Academy Sharing Knowledge

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

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Special Issue

NASA’s 50th
ON THE COVER

This image was used during the 42nd Annual Smithsonian Folklife 

Festival in 2008 to showcase NASA’s history and continuing exploration. 

Represented are some of NASA’s discoveries and pursuits in planetary 

and lunar exploration. Earth’s moon appears behind an astronaut helmet 

on the left and Mars appears on the right, followed by Jupiter, Saturn, 

Uranus, and Neptune cascading toward the background. Between them 

is the Ares I crew launch vehicle, currently being developed as part of 

the Constellation program and NASA’s Vision for Space Exploration. Image courtesy of the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage
13 42

DEPARTMENTS

3 

In This Issue

By Don Cohen

70 

The Knowledge Notebook

By Laurence Prusak

72 

ASK Interactive 

SPECIAL FEATURES

25

Some NASA Moments

Striking episodes in the careers of 

NASA practitioners.

42

A Half Century of NASA Photos 

By George Michael (Mike) Gentry 

Some of the most striking images from 

NASA’s first fifty years.

STORIES

9

Early Lunar Missions: A Memoir

By J.D. Burke A JPL project manager in the 

early sixties, Burke recalls the space race 

with the Soviets.

13

The Apollo Era: Working at Marshall in 

the Sixties

By Glenn A. Robinson, Jr. A discussion of 

Wernher von Braun’s management style and 

the power of learning by doing.

18

Teaching Geology to Apollo Astronauts

By Gary Lofgren To prepare for their work 

on the moon, Apollo astronauts did many 

field exercises and built a common language 

with geologists.

31

NASA’s First Scientist-Astronauts

By Joe Kerwin NASA’s first physicianastronaut describes the Skylab experiments 

that studied the effects of weightlessness.

60

Leadership, Teamwork, and Focus: 

Viking’s Landing on Mars

By Kerry Ellis Managerial skill and 

innovation made Viking’s technical 

achievement possible.

65

Lessons from Shuttle Development

By Jim Odom The transition from Apollo to 

Space Shuttle offers lessons for today’s 

transition to Constellation.

Contents

57

INSIGHTS

5

Lessons from the Past: How NASA’s 

Early Culture Informs Current Challenges 

By Howard E. McCurdy The technical 

capability, management expertise, and 

close contractor relationships behind the 

moon landings are essential to NASA’s 

future success.

22

A Brief History of Project Management 

Development at NASA

By Ed Hoffman Effective training, 

frameworks, and forums must reflect the 

needs and experience of practitioners.

29

Shaping the Space Age: The 

International Geophysical Year

By Matthew Kohut The first U.S. satellite, 

Explorer 1, made one the most important 

discoveries of the IGY.

34

Using the Moon to Learn About 

Living on Mars

By Laurence R. Young Young argues that 

the planned lunar outpost needs a medical 

laboratory.

36

Space Science: Forty-Five Years 

of Thinking and Tinkering

By Noel Hinners Making the most of scarce 

resources and collaboration between scientists 

and engineers are key to continuing NASA’s 

impressive history of scientific discovery.

39

Discovery-Driven Science

By Dr. James B. Garvin The chief scientist 

at Goddard Space Flight Center discusses 

revolutionary findings in space science.

47

NASA and the Future of Knowledge

By Laurence Prusak and Don Cohen 

Trust, strong personal networks, and 

respect for local expertise characterize 

organizations that use knowledge effectively.

52

Success, Failure, and NASA Culture

By Dr. Stephen B. Johnson The root causes 

of failure are often cultural, not technical.

57

The Societal Impact of Space Flight

By Steven J. Dick The NASA historian looks 

at studies of the economic, political, and 

social impact of the space program.

68

NASA’s Inventions and Contributions 

Board: A Historical Perspective

By Carol Anne Dunn Thanks to ICB 

awards, many NASA innovations find new 

uses outside the space program. 

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 

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

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

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

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

Issue No. 32

Staff

APPEL Director and Publisher

Dr. Edward Hoffman

ehoffman@nasa.gov

Editor-in-Chief

Laurence Prusak

lprusak@msn.com

Managing Editor

Don Cohen

doncohen@rcn.com

Editor

Kerry Ellis

kerry.ellis@asrcms.com

contributing Editor

Matt Kohut

mattkohut@infactcommunications.com

Senior Knowledge Sharing

Consultant

Jon Boyle

jon.boyle@asrcms.com

Knowledge Sharing Analysts

Ben Bruneau

ben.bruneau@asrcms.com

Katherine Thomas

katherine.thomas@asrcms.com

APPEL program Manager

Yvonne Massaquoi

yvonne.massaquoi@asrcms.com

Design

Hirshorn Zuckerman Design Group, Inc.

www.hzdg.com

Printing Specialist

Hanta Ralay

hanta.ralay-1@nasa.gov

Printing

GraphTec
In his “Knowledge Notebook” piece, Laurence Prusak 

notes that the past experiences of organizations influence 

how they behave now and how they will behave in the 

future. The truth of this is complex. It means that what 

an organization learns from its successes and failures—

both technical knowledge and knowledge about how to 

organize work—can be put to use, past accomplishments 

serving as the foundation for future ones. It also means 

that unproductive old habits and beliefs tend to persist 

even when the damage they do is recognized. As Stephen 

Johnson suggests in “Success, Failure, and NASA Culture,” 

elements of organizational culture are often the root cause 

of failures, but culture is hard to understand and change.

Still, Prusak is right that understanding the past is 

essential preparation for the future. This issue of ASK, which 

commemorates NASA’s fiftieth anniversary, is one attempt 

among many to look at and learn from the space agency’s 

first half century. Some of what you will find here is pure 

celebration. That is appropriate, because great achievements 

should be celebrated and because the joy of achievement is 

one of NASA’s essential and defining strengths. Some of the 

articles here take a hard, analytical look at what the Agency 

has been as a way of exploring what it needs to become to 

accomplish its new mission. Some practitioner stories of past 

projects offer advice that can be applied to future work.

So what do these articles teach us? One repeated 

theme is the influence of the political and social context 

on the space agency’s work. NASA is in the business of 

solving technical problems, but it would be a mistake 

to think that technical solutions are the sole or even the 

main source of the shape and success of projects. James 

Burke’s description of competition with the Russians in the 

late fifties and early sixties and Jim Odom’s “Lessons from 

Shuttle Development” are among the articles that show how 

powerfully politics affect budgets, schedules, and even the 

goals of missions. In the Apollo era, the Cold War space 

race meant that NASA programs were very well-funded 

but under tremendous schedule pressure. After the United 

States won that race, financial support weakened, leading 

to changes in the shuttle design and the successes and 

failures of “faster, better, cheaper.” Among their other skills, 

successful program and project managers need the ability 

to read the political situation, as well as the determination 

and flexibility to find new ways to achieve their goals when 

external factors threaten their plans.

The contribution of good management to project success 

is additional proof that creating technological marvels is not 

just a technical challenge. Johnson points to the essential 

role of project management and systems management 

expertise in NASA’s early achievements. In “Lessons from 

the Past,” Howard McCurdy attributes the Agency’s success 

in landing men on the moon to technical expertise, excellent 

management techniques, and effective relationships with 

contractors. And Kerry Ellis’s article on Viking shows how 

strong, smart leadership and good teamwork are vital to 

success. Landing on Mars and sending back pictures 

and information from the surface required technological 

innovation but also innovation in management, such as the 

creation and use of a data system that helped members of 

the large project team share information.

The value of skilled management is a familiar ASK

theme. So is the importance of learning and knowledge 

In This Issue

ASK MAGAZINE | 3
exchange. NASA must be a learning organization because 

so much of what it does has never been done before. It 

has to learn new things to do new things. Several articles 

make clear that we learn best from hands-on experience. 

In his recollection of being a young engineer at Marshall 

in the early sixties, Glen Robinson talks about how much 

he learned working on rocket test stands and how much 

he learned from people who had little advanced education 

but lots of practical experience. Greg Lofgren tells how 

doing geology on Earth prepared Apollo astronauts for 

doing it on the moon. Ed Hoffman’s brief history of project 

management development at NASA emphasizes the 

importance of making the real experience of practitioners 

the basis of what is taught about managing projects. Jim 

Odom recalls how valuable it was to have engineers with 

Apollo experience working on the shuttle and argues for 

a smooth, well-planned transition to Constellation that will 

similarly draw on expertise developed over decades of 

shuttle and International Space Station work. 

Looking to the future, many of our authors insist that 

finding ways to give engineers and managers more handson experience will be essential to NASA’s future. Some 

of the themes Prusak and I touch on in “NASA and the 

Future of Knowledge”—respect for local knowledge, the 

value of personal networks as knowledge sources, and 

understanding how learning happens—are implicit in these 

stories of knowledge and learning.

Several articles here consider NASA’s history of scientific 

discovery. Beginning with Explorer 1, launched before NASA 

came into existence, doing science has been an integral part 

of the space program. Noel Hinners and James Garvin draw 

on their long experience of space science to describe the 

factors that contribute to successful scientific missions and 

the decisions that must be made to do the best possible 

science within the constraints imposed by financial and 

engineering realities. Scientist-astronaut Joe Kerwin details 

the important medical research done on Skylab, and MIT’s 

Laurence Young argues for the medical research he believes 

should be done at the planned lunar outpost.

This issue of ASK is one small part of NASA’s fiftieth 

anniversary observations and barely scratches the 

surface of what the Agency has done in the past. I hope, 

though, that this brief look at some NASA experiences 

and accomplishments will contribute at least a little to its 

readiness to reach its goals for the future.

Don Cohen

Managing Editor

4 | ASK MAGAZINE
Imagine for a moment that high-ranking government officials enthusiastically embrace a plan to 

send Americans to the moon as part of an effort that will lead eventually to human expeditions to 

Mars. The officials charge NASA with the task of mobilizing the nation to achieve this goal. At first, 

the Agency struggles to achieve it. Efforts to produce a succession of robotic precursors falter. The 

rocket selected to dispatch the crew is not safe. The crew’s space capsule cannot land as planned. 

The program suffers cost overruns and schedule delays. The White House and Congress refuse to

provide extra funds; support for ventures beyond the moon dwindles. The Agency reorganizes itself.

Lessons from the Past: 

How NASA’s Early Culture 

Informs Current Challenges

By Howard E. McCurdy

Photo Credit: NASA

Peering from the Apollo 11 hatch while conducting a crew compartment fit and functional check in their command 

module are, from left, Neil Armstrong, commander; Michael Collins, command module pilot; and Buzz Aldrin, lunar 

module pilot. Lessons from Gemini and large-scale project management aided Project Apollo’s success.

INSIGHT | ASK MAGAZINE | 5
Does this sound familiar? Although it may seem to describe 

the current challenges facing NASA employees as they attempt 

to launch the Vision for Space Exploration, it is in fact a 

recounting of the difficulties encountered nearly fifty years ago 

as the original race to the moon began. The response of NASA 

officials at that time contains important lessons for efforts under 

way now.

In recalling what is often termed NASA’s “finest hour,” 

people tend to mythologize the Apollo landings and the 

successful efforts to overcome difficulties—most notably those 

that afflicted the flight of Apollo 13. Yet the effort to surmount 

earlier difficulties, especially those affecting the Gemini flight 

program, had a much greater effect upon NASA and transformed 

the Agency in ways that made the lunar landings possible.

Project Gemini, approved in late 1961, served as a bridge 

between the Mercury project and the larger goal of reaching 

the moon. NASA flew ten piloted Gemini missions in 1965 

and 1966. Concurrently, NASA dispatched nine Ranger 

spacecraft to the moon, robotic precursors to the human 

missions that would follow. Both projects endured significant 

troubles from the start. The resolution of those difficulties 

reshaped NASA and enhanced its capacity for effective project 

management. The NASA that reached the moon in 1969 was 

significantly different from the institution that began Project 

Gemini in late 1961.

Government officials approved Project Ranger as a means 

of obtaining close-up pictures of the lunar surface. The first 

six Ranger spacecraft failed to complete their missions. Balky 

rockets, faulty spacecraft, and inaccurate trajectories produced 

six successive mishaps. Congress launched an investigation and 

blamed the failures on deficient project management.

NASA officials selected the Titan II launch vehicle, being 

developed as an air force missile, to carry the Gemini astronauts 

into space. The rocket oscillated badly. Half of the first twenty 

test fights failed to meet expectations. Officials at the Johnson 

Space Center (then the Manned Spacecraft Center) called the 

rocket unfit for human flight. For the return to Earth, engineers 

designed a paraglider that would inflate upon descent and guide 

the space capsule to a smooth touchdown on land. When the test 

program produced more wing-load problems than controlled 

descents, NASA officials installed parachutes and reenlisted the 

U.S. Navy for another series of retrievals at sea.

The cost of Project Gemini grew by more than 40 percent 

over early estimates. NASA Administrator James Webb asked 

President John F. Kennedy for extra funds to help the program 

achieve its objectives. Kennedy rejected Webb’s request and 

Congress cut NASA’s appropriation by 3 percent. As Congress 

and the White House cut, NASA planners began to formulate 

a post-Apollo space program that would include a 1986 

human expedition to Mars. In 1964, Webb prepared President 

Lyndon Johnson for the financial commitments that this effort 

would entail. Johnson refused to be drawn in. He provided 

the funds to complete the objective of landing Americans on 

the moon but declined to provide any significant funding for 

activities beyond.

Commenting on the troubles faced by the people working 

on Project Gemini, the authors of the comprehensive history On 

the Shoulders of Titans conclude that “this picture of a smoothly 

meshed team moving from success to success, although true 

enough for the last six months of the program, slighted the 

obstinate technical and managerial problems that had to be 

surmounted before the happy outcome was reached.”

Developing NASA’s Culture

How did NASA officials respond to these problems and 

setbacks? At the start, the Agency relied upon a strong tradition 

of in-house technical capability. It had an extensive corps 

of government employees who understood the intricacies of 

spacecraft design, landing systems, rocketry, and aerodynamics. 

NASA officials sustained this technical capability by completing 

a certain amount of work in house, recruiting what they thought 

to be exceptional people, giving them a great deal of discretion, 

Photo Credit: NASA

W.C. Sleeman, Jr., inspecting a model of the paraglider 

proposed for use in Project Gemini. The wing suffered 

a number of problems and was later canceled, but the 

team learned from the failure, which helped Project 

Gemini’s eventual success.

6 | ASK MAGAZINE
allowing them to take risks and fail, and providing them with 

new and challenging assignments.

In-house work encouraged NASA employees to be 

technically competent. Most people remember the extensive 

training that astronauts received before their voyages, but NASA’s 

leadership trained its engineers and scientists as well. Engineers 

and scientists practiced their technical skills by working on 

real hardware, conducting tests, training astronauts, operating 

spacecraft, and doing research. As a result, NASA maintained 

a corps of professional employees who knew as much—if not 

more—about space flight and rocketry than any other group of 

people on the planet.

Second, NASA executives like James Webb looked outside 

the Gemini and Apollo projects for management practices that 

could be used to control schedules, monitor costs, regulate design 

changes, and ensure performance. They learned that complex 

projects worked best when governed by a single center engaged 

in systems integration. Webb turned to the U.S. Air Force 

ballistic missile program, which had the strongest tradition of 

large-scale systems management, and imported a succession of 

air force officers and contract employees who knew how the 

system worked. It took two major reorganizations and plenty 

of perseverance to install the system in NASA, but by the mid1960s the Agency was institutionally prepared to complete the 

Gemini project and move toward the moon landings.

Third, the Agency maintained a special relationship with 

its contractors. Agency policy dictated that NASA employees 

use private contractors to build the spacecraft, rockets, landing 

systems, and other components of Project Gemini. Yet NASA 

employees did not defer to contractors. Relying upon the 

technical capability inside NASA and the strong centers of 

in-house systems integration, NASA managers penetrated and 

controlled contractors to an unusual degree. One rocket scientist 

likened the relationship between NASA and its contractors to 

what one would expect to find between a professor and his or 

her students.

Together, these practices formed what came to be known as 

the NASA organizational culture: in-house technical capability, 

appropriate management techniques, and carefully maintained, 

close relationships with contractors. If a healthy organizational 

culture consists of the practices and values that help the 

organization accomplish its tasks, then NASA’s culture was 

unquestionably a healthy one. It helped the Agency complete 

the moon landings—on schedule and within the estimated 

cost—and supported a succession of successful missions to the 

moon, Mars, and the outer planets using robotic spacecraft.

Maintaining NASA’s Capabilities

When NASA strays from these practices, it invites trouble. The 

temptations to stray are considerable. Bureaucratic procedures, 

excessive oversight, aversion to risk, independent field centers, 

and unwarranted confidence all conspire to undermine healthy 

cultures. A recent survey conducted by NASA’s History Office 

confirms that agency employees worry about issues such as these, 

although employees still view the Agency as an exceptional place.

History suggests that there is no substitute for in-house 

technical capability. It is the foundation upon which all other 

practices rest. Without it, NASA would cease to be a research 

and development organization. In the 1960s, people like Max 

Faget, Christopher C. Kraft, Robert R. Gilruth, George M. 

Low, Wernher von Braun, Eugene F. Kranz, George Mueller, 

and many others helped preserve that capability. Respondents to 

the 2006 History Office survey believe that NASA still recruits 

exceptional people but does not give them enough hands-on work 

to keep them sharp. By a six-to-one margin, NASA professional 

employees agree that the Agency “has turned over too much of 

its basic engineering and science work to contractors.”

Experience also reveals that individual space missions suffer 

when they lack a single strong center of program integration. 

Large-scale systems management provided such a center for the 

moon race, transforming the troubles of Project Gemini into the 

achievements of Project Apollo. Historian Stephen Johnson has 

Together, these practices formed what came to be known as

the NASA organizational culture: in-house technical capability, 

appropriate management techniques, and carefully maintained, 

close relationships with contractors.

ASK MAGAZINE | 7
characterized the use of large-scale systems management during 

the moon race as “the secret of Apollo.” Yet it is not the only way 

to achieve program integration. A recent succession of low-cost 

projects demonstrated that “skunk works” techniques provide 

a worthy substitute for the more formal practices associated 

with systems management. Scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion 

Laboratory used skunk works techniques to complete the 

Pathfinder project; officials at the Applied Physics Laboratory 

used them to complete the NEAR-Shoemaker mission. Space 

entrepreneurs have adopted them in pursuit of goals like the 

X PRIZE. Basically, the skunk works approach substitutes small, 

tightly organized teams with a high capacity for interpersonal 

communication for the formal control strategies contained in 

systems management. Lots of organizations use it.

NASA’s relationship with contractors is still evolving. In the 

beginning, when space exploration was new, NASA attracted a 

disproportionate share of the world’s best spacecraft engineers 

and rocket scientists. Today, that talent is more widely dispersed, 

and NASA officials face substantial pressure to contract out 

their work. External organizations have substantial technical 

capability, but their institutional practices do not always 

match those found in NASA. I recently completed an analysis 

of twenty-three low-cost NASA projects conducted between 

1992 and 2005. One-third of the projects were completed in 

house; two-thirds were completed by contractors. Projects that 

followed NASA’s historic practices had a 100 percent success 

rate. They possessed a single center of program integration, 

funding commensurate with project complexity (not too little 

given the complexity of the mission), and a culture of technical 

competence. Where projects violated two or more of those 

precepts, they failed 50 percent of the time. Violation of the 

precepts occurred far more frequently on projects contracted out 

than ones done in house. 

A half-century of space flight has created a storehouse of 

experience that can be applied to future challenges. There are 

many ways to manage a space expedition and only a few ways 

to do it right. The civil space program has been well served by 

its tradition of in-house technical capability, strong centers of 

integration, and the insistence that contractors follow sound 

practices. Yet the temptation to compromise remains strong. 

Where that occurs, trouble invariably follows. NASA has the 

opportunity to achieve great new goals. Its history suggests that 

this will not be easy, but it is feasible. As President Kennedy 

noted in launching the modern space program, we do these 

things “not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” ●

Howard E. McCurdy is a professor in the School of Public 

Affairs at American University in Washington, D.C., and author of 

seven books on space policy, including Faster, Better, Cheaper: 

Low-Cost Innovation in the U.S. Space Program and Inside NASA, 

a study of the Agency’s changing organizational culture. He 

recently completed a book with Roger Launius, Robots in Space.

8 | ASK MAGAZINE
a MEMOIR

Technicians prepare 

the Ranger 4 satellite 

for use at the Parade 

of Progress show 

at the Public Hall in 

Photo Credit: NASA

Cleveland, Ohio. Early Lunar Missions

:

By J. D. Burke

STORY | ASK MAGAZINE | 9
On January 2, 1959, the Soviets’ Luna 1, Mechta (Dream), 

escaped into interplanetary space. To me, this was the real 

watershed. NASA had been founded in 1958, and JPL, 

transferred from army sponsorship, had become one of its field 

centers. We agreed that lunar and planetary exploration should 

be our central goal. Of course Earth satellites were important, 

destined, among other things, to found a huge new industry 

in telecommunication satellites, but these were regarded as not 

appropriate pursuits for a research laboratory in a university 

setting. So we decided that JPL should plan to work at the farther 

frontier and develop Earth satellites only for science missions. 

The first American lunar attempts were unsuccessful. 

Pioneer 4, a tiny, spinning Tin Woodsman’s hat, did follow 

Luna 1 into interplanetary space, but it and other U.S. lunar 

missions in 1959 returned no data from the moon. Meanwhile, 

Luna 2 hit the moon and Luna 3 ended centuries of speculation 

by imaging its far side. By 1960 we were into serious planning 

for more ambitious missions to the moon and Venus. Despite 

its tempting aspect as the first chance in history for humans 

to send something to Mars, we abandoned that year’s October 

Mars launch window as unattainable, given our capabilities 

at the time.

The Soviets did try for Mars. On October 10, 1960, at the 

instant when Tyuratam was brought by Earth rotation into 

alignment with a minimum-energy path to Mars, a vehicle lifted 

off carrying a far greater weight than any ever before lofted by 

rocket. Intercepted telemetry showed that the loaded upper stages 

weighed more than thirty tons. A new upper-stage engine started, 

but its turbine did not reach a stabilized full speed. Four days later, 

again at the exact right instant for a departure to Mars, another 

heavy vehicle lifted off. Again the upper-stage engine failed.

These flights, though not announced at the time in either the 

Soviet Union or the United States, were a powerful stimulus to our 

efforts. We now knew beyond doubt that we were in competition 

with determined and well-supported colleagues in the otherwise 

feared and mistrusted Soviet Union. Today I am privileged to 

enjoy the friendship of some of them who have survived up to 

now. Indeed two, Mikhail Marov and Nikolai Tolyarenko, are 

fellow faculty members of the International Space University.

During that same month, October 1960, I was appointed 

project manager of Ranger, the first American effort to place 

scientific instruments on the surface of the moon. Our technical 

work proceeded in an environment of managerial and political 

commotion as the army, navy, and air force jockeyed for position 

in the new space game and NASA struggled to be born. 

 The Eisenhower administration had a good fundamental 

policy: the U.S. civil space program would be done in the open, 

with secrecy only where it was absolutely needed, such as how 

the Atlas guidance system worked. There were also deeply secret 

space programs, such as the one openly labeled Discoverer—

known in the secret world as Corona and managed by the 

CIA—to obtain reconnaissance information on Soviet strategic 

capacities. The military services naturally wanted a piece of 

the action, and the air force thought it should own the U.S. 

space program. The navy laid claim by asserting it needed to 

have important navigation satellites. The army was already 

launching satellites, and JPL had been connected with the army 

until NASA was formed. So all three military branches were 

campaigning against each other in this important national 

strategic opportunity. 

Below this high-level struggle, we had huge arguments 

about who would be in charge of what—for example who had 

Photo Credit: NASA

An audience at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory listens to a description of the 

final moments of Ranger 6 in 1964. Ranger 6 impacted the moon as planned on 

February 2, 1964, but a malfunction disabled its camera system.

When the world changed with Sputnik on October 4, 1957, we at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory 

(JPL) were jubilant. Yes, we had been beaten in a race, but we now knew that our fondest hopes 

would be realized. Soon we and the Wernher von Braun U.S. Army team gained permission to 

launch Explorer 1, and we were planning missions to the moon.

10 | ASK MAGAZINE
authority to launch or stop a launch. We also had one part of 

the science community wanting to obtain scientific information 

about the earth and its surrounding magnetosphere, creating 

another controversy. To me, this was a competition with the 

Soviet Union and getting to the moon for lunar science was the 

paramount objective; magnetospheric science was secondary. 

But to the non-lunar scientists, their science was primary. They 

would say to us, “If my instrument isn’t ready, you should wait 

until it is.” Our lunar scientists never gave us this problem. 

Until things settled down around 1963–64, when the roles 

and missions became clear and everyone buckled down to do 

the job, we found a few good people scattered throughout the 

system who were prepared to work together and ignore the uproar 

going on around us. U.S. Air Force Major Jack Albert, who by 

policy might have been an opponent, was a proponent of our 

team and helped us in many ways. Harold Luskin at Lockheed 

also collaborated wholeheartedly with us. Having real people, 

separate from theoretical policies, made things work. Instead of 

adversaries, they were collaborators. 

Despite all the turmoil, we were able to launch five Rangers 

during 1961 and 1962. All reached orbit and one crashed on the 

moon, but none returned useful scientific data. As Cargill Hall 

states in his book, Lunar Impact, “Experience soon drove home 

the point that project management had to be delegated to a 

project manager at the pertinent field center, JPL. Experience 

also made clear the advantages of bringing together agency 

scientists and engineers both at Headquarters and in the field 

laboratory.” I was succeeded as project manager by my admired 

JPL friend Harris M. (Bud) Schurmeier, who took the project 

through one more failure and on to three triumphant successes 

in 1964 and 1965.

I remained with Ranger and saw it become the success I 

had always intended it to be. Hall points out, “The things for 

which he [Burke] struggled—straightforward, unchanging 

project objectives; experiments that could not be altered at a 

scientist’s whim; recognized authority and responsibility in and 

from all the agencies participating—Burke won all these in 

defeat. NASA and JPL leaders granted all these to his successor, 

Schurmeier, who, with new test facilities and procedures, used 

them skillfully to the advantage of Ranger.”

While we were preparing Ranger 1 in the spring of 1961, 

President Kennedy announced Apollo, launching the great moon 

race. Ranger and JPL’s Surveyor lunar soft-landing project came 

to be regarded as precursors to Apollo, with their original 

science objectives retained but with a new focus on getting 

early results. Also, a new project managed by Langley 

Research Center, Lunar Orbiter, was started to 

obtain images in support of Apollo.

Photo Credit: NASA

Most of the Soviet 

troubles resulted from failures 

of management. The kind of

management disputes we had early

on did not get resolved in their case.

Dedicated in May, 1964, the new 

Space Flight Operations Facility 

used state-of-the-art equipment 

for mission operations and 

communications with JPL’s 

unmanned spacecraft. 

One of the first 

missions to use 

the facility was 

Ranger 7.

ASK MAGAZINE | 11
Meanwhile our Soviet competitors were having a terrible 

time. At the Venus window in February 1961, they launched 

two more heavy rockets. One achieved Earth orbit but failed 

to eject its payload toward Venus. The other, Venera 1, failed 

on its way to the planet. In 1962 they launched six of their 

enormous rockets, three to Venus and three to Mars, but only 

one spacecraft, Mars 1, went on its way and eventually it, 

too, failed en route. At that opportunity JPL mounted two 

Venus missions. One launch failed, but the other sent Mariner 

2 to Venus, yielding the first data on the planet’s hellish 

atmosphere. 

A long and frustrating period of Soviet lunar attempts 

followed. Beginning on January 4, 1963, and continuing through 

the next two years, they launched at least ten missions with only 

two partial technical successes and no lunar scientific results 

except the far-side images from Zond 3, a planetary spacecraft 

sent past the moon. At last, on February 3, 1966, Luna 9 landed 

and began sending facsimile panoramas from the lunar surface.

Most of the Soviet troubles resulted from failures of 

management. The kind of management disputes we had early on 

did not get resolved in their case. For example, their launch vehicles 

were operated by Soviet armed forces in a military institution that 

did not have science among its primary objectives. They would 

launch vehicles before they were ready, and they would fail. They 

also faced a technical problem that we had to learn about, too, 

by bitter experience: it’s very difficult to start a rocket engine in 

microgravity because propellants do not remain where they are 

needed. Design ingenuity is required to get the liquid into the 

pumps before an engine can start. One reason the Soviet R-7/

Soyuz rocket was so successful and is still used is that all engines 

are running on the launchpad before liftoff.

By 1966 we had been collecting telemetry from the Soviet 

missions for several years. When Luna 9 landed, we were 

recording the spacecraft’s signals at our station in Eritrea and 

three other collaborating sites. The Doppler showed retrorocket 

braking of the descent all the way to the surface. Then the 

signal went off the air. Another failure? We waited anxiously. 

Then all of a sudden a new signal appeared: a scratchy, 

pulsing heartbeat. Wow, it was a fax! We were joyful to see 

the result of their ingenious system designs and persistent, 

patient overcoming of successive failures. Soon the American 

Surveyors, too, began landing on the moon and returning 

television images and, later, chemical data.

The next Soviet lunar spacecraft was stranded in lowEarth orbit, but then the USSR team achieved another historic 

milestone by placing the first spacecraft, Luna 10, in lunar 

orbit. From then on, the Soviet robotic lunar program advanced 

steadily, with much larger spacecraft launched by the huge 

Proton rocket, eventually returning small samples of lunar soil 

and delivering the two Lunokhod rovers to the moon.

On the larger stage of human lunar missions, the preparations 

for Apollo moved America ahead. We watched with overhead 

imaging while monstrous facilities for the giant N-1 rocket were 

built at Tyuratam, and when the four attempted launches of the 

N-1 failed, we were downcast at the thought that this would 

bring human lunar exploration to an end—as indeed it did. The 

greatest N-1 failure wiped out parts of the USSR launch facility 

on July 4, 1969, just before Apollo 11. When the Soviets decided 

to cut their losses and give up competition with Apollo, keeping 

lunar missions going was no longer a priority in either country. 

Soviet circumlunar human-precursor missions in the late sixties, 

labeled Zond 4 through 8, had demonstrated ingenious design 

and execution but did not lead anywhere. By 1976 it was all over.

What should we now conclude about this wonderful and 

never-to-be-forgotten experience? Both we and our competitors 

were in too much of a hurry at the beginning, and we had to 

learn that robotic lunar and planetary exploration is barely 

achievable even with great effort and care. In spite of their many 

failures, the Soviets did pull down each of the world’s historic 

firsts at the moon: the first escape, the first lunar impact, the 

first far-side images, the first lunar landing, and the first lunar 

orbit. But when it came to the great contest with Apollo, they 

could not keep up the pace. 

They had funding, they had good people, they had policy 

support, but they did not have a coherent and stable management 

system. Apollo succeeded because the whole nation rose to the 

challenge. With Mercury and Gemini building human confidence 

and skills in orbit, the robotic craft finding needed information at 

the moon, the giant Saturn V building upon decades of experience 

in the von Braun team, and the human lunar spacecraft being 

created with broad skills in industry, the colossal enterprise was 

rigorously managed all the way to its end in 1972. ●

J. D. Burke, a Caltech alumnus and former U.S. Navy aviator, 

was employed at Jet Propulsion Laboratory from 1949 to his 

retirement in 2001 after serving in many lunar and planetary 

projects. He was a member of Paul MacCready’s team, winning 

the Kremer Prizes for human-powered flight. Now in retirement, 

his main professional activities are with The Planetary Society 

and the International Space University. 1. R. Cargill Hall, Lunar Impact, (Wahington, D.C.: NASA History Office, 1977), NASA SP-4210.

2. J. D. Burke, “Seven Years to Luna 9,” Studies in Intelligence 10, Summer (1966, declassified 1994).

12 | ASK MAGAZINE
I graduated in 1963 with a degree in aerospace engineering from 

North Carolina State University and immediately went to work at the 

Marshall Space Flight Center. At that time, all of us young engineers 

Photo Credit: NASA

were assigned to work on smaller pieces of the Saturn V.

This photograph depicts a view of 

the test firing of all five F-1 engines 

for the Saturn V S-IC test stage at the 

Marshall Space Flight Center.

The Apollo 

Era: Working at Marshall 

in the Sixties

By Glenn A. Robinson, Jr.

STORY | ASK MAGAZINE | 13
As you can imagine, I was a fresh-out with no experience at 

all. My first week at Marshall, I was told, “We’re building this 

testing facility, and you’re going to be the engineer on it.” I knew 

nothing about building facilities, let alone aerospace test facilities. 

But based on that experience and similar experiences, I would 

strongly recommend that a young engineer who goes to work for 

NASA or an aerospace firm start in a test area. It teaches you that 

you cannot build things overnight. Materials must be ordered 

and delivered. Planning and initial work must be done. 

Working on that test facility at Marshall, I understood 

some simple realities. The electricians could not do anything 

until we had a structure. We could not build the structure 

until the foundation was in place. We learned to establish 

realistic schedules for that up-front work. Hardware was the 

same. We started with an idea, defined it, and then drew it 

on paper (no CAD-CAM in those days). Some people may 

believe that such things can be built quickly, but it takes time 

to do everything. 

Hands-On Knowledge

At Marshall in 1963, there were a number of people who were 

“wage-board employees.” Almost all of them were World War II 

veterans, most in their forties and fifties. The majority of them 

had no college education, but they had incredible knowledge. I 

don’t believe we could have accomplished what we did without 

them. We also had a complete machine shop in our building. 

If we did not have something that we needed, these veterans 

would go into the shop and build it. It was obvious to me how 

we won World War II when I watched these guys. If something 

was not immediately available, they’d build it from scratch. 

When I first came to Marshall, I had ten wage-board 

employees working for me, building a Saturn V model engine 

test-firing stand to evaluate building a Saturn V launch platform 

over water. These guys had a wealth of accumulated, hands-on 

knowledge and common sense. When we finished building the 

test stand, our first test was to fire a model of the F-1 engine. 

These were LOX/RP1 engines (liquid oxygen and jet fuel). As 

part of the testing, we had to do valve timings to make sure that 

the propellants came in at the correct time. 

While we were putting the facility together, one of the 

wage-board employees said to me, “Robbie, if we set these valves 

up like they’re telling us to set them up, I think we’re going to 

burn that engine up.” 

I asked, “Why?” 

He said, “Well, they’ve got us coming in with an oxidizer lead.” 

I said, “Well, the guys who configured it are supposed to 

know what they’re doing.” Of course, I was an inexperienced, 

twenty-one-year-old kid; I didn’t really know what I was doing. 

But I decided to discuss his concern with some of the senior 

engineers. They concluded that it was not a problem. I went 

back and told the technicians. 

They said, “Don’t worry about it. After we melt the first 

one, we’ll fix it.” 

Sure enough, in the first test firing we burned up an 

injector. So I went back to the technician and said, “Henry 

[Henry Hilton was his name], how did you know that this was 

going to happen? I have an aerospace engineering degree, but we 

never studied anything like this at NC State.” 

Henry answered, “It’s very simple. I looked at it like an 

acetylene torch.” 

“What do you mean?” I asked. 

Henry said, “An acetylene torch will do one of two things. You 

can either solder with it—melt stuff to put it together—or you can 

cut with it. If you’re running oxidizer rich, guess what: you cut with 

it.” He explained that all we had done was to create an acetylene 

torch, which caused a meltdown of the injector. I was a relative 

youngster with an engineering degree, but since I could admit 

that I didn’t know everything and was willing to ask questions, 

I gained the respect of the team working with me. I continued to 

benefit from their knowledge over the next few years as we worked 

together testing different parts of the Saturn rockets. 

In those early days of human space flight, NASA built and 

assembled a lot of the flight and test hardware, then built the 

facilities for all the experimental testing we did. Much of the 

14 | ASK MAGAZINE
Photo Credit: NASA

At its founding, Marshall inherited the army’s Jupiter and Redstone test stands, but much larger facilities were needed for the giant stages of the Saturn V. From 1960 

to 1964, the existing stands were remodeled and a sizable new test area was developed. The new comprehensive test complex for propulsion and structural dynamics 

was unique within the nation and the free world, and it remains so today because it was constructed with foresight to future as well as current needs.

ASK MAGAZINE | 15
Saturn hardware was designed at Marshall. Today, most of it 

is designed and built by contractor teams at their facilities. It’s 

a very different environment. I believe that part of the problem 

that exists at NASA today is that the old and experienced 

engineers (including me) move up into management and no 

longer have the opportunity to do much technical work with 

the young employees who are coming aboard. These new, 

young engineers work with other young engineers. I consider 

it to be a shame that we, who have had the experiences and 

the knowledge gained from many failures and successes, 

have not gotten more technically involved with our younger, 

less-experienced employees. 

Working for Von Braun

Wernher von Braun was a fascinating individual. If he met you 

once he would remember your name. Over the years, I had 

opportunities to fly on the Gulf Stream with him. The director’s 

seat was always at the back. People would get to the Redstone 

airfield early so they could sit near von Braun. He was fun and 

exciting to be around. He could talk on almost any subject; 

he was extremely knowledgeable. It didn’t matter whether you 

were a fresh-out twenty-one-year-old engineer or someone who 

had been around for twenty years; he was always willing have 

discussions with you. He was very open-minded, listened to 

what people had to say, and considered their recommendations. 

But once he made a decision, the decision was made and the 

decision was his.

The 138-foot-long first stage of the Saturn V is lowered to the ground following a 

successful static test firing at Marshall Space Flight Center’s S-1C test stand.

Photo Credit: NASA’s ASK Magazine

I believe that part of the problem

that exists at NASA today is that

the old and experienced engineers

(including me) move up into 

management and no longer have the

opportunity to do much technical

work with the young employees

who are coming aboard.

16 | ASK MAGAZINE
Von Braun would come down to the test stand that I was 

running as a very young test engineer and ask my permission to 

go out on the stand. His attitude was, “This is your environment, 

and you’re in charge.” Away from the test stand, there was no 

question: he was the center director, and he was in charge.

We did much of the S1B testing at Marshall. Back then, we 

didn’t have the computers that we rely on today. We used consoles 

with switches to manually operate all the valves and strip charts 

with ink pens to record measurements and data. A number of 

us were asked to support one of the S1B firings by monitoring 

some of the redlines. As I recall, the chamber pressure for the H-1 

engine was 1,000 psig and the redline was slightly above that. 

Those of us watching critical redlines were given cut-off 

switches. About two minutes into the test, the needle touched the 

redline on the chamber pressure of the engine I was monitoring 

and then went slightly above. I punched my button and shut 

down the test. Of course, it became really quiet in the room. 

Everyone was looking around to see who had shut it down. I 

admitted being the “culprit.” An investigation followed. The 

more senior people asked, “Why did you shut it down?” 

Needless to say, I acknowledged that I had shut down the 

test because the chamber pressure exceeded the redline by a 

couple of psi. The senior engineers asked, “Couldn’t you see it 

was stable and it wasn’t going anywhere?” They were going on 

and on like that, as typical engineers do. Von Braun had been 

sitting in the back during this “inquisition.” 

After a few minutes of intense inquiry he spoke up and 

asked, “What did you tell my young engineer to do?” 

They answered, “We told him to shut it down if it hit the 

redline.” 

Von Braun asked, “Did it hit the redline?” 

“Well, yes, it exceeded the redline by a couple of psi.” 

Von Braun responded, “Well, the young engineer did what 

you told him to do. Quit criticizing him. Change your redlines 

if they’re wrong and leave my young engineers alone.” Only he 

said it with a little bit more explicit language. That ended that, 

and, no, the redlines were never changed.

The Apollo Spirit

During that exciting time, money was not an issue like it is 

today. Our only challenges were technical. We all worked six or 

seven days a week to accomplish our mission of landing a man 

on the moon within the decade. We were very close, committed 

to our work and to each other. It is very difficult to describe 

the camaraderie. We played softball together; we worked 

together; we went fishing together; we vacationed together. Our 

environment was very much like being on a college football 

team. Our coaches were von Braun and the management team 

at Marshall. I believe that the only problem we had then was 

that we took greater risks than we should have. For example, 

we lost a couple of guys on a tank that blew up. They had been 

leak-checking the tank while it was pressurized at a level that 

was too high. We had a few other accidents along the road to 

our successes. Nobody heard much about those events. Our 

environment said, “We’re going to do this.” We were all gung 

ho. I don’t think there was anything that we thought we couldn’t 

do. Our accomplishments are a national legacy. Our spirit is 

part of the legacy, too, but it came with a silent price. ●

After graduating with a degree in aerospace engineering, Glenn 

A. Robinson, Jr., went to work at Marshall Space Flight 

Center, where he remained for the first twenty years of his fortyfour-year career with NASA. In 1983 he spent a year on detail at 

NASA Headquarters for the Space Station Task Force. He was 

detailed to Johnson Space Center in April 1984 to work in the 

Space Station Skunk Works, where he stayed until retiring from 

NASA in 2007.

ASK MAGAZINE | 17
Teaching Geology to 

 

Astronaut James B. Irwin, lunar 

module pilot, uses a scoop to make a 

trench in the lunar soil during Apollo 

15 EVA. Mount Hadley rises above 

the plain in the background.

Photo Credit: NASA; David Scott

18 | ASK MAGAZINE | STORY
Apollo Astronauts By Gary Lofgren

It is difficult to describe my excitement when I was about to 

see rocks from the moon for the first time. Apollo 11 went to a 

mare area, the Sea of Tranquility. We expected that basaltic lavas 

would be the most common kind of rock in the so-called lunar 

seas, and they were. The other kind of rock, the soil breccias, 

were a surprise and were our initiation to the rocks produced 

during the many impacts evident on the moon. 

Shortly after the samples were returned, I was asked to 

participate in the process of distributing them to scientists for 

study. Many scientists needed samples of a definite shape—a 

cube, for instance. Such samples would have to be cut with a 

saw, but no saw suitable for the task existed. Rocks are usually 

sawn with water as a lubricant and coolant, but using water 

or any liquid that would have contaminated the samples was 

unacceptable. One of the scientists developed a saw that used 

a diamond-impregnated wire to cut the samples dry. It was a 

delicate machine that needed constant attention. I was given 

the task of learning the saw and doing all the cutting for the 

initial Apollo 11 allocation of samples that required sawing. 

This gave me a chance to study the samples at my leisure. I used 

this opportunity to record my observations, which later became 

part of an introductory paper in the proceedings of the first 

lunar science conference. I went on to study the lunar basalts in 

my laboratory for the next ten years.

Teaching Geology to Astronauts

Far and away the most memorable aspect of my Apollo 

experience was working as part of a team of geologists that 

taught the astronauts geology. Being a rookie, I began working 

with the backup crew for Apollo 13, John Young and Charlie 

Duke, who eventually flew on Apollo 16. Training began in 

earnest when I was assigned to work with the Apollo 15 crew as 

the MSC representative. Apollo 15 was the first of the long-stay 

“J” missions. They would have three extra-vehicular activities 

(EVAs) on the surface totaling more than twenty hours. In 

addition, they would have a vehicle, the Lunar Rover, to extend 

the area over which they would conduct scientific experiments. 

Clearly the science effort was becoming huge. Dave Scott, the 

mission commander, recognized that fact and dedicated a large 

block of his and Jim Irwin’s time to becoming field geologists. 

They would land on basalt flow with Mount Hadley, part of 

the early lunar highland crust, a short distance to the east of the 

landing site. This would be the first landing with an objective to 

sample the primitive lunar crust. Training would have to prepare 

Dave and Jim to recognize and sample both basalt and lunar 

crustal rocks. They would set a standard for geologic fieldwork 

that would spur on the later crews.

The spectacular scientific success of the A-15 mission and 

Apollos 16 and 17 to follow—with their cumulative total of 

approximately sixty hours on the lunar surface—was in large 

part a result of extensive geologic field training. The geologic 

objectives for these missions were complex. What made the 

training so successful, in addition to great teachers and dedicated 

astronauts, is worth noting for future missions. 

A-15 was a turning point in the length and intensity of 

the training in geology. Training included sixteen to eighteen 

I came fresh out of graduate school to the then Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC—later Johnson 

Space Center) in 1973, prepared to build a laboratory to study the formation of basaltic rocks. Little 

did I know what was to come. I became a member of the Geology Branch. One of our primary 

activities was to train Apollo astronauts how to do geology on the moon. I eventually built the 

science laboratory and accomplished all I hoped to do when I came. My participation in the Apollo 

program, however, has been the highlight of my science career.

ASK MAGAZINE | 19
field exercises of two to three days each over eighteen months, 

augmented by limited classroom study. Every attempt was 

made to train in geologic settings that simulated some aspect 

of the scientific objectives of the mission. Apollo 15 would land 

between Hadley Rille and Mount Hadley on the edge of the 

Imbrium Basin. The crews were asked to systematically observe 

everything from the far distance to the near field and ultimately 

developed astute observation skills and a geologic vocabulary in 

common with the geologists in the mission science backroom. 

Most of the field exercises were focused on specific mission 

objectives to give the astronauts the background they needed 

to fully understand the scientific objectives and their rationale. 

One of the most important classroom activities was to learn basic 

lunar rock types by direct observation of Apollo lunar samples 

in the Lunar Receiving Laboratory. Because I was at MSC and 

close to the lunar samples, I took on the task of familiarizing 

the crew with the lunar samples we already had collected on 

previous missions. 

The primary teaching technique that evolved during the 

early training was perfected during the Apollo 15 training under 

the tutelage of Lee Silver, a Caltech professor who had been 

teaching field geology to students for years and was strongly 

encouraged to participate by Jack Schmitt. Jack would be on 

the A-17 prime crew and was on the backup crew for A-15. The 

training traverses were designed to mimic what would happen 

on the moon as closely as possible. Routine tasks such as sample 

collection and documentation were practiced on all traverses until 

they became second nature, freeing the astronauts to observe 

their surroundings. Every effort was made to visit terrestrial 

geologic localities that mimicked the geologic problems at the 

lunar landing sites as closely as possible. 

Traverses were designed by knowledgeable geologists with 

a definite path to follow and specific science objectives to be 

achieved at designated stations indicated on the traverse. The 

real mission capcoms, astronauts Joe Allen (prime) and Bob 

Parker (backup), acted as a communication link between the 

crew in the field and a science backroom comprising geologists 

not familiar with the geology that would be encountered by the 

astronauts. During these exercises, Joe and Bob developed their 

ability to prod and guide the activities of the crew to complete 

their designated tasks. The most important part of this training 

exercise was the face-to-face debriefing where the crew, together 

with the capcoms and the science backroom geologists, walked 

over the entire traverse and discussed the degree to which the 

crew had been able to communicate the geology they were 

seeing in the field. 

In the early exercises the gap was large, but with repetition 

over many field trips that gap disappeared and a common 

language was born. The capcoms developed an intimate 

knowledge of how the crew worked, what limitations were 

imposed by the rigor of the defined traverse, and how to best 

interact with the crew to get the job done. The geologists 

learned how difficult it would be to communicate with the 

crew and how best to make that happen. Most importantly, the 

crews had the opportunity to learn how to communicate with 

the geologists effectively and how and when to ask for advice. I 

believe this activity alone is primarily responsible for the success 

of the geologic traverses. These debriefings forced everybody to 

recognize their deficiencies and to eliminate them. Ultimately, 

this activity formed the cohesive team that succeeded so well. I 

know also that if I were to teach students field geology, I would 

use many aspects of this training with my students.

More than anything else, though, the work succeeded 

because the crews took ownership of the missions and dedicated 

themselves to their success.

Dave Scott was an innovative commander. It was his idea 

that he and Jim Irwin would put on their space suits and open the 

docking hatch on the top of the Lunar Module to view the area. 

From this vantage point, approximately 20 ft. above the surface, 

the view was spectacular. He was able to find all the major 

landmarks noted on their traverse maps, describe the geology in the 

distance, and evaluate the surface mobility. An exciting moment 

20 | ASK MAGAZINE
Gary Lofgren is a senior planetary scientist and the Lunar 

Curator, where he oversees the preparation of lunar material 

for distribution to scientists for study, to museums for display, 

and for educational purposes. He has been a research scientist 

and principal investigator in the NASA Cosmochemistry program 

since 1968.

Photo Credit: NASA Johnson Space Center

came during the second traverse, when Dave spotted a white rock 

on the surface whose cleavage surfaces reflected the sunlight and 

caught his attention. He retrieved the rock and quickly identified 

the white mineral as plagioclase feldspar. This was why they came 

to the base of Mount Hadley—to find a piece of the primitive 

lunar crust. One major mission objective accomplished. 

They made another equally important discovery there. 

We were also looking for olivine-rich rocks. Olivine is a green 

mineral, and they saw some rocks with a green cast. These 

ultimately proved to contain not olivine but a green glass brought 

to the surface by a basaltic fire fountain. This green glass from 

deep in the moon revealed much about the nature of its source 

and the interior of the moon.

Late one night, near midnight, I left the building where I 

had been in a science backroom to support the crew after this 

EVA. There was a nearly full moon shining overhead. I looked 

up and realized that the two guys I had just watched collect some 

great rocks were on that moon. It was one of those moments you 

never forget.

There were other moments. In the Lunar Receiving Lab 

(LRL) where the samples were returned and the first three crews 

quarantined, I remember Dave and Jim’s excitement when they 

first saw the rocks they had collected on the lunar surface in 

the calm of the laboratory. They recounted how they noticed 

these important crustal rocks and gave us a better picture of 

their setting on the surface. There were several rapt geologists 

gathered around. I felt that the many training hours showing 

the crew the lunar rocks had paid dividends. 

Preserving and Protecting Lunar Geology

Thirty years after the mission and a long career studying first 

lunar basalts and then meteorites, I returned to Apollo. I became 

the curator of the lunar samples. They were now in my care. 

After thirty years, the samples have lost some of their scientific 

luster to many people but not to me. I rededicated myself to 

preserving the Apollo lunar sample heritage. A new building to 

house the samples was finished in 1979, and it has served them 

well. They are well protected from Earth’s environment, which 

would quickly destroy the lunar character of the samples. But 

a nearly twenty-five-year-old building needed renewing. That 

became my mission. Now, after ten years of effort and nearly 

$3 million, that renewal is nearly complete. But preserving the 

building is only part of the job. The documentation of forty 

years of processing lunar samples needed to be preserved in a 

useful, accessible form.

The story of the lunar database is a story of the development 

of the digital age from the late sixties to the present. The first 

version was contained in a primitive computer that was accessed 

with a 300-baud phone modem, the kind that had you put the 

phone receiver in a cradle. It went through the stage of punch 

cards and then magnetic tapes. Eventually we reached a critical 

stage when the database was still on an outmoded VAX computer 

for which no spare parts existed. The transition to a modern 

database was a more demanding task than I ever envisioned. 

I hoped to get $50,000 to make this transition. The cost was 

ultimately closer to $1 million and took five programmers 

fourteen months to accomplish. Without this effort, we would 

have been nearly out of the business of allocating samples if the 

VAX failed. We would have had to go back to the days of pencil 

and paper. I am comfortable now that all the necessary changes 

have been made or are currently in process to house and care 

for the samples properly for decades to come. They are indeed a 

national treasure. ●

Astronauts David R. Scott, left, and James B. Irwin, right, join Manned Spacecraft 

Center geologists in looking at some of the first Apollo 15 samples to be opened 

in the Non-Sterile Nitrogen Processing Line in the Manned Spacecraft Center’s 

Lunar Receiving Laboratory. Holding the microphone and making recorded 

tapes of the two Apollo 15 crewmen’s comments is Dr. Gary Lofgren.

ASK MAGAZINE | 21
When I arrived at NASA, the Agency had one approach to 

professional development: people learned on the job. Period. 

There were no training courses, no formalized coaching sessions 

or consultations with retired expert practitioners, no ASK 

Magazine. It was very much a sink-or-swim environment, just as 

it had been for decades. NASA focused primarily on a few large 

programs and projects—this was the era of the Space Shuttle 

and Hubble—with relatively long life cycles. They created 

opportunities for new people to learn as members of large teams 

of experienced practitioners. 

In 1986, the Challenger accident happened. It was a 

watershed event for NASA. Enormous energy and thought went 

into understanding what had gone wrong and what it would 

take to repair the NASA legacy of project excellence. Numerous 

committees, boards, and tiger teams worked to figure out what 

needed to be done to improve project management.

One idea that came out of these activities was the Program 

and Project Management Institute (PPMI), the precursor 

to today’s Academy of Program/Project and Engineering 

Leadership (APPEL). PPMI was sponsored by then-Deputy 

Administrator J. R. Thompson, who assigned it an initial $2 

million training budget and one civil servant. (If you judge an 

organization by its number of civil servants, then not much has 

changed: today APPEL has two.) PPMI was a training program. 

It focused on developing a curriculum that would provide a 

baseline of knowledge and competence, and it did so under the 

assumption that training would account for only a fraction of an 

individual’s development; the rest would take place on the job, 

as it always had. 

I became involved with PPMI in 1991 when I interviewed 

with Frank Hoban, its director, for the position of deputy 

director. Frank was a straight shooter. At first he didn’t 

want me because I knew little about the real world of project 

management. Once we met, though, Frank decided that I had 

the right attitude and a willingness to learn, and he hired me 

straight away. 

Thinking about this special issue of ASK focusing on NASA’s fiftieth anniversary, it occurred to me 

that there is a story from my own experience that is worth sharing. I came to NASA in 1983, at what 

is now the midpoint of its history, and over the past twenty-five years I have witnessed a wholesale 

change in the Agency’s approach to developing its project managers and engineers.

A Brief History of Project Management 

Development at NASA

By Ed Hoffman

22 | ASK MAGAZINE | INSIGHT
Frank understood that PPMI had to be more than a training 

course. He emphasized the importance of identifying the 

competencies required for project management and then using 

those competencies as a basis for building a curriculum. He 

knew that there were multiple ways to do project management 

successfully, and that our efforts depended on respecting and 

listening to practitioners. Training that worked had to be based 

on what experienced practitioners did, not on an abstract theory 

of what they should do.

Frank set up working groups on project management, 

program control, systems engineering, and other technical 

disciplines, and he talked to everybody. He taught me the 

importance of field research, of spending time visiting the 

centers and talking to practitioners about what they did and 

what they needed. He knew we could not do our job sitting 

behind a desk. 

He also initiated the practice of writing down what we’d 

learned. PPMI began publishing NASA Issues in Program and 

Project Management, a journal that is still available online 

through the NASA Technical Report Server (NTRS) archive. 

He believed we had to write about what we were doing and 

clearly document our efforts. He got questions about that: “Why 

are you doing a journal about training?” His reply was that it 

was not about training, it was about improving the development 

of project practitioners. In Frank’s mind, we existed to serve as 

a resource for the technical community as a whole. Our work 

had to be aligned with the NASA mission and it had to reach as 

much of that community as possible. 

Just a few months later, Frank did something that shocked 

me: he left NASA. I protested that I was not ready to take over, 

but he assured me that I would be fine, that I was asking the 

right questions and pointing in the proper direction. So I ended 

up taking over project management development for NASA 

three months after arriving at Headquarters. It happened under 

the most improbable circumstances, and now I had to deliver. 

The other landmark in professional development at NASA 

was the arrival of Dan Goldin as NASA Administrator. Nobody 

who worked for Dan would ever say he was an easy boss, but 

he made things happen. He became known, of course, for 

instituting the “faster, better, cheaper” era, but he was also deeply 

concerned about the development of NASA project managers. 

Dan looked at what PPMI was doing and said, you have a lot 

of courses, but you don’t have a framework. He wanted us to 

adopt a competency-based framework for developing project 

managers over the course of their careers. This became the basis 

for the Project Management Development Process (PMDP). 

We researched and identified the competencies needed at each 

stage of a career, and we came up with a career learning strategy 

to attain those competencies. To this day, PMDP remains the 

bedrock on which our current career development framework 

ASK MAGAZINE | 23
is built. This is when our efforts became truly professional, 

culminating in the establishment of the Academy of Program/

Project Leadership (APPL) in 1997. 

The back-to-back failures of the Mars Polar Lander and 

the Mars Climate Observer in 1999 represented the next big 

challenge and opportunity for APPL. Dan was furious that we 

were doing nothing to support our project teams in the field. As 

painful as this was, his criticism set us in a new direction. We 

began offering direct support to project teams by sending them 

expert practitioners who could tell when a project had gone off 

course and help steer it back to health. To date, APPEL has 

sponsored hundreds of performance enhancement engagements 

with NASA project teams, and these services now consume the 

largest part of our budget.

Around the same time, I began to focus heavily on the 

importance of stories in NASA’s project-based environment. 

How you communicate matters, and stories are a powerfully 

effective way to communicate real-world expertise and build 

professional communities. We created ASK Magazine as a journal 

for practitioners to share their stories, lessons learned, and best 

practices. A report by the Government Accountability Office 

(GAO) found that NASA needed to do a better job of sharing 

lesson learned, and this provided us with an opportunity to 

expand our knowledge-sharing efforts. Shortly after starting ASK, 

we held the first Masters Forum to provide senior practitioners 

with a venue where they could share stories, build cross-agency 

relationships, and take time to reflect on what they had learned 

from their experiences. We followed the Masters Forum with 

the first Project Management Challenge conference, which 

represented the first opportunity to gather a sizable percentage of 

the project community in one place. The last two PM Challenge 

events have each had more than 1,000 attendees.

Our recent developments—our leap into the present—came 

about when Mike Griffin became NASA Administrator. One of 

his first initiatives was getting the Agency’s governance model 

right. Though that may sound like an abstract bureaucratic 

exercise, it had enormous importance because it determined 

how decisions would be made about work getting done at the 

project level. It set out clear lines of authority and refocused the 

Agency on one goal: mission success. 

APPL merged with the NASA Engineering Training (NET) 

program to form today’s APPEL, an integrated organization that 

has responsibility for the development of the entire technical 

workforce, not just the project community. Our professional 

development strategy now reflects a much broader focus than 

training. We provide a range of competency-based activities—

including project team support, knowledge-sharing conferences 

and publications, and training—that are all linked to a career 

development framework. We have revamped the training 

curriculum to include a four-level core curriculum as well as 

in-depth offerings in specific technical disciplines. We place a 

renewed emphasis on sharing best practices and lessons learned 

through our e-newsletters and case studies, and we support 

the Agency’s efforts to work with the Office of Management 

and Budget and the GAO on the implementation of common 

project standards across government agencies.

Through meeting my colleagues in other government 

agencies and professional organizations like the Project 

Management Institute, I have come to learn that NASA is seen 

as a leader in project team development. Many organizations are 

just now starting project academies to deal with the challenges 

that NASA had to undertake years ago, and they are hungry to 

learn about what we have done. 

What will the next fifty years hold for NASA? I do not place 

much stock in forecasts for the future, but I am comfortable 

making this one: we live in a project world today, and we will 

continue to live in a project world for the foreseeable future. 

We have made a lot of progress at NASA, but the need for 

constant learning and professional growth will continue and be 

an ongoing challenge. ●

He taught me the importance of field research, of spending time 

visiting the centers and talking to practitioners about what 

they did and what they needed.

24 | ASK MAGAZINE
NASA

There is a feeling of unreality as you strap into the spacecraft, and then the

first stage lights and the acceleration and vibration just seem to grow

and grow and grow. For the first two minutes, I was more a passenger

than a crewmember. Had we had a major problem, I’m not sure how well I would have

responded. But the first stage cuts off; you come forward in the straps; you look

around. The second stage lights, and it’s very gentle. You take a deep breath and

all your training comes back. The experience of launch; the feeling of weightlessness, 

of being a satellite on your own floating inside another, larger satellite; and the

view of the earth as you go around are the three wonders of that trip. I hope that one

or more of these commercial enterprises that are under way take off, have success, 

and bring the price down to where it’s in reach of a great many people.

– Joe Kerwin, physician and former NASA astronaut, and the first 

physician ever to be selected to be an astronaut

We asked some long-time NASA people to describe events during their careers at the Agency that 

they consider especially vivid or meaningful. We got a range of responses—from personal evocations 

of a moment of inspiration or crisis to descriptions of the challenge of saving a threatened project 

or the satisfaction of years of scientific discovery. What they all express in common, though, is a 

passionate commitment to the mission of space exploration.

Some

Moments

special feature | ASK MAGAZINE | 25
I was managing Galileo, which had been 

rescheduled several times due to external factors, 

mainly related to the shuttle program. It was originally 

scheduled for launch in 1982, then 1984, then 1986. Each change 

involved major reprogramming requiring different upper-stage 

configurations and different spacecraft configurations. Keeping 

the project intact through it all was programmatically and 

technically challenging. For the ’86 launch our plan was to use the 

shuttle with the wide-bodied Centaur upper stage to send Galileo 

on to Jupiter. In January of ’86, we were at the Cape readying 

the spacecraft for launch in May. The project had been stable 

and undisturbed for a couple of years, and it looked like we were 

finally on track for a May launch.

Then the Challenger accident happened. We knew that would 

mean a long delay before there would be another shuttle launch. 

Later we had other bad news. NASA decided that the Centaur 

was potentially too dangerous to fly on the shuttle. We were left 

with the much less energetic IUS (Inertial Upper Stage), which we 

'knew' couldn’t get us to Jupiter.

I encouraged people to think of anything and everything that 

might work. We began to explore the possibility of launching 

on the Russian Proton rocket, though that clearly would involve 

political issues. One day, a young engineer came to my office and 

suggested a new, radically different trajectory that would work 

with the lower-power upper stage. It would mean getting gravity 

assists from a Venus flyby, followed by an Earth flyby, going out 

to the asteroid belt, then back for a second Earth flyby, and then 

on to Jupiter. I immediately saw that this was a viable solution. 

We would have to make a few changes to the spacecraft. It would 

need new heat shielding because it would travel closer to the sun 

than in the original mission plan. It would need a second lowgain antenna to give coverage on the aft side of the spacecraft, 

because Earth would be on the aft side during the time the 

spacecraft was traveling inside the orbit of Earth. Thanks to my 

earlier work on the Mariner 5 and Mariner 11 projects, I knew 

these changes were doable. Galileo launched in 1989 and arrived 

at Jupiter in 1995.

For me, the lessons of this often-challenged project were

•	 Don’t ever give up

•	 Be open to innovative solutions and ready to try things

that have never been tried before

Years later, a colleague said the word back then was that, 'Casani 

lives in a world without corners,' meaning that, in spite of all the 

programmatic and technical challenges faced by Galileo, the 

project always found a way to slip out of the corner. 

– John Casani, currently special assistant to the director at 

the Jet Propulsion Laboratory; previously managed Voyager, 

Galileo, and Cassini

Photo Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

The Hubble Space 

Telescope has 

yielded mountains 

of information 

about the universe, 

including this color 

mosaic of the Orion 

Nebula (M42).

In 1977, while I was Associate Administrator for Space Science, the Hubble Space Telescope 

and the Galileo mission to Jupiter were both presented to Congress for funding. James Fletcher, 

NASA’s Administrator at that time, told me I wasn’t going to get both missions and to pick one. 

I told him I thought we could get both. Delightfully, he let me try. The House appropriations 

subcommittee had approved Hubble but deleted funds for Galileo. But the House authorizing 

subcommittee had approved the Jupiter mission, so the disagreement needed to be resolved by a 

floor vote of the full House.

I went to the Hill to watch it. After a long, intense discussion, the vote was taken: 280 in favor 

of Galileo; 131 opposed; 22 abstentions. We had won. I went back to the administrator that same 

afternoon and said, “Jim, I told you we could do it.” He looked at me and said, “Noel, you may live 

to regret that.” Indeed, the following year at the House appropriations subcommittee hearing the 

chairman, Edward Boland, really took after me. He was still angry and extremely frosty.

It was worth it! We got Hubble and an incredibly exciting planetary mission, two of the 

highlights of my five years as Associate Administrator for Space Science.

– Noel Hinners, formerly NASA’s Associate Administrator for Space Science (1974–1979), director 

of Goddard Space Flight Center (1982–1987), and director of the Smithsonian National Air and 

Space Museum (1979–1982)

26 | ASK MAGAZINE
Many scientists would be happy to make a discovery every year. 

Those of us on the Voyager team were fortunate to have participated 

in floods of discoveries: one surprise after another that have changed 

and deepened our understanding of the solar system.

The two Voyagers were launched in 1977. For over a year they 

traveled toward the outer planets with only some of the scientific 

instruments returning data. Then, as Voyager 1 approached 

Jupiter, increasingly better information poured in day after day. 

Every afternoon for more than a week, the science team met to 

discuss what had arrived in the previous twenty-four hours, what 

we were learning, and what we did not yet understand about the 

data. The following morning we would have a press conference to 

announce our new insights into the planet. That afternoon, we 

would examine more new data in another science meeting and 

the process would repeat itself.

The surprises kept coming. Images of Io, one of Jupiter’s four 

moons, showed hundreds of black spots. Although it had just been 

proposed that Jupiter’s moon would experience tidal heating from 

the gravitational pull of the giant planet, until we actually saw a 

volcanic plume, we couldn’t take the leap and acknowledge that 

those spots were calderas. We had discovered hot lava lakes and 

nine active volcanoes on Io. That was the end of the old idea that 

the further reaches of the solar system would be cold and dead.

We experienced those intense, illuminating seven- to ten-day 

periods of discovery in the years following as the Voyagers flew by 

Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune and their satellites. The wealth of 

new information also gave us opportunities to engage the public 

and share the excitement of the many discoveries. In those days 

before the advent of the World Wide Web, we sent real-time 

pictures to planetariums around the country. Crowds gathered to 

glimpse these first close-up images of what had been, until then, 

little-known points of light in the sky.

Even today, more than thirty years after the twin Voyager 

spacecraft left Earth, we are still learning and still surprised. 

Voyager 1 is approaching the heliopause, the extreme outer edge 

of the bubble of solar wind ions that envelope the solar system. 

It is already in the area where a shock forms as the million-mileper-hour outbound wind of solar ions abruptly slows as it presses 

outward against the external interstellar wind. We expected that 

shock would heat the solar wind ions but found that the energy 

of the collision mainly heats ions coming from outside the solar 

system—another surprise we are striving to understand.

In another seven years or so, Voyager 1 will 

leave the solar bubble and begin traveling through 

material that comes from other stars. The scientific 

adventure—and the learning—continues.

– Ed Stone, former director of the Jet Propulsion 

Laboratory (1991–2001), Voyager project 

scientist, and currently professor of physics at Caltech

My most vivid moment was my time as mission director 

on Viking and landing on Mars. No one had ever landed 

a spacecraft on Mars—or any planetary body other than 

the moon—and had it successfully operate afterward. 

We were doing something no one had ever done before. 

It was an extraordinary engineering challenge, but even 

more than that we had the opportunity to learn firsthand 

about a planet that had been shrouded in mystery and 

intrigue for decades. The science was exciting, and the 

engineering was exciting. It was tough to do and had no 

certainty of being successful.

As we approached Mars orbit, one of the first things 

we ran into was a helium leak in the propulsion system. 

The helium pressurized the fuel in the rocket onboard the 

orbiter, and if we didn’t do something about the leak, the 

pressure would build up and it would explode. We had two 

possible courses of action: we could blow a pyrotechnic 

valve that would seal off the helium so it wouldn’t leak 

anymore, or we could burn the engine periodically, 

doing a large number of midcourse maneuvers to relieve 

the pressure. The easy thing to do was to blow the 

pyrotechnic valve. The problem was it would leave us to 

rely on only one working pyrotechnic valve. If that one 

didn’t work, the mission would fail. So we chose the hard 

way, the series of midcourse maneuvers. This meant a 

lot of work for all of us on the flight team, but it worked.

As we got even closer to Mars, we began to worry 

that the preselected landing site was too rough. Now, 

the smallest thing we could see was the size of the 

Rose Bowl, but all the geologists and people who really 

understood Mars knew enough to worry about the site. 

We took time looking for a new landing site. We were 

originally supposed to land on July 4, 1976, to celebrate 

America’s bicentennial, but we never hesitated one 

second to abandon the 200th anniversary. We never 

considered taking extra risks to meet that date. 

The lander was finally ready to land. The landing 

went as expected, and I remember the feeling of relief, 

excitement, and anticipation when it landed and we 

confirmed we were really on the surface and things were 

working well. At that point it was an engineering success. 

But we didn’t go there for an engineering success, we 

went there to learn about Mars.

It was a fantastic feeling, but we had yet to learn 

what Mars looked like. I remember watching as the first 

picture came in. The resolution was such that you could 

see something as small as a blade of grass. Seeing that 

picture come in was the fulfillment of the eight or nine 

years I spent working on Viking.

– Tom Young, mission director for Viking

ASK MAGAZINE | 27
As a very young child, I had a strong interest in space exploration and pursued it with all my intellectual 

curiosity. I was also a co-founding member of our fourth grade science club, and I hoped that someday I could 

contribute to this great endeavor, however unlikely that seemed at the time.

Then along came “reality”—the draft, Vietnam, and the Tet Offensive—and those visions were lost to the insanity 

and turbulence of that age. Little did I realize that when I returned from that life-changing experience, I would 

experience another within less than a year.

Like most of the other billion-plus people who witnessed it, the most vivid and moving NASA moment for me 

was watching Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin take those first steps on another world. I also had a deep interest 

in journalism and interpretive reporting—the human stories behind the news. I watched Walter Cronkite become 

speechless at the sight of the first human lunar landing. He turned to Eric Sevareid, who commented that, because 

of what we are witnessing today, “I now have hope that humankind will endure in the cosmos, despite what we may 

do to ourselves here on this Earth.” I knew, at once, that I had heard a fundamental truth. That visual experience, 

those compelling words, that seminal moment touched me, rekindling the curiosity and drive that would help a child’s 

distant, and seemingly unreachable goal, become a reality—to somehow contribute, in however small a way, to 

this amazing, inevitable adventure.

– Lewis Peach, former vice president for Exploration and Technology and chief engineer for USRA, director of 

Advanced Programs in the Office of Space Flight at NASA, deputy director for space station engineering, 

and associate director for computational physics and supercomputing

There were tremendous people in the mission planning 

and analysis division who developed all the information 

about when to conduct burns, how long they would be, 

and the spacecraft’s attitude during the burns. Starting 

with Apollo 8, they did a fantastic job building on the 

experience of the robotic missions. I still marvel, back 

then and to this day, at their accuracy. Everything came out 

almost to the second. 

It was our job in flight planning to fit in all the crew activities 

and procedures so things happened when they were designed to 

happen. When we flew those Apollo missions, we had a set of 

simulators here at Johnson Space Center—a command module 

simulator and a lunar module simulator. There was a duplicate 

set at Kennedy Space Center (KSC), and the set in the training 

facility at KSC was kept in the absolute configuration of the 

flight so that, late in the game, whatever changes were made 

were implemented at KSC. The crews spent the last couple of 

months training at KSC, and we would go down there and do 

all the final flight planning and procedure adjustments out of a 

little office at KSC. 

I had that duty for Apollo 11. I was there with a couple of 

other people working on all the things leading up to the mission. 

It was quite a task because there were so many possible 

adjustments to the procedures and the flight plan. 

We made 1,100 changes in the last two months. 

Some of the adjustments came from refinements of 

the trajectory. Even more of them came from a more 

detailed understanding of how systems might operate 

in the lunar environment. And we made some changes late in 

the game having to do with the settling of the spacecraft on the 

lunar surface and whether any propellants would be trapped in 

the nozzle of the engine and therefore be an explosive hazard. So 

we developed procedures to bleed off residual propellant. We had 

to verify all these changes, carry them out in the simulators, and 

validate that they were ready to go. We worked with the flight 

control team back in Houston to make sure that it was all squared 

away with them. 

You can imagine that we stayed a little nervous, hoping 

everything was the way it was supposed to be to carry out this mission. 

When Apollo 11 landed, we felt tremendous accomplishment but 

also concern about how things would go on the surface and then 

how they would go when we had to lift the ascent module off the 

moon and rendezvous with the command module for the trip 

home. Once they had rendezvoused and the command module 

and crew were on the way back, we breathed a little sight of relief. 

There wasn’t total relief until those three parachutes were out there 

and they were descending to the ocean.

We had such gifted managers in the program. The secret 

of Apollo was the capability of the management team and the 

hard work of all the supporting people trying to make it happen. 

Their dedication, conviction, and enthusiasm were unbelievable. 

No one left work. They might go home for a while, 

but no one left work.

— John O’Neill, chief of the Flight Planning Branch 

during Apollo 11 and deputy director of the 

Mission Operations Directorate during Apollo 13

28 | ASK MAGAZINE
Despite what its name suggests, the IGY was an eighteen-month 

period from July 1, 1957, through December 31, 1958, during 

which scientists around the world conducted coordinated 

observations in eleven earth science disciplines. The IGY began 

with forty-six participant countries; sixty-seven ultimately became 

involved. Both Sputnik and Explorer I, the U.S. satellite launch that 

followed four months later, took place during the IGY. The IGY 

helped define aims and values that have characterized much of our 

first fifty years in space: an emphasis on science missions whose 

results are shared with international communities of scientists. 

One of the three elements in NASA’s mission statement describes 

a goal similar to that of the IGY, though grander: “To advance 

and communicate scientific knowledge and understanding of the 

earth, the solar system, and the universe.”

The genesis of the IGY has also become something of a 

legend. It was the inspiration of Lloyd Berkner, an American 

physicist who worked at the nexus of the scientific and 

national security communities in a career that seemingly fused 

Indiana Jones with “The X-Files.” He was an adventurer who 

accompanied Richard Byrd on his Antarctica expedition in 

1928. During World War II, he worked for the U.S. Navy on 

the development of advanced radar technology. After the war, 

he became the executive secretary of the Joint Research and 

It’s a story so familiar it has achieved popular status as NASA’s creation legend: when the Soviet 

Union launched Sputnik in October 1957, it shocked the flat-footed United States into action, 

locking the Cold War gladiators into a space race. Like most legends, there is a kernel of truth in it, 

but the full story is more complex. The United States had been working fervently for years to develop 

its own capability to reach space, most famously through the efforts of Wernher von Braun’s group 

of rocket scientists at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency. More than two years before Sputnik, the 

United States had already announced its intention to launch a satellite that would collect scientific 

data “to benefit scientists from all nations.” The launch would be the centerpiece of the United 

States’ participation in the first International Geophysical Year (IGY), an oft-overlooked event that 

helped set the stage for space exploration. 

Shaping the Space Age: 

The International Geophysical Year

By Matthew Kohut

Photo Credit: NASA

Jet Propulsion Laboratory Director Dr. James Pickering, Dr. James Van Allen 

of the State University of Iowa, and Army Ballistic Missile Agency Technical 

Director Dr. Wernher von Braun triumphantly display a model of the Explorer I, 

America’s first satellite, shortly after the satellite’s launch on January 31, 1958. 

INSIGHT | ASK MAGAZINE | 29
Development Board that advised the Department of War and 

the navy on integrating science and technology into military 

research and development. 

In April 1950, Berkner raised the idea of the IGY at a dinner 

party held by physicist James Van Allen, who worked at the 

Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University. The 

British geophysicist Sydney Chapman was also at Van Allen’s 

that night, and he latched on to Berkner’s suggestion, noting 

that a period of high solar activity climaxing in 1957–1958 

would be an ideal time for observations. All three scientists 

shared an interest in the potential uses of rockets to expand the 

reach of atmospheric research. 

Berkner suggested the IGY as a broadening of the International 

Polar Year (IPY), which had been held twice before, in 1882–

1883 and 1932–1933. During the first IPY, twelve countries 

participated in fifteen expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctica. 

The second IPY focused on the newly discovered “jet stream” 

and saw participation expand to forty nations. Two years after 

conceiving the idea at Van Allen’s house, Chapman and Berkner 

formally proposed the IGY to the International Council of 

Scientific Unions (ICSU). Once the ICSU approved it, Chapman 

and Berkner became president and vice president, respectively, of 

the ICSU’s special committee set up to manage the event. The 

IGY took place concurrently with the third IPY in 1957–1958.

A U.S. National Committee operating under the guidance of 

the National Science Foundation coordinated U.S. involvement. 

The National Science Foundation and the National Academy of 

Sciences made the case in Washington in favor of developing an 

Earth satellite, and by July 1955, the White House announced 

its intent to launch one during the IGY. 

On the eve of the IGY’s kickoff, President Dwight D. 

Eisenhower said that “... the most important result of the 

International Geophysical Year is the demonstration of the 

ability of peoples of all nations to work together harmoniously 

for the common good.” 

Eisenhower’s desire for cooperation faced a severe test 

four months later when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 

on October 4, 1957. Within six weeks, the Senate Armed 

Services Committee, led by the chairman of the Preparedness 

Investigating Subcommittee, Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, began 

an “Inquiry into Satellite and Missile Programs.” 

On January 31, 1958, two months after the hearings began, 

Explorer I was launched. Though Sputnik beat the U.S. satellite 

into space, it returned nothing of scientific value. Explorer I 

achieved the true goals of the IGY. Through the use of a cosmic 

ray detector that flew on Explorer I, James Van Allen discovered 

a radiation belt around Earth, which was later named for 

him. This has been widely recognized as the greatest scientific 

contribution of the IGY.

Despite the competitive dynamic between the superpowers, 

cooperation remained a key consideration for the United 

States as it developed its civilian space program. NASA’s first 

Administrator, T. Keith Glennan, appointed a director of the 

Office of International Cooperation as part of the new Agency’s 

management team in October 1958. Within a year, this position 

went to Arnold Frutkin, who had recently served as deputy to 

the executive director of the U.S. Committee for the IGY at 

the National Academy of Sciences. Frutkin’s experience with 

the IGY directly shaped NASA’s early approach to international 

cooperation. He went on to write International Cooperation in 

Space, a seminal work on the topic. 

The IGY’s legacy was vast. In addition to the first satellite 

launches, it resulted in significant scientific gains. Research 

conducted in Antarctica helped pave the way for ratification of 

the 1961 Antarctic Treaty. The World Wide Data Centre was 

established to collect and share atmospheric measurements. 

Perhaps most importantly, though, the IGY set a precedent for 

peaceful international scientific collaboration that has been 

emulated through events such as the International Year of 

the Quiet Sun of 1964–1965, during which NASA launched 

Explorer 30 and a number of ship-based sounding rocket 

experiments. The clearest evidence today of the IGY’s enduring 

legacy is the fourth International Polar Year, which began in 

March 2007 and runs through March 2009. ●

Photo Credit: NASA

Simulated Van Allen Belts are generated by plasma thruster in Electric Propulsion Laboratory tank #5 at the Lewis Research Center, now Glenn Research 

Center. The discovery of the Van Allen Belts has been widely recognized as the greatest scientific contribution of the International Geophysical Year.

30 | ASK MAGAZINE
Title

By

Intro

The scientist-astronaut program was a little vague at the 

beginning. When we arrived, we found that NASA had given in 

to pressure from a scientific community that looked forward to 

what then seemed an infinitely expanding space program. There 

was lots of optimism in the early and mid-sixties about what we 

would do in the next ten or fifteen years. But NASA didn’t have 

a very clear idea of what to do with scientist-astronauts once 

they had them. 

My first visit to the astronaut office after being hired was 

illustrative. Three of the guys were off being trained as pilots. 

Curt Michael, an air force pilot and theoretical astrophysicist, 

and I were there, sitting in the back of the room at the Monday 

morning pilots’ meeting. Al Shepherd mentioned that we’d been 

hired and said that NASA had given the OK to hire another 

group of astronauts next year. Dick Gordon asked, “Are they 

going to be pilots?” 

Al said, “I certainly hope so.” 

It’s not that the welcome we got was cold; it was just sort 

of quizzical. There were some valid questions, like, “Are you 

going to put a guy on a mission to the moon who hasn’t got the 

kind of experience managing aircraft and spacecraft that test 

pilot–astronauts have got?” In fact, no scientist flew in Apollo 

until Jack Schmitt flew on Apollo 17. 

Three of us flew on Skylab missions, which were considered 

less adventurous in terms of the piloting skills they required—

that certainly was true—and more important as far as scientific 

output was concerned. All three of us—Owen Garriott, a PhD 

electrical engineer with wide-ranging interests in science; Ed 

Gibson, whom we considered our astronomer; and myself—

believed that we contributed significantly to the success of the 

program on a number of fronts. The Skylab program began 

development a couple years after we showed up. Working 

Skylab support along with our training for space flight and 

other duties, we were able to contribute a lot to the development 

of equipment and procedures for the program.

The Skylab mission was the first that gave space medicine 

top priority. The in-flight medical support system—that is, 

the doctor’s bag flown on Skylab—was considerably more 

sophisticated than would be needed or could be justified if the 

crew were just pilots. What pilots would need was a first aid 

kit with maybe a few extra items that they were trained to use. 

We had a lot of drugs, we had laboratory equipment, and we 

had minor surgical stuff. The very fact that physicians were 

allowed to put that stuff on the manifest and then develop it 

and test it and fly it put them ahead of the game for the followon programs.

I think the principal investigators of the life sciences 

experiments might agree, if any of them are still around, that 

having a physician-astronaut as their interface to the operational 

world was a good thing. They achieved more cooperation and 

a much higher level of priority working with Dr. G. Donald 

Whedon on his complete intake and output study, which 

required us to weigh and measure any uneaten food; to adhere 

to a very rigid diet preflight, in flight, and post-flight; and to 

collect all the urine and feces. It was a dog of an experiment. I 

doubt that it will ever be repeated because it was so much work. 

But we did it, and we did it well. 

The other major science area on Skylab was the solar physics 

package, the so-called ATM (Apollo Telescope Mount), which 

was a state-of-the-art package of six or seven telescopes and 

cameras, all focused on the sun. Owen and Ed were in charge 

of operating it and were able to get us all intensive training and 

bring us up to the level, not of scientists—not in my case—

but of graduate students, able to do an intelligent job at that 

We who were not test pilots were delighted when NASA announced it was going to hire scientistastronauts, that is, people with PhD or MD degrees that might prove useful in space flight. 

We didn’t think too much about what NASA’s plans were in detail. We just went for it.

By Joe Kerwin

Scientist-Astronauts

STORY | ASK MAGAZINE | 31
console. As the missions went on, they were given more and 

more autonomy. They had the right to turn on cameras and 

focus on specific phenomena they were seeing on the solar disc. 

We went pretty much by rote on my flight, but Owen and 

Ed, on their two-month and three-month flights, were really 

turned loose. They did a lot of excellent work, just as Jack Schmitt 

did on the surface of the moon. The result was a wonderful 

harvest of scientific data. I think we showed a positive role for 

scientists in space.

The second scientist-astronaut group, eleven folks hired in 

1967, didn’t make out very well. Shortly after they arrived at 

NASA, they dubbed themselves “the excess eleven” because the 

program had already taken a downturn in budget and future 

prospects. There was a huge gap between Skylab and the shuttle, 

and the majority of them couldn’t sit around for ten years or 

longer. Many of them left. 

The next step in this process was preparing for the shuttle 

program, including making determinations and agreements 

with the science community on scientists’ roles. There was a 

lot of fuss, bother, and argument during the seventies—the 

period when the shuttle was in development—to determine 

who should be on shuttle crews. The result, eventually, was a 

three-part crew definition: the pilots, the mission specialists, 

and the payload specialists. It hasn’t always been religiously 

adhered to, but it’s been the core for the whole shuttle program. 

The mission specialists are the career astronauts, some scientists 

and some engineers, who have the experience and responsibility 

to ensure the operability of the experiments and, with their 

scientific backgrounds, often to be productive in science as well. 

But when you really need a scientific expert, you hire a payload 

specialist, often from the community or the university that is 

sponsoring an experiment, and send him or her up. They fly 

with their experiment. They’re not career people. Most of them 

fly once, some two or three times. I think that layout has given 

NASA and the scientific community the flexibility they have 

needed to do good work in science on the shuttle.

Having science on board is part of NASA’s culture now. 

It’s helped by the fact that not everybody needs to be a pilot on 

larger vehicles like the shuttle. That should be the case on the 

International Space Station (ISS). Unfortunately, we haven’t yet 

gotten to a point where we can put more than three people up 

there for long durations.

I report with a mixture of pride and disappointment that 

the Skylab medical results are still, by a good margin, the best 

that have ever been done in space in terms of understanding 

human physiology and measures to counter the effects of living 

in space. They should have been surpassed by the space station. 

ISS offers a wonderful opportunity to get significantly sized 

crews up and do advanced experiments with enough numbers 

to get statistically significant results, but it hasn’t happened yet 

due to many problems in the space station program.

Learning from Skylab

The first and most amazing surprise on our flight was the fact 

that, after three to seven days, depending on the individual, you 

become immune to space motion-sickness. That is a significant, 

unexpected finding. It gives us hope that humans will tolerate 

unusual acceleration environments quite nicely, even a rotating 

spacecraft with artificial gravity. I think they will be able—this 

is an unproven assertion—to live in a rotating spacecraft with 

an inertially stable core and transition from one to the other 

without any trouble once they get used to it. We had a rotating 

chair in Skylab designed to measure the response of the vestibular 

system—the inner ear—to weightlessness. One of three or four 

major parts of that experiment was to spin that chair up at a 

pretty good rate and make head movements guaranteed to make 

you motion sick and see whether the number of head movements 

it takes was more, the same, or less in weightlessness than it was 

on the ground. In our case, because we had problems with the 

vehicle, it took several days to cool off and activate Skylab to the 

point where we could start doing that test. The first time we did it, 

day seven or eight, we had no symptoms of motion sickness at all.

Skylab was the engineers’ opportunity to excel because that 

was a mission in which the Skylab itself, the orbiting workshop, 

Photo Credit: NASA

Astronauts Joseph Kerwin (left) and William Lenoir familiarize themselves with 

equipment aboard the Spacelab mockup during a 1976 visit to the Marshall 

Space Flight Center.

32 | ASK MAGAZINE
was seriously damaged during launch by the loss of the 

heat shield, the loss of one solar panel, the closed pinning 

of the other solar panel, the overheating in orbit, and the 

inadequate electrical power. People worried about losing 

the whole program. The engineers got to work and in ten 

days devised three different ways of getting the temperature 

down and got an advance handle on the equipment we 

might need to free up the solar panel. We went up and did 

all that stuff and saved the program.

When we launched on Skylab, there was a lot of fear 

about spending even twenty-eight days in space. “Can 

they go twenty-eight days?” People worried, “Will they 

even be able to stand up afterward? Will they all die if 

they have to egress the spacecraft?” Now we don’t have 

those worries any more.

Exercise is a necessary and sufficient countermeasure to muscle weakness and possibly cardio-vascular 

deconditioning in space flight. We saw that develop 

from the first to the second and third missions. After 

the twenty-eight days of our flight, we came back with 

significant weakness in both the arms and the legs—mostly the 

legs—despite the fact that we had a bicycle ergometer and used 

it pretty much every day. The second flight doubled the exercise 

time and added some isometric exercise. They did as well in 

two months as we did in one. The third crew added a poor 

man’s treadmill and gave another half hour a day to exercise. 

They were up there for almost three months and came back in 

better shape than the second crew, slightly better than ours, and 

their appetites improved; their weight loss was less than either 

of the other two crews. That was the combination of findings 

that really gave us confidence to build the space station and 

say, “Humans are going to be able to go to Mars because a 

combination of the proper diet and proper exercise is going to 

keep us fit long enough to get there.”

The Future of Life Sciences in Space 

In the future, I think we need to be open to the opportunities 

and the adventures and discoveries that we make, many of which 

will be unexpected. In life sciences, what we’ve learned about 

human physiology is very interesting, but we’re talking about 

adult human beings in space for periods of one to six months. 

What is going to happen to animals that are born and grow and 

reproduce in weightlessness 

over a number of generations? 

Let’s fly a Noah’s Ark some 

day when we’re ready and 

fly and raise a bunch of 

animals in weightlessness 

and see what happens to 

their physiology, to their 

anatomy, to their DNA. 

Will we produce different 

species? Will adaptation 

take place? I think there’s a 

world of discoveries open in 

that direction. ●

Joe Kerwin is a physician and former NASA astronaut. He was 

the first physician ever to be selected to be an astronaut.

Photo Credit: NASA

After Skylab’s launch, the large, delicate, meteoroid shield on the outside 

of the workshop was ripped off by the vibration of the launch. Engineers 

worked frantically to develop solutions to this and other problems and 

designed a protective solar sail to cover the workshop. Here astronauts 

practice deploying the protective solar sail in Marshall Space Flight Center’s 

Neutral Buoyancy Simulator. Astronauts Conrad and Kerwin were able to 

complete the needed repairs to Skylab, salvaging the entire program.

Photo Credit: NASA; Charles Conrad, Jr.

Astronaut Paul J. Weitz, Skylab 2 pilot, 

gets a physical examination by a fellow 

crewman during the twenty-eight-day 

Skylab 2 mission.

ASK MAGAZINE | 33
The major issues in reduced gravity are well known from our 

experiences in orbit from Skylab and Spacelab through Mir 

and the International Space Station. Bones lose strength and 

size when deprived of the regular compressive forces associated 

with walking, and muscles atrophy when no longer required 

to support body weight. The cardiovascular system, which 

regulates blood pressure, volume, and flow, is no longer 

challenged by “standing up,” and we are likely to faint when 

standing erect back on Earth. Posture is disturbed by the 

absence of a steady pull on the vestibular organs that regulate 

balance. The open question for us is the extent to which such 

potentially hazardous disruptions would also be present in the 

partial gravity of Mars, with its attractive force only threeeighths that of Earth.

One might conjecture a linear relationship for physiological 

parameters, between the values at 1 g (Earth gravity) and 

those at 0 g, making it simple to predict the results at 3/8 

g. But biological processes are almost never linear. Doubling 

the input rarely doubles the output. Instead, we commonly 

see thresholds, saturations, hysteresis (or lagging effects), 

and other non-linearities, which make it folly to imagine 

we can predict effects between those two values. However, 

if we can insert reliable measurements at some third g level 

So we are going back to the moon, this time with more people staying for longer periods. The lunar 

outpost has been envisioned as a substantial home base—if not a settlement—to house and supply 

astronauts as they explore the lunar surface. It needs to be more than that. Since one of the principle 

arguments in the Vision for Space Exploration is to use the moon to prepare for further exploration of 

the solar system (read Mars), we should be planning how to take advantage of this new opportunity. 

If we concentrate our efforts solely on maintaining the health and safety of the crew, we will miss 

out on a unique chance to understand the challenges to human survival on Mars. 

Using the Moon to Learn 

About Living on Mars

By Laurence R. Young

At Moses Lake, Washington, in June, astronauts, engineers, and scientists 

wore demonstration spacesuits, drove prototype rovers, and simulated 

scientific work to test some of the tasks that NASA studies have identified 

as possible in future lunar exploration.

Photo Credit: NASA

34 | ASK MAGAZINE | INSIGHT
Laurence R. Young is the Apollo Program professor of 

astronautics and professor of health sciences and technology at 

the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

between 0 and 1, we might better be able to predict the 

physiological effects of gravity throughout the range. If we 

add measurements of human deconditioning at lunar gravity 

(1/6 g) to our existing 0 g and 1 g data, we will be in a much 

better position to anticipate the experience of 3/8 g. Our 

outpost on the moon will present exactly that opportunity. 

All that will be required is a well-equipped lunar laboratory, 

along with careful scientific protocols and the commitment of 

astronauts to adhere to the testing requirements. 

For example, bone density and imaging, muscle size and 

strength, cardiovascular regulation, and postural stability would 

need to be measured periodically during a stay of three to six 

months on the surface. Exercise and other countermeasures 

would need to be specified and monitored. Extravehicular 

activity in particular would need to be recorded and monitored 

to see whether the exercise associated with work in a pressure 

suit alone would provide sufficient protection, and a control 

group would eventually be required as well. The lunar laboratory 

would provide invaluable information, not only about the ability 

to survive the challenges of living on the moon, but also about 

the likely difficulty of living in Martian gravity. 

If it turns out that simply living and working at lunar gravity 

is sufficient to maintain fitness, then we can be confident that 

Martian gravity will be similarly adequate, and no special 

countermeasures will be called for on Mars. On the other hand, 

if living at 1/6 g produces bodily deconditioning like that seen 

at 0 g in orbit, then we probably should prepare a range of 

countermeasures to assist our Martian explorers during their stay 

on the planet. The lunar outpost can be a true space laboratory 

and offer a unique opportunity to learn how to protect human 

beings as we venture into the solar system. ●

The lunar laboratory would provide

invaluable information, not only about

the ability to survive the challenges of

living on the moon, but also about the likely

difficulty of living in Martian gravity. 

Photo Credit: Ed Quinn

ASK MAGAZINE | 35
When I started my specialty of planetary science in the early 

sixties, the moons and other planets were simply interesting little 

blobs in space. But each time we take a closer look, we find out 

how incredibly fascinating and complex they all are. We’ve seen 

evidence of geologic processes unlike those that have occurred on 

Earth, and what we see on Titan may mirror the most primitive 

beginnings of our solar system, going back to when organic 

chemistry was being formed. Organic chemistry, along with 

water, is the key to life, and the search for life remains a driver of 

space science. Cassini’s results at Titan have taken on incredible 

priority because they may give us a clue about how life started in 

the solar system. The recent findings of abundant past water on 

Mars have also invigorated the new field of astrobiology.

The complexity and incredible diversity of geologic processes 

that we’re seeing in the solar system beat anything we imagined 

in the early sixties. Getting above our atmosphere and seeing light 

wavelengths that are typically obscured have broadened what we 

know about the evolution of the universe, galaxies, dark energy, and 

black holes—knowledge that helps us solve more of the mysteries 

about our own planet and how it fits into the grand puzzle.

Where we can explore is, as far as we know, limitless. So 

choosing our destinations and experiments is not an easy task. 

Picking one foray from among thousands—or millions—of 

possibilities requires coordination between NASA and the 

external science community, an ongoing collaboration that has 

been one of NASA’s major strengths.

Deciding Where to Go

Deciding which endeavors to pursue requires first asking, “Is 

it good science?” The proposals NASA receives come from 

scientists who make a career out of thinking about what’s 

exciting in space and how to find out more, so they can answer 

that question well. But there is always more science to do than 

can be accommodated. 

 NASA, like Gaul, is divided into three major parts: human 

space flight, aeronautics, and space and earth science. I headed up 

the space science part of NASA as associate administrator from 

1974 to 1979, and my job was both to manage the programs we 

had taken on from a Headquarters perspective and to initiate new 

programs. Each endeavor requires being both a proponent and a 

Starting in 1963, I have witnessed in amazement the science discoveries made by the nation’s 

human and robotic space program. I also had a direct hand in those discoveries, first on Apollo and 

subsequently as NASA’s Associate Administrator for Space Science and director of Goddard Space 

Flight Center. As director of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, I saw firsthand the 

impact our space and aeronautics programs have on the public, and at the University of Colorado’s 

Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics and its aerospace engineering sciences department, 

I’ve witnessed their power to inspire students. NASA, especially in its forays in space science, has 

the capability to expand our knowledge and understanding not only of the universe around us but 

also of our own planet. The science done by exploring space is, at its core, an extension of physics, 

astronomy, geology, and chemistry—things we’ve done terrestrially for well over a hundred years. 

But leaving the confines of our own atmosphere has materially advanced our knowledge in those 

areas and offered boundless material to inspire practical applications and our imaginations.

Space Science: Forty-Five Years 

of Thinking and Tinkering

By Noel Hinners

36 | ASK MAGAZINE | INSIGHT
Image Credit: NASA, Arizona State University

This montage of the nine planets and four 

large moons of Jupiter in our solar system 

is set against a false-color view of the 

Rosette Nebula. Most of the planetary 

images in this montage were obtained by 

NASA’s planetary missions, which have 

dramatically changed our understanding 

of the solar system in the past thirty years.

manager. The Agency works closely with the National Academies’ 

Space Studies Board to help decide what priorities should be, 

asking, “Is it forefront science? Is it potentially a breakthrough? 

Does it add materially to our store of knowledge?”

Science prioritization was and is an important job at 

Headquarters. It was easier to do for small missions, because the 

big ones, like Galileo and Hubble, required so much of the budget 

it made them tougher to get approved. A big part of my job was 

selling the big science programs that had major science payoffs 

while keeping the little ones that also contributed invaluable 

science going. COBE was one of those small programs, and it is 

NASA’s only Nobel Prize–winning mission.

Beyond Science and Engineering

NASA’s collaboration with the external science community 

doesn’t end once a destination has been chosen. Once we 

have a destination, we have to figure out how to get there and 

achieve the science experiment. After all, the experiments—and 

a means of getting them into space—still need to be created. 

Communication between scientists and engineers is essential for 

a project to succeed. These two communities speak different 

languages, however, and it’s not always easy for them to 

understand one another. By having a quality in-house science 

community, NASA has been able to forge a better link between 

its engineers and the academic science community.

Excellent engineering and science are the sine qua non of 

mission success, and NASA has the skills to solve technical issues, 

but these alone are insufficient. Failure reviews from Challenger, 

Columbia, and the Mars ’98 missions consistently point out how 

a lack of genuine communication is often a major contributor 

to problems. Communication is in and of itself an art form that 

must be cultivated. We must ask, are we talking to one another 

in terms we understand? Are we listening with intent to hear? 

Have we properly aligned roles and responsibilities so we’re not 

getting in each other’s way? Are we working in a cooperative 

mode where everybody is providing the skills and capabilities 

that bring a project together? Communicating, understanding 

one another, and defining roles and responsibilities are essential 

necessities for project success. NASA clearly recognizes this and 

actively supports team development to hone communication 

skills and should continue this practice.

Once the right team is in place and communicating well, 

many missions face the budget hurdle. Stringent budgets have 

been with NASA continually, even during the latter part of 

Apollo. This presents the challenge of figuring out how to do 

missions more economically, do them more quickly, get more for 

the investment dollars, and push the boundaries without falling 

into the downside of faster, better, cheaper. I was involved in the 

infamous faster-better-cheaper era, which resulted in the Mars 

mission failures of the late nineties. But they didn’t fail because 

faster, better, cheaper is inherently a bad concept. When you 

take the practice to extremes and try to do things for too little 

money, though, you get into trouble. We should have been smart 

enough not to push ourselves to attempt things that didn’t make 

good engineering sense. It was a painful lesson and one we need 

to transmit to those who are coming into the business today. 

From Discovery to Further Exploration

Mars has long been high on the list of places to go. It has 

had a special place in science programs and in dreams about 

human exploration. Much of this fascination was driven by 

both the fantasy and actual potential for finding life. The early 

Mariner flybys and orbiters set the stage. And then, in 1976, 

Viking landed with a prime goal of searching for evidence of 

life on Mars. While obtaining a lot of geologic and atmospheric 

information that significantly improved our understanding of 

the Mars environment, it detected no evidence of life. This is 

not because there never was or never might have been primitive 

life, but because all the evidence we’ve gathered so far shows 

that Mars has a very chemically active, oxidizing surface, which 

destroys organic molecules. This active surface remains today, 

even at the Phoenix site. It is one of the most intriguing and 

damning aspects of Mars. The surface is so oxidizing, I wonder 

if humans can cope with it. Can we devise life support systems 

for astronauts that will enable them to be safe? This is a major 

question as regards future human exploration of Mars. 

ASK MAGAZINE | 37
A Mars sample return (MSR) mission has the potential to 

significantly advance our understanding of all aspects of Mars, 

especially the life question. Getting a sample back will enable 

more precise and detailed science in a terrestrial laboratory 

than we can possibly do remotely today. While remote-sensing 

experiments improve, they’re always ten to fifteen years behind 

what we can do in a terrestrial lab; it simply takes time for an 

instrument to evolve from lab use to a flight experiment. With 

that detailed science, we can better understand the oxidizing 

surface awaiting us on Mars, an issue that must be resolved 

before we can be serious about sending humans. MSR is also an 

opportunity to begin structuring a round-trip mission to the red 

planet. In that sense, the sample return mission is a prototype 

for potential human exploration.

To achieve MSR, of course we’ll need the obvious: the right 

leaders, science team, and budget. It will be an expensive mission, 

on the magnitude of the big astronomy missions: what Hubble 

has been and the James Webb Space Telescope will be. One 

way to help tackle the budget challenge is to use international 

cooperation. The European Space Agency and others are very 

interested in MSR, and NASA is working with potential partners 

to see what kind of cooperative MSR mission would make sense. 

Looking into the Future

No one can accurately predict NASA’s next fifty years. Look 

back at the fifties and sixties and see what people were predicting 

then. Wernher von Braun’s Collier articles envisaged monster 

orbiting space stations and humans on Mars. Those things 

haven’t happened. On the other hand, we totally underestimated 

the direction things would take and the advances in technology 

that are, in large part, unpredictable beyond a decade or so. Our 

robotic capability has improved unbelievably over the past fifty 

years. Even forty years ago, few conceived of doing some of the 

things we do today robotically. 

I did a thought experiment and concluded that today we 

could do robotically most of what Apollo did. As proof of 

this concept, note that the Spirit and Opportunity rovers on 

Mars exceed in capability the geologic exploration capability of 

Apollo in many ways. There’s no reason at all that our progress 

in robotics will do anything but continue to evolve, which 

brings up a major challenge for NASA: how to balance human 

exploration with things you can do robotically at one-tenth or 

one-hundredth of the cost. And while robotic approaches may 

be more cost-effective, humans have special capabilities that 

are incredibly useful in exploration. The Hubble repair and 

refurbishment activities are a prominent example. We need to 

do a much better job of understanding how to integrate NASA’s 

human and robotic worlds. Finding the right mix of humans 

and robotics is a major challenge that the agency needs to face. 

In the future as in the past, NASA will have to choose how 

best to use scarce resources. Good communication and strong 

engineering and science skills within NASA, industry, and 

academia will all remain important. Although it’s not possible 

to predict exactly where we’ll be decades from now, I think 

it’s safe to say that NASA will continue to make astounding, 

unexpected, and valuable scientific discoveries. ●

Noel Hinners consults for NASA, the aerospace industry, and 

4-D Systems, which supports the NASA Academy of Program/

Project and Engineering Leadership. He has been on and chaired 

several space-related committees and has published on NASA 

programs. He currently serves on the executive committee of NASA’s 

Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group and chairs the External 

Advisory Board of the University of Colorado Aerospace Engineering 

Sciences Department. He is also the executive secretary of the 

NASA Chief Engineer’s Management Operations Working Group.

Small explorer missions like the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) contribute to 

space science as much as the larger missions, like Hubble. COBE won a Nobel Prize 

and helped prove the big bang theory. The above image, in representative colors, is 

a projection of the entire infrared sky created from years of observations by COBE.

Balancing larger missions with smaller ones is an ongoing process at NASA. 

Larger missions require more money and can be tough to get approved, but the 

dividends are worth it, as shown by this image of the Centaurus A galaxy from 

the Hubble Space Telescope.

Photo Credit: NASAPhoto Credit: NASA, E.J. Schreier (STScI) 

38 | ASK MAGAZINE
NASA’s missions are often described as technology-enabled 

and science-driven. This has been the hallmark of such icons of 

discovery as the Hubble Space Telescope, the Earth Observing 

System, the Cassini mission to Saturn, and the Mars Exploration 

Rovers (MER). Many of the breakthrough paradigm shifts in 

scientific understanding of the earth, universe, solar system, 

and sun have been catalyzed by particular missions with an 

emphasis on “discovery-driven science,” which provides a 

tightly interwoven blend of technology-enabled measurements 

and broad, reconnaissance-level questions. Not all NASA 

missions, whether human-based or robotic, can be characterized 

as “discovery driven,” but many have achieved unanticipated 

discoveries. A review of those NASA missions that best embody 

discovery-driven science suggests that attention to the discovery 

impact potential of breakthrough measurements in space will 

characterize NASA’s next fifty years of scientific exploration.

NASA’s flurry of “first-ever” missions during its first 

decade of existence were intended to provide initial surveys of 

the universe using instruments that had never before flown in 

space. Because such missions were our first foray to these targets, 

the path-finding measurements they provided established the 

basis for fundamental changes in scientific knowledge about 

the planets and the wider universe. Missions such as Ranger, 

Surveyor, and Lunar Orbiter were NASA’s initial reconnaissance 

of the moon, and they blended engineering requirements with 

scientific measurements. Profound discoveries resulted in each 

case, with critical demonstrations of enabling technological 

capabilities essential to the later success of the Apollo lunar 

surface missions. 

The concept of discovery-driven science may have been 

intrinsic to NASA’s first missions to the frontiers of space, 

but it probably did not emerge as a powerful theme until the 

pioneering wave of planetary reconnaissance missions that 

began in the 1970s and continue today. Missions such as 

Mariner 9 (Mars), Viking (Mars), Voyager (outer planets), 

Pioneer Venus, and the Landsat series (Earth) were conceived to 

revolutionize our scientific understanding of key aspects of the 

universe using robotic spacecraft equipped with next-generation 

instrumentation. Due in many cases to the unknown character 

of the target destinations, the measurements acquired were often 

broad in scope and addressed key environmental issues. These 

1970s missions helped define the era of discovery-driven science 

that blossomed from the catalytic results they achieved. 

We can define discovery-driven science in several ways. 

First, it embodies scientific investigations with measurement 

capabilities that go beyond the scope of basic scientific 

hypotheses that are the primary focus of any given mission. An 

example is any astronomical observatory in space that employs 

its imaging ability to “see” at new spatial and spectral scales. 

Second, it specifically outlines areas of high science-discovery 

potential tied to one or more scientific questions for which there 

are multiple possible outcomes, including those that cannot be 

considered prior to the mission. While all scientific investigations 

can potentially “discover” new aspects of the physical universe, 

For fifty years, NASA has promoted scientific investigations enabled by the space-borne vantage 

point it has pioneered. Beginning with the first scientific measurements made in space by Explorer 

1, major discoveries have been made about the workings of the universe, our home planet Earth, the 

sun, and our solar system, many of which were never imagined prior to the so-called Space Age. Were 

the groundbreaking discoveries of NASA robotic and human missions of exploration an anticipated 

consequence or a side benefit of the classical scientific method applied to space exploration? 

Discovery-Driven Science 

By Dr. James B. Garvin

INSIGHT | ASK MAGAZINE | 39
Photo Credit: NASA, ESA, K. Sharon (Tel Aviv University), and E. Ofek (Caltech)

Exploring the universe via the Hubble Space Telescope’s deep field. 

Hubble’s ongoing legacy of discovery-driven science is intrinsic to 

NASA’s strategy for the Great Observatories in astrophysics.

some are inherently more focused on quantifiable, incremental 

improvements in the state of knowledge associated with a 

small number of specific questions or issues. Discovery-driven 

science goes beyond this approach to embrace more ambitious 

measurements of the unknown or, as it is sometimes called, “the 

previously un-measurable.”

Virtually all of NASA’s early scientific missions demonstrated 

key aspects of discovery-driven science, but it was not until the 

past fifteen years or so that NASA has explicitly addressed the 

need for missions that emphasize this approach. In addition, 

human exploration missions to deep space that include discoverydriven science are now being considered in response to NASA’s 

implementation of the Vision for Space Exploration. 

The Apollo missions to the moon dramatically demonstrated 

how human activities can accentuate discovery-driven science, 

thanks to the intrinsic adaptability of the human explorer “on 

site.” The Apollo J-series missions were guided by scientific 

objectives with abundant discovery potential and may have been 

the very first intentional discovery-driven science investigations 

implemented by NASA. These breathtaking missions of discovery 

catalyzed an era of unprecedented robotic reconnaissance of the 

solar system, including the Viking missions to Mars and the 

Voyager “grand tour” mission to the outer solar system. 

Discovery-Driven Science in Action

A few specific examples illustrate well the benefits of an 

exploration strategy that embodies discovery-driven science. 

Perhaps the epitome of discovery-driven science is the 

Hubble Space Telescope, which has pioneered the space frontier 

for nearly twenty years and, in doing so, has produced multiple 

major discoveries about the accessible universe. The power 

of Hubble has always been its incredible “agility”—its ability 

to do many things well—which is a hallmark of discoverydriven science. In addressing fundamental questions within 

astrophysics and planetary sciences, it has produced observations 

that have changed viewpoints about basic processes, extending 

from the earth’s moon to the so-called deep field. Hubble is an 

astronomical reconnaissance system capable of using its vantage 

point to pursue discovery-guided questions for which there are 

few, if any, preconceived ideas as to what will be observed. It 

has been able to discover new truths about objects in our own 

solar system, including dwarf planets such as Pluto, main-belt 

asteroids such as Ceres, and even the moon and Mars. 

In an unprecedented use of its unique ultraviolet “vision,” 

NASA directed Hubble to investigate the lunar surface in 

2005 to better understand its resource potential. It was able 

to remotely measure the elusive signature of titanium-dioxidebearing soils that extended far beyond those directly sampled 

by the crew of the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. Oxygen could 

be readily harvested from such soils for exploration-related uses, 

and their identification could prove to be of strategic value when 

NASA’s human exploration of the moon resumes by 2020. The 

ultimate legacy of Hubble’s rich array of scientific discoveries 

can be measured by the voluminous record of publications 

that have resulted from its observations. The Hubble-related 

scientific publication record is testament to its role as a leading 

example of intentional discovery-driven science in action.

The NASA Earth Observing System (EOS) was originally 

conceived as a “Mission to Planet Earth” in the late 1980s. It 

was designed to provide dozens of fundamental measurement 

sets that describe the earth “system” with adequate fidelity to 

constrain and amplify physical models of the behavior of the 

system, models that could help us improve the quality of life 

on Earth. While measuring the variables of our home planet 

via a constellation of Earth-orbiting platforms, EOS was also 

intended to catalyze discovery-driven scientific investigations 

related to climate variability. The massive amount of decisionrelevant information that has been produced by the EOS suite of 

spacecraft has had a revolutionary impact on our understanding 

of the short-term climate of our planet, including the dynamics 

of ice cover and its relation to sea-level rise. Clearly, NASA’s 

Earth science observations have produced dramatic discoveries. 

40 | ASK MAGAZINE
NASA’s first competed Earth system science mission, GRACE, 

exemplifies a new flavor of discovery-driven science by measuring 

the intricacies of time-variable gravity as it relates to heat flow 

in the oceans and the changing ice sheets of our planet. NASA 

is poised to continue its legacy of groundbreaking Earth science 

in the years ahead using discovery-driven science approaches for 

both small and large missions.

Perhaps the other most visible example of discovery-driven 

science at a NASA program level is the past approximately 

eight years of the Mars Exploration Program (MEP). After 

program restructuring around 2000, the resulting new 

architecture embraced discovery-driven science in multiple ways, 

including an openly competed Mars Scout program element, 

 as well as via specific strategic missions. Specific attention 

to maximizing discovery potential was established as a MEP 

guiding philosophy. This enabled decisions that resulted in 

uniquely discovery-driven missions such as the Mars Exploration 

Rovers Spirit and Opportunity, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter 

(MRO), and the 2009 Mars Science Laboratory, presently under 

development at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. 

The MRO mission was developed to specifically address 

discovery-oriented questions about Mars for which there were 

no easy answers. The search for mineral evidence of the history 

and persistence of water in the geologic history of Mars had 

historically proven to be an elusive one, but MRO’s instruments 

have discovered new possibilities that were previously 

unsuspected. MRO involves three new classes of remotesensing instruments that have dramatically increased resolution 

on surface and subsurface processes, and measurements from 

them have demonstrated the value of high-discovery potential 

experiments at the edge of the science frontier. The first Mars 

Scout mission, Phoenix, also illustrates substantial attention to 

discovery potential in its choice of a landing site in the high 

latitude polar plains as well as its inclusion of instruments such 

as an atmospheric lidar and the first atomic force microscope in 

space. These new measurement systems have probed previously 

unknown aspects of the local Martian “system” and, in doing 

so, have discovered important aspects of how Mars operates at 

scales as fine as nanometers. The current and ongoing Mars 

program within NASA provides ample evidence of the positive 

influence and value of discovery-driven science as a guiding 

philosophy. 

The Past and the Future

NASA’s first fifty years have included a variety of missions that 

embody the philosophy of discovery-driven science. Monumental 

icons to science such as Hubble, EOS, and MEP, among others, 

present dramatic evidence of the value of this approach. New 

scientific paradigms have been established by discovery-driven 

scientific missions of exploration, starting with the Apollo lunar 

surface missions and continuing today with ongoing missions of 

discovery such as Cassini at Saturn, MESSENGER at Mercury, 

Phoenix on Mars, and the EOS constellation in Earth orbit. 

The next fifty years of NASA missions can sustain the lesson 

of discovery-driven science by propagating the philosophy into 

the upcoming era of more tightly integrated human and robotic 

exploration missions, starting with our return to the moon. 

The science frontier is vast. Deploying innovative approaches 

for extending the discovery-driven science of NASA missions 

in the next decades will assuredly continue to expand our 

understanding of the universe in which we live. ●

James B. Garvin is the chief scientist at Goddard Space 

Flight Center.

Apollo 16 astronaut Charles M. Duke Jr. stands near the lunar roving vehicle 

during the second Apollo 16 extravehicular activity at the Descartes landing 

site. Apollo surface missions such as Apollo 16 provided ample opportunities 

for discovery-driven science in action by means of human explorers “on site” 

Photo Credit: NASA

adapting to what they observed and refining their activities accordingly.

ASK MAGAZINE | 41
No smell of dark room chemicals and no more 8 x 10 paper prints 

greet us in 2008, but digital imagery looks just as impressive as 

it pops up in a gallery of thumbnails on the computer screen 

for captioning and editing. The digital capabilities we now have 

mean we can release a photo the very same day a space-walking 

astronaut has taken it. That may not impress the younger 

generation, but it still amazes us greybeards, with our memories 

of darkrooms and rushed courier trips from the airport. Many 

who read this will someday be able to take for granted new leaps 

in technology now unknown that will communicate NASA’s 

future adventures and discoveries.

Here are a few of the many great images that help tell part 

of the story of NASA’s first fifty years.

You might think I would take my work for granted after almost forty years of working with NASA 

photos. I never have, and even to this day I occasionally pinch myself. The same thrill I had dealing 

with the Apollo 11 photography when it was fresh, right after the moon landing in 1969, continues 

today when I see a great picture of the International Space Station over a panoramic spread of terrain 

or a new picture of some interesting part of the universe from the Hubble Telescope. From Apollo 

through early shuttle, we waited for astronauts to complete their space missions and bring back bags 

of film, which required lab processing and lots of other work prior to release to the media. I enjoyed 

receiving a large stack of moon photos from our photo lab that still had the smell of a darkroom 

on them for distributing to media, and then actually seeing them in collated sets, the sense of smell 

quickly giving way to the sense of sight. With their beauty just jumping up to smack you in the face, 

we felt like Santa Claus packaging up shiny new toys for the children of the world. 

A Half Century 

of NASA Photos

By George Michael (Mike) Gentry

There are no photos of President Dwight D. Eisenhower signing the 

National Aeronautics and Space Act on July 29, 1958. According to Public 

Papers of the Presidents, he released a statement upon signing the bill. 

This usually means that he did not deliver the statement in person, so there 

was no ceremony. The other two men in the photo are T. Keith Glennan 

and Hugh L. Dryden. The photo was taken at the swearing-in ceremony 

for Glennan as administrator of NASA and Dryden as deputy administrator 

that took place in the White House Conference Room on August 19, 1958.Photo Credit: NASA

42 | ASK MAGAZINE | SPECIAL FEATURE
This photograph of the Gemini 7 spacecraft 

was taken from the hatch window of the Gemini 

6 spacecraft during rendezvous and stationkeeping (maintaining a specific orbit) maneuvers 

at an altitude of approximately 160 miles on 

December 15, 1965. The two spacecraft are just 

a few feet apart. Inside the Gemini 7 spacecraft 

are astronauts Frank Borman and James A. 

Lovell. The December 1965 flight was followed 

three years later by a historic Apollo 8 flight, 

also in December, which included the same two 

astronauts as part of a three-man crew.

Photo Credit: NASA

Photo Credit: NASA

The first three Americans to fly in space were, from left to right, John H. 

Glenn, Jr.; Virgil I. (Gus) Grissom; and Alan B. Shepard, Jr. They posed 

for this photo in 1961 while anticipating their flights of Mercury-Atlas 

6, Mercury-Redstone 4, and Mercury-Redstone 3, respectively. They 

personified the Thomas Wolfe–coined term, “the Right Stuff.” Glenn was the 

first American to orbit the earth, while Shepard was NASA’s first astronaut 

to go into space. Grissom, who six years later lost his life in the Apollo 204 

(also known as Apollo 1) fire at Cape Kennedy, flew a suborbital mission, 

launched between the flights of Shepard and Glenn.

ASK MAGAZINE | 43
Several years ago I was at Fair Lanes Bowling Alley, participating in a NASA 

mixed Tuesday night league, when I got a page from the main desk telling me 

I had a phone call. It was John Denver. He was here in Houston, having just 

completed a battery of medical tests at Johnson Space Center because he 

wanted to fly in space.

He said, “Hi, John Denver here ... got your name from PAO [the public affairs 

office], and they said you were probably at the bowling alley. I’m looking to do a 

hologram based on the Apollo 17 Earth photo, and I wanted to talk to you about 

that. I want to use it as a huge icon for my future concerts.”

It is by far the most asked for image in the NASA collection. It so inspired a 

Canadian teacher twenty years ago that she took on the mission of distributing 

the image worldwide. The name of her project was “The Earth in Every 

Classroom.”

I have traveled to various parts of Mexico and Japan and in about thirty 

states in the United States. I don’t think there’s been a trip I’ve taken that I didn’t 

see the Apollo 17 Earth view on TV or on a billboard or in some medium or other.

Photo Credit: NASA

A view of Harrison H. Schmitt, Apollo 17 lunar module pilot, at the Taurus-Littrow landing site during the mission’s first spacewalk. Note the lunar 

roving vehicle on the right side of the giant rock, from which chip samples and other pieces were taken for return to Earth and subsequent scrutiny 

by scientists. Schmitt was the only geologist to walk on the moon. Eugene A. Cernan took the handful of pictures that make up this mosaic.

Photo Credit: NASA/Eugene A. Cernan

44 | ASK MAGAZINE
Magellan, Pioneer, and Soviet Venera spacecraft all played a role in producing this image of Venus. Magellan synthetic aperture radar 

mosaics from the first cycle of Magellan mapping were placed onto a computer-simulated globe to create the image. Data gaps were filled 

with Pioneer-Venus orbiter data, or a constant mid-range value. Simulated color was used to enhance small-scale structures. The simulated 

hues are based on color images recorded by the Soviet Venera 13 and 14. The image, produced at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) 

Multimission Processing Laboratory, is a single frame from a video released at the JPL news conference on Oct. 29, 1991.

Photo Credit: NASA

Photo Credit: NASA

The International Space Station was photographed against the topography of 

the Canadian province of Quebec on April 29, 2001, following separation from 

the Space Shuttle Endeavour. An impact feature known as the Manicouagan 

Reservoir is almost directly beneath the orbital outpost. One of several impact 

craters on Earth, Manicouagan’s unique crab-like shape makes it easily 

recognizable from 220 statute miles above Earth. The 35mm frame was exposed 

by one of the STS-100 crewmembers onboard the shuttle.

Photo Credit: NASA

This picture of a half-moon over a 

relatively small section of Earth 

and its atmosphere is not a rarity, 

because many space travelers have 

encountered similar scenes, but this 

particular image was captured by 

the final Space Shuttle Columbia

crewmembers prior to their 

deaths on February 1, 2003. Although 

it was recorded with a digital still 

camera and downlinked from 

space, much of the crew’s filmed 

imagery was recovered in very good 

condition among the Columbia debris 

in North Texas after the mission’s end.

Photo Credit: NASA

This eleven-year-old Hubble image 

reveals a pair of one-half lightyearlong interstellar “twisters”—

eerie funnels and twisted-ropelike structures—in the heart of the 

Lagoon Nebula (Messier 8), which 

lies 5,000 light-years away in 

the direction of the constellation 

Sagittarius. The Lagoon Nebula and 

nebulae in other galaxies are sites 

where new stars are being born 

from dusty molecular clouds. These 

regions are the “space laboratories” 

for astronomers to study how stars 

form and interactions between the 

winds from stars and nearby gases. 

These color-coded images are the 

combination of individual exposures 

taken in July and September of 1995, 

with HST’s Wide Field Planetary 

Camera 2.

ASK MAGAZINE | 45
George Michael (Mike) Gentry was reared on the Texas–

Oklahoma border and educated at The University of North Texas. 

He was a newspaperman in that area until coming to NASA’s Public 

Affairs Office to work with photos for the news media in 1969.

Photo Credit: NASA

When I was in the ninth grade (in the fifties), you learned (if you 

didn’t know already) that Saturn had rings. There was no mention 

of rings on Jupiter, which the Voyager missions of the late seventies 

found. Jupiter’s rings are not nearly as conspicuous or pretty as 

Saturn’s. Each time we fly a spacecraft “near” Saturn, we learn 

something new or discover more spectacular views. The Voyager 

views of both Saturn and Jupiter knocked me off my feet, and the 

Cassini ones have left me speechless. This natural-color mosaic 

was constructed from forty-five wide-angle camera images (fifteen 

separate sets of red, green, and blue images) taken by the Cassini 

spacecraft over the course of about two hours.

Scientist-Astronaut Harrison Schmitt, Apollo 17 lunar module pilot, is 

photographed next to the U.S. flag at the Taurus-Littrow landing site 

during extravehicular activity of NASA’s final lunar landing mission in 

the Apollo series. The photo was taken by astronaut Eugene A. Cernan, 

commander and the last man of the twentieth century to have walked on 

the moon. The highest part of the flag appears to point toward our planet 

Earth in the distant background. This is one of a very few pictures from 

the moon that show both a human being and Earth in the same frame.

Photo Credit: NASA/Eugene A. Cernan

View of Astronauts Robert L. Curbeam, Jr., (left) and Sweden’s Christer 

Fuglesang of the European Space Agency, both serving as STS-116 

mission specialists, as they work at the forward side of the starboard 1 

truss on the International Space Station during the first extravehicular 

activity session on the flight. This breathtaking view represents the 

hundreds of hours thus far spent by astronauts assembling the orbital 

outpost. New Zealand is visible in the background.

Photo Credit: NASA

46 | ASK MAGAZINE
Effective knowledge organizations substantially rely on 

structures and practices that differ from the command-andcontrol hierarchies of many traditional manufacturing firms. 

We want to look briefly at how NASA stacks up as a knowledge 

organization and what it may still need to do to meet the 

knowledge demands of its future missions. We acknowledge 

our limitations—NASA is a large, complex, varied organization 

that we are still in the process of exploring. But we think we 

have learned enough to make some useful observations.

The Knowledge Organization

Knowledge organizations behave differently because knowledge 

is different—from information, from data, and certainly from 

the material resources that dominate manufacturing firms. 

Knowledge is often local, originating and having meaning in 

the context of particular work and a particular place. It is social, 

created, understood, and used mainly by groups of people 

who work together or share the same profession. It is largely 

tacit—that is, embedded in work practices and bound up 

with the experience, judgment, and understanding of experts 

and therefore impossible to capture fully in a document or 

diagram. Because it is local, social, and tacit, its effective use is 

voluntary, depending on the full engagement of people and their 

willingness to tap their inner resources and challenge themselves 

and each other.

Successful knowledge-intensive firms—private-sector 

examples include McKinsey and Company, Northrup 

Grumman, Google, and W. L. Gore and Associates—encourage 

practices and values and organize and manage themselves 

in ways that recognize the special nature of knowledge and 

support its creation, sharing, and use. Here are some of the most 

important characteristics of knowledge-intensive firms and our 

sense of how well NASA exemplifies them.

Extensive and Durable Informal Networks

A lot of organizational knowledge travels through informal 

networks, the personal connections that people establish in 

the course of their careers. We all have people we go to for 

knowledge or help or because we think they can connect us with 

someone else who has the knowledge we need. Organizations 

NASA is unquestionably a knowledge-intensive organization. Among government agencies, it is 

probably the most knowledge intensive. Its work depends on acquiring and applying the sophisticated 

knowledge of fields including engineering, science, and mathematics, as well as knowledge about how 

to organize immensely complex projects. Knowledge is also one of the agency’s essential products. It 

is a major source of new knowledge about the earth, the solar system, and the universe. Its mandate 

specifically includes generating and sharing knowledge, aims articulated in two of the three parts of 

NASA’s mission statement:

• To advance and communicate scientific knowledge and understanding of the earth, 

the solar system, and the universe.

• To research, develop, verify, and transfer advanced aeronautics and space technologies. 

NASA and the Future of Knowledge

By Laurence Prusak and Don Cohen

INSIGHT | ASK MAGAZINE | 47
that have strong networks give people opportunities to meet and 

mix, understand the value of informal conversation, and have 

cultures that value both asking for and giving advice.

NASA gets high marks for its informal networks. Its employees 

tend to have long careers at the Agency, so they have time to build 

extensive networks of people they can call on to help solve problems. 

Members of project teams form ties that persist even after they 

move on to other work. NASA retirees and older employees—the 

“greybeards” who worked on Apollo and Viking, for instance—

often retain connections with the Agency and are called on, 

informally and formally, to offer their expertise and advice.

Most important, that kind of knowledge sharing is the 

norm at NASA. Of course there are people who want to defend 

their territory and engineers whose desire to solve problems 

themselves leads them to reject ideas that are “not invented 

here,” but we see most NASA personnel readily seeking advice 

from people whose expertise they respect and responding to 

requests for their expertise.

Trust (and Mission)

Effective knowledge work requires a high level of trust. People 

will not share or seek knowledge from others or work effectively 

together on collaborative knowledge-intensive projects unless 

they believe that their colleagues are trustworthy: not only 

that they will be reliable providers and users of knowledge, but 

that they will share credit appropriately and not use their own 

knowledge for political or professional advantage.

Trust has many sources, including the trustworthy behavior 

of leaders and managers. Shared values and a shared sense of 

mission powerfully contribute to trust at NASA. In project after 

project, the tensions and disagreements that are an inevitable 

part of doing difficult work together are offset by recognition 

of a shared commitment to an important and noble goal: the 

safety of astronauts and advancing human knowledge of the 

earth, the solar system, and the universe. 

Respect for Local Knowledge

The localness of knowledge—its origin and use in the context 

of particular work—means that leaders and managers can never 

know everything they need to know to make good decisions. 

They must consult with and sometimes defer to people engaged 

in the daily “hands-on” work of the organization. W. L. Gore 

and Associates offers a striking example. Recognizing that 

innovation comes from the people directly engaged in research, 

the company gives individual researchers full authority to start 

new projects if they can convince enough people of the value of 

their ideas to form a project team.

Historically, NASA has a mixed record in this area. 

The Challenger and Columbia accidents arguably resulted 

from failures to pay enough attention to individual or local 

knowledge, either because of poor communication, a failure 

to give minority views serious enough attention, or a thencommon cultural barrier to speaking truth to power.

NASA’s new governance model, described in its recently 

revised “Program and Project Management Requirements” 

document (NPR 7120.5D), attempts to address this issue by 

providing a structure for dissenting opinions to be heard and to 

Organizations that have strong

networks give people opportunities

to meet and mix, understand the

value of informal conversation, 

and have cultures that value both 

asking for and giving advice.

48 | ASK MAGAZINE
rise to the highest level of management if they are not satisfactorily 

resolved at a lower level. This change matters, both as a process 

and as a signal that management wants different opinions. To 

ensure that the process works, though, the organization needs to 

continue to demonstrate a commitment to carefully evaluating 

diverse ideas and opinions.

Shared or Distributed Decision-Making

Genuine respect for local knowledge means putting some 

decision-making power in local hands—giving people the 

authority to make choices that only they are qualified to 

make because only they have the relevant knowledge. Clearly, 

it would not be appropriate for groups working on NASA’s 

complex, highly integrated projects to make local decisions 

without regard to their effect on the bigger picture—it’s the job 

of systems engineers and project managers to make decisions 

based on the system as a whole. But effective project managers 

talk about making clear to team members what has to be done 

and giving them the freedom to decide how to do it, based 

on their experience and expertise. Good NASA project leaders 

involve a broad range of project participants in “trade studies” 

that evaluate the effects of possible design changes so that local 

needs and knowledge can be heard and weighed.

The 7120.5D processes and requirements document, 

which specifies project roles and milestones, is an interestingly 

mixed story in relation to shared decision making. Writing and 

reviewing the document, the Agency worked hard to incorporate 

practical knowledge so that it would reflect some of the wisdom 

of real experience, not just a theoretical idea of how the work 

should be done. In many organizations, important knowledge 

is embedded in the processes and routines used to get work 

done, and 7120.5D tries to capture and promote that embedded 

knowledge. The document also recognizes the need for flexibility 

within the guidelines to respond differently to different projects 

and situations. At the same time (as in any large, complex 

organization) a tension exists between, on the one hand, the 

need for standards to support coordination, efficiency, and an 

expected level of quality and, on the other hand, the freedom to 

respond creatively to unusual and unexpected circumstances. 

Time will tell whether the new processes and requirements 

successfully balance these two needs.

Learning

Effective knowledge organizations make sure their employees 

keep learning, sometimes through support for formal education 

but especially through appropriately challenging work experience 

ASK MAGAZINE | 49
(often guided by mentors and more experienced colleagues). 

Many of these organizations also recognize and encourage 

learning opportunities that are neither formal education nor 

work per se: observing and talking to colleagues, hearing and 

telling stories that capture the realities of work.

A strength of NASA’s formal educational programs is that 

they often use these multiple learning modes. Course offerings 

from the Academy of Program/Project and Engineering 

Leadership (APPEL) and APPEL’s Masters Forums combine 

storytelling and conversation with more traditional instruction. 

Goddard’s Systems Engineering Education Development 

program, Ames’s Project Excellence Systems Engineering 

Development program, and Glenn’s Space Missions Excellence 

program all combine classroom instruction, mentoring, and 

guided project experience.

Long-time NASA employees often talk about how much 

they have learned from their project work. Many describe being 

given significant responsibility for a project element as soon as 

they began work at the Agency and talk about how much that 

early hands-on experience taught them and how it ensured their 

commitment to NASA. But many people we have spoken to—

people within NASA and NASA observers—worry that current 

and future generations of employees will not get enough handson design and engineering experience to develop their expertise 

and keep their interest. NASA projects have always involved both 

civil servants and contractors; many are concerned that the civil 

servants may spend too much time overseeing technical work 

done by others and not enough doing the work themselves. The 

result, they fear, will be difficulty attracting the most talented 

engineers and scientists and insufficient technical expertise 

within NASA.

Pursuit of Outside Knowledge

Successful knowledge-intensive organizations look outside their 

borders for the some of the knowledge they need. As part of its 

“connect and develop” strategy, Procter and Gamble has more 

than fifty “technology entrepreneurs” who are responsible for 

seeking knowledge outside the company. Organizations that cut 

themselves off—from arrogance or in an effort to protect their 

knowledge from outsiders—wither and die.

NASA works cooperatively with universities and foreign 

space agencies (as well as industry) in part to share the cost of 

expensive missions but also to get the benefit of outside expertise. 

The International Space Station is the most visible example of 

multinational cooperation, but far from the only one. NASA 

also sponsors competitions—Centennial Challenges—to 

encourage outsiders to apply their knowledge and skill to 

technical challenges. In 2007, Peter Homer won the Astronaut 

Glove Challenge, designing a more dexterous spacesuit glove. 

NASA is now sponsoring a lunar lander challenge, administered 

by the X PRIZE foundation.

There are some limitations on these collaborations. The 

International Trade in Arms Regulations sometimes create 

barriers to international knowledge sharing. NASA’s relationship 

with private space entrepreneurs is at an early stage, so the extent 

and importance of knowledge sharing remains to be seen.

Acquiring, sharing, and preserving

the generations of knowledge

needed for [NASA’s] new human

exploration missions will require

substantial ongoing attention to 

good knowledge practices.

50 | ASK MAGAZINE
Knowledge About Knowledge/Knowledge Roles

Many organizations spend significant time and money on 

knowledge development, transfer, and use. Leaders and others 

understand how knowledge works, make knowledge part of the 

organizational conversation, and recognize the importance of 

investing in knowledge. McKinsey and Company, for instance, 

employs hundreds of people whose job is to facilitate knowledge 

exchange and provide essential context for documents and other 

resources. Intel has used “knowledge harvesters” to identify 

valuable project knowledge and help communicate it to other 

project teams that can use it.

At NASA, a relatively small number of people devote their 

time explicitly to knowledge work—in APPEL, for instance, 

through knowledge programs at the Jet Prolusion Laboratory and 

Goddard, and in recent Exploration Systems Mission Directorate 

efforts to link knowledge sharing to risk management. As in 

many organizations, though, there is more knowledge work to 

be done than there are people to do it, and the Agency may 

need to do more to preserve and share its project knowledge. 

NASA knowledge personnel should also perhaps practice what 

they preach by getting together to share their knowledge about 

knowledge more frequently and systematically.

The Future of Knowledge at NASA

On balance, NASA displays many of the characteristics of a 

healthy knowledge organization. Its mission-oriented, generally 

high-trust culture; its robust informal networks; its emphasis 

on learning; and its reasonable openness to outside knowledge 

all contribute to knowledge effectiveness. Formal and informal 

mentoring and long careers with the Agency foster individual 

and group expertise.

We believe the extraordinary challenges of NASA’s future 

missions—both their technical demands and their duration—

will require extraordinary efforts to develop and transmit 

knowledge. The future of knowledge at NASA should include 

continued attention to learning, with an emphasis on learning 

from hands-on experience. It should mean continuing 

efforts to understand and respect local knowledge and bring 

it into the decision-making process. It should continue 

and strengthen the trend toward seeking and using outside 

knowledge. And it should include additional investment in 

the practices that preserve and communicate valuable project 

knowledge. Acquiring, sharing, and preserving the generations 

of knowledge needed for its new human exploration missions 

will require substantial ongoing attention to good knowledge 

practices. From its earliest days, NASA has developed ways to 

create and coordinate vast amounts of knowledge to accomplish 

its innovative missions. It can and must continue to do so if it 

is to succeed in the future. ●

ASK MAGAZINE | 51
When humans first went to space in the 1950s and 1960s, many rockets and satellites failed, leading 

to the development of processes and technologies to reduce the probability of failure. The extreme 

harshness of the space environment required novel technologies, but it also drove conservative 

design to prevent or mitigate failures. In NASA’s formative years, these contradictory requirements 

deeply influenced its organizations and processes. The novelty of NASA’s missions, along with the 

fact that they were generally unique or few of a kind, led to the adoption and refinement of project 

management and systems engineering to develop and build rockets and spacecraft. 

Success, Failure, and NASA Culture

By Dr. Stephen B. Johnson

Workers study Hubble’s main, eight-foot (2.4 m) mirror. The flaw in the Hubble Space Telescope’s optics was due in part to reductions in testing to save money.

Photo Credit: NASA

52 | ASK MAGAZINE | INSIGHT
While Wernher von Braun’s experienced rocket team at Marshall 

Space Flight Center eschewed systems engineering, NASA’s 

other field centers developed that discipline to ensure proper 

communication and design reviews. In the 1950s and 1960s, the 

introduction of systems engineering, along with other related 

innovations such as redundancy and environmental testing, 

generally reduced system failure rates from around 50 percent 

to around 5 to 10 percent for robotic spacecraft and better than 

that for human flight. Von Braun’s team seemed anomalous, for 

it attained very high reliability with its Saturn rockets without 

systems engineering. However, von Braun’s team, which held 

together for nearly four decades, had learned its trade through 

three decades of tests and high failure rates from the 1930s in 

Germany through the 1950s in the United States. Only after 

the retirement of the German rocket team in the 1970s and 

the diversification of Marshall beyond rocketry did systems 

engineering begin to make significant inroads there.

Improvement in system reliability came with increased 

bureaucracy, as systems engineering put a variety of crosschecks and reviews in place. System dependability improved, 

but these processes and technologies increased the cost of each 

vehicle. Eventually, and in response to pressures to decrease 

costs, engineers and managers cut back on safety and reliability 

measures. Also, as Henry Petroski explains in To Engineer Is 

Human and Success Through Failure, success encourages engineers 

to reduce performance and safety margins to reduce costs and 

to create more elegant, optimal designs. Not surprisingly, these 

cutbacks, exacerbated by overconfidence, lead to failures. 

Failures in turn lead to increased attention to reliability and 

safety, pushing the pendulum in the other direction.

We see these pendulum swings in NASA’s history. By the 

1980s, as NASA faced increasing pressures to reduce costs, 

many aspects of its bureaucracy, including systems engineering, 

came under scrutiny. Many outsiders and some insiders began 

to question the need for all the “red tape.” Citing a variety of 

examples, such as Total Quality Management (TQM) from 

Japan’s automotive manufacturing and the Skunk Works 

model from Lockheed’s aviation organization, critics believed 

NASA could build and operate its systems more quickly and 

less expensively by cutting back or changing its management 

and organization.

Faster, Better, Cheaper

After the Challenger accident in 1986, the human flight program 

was able to reestablish a focus on safety for a number of years. 

This shifted the cost-cutters’ attention to robotic spacecraft 

programs, however. By the late 1980s, NASA began to 

experiment with a number of these management ideas, including 

TQM and reengineering. At the same time, traditional projects 

came under criticism. For example, the Cassini probe came 

under fire, parodied as “Battlestar Galactica” because of its size, 

complexity, and cost, and was frequently cited as an example 

of what NASA should not do. Failure of the Mars Observer in 

1993 demonstrated again that projects managed with traditional 

methods sometimes failed. The 1990s became the era of “faster, 

better, cheaper” (FBC) during Dan Goldin’s administration. 

Projects such as Mars Pathfinder, which landed on Mars for 

significantly lower costs than the 1970s Viking project, were 

touted as proof that the new methods worked (and hence that 

the old techniques were unnecessary).

Funding cuts and experiments to reduce the bureaucracy 

led to occasional success but also to increased failure rates. The 

flaw in the Hubble Space Telescope’s optics was due in part to 

reductions in testing to save money. A series of failures in Earthorbiting projects and most prominently in the Mars Polar Lander 

and Mars Climate Orbiter projects in 1999 led to a rethinking 

of the FBC strategy. By the early 2000s, the Mars program had 

retrenched and returned to more conservative and traditional 

management with significantly more funding than its recent 

predecessors. Managerial innovations like TQM, reengineering, 

and FBC were being reconsidered or rejected in favor of a return 

to classical systems engineering and systems management.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the debates about NASA’s 

organization and its relation to system success or failure had 

been couched in terms of management methods, in particular 

systems engineering and management versus a variety of other 

ASK MAGAZINE | 53
techniques that usually originated 

outside the space industry. The loss of 

Columbia in February 2003 changed 

the debate. What caught the attention 

of the Columbia Accident Investigation 

Board (CAIB) and others was the 

resemblance of the decisions and 

factors leading up to the accident to 

those behind the Challenger accident 

seventeen years earlier. Ominously, 

the problems seemed to exist within

the structures and processes of 

classical systems engineering and 

management. These inherent problems

posed, and still pose, a much more 

serious threat to NASA than the 

attempts to impose new and arguably 

ill-suited techniques from outside the 

space industry. Instead of failures to 

follow rigorous systems engineering 

methods, as had been the usual earlier 

diagnosis, the CAIB identified NASA’s 

culture as a primary cause of the

Columbia tragedy.

The Challenge of Culture

This diagnosis was problematic for 

NASA for at least two reasons. First, 

it was not clear what “culture” really 

meant, as it is a famously holistic 

and ambiguous term, even for social 

scientists who use it in their day-today work. “Culture” covers a lot a 

ground, including patterns of human 

knowledge, beliefs, behaviors, and

social forms. Out of the full set of 

NASA’s human knowledge, beliefs, and behaviors, what is it 

exactly that NASA needed to change? Second, whatever NASA’s 

culture actually is, it is not geared toward soft and squishy 

concepts about people but rather toward precise, technical 

assessments of things. Any action to address social issues would 

be difficult.

NASA’s first response to the Columbia accident was 

to determine and fix the technical causes and implement 

operational procedures to minimize the risks; for instance, 

ensuring that shuttle missions always had means to inspect 

the thermal tiles and repair them if necessary. Addressing 

the cultural issue was more difficult. Knowing that internal 

The Cassini spacecraft is mated to the launch vehicle adapter in Kennedy Space Center’s Payload Hazardous 

Servicing Facility. Cassini was once frequently cited as an example of what NASA should not do because of its

size, complexity, and cost.

Photo Credit: NASA Kennedy Space Center

54 | ASK MAGAZINE
expertise was lacking, NASA hired Behavioral 

Science Technology, Incorporated, (BST) in 

2004 to lead the culture-change effort. BST 

promised to assess NASA’s culture through 

surveys and then implement changes that

could be quantitatively measured. This 

experiment lasted only one year, however, 

as NASA’s executive leadership decided that 

NASA had the skills to implement cultural 

change in house.

Another of the CAIB recommendations 

was to implement an Independent Technical 

Authority. This was duly accomplished. 

In February 2006 it was replaced by a new 

directive to move to a “Process-Based Mission Assurance” system. 

Behind these changes was the implementation of a renewed and 

restrengthened matrix management system, where engineers were 

responsible to the engineering technical authority for the technical 

effectiveness of their work and to their project management for dayto-day direction. One major goal was to ensure that if engineering 

opinion was rejected through one line of management, engineers 

had another line through which to communicate their concerns. 

Safety reporting systems remained in place and were reemphasized 

to ensure that safety-related problems could be reported separately 

from either of the project or engineering management chains. 

At present, these activities form the bulk of NASA’s top-down 

cultural changes, albeit without the “culture change” label. In 

addition, educational efforts at NASA’s Academy of Program/

Project and Engineering Leadership (APPEL) are under way to 

address some of the cultural issues brought forward by CAIB, as 

education is a key component of long-term generational change 

in the workforce.

Is there still a need for “culture change” at NASA? I believe 

the answer remains “yes.” The reinvigorated matrix structure is a 

move in the right direction, multiplying communication channels 

and delineating responsibilities for technical excellence. APPEL’s 

new and updated engineering and management curriculum, if 

properly focused, is also a significant step. However, the core 

issues that relate NASA’s “culture” to improvements in system 

dependability and safety have so far, in my opinion, only 

been marginally addressed. If the CAIB had any message for 

NASA regarding culture, it is that something in NASA’s social 

organization and processes leads to technical failure of systems. 

To directly address the CAIB’s concern, we must determine the 

connection between culture and failure.

To make this connection, we need to understand the nature 

of faults and failures. Failure is generally the outcome of a chain of 

events that are made more likely by various contributing factors. 

Failure investigations start from the end of the failure process: the 

final failure effects, which can include complete system loss, like 

the Space Shuttle Columbia burning up in the atmosphere, or can 

be more benign, such as the scrub of a launch. The proximate 

causes are generally the technical items that malfunctioned and 

led to the failure effects: O-ring failure of the Challenger accident, 

or the foam that fell off the external tank and hit Columbia’s wing 

during ascent. But proximate causes have their genesis in root 

causes, such as human-induced errors in the application of the foam 

to the external tank in the Columbia case, the decision to launch 

Challenger on a morning when the temperature was lower than 

rated environmental limits, or human error in creating the shuttle’s 

original, flawed Solid Rocket Booster segment-joint design. Finally, 

there are contributing factors, such as pressures to launch the 

shuttle on an accelerated schedule, pressures to lower costs, or use 

of a teleconference instead of a face-to-face meeting contributing

to miscommunication. 

Frequently, we find that the failure effects and the proximate 

causes are technical, but the root causes and contributing factors 

are social or psychological. Successes and failures clearly have 

technical causes, but a system’s reliability strongly depends on 

human processes used to develop it, the decisions of the funders, 

Contributing Factors

Overambitious schedule

Power asymmetry

Weak safety organization

Inexperienced personnel

Overconfidence

root causes

Individual mistakes

Individual misunderstandings

Miscommunication

Component Wearout

Environmental Complexity

System effects

Catastrophic explosion

Satellite loses power

Loss of redundant string

Launch scrub

Loss of data

proximate causes

O-ring joint failure

Floating metal shorts pins

Operator bad command

Software memory overwrite

Structural load failure

causes

are social

effects

are technical

Failure Event Chain

ASK MAGAZINE | 55
managers, and engineers who collectively determine the level 

of risk. In the terms of an old cliché, “we have met the enemy, 

and they are us!” We humans make mistakes, either individual 

cognitive or physical mistakes, or as groups through lack of 

communication or miscommunication.

Although the statistics have not been studied fully, my 

sense, from experience in the field and discussions with other 

experienced engineers, is that 80 to 95 percent of failures are 

ultimately due to human error or miscommunication. Most of 

these are quite simple, which makes them appear all the more 

ridiculous when the investigation gets to the root cause and 

finds, for example, that it is due to a missed conversion factor of 

English to metric units, a simple error in a weld, a reversed sign 

in an equation, or one person not knowing that another person 

had a piece of information needed to make a proper decision. 

The mundane nature of the causes is precisely what makes them 

so hard to catch. We constantly carry out simple daily tasks and 

communications. Thousands of such tasks and communications 

happen every day on a project, and any one of them can be the 

cause of tomorrow’s dramatic failure.

Systems management and systems engineering reduce 

failure rates by providing formal cross-checks that find and fix 

most potential mission-ending faults. Skunk-works approaches 

can succeed through the extraordinary hard work of a cadre 

of experienced personnel, but over the long run, they are not 

repeatable. That is because we humans are unable to maintain 

our focus for long periods. Eventually we become lax and forget 

some key detail or skip a critical process because “we know” 

that we have done the right things and don’t need to doublecheck. Systems management and systems engineering cannot 

guarantee absolute success either, but history shows that they 

do significantly reduce project failure rates. This should be no 

surprise, because that is what they were created to do.

How can NASA make progress directly addressing the CAIB 

recommendations? The first step is recognizing that technical 

failures have individual and social causes. Evidence for this is 

overwhelming, and we do not need to look further for some 

elusive “cultural issue.” The second step is to take action. While 

there is no single solution to this problem, there are many ways 

we can improve. We can perform research to better understand 

how humans make mistakes and what circumstances increase 

our “natural error rates.” We can use this research to change 

the environment in which we operate and communicate, and 

we can educate ourselves to reduce the probability of making 

individual mistakes or miscommunicating with others. We can 

improve the relationships between engineering, operations, and 

safety organizations, and we can create design and operational 

engineering disciplines to better engineer our systems to tolerate 

the inevitable failures.

Above all, NASA needs to make tackling the individual and 

social causes of failure a priority. It should put a plan in place to 

start the research and to plan, coordinate, and assess organizational 

and educational innovations specifically targeted to improve 

dependability. Individual education, organizational change, and 

technical improvements will all be part of this plan. All these 

methods, and the efforts of all of us, will be needed to tackle this, 

one of NASA’s most difficult and deep-seated issues. ●

Stephen B. Johnson is a health management systems engineer 

for the Advanced Sensors and System Health Management Branch 

at Marshall Space Flight Center and an associate research professor 

with the Institute for Science, Space, and Security Centers at the 

University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. He is the author of The 

United States Air Force and the Culture of Innovation, 1945–1965

and The Secret of Apollo: Systems Management in American and 

European Space Programs.

Frequently, we find that 

the failure effects and the

proximate causes are technical, 

but the root causes and 

contributing factors are 

social or psychological.

56 | ASK MAGAZINE
NASA’s founding document, the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958, specifically charged 

the new agency with eight objectives, including “the establishment of long-range studies of the 

potential benefits to be gained from, the opportunities for, and the problems involved in the 

utilization of aeronautical and space activities for peaceful and scientific purposes.” Although the 

Space Act has been often amended, this provision has never changed and still remains one of the 

main objectives of NASA.1

 Despite a few early studies, the mandate to study societal impact has 

largely gone unfulfilled as NASA concentrated on the many opportunities and technical problems 

of space flight itself. 

The Societal Impact of Space Flight

By Steven J. Dick

INSIGHT | ASK MAGAZINE | 57
As NASA celebrates its fiftieth anniversary, it is time to take 

up the challenge once again. Multidecade programs to explore 

the planets, build and operate large space telescopes and space 

stations, or take humans to the moon and Mars require that the 

public have a vested interest. But whether or not the ambitious 

space visions of the United States and other countries are 

fulfilled, the question of societal impact over the past fifty years 

remains urgent, and may in fact help fulfill current visions, or at 

least raise the level of debate.

It seems obvious that certain turning points in the history 

of space flight must have had an impact: Sputnik, the moon 

landing, the Space Shuttle disasters, and so on are etched in 

memory for better or worse. But unpacking the nature and 

extent of that impact is no simple task. Secondly, a commercial 

and economic component to space flight is undeniable. It 

ranges from a far-reaching aerospace industry to the famous 

(and sometimes literally legendary) “spinoffs;” it is a part 

of national and international political economy; and it has 

sometimes measurable, but often elusive, effects on daily life 

and commerce. Economic impact is closely related to a third 

area: applications satellites, which are in turn often inseparable 

from environmental issues and national security. 

Imaging Earth from space and global space surveillance have 

played an arguably central role in the increasingly heated debate 

over global climate change and have changed the manner in which 

national security issues are understood and interpreted. Just how 

central is a matter that only historical analysis can reveal. In a 

fourth domain, that of social impact, space activities have affected 

science, math, and engineering education; embodied questions 

of status, civil rights, and gender, among other social issues; and 

led to the creation of “space states” such as California, Florida, 

and Texas. Finally, space flight has affected culture in multiple 

ways, ranging from worldviews altered or completely transformed 

by the images of Earth from space and the spectacular views of 

space from Earth-orbiting spacecraft, to a sense of our place in 

the universe made possible by studies of cosmic evolution and the 

search for extraterrestrial life, and the embodiment of these and 

other themes in literature and the arts. 

These overarching themes raise further questions. What 

is the difference between social impact and cultural impact? 

What is the interplay between space flight and those enduring 

American values of pioneering, progress, enterprise, and rugged 

individualism? How does this interplay differ from experiences 

in the Soviet/Russian, European, or Chinese milieu? How has 

space flight affected conceptions of self and others, as well as our 

understanding of our purpose in the universe? 

Despite the importance of the subject, very few systematic 

studies of the societal impact of space exploration have been 

undertaken over the past fifty years. One exception that stands 

out from four decades ago is The Railroad and the Space Program: 

An Exploration of Historical Analogy. Funded by NASA through 

the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, The Railroad and 

the Space Program focused on the uses of historical analogy 

to illuminate the problem of societal impact. Confident in 

the use of historical analogy as suggestive, but not predictive, 

of the future, the authors of the volume elaborated on two 

technological events whose beginnings were separated in time 

by 150 years. The railroad was, they said, an engine of social 

revolution that had its greatest impact a full fifty years after the 

start of the railways in America. As a transportation system, the 

railway had to be competitive with canals and turnpikes, and 

twenty years after the start of railways in America, more miles 

of canals were being built than railroads. It was not initially 

clear that railroads could be economically feasible. In the course 

of the nineteenth century, they represented human conquest of 

natural obstacles, with consequences for humans’ view of nature 

and our place in it. Moreover, secondary consequences often 

turned out to have greater societal impact than the supposed 

primary purposes for which they were built. And though many 

technological, economic, and managerial hurdles needed to be 

overcome, railroads are still with us.

The space program has had, and still has, its technological 

challenges, and the economic benefits may be even longer term 

than the railroad. But by conquering the dimension of space as 

aviation did to a small extent in the thin skin of Earth’s atmosphere, 

and as the railroad did on the surface, in the long run the space 

58 | ASK MAGAZINE
program’s impact may exceed that of the railroad. Although 

originally suspicious of parallels with the past, present, and future, 

the authors in the end saw “the possibility of moving up onto a 

level of abstraction where the terrain of the past is suggestive of 

the topography of the present and its future projection.”2

 They 

cautioned that in taking such an approach as much empirical 

detail should be used as possible, and that analogies drawn from 

vague generalities should be avoided. Four decades later, The 

Railroad and the Space Program still makes for relevant reading.

In addition to that early study, there have been other, sporadic 

forays. On the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the British 

Interplanetary Society, NASA was heavily involved in a special 

issue of its journal devoted to “the impact of space on culture.”3

There NASA scientists Charles Elachi (now director of the Jet 

Propulsion Laboratory) and W. I. McLaughlin, as well as historian 

Sylvia Kraemer, among others, discussed the impact of space 

endeavors on space science, politics, the fine arts, and education. 

In 1994 the Mission from Planet Earth program in the Office of 

Space Science at NASA sponsored a symposium entitled, ‘‘What 

is the value of space exploration?’’ A variety of speakers ranging 

from Carl Sagan to Stephen Jay Gould discussed the scientific, 

economic, cultural, and educational impact of space exploration.4

More recently, in 2005 the International Academy of 

Astronautics (IAA), which has a commission devoted to space 

and society, sponsored the first international conference on space 

and society in Budapest, Hungary. The IAA and the European 

Space Agency jointly sponsored a study published as The Impact 

of Space Activities upon Society,

6

 in which well-known players on 

the world scene briefly discussed their ideas of societal impact, 

ranging from the practical to the inspirational. 

The authors of more general studies of space flight have 

on occasion tackled the subject of societal impact. In her book 

Rocket Dreams: How the Space Age Shaped Our Vision of a World 

Beyond, Marina Benjamin argues that space exploration has 

shaped our worldviews in more ways than one. “The impact 

of seeing the Earth from space focused our energies on the 

home planet in unprecedented ways, dramatically affecting our 

relationship to the natural world and our appreciation of the 

greater community of mankind, and prompting a revolution in 

our understanding of the earth as a living system,” she wrote. 

Benjamin thinks it no coincidence that the first Earth Day on 

April 20, 1970, occurred in the midst of the Apollo program; 

that one of the astronauts developed a new school of spiritualism 

while others have also been profoundly affected spiritually; or 

that people “should be drawn to an innovative model for the 

domestic economy sprung free from the American space program 

by NASA Administrator James Webb.” Space exploration 

shapes worldviews and changes cultures in unexpected ways; by 

corollary so does lack of exploration.7

Others have demonstrated the complex relation of space 

goals to social, racial, and political themes. One such study is De 

Witt Kilgore’s Astrofuturism: Science, Race, and Visions of Utopia 

in Space, where the author examines the work of Wernher von 

Braun, Willy Ley, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Gentry 

Lee, Gerard O'Neill, and Ben Bova, among others, in what he 

calls the tradition of American astrofuturism.8

All these topics are discussed in the volume Societal Impact 

of Spaceflight, recently published in the NASA History series. 

It is available online at http://history.nasa.gov/sp4801-part1.pdf 

and http://history.nasa.gov/sp4801-part2.pdf. As NASA moves 

forward with its new vision for space exploration, understanding 

the societal impact of space flight may prove essential for 

sustaining its programs during the next fifty years. ●

1 The National Aeronautics and Space Act and its complete legislative history may be found at http://www.hq.nasa.

gov/office/pao/History/spaceact-legishistory.pdf. The passage quoted here is on page 6.

2 Bruce Mazlish, ed., The Railroad and the Space Program: An Exploration in Historical Analogy, (Cambridge, MA: MIT 

Press, 1965).

3 British Interplanetary Society, “The Impact of Space on Culture,” Journal of the British Interplanetary Society 46,

no. 11 (1993).

4 NASA, What is the value of space exploration?, July 18–19, 1994, NASA History Reference Collection.

5 IAA, 2005. Meeting agenda at http://www.iaaweb.org/iaa/Publications/budapest2005fp.pdf

6 European Space Agency, The Impact of Space Activities upon Society, ESA BR-237, 2005.

7 Marina Benjamin, Rocket Dreams: How the Space Age Shaped our Vision of a 

World Beyond (New York: Free Press, 2003). 

8 De Witt Douglas Kilgore, Astrofuturism: Science, Race, and Visions of Utopia in 

Space (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003).

Steven J. Dick is NASA’s Chief Historian.

Space exploration shapes worldviews and changes

cultures in unexpected ways; by corollary so does

lack of exploration.

ASK MAGAZINE | 59
Title

By

Intro

Leadership, Teamwork, 

and Focus: Viking’s Landing on Mars

The planetary landing spacecraft 

Viking I under assembly at Martin 

Marietta Aerospace. Learning about 

instrument sensitivity during the 

Ranger missions led to the use of 

white tech suits during assembly, 

which is a standard practice today. Photo Credit: NASA

By Kerry Ellis

60 | ASK MAGAZINE | STORY
The U.S. Mariner missions provided glimpses of the planet. 

Mariner 4 accomplished the first successful Mars flyby and 

returned the first images of another planet from deep space. The 

images were taken from orbit, which gave too broad a view to 

distinguish small surface details—data necessary to determine 

safe landing sites. “We had no visibility and no imagery,” said 

Viking project manager Jim Martin. “Look at the first color 

picture, and you see ‘Big Joe’ 25 to 30 feet away. If we’d hit that 

rock, Viking would have been smashed. We had no visibility. 

Just a lot of luck.” 

Along with luck, the Viking team had talent, intelligence, 

and an avid desire to solve the mysteries of Earth’s near neighbor. 

A key driver and source of excitement for those involved was 

the burning question of whether life existed, or could exist, 

on Mars. The search for life presented its own difficulties, 

including the sterilization of all lander parts to avoid bringing 

Earth contaminants to Mars. This requirement eliminated 

about 90 percent of standard industry parts they could use 

for fabrication, according to Ansel Butterfield, the Viking 

parts coordinator. Creating technology that did not yet exist, 

finding cost-effective solutions, and explaining requirements to 

manufacturers became additional hurdles.

Butterfield recalled a conversation he had with a man 

from General Electric (GE), which was producing televisions 

at the time. While comparing notes about an electronic 

voltage amplifier, which would cost $50 each for Viking, the 

GE representative claimed he could get them for 50 cents. “I 

explained they were a bit different,” said Butterfield in a NASA 

interview. “When he asked, ‘What’s the difference between your 

electronics and mine?’ I told him, take your television set, stick 

it in the oven and bake it at 250 degrees for twenty-four hours, 

put it in a deep freeze for a year, then snap it and roll it down a 

flight of stairs, dump it out a second-floor window, and expect 

it to play.”

The Viking orbiters and landers were not going to have an 

easy journey.

Designing, Fabricating, and Testing

Viking was a huge undertaking consisting of two orbiters 

carrying two landers. The orbiters would capture and relay 

information about the Mars surface that would allow the 

mission team to determine safe landing sites for both landers. It 

was a complex mission to design and fly, especially considering 

the technology available in the late sixties to early seventies. 

Creating the landers presented a larger challenge. 

While engineers designing the orbiters could pull from their 

experience designing Mariner, the lander team was breaking 

new ground. The Viking landers were heavier and more 

complex than NASA’s earlier lunar lander, Surveyor. They 

also needed to travel much farther than the earth’s moon and 

had to descend safely through the Martian atmosphere. The 

relative thinness of the atmosphere made that, in some ways, a 

more difficult challenge than reentry into Earth’s atmosphere, 

which had been solved during Apollo. These factors would 

affect the overall design and fabrication of the Viking landers, 

as well as the scientific instruments. Martin made certain 

the science team was involved in discussions early on as the 

engineers drafted requirements. 

One of the most challenging instruments was the gas 

chromatograph-mass spectrometer (GCMS), which spent some 

time on Martin’s infamous Top Ten Problems list. A combination 

of two instruments in one, the GCMS was a crucial instrument 

for the science the team wanted to achieve with Viking. It would 

separate, analyze, and identify different molecules from a Mars 

soil sample; it was cutting-edge science. So cutting-edge, the 

original GCMS was the size of a room. The Viking scientists 

and engineers had to shrink it to fit inside a 1-foot cube. They 

overcame several technical issues that resulted in a GCMS flying 

on each lander and returning data to Earth successfully.

The innovations that came out of Viking went beyond the 

creation of complex scientific instruments; they included new 

solutions in communication, engineering, and mission design 

made necessary by the complexity of the mission. One of those 

Since the advent of space exploration, Mars has been a tantalizing goal. Astronomers had been 

peering at Mars for centuries, trying to discern its features; science-fiction novels had been filling the 

human imagination with ideas of life on the red planet’s harsh surface for fifty years before the first 

orbiter attempts were made. But Mars did not make it easy for us to approach. Between 1960 and 

1974, the U.S. and Soviet space programs made twenty-two attempts to reveal some of the planet’s 

secrets. Fifteen of those missions failed.

ASK MAGAZINE | 61
innovations was the Viking Automatic Data System, an early 

use of computer systems to share and review documents. “This 

is what we routinely do today, but remember this was 1970,” 

said Gus Guastaferro, the Viking business manager. “They 

were having a hard time developing it, and I recommended we 

drop it. Jim [Martin] looked around the room and said, ‘Is there 

anybody else in the room that has an opinion that is also against 

progress?’ And Tom [Young] said, ‘Jim, I think it’s a great idea 

and we should pioneer that kind of spillover effect.’ And he 

was right,” Guastaferro said. “It was the type of visionary thing 

that happened in Viking that changed all of us. Jim had an 

obligation that we had to grow as an organization and introduce 

new tools and new ways of doing business.”

Viking also introduced a revolutionary approach to flight 

planning when the launch date slipped from 1973 to 1975 

due to budgetary reasons. Norm Crabill, part of the mission 

analysis and design team, recalled that 1973 was a “low energy 

to Mars year,” meaning the journey would take only six months 

to complete, compared with nine or ten months in 1975. “I 

had the duty of telling Jim he had to go back to the president 

and tell him we had to launch in 1973 because you couldn’t 

get there from here in 1975,” recalled Crabill. “My education 

broadened immediately when the answer was, ‘You don’t 

understand. You find a way to get there in 1975.’” They put 

together a team to determine another way to accomplish the 

journey and discovered what is now called a Type II trajectory, 

which means flying a spacecraft more than halfway around 

the sun. “Everyone at NASA got involved because the idea was 

so radical,” said Crabill. “I like to think it broke the mold on 

interplanetary trajectory design.” 

Even after the rigorous testing that led to Viking’s 

successful launch in 1975, engineers and scientists worked 

through scenarios of unexpected events that would require 

quick brainstorming and solutions to keep the orbiters and 

landers working. “One of the things we did to prepare for 

Viking, and is still done today, is put together exercises to 

simulate what would happen in real time to ensure we didn’t 

forget anything,” said Hugh Kieffer, principal investigator for 

the infrared thermal mapper. One of the exercises covered the 

first few days of the surface mission, which the scientists found 

somewhat boring. “We had to go to meetings to plan for data 

we didn’t have,” explained Kieffer.

After more than a day of analyzing imaginary but 

expected data, those leading the effort dreamed up a concept 

to make it more thrilling and get the team more involved. At 

the next meeting, they had the water vapor detector report 

that its instrument seemed to be out of calibration. Then the 

spectrometer team reported they were receiving strange values. 

“So the normal process of regularly planning the next day was 

suddenly getting requests,” said Kieffer. “We couldn’t follow the 

plan; we had to change things based on discoveries. We were 

pushing the flight team out of their comfort zone of regularly 

planned sequences. By the time the third ‘discovery’ came up, it 

was clear we’d stressed the operations team to its limit because 

Gentry Lee, who was in charge of running daily operations, 

stood up and pounded his fist on the table, shouting, ‘Enough! 

There will be no more discoveries!’” 

Though the team worked hard to anticipate the unexpected, 

unanticipated problems arose. Ingenuity and foresight helped 

the team meet those challenges. Jim Cochran, a photographic 

chemist, recalled one instance where they needed to use a third 

lander they had kept on Earth for troubleshooting. “We sent a 

signal for a sampler boom to unhinge on a lander, and it failed,” 

said Cochran. Worried they wouldn’t be able to gather an 

important biological sample, they pointed the lander’s camera 

up at the arm and saw a pin that hadn’t fallen out. “They 

programmed the lander on Earth to twist and wiggle the boom 

until the pin fell out, then sent the same program to the lander 

on Mars. They turned the camera back down to the ground 

until they saw the pin and knew it had dropped. And that’s what 

they did with Viking: they came across problems that had never 

been solved before and solved them,” said Cochran.

Photo Credit: NASA Langley Research Center

Watching for the first images 

from Viking to come in.

62 | ASK MAGAZINE
It’s About People 

In a series of interviews conducted by NASA at Viking’s thirtieth 

anniversary celebration, many of those involved in the program 

spoke about the extraordinary team that had been gathered to 

make breakthroughs in planetary exploration to Mars. Martin, 

for many the most memorable project manager they ever worked 

for, said, “We probably had the most talented team of engineers 

you could find.” 

Viking’s success was due to more than having the right 

people. Everyone worked diligently and collaboratively to 

find solutions to problems, and they continually learned from 

previous and on-the-job experience. For example, problems that 

had arisen on the early lunar Ranger missions were factored into 

Viking’s fabrication. Bob Crabtree, mission operations manager 

for Viking’s cruise phase, said, “Quality assurance then [during 

Ranger] was unheard of. People were even allowed to smoke in 

the vehicle assembly building. Now we have techs in white suits, 

but we didn’t know things were that sensitive during Ranger. 

All the things we learned were factored into Viking, and Viking 

worked exceptionally well.”

And the team never stopped learning during the mission. 

“We really learned about longevity of engineering,” said Steve 

Wall, a camera engineer for Viking. “To maximize lifetime as 

we rewired parts of Viking to keep it working is the lesson I’d 

like carried forward, what I’d like us to be remembered for.” 

Ed Rinderle, a Viking programmer, attributed some 

of Viking’s success to the working environment: “We were 

all gathered in one big bullpen, an open area, no cubicles or 

partitions. You got to know each other on a different level than 

had we been separated.” 

The team was also thoroughly dedicated to the success of 

Viking and maintained an intense focus throughout the mission 

at all levels. A striking example of this focus occurred during a 

checkout of a lander’s software and computer before it separated 

from an orbiter. In the middle of this crucial checkout, a red 

phone connecting directly to the White House rang in Martin’s 

Photo Credit: NASA

This close-up view shows the mated Viking lander (top) and orbiter in the 

Kennedy Space Center Spacecraft Assembly and Encapsulation Facility.

The innovations that came out of Viking ... included 

new solutions in communication, engineering, and 

missions design made necessary by the complexity 

of the mission.

ASK MAGAZINE | 63
office. “Jim picks up the phone and a voice on the other end 

says, ‘Mr. Martin, this is the White House calling ...” recalled 

John Newcomb, who was involved in the mission design and 

software. “Jim interrupted, ‘You tell President Ford, please, that 

I do not have any time to speak to him right now—we are in 

the middle of a lander checkout—and for him to call back in 

three hours.’ And he hung up on the president. In three hours, 

President Ford called back,” said Newcomb. “For those of us 

who had been working with Jim for eight-plus years, it was a 

no-brainer. Of course the president was going to call Jim back. 

Jim told him to!” 

Teamwork, dedication, creative problem-solving, and 

rigorous testing all contributed to Viking’s success and 

the team’s feeling of immense accomplishment when the 

first lander image from Mars arrived line by line. “Viking 

convinced me that one can take on a major engineering and 

science challenge and succeed with the right ingredients,” said 

Noel Hinners, then NASA associate administrator for space 

science. “That includes a great leader and a great team. Don’t 

think anything is so difficult and hard you shouldn’t even try 

it. With the right planning, people, leadership, and budget, 

you can do a lot and succeed.” ●

Interviews were originally conducted by NASA and can be found 

at http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/video/viking30/index.html. 

For more information regarding the challenges solved on the 

GCMS, please see the APPEL case study at http://appel.nasa.gov/

items/Viking_GCMS_case_07%2025%2006.pdf.

Photo Credit: NASA Jet 

Propulsion Laboratory

Near the Viking 1 

lander on the Chryse 

Plains of Mars, ‘Big 

Joe’ stands a silent 

vigil. This large, 

dark rock is about 

6.6 ft. long and lies 

about 26 ft. from the 

spacecraft—a narrow 

miss during Viking I’s 

landing.

Jim interrupted, ‘You tell President Ford, please, that I 

do not have any time to speak to him right now—we are

in the middle of a lander checkout—and for him to call

back in three hours.’ And he hung up on the president.

64 | ASK MAGAZINE
Title

By

Intro

Shuttle

Development

Lessons from

By Jim Odom

The April 12 launch at Pad 39A of STS-1, just 

seconds past 7:00 a.m., carries astronauts John 

Young and Robert Crippen into an Earth orbital 

mission scheduled to last for fifty-four hours, 

ending with an unpowered landing at Edwards Air 

Force Base in California. 

Photo Credit: NASA

STORY | ASK MAGAZINE | 65
Design Change and Challenges

Our first proposed booster–orbiter configuration featured a flyback booster and smaller engines on the orbiter than those in 

the final design. The proposed engines would have had enough 

power to circularize the shuttle’s orbit but not enough to do the 

heavy lifting to reach orbital velocity. We envisioned ten flights 

a year. The problem was that design and development of that 

configuration would cost about $10 billion and Congress was 

only willing to authorize half as much. We were disappointed, 

but we had to find a way to live with that budget constraint. 

It was that or no program at all. We came back quickly with 

a new $5 billion configuration and program. It was essentially 

the design that was eventually built: recoverable solid rocket 

boosters and a disposable external fuel tank that supplied the 

propellants to the orbiter’s three main engines. 

Our initially more expensive design would have been more 

economical in the long run. In almost any space program, the 

bigger investment you can make up front, the lower the operating 

costs will be. As a rule, those investments pay off, but political 

and economic realities often stand in the way of making them.

We knew, too, that the proposed sixty shuttle flights a year 

in the revised plan were probably not realistic. The number was 

arrived at by doing the math on how many flights would be 

needed to meet the financial goals of low pre-launch cost.

From a technical point of view, the structure of the external 

tank was not especially complicated. It was similar to the second 

stage of Apollo’s Saturn V—a bit smaller in diameter but longer 

and using similar materials and welding techniques. The real 

technical challenge came from the fact that the orbiter tiles 

could be damaged by ice falling off the tank during launch, 

so the external tank needed enough insulation to keep the 

outside temperature above 32 ̊F. (The internal temperature was 

approximately –400 ̊F.) We needed to apply insulating foam 

to one-third of an acre of tank surface, much of it through 

automated spraying, but with joint and bracket insulation 

applied by hand.

The first flight was delayed several weeks because a large 

section of insulation over the liquid oxygen tank delaminated 

during the first tanking test at Kennedy Space Center. It turned 

out that the material bonding the insulation to the tank skin 

and the foam itself had not been applied properly. That had to 

be cleaned off and replaced entirely by hand on the launchpad.

Over time, the foam, which had to be both light and 

aerodynamically resilient, was reformulated eight times when we 

had to find replacements for chemicals used in its manufacture 

that were judged to be polluting. A great deal of hard work 

went into making the foam insulation as safe and effective as 

possible. The Columbia accident showed that we needed to 

make improvements. Most of the improvements were made in 

the manual applications and processes.

Another technical challenge was understanding the 

aerodynamic stresses on the various elements of shuttle system, 

I was the project manager for the Space Shuttle external tank for eleven years, from the planning 

days in 1971 through the launch of the sixth shuttle flight in 1983. Work on the shuttle program was 

widely distributed. The program office was at Johnson Space Center; the engines, solid rockets, and 

tanks were developed at Marshall; and ground operations were at Kennedy, with major work done 

by contractors North American Aviation, Lockheed Martin, Morton Thiokol, and Rocketdyne, 

among others. Although centers and contractors had primary responsibility for different elements 

of the shuttle system, those elements were tightly interrelated. For instance, avionics and flight 

control systems were on the orbiter but directly affected the control of the main engines and solid 

rocket boosters, so success depended on a tremendous amount of coordination and integration. 

That meant multicenter working groups meeting and communicating frequently, lots of travel, 

many meetings at Johnson with management and technical people, and daily communication at 

the program and project level. The frequent budget discussions were held at NASA Headquarters 

in Washington, D.C.

66 | ASK MAGAZINE
including, of course, max ascent loads—the point of maximum 

dynamic pressure. The analysis was extremely complicated 

and needed to be done from a systems standpoint, rather than 

separately for parts of the whole. That was another instance when 

communication and coordination were essential. Emphasizing 

systems engineering and the interfaces between elements of the 

program was key.

Program Transitions

The Apollo program was still active when we began working on 

the shuttle. I worked closely with Apollo program engineers who 

joined the shuttle program to work on the external tank and 

brought their very valuable Saturn V knowledge and experience 

with them. Apollo skills, especially in manufacturing, were 

directly applicable to the shuttle program.

One of the important lessons of a successful program 

transition is the value of moving people over to the new program 

and involving them in the design process as early as possible. 

That way, you get the full benefit of their expertise and ensure 

their commitment to the new program.

NASA’s challenge today is to make sure the last shuttle 

flights are carried out safely while we develop the next generation 

of launch vehicles and spacecraft. The timing appears good to 

transfer experienced hardware and operations people from the 

shuttle to Ares 1 and Ares 5 development. If Ares should be 

delayed more than eighteen months or more, though, NASA will 

face the problem of not having new work to move experienced 

people to as the shuttle program winds down. It is important 

to try to avoid that problem to ensure that the Constellation 

program will get the benefit of many years of shuttle experience, 

just as the shuttle program got the benefit of Apollo. ●

Jim Odom began his career in the launch vehicle business with 

the Wernher von Braun team as a G.I. developing and launching 

the army’s Redstone and Jupiter rockets. He transitioned with 

this team to become NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. He 

retired from NASA in 1989.

One of the important lessons of 

a successful program transition 

is the value of moving people over 

to the new program and involving

them in the design process as 

early as possible.

Photo Credit: NASA

This 1972 chart conceptualizes the use of two parallel Solid Rocket Motor 

Boosters in conjunction with three main engines to launch the proposed 

Space Shuttle into orbit.

ASK MAGAZINE | 67
Outside NASA’s scientific community, NASA’s Inventions and Contributions Board (ICB) and 

its Space Act Awards Program are practically unknown, yet its history is a microcosm of NASA’s 

history, and it has been an important factor in NASA’s extensive technological achievements. The 

Board was formed to review waivers of title to inventions by NASA contractors and to award money 

for scientific and technical contributions that are of significant value in conducting aeronautical and 

space activities. Created by the original Space Act of 1958, the Board itself was a visionary, innovative, 

and historical concept that has continually chronicled NASA’s challenges and innovations.

The Board’s inception was visionary because there was little 

precedent. A forward-looking Congress recognized that if NASA 

was to achieve one of its chartered purposes—“the preservation 

of the role of the United States as a leader in aeronautical and 

space science and technology”—then incentives must be given 

to the new agency’s scientists, engineers, and technologists to 

create and invent technologies that would be needed by the 

fledgling space program. Today, these contributors are honored 

with awards for innovations that have been reported in NASA 

Tech Briefs, software that has been approved by NASA for release 

to qualified users, and inventions that have received approval for 

patent applications by NASA under the Space Act.

NASA epitomizes the spirit of innovation through the 

imagination of its scientific and engineering communities. In 

the latest ICB annual report, we highlight the Robot CableCompliant Device developed at Goddard Space Flight Center. 

Goddard featured this invention on its Tech Transfer Web 

site, stating that it provided customized structural response 

and mitigated shock and vibration damage. The center also 

lists a variety of applications in which the technology could 

be used. One of those applications, developed by Enduro, is a 

rehabilitative walker that enables patients to stand and move 

without the aid of a physical therapist. It is currently being used 

to help soldiers and others at the Walter Reed Medical Center 

in Washington, D.C. 

The device is also being used in the NASA Space Technology 5 

(ST5) mission. ST5 consists of three 25 kg satellites orbiting the 

earth together to measure the magnetosphere and demonstrate 

miniaturized technology. Each spacecraft has an umbilical 

separation connector that indicates when the spacecraft is fully 

released from the rocket. The connector is positioned by a compliant 

mount, which possesses a high tolerance for misalignment, and 

allows the spacecraft to separate smoothly. The compliant mount is 

an alternate embodiment of the Robot Cable-Compliance Device 

technology. This is one example of how a NASA technology can 

be developed into many useful applications. The Tech Transfer 

Office’s coordination with ICB helps publicize these inventions, 

enabling others outside the Agency to help brainstorm the many 

ways one widget could be used.

Through the years, awards to scientists and engineers have 

consistently increased in monetary value. The largest award of 

the sixties was to Francis Regallo of Langley Research Center: 

$35,000 for a flexible wing (kite). In the seventies it was Richard 

T. Whitcomb, another Langley employee, who received $25,000 

for the Airfoil Shape for Flight. In 2005, Kennedy Space Center 

employees in conjunction with the University of Florida received 

$73,000—the largest award for Invention of the Year in the 

history of the Board—for Zero-Valent Metal Emulsion for 

Reductive Dehalogenation of DNAPL-Phase Environmental 

Contaminants, an environmental clean-up technology.

By increasing the awards, the ICB motivates inventors to 

make their inventions known to a broader audience. NASA 

technologies that might have otherwise remained behind 

closed doors are more readily available to industry and other 

NASA’s Inventions and Contributions 

Board: A Historical Perspective

By Carol Anne Dunn

68 | ASK MAGAZINE | INSIGHT
NASA Centers for future creative applications. This broader 

dissemination and publication of winning inventions by the 

ICB helps communicate what’s available inside NASA and helps 

keep innovation between centers and with communities outside 

the Agency active. 

Through the activities of the ICB, each of NASA’s 

ten centers has contributed to NASA’s impressive roster of 

technological achievements. The first Board, convened on 

December 4, 1958, had 250 cases awaiting review, and during 

its first year of existence, requests for awards arrived at the rate 

of 100 per month. On May 9, 1960, T. Keith Glennan, NASA’s 

first administrator, noted, “Directly following lunch we had a 

briefing by the Inventions and Contributions Board. Those poor 

devils had to review 2,000 proposals arising out of supposed 

inventions and contributions.” Today’s Board comprises twentytwo members and is chaired by the NASA Chief Engineer. The 

NASA Administrator selects its members, and they serve for a 

minimum of three years. 

In addition to recognizing NASA’s innovative scientists, 

engineers, and technologists, the Board has produced a detailed 

record of NASA’s technological achievements throughout the 

years. These technologies continue to have a tremendous effect 

on the U.S. economy. The 2003 ICB annual report estimated 

that the extraordinary impact of just a few of these inventions 

on the U.S. economy and world commerce was more than 

$200 billion, and the aggregate of all 98,000 awards that 

the Board has granted throughout its fifty-year existence is 

conservatively estimated to have contributed more than half a 

trillion dollars in wealth to the economy and enabled technology 

that will change how we work and live. More importantly, the 

Board recognizes NASA’s finest technical talent, whose expertise 

covers more than forty fields of science and technology, and 

makes them more readily available to the public. ●

For a complete list of winning technologies, visit the ICB Web site 

at http://icb.nasa.gov.

Carol Anne Dunn currently works as a project specialist 

in the Technology Transfer Office at Kennedy Space Center. 

She is also the awards liaison officer for the Inventions and 

Contributions Board.

Photo Credit: NASA

The NASA Inventions and Contributions board convenes in March 1960 to 

discuss a petition of Bell Aircraft Corporation for a waiver of patent rights 

on the invention of the “catalyst bed.”

Photo Credit: NASA

The NASA Inventions and Contributions Board on November 16, 1961.

ASK MAGAZINE | 69
The Knowledge Notebook

Learning from History

By Laurence Prusak

NASA’s fiftieth anniversary, being observed in a 

variety of ways this year, including in this special 

issue of ASK, makes me think about the importance 

of looking back—not just to celebrate but to learn 

from the past.

I am frequently astonished at just how 

ahistorical so much of so-called management 

thinking is—to say nothing of how little history 

seems to be taught to our students nowadays. From 

grade school through business school, it is often 

assumed that the past has little to offer the present 

or to contribute to preparing for the future. It is 

really a remarkable reversal of how our grandparents 

were taught. Their generation considered history a 

key subject for study if not the key subject. History 

has been highly valued as far back as we have 

records in ancient China, India, the Near East, 

and Africa. It’s only in the past thirty years or so 

that schools began to replace the study of the past 

with understanding the present through various 

social science subjects such as economics, political 

science, sociology, and all the stuff lumped under 

the social science umbrella.

But history counts. The past shapes the 

present. Organizations, as well as cultures and 

countries, are what is sometimes called “path 

dependent.” That is, their past experiences and 

behaviors set the table for present and future 

actions. And while I am not at all a determinist, it 

is the rawest folly to pretend that the activities of 

the near and even far past have no pull or power 

in the present.

So why do most organizations have so little 

real and passionate interest in their own past? 

Well, politics play a role here. While knowledge 

may sometimes be power, as the saying goes, power 

is always in a position to dictate what knowledge 

is taught and what is ignored or denied. It is often 

difficult to learn anything like the real truth in 

many organizations because those in power don’t 

care to admit their own imperfections, missed 

opportunities, outright blunders, and malfeasance 

(or, for that matter, the valuable contributions 

of some of their predecessors). Their actions are 

often covered in clouds of rationalizations and 

ambiguities, including claims that the right thing 

to do is focus on the future and not be distracted by 

“ancient history.” This presentism, aptly expressed 

in the popular saying, “that was then, this is now,” 

tries to pretend that “then” is a useless construct 

and obstructs current understanding.

But how can we learn to do better if we don’t 

have a real understanding of both the good and the 

bad in our own past? How can we solve current 

problems if we choose to ignore their causes? 

The errors and mistakes we make, at NASA and 

everywhere else, are often distinct. We need to 

study them dispassionately to make any progress in 

doing things more effectively. Without using our 

own history to teach, we lose the source materials 

that can best instruct us.

In this anniversary year, NASA is appropriately 

celebrating its many astonishing accomplishments. 

It is also, in forums and publications (including 

this one), hearing about what went into those 

accomplishments from people who were part of 

them. It is engaged in discussions about what the 

triumphs and tragedies of the past tell us about 

what the space agency needs to do and be to 

achieve its future goals.

All that is important, but we should also think 

about how NASA can best learn from the past year 

70 | ASK MAGAZINE
in and year out. Here is one way I’ve seen the past effectively 

used to inform the present and prepare for the future.

Organizations can write detailed, honest, real-life cases 

that are then taught with the actors present, taking part in the 

discussion of what did and didn’t work. I have seen this done 

very successfully at Petrobras, the large Brazilian energy firm. 

It also works at Harvard Business School by way of their famed 

case-writing methods, as well as at other organizations, but, 

alas, rarely at government agencies. Having the actors involved 

gives the cases far more authenticity—it makes them living 

history that passes the well-known sniff test and allows for a 

real discussion to take place, one that gives the participants an 

opportunity to absorb and socialize the lessons in ways that 

abstract lectures, sets of rules, or e-learning never allow.

All the training courses available in all the organizations 

in the world can never have the impact of a true story told in 

an authoritative voice with the participants present to discuss 

why they did what they did or didn’t do. Of course, this needs 

to be done in a culture of safety, not one of blame. That would 

ruin the effort. When done well, though, it is a modestly priced 

approach that brings history to life, which genuinely promotes 

learning from the past—a crucial activity humans have relied 

on for thousands of years. ●

... how can we learn to do better if

we don’t have a real understanding

of both the good and the bad in our 

own past? How can we solve current

problems if we choose to ignore

their causes?

ASK MAGAZINE | 71
ASKinteractive

For More on 

Our Stories

Additional information 

pertaining to articles featured 

in this issue can be found by 

visiting the following Web sites:

• Apollo: http://www.nasa.gov/

mission_pages/apollo

• Viking: http://www.nasa.gov/

mission_pages/viking

• Space Shuttle and 

International Space Station:

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/

shuttle_station/index.html

• NASA History Office: 

http://history.nasa.gov

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.

Reminder: PM Challenge 2009

The NASA PM Challenge is the Agency’s annual forum for NASA stakeholders 

to connect and discover current trends in program management, project 

management, and related disciplines by sharing their knowledge, lessons 

learned, and new ideas that enhance mission success. PM Challenge 2009, 

the Agency’s sixth annual project management conference, will be held 

February 24–25, 2009, in Daytona Beach, Florida, near the Kennedy Space 

Center. Registration opens November 3, 2008. For more information, and to 

register, visit http://pmchallenge.gsfc.nasa.gov.

Web of Knowledge

Ever wonder about what the Hubble Space Telescope has revealed? Explore a 

wealth of deep-space images, including far-off galaxies, planets, nebulae, and 

more at http://hubblesite.org. Also watch video podcasts and short movies 

about how galaxies interact with each other and even combine to make new 

galaxies, black holes, other astronomy highlights from Hubble, and celestial 

events at-home astronomers can witness each month. The site also has 

resources for children and educators to assist with learning about our cosmos.

NASA Celebrates Fifty Years

Join NASA in celebrating its fiftieth anniversary by reviewing exciting 

discoveries and images from past missions, watching special lectures 

from NASA Administrator Michael Griffin and Dr. Stephen Hawking, 

or visiting interactive Web features that walk you through each 

decade since the Agency’s inception. See how NASA has contributed 

to inspiration, innovation, and discovery for half a century, what it 

is accomplishing today, and what it plans for the future. Visit the 

anniversary Web site at http://www.nasa.gov/50th.

72 | ASK MAGAZINE
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