the 

squalor of lands polluted by animal waste, or preparing former 

prisoners for a productive return to society? 

Obviously each successful individual case has its own 

structure and strategies, but we can identify a few themes of 

potential application to any organization seeking to create its 

own innovative approaches. 

Simple Technology Often Wins 

How many projects in large, complex organizations become large 

and complex because of this or that huge IT investment intended 

to bring together and analyze all the information needed by 

different users in every different configuration possible? Many 

large projects are delayed, run overbudget, or even ultimately 

fail when the key problems might have been solved by a simpler 

approach, using less but more targeted technology—typically 

everyday technology already in the hands of users. Social 

innovators, who normally lack the resources and infrastructure 

for complex systems, often call upon what is literally at hand— 

for example, collecting and distributing market prices over cell 

phone SMS messages to poor farmers in Africa, allowing them 

to bypass exploitative middlemen and gain more profit for their 

work in the fields, or distributing basic health information to 

indigent villagers about infection, HIV, and maternal care using 

the same simple medium, as the Grameen Foundation does. 

In other words, consider simple and basic solutions to 

capture value faster and cheaper. African fields in many 

countries are now being irrigated without electricity or complex 

machinery by simple bicycle-like pedal pumps. Charles Best, 

a U.S.-based social innovator, created a minor revolution in 

funding supplies for poor public schools with the elegant idea 

of allowing teachers themselves to post specific needs for their 

classrooms on his “Donors Choose” Web site; donors can browse 

through the advertised needs and in a simple and targeted way 

provide money for calculators, new books, or basic furnishings 

for underequipped classrooms. Before “Donors Choose,” 

funding for school supplies was caught in the bureaucracy of 

district budgets and complex allocations; that’s not gone away, 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ASK MAGAZINE | 35 

... INNOvATIONS ARE SPREAD By PEOPLE-TO-PEOPLE RELATIONShIPS, wITh IMPACT 

GROwING MORE ThROUGh ThE INFORMAL TRANSFER OF vALUES AND KNOwLEDGE 

FOCUSED ON A ShARED MISSION ThAN FORMAL INFRASTRUCTURE. 

but entrepreneurial teachers can now cut through the red 

tape and rapidly get what they need, thanks to the small-scale 

philanthropy of private donors—brokered through a basic Web 

site open to the public. 

Breaking Silos with Hybrid Approaches 

The bureaucracy of large organizations stifles projects and 

frustrates customers with the all-too-common cry of “not my 

department”—when in fact the solution to a problem or the 

opportunity to be captured is all about putting the ideas of 

different departments together. Managers become frozen by 

the mind-set that they must control all that reports to them 

and work around all that does not; similarly, most believe that 

there is one way of doing things within an industry or unit that 

defines how that enterprise works and differentiates it from other 

enterprises. The hardware people make hardware, the software 

people make software, and never the twain shall meet. Yet when 

they do meet, wonderful things can sometimes happen. 

Social innovators create often unpredictable value by 

jumping across traditional categories and breaking silos 

with cross-domain thinking and collaboration, combining 

unexpected entities, processes, or multiple approaches to 

problems in a new composite solution. The citizens of Nairobi 

long believed that public sanitation, when it existed at all, was the 

province of the not-very-efficient municipal authorities—until 

a social entrepreneur named David Kuria created a successful 

network of pay toilets combined with related small businesses 

in the slums of the city. Co-designed with members of the 

community, featuring innovative design and operations that 

also provide energy recycling and reuse of waste for farming, the 

“IKO” toilets have become profitable community institutions, 

funded not just by users but also investors and retailers who use 

the sites to set up adjacent micro-businesses such as shoeshining, 

retailing, and phone-card sales. 

The citizens of Mumbai until recently despaired about their 

hopelessly inefficient municipal ambulance service, but with 

the launch of an entrepreneurial nonprofit organization “1298” 

(the telephone number of the new service), they now have a 

separate, high-quality response that combines a state-of-the-art 

call center and information-technology tracking with a network 

of privately maintained emergency medical vehicles. 1298 uses 

an innovative business model whereby better-off patients crosssubsidize less-well-off patients on an ability-to-pay basis, and 

prices further vary depending on the quality of the hospital 

the patient desires. Another innovative hybrid organization is 

the “Partnership for Quality Medical Donations” (PQMD), a 

consortium of pharmaceutical and medical-supply companies 

that work with relief organizations serving needy populations 

around the world; the manufacturers combine their product 

know-how and supply with the nongovernmental organizations’ 

(NGO) distribution and on-the-ground knowledge of 

community health organizations to create an integrated end-toend supply chain. The unique partnership thus provides access 

to donated pharmaceuticals and other health-care supplies for 

people in need all around the world. In these and many other 

cases, new value is created by bringing together often unfamiliar 

partners or processes, spanning boundaries embodied in 

traditional categories of industry or service. 

Leveraging Networks for Scale 

PQMD is an example of another common strategy in much 

of social innovation—using networks and a range of “softer” 

or more informal relationships to spread programs and create 

more impact. The combined networks and relationships 

of all the NGOs in PQMD provide much greater reach and 

distribution than any single organization, and more than all 

the pharmaceutical manufacturers can hope to achieve on their 

own; the heart of the consortium is a set of core values and a 

commitment to mission that binds the different networks of the 

members into an integrated whole. 

Root Cause, a social-innovation consulting and research 

organization, has created a path-breaking funding marketplace 

in Boston (the “Social Innovation Forum”), bringing together 

donor-investors and their networks of socially minded colleagues 

with rising community innovators who need knowledge, 

visibility, and operating capital to advance their work in health, 

education, and other human services. Thanks to these networks, 

much more funding is now available to the social entrepreneurs 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

36 | ASK MAGAZINE 36 | ASK MAGAZINE 

of metropolitan Boston; other municipalities have expressed 

interest in the model, and Root Cause is building networks to 

support the spread of the innovation. 

Another network-building story can be found in the 

Nyala Dairy Cooperative in Kenya. The cooperative, aided 

by pioneering work of the social-innovation consulting 

organization TechnoServe, built a wide range of community 

networks and for-profit business relationships (leveraging both 

commercial and traditional tribal relationships) to make its 

dairy the hub of a much larger commercial and social center. 

The network expansion now brings more economic prosperity 

to an increasingly large population in the region. Teach for 

America, the social innovation of Wendy Kopp that recruits 

and places “best and brightest” graduating college students in 

poverty-stricken urban and rural school districts, continues to 

build its impact not just through the development of its corps of 

teachers, but also through networks of alumni who collect and 

share best practices and help recruit future members. In these, 

and thousands of other cases, innovations are spread by peopleto-people relationships, with impact growing more through the 

informal transfer of values and knowledge focused on a shared 

mission than formal infrastructure. 

Mission-Driven Performance 

and the New Kind of Leadership 

The motivating power of mission is another critical attribute of 

social innovation. Though nonprofits have long called on the 

shared values and shared purpose of noble missions to engage 

volunteers and staff, social innovators up the ante. Leaders of social 

innovation seek solutions that are more rapid, measurable, and 

disruptive; they make the call to mission a deep and penetrating 

part of all that they and their organizations do. At the same 

time, the leadership style of social innovators is neither messianic 

nor ego-driven; depending on networks, rapid problem solving, 

and widely distributed learning and change, the best socially 

innovative leaders share responsibility within their organizations 

and across the networks they call upon and do all they can to 

replace hierarchy with purpose-driven collaboration. 

That style of leadership is further enhanced by social 

innovation’s insistence on measurable performance, accountability, 

and transparency. When all are committed to mission and 

results, and when all engage in new ways of working and 

solving problems in order to break through persisting, complex 

barriers, there is no tolerance for the pomp of position or the 

hoarding of knowledge or authority for personal gain. The 

common themes of these innovators are not “me” but “us,” not 

“glory” but “impact.” Thus the comment of Charlie Brown, 

the leader of Ashoka’s open-source social-solution network, 

Changemakers.net: “There are better ways to change the world 

than building a personal empire.” 

A Challenge for All 

Not all problems or opportunities are suitable for social 

innovation, nor is social innovation a panacea for all that ails 

humanity or a particular organization. But more and more 

organizations adopting the social-innovation approach are 

getting traction in problem arenas long written off as hopeless. 

At the same time, like other revolutions through history, this 

one may be as valuable for the broader and longer-term effects 

it catalyzes as for the immediate change it brings. We may hope 

and pray that creative social innovation finds new and better 

ways to educate children, provide better health and living 

conditions for the poor, and make a dent in ending domestic 

violence or global pollution. If it also serves to inspire leaders in 

any organization to work in new, better ways, it may deservedly 

live beyond the excitement of the moment. ●

Brook Manville consults to “socially minded organizations,” 

including many social innovators, as Principal of Brook 

Manville, LLC. Based in Washington, D.C., he can be reached at 

brook@brookmanville.com. 
 

INSIGHT | ASK MAGAZINE | 37 

Phaeton: Learning by Doing


 BY JOHNNY KWOK 

Recent graduates working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) face a familiar dilemma: project 

managers want individuals with experience, but how do you get the necessary experience if your 

lack of it prevents managers from hiring you? JPL has inaugurated a training program to address 

this problem. 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

38 | ASK MAGAZINE 

hOw DOES ONE TRAIN AN EARLy-CAREER hIRE TO BE ASSERTIvE AND yET BE hUMBLE, TO 

LEAD AND TO FOLLOw, TO COUNT ON SENIORS FOR ADvICE AND yET BE AN INDEPENDENT 

ThINKER, TO EARN RESPECT whEN EvERyONE KNOwS yOU ARE AN EARLy-CAREER hIRE? 

It was around Halloween in 2007 when Benjamin Solish, who 

had been employed at the lab for about six months, drew the 

short straw among his peers and fired off an e-mail to JPL 

Director Charles Elachi. 

“Dear Dr. Elachi,” it began, “as you may know, the X PRIZE 

Foundation recently released a challenge to the engineering 

community to send a rover mission to the moon. Our team, all 

early-career hires at JPL, is excited to answer that challenge.” 

Early-career hire is a designation for employees less than three 

years out of college. 

The e-mail contained a request to use JPL facilities to 

compete in the Google Lunar X PRIZE and mentioned that 

this would be a chance for younger employees “to gain valuable 

end-to-end experience on a small-scale mission, which would 

greatly benefit our future work at JPL.” It was signed “The 

Phaeton Explorer Team,” followed by the names of seven earlycareer hires. 

To their surprise, the Phaeton Explorers received an e-mail 

back from Elachi requesting to meet with them. During the 

meeting, Elachi channeled their shoot-for-the-moon enthusiasm 

into creating a one-of-a-kind training program that would achieve 

their original objective. After several months of brainstorming 

and iterations with upper management and Elachi, the Phaeton 

Program was born. 

The group’s recommended approach for the program 

included developing small payload projects with a life cycle 

of about two to three years and start dates separated by about 

one year. Participants would be assigned multiple positions on 

Phaeton projects in different phases of each mission’s life cycle— 

projects would mimic JPL flight projects but be staffed by earlycareer hires, including key management positions. Each year the 

program would solicit early-career hires who would devote half 

to three-quarters of their time to the program for a period of up 

to eighteen months. The plan also called for a Phaeton advisory 

board to annually select project concepts, and for the recruiting 

and funding of mentors. 

With an institutional blessing, committed training funds, 

and a dedicated facility, the Phaeton Program office was formed 

in June 2008. Six concepts were evaluated based on criteria 

that included technical feasibility as a project managed by 

early-career hires, cost and schedule risks, diversity of handson experience, and relevance to JPL/NASA mission statements. 

Two projects were selected to proceed to Phase A definition. A 

call for applicants was issued. Out of a potential pool of two 

hundred eligible early-career hires, seventy applications were 

received and about twenty people were selected. 

One of the selected projects is Phaeton Mast Dynamics 

(PMD), a collaboration with Caltech and the NuSTAR 

project, a high-energy X-ray telescope scheduled for launch in 

August 2011. PMD will measure and characterize the dynamic 

behavior of the 10-meter boom of the telescope. “During my 

career at JPL, I’ve been exposed to a lot of Phase C and D work, 

but I have never been given the opportunity to be involved in 

Phase A and B work,” said project manager Lauren Halatek of 

the measurement systems group. “Phaeton is a great learning 

experience,” Halatek said. “I have a lot more respect for those 

who have been here a long time and make it look so easy.” PMD 

plans to deliver the payload to NuSTAR in March 2010. 

The second selected project proposed furthering the 

technology of terrain-relative navigation using a yet-to-bedetermined suborbital vehicle as a carrier for the payload 

comprising imaging and inertial reference units. The group was 

struggling with the affordability of the suborbital vehicle when 

JPL received notification of the training opportunity called 

Hands-On Project Experience (HOPE), issued by NASA’s Science 

Mission Directorate, the Office of the Chief Engineer, and the 

NASA Academy of Program/Project and Engineering Leadership. 

HOPE’s training objectives are exactly what the Phaeton program 

is designed to accomplish. Furthermore, it provides for a sounding 

rocket from Wallops Flight Facility. What luck! 

True to the intent of Phaeton as a training program, the 

focus of this group of early-career hires was redirected toward 

proposal and formulation training instead of implementation 

training. In addition to proposal classes, the early-career hires 

were assigned roles in proposal definition and production and 

matched with mentors with relevant experience. The effort paid 

off with the selection of the winning proposal in April 2009, 

called Terrain Relative Navigation and Employee Development 

(TRaiNED). TRaiNED will be launched in June 2010. 

“The Phaeton Program gave a group of early-career hires an 

opportunity to learn the JPL formulation process from a group 

of senior, experienced mentors,” said Don Heyer, the project 

manager for TRaiNED. “The fact that we won just makes it 

even more rewarding.” 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ASK MAGAZINE | 39 

With these two projects completing in 2010, another project 

was selected in June 2009 for Phase A concept definition: the 

Optical Planetary Access Link for space station. This project 

will validate optical acquisition and tracking algorithms and 

mechanisms intended for use on Mars by placing an instrument 

on the International Space Station. 

More Than Engineering and Science 

The Phaeton experience isn’t limited to the lab’s early-career 

engineers and scientists. 

“Phaeton was designed for the development of both 

technical and business professionals,” noted Hosanna Aroyan, 

project resource analyst and business administration manager 

for Phaeton. Aroyan, also an early-career hire, believes learning 

to manage the business components of flight projects through 

Phaeton will pay dividends for the lab over time: “A business 

professional that understands and can communicate the needs 

between line and project management is important. Phaeton, 

through the participation of actively involved mentors, allows 

for that development to occur early in our career.” 

“As the Phaeton training lead, it’s my task to create a 

curriculum of classes, tours, field trips, and observational 

opportunities to complement their hands-on experience. This 

has provided me with a clearer understanding of JPL’s project 

life cycle and all that’s involved in making each step happen,” 

said Betsy Riley, who is an early-career hire from Professional 

Development in the Human Resources Department. 

Supplying business and flight-project experience to earlycareer hires was a complex notion that came from the ground 

up. “When you first get to the Lab, you get pigeonholed into 

one area,” said Solish, one of those who worked early on to 

develop the Phaeton concept and is now a systems engineer for 

TRaiNED and an advisor to the Phaeton Program. “Phaeton 

is not just networking; it’s understanding how the Lab is put 

together and how it works,” he said. 

Darren Michaels was working on a conceptual design of 

analog circuits for the future Europa Orbiter when he was selected 

as the lead electrical engineer on PMD. “In fifteen short months 

we have turned a basic napkin-drawing concept into a real flight 

instrument. Now, as the flight hardware evolves, we even have 

the opportunity to problem-solve some anomalies that came up 

during flight environmental tests,” he explained. “These are real 

tasks and situations that all projects experience, and it is very 

exciting to go through the full experience so fresh out of college. 

Where else can new hires obtain such comprehensive training 

on building and delivering spacecraft payloads?” 

The fulfillment of being part of the Phaeton Program is 

not limited to early-career hires. “It is an amazing experience 

working with such talented new engineers,” said Calina 

Seybold, the senior engineer who is the systems engineering 

mentor for TRaiNED. “An especially gratifying moment came 

after the TRaiNED HOPE proposal was submitted, when I was 

presented with a thank-you card containing a handwritten note 

from each member of the early-career hire team.” 

There are challenges in managing a training program of this 

nature. I found myself frequently having to remind supervisors 

and early-career hires that this is not just a training program. 

There are schedules, deliverables, and cost commitments. 

Although I found no shortage of mentors for technical training, 

it is much harder to find mentors to guide the early-career hires 

to develop leadership skills. How does one train an early-career 

hire to be assertive and yet be humble, to lead and to follow, to 

count on seniors for advice and yet be an independent thinker, to 

earn respect when everyone knows you are an early-career hire? 

And yet, in the past eighteen months, I have seen this group of 

early professionals mature in their skill and thinking, gain each 

other’s respect, and establish lifelong camaraderie. 

Although the idea to compete against industry for Google’s 

$30 million prize purse was rebuffed, the Phaeton Explorers 

won another prize. They became the catalysts to developing 

future leaders for JPL and beyond. ●

For more information about the Phaeton Early-Career Hire 

Development Program, visit phaeton.jpl.nasa.gov. 

Johnny kwok is the assistant director for formulation in 

the Engineering and Science Directorate at the Jet Propulsion 

Laboratory. In addition to being the program manager for 

Phaeton, he oversees activities in workforce planning, concept 

development, and costing. 
Title 

BY 

Intro 

 -

 

 -

 

 - 

- 

 

 

40 | ASK MAGAZINE | STORy 

The Saturn I S IV 

stage (second stage) 

assembly for the SA 9 

mission underwent a 

weight and balance 

test at Cape Canaveral. 

The S IV stage had six 

RL 10 engines arranged 

in a circle, using liquid 

hydrogen and liquid 

oxygen as propellants. 
 

 

ASK MAGAZINE | 41 

ROCKETING
 

FROM PAST 


TO FUTURE
 

AS TOLD TO TRACY McMAHAN AND MATTHEW KOHUT BY PHIL SUMRALL 

This story draws extensively from a September 2007 

interview with Ares Projects Oral Historian 

Tracy McMahan as well as a December 2009 interview 

with ASK Contributing Editor Matthew Kohut. 

Photo Credit: NASA Marshall Space Flight Center 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

42 | ASK MAGAZINE 

The Saturn V vehicle (SA-501) 

for the Apollo 4 missions stands on 

the Crawler Transporter Vehicle. 

The Apollo 4 mission was the first 

launch of the Saturn V launch vehicle. 

Photo Credit: NASA Marshall Space Flight Center 

A Chance Encounter at the Barbershop 

I was fortunate enough to accidentally meet Dr. Wernher von 

Braun on a Saturday morning in the early spring of 1962 at a 

downtown barbershop in Huntsville, Alabama. I was waiting 

my turn, and Dr. von Braun came in and happened to sit down 

next to me. He had a number of papers in his hands, and he was 

thumbing through more papers in his briefcase. 

He worked for a while—I would say a half hour or so—and 

then he put his papers away, closed the briefcase, and struck up a 

conversation. Of course, I knew immediately who he was; he had 

no idea who I was. He was very, very friendly, very charming. 

He asked me what I was doing, and when I told him I was 

teaching math and science in a local private school, he asked 

about what classes I had taken in college, what I had studied, 

what my major was, and that sort of thing. I was amazed at how 

curious he was about everything. 

He wanted to know every course that I had taken, basically 

what the courses covered and what kind of grade I had made 

and so forth. We had a lot of time to wait, and he interviewed 

me pretty thoroughly, and at the end of it he said, “Well, have 

you ever thought about working in the space program?” 

I answered honestly that I had not. He said, “Well, if you 

ever decide that you would like to work in the space program ....” 

He gave me a name and phone number and said to call this 

individual. “Tell him that you and I have talked, and that I 

thought there was a place for you at Marshall Space Flight 

Center,” he said. At that time, I was not seriously considering 

changing careers. However, a few months later in June, after the 

school year was out, there were reasons that I decided I perhaps 

didn’t want to return for another year. 

I called the personnel office and eventually talked with the 

individual who Dr. von Braun had recommended. Turned out 

he was the director of the personnel office at Marshall, and he 

arranged an interview the next day with Helmut Bauer, who 

worked in the aeroballistics area. He told me that they would 

offer me a job, and I was called by personnel the very next day 

and formally offered the job. I reported to work the second of 

July 1962. 

Engineering Then and Now 

I worked primarily on the Saturn V, and looking back on it 

now, we just didn’t have good analytical tools at all. It was very 

primitive. For example, one of the things that I worked on was 

dynamic stability and wind response. The vehicle is not a rigid 

body. It may look rigid, but it bends, and that little bit of bending 

corrupts the signals to the rocket-control sensors. The vehicle 

may be going absolutely straight, but if it’s slightly bent, the 

sensor may think it’s deviating from its path and try to bring it 

back on course. When it does that, it may cause it to bend more, 

and may start an oscillation that, instead of damping out, builds 

up. Couple that with the fact that you have propellant tanks 

that are quite large, and the propellant sloshing in those tanks 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

- - -

 

 - -

 

 

 - - 

ASK MAGAZINE | 43 

creates enormous forces, which in turn can cause the vehicle to 

bend. It is all a complex set of system interactions. 

I was working for Helmut Bauer, who was considered one 

of the foremost experts in modeling propellant slosh. We had to 

build analytical models, and we had relatively crude computers 

compared with what we have today. We just didn’t have the 

tools to make complex models. 

We built the Dynamic Test Stand facility, which at the time 

was the tallest self-supporting structure in the state of Alabama. 

We built that so we could put this gigantic Saturn V in there and 

excite it and actually measure its bending characteristics. From 

that, we would validate the analytical models and design the 

control systems. Today we have discussions about whether we 

even need to build the large, structural test articles for groundvibration testing because our models are that good. Back in 

the Saturn days, we built these large test facilities and all the 

structural articles and did the best we could analytically, and we 

still weren’t confident we had it right. The power of the models 

that engine designers have today is just beautiful. 

We test a lot in the wind tunnel now, and a lot of what we do 

is calibrate and validate the computational fluid dynamics, which 

would not have been possible in those days because we didn’t 

have the computational capability to build very sophisticated 

models; aerodynamic flows are very complex and require 

extremely large and fast computers. We find now that we can 

avoid a lot of wind-tunnel tests with the aerodynamic analytics 

that we generate through computational fluid dynamics. That’s 

just one example of how far the models have come in the past 

several years. 

Lessons of Apollo 

The Saturn I was a very large vehicle, at that point the largest 

vehicle that had ever flown. From it we learned a number of 

lessons that we still apply today. We built the Saturn I primarily 

out of existing materials. That is, we took the H-I engines that 

already existed for another application within the Department 

of Defense, we took the RL-10 engines that already existed for 

the Centaur, and we took the tooling that existed for building 

some of the ballistic missiles. The Redstone missile that was 

developed at Marshall had a 70-inch-diameter tank. The Jupiter, 

a later variant, had 105-inch-diameter tank. With the Saturn I, 

we developed what we call the cluster concept. That’s part of 

why it was so dynamically difficult. We took that 105-inch 

Jupiter tank and used the Redstone tooling so we could build 

the Jupiter tank quickly and at lower cost. Then we built eight of 

the Redstone 70-inch-diameter tanks and clustered those around 

that center core Jupiter tank. The center core and four of the 

70-inch tanks contained liquid oxygen, and the other four 

contained the RP-1 (rocket propellant 1), a rocket grade of 

kerosene. That’s what we fed to the H-I engines on the Saturn I. 

Engineers and technicians 

at the Marshall Space Flight 

Center placed a Saturn V 

ground test booster (S IC D) 

into the dynamic test stand. 

The 300,000 pound SI C 

stage is being lifted from its 

transporter into place inside 

the 360 foot tall test stand. 

Photo Credit: NASA Marshall Space Flight Center 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 - -

 - 

 

 

-

 - 

 

44 | ASK MAGAZINE Photo Credit: NASA

By clustering tanks that were made from existing tooling, using 

engines that already existed for both that and the upper stage—we 

used the RL-10s on the upper stage—we were able to put together 

the Saturn I primarily using existing things. We’re doing that 

today in the Ares I and Ares V: taking things that already exist and 

putting them together in a new and creative way. 

I think the most important lesson we learned from Saturn V 

is the importance of robustness. In the spring of 1968, we flew 

the second Saturn V. We called it SA-502. SA-501, which was the 

first flight of the Saturn V, had been a nearly flawless example 

of how a big launch vehicle should operate. But we had a whole 

myriad of problems on the second vehicle. We experienced a 

severe first-stage oscillation in the thrust. It would go up and 

down in a way that caused the vehicle to be periodically in 

compression. We called it the pogo effect because it goes up and 

down like a pogo stick. 

The 327 foot tall 

Ares I X test vehicle, 

brightly lit against 

the night sky, rides 

aboard a crawler 

transporter for 

the 4.2 mile trip to 

Launch Pad 39B. 

Then, during second-stage flight, we had the experience 

of having to shut down an engine because we were getting an 

indication that there was a potential catastrophic failure, so we 

sent a command to shut the engine down. It had five J-2 engines, 

and we sent a command to shut down the problem engine before 

it catastrophically failed. To be sure, we sent a second command 

from a different source to make sure it shut down. Unfortunately, 

the wiring to the engines was wrong, and so instead of shutting 

down that engine, we shut down the opposite engine, which was 

a perfectly good engine. Instead of having five engines, we had 

only three, yet the mission continued. 

When we got into the burn of the S-IVB, the third stage, 

there was a fuel line that began to shake violently and cause 

some oscillations, and we actually threw off one of the spacecraft 

lander adapters—the SLA, as we call it—the spacecraft lunar 

excursion module (LEM) adapter, and one of those panels 

failed. So, we had pogo in the first stage, we had an engine 

out in the second stage and cut off a wrong engine, had this 

oscillation in the third stage, and had a structural failure in the 

spacecraft LEM adapter. All those problems, and yet we still 

made it to orbit. 

We had the decision to make whether we were going to fly 

another test flight of the Saturn V vehicle, unmanned, or whether 

we would put people on the next one. Now, remember, we had 

just had all these failures. Although we limped into orbit, we’d 

had a lot of near disasters. But we had enough robustness in the 

system, we thought we understood the failures, and we corrected 

all those things. We added accumulators on the first stage to 

take care of the pogo problem. We made sure that the wiring 

was right on the second stage. We changed the attachment of 

the line that had oscillated on the third stage, and then made a 

structural change to the SLA. We had all those things fixed, and 

we had enough confidence in that vehicle’s robustness that we 

committed to send humans. That was Apollo 8. We’re trying to 

build that same kind of robustness into the Ares family today. 

Finally, I would say we learned the importance of safety 

from the Apollo program. We had the tragic fire on the 

launchpad during the checkout of Apollo I that took the lives of 

Gus Grissom and Ed White and Roger Chaffee. Although that 

particular failure had nothing whatever to do with the Saturn, 

it was part of the Apollo program, and all of us felt that very 

deeply. That moved us all very much. 

I think that today, safety is our number-one criterion. 

When we picked the launch vehicle that we today call Ares I, we 

analyzed many concepts and picked the Ares I on the basis that 

it was the safest of all. Our goal is to make the Ares I ten times 

safer than any launch vehicle ever flown. We are continuously 

learning from our past and improving the designs of our future 

systems. ●
 

 

 

 

INSIGHT | ASK MAGAZINE | 45 

Still Learning from Columbia

BY MATT MELIS 

On February 1, 2003, Space Shuttle Columbia and her crew were lost during reentry. In the months 

following, a nationwide team of experts from NASA, industry, and academia, spanning dozens of 

technical disciplines, was assembled to investigate the causes of the tragedy. 

Mechanics Jeff Hammel (left) and Jim Sexton 

(right) prepare a ballistics impact gun for testing 

as aerospace engineer Mike Pereira looks at a 

computer monitor that will display photos of the 

blast taken by a high-speed camera. 

Photo Credit: NASA 
 - 

’

 

-

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

46 | ASK MAGAZINE 

(Left) Duane Revilock sets up a high speed digital 

camera in Glenn s Ballistics Impact Laboratory to 

aid in testing the orbiter leading edge. 

(Right) A test engineer inspects the hole created 

during full scale testing of the orbiter leading edge. 

Photo Credit: NASA 

Launch imagery and forensic reconstruction of the orbiter 

provided the evidence that enabled the Columbia Accident 

Investigation Board to determine the root cause of the accident. A 

piece of insulating foam had separated from the orbiter’s external 

fuel tank bipod attachment eighty-one seconds into the STS-107 

launch, causing a breach in the thermal-protection system on the 

left wing’s leading edge. This breach allowed superheated air to 

penetrate and erode the aluminum structure of the left wing, 

which ultimately led to the breakup of the orbiter. 

As the shuttle was being designed, the program team knew 

the metal bipod attachment connecting the orbiter to the external 

tank would require either heating or insulation to prevent large, and 

undesirable,icedepositsformingonitpriortolaunch.Buildingsafety 

into a system—in this case, mitigating a threat from ice—might 

produce unintentional risks that could go unrecognized even after 

hundreds of flights or perhaps an entire flight program. Choosing 

to use foam insulation on the bipod attachment introduced a critical 

design flaw into the system, one that would not be fully understood 

until more than twenty years after the shuttle’s first flight. 

The board concluded its investigation with a full-scale 

impact test that recreated the foam strike on Columbia in order 

to demonstrate that event as the most likely cause of the tragedy. 

Despite months of newly acquired experience in testing and 

analysis on the orbiter wing’s leading edge, dozens of engineers 

and technicians were still unprepared to witness the 16 x 17–inch 

hole created when 1.67 lbs. of foam hit the leading-edge article 

during the full-scale test. Their surprise and disbelief can be 

clearly heard in video documenting the test, emphasizing that 

a complete and rigorous test program is necessary to fully 

understand the capability and weakness of any given flight 

system—and that even seasoned experts can’t completely rely 

on their intuition once outside the bounds of their experience. 

Working as One NASA 

Prior to the loss of Columbia, NASA had performed limited 

debris-impact testing on shuttle structures and had no “physicsbased” software-prediction tools to analyze such events. Physicsbased software does what the name implies: it incorporates the 

laws of physics and engineering principles into the equations that 

make up computational tools. The agency did have significant 

expertise in impact physics at the Glenn and Langley research 

centers, but it was rooted in propulsion and airframe aeronautics 

research efforts, which were not typically partnered with NASA’s 

spaceflight programs. 

After the accident, the shuttle program chartered an 

independent team of experts in impact analysis and testing from 

Glenn Research Center, Langley Research Center, Johnson 

Space Center, and Boeing to identify and develop rigorous, 

physics-based approaches to predict impact damage to orbiter 

tiles, leading edges, and structures. This team would also 

provide materials and impact-testing support to the STS-107 

accident investigation and Return-to-Flight programs. 

Coordinating from the orbiter office at Johnson, our core 

group performed much like a football team: teammates with 

clearly defined jobs to do. Glenn was responsible for an enormous 

amount of impact testing, developing material models and then 

ensuring they would function correctly once integrated into 

the analysis software. Langley conducted materials tests and 

performed validations on the models from Glenn. Once the 

methods were accepted, Boeing would carry out what we called 

“production runs,” performing hundreds of analyses on shuttle 

components to ensure we were safe to fly and able to survive any 

debris strikes that were expected on a shuttle launch. 

The team was highly effective from its inception, in large part 

due to having been assigned a well-defined set of milestones and 

goals to accomplish for the program. We were empowered to work 

independently, and we were allowed to do our jobs unencumbered 

by administrative burden. We certainly had plenty of e-mail 

in our inboxes and spent hours on teleconferences—constant 

communication that was necessary for our work. 

Travel played a valuable if not critical role in building and 

maintaining the team’s effectiveness. Since we lived in different 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo Credit: NASA Glenn Research Center 

... A COMPLETE AND RIGOROUS TEST 

PROGRAM IS NECESSARy TO FULLy 

UNDERSTAND ThE CAPABILITy AND 

wEAKNESS OF ANy GIvEN FLIGhT 

SySTEM ... EvEN SEASONED ExPERTS 

CAN’T COMPLETELy RELy ON ThEIR 

INTUITION ONCE OUTSIDE ThE BOUNDS 

OF ThEIR ExPERIENCE. 

parts of the country, we would convene four to five times a year 

at one of the centers. Not only did we accomplish a lot of work at 

these meetings, but we also reaffirmed the trust and confidence 

we had developed with one another. Trust is a crucial component 

in high-functioning groups that depend on each other to achieve 

a common goal, and I believe it is established most effectively 

face to face. 

In a true “One NASA” sense, our multicenter analysis 

team would work together for nearly five years developing the 

sophisticated analysis capability the shuttle program uses today 

for making flight-rationale decisions. Through both personal 

and programmatic associations made in the years following 

Columbia, the expertise and capabilities existing at Glenn and 

the other research centers are now much more recognized and 

accessible by the flight centers. Several engineers at Glenn 

and Langley are still assigned to the shuttle program, further 

highlighting their recognized value to the program. 

This expanded awareness of our expertise has also led to 

other efforts within NASA. We continue to advance jet engine 

fan-containment technology in the ballistic lab at Glenn to 

make our aircraft safer. Our analysts are also contributing to 

the development of NASA’s new Orion crew capsule for human 

spaceflight by helping design seats for the astronauts that will 

help them avoid injury in the event of a hard landing. Our 

advances in knowledge and technology during our Returnto-Flight efforts will most certainly continue to support the 

agency’s future aeronautics and spaceflight programs. 

Advances in Technology 

As often is the case with ambitious programs like Return to 

Flight, the development and maturation of new technologies are 

greatly accelerated. In fact, this occurred as a consequence of the 

ballistic impact-testing efforts. 

The advent of digital photography dramatically improved 

NASA’s ability to accomplish its goals on the accident 

investigation as well as the Return-to-Flight program. Highspeed digital cameras, largely unavailable and cost prohibitive 

just a few years before, were used extensively in both these efforts 

and provided near-instantaneous playback of any event they 

recorded. We used sixteen cameras to document the full-scale 

leading-edge test at rates of up to 30,000 frames per second— 

an unprecedented use of digital high-speed cameras. 

Since the development of the digital still camera, a technique 

called “stereo photogrammetry” had come into practice. It 

accurately measured deformations on objects by using a pair of 

digital cameras to observe a test article from two points of view. 

Just as we sense depth using both our eyes, so can a pair of 

cameras—but with the added benefit of allowing us to apply 

mathematics to the images to compute precise displacements, 

stress, and strains for engineers. 

It was a natural progression to apply these principles to the 

high-speed cameras being used to record the impact tests, and 

the NASA Glenn Ballistic Impact Lab worked closely with a 

commercial vendor of this technology to adapt the capability to 

use high-speed camera images. Once developed, this capability 

was critical for validating our analysis models. The technique 

was so successful that it was used on some of the full-scale 

leading-edge tests as well. Six years later, this technology is 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SINCE wE LIvED IN DIFFERENT PARTS OF 

ThE COUNTRy, wE wOULD CONvENE 

FOUR TO FIvE TIMES A yEAR AT ONE 

OF ThE CENTERS. NOT ONLy DID wE 

ACCOMPLISh A LOT OF wORK AT ThESE 

MEETINGS, BUT wE ALSO REAFFIRMED 

ThE TRUST AND CONFIDENCE wE hAD 

DEvELOPED wITh ONE ANOThER. 

48 | ASK MAGAZINE 48 | ASK MAGAZINE 

Photo Credit: NASA 

Comparison of the LS-DYNA predictions with high-speed video of the fullscale test. 

standard equipment in labs doing high-speed work both within 

and outside the agency. 

The Rest of the Story 

Early in 2009, the Orbiter Thermal Protection Group at Kennedy 

Space Center contacted us to inquire about getting some of our 

high-speed test video to present to their organization and enhance 

their understanding of debris-impact phenomena on their systems. 

Rather than provide only the movies, I offered something a 

bit better: a two-hour seminar summarizing the accident and 

describing how ballistic-impact research played a critical role in 

supporting the investigation and the Return-to-Flight effort. 

More than fifty people attended that first seminar, and their 

response was so positive that I was asked to return to Kennedy to 

speak to all the technicians and engineers in the thermal-protection 

group. Over the next several months, I would present eight times to 

more than three hundred people who work on the shuttle orbiter. 

Feedback from the attendees affirmed two things. First, 

sharing our story was extremely valuable and worthwhile to 

the workforce. I presented dozens of high-speed impact-testing 

movies from our work—impacts on tiles, reinforced carboncarbon, windows, the external tank structure—materials that 

every tech and engineer attending saw or handled daily. They 

were captivated by the impact movies and the damage that could 

be caused by lightweight foam or a tiny piece of tile-gap filler. 

They also felt a sense of satisfaction as they learned how much 

effort the impact team had put into safeguarding their thermalprotection systems. There was a very strong sense of community 

and pride knowing what their teammates at the other centers 

had done to help make the orbiter safer. 

Second, I became aware that creating such presentation 

materials for knowledge sharing, teaching our lessons learned, and 

preserving the agency’s history is invaluable to NASA as well as to 

our stakeholders. After the experience of speaking at Kennedy, I 

concluded it would be worthwhile to adapt our team’s story to video to 

permanently preserve it for future generations. Dozens of individuals 

with the debris-impact team worked tirelessly for more than two 

and a half years to overcome immense technical challenges to get 

NASA back to safely flying. Their story is worth knowing. 

The shuttle is not unique in having dormant design flaws. 

They are inevitable in complex systems: aircraft, air traffic 

control, nuclear power plants, and even today’s financial 

systems are some examples. It is the job of those who tend to 

these systems to identify and resolve such flaws to ensure safety 

and mission success. To our credit, we’ve collectively done a 

commendable job. Our shuttle fleet flies safer than it ever has. 

Better imagery, better engineering, and more sophisticated 

analysis tools, as well as effectively learning from our past 

lessons, are just a few contributing factors. Nevertheless, in the 

business of spaceflight, we cannot relax until the wheels stop 

on the last vehicle to return home. Columbia will always be a 

painful, yet necessary, reminder for us to stay vigilant, always on 

the lookout for what lies hidden. ●

Matt MeliS has been an aerospace engineer at Glenn 

Research Center for twenty-six years. As part of NASA’s outreach 

efforts, he frequently presents his team’s story to technical 

and nontechnical groups alike through the NASA Speakers 

Bureau. For more information, contact Mr. Melis directly at 

Matthew.E.Melis@nasa.gov. 
Title 

BY 

 

 

BigFacilities, 

Flow diversion vanes inside 

the Unitary Wind Tunnel. 

Photo Credit: NASA 

STORy | ASK MAGAZINE | 49 

 BY MI

 

CHAEL OSPRING hARD LESSONS 

Three years after a catastrophic accident at the National Full-Scale Aerodynamic Facility, the large 

wind tunnel at Ames Research Center, it was time for a second unplanned shutdown. John Perry 

and I had watched the facility’s dynamic pressure during testing for several minutes. At less than 

two-thirds of the required pressure, the structure was already close to redlining. We needed to stop 

the integrated system test for two months and spend several hundred thousand dollars to reach 

design speed. That was the first time I wanted to quit my job, and it wouldn’t be the last. But for 

every tough challenge I’ve faced during my thirty-four years at NASA, I’ve gained some important 

lessons. In this case, taking responsibility for a problem can be as rewarding as it is challenging. 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

50 | ASK MAGAZINE 50 | ASK MAGAZINE 

Getting Our Feet Wet 

Five years after that shutdown, I was working on the 12-Foot 

Pressure Wind Tunnel (PWT) Restoration Project. At the time 

it was the largest American Society of Mechanical Engineers 

Division 2 pressure vessel ever constructed in the country. We 

needed to fill it with water for three separate hydrotests—a total 

of more than five million gallons of water. We presented the 

review committee with a probabilistic calculation concluding that 

the magnitude 5.1 earthquake required to fail the columns would 

not occur during our testing. The numbers showed it was beyond 

reasonable expectation for such an event occur during the ten-day 

period we had planned for tests. However, once we had five million 

gallons of water in the primary vessel, we realized that we didn’t 

wish to experience an earthquake of any magnitude. Statistics are 

useful when considering other people or other times. When it’s 

you and now, statistics don’t matter. Following a suggestion from 

our project manager, Harry Gobler, we stayed the weekend to 

complete all three hydrotests before Monday morning. 

During the course of the 12-Foot PWT project, we needed 

to create control screens for the first fully automated windtunnel facility within NASA. The controls contractor had run 

into a cash-flow problem because he had underestimated the 

necessary design time. Again following Harry’s advice, I flew to 

the contractor’s facility for an off-the-record Saturday meeting to 

discuss the issues face to face. I learned the contractor’s funding 

issue on my job would bring unneeded and unwanted attention 

from his corporate headquarters. With great struggle, I managed 

to get a change order approved to cover the fully justifiable costs. 

Once the contractor believed that I needed his expertise and didn’t 

want him to lose money, we came to trust each other fully. This 

single incident reversed all my cultural training about contractors 

and partnering. I learned that the majority of contractors, apart 

from a few gold-diggers, are hardworking people trying to make a 

profit. When treated fairly, they produce excellent results. 

During the earlier design effort on the same project, we 

needed to make important decisions about how to split our 

twelve construction-work packages for procurement. Two of 

these packages were so technically complex that our previous 

project manager, Nancy Bingham, decided to try a relatively 

unused procurement strategy that would result in a short list of 

technically qualified bidders, who could then bid against each 

other. When the Acquisition Division told us that Ames never 

did business this way, Nancy brought in a copy of the Federal 

Acquisition Regulations and put it on a stand in the middle of 

the project office. When anyone made a definitive statement in 

a meeting about acquisition, we would simply go to the project 

office and look it up, chapter and verse. 

What we found was that many objections to our 

unconventional ideas were personal and subjective, but not 

prohibited by the Federal Acquisition Regulations. The boxes we 

had been confined to because of our lack of experience with large 

procurements began to melt away. At the end of the 12-Foot PWT 

project, we had successfully acted as the prime contractor, issuing 

and managing twenty separate contracts that totaled more than 

$101 million. Our group of relatively young engineers became a 

group of seasoned contracting officer’s technical representatives (or 

COTRs) in just a few short years. With constant encouragement 

to think for ourselves and take responsibility, we were able to gain 

significant experience in a short amount of time. Having the 

courage to push boundaries and ask questions allowed us to find 

strengths we didn’t know we had. Photo Credit: NASA 
-

 

 - 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

hAvING ThE COURAGE TO PUSh BOUNDARIES AND ASK qUESTIONS ALLOwED US 

TO FIND STRENGThS wE DIDN’T KNOw wE hAD. 

ASK MAGAZINE | 51 ASK MAGAZINE | 51 

Rewinding the Coils 

Before long, I faced impending failure on another project. 

As part of the Unitary Modernization project to upgrade 

the Unitary Plan Wind-Tunnel Facility, we were rewinding 

four large alternating-current motors, each one capable of 

65,000 horsepower. Two years into the rewind, several coils 

began to fail at the contractor’s plant during a high-potential 

test at 10,000 volts. They kept splicing the failed coil strands, 

assuring me of the high quality and robust nature of the 

repair. “We use this repair in industry all the time,” declared 

the contractor. 

Our team had an experienced motor designer, Andy 

Spisak, who told us the splices would not work and that we 

needed to make design changes. After more than twenty coil 

failures, I walked into Harry’s office and said I didn’t know 

what to do. “I’ve been waiting for you to admit the failure, 

because I need your expertise to solve the problem,” Harry 

said. “Here’s the plan.” 

We flew to Houston a few weeks later and asked the 

contractor to conduct one last “winner-take-all” high-potential 

test on each of the motor stators in the presence of the 

contracting officer. If any of them passed, we would pay for 

newly designed coils for that particular stator rewind. If any 

of them failed, the contractor would have to pay. Harry was 

betting every dollar of his project’s contingency fund that the 

other stators would fail. 

After some negotiation, we set the test parameters. Within 

two hours, every stator failed. Although we lost a year and 

a half, the contractor paid the majority of costs for correctly 

redesigned coils. When I asked Harry how he knew that the 

motor stators would fail the high-potential test, he said, “I 

didn’t. But it seemed like a good bet, considering the technical 

expertise of the team. If it didn’t work out, I was willing to 

deal with the consequences.” 

I learned that sometimes you don’t know the answer, but you 

may have to make a very important decision with incomplete 

data. The key is to surround yourself with competent people 

and listen to them. 

As we were getting ready to start the facility in 1998, the 

contractor warned us that the proprietary control software for 

the main drive system was not designed with Y2K in mind. Since 

the four main drive motors had a capability of 180 megawatts 

at full power, a software glitch was potentially catastrophic. 

The controls contractor could redesign the software, of course, 

View looking upstream at the 135,000 horsepower 

drive system comprising six parallel fans that 

power the National Full Scale Aerodynamic Facility. 
- -

-

 

 

 

52 | ASK MAGAZINE 

... SOMETIMES yOU DON’T KNOw ThE ANSwER, BUT yOU MAy hAvE TO MAKE A 

vERy IMPORTANT DECISION wITh INCOMPLETE DATA. ThE KEy IS TO SURROUND 

yOURSELF wITh COMPETENT PEOPLE AND LISTEN TO ThEM. 

Upstream view of the 15,000 horsepower variable pitch fan inside 

the 12 Foot Pressure Wind Tunnel. Photo Credit: NASA 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

-

 

 

One of four alternating current drive motors, 

rated 65,000 horsepower each, just before 

Photo Credit: NASA 

installation into the Unitary Wind Tunnel.

ASK MAGAZINE | 53 ASK MAGAZINE | 53 

at an added cost and considerable lost time. Peter Graube and 

Mark Phillips, two of NASA’s controls engineers, approached 

me with an idea. “We can rewrite the software ourselves, put 

it on a PC, and provide our own configuration management,” 

they said. 

The best part was it could be done in eight weeks. Although 

Harry was skeptical, he asked me, “Do you believe them? Can 

they do it?” Without enough money to pay the contractor, or 

any other plan to deal with the problem, it didn’t seem like we 

had any alternative. I learned one of the most valuable people 

lessons from what happened next. 

Peter and Mark rewrote the software. They installed and 

tested it in eight weeks, exceeding my expectations but not 

their own. I learned that passionate people are easy to manage. 

All you have to do is give them responsibility and tools, trust 

them to do their jobs, and get out of their way. 

Many Stories, Many Lessons 

There are dozens of untold stories, but the real value is in the 

lessons I have learned. The best lessons seem almost obvious now 

that the struggle of learning them is far behind. My personal 

short list includes the following: 

• The project is always more important than any individual 

desires. Everyone can be replaced, and that includes me. 

• A project lives or dies with its people. You must surround 

yourself with trustworthy people who want to be part of 

a team. 

• People want to be trusted. Trust them until they have 

twice shown themselves untrustworthy. And always be 

willing to take the first hit. 

• Make hard decisionsin the quickest, fairestmanner possible 

and explain your rationale. People want a decision and will 

respect one made out of fairness if it is explained to them. 

• People need to be informed. If not informed, they will 

assume the worst. Communicate freely and often, and 

empower others with your information, rather than 

empowering yourself. Never allow gatekeepers to manage 

the flow of information. 

• Teach people to give and take criticism on a non-personal 

level. Most technical issues can be sorted out in candid, 

informal sessions. 

• People want and need to be heard. Listen to everyone, on 

their terms, when they are ready to share. 

• “Good enough” is always better than “optimum.” Meet 

the requirements and move on, because you will need the 

resources in other places. 

• Most roadblocks are unnecessary. Never let someone without

responsibility for cost or schedule try to influence yours. 

• Test your authority and encourage others to do the same, 

which means they will be testing you. 

• Give people your blessing when they think for themselves, 

even if it causes you some personal pain. 

• Find a way to include everybody. People work much 

harder when they have some responsibility. Make their 

failures your problem and try again. 

• Keep meetings small. Hardworking people don’t want to 

meet. Non-workers love to meet. 

• Find a mentor and pick his or her brain. Make sure it 

is someone who is not impressed with you, so they can 

be honest. 

Theselessonswerelearnedonthejobinpainfulcircumstances 

over a long period of time. Some of them were the outcome of 

direct personal failures, which leads to perhaps the best lesson 

of all: having our worst perceived scenario happen sometimes 

results in a pearl of great value. ●

Michael oSprinG is a mechanical engineer with thirty-four years 

of experience in design and analysis of wind-tunnel models, large 

facilities, ground-support equipment, and aircraft. He has served 

as engineering manager on several large facility modifications and 

currently acts as a group leader for mechanical design. 
Title 

BY 

Intro 

 

Classes and 

54 | ASK MAGAZINE | STORy 

Spacecraft
 

Operations
 

BY LEIGH GATTO AND TODD WATSON 

A yellow caution flag pops up on the monitor with the message, “Battery Voltage to Temperature 

Ratio Is Out of Limits!” “That’s okay,” mathematics senior and certified spacecraft analyst Darrell 

Washington tells computer science senior and certified command controller Kevin Gross. “We just 

changed the V/T ratio on the spacecraft this morning, so we expect to see that flag.” It is just another 

day on campus and another real-time contact with an orbiting NASA satellite. 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

’

ASK MAGAZINE | 55 Image Credit: NASA 

Before a solar storm in 2003, Earth s radiation belts underwent significant changes in structure. 

This image showing low particle flux was built from SAMPEX measurements. 

Located on the campus of Bowie State University in suburban 

Washington, D.C., the Bowie Satellite Operations and Control 

Center (BSOCC) has been training students in real-time satellite 

flight operations since 1996. This innovative program combines 

a rigorous series of mission control certifications with daily flight 

operations for NASA’s Solar, Anomalous, and Magnetospheric 

Particle Explorer (SAMPEX). The SAMPEX spacecraft collects 

data on solar and galactic radiation and is controlled from the 

university’s mission operations center. Students take part in 

almost all aspects of flight operations while pursuing three 

progressively advanced levels of mission control certification. 

Along with their work in the BSOCC, they also carry a fulltime schedule of college classes in science and technology. 

Building the BSOCC 

The idea for the BSOCC took shape in the mid-1990s, when 

former Goddard Space Flight Center Director Joe Rothenberg 

wanted to reduce the operating costs of extended-duration science 

missions by using university-based control centers and student 

participation. Bowie State University, one of the nation’s oldest 

Historically Black Colleges and Universities, has had a long and 

productive relationship with Goddard. Just six miles northeast 

of Goddard, its campus was a logical place to install a mission 

operations center. NASA’s Leigh Gatto, the Small Explorers 

mission director at the time, was asked to build the facility and 

move SAMPEX flight operations to Bowie State University. 

“When we first began building the facility, we had no 

money and no place to go,” explained Gatto. “At the time, Dr. 

Nagi Wakim was the Associate Provost of Bowie State University 

and a steadfast supporter of the BSOCC concept. Together, 

Nagi and I lobbied Bowie State and Goddard for resources. We 

applied for and won seed money from the Goddard Director’s 

Discretionary Fund. We also convinced the university to section 

off a corner of the campus’s main library to build the ops center. 

With initial resources acquired, we met with the SAMPEX 

principal investigator. Together we were able to convince him 

that his spacecraft would be well cared for under the watchful 

eyes of university students.” 

Mission oversight and student training are currently 

performed by Todd Watson, a Honeywell employee who 

functions as both satellite engineer and center director. Watson 

was a part of the BSOCC from the very beginning, one of the 

first group of trainees in 1996. After the company he worked 

for went out of business, he enrolled in Bowie State’s computer 

science graduate program and one day happened to see a 

poster advertising for NASA flight-control candidates. “I was 

astonished that there was such a program on campus and went 

right over to apply,” he said. He completed all the certifications, 

was hired by Honeywell, and eventually took on leadership of 

student training and flight operations. 

The BSOCC concept calls for the university to provide 

the facility and the student stipends, while NASA provides the 

spacecraft, control center equipment, and one full-time flight 

operations professional. The BSOCC’s certification program is 

based on the training used by the Small Explorers program at 

Goddard and was developed by Honeywell. 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo Credit: Todd Watson 

Bowie State University students Darrell Washington and Kevin Gross 

at the controls during a NASA satellite contact. 

56 | ASK MAGAZINE 

BSOCC Missions and Technology 

SAMPEX was launched into low-Earth orbit in 1992. The 

spacecraft has four scientific sensors designed to study solar 

energetic particles, anomalous cosmic rays, galactic cosmic rays, 

andmagnetosphericphysics.Missiondataisdeliveredtoscientists 

at the Aerospace Corporation in El Segundo, California. 

The Wide-field Infrared Explorer (WIRE) performed a 

four-year experiment in asteroseismology (a science concerned 

with the structure of variable stars) while being controlled from 

the BSOCC. That experiment was concluded in 2008. 

Along with being the primary control center for these 

missions, BSOCC has served as a backup control center for 

NASA’s Submillimeter Wave Astronomy Satellite and its 

Transition Region and Coronal Explorer (TRACE). BSOCC 

recently hosted TRACE operations for two weeks while satellite 

operations were moved into a new facility at Goddard. 

In BSOCC, students also take part in the mission support 

work that goes along with flying satellites. The Bowie State 

facility has undertaken several ground-system upgrades, helped 

test and implement Goddard Mission Services Evolution 

Center technology, and performed numerous ground-station 

proficiency and engineering tests. Approximately forty students 

have been certified in the program, and nearly ninety flight 

control certifications have been awarded. About half these 

graduates now work in the aerospace industry, most of them 

with NASA and its contractors. BSOCC students have a 

100 percent college graduation rate. 

In 2003, the BSOCC moved from its original location in 

the campus’s main library to a much larger facility in Bowie 

State’s new computer science building. The program added 

flight operations for a second mission, the WIRE spacecraft, 

which performed stellar seismology observations until the 

spring of 2008. SAMPEX, staying remarkably healthy over 

its long lifetime, has remained BSOCC’s primary mission. It 

continues to provide valuable data to the scientific community 

while ensuring the futures of dozens of students. 

BSOCC’s Training Program 

Since the beginning of the program, training has centered on 

mission controller certification. It takes two years, including one 

summer, to complete the three levels of command controller, 

mission planner, and spacecraft analyst. The command controller 

learns how to set up and take real-time satellite contacts while 

monitoring the receipt of data from the NASA tracking stations. 

During a contact, the command controller sends commands to 

the spacecraft and ensures that telemetry—comprising attitude 

control, engineering, and science data—is properly downlinked 

to the ground station. 

The mission planner learns how to build the “command 

loads” that are uplinked to the spacecraft during real-time 

contacts. Command loads contain instructions for the satellite to 

follow when it isn’t in contact with controllers on the ground— 

such as turning the transmitter on or off and cycling power 

for the scientific sensors. The mission planner also verifies the 

schedules of contacts with the NASA tracking stations, ensuring 

that minimum requirements for viewing-period duration and 

spacecraft elevation are met. 

The spacecraft analyst is the final and most advanced level 

of mission control certification offered in BSOCC. The analyst 

helps oversee the activities of the command controller and the 

mission planner and is responsible for identifying spacecraft 

anomalies and starting the process of resolving them. The 

analyst must understand the satellite’s subsystems, including 

power, thermal, attitude control, communications, computer, 

and payload. He or she should be able to identify any anomalous 

conditions with either the ground system or the spacecraft. 

Training includes classroom sessions, hands-on experience, 

and independent study. After passing a long list of skill 

demonstrations, the trainees must pass a written test for each 

certification. Students work and train in the facility between 

classes and have adequate opportunities to participate in realtime satellite contacts. The control center normally teems with 

activity; in addition to operating satellites, the students take part 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SAMPEX ’s Proton -Electron Telescope instrument captured these energetic 

electron fluxes over the North Pole between July 1992 and July 1993. 

TRAINING INCLUDES CLASSROOM 

SESSIONS, hANDS-ON ExPERIENCE, AND 

INDEPENDENT STUDy. AFTER PASSING A 

LONG LIST OF SKILL DEMONSTRATIONS, 

ThE TRAINEES MUST PASS A wRITTEN 

TEST FOR EACh CERTIFICATION. 

Image Credit: NASA 

ASK MAGAZINE | 57 ASK MAGA ZINE | 57 

in mission-support tasks such as data trending and spacecraft 

anomaly investigation. 

Occasionally a fully certified student will still have time to 

work in BSOCC before graduation. Along with acting as peer 

mentors to the newer interns, these advanced students may be 

assigned special projects involving satellite subsystem research 

or creating and editing computer scripts and programs. 

The Present and the Future 

One student, Alicia Scott, worked in the BSOCC while earning 

her master’s degree in computer science. Since graduation, she 

has worked at Goddard for NASA contractors Honeywell and 

SAIC, where she has participated in mission support for the Terra, 

Tropical Rainfall Measuring, and Hubble missions. Scott said, “I 

was able to apply everything I learned in the BSOCC to the daily 

operation of the Terra mission at Goddard. It was a great relief to 

the management team that I was already knowledgeable of the 

basics involved in mission operations. The most critical thing I 

took from the BSOCC was the importance of communication 

between members of the operational team. The most effective 

procedures and commands for spacecraft ops result from good 

communication. The three levels of certification at the BSOCC 

allowed me to view operations from different standpoints and 

to focus on one aspect at a time. Once I started my job with 

the Terra mission, it was easy to combine all these standpoints 

into one position. I was performing all duties learned at BSOCC 

and was better able to focus on anomaly recovery and error 

prevention, which is essential to the life of a mission.” 

Miquel Moe completed the BSOCC certifications as 

an undergraduate in math and engineering. He is now an 

electronics engineer for NASA at Goddard, where he leads the 

screening of electrical components for the design phase of the 

ICEsat-2 mission. Moe believes the BSOCC training helped 

put his career on track. “First and foremost, BSOCC provided 

me a quality, real-life work experience while allowing me to 

focus primarily on my undergraduate studies,” he explained. 

“The skills I acquired working for BSOCC have made me 

very attractive to employers such as the National Oceanic and 

Atmospheric Administration and NASA Goddard, for whom I 

now work. Not only do I understand the engineering aspect of 

space missions, I also understand the scientific, data acquisition, 

and spacecraft-commanding aspects. This knowledge paid 

me great dividends in the past as an intern working on the 

Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite project, and 

it will continue to pay off in my future as an employee.” 

With its fully equipped mission control center, the BSOCC 

is well positioned to take on new projects for NASA. As more 

students take advantage of this unique training, the pool of talent 

available to the local aerospace community will increase. Current 

BSOCC student and mathematics major Darrell Washington 

put it this way: “With BSOCC on my résumé I know that there’s 

someone out there who will take an interest.” ●

leiGh Gatto is the technical director for the Independent 

Verification and Validation (IV&V) Program. During his eighteen 

years with NASA, he has served in numerous positions with 

Goddard, Wallops Flight Facility, IV&V, Johnson Space Center, 

and NASA Headquarters. Prior to joining NASA, he spent nine 

years in the U.S. Air Force and received his BS from the University 

of Maryland and his MS from Johns Hopkins University. 

todd watSon joined Honeywell Technology Solutions, Inc., 

as a systems engineer in 1998 and has managed the BSOCC 

program since 2000. He holds a BS degree from the University 

of Maryland–College Park and did postgraduate studies in 

computer science at Bowie State University. 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

58 | ASK MAGAZINE 

The Knowledge Notebook
 

How Organizations Learn Anything
 

BY LAURENCE PRUSAK 

During the late 1930s, several researchers working 

on the West Coast noticed something interesting 

occurring during the manufacturing of aircraft 

bodies. Whenever a new design or model was 

manufactured, building the second one always 

took considerably less time than the first one had. 

The third iteration took less time than the second. 

(Before long, of course, those time savings leveled 

out.) The learning needed to build the aircraft 

more efficiently was learned by the workers and 

the organization itself in the process of building 

them. Now, this sort of insight will not come as a 

big surprise to many readers. In fact, Adam Smith 

in The Wealth of Nations remarked on the same 

phenomenon after watching nails being made in 

eighteenth-century workshops; his observations 

became the foundation of his theory of the division 

of labor. Planes are much more complex than nails, 

however, and the cost of building them is much 

greater, so the efficiencies observed in the aircraft 

factory and the idea they suggested began to attract 

serious research attention after World War II. 

That was when operation-research analysts 

working at the Rand Corporation began 

writing papers and developing equations for 

understanding in a more quantifiable way exactly 

what goes on during this type of learning process. 

This work was codified and given more analytic 

heft by Ken Arrow, a highly influential Nobel 

Laureate economist now at Stanford. Arrow’s 

paper, “Learning by Doing,” was published in 

1962. It aroused great interest among economists, 

but it wasn’t exactly a great success among the 

“training” bureaucracies in organizations—all 

the many managers responsible for promoting 

organizational learning. They were still wedded to 

the rather limited and less valuable type of learning 

that takes place predominantly in classrooms or 

(later) facing one’s computer monitor. 

This was a great pity and has caused much 

waste of money and time. Arrow gave academic 

rigor to the idea that people and the organizations 

they work in learn mostly by doing, that active 

participation is the best teacher. The learningcurve theory, made popular (and profitable) by 

some management consultants in the seventies, was 

the direct result of this work. It holds that the time 

required to complete a task decreases as the task is 

repeated,thattheamountofimprovementdecreases 

over time, and that the rate of improvement can be 

predicted with reasonable and useful accuracy. 

These lessons were very slow to catch on for 

several reasons. One is that Arrow used some 

psychological studies as well as economics and they 

hinted at the fact, now more emphasized in practice, 

that one needs reflection to really understand 

and learn from one’s experiences. Though some 

learning perhaps comes from repetition alone, most 

of it doesn’t happen in that purely automatic way. 

Giving employees the time and tools (including 

“soft” tools like storytelling and discussion) to 

reflect on what they have learned from the process 

of doing work is still a rare phenomenon in the 

workplace. Our management methods and styles 

work against institutionalizing any form of activity 

that cannot be readily quantified. Many managers 

are more comfortable with a quiz showing whether 

people have grasped the lessons of a training session 

than the less tangible understanding gained by 

telling or listening to a story about work. 

The other main reason for this gulf between 

what is now known about how people learn and 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ASK MAGAZINE | 59 

how we use such knowledge is a commercial one. Many vendors 

and consultants sell various and sundry offerings dedicated to 

making organizational learning more efficient and (they claim) 

more effective. While some of these products and services are 

potentially useful, many are based on the idea that there are easy 

technical fixes to what is a very human and somewhat complex 

activity that can only be very partially mediated by technologies. 

Now that economists are perhaps starting to more readily 

accept the findings of learning theorists and psychologists and 

this knowledge is filtering down into more popular business 

thinking, we may start to see a more nuanced and realistic 

understanding of organizational learning emerge. If leaders 

really come to accept and support the understanding that the 

most valuable learning comes from action and reflection, we 

could see a great increase not only in project productivity but 

in innovation and the spread of useful and valuable knowledge 

throughout organizations as well. ●

GIvING EMPLOyEES ThE TIME AND 

TOOLS (INCLUDING “SOFT” TOOLS LIKE 

STORyTELLING AND DISCUSSION) TO 

REFLECT ON whAT ThEy hAvE 

LEARNED FROM ThE PROCESS OF 

DOING wORK IS STILL A RARE 

PhENOMENON IN ThE wORKPLACE. 
 

’

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

’ - -

” 

’

_

60 | ASK MAGAZINE 

ASKinteractive
 

NASA in the News 

NASA s Kepler space telescope, designed to find Earth size planets near sun like stars, 

has discovered its first five exoplanets, or planets beyond our solar system. “These 

observations contribute to our understanding of how planetary systems form and evolve 

from the gas and dust disks that give rise to both the stars and their planets,” said 

Principal Investigator William Borucki of Ames Research Center. Known as “hot Jupiters 

because of their high masses and extreme temperatures, the new exoplanets range in 

size from similar to Neptune to larger than Jupiter. Estimated temperatures of the planets range from 2,200 to 

3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, hotter than molten lava and too hot for life as we know it. All five of the exoplanets 

orbit stars that are hotter and larger than Earth s sun. To learn more about this discovery and the Kepler 

mission, visit www.nasa.gov/mission pages/kepler/main/index.html. 

Learning and Development 

The Academy of Program/Project and Engineering Leadership (APPEL) has 

updated its curriculum offerings. The APPEL Program Management and 

Systems Engineering development structure includes three major components: 

core curriculum, in-depth courses, and outside-the-classroom development 

experiences. Evaluating the quality and results of this curriculum—and providing 

for its continuous improvement—is a high priority of the APPEL team. For more 

information, visit www.nasa.gov/offices/oce/appel/curriculum/curriculum.html, 

or view the master schedule and registration information at www.nasa.gov/ 

offices/oce/appel/curriculum/schedule/292.html. 

Web of Knowledge 

As NASA continues to set new goals and launch challenging missions in the new 

year, the agency also took time to review its discoveries and accomplishments 

during 2009. Among the top accomplishments for the year are the discovery of 

water on the moon, the successful test flight of the new Ares I-X launch vehicle, 

and the appointment of a new administrator. Read about these milestones and 

more at www.nasa.gov/externalflash/YIR09/index.html. 

For More on 

Our Stories 

Additional information 

pertaining to articles featured 

in this issue can be found by 

visiting the following Web sites: 

• Stardust: www.nasa.gov/ 

mission_pages/stardust/ 

main 

• Ames Research Center 

wind Tunnels: www. 

windtunnels.arc.nasa.gov 

• Ares V: www.nasa. 

gov/mission_pages/ 

constellation/ares/aresV/ 

index.html 

feedback 

We welcome your comments on what you ve read in this issue of ASK and your suggestions for articles you 

would like to see in future issues. Share your thoughts with us at askmagazine.nasa.gov/about/write.php. 
Not yet receiving your own copy of ASK? 

To subscribe, send your full name and preferred mailing address 

(including mail stop, if applicable) to ASKmagazine@asrcms.com. 

If you like ASK Magazine, 

check out ASK the Academy 

ASK the Academy is an e-newsletter that offers timely news, updates, 

and features about best practices, lessons learned, and professional 

development. Learn more at askacademy.nasa.gov. 
National Aeronautics and Space Administration 

NASA Headquarters 

300 E Street SW 

Washington, DC 20546 

www.nasa.gov 

NP-2009-12-636-HQ