Academy Sharing Knowledge

The NASA Source for Project Management and Engineering Excellence | APPEL SPRING | 2013

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Inside

INTERVIEW WITH DON PETTIT 

THE LEGACY OF NASA’S 

BALLOON MISSIONS

SPACEPORT INNOVATORS
Scan this code with 

your mobile device 

to read ASK online.

titten PoD/ASA: Ntidero CtohP

ON THE COVER

This is a composite of a series of images photographed from a mounted camera 

on the Earth-orbiting International Space Station, from approximately 240 miles 

above Earth. Expedition 31 Flight Engineer Don Pettit said of the photographic 

techniques used to achieve the images: “My star-trail images are made by taking 

a time exposure of about 10 to 15 minutes. However, with modern digital cameras, 

30 seconds is about the longest exposure possible, due to electronic-detector noise 

effectively snowing out the image. To achieve the longer exposures I do what many 

amateur astronomers do. I take multiple 30-second exposures, then ‘stack’ them 

using imaging software, thus producing the longer exposure.” A total of 18 images 

photographed by the astronaut-monitored stationary camera were combined 

to create this composite.
Contents

33

Departments

3

In This Issue

By Don Cohen

4

From the NASA CKO 

Living in Uncertainty

By eD hoffman

54

The Knowledge Notebook 

The Folly of Technological Solutionism

By LaurenCe Prusak

56 

ASK Interactive 

InsIghts

11

The Challenge of Launching 

Old Scientific Instruments

By karen haLterman Instruments 

launched decades after being built need 

special handling.

24

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Software 

Engineering at NASA 

By haLey stePhenson Wiki technology 

makes it easy to provide context for NASA 

software requirements.

28

Interview with Don Pettit 

By kerry eLLis The astronaut talks about his 

experiments, his blog, and the joys of living 

in space.

40

Earth’s Bridge to Space

By stefano CoLeDan Every successful 

launch at Kennedy Space Center is the 

culmination of careful planning, cooperation, 

and years of experience.

49 

The Transformation of MOD: Adapting 

to Change in a Dynamic Environment 

By JoyCe aBBey Leaders, employees, and 

commercial partners find new efficiencies 

for the Mission Operations Directorate.

28 15

ASK MAGAZINE | 1
Issue No. 50

Staff

NASA CKO and Publisher

Dr. Edward Hoffman

ehoffman@nasa.gov

Editor-in-Chief

Laurence Prusak

larryprusak@gmail.com

Managing Editor

Don Cohen

doncohen@rcn.com

Editor

Kerry Ellis

kerry.ellis@inuteqllc.com

Contributing Editors

Matt Kohut

mattkohut@infactcommunications.com

Haley Stephenson

haley.stephenson@valador.com

Senior Knowledge Sharing 

Consultant

Jon Boyle

jon.boyle@inuteqllc.com

Knowledge Sharing Analysts

Ben Bruneau

ben.bruneau@inuteqllc.com

Ramien Pierre

ramien.pierre@inuteqllc.com

academy program Manager

Yvonne Massaquoi

yvonne.massaquoi@inuteqllc.com

Design

Hirshorn Zuckerman Design Group, Inc.

www.hzdg.com

Printing Speci alist

Tun Hla

tun.t.hla@nasa.gov

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

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

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

publications, providing performance enhancement services and tools, supporting 

career development programs, and creating opportunities for project management 

and engineering collaboration with universities, professional associations, industry 

partners, and other government agencies.

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

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

learned with fellow practitioners across the Agency. Reflecting the Academy’s 

responsibility for project management and engineering development and the 

challenges of NASA’s new mission, ASK includes articles about meeting the technical 

and managerial demands of complex projects, as well as insights into organizational 

knowledge, learning, collaboration, performance measurement and evaluation, and 

scheduling. We at APPEL Knowledge Sharing believe that stories recounting the reallife experiences of practitioners communicate important practical wisdom and best 

practices that readers can apply to their own projects and environments. By telling 

their stories, NASA managers, scientists, and engineers share valuable experience-based 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

yvonne.massaquoi@inuteqllc.com; 301-837-9127.
Everyone who is familiar with NASA missions knows that most Launch Services Program’s ability to ensure the successful 

of them involve collaboration among many organizations launch of current and future missions lies decades of 

and individuals. Project teams often include several NASA experience and expertise.

centers, other countries’ space agencies, industry partners, IceBridge is another mission closely linked to past and 

and universities. Review board members and other future missions (“Collaborative Planning for IceBridge 

experts not officially part of project teams contribute their Science”). Using aircraft to gather data about polar ice, 

knowledge and advice. Very few missions could get off the it is bridging the gap between past and future satellite 

ground—literally or figuratively—without a broad assembly missions; IceBridge scientists are shaping how they collect 

of resources and expertise. data to ensure consistency with the satellite scheduled for 

Several of the articles in this issue of ASK show that the launch in 2016.

work that makes many projects possible goes far beyond “Hard Lessons and Lean Engineering” discusses 

even those extensive collaborations. Behind every ambitious Morpheus and the Autonomous Landing Hazard Avoidance 

mission is a whole history of earlier projects that laid the Technology, projects that are among the building blocks of 

groundwork for later accomplishments and helped develop what will eventually be technologies that make future asteroid 

the skills engineers, scientists, and managers need to carry and planetary landings possible. The article also deals with 

out current and future work. NASA projects don’t happen in an important subject—doing good work on a tight budget—

isolation; they are part of a wide web of interrelated efforts. that is a fact of life throughout the agency and another theme 

Look, for instance, at “Building a Better Telescope: The of several articles.

Legacy of NASA’s Balloon Missions.” That article and the Joyce Abbey’s “The Transformation of MOD” is a 

companion piece on producing mirrors for the Nuclear case in point. It details the extensive and innovative steps 

Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) show just how Johnson Space Center’s Mission Operations Directorate 

essential balloon-based X-ray telescope missions at several has been taking to make sure they can continue to provide 

NASA centers have been to NuSTAR and other, planned the same quality of service at much-reduced cost. “Safety 

orbital observatories. The balloon missions have been a Day Collaboration” by Mike Lipka and David Miranda’s 

training ground for graduate students who would become “Spaceport Innovators” also provide examples of NASA 

project scientists on future missions; the missions’ early work employees finding ways to accomplish their aims with little or 

on the technical challenge of designing and building X-ray no money to spend. These articles show that creativity and 

telescopes made the NuSTAR instruments possible, and collaboration are not limited to technological and scientific 

continuing technical work by the balloon teams will benefit achievement; they also contribute to efficiency and good 

future missions. Years of balloon work have built international management and help NASA do a lot with a little.

communities of scientists and engineers whose shared 

expertise is being applied to sophisticated instruments like Don Cohen

the Astronomical Roentgen Telescope scheduled for launch Managing Editor

on a Russian-led orbital mission.

In “Earth’s Bridge to Space,” Stefano Coledan shows 

how today’s successes are built on earlier work. Behind the 

In This Issue

ASK MAGAZINE | 3
Project-based organizations like NASA 

have a paradox embedded in their DNA: 

the tension between the organization’s need 

for stability and the inherent uncertainty of 

complex projects. 

My colleague Terry Cooke-Davies, 

global chairman of Human Systems, 

captured this well a few weeks ago at our 

Engaging Leaders in Knowledge event:

 The way senior management thinks and the way a 

precondition of its success. This has been true of everything 

from Project Mercury’s Big Joe to Mars Curiosity. 

Innovation often defies tidy schedules and budgets. In a 

recent article in Wired, Stephen Attenborough, the first 

employee of Virgin Galactic, described the challenge 

of soliciting passengers for the company’s commercial 

spaceflight venture:

 We were saying, “Look: we don’t know how long 

this project’s going to last, we don’t know when the 

product’s going to be delivered; we don’t know what 

it’s going to look like; we don’t really know much 

about what it’s going to be like for you on board; we 

don’t [know] whether you’re going to be eligible to 

fly, because we don’t understand too much about the 

fitness requirements ... but if you want to join, we 

need $200,000 up front.”

This is fundamentally similar to the challenge that 

many NASA projects face. We need resources in advance 

just to define the requirements of projects that begin with 

long lists of uncertainties. The quality necessary to survive 

in this environment is adaptability, which can be at odds 

with a larger organizational culture that values stability.

The best program and project managers understand 

that the key to handling this tension is communicating in 

the right key for different audiences. Senior management 

needs one level of reporting so they can show NASA’s 

stakeholders that the agency is being a responsible steward 

of the taxpayer’s dollars. Without that, no projects get 

funded. Team members, partners, and vendors need 

other kinds of detailed communication about day-to-day 

specifics. None of this removes the inherent uncertainty 

of complex projects, but it makes it easier to live with 

the paradox. ●

From the NASA CKO

Living in Uncertainty

 BY ED HOFFMAN 

4 | ASK MAGAZINE
Title

BY 

Intro

BY KERRY ELLISybbie BoJ/ASA: Ntidero CtohP

Future human space exploration will mean getting beyond low-Earth orbit—and returning safely. 

Several projects across NASA are working on the challenges that goal presents, among them 

propulsion alternatives and guidance, navigation, and control. Th ree years ago, Project Morpheus 

and the Autonomous Landing and Hazard Avoidance Technology project, or ALHAT, began 

collaborating on advances in these areas.

AND

Morpheus ground-level 

hot fire on April 2, 2012, 

at Kennedy Space 

Center’s Vertical Test 

Bed Flight Complex.

story | ASK MAGAZINE | 5
Morpheus is a rapid-prototype vertical lander concept testing think the benefit to the agency is astronomical. It’s been a great 

many ideas at once. It is known as a vertical test bed: a lander training ground.”

that can be adjusted, scaled, and reconfigured to test different One lesson Morpheus has taken from its commercial partners 

design ideas. This makes it a great platform on which to test is finding the right level of documentation. In one instance, the 

ALHAT’s sensors and software, meant to detect hazards in team worked closely with Armadillo Aerospace to see how a 

real time and adjust flight trajectories to avoid them without small development team operated. They learned how to improve 

human intervention. processes for lean development and were able to pass on some NASA 

Together, they can provide a template for future planetary knowledge to improve Armadillo’s safety and process measures.

landers, one that can scale down for asteroid missions or “We decided to pick and choose from procedural 

potentially scale up for human spaceflight to Mars. requirement 7120.5 and the agency’s project management 

policies to determine what was applicable to Morpheus. Those 

Lean Engineering policies primarily exist for larger projects and programs, but 

To provide quick technology demonstrations, both projects they’re a great information source for project management if 

have focused on keeping their management and engineering appropriately tailored to your project,” explained Olansen. “We 

approaches lean and mean. For the project managers, this has don’t produce a bunch of documents, and we only produce a 

meant finding ways to document processes and lessons learned handful for written signatures, such as range-safety documents.” 

with enough rigor to satisfy requirements and benefit current Everything else is kept online to ensure the project has enough 

and future projects but without a mountain of paperwork rigor regarding safe operations and capturing lessons learned. 

that might prevent rapid design and development. On the “Engineers like to do things, not write documents,” added 

engineering side, the philosophy has focused on a test early, Chirold Epp, project manager for ALHAT, “so as a project 

test often approach using low-cost materials that can be found manager, I have to work a bit to make sure we document what 

commercially or quickly modified. we’ve done, and people can pick it up and understand what 

At the core of these approaches has been collaboration we did right and what we did wrong. Our effort has been to 

and communication. The Morpheus and ALHAT teams have document all data whenever we do a field test and ensure it’s 

looked to their peers at other centers to provide their expertise readable; otherwise, you can spend way too much time writing 

and knowledge to the projects, and to industry partners with documents. We need to do the work. And for good technology 

experience in operating rapid-prototype projects. development, we believe that’s the right way to go.”

According to Jon Olansen, Morpheus project manager, The lean development approach also applies to the 

Morpheus is about 90 percent in-house collaboration spanning engineering itself, often relying on “good enough” solutions that 

several NASA centers, including Johnson Space Center, will allow for safe testing and progressive learning in the moment. 

Goddard Space Flight Center, Stennis Space Center, Kennedy On Morpheus, for example, engineers needed to figure out 

Space Center, and Marshall Space Flight Center. “By keeping how propellant would slosh within their fuel tanks. Usually, 

the work predominantly in house, our civil servants have learned this requires a lot of time creating and analyzing models before 

a tremendous amount,” he said. The team includes experienced development takes place. Instead, one of the engineers went to 

personnel as well as those new to the agency and students. a hardware store and spent $80 on wood, attachment fittings, 

“We have all learned so much doing this hands-on work, and I four light globes, and food coloring. They put together a simple 

ON THE ENGINEERING SIDE, THE pHILOSOpHy HAS FOCUSED ON A TEST EARLy, 

TEST OFTEN AppROACH USING LOW-COST MATERIALS THAT CAN BE FOUND 

COMMERCIALLy OR qUICKLy MODIFIED.

6 | ASK MAGAZINE
model of Morpheus’s four-tank structure, filled the globes Crash Landing

with colored water, hung it from a single point, and induced After several successful tethered tests at Johnson—where the 

oscillations to see how the fluid would slosh within the globes. Morpheus lander was held aloft by crane and its thrusters 

“We could see that if we induced an oscillation in one fired for continuous periods—both teams were anticipating 

direction, eventually the water would swirl in the globes instead the first free-flight attempt. They began at Kennedy on 

of slosh back and forth, due to the tank configuration. It got us August 3 with another tethered test to ensure all systems were 

80 percent of the answer,” explained Olansen. “It didn’t give us working as expected. Everything checked out. No shippingevery detail, but it gave us plenty of information to design baffles related issues were found. 

we could put into the tanks to reduce slosh to the point where On August 7, Morpheus made its first free-flight attempt. 

it’s not an impact to the way we fly. It’s great for a prototype, but The vehicle successfully rose a couple feet off the ground but, 

it would require more work if we were going to fly in space with shortly after liftoff, sensors onboard the vehicle falsely detected 

a follow-on vehicle. But we now have an 80-percent solution, an engine burn-through. The rest of the system reacted 

and it cost us $80 to get it there.” as programmed: it initiated a soft abort, descended to the 

“Because you don’t always have the money to buy the most launchpad, and shut off its engines.

expensive and best parts, you’ve got to build something that “The test lasted probably a total of 7 seconds,” said Olansen. 

works, then go out and test,” added Epp. “You just proceed in “We brought the vehicle back to the hangar, and we knew 

that fashion and move ahead.” immediately it was a false indication, which we fixed.” During 

Both teams follow a build-test-build philosophy. “When you that review, the team discovered the lander’s footpads had 

do that kind of testing, things don’t always work how you expect. melted slightly from being in the engine plume. They reached 

But you learn, then you go back and do it again,” said Epp. out to the thermal-protection experts at Kennedy for advice. 

Crucial to that learning is good communication—across “They came up with a design using excess shuttle materials, 

the team and up the chain of management. Since the combined implemented it, and built new thermally protected footpads for 

teams include seven NASA centers and a few commercial partners us in about four hours.”

spread out across the nation, much of the communication Two days later, they were ready to try again. Loaded 

happens in teleconferences and e-mail, but Olansen and Epp are with mass simulators to represent the ALHAT payload—the 

co-located at Johnson and get folks face to face when needed. actual sensors would be used once free-flight tests completed 

“Whenever we felt it was necessary to get the group successfully—Morpheus again fired up its engines and began 

together face to face, we would do that. You can do a lot to ascend. Just 0.6 seconds after liftoff, the lander experienced 

with telecommunications, but sometimes you still need to data loss from its inertial measurement unit (IMU), the prime 

get together and talk,” said Epp. Early on, the ALHAT team navigation sensor that tells the vehicle where it’s headed. 

got together four times a year for a few days to review what “Without that data, the vehicle had no way to control 

they were learning and how to proceed. “This year we moved itself,” Olansen explained. “It continued to try to respond to 

everything initially to Langley Research Center and tested the last piece of data it had, which was a slight correction in 

there with the whole team: Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Langley, attitude. As a result, it continually corrected for that pitch error 

Johnson, and Draper Laboratories. Then we came to Johnson and never received information it was corrected, which resulted 

and brought everyone here to work on Morpheus.” in a parabolic flight trajectory.”

ASA: Ntidero CtohP

Crash site after 

Morpheus’s second 

free-flight attempt.

ASK MAGAZINE | 7
Morpheus crashed—and the crash was streamed live it was not a mishap because I notified him that this outcome 

on the Internet. The response, both within the agency and was identified in a pre-declare.”

from external news media, was immediate. Calls and e-mails “When Terry got the initial notification, his quick response 

came pouring in. Those from the agency, including from was this does not rise to the threshold for NASA mishap,” 

Administrator Charles Bolden, were supportive and reassuring. said Mike Ryschewitsch, NASA’s chief engineer. “From 

Upper management let the team know immediately the project his perspective and my perspective, they had pre-identified 

would continue, and they should work to recover, learn, and that loss of the hardware was one of the possible outcomes and 

improve the next build. had done a very thorough job of safety planning to protect 

For Olansen, the toughest part of being a manager during against the worst-case incident, which was what actually 

the time immediately following the crash was ensuring his did happen, to be sure that no one would get hurt. If either 

attention wasn’t pulled away from his team. Because everything one of those had not been true ... then it would have been a 

was streamed publicly, there was a lot of attention that required different slice.”

his response. “Instead of responding to those things right away, Morpheus’s deputy project manager, Stephen Munday, led 

the first thing I did was ensure the emergency procedures and the failure-investigation meetings that followed, sitting down 

recovery activities were occurring properly. Take care of the with Olansen to discuss findings and next directions, which 

important things first and make sure the team, the hardware, were communicated to the team, who were simultaneously 

and everything else was safe,” he said. working on design improvements. Since much of the evidence 

As the team picked up the pieces from the crash site, Olansen had burned in the crash, a definitive root cause could not be 

paused to gather everyone in the middle of the field and let them determined. But knowing the IMU failure contributed to the 

know their efforts were not over; Morpheus wasn’t canceled; this crash and analyzing the flight data they could recover, the team 

was a chance to learn and make the next lander better. deduced that heavy vibration likely led to connectors from the 

The failure investigation never escalated to a full, formal IMU losing contact. 

mishap investigation largely because the team’s communication “We were able to recover vibration data all the way through 

and documentation had been robust, even with its scaled- the crash, and we could evaluate and assess the vibro-acoustic 

back customization. environment, which we believe was a significant player in the 

The team worked to “pre-declare” expected test outcomes, cause of the crash,” said Olansen. “We know there was a failure 

a process introduced for rapid-prototype projects at NASA. between the IMU and the computer that was receiving the 

Gerry Schumann, the mishap investigator program manager data, but the computer itself and the software were working 

at Kennedy, sat down with the project managers and safety fine. It was in the transmission from the IMU to the computer 

personnel to define the potential risks. “Tests are just that: where the problem occurred. There are cable connectors, 

tests,” he said. “If we pre-declare what might go wrong through bus couplers, and the IMU itself—any of those components 

fault analysis and perform engineering analysis afterward, then could have been the failure and would have provided the 

we don’t need a full-blown mishap investigation. signature we saw.”

“Appropriately notifying everyone when the crash happened To reduce the chance of recurrence, they are adding a 

was also important,” Schumann added. “Terry [Wilcutt, second IMU and will isolate both units from vibration (which 

NASA’s chief of safety and mission assurance] knew right away was not done initially because isolation could affect the vehicle’s ASA: Ntidero CtohP

While Morpheus rebuilds, 

the Autonomous Landing 

Hazard Avoidance Technology 

team continues testing their 

sensors by attaching them to 

a helicopter and performing 

field tests.

8 | ASK MAGAZINE
ehes KirK/ASA: Ntidero CtohP ybbie BoJ/ASA: Ntidero CtohP

The witness plate is installed to 

gauge the environment during 

liftoff. Damage, if any, sustained 

during the firing is valuable data 

for future sensor positioning.

The team prepares Morpheus for 

attachment to the crane rigging.

ASK MAGAZINE | 9
ability to meet ALHAT’s stringent pointing requirements). In 

addition, they plan to upgrade the cable connectors and bus 

couplers with military-grade hardware as well as create a flame 

trench on their launchpad to reduce the vibration.

Confident they will have a lander on which to test their 

payload, the ALHAT team has proceeded with testing and 

improvements to their sensors.

“We realized there was going to be a lull, so we quickly set 

out to run a helicopter test and fly trajectories toward the hazard 

field using our sensors exactly the way we would fly them on 

Morpheus,” said Epp. “And that has turned out to be extremely 

valuable. It’s going to help us get a big head start on success 

once Morpheus flies again. Our sensors are being updated and 

improved based on that helicopter test. And that test has gotten 

our team excited.”

“We didn’t stand the team down while we did a failure 

investigation,” said Olansen. “A couple of us focused on the 

failure investigation, but the rest of the team focused on the 

redesign effort, the improvements we needed, and the rebuild. 

We still put rigor into the failure investigation, but we didn’t 

have the whole team stand down to do that. I think giving them 

something to look forward to and work toward, which was 

driving them the couple years prior, was a key component to 

getting back on the horse.” 

Epp added, “The impact to us wasn’t quite as bad as it was 

for Morpheus, but one of the things I always try to seize on is 

opportunity. Failure frequently opens up opportunity. Suddenly 

there was opportunity for us to make our system better. The 

whole idea of moving on and finding ways to do it better became 

a pretty good rallying point.”

Future Flight

Since last summer, the Morpheus and ALHAT teams have

become a single team, though not much has changed in the

way they work together. The camaraderie and trust that existed

before continue today. 

“I’ve been with NASA for a while, and NASA culture rallies 

around accidents and failure,” said Epp. “NASA has a culture 

that says pick your feet up, figure out what went wrong, and do 

it better. I’ve seen that over and over again, and I think this was 

another beautiful illustration of that.” ●

ttenran HeruaL/ASA: Ntidero CtohP

Project Morpheus tether 

test on March 13, 2012. 

AS THE TEAM pICKED Up THE pIECES FROM 

THE CRASH SITE, OLANSEN pAUSED TO 

GATHER EvERyONE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE 

FIELD AND LET THEM KNOW THEIR EFFORTS 

WERE NOT OvER; MORpHEUS WASN’T 

CANCELED; THIS WAS A CHANCE TO LEARN 

AND MAKE THE NEXT LANDER BETTER.

10 | ASK MAGAZINE
Scientific instruments for robotic NASA space missions are usually designed for flight on a specific 

satellite with a planned launch date. Sometimes multiple copies of instruments are developed to fly 

on several satellites. Occasionally, the last instrument in the series is launched years after originally 

planned and may be decades old when it finally reaches space.

The Challenge of Launching 

Old Scientific Instruments

BY KAREN HALTERMAN

InsIght | ASK MAGAZINE | 11
It might seem that almost all work related to flying a series Mitigation: Decision authorities need to be aware of the 

of instruments should be finished after the flight hardware is problems of flight hardware maintenance and should advocate 

built, with only minimal effort needed later to launch the stored for the necessary budget. The POES project has addressed this 

instruments. In reality, maintaining flight hardware for many by identifying the increased risks to mission success without the 

years prior to flight is a major challenge. The experiences of necessary sustaining engineering funding. While it is expensive 

the Goddard Space Flight Center Polar Operational Satellites to lengthen the old mission, its longer lifetime often defers the 

(POES) in providing earth-sensing instruments developed for costs of a follow-on mission to later years. 

the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for 

flight on the European Meteorological Operational (MetOp) Retaining Knowledge

spacecraft teaches some important lessons about that challenge. Problem: It is difficult to preserve detailed understanding of the 

These instruments were procured from Goddard design, manufacturing, and testing of flight hardware twenty 

instrument contractors at an average cost of about $14 million years after the last unit was delivered. Folks move to new projects, 

for each instrument at delivery in the late 1990s. The last set of relocate, change employers, or retire. Companies no longer 

these instruments will be almost twenty years old at the time of produce spaceflight hardware or go out of business. Records are 

their planned launched on MetOp-C around 2018. archived somewhere in yellowing paper or in obsolete, unreadable 

electronic media. Documentation is incomplete or ambiguous. 

Programmatic Issues Important unwritten lessons have been forgotten. 

Some of the issues faced by POES and other projects responsible Mitigation: Continuity of a core team is essential to 

for launching old instruments are programmatic, relating to maintaining old instruments and new people must be added 

how the missions are supported, staffed, and managed. when needed. On-orbit support for the launched instruments 

can provide a focus for training new personnel. The POES 

Obtaining Sufficient Funding project has maintained high-fidelity engineering units on 

Problem: When a decision is made to develop a series of all instrument contracts. They bring their essential expertise 

satellites and instruments, the need for the mission is well to rehearsals for working on the flight unit and investigating 

defined. Strong financial arguments are made for copies of the anomalies by recreating the test conditions or on-orbit 

same instrument—savings come from having a single design for environment. Frequently, the company that provided the unit is 

multiple units and mass parts purchases. Many years later, after developing newer instruments in the same family type and has 

all but the last unit of the series are on orbit, it is much harder a pool of skilled individuals who can assist the older project. Key 

to obtain needed funding. Typically, the original schedule is positions in the new project are often filled by veterans of the 

out of date and the final launch has been delayed many years. previous instrument generation. Retirees from the old project 

Government managers who started the mission have transferred have been an excellent knowledge source for the POES project; 

to other projects or retired, and savings from procuring multiple they often gladly work part time and can support essential 

copies are being eroded by the sustaining engineering costs for activities like prelaunch reviews. Incentives to keep experienced 

the unexpectedly long mission lifetime. Those now responsible people with the old project include interesting assignments 

for budgets are probably struggling to fund missions currently during slow periods, participation in spacecraft-level testing, 

in development and may be less familiar with the old one. attending the final launch, and bonuses. 

CONTINUITy OF A CORE TEAM IS ESSENTIAL TO MAINTAINING OLD INSTRUMENTS 

AND NEW pEOpLE MUST BE ADDED WHEN NEEDED. ON-ORBIT SUppORT FOR THE 

LAUNCHED INSTRUMENTS CAN pROvIDE A FOCUS FOR TRAINING NEW pERSONNEL. 

12 | ASK MAGAZINE
Extending Contracts contract, executed in 1988, has had more than 375 modifications, 

Problem: It takes about five years from contract start to deliver including several sole-source performance period extensions. 

the last unit in a series. Assuming another twenty years until the General NASA requirements should be grandfathered to when 

final launch, flight hardware contracts can be active for twenty- the instruments were delivered unless there is compelling reason 

five years or longer. Corporate takeovers and mergers as well as and funding to add new ones to the contract. 

changes to major subcontractors and suppliers are likely to affect 

contracts that old. Company restructuring usually creates new Technical Issues

mandated processes and procedures that are disruptive to an old POES and similar projects also have to deal with technical 

issues related to the age of instruments.

Extended Storage

pROBLEMS WITH FLIGHT HARDWARE Problem: Had it been known at project start that the final 

instrument would be launched twenty years after delivery, long- RESULTING FROM MANy yEARS ON term maintenance would have been a design requirement. Easy 

THE GROUND INCLUDE EXpIRATION OF replenishment of limited-life items or storage orientation to 

minimize gravitational effects are the kinds of measures that 

MATERIALS’ SHELF LIvES, LUBRICANT would have been taken. Problems with flight hardware resulting 

from many years on the ground include expiration of materials’ CREEpING FROM BEARINGS AND shelf lives, lubricant creeping from bearings and reservoirs, 

RESERvOIRS, RELAXATION OF MECHANICAL relaxation of mechanical preloads, cracking of stakes and bonds, 

and contamination of detectors by moisture or organics.

pRELOADS, CRACKING OF STAKES Mitigation: Flight hardware should be kept in an 

appropriately clean, controlled environment. POES project AND BONDS, AND CONTAMINATION OF instruments are purged with gaseous nitrogen to minimize 

the degradation of materials over time. They are activated DETECTORS By MOISTURE OR ORGANICS. periodically to ensure they function properly and to exercise 

motors and mechanisms. If testing before launch indicates that 

performance has degraded and there is insufficient budget or 

time for repair, then project leaders must recognize that all 

project. Government contract administration is required until instrument requirements may not be met on orbit.

the last instrument is launched. The continually updating NASA 

flight-project requirements need to be evaluated to determine Making Repairs

which ones apply to flight hardware built so many years earlier. Problem: If flight hardware is twenty years old at launch, it 

Mitigation: Appropriate levels of government contractual, was probably modified after it was built. Instruments can 

financial, and technical effort are necessary to keep the require rework for many reasons: to correct problems found on 

instrument contracts active. One POES project instrument earlier units in the series, in response to parts alerts, handling 

ASK MAGAZINE | 13
or shipment damage, test failures, spacecraft interface changes, 

contamination, overstressing during testing, alignment changes, 

and other factors. There is risk in repairing an old instrument 

without skilled people, good documentation, and the necessary 

ground-support equipment (GSE). A full set of spare parts or 

assemblies may not be available because they were never originally 

procured or were installed in earlier flight units. Acquiring new 

parts for old flight hardware is arduous; parts may no longer 

be manufactured, may be unaffordable due to minimum lot 

requirements, or be only available from an unreliable off-shore 

supplier. The design may contain unique parts developed by a 

niche company that went bankrupt. Existing parts probably 

need relife testing. If new parts are used to replace obsolete 

or unavailable parts, redesign will be necessary. Replacement 

parts may not fit the original footprint, interfaces, or thermal 

characteristics. The company’s manufacturing capabilities may 

have been modernized since the instrument was built. For 

example, surface-mount techniques may be the sole method 

used today for electronics boards, so repair of boards designed 

for older techniques may not be possible.

Mitigation: If a problem is minor, it may be better not to risk 

repairing an old instrument. Spare parts should be replenished 

when used so that a complete set remains available until the 

last unit is launched. If repairs are necessary and some parts are 

missing, aggressive efforts will be needed to locate them. Some 

parts may still be in stock at the company or within NASA. 

POES project contractors have acquired new parts suppliers 

when the original parts were unavailable and undertook the 

formal flight qualification of the replacement parts. 

Updating Ground-Support Equipment

Problem: GSE is often ignored when an instrument waits 

twenty years for flight. Computers used for structural analysis 

and to control instrument tests and process science data when 

Karen halterman d has been the POES project manager 

since 2001, interrupted by fi ve years starting in 2006 when she 

, served as the Magnetospheric Multiscale project manager.

the instruments were built probably have been supersede

numerous times. Equipment needed for environmental testing

including special fixtures, thermal-vacuum chambers, and 

thermal-vacuum targets, may not be found.

Mitigation: Implementing a realistic GSE refresh plan 

is essential. EBay can sometimes be a source of antiquated 

equipment. The POES project has modernized GSE when 

sufficient spare parts are unavailable to repair existing GSE.

Meeting the Challenge

As the POES experience shows, maintaining old flight hardware 

is challenging. A variety of programmatic and technical issues 

must be dealt with to successfully launch flight hardware 

decades after manufacture.

Early planning for the possibility that many years may pass 

before an instrument is launched can help avoid or mitigate 

problems later on. That may happen to many science missions, 

not only those that feature instruments built for multiple flights. 

In today’s era of constrained budgets, such delays are likely to 

be common. The lessons of POES can help those other missions 

meet the challenge. ●

14 | ASK MAGAZINE
ASA: Ntidero C

Antarctica offers a unique environment for long-duration balloon flights, which the International Focusing Optics Collaboration for micro-Crab Sensitivity 

to

(InFOCuS) mission hopes to take advantage of in 2014. Here, the Super Trans-Iron Galactic Element Recorder payload prepares for its Antarctic launch.

hP

In an article on the NuSTAR launch delay in the fall 2012 issue of ASK, I wrote, “NuSTAR,

the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, contains the fi rst focusing telescopes designed to look 

at high-energy X-ray radiation.” Soon after that issue was sent out, complaints began to arrive:

What about the balloon missions with focusing X-ray telescopes that preceded it? Didn’t I know 

about HERO, the High-Energy Replicating Optics mission? Or HEFT, the High-Energy Focusing 

Telescope? And what about InFOCuS, the International Focusing Optics Collaboration for microCrab Sensitivity? Even the names of two of the three made it clear that those pre-NuSTAR missions 

featured focusing high-energy telescopes.

BUILDING A BETTER

THE LEGACY OF NASA’S BALLOON MISSIONS

BY DON COHEN

story | ASK MAGAZINE | 15
Well, no, I didn’t know about them. I’d never heard of them. mission, notes that balloon missions’ time scale of a few years 

My mistake. In the online version of the NuSTAR article, we is ideal for PhD students. Because of that relatively short span 

added a qualifier—the first focusing telescopes “on orbit”—to from start to finish and because balloon mission teams are much 

the offending sentence to make it true. I promised to correct the smaller than the teams responsible for orbital missions, students 

error in a later print issue of ASK. can be involved in every aspect of a mission.

Which is what I’m doing here. But when I began to look 

into those balloon missions, it became clear that they should From HEFT to NuSTAR

have more than a brief mention in a one- or two-sentence Graduate student experience with balloon-based high-energy 

apology. They are well worth writing about in their own right. astronomy brought Fiona Harrison into the field. The desire to 

And the way they have fostered expertise and technical advances build a more sensitive, focusing instrument eventually led to her 

that made NuSTAR possible and continue to contribute to new becoming principal investigator for HEFT, a NASA-sponsored 

missions is an especially rich subject for ASK. mission carried out by Caltech, Lawrence Livermore National 

Laboratory, Columbia University, and the Danish National 

Why Balloons? Space Center. Harrison, a professor of astronomy at Caltech, 

The drawbacks of balloon-based astronomy are obvious. says that HEFT helped develop the technology that eventually 

The missions are very brief compared to the years-long life of made NuSTAR possible.

orbiting telescopes, many lasting less than a full day. Although Proposed in 1995, HEFT’s first flight occurred in 2005. 

the balloons rise high enough to avoid much of the atmospheric The ten years between proposal and launch included four or 

distortion and absorption that limits Earth-based telescopes, five years of technology development of the instrument’s optics 

they do not eliminate those problems entirely. And even the and detectors. A big challenge of imaging high-energy X-rays 

thin atmosphere above 125,000 feet exerts forces that make is that they can only be reflected toward a detector if they 

holding a steady focus on distant objects challenging. strike a mirror at a very shallow angle, grazing the surface like 

But there are important advantages. The obvious one is a stone skipping off the surface of a lake. At a steeper angle of 

cost. Launching a balloon payload costs a tiny fraction of what incidence, they will penetrate the reflecting material instead. So 

a rocket launch does. And, unlike an orbital mission, a balloon’s HEFT’s mirrors are conical tubes that focus X-rays that enter 

gondola and the instruments it contains can usually be recovered almost parallel to their surface. In order to collect enough of 

intact and used again. the radiation to create a useful image, the telescope consists 

The low cost and instrument reuse make the balloon mission of several hundred reflecting surfaces nested each within the 

especially useful for testing and improving instruments—as others, separated by a thin substrate.

opposed to the orbital-science missions whose instruments need The teams originally used aluminum foil as the substrate 

to be as close to perfect as possible before launch. That low cost but that material could not hold its shape well enough to 

and the relative frequency of missions also make them ideal meet the required rigorous specifications. Through trial and 

opportunities for graduate students in high-energy astronomy error, they eventually settled on a “slumped” glass substrate—

to learn their trade—something that the more expensive but extremely thin glass sheets, like those developed for flat-panel 

budget-limited orbital missions could not accommodate. Brian televisions, melted into the proper shape over molds (called 

Ramsey, leader of Marshall Space Flight Center’s HERO “mandrels”). Designing and building an effective detector was 

DESIGNING AND BUILDING AN EFFECTIvE DETECTOR WAS ALSO A 

pROCESS OF TRIAL AND ERROR. BEFORE THE FIRST LAUNCH, SEvERAL 

pROTOTypES USING DIFFERENT TECHNOLOGIES HAD TO BE TRIED SO THE 

RIGHT COMBINATION COULD BE BUILT INTO THE FLIGHT pAyLOAD.

16 | ASK MAGAZINE
also a process of trial and error. Before the first launch, several 

prototypes using different technologies had to be tried so the 

right combination could be built into the flight payload.

Without HEFT, there probably would have been no 

NuSTAR. For one thing, the success of the balloon mission 

was an incontestable proof of concept that helped convince the 

committee judging candidate proposals for NASA’s Explorer 

program that NuSTAR could perform as promised. And the 

HEFT team became the core of the NuSTAR team, bringing 

their experience and the knowledge it fostered to the orbital 

mission. So in addition to providing its own science results, like 

an X-ray image of the Crab Nebula, HEFT was a test bed and 

training ground for the later mission.

Not all the expertise that made NuSTAR possible comes 

from HEFT. At Goddard Space Flight Center, Will Zhang was 

working on slumped-glass substrate for mirrors for the proposed 

Constellation-X mission (which later merged with the European 

XEUS, or X-ray Evolving Universe Spectroscopy, project to 

become the International X-ray Observatory, or IXO). Harrison 

was lead of the Constellation-X team and thus knew about 

Zhang’s work. She determined that it had advantages over what 

had been done for HEFT and asked him to make glass segments 

for NuSTAR, which were then coated and built into mirrors by 

the same team that built HEFT.

From HERO to ART

Marshall’s HERO mission uses a different technology for 

building its telescopes. Instead of the slumped-glass substrate 

segments used on HEFT and NuSTAR, it uses electroformed 

nickel replication to create nickel-cobalt shells that are then 

coated with a thin reflective layer of iridium. Only 1/100th of an 

inch thick, the shells are grown in a tank on polished aluminum

mandrels. Unlike the slumped-glass substrates, which must be 

bonded together to make a conical whole, the nickel-cobalt shells 

are single conical pieces. This allows the HERO technology to 

provide greater angular resolution—the ability of a telescope 

View from inside the 

optical bench of the HERO 

configuration consisting 

of eight co-aligned mirror 

modules, each module 

containing twelve mirror shells.

r te ne Ct h ig

Fl ecap l Slahsr a MASAN:ti der C ot ohP

Photo Credit: NASA/Nagoya University

ASK MAGAZINE | 17

InFOCuS heads above the clouds. At a 

float altitude of 128,000 feet, the balloon 

will inflate to 40 million cubic feet, large 

enough to hold several jumbo jets. 
Front view of the High-Energy 

Focusing Telescope instrument 

minutes before launch.

maeT TFE: Htidero CtohP

to separately image objects at a small angular distance from flights possible. Thirty-day flights have occurred and a newly 

one another. NuSTAR’s optics have an angular resolution of designed high-pressure balloon might stay aloft for more than 

about 50 arc seconds; the angular resolution of HERO’s optics one hundred days. That, notes Ramsey, could make them a lowis 25 arc seconds. (One arc second is 1/3,600th of a degree of cost competitor with orbital missions.

angular measurement.) HERO’s mirrors are, however, relatively A new pointing system that can keep balloon-based 

heavier than glass-substrate mirrors. telescopes aimed at distant objects with unprecedented accuracy 

HERO took the first focused hard X-ray images of any should also contribute to the scientific value of future missions. 

kind in 2001—images of Cygnus X-1 and the Crab Nebula. It The Wallops Arc Second Pointer (or WASP), developed at 

is scheduled to fly next in the fall of 2013 to look at our sun as NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility, can steadily aim a telescope at 

well as targets outside the solar system. an object or area a single arc-second wide. Ramsey hopes that 

HERO’s superior imaging technology has been used on WASP will be used on a future “Super-HERO” mission.

FOXSI, the Berkeley-based Focusing Optics X-ray Solar Imager, InFOCuS also currently features a rigid telescope 8 meters 

a sounding-rocket mission that flew in November 2012. And the long, something not possible in the confined payload space of 

Russian space program is purchasing HERO-like optics for the existing orbital launch vehicles. But what scientists and engineers 

ART (Astronomical Roentgen Telescope) instrument aboard learn from that instrument can guide future orbital missions that 

the Russian-led Spectrum Roentgen Gamma project, an orbital have a deployable folded version of an instrument of similar size.

mission designed for an all-sky X-ray survey and scheduled for Zhang’s continuing work on slumped-glass-based mirrors 

a 2014 launch. will also serve future missions. Currently, he is able to produce 

substrates with approximately ten times the resolution of 

The Ongoing Legacy NuSTAR’s instruments. The challenge here is whether they can 

Jack Tueller, principal investigator for InFOCuS, describes the be built up into a full optic and retain the good performance. 

“enormous technological evolution” that has characterized that The technology was expected to be used in IXO. That mission 

mission (a collaboration between Goddard and the University has been canceled, but the technology is ready for the future 

of Nagoya), which launched its first balloon-borne telescope in application that will come and will bring with it new discoveries.

2001. As was true of HEFT and HERO, the InFOCuS team The story of these past, present, and future missions shows 

had to work toward the design of an effective instrument. how technological progress happens. Instruments become 

Some of the early versions of nested reflective surfaces would increasingly sophisticated and powerful by incorporating and 

“crinkle up,” says Tueller. Commenting on the trial-and-error improving on the achievements of their predecessors. That 

opportunities offered by balloon missions, Tueller adds, “The improvement is possible because of the openness of scientific 

risk is less than for orbital missions. If it’s not successful, you get and engineering communities to share with and learn from 

the payload back and fly it again.” one another. There is competition, Zhang admits, but, he says, 

InFOCuS continues to develop. X-Calibur, a new “We compete and cooperate.” Communication is key. “We go 

instrument that will detect the polarization of X-ray, will fly by to the same conferences,” says Zhang. “We read and publish in 

2014. And the InFOCuS team is investigating long-duration the same publications; we hear things through the grapevine.” 

flights that would be launched from Antarctica, where wind And they share the same goal: a fuller understanding of how the 

patterns and 24-hours-a-day summer sunlight make the long universe works. ● 

18 | ASK MAGAZINE
Brian Ramsey, lead scientist for the High-Energy Replicating Optics 

program, installs the mirrors that in May 2001 collected the world’s 

first focused high-energy X-ray images of any astronomical object. 

The Marshall-fabricated mirrors, a special type called “grazing 

incidence,” are nested cylinders with extremely smooth inner 

surfaces that reflect high-energy X-rays at very shallow angles.

... LOW COST AND THE RELATIvE FREqUENCy OF 

MISSIONS ALSO MAKE THEM IDEAL OppORTUNITIES 

FOR GRADUATE STUDENTS IN HIGH-ENERGy 

ASTRONOMy TO LEARN THEIR TRADE—SOMETHING 

THAT THE MORE EXpENSIvE BUT BUDGET-LIMITED 

ORBITAL MISSIONS COULD NOT ACCOMMODATE.

r et ne t C h ig Fl ecap l S al hsra MASAN:t di er C to ohP

ASK MAGAZINE | 19
Title

BY 

Intro nn GuisrCh/ASA N:tide CrothoP

Niko Stergiou, a contractor at 

Goddard Space Flight Center, 

helped manufacture the 9,000 mirror 

segments that make up the optics 

unit in the NuSTAR mission. 

Many NASA projects involve designing and building one-of-a-kind spacecraft and instruments. 

Created for particular, unique missions, they are custom-made, more like works of technological art 

than manufactured objects. Occasionally, a mission calls for two identical satellites (STEREO, the 

Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory, for instance). Sometimes multiple parts of an instrument 

are nearly identical: the eighteen hexagonal beryllium mirror segments that will form the James 

Webb Space Telescope’s mirror are one example. But none of this is mass production or anything 

close to it.

BUILDING NUSTAR’S MIRRORS

20 | ASK MAGAZINE | story
The mirror segments my group has built for NuSTAR, the the interior surface and a bakeout, dries into a smooth and clean 

Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, are not mass produced surface, very much like glazed ceramic tiles. Finally we had to 

either, but we make them on a scale that may be unique at NASA: map the temperatures inside each oven to ensure they would 

we created more than 20,000 mirror segments over a period of two provide a uniform heating environment so the glass sheets 

years. In other words, we’re talking about some middle ground could slump in a controlled and gradual way. Any “wrinkles” 

between one-of-a-kind custom work and industrial production. inadvertently introduced would lead to permanent error on the 

finished mirror segment. 

Mirrors for NuSTAR NuSTAR required a total of nearly 9,000 mirror segments: 

The mirror segments of NuSTAR’s two X-ray telescopes are just under 3,000 for each of the two telescopes that would 

made from thin glass sheets coated in alternating layers a few fly on the spacecraft plus another 3,000 for a spare. To make 

atoms thick with silicon and tungsten. They focus hard X-rays sure we could guarantee to provide that many, and given the 

that glance off those reflecting surfaces at an extremely shallow inevitability of breakage and other losses during the many steps 

angle. To capture sufficient X-rays to ensure high-quality images, between their creation and their finally being integrated into the 

the mirror segments are nested one inside the other—a total of telescopes, we decided to produce 20,000. Of those, we shipped 

133 concentric shells of mirrors for each telescope. To create 15,000 to the Danish Technical University in Copenhagen and 

the mirror segments, sheets of glass are placed atop molds, or Columbia University in New York City, where they were coated 

mandrels, and heated until they “slump” to the required shape. with multilayers and assembled into the two telescopes. 

I have been developing and perfecting the process for forming The challenge was not only producing these delicate 

these mirror segments for more than a decade. My coworkers and components to the necessary rigorous specifications but also 

I first had to find a way to prevent the glass sheet from sticking doing so within the constraints imposed by a stringent project 

to the mandrel surface at the slumping temperature: 600 degrees budget and schedule. We needed to combine the precision of 

centigrade. After investigating a number of materials, we settled custom work with the efficiency of something like industrial 

on a boron-nitride slurry that is widely used in industrial casting mass production. That meant honing the process to make each 

processes. The specific challenge we had to meet was to smooth step as efficient, simple, and reliable as possible. For example, 

the boron-nitride release layer so that it does not create a texture we reduced the amount of time required to smooth the boronon the finished glass segments. Any texture or roughness on the nitride coat from fifteen weeks to less than eight weeks. We also 

glass surface would result in scattering that would degrade X-ray had to optimize the temperature cycle of the oven to reduce the 

image quality. overall amount of cycle time from thirty-one hours to less than 

Many trials and errors led us to a procedure that smoothed sixteen hours, so the process could be completed overnight. This 

the initially rough boron-nitride surface to a mirror finish. reduction was absolutely essential to meet the project schedule. 

Then we had to reengineer the interior surfaces of commercially I knew we needed savvy, hands-on people to do the work. 

procured electric ovens to create a clean environment, because Practical experience with handling materials—a sense of the 

any particulates in the oven could be trapped between the glass “feel” of things—was much more important than theoretical 

sheet and the mandrel surface, creating craters on the finished knowledge. Fortunately for us, a nearby automotive shop was 

mirror surface and degrading image quality. Fortunately, we downsizing as a result of the recession. We quickly picked up six 

were able to find a ceramic slurry that, after being sprayed on of their technicians who fit the bill.

BY wILLIAM w. ZHANG

ASK MAGAZINE | 21
nn GuisrCh/ASA N:tide CrothoP

Astrophysicist William Zhang conceived an idea for 

making curved or slumped glass mirror segments 

to focus highly energetic X-ray photons. 

22 | ASK MAGAZINE
In February 2008, Goddard management made available 

to us a warehouse to use. We had to clean it and create a clean 

room and buy ovens and other equipment. Then our team had 

three months of training. The training of a new worker starts 

with familiarizing him or her with handling the 0.21-mm-thick 

glass sheets. Typically during the first two weeks on the job, a 

worker would break a number of mirror segments. Miraculously, 

workers rarely broke a mirror segment once they got the knack 

of handling it. The training ends with the worker being able 

to work independently, from operating ultrasonic cleaners to 

programming electronic oven controllers and cutting the thin 

glass mirrors with a nearly 100-percent success rate. In the 

spring of 2009, we began cranking out mirrors. We finished 

in early 2011, slightly ahead of project schedule and 10 percent 

under budget, saving more than $500,000 for the project.

The entire manufacturing process was not without surprises, 

however. In the summer of 2009, for instance, we found that 

some mirror segments had unacceptably high microroughness. 

We quickly traced this problem to a detergent we were using 

to clean the glass sheets in ultrasonic cleaners. The particular 

batch of detergent was exceedingly alkaline and was chemically 

etching the glass sheets, compromising the pristine, extremely 

smooth surface that is required. We quickly implemented a 

procedure to monitor the pH of the ultrasonic solution and the 

time that each glass sheet is soaked. 

Continuous Improvement

Three quantities define the power of a telescope. One is

angular resolution, or the ability of optics to image objects 

located at a small angular distance from each other as separate. 

Another is total photon-collecting area. The third is energy 

bandwidth—the range of photons of different energies a

telescope can focus. 

Given the budget limitations and related mass limitations 

of small Explorer missions like NuSTAR, the collecting area 

of an orbiting X-ray telescope is essentially fixed. Bandwidth 

is relatively fixed as well, limited by the physics of mirrors 

and detectors. So the one place that has significant room for

William W. Zhang is an astrophysicist at Goddard Space 

Flight Center. In addition to his work for NuSTAR, he is leading 

a group of scientists and engineers developing lightweight and 

high-angular-resolution X-ray optics for future NASA missions.

improvement is angular resolution, which is largely a function

of the precision of the mirrors. That’s what we’ve been working

on since the completion of our work for NuSTAR.

We have made improvements in all three areas involved in 

making these telescopes.

Substrate. We are now making the mandrels more precise. 

For NuSTAR, we formed two or three layers on each mandrel 

and distorted them slightly to fit one within the other. Now each 

layer has its own mandrel. More than doubling the number of 

molds has required us to lower the price of each by 50 percent. For 

a future mission we are working on reducing the cost of making 

mandrels so that, for the same budget as NuSTAR, we expect 

to be able to make two to three times the number of mandrels. 

Coating. The NuSTAR substrates were coated with silicon 

and tungsten in alternate layers, each approximately 30 angstroms 

thick. That coating was somewhat “stressy” (meaning the coating 

exerted stress on the substrate) and therefore distorted the 

glass slightly when it was applied. We have now developed and 

optimized an annealing process that can effectively relieve all the 

coating stress, resulting in the preservation of the substrate figure. 

Assembly. In assembling the NuSTAR mirrors, colleagues 

at Columbia University had to force them into shape to fit 

them together. Now, more precise mirror shapes and improved 

assembly techniques have eliminated most of the distortion that 

process created. In the new process we have developed, each 

mirror segment is attached to the housing at only a small number 

of discrete locations, resulting in less constraint and distortion.

Taken together, these improvements reduce distortion 

by a factor of ten, leading to significantly better angular 

resolution. NuSTAR’s telescopes have an angular resolution of 

58 arc seconds. (An arc second is 1/3,600th of a degree.) We 

expect future telescopes to achieve an angular resolution of 

better than 10 arc seconds.

These new telescopes will fly first on a balloon or a sounding 

rocket. In the future, orbiting on a NuSTAR-like spacecraft, 

they will be able to see fainter objects farther away in space and 

further back in time, adding to our growing knowledge of the 

nature and origin of the universe. ●

Different views of one of two optic units onboard NuSTAR, 

each consisting of 133 nested cylindrical mirror shells as 

thin as a fingernail. The mirrors are arranged in this way in 

order to focus as much X-ray light as possible. 

ASK MAGAZINE | 23

 hcetlaC-LJP/ASA N:tide CrothoP
The 135 software engineering requirements for NASA projects 

are listed in a small, blue booklet, seventy pages long, called 

NASA Procedural Requirement (NPR) 7150.2. It is one of many 

NPRs at NASA for disciplines including finance, launch services, 

legal, human resources, and program/project management. They 

are the “how to and must do” for work at NASA. 

An inherent challenge of writing NPRs is stating what is 

required to readers without detailing how those requirements 

should be implemented. Make it too prescriptive and they might 

discount better-suited processes for their project. Too brief and 

they are left uncertain. In the case of 7150.2, almost every 

requirement is one sentence long. For instance, requirement 

2.4.1 on software verification reads, “The project shall plan 

software verification activities, methods, environments, and 

criteria for the project.” This single line of text is followed by a 

brief note and then requirement 2.4.2, software validation.

 “We [kept] it pretty lean,” said John Kelly, NASA’s 

program executive for software engineering, who was involved 

in devising the requirements, “but people were asking us for 

more information.”

The solution: write a handbook. A sort of hitchhiker’s guide 

to the NPR, a handbook doesn’t impose additional requirements; 

it’s meant to be an assist. One prominent and highly regarded 

example is the NASA Systems Engineering Handbook (NASA/

SP-2007-6105), which sits on the bookshelves and desks of 

systems engineers at NASA and beyond. The NASA software 

engineering community voiced their need for a similar resource. 

Their leadership responded with an electronic, browser-based 

handbook run on a wiki platform—a dramatically different 

approach for collaborative authorship and review that has 

sparked interest across NASA.

“Somebody described it almost as a knowledge capture 

type of activity,” remarked Kelly on the process of creating the 

handbook. “It’s as if all of a sudden NASA really knows what 

it knows.”

Not Wikipedia

In 2011, on a detail to the Office of the Chief Engineer at NASA 

Headquarters, Glenn Research Center’s Kevin Carmichael was 

assigned by Kelly to lead the development of NASA’s first-ever 

Software Engineering Handbook (SWEHB). 

Typically, creating and updating a handbook is a complicated 

and time-intensive process involving a plethora of e-mails, edits, 

version control, and spreadsheets called comment-resolution 

matrices. It can take years.

But the SWEHB wasn’t to be the usual handbook. Inspired 

by mobile apps and e-magazines, the software engineering 

working group leadership wanted the handbook to be electronic. 

To help refine their options, a member of the group brought 

in a web-savvy young professional from Goddard Space Flight 

Center, software engineer Jon Verville. 

Verville took the initial concept for the handbook and 

built on it to arrive at a robust and flexible solution. “It needed 

to be something that was broadly accessible, irrespective of 

platform—you know, mobile, desktop, laptop,” he explained. 

If you have the Internet, you can access the handbook, whereas 

selecting a proprietary solution or singling out a particular 

type of hardware like an iPad would limit that accessibility. 

Instead, Verville recommended a browser-based solution built 

on a wiki platform. 

Using a wiki platform, the NASA Software Engineering Working Group has set a new precedent

for collaboratively authoring, reviewing, and enabling interactivity for handbooks at NASA. 

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Software 

Engineering at NASA

 BY HALEY STEPHENSON

It’s as if all of a sudden NASA 

reall y knows what it knows.

24 | ASK MAGAZINE | InsIght
“For a lot of us, ‘wiki’ meant Wikipedia,” said Carmichael. 

“We all had some familiarity with that, but we didn’t see how it 

translated into what we were trying to do.”

The proposed wiki platform wouldn’t look like Wikipedia 

but it would have similar functionality. It would enable 

collaborative authorship of the handbook by a defined group. 

Furthermore, the platform provided simple, yet powerful 

features such as commenting, revision tracking, database 

capability, and hyperlinking. For example, publications often 

reference outside materials that are useful, but perhaps not easily 

found. “Then it’s an exercise for the reader to hunt that down, 

and it can be time consuming,” Verville said. “It’s just one more 

of these little hurdles that people encounter while trying to 

find the information they need.” Providing direct hyperlinks to 

online resources significantly reduces this barrier.

If a hyperlink or a reference changes, that’s okay, 

explained Verville. In paperback, a reference would have to 

be located everywhere it appears in the handbook, updated 

page by page, and reprinted. The wiki’s database feature 

could accomplish the same goal with a few keystrokes and 

the click of a button. 

Additionally, the platform would allow users to select a 

requirement from the directory or search for it. They could 

get what they need at the required level of detail and get back 

to work, or serendipitously discover other useful information 

that might help them further. Inside the wiki-based handbook 

Verville proposed, requirements like the aforementioned 2.4.1 

on software verification would have a richer, more accessible 

story to support them. 

Convinced, Carmichael and the SWEHB team dubbed 

Verville the handbook’s architect and committed to using a 

particular wiki platform called Confluence. 

The Beta Handbook

Each section of the SWEHB provides six areas of information 

per entry: the requirement, its rationale, guidance for 

implementation, notes for small projects, associated resources, 

and related lessons learned. 

The authoring team consisted of seven members, amounting 

to three and a half full-time employees, distributed across 

Tennessee, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C. 

They met in person only three times over the two and a half 

years they worked together and primarily coordinated through 

weekly teleconferences. “This was the first time that I managed 

a distributed team like that,” said Carmichael. “It worked 

exceedingly well.” 

The team came up with a six-step process for authoring 

and releasing each part of the handbook for review. Throughout 

each step, a built-in work-tracking system monitored their 

progress so they could all see who was working on what and 

if the work was under way, completed, or not yet started. 

The process steps were the following: author a section, send

it to a technical writer for review, send to Carmichael for 

review, send to Kelly for review, then a final review by the 

They could get what the y 

need at the re quired le vel of

detail and get back to work , or

serendi pitousl y disco ver other

useful information ...

ASK MAGAZINE | 25
section’s original author, and then post the content to the

wiki online. 

This didn’t make the content final, however. The final 

version of the handbook would have to undergo a technical 

working group review, an agencywide review, an Engineering 

Management Board review, and then receive final approval 

from NASA Chief Engineer Mike Ryschkewitsch. If the 

SWEHB were printed, this would have meant months to years 

before practitioners would be able to see any part of it. But 

the SWEHB wasn’t printed, so Carmichael and his team had 

another idea. 

“We had a lot of people who wanted help; they wanted 

guidance immediately. They didn’t want to wait two and 

a half years,” said Carmichael. “So we put stuff out there and 

we just called it ‘beta.’” This meant that anyone at NASA 

could see the SWEHB being built from the ground up, section 

by section.

The beta handbook’s rigorous six-step authorship and 

collaborative review process provided its contents an acceptable 

level of pedigree. Making the beta version available online 

also enabled anyone in the agency to review it and provide 

input in the form of comments on any of the published pages. 

Approved edits were made quickly and a team member would 

e-mail the individual who suggested the change to make sure 

the revision met their initial intention. “That was a different 

way of doing things,” said Carmichael. “Whenever we made 

edits ... people could see them immediately.”

“In an old process, you couldn’t do that. It would have 

been so labor intensive that all this interaction would have 

been impossible,” said Verville. “For instance, in one month, 

we received over one hundred comments from software experts 

across NASA, our team made over three hundred approved 

online edits, and we had over two thousand visits to the site 

from our review team. There is no way this could be replicated 

through anything but the web.” 

Posts and Threads

When the team pushed out the call to review the handbook, 

reviewers were given the option to put their comments into 

a spreadsheet and e-mail them back or post their comments 

directly to the bottom of the appropriate wiki page. Carmichael 

estimated that less than 3 percent of the comments were 

delivered by spreadsheet. 

“The vast majority of people found it to be much easier 

to put comments directly into the wiki, and people fed off 

other people’s comments, so it became a good discussion,” 

said Carmichael.

Throughout the review process, members from all ten 

centers used the commenting space available at the bottom of 

every page of the handbook to provide their input. In total, 

nearly eight hundred comments were collected. 

“There’s a little bit of threading here,” said Verville, pointing 

at his computer screen while clicking through a section of the 

handbook’s comments. “See, this person at Johnson responded 

to this person from Dryden .... It’s very contextual. You’re 

leaving a comment right on the page where you’re reviewing 

the information, and so when other people went to review it, 

it wasn’t about the whole handbook. It was on this particular 

section of 135 sections where they were putting their comments.”

“The inputs we got were fabulous,” Kelly said about the 

commenting feature. “That made it so much richer than just 

“THAT WAS A DIFFERENT WAy OF 

DOING THINGS,” SAID CARMICHAEL. 

“WHENEvER WE MADE EDITS ... pEOpLE 

COULD SEE THEM IMMEDIATELy.”

26 | ASK MAGAZINE
one person pounding away [on revisions] and not being able to 

reap some of the inputs from various people who contributed to 

the wiki environment.”

A Paradigm Shift

The SWEHB is the first of its kind at NASA. Approved by

Ryschkewitsch on February 28, 2013, the handbook serves as 

a successful test case for authoring and reviewing handbooks

in a digital environment. Throughout the process, the wiki

approach was met with some skepticism and caution, as it did 

not follow NASA’s traditional print-publication process. As a

result, the team worked diligently to gain stakeholder trust and 

buy-in to accommodate their electronic process, while ensuring 

the SWEHB would meet NASA’s requirements without

compromising its standards. 

Interest in capturing organizational or community

knowledge using a wiki platform is growing among groups

internal and external to NASA. Within NASA, the SWEHB

team has been approached by a number of groups who are

interested in learning from their process and implementing it

in their own organizations. Outside NASA, the Department of 

Defense sponsored a global collaboration among members from 

dozens of organizations to create the Systems Engineering Body 

of Knowledge using a similar platform. They released their final 

version in late 2012. 

The handbook is also representative of how the next

generation of employees at NASA will work, explained

Carmichael. Like the introduction of e-mail or social media into 

the workplace, implementing a new or unfamiliar paradigm is 

often met with some resistance. “Younger people in the agency 

will readily adopt stuff like this. The software engineering

community will readily adopt electronic media like this,” said 

Carmichael. However, because the SWEHB is not a book that 

sits on a shelf or a physical document, Carmichael anticipates 

the agency will see somewhat of a transition period for current 

employees—especially those who are more comfortable

with traditional handbooks—to acclimate to this particular 

electronic resource and the others that are likely to follow. “It’ll 

take time to overcome that,” Carmichael said. 

In May 2013, a version of NASA’s SWEHB will be made 

publicly available online at swehb.nasa.gov. This will be 

beneficial to NASA and its international, industry, and academic 

partners who build components integrated into NASA missions. 

If those components have software, they must meet 7150.2. 

“They have a big interest in knowing what’s in 7150.2 and the 

reasons behind the different requirements,” explained Verville. 

“So there’s a big [potential] for people who are our partners to 

get something out of this as well, maybe have feedback or have 

a stake in it being relevant to them, and for them to be able to 

comment on it, too.” 

“It’s a nice canned resource for people to pull information 

from,” said Kelly. Typically, if someone had a question about a 

requirement or topic, they’d have to track someone down to find 

what they needed to know. The handbook offers an alternative. 

“You don’t have to know somebody to ask something and get 

something in a real piecemeal fashion,” explained Kelly. “You 

can go to one place and boom, it’s all there. The knowledge of 

how you do things—how to successfully do things.

“It’s a lot easier than me fumbling through my files in my 

office,” laughed Kelly. ●

Find the Software Engineering Handbook 

online at swehb.nasa.gov, or by scanning this code.

ASK MAGAZINE | 27
Astronaut Don Pettit began his career with NASA seventeen 

years ago and has since flown on three spaceflight missions. 

Logging more than 370 days in space and over 13 spacewalk 

hours, he lived aboard the International Space Station for five 

and a half months during Expedition 6, was a member of the 

STS-126 crew, and again lived aboard station for six and a half 

months as part of the Expedition 30/31 crew. 

 INTERVIEw wITH

Don 

Pettit

 BY KERRY ELLIS

InsIght | ASK MAGAZINE | 28
electrician, a navigator. You could have being a crew. If you’re interested in doing call opportunistic science. It’s science 

all these specialties. But when you have it, you do it. of opportunity. 

a crew size of six, almost everybody has We do this in research labs on the 

to be able to do medical, navigation, and ellIs: Great way to reach the public. ground: you do your programmatic 

cooking. But people gravitate toward science, and while you’re there and have 

things they like to do. For example, pettIt: It is. And at the same time it’s off-duty time, you may get an idea. 

André Kuipers was on our mission, and meaningful. For the diary of a space Since you have a lab in front of you, you 

he’s a medical doctor. When it came time zucchini, I was telling a story from the do an opportunistic experiment on the 

to draw blood, he did his own and then view of a third person who was part of side. A lot of times these things fail, but 

drew everybody else’s. Even though I was the crew while also taking time to weave every once in a while something really 

trained to draw blood, I didn’t have to do in the technology needed to keep space neat will come from these opportunistic 

it much during the mission—which was zucchini alive, and the trials we had to go experiments. And at ground laboratories, 

great because one of the reasons I’m not through, such as lighting and not having they often are the roots for writing a 

a medical doctor is I don’t like sticking dirt. I started to compost food and use the proposal and getting funding to become 

people. I gravitated toward keeping the liquid from the compost in an aeroponic future programmatic science. Many times 

galley in shape and making sure we all potting system I cobbled up to keep the the real advances—the eurekas—come 

had food deployed in a manner we could plants alive. from the opportunistic science. Knowing 

eat and weren’t running out of things. that is how science is advanced on Earth, 

Any of us could have done it, but I started ellIs: Was space zucchini your favorite I use that model on station. I do the 

doing it at the beginning and kept it up experiment during the mission? programmatic science for the principal 

for the whole mission. investigators, using all the facilities and 

pettIt: Yeah. There are programmatic expendable resources how they want. 

ellIs: You also took on blogging during experiments—the ones that justify the Then in my off-duty time, I use extra 

that mission. work on space station—that come up things, like food and water, little bits of 

from the ground and are well thought- wire, and maybe a few things I brought 

pettIt: I like to write. I have a hard out and well-planned. There are up in my personal kit to do scientific 

time writing something meaningful in principal investigators on the ground investigations of my own design. Simply 

140  characters, so my style is to write and we, the astronauts, are more like because I was there and I could. 

three or four pages at a time instead of for glorified graduate students doing 

Twitter. Blogging fit my style. Blogging the experiment on their behalf. The ellIs: Did any of the experiment results 

and tweeting are personal, not a piece of stuff I did, like space zucchini, I like to or behaviors surprise you?

ASK MAGAZINE | 29
IF YOu PuT A human being IN SPACE, YOu NEED machines

TO TAKE YOu there, KEEP YOu alive, AND BRING YOu home, 

SO YOu NEED TO understand HOW THOSE machines work

AND HOW TO fix them. 

30 | ASK MAGAZINE
ASK MAGAZINE | 31
BEING earth-centric, YOu THINK YOu NEED YOuR computer 

on a desk; THEN YOu REALIZE YOu don’t need a desk, just 

a wall; THEN YOu GO ONE STAGE FuRTHER AND REALIZE you

don’t even need the wall. 

32 | ASK MAGAZINE
SPACEPORT 

INNOVATORS

BY DAVID J. MIRANDA

A robot built by Florida Robotics served as 

the centerpiece of the exhibit by Kennedy’s 

Environmental Management Branch. 

ttelfihm SiK/ASA: Ntidero CtohP

 THE RING AS

TION SHAEDGLENOWGATEWAY TO INNOVA

K

story | ASK MAGAZINE | 33
The key event in the birth of the Post-it was not the invention group at Kennedy Space Center a few years ago that tries to 

of the adhesive or even Fry’s eureka moment. It was the seminar foster innovation at our center and ingrain it in our culture. 

where the key technology was shared. Knowledge sharing is an We called ourselves the Spaceport Innovators and opened our 

essential component in the process of innovation. When we membership to everyone on center. 

look back at the history of great innovations, we nearly always Over time, we have grown from a small group of about 

find that innovations do not come from a lone genius locked twenty to a membership of more than two hundred people with 

away from the world. Instead, they come from people who find an average meeting attendance of over thirty. Among our ranks 

ways to connect with other people and their different ideas. are civil servants and contractors from nearly every directorate 

These people are able to take concepts, often in disparate fields, at every level. The group meets every other week and is a venue 

and combine them to form a new idea that is better than its for employees to share their knowledge. That knowledge can 

individual parts. Google the history of the ice cream cone, the vary from innovation success stories like Johnson Space Center’s 

airplane, the cell phone, Velcro, the moving assembly line, and, Project Morpheus and Langley Research Center’s Max Launch 

of course, the Post-it, and you will find that all those innovations Abort System, technology demonstrations like the Harris 

were created as a result of melding ideas from different sources. Corporation Force Feedback Robotic System, exciting research 

projects like the Trash to Supply Gas project, interesting books 

Spaceport Innovators like What Would Google Do?, and even far-reaching topics like 

At NASA, innovation has always been a part of our jobs. As colonizing the solar system in fifty years via robotics utilizing 

we transform ourselves for a new era of space exploration, we space resources. Sometimes our speakers from outside Kennedy 

need to continue to find new and exciting ways to collaborate happen to be visiting the center for other reasons, as was the case 

and innovate. To that end, with support from our center’s with the Launch Abort System talk; sometimes they present via 

engineering and technology leadership, we started an employee telecom/webcam, as our Morpheus speaker did.

Employees showed 

off some of their 

ideas and toured 

Kennedy Space 

Center’s unique labs 

and facilities during 

the center’s first 

Innovation Expo.

ASA: Ntidero CtohP

In 1980 3M brought one of the most famous products in the company’s history to market. The 

Post-it note became a breakout success and is today a staple of the modern office. How it made it 

to market is a classic story in the history of American innovation. The key component of the Post-it 

was the weak adhesive that allowed it to stick but also be easily removed. When this weak adhesive 

was first developed in 1968, no one could find a use for it. In search of a use, its inventor presented 

the glue at formal and informal knowledge-sharing events at 3M over the course of several years. 

In 1974, Art Fry happened to hear about the glue at one of these knowledge-sharing seminars. 

During his church’s Sunday service later that week, Fry was frustrated when the small paper strip 

bookmarks in his hymnbook kept falling out. At that moment he saw the potential of the weak 

adhesive. It could be used as a way to keep his little bookmarks in place! The Post-it was born. 

34 | ASK MAGAZINE
Our meetings are normally an hour long and usually focus 

on a single topic via a presentation followed by a question-andanswer session. A casual observer may think that the highest 

value of these meetings occurs when the speaker is talking, but I 

think the golden moments are when the audience asks questions, 

because that’s when the knowledge sharer and the knowledge 

receiver interact. That’s when two minds work together and the 

sparks of innovation occur. You know a particular meeting has 

been successful when people linger after it has ended and talk 

one to one. These are the moments when the knowledge shared 

and casual questions can lead to something much bigger. 

Over time, it was only natural that our members would look 

for ways to collaborate outside the meetings. Now, in addition 

to the biweekly meetings, members of Spaceport Innovators 

form small teams to work on projects that are of interest to the 

mission of the group: “To foster innovation and lead change 

through collaboration, communication, and knowledge sharing. 

Spaceport Innovators will serve as an incubator for innovative 

ideas and help launch them toward success.” Some of the projects 

we have worked on include creating innovation and creativity 

spaces on center, coordinating our center’s participation in the 

International Space Apps Challenge, and organizing Kennedy’s 

first Innovation Expo.

The First Innovation Expo

The Innovation Expo, held on September 6, 2012, has been 

our biggest project yet. In many ways, the Expo was Spaceport 

Innovators on a much larger scale. It included exhibits by 

every directorate on center, tours of Kennedy’s labs and 

facilities, networking activities, an innovative project-funding 

competition, and short talks by NASA innovators and diverse 

outsiders including the U.S. Navy, Publix supermarkets, and 

Universal Orlando theme park. (You can find videos of the 

talks at http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLStC43yAV6zR

nhStfOTGfjFovf78M7qji.) Each component was an attempt to 

get the Kennedy community to connect in a different way. We 

located the activities in easily accessible parts of the center and 

placed the exhibits in the main building lobbies so employees 

had no choice but to participate. 

This one-day Expo was knowledge sharing on a centerwide 

scale. Of course we encountered many of the challenges that 

these types of activities typically face. It can be difficult to 

separate people from their work and have them do something 

different. Although the overall event was successful, some of 

our activities struggled to reach our attendance expectations. In 

retrospect, that should not have come as a surprise. Participation 

mirrored what we see in our Spaceport Innovators meeting every 

month. Sometimes a topic will bring so many people that we 

can’t fit them in the room, but at other times so few people come 

that there are more presenters than audience. Unsurprisingly, 

Spaceport Innovators often include knowledge from innovation success 

stories like the Trash to Supply Gas project, shown here with Chemist 

Anne Caraccio working on a prototype reactor for incinerating trash in 

space. She is part of the team developing a mechanism to burn trash 

and extract valuable gases from the material. 

A CASUAL OBSERvER MAy THINK THAT 

THE HIGHEST vALUE OF THESE MEETINGS 

OCCURS WHEN THE SpEAKER IS TALKING, 

BUT I THINK THE GOLDEN MOMENTS ARE 

WHEN THE AUDIENCE ASKS qUESTIONS, 

BECAUSE THAT’S WHEN THE KNOWLEDGE 

SHARER AND THE KNOWLEDGE RECEIvER 

INTERACT. THAT’S WHEN TWO MINDS 

WORK TOGETHER AND THE SpARKS OF 

INNOvATION OCCUR.

iskadindorei GrtmiD/ASA N:tide CrothoP

ASK MAGAZINE | 35
THE SURvIvAL OF MANy ORGANIZATIONS 

DEpENDS ON INNOvATION, AND NO 

ORGANIZATION’S FUTURE IS MORE 

TIED TO INNOvATION THAN NASA’S.

most people will only attend when they think the topic has The survival of many organizations depends on innovation, 

w and no organization’s future is more tied to innovation than 

re NASA’s. We are now entering a period of great change not 

 to only in how we operate but also in what we do. How we 

o- reshape our culture today will have a lasting effect for decades 

 in to come. As we move forward we must understand that the 

e. very foundation of innovation is knowledge sharing. As an 

. organization we must encourage as many communication 

or opportunities as possible, and as individuals we must strive to 

as expand our breadth of knowledge. ●

as 

something to do with their work. Unfortunately, that narro

view of what is relevant will not make the workforce mo

innovative, since the biggest innovations come from listening

topics that we think have nothing at all to do with our day-t

day job. A true innovator is a person who has a deep expertise

a narrow discipline, but also has a wide breadth of knowledg

To be successful we must open up to new thoughts and ideas

Given that fact, multidisciplinary teams are ideal f

innovation. Our Spaceport Innovator teams strive to be 

multidisciplinary as possible. Our Innovation Expo team w

made up of people from directorates including engineering, 

finance, information technology, education, public affairs, 

human resources, and safety, and included both civil servants 

and contractors. Each of us brought different perspectives and 

ways of doing things, but we were still able to come together 

and organize this event in just two months. As we progressed, 

we were guided by the principles of transparency, diversity, 

collaboration, accountability, risk acceptance, and team 

empowerment. Each principle was key to making this event 

as successful and as innovative as we could. It allowed ideas to 

intermingle and flow freely without fear of failure. 

One great example of our diversity leading us to a great 

solution was how we found many of our speakers. When we 

initially brainstormed ideas for speakers, we came up with many 

of the usual suspects, and frankly weren’t being very creative or 

innovative. Luckily, one member of the team was involved with 

Couchsurfing.org, which finds accommodations in people’s 

homes and apartments, during his college years. He had met 

some interesting people in his travels. He was able to tap into 

his couch-surfing network and find exactly the kind of outof-the-box people we needed. His unique experiences led to a 

great benefit for the event, bringing in speakers including Carol 

Sugars, who spoke about the world’s first biofuel-powered jet, 

and Adam Nehr of Earthrise Space Inc., on the relationship 

between risk taking and innovation.

DaviD J. miranDa is a NASA simulation engineer with the IT 

Computational Science Branch at Kennedy Space Center, where 

he supports discrete event simulation and design visualization 

work initiatives for center and agency projects. He also leads 

Kennedy’s Spaceport Innovators, who are dedicated to making 

Kennedy an even more creative and innovative place to work.

36 | ASK MAGAZINE
BY MIKE LIPKA

“The welfare of each of us is dependent fundamentally 

upon the welfare of all of us.”

— President Theodore Roosevelt, 

 New York State Fair, Syracuse, NY, September 7, 1903

Safety Day is an annual event held at every NASA center and on innovations and new ideas developed elsewhere in the 

facility. It is a crucial component of the agency’s forward- organization. We all “play for the same team,” but it is not easy 

looking mishap-prevention effort. No two Safety Day events to see what everyone else at the agency is doing. A collaborative 

are exactly alike. Each center plans and implements its activities approach allows NASA centers’ Safety Day planning teams to 

independently. That allows the local Safety Day teams to address spend a minimal amount of time to gain the maximum amount 

the issues that matter most to their individual centers, but it of wisdom and experience from their peers.

also means that they may be unaware of potentially valuable In my role at the NASA Safety Center (NSC), I focus 

approaches taken by other centers. on developing knowledge-sharing opportunities within the 

NASA faces the same problem that all large organizations agency’s Safety and Mission Assurance (SMA) community. The 

with multiple geographic locations face: keeping current NSC was formed in 2006 as part of the Office of Safety and 

BY MIKE LIPKA

“The welfare of each of us is dependent fundamentally 

upon the welfare of all of us.”

— President Theodore Roosevelt, 

 New York State Fair, Syracuse, NY, September 7, 1903

Safety Day is an annual event held at every NASA center and Safety Day is an annual event held at every NASA center and Safety Day is an annual event held at every NASA center and Safety Day is an annual event held at every NASA center and Safety Day is an annual event held at every NASA center and Safety Day is an annual event held at every NASA center and Safety Day is an annual event held at every NASA center and Safety Day is an annual event held at every NASA center and Safety Day is an annual event held at every NASA center and on innovations and new ideas developed elsewhere in the on innovations and new ideas developed elsewhere in the on innovations and new ideas developed elsewhere in the on innovations and new ideas developed elsewhere in the on innovations and new ideas developed elsewhere in the on innovations and new ideas developed elsewhere in the on innovations and new ideas developed elsewhere in the on innovations and new ideas developed elsewhere in the on innovations and new ideas developed elsewhere in the on innovations and new ideas developed elsewhere in the 

organization. We all “play for the same team,” but it is not easy 

Safety Day is an annual event held at every NASA center and Safety Day is an annual event held at every NASA center and Safety Day is an annual event held at every NASA center and on innovations and new ideas developed elsewhere in the 

organization. We all “play for the same team,” but it is not easy 

Safety Day is an annual event held at every NASA center and 

facility. It is a crucial component of the agency’s forwardSafety Day is an annual event held at every NASA center and facility. It is a crucial component of the agency’s forward- facility. It is a crucial component of the agency’s forward- facility. It is a crucial component of the agency’s forward- facility. It is a crucial component of the agency’s forward- facility. It is a crucial component of the agency’s forward- facility. It is a crucial component of the agency’s forward- facility. It is a crucial component of the agency’s forward- facility. It is a crucial component of the agency’s forward- facility. It is a crucial component of the agency’s forward- organization. We all “play for the same team,” but it is not easy organization. We all “play for the same team,” but it is not easy organization. We all “play for the same team,” but it is not easy organization. We all “play for the same team,” but it is not easy organization. We all “play for the same team,” but it is not easy organization. We all “play for the same team,” but it is not easy organization. We all “play for the same team,” but it is not easy organization. We all “play for the same team,” but it is not easy organization. We all “play for the same team,” but it is not easy organization. We all “play for the same team,” but it is not easy organization. We all “play for the same team,” but it is not easy 

to see what everyone else at the agency is doing. A collaborative 

facility. It is a crucial component of the agency’s forwardlooking mishap-prevention effort. No two Safety Day events looking mishap-prevention effort. No two Safety Day events organization. We all “play for the same team,” but it is not easy 

looking mishap-prevention effort. No two Safety Day events looking mishap-prevention effort. No two Safety Day events looking mishap-prevention effort. No two Safety Day events looking mishap-prevention effort. No two Safety Day events looking mishap-prevention effort. No two Safety Day events looking mishap-prevention effort. No two Safety Day events looking mishap-prevention effort. No two Safety Day events looking mishap-prevention effort. No two Safety Day events looking mishap-prevention effort. No two Safety Day events to see what everyone else at the agency is doing. A collaborative to see what everyone else at the agency is doing. A collaborative to see what everyone else at the agency is doing. A collaborative to see what everyone else at the agency is doing. A collaborative to see what everyone else at the agency is doing. A collaborative to see what everyone else at the agency is doing. A collaborative to see what everyone else at the agency is doing. A collaborative to see what everyone else at the agency is doing. A collaborative to see what everyone else at the agency is doing. A collaborative to see what everyone else at the agency is doing. A collaborative to see what everyone else at the agency is doing. A collaborative 

are exactly alike. Each center plans and implements its activities 

to see what everyone else at the agency is doing. A collaborative 

are exactly alike. Each center plans and implements its activities approach allows NASA centers’ Safety Day planning teams to 

looking mishap-prevention effort. No two Safety Day events 

are exactly alike. Each center plans and implements its activities 

to see what everyone else at the agency is doing. A collaborative 

are exactly alike. Each center plans and implements its activities are exactly alike. Each center plans and implements its activities are exactly alike. Each center plans and implements its activities are exactly alike. Each center plans and implements its activities are exactly alike. Each center plans and implements its activities are exactly alike. Each center plans and implements its activities are exactly alike. Each center plans and implements its activities are exactly alike. Each center plans and implements its activities are exactly alike. Each center plans and implements its activities are exactly alike. Each center plans and implements its activities approach allows NASA centers’ Safety Day planning teams to approach allows NASA centers’ Safety Day planning teams to approach allows NASA centers’ Safety Day planning teams to approach allows NASA centers’ Safety Day planning teams to approach allows NASA centers’ Safety Day planning teams to approach allows NASA centers’ Safety Day planning teams to approach allows NASA centers’ Safety Day planning teams to approach allows NASA centers’ Safety Day planning teams to approach allows NASA centers’ Safety Day planning teams to approach allows NASA centers’ Safety Day planning teams to approach allows NASA centers’ Safety Day planning teams to 

independently. That allows the local Safety Day teams to address 

are exactly alike. Each center plans and implements its activities approach allows NASA centers’ Safety Day planning teams to approach allows NASA centers’ Safety Day planning teams to approach allows NASA centers’ Safety Day planning teams to 

independently. That allows the local Safety Day teams to address independently. That allows the local Safety Day teams to address independently. That allows the local Safety Day teams to address independently. That allows the local Safety Day teams to address independently. That allows the local Safety Day teams to address independently. That allows the local Safety Day teams to address independently. That allows the local Safety Day teams to address independently. That allows the local Safety Day teams to address spend a minimal amount of time to gain the maximum amount spend a minimal amount of time to gain the maximum amount spend a minimal amount of time to gain the maximum amount spend a minimal amount of time to gain the maximum amount spend a minimal amount of time to gain the maximum amount spend a minimal amount of time to gain the maximum amount spend a minimal amount of time to gain the maximum amount spend a minimal amount of time to gain the maximum amount spend a minimal amount of time to gain the maximum amount spend a minimal amount of time to gain the maximum amount spend a minimal amount of time to gain the maximum amount spend a minimal amount of time to gain the maximum amount 

of wisdom and experience from their peers.

independently. That allows the local Safety Day teams to address independently. That allows the local Safety Day teams to address independently. That allows the local Safety Day teams to address spend a minimal amount of time to gain the maximum amount 

the issues that matter most to their individual centers, but it 

spend a minimal amount of time to gain the maximum amount 

of wisdom and experience from their peers.

independently. That allows the local Safety Day teams to address spend a minimal amount of time to gain the maximum amount 

the issues that matter most to their individual centers, but it the issues that matter most to their individual centers, but it the issues that matter most to their individual centers, but it the issues that matter most to their individual centers, but it the issues that matter most to their individual centers, but it of wisdom and experience from their peers. of wisdom and experience from their peers. of wisdom and experience from their peers. of wisdom and experience from their peers. of wisdom and experience from their peers. of wisdom and experience from their peers. of wisdom and experience from their peers.

also means that they may be unaware of potentially valuable 

the issues that matter most to their individual centers, but it of wisdom and experience from their peers. of wisdom and experience from their peers. of wisdom and experience from their peers.

also means that they may be unaware of potentially valuable also means that they may be unaware of potentially valuable also means that they may be unaware of potentially valuable also means that they may be unaware of potentially valuable also means that they may be unaware of potentially valuable also means that they may be unaware of potentially valuable also means that they may be unaware of potentially valuable also means that they may be unaware of potentially valuable also means that they may be unaware of potentially valuable In my role at the NASA Safety Center (NSC), I focus In my role at the NASA Safety Center (NSC), I focus In my role at the NASA Safety Center (NSC), I focus In my role at the NASA Safety Center (NSC), I focus In my role at the NASA Safety Center (NSC), I focus In my role at the NASA Safety Center (NSC), I focus In my role at the NASA Safety Center (NSC), I focus In my role at the NASA Safety Center (NSC), I focus In my role at the NASA Safety Center (NSC), I focus In my role at the NASA Safety Center (NSC), I focus 

approaches taken by other centers.

also means that they may be unaware of potentially valuable In my role at the NASA Safety Center (NSC), I focus In my role at the NASA Safety Center (NSC), I focus 

approaches taken by other centers.

also means that they may be unaware of potentially valuable also means that they may be unaware of potentially valuable also means that they may be unaware of potentially valuable In my role at the NASA Safety Center (NSC), I focus In my role at the NASA Safety Center (NSC), I focus 

approaches taken by other centers. on developing knowledge-sharing opportunities within the 

also means that they may be unaware of potentially valuable 

approaches taken by other centers.

In my role at the NASA Safety Center (NSC), I focus 

approaches taken by other centers. approaches taken by other centers. approaches taken by other centers. approaches taken by other centers. approaches taken by other centers. approaches taken by other centers. approaches taken by other centers. approaches taken by other centers. approaches taken by other centers. approaches taken by other centers. approaches taken by other centers. approaches taken by other centers. approaches taken by other centers. on developing knowledge-sharing opportunities within the on developing knowledge-sharing opportunities within the on developing knowledge-sharing opportunities within the on developing knowledge-sharing opportunities within the 

agency’s Safety and Mission Assurance (SMA) community. The 

approaches taken by other centers.

NASA faces the same problem that all large organizations 

on developing knowledge-sharing opportunities within the 

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NSC was formed in 2006 as part of the Office of Safety and 

NASA faces the same problem that all large organizations agency’s Safety and Mission Assurance (SMA) community. The 

with multiple geographic locations face: keeping current 

agency’s Safety and Mission Assurance (SMA) community. The 

with multiple geographic locations face: keeping current with multiple geographic locations face: keeping current with multiple geographic locations face: keeping current with multiple geographic locations face: keeping current with multiple geographic locations face: keeping current with multiple geographic locations face: keeping current with multiple geographic locations face: keeping current with multiple geographic locations face: keeping current NSC was formed in 2006 as part of the Office of Safety and NSC was formed in 2006 as part of the Office of Safety and NSC was formed in 2006 as part of the Office of Safety and NSC was formed in 2006 as part of the Office of Safety and NSC was formed in 2006 as part of the Office of Safety and NSC was formed in 2006 as part of the Office of Safety and NSC was formed in 2006 as part of the Office of Safety and NSC was formed in 2006 as part of the Office of Safety and NSC was formed in 2006 as part of the Office of Safety and NSC was formed in 2006 as part of the Office of Safety and NSC was formed in 2006 as part of the Office of Safety and NSC was formed in 2006 as part of the Office of Safety and NSC was formed in 2006 as part of the Office of Safety and NSC was formed in 2006 as part of the Office of Safety and NSC was formed in 2006 as part of the Office of Safety and 

story | ASK MAGAZINE | 37
Mission Assurance. It focuses on improving the development 

of personnel, processes, and tools needed for the safe and 

successful achievement of NASA’s strategic goals. 

Sharing Ideas

Last year, I launched an effort to determine what kind of 

help SMA directors were looking for to make their Safety 

Day more successful. I contacted the directors and Safety 

Day team members at every NASA center and facility to get 

their perspectives. In addition to basic questions on budgets, 

logistics, and management support, I wanted to hear about 

their willingness to share their Safety Day ideas and content 

with other centers.

One of the NSC’s functions is to be a knowledge “broker” 

for the rest of NASA. My team and I are looking at what has 

worked best in the past and trying to make those practices 

available to every center. We want to develop an awareness 

of what others are doing to share good ideas and create some 

efficiencies—sharing ideas and content can save money.

I began the interviews by asking two questions: “Would 

your center be interested in how other NASA centers approach 

their Safety Day?” and “Would you share your center’s success 

stories with the other NASA centers?”

“The response was unanimous,” says NSC Director Alan 

H. Phillips. “Everyone answered, ‘yes.’” 

38 | ASK MAGAZINE
Once we understood that center SMA offices were 

interested in learning more about Safety Day activities of other 

centers and sharing their own approaches, it was full speed 

ahead. “This was an opportunity for the NSC to bring the 

centers together to work toward common issues related to their 

Safety Day events,” Phillips added.

Reviewing my discussions with the SMA directors and 

planning teams, I found three common themes regarding the 

challenges that NASA centers and facilities face when planning 

and executing Safety Day events: 

• Developing a Safety Day event in the face of 

shrinking budgets 

• Keeping center personnel interested in safety issues

• Managing the time that center SMA staff spend 

working on Safety Day events

My interview process led to a virtual Safety Day planning 

meeting in December 2012 that involved representatives from 

nearly every NASA center and facility. Approximately twenty 

people participated in the discussion. The purpose was to get 

people to discuss how they planned, promoted, and staged 

their centers’ Safety Day activities. They were asked to explain 

both what they do and how they get things done. I asked center 

representatives for their Safety Day “wish lists.” Responses 

included higher budgets, meaningful activities, more hands-on 

events, and involvement from others at the center. While we can’t 

increase their budgets, we can give them some ideas on how to 

stretch their dollars. The goal is to make Safety Day an engaging 

and meaningful event at each NASA center. We want to raise 

awareness of safety issues, and we also want to leverage the centers’ 

resources so everyone gets the most out of their investment in 

time and money.

Safety Day Stories

We kicked off the meeting by reviewing the common challenges 

identified in individual discussions. We then began to address 

planning requirements of Safety Day events. I felt it was 

important that the centers’ Safety Day planning teams hear 

directly how their colleagues solve problems. Person-to-person 

interaction has more meaning and impact than reading a list 

of best practices, and it provides opportunities to ask detailed 

questions of the people who have successfully planned and 

executed Safety Day events. 

We started each discussion by having a participant tell a 

story that encapsulated what they did and how they did it to 

provide context. The storytelling approach has an iterative effect, 

triggering others to respond with their own stories, building 

new understanding. After each story is told, other participants 

follow up with their own experiences.

One story described the creative use of bartering to attract 

an interesting and knowledgeable speaker despite a limited or 

non-existing budget. In 2012, Kennedy Space Center invited 

the National Football League’s medical director to speak about 

concussion safety. Instead of a speaker’s fee, he was given a 

personal tour of the space center, which he greatly enjoyed. After 

this experience was shared, a participant from Glenn Research 

Center told how they got a representative from the Cleveland 

Clinic to speak at their Safety Day event by providing a tour of 

the center and offering to present at a Cleveland Clinic safety 

and health event in the future.

Wider Sharing

The centers’ input has been included in a Safety Day Planning 

Guidebook that is available from the NSC. The guidebook is 

descriptive, not prescriptive. It is not intended to be instructions 

on the proper way to conduct a Safety Day at NASA. It presents 

what has worked at different centers and shows what attendees 

think is most useful.

Another result of the planning effort was the formation of 

a Safety Day community of practice on the NSC Knowledge 

Now collaboration tool to exchange Safety Day knowledge and 

experiences year-round.

During the meeting, I let the centers know that the NSC 

offers safety information campaigns that can be used for Safety 

Day. We have materials on electrical safety, ladder safety, 

transportation safety, and more. Centers can download videos, 

posters, and brochures directly from the NSC web site whenever 

they need to. The centers can use those materials as is or tailor 

them to fit their own plans.

All these efforts are designed to give people who are separated 

geographically but work on the same issues opportunities to 

share. If someone knows of a guest speaker who is interesting 

and has a great safety message, that person should let the other 

centers know about it. If unique games and interactive exercises 

have made learning more fun and memorable at one center, it’s 

important to spread the word.

I presented what has been accomplished so far at the annual 

Safety Directors and Occupational Health Managers meeting in 

March 2013 at Kennedy. I also plan to hold virtual checkpoint 

meetings each June and December to continue discussions on 

the progress of Safety Day planning. ●

For more information on planning center Safety Day, contact the 

author at 440-962-3172 or michael.j.lipka@nasa.gov.

miKe liPKa is the knowledge management offi cer for the 

Safety and Mission Assurance organization, responsible for 

the design and implementation of knowledge management 

programs. As a member of the NASA Safety Center, his work 

is focused on knowledge strategy and needs assessment, 

developing communities of practice, and facilitating knowledgesharing opportunities.

ASK MAGAZINE | 39
ttelfihm SiK/ASA: Ntidero CtohP

Earth’s Bridge to Space

 BY STEFANO COLEDAN

Two months shy of the thirtieth anniversary of the fi rst Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS) 

launch, the eleventh in this group of NASA spacecraft successfully fl ew into orbit January 30, 2013, 

aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket. Th e TDRS-K lifted off Launch Pad 41 at Cape 

Canaveral Air Force Station at 8:48 p.m., lighting up the evening sky in a golden display of fi ery 

power. Th is latest version is the fi rst of a new generation of communications and data-relay satellites. 

Built by Boeing, the 3,700-lb. satellite is a heavier, more sophisticated, and more powerful descendant 

of the spacecraft making up the original network. “TDRS-K will handle amounts of information 

up to fi ve times larger than its predecessors,” says TDRS-K Program Manager Jeff rey Gramling. 

The NASA and United Launch Alliance launch teams monitor the countdown before the 

launch of the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite-K spacecraft on an Atlas V rocket. The teams 

work inside the Atlas Space Operations Center at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla. 

40 | ASK MAGAZINE | InsIght
Technicians inspect the payload fairing placed over Tracking and Data 

Relay Satellite-K inside the Astrotech payload processing facility near 

Kennedy Space Center. 

sbocam JiT/ASA: Ntidero CtohP

A successful liftoff is a fundamental step in the climb to customer’s needs and requests and define the support required 

Earth orbit. Just as vital, however, are the services preceding, and technical guidance needed for each unique mission. The 

supporting, and following every launch—all the way from pre- main task is helping the customer choose what launch vehicle 

mission planning through launch vehicle–spacecraft separation best fits the satellite for an acceptable price.

to the end of the spacecraft’s useful life. When the mission has been defined with clear enough 

NASA’s Launch Services Program (LSP), established in requirements to proceed with purchasing the launch service, it’s 

1998, is deeply involved in every step of this process. It brings up to NASA’s Flight Planning Board to give the green light to 

a half-century of launch experience and expertise, along with procure the launch service.

state-of-the-art technology, strategic planning, business, 

procurement, and engineering best practices to every mission. Launch Vehicle/Spacecraft Engineering 

LSP strives to facilitate and reinvigorate America’s space effort, Manufacturing Phase

broadening the unmanned rocket and satellite market by Once a mission is formally manifested through NASA 

providing reliable, competitive, and user-friendly services. Headquarters’ Human Exploration Operations Mission 

It’s no exaggeration calling the LSP Earth’s bridge to space— Directorate’s Flight Planning Board, the mission transitions 

a bridge standing on four pillars representing the LSP goals: to a permanently assigned mission integration team, providing 

consistent LSP involvement from the earliest mission concept 

• Maximize mission success and achieve mission excellence studies to the final countdown. Mission integration working 

for all missions. group meetings and ground operations working group meetings 

• E nsure long-term launch services by providing are held at regular intervals throughout the launch campaign. 

end-to-end and advisory service expertise for NASA The first major goal in this phase is to develop and coordinate 

science, exploration, U.S. government, and government- the mission’s interface control document, followed closely by 

sponsored missions. the safety package for range safety and the launch-site support 

• Promote evolution of a U.S. commercial space launch plan for launch-site processing. Data exchanges support analysis 

market through continued relationship development in areas including thermal, clearance, separation, environment, 

with customers and stakeholders as well as the continual and trajectory. These analyses are reiterated throughout the 

enhancement of policy, contracts, and launch products launch process. 

and services. 

• Continually enhance LSP’s core capabilities by monitoring Launch-Site Operations and Launch Campaign 

the program’s performance-assessment tools and measures, Typically, sixty to ninety days before launch, a spacecraft arrives 

relationships with customers and stakeholders, workforce, at the launch site for stand-alone processing. Activities include 

LSP policy and contracts, and services. post-shipment testing, fueling, and spin balancing, if required. 

The launch vehicle will be erected and tested in the vertical 

Anatomy of a Launch integration facility before it is moved to the launchpad a day or 

The successful launch of TDRS-K was the fulfilling conclusion two before launch. At the conclusion of spacecraft processing, 

of an effort dating back seven years—average for a process that the spacecraft is encapsulated and moved to the pad for mating 

normally takes between four and ten years. TDRS-K’s trip to operations and integrated testing.

orbit began with LSP’s pre-mission planning, mission planning, In mid-January, across the Indian River from the Kennedy 

and mission baseline phases. These phases take into account the Space Center, some thirty engineers and technicians worked in 

ASK MAGAZINE | 41
the privately owned Astrotech payload processing facility (PPF). 

Inside the spotless workroom, they put the finishing touches 

on the $400-million TDRS-K so it could fit into the protective 

fairing of the Atlas. Total cost for the rocket, launch services, 

and other operations under different contracts amounted to 

$123.9 million.

According to Diana Calero, NASA’s LSP mission manager 

for TDRS-K, “Regardless of how many times one enters the PPF 

or a similar ‘clean room’ to check out a spacecraft, there is always 

an element of surprise. You always have a sense of awe when 

you walk in and see this big spacecraft that’s so intricate and so 

technologically advanced. Entering the PPF gives you pause. You 

look at this spacecraft and just let the greatness of what’s about 

to be launched sink in. There’s definitely that feeling of awe, and 

also of pride, sending this spacecraft 22,300 miles above Earth 

to have it carry out all the work it’s designed for.” 

Launch Management

The launch management phase concludes with the launch 

readiness reviews—the final opportunities to close out technical, 

timetable, and operational requirements. Once these activities 

are complete, the green light to start final launch preparations 

comes on. “We are a very process-driven organization,” said 

Launch Director Tim Dunn. “Part of my responsibility is 

making sure, as we enter a launch campaign for a specific 

mission, that all of our processes are being implemented. During 

the countdown, in my role as launch director, I have the final 

say from NASA as to whether we are ready to launch or not,” 

Dunn said. “And if we are good to go, I will pass that ‘go’ to our 

launch contractor, United Launch Alliance, which will execute 

the final, terminal countdown, taking us down to T minus 0.”

As workers at the pad finished preparing the Atlas V rocket 

and Centaur upper stage for fueling, most of the discussions 

were centered on wind speed and gusts. They were still within 

the safety limits, yet worth keeping an eye on. The launch 

team at the Atlas V’s Spaceflight Operations Center cleared 

A United Launch Alliance Atlas V 401 rocket 

with its NASA Tracking and Data Relay 

Satellite-K payload races above the lightning 

masts on Space Launch Complex 41, leaving 

plumes of exhaust and smoke in its wake. 

yarrut Mrebod Rny aary GnoT/ASA: Ntidero CtohP

NASA’S LAUNCH SERvICES pROGRAM 

BRINGS A HALF-CENTURy OF LAUNCH 

EXpERIENCE AND EXpERTISE, ALONG 

WITH STATE-OF-THE-ART TECHNOLOGy, 

STRATEGIC pLANNING, BUSINESS, 

pROCUREMENT, AND ENGINEERING BEST 

pRACTICES TO EvERy MISSION. 

42 | ASK MAGAZINE
a handful of minor technical problems on the rocket. As for 

TDRS-K, it was in perfect health and got mentioned only for 

a final “go.”

The readiness polls followed, with the final one taking place 

during the last planned pause in the countdown, holding at 

T minus 4 minutes. All parties involved responded “go.” Outside, 

the wind had cleared the sky of any clouds or haze. The stars 

were shining vividly, and more than one person expressed hope 

it would be a good omen.

The Launch

Four minutes of propulsion were all it took for the Atlas to 

consume all its hydrocarbon fuel and liquid oxygen, and finally 

separate from the Centaur. The upper stage continued its ascent. 

Data received on the ground showed small pressure oscillations 

in the liquid oxygen tank, whereas the hydrogen tank remained 

steady throughout both firings of the upper-stage RL-10 engine. 

The reason for the phenomenon wasn’t immediately clear, but 

it had no impact on an otherwise perfect climb to space. One 

hour and 52 minutes after liftoff, the Centaur released the 

eleventh TDRS satellite on its path to geosynchronous orbit, 

22,300 miles high. Applause broke out in the Launch Control 

Center and Hangar AE. 

Post Launch

The work doesn’t end there. Telemetry data is analyzed for 

any observations or discrepancies with the launch vehicle

performance and spacecraft delivery to the correct orbit is

verified. Finally, control is handed over to the spacecraft team 

for final testing and future use from its geosynchronous orbit.

The pride felt by all directly involved—from managers to 

engineers, analysts, launch and flight controllers—is palpable. 

Despite all the stress, the endless meetings and worries, and the 

overtime, none of them perceive their jobs as drudgery. On the 

contrary, says Chuck Tatro, mission manager for the upcoming 

James Webb Space Telescope and Mars Atmosphere and Volatile 

Evolution missions, “There are lots of days I don’t remember 

the drive home. I’m just very excited or very deeply in thought 

about an issue.” He admits, “There are lots of days that you take 

your work home with you, or you think about it during your 

drive home. That’s naturally part of what we do because we all 

like this business so much. We all enjoy launching satellites and 

missions to other planets. It’s exciting. So you tend to engage 

more than just from 8 to 5.” Smiling, he adds, “And it’s fun.” 

Dunn notes, with obvious pride, “Here at the Launch 

Services Program, we have some of the best and brightest from 

across the launch industry here at our disposal. Our technical 

team, engineers and analysts, have a very large number of years 

of service.” The average LSP engineer has a service experience 

that’s generally greater than ten years, Dunn says, but it’s not 

rare to come across individuals with more than twenty years of 

launch practice. This high level of competence is of particular 

significance. In fact, it works like a magnet, as it helps in shaping 

the LSP of the future. “We’re able to bring in new engineers that 

are working alongside guys who have been doing the job, and 

doing it successfully, for twenty to thirty years. It’s tremendously 

rewarding working with the type of individuals that LSP can 

attract,” says Dunn. 

“We couldn’t do it without a dedicated, professional group 

of people who are putting a large portion of their lives into 

this. Even if you have all the procedures, and you’ve done this 

before, you still need the right people doing this job right,” 

adds Gramling. ●

Stefano ColeDan has been assisting NASA’s Launch 

Services Program since 2012 as an a.i. solutions contractor. 

Besides a journalism degree from Orlando’s University of Central 

Florida, he holds a metallurgy and mechanical engineering 

diploma from a Polytechnic Institute near Venice, Italy, as well as 

a State of Florida certification as a science teacher.

Tracking and Data Relay Satellite-K, 

enclosed in its payload fairing, passes 

through the Launch Complex 39 area 

and Vehicle Assembly Building at 

Kennedy Space Center as it travels from 

the Astrotech payload processing facility 

to its launch site. 

nosnen BnelG/ASA: Ntidero CtohP

ASK MAGAZINE | 43
View of the northern Antarctic Peninsula from high altitude 

during IceBridge’s flight back from the Foundation Ice Stream. 

sina VeosJ-air/MaASA N:tide CrothoP

COLLABORATIvE PLANNING FOR 

science

44 | ASK MAGAZINE | story
Operation IceBridge started in 2009 when NASA’s Ice, Cloud, studies sea ice and one looks at land ice. The land-ice group, led 

and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) stopped collecting data. by Ken Jezek, a scientist at the Byrd Polar Research Center at 

With ICESat-2, NASA’s replacement for ICESat, still years away Ohio State University, concerns itself with the Greenland and 

from launch, there was an urgent need to fill this observation Antarctic ice sheets, Canadian ice caps, and various glaciers. 

gap at a time when ice in the Arctic and Antarctic was showing Richter-Menge leads the sea-ice group, which focuses on sea ice 

signs of dramatic change related to the warming environment. in the Arctic and Southern oceans. The specialized groups also 

IceBridge started as a way to maintain a continuous data record work with each other and the IceBridge project science office on 

between the two satellite missions. Since it began in 2009, matters related to the overall mission plan during coordinated 

IceBridge has been gathering detailed information on many sessions at the meetings. 

aspects of polar ice to improve understanding of how the Arctic 

and Antarctic are changing and how these regions interact with Meeting of the Minds

the global climate system. Members of the science team work together continually 

through e-mail and telephone, but their twice-yearly team 

Guidance and Advice meetings have the most impact. During these sessions the 

Like many NASA missions, IceBridge relies on a team of expert science team meets with mission representatives and scientists 

scientists to guide the project in the form of Level 1 science using IceBridge data, reviews mission goals, and works on 

requirements—the mission’s essential aims. These requirements plans for the upcoming IceBridge campaign. 

and other guidance from the science team determine what Campaign planning is a vital part of the science team 

IceBridge will study. meetings, but the presentations on research are probably just 

Science team members are selected for a three-year term as important. Listening to researchers at the meetings led 

through an open process. Candidate proposals are assessed to surveys of the Beaufort and Chukchi seas, collaborative 

at NASA Headquarters and the winners are chosen based on activities such as IceBridge’s work with the European Space 

the strengths of the proposals and the particular expertise of Agency’s CryoSat verification campaign, and the quick-look seathe scientists who submit them. “NASA did the IceBridge ice data product that rose from a need to get data for seasonal 

project a great service by giving us diversity in the expertise and predictions more quickly. “Meetings are a big part of knowing 

perspectives of the science team members,” said Jackie Richter- what the community is doing and how IceBridge figures into 

Menge, IceBridge science team co-lead and researcher with the the picture,” said Richter-Menge.

U.S. Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory In addition to bringing forth new ideas, listening to the 

in Hanover, NH. polar science community gives the IceBridge science team a way 

At the end of each three-year term, a new call for proposals to learn how the mission can improve what it does. The influence 

goes out. “This allows members of the science community to of this process can be seen in the differences between Arctic 

actively participate and engage in IceBridge,” said Michael flight lines in 2011 and 2012. Sea-ice cover in the Beaufort and 

Studinger, Operation IceBridge’s project scientist, based at Chukchi sea regions north of Alaska are seeing big changes and 

Goddard. “Open competition every three years is a mechanism there is growing interest in commercial activity. Community 

to make sure the project is supported by the best ideas from the feedback highlighted the shortage of good information on sea 

science community.” ice there, motivating the team to consider more flights in this 

Because IceBridge studies many aspects of polar ice, its region. “The big jump in coverage came from the sea-ice team 

science team requires a wide range of expertise. One group listening to the community,” said Richter-Menge.

Success in science often relies as much on planning, communication, and constant improvement as 

it does on gathering data, writing papers, and giving lectures. This is especially true for large scientific 

missions like NASA’s Operation IceBridge. To ensure the mission meets its goals, shares knowledge, 

and fosters communication, IceBridge conducts science team meetings twice a year, most recently in 

January 2013, when scientists and engineers met at Goddard Space Flight Center. The knowledge 

shared at these meetings helps shape IceBridge’s scientific aims and improves efficiency.

ASK MAGAZINE | 45
kcen BosreffeJ/ASA: Ntidero CtohP

Nighttime interior shot of NASA’s DC-8 

during a transit flight to Santiago, Chile, 

for Operation IceBridge.

rgenudil StaehcMi/ASA N:tdier CotohP

Choosing Paths reaches a consensus on which flights best meet the mission’s 

One of the most important and visible tasks of the science team overall goals. Prioritizing the next campaign’s surveys is one of 

meetings has to be the selection of campaign flight lines. This the main highlights of IceBridge science team meetings. “One 

process involves looking at the needs of many different scientists of our primary roles is to make recommendations on flight 

and then prioritizing which flights will meet which needs while lines,” said Richter-Menge. 

working within the mission’s budget and time constraints. The This selection procedure has been improving over the past 

requests are vetted by the science team and then turned into year in a manner reflecting an overall move toward process 

potential flight lines that are discussed at the meeting. During improvement with the IceBridge science team and project science 

these discussions the science team decides which flights meet office. In the past, scientists would send e-mails to various people 

the most needs, starting with those laid out in the Level 1 in the science team or project science office. “You might have 

science requirements. Scientists work to balance trade-offs—for to search through e-mails from twenty or thirty people to put 

example, compromising on repeat flights in order to expand together one mission,” said John Sonntag, Airborne Topographic 

coverage area. Through this process of give and take, the team Mapper senior scientist and IceBridge mission planner. 

Science team members 

at the January 2013 

IceBridge science team 

meeting sort through printed 

copies of proposed flight lines. 

IceBridge holds science team 

meetings twice a year to plan for 

future campaigns and measure 

progress the mission is making 

toward its science goals. 

46 | ASK MAGAZINE
Iceberg embedded in sea ice. 

This opening was likely caused 

by winds blowing against the 

side of the iceberg. 

elae HgroeG/ASA: Ntidero CtohP

OpEN COMpETITION EvERy THREE 

yEARS IS A MECHANISM TO MAKE 

SURE THE pROjECT IS SUppORTED 

By THE BEST IDEAS FROM THE 

SCIENCE COMMUNITy.

ASK MAGAZINE | 47
“We needed a unified way to manage requirements,” said 

Christy Hansen, IceBridge project manager. “So we created a 

spreadsheet for them to fill out.” The 2012 Antarctic campaign 

was the first use of this new process, which turned out to 

be a success. This sort of improvement is at the heart of the 

interaction between the science team and project science office. 

“We ask the team what problems they had in the past and work 

to make things more efficient,” Hansen said.

Improving the Process

If the science team’s job is to make recommendations for the 

mission, then the IceBridge project science office’s job is to 

turn them into reality. As project scientist, Studinger handles 

details such as how to implement Level 1 science requirements. 

Hansen manages the overall logistical and planning aspects of 

the mission, ensuring the mission is meeting requirements and 

following process. One of the biggest parts of this task is keeping 

the lines of communication open. “We don’t want people feeling 

like they’re left out of the loop,” said Hansen. 

Two new tools for keeping these lines open are IceBridge’s 

science web site and mission tools suite. The mission tools suite 

is a portal where the various members of the IceBridge team 

share documents, track the mission’s milestones on a shared 

calendar, and communicate with each other via an online 

message board. The science web site serves as a one-stop shop for 

the science team, project science office and instrument teams, 

and researchers in the polar science community, containing 

updated Level 1 science requirements, lists of publications, and 

links to IceBridge data. In the future, it will include tools and 

computer code for working with that data. These tools and the 

continual interaction with the science team, instrument teams, 

and groups like the National Science Foundation and NASA 

Headquarters are all about making the mission as efficient and 

successful as possible.

Not all of IceBridge’s improvements rely on high technology. 

To streamline the sometimes time-consuming process of george hale is the science outreach coordinator for Operation 

prioritizing flight lines, one science team member came up with IceBridge at Goddard Space Flight Center.

the idea to use printouts of proposed flights. “I had a feeling that 

people were having trouble visualizing the whole scheme,” said 

Robin Bell, scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory 

at Columbia University. By sorting the printouts into low-, 

medium-, and high-priority groups, the science team was able 

to reach a decision on flight lines and walk away with a better 

sense of the mission’s goals.

Looking to the Future

In addition to planning for the next IceBridge campaign, the science 

team is also looking further ahead. Part of this is coordinating 

collaborative efforts for next year’s campaigns. “We’re looking 

down the road and fostering cooperation,” said Richter-Menge. 

A couple of the opportunities currently being explored include 

coordinating with research planned by Germany’s Alfred 

Wegener Institute later in 2013 and a new season of European 

Space Agency CryoSat verification work slated for 2014.

The IceBridge science team is also working on the coming 

transition to ICESat-2. The satellite, scheduled for launch 

in 2016, will carry a laser altimeter at a far higher altitude 

than IceBridge. To ensure a smooth transition, the team is 

collaborating with researchers using the land, vegetation, and 

ice sensor (LVIS), a laser altimeter instrument. “We’re working 

with the LVIS team on collection of high-altitude data,” said 

Richter-Menge.

Before the Arctic campaign ends in May, IceBridge will 

start working on goals for the Antarctic flights coming up later 

in the year and—using the mission’s newly honed processes and 

tools—will prepare for the science team meeting taking place 

this summer. ●

Operation IceBridge Project Scientist 

Michael Studinger looks over an 

Antarctic map with Mario Esquivel, a 

teacher from Punta Arenas, Chile, while 

returning from a science mission over the 

Ronne Ice Shelf on November 1, 2012.

kcen BosreffeJ/ASA: Ntidero CtohP

48 | ASK MAGAZINE
During the Apollo era, the NASA budget peaked at approximately 4 percent of the overall federal 

budget. Fifty years later, the Cold War is over, there are no more missions to the moon, the Space 

Shuttle has been retired, the International Space Station (ISS) has been completely assembled, and 

America’s sights are set on destinations beyond low-Earth orbit. NASA has had to achieve these 

complex missions with less funding than Apollo, while maintaining a commitment to excellence and 

mission success. For the past twenty years, Johnson Space Center’s Mission Operations Directorate 

(MOD) has been working to ensure that their skills, facilities, and standards of excellence remain 

at the highest level.

The Transformation of MOD: Adaptin

to Change in a Dynamic Environment

g 

BY JOYCE ABBEY

The Neutral Buoyancy Lab is a vital 

training ground for spacewalking 

astronauts. In this photo, a crew of 

technicians prepares two astronauts 

for their descent into the pool.

retnee Ccapn SosnhoA JSA: Ntidero CtohP

InsIght | ASK MAGAZINE | 49
What is MOD? MOD realized that, as an organization, they were going 

MOD is responsible for the planning, training, and flight of to have to be leaner and more agile to survive in a future of 

NASA’s astronauts and human space vehicles. MOD includes diminishing resources. MOD leadership identified three 

the infrastructure required for these activities: the Mission major objectives:

Control Center (MCC), IT architecture, and simulators and 

mock-ups, such as the ISS training facility, Space Vehicle Mock- • Reduce the cost of their station operations by 30 percent.

Up Facility, and the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory. • Support Constellation for no more than 50 percent of 

MOD’s mission is to ensure the success of any NASA what it took to fly and support shuttle.

human spaceflight program, remain stewards of critical human • Restructure mission-related information systems and deploy 

spaceflight technical capabilities, and facilitate flight operations a state-of-the-art, commodity-based IT infrastructure.

culture. The technical and leadership culture of MOD has 

survived because of the deliberate transformation the directorate As Kotter makes clear in his book, a transformation effort 

has instigated in the face of increasingly complex mission will fail unless most of the organization’s members understand, 

objectives and static or diminishing budgets. appreciate, commit to, and engage in making it happen. MOD 

In 1990, while supporting the Space Shuttle program, MOD’s leadership’s guiding principle has been to use every existing 

budget was approximately $412 million and its head count communication channel and opportunity to explain and 

approximately 5,000. By 2010/2011, MOD had the same budget support the initiative.

but fewer than 2,500 employees to support shuttle, the continued A new publication called the 8th Floor Newsletter (a 

construction and support of the space station, and the planning reference to the location of MOD management offices) was 

and development of procedures for the new Constellation program. sent to all employees. It provided current information on the 

With a 50 percent reduction in workforce and a tenfold increase shuttle and ISS programs and outlined what was happening 

in complexity over the course of twenty years, MOD leadership strategically inside the directorate. Additionally, facts were 

realized they had to proactively work to sustain a technically presented, rumors dispelled, and answers to hard questions 

sound organization regardless of the external environment. provided at regular all-hands meetings hosted by MOD civil 

servant and contractor leadership. Understanding that no single 

Developing a vision communication method would suffice and that it is human 

No single event drove the transformation; it evolved out of nature to resist change, leadership acknowledged the need to 

MOD’s culture of continuous improvement. Texts including repeat the message of this transformation continually, and 

Jim Collins’ Good to Great and Built to Last and John Kotter’s reiterate that MOD was not changing what they did, but merely 

Leading Change served as guideposts and led to tough questions how they did it. Effective communication became especially 

such as, “What can we do to continue to raise the bar, but also important as MOD made changes to how personnel are trained. 

acknowledge the budgetary environment?” As Jim Thornton, (See “Implementing Change” on the following page.)

manager of MOD’s Management Integration Office stated, Although the vision was articulated from the top down, 

“Recognizing the environment and the programs’ need to implementation plans were developed by the boots on the ground. 

constantly squeeze more juice out of the orange fuels the fire for Actively engaging employees was crucial to success and to ensuring 

improving, innovation, and efficiency and never being static.” a variety of perspectives, so tiger teams of individuals selected 

View of the station flight control room in Johnson Space Center’s Mission 

Control Center during rendezvous and docking operations between the 

Soyuz TMA-3 spacecraft and the International Space Station. 

retnee Ccapn SosnhoA JSA: Ntidero CtohP

50 | ASK MAGAZINE
from sections of the organization were created. Participants were and change, but trying to find a company or industry that does 

what MOD does is far from easy. Recognizing this challenge, 

leadership found industries that do parts of what they do, such 

as the State of Arizona Control Center for Power Distribution 

in Phoenix, the New York City Emergency Response Center 

that was developed after 9/11, and the Schriever Air Force Base 

50th Space Wing, which commands satellites. Benchmarking 

delivered mixed results. Some visits showed that MOD itself 

is the benchmark—an important validation of the operation. 

To ensure that benchmarking remains part of the objective for 

continuous improvement, a new chief engineer position was 

created to focus on the process. The directorate also implemented 

a requirement that those in leadership roles complete at least one 

benchmarking effort each year.

Implementing Change

Making more efficient use of personnel was an important 

change. For instance, flight controllers and flight instructors 

were traditionally two distinct groups. New hires brought 

into the organization were assigned to do either flight control 

or instructor disciplines. They then had two to five years of 

training that resulted in a capstone certification as a mission 

controller or as a full-task simulator instructor. Leadership 

realized that maintaining separate roles would not be efficient. 

Naturally, they had to overcome resistance to change. They 

used the multiprong approach to communication and stressed 

that they were not changing what is done, but how it is done. 

In the new approach, new hires are required to learn a 

scaled-down set of operational responsibilities within a year to 

eighteen months. Once that initial certification is achieved, the 

individual proceeds to an advanced flight controller certification, 

instructor certification, or both. This allows the organization to 

receive a quicker return on investment, improves the quality of 

training by providing instructors with operational experience, 

and reduces organizational overhead by not having to maintain 

separate groups of flight controllers and instructors.

encouraged to view the organization as a whole. These teams

looked at a variety of issues inside the directorate and came

up with transformational recommendations. Extending that

engagement through the good team relationships with primary

contractors brought MOD further cost-saving initiatives.

United Space Alliance, MOD’s flight operations contractor,

submitted suggested efficiencies. Lockheed Martin, the facilities

development and operations contractor, also proposed initiatives

to help reduce facility costs. The winner of the Neutral Buoyancy

Lab operations contract developed partnerships with industry to

assist in offsetting the operational cost of the facility without

compromising MOD’s needs.

To counter a widely held misperception within NASA

that MOD was too costly and resistant to change, leadership

assembled historical data to disprove this belief. Director of

Mission Operations Paul Hill met with the deputy NASA

administrator to review the funding and facts and explain

MOD’s role and responsibilities. NASA Headquarters quickly

recognized the directorate as a benchmark for an efficient

NASA organization.

Leadership adopted benchmarking to guide plans for change.

This process is widely used in industry to spur improvement

Johnson integrated environments facilities test, evaluate, and certify for 

spaceflight. The Space Station Airlock chamber was developed to support 

the International Space Station program for airlock and extravehicular 

hardware testing, verification/certification, and flight crew training.

retnee Ccapn SosnhoA JSA: Ntidero CtohP

... A TRANSFORMATION EFFORT WILL FAIL 

UNLESS MOST OF THE ORGANIZATION’S 

MEMBERS UNDERSTAND, AppRECIATE, 

COMMIT TO, AND ENGAGE IN MAKING 

IT HAppEN.

ASK MAGAZINE | 51
Whenever a transformation of this magnitude happens,

evaluating and managing risk are paramount. MOD chose

not to employ a formal risk management process during the 

transformation, as risk management was already institutionalized 

within the MOD culture. The underlying theme throughout 

the transformation was “first, do no harm.” Crew safety, mission 

success, and the reliability of the facilities were non-negotiable, 

and the entire organization kept these in the forefront of their 

minds. As Thornton stated, “MOD will not lower the bar

to achieve efficiencies and will not compromise crew safety,

mission success, and availability of facilities.” The result of

this streamlining effort was well worth the challenges, as the 

organization was able to find efficiencies, increase the skill and 

knowledge of employees, and significantly reduce training time 

while ensuring the safe flight and return of NASA’s human

space vehicles and astronauts.

MOD’s facilities are crucial to their mission, from the

mock-ups for training to the computers used to transmit

data from Mission Control Center to the ISS. These facilities 

and hardware numbering over 7,500 individual pieces were 

expensive and required constant maintenance. Due to the

advances in personal computing, MOD was able to swap

high-maintenance mainframe computers for commercially

available hardware and software, which were easily adapted 

to the needs of the directorate. Furthermore, recognizing that 

their expertise did not lie in software development, MOD

sought out a partnership with Ames Research Center. Ames 

was able to develop cloud-like computing software to do a

portion of the work flight controllers previously did manually. 

The directorate is now on track to reduce IT equipment by 

75 percent by 2015. As Hill stated, “... a number [of] things 

have come together that point the way for us to do things

in the control center, like shrink down our IT footprint to 

a few boxes compared to a few rooms or an entire floor of 

a building.” The switch to commercially available hardware 

and software has also meant a 20-percent reduction in total 

power usage since 1990, with an additional expectation of a 

25-percent reduction over the next three years as more changes 

are made to the facility architecture.

Hill said, “Within the last two years we have already given 

back about a third of that commitment to the Space Station 

Program .... The rest of that 30 percent we are on the path to 

commit to in our next budget cycle.” As far as the reduction in 

the cost to plan-train-fly Constellation, Hill stated, “Had we 

stayed on the path that we were on for Constellation, MOD 

would be showing up in the official NASA budget with costs 

no higher than half of what our costs are for equivalent shuttle 

operations. For the ascent, entry, and orbit operations associated 

with Orion in test flights and commercial crew services to ISS, 

MOD is on a path to support with 25 percent or less than our 

shuttle costs.”

THE RESULT OF THIS STREAMLINING 

EFFORT WAS WELL WORTH THE 

CHALLENGES, AS THE ORGANIZATION WAS 

ABLE TO FIND EFFICIENCIES, INCREASE THE 

SKILL AND KNOWLEDGE OF EMpLOyEES, 

AND SIGNIFICANTLy REDUCE TRAINING 

TIME WHILE ENSURING THE SAFE FLIGHT 

AND RETURN OF NASA’S HUMAN SpACE 

vEHICLES AND ASTRONAUTS.

rials BemaJ/ASA: Ntidero CtohP

52 | ASK MAGAZINE
The Coming Commercial Spaceflight Era

Private industry often perceives government involvement as

oversight or regulatory, more of a hindrance than a help. Hill

stated, “From a government organization perspective ... we

have to look at the relationship differently in order to appeal to

industry to see government as an entity that is here to help. It’s

about leveraging those things that are unique about MOD—

the real MOD strengths—to ensure the success of whatever the

next mission is or missions are. How do we best leverage the

things that MOD is responsible for?”

To best position MOD’s assets—the people, facilities, and

knowledge—leadership had to come to terms with some hard 

facts. They realized that this effort was not about preserving 

jobs or protecting infrastructure, budget level, or workforce. 

Nor was the goal to turn MOD’s workforce into facility 

managers leasing space for commercial companies to use. 

Instead, leadership focused on developing a value proposition 

regarding MOD’s capabilities and the opportunity to help the 

commercial space industry.

The directorate found many win–win scenarios. Industry 

workforce would work directly with flight controllers and 

instructors who would share their unique knowledge based on 

fifty years of MOD experience. Leadership expects that not 

only will industry have assistance in determining how to set 

up their operations, but that MOD will also absorb some of 

industry‘s best practices. Commercial partnerships would help 

maintain MOD’s existing infrastructure—the MCC, mockups, and simulators—while commercial industry could defer or 

avoid the expense of building these themselves.

Meeting the Challenge

Transformation is difficult, but MOD has shown that it is

possible to change while maintaining a dedication to excellence

and mission success by paying attention to communication

personnel engagement, benchmarking, and finding efficiencies

Dedication to continuous improvement and efficiency and

to developing a plan for partnerships with commercial space 

providers, MOD has made sure that they will be equipped to 

meet new challenges and will no longer have to react to every 

program or objective change. Whatever the next mission 

objective, they will have the skills and knowledge and facilities 

needed to achieve it. As NASA transitions from the shuttle era 

to the era of commercial opportunities and exploration outside 

low-Earth orbit, MOD will be ready and able to support the 

future success of human spaceflight. ●

JoyCe abbey is the employee communications/external relations 

director for SAIC’s Risk and Reliability Solutions Division, working 

in education and community outreach, focusing on employee

engagement, and serving as a trusted advisor to NASA Johnson 

, Space Center. She began working in mission operations on the Space 

. Shuttle program at Johnson in 1986 and later joined the Safety and 

Mission Assurance team in 1990 before moving on to resource

management, and organizational planning and development. 

NASA astronauts Clayton Anderson (left) and Rick Mastracchio, both STS-131 

mission specialists, use virtual-reality hardware in the Space Vehicle Mock-Up 

Facility at Johnson Space Center to rehearse some of their duties on an upcoming 

mission to the International Space Station.

ASK MAGAZINE | 53
The Folly of Technological Solutionism 

BY LAURENCE PRUSAK 

The Knowledge Notebook

A few decades ago a Massachusetts Institute of technology can bring it about, no matter how 

Technology researcher, Ithiel de Sola Pool, put out dazzling its features.

a book called Predicting the Telephone. In it, he Let’s look at two predictions closer to our own 

discussed the predictions and hopes that people in time that may be more immediately familiar to 

the early twentieth century had for what seemed you than the early telephone.

like the soon-to-be-accomplished achievement When computerization in its varied forms 

of universal telephony. I was much taken by this was beginning to be widely used in organizations 

book and actually dug a bit further and found that beginning in the mid-1980s, many commentators 

the predictions by the best and brightest of that predicted that the development would tend to 

era were even more extreme than Pool suggested. flatten bureaucratic hierarchies and make these 

Maybe the most wrongheaded among a range of organizations far more democratic and efficient. 

wrongheaded visions was the widespread belief that, They reasoned, in part, that the widespread 

because kings, kaisers, tsars, and presidents would availability of the knowledge and information 

be able to talk directly to one another, without that informed decisions and created value for 

intermediaries or cumbersome mechanisms like organizations would mean that leaders could no 

the telegraph, there would never be another war. longer claim the role of exclusive decision-makers 

Well-meaning rulers could solve their differences and the rewards that went with it. This flattening 

by direct communication and peace would prevail. was even predicted for government agencies 

This comforting assurance ushered in the bloodiest (though, to be fair, with far less confidence). 

century in recorded history. Two Harvard Business School researchers 

 Does this sound familiar? Evgeny Morozov looked carefully into this issue and found 

thinks so. In his new book, To Save Everything, that perhaps the reverse had happened—that 

Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism, technology allowed power and centralized control 

he discusses how predictions for the Internet to be even more concentrated and enforced, a trend 

are following this same trajectory: first amazed that is still continuing. I can perhaps add that the 

delight and dreams of universal applicability and predicted beneficial effects on organizations of 

revolutionary positive effect; then the reality of social media can also be added to this list. 

the technology being adapted to the same ends Another example was predictions about 

that were prevalent in the culture before, perhaps early television. My father worked in midtown 

accomplished with more efficiency thanks to Manhattan in the late 1940s when it was the home 

the technological innovation. The grand point of the major TV networks. He knew some people 

he makes is that culture and settled patterns of who worked in this new industry. He told me that 

behavior are far more powerful and more deeply they believed TV would elevate the cultural and 

entrenched than many of our technological political level of the nation, somewhat like the 

utopians think. Real cultural change is complex, BBC in England. Shows like Meet the Press would 

difficult, and relatively rare, and no single be an aid to democracy, presenting politicians in 

54 | ASK MAGAZINE
tough press interviews and creating a more informed electorate. 

No comment is needed here. 

 Morozov follows in a long line of techno-skeptics who 

emerge from all points on the political spectrum when others 

confidently predict the world-changing effects of some new 

technology or other. These voices have been crying in the 

wilderness since the early nineteenth century. They have argued 

for the strength and durability of culture, the likely use of new 

tools to enhance and promote already established forces, and 

the difficulty of ever making substantive changes. They bring 

up an issue, as Morozov does, that is almost totally ignored 

by techno-utopians of all stripes: power. Commercial power, 

political power, and the power of enduring social structures are 

formidable. It is hard, if not impossible, to bring about change 

without taking power into account as it is usually the powerful 

people and forces that one is trying to change and no one gives 

up power easily or voluntarily. 

While not anti-technology, these writers remind us that the 

fantasies that seem to spring eternal whenever a new technology 

becomes widespread should be viewed with a skeptical eye. Yes, 

we have made tremendous strides in using technologies for our 

everyday comfort and health. No one wishes to do away with the 

real benefits of modern medicine and the convenience of modern 

communication. But potential solutions to major problems and 

difficulties facing us today have much more to do with good 

judgment, wisdom, and determination than with some new tool, 

no matter how amazing it seems at first glance. ● 

REAL CULTURAL CHANGE IS COMpLEX, 

DIFFICULT, AND RELATIvELy RARE, AND 

NO SINGLE TECHNOLOGy CAN BRING 

IT ABOUT, NO MATTER HOW DAZZLING 

ITS FEATURES.

ASK MAGAZINE | 55
ASKinteractive

For More on 

Our Stories

Additional information 

pertaining to articles featured 

in this issue can be found by 

visiting the following web sites:

• nasa’s balloon 

program office: 

sites.wff.nasa.gov/code820

• project morpheus: 

morpheuslander.jsc.nasa.gov

• Icebridge: 

www.nasa.gov/icebridge

A Lab Aloft

want a sneak peek behind the science experiments being conducted 

onboard the International Space Station (ISS)? Scientists talk about 

the questions behind their experiments and the sometimes surprising 

answers they find by conducting them in space at A Lab Aloft, a blog 

dedicated to the research performed on ISS. Read about how flames 

react in microgravity, how bone density changes in space, how Earth’s 

atmosphere changes, and more at wiki.nasa.gov/cm/newui/blog/

viewpostlist.jsp?blogname=ISS%20Science%20Blog.

NASA TV on YouTube

Keep up to date with the weekly happenings around NASA and follow 

along with current mission updates on NASA TV’s YouTube channel. 

Filled with more than two thousand videos documenting the agency’s 

progress in science and exploration, the channel also offers a one-stop 

shop to NASA center channels and other related material. watch online 

at www.youtube.com/NASATelevision.

NASA in the News

NASA’s Van Allen Probes discovered a previously unknown, transient third 

radiation belt around Earth, revealing the existence of unexpected structures 

and processes within these hazardous regions of space. The Van Allen belts 

are affected by solar storms and space weather and can swell dramatically, 

and this discovery shows even new belts can be temporarily formed due 

to particle reactions. “Even fifty-five years after their discovery, the Earth’s 

radiation belts still are capable of surprising us and still have mysteries to discover and explain,” said Nicky Fox, 

Van Allen Probes deputy project scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. This 

discovery shows the dynamic and variable nature of the radiation belts and improves our understanding of how 

they respond to solar activity. Scientists observed the third belt for four weeks before a powerful interplanetary 

shock wave from the sun annihilated it. Read more about this discovery at www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2013/

feb/HQ_13-065_Van_Allen_Probes_Belts.html.

feedback

We welcome your comments on what you’ve read in this issue of ASK and your suggestions for articles you 

would like to see in future issues. Share your thoughts with us under “Contact Us” at appel.nasa.gov.

56 | ASK MAGAZINE
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