ASK Magazine

By Jon Verville, Patricia Jones, and Mark Rober   How Does a Wiki Work? The NASA workforce is hungry for ways to improve collaboration. Wikis can help—and are helping—to do that.

By Haley Stephenson   Opening the International Space Station under normal circumstances is challenging. Doing it during the third-costliest hurricane to hit the United States is another story.

By Glen A. Robertson One hundred years from now there will exist technologies that today’s science fiction writers have yet to dream of. Many of these technologies will come from theories, ideas, and concepts that are laughable today.

Supplying oxygen is only one of many life-support necessities for human spaceflight, but it’s obviously one of the most vital.

By Don Cohen   Currently a professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Jeffrey Hoffman flew on five shuttle missions as a NASA astronaut, including the first Hubble repair mission. He also served as NASA’s European representative for four years. Don Cohen spoke with him at his […]

By Jim Hodges   The first time Mark Sirangelo saw the model on which Sierra Nevada’s Dream Chaser is based, in 2005, it was in the corner of a huge hangar at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. “It was covered with dust and other things I’d probably better not mention,” said Sirangelo, who […]

By Danielle Wood, Heidi Davidz, Donna Rhodes, and Maria So   How do NASA’s systems engineers develop the skills they need to think effectively about the complex systems they develop? How do people outside formal systems-engineering roles improve their ability to see connections across subsystem and organizational boundaries? What can NASA management do to facilitate […]

By Russel Rhodes   There is more to a ballistic rocket than hardware and software. Think about all the fluids required to power its systems.

By Daniel Andrews It’s 3:30 a.m. on Saturday, August 22, 2009. My cell phone rings. As the project manager for the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS), I was used to sleeping with the phone near my bed ever since launch.