’

National Aeronautics and Space Administration 

Academy Sharing Knowledge 

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

Inside 

Galileo s Rocky Road to JupiteR 

the challenGe of complexity 

manaGinG in an unsettled enviRonment 
’ 

Photo Credit: NASA/Sean Smith 

ON THE COVER 

A mobility chassis prototype is demonstrated in 2008 as part of a series of tests of lunar 

surface concepts. This is one prototype of many that are field tested as part of NASAs 

ongoing Desert Research and Technology Studies, or Desert RATS. The Desert RATS 

tests offer a NASA-led team of engineers, astronauts, and scientists from across the 

country an opportunity to come together to conduct technology development research 

for future planetary exploration missions. 
 

 

 

ASK MAGAZINE | 1 

Contents
 

5 50 

DEPARTMENTS 

3 

In This Issue 

By Don Cohen 

4 

From the Academy Director 

2011 Trends in Project Management 

By eD hoffman 

62 

The Knowledge Notebook 

The Meaning of Meaning 

By LaurenCe Prusak 

64 

ASK Interactive 

INSIGHTS 

11 

Crew Resource Management 

Improves Decision Making 

By Jerry muLenBurg A technique for 

responding to aircraft emergencies can 

improve project decisions. 

29 

Interview with Rüdiger Süß 

By Don Cohen The German Aerospace 

Center’s project manager for corporate 

strategy talks about earning the 

commitment of managers. 

50 

Managing in an Unsettled Environment 

By sCott J. Cameron Uncertain times call for 

thoughtful planning and clear communication. 

59 

Volunteers Wanted: Best Practices 

from Volunteer Organizations 

By keith L. WooDman A compelling vision, 

support, and recognition build commitment. 

STORIES 

5 

Galileo’s Rocky Road to Jupiter 

By erik n. niLsen anD P. a. “trisha” Jansma 

Determination and ingenuity saved the 

Galileo mission. 

14 

Rapid Prototyping and Analog Testing 

for Human Space Exploration 

By DougLas Craig Testing new space 

technologies on Earth guides innovation. 

19 

NASA EDGE: Providing an Inside 

and Outside Look at NASA 

By BLair aLLen Unscripted vodcasts give 

experts and amateurs insight into NASA 

programs. 

22 

Permission to Stare—and Learn 

By kerry eLLis The history of spaceflight 

is told in great photographs. 

33 

Leading the Race to Space 

By Piers Bizony Comparing the U.S. and 

Soviet space programs of the sixties, the 

author profiles two leaders. 

38 

Reflecting on HOPE 

By Don heyer A group of young Jet 

Propulsion Laboratory employees launch 

a mission and learn how to work as a team. 

41 

Solar Dynamics Observatory 

Lessons Affirmed 

By Brent roBertson anD miChaeL Bay 

For this complex mission, rigorous testing 

was essential. 

46 

Configuration Management: 

A Record and a Resource 

By DeBBie DusterWaLD Flexibility and 

humor help a configuration manager 

document NASA projects. 

54 

Mars Science Lab:
 

The Challenge of Complexity
 

By riCharD Cook Increasing complexity 

makes systems testing a challenge. 

54 
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Issue No. 42* 

Staff 

AcADEMy DIREcTOR AND PublISHER 

Dr. Edward Hoffman 

ehoffman@nasa.gov 

EDITOR-IN-cHIEf 

Laurence Prusak 

larryprusak@gmail.com 

MANAGING EDITOR 

Don Cohen 

doncohen@rcn.com 

EDITOR 

Kerry Ellis 

kerry.ellis@asrcms.com 

cONTRIbuTING EDITORS 

Matt Kohut 

mattkohut@infactcommunications.com 

Haley Stephenson 

haley.stephenson@valador.com 

SENIOR KNOwlEDGE SHARING 

cONSulTANT 

Jon Boyle 

jon.boyle@asrcms.com 

KNOwlEDGE SHARING ANAlySTS 

Ben Bruneau 

ben.bruneau@asrcms.com 

Ramien Pierre 

ramien.pierre@asrcms.com 

AcADEMy PROGRAM MANAGER 

Yvonne Massaquoi 

yvonne.massaquoi@asrcms.com 

DESIGN 

Hirshorn Zuckerman Design Group, Inc. 

www.hzdg.com 

PRINTING SPEcIAlIST 

Hanta Ralay 

hanta.ralay 1@nasa.gov 

* The ultimate answer to the ultimate question 

of life, the universe, and everything. 

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

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

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

providing performance enhancement services and tools, supporting career development 

programs, and creating opportunities for project management and engineering 

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

government agencies. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

of practitioners communicate important practical wisdom and best practices that 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

ASK MAGAZINE | 3 

In This Issue
 

In his article on a technique devised to help pilots and others 

deal with emergencies (“Crew Resource Management 

Improves Decision Making”), Jerry Mulenburg sums up 

the core actions of crew resource management as “see it, 

say it, fix it.” That’s a good way for the members of any 

project team to approach problems. Identifying problems 

(through testing or merely keeping your eyes and your mind 

open), communicating them to other team members so 

your collective knowledge can be applied to solving them, 

and acting on that knowledge pretty much describes how 

teams should operate. 

So it’s not surprising that Scott Cameron’s “Managing 

in an Unsettled Environment” makes roughly those 

same points. He recommends working to understand 

the changes on the horizon clearly and thoroughly, 

communicating their implications, and taking action to 

ensure that you have the capabilities needed to work 

successfully in a new environment. 

Both Mulenburg and Cameron emphasize respect in 

communication and joint action. It’s obvious why. Good 

communication is impossible without respect (for others’ 

expertise and good will). And, in organizations like NASA, 

where people in effect volunteer their best efforts to 

projects (see Keith Woodman’s “Volunteers Wanted”), 

respect is essential to commitment and good teamwork. 

In the interview, Rüdiger Süß describes learning how to 

win the cooperation of others at the German Aerospace 

Center by respecting their needs and fears. Respect also 

underlies the kind of shared meaning-making Laurence 

Prusak describes in the “Knowledge Notebook.” 

Erik Nilsen and Trisha Jansma’s “Galileo’s Rocky Road 

to Jupiter” is a vivid study of “see it, say it, fix it” and 

mutual respect in action. Galileo’s recovery from a series of 

setbacks, including a potentially mission-ending problem, 

is a tribute to teamwork, ingenuity, and determination. Also 

interesting is the fact that the four-year journey to Jupiter 

gave the Galileo team the time they needed to respond to 

the challenges. 

There are, of course, various ways to “see”—that is, 

to understand problems and situations clearly. “Solar 

Dynamics Observatory Lessons Affirmed” and “Mars 

Science Lab: The Challenge of Complexity” both insist on 

the need for rigorous testing to “see” potential problems in 

spacecraft under development. And field testing prototypes 

of new technologies (“Rapid Prototyping and Analog 

Testing for Human Space Exploration”) lets engineers 

quickly see whether a proposed approach is likely to work. 

That is a form of seeing by doing, which is very much the 

subject of Don Heyer’s “Reflecting on HOPE.” Heyer was 

project manager of a project designed to give NASA earlycareer hires the hands-on experience of taking a mission 

from concept to completion, an experience that taught 

them things they could not have learned in other ways. 

Configuration management, skillfully carried out, gives 

current and future project teams a way to see a project 

through documents that accurately chart its course. (See 

Debbie Dusterwald’s “Configuration Management: A 

Record and a Resource.”) The NASA EDGE vodcast team 

helps us see NASA work by asking the right questions. 

Finally, we can literally see the history of the space program 

by looking at the outstanding photographs of talented and 

thoughtful NASA photographers (“Permission to Stare”). 

Don Cohen 

Managing Editor 
4 | ASK MAGAZINE 

From the Academy Director
 

2011 Trends in Project Management
 

By ED HOFFMAN 

Throughout the past year, I have seen organizations, 

leaders, and managers wrestle with challenges 

brought on by economic, political, technological, 

and organizational change. The complexity of the 

global economy continued to present surprises. 

Political powers shifted. E-books outsold paperbacks 

for the first time in history. Organizations like British 

Petroleum and Johnson & Johnson faced greater 

public scrutiny and accountability than ever before. 

All this leads me to believe that organizations with 

open and global mind-sets will gain the inside track 

in the project world. Three trends in particular are 

shaping the future of project management, requiring 

a more global mind-set from practitioners. 

Transparency 

Projects exist in a more transparent, networked 

environment than in the past. President Obama’s 

open government directive initiated a shift toward 

government transparency. Thirty-nine government 

agencies, including NASA, have developed open 

government initiatives. World Wide Web pioneer 

Tim Berners-Lee highlighted the work of Data.gov, 

introducing the possibilities (and controversy) that 

open data and ideas can offer, from new uses of 

satellite data to provide relief to earthquake victims 

in Haiti to WikiLeaks. Managers and leaders are 

expected to be open about their work. Information 

and decisions are no longer easily hidden. The jig 

is up—the public knows where to find the wizard 

behind the curtain. 

Frugal Innovation 

The growing demand for breakthrough technologies 

in engineering and management has led to the 

emergence of innovation grounded by cost. Associated 

with products like the Nokia 1100 and the Tata 

Nano, this innovation paradigm is spreading to 

aerospace projects like the Lunar Crater Observation 

and Sensing Satellite, CubeSats, and Johnson Space 

Center’s Project M to put a humanoid robot on the 

moon. The next big thing will come from incremental 

changes punctuated by revolutionary leaps. It is a 

continuous process. Homo sapiens didn’t walk out of 

the primordial soup. 

Smart Networks 

Today’s projects are about collaboration, alliances, 

and teaming—you’re only as good as your network. 

In 1965, the world’s first communications satellite 

introduced the “frightening prospect” of man being 

able to communicate anything anywhere in the 

world. Now wikis, Facebook, Twitter, and blog-like 

platforms are rapidly spreading and transforming the 

way we connect. Organizations need to harness the 

power of these platforms’ multiple ways to transfer 

knowledge and information. Cultivating “smart 

networks” that provide broad streams of information, 

a global perspective, and a sophisticated ability to 

manage information overload is integral to success. 

Tomorrow’s project world will be driven by an 

integrated and nearly invisible game-like framework 

that will enhance virtual work, connect distributed 

teams, and encourage collaborative discovery. This 

framework will be a unifying medium for the next 

generation of young professionals, almost all of whom 

will work intensively with international partners. 

We live in a society that expects to know about 

and believe in the work that we are doing—and we 

owe them nothing less. ●
Title 

By 

Intro 

 

 

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STORy | ASK MAGAZINE | 5
 

Galileo’s rocky


oad to Jupiter 

By ERIK N. NILSEN AND P. A. “TRISHA” JANSMA 

On October 18, 1989, the Galileo 

spacecraft lifted free from the 

shuttle cargo bay. This step was 

the culmination of a development 

effort spanning eleven years and six 

major mission redesigns, and the 

first step on a long, rocky road to 

Jupiter. Galileo’s ultimate success 

is a tribute to the creativity, hard 

work, and determination of the 

many individuals and groups who 

wrestled with problems that easily 

could have doomed the mission. 

During STS 34, the Galileo spacecraft atop the inertial 

upper stage is deployed from Atlantis s payload bay. 

Photo Credit: NASA 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

6 | ASK MAGAZINE 

ThE ExTENDED JoUrNEy rEqUIrED DESIGN 

MoDIFICATIoNS, INCLUDING ADDING SEvErAL SUN 

ShIELDS To ProTECT ThE SPACECrAFT whEN 

FLyING To vENUS For ITS FIrST GrAvITy ASSIST. 

Galileo was originally conceived in the late 1960s and received 

its first development funding in 1978. Planned for launch in 

1982, its fate was inextricably intertwined with that of the Space 

Shuttle, then under development. Galileo was to be one of the 

first deep-space missions to launch on the shuttle; early slips in 

the availability and capability of that vehicle directly affected 

Galileo. They also influenced the design. 

Early on, the decision was made to use new technologies 

previously used only in Earth-orbiting spacecraft. Dual-spin 

spacecraft design was new to interplanetary craft and new to 

the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). The dual-spin design has 

one section of the spacecraft fixed while the other part spins. 

Remote-sensing instruments (which desire a stable platform for 

imaging) could be mounted on the fixed section, and the fields 

and particles instruments (which desire a complete view of space in 

all directions) could be mounted on the rotating section. This was 

an innovative way to meet science requirements, but it presented 

many design hurdles. 

The second decision was to use a deployable high-gain 

antenna (HGA). Constraints on the size of an antenna that 

could fit within the shuttle cargo bay and a desire to reduce 

mass—a constant Galileo design issue—led to this choice. But 

both decisions created difficulties on the way to Jupiter. By far 

the most serious was the failure of the HGA to deploy. 

Political pressures dogged the initially underfunded project as 

costs began to rise. Slips in capability and delivery of the planned 

shuttle necessitated several major redesigns, including options to 

move Galileo to an expendable launch vehicle, and dual launch 

options, with the spacecraft and the Jupiter probe (an integral part 

of the mission concept) launched on separate vehicles. Launch 

slipped from 1982 to 1983, then 1985, and finally to 1986 before 

the shuttle was successfully completed and flown, and the Galileo 

design stabilized. The spacecraft and the launch team were at the 

cape when the Challenger accident occurred on January 28, 1986. 

Galileo was shipped back to JPL for storage and continued 

testing. Ultimately, the spacecraft would make three 

transcontinental trips, which may have contributed to the 

antenna failure. While awaiting the shuttle’s fate, the Galileo 

team investigated alternatives. As the Challenger investigation 

drew to a close and recommended changes were made to shuttle 

operations, it became clear that Galileo was at a crisis point. To 

get the energy for a direct trajectory to Jupiter, Galileo planned 

to use the Centaur liquid-propellant upper stage to boost it on 

its way after exiting the shuttle. After the Challenger accident, 

the decision was made to prohibit liquid-propellant upper stages, 

forcing Galileo to use the much-less-capable inertial upper stage, 

which used solid propellant. This booster was not capable of 

sending the spacecraft on a direct course to Jupiter, but by the 

clever use of gravity assists from Venus and from Earth, a viable 

mission could be flown, with a much longer flight time to Jupiter. 

ThE SCIENCE TEAM hAD To worK LoNG 

AND hArD To PrIorITIZE SCIENCE GoALS, 

DEvELoP NEw SCIENCE PLANS, AND, IN 

SoME CASES, PLAN UPDATES To oNboArD 

SoFTwArE IN ThE INSTrUMENTS To 

INCrEASE DATA EFFICIENCy. 

The extended journey required design modifications, 

including adding several sun shields to protect the spacecraft when 

flying to Venus for its first gravity assist. Operational changes 

were needed also to ensure the systems would survive. One was 

to delay the deployment of the HGA until the spacecraft was 

past the first Earth flyby. 

The HGA was made of a metalized mesh attached to a set 

of ribs, and looked very much like an inverted umbrella. The 

ribs were held to a central tower by a series of pins and retaining 
ASK MAGAZINE | 7 

Eight days after its final encounter with 

Earth, the Galileo spacecraft looked 

back and captured this remarkable 

view of Earth and the moon. 

Photo Credit: NASA 
 

 

 

 

Photo Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona 

8 | ASK MAGAZINE 

The images used to create this color 

composite of Io were acquired by 

Galileo during its ninth orbit of Jupiter. 

rods. Shortly after launch, the retaining rods were released, but 

the antenna was held in a closed configuration, protected under 

the sun shield when the spacecraft was within 1.0 astronomical 

unit of the sun—the distance from Earth to the sun. 

During the first two and a half years of the mission, the 

operations team communicated with the spacecraft via the first 

low-gain antenna (LGA), and a second LGA added specifically 

for communications during the Earth-to-Venus-to-Earth leg of 

the trajectory. On April 11, 1991, shortly after the first Earth 

flyby, the operations team at JPL commanded the HGA to open. 

After twenty minutes of anxiously waiting for the fully deployed 

signal, the project team realized that something terribly wrong had 

occurred, and the HGA mission was in jeopardy. An investigation 

team was quickly organized to determine the state of the antenna 

and find a way to rectify the problem. 

Over the next two years, numerous attempts were made 

to further deploy the antenna. At the same time, the project 

commissioned a separate, multidisciplinary study team to 

investigate ways to continue the mission without the HGA. 

Radical alternatives such as launching a relay satellite were 

quickly discarded due to time and budget constraints, so the 

team concentrated on alternatives using the LGA to support 

Jovian orbital operations. The project’s worst fears were realized. 

All efforts to fully deploy the antenna were unsuccessful. 

The HGA was virtually useless. 

Emergency Redesign 

To support operations using the LGA, we needed to radically 

redesign the telecommunications link architecture. Without 

any modifications, the LGA would only support 10 bits per 

second (bps) at Jupiter, less than one-ten-thousandth of the 

134 kilobits per second (Kbps) planned. The task of the team 

was to recover as much functionality as possible, given the 

capabilities of the communications link. Major modifications to 

the spacecraft hardware to boost transmit power were not possible, 

so much of the effort was focused on increasing the receiving 

capability on Earth and developing a much more efficient data 

and telecommunications architecture. 

Using advanced arraying at the Deep Space Network 

complexes, the receive aperture available (and thus the data rate) 

could be increased by a factor of 2.5, and additional changes 

to the receivers and the telecommunications link parameters 

increased capability significantly. These changes increased the 

data downlink rate from 10 bps to approximately 300 bps. More 

efficient downlink encoding and onboard data compression 

further increased the effective data rate. Together these efforts 

could increase the information downlink to approximately 

4.5 Kbps, more than four hundred times the initial 10 bps. 

ThE MoST SIGNIFICANT rESoUrCE 

ThAT ThE GALILEo TEAM hAD wAS TIME: 

APProxIMATELy FoUr yEArS bETwEEN ThE 

TIME ThE hGA ANoMALy oCCUrrED AND 

ThE SPACECrAFT’S ArrIvAL AT JUPITEr. 

But even this improvement was a huge decrease in the 

expected data-return rate. The science team had to work long 

and hard to prioritize science goals, develop new science plans, 

and, in some cases, plan updates to onboard software in the 

instruments to increase data efficiency. Clear, frank, and frequent 

communication between the science team and the development 

team was required to balance science desires with the capabilities 

of the system. 

The most significant resource the Galileo team had was time: 

approximately four years between the time the HGA anomaly 

occurred and the spacecraft’s arrival at Jupiter. Having that span of 

time was critical to the redevelopment of the onboard software to 
ASK MAGAZINE | 9 

ThE SUPPorT oF ThE NASA MANAGEMENT ThAT MADE FUNDING AND 

rESoUrCES AvAILAbLE To ThE ProJECT To DEAL wITh ThE ANoMALy 

wAS CrITICAL, AS wErE ThE ENorMoUS CoNTrIbUTIoNS oF ThE 

TEChNICAL CoMMUNITy IN UNDErSTANDING ThE SySTEM CAPAbILITIES 

AND DESIGN oPTIoNS. 

do the required data processing and data compression. This was 

also a time when some other preflight decisions became crucial. 

As a backup to the real-time downlink, an onboard tape 

recorder (the Data Memory Subsystem, or DMS) had been 

designed to record data during certain high-activity periods. Since 

these periods were few, only a single DMS had been included in 

what was largely a dual, redundant avionics system. In addition, 

during the delay due to the Challenger accident, the project team 

investigated a potential solid-state memory failure and decided 

to double the onboard memory. Both of those resources became 

critical to the new orbital operations, to buffer high-rate data 

during the Jovian encounters, and trickle it to Earth over the 

remainder of the orbit. 

Over the next four years, two updates to the onboard software 

were prepared and extensively tested. The first was a minor update 

to the software to support the critical probe relay and Jupiter 

orbit-insertion sequences. The project team wanted to make only 

those changes necessary to buffer the critical probe data to allow 

downlink over the LGA. The second update would completely 

replace the onboard software to implement the changes to the 

data system. 

One More Glitch 

The fates were not through with Galileo. On October 11, 1995, 

as the spacecraft was approaching Jupiter, the mission controllers 

commanded the Solid-State Imager to record an image of the 

planet and store it on the DMS. At the conclusion of this activity, 

the tape recorder was to be rewound and the data played back onto 

the downlink. When commanded, the DMS began to rewind, but 

failed to stop at the end of the tape. All indications were that the 

DMS was broken and would not be available for orbital operations. 

The project team immediately began an intensive effort 

to determine the actual state of the DMS, while initiating 

a concurrent activity to redesign the LGA orbital-operations 

software to work without this critical equipment. After two weeks 

of effort, the flight engineers were able to determine that the 

DMS was not broken, but that the tape itself had stuck to the 

erase head and did not rewind. The tape capstan was turning 

without tape movement, resulting in burnishing a spot on the 

tape. Subsequent efforts moved the tape forward, and the team 

decided it was prudent not to run the tape across the damaged area 

ever again. The burnished area was buried under several wraps 

of tape on the reel. The Phase 2 flight software was modified 

to use the tape recorder in a new way, using recorded markers to 

indicate the end of tape (rather than the tape markers), ensuring 

the damaged area would remain buried. 

After Jupiter orbit insertion, and successful reception 

of the critical probe data, the flight team carried out the first 

complete reload of flight software ever performed on a deepspace mission. Loading the Phase 2 flight software was a major 

operational undertaking, requiring several weeks. After all the 

software was loaded, the flight team waited breathlessly as the 

command was transmitted to turn on the new capabilities. After 

a brief blackout while the ground system synchronized with the 

new telemetry stream, data started flowing, and the new system 

became operational. The team was tremendously relieved, and as 

the science data flowed, they all celebrated the accomplishment. 

Science Success 

The ability of the Galileo project to face and overcome a debilitating 

failure in flight was a testament to the creativity and determination 

of the NASA community. The support of the NASA management 

that made funding and resources available to the project to deal with 

the anomaly was critical, as were the enormous contributions of 

the technical community in understanding the system capabilities 

and design options. The contributions of the Deep Space Network 

and the telecommunications community in advancing the state 

of the art in antenna arraying, low-noise receiver technology, and 

advanced modulation schemes provided hope that a solution could 

be found. And the dedication of the Galileo flight team and the 

software development and test crew proved that the loss of the 

HGA could be overcome. The HGA anomaly workarounds were 
 

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10 | ASK MAGAZINE 

whILE ThE voLUME oF DATA rETUrNED wAS LESS 

ThAN orIGINALLy PLANNED, ThE SCIENCE vALUE oF 

ThE DATA IS IMMENSE. 

Photo Credit: NASA/JPL Caltech 

Pseudo true color mosaic of a belt zone boundary near Jupiter s equator. 

The images that make up the four quadrants of this mosaic were taken by 

Galileo within a few minutes of each other. 

truly a team effort involving a system approach that included 

science, flight, ground, hardware, and software. 

In the end, the science return was the clearest testament to 

Galileo’s success. While the volume of data returned was less 

than originally planned, the science value of the data is immense. 

The textbooks on Jupiter and its moons have been rewritten, and 

intriguing new questions have surfaced. One is whether Europa 

could harbor an immense ocean under its icy surface. It will be up to 

future missions to build upon the legacy of Galileo and find out. ●

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

California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the 

National Aeronautics and Space Administration. © California 

Institute of Technology. Government sponsorship acknowledged. 

erik N. NilseN joined the Galileo flight team shortly after 

launch and was integrally involved in the HGA anomaly 

investigation team and the LGA mission development team. He is 

currently the Mars Sample Return Advanced Concepts manager, 

working on the campaign to return surface samples from Mars 

to Earth for study. He is a registered professional engineer in the 

state of California and has more than twenty years of experience 

in space mission analysis and design. 

p. a. “trisha” JaNsma is the lead for the deployment 

subgroup for the NASA Systems Engineering Working Group for 

the Office of the Chief Engineer. She also supports training and 

deployment for the Systems Engineering Advancement Project. 

With more than thirty years at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 

both line and project management positions, she has a broad 

background in systems and software engineering in both 

engineering and scientific environments. She received a NASA 

Exceptional Service Medal for her work as the implementation 

manager for the Planetary Data System Version 1. 
INSIGHT | ASK MAGAZINE | 11 

Crew Resource Management 

Improves Decision Making

 By JERRy MULENBURG 

People make decisions, and people are fallible. So how can we make the best decisions in a particular 

situation given the information available? Crew resource management techniques designed for 

aircraft emergencies can help. 
 

 

 

 

 

12 | ASK MAGAZINE 

DECISIoNS ArE oFTEN Poor ChoICES 

MADE For ExPEDIENCy or oUT oF 

IGNorANCE oF ALTErNATIvES. 

Some think of decision making as a logical, well-defined 

process and teach it that way in management courses and 

elsewhere. The evidence of practical experience shows, 

however, that decision making is seldom a precise, rational 

activity. In reality, it is often plagued with bias, misconception, 

and poor judgment. Decisions are often poor choices made 

for expediency or out of ignorance of alternatives. In my own 

experience, the person at the top in the hierarchy in most 

organizations is expected, or assumed, to be in the best 

position to make the important decisions. Having served in 

several different NASA Ames Research Center divisions, and 

as the head of two of them, I experienced firsthand the fallacy 

of this expectation. 

As managers, we get in our own way sometimes because 

we don’t think enough and sometimes because we think too 

much. Thinking hard about the decision is not enough; we need 

to think about it in the right way. Rather than make us better 

decision makers, a lot of experience in an area can sometimes 

blind us to alternatives because of our investment in what we’ve 

done before. In his book, How We Decide, Jonah Lehrer describes 

the need to embrace uncertainty and new ideas in decision 

making: “There is no secret recipe for decision making ... only 

... commitment to avoiding those errors that can be avoided. 

There’s not always time to engage in a lengthy cognitive debate. 

But whenever possible, it’s essential to extend the decisionmaking process [to] entertain competing hypotheses [and] 

continually remind yourself of what you don’t know.”1 Lehrer 

also warns that we are often most ignorant of what is closest 

to us. These ideas have special relevance to high-risk and other 

complex decision-making situations. 

For instance, what if you were piloting an aircraft full 

of passengers and suddenly ran out of fuel? How would you 

go about making the decision about what to do first, next, 

and, if none of these efforts solved the problem you’re facing, 

then what? This type of situation is so out of the ordinary, 

fortunately, that few people have experienced it, but such 

emergencies can and do happen. Thanks to a program called 

crew resource management, or CRM, decision makers can 

learn how to handle them. 

Crew Resource Management 

The best example of CRM in use may be the safe landing on 

January 15, 2009, of U.S. Airways flight 1549 by Captain Chesley 

(Sully) Sullenberger in New York’s Hudson River. Hitting a 

flock of geese on takeoff from New York’s LaGuardia Airport 

completely shut down both engines on his Airbus A320. With 

more than 19,000 hours of flight time, including flying gliders, 

Captain Sullenberger’s experience and training helped prepare 

him for the once-in-a-lifetime decision he faced. In less than three 

minutes, this is what Captain Sullenberger did: 

• Requested permission to return to LaGuardia—approved

(normal procedure) 

• Performed engine restart procedure—engines didn’t restart

(multiple attempts would have resulted in the same outcome 

and time was short) 

• Asked for alternate airport-landing location in New

Jersey—granted (wanted to avoid densely populated area 

near LaGuardia) 

• Made final decision to land in the Hudson River—

successful in saving all onboard (copilot provided airspeed 

and altitude readings for pilot to glide aircraft in) 

As Sully put it: “I was sure I could do it. I think, in many 

ways, as it turned out, my entire life up to that moment had been 

a preparation to handle that particular moment.”2 During a talk 

about his experiences, Captain Sullenberger mentioned that he 

owed a lot to the CRM training he went through. 

The CRM training Sully refers to is a program Ames 

developed in the 1970s in response to a number of flawed inflight decisions that resulted in aircraft crashes. CRM is now 

widely used in military and civilian aviation throughout the 

world. So what is CRM, and how can its lessons about decision 

making apply to complex project situations? 

The driving idea behind CRM is to train aircrews in 

communication skills to maximize coordination and minimize the 

chance for errors. According to AirlineSafety.com, CRM is “... one 

of the most valuable safety tools we have today. It has contributed 

significantly toward the prevention of ‘pilot error’ accidents; it has 
ASK MAGAZINE | 13 

saved airplanes and lives.”3 The basic tenets of CRM are to avoid, 

trap, or mitigate the consequences of errors resulting from poor 

decisions. To do this, according to CRM, it is essential to 

1. recognize that a problem exists, 

2. define what the problem is, 

3. identify probable solutions, and 

4. take appropriate action to implement a solution. 

CRM techniques have been applied to other high-risk 

situations, including the high-stress environment of the operating 

room. Poor decisions are not simply due to surgeon error but also to 

the processes and systems that allow errors to remain undetected. 

CRM in the operating room has shown positive results due to 

improved communication, teamwork, error reduction, and better 

training of the whole team, reducing avoidable mortality rates. 

One CRM trainer describes the CRM process as “see it, 

say it, fix it.” This is a good approach to problems on complex 

projects, including NASA projects. 

Applying CRM at NASA 

Flawed decision making was one of the root causes of the loss of 

the Challenger and Columbia Space Shuttles and their crews. It also 

contributed to the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter, Mars Polar 

Lander, and problems on other projects. Despite all the seasoned 

veterans working on a project (and sometimes because they trust 

their expertise too much), mistakes are made, omissions occur, 

and clear thinking is often displaced by a false sense of knowing 

what is going on. For most complex projects, the decisions are 

not as monumental as for in-flight emergencies or surgery. But 

the mistakes matter and sometimes lead to the expensive and 

disappointing loss of mission or, tragically, loss of crew. 

NASA would benefit greatly from applying CRM-like 

techniques to its complex projects. One of the things CRM does 

is integrate the knowledge and experience of all team members 

to arrive at a wise and robust decision. The acronym TRIM, 

which stands for team resource integration management, clearly 

describes the process. TRIM embraces the three CRM tenets 

of avoid, trap, or mitigate the consequences of decision-making 

errors, and helps ensure that the four CRM steps—recognizing 

that a problem exists, defining the problem, identifying probable 

solutions, and taking appropriate action—will be carried out 

effectively. “Integration” describes the need to integrate the whole 

team’s knowledge and skill into a final solution. TRIM also stands 

for terms that emphasize communication: 

DESPITE ALL ThE SEASoNED vETErANS worKING oN A 

ProJECT (AND SoMETIMES bECAUSE ThEy TrUST ThEIr 

ExPErTISE Too MUCh), MISTAKES ArE M ADE, oMISSIoNS 

oCCUr, AND CLEAr ThINKING IS oFTEN DISPLACED by A 

FALSE SENSE oF KNowING whAT IS GoING oN. 

• Talk with each other 

• Respect each other 

• Initiate action 

• Monitor results 

CRM is already a mature discipline with clear benefits in 

high-risk situations that can translate to complex projects. Using 

its successful training methods, CRM seems ideal for application 

to project management decision making. I believe it is important 

that the project management community recognize the benefits 

gained by the application of the CRM/TRIM technique to 

reduce decision errors and the consequences of those errors. CRM 

is a systematic way of helping us use our collective cognitive 

skills to gain and maintain situational awareness and develop 

our interpersonal and behavioral skills to establish relationships 

and communicate with everyone involved, to achieve accurate 

and robust decisions. ASK readers responsible for managing 

complex projects can take the initiative to begin implementing the 

CRM/TRIM processes and provide feedback on their results. ●

Jerry muleNburG retired from NASA in 2006 with more than twenty-five years of 

distinguished service. He held positions as assistant division 

chief for Life Sciences, and division chief of the Ames Aeronautics 

and Space Flight Hardware Development Division and of Wind 

Tunnel Operations. A former air force officer, he is a Project 

Management Institute Project Management Professional and 

a trained MBTI administrator, and he currently teaches project 

management at the university graduate and undergraduate 

levels. He also provides training in project management as an 

independent consultant. 

1. Jonah Lehrer, how We Decide (New york: houghton Mifflin, 2009). 

2. Alan Levin, “Pilot: ‘I was sure I could’ land in river,” usa today, February 9, 2009. 

3. robert J. boser, “CrM: The Missing Link,” November 1997, www.airlinesafety.com/editorials/editorial3.htm. 
14 | ASK MAGAZINE | STORy 

By DOUGLAS CRAIG 

Space Exploration Vehicle docking with Cabin A for a simulated 

rescue mission. This simulated mission was part of the 2009 

Desert RATS held at Black Point Lava Flow in Arizona. 
ASK MAGAZINE | 15 

Humanity’s dream of exploring the wonders of space—to look for life on other planets and to better 

understand our place in the universe—has not diminished over the years. But advances in human 

space exploration beyond low-Earth orbit have been slow to emerge. 

Photo Credit: NASA 
 

16 | ASK MAGAZINE 

...underwa


Photo Credit: NASA/Bill Todd NASA Aquanaut crew performing demonstration 

of incapacitated crewman recovery on the side 

hatch of the SEV during the NEEMO 14 mission. 

NASA’s new human space-exploration enterprise requires a strategy 

that will enable us to explore new worlds, develop innovative 

technologies, and foster burgeoning industries, all while increasing 

our understanding of Earth and our solar system. It will allow 

us to work on objects in Earth’s orbit such as the International 

Space Station (ISS) and satellites while also exploring objects such 

as near-Earth asteroids, the moon, Mars, and Mars’s moons. But 

traveling to and living on these destinations will require us to 

develop cutting-edge technologies and new ways to work in space 

to help us survive and thrive in these forbidding, faraway places. 

As a first step, NASA has implemented two separate but 

integrated activities: rapid prototyping and using analog test 

environments. Rapid prototyping creates innovative concepts 

for exploration by rapidly developing low-cost but functional 

space-system prototypes using small, dedicated teams drawn 

from NASA’s ten centers. These prototypes are incorporated 

into terrestrial, analog mission tests that enable an inexpensive, 

integrated validation of mission concepts in a representative 

environment. These analog missions include going out into the 

Arizona desert to perform long-distance traverses over lunar- and 

Mars-like terrain, using the National Oceanic and Atmospheric 

Administration’s (NOAA) underwater Aquarius habitat to 

conduct simulated extravehicular activities under differing levels 

of gravity, using the Nuytco Research Deepworker submersibles 

to study microbialites in a remote freshwater lake in Canada 

for traverse planning and science data collection, and using the 

volcanic environment of Mauna Kea in Hawaii to test systems 

that extract oxygen from volcanic rocks. 

Rapid Prototyping 

Using lessons learned from the Department of Defense and the 

sub-sea industry’s rapid-prototyping activities, NASA created a 

management environment for the rapid development of several 

prototypes at very low costs. The philosophy was to establish 

a series of iterative design-build-test projects, built on the 

principle that NASA is at its best working with a clear, simple, 

 terrestrial 


craters, de


 volcanic la
 

and understandable vision and a limited amount of time to
 

achieve that vision. The projects focus on producing functional
 

prototypes of increasing fidelity so systems integration issues can
 

be understood early through rigorous design, build, and human
 

in-the-loop testing.
 

The project teams are multi-center, multidisciplinary groups
 

of capable and motivated individuals working together virtually
 

from their home NASA centers. Several systems were developed
 

using this philosophy, including the Space Exploration Vehicle
 

(previously the Lunar Electric Rover), a habitat demonstration
 

unit, Robonaut 2, a portable communications tower, and an
 

extravehicular activity suit port.
 

The Space Exploration Vehicle (SEV) 

In the past, many people believed the best way to explore the 


lunar surface would be similar to the Apollo missions: astronauts
 

in space suits using a rover with no enclosed cabin. Others
 

believed a small rover with an enclosed, pressurized cabin that 


allowed astronauts to function without being in their space
 

suits—but with the ability to quickly put on or take off a space 


suit—would be more effective. This debate continued for about
 

a year with experts arguing over presentation charts until, at a 


workshop break, three people came up with a plan to develop 


a low-cost, low-fidelity version of the rovers needed to test the 


competing concepts. 


Nine months later, the concept vehicle now known as SEV 


was sent out into the desert to pit its performance against an 


unpressurized rover—and prove that pressurized rovers were
 

67 percent more effective than unpressurized rovers while
 

providing an environment better suited for long-duration surface
 

exploration missions.
 

Key to SEV’s success was a high-level set of architecture
 

questions to be addressed and a clear vehicle concept. The project
 

manager also had the flexibility to develop a project structure and
 

choose team members. Because of the tight funding and schedule,
 

this team was kept very small, with members having much more

 

 

ASK MAGAZINE | 17 

ter, arctic, 

impact 

sert, va flows... 

Photo Credit: NASA 

An astronaut and a geologist don spacesuits to test 

an unpressurized version of a lunar rover concept that 

enables them to easily disembark and explore. The test 

was part of the 2008 Desert RATS held at Black Point 

Lava Flow in Arizona. 

responsibility than on larger NASA hardware-development 

projects. This empowered the task leaders and required them to 

be creative in their areas of responsibility, instilling a feeling of 

greater accountability. They also had more agility since the process 

for making changes involved much less review and paperwork 

than typical NASA projects. 

The SEV project was able to make important design decisions 

in a thoughtful but cost- and time-efficient manner, due mainly 

to the small team and the prototype vehicles not being flight 

vehicles. Quick decisions in the early stages of development— 

when mistakes are less expensive and less consequential—gave 

the project team an understanding of how those decisions interact 

and how they manifest in hardware. 

For example, the initial design of the suit port on the SEV 

consisted of a manual latching mechanism, on the principle of 

keeping the design as simple as possible. The test at the Desert 

Research and Technology Studies (Desert RATS) demonstrated 

that the mechanism design did not perform well in the 

environment. These results formed the basis for changing the 

mechanism from the manual mechanical latch to an electrically 

powered latch. Learning this early on in the design phase allowed 

the change to be made with minor cost impact. 

As missions to other destinations are studied, the SEV concept 

has been found to be very advantageous for in-space activities such 

as satellite servicing and exploration of asteroids. As a result, the 

SEV now has two variants: one for surface exploration and one 

for in-space exploration. 

Analog Testing 

Driving a rover around a center’s rock yard isn’t enough to 

reveal the true operations and limitations of a vehicle designed 

for long traverses. It is important to test the systems in an 

integrated, operational field mission to ensure relevant test 

results. These extreme environments greatly enhance our 

ability to analyze concepts in simulated conditions and enable 

experiments with long-range and long-duration expeditions. 

Additionally, members from the NASA mission and ground 

operations team as well as international space agencies, industry, 

academia, and other government agencies take part in these tests. 

Each test refines our understanding of the systems and human 

capabilities needed to successfully explore beyond Earth’s orbit 

while developing the teamwork and methodologies to ensure 

that future space systems are efficiently built to accomplish 

their tasks. 

NASA has developed a process for these tests of system and 

operational concepts on Earth and on ISS, known as analog 

missions. These missions are carried out in representative 

environments that have features similar to the missions’ target 

destinations. These can include locations underwater, in the 

arctic, on terrestrial impact craters, in the desert, on volcanic 

lava flows, and on ISS. Two of the larger missions are the NASA 

Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO) and 

Desert RATS, or D-RATS. 

NEEMO 

NEEMO uses the only underwater research facility in the 

world: NOAA’s Aquarius habitat. Working in partnership 

with NOAA, NASA uses the habitat because it provides some 

of the best conditions for practicing space operations in a 

harsh environment, giving astronauts a broad knowledge and 

awareness of risks, issues, and objectives associated with human 

space-exploration missions. There have also been numerous 

discoveries made during NEEMO missions on human health, 

engineering, telemedicine, space operations, education, and 

public outreach that directly relate to spaceflight needs and are 

being implemented with each mission. 

The NEEMO mission tests are developed with the same 

rigorous timelines as current shuttle and ISS missions. Upon 

completion of the latest NEEMO mission, the NEEMO mission 

commander, Astronaut Chris Hadfield, who has flown on two 

Space Shuttle flights and was the first Canadian to walk in 

space, stated that this mission was the closest to a real spaceflight 
 

 

 

 

18 | ASK MAGAZINE 

qUICK DECISIoNS IN ThE EArLy STAGES oF DEvELoPMENT—whEN MISTAKES ArE LESS 

ExPENSIvE AND LESS CoNSEqUENTIAL—GAvE ThE ProJECT TEAM AN UNDErSTANDING 

oF how ThoSE DECISIoNS INTErACT AND how ThEy MANIFEST IN hArDwArE. 

mission as you could get on Earth. This rigor allows us to 

make informed decisions about design changes before project 

development begins. 

For example, the size of side hatches changed significantly 

between the first and second SEV designs based on testing 

configurations at the NEEMO and D-RATS analog field tests. 

The tests were designed to address the human factors group’s 

belief that a larger hatch was needed for mission operations. 

Results showed that the astronauts had no issues using the smaller 

hatch size for standard or emergency operations in a low-gravity 

environment. This enabled the design to be changed to the smaller 

hatch size, thereby reducing the overall mass of the architecture 

vehicles that contain a hatch. This, in turn, reduces the cost of 

the architecture due to less propellant required throughout the 

architecture phases. The cost of these tests was minor compared 

with the cost impact if this information was learned during the 

flight vehicles’ development. 

D-RATS 

D-RATS field tests have become large missions where multiple 

prototype systems are tested together to evaluate concepts about 

integrated operations. Using the Black Point Lava Flow and 

SP Mountain areas in Arizona—because their terrain, geologic 

features, size, and dusty environment are similar to what would be 

encountered on surfaces in space—allows NASA to test prototypes 

under realistic communications and operational scenarios. 

The latest D-RATS field test focused on the simultaneous 

operation of two SEVs, including new ways of performing surfacescience operations. Over a fourteen-day period, the astronaut and 

geologist crew teams performed a science- and exploration-driven 

course of more than 300 km under different communications 

and operations scenarios, only egressing to perform simulated 

extravehicular activities: to collect geological samples or to work 

in the habitat demonstration unit. 

One of the major concerns about the SEV was that its size was 

relatively small. There were people who did not think it was large 

enough for a fourteen-day mission; they thought it would be too 

small for two astronauts to work in the confined space for that 

period of time due to psychological issues. The ability to perform 

a fourteen-day mission in an SEV would have a major impact 

on the mission architecture, reducing the number of heavy-lift 

launch vehicles needed for a lunar campaign. Upon completion 

of the test, the crew stated that not only was the size adequate 

for a fourteen-day mission, but they felt as though it would be 

suitable for a thirty-day mission. A mission spanning thirty days 

would allow much more exploration of the lunar surface at a 

greatly reduced cost. 

Inexpensive and Informed Decision Making 

Validating rapid prototypes of innovative concepts through 

analog field tests has greatly advanced NASA’s understanding of 

more effective methods for human space exploration. In addition, 

the process has provided an example of how future human 

space-exploration systems can be developed at a greatly reduced 

cost. Rather than sitting through design reviews and trying 

to understand how systems would be used, these approaches 

provide realistic insight into system and operational requirements, 

guiding design changes early in the development phase and 

saving the time and cost associated with changing designs and 

contracts later on. ●

For more information, please visit the following: 

www.nasa.gov/exploration/analogs/index.html 

www.youtube.com/NASAanalogTV 

www.nasa.gov/multimedia/podcasting/nasa360/nasa360-0214.html 

www.nasa.gov/multimedia/podcasting/nasa360/nasa360-0318.html 

douGlas craiG is currently the manager of strategic analyses for 

the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate’s (ESMD) Directorate 

Integration Office at NASA Headquarters. His responsibilities include 

overseeing the human exploration architecture studies; managing 

rapid-prototype projects, including the Space Exploration Vehicle, 

Habitat Demonstration Unit, and Robonaut 2; managing the ESMD 

integrated, analog mission-test activities; and leading the creation 

and development of associated partnerships. 
 

STORy | ASK MAGAZINE | 19 

PROVIDING AN 

INSIDE AND OUTSIDE 

LOOK AT NASA 

By BLAIR ALLEN 

NASA has many outlets for sharing 

details about what goes on behind its 

doors, but none so personable as NASA 

EDGE, a video podcast (or vodcast) 

that grew out of an idea to be “different 

... unscripted and unpredictable.” After 

four years, sixty-two vodcasts, and more 

than seventeen million downloads, the 

description still applies. 

The show originally came together after Chris Giersch and I, 

who had both worked in NASA education programs, connected 

right after I finished my work on the NASA SCI Files, a series of 

instructional programs comprising broadcast, print, and online 

elements. He called my manager to talk about a potential new show, 

so I put together a few ideas—none of which were great. It didn’t 

matter, however, because Chris really was hoping to do a show 

for NASA that resembled ESPN’s Mike and Mike in the Morning. 

He pitched that idea to me and asked if I thought we could do 

it. I loved the idea and really liked the format of hosts/characters 

talking freely and openly about NASA. We had been doing that 

for years, it just wasn’t a “show.” 

Chris went to NASA Headquarters and got enough money to 

shoot a pilot. It wasn’t a lot of money. In fact, we hosted the show 

ourselves because we didn’t have enough money to pay actors. 

As it turned out, Debbie Scrivner, former NASA Exploration 

Systems Mission Directorate communications lead, loved the 

pilot and funded it with the caveat that Chris, Franklin, and I 

remain on the show. 

Being unscripted has proved vital to the show’s success. When 

the NASA EDGE team interviews NASA engineers and scientists, 

we rely more on instincts than talking points to explore projects 

and missions. This helps keep the show conversational, and guests 

don’t have to worry about memorizing scripted responses. We ask 

questions, get clarification, joke and laugh about things—all of 

which doesn’t happen well with a script. 
 

-

20 | ASK MAGAZINE 

Photo Credit: NASA EGDE 

Co Host Blair Allen at the Kennedy Space Center Space Life Sciences Lab 

to investigate dust mitigation. 

If I, the goofy co-host, can ask crazy 

questions, then the audience feels their 

questions can be asked as well. We all 

ask scientific and wacky questions, but 

on the whole, the co-host asks a lot 

more of the wacky and a lot less of the 

scientific ones. 

Staying in touch with fans is an 

important part of the show’s character. 

“Facebook and Twitter are huge for us,” 

said Chris, co-creator, project manager, 

and host of NASA EDGE. “We talk 

to our fans all the time. Sometimes 

we take questions, quotes, and status 

updates and use them on the show. 

We have even had a few Facebook fans 

come on the show and report the news.” 

And when NASA EDGE travels or 

attends an event, we can usually find a 

That spirit of creative freedom has been an important 

part of the development of NASA EDGE. Our formula can 

be unpredictable and has its own inherent risks—like not 

coming across as well as you could with scripted material or 

saying something completely wrong or using the wrong name for 

something NASA has renamed—but the reward is a growing, 

loyal audience that seems eager to learn more about NASA in a 

nontraditional way. 

“You have to take risks,” Ron Beard, our set therapist, 

laughingly said. “These guys take risks, and the co-host fails, a 

lot. But the risks are how we all find out what really works and 

what doesn’t.” 

Mission Madness was one such risk. We had developed the 

idea of putting NASA missions (past, present, and future) together 

in an online, head-to-head, single-elimination tournament based 

on popular vote. We generated a huge amount of exposure, 

discussion, and fan participation during the tournament, but 

we took a lot of valid criticism for allowing multiple voting. There 

were lots of ways to go with the voting, and we felt like we went 

with our best option, but in the process we learned so much. If 

Mission Madness returns, it will look different as a result. 

One thing that has continued to work is our combining 

both an inside and outside look at NASA. To identify with a 

broad audience, you need to really talk to them—and speak in 

terms they understand. NASA can come across as too “sciency,” 

which isn’t necessarily bad—after all there are tons of engineers 

and scientists within and outside NASA who want to learn 

about what their peers are doing. But when non-scientists and 

non-engineers hear about goings-on at NASA, they come up 

with very different questions, which need different answers. 

few of our fans willing to meet us for 

lunch or dinner. People love NASA. They’ll even come and hang 

out with me to find out more about the agency. It is also a great 

way for us to find out more about them—exactly what our fans 

like and dislike about the show. We may not do focus groups, 

but we do listen to our fans. 

Listening to the fans is critical, but it is also important to 

listen to the folks at NASA. We are NASA, after all. We’re not 

out just to get a story. We’re here because NASA does really cool 

stuff, and we want to be part of it. 

This became really evident during our recent work with 

the Desert Research and Technology Studies (D-RATS). What 

started as a simple interview became a team effort to contribute 

to the amazing work of the D-RATS team. 

“I remember talking to Barbara Romig about opportunities 

to shoot, and she mentioned that they weren’t able to cover 

everything they wanted to with video,” Chris recalled. “Well, 

we have three cameras. So after the interview, we just started 

shooting more and more video and gave it to them.” This helped 

us realize that there were more opportunities to serve NASA in 

addition to giving them exposure through our vodcast; we could 

actually contribute to their work. 

This is now a standard procedure for NASA EDGE, and we 

actively look for these kinds of opportunities. For example, in 

January 2011 we were shooting an interview about dust mitigation 

with Dr. Carlos Calle at Kennedy Space Center. We shot a nice 

demonstration of their test article, but we only got one angle. 

Dr. Calle and his team helped set up the demonstration in a 

different part of the lab to get an even better view and greater 

magnification. When they saw the footage, even they were 

blown away: they hadn’t seen the view we were able to give them. 
ASK MAGAZINE | 21 

We shot several versions and provided them with high-definition 

The Space Exploration Vehicle is pulled over 

for speeding in a NASA EDGE promo. video of their test the next day. 

Covering the launch of Pad Abort 1—the test of the Orion 

launch abort system—was another great experience; it was the 

audience response that really made it. Three entirely different 

motors developed by three different teams were tested during 

that launch. As Orion left the pad, the crowd erupted with 

cheers. During the flight, each of the three motors fired at 

different times. Loud cheers erupted as each fired successfully. 

It was great to see, hear, and feel their excitement at the success 

of their work. 

Because we are covering all kinds of missions and aspects 

of projects, we get to see the big picture that many of the folks 

working on the details don’t. Whenever we shoot a segment, we 

ask the NASA scientists and engineers if they need anything, and 

we share our relevant footage with them. This is another way of 

adding value to the overall production. 

Most of the scientists and engineers are happy to work with us 

because we help them in an area with which they are unfamiliar, 

and we always try to make it a team effort. It is important for us 

to have them buy into whatever we do because ultimately we are 

all working to get the word out. 

If a mission has a social media presence, we’ll try to incorporate 

that into what we do. If we can find multiple purposes for our 

footage or promote a mission via NASA EDGE commercials, 

we will. We like to shoot promos that aren’t simply about NASA 

but rather include NASA projects, personnel, and context. For 

example, we shot a promo at Johnson Space Center that featured 

the Space Exploration Vehicle being pulled over for speeding. 

We shot a space food promo with the people who actually work 

in the food lab. 

This team building has worked so well that it has branched 

out into different media. In 2010, NASA EDGE released its first 

NASA app for the iPhone. It is a Lunar Electric Rover Simulator 

Photo Credit: NASA EDGE 

that allows players to drive the rover around the lunar surface 

and learn about the requirements of a lunar outpost. As a bonus, 

NASA EDGE used Barbara Romig and Joe Kosmo (D-RATS 

test leads) as voice talent. The team is currently working on a 

NASA EDGE iPad app. 

Having fun with what we do really helps keep our team 

well knit but also makes it easier for us to create new connections 

with our extended NASA family, something I feel really comes 

across in our vodcasts. Being unscripted, being open to the 

outside view, working closely with the scientists and engineers— 

all of it comes together, not always seamlessly, but in a way 

that gives NASA EDGE its unique style: casual but respectful, 

goofy but informed, fast-paced and fun. We have a great time 

interacting with each other, our NASA colleagues, and our fans, 

and it shows. It draws in our audience and often gives us—and 

our viewers—access to things they might never have learned 

about otherwise. 

Engaging our varied audiences in new and exciting ways 

presents a continual challenge for us, but it’s one we approach 

happily. We learn more about NASA right along with our fans, 

and we love sharing the great many things NASA does in a way 

Ron Beard during the NASA EDGE live broadcast from Pad Abort 1, 

launched May 6, 2010, at White Sands Missile Range, N.M. 

our audiences can understand and enjoy. ● 

blair alleN once participated in a focus group to determine 

the public’s knowledge of NASA. After demonstrating a profound 

lack of even the most basic NASA facts, he became the poster 

boy for NASA outreach. If NASA could inform Blair, the public 

would bubble over with information on the agency’s programs. 

After six years of intense work, he was approached by NASA 

EDGE to see if they could successfully educate him. He’s been 

Photo Credit: NASA EDGE 

learning ever since. 
Title 

By 

Intro 

22 | ASK MAGAZINE | STORy 

By KERRy ELLIS 
’

’

’ ’ 

’ 

— ’ — 

”

ASK MAGAZINE | 23 

Russian security officers walk along the railroad tracks as the 

Soyuz rocket is rolled out to the launchpad on Sept. 28, 2009, at 

the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. “It s just so different, 

a train pushing a Soyuz out to the pad as opposed to the crawler 

with shuttle. There s lots of different ways to capture that 

creatively,” said Ingalls. “Now I ve done it so many times that it s 

become a real challenge to make a different and unique picture 

each time. And to make it seem fresh and new, what it s become 

more of now and unfortunately it s a harder thing to do is try 

to capture the people and the personalities behind all this. 

Knowledge obtained from decades of exploration and discovery, in space and here on 

Earth, would remain unknown if no one learned about it. One of the most effective 

ways to share that knowledge is through photography. A single image can tell a story 

and capture history more vividly than reading, as the cliché goes, a thousand words. 

Photography gives us permission to stare—to absorb, study, and understand. 

Photo Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls 
.”

24 | ASK MAGAZINE 

“I was raised not to stare at people,” said NASA Headquarters 

photographer Bill Ingalls. “Well, photography gives you full 

permission to do that: to really stare at something and take it 

in and think about it. And if it’s a portrait, to really stare at that 

person and observe.” 

When one-of-a-kind projects launch into orbit, there’s often 

only a moment to capture them so current and future generations 

have a chance to study them in depth. For missions that stay 

closer to home, macro and telephoto lenses allow photographers 

to give a close look at things that might otherwise be invisible. 

“There’s a responsibility that you are the eyes for everyone 

who can’t be there,” explained Ingalls. “So there may be times 

I think an image could be made that’s particularly artistic, but 

maybe does not help tell the story, so I might have to wave off 

on that to help tell the story. The goal, of course, is to help tell 

the story in a creative and interesting way, but not so off the wall 

that the story somehow gets lost.” 

The beauty of a photograph is that not everyone sees the 

same story in an image. Engineers may marvel at successful 

technology, students may think about the adventure of spaceflight, 

and scientists may glean previously unseen information about 

Earth and space. 

Similarly, no two NASA photographers see things in quite 

the same way. “I was always amazed with how many times the 

Space Shuttle and its launches have been photographed, the way 

each photographer approaches that subject,” said Langley Research 

Center photographer Sean Smith. “I’m amazed at how different 

and beautiful are the different visions of the shuttle—it’s never 

really the same shot twice. That’s just an example of how many 

ways can you shoot the same thing, but with just a little bit of 

your own vision, it’s different every time.” 

A Collaborative Community 

For each assignment, NASA photographers learn as much as they 

can about the topic before they go out to shoot it, often viewing 

photographs that have been made by previous generations and 

by current colleagues to gain additional understanding and see 

what’s already been done. But some things can’t be learned until 

they’re actually on site. 

“I was amazed my first time in Russia,” recalled Ingalls. 

“The hardware itself, in the beginning, was unique to me 

and to a lot of the viewers of the imagery, I think. It’s just so 

different—a train pushing a Soyuz out to the pad as opposed 

to the crawler with shuttle. And the environment is different. 

I remember once I was lying down next to the railroad tracks 

as the Soyuz was coming and thinking, ‘Any minute someone 

is going to tell me to get out of the way,’ but they didn’t care. 

As long as I didn’t stop that Soyuz, if I wanted to get crushed, 

that was my business. Now, of course, they would not let me 

stay there—safety comes first.” 
-

’ 

”

ASK MAGAZINE | 25 

A mock up of the Orion space capsule heads to its 

temporary home in a hangar at Langley Research 

Center. “It was close to eight hours of them moving 

it from where it was, and I was hoping we d have 

enough light,” said Smith. “This shot was forced 

luck. I just stuck with it. I had shot through my card, 

and I was deleting as I was running along with the 

capsule. The sun was going down, and I just had 

enough sun on the horizon that made it pop a little 

bit. Paired with the lights of them going into the 

hangar, it just made the shot. 

Photo Credit: NASA/Sean Smith 
-

’

’ 

’ 

’ 

’ 

’

’

” 

26 | ASK MAGAZINE 

Photo Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls 

NASA management watch the launch 

of Space Shuttle Discovery on its 

thirty ninth and final flight from the 

firing room at Kennedy Space Center, 

Feb. 24, 2011. “Since Return to Flight, 

I ve been in the firing room, which is 

a real thrill for me because I hadn t 

been in there before that,” Ingalls 

said. “But there again, I ve done 

that so many times that it s a real 

challenge to come up with something 

new. What I like about that is it s all 

about the faces there. It s all about the 

emotion. It s about trying to capture 

that emotion but tie something in to 

be sure it tells a story. 
ASK MAGAZINE | 27 

Working closely with the people building, launching, and 

operating missions has become an important part of telling 

NASA’s story through photography. “They’re the content experts,” 

explained Smith. “They know what’s going on, and they can 

explain it to me, which helps me realize what I’m trying to capture. 

Sometimes you go in and feel a little intimidated, but when you 

start meeting these people and talking to them, they’re gracious. 

They really try to help you get the best shot possible. And they’re 

interested in what you’re shooting, too.” 

In one case, Smith arrived on location for an assignment 

and decided to do a site survey to prepare for the next day. 

What he discovered was a field test in progress for a mobile 

chassis, part of the Desert Research and Technology Studies 

(Desert RATS), with a perfect backdrop of golden-hour light 

and puffy clouds. 

“I had just flown in, it had been a long day, and I just threw 

my bags in my hotel, and I walked up on the chassis. I just started 

shooting,” recalled Smith. “Later I found out someone was not 

so happy with what I’d done because they had no idea who I 

was, and I talked to that person. Once we talked, he was like my 

best friend. He said, ‘You just stick with me, and I’ll show you 

where you can shoot, what you can shoot, and what you can’t.’ 

He even let me get on back of the buggy. I got some great stuff 

out of that trip.” 

Ingalls had a similar experience when he began to photograph 

launches from the firing room at Kennedy Space Center. “The 

first time I was in the firing room, I did get a lot of people looking 

at me like, why is he in here? But now I’m pretty well received.” 

This has allowed him more freedom to capture the emotions of 

those involved in each launch and share that emotion with those 

outside NASA, giving the public a glimpse at the people behind 

the missions. 

Documenting History 

As important as it is to share NASA photography with people 

today, it’s more so to document history in the making for future 

generations. “If you ask anyone what they think of when they 

think of Apollo, ask anyone what they think of the shuttle, most 

people will respond by describing an image,” said Ingalls. 

And future generations’ ideas of NASA will be shaped by 

today’s images of the space station and planetary exploration. 

“I have a son that’s five and a half and I’ve got a daughter that’s 

almost three, and I show my work sometimes to my son,” said 

Smith. “I’ll get a, ‘Cool,’ and then, ‘What’s for dinner?’ And that’s 

fine, but I know somewhere down the line, when he’s older, he’ll 

look back on some of these pictures. This is stuff that he’ll be 

looking at hopefully years from now, and it’s something for him 

to remember me by. I know I’m shooting for NASA, but at the 

same time, I’m leaving something for my kids as well, and for 

other kids that will grow and see NASA.” 
”

”

28 | ASK MAGAZINE The crew mobility chassis 

prototype being tested at 

Moses Lake, Wash., as part of a 

series of tests of lunar surface 

concepts. “When I first walked 

out there to do a site survey, they 

had the Desert RATS on their 

little chassis, Smith said. “I just 

walked up on the chassis as they 

were working on it. That was one 

of the few times, right off the bat, 

I got some really decent shots 

just doing the site survey. 

Photo Credit: NASA/Sean Smith 

For those who will learn about NASA in the future, it’s as 

important to document the failures as it is to share the amazing 

successes, so those who follow do not make the same mistakes. 

Ingalls learned this most poignantly after the loss of Columbia. 

He was at home when his phone rang to inform him of 

the loss and request his assistance at Headquarters. One of his 

responsibilities was to go to the room where people from NASA 

management and outside agencies had gathered to find out what 

had happened and photograph then–Deputy Administrator 

Frederick Gregory. Ingalls shadowed Gregory to another room, 

where the deputy administrator began making calls immediately 

to form an investigative commission. 

“I made some images, and at one point I became a little 

uncomfortable with being there in front of Gregory,” recalled 

Ingalls. “To his credit, he sensed that and said, ‘I’m really glad 

you’re here; I’m glad you’re documenting all this. This is not 

pretty, but we need to remember what’s happening today.’ And I 

had two other people also approach me and say, ‘We’re glad you’re 

here. We’re glad you’re documenting this terrible day.’ 

“While the circumstances were terrible, I’m glad that we 

were let in to document that for historic purposes.” 

Looking to the Future 

Once a NASA photograph is released to the public, both Ingalls 

and Smith said they’re already thinking about the next photo to 

be made. What’s to come—and what they’ll learn—is just as 

exciting as where they’ve been. And they use their past experiences 

to build upon future ones, striving to improve each time they go 

out on assignment. 

As many stories as they’ve shared, they know there’s another 

waiting to be told. 

“Just look at the iconic shots of Mercury astronauts, the 

Apollo astronauts,” said Smith. “It’s a storyline, and it’s a great 

story. It continues to be a great story, and it just needs to be 

documented—wherever we go next.” ●
 

INSIGHT | ASK MAGAZINE | 29 

 INTERVIEW WITH
 

Rüdiger

 Süß

 By DON COHEN 

Rüdiger Süß is the project manager for corporate strategy 

and international relations for the German Aerospace Center 

(DLR). DLR is the national research center for aeronautics 

and space research and the German Space Administration. 

He and ASK Managing Editor Don Cohen talked in Long 

Beach, California, after NASA’s 2011 Project Management 

(PM) Challenge.

cOHEN: What is your current work at DLR? I can talk with engineers in more or less 

every aerospace field, but I also understand 

Süß: My main task is to coordinate the the administrative guys. 

long-term orientation of DLR. Every five 

years, we update the work we have to do cOHEN: What led you to take that 

to improve things, the kinds of initiatives master’s degree? 

we need, and figure out where we want 

to be in fifteen or twenty years. My job is Süß : Even as a student, I recognized that I 

to get the bosses and researchers together was most interested in how we cooperate. 

to coordinate all this, to work from I got interested in how, for example, 

the vision to the mission, from goals to Airbus, a company located politically in 

implementation. four countries, can make one big thing— 

how the whole political system works. I 

cOHEN: How long have you been in did the master’s degree in France and saw 

this job? that they’re more strategic thinkers than 

we are. We say, “Oh, we have a problem, 

Süß: This is my ninth year. I’m an aerospace we have to fix it.” They first think about 

engineer with a master in strategic the strategies and the positions of what 

management, so I understand both worlds. they’re going to do. As an engineer, I want 
 

 

 

 

30 | ASK MAGAZINE 

FOR A STRATEGY GUY, IT’S ALWAYS talk, talk, talk, AND 

YOU SEE THE IMPACT two years later; SOMETIMES IT’S hard 

to see AT ALL. 

to understand the problem and then solve 

it right away. With strategy, it’s more about 

how we position ourselves, how to improve, 

how we work with partners. 

cOHEN: A very different kind of challenge 

from what an engineer does. 

Süß: When I hear people talk about 

participating in the Cassini mission or 

working as a thermal engineer for a satellite 

mission, I envy them. For a strategy guy, 

it’s always talk, talk, talk, and you see the 

impact two years later; sometimes it’s hard 

to see at all. The result is not a product but 

a behavior. 

cOHEN: And results like those are hard to 

measure, except anecdotally. 

Süß: You can’t prove it. It’s all “perhaps.” 

Maybe you can talk about how many 

people came to DLR because this particular 

institute person was teaching. Or how 

much more money is made because of 

the certification of an institute. But these 

are secondary indicators. If an electronic 

device on a satellite goes wrong or the gyros 

are wrong, engineers can figure out why. 

For us, it’s always, did I say something 

wrong, wasn’t he well informed? Why 

didn’t it work? Sometimes you can’t figure 

it out, sometimes you can, but it’s not like 

an engineer coming with a screwdriver. I 

can’t screwdrive a strategy. 

cOHEN: What have you learned about 

how to do the work over the years? 

Süß: When I started this job, I went to 

people and said, “This is our new strategy; 

you have to help me implement it and 

figure out how to measure your work.” 

A lot of times I came out with a bloody 

nose. They’d say, “I’ve been in this job 

thirty-five years and now a greenhorn is 

telling me what I should do?” Or they just 

smile and say, “Yes, we’ll do everything 

you want,” but nothing happens. I hadn’t 

considered the personal impact. I began 

to understand about communicating 

with people. I understood I had to 

address their needs and fears—why 

they had this resistance. I had to ask, 

“How can we help you?” Then I could 

say, “This is what you want and this is 
 

ASK MAGAZINE | 31 

the strategy; let’s do something together 

that will give you what you want and 

the boss what he wants.” I turned from 

focusing on technical strategy issues and 

KPIs [key performance indicators] to 

communications management. 

cOHEN: Can you give me a specific 

example? 

Süß: Working with someone on resource 

planning in space research, he and I made 

a lot of lists, but he saw that his boss 

was against what we decided. He saw 

the resistance from above, and nothing 

happened. So I addressed his boss via my 

boss to explain what kind of benefit he 

would get from the strategy. His boss got 

more and more informed and said, “OK, 

this is a good thing; I understand it.” The 

next time we met, he said, “I got the go 

from my boss.” He needed an official goal 

from his side. 

In another case, I was working with 

two guys on developing strategies and their 

own KPIs. Then nothing happened. They 

said, “When we did all this, we hadn’t 

talked to the CEO.” I said, “I’m just here 

to serve you. I’ll step back. You talk to the 

big boss. If he doesn’t want it, he’ll tell you. 

If he wants it, go for it.” That’s the kind of 

thing I’ve learned. 

cOHEN: When you’re new at a job, you 

think you should do everything yourself, 

but you learn there are better approaches. 

Süß: Exactly. 

cOHEN: Are there ways in which your 

technical background has been 

important to this work? 

Süß: It’s important to be accepted by 

the technical guys as a technical guy. 

They say, “Oh, you’re an engineer,” and 

they’re more willing to listen. When 

we wanted to integrate a little research 

center into DLR, I needed my technical 

knowledge because it was about materials 

science. If I had no clue what they were 

doing, I couldn’t have supported it. 

With a technical background, I could 

explain what part of the scientific chain 

from molecular research to application 

this technology competence is and why 

it’s important. 

cOHEN: Part of your communications 

job must be to communicate within DLR 

what the strategy is and what it means 

in practical terms. 

Süß: There have been good changes in 

our communication policy. Now we put 

a lot of our strategy on the intranet, 

where everyone can read it and see what 

the KPIs are. There are also events 

for top performers and future leaders 

where we come in and say, “This is the 

strategy, let’s talk about it.” Mr. Wörner, 

our new CEO—he’s been CEO for four 

years—has gone to every DLR location 

and said, “This is our strategy; this is 

what we’re planning to do. What are 

your questions? Challenge me.” I was 

with him the whole time. By being 

transparent and closer to the people, 

we get more acceptance. Also, now we 

say [to senior managers], “We want to 

go in this direction. You sit together 

and define the goals and how you think 

we’ll achieve them.” That makes it their 

strategy. That changes the commitment. 

It becomes their own idea. 

cOHEN: How would you describe your 

current strategic direction? 

Süß: On the corporate side, we want 

to be more visible externally, recognized 

as an excellent partner to industry and 

government. We are putting a lot of effort 

into innovation, which is a shift from 

years ago. The ministry of technology 

and economy has said, “Whatever 

you do, it has to serve industry.” This 

means a mind shift. We want to consult 

more for the government. We are 

being asked to research, not only to 

develop interesting things—we want to 

deliver solutions for problems that the 

society has. We also want to increase 

scientific excellence. 

cOHEN: What are you doing to improve 

the science? 

Süß: We want to roll out quality 

improvement to our institutes, including 

a certification program that will mean 

people can say, “I know what my job is 

and I do it right.” 

cOHEN: That sounds like another 

communication effort. 

Süß: It’s partly communication. We have 

introduced a graduate program to train 

PhDs in communication and project 

management skills. We want to create 

alliances within DLR and with external 

partners so people can work better together 

and share information. We’re hiring 

someone for knowledge and information 

management. All the heads of our institutes 

are professors at universities, but so far 

it’s only the heads. We want more of our 
 

 

 

32 | ASK MAGAZINE 

I BEGAN TO UNDERSTAND ABOUT communicating with 

people. I UNDERSTOOD I HAD TO address their needs and 

fears—WHY THEY HAD THIS RESISTANCE. I HAD TO ASK, 

“How can we help you?” 

staff teaching at universities so they get 

challenged and we attract the best people. 

cOHEN: What are your knowledge 

management plans at this point? 

Süß: One guy who is very into IT 

[information technology] has proposed 

using more and more social media 

applications within DLR—a wiki and 

Twitter and such things. We asked, “How 

do people know about these things?” 

His answer: “We send them e-mail.” 

“Did you ever speak directly to them?” 

“No.” 

He is not aware that most knowledge 

management happens when people are 

together talking face to face. We told 

him there are three things in knowledge 

management: technology, OK, but also 

organization and people. Especially people. 

If they want to use electronic devices they 

can do it, but first they have to meet. You 

start with the people and finish with the 

iPad, not the other way around. 

cOHEN: Have you learned anything at 

this PM Challenge that can help you 

in your work? 

Süß: I’m a project manager, so I can

directly apply things like how to evaluate 

projects. I saw one session about using

the balanced scorecard approach to

evaluate projects, and think maybe I

should introduce that, slightly changing 

the notions and figures. For us, before, it 

was just asking, “What do you think?” 

You make project evaluation much

more systematic here—sometimes too

systematic, but it’s valuable. You ask

the experts—the strategic management 

committee and the planning management 

committee—to judge a project rather

than just judging it yourself. I will

perhaps apply this method, evaluating

to decide which of all the projects we

want to do is the best. 

cOHEN: What do you see as a major 

difference in how NASA and DLR function? 

Süß: One difference is how you treat 

finance, scheduling, and money flow. You 

have to go to the Congress and get the 

money. We are associated to the Federal 

Ministry of Economy and Technology. 

Our government-funded research follows 

a five-year budget plan. Our scientific 

projects may take longer to approve, but 

when they’re implemented, we can be sure 

to get funding for most of them for the 

next five years. We are therefore not as 

flexible as NASA is, but we may be more 

stable in the long term. ●
Leading

the Race to Space 

STORy | ASK MAGAZINE | 33 

During the space race of the 1960s, NASA Administrator 

James Webb and his Soviet counterpart, Sergei Korolev, 

shared the determination and skill needed to push a rocket 

program past countless political barriers, beyond the reach of 

jealous rivals, and toward success. Surprisingly, though, it was 

the American leader who exerted the kind of central control 

we typically associate with the Soviets. 

NASA Administrator James E. Webb (center) cites the space achievements of the Project Mercury 

astronauts who received the 1963 Collier Trophy Award in a ceremony held at the White House on 

October 10, 1963. President John F. Kennedy (left) and Vice President Lyndon Johnson accompanied 

Webb at the ceremony. 

Photo Credit: NASA 

By PIERS BIzONy 
 

34 | ASK MAGAZINE 

Image Credit: NASA 

Huntsville Times newspaper’s front-page coverage of the Gagarin flight. 

In the proud Soviet announcements about Yuri Gagarin’s historic 

ride into space, the man who sent him up there was not allowed to 

share any of the public glory. Born in 1907 in Ukraine to Russian 

parents, and educated in Kiev and Moscow, Sergei Pavlovich 

Korolev began his career as an aircraft designer. At first he saw 

rockets as a useful power source for aircraft, but by the late 1930s 

he knew they could be vehicles in their own right. 

The Soviet military showed a keen interest in rockets. In 1933 

Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky sponsored a research center, the 

Gas Dynamics Laboratory, hidden away behind the ramparts of 

the Petrapavlovskaya Fortress in St. Petersburg, known at that time 

as Leningrad. Another facility in Moscow, the Reaction Propulsion 

Laboratory, worked along similar lines. From the union of these 

two efforts, Valentin Glushko emerged as the most promising 

designer of combustion chambers and fuel pumps, while Korolev 

thought in broader terms about rockets. 

Unfortunately, Joseph Stalin was terrified of intelligent 

soldiers, and in 1937 he began a purge of the officer class. All 

the rocket engineers that the military had sponsored came under 

suspicion, and by June the following year they were in custody 

and suffering various extremes of coercion and torture. Korolev 

was dragged away on June 27, 1938, and condemned to ten years 

in a Siberian gulag. Glushko seems to have escaped the camps 

by denouncing Korolev. The sequence of events is uncertain, 

but one thing is for sure: throughout their subsequent alliance 

on some of the greatest pioneering achievements in rocketry, the 

two men loathed each other. 

Fortunately for Korolev, the aircraft designer Andrei Tupolev, 

also a political suspect, was head of a “sharashka” in Moscow, 

a research facility within the prison camp system where valued 

prisoners could work on engineering projects in relative comfort. 

At Tupolev’s request, Korolev joined his team. A telling detail of 

Soviet leniency was the fact that Korolev was released from the 

Siberian camp and ordered to report to Moscow, but no transport 

was made available to him. His improvised return journey, on 

foot, by ship, and by hitching rides on trucks, took many weeks 

and nearly killed him. 

According to Yuri Mazzhorin, one of Korolev’s senior experts 

on guidance trajectories, “He was an extraordinary person. You’d 

think his time in prison would have broken his spirit, but to 

the contrary, when I first met him in Germany when we were 

investigating the V2 weapons, he was a strong-willed, purposeful 

person who knew exactly what he wanted. But he never insulted 

you. He would always listen to what you had to say. Everybody 

loved him.” 

Korolev’s greatest creation was the R-7 missile, or Semyorka, 

“Little Seven” as it was affectionately known by the men who 

built it or flew on it. Fueled with liquid oxygen and kerosene, 

and incorporating four drop-away boosters parallel to a central 

core, this was the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missile. 

Glushko’s compact turbine fuel pumps and pipework serviced 

four combustion chambers simultaneously. The thrust of twenty 

separate nozzles was distributed among just five engine assemblies. 

The first launches of the R-7 failed, but on August 3, 1957, it 

flew a simulated nuclear strike mission (over Soviet territory), 

then began its career as a space launcher on October 4 that year, 

launching Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite. 

Dr. Andy Aldrin, director of business development and 

advanced programs for United Launch Alliance, and also a keen 

space historian, admires the speed with which Korolev could 

conjure up space triumphs. “He tried to go on vacation after 

Sputnik, and he got a call from Khruschev. ‘Comrade, come 

to the Kremlin.’ Of course he went, and Khruschev said, ‘In a 
 

 

 

 

 

ASK MAGAZINE | 35 

STrANGELy ENoUGh, NASA’S APoLLo ProJECT wAS A 

SUCCESS bECAUSE ITS LEADErShIP UNDEr wEbb AND hIS 

CLoSE DEPUTIES, robErT SEAMANS AND GEorGE MUELLEr, 

wAS SoMEwhAT SovIETIST IN ITS NATUrE ... 

month we have the fortieth anniversary of the glorious October 

Socialist Revolution. We want you to put up another satellite 

that will do something important.’ He wanted a satellite that 

could broadcast the ‘Communist Internationale’ from space, but 

Korolev had another idea. He wanted to launch a living creature. 

And within a month, he and his people scratch-built a special 

capsule and did just that.” 

Sputnik II went up on November 3, 1957, carrying the 

dog Laika, a living, breathing mammalian creature. This was 

a clear indication where Korolev was heading. Dr. Aldrin 

takes up the story. “Korolev promised the military that he 

could build spy satellites, and then said, ‘Of course we have 

to develop manned capsules first, so that trained pilots with 

good eyesight can report on what the cameras are likely to 

see.’ Basically, he conned them. He really understood how to 

work the political system.” 

Unfortunately, command over Russian space affairs became 

increasingly less well defined throughout the 1960s. While 

Korolev won political backing for his R-7 programs by virtue of 

his successes, this didn’t mean that he had much authority over 

his competitors, Vladimir Chelomei, mastermind of the Proton 

rocket; Glushko, the ever-resentful engine designer; and Mikhail 

Yangel, yet another missile tsar working out of Ukraine. The 

late-1960s Soviet effort to send a cosmonaut to the moon was not 

actually one effort but several, all viciously competing for funds 

and patronage. Korolev’s death from cancer in 1966 allowed his 

rivals to wreak havoc unchecked. Russia’s lunar ambitions decayed 

into a terrible mess, culminating in disastrous launch explosions 

and a costly lack of focus. 

Strangely enough, NASA’s Apollo project was a success 

because its leadership under Webb and his close deputies, Robert 

Seamans and George Mueller, was somewhat Sovietist in its 

nature: collective at ground level, but with tightly centralized 

and sometimes ruthless control from this small cadre within 

Washington Headquarters. One instance involved Harry Goett, 

the successful, hard-driving head of the Goddard field center in 

the early 1960s. Webb freely admitted that Goett had achieved 

an excellent record, but “he thought he was so good that he could 

get away with it—that, by God, nobody could really cause him 

any serious trouble. He said he wanted to draw an absolute line 

between the people that worked for him, and those that were in 

Headquarters.” Goett was eased out of his post. 

In 1963, an alarmed U.S. senator, William Proxmire, said that 

“NASA is probably the most centralized government-spending 

program in the United States. It concentrates in the hands of 

a single agency full authority over an important sector of the 

economy. This could be described as corporate socialism.” NASA’s 

Apollo-era chief, Webb, was feared by many prominent Americans 

precisely for those reasons, but his firm grasp on the reins was 

crucial to Apollo’s success. 

Portrait of Sergei Korolev. 
Photo Credit: NASA/Neil Armstrong 

36 | ASK MAGAZINE 

Astronaut Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin walks on the moon during the Apollo 11 mission. 

It enabled the agency to achieve great success and prestige 

throughout the Mercury and Gemini programs, because of his 

insistence that all NASA field centers should be answerable to the 

needs of specific space programs, and not the other way around. 

Not everyone liked it, but Webb’s imposed unity was valuable 

throughout most of the 1960s. The International Space Station 

is a great success today, but arguments among NASA centers 

before the first metal was cut lost time and cost the United 

States a great deal of money. Webb would never have stood 

for that lack of unity. 

The Soviet lunar programs faltered because their power 

structures were not hierarchical and decisive but individualistic and 

quarrelsome. Korolev and his rivals were rather like nineteenthcentury American railroad barons ruthlessly trying to shoulder each 

other out of the way, each determined to see their train, rather than 

the other fellow’s, play the leading role. None of them seemed quite 

strong enough to take overall charge of Russia’s space effort, while 

the Kremlin failed miserably to impose unity under one office. 

The real test of Webb’s strength of character came in the 

wake of the Apollo 1 fire of January 1967. He shouldered much 
ASK MAGAZINE | 37 

of the blame during the subsequent Congressional inquisitions, 

protecting Apollo and its people as best he could from direct 

repercussions. His fury at some senior NASA colleagues was 

not because of the fire itself; they had failed to warn him about 

contractual problems with Apollo’s manufacturers. Congress 

knew about these, and tried to use them to tarnish Webb’s 

personal reputation. 

People often think that “money was no object for Apollo.” 

Nothing could be further from the truth. The political mood in 

1967 was very different from in 1961, when the program had been 

initiated. Webb had to fight exceptionally hard to protect Apollo, 

especially given the fact that none of the new lunar vehicles had 

even left the ground at the time of the fire. 

Webb may not have suffered such extreme physical cruelties 

as Korolev suffered, but by the standards of bureaucratic life in 

the United States, he also had to show extraordinary courage—in 

defense of NASA, its people, and its programs. Time and again he 

supported the judgment of colleagues within the agency against 

political interference. In his own words, he “couldn’t let anybody 

dictate the decisions that were at the technical level, whether it was 

the president or the vice president or the scientists.” 

Today Webb is revered, but just as Korolev was accused 

of sabotage and disloyalty, and then had to spend more than 

a decade clearing his name, so the U.S. political establishment 

took just as many years to “exonerate” Webb from blame with 

regard to the Apollo 1 fire, and to remove once and for all the 

subtle accusations of dishonesty leveled against him during the 

Congressional inquiries and accompanying media assaults on 

his good name. Even a decade after the triumph of Apollo 11, 

the much-respected Republican Senator Margaret Chase Smith 

felt the need to lodge a formal letter with Congress, expressing 

her “disappointment at the lack of recognition for the man who 

put a man on the moon, James E. Webb. He had to take the 

heat and fire of partisan political attacks from headline-hungry 

politicians. I saw this at firsthand in my work on the Senate 

Space Committee. But as compared to the hero astronauts, what 

recognition or material gains did Jim Webb, and the thousands 

behind the scenes he typified, receive? Minimal, if any. They 

declined to commercially exploit their official positions. And 

today, they are forgotten men and women.” 

Korolev similarly gets too little of the glory for humankind’s 

earliest space triumphs. Alexei Leonov, the first man to walk in 

space, described to this author a tragic last meeting shortly before 

Korolev’s death on January 14, 1966, when a surgical procedure 

for stomach ulcers revealed serious cancers and internal bleeding. 

Throughout all his years working to give the Soviets a lead in 

space, Korolev seldom discussed his arrest, torture, beatings, and 

imprisonment under the old Stalinist regime. People thought 

of him as a burly man built like a bear, yet the truth was that 

his body was made rigid by countless ancient injuries. Leonov 

described a man who “couldn’t turn his neck but had to swivel 

his upper torso to look people in the eye, and nor could he open 

his jaws wide enough to laugh out loud.” 

Two days before he was scheduled for surgery, Korolev was 

resting at his home in Moscow. Gagarin and Leonov came to visit 

him with several other friends, and at the end of the evening, just 

as most of the visitors were putting on their greatcoats to leave, 

Korolev said to his two favorite cosmonauts, “Don’t go just yet. 

I want to talk.” According to Leonov, “He told us how he was 

taken away and beaten. When he asked for a glass of water they 

smashed him in the face with the water jug. They demanded a 

list of so-called traitors in the rocket laboratories, and he could 

only reply that he had no such list. Then they sent him to the 

prison camp.” 

This great powerhouse of a man had never spoken before in 

such a fragile and personal way, and the two young cosmonauts 

were deeply affected by what they heard. Leonov told me, “This 

was the first time that he had ever talked about his imprisonment 

in the gulag, since these stories are usually kept secret. We began 

to realize there was something wrong with our country. On our 

way home, Yuri couldn’t stop questioning. How could it be that 

such unique people like Korolev had been subjected to repression? 

It was so obvious that he was a national treasure.” Webb was also 

a “national treasure,” but the strange fact is most Americans have 

never heard of him. ●

piers bizoNy has written about science, aerospace, and cosmology for a wide variety of 

magazines in the United Kingdom and the United States. 2001: 

Filming the Future, his award-winning book on the making of 

Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, has become a standard 

reference work. It was also the basis for a C4 documentary film. 

In 1997, The Rivers of Mars, his critically acclaimed analysis of 

the life-on-Mars debate, was short-listed for the NASA/Eugene 

M. Emme Award for Astronautical Writing, while Starman, 

produced as an acclaimed book and a BBC film, told the story of 

Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s life for the first time. 
Title 

By 

Intro 

REflEcTING ON 

HOPE

By DON HEyER 

Recent hires who work for the Jet Propulsion 

Laboratory successfully launched a sounding rocket 

carrying the TRaiNED project 75 miles above Earth ’s 

surface on Dec. 6, 2010, from the U.S. Army ’s White 

Photo Credit: White Sands Missile Range 

Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. 

In the final days of 2008, the Science Mission 

Directorate and the Academy of Program/ 

Project and Engineering Leadership released a 

new opportunity under a fledgling program: the 

Hands-on Project Experience, or HOPE. It was 

described as a “training opportunity” and solicited 

proposals for small-scale projects from in-house 

teams of young engineers and scientists. The 

philosophy behind HOPE was simple: the most 

effective way to learn how to do something is to 

actually do it. Only months earlier, management 

at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) had 

teamed with a group of young employees to form 

the Phaeton Program around the idea that smallscale flight projects could be used as a tool to 

rapidly prepare personnel for larger-scale missions. 

These parallel ideas met in a shared undertaking 

in early 2009 when TRaiNED (Terrain-Relative 

Navigation and Employee Development) was 

selected to become the first HOPE project. I was 

selected to be the project manager for that project. 

38 | ASK MAGAZINE | STORy 
 

 

ASK MAGAZINE | 39 

The TRaiNED Concept 

The HOPE training opportunity requested proposals for a 

sounding-rocket project that would have a useful purpose for the 

Science Mission Directorate. Coincidentally, the JPL Phaeton 

Program had identified a sounding-rocket-based project to 

develop a technology called “terrain-relative navigation” (TRN) 

as one of its first projects. 

The TRN project presented significant appeal as a training 

experience. The project would be able to leverage a considerable 

portion of the technical design from a related sounding-rocket 

flight flown a few years earlier. The new project would essentially 

add to and incrementally improve the previous design, keeping 

the technical scope of the project manageable but challenging. 

What’s more, most members of the project team from the earlier 

flight were available and many could act as mentors to the new 

team. Finally, the program would support the developing project 

team periodically with short classroom-training modules designed 

to follow the life cycle of the project. 

TRN is a technology that could support precision navigation 

of future spacecraft. One can refine inertial-measurement-based 

position estimates using computer-vision technology to identify 

and track features in ground imagery. The objective of this TRN 

project was to advance the technology’s development by collecting 

ground imagery, inertial measurement unit data, and GPS data 

during a sounding-rocket flight and to use that data set to validate 

TRN through post-flight data processing. 

The pieces fit together nicely, but there was one gaping hole: 

the program hadn’t identified a way to get the TRN payload 

onto a sounding rocket. Project HOPE was the solution, and 

it quickly became clear that the two programs complemented 

each other nicely. 

Implementing TRaiNED 

The TRaiNED project was entirely staffed with early-career 

hires—employees less than three years out of school. These earlycareer hires were competitively selected at JPL from a large pool 

of applicants that wasn’t limited to the engineering team: all the 

project positions were filled with early-career hires. Furthermore, 

the search for candidates for each position wasn’t limited to those 

who worked in the related area of the institution. A wider search 

was conducted to give people who were hired out of school in one 

discipline an opportunity to gain experience in another. 

While each member of the project team brought a different 

background to the table, there were several common learning 

experiences that we encountered and tackled as one. For 

example, nobody on the project team had experience writing 

requirements, yet each individual was responsible for developing 

the requirements on their own element of the project. There were 

many different opinions about how to best structure and define 

these requirements, and these inconsistencies showed through at 

the project’s system requirements review. This review may not have 

gone as smoothly as many would have liked, but it served as strong 

motivation for the team to come together in the following weeks 

to rework project requirements as a group instead of individually. 

The result was not only a stronger set of requirements but a more 

integrated project team. 

As TRaiNED was the first HOPE project, there wasn’t any 

clear model to follow to effectively combine the training and 

technical goals of the project. Rather, the definition of both 

programs had to take place in step with definition of the project. 

At times this was a source of frustration: both programmatic 

training objectives and project technical objectives had to be 

accommodated, and these two objectives were sometimes in 

conflict. Working through these struggles became one of the 

cornerstone learning experiences for the project team, however, 

as we were forced to negotiate—as any other project would—the 

scope and expectations of our work with several stakeholders. 

Most of the team quickly learned how many stakeholders 

they actually had as they started work on their work agreements 

(WAs)—agreements between the project and line management 

that describes the work that is to be done and the resources that 

will be available to complete it. We expected to be able to sail 

through the WA approval process with relative ease but discovered 

quite the opposite. In some cases, getting a WA approved became 

a lengthy process of give and take between the project and the 

line spanning several weeks. While completing the WAs wasn’t 

automatic, the conversations they required helped to bring all 

the stakeholders together with the same understanding of the 

project’s goals and approach. 

In order for the project team to have an authentic hands-on 

experience, TRaiNED was treated like other flight projects. So, 

while only a fraction of the size of most flight projects, TRaiNED 

was planned and structured in the same fashion. Tailoring of the 

typical processes and requirements was conducted by the project 

team through normal channels. While there was significant 

tailoring to reflect TRaiNED’s relatively small scale, the project 

team experienced firsthand all that goes into planning and 

executing a project from its conceptual stages through its launch. 

Launch 

Fast-forward to December 2010. The team that started the project 

nearly two years earlier is still almost completely intact. During 

the past two years, we have completed and passed the major 

project life-cycle reviews; have designed, built, and tested our 

payload; and worked with a team from Wallops Flight Facility 

(WFF) to integrate the payload into the sounding rocket that 

sits on the launcher ready to fly. The JPL, WFF, and White 

Sands Missile Range teams have gathered in the block house 

or at other posts around the range and are busying themselves 

with their prescribed prelaunch tasks. We’ve been here before: 
 

 

 

Project HOPE team members work 

on the TRaiNED rocket during the 

assembly and debug processes. 

Photo Credit: NASA/Berit Bland 

40 | ASK MAGAZINE 

once in June when the weather moved in at the last minute and 

forced the launch to be canceled, and again in September when 

the weather forecast didn’t even hint at cooperating. After all 

the prelaunch tests check out, December’s countdown is also 

placed into a hold because the skies have clouded over. As the 

launch window nears its end, most people are beginning to resign 

themselves to another weather cancellation when, with just a few 

minutes remaining, Dr. Martin Heyne (the TRaiNED principal 

investigator) announces that there’s been just enough of a clearing 

in the weather to go for the launch. 

If an argument ever had to be made in support of Project 

HOPE, it was exemplified by the following fifteen minutes. The 

calm, composed manner in which each member of the project 

team quickly transitioned from a weather-induced limbo to 

efficiently executing the final steps of the launch countdown 

was rewarding to watch and special to be a part of. The collective 

poise exhibited by the team as the rocket left the rail didn’t exist 

in 2008. It was poise that could not have come from attending 

classroom lectures or from reading a stack of books. It came 

from experience. 

Lessons Learned and Suggestions 

for Future Projects 

Two more HOPE projects are currently under way, and with 

any luck their success will mean more to follow. Now that a few 

months have passed since the TRaiNED launch, I’ve had a chance 

to consider what helped make TRaiNED a success. While the 

following list is in no way comprehensive, I’d like to highlight 

four factors that I found to be of particular importance. 

1. Project Selection. The selection of an achievable concept 

is critical. The project has to be challenging enough 

to be worthwhile, but manageable enough so that the 

project team can divide their attention between solving 

technical problems and learning about how a flight project 

is executed. Learning how to execute a flight project, let 

alone actually doing it, is time consuming and easy to 

underestimate. 

2. Institutional Support. JPL provided us with a phenomenal 

level of support throughout the project. The institutional 

investment in a program to help direct and shepherd along 

this project and others like it was invaluable. 

3. Review Board Selection. It is important to convene a 

standing review board that recognizes the developmental 

nature of the project, but will still give objective feedback 

where the project demonstrates weaknesses. The standing 

review board assembled by Project HOPE for TRaiNED was 

an asset throughout the project. The TRaiNED standing 

review board not only helped us identify weaknesses in the 

project and correct them, but helped coach us so that we 

were better prepared for the next review. 

4. Mentors. Mentoring was critical to the success of the 

TRaiNED project. We were fortunate enough to have 

a team of engaged mentors who routinely took time 

out of their schedule to help us with whatever problem 

we happened to be facing that particular day. Most 

importantly, our mentors were invaluable in identifying 

upcoming problems that we weren’t even aware existed. I 

lost count of how many times they asked me, “Have you 

thought about XYZ?” I invariably realized that I hadn’t 

but needed to. ●

doN heyer is an electrical engineer in the flight communications section at the Jet 

Propulsion Laboratory. He is currently working on the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter project, and 

he is the project manager for TRaiNED. 
It is always exciting watching something launch into space. It is even more thrilling when the 

launch is the culmination of many years of work. Having worked on a large space-science mission 

at Goddard Space Flight Center, we had the privilege of working with a team of people dedicated 

to developing a one-of-a-kind scientific satellite that would do things never done before. Watching 

the Atlas V blast off from the Cape with our satellite onboard was a moment of truth. Would the 

satellite perform as designed? Had we tested it sufficiently before launch? Did we leave a latent flaw? 

Had we used our resources wisely to achieve the greatest possible scientific benefit?

DyNAMICS obSErvATory LESSoNS AFFIrMED 

 By BRENT ROBERTSON AND MICHAEL BAy 

This illustration maps 

the magnetic field lines 

emanating from the sun 

and their interactions 

superimposed on an 

extreme ultraviolet 

image from SDO.

Photo Credit: NASA/SDO

STORy | ASK MAGAZINE | 41
The Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) mission is changing 

our understanding of the dynamic structure of the sun and what 

drives solar processes and space weather, which affect our lives 

and society. Goddard led the team who built the spacecraft in 

house, managed and integrated the instruments, developed the 

ground system and mission operations, and performed observatory 

environmental testing. We had a compelling mission, adequate 

funding, a seasoned project management team, and a strong 

systems-engineering and quality-assurance staff. The instrument 

investigations were provided by highly competent and experienced 

organizations at Stanford University, the Lockheed Martin Solar 

and Astrophysical Laboratory, and the University of Colorado 

Laboratory of Atmospheric and Space Physics. It’s what we 

considered a dream team for mission development. 

SDO was a technically challenging mission with stringent 

science requirements necessitating the application of new 

technology in a severe orbital environment. In order to mitigate 

potential threats and ensure success, the SDO project instituted 

a thorough “test like you fly” philosophy at the system level along 

with a rigorous risk management and problem-tracking approach. 

A risk identification and mitigation process was put in place for 

everyone to use early on. As we moved from the design to the build 

phase, we emphasized stringent problem investigation, tracking, 

and closeout across the entire project. This process proved to be 

an effective technique to aggressively identify and track threats to 

mission success. We found and resolved system-level anomalies 

that otherwise might have gone unreported or been left open. The 

result was reflected in the findings of the SDO prelaunch safety 

and mission success review, where it was noted that there were 

fewer residual risks than normal. 

Like most projects, SDO encountered a number of

programmatic and technical issues throughout its development. 

Looking back at these issues affirms a number of lessons that may 

be useful for other projects. A budget rescission just after critical 

design review removed 30 percent of the funding at a critical 

time during development. The project was forced to slow down 

instrument development and defer spacecraft procurements. At 

the time, we gave up some schedule reserve. The launch readiness 

date slipped by only four months, but we realized in hindsight 

it was not a wise decision. We later encountered delays in flighthardware deliveries due to challenges in developing high-speed 

bus electronics needed for transferring large quantities of data for 

Photo Credit: NASA/SDO

A rather large M 3.6–class flare occurred near the edge of the sun on Feb. 24, 

2011; it blew out a waving mass of erupting plasma that swirled and twisted 

for ninety minutes.

42 | ASK MAGAZINE
transmission to Earth. The launch readiness date slipped another 

four months, which meant SDO lost its launch slot. Due to a 

backlog of Atlas V launches, a four-month slip ended up costing 

the project another fourteen months waiting for its turn to launch. 

We were very worried that we would lose critical people to other 

jobs during the wait, but in the end almost all the original team 

supported launch. Lesson affirmed: Giving up schedule reserve 

before starting a flight-build effort is a mistake. 

Looking back at the technical issues encountered by SDO, 

we can identify some as “high consequence.” These were issues 

that required rework of flight hardware, issues whose resolution 

held up integration and test efforts, or issues that could not be 

fully mitigated and resulted in a residual risk at launch. Could 

these issues have been avoided? Maybe some of them. Unexpected 

events always happen, especially when building a one-of-a-kind 

spacecraft. That is why we test. More than half these issues 

were due to interactive complexity among components that was 

hard to predict analytically and could only be discovered after 

system integration. What is worth noting is how these issues were 

identified and how they manifested themselves. 

Some issues were discovered with vendor components 

after they were delivered to the project. Although the vendor 

was required to subject components to an environmental test 

program, component testing did not always uncover all problems. 

For example, one component had a latent workmanship issue 

that was not discovered until thermal-vacuum testing. The 

device experienced anomalous behavior in a narrow temperature 

range. The problem was caused by an incorrect number of 

windings on an inductor that was selectable by an operator 

during the unit’s building and testing. The device’s functional 

performance had been verified by the vendor at the plateaus 

of component-level thermal testing but not during transitions. 

Lesson affirmed: Not all test programs are equal; what 

matters is having the right test program and, in this case, 

functional testing as temperatures vary over their full range. 

Another example involved the identification of a shorted 

diode on a component’s redundant power input. Component-level 

testing verified the power-input functions one at a time but did 

not specifically test for power-feed isolation between redundant 

inputs. This short was not discovered until the component was 

powered by a fully redundant system on the observatory during 

a test designed to show power bus isolation. Such “negative 

testing,” designed to verify protective functions, had uncovered 

a problem and was necessary to show the mission could continue 

in spite of failures. Lesson affirmed: Verifying functions may 

need negative testing at the system level, especially where 

protective or isolating features are intended. Both of these 

components were de-integrated from the observatory and returned 

to the vendor for repair, which delayed the completion of system 

integration and testing. But it was better to find these problems 

prelaunch instead of on orbit.

The SDO design used common products in multiple 

subsystems. This was not only cost efficient but also allowed for 

the discovery of potential issues through testing a larger number of 

common units, thereby enabling reliability growth. For instance, 

a common low-power switch card used in eight locations had 

a latent flaw that was found during the build of a flight spare 

unit. A short to ground that had not been uncovered during the 

testing of other similar cards due to a marginal tolerance was 

discovered. A possible on-orbit problem potentially induced by 

launch vibration or extensive thermal cycling was averted by having 

a design with a common product. Unfortunately, five electronics 

boxes were affected and all of them were already integrated on 

the observatory. We decided to de-integrate the boxes and fix 

the problem. It could have been worse; the observatory had 

not yet gone through its thermal-vacuum testing. But it was 

unnerving to find a problem like this so late in the test program. 

Lesson affirmed: The devil is in the details and the details 

can’t be ignored, as Murphy’s Law and Mother Nature will 

show you in flight, sometimes in dramatic fashion. 

One issue not due to complexity occurred during a bakeout. Most of SDO’s hardware had been baked to remove 

contaminants; the satellite’s high-gain antenna subsystem was 

one of the last pieces of hardware needing a bake-out. It was just 

NoT ALL TEST ProGrAMS ArE EqUAL; whAT MATTErS IS 

hAvING ThE rIGhT TEST ProGrAM AND, IN ThIS CASE, FUNCTIoNAL 

TESTING AS TEMPErATUrES vAry ovEr ThEIr FULL rANGE. 

ASK MAGAZINE | 43
Moments after launch, SDO’s Atlas V rocket flew past a sundog 

and, with a rippling flurry of shock waves, destroyed it. 

Photo Credit: NASA/Goddard/Anne Koslosky

44 | ASK MAGAZINE
another bake-out; what could go wrong? It turned out that the 

facility control software for test heaters was left turned off and 

nobody noticed that the uncontrolled test heaters subjected the 

hardware to damaging hot temperatures until it was too late. The 

good news was we had spares on hand to rebuild the subsystem, 

but this was a problem that could have been avoided. Lesson 

affirmed: Apply product savers1 to protect flight hardware 

from damaging conditions should test environments run 

awry, and continuously assess what can go wrong during 

testing of flight hardware, no matter how often similar tests 

have been performed. 

SDO used a rigorous “test like you fly” approach at the system 

level to find issues that might have escaped detection during 

design, review, and lower-level testing. In today’s systems, where 

interactive complexity can conceal potentially serious issues and 

impede our ability to foresee failure, it is essential to understand 

mission-critical functions and work tirelessly to uncover the 

“unknown unknowns.” It was especially critical to apply a “test 

like you fly” philosophy to increase the chance of finding the 

latent flaws that matter. Often, seemingly small problems and 

failures are the tip of an iceberg threatening something bigger. 

Many loss-of-mission failures are foreshadowed by prelaunch 

discrepancies. It was not good enough just to make things work. 

We needed to make sure we identified and understood why they 

didn’t work and then properly obviate or mitigate that cause. 

SDO was scheduled for launch on Feb. 11, 2010. But the SDO 

team was challenged one last time, when a winter “storm of the 

century” closed much of the Washington, D.C., area, where the 

Mission Operations Center was located. Undaunted, the entire 

team made it in to support the launch. It was a spectacular launch, 

with the rocket flying through a rainbow known as a sun dog, 

which the rocket’s shock wave extinguished. The rocket did its 

job, placing SDO in a geosynchronous transfer orbit. 

Since then, on-orbit science operations continue to exceed 

requirements and the spacecraft has performed flawlessly. The 

few residual risks accepted at the time of launch have not come to 

pass. The use of a rigorous process to uncover potential problems 

was a success. The technical issues, the wait for a launch, the 

snowstorm—all these challenges had been met. The years of 

hard work from many talented people paid off. ●

1. A product saver provides an independent shut-off of a potentially threatening environment (vibration, thermal) in case 

the prime environmental controller fails.

One of the four Atmospheric Imaging Assembly telescopes arrives at Goddard 

for integration and testing. Photo Credit: NASA

ASK MAGAZINE | 45
 “

- 

’

46 | ASK MAGAZINE | STORy 

Configuration
 

A still from the animation, Global Precipitation Measurement 

(GPM) Mission: A fly up the Nile River in Egypt, then a pull out into 

space,” showing Saudi Arabia, India, and the Caspian Sea. 

Image Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/Scientific Visualization Studio; 

Blue Marble Next Generation data is courtesy of Reto Stockli (Goddard) and 

NASA s Earth Observatory. 
 

ASK MAGAZINE | 47 

ManageMent:

A RecoRd [and a] ResouRce By DEBBIE DUSTERWALD 

At the 2009 NASA Project Management Challenge, I	 

walked to the lectern wearing a white wig. I asked the audience
 

to step back in time with me to the signing of the Declaration
 

of Independence. I represented George Washington. When 

the audience stopped laughing, I said, “Imagine for a moment, 

if we had to have all the signatures on our documents that 

our forefathers had during the signing of the Declaration 

of Independence. It would take a long time, and we would	 

not be very productive.” The Declaration of Independence 

established requirements and standards for our nation. It	 

was read, reviewed, and edited many times to be sure it was	 

correct before it could go to England. The documents we 

process for our projects might not be as far reaching, but they 

are important to mission success. Reviews take time, but they 

ensure that our documentation complies with requirements 

and has lasting value. 

Requirements and standards are the foundation of any NASA 

program and project. They define how a project accomplishes 

its objectives and moves forward to achieve its goals. It is the 

responsibility of configuration management to maintain the 

traceability of documents through the entire project life cycle. 

Configuration management is a formal process to document 

and control the coordination, evaluation, approval, and

release of all changes; to maintain all project documents and 

drawings; and to ensure all requirements are complied with 

and all proposed changes have been implemented and resolved. 

Without configuration management, project activities would 

not have traceability. Configuration management ensures 

that technical errors are corrected and new requirements

accommodated. It ensures that project objectives are being 

met and that the project team is performing effectively. Also, 

without successful configuration management, we would lack 

the wealth of accurate documentation that 

future projects can learn from and build on. 

Learning by Doing 

When I first started in configuration 

management, I worked for a company 

supporting Goddard Space Flight Center’s 

Image Processing Division. I worked in 

the Technical Reference Library at the 

Inglewood facility in Landover, Maryland. 

One end of the facility housed the technical 

publications department; at the other end 

was the engineering department. The library 

was located in the middle. This was one of 

the times in my career that I happened to be 

at the right place at the right time. I found 

that it is important to be close to the project 

office for easy access. 

It was my first opportunity to establish 

processes for configuration management 

of documents and drawings. I created 

a logbook for all the documents and 

drawings. It was a challenge to keep track of which documents 

and drawings were released and which were being changed 

because I had to do it all manually. I remember getting my first 

computer and using the dbase III Plus application for tracking 

documents and drawings. It was a whole new world for me 

and for the configuration management process. Throughout 

the years, computers and software have evolved and provided 

a much more effective and efficient traceability process. Over 

the years, I progressed from dbase III Plus, dbase IV, Microsoft 

Access, and the Next Generation Integrated Network (NGIN) 

to, now, the Management Information System (MIS) on my 

current project. 

I have worked on four “in-house” and one “out-of-house” 

projects at Goddard. Each of these projects had different scientific 

objectives. The principles of configuration management— 

identification, control, status accounting, and verification— 
48 | ASK MAGAZINE 

do not change, but no two projects conduct configuration 

management in quite the same way. Configuration managers 

need to enforce the requirements, but still be flexible and work 

with the project to accomplish its unique objectives. 

I learned quickly that I had to do configuration management 

a little differently when I worked on a project with significant 

cost and schedule constraints. It was a very fast-paced in-house 

project. Configuration management was done electronically. 

Before I started, the configuration management processes were 

viewed as a ball and chain that held back productivity. We had 

to accommodate the demands and limitations of the project. 

Because we did not do configuration management exactly as 

other projects may have done it, we heard criticism from the 

sidelines. But we met our objectives and the integrity of the 

documentation was not compromised. The spacecraft was 

launched, and the mission has been successful. 

When I started working on the Extreme Ultra Violet 

Explorer payload module in 1989, a project manager 

recommended that I interact with the team I would be 

supporting. I realized that establishing a line of communication 

and a rapport with the managers and the engineers performing 

the actual work is very important. Configuration management 

personnel must get out from behind their desks, attend 

status meetings, and connect with the people creating the 

documentation. If they want to be successful, configuration 

management personnel have to be willing to earn their project 

team’s cooperation. 

Working on the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory 

project, I realized how important it is to have a sense of humor 

and enjoy doing your job. The configuration management 

office was responsible for project-level documents, instrument 

and observatory procurements, and deliverables. Sometimes 

some of the managers would be late to scheduled Configuration 

Control Board (CCB) meetings. With the clock ticking and no 

one coming to the meeting, I would go into the project office, toot 

my fake horn, and announce: “Doo-doo-doo-doo ... Is everyone 

ready for the CCB meeting?!” The project manager would come 

out of his office and tell me, that’s what he likes to see, people 

having a good time with their work. There are times when we 

are a little too serious about what we are doing, so to break the 

ice, you need to laugh and have a good time. 

When I began working on the Lunar Reconnaissance 

Orbiter project in 2006, there were 250 open configuration 

change requests (CCRs). To close that many CCRs in a short 

amount of time, you need the support of the entire team. I 

worked with each individual subsystem lead and the project 

management office to get through the processing and release 

of the documents associated with these CCRs. I learned two 

Animation still showing Lake Nasser, Egypt. 

Image Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/Scientific 

Visualization Studio; Blue Marble Next Generation data is courtesy 

of Reto Stockli (Goddard) and NASA ’s Earth Observatory. 
 

ASK MAGAZINE | 49 

things from this experience: that teamwork is very important, 

and that everyone needs to share the same view of the objective. 

The GPM Mission 

I currently work as the configuration management lead for the 

Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission. I lead a 

team of six configuration management professionals. The core 

observatory has evolved through many versions and architectures, 

each producing a surge of new documentation specific to the plan 

at the time. The mission was initiated as a Goddard in-house 

effort with design work starting in earnest in 2002. As the design 

approached preliminary design review in late 2004, the project 

transitioned to an out-of-house effort managed by Goddard. The 

following year, the project direction shifted to a collaborative 

effort between Goddard and commercial vendors, in which the 

flight electronics and software would be procured and used on a 

Goddard-designed spacecraft bus. Studies were performed with 

potential vendors and development of procurement documents 

were in progress when the project reverted to the original plan of 

in-house development in fall of 2007. Each of these shifts created 

an avalanche of new and modified documents and drawings. 

Only through the lessons I learned on previous projects and the 

support of a great configuration management team have I been 

able to manage the project’s objectives. 

The GPM core observatory successfully completed its 

preliminary design review in November 2008 and its critical 

design review in December 2009. Integration of hardware into 

the mechanical structure is currently under way, with integration 

activities scheduled for most of 2011 and environmental testing 

throughout 2012. Shipment to the launch site at Tanegashima 

Space Center in Japan is planned for early the following year for 

a summer 2013 launch. 

Configuration management is responsible for managing all 

aspects of the GPM design cycle: requirements specifications, 

analyses and parts lists, schematic drawings, interface control 

documents, review materials, and test procedures and results. 

Many of the core observatory sensors and actuators, as well as 

the GPM microwave imager instrument, are procured from 

commercial vendors, which present a different configuration 

management challenge—to manage all the documentation 

associated with procurement activities and deliverable documents. 

The dual-frequency precipitation radar instrument and H-IIA 

launch vehicle are provided by the Japan Aerospace Exploration 

Agency, adding the challenge of international relations and 

compliance with international traffic in arms regulations. 

I have two mantras that work for me. The first one defines 

the configuration management process: baseline, control, change, 

control, traceability, review, and release. I developed my second 

mantra a few years ago when I worked with an engineer who did 

not provide documentation to support the work he was doing and 

made changes without going through the process. He told me 

time and time again I was keeping him from doing the work he 

needed to do; the configuration management process was slowing 

him down and causing him to not be on schedule. 

One day, I walked into the room and set down in front of 

him a 3-foot-long 2x4 board with his name on it. I held up the 

board and told him that if he did not do what needed to be done 

I was going to use it as it was meant to be used. Now, I am not 

a violent person and would never have carried out the threat: 

my second mantra is “do not hit the engineer.” The threat was 

effective, though. Recently a systems engineer added his own twist 

to this story. The Project Management Office is the biggest force 

behind configuration management. They set policy and priorities, 

and they provide influence over the engineers to make sure they 

are compliant. In other words, he said, project management is 

the 3-foot-long 2x4. 

Over the years, configuration management has grown into 

an important part of achieving project objectives. There are 

some key qualities that configuration management personnel 

need to accomplish their job. Good software tools to manage 

the information are important, but so are having good 

communication, people, and organizational skills—and a sense 

of humor. Configuration managers need to be part of the team 

and be grateful for the people who work to make the configuration 

management process successful. 

Success is a team effort. It requires cooperation, flexibility 

... and maybe a 3-foot-long 2x4. ●

debbie dusterwald is currently the configuration management 

lead for the Global Precipitation Measurement mission at Goddard 

Space Flight Center. She works on the PAAC III contract and is 

employed by ASRC Research and Technology Solutions. 
 

50 | ASK MAGAZINE | INSIGHT 

Managing in an 

Unsettled Environment

 By SCOTT J. CAMERON 
 

ASK MAGAZINE | 51 

Government service has historically been associated with a relatively stable work environment, 

at least when compared with private-sector organizations forced to continually adapt to shifting 

market forces in the pursuit of survival and profitability. The year 2011 is proving to be an unusually 

challenging one for NASA and other government agencies, however, replete with change and tumult. 

Fiscal year 2012 promises to be even more challenging. 

The Unsettled Environment 

The change and uncertainty are coming from a combination of 

three main factors: budgets, politics, and an aging workforce. 

Budgets 

More than half the fiscal year had elapsed before Congress 

and the president finally came to closure on annual 

funding on April 8, 2011. Unprecedented debate over how 

deep budget cuts needed to be this year represented a break 

in a pattern that goes back at least half a century, which 

saw presidents typically requesting less money than Congress 

eventually appropriated. 

While the debate over the FY2012 funding level has barely 

gotten started, House leadership is talking about cuts on the order 

of $6.2 trillion over the next decade, while the president is also 

beginning to signal an interest in further reductions after FY2012. 

Even the Senate is talking about freezing some FY2012 spending 

at the FY2011 level. Given increased costs due to inflation, even 

a freeze constitutes a cut in real dollars. 

At NASA, these fiscal challenges are compounded by 

programmatic changes. The Space Shuttle program is coming 

to an end. Constellation is slowly winding down, using precious 

financial resources in its last months that could be used 

productively elsewhere. 

Political Environment 

The year 2012 will see the return of a presidential election race 

and its focus on politics and political advantage. Preoccupation 

with politics will be heightened by the divided party control in 

Congress, with the Democratically controlled Senate and the 

Republican-controlled House each looking for ways to score 

political points. In such situations, sound, public policy-making 

can be impeded by political considerations, which often lead to 

stalemate and inaction. 

Workforce 

For years, federal human-capital management leaders have been 

warning of an impending retirement flood. The argument is 

that agencies will experience a massive wave of baby-boomer 

retirements any time now. 

This flood has not yet materialized. The stock market decline 

in recent years has wreaked havoc with the Thrift Savings Plans 

balances of many federal employees; like many workers in the 

private sector, they have been reluctant to retire until their 

retirement funds regain their pre-financial-crisis strength. At 

the same time, a historically high unemployment rate has limited 

federal employee opportunities for post-retirement employment 

outside government. 

But the wave of retirements is coming. Prospective retirees 

are older now than they were two years ago and, for many people, 

the attractions of retirement pull all the more strongly as they 

age. Also, the president and Congress have decided that federal 

employees will not receive annual cost-of-living adjustments 

for two years. For many employees, that means their “high 

three” compensation years that affect the size of their annuity 

in retirement are not going to get any higher, so there is little 

financial incentive to continue in the federal workforce. Finally, 

potential turnover of political officials, even when an incumbent 

president is reelected, can create a period of frustration and drift 

that many senior employees may want to avoid. 

Managing Through Uncertainty 

Managers can and must do three things to navigate these uncertain 

times. They must plan for change, support the workforce, and 

ensure that the organization is capable of performing once most 

of the change has happened. 

Plan for Change 

The critical steps in planning are collecting potentially relevant 

material, with a bias in favor of official sources of information 

and against tapping into the office rumor mill; analyzing the 

information collected; and then deciding how to adapt to 

the anticipated change. In general, do not be swayed by press 

coverage; editorials; employee blogs; posturing by local, state, 

or federal elected officials; and interest-group efforts to thwart 

administration policy. Since purveyors of incorrect or trivial 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

52 | ASK MAGAZINE 

STrIvE To ExPLAIN whAT ThE orGANIZATIoN wILL 

LooK LIKE AFTEr ThE ChANGE, So EMPLoyEES CAN 

vISUALIZE ThE FUTUrE AND ThINK AboUT ThEIr 

PLACE IN IT. wIThoUT UNDErPLAyING DIFFICULTIES, 

IDENTIFy AND ShArE ThE PoSITIvE. 

information are often among the loudest communicators, this 

can be a challenge. 

Agency leadership testimony before Congress, official press 

releases, and approved communications to employees are among 

the best information sources. Those documents go through a 

thorough internal clearance process, and, therefore, are most 

likely to accurately represent the official viewpoint. 

Analysis of the information collected needs to be done in 

the context of understanding how and when the change will 

likely happen, and who will be instrumental in accomplishing it. 

Change can be driven by a variety of processes, each with its own 

timelines and windows of opportunity for influence. It is critical 

to understand what’s driving a particular change, so the interested 

manager may inject himself or herself into the process in the most 

effective way at the most opportune moment. Typical change 

drivers are budget, litigation, acquisition, regulation, executive 

orders, and congressional action to amend current or create new 

statutory authority. Agency managers should develop a mental 

model of what the organization will look like after the change, 

so appropriate strategies can be defined to get from the “as is” 

to the “to be.” 

The process driving the change will typically provide crucial 

information on when the change will actually begin and when 

it is expected to be completed. It is important to understand the 

motivation of those forcing change. Do they want to cut budgets, 

decrease staff, or simply shift the emphasis of an agency? Unless 

their motives are understood, there is a real risk that strategies 

chosen to manage change will be misguided and unsuccessful, 

since they may not address the “problem” to be solved. Indeed, 

there is even the possibility that an adaptation strategy chosen 

without regard to the driver behind the change may exacerbate 

the perceived problem, and cause the manager to lose credibility. 

Support the Workforce 

The single best way to support the workforce is through practicing 

good communication. Communication must be 

• Open. Keep no secrets from employees unless you have 

been given information confidentially. 

• Frequent. If employees don’t hear from their manager 

enough, they will make up their own imaginative—but 

invariably wrong and often damaging—explanations of 

what is going on. 

• Honest. Share what you know and what you don’t know; 

don’t try to fake it, because people will notice and you will 

lose credibility. 

• Respectful. Recognize that employees will vary a great deal 

in terms of experience, sophistication, and anxiety, so don’t 

give the impression that any questions are inappropriate. 

• Multimodal. Don’t rely on just one form of communication; 

people learn differently and not everyone may have ready 

access to a single mode of communication. 

• Consistent. Leverage the chain of command to share and 

exchange information, but make sure that all communicators 

are “on message.” 

• Current. Stay on top of developments so you can share 

promptly when conditions change to retain confidence 

and reduce anxiety. 

• Prudent. Avoid talking to the press without a handler from 

your public affairs office to avoid unnecessary pitfalls, since 

a reporter may be more interested in creating an exciting 

story than reporting the “truth” as you see it. 

Strive to explain what the organization will look like after 

the change, so employees can visualize the future and think 

about their place in it. Without underplaying difficulties, 

identify and share the positive. Adhere to the party line, since 

nothing is gained by publicly disagreeing with policy decisions. 

Expect to repeat your message, since not everyone “gets it” the 

first time, and people will take comfort in constancy in an 

unsettled environment. 

If it looks like your organization is going to have to absorb 

a significant budget cut, then you need to think strategically, 

tactically, and humanely. 

From a strategic perspective, be active, not passive. Seek 

to drive change rather than be a victim of it. Discover if the 

change creates an opening to reshape the organization in ways you 

wanted to pursue in the past that may have been impractical in a 
ASK MAGAZINE | 53 

more staid institutional setting. Perform a multisector workforce 

analysis, taking the opportunity to reconsider the appropriate mix 

of federal employees, contractors, and other partners in light of 

the future mission. Envision the federal workforce that you will 

need to succeed after the change, and conduct all other activities 

with that end in mind. 

Tactically, be willing to make difficult decisions intelligently 

rather than abdicating control to bureaucratic processes. Make 

sure you are aware of applicable labor-relations regulations and 

constraints. Use early-outs and buyouts selectively to reshape 

the workforce. Working closely with your acquisition office, 

consider modifying contracts to refocus effort on the highest-value 

work. Choose not to exercise option years or cancel unnecessary 

contracts to conserve cash. Manage vacancies thoughtfully, 

avoiding across-the-board hiring freezes. If all else fails and you 

find yourself presiding over a reduction in force, find and work 

closely with an expert in the human resources office who will show 

you how to use your discretionary powers to shape it. Creatively 

target the reduction functionally and geographically, to help 

shape the outcomes as much as possible. Finally, get it over with 

as soon as possible to control the damage to morale and reduce 

the flight of your best talent. 

Be humane by being honest with people about their futures; 

don’t try to protect them from the truth. If you have not been 

doing it all along, this is the time to separate senior people who 

are poor performers; the organization cannot afford to carry them 

anymore. Work closely with human resources, but get it done. 

Set up an outplacement process to help capable people who don’t 

have a natural place in the changed organization to find a better 

niche in other parts of the agency. Pay special attention to your 

star performers; let them know that you want them around and 

plan to look after their interests as much as you can. 

Preserve the Capability to Perform 

Keeping in mind your vision for the “new” organization, be 

clear with yourself and your team, and human resources, on 

the competencies your people will need to succeed in the future. 

Then deliberately hire people who can catalyze the transition to 

the new organization. Do succession planning, and shape your 

training program so that it enhances the desired competencies 

and equips high-performing junior people to handle more-senior 

positions. Use the individual performance-management system 

to signal the new skills, knowledge, and competencies that you 

want in your new organization, and to focus the efforts of your 

staff on work that will advance the transformation. Work very 

hard to keep your high-performers engaged, so they will stick 

with the organization through the transition. 

Don’t forget to manage your relationships with contractors 

and other partners so they, too, begin to focus on creating 

the target organization. As applicable, revise contracts, grant 

agreements, and cooperative agreements so they are aligned with 

the new organization. 

Resist the temptation to follow the typical but deplorable 

pattern of responding to budget cuts by eliminating travel, awards, 

training, and new hires. While this may be a tempting stop-gap 

strategy to solve a short-term budget problem, it is not a good 

long-term choice. You and your customers are better off with a 

relatively smaller organization that is well trained, well rewarded, 

gets to develop professionally through travel to important events 

or locations, and can hire new people when they are needed, than 

with a slightly larger organization that can do none of these things. 

This implies that initial staff reductions should be deeper than 

what is necessary to simply “squeak by.” Squeaking by is no way 

to run an organization over the long term. 

Finally, in managing an organization in an unsettled 

environment, do not forget to manage your own needs. Without 

allowing yourself to take the opportunity to periodically refresh 

yourself, your own morale and attitude will be less than what 

you want to project and less than what you need to successfully 

manage a difficult transition. ●

scott J. cameroN, director of Grant Thornton LLP, works with 

government agencies to help them improve the effectiveness and 

efficiency of their organizations. He is a principal of the Council 

for Excellence in Government. Until March 2006, he was deputy 

assistant secretary at the Department of the Interior, where he 

was chief human capital officer, e-government executive, and 

served on the interagency Chief Acquisition Officers Council. He 

can be reached at scottj.cameron@gt.com. 
Title 

By 

Intro THE

Mars science Lab: 

OF

CHALLENGE

COMPLEXITY

By RICHARD COOK 

One of NASA’s great strengths over the past fifty years has been our ability to execute complex, oneof-a-kind projects. In some cases, we have literally written the book on how to carry out programs with 

difficult technological, scientific, or programmatic objectives. It is somewhat surprising, therefore, 

that we’ve had significant problems in the past few years with some highly visible, complex projects. 

I work on one of those projects, the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL). 

54 | ASK MAGAZINE | STORy 
’ 

' 

The parachute for NASA s Mars 

Science Laboratory (MSL) 

being tested inside the world s 

largest wind tunnel at Ames 

Research Center. An engineer is 

dwarfed by the parachute, the 

largest ever built to fly on an 

Photo Credit: NASA/Ames Research Center/JPL 

extraterrestrial flight. 

ASK MAGAZINE | 55 
 

 

 

 

 

 

-

Artist ’s concept of the 

Mars Science Laboratory 

in Martian terrain. 

Image Credit: NASA/JPL Caltech 

56 | ASK MAGAZINE 

MSL is the next major step forward in NASA’s Mars Exploration 

Program and will address key questions about the past and current 

habitability of Mars. The project is also developing critical new 

technology for landing on Mars, acquiring and processing surface 

samples, and conducting long-duration surface operations. This 

is probably the most complex planetary mission that NASA has 

ever attempted. As a result, it has stressed our implementation 

processes, our technology, our engineering capabilities, and our 

people. Although the project hasn’t launched yet, it has been 

extraordinarily useful in one regard: demonstrating the challenges 

of managing complexity on large-scale programs. 

So, what is complexity? The word is frequently thrown 

around as a sort of synonym for “difficult.” But it is more than 

that. Paraphrasing Webster, “Complexity is the quality of being 

intricately combined.” The characteristic that separates complex 

projects from merely difficult ones is the number of interconnected 

elements that are tied either technically or programmatically. 

Flagship efforts are becoming increasingly difficult and complex. 

Increased complexity is a primary cause for the challenges we’ve 

experienced. The MSL development experience is rich with 

examples where our ability (or inability) to effectively manage 

complexity has provided valuable lessons. 

At the recent Project Management (PM) Challenge in Long 

Beach, California, I gave a presentation on those lessons across 

domains including technology infusion, margin management, 

schedule planning and oversight, and the role of external reviews. 

Given space limitations here, I will focus on the connections 

between system architecture and complexity. 

Defining the right system architecture—the top-level 

structural and behavioral relationships between parts of a system— 

is critical to managing complexity. So what makes the “right” 

system architecture? The easiest answer is, the one that is as simple 

as possible but no simpler; the one with the most “separation” 

between elements; the one with the simplest interfaces, the most 

functional independence, the least reliance on those one-size-fitsall solutions that drive custom-interface accommodation. Greater 

complexity and interaction mean increased potential for problems 

and increased difficulty in testing to discover them. 

Unfortunately, a number of factors frequently undermine 

system architecture simplicity. Examples include technology 

limitations and complexity, mass/volume constraints, cost, and 

the use of heritage hardware. I could mention several examples 

of MSL handling systems complexity well, but I’ll start with one 

where we didn’t. 

ThE ChArACTErISTIC ThAT SEPArATES 

CoMPLEx ProJECTS FroM MErELy 

DIFFICULT oNES IS ThE NUMbEr oF 

INTErCoNNECTED ELEMENTS ThAT 

ArE TIED EIThEr TEChNICALLy or 

ProGrAMMATICALLy. 

We inherited several key aspects of the MSL architecture 

from the Mars Exploration Rover program. One example was 

having the rover’s avionics control the entire mission from launch 

through landing. This architecture was adopted for MSL despite 

the fundamentally different functions for launch; cruise; entry, 

descent, and landing (EDL); and rover operations. The intent 

was to take advantage of the core elements of the rover avionics 

(the processor, the power converters) to perform cruise and EDL 

functions. Adding additional boxes outside the rover required 

accepting the associated cost, schedule, and mass impacts. The 

problem with this architecture is that it significantly increased 

the complexity of the design by functionally integrating the rover 

and cruise/EDL systems. The cruise/EDL system could not be 

designed and tested independently from the rover because it was 

an integrated system. 
 

- 

Spacecraft technicians 

at the Jet Propulsion 

Laboratory prepare a 

space -simulation test of the 

Mars Science Laboratory 

cruise stage in a facility that 

simulates the cold, vacuum 

environment of space. 

Photo Credit: NASA/JPL Caltech 

ASK MAGAZINE | 57 

So why was this choice made? We did an early concept 

study of a “smart” descent stage. The idea was to put enough 

avionics on the descent stage to control the vehicle during cruise 

and EDL (the rover would be along for the ride). The primary 

reason we didn’t choose that approach is that we have a tendency 

in the early phases of a project to base system-design choices 

on box-level factors. Because the cost, schedule, and design of 

boxes can be coarsely quantified, it is simpler to factor them 

into design choices. Less apparent factors like the amount of 

input/output a box requires, the interface complexity, faultprotection implications, and verification challenges—all 

byproducts of system complexity—are difficult to quantify 

and factor into system decisions. These items typically don’t 

manifest themselves until later in the development cycle and 

are frequently the source of significant cost growth. By not 

adequately factoring this cost-growth risk into the system trade, 

we ended up with a design with the fewest number of boxes 

rather than the least complex architecture. 

Another driver toward functional over-integration is the 

pervasive impact electronics technology is having on our core 

systems. Unlike the world of thirty years ago, virtually all electronics 

we use today come from a commercial sector with different and 

diverse technology drivers, not just space applications. The increased 

functionality possible with high-density field-programmable gate 

arrays (FPGAs), low-voltage parts, and high-speed bus architectures 

are dramatic and enabling, but they increase complexity enormously. 

The pressure to have “less” hardware and depend more on software 

results in highly integrated and highly complex designs. 

One associated pitfall is that we don’t approach the 

incorporation of these new devices into our systems with the 

same degree of rigor we treat other types of technology. That 

may partly be due to the perceived maturity of the commercial 

components. We frequently have trouble with parts that have a 

commercial track record but haven’t been through a full flightqualification program. A good success story on MSL was our 

efforts to “mature” high-density, radiation-tolerant FPGAs. 
 

 

 

58 | ASK MAGAZINE 

ThE PrESSUrE To hAvE “LESS” hArDwArE AND DEPEND MorE oN SoFTwArE rESULTS 

IN hIGhLy INTEGrATED AND hIGhLy CoMPLEx DESIGNS. 

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and other programs had 

experienced a series of problems with less dense parts, so MSL 

adopted an aggressive program to establish acceptable design 

guidelines, packaging/rework approaches, and thermal control/ 

qualification strategies. The result was that the project did 

not experience significant FPGA technology issues during the 

build/test campaign.1 

The FPGA challenges we did have were associated with 

the design complexity caused by functional over-integration. 

The large number of logic gates available in modern FPGAs 

allows many functions to be combined into a single component. 

This does complicate the design effort, although some parts 

of the FPGA “code” can be developed by parallel teams. The 

verification and validation effort, however, grows dramatically 

because so much functionality is combined. Our test methods 

don’t really support ways of performing rapid, parallel testing of 

a single, highly integrated element. A long serial-test program 

is difficult to manage, is brittle to changes and problems, and 

can be inappropriately curtailed if schedule pressure mounts. 

A design based on a larger number of simpler elements would 

permit parallel component testing and (with appropriate interface 

definition) simpler system testing as well. 

Fault tolerance is another system-architecture driver that can 

significantly affect complexity. Inappropriate evaluation of localversus-system fault tolerance can dramatically increase complexity 

without necessarily improving overall reliability. An example from 

MSL was the incorporation of partial redundancy in the core rover 

avionics. The mass and volume of the avionics are major drivers 

on both the rover configuration and the required capabilities of 

the entry, descent, and landing system. Heavier or larger avionics 

increase EDL system risk by reducing control-system performance 

margins or increasing landing velocity and loads. 

Intrinsically, however, avionics fault tolerance is provided 

by adding redundant boxes with some degree of cross-strapping. 

(Cross-strapping permits redundant boxes to work with other 

redundant elements in the system architecture.) On MSL, the 

project took an intermediate position of incorporating some 

partial avionics redundancy to mitigate box-level failures while 

not driving EDL risk adversely. Unfortunately, the resulting 

system is neither fish nor fowl from a complexity perspective. 

By having a combination of single-string and redundant elements, 

the resulting fault-containment architecture is more complex 

and more difficult to design, analyze, and verify than either a 

single-string or fully redundant design. The marginal increase in 

reliability associated with the partial redundancy may not have 

been worth the increased complexity. 

These are just a few examples of the drivers that can push 

a system architecture toward increased complexity. Potential 

institutional mitigations could include additional training to 

increase our systems engineering expertise on both the sources 

and consequences of architectural choices. Additional efforts can 

also be made to rigorously review system architecture choices to 

understand the long-term implications. Upgrading our cost and 

schedule estimation processes to capture the impact of complexity 

on cost and schedule risk would also be very useful. 

From the perspective of an individual project manager, 

establishing simplicity as a programmatic goal is both a symbolic 

and a real step toward managing development risk. This is 

particularly imperative for projects with profound technical and 

engineering challenges. Intrinsically difficult missions like MSL 

are made much more challenging if managing complexity gets 

inadequate attention. Policy direction advocating simplicity is a 

useful first step to keeping complexity contained. ●

richard cook is the deputy project manager of the Mars 

Science Laboratory at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He is a 

veteran of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program, having held key 

roles on Mars Pathfinder, Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity, and 

Mars Surveyor ’98. 

1. we did have FPGA problems associated with design complexity (we tried to put too much functionality into a given part), 

which led to very long delivery delays and test-program challenges. The fundamental part technology worked, however. 
INSIGHT | ASK MAGAZINE | 59 

Volunteers Wanted: Best Practices 

from Volunteer Organizations 

By KEITH L. WOODMAN 

I once had a NASA project manager who was notoriously hard to work with lament that people 

were leaving his project as fast as they could. Another project manager, who had no trouble 

retaining people, told me one of his secrets to success was to manage team members like volunteers. 

This insight intrigued me. 
 

 

 

, 

60 | ASK MAGAZINE 

NASA technologists definitely have some similarities to volunteers: 

they both dislike poor project management (the number-one reason 

volunteers quit), and they both have options when faced with an 

unpleasant work situation. While NASA technologists may not be 

able to just quit the way volunteers can, they certainly have more 

options than their counterparts in the private sector. Typically, 

NASA project managers do not directly supervise the employees 

supporting their projects. Instead, employees are matrixed from 

other organizations, which also support several other projects. So 

if a technologist is dissatisfied with a project manager, there is a 

chance she could move to another project. This chance greatly 

increases with the technologist’s experience and competence, the 

demand for her particular skills, and the number of other projects 

the organization supports. 

To help keep the best technologists onboard, NASA project 

managers can benefit from understanding how leaders of volunteer 

organizations attract, motivate, and keep talented people working 

for them. The United Press Service report, “A Guide to Investing 

in Volunteer Resources Management: Improve Your Philanthropic 

Portfolio,” includes a comprehensive list of best practices for 

managing volunteer organizations, many of which could help 

NASA project managers retain the best employees. 

Developing and Communicating 

a Compelling Vision 

Project managers should establish and communicate a 

compelling vision for what they want their projects to 

accomplish. Compelling visions are common at NASA, thanks 

to the incredible work our agency does beyond the cutting edge 

of technology, accomplishing things that have never been done 

before. Unfortunately, I have seen great visions go to waste because 

the project manager never communicated them. Project managers 

must make communicating their visions a priority. 

Setting the Example 

Project managers must “walk the talk,” demonstrating the 

commitment, values, and beliefs they want from their teams. In 

my experience, project managers who live up to the standards they 

profess inspire team members to meet or exceed those standards. 

On one project I worked on, members of our team were letting 

personal pride get in the way of working with other teams. The 

project manager called us in and talked about how our team needed 

MANAGErS NEED To MAKE CLEAr 

ThE ProJECT’S GoALS, TIMELINES, 

orGANIZATIoN, LINES oF AUThorITy

AND roLES—ThEIr owN AND ThoSE

oF oThEr KEy LEADErShIP 

PoSITIoNS IN ThE ProJECT. 

to swallow its ego for the sake of the project. At the next project 

review, we saw him set the example when he ignored multiple 

insults from one of the project’s sponsors, attacks I know I would 

have taken personally. Instead, he stayed focused on the project’s 

technical problems and how to solve them. His demonstration 

of what he was telling us to do made us check our own egos at 

the door for subsequent project meetings. Had he not done so, 

it’s doubtful the project would have pulled itself together. Project 

managers who fail to meet their own standards will be seen as 

hypocritical, which greatly diminishes their team’s trust and will 

eventually lead to reduced support. 

Orienting Personnel 

Ensuring project personnel understand what they need to know to 

support the project from the very beginning is an important task 

for project managers. Managers need to make clear the project’s 

goals, timelines, organization, lines of authority, and roles—their 

own and those of other key leadership positions in the project. Most 

importantly, the project manager must convey what is expected of 

the team: what they are required to do and how they are expected 

to perform. To the extent possible, job descriptions and project 

policies should be documented and accessible. 

If possible, project managers should screen employees before 

they join the project teams to determine if they would be a good 

fit technically and otherwise, particularly on smaller projects. 

They should look for a genuine desire in each person to play an 

active role in the overall success of the project. 

Providing Support 

Volunteers want to feel supported by the organizations to which 

they donate their time; so do NASA personnel. Ensuring that 

employees have the resources they need to get the job done is one 

way project managers can provide that support. Another is to 

offer developmental support to help employees do their current 

jobs better or prepare them for future positions. NASA project 
 

ASK MAGAZINE | 61 

managers have several opportunities to support employees’ 

training, such as classes offered by the Academy of Program/ 

Project and Engineering Leadership or university classes through 

NASA’s education system. Very often, projects reap immediate 

benefits as project personnel bring back new knowledge and 

apply it to make their projects successful. For instance, a 

project manager once sent me to the Massachusetts Institute of 

Technology for a short course on a new analysis technique. The 

moment I returned, he formed an analysis team whose product 

was based on the results provided by the new technique. Both 

the team and I benefited from the time our project manager 

took to aid my professional development. 

On another of my projects, the project manager described 

his philosophy: he groomed engineers with a systems perspective 

for future work as systems engineers or instrument managers. 

This chance at advancement gave me incentive to develop a 

systems perspective. 

Supervising and Communicating 

Project managers should also be following the old management 

axiom that what gets measured gets done. As the project moves 

forward, monitoring the performance of project personnel is key. 

This allows the project manager to address problems sooner rather 

than later and provide feedback on how employee efforts are helping 

the project reach its goals. Employees want to know their efforts 

make a difference. But project managers should also actively seek 

feedback on their own performances. Some questions that would 

provide useful feedback might include the following: 

• Do team members feel their efforts are having a positive

impact on the project? 

• Do they think the project is well managed?

• Is the project manager making them feel that they are a

welcome and integral part of the team? 

• In what ways is working on the project (or for the project

manager) meeting or not meeting their expectations? 

• And, perhaps most importantly, would project personnel

work for the project manager on a future project? Why or 

why not? 

Of course, employees may not be willing to share this kind of 

information openly, so developing a way to anonymously submit 

feedback may help. Hearing criticism is never easy, but there is 

always room for improvement. After receiving the results, project 

managers may want to work with a coach or mentor to improve 

in areas indicated by their former staff. 

For more than a year, I have been working with a coach who 

is helping me to strengthen weaknesses indicated by my peers 

and through direct reports. Doing so has helped me increase my 

ability to listen, giving me more options to successfully conclude 

my projects. When personnel feel their ideas have value for you, 

they generally want to keep working with you. 

Recognizing Performance 

NASA project managers would also do well to remember 

another management axiom: what gets rewarded gets repeated. 

Appreciation tends to be listed as one of the primary motivators for 

employees and volunteers. Usually the simplest, and perhaps the 

most effective, way for project managers to motivate employees to 

keep working for them is to sincerely offer thanks for an effort well 

done. One NASA project manager I worked for (and would work 

for again) was rarely able to reward his employees monetarily, but 

he always made us feel appreciated by consistently recognizing and 

sincerely thanking us for our efforts. Combining rewarding with 

communicating can help reinforce behaviors project managers 

want from their employees. 

A Voluntary Workforce 

As any project manager in the private sector will tell you, retaining 

good people is critical to success. Investing the time and resources 

into training replacement personnel is costly on many levels. NASA 

technologists, like volunteers, have a lot of say over the projects 

they will and will not support. Therefore, it may be in NASA 

project managers’ best interests to view the people supporting 

them as volunteers and provide the compelling vision, support, 

communication, and recognition required to retain their support. ●

keith l. woodmaN is manager of the Space Exploration 

Research and Technology Office at Langley Research Center. 

By the time of this publication, he should have completed his 

doctorate of engineering management from Old Dominion 

University in Norfolk, Virginia, having defended his dissertation 

about strategic leadership in the public sector. He has been with 

NASA for twenty-three years. 
 

 

62 | ASK MAGAZINE 

The Knowledge Notebook
 

The Meaning of Meaning
 

By LAURENCE PRUSAK 

A while ago I asked a number of colleagues, clients, 

and friends the following question: “If the word 

‘knowledge’ were somehow banned from the English 

language, what existing word could take its place?” 

The answer I get most often, especially when I’ve 

asked students and others who are not in the business 

of thinking about organizational knowledge, is 

“information.” It’s a natural and reasonable enough 

choice, I suppose, but the answer I would give and 

the one I want to advocate is “meaning.” When I 

explain why I prefer that word, I usually can get 

most practitioners of knowledge-related work to 

agree. After all, meaning is what gives information 

its value. The meaning-making process takes the 

codified symbols that we call information and 

makes sense of them in ways that help guide our 

thoughts and actions. 

Meaning is subjective, of course. We develop 

our own mechanisms for giving meaning to things 

and words from the world around us and the 

world within us. Different people interpret the 

same information in different ways and sometimes 

discover in it (some might say, impose on it) very 

different meanings. 

Yet we live in a world of collective activities. 

Teams, projects, organizations, schools—all have 

to develop collective meaning in order to do their 

collective work. This happens, of course. If it 

didn’t, collaboration would be impossible. We 

assign common meanings not just to words but to 

all sorts of representations and symbols, and this 

collective sense-making allows organizations and 

cultures to flourish. Yet it happens in subtle and 

often unnoticed ways—pervasive yet invisible— 

and our failures to pay conscious attention to 

the process of shared meaning-making means 

that we often don’t work together as effectively 

as we could. 

The process, however, is often overlooked and 

even disdained by the latest incarnations of technoutopians who continue to argue that information 

alone matters and that the more of the stuff we have, 

the better an outcome will be. I was told three times 

in the past month—by people in a federal agency, 

a prominent non-governmental organization, and 

a commercial firm—that more connectivity in any 

system (in other words, greater access to information) 

means that the proposed system will develop more 

knowledge. When I pointed out that this isn’t at 

all a proven case, I quickly lost my audience. They 

wanted to move on to system configuration, not talk 

about whether the system would actually provide the 

promised value. I’m used to this kind of response, so I 

wasn’t especially upset personally, but past experience 

suggests that their expectations are likely to be unmet. 

Let’s look briefly at a few of the things meaning 

can bring to information. I am inspired to do this 

by recently reading a wonderful new book on the 

history of information by James Gleick called The 

Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, and by 

doing some teaching in Tokyo for Fuji and some of 

their clients on the subject of practical wisdom, which 

is closely related to what I am writing about here. 

Context. Meaning puts information in context, 

showing where it belongs in the scheme of things, 

how it relates to other information, how it adds to 

or modifies existing knowledge. 

Implications and Consequences. Meaning 

gets at the implications of information, its potential 

effects on individuals, organizations, and society. 

Thinking in Time (also the title of a wonderful 

book). Meaning-making includes thinking about 
 

 

ASK MAGAZINE | 63 

where information originated and where it seems to be going, 

and how its origins affect how we interpret it. 

You get the picture, I hope. 

Let me be just a bit more personal here. I was once a 

contestant on a national quiz show. I had a very good memory 

at the time and liked to read, so I was a natural for this type of 

thing. I did well and for a time thought I was much smarter 

than I actually was. I could recite facts that I didn’t know the 

meaning of and confused this skill with having real knowledge, 

judgment, and discernment. This was a long time ago—I was 

a college student—so I won’t be too hard on myself. Because of 

my quiz-show experience, I was quite interested in the reactions 

to Watson, the elegant IBM computer program that recently beat 

a couple of Jeopardy champions. But when pundits declare that 

the machine is “smarter” than people, I am reminded of my own 

experience of the silliness and shallowness of this type of thing. 

Gleick ends his fine book by talking about how, among the 

seemingly infinite amount of information we now have at our 

fingertips, we still are always “looking for lines of meaning.” 

Think about it. ●

... oUr FAILUrES To PAy CoNSCIoUS 

ATTENTIoN To ThE ProCESS oF ShArED 

MEANING-MAKING MEANS ThAT wE oFTEN 

DoN’T worK ToGEThEr AS EFFECTIvELy 

AS wE CoULD. 
’

-

’ - 

’

’ ” 

_

64 | ASK MAGAZINE 

ASKinteractive
 

NASA in the News 

A pattern of X ray “stripes” in the remains of the Tycho supernova, 

discovered after long observation with NASA s Chandra X ray 

Observatory, may provide the first direct evidence that a cosmic 

event can accelerate particles to energies a hundred times higher 

than those achieved by the most powerful particle accelerator on 

Earth, the Large Hadron Collider. “We ve seen lots of intriguing 

structures in supernova remnants, but we ve never seen stripes before, 

said Kristoffer Eriksen of Rutgers University, who led the study. The 

results could explain how some of the extremely energetic particles bombarding Earth, called cosmic rays, are 

produced, and they provide support for a theory about how magnetic fields can be dramatically amplified in 

such blast waves. Read more about the discovery at www.nasa.gov/mission pages/chandra/news/tycho.html. 

Building Curiosity 

Curiosity Cam takes you inside the clean room at NASA’s Jet 

Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., to watch the next 

Mars rover being built. Technicians assembling and testing the 

Mars Science Laboratory, known as Curiosity, are covered head 

to toe in white smocks, booties, and facemasks to help protect 

against earthly contaminants hitching a ride to Mars. Watch 

Curiosity come together at www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/ 

building_curiosity.html. 

NASA Image of the Day 

Discover what’s going on inside NASA through beautiful 

photographs from across the agency. Images from current 

missions, new scientific discoveries, moments in history, and 

more are posted daily with extended descriptions to help 

you learn visually about NASA’s goings-on: www.nasa.gov/ 

multimedia/imagegallery/iotd.html. 

For More on Our Stories 

Additional information pertaining 

to articles featured in this issue can 

be found by visiting the following 

web sites: 

• Galileo: solarsystem.nasa.gov/galileo 

• Mars Science Laboratory: 

www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl 

• NASA EDGE: www.nasa.gov/ 

multimedia/podcasting/nasaedge 

feedback

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