Academy Sharing Knowledge

The NASA Source for Project Management and Engineering Excellence | APPEL WINTER | 2008

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Inside

Wayne Hale on Leading Your Leaders

Dawn: Cooperation, Not Control

Planning for Disaster
ON THE COVER

In this artist’s rendering, a narrow asteroid belt filled with rocks and dusty debris orbits 

a star similar to our own sun when it was approximately 30 million years old (about the 

time Earth formed). During a nearly decade-long mission, Dawn will study the asteroid 

Vesta and dwarf planet Ceres, celestial bodies believed to have accreted early in the 

history of the solar system. The mission will characterize the early solar system and the 

processes that dominated its formation. Image Credit: NASA 
8 12

DEPARTMENTS

3 

In This Issue

By Don Cohen

4 

From the APPEL Director

By Ed Hoffman

48 

Knowledge in Brief 

49 

ASK Bookshelf

50 

The Knowledge Notebook

By Laurence Prusak 

52 

ASK Interactive 

INSIGHTS

8 

Leading Your Leaders

By n. Wayne Hale, jr. To make well-informed 

decisions, leaders need to be guided by the 

knowledge and judgment of those who do 

the hands-on work.

24 

Using the Space Glove to Teach 

Spatial Thinking

By Peter Lord The head of the Island 

Astronomy Institute enlisted the aid of the 

astronaut glove inventor to teach space 

science to schoolchildren.

27 

The Power of Story

By Jessica Fox and Don Cohen Narratives 

can communicate ideas, values, and 

emotions—and inspire action.

29 

Interview with Jay O'Callahan

By Don Cohen The well-known storyteller 

talks about the power of stories to explain 

and inspire, and the essential contribution 

of story listeners.

40 

Reaching for the APEX at Ames

By Matthew Kohut Structured mentoring 

and on-the-job training help Ames project 

managers and systems engineers develop 

the skills they need.

42 

The Project Manager Who Saved 

His Country

By John Baniszewski A project completed 

more than 150 years ago affords lessons 

for today’s project managers.

46 

Choosing and Developing the Right 

Leadership Styles for Projects

By Dr. Ralf Müller Because different 

kinds of projects require different emotional, 

managerial, and intellectual skills, success 

depends on carefully matching the leader 

to the task.

STORIES

5 

The Summer of Hydrogen

By Philip Weber The Kennedy Space 

Center ground crew dedicated months of 

effort and ingenuity to finding and fixing a 

puzzling hydrogen leak.

12

Dawn: Cooperation, Not Control

By Todd May The Discovery and New 

Frontiers Program Office at Marshall had 

to earn the trust of the Dawn team by 

proving that it wanted to contribute to 

the mission, not control it.

16 

Best Buy: Planning for Disaster

By Adam Sachs and Kerry Ellis Rising to 

the challenge of a summer of hurricanes 

in Florida, the retailer shaped an effective 

disaster-response plan.

20 

The Astronaut Glove Challenge: Big 

Innovation from a (Very) Small Team

By Peter Homer Learning from incremental 

failure, the author-inventor built a better 

astronaut glove.

33 

Learning from Space Entrepreneurs

By William Pomerantz Small, passionate, 

resourceful teams of space flight 

entrepreneurs compete—and cooperate—

in X PRIZE Foundation competitions.

38 

Featured Invention: 

Laser Scaling Device

By Carol Anne Dunn and Giny Cheong

A device developed by the Applied Physics 

Lab to aid shuttle repair is adopted by crime 

scene investigators.

Contents

16

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

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

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

publications, providing performance enhancement services and tools, supporting 

career development programs, and creating opportunities for project management 

and engineering collaboration with universities, professional associations, industry 

partners, and other government agencies.

ASK Magazine grew out of the previous academy, the Academy of Program/Project 

Leadership, and its Knowledge Sharing Initiative, designed for program/project 

managers to share best practices and lessons learned with fellow practitioners across 

the Agency. Reflecting APPEL’s new responsibility for engineering development 

and the challenges of NASA’s new mission, ASK includes articles that explore 

engineering achievements as well as insight into broader issues of organizational 

knowledge, learning, and collaboration. We at APPEL Knowledge Sharing believe 

that stories recounting the real-life experiences of practitioners communicate 

important practical wisdom. By telling their stories, NASA managers, scientists, and 

engineers share valuable experience-based knowledge and foster a community of 

reflective practitioners. The stories that appear in ASK are written by the “best of 

the best” project managers and engineers, primarily from NASA, but also from other 

government agencies, academia, and industry. Who better than a project manager or 

engineer to help a colleague address a critical issue on a project? Big projects, small 

projects—they’re all here in ASK.

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

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

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

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

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

the Knowledge Sharing Project Manager, Rosie Robinson, ASRC Management Services, 

6303 Ivy Lane, Suite 130, Greenbelt, MD 20770; rosie.robinson@asrcms.com; 

301-837-9067. 

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

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

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

Editor

Kerry Ellis

kerry.ellis@asrcms.com

contributing Editor

Matt Kohut

mattkohut@infactcommunications.com

Knowledge Sharing manager

Rosie Robinson

rosie.robinson@asrcms.com

Knowledge Sharing Analysts

Ben Bruneau

ben.bruneau@asrcms.com

Katherine Thomas

katherine.thomas@asrcms.com

APPEL program Manager

Jon Boyle

jon.boyle@asrcms.com

Design

Hirshorn Zuckerman Design Group, Inc.

www.hzdg.com

Senior Printing Specialist

Dave Dixon

david.a.dixon@nasa.gov

Printing

GraphTec

Issue No. 29
The Academy of Program/Project and Engineering Leadership (APPEL) and 

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

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

publications, providing performance enhancement services and tools, supporting 

career development programs, and creating opportunities for project management 

and engineering collaboration with universities, professional associations, industry 

partners, and other government agencies.

ASK Magazine grew out of the previous academy, the Academy of Program/Project 

Leadership, and its Knowledge Sharing Initiative, designed for program/project 

managers to share best practices and lessons learned with fellow practitioners across 

the Agency. Reflecting APPEL’s new responsibility for engineering development 

and the challenges of NASA’s new mission, ASK includes articles that explore 

engineering achievements as well as insight into broader issues of organizational 

knowledge, learning, and collaboration. We at APPEL Knowledge Sharing believe 

that stories recounting the real-life experiences of practitioners communicate 

important practical wisdom. By telling their stories, NASA managers, scientists, and 

engineers share valuable experience-based knowledge and foster a community of 

reflective practitioners. The stories that appear in ASK are written by the “best of 

the best” project managers and engineers, primarily from NASA, but also from other 

government agencies, academia, and industry. Who better than a project manager or 

engineer to help a colleague address a critical issue on a project? Big projects, small 

projects—they’re all here in ASK.

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

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

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

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

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

the Knowledge Sharing Project Manager, Rosie Robinson, ASRC Management Services, 

6303 Ivy Lane, Suite 130, Greenbelt, MD 20770; rosie.robinson@asrcms.com; 

301-837-9067. 

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

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

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

Editor

Kerry Ellis

kerry.ellis@asrcms.com

contributing Editor

Matt Kohut

mattkohut@infactcommunications.com

Knowledge Sharing manager

Rosie Robinson

rosie.robinson@asrcms.com

Knowledge Sharing Analysts

Ben Bruneau

ben.bruneau@asrcms.com

Katherine Thomas

katherine.thomas@asrcms.com

APPEL program Manager

Jon Boyle

jon.boyle@asrcms.com

Design

Hirshorn Zuckerman Design Group, Inc.

www.hzdg.com

Senior Printing Specialist

Dave Dixon

david.a.dixon@nasa.gov

Printing

GraphTec

Issue No. 29
I love movies. What does that have to do with ASK

and NASA? My love of movies recently led me to 

purchase a DVD set called A Personal Journey with 

Martin Scorsese Through American Movies. Scorsese 

is a great director. Among his forty films are Taxi 

Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, and The Departed. 

Buying and watching the documentary crystallized 

for me concepts about innovation—an issue that is 

critically important to NASA and this magazine.

Until now, I accepted the notion that 

innovation was about destruction: breaking away 

from the past, blowing up the old, changing 

everything. Burn your ships when you get to a 

new place so there’s no going back. (According to 

legend, Spaniard Hernándo Cortés did that on the 

coast of Mexico to make retreat impossible.)

I think that view is wrong. In reality, innovation 

brings the old and new together, both in what it 

creates and how the creative process happens. It 

doesn’t burn bridges; it builds them. 

I first saw the Scorsese documentary years ago 

when I checked out a beaten-up set of VHS tapes 

from my local library. I loved every minute of it. 

Scorsese communicated his passion and devotion 

to great movies and vividly evoked the challenge 

movie artists face in bringing their unique visions 

to the screen. Those individual visions can only be 

made real through the competence and cooperation 

of a whole community of reflective practitioners. 

And however brilliant and “new” they may be, 

they will only matter to audiences if they connect 

with fundamental human experiences and feelings 

that are very old.

I never expected to see this documentary 

again. But after watching the recent Kennedy 

Center Honors that included Scorsese, I typed 

“Martin Scorsese” into Amazon’s search field and 

was ecstatic to find the documentary had been put 

on DVD in 2000.

The relatively new experience of online 

purchasing is amazing. The Amazon site offers 

reviews, search capabilities, communities, buying 

options, and links to other sites. It is successful not 

only because of shopping convenience but because 

its technology makes a large, like-minded social 

community instantly accessible. It helps you do 

old things—buy something you want and connect 

with other people—in a new way. 

By definition, innovation means something 

new, but the best innovations of the Internet—

Google, Amazon, eBay, Second Life—are powerful 

because they build on exactly the things that are 

most useful and valuable from the past. Instead of 

the new overthrowing the old, the new strengthens 

and extends proven ideas and capabilities. The ease 

and power of its social connections has made the 

Internet a ubiquitous tool, as common as driving a car 

or turning on the television. From games to shopping 

to information exchange to influence networks, it 

has wrought a tremendous transformation thanks 

especially to the vast potential for collaboration it 

has opened up. The Internet is an innovation in 

how we collaborate that I believe will lead to even 

greater innovation.

So both Scorsese’s understanding of how great 

movies are made and my experience of buying the 

DVDs on which he shared his wisdom tell me that 

community is an essential part of innovation. Humans 

have always needed to communicate, collaborate, 

and share with other humans, and great innovations 

spring from our communal experience. Innovation is 

more about connection than destruction. ●

From the APPEL Director

Innovation: Burning Bridges or Building Them?

By ED HOFFMAN 

“I can only talk about 

what has moved me or 

intrigued me. I can’t 

really be objective here.” 

 –Martin Scorsese, from 

A Personal Journey with 

Martin Scorsese Through 

American Movies

4 | ASK MAGAZINE 
I love movies. What does that have to do with ASK

and NASA? My love of movies recently led me to 

purchase a DVD set called A Personal Journey with 

Martin Scorsese Through American Movies. Scorsese 

is a great director. Among his forty films are Taxi 

Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, and The Departed. 

Buying and watching the documentary crystallized 

for me concepts about innovation—an issue that is 

critically important to NASA and this magazine.

Until now, I accepted the notion that 

innovation was about destruction: breaking away 

from the past, blowing up the old, changing 

everything. Burn your ships when you get to a 

new place so there’s no going back. (According to 

legend, Spaniard Hernándo Cortés did that on the 

coast of Mexico to make retreat impossible.)

I think that view is wrong. In reality, innovation 

brings the old and new together, both in what it 

creates and how the creative process happens. It 

doesn’t burn bridges; it builds them. 

I first saw the Scorsese documentary years ago 

when I checked out a beaten-up set of VHS tapes 

from my local library. I loved every minute of it. 

Scorsese communicated his passion and devotion 

to great movies and vividly evoked the challenge 

movie artists face in bringing their unique visions 

to the screen. Those individual visions can only be 

made real through the competence and cooperation 

of a whole community of reflective practitioners. 

And however brilliant and “new” they may be, 

they will only matter to audiences if they connect 

with fundamental human experiences and feelings 

that are very old.

I never expected to see this documentary 

again. But after watching the recent Kennedy 

Center Honors that included Scorsese, I typed 

“Martin Scorsese” into Amazon’s search field and 

was ecstatic to find the documentary had been put 

on DVD in 2000.

The relatively new experience of online 

purchasing is amazing. The Amazon site offers 

reviews, search capabilities, communities, buying 

options, and links to other sites. It is successful not 

only because of shopping convenience but because 

its technology makes a large, like-minded social 

community instantly accessible. It helps you do 

old things—buy something you want and connect 

with other people—in a new way. 

By definition, innovation means something 

new, but the best innovations of the Internet—

Google, Amazon, eBay, Second Life—are powerful 

because they build on exactly the things that are 

most useful and valuable from the past. Instead of 

the new overthrowing the old, the new strengthens 

and extends proven ideas and capabilities. The ease 

and power of its social connections has made the 

Internet a ubiquitous tool, as common as driving a car 

or turning on the television. From games to shopping 

to information exchange to influence networks, it 

has wrought a tremendous transformation thanks 

especially to the vast potential for collaboration it 

has opened up. The Internet is an innovation in 

how we collaborate that I believe will lead to even 

greater innovation.

So both Scorsese’s understanding of how great 

movies are made and my experience of buying the 

DVDs on which he shared his wisdom tell me that 

community is an essential part of innovation. Humans 

have always needed to communicate, collaborate, 

and share with other humans, and great innovations 

spring from our communal experience. Innovation is 

more about connection than destruction. ●

From the APPEL Director

Innovation: Burning Bridges or Building Them?

By ED HOFFMAN 

“I can only talk about 

what has moved me or 

intrigued me. I can’t 

really be objective here.” 

 –Martin Scorsese, from 

A Personal Journey with 

Martin Scorsese Through 

American Movies

4 | ASK MAGAZINE 
I was the external tank/solid rocket booster project engineer on 

the ground crew during that painful stretch of mainly trial-anderror efforts to locate and solve the problem. It drove us crazy for 

more than six months—a Florida-length summer. As painful as 

it was, the experience demonstrated the incredible dedication 

and persistence of the workforce and, we eventually discovered, 

showed the importance of designing tests that match flight 

conditions as exactly as possible.

Columbia (STS-35) was on Launch Pad A for a scheduled 

May 30 launch when we discovered the hydrogen leak during 

tanking. The external fuel tank is loaded through the orbiter. 

Liquid hydrogen flows through a 17-inch umbilical between the 

orbiter and the tank. During fueling, we purge the aft fuselage 

with gaseous nitrogen to reduce the risk of fire, and we have 

a leak-detection system in the mobile launch platform, which 

samples (via tygon tubing) the atmosphere in and around the 

vehicle, drawing it down to a mass spectrometer that analyzes its 

composition. When we progressed to the stage of tanking where 

liquid hydrogen flows through the vehicle, the concentration of 

hydrogen approached four percent—the limit above which it 

would be dangerously flammable. We had a leak.

We did everything we could think of to find it, and the 

contractor who supplied the flight hardware was there every 

day, working alongside us. We did tanking tests, which involved 

instrumenting the suspected leak sources, and cryo-loaded the 

external tank to try to isolate precisely where the leak originated. 

We switched out umbilicals; we replaced the seals between the 

umbilical and the orbiter. We inspected the seals microscopically 

and found no flaws. We replaced the recirculation pumps, 

and we found and replaced a damaged teflon seal in a main 

propulsion system detent cover, which holds the prevalve—the 

main valve supplying hydrogen to Space Shuttle Main Engine 3

—in the open position. The seal passed leak tests at ambient 

temperature but leaked when cryogenic temperatures were 

applied. We added new leak sensors—up to twenty at a time—

and tried to be methodical in our placements to narrow down 

the possible sources of the problem. We even switched orbiters, 

Ground crew veterans at Kennedy Space Center still talk about what they call “the summer of 

hydrogen”—the long, frustrating months in 1990 when the shuttle fleet was grounded by an elusive 

hydrogen leak that foiled our efforts to fill the orbiter’s external fuel tank.

One member of the ground crew 

even volunteered to sit in the aft

fuselage during fueling wearing an

oxygen supply so he could carry 

a sensor around from point to

point until he found the leak. It’s

no surprise that his proposal was

vetoed on safety grounds, but

he was ready to do it—that’s how 

frustrated and determined we were.

6 | ASK MAGAZINE 
I was the external tank/solid rocket booster project engineer on 

the ground crew during that painful stretch of mainly trial-anderror efforts to locate and solve the problem. It drove us crazy for 

more than six months—a Florida-length summer. As painful as 

it was, the experience demonstrated the incredible dedication 

and persistence of the workforce and, we eventually discovered, 

showed the importance of designing tests that match flight 

conditions as exactly as possible.

Columbia (STS-35) was on Launch Pad A for a scheduled 

May 30 launch when we discovered the hydrogen leak during 

tanking. The external fuel tank is loaded through the orbiter. 

Liquid hydrogen flows through a 17-inch umbilical between the 

orbiter and the tank. During fueling, we purge the aft fuselage 

with gaseous nitrogen to reduce the risk of fire, and we have 

a leak-detection system in the mobile launch platform, which 

samples (via tygon tubing) the atmosphere in and around the 

vehicle, drawing it down to a mass spectrometer that analyzes its 

composition. When we progressed to the stage of tanking where 

liquid hydrogen flows through the vehicle, the concentration of 

hydrogen approached four percent—the limit above which it 

would be dangerously flammable. We had a leak.

We did everything we could think of to find it, and the 

contractor who supplied the flight hardware was there every 

day, working alongside us. We did tanking tests, which involved 

instrumenting the suspected leak sources, and cryo-loaded the 

external tank to try to isolate precisely where the leak originated. 

We switched out umbilicals; we replaced the seals between the 

umbilical and the orbiter. We inspected the seals microscopically 

and found no flaws. We replaced the recirculation pumps, 

and we found and replaced a damaged teflon seal in a main 

propulsion system detent cover, which holds the prevalve—the 

main valve supplying hydrogen to Space Shuttle Main Engine 3

—in the open position. The seal passed leak tests at ambient 

temperature but leaked when cryogenic temperatures were 

applied. We added new leak sensors—up to twenty at a time—

and tried to be methodical in our placements to narrow down 

the possible sources of the problem. We even switched orbiters, 

Ground crew veterans at Kennedy Space Center still talk about what they call “the summer of 

hydrogen”—the long, frustrating months in 1990 when the shuttle fleet was grounded by an elusive 

hydrogen leak that foiled our efforts to fill the orbiter’s external fuel tank.

One member of the ground crew 

even volunteered to sit in the aft

fuselage during fueling wearing an

oxygen supply so he could carry 

a sensor around from point to

point until he found the leak. It’s

no surprise that his proposal was

vetoed on safety grounds, but

he was ready to do it—that’s how 

frustrated and determined we were.

6 | ASK MAGAZINE 
Intro

Leading Your Leaders

By N. Wayne Hale, Jr. 

8 | ASK MAGAZINE | INSIGHT 
Intro

Leading Your Leaders

By N. Wayne Hale, Jr. 

8 | ASK MAGAZINE | INSIGHT 
the competition. Real engineers and technicians always 

consider cost and schedule in their work.

3. Don’t cry wolf.

If you repeatedly tell top management the world is going 

to end, and then it doesn’t end, your credibility will suffer. 

Worst-case analysis or worst-on-worst tests are mandatory 

and results from them must be reported, but these tests and 

analyses don’t represent what will happen. It is not enough to 

demonstrate how badly things might turn out; it is important 

to show how the hardware will most likely perform and put 

the really bad outcomes in the right context.

4. Solve the problem. 

Raising questions is important. However, we are in the 

business of doing things. Engineers and technicians are 

paid to get things done. Yes, you have to identify the 

problem, frame the design, identify the tests, perform 

the analysis, and assemble the hardware. But the goal 

is to solve the problem. Nobody ever said flying in space 

was easy. We make it look easy the same way that an 

Olympic champion makes her sport look easy: by 

working hard at improving performance every day.

5. Mike Griffin has said, “Nobody gets to do

homework problems and push the paper

under the door.”

What that means is that we all have to understand the 

risk relative to the bigger picture. No matter where you 

are on the org chart, you have to understand the context, 

be able to place the risk involved in relation to the risk of 

the alternatives. You don’t understand the risk (or cost, 

schedule, or performance) of the alternatives? Then 

you have homework to do. Be prepared to put your 

recommended solution in relation to the alternatives.

6. Banish the words “we just don’t know” 

from your vocabulary.

When you say those words, you empower dumb upperlevel managers to make a decision based on their 

inadequate understanding of the problem and on other 

factors (like cost and schedule). Do you really think 

the guy at the end of the table who just came from the 

budget meeting is a better expert than you are on your 

gizmo? No. It is important to say how you are going 

to find out those things you don’t know. If you are the 

smartest guy and you don’t know, at least provide a plan 

on how we will get to a good solution. As a famous 

astronomer once noted, “We don’t know one-tenth of 

one percent about anything.” That’s true, but it doesn’t 

stop us from trying to build things that work. So we 

do what they still teach in engineering school: make 

some reasonable approximations. Neglect the terms that 

provide a relatively small contribution to the answer. 

Give it the best you’ve got. Instead of saying, “we just 

don’t know,” tell your leader what you can do and what 

approach you are going to take, and include a description 

of the variations that may result from your work. 

You can also use some elements of good flight rationale to 

provide to your not-so-smart leaders.

First, use expert judgment. After flying this equipment for 

years, hands-on experts have learned a great deal. Judgment, 

honed over a long period from observation of many space flights 

and the operation of our hardware, is valuable. When faced with 

a problem, it is imperative to review the previous history and 

True, skimping on time or money 

can cause mistakes, but folks

whose gizmos are delayed

unreasonably or cost more

than is practical get their

programs canceled ...

10 | ASK MAGAZINE 
the competition. Real engineers and technicians always 

consider cost and schedule in their work.

3. Don’t cry wolf.

If you repeatedly tell top management the world is going 

to end, and then it doesn’t end, your credibility will suffer. 

Worst-case analysis or worst-on-worst tests are mandatory 

and results from them must be reported, but these tests and 

analyses don’t represent what will happen. It is not enough to 

demonstrate how badly things might turn out; it is important 

to show how the hardware will most likely perform and put 

the really bad outcomes in the right context.

4. Solve the problem. 

Raising questions is important. However, we are in the 

business of doing things. Engineers and technicians are 

paid to get things done. Yes, you have to identify the 

problem, frame the design, identify the tests, perform 

the analysis, and assemble the hardware. But the goal 

is to solve the problem. Nobody ever said flying in space 

was easy. We make it look easy the same way that an 

Olympic champion makes her sport look easy: by 

working hard at improving performance every day.

5. Mike Griffin has said, “Nobody gets to do

homework problems and push the paper

under the door.”

What that means is that we all have to understand the 

risk relative to the bigger picture. No matter where you 

are on the org chart, you have to understand the context, 

be able to place the risk involved in relation to the risk of 

the alternatives. You don’t understand the risk (or cost, 

schedule, or performance) of the alternatives? Then 

you have homework to do. Be prepared to put your 

recommended solution in relation to the alternatives.

6. Banish the words “we just don’t know” 

from your vocabulary.

When you say those words, you empower dumb upperlevel managers to make a decision based on their 

inadequate understanding of the problem and on other 

factors (like cost and schedule). Do you really think 

the guy at the end of the table who just came from the 

budget meeting is a better expert than you are on your 

gizmo? No. It is important to say how you are going 

to find out those things you don’t know. If you are the 

smartest guy and you don’t know, at least provide a plan 

on how we will get to a good solution. As a famous 

astronomer once noted, “We don’t know one-tenth of 

one percent about anything.” That’s true, but it doesn’t 

stop us from trying to build things that work. So we 

do what they still teach in engineering school: make 

some reasonable approximations. Neglect the terms that 

provide a relatively small contribution to the answer. 

Give it the best you’ve got. Instead of saying, “we just 

don’t know,” tell your leader what you can do and what 

approach you are going to take, and include a description 

of the variations that may result from your work. 

You can also use some elements of good flight rationale to 

provide to your not-so-smart leaders.

First, use expert judgment. After flying this equipment for 

years, hands-on experts have learned a great deal. Judgment, 

honed over a long period from observation of many space flights 

and the operation of our hardware, is valuable. When faced with 

a problem, it is imperative to review the previous history and 

True, skimping on time or money 

can cause mistakes, but folks

whose gizmos are delayed

unreasonably or cost more

than is practical get their

programs canceled ...

10 | ASK MAGAZINE 
Title

By

Intro

As manager of NASA’s Discovery and New Frontiers program 

at Marshall Space Flight Center, I had oversight responsibility 

for Dawn, which the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) was 

managing while developing the spacecraft with Orbital Sciences 

Corporation. Over the years, Marshall has had a reputation 

for taking a command-and-control approach to program and 

project management: tell the project institutions or contractors 

what to do and, to a large extent, how to do it—end of story. 

When we formulated the Discovery and New Frontiers 

program, however, we decided to take a different tack. All 

our projects were developed either by JPL or Johns Hopkins 

University’s Applied Physics Laboratory (APL). We knew these 

organizations actually knew what to do and how to do it. While 

the responsibility for mission development lies squarely with the 

On September 27, 2007, a Delta II rocket carrying the Dawn spacecraft lifted off from Kennedy 

Space Center. Part of NASA’s Discovery program, the $370 million Dawn mission began its 

three-billion-mile voyage to the asteroid belt to study the asteroid Vesta and Ceres, a dwarf planet. 

The spacecraft is scheduled to reach Vesta in 2011. After spending nine months measuring the 

composition, shape, and topography of that body, it will travel a billion miles to carry out a similar 

analysis of Ceres in 2015.

Cooperation,

Photo Credit: NASA/Troy Cryder

NASA’s Dawn spacecraft arrives 

at Launch Pad 17B at Cape 

Canaveral Air Force Station.

Not Control

by todd may

12 | ASK MAGAZINE | STORY 
Title

By

Intro

As manager of NASA’s Discovery and New Frontiers program 

at Marshall Space Flight Center, I had oversight responsibility 

for Dawn, which the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) was 

managing while developing the spacecraft with Orbital Sciences 

Corporation. Over the years, Marshall has had a reputation 

for taking a command-and-control approach to program and 

project management: tell the project institutions or contractors 

what to do and, to a large extent, how to do it—end of story. 

When we formulated the Discovery and New Frontiers 

program, however, we decided to take a different tack. All 

our projects were developed either by JPL or Johns Hopkins 

University’s Applied Physics Laboratory (APL). We knew these 

organizations actually knew what to do and how to do it. While 

the responsibility for mission development lies squarely with the 

On September 27, 2007, a Delta II rocket carrying the Dawn spacecraft lifted off from Kennedy 

Space Center. Part of NASA’s Discovery program, the $370 million Dawn mission began its 

three-billion-mile voyage to the asteroid belt to study the asteroid Vesta and Ceres, a dwarf planet. 

The spacecraft is scheduled to reach Vesta in 2011. After spending nine months measuring the 

composition, shape, and topography of that body, it will travel a billion miles to carry out a similar 

analysis of Ceres in 2015.

Cooperation,

Photo Credit: NASA/Troy Cryder

NASA’s Dawn spacecraft arrives 

at Launch Pad 17B at Cape 

Canaveral Air Force Station.

Not Control

by todd may

12 | ASK MAGAZINE | STORY 
Deep Space 1, launched in 1998, was the first and only 

other NASA mission to use ion propulsion, so there were still 

technological and developmental hurdles to overcome for Dawn. 

Developing the system presented several engineering challenges 

that were also management challenges. One of the engineering 

challenges facing the JPL engineers working on Dawn was to 

understand the behavior of the nearly 1,000 pounds of xenon the 

engines required when the Delta II rocket’s third stage spun. 

Most spacecraft do not have difficulty sensing post-separation 

spin rates while the propellant and spacecraft are exchanging 

angular momentum. For Dawn, however, the heritage gyros 

of the spacecraft attitude control system saturated at too low 

a spin rate for this problem. Since a significant fraction of the 

flight system’s moment of inertia was in the xenon propellant, 

and given the low-saturation rate of the gyros, it was critical 

to mission success to understand the xenon spin behavior. If 

the attitude control system was activated while the gyros were 

saturated, the hydrazine propellant needed for the mission 

would have been expended in the first minutes of the mission, 

resulting in mission failure. 

JPL engineers had no previous relevant experience to help 

them understand the potential problem. Success came from 

not simply identifying and assigning blame for the problem 

or taking control of it away from the group trying to solve it, 

but instead from focusing on how to help them succeed. The 

Discovery Program Office immediately offered engineers at 

Marshall a number of lessons about propellant slosh dynamics of 

superfluid helium learned while working on the Gravity Probe B

project. This gave JPL engineers the support they needed to 

develop analysis and test techniques to resolve the problem. 

Later, the xenon tank failed during qualification testing. 

The failure occurred just below the qualifying pressure, 

though—significantly higher than the nominal operating 

pressure. Focusing on the goal of mission success rather than 

the letter of the law of requirements, the Discovery Program 

Office grabbed pressure vessel experts and worked alongside the 

project to develop the recommendations and rationale to lower 

the operating pressure while maintaining mission performance 

requirements. This avoided the significant delay and expense 

redesigning, rebuilding, and requalifying the tank, which was 

already installed on the vehicle, would have caused.

Launch Delays

After a couple other assignments, I rejoined Dawn as deputy 

associate administrator for programs in NASA Headquarters’ 

Science Mission Directorate. In this role, I chaired the Program 

Management Council (PMC) that provided the recommendation 

to the associate administrator to proceed with final launch 

preparations. Dawn was scheduled for launch between June 20

and July 10, 2007, which, from four months out, seemed a 

reasonably generous launch window. Consequently, I was bullish 

on our ability to launch in this timeframe. After the PMC, I put 

out a press release announcing that we were “full steam ahead.” 

But as always seems to be the case, Murphy was right, and we 

learned the hard way how seemingly minor circumstances and 

delays can cascade into major problems. It’s like the old saying: 

“For want of a nail, the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe, the horse 

was lost; for want of a horse, the rider was lost ...” and so on. 

In Dawn’s case, what seemed like a relatively benign tenday slip in the delivery of the second stage fuel tank cascaded 

into what Steve Francois, the Launch Services Program manager 

at Kennedy Space Center, called “the perfect storm.” What 

happened? Here’s a sampling. 

The P3 Orion surveillance aircraft, which was ready 

to provide telemetry during the original launch period, had 

another commitment during the new launch window dates. We 

purchased the services of a navy ship that could sail to the eastern 

Atlantic to receive the telemetry, but it had mechanical problems, 

ran into twelve-foot sea swells and unfavorable ocean currents, 

and failed to get to the location on schedule. We ordered up 

yet another telemetry aircraft, Big Crow, which also developed 

mechanical problems and could not get to its deployment 

station. We encountered a crane failure from a simple bearing 

that cost another week. Then there was the weather. 

In July at the Cape it’s common for afternoon thunderstorms 

to develop and force transportation and fueling delays. We 

Image Credit: NASA/JPL

Artist concept of the Dawn spacecraft after launch. 

14 | ASK MAGAZINE 
Deep Space 1, launched in 1998, was the first and only 

other NASA mission to use ion propulsion, so there were still 

technological and developmental hurdles to overcome for Dawn. 

Developing the system presented several engineering challenges 

that were also management challenges. One of the engineering 

challenges facing the JPL engineers working on Dawn was to 

understand the behavior of the nearly 1,000 pounds of xenon the 

engines required when the Delta II rocket’s third stage spun. 

Most spacecraft do not have difficulty sensing post-separation 

spin rates while the propellant and spacecraft are exchanging 

angular momentum. For Dawn, however, the heritage gyros 

of the spacecraft attitude control system saturated at too low 

a spin rate for this problem. Since a significant fraction of the 

flight system’s moment of inertia was in the xenon propellant, 

and given the low-saturation rate of the gyros, it was critical 

to mission success to understand the xenon spin behavior. If 

the attitude control system was activated while the gyros were 

saturated, the hydrazine propellant needed for the mission 

would have been expended in the first minutes of the mission, 

resulting in mission failure. 

JPL engineers had no previous relevant experience to help 

them understand the potential problem. Success came from 

not simply identifying and assigning blame for the problem 

or taking control of it away from the group trying to solve it, 

but instead from focusing on how to help them succeed. The 

Discovery Program Office immediately offered engineers at 

Marshall a number of lessons about propellant slosh dynamics of 

superfluid helium learned while working on the Gravity Probe B

project. This gave JPL engineers the support they needed to 

develop analysis and test techniques to resolve the problem. 

Later, the xenon tank failed during qualification testing. 

The failure occurred just below the qualifying pressure, 

though—significantly higher than the nominal operating 

pressure. Focusing on the goal of mission success rather than 

the letter of the law of requirements, the Discovery Program 

Office grabbed pressure vessel experts and worked alongside the 

project to develop the recommendations and rationale to lower 

the operating pressure while maintaining mission performance 

requirements. This avoided the significant delay and expense 

redesigning, rebuilding, and requalifying the tank, which was 

already installed on the vehicle, would have caused.

Launch Delays

After a couple other assignments, I rejoined Dawn as deputy 

associate administrator for programs in NASA Headquarters’ 

Science Mission Directorate. In this role, I chaired the Program 

Management Council (PMC) that provided the recommendation 

to the associate administrator to proceed with final launch 

preparations. Dawn was scheduled for launch between June 20

and July 10, 2007, which, from four months out, seemed a 

reasonably generous launch window. Consequently, I was bullish 

on our ability to launch in this timeframe. After the PMC, I put 

out a press release announcing that we were “full steam ahead.” 

But as always seems to be the case, Murphy was right, and we 

learned the hard way how seemingly minor circumstances and 

delays can cascade into major problems. It’s like the old saying: 

“For want of a nail, the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe, the horse 

was lost; for want of a horse, the rider was lost ...” and so on. 

In Dawn’s case, what seemed like a relatively benign tenday slip in the delivery of the second stage fuel tank cascaded 

into what Steve Francois, the Launch Services Program manager 

at Kennedy Space Center, called “the perfect storm.” What 

happened? Here’s a sampling. 

The P3 Orion surveillance aircraft, which was ready 

to provide telemetry during the original launch period, had 

another commitment during the new launch window dates. We 

purchased the services of a navy ship that could sail to the eastern 

Atlantic to receive the telemetry, but it had mechanical problems, 

ran into twelve-foot sea swells and unfavorable ocean currents, 

and failed to get to the location on schedule. We ordered up 

yet another telemetry aircraft, Big Crow, which also developed 

mechanical problems and could not get to its deployment 

station. We encountered a crane failure from a simple bearing 

that cost another week. Then there was the weather. 

In July at the Cape it’s common for afternoon thunderstorms 

to develop and force transportation and fueling delays. We 

Image Credit: NASA/JPL

Artist concept of the Dawn spacecraft after launch. 

14 | ASK MAGAZINE 
Best Buy: 

By Adam Sachs and Kerry Ellis

Planning for Disaster

16 | ASK MAGAZINE | STORY 
Best Buy: 

By Adam Sachs and Kerry Ellis

Planning for Disaster

16 | ASK MAGAZINE | STORY 
in. During a call after the first storm, the leadership team freely 

communicated what their customers had said they needed. 

Taking this information to heart, Best Buy worked out a deal 

with Pepsi, their beverage vendor at the time, to bring in ample 

amounts of bottled water. “We hadn’t specialized in water,” said 

Sachs. “No one thinks, ‘I need water, I’ll go to Best Buy,’ but 

our customers were asking for it. So five to seven days before 

the next storm was supposed to roll through, we called Pepsi to 

get cases of water.” They also sought out gas generators and still 

carry them in their stores today. Every time they were able to 

communicate with their customers, they learned more. 

Store leaders and employees also helped identify additional 

processes, partners, and even product needs that could help 

for future storms. Sachs and his team of experts took all the 

ideas and needs and wrote them out on a whiteboard in order to 

break them out by discipline and areas of responsibility. Then 

everyone took charge of their areas of responsibility and tried 

to find solutions. The first storm response was mainly about 

the company’s facilities and employees. “For the second, third, 

and fourth storms, we knew it had to be ‘and’—employees 

and families and customers,” said Sachs. As a result of these 

efforts, Best Buy created Web sites and provided BlackBerries 

to help with communication, expanded 

their mix of battery-operated products, 

improved facility maintenance, and 

built processes around asset recovery 

and insurance claims. 

They also refined processes 

that were good in theory but proved 

difficult to execute. The list of store 

employees and their phone numbers is 

one example. “We realized that was a 

great idea,” said Sachs, “but we didn’t 

have a way to call some of those people 

because their phones didn’t work. 

Some of our store leaders drove out to 

find their employees, and it was much 

more tedious than we anticipated.” 

For the second storm, Best Buy set up 

voicemail in another market that would 

be unaffected by the hurricane and gave 

the number to its employees. “Instead of 

us calling them, we had them call us. 

The message would tell our employees 

when we planned to open and when 

they could come back to work. If their 

family had any needs, they could let 

us know at this number and we’d help 

them.” And it worked. 

The company also looked to 

improve things it already did well. 

Though it carries batteries for radios, 

appliances, and toys, that stock usually 

18 | ASK MAGAZINE 
in. During a call after the first storm, the leadership team freely 

communicated what their customers had said they needed. 

Taking this information to heart, Best Buy worked out a deal 

with Pepsi, their beverage vendor at the time, to bring in ample 

amounts of bottled water. “We hadn’t specialized in water,” said 

Sachs. “No one thinks, ‘I need water, I’ll go to Best Buy,’ but 

our customers were asking for it. So five to seven days before 

the next storm was supposed to roll through, we called Pepsi to 

get cases of water.” They also sought out gas generators and still 

carry them in their stores today. Every time they were able to 

communicate with their customers, they learned more. 

Store leaders and employees also helped identify additional 

processes, partners, and even product needs that could help 

for future storms. Sachs and his team of experts took all the 

ideas and needs and wrote them out on a whiteboard in order to 

break them out by discipline and areas of responsibility. Then 

everyone took charge of their areas of responsibility and tried 

to find solutions. The first storm response was mainly about 

the company’s facilities and employees. “For the second, third, 

and fourth storms, we knew it had to be ‘and’—employees 

and families and customers,” said Sachs. As a result of these 

efforts, Best Buy created Web sites and provided BlackBerries 

to help with communication, expanded 

their mix of battery-operated products, 

improved facility maintenance, and 

built processes around asset recovery 

and insurance claims. 

They also refined processes 

that were good in theory but proved 

difficult to execute. The list of store 

employees and their phone numbers is 

one example. “We realized that was a 

great idea,” said Sachs, “but we didn’t 

have a way to call some of those people 

because their phones didn’t work. 

Some of our store leaders drove out to 

find their employees, and it was much 

more tedious than we anticipated.” 

For the second storm, Best Buy set up 

voicemail in another market that would 

be unaffected by the hurricane and gave 

the number to its employees. “Instead of 

us calling them, we had them call us. 

The message would tell our employees 

when we planned to open and when 

they could come back to work. If their 

family had any needs, they could let 

us know at this number and we’d help 

them.” And it worked. 

The company also looked to 

improve things it already did well. 

Though it carries batteries for radios, 

appliances, and toys, that stock usually 

18 | ASK MAGAZINE 
Title

By

Intro

Innovation from 

How does one guy in 

Maine transform a pile 

of failures sitting on 

his dining room table 

into one of the biggest 

innovations in spacesuit 

glove technology since 

the beginning of human 

space flight? This is a 

story about what it took 

to compete in and win 

the 2007 Astronaut 

Glove Challenge, one 

of seven competitions 

organized under NASA’s 

Centennial Challenges 

program.

The Astronaut Glove Challenge:

Several versions of Homer’s glove show his idea’s progress.

Photo Credit: Matthew Z. Homer

20 | ASK MAGAZINE | STORY 
Title

By

Intro

Innovation from 

How does one guy in 

Maine transform a pile 

of failures sitting on 

his dining room table 

into one of the biggest 

innovations in spacesuit 

glove technology since 

the beginning of human 

space flight? This is a 

story about what it took 

to compete in and win 

the 2007 Astronaut 

Glove Challenge, one 

of seven competitions 

organized under NASA’s 

Centennial Challenges 

program.

The Astronaut Glove Challenge:

Several versions of Homer’s glove show his idea’s progress.

Photo Credit: Matthew Z. Homer

20 | ASK MAGAZINE | STORY 
About six weeks before the competition date, I had a 

breakthrough “Aha!” moment. I knew I needed to constrain 

the pressure inside the glove’s finger but at the same time allow 

it to flex. Late one night I came up with the idea of creating a 

“linkage” across the joint of the finger, but I was struggling with 

how to do it. I was applying strips of tape to my fingers in an 

attempt to simulate links when I came up with the “X” design 

that allowed me to make a fist without feeling any resistance 

from the tape. I knew I had a winner, and after a few more 

iterations, I had created a working flexible finger design. The 

next task was to join four of these fingers to a palm and to 

develop a functional metacarpal (knuckle) joint. It took quite 

a few tries to figure this part out, not just the mobility element, 

but also the patterning and fabrication sequence. I followed the 

same process of incremental failure to learn and ultimately to 

come up with a flexible metacarpal joint.

I followed the same process for the thumb articulation, and 

finally the wrist joints, with less time available for each. The 

final step was putting all the elements together into a complete 

glove. I only had one day to accomplish this, but, because I 

knew each element worked and I had refined the patterning and 

fabrication sequence (and my fabrication skills) through all that 

repetition, I was confident I could pull it off. As it turned out, I 

was only able to test the first glove in my homemade glove box 

for about an hour because I had to get back to work fabricating 

the second, identical glove the rules required. That marathon 

build session lasted until it was time to leave for the event, so I 

first tried out the second glove during the actual competition.

Once the event began, I learned that five teams had registered 

to compete—four individuals like myself, and Team MDLH, 

which included spacesuit mobility expert Gary Harris, aerospace 

engineer Pablo de Leon of the University of North Dakota, and 

Nik Moiseev, who until 2005 was an engineer with the Russian 

firm Zvezda that designed that country’s current and Sovietera spacesuits. Two teams dropped out before the competition 

started because they had not finished their gloves in time. So the 

official lineup was myself; Ted Southern, a graduate art student 

from Pratt Institute in New York; and Team MDLH. And of 

course the “house glove,” NASA’s Phase VI glove.

After going over some preliminaries, the competitors were 

asked to bring out their gloves. This was the first opportunity 

to see each other’s work, and it was immediately apparent that 

there were three very different designs. Aside from some initial 

Photo Credit: Matthew Z. Homer

“acceptance” testing (length, weight, leak check), there were 

Homer pressure 

tests his glove.

22 | ASK MAGAZINE
About six weeks before the competition date, I had a 

breakthrough “Aha!” moment. I knew I needed to constrain 

the pressure inside the glove’s finger but at the same time allow 

it to flex. Late one night I came up with the idea of creating a 

“linkage” across the joint of the finger, but I was struggling with 

how to do it. I was applying strips of tape to my fingers in an 

attempt to simulate links when I came up with the “X” design 

that allowed me to make a fist without feeling any resistance 

from the tape. I knew I had a winner, and after a few more 

iterations, I had created a working flexible finger design. The 

next task was to join four of these fingers to a palm and to 

develop a functional metacarpal (knuckle) joint. It took quite 

a few tries to figure this part out, not just the mobility element, 

but also the patterning and fabrication sequence. I followed the 

same process of incremental failure to learn and ultimately to 

come up with a flexible metacarpal joint.

I followed the same process for the thumb articulation, and 

finally the wrist joints, with less time available for each. The 

final step was putting all the elements together into a complete 

glove. I only had one day to accomplish this, but, because I 

knew each element worked and I had refined the patterning and 

fabrication sequence (and my fabrication skills) through all that 

repetition, I was confident I could pull it off. As it turned out, I 

was only able to test the first glove in my homemade glove box 

for about an hour because I had to get back to work fabricating 

the second, identical glove the rules required. That marathon 

build session lasted until it was time to leave for the event, so I 

first tried out the second glove during the actual competition.

Once the event began, I learned that five teams had registered 

to compete—four individuals like myself, and Team MDLH, 

which included spacesuit mobility expert Gary Harris, aerospace 

engineer Pablo de Leon of the University of North Dakota, and 

Nik Moiseev, who until 2005 was an engineer with the Russian 

firm Zvezda that designed that country’s current and Sovietera spacesuits. Two teams dropped out before the competition 

started because they had not finished their gloves in time. So the 

official lineup was myself; Ted Southern, a graduate art student 

from Pratt Institute in New York; and Team MDLH. And of 

course the “house glove,” NASA’s Phase VI glove.

After going over some preliminaries, the competitors were 

asked to bring out their gloves. This was the first opportunity 

to see each other’s work, and it was immediately apparent that 

there were three very different designs. Aside from some initial 

Photo Credit: Matthew Z. Homer

“acceptance” testing (length, weight, leak check), there were 

Homer pressure 

tests his glove.

22 | ASK MAGAZINE
Title

By

I was standing in the dining room of a rambling white Victorian on Mount Desert Island, home to 

Maine’s Acadia National Park. Arrayed before me on a massive wooden table lay an antique sewing 

machine, an improvised pressure test stand, a glass vacuum chamber, and an immense collection of 

gloves and fingers. I had driven across this mountainous island as an engineer and curious educator 

hoping to get my hands on Peter Homer’s Centennial Challenge–winning astronaut glove. 

Using the Space Glove to Teach 

Spatial Thinking

By Peter Lord

Photo courtesy Peter Lord

Alexis of Pemetic Elementary School tries on one of Peter Homer’s “failed” glove designs.

24 | ASK MAGAZINE | INSIGHT 
Title

By

I was standing in the dining room of a rambling white Victorian on Mount Desert Island, home to 

Maine’s Acadia National Park. Arrayed before me on a massive wooden table lay an antique sewing 

machine, an improvised pressure test stand, a glass vacuum chamber, and an immense collection of 

gloves and fingers. I had driven across this mountainous island as an engineer and curious educator 

hoping to get my hands on Peter Homer’s Centennial Challenge–winning astronaut glove. 

Using the Space Glove to Teach 

Spatial Thinking

By Peter Lord

Photo courtesy Peter Lord

Alexis of Pemetic Elementary School tries on one of Peter Homer’s “failed” glove designs.

24 | ASK MAGAZINE | INSIGHT 
rooted in our most basic perception of our physical surroundings. 

Several college students in our philosophy of astronomy class 

reported feeling the earth move under their feet as they repeated 

Galileo’s observations through a telescope; was Jupiter moving, 

or was it Earth? 

The challenge of extending students’ skills in spatial 

thinking to astronomical scales was the central focus of our 

K–8 curriculum development. When the project’s lead teacher 

requested a curriculum that cumulatively built on each prior 

year’s learning in a spiral fashion, I knew exactly what the school 

was asking for. Second and third graders began by noticing 

the cyclical patters that the sun, moon, and stars make in the 

sky. Fourth graders explored the phases of the moon by taking 

turns modeling and sketching them in their classroom and then 

comparing them to the real sky. Sixth graders used real telescopes 

to observe a moving model of our solar system and walked a 

scale model of the planets’ orbits. The curriculum is designed 

to expand students’ capacity to visualize space in a hierarchical 

fashion that asks them to imagine themselves from a broader 

number of spatial perspectives through hands-on activities. 

The “situational awareness” Peter’s story describes is a 

hallmark of high-performance engineering and innovation. 

Keeping in mind the potential outcomes of multiple paths of 

pursuit from multiple perspectives while keeping track of their 

relative merits and performance requirements is a demanding 

spatial task. 

What made it possible for Peter to transform the failure 

of his first glove into triumph was the mental space in which 

that failure provided exactly the information needed for a new 

breakthrough. In at least two cases, Peter could immediately 

“see” the full implications of what his hands were telling him. 

He tells the story of how putting his hands in a Phase VI 

astronaut glove instantly transformed his understanding of the 

glove challenge. Six months into his development, the failure 

of circumferentially wrapped cords to produce a sufficiently 

flexible glove again forced him to abandon his assumptions. His 

situational awareness was so clear and compelling it became a 

gut-level response. Peter’s finely developed spatial skills enabled 

him to almost instinctively focus his full energy on a carefully 

constructed set of experiments. The finger’s ability to sense 

pressure, force, and work gave him the immediate feedback 

required to solve this one central problem. Once properly 

understood, his failure quickly led to the magical “Aha!” 

moment of discovery; the rest is history.

Peter worked in the kind of information-rich, hands-on 

environment so essential to science education. At the request 

of local teachers, Peter and I hauled his collection into class to 

test my belief in the glove’s educational potential. Peter and I 

shared his engineering process, complete with failures and the 

principles of pressure, force, and work at play in the successful 

design. Then we gave students the chance to get their hands on 

it all, letting them develop their own spatial understanding. The 

feedback from the students and teachers was that the glove was 

an instant hit: they really “got” it. 

Just as children need opportunities to develop hands-on 

understanding, engineers need to explore new possibilities 

through incremental hands-on failure. High-performance 

innovation is all about learning to make maximum use of 

thinking spatially to direct this process. Peter Homer’s glove 

also reminds us that efficient engineering decisions need to be 

made as close to the hardware as possible. Whether we’re doing 

hands-on education or hands-on engineering, it is when we trust 

in our ability to “feel our way” through failure that we reach our 

highest potential. ●

Peter Lord is executive director of the Island Astronomy 

Institute and a consulting senior satellite systems engineer with 

Stellar Solutions.

26 | ASK MAGAZINE 
rooted in our most basic perception of our physical surroundings. 

Several college students in our philosophy of astronomy class 

reported feeling the earth move under their feet as they repeated 

Galileo’s observations through a telescope; was Jupiter moving, 

or was it Earth? 

The challenge of extending students’ skills in spatial 

thinking to astronomical scales was the central focus of our 

K–8 curriculum development. When the project’s lead teacher 

requested a curriculum that cumulatively built on each prior 

year’s learning in a spiral fashion, I knew exactly what the school 

was asking for. Second and third graders began by noticing 

the cyclical patters that the sun, moon, and stars make in the 

sky. Fourth graders explored the phases of the moon by taking 

turns modeling and sketching them in their classroom and then 

comparing them to the real sky. Sixth graders used real telescopes 

to observe a moving model of our solar system and walked a 

scale model of the planets’ orbits. The curriculum is designed 

to expand students’ capacity to visualize space in a hierarchical 

fashion that asks them to imagine themselves from a broader 

number of spatial perspectives through hands-on activities. 

The “situational awareness” Peter’s story describes is a 

hallmark of high-performance engineering and innovation. 

Keeping in mind the potential outcomes of multiple paths of 

pursuit from multiple perspectives while keeping track of their 

relative merits and performance requirements is a demanding 

spatial task. 

What made it possible for Peter to transform the failure 

of his first glove into triumph was the mental space in which 

that failure provided exactly the information needed for a new 

breakthrough. In at least two cases, Peter could immediately 

“see” the full implications of what his hands were telling him. 

He tells the story of how putting his hands in a Phase VI 

astronaut glove instantly transformed his understanding of the 

glove challenge. Six months into his development, the failure 

of circumferentially wrapped cords to produce a sufficiently 

flexible glove again forced him to abandon his assumptions. His 

situational awareness was so clear and compelling it became a 

gut-level response. Peter’s finely developed spatial skills enabled 

him to almost instinctively focus his full energy on a carefully 

constructed set of experiments. The finger’s ability to sense 

pressure, force, and work gave him the immediate feedback 

required to solve this one central problem. Once properly 

understood, his failure quickly led to the magical “Aha!” 

moment of discovery; the rest is history.

Peter worked in the kind of information-rich, hands-on 

environment so essential to science education. At the request 

of local teachers, Peter and I hauled his collection into class to 

test my belief in the glove’s educational potential. Peter and I 

shared his engineering process, complete with failures and the 

principles of pressure, force, and work at play in the successful 

design. Then we gave students the chance to get their hands on 

it all, letting them develop their own spatial understanding. The 

feedback from the students and teachers was that the glove was 

an instant hit: they really “got” it. 

Just as children need opportunities to develop hands-on 

understanding, engineers need to explore new possibilities 

through incremental hands-on failure. High-performance 

innovation is all about learning to make maximum use of 

thinking spatially to direct this process. Peter Homer’s glove 

also reminds us that efficient engineering decisions need to be 

made as close to the hardware as possible. Whether we’re doing 

hands-on education or hands-on engineering, it is when we trust 

in our ability to “feel our way” through failure that we reach our 

highest potential. ●

Peter Lord is executive director of the Island Astronomy 

Institute and a consulting senior satellite systems engineer with 

Stellar Solutions.

26 | ASK MAGAZINE 
Because stories almost always tell about a hero 

or group of people facing a challenge, listeners see the 

events of the story through those individuals’ thoughts 

and feelings. We tend to identify with the hero and live 

the story through him or her. Think about the tragedy of the 

Apollo 1 fire. A lot of essential technical information about what 

happened was captured in reports that followed the accident. But 

the story of what happened communicates the sorrow, pain, and 

guilt of the accident, the human failings that contributed to it, 

the passionate determination of the survivors to do better and to

go on. Hearing the story today helps NASA engineers understand 

their limitations and what’s at stake in their work, and it 

inspires them to work harder and better. Stories get us as close 

as we can to learning from experience without actually having 

the experience.

As the interview with storyteller Jay O’Callahan in this 

issue of ASK makes clear, metaphor—images that suggest a 

range of meaning—makes stories powerful and rich. Metaphor 

is part of what makes listeners active participants in stories, and 

they must engage with and interpret these images that work on 

the show-don’t-tell principle. An image that has to be explained, 

Campbell says, is not working. You would never say, “He was 

a deer in headlights, and what I mean by that is that he was 

stunned, scared, and caught unaware.” 

Metaphor frees us to interpret stories individually. Stories, 

metaphor, and narrative activate our innate impulse to search 

for meaning. As listeners, we play with 

them like kids on well-constructed 

jungle gyms. We feel as if we are 

extracting meaning ourselves, and we 

are—stories don’t force a single, simple 

conclusion on us. But a good story 

guides us, so that what we learn is what 

the story wants to tell us, but adapted 

to our own needs and interests. 

Charles Dickens’s A Christmas 

Carol demonstrates the transformative power of 

living through a story. Ebenezer Scrooge’s nephew, Fred, 

and his employee, Bob Cratchit, try to talk him out of his 

stinginess to no avail. Even the ghost of his former partner, 

Jacob Marley, can’t convince him to change his ways. Only 

directly witnessing the drama of his past, present, and future 

gives Scrooge an emotional understanding of the meaning of his 

life powerful enough to change him. 

Although we are not all so fortunate to have the ghosts of 

our past, present, and future create a personal holodeck for us 

to journey through, a good story can come close to giving us a 

sense of lived experience. The technical information we need to 

do our work probably comes from other sources, but stories tell 

us how we work and—even more important—why we work. ●

Metaphor frees us to interpret stories

individually. Stories, metaphor, and narrative

activate our innate impulse to search for

meaning. As listeners, we play with them like

kids on well-constructed jungle gyms. 

* Joseph Campbell, Mythos, DVD, Directed by Robert Walter (New York, NY: Wellspring, 2002).

28 | ASK MAGAZINE 
Because stories almost always tell about a hero 

or group of people facing a challenge, listeners see the 

events of the story through those individuals’ thoughts 

and feelings. We tend to identify with the hero and live 

the story through him or her. Think about the tragedy of the 

Apollo 1 fire. A lot of essential technical information about what 

happened was captured in reports that followed the accident. But 

the story of what happened communicates the sorrow, pain, and 

guilt of the accident, the human failings that contributed to it, 

the passionate determination of the survivors to do better and to

go on. Hearing the story today helps NASA engineers understand 

their limitations and what’s at stake in their work, and it 

inspires them to work harder and better. Stories get us as close 

as we can to learning from experience without actually having 

the experience.

As the interview with storyteller Jay O’Callahan in this 

issue of ASK makes clear, metaphor—images that suggest a 

range of meaning—makes stories powerful and rich. Metaphor 

is part of what makes listeners active participants in stories, and 

they must engage with and interpret these images that work on 

the show-don’t-tell principle. An image that has to be explained, 

Campbell says, is not working. You would never say, “He was 

a deer in headlights, and what I mean by that is that he was 

stunned, scared, and caught unaware.” 

Metaphor frees us to interpret stories individually. Stories, 

metaphor, and narrative activate our innate impulse to search 

for meaning. As listeners, we play with 

them like kids on well-constructed 

jungle gyms. We feel as if we are 

extracting meaning ourselves, and we 

are—stories don’t force a single, simple 

conclusion on us. But a good story 

guides us, so that what we learn is what 

the story wants to tell us, but adapted 

to our own needs and interests. 

Charles Dickens’s A Christmas 

Carol demonstrates the transformative power of 

living through a story. Ebenezer Scrooge’s nephew, Fred, 

and his employee, Bob Cratchit, try to talk him out of his 

stinginess to no avail. Even the ghost of his former partner, 

Jacob Marley, can’t convince him to change his ways. Only 

directly witnessing the drama of his past, present, and future 

gives Scrooge an emotional understanding of the meaning of his 

life powerful enough to change him. 

Although we are not all so fortunate to have the ghosts of 

our past, present, and future create a personal holodeck for us 

to journey through, a good story can come close to giving us a 

sense of lived experience. The technical information we need to 

do our work probably comes from other sources, but stories tell 

us how we work and—even more important—why we work. ●

Metaphor frees us to interpret stories

individually. Stories, metaphor, and narrative

activate our innate impulse to search for

meaning. As listeners, we play with them like

kids on well-constructed jungle gyms. 

* Joseph Campbell, Mythos, DVD, Directed by Robert Walter (New York, NY: Wellspring, 2002).

28 | ASK MAGAZINE 
Cohen: When we think about stories, 

we usually think about events more 

than images, about how a character 

deals with a problem or a challenge. 

Isn’t wondering about what’s going to 

happen an important part of stories?

O’Callahan: Astronaut Gene Cernan, 

speaking at Acton High School in 

Massachusetts, said walking on the 

moon was like dreaming or like hearing 

a story before bedtime. I think he meant 

the experience was full of mystery. Only a 

word like dream could communicate how 

unusual the experience was. The deepest 

stories, like Moby Dick, touch on mystery, 

and there is something mysterious, 

bravely wild, and joyous about exploring 

the universe.

A friend of mine, Gail Gutradt, is 

writing a work in progress about her 

volunteer work with children who have 

AIDS in Cambodia. Gail was speaking 

to a seventeen-year-old boy, Samorn, who 

hopes to be a doctor. He asked Gail if it 

were true men had walked on the moon. 

She said yes, and he asked if they’d been 

to the sun. “Too hot,” Gail said. Samorn 

mused then brightened, saying, “Maybe 

they could fly in a rocket made of ice.” It’s 

Samorn’s journey, too.

Astronaut John Young said after 

he commanded the Columbia shuttle, 

“We’re really not too far, the human race, 

from going to the stars.” We humans are 

sticking our big toe into the universe. 

Cohen: There’s a good bit of danger and 

uncertainty in that adventure. I think 

those things are often part of compelling 

stories.

O’Callahan: Usually stories have elements 

of risk, trouble, challenge, adventure. 

These elements are universal because 

they’re part of life. A story gets exciting 

when someone takes a risk. With risk 

there’s tension and with tension there’s 

energy, and the energy draws us into 

the story. NASA’s work involves great 

risk. Sometimes, as with Challenger and 

Columbia, the result is tragedy. 

... I think people are distracted. They are almost too 

busy to focus on anything, but space exploration is so

extraordinary I think our imaginations can catch fire

again. After millions of years we’re able to leave this

earth and explore what’s beyond.”

30 | ASK MAGAZINE 
Cohen: When we think about stories, 

we usually think about events more 

than images, about how a character 

deals with a problem or a challenge. 

Isn’t wondering about what’s going to 

happen an important part of stories?

O’Callahan: Astronaut Gene Cernan, 

speaking at Acton High School in 

Massachusetts, said walking on the 

moon was like dreaming or like hearing 

a story before bedtime. I think he meant 

the experience was full of mystery. Only a 

word like dream could communicate how 

unusual the experience was. The deepest 

stories, like Moby Dick, touch on mystery, 

and there is something mysterious, 

bravely wild, and joyous about exploring 

the universe.

A friend of mine, Gail Gutradt, is 

writing a work in progress about her 

volunteer work with children who have 

AIDS in Cambodia. Gail was speaking 

to a seventeen-year-old boy, Samorn, who 

hopes to be a doctor. He asked Gail if it 

were true men had walked on the moon. 

She said yes, and he asked if they’d been 

to the sun. “Too hot,” Gail said. Samorn 

mused then brightened, saying, “Maybe 

they could fly in a rocket made of ice.” It’s 

Samorn’s journey, too.

Astronaut John Young said after 

he commanded the Columbia shuttle, 

“We’re really not too far, the human race, 

from going to the stars.” We humans are 

sticking our big toe into the universe. 

Cohen: There’s a good bit of danger and 

uncertainty in that adventure. I think 

those things are often part of compelling 

stories.

O’Callahan: Usually stories have elements 

of risk, trouble, challenge, adventure. 

These elements are universal because 

they’re part of life. A story gets exciting 

when someone takes a risk. With risk 

there’s tension and with tension there’s 

energy, and the energy draws us into 

the story. NASA’s work involves great 

risk. Sometimes, as with Challenger and 

Columbia, the result is tragedy. 

... I think people are distracted. They are almost too 

busy to focus on anything, but space exploration is so

extraordinary I think our imaginations can catch fire

again. After millions of years we’re able to leave this

earth and explore what’s beyond.”

30 | ASK MAGAZINE 
The information I gathered became the 

compost pile. It heated up, and the story 

came alive. As I gathered the information, 

it was important to be in the city of 

Bethlehem, to be in the steel plant, to 

know the place. I’ve learned that place is 

very important.

Cohen: Why?

O’Callahan: Place becomes a character in 

every story. It’s so obvious, it’s invisible 

to us, but place shapes us. A lot of 

my stories are about growing up in a 

place called Pill Hill, a predominately 

wealthy neighborhood in Brookline, 

Massachusetts. Pill Hill shaped me. The 

trees there, the neighbors, the political 

and religious conflicts that were going on 

which seemed electric to me as a boy. 

When I’m commissioned to do a 

story, I need to be part of the place. I 

need to talk to the people who live and 

work there. I need to walk the streets. 

In the city of Bethlehem, I met one 

family, the Waldonys, and I centered 

the whole Bethlehem Steel story on 

Ludvika Waldony. Ludvika was eighteen 

when she came from Poland on a ship by 

herself in 1907 with very little education 

and almost no money. The story is told 

through her eyes. I hope Ludvika’s story 

captures the experience of hundreds 

of thousands of immigrants who came 

from all over the world to work in the 

steel-making city of Bethlehem. 

Cohen: If you were telling a story about 

NASA, do you have a sense of what it 

might be about?

O’Callahan: My first job would be to 

talk with NASA people—scientists, 

engineers, astronauts. I’m sure that 

underneath the whole NASA enterprise 

there is a sense of wonder. Perhaps 

science and myth are coming together 

in NASA. The myths of old were often 

stories about the sun, the stars, and the 

moon. Now with NASA, we’re going 

out there. NASA is turning our eyes 

heavenward just as the ancients did. 

Cohen: I remember the excitement of the 

first moon landing, and Walter Cronkite 

presenting it as a world-changing 

event, but then the world didn’t seem 

to change all that much. I think many 

people were disappointed.

O’Callahan: Rather than disappointed, 

I think people are distracted. They are 

almost too busy to focus on anything, but 

space exploration is so extraordinary I think 

our imaginations can catch fire again. After 

millions of years we’re able to leave this earth 

and explore what’s beyond. That’s amazing. 

If people can take this in they’ll realize how 

astonishing it is. There are rovers on Mars 

and now we’re headed toward sending a 

manned spacecraft to Mars. 

In another ASK interview, Michael 

Coats says, “When I look down, I’m no 

longer a Texan or an American; I’m part 

of the human race.” In time we may all 

see through the eyes of Michael Coats 

and realize we can find ways to live and 

work in greater harmony. 

Cohen: Do stories need to be told face 

to face?

O’Callahan: I think that’s best. Radio, 

DVD, and print are wonderful, but when 

I read Eileen Collins’ ASK interview, 

I was so moved I wanted to meet her, I 

wanted to hear her voice. Storytelling is 

a fundamental way of communicating. 

Ideally a story is told directly to another 

person or a group of people.

Cohen: When story listeners and 

storytellers are together, I think they 

affect each other.

O’Callahan: Listeners mysteriously have 

the power to draw out details, images, 

and memories. Listeners can inspire the 

storyteller. Becoming a good listener takes 

a lifetime. Listening is a creative process. 

It takes attention—that’s crucial—and it 

takes a generosity of spirit. My children 

listened me into being a storyteller. 

Listening is key.

 NASA’s work is thrilling. They’re 

exploring the universe. We haven’t taken 

in the wonder of it, but one day we’ll 

wake up astonished. ●

Listening is a creative process. It takes attention—that’s

crucial—and it takes a generosity of spirit.”

32 | ASK MAGAZINE 
The information I gathered became the 

compost pile. It heated up, and the story 

came alive. As I gathered the information, 

it was important to be in the city of 

Bethlehem, to be in the steel plant, to 

know the place. I’ve learned that place is 

very important.

Cohen: Why?

O’Callahan: Place becomes a character in 

every story. It’s so obvious, it’s invisible 

to us, but place shapes us. A lot of 

my stories are about growing up in a 

place called Pill Hill, a predominately 

wealthy neighborhood in Brookline, 

Massachusetts. Pill Hill shaped me. The 

trees there, the neighbors, the political 

and religious conflicts that were going on 

which seemed electric to me as a boy. 

When I’m commissioned to do a 

story, I need to be part of the place. I 

need to talk to the people who live and 

work there. I need to walk the streets. 

In the city of Bethlehem, I met one 

family, the Waldonys, and I centered 

the whole Bethlehem Steel story on 

Ludvika Waldony. Ludvika was eighteen 

when she came from Poland on a ship by 

herself in 1907 with very little education 

and almost no money. The story is told 

through her eyes. I hope Ludvika’s story 

captures the experience of hundreds 

of thousands of immigrants who came 

from all over the world to work in the 

steel-making city of Bethlehem. 

Cohen: If you were telling a story about 

NASA, do you have a sense of what it 

might be about?

O’Callahan: My first job would be to 

talk with NASA people—scientists, 

engineers, astronauts. I’m sure that 

underneath the whole NASA enterprise 

there is a sense of wonder. Perhaps 

science and myth are coming together 

in NASA. The myths of old were often 

stories about the sun, the stars, and the 

moon. Now with NASA, we’re going 

out there. NASA is turning our eyes 

heavenward just as the ancients did. 

Cohen: I remember the excitement of the 

first moon landing, and Walter Cronkite 

presenting it as a world-changing 

event, but then the world didn’t seem 

to change all that much. I think many 

people were disappointed.

O’Callahan: Rather than disappointed, 

I think people are distracted. They are 

almost too busy to focus on anything, but 

space exploration is so extraordinary I think 

our imaginations can catch fire again. After 

millions of years we’re able to leave this earth 

and explore what’s beyond. That’s amazing. 

If people can take this in they’ll realize how 

astonishing it is. There are rovers on Mars 

and now we’re headed toward sending a 

manned spacecraft to Mars. 

In another ASK interview, Michael 

Coats says, “When I look down, I’m no 

longer a Texan or an American; I’m part 

of the human race.” In time we may all 

see through the eyes of Michael Coats 

and realize we can find ways to live and 

work in greater harmony. 

Cohen: Do stories need to be told face 

to face?

O’Callahan: I think that’s best. Radio, 

DVD, and print are wonderful, but when 

I read Eileen Collins’ ASK interview, 

I was so moved I wanted to meet her, I 

wanted to hear her voice. Storytelling is 

a fundamental way of communicating. 

Ideally a story is told directly to another 

person or a group of people.

Cohen: When story listeners and 

storytellers are together, I think they 

affect each other.

O’Callahan: Listeners mysteriously have 

the power to draw out details, images, 

and memories. Listeners can inspire the 

storyteller. Becoming a good listener takes 

a lifetime. Listening is a creative process. 

It takes attention—that’s crucial—and it 

takes a generosity of spirit. My children 

listened me into being a storyteller. 

Listening is key.

 NASA’s work is thrilling. They’re 

exploring the universe. We haven’t taken 

in the wonder of it, but one day we’ll 

wake up astonished. ●

Listening is a creative process. It takes attention—that’s

crucial—and it takes a generosity of spirit.”

32 | ASK MAGAZINE 
Prizes like the Ansari X PRIZE and later efforts like the NASAfunded Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge and 

the recently announced $30 million Google Lunar X PRIZE 

exist to focus public attention and apply innovative new ideas 

to targeted technical problems. Many of the new ideas are 

elegant technical solutions, like Burt Rutan’s use of feathered 

wings on SpaceShipOne. Equally, if not more, important are 

the innovative program management practices that come into 

play when extremely small and motivated teams put their own 

money on the line to win a prize. Just as SpaceShipOne is not a 

replacement for the Space Shuttle or other governmental human 

space flight programs, prizes like those offered by the nonprofit 

X PRIZE Foundation will not, and likely cannot, replace 

government design, development, or procurement methods. 

But just as SpaceShipOne and its counterparts in the private 

sector can provide effective lessons and practical applications for 

government programs, so too can program mangers at NASA 

and other government agencies take important cues from the 

teams competing for prizes.

In my two and a half years at the X PRIZE Foundation, 

I’ve had the enormous pleasure of working with several such 

teams. The experience gives me a front-row seat from which to 

observe breathtaking innovation. The individuals and groups 

that are attracted to these prize competitions are a particularly 

fascinating subset of the human species: passionate, strongwilled, risk-taking, and imaginative.

The space industry would benefit from the involvement and 

enthusiasm of any one of this new class of steely-eyed missile 

men and women. On their own initiative and with their own 

funding, these pioneers put an enormous variety of concepts 

through the tests needed to expose each as a useful tool or a 

dead end.

With one of our space prizes successfully claimed, another—

the Lunar Lander Challenge—just shy of being won, and the 

Google Lunar X PRIZE recently announced, we can already 

begin to look at the progress of the teams and draw important 

conclusions. I won’t presume to call them “lessons learned” as 

the lessons from each still need to permeate the industry and 

inform decision making across the sector. Instead, I think the 

struggles of each team have revealed some important lessons 

that we need to learn.

Build, Test, Fly, Destroy, Repeat

The early days of rocketry and space exploration in the United 

States were marked by incredibly rapid progress: a seemingly 

endless parade of firsts. Not coincidentally, this period also saw 

more than its fair share of failure, especially in the infamous 

“kaputnik” days prior to the successful launch of Explorer. 

Without a standard canon of known quantities to turn to, 

the early pioneers of rocketry and space flight were forced 

to dream up new ideas that ranged from the elegant to the 

bizarre and to accept the fact that the price of radical progress 

is occasional failure.

Nowadays, rapid prototyping and testing have slowed, as 

we rely more and more on the extensive knowledge gained by 

our predecessors and on the embarrassment of riches modern 

engineers get from computational modeling and computerassisted design. In many cases, this leads to much improved or 

phenomenally more efficient designs. It also, however, fosters 

a culture so terrified of failure that we over-engineer and 

overanalyze everything, often tweaking designs for decades 

before a new system takes flight. (This is not a problem unique 

to rockets; the same phenomenon seems to have occurred in 

high-performance jets.) This is one reason why it was possible for 

President Kennedy to dream of the completion of the Mercury 

and Gemini missions and a successful landing on the moon in 

under a decade, while returning to the moon may take nearly 

twice as long. 

Lacking access to the tremendous computational resources of 

the national space program—and, just as importantly, removed 

from the harsh judgment of public shareholders or congressional 

appropriations committees—the hungry entrepreneurs who 

They often go from drawing on the back of a napkin to firing engines

or even flying vehicles in a matter of weeks or months, learning

valuable lessons along the way.

34 | ASK MAGAZINE 
Prizes like the Ansari X PRIZE and later efforts like the NASAfunded Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge and 

the recently announced $30 million Google Lunar X PRIZE 

exist to focus public attention and apply innovative new ideas 

to targeted technical problems. Many of the new ideas are 

elegant technical solutions, like Burt Rutan’s use of feathered 

wings on SpaceShipOne. Equally, if not more, important are 

the innovative program management practices that come into 

play when extremely small and motivated teams put their own 

money on the line to win a prize. Just as SpaceShipOne is not a 

replacement for the Space Shuttle or other governmental human 

space flight programs, prizes like those offered by the nonprofit 

X PRIZE Foundation will not, and likely cannot, replace 

government design, development, or procurement methods. 

But just as SpaceShipOne and its counterparts in the private 

sector can provide effective lessons and practical applications for 

government programs, so too can program mangers at NASA 

and other government agencies take important cues from the 

teams competing for prizes.

In my two and a half years at the X PRIZE Foundation, 

I’ve had the enormous pleasure of working with several such 

teams. The experience gives me a front-row seat from which to 

observe breathtaking innovation. The individuals and groups 

that are attracted to these prize competitions are a particularly 

fascinating subset of the human species: passionate, strongwilled, risk-taking, and imaginative.

The space industry would benefit from the involvement and 

enthusiasm of any one of this new class of steely-eyed missile 

men and women. On their own initiative and with their own 

funding, these pioneers put an enormous variety of concepts 

through the tests needed to expose each as a useful tool or a 

dead end.

With one of our space prizes successfully claimed, another—

the Lunar Lander Challenge—just shy of being won, and the 

Google Lunar X PRIZE recently announced, we can already 

begin to look at the progress of the teams and draw important 

conclusions. I won’t presume to call them “lessons learned” as 

the lessons from each still need to permeate the industry and 

inform decision making across the sector. Instead, I think the 

struggles of each team have revealed some important lessons 

that we need to learn.

Build, Test, Fly, Destroy, Repeat

The early days of rocketry and space exploration in the United 

States were marked by incredibly rapid progress: a seemingly 

endless parade of firsts. Not coincidentally, this period also saw 

more than its fair share of failure, especially in the infamous 

“kaputnik” days prior to the successful launch of Explorer. 

Without a standard canon of known quantities to turn to, 

the early pioneers of rocketry and space flight were forced 

to dream up new ideas that ranged from the elegant to the 

bizarre and to accept the fact that the price of radical progress 

is occasional failure.

Nowadays, rapid prototyping and testing have slowed, as 

we rely more and more on the extensive knowledge gained by 

our predecessors and on the embarrassment of riches modern 

engineers get from computational modeling and computerassisted design. In many cases, this leads to much improved or 

phenomenally more efficient designs. It also, however, fosters 

a culture so terrified of failure that we over-engineer and 

overanalyze everything, often tweaking designs for decades 

before a new system takes flight. (This is not a problem unique 

to rockets; the same phenomenon seems to have occurred in 

high-performance jets.) This is one reason why it was possible for 

President Kennedy to dream of the completion of the Mercury 

and Gemini missions and a successful landing on the moon in 

under a decade, while returning to the moon may take nearly 

twice as long. 

Lacking access to the tremendous computational resources of 

the national space program—and, just as importantly, removed 

from the harsh judgment of public shareholders or congressional 

appropriations committees—the hungry entrepreneurs who 

They often go from drawing on the back of a napkin to firing engines

or even flying vehicles in a matter of weeks or months, learning

valuable lessons along the way.

34 | ASK MAGAZINE 
Speed-Up, a team in the $2 million Northrop 

Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge, watches 

the show at the 2007 X PRIZE Cup. 

Photo Credit: X PRIZE Foundation

36 | ASK MAGAZINE 
Speed-Up, a team in the $2 million Northrop 

Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge, watches 

the show at the 2007 X PRIZE Cup. 

Photo Credit: X PRIZE Foundation

36 | ASK MAGAZINE 
When the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) at Kennedy Space Center developed the laser scaling 

device for the Space Shuttle program, the inventors had no idea that the invention would become 

commercially successful with law enforcement and crime scene investigation teams. 

After a storm caused extensive hail damage to the shuttle’s 

external tank, NASA Space Shuttle operations personnel 

wanted to measure the extent of the damage. Although 

telephoto lenses clearly showed the damage to the external 

tank, the image contained no reference objects to determine 

the exact size of the dents. In many photographic situations an 

object such as a ruler is placed within the frame so the viewer 

will have a visual indication of the scale of the other objects in 

it. This procedure was not possible in this situation, however, 

as several areas were physically inaccessible. Personnel needed 

to know the scale of the damage to determine whether repairs 

would be necessary, so the operations team called on APL’s 

innovative problem-solving abilities to help.

Dr. Robert Youngquist, the lead inventor, explained, “Our 

lab is unique here at Kennedy, and there aren’t any other labs 

that do what we do. When problems arise that aren’t specific 

to any lab, for example corrosion or chemistry, or when strange 

problems arrive, they are brought to our lab. Historically, we’ve 

fallen into the role as a catchall to solve problems that don’t fit 

or aren’t supported by the more specific labs.” 

Two shuttle engineers, Charles Stevenson and Jorge Rivera, 

came to Dr. Youngquist and APL with the idea for the laser 

scaling device. Dr. Youngquist recalled, “They hadn’t thought 

it all through very well, but they had realized that by using laser 

beams, they could get some kind of scaling information. They 

posed the problem and suggested laser beams as a solution. I 

built the system in my lab using lab parts and verified that it 

met the requirements [one-sixteenth-inch resolution at 80 feet].” 

William Haskell and Robert Cox built the first prototype while 

Dr. John Lane, Kim Ballard, and Dr. Youngquist created the 

software, which converts the pattern in the image and computes 

the distance scale for the entire image.

The resulting device attached directly onto a camera or 

any other observation instrument to project parallel laser lines 

into the camera’s field of view. The lines indicated a known 

distance and generated a set of evenly spaced laser spots on 

the object being photographed. The resulting image projected 

a built-in scale to show the size of the object being seen. The 

accompanying software converted the pattern in the photo and 

computed the distance scale, saving valuable time in establishing 

and documenting measurements. The laser scaling device 

essentially placed a virtual ruler in the field of view that allowed 

the operations personnel to determine the scale of the object and 

measure the extent of the external tank’s hail damage with more 

than one-sixteenth-inch accuracy.

The Kennedy APL team also tested several other design 

prototypes, including multiple lasers versus a single laser sent 

through beam-splitting optics and plastic versus metallic 

housings for the battery. The experimentation resulted in a 

multilaser assembly that used four lasers, as requested by shuttle 

operations personnel, and subsequent versions that used two 

lasers. Dr. Youngquist said, “We always try to find simple 

solutions. A lot of the hardware that we build, a lot of the reason 

people like us, is because we find simple solutions.”

Dr. Youngquist also cited several factors for his laboratory’s 

success: “Ingenuity and mechanical design as well as our 

breadth of background and years of experience are vast here. 

We also provide a strong customer experience—we listen to 

them and the problems that they bring to us. Other labs fix 

things by using what they know, while we will learn things 

Featured Invention: 

Laser Scaling Device

By Carol Anne Dunn and Giny Cheong

38 | ASK MAGAZINE | STORY 
When the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) at Kennedy Space Center developed the laser scaling 

device for the Space Shuttle program, the inventors had no idea that the invention would become 

commercially successful with law enforcement and crime scene investigation teams. 

After a storm caused extensive hail damage to the shuttle’s 

external tank, NASA Space Shuttle operations personnel 

wanted to measure the extent of the damage. Although 

telephoto lenses clearly showed the damage to the external 

tank, the image contained no reference objects to determine 

the exact size of the dents. In many photographic situations an 

object such as a ruler is placed within the frame so the viewer 

will have a visual indication of the scale of the other objects in 

it. This procedure was not possible in this situation, however, 

as several areas were physically inaccessible. Personnel needed 

to know the scale of the damage to determine whether repairs 

would be necessary, so the operations team called on APL’s 

innovative problem-solving abilities to help.

Dr. Robert Youngquist, the lead inventor, explained, “Our 

lab is unique here at Kennedy, and there aren’t any other labs 

that do what we do. When problems arise that aren’t specific 

to any lab, for example corrosion or chemistry, or when strange 

problems arrive, they are brought to our lab. Historically, we’ve 

fallen into the role as a catchall to solve problems that don’t fit 

or aren’t supported by the more specific labs.” 

Two shuttle engineers, Charles Stevenson and Jorge Rivera, 

came to Dr. Youngquist and APL with the idea for the laser 

scaling device. Dr. Youngquist recalled, “They hadn’t thought 

it all through very well, but they had realized that by using laser 

beams, they could get some kind of scaling information. They 

posed the problem and suggested laser beams as a solution. I 

built the system in my lab using lab parts and verified that it 

met the requirements [one-sixteenth-inch resolution at 80 feet].” 

William Haskell and Robert Cox built the first prototype while 

Dr. John Lane, Kim Ballard, and Dr. Youngquist created the 

software, which converts the pattern in the image and computes 

the distance scale for the entire image.

The resulting device attached directly onto a camera or 

any other observation instrument to project parallel laser lines 

into the camera’s field of view. The lines indicated a known 

distance and generated a set of evenly spaced laser spots on 

the object being photographed. The resulting image projected 

a built-in scale to show the size of the object being seen. The 

accompanying software converted the pattern in the photo and 

computed the distance scale, saving valuable time in establishing 

and documenting measurements. The laser scaling device 

essentially placed a virtual ruler in the field of view that allowed 

the operations personnel to determine the scale of the object and 

measure the extent of the external tank’s hail damage with more 

than one-sixteenth-inch accuracy.

The Kennedy APL team also tested several other design 

prototypes, including multiple lasers versus a single laser sent 

through beam-splitting optics and plastic versus metallic 

housings for the battery. The experimentation resulted in a 

multilaser assembly that used four lasers, as requested by shuttle 

operations personnel, and subsequent versions that used two 

lasers. Dr. Youngquist said, “We always try to find simple 

solutions. A lot of the hardware that we build, a lot of the reason 

people like us, is because we find simple solutions.”

Dr. Youngquist also cited several factors for his laboratory’s 

success: “Ingenuity and mechanical design as well as our 

breadth of background and years of experience are vast here. 

We also provide a strong customer experience—we listen to 

them and the problems that they bring to us. Other labs fix 

things by using what they know, while we will learn things 

Featured Invention: 

Laser Scaling Device

By Carol Anne Dunn and Giny Cheong

38 | ASK MAGAZINE | STORY 
“Every manager has the same complaint, regardless of his or her level,” says Dr. Jeffrey McCandless, 

strategic advisor for the Human Systems Integration Division at Ames Research Center. “We all say 

it all the time: ‘My subordinates don’t understand the big picture, and they don’t understand all the 

relationships that I, the manager, need to build.’”

Reaching for the APEX at Ames

By Matthew Kohut

As one of the first graduates of the Ames Project Excellence 

(APEX) development program, McCandless has been trying 

to keep his eye on the big picture. He was one of twenty 

participants selected to go through the pilot year of APEX, a 

professional development program for project managers and 

systems engineers. “APEX gave me a much broader perspective 

about the center,” he says. “I realized that I have to make sure I 

don’t just focus on my own division here.”

Pete Zell, another member of the APEX class of 2006, 

found a different kind of focus in the program. “APEX allows 

you to turn down the volume and concentrate on improving key 

project management skills more deeply,” he says. Zell, deputy 

project manager for the Crew Exploration Vehicle Thermal 

Protection System, found that APEX meshed perfectly with his 

day job: “I didn’t have to go out and search for things to try and 

improve my skills on—I had it all sitting in front of me. The 

fact that I was on a large, multicenter project gave me plenty of 

opportunities to apply the skills to my work.”

Real-world applicability was precisely the intention of the 

program’s creators. “APEX is designed and driven to help people 

do what they’re supposed to be doing right now, and do it better. 

We consider their project work one big OJT [on-the-job-training] 

assignment,” says APEX Program Manager Claire Smith. Smith 

and Ron Johnson, chief of the Systems Management Office at 

Ames, were the driving forces behind APEX. “The process is 

designed so that development happens in a continuous loop,” 

Johnson explains. “Experiences and knowledge are generated 

via project work. Those experiences are discussed and reflected 

upon in the mentoring sessions, and then those new insights 

and sharpened awareness are taken back to the project work.”

In addition to on-the-job training, the program includes 

mentoring, coursework, and coaching provided through the 

Academy of Program/Project and Engineering Leadership. 

The first task of each participant is to conduct a self-assessment 

and determine a skill level—developmental, functional, 

or proficient—in twenty-six core competencies for project 

management or systems engineering. APEX integrates each 

participant’s competency ratings with the needs that Ames 

center management has identified for competencies in its project 

managers. Participants then choose three or four competencies to 

concentrate on for the year and design an individual development 

plan (IDP) to attain the next level of capability in each. 

“The thing I found manageable about the program was that it 

didn’t try to do everything. It didn’t try to improve you across the 

entire spectrum, which would’ve been overwhelming,” Zell says. He 

chose budget and full-cost accounting, requirements development, 

scheduling and work breakdown structure development, and risk 

management as the four areas in which he would like to improve 

his skills during the year. “I could pick something that I needed to 

do anyway. By doing that, it helped me focus within my project, 

which was valuable, and it gave me constant feedback.”

McCandless focused on NASA procedures, project planning 

and scheduling, and project control. “After [learning more about] 

NPR 7120.5D, I have a better understanding of the four key steps of 

a project’s development from the beginning all the way through to 

evaluation. I’ve been around long enough to see that some projects 

have failed because some of these pointers in 7120.5 haven’t been 

met or done. By seeing them in black and white in front of me, it 

drives that home so I remember it for the next project.”

A key component of APEX is mentoring. Each participant 

has four to six hours per month of one-on-one mentoring with 

a senior-level person in the field. Additionally, monthly team 

40 | ASK MAGAZINE | INSIGHT 
“Every manager has the same complaint, regardless of his or her level,” says Dr. Jeffrey McCandless, 

strategic advisor for the Human Systems Integration Division at Ames Research Center. “We all say 

it all the time: ‘My subordinates don’t understand the big picture, and they don’t understand all the 

relationships that I, the manager, need to build.’”

Reaching for the APEX at Ames

By Matthew Kohut

As one of the first graduates of the Ames Project Excellence 

(APEX) development program, McCandless has been trying 

to keep his eye on the big picture. He was one of twenty 

participants selected to go through the pilot year of APEX, a 

professional development program for project managers and 

systems engineers. “APEX gave me a much broader perspective 

about the center,” he says. “I realized that I have to make sure I 

don’t just focus on my own division here.”

Pete Zell, another member of the APEX class of 2006, 

found a different kind of focus in the program. “APEX allows 

you to turn down the volume and concentrate on improving key 

project management skills more deeply,” he says. Zell, deputy 

project manager for the Crew Exploration Vehicle Thermal 

Protection System, found that APEX meshed perfectly with his 

day job: “I didn’t have to go out and search for things to try and 

improve my skills on—I had it all sitting in front of me. The 

fact that I was on a large, multicenter project gave me plenty of 

opportunities to apply the skills to my work.”

Real-world applicability was precisely the intention of the 

program’s creators. “APEX is designed and driven to help people 

do what they’re supposed to be doing right now, and do it better. 

We consider their project work one big OJT [on-the-job-training] 

assignment,” says APEX Program Manager Claire Smith. Smith 

and Ron Johnson, chief of the Systems Management Office at 

Ames, were the driving forces behind APEX. “The process is 

designed so that development happens in a continuous loop,” 

Johnson explains. “Experiences and knowledge are generated 

via project work. Those experiences are discussed and reflected 

upon in the mentoring sessions, and then those new insights 

and sharpened awareness are taken back to the project work.”

In addition to on-the-job training, the program includes 

mentoring, coursework, and coaching provided through the 

Academy of Program/Project and Engineering Leadership. 

The first task of each participant is to conduct a self-assessment 

and determine a skill level—developmental, functional, 

or proficient—in twenty-six core competencies for project 

management or systems engineering. APEX integrates each 

participant’s competency ratings with the needs that Ames 

center management has identified for competencies in its project 

managers. Participants then choose three or four competencies to 

concentrate on for the year and design an individual development 

plan (IDP) to attain the next level of capability in each. 

“The thing I found manageable about the program was that it 

didn’t try to do everything. It didn’t try to improve you across the 

entire spectrum, which would’ve been overwhelming,” Zell says. He 

chose budget and full-cost accounting, requirements development, 

scheduling and work breakdown structure development, and risk 

management as the four areas in which he would like to improve 

his skills during the year. “I could pick something that I needed to 

do anyway. By doing that, it helped me focus within my project, 

which was valuable, and it gave me constant feedback.”

McCandless focused on NASA procedures, project planning 

and scheduling, and project control. “After [learning more about] 

NPR 7120.5D, I have a better understanding of the four key steps of 

a project’s development from the beginning all the way through to 

evaluation. I’ve been around long enough to see that some projects 

have failed because some of these pointers in 7120.5 haven’t been 

met or done. By seeing them in black and white in front of me, it 

drives that home so I remember it for the next project.”

A key component of APEX is mentoring. Each participant 

has four to six hours per month of one-on-one mentoring with 

a senior-level person in the field. Additionally, monthly team 

40 | ASK MAGAZINE | INSIGHT 
Title

By

Intro 

By John Baniszewski 

The Project Manager Who

Saved

His Country

Photo Credit: Library of Congress

George Meade

42 | ASK MAGAZINE | INSIGHT 
Title

By

Intro 

By John Baniszewski 

The Project Manager Who

Saved

His Country

Photo Credit: Library of Congress

George Meade

42 | ASK MAGAZINE | INSIGHT 
their soldiers, resulting in one-third of his army having little ability to 

affect the battle decisively. During the entire three days of fighting, 

Lee never had his three key subordinates in the same place, at the 

same time, to share information and ensure cooperation. 

Scope Management

A project manager must define the scope of the work, break it 

into manageable pieces, verify and control what work is being 

done, and make sure that the work being done is essential to 

the project. One of the biggest causes of Lee’s defeat was the 

southern cavalry soldiers’ failure to do their most critical job: 

collect intelligence about the enemy. A week before the battle, 

Lee allowed his cavalry commander, General J.E.B. Stuart, to 

go on an ill-planned mission that crippled Lee’s ability to gather 

information about the Union army. They wasted valuable time 

capturing supplies instead of focusing solely on their primary 

mission of scouting. As a result of this “scope creep,” Lee’s 

cavalry failed to play the role for which it was most needed. Lee 

went into battle knowing very little about the strength of his 

opponent and made key decisions with inadequate knowledge.

When Meade took command of his army on June 28 and 

ordered its advance, he had to separate it into several pieces to carry 

out all his requirements. Meade made sure that his subordinates 

did exactly what he wanted done by sending them frequent orders 

about the direction of march, number of miles to advance, and 

destinations at the end of each day. He monitored their progress 

closely. If his subordinates failed to reach their daily objectives, 

he chastised them mercilessly. He made sure their independent 

movements were completely in compliance with his master plan. 

He resisted pressure from Washington to send his cavalry chasing 

General Stuart, knowing that he needed his cavalry to focus on 

the crucial role he assigned it. Thanks to Meade’s efforts, he was 

able to achieve an incredibly rapid concentration of his soldiers 

and fight the battle with an advantage of numbers. 

Time Management

Every project manager knows the challenges of schedule and 

the value of schedule slack. The key to victory in the Civil War 

was to get soldiers quickly to where they were needed—the 

battlefield. Meade had his men march an average of twenty 

miles a day for three days. Twelve miles a day was considered 

challenging. Supply wagons were ordered off the roads so they 

would not impede the combat soldiers’ march. 

In contrast, Lee did not seem overly concerned about the 

speed of his army’s concentration once he knew a battle was 

likely. His official report said that “the weather being inclement, 

the march was conducted with a view to the comfort of the 

troops.” At one point, 12,000 of his best combat soldiers were 

stopped dead for hours, blocked by supply wagons at a road 

intersection, greatly delaying their arrival at Gettysburg.

Resource Management

Project managers must get the resources they need and use them 

effectively. Meade’s critical resource was combat soldiers on the 

battlefield. Meade knew the value of keeping a reserve. On day 

two of the battle, he kept 20 percent of his combat soldiers and 

25 percent of his cannons as his reserve, to be used as needed. 

One of Meade’s incompetent subordinates disobeyed his orders 

and moved his troop to a weak and vulnerable position, where 

they were hit with a devastating surprise attack by 15,000 

Confederates. Meade immediately threw in his reserves, 

sending them where they were most needed, and shifted other 

resources from places where things were quiet. His prompt 

action prevented a disaster.

The Confederates never had additional troops where and 

when they were needed. When one of Lee’s subordinates, James 

Longstreet, was on the verge of a breakthrough, he needed 

additional resources to ensure victory. None were there. He later 

complained, “We received no support at all, and there was no 

evidence of cooperation on any side.”

Human Resource Management

Project managers get the people they need and use their talents 

to achieve mission success. George Meade knew the importance 

of using the right people for the right jobs. As a condition 

of accepting command, he demanded and got authority to 

Meade had a centralized organization, the Bureau of Military Information

(BMI), to collect information from hundreds of sources and turn it into

knowledge that could be used to make decisions.

44 | ASK MAGAZINE 
their soldiers, resulting in one-third of his army having little ability to 

affect the battle decisively. During the entire three days of fighting, 

Lee never had his three key subordinates in the same place, at the 

same time, to share information and ensure cooperation. 

Scope Management

A project manager must define the scope of the work, break it 

into manageable pieces, verify and control what work is being 

done, and make sure that the work being done is essential to 

the project. One of the biggest causes of Lee’s defeat was the 

southern cavalry soldiers’ failure to do their most critical job: 

collect intelligence about the enemy. A week before the battle, 

Lee allowed his cavalry commander, General J.E.B. Stuart, to 

go on an ill-planned mission that crippled Lee’s ability to gather 

information about the Union army. They wasted valuable time 

capturing supplies instead of focusing solely on their primary 

mission of scouting. As a result of this “scope creep,” Lee’s 

cavalry failed to play the role for which it was most needed. Lee 

went into battle knowing very little about the strength of his 

opponent and made key decisions with inadequate knowledge.

When Meade took command of his army on June 28 and 

ordered its advance, he had to separate it into several pieces to carry 

out all his requirements. Meade made sure that his subordinates 

did exactly what he wanted done by sending them frequent orders 

about the direction of march, number of miles to advance, and 

destinations at the end of each day. He monitored their progress 

closely. If his subordinates failed to reach their daily objectives, 

he chastised them mercilessly. He made sure their independent 

movements were completely in compliance with his master plan. 

He resisted pressure from Washington to send his cavalry chasing 

General Stuart, knowing that he needed his cavalry to focus on 

the crucial role he assigned it. Thanks to Meade’s efforts, he was 

able to achieve an incredibly rapid concentration of his soldiers 

and fight the battle with an advantage of numbers. 

Time Management

Every project manager knows the challenges of schedule and 

the value of schedule slack. The key to victory in the Civil War 

was to get soldiers quickly to where they were needed—the 

battlefield. Meade had his men march an average of twenty 

miles a day for three days. Twelve miles a day was considered 

challenging. Supply wagons were ordered off the roads so they 

would not impede the combat soldiers’ march. 

In contrast, Lee did not seem overly concerned about the 

speed of his army’s concentration once he knew a battle was 

likely. His official report said that “the weather being inclement, 

the march was conducted with a view to the comfort of the 

troops.” At one point, 12,000 of his best combat soldiers were 

stopped dead for hours, blocked by supply wagons at a road 

intersection, greatly delaying their arrival at Gettysburg.

Resource Management

Project managers must get the resources they need and use them 

effectively. Meade’s critical resource was combat soldiers on the 

battlefield. Meade knew the value of keeping a reserve. On day 

two of the battle, he kept 20 percent of his combat soldiers and 

25 percent of his cannons as his reserve, to be used as needed. 

One of Meade’s incompetent subordinates disobeyed his orders 

and moved his troop to a weak and vulnerable position, where 

they were hit with a devastating surprise attack by 15,000 

Confederates. Meade immediately threw in his reserves, 

sending them where they were most needed, and shifted other 

resources from places where things were quiet. His prompt 

action prevented a disaster.

The Confederates never had additional troops where and 

when they were needed. When one of Lee’s subordinates, James 

Longstreet, was on the verge of a breakthrough, he needed 

additional resources to ensure victory. None were there. He later 

complained, “We received no support at all, and there was no 

evidence of cooperation on any side.”

Human Resource Management

Project managers get the people they need and use their talents 

to achieve mission success. George Meade knew the importance 

of using the right people for the right jobs. As a condition 

of accepting command, he demanded and got authority to 

Meade had a centralized organization, the Bureau of Military Information

(BMI), to collect information from hundreds of sources and turn it into

knowledge that could be used to make decisions.

44 | ASK MAGAZINE 
Analyzing extensive questionnaires completed by 400 project management professionals, Professor 

Rodney Turner of the Lille Graduate School of Management and I have identified competencies that 

contribute significantly to project management success. Our research helps define the managerial 

and emotional competencies needed to make projects work. We also found that different kinds of 

projects call for different combinations of competencies.

Choosing and Developing the Right 

Leadership Styles for Projects

By Dr. Ralf Müller

While some commentators focus on project tools and techniques, 

Aristotle knew thousands of years ago that effective leadership 

depends on the social competencies needed to form good 

relationships and evoke common values. The fact that fewer 

than 50 percent of projects succeed in achieving their aims on 

time and on budget suggests that even the best tools won’t do 

the job in the wrong hands. Our research shows that Aristotle 

was right about the kinds of competencies successful leaders—

including project leaders—must have.

Earlier research suggests that a manager’s leadership style can 

be defined in terms of emotional (EQ), managerial (MQ), and 

intellectual (IQ) competencies. (See table on facing page.) We 

found that emotional competency correlates significantly with 

project success in high-performing projects of almost all types. 

The higher the EQ, the higher the level of project success. 

However, different kinds of projects require different 

competencies. In engineering and construction projects, 

conscientiousness, interpersonal sensitivity, and engaging 

communication contribute most to project success. This is 

because of the need for discipline and due diligence in managing 

these complex projects and also because of the need to evoke and 

integrate various opinions and possible solutions to problems. 

For IT projects, the important competencies for success 

once again include engaging communication, along with selfawareness and developing resources. Finding the right “tone” 

with others, together with good control over personal feelings 

and helping project team members take on challenging tasks, 

are the attributes of successful leadership in these projects. 

This combination helps IT leaders overcome the common 

problems of unclear goals and low budgets on the side of the 

project team, and unrealistic expectations on the side of future 

users of the IT system. 

Organizational change projects also require engaging 

communication in addition to motivation, an emotional 

competency. The project manager who rates high on motivation 

exhibits and encourages drive to achieve clear results. He or 

she actively creates the energy that major change requires. In 

combination with interpersonal competencies, this drive is 

essential for managing reorganizations or implementing new 

work processes.

We found that one competency correlates negatively with 

success in all high-performing projects: vision and imagination, 

an intellectual competency. Visionary and imaginative people 

are without doubt important to project success, but when the 

project manager is too imaginative he can compromise the task 

at hand. Conscientiousness is much more important to successful 

project management than vision. Vision and imagination are 

better supplied by people in other roles, such as the project 

sponsor, who sets and communicates a project’s objectives.

These findings suggest that project managers should think 

consciously of the specific skills their particular projects call for, 

and leaders should pay careful attention to matching projects 

and project managers, developing project managers with the 

skills appropriate to the work they will be doing. It is commonly 

thought that IQ is somewhat fixed after the age of twelve. EQ 

and MQ, however, can be developed throughout life.* That 

makes it possible for people to learn the competencies that suit 

the needs of a particular project type. 

But developing the intellectual, emotional, and managerial 

competencies that effective project managers need takes time 

46 | ASK MAGAZINE | INSIGHT 
Analyzing extensive questionnaires completed by 400 project management professionals, Professor 

Rodney Turner of the Lille Graduate School of Management and I have identified competencies that 

contribute significantly to project management success. Our research helps define the managerial 

and emotional competencies needed to make projects work. We also found that different kinds of 

projects call for different combinations of competencies.

Choosing and Developing the Right 

Leadership Styles for Projects

By Dr. Ralf Müller

While some commentators focus on project tools and techniques, 

Aristotle knew thousands of years ago that effective leadership 

depends on the social competencies needed to form good 

relationships and evoke common values. The fact that fewer 

than 50 percent of projects succeed in achieving their aims on 

time and on budget suggests that even the best tools won’t do 

the job in the wrong hands. Our research shows that Aristotle 

was right about the kinds of competencies successful leaders—

including project leaders—must have.

Earlier research suggests that a manager’s leadership style can 

be defined in terms of emotional (EQ), managerial (MQ), and 

intellectual (IQ) competencies. (See table on facing page.) We 

found that emotional competency correlates significantly with 

project success in high-performing projects of almost all types. 

The higher the EQ, the higher the level of project success. 

However, different kinds of projects require different 

competencies. In engineering and construction projects, 

conscientiousness, interpersonal sensitivity, and engaging 

communication contribute most to project success. This is 

because of the need for discipline and due diligence in managing 

these complex projects and also because of the need to evoke and 

integrate various opinions and possible solutions to problems. 

For IT projects, the important competencies for success 

once again include engaging communication, along with selfawareness and developing resources. Finding the right “tone” 

with others, together with good control over personal feelings 

and helping project team members take on challenging tasks, 

are the attributes of successful leadership in these projects. 

This combination helps IT leaders overcome the common 

problems of unclear goals and low budgets on the side of the 

project team, and unrealistic expectations on the side of future 

users of the IT system. 

Organizational change projects also require engaging 

communication in addition to motivation, an emotional 

competency. The project manager who rates high on motivation 

exhibits and encourages drive to achieve clear results. He or 

she actively creates the energy that major change requires. In 

combination with interpersonal competencies, this drive is 

essential for managing reorganizations or implementing new 

work processes.

We found that one competency correlates negatively with 

success in all high-performing projects: vision and imagination, 

an intellectual competency. Visionary and imaginative people 

are without doubt important to project success, but when the 

project manager is too imaginative he can compromise the task 

at hand. Conscientiousness is much more important to successful 

project management than vision. Vision and imagination are 

better supplied by people in other roles, such as the project 

sponsor, who sets and communicates a project’s objectives.

These findings suggest that project managers should think 

consciously of the specific skills their particular projects call for, 

and leaders should pay careful attention to matching projects 

and project managers, developing project managers with the 

skills appropriate to the work they will be doing. It is commonly 

thought that IQ is somewhat fixed after the age of twelve. EQ 

and MQ, however, can be developed throughout life.* That 

makes it possible for people to learn the competencies that suit 

the needs of a particular project type. 

But developing the intellectual, emotional, and managerial 

competencies that effective project managers need takes time 

46 | ASK MAGAZINE | INSIGHT 
Knowledge in Brief

Successfully sharing knowledge is complicated. To acquire 

knowledge, you have to have some idea of what you need to 

know, find a good source for that knowledge, figure out how 

the people (or documents) offering that knowledge understand 

the concepts involved, and work out how the knowledge applies 

to your own activities. An effective knowledge provider needs 

to understand the needs and assumptions of the knowledge 

seeker. For both seekers and providers, an important but often 

overlooked element of the process is listening. Here are three 

stories about effective listening.

Red Auerbach and the Celtics

Red Auerbach coached the Boston Celtics to eight consecutive 

NBA championships. There’s a bronze statue of him sitting on 

a bench in Boston’s Faneuil Hall marketplace—balding, stocky, 

holding his famous “victory cigar”—an ordinary-looking guy, 

but a basketball genius. Part of that genius was an extraordinary 

ability to communicate with his players. It’s true he had a loud 

voice, he was passionate, and he knew a lot about basketball. But 

the key to his effectiveness was his ability to listen.

Celtics star Bill Russell has said, “Red had the greatest of 

ears. After he talked to a player four times, he knew how to 

communicate with him.” Listening taught Auerbach how to talk 

to his players. He himself once said, “It’s not what you say; it’s 

what they hear,” putting his finger on an essential truth about 

communication: it only works when you understand the person 

you’re talking with and shape your words and manner to how he 

hears—that is, to how he thinks, what he cares about, and what 

he needs. The only way to understand those things is to listen.

Doctors and Patients

In How Doctors Think, Jerome Groopman notes that, on average, 

doctors interrupt their patients’ stories about their ailments 

within eighteen seconds. They interrupt not only because they 

are pressed for time but because they think they understand the 

problem; they have already made their diagnosis. Groopman 

tells stories of doctor error that show how dangerous jumping to 

conclusions and cutting off patients can be.

Groopman talks about how important it is to respect 

patients and understand that they know things about their own 

conditions that the doctor, for all his training, cannot know. 

Respecting the person you’re listening to—understanding 

that he or she has something to teach you—is important to 

all knowledge exchange. Equally important is being open to 

information that challenges your assumptions or hypotheses. 

Doctors who think they already know the answer often don’t 

hear contradictory data even when they appear to be listening.

Listening to an Employee

A talented young woman had worked on organizational 

development for a high-tech firm for three years. Although she 

enjoyed the work and liked the people she worked with, she was 

beginning to think it was time to move on—maybe to go back 

to school to get an advanced degree.

She had not yet told her boss what she was thinking, but he 

seemed to sense that she was getting ready to make a change. He 

came to her office one morning and said, “If you were able to 

define the perfect job for yourself at this company, what would 

that job look like?”

She thought for a few moments, then described a job with 

more responsibility and flexibility than her current position, one 

that would allow her to knit together organizational development 

efforts at multiple sites, to visit other organizations to understand 

their related activities, and to develop new learning programs 

that she had not had the time or influence to make happen.

“OK,” said her boss, “that’s your job.”

She stayed with the company for several years more, doing 

excellent work. ●

Learning by Listening

48 | ASK MAGAZINE 
Knowledge in Brief

Successfully sharing knowledge is complicated. To acquire 

knowledge, you have to have some idea of what you need to 

know, find a good source for that knowledge, figure out how 

the people (or documents) offering that knowledge understand 

the concepts involved, and work out how the knowledge applies 

to your own activities. An effective knowledge provider needs 

to understand the needs and assumptions of the knowledge 

seeker. For both seekers and providers, an important but often 

overlooked element of the process is listening. Here are three 

stories about effective listening.

Red Auerbach and the Celtics

Red Auerbach coached the Boston Celtics to eight consecutive 

NBA championships. There’s a bronze statue of him sitting on 

a bench in Boston’s Faneuil Hall marketplace—balding, stocky, 

holding his famous “victory cigar”—an ordinary-looking guy, 

but a basketball genius. Part of that genius was an extraordinary 

ability to communicate with his players. It’s true he had a loud 

voice, he was passionate, and he knew a lot about basketball. But 

the key to his effectiveness was his ability to listen.

Celtics star Bill Russell has said, “Red had the greatest of 

ears. After he talked to a player four times, he knew how to 

communicate with him.” Listening taught Auerbach how to talk 

to his players. He himself once said, “It’s not what you say; it’s 

what they hear,” putting his finger on an essential truth about 

communication: it only works when you understand the person 

you’re talking with and shape your words and manner to how he 

hears—that is, to how he thinks, what he cares about, and what 

he needs. The only way to understand those things is to listen.

Doctors and Patients

In How Doctors Think, Jerome Groopman notes that, on average, 

doctors interrupt their patients’ stories about their ailments 

within eighteen seconds. They interrupt not only because they 

are pressed for time but because they think they understand the 

problem; they have already made their diagnosis. Groopman 

tells stories of doctor error that show how dangerous jumping to 

conclusions and cutting off patients can be.

Groopman talks about how important it is to respect 

patients and understand that they know things about their own 

conditions that the doctor, for all his training, cannot know. 

Respecting the person you’re listening to—understanding 

that he or she has something to teach you—is important to 

all knowledge exchange. Equally important is being open to 

information that challenges your assumptions or hypotheses. 

Doctors who think they already know the answer often don’t 

hear contradictory data even when they appear to be listening.

Listening to an Employee

A talented young woman had worked on organizational 

development for a high-tech firm for three years. Although she 

enjoyed the work and liked the people she worked with, she was 

beginning to think it was time to move on—maybe to go back 

to school to get an advanced degree.

She had not yet told her boss what she was thinking, but he 

seemed to sense that she was getting ready to make a change. He 

came to her office one morning and said, “If you were able to 

define the perfect job for yourself at this company, what would 

that job look like?”

She thought for a few moments, then described a job with 

more responsibility and flexibility than her current position, one 

that would allow her to knit together organizational development 

efforts at multiple sites, to visit other organizations to understand 

their related activities, and to develop new learning programs 

that she had not had the time or influence to make happen.

“OK,” said her boss, “that’s your job.”

She stayed with the company for several years more, doing 

excellent work. ●

Learning by Listening

48 | ASK MAGAZINE 
The Knowledge Notebook

The Costs of Knowledge

By Laurence Prusak

One of the defining features of society and the 

economy at the beginning of the twenty-first 

century is the plummeting cost of working with 

information. The IT revolution, which started 

its public life slowly in the mid-1950s, picked up 

tremendous steam in the decades that followed. 

By the end of the century, the cost of accruing 

and distributing information had fallen to levels 

that would have been inconceivable a few dozen 

years earlier. 

A computer scientist I know recently took 

his twelve-year-old son to a baseball game. The 

boy bought a box of candy that contained a little 

“prize”—a very small, cheaply made calculator. 

This boy, who lives with pretty sophisticated 

machinery, disdainfully tossed the toy into the 

nearest trash can. His father retrieved it and 

brought it home to look closely at it. He found 

that this trivial toy had more computing power 

than the largest machines built during the Second 

World War! All that change has happened in my 

own lifetime. The computing power of the mission 

control center that got Apollo to the moon in the 

sixties—a hugely expensive marvel at the time—is 

utterly insignificant today.

The effect of cheap and seemingly ubiquitous 

computing on the search for and retrieval of 

information is apparent to all. Less obvious is the 

fact that knowledge is not subject to these changes. 

In fact, one can make the case that knowledge 

costs have actually increased over the same period. 

Let’s look at why information and knowledge are 

so different in this regard.

Some recent research I conducted with some 

colleagues divided up the actual activities that 

working with knowledge entails into four discrete 

activities: searching for knowledge, negotiating 

with knowledge sources, adapting and adopting 

new knowledge, and distributing knowledge. All 

these human activities take time and attention. 

While technology can play a role in mitigating their 

costs, knowledge still proves to be an expensive 

item in any organization’s budget.

Searching for knowledge is probably the most 

amenable to some sort of technological assist. 

Virtually everyone uses some sort of search engine, 

often Google, to try to figure out who knows 

something they need to learn about and how to 

contact them. While this isn’t a fail-safe process—

the Web includes a lot of self-promotion and bogus 

information—it is a remarkably efficient way to 

get started.

But acquiring knowledge—genuinely learning

something new—requires the consent and 

commitment of the person you’re trying to learn 

from. In contrast to information, which can 

usually be effectively transmitted in a document 

or diagram, knowledge comes from explaining, 

clarifying, questioning, and sometimes actually 

working together. Getting this kind of attention 

and commitment often involves some form of 

negotiation, since even the most generous person’s 

time and energy are limited. Few experts sit around 

waiting to share their knowledge with strangers or 

casual acquaintances.

In reasonably collaborative enterprises—

I think NASA is one—this sort of negotiation 

isn’t too onerous. People want to help each 

other and share what they know, so the “cost” of 

acquiring knowledge is relatively low. In many 

organizations (and many communities and 

countries), however, there are considerable costs 

50 | ASK MAGAZINE 
The Knowledge Notebook

The Costs of Knowledge

By Laurence Prusak

One of the defining features of society and the 

economy at the beginning of the twenty-first 

century is the plummeting cost of working with 

information. The IT revolution, which started 

its public life slowly in the mid-1950s, picked up 

tremendous steam in the decades that followed. 

By the end of the century, the cost of accruing 

and distributing information had fallen to levels 

that would have been inconceivable a few dozen 

years earlier. 

A computer scientist I know recently took 

his twelve-year-old son to a baseball game. The 

boy bought a box of candy that contained a little 

“prize”—a very small, cheaply made calculator. 

This boy, who lives with pretty sophisticated 

machinery, disdainfully tossed the toy into the 

nearest trash can. His father retrieved it and 

brought it home to look closely at it. He found 

that this trivial toy had more computing power 

than the largest machines built during the Second 

World War! All that change has happened in my 

own lifetime. The computing power of the mission 

control center that got Apollo to the moon in the 

sixties—a hugely expensive marvel at the time—is 

utterly insignificant today.

The effect of cheap and seemingly ubiquitous 

computing on the search for and retrieval of 

information is apparent to all. Less obvious is the 

fact that knowledge is not subject to these changes. 

In fact, one can make the case that knowledge 

costs have actually increased over the same period. 

Let’s look at why information and knowledge are 

so different in this regard.

Some recent research I conducted with some 

colleagues divided up the actual activities that 

working with knowledge entails into four discrete 

activities: searching for knowledge, negotiating 

with knowledge sources, adapting and adopting 

new knowledge, and distributing knowledge. All 

these human activities take time and attention. 

While technology can play a role in mitigating their 

costs, knowledge still proves to be an expensive 

item in any organization’s budget.

Searching for knowledge is probably the most 

amenable to some sort of technological assist. 

Virtually everyone uses some sort of search engine, 

often Google, to try to figure out who knows 

something they need to learn about and how to 

contact them. While this isn’t a fail-safe process—

the Web includes a lot of self-promotion and bogus 

information—it is a remarkably efficient way to 

get started.

But acquiring knowledge—genuinely learning

something new—requires the consent and 

commitment of the person you’re trying to learn 

from. In contrast to information, which can 

usually be effectively transmitted in a document 

or diagram, knowledge comes from explaining, 

clarifying, questioning, and sometimes actually 

working together. Getting this kind of attention 

and commitment often involves some form of 

negotiation, since even the most generous person’s 

time and energy are limited. Few experts sit around 

waiting to share their knowledge with strangers or 

casual acquaintances.

In reasonably collaborative enterprises—

I think NASA is one—this sort of negotiation 

isn’t too onerous. People want to help each 

other and share what they know, so the “cost” of 

acquiring knowledge is relatively low. In many 

organizations (and many communities and 

countries), however, there are considerable costs 

50 | ASK MAGAZINE 
ASKinteractive

For More on 

Our Stories

Additional information 

pertaining to articles 

featured in this issue can 

be found by visiting the 

following Web sites:

• X PRIZE Foundation: 

http://www.xprize.org

• Dawn Mission: http://

www.nasa.gov/mission_

pages/dawn/main/index.

html

• Maine Space Grant 

Consortium: 

http://www.msgc.org

feedback

We welcome your comments on what you’ve read in this issue of ASK and your suggestions for articles you 

would like to see in future issues. Share your thoughts with us at http://appel.nasa.gov/ask/about/write.php.

Get Involved in Space Exploration

Looking for ways to get your children or students involved in space exploration? NASA offers 

several opportunities for students from kindergarten through college to gain hands-on experience 

in the space program, including several competitions—from lunar plant growth to the annual 

Great Moonbuggy Race. To find out more about the ongoing competitions, seminars, and 

special programs, visit http://www.nasa.gov/audience/foreducators/index.html. There are also 

opportunities for professional or amateur astronomers, as well as the general public, to have a 

hand in NASA mission activities, such as the Cassini-Huygens Saturn Observation Campaign: 

http://soc.jpl.nasa.gov/index.cfm. 

Web of Knowledge

The transfer, application, and commercialization of NASA-funded technology occur in many ways: 

knowledge sharing, technical assistance, intellectual property licensing, cooperative research and 

technology projects, and other forms of partnership. The NASA Innovative Partnerships Program 

(IPP) directs programs and initiatives to foster technology partnerships, commercialization, and 

innovation in support of NASA’s overall mission and national priorities. Their Web site includes 

links to other sites operated by NASA’s national network of programs, organizations, and 

services sponsored by and affiliated with the IPP at NASA Headquarters. These sites explore 

NASA technology and give access to opportunities for technology transfer, development, and 

collaboration with NASA. Also learn how NASA technology has moved into the marketplace and 

contributed to NASA Mission Directorates and the nation’s prosperity: http://ipp.nasa.gov.

NASA in the News

NASA recently launched a Web site that contains survey responses collected from 25,762 air carrier 

pilots and 4,777 general aviation pilots as part of the NASA National Aviation Operational Monitoring 

Service (NAOMS) project, which ran from April 2001 through December 2004. NASA funded NAOMS 

to investigate new methodologies that may be of use to the broader research community. The study 

itself focused on aviation safety, reaching out to pilots for their responses, which would remain anonymous, instead of 

relying on them to proactively proffer information via other channels, such as the Federal Aviation Administration’s Aviation 

Safety Action Program. NASA Administrator Michael Griffin commented, “Folks were looking to develop a methodology that 

would unearth precursor information, the kinds of data that, after an accident, one looks back and says, ‘Oh, I could have 

seen this coming.’ That is a goal in all fields of safety.” The redacted data, as well as initial methodology analysis and insight 

into the process of disaggregating the data, can be found online at http://www.nasa.gov/news/reports/NAOMS.html.

52 | ASK MAGAZINE
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