Academy Sharing Knowledge

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

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Inside

NASA Aids Chilean Rescue Effort 

Mars on a Budget 

The Innovation Paradox 
ON THE COVER

The small open star cluster Pismis 24 lies in the core of the NGC 6357 nebula 

in Scorpius, about 8,000 light-years away from Earth. The brightest object in the 

center of this image is designated Pismis 24-1; Hubble Space Telescope images of 

the star show that it is really two stars orbiting one another that are each estimated 

to be 100 solar masses, among the heaviest stars known. Photo Credit: NASA, ESA, and J. Maíz Apellániz (Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía, Spain)
Contents

25

DEPARTMENTS

3

In This Issue

By Don Cohen

4

From the Academy Director

And the Band Played On

By Ed Hoffman 

60

The Knowledge Notebook

The Limits of Knowledge

By Laurence Prusak

62

ASK Interactive 

INSIGHTS

19

Interview with Jill Prince

By Don Cohen The Langley engineer talks 

about the challenges of aerobraking and 

the value of “diving right in” at the start of a 

NASA career.

29

The Potential of a New Workplace

By Naoki Ogiwara In Europe and Japan, 

“Future Centers” feature spaces designed 

to enhance creative thinking.

Special Pullout

Academy Sharing Knowledge

38

Jamming with the Institute 

for Healthcare Improvement

By Katrina Pugh and Jo Ann Endo 

“Jamming” is an effective technique for 

sharing organizational knowledge.

42

Innovative Partnership Finds Answers 

to Modeling Lunar Dust

By Carol Anne Dunn, Carlos Calle, and

Richard LaRoche To learn more about 

managing lunar dust, NASA and a simulation 

technology company pool their expertise.

51

The Innovation Paradox

By Ed Hoffman Sometimes organizational 

“support” kills good new ideas.

STORIES

5

Applied Knowledge: NASA Aids 

the Chilean Rescue Effort

By Don Cohen NASA’s spaceflight 

expertise helped bring trapped Chilean 

miners safely to the surface.

10

Factoring in Humans

By Haley Stephenson We still have a lot 

to learn about the effects of microgravity 

on astronauts.

15

The Path to Scientific Discoveries: 

Designing the Cassini Solstice 

Mission Trajectory

By Brent Buffington Planning orbits for 

Cassini’s extended science mission is a 

science and an art.

25

Mars on a Budget

By Randall Taylor Why did this faster, 

better, cheaper project succeed? 

Openness to outside help is one reason.

33

Spaceflight Hardware 

on a Service Contract

By Jason Crusan, Marybeth Edeen, 

Kevin Grohs, and Darren Samplatsky 

A performance-based contract rewards 

successful operation of new space station 

hardware.

46

Explosive Lessons in Hydrogen Safety

By Russel Rhodes Learning the hard way 

to reduce liquid hydrogen risks.

54

Lessons from the National Ignition 

Facility

By Matthew Kohut An ambitious new 

project demands new approaches to 

planning and management.

5 51

ASK MAGAZINE | 1
Issue No. 41

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@asrcms.com

Contributing Editors

Matt Kohut

mattkohut@infactcommunications.com

Haley Stephenson

haley.stephenson@valador.com

Senior Knowledge Sharing

Consultant

Jon Boyle

jon.boyle@asrcms.com

Knowledge Sharing Analysts

Ben Bruneau

ben.bruneau@asrcms.com

Mai Ebert

mai.ebert@asrcms.com

Ramien Pierre

ramien.pierre@asrcms.com

academy program Manager

Yvonne Massaquoi

yvonne.massaquoi@asrcms.com

Design

Hirshorn Zuckerman Design Group, Inc.

www.hzdg.com

Printing Specialist

Hanta Ralay

hanta.ralay-1@nasa.gov

Printing

Peake DeLancey

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

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

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

providing performance enhancement services and tools, supporting career development 

programs, and creating opportunities for project management and engineering 

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

government agencies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

of practitioners communicate important practical wisdom and best practices that 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yvonne Massaquoi, ASRC Management Services, 6303 Ivy Lane, Suite 130, Greenbelt, 

MD 20770; yvonne.massaquoi@asrcms.com; 301-837-9127. 

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

(including mail stop, if applicable) to ASKmagazine@asrcms.com.
In the interview in this issue of ASK, Jill Prince estimates 

that 90 percent of the knowledge she needs as an aerospace 

engineer comes from work experience—her own and 

that of mentors and other colleagues. Most professionals 

would probably agree that experience is the best teacher. 

Several other articles here illustrate the importance of 

learning by doing.

For instance, Russel Rhodes’s “Explosive Lessons 

in Hydrogen Safety” recounts how it took time and 

some dramatic accidents to show technicians just how 

treacherous liquid hydrogen can be and what they needed 

to do to handle it safely. Haley Stephenson describes 

knowledge about the effect of microgravity on the human 

body that could only be learned from experience; no amount 

of theorizing could have discovered it. And the Pathfinder 

team put a rover on the surface of Mars for a surprisingly 

small amount of money (“Mars on a Budget”) by drawing 

on the experience of veterans of the Viking mission as 

well as private industry, other government agencies, and 

international partners. They knew they lacked the time and 

money to develop the needed technologies from scratch; 

the only way to succeed was to benefit from others’ hardearned knowledge. The Department of Defense’s parachute 

know-how and Volvo’s airbag expertise were essential to 

Pathfinder’s successful entry, descent, and landing.

Pathfinder offers examples of experiential learning 

applied to new situations. “Applied Knowledge” does the 

same. The NASA team that aided Chile’s mine rescue 

effort contributed knowledge about the psychology of 

confinement developed through decades of spaceflight 

experience and procedures for safely re-nourishing starving 

people derived from the tragic mis-feeding of prisoners of 

war and concentration camp internees.

The mine rescue article also shows expertise is most 

effectively communicated when those who have it go 

where it is needed and are in direct contact with the people 

who need it. In “Jamming with the Institute for Healthcare 

Improvement,” Katrina Pugh and Jo Ann Endo describe a 

formal procedure for transferring experiential knowledge 

from one group to another based on similar principles.

Matthew Kohut’s “Lessons from the National Ignition 

Facility” shows what can happen when a project is so large 

and complex that no one has sufficient relevant experience 

to understand its requirements. The Department of Energy 

team needed to get well into work on a new, uniquely 

powerful laser facility before they realized that the scope 

of the project demanded a new management structure and 

new work processes.

One of the lessons of experience is that it may be 

necessary to ignore some of what experience teaches—for 

instance, standard procedures and conventional wisdom—

to come up with a technology or work process that is new 

and better. In his “From the Academy Director” column, Ed 

Hoffman acknowledges the value of veterans sharing their 

hard-won wisdom with younger colleagues while insisting 

on the importance of leaving them free to make their own 

mistakes on the way to innovations the older generation 

never thought of. On a related note, Hoffman’s “The 

Innovation Paradox” says that experience shows that too 

much organizational attention—even attention meant to be 

supportive—can stifle new ideas. Organizations that value 

innovation need to find the right balance of laissez-faire

distance and support, of respect for and dissatisfaction 

with the knowledge that experience has so far revealed.

Don Cohen

Managing Editor

In This Issue

ASK MAGAZINE | 3
Those who do not remember the past are 

condemned to repeat it.

The wisest mind has something yet to learn.

—George Santayana

During the last weeks of playing baritone horn in 

my high-school band, I started wondering how the 

band would be able to continue. I looked at Marco, 

who was the best trombonist; he was graduating. 

I looked at Frankie, the best trumpeter; he was 

graduating. The percussion section, graduating—

to a career of crime no doubt. All the best talent 

was leaving. The incoming class seemed weak 

and inferior. 

I asked the bandleader what he was going to 

do when we left, my concern about the future 

tinged with a sense of our superiority. He pounced: 

“You guys are all the same; you think because you 

are leaving that the band will stop. Well, I’ve been 

doing this for twenty years; every year guys go, and 

the next year the band continues to play.”

Thirty years later, I was in a NASA task group. 

The person next to me would be retiring in a 

matter of weeks after a long and successful career. 

Someone asked, “What is NASA going to do to 

replace you?” Others agreed that replacement was 

impossible; we needed an exact replica. I smiled 

and thought: if only cloning were an option. 

Then I realized I was thinking the band would 

not play next year because a talented player was 

leaving.

Giving the future the benefit of what we’ve 

learned is a good sentiment and often a good practice, 

yet it sometimes seems based on distrust of the next 

generation and new ways of being. Meetings and 

working groups develop competency models for the 

next generation; standards and policies are written 

to preserve our “wisdom.” Veteran subject-matter 

experts promote career-development programs 

to train the next generation in proven, successful 

practices. Lessons learned, case studies, and sharedexperience sessions abound, along with knowledge 

identification, capture, retention, and distribution 

activities. Much of this is good stuff. A society that 

has a successful future is one that educates, learns, 

shares, and openly exchanges knowledge. But some 

of it comes from thinking next year’s band may not 

be able to play as well as we do.

Well, the future wants to make its own 

mistakes and discover how to use its own talents. 

It doesn’t want to be tamed by the past. Innovation 

demands new thinking; new thinking means risky 

exploration of the unknown. Failure review boards 

and historians teach how mistakes could have been 

avoided “if only you listened to our lessons from 

ten years ago.” But some mistakes are valuable, and 

sometimes “different” means “better.” 

So do we let the future shape itself, mistakes 

and all, or do we safeguard it, reducing mistakes 

and inventiveness? 

Perhaps stories provide the balanced approach 

we need. Stories communicate what experience 

teaches without laying down rigid rules about 

what to do and how to do it. Stories are open to 

interpretation that fits their lessons to new contexts. 

Stories can be a foundation for future excellence, 

not a constraint that limits it. ●

From the Academy Director

And the Band Played On

By ED HOFFMAN 

4 | ASK MAGAZINE
Title

By 

Intro

In the summer and fall of 2010, the world followed the story of thirty-three Chilean miners trapped 

nearly half a mile underground and celebrated their successful rescue in October. A team from NASA 

that included physicians, a psychologist, and engineers contributed to that success, providing knowledge 

gained from spaceflight programs to the government and experts dealing with this down-to-earth 

emergency. Traveling to the mine site in Copiapo, Chile, they developed a cooperative relationship 

with Chilean officials and specialists that made it possible to share their knowledge effectively.

Applied

Knowledge:

NASA Aids the Chilean Rescue Effort

By DON COHEN

The last of the 

trapped miners 

returns to the 

surface on 

October 13, 2010.

Photo Credit: Hugo Infante/Government of Chile

STORY | ASK MAGAZINE | 5
Photo Credit: Hugo Infante/Government of Chile

Rescue workers practice 

a dry run with one of the 

capsules used to liberate 

the trapped miners at 

the San Jose mine near 

Copiapo, Chile, on 

October 11, 2010.

6 | ASK MAGAZINE
Making the Connection

The depths of a mine in South America are a long way from the 

Space Shuttle and the International Space Station, but there is 

a natural fit between what NASA knows and what the Chilean 

rescue team needed to know. Among other things, the space 

program has been an opportunity for decades of learning about 

the psychology and physiology of groups of people in confined 

spaces. And the agency’s contingency planning—for instance, 

for rescuing the crew of a damaged shuttle—has included 

studying orbital equivalents of the miners’ situation.

An existing relationship helped bring together agency 

experts and the Chileans. A NASA delegation that included 

Lori Garver, deputy administrator of NASA, and Al Condes, 

deputy associate administrator for International and Interagency 

Relations, had encountered Chilean space agency personnel at 

a meeting of the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful 

Uses of Outer Space. That connection led to a half-hour phone 

call between Dr. Mike Duncan, deputy chief medical officer 

at the Johnson Space Center (and eventual NASA team lead), 

and the Chilean Minister of Health. A teleconference later 

the same day provided NASA experts with an overview of 

the emergency. Using a mobile phone, the Chilean Minister 

of Health and several other Chilean health-care personnel at 

the San Jose mine summarized the health status of the miners 

and described their underground environment. Participating 

in the telecon from NASA were Duncan; Dr. J. D. Polk, chief 

of the space medicine division; Dr. Al Holland, operational 

psychologist; and three nutritionists: Barbara Rice, Sara Zwart, 

and Holly Dlouhy. These NASA experts e-mailed an initial set 

of medical, psychological, and nutritional recommendations to 

Chile shortly after that call.

Being There

During the teleconference, Duncan offered to bring a NASA 

team to the mine site, a suggestion that was readily accepted. 

He made the offer, he said, because “experience tells you you 

get a better understanding out of being there.” That proved to 

be true, but better insight into the situation was not the only 

benefit of the five days the team spent in Chile at the end of 

August and beginning of September. 

Being there allowed team members to develop relationships 

with their counterparts that were the kinds of social connections 

through which expertise can be understood, trusted, and put to 

use. Shared professional experience cemented these bonds and 

helped overcome differences in language and culture. NASA 

Engineering and Safety Center (NESC) Engineer Clint Cragg 

discovered that, like him, his Chilean counterpart had been 

a submariner. In addition to creating common ground, that 

background gave them both firsthand knowledge of what it 

meant to share a confined space with a group of men. They also 

ASK MAGAZINE | 7
had engineering in common, just as the physician-to-physician 

and psychologist-to-psychologist connections created common 

ground. (NASA psychologist Holland’s counterpart was named 

Alberto; sharing a name, though in most ways a trivial connection, 

also helped bring them together.) Physician Polk said, “We went 

down representing our government; we left as friends.”

Once in Copiapo, the team discovered that their earlier 

e-mails had never gotten to the people who needed them. That 

alone was a powerful argument for the value of being there. 

And the language difference, something of a problem during a 

teleconference or cell-phone conversation, ceased to be an issue 

working face to face, with Spanish speakers who had a good 

grasp of English and with the assistance of interpreters.

Applying NASA Expertise

Central to the medical expertise that NASA shared with the 

Chileans was an understanding of refeeding syndrome—the 

danger of overwhelming people who have been malnourished 

with the wrong kinds and quantity of food. After even a 

few days of starvation, a sudden influx of carbohydrates and 

calories can cause a rapid rise in insulin levels and associated 

metabolic effects that can lead to death. This lesson was learned 

the hard way after the world wars of the twentieth century, 

when well-meaning efforts to feed rescued prisoners of war 

and concentration camp internees caused many deaths. NASA 

has applied its understanding of the syndrome to contingency 

planning for the shuttle. The crew of a shuttle stranded at the 

Hubble telescope would have had to wait months for rescue, 

surviving on a diet of no more than 800 calories a day, so it was 

essential to plan for their safe renourishment.

The Chilean miners were starving, sharing very limited 

rations for seventeen days before the first supply hole was 

drilled. The four-inch diameter of the hole in effect imposed an 

appropriate level of refeeding, since it was impossible to send too 

much food to thirty-three men through such a narrow channel. 

But NASA’s refeeding expertise helped develop an informed 

plan for bringing the miners back from starvation that included 

keeping nourishment at an appropriate level when a second hole 

for delivering supplies became available. Polk said, “We knew 

we were making progress nourishing the miners when one of 

them sent back a dessert because it wasn’t what he wanted.”

Holland’s field—the psychology of confinement—is a rare 

specialty. His first task was to quickly give his Chilean colleague 

a framework for his recommendations. Once on site, he learned 

that the miners had more room than he’d thought; they had 

access to a little over a mile of tunnel as well as the garage-size 

space he knew about. This made it easier to find ways to deal with 

issues of privacy and hygiene while the men remained trapped.

All the members of the NASA team concluded that the 

Chileans, understandably focused on the rescue itself, had not 

yet thought through psychological and medical issues that 

would arise after they were brought to the surface. Chief among 

these was the importance of exposing the miners only gradually 

to family and others. Past space missions and the experience 

of prisoners of war had taught that it was critical to limit and 

carefully control contact during the first forty-eight hours.

NASA team members were impressed by the readiness of 

the Chileans to request and receive help from others, as well as 

the willingness of people throughout the country and around 

the world to contribute to the rescue effort—and their ingenuity. 

The miners were dealing with harsh conditions: a temperature 

of 90 ̊F, 90 percent humidity, and only hard, damp rocks to 

sleep on. Chilean officials put out a general call for sleeping cots 

that could be rolled up into cylinders no more than four inches 

wide. A few days later, thirty-three cots arrived at the site.

The Rescue Capsule

Once the second borehole was expanded to a diameter of 

a little more than 2 ft., rescue became possible. The initial 

requirements the Chileans devised for the rescue capsule were 

quite general, limited to maximum diameter, height, and 

weight, with no design specifics. The NASA team worked on 

Photo Credit: Cecilia Penafiel, U.S. Embassy in Chile

NASA Engineering and Safety Center Principal 

Engineer Clint Cragg (right) consults with Rene 

Aguilar, deputy chief of rescue operations for 

the Chilean mine disaster. 

8 | ASK MAGAZINE
recommendations for the capsule as soon as they returned to 

the United States.

Arriving home just before Labor Day weekend, Cragg sent 

out a request for engineers to help. The response was immediate 

and enthusiastic. On Tuesday morning, about twenty engineers 

met to formulate their recommendations. 

The engineers worked with the physicians and psychologist 

on elements of the design that would ensure the well-being 

of the miners during what they were told would be a trip to 

the surface that could take between one and four hours. They 

recommended including devices that could deliver oxygen and 

measure oxygen levels during the ascent. Two-way audio and 

video communication was also recommended, to monitor the 

condition of the miners and lessen their sense of isolation as they 

slowly rose through a narrow, half-mile-long hole.

The final set of recommendations included a harness that 

would allow the occupant to escape back down the hole if the 

capsule became stuck, the requirement that a single person be 

able to strap himself in the capsule, and a strategy for dealing 

with friction in the borehole that could otherwise break the 

capsule after repeated trips. They recommended either Teflon 

pads or spring-loaded wheels. The second of those choices was 

adopted by the Chileans.

Cragg said he was impressed by how good the NASA 

engineers were at thinking the problem through and imagining 

what could go wrong. They also thought carefully about how

to present the recommendations. Their initial plan was to 

organize them by functional area (for instance, power, structure, 

materials, and human factors). One of the engineers quickly 

realized that they should instead be divided into two sections, 

structure and support services, so that those elements could be 

worked on separately. Two Spanish-speaking members of the 

team helped make sure the recommendations would be clear to 

non-native English speakers.

On Friday, they had finished. Cragg noted, “The NESC 

routinely assembles teams on short notice to help solve problems. 

Our previous experience helped to get our list of suggested 

requirements done rather quickly.” They sent the results to 

Chile. The message came back: “We understand it all.”

Again at a Distance

Back home, the team members again experienced some of 

the difficulty of trying to work at a distance. Duncan said it 

was helpful to know people individually and have their direct 

e-mail addresses, but it was frustrating not to be sure that the 

information offered by the NASA team got where it needed 

to go. Holland talked about the difficulty of not being able to 

monitor changing psychological conditions directly, and the 

delay caused by having to translate e-mails sent back and forth 

between the two countries.

But the combination of personal relationships and new 

communication technology could work wonders at a distance. 

On a Skype call, Polk’s Chilean counterpart asked him to 

recommend a safe speed for the rescue capsule, one that would 

not cause men in a weakened condition to black out. Polk, at 

home with his laptop, e-mailed a couple of colleagues, checked 

some web sources, and was able to provide the answer in a few 

minutes without leaving the couch he was sitting on.

Members of the NASA team emphasize that the Chileans 

were always the major players in the rescue effort, and that 

their determination and skill were key to its success. But 

NASA’s expertise unquestionably contributed to that outcome. 

When, like the rest of the world, the team members watched 

the miners emerge one by one to be embraced by their loved 

ones, they knew they had helped turn a potential tragedy into 

a triumphant reunion. ●

Being there allowed team members to develop relationships with their 

counterparts that were the kinds of social connections through which 

expertise can be understood, trusted, and put to use.

ASK MAGAZINE | 9
Title

By 

Intro

Huma

Factoring IN Photo Credit: NASA

10 | ASK MAGAZINE | STORY
ns To a rocket scientist, you are a problem. You are 

the most irritating piece of machinery he or she will 

ever have to deal with. You and your fluctuating 

metabolism, your puny memory, your frame that 

comes in a million different configurations. You 

are unpredictable. You’re inconsistent. You take 

weeks to fix. ... A solar cell or a thruster nozzle 

is stable and undemanding. It does not excrete or 

panic or fall in love with the mission commander. 

It has no ego. Its structural elements don’t start to 

break down without gravity, and it works just fine 

without sleep.

~ Mary Roach, Packing for Mars

By Haley Stephenson

Space radiation hitting cell DNA.

ASK MAGAZINE | 11
The human body does weird things in microgravity. Bones 

weaken as they lose density, the heart periodically goes off beat, 

and muscles atrophy despite hours of mandated exercise. Flying 

in space is unnatural for terrestrial beings. With our sights set 

on flying humans in the harsh space environment farther and 

longer than ever before, engineering future space transportation 

systems with the human factor in mind has become more 

important and challenging than during the first half century of 

human spaceflight. 

NASA estimates it will take ten months for astronauts to reach 

Mars for a yearlong mission, and ten months to return—a total 

of nearly three years. Currently, astronauts spend no more than 

approximately six months in microgravity on the International 

Space Station. When they return to Earth, their muscle tone is 

on par with an octogenarian, and they cannot walk away from a 

spacecraft on their own. These astronauts do not lack the “right 

stuff”—rather, this is the reality of how microgravity affects the 

human body in today’s state-of-the-art spacecraft. 

Before we flew anything in space, no one knew how we 

would function without a continuous gravitational field. Today, 

planning for long-duration space exploration is still a daunting 

task with big challenges such as radiation exposure and bonedensity loss, and the less visible, but equally complex, challenges 

such as the response of neurosensory systems to prolonged 

microgravity. One piece of this puzzle is understanding the 

change in responsiveness that occurs in the human gravitysensing vestibular system—that system in the inner ear that 

contributes to our sense of balance and spatial orientation. It is 

the neurosensory system that allowed us to take a small step and 

a giant leap on the moon but, if left in microgravity too long, 

may not allow for either to happen on Mars.

Gravity As Most of Us Know It

William “Bill” Thornton is a former NASA astronaut, medical 

doctor, principal investigator, and physicist. He is meticulous, 

rigorous, and precise about most everything. He also was part of 

the astronaut support crew during Skylab and flew as a mission 

specialist on shuttle flights STS-8 and STS-51B. He studied, 

among other things, changes in the vestibular system while in 

microgravity and during reentry to Earth. 

“Here I am, sitting solidly in my chair,” said Thornton. “I 

feel my joints are oriented ... to the [force of gravity].” He then 

shut his eyes. “I still know which way I am oriented ... primarily 

because of these remarkable little hair cells, microscopic hair 

cells, tens of thousands of them in each inner ear.” 

When these hair cells bend, the brain determines how the 

head and body are oriented with respect to gravity. But they can’t 

bend on their own. They are set in a gelatinous layer that has 

little “stones” called otoliths (Greek for “ear stone”) embedded 

on top of the layer. When gravity tugs on these stones, they tug 

at the gelatinous layer, causing the hair cells to bend. 

“If I tilt my head forward just sitting here in my chair, 

[gravity] is going to deflect the [otoliths] and hair cells downward, 

which tells me one of two things,” said Millard “Mill” Reschke, 

NASA’s chief of neuroscience located at Johnson Space Center. 

“I’ve either turned my head forward or I’m accelerating in one 

direction backward.” 

To determine which of these is happening, another vestibular 

subsystem is needed. This subsystem only detects head tilts 

and not the sensation experienced when riding in an elevator 

or accelerating in a car, which is called linear acceleration. If 

both the otoliths and this subsystem respond, then the brain 

interprets that the head is tilting. If only the otoliths respond, 

Photo Credit: NASA

Mission architecture limits 

the amount of equipment 

and procedures that will be 

available to treat medical 

problems. Limited mass, 

volume, power, and crew 

training time need to be 

efficiently utilized to provide 

the broadest possible 

treatment capability.

NASA estimates it will take ten months

for astronauts to reach Mars for a

yearlong mission, and ten months to

return—a total of nearly three years.

12 | ASK MAGAZINE
the head (and hopefully the body) are linearly accelerating. 

“But,” continued Reschke, “if I tilt my head in 0 g, what 

happens? Nothing. There’s no signal from those hair cells to tell 

me that I have moved my head forward.” This is when things 

get wonky. 

“In the new environment where there is little gravity, the 

brain begins to learn that stimulation of the otoliths is only 

via linear acceleration,” said Reschke, not tilts. Upon return to 

Earth, the brain continues for some time to interpret otolith 

responses just as it did in microgravity. “Making head tilts now 

feels like a linear acceleration.”

A Hot Microphone

In the early 1970s, Reschke was teaching at a university when he 

got an offer to study neurosensory systems at NASA. Not one for 

university professing, he said, “I made a beeline for [NASA].” 

When he arrived, Apollo was ending and Skylab was 

gearing up. Reschke would study vestibular function in 

microgravity. His lab was small, three people at most, and he 

befriended Thornton. “He was the first astronaut I had ever 

met,” recalled Reschke, “and we immediately started debating.” 

Until Thornton retired, the two men spent most of their careers 

challenging one another in order to better understand vestibular 

instability that resulted from spaceflight. 

When Reschke started, conventional thinking held that if 

an astronaut didn’t move in his environment, he couldn’t adapt 

to it. Since the Mercury program, space capsules had only gotten 

bigger, and Skylab would offer the most room yet. More space 

for an astronaut to move around in meant a greater likelihood 

of possible changes in the vestibular system’s response and, 

consequently, the brain’s interpretation of movement. What 

they found was that these changes occurred more often than 

anyone realized. 

“At the time, as far as anyone knew, motion sickness was not 

a common side effect of spaceflight,” said Reschke. “It wasn’t 

until the Skylab flights when [astronauts] finally admitted to 

motion sickness being a problem.” Their admission came after 

an astronaut asked where he should dispose of his emesis (vomit) 

bag. Unbeknownst to him, he had left his microphone on and 

the jig was up. A love of flying and the fear of being declared 

“unfit” made astronauts reluctant to report motion sickness. 

In 1989, NASA started the Extended-Duration Orbiter 

Medical Project (EDOMP) to better understand the changes 

microgravity induced in humans. At that point, the shuttle 

hadn’t flown astronauts for more than ten days. When they 

returned, astronauts experienced difficulty standing up and 

sometimes fainted. With plans for building and inhabiting 

an International Space Station moving forward, NASA was 

concerned about a crew’s ability to land and exit the orbiter after 

long-duration missions in microgravity. 

The EDOMP program led to the development of space 

exercise devices like treadmills and rowing machines to help 

mitigate some of the bone, muscle, and cardiovascular problems 

caused by microgravity. As for space motion sickness, there 

are some psychological training techniques NASA has up its 

sleeve, but most astronauts are prescribed medication to lessen 

the effects. 

Microgravity As Few of Us Know It

“A first and basic problem of any animal that moves in space is 

to orient his body with the environment,” said Thornton. “Just 

imagine for a second now that you don’t know which way is 

up or down, or you don’t know which way to move your arm,” 

he continued. That is what space is like. There are no trees or 

buildings to tell you which way is up and which way is down. 

After launch, when the astronauts unstrap themselves 

from their seats and start to move about the orbiter, “almost 

immediately you start to experience a little fluid shift in your 

body where fluid is moving from the extremities toward the 

head and the trunk of the body,” said Reschke. “Your postural 

response becomes changed significantly.” Most astronauts feel 

like they’re tumbling and assume a quasi-fetal position: bend in Photo Credit: NASA Johnson Space Center

During a preview of Skylab medical altitude test 

experiments, Astronaut Karol J. Bobko is being 

configured for a test in the Lower Body Negative 

Pressure experiment while Scientist-Astronaut 

William E. Thornton assists. 

ASK MAGAZINE | 13
the spine, head thrust forward, knees drawn up. 

During one mission, Thornton recalls unstrapping himself 

and floating out of his chair, immediately going about his work 

with his crewmate. “We moved very, very carefully, making no 

sudden motions,” he said. “About an hour [later] and both of us 

were springing a leak [a euphemism for vomit].”

His crewmate was the first to reach for his emesis bag. 

Thornton’s medical training kicked in. “I grabbed him and 

started doing a standard routine neurological exam,” he said. 

There was no pre-indication it was going to happen, recalled 

Thornton. No nausea, disorientation, nothing. At this point his 

neurological exam “was totally normal.” At least it was until 

Thornton had his crewmate close his eyes and proceeded to tilt 

him like the hands on a clock. 

“He’s one of the nicest men, but when I did that he came 

up shouting, ‘Don’t do that!’” recalled Thornton. His crewmate 

had space motion sickness and had become hypersensitive to the 

tilting motion. 

Thirty minutes later, Thornton couldn’t get his emesis bag 

out fast enough. “Believe you me, globules of vomit floating 

around in weightlessness is not a pleasant thing.” 

This is only one of several effects microgravity has on the 

vestibular system. Since the system and the muscles that control 

eye movements are connected, delays in eye reflexes can also occur. 

It may take one second or more to fixate on a visual target. When 

you turn your head to track an object in your visual field, your 

vestibular system tells the eye muscles that the head is moving 

and that if they’d like to keep that object in view, they need to 

move, too. In space, eye-tracking movements can be delayed due 

to the lack of gravity acting on the vestibular system.

Reprogramming

Once on the ground, readaptation to the earth begins almost 

immediately. Some systems take longer than others to recover, 

but within the first six to eight hours, most are returning to 

normal. Said Reschke, “You’re establishing neural connections 

like crazy at this point. Turning your head to see something 

after a long mission can take up to several days [to recover].” 

Head turns can sometimes cause distortion and blurring 

of the visual field. If the mission lasts longer than six months, 

it can sometimes take weeks. When astronauts return, they feel 

very heavy. Said Thornton, “When you walk, you notice that 

you are unstable.” Shut your eyes and you may fall down.

All of a sudden, gravity is tugging on the tiny otoliths in 

your ear in a way that it hasn’t for months. 

The Future of Human Factors

Engineers and scientists have addressed most of the immediate 

problems that arise from long-duration spaceflight: eating, 

drinking, breathing, sleeping, and going to the bathroom. But 

invisible changes such as vestibular instability, loss of bone 

density, and cardiovascular changes will require more innovative 

solutions and greater collaboration between NASA disciplines. 

Although working in different capacities, Reschke and 

Thornton continue to wrestle with the challenges of sustaining 

human functions during space-exploration missions. Thornton 

is writing a handbook for engineers that offers information on 

how to design space transportation systems of the future with 

human factors in mind. Reschke looks to continue expanding 

upon his study of the vestibular system in microgravity at 

Johnson and through enhanced international collaboration. 

“We know that people can live in space for six months 

without a whole lot of difficulty,” said Reschke. “It’s those 

transitions between 0 g and 1 g—the transitions back to Earth or 

another gravitational environment—where you’re going to have a 

problem.” It is those other gravitational environments that are of 

interest to aerospace engineers and neuroscientists alike. 

Gravity on Mars or an asteroid is a fraction of the gravity 

we feel on Earth. But there won’t be a ground crew to lean on 

during egress on Mars. Without better ways to mitigate the 

effects of microgravity on human space explorers, one small step 

might actually be one careful crawl. ●

Photo Credit: NASA Johnson Space Center

An overhead view from 

the Skylab 4 Command 

and Service Modules of 

the Skylab space station 

cluster in Earth orbit.

14 | ASK MAGAZINE
Title

By 

Intro

By Brent Buffington

Titan’s golden, smog-like atmosphere and 

complex layered hazes appear to Cassini as a 

luminous ring around the planet-sized moon.

The Path to Scientific Discoveries: 

Cassini-Huygens, a joint mission between NASA, the European Space Agency, 

and the Italian Space Agency, has roamed the Saturnian system for the better part 

of six and a half years. Data from the Cassini spacecraft have led to discoveries 

that include water ice and vapor geysers in the south polar region of the 

small moon Enceladus; an active hydrocarbon hydrological cycle 

(including liquid methane/ethane lakes, dendritic channels, 

dunes, clouds, and possible precipitation) on Titan; 

verification of the continued existence of a perplexing 

hexagon-shaped structure near Saturn’s north 

pole, first observed by Voyager 1; and a 

number of new, highly complex, and 

dynamic structures in our solar system’s 

most massive and diverse ring system. 

These and many other discoveries 

have been made possible by highly 

successful spacecraft operations 

and subsystem maintenance, 

sequencing, instrument monitoring,

risk management, and navigation 

of the most complex gravityassist tour in the history of 

unmanned spaceflight.

Photo Credit: NASA/JPL

STORY | ASK MAGAZINE | 15
A Rich Scientific Harvest

Cassini’s four-year prime mission, from July 2004 to July 

2008, sustained a staggering pace of scientific discovery, 

generating more than one thousand independent publications 

in prominent science and engineering journals. During the 

prime mission—which included 45 encounters with Titan, 

4 with Enceladus, and 6 with other icy satellite flybys; 75 Saturn 

orbits; 161 planned maneuvers (112 executed); and the many 

science sequence and flight software updates—Cassini averaged 

two key events per week. Through all these activities, spacecraft 

subsystems and instruments remained healthy, substantial 

consumables margins were maintained, and power levels from 

the radioisotope thermoelectric generators allowed for many 

more years of science operations.

The continuing quality of scientific return and the 

spacecraft’s excellent state of health led NASA Headquarters to 

grant it two mission extensions. The first, the Equinox mission, 

was a 2.25-year extension from July 2008 to October 2010 

that carried Cassini through Saturn’s northern-hemispheric 

vernal equinox in August 2009. Even though this mission was 

technically an extension, it was similar in scope and funding 

to the prime mission, with science observations and the related 

navigation and spacecraft operations continuing at the same 

or greater pace. In all, the Equinox mission included 28 Titan 

flybys, 8 Enceladus and 3 other icy satellite flybys, 64 Saturn 

orbits, and 104 planned maneuvers (70 executed).

The second extension, the Solstice mission, required a 

radical change in design methodology. Its overriding scientific 

goal is to reach Saturn’s northern summer solstice in May 2017, 

more than doubling the total mission duration, with only 

20 percent of the propellant available at the beginning of the 

prime mission. Furthermore, an expected 40 percent reduction 

in staffing would limit the frequency of key events as well as the 

complexity of the observational sequences. 

Designing the Solstice Trajectory

The process of designing a trajectory is bound by the laws 

of physics and driven by scientific intrigue. The goal is to 

maximize the number of high-quality scientific observations 

and measurements while minimizing propellant expenditure 

and adhering to operational, spacecraft, and environmental 

constraints. Scientists from five discipline working groups 

(Saturn, rings, Titan, icy satellites, and magnetosphere and 

plasma) developed more than forty science objectives to guide 

the Solstice mission design and addressed two major themes: 

seasonal/temporal change and new questions that have arisen 

since the start of the mission. 

The enabling mechanism for the complicated mission 

design of the Cassini trajectories is a concept understood for 

over a century and employed in a number of missions during 

the past forty years: the gravity assist. A gravity assist entails a 

spacecraft using a massive, intermediate, moving celestial body 

to significantly modify its trajectory. Depending on the flyby 

speed and distance, and how the spacecraft flies by the large 

gravitating body (above/below, behind/in front), the spacecraft’s 

orbit size, period, energy, inclination, and distance relative to the 

central body can be altered in an incremental and predictable 

manner such that a wide range of geometries can be attained to 

meet myriad, often disparate, scientific goals. 

Given the high velocities with which Cassini encounters 

the various moons of Saturn, Titan is the only Saturnian 

satellite massive enough to significantly alter the spacecraft’s 

trajectory. To quantify the significance of Titan, consider this: 

the amount of propellant onboard a spacecraft is often expressed 

in terms of how much the propellant can change the velocity 

of the spacecraft in meters per second (m/s), or “delta v” (∆v). 

After entering into orbit around Saturn in July 2004 (which 

required a 627 m/s Saturn orbit insertion maneuver and a 

393 m/s maneuver to raise periapsis, the lowest point of the 

orbit), Cassini possessed a total ∆v capability of approximately 

754 m/s. By contrast, a single Titan flyby can provide a change 

in the spacecraft’s velocity in excess of 800 m/s. In the course 

of more than seventy Titan flybys to date, the large moon has 

imparted to Cassini a total ∆v of more than 50,000 m/s. 

For any given Titan flyby, several options exist for the 

post-flyby spacecraft orbit(s) depending on how we choose 

to fly by Titan. These choices increase geometrically as the 

number of Titan flybys increases, quickly overwhelming any 

attempts to design an optimal trajectory computationally. The 

Saturn’s moon Rhea looms “over” a smaller 

and more distant Epimetheus. Photo Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

16 | ASK MAGAZINE
immense number of possible tours creates both opportunities 

and difficulties.

To prune the multitude of options associated with a sevenyear trajectory comprising more than fifty Titan flybys, John 

Smith and I (the tour designers) conducted parametric studies 

to determine how various science objectives fit with one another: 

which were complementary, mutually exclusive, and cheap or 

expensive both in propellant and time, and which made more 

sense to carry out at specific times in the tour. Guided by these 

studies, we built a handful of end-to-end tours, attempting 

to incorporate as many requested observations as possible for 

more than two hundred scientists (from the United States and 

seventeen European nations) to assess. The optimization of 

tours hinged on the communication between the tour designers 

and scientists, with the tour quality and complexity evolving as 

the interaction of scientific objectives became better understood 

and the geometric constraints defining them became refined. 

Based on the scientists’ evaluations—what characteristics 

of each tour were good, bad, and ugly—we would adapt our 

strategies and develop a fresh crop of candidate trajectories to 

be released and evaluated three to four months later. Survival of 

the best trajectory traits and the development of new traits was 

Darwinism at its finest. 

The core of designing trajectories resides in orbital 

mechanics—the fundamental understanding of how objects 

interact with one another in outer space—and the ability to 

model these interactions accurately and quickly enough to 

evaluate the efficiency and scientific quality of many different 

routes. But on many levels, trajectory design is as much an art 

as a science. We started with a set of initial conditions (the 

ending conditions of the Equinox mission) and a blank canvas 

of space and time in front of us. Much like a painter, we have 

a finite number of “colors” in our palette available to paint 

our masterpiece—in our case, resonant, non-resonant, and 

pi-transfers; equatorial and inclined orbits; and inbound and 

outbound Titan flybys. The way in which we combined these 

colors was motivated by high-priority scientific objectives, guided 

by experience-based intuition and flashes of inspiration, and 

governed by spacecraft capabilities (control authority, available 

propellant), environmental constraints (Saturn’s rings, Titan’s 

atmosphere, Enceladus’ plume, solar conjunction), operational 

intensity constraints (time-of-flight between flybys, maneuver 

frequency), ground-system limitations, and a finite mission 

duration. Within those constraints, we had creative freedom, 

each brush stroke (that is, each Titan flyby) giving rise to certain 

geometric opportunities while precluding others, our choices an 

attempt to create the most aesthetically (scientifically) pleasing 

painting possible.

Achieving consensus among more than two hundred 

scientists from five different disciplines’ working groups vying 

Vertical structures, among the tallest seen in 

Saturn’s main rings, rise abruptly from the edge of 

Saturn’s B ring to cast long shadows on the ring.

The core of designing

trajectories resides in orbital

mechanics—the fundamental

understanding of how objects

interact with one another in

outer space—and the ability 

to model these interactions

accurately and quickly enough 

to evaluate the efficiency and 

scientific quality of many 

different routes.

Photo Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

ASK MAGAZINE | 17
for observation time needed to carry out the scientific 

investigations to which they have dedicated their lives was not 

always a simple matter. With twelve instruments on Cassini, 

there were also numerous and competing interests within 

the discipline working groups. Some objectives required the 

spacecraft’s orbit plane to be the same as Saturn’s ring plane 

(which is also very close to the orbit plane of the larger inner 

satellites); other objectives required medium or highly inclined 

orbits. Additional examples of objective-driven geometry 

included being close to or far from Saturn, placing ground 

tracks over specific features or regions of satellites, flying during 

a solar phase, and orientating the line of apsides1

 with respect to 

the Saturn–Earth line. To further complicate matters, a single 

objective could require many different types of observational 

geometries, sometimes from multiple instruments, as well as 

repeated observations to determine temporal variation. 

After two years of development and numerous iterations 

between the tour designers and the scientists (the number 

of iterations was limited by schedule deadlines), the project 

selected a single tour that best addressed the majority of the 

high-priority science objectives and fit within established 

operational and safety constraints. We then spent a few 

additional months implementing a number of small tweaks 

to further optimize science return. A final reference trajectory, 

the end product of the tour-design process, was delivered to 

the project in July 2009. 

The Solstice mission, from October 2010 to September 

2017, includes 54 Titan flybys, 11 Enceladus and 8 other icy 

satellite flybys, 155 Saturn orbits, and 206 planned maneuvers. It 

will extend Cassini’s operational lifetime past Saturn’s northern 

summer solstice to increase the observed temporal baseline 

beyond two Saturnian seasons. In addition, to satisfy the NASA 

Planetary Protection Office’s requirement to minimize the 

probability of biological contamination of the Saturnian moons, 

Enceladus and Titan, from inadvertent spacecraft impact before 

control of the spacecraft is lost (that is, when the gas tanks 

are empty), a Saturn-impact, end-of-mission scenario2

 was 

incorporated into the Solstice mission. Before the spacecraft’s 

fate is sealed, however, the mission will implement one last 

encore, aptly referred to as the “proximal orbits.” 

Prior to impact, a spectacular series of twenty-two orbits 

will be executed; during each one, Cassini will pass through a 

1,850-mile gap (believed to be clear of any debris harmful to 

the spacecraft) interior to Saturn’s innermost ring, just above the 

cloud tops of Saturn, at speeds in excess of 76,000 mph. Finally, 

on the twenty-third orbit, one last high-altitude Titan flyby will 

alter the spacecraft’s trajectory such that Cassini will impact 

Saturn four days later, trading its temporary roaming residency 

in the Saturnian system for one of a more permanent stature 

via a fiery collision into Saturn. The elegance of this spacecraftdisposal option is that Saturn impact is guaranteed regardless 

of whether the spacecraft survives the first (or any) proximal 

orbit-ring plane crossing—no further propulsive maneuvers are 

necessary. And, en route, unique science opportunities beyond 

the initial scope of the Cassini project will be available. A 

spectacular ending to a spectacular mission. ●

Note: This work was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 

California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the 

National Aeronautics and Space Administration. © California 

Institute of Technology. Government sponsorship acknowledged.

BRENT BUFFINGTON is a member of the Outer Planets Mission 

Analysis Group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and was part of 

the trajectory design teams responsible for the Cassini Equinox 

and Solstice missions. Currently, he is an orbit determination 

analyst on the Cassini navigation team.

1. The line connecting the points of the orbit furthest from and closest to the planet.

2. This spacecraft-disposal option has been reviewed but not formally approved by NASA Headquarters.

Solstice Mission (2010–2017)

The seven-year Solstice Mission, consisting of 155 orbits, will be the final 

installment of Cassini’s exploration of the Saturnian system and will utilize 

the remainder of the spacecraft’s propellant reserves. The different colors 

represent the eight major mission phases used to fulfill requested scientific 

objectives, which required a wide range of observational geometrics.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL

18 | ASK MAGAZINE

The orbit of seven of Saturn’s larger 

satellites are shown in white.
Cohen: Let’s talk about your aerobraking 

work at Langley, maybe starting with a 

description of what it is.

Prince: Aerobraking is using atmospheric 

drag on a spacecraft to slowly reduce the 

apoapsis altitude of the spacecraft [the 

furthest distance from the planet] to 

something closer to what you want the 

final science orbit to be.

Cohen: What is the reason for using 

aerobraking?

Prince: There are two ways to get a 

spacecraft into a desired orbit. You can 

use a lot of fuel and immediately put it 

into a small orbit, or you can save much 

of that fuel by capturing into a large orbit 

and using aerobraking to reduce the orbit 

size. It may take extra time, though. 

Mars Odyssey spent seventy-seven days 

aerobraking. For Mars Reconnaissance 

Orbiter (MRO), it was 145 days. But it’s 

worth the fuel, mass, and cost savings of 

launching a smaller mass to Mars.

Cohen: Are you making decisions and 

adjustments all during that time?

Prince: Yes. What’s tricky about 

aerobraking at Mars is you have so 

much atmospheric uncertainty that you 

can’t rely on past missions to understand 

your current one. The data helps in your 

atmosphere modeling, but you can’t 

fully rely on it. You have to go into the 

atmosphere in real time and figure out 

what’s going on, what perturbations you 

are seeing.

Cohen: The perturbations are winds ...?

Prince: Winds, density variability, polar 

warming. There are a lot of atmospheric 

effects going on.

Jill Prince has been an aerospace engineer at Langley Research 

Center since 1999. She was recently awarded a Women in 

Aerospace Achievement Award for her work on autonomous 

aerobraking. Don Cohen spoke to her at NASA Headquarters 

in Washington, D.C.

 I ntervie w With

Jill 

Prince

 By Don Cohen

INSIGHT | ASK MAGAZINE | 19
Cohen: So how do you respond to 

those effects?

Prince: You can make a maneuver at 

apoapsis, the furthest distance from the 

planet, to affect your altitude at periapsis, 

the closest distance to the planet. You can 

therefore control your periapsis altitude 

but not much else. There are so many 

things to predict, model, and analyze: 

you don’t know exactly how dense the 

atmosphere is going to be in the next orbit. 

You have uncertainties in aerodynamics. 

You have uncertainties in temperature 

modeling. Over the past few years, we’ve 

tried to develop the idea of autonomous 

aerobraking to put a lot of the work that 

has been performed on the ground onto 

the spacecraft itself.

Cohen: I’ve always been impressed by 

the amount of forethought that goes into 

planetary missions—having to imagine 

conditions that are going to arise 

millions of miles away and years later.

Prince: You have to preplan. I spent five 

years on Mars Phoenix entry, descent, 

and landing. That was a seven-minute 

descent. Five years for seven minutes. It’s 

a long time planning to make sure that 

you know what’s going to happen, within 

certain bounds. We don’t just show up 

when the spacecraft gets there and say, 

“OK, where are we going to go next?”

Cohen: What has it been like working 

with project managers and engineers, 

contributing your knowledge to their 

plans and designs?

Prince: It’s always been a good 

experience. The missions I’ve worked on 

have been at different centers across the 

country and in different industries. For 

the three missions that I was a part of 

mission operations, we were at Langley 

working with project managers at JPL 

[Jet Propulsion Laboratory]. We work 

very well across the country. On Mars 

Odyssey, we had a three-hour time 

difference. It was perfect. We’d get data 

in the morning and have a three-hour 

jump to get the rest of the team the data 

we all needed to make a decision early in 

the morning [in California].

Cohen: So there are sometimes 

advantages to working at a distance. 

Did you also spend time out there?

You should really design the mission with entry, 

descent, and landing in mind, not design a mission and

figure out that last seven minutes later.

20 | ASK MAGAZINE
Prince: For Mars Odyssey and MRO, 

the Langley team all went for meetings 

every once in a while, but we did all of 

the Langley aerobraking work at Langley. 

We stayed in our separate locations. For 

Phoenix, I spent a month at JPL before 

the landing, trying to optimize the 

trajectory to target the planet exactly 

where we needed to go. For the two 

orbiters, aerobraking meant very long 

operations. Entry, descent, and landing 

was a one-shot deal. You don’t get a couple 

of orbits to toe-dip in the atmosphere to 

see if it’s to your liking. You have one shot 

and that’s it. It was 145 days of excitement 

contained into one.

Cohen: Did you find—when you worked 

mainly from Langley—that you had to 

get to know the people you were going 

to work with at a distance?

Prince: Yes, you can’t glean personality 

from a phone call or an e-mail. You have 

to talk with them one on one and spend 

time with them to know how they work 

and how they best receive data. 

Cohen: How did you make that happen?

Prince: There were usually face-to-face 

meetings for years beforehand. The 

Langley engineers I work with and I are 

usually in the same building, and that is 

always a very easy working experience.

Cohen: Were you involved in projects 

from the beginning?

Prince: I joined the Odyssey team maybe 

a year prior to launch, if that, and I think 

Langley got involved at a relatively late 

date. For MRO, we started a lot earlier 

and were more involved in the aerobraking 

mission design.

Cohen: Did that earlier start mean 

differences in how the work went?

Prince: It did. There are fewer problems 

down the road when you can design the 

mission based on its atmospheric flight. 

If you don’t take that into account until 

later in the mission life cycle, there can 

be some problems along the way that you 

might have to find a less-than-optimal 

solution for. In entry, descent, and 

landing, that’s particularly important. 

You should really design the mission with 

entry, descent, and landing in mind, not 

design a mission and figure out that last 

seven minutes later.

Cohen: Can you give me a specific 

example of how the atmospheric flight 

analysis has influenced mission design?

Prince: On Mars Phoenix we discovered 

a year or so before launch that there 

was an issue with the reaction control 

system. There was the potential that the 

interaction with the atmosphere at upper 

altitudes would interfere adversely with 

the thrusters being fired so that when 

you thought you were firing thrusters to 

control the spacecraft in one direction it 

might have produced the opposite effect. 

You think you’re going one way and the 

atmosphere is going to force you to go 

the other way. Because of that analysis, 

the team decided not to fire the thrusters 

at all. Instead of a controlled flight 

hypersonically, we left it uncontrolled. If 

we had tried to control that spacecraft in 

the upper atmosphere it really could have 

been problematic.

Cohen: How did you discover that 

problem?

Prince: There was a joint effort going 

on with Mars Science Laboratory, which 

will launch this year. Some of the analysis 

the aerothermodynamicists were doing at 

Langley discovered the potential. They 

ran some wind-tunnel tests, did computer 

modeling, and found this problem. We 

ran the aerodynamic uncertainties in a 

trajectory simulation and confirmed that 

it could be an issue. It was then shared 

with the Phoenix team so we could 

quickly mitigate this risk.

Cohen: I know landing a large spacecraft 

on Mars is a major challenge.

Prince: If we try to land anything of 

higher mass than Mars Science Lab (about 

1 metric ton), we will have issues. We’re 

working with Viking technology that’s fifty 

years old. We need new technology to be 

able to land anything bigger than 1 metric 

ton on the surface on Mars. Otherwise we 

can’t do it without a boatload of fuel.

Cohen: What direction might those new 

technologies take?

Prince: There are several studies 

looking at several different options: 

inflatable atmospheric decelerators, both 

hypersonic and supersonic; supersonic 

retro-propulsion. An entry, descent, and 

landing analysis wrapping up now has 

been investigating architectures to get a 

large mass to the surface of Mars.

ASK MAGAZINE | 21
Cohen: How did you get into aerobraking 

in the first place?

Prince: I jumped right into it. I went to 

George Washington University for my 

master’s degree in engineering. Their 

program was physically located at Langley. 

I archived some Mars Global Surveyor 

data—the first Mars aerobraking mission. 

My thesis was on autonomous aerobraking. 

I’ve had the same phone number and I’ve 

been working with the same group of 

people ever since. It’s been fabulous.

Cohen: How much of what you know 

came from school, how much from 

being on the job?

Prince: I would say 90 percent from 

job experience. You have to have the 

background to understand the physics 

behind the orbit, but you learn the 

operations from experience.

Cohen: How important was mentoring in 

the early part of your career?

Prince: I would say mentoring not only 

had an extremely positive effect on the 

early part of my career, but I still have 

mentors and often look to them for 

guidance. I don’t think there is a point 

in any person’s career where she or he 

should think they don’t need somebody 

else’s input.

Cohen: What kinds of things do people 

who have been around a long time know 

that newcomers don’t?

Prince: People who have been around a 

while know more about how to handle 

situations, how to deal with other 

people. But they also give technical 

advice and have experience to back 

it up. For example, I wouldn’t have 

known in my first aerobraking 

mission why certain atmospheric 

data didn’t line up with what I 

would have expected. “Why is the 

density acting so strangely here 

and not over here?” Sometimes you 

have to ask somebody who has been 

there before. Maybe I would have 

figured it out for myself in ten years, 

but having someone with decades of 

experience is helpful.

Cohen: Now that you’ve been with NASA 

over ten years, what kind of advice 

would you give a new employee?

Prince: I’d throw them in the deep 

end. I’d tell them to dive right in and 

see where you can go. If you’re given an 

opportunity, make the best of it. You 

can’t let an opportunity go by.

Cohen: Which is what you did.

Prince: My advisor at George Washington 

helped to throw me in that deep end. 

He said, “I have a couple of students 

that I’d like to have help out Mars 

Odyssey.” The engineers at Langley 

didn’t know who I was, but they said 

OK. There was a lot of trust. When 

you’re given the responsibility of working 

on a flight project you have to live up 

to that.

Cohen: Were you terrified? Excited?

Prince: I was too naïve to be terrified.

Cohen: I’ve heard similar stories from 

other people at NASA—that they were 

given responsibility for important work 

from the beginning.

Prince: If I hadn’t been put on a project 

I had so much fun doing, I don’t think I 

would have stayed. I was fortunate to really 

like what I got into, and in the past ten 

years I’ve been fortunate enough to work 

three different flight projects. I haven’t 

left Langley other than for my current 

six-month detail at Headquarters.

Cohen: You’re working with Bobby 

Braun on new technology?

Prince: Yes, I’m working in the Strategic 

Integration Office in the Office of the 

Chief Technologist with Bobby Braun 

and James Reuther. Along with others, 

I work on activities including the 

technology road mapping that NASA 

is doing to define the pathway of our 

technological future for the next twenty 

years or so. I’m here as part of a mid-level 

leader program that is in its pilot year.

Cohen: It’s a leadership development 

program?

Prince: Yes. Part of that program is a 

three- to six-month detail.

Cohen: What is the biggest challenge of 

the assignment?

Prince: Understanding a much broader 

scope of technology development is a 

challenge. I have been focused on entry, 

descent, and landing for a while. It is 

exciting, yet still a challenge to open that 

22 | ASK MAGAZINE
lens a bit and learn about technologies in 

other areas. 

Cohen: So do you see yourself as a 

technician or a manager?

Prince: I’ve been an assistant branch 

head at Langley since 2007. Recently 

at Langley I’ve been doing a little more 

managing than technical work. I think 

I’m OK with that. Having an assistant 

branch head job is great because I have 

a supervisory role but I can keep playing 

with the technical toys.

Cohen: How has the work at 

Headquarters been going?

Prince: We’re forging on, trying to push 

technology as far as we can with what we 

have available. We’re wrapping up the 

technology road-map efforts right now 

in hopes of getting several road maps to 

the National Research Council that they 

can improve upon and help out with our 

technology pathways in the future. They 

are amazing products. It’s inspiring to 

read what people have come up with and 

think about where NASA is going to be a 

couple of decades from now.

Cohen: Bobby Braun has talked about 

the importance of failure to innovation.

Prince: Sometimes experiencing failure 

is the best way to improve the current 

technology. When people talk about 

NASA, “failure is not an option” is 

one of the first catchphrases you hear. 

When you’re dealing with technology 

(not human spaceflight, of course) that’s 

not necessarily the attitude you want. 

In building successful technology 

programs, you push the boundaries 

and strive for innovation. Sometimes 

you run into the proverbial unknown 

unknowns. We want to learn and 

understand all we can in our technology 

efforts but we have to be willing to take 

risks and understand that failure is 

sometimes an outcome. But it’s hard to 

change a culture mind-set. And several 

high-profile NASA failures remain fresh 

on many people’s minds; in my area of 

work, those include the two failed Mars 

missions in 1999.

Cohen: Would you say those two Mars 

failures were total losses or were they 

learning opportunities?

Prince: We learned a lot, especially from 

Polar Lander. We learned many potential 

causes of failure and that contributed to 

the success of Phoenix, which was a sister 

spacecraft. Even though I didn’t work on 

Polar Lander, I learned a lot from it.

Cohen: You recently got a Women in 

Aerospace Achievement Award.

Prince: I did. I was extremely honored 

by this award—what an amazing 

organization. It was specifically for my 

work in the development of autonomous 

aerobraking.

Cohen: Has being a woman engineer 

ever been a problem for you?

Prince: If anything, I think it has given 

me more opportunity. Because they are 

a minority in engineering, you typically 

remember the women you see in 

engineering. Sometimes that’s positive.

Cohen: As a student, did you run into 

teachers who said, “You’re a woman; 

you can’t do math or science?”

Prince: Absolutely not. I get a lot of 

speaking requests to try to get young 

girls interested in math and science. 

I’ve probably talked to twenty different 

schools. I talk to Girl Scouts. I’ve talked 

to astronomy clubs. I recently gave a 

talk to a group of female physicians and 

attorneys in Syracuse, New York. Groups 

of women like to see another woman 

talking to them. I get a lot of students ask 

their teachers, “She’s not an engineer, is 

If I hadn’t been put on a project I had so much fun doing, 

I don’t think I would have stayed.

ASK MAGAZINE | 23
she?” I think I’m asked to speak because 

I’m a woman, but I don’t mind that 

anymore. I used to.

Cohen: Used to mind it because you 

thought of yourself as an engineer, not a 

female engineer?

Prince: There was a little of that. I think 

I’ve gotten over it. I realize that speaking 

to students is a great opportunity to 

motivate other young women into 

technical fields, and if I can do that, 

what better way is there to increase the 

diversity in those fields?

Cohen: How has the response to those 

talks been?

Prince: I keep doing it because of the great 

response I get. I don’t just do it for kids; 

I do it for myself, too. It’s very gratifying. 

It makes me remember what a wonderful 

job I have. It’s amazing how smart kids 

are. They pick up stuff very quickly. 

They ask some really good questions. It’s 

impressive and inspiring.

Cohen: What are your goals for the 

future at NASA?

Prince: NASA is an amazing agency. We 

do things here that no other organization 

can. We pursue seemingly impossible 

challenges and improve our way of life 

along the way. I’m having so much fun 

right now, it’s hard to think much about 

the future. When I stop having fun, I’ll 

think about what’s next. ●

We want to learn and understand all we can in our

technology efforts but we have to be willing to take risks

and understand that failure is sometimes an outcome.

24 | ASK MAGAZINE
Mars

Artist’s concept of the 

Pathfinder lander and 

Sojourner rover on Mars.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL

on a

Budget

By Randall Taylor

STORY | ASK MAGAZINE | 25
It was not the first time NASA had successfully landed a 

spacecraft on the planet. More than twenty years earlier, 

the Viking program had put two landers on Mars. But 

Pathfinder got there for a tiny fraction of Viking’s cost. After 

a teleconference with Wes Huntress, during which NASA’s 

Associate Administrator for Space Science approved Phase B 

mission planning, project manager Tony Spear said, “That was 

Wes. He asked me for a Mars lander for Discovery money. I told 

him yes. Now we have to figure out how to do it.”

As the second mission in the agency’s Discovery program 

of low-cost space science initiatives, Pathfinder was approved 

for Phases C and D (design and development) at a maximum of 

three years and $150 million to do the spacecraft development 

work. ($25 million was separately provided for the micro-rover 

development, and the launch vehicle was supplied by NASA, 

so the total project life-cycle cost was $250 million.) Going 

over budget was not an option; if Pathfinder couldn’t be built 

for that amount of money—a congressional cost cap—it 

would be canceled. 

We Are the World

Spear’s plan was to keep a full 50 percent of the budget in 

reserve to deal with the inevitable surprises and adjustments the 

ambitious new technology program would bring with it. He 

was immediately forced to reduce that to 40 percent when news 

came that residual hardware from Mars Observer would not be 

available, due to that mission’s failure and the reallocation of 

flight spares to the new Mars Global Surveyor project. Then 

there were the added requirements: two unfunded mandates. 

The budget would have to pay for a public-outreach program 

and a technology-transfer program. And—yes—let’s not just 

land on Mars; please build a rover that can move on the surface, 

photographing and analyzing its surroundings. (The additional 

money provided for the rover did not fully account for 

accommodation costs on the spacecraft.) Finally, there was even 

a Level 1 requirement to create a “new way of doing business” 

for NASA, part of NASA Administrator Dan Goldin’s Faster, 

Better, Cheaper directive, which we took very seriously.

Under those circumstances, figuring out how to do it meant 

adopting a dramatically anti-not-invented-here approach. Spear 

was ready to find partners anywhere and learn from anybody 

who could offer assistance. The Pathfinder team talked to the 

Department of Defense about parachutes and Volvo about 

airbags. We met with the Russians. We talked to Viking people. 

(Jim Martin, Viking’s project manager, was on Pathfinder’s 

review board.) We learned Apollo-era wisdom from Max Faget. 

We worked with two German institutes, the Danes, and other 

NASA programs in progress at the time.

Some of these working relationships demonstrated 

the generosity and flexibility of others and Spear’s skillful 

management of the human dimensions of cooperative work. 

The Cassini program, which would launch a spacecraft to 

Saturn in 1997, bore the full cost of engineering and building 

the Deep Space Transponder; Pathfinder bought flight units at 

lower recurring-cost prices.

The Niels Bohr Institute of Denmark supplied the 

project’s magnetics experiment. One of Germany’s Max Planck 

Institutes helped build the alpha proton X-ray spectrometer, 

to be carried by the rover. The German hardware was in the 

trunk of a taxi that had an accident en route to their partner, 

the University of Chicago; fortunately, the flight unit survived 

intact. A second Max Planck Institute supplied detectors for the 

Mars

Pathfinder’s

airbags.

Image Credit: NASA

In December 1996, A Delta II rocket launched the Mars Pathfinder spacecraft. Seven months 

later, the Pathfinder lander, slowed by parachute and retrorockets and protected by a cluster of 

airbags, came to rest on the surface of Mars and released a 23-lb. rover that included cameras and a 

spectrometer for analyzing the Martian soil.

Mars 

Pathfinder’s 

airbags.

Image Credit: NASA

26 | ASK MAGAZINE
lander camera. Unfortunately, the camera builder destroyed 

the flight detectors. A second set was furnished at German 

expense (we couldn’t pay for it due to NASA’s no-exchange-offunds policy); these, too, were ruined. Luckily, the third time 

was the charm. Our foreign partners performed with technical 

excellence and good grace.

Build a Little, Test a Little, Wreck a Little

People mattered, and process mattered. Tony Spear; Brian 

Muirhead, the spacecraft manager; and Donna Shirley, the 

rover manager, assembled a team that Tony described as a mix 

of “scarred veterans and bright, energetic youth.” Old dogs were 

taught new tricks, and the next generation of robotic space 

developers learned from them. We did concurrent engineering 

(helped by advice from Lockheed’s Skunk Works). We 

streamlined the procurement process. We partnered with Safety 

and Mission Assurance on a Class A test program and shortcycle documentation approvals.

To develop the supersonic parachute that would operate in the 

thin Martian atmosphere to slow Pathfinder during its descent, 

Pathfinder drew on the Department of Defense’s experience of 

learning by doing. NASA projects typically go through preliminary 

design, final design, build, procure or fabricate, assemble, and 

test. In contrast, the Department of Defense’s parachute programs 

involved building prototype parachutes, dropping them, and 

redesigning based on their performance. This proved an effective 

way of coming up with a design for Mars. What became known 

as “Desert Splat”—a notable parachute failure—helped point the 

way to eventual success.

Ingenious public relations helped defuse some potential 

problems. The contractor doing parachute work for Pathfinder 

discovered that a ballast rock lost during one drop in Connecticut 

had lodged in a farmer’s pickup truck. They mollified the victim 

of the accident by not only paying for repairs to the truck but 

agreeing to do a flyover and festive balloon drop at the farmer’s 

daughter’s birthday party.

We had to invent how to crash-land on Mars, something 

never done before. The development process was guided by an 

Image Credit: NASA/JPL

This 360-degree panoramic view was created using several images 

taken by Pathfinder’s IMP camera. The images were later stitched 

together to create this bird’s-eye view; the black circle is a result of 

the camera’s limited field of view atop Pathfinder.

ASK MAGAZINE | 27
interdisciplinary entry, descent, and landing team that included all 

the major players (NASA centers, federal agencies, industry, small 

business, and consultants) and frequently evaluated progress. 

Pathfinder had more than one hundred peer reviews. 

These involved spacecraft subsystems, the payload, and crosscutting systems. The spacecraft manager chaired some of the 

rover peer reviews and the rover chief engineer chaired several 

of the spacecraft reviews. Reviews began early in the project. 

For example, one review compared a tethered rover design to 

an untethered one. These internal reviews provided a second 

set of eyes at key points in the project development. They were 

supplemented by six incremental delivery demonstrations, which 

forced the various project systems to play together early; the most 

famous occurred at the non-advocate review/preliminary design 

review, when the NASA Independent Review Board chair, Jim 

Martin, walked into the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) ground 

data-system area and had his picture snapped by the University of 

Arizona’s engineering model lander camera. The pixels were sent 

through a Deep Space Network simulator, and his profile showed 

on the ground-system workstations before he exited the room.

Cost Control Is a State of Mind

Bringing the project in on budget meant that everyone working 

on Pathfinder—scientists and engineers as well as managers—

had to be cost-conscious all the time. Because every element 

except the flight system was individually cost-capped by the 

project manager, groups working on project elements knew 

what they had to work with: there was no pot of general project 

money to draw on if they overspent; all reserves had to go toward 

the spacecraft.

One effect of this budget clarity was to eliminate competition 

among the groups—there was no extra money to compete for. 

That and the shared goal of a successful Mars mission fostered 

valuable cooperation.

One team whose subsystem had to locate the sun found 

that a sun sensor would be too expensive. Echoing Spear’s antinot-invented-here ethos, the team lead, David Lehman, said, 

“I can’t solve this in my area, so we’ll have to get help.” The 

team approached the lander camera group about using that 

instrument to find the sun and transferred funds to them to pay 

for camera software routines that would meet the need.

Similarly, when the power team could not afford the 

caliber of solar cells they wanted, Allan Sacks, the ground 

data systems manager, told them, “I’ll give you the $100K 

you need for better cells because that will make operations less 

complicated for my team.”

Faster, Better, Cheaper

John Casani, the head of JPL’s Pathfinder review board, made a 

bet with Spear that the avionics subsystem would not be delivered 

on time and on cost. It came in on budget and one day early, and 

Casani had to pay up, delivering two cases of wine to the project 

celebration at the subsystem manager’s (Lehman’s) home.

“Faster, better, cheaper,” the mantra of that era, has been 

criticized for demanding too much for too little. We can point to 

cases where trying to accomplish ambitious goals with severely 

limited funds probably contributed to failure. Pathfinder is a 

faster, better, cheaper success story. Discipline, determination, 

teamwork, and openness to any and every source of expertise 

and assistance made the difference—a lesson for any project. ●

For more information, see 2007 IEEE paper, “Ten Years After: 

Enduring Lessons Learned from Mars Pathfinder,” available from 

the author.

Note: This work was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 

California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the 

National Aeronautics and Space Administration. © California 

Institute of Technology. Government sponsorship acknowledged.

Randall Taylor was the procurement manager for the 

Mars Pathfinder project. He has worked at the Jet Propulsion 

Laboratory since 1979, with current assignments as project 

acquisition manager/review captain on the GRAIL project and 

project manager of the Acquisition Reengineering project.

28 | ASK MAGAZINE
KDI’s Future Center.

Photo courtesy of Naoki Ogiwara

The Potential of 

a New Workplace

By Naoki Ogiwara

Organizations—no matter what industry they belong to—are now facing more complex social, 

technological, political, and environmental challenges than in the past. To tackle such issues, some 

European and Japanese organizations have created unique physical spaces called “Future Centers.” 

Some of them are producing appreciable results.

INSIGHT | ASK MAGAZINE | 29
The Sky Box at ABN AMRO’S Dialogues House. Photo courtesy of Naoki Ogiwara

Tax and Customs Administration Creativity

At “The Shipyard,” a number of officers use the room named 

“The Brain” when they brainstorm. The room is carefully 

designed to stimulate users to come up with many wild ideas: 

walls as whiteboards, lighting patterns, intentionally not-verycomfortable stools (comfortable chairs make people too relaxed 

for brainstorming, according to them), and an out-of-sight 

door (doors being points where somebody might intrude and 

break concentration). A room called “The Silence,” in contrast, 

is serene and hushed, with layers of curtains that shut out any 

sound and with comfortable cushions—one can even lie on 

them—and without visible doors or windows. This room is not 

for discussions but for calm dialogue and reflection.

The Shipyard is owned and operated by the Dutch Tax and 

Customs Administration. It was built in 2004 by renovating a 

historic building for the purpose of leveraging the intellectual capital 

of the agency and enhancing the creativity of its officers. Why is 

creativity so emphasized at the Tax and Customs Administration? 

According to Ernst de Lange, founder and innovator of The 

Shipyard, there is a strong need to leverage officers’ brains: “Tax 

evaders and frauds are very creative. To collect money, or seize assets 

from them, we simply need to be more creative. Effective education 

for taxpayers and future taxpayers, utilization of intuition in the 

revenue office’s work—there are so many fields where we need to 

bring out the potential of our staff’s creativity.”

The Shipyard was built for internal use by the agency, 

and the more than one hundred topics discussed there in a 

year are all related to the agency’s long-term vision. Over four 

thousand officers used the center last year, and inspector teams 

for substantial tax evasions are frequent users, as De Lange 

suggests. The Shipyard consists of more than a dozen different 

kinds of rooms for different types of discussions and activities. 

In addition to The Brain and The Silence, spaces include “The 

Workshop” for prototyping ideas, “The Harvest” for refining 

rough ideas, and “The Theater” for developing participants’ 

perspectives and mind-sets. They are all well designed to meet 

their specific objectives.

Physical space is not everything at The Shipyard, however. 

Choosing the right topic and designing appropriate processes 

are keys for success. De Lange and his team are in charge 

of selecting topics—what will and will not be discussed at 

The Shipyard—and designing discussion processes: whether 

there will be just one workshop or a sequence of multiple 

workshops, who will be invited, which room(s) to use, what 

methodologies of discussion to use, what type of facilitators 

to assign. A leading concept of The Shipyard is “license to 

disturb.” Through creative ways of generating, prototyping, 

and executing ideas of officers, the agency has gained 

significant economic benefits, including generating more 

efficient methods of tax collection.

The Shipyard is one example of Future Centers spreading 

across Europe. A couple of dozen Future Centers have been 

launched by government agencies, public-sector organizations, and 

private companies. The centers are basically highly participative 

30 | ASK MAGAZINE
working and thinking environments for accelerating innovations 

via co-creating, prototyping, and building breakthroughs. 

Although their purposes vary depending on organizations’ aims 

and context, there are common assumptions behind them. All 

the organizations face issues so complex that they need more 

creative ways to solve them through the fusion and creation of 

knowledge by diverse stakeholders.

The World’s First Future Center

The first Future Center was built at Skandia Life Insurance 

in Sweden in 1996. Skandia was already well known as the 

first company to successfully implement intellectual-capital 

management. After their efforts to leverage intellectual capital, 

the company realized they needed special environments with 

spaces, methodologies, and tools that could maximize the 

value of those invisible assets. Dr. Leif Edvinsson, one of the 

key drivers of intellectual-capital management at Skandia, and 

his team believed the headquarters building or branch offices 

were not the best places to generate and test wild new ideas for 

the future. After team discussions and some experiments, the 

company created the first Future Center by renovating an old 

lakeside house. A number of teams visited it to think in new 

ways. They developed many ideas, some of which have resulted 

in major successes over time.

The Spread of Future Centers

Similar thinking in the United Kingdom led institutions 

including Royal Mail and the Department of Trade and Industry 

to open their own centers around the year 2000. Inspired 

by the success of Skandia’s pioneering Future Center, other 

organizations in Europe began their own initiatives. There are 

currently more than twenty European Future Centers in both 

public and private sectors. “Dialogues House” is a Future Center 

owned and operated by ABN AMRO, one of the largest banks 

in Europe. It was launched in 2008 by drastically renovating 

a trading room. Like The Shipyard, Dialogues House has 

specialized spaces, including “Sky Box,” semi-opened mezzanine 

space for collaboration; “Pressure Cooker,” closed space for 

Ceiling of The Silence at the Dutch Tax 

and Customs Administration’s Shipyard.

Photo courtesy of Naoki Ogiwara

ASK MAGAZINE | 31
Entering the Pressure Cooker

Photo courtesy of Naoki Ogiwara

at Dialogues House.

brainstorming and intensive discussions; and “Forum,” for 

large-scale events with studio features. The bank’s purpose in 

building Dialogues House is to drive innovation by incubating 

ideas related to entrepreneurship, innovation, sustainability, and 

collaboration. It is also open to outsider social entrepreneurs and 

nonprofit organizations. Many business ideas have been turned 

into actual businesses, including, for instance, using the bank’s 

credit management abilities in new areas such as the art trade.

The movement landed in Japan in 2007. KDI (Knowledge 

Dynamics Initiative), a small consulting unit of Fuji Xerox, 

launched its Future Center in Tokyo. It is used mainly for 

holding workshops with Fuji Xerox clients, many of whom 

visit the center every day. Over 3,500 people visited the Future 

Center in 2010. KDI has formed a “Future Center Community” 

with more than forty Japanese organizations to expand the 

movement in the country. Some other Japanese organizations 

have launched their own Future Centers.

Key Elements of a Future Center

Although each Future Center has its own unique features, they 

have some things in common. All centers are facilitated working 

and meeting environments that help organizations prepare for the 

future in a proactive, collaborative, and systematic way. To realize 

the objectives of creating and applying knowledge, developing 

practical innovations, bringing citizens in closer contact with 

government, and connecting end users with industry, they share 

some key elements:

• Careful design and use of space. Extraordinary settings 

encourage creative mind-sets and behavior; different 

modes of discussion require different spaces.

• Facilitation. A skilled facilitator is needed to energize and 

encourage participants and support the processes.

• Process design. The staff need to be familiar with various 

styles and methodologies associated with workshops, 

discussions, and dialogue and be able to choose the 

appropriate one in a given situation.

• Hospitality and playfulness. Participants are only able to 

extend their limits when they feel safe and have fun.

There’s no magic behind the success of Future Centers; 

they simply follow the rules of individual and organizational 

creativity. The key is a holistic approach to bring out that 

creativity by tapping the power of space, dialogue, and process. 

Increasing numbers of European and Japanese organizations 

have started to see the benefits of the creativity inspired by these 

idea incubators. And the concept is still evolving: the Future 

Centers of the future will likely be even more effective. ●

Choosing the right topic and 

designing appropriate processes

are keys for success.

As a senior consultant at KDI, Fuji Xerox, Naoki Ogiwara has 

led several dozen client projects on knowledge management, 

change management, and Future Centers as well as global 

benchmarking research for more than a decade.

32 | ASK MAGAZINE
about 

the academy

The Academy of Program/Project 

and Engineering Leadership is 

NASA’s agencywide resource for 

professional development of its 

project managers and engineers. 

NASA’s missions demand a 

technical workforce with the ability

to design, develop, and execute 

one-of-a-kind projects in aeronautics 

research, space exploration, and

scientific discovery. These challenges 

are unique—and the solutions 

are often “firsts” or “onlies” that 

require innovation, knowledge, 

and learning. Projects have to meet 

the highest standards of safety 

and technical excellence while 

facing increasingly tight constraints 

in terms of cost, schedule, and

sustainability. The majority of 

NASA’s missions today include 

international partners, making 

project leadership a more dynamic 

challenge than ever before. 

The Academy’s activities promote 

learning on three levels: individual 

practitioners, project and engineering 

teams, and across the organization. It 

enables individual learning through 

its integrated curriculum and formal 

development programs, team learning 

through performance enhancement 

services, and organizational learning 

through knowledge-sharing activities. 

Discover more about the Academy 

at appel.nasa.gov.

curriculum

The Academy’s training curriculum enables NASA’s technical 

workforce to develop NASA-specific expertise and capabilities in 

project management, systems engineering, and engineering. It is 

intended to supplement an individual’s academic and professional 

work experience. The curriculum draws extensively on best 

practices and the knowledge of NASA subject-matter experts 

to ensure it addresses the needs of the agency’s practitioners. 

All courses are developed following established instructional 

design processes, and include rigorous annual audits, revisions, 

and incorporation of participant feedback. Courses are highly 

interactive, featuring case studies, group discussions, and 

individual exercises. 
Title

By 

knowledge sharing

The Academy’s knowledge-sharing activities promote excellence in project 

management and engineering by using the power of stories to build a 

community of practitioners who are reflective and geared toward sharing. 

By facilitating agencywide knowledge sharing through forums, conferences, 

award-winning publications, case studies, and multimedia offerings, the 

Academy helps ensure that critical lessons and knowledge remain accessible. 

The Academy’s knowledge network extends beyond NASA to include expert 

practitioners from industry, academia, other government agencies, research 

and professional organizations, and international space agencies.

performance enhancement

Since most learning at NASA takes place within project teams, the best opportunity 

for facilitating project success is at the team level. The Academy offers team support in 

areas including team building, technical training, process development, planning and 

scheduling, program control and analysis, systems management, risk management, 

and software management. Through mentoring, coaching, consultations with expert 

practitioners, focused workshops, and large group sessions, these activities facilitate 

immediate improvements as well as enhance long-term team capabilities. 

 

 

 

Since NASA practitioners report that 90 percent of learning takes place on the job, 

the Academy facilitates on-the-job experiences and developmental assignments through 

its Systems Engineering Leadership Development Program (SELDP) and Hands-On 

Professional Experience (Project HOPE). These formal development programs provide 

early- and mid-career professionals with hands-on opportunities for learning that 

accelerate their professional development and readiness to lead. 

formal 

development 

programs
Academy

Sharing

Knowledge

SPECIAL PULLOUT

NASA’s ASK Magazine gives program and project managers, engineers, and scientists a way to share 

expertise and lessons learned with fellow practitioners. This is only one way ASK helps share knowledge 

as part of NASA’s Academy of Program/Project and Engineering Leadership.

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, 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 professionals 

just like you, primarily from NASA, but also from other government agencies, academia, industry, and 

international partners. 

Many of these stories are heard firsthand at Academy events, such as Masters Forums, Knowledge 

Forums, and Masters with Masters. This pullout includes more information about the Academy and its 

offerings, and how you can become more involved in sharing knowledge with us at ASK.
Masters Forums

The Masters Forum program was designed to enable NASA and 

the program’s participants to share project management best 

practices and lessons learned, cultivate a community of reflective 

practitioners, build cross-center relationships, and develop the 

leadership expertise of the agency’s veteran and emerging project 

managers and engineers. Thought-provoking presentations and 

dynamic group discussions allow attendees to network with 

influential leaders from government agencies, universities, private 

industry, and international partners. Many stories from these events 

are shared with a broader audience through ASK Magazine, the 

ASK the Academy e-newsletter, and videos published online on 

the Academy’s web site and YouTube channel.

Knowledge Forums

Knowledge Forums are small, engaging, one-day events that 

address different aspects of knowledge acquisition, capture, and 

transfer. The forums feature leading experts and practitioners 

from government, industry, and academia who deal directly with 

knowledge-related challenges. Participants interact with panelists 

to share stories and experiences in open discussions related to 

the evolving field of knowledge management. Emphasis is placed 

on informal discussions and networking in order to cultivate a 

strong and innovative knowledge community. Summaries from 

each forum, as well as resources on good storytelling and lessons 

in leadership, are published on the Academy’s web site.

Masters with Masters

Masters with Masters is a series of web-based learning videos 

that bring together two master practitioners to reflect on their 

experiences, lessons learned, and thoughts about upcoming 

challenges. The goal of this series is to engage master practitioners 

in conversations that bring insights to the surface and promote 

reflection and open sharing as a regular practice at NASA. All 

Masters with Masters events are recorded before a live audience 

and include time for questions and answers. The videos are 

archived on the Academy web site, and select clips are posted to 

the Academy’s YouTube channel.

NASA’s Project Management Challenge

The Project Management Challenge is an annual seminar designed 

to examine current program/project management trends and 

provide a forum for sharing knowledge and exchanging lessons 

learned. By attracting stakeholders from all experience levels, 

we help establish an important link between NASA’s world-class 

experts and the emerging leaders of tomorrow.

Have something good to share, but you aren’t sure where to start? 

The following articles were published in ASK after face-to-face 

conversations at these Academy events. We hope they will provide 

you with some inspiration.

• “The Freedom to Learn,” by Jack Boyd: www.nasa.gov/offices/oce/

appel/ask/issues/40/40s_freedom.html

• “Peer Assist: Learning Before Doing,” by Kent A. Greenes: www.

nasa.gov/offices/oce/appel/ask/issues/40/40i_peer_assist.html

• “Islands and Labyrinths: Overcoming Barriers to Effective Knowledge 

Transfer,” by T.J. Elliott: www.nasa.gov/offices/oce/appel/ask/issues/

39/39i_islands.html

• “Space Exploration in the 21st Century: Global Opportunities and 

Challenges,” by Jean-Jacques Dordain: www.nasa.gov/offices/oce/

appel/ask/issues/38/38i_space.html

• “Petrobras and the Power of Stories,” by Alexandre Korowajczuk and 

Andrea Coelho Farias Almeida: www.nasa.gov/offices/oce/appel/

ask/issues/38/38s_petrobras.html

• “Big Facilities, Hard Lessons,” by Michael Ospring: askmagazine.

nasa.gov/issues/37/37s_big_facilities_hard_lessons.html

• “Management by Wandering Around: A Potent Arrow in the Manager’s 

Quiver,” by Noel W. Hinners: askmagazine.nasa.gov/issues/35/35s_

management_by_wandering.html

• “Answering the Call: Communicating with Soyuz,” by Ed Campion: 

askmagazine.nasa.gov/issues/35/35s_answering_the_call.html

• “Is Software Broken?” by Steve Jolly: askmagazine.nasa.gov/

issues/34/34i_software_broken.html

• “International Cooperation: When 1 + 1 = 3,” by Toshifumi Mukai:

askmagazine.nasa.gov/issues/31/31s_international_cooperation.html

Learn more about the Academy at appel.nasa.gov.

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Looking for a way to share your own stories and experiences with us? You can always 

reach us online at askmagazine.nasa.gov. We also look for stories at these Academy events.
What began as conversations between NASA and Hamilton Sundstrand managers 

grew into an idea to develop a piece of spaceflight hardware with minimal NASA 

oversight. We expected this approach would allow the contractor to build hardware 

faster and cheaper while providing higher profit than the conventional cost-plusfee contracting approach. In exchange for this free rein during development, 

the contractor would take on significant financial and technical risk 

throughout design, testing, and the hardware’s operational life cycle. 

The idea came to fruition with the Sabatier system. 

Hamilton Sundstrand

By Jason Crusan, Marybeth Edeen, Kevin Grohs, and Darren Samplatsky

STORY | ASK MAGAZINE | 33
Photo Credit: NASA

After departing the International Space Station, the STS-130 crew onboard 

Space Shuttle Endeavour captured this view of the space station high above Earth.

developed the oxygen-generation system that interacts directly 

with the Sabatier system to provide hydrogen. In addition, the 

interfacing systems for the Sabatier were already in place and 

operational onboard the ISS. Since the Sabatier was always planned 

as part of the regenerative environmental control and life-support 

system on the station, the interfacing systems were ready for it. 

Communication and Teamwork 

To increase our chance of success, we had open and honest 

communication between the organizations that allowed us 

to understand each other’s goals and challenges clearly. Frank 

communication began during initial contract negotiations, when 

it became apparent that without both parties being completely 

up front about their expectations, it would be impossible to 

close the deal. This meant each side had to explain its ultimate 

negotiating objectives and constraints in order for discussions 

to reach a mutually acceptable middle ground. Otherwise, 

significant differences that needed to be reconciled would have 

made it impossible to come to any agreement. 

With an understanding of what was driving NASA and 

Hamilton Sundstrand requirements, we were able to define an 

approach to provide milestone payments before activation that 

were subject to a 100-percent refund to NASA if the hardware 

did not work upon on-orbit activation. This met NASA’s need to 

keep Hamilton Sundstrand’s “skin in the game” until activation 

and met Hamilton Sundstrand’s need for income during the 

development phase; it was referred to as a 100-percent lookThe system catalyzes the reaction between carbon dioxide and 

hydrogen—byproducts of current life-support systems onboard 

the International Space Station (ISS)—to produce water and 

methane. In exchange for Hamilton Sundstrand conducting and 

financing the design, development, testing, and evaluation of the 

Sabatier system, NASA would pay for its capability to produce 

water on orbit. If the system failed due to Sabatier-related hardware 

or software issues, then NASA would not be responsible for any 

payments to the contractor. In effect, NASA would pay for the 

availability of water production while the contractor would be 

responsible for maintaining system operability during the contract 

period. Holding Hamilton Sundstrand accountable for success 

significantly reduced NASA’s technical, cost, and schedule risks. 

The water produced by Sabatier will be useful when we 

reach the end of the Space Shuttle program and the “free” water 

the shuttle has been providing as a byproduct of its fuel cells. 

But the Sabatier hardware will not be a critical ISS system, since 

future plans include water delivery by other resupply vehicles. 

While it seems odd to build a system for manned spaceflight 

that does not have to work, this was the key to developing and 

executing our idea for the service-contract model: it allowed 

failure to be an option. At the same time, the risk of failure 

was relatively low since the existing technology needed for 

development was mature. 

NASA and Hamilton Sundstrand had been researching 

Sabatier systems for more than twenty years. The contractor 

also had significant hardware-development experience and had 

34 | ASK MAGAZINE
back clause. While being open and honest about the real drivers 

behind our negotiation strategies went against our bargaining 

instincts, it enabled us to work together more efficiently toward 

a common goal: a mutually acceptable agreement that ultimately 

met all parties’ objectives. 

We also had unwavering team commitment within both 

organizations, which allowed us to work through unexpected 

difficulties that arose as new contracting approaches were 

generated and implemented. Some of these issues were simple 

on the surface, and some were very complex. In one case, 

Hamilton Sundstrand provided a data product that met contract 

requirements, but because NASA did not sufficiently define 

the requirement for its format, the data could not be added to 

the relevant NASA database. To correct this, both NASA and 

Hamilton Sundstrand evaluated options for reformatting the 

data and shared those solutions with each other. In the end, 

NASA reformatted the data product because it was the easiest 

solution for everyone concerned. 

Team commitment was critical to integrated safety 

analyses. Hamilton Sundstrand had successfully completed 

safety reviews for the Sabatier system as a stand-alone piece 

of hardware, and thus met their contractual requirements. 

But when the ISS program began to perform integrated safety 

analyses six months prior to flight, a number of issues arose 

concerning a vent line the Sabatier would share with the 

oxygen-generation system. Hamilton Sundstrand provided 

critical expertise not only on the design and operation of 

their system, but on the approaches they had identified for 

mitigating risks discovered in the integrated analysis. If the 

contractor had not helped resolve these issues, they would have 

met their contract requirements, but NASA would never have 

been able to install and activate the system. In more traditional 

contracting relationships, problems such as these could have 

led to cost increases and delays. 

Developing the Approach and Requirements

Part of the challenge to successfully implementing this 

contracting approach was communicating what the benefits 

and risks were to both NASA and the contractor organizations. 

We also needed to create custom contract clauses that defined 

termination liability for every day of the contract and the 

100-percent look-back penalty. The contractor had to ensure 

the return on investment was sufficient to account for the 

fact that funds would be spent in 2008–2009 but payments 

would not be made by NASA until 2010–2014, so the “cost of 

money” had to be included in profit calculations. The decision 

to make early milestone payments had the additional impact 

of reducing life-cycle costs to the government by providing 

some funding up front. This reduced the cost of money to 

Hamilton Sundstrand, and the contractor has the potential to 

realize financial returns commensurate with its risk, provided 

the system works as promised.

Technical and schedule issues presented their own challenges. 

The overall schedule was under two years, a significant challenge 

for developing any piece of spaceflight hardware that contains 

what is essentially a furnace, a multistage compressor, and a 

condenser/phase-separation system. Developing the compressor 

was a key technical concern. All previous work on the part had 

been done by NASA, so Hamilton Sundstrand would need to 

get up to speed on that technology quickly. 

To help mitigate risk, NASA limited its requirements to 

technical interfaces and safety. Requirements related to the 

launch environment and system reliability were removed because 

NASA would not pay for any service if the hardware did not 

survive the launch or was otherwise unusable. Items such as the 

failure modes and effects analysis and the hazard analysis were 

retained along with the requirements of normal safety review 

panels. This allowed more than 70 percent of NASA’s standard 

requirements to be removed. Verification of the remaining 

requirements was left as flexible as possible, and specific 

verification criteria were defined only where absolutely required. 

In many cases, certificates of compliance from Hamilton 

Sundstrand were accepted as verification compliance.

One of the other unique aspects of the contract is that 

NASA did not require commitment to a specific launch date or 

launch vehicle for the hardware. Instead, the agency gave itself 

and the contractor a six-month window from final delivery of 

the hardware to launch and on-orbit checkout.

While being open and honest about the real drivers behind our negotiation

strategies went against our bargaining instincts, it enabled us to work

together more efficiently toward a common goal: a mutually acceptable

agreement that ultimately met all parties’ objectives.

ASK MAGAZINE | 35
In the Tranquility node aboard 

the International Space Station, 

NASA Astronaut Doug Wheelock, 

Expedition 25 commander, works 

to install the new Sabatier.

Photo Credit: NASA
Since NASA’s contracting goal was for Hamilton Sundstrand 

to take on the majority of the risk, and we knew from experience 

that initial activation of a system on orbit is always challenging, 

there was a grace period in the contract to allow the contractor 

to work through any start-up issues before the look-back penalty 

took effect. 

The performance-based criteria didn’t end after activation; 

they apply to the entire on-orbit life cycle. To simplify the onorbit criteria, we created a system to calculate the number of days 

the Sabatier is available for water production. The performance 

payment for any given year is a simple calculation that subtracts 

down days from a maximum payment based on full-time 

functioning. We also defined protocols covering contingency 

scenarios to address whether system inoperability related to 

NASA interfaces or the Hamilton Sundstrand system.

What We Learned

The Sabatier hardware was activated on orbit in October 2010 

and successfully passed its checkout period. This meant we did 

not need to exercise the look-back clause for initial milestone 

payments. Future payments depend on the hardware continuing 

to be available to produce water onboard the ISS. 

A number of things helped make this service-contract 

approach work well: 

• Fully defining safety and interface requirements, as well 

as minimal verification requirements, at the beginning of 

the project

• Defining roles and responsibilities for both NASA and the 

contractor, from the working troops all the way through 

the highest-level management 

• Having an experienced spaceflight-hardware contractor

• Having sufficiently mature technology to keep hardware

development risk low 

• Making NASA’s expertise openly available to the contractor 

• Fostering open and honest communication regarding 

business goals and limitations, legal options, issues, and 

drivers for both parties

Additionally, the roles of NASA and the contractor during 

certification for flight readiness must be defined so NASA teams 

understand the limits of their role and don’t inadvertently add 

requirements that are typical of “normal” contracts. Coordination 

with other contractors who will interact with the new hardware 

is also important. For example, our unique contract approach 

and the fact that NASA is not taking ownership of the hardware 

had numerous effects at Kennedy Space Center, where Boeing 

and Lockheed Martin are responsible for performing some 

operations on flight hardware to prepare it for launch to the ISS. 

Since NASA was not taking ownership, the data required for 

the property and accounting systems used by Boeing to track 

hardware they were performing work on could not be provided. 

It was impossible to assign a value to the hardware for the 

accounting system since NASA did not know what Hamilton 

Sundstrand had really spent on the hardware, and the value was 

ultimately dependent on how the hardware performed on orbit. 

As a result, the hardware sat for days in shipping and receiving 

until workarounds could be developed and implemented. 

This contract approach delivered process efficiency and 

innovation but drove out innovation in hardware and software 

design, given the contractor’s need to minimize the risk of 

hardware failure in order to maximize profit. Even though 

failure was an option for NASA, since our risk was minimal, the 

incentive for the contractor to succeed was much greater. This 

suggests that the service-contract approach can work well for 

some technology initiatives, but not all. For instance, it would 

not be feasible for high-risk, innovative development. And it 

might be difficult to give contractors so much independence 

when they are building critical systems that must work. But 

there are many situations where this approach can benefit both 

NASA and its contractors. We should think about when and 

how it is appropriate. Successful flight-hardware development 

does not mean always defaulting to a cost-plus-fee contract. ●

Darren Samplatsky is the engineering manager for the 

Sabatier Assembly at Hamilton Sundstrand Space Systems in 

Windsor Locks, Conn.

Jason Crusan serves as chief technologist for the Space 

Operations Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters, where he 

is principal advisor and advocate to the Associate Administrator for 

Space Operations on matters of technology policy, investments, and 

initiatives. Since joining Headquarters in 2005, he has been driving 

an entrepreneurial approach to managing projects by leveraging 

investments and partnerships with industry, academia, government 

agencies, and national laboratories.

Kevin Grohs is currently the Sabatier program manager at 

Hamilton Sundstrand. He has worked in contracts administration, 

operations management, and program management over the 

past twenty years in their Windsor Locks facility.

Marybeth Edeen has been at NASA for twenty-three years 

and managed the development of hardware required to enable 

ISS to accommodate a six-person crew. She is currently the 

manager of the ISS National Lab Office, which finds and enables 

uses of the ISS by the private sector and U.S. government 

agencies outside NASA.

ASK MAGAZINE | 37
What do you do when you have valuable knowledge spread among multiple people in multiple 

organizations, and they don’t consider themselves experts? Here’s an example of just that: a number 

of quality-improvement teams working for health-care providers around the country with some 

remarkable successes and some failures, but few seeing what we call the “wider view”—the cause 

and effect of their teams’ success.

Jamming with the Institute 

for Healthcare Improvement 

By Katrina Pugh and Jo Ann Endo

38 | ASK MAGAZINE | INSIGHT
The Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), a not-forprofit organization dedicated to fostering improvements in 

health-care delivery throughout the world, saw the imperative 

of knowing what made health-care quality-improvement teams 

successful. Spreading the knowledge could mean the difference 

between life and death for patients. 

One of IHI’s most far-reaching efforts is their IMPACT 

Communities. Made up of hospital teams from around the 

United States, these distributed communities use IHI’s tools 

and methods to introduce quality-improvement initiatives. 

IMPACT Communities have dealt with important issues, 

including health-care-associated infections and improving care 

in emergency departments and clinical office practices, resulting 

in improvements that have saved millions of dollars annually. In 

2009, the multi-hospital “Perinatal” IMPACT Community of 

about one hundred doctors, nurses, technicians, administrators, 

and project managers had been working with IHI for two years 

to reduce medical errors, using IHI’s process-improvement 

methods in maternity wards. IHI knew that they would be 

launching future improvement communities in other care areas 

and believed that those communities could learn a great deal 

from this group. 

Hidden Know-How

During planning discussions, IHI leadership felt there were 

some remarkable cases of hospital teams quickly coming 

together to do effective work while other teams took longer to 

form, agree on goals, establish effective communication, and 

become productive—if they ever did. They wanted answers to 

these questions:

• How do hospitals become ready to consistently adapt 

IHI’s practices?

• How do diverse hospital quality-improvement team 

members “gel” into a team that is a force of change within 

their organizations? 

IHI needed a process that could capture what people knew 

intuitively (and collaboratively) but wasn’t written down. And 

IHI needed to incorporate their knowledge into new processes 

rapidly. If there were efficiencies to be had and lives to be saved, 

there wasn’t a moment to spare. 

Enter Knowledge Jam. Knowledge Jam is a process for 

bringing out the tacit knowledge of teams and experts through 

a formal process of targeting specific knowledge, facilitating 

a knowledge conversation between experts or veteran teams 

(knowledge originators) and knowledge seekers (or their 

representatives, the “brokers”), and then ensuring the knowledge 

is put into practice. Knowledge Jam’s steps are select, plan, 

discover/capture, broker, and reuse. The Knowledge Jam cycle 

extends from targeting what (and whose) know-how is needed to 

eliciting it, translating it, reusing it, and measuring its impact. 

Consultants Katrina Pugh, Align Consulting, and 

Nancy Dixon, Common Knowledge Associates, facilitated a 

Knowledge Jam with IHI in the spring of 2009. Knowledge 

originators were seven health-care practitioners (nurses, 

doctors, administrators, and project managers) from six 

hospitals. Brokers from IHI included IHI staff Jo Ann Endo, 

Sarah Jackson, Jonathan Small, and Kiette Tucker and IHI 

faculty Marie Schall and Ginna Crowe, who also occasionally 

doubled as originators. 

Efficiency is a critical part of a Knowledge Jam. The 

actual discover/capture event, which involves originators and 

brokers, generally lasts only 90 minutes. Rigorous planning 

and ongoing, purposeful interactions between brokers 

and originators, brokers and brokers, and originators and 

originators save meeting time for everyone. The event is more 

about “channeling insight to a target” than the “harvesting in 

bulk” and dumping into an all-too-often stagnant repository 

that characterize some knowledge management efforts. 

Another key to Knowledge Jam efficiency is the three 

disciplines of facilitation, conversation, and translation. These 

are threaded into the Knowledge Jam’s five-step cycle:

Facilitation

A facilitator helps select, plan, and coordinate the Knowledge 

Jam process, organizing the early structuring of concepts, 

providing quality control, aligning Jams to business objectives, 

and, most importantly, setting a tone of curiosity and respect for 

the Jam that fuels conversation that yields unique and reusable 

insight. Facilitators model and reward respectful, open inquiry 

and discourage defensive, criticizing, or protective attitudes. 

During the four planning months, we identified topics and 

participants, held a planning meeting, and prepared for the 

discover/capture event. We also conducted approximately ten 

interviews with brokers and originators. Participants in the 

planning included nurses, doctors, quality-program managers, 

IHI faculty and staff, and program designers. (Note that none 

of this was full time; Knowledge Jams have a surprisingly light 

time footprint.)

Scope,

sponsor

Get 

 participants,

topics

Facilitate

conversation

Translate 

and

circulate

Apply 

and 

measure

Discover/

Capture Select Plan Broker Reuse

ASK MAGAZINE | 39
Conversation

Knowledge Jams invite the curiosity of those who will use (or 

transmit) the knowledge. An open conversation between the 

brokers and originators surfaces the conditions around the facts 

(How did you decide to do that?). The Jam can also reveal 

connections between events, outcomes, and people that we 

hadn’t considered. Drawing out context in this manner makes 

captured know-how reusable in other contexts.

Three dimensions of effective conversation are the “posture 

of openness,” “pursuit of diversity,” and “practices of dialogue.” 

The diversity dimension deserves some emphasis, as it 

played a key role in drawing out valuable context during 

the discover/capture step in the IHI Knowledge Jam. The 

group was critiquing a draft definition of what it means for 

multidisciplinary hospital quality teams to “gel” as they come 

together to implement improvement practices. 

40 | ASK MAGAZINE

IHI Knowledge Jam Excerpt 

Showing Cognitive Diversity

Knowledge Jam Comments Summary/Implications

Facilitator: What would you add to or take away from this description of what team “gelling” is? 

Add to “gel” definition:

Originator 1 (Nurse, New Hampshire Hospital): Open communication is a big piece of it. 

There needs to be a process to work through disagreement. By “open communication” I mean 

safety in the group to say what you think.

• Communicating openly

Originator 2 (Nurse, Connecticut Hospital): Taking the appropriate steps (intervention) to get 

the results. Having agreement about what those interventions will be. 

• Working for multidisciplinary 

agreement on interventions

Broker 1 (IHI staff, Statistician): A team may gel before it actually has results.

Originator 1: A willingness to hold each other accountable for each piece of the project. That 

includes committing to having that hard discussion about desired results, and ensuring that you 

are getting those results out of the process. 

• Holding each other accountable

Broker 2 (IHI faculty, Psychologist): For me, what we are describing is a “functional team.” 

There needs to be a relationship factor, beyond just our functional needs. 

• Having relationships at human, not 

just task, level

Facilitator: Please, can you elaborate? 

Broker 2: You need to know people as humans, and not just be task-oriented. That means 

developing a relationship that has to do with our personal space—for example, what we are 

working on. It means acknowledging that life gets in the way. To me, that makes it a more 

sustainable team. 

Originator 3 (Nurse, Louisiana Hospital): A mutual respect within your team. • Respecting each individual’s role in 

the program

Facilitator: How is this different from the personal getting-to-know-you? 

Originator 3: If I am working in a multidimensional team, there is more than just “respect.” What 

I mean is, “knowing what each other is doing.” For example, [implementing a change] means 

step A–J for nurses, and for physicians that means Y. So when we meet collaboratively we are 

taking the time to see what the implications are for each area. 

• Knowing more about each others’ 

tasks and what it takes to get the 

job done

Originator 2 (commenting at the end of the discover/capture event): We all have the 

same goals, but it is interesting that the way we meet them may differ. It has to do with culture, 

structure, and management styles of the organization. Maybe it’s the styles of people who have 

quality-improvement roles, who bring their uniqueness to the table.
The nurses, doctors, and IHI staff contributed a spectrum 

of ideas to the definition of “gelling,” including communicating, 

having mutual respect, recognizing each team member’s work 

and life burdens, building relationships, and accomplishing 

measurable quality-improvement goals together. They also 

made clear that a team can gel before it has results. The 

participants’ expanded definition helped make their subsequent 

recommendations far more useful, decisive, and prescriptive.

Translation

Involvement by brokers throughout the Jam gives them a sense of 

ownership. They remix the ideas into their context (their division, 

country, project, or product) and integrate those ideas for action. 

The translation of the knowledge into a project template, a 

design spec, or a marketing protocol suits the knowledge seekers 

who are embarking on a decision, innovation, process revision, 

or outreach program. Brokers often use change management 

strategies and collaboration or social media technology like 

team sites, wikis, and microblogs to ensure jammed knowledge 

gets communicated, amplified, and used.

The three disciplines make jamming more efficient, but 

they also extend to more strategic forms of knowledge transfer. 

For example, the culture of facilitation (intention), conversation 

(openness), and translation (stewardship) is just as applicable 

to communicating, socializing, and adopting a new business 

model as it is for remixing an expert’s or team’s know-how for a 

tactical program. 

A Big Insight 

Effective perinatal community teams revealed that it is critical 

to gel intentionally (say, by adopting new methods and metrics) 

but that informal interactions, such as holding check-ins and 

telling stories, help them stick together. The group came to 

agree on the following dimensions of gelling:

1. Conduct goal setting as team building.

2. During the relationship-building process, meet with 

peer organizations with experience in similar health-care 

improvement methods.

3. Infuse shared decision-making with a diversity of 

experience and values.

4. Build cohesiveness through both performance data and 

storytelling.

5. Integrate new members intentionally.

6. Formally sustain the organization’s commitment to the 

new health-care improvement culture through project 

management and work structures.

As a consequence of the Knowledge Jam, IHI added these 

gelling components to an organization-wide design model 

called the “Results Driver Diagram.” The diagram is a critical 

part of the development of all IHI’s collaborative programming, 

affecting hundreds of health-care organizations around the 

United States. 

Starting Your Own Knowledge Jams

Taking Knowledge Jams into your organization requires thinking 

ahead to where the tacit knowledge of experts and teams could 

potentially improve processes, accelerate innovation, or expand 

margins. Next is prioritizing topics with potential originators and 

brokers. Then let the jamming begin! Good facilitators can set 

the tone, encourage broker–originator conversations, and manage 

the whole process through epiphanies and low points alike. 

Because the application of the knowledge (and the 

corresponding choice of knowledge to jam) are targeted and 

collaborative, Knowledge Jams’ outcomes can be substantially 

more cost- and effort-efficient than traditional means of 

knowledge transfer. IHI was able to capitalize on newfound 

gelling insights just at the moment they were preparing to launch 

new IMPACT Communities. So, too, might you find that a 

Knowledge Jam could inform your critical program with the 

hidden know-how of those brilliant, but time-starved, experts 

and veteran teams. ●

Jo Ann Endo is the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s (www.ihi.org) communications 

specialist and administrator of the Mentor Hospital Network. She has worked at IHI since 

2005, focusing first on the 100,000 Lives and 5 Million Lives campaigns and now on the IHI 

Improvement Map. 

Katrina Pugh is president of Align Consulting and author 

of the forthcoming book, Sharing Hidden Know-How: How 

Managers Solve Thorny Problems with the Knowledge Jam 

(Jossey-Bass, 2011). 

ASK MAGAZINE | 41
EDEM simulation of dust 

particles being removed 

from a dust screen under the 

influence of an electric field.

Image Credit: DEM Solutions

Innovative Partnership Finds 

Answers to Modeling Lunar Dust

By Carol Anne Dunn, Carlos Calle, and Richard LaRochE

A major problem facing manned or unmanned missions to the moon is lunar dust. Dr. Carlos Calle, 

founder and director of the Electrostatics and Surface Physics Laboratory at Kennedy Space Center, 

is familiar with the problem. He has carefully reviewed Apollo mission reports and debriefings to 

familiarize himself with problems encountered during those missions. The Apollo astronauts had 

limited visibility during descent due to dust effects, and NASA was uncertain how the astronauts’ 

health would be affected as they inhaled and ingested the dust. During the Apollo 15 mission, a 

camera failed because highly abrasive dust entered the drive mechanism. 

42 | ASK MAGAZINE | INSIGHT
Lunar dust is thought to be electrostatically charged, which 

would make it difficult to remove from solar panels, viewports, 

camera lenses, and astronaut suits, gloves, and visors. Similar 

problems would be encountered on the dusty surface of 

Mars. With possible missions to the moon to try out enabling 

technologies for Mars exploration, scientists like Calle are 

concerned for a number of reasons. We would be staying longer 

on the surface than the Apollo astronauts; future missions may 

include dust-raising activities, such as excavation and handling 

of soil and rock; and we would be sending robotic instruments 

to do much of the work for us. 

Understanding more about the chemical and physical 

properties of lunar dust, how dust particles interact with each 

other and with equipment surfaces, and the role of static 

electricity build-up on dust particles in the lunar environment 

is imperative to developing technologies that can remove 

and prevent dust accumulation as well as successfully handle 

regolith, also known as lunar soil. Calle is currently working on 

the problems of the electrostatic phenomena and is involved in 

developing instrumentation for future planetary missions. 

The Electrostatics and Surface Physics Laboratory performs 

research and development on technologies that can assist 

operations at Kennedy and at other NASA centers to detect, 

mitigate, and prevent electrostatic-charge generation and 

discharge on spaceflight hardware, ground-support equipment, 

International Space Station modules, and payloads. 

“We are particularly excited about our work on the 

Electrodynamic Dust Shield,” said Calle. “We first worked 

with the University of Arkansas at Little Rock to mitigate 

and prevent the accumulation of dust on solar panels for 

Mars missions.” Every fifteen months to three years, Mars is 

engulfed in a dust storm that can last for months, and every day 

there are dust devils, tornado-like columns of spinning dust. 

The project is now part of the NASA-wide Dust Management 

Project. Even though NASA is not planning on manned moon 

missions, the lab expects there to be unmanned lunar missions 

where this technology for preventing and removing surface 

dust will be important. 

To further this research, Kennedy’s Innovative Partnerships 

Program (IPP) Office partnered with DEM Solutions, Inc., a 

global leader in particle-dynamics simulation software, after 

NASA personnel made a seed fund proposal to IPP. Customers 

in pharmaceutical, chemical, mineral, and materials processing 

industries as well as oil and gas production, agriculture, 

construction, and geo-technical engineering use DEM’s EDEM 

software to improve the design and operation of equipment that 

comes into contact with particulate material. 

EDEM can simulate and analyze particle handling and 

manufacturing operations, which allows users to create a 

model of any granular-solids system. Computer-aided design 

models of real particles can be imported to obtain an accurate 

representation of their shape. In addition to particle size and 

shape, the models can account for physical properties of particles 

along with interaction between particles and with equipment 

surfaces and surrounding media. The flexibility and extensibility 

of the software enables simulation of granular materials from 

powders to gravel. In order for the software to simulate regolith, 

however, additional modeling and validation of electrostatic and 

surface-energy adhesion forces, dynamic friction, and particle 

shape were required. 

DEM Solutions was able to use previous experience working 

closely with NASA scientists to develop custom solutions for 

modeling the effects of electrostatic forces on particles. The 

NASA scientists provided a theoretical framework for introducing 

the electrostatic force component to the software, and DEM 

engineers developed the computer code that implemented it. 

The new proposal enhanced the existing EDEM 

software to provide more accurate modeling of lunar dust 

and regolith—with the potential to improve design quality 

and provide significant savings, especially in respect to field 

testing. “We wanted to build on off-the-shelf software, and 

the user-friendliness and range of capabilities in EDEM made 

ASK MAGAZINE | 43
it attractive. The experience of the staff at DEM Solutions 

in modeling complex particulate systems such as [those] 

encountered in space applications gave us the confidence that 

they would be a strong partner,” said Calle. 

Once the work was under way, NASA provided a simulation 

that had been developed earlier for the study of electrodynamic 

dust-shield technology. DEM Solutions incorporated that 

simulation into EDEM and developed a more complete 

simulation of the dust shield in action. This early implementation 

not only served to show that the theoretical framework and the 

computer code were correct, but also provided NASA with a 

tool that could be used immediately. 

Most of the technical work was performed by David Curry, 

a senior consulting engineer at DEM Solutions in Edinburgh, 

and Michael Hogue, of Kennedy’s Electrostatics and Surface 

Physics Laboratory. To ensure that work remained focused and 

moving in the right direction, regular web-based conferences 

were used to share results and discuss ideas for extending the 

modeling capabilities. In addition, Curry visited Kennedy near 

the end of the project to work directly with Hogue to provide 

training and transfer knowledge about the technology developed 

in EDEM. 

“The NASA IPP project enabled us to extend the 

capabilities of our EDEM particle-modeling software for 

NASA’s applications,” noted Richard LaRoche, vice president of 

engineering and U.S. general manager of DEM Solutions. “But 

this project also spawned innovations resulting in advanced 

features that our current customers now use for modeling 

cohesive materials and particle-fluid systems.”

The DEM Solutions partnership provided NASA with 

expertise in particle-dynamics simulation and a custom 

computer-aided engineering tool that supported initiatives 

in the Exploration Science Mission Directorate’s Exploration 

Technology Development Program, particularly in dust 

mitigation and in situ resource utilization, modeling the behavior 

of the dust as it came into contact with an electrodynamic dust 

shield. Other simulations now augment the development of other 

NASA dust-mitigation technologies, such as those designed for 

dust removal and cleaning optical and thermal radiator surfaces, 

connectors, and seals. 

To help create accurate simulations, Kennedy’s Electrostatics 

and Surface Physics Laboratory and Glenn Research Center’s 

In Situ Resource Utilization Lunar Regolith Characterization 

Laboratory identified the correct physics to add to the EDEM 

code. Glenn researchers Allen Wilkinson, Enrique Rame, and 

Al DeGennaro shared abstracts of relevant research papers from 

their on-site NASA Exploration Soils Bibliographic Database 

Resource. Using this information, DEM Solutions engineers 

proposed several approaches for the lunar-soil particles that 

could be integrated into existing EDEM software without 

significantly slowing down the simulation or unnecessarily 

increasing user inputs. 

One challenge was calibrating the new EDEM model to 

obtain the right lunar-soil parameters. The teams decided to run 

a laboratory experiment—the Schulze shear test—with lunarsoil simulant and then simulate the same experiment in EDEM. 

Enrique Rame from the National Center for Space Exploration 

Research in Fluids and Combustion at Glenn ran the lab test 

and provided DEM with the operational parameters and results. 

Philip T. Metzger from the Granular Mechanics and Surface 

Systems Laboratory at Kennedy provided additional information 

on lunar-soil particle-size distribution. This information was 

used to create an initial model for lunar soil and then to run 

simulations with different EDEM parameters to identify the 

best input parameters. 

These new EDEM capabilities can be applied in many 

industries unrelated to space exploration, and they have been 

adopted by several U.S. companies, including John Deere, 

Pfizer, and Procter & Gamble. 

Carol Plouffe, an engineering manager working for John 

Deere, said, “The goals of the project are of great interest to 

John Deere since we have similar objectives as NASA in terms of 

Simulation of lunar 

soil particles.

Image Credit: DEM Solutions

44 | ASK MAGAZINE
being able to build reliable models of bulk particulate behavior 

and are users of EDEM software. Most of the agricultural 

and construction machinery developed by Deere involves the 

movement of bulk material. By developing the capability to 

model regolith, which is a fine material with angular particles 

and cohesive properties, the project is likely to solve some of 

the modeling challenges we face on Earth with cohesive or 

sandy soils.”

This project benefited all involved and shows that NASA’s 

IPP Seed Fund can help both the space program and other U.S. 

industries. Working together with external partners contributes 

to NASA’s ability to help stimulate the economy and provide 

solid answers to difficult problems. ●

Special thanks to DEM Solutions for their help in writing this article. 

For more information, visit www.dem-solutions.com. For questions 

regarding NASA’s Innovative Partnerships Program Seed Fund, 

contact Alexis Hongamen at alexis.hongamen-1@nasa.gov.

Richard LaRoche (richard.laroche@dem-solutions.com) is 

vice president of engineering and U.S. general manager of DEM 

Solutions. 

Carlos Calle (carlos.i.calle@nasa.gov) is a senior research 

scientist and the founder and director of the Electrostatics and 

Surface Physics Laboratory at Kennedy Space Center. 

Carol Anne Dunn currently works as a project specialist 

within the Engineering Management and Integrated Services 

Branch at Kennedy Space Center. She is also the awards liaison 

officer for the Inventions and Contributions Board.

Even though NASA is not planning

on manned moon missions, the lab

expects there to be unmanned lunar 

missions where this technology for 

preventing and removing surface

dust will be important.

ASK MAGAZINE | 45
Explosive Lessons

The Centaur program, which developed a high-energy second-stage rocket in the early sixties, 

marked NASA’s first effort to use large quantities of liquid hydrogen. Following in parallel, and using 

a second stage fueled with liquid hydrogen, was the Saturn I block II vehicle. I was selected to be 

the engineer responsible for the design and operation of the new liquid storage and transfer systems 

these rockets needed. Even small amounts of liquid hydrogen can be explosive when combined 

with air, and only a small amount of energy is required to ignite it. Both its explosiveness and 

the extremely low temperatures involved make handling it safely a challenge. It has taken a lot of 

experience, including the experience of dramatic failures, to teach us just how dangerous it is and 

how carefully we need to treat it.

By Russel Rhodes

Smoke and flames belch from the huge S-1C test stand as the first stage 

booster of the Apollo/Saturn V space vehicle is static fired at the NASA 

Mississippi Test Facility, now Stennis Space Center.

Photo Credit: NASA

in hydrogen safety

46 | ASK MAGAZINE | STORY
Explosive Lessons

August 30, 1963. We were ready to fuel the Saturn I block II vehicle, 

our first configuration with a liquid-hydrogen-and-oxygenpowered second stage. The stage had six RL-10 engines, and the 

launch complex to support it contained a 125,000-gallon dewar 

for storing liquid hydrogen about 600 ft. from the launchpad. 

For additional safety, we had two ponds where hydrogen that was 

vented during preparation could be safely burned off. 

We began filling the transfer line and chilling the stage 

tank while venting hydrogen down to its burn pond. Everything 

seemed to be working fine when Al Zeiler, who was watching 

the process through a periscope (we had very little closedcircuit television in those days), told us we’d had an explosion 

at the pad. Inside the blockhouse, we hadn’t heard a thing, but 

Al reported seeing steel trench covers, which weighed about 

300 lbs. each, flying several hundred feet in the air. 

We immediately closed the vehicle tank vent valve and 

activated a helium purge to eliminate any hydrogen gas in the 

line and put out the fire. The system operator did not understand 

the severity of the situation, however. He closed the helium 

purge and vented the vehicle tank, which restarted the flow of 

hydrogen and reignited the fire. I instructed the operator to shut 

the vent valve and again turn on the helium purge. 

There was considerable damage to the vent system, and about 

200 ft. of trench covers were blown off. We ended up using the 

Labor Day weekend to remove the damaged system and clean 

up the area. Some of the damaged hardware was placed on the 

floor of the operational butler building, including aluminum 

bellows sections—which allowed the vent line to expand and 

contract—that had been cut out of the line. The following 

Tuesday morning, I gave one of the bellows a kick and water 

spilled out. That was the first clue to what had happened. 

With the vehicle venting helium, closing the vehicle tank 

vent valve creates a partial vacuum in the ground system vent line. 

This triggers a siphoning effect that starts filling the vent line 

with water from the burn pond. This may have been the 

source of the water in the bellows. The other possible cause 

may have been from another crew’s prior attempt to clean the 

vent system. 

The bellows were fully expanded during our first test; flowing 

in liquid hydrogen made the line cold, causing it to shrink about 

30 in. This allowed water to freeze and fill the bellows with ice. 

As the pipe expanded during warm-up after the flow test, the 

bellows tried to collapse to their minimum dimension before the 

ice melted, resulting in a rupture and a large leak path into the 

trench. So water from either the cleaning or siphoning incidents 

created conditions that resulted in the failure. 

The solution involved replacing the original design with a 

solid line with no bellows sections. Instead, a bellows flex hose 

was installed at the end of the line where it connected to the 

base of the tower, which gave 30 in. of freedom to accommodate 

expansion and contraction. 

Hydrogen has a very broad flammability range—a 

4 percent to 74 percent concentration in air and 4 percent to 

94 percent in oxygen; therefore, keeping air or oxygen from 

mixing with hydrogen inside confined spaces is very important. 

Also, it requires only 0.02 millijoules of energy to ignite the 

hydrogen–air mixture, which is less than 7 percent of the energy 

needed to ignite natural gas. That is why a burn pond using a 

1-in. water seal was considered safer than a flare stack. Experience 

over the next several years showed us that keeping air out of the 

vent system was difficult and required strict procedural control 

and maintenance.

Explosion at the Mississippi Test Facility

More often than not, fears about the potential for explosions 

were justified. Designers at Kennedy Space Center were 

concerned about using a hydrogen flare stack to manage waste 

hydrogen because they believed air could enter it and lead to an 

explosion. During the developmental testing of the SII stage of 

the Saturn V moon rocket at the Mississippi Test Facility (now 

Stennis Space Center), their concern was validated. 

H

Launch of the Saturn I SA-5 on January 29, 1964. 

This was the first flight of a live S-IV (second or upper) 

stage with the cluster of six liquid-hydrogen-fueled 

RL-10 engines and the first use of Launch Complex 37.

Photo Credit: NASA Marshall Space Flight Center

O

ASK MAGAZINE | 47
Test operations had removed a problematic vent valve 

and installed a blanking plate to seal the opening. When the 

vent valve was removed, low-density helium flowed out of the 

high-elevation opening on the test stand, causing air to be 

drawn into the system through the flare-stack opening. One 

morning, a high-pressure relief valve vented hydrogen gas into 

the system. 

A helium purge pushed gases from the system to the flare 

stack. When the gaseous hydrogen reached the top of the 

stack, it burned; however, because there was air in the system, 

the flame flashed back into the system to burn any flammable 

gases. Operational personnel having lunch in the nearby 

control room heard the flame flash back with a screeching 

sound. This flashback occurred several times until it found 

a hydrogen–air mixture that was detonable. The resulting 

explosion destroyed several hundred feet of the vent system. 

From our experience at the hydrogen production facility in West 

Palm Beach, Florida, and our first Saturn storage facilities at 

Launch Complex 37, we learned that unflared vent stacks used 

for disposing low volumes of gas could be ignited by a static 

charge in the air. The first time the vent caught fire from a static 

charge, the techs tried to use a fire hose to extinguish it. Of 

course, this didn’t work, and the valve was closed while purging 

the system with nitrogen gas to remove any fuel present. 

To prevent static charge, a lightning rod was mounted directly 

to the vertical vent system with its tip above the flammable 

hydrogen–air mixture. But when the lightning rod grounding 

connection became slightly corroded and lost its continuity, the 

vent system outlet caught fire again, melting the metal rod. We 

replaced it with a fiberglass rod, and operators learned they must 

maintain a good ground connection to avoid fires.

Marshall Space Flight Center workers fill fuel 

tanks with liquid hydrogen used for test firing 

at the S-IVB (Dynamic) Test Stand.

Photo Credit: NASA Marshall Space Flight Center

HYDROGEN FIRES
Finding Leaks

During the design and activation of the LC-39 Pad A liquidhydrogen facility, concern about hydrogen leaking from the 

seal on a supply-line shutoff valve drove the need for a faulttolerant solution. Since the tanker-replenishment operation was 

performed with personnel in the area, our concern was great 

because the valve was the last opportunity to isolate the tank’s 

hydrogen from personnel. 

The valve used an extended bonnet (or valve cover) that had 

two sets of seals separated by a ring that had a port to allow for 

hydrogen purging if the valve needed maintenance. The faulttolerant solution was a high-pressure helium purge ported into 

this bonnet and controlled by a panel located about 100 ft. from 

the valve. This purge was supplied at a pressure slightly higher 

than the intended operating pressure of the liquid-hydrogen 

line. Some operations personnel didn’t believe this capability was 

needed, though, so they did not set up the pressure accordingly 

while replenishing liquid hydrogen. 

During a transfer, a leak developed at the valve bonnet seals 

and prevented anyone from getting close enough to the valve to 

close it. This provided us an opportunity to not only verify our 

fault-tolerant solution, but also educate the technicians on the 

need for safety backup systems and the importance in following 

procedures to use them as directed.

We instructed the technicians to go to the helium-purge 

control panel located safely away from the storage tank and 

activate the system that would supply ambient helium gas to the 

valve bonnet and warm the shaft seals, making them expand 

and seal. The system stopped the leak in less than a minute. 

Cryogenic Propellant Leaks

We have made progress on safely and surely detecting 

hydrogen leaks. In the early days of launching ballistic liquid 

rockets, vehicle propulsion systems were visually checked for 

leaks by launch personnel at ambient temperatures before 

propellant was loaded, after a small quantity of cryogenic 

propellants were chilled and loaded, and after we completed 

cryogenic loading. 

My responsibility as the launch operations fuels section chief 

was to safely load the fuel propellants on the Saturn vehicles. 

Because of requirements for cryogenic propellants, I was 

looking for an automatic process to verify that exposed systems 

were purged dry of moisture and liquid-hydrogen systems were 

purged of air or incompatible gases. 

I approached my division chief for permission to purchase a 

small mass spectrometer to provide this capability. He was more 

concerned about developing a leakage-verification capability of 

the vehicle’s closed compartments and asked if I thought this 

mass spectrometer technique could perform leakage verification 

instead. I told him I was sure it had great possibilities. He passed 

on the idea of using this technique to the design organization in 

Huntsville, Alabama. 

Before the mass-spectrometer system was ready, a visual 

leak check was performed by launch-site personnel wearing 

Scott air-packs and an external light source. This practice was 

discontinued as soon as the hazardous-gas detection system 

(HGDS) was ready for use. This system is still used on all 

launch vehicles using liquid hydrogen for fuel. 

Continuing challenges

Although we have learned a great deal about safely handling 

liquid hydrogen, the challenges continue. The RS-68 engine 

being considered for use in a new cargo launch vehicle has 

a 2-second hydrogen flow for start-up, compared with the 

Space Shuttle main engine 100-millisecond lead. A launchpad 

shutdown of a vehicle with five such engines could generate 

enough unburned hydrogen in the exhaust to create a very large 

fireball rising around the entire vehicle and the mobile launch 

tower—obviously not a safe operating environment.

ASK MAGAZINE | 49
To help make safety for future launches more affordable, 

research was initiated for hydrogen and helium visualization 

techniques. A study led by Glenn Sellar, University of Central 

Florida, and supported by Sandra Clements, a summer facility 

professor from Florida Tech, identified two very promising 

techniques: “Rayleigh Scattering” and “RAMAN/LIDAR.” 

The idea is to replace the many-point sensors covering the 

ground hydrogen systems with a visual scanning system that 

can better detect, visually locate, and quantify the hydrogen 

present. If the system can operate as a helium detector as well, it 

can also be used to verify leak-free fluid systems. 

This single system would replace not only the hydrogen 

sensors, but also the many methods of performing leak checks 

on the fluid systems. The HGDS currently used for monitoring 

a vehicle’s confined spaces will not indicate where the leak or 

leaks are located within the compartment. The visual technique 

would provide this vital information to allow for quick 

assessment and corrective action. This same technique would 

also be used to perform the fluid systems functional verification 

for leak tightness prior to its operation. This would take us one 

step closer to a fully automated safe approach to managing the 

perils of liquid hydrogen. ●

Russel Rhodes has been employed for more than fifty years 

at Kennedy Space Center. During this time, he has been engaged 

in the design, development, testing, and operation of ballistic 

missiles and space transportation systems, and has specialized 

experience in space vehicle propellant loading, cryogenic, 

hydraulics, high-pressure gases, and other propulsion systems.

H

During a transfer, a leak

developed [and] ... provided us

an opportunity to ... educate

the technicians on the need 

for safety backup systems 

and the importance in

following procedures to 

use them as directed.

50 | ASK MAGAZINE
Intro

The Innovation Paradox

By Ed Hoffman

INSIGHT | ASK MAGAZINE | 51
Entrenched ways of doing things and bureaucratic caution can and do discourage innovation in 

organizations, but even organizational support for new ideas can be a mixed blessing.

“Do what you want as long as I don’t know about it,” a manager 

once told me. I could run with any idea I wanted, but if 

something went wrong, it was my neck on the line. I found 

this both freeing and discouraging. While I had the freedom 

to experiment, it bothered me that I was left to deal with the 

consequences if my good idea didn’t pan out. And I was even 

more discouraged by the fact that I had to bring my new idea 

to life under the radar, without the organizational resources and 

official recognition that I thought could help it happen.

I believed then (and still do) that if something went wrong, 

the responsibility for dealing with it rested with me. I also 

believed (and still do) that a good manager should acknowledge 

good new ideas and, if he thinks they are worth trying, should 

ask, “What do you need from me?” Isn’t it the job of a manager 

to support efforts to solve organizational problems in new ways 

or develop new and better ways of working?

You’d think the answer to that question has to be “yes,” 

but it’s a “yes” that comes with some interesting caveats 

and qualifications.

Years after that manager advised me to not tell him about 

the new ideas I was working on, I had a discussion with some 

engineers at one of NASA’s centers and learned about a unique 

tiger-team activity that could potentially save money and 

streamline operations in the center’s business area. This activity 

was supported by the center but had almost complete autonomy 

and was unknown elsewhere in the agency.

When I recommended to one engineer that the Academy 

might highlight some of his team’s good innovative practices, 

he seemed hesitant. I later learned that this reluctance stemmed 

from my “management” status. From this experience and others 

like it, I have come to find that the survival of good ideas, 

particularly quiet innovations in the way work is done, depends 

on their ability to fly under the radar, especially in the early 

stages of their development. When good ideas are exposed, 

they face two likely outcomes: either the organization looks for 

ways to “control” the innovative approach (which often means 

making it less innovative and weighing it down with rules and 

requirements), or management genuinely wants to help develop 

and exploit the innovation.

At first glance, the second outcome does not sound like a 

problem, but often it is. Especially in their early stages, good 

new ideas tend to be delicate creatures. They probably have some 

weaknesses that need to be discovered by trial and error; if they 

are genuinely new, people may need to develop some new skills 

before they can carry them out effectively. Embryonic new ideas 

strengthen and mature thanks to the efforts of a very small number 

of people who understand the purpose and potential of those ideas, 

the nourishment they need, the time they need to develop, and 

the context in which they can thrive. Premature and too-vigorous 

organizational help can mean too many cooks in the kitchen. 

The new idea can easily be distorted, or succumb to unrealistic 

expectations about how quickly it will show results. Plenty of good 

ideas have been discarded as “failures” because they didn’t pay off as 

soon or as spectacularly as management thought they should.

Good ideas need support to be fully realized, but they 

also dread support that is likely to bring these unintended 

consequences with it.

So what is the solution? Many organizations live and die 

by good new ideas. The challenge they face is to cultivate good 

ideas by giving innovators just the right blend of freedom and 

support. One simple approach that is not taken often enough 

is to let the innovators themselves decide how the organization 

can help them develop their ideas. A manager asking, “What do 

you need from me?” has a good chance of finding the sweet spot 

between no support (“Do what you want as long as I don’t know 

about it”) and idea-killing interference.

52 | ASK MAGAZINE
Some organizations give employees the freedom they need 

to come up with new ideas by specifying that a percentage of 

their work time can be devoted to anything that interests them, 

with no pressure to come up with a successful product or even 

report back to their supervisors on what they’re doing. A policy 

of encouraging individuals to spend 20 percent of their time 

on personal projects has produced some valuable innovation at 

Google (though recent news stories about creative employees 

leaving the company because they think it has become too 

bureaucratic and slow to adopt their ideas suggest how hard 

it is for large organizations to maintain the innovative spirit 

that made them successful in the first place). For many years, 

15 percent of 3M employees’ time was reserved for creative 

work. That, combined with frequent opportunities to tell others 

about their work, famously brought together the scientist who 

had developed a lightly sticking adhesive with the researcher 

looking for a way to keep slips of paper in place in his hymn 

book. The result: Post-it notes.

 These examples of individual freedom to create raise 

another tricky point about the process of turning a new idea 

into a mature innovation—a useful product or practice. When 

the people working privately do eventually bring their good new 

ideas to the attention of the organization, it is often hard for the 

organization to understand their value, and the more innovative 

an idea is, the more likely it is that the organization will fail to 

get it. The classic example of this dilemma is the Xerox PARC 

story. In the 1970s, Xerox gave a group of very smart researchers 

at the Palo Alto Research Center approximately five years of 

absolute freedom and adequate funding to come up with ideas 

about the office of the future. They did their job well, inventing 

the graphical user interface, the computer mouse, the laser 

printer, and Ethernet networking. In a way, these innovations 

were too innovative for Xerox decision makers; they didn’t 

understand their potential—didn’t understand that they would 

in fact define the office of the future. So Apple, not Xerox, was 

the first to build a commercial, graphical-user-interface personal 

computer—now the standard for all personal computers.

What does all this mean for NASA? Giving employees 

“free” time to develop new ideas is definitely a challenge for a 

public agency like NASA, with its tight budgets and tight project 

schedules, but I think there are ways the agency as a whole and 

managers locally can encourage individuals and small groups 

to work on innovative ideas. Accepting the possibility that a 

new idea might flop (and many will) and not penalizing people 

when it does is one important step. Asking, “What can I do to 

help?” and providing just the right amount of support is another. 

(Just as astronomers have started talking about “Goldilocks 

planets”—planets that may harbor life because they are just 

right, not too hot or too cold—maybe we should talk about 

Goldilocks support for innovation.)

And when the great new ideas that people at NASA can and 

will develop are brought to the attention of the agency’s decision 

makers, those leaders need to have the openness and imagination 

to understand their value and support the sometimes lengthy 

process of successfully putting them to work.

None of this is easy, but the future greatness of NASA 

depends on doing it right. ●

Plenty of good ideas have been

discarded as “failures” because 

they didn't pay off as soon or 

as spectacularly as management

thought they should.

ASK MAGAZINE | 53
Title

By 

Intro Photo Credit: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

from the National

Ignition Facility

By Matthew Kohut

Lessons Lessons

54 | ASK MAGAZINE | STORY
The National Ignition Facility (NIF) is home 

of the world’s largest laser. With 192 laser 

beams that can deliver more than sixty times 

the energy of any previous laser system, NIF 

represents a significant step in enabling the study 

of high-energy density science. The design and 

construction of this unique, highly complex 

facility posed management challenges that the 

project team overseeing its development could 

not foresee.

A One-of-a-Kind Facility

The Department of Energy (DOE) formally broke ground on 

NIF at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories (LLNL) in 

May 1997. The federal government used a lean management 

structure for NIF, relying on a small core team of civil servants 

to oversee a contractor organization of hundreds. DOE chose to 

implement this project through one of its existing Management 

and Operating (M&O) contracts—broad agreements that 

provide the government with access to the capabilities of its 

national laboratories. 

NIF, a ten-story building the length of three football fields, 

actually consists of three connected buildings: the Optics 

Assembly Building, the Laser and Target Area Building, and 

the Diagnostics Building. In the Optics Assembly Building, 

assembly of precision-engineered laser components takes place 

under Class 100 clean-room conditions. The Laser and Target 

Area Building houses the 192 laser beams in two identical bays. 

Large mirrors direct the laser beams into a target bay, where they 

are focused to the center of a 10-meter-diameter target chamber. 

The cleanliness inside the beam enclosures typically exceeds that 

of a semiconductor or pharmaceutical manufacturing plant. 

LLNL had built several complex laser systems prior to NIF, 

but nothing approaching its size and scope. “When you do work 

planning and estimating for something where there isn’t a direct 

comparison that provides you the basis for a parametric estimate, 

you go with what you understand,” said Scott Samuelson, who 

began working on the project in the mid-1990s. “All the prior 

laser systems at the lab were put together one beamline at a 

time by trained technicians who worked for the lab. Our initial 

thinking assumed we’d use the in-house [workforce], and they’d 

put it together just like the previous systems.”

The challenge proved greater than expected. “As we 

got closer to having to start the assembly of the beam-path 

infrastructure—as the building was getting finished on the 

inside and you could start to get a physical feel for the scale of 

the laser system and the components we would be assembling, 

The final optics 

assemblies, shown 

here mounted on the 

lower hemisphere of 

the target chamber, 

contain special optics 

for beam conditioning, 

color conversion, and 

color separation.

ASK MAGAZINE | 55
Photo Credit: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

and the challenge of doing that work in a clean environment—I 

thought, ‘You know, I don’t think we can do it the way the 

previous systems were built; I don’t see how those techniques 

and people can successfully put this thing together.’” Samuelson, 

then acting as field director for the project, agreed with LLNL 

management that a new look at the original plan for building 

the laser system should be conducted.

Resetting the Baseline

In 1999, one of the largest cranes in the world lifted NIF’s 

10-meter-diameter target chamber into the target bay in a 

dramatic event attended by Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson. 

Shortly after the event, the project team came forward with 

an estimate to complete, which identified deficiencies in the 

existing project planning and projected schedule delays and 

several hundred million dollars of cost overruns. When this 

came to light, Secretary Richardson issued a forceful press 

release setting out a six-step approach for addressing NIF’s 

cost and schedule problems. “These are project management 

issues, and we will get ahead of these problems and turn them 

around with aggressive and tighter management action from 

this department,” Richardson wrote. This action plan led to 

management changes at LLNL, increased and more-focused 

oversight from DOE, and reviews by a Secretarial NIF Task 

Force as well as the General Accounting Office.

The reviews resulted in significant revisions to the project’s 

baseline cost and schedule. “Basically what happened is the 

project just didn’t understand how hard the job of building that 

ship in the bottle and keeping it as clean as it needed to be inside 

while we were doing it would be,” Samuelson said. “The work 

scope was there, but the effort associated with that work scope 

was underestimated.”

Samuelson attributed the cost-estimation errors to the lack 

of a model that could offer a meaningful basis for comparison: 

“The lab did their best estimate. We had external reviewers come 

in, we had independent cost estimators come in, but in the end, 

they could only look at what they understood; they had to take 

our word for the things they simply had no experience with. As 

a result, the estimates for the ‘conventional’ parts of the facility 

were pretty much right on, but our existing management systems 

never gave us a good independent estimate of the ‘first-of-a-kind’ 

portion of the project. That’s where you end up when you’re 

doing something that nobody’s ever done before. The real lesson 

to me is that we proved one more time that the old RAND 

study on mega projects was right: on these highly complex, 

one-of-a-kind projects, you make your best estimate of what it’s 

going to cost and then double it. Don’t plan on spending the 

extra, just sit on it until you find out what you didn’t know and 

understand what you really need it for. ”

After the Shakeup

The multiple reviews led to changes in the management approach. 

“It changed a lot of things,” said Samuelson. “It redefined a lot 

of management relations. It certainly redefined the teams that 

were working on the project, and the way we were using the 

suite of project management tools and techniques that we had 

available to us.”

Managers tightened the scope of the project. “We took 

the opportunity to review our project-completion criteria and 

scrubbed them very carefully,” explained Samuelson. “We 

made some small changes based on input from the scientific 

community and incorporated them through the change-control 

process. The final product was included in the project execution 

plan so there wouldn’t be any doubt what we were signed up for; 

it never changed after that.”

The management chain on the federal side shortened. “Back 

when this started, you had a program manager in Washington, 

and you had a project manager in Washington who was part of 

another organization, and they had no real contractual authority 

to direct the people at the M&O contractor doing the work. 

All that came down a separate line through what was then the 

operations office manager to one of his assistant managers, and 

Deformable mirrors, located 

at the ends of the NIF main 

amplifiers, use an array of 

thirty-nine actuators to create a 

movable surface that corrects 

aberrations in a beam due to 

minute distortions in the optics.

56 | ASK MAGAZINE
Photo Credit: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

The target chamber under 

construction. Holes in the target 

chamber provide access for the 

laser beams and viewing ports 

for NIF diagnostic equipment.

then eventually to the guy out in the field, which was the job I 

held back then. It made for a pretty difficult situation when you 

needed to reach the person where all those lines came together,” 

said Samuelson.

The reviews led to the creation of the Office of the NIF 

Project, whose director reported to the assistant secretary for 

defense programs. “Anytime you do anything that’s this big and 

this hard, I think that’s what you ought to do,” said Samuelson. 

“You need to focus on the project. You can’t have other priorities. 

You can’t have distractions from other places. The person 

you’re reporting to must be able to make decisions and allocate 

resources consistent with the Department’s commitment to the 

success of the project.”

For the next two or three years, the project continued with 

an office director in Washington, D.C., and a deputy who 

served as the field director on-site at NIF. There was more 

formality than in the past in the use of external review groups 

as well as more rigor in reporting. The changes in the project 

management approach and tools made a difference.

“In the earlier time period, we were using an earned value 

management–like system, not a real earned value management 

system [EVMS], because a full EVMS wasn’t required in those 

days. We probably had a little less insight into future performance 

based on what we had observed under that old system than we 

did later in the project, but we thought it was adequate at the 

time,” Samuelson said.

He also noted the forecasting limitations of project 

management tools: “Earned value management is a great tool, 

but for better or for worse, it measures past performance against 

your plan. You can use that information to project what may 

happen in the future against that plan, but what we identified 

that led to the revised estimate to complete (prior to the 1999–

2000 re-baseline) wouldn’t have been identified until later 

through an EVMS. We were performing against the plan; the 

problem was that the plan was underscoped going forward, but 

what we’d done so far was not an indication of that. It was just 

a matter of looking at the work ahead and saying, ‘It’s not going 

to happen that way.’”

The project also made greater use of external reviews than 

it had in the past. “We really ran the reviews using the model 

the Office of Science uses. Dan Lehman has run reviews on 

their projects for years, and he has a pretty specific formula 

for how you conduct them. We would have a group of very 

experienced people who’d come in and turn us inside out, and 

tell us what they thought, ask us what we thought, and then 

they would leave us with their opinions,” Samuelson said. “I’d 

say 99 percent of the time, we took care of what they told us. It 

was almost completely embraced, and it paid a lot of dividends 

over the years.”

The Role of the Federal Project Director

After the director of the Office of the NIF Project retired, 

Samuelson and others rotated responsibilities for a time. In 2004, 

DOE established the federal project director (FPD) designation 

and began the process of certifying Samuelson to fill the new 

position for NIF.

One of the biggest differences having an FPD made was 

focusing contact between the government and its contractor. 

“The project organization got even tighter, and there was 

increased emphasis on the importance of providing direction 

via the contract. It made it a lot easier to keep straight what 

the government was officially saying to the contractor with 

regard to the project. The contractor knew that while program 

managers and other senior managers in HQ made decisions 

and communicated directly with them, project direction 

implementing those decisions came out of my [FPD] office 

through the contract,” said Samuelson. “That really helped on 

both sides. It’s hard to overplay how important that was.”

Samuelson described the FPD’s role as one that shapes 

the reaction the system will have to events that occur. “Project 

management is about solving the hundred problems that come 

up every day. If every time something happens, you just say, 

ASK MAGAZINE | 57
‘They’re normal, and we’re taking care of them, and I know it’s 

happening—thanks for keeping me informed, and let me know 

if any problem is getting bigger,’ then people tell you about 

them,” he said. “If you make a big deal and stir up the whole 

system every time you hear that something didn’t happen when 

it was supposed to, you’re going to have a hard time finding out 

about it, and you’re going to be too busy with things that the 

contractor should just be handling to pay attention to the stuff 

you need to be paying attention to. That’s especially true with 

something the size of NIF.”

NIF’s federal employees focused on creating a strong team 

with the M&O office. “For all intents and purposes, everything 

that was going on there was transparent,” said Samuelson. “We 

had access to all their information and management systems, and 

we defined very carefully what the thresholds and boundaries were 

on responsibilities.” He emphasized the importance of developing 

a certain level of trust with the contractor workforce: “I don’t 

know any way to do that other than to be here [in the field] in 

the middle of what’s going on, being able to have the trust of the 

people so they feel comfortable talking to you about what’s really 

happening and they understand that you’re going to be focused 

on helping find a solution and moving things forward.”

From Samuelson’s perspective, the oversight role revolves 

around access to information and the ability to evaluate it. “I got 

lots of numbers and pieces of paper and statements of whether 

milestones were being met. That’s all good. But it’s developing 

the ability to determine whether or not what you’re seeing 

matches what’s really going on. Is the system giving you data 

you should believe?” he asked rhetorically. “Then when you 

look at that data and it matches your other observations, and 

you do see something going on, do you understand why that’s 

happening?”

Most importantly, Samuelson and his team focused on 

eliminating roadblocks and keeping the project moving toward 

completion. “I think that one of the things that all of us as a group 

did well for the last nine years was just handle stuff: resolve the 

issues and make sure people were aware and informed,” he said.

Crossing the Finish Line

On March 31, 2009, DOE announced that the National Nuclear 

Security Administration had certified the completion of the 

National Ignition Facility. Eighteen months later, the Project 

Management Institute named it the 2010 Project of the Year. ●

This story has been provided by the Department of Energy’s Office 

of Engineering and Construction Management.

58 | ASK MAGAZINE
Photo Credit: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

The interior of the NIF 

target chamber. The 

service module carrying 

technicians can be seen 

on the left. The target 

positioner, which holds the 

target, is on the right.

ASK MAGAZINE | 59
The Limits of Knowledge

By Laurence Prusak

The Knowledge Notebook

Have you thought about why some individuals, 

institutions, agencies, and even countries seem 

to exhibit a persistent pattern of bad judgment? 

There are so many examples to choose from that 

it may be unfair to single out specific examples, 

but think, for instance, of the different reactions 

of Norway and Dubai to the revenues that came 

from their discoveries of large energy resources. 

Norway prudently invested its windfall in longterm education and infrastructure and future 

financial stability, resisting powerful pressures to 

spend it right away or return it to the taxpayers. 

Dubai spent much of its wealth on showy projects, 

building, among other things (and with the help 

and encouragement of Citicorp), a ski slope in one 

of the hottest places in the world. 

We all could list our favorite examples of flawed 

judgment. Our recent financial crisis sadly offers 

enough examples to fill many large volumes. Perhaps 

it is more useful, though, to try to think about what 

goes into good judgment. To do that, we need to 

decide what judgment is. We also want to consider 

how it differs from knowledge, because being 

knowledgeable does not guarantee that individuals 

or institutions will make smart decisions. 

Let’s look at Wall Street and most of the 

other financial centers around the world. Who 

could deny that these firms and their government 

regulators were filled with knowledgeable people? 

They recruited the top students of the top business 

schools, continuously weeded out those who seemed 

not smart enough and driven enough for their 

hypercompetitive environment, and continuously 

poached the most talented brokers and analysts 

from each other. So how could organizations that 

possessed so much knowledge and talent make 

such disastrous mistakes—mistakes grave enough 

to plunge the world into a recession that destroyed 

millions of jobs and untold wealth? 

Aristotle had an answer for this question 

that still rings true. He saw knowledge as a tool, 

a method, a technique that could not arrive at 

good judgment without virtue. “Virtue” in this 

case refers to a set of values and dispositions that 

Aristotle calls “practical wisdom.” Practical wisdom 

is another term—a good one—for what we usually 

think of as good judgment. Modern researchers 

have added that judgment can be thought of as the 

context and background of decision making. 

Probably this distinction between knowledge 

and judgment does not especially surprise you. 

We all know people who are highly intelligent and 

possess extensive knowledge of one or more subjects 

but who make terrible decisions. They lack practical 

wisdom. They don’t have good judgment.

So should organizations try to hire people 

who are “virtuous,” in Aristotle’s sense of the 

word? Well, organizations sometimes try to choose 

people who seem to possess practical wisdom, but 

that quality is not always easy to identify. Besides, 

it’s easy to be so impressed by the knowledge, drive, 

and confidence of candidates that the question of 

judgment does not get the attention it deserves.

Certainly (as I discussed at the beginning of 

this little essay), good judgment is in short supply in 

many institutions. So here is a very brief list of some 

ways to try to improve the quality of judgment—

your own and that of the people you work with.

• Encourage democratic discussion and 

decision making. The “great man or 

woman” theory of leadership—the idea that 

60 | ASK MAGAZINE
one person has all the answers—is deeply flawed. The 

odds favor developing sound collective judgment when 

trust and goodwill are present in a group. 

• Look to all sources of potential help. Knowledge comes 

in many flavors and varieties. Make sure your sample size 

is adequate to your needs.

• Think in terms of past and future time. Nothing 

happens without background or potential consequences. 

Encourage others to do the same. 

• Pay attention to context. No project or situation exists in 

isolation, and understanding the context of your work can 

lead to a wiser choice than a narrow focus on a problem 

to be solved.

• Consult your values as well as your knowledge when 

making decisions. ●

No project or situation exists 

in isolation, and understanding

the context of your work can

lead to a wiser choice than a

narrow focus on a problem

to be solved.

ASK MAGAZINE | 61
ASKinteractive

For More on 

Our Stories

Additional information pertaining 

to articles featured in this issue 

can be found by visiting the 

following web sites:

• Cassini: www.nasa.gov/

mission_pages/cassini/main/

index.html

• Pathfinder: www.nasa.

gov/mission_pages/marspathfinder/index.html

• Human Research Program: 

www.nasa.gov/exploration/

humanresearch/index.html

feedback

We welcome your comments on what you’ve read in this issue of ASK and your suggestions for articles you 

would like to see in future issues. Share your thoughts with us here: askmagazine.nasa.gov/about/write.html.

NASA Tweetups

Get a behind-the-scenes look at NASA with Tweetups. A Tweetup is an informal 

meeting of people who use the social messaging medium Twitter. NASA 

Tweetups provide @NASA followers with the opportunity to visit NASA facilities 

and speak with scientists, engineers, astronauts, and managers. The events 

range from two hours to two days in length and include a “meet and greet” 

session to allow participants to mingle with fellow tweeps and the people behind 

NASA’s Twitter feeds. Registration for upcoming NASA Tweetups is announced at 

www.nasa.gov/connect/tweetup/index.html, @NASA, and @NASATweetup.

Web of Knowledge

In 2010 NASA set a new course for human spaceflight, helped rewrite science 

textbooks, redefined our understanding of Earth’s nearest celestial neighbor, put 

the finishing touches on one of the world’s greatest engineering marvels, made 

major contributions to life on Earth, and turned its sights toward the next era of 

exploration. Read more about these accomplishments at NASA’s Year in Review: 

www.nasa.gov/externalflash/YIR10/index.html.

NASA in the News

NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has unveiled a previously 

unseen structure centered in the Milky Way. Two gamma-ray-emitting 

bubbles that extend 25,000 light-years north and south of the galactic 

center were discovered after processing publicly available data from 

Fermi’s large area telescope. The bubble emissions are more energetic 

than the gamma-ray fog seen elsewhere in our galaxy, and these 

emissions, as well as the structure’s shape, suggest it was formed as a result of a large and rapid energy 

release—the source of which remains a mystery. Scientists are conducting more analyses to better understand 

how the never-before-seen structure was formed. Read more about Fermi and this discovery at www.nasa.gov/

mission_pages/GLAST/main/index.html. 

62 | ASK MAGAZINE
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