National Aeronautics and Space Administration 

Academy Sharing Knowledge 

The NASA Source for Project Management and Engineering Excellence | APPEL WINTER | 2009
 

Inside 

A New DesigN ApproAch 

workiNg with ZeAlots AND skeptics 

humAN system risk mANAgemeNt 
Image courtesy the NASA Art Program 

ON THE COVER 

“Power 1963,” by Paul Calle 

In this oil on panel piece, Calle depicts the Atlas launch vehicle, producing 360,000 lbs. of thrust, 

as it lifts the last Mercury astronaut, Gordon Cooper, into Earth orbit for a thirty-four-hour flight on 

May 15, 1963—at the time, an American long-duration record. 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

5 34 38 

ASK MAGAZINE | 1 

Contents
 

DEPARTMENTS 

3 

In This Issue 

By Don Cohen 

4 

From the APPEL Director 

By eD hoffman 

53 

ASK Bookshelf 

54 

The Knowledge Notebook 

By LaurenCe Prusak 

56 

ASK Interactive 

INSIGHTS 

10 

Staying Focused on Fundamentals 

By steve Goo Rocket science is hard but 

development programs succeed by paying 

attention to the basics of purpose and 

process. 

19 

Viewpoint: The Bigger Pictures 

By Piers Bizony The science writer argues 

that artists have an essential role to play in 

inspiring public support for NASA missions. 

29 

Interview with Charles Kennel 

By Don Cohen The former associate 

administrator for the Office of the Mission 

to Planet Earth talks about the challenges 

and benefits of a system of small Earthobserving satellites. 

38 

Human System Risk Management 

By JuDith L. roBinson The new Human 

System Risk Forum brings the insights of a 

range of disciplines to bear on human space 

flight safety issues. 

STORIES 

5 

A New Design Approach: 

Modular Spacecraft 

as toLD to matthew kohut By ButLer hine 

anD mark turner Going modular offers a 

variety of economical mission possibilities. 

13 

Pathfinder’s Mars Landing: 

To Reboot or Not Reboot 

By roB manninG Thanks to quick thinking 

and intimate knowledge of the spacecraft, 

the Pathfinder team made the right choice 

at a tense moment. 

15 

Mars Express: Global Collaboration 

By kerry eLLis Cooperation among several 

countries and organizations helped make 

ESA’s first planetary mission a success. 

23 

Responsibility, Not Blame 

By anGeLo “Gus” Guastaferro Faced with 

a wind tunnel foul-up, the author focuses on 

understanding and fixing the problem. 

25 

Owning the Product and the Process 

By stePhen a. Cook An Ares team at 

Marshall embraces in-house development. 

34 

Working with a Team of Zealots 

and Skeptics 

By Barry GoLDstein Gathering a diverse 

team ensures a thorough analysis of 

Phoenix entry, descent, and landing issues. 

42 

Conquering Space by 

Capturing Imaginations 

By svetLana shkoLyar One company’s 

multidisciplinary approach to future space 

exploration. 

47 

The Quest for Good IDEAS 

By matthew kohut A new APPEL course 

offers hands-on experience in innovation. 

50 

SOFIA: Getting Airborne 

By kerry eLLis After a rocky start, NASA’s 

new airborne observatory is poised to 

become a valuable new tool for astronomers. 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

-

Issue No. 33 

Staff 

APPEL DIREcTOR AND PubLISHER 

Dr. Edward Hoffman 

ehoffman@nasa.gov 

EDITOR-IN-cHIEf 

Laurence Prusak 

lprusak@msn.com 

MANAGING EDITOR 

Don Cohen 

doncohen@rcn.com 

EDITOR 

Kerry Ellis 

kerry.ellis@asrcms.com 

cONTRIbuTING EDITOR 

Matt Kohut 

mattkohut@infactcommunications.com 

SENIOR KNOwLEDGE SHARING 

cONSuLTANT 

Jon Boyle 

jon.boyle@asrcms.com 

KNOwLEDGE SHARING ANALySTS 

Ben Bruneau 

ben.bruneau@asrcms.com 

Katherine Thomas 

katherine.thomas@asrcms.com 

APPEL PROGRAM MANAGER 

Yvonne Massaquoi 

yvonne.massaquoi@asrcms.com 

DESIGN 

Hirshorn Zuckerman Design Group, Inc. 

www.hzdg.com 

PRINTING SPEcIALIST 

Hanta Ralay 

hanta.ralay 1@nasa.gov 

PRINTING 

GraphTec 

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 

Katherine Thomas, ASRC Management Services, 6303 Ivy Lane, Suite 130, Greenbelt, 

MD 20770; katherine.thomas@asrcms.com; 301-793-9973. 

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
 

When Megan was fourteen years old, she started to have 

trouble swallowing and keeping food down. The family 

general practitioner examined her and ordered some tests. 

Finding nothing obviously wrong, he assured Megan and 

her parents that the problem would take care of itself. But 

Megan’s digestive problems got worse. She went to one 

specialist who prescribed an antibiotic that had no effect. 

Other doctors were baffled. Then her parents took her to 

the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. Soon after she was 

admitted, three specialists entered Megan’s room together: 

an internist, an allergist, and a gastroenterologist. They had 

all studied her records. They asked a few questions and 

examined her. Then they shared their ideas. 

The allergist said he was sure the problem was not a 

food allergy. 

“I think it’s an infection,” the gastroenterologist said. 

The internist agreed and thought he knew why the earlier 

course of antibiotic treatment had not worked. Within five 

minutes, the three physicians agreed on a diagnosis and 

a treatment—a particular antibiotic effective against the 

unusual infection she had contracted. Her rapid recovery 

proved them right. 

This true story illustrates the value of a multidisciplinary 

approach to difficult problems, the theme of several articles 

in this issue of ASK. The knowledge of people from different 

fields working together can combine to generate ideas that 

individuals or groups with a shared specialty are unlikely 

to come up with. So, for instance, the varied members of 

the Human System Risk Forum (Judith Robinson’s “Human 

System Risk Management”) arrive at a solution that 

members of a cardiovascular research lab couldn’t see from 

their necessarily limited perspective. Similarly, the different 

viewpoints Barry Goldstein describes bringing together in 

“Working with a Team of Zealots and Skeptics” ensured that 

Phoenix’s entry, descent, and landing processes got a more 

knowledgeable and rigorous examination than either group 

alone would have provided. Matthew Kohut’s article about 

the IDEAS course and Svetlana Shkolyar’s “Conquering 

Space by Capturing Imaginations” both show how important 

a role diversity of ideas plays in innovation. 

There is more to reaping the benefits of diversity than 

throwing dissimilar people together. Ed Hoffman’s “From 

the Director” column discusses the skills needed to turn a 

diverse group of people into a successful team. The manager 

of a multidisciplinary project team must understand enough 

about the varied technical specialties of members to earn 

their trust and make informed decisions about the value of 

their contributions (as well as foster trust and communication 

among team members). The project leader also helps keep 

the group focused on the team’s goals and the practical 

realities of schedule and cost—the project basics Steve 

Goo talks about in “Staying Focused on Fundamentals.” 

The interview with scientist Charles Kennel looks at 

similar issues of coordination and communication in a 

different context: the development of a system of Earthobserving satellites and the challenge of making the 

information they provide accessible and useful to both 

scientists and politicians. 

Finally, Piers Bizony makes a case for a multidisciplinary 

approach broad enough to include artists. His “Viewpoint: 

The Bigger Pictures” suggests that we need artists, writers, 

and musicians to capture the emotional complexity of space 

flight, to show the public why we do it and win their support 

for future exploration. 

Don Cohen 

Managing Editor 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

4 | ASK MAGAZINE 

From the APPEL Director
 

Multidisciplinary Project Leadership
 

By ED HOFFMAN 

If you were building a house, what set of skills would 

you need? It might be best to be a carpenter, capable 

of working on the rough framing, the exterior, and 

the trim details. There’s also a good argument 

for being a mason: a house is only as strong as its 

foundation, and a good brick or stone exterior will 

last a lifetime. Then, of course, there are electrical 

systems, plumbing, heating, ventilation and air 

conditioning, and other specialized trades. 

It’s possible that specializing in one construction 

trade over another has advantages, but the skills 

I’d want would be those of a project manager. In 

home construction, that person is called the general 

contractor, but the responsibilities are those of a project 

manager: managing cost and schedule, communicating 

to promote coordination and integration of team 

members from different disciplines, knowing enough 

about the technical details to ask the right questions, 

and ensuring that the finished product meets all 

requirements and performs as expected. 

Project managers have been playing this role on 

engineering projects since the time of the pyramids. 

We know this has been the case in research-driven 

industries since early in the last century. In his book 

The Scientific Life, Harvard Professor Steven Shapin 

writes that “corporate research centered not on the 

competencies and career interests of any one worker, 

or on any one group of specialized workers, but on 

the project [his emphasis], which typically called 

on the skills of research workers from a variety of 

scientific disciplines ... placed in organizational 

structures where communication ... was facilitated 

and encouraged.” He goes on to note that Eastman 

Kodak, which opened its first industrial research 

laboratory in 1912, was organizing cross-disciplinary 

groups of scientists to work on photographic 

emulsion nearly 100 years ago. Since then, technical 

organizations have increasingly organized around 

projects because they have found it to be the best 

way to synthesize the efforts of talented individuals 

with diverse areas of expertise and knowledge. 

A modern project brings together people of 

multiple talents over a finite period of time to 

accomplish a specific objective. There is a strong 

focus on understanding the customer—getting 

the requirements right is critical. The project takes 

place in a dynamic environment that demands 

adaptability. Teams typically cross all kinds of 

boundaries: geographic, cultural, organizational, 

and professional. Outsourcing for expertise is the 

norm. Team members can be employees, partners, 

consultants,orevenvendors,whichmeanstheproject 

manager has limited authority. So professional 

management skills like persuasion, negotiation, and 

collaboration are as essential as traditional project 

controls like cost and schedule management. 

Leading a diverse team of highly talented 

individuals requires earning respect and trust. 

The key word is “earning.” Credentials matter, 

of course—experts won’t tolerate being led by an 

amateur—but they are only the price of admission. 

Team members ultimately care about actions. 

Respect and trust are reciprocal. When leaders 

practice them, the team will follow, and vice versa. 

A project leader is like an orchestra conductor. An 

orchestra brings together strings, woodwinds, brass, 

and percussion, all of which require highly specialized 

skills. The conductor has to guide the entire ensemble 

through a composition—a project—that takes place 

in a finite period of time. Of course, an orchestra 

rehearses. There is no rehearsal for project leadership; 

it is a continuous on-the-job learning experience. ●
Title 

By 

Intro 

 

 

 

A New Design Approach: 

Photo Credit: NASA 

Engineers prepare the Hover 

Test Vehicle for ground tests. 

AS TOLD TO MATTHEW KOHuT By BuTLER HINE AND MARK TuRNER 

MODuL AR

SPAcEcRAf T 

STORy | ASK MAGAZINE | 5 | ASK MAGAZINE | 5 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

6 | ASK MAGAZINE 

When Pete Worden took over as the center director at Ames Research Center, one of the charters he 

came in with was to inject low-cost ways of doing spacecraft development into NASA as an agency. 

He kicked off a handful of projects to achieve this, including the Modular Common Bus. At the 

outset, he told us to design for a broad range of target locations: lunar orbit, lunar surface, libration 

points, and asteroid rendezvous. He also said we had to make the spacecraft compatible with a range 

of low-cost launch vehicles, from the Falcon 1 at the low end to the Minotaur 5 at the high end. 

Capabilities-Driven Design: 

Fly It and They Will Come 

The Common Bus basically flipped the standard NASA 

spacecraft development pyramid, where you start with your 

requirements and instruments and flow a spacecraft design from 

that. We call the Common Bus approach capabilities-driven 

rather than a requirements-driven development. The idea is to 

maximize the use of off-the-shelf or readily available components 

and look for a sweet spot in the design that will enable you to 

create a small spacecraft for common use independent of the 

payload you’re going to carry. 

If you build a standard size and form factor, the science 

communitywillcreatepayloadstoflyonit.Onceyoustandardize 

anything that’s going into space, the science community is 

creative about making packages work in that form factor. And 

while we didn’t design the spacecraft for any particular payload, 

we did look at the list of possible payloads: some of the robotic 

precursor concepts for the lunar lander, dust experiments and 

other science for lunar orbit, communication relay packages for 

lunar orbit, and typical packages for asteroid rendezvous. We 

picked the most challenging payloads in each of those areas and 

used them to shape our design. So even though we didn’t design 

for one payload, we did work with a lot of examples. 

An Atypical Team 

One thing Director Worden did early on was bring in Al 

Weston and Pete Klupar, two people from outside NASA who 

had extensive experience at the Air Force Research Laboratory 

(AFRL). Al was halfway a team member and halfway our 

primary customer. He was involved every step of the way. 

Formerly director of the National Hover Test Facility at Edwards 

Air Force Base, he had a lot of experience. Pete, who came 

from AFRL to Ames, has flown something like forty-five to 

fifty small spacecraft. During a typical NASA career, you get a 

half-dozen missions under your belt, if you’re lucky. The AFRL 

model is one we looked at in trying to enable small spacecraft 

design, and Pete was the one who brought that experience to the 

table. So we had a lot of resources around us with tremendous 

experience, but it wasn’t the traditional NASA experience. 

We were set up like a skunk works, and we were allowed to 

handpick the best people on the team. A lot of them had some 

flight experience in International Space Station and Space Shuttle 

payloads or sounding rockets, but the team as a whole did not 

have a lot of experience with free-flyer spacecraft. One of the 

things we learned when recruiting people for this kind of team 

was to look at their hobbies, because that tells you a lot about how 

they’ll approach their work. Most people on this team had handson hobbies: woodworking, machining, racecar fabrication. 

Our team has an extremely strong foundation in engineering 

design and materials. Most of our folks have fifteen to twenty 

years of hardcore engineering design experience. Their greatest 

strength is that they have multidisciplinary skills. Many of our 

engineers are capable of performing tasks typically done by a 

variety of engineering disciplines. For example, some have run 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ASK MAGAZINE | 7 

Photos courtesy Mark Turner and Butler Hine 

smaller projects in which they have had to design, analyze launch 

loads, develop requirements, manage configurations, write their 

own test plans, and do their own verification and validation. 

For the Common Bus effort, our designers assembled 

the prototype hardware they designed to the greatest extent 

possible. This was done to contain costs and also to allow 

them to experience firsthand what worked and what did not. 

Having a smaller cross-disciplinary team creates efficiencies by 

requiring less time to communicate and transfer information 

and instructions. For projects of this size, this approach has been 

very effective. They also had incredible intellectual curiosity. As 

soon as we gave them a problem, they ran out and researched 

everything that had been done. 

A Modular Approach 

Given the range of targets, we figured we’d have to design an orbiter 

and then separately design a lander, because we assumed that one 

spacecraft couldn’t meet such radically different requirements. So 

we started out designing landers and orbiters in parallel. As the 

designs evolved, the design team started breaking the systems up 

into modules. There were a lot of reasons to do that. 

The thing that stretches out the cost and schedule of a typical 

spacecraft build is the integration flow—downstream integration 

that depends on upstream integration being completed first. We 

pushed for modularity so we could have parallel integration of the 

spacecraft development. According to some of the schedule rough 

cuts we analyzed, parallel integration could save us up to a year. 

There was a “Eureka!” moment when the team suddenly 

realized that we could use some of the same modules for both 

orbiters and landers. Suddenly the team coalesced around these 

module designs that become an orbiter configuration when you 

combine them one way and a lander configuration when you 

combine them another way. And if you standardize the modules, 

then theoretically you can reuse that design for each mission and 

recombine the modules to meet specific mission requirements. 

When you look at design drivers, especially your launch 

loads, a cylindrical structure is close to ideal. Early spacecraft 

like Pioneer have very efficient shapes; they’re usually cylinders 

with body-mount solar panels. Then you realize that, if you 

start using advanced composites, which they didn’t have in the 

sixties, you could have the beauty of flat surfaces for mounting 

your electronics, payloads, brackets, and harnesses very easily, 

yet maintain close to the same structural advantages of a 

cylindrical shape. 

Through the use of composites, what worked for a lunar 

lander was also ideal for an orbiter. These common segments 

enabled us to maximize payload capacity, which was critical for 

these very small, mass-sensitive launch vehicles. 
8 | ASK MAGAZINE 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Common Bus Hover Test Vehicle undergoes free flight -

tests in the Hover Test Facility at Ames Research Center. 

A Design Trade: Body-Mount Solar Panels 

Historically, Ames has done body-fixed solar panels for a lot of 

designs. Other NASA centers standardized around deployable 

solar panel wings. Our preference for fixed solar panels was kind 

of a running joke because we wound up there for reasons having 

nothing to do with past Ames designs. 

Body-fixed solar panels made us independent of attitude 

in space. That gave us structural advantages as well, and it also 

gave us a lot of flexibility to handle the thermal environment 

operationally rather than in the design. It meant we could be 

a three-axis stabilized spacecraft, or a spinner, or a combo. We 

could have a pointed instrument that needed to be three-axis 

stabilized, and then for thermal reasons we could do a slow 

rotation to avoid having one side constantly hot and the other 

constantly cold. One of the main reasons reusable spacecraft 

designs haven’t really worked in the past is because of issues 

like thermal design. Typically your thermal design has to be 

customized for the payload and the location where you’re sending 

the spacecraft. That’s what makes each spacecraft unique: the 

mission, the launch loads, and the thermal environment. 

As we got deeper into the solar panel work, we also realized 

that,fromanorbitalmechanicsstandpoint,wecouldgoonlonger, 

slower-duration missions by being body-mount fixed instead of 

Photos courtesy Mark Turner and Butler Hine 

deployable. Vehicles sometimes take many days or weeks to get to 

their final destinations. If you’re going to the moon, you’d have 

to do a descent—a braking burn as you approach the moon— 

and the g-loads would be so great that you wouldn’t be able to 

use deployable solar arrays until you got to the moon. But if it 

takes days or weeks to get there, your only real option is to keep 

everything body-mount fixed. That bought us a lot of flexibility 

for many of these small science missions. It’s perhaps not optimal 

from a power standpoint, but it provided tremendous flexibility 

from a mission operations standpoint. 

When you go body-fixed, you have less surface area for 

solar panels. Our design was able to produce 200-plus watts, 

which gave us plenty of power for the baseline spacecraft use and 

60 watts or so available for the instruments. For the whole range 

of instruments we looked at, 60 watts was plenty. Instruments 

with higher power requirements may call for deployed wings 

that articulate to track the sun, which can give you a kilowatt, 

but that starts to limit the types of missions you can do. That 

was one of our direct trades: power availability versus thermal 

and attitude generality. 

Deployed arrays also went counter to our philosophy of 

keeping costs low with short turnaround time. Deployables 

require one of the more elaborate, lengthy, and expensive test 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ASK MAGAZINE | 9 

sequences. The gimbals, for example, are typically one of the 

longer lead items on spacecraft development. So we saw bodyfixed panels as a real risk-reduction enhancement without 

compromising the particular science suite we were trying to 

address in this particular portfolio. But it was a trade-off. We 

did give up power in order to get this flexibility. 

A Knowledge Network 

Because Ames is a research and development center, the systems 

engineering group here has the ability to work on a diverse array 

of engineering projects. Since most of our engineers work on 

smaller, shorter-run projects, they typically have to be jacks-ofall-trades. To survive in this environment, you have to be able to 

synthesize a state-of-the-art problem quickly and figure out how 

to extract the knowledge you need from the resources available. 

Nowadays the Internet has made that much easier, but most 

ONE OF THE KEyS TO SuCCESS IS 

KNOwING HOw TO ESTAbLISH A HuMAN 

NETwORK. EvERy ENGINEER ON OuR 

TEAM RELIES ON A HuMAN NETwORK TO 

GET AT STuFF THAT wOuLd bE OTHERwISE 

quITE dIFFICuLT. 

of the guys on our team were practicing this in the days before 

the Internet. The ability to extract that type of knowledge— 

tracking down the necessary information, setting up a network 

of colleagues around the country to get the answers you need— 

is really a black art. 

Since our team as a whole was relatively new to spacecraft 

design, we looked at what everybody else had done. None of our 

engineers like to reinvent the wheel. So we started by absorbing 

everything that had already been done historically and making 

sure we had an appreciation for that. 

The two of us had the advantage of working for the Robotic 

Lunar Explorer Program (RLEP), so we had substantially 

researched prior lunar robotic missions such as Surveyor, 

Ranger, and even Lunakhod, a Russian lunar rover. We actually 

extracted Russian books and had parts of them translated so we 

could learn as much as possible. We also looked at robotic lander 

missions flown to Mars. So we didn’t start from scratch. We had 

extensive research already at hand on robotic missions—lunar 

and Mars, Apollo data from the past, ranges of instruments that 

could do robotic precursor activities for the Vision for Space 

Exploration. We found gold mines in the early Apollo precursor 

missions. A lot of smart people had gathered a lot of data, and a 

lot of deep thinking had been done. 

During our time in the RLEP program office, we were able 

to tap into a few of the remaining lunar scientists who participated 

in Apollo and pre-Apollo programs. We managed to find one of 

the early Ranger project managers, who was extremely helpful in 

giving us some of the rationale for decisions made in those early 

days. Gary Olaf, who was heavily involved in lunar dust studies, 

was a treasure trove of information from these early experiments. 

He knew where to find the information, and he gave us a lot of 

pathways to find information that would typically be very, very 

hard to get. Again, it’s part of building a network. 

One of the keys to success is knowing how to establish a 

human network. Every engineer on our team relies on a human 

network to get at stuff that would be otherwise quite difficult. 

Sometimes those contacts provide unexpected benefits. One 

of our Surveyor mission reports came from a consultant who 

happened to know a project manager from Surveyor, who 

gave him one of the few remaining hard copies of a document. 

Looking at the thousands upon thousands of people who worked 

on Surveyor and the millions of man-hours put in perspective 

how daunting it was for us to do our work with a dozen people. 

If we did not leverage the work thousands had done four decades 

prior, our job would have been impossible. ●
 

10 | ASK MAGAZINE | INSIGHT 

Staying Focused on Fundamentals
 

By STEVE GOO 

My first teacher in rocketry had a saying: “Pointy end up and fire out the bottom.” His description of 

a perfect takeoff didn’t mean that the execution was simple. It requires a lot of difficult engineering 

to get a rocket into space and keep it on course. But it also requires that many talented people stay 

focused on the fundamentals. 
ASK MAGAZINE | 11 

Most days, program management seems a lot like rocket science. 

At Boeing, we execute very well on many complex programs, 

but not without problems. The typical troubles found in our 

programs—and in other companies inside and outside the 

aerospace industry—occur because we lose our discipline and 

forget to focus on the basics. 

Ten years ago, Boeing chartered a team to investigate 

why some of our programs did well and others struggled. It 

discovered the high performers used management strategies the 

other programs didn’t. This finding led to the creation of the 

Boeing Program Management Best Practices, a management 

system for successfully leading a program through the twists 

and turns that invariably occur during its life span. 

The eight best practices the team identified represent the 

fundamentals of program management. They serve as a road 

map for creating a focused, disciplined, and integrated approach 

to leading a program team. 

Boeing has made use of these practices a top priority and 

put in place policies, processes, tools, and metrics to help our 

program managers employ them successfully. We built our best 

practices into an implementation model that is like CMMI 

(Capability Maturity Model Integration). It has 134 attributes, 

each with five maturity levels. Every year programs assess their 

implementation of the best practices, and every year we raise 

the bar a little, improving the model by incorporating new 

approaches and lessons learned. Refining and sharing the best 

practices allow us to replicate our successes and take maximum 

advantage of what we have learned as a company. 

Of course, our best practices offer no guarantees. But over 

the past decade, they have demonstrated their value time and 

again. They have helped healthy programs see better results and 

reduced problems in programs that were overcommitted or at 

high risk because of technical, schedule, or budget challenges. 

The first best practice, Create and Review Business Plan, 

starts with the program’s strategy. It gets at the heart of what the 

customer is trying to accomplish: what customer needs you are 

trying to fulfill with your program. Program managers must 

understand both requirements and strategy. That way, when 

changes occur, they can better manage their impact on cost, 

schedule, and other aspects of the program. We make this the 

number-one best practice because it focuses on the customer. 

The second best practice is the Business Offer or proposal: 

what you are going to commit to. This is important because it 

is much easier to successfully execute a program that is actually 

doable. This sounds fundamental, doesn’t it? But how many times 

have we seen programs that cannot get there from here? The 

business offer makes sure you take a scientific, rigorous approach 

and are grounded in reality by experts in scheduling and cost 

accounting. The goal is to make commitments you can keep. 

Organization comes next. How are you going to organize the 

program? Many program managers have trouble with this one. 

There should be a tight linkage between the work breakdown 

structure and the organization charts. What you have to build 

must be aligned with who is responsible for building it. A 

product-based organization helps the program manager because 

he or she can point to who is working on every one of those 

things you have committed to deliver to your customer. 

Suppliers are the people who know the most about those 

things they are building for you. Program managersmust integrate 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Big 8: Boeing Program 

Management Best Practices

• Create and Review Business Plan: Set strategic 

objectives and measure progress throughout the life 

of the program.

• Business Offer: Understand customer, regulatory, and 

other requirements. Prepare executable and profitable 

proposals and contract changes.

• Organization: Develop a product-based organizational 

structure with clearly documented team responsibilities.

• Supplier Integration: Establish and maintain a 

collaborative working environment with suppliers from 

the earliest stage through program end. 

• Program Execution and Control: Use a formal 

concept of operations to manage technical, quality, 

schedule, cost, and other activities.

• Risk, Issue, and Opportunity Management: Use an 

integrated method to grasp opportunities and mitigate 

or correct risks and issues.

• Help Needed and Independent Reviews:

Promote a culture of open communication and 

continuous improvement.

• Program Communication: Develop and maintain strong 

relationships with internal and external stakeholders.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

12 | ASK MAGAZINE 

IN AEROSPACE, wE dELIvER PROduCTS THAT ARE HARd TO buILd, SO IT IS 

uNREASONAbLE TO ExPECT THAT ALL yOuR TEAMS ARE GOING TO bE AbLE 

TO SOLvE EvERy PRObLEM THEy ENCOuNTER ON THEIR OwN. 

them into the overall team so absolute transparency exists up and 

down the contracting chain. Good Supplier Integration keeps 

you from getting surprised because it tells you what’s going on. 

Failing to manage and communicate requirements with suppliers 

usually leads to cost overruns, missed deadlines, and rework. 

When we understand and properly manage our supply chain, we 

can seize opportunities or take corrective action quickly. 

Program Execution and Control is where a program 

manager “lives” most of the time. This best practice helps you 

to consistently manage the seven baselines—requirements, 

organization, cost, schedule, configuration, information 

technology, and technical performance measures—as an 

integrated set. It is about having a plan and looking at metrics 

with real data every week. To manage effectively, you must have 

a plan that tells you where you should be and information about 

current status that tells you where you really are. 

Risk, Issue, and Opportunity Management gives program 

managers the ability to look around corners, anticipate what 

might become a problem, and prepare to deal with it. A risk is 

something that could go wrong but hasn’t yet, while an issue is 

something that is going wrong. At Boeing, we manage risks and 

issues as integrated sets because so many issues were risks that 

we were unable to mitigate successfully. Opportunities are the 

opposite of risks; they are the things that allow you to perform 

better than planned. Your team will likely say you don’t have any 

opportunities. That just means they haven’t been identified yet. 

When a team has problems, it creates opportunities to get out of 

trouble. This best practice is about seizing opportunities before 

there are problems. You also need opportunities to offset the risks 

and issues you were unable to predict so you can end up on plan. 

Help Needed and Independent Reviews promote a team 

approach to problem solving and finding better ways to get the 

job done. In aerospace, we deliver products that are hard to build, 

so it is unreasonable to expect that all your teams are going to be 

able to solve every problem they encounter on their own. “Help 

needed” is about openly communicating, finding out what teams 

need, and getting them help to make sure they can succeed. At 

Boeing we require the last chart of any briefing to be titled “Help 

Needed” and to describe what outside help, if any, you need. We 

then use a “Help Provided” system for tracking and reporting the 

actions we take in response to the request. 

The Program Communication best practice requires 

program managers to keep everyone inside and outside the 

program aligned with its vision, strategy, and status. Program 

managers don’t actually build hardware, release drawings, or 

analyze performance. We lead the people who do. You’ve got 

to communicate with your employees and contractors to keep 

them motivated. When I was on the space station program, we 

would get the team together and talk about our vision and how 

someday we would be able to go out into our backyards, look at 

the sky, and show our grandchildren what we built. That helped 

when the going got tough and we had to work some incredibly 

long hours. You also have to communicate with your external 

constituents—your senior management, your contractor’s senior 

management, and Congress—who need to know your plan and 

how are you doing so they will keep funding the program. 

Boeing’s eight Program Management Best Practices are 

not rocket science. They are the basics, as fundamental to a 

program manager as blocking and tackling are to a football 

team. Without these basics, your program is at risk. With them, 

a capable leader has a good shot of being successful. 

In aerospace, we expect our products to be perfect. We don’t 

seem to have that same expectation about the way we manage 

our programs, but perfection is certainly within our grasp. As 

we continue to take on inherently risky development programs, 

program managers must not lose sight of the fundamentals. We 

must require them to be disciplined in the basics of program 

management so the performance of our programs is as predictable 

and as good as the performance of the products we build. ●

Steve Goo is vice president of international operations for 

Boeing Integrated Defense Systems. 
Title

By 

Intro

 

STORy | ASK MAGAZINE | 13 

P A T H F I N D E R ’ S M A R S L A N D I N G : 


Photo Credit: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory 

By ROB MANNING 

This picture from Mars Pathfinder was taken after the spacecraft landed on
 

July 4, 1997, and shows the Sojourner rover perched on one of three solar panels.
 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

14 | ASK MAGAZINE 

On July 4, 1997, half an hour before Pathfinder 

was scheduled to enter the Martian atmosphere, 

we had just finished the transition from Earth 

control to fully autonomous control: the 

spacecraft was now responsible for its own 

actions. Monitoring Pathfinder’s telemetry, 

we looked for the expected sequence of actions 

that would prepare for Mars entry, descent, 

and landing. One step was closing valves in 

the propulsion system, but the spacecraft told 

us the valves were staying open. The valves 

being open or closed was not critical in itself, 

but we needed to know why we had gotten 

that unexpected message and whether it 

signaled a larger problem that would threaten 

the mission. 

Our best guess was that the spacecraft might be running an 

old version of software, the version it launched with. During 

the seven-month journey to Mars, we designed, tested, and 

uploaded new software that made the entry, descent, and 

landing (EDL) system much more tolerant of noise and 

possible radar outages. This unexpected message looked a lot 

like how the old software used to behave. Had we booted up 

the old version by mistake? It was possible; both versions were 

still on board. 

We did have time—but barely ten minutes—to send a 

command to reboot into the right version before the EDL 

sequence started. It would take eleven minutes for any signal we 

sent to reach the spacecraft. But rebooting the computer minutes 

before entering the Martian atmosphere was not something we 

wanted to do unless we were absolutely sure that Pathfinder 

was running the wrong version of the software. How could we 

find out? The spacecraft was not configured to send down the 

current version number and there was no time to ask it. 

Glenn Reeves, the flight software lead, turned to Richard 

Cook and, virtually at the same time, they yelled, “Jordan 

Kaplan!” Cook, our mission manager, then raced into Jesse 

Wright’s office in search of the answer in the few minutes we 

had to make a decision. 

Jordan had been a member of the Pathfinder team who, 

sadly, had died in April when his private plane crashed. To 

honor his memory, the software team had added his name 

to the software “fill packets”—text available to insert in 

communication from the spaceship to Earth when the actual 

data being sent did not fill the standard-size “frames” the data 

transmission system used. His name appeared only in the new 

version of the software. 

Richard ran to Jesse’s computer, where Jesse quickly decoded 

the fill packet. Moments later, they came back yelling, “Jordan 

Kaplan! Don’t reboot!” They had found his name; Pathfinder 

was running the right version of the software. 

Pathfinder landed successfully. The tension of that lastminute crisis is memorable, but so is the quick thinking of the 

Pathfinder team and the thoroughness of their knowledge of 

the system—down to the software fill code. The experience also 

shows the potential value of frivolity (and human feeling, in this 

case). The supposedly meaningless content of the fill packets 

turned into a valuable analytical tool. In planetary exploration, 

you can’t predict all the problems you’ll face or all the resources 

you’ll have to solve them. ●

Rob ManninG was chief engineer for the 1997 Mars Pathfinder 

project and is currently chief engineer for the Mars Exploration 

Program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. 
Title

By 

Intro

 

 

 

 

 

STORy | ASK MAGAZINE | 15 

MARS ExPRESS:


Perspective view of Hebes Chasma 

obtained by the high-resolution 

stereo camera (HRSC) on ESA’s 

By KERRy ELLIS Mars Express spacecraft. 

The pursuit of space science does more than reveal new facts and spawn new theories about the 

universe and our place in it. It also provides common ground for international collaboration. 

Scientists all over the world share their passion for investigating and learning about other planets, 

and Mars in particular draws attention. But why are we so eager to keep exploring our neighbor in 

the solar system? And how do scientists scattered across the world collaborate on one mission to a 

destination millions of miles away? 

Photo Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum) 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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16 | ASK MAGAZINE 

Many of the missions flying in space today begin with a 

scientist somewhere asking a question. Agencies like NASA 

and the European Space Agency (ESA) provide the means 

to answer those questions, and those scientists frequently 

join the resulting projects as principal investigators. When 

several scientists ask different questions about the same place, 

missions offer a way for a variety of experiments to catch the 

same ride into space. 

The ESA’s Mars Express orbiter, Europe’s groundbreaking 

first planetary mission, involved principal investigators from 

Germany, Sweden, Italy, and France and contributions from 

Japan, the United States, and Russia. It gave a ride to seven 

exploratory instruments, and while each instrument measures 

something different about the red planet, they are all seeking 

to answer the same questions: What happened on Mars? And 

could it happen on Earth? 

Seeking Answers Together 

To obtain cohesive answers, principal investigators 

collaborate with each other and communicate continuously 

among themselves and with ESA. Each principal investigator 

works with a team of scientists and engineers on his or her 

instrument and coordinates with many scientific groups in 

different countries. The high-resolution stereo camera (HRSC) 

team, for example, includes nine co-investigators from across the 

United States, at Arizona State University, Brown University, 

the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the U.S. Geological Survey. 

Before launching Mars Express, the principal investigators 

also had to coordinate with the ESA engineers building the 

orbiter and lander. Since the mission is currently in operation 

around Mars, they keep in close contact with each other through 

weekly teleconferences and many meetings coordinated by the ESA 

Mars Express project scientist. To plan their observations, they are 

also in constant contact with the ESA science operations center. 

The scientists work closely with their fellow principal 

investigators, coordinating when each instrument will make 

its observations or discussing how data obtained from one 

instrument could benefit a sister experiment. Most of the 

Apollinaris Patera is an ancient shield volcano measuring approximately 


180 km by 280 km at its base and rising to a maximum of 5 km above the
 

surrounding terrain. The image also shows the terrain partly covered by 


thin, diffuse clouds indicated by bluish tinted areas.
 

principal investigators had worked together on the failed ’96 

Russian mission to Mars, so they came prepared to meet with old 

colleagues and improve their instruments for the ESA mission. 

Sometimes their conversations helped evolve the design of an 

instrument as it was being built to ensure better coordination 

with the other experiments on the mission. 

“The concept of our experiment evolved substantially from 

thesediscussions,” saidVittorioFormisano,principalinvestigator 

for the planetary Fourier spectrometer (PFS). “We attempted 

different solutions to different aspects in the beginning, and 

when we passed from the Russian mission to the ESA proposal, 

there was a strong mass reduction requirement. We decreased 

the experiment mass by 12 kg, reorganizing the international 

collaborations and contributions.” 

Even after Mars Express launched, scientists continue to 

adapt their observations as they receive new information from 

their experiments. These discoveries have changed the course of 

the mission as it is operating. 

“Most discoveries were made along the course of the 

mission, without being predicted, concerning the composition of 

both the surface and the atmosphere—clouds in particular,” 

said Jean-Pierre Bibring, principal investigator for the visible 

and infrared mineralogical mapping spectrometer (OMEGA). 

“Consequently, we modified our observational strategy 

accordingly, trying to coordinate with the other principal 

investigators as much as we could.” 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ASK MAGAZINE | 17 

Photo Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum) 

These discoveries go beyond informing the mission during 

its journey; they also help shape future missions to Mars. “Earlier 

on, most of our understanding of Mars surface structures 

and evolution came from the interpretation of optical images 

and altimetry data,” said Bibring. “The study of the surface 

minerals with new tools like OMEGA is providing us with a 

new fundamental set of information to reveal, for instance, the 

history of liquid water on the red planet. We have discovered the 

presence of hydrated minerals—called phyllosilicates—which 

show that water must have flowed abundantly in the early 

history of Mars. This opens the possibility that conditions for 

life to grow may have existed, as on Earth. Sites featuring such 

minerals could be favored targets for future missions, as they 

would be among the most likely to contain microfossils if ever 

life once emerged on Mars.” 

To obtain these findings, Bibring worked in tandem with 

the other principal investigators at all levels, from programmatic 

to scientific. “We had to coordinate observation scheduling 

and data sharing, and we even exchanged co-investigators and 

students,” he said. 

Working closely with the OMEGA instrument is the 

PFS instrument, which studies the atmosphere by measuring 

its composition and temperature and the way it varies with 

altitude. PFS obtains these measurements by studying the 

sunlight absorbed by molecules and the infrared radiation they 

emit. “OMEGA has a lower spectral capability but can produce 

images, unlike PFS,” said Formisano. “PFS has a very high 

spectral resolution, and it identified traces of methane in the 

Promethei Planum, an area seasonally covered with 

a layer of ice more than 3,500 m thick in the Martian 

south polar region, photographed by the HRSC. 

Photo Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum) 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

18 | ASK MAGAZINE 

atmosphere from orbit for the first time. Methane is another 

important element to track when looking for traces of life.” 

OMEGA, PFS, HRSC, the ultraviolet and infrared atmospheric 

spectrometer (SPICAM), the energetic neutral atoms analyzer 

(ASPERA), and the other instruments are providing a complete 

picture of what makes up Mars’s atmosphere and surface, and if 

water could have existed there for a prolonged period of time. 

Mars Express’s collaborative successes have extended 

beyond its primary mission. The spacecraft helped NASA’s 

Mars Phoenix mission by capturing and relaying data during 

the lander’s entry, descent, and landing. 

Learning About Mars—and Earth 

“We think of Mars as a sister of Earth,” said Martin Pätzold, 

principal investigator for the radio science experiment (MaRS). 

“It could well have harbored life in its early years. It is therefore 

very interesting to look closely at the similarities and differences 

between our two planets, from a geophysical point of view, 

analyzing its upper atmosphere and the effect of the solar wind 

on it, the roughness of the planet’s surface, and even its interior 

by measuring the effects of Mars’s gravity field on the spacecraft 

velocity.” Among other things, the MaRS experiment also 

allowed the most precise measurement ever of the mass of the 

Martian moon Phobos. 

Jean-Loup Bertaux, principal investigator for SPICAM, 

is testing the theory that more water vapor in the atmosphere 

means less ozone. “This could have vital consequences for Earth 

because we have both ozone and very little water vapor in our 

stratosphere,” he said. “With changes in our climate, our water 

vapor levels could increase drastically in the stratosphere, and 

this may be developing a new threat for ozone. On Mars, we can 

check our theory on the chemistry of water vapor and ozone, 

and since chemical reactions are the same on both planets, we 

would thereby learn more about our planet’s possible future.” 

The greatest ambition of MARSIS, led by Giovanni Picardi 

and Jeffrey Plaut, is to find liquid water still existing on Mars, 

“because this is the basis of life, both in scientific thought and also 

according to the Greek philosopher Eraclito’s ancient principle 

of ‘panta rei’—everything flows!” Picardi said. MARSIS is 

looking deep below Mars’s surface and has already identified, 

for the first time ever, ice-water deposits underground. 

Future Exploration 

Mars Express launched successfully in June 2003 and was 

originally planned to run for one Martian year (687 days). The 

mission has already been extended twice, and it is now funded 

for operation until May 2009. Its success, despite the loss of its 

Beagle 2 lander, represents Europe’s first foray into planetary 

exploration and paved the way for ESA’s Venus Express, which 

launched in 2005. The collaborative discoveries of the Mars 

Express principal investigators, combined with those of space 

scientists across the world, help create a cohesive picture of 

the solar system’s—and Earth’s—evolution and the unique 

circumstances required to support life. Their discoveries are also 

informing future exploration of Mars. 

Stas Barabash, principal investigator for the ASPERA 

instrument that is studying how particles in the atmosphere 

interact with solar wind, is building on the data returned by Mars 

Express. By studying ionized gases at the boundary between 

Martian atmosphere and space, Barabash says, “We are studying 

just how quickly water vapor and other gases are being lost from 

Mars. Ultimately, these measurements could help us decide 

whether Mars supported conditions suitable for life in the past.” 

Gerhard Neukum, principal investigator for the HRSC, 

is also confident his 3–D measurements, mapping of Mars’s 

surface, and study of volcanic and glacial activity could help us 

understand the planet’s evolution as well as aid future exploration 

efforts. “In a way, we are investing in the future generations of 

scientists to come,” he said. “We are uncovering a whole new 

world in 3–D, showing exactly what Mars looks like as though 

the images were taken from a low-flying airplane. And, who 

knows, we may be preparing the ground for somebody to go to 

Mars one day.” ●
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“

-

 

 - - 

’

Viewpoint: The Bigger Pictures 

By PIERS BIZONy 

INSIGHT | ASK MAGAZINE | 19 | ASK MAGAZINE | 19 

First Steps 1963,” by Mitchell Jamieson 

In this silver colored spacesuit, Astronaut Gordon Cooper steps away from his 

Mercury spacecraft and into the bright sunlight on the deck of the recovery ship 

after twenty two orbits of Earth. Jamieson spent two weeks in mid Pacific Ocean 

awaiting Cooper s return. He documented the recovery and medical examination 

and accompanied the astronaut and recovery team back to Cape Canaveral. 

Image courtesy the NASA Art Program 

I am endlessly curious about the logic of NASA’s hardware 

designs and mission architectures, but I am a writer by trade 

and an engineer only in the armchair sense. My “mission” is to 

keep people interested in the possibilities of space exploration 

and persuade them that the collective global investment—in 

tax dollars, euros, rubles, yuan, and yen—is justified. Mine is 

an engineering challenge of sorts: manipulating the responses 

of as many individuals as I possibly can so as to keep them on 

my side. Every vote counts. Writing as one who believes that 

human expansion into space is virtuous, and for whom NASA 

represents a wonder of the civilized world, I am now going to 

play devil’s advocate. Let us not deny that quite a lot of folk 

don’t think the way I do. Some of them doubt that the federal 

government should continue to have a central role in sustaining 

human space flight. Those are the people that we NASA 

advocates have to reach. 

Half a century ago, at the very dawn of the space age, 

government advisors prided themselves on their supposed 

ability to identify potentially useful areas for large-scale national 

research, such as aviation, computing, rocketry, and nuclear 

energy. Today it’s all anyone can do to just keep in touch with 

the bewildering pace of developments in medicine, genetics, 

electronic consumer goods, personal computing, and global 

communication. Policymakers are hard-pressed merely to cope 

with these myriad advances, let alone urge their invention. 

Even the bombs and missiles that were once our darkest pride 

have lost their edge in an era of “asymmetrical warfare.” A few 

fanatics with dime store craft knives can change the world in a 

day, while the intercontinental ballistic missiles and their costly 

megatons stay sealed in their silos, impotent in a world that 

barely even worries about them anymore. 

As for space exploration, that ambiguous child of the 

Cold War, let’s face the uncomfortable truth that most launch 

vehicles are based, essentially, on antique technology. They have 

advanced less in the fifty years since their invention than just 

about any other vehicle except for the automobile. The public 

senses this and turns its attention to newer, sexier technological 

stimulations, such as iPods and the Internet. There is a problem 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

in the language of space if young people no longer find quite 

as much excitement in the adventure as their parents and 

grandparents did fifty years ago, when they, in their turn, were 

young. To be sure, many thousands of people are still fascinated 

by space exploration, and millions more take at least a passing 

interest, but those multitudes may no longer be sufficient to 

ensure a long-term continuation of human space flight at a 

major national level. 

NASA’s plans for the future are therefore a cultural matter as 

well as an engineering issue. That’s what I want to talk about here. I 

suggest that if NASA is to preserve and promote its status in society 

as a whole, it needs to speak to the nontechnical public in a more 

engaging way that satisfies the emotions as well as the intellect. 

20 | ASK MAGAZINE 

“Apollo 8 Coming Home,” by Robert McCall 

For the first time, human eyes directly observed the far side of the moon 

on Christmas Eve 1968. The Apollo 8 rocket engine was fired to bring the 

spacecraft out of its lunar orbit and home to Earth. McCall created this oil 

on canvas piece in 1969. 

Image courtesy the NASA Art Program 

NASA’s Web sites are beautifully designed and filled with 

fabulous images, texts, and download options. I have to assume 

that these vast electronic resources reflect the Agency’s overall 

public posture. The “how” of getting into space is always 

perfectly expressed, but the “why” sometimes absents itself. 

This is because the “why” is not a question that can easily or 

fully be answered in terms of immediate economic benefits, 

scientific rewards, or educational spin-offs. The “why” of space 

exploration is a matter of emotions and instincts. 

As a government entity funded by taxpayers, NASA has to 

be extraordinarily careful how it describes its motivations. The 

safety of a collective mission statement protects NASA from 

potentially damaging criticism but at the same time eliminates 

much of the emotional drama of the Agency’s work, because 

its public communications have to be checked against the 

possibility of annoying Main Street or Capitol Hill. Of course 

there is nothing that NASA can do about this. It is part and 

parcel of being a federal organization with an obligation to 

reach out to a wide constituency without alienating any part of 

that constituency. 

It is difficult for NASA to talk, for instance, about the 

spiritual or emotional aspects of space, because there are more 

opinions about such matters than you can shake a stick at. 

Apollo 11’s Michael Collins once said, “I think a future flight 

should include a poet, a priest, and a philosopher. Then we 

might get a much better idea of what we saw.” We can only 

imagine the chaos that would ensue if one kind of priest was 

selected over another. As for the prospect of philosophers arguing 

semantics aboard a spacecraft—well, the mind boggles. It is 

easy to understand why NASA sticks to selling space in terms of 

scientific and societal benefits: themes that can be expressed in 

terms that taxpayers and politicians can argue about rationally. 

Rationality is the only tool that can help us decide how 

a space mission can be done, and how it should be funded. 

However, when it comes to winning support for that funding, 

I think that NASA may be missing a trick or two. I propose 

that it should make greater use of what the intelligence agencies 

might describe as “deniable assets.” I mean the people who can 

best express the poetry, the drama, the emotion, the glory, and, 

yes—although it is essentially a taboo subject—the thrilling 

dangers of flying into space, while at the same time not being 

official spokespeople for NASA. 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ASK MAGAZINE | 21 

RATIONALITy IS THE ONLy TOOL THAT CAN HELP uS dECIdE HOw A SPACE MISSION CAN 

bE dONE, ANd HOw IT SHOuLd bE FuNdEd. HOwEvER, wHEN IT COMES TO wINNING 

SuPPORT FOR THAT FuNdING, I THINK THAT NASA MAy bE MISSING A TRICK OR TwO. 

Artists, I believe, should have more of a role in NASA’s public 

relations strategy. I adore the wonderful computer graphics of 

hardware concepts, from John Frassanito’s company and many 

others employed by NASA. I’m a total junkie for that stuff—my 

downloading habit verges on the alarming—but in this article I 

am talking about expressive artists, writers, and performers, not 

realistic illustrators or technical journalists. 

A little history. In 1962 Hereward Cooke of the National 

Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., wrote a letter of invitation 

to a number of prominent artists, inviting them to tour NASA 

and create works based on their impressions. He was eloquent 

about the need for both art and science in any space endeavor: 

“When a major rocket launch takes place, more than two 

hundred cameras record every split second of the activity,” he 

wrote. “Every nut, bolt, and miniaturized electronic device is 

photographed from every angle. But the camera sees everything 

and understands nothing. It is the emotional impact, the 

interpretation and hidden significance of these events, that lie 

within the scope of the artist’s vision.” Cooke assured the selected 

artists that they would be given access to NASA facilities and 

would be subjected to no editorial pressures whatsoever. 

Paul Calle, famous for his scenes of life in the Old West, 

took up the challenge, producing superb pencil drawings 

of astronauts and their capsules. Robert Rauschenberg’s 

semiabstract silk-screen prints seem both celebratory and mildly 

sarcastic at the same time; Bob McCall, a well-known aerospace 

illustrator, delivers romantic yet technically accurate pictures 

to satisfy space hardware buffs; and Lamarr Dodd captures an 

impressionistic morass of wires, switches, cables, and dials, with 

silver-clad humans embedded in the machinery of their ships. 

Jamie Wyeth’s delicate watercolors show the forlorn 

scrublands surrounding the launchpads. Rockets, with their 

barely constrained capacity for disaster (admit it, revel in it), 

have to keep their distance from the everyday human realm 

of towns and streets and family backyards. This is a dark yet 

thrilling truth that artists can explore more freely, perhaps, than 

NASA press officers. The drab safety-zone territories around 

Wyeth’s launchpads are a sort of endless “nowhere,” inhabited 

neither by man nor machine: a wasteland for explosions to vent 

their fury without causing more harm than necessary. 

A more inward landscape is explored by Mitchell Jamieson, 

who understands the psychological drama behind the Space Age’s 

political and technological rhetoric. It needs only the lightest 

sweep of an artist’s brush to expose the religious and mystical 

desires implicit in cosmic exploration. Jamieson’s painting of a 

geometrically fragmented astronaut in his spacesuit brings to 

mind the saintly figures in a cathedral’s stained-glass window. 

The art collection that emerged from the efforts of Cooke 

and his collaborators grew into a major body of work, which is 

now under the guardianship of the Smithsonian Institution’s 

Air and Space Museum. However, I am sad to observe that 

times have changed. 

Last year, in London, I was fortunate to hear the singer and 

performance artist Laurie Anderson talk about space: “I was 

the first NASA artist in residence. And I was the last artist in 

residence.” Five years ago, she accepted a yearlong commission 

to haunt the corridors of various NASA field centers and 

respond, in her inimical way, to what she saw and heard. With 

her penchant for dreamlike electronic experimentation and 

restless curiosity about modern technological culture, she was 

the perfect artist to take a quirky, sideways look at the space 

business and to bring those observations to thousands of her 

fans, people not necessarily familiar with NASA’s work. 

Sadly, Congress had by then forgotten the importance of art. 

In June 2005, Anderson’s modest honorarium of $20,000 was the 

subject of a Congressional debate, which art lost. A critic of the 

residency argued that “NASA should not be spending taxpayer 

dollars on a performance artist.” Congress voted accordingly 

and prohibited using federal funds for artists in residence at 

NASA in the future. That kind of thinking could cost NASA 

its second shot at the moon. The majority of American citizens 

are not engineers or scientists. It takes a variety of languages, 

including those of art, music, and literature, to reach them. 

At the same time, the subjectivity of our individual responses 

to space is not something that NASA itself can afford to tangle 

with. Therefore, I reiterate that the Agency should be allowed 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

22 | ASK MAGAZINE 22 | ASK MAGAZINE 

to communicate through independent artists and writers and 

musicians in order to reach as wide a spectrum of society as 

possible. Then, when some artist or other says something 

“controversial,” NASA can properly distance itself from that 

artist’s views. The point is not for artists to “toe the company 

line.” The point is for them to put space flight into the culture 

so that it becomes something more than a niche activity for 

aerospace professionals. 

Scientific discoveries in space are only half the story. It’s 

what we make of those discoveries that counts; and, inevitably, 

what we make of them is subjective and open to debate. As 

always, human progress can only come from inside ourselves. 

We can’t find it “out there,” no matter how far we travel, or how 

complex our spaceships become. According to the British author 

J. G. Ballard, “The biggest developments of the immediate future 

will take place not on the moon or Mars, but on Earth, and it is 

inner space, not outer, that needs to be explored. Even in space, 

the most alien creatures we’ll confront are ourselves.” And that 

subject—in the end, the only subject that matters to any of us— 

is beyond the ability of NASA’s scientists and engineers alone to 

convey to the public. They also need artists. ●

“Hot Shot,” by Robert Rauschenberg 

Rauschenberg attended the first launch of 

the Space Shuttle Columbia in April 1981. This 

lithograph captures elements of the shuttle, 

Kennedy Space Center, and the space culture of 

the Cocoa Beach area around Cape Canaveral. 

Image courtesy the NASA Art Program 

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

 

 

 

 

 

STORy | ASK MAGAZINE | 23 Photo Credit: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory 

The Mars Exploration Rover parachute underwent deployment 

testing in the world ’s largest wind tunnel at Ames Research Center. 

By ANGELO “GuS” GuASTAFERRO 

Why take responsibility for a major foul-up on a 

project outside your area of expertise that started 

before you were on the scene? Here’s one story 

that may answer that question. 

I became deputy director of Ames Research Center in April 1981. Having previously worked on the Viking mission 

and for the planetary exploration program at Headquarters, I was new to this level of management. I also didn’t 

have a lot of experience in most of the work being done at Ames. But in 1982, I found myself acting director because 

the director, Clarence Syvertson, had coronary bypass surgery and was out for four months. 

At that time, a group of Ames engineers were working to increase the capacity of an existing 40' x 80' subsonic 

wind tunnel used for full-scale testing of aircraft. They were adding an 80' x 120' test section and installing 

more powerful drive motors to increase the wind speed from 200 to 300 knots. One of the elements of the new 

design was a set of plywood vanes that would direct the airflow to one or the other test sections. On December 9, 

disaster struck. 

RESPONSIbILITy,

Not blame 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

TAKING PROMPT CONTROL OF AN ACCIdENT OR INCIdENT 

INvESTIGATION SHOwS, FIRST OF ALL, THAT yOu ARE COMMITTEd 

TO FINdING OuT wHAT wENT wRONG ANd RECTIFyING THE ERRORS. 

24 | ASK MAGAZINE 

During testing that day, the 130-foot-long turning vane 

set failed. Debris crashed into the wind tunnel’s six fifteenblade wooden propellers (each as high as a four-story building), 

damaging or destroying most of them. As I said at the time, 

“We generated a lot of toothpicks.” 

The accident investigation board eventually found multiple 

causes for the failure, including potential problems with the 

original design, late design changes that were not properly 

reviewed, construction quality that did not meet requirements, 

and inadequate instrumentation for measuring loads on the 

vane set. But this story is not about why the failure happened; 

it is about how leaders should respond when a problem like this 

one occurs. 

It could have been tempting to find someone else to blame. 

After all, I was new to Ames. I hadn’t been involved in the 

design decisions for the project. It wasn’t my area of expertise. 

Approaching it this way was tempting, but not productive. The 

fact was I was acting director, and the failure happened on my 

watch. By telling myself, “Gus, you’re responsible,” I was able 

to get past the question of blame and concentrate instead on 

moving quickly to understand and solve the problem. 

I thought it was important to do what needed to be done 

before being told by NASA Headquarters. Within hours, we had 

a recovery plan in place, and I received Headquarters approval 

from the chair of the investigation board, Bob Swain. Taking 

prompt control of an accident or incident investigation shows, 

first of all, that you are committed to finding out what went 

wrong and rectifying the errors. It also puts you in a position to 

shape the outside review team. 

Bob and I took three days to complete the team and outline 

the investigation. With most of my career spent at Langley 

Research Center, I was determined to get the systems engineer at 

Langley and the U.S. Air Force Tullahoma wind tunnel facility 

involved in the investigation. Taking responsibility doesn’t mean 

you have all the answers. I certainly didn’t. We put together a 

team that I knew would do an outstanding job of analyzing 

the fatal flaw and coming up with the recommendations we 

needed to get the tunnel up and running. Their two months of 

dedicated work fully lived up to my expectations. 

Then I went to the United Kingdom with the Ames 

Engineering Directorate to get new propellers made. Constructed 

of layers of hand-shaped, laminated spruce, they called for 

skilled precision work. It took at least six months to get new 

blades made to specification. 

The wind tunnel was out of commission for a year—a pretty 

good recovery time, I think, given the extent of the failure. 

Since then it has been used successfully for full-scale testing 

of helicopters and Mars rover parachute designs, among many 

other applications. It is still operating today, more than twentyfive years after that December day when we found ourselves 

facing a tunnel full of toothpicks. 

Handling that crisis was a formative experience for me. 

Looking back, I’d say it taught me several valuable lessons. The 

importance of taking responsibility is the biggest one, but a 

couple of others come to mind: 

• It’s important to stretch yourself. Don’t always do what’s 

in your comfort zone. 

• If you admit you need help and give people credit for their 

contribution, they will help you. ●

anGelo “GuS” GuaStafeRRo held the first of three 

leadership management positions in the Viking Mars mission that 

successfully landed two spacecraft on the planet in 1976. He has 

been director of Planetary Programs at NASA, deputy director of 

Ames Research Center, and vice president of Lockheed Martin in 

charge of Civil Space. Since 1998, he has been a lecturer and a 

consultant for NASA and other organizations. 
Title

By 

Intro 

 

 

 

 

 

Owning 

the Product 

+ the Process 

By STEPHEN A. COOK 

STORy | ASK MAGAZINE | 25 

Organizations are like people—sometimes it takes a major shock or a disaster to change their 

behavior. For NASA, the shock occurred on February 1, 2003, when Space Shuttle Columbia 

broke up on re-entry. Even as we mourned the loss of the crew, many at NASA began some 

serious soul-searching. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) was formed within 

two hours of the accident. In addition to the technical reasons for the disaster, the CAIB report 

cited management and cultural problems inside and outside NASA. They faulted political leaders 

for not giving NASA a clear mission and faulted NASA for weakening its in-house engineering 

and safety organizations. In response, policymakers developed the U.S. Space Exploration Policy 

to provide the Agency with a long-term vision. And NASA changed internal structures and 

practices to strengthen engineering and safety. 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

26 | ASK MAGAZINE 

Photo Credit: NASA 

NASA’s New Approach 

The CAIB report advised us to establish a strong engineering 

technical authority and focus on safety as a core engineering 

discipline, rather than relying on industrial safety policies. 

Establishing the Safety and Mission Assurance and Engineering 

Directorates as separately managed and separately funded 

entities means that NASA engineers in those organizations 

can be more forthcoming about raising safety issues without 

fear of retribution. 

Engineering and safety are closely linked in a discipline as 

demanding as space flight. Every engineering decision has flight 

safety consequences, so our engineering and safety teams must 

be staffed with competent engineers and space systems managers 

to ensure we are applying an effective risk-based approach to 

the design. Routine, open, and honest communication among 

project management, engineering, and safety is a must. Cost, 

schedule, and political constraints exist in any project; all the 

parties have to understand them clearly and find creative ways 

to work within them. For Ares, we are cultivating a “Yes, if ...” 

rather than “No, because ...” culture by giving NASA civil 

servants a product ownership role. 

NASA Administrator Mike Griffin gave us one clear 

directive for managing the Constellation program: NASA must 

own the intellectual property rather than use a proprietary 

design developed and owned by a contractor. The Agency used 

this development model to build the Apollo crew capsule and 

the Saturn launch vehicles in the sixties, but it is a new way of 

working for the current NASA team. For thirty years, NASA 

deferred to private industry for launch vehicle development and 

operations. We needed to get our hands dirty by delving into 

the details of development. 

Ares Projects—Owning the Product 

The Ares projects at Marshall Space Flight Center are charged 

with developing the launch vehicles to get the Orion crew 

exploration vehicle and Altair lunar lander into space. The Ares I 

crew launch vehicle will lift off from Launch Complex 39B at 

Kennedy Space Center using a five-segment solid rocket motor 

based on the ATK Launch Systems four-segment motor used 

on the Space Shuttle. The upper stage, powered by a liquid 

hydrogen/liquid oxygen J-2X engine—a modern version of the 

Apollo/Saturn J-2—will push Orion to low-Earth orbit. 

To accomplish this enormous task, we have revived Wernher 

von Braun’s practice of building and maintaining in-house 

engineering and safety expertise, but we have incorporated 

modern management practices, such as Lean Six Sigma and 

Kaizen, establishment of team norms, and an all-digital model 

and manufacturing process. Rather than reviving the top-down 

management of the 1960s, we are empowering engineers at all 

levels to identify improvements in their daily processes. 

NASA Marshall and our partner centers are responsible for 

overall vehicle or “stack” integration and developing the upper 

stage in house, with an innovative partnership with Boeing 

for production. In addition, we are using Boeing’s propulsion 

expertise to work very closely with first-stage contractor ATK 

Launch Systems and upper-stage engine contractor Pratt & 

Whitney Rocketdyne to develop these two key elements. 

This robotic weld tool at Marshall Space Flight Center is configured 

to assemble the domes at the ends of each of the Ares I Upper Stage 

propellant tanks. 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ASK MAGAZINE | 27 

This expanded view of Ares I 

and Orion depicts all the 

primary vehicle elements. 

Image Credit: NASA 

In-House Development in Action— 

The Ares I Upper Stage 

One of the managers most affected by these changes is Danny 

Davis, the Ares I upper-stage manager. When asked to sum up 

his job, he said, “The NASA design team is responsible for all 

design, development, and testing of the upper-stage system. We 

are reducing development risk and cost by incorporating state-ofthe-art technologies and minimizing the need for new technology 

development. We also have to reduce the overall cost of ownership 

of the upper stage by considering early in the design process the 

input of the Boeing team that will fabricate the stage and the 

operations team that will handle and operate the stage.” 

According to Davis, the upper-stage production system is 

being designed along with the upper stage itself, with the upperstage production contractor (Boeing) providing “producibility” 

input to the NASA design team: “The NASA design team 

has exceptional capacity and passion to implement the upperstage development and operations. For example, during one 

‘lean’ event that included both NASA and Boeing personnel, 

the upper-stage team cut 100 days off the time it takes to 

manufacture a stage.” One major savings came from Boeing’s 

suggestion to tack weld the upper-stage barrel segments in a 

vertical orientation rather than build the stage horizontally, an 

insight gained from building Delta IV launch vehicles. The 

NASA/Boeing Kaizen team took that process one step further 

and decided to completely weld the barrel segments together 

vertically, resulting in substantial assembly time savings. 

Tim Vaughn, chief of the Metals Engineering Branch 

of Marshall’s Engineering Directorate, works with Davis 

on the upper stage. He has been on the leading edge of Ares 

development, and his team is working on the stage from the 

production angle: “We do weld development, materials and 

failure analysis, metallurgical engineering, and sub- and fullscale manufacturing and assembly. We are key players in the 

manufacturing and assembly area. We are developing all the 

components, manufacturing processes, the tools, and fixtures, 

and we’re demonstrating all that with full-scale hardware.” 

Vaughn’s team has started nearly from scratch. It has been 

forty years since NASA built rocket stages on this scale, and the 

technology has progressed quite a bit since the days of Apollo. 

As Vaughn explains, “There was nothing ‘heritage’ that we 

could draw upon except industry infrastructure and the initial 

development experience from the External Tank Program. Today 

we are using the strongest and lightest aluminum alloy currently 

available, Aluminum-Lithium 2195. It’s difficult to weld and 

form. We are also using the friction stir weld process for all major 

structural welds. Our goal is to take advantage of all state-of-theart technology development that we have available.” 

Developing the Team 

Of course it’s not just a matter of building the hardware. On top 

of the fundamental tasks of developing qualified components, 

manufacturing processes, and tooling fixtures, Vaughn notes, 

“We also need to develop people. All the components are new, 

and all the people are new. Everything we do on a day-to-day 

basis is new. Most civil servants and contractor partners have 

limited full-scale production experience, but they’re all bright 

people and we’re all learning. Everybody is enjoying learning how 

to go about doing this.” He adds, “Engineers love to build things. 

I’ve got engineers who had been pushing paper for years now 

responsible for developing hardware components, and they’re 

having the time of their lives. I’ve got welding engineers who are 

absolutely having a blast trying to figure out the best and most 

efficient way of assembling tank structures. There is no problem 

whatsoever motivating people. Everybody understands that what 

they are doing will be used as a basis for the next twenty to thirty 

years. Future generations, not just NASA engineers, will be using 

what we developed. This is engineering Shangri-La!” 

Changing the Culture 

Why is Ares’s shift from an oversight to a development culture so 

important? As Vaughn puts it, “When you do development, you’re 

starting from ground zero, and you get to design and develop the 

type of vehicle that you think needs to be developed. The design 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

28 | ASK MAGAZINE 

dAvIS SAyS, “wE LEARN EvERy dAy wHAT IT MEANS TO ‘OwN’ THE dEvELOPMENT. 

OuR TEAM IS MAKING bINdING dECISIONS ANd wORKING THROuGH PRObLEMS, 

bEING INNOvATIvE, ANd LISTENING TO THE ‘wISE OwLS’ wHO PROvIdE AdvICE.” 

is being done in house, and we actually get to have input on how 

the design is being built, how we’re going to manufacture the 

vehicle, and to me that’s the beauty of engineering.” 

Asked if there were disadvantages to this culture change, 

Vaughn replied, “There are people who do not like the 

responsibility and the accountability that this new direction gives 

you. It’s easy to sit back and criticize something that someone 

else has done, but to stick your neck out and say, ‘This is the way 

it’s supposed to be done,’ is the key difference. The things that 

we’re doing now, ten to fifteen years from now, someone’s going 

to be critiquing or, if we are successful, using our program as a 

model to follow. We have to make decisions that influence the 

direction of the space agency, at least in terms of manufacturing, 

and that is an uncomfortable position for some people.” 

When it comes to the cultural changes within the upper 

stage, Davis says, “We learn every day what it means to ‘own’ 

the development. Our team is making binding decisions and 

working through problems, being innovative, and listening to 

the ‘wise owls’ who provide advice. We also listen carefully to 

our production contractor to make sure our design is carefully 

thought out for all aspects of our mission. 

“The NASA design team is fortunate to have several of the 

men and woman who participated in the development of the 

Saturn and Space Shuttle launch system available for consultation 

and advice. Many of our advisors were in top management 

roles and understand the complexity and details of the job 

ahead of our team. They know the exhilaration of successfully 

accomplishing the mission. Each of them has relayed that our 

job is not easy—you must be tough and persistent and never 

give up—but in the end the space program and our nation will 

benefit from the sacrifice made by our team. Encouragement 

from someone that has been there is priceless.” 

When asked how his team approaches the Ares project, 

Davis added, “Our team is committed to forging a minimumcost development and operational design by a close partnership 

with our production contractor and the operators who will inherit 

our hardware. Each team member owns the cost and operational 

efficiency of their respective components and subsystems. We 

ensure this by insisting on strict accountability for development 

and recurring costs, and modeling of the stage operations. Each 

team member owns the life cycle of their respective design.” 

Vaughn adds, “One of the culture changes we’ve had to make 

is moving to a ‘badgeless’ organization. What you want to do is 

set up an organization working a series of major tasks to have the 

latitude to assign lead roles to the best people. The best people 

aren’t always civil servants. I’ve assigned lead roles for component 

development, weld tools, and various other technical tasks to 

Boeing, our Ares I production contractor, and Jacobs Engineering, 

our engineering support contractor. I’ve got contractor personnel 

and government personnel working together as teams; contractor 

reporting to contractor, contractor to government, and government 

to contractor. There has been resistance, but when you have the 

best people leading major tasks, it pretty well takes care of itself.” 

Preparing for the Future 

Rebuilding an “oversight” culture into a “doing” culture may be 

more difficult than building a new rocket. Vaughn notes, “There’s 

management theory that says it takes from three to seven years 

to change the culture of an organization,” and emphasizes the 

patience and persistence needed to take a group in a new direction. 

Bringing critical work in house ensures a knowledgeable civil 

service workforce that understands the work to be done, owns the 

products and processes, and uses resources wisely. Owning the 

product and process is giving NASA’s workforce the knowledge 

and skills needed to ensure the future development of the Ares V 

cargo launch vehicle and Altair lunar lander and, ultimately, to 

fulfill the challenges of the new U.S. Space Exploration Policy. ● 

StePhen a. Cook is the Ares project manager at Marshall 

Space Flight Center. 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

INSIGHT | ASK MAGAZINE | 29 

INTERVIEW WITH 

Charles 


Kennel
 

By DON COHEN 

Dr. Charles Kennel was associate administrator for the 

Office of the Mission to Planet Earth from 1994 to 1996, 

when he helped restructure NASA’s Earth Observing 

System. For many years he was a professor of physics at 

UCLA, carrying out research in space plasma physics 

and astrophysics. He is formerly the director of and now 

professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and 

he was the founding director of the Environment and 

Sustainability Initiative at the University of California, 

San Diego. Don Cohen spoke to him at the Jet Propulsion 

Laboratory in Pasadena, California. 

cOHEN: How did you come to work on space science. I felt that small spacecraft 

the Earth Observing System? were a good way to go for that subject; they 

offered a lot of flexibility. This idea turned 

KENNEL: I had spent my career since out to be important for my subsequent life 

coming to UCLA working in astrophysics at NASA. 

and space science. I’d been on a lot of One day I was sitting in my office at 

NASA committees and NRC [National UCLA and got a phone call from Dan 

Research Council] committees and was Goldin [then-NASA Administrator]. He 

deeplyinterestedinNASAasaninstitution said, “Charlie, I’d like you to come to 

but had no idea of taking a management Washington.” 

role. I recall I had been on one NASA I said, “You mean to work in 

panel that advocated a program of small astrophysics and space science?” 

spacecraft with very targeted missions in He said, “No, no, no: Earth science.” 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

30 | ASK MAGAZINE 

WE BENEFITED FROM three years of dialogue BETWEEN
 

SCIENTISTS AND ENGINEERS ABOUT THE initial concepts 


and designs.
 

When I asked him why, he said, “It’s 

a long story, but I’d like you to come and 

talk to me about it.” 

So I duly flew to Washington. We had 

an eight-hour discussion. The gist of it was 

that the Earth Observing System needed 

to be restructured. We couldn’t sustain 

large spacecraft financially and needed to 

go to a system of small spacecraft. Goldin 

thought a lot of people in Congress and 

the political sphere believed that NASA, 

NASA scientists, and the universities 

working on such things as the ozone 

hole, deforestation, and climate change 

were being unduly alarmist in order 

to feather their own research nests. He 

said, “You’re a reputable scientist from 

another field. You’re going to have to 

make tough decisions, but I’m going to 

give you a completely free hand. I want 

you to make them strictly on the basis 

of science. Congress will perceive you 

as an independent voice.” He helped me 

very much by giving me two wonderful 

deputies, Bill Townsend and Mike Mann. 

They were able to run the institutional 

and the engineering side of Mission to 

Planet Earth, and did so very well. 

cOHEN: What were some of the 

challenges of restructuring the system? 

KENNEL: We needed to go from two large 

spacecraft to many small ones. The 

challenge was to integrate the operations 

and data from a complex system of satellites 

to get the multidisciplinary knowledge 

that was needed. For that, we had to 

work with the scientific community. The 

essential point was that NASA engineers 

and the scientific community worked 

together to restructure the program 

using system concepts to build an Earthobserving system. 

The original idea had been to observe 

all the variables pertinent to the earth 

system simultaneously. That’s how we 

first ended up with more than twenty 

instruments on each of two giant 

spacecraft. The integration of twenty 

instruments with demanding and 

conflicting requirements is difficult and 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ASK MAGAZINE | 31 

expensive. We needed a little bit of give on 

both sides—the scientists had to figure out 

how to interrelate data taken at different 

times and places, and the engineers had to 

figure out how to make the measurements 

NASA had promised on a collection of 

smaller spacecraft. Clearly, absolutely 

simultaneous measurements were best. 

The system of satellites ultimately was 

able to observe all parts of the earth 

system during the same time period, but 

not simultaneously. By making these 

compromises, scientists and engineers 

working together figured out how to get 

scientifically meaningful results at onethird the original cost. 

NASA then went to Congress and 

said, in effect, “Look, we’re really in 

the business of making twenty-four 

measurements, not necessarily building 

a giant spacecraft.” Congress gave us the 

leeway to put the instruments on new 

spacecraft without requiring a separate 

Congressional discussion of each one, 

so long as we brought the system in on a 

budget that enabled some cost savings. 

cOHEN: So you had quite a bit of freedom 

to decide how to build the system. 

KENNEL: There were other kinds of 

freedom. We knew we were going to need 

measurements of ocean color. When 

you measure ocean color from space, 

you basically measure the amount of 

chlorophyll, which measures the richness 

of the ecosystems in the upper 100 meters 

of the ocean. These marine ecosystems 

are responsible for retiring about half 

the carbon dioxide in the earth system, 

so you need ocean color measurements. 

There had been an experiment in 1977 

called the Coastal Zone Color Scanner, 

which did the first measurements. Then 

there was a long hiatus. When the Earth 

Observing System [EOS] came along in 

the mid-nineties, we consulted with our 

international colleagues in the committee 

on Earth-observing satellites and found 

that three or four nations were planning 

color missions. We, NASA, decided that 

we could cancel our small ocean color 

mission, EOS Color, which would have cost 

between $100 million and $200 million. 

But we didn’t leave the U.S. ocean 

color community completely bereft. We 

created a program called SIMBIOS 

[Sensor Intercomparison and Merger for 

Biological and Interdisciplinary Ocean 

Studies], in which NASA actually paid 

for oceanographic ships to do validation 

experiments for the other international 

satellites. As a result, we got their color 

data and they got their data validated. 

So long as somebody was making 

the measurements, what was needed 

was intercalibration, so the different 

spacecraft data could actually talk to one 

another. That idea came from looking at 

satellites as a part of an observing system 

that could include other platforms. 

cOHEN: Did you have a complete 

concept of the system at the beginning 

or did it develop as you went along? 

KENNEL: We had the general idea of 

a system of satellites. Each smaller 

spacecraft could be adapted to the 

instruments it was carrying with fewer 

requirements conflicts. The system would 

be more robust, because if you lost a small 

spacecraft, you would still have the rest 

of the observing system, whereas if one 

of those big shuttle experiments failed, 

you lost twenty measurements and five 

years. Because it was a system, an iterative 

process of incremental redesigns came 

out of the dialogue between the science 

community and the NASA engineers. 

cOHEN: What was that process like? 

KENNEL: Nobody likes to lose funding, but 

we did have to make cuts. When you look 

at the different parts of a complex system, 

it’s tempting for a manager to say, “We 

can save money on this subsystem. I need 

the money someplace else.” That kind of 

strugglegoesonallthetime.Thequestions 

in my mind always were, “When are we 

going too far, how will I know we’re going 

too far? Will the loyal engineers who are 

trying to make this whole system go tell 

you if things are getting out of hand and 

you’ve gone too far?” 

There’s always a trade-off. You have 

to sense where the sweet spot is. If you’re 

running a big organization, you don’t 

know. The engineers know their jobs very 

well, but how do I know when they are 

taking on needless risk because I asked 

them to? 

cOHEN: Did they tell you? 

KENNEL: I hope they did eventually. 

cOHEN: What did you do to get them to 

talk to you candidly? 

KENNEL: Remember, I had an absolutely 

wonderful deputy, Bill Townsend. He 

had the job of telling me, and everyone 

else, engineering truth. Bill would very 

often go out to Goddard Space Flight 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

32 | ASK MAGAZINE 

Center to tell them, “I’ve got one more 

redesign study for you.” They would 

groan, not always inwardly. But I think 

by going and asking them regularly, “Can 

we look at this option, can we look at that 

option?” Bill began to find out where the 

really tender spots were in the system, 

where help was needed. Goddard and 

Headquarters had an ongoing dialogue 

for all my three years. 

cOHEN: He talked face to face with them? 

KENNEL: He was out there twice or three 

times a week. They began to trust him. 

His continuous pestering for new trade 

studies, new re-thinks, in its way led 

to defining what NASA really wanted. 

We weren’t yet building the spacecraft, 

so what we were doing was getting 

the initial design right. We benefited 

from three years of dialogue between 

scientists and engineers about the initial 

concepts and designs. Other parts of 

the Agency had trouble with the faster, 

better, cheaper concept, but we were 

trying to implement it because it was 

right for Earth science—at least to go 

to smaller spacecraft. I think we were 

going for better and cheaper, but not 

faster. We built up a relationship of trust 

with Goldin, so there were not the bad 

feelings in that program that there were 

in some of the others. 

When I left NASA in ’96, the concept 

and the budget level were basically 

set. Once that was done, NASA could 

concentrate on executing. It fell to my 

successor, Ghassem Asrar, to make sure 

that the individual projects got managed 

rigorously. NASA managed all of those 

launches without a failure. 

cOHEN: Several NASA project managers 

have talked to me about the value of a 

longer-than-usual planning and design 

phase. 

KENNEL: I think the benefits are huge. The 

biggest mistakes are made early on. One 

of the things we’re doing in the [National 

Academy of Sciences] Space Studies Board 

is trying to get more realism into the initial 

mission conception. Our decadal surveys 

of astrophysics, planetary science, and 

heliospheric systems all will have study 

teams of scientists and engineers and project 

managers and will all do independent 

cost analysis. So in the future, when the 

Academy makes a recommendation, our 

panels will have thought through some of 

the major trade-offs. 

cOHEN: So what, briefly, is the chief 

benefit of having this system of satellites? 

KENNEL: The key thing about spacecraft is 

that they observe the earth evenhandedly. 

The same instrument with the same 

calibration observes all parts of the earth 

in the same way. The purpose of the 

next round of Earth observing is not 

to diagnose whether climate change is 

happening or even really to improve the 

forecast of global climate change, though 

it will do both. Then, what is new? Every 

region will soon be deploying its own 

ground system to measure the things 

they care about. They’ll correlate their 

own data with satellite data that will 

provide the global framework for their 

regional measurements. Suppose you live 

in Southeast Asia and read of problems in 

Africa; because of the impact of climate 

change, species are moving northward or 

moving up the mountains seeking colder 

weather. That’s all very interesting, but 

it doesn’t tell you what’s happening in 

your region, or how it interacts it with 

other things you care about. The real 

issue is how will climate change affect 

my region, my economy, and the things 

I care about. 

cOHEN: Is part of addressing those 

concerns finding the right language 

to describe what’s happening? 

KENNEL: One of the great things the 

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate 

Change [IPCC] did was teach us in the 

scientific community how to speak more 

effectively to decision makers. Their last 

report reviewed the state of scientific 

knowledge on all the important climate 

questions they could think of and came 

up with an objective review. When they 

express these results in scientific terms, 

scientists in every country can check 

them out. The other part of the IPCC 

report recognizes that most decision 

makers don’t understand the science 

and have a different set of questions. So 

the panel included a second layer, which 

they call the summary for policymakers. 

The leaders of the teams that did the 

scientific assessment sat down with the 

policymakers, listened to their questions, 

and tried to answer them in terms that 

the policymakers can understand. The 

IPCC invented a carefully thought-out 

language to convey the degree of their 

certainty about how the science bears on 

the main policy issues. 

cOHEN: Giving a kind of scientific 

precision to non-scientific language? 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ASK MAGAZINE | 33 

THE OF THE teams THAT DID THE scientific 

assessment SAT DOWN WITH THE policymakers, LISTENED 

TO THEIR questions, AND TRIED TO ANSWER THEM IN TERMS 

THAT THE policymakers can understand. 

LEADERS 

KENNEL: Politicians meet all sorts of 

people, including people from either 

extreme of the spread of scientific opinion 

and understanding. They need a way 

to calibrate whether the person they’re 

talking to is a crackpot or speaking from 

the center of the scientific community. 

Having an assessment that’s been worked 

on by literally hundreds of scientists and 

revised many times in collaboration with 

policymakers gives the policymaker 

a way of calibrating the statements of 

the individual with whom he or she is 

speaking. The precision of that language is 

very important. This language also helps 

tremendously in public communication 

of the IPCC. 

cOHEN: In the past, certainly, there’s been 

a lot of controversy about climate change. 

KENNEL: One of the greatest difficulties 

that we’ve had in the climate debate 

came from a clash of fundamental values 

between the scientific community and 

the media. The media live in a world in 

which everything is politicized. When 

52 percent of the people are on one side of 

an issue and 48 percent on the other, that’s 

a big majority. So it is good journalistic 

practice to have statements from both 

sides of an issue. 

But with climate change, hundreds of 

scientists are represented by the IPCC, 

which crafts collective statements. The 

IPCC is careful to characterize the 

degree of uncertainty of each statement 

it makes, but uncertainty is always a 

part of any scientific conclusion. The 

media, following their most basic ethical 

principles, seek out advocates of opposing 

views precisely because their view is 

opposed. The opposing views are given 

equal weight in the public presentation, 

whereas they do not have anything like 

equal weight in the community that’s 

doing the research. The net result is 

the general public thinks significant 

uncertainty exists where it doesn’t. 

Because of the checks and balances of 

the scientific method, because scientists 

meet frequently and check each other 

out, and because they have things like the 

intergovernmental panel, there does tend 

to be a broad consensus about at least the 

main aspects of the field. ●
Title

By 

Intro

34 | ASK MAGAZINE | STORy 

Zealots

skeptics

&

Working With a team of 

By BARRy GOLDSTEIN 
Photo Credit: NASA/JPL/UA/Lockheed Martin 

ASK MAGAZINE | 35 ASK MAGAZINE | 35 

The Phoenix Mars Lander is lowered into a thermal vacuum chamber at Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, in December 2006. 

The Phoenix Mars mission was born of failure. Like the mythical Phoenix bird that 

rose from the ashes of the previous generation’s Phoenix, the mission was born out of 

the “remains” of earlier attempts. It used much of the hardware from the Mars Surveyor 

Lander and carried instruments either identical to or based on those of the Mars Polar 

Lander. The success of Phoenix is a testament to our ability to learn from our mistakes. 

The 1998 Mars Polar Lander (MPL) fell silent when it reached Mars in December 

1999, a few months after the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter. The former fell victim to 

problems during entry, descent, and landing (EDL)—by far the most challenging part 

of any Mars landing mission. After those failures, the 2001 Mars Surveyor Lander was 

canceled before launch. 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Spacecraft specialists work on the lander after its fan-like 

Photo Credit: NASA/JPL/UA/Lockheed Martin 

circular solar arrays have been spread open for testing.

THE ZEALOTS HAd ESSENTIAL, INTIMATE 

KNOwLEdGE OF THE EdL ARCHITECTuRE; 

THE SKEPTICS quESTIONEd EvERy ASSuMPTION 

ANd HELPEd dRIvE uS TO dISCOvER, ANALyZE, 

ANd dEAL wITH THE POTENTIAL PRObLEMS. 

36 | ASK MAGAZINE 36 | ASK MAGAZINE 

Zealots and Skeptics 

As Phoenix project manager, I had no doubts about the 

importance of getting EDL right. As a competed mission, 

Phoenix participated in a site visit at Lockheed Martin in 

Denver in the summer of 2003. When asked by the review 

team what the three highest priorities were for the development 

phase of the project, my reply was EDL and EDL followed 

closely by EDL. 

The Phoenix project was selected in August 2003. 

We held the first EDL team meeting less than two months 

later. The project as a whole and specifically the EDL team 

was purposely populated with both zealots for and skeptics 

of the architectural design. The zealots were the fathers and 

grandfathers of the 1998 EDL architecture who believed that 

the failures resulted from limitations imposed by the faster, 

better, cheaper approach to missions but that the architecture 

itself was sound. The skeptics were not advocates for that 

architecture and would take a hard look at every conceivable 

source of failure. 

At that first meeting, I told the team, “MER [Mars 

Exploration Rover] is on its way to Mars. If it lands successfully, 

we’ll be lucky.” I said it partly for shock effect—we had tested 

the MER vehicles and architecture as well as any previous 

spacecraft—but I knew how complicated those systems were. 

The moment you have confidence is the moment you stop 

looking for potential problems. That is precisely when 

overconfidence can lead to disaster. As a team, we would need 

to stay nervous right up to the point when we knew we had been 

successful. That is exactly what we did. 

The MPL Failure Review Board and the Mars Surveyor 

Lander Return to Flight Review Board had collectively 

generated a set of forty-two actions to address presumed 

weaknesses that could have accounted for the failure of MPL. 

These actions were to be closed out by our team. At this initial 

meeting I informed the team, “If all we do is close out these 

forty-two, I’m going to recommend not to launch, because 

there’s more out there.” Again, this was partly for shock effect, 

but it was my sincere belief that if we did our job we would 

find important issues that were not on that list. 

Some New Items 

In fact, we found plenty. While testing the separation 

connectors used to conduct power and signals between the 

cruise stage and the entry vehicle, we discovered that less than 

an adequate safety margin existed at the temperatures expected 

at the time of separation. To increase the margin, we increased 

mechanical clearance at the core of the connectors and added 

heaters to make sure that thermal contraction would not 

further degrade margins. 

Detailed assessment of the breakup analysis of our cruise 

stage, conducted for planetary protection reasons, revealed that 

some of the components on the cruise stage would not break 

up on entry; they could actually fly behind the entry vehicle 

and, given their ballistic characteristics, have the potential to 

catch up with it. To eliminate this risk, we modified the EDL 

architecture, altering our sequence so the entry vehicle would 

turn from sun point to Mars entry attitude after its separation 

from the cruise stage. This change provided additional lateral 

separation from between the entry vehicle and the phalanx of 

shrapnel that could have caught it from behind. 

Several other changes were made in the structure and system 

software to correct for underpredicted loads and functional 

discrepancies with the landing radar, which was modified for 

space use. In short, there were over a dozen additional issues 

with the landing system that the extended Phoenix test and 

analysis program uncovered and rectified. In some of those 

cases, the skeptics played the valuable role of making sure our 

analyses were vigorous and thorough. 

Team Dynamics 

The composition of the EDL team and the ability of its members 

to work well together made this work possible. The zealots had 
essential, intimate knowledge of the EDL architecture; the 

skeptics questioned every assumption and helped drive us to 

discover, analyze, and deal with the potential problems. EDL 

as a technical discipline cannot be separated from the overall 

spacecraft development, and the Lockheed Martin team that 

designed, built, and tested the spacecraft welcomed the Jet 

Propulsion Laboratory team members as part of the development 

team who contributed to productivity, not just provided 

oversight. The relationships worked because of mutual respect 

among members, despite the differences of opinion. They were 

all professionals, all experienced, all highly skilled, and equally 

dedicated to the success of the project. Whatever conflict we had 

was creative conflict, because people took one another seriously 

and worked together to arrive at answers. This respect increased 

as we went along. By the time we got to the operational phase 

of the mission, we truly had a unified team whose individual 

organizational affiliations were no longer apparent. 

Success 

Our focus paid off. At launch day in August 2007, we were 

confident that our continued paranoia was doing its job. On 

May 25, 2008, we knew that our paranoia could end: Phoenix 

landed successfully. Phoenix scooped up and analyzed soil from 

near Mars’s north pole. Along with other data about the planet’s 

soil and atmosphere, it confirmed the presence of water-ice just 

below the surface and found evidence of the existence of liquid 

water in the past. 

As expected, the decrease in daylight hours near the pole 

reduced the solar-electric power available for the lander. Five 

months after we landed, long after the anticipated threemonth life of its mission, Phoenix stopped communicating 

with Earth. Dedication, belief, skepticism, and teamwork had 

been rewarded. ●

Photo Credit: NASA/JPL/UA/Lockheed Martin 

ASK MAGAZINE | 37 ASK MAGAZINE | 37 

Spacecraft technician Billy Jones inspects the Phoenix Lander’s robotic arm, 

which was used to dig into the planet’s icy soil to study the history of water and 

search for complex organic molecules. 

baRRy GoldStein started his career at the Jet Propulsion 

Laboratory in 1982. Recent assignments have included deputy flight 

system manager for the Mars Exploration Rovers and, most recently, 

project manager for the Phoenix Lander. He holds an undergraduate 

degree in mathematics with a physics minor from the University of 

Colorado and an Executive MBA from the Peter Drucker school of 

management at the Claremont Graduate School. 
Title

By 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

38 | ASK MAGAZINE | INSIGHT 

Human System 

Risk Management 

By JuDITH L. ROBINSON 

The human system is one of the most complex elements of space exploration missions. Our current 

long-duration space flight knowledge comes primarily from missions of up to six months’ duration. 

Based on that experience, we know that lunar, Mars, and other long-duration missions will pose 

significant physiological, performance, and psychological challenges. 

The mission of Space Life Sciences at the Johnson Space Center, 

as articulated in the May 2007 “NASA Space Life Sciences, 

Strategy for Human Space Exploration,” is to “optimize human 

health and performance to enable space flight mission success.” 

Under the leadership of director Dr. Jeffrey R. Davis, we have 

developed a comprehensive, integrated human system risk 

management process to foster the evidence-based, multidiscipline 

communication and discussion that are the foundation of 

successful human health and performance research, technology 

development, countermeasure development, and provision of 

appropriate ground-based and in-flight medical capabilities to 

meet space exploration objectives. 

To integrate all elements of the human system into one 

comprehensive set of activities, employ a common approach to 

managinghuman systemrisks,and educatethelargercommunity 

about human health and performance technical capabilities and 

ongoing work, the Johnson Space Life Sciences Directorate has 

established a human system risk forum and board, developed 

and baselined our initial human system risk master list, and 

developed a Risk Management Analysis Tool (RMAT) that is 

central to our continuous risk management process. 

Understanding Human System Risks 

Early human space flight programs focused on ensuring that 

crews remained healthy and physically fit to allow them to 

meet mission demands. During Project Mercury, space life 

sciences investigated the astronaut’s ability to function in space. 

The Gemini program gave us additional information on the 

physiological effects of weightlessness. Apollo provided even 

more information on the effects of weightlessness, while we 

developed and ensured human capability to work in the lunar 

environment for periods of up to twelve days. Beginning with 

Skylab and continuing with the Space Shuttle, NASA–Mir, and 

International Space Station programs, our focus broadened to 

encompass activities including human health and performance 

research and countermeasures development; medical operations 

based upon standards; and habitability, human factors, and 

environmental factors. 

We have defined three categories of human system threats 

or issues: 

1. Exposure to hypergravity or hypogravity environments 

2. Remote deployment in space 

3. Exposure to hazardous and closed environments 

These three “parent threats/issues” potentially cause 

physiological changes, cause or contribute to medical events, 

provide environmental exposures (for example, to radiation), 

require appropriate considerations and countermeasures 

because of closed-loop life support systems (air and water), and 

require design of space habitats and vehicles and associated 

habitability systems appropriate for long-duration missions. 

Our efforts directly address human system considerations but 

also influence spacecraft design, development, and operations, 

including life support systems, monitoring systems, and 

astronaut workload. 

At one time, we talked about human system risks in absolute 

terms, but we have found it essential and beneficial to consider 

human health and performance risks in context—linking the 

risk to a precipitating spacecraft or space environment condition 

or event and understanding how that affects human health and 

performance. The fact that mass and volume are very limited 

during space exploration missions potentially affects onboard 
ASK MAGAZINE | 39
 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

40 | ASK MAGAZINE 

medical and environmental management capabilities. Those 

limitations are realities that must be factored into our human 

system risk-mitigation strategies. 

Consider the example of one scenario for Orion, the new 

crew exploration vehicle under development: a catastrophic 

failure at translunar insertion that results in a depressurized 

spacecraft. From a purely medical point of view, the preferred 

response would be to re-pressurize the vehicle, but the craft 

will not carry enough consumables to do that. That reality 

refocuses the risk mitigation strategy for the crew on a solution 

set in which the crew would don their space suits and live 

in them until their safe return to Earth. Our responsibility 

becomes one of determining how long this scenario is really 

viable for crew survival and what the effects of a prolonged 

period in a suit would be. 

The Forum in Action 

The Human System Risk Forum and Board are where human 

health and performance scientists and physicians and human 

system engineers come together to discuss and integrate all 

elements of the human system. Started in May 2008, the 

forum provides a place to discuss high-priority risks thoroughly 

and exchange evidence-based information and data. Bringing 

together different disciplines can lead to more informed, 

balanced decisions than any one group would likely make 

on its own. 

For example, a cardiovascular research lab that had 

been studying the risk and countermeasures for orthostatic 

intolerance (that is, a blood pressure drop leading to fainting 

when standing up after return to Earth) came to the forum 

with a problem and a question. The promising pharmaceutical 

agent they were testing interacted negatively with other 

medications used in space. Since they had stopped testing the 

specific pharmaceutical countermeasure due to the interactions 

noted, they asked the members of the forum—researchers, 

space medicine physicians, and other human system experts— 

whether they should look for alternatives that were free of the 

described troubling interactions. In other words, and not 

surprisingly, they were looking for a solution within their own 

area of expertise. But the space medicine representatives at the 

forum pointed out that orthostatic intolerance need not be 

addressed with pharmaceuticals: there are mechanical devices 

that astronauts can use to mitigate the problem. So forum 

members recommended that the specific countermeasure 

research effort be stopped entirely. Perhaps this was not the 

solution that was anticipated at the start of the meeting, but it 

was the consensus recommendation that was reached through 

multidiscipline discussion. 

Recommendations made by the Human System Risk 

Forum concerning work required to close gaps in knowledge 

and technologies, to retire or mitigate risks, and to identify 

new risks are brought to the Human System Risk Board, where 

strategic decisions are made concerning our portfolio of work. 

The board does not duplicate routine, tactical decisions that 

we negotiate with the agency’s programs. It is the place where 

we make strategic decisions about the recommended level of 

investment in high-priority human system risks. Both the forum 

and the board help us communicate and widely disseminate 

information and tactical decisions to the broader human health 

and performance community. 

The human system may also have relationships to and 

interdependencies with other system and program risks. 

Mitigation strategies must therefore be worked collaboratively 

with other system owners. The Human System Risk 

Forum meets at Johnson on the second and fourth Tuesday 

of each month. Participation has been extended to the larger 

NASA community through the use of teleconferencing and 

WebEx capabilities. 

Capturing and Documenting Human System Risks 

Another important consideration in the Space Life Sciences 

implementation of the human system risk management 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ASK MAGAZINE | 41 

effort has been to follow Continuous Risk Management 

(CRM) as defined by NASA and used throughout program and 

project management. 

bRINGING TOGETHER dIFFERENT 

dISCIPLINES CAN LEAd TO MORE 

INFORMEd, bALANCEd dECISIONS 

THAN ANy ONE GROuP wOuLd LIKELy 

MAKE ON ITS OwN. 

In the past, we sometimes described human system risks 

using medical and scientific terminology that program and 

project managers had difficulty understanding and relating to 

the kinds of risk calculations they make in their work. Using 

the same nomenclature and following the same CRM processes 

facilitates communication of risks to those outside the human 

health and performance community. Using consistent CRM 

language and discipline to provide information allows others in 

the agency to balance human health and performance risks with 

technical development and operational risks, resulting in more 

informed decision making. 

Integral to human system risk management has been the 

development and baselining of a human system risk master 

list that captures all the currently known human system risks 

and potential risks. As it matures, the list will provide the 

chief medical officer and the Health and Medical Technical 

Authority with a comprehensive description of all human system 

risks and their status. 

To that end, we have developed an RMAT to capture 

detailed information for each human system risk, including the 

evidence supporting it. Intended primarily as a communication 

tool, the RMAT is formatted to facilitate the understanding 

of human system risks and allows comparison of existing 

standards, requirements, and mitigation strategies against 

known mission architectures and resources. Missions differ 

in duration, distance from Earth, resources, and onboard 

capabilities. It is vital that the information we collect using the 

RMAT format allow for the development of risk-mitigation 

strategies for each architecture and that differences in the 

likelihood and consequence of risks in different kinds of 

missions be taken into consideration. 

The RMAT information will improve understanding of 

risks and their mitigation strategies in the human health and 

performance community and other, associated disciplines. We 

will use this approach as we work through human system health 

and performance risks over the next several years to ensure 

appropriate evidence and mitigation strategy development and 

eventual implementation. ●

Judith l. RobinSon is associate director of Space Life 

Sciences at Johnson Space Center. 
Title

By 

Intro

 

42 | ASK MAGAZINE | STORy 

CONquERING SPACE


BY CAPTURING
 

IMAGINATIONS


 By SVETLANA SHKOLyAR Image courtesy 4Frontiers Corporation 
 

ASK MAGAZINE | 43
 

Artist rendering of the settlement 

by Michael Carroll. 

What do the rocket scientist Dr. Wernher 

von Braun, 1950s television programs 

and magazine articles, and an emerging 

corporation focused on the human 

settlement of Mars have in common? 

They all recognize that linking science 

and the media creates excitement and 

support. Their objective has been to inspire 

the rest of us that “Man Will Conquer 

Space Soon!” In the 1950s, this sentiment 

was conveyed by von Braun in a series of 

influential magazine articles. The 4Frontiers 

Corporation is making similar efforts today. 
 

 

 

vON bRAuN wAS CONSIdEREd TO bE THE “FATHER OF THE u.S. SPACE PROGRAM” NOT 

ONLy FOR HIS PIONEERING ROCKET SCIENCE, buT ALSO FOR THE wAy HE PROMOTEd 

THE SPACE PROGRAM, ESPECIALLy THROuGH HIS wORK wITH wALT dISNEy. 

44 | ASK MAGAZINE 44 | ASK MAGAZINE 

Close-up view of 4Frontiers’ site of the first permanent settlement on Mars. 

Capturing America’s Imagination 

German-born von Braun developed the V-2 missile during

World War II, but his real interest was in engineering rockets

for space exploration, not war. Throughout his American career,

during which he guided the development of the Saturn V launch

vehicle and directed NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center,

von Braun worked tirelessly to convince the public that mankind

should escape from what he called the “chains of gravity” that

bind us to the earth. In the 1950s, Collier’s Weekly, which had

a circulation of more than four million, asked von Braun to

contribute articles about his vision for space exploration. Those

articles included his concepts for a space station and spurred the

movement to create one. 

As space historian Randy Liebermann notes, “After twentyfive years of continuous and directed thinking and endless 

hours of experimentation, von Braun, the world’s leading rocket 

engineer, had the chance to come out of his sequestered military 

environment and, through a national magazine, inform the 

general public of his detailed blueprint for realizing manned 

space travel.” 

Von Braun was considered to be the “father of the U.S. space 

program” not only for his pioneering rocket science, but also 

for the way he promoted the space program, especially through 

his work with Walt Disney. He worked as a technical director 

with Disney to create three space-related television films. 

Disney introduced “Man in Space” and “Man and the Moon” 

in 1955 and “Mars and Beyond” in 1957, seen by an estimated 

forty-two million viewers. Von Braun’s objective was to create 

what he called a “science factual” show. 

Together, von Braun and Disney used the power of the new

medium of television to convey to Americans just “how high

man might fly on the strength of technology and the spirit of

human imagination,” in the words of Marshall Space Flight

Center historian Mike Wright. 

These Disney films were the first to explain basic science

in a vivid, humorous, and colorful way. “It was a matter of

synthesizing the philosophical aspects into neat packages and

solid statements which the public would buy,” wrote Erik

Bergaust, von Braun’s biographer. Critics and commentators

regarded the shows not as science fiction entertainment but 

rather as predictions of what emerging technology would make 

possible. Dr. Ernst Stuhlinger, a technical consultant for the 

shows, wrote that von Braun’s wish to see man conquer space 

meant turning not just scientists, industry, and politicians into 

supporters but also, most importantly, the public. 

Applying Von Braun’s and Disney’s 

Techniques Today 

Like von Braun in the 1950s, the 4Frontiers Corporation 

understands that although technical skills are essential, it 

takes public support as well as strengths in many other areas to 

“conquer” the ultimate frontier. Applying this understanding is 

key to their strategy. 

In July 2005, 4Frontiers was founded at the Massachusetts 

Institute of Technology to help extend humanity’s reach to new 

frontiers, specifically the first human settlement on Mars. The 

four frontiers the founders envision are Earth orbit, the moon, 

Mars, and asteroids. While humans may not conquer Mars for 

Image courtesy 4Frontiers Corporation 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ASK MAGAZINE | 45 

at least another decade, informative entertainment, Earth-based 

technology development, and consultancy are three business 

frontiers the company is working to master today. Efforts 

in these areas will lay the foundation needed to pursue their 

ultimate objective. 

A crucial aspect of 4Frontiers’ strategy is to engage the 

public through informative entertainment, sharing its vision 

and its latest innovations while translating public interest into 

support of the company’s research and business operations. To 

do so, the company has been developing a number of unique 

ventures. Educational tour packages have been created for 

groups interested in space and U.S. culture, providing behindthe-scenes tours of space and science centers throughout the 

country. 4Frontiers is even planning a television reality show 

where groups of individuals compete as if they were early Mars 

settlers. New media such as Twitter and Facebook are being 

used to engage the public in 4Frontiers’ efforts. 

A second avenue being pursued is educational programming. 

4Frontiers knows that educating and exciting today’s youth 

will help to inspire tomorrow’s pioneers. Fictional stories about 

the first family on Mars have been included in an interactive 

children’s Web site, www.crazy4mars.com. Curricula have 

been developed for fifth- through seventh-grade classrooms 

that present the theme of Mars exploration. The company is 

also planning to open an Informative Entertainment Center 

that will house a museum, business center, and research facility 

for innovative space technologies. 

4Frontiers recognizes that the pursuit of interesting 

technology alone is insufficient to permit the company to 

accomplish its goals. As Peter Collins, an intern for 4Frontiers, 

explains, “It is not just technical skills that will get us to Mars, 

but business skills also; projects need to be managed, funding 

obtained, and profits made along the way.” 

The third business segment that the corporation is exploring 

is consultancy. “The company is developing a solid client base for 

its space technology engineering consulting. Real value can be 

added in this area through cross-pollination between different 

technical disciplines,” said Joseph Palaia, vice president and cofounder of 4Frontiers. 

The company has provided consulting services for some 

organizations, including one researching advanced energy 

conversion technology in Florida and another manufacturing 

semiconductor equipment in Massachusetts. “Technical solutions 

we develop for the space frontier often have direct applicability 

here on Earth,” said Palaia. The company has also consulted for 

Galactic Suite Limited, a company aiming to get an orbiting 

space vacation resort open in 2012. 4Frontiers even provided 

entertainment and education consulting services for high school 

students from New Delhi, India, including the development and 

execution of two custom tour package programs for them. 

The Power of Diversity 

The co-founders of 4Frontiers, CEO Mark Homnick and Vice 

President Palaia, both have engineering backgrounds. They have 

played leading roles in the company’s Mars settlement design 

efforts, and they are strong proponents of bringing people with 

diverse skills together to develop inventive solutions to problems 

and rich visions of the future. 

“Imagine if you were tasked with designing a city on 

another planet,” Palaia said. “We cannot do that unless we are 

multidisciplinary.” Indeed, the company has engaged some 

untraditionalparticipants,includingspecialistsinastrosociology, 

psychology, artistic rendering, and science fiction writing, 

alongside the more traditional technical disciplines. What 

enables communication between these individuals who would 

not normally interact is their interest and passion for 4Frontiers’ 

mission. Through their brainstorming, whether face to face or 

via communication technologies, they can come up with ideas to 

solve technical problems relevant to Mars and here on Earth. 

An example of this approach occurred during the 

Generation II Mars settlement programming study meeting in 

Atlanta in 2006. In one weekend, more than two dozen experts 

gathered to refine concepts for the first Mars settlement. No two 

members were from the same discipline. Those in attendance 

included, among many others, experts in aerospace engineering, 

medical factors, psychology, and architecture. The Generation II 

study helped 4Frontiers facilitate later investigations on 

settlement architecture and greenhouse material. 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

46 | ASK MAGAZINE 

According to Palaia, progress in the coming decades will be 

driven by work from teams who cross the boundaries between 

disciplines. These diverse groups may discover new approaches 

to problems that have typically been handled exclusively by 

one discipline. 4Frontiers will engage partner organizations 

and individuals to execute project elements and move the work 

forward. The drawback to this multidisciplinary approach from 

a corporate perspective is closely related to what makes them 

successful: these teams tend to come up with very ambitious 

new ideas. “We are good at developing innovative crossdiscipline solutions,” said Palaia, “but then we need to engage 

teams outside our group to actively develop those ideas.” 

Within 4Frontiers, people use their own varied skills to work 

effectively. Homnick leveraged his engineering background and 

managerial skills to manage the Generation I Mars settlement 

programming study, which now serves as a foundational element 

of the company’s Mars settlement research efforts. His expertise in 

project management for large-scale electronics projects was useful 

to the settlement study because elements of risk and incomplete 

information are common in both. He was able to use a wellunderstood project management process, apply it to this study about 

a topic that is not well understood, and achieve a meaningful result. 

Homnick led the study effort to identify the goals, objectives, and 

project needs, just as in a typical project management situation, to 

determine that a project like this was feasible. 

The company looks continually for new ideas. Interns 

Alex Stimpson and John Truett, exploring various research 

grant opportunities during the summer of 2008, proposed 

using nanotubes to increase the permeability of fish eggs and 

embryos, enabling their cryopreservation. A research proposal is 

being developed to actively pursue this innovation. 

New Frontiers 

The very first press release put out by 4Frontiers explained why 

it is one of the few start-ups treading the ground of these new 

frontiers: “While a number of companies have set their sights on 

advancements in getting to Mars, few have laid out plans with 

technical reality and actual designs to quickly and affordably 

establish settlement.” 

“Lots of people tried just the technical approach. We don’t 

thinkthat’llwork.Itistoomyopic,”explainedHomnick. “Others 

try education and tourism and don’t develop technology. That’s 

short-lived, too. We combined the two; that’s how we created 

4Frontiers—a symbiotic relationship between the elements.” 

The company is in the early stages of designing and building 

an Informative Entertainment Center, where visitors will be 

able to tour a full-scale Mars settlement replica. There, they 

... THE COMPANy HAS ENGAGEd 

SOME uNTRAdITIONAL PARTICIPANTS, 

INCLudING SPECIALISTS IN 

ASTROSOCIOLOGy, PSyCHOLOGy, 

ARTISTIC RENdERING, ANd SCIENCE 

FICTION wRITING, ALONGSIdE THE MORE 

TRAdITIONAL TECHNICAL dISCIPLINES. 

can sample Mars algae snacks, buy tickets for space vacations 

and experiences from real space tourism companies like Virgin 

Galactic, and see technologies and systems being engineered for 

future use on Mars. 

One final motivation inspires 4Frontiers. According to 

Palaia, “Human beings benefit from going into new 

environments. Here on Earth, we’ve run out of physical 

frontiers.” Von Braun might have agreed. ●

Svetlana ShkolyaR is a science communication graduate 

student, researcher, and writer. 
Title 

By 

Intro

IdEAS

STORy | ASK MAGAZINE | 47

Suppose you had to design a door within a 

lunar lander module that would shield the 

crew habitat from solar activity during a 

moon mission. Assuming this isn’t already 

your day job at NASA, how would you 

begin to devise a solution? 

The Quest for Good
 

By MATTHEW KOHuT 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

48 | ASK MAGAZINE 48 | ASK MAGAZINE 

IN THE wORLd OF dESIGN, NObOdy HAS A MONOPOLy ON THE ANSwERS. 

IT PAyS TO LOOK EvERywHERE. 

Teams brainstorm, sketch, and build possible solutions for projects during the 

IDEAS course. 

That’s the question that two dozen participants wrestled with 

over a three-day period at Ames Research Center last fall. Their 

brainstorms, deliberations, drawings, and prototypes were 

the central group activity of Innovative Design Engineering 

Applications (IDEAS), a new course offered by the Academy 

of Program/Project and Engineering Leadership that focuses 

specifically on the challenge of design. IDEAS introduces a 

variety of tools that engineers can use to help conceive, develop, 

and test new design concepts. The emphasis on variety is 

deliberate because there is no single approach that works well in 

all contexts. “The design practice of systems engineering is more 

of an art learned through experience,” said course instructor 

John Sturrock. 

Day One: Divergent Tools 

“Is brainstorming a soft or hard tool?” John Sturrock asked 

the class. 

“Soft.” 

“How about Design for Six Sigma?” 

“Hard.” 

Sturrock hadn’t defined “soft” or “hard.” Participants 

shared common assumptions about what these metaphors 

meant. This wasn’t terribly surprising since all were NASA 

engineers working in very similar organizational settings, 

but those same words could have different meanings to 

people in different contexts. His point: an over-reliance on 

verbal communication in the design process can introduce 

ambiguities or misunderstandings. 

The class also examined visual thinking, which 

highlighted the importance of drawings and sketches. It 

explored kinesthetic learning through a case study focusing on 

the design of the astronaut seat for the Orion vehicle. The case 

recounts the experience of the lead designer of the seat, who 

was having trouble arriving at a design solution through the 

use of software-based visual tools such as Pro-Designer and 

AutoCAD. By building a prototype seat in his garage, he was 

able to touch and feel how the controls and handling worked, 

leading to new breakthroughs. 

Day one emphasized divergent tools, which are a means of 

gathering a wide range of ideas. Brainstorming is a divergent 

tool. Selecting team members with diverse backgrounds 

who haven’t worked together is another one. Divergent tools 

offer the promise of enhancing creativity but no guarantees. 

“Design is an unstable activity,” said Sturrock. “Not only do 

we not know where we’re going, but we change our destination 

as we go.” 

“Much time was spent on exercises meant to demonstrate 

that we never get a ‘full picture’ of possibilities and we are 

inherently biased in our focus of attention,” said Silvano 

Colombano, a computer scientist in the Intelligent Systems 

Division at Ames. “A wider, more unbiased coverage of 

problems and solutions comes at a cost. The real difficulties 

in innovative design are the cost–benefit analysis associated 

with eliminating biases, and how to organize groups of people 

so that the best possible solutions can be obtained by their 

combined brain power.” 

Participants broke into small groups and began 

brainstorming designs for their lunar habitats, generating as 

Photo courtesy John Sturrock 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

many ideas as possible. Sturrock encouraged the groups to 

follow the practice of design firm IDEO and refrain from 

judgments or criticisms during these initial sessions: the goal 

was mass creativity. Water was a key design element because 

of its ability to act as a radiation shield. How about a revolving 

door with one side filled with water? A flexible water curtain? 

A water-filled sleeping bag for each crewmember? There would 

be time to sort, rank, and criticize the next day. 

Day Two: Convergent Tools 

The hard tools of design come into play at the point where 

creativity meets engineering rigor. Quality Functional 

Deployment (QFD) sets customer requirements alongside 

business processes to determine strong and weak correlations. 

The Pugh matrix (also known as a criteria-based matrix) 

offers a simple means of scoring and ranking concepts against 

requirements. Design for X (DFX) looks at design in terms of 

a certain functional aspect, such as “design for maintenance 

and serviceability,” “design for reliability,” or “design for 

manufacturing and assembly.” These kinds of tools enable 

designers to converge on ideas that are worthy of further 

time and energy. 

“Tools like the Pugh decision matrix, brainstorming, and 

innovation have their application to my everyday job. Many 

of the design decisions that get made are done so for specific 

reasons and require data to back them up,” said Joe Matus, a 

systems engineer from Marshall Space Flight Center. “When 

designing a one-of-a-kind vehicle or experiment, or a limited 

quantity launch vehicle with critical performance parameters, 

it is important to weigh the myriad solutions that are available 

and to choose the one that makes the most sense in the overall 

scheme of things. Once a forward path is chosen, it can be quite 

costly to decide later that it is not the correct one.” 

Participants then used the convergent tools to score and 

rank their lunar habitat designs from the first day. The water 

sleeping bag would never pass muster with the crew. A revolving 

door or some sort of ball valve might work. The good designs 

would make it to day three. 

Photo courtesy John Sturrock 

One team ’s initial rough sketch and model for the lunar habitat case. 

ASK MAGAZINE | 49 ASK MAGAZINE | 49 

Day Three: TRIZ, Open Innovation, 

and Final Projects 

Participants spent the first part of day three discussing 

some other valuable techniques for spurring and guiding 

innovation. One is the Theory of Inventing Problem Solving. 

While working as a patent examiner in the Soviet Union in the 

mid-1940s, Genrich Altshuller, a Soviet engineer, developed 

a rigorous taxonomy of inventions, focusing on how patent 

applicants solved problems. He found that there were forty 

inventive principles that were used time and again, regardless 

of the industry or technical discipline, to solve common 

technical contradictions. This led him to the Theory of 

Inventing Problem Solving, which became known worldwide 

by its Russian acronym TRIZ. 

Another is open innovation, one of the most dynamic 

developments in the design world over the past decade. The 

open-source software movement is the leading example, though 

the practice has spread to countless industries and manifested 

itself in multiple ways throughout NASA, ranging from the 

Innovative Partnerships Program to the Centennial Challenge 

competitions it has sponsored. In the world of design, nobody 

has a monopoly on the answers. It pays to look everywhere. 

The final activity brought the small groups together one 

last time for a ninety-minute rapid prototyping session. The 

lunar habitat designs that had been brainstormed on day 

one and analyzed on day two took shape with Styrofoam, 

aluminum foil, paper plates, and Scotch tape. Each group 

made a short presentation to the class, and then participants 

voted for their favorites. Photos and sketches of the best designs 

would be shared with the lunar habitat design team at Johnson 

Space Center. 

The IDEAS session at Ames marked the second time the 

course had been offered at NASA—it had been held earlier in 

the summer at Kennedy Space Center. It is easy to envision 

future sessions held specifically for newly formed design teams or 

new hires at the Agency. The challenge of developing innovative 

designs will be waiting for them. ●
Title

By 

Intro

S

GeT

OF

TinG Air

I

B O

A 

rne

By KERRy ELLIS 

As early as the beginning of the seventeenth century, when Galileo used his telescope to turn 

Ptolemy’s geocentric theory on its ear, astronomers have continually sought better ways to look into 

the heavens to discern what exists in the depths of our star-studded universe. This scientific pursuit 

has resulted in numerous ground-based observatories and, more recently, space telescopes, but very 

few airborne observatories. The Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) is here 

to change that. 

Photo Credit: NASA Dryden Flight Research Center 

50 | ASK MAGAZINE | STORy 
SOFIA flies over Dryden after a ferry flight from Waco, Texas. ASK MAGAZINE | 51 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Two USRA technicians at NASA Ames Research Center are reflected in 

the coated SOFIA telescope main mirror suspended above them in the 

mirror coating facility. 

With several infrared telescopes currently in operation, including 

Mauna Kea Observatories in Hawaii, Kitt Peak National 

Observatory in Arizona, and NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, 

adding one more may seem like overkill. But SOFIA offers some 

advantages the other observatories do not. To understand these 

benefits, it helps to first understand the unique advantages infrared 

astronomy offers over optical, or visible light, astronomy. 

Due to the expansion of the universe, objects that are furthest 

away from Earth have their light shifted to longer wavelengths. 

Viewing the infrared wavelength allows us to observe visible 

light from stars in distant galaxies. Many interesting objects, 

such as the dusty gas clouds where stars are formed or planets 

outside our solar system, are also too cold to emit visible light, 

but they glow brightly in infrared. Also, dust can obscure many 

things in the visible light range, which is why the Milky Way 

appears to have dark, blank patches between its billions of stars. 

Stars do exist within those voids, and infrared wavelengths 

pierce through the dust obscuring them, allowing an infrared 

telescope to see what lies beyond. 

However, infrared light is absorbed by moisture in the 

atmosphere, which is why infrared observatories are built high 

upon mountains or launched into space. Ground observatories 

are limited to what can be seen from a fixed location and get 

above only a portion of the water vapor in Earth’s atmosphere, 

and space telescopes eventually run out of the cryogen needed 

to keep infrared instruments cold enough to operate. SOFIA 

eliminates most of these disadvantages. 

Its infrared telescope is mounted in the rear fuselage of 

a highly modified Boeing 747SP aircraft, which will fly at 

about 40,000 ft. to get above 99 percent of the moisture in 

the atmosphere. It will be able to land each night for refueling, 

servicing, or even technological updates to keep the instruments 

cutting-edge. SOFIA’s mobility will allow it to fly anywhere in 

the world to observe celestial events, including occultations, or 

eclipses of stars. A ground-based observatory may experience a 

dozen of these events out of the couple hundred that occur in 

a year, reducing the chances for valuable new discoveries. For 

example, the Kuiper Airborne Observatory, SOFIA’s predecessor, 

discovered the atmosphere around Pluto by observing an 

occultation in which the light of a star behind the planet did not 

sharply drop off but instead slowly waned and waxed, refracting 

through Pluto’s atmosphere. 

Reorganizing for Success 

The SOFIA project began about ten years ago. After several 

schedule delays and cost overruns that threatened to end the 

project before it flew, SOFIA changed from a contractor-led 

project with government oversight to a government-led model 

with contractor support. 

Part of this change included moving the program office 

to Dryden Flight Research Center. Dryden’s expertise includes 

development, testing and evaluation, and flight research, which 

benefit SOFIA’s current development and testing phase. For 

the next few years, the program challenges will be finishing 

the system integration and testing numerous modifications 

and subsystems. The most significant of these is the structural 

change needed to accommodate the large hole in the fuselage for 

the telescope. The team extensively tested the modification in a 

wind tunnel, working to ensure the modified aircraft flies just 

like the unmodified aircraft. The proof will be in the flight test. 

The reorganization also aligned the various organizations 

involved with SOFIA according to their strengths. For example, 

Ames Research Center and USRA became responsible for the 

science associated with SOFIA, while Dryden and its supporting 

contractors are responsible for the integration, testing, and 

operation required to turn the airplane into an observatory. 

Before the move, the German space agency Deutsche 

Zentrum für Luftund Raumfahrt (DLR), which is contributing 

funding to the project and building the telescope, helped fight 

to keep SOFIA from being canceled. While the move changed 

the main points of contact for DLR, communication has helped 

maintain cohesion among the team. 

In addition to weekly teleconferences involving the German 

and NASA program offices—which take place early in the 

morning since Germany is nine hours ahead of the west coast— 

the project leaders have created independent project teams, or 

IPTs, to help coordination and communication efforts. For 

example, the telescope has an IPT comprising NASA, DLR, 

and contractor team members to facilitate knowledge sharing 

and team cohesion. 

Photo Credit: NASA 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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52 | ASK MAGAZINE 

Since SOFIA’s hardware development and testing occur 

at Dryden, most of the DLR engineers work there. Michael 

Toberman, deputy project manager for SOFIA, also had the 

opportunity as part of his career development plan to work 

overseas in Germany at DLR for nearly four months and learn 

how the agency works. His experience has helped him better 

coordinate the SOFIA efforts back home. 

Getting Ahead 

While SOFIA is now ahead of the game on its cost and delivery 

schedule, its earlier delays disenchanted the science community. 

Lacking the support of its main audience, SOFIA again teetered 

on the edge of extinction. 

To reinvigorate the scientists and regain their trust, the 

SOFIA team first listened to what the scientists wanted. They 

obtained feedback from the community through existing 

program reviews and other input. High-level NASA and 

National Research Council science advisory groups, such as the 

NASA Advisory Council, the Committee on Astronomy and 

Astrophysics, and the Astronomy and Astrophysics Advisory 

Committee, also regularly reviewed the SOFIA program. “The 

messages I received were (1) ‘we want the science scheduled 

quickly’ and (2) ‘we want a credible cost and schedule to get 

there,’” said Bob Meyer, SOFIA’s program manager. So the 

team brainstormed creative ways to get science from the first inflight observations as quickly and credibly as they could. The 

program philosophy changed from finishing the observatory 

before testing began to an approach that pursued the minimum 

capability required to obtain limited science observations as early 

as possible. “It’s a fly a little, fix a little, fly a little philosophy,” 

said Meyer. 

Once the team established the schedule, they set about 

proactively communicating it and providing updates on how 

they were meeting it. They published regular announcements 

on the mission Web site and sent speakers to meetings and 

departmental colloquia around the world, including regular 

American Astronomical Society (AAS) meetings, to speak 

directly with the scientists. Meyer added, “We also have 

independent science review teams, comprising people not 

involved with the program, come look at SOFIA once or twice 

a year. They have favorable feedback, and they share their 

observations with their colleagues.” 

Another concern for SOFIA was the age of its science vision, 

which was cutting-edge when the program began in the nineties. 

But a decade later, the team was worried about the science becoming 

stale, in large part because of new discoveries from the Hubble 

Space Telescope and new infrared observatories such as Spitzer. 

“We conducted workshops in conjunction with the biannual AAS 

meetings, looking at what science was current and where SOFIA 

could add the most value,” said Meyer. “With the workshops and 

people seeing how close we are to flying with a science instrument, 

we’ve really turned the science community around.” 

The SOFIA team also announced to the world that the 

observatory had successfully flown from Waco, Texas, to Dryden 

during an event to unveil the airplane. Originally christened by 

Charles Lindberg’s wife when the plane went into service for 

Pan Am, SOFIA still bears its original moniker of “Clipper 

Lindberg” on its side. The team invited Eric Lindberg, Charles’s 

grandson, to rechristen the Boeing 747 for science. “That event 

marked a turning point; it showed that SOFIA had flown and 

was real,” said Meyer. 

Moving Forward 

SOFIA has conquered many hurdles, and the team is doing 

everything within its power to carry out the mission’s first science 

observation flight on schedule in 2009. Part of their preparation 

includes testing for and eliminating any acoustic resonance that 

may occur while flying with the telescope observation door open. 

“It’s the same thing that happens when you blow air over the 

top of an empty bottle,” explained Meyer. “Acoustic resonance 

would vibrate the structure and could put the mission at risk.” 

Acoustic resonance brought a Department of Defense 

(DoD) project to a standstill, so the SOFIA team spoke with 

the DoD to learn about its approach to flight tests. “We’re doing 

more extensive wind tunnel and analytical testing than they 

did, and we don’t believe we’ll have the same issue,” said Meyer. 

“It’s a risk we carry until we fly with the door open for the first 

time, which should be in about three months.” 

With continued communication among the team and with 

the science community, SOFIA is sure to take off and bring to 

light new discoveries hidden behind the dust of space, such as 

how planets and stars form, how material is processed within and 

cycled through the spaces between stars, the composition and 

structure of planetary atmospheres, and the role of ultraluminous 

infrared galaxies in the formation of the early universe. ●

The SOFIA airborne observatory s 2.5 meter infrared 

telescope peers out from its cavity in the SOFIA rear 

fuselage during nighttime line operations testing. 

Photo Credit: NASA Dryden Flight Research Center 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ASK MAGAZINE | 53 

ASK Bookshelf 

Here is a description of a book that we believe will interest ASK readers. 

The Powers to Lead, by Joseph S. Nye, Jr. 

(New York: Oxford University Press, 2008) 

Joseph Nye, who has served as chairman of the National 

Intelligence Council and Assistant Secretary of Defense as well 

as dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, has long 

been a proponent of “soft power”—the ability to get what you 

want by attraction, by co-opting rather than coercing others. 

That idea, along with Nye’s recognition that both hard and soft 

power can play a role in achieving desired results, informs this 

brief, sensible, useful book on leadership. 

Nye defines a leader as someone who “helps a group create 

and achieve shared goals.” Implicit in that definition is his 

insistence that leadership is a relationship, both because leaders 

only exist in relation to followers and because success is more 

likely when goals and ways of working are shaped by leaders and 

followers together. Effective leaders have vision, communication 

skills, and emotional intelligence. This last quality includes 

a person’s ability to master his or her own emotions and the 

empathy needed to understand and interact appropriately with 

others. Successful leaders also understand how the context of 

work influences the appropriateness of particular leadership 

strategies and styles. Leading in a crisis and leading a long 

development project may require different approaches—a 

different balance of hard and soft power, for instance, or more 

or less emphasis on inspiration or maintaining order. 

While recognizing that hard and soft power both have 

value (he calls the combination of the two “smart power”), 

Nye emphasizes the value of soft power, perhaps because 

traditional ideas of leadership stress hard power, sometimes to 

the exclusion of any other kind. He admits that consultative 

leadership—soft-power asking and engaging—takes more time 

than issuing orders, but it has the advantage of giving leaders 

more information and gaining the commitment (not just the 

obedience) of followers. 

Members of NASA project teams should find lots of useful 

insight in The Powers to Lead. The book gives project managers 

and other “official” leaders an opportunity to analyze their own 

behavior as leaders, evaluate their effectiveness, and add to their 

repertoire of approaches for their varied and challenging work. 

But team members not normally identified as leaders will also 

find value here. For one thing, being an effective follower is being 

an essential contributor to the leadership relationship. Also, as 

Nye points out, leadership in groups tends to be somewhat fluid, 

with different people becoming leaders in different situations, 

whether or not their taking on that role is formally recognized. 

Finally, Nye makes an important point about what he calls 

“leader attribution error”—the tendency to give leaders more 

credit for accomplishment and more blame for failure than they 

deserve. We often imagine leaders have influence and knowledge 

far beyond what they actually possess. Understanding leaders’ 

limitations and seeing them as one factor among many in getting 

work done can also contribute to success, including successful 

leadership. ●
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

54 | ASK MAGAZINE 

The Knowledge Notebook
 

Leadership and Knowledge
 

By LAuRENCE PRuSAK 

I almost hesitate to write this column because 

I devoutly believe that too much is made of 

“leadership” in business curriculums and in the 

popular press. Organizational life in general and 

the activities involved in actually getting things 

done are profoundly social, never the work of one 

man or woman. Having said that, I recognize that 

we still mainly organize ourselves with hierarchical 

structures, archaic as they may seem. Given this 

fact, it does matter what the “leader” does or 

says. Organizational structures and the roles 

of leaders differ quite a bit from organization to 

organization, but it seems that leaders will have 

considerable power and influence for some time, 

though probably less than they think. 

So what can a “leader” actually do to advance 

the cause of knowledge in an organization? Very 

few people would actually speak out against 

knowledge—though I have met one or two who 

have done just that—but benign neglect will not 

help organizations use knowledge more effectively 

and efficiently and develop and value new 

knowledge. Here are some things leaders can and 

should do. 

One essential action is to talk about knowledge, 

making the case for the importance of knowledge to 

the organization with passionate conviction. Good 

ideas do not—I repeat, do not—succeed because 

of their internal logic or their obvious merit. They 

succeed because people fight for them, using their 

passion, their understanding, their political skill and 

guile, and their rhetorical powers to make the case 

for ideas they believe in. This involves finding cases 

and stories of how knowledge adds value. We all 

have seen this happen in varied circumstances and 

know how well it works when it is done well. One 

way any of us can help in this regard is to feed these 

cases to our leaders. It may seem a small thing to 

do, but it can be tremendously effective in helping 

leaders lead and advance the knowledge cause. 

Another important leadership role is to use 

symbols and signals to show employees the value 

placed on knowledge. Symbols can be anything 

from awards for innovative uses of knowledge— 

BP used to give an award for what they called the 

“best stolen” idea—to encouraging employees to 

read and write, attend relevant meetings, subscribe 

to journals, and bring in guest speakers. In addition 

to the value of the activity, all these things convey 

a message, signaling the importance of the subject 

and showing that management values it enough to 

spend some funds on its behalf. 

Probably the strongest signal about what an 

organization values and believes is sent by who gets 

promoted. Considerable research has been done 

on the power of promotion as a communication 

device. A promotion in essence says, “This person 

exemplifies the values we hold dear.” Even if 

successful employees’ vocational or educational 

histories are not relevant to you, you are likely to be 

aware of what sort of people they are, what values 

they represent, and how they advanced. If you don’t 

know these things from direct observation, you will 

learn about them soon through the organizational 

grapevine that quickly spreads such news. 

Let me give you an example. I have worked 

for five major management consulting operations 

in my too-long working life. All these firms 

claimed they were committed to developing new 

knowledge. They stressed this claim in their 

advertising and made it a central, vigorous part 

of their attempts to win and hold new clients. All 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ASK MAGAZINE | 55 

but one of them, however, based promotions only on how many 

engagements individual consultants sold. Knowledge creation by 

consultants was never recognized or rewarded. Needless to say, 

this mismatch between words and deeds engendered cynicism 

in the staff about the importance of knowledge-development 

activities. If only sales were valued, one had better sell if one 

wanted to succeed. 

Now, I am not against promoting sales, but the result 

of telling one and all how much they valued knowledge and 

then not valuing it at all in action was that those firms seldom 

developed or transferred valuable knowledge. It is interesting to 

note that the only one of the five firms that exists and thrives 

today is the one that genuinely promoted knowledge activities. 

The other very important thing leaders can do is lead by 

example. Our new president offers a case in point. What better 

way to promote literacy and clear thinking among our kids than 

to have a president—the ultimate leader—who has actually 

written two literate and clear-headed books. 

When I read about a CEO or senior manager who genuinely 

encourages knowledge activities, the story stays in my memory 

mainly because it is so rare an event. A day may come when it is 

more common. Until then, I urge leaders who may be reading 

this to realize above all that your employees and peers watch 

both what you say and what you do and tend to adjust their own 

behavior accordingly. So talk about the value of knowledge but, 

above all else, show how much knowledge matters through your 

deeds and decisions. ●

GOOd IdEAS dO NOT—I REPEAT, dO 

NOT—SuCCEEd bECAuSE OF THEIR 

INTERNAL LOGIC OR THEIR ObvIOuS 

MERIT. THEy SuCCEEd bECAuSE 

PEOPLE FIGHT FOR THEM. 
 

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56 | ASK MAGAZINE 

ASKinteractive
 

When Thoughts Turn Inward,” by Henry Casselli 

Astronaut John Young reflects pensively as he suits up for 

launch on April 12, 1981. Casselli conveys a quiet, almost 

spiritual moment when the astronaut must mentally prepare 

for his mission. This was the first time that the newly 

inaugurated Space Shuttle would carry humans, in this case 

the two person crew of John Young and Robert Crippen. 

Image courtesy the NASA Art Program 

NASA Art Program 

The NASA Art Program was founded by James Dean in 1962 to record the 

history of space exploration through different media and genres in order to 

reach, educate, and inspire a variety of audiences. Paintings, illustrations, 

photographs, poetry, and even songs have been commissioned by NASA 

from notable artists, including Norman Rockwell, Annie Leibovitz, Robert 

Rauschenberg, and Patti LaBelle. View some of the original artworks 

chronicling the wonders, risks, and triumphs of space exploration at http:// 

www.hq.nasa.gov/copernica. The current curator, Bertram ulrich, joined 

Dean to write a book celebrating the images for NASAs 50th anniversary. 

The book can be found in bookstores or online at http://www.amazon. 

com/NASA-ART 50 years Exploration/dp/0810972875. 

Learning and Exploration 

Relive NASA’s journeys to the moon through the personal stories of the astronauts, 

engineers, and flight directors who helped make man’s journey into space a reality. The 

Discovery Channel site includes several clips from the six-part series When We Left 

Earth along with interactive features that highlight NASA’s effect on our everyday lives, 

test your knowledge about the twenty-four men who went to the moon, allow you to 

interactively explore the universe, and more. Listen to the firsthand accounts of Mercury, 

Gemini, Apollo, and Space Shuttle at http://dsc.discovery.com/tv/nasa/nasa.html. 

Web of Knowledge 

The new year is often a time when people reflect upon what they accomplished 

the year before and how those experiences will help them face new challenges, 

and NASA is no different. Though the Agency recently celebrated fifty years of 

exploration, it also took time to review its discoveries and accomplishments during 

2008. Among the top ten accomplishments for the year are the International Space 

Station’s ten-year anniversary, Hubble’s discovery of a planet circling a distant star, 

and completion of the successful Phoenix lander mission to Mars. Read about 

these and more at http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/yir2k8/index.html. 

For More on 

Our Stories 

Additional information 

pertaining to articles 

featured in this issue can 

be found by visiting the 

following Web sites: 

• Mars Express: http:// 

www.esa.int/esaMI/ 

Mars_Express/index.html 

• Phoenix: http://www. 

nasa.gov/mission_pages/ 

phoenix/main/index.html; 

http://phoenix.lpl.arizona. 

edu 

• SOFIA: http://www.nasa. 

gov/mission_pages/ 

SOFIA/ 

feedback 

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