Academy Sharing Knowledge

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

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Inside

Learning from Hubble

Juno: Making the Most of More Time

X-Teams for Innovation
ON THE COVER

This image of Jupiter in visible light from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope shows the 

turbulent pattern generated by the two plumes at the upper left part of Jupiter. To learn 

more about how and when Jupiter formed, the Juno spacecraft will reach the planet 

in 2016 and enter into a highly elliptical polar orbit that skims 5,000 km above the 

atmosphere. Juno will provide new information to help us understand more about Jupiter’s 

formation, information scientists consider essential for understanding the origin of the solar 

system itself because Jupiter contains more mass than all the other planets combined. Photo Credit: NASA, ESA, IRTF, and A. Sánchez-Lavega and R. Hueso (Universidad del País Vasco, Spain)
35 5

DEPARTMENTS

3 

In This Issue

By Don Cohen

4 

From the APPEL Director

By Ed Hoffman

54 

The Knowledge Notebook

By Laurence Prusak 

56 

ASK Interactive 

INSIGHTS

9 

Counterfactual Thinking

By William H. Gerstenmaier, Scott S. 

Goodwin, and Jacob L. Keaton Preparing 

for the unexpected means challenging 

conventional thinking and your own favorite 

assumptions. 

17 

Interview with Christyl Johnson

By Don Cohen NASA’s assistant associate 

administrator talks about her early 

experiences at the Agency, the importance 

of mentoring, and how to attract talented 

new engineers and scientists.

27 

Fusing Risk Management 

and Knowledge Management

By Charles Tucker Linking knowledge 

management to recognized risks improves 

the chances that valuable knowledge will 

be reused.

32 

Infusing Operability: KSC Launch 

Experience Helps Shape New 

Vehicle Design

By Pat Simpkins, Alan Littlefield, and

Larry Schultz Knowledge from decades 

of launch experience at Kennedy is being 

applied to the design of new launch vehicles 

and spacecraft.

39 

Harvesting Project Knowledge

By Kate Pugh and Nancy Dixon Trained 

facilitators identify and help transmit 

important project knowledge.

47

Technological Progress 

from User Necessity

By Svetlana Shkolyar Kennedy Space 

Center’s Applied Physics Lab works with 

users to develop the launch services 

technologies they really need.

50 

X-Teams for Innovation

By Deborah Ancona and Henrik Bresman 

High-performance teams are good at finding 

outside knowledge, resources, and support.

STORIES

5 

Juno: Making the Most of More Time

By Rick Grammier A launch delay gave 

the Juno team more time for planning and 

risk reduction. 

13 

The Applied Meteorology Unit: 

True Technology Transfer

By Carol Anne Dunn and Francis J. Merceret 

The weather technology group develops tools 

that meet specific space program needs.

23 

The Road to GRACE

By Edgar S. (Ab) Davis Building relationships 

and taking advantage of unexpected 

opportunities put this international science 

mission on track.

29 

Managing—and Learning from—a 

Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Risk

By Charles Tucker The process used to 

solve a fuel-sloshing issue offers a model 

for dealing with risk.

35 

Applying the Secrets of Hubble’s 

Success to Constellation

By Frank Cepollina A design that 

supports in-orbit servicing saved the Hubble 

telescope; NASA’s new vehicle designers 

should take that lesson to heart.

42 

To Stay or Go? A UAV Science 

Project Story 

By Tony Kim As this science team discovered, 

sometimes you have to find your way around 

a problem that cannot be solved.

Contents

50

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

Magazinee help NASA managers and project teams accomplish today’s missions and meet 

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

performance enhancement services and tools, supporting career development programs, 

and creating opportunities for project management and engineering collaboration with 

universities, professional associations, industry partners, and other government agencies.

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

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

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

management and engineering development and the challenges of NASA’s new mission, 

ASK includes articles about meeting the technical and managerial demands of complex 

projects, as well as insights into organizational knowledge, learning, collaboration, 

performance measurement and evaluation, and scheduling. We at APPEL Knowledge 

Sharing believe that stories recounting the real-life experiences of practitioners communicate 

important practical wisdom and best practices that readers can apply to their own projects 

and environments. By telling their stories, NASA managers, scientists, and engineers share 

valuable experience-based knowledge and foster a community of reflective practitioners. 

The stories that appear in ASK are written by the “best of the best” project managers and 

engineers, primarily from NASA, but also from other government agencies, academia, 

and industry. Who better than a project manager or engineer to help a colleague address a 

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

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

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

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

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

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

the Knowledge Sharing Project Manager, Rosie Robinson, ASRC Management 

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

301-768-5744. 

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

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

Staff

APPEL Director and Publisher

Dr. Edward Hoffman

ehoffman@nasa.gov

Editor-in-Chief

Laurence Prusak

lprusak@msn.com

Managing Editor

Don Cohen

doncohen@rcn.com

Editor

Kerry Ellis

kerry.ellis@asrcms.com

contributing Editor

Matt Kohut

mattkohut@infactcommunications.com

Knowledge Sharing manager

Rosie Robinson

rosie.robinson@asrcms.com

Senior Knowledge Sharing

Consultant

Jon Boyle

jon.boyle@asrcms.com

Knowledge Sharing Analysts

Ben Bruneau

ben.bruneau@asrcms.com

Katherine Thomas

katherine.thomas@asrcms.com

APPEL program Manager

Yvonne Massaquoi

yvonne.massaquoi@asrcms.com

Design

Hirshorn Zuckerman Design Group, Inc.

www.hzdg.com

Printing Specialist

Hanta Ralay

hralay@hq.nasa.gov

Printing

GraphTec

Issue No. 30
At the Academy’s Masters Forum in April, the word “risk” 

turned up in many presentations and discussions: how to 

anticipate and mitigate risks; how to learn from risks that 

turn into real problems; how much risk is acceptable in 

robotic and human space flight. Underlying all that attention 

was recognition that NASA’s missions are inherently risky. 

Appropriately managing risk is one of project teams’ core 

responsibilities.

Risk is a focus of this issue of ASK, too. In “Juno: Making 

the Most of More Time,” Rick Grammier describes how his 

team has used an unusually long definition and planning 

phase to evaluate and address risks. Extensive prototyping 

and testing of instruments and comprehensive discussions 

between engineers and scientists should, Grammier thinks, 

reduce risks common in complex science missions.

The problem that nearly turned the Hubble telescope 

into worthless space junk—an improperly ground primary 

mirror—was so basic that no one saw it as a likely risk. Frank 

Cepollina’s “Applying the Secrets of Hubble’s Success to 

Constellation” looks at the design for in-orbit servicing that 

made it possible to rescue Hubble and says that designers 

of NASA’s next generation of launch vehicles and spacecraft 

should follow Hubble’s lead. One of the lessons of Hubble is 

that unanticipated problems are likely to occur. Counterfactual 

thinking, recommended by Gerstenmaier, Goodwin, and 

Keaton, can help predict some of them. Questioning 

assumptions and analyzing the effect of past decisions are 

among the techniques that can uncover hidden risks.

Because dealing with risk is central to mission success, 

Dave Lengyel at the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate 

has been linking risk management and knowledge sharing 

to ensure that lessons transferred from one project to 

another are the ones that really matter and that NASA’s 

knowledge management efforts are not an example of 

what he calls “collect, store, and ignore.” Charles Tucker’s 

related articles (“Fusing Risk Management and Knowledge 

Management” and “Managing—and Learning from—a Lunar 

Reconnaissance Orbiter Risk”) explain Lengyel’s work.

Those articles bring up the other important theme of 

this issue: devoting your efforts to what really matters, or 

what we might call “mission pragmatism.” Just as Lengyel’s 

knowledge-based risk approach captures lessons that count, 

the knowledge harvesting process Nancy Dixon and Katrina 

Pugh describe includes careful determination of which projects 

will generate knowledge that justifies the effort and expense 

of identifying and communicating it. “Infusing Operability” 

shows how practical wisdom gained from Kennedy Space 

Center’s long history of launches is contributing to new 

vehicle designs that will make ground operations more 

efficient and reliable. Ancona and Bresman’s “X-Teams for 

Innovation” stresses the importance of project teams that 

know how to get the external knowledge and support they 

need to do their work. And articles about the Applied Physics 

Lab (by Svetlana Shkolyar) and the Applied Meteorology 

Unit (by Carol Anne Dunn and Francis Merceret) emphasize 

the importance of the word “applied.” Both organizations 

develop technologies that respond to clear and critical user 

needs and directly contribute to mission success.

Finally, there is Tony Kim’s story of an unmanned aerial 

vehicle science project (“To Stay or Go?”), which combines 

the themes of risk and pragmatism. When a range safety 

officer’s aversion to risk makes flight permission unlikely, the 

team sensibly moves the project elsewhere.

Don Cohen

Managing Editor

In This Issue

ASK MAGAZINE | 3
The age of international projects has dawned. 

Project work is increasingly global. Determining 

where work happens and how the many, diverse, 

and widely distributed partners who make up 

project teams accomplish work together are 

increasingly part of a project leader’s job. One of 

the benefits of this new age is the opportunity it 

offers to see the world of project work in innovative 

ways devised by varied cultures. But we are able 

to work together across borders because of our 

essential similarities.

More than 2,000 years ago, Marcus Aurelius 

wrote, “To see the things of the present moment is 

to see all that is now, all that has been since time 

began, and all which shall be unto the world’s end, 

for all things are of one kind, and of one form.”

I remember my social studies teacher at 

Midwood High School saying that in class one 

day. I laughed. First of all, hearing a middle-aged, 

Brooklyn high school teacher quoting an ancient 

Roman philosopher seemed like something from 

a Mel Brooks movie. And what did it mean? 

The ensuing discussion informed us that Marcus 

Aurelius was saying there was nothing new in the 

world. Things would change, but the nature of 

human experiences, emotions, thoughts, feelings, 

and ideas remained limited and constant. This was 

hard for me to accept. How could a generation that 

experienced Apollo be essentially the same as our 

ancestors from the Middle Ages?

Fast-forward a few decades. The idea that 

humans are interconnected and share the same 

experiences and lessons was vividly apparent on my 

recent trip to Japan. I was invited by my friend and 

colleague Hiro Tanaka to be a keynote speaker at the 

Project Management Japan Association conference. 

It was fascinating to listen to different perspectives 

on project management. Yet, as the trip continued, 

what most made me smile was the sense that we 

are all in this together, facing similar problems. The 

issues we discuss at NASA (like talent management, 

complex project systems, portfolio management) 

are the same ones being discussed throughout the 

project world. Different cultures offer their unique 

insights about how to deal with them, but our 

similarities are the essential core.

In Tokyo I was privileged to visit with 

colleagues from the Japanese Space Exploration 

Agency (JAXA). During the shuttle mission 

where the Kibo (“Hope” in Japanese) module was 

configured to the International Space Station, 

I talked with the JAXA senior chief engineer, 

Toshifumi Mukai. Space exploration is now a 

thoroughly international collaboration. 

As I listened to international perspectives on 

challenges and solutions for a project world, and 

as I visited with JAXA, I remembered Marcus 

Aurelius’s words about the sameness at the heart 

of the world’s great variety. The human challenges 

of the future will be met through global project 

structures. The challenges of exploring space, 

curing and preventing disease, battling poverty, and 

supplying the world’s energy in environmentally 

sound ways will be faced through international 

project partnerships. 

The varied perspectives of different cultures 

will provide a rich variety of insights and innovative 

concepts; our shared values and aims will unite us 

in common work. There is no one blueprint for 

how to make international projects successful, but 

there are many possibilities. For me, that is the 

hope for the future. ●

From the APPEL Director

Of One Kind

By ED HOFFMAN 

4 | ASK MAGAZINE
Title

By 

Intro

JUNO

Making the Most of More Time

Juno was selected in 2005 with an initially 

scheduled launch in 2009. Almost immediately, 

though, NASA Headquarters warned us that 

budgetary issues would delay the launch a year 

or two and asked the project team to prepare a 

cost assessment for a 2010 launch. We completed 

that task in November 2005. Six months later, 

NASA informed us that budget issues would 

cause a further delay, and the launch date would 

be in 2011. This required the project team to 

re-plan yet again.

Artist’s conception of the Juno spacecraft orbiting Jupiter. 

Image Credit: NASA

By Rick Grammier

STORY | ASK MAGAZINE | 5
The schedule change posed challenges for the Juno team. One was 

dealing with the budgetary implications of delay. Inflation would 

add cost, as would the personnel and management expenses of a 

longer project, even with the team size frozen at a low level during 

the early years. Continuing budgetary concerns also increased 

pressure to accurately estimate, manage, and minimize the revised 

budget associated with the launch delay. Another challenge was 

figuring out how to maintain our heritage designs and retain 

skilled personnel, making the best use of their expertise during 

the suddenly extended early stages of the project. 

We decided to take advantage of our unusually long 

Phase B—the definition and planning phase that precedes design 

and development—to evaluate and address the risks inherent in 

this complex mission. Part of NASA’s New Frontiers program, 

Juno will enter a polar orbit around Jupiter in 2016 and begin 

making precise measurements of the planet’s gravity, magnetic 

fields, and atmosphere. The new information the spacecraft 

acquires about the structure and composition of the giant planet 

and its atmosphere will vastly increase scientists’ understanding of 

how such planets form, which is key to understanding how the rest 

of our solar system formed. A typical Phase B for a project of this 

size lasts about a year; ours would be almost three years long.

We hoped we could use that time to avoid and reduce some 

familiar perils of science missions—among them incomplete 

or misunderstood requirements, costly late design changes, 

communication gaps between scientists and engineers, and the 

tendency of reality to negate overly optimistic expectations about 

reusing technology from other missions and reveal mismatches 

between requirements and capabilities. 

Juno’s Phase B started in November 2005. We’re now only 

a few months from the end of that planning phase and can look 

at some of what’s been accomplished.

More Time to Talk 

One undeniable benefit of the extended Phase B was the time it 

gave us to unify the team and communicate effectively. We are 

a diverse, geographically distributed team, with participation 

from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Lockheed Martin, 

Goddard Space Flight Center, the University of Wisconsin, the 

Southwest Research Institute, the Applied Physics Laboratory, 

University of Iowa, Italian Space Agency, and elsewhere. These 

groups have different cultures, different expectations, and 

their own ways of communicating. The English language is 

imprecise; the same words may have different meanings for the 

speaker and listener. The more you talk about things together, 

the more mutual understanding you get—and the more each 

group grasps and respects the challenges and issues other groups 

wrestle with. By increasing understanding and trust, those 

conversations improve the chances of developing solutions that 

work for everyone.

Among our communication efforts have been workshops 

to discuss JPL’s flight project practices and design principles 

that have helped identify potential misunderstandings and 

conflicts. We also had a payload “road show” to conduct indepth conversations with each instrument provider regarding 

the project’s requirements and expectations in multiple areas 

(including mission assurance requirements, environmental 

requirements, design principles, and processes), to identify 

disconnects and associated risks, and to agree on the path 

forward. These far-ranging discussions have given us a chance 

to deal with issues that otherwise would arise one by one in 

Being there in person encourages

“sidebar” conversations that don’t

happen during a teleconference.

6 | ASK MAGAZINE
later phases, resulting in less than optimal solutions. In order 

to ensure frequent communication, enhanced team integration, 

and timely identification and resolution of issues, we have 

established a robust command, control, and communication 

structure comprising biweekly integrated management and 

engineering team meetings, weekly project system engineering 

team meetings, weekly Juno payload engineering team meetings, 

and semimonthly management reviews of the entire project, to 

name a few. These meetings have broad participation from all 

discipline areas: the science team, systems engineering teams, 

management teams, and business teams.

JPL people meet in person, with others calling in to the 

meetings, but we take advantage of chances to get people 

together. I have set up a standard rotation process among myself, 

Rick Nybakken (deputy project manager), Doug Bernard 

(project system engineer), and Sammy Kayali (project mission 

assurance manager) so that we have a presence at Lockheed 

Martin, the flight system contractor, each week. A similar 

process is followed at lower levels as well. Being there in person 

encourages “sidebar” conversations that don’t happen during 

a teleconference; you see how team members interact outside 

formal meetings; you get a sense of what’s really going on and a 

better grasp of people’s concerns; and you develop a better sense 

of how people think and talk than you can get at a distance. 

As Doug Bernard has said, “People need to know each other 

well enough to interpret remarks made on the phone. In-person 

meetings give you a better chance to catch their intentions.”

More than a year and a half of frequent in-person and 

phone meetings of science, engineering, and payload personnel 

in seven working groups helped the team work out the mission’s 

requirements and understand the trade-offs between research 

capabilities and engineering and budget limitations.

Trade Studies

Every mission involves trade-offs. Our longer Phase B has given 

us the luxury of taking the time to really understand them, not 

just choose one option and move on. We have had time to put 

together explanations of why we made the choices we made, 

which helps reconcile people to the decisions, even the ones that 

did not go the way they wanted. And the more extensive study 

and discussion have led to some solutions that work well for 

everyone, while decreasing mission risk within our technical, 

schedule, and budget constraints.

One of these studies focused on the selection of our initial 

Jupiter orbit. The question was whether we should modify the 

original plan of going immediately into an eleven-day orbit 

around Jupiter or go instead into a larger, seventy-seven-day 

initial orbit, dropping down to the eleven-day orbit later. That 

change would save fuel (and therefore mass). It would have 

other advantages, too. The mission’s operations people liked the 

idea of having time in high orbit to prepare for the lower orbit, 

where the full suite of science instruments would be turned on. 

The large orbit would also give scientists a good opportunity to 

study Jupiter’s polar magnetosphere, never before visited. On the 

downside, the higher orbit would change our orbital geometry, 

slightly increasing the total radiation dose.

The mission design and navigation team studied the options 

and reported back to the project systems engineering team. 

That team clarified which options should be studied further. 

The subsequent trade study of those reduced options led to the 

high-orbit choice.

Another trade study regarding Juno’s spin rate (the spacecraft 

is spin stabilized) involved the entire science and payload team. 

The original plan called for a 3 rpm spin rate. The magnetometer 

principle investigator asked if we needed that high a spin rate, 

because the magnetometer’s star tracker was not certified at 

3 rpm. But the microwave radiometer instrument team wanted 

the higher spin rate, which would give them more measurements 

since their instrument would more frequently point toward the 

planet. The microwave radiometer team analyzed in depth the 

impact of various spin rates on data collection and determined 

that there was little science opportunity cost as long as the spin 

More than a year and a half of frequent in-person and phone meetings of 

science, engineering, and payload personnel in seven working groups helped 

the team work out the mission’s requirements and understand the trade-offs

between research capabilities and engineering and budget limitations.

ASK MAGAZINE | 7
Rick Grammier is currently the project manager for the Juno 

mission in the New Frontiers program. His experience includes 

previous roles as project manager for Deep Impact, deputy director 

for Planetary Flight Projects at JPL, manager of JPL’s Office of 

Mission Assurance, and project engineer and deputy project 

manager for Stardust. He has a BS in engineering from the United 

States Military Academy and an MS in electrical and computer 

engineering from California State Polytechnic University.

rate stayed at 2 rpm or higher. The spacecraft design was also 

simplified by reducing the spin rate. The full team agreed that 

2 rpm would work well for all parties.

More Time to Test and Choose

Our extended Phase B has given us more time to develop and 

evaluate options for critical mission elements. Juno’s Stellar 

Reference Unit (SRU)—the camera to measure star positions 

and use them to determine the spacecraft’s attitude—is a good 

example. No one has yet built an SRU guaranteed to tolerate the 

radiation environment in which Juno operates, in concert with 

the spacecraft’s spin rate. Our extended schedule has allowed 

us to write Phase B study contracts with two prospective 

vendors. They will design and test their approaches, including 

radiation tests. A “shootout” at the preliminary design review—

considering technical, schedule, and cost performance—will 

allow us to determine which is the best choice. 

We also have used the additional time to test and analyze the 

cells of Juno’s large solar array in a realistic manner—absolutely 

critical for the first mission that will be solar powered so far 

from the sun and in Jupiter’s harsh radiation environment.

Our Phase B Benefits

Juno is a demanding mission, with as large a set of instruments as 

you would expect to see on a more expensive flagship mission and 

the technical hurdles of providing adequate radiation shielding 

and deep-space solar power. It has as well the familiar challenges 

every mission faces: bringing together diverse organizations 

into a cooperative team, making trade-offs between science and 

engineering, maintaining budget discipline, and identifying 

and mitigating risks.

We think our extended Phase B has put us in an excellent 

position to meet these demands and avoid common problems. 

Thanks to having scientists and engineers working closely 

together for so long, we think we have developed a set of realistic 

requirements that balance science capabilities and engineering 

realities. Early prototyping of the science instruments should 

reduce incompatibilities and other glitches when the spacecraft 

is built. We think we are less likely to confront the unpleasant 

surprises of requirements changes later on, when they are more 

costly and difficult to deal with. Having had time to involve 

mission ops people in our deliberations should help avoid 

the problem of discovering mismatches between operational 

requirements and mission design later.

Time will tell how much of this very extensive Phase B 

work pays off, but we are moving on with a lot of confidence. 

Members of the project’s standing review board agree, citing the 

cooperation of scientists and engineers and our grasp of critical 

requirements. One commented, “The project has made excellent 

use of the additional schedule time in this extended Phase B.”

The mission is named after the goddess Juno, the wife of 

Jupiter. In mythology, she used her powers to peer through 

the clouds Jupiter was using to hide his activities. In 2016, we 

expect our Juno to peer at Jupiter and discover many of the giant 

planet’s secrets. ●

8 | ASK MAGAZINE
Seeing Through the Haze: 

How Counterfactual Thinking Can Help 

NASA Prepare for the Unexpected

By William H. Gerstenmaier, Scott S. Goodwin, and Jacob L. Keaton

INSIGHT | ASK MAGAZINE | 9
Author Nassim Taleb uses the story of the discovery of the black 

swan and how it demolished millennia of prior evidence to 

describe events that were not thought possible: 

A Black Swan event is a highly improbable occurrence 

with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it 

carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an 

explanation that makes it appear less random, and more 

predictable, than it was.

Today, we take black swans for granted and may not grasp 

why Europeans had such difficulty coming to terms with their 

existence. We may be more prone to experiencing extreme, 

unexpected events than the people who lived before us because 

of the complexity and interconnectedness of the technologies 

we use, and we can easily find examples of Black Swan events 

in our time. Such a list would include both the Challenger

and Columbia accidents, the events of 9/11, the collapse of the 

Interstate 35W bridge in Minnesota, and many of the events that 

have roiled world financial markets in the past decades. Given 

our experiences with extreme events, it is natural for us to want 

to identify them and try to predict when they will happen.

We often attempt to do this by plotting the probability 

distributions of events along a bell-shaped curve whose narrow 

“tails” at either end represent outlier events, supposedly rare 

and unlikely to happen. It is likely these tails are thicker than 

the typical bell curve would suggest and some of those outlier 

events are much more prevalent than we imagine. There is also 

the question of whether a bell curve, or any other distribution 

model, is appropriate to determine whether an event is likely to 

occur. The randomness you find in a casino is limited and well 

understood; the casino knows how many cards are in a deck, 

how many faces on a die and, because all possible outcomes are 

known in advance, it can calculate the odds of any particular 

outcome occurring. In the world outside the casino, we don’t 

know all the possible outcomes, nor do we know precisely how 

many cards are in the deck. In many cases we may not even 

know how many decks there are. 

When unexpected events do occur, we often dismiss them 

because they did not have a significant impact and we think 

the chances that they will occur again are even more remote. 

Harder to dismiss are outlier events that almost occur and that 

would have had a serious impact; these near misses should not 

be dismissed lightly. Such events are “gifts”—nothing bad 

really happened, and they provide a tremendous opportunity 

for learning. We can use these events to brainstorm similar 

situations in other systems and rethink our assumptions and 

models, but we must overcome two common biases first.

When an extreme event occurs, an investigation is initiated 

to determine exactly what happened and why. When you see all 

the data available to you after the event, you can build a story of 

how it all fits together and you end up with an explanation that 

makes complete sense. This leads you to believe the event was 

predictable—that is “hindsight bias.” But it’s difficult before the 

event occurs to be perceptive enough to know this kind of event 

may be sitting out there and ready to occur and to grasp how 

it might play out. Once causes are identified and thought to be 

understood, we conclude that if only we had done x, y, and z, 

the event wouldn’t have occurred. Then we institutionalize x, 

y, and z in our plans and processes to prevent the same thing 

Before the English explored Australia in the 1600s, it was held as an indisputable fact in Europe that 

all swans were white. This “fact” was based on empirical evidence stretching back for thousands of 

years that grew stronger as each observation of a white swan confirmed the belief that only white swans 

existed. Yet all that evidence was invalidated by a single observation of a black swan in Australia. In 

time, the black swan became a metaphor for things that weren’t supposed to exist, yet did.

10 | ASK MAGAZINE
from happening again. Such changes will not protect us from 

other extreme events, and implementing these changes as rigid 

procedures inhibits learning, adaptation, and growth. We end 

up “following the flow chart,” and we think less actively about 

what we’re doing and why.

Confirmation bias leads us to form beliefs that are based 

on repetition, not on analysis or testing. Each recurrence of an 

event serves to confirm our view that the event will happen again 

in the same way. Every recurrence that has no serious negative 

consequences confirms our view that the event is not dangerous 

and may lull us into accepting it as normal. The Thanksgiving 

turkey has a thousand days of earned-value metrics behind it; as 

far as it knows, the day after Thanksgiving will be just like the 

day before it. Good metrics do not ensure success tomorrow.

These biases cloud our view; we need ways of seeing through 

the haze. One way of combating our biases and helping defend 

against potential Black Swan events is through counterfactual 

thinking. Counterfactual thinking means imagining alternative 

outcomes to past events. It can be practiced by continuously 

asking “what if” questions about what might have happened 

instead of what actually did. It can identify potential risks or 

solutions to problems that can then be analyzed and tested.

When Endeavour suffered tile damage due to a piece of 

foam breaking away from a bracket on the external tank during 

launch on August 8, 2007, the common-sense decision was to 

repair the tile damage in orbit. Instead we made the decision 

to return with the tile damaged, and a lot of people could not 

understand why.

What we did was use the Orbiter Boom Sensor System to 

create a three-dimensional model and then fashion an exact 

copy of the damaged tile here on the ground. We tested this 

model analytically and by simulating re-entry using an arcjet 

and assuming worst-case heating. We saw some tunneling in 

the tile and some charring of the felt pad, but the structure 

underneath was undamaged and would withstand re-entry.

This test allowed us to say conclusively that this would be 

the worst-case result of not repairing the tile. It was a known

condition, unlike what might happen if we attempted to make 

the repair. The actual result was not as bad as the worst-case 

scenarios and testing showed us, so it was a good decision.

We used the same process of asking “what if” questions 

that is at the heart of counterfactual thinking. And this type 

of thinking can be applied in all areas of program and project 

management, including budget processes, property disposal, 

transition management, and overall decision making.

We manage one-of-a-kind projects that entail significant 

risks, known and unknown, that can have an enormously adverse 

impact on our outcomes. As project and program managers, 

what can we do to prepare for unexpected events? No one can 

answer that in a definitive way, but there are strategies that will 

help us prepare for and manage the unexpected.

• Purposely induce a counterfactual mind-set prior to major 

decisions or significant meetings, perhaps by reviewing 

past close calls. Actively challenge assumptions to look at 

high-impact risks that supposedly have a low probability 

of occurring and brainstorm possible scenarios that could 

entail those risks. Don’t pick sides; let the data drive 

and flavor the discussion. Then translate the results into 

productive actions by planning for those risks in your 

program or project.

• When you do risk management, step back and really 

brainstorm, pushing the envelope in your risk matrix; 

ask what else might happen and what effect that might 

have. But do not become paralyzed by what you discover: 

risk is real and unavoidable. It is better to discuss and 

think about it than be totally unprepared for a Black 

Swan event. 

• Even if your project or mission is going well, when earned 

value looks good, the schedule is being met, and the budget 

is healthy, ask what could cause a problem that could 

dramatically change the outcome of your project or mission.

• Recognize that the conventional wisdom of the group is 

not always correct. We need to guard against groupthink, 

staying aware of our natural tendency to jump to the same 

conclusions and move in the same directions. Assign folks 

ASK MAGAZINE | 11
to look at non-problem areas that are high risk so we aren’t 

all focusing on the “problem of the week.” Be creative in 

thinking of ways to analyze and test possible issues in 

these high-risk areas to better understand them. Probe the 

boundaries, test to failure, and know the true margin of 

the real systems. 

• Pay closer attention to anomalies and other unexpected 

events, not just near misses, and ask what could have 

happened or what might happen next time. Perhaps we 

should approach all unexpected and outlier events as near 

misses, at least initially. Some may be indications of a 

Black Swan event in the future, and we should treat these 

as precious learning opportunities.

• When you or others create explanations for events, don’t 

fall in love with the hypotheses and seek out supporting 

data. Instead, assume that a hypothesis is wrong and look 

for data to refute it; search for that which is counter to 

what you want to happen. The goal is to find the best 

answer with the data available at the decision time, not 

your answer or the group’s answer.

• Improve your predictive and decision-making capabilities 

by regularly reviewing your past decisions. Capture the 

data available at the time of the event or decision. Was 

the information needed to predict the outcome in the 

available data? Did we fail to collect or analyze it? If the 

data did not exist, is there a way to create or capture it 

so it is available next time? Did we capture the proper 

assumptions we made at the time of the decision? Was 

the data just not available at the decision time? 

• Keep a sense of humor. Always looking for negative 

consequences and dangers can skew your sense of 

proportion and balance and will take an emotional toll. 

Maintain a positive perspective and remember that all 

problems are positive challenges.

We must believe in our abilities to succeed with our 

projects and missions and at the same time do everything we 

can to uncover extreme negative events that can cause failure 

before they happen. We have to move forward with certainty 

in what we intend to achieve, and at the same time prepare for 

the unexpected by doubting everything.

The risks we identify now may not be the risks we need 

to be the most concerned about, but we can’t be honest about 

risk if we don’t accept our fallibility and recognize that we 

have biases that skew our observations and analyses, or if we 

suppress dissenting opinions. Acknowledging and talking 

about these issues openly and directly is a good first step. ●

Jacob L. Keaton is a policy analyst in the International Space 

Station office in the Space Operations Mission Directorate at 

NASA Headquarters.

Scott S. Goodwin works as a management analyst in the 

Program Integration Office for Space Operations. In this position, 

he applies his computer engineering background and experience 

with UNIX and Tcl to process and analyze workforce and budget 

data in support of Space Shuttle Program to Constellation 

Program transition. Sometimes he is even successful.

William H. Gerstenmaier is the Associate Administrator 

for Space Operations. In this position, he directs NASA’s human 

exploration of space. He also has programmatic oversight 

for the International Space Station, Space Shuttle, space 

communications, and space launch vehicles.

References:

• Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (New York: Random House, 2007).

• Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (New York: Random House, 2005). 

• A. D. Galinsky and L. J. Kray, “The debiasing effect of counterfactual mind-sets: Increasing the search for disconfirmatory information in groups,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 91 (2003): 69–81.

We must believe in our abilities to succeed with our projects and 

missions and at the same time do everything we can to uncover 

extreme negative events that can cause failure before they happen.

12 | ASK MAGAZINE
A powerful electrical storm created an eerie 

tapestry of light in the skies near Complex 

39A in the hours preceding the launch of STS-8. 

Engineers have since designed a Lightning 

Detection and Ranging system to protect 

shuttle launch personnel and equipment 

during thunderstorms.

Photo Credit: NASA/Sam Walton

Applied

The

 Meteorology Unit

True Technology Transfer

By Carol Anne Dunn and Francis J. Merceret

STORY | ASK MAGAZINE | 13
Over the course of its history, NASA has transferred technology 

using a variety of methods: licensing, partnering with industry, 

and infusing technology into its missions through the Small 

Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology 

Transfer programs. What we consider the purest form of 

technology transfer—technology usually published or put on a 

Web site free of charge—is done by a little known office within 

the Applied Technology Directorate at Kennedy: the Kennedy 

Space Center Weather Office. What may not be common 

knowledge outside the weather community is that NASA, and 

Kennedy in particular, has made many important discoveries 

in meteorological science and developed groundbreaking 

meteorological instrumentation systems. 

The ability to apply these discoveries and technologies 

immediately to operations is due, in no small part, to the Applied 

Meteorology Unit (AMU), a unique joint venture among 

NASA, the U.S. Air Force, and the National Weather Service. 

Originally conceived by a NASA “blue ribbon” advisory panel 

and the National Research Council, the AMU was established in 

1991. The AMU develops and evaluates technology to improve 

weather support to spaceport operations and its customers and 

transitions it to operations. Its contract provides for five fulltime professionals with degrees in meteorology or related fields. 

The AMU’s effective technology transfer relies on three 

key elements:

• Tasking is assigned by the customers with input from 

other stakeholders.

• Performance of each task continuously involves the

customers with quarterly in-depth reviews for every project.

• Customers review and test the resulting products before 

they are delivered.

The AMU projects are chosen through formal prioritized 

tasking, option hours tasking, and mission immediate tasking. 

The AMU’s tasking process has been listed as a best practice by 

the U.S. Navy’s Best Manufacturing Practices Institute. 

Formal prioritized taskings, which account for more than 

80 percent of the AMU’s workload, are assigned by AMU group 

consensus, usually reached after several discussion phases. The 

group consists of representatives from each AMU partner 

agency. Six weeks prior to the quasi-annual face-to-face tasking 

meeting, each agency submits proposed tasks for the next twelve 

to fifteen months. E-mail and telephone discussions lay the 

groundwork for an efficient and effective meeting. The AMU 

tasking process has so far always achieved consensus, usually 

by additional modification or withdrawals of proposals to get 

within the resource limitation. 

Option hours tasking, which accounts for most of the 

remaining AMU workload, is available for work that was not 

accepted through the formal prioritized process or which is 

Mark Twain once said, “Everyone talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it.” These 

days we “do” weather forecasting, and it is right far more often than it is wrong, which is fortunate 

for those of us in Florida and at NASA, since central Florida leads the nation in lightning strikes, 

and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and Kennedy Space Center lie within “Lightning Alley.” 

This does not bode well for launching space vehicles. However, thanks to many new or improved 

technologies, NASA can now launch knowing it has the latest in technological information to keep 

its personnel, hardware, and facilities safe.

14 | ASK MAGAZINE
proposed between tasking meetings. A customer who is willing 

to pay for the service may request that the proposed task be 

undertaken using option hours. Option hours work is subject 

to some constraints: tasks may not undertake basic research and 

they must relate to improving shuttle program weather support 

or national and commercial space program activities at the 

Eastern Range. The chief of the AMU makes the final decision 

as to whether a proposed option hours task is appropriate. If it 

is approved, the proposing organization provides the necessary 

funding to purchase the additional hours.

On rare occasions, the AMU’s special expertise and 

experience may be needed to assist operational customers with 

a situation outside their normal experience when there is no 

time to go through either prioritized or option hours tasking. 

This may happen, for example, during a launch countdown 

where unusual radar signatures are seen or remote-sensing and 

local observations appear inexplicably inconsistent. Resolving 

the causes of these anomalies needs to be done immediately to 

assure mission success. 

Regardless of how the technology is transferred, AMU 

products have helped support America’s space program. One 

product, an anvil forecast tool, was developed to display a 

thunderstorm anvil threat corridor on a satellite image. An anvil 

is that often wispy, flat, long cloud that blows off the top of 

thunderstorms at high altitudes. Flying through an anvil can be 

dangerous because it may 

contain enough electric 

charge from the parent 

thunderstorm to trigger 

a lightning strike to the 

vehicle flying through 

it. The threat corridor is 

based on observed data 

from a rawinsonde (a 

radiosonde probe that 

measures wind speed 

and direction along with 

temperature, pressure, and humidity) or forecast data from a 

numerical weather prediction model. The tool allows forecasters 

to generate and display the anvil threat corridor as dotted lines 

overlaid on the latest satellite picture. If thunderstorms are 

forecast for the threat corridor, the time until the resulting 

anvils would approach close enough to violate launch or landing 

lightning safety constraints can be estimated from the dotted 

range rings on the overlay. By developing this tool specifically for 

the operational display system, the AMU enabled the forecasters 

to use the capability in real time on a system they use routinely 

in support of daily operations.

Upper air wind changes are another major threat to the 

safety of launch vehicles as they ascend. Marshall Space Flight 

Center developed a radical improvement to signal processing 

that allowed those winds to be measured using a radar wind 

profiler located at Kennedy. The data from the new profiler 

algorithm was as accurate as the most accurate wind-finding 

weather balloon and better than any previously available 

commercial signal-processing methodology. In addition, the 

new algorithm enabled the profiler to generate complete wind 

profiles from 6,000 to 60,000 feet in 500-foot intervals every 

five minutes. The best previously available algorithm required 

at least thirty minutes per profile. Balloons take an hour to 

generate a wind profile. 

An example of the anvil forecast graphic 

overlaid on a visible satellite image of the 

Florida peninsula. 

Photo courtesy Francis Merceret

NASA can now launch knowing it

has the latest in technological

information to keep its personnel, 

hardware, and facilities safe.

ASK MAGAZINE | 15
Unfortunately, Marshall’s new algorithm required more 

computing power than was available and could only be used for 

research purposes because it could not be run in real time. The 

AMU redesigned the software to run on the operational system in 

real time, developed a user interface for interactive quality control 

on the day of launch, and wrote a comprehensive training package 

to enable operational personnel to effectively use these new tools. 

Operational use of the Kennedy wind profiler, running the AMU 

software and quality control interface, has already prevented loss 

of at least one expendable launch vehicle mission due to lastminute wind changes undetected by weather balloons.

The Kennedy Weather Office and the Applied Meteorology 

Unit work hand in hand to safeguard our nation’s space program 

from the adverse effects of lightning, tornadoes, and hurricanes. 

These dedicated individuals—Mr. John Madura, chief of the 

weather office; Dr. Francis Merceret, AMU chief and director of 

research for the weather office; and ENSCO/AMU employees 

Dr. Bill Bauman (AMU program manager), Dr. David Short, 

Ms. Winnie Lambert, Dr. Leela Watson, and Mr. Joe Barrett—

have contributed to advancing the frontiers in the science of 

meteorological support to space flight and technology transfer 

in its “purest form.”

AMU customers have continued to fully fund and support 

the AMU for seventeen years despite serious challenges to their 

available resources. The quality of work has also warranted 

publication in numerous peer-reviewed journal articles, including 

a cover article in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological 

Society. ●

For more examples and additional information about the AMU, 

visit the AMU Web site at http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/amu. Francis J. Merceret is chief of the Applied Meteorology 

Unit (AMU) at Kennedy Space Center, a position he has held since 

1991. He is also director of research at the Kennedy Weather 

Office, where he provides technical expertise in atmospheric 

physics and meteorological instrumentation, directs research 

conducted by or for the office, and undertakes scientific 

investigations.

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.

The AMU redesigned the software

to run on the operational system

in real time, developed a user 

interface for interactive quality 

control on the day of launch, 

and wrote a comprehensive training

package to enable operational

personnel to effectively use these

new tools. 

16 | ASK MAGAZINE
Christyl Johnson has been assistant associate administrator 

in the Office of the Administrator at NASA since fall of 

2005. She joined NASA in 1990, designing and building 

laser systems for remote sensors at Langley Research 

Center. She has also been associate director for exploratory 

missions in the Office of Earth Science and the deputy 

chief engineer for Program Integration and Operations in 

the Office of the Chief Engineer. Don Cohen talked to her 

recently at her office in NASA Headquarters.

I nter v iew W ith

Cohen: Tell me about the responsibilities 

of your current job.

Johnson: I am the assistant associate 

administrator for the Agency, so I am the 

deputy to the number three person. We 

are responsible for technical oversight of 

the Agency’s missions.

Cohen: That means, in part, dealing with 

technical disputes not resolved at a 

lower level?

Johnson: Yes. It has been good to see the 

technical authority process working the 

way it was envisioned: to see some real 

disagreements between the programmatic 

elements and the institutional elements 

like safety and mission assurance or 

engineering get addressed and resolved. 

These disagreements now have a path 

of adjudication all the way up to the 

administrator for a final decision. It’s 

good that the issues are bubbling up and 

being discussed openly. We are working 

hard to create an environment in which it 

is not tolerated, when big problems arise, 

that the engineer with the concern gets 

stifled and his concerns are not heard 

and addressed.

Christyl 

Johnson

By Don Cohen

INSIGHT | ASK MAGAZINE | 17
Cohen: What have been the most 

challenging cases?

Johnson: The engineering issues are 

probably the easiest. The most difficult 

decisions are the ones that affect people’s 

lives and are more personal than 

technical. You can perform calculations 

and make reasonable trades regarding a 

specific technical issue, but when it comes 

to making a decision about moving a 

program from one Center to another, 

you have to deal with the political and 

personal fallout of that decision.

Cohen: Has that happened recently?

Johnson: SOFIA [Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy] moved 

from Ames Research Center to Dryden 

Flight Research Center. In these types of 

situations you have hurt feelings, not just 

at the employee level but all the way up 

through the management chain.

Cohen: What was the rationale for the 

move?

Johnson: The Ames team was experiencing lots of delays due to technical 

and management problems. Dryden was 

determined to be better equipped and 

more experienced to be able to complete 

the mission successfully, so the decision 

was made to move it.

Cohen: So it was a technically easy 

decision, but ...

Johnson: ... but there were political implications associated with moving it from 

one district to another. Lots of people are 

affected by these kinds of decisions. There 

are those that have to uproot their families 

and follow the aircraft because they’re 

the ones doing the day-in–day-out work. 

And you have a center director who says, 

“Believe in me, I have the ability to do this. 

You hired me to do this job; I’ve told you 

I gotmentoringthatwasabsolutely critical. Itis crucial

for anyone responsible for a research environment

to make sure that they spend that time up front giving

new hires some kind of guidance.

18 | ASK MAGAZINE
how I’m going to get it accomplished. So 

give me a chance.” There’s a lot that the 

engineers never see.

Cohen: Do you see your main role as 

giving engineering advice, or using your 

engineering background as a foundation 

for these human decisions?

Johnson: Definitely using my engineering 

background to make sound, reasoned 

judgments. It is always better to have 

someone in a senior leadership position 

like this one who has experience actually 

building technical systems. You don’t 

know how long it takes to do thermal vac 

if you’ve never done it before; you don’t 

know what a reasonable estimate is if 

you’ve never made one. Because I started 

my career designing and building laser 

systems, testing them and putting them 

on aircraft, and doing field measurements 

in the deserts of New Mexico, I know 

what it takes to build systems successfully. 

When they say, “I can get this done in two 

weeks,” you remember what it was like and 

say, “That doesn’t sound right to me.”

Cohen: It’s wishful thinking.

Johnson: Exactly. As a technical manager 

you make decisions based not just on their 

assessment but on your experiences, too. 

Cohen: You started out as an engineer.

Johnson: Yes, I was the lead engineer for 

the Chromium: LiSAF laser development 

project at Langley. I designed and built 

a Chromium: LiSAF laser oscillator that 

was the first to achieve 33 millijoules in 

a diode pump scheme. I also established 

the first stress-optics laboratory at Langley. 

Universities and other organizations came 

or sent their crystals to be tested in this 

lab. I became the program manager for 

the Differential Absorption Lidar (DIAL) 

Program, which encompassed all the laser 

development research projects at Langley.

Cohen: So you combined engineering 

and management early on.

Johnson: Yes, because I had the ability 

to communicate effectively with both 

engineers and management.

Cohen: Did you know when you started at 

NASA that you had those skills, or did you 

think of yourself as a nerdy engineer?

Johnson: I have never viewed myself 

as a nerdy engineer. I love being able to 

create things with my own hands—my 

father and I rebuilt Mustangs together. 

Math and science came easily for me, but 

I’m really a people person. I like being 

in the lab, but I’m more in my element 

communicating those lab results in 

international forums or negotiating with 

the Italians for a spin table for Triana.

Cohen: Were you already thinking in that 

direction when you started at NASA?

Johnson: I have always been a people 

person and communication came easily, 

but I never dreamed I would be presenting 

papers in international forums when I 

started at NASA. When I first came, 

the organization I was in was trying to 

create and discover new laser crystals 

that could achieve greater efficiencies 

and greater power output—which we 

need for remote sensing. It’s very difficult 

to find the combination that gives you 

high efficiency, great output power, 

the wavelength that you need, and the 

right input stimulus. Listening to the 

discussions in meetings when I first 

started, I remember thinking, “Oh, my 

God, this stuff is Greek to me! How am I 

ever going to get to be as smart about this 

stuff as a Norm Barnes,” who was the guru 

of the laser design world? As an engineer, 

I was just focused on this Chromium: 

LiSAF system and in the laboratory 

tweaking knobs. When I couldn’t get it 

to work, I would brainstorm with other 

design engineers to try to figure out what 

to try next. This was my baby. They had 

their own research to do, but they’d sit 

down with me and brainstorm. This 

was a very helpful practice that we all 

benefited from.

Cohen: That was your first assignment?

Johnson: No, I had been a summer 

student starting in 1985, so I had 

numerous smaller assignments prior to 

that. I also did my master’s thesis research 

at Langley, so I was very much a part of 

the team before I started working there 

officially in 1990. 

Cohen: The student work wasn’t in a 

co-op program?

Johnson: No, the Lincoln AeroSpace 

Engineering Recruitment (LASER) 

program that I was selected for required 

you to work at a NASA Center for one 

summer. I did that assignment in 1985 

and really enjoyed it. The Langley people 

hired me back the following years as a 

ASK MAGAZINE | 19
summer hire so I could continue to do 

work for them.

Cohen: Were your first months at NASA 

sink or swim, or did you get guidance 

and mentoring?

Johnson: I got mentoring that was 

absolutely critical. It is crucial for anyone 

responsible for a research environment 

to make sure that they spend that time 

up front giving new hires some kind of 

guidance. There were several people 

who came in and didn’t get that kind of 

mentoring. They sat around and didn’t 

know what to do. They weren’t getting 

much out of the work, and they weren’t 

contributing much to it. Because I had 

been there those previous summers, I 

had already established relationships 

with people in the organization. I could go 

to them and ask, “What do you think 

about this?”

Cohen: People who are less outgoing 

might not be able to do that.

Johnson: True. That’s why, later, we 

made sure that anyone who came in did 

have mentoring. It’s critical. You can’t 

just throw people in the water and say 

“Swim!” if you want them to contribute.

Cohen: What kind of mentoring did you 

get?

Johnson: Some was technical advice, 

like pointers and guidance in my laser 

design and development efforts. Other 

mentoring was of a political nature, like 

a challenge that I faced as the subsystem 

manager of the LASE [Lidar Atmospheric 

Sensing Experiment] program when a 

person tried to throw a monkey wrench 

into the laboratory operations. Then there 

was career advice like what kind of job to 

take next and what kind of experience I 

needed before going to the next level.

Cohen: Can you tell me about the problem 

with LASE?

Johnson: I was subsystem manager for the 

diode-seeding subsystem of the program. 

We had established an autonomous lab 

to do characterizations of the diodes 

that we needed to seed the system. I had 

engineers and technicians working long 

hours to address a line-locking problem 

that was threatening the delivery of this 

critical system for the mission. The chief 

engineer of our division would come 

in the lab and try to take the engineers 

off task to try his ideas. I went to him 

and I said, “You cannot redirect these 

engineers. We have a task plan and a very 

tight schedule.” He wouldn’t listen to me 

because he was a senior-level manager 

and I was just a program manager. 

Finally, I went to my branch manager, 

who called a meeting with all the senior 

managers in our division. In the meeting 

I let them know what was going on, and 

I asked them to ask the chief engineer 

to stop interfering with our efforts. 

The management team asked him to 

stop going into our lab. He replied, “I 

can do whatever I want, I’m the chief 

engineer.” The team was outraged by his 

response and started arguing with him. I 

interrupted and said, “As long as we know 

what the rules of the game are, we can 

play the game. If he wants to redirect the 

engineers, all we have to do is tell them 

not to listen to him.” We ended up doing 

just that. The division manager later told 

me that he had heard of how I handled 

the situation and that my tact was exactly 

what was needed in our managers. He 

also said, “Christyl, that is exactly the 

approach you need to take. It doesn’t have 

to be a fight. You keep on going down the 

path you’re on.” It was good to get that 

kind of affirmation.

Cohen: You got both advice and support.

Johnson: Yes, and it turned out well. 

We identified the problem, fixed it, and 

delivered the system on schedule.

Cohen: So that’s a case where the 

problem had more to do with human 

interaction than technical issues.

Johnson: When engineers become 

frustrated and can’t think, that takes away 

their ability to get the job done quickly. If 

you want them to focus on the issues, you 

can’t have extraneous stuff interfering.

Cohen: Do you think being black and a 

woman has influenced your career at 

NASA?

Johnson: I don’t view it as a negative. 

I don’t see it as a positive, either. It just 

is. I’ve enjoyed being not just the only 

black female, but the only female in 

some arenas that I’m in. I have found 

that most men are comfortable working 

with me. Sometimes men don’t view 

talented women as a threat like they do 

their male counterparts. There have been 

times when I had to deal with people who 

were not accustomed to women being in 

20 | ASK MAGAZINE
engineering or to having women as their 

equals or their supervisors. That can cause 

problems. There have been some guys 

that really struggle with acknowledging 

a woman in a prominent role. They 

won’t look at you during discussions at 

meetings. Even if you are the one that 

is asking the questions, they’ll give the 

answer to one of the other males at the 

table. Those things happen. I chalk it up 

to the guy being ignorant and keep going. 

It’s not personal.

Cohen: You also got mentoring that was 

career advice?

Johnson: When I was program manager 

for the diode program, the laser engineers 

did their performance planning through 

me. Then I would sit down with the 

deputy branch manager and talk about 

what each group was going to be doing, 

and what I thought were their success 

criteria. He would sign off on them or 

talk to the branch manager. He was the 

person I worked most closely with in 

the management chain. Once, when the 

branch manager had gone on vacation, 

an assistant branch head position in the 

electro-optics and controls branch was 

advertised. The deputy branch manager 

said, “Christyl, you are already performing 

many management functions, and you 

are good at it. You really should consider 

applying for the job.” The branch 

manager who was on vacation had been 

telling me, “It’s not good to get out of the 

laboratory until you’ve been doing this 

for fifteen years and establish yourself in 

the engineering community as an expert 

in a specific field. Then maybe consider 

going into management. You’ll never be 

able to succeed if you’re not established as 

an expert first.” But the assistant branch 

head said, “You don’t have to be an expert 

to make progress in your career. Your 

career path is completely up to you.” He 

wrote my recommendation, and I got the 

job. That ended up being a really positive 

experience for me.

Cohen: Is it important for most 

engineers to develop some of these 

people skills or does it make sense to 

say, “We’ll let this introverted genius 

engineer just focus on his own work?”

Johnson: I think there’s enough room for 

everyone to be themselves. It’s good to 

give those total introverts some exposure 

that can help them to grow. If they’re 

comfortable doing things that can stretch 

them, that’s great. Their supervisors 

should look for opportunities to present 

to them to give them the choice. 

Sometimes those introverts come up with 

the most creative ideas. As an engineer 

and physicist, I know you need the space 

to let your mind function the way that 

it functions. If you try to take a square 

peg person and force him into a round 

hole, you’re not going to get the best that 

person has to offer you.

Cohen: How would you describe NASA’s 

challenges today and the challenge of a 

new administration next year?

Johnson: We don’t know what’s going 

to happen with the presidential election. 

That could be a whole new set of 

challenges we’ll have to deal with. As 

for now, we know that we have lots of 

challenges making sure that the Ares 

launch vehicle will be ready for flight in 

2014. We know we have a gap between 

the planned retirement of the shuttle 

in 2010 and the maiden flight of Ares. 

There are many hurdles that we need 

to overcome to meet the milestones 

before us. In order to maintain support 

for our mission, we’ve got to deliver on 

the first few milestones in the queue for 

Constellation. We are constantly criticized 

for schedule slips and cost overruns, so 

we must be realistic about what we are 

I would not have chosen to come to NASA if I’d been 

told that I was going to oversee a contract for which

someone else was doing the fun engineering work.

ASK MAGAZINE | 21
G

committing ourselves to and be able to 

deliver on those promises. That’s the 

only way we’ll get the commitment and 

support we need from the Hill and our 

other stakeholders.

Cohen: That may involve speaking some 

hard truths, like saying, “You want us to 

do this by a certain date but it can’t be 

done with the amount of money you’re 

giving us.”

Johnson: That’s always a challenge, but 

Mike Griffin is the kind of person who 

can communicate very bluntly.

Cohen: Does NASA have the skills it needs?

Johnson: I think we have a wealth of 

talent within NASA. As long as we 

continue to do the things we need to do 

to fill the pipeline in the STEM fields—

science, technology, engineering, and 

mathematics—we’ll continue to have the 

kind of people we need. It’s also a matter 

of enticing good people in those fields 

to come to NASA. They won’t want to 

come here if they’re going to be contract 

oversight managers. I know I would not 

have chosen to come to NASA if I’d been 

told that I was going to oversee a contract 

for which someone else was doing the fun 

engineering work.

Cohen: How do we avoid that?

Johnson: We have to strategically assign 

centers to do in-house work to maintain 

the competencies we need for the future. 

We want to develop our engineers with 

these critical skills and we want to be 

smart buyers when we contract work 

out. How can we be smart buyers for 

procuring systems that we don’t have 

experience building ourselves? How do 

you have quality engineers if you don’t 

have quality work for them to do? You 

have to make a conscious decision to 

ensure a healthy balance between those 

things you do in house and those things 

you contract out.

Cohen: Do you think today’s engineering 

students look at NASA as an exciting 

place?

Johnson: It’s a mixed bag. There are many 

students who get excited at the mention of 

NASA. They are intrigued by space and the 

research we do. On the other hand, many 

students have been to career fairs and seen 

a decline in the hiring opportunities at 

NASA. We have to make sure that we do 

a good job establishing the kind of work 

that would draw good people and then we 

have to have the flexibility to bring some 

of them in.

Cohen: Is NASA going out to make the 

case, to communicate the excitement of 

the work?

Johnson: Yes, we are doing this in 

many ways. When I do personally, the 

message is received overwhelmingly well. 

I have engaged some of the students in 

dialogue, and I have heard that they are 

surprised when they visit some of the 

NASA research facilities. Their school 

laboratories have the latest equipment 

so they expect NASA to have at least the 

same caliber if not better. That is not 

what they see when they go to some of our 

facilities. We must do what is necessary to 

provide them with challenging work and 

the necessary tools to get the job done. 

Our laboratory facilities and equipment 

are important elements for sustaining the 

capabilities we will need for the future. 

Cohen: As a young engineer, your 

experience with NASA was very positive.

Johnson: Yes, the LASER program was 

designed to give students exposure to 

engineering in practice. Those kinds of 

programs are invaluable. When I went to 

Langley that first summer and got to work 

side by side with practicing engineers, I 

was sold. I had opportunities with IBM 

and others that could offer higher salaries, 

but I was sold on NASA. After they gave 

me the exposure and the experience, I 

didn’t want to go anyplace else. I found 

that once you are on the NASA team, the 

opportunities are limitless. There are so 

many parts of NASA, with such a variety 

of work, that you can move around and 

have a couple of careers without ever 

leaving the Agency. ●

22 | ASK MAGAZINE
The Road to 

On March 17, 2002, twin satellites comprising the flight segment of the Gravity Recovery and 

Climate Experiment (GRACE) were launched by a Russian Rockot launch vehicle from the Plesetsk 

Cosmodrome into orbit 300 miles above the earth. The successful launch of that science mission 

represented not just a technological achievement but years of planning, re-planning, negotiation, 

and persuasion. The early history of the program suggests some of difficulties and rewards of 

international cooperation.

GRA

By Edgar S. (Ab) Davis

CE

Gravity model figure of Europe and Africa prepared by The 

University of Texas Center for Space Research as part of a 

collaborative data analysis effort with the NASA Jet Propulsion 

Laboratory and the GeoForschungsZentrum Potsdam. 

Image Credit: NASA/University of Texas Center for Space Research

STORY | ASK MAGAZINE | 23
Measuring Earth’s Gravitational Field

The aim of the GRACE experiment is to map the strength of 

Earth’s gravity field at given latitudes, longitudes, and times. 

To measure ocean surface currents using satellite altimetry from 

TOPEX-Poseidon, oceanographers needed measurements of 

mean ocean geoid (sea level without the influence of tides and 

weather) improved by a factor of twenty—from an uncertainty 

of about 20 cm to about 1 cm. During the concept design phase, 

it became clear that GRACE could exceed this requirement 

by more than a factor of twenty-five, and it could do it every 

month. This remarkable performance extended to the land 

as well. Among other things, GRACE is now being used to 

measure both seasonal and year-to-year variations in the storage 

of water in the world’s major watersheds; in the amount of ice 

stored on Greenland and Antarctica; and the degree to which 

the sea level is rising due to the addition of water that up to now 

has been stored on land. 

The twin GRACE satellites, separated by 105–165 miles 

(and by about thirty seconds in time), fly in essentially the 

same circular orbit under the influence of Earth’s total mass. 

Mass near the earth’s surface is not uniformly distributed. The 

first satellite speeds up along its circular orbit as it approaches 

a concentration of mass on the surface and slows down after it 

passes by. Approximately thirty seconds later, the second satellite 

experiences the same effect. The resulting fluctuation in satelliteto-satellite range is related to the magnitude and extent of mass 

concentration. A microwave link between the twins measures 

the ever-changing range with submicron precision. The range 

measurements and the nongravitational forces on each satellite 

are recorded ten times per second and sent to the ground twice 

a day. Every thirty days, the accumulated data is converted to a 

new mathematical model of the gravity field.

After participating in European Space Agency (ESA)– and 

NASA-led studies for gravity missions that failed to move out 

of the study phase, I assumed responsibility for developing the 

GRACE mission concept into a flight project in 1992. By the 

summer of 1994, the instrumentation design had taken shape, 

and we had refined the requirements on twin satellites well 

enough to begin discussions with potential contractors. I took the 

requirements on a tour to leading small satellite suppliers in the 

United States. No one had a design that came close to meeting 

the mission’s requirements for thermal control and structural 

stability, and no one had experience with the ultra-sensitive 

accelerometer that we needed to measure the nongravitational 

forces on the satellite. Furthermore, the United States had given 

up on developing the kind of accelerometer that was needed. 

An International Effort

In the United States we tend to assume that our technologies 

are the best in the world. This is counterproductive hubris. For 

GRACE, we used ultra-sensitive accelerometers from France, 

star cameras from Denmark, custom satellites with an ultrastable structure from Germany, and a Russian launch vehicle 

with a custom dual-satellite dispenser. We found it easy to adapt 

to the Russians’ logical and well-defined processes for completely 

meeting a customer’s technical and operational requirements. 

But it did take long hours to negotiate every point through 

interpreters and document everything in writing in both Russian 

and English. It paid off in an efficient six-week launch campaign 

at Plesetsk with six feet of snow. The Russian-supplied launch 

vehicle delivered exceptional performance. The Rockot exceeded 

all GRACE requirements by a factor of three or more.

Our European contractors all worked on fixed-price 

contracts, so we knew we would get their best people. More 

importantly, every decision with the European suppliers was 

made with an accurate assessment of the cost.

The path to international cooperation had its twists and 

turns as well as opportunities and setbacks. At the July 1995 

International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics meeting in 

Boulder, NASA’s John LaBrecque organized a meeting of all the 

known proponents of various concepts for measuring Earth’s 

gravity field. At that meeting, Dr. Christoph Reigber of GFZPotsdam, Germany’s geosciences research center, presented the 

German plans for a single-satellite gravity and magnetic field 

LEFT: GRACE launched from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome, 

a former Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) site in 

northern Russia. 

RIGHT: View of the twin satellites in a clean room.

Photo Credits: NASA/University of Texas Center for Space Research

24 | ASK MAGAZINE
mission and expressed interest in the GRACE concept that I 

presented. LaBrecque suggested that we explore a cooperative 

U.S.–German mission. 

When we took the concept to DARA, the German space 

agency, the head of DARA’s Earth sciences program said a 

study would be a waste of time because they didn’t have the 

money for the full mission after the approval of CHAMP 

(CHAllenging Mini-satellite Payload). But DARA had no 

objection to Reigber using GFZ-Potsdam funds for the study. 

And we found a potential German ally for our concept at the 

meeting. Two people introduced themselves as representing 

DLR’s German Space Operations Center, GSOC. I only 

vaguely knew of its existence, but I made a spur-of-the-moment 

decision to put my trust in the GSOC and committed to give 

them responsibility for GRACE mission operations. While 

the prospects for cooperation looked bleak, we accepted an 

invitation to visit GSOC the next day. We found a modern but 

underutilized facility. There were five empty control rooms; 

in the sixth, a lone operator was monitoring the ten-year-old 

RoSAT mission, an X-ray observatory. Missions like GRACE 

were clearly important to their future. 

I went on to GFZ-Potsdam with Reigber and drafted an 

agreement to facilitate NASA sponsorship of the joint feasibility 

study. In November 1995, I returned to GFZ-Potsdam for six 

weeks. Reigber arranged for me to share an office with his 

systems engineering team from Dornier Satellite Systems who 

were working on CHAMP. I understood that I would be working 

with this group on the feasibility study, but it soon became 

clear that my study was not on their radar screen. They were 

preparing for the CHAMP project’s preliminary design review 

and assumed that I was there for the same purpose. I did help 

with the systems aspects of hosting the receiver, which NASA 

had agreed to supply to the CHAMP project. It took some time, 

but in the process I found that Dornier Satellite Systems had 

special technical capabilities that were essential to the success of 

the GRACE mission. Instinctively, Reigber knew that I would 

connect with the team from Dornier on the GRACE project. 

The time at GFZ-Potsdam put me contact with ONERA, 

the French aerospace lab. The French space agency, CNES, 

had agreed to supply an accelerometer built by ONERA to 

CHAMP. In Potsdam, I learned a lot from Bernard Foulon and 

Pierre Touboul about the limitations and capabilities of their 

ultra-precise accelerometer. The unit could be easily tailored 

to the GRACE requirement. The technical competence and 

integrity of the ONERA team was quickly apparent. They had 

no peer in the field of ultra-sensitive accelerometers. We needed 

their device for GRACE.

GFZ-Potsdam planned to use a Russian COSMOS rocket 

acquired through a German-Russian partnership to launch 

CHAMP, but a second Russian launch vehicle option was under 

development by another German-Russian partnership—the 

Rockot. Both vehicles had the payload capacity and fairing size 

needed to launch the twin GRACE satellites. I worked out five 

options for launching the twin GRACE satellites, two on the 

COSMOS and three on the more capable Rockot.

We still faced serious hurdles. A plan for U.S.–German 

cooperation on GRACE was shaping up in my study—NASA 

would supply the GRACE instrumentation and the launch on a 

Russian launch vehicle, and DARA would supply the satellite and 

the mission operations—but the plan proved to have a fatal flaw. 

The Space Transportation Policy of 1994 provided that a NASA 

payload could only fly on a foreign launch vehicle provided by 

a foreign government under a no-exchange-of-funds agreement. 

NASA could not purchase, or contribute to the purchase of, the 

Russian launch vehicle without a presidential waiver.

Shortly after this problem became apparent, SS/Loral 

came to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and described how 

the GlobalStar satellite bus might be adapted to carry science 

instruments. The GlobalStar bus didn’t come close to meeting 

the GRACE requirements, but SS/Loral mentioned their 

corporate connection to Dornier on the GlobalStar project. That 

suggested a new plan. I saw a way to buy satellites from Dornier 

through SS/Loral, so NASA could supply the instrumentation 

and the twin GRACE satellites, and DARA could supply the 

ASK MAGAZINE | 25
Russian launch vehicle and the mission operations. SS/Loral 

and Dornier agreed to pursue the plan. NASA issued the call 

for a proposal to the Earth System Science Pathfinder program 

(ESSP). I needed DARA’s commitment to the plan. 

The timing could not have been worse. The funding for 

the space program in Germany was being cut by 25 percent and 

DARA staffing was to be reduced and merged into the DLR. 

But we needed their signature on a letter supporting our step-one 

proposal to NASA. We needed to meet with them and negotiate 

a commitment. Reigber was very concerned and discouraged 

us from coming to Germany. We took his name off the cover 

page of our presentation but included him as the proposed coprinciple investigator. Trusting us not to embarrass him, he 

came to our meeting with DARA. GSOC was also represented. 

Our proposal met with a positive response from DARA 

management. With Reigber’s help, we moved to discussing the 

content of the supporting letter for the step-one proposal. The 

new plan was sensitive to German industrial policy regarding 

reunification, foreign policy regarding strengthening economic 

ties with Russia, and the reality of a limited budget for space 

missions. The Germans committed to be part of the step-one 

proposal. It took similar finesse to get them to be a part of the 

step-two proposal. 

But six months after GRACE was selected for the NASAESSP program and two months after JPL received funding for 

the project, the head of the DLR was planning to tell the NASA 

administrator that the DLR did not have the funds for GRACE 

and would not participate in the project. I could only think that 

he had received bad advice in making this decision. The night 

before his meeting with the NASA administrator, I obtained the 

number of the hotel in Washington, D.C., where he was staying 

and called Reigber in Rio de Janeiro. Reigber awoke the head 

of DLR at 1:00 a.m. I can only imagine what was said. The 

next morning, the head of the DLR told the administrator that 

Germany would cooperate on the GRACE mission. Within 

a month, the contract between JPL and Dornier was executed. 

About a year later, NASA and DLR signed the memorandum of 

understanding, and DLR had selected the Rockot launch vehicle 

for the mission. The project had a successful mission confirmation 

review and NASA approved the mission for implementation. 

Some Key Points

1. Success stemmed from the essential work of gathering an 

international team with the skills and capabilities that 

GRACE required, building relationships, and getting 

essential commitments.

2. Establishing cooperation with the Germans on GRACE 

depended on having a respected German scientist, Christoph 

Reigber, as an advocate for the project. His vision, leadership, 

and diplomacy with German officials were critical. 

3. We created a deal that was sensitive to German policy 

objectives and a budget crisis in the German space program. 

In a business-as-usual arrangement, DLR would have 

purchased the satellites and NASA would have supplied the 

launch. By reversing responsibility, the DLR’s budget for the 

implementation phase was reduced by about a factor of four. 

In the face of long odds, persistence has paid off. For more 

than five years, GRACE has been measuring and mapping 

variations in Earth’s gravitation. It has shown how much water 

is used for irrigation in Northern India and near the Aral Sea. 

It has determined that Greenland’s ice is melting much faster 

than expected, at a rate of 150 to 250 cubic kilometers a year. 

(One cubic kilometer is about 264 billion gallons of water.) ●

Edgar S. (Ab) Davis, an engineer with experience in 

developing precision optical and RF systems, led the GRACE 

project through the formulation and proposal phases. He 

managed the project for the California Institute of Technology’s 

Jet Propulsion Laboratory through the implementation, launch, 

an early orbit phases. He has a BS in mechanical engineering and 

an MS in electrical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. 

ab.davis@jpl.nasa.gov

in the united states we tend to assume that our technologies are the best

in the world. this is counterproductive hubris.

26 | ASK MAGAZINE
Fusing Risk Management 

and Knowledge Management

By Charles Tucker

Then, in 2005, came the “Reese’s moment,” as Lengyel, 

who had recently joined the Exploration Systems Mission 

Directorate, calls it—“Hey, you got KM in my RM!” It was the 

idea of knowledge-based risks, or KBRs, which would couple 

continuous risk management with lessons learned.

The goal, says Lengyel, was to get away from “a passive 

collection system” of lessons and into a framework where 

recognized risks guided knowledge capture and delivery. Rather 

than introducing new KM tools, a KBR-oriented system would 

focus on transferring knowledge by infusing it into existing work 

processes. It would aim to close knowledge gaps by providing 

broader access to risk information not only relating to NASA 

legacy programs such as the Space Shuttle and International 

Space Station but also capturing and transferring what ESMD 

learns in managing risks along the way. 

“A great way to identify risks is through lessons learned, which 

in many cases were risks that challenged a previous program. 

KBRs provide that as well as analysis and planning information,” 

says Lengyel, who is now the risk and knowledge management 

officer at ESMD. “We’re just saying, ‘Here’s what worked or 

didn’t work for this particular risk.’ A lot of risk management 

requires a little bit of art in putting a good plan together.”

The timing for launching the KBR effort dovetailed with 

the cancellation of the Orbital Space Plane, conceived as a crew 

rescue and transport craft for the space station. There was an 

abundance of “lessons about lessons” that proved useful in 

building the KBR construct.

“About that time,” recalls Lengyel in an interview in his 

office at NASA Headquarters, “we started looking at how 

we were going to do lessons learned differently and more 

meaningfully than we had in the past.” He asked risk and 

knowledge managers from across the directorate to join a 

working group that included representatives from NASA’s 

Academy of Program/Project and Engineering Leadership 

(APPEL) and Office of Safety and Mission Assurance, as well 

as contractors such as Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne, Lockheed 

Martin, the chief knowledge officer at Goddard Space Flight 

Center, and information technology specialists. “We came up 

with the concept of knowledge-based risks. We said we were 

going to capture what worked and what didn’t work within the 

context of risks, put it back into our risk system, and use that 

knowledge to help us write better risks, identify risks, and have 

better plans and discrete mitigation steps.” The risk database 

becomes a knowledge base over time—not a separate lessons 

learned system.

The KM working group began to do benchmarking inside 

and outside the Agency. It looked at aerospace companies, 

financial firms, the Department of Defense and the CIA, and a 

top pharmaceutical company, culling best practices. The initiative 

began to evolve, taking shape as a four-spoke wheel with KBR as 

the hub. One of the four practices, called Pause and Learn (PaL) 

and developed by the Goddard KM officer, was based on the 

U.S. Army’s after-action review; the others are knowledge-sharing 

forums, experience-based training using case studies, and Webenabled teams that are growing rapidly. The ESMD’s Risk and 

Knowledge Management portal is located within the Integrated 

Collaborative Environment (ICE) and already has more than 

16,000 registered users. [See accompanying article on how 

Lengyel’s first KBR is displayed on the ICE site.]

At the heart of all this activity was a guiding principle: power 

to the people. It was a movement away from technology. “A lot of 

KM effort in the Agency is very IT-centric—what I call the ‘IT 

An idea had been percolating in Dave Lengyel’s mind for some time: how to integrate risk 

management (RM) and knowledge management (KM) to create a better risk-management 

approach for the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate (ESMD). How could the wealth of 

current and future lessons-learned information be fused with RM practices in a dynamic system? 

INSIGHT | ASK MAGAZINE | 27
junkyard’ approach to knowledge management,” says Lengyel, 

a former marine aviator and FA-18 and F-15 aircrew training 

instructor at the McDonnell Aircraft Company before coming 

to NASA. “We’re taking a light-touch approach when it comes to 

IT tools. Much of what we’re doing depends on learning through 

conversation, people talking to each other, knowledge-sharing 

forums ranging from brown-bag lunches to more focused 

workshops and conferences to experience-based training. We 

wanted to put these things together in a way that would be more 

closely aligned to process improvement than just strict KM.”

The Constellation program provided fertile ground for 

the new integrative approach. “For Constellation, we looked at 

requirements-related risks and found that we had 255 risks. Only 

about a third of them had legitimate mitigation plans. They 

ranged from ‘I’m not going to be able to meet this performance 

requirement’ to ‘Given the lack of requirements or immaturity, 

this risk is going to happen to me.’ The fact that they didn’t have 

good mitigation plans was not a good thing for us. So we did some 

more analysis and found ten things that seem to be working that 

are reducing risk. Over time what we can do is build templates 

so we can sit down with risk owners when they come in with a 

certain type of risk and say, ‘Here’s a better way to identify the 

actual root cause, and here are some things to consider in your 

plan and mitigation steps to really work your plan.’

“One of our challenges two and a half years ago was opening 

up the risk database. We were told by really experienced risk 

managers in our directorate that if you open up the database, 

people will not put risk information in there because they didn’t 

want Ground Ops to look at Capsule to look at Booster, that there 

would be hesitation to put that information in because we didn’t 

do that before because of different cultures, different centers. 

“But you just can’t do enterprise risk management if you close 

the database and partition it off by program and project. We said 

we’ve got to get over this structural barrier. So we opened it up 

and moved on. What helped us immensely during this period 

was adopting best practices from space station and shuttle and 

moving it into Constellation, Ares, Orion, and so on.”

Lengyel likes to describe RM-KM integration as a “processimprovement approach” that helps the experts—the risk 

managers—play to their strengths. “People in human space 

flight understand what risk management is. They understand 

the foundations, they understand the resource challenges. They 

also understand why it makes sense to let the risks point you to 

areas you need help in. I think we do a really good job of risk 

management. I think we do a lousy job of KM.”

As the integration plan is implemented, Lengyel envisions a 

KBR-capture system built on quality, not quantity. “In the last 

lessons learned system, there were sixteen hundred–plus lessons. 

On a good year they collected eighty to a hundred. A lot of 

that was useless—what I call ‘spilled milk’ stuff. We want to 

capture really meaningful information, maybe ten or fifteen 

KBRs per year.” 

At ESMD, where the future of U.S. human space flight 

is being shaped, Lengyel believes merging risk and knowledge 

management is essential, and that it starts with the practitioners. 

“It’s the risk community, the risk managers, who form the central 

nervous system for information flowing in our directorate,” he 

says. “I don’t expect risk owners to be dancing around in the 

database looking for KBRs that might help them. You’ve got 

to feed this information to them, you’ve got to do the analysis 

and get it to them to help them do their work more effectively. 

Otherwise we’re just going to have a fancier lessons-learned 

system. I call that the ‘collect, store, and ignore’ approach. Let’s 

stop doing that. Let’s make it an active system.” ●

I don’t expect risk owners to be

dancing around in the database

looking for KBRs that might help

them. You’ve got to feed this

information to them, you’ve got

to do the analysis and get it to 

them to help them do their work

more effectively.

28 | ASK MAGAZINE
Title

By 

Intro Spinning the upper stage of a rocket in flight is one way to 

stabilize the vehicle, just as a bullet spins to stay on course. But 

liquid propellant sloshing around in a spacecraft’s fuel tanks 

produces a wobble, or nutation, that can cause instability and 

alter flight trajectory. The rate of wobble increase is measured 

by something called nutation time constant (NTC).

In the case of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) with its 

large propulsion tank, NTC presented a considerable problem. 

With the moon as LRO’s destination, much of the spacecraft’s 

mass had to be fuel—liquid propellant in the mission’s initial 

design. “Driven by the schedule and the hardware availability, 

we had baselined a large, single tank because that worked well 

and the design was mass efficient,” said Craig Tooley, LRO 

project manager, in a video interview for the Exploration 

Systems Mission Directorate (ESMD) Integrated Collaborative 

Environment (ICE) portal. “With that came uncertainty about 

the management of the slosh during the spinning phase of the 

Delta II rocket we were on.”

LRO was scheduled for launch in the fall of 2008 for a 

yearlong mission orbiting the moon as an advance scout for 

the Constellation program’s human space flight missions. In 

early 2005, with an important design review approaching, 

consideration of the options for retiring the NTC risk became a 

paramount issue for the management team.

“As this risk became more and more likely,” recalled Tooley, 

“we were at a juncture where we decided that it was, shall we 

say, frightening us, and we needed to take it forward with fairly 

significant mitigations. This meant launching LRO with a solid 

rocket motor and reducing the need for quantity of fuel or, as 

ESMD understood the alternative option, launching LRO on a 

non-spinning vehicle.”

It was a daunting challenge at a critical juncture. As Scott 

Horowitz, associate administrator of ESMD, put it, “This one 

was so far outside the box that you could just look at it and say 

this is going to be really hard to solve or you may not be able to 

solve it without a major redesign of the spacecraft. They were 

coming into PDR [preliminary design review]. By that time, 

you want things pretty stable. You don’t want a major redesign 

of the spacecraft—that’s the time you don’t want to be changing 

your requirements unless you have to.”

How the risk was managed demonstrated a “process working 

very, very well,” said Tooley. Successful mitigation hinged 

In 1994, during its 

flight, the Clementine 

spacecraft returned 

images of the moon. 

The LRO will travel to 

the moon in 2008 and 

map the surface to help 

pave the way for humans 

to return.

Photo Credit: NASA/JPL/USGS

Managing—

and Learning from— a Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Risk By Charles Tucker

STORY | ASK MAGAZINE | 29
on open, two-way communication throughout the decisionmaking process as the risk was escalated from the project to 

the program level. It required a strategy and plan that reflected 

an enterprise risk management approach. NTC presented some 

other characteristics as well of a model “knowledge-based risk,” 

or KBR, the linchpin concept in an initiative at ESMD to 

integrate risk and knowledge management: communication was 

critical, analysis of alternatives would lead to opportunity, and 

the risk appeared late on the project timeline. It was adopted by 

Dave Lengyel, the directorate’s risk and knowledge officer, as 

the flagship example of a KBR. [See previous article.]

A launch delay for LRO was looming if the NTC problem 

could not be resolved without redesigning the craft—an option, 

Tooley said, that simply “wasn’t compatible with the time we 

had.” On the other hand, “If we actually went and carried this 

risk forward unmitigated and launched with a great uncertainty, 

the risk was the rocket flight wouldn’t follow the right trajectory 

when we got to the moon—and obviously we were never going to 

go down the path where we launched with that kind of risk.”

Carl Walz, a former shuttle astronaut and acting director for 

ESMD’s Advanced Capabilities Division, which oversees LRO as 

part of the Lunar Precursor Robotic Program, described the pressure 

on the project. “As the Vision for Space Exploration articulated, this 

is really our first big mission to the moon. We wanted to make sure 

we got out of the starting gate on time with a winner. The challenge 

was the schedule because we were trying to make the end of 2008. 

It was a very aggressive development schedule.

“We had pulled one of the best project managers in Craig and 

given him a tough task: have this thing ready to fly, and fast. We 

were concerned about schedule because when we compared LRO 

to other projects of about the same magnitude, it was clear that we 

were bucking a trend, that typically these projects took longer than 

what we were projecting. We kicked around the options: ‘Well, we 

might be okay, we might be able to solve the nutation time constant 

[with spacecraft redesign].’ But there was significant risk, and there 

was no confidence that we could find a way to deal with that.”

“They were in a bad place time-wise to handle a problem 

of the magnitude they were facing,” Horowitz recalled, “so they 

either had to make a decision to make a major design change 

to this vehicle ... or they were probably going to not be able to 

solve this problem in the time that they had to solve it, with the 

resources they had. In my opinion they couldn’t have gotten 

there from here with all the constraints.” 

The nature of the risk and the specialized analysis it required 

made mitigating NTC especially tricky. As Tooley explained 

in the ICE video interview, “Spinning spacecraft with large 

volumes of fluid is something that has been tackled, but they’re 

basically unique design problems.” LRO consulted the small 

cadre of experts in the discipline, who recommended a series of 

scale-model tests and design iterations. But there wasn’t time in 

LRO’s schedule to allow for that work.

Horowitz, a former shuttle astronaut like Walz and an 

aerospace engineer by training, explained the typical process. 

“The thing you want to do is survey everything that has gone 

before and at least envelop your problem. So we say, ‘Hey, these 

people had a problem and the mass of their tank was this high 

and their rotation rate was this high,’ and you plot all those 

points, and if you’re somewhere in there, then you have a chance 

of solving your problem. But if you look at all the work people 

have done for a similar problem and you’re here”—LRO’s unique 

position—“then you’ve got a real problem on your hands.” The 

LRO mission, Horowitz believed, needed “to find another path” 

to mitigate its NTC problem—and soon.

“As the nutation time constant risk rose in likelihood,” 

said Tooley, “we decided it warranted, independent of our 

risk-management process, discussion and decision making at 

the headquarters/directorate level. We presented the potential 

mitigation for the risk and the options for what could be done 

about it, thus enabling Scott Horowitz to make a decision.”

The solution—changing launch vehicles from a Delta II to 

the bigger Atlas V, which didn’t have spin stabilization—would 

not only mitigate the NTC risk, it would provide an unexpected 

bonus. Tooley explained how the mitigation decision process 

rippled through spacecraft design considerations, influenced 

cost, and opened the door for a secondary payload.

“One of the weighting factors was the larger launch vehicle. 

The fact that it was larger didn’t actually matter—it was that 

it had a guided third stage, not a spinning third stage. That 

Artist’s concept of the Lunar 

Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Image Credit: NASA

30 | ASK MAGAZINE
enabled us to do some simplifications of the design. We said, 

‘Well, we have a larger fairing now, how could we use this 

potential decision to mitigate some of the impacts of this 

redesign we have to do?’ [Rather than buying a single large tank 

that would have needed baffles on a Delta], now we’ll use some 

existing tanks we can get ahold of—there were actually tanks 

from the cancelled X38 programs—that we couldn’t fit in the 

Delta fairing ... and get ahead on that part of the design cycle. 

That’ll make our jump a little easier as we redesign.” In addition, 

the larger fairing allowed for the use of a more traditional panel 

solar array rather than the originally planned complex folding 

array. “We exploited all the fringe benefits of going on the larger 

launch vehicle to help reduce the risk that the redesign itself 

would impact our schedule,” Tooley said.

As the project manager described it, this was all part of the 

“calculus” done at the associate administrator level. The result of 

this calculation was not only NTC risk mitigation but the addition 

of the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS), 

a mission designed to excavate a polar crater on the moon for 

buried ice. “Our side was fairly constrained by our design, so there 

was a lot of mass margin going to go to waste. They exploited 

that opportunity to send a companion secondary payload to the 

moon to really augment the questions that LRO was addressing. 

That made the increased cost of the launch vehicle acceptable to 

ESMD, because they actually fly two missions instead of just one, 

as well as reducing the risk of the primary mission.” 

Horowitz concurred on the dual-benefit byproduct: “They 

didn’t have to do any major redesign of the spacecraft, they’re on 

schedule ... and we got a whole other spacecraft out of the deal.”

The process of retiring the NTC risk on LRO illustrated 

the importance of an underlying principle of risk and knowledge 

management integration: communication. As Tooley said, “We 

were tracking this risk as it elevated in our awareness, until it 

precipitated the discussion that we should take this forward to 

an ESMD decision level, and we said, ‘Yo, folks, we think this 

risk warrants some higher-level discussion.’” 

From the ESMD viewpoint, said Walz, the process was 

paramount. “What really stood out was the ability of the project 

to go all the way to the top and having the folks at the top be 

willing to hear the issue and entertain something as radical as 

going out and getting a brand new launch vehicle. It was the 

freedom to be able to come forward with potential solutions and 

then, given the decision-making authority, the latitude to go 

forward and accommodate another mission.”

As Horowitz recalled in the ICE interview, “What I’ve been 

real happy with on this project is the fact that the communication 

is good. People shouldn’t be afraid to escalate their risks .... 

What I have found is that ideas basically generate more ideas 

.... [That] helps you make connections to other experiences 

that you might have. By elevating it, with potential different 

solutions, it wasn’t us saying, ‘Hey, go stick it on another rocket.’ 

Somebody in the group somewhere had come up with that idea, 

and so we started probing and asking more questions and asking 

them to dig deeper, and then they basically came up with their 

own solution ... by having that open communication and not 

just saying, ‘we got a problem,’ but ‘here are all the potential 

ideas we think we have to solve this risk.’”

Earlier this year, LRO was in the middle of the integration 

phase, being prepared for thermal vacuum testing in simulated space 

conditions. The mission was on schedule for an October launch. 

The process of mitigating the NTC risk was ripe for capture 

in ESMD’s knowledge-based risk system, which is why Lengyel, 

the ESMD risk and knowledge management officer, showcased 

it on the directorate’s ICE portal as the first KBR based on a 

closed risk. When Constellation Program Manager Jeff Hanley 

projected NTC on the screen at a review as an exemplar of 

knowledge-based risk management, Lengyel was satisfied: The 

integrative approach to addressing risk, based on knowledge 

sharing, had begun to take flight. ●

Charles Tucker works with Dr. Edward W. Rogers, 

chief knowledge officer at Goddard Space Flight Center, on 

organizational learning and knowledge management initiatives 

using case studies of Goddard and other NASA missions.

They basically came up with their own solution ... by having that open

communication and not just saying, “we got a problem,” but “here are

all the potential ideas we think we have to solve this risk.”

ASK MAGAZINE | 31
For the designers of a new launch vehicle, reducing mass is a major goal and seems an absolute 

good—the lower the mass, the less energy needed to put a spacecraft in orbit. Given a choice, for 

instance, among different temperatures for storing pressurized helium on the vehicle, designers of the 

Ares 1 upper stage are likely to choose the lowest temperature option to improve performance and 

save weight. But the effects of that choice on ground operations could be extensive and expensive. 

The need to supply the extra-cold helium would add complexity and weight to the mobile launcher 

and crawler-transporter, which carry the launch vehicle from the Vehicle Assembly Building to the 

launchpad. That change could require a new kind of rock for the crawlerway that the crawler travels 

on, and that change might have its own further consequences. Looking at the mission as a whole, 

what seemed like an easy way to save 300 lbs. on the launch vehicle turns into a design choice that 

would cost $25 million in ground systems modifications.

Infusing Operability: 

KSC Launch Experience Helps 

Shape New Vehicle Design

By Pat Simpkins, Alan Littlefield, and Larry Schultz

In fact, many large and small decisions about the design of 

launch vehicles and spacecraft have profound implications for 

the speed, reliability, and cost of launch processes and other 

ground operations. Pat Simpkins, director of engineering at 

Kennedy Space Center (KSC), describes the consequences of 

such decisions as being like “the house that Jack built”—the 

nursery rhyme that describes a long chain of escalating linked 

actions. (“This is the cow with the crumpled horn,/ That tossed 

the dog,/ That worried the cat,/ That killed the rat,/ That ate 

the malt/ That lay in the house that Jack built.”) As in the case of 

the pressurized helium tank options, a single design decision can 

unleash a cascade of effects that the designer cannot foresee and 

probably does not even think about. Simpkins talks about the 

importance of “infusing operability” into the next generation 

of launch vehicles and crew vehicles by making the knowledge 

KSC has gained from decades of launch experience an integral 

part of the design discussion and decision making.

Sometimes a design that improves ground operations does 

not even require significant trade-offs from launch vehicle or 

spacecraft designers. Designers may simply not be aware that 

one of two options they see as essentially equal may in fact be a 

much better choice in regards to ground systems. For instance, 

the original design for the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) 

had access points on different sides of the vehicle, which would 

require building a second tower. Designing the vehicle with all 

the access points in one vertical line will save many millions of 

dollars and reduce complexity. The integrated design team at 

KSC worked with the CEV designers to relocate the hatch and 

eliminate the need for the second tower at the launchpad.

Alan Littlefield, chief engineer for the mobile launcher (a 

transportable launch base), says that KSC has always tried to use 

what it has learned from decades of launch experience to steer 

design teams in the right direction, but ground operations rarely 

played an extensive official role in the design process in the past. 

That is changing with the Constellation program, adds mobile 

launcher project manager Larry Schultz. He says that operations’ 

contribution to the design process for the new Ares launch vehicle 

and Orion crew vehicle is “ten times what it was for the shuttle.”

KSC’s direct involvement in design discussions and its ability 

to question design ideas is new and important. The technical 

32 | ASK MAGAZINE | INSIGHT
The crawlerway, in the foreground, still bears the 

tracks of the crawler-transporter that delivered 

Space Shuttle Endeavour to Launch Pad 39A, in 

the background.

Photo Credit: NASA/Ken Thornsley

ASK MAGAZINE | 33
and budgetary challenges of the Agency’s new space exploration 

goals make it essential to apply all NASA’s best experience-based 

knowledge to the design of new vehicles and spacecraft. The 

cost and reliability of the new technology throughout its life 

cycle—design, manufacture, and many launches—need to be 

considered up front and inform design choices.

The future missions being planned now will call for quick 

turnarounds and back-to-back launches to support the in-orbit 

rendezvous of cargo and crew vehicles. Among the important 

strategies for improved operability will be designing vehicles that 

require minimal testing on the launchpad and will be as close 

as possible to ready to fly when they reach the pad. The Space 

Shuttle requires six to eight weeks of testing and preparation on 

the launchpad; the goal for new vehicles would be only a week 

or two on the pad. 

Cutting the current time that dramatically would have 

several clear advantages. It would mean less exposure to the 

elements—think of the hail damage that delayed Atlantis’s

STS-117 mission. And, if problems do arise during preparation 

and testing, they can usually be handled better in the Vehicle 

Assembly Building, which has better analytical facilities and 

better access to all parts of the vehicle than the launchpad.

Not all of KSC’s recommendations are adopted, of course, 

but Littlefield says that decisions are at least made with an 

understanding of the overall economic and operational costs. 

And sometimes the discussions leading to decisions that go 

against KSC’s recommendations generate new ideas and better 

designs that help improve performance or reduce costs. The 

discussion about supplying the Ares 1 upper stage vehicle with 

helium for pressurization considered, among other things, raising 

the helium to a higher temperature to reduce the effects of cost 

and weight on the mobile launcher. Ultimately, that option was 

not chosen, but the conversation eventually led to a design that 

provided the lowest practical helium temperature and promised 

improved performance at reduced cost. ●

Pat Simpkins is the director of engineering at Kennedy Space Center.

Alan Littlefield is the mobile launcher chief engineer, with twenty-three years of 

experience designing and testing ground support equipment, launch systems, and test 

equipment and facilities.

Larry Schultz is the program manager for the mobile launcher.

An artist’s rendition of an Ares I rocket at Launch Pad 39B at 

Kennedy Space Center. The pad, previously used for Apollo 

and shuttle launches, will be modified to support future 

launches of Ares and Orion spacecraft.

Image Credit: NASA

The future missions being planned now will call for 

quick turnarounds and back-to-back launches to support

the in-orbit rendezvous of cargo and crew vehicles.

34 | ASK MAGAZINE
From its ignominious beginnings to its triumphant redemption, the story of the 

Hubble Space Telescope is known around the world. What is less well known is the 

story behind the story—the elements that made Hubble’s ultimate success possible.

Applying the Secrets 

of Hubble’s Success 

to Constellation

By Frank J. Cepollina

Artist’s conception of astronauts preparing for extravehicular activity from the new Crew Exploration Vehicle.

Image Credit: NASA

STORY | ASK MAGAZINE | 35
In 1990, I waited impatiently with the rest of NASA for the 

first images from the marvelous new Hubble Space Telescope 

to be released. Then came the bad news: spherical aberration. 

Simply put, the much-touted space telescope had blurry vision. 

The embarrassment was excruciating as the world came to know 

Hubble as the $1.6 billion “techno-turkey.”

This would have been the end of the story—and possibly 

the end of NASA as we knew it—had it not been for the forwardthinking designers of both Hubble and the Space Shuttle. You 

see, Hubble and the Space Shuttle were on the drawing boards 

at the same time, and managers realized that on-orbit servicing 

by the Space Shuttle could regularly enhance and upgrade the 

space telescope. 

Fortunately, both Hubble and the shuttle were built with 

servicing in mind. The shuttle got a robotic arm for rendezvous 

and capture, and Hubble was built with two grapple fixtures 

and astronaut-friendly handholds, latches, and modular 

instruments that could be changed out during spacewalks. 

These were the features that allowed astronauts to fit the space 

telescope with the corrective lenses that saved Hubble’s vision 

and NASA’s reputation. Since then, Hubble has become a 

phenomenal scientific success story with major astronomical 

discoveries being made in rapid succession, servicing mission 

after servicing mission. The public appreciation of this type of 

science exploration has also been very gratifying.

Looking back over the past fifteen years, I believe that 

four major elements made this success possible: developing 

architecture, bringing fresh technology to orbit, looking 

toward the future, and collaborating. As we move forward with 

Constellation, these are the things that should keep NASA on 

the path to success.

Architecture

I define “architecture” as the collection of hardware, individuals, 

and facilities needed to achieve major goals. History has taught 

me that the architecture needs to be developed in conjunction 

with transportation systems and astronaut capabilities. Trying 

to retrofit an in-space servicing capability to concepts and 

hardware for which it was not originally planned costs time, 

money, heartache, and additional risk. 

Modularity is the heart of serviceability and the secret to 

project cost-effectiveness. When you build subsystems and 

systems as clean, separate modules with minimal mechanical, 

electrical, and thermal interfaces between them, you’ll see how 

much more quickly they can be integrated and tested, and 

how much money that saves. At Goddard Space Flight Center, 

modular spacecraft were designed and flown on several missions, 

including Solar Max, Compton Gamma Ray Observatory 

(GRO), Landsat 4 and 5, Extreme Ultra-Violet Explorer, Upper 

Atmosphere Research Satellite, Ocean Topography Experiment/

Poseidon, and several Department of Defense missions. In these 

programs, modularity reduced mission integration times by as 

much as half. Since integration and testing costs account for onethird of program cost, a 50 percent reduction in the integration 

and testing times results in significant program cost savings. 

For most scientific and Earth operational programs, proper 

architecture is the most significant factor in limiting project 

costs. Solar Max, Weststar, Palapa, Syncom IV, GRO, and 

Intelsat VI were all repaired and put back into operation without 

a separate servicing investment during development. Not one 

dime was budgeted for satellite servicing.

From time to time as new programs are initiated, study 

managers comment that incorporating servicing into their 

design would drive up the design cost. This is because they are 

working with designs that do not take advantage of modularity. 

Experience shows that these designs are inherently more 

expensive, both because of the longer integration and testing 

times and the fact that they are not easily and quickly repairable 

on the ground, let alone in orbit.

When we began designing modular, serviceable systems to 

take advantage of the new shuttle space transportation system 

way back in the seventies, we kept intensively focused on the 

shuttle development to make sure it had the scars (mechanical 

and electrical interfaces) needed for spacecraft servicing. 

Accommodations for servicing by the transportation system 

are vitally important. That’s why the development of future 

spacecraft systems—including transportation systems—

must maintain coordination and remain conscious of and 

communicate each other’s needs. 

Fresh Technology to Orbit

On-orbit servicing of satellites such as Hubble dramatically 

accelerates the rate of scientific discovery by bringing 

instruments with the newest and freshest technology to orbit. 

Astronauts service the Hubble 

telescope during a spacewalk.

Image Credit: NASA

36 | ASK MAGAZINE
As new technology becomes available, spacewalking astronauts 

fit Hubble with the latest, most advanced instruments and 

replace components that would otherwise wear out and limit the 

telescope’s life. Each visit increases the telescope’s capabilities by 

at least a factor of ten. On the fourth servicing mission, scheduled 

for later in 2008, we are taking two instruments to orbit that 

have twenty to twenty-five times more observing power than 

the instruments we’re bringing back home. 

If you have the ability, whether with robots or the 

Constellation crew vehicle, to carry things to your orbiting 

facility, you can make changes, upgrade, service, repair, recover, 

and rescue. And if you manage carefully, you can take brand 

new technology to orbit on a planned, periodic basis. Things 

wear out. Technology becomes outdated. The ability to upgrade 

is a real asset, because technology for items such as detectors, 

optics, electronics, computers, and communication systems 

continues to get better exponentially. As we have learned through 

Hubble and on-orbit servicing, you can keep your astronomical 

observatory or other satellite at the cutting edge, useful, and 

relevant, to address the latest scientific questions.

The Future

As an agency, we must think ahead. If, as many of us believe, the 

Constellation architecture is capable of more than just ferrying 

people from Earth’s surface to the International Space Station 

or the moon, then let’s start thinking now about how to modify 

and augment Orion to make in-space servicing possible. A 

grapple arm fixture and a storage location to carry reasonably 

sized instruments can be designed into Orion now. Trying to do 

it ten years from now, when the hardware is built and moving 

out to Cape Canaveral, will be too late and too expensive. If the 

investment is already being made for transportation now, let’s 

make sure the capabilities for servicing are there, too.

Every NASA program and project manager—including 

those on the Constellation program—must look toward the 

future as they prepare hardware so they can take advantage of 

systems as they come online. Think through what you want 

your systems to be doing ten to twenty years into the future. 

If you cannot modify the elements of your architecture to 

achieve all the goals that you want in space, at the very least 

do not preclude the potential for upgrading later. Allow for 

expandable architecture.

Although there are no plans for servicing Hubble after the 

2008 servicing mission, we’re going to be attaching a soft capture 

mechanism to the aft end of the telescope. At a minimum, 

this will allow some type of robotic or human rendezvous and 

docking and for Hubble de-orbiting. A grapple fixture is going 

to be installed on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) 

even though there are no plans to service or upgrade it. What 

if our capabilities change ten years into the future and JWST 

has a problem? At least there will be something onto which a 

robot or a manned vehicle can connect during a rendezvous 

docking and repair attempt. Even if we are not going to service 

these satellites in orbit, we should make them modular so we can 

replace power systems, communication systems, and detector 

systems simply during ground integration and testing.

In the case of the Crew Exploration Vehicle, we have been 

making the point for designers to provide attach points and the 

capability of controlling robotic systems from the vehicle. Cargo 

storage provisions need to be added to the service module. If you 

can’t design your architecture with a general-purpose, widely 

applicable system, at least design it so it can be easily upgraded 

in the future. Think about the future now and don’t make the 

future hostage to the decisions you make today. 

By the same token, observatories need to be designed with 

higher degrees of modularity. It makes no sense to bury a fine 

guidance telescope control system in the middle of an instrument 

or instrument cluster. Think of what that does to program cost 

when one has to remove and reintegrate the science instrument 

to repair a failed control system component on the ground, let 

alone in orbit. NASA Administrator Michael Griffin said, “It’s 

For most scientific and Earth

operational programs, proper 

architecture is the most significant

factor in limiting project costs.

ASK MAGAZINE | 37
dumb to put big money in big systems that cannot have their 

lives extended, serviced, and repaired if necessary.”

The future has a claim on the present. There’s an enormous 

penalty to be paid for lack of foresight. 

Collaboration

The Hubble Space Telescope project, through its engagement 

with multiple NASA Centers and contractors, has been best 

served by the “collaborative relationship” and “badgeless 

society” approaches to project management. In a collaborative 

relationship, everyone on the team works together in a nonthreatening atmosphere. This approach encourages inclusion and 

the realization that coworkers are all part of one NASA family, 

and it attracts the best of the best technologists from around 

the world. In a badgeless society, multimember teams work side 

by side, and those with the best, most appropriate skill sets lead 

particular aspects of the job, irrespective of center or company 

affiliation. These two approaches to project management are 

particularly equalizing, empowering, and effective.

For example, during the development of new solar arrays for 

the first servicing mission, the European Space Agency (ESA/

Estec) encountered difficulties in testing bi-stem shields to the 

rigors of solar space environment. To solve the problem, we 

went to Glenn Research Center to develop a special ultraviolet/

free atomic oxygen test facility, and they conducted a series of 

evaluation tests. Eight years later, when we were developing rigid 

gallium arsenide arrays for Hubble Servicing Mission 3B, we 

went to ESA/Estec because they had developed a large-diameter 

solar-illuminated thermal vacuum facility (the best in the world) 

to test a new array for thermal-induced jitter.

It is important to avoid the common pitfalls of multicenter 

participation, with assignments of center efforts based on their 

technical merits. Partners should coordinate and communicate 

information and requirements but not direct how the work is to 

be done. We have to shun short-sighted tendencies, including 

insisting that “it has to be done my way”—getting hung up 

on the “how” and losing sight of the “why,” the shared goal. 

Centers have to earn and establish trust in each other, and center 

directors have to take ownership of the partnering activity. 

By forging multicenter strategic alliances, partners gain 

access to the unique strengths of the centers. These symbiotic 

relationships offer experience that no one center can achieve. 

Strategic technologies enable each center to develop and advance 

unique technologies, so they can be offered to other centers. 

Communication is the key to collaborative success. Each center 

needs to communicate its strategic technologies, and through 

communication and trust, centers must eliminate center-tocenter divisiveness and needless competition. In addition, 

program offices must avoid stovepiping tendencies that further 

hinder the application and advancement of new technologies 

across the Agency. 

From Hubble to Constellation

Time is running out. Constellation is moving ahead. It’s like 

a train that’s moving faster and faster down the track. It’s 

time we hop on and start providing trailblazing missions that 

demonstrate the usefulness of these new systems. We can and 

must apply the lessons learned from Hubble to Constellation. 

This doesn’t have to be expensive. For example, a pathfinder 

can demonstrate that you are adding mechanical bolt-down and 

electrical interfaces (scars) to Orion so it can be used for repair 

and servicing in the future. 

We did it with shuttle, we can do it with Orion. It’s just 

a question of whether or not we have the willpower, common 

sense, and foresight. ●

Frank J. Cepollina serves as deputy associate director for the Hubble Space Telescope 

Development Project at Goddard Space Flight Center. He is 

known as the “Father of On-Orbit Servicing” for his decades of 

leadership in repairing and upgrading satellites in orbit. He has 

received several awards for his leadership and efforts, including a 

NASA Exceptional Achievement Award (1985), NASA Outstanding 

Leadership Medal (1993), the 1994 National Space Club Eagle 

Manned Mission Success Award, and the Space Logistics Medal 

(2005) from the International Society of Logistics. In 2003 he 

was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

A soft capture mechanism will allow the new 

Crew Exploration Vehicle to capture satellites.

Image Credit: NASA

38 | ASK MAGAZINE
“Every time we do something again, we should do it better than the last time” has become a familiar 

refrain. It means the knowledge gained from experience should be used to improve performance of 

the next similar task. Why doesn’t that happen as often as it should? For one thing, project teams 

don’t always understand what they’ve done right (or wrong). Teams are often unable to repeat their 

successes because they have little insight into what worked well the first time. Individual reflection 

is unlikely to arrive at a full understanding of the team’s work, with its multiple interwoven elements. 

Without time to reflect, teams may repeatedly make the same mistakes and carry them forward as 

members move on to other projects. 

Harvesting Project Knowledge 

By Nancy M. Dixon and Katrina Pugh

INSIGHT | ASK MAGAZINE | 39
Even when a project team does analyze its processes 

successfully—maybe through an after-action review, or “hot 

wash”—the knowledge gained seldom gets to other teams that 

can use it. Many organizations struggle unsuccessfully to share 

valuable knowledge between projects. Little-used lessons learned 

databases and project reports that are filed and forgotten are 

familiar artifacts of these efforts. 

We have developed a process we call “facilitated 

knowledge harvesting” that we have carried out in a number of 

organizations. This approach, piloted at a large semiconductor 

manufacturer, has helped the company speed knowledge 

collection and transmission and improved the likelihood that it 

gets productively reused. 

The harvesting process involves five important steps 

(though, as the examples show, two steps may overlap or coincide 

to some extent):

1. Select projects for knowledge harvesting. The selection 

process is important because only projects that are likely 

to generate knowledge that can be profitably applied to 

other valuable projects can justify the investment of time 

and talent that harvesting requires.

2. Plan the harvest cycle from pre-work through capture and 

reuse. Planning involves both logistics and stakeholder 

identification. Who should be part of the harvest? When 

it comes to knowledge originators (those who have 

gained the knowledge through their work), it’s best to 

have deep subject-matter expertise and comprehensive 

knowledge across the project, or “big picture” people in 

the harvest. When it comes to seekers (those who could 

use the knowledge), the most obvious beneficiaries are a 

team preparing to do a similar task in a different context 

or teams encountering a similar context, even when their 

task is different. 

3. Discover and capture valuable knowledge. This entails 

bringing together the knowledge originators and seekers 

either virtually or in the same room and facilitating a 

conversation that roughly follows the agenda developed 

during the plan. Importantly, the facilitator draws out 

both the seekers, who ask questions, and the knowledge 

originators. Reflection by the originating team is the first 

and most significant step in achieving reuse by other 

teams. Unless the originating team understands the basis 

for its own successes and failures, it will not be able to 

provide accurate, clear, and translatable lessons for others.

4. Broker or transfer the knowledge through systems 

and directly to seekers. Tag and publish the knowledge 

harvest documents in an appropriate knowledge 

repository. In a study of knowledge transaction costs, 

Prusak and Jacobson (2006) found that 38 percent of 

these costs lie in simply eliciting knowledge from experts. 

Importantly, the harvest process involves facilitating 

connections between knowledge originators and seekers 

at the harvest as well as other potential reusers of the 

harvest insights who may not have been present during 

the event. These intentional connections greatly reduce 

time spent eliciting knowledge. 

5. Reuse the knowledge. Teams engaged in similar tasks, 

or working in a similar context, use the knowledge to 

carry out their own work. Prusak and Jacobson found 

that 46 percent of knowledge transaction costs lie in 

adaptation, largely because knowledge was “thrown 

over the wall” with little context added. Knowledge 

harvesting encourages seekers to reuse the knowledge 

and help draw out the context from the knowledge 

originators. Even reusers who do not attend the harvest 

event get the benefit of rich contextual information that 

facilitates adaptation.

Based on our research and practice, we found that success 

in eliciting and reusing knowledge relies on a vital mix of these 

three ingredients:

1. Facilitating knowledge harvest

2. Engaging knowledge seekers

3. Brokering the knowledge

Facilitating Knowledge Harvest

The facilitator steps in when knowledge originators cannot 

always see the relevance of their own knowledge. The 

facilitator helps to identify potential seekers of the originating 

team’s knowledge. Finally, the facilitator helps transport the 

knowledge to others who could use it.

Facilitation is crucial to bringing important knowledge 

to the surface, putting it in a meaningful and useful form, and 

communicating it to potential reusers. An effective harvest event 

environment encourages participants to speak concretely, avoid 

blame, withhold judgment, and ground their assumptions in shared 

meaning. When team members, aided by a skilled facilitator, reflect 

together on their work experience to derive lessons for themselves, 

confidence and comprehension both increase.

For example, a semiconductor manufacturer has endeavored 

to maintain performance standards across fabrication plants. 

The company deployed veteran managers from an established 

“fab” to a new plant during its start-up phase. The challenge was 

to help the new plant operate smoothly when the veterans left. 

Facilitators conducted a knowledge-transfer event for veterans 

and new managers. The facilitation elicited a deep discussion 

about judgment and non-intuitive plant behavior, concepts that 

were beyond the written manuals. 

40 | ASK MAGAZINE
Engaging Knowledge Seekers

The facilitator guides the conversation, but the seekers have a 

vested interest in the outcome and a practical understanding 

of what they need to know. A few prompts from a facilitator 

can often launch a very effective knowledge transfer. Seekers 

have the opportunity to focus discussion on the knowledge 

that matters to them and to explore those ideas until they 

understand them. 

When knowledge seekers are engaged in the harvest, the 

likelihood of harvesting the most important knowledge and of 

having that knowledge put to use is increased. At the harvest 

event, the knowledge originators comprise a “panel,” with 

seekers in the audience. Seekers include members of other project 

teams, as well as methodology keepers, training developers, 

and marketing authors. Because seekers are motivated by selfinterest, they ask extended questions and think about adaptation 

costs. The harvesting event brings out important nuances and 

meanings, not just recitations of “here’s what I did.” As a result 

of the harvest, teams are not only emboldened to reuse the 

knowledge but also more effective at using it.

Here’s an example. Pharmaceutical companies carry out a 

multiyear development process that goes from original research 

through in vitro testing, animal testing, clinical testing, FDA 

approval, launch, and marketing. At any one time, several teams 

will be at different phases of that multiyear process. At one large 

pharmaceutical company, a team that had just completed the 

FDA approval stage met with a team working on a similar drug 

category that was preparing to enter that phase. The originating 

team was able to transfer up-to-date knowledge about the social, 

political, and regulatory factors they experienced in their review 

that had implications for the type and detail of the data the 

approval would require. Bringing together originators and seekers 

in this knowledge harvest shortened the product development 

cycle, not only for this phase but for many other phases as well.

Brokering the Knowledge

Both the facilitator and the seekers become “brokers” of the 

knowledge gained in the harvest, acting as intermediaries who 

bring the knowledge to others. The seekers take knowledge into 

their worlds—of projects in process, methodologies, training 

or marketing materials—and transfer it through participation, 

direct outreach to colleagues, and publishing.

At a technology-consulting firm, a knowledge seeker–

turned-broker, who was responsible for project methodology, 

learned about a new approach to measuring data center power 

consumption during a harvest. The seeker went beyond the 

agenda of the harvest and probed the originating team’s innovative 

measurement experience with his questions. What he learned 

allowed him to package the methodology for subsequent data 

center power-management projects at different clients, saving 

considerable time in the assessment phase of subsequent projects. 

“Live” harvesting sessions zero in on the knowledge people 

really need and allow for the back-and-forth conversation that 

creates genuine understanding and helps potential reusers adapt 

the originators’ expertise to their own needs. It also benefits the 

expert panel members, who often get insight into their own work 

in the process of explaining it and also learn from seekers—active 

knowledge exchange almost always goes in both directions.

The Power of Connection

What makes the harvest better than more familiar efforts to 

capture knowledge in lessons learned databases or reports is the 

interpersonal component. By adding adroit facilitation, engaging 

seekers in the harvest, leading ongoing interpersonal knowledge 

transfer, or “brokering,” knowledge gets into circulation and 

improves the way we do our work. Knowledge harvesting 

requires an investment of time and skilled personnel, but it 

actually works. Knowledge harvesting is less about capture and 

more connection and conversation. ●

Katrina Pugh is technical program manager and WW 

knowledge management consultant with Intel Enterprise Solution 

Sales (ESS), responsible for knowledge harvesting, communities 

of practice, and knowledge management tools implementation. 

Previously, she performed strategy and technology consulting 

for fifteen years, with a focus on knowledge management and 

business process redesign.

Nancy M. Dixon is an author and consultant working with 

clients to create effective ways to hold knowledge conversations. 

She is the author of eight books, including Common Knowledge 

and The Organizational Learning Cycle, as well as more than fifty 

articles that focus on how organizations learn.

“live” harvesting sessions zero in on

the knowledge people really need 

and allow for the back-and-forth

conversation that creates genuine

understanding and helps potential

reusers adapt the originators’ 

expertise to their own needs.

ASK MAGAZINE | 41
Title

By 

Intro

What would you do if you were a scientist and 

had just been told by the safety authority that you 

can only search above the ocean for the science 

data that you can only get over land?

To

or

A UAV Science 

Project Story

By Tony Kim

Stay

42 | ASK MAGAZINE | STORY
The Altus in flight.

Go? Photo Credit: NASA

ASK MAGAZINE | 43
What would you do as a project manager who has already spent 

twice the analysis budget when the analyst asks for another 

chunk of change so he might be able to give you a partial answer 

to meet requirements that seem to be a moving target? 

This was our dilemma in the spring of 2002. I was the 

project manager of the three-year Altus Cumulous Electrification 

Study (ACES) from beginning to end. It is rewarding to start 

and finish a project successfully, but this one could easily have 

been terminated if back-up plans had not been available and 

ready for use. 

The Mission

ACES was a science experiment to investigate thunderstorms 

using an unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV. At the time, the UAV 

was a new technology that could make a significant and unique 

contribution to the study of lightning and thunderstorms. Its 

measurements could be linked to global processes to provide an 

improved understanding of the total earth system. Part of the 

NASA-sponsored, UAV-based science demonstration program, 

the ACES project objectives were

• To conduct high-quality research that exploits a UAV’s 

unique capabilities 

• To demonstrate the utility and promise of UAV platforms 

for earth science

• To build confidence in UAV platforms 

• To identify mission planning and operations unique to a UAV

• To advance UAV operations in national air space

The decision to select the Altus UAV from General Atomics 

Aeronautical Systems was based on a number of factors, including 

the maturity of this aircraft system, its performance capabilities 

and proven flight record, and the successful integration and 

flight of a developmental version of the ACES payload on 

Altus in September 2000. In addition, Altus was an electrically 

quiet platform, ensuring that the thunderstorm measurements 

could be readily achieved. Slow flight speed coupled with long 

endurance and high altitude flight gave the Altus aircraft the 

ability to be maintained continuously near thunderstorms for 

long periods of time so investigations could be conducted over 

entire storm life cycles. 

The only limitations encountered during the campaign 

were significant maintenance issues associated with the Altus, 

arising in large part because it was flown near the edge of its 

operational limit. The potential for maintenance problems was 

acknowledged even during the proposal development phase, 

and some issues did arise during the mission. Clear flight rules 

defined by General Atomics helped ensure safe operations, 

though. One rule, for instance, was to maintain altitude so that 

the UAV could glide back to the runway if it lost engine power.

Seeking Flight Approval

Patrick Air Force Base at Cape Canaveral was the primary 

deployment site identified in the ACES proposal. It was selected 

first for the unique ground-based lightning measurement 

systems located at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. Second, 

we believed that deploying at Patrick, with easy access to the 

Eastern Test Range and restricted coastal airspace, would ease 

the FAA approval process. We didn’t foresee the problems that 

ultimately led to a “no-fly” decision from Patrick. 

Predeployment planning and activities (extending back to 

the proposal development stage) progressed smoothly. From its 

inception, ACES closely coordinated with the Joint Planning 

Customer Service Office (JPCSO) and followed its procedures. 

JPCSO was established in concert with Spaceport Florida 

Authority, Patrick, and Kennedy as a “one-stop shop” for Cape 

Canaveral Spaceport services. Since the office was new, though, 

the working relationships between the various Patrick and 

Kennedy organizations that it represented were not always well 

established. In fact, this new model for working with customers 

may have been a source of animosity or conflict between some 

of those organizations.

Initially, JPCSO believed that the Altus could be treated 

like a conventional aircraft with respect to airfield operations 

and control. They thought the Eastern and Western Range 

(EWR 127-1) Safety Requirements for rockets would not be 

applied and the role of the Patrick Range Safety Office would 

be minimal. However, range safety interest and involvement 

in the project increased steadily following ACES selection and 

Both an early bad decision

based on insufficient data

and a well-informed decision

made too late can damage

a project.

44 | ASK MAGAZINE
authority to proceed. Ultimately, the difference in views between 

range safety and JPCSO led to our making a presentation to 

the Patrick commanding officer in December 2001. A major 

factor in the commanding officer’s decision was a suggestion by 

the judge advocate general that the commanding officer of the 

airfield was responsible for the UAV while it was on the base and 

during all phases of flight. 

As a result of this meeting, the commanding officer 

commissioned range safety to “make this mission safe.” If he 

had said, “make this mission work and keep it safe,” the final 

result might have been different. I feel that mission success 

must always be mentioned along with safety. If safety is the only 

objective in the challenging type of work that NASA does, we 

might as well just stay home.

This decision placed the ACES project under EWR 127-1 

requirements that the Altus could not fully satisfy. Discussion 

about tailoring requirements to suit the ACES project did not 

lead to substantive negotiations. Patrick Range Safety believed 

there was not enough data to make those changes and remained 

most comfortable viewing the UAV within the rocket paradigm 

they knew well. A number of issues made it difficult or impossible 

to get beyond this impasse:

• The project could not meet the level of aircraft 

documentation EWR 127-1 required. The fact that 

General Atomics was at first reluctant to reveal that 

they did not have some of the information we requested 

compounded the problem.

• The Altus had a number of single-point failures that 

could not be easily or acceptably remedied. At the top of 

the list was not having a fully redundant and adequately 

documented flight termination system. 

• Patrick Range Safety lacked knowledge and experience 

about the turbulent and electrical thunderstorm 

environment and failed to consult experts in aircraft 

flights in and around thunderstorms.

Some suggestions for mission operations that proved 

unfeasible emerged during the discussions with range safety. 

One, ocean-only flights, was scientifically unacceptable. The 

installation of a redundant flight termination system (FTS) 

or a fully qualified FTS was technically feasible, but cost and 

schedule prohibitive. It also became clear that the activation and 

coordination of the Range Operations Control Center or an 

independent range operations center would be imposed on ACES 

operations, a scientifically, operationally, and financially impractical 

requirement. The open-ended discussions, with no clear indication 

of convergence, tended toward “paralysis by analysis.” 

Seeing “the writing on the wall” at Patrick, we investigated 

a number of alternate deployment locations that would satisfy a 

reduced set of science goals: other commercial Florida airports, 

Eglin Air Force Base, Mayport Naval Air Station, and Naval 

Air Facility Key West (NAFKW). The likely availability of 

other sites and the lack of progress in our discussions at Patrick 

made it fairly easy to request a final decision from Patrick 

Range Safety, although the principal investigator was initially 

reluctant, not wanting to give up the highly desirable groundbased lightning imaging system available at Kennedy. (ACES 

was run in PI mode, giving the principal investigator ultimate 

authority on major project decisions.) But the many restrictions 

to flight operations being levied on the mission convinced the 

principal investigator that a decision should be made by Patrick 

Range Safety without further analysis. The ACES project 

sought a final decision from Patrick and received a definitive 

no-fly decision in April 2002.

Our experience at Patrick taught us some important lessons:

• Establish responsibility and liability early. In the case 

of ACES, had General Atomics Aeronautical Systems 

been considered responsible and liable for operations in 

National Air Space, the Patrick approval process might 

have been eased (particularly if it was determined that 

EWR 127-1 need not be applied). 

• Document the aircraft system as well as possible. 

Possessing redundant systems as well as key safety features 

such as collision avoidance systems also imparts obvious 

advantages, particularly in having the UAV aircraft treated 

more like a conventional aircraft. On this point, schedule 

and funding limited ACES’s options.

• Obtain an on-site advocate at the appropriate level 

to serve as a spokesman and represent the interests 

of the project. The JPCSO could conceivably serve in 

this capacity (and probably will do better in the future 

as this organization matures). For ACES, a Kennedy coinvestigator with a stake in the project and a working 

knowledge of the local organizations would have proved 

beneficial. 

• Attempt to obtain direct access to the decision makers. 

One problem ACES encountered at Patrick was having few 

opportunities to deal directly with the individuals making 

the key decisions. This made it very difficult to present 

our case and more directly participate in the decisionmaking process. This was probably the most frustrating 

part of our experience at Patrick.

A New Deployment Site

The no-fly decision allowed the ACES project to focus its full 

attention and resources on obtaining an acceptable alternate 

deployment site. Steve Wegener, the UAV science demonstration 

program manager who had oversight of ACES and another UAV 

ASK MAGAZINE | 45
Tony Kim has worked at the Marshall Space Flight Center 

for eighteen years. He is currently responsible for the advance 

capability and technology development for the Deep Throttling 

Engine, a liquid oxygen and hydrogen expander closed cycle 

rocket engine with throttling capability for safe and soft landing 

on the moon.

Photo Credit: NASA

The ACES UAV is worked on before flight.

project, suggested we investigate the Naval Air Facility Key 

West. It provided the best science opportunity in Florida outside 

the Kennedy area, with excellent weather and ground-based 

instrumentation infrastructure. It offered the best opportunity 

for project success, since the FAA felt that it would be the easiest 

place for them to give us a certificate of authorization approval 

for flight. It also helped that the NASA-sponsored Crystal-Face 

project to investigate cirrus clouds had established contacts there 

and was planning to conduct their campaign from NAFKW 

in July. Exemplifying the “OneNASA” principle, Crystal-Face 

helped ACES slide in behind its campaign.

NAFKW treated the Altus UAV like any other aircraft 

flown from their facility. The Marshall Space Flight Center 

aircraft safety officer contacted his counterpart at NAFKW 

and addressed safety issues in one phone call. The NAFKW 

aviation safety officer was satisfied on the condition that an FAA 

certificate of authorization would be established prior to flight. 

This interaction typified our relationship with NAFKW. The 

distribution of responsibility and authority to the chief officers 

and on-site contractors made it easy to get things done. We 

readily developed a memorandum of agreement (MOA) with 

NAFKW for the ACES project using the Crystal-Face MOA 

as a model. Good communication among all parties involved 

made a huge difference.

ACES’s well-defined project and implementation planning 

had been the basis of its competitive selection. Our final proposal 

included a detailed implementation plan, work breakdown 

structure, and schedule. Throughout development execution, the 

project team maintained a clear understanding of the facilities, 

logistics, expendables, and schedule required for success. When 

unexpected and ultimately insurmountable problems developed 

at the proposed primary deployment site, our comprehensive 

plan and schedule gave us the flexibility, time, resources, and 

clarity of purpose needed to make a successful transition to a 

scientifically acceptable alternative deployment site. 

The critical point in the project was our request for a final 

decision by Patrick Range Safety. It is obviously not desirable 

to base important decisions on insufficient data, but acquiring 

information takes time and resources—not making a decision 

because you think you don’t know enough has its own costs and 

consequences. Both an early bad decision based on insufficient 

data and a well-informed decision made too late can damage a 

project. Given our difficulties at Patrick, our decision was fairly 

clear-cut, but it did take time to get buy-in from all interested 

parties. Fortunately, we made a decision early enough to allow 

us to recover to a site that was not as scientifically desirable as 

Patrick but was good enough to accomplish most of our science 

objectives. We all have to make such decisions in a project, 

assessing risk, resources, and schedule in light of project goals. 

Knowing when to make key decisions is part of what makes 

project management as much an art as a science. ●

46 | ASK MAGAZINE
Technological Progress 

from User Necessity

By Svetlana Shkolyar

New specialized tools that improve existing processes or address new issues can make space launch 

preparations more effective. Developing those innovative technologies is the mission of the Applied 

Physics Lab (APL) at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, but users influence the design of the tools and 

decide which ones will actually be used. 

One example is the external tank (ET) vent hood alignment tool, 

used to align the vent positioned on the ET tip. This “beanie 

cap” prevents ice that might damage the orbiter during launch 

from forming on the vent. Engineer Jorge Rivera enthusiastically 

accepted it for use because he recognized that it would align the 

vent more safely and quickly than the existing process. Before the 

tool was available, technicians worked while strapped inside the 

hood—a hazardous operation that took as long as eighty hours. 

With the tool, alignment can be quickly and safely performed 

from outside the hood, not only before external tank propellant 

loading, but also with a loaded tank when a launch is scrubbed. 

Despite management’s concern that it needed additional 

capabilities, Rivera immediately saw its value.

A tool that aids the crucial task of leveling an orbiter in the 

orbiter processing facilities after missions was also in demand 

because the access platform system could damage a vehicle that 

is not perfectly level. The user, a NASA contractor from the 

United Space Alliance named Mike McClure, recognized the 

need for an improved leveling tool. 

This improved orbiter jack and leveling system is memorable 

because, when funding was tight, the users and APL took the 

idea to the Kennedy shuttle processing chief, Michael Wetmore, 

and fought for it together. “Development of the improved orbiter 

jack and leveling system is an outstanding example of how groups 

from different organizations with different responsibilities can 

work together to achieve a goal even in times of tight funding,” 

remembers Charles Stevenson of the Shuttle Chief Engineers 

Technician Steve Parks of Arctic Slope Regional Corporation is testing the 

vacuum of the WET tool. This Plexiglas sheet has holes drilled into it to simulate 

Photo courtesy Svetlana Shkolyar

the waterproofing holes on the shuttle tiles. 

INSIGHT | ASK MAGAZINE | 47
Office. McClure worked “hand in hand” with the lab to 

develop it, remembers Dr. Robert Youngquist, who got the APL 

running in 1989. Without McClure’s support, technically and 

politically, the system would never have been built.

“The idea for such a system came about many years ago, but 

no one was willing to champion it until I came into the group,” 

said McClure. “That is usually what makes or breaks a good 

project: a champion. You have to be willing to keep pushing.”

It is clear why he was so determined. The orbiter needs 

to be raised accurately to the height of the servicing platforms 

by jacks installed forward and aft, an operation that requires 

precision within one-eighth inch. The previous method of using 

calibrated measuring sticks consumed time, cost, and labor, and 

it was hazardous to tile safety. “It took 25 percent longer than 

with either of our laser systems,” recalls McClure. “From a timesaving standpoint, the laser systems were significant, especially 

when you add up the number of technicians and quality control 

inspectors involved with our operations.” 

The system uses Leica laser rangefinders positioned at the 

four corners under the jacks and transmits the height readings to a 

central computer. It is a vital tool for the orbiter’s safety that would 

not have come about without the push from McClure’s group.

The water extraction tool (WET), a vacuum system for 

drying multiple orbiter tiles, is “a case where hardware is needed 

for contingencies,” said Dr. Youngquist. The tool was designed 

to remove water from orbiter tiles after the March 2001 Atlantis

orbiter mission, which was rained on after landing at Edwards Air 

Force Base in California. WET is five times faster than the method 

used for Atlantis, which was dried by heating it with infrared 

lamps. It efficiently prevents launch delays and tile damage during 

ascent to the 20,000 tiles covering more than 180 square meters on 

the orbiter. The tool now dries 150 tiles in two hours, not days as 

before, by vacuuming water out through the needle holes in each 

tile that are used to inject a waterproofing compound. 

The vacuum system also makes use of the facility’s vacuum 

cleaning system instead of using extra power for heat lamps. It 

allows faster temperature recovery, easier tile access, and clearer 

water flow visibility. “The Thermal Protection System team 

laughed when we first demonstrated the system; it was so much 

easier to use,” recalls APL physicist Stan Starr. 

Photo courtesy Svetlana Shkolyar

Quality assurance inspector James Allen Atwell is using the fuel hole 

inspection device to look into a nozzle in the Orbiter Processing Facility bay 2.

According to Youngquist, 

“the best case is when the end 

user wants to work with you 

and develops a vested interest” 

in making a tool.

48 | ASK MAGAZINE
The team approved of the tool, but after it was developed, 

tested, and delivered, they “kindly asked us to keep our 

hardware,” recalled Youngquist, because shuttles are rarely 

rained upon. But in August 2005, Discovery landed at Edwards 

and encountered almost two inches of rain. “When users want 

something, things can move very quickly,” said Youngquist. A 

request for the tool was sent to the lab; within two weeks, WET 

was being used in the field. 

Another APL technology that would not have made it into 

the field without the user’s active involvement was the Reaction 

Control System, or RCS, nozzle inspection tool. This checks 

the RCS for defects, which cost millions of dollars to remake 

and repair. The tools are made of Teflon to limit damage to the 

orbiter surface. “We worked closely with the inspectors and gave 

them a machined Teflon glove and a Teflon mirror tool with a 

mirror and eyepiece. It went through a few versions until they 

were satisfied that it met all their needs,” said Youngquist. 

The RCS nozzle inspection tool replaced a flashlight and a 

boroscope tool, which were time consuming to use and failed 

to meet the desired capability. Today, three RCS tools are 

used at four sites, including the White Sands Test Facility that 

refurbishes thrusters. 

Just as NASA Orbiter Maneuvering System engineer 

John Peters “took a hands-on interest” in the RCS project, 

Robin Floyd, lead window inspector, took a similar interest in 

developing the surface light optimizing tool (SLOT). SLOT 

saves money and time by efficiently highlighting tiny defects 

on orbiter windows. It took the lab only a few days to make 

a small plastic tool that attaches to the window via a suction 

cup and uses total internal light reflection with a prism to trap 

light in the glass. The light escapes at defects, showing the 

smallest damages to the windows, caused by micro-meteors, as 

bright points. Developing a tool with a large mirror makes the 

inspection “like looking through a big picture window,” recalled 

SLOT quality inspector James Atwell.

Floyd conceived the idea for SLOT independently but had 

no means of fabricating it on his own; he teamed up with APL 

and jointly produced the tool when a “meeting of the minds 

occurred,” said Youngquist. 

As a result, fourteen SLOT devices were delivered during 

the 2005 fiscal year and hundreds of potentially risky defects 

that the previous approach did not find were located. The 

SLOT will soon be adapted for use on the International Space 

Station and the Constellation project, which hopes to send the 

Ares I and V crew and cargo launch vehicles to the moon and 

Mars. It is now in its fourth generation. 

In all, more than forty pieces of hardware have been 

developed at APL to assist shuttle program operations in the 

nineteen years of the lab’s operation. According to Youngquist, 

“the best case is when the end user wants to work with you 

and develops a vested interest” in making a tool. He adds, 

“Technology is a function of how ardent the customer is on 

getting the product; it is need and personality driven.” No one 

knows better than the user whether a particular tool will make 

his work easier and better. Listening to the customer is one 

important secret of successful technology development. ●

Some of this content was originally published on Space.com, for the 

Institute of Engineering Technology, and in NASA Kennedy Space 

Center’s Spaceport News.

Svetlana Shkolyar was a student intern at Kennedy Space 

Center in 2007 and is currently a master’s student in science 

communication at the University of Florida. She has a bachelor’s 

degree in physics and hopes to write about leading achievements 

in science.

Photo courtesy Svetlana Shkolyar

Four Leica laser rangefinders for the Improved Orbiter Jack and Leveling System.

ASK MAGAZINE | 49
X-Teams for Innovation

By Deborah Ancona and Henrik Bresman

For more and more companies in today’s hypercompetitive business environment, success depends on 

the ability to innovate and put innovations to productive and profitable use. For those companies—

and for government agencies, nonprofits, school systems, and other organizations facing their own 

innovation challenges—the question is how do you actually create an infrastructure of innovation? 

How do you establish the conditions that produce breakthrough innovation—not just once, but 

again and again? 

50 | ASK MAGAZINE | INSIGHT
Years of research (ours and others’) show that the real action takes 

place at the team level. This realization is not new. The hard 

part is to put in place teams that emerge as reliable engines of 

innovation. How do you actually do it? We offer one eminently 

practical answer: X-teams.

Fact: Especially in large, complex organizations, the most 

important work—including the critical work of generating 

new products and services—is done in teams. That will not 

change anytime soon.

Fact: Most of our thinking about what makes a team successful 

is focused on internal dynamics; for instance, on how team 

members interact, how they structure their work, how they 

resolve their differences.

Fact: Some of the most provocative research on team performance 

indicates clearly that a team can work well “on the inside” 

and still not deliver results. In other words, in the real world, 

“good” teams often fail.

What Is an X-Team and What Makes It Special?

Numerous research studies comparing high- and low-performing 

teams—including sales teams, product development teams, and 

consulting teams in the computer, software, pharmaceutical, 

and financial services industries—enabled us to develop the 

X-team model of high-performing teams. 

An X-team combines and integrates high levels of external 

activity with extreme execution inside the team, hence the name. 

While most teams engage in some degree of external activity, 

X-teams view such activity as central to their mission, their mindset, and their modus operandi. “Going outside” is a top priority 

from the day the team comes together. Like other project team 

members, members of an X-team are selected because they have 

the necessary content expertise, process skills, personality, and 

motivation to work together “on the inside.” But they are also 

chosen for their ties to other individuals and groups that can help 

the team achieve its goals, whether inside or outside the company.

X-team external behaviors are illustrated by the Razr team 

at Motorola. By the late nineties, Motorola, the communications 

industry juggernaut, had fallen off track. The former cell 

phone industry trailblazer was lagging behind more nimble 

Scandinavian companies like Ericsson and Nokia, and even 

Korean players like Samsung and LG. The problem was that, 

like many of its historically successful peers, Motorola had grown 

into a giant and had become, as Yankee Group analyst John 

Jackson put it, “the stodgy, engineering-driven, Midwestern 

company that was Motorola.” Meanwhile, the competition had 

become exponentially smarter and more aggressive. Motorola’s 

future looked bleak.

Along came the Razr team. Razr was a team on a mission: 

it would develop a cooler and sleeker phone than anything the 

world had seen. Cool and sleek was nothing new, but this team 

planned to produce a phone that would surpass anything that 

had come before, a veritable “razor” of a phone. Adding to the 

technical challenge, the team faced a competitive climate in 

which so-called smartphones—offering a multitude of functions 

such as e-mail and Internet browsing—were all the rage.

The challenge of bucking industry trends was matched with 

what the team was up against at Motorola itself. As other teams 

had discovered, Razr found that the team’s great ideas, vision, 

and engineering brilliance was not enough. Somehow the team 

had to find a way to get the resources it needed to push through 

a big, unorthodox, and expensive project in a large, orthodox, 

cash-strapped organization. The answer? The team engaged in 

three core external activities: scouting, ambassadorship, and 

task coordination. 

An X-team’s external activity takes the form of scouting 

for new ideas, opportunities, and resources. This might mean 

conducting a survey, hiring a consultant, interviewing customers, 

spending a day “googling” the competition, or just having 

coffee with an old college professor. The Razr team faced real 

technical challenges. A complex design required complicated 

technological footwork. Team members started by looking at 

what other teams had done before them. They looked not only 

at what had worked and what had not worked but also at what 

had been discarded. The team solved a number of technological 

challenges, like mounting a camera on a tiny phone and 

ASK MAGAZINE | 51
developing a keypad that was etched directly onto the phone, by 

repackaging existing technologies developed—and sometimes 

discarded—by other teams. Furthermore, scouting the market 

convinced them that simple functionality and cool design, very 

different from the smartphones of many competitors, was a 

niche that was waiting to be filled.

Another critical external activity is ambassadorship, meeting 

with management to gain support, sponsorship, and protection 

from potential internal opponents; to acquire funding and 

other resources; and to keep the team’s work tightly connected 

to the company’s strategic imperatives. The Razr team engaged 

in ambassadorial activity by finding a match between its 

product idea and top management’s desire to shift Motorola’s 

stodgy image. They also worked with top management to “gain 

air cover” for the team and its program so it could short-cut 

bureaucratic procedures, eliminate political interference, and 

move quickly through product development. 

Finally, working externally involves task coordination, 

engaging with other individuals and groups inside and outside 

the company to get feedback, identify critical resources, and 

convince or cajole others to help get the task done. Razr had to 

engage in task coordination. Finding a home in the system of 

manufacturing and marketing set up for very different kinds 

of phones was not an easy feat. Nevertheless, by working with 

other teams, figuring out the interdependencies, and making 

some compromises (while refusing others), Razr pulled it off. 

The end result? The Razr design became the best-selling cell 

phone in the world. With its killer margins, the product was credited 

with turning around Motorola at a crucial time. Unfortunately, 

circumstances unrelated to the Razr project prevented the company 

from diffusing X-team practices into its culture. 

X-teams blend high levels of external activity with “extreme 

execution” inside. They follow well-established guidelines for 

building the collaborative culture, a transparent decision-making 

structure, and open information processing/communication 

systems necessary to make full use of outside ideas and resources, 

and they keep the work moving forward.

An X-team’s external and internal activities go on 

concurrently, with changing emphases, through a series of 

flexible phases that shift with the work requirements. An 

X-team initially explores the environment to figure out what 

customers want, what the competition is doing, what top 

management will support, and where resources can be found. 

By going outside from the very beginning, the team establishes 

the critical importance of an external focus and innovation 

begins by bringing new eyes to a problem. For example, when 

an IDEO design team was redesigning an emergency room, they 

put a camera on a patient’s head for ten hours. After watching 

ten hours of ceiling they realized that their design would need 

to expand to the ceiling.

Acting on the results of its initial exploration, and placing 

somewhat greater emphasis on internal activities, the team then 

moves quickly to prototype, test, and modify an innovative 

new product or service that will exploit the most promising 

opportunity. For example, when a team at Microsoft decided 

to create new software for the Internet generation, they tested 

multiple prototypes with potential customers and redesigned 

multiple times based on their feedback. They worked quickly 

to get other parts of Microsoft to help them in the redesigns. 

Finally, the team shifts operating mode again, this time to 

export the innovation to the larger organization for full-scale 

implementation. The same Microsoft team spent a great deal of 

time getting others at Microsoft Messenger excited about their 

software approach. 

How to Make X-Teams Work: 

5 Success Factors

1. Choose team members for their networks as well as their 

personality, skills, and compatibility with others.

2. Make external outreach a mind-set and modus operandi 

from day one.

3. Provide tools, such as checklists, to help teams focus on 

external activities as well as the internal process.

4. Set milestones and deliverables to keep teams moving 

through exploration, exploitation, and exportation.

5. Work with top management to get their commitment to 

work as a partner to help establish a context to make 

X-teams work.

52 | ASK MAGAZINE
Another critical external activity is ambassadorship, 

meeting with management to gain support, sponsorship, 

and protection from potential internal opponents; 

to acquire funding and other resources; and to keep the team’s

work tightly connected to the company’s strategic imperatives.

As an X-team moves through these cycles of activity, its 

members move across the team’s core, operational, and outernet tiers, changing roles as needed. The team also periodically 

adds and subtracts members as new linkage and/or expertise 

is needed. This exchangeable membership—along with such 

activities as scouting, ambassadorship, and task coordination—

has the added result of simultaneously reinforcing the team’s 

connection to the larger organization and extending the reach 

of the team’s innovative thinking. Thus, the Microsoft X-team 

not only created a new social networking product for “netgen” 

users but also became the driving force behind a new model for 

customer-inspired software development. 

In other words, X-teams are not only highly successful at 

achieving their own task, they are also highly effective agents of 

change and innovation across the larger organization.

Making It Happen: Putting X-Teams to Work 

in the Real World

X-teams can be systematically set up, trained, coached, and 

replicated. In all, around 100 X-teams have been trained at MIT 

Sloan’s Executive Education program with input from the MIT 

Leadership Center. 

At BP, for example, X-teams have delivered a variety of 

breakthroughs, including new ways to manage the company’s 

huge oil/gas exploration projects across the world. At Merrill 

Lynch, X-teams have produced everything from new interest 

rate volatility indexes to a foreign exchange hedge fund index to 

an entirely new and very successful distressed equity business. At 

Vale, the Brazilian mining company, X-teams have been trained 

to play a key role in taking the company global and integrating 

newly acquired companies.

These are examples of real success. Before setting up a 

comprehensive X-team program, however, it is important to 

recognize the careful planning and substantial support it requires. 

Important success factors include consistent commitment from 

top management and a solid launch, ensuring that everyone 

involved at all levels of the organization commits to the goal of 

the program and the work needed to get there. Another critical 

factor is ensuring that team efforts are celebrated and that all the 

X-teams’ hard work is put to good use.

In X-Teams: How to Build Teams That Lead, Innovate, 

and Succeed (Harvard Business School Press, 2007), we detail 

how X-teams have driven innovation at companies as diverse 

as Microsoft, BP, Merrill Lynch, Vale, Procter & Gamble, and 

Southwest Airlines. Extrapolating from these examples, we also 

provide detailed guidelines for managers who want to set up an 

X-team, for X-team leaders themselves, and for senior executives 

who want to use X-teams as a powerful tool to establish a 

distributed leadership model companywide.

There is no doubt that X-teams work. There is also no 

doubt that making them work can be complicated for senior 

management and taxing for team members. In deciding whether 

the potential benefits justify the effort, consider the words of 

Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, 

committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only 

thing that ever has.” That is the essential message and truth 

behind X-teams. ●

Henrik Bresman is assistant professor of organizational 

behavior at INSEAD. 

Deborah Ancona is Seley Distinguished Professor of 

management at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and faculty 

director of the MIT Leadership Center. 

ASK MAGAZINE | 53
The Knowledge Notebook

Authors Who Make a Difference

By Laurence Prusak

When I was twelve or so I fell in love with science 

fiction. It was a short but intense love affair lasting 

about three years, but its consequences are still 

very much alive within me. I was brought back to 

this early passion recently by reading some of the 

many obituaries for Arthur C. Clarke, certainly 

one of the mainstays of my science fiction reading 

agenda, and also the one author among the many 

that I read who had, and will continue to have, a 

lasting effect on our collective imaginations. Let 

me elaborate a bit.

It is now established that there was a “golden 

age” of science fiction that lasted from the years 

of the early cold-war period to, ironically, the 

launching of Sputnik and the creation of NASA. 

This period saw the transition of the genre from 

a mainly lowbrow fixation on “bems” (bug-eyed 

monsters to all you non-aficionados), published 

in rags such as Weird Tales, to stories of real 

sophistication and philosophical impact. This was 

the glory period of Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, 

Theodore Sturgeon, and many others who wrote 

for Galaxy and began to publish their books with 

more mainstream publishers.

Their wide-ranging influence was facilitated 

by the arrival of the paperback book—cheap 

editions, often with elegant covers, that brought 

to the masses (and the young) the works of these 

wonderful writers, including the last them to 

die—at 90: Arthur C. Clarke.

Fifty years after the fact I can still recall 

the pleasure and stimulation (are they different 

phenomena?) I received when for a mere quarter 

I could buy a spanking new edition of Clarke’s 

Childhood's End—a book still very much worth 

reading. I was not alone in this love. I had several 

friends who were equally transfixed. We even went 

to conferences in New York devoted to science 

fiction. We were real fans. The science fiction 

fandom, along with the writers and publishers, 

formed a community of interest—sort of an early 

blogging community without the technology. And 

this brings me to the major point I want to stress. 

What was being created, absorbed, and 

disseminated in those golden days was an 

overall narrative consisting of many stories that 

revolved around the belief that science and 

technology were not only inherently fascinating 

but would one day bring spectacular changes in 

all the ways we live, work, and think. Some of the 

specific developments they imagined have come 

about. Clarke himself was the first to describe 

the possibility of communication satellites in 

geosynchronous orbits—the basis of global 

communication that we almost take for granted 

today. Some developments they missed entirely: 

no one predicted the small, ubiquitous computers 

that are such an integral part of contemporary 

life. Some of their imaginings—bubble-covered 

cities, high-speed moving sidewalks, robots 

indistinguishable from humans—are still in the 

realm of science fiction. But underlying all those 

particular stories was the narrative of technological 

transformation. 

Clarke formulated three laws of prediction 

that expressed his belief in the almost unlimited 

potential for technological innovation:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist 

states that something is possible, he is almost 

certainly right. When he states that something 

is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

54 | ASK MAGAZINE
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is 

to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable 

from magic.

Even in retrospect we can’t measure the impact of this 

narrative in any exact way. Yet I think we’d all agree that this 

belief had a huge influence on my life, yours, and many other 

lives, including people of power who have acted on these beliefs 

in the policy arena. Some of you may have come to work for 

NASA or other aerospace organizations in part because science 

fiction inspired a love of space flight and space exploration. The 

Apollo astronauts’ landings on the moon and NASA’s robotic 

exploration of other planets in the solar system are realizations 

of dreams dreamt by those science fiction writers. The impact 

of stories can be more wide-ranging than their authors imagine. 

Those cheap paperbacks had far more influence than many 

hardcover books that climbed the best-seller lists of those years 

and many weighty tomes of academic research and opinion.

My love affair ended as abruptly as it began. I began to 

read what I was led to believe was more “serious” literature and 

began to take a strong interest in history and the more human 

of the social sciences. Reading science fiction would have been 

considered “uncool” among my college and grad school friends, 

to say nothing of those professors whom we looked up to as role 

models. I can see now how much fluctuating fashion plays a 

role in what ideas get taken up and how ideas and the narratives 

that carry them along are subject to all sorts of forces that have 

little to do with their intrinsic merits. All those wonderful scifi authors from the golden age surely have the last laugh as we 

live at least some aspects of the life they foresaw—some of the 

wonders they described and some of the evils they warned us 

about. How wonderful that at least Clarke lived long enough to 

see it happen. ●

The impact of stories can be more

wide-ranging than their authors

imagine. Those cheap paperbacks

had far more influence than many 

hardcover books that climbed 

the best-seller lists of those

years and many weighty tomes of 

academic research and opinion.

ASK MAGAZINE | 55
ASKinteractive

For More on 

Our Stories

Additional information 

pertaining to articles 

featured in this issue can 

be found by visiting the 

following Web sites:

• Juno Mission:

http://juno.wisc.edu/

• Lunar Reconnaissance 

Orbiter Project: http://

lunar.gsfc.nasa.gov/

• Gravity Recovery and 

Climate Experiment 

(GRACE): http://www.

jpl.nasa.gov/missions/

current/grace.html

feedback

We welcome your comments on what you’ve read in this issue of ASK and your suggestions for articles you 

would like to see in future issues. Share your thoughts with us at http://appel.nasa.gov/ask/about/write.php.

Learning and Exploration

Learn about NASA’s past and future projects with NASA 101, an online interactive Flash module 

that takes you through the journey of space flight NASA has embarked on for the past fifty years. 

Summaries of past and future missions, centers, and directorates as well as the inspiration, 

innovation, and discovery NASA has stimulated are all available in one visually stunning package 

that includes movies, short film clips, and interactive models of space and flight vehicles. Visit NASA 

101 and learn more about the Agency and its achievements and aspirations at http://www.nasa.gov/

externalflash/nasa101/index.html.

Web of Knowledge

NASA’s Science Mission Directorate recently launched a new Web site that provides enhanced and 

engaging information about NASA’s scientific endeavors and achievements. The site will provide 

in-depth coverage of NASA’s past, present, and future science missions with features that include 

the following: 

• Interactive tables and searches for Earth, heliophysics, planetary and astrophysics missions 

• Insight into dark matter and dark energy, planets around other stars, climate change, Mars, and 

space weather

• Resources for researchers, including links to upcoming science solicitations and opportunities 

• A citizen-scientist page with access to resources that equip the public to engage in scientific 

investigation 

Visit the new NASA science Web site at http://nasascience.nasa.gov.

NASA in the News

In April, Professor Stephen Hawking, one of the world’s foremost cosmologists and astrophysicists, spoke 

about “Why We Should Go Into Space” as part of NASA’s 50th anniversary lecture series. “What is the 

justification for spending all that effort and money on getting a few lumps of moon rock? Aren’t there better 

causes here on Earth? In a way, the situation was like that in Europe before 1492,” said Hawking. “People might 

well have argued that it was a waste of money to send Columbus on a wild goose chase. Yet, the discovery 

of the new world made a profound difference to the old. ... Spreading out into space will have an even greater 

effect. It will completely change the future of the human race and maybe determine whether we have any future at all.” The talk 

included a segment from his daughter Lucy Hawking, who is a journalist and novelist. For a full transcript of Professor Hawking’s 

talk, visit http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/223968main_HAWKING.pdf. You may also watch a video of his presentation at http://mfile.

akamai.com/18566/wmv/etouchsyst2.download.akamai.com/18355/wm.nasa-global/Future_Forum/hq_stephen_hawking.asx.

56 | ASK MAGAZINE
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