Academy Sharing Knowledge

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

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Inside

International Cooperation: When 1 + 1 = 3

Interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson

The Power of Social Networks
ON THE COVER

The view of Earth from space continually reveals new aspects of our planet, 

aiding scientific research and increasing human understanding about how 

the “blue marble” developed and how it changes over time. The cover 

image shows the dynamic force of high winds across the earth’s surface. 

When wind speeds attain sufficient velocities, sand particles are transported 

in the lower atmosphere, causing a dust storm such as the one that is 

pictured here in the Djourab Sand Region of central Chad. Image courtesy of the Image Science and Analysis Laboratory, NASA Johnson Space Center
5 11

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

11

Interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson

By Don Cohen The director of the Hayden 

Planetarium talks about studying the planets 

to learn about Earth, NASA’s greatest 

accomplishment, and public perceptions 

of the Agency.

20

An Introduction to System Safety

By Nancy Leveson A narrow focus on 

component reliability can miss the bigger 

picture: the safety of the system as a whole.

32 

The Optimized Project Portfolio 

By Michael A. Hall An analytic overview 

of projects judges their contribution to an 

organization’s strategic goals. 

39

What’s Ahead for Project Management 

By MattHew Kohut A roundtable 

discussion of the skills and training needed 

to manage complex projects.

47

Nothing Weak About It: Thriving in 

a Weak-Matrix Project Environment

By Keith L. Woodman Relying on 

communication and negotiation, the center 

focal helps manage the demands of large, 

multicenter projects. 

50

NASA CoLab: Creating a Space for 

Participatory Exploration

By Matthew Kohut A small team at 

Ames builds a virtual workspace for 

collaboration within and beyond NASA.

STORIES

5

International Cooperation: 

When 1 + 1 = 3

By Toshifumi Mukai International project 

success depends on recognizing and 

respecting differences.

8

A New Astronaut Seat: Teamwork 

and Individual Initiative

By Dustin Gohmert A homemade prototype 

helps the Orion seat design team reach the 

next level.

17

Operation Burnt Frost: The Power 

of Social Networks

By Lucas Steinhauser and Scott Thon 

Thanks to informal professional networks, 

U.S. Strategic Command quickly got the 

knowledge it needed to intercept a falling 

satellite.

25

NASA Spinoff Technology Helps 

Detect Cardiovascular Disease

By Daniel Lockney Developed to analyze 

images from space, JPL’s Video Image 

Communication and Retrieval software 

finds hidden heart attack risks.

28

Staying Motivated During Tough Times 

By Jennifer Cole Faced with funding 

cuts and an uncertain future, a Dryden 

project team uses camaraderie and humor 

to keep going.

35

Learning by Doing: A NASA–Capitol 

College Partnership

By Ken Dolan A college program extends 

the life of a NASA satellite and gives 

students hands-on experience.

44

MESSENGER: Big Science 

in a Small Space

By Kerry Ellis The MESSENGER project 

team meets the technical challenge of 

sending a low-cost mission to Mercury.

Contents

17

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

Magazinee 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 

the Knowledge Sharing Project Manager, Rosie Robinson, ASRC Management 

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

301-768-5744. 

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

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

Issue No. 31

Staff

APPEL Director and Publisher

Dr. Edward Hoffman

ehoffman@nasa.gov

Editor-in-Chief

Laurence Prusak

lprusak@msn.com

Managing Editor

Don Cohen

doncohen@rcn.com

Editor

Kerry Ellis

kerry.ellis@asrcms.com

contributing Editor

Matt Kohut

mattkohut@infactcommunications.com

Knowledge Sharing manager

Rosie Robinson

rosie.robinson@asrcms.com

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

hralay@hq.nasa.gov

Printing

GraphTec
Several articles in this issue of ASK give essentially the same 

important advice to project managers and engineers. In 

one way or another, they say, “Step back and look at the 

big picture.”

That is certainly the message of Nancy Leveson’s “An 

Introduction to System Safety.” She explains why paying 

attention to the interactions of the system as a whole (not 

only the hardware and software but people and processes, 

too) is much more likely to ensure safety than focusing on 

the reliability of individual components. And Michael Hall’s 

discussion of “The Optimized Project Portfolio” argues that 

leaders need to keep their eyes on the big picture to make 

sure that the projects they approve and support actually help 

the organization achieve its aims.

“Nothing Weak About It,” by Keith Woodman, describes 

the work of “center focals” for the Constellation program at 

Langley almost entirely in terms of their ability to step back 

and understand center capabilities and project needs as a 

whole. Then they use that knowledge to negotiate balanced 

and effective use of the center’s resources. Toshifumi Mukai, 

the chief engineer of JAXA, the Japanese space agency, 

recalls his experience on a Japanese–American project to 

talk about what makes international projects work. Here, 

too, the broad view is important: working toward the overall 

success of the project rather than the local preferences of 

one group or the other. In international projects, looking at 

the big picture also means stepping back from the purely 

technical demands of the job to understand differences in 

language and culture and make them work for rather than 

against the project. In more general terms, “What’s Ahead for 

Project Management,” a roundtable discussion, considers 

the multiple abilities and breadth of vision project managers 

will need to manage complex, international projects.

Taking a step back also means finding new perspectives 

and new sources of knowledge that provide new ways of 

solving stubborn problems (and often a better understanding 

of what the problems are). The Operation Burnt Frost team 

used informal social networks to get the knowledge they 

needed to intercept a falling satellite. At Johnson Space 

Center, Dustin Gohmert took home what the astronaut seat 

team had been learning and turned it into a prototype that 

helped move the project to the next level. NASA and Capitol 

College found one solution to two problems—insufficient 

funding to continue monitoring a satellite and students’ need 

for hands-on experience—by turning over the tracking job to 

the college.

The value of new, broader sources of knowledge 

motivates the CoLab project, which has created an online 

environment where people within and outside NASA can 

share ideas. It underlies Ed Hoffman’s advocacy for a 

diversity of perspectives and Laurence Prusak’s advising 

people to get out of their offices and learn something. Too 

often, we equate serious work with bending over a computer 

or workbench, with intense focus on the task at hand. But 

standing up and looking around, taking a walk, or having a 

conversation are also part of work, and sometimes the most 

important part.

Don Cohen

Managing Editor

In This Issue

ASK MAGAZINE | 3
I recently participated in a panel discussion about 

next-generation challenges and strategies for 

aerospace. Such sessions have become common as 

we worry about the ability of the future workforce to 

assume responsibility for the science, engineering, 

technology development, and management of our 

future aerospace missions.

You often hear that members of Gen X and Y do 

not have the work ethic, commitment, or attention 

span of their elders. In one session, someone 

commented that “research had determined” that 

the new generation has an attention span of a few 

seconds. (I wondered how they crossed the street 

without being run over.) The few hundred attendees 

at the conference were skewed significantly toward 

maturity and long experience. Whenever I appear 

on a panel devoted to next-generation work issues, 

I see few representatives of the target community 

there to keep us honest.

This is nothing new. Twenty years ago, getting 

ready to facilitate a strategic diversity planning 

session, I was struck by the complete lack of diversity 

on the work team, which consisted entirely of middleaged white males. We spent the day wondering what 

could be done to improve workforce diversity and 

how to understand the needs of a diverse workforce. 

But the most obvious resource—a diversity of 

perspectives—was missing.

We have a tendency to work a problem 

without including the people who know it best. 

Perhaps it is natural to invite the people you know, 

but assumptions made on behalf of those who are 

missing are often flat wrong. One such assumption 

is that the next generation is not ready to take over, 

but little evidence is offered to support it. Every 

generation takes over a world that is more complex 

than what came before, and so far every generation 

has outdistanced its predecessors. I remember Gene 

Kranz indicating at a NASA event that the average 

age of the Apollo workforce was twenty-seven. 

Evidently youth was not a hindrance to landing a 

man on the moon.

I have also been told that this new generation is 

not as dedicated or committed as past generations. 

That is not what I see. In many respects the nextgeneration workforce seems far better prepared. 

They are more open to diversity, working in 

teams, international collaboration, information 

technologies, and continuous learning, to mention 

just a few potential strengths. As far as motivation 

and commitment are concerned, spend a few 

minutes with a new co-op student. The enthusiasm 

and dedication are unmistakable.

At that recent conference, I asked for a show of 

hands to determine how many in the audience were 

under thirty. Five hands went up. I watched their 

reactions at different points of the panel discussion. 

They sat and listened while they heard theories 

about the next-generation workforce. Theories 

about how they learned. Theories about how they 

worked. Theories about how prepared they were to 

enter the workforce. Theories about their loyalty. 

Theories about their professional passion. During 

some of the discussion they seemed to nod their 

heads in agreement. At other times, they seemed 

to laugh at the conjectures and concerns. Despite 

their small numbers, they were active participants, 

asking questions and offering ideas. They made 

their voices heard. What they said loud and clear 

was, “We are here, and we are ready.” ●

From the APPEL Director

Don’t Trust Anyone Under Thirty?

By ED HOFFMAN 

W

4 | ASK MAGAZINE
International Cooperation: 

Image Credit: Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency

W

By Toshifumi Mukai

hen 1 + 1 = 3

The hope in international projects is that one plus one will equal three—that the diverse resources, 

skills, and technologies of the partners will add up to more than the sum of their parts. To get those 

benefits, however, project teams need to successfully manage the challenges that arise when different 

countries with different languages and cultures collaborate on a complex project. Successful project 

management always involves effective communication and negotiation to coordinate the activities 

of various groups to achieve the shared goal. This coordination is all the more challenging when the 

groups work in countries halfway around the globe from each other and must overcome potential 

cultural and linguistic barriers.

The Akebono (EXOS-D) and Geotail missions 

observe Earth’s magnetic field.

STORY | ASK MAGAZINE | 5
One successful international project I worked on was Geotail, a 

joint effort of the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science 

(ISAS), which is part of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency 

(JAXA), and NASA. ISAS developed the spacecraft and about 

two-thirds of the science instruments while NASA provided the 

launch vehicle, about one-third of the science instruments, and 

tracking support.

Geotail was designed to study the structure and dynamics of 

the Earth’s magnetotail, the part of the magnetosphere pushed 

away from the sun by the solar wind of charged particles. To 

explore this vast tail region, the Geotail spacecraft traveled in 

a highly elliptical orbit ranging from 8 to 210 earth radii. Its 

measurements of plasma and electric and magnetic fields have 

contributed to the understanding of the physics of interactions 

between Earth and the sun, and have made it a valuable part of 

the International Solar-Terrestrial Physics program.

One reason for the project’s success is that the scientists 

working for the international program had a clear common goal. 

That is a feature of every successful science project, the necessary 

foundation for success. As important as that commonality is, 

though, it does not eliminate the potential for cross-cultural 

misunderstanding and confusion.

What kinds of difficulties do cross-cultural programs 

face? Language is the toughest one between the United States 

and Japan, but we also had to think about (and find common 

ground) in regard to our different decision-making processes 

and meeting styles. We also had to deal with communication 

across many time zones as well as funding and legal issues 

(including liability and ITAR, the International Traffic in 

Arms Regulations that limit access to some American technology 

and knowledge).

English was the official language of the project. (One of my 

American friends said there are only two languages in the world, 

English and FORTRAN.) But only a few of the Japanese members 

spoke English fluently, and we faced many misunderstandings 

and much confusion during our discussions.

English and Japanese are very different not only in their 

vocabularies but in their structures, differences that reflect 

dissimilar values and ways of thinking. For example, look at 

the English sentence, “I am not supporting this idea,” and its 

Japanese equivalent:

The various elements of the statement appear in a very 

different order in the two languages. Notice that the negation 

is located at the very end of the Japanese sentence—something 

that may reflect a cultural reluctance to express a negative 

opinion in Japan. The language differences are not just a matter 

of vocabulary. They extend to how language and—to a certain 

extent—how thinking are structured.

The most important first step toward resolving this and 

other cultural issues is to recognize that the differences exist 

and to respect each other’s cultures and traditions. In the case of 

the language problem, both groups recognized the likelihood of 

misunderstanding and took steps to minimize it that included 

repeating and paraphrasing, slowing down the conversation, and 

frequently confirming that the discussion was being understood 

by all parties. Some American participants took Japanese lessons, 

which was important in several ways:

• It showed their respect for the Japanese language and culture.

• Trying to learn Japanese made clear to the Americans how 

challenging it is for the Japanese to work in English.

• Even a rudimentary understanding of Japanese helped the 

Americans understand some of the likely sources and types of 

misunderstandings the language differences could cause.

Image Credit: Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency

Configuration of the Geotail.

6 | ASK MAGAZINE
One of the Geotail principal investigators, Roger 

Anderson from the University of Iowa, has identified these 

language lessons as one of the reasons for the team’s successful 

collaboration. He also noted that the Japanese practice of 

seeking consensus is quite different from American and 

European ways of working and points to other important 

lessons from the Geotail experience:

• In international cooperation it is important that one side 

not dictate requirements to the other side.

• Diplomacy is very important. It is much better to guide 

your colleagues in the direction you want them to go than 

to make demands.

Dr. Anderson and Dr. Mario Acuna of NASA also have 

called Geotail an “outstanding success” and commented that “the 

development of a mutual trust relationship between the partners 

was perhaps the most critical element of all for success.”

Mutual respect, trust, and recognition that cultural 

differences exist, matter, and must be explicitly dealt with are 

requirements of successful international projects. In summary, 

I would suggest these principles for the success of international 

collaboration:

• Two (or more) teams share the same goal and seek the 

overall optimal result, not the local optimum.

• Each team should clearly recognize and value the other 

party’s different culture and traditions.

• The single most important word in international projects 

is trust. Team members earn trust by being sincere, 

honest, and open-minded.

These principles apply especially to international projects 

but no doubt the same principles contribute to the success 

of any challenging project in which team members work for 

different organizations or in different locations. ●

Toshifumi Mukai is senior chief engineer at the Japan 

Aerospace Exploration Agency.

Diplomacy is very important. 

It is much better to guide your

colleagues in the direction you want

them to go than to make demands.

Photo Credit: NASA

A Delta II rocket carrying the 

Geotail spacecraft lifts off at 

Launch Complex 17, Kennedy 

Space Center.

ASK MAGAZINE | 7
A New

Astronaut 

Seat: Teamwork and Individual Initiative

By Dustin Gohmert

The Advanced Crew Escape Suit 

(ACES) fit in the Orion concept 

seat is evaluated. ACES was 

used as the reference suit for the 

anthropometric guidance provided 

for seat design. Photo courtesy Dustin Gohmert

8 | ASK MAGAZINE | STORY
We knew that an effective seat would be one that spread those 

forces evenly over the astronaut’s body and constrained motion 

to avoid the harm done to limbs or head flung in any direction. 

Given the tight quarters of the six-person capsule and payload 

considerations, the seats would have to be compact, lightweight, 

and easily storable when not in use. We decided early on that the 

solution the Russians used on Soyuz—custom seats molded to 

every astronaut—would not work for us. Among other things, 

they could not be folded for storage and would create problems 

when astronauts took shifts on the International Space Station 

(and would presumably have to keep their seats with them).

By December 2007, Lockheed Martin had a seat that 

was set to meet the myriad requirements specified early in the 

project. While this seat was a good overall solution, NASA 

faced a dilemma: it was built to requirements specified before 

the team fully understood the extent of potential landing injury 

problems and how to solve them. That often happens when 

you’re designing something new: you discover things in the 

process of doing the work that you needed to know to define 

the requirements, but couldn’t have known at the time the 

requirements had to be written. 

Since that time we had learned a lot, especially from the 

technologies auto racing had developed to protect drivers. Years 

of experience and experiment had gone into seats designed 

for NASCAR, Indy, and Monster Truck racing. Monster 

Truck drivers repeatedly experience forces as great as 18 G’s—

comparable to some of the worst impacts the astronauts could 

experience. NASCAR and Indy racers routinely survive impacts 

of greater than 50 G’s with little or no injury. The veteran 

racing designers shared their knowledge with us freely and 

enthusiastically. We also got valuable information from Apollo 

astronauts and vehicle design teams. Solutions used on Apollo 

were shared by the folks who have done this work before us; for 

instance, they used heel clips to help immobilize the astronauts’ 

legs during reentry and landing. That helped provide a solution 

to our potential leg-flail concerns.

So we had a much better idea now of what the seat needed 

to do and how we might give it those capabilities, but the 

Lockheed Martin and NASA seat team already had a viable 

design that fulfilled the requirements laid out in black and 

white. To upgrade the requirements and rewrite contractual 

agreements could delay us several months in the critical time 

approaching our design reviews.

Do Try This at Home

As people discussed the seat during team meetings on impact 

safety, I found myself thinking, “that’s a good idea,” or, “that 

probably won’t work.” Those judgments reflected what we were 

learning together and also my own earlier work on the orange 

pressure suits the shuttle crew wear during launch and reentry. 

Those suits are the “interface” between the astronaut and the 

chair, so understanding how they are constructed was essential 

to understanding the seat. One problem with the existing design, 

clearly, was that the seat was flat and people are not. And we hadn’t 

fully solved the problem of adjusting for different leg lengths to 

provide continuous support. I began to have a good sense of what 

the seat should look like. As I’ve mentioned, though, we were not 

at a point where we could stop work and start over from scratch.

I decided I would try to come up with something at home over 

the Christmas–New Year’s holiday that might help put us on the 

right track, thinking that if I came up with a design that worked, 

NASA might support it and Lockheed Martin might be able to 

take it to the next level without further contract negotiations. 

There were some other reasons the idea appealed to me. I 

liked hands-on work; I grew up on a ranch in Texas where you 

needed to know how to fix things and build them from scratch. 

And I’d recently gotten some new tools that I wanted to try out. 

So I walked up and down the aisles of the local Home Depot, 

thinking, “I’ll probably need this.” I spent $200, which I hoped 

I’d eventually get reimbursed for.

The first thing I did was ask my fiancée to draw the outline 

of my body on big sheets of cardboard. That gave me a template 

As Orion seat subsystem manager, I had been working with contractor Lockheed Martin for 

approximately a year and a half on the design of an astronaut seat for the new crew exploration 

vehicle, Orion. The seat would have to protect astronauts from the “high landing loads,” or g-forces, 

of landings on water or land, including those where problems like one of the parachutes not opening 

or high crosswinds would expose the crew to higher-than-expected loads. Even a perfect landing is 

what you might call a “controlled crash.”

ASK MAGAZINE | 9
I could use to shape the chair, designing, most importantly, a 

curved, adjustable lower part of the seat that matched the curve of 

the buttocks. Of course we had done computer modeling to try 

to fit body shapes to chair designs, but computer models tend to 

be too rigid when designing for the ultimate non-rigid interface: 

the human body. One model, for instance, showed that the fit 

between suit and seat would be too tight when in actual fact it left 

space that needed to be filled. I worked ten ten- to twelve-hour 

days in my garage. (At 10:30 p.m. on New Year’s Eve, my fiancée 

said, “So, are we going out?” We did.) At the end of that time, I 

had a full-size working prototype made out of wood, metal, and 

fabric. Its main new features were the adjustable, curved lower 

section and spacers of various sizes that could make a snug fit 

between the seat and astronauts’ shoulders and hips.

Why Build a Prototype?

There were good reasons for building a prototype rather than 

just sketching my ideas. For one thing, you learn by touching 

the hardware. It teaches you that sometimes what looks good 

on paper is impossible to make—every piece of hardware is 

a compromise between an idea and the realities of physical 

materials. Also, the hardware shows you things you couldn’t 

guess from diagrams. When I tested my prototype with people 

of very different heights and leg and arm lengths, I was surprised 

to find that everyone’s hands always ended up near their knees. 

That gave me the idea of putting the controllers near the knees 

on the sides of the flight crews’ chairs, thereby eliminating the 

complication of separate armrests for the hand controllers.

The other reason for building a prototype is that I knew that 

sketches can easily be dismissed for lack of clarity or understanding 

(or can lead to long discussions about whether or not the design 

would work in the real world). Everybody has sketches, but not 

everybody has a full-size working prototype. In other words, 

the squeaky wheel gets the attention, and I squeaked as loud 

as I could. Because I knew the impression the prototype made 

would be important, I spent time sanding edges and painting the 

wooden parts to make it look as professional as possible.

Back to Teamwork

After the holidays, I took the prototype and a PowerPoint 

presentation I had created “on the road” to numerous boards and 

meetings of groups overseeing the project and to my Lockheed 

Martin colleagues. I didn’t present the seat design as my brilliant 

idea, because it wasn’t. It was a product of a lot of learning that 

the whole team had done and of contributions from many 

sources: the Lockheed Martin design team, race-car engineers, 

suit designers, former astronauts, and others. Building the seat 

was really an exercise in integration, not an exercise in invention. 

I specifically designed the new seat features as an upgrade to 

the already existing good design, not as a replacement for it. 

That made it easier to foster team commitment to the changes 

without significant impact or rework on the sound foundation 

that had already been laid.

From there the teamwork continued. For instance, I had 

struggled to find a good way to have the leg and foot support slide 

in for storage; I never found a satisfactory answer. The Lockheed 

Martin guys quickly saw that it would be easier and better to have 

that part of the seat fold over. It was an obvious solution, but I 

hadn’t seen it. I also worried that a bar at the end of the footrest 

would stick up when the seat was in the stored position. I stopped 

worrying when an astronaut looked at it and liked the bar that 

way, saying, “I can tuck my toes under here on orbit.”

Lockheed Martin fairly quickly built an improved metal 

version of the prototype seat, while incorporating new creative 

solutions in the design. As I write this, it is scheduled for impactsled testing with crash-test dummies at Wright-Patterson. I’m sure 

we will learn things that influence the final design of the seat, but 

we seem to be on the right track. I’m proud of the contribution 

I made by spending those ten days incorporating what we had 

learned into a prototype, but this has truly been a team effort and 

will continue as one for years to come as we work to provide the 

safest seats ever ridden to space and back. ●

Dustin Gohmert is the seat subsystem manager at Johnson Space Center for NASA’s new 

crew exploration vehicle, Orion. Photo courtesy Dustin Gohmert

Isometric view of the seat adjusted to accommodate 99th percentile operator.

10 | ASK MAGAZINE
Neil deGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist with the American 

Museum of Natural History in New York City, where he 

also serves as the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden 

Planetarium. In addition to writing for many professional 

publications, Tyson has written popular science books, 

including his memoir, The Sky Is Not the Limit: Adventures 

of an Urban Astrophysicist, and Death by Black Hole and 

Other Cosmic Quandaries. He is the host of PBS’s NOVA 

ScienceNOW and has served on presidential commissions 

studying the future of the U.S. aerospace industry and the 

implementation of the United States’ space exploration policy. 

Don Cohen talked to him in New York.

I nte r v iew W ith

Cohen: How does NASA affect your 

work as head of the planetarium? 

Tyson: In two fundamental ways. One 

relates to the public’s appetite for the 

cosmos, stimulated by discoveries and 

missions conducted by NASA. Since 

there are hardly any NASA facilities in 

the Northeast—hardly anyone knows 

about GISS [Goddard Institute for Space 

Studies]—it has no direct presence in the 

hearts and minds of New Yorkers. For 

many people, the Rose Center for Earth 

and Space and the Hayden Planetarium 

are the closest they’ll ever get to NASA in 

this region of the country. So we closely 

monitor missions and frequently design 

programs around NASA science. 

Neil deGrasse 

Tyson

By Don Cohen

Photo Credit: © 2006 Chris Cassidy for NOVA ScienceNOW

INSIGHT | ASK MAGAZINE | 11
Cohen: For example? 

Tyson: We recently had our annual Isaac 

Asimov panel debate on “Mining the 

Sky”—what to do about the natural 

resources of space scientifically, culturally, 

morally, and ethically. I had an engineer 

from NASA Marshall, Curtis Manning, 

who specializes in in situ resource 

utilization. I got Cassie Conley, the head 

of the planetary protection group at 

NASA, to talk about what it means to go 

into space in search of resources, either 

in support of space-based activities or to 

bring back here. We also had a mining 

geologist to ground everyone, figuratively 

and literally. 

Cohen: What’s the other way NASA 

connects to your work? 

Tyson: We apply for support money 

from NASA for programs we run. Our 

most visible NASA-supported programs 

are space shows. In the old days, the 

planetarium director would stand up 

with a microphone and recite what 

constellations were visible that season. 

That doesn’t play anymore, nor should it. 

We know too much about the universe 

and the universe is too dynamic, too 

broad and deep, for anyone to believe 

that pointing out objects in the night 

sky constitutes astronomy any more. So 

we identify various cosmic objects and 

take the viewer there visually. We’ve 

enjoyed NASA support for each of the 

shows that we’ve produced over the past 

eight years. 

Cohen: How would you characterize 

public response to NASA? 

Tyson: People are generally completely 

supportive. Those who grumble about 

science and space don’t tend to visit us. 

If NASA is so visible that people think it’s 10 percent of

the federal budget when it’s six-tenths of one percent, 

somebody’s doing something right.

12 | ASK MAGAZINE
Our visitors are self-selected, of course, 

but the numbers have gone up. We get 

families, kids, international visitors. 

We show them the universe as it is and 

how we’ve come to learn our place in 

the universe. We give it context. We are 

fundamentally linked to the geological 

sciences, to the anthropological sciences, 

to the archaeological sciences. Context 

matters when someone says, “Let’s 

go to space!” and someone else says, 

“Well, why?” 

Cohen: Context matters because ...? 

Tyson: Often the “why” isn’t, “Here’s the 

answer.” The why is, “Here’s the landscape 

in which this activity is unfolding.” 

Once you understand the landscape, 

it’s self-evident why we are undertaking 

these activities. So I see almost complete 

support for our space activities. 

Cohen: What kind of effect has NASA 

had on you personally? 

Tyson: I was born the same week NASA 

was founded, so we’re the same age and 

feel some of the same pains, joys, and 

frustrations. But the Apollo program had 

no effect on me. 

Cohen: Why no effect? 

Tyson: Because the astronauts were military 

pilots. They had crew cuts. Their skin was 

many shades lighter than mine. That was 

not an adventure that at all considered 

me as one of its participants, so I couldn’t 

consider myself as one of them. It’s not 

that I didn’t appreciate what NASA was 

doing. I was as excited as the next person 

that we landed on the moon. It was a great 

engineering feat, a great technological feat. 

It just didn’t influence my ambition to 

become a scientist. My interest came about 

entirely separate from that. 

Cohen: Where did it come from? 

Tyson: From my first visit to Hayden 

Planetarium, where I saw the night sky 

as never before, as undreamt of actually, 

because I grew up in the Bronx and I was 

sure the night sky was maybe eight stars, 

ten on a good night—not the thousands 

they were showing me. I thought it was 

a hoax. A couple of years later, I looked 

up with binoculars and the universe 

looked really different than it did with 

the naked eye. I realized that maybe what 

I was seeing from the Bronx was not the 

real thing. So NASA was going into lowEarth orbit and then to the moon and 

back, and my interest was being forged 

on the large-scale universe. 

Cohen: In 1968, a year or so before 

the moon landing, I heard a talk by 

[astronomer] Fred Hoyle where he said 

space exploration was all well and 

good, but it would never replace looking 

through a telescope. 

Tyson: Unless you figure out how to get 

to the place the telescope sees. I think he’s 

right for the large-scale universe, but I 

bet he would not have imagined what we 

would glean just from our own planetary 

system from space probes that have been as 

far out as Saturn. Now we know that the 

moons are in many ways more interesting 

than the planets themselves. I don’t think 

he could have imagined that at the time. So 

space travel is replacing telescopes. No one 

is saying, “Give me a good telescopic view 

of Saturn.” No, we just call Cassini and 

say, “What have you got for me today?” 

So Hoyle was half right. 

Cohen: What do you think our relative 

investment in robotic and human space 

exploration should be? 

Tyson: I wear two hats. As a pure scientist, 

I would say, “Just send robots.” For every 

astronaut you send up, you could send ten 

or more robots to ten different places. Very 

few scientists, given that specific choice and 

given the relative cost of the two, would 

say, “Send people instead of robots.” But I 

also spend a good part of my professional 

life interacting with the public. I’m a 

public educator and a public scientist. In 

that capacity, I’d say there is no question 

that human exploration of space has no 

substitute. Nobody names high schools 

after robots. People have said, “Look at the 

interest shown in the Mars rovers.” That’s 

undeniable, but let’s go back forty years. 

There were robotic missions to the moon. 

Does anyone remember them who wasn’t 

directly involved in them? Of course not, 

because people were going to the moon. 

There’s no substitute for the thrill of 

having one of your own explore, without 

specific reference to a scientific goal. We’ve 

been doing it from the very beginning, 

and I see no reasons why we wouldn’t 

want to continue. For many people, it 

is the motivation for the exploration of 

space, because we can explore vicariously 

through the eyes of an explorer who can 

experience, who can feel, who can emote. 

People criticize the golf ball that was hit 

on the moon, but I celebrate that, because 

ASK MAGAZINE | 13
it’s something a human would do. A robot 

follows your commands; humans can be 

a little naughty now and then. When 

you send one of your own, you can track 

that person, you can ask, “What school 

did they go to? What’s their hometown?” 

There will be headlines on them, and 

every chapter in their past lives will be 

captured and celebrated by the press. 

You’ll create role models. Robots just 

don’t make role models. 

If you want a nation to have space 

exploration ambitions, you’ve got to send 

humans. So if you catch me on a science 

day, I’m going to tell you, “Leave the 

people home.” Then there’s the reality 

check and I say, “We need to have people 

reaching the frontier of space exploration. 

That makes the headlines.” History has 

shown that and the future will bear it 

out. You don’t contrast rovers and shuttle 

missions; that’s not the right comparison. 

When you spend all your time “driving 

around the block,” where one mission is 

no more ambitious than the previous one, 

headlines do not follow—unless of course 

there’s a disaster, like Challenger and 

Columbia. You’ve got to compare Mars 

rovers to human exploration of some place 

where humans have never been. Then find 

out who’s getting the headlines. 

Cohen: In one of your essays in Death 

by Black Hole, you say robots are only 

good at finding what you know you’re 

looking for. 

Tyson: I think a robot can find something 

unexpected but, yes, it’s true you program 

a robot for what you expect to see. You 

program it to climb over a particular 

kind of rock, to look in a certain 

spectral band, to dig in a certain way. 

Something completely unexpected could 

go unnoticed. 

Cohen: What do you think was the most 

significant accomplishment of NASA’s 

first fifty years? 

Tyson: People like to say it was landing on 

the moon. I’d phrase it in a different way. 

The most significant accomplishment 

was saying we would put someone on the 

moon and then doing it. I think we would 

eventually have put someone on the moon 

but to say it and then do it speaks to a 

high level of ambition. In some ways, the 

landing was the easy part. What you had 

to do to get to that point was the hard 

part. The Mercury missions and Gemini 

missions were steps toward landing on 

the moon: the one astronaut, the two, the 

three, the spacewalk, the docking—all 

of those were proving grounds. That’s 

where the cross-pollination of the various 

engineering disciplines came in. The 

aerospace engineering, the material 

engineers, the scientists had to come 

together with a single mind. It’s not often 

you get that for small projects, much 

less large ones, much less ones that are 

government-agency mandated. I think 

without question that’s the greatest 

achievement. 

Cohen: What would you like to see 

NASA commit itself to next? 

Tyson: I’m not naïve enough to think that 

just because we went to the moon we’re 

automatically going to land on Mars. 

What drove the moon landing was a flow 

of money commensurate only with times 

of war, because we were at war with the 

Soviet Union. 

Cohen: NASA got 4 percent of the 

federal budget then. 

Tyson: That was a war budget, and when 

you’re at war you spend money. I think the 

greatest challenge now is to ask what else 

can drive the expenditure of money. One of 

the big drivers is the promise of the growth 

of wealth. So I think space tourism, which 

for a while was considered a fringe activity, 

may be the most important source of 

capital for the future of space exploration. 

Yes, one job of a government with foresight 

is to invest where capital markets have yet 

to tread, but then the government needs 

to open those pathways for others to 

create the market, allowing space travel to 

become routine. 

Cohen: We’re at the beginning of that 

process. 

Tyson: You can smell it in the air. The 

entrepreneurs who are out there—the 

X PRIZE, Space X—have the goal of 

making space exploration cheap enough 

to attract tourists. Once you have an 

industry, you invite competitors that will 

continue to drive the price down and create 

more opportunity. I’m a big supporter of 

that notion. I think many futurists of the 

Apollo era were naïve. Nearly all of them 

said things like, “We’re on the moon now, 

we’re explorers, we’re discoverers. Mars is 

next. We’ll be on Mars by 1985.” Reality 

check, please. Somebody is paying for this. 

Who? It’s Congress. Why? Because of the 

communists. It wasn’t because Congress 

thinks exploration is a great thing to do. 

14 | ASK MAGAZINE
In fact the history of exploration across 

nations and across time is not one where 

nations said, “Let’s explore because it’s 

fun.” It was, “Let’s explore so that we can 

claim lands for our country, so that we 

can open up new trade routes; let’s explore 

so we can become more powerful.” It 

was never, “Let’s explore so that we can 

understand science better.” I wish it were, 

but there’s no history of that. Maybe the 

explorers themselves felt that way, but 

somebody had to sign the check, and the 

people signing the check did not share 

those philosophies. 

Cohen: Are there good ways to 

demonstrate the value of NASA to 

the public? 

Tyson: I think one of the greatest ways to 

assess the value of an agency to a nation 

is to do the following experiment: ask 

people how much money they think an 

agency gets. When they do it for NASA, 

they think it’s something like 10 percent 

of the federal budget. Then you tell 

people how much money they actually 

get. The ratio of those two numbers is the 

magnifier impact of every dollar spent. 

So the fact that everybody thinks NASA’s 

budget is ten to fifty times larger than it 

is tells you how successful NASA is at 

what it does. That should be celebrated. 

If NASA is so visible that people think 

it’s 10 percent of the federal budget when 

it’s six-tenths of one percent, somebody’s 

doing something right. There ought to be 

a government index that ranks agencies 

by how much money people think 

they’re getting. I bet NASA would come 

out at the top. I think the public needs 

to understand more than technology 

spinoffs. I think much too much has been 

made of spinoffs. 

Cohen: Although people are not aware 

of how much useful technology NASA 

has developed. 

Tyson: That’s true, and that story should 

be told no matter what. But I think 

NASA has a bigger story, a more noble 

story to tell. The exploration and research 

conducted by NASA have the potential 

to circumvent problems that right now 

we’re simply running away from. 

Cohen: Like what? 

Tyson: Mars once was wet and fertile. It’s 

now bone dry. Something bad happened 

on Mars. I want to know what happened 

on Mars so that we may prevent it from 

happening here on Earth. Venus has a 

runaway greenhouse effect. Something 

bad happened on Venus, too. It’s an 

experiment that has already run its 

course there; we don’t have the luxury 

of performing that experiment here on 

Earth. There are cosmic hazards that we 

were all ignorant of but certainly existed 

in 1900. We learned of them because of 

space exploration. For instance, asteroid 

Mars once was wet and fertile. It’s now bone dry.

Something bad happened on Mars. I want to know

what happened on Mars so that we may prevent it

from happening here on Earth.

ASK MAGAZINE | 15
impacts. One slammed into Earth 100 

years ago this June in Tunguska, Siberia. 

We’re cataloguing asteroids so that if a 

big one is headed this way, we can go out 

and deflect the damn thing rather than 

build shelters and try to run away from 

it. Without a space program, you end up 

running away from problems, when in 

fact we have scientists, engineers, clever 

people who can actually stop the thing 

in the first place. That’s what vaccination 

was all about: instead of treating your 

symptoms, let’s prevent the disease in the 

first place. That’s taken for granted when 

it’s done by medicine. But with other 

dangers, people might say, “This tornado 

is big, we need a better shelter,” or, “I’ll 

build a levee so that I don’t get flooded 

next time,” rather than stopping the 

storm system in the first place. A great 

thing about science is that you can control 

many things once you understand them. 

You can’t just run away from problems 

all the time. Space exploration is a means 

of coming to understand our place in 

the universe because the universe is not 

always a garden of Eden. Sometimes it’s 

hostile. So I see this investment as buying 

into our space security. 

Cohen: One or more of the presidential 

candidates has talked about using 

most of NASA’s money for Earth-related 

missions. 

Tyson: You want some money on the 

earth, but if you always concentrate on 

the earth, you miss the stuff coming in 

from outside. Not only that. Discovering 

that which was unknown to the 

generation before you is a noble quest. 

Only the greatest of civilizations have 

had the luxury to do that. America is the 

country I want to live in because that 

is the kind of legacy we have enjoyed. I 

recently gave a talk to 900 people and the 

last question of the day was, “Suppose, in 

the new administration, everyone votes 

to cancel all science projects and devote 

the money to programs that help people. 

If you were given the choice of one and 

only one science project to have happen, 

what would that be?” You know what I’d 

do? I’d use that money to build a boat 

and sail to a country that’s investing in 

science projects. America would no longer 

be the country I grew up in, the one that 

believes we’ll have a tomorrow different 

from today because we’ve funded creative 

people whose goal in life is to make a 

better world. ●

16 | ASK MAGAZINE
Maj. Santos Munoz, Joint Functional Component Command for Space, and other 

Vandenberg leadership give farewells to airmen boarding a C-5 Galaxy headed to McGuire 

AFB, NJ, on February 15. Thirty-six airmen from the 30th Space Wing were deployed in 

Photo Credit: U.S. Air Force/Airman 1st Class Jonathan Olds

support of Joint Task Force Burnt Frost. 

Operation 

Burnt Frost:

T he P o w er o f S o c ial N et w orks

By Lucas Steinhauser and Scott Thon

STORY | ASK MAGAZINE | 17
Coordination, communication, and knowledge sharing were 

major challenges, yet they were critical to the mission’s success. 

Social networks played key roles in the successful outcome of 

the operation, connecting people and their knowledge. 

Sociologists define social networks as connections among 

people, the informal personal relationships based on trust and 

reciprocity. In other words, they are made up of the people you 

know (and some of the people they know) who can be relied on 

to offer knowledge and assistance when you need them and who 

expect you to return the favor when and if the need arises. 

This is one story of how social networks contributed to the 

success of Operation Burnt Frost.

Social Networks at Work

It was late one evening in December 2007. Colonel Michael 

Carey, deputy director of global operations for U.S. Strategic 

Command, and his team had been working all day to find an 

expert in modeling the orbit of space objects. Col. Carey got out 

his notebook of contacts and called an old colleague at home: 

“Hey, Jeff, I need your help real quick ....” Jeff didn’t know 

the answer, but he was able to give Col. Carey the name of an 

engineer he knew at NASA who was an expert in the area.

The challenge of intercepting a rapidly spinning, bus-sized 

satellite as it hurled through space at 17,000 mph was daunting 

and unlike anything the team had done before. The complex 

problem required expertise to calculate the necessary trajectory 

and to understand the likelihood of success. Finding the expert at 

NASA so quickly—through a couple of phone calls—was a huge 

benefit to the tightly scheduled mission. His involvement proved 

critical to mission success. He provided invaluable knowledge 

through analytical modeling and planning, information that 

fed operational plans and supported the decision briefing that 

went to the president of the United States.

The mission’s success might have been jeopardized if Col. 

Carey hadn’t been able to reach out and connect with the 

appropriate subject-matter experts. Leveraging expertise through 

individual social networks was a huge factor in the success of 

the operation. Many organizations were capable of supporting 

various critical tasks, but knowing and being able to contact the 

many subject-matter experts saved time, increased confidence, 

and improved mission effectiveness.

When it was over, Col. Carey recalled the numerous valuable 

contacts he and his team had accumulated, and the wealth of 

talent, skills, and specialized expertise they provided. Looking 

back, he expressed his desire to maintain the contacts and 

relationships made during the operation, contacts likely to prove 

fruitful for new missions and new challenges. And Col. Carey 

can now count himself as a member of all the social networks 

of all the subject-matter experts that he came in contact with 

during this operation. 

A Recognized Asset

Most of us have informal networks we can call on for information 

and assistance. Engineers, scientists, project leaders, and managers 

in many organizations rely on those contacts for expertise and 

advice. Some organizations—Whirlpool, Halliburton, SanofiAventis, Chevron, and Caterpillar, for example—have made 

explicit efforts to support and strengthen the social networks 

On February 20, 2008, a single Standard Missile 3 (SM3), fired from the USS Lake Erie in the 

Pacific Ocean, shot down a National Reconnaissance Office satellite that was falling out of orbit 

and potentially posing danger to people around the globe. The ailing satellite’s fuel tank contained 

nearly 1,000 lbs. of highly toxic hydrazine fuel. President Bush tasked U.S. Strategic Command 

with seeking a way to mitigate the danger to people around the world, and Operation Burnt Frost 

was born. The mission required the collaboration of more than two dozen federal agencies whose 

personnel were spread around the United States. 

Finding the expert at NASA so

quickly—through a couple of

phone calls—was a huge benefit

to the tightly scheduled mission.

18 | ASK MAGAZINE
of their employees. Frequently including relationships that go 

beyond their organizational boundaries, these connections can 

promote cross-cultural, global collaboration by connecting 

individuals who share similar interests.

These personal connections can center on a common 

passion or profession—for instance, space launch or a technical 

discipline—or shared experience, like attending school together. 

Research has shown that high performers typically have especially 

robust connections outside their unit or organization. 

Networks can be supported by a wide range of 

communication media; face-to-face interactions are powerful 

and important builders of trust and understanding, but 

telephone, e-mail, and Web-based collaboration tools also help 

maintain social networks. New social networking tools such 

as LinkedIn and Facebook help people stay in contact as they 

move to new organizations or new job responsibilities. 

Networking and Collaboration = Success

On February 20, the SM3 streaked skyward. Moments later, the 

efforts of hundreds of subject-matter experts, linked together by 

their personal and professional connections, paid huge dividends 

150 miles above the earth as the missile slammed into the falling 

satellite, smashing it to pieces that would harmlessly burn up in 

the atmosphere. This impressive technical accomplishment was 

an equally impressive organizational accomplishment. Extensive 

social networking played a key role throughout the operation 

and was a major part of the successful intercept. ●

Photo Credit: U.S. Navy

The USS Lake Erie launched a Standard 

Missile 3 at a non-functioning National 

Reconnaissance Office satellite as 

it traveled in space at more than 

17,000 mph over the Pacific Ocean. 

Four Ways to Strengthen 

Your Social Network

1. Actively participate in communities of practice. 

In many organizations, formal and informal 

communities bring together people with shared 

interests and related experiences. Such communities 

excel at knowledge sharing and developing 

professional and personal contacts.

2. Contact the author. If you read an interesting 

article, blog, or Web page, follow up with the author 

to share ideas and learn more. 

3. Participate in organizational social functions. 

These events allow you to establish relationships with 

individuals outside your branch or division and give you 

access to diverse knowledge and experience.

4. Join professional organizations and attend 

conferences. These activities provide opportunities 

to extend your networks beyond the boundaries of 

your organization and to get new perspectives on 

your own knowledge.

Scott Thon leads the Knowledge Transfer Office at U.S. 

Strategic Command. He is dedicated to implementing innovative 

knowledge transfer concepts that leverage social and human 

capital within the Command. A graduate of the U.S. Army War 

College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, he holds a BS in business from 

the University of Minnesota and an MS in logistics from the Naval 

Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.

Lucas Steinhauser is the deputy chief of the Knowledge 

Transfer Office at U.S. Strategic Command. He recently received 

a doctorate in information systems and technology from the 

University of Nebraska at Omaha. His research focuses on the 

use of collaborative work practices that are enabled through 

information technology.

ASK MAGAZINE | 19
An Introduction to System Safety

By Nancy Leveson

Photo courtesy NASA History Office

The explosion of several Atlas F missiles in their silos was one of the 

signals that system safety engineering was needed. The missiles later 

became part of NASA’s expendable launch systems, though accidents 

still happened. In 1965, the NASA experimental Atlas/Centaur lifted off 

the pad and the main stage prematurely cut off, causing the vehicle to 

fall back onto the pad and explode.

20 | ASK MAGAZINE | INSIGHT
System safety uses systems theory and systems engineering approaches to prevent foreseeable accidents 

and minimize the effects of unforeseen ones. It considers losses in general, not just human death or injury. 

Such losses may include destruction of property, loss of mission, and environmental harm. 

A Little History

Rigorous, defined approaches to safety engineering mostly arose 

after World War II, when the Atomic Energy Commission (and 

later the Nuclear Regulatory Commission) were engaged in a 

public debate about the safety of nuclear power; civil aviation was 

trying to convince a skeptical public to fly; the chemical industry 

was coping with larger plants, increasingly lethal chemicals, and 

heightened societal concern about pollution; and the Department 

of Defense (DoD) was developing ballistic missile systems and 

increasingly dangerous weapons. These parallel efforts resulted in 

very different approaches, mostly because the problems they needed 

to solve were different.

While the nuclear power, commercial aircraft, chemical, and 

other industries have taken a conservative approach to introducing 

new technology, changing designs slowly over time, defense and 

space systems have pushed the technology envelope, developing 

tremendously complex, novel designs that stretched the limits 

of current engineering knowledge, continually introducing 

new and unproven technology, with limited opportunities to 

test and learn from extensive experience. In response, a unique 

approach to engineering for safety, called system safety, arose in 

these industries.

When the Atlas and Titan intercontinental ballistic missiles 

(ICBMs) were being developed in the 1950s, system safety was not 

yet identified and assigned as a specific responsibility. Instead, each 

designer, manager, and engineer was responsible for the reliability of 

his particular component or subsystem. As a result, many interface 

problems went unnoticed until it was too late. Within eighteen 

months after the fleet of 71 Atlas F missiles became operational, four 

blew up in their silos during operational testing. The missiles also 

had an extremely low launch success rate. The air force had typically 

blamed most accidents on pilot error, but these new liquid-propellant 

missiles had no pilots to blame and yet blew up frequently and with 

devastating results. When these early losses were investigated, a large 

percentage of them were traced to deficiencies in design, operations, 

and management. The importance of treating safety as a system

problem became clear and, as a result, systems engineering and system 

safety (a subdiscipline of systems engineering) were developed. 

The Minuteman ICBM became the first weapon system to have 

a contractual, formal, disciplined system safety program. At first, few 

techniques that could be used on these systems existed, but specialized 

system safety practices evolved over time. Particular emphasis was 

placed on hazard analysis techniques, such as fault trees, which were 

first developed to cope with complex programs like Minuteman. 

While these techniques were useful for the technology of the time, new 

technologies, particularly digital technology and software, have made 

many of them no longer appropriate for the increasingly complex, 

software-intensive systems we build today. Unfortunately, recognition 

of these limitations has been slow. Attempts to apply techniques 

developed for the simpler and primarily electro-mechanical systems of 

the past continue, with only partial success.

The space program was the second major area to apply system 

safety approaches in a disciplined way. After the 1967 Apollo 1 

fire that killed three astronauts, NASA commissioned the General 

Electric Company at Daytona Beach, among others, to develop 

policies and procedures that became models for civilian space flight 

safety activities. Jerome Lederer was hired to head safety at NASA. 

Under his leadership, an extensive system safety program was set 

up for space projects, much of it patterned after the air force and 

DoD programs. Many of the same engineers and companies that 

had established formal system safety defense programs also were 

involved in space programs, and the systems engineering and system 

safety technology and management activities were transferred to 

this new work. 

But as time has passed without major new manned space 

flight development projects at NASA, many of the very effective 

NASA system safety practices have been replaced by reliability 

engineering and approaches to safety used by industries with 

very different requirements. For Constellation to be successful, 

traditional system safety practices will need to be reemphasized and 

extended to handle new technology, particularly extensive use of 

software and computers.

ASK MAGAZINE | 21
What Is System Safety?

The primary concern of system safety is the management 

of system hazards as opposed to emphasis on eliminating 

component failures in reliability engineering. Borrowing 

Thomas Huxley’s definition of science, in 1968 George Mueller 

described the then-new discipline of system safety engineering 

as “organized common sense.” It is a planned, disciplined, and 

systematic approach to identifying, analyzing, eliminating, 

and controlling hazards by analysis, design, and management 

procedures throughout a system’s life cycle. System safety 

activities start in the earliest concept development stages of 

a project and continue through design, production, testing, 

operational use, and disposal. 

Although system safety is a relatively new and stillevolving discipline, some general principles hold for its various 

manifestations and distinguish it from other approaches to 

safety and risk management.

• System safety emphasizes building in safety, not adding 

protection features to a completed design. System safety 

emphasizes the early identification of hazards so action can 

be taken to eliminate or minimize them in early design 

decisions; 70 to 90 percent of the design decisions that 

affect safety are made in concept development, requirements 

definition, and architectural design. The degree to which 

it is economically feasible to eliminate or minimize a 

hazard rather than to control it depends on the stage in 

system development at which the hazard is identified and 

considered. Early integration of safety considerations into 

the development process allows maximum safety with 

minimum negative impact. The usually more expensive and 

less effective alternative is to design first, identify the hazards, 

and then add on protective equipment to control the hazards 

when they occur. A recent demonstration project for the Jet 

Propulsion Laboratory showed how safety can be designed 

into a spacecraft (an outer-planets explorer, in this case) from 

the early concept formation and trade study stages. New 

hazard analysis approaches that include software were used. 

(See http://sunnyday.mit.edu/papers/IEEE-Aerospace.pdf.) 

• System safety deals with systems as a whole rather 

than with subsystems or components. Safety is an 

emergent property of systems, not components. One 

of the principle responsibilities of system safety is to 

evaluate the interfaces between the system components 

and determine the effects of component interaction. (The 

Photo Credit: U.S. Air Force

The Minuteman ICBM became 

the first weapon system to have a 

formal, disciplined system safety 

program. Here, a Minuteman II 

launches successfully.

22 | ASK MAGAZINE
set of components includes humans, machines, and the 

environment.) Safety is an emergent system property. It is 

not possible to determine whether a spacecraft design 

is acceptably safe, for example, by examining a single 

valve. In fact, statements about the “safety of the valve” 

without information about the context in which it is used 

are meaningless. Conclusions can be reached about the 

reliability of the valve (defined as the probability that 

the behavior of the valve will satisfy its specification over 

time and under given conditions), but safety can only be 

determined by the relationship between the valve and the 

other spacecraft components, in the context of the whole.

• System safety takes a larger view of hazard causes than

just failures. A lack of differentiation between safety and 

reliability is widespread at NASA and elsewhere. Hazards 

are not always caused by component failures, and all 

failures do not cause hazards. Reliability engineering 

concentrates on component failure as the cause of accidents 

and a variety of techniques (including redundancy 

and overdesign) are used to minimize them. As early 

missile systems showed, however, losses may arise from 

interactions among system components; serious accidents 

have occurred when the system components were all 

functioning exactly as specified. The Mars Polar Lander 

loss is an example. Each component worked as specified 

but problems arose in the interactions between the landing 

leg sensors and the software logic responsible for shutting 

down the descent engines. Reliability analysis considers 

only the possibility of accidents related to failures; it does 

not investigate potential damage that could result from 

successful operation of individual components. Software, 

ubiquitous in space systems today, is an important 

consideration here. In most software-related accidents, 

the software operates exactly as intended. Focusing on 

increasing the reliability with which the software satisfies 

its requirements will have little impact on system safety. 

Reliability and safety may even conflict. Sometimes, in 

fact, increasing safety can decrease system reliability. Under 

some conditions, for instance, shutting down a system may 

be an appropriate way to prevent a hazard. That increasing 

reliability can diminish safety may be a little harder to see. 

For example, increasing the reliability (reducing the failure 

rate) of a tank by increasing the burst pressure–to–working 

pressure ratio may result in worse losses if the tank does 

rupture at the higher pressure. System safety analyses start 

from hazards, not failures and failure rates, and include 

dysfunctional interactions among components and system 

design errors. The events leading to an accident may 

be a complex combination of equipment failure, faulty 

maintenance, instrumentation and control inadequacies, 

human actions, design errors, and poor management 

decision making. All these factors must be considered.

• System safety emphasizes analysis in addition to past 

experience and codes of practice. Standards and codes 

of practice incorporate experience and knowledge about 

how to reduce hazards, usually accumulated over long 

periods of time from previous mistakes. While the use of 

such standards and learning from experience is essential 

in all aspects of engineering, including safety, the pace of 

change today does not always allow for such experience to 

accumulate. System safety analysis attempts to anticipate 

and prevent accidents and near misses before they occur, 

in addition to learning from the past.

• System safety emphasizes qualitative rather than 

quantitative approaches. A system safety approach 

identifies hazards as early as possible in the design stage and 

then designs to eliminate or control those hazards. At these 

early stages, quantitative information usually does not exist. 

Although such information would be useful in prioritizing 

For Constellation to be successful, traditional system safety practices

will need to be reemphasized and extended to handle new technology, 

particularly extensive use of software and computers.

ASK MAGAZINE | 23
hazards, subjective judgments about the likelihood of a 

hazard are usually adequate and all that is possible when 

design decisions must be made. In addition, probabilistic 

risk analyses that exclude potential causes of an accident, 

including interactions among non-failing components, 

design errors, software and hardware requirements errors, and 

poor management decision making, can lead to dangerous 

complacency and focusing engineering efforts only on the 

accident causes for which those measures are possible. If 

enough were known about factors such as design errors to 

define a probability for them, then safety would be more 

effectively enhanced by removing the design error than by 

measuring it in order to convince someone that it will never 

cause an accident. In the case of the Mars Polar Lander, if the 

scenario that unfolded had been known and could have been 

included in a probabilistic risk analysis, then the engineers 

would have had enough information to change the software 

so the unsafe control command would not be issued. 

• System safety is more than just systems engineering 

and must incorporate management and safety culture 

concerns. System safety engineering is an important 

part of system safety, but the concerns of system safety 

extend beyond the traditional boundaries of engineering. 

In 1968, Jerome Lederer, then the director of the NASA 

Manned Flight Safety Program for Apollo, wrote:

 System safety covers the total spectrum of risk 

management. It goes beyond the hardware and associated 

procedures of system safety engineering. It involves: 

attitudes and motivation of designers and production 

people, employee/management rapport, the relation 

of industrial associations among themselves and with 

government, human factors in supervision and quality 

control, documentation on the interfaces of industrial 

and public safety with design and operations, the interest 

and attitudes of top management, the effects of the 

legal system on accident investigations and exchange of 

information, the certification of critical workers, political 

considerations, resources, public sentiment, and many 

other nontechnical but vital influences on the attainment 

of an acceptable level of risk control. These nontechnical 

aspects of system safety cannot be ignored.

Using these general principles, system safety attempts to 

manage hazards through analysis, design, and management 

procedures. Key activities include analyzing system hazards from 

the top down, starting in the early concept design stage to eliminate 

or control hazards and continuing during the life of the system to 

evaluate changes in the system or the environment; documenting 

and tracking hazards and their resolutions (establishing audit trails); 

designing to eliminate or control hazards and minimize damage; 

maintaining safety information systems and documentation; and 

establishing reporting and information channels. ●

For more information see the following:

• http://sunnyday.mit.edu/papers/jsr.pdf

• http://sunnyday.mit.edu/accidents/safetyscience-single.pdf

• http://sunnyday.mit.edu/ESMD-Final-Report.pdf

Nancy Leveson is a professor of aeronautics and 

astronautics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has 

been associated with NASA for more than twenty years, was a 

member of the NASA Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel at the 

time of the Columbia loss, and was a consultant for the Columbia

Accident Investigation Board. She is a member of the National 

Academy of Engineering. 

Seated at the witness table before the Senate Committee on Aeronautical and Space Services hearing on the Apollo 1 accident are (left to right) Dr. Robert C. 

Seamans, NASA deputy administrator; James E. Webb, NASA administrator; Dr. George E. Mueller, associate administrator for Manned Space Flight; and Maj. Gen. 

Samuel C. Phillips, Apollo Program director. In an effort to prevent another such tragedy from occurring, NASA commissioned the General Electric Company 

and others to develop policies and procedures that became models for civilian space flight safety activities.

Photo Credit: NASA

24 | ASK MAGAZINE
For decades now, NASA has been sending spacecraft throughout 

the solar system. Once in space, many of these craft use advanced 

cameras to create images of corners and crevices of our universe never 

before seen and then transmit these pictures back to laboratories on 

Earth, where scientists then ask: What exactly are we looking at?

That question is often answered at NASA’s Jet Propulsion 

Laboratory (JPL) in the Image Processing Laboratory, founded 

in 1966 to receive and make sense of spacecraft imagery. There, 

NASA-invented VICAR (Video Image Communication and 

Retrieval) software has, through the years, laid the groundwork 

for understanding images of all kinds. The original software, 

created by a JPL team of three—Robert Nathan, Fred Billingsley, 

and Robert Selzer—is still in use today, although with 

improvements that offer greater accuracy and effectiveness.

The imaging division at JPL has grown increasingly 

sophisticated over the years, developing new processes and 

technologies to handle increasingly complex acquisitions from 

NASA science missions, from the Voyager images of Saturn and 

Jupiter taken in the 1970s to new imagery captured by the Mars 

Reconnaissance Orbiter in late 2006 that suggests water still 

flows on Mars, opening the possibility that the red planet could 

perhaps support life. 

Partnership

Selzer, from the original VICAR team, has made the NASA 

imaging technology his life’s work, spending forty-six years as 

a NASA employee and continuing to work on its advancement 

even after his retirement from JPL. He received many NASA 

awards for technical achievement, including the prestigious 

Technology and Application Program Exceptional Achievement 

Medal. During the last fifteen years of his career as a government 

scientist, he led the JPL Biomedical Image Processing Laboratory, 

working on medical applications of the imaging technology.

The project began when the imaging team developed the 

idea of using the VICAR software to analyze X-ray images of 

soft tissue. Typically, X-rays are not effective for this purpose, 

but researchers thought the imaging software might change 

that. The results were interesting, but too much quality was 

lost in transferring the pictures into a digital format for useful 

analysis. Still, the idea seemed promising, so, with several grants 

from NASA, the testing continued.

Selzer’s JPL team, partnering with scientists from the 

University of Southern California under the direction of the 

late Dr. David Blankenhorn and Dr. Howard Hodis, director 

of the Atherosclerosis Research Unit at the school’s Keck School 

of Medicine, began to image X-rays of arteries. Achieving only 

marginal success, they hit upon the idea of applying the software 

to ultrasound imagery, which was already digitally formatted. 

The new approach proved successful for assessing plaque buildup 

and arterial wall thickness, direct predictors of heart disease. 

Testing continued, and the team, buoyed by its successes, began 

looking for outside funding and methods of distribution. At this 

point, Gary F. Thompson entered the picture. 

Thompson has a history of heart disease in his family. The 

first male in many generations to live past age fifty, and the last 

living male in his family line, Thompson comes from a long line 

of active, athletic men who, with no prior symptoms, suffered fatal 

heart-related events. A lifelong athlete who had boxed in the New 

York City Golden Gloves tournament in his youth and ran his first 

marathon in 1975, Thompson was understandably concerned, but 

feeling confident, when he approached his fiftieth birthday. He 

had the family history working against him, but he was also in 

prime shape. To celebrate his half-century mark, he planned to run 

three marathons—Los Angeles, New York, and Boston—and he 

underwent a battery of medical tests, all of which confirmed that he 

was in perfect health, without any signs of cardiovascular disease.

Seven days after his birthday, Thompson ran the Los 

Angeles marathon. At the fifteenth mile, he started experiencing 

Photo courtesy NASA Spinoff

ArterioVision measures the thickness of the first two layers of the carotid artery 

wall using an ultrasound procedure and advanced image-analysis software. 

Featured Invention: 

NASA Spinoff Technology Helps 

Detect Cardiovascular Disease

 By Daniel Lockney 

STORY | ASK MAGAZINE | 25
back pain. By the twentieth mile, it became so excruciating that 

he stopped running. Later, at the hospital, doctors confirmed 

that he had suffered a moderate heart attack and lost 48 percent 

of his heart muscle. Modern medical testing, he realized, had 

failed him. Luckily for Thompson, having 52 percent of his 

heart working was the equivalent of 127 percent for men of his 

age, because he was so athletic.

Months later, at dinner with David Baltimore, then 

president of the California Institute of Technology, Thompson 

asked about new heart-related breakthroughs and was surprised 

to hear that there was, indeed, a new technology that had 

been developed at JPL: a noninvasive diagnostic system with 

the ability to accurately predict heart health. Baltimore offered 

to set up an appointment for Thompson at the University of 

Southern California hospital where this new method was being 

tested, but Thompson declined.

Instead, he went in on his own, unannounced, and 

without revealing his family history or heart attack. Despite his 

recent heart attack, he gave every impression of great health. A 

technician performed an ultrasound scan on either side of his 

neck, the location of the carotid arteries. When the results were 

in, the technician told Thompson that he needed to meet with 

the doctor immediately. The test showed that Thompson had the 

thickest artery walls of the more than 3,000 people tested, a clear 

indicator that he was in danger of a heart attack or stroke.

Thompson was impressed. This new device had managed 

to find what all the other tests had missed. Thompson, a hardcharging entrepreneur, met with the researchers Selzer and 

Hodis and told them that they needed to get this technology into 

the hands of physicians. They agreed. Thompson developed a 

business plan, secured an exclusive license for the JPL-developed 

technology from Caltech, and invested his own money to start 

Medical Technologies International Inc. (MTI) in Palm Desert, 

California. Selzer now serves as the company’s chief engineer.

Product Outcome

MTI licensed fourteen research institutions around the world for 

pre-U.S. Food and Drug Administration clearance and researchonly use of the analysis software, and incorporated feedback from 

these groups into the new clinical product it was developing. 

It patented the new developments and then submitted the 

technology to a rigorous review process at the FDA, which cleared 

the device for public use. MTI also filed with the American 

Medical Association to have the device given a dedicated Current 

Procedural Technology (CPT) code for insurance purposes, thus 

encouraging more doctors to offer this test to patients.

The patented software is being used in MTI’s 

ArterioVision, a carotid intima-media thickness (CIMT) test 

that uses ultrasound image-capturing and analysis software to 

noninvasively identify the risk for the major cause of heart attack 

and strokes: atherosclerosis, a buildup of cholesterol and fatty 

substances in the arteries, combined with arterial hardening. 

Atherosclerosis, referred to by the American Heart Association 

(AHA) as the “silent killer,” initially has no discernable symptoms 

until one or more of the arteries becomes so congested that these 

major, sometimes fatal, problems occur. The AHA estimates 

that two out of three unexpected cardiac deaths occur without 

prior symptoms.

Photo courtesy oNASA Spinoff

ArterioVision uses a proprietary database and JPL-developed algorithms to show percentile of risk for atherosclerosis.

This new device had managed to find

what all the other tests had missed.
In fact, astronaut Edward White, the first astronaut to 

ever perform a spacewalk and one of the three space pioneers to 

die during the Apollo launchpad tragedy in 1967, was thought 

by most to be in perfect health, having successfully passed the 

rigorous astronaut testing. An autopsy directly after the accident, 

though, revealed that he had extreme thickening of the arteries 

and showed most signs of heart disease. 

Unlike CT scans, which are expensive and pose some 

radiation risk, the NASA-based technology poses no risks, and it 

is relatively inexpensive. The imaging technology can distinguish 

between 256 different shades of gray and differentiate nuances 

at a subpixel level of interpolation, making it the most accurate 

in this field, and it is compatible with all existing ultrasound 

machines, making it readily accessible to physicians. 

While ArterioVision is not the only FDA-cleared CIMT 

tool on the market, it is the only one that offers a predictive 

report for the physician and patient. It explains the significance 

of test results using a proprietary database and JPL-developed 

algorithms and can extrapolate to show percentile of risk.

One particular feature of the report is the revelation of 

arterial age. It can show the patient that while he may be fifty 

years old, his arteries may be the equivalent of patients seventyfive years old. This real-world number is something patients can 

identify with and helps promote compliance with drug therapies 

and other forms of treatment—one of the most difficult aspects 

of preventing and treating heart disease. Physicians often lament 

that they stress the importance of lifestyle changes to their 

patients, but since heart disease does not initially come with 

symptoms, but instead with potentially fatal events, it is often 

difficult to impress upon the patients the urgency of taking 

care of their hearts. The ArterioVision patient report provides a 

significant warning sign and gives concrete examples.

Currently, the technology is being used in all fifty states and 

in many countries throughout the world. MTI is continuing to 

push this lifesaving technology and is rapidly expanding its sales 

force in an effort to live up to its company credo, “Making a 

Positive Difference Every Day.” 

In April 2008, this NASA spinoff technology was 

inducted into the Space Technology Hall of Fame. Without 

the researchers’ dedication to finding new applications for 

their imaging software and a vigilance for testing the result 

in the field, this medical innovation may never have made it 

outside JPL’s walls. ArterioVision’s success shows more than 

what’s inside the heart; it shows how creative thinking and 

communication can make a difference in the health and wellbeing of others. ●

This article was originally published in NASA’s Spinoff 2007 

(http://www.sti.nasa.gov/tto).

Daniel Lockney is editor of the NASA publication Spinoff, which shows the practical, tangible 

benefits of the nation’s investment in aerospace research. Since 1976, Spinoff has documented 

more than 1,600 NASA-derived technologies in the categories of medicine, transportation, 

safety, environmental resource management, computers, and manufacturing technology.

Using ultrasound image-capturing and analysis software, ArterioVision noninvasively identifies the risk for the major cause of heart attacks and strokes.

Photo courtesy NASA Spinoff

ASK MAGAZINE | 27
Title

By 

Intro

Tough Times

Staying Motivated During 

By Jennifer Cole

28 | ASK MAGAZINE | STORY
Our team was working with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on one of those rare 

projects that is just big enough. In other words, we had just enough experts on board to be effective 

yet flexible. I was the youngest as the chief engineer. Although I’d been chief engineer on a project or 

two before, this was my first time working directly with another government agency. I was relatively 

new to working with my NASA team, which included seven engineers and pilots. Our team was 

diverse in terms of experience, skills, and personalities, but we had one thing in common: we really 

enjoyed the task at hand.

That task consisted of figuring out how to safely control and 

land an airliner using just the thrust from the engines. This 

is called throttles-only control (TOC). We weren’t allowed 

to modify the airliner in any way, given the time and cost 

involved, and we had to use a “stock” airliner with line pilots. 

The idea was to give the pilots an emergency checklist that 

would provide them with the most useful information in the 

shortest time to learn how to fly TOC. Homeland Security was 

interested in expertise Dryden Flight Research Center gained 

from the earlier propulsion-controlled aircraft (PCA) project, 

which demonstrated the feasibility of the idea with an automatic 

MD-11 landing using just engine thrust for all axes of control. 

Although that project employed extensive modifications to the 

aircraft and engines, the concept of throttles-only control was 

researched extensively, in both airplanes and simulations. 

Dryden didn’t have in-house simulations of the airliner, and 

our test pilots are probably far from being representative of line 

pilots. So DHS made arrangements with an airline to get access 

to their simulations and their pilots and carry out a test flight 

with their airplanes. We research engineers are used to working 

with simulations rife with every parameter imaginable, delivered 

in a standard format and at a specified data rate. An airline 

simulation, however, is used for pilot training and certification. 

Our first challenge was to set up a conversation with the airline’s 

simulation engineer to identify the common ground between 

the limitations of the training simulation and our engineering 

needs. The simulation data was going to form the foundation 

of our flights, so the quality, format, and type of data were of 

critical importance. 

Initially, this presented a challenge from both sides as we tried 

to make a training simulation into an engineering simulation. 

We struck common ground when we were finally face to face 

and could explain what we needed and what the airline could 

provide without significant modifications. As we worked 

together, the simulation engineer suggested improvements that 

helped us out a lot. By the way, that conversation continued 

until the very last day of our work, as our parameter list evolved 

and the last data set was produced. It is clear now that this open, 

solid communication link with our simulation engineer was a 

critical aspect of the project’s success; it enabled us to get the 

best and most consistent data set possible. 

Next was scheduling time in the simulation. Because of 

their intended use, airline simulations are tightly scheduled in 

multihour blocks around the clock. Although the airline was 

getting paid for our time in the simulation, we didn’t exactly 

outrank the captains, who got the prime spots. We usually had 

the 6:00 a.m.–10:00 a.m. slot, but once or twice we got bumped 

to the 10:00 p.m.–2:00 a.m. slot. I felt especially bad for our 

simulation engineer, who remained essentially “on call” during 

our simulation times in case we crashed it (as one might crash 

a computer), couldn’t reset it, or realized we’d left a parameter 

or two out of our required list. We strove to maintain a good 

working relationship with him by giving him as much lead 

time as possible to make modifications. In the beginning, both 

ASK MAGAZINE | 29
entities set clear expectations, which helped establish a good 

working foundation. Throughout the project, we treated his 

support of our work in the simulation with top priority. 

We had a limited number of simulation hours, and a limited 

amount of travel money, so we meticulously planned every last 

minute of those simulation visits, which took us one time zone 

and three states away from California. 

We were in the zone, so to speak, getting great data. We 

had one flight under our belt and had established an excellent 

working relationship with both Homeland Security and the 

airline. We kept all our customers in the loop on our progress, 

and we didn’t sugarcoat it. When we had a concern, we made 

sure to communicate it in the context of how it would affect the 

final product, and we communicated it to the appropriate level 

and with a workable solution, if we had one. 

As with any engineering endeavor, our team had to make 

certain simplifying assumptions to stay within the scope of 

the task. As we progressed further into the research, we kept a 

running list of our unknowns and key assumptions. Some time 

after the first flight, we had identified plenty of areas for further 

research. Together, we organized and prioritized several key 

areas that we felt warranted further study, from validating our 

simplifying assumptions to exploring the checklist’s application 

to other airframes, and presented our ideas to DHS. Because we 

already had the group identified and working together, it made 

sense to build the foundation necessary to explore these other 

areas now to simplify our efforts later, if DHS wanted to fund 

further work. Then we ran into a big brick wall.

The DHS program office that was supporting us had its 

funding redirected due to new priorities. Almost overnight, our 

current work and certainly our future work were in jeopardy. 

Our small group took this rather hard as there is nothing worse 

than pouring your heart and soul (and weekends!) into a project 

and then getting the rug yanked out from under you. Although 

we had all experienced this before in our aerospace careers, 

this one stung especially hard, perhaps because we were such a 

small, flexible group and were giving the customer exactly what 

they wanted. Although we weren’t cheap, we were conducting 

research effectively and efficiently, the way all projects intend. 

As the technical experts, we were given the authority to make 

technical decisions, even big ones. If we had a question about 

project scope or aircraft capability, we had the phone number of 

the person who could answer it.

As the chief engineer, I served largely as “management” 

when we were on travel, so I learned firsthand about problems 

and successes. Now, it was incumbent upon me to keep us 

moving toward our goal, doing as much as we could for as long 

as we could, without getting mired in the muck of why this had 

to happen and also searching for a reason we understood.

First things first: we refocused on the task at hand. There 

was a possibility that we wouldn’t get a second flight, which 

meant that we had to reprioritize our simulation times. We had 

to strike a balance between pilot availability and simulation time; 

if pilots weren’t available at the same time as the simulation, 

we had a prioritized list of research maneuvers to do instead 

with the rest of the research team. When the pilots were there, 

we focused more on refining the checklist. Either way, we 

functioned as a well-oiled machine, quickly moving from one 

maneuver to the next. Every person in the simulation (and for 

the flights) had a specific role, from pilot to flight test engineer 

to qualitative data recording. 

Once the team had its

sights set on what

we could still do, we

stopped wasting

energy on the things

we couldn’t control. 

30 | ASK MAGAZINE
Once the team had its sights set on what we could still do, 

we stopped wasting energy on the things we couldn’t control. 

We communicated our tweaked “replan” back to DHS and 

the airline to make sure our priorities still aligned. We kept 

the conversation focused on the minimum level of support we 

needed to still deliver a product and what that product would 

look like. All the players were in the room, and everyone had a 

stake, operating just as we had since the beginning. Ultimately, 

we were able to get everyone’s concurrence, and DHS gave us 

the approval to proceed. 

We headed back to the simulations. It was difficult to get 

remotivated, sitting in the simulation before the sun was even 

up and gearing up for another four hours in close quarters. 

Our jokes turned sarcastic, and we had some exhausted faces 

at dinners. Generally speaking, I am a rather happy person who 

always tries to look on the bright side of things, but even I was 

really disappointed.

Rather than try and be the lone ray of sunshine, I 

concentrated on keeping our group on schedule. We still had 

breakfast at the cafeteria every morning before our sessions and 

lunch afterward. We still had dinners in the local restaurants, 

we still met for coffee in the hotel lobby, and we always met 

during our long afternoons to discuss what we’d learned that 

day and how it affected the next day’s work. This helped to keep 

the group together as we moved forward.

Remember the diverse set of personalities mentioned 

earlier? The potpourri of people on this project really helped to 

keep us going and smiling. One member of the group seemed 

particularly susceptible to adventures during travel, from getting 

upgraded to first class because of purported center-of-gravity 

issues to taking off before the rest of the group and somehow 

landing after us. His stories provided much needed humor and a 

sense of anticipation as we all wondered what the story was going 

to be this time. Another engineer had to be talked into joining us 

for our simulation sessions. I pseudo-bribed him into going with 

us by loaning him seasons from my collection of The Simpsons

DVDs. This became a running joke, as we ran out of simulation 

sessions before I ran out of Simpsons episodes. We learned that 

pilots enjoy eating almost as much as they enjoy flying, and our 

simulation engineer became known as God, as only he could 

bring us back from a failed maneuver or save our data.

It was the little things—the oatmeal breakfast before the 

simulation session and the turkey sandwiches and apple pie 

afterward, the complimentary hotel coffee, the Simpsons jokes, 

and the vortex of activity that always followed one particular 

team member—that kept us going during the tough times. We 

finished our simulation sessions, received permission to do our 

final flight, obtained one-of-a-kind data, and finished the year 

with our final report to Homeland Security. Two years later, we 

are still fielding requests for presentations and the occasional 

interview, and our team’s collective efforts have been recognized 

with a NASA Group Achievement Award. ●

Jennifer Cole is chief of the Research Aerodynamics and 

Propulsion Branch at Dryden Flight Research Center in Edwards, 

California.

It was the little things—the oatmeal

breakfast before the simulation

session and the turkey sandwiches

and apple pie afterward, the

complimentary hotel coffee, the

Simpsons jokes, and the vortex of

activity that always followed one

particular team member—that kept

us going during the tough times.

ASK MAGAZINE | 31
The Optimized Project Portfolio

By Michael A. Hall

Albert Burkholder is vice president of group operations for Griffin Systems, Inc. Sitting in a blazing 

hot office in the El Centro facility, he is reflecting on what he has heard and seen today during the 

operations meeting with Ed Cruz, the site operations director. Albert understands the importance of 

having a strategy. He also realizes many of the projects Ed just reported on will yield no measurable 

strategic results.

32 | ASK MAGAZINE | INSIGHT
Months earlier, Albert and the leadership team spent several 

days off site to formulate a two-year strategy and agreed on a list 

of twenty-one initiatives to achieve it. For the past four years, 

revenue has been in decline in every market they serve. On a 

brighter note, strategy implementation started ten months ago 

and a few of the initiatives increased revenue growth during the 

past three quarters. The most recent quarterly report shows a 

5 percent increase last month and a 7 percent increase in yearto-date revenue. Increasing revenue for three straight quarters is 

a significant improvement, but contract delivery performance, 

part quality, and scrap rates are all tracking in the wrong 

direction. The strategy identified two of these areas—dedication 

to quality and “do what we say we will do”—as fundamental 

beliefs and outlined initiatives to address them.

Albert and the team are concerned that the sites cannot 

handle all the projects. How can the leadership team be sure 

the right things are being done? What can be done to make 

sure the organization’s project teams are communicating 

clearly and understanding each other? Albert and his team were 

learning an important lesson about strategic success. Success 

is a function of the strategy’s quality and the effectiveness and 

efficiency of its implementation. 

Judging projects in terms of their contribution to strategic 

and operational objectives, organizations can develop a projectand program-selection process—or project portfolio process—to 

set priorities. Project portfolio management is like the process 

used to manage an individual’s investment portfolio. Investors 

set objectives that are used to evaluate investment choices, 

ensuring proper emphasis and risk management. The same 

thinking guides project portfolio management. Establishing 

an optimal project portfolio aids success because pursuing the 

wrong projects (or too many projects with too few resources) 

can jeopardize both project execution and achievement of 

the organization’s goals. While many variables influence 

the success of projects—including the experience of project 

managers, the organizational structure and how it supports 

projects, and the way projects are funded—setting priorities 

effectively ensures that successful projects will contribute to 

organizational success. 

Project Priority Setting 

Using a systematic, data-driven portfolio process to manage 

work involves an ongoing, iterative process that

• Eliminates confusion as to what projects are most important

• Has the right mix of strategic and tactical projects

• Minimizes risks connected to lack of project coordination 

and visibility

• Controls project size and scope 

• Makes practical use of valuable resources

• Identifies important links to ongoing, long-term capital 

expenditures and other strategic initiatives

• Is systematic

• Is data-driven

Without a systematic process to manage a portfolio 

of projects, firms are prone to project proliferation and 

project scope creep (meaning projects grow into more than 

was planned or are outside the strategy). Using an effective 

portfolio management process provides the means for people 

to focus on the critical few initiatives that will deliver results 

and reduce complexity in a given time. This may be especially 

important for U.S. government and quasi-government agencies 

struggling to implement strategies given changes in leadership, 

administration, and suppliers. 

NASA’s strategic goals, laid out in its 2006 plan, define 

the breadth, depth, and complexity of what it is striving to 

accomplish. The challenge for NASA, as for any organization, 

is in the implementation. The project portfolio process helps 

automate data gathering and reporting so complex projects and 

missions can be managed effectively. An optimized portfolio 

includes a dashboard for leaders to monitor and assess resource 

Using an effective portfolio management process provides the means

for people to focus on the critical few initiatives that will deliver

results and reduce complexity in a given time.

ASK MAGAZINE | 33
needs and overall performance against specific measures. This 

minimizes project proliferation and scope creep.

As NASA continues to build an initiative portfolio, two key 

questions can help the Agency keep focus:

1. Given available resources and the need to not compromise 

ongoing operations, how many small/medium/large 

initiatives can we take on?

2. How can we ensure that we are working on the highestpriority initiatives?

Effective project portfolio management means knowing 

the relative value and risk associated with every project that 

has been proposed or is under way. It means knowing how 

resources are deployed across projects and what resources 

are available for new projects. Most of all, it means making 

tough decisions about which projects will be done and when, 

based on a shared understanding of each project’s potential for 

adding value to the organization.

The work environment plays a pivotal role in getting results 

from project portfolio management. This includes making 

sure that people have the right expectations and resources, 

and that obstacles are removed. It includes people clearly 

understanding the “what’s in it for me” of achieving success. 

And it includes making sure people know how, specifically, their 

work advances—or retards—both the project and the overall 

portfolio. Finally, it includes making an accurate assessment of 

the cross-project impact of actions, so that what supports one 

project does not derail another.

Developing an optimal project portfolio is usually a 

collaborative process between our consulting firm, KepnerTregoe, and clients, and we work with them to establish 

a process for ongoing project portfolio management. An 

effective portfolio management process can provide the 

means for people to focus on the “critical few” initiatives that 

deliver results. ● Michael A. Hall is an IP consultant at Kepner-Tregoe, Inc.

Project Consistency Supports

Portfolio Management

Project portfolio management works best when projects 

are managed in a consistent way. NASA employs a 

common project management framework for both 

contractor and NASA teams managing projects. Aligning 

project standards and practices with the Project 

Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) and supporting 

use of common project software are two ways to help 

create a shared project language and approach.

When NASA changed Lockheed Martin Space Operation’s 

Science, Engineering, Analysis, and Test Operation (SEAT) 

to completion-form and performance-based contracting, 

Lockheed Martin SEAT, rather than NASA, was given the 

responsibility of project management. Kepner-Tregoe 

provided the SEAT program with training to help them gain 

the skills needed to manage projects, not just work on them. 

Kepner-Tregoe’s project management process is taught in 

workshops, which focus on applying principles, and through 

a “learn and do” process, where our consultants act as 

project managers and trainers on actual projects. As the 

client project managers learn the process, they assume more 

responsibility. Armed with a powerful project management 

process, project managers and team members can better 

define and plan a project while nimbly anticipating and 

responding to issues during implementation. 

34 | ASK MAGAZINE
Launched in 1996, the Total 

Ozone Mapping Spectrometer 

(TOMS) satellite was expected 

to map and understand the 

magnitude of polar ozone 

depletion for two years. More 

than ten years later, it was 

still in orbit and providing 

valuable scientific data. Its life 

was extended thanks in part to a 

collaboration with Capitol College’s 

Space Operations Institute (SOI), 

whose students became lead controllers 

of the NASA spacecraft in 2002, first 

from Goddard Space Flight Center and 

then from a control center on campus. Using 

students for TOMS mission support reduced 

NASA’s operational cost from millions of dollars a year 

to a few hundred thousand dollars, making the extended 

mission operations possible. The partnership also gave the 

students an important hands-on learning experience. The Capitol 

College team demonstrated that a small contingent of engineering 

students could perform a number of complex technical tasks well 

with limited subject-matter expert supervision. Dave Wagner, 

Capitol College’s Space Operations Institute director, described 

the arrangement as a “win-win situation,” saying, “Students get to 

learn and NASA reduces its cost without increasing its risk.”

Image Credit: NASA/Goddard Scientific Visualization Studio

eL

ra n ni

g by

Do

ni

g

:

A

N

ASA–

Capitol College Partnership

By Ken Dolan

Using data from NASA’s Total 

Ozone Mapping Spectrometer 

(TOMS) instrument onboard 

the Earth Probe satellite, 

researchers can evaluate and 

compare current conditions 

over the South Pole to readings 

taken by other instruments 

in years past. This shows the 

Antarctic ozone hole in 2000.

STORY | ASK MAGAZINE | 35
One task Capitol 

College students took 

on was redesigning 

the operations ground 

system for the satellite.

With NASA contractors 

and college faculty 

serving as technical 

mentors, Noah Williams 

and Peter Fetterer put 

together a ground system 

that emulated the one 

being used for operations in 

the TOMS control center at 

Goddard. It was not a simple 

task. Among other things, 

the system had to capture data 

from the tracking station, separate 

spacecraft and science data, display 

spacecraft health and safety data, 

and provide spacecraft and instrument 

command capabilities.

Fetterer remembers, “Noah started with 

some spare hardware the school had lying around. 

We received some software and some incomplete 

instructions on how to install the software. Noah and I had to 

work though various issues and were able to get some answers 

to questions from the operations folks. As we grew more 

confident that the system was receiving telemetry correctly, we 

built a system using the newer IBM e-series servers.” Williams 

adds, “On the security side, in some cases, the previously used 

software was swapped out for more secure, commercial software 

that provided more functionality.”

As the work proceeded, Si Tran, a Capitol College 

student who had become a certified TOMS flight controller 

in the Goddard control center, came on board to verify that 

the new system 

produced exactly 

the same results as the 

operational system. Tran

ran a complete set of functional 

tests, played data through the system,

and verified system performance. Describing 

her overall experience with TOMS, Tran says, “It was

overwhelming at first, but I’m really grateful for the chance 

to get this kind of experience.”

In the summer of 2003, the Upgraded TOMS Ground 

System (UGS-1) was packed up and moved to the TOMS control 

center at Goddard. Once in place, it was again run through a 

set of successful systems tests. Then began a period of “shadow 

operations,” the new system receiving the same data at the same time 

as the operational system and exactly duplicating its performance. 

After an operational readiness review, the system became the 

primary operational system in September 2004. This program was 

accomplished in eighteen months at the cost of some hardware, 

software, and student salaries. It was a great deal for NASA. 

36 | ASK MAGAZINE
While this 

work was going 

on, another team of 

Capitol College students 

was redesigning the TOMS 

Flight Dynamics system. TOMS 

operations had been using Flight Dynamics 

products provided by the Goddard Flight Dynamics Facility. 

The college students, including Jason Tobiasz as one of the leads, 

designed a PC-based system that met TOMS requirements. 

UGS-1 was so successful that NASA subsequently asked the 

college to build a second system and install it in a control center 

at Capitol College. Fetterer and Williams became mentors of a 

new set of college students who built and tested UGS-2. Sabrina 

Kirkley was one of the students who came on board to provide 

configuration management, verify system performance, and 

prepare and present the UGS-2 readiness review. This system 

went through the same process and was put together even more 

quickly than the first system.

Kirkley had this to say about the program: “I think the SOI 

program provides a great foundation in both practice 

and theory for anyone interested in pursuing a career in 

the space industry. My experiences as a ground segment 

intern helped me to understand how a control center is 

run and maintained and the importance of quality testing 

and documentation processes. I would not have been as 

successful in my current position without the knowledge 

that I gained through SOI and the Space Missions and 

Operations Specialist Certificate programs available through 

Capitol College.”

In 2006, TOMS operations were moved to the Capitol 

College control center. From 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. weekdays, 

certified student operators or a faculty advisor monitored the 

satellite’s passing in the morning and late afternoon, sent it 

commands, and collected data from it. A control center 

at Goddard tracked the spacecraft during the 

evenings, on weekends, and when the students 

were on break. Students with a college 

professor mentor operated the satellite 

without loss of data until the second 

TOMS transmitter failed and the 

mission was terminated in the 

spring of 2007. 

A new cadre of students 

is currently working on a 

Tropical Rainfall Measuring 

Mission (TRMM) R&D 

project to provide TRMM 

an up-to-date, highly secure 

ground system to replace 

the aging system now in 

use. By December 31, 2008, 

they will have a new system 

checked out and ready for 

operations in the backup 

TRMM control center.

Data collected from TOMS during the year 2000 

resulted in this view of the United States with 

red, denoting highest ground levels of ultraviolet 

radiation, covering the western portion and 

equatorial region.

Image Credit: NASA/Goddard Scientific Visualization Studio

ASK MAGAZINE | 37
 Besides the NASA grant, the 

Space Operations Institute at 

Capitol College has a number of 

subcontract tasks with NASA 

contractors. It normally employs 

about twenty-five students 

who work as control center 

operators, systems engineers, 

and software programmers 

and also perform other 

tasks. Students have tracked 

satellites as well as helped 

with launches, conducted 

research on battery systems, 

and redesigned upgraded 

ground systems. Overall, 

almost eighty students have 

been employed by the Institute. 

To date, forty-six have graduated, 

with more than 75 percent of them 

finding employment in the space industry. 

 Williams and Fetterer, who both worked 

on the TOMS operations ground system as students, 

now work for Honeywell at Goddard, as does Si Tran. Sabrina 

Kirkley has found work in mission development at Orbital 

Sciences Corporation, and Jason Tobiasz is a systems engineer 

at a.i. solutions, which develops orbit flight dynamics software.

When the initial contract with Capitol College expired in 

late 2005, NASA found additional money in its tight budget to 

continue funding SOI projects—a testament to the Agency’s 

faith in the program and the success of the students. Edward 

Chang, the contracting officer’s technical representative from 

NASA Goddard, has said, “When NASA says it wants to 

educate, this is as good a result as we can have.” ●

Parts of this article first appeared in the Capitol Chronicle. Ken Dolan is director of operations at Capitol College.

The fires that raged across southern Africa in 

August and September of 2000 produced a 

thick “river of smoke.” NOAA’s Advanced Very 

High-Resolution Radiometer measured the 

fires and TOMS measured the smoke index.

Overall, almost eighty students

have been employed by the Institute. 

To date, forty-six have graduated, 

with more than 75 percent of 

them finding employment in the

space industry.

Image Credit: NASA/Goddard Scientific Visualization Studio

38 | ASK MAGAZINE
Matthew Kohut of ASK the Academy met with Project Management Institute (PMI) CEO Greg 

Balestrero, PMI Board Member Yanping Chen, Academy Director Dr. Ed Hoffman, and ASK Magazine

Managing Editor Don Cohen for a wide-ranging survey of the project management landscape today.

What’s Ahead for Project Management: 

A Roundtable Discussion with the 

Project Management Institute

By Matthew Kohut

Kohut: What big trends are dominating the field of project 

management globally?

Balestrero: I’d say that globalization has changed the face 

of project management. It’s difficult to think of a company or 

organization that doesn’t feel the pressures and implications of 

globalization. 

The Airbus A-380 is one example of the effects of 

globalization on the organization, and the challenge of having 

a common framework and understanding—as simple as a 

lexicon, as complicated as a common process—for project 

and program management. In the case of the A-380—1,500 

suppliers, 24,000 projects cutting across thirty countries that 

have a variety of currencies—it’s crucial to have a common 

understanding of what project deadlines mean to the project, 

what project scheduling is, and things like risk management.

Managing a project with the scale and scope of the International 

Space Station, where you have contractors, mission specialists, 

and control specialists all over the world, requires a sincere and 

deliberate effort to concentrate on a common standard, common 

practice, and a common approach. In something as highly 

visible as the space station, where the project’s so costly and the 

accountability is great, communication becomes a crucial issue. 

Project communication is one of the nine knowledge areas in 

the PMBOK GuideTM (PMI’s Project Management Book of 

Knowledge). The need to emphasize skilled communication is 

compounded when you go across geographic boundaries. 

Cohen: Talking about communication, I’m concerned about 

how the knowledge needed to do the project successfully is, 

first of all, communicated among the parties of the project and, 

second, how things learned during the project are passed on for 

future project uses. What’s the role of the project manager in 

making sure that happens, and do you know of approaches that 

solve that big knowledge problem? 

On the International Space Station, the U.S.-built Unity node 

(top) and the Russian-built Zarya or FGB module (with the 

solar array panels deployed) were joined during a December 

1998 mission. International collaboration has helped further 

space exploration and science. 

Image Credit: NASA

INSIGHT | ASK MAGAZINE | 39
Balestrero: As far as turning each project into a learning 

activity so that results can be passed on, one of the key processes 

is project closure. Project closure includes a learning exercise: 

what went right, what went wrong, and how do you transfer 

that information or distribute it so that the next person or 

project team will know what’s going on. 

With regard to knowledge, success starts with a clear 

definition of the scope of the project and what the expected 

outcomes are. That’s not easy to do. I was reading a case study of 

the Atlanta aquarium. One of the criteria was a comprehensive 

study of all the animals and what their habitats had to include. 

As they made team decisions on meeting the deadline—on 

a $290 million, forty-four-month project—they’d sit down 

periodically and audit against the habitat. Were they creating 

the habitat that would allow these animals to survive? They had 

that from the very beginning of the project.

Chen: There’s the question of how to share program/project 

knowledge internally and also how to pass it from generation 

to generation. NASA and all the space agencies document 

knowledge and encourage sharing documents internally, but 

not across boundaries. That concerns me. NASA has been 

called to take the lead in human exploration of space. That’s 

not a mission that one country can accomplish. It has to involve 

many nations, but it’s difficult for the space agencies to share 

knowledge outside. There is also a kind of a spirit, an inspiration, 

that is often lost in the translation across the generations. So 

how can you capture that part? 

Hoffman: One of the great things about NASA is that most of 

our missions are international partnerships. They go beyond 

international space agency partnerships—much of the work is 

done by industry, a large part is academic. You basically have an 

activity that pulls the whole world community together. The 

challenges are to find out what needs to be done and then find 

ways and formats for people to work together. 

When international activities work well, you see examples of 

person-to-person relationships. I’m not a big fan of the database 

approach because I don’t usually see that working; I believe people 

need to see each other and talk together. When you go to a different 

country, it’s important to find out what that country is proud of, and 

what are some of the things that are important there, because it’s 

the relationship that ultimately leads to the success of the mission. 

When you look at something like the International Space Station, 

it’s natural to see the problems, the cost, and the technological 

breakthroughs. Look at what was accomplished in terms of the 

international community coming together. We went from the 

Apollo era when the Soviet Union was the enemy, to the Russians 

having a key part in the space station. That to me is the hope for 

space—it’s something that can pull the community together. 

Cohen: Greg, you talked earlier today about various kinds of 

diversity in these large projects—intellectual diversity and 

cultural diversity. Have you seen things people do to balance 

getting the diversity with keeping that common ground they 

need to work together?

Balestrero: There’s work being done today in many aspects of 

developing leadership skills that looks at diversity in personality 

tendencies or in aspects of emotional and social intelligence to 

help solve problems in a disciplined way. For example, there 

are tools that are spinoffs of the Myers-Briggs personality-type 

indicators for decision making. Let’s say you put people in a 

room to brainstorm that are unaccustomed to it. You will not 

achieve the results you expect. In the movie Apollo 13, I love 

that scene where they throw a whole bunch of miscellaneous 

materials down and say, “Start brainstorming.” You can 

immediately see that some people were uncomfortable with that 

and others bought into it completely right away. 

Great project team leaders try to seek and embrace diversity, 

encourage conceptual diversity, and encourage feedback. Today’s 

world demands a project manager or program manager who can 

be sensitive to and encourage diversity of all kinds—especially 

conceptual diversity when it comes to problem solving—and yet 

be able to manage that diversity to give you the desired output. 

It is not only cultural and emotional diversity but intellectual 

diversity. You don’t want constant conflict or brainstorming 

with no output.

Hoffman:I like your definition of diversity because it goes toward 

diversity of ideas, of different ways to approach something, of 

discipline backgrounds, of nations. Managing that diversity 

well gives you solutions and new approaches. From what I’ve 

seen, folks love working on NASA’s international missions. It’s 

partly about seeing the world through different eyes, and it’s 

partly about finding new solutions through diverse ideas. 

Kohut: The Atlanta aquarium example you cited brings up the 

question of systems engineering. Could you say a little about 

the relationship between project management and systems 

engineering?

Balestrero: The aquarium is a classic case of looking at an 

entire system and how the elements of that system are going to 

interrelate. What project management does in a big way with 

systems engineering is focus on managing the interfaces. The 

systems engineer manages the interfaces among the subsystems. 

The project manager develops a full project plan that can be 

managed from start to finish. Both are absolutely essential in 

making the project successful. As you know, systems engineering 

as a discipline developed in the 1960s as part of the emerging 

40 | ASK MAGAZINE
space program. The Aerospace Corporation in the late 1960s 

created a body of work in systems engineering that had never 

existed before. It addressed the complexity of scale and scope in 

the new space program which did not exist before.

Chen: When I was working in the Chinese space program, we 

used systems engineers to manage the space program. Systems 

engineering derived from the engineering community. It is 

project management of a sort, but it treats all the relationships 

as engineering components, so you have the system, the 

subsystem, the sub-subsystem, and then you have interfaces and 

configuration management. You put everything in the system 

into engineering concepts. A project manager uses a lot of the 

same methodology to manage a project.

Hoffman: A lot of complex projects are mismanaged because they 

lack a sense of the systems implications of what they’re doing. 

Systems engineering asks, are you looking at the larger systems 

implications? Are you asking what can go wrong? Are you asking, 

what things aren’t going to happen? Part of the challenge is that 

systems engineers define their job many different ways. Is it the 

design of the system? Is it looking across the boundaries? From 

a risk standpoint, is it anticipating what can go wrong ahead of 

time? If you look at Constellation, it’s going to be different five 

years out in terms of new technologies. Have we built in the 

ability to think, adapt, and modify? Anytime you’re at a project 

point where you’re dealing with complexity, you need to factor 

in the systems implications.

Cohen: It also fits in with what Greg said earlier about getting 

clarity about the project goal. As in the case of the aquarium, the 

job of the systems engineer is to make sure that what’s happening 

is focused on that goal and doesn’t get sidetracked solving little, 

local problems.

Hoffman: What do you see as the biggest challenge in developing 

the next generation of project managers? 

Balestrero: That’s a great question, but it’s difficult to answer 

because it’s evolving. It’s a very young discipline and even 

younger as a profession. It’s like watching engineering form as a 

discipline 250 or 300 years ago. We’re seeing things transform 

into first a discipline, a set of tools, and then people who take 

that on as a career path. 

Society has to take some responsibility for educating those 

individuals. China saw it as a critical issue and immediately 

chartered ninety-six master’s programs in project management 

at engineering schools throughout the country. The United 

Whale sharks, sawfish, and stingrays swim overhead in the underwater tunnel at the Georgia Aquarium. The new aquarium opened in 2005 and has been a success in part 

because of a clearly defined project scope at its inception and frequent auditing against the criterion that all habitats had everything needed to ensure the animals survived. Photo Credit: Georgia Aquarium

ASK MAGAZINE | 41
States doesn’t have that kind of centralized commitment or 

decision process. Our public school system is driven by local 

school districts with state funding. 

Cohen: To what extent do you think someone who’s well trained 

in project management but who doesn’t have engineering or 

software expertise can be an excellent manager of a technical 

project?

Balestrero: The program manager who was in charge of 

developing the BMW Z4 came out of a business-consulting 

firm; he was from McKinsey. Some of the skills he needed to 

manage that project—understanding the technology that was 

being put into the vehicle, the manufacturing, dealing with a 

global supply chain—developed as he went along. He was highly 

successful. He’s now vice president of Engineering Integration. 

I think leadership is not about having all the knowledge and 

being an engineer. It is about having the knowledge and skill to 

be able to make sure the project team has the knowledge it needs 

and having enough of what I would call professional skepticism 

to know how to challenge assumptions. Personally, I think it 

can be done. We’ve seen people leave IT and manage projects 

in health care and people from automotive engineering move to 

IT. It’s an issue of having the right framework, understanding 

the lexicon for managing projects, and having a clear grasp of 

the associated processes, and then bringing together the people 

that are crucial to achieve the end result.

Kohut: The critical thing is the project manager having the right 

counsel, the project team members he or she can draw on to get 

the hard technical facts and the appropriate level of skepticism, 

because the project manager does not necessarily know the 

detailed questions that need to be asked but will recognize them 

when they’re raised by the project team.

Balestrero: How to mitigate the risk of a fire on the Mir space 

station is very different than mitigating the risk of a fire inside 

an automobile, but the approach to getting the team to address 

the risks is the same. 

Cohen: I agree that having management expertise means you 

don’t necessarily have to have the technical expertise, but if I’m 

an engineer and you don’t know much about engineering, I may 

not respect you. Your perspective suggests a different mode of 

earning the respect of the people working for you, by saying, 

“You know these important things, but I know this other set of 

important things.”

Chen: This is about diversity. Not everyone should be an expert 

engineer in a specific area, because you’d only have that one 

engineering perspective. I am not an engineer. When I was 

managing China’s astronaut space program, I had 200 projects, 

about 50 to 60 percent of them purely engineering projects. 

However, when I communicated with them, they knew how 

much I could contribute and how much they could contribute, 

so we had mutual respect as a diversified team. Another thing is 

that, as a program manager or a project manager, you trust the 

engineering ability of your team members and let them do their 

work. If you challenge them, of course they will say, “Which 

engineering school did you graduate from?” You don’t do stupid 

things like challenge an expert. That’s emotional intelligence. 

Meanwhile you need to show your expertise, what you can 

contribute to the team. 

Balestrero: From an organizational point of view, project 

managers have to have a well-defined position. They have to be 

Image Credit: NASA

This is a technical rendition of the Space Shuttle Atlantis docked to the Kristall 

module of the Russian Mir Space Station. The configuration is that of STS-71/

Mir Expedition 18, a joint U.S.–Russian mission completed in June 1995, and 

represents how having a common goal can help overcome project management 

and engineering challenges.

42 | ASK MAGAZINE
accountable for a specific result and have the authority to act. 

That means they’ve got to have great executive sponsors who are 

willing to go to the mat for them to get them what they need so 

they can build trust with their own team. A good way to cut off 

the legs of the project manager is not to give him the resources 

he needs to get the project done.

Then there’s trust. Stephen Covey defines trust as being 

trustworthy as well as trusting. In order to build a bond of trust, 

you have to be trustworthy. When you make a commitment, 

you have to be able to deliver on it. And you have to be trusting. 

Once the individual on the team is given a task, you have to 

trust that they can do it. Anything that gets in the way of that 

has to be addressed, candidly, honestly, and openly, and in a 

way that respects the individuals. Otherwise you’ll never build 

a bond of trust. 

Hoffman: It goes back to the people again. Projects are teamfocused. Do you have a team of individuals who feel included, 

who know that their roles make a contribution, so it’s in their 

interest to build up the team and bring up problems as well 

as solutions? Is the team based on appreciation? Do they feel 

valued, which makes them work in a different way than if they 

don’t? Do they feel that they’re working off a set of shared values 

and doing something special together? High-performing teams 

have that essential human factor: appreciation, inclusion, values, 

clarity about the goal and the requirements, and constant 

communication. 

Kohut: When you talk about project management, you typically 

think cost, schedule, and performance. But the project manager 

has to be the most emotionally intelligent person on the project. 

It’s absolutely critical to the respect needed. Trusting and being 

trustworthy are qualities of emotional intelligence.

Balestrero: It goes back to training and investing in the 

project. It’s not just about picking somebody who likes details. 

What changes in going from project management as a discipline 

to a project management profession is investment in skills. 

Organizations don’t think twice about investing in the right 

technology, but do they invest in project managers? NASA 

does—that’s where APPEL [Academy for Program/Project 

and Engineering Leadership] comes in—but there are many 

organizations that won’t invest.

Take our new program management certification. The 

certification process has three elements. Every application is 

screened by a panel to determine whether or not the individual 

qualifies to take the examination in terms of experience. If that 

individual passes, he or she takes a written examination of 170 

questions. He or she will have a 360-degree evaluation of his or 

her capabilities as a program manager. Part of that assessment 

includes leadership ability. It’s recognition that their peers must 

recognize their effectiveness as a leader in managing programs 

before they can be considered. The aim is to build a team leader 

who is strong in the human aspects. Those things sound squishy, 

but they are what makes for successful teamwork.

Hoffman: You’re talking about assessing individual program 

managers and project managers. Let’s face it—at the end of the 

day it’s the team that either fails or succeeds. One of the things we 

do at APPEL is assess how the project team is working together. 

I think it needs to be done at the project kickoff. I’ve been on 

projects where from day one you knew it was going nowhere. 

On the other hand, I’ve been on teams where you knew it was 

going to work. How would we go about assessing the team?

Balestrero: That’s a great question. We haven’t discussed it 

at length, but project closure is a very sophisticated part of the 

success of a program. How well can they do a rigorous learning 

assessment? People always want to get done with the project 

and move on and won’t take the time to do a truly rigorous 

assessment. But that’s where the learning is—turning that 

project team into a learning organization. That’s an area of 

opportunity. ●

PMI’s PMBOK may be found and purchased online at 

http://www.pmi.org/Marketplace/Pages/ProductDetail.

aspx?GMProduct=00100035801.

Today’s world demands a project

manager or program manager who

can be sensitive to and encourage

diversity of all kinds—especially 

conceptual diversity when it comes

to problem solving—and yet be able

to manage that diversity to give you

the desired output.

ASK MAGAZINE | 43
Title

By 

Intro

Looking upward inside the mobile service tower on Launch Pad 17-B at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, 

the MESSENGER spacecraft is lowered toward a Boeing Delta II Heavy rocket for mating.

Big Science

 in a Small SpaceBy 

by Kerry Ellis

MESSEN

G

E

R

Photo Credit: NASA

44 | ASK MAGAZINE | STORY
The last time NASA visited Mercury was in the early seventies, when Mariner 10 made history as 

the first mission to explore two planets and the first spacecraft to use a gravity assist to change its 

course. In the thirty years since learning about the planet’s large core, magnetic field, and mostly 

helium atmosphere, scientists and engineers have been researching ways to return and explore the 

planet in more depth. But the extreme temperatures caused by Mercury’s widely elliptical orbit—

about 450oC at noon on the equator when it’s closest to the sun and a frigid -180oC at night—are a 

tough challenge for any spacecraft. Those extremes present additional difficulties for designing and 

testing a mission to the innermost planet in our solar system.

Studies from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory estimated that 

building a spacecraft and running a mission that could meet 

the challenge would cost well over $1 billion. When the Johns 

Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) proposed 

the MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and 

Ranging (MESSENGER) mission for about $300 million, 

NASA’s Discovery program approved it as the seventh of its 

lower-cost, scientifically focused projects. 

APL had ambitious plans to create a lightweight spacecraft 

that could house the large amount of fuel needed to propel 

MESSENGER on a 4.9-billion-mile journey that included 

multiple trips around the sun and a series of flybys of Earth, 

Venus, and Mercury, a complex sequence of gravity assists 

needed to slow the vehicle enough so the craft’s propulsion 

system could insert it into Mercury’s orbit. The team needed 

to pack seven miniature science instruments into the small 

space not taken up by the propellant, which accounted for more 

than half of MESSENGER’s mass at launch. Finding a place to 

house them was made even more difficult by the need to affix 

a sunshade to the spacecraft to protect it from the sun. This 

would be a blindfold for any observations and further limited 

where instruments could be placed.

In August 2004, the spacecraft successfully launched, 

and it has already completed its Earth flyby, two Venus 

flybys, and first Mercury flyby. Getting to that launch was 

not easy, however.

To gain a better understanding of the project and prepare 

for an impending preliminary design review, the lead systems 

engineer met face to face with the individual leads for each 

subsystem to ask them questions and capture requirements based 

on their answers. But for this tactic to work, he also needed to 

gain their trust. So the systems engineer focused on figuring 

out what everyone needed and how to meet those needs. This 

did more than build the trust he needed to succeed in a lead 

position; his foresight also set the stage for reciprocation when 

he might need a favor in the future.

After defining the requirements, a process that took two to 

three months to complete, the team then needed to figure out 

how to prove to everybody that the spacecraft could fly in an 

environment with light and heat as much as eleven times more 

intense than we receive on Earth. They had a great thermal 

engineer who used an illumination lamp at Glenn Research 

Center that could focus eleven times the sun’s intensity into 

a small area. Because they couldn’t take the entire spacecraft 

up to Glenn, they built a small mock-up of the sunshade and 

components to send to the Ohio center, where they blasted it 

for hundreds of hours to prove the spacecraft could handle the 

light. To prove it could also survive the heat, the team went 

to Goddard Space Flight Center with the full spacecraft and 

placed giant heaters in front of it. Showing how this spacecraft 

could survive an environment you can’t really replicate on Earth 

was a big hurdle, but they overcame it.

Once the team proved the spacecraft could survive the 

mission, they had to tackle the mass challenge involved in 

making sure it would arrive at its destination. Because the 

Mercury orbit insertion maneuver is so complex, MESSENGER 

required a lot of fuel. In fact, about 54 percent of the spacecraft’s 

final 2,400-lb. launch weight was propellant. To compensate, 

the team sought to lighten the load in other places, mainly in 

the body of the spacecraft itself. 

Traditional spacecraft use an aluminum honeycomb with 

aluminum sheets encasing the structure. MESSENGER used a 

composite material, a graphite blend much like what you would 

find in the shaft of a golf club, because it was strong and, more 

importantly, very light. The team later realized that a majority of 

spacecraft subsystems rely on aluminum as a conductor for heat 

and electricity, and to ground components. To solve the challenge 

introduced by the lightweight composite, they placed copper sheets 

around the spacecraft to act as a conductor. After all their mass 

savings, they ended up adding mass back to get the grounding 

for the electricity, and then adding heat pipes to transfer the heat. 

Even with these additions, the main structure of the spacecraft was 

ASK MAGAZINE | 45
On January 14, 2008, MESSENGER became the first spacecraft to see the 

side of Mercury shown in this image.

less than 9 percent of the total mass of the spacecraft, compared 

with 10–20 percent on most other spacecraft. 

To save even more mass, the team worked with Aerojet in 

California to develop a new tank design. Three of these new 

tanks—the lightest ever to hold this amount of mass—are in 

the middle of the spacecraft. This also required a lot of hard 

work, but optimizing the tanks was necessary in order to make 

the mission work.

The unique mass requirements of MESSENGER presented 

engineering challenges that required ingenuity to solve—as 

well as some reworking of ideas. Adapting initial plans to 

circumvent unforeseen problems is not an unexpected step in 

NASA’s one-of-a-kind projects, and it highlights the need to 

define requirements and risks early and thoroughly as well as 

ensure they are documented for reference. Documentation not 

only helps those who may later join the mission understand the 

work, but also aids future missions that may look to solve similar 

problems as NASA ventures further into unexplored space. ●

Showing how this spacecraft could survive an environment you can’t

really replicate on Earth was a big hurdle. Photo Credit: NASA/APL/Carnegie Institution of Washington

Technicians at Astrotech Space Operations in Titusville, Fla., check the progress 

of the MESSENGER spacecraft as it is lowered onto a spin table for testing.

Photo Credit: NASA

46 | ASK MAGAZINE
If you asked the typical project manager how much authority he wants, he would likely respond by 

saying the more, the better. In NASA’s increasingly complex project environment, however, project 

managers often find themselves facing situations where they have less authority than they would 

expect. This is the nature of what is called a weak-matrix project. But “weak” is poor choice of words 

because only strong leaders will succeed in this challenging project environment. 

Nothing Weak About It: Thriving in 

a Weak-Matrix Project Environment

By Keith L. Woodman

The Weak-Matrix Project Environment

As our Agency’s projects increase in size, complexity, and 

distribution, a secondary project manager is often needed. This 

secondary project manager represents both a project’s interests 

at a geographically distributed support organization and the 

organization’s interests within the project. This position can 

go by many names, including weak-matrix project manager, 

distributed project manager, or, in the case of the Constellation 

program, center focal. 

In the weak-matrix environment, the center focal 

communicates the project’s requirements to his or her center’s 

functional engineering units, which may contain design, 

development, testing, and fabrication capabilities. After needs 

and capabilities are identified, the center focal leads negotiations 

between the center and the project leaders to develop resource 

and task agreements. Once those are in place, the center focal 

is responsible for managing the budget allocated by the project 

and for ensuring the timely delivery, completion, and quality of 

the products developed at the center.

The center focal’s role is different from the traditional 

project manager’s. Unless requested to do so by the project 

manager, the center focal does not plan or direct the day-to-day 

or long-range tasks for the personnel who support the project. 

The project manager or her technical subordinates do that; the 

center focal’s responsibility becomes coordination, integration, 

and oversight of these tasks. In this respect, the center focal has 

much less authority than the traditional project manager.

The Langley Research Center Constellation Projects Office 

exists in a weak-matrix environment with some complicating 

factors not accounted for in the generic model. The first 

complicating factor is that the office represents six Constellation 

program (CxP) projects: three Level II offices, the Lunar Lander 

and Lunar Surface Systems Project Offices, and the Mission 

Operations Project Office. Each of these projects has its own 

requirements and ways of conducting business. For example, 

some projects require formal internal task agreements with 

Langley while other projects will insist that there is no need for 

formal agreements. It is up to the center focal to adapt to these 

varying cultures and make the situation work.

Another challenge involves workforce availability and 

established commitments. Several other projects draw on Langley’s 

resources. For Constellation at Langley, there are separate Orion 

and Ares project offices, as well as project offices representing 

the Agency’s science and aeronautics programs. Attempting to 

balance priorities across the exploration, science, and aeronautics 

programs requires constant and complex negotiations between 

the center focals, the projects they represent, and Langley’s 

engineering directorates. It also requires continually balancing 

the civil servant and contractor workforce. Successful negotiations 

require the center focal to meet constantly with the center’s line 

management and other project focals to communicate issues and 

needs and to establish priorities.

While the weak-matrix project might sound like a situational 

nightmare to some, it can be a very rewarding activity to lead 

and offers the center focal some unique opportunities that other 

project management positions do not. Successfully leading a 

weak-matrix project calls for situational awareness, negotiation 

skills, technical assignments, and influence. 

INSIGHT | ASK MAGAZINE | 47
Situational Awareness

Langley, like other centers, offers a wide range of engineering 

disciplines and facilities. Because it is so large and diversified, 

few people can claim to have complete knowledge of the center’s 

capabilities, but center focals need to know a lot about them to 

do their jobs well. One effective way to develop organizational 

knowledge is setting up and conducting tours. Conducting tours 

for visiting project leaders not only acts as a reinforcement of the 

center focal’s knowledge, it may also reveal new or unknown 

center capabilities. 

To develop an intimate understanding of a project’s 

requirements, culture, and way of conducting business, the center 

focal should take advantage of opportunities to meet the project 

manager face to face. When travel is not possible, center focals 

should “virtually” attend as many project meetings as possible. 

As situational awareness of the project and the organization 

grow, the center focal becomes an information conduit, keeping 

his or her organization informed of the project’s needs and 

ensuring the project understands the organization’s abilities

and commitments.

Often, center focals compete against other projects for their 

organization’s resources. Understanding the nature of these 

other commitments and the priority level assigned to them will 

aid the center focal’s negotiation skills.

Negotiation Skills

Negotiating in the weak-matrix project environment is like 

walking a multidimensional tightrope. The center focal must 

continuously balance the project’s changing needs with the 

center’s capabilities while maintaining an awareness of the priority 

level of all activities. In this complex, multiparty environment, 

negotiating “win-win” solutions is rare. Typically, the optimal 

solution is satisficing—satisfying as many of the interested 

parties as much as practically possible. When dealing with many 

Engineering

Directorates

Engineering

Directorates

Engineering

Directorates

Langley Research Center

Constellation

Office CF

CxP SE&I

CxP T&E

CxP SRQA

CxP LLPO

CxP LSSO

CxP MOP

Orion CF

Ares CF

Science CF

Aeronautics CF

Day-to-Day Direction/Long-Range Planning

Personnel/Facilities Support

CF = Center Focal(s)

CxP = Constellation Program

SE&I = Systems Engineering and Integration (Level II)

T&E = Test and Evaluation (Level II)

SRQA = Safety, Reliability, and Quality Assurance (Level II)

LLPO = Lunar Lander Project Office (Level III)

LSSO = Lunar Surface Systems Office (Level III)

MOP = Mission Operations Project (Level III) 

48 | ASK MAGAZINE
interests—the project’s, the center’s, the employees’—the center 

focal must constantly ask, “What solution will bring a balance 

between the Agency’s values of safety, teamwork, integrity, and 

mission success?” 

The health and welfare of the Agency’s workforce must 

be carefully balanced against the needs of its programs. At 

Langley’s Constellation Project Office, Project Manager 

Jerry Hill and I have an engineer on our team who was being 

stretched across multiple projects because his avionics skills were 

in such high demand. During a regular status meeting with 

him, he confided to us that he was starting to suffer fatigue 

and burnout. We immediately and aggressively negotiated with 

Langley’s engineering directorates and the various projects to 

reduce his workload. Of course, some of the projects he was 

pulled off were not happy, but we worked with them to fill 

those tasks with other qualified personnel and agreements were 

eventually reached that satisfied all parties. 

Once a center focal has negotiated the majority of necessary 

task agreements between the project and his organization and set 

up a monitoring and reporting system, the project manager may 

request that he take on a more technical role. Few traditional 

project managers have this opportunity, and it is an important 

one for leaders of weak-matrix projects. 

Taking on Technical Assignments

There are many benefits for center focals who do as much 

technical work as they can. First, it keeps them technically 

sharp by allowing them to use their project management, 

systems engineering, or other discipline skills. Second, although 

center focals already perform a very important service, taking 

on technical assignments reduces their constituents’ and the 

project’s tendency to view them as overhead or middlemen. 

Third, and most important, taking on technical assignments 

can greatly increase job satisfaction. Adding challenging 

technical assignments can provide greatly needed balance for 

communication and negotiation work.

When Constellation began, Jerry and I worked very hard 

to understand our customers’ requirements and to fill their 

needs with qualified Langley personnel. We then helped our 

people develop strong working relationships and effective lines 

of communication with their Constellation project customers 

by ensuring that requirements were clearly communicated and 

milestones were met. Once these relationships were established, 

our need for constant relationship building and oversight 

decreased. With this freed-up time, Jerry and I began looking for 

opportunities to assist the program in a more technical capacity. 

Based on his experience, Jerry was chosen to act as the 

CxP Level II representative to the Ares I-X project and to be 

a member of the Constellation Safety Engineering Review 

Panel. Based on my experience in technology development and 

assessment, I took the opportunity to work for CxP Level II 

on their technology prioritization process, helping the program 

determine its long-term technology investments. Tackling 

these technical assignments not only improved our situational 

awareness and professional satisfaction, it also contributed to 

increasing our influence within the program.

Building Influence

The project manager controls the budget and task assignments, 

and the center functional managers maintain a high level of 

control of their personnel supporting the project. While the 

center focal has limited control in this environment, his ability 

to influence can be great. Influence means that you can make 

things happen, without actually being in control. Understanding 

this difference and striving to build influence as opposed to 

taking control will help the center focal excel.

To influence the project, center focals must demonstrate 

an understanding of project requirements, be able to identify 

and obtain their center’s assets, consistently ensure that tasks are 

completed on time and within budget constraints, contribute 

to technical efforts when possible, and be able to communicate 

this knowledge and use it in negotiation. The center focal must 

also understand the pressures other commitments put on his 

center and be able to negotiate with the project for proper 

and timely funding. Another great way for the center focal to 

build influence is to regularly request performance feedback on 

center personnel from their project customers and provide this 

information back to center line management.

Keeping Weak-Matrix Projects Strong

Weak-matrix projects are challenging. Their size and complexity 

and the roles different centers—with their individual capabilities 

and ways of working—play in them make the work of center 

focals important to their success. Center focals’ understanding 

of the project and the realities of their own center put them in 

an ideal position to understand how the center’s resources can 

best be marshaled to get the work done. Their communication 

and negotiation skills help ensure that competing demands on 

the center’s workforce are fairly and effectively balanced and 

that their projects get the most possible benefit of the center’s 

special expertise. ●

Keith L. Woodman is deputy manager of the Constellation 

Project Office at Langley Research Center. He has been with 

NASA for twenty years in a variety of technical positions, 

including electronics technician, embedded systems designer, 

commercialization portfolio manager, and systems engineer and 

analyst. He is also an engineering management doctoral student 

at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. 

ASK MAGAZINE | 49
NASA CoLab: Creating a Space 

for Participatory Exploration

 By Matthew Kohut

Silicon Valley has long been the epicenter of high technology, but until recently NASA maintained 

a low profile in the neighborhood. “NASA Ames Research Center is 1,800 acres in the middle of 

Silicon Valley, with neighbors like Google and Yahoo!, and [yet] you go a mile away and people 

don’t know that we’re there,” says Robert Schingler, special assistant to NASA Ames Research Center 

Director Pete Worden. “That was one of the things we wanted to do [under Worden’s leadership]—

to become more a part of Silicon Valley.” 

The NASA CoLab environment in 

Second Life includes a meeting 

place for conferences.

Image Credit: © 2008, Linden Research, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

50 | ASK MAGAZINE | INSIGHT
A skeptic might ask why this is important. Isn’t NASA doing 

fine without an outreach effort to its wealthier neighbors? 

From Schingler’s point of view, the Agency stands to gain a lot 

by opening its doors and letting others look in. “A lot of the 

problems that we’re actually solving are not unique to NASA,” 

he says. “[For instance] our information technology problems 

were solved five years ago by Google, and our power generation 

problems are currently being worked on by the clean technology 

sector. So the more that we can open up and allow transparency 

to occur within the space program, the more that other tools, 

technologies, and solutions can come into the space program 

and vice versa. We [NASA] may be developing something that 

is the linchpin or the missing ingredient of a new technology in 

a different sector.” 

To tackle this challenge, Schingler and a small team did 

a brief study to figure out what they could do to help NASA 

become more ingrained in Silicon Valley. “We came up with 

a very simple thesis, and that is participatory exploration,” 

he says. “Quite generally, that means allowing people who 

don’t work for NASA to participate in a meaningful way in the 

space program.” 

In an era of open source code, shareware, and freeware, there 

is no shortage of ways to collaborate using information technology. 

“The culture here in Silicon Valley is one of collaboration; the 

Web 2.0 technology tools are all about collaboration. What we 

tried to do is come up with a platform,” Schingler says. 

The platform that Schingler and his colleagues came up 

with, NASA CoLab, is a series of projects and frameworks 

designed to foster collaboration “between the nation’s space 

program and talented, creative, tech-savvy communities,” as 

the NASA CoLab homepage explains. The project attempts 

to create the environment for this collaboration to occur by 

using online tools, experimenting with physical co-working 

environments, and hosting a collaboration community 

based in Second Life, the online 3-D virtual world created by 

its “residents.” 

True to its Silicon Valley roots, NASA CoLab is a labor of 

love run by a skeleton crew. “It feels like a start-up, which is a 

pretty rare experience within a large government organization,” 

says Delia Santiago, the project’s only full-time employee. “It’s a 

small team, and we all do a lot and learn a lot.” 

NASA CoLab’s Second Life community attracted a great 

deal of media attention when it was first announced. Second 

Life is considered a “massively multiplayer online game” that 

can support thousands of users simultaneously. When Schingler 

and his colleagues went looking for a space to host a virtual 

collaboration community, Second Life offered a ready-made 

answer. “We didn’t want to create a bunch of technology, we 

wanted to use what’s out there,” he says. “The easiest thing 

we could do was to get an island—a virtual island in Second 

Life. So that was what we did. We got an island ... and put 

a flag down and said, ‘All right, we’re NASA, and we’re open 

for collaboration. What do you guys want to do?’ And slowly 

people started coming.” 

A year later, the island seems to have caught on. “We have 

regular people from all ten NASA Centers,” Schingler says. 

Others have followed NASA CoLab’s lead: the Jet Propulsion 

Laboratory set up its own island in Second Life. The NASA 

CoLab island includes a sandbox where people can “play” with 

and build space-related objects, but the majority of the island 

is actually meeting space, Schingler says: “A number of space 

organizations use it for their weekly meetings.” 

The NASA CoLab team is quick to point out that the 

collaborative tools they use are not meant just for younger, techsavvy users. “One of my favorite things is working with someone 

who isn’t familiar with Second Life or Twitter and is maybe 

somewhat afraid of the technology, and helping them see that these 

are just tools, and they’re not hard to use,” says Santiago. “You don’t 

have to be an über tech geek to get something out of Second Life.”

Schingler sees big possibilities for the long-term future 

of virtual collaborative environments in space exploration. 

“As Pete Worden says, the next time a human lands on the 

ASK MAGAZINE | 51
moon, we all get to go. Rather than watch it on a black-andwhite television like we did in the past, we want avatars to be 

there, and we want it to feel like you’re experiencing what it’s 

like to be there.” 

NASA CoLab’s online tool set includes a space for 

collaborative conferences. The team has been deeply involved 

in two conferences with the Next Generation Exploration 

Conferences (NGEC). After a highly successful initial 

conference in 2006 sponsored by the Exploration Systems 

Mission Directorate, a second conference took place in 

February 2008. Billing itself as a gathering of emerging global 

space leaders to design the future of space exploration through 

direct input at NASA’s highest levels, NGEC-2 focused 

on “Entrepreneurial Opportunities in Lunar Development.” 

The proceedings from this second conference will be published 

online in the near future.

NASA CoLab’s in-person collaborative community includes 

a series of salon gatherings in San Francisco, called Luna 

Philosophie, and experiments with co-working environments. 

The Luna Philosophie series features NASA guest speakers 

followed by group discussions, as well as plenty of time for 

socializing. “By hosting the salons in San Francisco, we are 

bringing NASA to the audiences we want to reach and making 

it easy for them to learn, experience, and hopefully participate 

with NASA’s innovators,” says Schingler. 

NASA CoLab also aims to have a co-working space in San 

Francisco. Co-working spaces are collaborative workspaces 

where people can drop by to meet and work alongside new 

people. “We just started a co-working space at Ames, bringing 

the culture of collaborative workspaces closer to home, but we 

hope to have a presence in San Francisco as well so as to infuse 

the vibrant, innovative social and cultural capital of the city into 

NASA’s work,” says Santiago. 

During the next year the NASA CoLab team plans to 

play more of an enabling and facilitation role for participatory 

exploration projects across NASA. “We intend to document 

some of our successes and make it easier for other NASA 

Centers to create environments to support their innovators and 

facilitate participatory exploration elements of their missions,” 

says Schingler. ●

Find out more about CoLab at http://colab.arc.nasa.gov. Read 

the proceedings from the 2006 Next Generation Exploration 

Conference at http://ngec.arc.nasa.gov/2006proceedings.

Image Credit: © 2008, Linden Research, Inc. 

All Rights Reserved.

Several models of current NASA 

projects are available in the CoLab, 

offering users an opportunity to learn 

more about what NASA is doing.

By hosting the salons in San

Francisco, we are bringing NASA 

to the audiences we want to reach

and making it easy for them to

learn, experience, and hopefully 

participate with NASA’s innovators.

52 | ASK MAGAZINE
ASK Bookshelf

The Rational Project Manager: A Thinking 

Team’s Guide to Getting Work Done, by Andrew 

Longman and Jim Mullins (Hoboken, NJ: John 

Wiley & Sons, 2005)

Sometimes the hardest part of managing a project is finding 

time to think about the planning and issues involved. The 

Rational Project Manager stresses that thinking before taking 

action is a critical factor in successful project management. 

It offers several brainstorming questions and suggestions 

to help project managers use critical thinking throughout 

their projects.

Andrew Longman and Jim Mullins, senior consultants 

at consultancy Kepner-Tregoe, define the steps involved in a 

project’s life cycle and what project managers should stop to 

think about before ever touching a GANTT or PERT chart. 

While the authors encourage the use of tools that are prevalent 

in many project managers’ toolkits, they stress that getting the 

right information into those tools by asking yourself and other 

people the right questions is more important.

The authors are big proponents of making lists, which 

help divide and conquer what can sometimes seem like an 

unmanageable mountain of problems. They simplify project 

management as definition, planning, and implementation, with 

chapters devoted to each of these steps in the book. They break 

these down into smaller actions, the last of which is always 

a reminder to talk to the people on the project. Often these 

conversations lead to new information that affects planning. 

Longman and Mullins devote a substantial section of their book 

to communication and managing people.

Probably most valuable for NASA employees are the 

chapters on deciphering contracts and working with large, 

diverse teams. The tips on how to handle big changes late in a 

project to ensure they don’t affect the project’s critical path are 

also vital for NASA project managers. But most useful are the 

lists of prodding questions project managers can use to elicit the 

information they need to make decisions.

Charts and graphs alone never complete projects. People 

need to be involved. The authors understand this point and 

would do well to emphasize it more in future revisions to 

this work, which was first published in 1959, shortly after 

NASA’s foundation. It shows that project management as a 

practice hasn’t changed much, but our approaches to it can be 

continually refined.

The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global 

History Since 1900, by David Edgerton 

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)

Most books and articles about technology focus on the latest 

innovations. Given the public’s avidity for novelty, the pressure 

on journalists and historians to laud the new and neglect the 

virtues of the tried and true is strong. This book looks at familiar, 

successful technologies that the author calls “technology in use.” 

It is very different from those histories of one “wow” thing after 

another. For example, Edgerton considers the refrigerated cargo 

ship, an invention that changed the course of history in Latin 

America, the United Kingdom, and the United States, allowing 

fresh fruit and meat to be transported anywhere. And he lauds 

the modern bicycle. Bicycles are more numerous than cars and 

more often used (and may be even more important in the oilconstrained future). 

It is hard to dislike a book whose first chapter begins, “Is the 

condom more significant than the airplane?” This bottoms-up 

history is a fine counterweight to all the gee-whiz writings about 

inventions that have relatively little effect in the long run. ●

Here are descriptions of two books that we believe will interest ASK readers.

ASK MAGAZINE | 53
The Knowledge Notebook

Managing Your OWN Knowledge

By Laurence Prusak

Knowledge management as a discipline and 

practice has now been with us for about twenty 

years and shows no sign of disappearing into that 

distant land where old fads and fashions go. It may 

change its name and some of its practices, but it 

continues to thrive because organizations need 

to develop and use knowledge effectively to deal 

with increasing uncertainty in their environments. 

But what of individuals? Don’t they too live in 

very uncertain times, with tectonic shifts in the 

global economy and in the relations between 

employers and employees? Don’t they need to 

manage their knowledge?

The answer everyone gives (at least everyone I 

poll) is, “Of course, I manage my own knowledge. 

I wouldn’t get anywhere if I didn’t!” Yet when I 

ask them how they do it—what specific activities 

they undertake—I usually get a blank stare and 

a response that goes somewhat like, “Well, I try 

to read on the plane,” or, “Every year I go to a 

conference, or every year when I have the budget.” 

Pretty slim pickings for what is perceived to be an 

essential activity.

So what can one do to manage one’s 

knowledge? What can an individual learn from 

what organizations have been doing for the past 

few decades? Here are some practices to ponder 

based on my own observations and consulting as 

to what works in this field.

Scanning and adopting: Joseph Stiglitz, a 

Nobel laureate in economics, observed that one of 

the most important things for any organization to 

do is “scan globally and adapt locally.” This lesson 

is also pertinent for individuals. One needs to 

continuously search for new ideas, products, even 

new dreams and visions, to keep abreast of the 

vibrant and growing global marketplace of ideas, a 

market that has been made both more competitive 

and more efficient by the Internet. If you don’t, 

you can be sure someone else will, and you will lose 

a step in keeping your own knowledge up to date.

Vetting and filtering: Even if you spend much 

of your limited time scanning and searching for 

new ideas, you still need to learn how to evaluate 

what you are taking in. This vital skill is seldom 

taught in school. How do you judge how true or 

how useful what you are reading is? Can you “take 

it to the bank”? Do you have the tools to discern 

the valuable parts of the fire hose of stuff coming 

from the Web? With so many firms, journalists, 

publicists, and consultants pushing products, 

how can you judge what really matters? It’s possible 

to distinguish good from bad, but it takes time

and effort.

Networking: Many of us get our new ideas 

from colleagues, friends, co-workers, and others in 

the varied networks we belong to. This is fine. Faceto-face (or terminal-to-terminal) communication 

with those we know and trust has always been a 

potent source of ideas and always will be. Here too, 

though, think through how you go about it. Are 

you yourself trustworthy? That is, do you provide 

valuable knowledge when someone in your network 

asks for help? Do you make real contributions to 

your network or just take what you need? One of 

the least-mentioned subjects in the many books on 

networking is the need to invest in your network, 

putting in time and resources to strengthen the 

network’s density, content, and reach.

Getting out of your office: This might sound 

a bit banal and obvious but it is important to say 

nonetheless. What you know depends on where 

54 | ASK MAGAZINE
you are. Stay in your office all the time and what you know will 

be the walls and windows surrounding you. Yes, you have your 

trusty computer and access to all the world’s information, but 

information isn’t knowledge. Think of the difference between 

reading about a country (information) and spending time there 

(knowledge). And new ideas are more than words on a screen. 

They include passion and other emotions that can only be 

communicated by being there. There is no substitute for getting 

out and going someplace to really “get it”—to deeply and usefully 

understand a new idea, problem, situation, or opportunity.

As you can see by now, a key concept in this piece 

is investment. Knowledge is expensive to obtain. If you are 

going to manage your own knowledge assets, you will have to 

spend some of your scarce resources—especially of time and 

perhaps money. There just isn’t any shortcut to knowledge or 

technical marvel that makes learning fast and easy. Genuinely 

knowing a technology, a market, a country, a firm, a set of 

propositions, or a concept takes investments in attention, 

travel, and care. Obtaining new knowledge is expensive, but 

a lot of old knowledge loses value over time. My advice is to 

keep investing. ●

There is no substitute for getting

out and going someplace to really 

“Get it”—to deeply and usefully 

understand a new idea, problem, 

situation, or opportunity.

ASK MAGAZINE | 55
ASKinteractive

For More on 

Our Stories

Additional information 

pertaining to articles featured 

in this issue can be found 

by visiting the following Web 

sites:

• Geotail Mission: 

http://pwg.gsfc.nasa.gov/

geotail.shtml

• MESSENGER: http://www.

nasa.gov/mission_pages/

messenger/main/index.html

• Total Ozone Mapping 

Spectrometer: http://

toms.gsfc.nasa.gov/index_

v8.html

feedback

We welcome your comments on what you’ve read in this issue of ASK and your suggestions for articles you 

would like to see in future issues. Share your thoughts with us at http://appel.nasa.gov/ask/about/write.php.

Learning and Exploration

Expand your scientific knowledge of the cosmos and the world around us 

with Neil deGrasse Tyson and PBS’s NOVA ScienceNOW. View video clips 

on a variety of topics, including physics, space science, health, bioscience, 

and technology. Learn more about the scientists, catch up on science 

news, and download podcasts for more video excerpts and outtakes. 

You can also preview the new episodes of NOVA ScienceNOW airing this 

summer online at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow.

Web of Knowledge

Ever wish you could get a peek inside the walls at NASA and glimpse the 

projects being worked on? Or have a direct conversation with some of the 

leading minds inside the Agency? With the NASA blogs, you can. Read up 

on thoughts from NASA Deputy Administrator Shana Dale and Wayne Hale, 

deputy associate administrator for strategic partnerships and previously 

the Space Shuttle program manager, or catch up on missions like GLAST. 

You can also get a glimpse of new lunar rover and spacesuit concepts. 

Find it all at http://blogs.nasa.gov/cm/newui/blog/blogs.jsp.

NASA in the News

NASA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service have partnered to 

obtain imagery of wildfires in response to requests from the California Department of 

Forestry and Fire Protection, the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, 

and the National Interagency Fire Center. A remotely piloted aircraft carrying a NASA 

sensor flew over much of California in early July, gathering information that will be 

used to help fight more than 300 wildfires burning within the state. The flights by 

NASA’s unmanned Ikhana aircraft are using a sophisticated Autonomous Modular Scanner developed at Ames 

Research Center. Read press releases and view the images returned by Ikhana at http://www.nasa.gov/fires.

56 | ASK MAGAZINE
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