Academy Sharing Knowledge

The NASA Source for Project Management and Engineering Excellence | APPEL W I N T E R | 2 0 0 6

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Inside

INTERVIEW WITH CHRIS SCOLESE

COOPERATION, NOT COMPETITION

PRESERVING DEEP SMARTS
O N T H E C O V ER

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope snapped this picture of Mars on October 28, 2005, within a day of its closest 

approach to Earth on the night of October 29. Hubble astronomers were excited to have captured a regional 

dust storm on Mars that had been growing and evolving over the past few weeks. The dust storm, which is 

nearly in the middle of the planet in this Hubble view, is about 930 miles long measured diagonally, which is 

about the size of Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico combined.
25 9 5

D E PA RT M E N T S

3 

In This Issue 

4 

From the Director

22

Innovation Report

44 

The Knowledge Notebook

46

ASK Interactive

F E AT U R E S

9 

Preserving Deep Smarts 

at NASA

How an organization can ensure that 

rich, experiential knowledge is passed 

on to a new generation.

17 

Profile of a Leader: 

Orlando Figueroa

Nearly three decades of project 

and program management have 

taught Federal Employee of the Year 

Figueroa that respect, integrity, and 

focus are the foundation of project 

and program success.

Special Pullout 

NASA Knowledge Map

A quick visual guide to the location and 

work of NASA’s centers.

25 

Interview with Chris Scolese

The Chief Engineer talks about NASA’s 

mission and the learning, commitment, 

cooperation, and leadership needed to 

achieve it.

36 

Enhancing NASA’s 

Performance as a Learning 

Organization

Goddard’s Knowledge Architect and 

Director of the Office of Mission Success 

are developing a system of practices to 

improve learning and knowledge sharing.

S T O R I E S

5 

Cooperation, Not Competition

How the NASA Fabrication Alliance turned 

a cost-cutting mandate into an opportunity 

to share work and exchange expertise.

12 

Cultivating a Community

By involving the local community in their 

solar-powered airplane development, 

project managers created an advocacy 

group that supported the work.

14 

Old Lessons for 

a New Generation

Project management lessons from the 

Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory 

Project. Realistic planning and effective 

communication are key.

23 

2004 Invention of the Year

Two Glenn scientists develop a 

flexible, high-temperature thermal 

barrier that improves the reliability 

of solid rocket motors.

30 

Straight to the Source

A hands-on approach that opens lines 

of communication between management 

and fabrication teams gets a project back 

on schedule.

32 

Learning to Soar

NASA engineers teach an unmanned 

aerial vehicle to extend flight by 

detecting and soaring on updrafts.

40 

Getting to “Go”

Collaboration with Lockheed Martin, 

the Air Force, and other organizations 

makes it possible to certify the Atlas V

for launch in time for the Mars 

Reconnaissance Orbiter mission.

Contents

ASK MAGAZINE | 1
The Academy of Program and Project Engineering and Leadership (APPEL) and 

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

and meet tomorrow’s challenges by providing performance enhancement services and 

tools, supporting career development programs, sponsoring knowledge sharing events 

and publications, and creating opportunities for project management and engineering 

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

government agencies.

ASK Magazine grew out of APPEL’s Knowledge Sharing Initiative. 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 and industries. These 

stories contain knowledge and wisdom that are transferable across projects. 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.

Please direct all inquiries about ASK Magazine editorial policy to Don Cohen, 

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

For inquiries about other APPEL Knowledge Sharing programs and products, 

please contact the Knowledge Sharing Project Manager, Tina Chindgren, at 

ASRC Management Services, 6303 Ivy Lane, Suite 800, Greenbelt, MD 20770; 

tina.chindgren@asrcms.com; or 301-837-9069.

Staff

APPEL DIRECTOR AND PUBLISHER

Dr. Edward Hoffman

ehoffman@nasa.gov

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Laurence Prusak

lprusak@msn.com

MANAGING EDITOR

Don Cohen

doncohen@rcn.com

TECHNICAL EDITOR

Kerry Ellis

kerry.ellis@asrcms.com

KNOWLEDGE SHARING MANAGER

Tina Chindgren

tina.chindgren@asrcms.com

KNOWLEDGE SHARING ANALYST

Ben Bruneau

ben.bruneau@asrcms.com

DESIGN

Hirshorn Zuckerman 

Design Group, Inc.

www.hzdg.com

SENIOR PRINTING SPECIALIST

Jeffrey McLean

jmclean@hq.nasa.gov

PRINTING

GraphTec
Reflecting NASA APPEL’s new responsibility for engineering 

career development (which Ed Hoffman mentions in his 

column), we are adding stories of engineering achievement 

to the magazine. In this issue, we describe a new thermal 

barrier used to protect the O-rings in solid rocket motors 

and an unmanned aerial vehicle that detects and soars on 

updrafts. Those articles illustrate not only the technical 

skill of NASA engineers but their ability to get outstanding 

results with modest resources.

ASK will also now publish articles that explore 

broader issues of organizational knowledge, learning, 

and collaboration. As Chris Scolese notes in this issue’s 

interview, NASA needs to excel as a learning organization 

and to develop and retain critical knowledge to meet the 

challenges posed by its ambitious new mission. To launch 

our consideration of those subjects, we include here an 

article on learning strategies at Goddard Space Flight Center 

and a piece on retaining the rich, experiential knowledge 

that Dorothy Leonard and Walter Swap call “deep smarts.” 

Laurence Prusak’s “Knowledge Notebook” reflects on the 

importance of understanding different kinds of knowledge 

that contribute to effective work. And the NASA Knowledge 

Map included in this issue we hope will serve as both a useful 

guide to basic information about the work of NASA centers 

and a picture of the impressive skills and accomplishments 

of the organization as a whole.

The stories you will read here tell about careful planning, 

realism, commitment, trust, and collaboration as sources 

to success. A theme running through many of them—from 

the development of the Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory 

to Orlando Figueroa’s many projects—is the importance of 

communication. Most of the other success factors—certainly 

trust and collaboration—depend on good communication. 

Without it, teamwork is impossible and success unlikely.

Communication is what ASK is all about, and we believe 

the highest form of communication is conversation—the 

back-and-forth of shared ideas, questions, arguments, 

agreements, and explanations. Our new “ASK Interactive” 

page invites you into conversation with us. Your insights, 

questions, complaints, and stories will help make ASK a 

better magazine and a part of the larger conversation that is 

an essential part of NASA’s pursuit of excellence.

Don Cohen

Managing Editor

WELCOME TO THE NEW ASK. Readers of the earlier version of the magazine 

will find some familiar features here—most notably, stories of project management 

challenges and the lessons they teach. We continue to believe that stories recounting 

the real-life experiences of practitioners provide important practical wisdom—a kind 

of conversation on paper that is the next best thing to talking face to face.

In This Issue

ASK MAGAZINE | 3
The Wikipedia (a comprehensive, free, online, editable 

encyclopedia that would have been unthinkable 

even a few years ago but for me demonstrates the 

power of change) defines change as the quality of 

impermanence and flux. Like most human activities, 

even highly successful ones, ASK Magazine and the 

Academy that supports it have changed. I guess 

this was inevitable given the changes in leadership, 

mission, and technology that NASA as a whole has 

undergone in the past several years. We are now 

focused on missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond, 

challenging goals that will require the highest level 

of technical and organizational excellence.

The former NASA APPL is now the NASA 

Academy of Program/Project and Engineering 

Leadership (NASA APPEL). The addition of the 

letter “E” reflects significant, additional responsibility 

for the Academy—for engineering career development 

as well as project management. In keeping with this 

new responsibility, NASA APPEL is now housed and 

managed in the Office of the Chief Engineer (OCE). 

I remain the Director of the Academy and the ASK 

Magazine publisher, and Mr. Anthony Maturo serves 

as the APPEL Deputy Director. The Academy team 

now includes Dr. Jon Boyle, a long-time Academy 

leader and contributor, serving as Program Manager; 

Ms. Tina Chindgren, a recognized expert in the 

fields of Organizational Learning and Knowledge 

Management, serving as the APPEL Knowledge 

Sharing Project Manager; and Mr. Benjamin Bruneau 

serving as the APPEL Knowledge Sharing Analyst. 

We also have a new world-class editorial team with 

Editor-in-Chief Lawrence Prusak, Managing Editor 

Don Cohen, and Technical Editor Kerry Ellis.

One thing has remained constant. It is our 

belief in the power and purpose of storytelling, that 

most ancient of knowledge creation and transfer 

tools. Good stories engage and motivate us; they 

illuminate subtle and contrasting points of view 

that otherwise would be lost to both novice and 

experienced practitioners of professions. In the world 

of work, they provide a practical framework to deal 

with extraordinary change, allowing us to imagine 

the possibilities of a new environment before that 

new environment arrives, better preparing us for 

the supposedly unimaginable and unheard of. We 

can also communicate our expectations through 

storytelling, expanding the boundaries of the 

possible. Stories broaden our perspective by allowing 

us to see with the tellers’ eyes. Through stories, we 

can communicate knowledge that helps us innovate 

and find new solutions to problems and adds valuable 

tools to the toolboxes of project management and 

engineering professionals. 

That being said, I guarantee you that this new 

team will work to make ASK Magazine the source 

for good stories that will help you in your job as 

project manager and now as engineer. Change 

gives us new opportunities to present good stories 

that will enlighten, inform, stimulate, and, perhaps, 

serve as the “eureka” moment that will open a door 

to further research or supply a new idea that moves 

your project to a higher level of performance. If we 

can accomplish that with a fraction of the federal 

managers that read this magazine on a regular basis, 

I will be happy and humbled. Remember that ASK 

Magazine consists of your stories. I encourage and 

challenge you to help us make this publication 

better serve your interests as project managers and 

engineers by letting our editors know what you 

think of the stories you read here and especially by 

sharing your own stories with them. ●

From the Director

Change and Continuity

4 | ASK MAGAZINE
Usually when an organization announces an efficiency drive that could mean budget cuts and 

workforce reductions, people scramble to circle the wagons and protect their jobs—to convince the 

higher-ups that their work is essential and no one else can do it. But NASA’s Fabrication Alliance 

met the efficiency requirements of the Agency’s 1994 Zero Based Review (ZBR) by building a 

cooperative relationship among NASA research centers. In the process of eliminating duplicated 

efforts and reducing costs, the Alliance created a mechanism for sharing skills and work.

The Parametric Inlet model is shown in a wind tunnel at NASA Glenn Research Center on October 24, 2003.

The NASA Fabrication Alliance: 

Cooperation, Not Competition

 BY JERRY MULENBURG

STORY | ASK MAGAZINE | 5
When the Agency instituted the ZBR with a goal of 

consolidating efforts and creating more efficiency among its 

centers, no organization faced a greater threat to survival than 

the Office of Aeronautics & Space Transportation Technology 

(OASTT, Code R), which included Ames Research Center, 

Dryden Flight Research Center, Langley Research Center, and 

Lewis Research Center (now Glenn Research Center). “We all 

knew that we were kind of in trouble, especially in the area of 

manufacturing,” said Peter Murray, former Chairman of the 

Fabrication Alliance and retired Deputy Chief, Manufacturing 

Engineering Division, from Glenn. Manufacturing at NASA 

centers often means producing complex, one-off prototypes and 

components—not a process that lends itself to efficiency.

In an attempt to meet ZBR goals and identify possible 

inefficiencies, Code R created an intercenter team called Project 

Reliance. Nearly 80 key people—two to three individuals from 

each function within the aeronautics centers—gathered for one 

intense week at Ames. The participants created subteams according 

to their functional specialty, including acquisition, engineering, 

Automated Data Processing, experimental facility operations, 

manufacturing, plant management, technical information 

production, and technical library. Guided by a Steering Committee 

of senior managers from each center, Project Reliance aimed to 

identify future opportunities for making the most of our resources. 

The manufacturing subteam saw itself as an investment to ensure 

that Code R fabrication/manufacturing capabilities would be 

managed effectively and efficiently across the Agency. 

Foundation of Trust

Dubbed the Fabrication/Manufacturing Co-Op, the 

manufacturing subteam’s initial mission was simply to continue 

the collaboration that Project Reliance had started among Ames, 

Dryden, Langley, and Lewis in order to improve manufacturing 

capabilities through cost-effective methods. “Folks ... went in 

with a lot of apprehension about what the outcome was going to 

be ... even to the extent that all the civil servants could possibly go 

away following this exercise and we would need to find another 

means by which to get fabrication manufacturing work done in the 

Agency,” said Stewart Harris, Associate Director for Fabrication 

at Langley and current Chairman for the Fabrication Alliance.

To overcome the initial apprehension, the co-op focused first 

on getting the right people involved, which included at least two 

individuals from each center. The co-op wanted one of those 

people to be at the division level, “someone that could ... make 

decisions for the organization, make decisions for the center, and 

work issues [in] real time,” Harris said. Once the right people were 

in place, the group focused on building trust among the centers. 

One of the first steps to building trust among this new team, 

however, was to throw titles out the window during meetings. 

“When we got together, we sort of dropped those titles that we all 

covet so much . ... Everyone felt like they had an equal say and 

what they had to say was important,” Harris added.

Communication and participation were strongly encouraged 

and occurred through weekly teleconferences and face-to-face 

meetings held two to three times each year—practices that 

continue today. The co-op meeting location rotated among the 

four centers and allowed members not only to meet their colleagues 

in person but also to tour each center’s manufacturing facilities 

and better understand their capabilities. “We started out trying 

to really benefit from areas that one center had that we didn’t. 

In other words, we weren’t trying to take anything away from a 

center, we were trying to use their expertise,” Murray said.

Through a combination of fostering personal relationships 

across the centers and building a catalog of expertise that listed 

points of contact within each center, a firm foundation of trust 

grew among the co-op members. Soon, each co-op participant 

felt comfortable calling any other member for help at any time.

A New Objective

When Pete Haro, the first Chairman of the Fabrication/

Manufacturing Co-Op and Chief of the Manufacturing Division 

at Ames, retired in 1996, I became involved with the co-op as the 

Ames hardware development representative. It was immediately 

clear to me that these folks were on to something big. Not only 

was the co-op model important to Code R’s effectiveness, but it 

also had high potential value for the entire Agency. 

A cross-center user group had already successfully solved 

the problem of incompatible Computer Aided Manufacturing 

(CAM) software by agreeing to use common software. Part 

of this effort included a joint-center training class instead of 

multiple training sessions at each center—an efficiency that also 

forged new bonds among those who attended. 

The co-op also gained access to the Surplus Utilization

Expert, a computer tracking system created by Glenn for 

6 | ASK MAGAZINE
THESE NEW COLLABORATIONS AND EXCHANGES BOLSTERED OUR 

MEMBERSHIP, RESULTED IN SHARING MORE SOPHISTICATED WORK, AND 

NURTURED THE DYNAMIC THAT MADE MUCH LARGER PROJECTS POSSIBLE. 

obtaining excess government equipment and materials, which 

saved hundreds of thousands of dollars. Co-op members acquired 

excess metals and new, or near new, equipment for only the cost of 

transportation from its current location to the requesting center. 

Another major early accomplishment was the acquisition 

of a single, joint-center contract to obtain outside fabrication 

services—the first of its kind. The Reliance Consolidated Models 

Contract allowed all co-op centers to obtain estimates from 

any one contractor, or all three, and then choose the best offer. 

Instead of contractors competing and administering separate 

contracts at each center, outside fabrication work now only 

required a simple task order. An unexpected benefit from this 

contract was lower cost estimates from the three contractors—as 

much as 20 percent less than our earlier experiences with them.

Having achieved these successes, the co-op met in Houston 

in January 1997 to reinvent and rejuvenate itself with a new set 

of goals, objectives, and operating policies. Among these were 

actions each center would undertake that were tied to expected 

returns from increased efficiency and effectiveness. 

We agreed to limit specialized fabrication capabilities to 

centers that currently had them or to one center that would 

obtain a capability and share it. Langley, for example, procured 

a new rapid-prototyping stereolithography system, and the 

other three centers sent their stereolithography work to Langley 

instead of purchasing their own machines. By using the common 

software now in place at all centers, Langley could manufacture 

and ship products back to another center within a day or two, 

eliminating both duplication of expensive equipment and 

significant time and cost to contract the work out. This decision 

alone represented a savings of more than $1.2 million and cut 

required labor for this work by two-thirds. 

Careful documentation of our efforts revealed returns 

in excess of $16.5 million in savings and cost avoidance over 

the next five years. These new goals, actions, and expected 

savings led to NASA Administrator Dan Goldin awarding the 

Reliance Fabrication/Manufacturing Co-Op Team the 1997 

Administrator’s Award for Continuous Improvement. With 

new confidence from several successful collaborations under 

our belt, we were certain the co-op would become a long-lasting 

success at NASA. 

Within a year or two after the Houston meeting, we’d 

accomplished many of our goals. It was time to take another 

look at our future. To help our centers and the Agency, 

we began consolidating our centers’ capabilities into fewer 

buildings, eliminating satellite shops, sharing resources such 

as excess equipment or knowledge of specialized fabrication 

techniques, and sharing work when any center had available 

capacity instead of contracting it out. We also created subteams 

to address current issues, including common business practices, 

advanced manufacturing and technology exchanges, and a 

common manufacturing approach for implementing ISO 9000 

across the Agency. 

A unique problem the co-op faced, and still struggles with 

today, was paying centers for work they did for one another. 

The NASA financial system took months to process a funds 

transfer, but work for critical projects often had to be done 

in days or hours. Once again, our members’ ingenuity went 

to work. Although Ames could not quickly transfer funds to 

Langley for critical stereolithography work, Ames could order 

replacement materials and have them delivered to Langley—

which we did, in quantities that covered Langley’s cost of 

materials and labor. We also used a barter system to exchange 

excess materials and equipment, and we created a system to 

allocate hours at the beginning of each year for potential work 

from other centers. 

Spreading Our Wings

With some acknowledged uneasiness at the possible effects on 

the close working relationships we had developed over nearly 

five years, we recognized that it was time to expand beyond 

the aeronautics centers and invite other centers to the table. 

In April 1999, Goddard Space Flight Center joined our team. 

The advantage the co-op gained was easy access to Goddard’s 

unique metal-plating capability, which we had never had within 

aeronautics. In September 2000, Marshall Space Flight Center 

followed Goddard, and soon the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 

Johnson Space Center, Kennedy Space Center, and Stennis 

Space Center fabrication organizations all joined. Now that we 

were a true Agency-wide team, the Fabrication/Manufacturing 

Co-Op was renamed the NASA Fabrication Alliance.

During this expansion, we realized that many of the 

aeronautics centers’ fabrication issues and needs were identical 

to those of other NASA centers. These new collaborations and 

exchanges bolstered our membership, resulted in sharing more 

ASK MAGAZINE | 7
sophisticated work, and nurtured the dynamic that made much 

larger projects possible. 

One of those projects was a high-precision parametric 

engine inlet that needed to be fabricated for a wind tunnel 

test. Glenn developed a design for it then used the Alliance to 

divide the work among four centers. The initial drawing review 

began in early 2000; the work itself took 22,000 hours and was 

completed in April 2003. We could not have met the project 

milestones if we hadn’t tried something new and risky. Our 

creative scheduling included dividing up the complex inlet so its 

parts could be machined independently at five separate NASA 

centers. Building the many components simultaneously, instead 

of serially, was possible because of digital modeling, which our 

now standardized software allowed us to share across centers. 

Weekly telephone conferences kept the project team in 

close contact, and we exchanged digital photos to show progress 

and to share problems, which also made final assembly easier. 

When completed, the precision-machined, mating flow surfaces 

matched flawlessly, and the project schedule was reduced by at 

least twenty-four months. 

Another critical test of the Alliance collaboration capability 

came after the shuttle Columbia accident. Johnson was tasked 

to provide an exact shuttle wing section mock-up, and quickly, 

to test a theory that the wing’s leading edge failed due to foam 

striking it during launch. Building this precise mock-up of 

the critical wing section was more work than Johnson could 

do in the short time available. “Just by bringing that issue up 

at the [Fabrication Alliance] telecon, they were able to get the 

job done,” said Carl Voglewede, Branch Head for Fabrication 

Business & Contract Management Branch at Langley. 

The mock-up wing consisted of more than 500 manufactured 

parts and 2,000 fasteners. To meet the extremely tight schedule, 

Johnson relied on the NASA Fabrication Alliance to fabricate 

many parts. The Alliance successfully coordinated the distribution 

of needed parts to the various centers in less than three days. We 

procured all materials, manufactured every part, and assembled 

the entire wing in just five weeks. We also provided all the 

direct personnel contacts needed at each center for immediate 

support and manufacturing implementation. Ames, Dryden, 

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Marshall, and Stennis all provided 

essential support in the manufacturing of parts. The success of 

this project was exhibited in a video showing a test foam sample 

penetrating the mock-up wing’s leading edge. The “possible” 

cause of the accident suddenly became the “probable” cause.

These projects increased our technical knowledge and, 

more importantly, deepened trust among Alliance members. 

The strength of the Alliance partnership encouraged us to 

share hard-earned aerospace trade secrets obtained through past 

experience to an unprecedented degree. 

Future of the Alliance

Nurtured and sustained for more than a decade by a handful of 

NASA fabrication experts’ grassroots activities, the Fabrication 

Alliance retains the spirit and energy of its original members. 

The Alliance formula—cooperation, not competition—resulted 

from having a joint goal, building relationships and trust among 

colleagues, identifying common goals and objectives with a real 

commitment to implementing them, and maintaining both 

face-to-face and frequent other communications. 

Our members continually strive for innovation and still set 

new challenges for growth and knowledge sharing. “One of the 

things I’ve been working on is regional workforce development. 

How can we partner with academia, with industry, with 

government to develop the workforce for the future?” Harris 

said. After ten years of sharing and building knowledge across 

the centers, the Alliance faces the challenge of retaining it. 

“As we lose personnel either through retirement or people 

moving to other jobs, the resource situation is getting more 

critical,” said Voglewede. “That’s something we’ve talked about 

in the Alliance, and we need to put some energies into that,” 

Harris added. 

We continue to talk openly about the challenges we face, 

whether they are technical, resource driven, or Agency issues and 

initiatives, and we know that accurate, reliable information is 

only a keystroke or phone call away. Membership turnover has 

not hampered the respect or enthusiasm generated among the 

members, and lifelong friendships have resulted from the Alliance 

interactions. We truly know the meaning of One NASA. ●

While Manager of the Ames Aeronautics and Spaceflight 

Hardware Development Division (for 8 years), DR. GERALD 

(JERRY) MULENBURG was the Ames representative and an 

active member of the Fabrication Alliance. He is currently Senior 

Analyst for project management and systems engineering in the 

Systems Management Office at Ames. Jerry also represents Ames 

on the Academy of Program/Project and Engineering Leadership 

(APPEL) working group and is a member of the ASK Magazine 

Review Board.

“ WHEN WE GOT TOGETHER, WE 

SORT OF DROPPED THOSE TITLES 

THAT WE ALL COVET SO MUCH. ... 

EVERYONE FELT LIKE THEY HAD AN 

EQUAL SAY AND WHAT THEY HAD 

TO SAY WAS IMPORTANT.”

8 | ASK MAGAZINE
Preserving

DEEP SMARTS

at NASA

BY DOROTHY LEONARD AND WALTER SWAP

By 2006, almost half of NASA’s 

workers will be eligible for 

retirement, many of them in 

science and engineering.1 Some of 

the knowledge likely to walk out 

the door is obsolete, irrelevant, or 

otherwise useless. But some of it 

is irreplaceable. Moreover, much 

is tacit, that is, not articulated 

in any form easily retrieved by 

others. And the most valuable of 

that expertise fits our definition 

of “deep smarts”:

Deep smarts are a potent form of expertise based on firsthand life experiences, providing insight drawn from 

tacit knowledge, and shaped by beliefs and social forces. 

Deep smarts are as close as we get to wisdom. They are 

based on know-how more than know-what—the ability 

to comprehend complex, interactive relationships and 

make swift, expert decisions based on that system-level 

comprehension and also the ability, when necessary, to 

dive into component parts of that system and understand 

the details.2 

Deep smarts may be technical or managerial. 

Intelligent people can develop competence within a 

couple years, but truly deep smarts are gained only 

through ten or more years of diverse, active learning 

FEATURE | ASK MAGAZINE | 9
experiences. As a senior manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory 

interviewed in 2002 noted about one aspect of management, “You 

have to balance risk management and cost. And that balance is 

very difficult to learn without firsthand experience on several 

projects.” In that same set of interviews, senior staff discussed a 

few highly publicized NASA failures and noted that engineers 

and managers on one of those projects “didn’t have the experience 

to know when they were doing something wrong. Sometimes you 

don’t know enough to even know that there is a problem.” 

What Deep Smarts Look Like

Consider the following brief example of deep smarts. A scientist 

realizes that his company is about to lose a profitable Defense 

Department contract because of basic flaws in software and 

hardware design that have led a missile prototype to fail. Drawing 

on twenty years of experience and speaking without notes, he 

spends several hours presenting to the project team, laying out 

in detail all the needed changes. It takes several hundred people 

eighteen months to implement the design changes, but the 

company wins a contract that still delivers profits decades later. 

Experts with deep smarts like these differ from novices, or 

even relatively competent performers, in a number of ways. They 

are the “go-to” people in an organization because they seem to 

be able to make swift, wise decisions without engaging in much 

obvious analysis. Colleagues seeing such a capability sometimes 

attribute it to “intuition” or “gut feel.” In actuality, when deeply 

smart people confront a problem, they draw on hard-won 

experience. Their brain accesses a broad repertoire of relevant 

work and life experiences and sorts through a menu of possible 

responses at warp speed, seeking a possible match to the pattern 

before them. This is not to say that experts are always right nor 

to disparage the value of the intellectual challenge someone with 

a “beginner’s mind” can add to innovation.3 But when an expert 

changes jobs or physical locations, or retires, managers need to 

consider how to capture that individual’s priceless wisdom.

Difficulties in Transferring Deep Smarts

The problems with transferring deep smarts are many. Because 

such expertise is experience based, it is context dependent and 

usually heavily tacit. Think of something that you are very good 

at—it could be as scientific as understanding the behavior of 

certain kinds of molecules under stress or as homely as baking 

bread, as cognitively complex as chess or as physical as golf. Now 

how much of your expertise could you port over to someone 

else’s head? Much would depend upon what mental receptors 

that individual already had, but the more your knowledge is 

derived from experience, the harder it is to transfer it to someone 

else. In fact, you often don’t know what you know or bring it 

into conscious consideration until you are forced to explain or 

demonstrate it in response to some specific situation. And even 

then you will often be at a loss for words that would convey 

exactly what you know, because you cannot structure all your 

knowledge into words. You have learned through practice and 

feedback, just as skilled surgeons or masons or teachers do. 

Actual Transfer Is Impossible

One of the greatest fallacies in management today is the 

belief that deeply smart people can transfer most of their 

knowledge through checklists, PowerPoint presentations, or 

data repositories. Such experts can transfer lots of information; 

they can help individuals create mental armatures on which to 

build their own knowledge—but the only path to “transferring” 

deep smarts lies through re-creation of experience, since that 

is how the experts acquired pattern-recognition capability to 

begin with, and since they will never be able to remember and 

structure all that they know. Moreover, of course, the more 

actively our brain is engaged, the more we retain. Therefore, we 

suggest a hierarchy of knowledge transfer modes, ranging from 

passive to highly active ones. See the figure above. 

As this figure suggests, people learn more experience-based 

knowledge from stories than either rules of thumb or lectures. 

Vicarious experience transfers more smarts than abstractions. 

Stories provide context and usually vivid, rich details that lodge 

in the mind longer than straight lecture or generalities. Socratic 

questioning (“Why? What then? How do you explain...?”) 

further engages the brains of the people being quizzed and causes 

them to retain even more of the knowledge an expert offers.

Knowledge Coaches and Guided Experience

But the best way for experts to help others recreate their deep smarts 

is through guided experience—helping their less experienced 

colleagues learn by doing. Such experts are functioning as knowledge 

coaches, and, by taking on this role, they can shorten the time their 

protégés would otherwise require to achieve deep smarts. 

Increasing Growth of Deep Smarts

– Learning by Doing

– Socratic Questioning

– Stories with a Moral

– Rules of Thumb

– Directives/Presentations/Lectures

[ ACTIVE LE ARNING ]

[ PAS S IVE RECE P TION ]

Modes of Knowledge Transfer

Reprinted from Deep Smarts: How to Cultivate and Transfer Enduring Business 

Wisdom (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2005).

10 | ASK MAGAZINE
In our international, multiyear research study on deep 

smarts, we observed four types of guided experience: practice, 

observation, joint problem-solving, and experimentation. The 

first of these, guided practice, is obvious: most of us have benefited 

from music or athletic coaching. Such attention to structuring 

practice and performance feedback is much rarer in organizations, 

however. Instead, we waste employee time and our resources by 

forcing people to learn through trial and error, with little welltimed feedback. Yearly performance reviews are usually too little 

and often too late to help a new manager learn how to conduct 

meetings, work with client organizations, or manage projects. 

There are two kinds of guided observation, shadowing 

and mind-stretching. Few managers think of inviting junior 

employees as spectators to critical meetings or negotiations, for 

example, even if such attendance would lay the foundation for 

those employees’ future decision-making processes. A junior 

staff member we know talked her supervisor into letting her 

sit in on strategy sessions. Her supervisor was subsequently 

pleasantly surprised by her increased ability to link her project 

work to larger organizational issues and anticipate both potential 

opportunities and difficulties. Mind-stretching enables people to 

experience situations that will challenge their current assumptions 

and provide new sets of potential responses to problems—that 

is, expand their experience repertoires. No one at Whirlpool 

thought of targeting men as customers until a group of product 

developers toured suburban garages, where they discovered old 

refrigerators containing beer and extremely messy workbenches. 

Out of these observations was born the innovative Gladiator line 

of “beer-ators” (“ruggedized” refrigerators that can withstand 

temperature extremes) and modular workbench/storage units.

Guided (joint) problem-solving by the knowledge coach and 

apprentices is a potent technique for re-creating deep smarts. 

The coach shares diagnostic approaches and provides feedback 

but allows the protégés to grow their experience repertoires by 

tackling a variety of problems. The protégé thus absorbs context 

and, in the best of situations, develops tacit knowledge. In many 

of the situations we observed, the coach also learned from the 

protégé through this practice.

Finally, when the situation is so uncertain or novel that even 

the expert has no sure answers, guided experimentation allows for 

the growth of deep smarts. In such cases, the expert, or knowledge 

coach, guides the process of experimentation—but does not 

necessarily prejudge the outcome. For example, when a new 

technology emerges, no one is immediately certain of its highestvalue application. That knowledge is discovered only through 

experimentation in the market. But there are better and worse ways 

of experimenting, and a deeply smart person knows where the 

bleeding edge of knowledge is and how to structure experiments 

to elicit the most useful information. The protégé learns how to 

experiment when knowledge is incomplete or otherwise inadequate.

Dual Purpose Projects 

“All very well,” you say, “but how realistic is it for us to re-create deep 

smarts through guided experience? Who has time?” It’s a legitimate 

question. But not everyone in an organization has critical deep smarts. 

Not all knowledge is created equal. For those relatively few who do 

possess extremely important knowledge, a better question is “how 

can we afford to lose it?” Yes, we can hire some deeply smart people 

back as consultants, but that is a very temporary measure. A better 

program is to plan on the cultivation and transfer of deep smarts 

by embedding in our systems and culture the practice of setting 

up projects with a dual purpose: to deliver the business, technical, 

or scientific output and to develop “bench depth” in critical areas 

through guided experience. We need our deeply smart people to serve 

as knowledge coaches on such projects. Some experts are already 

superb teachers, but others may need some instruction on how people 

learn and how tacit knowledge can be re-created. One organization 

we know of offers each expert a facilitator to help him or her guide 

the experience of protégés. Since dual-purpose projects deliver on 

organizational performance objectives, the investment in learning 

is less expensive than training programs that separate knowledge 

acquisition from its application. 

Deep Smarts for Mission Success

Retention of critical managerial and technical knowledge is 

essential for NASA to successfully accomplish its ambitious and 

far-reaching mission, and some of those vital deep smarts are 

departing at alarming rates. Even the most sophisticated IT tools 

for documenting best practices cannot capture and communicate 

this rich know-how. To ensure its future success, NASA will need 

to identify experience-based expertise and then design the human 

development programs to re-create those deep smarts. ●

DOROTHY LEONARD is the William J. Abernathy Professor of 

Business Administration, emerita, at Harvard Business School. 

WALTER SWAP is Professor of Psychology, emeritus, and 

former Dean of the Colleges at Tufts University. Leonard and 

Swap are the co-authors of When Sparks Fly: Igniting Creativity 

in Groups and Deep Smarts: How to Cultivate and Transfer 

Enduring Business Wisdom.

1. Except when otherwise noted, quotes throughout are from Dorothy Leonard and David Kiron, “Managing Knowledge and Learning at NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL),” Harvard Business School case # 9-603-062 (2002).

2. Dorothy Leonard and Walter Swap, Deep Smarts: How to Cultivate and Transfer Enduring Business Wisdom (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2005).

3. See the discussion of creative abrasion in Dorothy Leonard and Walter Swap, When Sparks Fly: Igniting Creativity in Groups (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1999, 2005).

ASK MAGAZINE | 11
 Cultivating a Community 

BY BEN BRUNEAU AND KERRY ELLIS

When beginning a project, most project managers look first for budget approval and a team that 

will make the project succeed. To garner NASA’s continued support after a project has begun, many 

rely on progress reports and updates to senior leaders that will convince them the project is worth 

continued investment. But two project managers took a different approach: they convinced their 

local communities that they could personally benefit from the research. By looking outside NASA 

and gaining local support, the managers did not need to spend all their time convincing higher-ups 

that the project should continue. The community helped do it for them.

Dougal Maclise and Jenny Baer-Riedhart worked together 

in NASA’s Environmental Research Aircraft and Sensor 

Technology (ERAST) program and teamed up on a project 

called Pathfinder, an unmanned, solar-powered airplane. The 

Pathfinder project was based in Kauai, Hawaii’s northernmost 

island, and its goal was to develop a solar-powered unmanned 

aerial vehicle that could remain aloft for many hours to capture 

research data.

Pathfinder’s payload was a small camera attached to the 

fuselage. Maclise immediately began thinking of ways to use 

the technology to benefit others. “My objective was to look 

for new ideas, new ways to use our information. For example, 

we planned to take pictures of the forests to collect data on 

agriculture. Then we met somebody who was talking about 

mapping roads. Suddenly we were aiming our camera at the 

roads, too,” he says.

Maclise focused first on sharing the technology and its 

potential with the local scientific community. “To help scientists 

understand the potential value of our data to them, I went on 

marketing trips around the islands. I met scientists who had no 

idea about aerial photography and what it could do for them. I 

tried to explain to them how chlorophyll reflects infrared—what 

the camera was capturing—more than it reflects green, and how 

it showed the stress of the plants,” he explains.

Recognizing this potential for photo-mapping plant strain, 

Maclise expanded his audience and went to the local agriculture 

industry. He began visiting sugarcane producers and tried to 

explain how the Pathfinder project could help them grow their 

crops, but it wasn’t until he demonstrated aerial photography’s 

benefits that interest grew. “I went for a ride with a sugarcane 

producer in his helicopter and took pictures of crops to 

demonstrate the value of the project and to whet his appetite for 

wider-scale images available from Pathfinder,” Maclise explains. 

“Later, when I showed him the pictures, he pored over them. 

Within a day he was using the information we’d collected to fix 

broken irrigation lines. Word of that got around to other parts 

of the community, like the coffee growers, and they began to see 

how useful aerial photography could be to them.”

Baer-Riedhart recognized that a broader approach to 

sharing information about the Pathfinder could be useful, and 

she approached a Kauai resident the team had gotten to know 

very well, Dave Nekomoto. Nekomoto helped open many doors 

in the Kauai community for the NASA project. “We involved 

the Kauai Community College by hiring students to work for us 

at the Pacific Missile Range Facility (PMRF) and introducing 

them to advanced solar technology. This was done on Dave 

12 | ASK MAGAZINE
Article adapted from Dr. Alexander Laufer, Todd Post, Dr. Edward J. Hoffmann, Shared Voyage: 

Learning and Unlearning from Remarkable Projects (Washington, D.C.: NASA History Division, 

2005), 156–58.

Nekomoto’s advice, and he put us in direct touch with the right 

people at the college,” Baer-Riedhart recalls. 

The Pathfinder team also learned from Nekomoto the high 

regard Kauaians have for those who educate their children, so 

Baer-Riedhart broadened their information-sharing approach 

even more. “Working with the base commander and the PMRF 

public affairs office, the NASA and AV team orchestrated an open 

house that brought in approximately 1,000 local schoolchildren 

to see the Pathfinder, its payloads, and key parts of the PMRF 

support equipment. We jokingly called this event the ‘1,000-

Kid March,’ and the name stuck,” Baer-Riedhart shares. “It was 

tremendously successful, and students and teachers from across 

the state participated.”

Nekomoto was also quick to let Hawaii’s political machine 

know what was going on with the Pathfinder project. Garnering 

this political support resulted in Hawaii’s entire congressional 

delegation sending a letter to NASA commending the team 

on the project’s success. “Suddenly money that hadn’t been 

available before appeared [from NASA], and this gave the 

project some extra lift, so to speak, making our attempts at 

another world-record-altitude flight an even more viable goal,” 

Baer-Riedhart explains.

People in the community who could benefit from the 

Pathfinder technology became valuable to Pathfinder’s success. 

These technology users became customers of the project. 

“Normally, the customer gives you money in exchange for 

something you give him,” Maclise explains. “Those people 

weren’t giving us money, but they’re the users of the information 

we could provide to them, so we collected their needs.” By 

meeting their needs, the team gained increased support and 

recognition from the community.

Embedding the project into the surrounding community 

kept Pathfinder alive. “The reality is that every year you have 

to defend your program,” Maclise says. “The best way to keep 

a program alive is to get the user communities to say they need 

the data your program provides them. Thus it behooves you to 

spread your base of support far and wide.”

“Many times in our projects we think that just being 

smarter than someone else or having the best idea is all we 

need,” Baer-Riedhart shares. “That helps, no doubt, but you’ve 

got to understand the human side of things. We came to Kauai 

not knowing how the human dimension would figure into our 

activities, but we understood that however it worked itself out was 

going to be critical to our success. That’s why we set aside money 

in our budget specifically for the kinds of activities described 

here. Call it marketing or public relations, but whatever you call 

it, by the time we left Kauai, we had probably spent 20 percent 

of our project time on it.”

That effort resulted in project success, as the Pathfinder took 

flight on September 11, 1995, and set the first altitude record for 

solar-powered aircraft at 50,000 feet during a twelve-hour flight. 

In 1998, the plane was modified and renamed the PathfinderPlus project. It continues to be adapted and modified for scientific 

exploration as new possibilities for its use are investigated. These 

possibilities include monitoring forest nutrient status, detecting 

crop damage or fires, establishing commercial communications, 

and creating emergency communication links for recovery and 

relief workers. ●

STORY | ASK MAGAZINE | 13
Old Lessons for 

a New Generation

BY MARTY DAVIS

The seventeen-ton Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory (or CGRO), launched aboard the space 

shuttle Atlantis on April 5, 1991, was, at the time, the heaviest astrophysical payload ever flown. 

It returned data to astronomers for nine years, detecting gamma rays from sources including black 

holes and our own sun and providing content for literally thousands of scientific papers. In June 

2000 it was safely de-orbited and re-entered Earth’s atmosphere.

So the project to build the observatory was a success. But that does 

not mean it did not have problems, including some serious ones. 

As Instrument Systems Manager and then Observatory Manager 

for the project, I got to see both what we did well and what we 

could and should have done better. Although work on the CGRO 

began some two decades ago, I believe that our experience offers 

important lessons to managers of large projects today.

The success of the variety of subsystem and instruments 

we developed was determined, in large part, by the quality of 

management. Having the right technical expertise is essential, of 

course, but large, complex projects like this one stand or fall on 

how well the work of the many parties involved is coordinated, on 

sensibly allocating resources of money and time, on identifying 

and solving small problems before they become big ones—in 

other words, on project management skills.

A Slow Start

The Gamma-Ray Observatory project got off to a slow start. 

A study phase began in 1978. Three years later, CGRO was 

confirmed as a project, but sufficient money to begin the work 

in earnest was not allocated until two years after that, in 1983. 

This leisurely pace gave the team the false impression that 

they had plenty of time to get organized and do the work. The 

unprecedented size of the project made it difficult to predict 

how much effort it would entail. Many members of the project 

team had worked on small, rocket-launched satellites, building 

instruments in what was almost a hobby shop atmosphere. Even 

though we knew that designing and building a device so much 

larger than anything done before would be more challenging, we 

underestimated just how much additional work that difference 

in size would generate. Scaling up doesn’t mean the same 

only larger. It creates new technical problems that are difficult 

or impossible to foresee (and therefore difficult to schedule 

and budget). In this particular case, it meant moving from 

the “hobby shop” to more formal design and manufacturing 

environments. It dramatically increased the number of tasks, 

organizations, and groups that project leaders had to coordinate, 

evaluate, and support.

Not recognizing the true extent of the work resulted 

partly from never having experienced a project this big and 

reflected a dangerous optimism that we often bring to our 

projects. A can-do attitude is important, but underestimating 

the effort needed because you assume this project will be free 

of the problems and inefficiencies that plagued past projects 

is dangerous. Listen to the wisdom of experience, including 

rules of thumb (spend 50 percent of your costs by Critical 

Design Review), past experience (it took 150 people in the 

past to put a large observatory through integration and test), 

and common sense (is it really practical to have one group 

of people analyze and design hardware and software, another 

group build it, and a third group test it?). We did not always 

do that, assuming, for instance, that 100 people could do the 

integration and testing and asking three separate groups to 

design, build, and test hardware and software components.

On the positive side, we took time early on to document 

expectations in detail and develop schedules, budgets, 

14 | ASK MAGAZINE
descriptions of responsibilities, and fiscal monitoring tools. This 

preparatory work helped avoid countless future disagreements 

about tasks and resources. It put us in a position to measure 

our progress against clearly defined goals and schedules. And 

it mitigated, to some degree, the unforeseen problems that 

inevitably arise in long projects. Ours took thirteen years from 

study phase to launch. During that time, one design engineer 

died and others retired or turned their attention to other work. 

Even good, detailed documentation could not entirely make up 

for the expertise lost in those cases, but it allowed those who 

took over their roles to get their bearings quickly.

So one important lesson learned is this: Invest time and 

effort in thorough planning and documentation up front. Doing 

so will save you time, money, and headaches later on.

Of course, you should be sure to use the management 

tools you put in place. We often ignored them, explaining 

away variances, schedule slips, interrelationship disconnects, 

and technical problems. When our earned-value measurement 

system told us that the cost of work accomplished so far 

indicated that we were overspending and underperforming, our 

gut feeling was that we had workarounds to solve the problem, 

but the system was right.

Four Instruments, Four Management Stories

Four different instruments included in the observatory were 

developed by different groups at a variety of locations. Each of 

these elements of the project was managed somewhat differently 

from the others. Their circumstances suggest that there is no 

one, right model for managing large projects, plenty of ways to 

go wrong, and some key ingredients of success.

Instrument One

One of the instruments had three co-Principal Investigators 

located at three separate institutions. NASA Headquarters tried 

to alleviate the tension among them by making one scientist 

responsible for the entire instrument. Though the participants 

agreed to this arrangement, it did not eliminate the problems. 

In reality, the assigned Instrument Manager was in charge of 

only half the relevant work at his center and none at the other 

institutions. Assisted only by a coordinator, he shared secretarial, 

procurement, and financial support with others in his section. 

So a $40 million instrument was being managed by a two-man 

team that only actually controlled a third of the work.

One institution sharing the workload was a university that 

had no experience building flight hardware, but the Instrument 

Manager had no experienced manpower to assign to the 

university. Basically, the plan was to have the funds to clean up 

the eventual mess that all the managers knew would happen. 

Center management also had a skewed perception of the 

complexity of the instrument, which was prevented from flying 

on its original mission due to budget cuts. They had repeatedly 

been shown a sketch of it created for that cancelled mission. 

When the Instrument Manager’s center sold the instrument to 

this new project, they gave the impression—which proved to 

be false—that extensive engineering backed up the drawing. 

So management failed to realize how much work needed to be 

The Gamma Ray Observatory (GRO) with its solar array panels deployed is grappled by the remote manipulator system April 11, 1991. This view taken by the STS 37 

crew shows the GRO against a backdrop of clouds over water on the Earth’s surface.
done to build this complex instrument until the project was 

under way.

In this case, divided responsibility, insufficient manpower, 

and lack of clarity about the complexity of the task led inevitably 

to problems.

Instrument Two

The second instrument had only one manager with total 

responsibility. That avoided issues of divided accountability, but 

“total responsibility” ended up being the problem. The manager 

was a very capable section head who also worked on other 

tasks. He did his own financial, scheduling, and procurement 

work. He worked hard and convinced himself that he knew 

everything happening with his contractors. He didn’t, but he 

was so overloaded with work and working so hard to stay on top 

of it that he was unaware he had lost control. 

The project office took up the issue of lack of management 

support with one of the instrument organization’s senior 

managers. A detailed analysis was put together and discussed 

with him, but the senior manager pushed for a management 

consultant to study the situation. After three months of 

observation, the consultant agreed with the project office’s 

assessment. The report was filed and ignored, however. 

Eventually, continuing problems spurred a meeting of NASA 

headquarters, center management, and the instrument 

organization’s senior management, but it came too late to 

avoid the problems poor management had caused.

Here, an overcommitted manager and the failure of senior 

management to respond to a problem quickly and decisively 

were the source of the difficulties. 

Instrument Three

A third, simpler instrument also suffered from some 

management problems, but it had what turned out to be the 

advantage of being delivered from one NASA center to another. 

Centers feel a certain (usually friendly) rivalry and need to 

maintain their reputations in the eyes of the other centers and 

NASA headquarters. Our project office once brought problems 

at another center working on the project to the attention 

of headquarters. The center responsible for the instrument 

responded by working hard to strengthen its management. If 

Instrument One had not come from the same center that also 

housed the project office, reputational pressure might have 

resulted in a faster resolution of problems.

Instrument Four

The development of the fourth instrument should not have 

worked, but it did. Hardware responsibility was divided among 

four different groups with five funding sources from four 

different countries. But the team took major steps to promote 

teamwork and a shared understanding of their task early 

on. They agreed to put their egos aside, support each other’s 

efforts, and follow the lead of the principal investigator. The 

instrument was managed by a committee, but the committee 

acted as a single unit.

Even this effective team experienced two setbacks. First, a 

shortage of funding caused them to choose hardware over system 

engineering support early in the design phase. This contributed 

to later technical performance issues. These problems exposed 

a second issue. No clear lines of responsibility for hardware 

integration had been laid out with the contractor responsible. In 

comparison with the issues of poor management that plagued 

the project’s other instruments, these two problems, spread over 

eight years of collaboration, were relatively minor.

Some Lessons Learned

Despite the many problems suggested, the project was highly 

successful and yielded outstanding science for almost a decade. 

As is often the case at NASA, people found ways to do the 

work and do it well. But recovering from our mistakes was 

costly and took a toll on participants. Our excellent Project 

Manager came very close to burning out two of his highest 

performers. (There is a lot of literature on how to motivate 

poor performers but not much on how to tell when you are 

driving your “workaholics” too far.)

Some of the most important lessons of the CGRO project 

are these:

• Spend ample time up front for detailed, clear, realistic 

planning. The effort will pay benefits throughout the life 

of the project.

• Work hard to provide resources appropriate to the 

complexity of the project. It’s expensive to try to do work 

on the cheap.

• When problems arrive, deal with them quickly and 

decisively. Trying to explain them away or ignore them 

makes them worse.

• Communicate, communicate, communicate. The success 

of the work on Instrument Four came from continual, 

extensive communication; many of our problems were 

due to poor communication. ●

MARTY DAVIS is the Program Manager of the Geostationary 

Operational Satellite (GOES) at the NASA Goddard Space Flight 

Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. He is responsible for the design, 

assembly, integration, and test of the GOES flight and ground 

support hardware and for the launch activity and on-orbit 

checkout of the spacecraft.

16 | ASK MAGAZINE
Profile of a Leader

Orlando Figueroa: Federal Employee of the Year

ORLANDO FIGUEROA BEGAN HIS NASA CAREER

TWENTY-SEVEN YEARS AGO AT GODDARD SPACE

FLIGHT CENTER, NOT KNOWING HE WOULD

EVENTUALLY BECOME THE CENTER’S DIRECTOR OF

APPLIED ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY—AND

FEDERAL EMPLOYEE OF THE YEAR. DR. ED WEILER, 

WHO NOMINATED HIM FOR THE AWARD, DESCRIBES

FIGUEROA’S UNUSUAL ABILITY TO “CUT THROUGH

THE TAPE AND GET THE JOB DONE.” “FIGUEROA HAS

A FIERCE DETERMINATION TO DO A JOB WELL AND

ISN’T AFRAID TO SPEAK HIS MIND,” SAID WEILER. 

“THOSE QUALITIES EXPLAIN WHY HE IS EMPLOYEE

OF THE YEAR AND MADE HIM THE IDEAL MARS

PROGRAM DIRECTOR.”

BY KERRY ELLIS

FEATURE | ASK MAGAZINE | 17
Technicians maneuver the aeroshell for Mars Exploration Rover 2 

onto a workstand in the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility at 

Kennedy Space Center.

18 | ASK MAGAZINE
Figueroa was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and obtained a 

Bachelor of Science Degree in Mechanical Engineering from 

the University of Puerto Rico in 1978. He moved to Maryland 

and took his first steps with NASA at Goddard, where he joined 

the Heat Capacity Mapping mission, which mapped the land 

over the United States, during its integration and test phase. 

“Imagine coming out of school as an engineer all gungho about applying whatever I learned and being part of the 

team that took this mission to the launch pad and launched it 

successfully,” Figueroa said. His first mission became one of his 

most memorable, not just for witnessing his first launch but for 

the lessons he learned from the team.

“This group of people embraced me as part of the team,” 

said Figueroa, “and two of my supervisors took very seriously 

the role of mentorship. John Webb and Joe Dezio met with 

me often to talk about the job, my progress, and to provide 

guidance.” It was during this mission that Figueroa also learned 

to keep his eyes on the goal, and he took that lesson to heart 

during future missions that posed difficult challenges.

Those missions were not long in coming. After applying 

his determination and skill to missions that included free fliers 

and the shuttle and to line management positions, Figueroa was 

approached by Tom Huber and Alan Sherman—Director and 

Deputy Director of the Goddard Engineering Directorate—

to manage the Small Explorers program in 1990. This 

program represented a move from huge “Battlestar Galactica” 

vehicles, which might launch once per decade, to vehicles that 

provided more frequent flight opportunities to the science 

community. But engineering these smaller vehicles was not 

the only measure of success. “We knew we had a responsibility 

not only to build extremely capable scientific spacecraft with 

relatively small resources but also to help build a capability in 

the commercial sector so they could also do this on their own,” 

Figueroa recalled. 

To put this program on the path to success, he first set about 

establishing an environment of teamwork and mentorship like 

the one he had encountered when he first joined NASA. First 

he had to get to know the team. That required a lot of walking 

around and face-to-face interactions. This also allowed him to 

get a sense of what was going on and what was getting in the 

way. “One of the things that I learned as I was growing up in the 

system was to be able to very quickly identify areas that needed 

attention, that were not working as they should to fulfill the end 

goal of mission success,” Figueroa said.

He identified key areas that needed attention before the goal 

could be achieved and went after them with zeal. This quickly led 

to several small wins, which helped people feel successful early and 

remain motivated. “I am very open and honest in communicating 

what I see. It was very direct, not behind anyone’s back. It was 

observing what we need to do and making corrections along 

“IN THE LATE ’90s VERSION OF THE 

MARS PROGRAM, WE WERE MOVING VERY 

AGGRESSIVELY NOT ONLY TO DO ORBITER 

AND ROVER MISSIONS BUT ALSO TO BRING 

SAMPLES BACK TO EARTH AS QUICKLY AS 

WE POSSIBLY COULD. WE WERE TRYING TO 

DO THIS WITH AN EXTREMELY FRUGAL 

BUDGET, SO WE WERE ALWAYS OPERATING 

VERY CLOSE TO AND, UNKNOWINGLY, 

BEYOND THE EDGE.”

ASK MAGAZINE | 19
the way,” Figueroa said. “We engaged the contractors and other 

organizations in frequent meetings to discuss progress and deal 

with issues promptly. We dealt with whatever was getting in the 

way of completing the deliverables swiftly.”

After three successful missions in the Small Explorers 

program and getting two more on their way, Figueroa moved 

on to the Large Explorers program, where the X-Ray Timing 

Explorer and the Advanced Composition Explorer were in 

development, and a new mission demanding a new approach 

was looming on the horizon. Headquarters posed the challenge 

of completing the Far Ultraviolet Spectrometer Explorer mission 

for half the cost of what was initially envisioned. 

Johns Hopkins University put together a strong proposal 

for the mission. A strong proposal, however, was not enough to 

ensure mission success. “I knew many of the players at Johns 

Hopkins,” Figueroa said, “so I started to build a relationship 

with these individuals.” This allowed NASA and Johns 

Hopkins to quickly create a collaborative team. “The way you 

build that [collaboration] is setting up the channels for frequent 

communication—daily, if needed, or weekly. This gives them 

the sense that not only am I soliciting for them to open the door, 

but that I am willing to open the door as well,” he said. 

Foreign contributions, batteries, guidance and navigation 

sensors, and detectors represented challenges that threatened 

the cost and schedule commitments and required careful and 

frequent coordination. After the mission launched successfully, 

Figueroa attributed a large part of that success to good teamwork 

and the communication his team and the Johns Hopkins team 

established. “We could talk frankly about anything that was 

going on at any time, and we dealt with issues promptly before 

they could grow or, worse, be forgotten,” he said. 

The skills and knowledge developed through these 

experiences were critical when Figueroa eventually moved to the 

Mars program. Prior to becoming the Mars Program Director, 

Figueroa was the Deputy Chief for Systems Engineering for 

NASA when the Agency was dealing with the Mars Climate 

Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander mission failures. In that 

position, he focused on how to strengthen systems engineering 

and software capabilities throughout the Agency. When he was 

approached to take over as director for the Mars program, he 

knew what to avoid.

“In the late ’90s version of the Mars program, we were 

moving very aggressively not only to do orbiter and rover 

missions but also to bring samples back to Earth as quickly as 

we possibly could. We were trying to do this with an extremely 

frugal budget, so we were always operating very close to and, 

unknowingly, beyond the edge. The failures demonstrated that 

we were violating some of the most fundamental principles of 

engineering and management. We were trying to focus our 

attention on the bigger, more visible issues, while the system 

of checks and balances diminished to the point that many 

small, yet important, things were being overlooked—the 

accumulation of which was building undue risk in the system,” 

Figueroa said.

Following the restructuring of the Mars program and upon 

taking over its leadership, Figueroa focused on these issues 

and others that the individual review teams had uncovered. 

He again applied his earlier lesson of quickly identifying what 

prevents success then communicating these observations in 

an open and honest forum and dealing with them swiftly. He 

also focused on building a relationship with the Jet Propulsion 

Laboratory (JPL) to support their success, “because ultimately 

their success would mean our success,” he said. As Dr. Weiler 

noted, “Orlando would go around [JPL] and just talk to the 

engineers on the floor.” 

Keeping the program geared toward success required 

paying attention to the details, which can be hard to do at 

the director level. “Orlando worked Mars twenty-four hours 

a day,” said Dr. Weiler. Figueroa relied on building trust and 

open communication to keep him abreast of the details and any 

problems that might arise. “Jim Garvin [program scientist], 

Ed Weiler [Associate Administrator for Science], and I worked 

20 | ASK MAGAZINE
hard on opening that communication channel,” he said. 

They constantly spoke about progress and issues and agreed 

on ways to address issues. Eventually, the program manager 

felt comfortable enough to call Figueroa at home if a critical 

issue came up. “I would commit myself to not overreacting 

to anything and allow the team to do their work, recognizing 

that they would do well in their promise to come back and 

give me the details,” Figueroa said. 

His thorough involvement demonstrated an in-depth interest 

in the technical integrity of the mission and supported an ability 

to anticipate and act upon programmatic issues as they arose. 

The Mars Program Manager at JPL and the rest of the JPL team 

appreciated his genuine interest in their work and the support he 

provided during the inevitable challenges of the mission. 

The Mars Explorer Rover mission launched Spirit and 

Opportunity in 2004. “At any given time in the last year before 

launch, if you would have told us we would have two successful 

launches, two successful cruise modes, two successful landings, 

and two successful missions in total, Orlando and I would not 

have bet one-tenth of a penny on that. We would have been very, 

very pleased landing one of them—that was mission success. We 

couldn’t have hoped for two,” said Dr. Weiler. Launching two 

rovers within days of each other had never been done before, and 

it was accomplished in three years, from conception to launch, 

in the wake of mission failures from Mars ’98.

“He excited a nation. He excited a world. How many federal 

employees get that opportunity?” said Dr. Weiler.

Now Figueroa has come full circle, returning to the center 

where he began his education in leadership. As Director of 

Applied Engineering and Technology at Goddard, he continues 

to apply what he learned throughout his career to his current 

job. He is now responsible for 1,300 employees and provides 

guidance on engineering and system technology. “It is a large 

organization with exceptional people, and it has a record of 

success that is hard to match. I want to build from that success 

to better serve the center and the Agency,” Figueroa said. 

“There are certain principles that I have found in common 

[on my missions] that make things successful,” he said. “There 

is a sense of respect and integrity that opens the door for open 

and honest communication. People feel free to say whatever 

they feel may be getting in the way of the end goal. 

“I talked about maintaining focus on the end game and 

recognizing that there are going to be very difficult challenges 

along the way. ... To pretend that this is going to be an easy task 

along the way is foolish and unreal.

“Acknowledging the people who are actually doing the 

work is another very important part of leadership. I know the 

individuals I mentioned [as mentors] always took that very 

seriously, and I’m grateful for them taking the time. I hope I can 

do as good a job at being the mentor, the example, the leader, 

the focus that the people who embraced me when I started were. 

I am certainly committed to it.” ●

“ THERE ARE CERTAIN PRINCIPLES 

THAT I HAVE FOUND IN COMMON 

[ON MY MISSIONS] THAT MAKE THINGS 

SUCCESSFUL ... THERE IS A SENSE OF 

RESPECT AND INTEGRITY THAT OPENS 

THE DOOR FOR OPEN AND HONEST 

COMMUNICATION. PEOPLE FEEL FREE 

TO SAY WHATEVER THEY FEEL MAY BE 

GETTING IN THE WAY OF THE END GOAL.” 

ASK MAGAZINE | 21
Innovation Report

The ICB: Recognizing and Rewarding Innovation

BY ROGER FORSGREN

When Congress established NASA under the Space Act of 1958, 

it realized that the new Agency created to answer the Cold War 

challenge of Sputnik needed to be a fertile ground for scientific 

and engineering ingenuity. In order to encourage that creativity, 

they authorized the Inventions and Contributions Board (ICB) 

and included it in the legislation that created NASA.

The ICB recognizes and rewards the technological 

inventiveness of NASA employees and NASA contractors. By 

doing so, it helps to energize the creative spirit that has made 

NASA the premier engineering organization in the world. 

The Board reviews and makes recommendations about the 

significance of each application for award. In 2005, we received 

771 applications from individuals and groups and gave monetary 

awards totaling nearly $1.8 million to 2,628 individuals. 

To become a member of the Board, one has to be recognized 

as an expert in his or her field and be nominated by a center 

director. To maintain our objectivity in evaluating applications, 

we seek to have each center represented. The NASA Chief 

Engineer, Chris Scolese, chairs the Board.

To reward NASA’s engineering excellence and stimulate 

creativity, the ICB provides four separate Space Act Awards: 

Board Awards for innovative projects, Patent Awards for 

inventions, Software Awards, and Tech Brief Awards for ideas 

accepted for publication in Tech Briefs Magazine.

Since our inception in 1958, we have granted more than 

89,000 monetary awards to NASA employees and contractors. 

The Board Awards can be as high as $100,000, depending on 

the potential significance of the contribution. Currently, Patent 

and Software Awards are $1,000 for sole inventors or authors 

and $500 each for multiple contributors. If an idea is published 

in Tech Briefs, we award $350 to each author.

One recent project that received a Board Award was a rotary 

blood pump, also known as a ventricular assist device (VAD), 

which won the NASA Commercial Invention of the Year in 2001. 

The small, turbine pump works with the heart to pump blood 

instead of replacing it completely. The idea for this pump came 

from a NASA employee who was also a heart patient. He spoke 

with Dr. Michael DeBakey about the problems with existing 

VADs and suggested that Dr. DeBakey speak with NASA 

engineers about improving them. The result of that collaboration 

is now regularly used to help heart transplant patients.

An earlier Board Award project developed on-board flight 

software for Apollo. Margaret Hamilton designed all components 

and subsystems to eliminate interface errors at the systems level 

and make all hardware components subservient to the software. 

Three minutes before Eagle’s touchdown on the Moon on 

July 20, 1969, the software overrode a command to switch the 

flight computer’s priority processing to a radar system that had 

accidentally been turned on. If the software override had not been 

active and successfully preprogrammed, the Apollo Eagle might 

have aborted the mission or crashed that day.

In addition to our Space Act Awards, we present a Software 

of the Year Award and hold a ceremony each year at NASA 

headquarters for the winners. The ICB also works with the 

NASA General Counsel to provide the Invention of the Year 

Award. To highlight NASA’s technical achievements for upper 

management, we also print an annual report detailing the most 

significant contributions made throughout the previous year.

In upcoming issues of ASK Magazine, I plan to describe some 

of the outstanding technical work that is being done throughout 

the Agency so readers can learn about the contributions our 

colleagues are making. This issue of ASK features an article 

on one of this year’s two Inventions of the Year, the braided 

carbon-fiber thermal barrier developed by Dr. Bruce Steinetz 

and Patrick Dunlap at Glenn Research Center. ●

If you have questions about the ICB, please feel free to contact 

me at Roger.Forsgren@nasa.gov. If you want to learn more about 

the awards process, please visit our Web page at http://icb.nasa.gov.

ROGER FORSGREN earned a bachelor’s degree from 

Georgetown University and a bachelor’s and master’s degree 

in engineering from Cleveland State University. He started his 

career at Glenn Research Center as a technician and worked 

as a manufacturing engineer in the Manufacturing Engineering 

Division and as a program manager in the Microgravity Science 

Division. In 2005 he was appointed the Director of the Inventions 

and Contributions Board and transferred to NASA headquarters.

22 | ASK MAGAZINE
Engineers at Thiokol (now ATK Thiokol) worried about heat 

effects they were finding on the O-rings that sealed the joints 

between nozzle sections of their reusable solid rocket motors, or 

RSRMs. In its worst form and combined with brittleness caused by 

cold weather at launch, a similar problem in the motor’s field joint 

led to the Challenger disaster in 1986; lesser nozzle O-ring heat 

effects have been observed on flights since then. One of the ATK 

Thiokol engineers remembered reading about an award Steinetz 

and Sirocky (a former colleague) had received for high-temperature 

seal work. He called Steinetz and asked if the seal team could apply 

their expertise to the solid rocket motor’s seal problem.

Steinetz and Sirocky’s 1997 Invention of the Year award 

was for a ceramic, braided rope seal used in the engines of the 

F-22 and other applications that require an effective insulator 

that is also flexible and resilient. But the RSRM presented a 

much greater challenge. The original ceramic seal was exposed 

to temperatures of around 1500 ̊F. In ATK Thiokol’s rocket 

motor, the thermal barrier would face temperatures of around 

5500 ̊F. When the engine fired, pressure in the RSRM nozzle 

joints would go from ambient atmospheric pressure of 14 lb./

square inch to 1,000 lb./square inch in less than a second. The 

thermal barriers would have to protect the booster’s O-rings 

from high temperatures while allowing enough gas through 

to provide the pressure needed to seat the O-rings firmly in 

their sealing positions. And the thermal barriers would have to 

survive for close to two-and-a-half minutes, the length of time 

that the rocket fired.

The challenge was all the greater because Steinetz and 

Dunlap had no money earmarked for the research. They 

could borrow a little funding from other projects that would 

benefit from what they learned, but they would have to find an 

inexpensive way to develop and test possible solutions.

Luckily, a standard oxy-acetylene torch generates about 

5500 ̊F of heat, so they had a ready-made, low-cost tool for 

screening potential thermal barrier materials. They first tested 

their ceramic braid seal. The torch burned through the material 

in just over six seconds. Next they tried a thermal barrier 

made of braided phenolic, a heat-resistant plastic. It lasted 

2004 Invention of the Year

BY LAURIE STAUBER

A phone call from a concerned Thiokol engineer in 1997 led Dr. Bruce Steinetz and Mr. Patrick 

Dunlap of the Glenn Research Center to work on developing a flexible barrier that could withstand 

the extreme temperatures generated by solid rocket motors. The braided carbon-fiber thermal barrier 

they invented has won the NASA Government Inventions and Contributions Board Invention 

of the Year Award for 2004, which was presented at a special NASA Headquarters ceremony in 

September 2005.

The carbon thermal barrier seal passes a torch test with flying colors.

STORY | ASK MAGAZINE | 23
approximately 40 seconds. Their third test material was an 

eighth-inch diameter rope braided out of an aerospace grade 

carbon fiber, a close cousin to the material used in some golf 

club shafts, fishing rods, and other sports equipment. The 

carbon braid was promising, lasting about two minutes before 

it burned through. A quarter-inch braid lasted more than six 

minutes. They had taken a major step forward in solving the 

problem and communicated the results to ATK Thiokol.

ATK Thiokol ran tests on the carbon-fiber thermal barriers, 

first in rockets with 70 lb. of thrust (as compared with the 

millions of pounds of thrust of their full-scale rockets) and then 

on larger, though still scaled-down versions of the RSRM. The 

thermal barriers passed with (literally) flying colors. Tests that 

recorded temperatures more than 2500 ̊F on the upstream side of 

the dual thermal barriers registered less than 200 ̊F on the other. 

The braided structure was key to solving the problem of letting 

sufficient pressure through to seat the downstream O-rings while 

protecting them from heat. The new thermal barriers will be used 

on ATK Thiokol RSRMs for shuttle mission STS-122.

Steinetz says that how the barrier produces so great a 

temperature drop is “a little bit of a mystery.” Looking back on 

the discovery process, he remarks on how “uneven” technical 

development is. “A lot of things lined up perfectly, and we 

were able to come to a solution in short order,” he says. “Many 

research projects don’t go like that.”

The thermal barriers have also solved a problem in the solid 

rocket motors Aerojet manufactures for the Lockheed-Martin 

Atlas V. The 67-foot-long Aerojet rockets are a single piece, with 

no joints except where the rocket body connects with the nozzle. 

In the summer of 2002, only months before the scheduled 

launch of an Atlas V to put a commercial satellite in orbit, an 

Aerojet rocket suffered a dramatic failure on the test stand due 

to hot gases compromising the nozzle seals and joint. Aerojet 

engineers asked Steinetz and Dunlap for help and quickly 

redesigned the joint using three of the braided carbon-fiber 

thermal barriers. The rocket was certified in June 2003, and the 

commercial launch took place the following month. Since then, 

Atlas Vs with pairs of Aerojet rockets have successfully launched 

the AMC-16 satellite that provides DISH network services and 

Inmarsat 4-F1, which delivers broadband communications to 

86 percent of the world.

NASA will use the Atlas V to launch the Pluto Horizons 

Spacecraft in 2006 and is considering its use to launch payloads 

for the International Space Station and future Exploration 

Initiative missions. Steinetz and Dunlap have turned their 

attention to other challenges, including developing docking 

and berthing pressure seals for the Crew Exploration Vehicle 

and seals designed to mate a new Apollo-like heat shield to the 

vehicle structure. ●

THE CHALLENGE WAS ALL THE GREATER 

BECAUSE STEINETZ AND DUNLAP HAD NO 

MONEY EARMARKED FOR THE RESEARCH. THEY 

COULD BORROW A LITTLE FUNDING FROM OTHER 

PROJECTS THAT WOULD BENEFIT FROM WHAT 

THEY LEARNED, BUT THEY WOULD HAVE TO FIND 

AN INEXPENSIVE WAY TO DEVELOP AND TEST 

POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS.

LAURIE STAUBER currently works as Marketing Liaison 

Specialist in the Technology Transfer & Partnership Office at 

Glenn Research Center. She is also the Awards Liaison Officer, 

manages the Glenn Success Stories Team, and covers Spinoff 

Magazine for the center.

Steinetz and Dunlap are pictured with their thermal barrier and patent.

24 | ASK MAGAZINE
NASA

 Knowledge Map

AMES RESEARCH CENTER

Moffett Field, CA

1,224 civil servants | 1,521 contractors

Focuses on information technology

Engages in wind tunnel development 

and operation

Uses supercomputing and advanced 

computer-based modeling

Explores artificial intelligence

www.nasa.gov/about/sites/index.html

ASK Magazine would like to extend special thanks to Stephen Chesley in the 

Office of Human Capital Management for his assistance.

ARC

JOHNSON SPACE CENTER

Houston, TX

2,748 civil servants | 12,282 contractors

Focuses on human operations in space

Serves as shuttle mission control and 

operations planning

Conducts studies of lunar samples 

returned by the Apollo program

JET PROPULSION LABORATORY

Pasadena, CA

5,225 employees

Focuses on deep space systems

Designs and operates spacecraft 

to explore the Solar System

Supports research in automated 

spacecraft operations and related 

computer science

DRYDEN FLIGHT RESEARCH CENTER

Edwards, CA

424 civil servants | 520 contractors

Focuses on atmospheric 

flight operations

Supports development and 

operations for the Shuttle

Enhances competitiveness in the 

U.S. aerospace industry
DFRC

JPL

GRC

MSFC

SSC

JSC

KSC

GSFC

HQ

WFF

LRC

NASA HEADQUARTERS

Washington, DC

1,500 civil servants | 752 contractors

Headquarters has authority for all NASArelated entities/projects

Interacts with Administration and Congress

Serves as focal point for accountability, 

communication, and liaison for external entities

Provides agency leadership through budget 

integration, policies and procedures

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER

KSC, FL

1,793 civil servants | 10,708 contractors

Focuses on launch and cargo 

processing systems

Develops and maintains the Shuttle 

launch pads and control center

Provides primary landing site for the 

Shuttle

LANGLEY RESEARCH CENTER

Hampton, VA

1,906 civil servants | 1,557 contractors

Focuses on aeronautical flight research

Explores hypersonic flight

Examines advanced composite materials 

and their nondestructive testing

WALLOPS FLIGHT FACILITY

Wallops Island, VA

255 civil servants | 529 contractors

Focuses on suborbital research programs

Serves as rocket launch site

Sends scientific research balloons into 

the Earth’s upper atmosphere

GLENN RESEARCH CENTER

Cleveland, OH

1,628 civil servants | 1,744 contractors

Focuses on turbomachinery

Conducts combustion research

Prepares chemical and electric 

rocket propulsion

GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER

Greenbelt, MD

2,846 civil servants | 4,400 contractors

Focuses on scientific research

Manages and operates the Hubble 

Space Telescope

Directs development of the Earth 

Observing System

STENNIS SPACE CENTER

SSC, MS

254 civil servants | 1,258 contractors

Focuses on rocket propulsion testing

Maintains and operates a range 

of test-firing stands

Issues grants for land-use planning 

and other Earth remote-sensing data

MARSHALL SPACE FLIGHT CENTER

Huntsville, AL

2,391 civil servants | 3,554 contractors

Focuses on space propulsion

Develops pressurized living and 

working modules for the International 

Space Station

Preparing to lead development of new 

generation of reusable launch vehicles
In a meeting at Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, ASK Magazine’s new editorial team met 

with the Academy of Program/Project and Engineering Leadership’s (APPEL) Knowledge Sharing 

Project Manager, Tina Chindgren, and Director, Dr. Ed Hoffman. During discussion and planning, 

we confessed that it was challenging for newcomers to take in the breadth and depth of 

NASA’s research. It occurred to us that even many NASA veterans might benefit from a clear, concise 

overview of what happens where in the organization. We decided to create an explanatory picture 

of NASA centers that offers an easy way to grasp the range and location of NASA activities. 

APPEL partnered with Hirshorn Zuckerman Design Group to produce this NASA Knowledge Map, 

which we present here for your use. • Mapping knowledge is a relatively new concept, gaining 

currency along with growing recognition of the importance of developing and coordinating 

organizational knowledge. A knowledge map is meant to present complex details in a visual format 

that helps people more easily see what an organization “knows.” It can be especially useful at 

showing geographic location, relationships, and relative size—information 

that is hard to communicate economically and effectively in words alone. Visualizing knowledge 

can aid understanding of an organization’s many practices and how they fit into the larger network 

of knowledge.• We consider this map to be a work in progress, and we welcome your suggestions 

for changes and additions that might make it more useful (keeping in mind that simplicity is one of 

the hallmarks of a good knowledge map). You may find our contact information at the end of this 

magazine on the “ASK Interactive” page.

 Knowledge Map

 NASA

SPECIAL PULLOUT
SAFETY

NASA’s constant attention to safety is the cornerstone upon which we build mission success. We 

are committed, individually and as a team, to protecting the safety and health of the public, our team 

members, and those assets that the nation entrusts to us.

TEAMWORK

NASA’s most powerful tool for achieving mission success is a multidisciplinary team of competent 

people. The Agency will build high-performing teams that are committed to continuous learning, 

trust, and openness to innovation and new ideas.

INTEGRITY

NASA is committed to an environment of trust, built upon honesty, ethical behavior, respect, and 

candor. Building trust through ethical conduct as individuals and as an organization is a necessary 

component of mission success.

MISSION SUCCESS

NASA’s reason for being is to conduct successful space missions on behalf of this nation. We 

undertake missions to explore, discover, and learn. And we believe that mission success is the 

natural consequence of an uncompromising commitment to safety, teamwork, and integrity.

Source: Strategic Management and Governance Handbook, NPD 1000.0 (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Chief Engineer, August 2005). 

NASA Core Values
Shortly after he took on the job 

of Chief Engineer, Chris Scolese 

talked with Don Cohen about 

leadership, learning, and NASA’s 

new mission.

I N T E R V I E W W I T H

COHEN: How do you see the role of 

the chief engineer at this moment in 

NASA’s history?

SCOLESE: The job that Mike Griffin 

asked me to do is to bring excellence 

in engineering to this Agency. I believe 

we have great engineers, scientists, and 

practitioners here. One part of my job 

will be channeling the talent we’ve got 

to deliver the new products that we 

need: a CEV (Crew Exploration Vehicle); a launch vehicle to get us to the 

Moon and ultimately to Mars; and robotic missions to scout areas where we 

want to put humans down and to find 

resources so they can live as much off 

the land as possible.

COHEN: Do you think it’s important to 

retain the knowledge of older engineers 

soon retiring from NASA to accomplish 

this mission?

SCOLESE: Absolutely. In some ways, 

our human space flight goals are a case 

of back to the future. We need to learn 

from the experience of the people that 

helped us with the shuttle and Apollo so 

that we have the best possible chance of 

delivering the vehicles we need. That’s 

going to mean not only looking at people 

we have currently working in the Agency 

but talking to people who worked at 

NASA or in industry and are now retired. 

A lot of people have been writing books 

about the Apollo era lately, but there’s no 

 Chris 

 Scolese

BY DON COHEN

FEATURE | ASK MAGAZINE | 25
substitute for talking to the practitioners 

and finding out what the reality was when 

they were building the lunar module or 

the capsule.

COHEN: It’s hard to capture 

that knowledge.

SCOLESE: It is, and as you get further from 

the experience, you tend to remember 

the good things and overlook the 

bad. NASA has to become a learning 

organization. One of the things I want 

to see us do is get lessons learned out as 

quickly as possible. We need to do this for 

our successes as well as our failures. We 

need to sit down for an after-action review 

after a mission is launched, catalogue the 

lessons of that experience, and make them 

immediately available.

COHEN: After-action reviews seem to 

work well when they’re a standard part of 

every project. If they’re voluntary, people 

will always be too busy to do them.

SCOLESE: When I went to Goddard, 

they were required after a mission was 

launched and checked out. And after 

every mishap or significant close call, we 

had an after-action review.

COHEN: So you think learning from 

mistakes is important?

SCOLESE: We lost some of our luster 

because of Columbia and the Mars ’98 

failures. But, as we learned from Mars 

’98, we can come back stronger when we 

apply the lessons learned from failure. 

My job is to take those lessons and produce 

the successes we need in the future. It’s 

not going to mean we won’t have failures, 

but we want to make sure they are few 

and far between, and we don’t ever want 

to have a Columbia again. We want to 

develop a test program that tells us what 

the limits are so we don’t put a crew at 

risk, so we don’t lose a mission. Part of 

what we learned from Mars ’98 is that 

engineering rigor, discipline, and rigorous 

ONCE WE CAN leave Earth’s orbit AND START LIVING OUT 

THERE, THE BEYOND BECOMES VERY BIG. THE whole solar 

system and universe ARE OPEN TO US. WE’RE GOING TO 

BE LOOKING FOR Earth-like planets. WE’RE GOING TO BE 

LOOKING AT THE fundamental physics OF THE UNIVERSE.

26 | ASK MAGAZINE
review processes give you the highest 

probability of mission success. We have 

to apply the same lessons on the human 

space flight side. We haven’t designed a 

human spacecraft in thirty years. We 

haven’t flown a new human spacecraft in 

ten or twenty years, depending on whether 

you include the replacement orbiter for 

Challenger. We’ve got to reenergize our 

talent and go back and get the talent that 

helped us design and test the shuttle and 

Apollo. We also need new capabilities.

COHEN: For instance?

SCOLESE: Having a long-term program 

means we’ve got to bring in talents that 

are not traditional to the Agency. We 

know that many of these new systems 

are going to last ten, twenty, or thirty 

years. We have to look at maintainability, 

supportability, and logistics so they will 

still be viable thirty years from now. We’re 

going to have to maintain the knowledge 

that it took to design those systems so we 

know how to operate and adapt them. 

The shuttle was designed thirty years 

ago by a lot of smart people, most of 

them now gone from the Agency. Many 

decisions they made that may not seem 

to make sense today made sense then, 

but if you don’t have the knowledge that 

allows you to say, “Oh, that’s why,” you 

run into issues. The same is true of the 

expendable launch vehicles. The Delta II

is a wonderful vehicle. Had we known 

it was going to be around for fifty years, 

we probably would have thought about it 

differently. Today, we know that what we 

design will be around for twenty or thirty 

years, so we can start thinking differently 

now. That’s a new capability for NASA.

COHEN: Does the new mission focus 

mean hard choices for NASA? For 

instance, backing away from programs 

it has supported in the past?

SCOLESE: We certainly have to make hard 

choices, but I’m not sure the new vision has

as much impact on that as other factors.

Instead of eliminating capabilities, we 

will be focusing capabilities. You’ll see 

that all the letters of “NASA” apply. 

Landing on the Moon is one thing, and 

we’ve done it with robotic spacecraft 

and human spacecraft. So we have 

some experience there. Mars is different. 

It has an atmosphere—thinner than 

Earth’s, a different composition, but an 

atmosphere. That means landing will be 

a different process. NASA successfully 

landed on Mars five times, in some cases 

with powered descent and in some cases 

using parachutes and balloons. Now 

we’re talking about larger spacecraft to 

send humans there, so we’re going to have 

to understand the Martian atmosphere 

a lot better. If our folks working on 

hypersonic aircraft and aerodynamic 

shapes can come up with the capabilities 

that allow us to have a wider range of 

entry conditions, that makes the job of 

landing there that much easier. We can 

use the atmosphere to slow down. For 

instance, we can use parachutes. Again, 

most of our knowledge of parachutes 

comes from the aeronautics folks. If 

we understand Earth’s atmosphere, 

to a certain extent we can extrapolate 

that knowledge to Mars. The better we 

understand the chemistry and physics 

of the atmosphere, the more likely we’re 

going to be able to land on Mars safely. 

Understanding the constituent parts of 

the atmosphere may provide capabilities 

for robotic air-breathing engines. Also, 

robotic spacecraft that go in long before 

humans get there can find not only good 

landing sites but also resources. Where 

might there be water? Where might 

there be heavy concentrations of oxygenbearing minerals? Where might there be 

potentials for getting fuel? If we find an 

area that has water or ice, we can convert 

that to hydrogen and oxygen, and we’ve 

got fuel. If we find carbon dioxide and 

bring some hydrogen with us, we can 

make methane. Now we have methane 

and oxygen: fuel. We can breathe oxygen 

that we find. 

Our vision calls on us to provide 

economic opportunities and expand our 

knowledge of science. We’re going to 

be looking at the earth to understand 

it better. We’ve just been through powerful 

hurricanes. If we can support our sister 

agencies—NOAA [National Oceanic 

and Atmospheric Administration] and 

USGS [U.S. Geological Service] and 

FEMA [Federal Emergency Management 

Agency]—we’ll do that. But our prime 

focus will be on getting people on the 

Moon and Mars. Once we can leave 

Earth’s orbit and start living out there, 

the beyond becomes very big. The whole 

solar system and universe are open to us. 

We’re going to be looking for Earth-like 

planets. We’re going to be looking at the 

fundamental physics of the universe.

COHEN: Are there problems of 

communication and maybe tensions 

or disconnections among groups—

engineers, scientists, astronauts, 

bureaucrats—that need to be resolved 

to achieve these goals?

ASK MAGAZINE | 27
SCOLESE: A lot of what came out of the 

CAIB [Columbia Accident Investigation 

Board] report and the return-to-flight task 

group addressed exactly those issues. We 

didn’t have the communications we needed 

to make the right decisions. Those barriers 

are being brought down. The NASA 

Engineering and Safety Center (NESC) 

is one example of doing that by bringing 

together the best engineering talent from 

around the Agency—not just from Ames 

or Glenn or Langley or Goddard or JPL or 

Johnson or Marshall or Kennedy. They are 

available as a resource to bring exactly the 

cross-fertilization and different views you’re 

talking about. The Independent Technical 

Authority is addressing the question of 

who is responsible for the success of an 

element or of a system. That’s part of what 

engineering excellence is about. 

There’s always some tension, frankly, 

and it’s healthy. Do scientists talk to 

engineers? Of course. If they don’t, 

they’re not going to get what they want. 

Do engineers talk to scientists? Of 

course. If the scientists don’t have good 

ideas, there are fewer missions to do. 

Scientists want to accomplish significant 

things. So does the bureaucracy. They 

set the goals and then the engineers and 

astronauts and resource people say, “We 

can go this far, but not that far.” We 

don’t want to lose that tension, but we 

do want to bring down the barriers of 

communication. That’s part of my job. 

Engineering excellence always comes 

down to communication and the ability 

to work together.

COHEN: So maybe organizational skills 

are as important a part of achieving 

NASA’s goals as technical skills.

SCOLESE: We definitely have to adjust 

our management and organizational 

philosophies to meet those challenges. 

And we should evaluate those techniques 

just as we evaluate technologies. When 

you have a new technology, you’re 

skeptical, you worry about it, you check 

it, you modify it as you go along until it 

delivers what you expected. Or you adjust 

your expectations to what you can deliver. 

We need to do the same thing with our 

management systems. We haven’t done 

that. We never look down the road and 

ask, “Is it giving us the value we expected 

in the beginning?” When we need a new 

engine, we develop a test program and 

look at every step along the way: Are the 

materials working? Are the temperatures 

what we predicted? Do our analytical 

models make sense? If not, what do we 

have to change? We should do the same 

thing for our management systems.

COHEN: What is it in your background 

that gave you the values and insights 

you’re applying now?

SCOLESE: I was in the nuclear navy for 

about eight years, part of that time 

working for Admiral Rickover. That 

instilled a value in me that’s absolutely 

important: being personally responsible 

for the success and safety of the mission. 

In the nuclear navy, when a new ship went 

to sea or you put new hardware on a ship, 

you went out with the crew. So you really

want to make sure it works. Of course, 

you do anyway, but this dramatized the 

point. You never want to be in a situation 

where you’d say, “I wouldn’t go out on it 

because it’s unsafe.” When I was a junior 

officer, I didn’t have much responsibility, 

but I knew that what I did would have an 

impact. If we’re going to have engineering 

excellence, technical excellence, and 

mission success, every single person has 

to realize that they are part of the team 

and their work is important to the success 

of the mission. Whether your work is 

sweeping the floor; washing windows; 

typing reports; or designing, testing, or 

flying the system, you’re part of it. You’re 

responsible for your job but also for 

problems you see. There was the case of a 

janitor who was sweeping up and noticed 

bolts lying on the floor. He reported it. 

I don’t think those bolts had a direct 

impact on the mission, but they showed 

that people controlling the hardware 

weren’t doing a good job.

COHEN: Is there a part of your 

experience that helped you recognize 

the importance of the human or social 

side of an organization?

SCOLESE: I think sports did it, to be 

honest with you. I wasn’t a very good 

baseball player in Little League, but we 

had a coach who was just great. We were 

a bunch of misfits, but we all got along. 

The coach taught us what he could, and 

we probably won more games than we 

should have. I ended up being pretty 

good in track, but my first two years on 

the team were really frustrating. The 

coach didn’t provide any organization. 

My last two years, with largely the 

same people and a different coach, were 

fantastic. We won various championships 

at the appropriate level. We went as 

high as we could possible go. I saw that 

building a team depended not only on 

the people on the team but also on the 

28 | ASK MAGAZINE
leadership, and that a well-functioning 

team can accomplish a lot more than the 

individuals themselves. Sometimes that 

involved personal sacrifice. The coach 

would say, “I know you can win this race, 

but I really need you to take at least a 

second or third place in another one.” So 

you thought, “All right, I’m not going to 

get a gold medal this time.” Sometimes 

you surprised yourself. The team ended 

up doing well as a result, and we all ended 

up doing well. Throughout my career, 

most of my supervisors have recognized 

the importance of good leadership and 

helped me to recognize it. In the navy 

and NASA, I was fortunate to have 

people who appreciated and understood 

that and served as mentors. And I had 

one really terrible person and saw how 

dysfunctional you could be when you 

don’t recognize and utilize talents.

COHEN: I’ve been struck at how 

talented and enthusiastic most 

people at NASA are.

SCOLESE: In an organization like NASA, 

you find very few people who are poor 

performers, but you often find people who 

are in the wrong job. What we have to 

do as supervisors, leaders, and managers 

is find the right job for the person. When 

you do that, they usually excel. I’ve yet to 

find anybody in NASA who just comes in 

to sit at a desk. Everybody is motivated. 

They could make more money and have 

a more relaxed personal life in just about 

any other place. We build one-of-a-kind 

items so you never know what’s going 

to happen tomorrow because you’re 

pushing an envelope here. You don’t have 

a blueprint to go back to and say, “We 

built the last car like this, so this car goes 

the same way.” People here are motivated 

to do things that are hard. One of the 

great things about NASA is we’re always 

doing something different and trying to 

do something better. We’re not building 

the hundred-thousandth car. We work at 

the frontiers of technology and science 

and humankind. ●

WHEN YOU HAVE A new technology, YOU’RE SKEPTICAL, 

YOU worry about it, YOU check it, YOU modify it AS YOU GO 

ALONG until it delivers WHAT YOU EXPECTED. OR YOU adjust 

your expectations TO WHAT YOU CAN DELIVER.

ASK MAGAZINE | 29
I had just been assigned as the Deputy Project Manager for a 

critical Department of Defense (DOD) project that was based 

on cutting-edge technology that had the potential to change the 

way U.S. forces engage the enemy on the battlefield. The project 

faced critical challenges of balancing research and development 

concerns in untested technology with prototype production 

issues concerning numerous components fabricated by hand for 

the very first time.

There was no arguing the data. We used a project 

management software package that captured every detail 

of the project and provided us with a clear status on every 

angle of project progression at the subtask level. The project 

manager, Mark White, was recognized as a technically savvy 

businessman who possessed encyclopedic knowledge of every 

detail, and he could quickly tell you the status of any task in 

his comprehensive project plan. In every senior management 

briefing, this guy absolutely shone through as an authority 

on how production projects are controlled, and he always had 

the right answer at the right time. Mark had never managed 

a research and development project, however, only production 

projects with proven technologies. Now we had hit a deep 

pothole. It looked like the schedule would slip at least a month 

because of undefined technical production difficulties and 

slower-than-anticipated assembly processes.

I looked at the management team. Their body language 

clearly communicated the deep funk the project review had 

thrown them into and reflected the mood of the project manager. 

I began to get angry, wondering what, specifically, was putting 

us behind schedule. I decided I needed much more data than 

the spreadsheets, projections, and reports could tell me. The 

fabrication plant was within an hour’s drive of headquarters. 

“Mark,” I called across the room, “I’m headed out on a visit to 

the fabrication facility. Just gonna go and see what’s going on.” 

The project manager was back at the computer screen, analyzing 

the data ... one more time as he waved an acknowledgment in 

my direction.

The traffic could have been much worse, and I pulled up 

to the gate within the hour. I drove to the assembly building, 

processed through security, and entered the main production 

floor. Impressed by the product sitting under bright flood 

lamps, I noticed a curious feeling surrounding the work 

area. There was little actual assembly activity going on, but I 

saw assemblers in little groups talking, drinking coffee, and 

working on paperwork—doing everything but work on the 

vehicle. I approached one of the workers and asked, “Where’s 

the foreman?” After I explained that I was the Deputy Project 

Manager, he directed me to a small room off to the side of the 

main area.

Straight to the Source

 BY JON BOYLE

“It doesn’t look good in terms of the schedule. I don’t see any 

way we are going to make the delivery deadline,” our project 

manager said. He settled back into his chair, a look of resignation on his face. I was 

looking at the same data and coming to the same conclusion. There was no way we were going to 

meet schedule requirements, much less cost or technical performance requirements, based on the 

projections we had just reviewed with the management team. The schedule had steadily slipped 

from project kick-off onward, until now we faced a significant adjustment. 

30 | ASK MAGAZINE | STORY
“I understand you’re the foreman here. I’m the new Deputy, 

Jon,” I said as I sat down in Hank Glaser’s office. As I talked with 

the foreman, I slowly realized that he didn’t know how important 

the schedule was and how our activities affected DOD testing 

requirements that would occur after we delivered the product. I 

explained the big picture to Hank, covering all the details and 

how our project fit into program requirements, as well as going 

over what impact our inability to deliver to schedule would have 

on other program elements. Hank now understood the situation 

and anxiously shared with me the technical and production 

issues that had slowed the project down.

It turns out that there was great concern about wiring 

together different systems that were being fabricated. The 

complex product gave off so much heat during operation 

that the handmade circuit modules required metal heat sink 

covers. But tight tolerances meant that wiring cables were 

getting stuck on heat sink covers throughout the product as 

the workers attempted to run cables. I walked around the 

production floor with Hank, talking to the workers as we 

thought about the issue.

I noticed a small piece of wide-mesh nylon screen sitting 

on a worktable. I picked it up, and it felt slippery between my 

fingers, stiff and yet flexible. “Hank, would this stuff work if 

you attached it over the top of the heat sinks?” I asked. “It seems 

pretty flexible and slippery, but I don’t know if it could take the 

heat, and I’m not sure how you would be able to attach it to the 

heat sinks.” Hank’s eyes grew wider as he thought. “You know,” 

he said, “this is pretty unconventional, but it might work.” 

That afternoon, Hank sent the nylon screen over to 

engineering to be tested, to design an approach using such a 

concept, and to see if there were any better materials that could 

be used to overcome the heat sink problem. As it turns out, 

engineering conducted heat-dissipation tests and validated the 

concept of the nylon screen, recommending ordering rolls of the 

very same material to be attached by heat-resistant glue to the 

heat sink covers on all modules situated under cable run areas.

I returned to the management team and asked Mark for 

permission to relocate my duty area to the fabrication plant. 

Mark readily agreed, since he had already been informed of the 

technical solution to the heat sink problem. I began delivering 

the project management report directly to the assembly team, 

giving them access to the same data that the management team 

received on a regular basis. I also helped with the assembly 

process, tucking my tie into my shirt and assembling pieces of 

the product, even drilling and counter-sinking different parts. I 

got to know the team pretty well, and we laughed and worried 

and sweated through the ramp-up to delivery day.

As it turns out, we beat the schedule by two days, and we 

came in under budget, even after I had ruined some parts of 

the product by counter-sinking them too deeply with the drill. 

Leading by example and opening the lines of communication 

had done the trick. In the assembly worker’s view, management 

had taken the time to come down and work at their level, 

keeping them informed every step of the way, giving them 

the big picture about where they fit into the overall scheme of 

things, and adding outside perspective on a problem they were 

too close to to solve. I also received the “Counter-Sinker of the 

Year” Award at the company awards luncheon, gently being 

chided that we would have come in even more under budget if I 

had only known how to counter-sink better. ●

DR. JON BOYLE is the Program Manager for the NASA Academy 

of Program/Project and Engineering Leadership (NASA APPEL) 

at Arctic Slope Regional Corporation Management Services, 

responsible for all products and services produced by the 

Academy and strategic relationships for the program. Dr. Boyle 

teaches Knowledge Management at Virginia Tech, where he 

earned his Doctorate. He also holds a M.A. from George Mason 

University and a M.Ed. from Boston University.

THERE WAS LITTLE ACTUAL ASSEMBLY 

ACTIVITY GOING ON, BUT I SAW 

ASSEMBLERS IN LITTLE GROUPS TALKING, 

DRINKING COFFEE, AND WORKING ON 

PAPERWORK—DOING EVERYTHING BUT 

WORK ON THE VEHICLE. 

ASK MAGAZINE | 31
SOAR

BY MICHAEL ALLEN 

LEARNING TO 

On a spring day at Edwards Air Force Base, someone pointed overhead to a flock of migrating white 

pelicans soaring gracefully in formation. I wondered if the Autonomous Soaring project I had just 

started would produce an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that could soar as gracefully. Not likely, I 

thought, as the pelicans soared in perfect unison, optimizing their climb rate in an invisible column 

of rising air called a thermal or updraft. 

32 | ASK MAGAZINE | STORY
Michael Allen stands with the SBXC glider.

ASK MAGAZINE | 33
The Autonomous Soaring project was initially funded in 2003 

with director’s discretionary funding. The result of the work 

done in 2003 was a simulation study using National Oceanic and 

Atmospheric Administration weather measurements to estimate 

updraft properties at Desert Rock, Nevada. The study showed 

that a small UAV could extend its two-hour nominal endurance 

to fourteen hours during the summer and up to eight hours in 

the winter. In 2005, with funding from the NASA Flight and 

System Demonstrations Project, I put together a small team to 

demonstrate that a small UAV could actually detect and stay 

within an updraft without human intervention. 

While others had written papers and hypothesized about 

extending UAV flight time by using updrafts to reserve 

engine power, no one had tested the theory. If our experiment 

succeeded, we could influence the way UAVs are used for earth 

science, weather monitoring, and military surveillance. Our 

success could also increase the effectiveness of a Mars airplane, 

allowing for observation at levels between the rovers and the 

orbiters. Since the detection of dust devils on Mars indicates a 

movement of heat through the atmosphere, a small UAV could 

ride the same updrafts that form the dust devils and survey the 

planet from a new altitude.

The fact that hobbyists are able to soar with radio-controlled 

model gliders in updrafts for long periods of time using only 

visual cues indicated that our task was possible. The difficulty 

lay in trying to put soaring skill and good judgment into an 

algorithm that could run on a miniature autopilot aboard a 

UAV. The actual vehicle was unimportant. Soaring on updrafts 

didn’t require a different fuselage shape or longer wing span, 

it required the correct algorithm for detecting thermals in the 

air and shutting off the engine. We knew immediately that our 

focus was not going to be on the hardware for our UAV; we had 

to get the programming right.

A great way to put human language rules into computer code is 

to use fuzzy logic, which uses a set of nonlinear functions and rules 

to capture the meaning of less-than-mathematically precise words 

in algorithms. Our rules for soaring came from the book CrossCountry Soaring by Helmut Reichmann, a well-known competition 

glider pilot. Those rules helped us create the controller that would 

switch the UAV to soaring mode when a thermal was detected. 

The new soaring controller worked the first time we tried it in our 

development simulation, but as soon as we included calculations 

to smooth the “noise” we expected from the flight sensors, the 

aircraft wandered along a path that looked like the petals of a daisy. 

A comparison of the smoothed value used by the controller to the 

original measured value showed that the problem was caused by a 

delay the smoothing calculations introduced. Finding better sensors 

to install on the aircraft would solve the problem, but purchasing 

and installing the new sensors was beyond the scope of our 1.5 fulltime equivalent, one-year project. The solution had to come from a 

software change instead. 

Our team included six engineers and two summer students. 

None of the engineers worked on the project full time, and 

the students did not stay for the entire project. This was a side 

experiment for all of us, and we worked on it because we were 

interested in the results. We had to be self-motivated for the 

project to continue and succeed. As a result of our part-time 

status, only two or three of us could get together at a time, so 

a rotating cast of people worked on our UAV at any moment. 

Because of this, software changes had to be easy to make and to 

test, and they had to be self-explanatory or easily shared through 

e-mail, since most of our communication was written.

We selected the Cloudcap Piccolo Plus autopilot for flight 

testing because it used Matlab Simulink software to describe the 

autopilot guidance and control algorithms. This meant that we 

could make changes in the software that could be tested using a 

Matlab-based simulation, or we could test the software using a 

hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation. The HIL simulation fed 

aircraft parameters to the Piccolo hardware—the place where the 

calculations for flight control and soaring were made—and the 

Piccolo would send back new commands for the rudder, elevator, 

and aileron, for example, to better maneuver the airplane. 

34 | ASK MAGAZINE
Once we had the software that would allow us to make 

quick and easy changes, we had to fix the problem caused by 

sensor delay. We included an updraft position estimator in the 

algorithm to give the aircraft a quicker indication of when it 

was off course. Our subsequent controller worked very well in 

the Matlab simulation, but it caused erratic behavior in the HIL 

simulator. We quickly realized we had overtaxed the Piccolo 

by adding the fuzzy logic controller and updraft estimator 

in addition to its own autopilot calculations. The fuzzy logic 

controller was a major cause of the problem; it was taking more 

time to compute than the updraft estimator or the standard 

autopilot. Again the problem was quickly fixed in software by 

re-casting the fuzzy logic controller in a simpler form.

With the software and controller working to our satisfaction, 

we needed to select a plane. We chose a model glider called 

the SBXC, made by RnR Products, for flight testing because 

it had a large fuselage and a wide speed range (18–100 mph). 

An electric motor with gear reduction was added to allow the 

airplane to climb to test altitudes and cruise while searching for 

updrafts. A folding propeller reduced drag when the aircraft 

shut off its motor during soaring flight. Guidance and control 

were accomplished using the Piccolo autopilot, which is a selfcontained flight computer and sensor package about the size 

of a brick that weighs only 7.5 oz. It includes GPS, aircraft 

accelerations and rotational rates, static and total pressure, and 

a radio modem.

Before flights could begin, we had to solve the problem of 

flight termination. If the flight had to be terminated, cutting 

power to the motor would not work because the excellent 

gliding performance of the motor-glider meant it could still fly 

long distances. We solved the problem by adding a mechanism 

to deflect the elevator to 60 ̊ and put the aircraft into a “deep 

stall” if we needed to bring it down. Fortunately, we never had 

to use this feature during flight tests.

Research flight testing began on August 5, 2005. The first 

time we turned on the soaring algorithms, the aircraft flew 

through several updrafts but never switched into soaring mode. 

One week later, after another software change, we saw our first 

autonomous detection and engagement of an updraft; the aircraft 

shut off its motor and climbed 300 feet. The aircraft switched into 

soaring mode many times during that flight, but it kept finding 

updrafts that were too weak for soaring. At the end of the flight, 

we let our pilot, Tony Frackowiak, soar the aircraft remotely so we 

could gather data to compare with the autonomous system. 

We didn’t immediately prepare for the next flight. Instead, 

the ground station operator, Victor Lin, and I did a quick replay 

of the flight data in Simulink to determine what was happening. 

We found that the software fix was simple and increased the 

updraft vertical velocity threshold used in the mode switching 

logic to determine if an updraft was strong enough to soar in. We 

demonstrated the flexibility of our process that day by making 

a flight software change in the field between flights. The total 

time needed to analyze the problem, fix the software, compile 

and load the software on the aircraft, and prepare the aircraft for 

flight was less than two hours. The change proved successful, 

and the aircraft found five more updrafts and successfully 

climbed in one of them to gain 1,000 feet of altitude.

I believe that the success of the project was due in a large part 

to the flexibility allowed by our unique flight-software change 

process. The development of analytical tools that could be used 

to look at both simulation results and flight data allowed flight 

tests to be another step in the development of the algorithms. 

The tools made possible a “fly-fix-fly” approach that sped the 

development of the soaring algorithms. Our UAV never did soar 

as gracefully as a white pelican, but it was amazing to see our 

design take flight and soar. ●

IF OUR EXPERIMENT SUCCEEDED, 

WE COULD INFLUENCE THE WAY 

UAVs ARE USED FOR EARTH 

SCIENCE, WEATHER MONITORING, 

AND MILITARY SURVEILLANCE. 

MICHAEL ALLEN graduated Embry-Riddle Aeronautical 

University in 1999 and since then has worked at NASA’s Dryden 

Flight Research Center in the stability and controls branch. 

Michael has worked on the Autonomous Formation Flight Project, 

the Active Aeroelastic Wing Project, and the Autonomous Soaring 

Project. Michael is currently working on autonomous refueling 

and Autonomous Soaring with multiple UAVs.

ASK MAGAZINE | 35
The Board concludes that NASA’s current 

organization does not provide effective 

checks and balances, does not have an independent 

safety program, and has not demonstrated 

the characteristics of a learning organization. 

—Columbia Accident Investigation Board Report (2003)1

Enhancing NASA’s

Performance as a

Learning Organization

BY RICHARD DAY AND ED ROGERS

}

36 | ASK MAGAZINE | FEATURE
In May 2003, Goddard Space Flight Center recruited a 

Knowledge Management Architect to apply additional focus to 

the integrated management of the center’s knowledge assets—

in particular, its forty-seven years of experience-based wisdom 

in managing space flight projects. In August of that year, the 

Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) released 

its final report calling for NASA to act more like a learning 

organization. As Knowledge Architect and Director of the 

Office of Mission Success at Goddard, we believed that the two 

challenges of integrating knowledge management and creating 

a learning organization were intertwined and must be addressed 

together. This is the story of how we are addressing these twin 

challenges at Goddard.

Academic literature suggests that a learning organization 

knows how to retain knowledge, appreciates the value of sharing 

collective knowledge, and grows more knowledgeable with each 

activity it performs. Knowledge management literature tells us 

that the core of an organization’s knowledge resides in the work 

units and projects where it is being generated, not in a centralized 

repository. The key to managing knowledge is not to extract it 

from its origins but to facilitate its use both at its source and 

within communities of practice across the organization.2 With 

these ideas as starting points, we set out to design an approach 

to improve Goddard’s performance as a learning organization 

while improving the way we managed our knowledge.

We started by looking at what was already happening 

in the Agency. There are many activities called “knowledge 

management” and dozens of tools and databases in use. Many 

of these tools seemed to offer some useful efficiency gains by 

automating activities, keeping records, controlling, and, in a 

limited way, searching documents. As we looked deeper, we 

concluded that, to be effective, knowledge management must 

go beyond simply getting the right information to the right 

people at the right time. Focusing solely on knowledge efficiency 

concerns would not necessarily create a healthy organizational 

learning environment and might, in fact, hinder some types of 

collaborative learning behavior.

NASA’s knowledge management efforts prior to Columbia 

tended to focus on providing information technology tools 

with an emphasis on capturing knowledge from workers for 

the organization as opposed to facilitating knowledge sharing 

among workers. In line with other organizations (Army, World 

Bank, and aerospace industry), we emphasized that the core 

of Goddard knowledge resides in the engineering work units 

and projects where it is being generated. Therefore, knowledge 

management should help Goddard project teams, work units, 

and other groups behave and function as parts of a learning 

organization, generating, sharing, using, and preserving their 

own knowledge. The divisions and other work units at Goddard 

are the primary owners and holders of their knowledge. 

Goddard’s plan is designed to help put practices in place that will 

facilitate the flow of knowledge and help build the local learning 

loops that characterize a learning organization.3 We tried to 

apply these lessons learned about knowledge management at 

Goddard to achieve meaningful change toward the goal of 

becoming a better learning organization. 

The Goddard System of Learning Practices

Lessons from the field of strategic human resource management 

told us that we would need a coordinated system of 

organizational practices, not a single process or application.4 We 

also needed a representation of a learning architecture to support 

communication and understanding of the concept among project 

teams. The learning architecture is evolving into a complex, 

integrated map of Goddard mission success processes, but we 

nevertheless wanted a concept that would fit on one page, could 

be represented in a picture, and would make sense to any project 

manager in less than five minutes. After months of iterations 

and discussions with project participants, we settled on six 

practices that we incorporated into a learning-loop diagram (see 

figure on page 39). The architecture is designed to avoid shortterm, suboptimal solutions based on efficiency models, address 

the three characteristics of a learning organization, and build a 

more reliable and sustainable organizational system. The next 

step was to get these six practices embedded in the Goddard 

project life cycle.

Practice 1: Pause and Learn (PAL)

The Pause and Learn (PAL) process is the critical foundation 

for learning from projects. PALs are participant discussions of 

what went right and wrong and what lessons the experience 

taught. Experience from the Army tells us PALs should 

occur after major events and milestones.5 They are valuable 

because data collected close to the event eliminates the bias of 

hindsight. The material generated belongs first and foremost 

to the team, but generally applicable lessons and insights 

should flow to other projects. The first PAL sessions we did 

were with the Geostationary Operational Environmental 

Satellite/Polar Operational Environmental Satellite Program. 

With multiple instruments on each spacecraft, a number of 

Source Evaluation Boards (SEB) were needed to evaluate each 

instrument proposal. 

ASK MAGAZINE | 37
A PAL we conducted helped one SEB team learn from their 

own challenging experience and provided practical wisdom to 

other SEB teams.

Practice 2: Knowledge Sharing Workshops

Many science, technical, and engineering seminars and lectures 

are given at Goddard as a matter of course. These are essential 

elements of a continuous learning culture. The Knowledge 

Sharing Workshops are intended to augment those activities 

with discussions of project management lessons rather than 

technical challenges and trades. Using a panel construct helps 

diffuse the individual focus without losing the personal story 

aspect of the workshop. At each workshop, senior project leaders 

share their personal insights, what they learned, and what they 

might do differently based on their recent project experience. 

These workshops are attended by emerging project leaders at 

Goddard who want to acquire the practical wisdom necessary to 

succeed as project managers. To encourage open sharing, these 

sessions are not recorded. The emphasis on conversation instead 

of slides and reports frees panelists to bring up even sensitive or 

unresolved issues.

Practice 3: Case Studies

To build organizational learning capacity for project management, 

the context provided by project stories must be brought into the 

knowledge management and learning system. A case study is 

the primary vehicle to do this. Case studies allow key players to 

present material, reflect on project management insights, and share 

contextual knowledge in a meaningful way. In a sense, they are 

constructed opportunities for fostering conversations. Participants 

often learn details of other projects or events that they did not know 

of beyond headlines. They also get to meet the people who were 

intimately involved with those events and to think through the 

decisions those people had to make at the time. In other words, they 

get the benefit of learning from the decision-making process itself, 

rather than just hearing filtered, after-the-fact explanations. Finally, 

hearing the story from those who experienced it builds trust, opens 

relationships, and fosters a sharing environment. 

One of our first case studies was on the Vegetation Canopy 

Lidar project at Goddard that was terminated in June 2002. 

The case has been used internally at Goddard and twice at the 

Project Management Challenge conferences in 2004 and 2005. 

It is also being used by contractors for training outside NASA.

Practice 4: Common Lessons Learned

A diverse panel of experts is periodically convened to review 

all cases from the past year, looking for similarities and trends. 

Patterns of behavior that increase risk or the likelihood of 

failure are identified. Strengths and competencies that could be 

emulated are also called out. Their assessment is integrated with 

many other performance and risk indicators for appropriate 

corrective and preventative actions, including incorporation 

into processes, rules, and training.

Practice 5: GOLD Rules

The GOLD Rules are meant to reflect Goddard’s wisdom in 

the design, development, verification, and operation of flight 

systems. Collected primarily from engineering organizations, 

they are in essence the best design practices written down. Links 

are being built from the rules to standards, lessons learned, and 

case studies so users of the rules can access their context—their 

origin, intent, and sphere of effect. This allows project personnel 

to more accurately assess the appropriateness and applicability of 

the rule to their project and helps convey the embedded wisdom 

of the rule, not just the sterile technical specification captured 

in the rule set itself. It is essential that users of the rule do not 

stop thinking about the practice to which the rule applies. The 

learning context surrounding the rule enables users to continue 

to think creatively instead of blindly following rules and inviting 

possible unintended consequences. Where waivers are sought, the 

provided context supports a healthy risk discussion to evaluate the 

implications of granting a waiver or allowing for a deviation.

Practice 6: The Road to Mission Success

The training of all members of extended project teams is 

crucial to the future success of Goddard. Goddard is taking an 

aggressive approach to ensure its project leaders, line managers, 

scientists, engineers, resource analysts, and other professionals 

have the fundamental skills and the collective wisdom of 

experienced leaders available to them. We also need to ensure 

that all employees appreciate the NASA/Goddard legacy and 

fully understand the way we do business at Goddard and our 

expectations for safety and mission success. The center has 

developed a comprehensive series of two-day workshops called 

the “Road to Mission Success” that will instill the requisite 

NASA core values and wisdom embedded in cases, PALs, 

common lessons, and workshops into future Goddard leaders. 

Senior managers are involved in delivering course cases. The 

series will become an integral component, and perhaps the 

capstone, of many leadership training programs across the 

center and will provide a common, consistent exposure to how 

the center functions and achieves mission success. 

Progress So Far

Goddard has made tremendous progress in building an effective 

learning organization and responding to the challenges facing 

NASA in a post-Columbia environment. To succeed in the 

long term, we must continue to support and reinforce learning 

behavior that enhances mission success across projects while 

investing in human capital strategies that assure sustainability 

38 | ASK MAGAZINE
1. Columbia Accident Investigation Board Report, Vol. 1 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, August 2003).

2. Etienne Wenger, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

3. P. Senge, The Fifth Discipline (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1990).

4. J. Barney and P. Wright, “On becoming a strategic partner: The role of human resources in gaining competitive advantage,” Human Resource Management 37(1) (1998): 31–46.

5. E. Rogers and J. Milam, Pausing for Learning, IEEE Aerospace Conference Proceedings (March 2005).

6. T. Davenport and L. Prusak, Working Knowledge (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1998).

in the future. Accomplishing these goals requires monitoring 

the health of teams, continuously integrating work processes, 

and facilitating knowledge sharing within the organization. 

The knowledge management reliability problem is how to 

ensure that engineers bring the line organization’s full knowledge, 

not just their own individual knowledge, to bear on each project. 

Project outcome should depend less on which engineer is assigned 

to the project than on the accessibility of the organization’s 

collective expertise. A lack of sharing at the branch level could 

result in an inability to deliver reliable expertise to projects. 

Anecdotal evidence indicates this is not an insignificant issue. 

Experienced project managers relate stories of how important it is 

to fight to get the right people on the team, tacitly acknowledging 

that the knowledge and expertise they need for the project are 

“owned” by particular individuals.

Clearly NASA is concerned about losing expertise as people 

retire, but we need to build a system that does not depend on the 

“expert guru” model and instead relies on a shared knowledge 

community that does not retire but evolves with time. The 

knowledge management challenge regarding human talent 

is not how to capture knowledge from people as they leave 

the organization but how to build learning into all that they 

do while they are here, so when they are ready to leave, most 

of their knowledge is embedded in the organization, people, 

processes, and policies that remain. Such a system will both 

sustain knowledge and produce more reliable results. This is the 

goal of Goddard’s learning practices system.

Knowledge sharing behavior attracts bright people to 

organizations. Intellectually curious people know that they have 

the best chance of being stimulated, creating new knowledge, 

and participating in exciting discoveries where a team or 

community of like-minded thinkers are engaged in open 

and honest sharing of their ideas, insights, and experiments.6

Goddard wants to continue to attract these people to build on the 

competencies that have characterized the center for forty-seven 

years. Though much remains to be done, we have embarked 

on an ambitious plan to help us function more like a learning 

organization and in so doing achieve mission success. ●

RICHARD DAY is Director of Mission Success at the Goddard 

Space Flight Center.

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THE GODDARD LEARNING AND 

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EDWARD ROGERS is the Knowledge Management Architect at 

the Goddard Space Flight Center.

ASK MAGAZINE | 39
40 | ASK MAGAZINE | STORY
Getting to “Go”

BY DARREN BEDELL

The MRO mission was the first NASA mission to use the new 

Atlas V launch vehicle. In fact, it was the first U.S. government 

launch on the Atlas V. While each NASA mission is important, 

going to Mars is a very big part of the Agency’s goals, and public 

interest has always been high for missions to the red planet. 

A few years back, the Headquarters Program Administrator 

was trying to get the Kennedy Space Center Launch Services 

Program’s (LSP) attention for a seemingly less important mission 

on a small rocket. “Treat it like a Mars mission,” she said, “the 

most important thing that we have; we have to make it work.” 

For a Mars mission, everyone’s sensitivity to mission success is 

higher than it is for a typical mission.

There have been great successes in going to Mars, but 

there have also been failures. My career has afforded me 

the opportunity to work on every Mars mission NASA has 

launched since the Viking missions, and I’ve seen both. While 

none of the failures were due to the launch vehicle, it really 

hurts when something goes wrong because everybody involved 

puts so much effort into these missions. Everyone works hard 

for mission success, which amplifies the anticipation and 

emotion at every launch. 

I’ll never forget the day the Mars Climate Orbiter arrived 

at Mars in 1999. I was in a small room in a contractor’s plant in 

California, listening to the real-time operations going on at the 

Jet Propulsion Laboratory. I had just learned the mission had 

failed. I walked into a conference room filled with people who 

had worked on the launch phase for three years—my face was 

surely pale—and announced to everyone that “they just lost the 

Mars Orbiter.” Facing these people was very difficult, a scar that 

I carry with me to motivate myself and our technical team when 

faced with tough choices on resource deployment, prioritization 

of issues, and final readiness for launch. 

Making a New Checklist

At the beginning of a mission’s life cycle, the planetary launch 

period is in your mind with each decision you make. As you 

get closer to launch, it really starts to stare you in the face. 

Taking more time to get it right isn’t an option because a Mars 

planetary mission can only be launched once about every 

twenty-six months. However, completing the work on time 

only to experience a launch failure due to our error is what 

we all feared the most. Facing another launch, this time on a 

vehicle with very limited flight history, we were determined to 

get everything right.

The Atlas V was developed commercially by Lockheed 

Martin, with some of the funds provided by the United States 

Air Force (USAF) under the Evolved Expendable Launch 

Vehicle contract. Because new rockets have a history of failure 

during their first few flights, the Agency established a policy 

in the 1990s to govern NASA’s requirements for using new 

launch vehicles. The policy was meant to ensure the quality of 

commercially developed launch vehicles because NASA buys 

launch services from the industry, which means NASA does not 

own or control the development of a new launch vehicle. 

The Launch Services Program Technical Staff was 

responsible for refining and implementing the Agency policy 

in preparation for the MRO launch. In addition to certifying 

the Atlas V according to policy requirements, the LSP also 

performed technical oversight of the hardware and unique 

analyses required to successfully place MRO on its way to Mars. 

As the final “go for launch” was given for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) mission 

on the Atlas V 401 launch vehicle, the hair on my arms stood up. The pride of what we were 

about to accomplish, and the nervous tension of really knowing the risks of space flight, had 

come to a head.

ASK MAGAZINE | 41
NASA certification only happens for new launch vehicles, 

and it is meant to ensure the highest practicable probability 

of mission success for all future missions to be flown on the 

vehicle.

We had to figure out how to assess the Atlas V for NASA 

certification because no checklist or definitions existed for new 

rockets with less than fourteen consecutive, successful flights. 

To solve the problem, I called my Chief Engineer, James Wood, 

and my Branch Chiefs, Pat Hanan, Mike Carney, and Jim 

Robinson, into my office. We knew that most of us would be 

there giving a “go” for the first launch on the Atlas V, so we 

needed to come up with something that we could live with that 

day, something we could accomplish in time, and something we 

could stand behind when we were asked for our “go.” 

Creating a Cornerstone for Success

We based our decisions on the risk we would eventually face 

on launch day, and we referred to a list of previous NASA 

assessments. The previous assessments gave us a starting place, 

but the certification items on the list did not apply to this 

new category of launch vehicle. We really had to think about 

what would work for certifying the Atlas V. We emphasized 

the importance of hardware qualification because of our 

experience with previous launch vehicles failing due to hardware 

malfunctions, and we added an assessment that used a causeand-effect “fishbone” technique that identifies potential failure 

modes and their mitigations. The combination of flight data 

review for three flights, hardware testing, analysis of the new 

Atlas V, and failure mode mitigation became the cornerstone of 

our NASA certification effort. 

As we created and refined our certification process for 

Atlas V, we realized getting to “go” before we could launch 

MRO would take about four times the effort of a typical 

NASA mission because we were using a new rocket and we 

had to certify it. My first thought was to ask for additional 

personnel. However, the same Program Administrator who 

once told me to treat another mission like a Mars mission, the 

most important thing we have, also told me I was not getting 

any more people. 

To help solve the problem, I had to look outside Kennedy. 

We partnered with the USAF, National Reconnaissance 

Organization (NRO), and other NASA centers to perform 

some of the technical work required for certification. For all 

information obtained from a partner, the LSP retained technical 

cognizance of the work performed by the other organization and 

held all technical and risk decision authority for that effort. 

Through a series of government launch vehicle collaboration 

meetings, the similarities and differences in the LSP, NRO, and 

USAF approaches to technical evaluation were discussed. Each 

organization knew that resources were limited, so finding a way to 

work together would be important. But we reached no definitive 

agreements during the first two years of the collaboration. We were 

all on unfamiliar territory and therefore lacked the trust necessary 

I’LL NEVER FORGET THE DAY THE 

MARS CLIMATE ORBITER ARRIVED AT 

MARS IN 1999. I WAS IN A SMALL ROOM IN 

A CONTRACTOR’S PLANT IN CALIFORNIA, 

LISTENING TO THE REAL-TIME OPERATIONS 

GOING ON AT THE JET PROPULSION 

LABORATORY. I HAD JUST LEARNED 

THE MISSION HAD FAILED.

42 | ASK MAGAZINE
to reach an agreement. We also didn’t understand the language 

of the other organizations, so this new collaboration started very 

slowly and carefully. To address these issues, we agreed to gather 

everyone together for one big meeting each year and supplement 

it with smaller meetings when necessary. As a result of these 

meetings, the most notable element of the partnership emerged. 

It involved using Lockheed Martin’s Design Equivalency Review, 

which the NRO funded. NASA engineers worked with Lockheed 

Martin, USAF, and NRO engineers, and we partnered with 

Marshall Space Flight Center and Glenn Research Center to 

increase our technical staff. 

We used the equivalency review to document most of the 

information we needed for the LSP hardware qualification 

assessment. James Wood and I knew the Lockheed Engineering 

Review Board process in detail, and we knew the NRO/USAF 

participation in the review board would be significant, which 

allowed us to relax our requirement for conducting a separate 

NASA Engineering Review Board. We required our engineers to 

participate in the Lockheed engineering review and to conduct 

a unique NASA evaluation of each component. We also shared 

our systems engineering evaluation of the components with the 

NRO and alerted them to any NASA findings they might want 

to consider in their own evaluation. 

Changing Course

At the beginning of the Design Equivalency Review, we were 

understaffed and the information was coming in too quickly for 

us to handle. Our approach to managing the LSP effort had to 

be changed in the middle because we had too many elements 

and not enough dedicated leadership. Pat Hanan, who had 

become the Engineering Division Chief at the time, brought 

in Dave Sollberger to organize the effort and provide detailed 

tracking plans to account for all the work being performed by 

the multiple organizations. For undefined problems or new 

approaches, establishing the management system is as important 

as defining the technical work. We learned the hard way that it 

was better to find a way to avoid falling behind schedule early 

in the process instead of having to play catch-up just before a 

deadline that can’t be moved. Dedicating someone to manage 

the relationship with the partner is imperative.

By the end of the equivalency review, the partnerships with 

other NASA centers were in place, and the information wasn’t 

coming in as fast as we needed to support the planetary launch 

window. We knew this because of the project management 

system Dave Sollberger had developed. Problems included delays 

in USAF launch dates, changes in personnel, and priorities of 

the Columbia failure investigation at our partner centers. The 

talented engineers throughout the government have a lot to 

offer; however, partnering is no panacea. We had to consider 

the efficiency of the support we received based on the particular 

agreement and situation, and we were not always in control of 

our destiny. That is what makes the completion of this effort 

even more remarkable. 

When I think back on hearing the final “go for launch” 

during the MRO countdown last August, I hope you 

understand why the hair on my arms stands up in excitement. 

I know how much thought and hard work it took to reach 

that moment, and how important a moment it was for the 

American Space Program. ●

DARREN BEDELL is one of two chief engineers who retain 

technical decision authority for NASA’s Launch Services 

Program. After receiving a B.S. in Engineering from the 

University of California–San Diego, he was a McDonnell Douglas 

structural design engineer for the Delta launch vehicle. He has 

been a significant part of more than 60 launches during his 

20-year career in launch vehicles.

ASK MAGAZINE | 43
The Knowledge Notebook

What Do We Mean When We Say “Knowledge”?

BY LAURENCE PRUSAK

We are clearly living in a “Knowledge Age.” 

Wherever you look, you find books, articles, 

programs, courses, advertisements, and degree 

programs using the word “knowledge” in some 

way to distinguish itself or its contents. This 

growing emphasis on knowledge derives from the 

more complex views of economists, sociologists, 

and other thinkers who have long (at least since 

the early 1970s) realized that the economy in 

the more developed world was devoted more to 

the production and delivery of knowledge-based 

products and services than to manufacturing, 

agriculture, mining, and other material goods. 

As one leading economic thinker, Paul Romer, 

succinctly put it, in our new economy “land, labor, 

and capital are being replaced by people, things, 

and ideas.”

Knowledge has become the main engine of 

our productivity (and, of course, has always been 

the source of NASA’s achievements), but we still 

do not have a clear, shared understanding of what 

the word “knowledge” means. This may seem like 

a minor point to some of you—just semantics—

but in fact that lack of clarity has important implications. I have personally seen tens of billions of dollars spent and largely wasted by industry and governments to develop “knowledge systems” of one 

sort or another, systems that were touted (and still 

are, I assure you) as helping organizations be more 

efficient or effective in working with their knowledge. When queried, the consultants, vendors, and 

other cheerleaders for these technical knowledge 

“solutions” would almost always conflate knowledge 

and information, implying that the two words are 

identical or close enough to make efforts to distinguish them look like hair-splitting—not the kind of 

intellectual exercise a busy, time-pressured executive 

has time for. But the result is that those executives 

end up spending millions on huge “knowledge” systems that are really information or even data management structures and have little or nothing to do 

with knowledge.

To make sure that our knowledge investments 

and efforts really do support knowledge creation 

and use, we often have to modify our use of the 

word with some explanatory word or phrase: “I’m 

talking about tacit knowledge,” or “This is about 

intellectual capital,” or “I mean the know-how 

that you can’t capture in a system.” Part of the 

problem is that we English speakers have only one 

word—knowledge—to describe a variety of ways 

of knowing.

These things were actually easier to sort out in 

classical Greece. Aristotle had four different words 

to choose from to describe different aspects of 

our one word, knowledge. He could use the word 

Episteme when he wanted to refer to approximately 

what we mean by scientific knowledge (abstract, 

explicit, repeatable rules). Techne implied the 

skills and crafts needed to accomplish something. 

Phronesis meant practical skills like sales and 

management and emotional intelligence. Metis, 

more difficult to translate, was used to mean 

cunning and savvy—something like what we 

mean by “street smarts” or “knowing the ropes.” 

It’s the kind of knowledge Odysseus had thousands 

of years ago and a skilled politician has today.

My intention is not so much to give you 

a lesson in classical Greek as to point out how 

deficient our language is in trying to encapsulate 

humanity’s mental capabilities in one paltry word. 

Those of us who try to work with knowledge and 

44 | ASK MAGAZINE
help organizations improve their knowledge sharing and use 

often have to make do with dichotomies that help explain what 

we mean. We talk, for instance, about “explicit” versus “tacit” 

knowledge—that is, knowledge that can be stated in words or 

set down in a document versus knowledge that eludes capture 

and can only be learned by example, practice, and mentoring. 

Even this dichotomy is too simple and therefore misleading. 

All knowledge is somewhat tacit in that even the most explicit, 

documented manual depends on the huge amount of tacit 

knowledge the reader already has. And much know-how 

(mainly tacit) is built of know-what (mainly explicit).

Such conceptual distinctions are still very useful, however, 

as long as we keep them in perspective. After all, when a person 

is immersed in a complex task or project, she doesn’t usually 

think, “Let’s see, should I use tacit or explicit knowledge now?” 

or “Do I need a document, a discussion, or data at this point?” 

The act of doing even a simple thing calls for a huge range 

of tools, techniques, and understanding that are, in truth, all 

jumbled together in what William James called the “blooming 

and buzzing” of life itself.

It is only when we want to do something about knowledge on 

an organizational scale that we begin to run into these semantic 

traps and language games. Trying to “manage” knowledge is a 

difficult task made more difficult by the many definitions and 

even greater number of assumptions as to what “knowledge” 

actually is. This is why it is always a good idea to sit down 

together and do that most rare of management activities—

think about what exactly are the types of knowledge you wish 

to work with when you start designing any project involving 

the development, retention, and transfer of knowledge. Once 

you’ve done that, it becomes easier to answer the less arduous 

questions of what form the knowledge takes, where it is located, 

how much value it has, and whether it can be documented or 

needs to be taught person-to-person or group-to-group.

For instance, some of the knowledge needed to maintain a 

complex piece of machinery is explicit and can be successfully 

documented. Performance specifications, standard tests, 

schedules for maintenance, the expected useful life of parts, and 

symptoms and solutions for many problems can be captured 

and shared with technicians by way of a database or manual. 

Many organizations do exactly that; it is a valid and valuable 

kind of knowledge transfer. But there is no manual that can 

teach someone to be a master mechanic, and attempting to write 

one would be a wasted effort. Such mastery involves a lot of 

subtle, tacit knowledge (for instance, identifying a problem by a 

slight change in the sound a machine makes or understanding 

how to approach a problem you have never exactly seen before). 

Organizations that recognize the kind of knowledge required 

for this kind of skill will understand that they need to invest in 

the kinds of activities that can develop it, activities including 

apprenticeship, mentoring, and storytelling.

So while we won’t all be forced to learn classical Greek (or 

even classical Chinese, which I’m told has even more terms for 

what we lump together as “knowledge”), we do need to be clear 

and careful about what we mean by “knowledge” if we want to 

be able to support it effectively in our organizations. Developing 

“meta-knowledge” (knowledge about knowledge) is important. 

After all, William James also said, “How do I know what I think 

until I see what I said?” ●

MY INTENTION IS NOT SO MUCH TO GIVE 

YOU A LESSON IN CLASSICAL GREEK 

AS TO POINT OUT HOW DEFICIENT OUR 

LANGUAGE IS IN TRYING TO ENCAPSULATE 

HUMANITY’S MENTAL CAPABILITIES IN 

ONE PALTRY WORD.

ASK MAGAZINE | 45
ASKinteractive

NASA in the News

The Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan nonprofit group that monitors 

the federal workforce, released a new survey that ranks government agencies 

according to employee satisfaction. NASA ranked sixth out of 30 overall. 

NASA topped the list in several categories:

• Effective Leadership

• Performance Based Rewards and Advancement

• Support for Diversity

The Agency was also ranked second in the teamwork and training 

and development categories. Read more about this study online at 

http://www.bestplacestowork.org.

Web of Knowledge

For the latest on project and 

engineering excellence and NASA’s 

mission from the office of the chief 

engineer, check out ASK OCE. Contact 

us at ASKmagazine@asrcms.com for 

more information.

Learning and Development

Check out these upcoming opportunities for increasing knowledge.

ISE 220 System Verification and Validation

February 21–24, 

Marshall Space Flight Center

This four-day course is intended to demonstrate the processes, information, and 

tools necessary to implement a credible verification, integration, and test program. 

It provides exposure to NASA and DOD standards, lessons learned, tools, and 

experiences in validation and verification. Lectures, small group exercises, and 

videos will enhance your learning experience. For more information, please e-mail 

APPELcourses@asrcms.com. 

NASA’s Project Management Challenge 2006

March 21–22, 

Galveston, Texas

NASA’s PM Challenge 2006, the agency’s third annual project management 

conference, will be held in Galveston, Texas, near the Johnson Space Center. This 

year’s theme is “Putting Ideas into Action.” As a mission-driven organization, NASA 

must continuously strive for improvement in program and project management. By 

sharing ideas, practitioners increase their knowledge and enhance mission success 

with more effective, efficient, and innovative ways to manage programs and 

projects. Registration is now open. Check the conference Web site for additional 

details: http://pmchallenge.gsfc.nasa.gov

For More 

on Our Stories

Additional information pertaining 

to articles featured in this issue can 

be found by visiting the following 

Web sites:

Invention of the Year 2004 

http://www.ilslaunch.com/launches/

atlaslaunches/Atlas57/

Mars Exploration Rovers 

http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/

solarsystem/mer_main.html

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@asrcms.com

46 | ASK MAGAZINE
YOU ARE A NEW MEMBER OF AN ENGINEERING 

TEAM. YOU SEE “SHORT CUTS” BEING TAKEN 

THAT COULD ADVERSELY AFFECT THE ULTIMATE 

SUCCESS OF THE TEAM’S EFFORTS. 

What would you do?

How would you handle this situation?

Do you have a question you want our readers to answer?

Submit it to ASKmagazine@asrcms.com

Submit your answers to ASKmagazine@asrcms.com

Q:
National Aeronautics and Space Administration

NASA Headquarters

300 E Street SW

Washington, DC 20546

www.nasa.gov

NP-2006-01-422-HQ