Academy Sharing Knowledge

The NASA Source for Project Management and Engineering Excellence | APPEL summer | 2011

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Inside

Taking a Risk To avoid Risk

inTeRnaTional PaRTneRshiPs

foR sPace exPloRaTion

human sPaceflighT and science 
ON THe COVer

Close-up detail of the surface of one of Josh Simpson’s glass “Planet” sculptures. 

Inspired in part by photographs taken by Astronaut Cady Coleman, his wife, he 

creates his fantasy planets in his studio in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts. Photo Credit: Tommy Olof Elder
Contents

25

DEPARTMENTS

3

In This Issue

By Don Cohen

4

From the Academy Director

On the Importance of Values

By eD hoffman

54

The Knowledge Notebook

The Burden of Knowledge

By LaurenCe Prusak 

56

ASK Interactive

INSIghTS

21

Interview with Steven Smith

By Don Cohen The NASA astronaut and 

space station liaison to the European Space 

Agency talks about the role of trust and 

understanding in international cooperation.

29

Weaving a Knowledge Web

By ASK eDitoriaL staff A new international 

committee is helping to share project 

expertise among spacefaring nations.

32

From Masters with Masters: 

Rob Manning and Rudi Schmidt

Experts from NASA and ESA compare 

their agencies’ Mars programs.

49

International Partnerships for Space 

Exploration

By kathy Laurini Reflecting on her long 

experience, the author describes elements 

of successful international partnerships.

52

Exploring Megaplanets

By Don Cohen Art and science meet 

in Josh Simpson’s glass planets.

SToRIES

5

Learning to Be an Engineer

By aDam harDing Early mistakes and the 

advice of more experienced colleagues 

helped Harding develop as an engineer.

9

Taking a Risk to Avoid Risk

By John mcmanamen As the space station 

grew, shuttle docking became more of a 

challenge.

15

Fixing a Troubled Project

By niCk Chrissotimos Faced with delays 

and potential budget problems, STEREO’s 

manager focused on improving team 

dynamics.

25

Human Spaceflight and Science

By howarD ross Experiments in space 

lead to unexpected benefits on Earth.

39

Expecting the Unexpected 

By taraLyn frasqueri-moLina At Disney 

Studios, a project manager relies on her 

plan for dealing with unexpected glitches.

43

Delivering Clean, Affordable Power

By Bo sChwerin Technology to produce 

oxygen and hydrogen on Mars can generate 

clean energy on Earth.

46

FAST Learning

By matthew kohut A small satellite project 

teaches lessons in systems engineering.

9 49

ASK MAGAZINE | 1
Issue No. 43

Staff

AcADEMy 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@inuteqllc.com

coNTRIbuTINg EDIToRS

Matt Kohut

mattkohut@infactcommunications.com

Haley Stephenson

haley.stephenson@valador.com

SENIoR KNowlEDgE ShARINg 

coNSulTANT

Jon Boyle

jon.boyle@inuteqllc.com

KNowlEDgE ShARINg ANAlySTS

Ben Bruneau

ben.bruneau@inuteqllc.com

Ramien Pierre

ramien.pierre@inuteqllc.com

AcADEMy PRogRAM MANAgER

Yvonne Massaquoi

yvonne.massaquoi@inuteqllc.com

DESIgN

Hirshorn Zuckerman Design Group, Inc.

www.hzdg.com

PRINTINg SPEcIAlIST

Hanta Ralay

hanta.ralay-1@nasa.gov

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 Academy Knowledge Sharing programs and products, please contact 

Yvonne Massaquoi, InuTeq LLC, 6303 Ivy Lane, Suite 130, Greenbelt, MD 20770; 

yvonne.massaquoi@inuteqllc.com; 301-837-9127.

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

(including mail stop, if applicable) to ASKmagazine@inuteqllc.com.
Every NASA project is a collaboration. A few, like the 

microsatellite development at Marshall Space Flight Center 

(see “FAST Learning”), are carried out by a small group at 

one location, but still depend on the cooperative efforts 

of engineers, scientists, and managers with different 

skills and responsibilities. Most involve teams at space 

agencies, corporations, and universities around the world. 

International participation in space science and exploration 

is becoming the norm.

That trend partly has to do with money. Space programs 

are expensive; many only happen when costs are shared. 

More important, though, is shared expertise. As Laurence 

Prusak says in “The Burden of Knowledge” (“The

Knowledge Notebook”), no single individual or institution 

can know everything important about any subject.

Increasingly, accomplishments in science and technology 

bring together the knowledge of many and diverse people. 

Connecting and coordinating that diversity are key to the 

future of aerospace.

Both the demands and benefits of international

cooperation spring from differences among partners—the 

differences in ways of working and thinking that must be 

understood and negotiated also generate a robust variety 

of ideas. Several articles in this issue of ASK consider 

those demands and benefits. In the interview, Steve Smith 

talks about his eight years as NASA’s space station liaison 

to the European Space Agency. His earlier experience as 

an astronaut contributes important practical knowledge 

to discussions of plans and procedures, but the heart 

of his job is understanding and respecting how NASA’s 

international partners work (and earning their understanding 

and respect). Kathy Laurini (“International Partnerships for 

Space Exploration”) emphasizes the importance to these 

collaborations of building relationships and understanding 

cultural differences over time.

Laurini makes clear that the only way to learn to work 

together is to work together. She describes how a series of 

Russian–American missions built a foundation of trust and 

understanding that made their International Space Station 

partnership possible. The International Project Management 

Committee, discussed in “Weaving a Knowledge Web,” 

was formed to bring together members of space agencies 

and related institutions because its founders recognized 

the importance of sharing knowledge and the fact that it 

could only be shared through relationships developed by 

joint work.

Which suggests a familiar ASK theme: learning by doing. 

Another aspect of the burden of knowledge, especially 

at the frontiers of science and technology, is that you 

can’t understand things just by thinking about them. You 

learn the most from unanticipated results and problems 

that arise in the course of doing real work. So Adam 

Harding explains the role of mistakes in his professional 

development (“Learning to Be an Engineer”), and Howard 

Ross, in “Human Spaceflight and Science,” describes 

how a simple experiment led to improved spaceflight 

safety and unexpected benefits on Earth. In “Delivering 

Clean, Affordable Power,” Bo Schwerin offers another 

example of an unforeseen return on research, in this case 

a technology for producing oxygen and hydrogen on Mars 

that can generate clean energy on Earth. One of the great 

things about working at the leading edge of science and 

exploration is that you don’t know what you’ll find until you 

get there.

Don Cohen

ASK Managing Editor

In This Issue

ASK MAGAZINE | 3
In the early 1980s, I was involved in conducting a 

study to determine the effectiveness of a new initiative 

promoting a more participative organization, 

interviewing employees and managers.

One young woman assured me that leadership 

had no interest in a more participative environment. 

I gently disagreed, pointing to efforts under way to 

promote participation—quality circles, training, 

and employee–manager dialogues. She countered 

by telling me about her recent experience. She had 

returned from a quality circle and was offering ideas 

for the office. Her manager told her, “Look, you’ve 

had your four hours of quality-circle participation; 

for the rest of the week, just do what I tell you.” 

Over the next month of interviews, I discovered that 

her experience was typical. There was a complete 

disconnect between what managers believed and 

their superficial support of this change initiative.

The more management pushed formal 

participation programs, the more employees 

considered the change to be insincere. In my briefing 

to leadership, I recommended placing much less 

emphasis on formal tools such as quality-circle groups, 

a recommendation that came as a jolt to senior leaders.

This experience motivated my dissertation research 

on “the impact of the managerial belief system on 

participative behavior.” I concluded that, when managers 

do not really believe in an organizational change, 

their informal behaviors communicating that lack of 

support are more powerful than formal approval.

Leader values and beliefs communicate to a 

team what really matters, but few project managers 

and teams take time to address the importance 

of values to their mission. This lost opportunity 

contributes to dangerous disconnects between 

desired and actual performance.

NASA has four core values—safety, integrity, 

teamwork, and excellence—and projects have 

unique requirements that make additional values 

essential to success. For example, the Lunar Crater 

Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) project 

depended on low-risk integration, intense partnering, 

and trust-building communication. NASA project 

manager Dan Andrews and industry project 

manager Steve Carman, Northrop Grumman, 

clearly communicated these core values to the team. 

(Read about LCROSS at www.nasa.gov/offices/oce/

appel/knowledge/publications/lcross.html.)

And look at how safety, excellence, teamwork, 

and integrity play out in the STS-119 Flight 

Readiness Review: www.nasa.gov/offices/oce/

appel/knowledge/publications/STS-119.html. 

Successful leaders embody desired project values 

and tell stories that amplify them. Practice and talk 

about open communication and that’s what you get; 

show and talk about lack of trust and you get that. 

It is no accident that the stories of successful and 

unsuccessful projects sound so different. 

Every project team should take the time to clarify 

their critical values and beliefs, asking the following:

1. W hat values will drive us to success?

2. A re our behaviors consistent with those values?

3. Are the stories we tell about our project (and each 

other) helping or hindering our performance?

4. Do we have a governance framework consistent 

with our values?

Charlie Parker said you need to live it for it to come 

out of your horn. Leaders and teams need to live—and 

talk about—the value that drives their projects. ●

From the Academy Director

O n the Importance of Values

BY ED HOFFMAN 

“If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.” —Charlie Parker

4 | ASK MAGAZINE
BY ADAM HARDINg Photo Credit: U.S. Air Force/SrA Javier Cruz

Airmen of the 23rd Equipment Maintenance Squadron make preparations 

to inspect for cracks within the wing frame of an A-10C Thunderbolt II, or 

“Warthog,” model. The risk of structural damage to wings of A-10 models 

was discovered at Hill Air Force Base, Utah. 

SToRy | ASK MAGAZINE | 5
Unlike the four other members of the panel, I didn’t begin my 

career with NASA. That allowed me to provide some comparisons 

with another government agency that hires and trains many 

aerospace engineers: the U.S. Air Force. 

After graduating with a BS in mechanical engineering from 

the University of Utah, I accepted a position at Hill Air Force 

Base to support the A-10 “Warthog.” I spent my first year learning 

about military aircraft, designing repairs to jets damaged by 

enemy fire, and learning how to maintain an aging aircraft. 

Fortunately, I was placed on a team with a good mix of greybeards 

and newer engineers. 

I had many experiences working for the air force that helped 

me develop as an engineer, including some notable mistakes. 

Part of becoming successful in a profession is being given the 

chance to fail. Making mistakes is part of becoming a good 

engineer. As Niels Bohr said, “An expert is a man who has 

made all the mistakes which can be made, in a very narrow 

field.” One memorable mistake that helped me better value 

my own contributions and appreciate the insight of experts 

occurred when I had been working for only a few months. 

Being the new guy, I was assigned easier projects like repairs 

on damaged bolt-holes. While not the epitome of engineering 

glamour that is dreamed of in college, it was nonetheless critical 

to airworthiness. I began to notice a pattern of damage in the 

wing-attach fitting area and decided to compile a summary 

of all documented repairs for this fitting over the past fifteen 

years. The end product was a reference table allowing quick 

turnaround on repair requests for any hole in this critical fitting 

that held the wing on the aircraft. 

Several of the experienced engineers took note of my increased 

efficiency and started to talk with me about it. I proudly showed 

them my summary of all the previously approved repairs. Instead 

of praise for the new guy’s accomplishment, they showed concern 

as they recognized a major flaw with my approach. While any 

single hole could be enlarged to the respective “clean up” diameter, 

only one hole in that particular fitting could be enlarged to that 

degree. If another hole on the same fitting required repair, it could 

not safely have that maximum diameter due to serious fatigue 

issues, something I was unaware of. 

Finding the flaw in my summary led to a fleet-wide evaluation 

of these basic repairs. My branch supported about thirty aircraft 

located at three different air bases at any one time, and there was 

no cross-check on this repair among the fifteen engineers who 

carried it out to ensure that multiple hole repairs weren’t being 

done on the same fittings. Soon this issue was resolved with an 

updated technical order that included a new summary table of the 

limits for each hole as they related to other damaged holes on the 

same fitting. I was not the one who engineered the solution; I was 

just the engineer who made the biggest mistake and highlighted 

the problem in the first place.

This experience taught me two principles that have helped 

me in my career. The first is how important the big picture is, 

and that I needed to rely on those with enough experience to see 

the big picture. Sometimes the solution to one problem creates 

new problems that you won’t see if you don’t have that broad 

vision. The second principle is, if an answer comes too easily, 

ask experienced engineers to evaluate the solution. It’s true that 

the right answer is sometimes the simplest one, but not always, 

and the simple right answer is not necessarily the easiest to find. 

The air force allowed me to return to graduate school to 

earn a master’s degree in engineering after my first year. This 

additional schooling was very valuable to my development as an 

engineer. I had spent a year learning from mistakes and interacting 

with experienced engineers. That gave me a different perspective 

A new engineer’s career with NASA usually begins by being tossed into the deep end. You are 

immediately handed real-world engineering challenges and face the overwhelming data, procedures, 

and calculations needed to solve them. There are mentors and training opportunities along the way 

to help adjust to the relentless pace of learning to be an engineer at NASA, but there isn’t much 

time during these formative years to pause and reflect on the evolution of your career or formulate 

potential advice for those about to follow in your footsteps. This is exactly the opportunity afforded 

me as a member of the “Developing New Engineers at NASA” panel at the 2011 PM Challenge 

in Long Beach, California. As a panelist, I was to appraise experiences that either promoted or 

detracted from my development and then share these perspectives. 

6 | ASK MAGAZINE
when I returned to the classroom. I appreciated the fact that most 

great engineering solutions are not pounded out individually, but 

through collaboration among team members. I had seen firsthand 

how things are built, broken, and rebuilt. 

Following graduate school, I returned to the maintenance 

hangar and tried to apply what I had studied in class. Although 

my job was inherently technical, the greatest challenges for me 

would be better classified as learning how to apply research skills 

to understanding the engineering already in place. Essentially, 

I was fixing problems that required an engineering degree to 

understand the proper contextual background for established 

technology but not for direct application for research or new 

design. The real engineering had already been done. Despite this, 

I still experienced a high degree of job satisfaction. 

In 2007, I accepted an offer to work at NASA’s Dryden Flight 

Research Center. NASA’s mission is oriented toward researchbased engineering. I was coming from an “end-user” focus on 

established engineering and, to a degree, felt like I was starting 

over with a greater technical emphasis. Instead of focusing on 

A-10 fleet maintenance, I was now working on research and 

development of the Orion crew module. 

My initial assignment was to the structures team. I had 

responsibility for the mass property testing of the crew module. 

This involved developing test equipment capable of manipulating 

the crew module in a variety of positions and attitudes while 

inducing oscillations and recording precise measurements to 

determine the center of gravity and moments of inertia (a 

measure of an object’s resistance to changes to its rotation). 

Testing the Orion crew module using air bearings.

Photo Credit: NASA

ASK MAGAZINE | 7
These measurements would directly influence the success of 

the launch. I had not worked on anything like this in my five 

years with the air force. Fortunately, I had access to seasoned 

engineers who had information dating back to similar testing 

done during the Apollo era. 

However, the greatest contributor to the success of these 

tests was a young engineer named Claudia Herrera, who had 

only been out of school for a couple of years. She had experience 

with the mass property testing of airplanes at Dryden, but not 

space capsules. Claudia tackled the technical and programmatic 

challenges head-on. As I worked with Claudia, I saw that the 

few years of hands-on experience at NASA had really given her 

an edge in continuing her development as an engineer. While 

I had already experienced some mental atrophy on principles 

taught in school, Claudia had been able to catapult ahead in 

her development thanks to the challenges of working at NASA.

Even though NASA’s culture and mission were different from 

the air force, the principle of learning by trial and error still held 

true. The simplest of oversights on one of our center-of-gravity 

tests emphasized a great lesson: always read the owner’s manual. 

We were using air bearings to provide a near-frictionless interface 

for our test fixtures. These allowed us to tilt the crew module to 

various angles for measurements. We had received on-site training 

by the manufacturer, who stated that our concrete floors were 

adequately smooth to interface with the air bearings. However, 

during our initial testing, the crew module caused the air bearings 

to drag despite weighing only a fraction of the system’s capacity. 

Due to schedule constraints, we didn’t have time to solve the 

problem and decided to retest when the next window opened 

in the schedule. 

Six months later, as we prepared to retest, we moved to 

another hangar with smoother concrete. As we began testing we 

noticed the same dragging problem. Our team was stumped. A 

mechanic recommended reviewing the owner’s manual, which 

we had previously only skimmed. A careful reading revealed a 

suggestion to use sheets of aluminum to improve performance. 

We did this and finally had the results we needed. This time, 

the answer was easy to find—it was right there in black and 

white—but our team took a long time to find it. 

If asked by a recent engineering graduate whether to accept 

an offer to work at NASA or the air force, I would recommend 

NASA. Here’s why: NASA engineers are directly responsible 

for cutting-edge research, testing, and publication of flight 

data. This makes NASA a premier training ground for new 

engineers. A new engineer develops best by building, testing, 

and breaking, and learning from the process. My development 

as a new engineer has accelerated since joining NASA. The 

maintenance environment at the air force was purposefully 

designed to reduce opportunities to make mistakes. That 

inherently reduced opportunities for growth. Despite this, I 

still found ways to mess things up there, too. 

My evaluation of what benefited me most as an engineer is 

that trial and error taught me more than reading and research. 

Exposure to the technical accomplishments of others is no 

substitute for experiencing failure yourself. My advice to new 

engineers is to volunteer for the challenging assignments and 

don’t be afraid of the mistakes that will happen along the way. 

Keep in mind that these mistakes are necessary steps to success. ●

AdAm HArding is an aerospace engineer in the Aerostructures 

Branch at Dryden Flight Research Center. He is currently 

supporting the Environmentally Responsible Aviation project.

EVEN THOuGH NASA’S culTuRE AND MISSION wERE DIFFERENT FROM THE AIR 

FORcE, THE pRINcIplE OF lEARNING By TRIAl AND ERROR STIll HElD TRuE. 

THE SIMplEST OF OVERSIGHTS ON ONE OF OuR cENTER-OF-GRAVITy TESTS 

EMpHASIZED A GREAT lESSON: AlwAyS READ THE OwNER’S MANuAl.

8 | ASK MAGAZINE
Title

By

Intro

By John McManamen

Taking a

TO AVOID The shuttle and station docking mechanisms after soft capture and 

before retraction during STS-121.

The shuttle capture ring ready to dock with station during STS-131.

Visitors learn about the docking mechanism that allows the Space 

Shuttle to dock with the International Space Station.

Risk

Risk

One of the many lessons I’ve learned 

during my career is we aren’t always 

as smart as we think we are. When we 

discovered large oscillations occurring 

during docking between the Space Shuttle 

and International Space Station (ISS),

I had a chance to learn that lesson again.

It’s amazing the kinds of problems you 

can find even in a mature program like 

the shuttle, which has been operating for 

thirty years. It teaches us to be vigilant 

and always stay curious, questioning 

things that don’t look right.

SToRy | ASK MAGAZINE | 9

Photo Credit: NASA Photo Credit: NASA Photo Credit: NASA
In this instance, what didn’t look right was a recurring 

misalignment during docking retraction: a process that occurs 

after the shuttle and station have successfully joined (known 

as “soft capture”) but have not yet achieved what we call a 

“hard mate,” when the docking is complete and everything has 

successfully sealed. Retraction is the process of the ISS docking 

mechanism slowly pulling in the docking mechanism on the 

shuttle side. Considering how close these two massive objects get 

to each other—anywhere between six and fourteen inches—a 

little wobble can mean a lot of risk: in this case, contact between 

things not intended to touch. 

Docking is one of those highly integrated operations 

that involves massive spacecraft and many systems, including 

relative rate and alignment sensors, digital autopilot for attitudecontrol systems, crew piloting to maintain lateral alignment and 

translational velocities, and a complex docking mechanism that 

can deal with residual misalignments and rates. Then consider 

that, once capture is achieved, both vehicles begin free drift—

turning off their thrusters and thus giving up attitude control—

and you can begin to imagine the entire process as a very complex 

dance happening at more than 17,000 mph, and up to 280 miles 

above Earth.

During the STS-133 docking operation, significant 

oscillations were experienced between the shuttle and ISS as the 

retraction was occurring. Reviews and a more detailed post-flight 

assessment raised numerous concerns about the current docking 

procedure and posed fundamental questions about whether we 

were operating within certification limits.

Trajectories and Timelines

When the docking procedure was originally created during the 

Space Shuttle–Mir missions and early ISS flights, the orbiting 

stations were much smaller, and the shuttle could approach and 

dock fairly quickly—usually in less than 20 minutes—along 

a trajectory much less susceptible to gravity-gradient torques 

during free drift. The gravity gradient (a greater gravitational 

pull on the parts of objects closest to Earth) can affect the 

orientation of satellites in space, inexorably pulling them out 

of alignment. In the case of shuttle and station, this force can 

pull hard enough to change their orientation to each other. 

This usually isn’t a problem when the station and shuttle can 

use thrusters to realign themselves individually. But when they 

shut off those thrusters and enter free drift, the gravity-gradient 

torques begin disturbing the operation. The longer the free drift 

lasts, the worse the wobble becomes. This wasn’t a problem 

when the shuttle–station docking process was completed within 

the nominal less-than-20-minute timeline, but that timeline 

had been getting progressively longer over the years—a result 

of making operational changes to deal with docking-system 

idiosyncrasies discovered over time.

One such idiosyncrasy occurred when an electromagnetic 

“brake,” the high-energy damper, inadvertently stuck beyond 

its normal time to disengage. We dealt with this by adding steps 

to the docking process: extending the docking ring and then 

retracting it briefly to reverse torques in the system, which allowed 

the clutch plates holding on to the high-energy damper to release. 

Adding steps also added time.

As the station grew in size and mass, the gravity-gradient 

effect became more dominant during shuttle–ISS docking. As 

this rotation built up over tens of minutes of time, the centrifugal 

force would create a misalignment during docking, which 

would slow down the docking procedure. If a sensor indicated 

a misalignment, the crew would follow procedure by stopping 

the automatic docking sequence, which would then disengage 

“fixers,” a design feature meant to limit misalignment during 

retraction. This would cause more wobble, and the crew would 

have to wait for alignment to reoccur before starting up the 

process again—more time. 

Partial view of the nose and crew cabin of Discovery taken from the International 

Space Station during the shuttle’s docking approach.

10 | ASK MAGAZINE Photo Credit: NASA
This partial view of the starboard wing of Space Shuttle Discovery was provided by an Expedition 26 crewmember 

during a survey of the approaching STS-133 vehicle prior to docking with the International Space Station.

Everything culminated during the STS-133 mission; the 

docking took nearly 50 minutes—more than double the nominal 

time. I had a moment to speak with the commander during a 

debrief about the mission, and he described what he saw looking 

out the overhead window: the ISS pressurized mating adapter 

coming fairly close to the orbiter, and the ISS guide pins looking 

as though they were going to hit the orbiter docking interface as 

misalignment grew. When I heard what he was talking about, 

my jaw dropped. We realized that with the evolution to our 

current procedure, we had no way of controlling the growing 

misalignment and no integrated tools to analyze the gravitygradient implications for the hardware, vehicles, or mission 

timeline. We needed a solution quickly, and we had just under 

four weeks to find it: STS-134 was getting ready to launch.

One Line, One Light

Convincing anyone to make a procedural change in under four 

weeks is no easy task, so we made sure we had our facts straight 

and our data validated to prove that the resolution was less risky 

than letting the system proceed as it had been.

Though we showed that the shuttle and ISS could never 

actually collide if oscillations happened during the soft-capture 

phase—though they could get worryingly close, closer than six 

inches—there were other risks to station that were very severe. 

Because the timeline had grown from less than 20 minutes to 

nearly 50 minutes, the station was at risk of losing its powergeneration and thermal-heat-protection capabilities due to 

longeron shadowing; the station’s solar arrays could not generate 

enough power for vital onboard systems. Something had to change 

to avoid this risk.

We knew there was no time to make any hardware changes, 

so we looked at what we else could do. Some of our concern 

was with the earlier procedure changes, which had the fixers 

operating in a different way than what had been certified. A 

fixer is just what it sounds like: a small switch that deploys to 

fix something in place, in this case the gears controlling the 

orbiter docking-ring rotation. We needed to understand what 

the fixers were doing in the new procedure. Were they engaging 

or not? Were they working properly or not? Were they failing 

or working? 

The operations community was very concerned about 

ensuring the fixers were working; if they weren’t, and we had a 

large gravity-gradient-induced oscillation, we could impact parts 

of the docking mechanism not intended for contact. We had to 

come up with a new technique to determine what was happening 

with the fixers in real time. 

The previous procedure included shutting off the automatic 

sequence if misalignment occurred in order to protect against 

a fixer failure. Our perception at the time was that the fixers 

could not structurally handle the stress of gravity-gradient 

torques. But stopping the sequence stopped the ring retraction 

and disengaged the fixers, so the fixers never got to do their 

job: preventing the orbiter capture ring from rotating. What we 

discovered during testing was the misalignment sensor would 

actually trip before ever making contact with the fixers. So we 

had to look creatively at what else was available in the system 

in terms of more accurate sensors, and we needed to better 

understand the fixers’ structural capacity.

The initial-contact sensor in the docking system is odd 

because that is all we use it for—it turns on a display-panel 

light for the crew—but it’s actually an unreliable indicator of 

initial contact. It turns out to be a very good indicator of how 

much the capture ring has rotated, though. We found that 

the initial-contact-sensor indication always occurred after the 

fixers engaged. Once we understood that, and were able to 

demonstrate it on the brassboard docking-mechanism unit we 

have—a test model which is essentially a flight unit—we knew 

the sensor was a very good indicator of whether a fixer had failed 

ASK MAGAZINE | 11Photo Credit: NASA
12 | ASK MAGAZINE

Backdropped by Earth, Discovery approaches the International Space 

Station during STS-133 rendezvous and docking operations. Already 

docked to the station is a Russian Progress spacecraft.
ASK MAGAZINE | 13Photo Credit: NASA
or not. The only time we should see that sensor light during 

retraction is if a fixer has failed.

The fixer load capacity was refined based on discussions with 

our Russian colleagues, who had originally designed, built, and 

tested the system. We were able to demonstrate through test data 

that loads applied to the test-unit fixers far exceeded our predicted 

worst-case gravity-gradient loads. With this information and our 

new knowledge of a sensor that could accurately indicate a failed 

fixer, we were confident we could modify the docking procedure 

to make it safer and more robust.

The procedure change ended up being very small. We altered 

only one line of code in the auto-sequence programming, and 

trainers advised the flight crew to ignore the misalignment sensor 

and instead use the initial-contact sensor to judge misalignment. 

But that small change had profound consequences for the overall 

operation. We mitigated huge risks to the docking mechanisms 

on both the shuttle and ISS, as well as risks to the vehicles 

themselves. The team worked hard and through long hours to 

find the simplest, safest solution before the next shuttle mission 

launched, and we found it in one light and one line of code.

By making those changes, we were able to decrease the delays 

caused by the automatic stop programmed into the docking 

procedure, which occurred whenever the first misalignmentsensor indicator lit up. Our hard work and innumerable data 

were validated once more when STS-134 docked without any 

of the delays experienced on STS-133. In fact, it achieved the 

transition from soft capture to hard mate in just 13 minutes 

and 4 seconds. 

Mitigating Potential Problems

Very few anomalies are caused by just one thing. It’s usually a 

number of factors, events, or changes that line up to result in a 

real problem. In our situation we had a number of things lining 

up for a potentially bad outcome. Thankfully, our team was able 

to recognize the signals and mitigate the risk before the potential 

could become reality. And we learned some very valuable lessons 

in the process: a thorough assessment is required even for the 

smallest, simplest procedure change; environments and systems 

can change, even after thirty years of proven performance, so reevaluate integrated system certification/verification regularly to 

ensure operations are still valid and safe; and, most importantly, 

stay hungry, be curious, and question things if they don’t look 

right. If those questions lead to hardware modifications or 

procedural changes, have a rigorous certification process in place 

to assess unintended consequences. This will help ensure one risk 

doesn’t unintentionally lead to more. ●

14 | ASK MAGAZINE

The International Space Station and the docked 

Space Shuttle Endeavour photographed by 

Expedition 27 crew member Paolo Nespoli 

from the Soyuz TMA-20 following its undocking 

on May 23, 2011. 

Photo Credit: NASA

JoHn mcmAnAmen began his NASA career at Johnson Space 

Center in 1987 as an aerospace engineer in the Mechanical 

Design and Analysis Branch of the Structures and Mechanics 

Division. In 2000 he became chief engineer of the International 

Space Station, seeing it through final development and early 

on-orbit assembly operations. In 2003, he was selected as an 

inaugural member and Technical Fellow in the newly formed 

NASA Engineering and Safety Center. He is currently chief 

engineer for the Space Shuttle program.
Fixing a

 Troubled 

Projec

BY NICK CHRISSOTIMOS

t

The three main areas that can lead a project down a slippery slope are 

team dynamics, technical development issues, or those things outside 

the project’s control—external support, problems, or direction.

Photo Credit: NASA

A mosaic 

of the extreme 

ultraviolet images from 

STEREO’s SECCHI/Extreme 

Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope taken 

on December 4, 2006.

SToRy | ASK MAGAZINE | 15
Dealing with technical development is a challenge that we 

engineers and scientists embrace, though we often underestimate 

the difficulties and do not allow adequate cost and schedule to 

develop the technology. Dealing with issues outside our control 

is always difficult, as we constantly face the challenges of budget 

cuts and delays pushed on us by the powers that be. I think we 

need to learn to say, “No, we cannot give you the same program 

requirements with less funding, inadequate cost reserves, or less 

time.” If they want the original requirements, they must provide 

the resources needed. 

But I will concentrate here on the team dynamics of projects, 

which have a powerful effect on project performance and can mean 

the difference between success and failure. I want to acknowledge 

4-D leadership with providing the resources and background for 

bringing to light this important aspect of project management 

and leadership. The 4-D assessment process, developed by Dr. 

Charles Pellerin and offered by the Academy of Program/Project 

and Engineering Leadership, analyzes the relative effectiveness 

of teams in terms of four behavioral norms:

• Valuing: Expressing authentic appreciation; addressing 

shared interests

• Relating: Appropriately including others; keeping all 

agreements

• Visioning: Hope and vision; commitment to outcomes

• Directing: Resisting blaming or complaining; roles, 

accountability, and authority

Taking Over a Troubled Project

There are a few things you need to understand as a project 

manager when you come into a troubled project. First, you really 

do have a “get-out-of-jail-free card” at the beginning. You need 

to assess the project’s status and then work with the stakeholder 

to renegotiate the requirements, cost, and schedule in order for 

you to succeed. But this is a one-time deal. So this is the time to 

ask for adequate resources. It is also the time to assess the team 

emotionally as well as logically, and then forge a team that will 

make the project a success. 

In 2003, I was asked to take over the Solar Terrestrial 

Relations Observatory (STEREO) project. STEREO, one 

of NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Probes program missions, was 

designed to simultaneously launch two spacecraft, each with 

sixteen instruments, into orbits around the sun, one moving 

ahead and one moving behind the earth’s orbit around the 

sun, thus providing a stereoscopic view of the sun. STEREO 

was a NASA-led mission with multiple international partners 

(United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Switzerland), other 

U.S. government agencies, Federally Funded Research and 

Development Centers, University-Affiliated Research Centers, 

industry, and universities providing the instruments. The 

spacecraft bus, observatory integration, and test and launch 

occurred in the United States. When I joined it, the project was 

behind schedule. From a technical standpoint, it was not in worse 

shape than any other project I had seen following critical design 

review, but parts of the project that were performing at lower 

efficiencies than expected were threatening the schedule and 

would eventually drive the mission cost higher than predicted.

Prior to my first full STEREO project team meeting, I was 

provided information on the team’s social dynamic by personnel 

from 4-D leadership. A 4-D survey showed that it was performing 

in the bottom 20 percent compared with typical NASA projects. 

Project members surveyed made some strongly negative comments, 

to say the least. There was mistrust, blaming, non-cooperation, 

and indifference. There was the “not invented here,” we-knowwhat-we’re-doing-but-they-sure-as-hell-don’t syndrome. There 

were no clear or established roles, accountability, or authority. 

This still from a video shows a 

lunar transit of the sun captured 

by the STEREO-B spacecraft.

Photo Credit: NASA

16 | ASK MAGAZINE
The STEREO spacecraft in the Goddard 

Space Flight Center cleanroom. 

At the first meeting I had with the STEREO team, which 

included the principal investigators, observatory/spacecraft 

provider, and NASA project personnel, I felt I had to put the 

fear of God into the team. Right off the bat, I made it clear 

that if we could not improve efficiency and team dynamics and 

develop clear roles and responsibilities, this project would either 

be descoped to a mission called “Mono” (a single spacecraft 

that never would have met the Level 1 requirements) or be 

canceled. They got the message, and I got their attention and 

commitment. The rules were No Whining and No Blaming; 

they could complain once, but then we would move on to fix MAKING NO DEcISION IS wORSE THAN 

MAKING THE wRONG ONE. IF yOu MAKE 

THE wRONG DEcISION, yOu AT lEAST 

HAVE lEARNED A lESSON.

this project and make it a success. We had one shot to get it

right and everyone had to contribute.

I then met with the project business manager, the deputy

project manager, the lead systems engineer, and the lead

scheduler—the most important folks on any NASA flight-project

team. We scrubbed the schedule and looked at what resources

would be required to get us to a launch-readiness date that made

sense. We assumed that current inefficiencies would continue for 

a while, added the appropriate contingency to compensate for this 

performance, and laid out our known risks and the associated 

mitigations. This later turned out to be an excellent approach as we 

had enough contingency to cover delays due to industrywide parts 

problems and late delivery of some instruments, and to partially 

cover a launch delay due to launch-services issues. In addition, 

we looked at all the instrument teams and assessed which ones 

would need additional personnel, schedule, and cost resources to 

have them deliver on time and meet performance requirements.

How did we improve the work and team environment? My 

deputy suggested a retreat. I am not a big retreat fan, as most 

of them end up with proposed actions that are not addressed 

at all or are forgotten within a week or two. So we decided to 

have a retreat where we would get all key partners together and 

concentrate on defining common mission goals and clear RAAs 

(roles, accountability, and authority), as well as socializing as 

a team. The only actions that would come out of the meeting 

would be the RAAs needed for the hardware development and 

integration phase of the mission. Clear RAAs show who is 

responsible for decisions.

Making timely decisions is critical, even when you may not 

have all the data. That is where experience and gut instinct come 

into play. Making no decision is worse than making the wrong 

one. If you make the wrong decision, you at least have learned 

a lesson. And we always had a Plan B, the “what if” in case we 

went down the wrong path. 

One example of making a timely decision with incomplete 

data is a situation that arose with respect to the thruster valves on 

STEREO. The valves had already been welded into the propulsion 

system when the manufacturer notified all its customers that there 

was a potential defect in some of them. We sent both NASA and 

the spacecraft developer folks from STEREO to the thrusterPhoto Credit: NASA/JHU APL
Image Credit: NASA/JHU APL

Artist’s concept showing the two STEREO 

observatories opening their solar panels. 

18 | ASK MAGAZINE
It was a great bonding experience. In addition, we documented our 

common goals for mission success while discussing differences and 

coming to understand that no one organization was necessarily 

smarter or better than the others. We were not NASA and not 

individual organizations. We were STEREO.

One example of our teamwork had to do with STEREO’s 

ANOTHER IMpORTANT ASpEcT OF THE 

SOcIAl SIDE OF lEADERSHIp AND 

TEAMING IS AppREcIATION. wE cREATED 

A quARTERly pEER-AwARD pROGRAM 

THAT INcluDED BOTH INDIVIDuAl AND 

GROup AwARDS.

contamination requirements, which were extremely stringent 

because of the mission’s multiple remote-sensing instruments 

with optical telescopes. The spacecraft and instruments required 

at least a Class 10K integration and testing facility and the use 

of tents, at times, with a Class 1K (no more than one thousand 

particles per cubic foot of air) rating. In addition, strict cleanliness 

protocols needed to be followed by all personnel at each facility 

to keep the total accumulated contamination as low as possible. 

The STEREO spacecraft in the

cleanroom at the Naval Research

Laboratory. Pho ot Credi :t NAS / A N

valve vendor to discuss the problem. The 

C/ L R sir h

vendor at that time was not sure which serial 

G

numbers were affected, but indicated that we 

probably had at least seven plus possibly eight 

more that could be faulty. They were still working on 

a fix and developing criteria for determining if some were 

flight worthy. So we were facing the possibility of fifteen out of 

twenty-four thrusters affected, and not yet knowing the criteria 

for acceptance nor the fix. 

When we looked at our schedule, it was obvious that the 

propulsion system was on the critical path. In addition, we knew 

we were not the only project affected by this potential recall. 

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, New Horizons, and at least two 

defense department missions were in the mix—all with launches 

either ahead of or close to ours. Our choices were to wait for more 

information, which meant we would be in line with all the other 

projects for rework/inspection, or to cut the suspected valves out 

immediately and send them back to the manufacturer, where they 

would be first in line for inspection/rework. The latter choice 

meant breaking flight configuration and having to re-weld and 

retest the entire system. But with the schedule critical and not 

knowing our priority status, we decided it was essential to be first 

at the valve vendor’s facility. We removed the suspect valves and 

sent them back to the vendor. As it turned out, the vendor recalled 

hundreds of valves, but with ours already there we were the first 

set out of the gate when they determined the fix. Our decision 

minimized the effect on our launch-readiness date. 

Building a Real Team

The retreat worked great. The socializing evening was the winner. 

There was no business done, just discussion of common interests 

and family in a relaxed atmosphere with, of course, some alcohol. 

Folks from the different organizations stayed up to the wee hours. 

nu n

ASK MAGAZINE | 19
This meant that all 

hardware providers 

needed to adhere to the 

contamination requirements 

and protocols. So we established 

a contamination working group with 

leads from both NASA and the spacecraft 

developer. These leads ended up working extremely 

well together as well as with the instrument providers and the 

launch-processing and launch-vehicle providers to develop and 

prepare the facilities for handling the STEREO observatories 

and to adhere to a common protocol. As it turned out, STEREO 

was the cleanest spacecraft ever launched. If the team dynamics 

had not changed to be “one for all and all for one,” this would 

not have been possible. 

The first retreat was so successful that we held two 

more prior to observatory integration and test, and then for 

the launch-processing campaign, when we felt we needed to 

redefine the RAAs for those phases. Each time, we came out 

of the retreats stronger as a team. By the time we reached the 

launch campaign, two additional 4-D surveys showed our team 

dynamics improving from the bottom 20 percent to average to 

the top 20 percent. 

Another important aspect of the social side of leadership 

and teaming is appreciation. We created a quarterly peer-award 

program that included both individual and group awards. 

Although there was no money involved, recognition by one’s 

peers and management did wonders. We were very careful not 

to abuse the process by handing out too many awards. The 

project management team would personally hand out these 

awards at team meetings and social events, at times traveling 

to the recipients’ facility and presenting the awards in front of 

their management.

Success

STEREO launched in October 2006. It completed its baseline 

two-year mission and is currently in its fifth year of orbiting and 

providing stereo views of the sun. The STEREO science coverage 

of coronal mass ejections has provided the heliophysics community 

with groundbreaking science. In addition, the STEREO 

spacecraft, currently 180 degrees apart—in combination with the 

recently launched Solar Dynamics Observatory—are providing 

full coverage, images, and observations of the sun’s near and far 

sides for the first time. 

STEREO showed that the social dynamic of a team can 

make or break a project. When I think about my experience 

on the project, I think of one of my favorite quotes, from C.S. 

Lewis: “Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, 

my God do you learn.” ●

nick cHrissotimos has twenty-nine years of project/

program management experience at Goddard Space Flight

Center. He is currently the associate director of Flight Projects 

for Heliophysics, where he is the program manager for Explorers, 

Living with a Star, and Solar Terrestrial Probes. 

An engineer looks on as the 

stacked STEREO spacecraft 

undergo a spin balance test. 

Photo Credit: NASA

20 | ASK MAGAZINE
out and exploring. It involved aviation; it 

involved adventure; it involved math and 

science, which I was thrilled with, coming 

from an IBM engineer’s family. And my 

parents said, “You always want to do 

something that contributes back to society.” 

With all great adventures comes knowledge 

that makes our lives better, so it was really 

a perfect fit. If you talk to friends from 

my youth, they’ll tell you, this guy always 

wanted to be a pilot and an astronaut.

cohEN: When you eventually flew into 

space ... 

SMITh: I was turned down by the astronaut 

office four times.

cohEN: When you finally flew, did it live 

up to your expectations? 

As a NASA astronaut, Steven Smith has flown on four 

shuttle missions and taken seven spacewalks to carry out 

Hubble telescope repairs and install the S-Zero Truss in 

the International Space Station (ISS). He is currently the 

NASA International Space Station program liaison to 

ESA, the European Space Agency. Don Cohen talked 

with him in May.

S

 INT

t

E R

e

v

ve

IEW W

n

I T H

Smith 

 BY DON COHEN

INSIghT | ASK MAGAZINE | 21
SMITh: It was thrilling as I expected ...

and more. Seeing the earth from space

and traveling at Mach 25 were incredible.

Living in microgravity was like a magic

show—you could even sleep on the wall

or ceiling. Seeing the sun rise and the sun

set sixteen times per twenty-four-hour day

is amazing. And then when you are lucky

enough to go outside for a spacewalk, it

is even more intense. I went inside the

Hubble Space Telescope and held items

that were 1,000 or 1,500 lbs. with my

fingertips. The challenge ever since has

been to accurately convey to people who

haven’t had a chance to experience it—

yet—what it is like. 

cohEN: Do you ever feel weighed down 

back on Earth? 

SMITh: It’s interesting when you come

back. Right after I landed at the end of

my first flight, my wife handed me my

two-year-old daughter. She weighed a

ton. I handed her back because I was a

little unsteady and I said, “I can’t hold

on to her.” Tom Jones handed me a very

expensive camera just after we came to

wheels-stop on my first flight and he

said, “Would you mind taking a picture

of me?” This multi-thousand-dollar

camera had been weightless for a couple 

of weeks. When he let go of it, I almost 

dropped it. My mind was still thinking it 

was weightless. It is tough to come back 

in that respect. 

cohEN: Tell me about your current work. 

SMITh: I’m what’s called the liaison 

between the NASA and ESA space station 

programs. That one word—liaison—is a 

good description. I help the two agencies 

work together on all things related to 

the space station, a wide range of things 

from technical discussions to financial 

discussions, export control, legal and 

political issues. We work together extremely 

well, but there are huge differences in 

experience and cultures. We’ve now got 

nineteen cultures at the European Space 

Agency. So my job is to try to bring the 

two together so they work well. 

cohEN: Can you give me an example of 

a specific issue you’ve been involved in? 

SMITh: One of the most common issues 

is technical disagreement: for instance, 

about how we operate the Automated 

Transfer Vehicle [ATV] at a certain part 

of its rendezvous. ESA might be seeking to 

WE HAvE WORKED WITH THE RUSSIANS for a long time, BUT 

THEY HAvE fifty years of experience AND WE HAvE fifty 

years of experience, AND WE DO THINGS DIFFERENTLY.

22 | ASK MAGAZINE
improve their operations or save money or 

both. They’ll come to our flight controllers 

and say, “On the second flight of ATV-2, 

can we do something different than we did 

on ATV-1?” Often engineers meet these 

proposals with a bit of reluctance. But we 

dug in and understood what ESA wanted 

and decided to go ahead and support their 

request. We also have times when rumors 

go around about a reorganization or the 

position of senior managers on either side, 

and often I’m just trying to correct the 

record, making clear what’s actually going 

on and what the actual conversations have 

been about. 

cohEN: So you’re a knowledge-transfer 

agent. How do you get accurate information 

about ESA to communicate to NASA, and 

about NASA to communicate to ESA? 

SMITh: On the NASA side, I’ve got several 

bosses and have all kinds of meetings 

with managers from different offices and 

different disciplines, so it’s pretty easy to get 

the NASA story to bring to our European 

colleagues in a concise, well-ordered way. 

In terms of transferring information from 

here back to NASA, a lot of it is available 

both in literature and on the Internet, 

but, as usual, by far the best way is by 

networking and walking the halls. I’ve 

been here for eight years now, so I’ve 

gotten to know many of the people very 

well. They understand me and understand 

the trust they can have. The best way to 

understand things is face to face. 

cohEN: Was it hard to develop that trust 

and understanding? 

SMITh: I started off on the Automated 

Transfer Vehicle project, ESA’s first attempt 

to build a human spaceflight vehicle. NASA 

was responsible for making sure it was 

safely integrated into the program. I’m sure 

when the first NASA reps arrived, there was 

some skepticism on the Europeans’ part 

that we would be overwhelming and try to 

impose all of our rules on them. I’m sure 

there still is some of that to this day. But my 

predecessors gave me one really good piece 

of advice. They said, “Your job is to keep 

NASA out of ESA’s way.” There are a lot of 

people in NASA who will ask for things; I 

need to be a filter before I pass them on to 

the Europeans. So I had to gain credibility. 

I think also they were a little bit concerned 

that an astronaut was coming over,

someone who had operational experience 

but maybe not other kinds of experience. 

They didn’t know my background. I did 

have seven years of industry experience at 

IBM and have a Stanford MBA, so I have 

some business experience, too. 

cohEN: I assume your astronaut 

experience has been helpful to you in 

this job. 

SMITh: Definitely. Astronauts have a unique 

opportunity to see so many things when 

we’re in the flight crew office. We get 

different experiences all over the agency 

and all over the space program. I was also a 

flight controller before I was an astronaut. 

I was in mission control for some shuttle 

flights, so I had some ground operations 

experience and had human spaceflight 

experience as well as the specific ISS

experience. Of course, having been in the 

space station is a huge benefit because I 

can understand the situation we’re talking 

about when we’re debating technical topics. 

ASK MAGAZINE | 23
how each culture works. It’s also important 

to guess what stereotypes they have of 

Americans, so I can dispel them. In any 

international negotiation, you need to 

understand the culture of the other party. 

My parents lived in Europe for six years, 

so I had some exposure to European 

cultures, but the first year that I was here 

I was trying to be very open-minded, very 

respectful, very quiet in my responses, just 

to gather in how all the cultures worked 

together. When I got to Les Mureaux, 

which is where the ATV ESA team was 

working, there were seventeen people but 

seven different cultures and seven different 

languages. It took some tiptoeing at the 

beginning. We have worked with the 

Russians for a long time, but they have 

fifty years of experience and we have fifty 

years of experience, and we do things 

differently. It’s really important to go in 

with a mind-set that we’re in the extreme 

on this particular topic on the left, they’re 

in the extreme on the right; probably the 

answer is not on the left or the right, it’s 

somewhere in between. I’ve tried to have 

that philosophy on everything I’ve done: 

that we’re not completely wrong and they’re 

not completely wrong. Somewhere in the 

middle is probably the happy medium. 

cohEN: Do you find that working in 

English—the official ESA working 

language—is a handicap for people who 

are not native speakers? 

SMITh: Almost not at all. The people are 

incredible. I’m jealous of their language 

skills every day. In eight years I don’t 

remember us ever miscommunicating.

Maybe we stumble for thirty seconds just 

to make sure we understood what the other 

person is saying. I think they’re so skilled

that it doesn’t even cross their minds. 

cohEN: How do you see the future of the 

ISS? 

SMITh: I think it’s going to be a fantastic

platform to continue to do our basic

research. We’re just getting our legs

under us in terms of good research. Now

that we’re talking about getting out of

low-Earth orbit, ISS is going to be an

international platform for us all advancing 

together to wherever we decide to go: nearEarth objects, the moon, Mars, whatever

we do. This incredible infrastructure is in 

place. I think ISS is the perfect place to

try different operational techniques and

technologies before you venture away. 

cohEN: I’d say the space station has 

been a huge technical achievement 

and a great example of international 

cooperation. 

SMITh: I have a couple of pictures of the

space station on the wall in front of me. It’s 

really amazing what was achieved, building 

something that’s the size of a football field

that generates the power to support six

humans in space. In terms of contributions 

to world peace, it’s been a huge asset. I think 

the best way to understand that is to talk

to people who are in their middle to late

sixties. They figured out how to do the space 

station and decided that, “You know what, 

we’d better work with the Russians on this 

or we’re not going to have a space station.” 

Those are the people that experienced the big 

turnaround. Those of us in the program now 

travel freely to see our friends in Moscow. 

It wasn’t too long ago that that would have 

been unheard of. It’s interesting to talk to 

some of the NASA personnel who traveled 

there in the Apollo–Soyuz time. Everyone 

was watching each other very carefully and 

was a little bit skeptical. Now there is none of 

that. We hold thousands of teleconferences 

a year, freely working together to make life 

better on Earth. That’s been a huge benefit 

to all of us. 

cohEN: What would you say are the 

biggest challenges coming up for the 

space station program? 

SMITh: There are a certain number of 

partners in the ISS program. I’m sure some 

non-partners are interested in flying with 

us to the moon and to Mars. So it will be 

really exciting and challenging to bring in 

even more cultures. There are some major 

countries in the world that are not part 

of ISS that I’m sure would be interested 

in being part of the next great adventure. 

cohEN: Like the Chinese? 

SMITh: Well, the two big countries that are 

not part of the ISS are China and India. 

The United Kingdom is not a major player; 

Australia isn’t; South America does not 

have countries involved. But participation 

in the next great adventure is going to 

come from all over the world. ●

NOW THAT WE’RE TALKING ABOUT getting out of low-Earth

orbit, ISS IS GOING TO BE AN international platform FOR US

ALL ADvANCING TOGETHER TO wherever we decide to go:

NEAR-EARTH OBJECTS, THE MOON, MARS, whatever we do. 

24 | ASK MAGAZINE
human Spaceflight and

Sci

BY H

e

OWARD R

n

OSS 

ce

Intentionally igniting 

a fire inside the Space 

Shuttle might seem like a bad 

idea, but done safely and correctly, it 

could answer all sorts of seemingly simple 

questions, such as, “Would a candle burn 

in zero gravity?” Several university doctoral 

programs had asked this very question for 

years, and nobody—not even microgravityscience experts—could agree on an answer. 

What we never expected was that the 

answer would lead to even more 

answers, and some remarkable 

scientific discoveries and 

advancements.

This still 

capture from a 

video shows a probe 

that incorporates lightscattering technology 

being tested at the 

National Institutes 

of Health. 

Photo Credit: NASA 

A candle 

burning on 

Earth (left) versus 

in microgravity. 

Photo Credit: NASA 

SToRy | ASK MAGAZINE | 25
Small Flame, Big Discoveries

What started as a trivial hallway conversation between me and 

a couple of grad students eventually grew into something more 

concrete. My colleagues, Dr. Daniel Dietrich of Glenn Research 

Center and Professor James T’ien of Case Western Reserve 

University, presented the idea as a simple high-school education 

experiment when, in fact, we didn’t know the answer ourselves. 

The idea sold. 

Since the shuttle had flown so few combustion experiments, 

we had to put the candle inside a nonflammable Lexan box, 

which was then placed inside a glovebox already installed on 

the orbiter. We drilled some holes in the candle box (the candle 

needs oxygen to burn), included a hot-wire igniter for the crew 

to operate, and away we went.

What we discovered was a candle would indeed burn in 0 g: 

unlike lit candles on Earth, it had a round flame, except near the 

bottom where the candle wax quenched it. It burned for about 

45 seconds (we had a bet going about how long it would burn; 

I lost—I had 20 seconds, Dan had 40 seconds). But later we 

realized the time it burned may have been limited by the number 

of holes in the box, preventing oxygen from the glovebox from 

easily getting to the flame. Would the candle burn longer if we 

used a different design?

We had also wanted to study two candles facing each other 

(unlike a birthday cake where the candles stand next to each 

other in parallel lines, here the candles were on a single line with 

the wicks facing each other). To our surprise, we learned that 

once we lit one candle, we couldn’t light the other, because the 

oxygen concentration near the second one was too low—the 

first candle effectively used up the necessary amount of oxygen. 

We were lucky to get a chance to try the experiment again on 

Mir, and the Russians allowed us to switch from a Lexan box to 

a wire-mesh one, which was much more open. But they required 

us to fly oxygen sensors with the experiment if we wanted to get it 

on board. We used commercial off-the-shelf sensors. They didn’t 

work well in flight, but their mere presence did allow us to get 

approved and onto Mir. 

This time we learned that a candle that burned for about 

10 minutes on Earth burned for 45 minutes (not seconds!) in 

space once we got rid of the Lexan box. The flame was incredibly 

weak (about 5 watts in space compared with 50 watts here on 

Earth), but it could survive a very long time. 

During the experiment with the wire-mesh box, we asked 

crewmembers to turn the lights on and off. What we found when 

we did that is all the candle wax had melted, but it didn’t drip off the 

candle because there was no gravity to pull it down. With the lights 

off, it was possible to see these incredibly fast, thermal, capillarydriven flows—essentially aerosol spray—inside that wax melt. 

At the end of one of these Mir experiments, Astronaut 

Shannon Lucid turned on the lights and said, “I see something 

that looks like a dandelion there, sitting there. I will take a picture 

of it, as well as make a drawing of what I see, in case the camera 

fails.” This happened right after the flame went out. Now, on Mir, 

you had 10 minutes of communication (“comm”) time followed 

by 70 minutes of no communication. So right at the end of her 

comm she said, “Can you tell me what that is?” Suddenly all 

the lights lit up from Moscow with people (especially those in 

safety) wanting to know, What is that thing? In the 70 minutes 

we had, we came to the conclusion it was a fog of condensed 

water vapor, which we told to Shannon and those in safety, and 

everyone seemed satisfied. Months later, when we saw the pictures 

and video, we came to a different conclusion: it was probably a 

cloud of condensed candle wax. Once the flame went away, the 

aerosols inside the wax melt condensed into a little round ball of 

flammable material. 

Fortunately at the time, when her comm time came around 

again, we told Shannon to turn on the fan inside the glovebox 

to blow the cloud of material into a filter in the glovebox. The 

whole event served as a realistic reminder of the need for careful 

post-fire cleanup operations. From this we learned that if there 

ever were a fire on a spacecraft, the crew would need to worry 

about the safety of their operations even after the fire was out. 

Later, there was a chance the agency would let us fly the 

experiment again. Since the oxygen sensors had not worked, 

we really wanted to know what the oxygen concentration was 

while the candle burned. We couldn’t find sensors that were 

minuscule enough to avoid hurting the delicate flame in 0 g that 

were also reliable over a wide temperature range, so we ended 

up building our own oxygen sensor. The same was true for the 

carbon-dioxide concentration: we designed, built, and tested our 

own non-intrusive sensor to measure the CO2. We were all set to 

fly, but the flight opportunity got canceled. 

Dan began to wonder what else we could do with what we 

had created. Somebody said, “Well, you need to know oxygen 

and carbon dioxide concentrations for metabolic analysis during 

exercise, and our sensors are really small—could we integrate them 

into a mask?” So he led a team that did just that. He began talking 

and working with a doctor at University Hospitals in Cleveland, 

Ohio. The resulting Portable Unit for Metabolic Analysis, or 

PUMA, ended up weighing less than two pounds and could 

collect and transmit data wirelessly in real time. 

Fast-forward a number of years and a number of tests—

we showed it to flight surgeons, demonstrated it could work at 

2 1⁄2 atmospheres underwater during NASA Extreme Environment 

Mission Operations—and eventually a private company and the 

U.S. Navy became interested. Today, PUMA has been successfully 

used for testing oxygen and carbon dioxide concentrations, 

monitoring metabolic analysis, and testing for hypoxia in pilots 

flying at high altitudes. 

So you start by wondering, “Will a candle burn in 0 g?” 

26 | ASK MAGAZINE
A Lexan 

box (left) from 

the original candle 

experiment and a 

wire-mesh box later 

used on Mir.

Photo Credit: NASA 

Photo Credit: NASA 

SO yOu START By 

wONDERING, “wIll A 

cANDlE BuRN IN 0 g?” AND yOu 

END up EIGHTEEN yEARS lATER 

HElpING pIlOTS uNDERSTAND 

THEIR pHySIOlOGIcAl STATuS 

wHEN FlyING AT HIGH 

AlTITuDE.

The 

Portable Unit 

for Metabolic 

Analysis.

Photo Credit: NASA 

ASK MAGAZINE | 27
HowArd ross is currently the chief technologist at Glenn 

Research Center, as well as the director of the Office of 

Technology Partnerships and Planning. Among his previous 

roles, he once served at NASA Headquarters as deputy associate 

administrator in the Office of Biological and Physical Research 

and helped select many spaceflight experiments that flew on the 

Space Shuttle and International Space Station. This assignment 

was based on his service as a principal investigator and project 

scientist on many microgravity experiments.

and you end up eighteen years later helping pilots understand 

their physiological status when flying at high altitude. Along the 

way, our descriptions of this silly little experiment packed the 

house at combustion-science symposiums where, honestly, much 

more important research was being discussed. Scientific American

carried a photo of the Mir flame, and references were made to it 

in the Encyclopedia Britannica’s annual updates. Professor T’ien 

tasked graduate students with modeling what was happening with 

the 0 g candle flame, and this effort proved far more challenging 

than anyone imagined. 

From Fire to Fluids

Another experiment made possible by the Space Shuttle started 

by wondering how colloids—the small particles that float around 

in paints, shampoo, soaps, detergent, milk, etc.—actually

aggregate, or condense. On Earth, they tend to sediment over 

time, so producers of these products need to acquire stabilizers to 

help keep the colloids in place. But would they exhibit the same 

behavior in space?

When we flew them on board the shuttle, the colloids created 

weird, treelike dendritic structures not normally seen on Earth. 

Some things that had never previously crystallized actually 

crystallized in space. And when the colloids did separate from 

each other, they did so under conditions completely contrary to 

the theory being used at the time. They would segregate under 

conditions far different from what anybody predicted. 

During one of those experiments, Rafat Ansari, a project 

scientist who looked at the light scatterings where we measured 

particle concentrations, discovered that what he was seeing acted 

the same way as his father’s cataracts. Rafat realized that a cataract 

is simply a collection of particles that have come together just 

like the colloids he was seeing in space. He used the measuring 

technology that we flew in space, miniaturized it, and started 

applying it to see if he could detect the formation of cataracts 

very early on. Turns out, he could detect it—ten times sooner 

than any other device that existed on the market at the time. In 

2003, the National Eye Institute featured this device to Congress. 

And in 2009, it wasn’t just the National Eye Institute but the 

entire National Institutes of Health citing it as one of their top 

six technology advances in the past year. 

Afterward, I asked Rafat why he became a scientist. He told 

me that when he was a seven-year-old in Pakistan, he saw people 

walking on the moon, and he said, “That’s absolutely amazing. 

I want to go into science because of that.” Human spaceflight 

touches people in ways we don’t expect. 

Unexpected Outcomes

These are just a few examples of how scientific curiosity, no 

matter how trivial it may seem at the beginning, can manifest 

itself in unexpected ways. This is an important aspect of science 

in general: what you learn along the way can end up being 

applied very differently than you ever anticipated. And space also 

teaches us to think differently, which makes those who work on 

these experiments a needed commodity even in environments 

outside space.

If there is any lesson in all of this, it’s to not be afraid to ask 

what seems to be a really simple question; you never know where 

it will lead. And always look at your own life for motivation to 

create solutions to common problems.

The Space Shuttle played a big role for thirty years in helping 

foster scientific discoveries and technological innovations such 

as these. The International Space Station and countless other 

missions will help us continue to do so in the future. As long as 

scientists continue to ask questions, and the space program flies 

the resulting experiments, big discoveries can come from very 

small beginnings—and the impact of human spaceflight can 

continue to surprise us. 

Each time we flew it felt like a personal Olympics: years 

of preparation for a few moments or days when proof would 

be forthcoming on whether our efforts—and yours—were 

worthwhile. I can say unequivocally and in every case, yes, they 

were. I want to thank everyone who played a part in making the 

shuttle fly so successfully for so long. I will always be grateful 

to all of you. ●

28 | ASK MAGAZINE
Weaving a Knowledge Web 

BY ASK EDITORIAL STAFF

In March 2011, some two dozen representatives from space agencies and related organizations 

around the world meet in the top-floor conference room of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) 

Paris headquarters. Outside the windows lining one wall, flags representing ESA’s nineteen member 

nations stir in the breeze. A painting of two human figures floating on a background of stars and 

galactic dust—an image of space exploration—hangs at one end of the room. Space exploration 

is why the members of the International Project Management Committee (IPMC) have gathered 

here. The group meets twice a year to develop ways to share the project management expertise that 

successful space programs depend on.

INSIghT | ASK MAGAZINE | 29
The space agencies of Germany, France, Italy, Czech Republic,

Canada, South Korea, South Africa, and the United States are

represented. Committee members from JAXA, the Japanese

space agency, have sent their regrets; the aftereffects of the recent 

devastating tsunami have kept them home. Ed Hoffman, director 

of NASA’s Academy for Program/Project and Engineering

Leadership, chairs the meeting.

The committee is just over a year old. Prior to NASA’s

2010 Project Management (PM) Challenge in Galveston, Texas, 

Hoffman asked Lewis Peach to help bring the international space 

community together. The result was two days of panels at the

PM Challenge featuring senior leaders from space agencies around 

the world and focusing on multinational aerospace projects.

Participants in that international track stayed an extra half day

to explore the possibility of forming the committee that became 

the IPMC.

The value of such a committee was clear to Hoffman

and the others at that meeting. International collaboration

on aerospace projects is increasingly the norm. Most efforts

today are multinational, bringing together space agencies,

universities, and industries from around the world. And

carrying out ambitious and expensive future science and

exploration missions will undoubtedly require the resources

of many nations. Those missions will demand that all the

partners involved possess high-level project management

and collaborative skills. An international committee focused

on sharing the collective project management knowledge of

many space agencies could help make that expertise widely

available and build some of the relationships that collaboration 

depends on.

Bettina Böhm, head of human resources for ESA and now 

vice-chair of the IPMC, explains ESA’s interest in the committee, 

noting that the need to collaborate with others is becoming

more and more important and that, at the time of that first,

exploratory meeting, ESA had just carried out a study on new

and better ways to prepare people for program and project

management. Bringing experienced people together to share 

practical learning was clearly one valuable approach.

At that initial meeting, the group established some 

foundational norms, namely, inclusiveness, mutual respect, and 

the need to show practical benefits.

The IPMC had its first official meeting a month after the 

2010 PM Challenge in conjunction with the International 

Astronautical Federation’s (IAF) spring meeting in Paris. It 

became an IAF Administrative Committee. That official link 

with IAF’s more than two hundred organizations that are active 

in space in nearly sixty countries gives the committee visibility and 

the potential for widespread influence. IPMC meetings since have 

been coordinated with IAF events: the International Astronautical 

Conference in Prague in the fall of 2010 and now in Paris again, 

where the IAF was holding its sixtieth-anniversary celebration 

and planning for the next conference.

THE VAluE OF SucH A cOMMITTEE wAS 

clEAR TO HOFFMAN AND THE OTHERS 

AT THAT MEETING. INTERNATIONAl 

cOllABORATION ON AEROSpAcE 

pROJEcTS IS INcREASINGly THE NORM. 

MOST EFFORTS TODAy ARE MulTINATIONAl, 

BRINGING TOGETHER SpAcE AGENcIES, 

uNIVERSITIES, AND INDuSTRIES FROM 

AROuND THE wORlD.

30 | ASK MAGAZINE
Böhm says these early meetings have been mainly—and 

appropriately—devoted to developing relationships, and creating 

and maintaining trust and openness. There have been some 

concrete actions taken, though. The most ambitious so far is the 

International Project Management course held at Kennedy Space 

Center in early 2011. Participants in the five-day course included 

fifteen people from ten IPMC agencies and organizations. At 

this Paris committee meeting, Andrea Cotellessa, an ESA staff 

member who attended the course, describes his experience. His 

review is positive (as were the assessments of other attendees), 

but he does suggest that some of the sessions were too much 

from a NASA point of view, with little attention to the different 

experiences of other agencies. The committee discussed ways 

of bringing more cases and lessons from other agencies into the 

curriculum. The second International Project Management 

course at Kennedy was held in July.

The committee has also recognized the importance of 

reaching out to young professionals—the engineers, managers, 

and scientists starting their careers—who will have the privilege 

of shaping international space-exploration missions over the next 

several decades and will face the challenges of those ambitious 

space programs. Young professionals have been invited to the 

meetings as observers, and the committee is considering a proposal 

for a young-professionals workshop and young-professional 

membership.

Emphasizing the need for continuing action, Böhm suggests 

that at least a couple of hours of every future meeting should 

focus on an issue in a way that results in specific, useful activity. 

Her emphasis on concrete action resonates with other members 

of the committee, who know that the benefits they can bring to 

their organizations justify their investments of time and travel.

The committee’s key challenge, says Hoffman, is to learn how 

to share the right expertise in the right ways among agencies that 

differ in size, experience, and how they approach aspects of the 

work. Continuing activities and conversation among members, 

like Cotellessa’s International Project Management course critique, 

are helping to develop a fuller understanding of member agencies’ 

practices, which will make effective learning possible at future 

International Project Management courses and in other settings. 

Another challenge is how to keep committee members who 

are scattered around the globe productively connected, given that 

they meet formally only twice a year.

That seems to be happening. Relationships formed here are 

proving to be the foundation for gatherings of small groups to 

work on issues of specific concern to their agencies. For instance, 

DLR, the Germany Aerospace Center, brought practitioners of 

several space agencies together at a small PM Challenge–like event, 

something unlikely to have happened without DLR’s participation 

in NASA’s PM Challenge and connections developed through 

the IPMC.

The committee will meet next at the International 

Astronautical Conference in Capetown in October. It is still 

very much at the beginning of its efforts. Its contribution to 

building the knowledge and networks to support twenty-firstcentury space exploration will no doubt take a variety of forms, 

likely including joint conferences and courses and a range of 

collaborative initiatives that arise from members’ discussions 

of their shared concerns and challenges. It is not possible to say 

exactly where its commitment to inclusiveness, respect, and the 

pursuit of practical benefits will take the IPMC, but it hopes 

to have a significant role in improving international aerospace 

learning and cooperation. ●

ASK MAGAZINE | 31
Hoffman: What makes Mars so fascinating?

Manning: The Viking landers that arrived on Mars in the

1970s did sampling of the soil that was believed to tell us that

the surface of Mars appeared to be a dead, sterile, boring place.

But the Viking orbiters showed tantalizing hints that water

may have coursed over the surface in huge deluges. Starting in

the mid-90s, the Mars Global Surveyor mission showed signs

that water may play an active role on Mars even in geologically

recent time. We see what we think is water ice along with the

CO2, and we see a dynamic atmosphere with huge dust storms.

In the early nineties, I had this fantastic opportunity to become

chief engineer for Mars Pathfinder. It allowed me to take all of

my childhood desires, and all of the things I admired from the

ten or twelve years of engineering, and put them together with

a small team to build a vehicle to move around on the surface

of Mars. 

Schmidt: I never expected that I would end up leading a

mission to Mars. I started in the European Space Agency in

the early eighties as a scientist. I sat in my office doing data

analysis, trying to conceive new ideas for new measurements

of electric fields, magnetic fields, particles in space. Eventually,

I became the project scientist for a mission called Cluster. I

spent fourteen years working on that mission. We lost it within

twenty seconds after launch in ’96. When the Russian Mars

’96 mission failed, some of the big European member states 

of the agency said, “We have lost so much money, so much 

knowledge, so many instruments on Mars ’96, we Europeans 

have to do our own mission.” I was asked whether I would 

take over the preparation of Mars Express. At that point, 

nobody knew whether we could launch in 2003, whether the

150 million that we finally found would be sufficient to build 

an orbiter, launch, fly, and operate it. That preparation period 

lasted until maybe early 2000, when we said, “Yes, we could 

launch in 2003. Yes, we can do it with 150 million.” At that 

point, I became Mars Express manager.

It was the first deep-space mission which we did alone. 

Mars Express was a fully European spacecraft operated by us 

and implemented by us, with some NASA instruments on 

board. We did not know whether we had enough experience 

to carry it through, so we took quite a careful approach. I 

said to my people at that time, “When I wake you up at 

two o’clock in the morning, without any hesitation you 

have to give me your ten biggest risks.” We built up lots of 

margin. Then politicians told us that we could not fly to 

Mars without a lander. All the reserves we had built up went 

to build Beagle 2, the lander. 

Manning: That’s a lot of pressure, having the first Mars mission 

with a lander and the first mission that you had to do from 

scratch. 

From Masters with Masters: 

Rob Manning and Rudi Schmidt

In February 2011, Academy of Program/Project and Engineering Leadership Director Ed Hoffman 

sat down with Rudi Schmidt, from the European Space Agency (ESA), and NASA’s Rob Manning 

at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) as part of the Academy’s Masters with Masters series.

Dr. Schmidt, the head of ESA’s Telecommunications Satellite Programs Department, was the project 

manager for several of ESA’s Directorate of Science and Robotic Exploration Programs, including 

Mars Express, Venus Express, and Gaia. Manning was formerly the Mars Exploration Program 

chief engineer at JPL and is currently the chief engineer for the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL).

32 | ASK MAGAZINE | INSIghT
Schmidt: We had little budget and a small team. At that time 

there was a big mission called Rosetta, which was supposed to 

be launched about the same time. They would have all of the 

development technology and the Mars Express team would buy 

the current units. In the end, our small team was much more 

efficient than the bigger Rosetta team. We overtook Rosetta in 

terms of development, and the small Mars Express team started to 

drive the technology. It was quite challenging. In several instances 

you don’t have enough background to make a decision, but you 

know that the launch is coming and the decision has to be made. 

Manning: My first Mars mission was Mars Pathfinder. We had 

a tiny budget, compared to the Viking missions. The best thing 

is having a small team. We were allowed to work in the shadow 

of a very large project, the Cassini mission. We were told to 

work in the faster-better-cheaper mode. We had to do a lander 

with very few, not-very-complicated requirements. It made for 

a very exciting environment because a small team could work 

very efficiently. Like Rosetta and Mars Express, we had Cassini 

technology that we could borrow from, but we beat them to the 

launchpad mostly because the planetary orbit demanded it but 

also because we were small and much more agile. Unlike your 

project, we didn’t have a lot of eyes looking at us. 

Hoffman: How does a program change when you’re managing 

a small team?

Manning: You constrain the mission objectives, keep the system 

as simple as you dare, but no simpler, and give yourself healthy 

reserves. We initially had 50 percent cost reserves. Obviously, 

from NASA’s perspective you don’t know what you’re doing if 

you’re asking for 50 percent reserves. That’s correct, we didn’t. 

We had never done a low-cost lander and rover before. We spent 

every penny of that 50 percent, by the way. On the other hand, 

the risk model we were working with was not the same one we 

would use today. We had very little redundancy, with just a 

few key places where we felt there were high-risk components: 

pyrotechnic devices, the radio transmitter, and a few other 

places.

Schmidt: After Mars Express, I am a fan of small project teams 

because they are efficient. A small team driven by launch date 

and constrained by cost has to be innovative. Our starting point 

was different from Rob’s because Mars Express is the child of a 

failure. We could not fail again. The inspector general reviewed 

us over and over again to make sure our margins, reserves, 

design assumptions, and requirements were all tight. In the end, 

it worked out well.

Manning: Larger projects have more instruments, they have 

a more complex mission definition, there’s just more you have 

to manage. It’s not just a scale-up. There are more interfaces 

that you have to deal with. As a consequence, you have to 

The Mars Science Laboratory rover, Curiosity, 

being prepared for March 2011 testing in a 

25-foot-diameter space-simulation chamber.

ASK MAGAZINE | 33Photo Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
use more rigorous systems engineering techniques so that 

the various things that are going on in parallel succeed and 

come back and meet you at the end. For a smaller mission, 

you have fewer things to manage. As a consequence, you can 

apply different management disciplines to improve efficiency 

without necessarily changing the risk posture. In some cases—

for example, MSL—we were asked to put a lot of redundancy 

in, approaching the redundancy of some traditional, large, 

flagship missions. That means you have twice as much 

equipment to build, more to integrate, more different 

permutations of testing to do. There’s a lot more complexity 

you have to manage. 

Schmidt: I’m not sure I fully agree with you. My budget 

following Mars Express was about five times Mars Express. 

The project team size was far from five times bigger than 

the Mars Express project. Instead of twelve people, it was 

seventeen. I like small, horizontal teams. That means people 

close to the project manager, a straight information path 

from the lowest member in the project team up to the project 

manager. Each person in the team feels responsible and knows 

that they have immediate access to the project manager in 

case of a problem.

Hoffman: Do you learn most when things don’t go right?

Manning: The great thing about failure is that people start 

believing you when you say there are issues you need to solve 

and you need the resources to solve them. In a project that is 

so cost-constrained that they can’t afford to even assess the 

risk, you’re getting on thin ice. You need to have not just done 

the work, but to have it reviewed with independent people 

who make sure that you didn’t forget anything. MER [Mars 

Exploration Rover] was much more complex than Pathfinder, 

and we were paying not just for hardware, but for additional 

work and double checking. 

Hoffman: Rob, when you were going through the Mars 

Exploration Rover lessons learned, you said that one of the 

things that stuck out to you was sometimes you just need to 

stop and reflect.

Manning: Yes, having a little extra help so that there are key 

people who really understand the design and you can stop 

and ask, “Did we really think this through?” On Phoenix, 

even though the design was directly based on the Mars Polar 

Lander, we bought ourselves some time and people to think 

through the entry, descent, and landing problem. We said, 

“Let’s take the design and analyze and test it as if it were brand 

new.” In the process, we learned new things about Phoenix 

and about Mars Polar Lander.

Hoffman: How do you balance managing risk and being able 

to innovate?

Manning: If we can get to our objective with something that’s 

tried and true, we will do it. But if there’s a new technology 

that we need to succeed, we will put our heart and soul into 

making it happen. A lot of people say, “Why didn’t you throw 

this technology in as well?” Well, because I can do this mission 

with a technology where I’ve already retired the risks. In the case 

of MER, we said we are going to use all that technology from 

Mars Pathfinder and adapt it with minimal or no changes. In 

fact, all the hardware had to be redesigned in order to meet the 

mission objectives. Less than 1 percent of the total mass of what 

we launched was heritage hardware from prior missions. We 

had to change everything a little bit to deal with larger landed 

masses. Even so, the knowledge of what was learned on Mars 

Pathfinder directly reduced the risk on MER, but it did add to 

cost. You just have to be quick on your feet and willing to learn. 

When you find information that tells you your assumptions 

were wrong, don’t hold on to them. Throw them away, learn the 

new ones, and go forward.

Photo Credit: ESA/VIRTIS/INAF-IASF/Obs. de Paris-LESIA

This false-color view was obtained 

by the Visible and Infrared Thermal 

Imaging Spectrometer onboard 

ESA’s Venus Express.

34 | ASK MAGAZINE
Schmidt: The plan was that we procure recurring units 

developed by Rosetta and that we re-fly the instruments of 

Mars ’96. The reality was the scientists said, “We need new 

instruments because we learned so much in building the first 

set of instruments that now we’ll do it differently.” We couldn’t 

stop the scientists developing new things because the payload 

was under member-state control. One day, relatively late in the 

project, the scientists came with the idea to change the orbit. 

This is the last thing you want because all your computations, 

all of your modeling, all your operational documents are written 

for a certain orbit. I must admit, quite often we found what 

I originally thought was a pretty stupid idea turned out to be 

implementable one way or another. But it doesn’t make your life 

easy if you keep changing what you thought is a solid goal post. 

That’s the result of working with people. People change their 

mind and you have to adapt. 

Hoffman: Aerobraking is obviously one of the breakthrough 

technologies in your area of expertise.

Manning: The great thing about entry, descent, and landing is 

that there is a heritage to build upon—a technological heritage, 

not a hardware heritage. The Viking missions developed 

something called SLA 561V, which is similar to the sprayon ablative heat-shield material used on the shuttle external 

tanks. This material was validated and tested thoroughly in 

the years leading up to the Viking launch. We were able to 

adapt that technology to very different conditions. We had 

to make it thicker, we had to redefine the formula after the 

twenty-year hiatus, but we used that same technology, the 

parachute technology, the whole structure of how to get rid of 

your heat shield and get out of your vehicle, undress yourself 

in a few seconds in a very dynamic environment. On MSL, 

technology that we had relied upon for many years for many 

missions suddenly didn’t work. Mars Science Laboratory has a 

four-and-a-half-meter-diameter heat shield, the largest circular 

heat shield anyone’s ever built. When MSL flies through the 

Mars atmosphere, its radiative heating environment and the 

shear dynamics are so great that the old technology just doesn’t 

work. So we had to come up with a whole new technology and 

adapt the PICA heat-shield material that we used on Stardust. 

That was a huge left turn, but it was done with our eyes wide 

open. For a project manager, it’s very scary going from the 

devil you knew to a devil you don’t, but this devil has worked 

out very well so far. 

Schmidt: Because Mars Express moved forward nicely, the 

project team had the idea to build a second Mars mission for 

launch in 2005 with all the leftovers. We naïvely assumed it was 

going to be a second Mars mission. But the director said we have 

to do a competition, we have to open it to all communities. So 

the ideas came back, and what did we get? A Venus mission. We 

needed a new solar array. We needed a completely new thermal 

system. So we bought ourselves a lot of problems, but in the end 

we also made this mission successful.

Hoffman: How do you work effectively when you have so many 

different stakeholders involved in something that’s naturally 

complex?

Schmidt: The needs of all the member states involved in the 

mission are a priority. It means you’re not always getting a certain 

piece of hardware from the best company; you have to make 

compromises, you have to be sure that enough money went to 

various countries according to certain computations. It’s a big 

fraction of my daily business; it’s the price of being a European. 

And because the cultures are different, the experience of the 

companies is different. And you have to build up an industry 

in new member states. We recently had a case where one of the 

project engineers was assigned to a company as a kind of resident. 

He trained them, he showed them, he explained to them, and in 

the end the hardware came—a week late, but working perfectly. 

Photo Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum)

Elevation of Ulyxis Rupes created using 

a digital terrain model obtained from the 

high-resolution stereo camera on ESA’s 

Mars Express spacecraft. 

ASK MAGAZINE | 35
One of a super-resolution stereo pair of “Twin Peaks” 

taken by the imager for Mars Pathfinder.

36 | ASK MAGAZINE
Photo Credit: NASA/JPL/Timothy Parker

AFTER MARS ExpRESS, I AM A FAN OF SMAll pROJEcT TEAMS BEcAuSE THEy 

ARE EFFIcIENT. A SMAll TEAM DRIVEN By lAuNcH DATE AND cONSTRAINED 

By cOST HAS TO BE INNOVATIVE. OuR STARTING pOINT wAS DIFFERENT FROM 

ROB’S BEcAuSE MARS ExpRESS IS THE cHIlD OF A FAIluRE. wE cOulD NOT FAIl 

AGAIN. THE INSpEcTOR GENERAl REVIEwED uS OVER AND OVER AGAIN TO MAKE 

SuRE OuR MARGINS, RESERVES, DESIGN ASSuMpTIONS, AND REquIREMENTS 

wERE All TIGHT. IN THE END, IT wORKED OuT wEll.

ASK MAGAZINE | 37
The next time around this company will have a good chance to 

win the competition.

Hoffman: Rob, obviously NASA has been increasingly involved 

in international missions. What are the benefits?

Manning: From a parochial perspective, sharing the cost 

of a project. We have been looking at collaborating on a 

Mars sample return for years. We have European science 

instruments on board Mars Science Laboratory. We aren’t 

as good as Europeans are at managing these complicated 

relationships. We are used to being able to solve the problems 

directly, finding the best, cheapest company, and having the 

control on our side. But the flip side is that having a partner 

can produce significant contributions. Our biggest challenge 

is how to do technically challenging and exciting, high-return 

missions across international boundaries, especially given 

ITAR [International Traffic in Arms Regulations]. It can be 

done. The Huygens-Cassini mission is a perfect example. It 

was a fantastic relationship.

Schmidt: I think it is relatively easy for European scientists to 

build international teams because they have to bring in their 

own money. I have seen PIs [principal investigators] coming 

in with a team proposal which included scientists from all 

continents. I am impressed by the capabilities of the scientists to 

put together these extremely complicated instrument proposals 

with complicated team structures behind them.

Manning: The things we want to do now are harder and harder: 

bringing things back from another planet, going to asteroids, 

going and staying at Jupiter, landing on Europa. Cost sharing 

makes a lot of sense. 

Hoffman: Both of you have work that you love. What is it you 

love the most about what you do?

Schmidt: I am really grateful the European Space Agency 

gave me the opportunity to work on the most fascinating 

missions. We had the first interplanetary mission under our 

own control, and we went to Venus with Venus Express. We 

had a Mars orbiter, we had a Venus orbiter, and then, of course, 

we have the Earth-observation program. So we monitored three 

planets totally different in terms of atmosphere evolution and 

environment evolution.

Manning: The best part was being there for the revolution of 

rediscovering Mars. The whole unfolding from one mission to 

another, including Mars Express, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, 

the Odyssey mission, on and on, every mission has turned over 

a whole page of understanding about this planet. And we have 

gone from an almost cartoonish view of what Mars was to an 

encyclopedic understanding of Mars. Of course, each new page 

brings up new questions. Being part of that revolution has been 

very exciting for me. ●

THE THINGS wE wANT TO DO NOw ARE HARDER AND HARDER: BRINGING THINGS 

BAcK FROM ANOTHER plANET, GOING TO ASTEROIDS, GOING AND STAyING AT 

JupITER, lANDING ON EuROpA. cOST SHARING MAKES A lOT OF SENSE. 

38 | ASK MAGAZINE
Even a genius team can never anticipate every 

possible risk that might occur on a project. Before 

unexpected risks rear their ugly heads, create a 

mitigation plan for dealing with the risk of not 

knowing what could happen.

Expecting THE

BY TARALYN FRASquERI-MOLINA

SToRy | ASK MAGAZINE | 39
In December of 2009, I had the opportunity to manage a great 

project. It was a huge renovation and technological upgrade to the 

main theater at the Walt Disney Animation Studios in Burbank, 

California. It would be the biggest project in terms of budget, 

schedule, and crew that I had managed in my Disney career. This 

project would also be an opportunity to show what serious project 

management could do and how necessary it was.

Since 2007, I and my media-engineering team had been going 

through all the phases and processes of a new project management 

life cycle. Before then, we hadn’t had any standardized 

methodologies. That lack of structure was contributing to project 

failures. When I was handed the project management reins and 

tasked with making some big changes, the first thing I did, after 

wigging out, was create a structure and a methodology that would 

work for my team and the kinds of projects we delivered. 

This large-scale shift didn’t occur overnight. I worked 

diligently to discover what project management meant for 

us, and to uncover what processes worked and didn’t work. 

Sometimes I’d ask my team for direct feedback about our 

process. They didn’t mince words about the things they didn’t 

like. Sometimes we learned by making mistakes together and 

realizing a change was necessary. Truthfulness and pinpoint 

criticism helped me make an honest assessment of my skill level 

as a project manager, how mature our project management 

system was, and where it (and I) needed to be. One thing that 

came from this introspection was a Change Control Board, or 

CCB. Team members were used to solving problems on their 

own and not having to make a pit stop, pitch their idea, and 

wait for someone else’s approval. In order to keep a lid on scope 

creep and gold plating, and to keep track of great ideas we 

couldn’t take advantage of immediately, a CCB was necessary. 

Our CCB is both formal and informal, structured enough to 

handle changes in complex projects, but flexible enough to 

approve changes that can add value right away. 

Once the methodology and processes were in place and my 

colleagues and I started to follow a structured plan, we began to 

have little project management wins. We started to shrink how 

far behind schedule we had been. Then we started to meet our 

deadlines, which eventually led to us meeting our project schedule 

as a whole. Completed projects began to cost less. We were still 

over budget, but less and less. Soon we were meeting all project 

costs, which eventually led to us coming in under budget for our 

entire fiscal-year portfolio. Our stakeholders’ frowns and grumbles 

turned to smiles and praise. My team could clearly see the value 

of project management. Over time I gained their buy-in, a big 

win for me considering they had been used to running without 

a project management plan for so long.

From 2007 to 2009, I improved upon and streamlined our 

early structure, methodology, and processes. When the main 

theater renovation came around in late 2009, it was a chance to 

showcase what I had developed and show what media-engineering 

project management was all about. 

Essentially, the intent of the main theater project was to 

remove all the old stuff and put in new stuff. The space was 

important; it was our only theater and could not be structurally 

changed. The schedule was critical; the theater was regularly 

used to support production and therefore could not be out of 

commission for more than a few days. It would be a technological 

powerhouse in a 140-seat space, including a first-of-its-kind 

dual-powered screen system. The screen system was the crown 

jewel and the one feature regularly touted as the driving factor 

behind the project. This system would allow the studio to have, 

in addition to a 2-D standard screen, a 3-D stereoscopic screen, 

a key piece of equipment for all technologically advanced movie 

theaters. And we wanted to get these two types of powered screens 

to fit in a space originally engineered for one. 

Unlike a fixed screen, which is hung on the wall like a giant 

portrait (this is what you usually see in a commercial movie 

theater), a powered screen is housed in a massive metal box 

weighing around 700 lbs. The metal box contains the screen, 

which is wrapped around a huge roller, and a motor that powers 

the roller to raise and lower the screen. The box is anchored into 

the ceiling, in a fly space. The need for two of these boxes in 

one space created a significant design challenge, but the project 

delivery team worked it out, and a screen company custom-made 

what we envisioned. Our biggest hurdle cleared, it seemed we were 

on our way to project victory. All we had to do was follow the plan.

After months of talking and theorizing, the day of installation 

arrived. I should have known the day wasn’t going to go well 

when the contracted demolition and install crew showed up with 

no hauling equipment and maybe two hammers among them. 

Once all my crews (demolition, construction, electrical, 

audio/visual technicians, HVAC, fire safety, clean up) were 

settled and demolition started, I got a call from building security 

that my screens had arrived. I stepped outside and saw a massive 

flat-bed trailer with two long, wooden boxes strapped to it. 

The whole thing seemed to be as long as two city blocks! The 

delivery crew hauled the boxes into the lobby and the install 

crew started breaking everything open. Things seemingly under 

control, I stepped away from the scene for a moment to take 

care of paperwork. About thirty minutes later, the install crew 

lead was at my desk telling me there was a problem with the 

metal boxes that house the powered screens. Each box measured 

30 feet and 10.5 inches long. But the screen wall inside the main 

theater measured only 30 feet and 7 inches long. Each box was 

3.5 inches too big.

The crowning piece of the whole show, the one-of-a-kind, 

custom-made, initiating force behind the project didn’t fit. On 

the way to project victory, we had taken a major detour into a 

project nightmare. 

40 | ASK MAGAZINE
The Team looks To you, The projecT 

manager, for direcTion in Times of 

Trouble. if you are scaTTered and 

franTic, Their confidence in you 

and your abiliTy To resolve The 

problem successfully will greaTly 

be diminished.

ASK MAGAZINE | 41
While I plan for as many risks as possible with the help of the 

project delivery team, I know it’s impossible to account for every 

risk. Realizing this early in establishing a project management 

methodology, I had developed a risk-mitigation plan for unknown 

risks that would help reestablish order during a time of chaos. 

The eight-step plan is

1. Remain calm.

2. Halt the entire project or just the affected work 

momentarily and let everyone take a break.

3. Immediately gather the resolution team, which 

consists of the project manager and any of the 

people who can offer solutions; meet privately.

4. Assess risk impact.

5. Brainstorm solutions.

6. Choose a solution.

7. Obtain project sponsor approval.

8. Communicate the solution to the entire team, 

resume project, resolve risk.

This process works for the kind of projects I manage. While 

these specific steps may not work for everyone’s projects, some of 

them should be widely useful. Remaining calm is a good general 

principle. Panic is not a useful approach to any problem. The 

team looks to you, the project manager, for direction in times of 

trouble. If you are scattered and frantic, their confidence in you 

and your ability to resolve the problem successfully will greatly 

be diminished. Stopping the affected work is also a valuable rule, 

since acting before you understand the problem or its solution 

is likely to make things worse. And quickly identifying and 

gathering the individuals who can help makes sense in most 

situations; you need the right people on hand to help make the 

right decisions. Not everyone needs to be involved in solving the 

problem. Whatever the details of your plan are, having some 

kind of plan in place to handle unanticipated risks will always 

work in your favor.

Following the eight steps, the resolution team and I came 

up with a solution for handling the problem. When we looked 

at the two sets of design drawings, we noticed the actual screens 

were the correct dimensions on both sets. On one set of drawings, 

however, the box dimensions were incorrect. We pulled open the 

boxes and found over seven inches of empty space on the motor 

side. An electrical crewmember grabbed a buzz saw and safely cut 

off the excess. Now the screen boxes are up in the ceiling of the 

main theater, nestled into a perfect fit, and they haven’t caused 

any trouble since.

It wasn’t until after the solution was being implemented 

that the manager, the project engineer, and I met to talk about 

how the trouble originated. We never pointed fingers during 

project implementation, since there was still a lot of work to be 

done, and a negative crew is less effective than a happy one. After 

many discussions and honest assessments of points of failure, we 

determined that the main cause of the risk were the erroneous sets 

of drawings the manufacturer gave to the project delivery team. 

Each drawing showed a different measurement. When I would 

call the manufacturer with one set of drawings, they’d confirm 

the measurements I was talking about. But when the engineer 

called the manufacturers using the other set, the manufacturer 

would confirm that as well. And because the project delivery 

team got both drawings from the same manufacturer (who is 

still a very reputable and trusted source), we assumed they were 

identical copies and didn’t think to compare the sets.

That is the worst part about project management. The 

smallest detail, one incorrect measurement, a seemingly harmless 

assumption left unverified, can spell disaster for a project you’ve 

been planning for months or years.

I know the old saying is, “measure twice, cut once,” but 

sometimes something (usually a very small thing) slips through 

the cracks. For those times, having a pre-planned response will 

help minimize a negative impact or eliminate it altogether. 

That’s what I learned. That, and always have a buzz saw 

on hand. ●

42 | ASK MAGAZINE
Delivering clean,

Affordable power

BY BO SCHWERIN

Imagine you are about to be dropped in the middle of a remote, 

inhospitable region—say the Kalahari Desert. What would you 

want to have with you on your journey back to civilization? Food 

and water, of course, but you can only carry so much. A truck would 

help, but what would you do when it runs out of gas? Any useful 

resources would have to be portable and—ideally—sustainable. 

Bloom Energy Servers at eBay. Photo Credit: Alan Russo

SToRy | ASK MAGAZINE | 43
Ceramic fuel cells coated with special inks are at the core of the Bloom Energy Server. 

Photo Credit: Jakub Mosur

Astronauts on future long-term missions would face similar 

circumstances as those in this survivalist scenario. Consider, for 

example, a manned mission to explore the surface of Mars. Given 

the extreme distance of the journey, the high cost of carrying 

cargo into space, and the impossibility of restocking any supplies 

that run out, astronauts on Mars would need to be able to “live 

off the land” as much as possible—a daunting proposition given 

the harsh, barren Martian landscape. Not to mention the lack of 

breathable air. Another consideration is fuel; spacecraft might have 

enough fuel to get to Mars, but not enough to return. The moon 

is like a day trip on one tank of gas, but Mars is a considerably 

greater distance away.

In the course of planning and preparing for space missions, 

NASA engineers consistently run up against unprecedented 

challenges like these. Finding solutions to these challenges often 

requires the development of entirely new technologies. A number 

of these innovations—inspired by the extreme demands of the 

space environment—prove to be solutions for terrestrial challenges 

as well. While developing a method for NASA to produce oxygen 

and fuel on Mars, one engineer realized the potential for the 

technology to generate something in high demand on Earth: 

energy. 

Partnership

K.R. Sridhar was director of the Space Technologies Laboratory at 

the University of Arizona when Ames Research Center asked him 

to develop a solution for helping sustain life on Mars. Sridhar’s 

team created a fuel-cell device that could use solar power to split 

Martian water into oxygen for breathing and hydrogen for use 

as fuel for vehicles. Sridhar saw potential for another application, 

though. When the NASA Mars project ended in 2001, Sridhar’s 

team shifted focus to develop a commercial venture exploring the 

possibility of using its NASA-derived technology in reverse—

creating electricity from oxygen and fuel. 

On the surface, this sounds like standard hydrocarbon 

fuel-cell technology, in which oxygen and a hydrocarbon fuel 

such as methanol flow into the cell where an electrolyte triggers 

an electrochemical reaction, producing water, carbon dioxide, 

and electrons. Fuel cells have provided tantalizing potential 

for a clean, alternative energy source since the first device was 

invented in 1839, and NASA has used fuel cells in nearly every 

mission since the 1960s. But conventional fuel-cell technology 

features expensive, complicated systems requiring precious metals 

like platinum as a catalyst for the energy-producing reaction. 

Sridhar’s group believed it had emerged from its NASA work 

with innovations that, with further development, could result in 

an efficient, affordable fuel cell capable of supplying clean energy 

wherever it is needed. 

In 2001, Sridhar’s team founded Ion America and opened 

research and development offices on the campus of the NASA 

Research Park at Ames. There, with financial backing from 

investors who provided early funding to companies like Google, 

Genentech, Segway, and Amazon.com, the technology progressed 

and began attracting attention. In 2006, the company delivered 

a 5-kilowatt (kW) fuel-cell system to The Sim Center, a national 

center for computational engineering, at The University of 

Tennessee–Chattanooga, where the technology was successfully 

demonstrated. Now called Bloom Energy and headquartered in 

Sunnyvale, California, the company this year officially unveiled 

its NASA-inspired technology to worldwide media fanfare. 

Stackable, Clean Energy

Bloom Energy’s ES-5000 Energy Server employs the planar solidoxide fuel-cell technology Sridhar’s team originally created for the 

NASA Mars project. At the core of the server are square ceramic 

fuel cells about the size of old-fashioned computer floppy disks. 

Crafted from an inexpensive sand-like powder, each square is 

coated with special inks (lime-green ink on the anode side, black 

on the cathode side) and is capable of producing 25 watts, enough 

to power a light bulb. Stacking the cells—with cheap metal-alloy 

squares in between to serve as the electrolyte catalyst—increases 

the energy output: a stack about the size of a loaf of bread can 

44 | ASK MAGAZINE
power an average home, and a full-size Energy Server with the 

footprint of a parking space can produce 100 kW, enough to power 

a 30,000-square-foot office building or 100 average U.S. homes. 

Solid-oxide fuel cells like those in Bloom’s Energy Server 

operate at temperatures upward of 1,800°F. The high temperatures, 

efficiently harnessed by the system’s materials and design, enable 

the server to use natural gas, any number of environmentally 

friendly biogasses created from plant waste, or methane recaptured 

from landfills and farms. Fuel is fed into the system along with 

water. The high temperatures generate steam, which mixes with 

the fuel to create a reformed fuel called syngas on the surface of 

the cell. As the syngas moves across the anode, it draws oxygen 

ions from the cathode, and an electrochemical reaction results in 

electricity, water, and only a small amount of carbon dioxide—a 

process that according to Bloom is about 67 percent cleaner than 

that of a typical coal-fired power plant when using fossil fuels and 

100 percent cleaner with renewable fuels. The server can switch 

between fuels on the fly and does not require an external chemical 

reformer or the expensive precious metals, corrosive acids, or 

molten materials required by other conventional fuel-cell systems. 

The technology’s plug-and-play modular architecture allows 

users to generate more power by simply adding more servers, 

resulting in a “pay as you grow” scenario in which customers 

can increase their energy output as their needs increase. The 

server also offers the benefits of localized power generation; 

the servers are located on site and off the grid, providing fulltime power—as opposed to intermittent sources like solar and 

wind—without the inefficiencies of transmission and distribution, 

Bloom says. Future servers may even return to the original NASA 

function of using electricity to generate oxygen and hydrogen. The 

company envisions feeding electricity from wind or solar power 

into its servers along with water to produce storable hydrogen and 

oxygen. The server could then use the stored gasses to generate 

electricity during cloudy, low-wind, and nighttime conditions. 

Stored hydrogen could even be used to provide fuel for hydrogenpowered cars.

Bloom quietly installed its first commercial Energy Server 

in 2008, and since then its servers have generated more than 

11 million kilowatt hours of electricity, along with a corresponding 

14-million-lb. reduction in carbon dioxide emissions, which the 

company says is the equivalent of powering about one thousand 

American homes for one year and planting one million trees. 

Sridhar believes it will be another five to ten years before 

Bloom’s technology becomes cost-effective for home use. 

At that point, he sees the server as a solution for remote and 

underdeveloped areas in need of power. He says the company’s 

mission is “to make clean, reliable energy affordable to everyone 

in the world.”

“One in three humans lives without power,” Sridhar says. 

“Energy demand exceeds supply.” Just within the United States, 

281 gigawatts of new generating capacity—the output of 937 new 

300-megawatt power plants—will be necessary by 2025 to meet 

national energy demands, according to the U.S. Energy Information 

Administration. The Bloom Energy Server may soon offer an 

environmentally sound option for meeting that challenge, a solution 

derived from the demands of space exploration.

“NASA is a tremendous environment for encouraging 

innovation,” says Sridhar. “It’s all about solving problems that are 

seemingly unsolvable. After realizing we could make oxygen on 

Mars, making electrons on Earth seemed far less daunting. We’re 

grateful to NASA for giving us a challenge with serendipitous 

impact for mankind.” ●

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

Information as the editor for NASA’s annual Spinoff publication.

THE TEcHNOlOGy’S pluG-AND-plAy MODulAR 

ARcHITEcTuRE AllOwS uSERS TO GENERATE MORE pOwER 

By SIMply ADDING MORE SERVERS, RESulTING IN A “pAy AS 

yOu GROw” ScENARIO IN wHIcH cuSTOMERS cAN INcREASE 

THEIR ENERGy OuTpuT AS THEIR NEEDS INcREASE.

ASK MAGAZINE | 45
Title

Intro

Photo Credit: U.S. Air Force/Lou Hernandez

“Fast” is the word that best describes Tom Simon’s experience working at Marshall Space Flight 

Center on the Fast, Affordable, Science and Technology Satellite (FASTSAT), a microsatellite 

designed to carry six small experiments into space. Having served as a Space Shuttle subsystem 

engineer and a research and development project chief engineer at Johnson Space Center since 

2001, Simon went to a spaceflight project where the whole team could stand around the satellite. 

Working on a small team with a quick schedule, Simon saw nearly every major production phase 

while assisting the project’s chief engineer in the fabrication and testing of the spacecraft. 

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46 | ASK MAGAZINE | SToRy
By Matthew Koh ut

Simon came to FASTSAT as a participant in the Systems 

Engineering Leadership Development Program (SELDP), 

which provides opportunities for a small class of high-potential 

candidates to develop and improve their systems engineering 

leadership skills and technical capabilities. A core feature of 

the program is a hands-on developmental assignment away 

from a participant’s home center in a work context that differs 

significantly from his or her past experience. In Simon’s case, 

FASTSAT fit the bill.

The objective of the FASTSAT project was to demonstrate 

the capability to design, build, and test a satellite platform that 

would allow researchers from government, academia, and industry 

to conduct low-cost scientific and technology experiments on 

an autonomous satellite in space. The project was in itself an 

experiment in lean, affordable development. 

FASTSAT is intended as a multigeneration effort with future 

launches of the satellite bus with different experiments on board. 

The first FASTSAT was called HSV-01 (Huntsville-01) and had 

ASK MAGAZINE | 47
a mass of approximately 100 kg. (Future FASTSAT satellites can 

now be produced by NASA’s partner, Dynetics.) HSV-01 was 

launched as a piggyback payload on an Air Force Space Test 

Program launch vehicle. HSV-01’s payloads included Marshall’s 

NanoSail-D, the first-ever solar sail of its size to unfurl in lowEarth orbit. From Simon’s perspective, the team learned a lot 

carrying out the project at a manned spaceflight center. 

The difference in scale from the Space Shuttle program Simon 

had worked on for four years changed his approach to learning. 

“If I had a question about how we mate to the launch vehicle 

with the satellite, I knew exactly who to talk to,” he said. “The 

family size of the project allowed the advantages of a co-located 

R&D [research and development] effort even when we applied 

it to the development of a spacecraft.”

FASTSAT also operated completely differently from the 

systems he’d encountered earlier in his career. “There were 

almost no moving parts, and no fluid systems,” said Simon, 

whose previous experience included working on the shuttle’s 

power-reactant storage and distribution system, which stores and 

supplies the liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen for the shuttle 

fuel cells and crew breathing, and R&D systems to produce 

propellants on other planets. “My rotation had me focusing 

now on software and electrical engineering, which meant being 

outside my comfort zone and learning a lot,” he explained. He 

found himself troubleshooting electrical problems and software 

bugs. “The day-to-day work was in completely different technical 

disciplines, which forced me to grow.” 

As the new kid on the block, Simon found that his colleagues 

were glad to help him get up to speed. “Even though I wasn’t 

coming in on the same page that they were on, I tried to make it 

very clear that I cared about the success of the program,” he said. 

“As long as that connection is made, folks don’t mind helping 

you catch up—especially if they see you as someone who can 

help them, too.” 

The schedule also represented a new way of working 

for Simon. FASTSAT had a twelve-month project life cycle. 

Processes were streamlined to where decisions were made in 

hours, not weeks. “Most of the projects that I’ve worked on 

I’ve had intended launch dates a few or several years away,” 

said Simon. The FASTSAT team charged hard, from a kickoff 

meeting in January 2009 to an assembled, fully loaded satellite 

nine months later.

Working under such a fast-paced schedule shifted his 

approach to projects. “Every project I join now, I’m going to 

start with [the perspective of], ‘What do we need to do?’ and 

not necessarily, ‘What have we always done?’” he said. “I’ll never 

be the same again.”

To keep pace with the schedule, testing took place nearly 

every day. “We had to basically get to the test phase earlier than 

any of us usually get to it, and let the data speak for itself,” Simon 

said. During the thermal-vacuum test, the team was reviewing the 

output signal from the flight transceiver and noticed a discrepancy 

that likely would have led to a failure. “One thing I learned from 

this project is that even if you’re trying to do things affordably and 

quickly, you don’t skip these meat-and-potatoes tests,” he said. 

“We could have spent six months analyzing the system, and we 

never would have found the transceiver issue. Instead, in a few 

days of testing, we found it.” 

As the project wrapped up and awaited launch, Simon drafted 

a lessons-learned document for the team: “I tried to keep it very 

concise. What was the issue? What did you do to fix it? How 

did it turn out? And it included a contact name to find out more. 

Rather than turning it into a giant bound book, I wanted to 

keep it fairly short.” He also organized the lessons by disciplines 

such as project management and systems engineering to make it 

user-friendly for readers. 

Simon saw the lessons-learned document as a resource for 

future work at NASA’s manned spaceflight centers. “Once the 

shuttle is retired and the station is complete, there are going to 

be a lot of people working on systems that need to be approached 

differently than the way we’ve worked in the past,” he said. Many 

of the lessons he captured went directly into the draft systems 

engineering management plan he wrote for potential future 

FASTSAT satellites, such as HSV-02. “Until you’ve gone through 

a build like that,” he said, “it would be impossible to predict all 

the lessons up front.” 

Working on FASTSAT—a robotic, non-human satellite—

helped Simon fill a gap in his experience between working on 

the shuttle and R&D work earlier in his career in a lab setting. 

“I don’t think they [the SELDP team] could have picked a better 

assignment, team, or organization for me,” he said. “If the first 

ten years are any sign, I’ll be learning every day until I retire.” ●

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Photo Credit: NASA Marshall Space Flight Center/Doug Stoffer
The year is 2050. The vicinity around Earth has become a vibrant economic sphere. Physical sciences 

and medical research in space are driving innovations that enable companies to offer new products 

that improve our quality of life. Tourists spend summer vacations beyond the atmosphere. Humans 

and robots are working together to service the space-based assets on which the global economy 

continues to depend. Beyond Earth orbit, we have established an outpost on the planet Mars—a 

visiting research station where scientists from around the world come to pursue answers to questions 

about Mars’s atmosphere and climate changes to better understand the future of our own planet. 

People visit the moon from time to time to service a deep-space observatory or extract a precious 

resource. We are prepared to mitigate the risk of dangerous asteroid collisions with our planet. In 

short, we have extended our human presence across the solar system “for the benefit of all mankind” 

(words from the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958, which created NASA).

International Partnerships 

for Space Exploration

BY KATHY LAuRINI

INSIghT | ASK MAGAZINE | 49
That human spaceflight brings worldwide benefits of knowledge, 

innovation, and inspiration is widely recognized both within 

the United States and around the globe. That view recognizes 

fifty years of human spaceflight achievements and the thriving 

international partnerships that built and operate the International 

Space Station (ISS). There is international consensus that the next 

step will be a global partnership for human exploration of our solar 

system, and that the time to start planning for this future is now.

NASA wants to continue to lead in human spaceflight. Our 

partners count on us to lead. How can we lead in this environment 

where we rely on international partner contributions to accomplish 

the basic mission? What can we do to ensure NASA can lead 

effectively? I hope to provide some useful insights, gained over 

thirty years of working with international partners on the Space 

Shuttle, ISS, and Constellation programs. I offer some lessons 

that I hope help managers to ensure their international programs 

or projects are successful. 

NASA’s Strategic Plan

The 2011 NASA Strategic Plan establishes extending and 

sustaining human activities across the solar system as one of 

the agency’s six strategic goals. This long-term goal calls for the 

development of an integrated architecture and capabilities for safe 

crewed and cargo missions beyond low-Earth orbit. The strategic 

plan recognizes that human presence cannot be extended without 

the capabilities and resources of our international and commercial 

partners. By including the importance of expanding international 

partnerships in its overarching strategy, NASA recognizes the 

increased complexity of future missions and challenges us to 

define and build the necessary partnerships. 

To me, expanding our international partnerships means 

building stronger relationships with the partners we have today 

and looking for opportunities to build new partnerships. I believe 

we must succeed in both areas if we want to lead the effort to 

extend and sustain human presence in space. 

There are two keys to strengthening our existing partnerships. 

First, we must remain reliable partners, following through with 

our obligations and informing partners early when we have issues. 

Second, as we plan for the future, we should involve them in the 

exploration-planning process. Consulting them and incorporating 

their ideas and capabilities in the development of an integrated 

architecture will bring robustness to the missions we plan together. 

This is happening today within the Human Exploration and 

Operations Mission Directorate, which is working to develop a 

human-spaceflight Global Exploration Roadmap. As part of this 

effort, representatives from twelve space agencies are working on 

mission scenarios of expanding human presence, with Mars as a 

driving long-term goal. All the current ISS partner agencies are 

engaged and contributing. 

Nations with emerging spaceflight programs such as India 

and South Korea will be important partners in the future. The 

work on the Global Exploration Roadmap is one example of 

initiatives that we will need to build lasting relationships with 

them, like those we have with our ISS partners.

Some Lessons Learned

In my experience, programs and projects with international 

agencies are most likely to be successful when you and your 

international counterpart are committed to the joint project. 

Understanding the specific programmatic and technical 

complexities and developing strategies to jointly manage them 

is important. While you may control the most significant portion 

of the budget needed for success, the investment of your partner is 

probably as great or greater, as a proportion of his agency’s overall 

budget. You and your counterpart should commit to maintaining 

regular communication, establishing timely decision-making 

mechanisms, and trusting each other to raise issues as early as 

possible. With these high-level considerations in mind, here are 

some other, more specific, things to look out for and think about.

Create Opportunities to Build Relationships

In 1993, the decision was made to expand the space station 

partnership to include the Russians. Bringing this new partner, 

whom many remember as an old adversary, into the program 

changed many things. When the Russians joined, the original 

space station partners—NASA, Canadian Space Agency (CSA), 

European Space Agency (ESA), and Japan Aerospace Exploration 

Agency (JAXA)—had been working together for more than five 

years under NASA’s leadership to settle requirements, define 

interfaces, distribute functions, and deal with other aspects of 

the cooperative venture. NASA’s relationship with CSA and ESA, 

based on shared shuttle-program experience, was very strong. Our 

relationship with JAXA was developing well. 

NASA program managers defined a phased approach to bring 

the Russians on board. Phase 1 involved cooperative initiatives 

within both NASA’s and Russia’s individual operational programs. 

NASA astronauts were to fly to the Mir space station. Russian 

cosmonauts were to fly on the Space Shuttle. The Space Shuttle 

NATIONS wITH EMERGING SpAcEFlIGHT 

pROGRAMS SucH AS INDIA AND SOuTH 

KOREA wIll BE IMpORTANT pARTNERS 

IN THE FuTuRE. 

50 | ASK MAGAZINE
was to fly around and eventually dock with Mir. Each of these 

missions involved a lot of planning, meetings, travel, and expense. 

You could argue that the benefits we gained from any individual 

mission may not have justified the cost. Taken together, however, 

those Phase 1 activities allowed us to build relationships necessary 

to continue leading the ISS program and working well with 

Russian partners. Engineers, managers, and astronauts spent 

time in Russia; many learned Russian and began to understand 

Russian culture both at work and outside work. We learned how 

the Russians made decisions, solved problems, and found creative 

ways to fund their effort during a difficult time in Russia, after 

perestroika. 

There were also more modest opportunities to learn about 

one another and build trust. They included demonstration of ISSrelated technologies, defining and validating interface standards, 

and joint development of precursor capabilities.

Lesson 1: Create large and small opportunities for people 

to build relationships, understanding, and trust.

Don’t Assume It Has to Cost More to Partner

People like to say it will cost more to partner than to do it all 

alone. It doesn’t have to be this way. It is true that there will be 

some additional costs associated with working internationally, and 

you must pay attention to export control and International Traffic 

in Arms Regulations. But a significant cost driver is the level 

of oversight assigned to all the critical design and development 

activities of your partner or partners. 

Long experience working with our traditional partners has 

shown us that we can rely on them to deliver excellent products. 

Let’s use this experience to streamline how we work together. In 

the early days of the space station program, we went through a very 

time-consuming process of examining the design and construction 

specifications of our partners to be sure they met or exceeded our 

standards. This process took man-years to complete and resulted 

in a discipline-by-discipline understanding of their approach to 

requirements definition, design, testing, and verification.

Lesson 2: Recognize that past experiences of NASA with 

traditional partner agencies will provide a good basis for building 

the relationships and trust needed to execute your project 

successfully and cost effectively.

Understand the Cultural Differences

Differences in culture within the work environment and 

outside work will exist between you and your partner agencies. 

Understanding and working effectively with the differences will 

help make your joint program or project successful. Within the 

work environment, what are roles and responsibilities of key 

players? How do they make decisions? Who decides? For bigger 

projects, embedding a technical liaison is a good idea. I served 

in this capacity for the ISS program. By being collocated with 

ESA, I developed a deep understanding of their work culture and 

the relationships among ESA countries, as well as with NASA. 

That knowledge helped us overcome some challenges early in 

the ISS program. 

Understanding and respecting the national culture is also 

important. People from different countries have different ways of 

looking at things and different ways of expressing their opinions 

or desires. For example, the Japanese will typically avoid directly 

expressing a negative answer. When JAXA colleagues say “that will 

be difficult,” it usually means it’s impossible and I’d be wasting 

my time trying to lessen the burden of a particular approach and 

should instead start looking for a compromise. Being familiar 

with the differences can avoid misunderstandings and make 

interactions more effective. 

Lesson 3: Take the time to understand the relevant cultures 

of your partners, both work and national cultures.

The Shared Future of Space Exploration

International partnerships will be important to NASA’s human 

spaceflight future. We need to lead—and partner—effectively. 

Establishing early, critical-path roles for our partners will be 

important for them and us, and is likely to lead to increased 

stakeholder support. Creating effective partnerships that bring 

their technical strengths, resources, and capabilities to bear will 

increase the robustness of our architectures in ways that increase 

the probability of mission success. 

In the famous words of Yuri Gagarin: Poyekhali!— 

Let’s go! ●

ASK MAGAZINE | 51
Josh Simpson has been creating planets for more than three decades. The cover photo 

of this issue of ASK shows detail from one of them.

 Exploring Megaplanets

BY DON COHEN Photo Credit: Ben Interlande

One of Simpson’s tektites.

52 | ASK MAGAZINE | INSIghT
He started in the mid-seventies when he was demonstrating 

glassblowing to eighth graders in Franklin County, Massachusetts, 

where he has his studio. He found that young teens quickly tired 

of seeing vases and bowls take shape, so he began making marbles 

they could take home with them. Then he happened to see Jim 

Lovell’s famous Apollo 8 “Earthrise” photo of the earth from 

space and the Apollo 17 “blue marble” picture of Earth floating 

in the blackness of space. The next day, instead of marbles, he 

began making planets—not known planets, but fantasy planets 

that might exist, he says, somewhere in the universe.

Since then he has made thousands of them, some less than 

two inches in diameter, others as large as fourteen inches. The 

100-plus-lb. megaplanet at the Corning Museum of Glass is the 

largest glass sphere ever created by traditional blowpipe methods. 

Over the years, the planets have become more complex, the 

varied terrain of their landmasses dotted with sprawling cities 

and strange shapes that might be organic or might be structures 

designed by alien civilizations. Sometimes tiny satellites and 

spacecraft hover in their clear glass skies.

Simpson’s fascination with space and distant planets began 

when he was a young boy and read, by his own admission, 

an “inordinate” amount of science fiction. The real-life space 

program, which gave us a new view of Earth and the planets 

of our solar system, increased his enthusiasm and expanded 

his vision. Although he had been making glass planets for 

fifteen years before he met and married NASA Astronaut 

Cady Coleman, her experience has influenced his work. He 

pores over the thousands of images of Earth she has taken 

from the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station. 

Through Cady, he got access to photographs of the effects 

of micrometeor strikes on NASA’s Long-Duration Exposure 

Facility, a spacecraft that spent almost six years in orbit to 

provide data on long-term exposure to the environment of 

space. He began using a hydrogen torch to try to create a 

similar effect on some of his planets.

For Simpson, work on the planets (and on his tektites, 

with their rough, meteor-like exteriors and glowing inner 

colors) brings together his interests in space exploration, art, 

and science. The physics and chemistry of glassblowing are 

a challenge that, he says, “has focused my attention and held 

me spellbound for over forty years.” He works with a molten 

liquid at 2,100 ̊F that is shaped only by gravity and centrifugal 

and centripetal forces. At that temperature, it glows orange, its 

eventual colors “red shifted” by heat. He prizes the chemical 

interaction between different colors of glass that creates a 

beach-like third color at the border of his seas and landmasses. 

He likes the fact that he uses techniques that were developed 

by glassmakers in the ninth century to create his spaceships. 

And he has spent thousands of hours trying to approximate 

the color of Cherenkov radiation—the intense blue glow of 

nuclear fuel rods in their water bath. (So far, silver in a glassy 

matrix comes closest.)

For the rest of us, Simpson megaplanets are worlds to 

explore that suggest the yet-unseen wonders of space and give 

us at least a small taste of the experience of astronauts fortunate 

enough to look down on their own planet from orbit. ●

Photo Credit: Ben Interlande

Simpson’s megaplanets swirl 

with imagined landmasses.

ASK MAGAZINE | 53
The Burden of Knowledge

BY LAuRENCE PRuSAK 

The Knowledge Notebook

Who was the last person who knew everything? 

That’s right, there was a time when this was a 

legitimate question for pundits in Europe and the 

early American republic. Ben Franklin was one 

contender for the title. Other well-known candidates 

put forward by people who think about this kind 

of thing include Francis Bacon, Erasmus, Thomas 

Aquinas, Voltaire ... well, you get the idea. 

But if we ask whether there is anyone alive today 

who knows everything, the absurdity of the question 

quickly becomes apparent. How could a single 

individual possibly master everything about even 

one subject, let alone everything about everything?

I have a friend who received a PhD in organic 

chemistry thirty-five years ago. At his oral exam he 

was expected to have a pretty good mastery of the 

whole subject, or at least a nodding acquaintance 

with major issues and experiments across the field. 

He recently told me that such an attempt today 

would be the height of folly. Organic chemistry—

like so many other disciplines—has grown so 

large, with so many new players, institutions, 

countries, and universities involved in so many 

areas of research, that any one person, no matter 

how smart and hardworking, can only master an 

ever-decreasing percentage of the total knowledge 

in the field. 

The burden of the sheer quantity of knowledge 

in any field is the focus of an interesting paper by 

Benjamin Jones of Northwestern University. Though 

it is written in “economese,” it is worth the effort 

to read because it takes a very interesting position 

on just how difficult it is for individuals to know 

enough to do innovative knowledge work, especially 

since to innovate usually means to know (and build 

on) what is already known about a subject. 

Just think for a moment about how many 

Chinese and Indian scientists today are doing 

research in organic chemistry that weren’t doing 

it twenty years ago. Or—with the advent of the 

web—how much research from those and even 

more remote places is now available easily and 

cheaply. Who could read all of it even if there were 

no language issues to overcome? And if you just 

choose to ignore it, how do you know you aren’t 

wasting your time replicating work already done in 

Kuala Lumpur or Lima or Delhi? 

The only possible way to avoid this pitfall is to 

work in large teams where the burden of knowledge 

can be more easily carried by a group. This is exactly 

what is happening, according to research Jones and 

others have carried out. More and more patents and 

scientific and technical papers are being written 

by ever-larger groups of researchers, each of them 

mastering enough of the content in a field so that 

their aggregate knowledge covers most of the relevant 

ground and reduces the possibility that their output 

will reproduce work already done by someone else, 

wasting huge amounts of time, energy, and money. 

This phenomenon is not limited to the pure 

sciences and technology studies. Research on 

organizational and management issues—a newer 

subject of formal studies than most sciences—is 

approaching the same epistemic limits with the same 

results. More and more of this work is also being 

done collaboratively. 

Some of the implications of this phenomenon 

are still slow to seep into schools or even into our 

general culture. The idea of heroic, individual 

innovators working alone and with intense focus 

is a very hard image to abandon. And we wouldn’t 

want to let it go completely. Within the context of 

54 | ASK MAGAZINE
group efforts, talented and knowledgeable individuals still come THE ABIlITy TO cOllABORATE wITH A 

s 

o TEAM—SOMETIMES A lARGE TEAM—

y AND uNDERSTANDING HOw TO wORK 

t 

t wITH AND wITHIN A NEw “DIVISION OF 

g 

e KNOwlEDGE” wIll BE MORE AND MORE 

cRITIcAl AS wE MOVE FORwARD INTO AN 

e 

AGE OF AN EVER-INcREASING BuRDEN OF 

KNOwlEDGE.

up with important new ideas. And our individual contribution

to our colleagues and teams still depend on our working hard t

master what knowledge we can and thinking hard and creativel

about it. But no one can fully master a subject anymore, and tha

makes all the difference in how we approach problems and wha

skills and behaviors we need to carry out this new way of workin

well. The ability to collaborate with a team—sometimes a larg

team—and understanding how to work with and within a new

“division of knowledge” will be more and more critical as we mov

forward into an age of an ever-increasing burden of knowledge. ●

ASK MAGAZINE | 55
ASKinteractive

For More 

on Our Stories

Additional information 

pertaining to articles 

featured in this issue 

can be found by 

visiting the following 

web sites:

• STEREO: www.nasa.

gov/stereo

• FASTSAT: www.

nasa.gov/mission_

pages/smallsats/

fastsat

• NASA Microgravity 

Science Division: 

microgravity.grc.

nasa.gov

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 here: askmagazine.nasa.gov/about/write.html.

Academy iTunes university

The Academy of Program/Project and Engineering Leadership now offers learning 

materials on iTunes university that are accessible whether you’re on the road or in the 

classroom. You can download a podcast to listen to on your way to work or watch a short 

video on a portable device about critical challenges facing today’s practitioners. The 

Academy provides videos and podcasts from thought leaders, master practitioners, and 

innovative thinkers on a variety of topics including green engineering, policy and politics, 

systems engineering, leadership development, and international collaboration. visit the 

Academy’s iTunes u page by typing “NASA APPEL” into the iTunes Store search bar or 

using the following uRL in any browser: itunes.apple.com/us/institution/nasa-academyprogram-project/id427161628. If you do not have an iTunes u account, you can install 

iTunes and create a user ID. Learn how at support.apple.com/kb/HT2731.

Web of Knowledge

NASA’s new video series offers the public a fast and fun way to learn about 

scientific discoveries and facts about Earth, the solar system, and beyond. Called 

“ScienceCasts,” the videos are created by an astrophysicist and a team of agency 

narrators and videographers. The format is designed to increase understanding of 

the world of science through simple, clear presentations. Future episodes will focus 

on citizen science research, the search for new galaxies, how to watch this summer’s 

Perseid meteor shower, and the causes of recent wild weather events in the united 

States. To view the latest videos online, visit www.youtube.com/user/scienceatnasa.

NASA in the News

NASA Public Affairs Officer Josh Byerly talked with ground-support personnel 

and mission officials in Russia and Kazakhstan as they prepared for the landing of 

Expedition 27 on May 23, 2011. Crewmembers Dmitry Kondratyev, Cady Coleman, 

and Paolo Nespoli returned home aboard the Soyuz TMA-20 spacecraft while Space 

Shuttle Endeavour and the STS-134 crew were still docked to the International Space 

Station. get a behind-the-scenes look at the planning and coordination involved 

when working internationally: www.nasa.gov/multimedia/videogallery/index.html?media_id=96666621.

56 | ASK MAGAZINE
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