Category — OpenDiscussion

First up is an article at OpenLangley about the NASA 360 program. NASA 360 is a video podcast tying NASA’s past, present, and future to the daily experience of people everywhere. Please have a look and leave comments and feedback over at the OpenLangley site.

Next is a really good post over at OpenNASA about specific ideas to work towards a more open and transparent NASA. The author covers NASA internal communication, NASA external communication, and information sharing. He gives specific problems, shows the effects, and proposes solutions. Many of these problems, if not all, affect Goddard.

And last is a second article from OpenNASA with a presentation about NASA’s planned return to the Moon called “Why the Moon?” (Rivers included this link in his weekly email a few weeks back). There’s a good discussion going on over there about it. Check it out!

The last month has seen a round of headlines about Hubble’s data-transmission failure and NASA’s repairs. The telescope went into safe mode in late September, just few weeks before the last Shuttle servicing mission was scheduled to launch. Everything was brought successfully back online this week, and a new photo was released on Thursday. This work was done out of GSFC, and congratulations to the team for getting the telescope back up and running!

Being an engineer (on a hiatus), I find it an interesting process by which people are able to diagnose and repair problems onboard a spacecraft they can’t see or examine. Reading about the Hubble makes me wonder if the engineers working on it feel a little like the Car Talk guys: trying to figure out what’s wrong with a car based on “There’s this noise from the under the hood” or trying to figure out how to fix your spacecraft based on the telemetry saying “Here’s some data you didn’t expect”. Although Hubble was a high-profile example, most missions end up having some type of problem that needs fixing once on orbit. Most of these issues don’t make news, and that’s probably a good thing. But problem-solving of all sorts is a vital part of what NASA does every single day.

Of course problem-solving happens every day in every field, but the Hubble repairs do highlight how good GSFC and NASA have to be at it. I worked on Terra (EOS AM-1) back in early 2000. There was unexpected thruster impingement on the solar panel, which took weeks to figure out. I was only a witness to the problem’s identification and solution, being just lowly co-op student at the time. But being able to watch that process unfold was invaluable to me as a student and as engineer. It was also one of my favorite projects that I worked on over my seven years at Goddard.

Being a part of OpenGoddard shows that you are a problem-solver as well. What are some of your favorite or most creative solutions that you’ve seen at Goddard?

Anyone else paying attention to the candidates’ views on NASA for this election?

If you are, maybe you’re like me and just want to laugh.  Is it just me, or does everyone seem to be changing their minds?  (the following description is more a summary of what I think I’ve read over the past few months rather than any sort of real analysis)

Back when McCain was wrapping up the nomination and Obama and Clinton were still resolving things, it seemed like the space community was generally more supportive of McCain.  After all, there were indications that Obama was going to delay the Constellation Program in order to pay for education initiatives.

Over the following months, there was a shift in Obama’s stance on NASA.  As of a week or so ago, he seemed to be the most supportive of NASA, providing detailed space policies on his website and indicating that he is going to support giving NASA more money to aid the transition to Constellation.

Now, over the past few days, McCain seems to have taken up the cry to support NASA.  On Friday, he spoke in Florida and indicated that he was also going to give NASA more money!

I don’t get it.  Is this just a battle for Florida votes?  Or are these real shifts in how the candidates view NASA?

FYI, you might want to check out the Obamanauts website at http://obamanauts.org/.  There’s some interesting info there, including a comparison of the two candidates’ space policies.  I don’t know of any similar group on McCain’s side of the aisle.

This article was published in Monday’s NY Times, on the front page of the print edition and of the website. It’s not about Goddard but is rather about the five-year hiatus that will happen for US manned space missions between the time when Shuttle is meant to be retired and when the new crew vehicle is operational.

Although this story doesn’t affect Goddard directly, it does pose some interesting questions. One thing that came to my mind was this: What would happen to Earth and space science missions if the new President decides to extend the Shuttle program, but also wants to continue to focus NASA resources on a return to the Moon? I don’t want to suggest that manned spaceflight isn’t important; it is, and I believe it is wrapped up in how we define ourselves as a nation. Ending one program well before its replacement is ready seems shortsighted, but that’s the situation we are in. And it could have consequences to other work being done not just at Goddard but NASA-wide.

That said, I was happy to see this story have such a prominent place in a widely-read paper like the Times. I imagine with NASA’s 50th anniversary this month that there will be more NASA stories than normal out there. I was a little disheartened that it was only the fourth-most emailed science story, though. But that sounds more like a topic for OpenNASA…

This week, I shared a post written by Loretta Whitesides at the WIRED blog: http://tinyurl.com/NASAhope

If you haven’t read it, I highly encourage you to do so. She takes the structure of Barack Obama’s acceptance speech but applies it to NASA. I read this entry to the OpenGoddard group at the beginning of our discussion.

What I got out of the discussion is that it can be really tough for folks to be inspired and excited on a day to day basis. Folks want to feel like they’re making a difference, and many are in positions where they don’t feel like they get to do that particularly often! Folks aren’t connected to any sort of big vision for our organization that would inspire them and help them see how their job is contributing to the world!

For those who weren’t there, I asked folks to think about what percentage of time they are really excited about what they’re doing at work, and what they’re doing at these times. Then, take a look at what it would take to increase this percentage, and take some action to increase it! Kind of a fun game to play! We’ll try to revisit it in a couple of weeks - or post comments here to share your experience!

Last week at our OpenGoddard Roundtable, we had a chance to get some insight into what the Office of the Chief Knowledge Officer does. We spent some time looking at a case study where a spacecraft was damaged during what seemed like a fairly routine process.

I struggle a bit with these exercises. I mean, yeah, looking at it now, it is easy to say “well, duh, of course he/she should have done this or that.” Hindsight is 20/20, after all! The real challenge is to have the foresight to realize that you have a problem BEFORE the accident happens! To be fair, people see and correct future problems all the time - but it only takes one accident to screw something up!

So the real question is (and the challenge of this office), how do you take lessons learned from a variety of failures (and near-misses) and turn that into knowledge that can be passed on to other projects so that these problems don’t happen again?

My gut says that most of the time these issues feel mostly like cultural issues, specifically in the way that people communicate. Just today, I heard the Chief Engineer say that he’s reviewed dozens of mishap investigation reports, and every one of them says something about communication. Where does this come from? Do we not take communication seriously at NASA? Are we just not trained in proper communication? Do we have unique challenges that we haven’t solved yet in this area?

What do you think?

We had a variety of discussions this past Tuesday, but the one I found the most interesting was around the perceived difference in how scientists and engineers determine peers’ reputations.

The original point was that it seems like when scientists are introduced (like at a colloquium), there’s a certain emphasis placed on the degrees they’ve earned and the academic institutions where they completed these degrees. On the other hand, when engineers are introduced, the emphasis is all on their experience and which missions or projects they’ve worked on during their professional careers. I think this difference is intriguing - why exactly do the two different cultures emphasize different types of experience?

We went on to talk about the engineering world, where this perspective permeates reviews. In other words, it seems that anytime a question comes up from someone outside the project being reviewed, it must be preceded by “back on mission ___…” It seems that other opinions aren’t really valued, and we get stuck in the trap of “well, if it hasn’t been done before (i.e. ‘heritage’), then it can’t be done on this project.”

Seems like a really interesting engineering cultural phenomenon to me! Do you see this happening? Do similar things happen in other fields?

As I’ve been thinking about what OpenGoddard’s been doing, I’ve realized how difficult it is to share what’s going on with all the people who have shown interest in the group. Specifically, we’ve had some really interesting Tuesday Roundtable discussions, and I’ve been trying to figure out (1) how to increase awareness of the kinds of topics that are coming up and (2) create a way for these ideas and perspectives to spread outside of OpenGoddard itself.

In thinking about this, I realized that this website/blog would be a good place to post a quick summary of our ideas, and not only would it allow folks who can’t make the discussions to see what’s going on, but it would also provide a way for people to leave comments and to build on those ideas.

My goal is to blog once a week about the Tuesday Roundtable discussion. Now since I have some catching up to do, I’ll have to summarize the topics to date pretty briefly. I promise that I’ll be very careful to post in a way that doesn’t jeopardize anyone’s privacy. Also, I’ll make every attempt to be clear about what in the post is my opinion versus the general opinion of the group. If anyone else would ever like to blog about a particular discussion, please let me know!

So, to try to capture some of my favorite ideas so far…

We talked about the new science building at Goddard that is under construction and had a general concern that it doesn’t seem right that civil servants automatically get the nice offices and contractors get the crap that’s left over. It makes more sense to organize offices in such a way that people who work together are close to each other!

We’ve talked a lot about collaboration, about the CoLab efforts at the agency, and about the various tools and organizations trying to figure out how to increase collaboration. How do you create a culture in which people want to work together?

We’ve heard that Google lets employees take 4 hours per week to work on whatever they want and that this time stimulates some awesome creativity and really cool projects! Perhaps we could do that at Goddard!

We love what the Center has done in terms of putting forward the effort to put together a blueprint for our future. Yet somehow it doesn’t seem to be catching on. People don’t seem to believe in it yet.

We’ve talked about how NASA hasn’t had one big unifying goal since the Apollo program, and that’s how we’ve ended up with four different missions all fighting for the same pot of money. Not very effective!

Anyway, that’s the two cent version of some of the things that have come up! If you’re at Goddard, stop by our Tuesday Roundtable discussions! Also, please leave comments and feel free to discuss things here too!