By Matthew Kohut Suppose you had to design a door within a lunar lander module that would shield the crew habitat from solar activity during a moon mission. Assuming this isn’t already your day job at NASA, how would you begin to devise a solution?
By Svetlana Shkolyar What do the rocket scientist Dr. Wernher von Braun, 1950s television programs and magazine articles, and an emerging corporation focused on the human settlement of Mars have in common?
By Barry Goldstein The Phoenix Mars mission was born of failure. Like the mythical Phoenix bird that rose from the ashes of the previous generation’s Phoenix, the mission was born out of the “remains” of earlier attempts.
By Stephen A. Cook Organizations are like people—sometimes it takes a major shock or a disaster to change their behavior.
By Angelo “Gus” Guastaferro Why take responsibility for a major foul-up on a project outside your area of expertise that started before you were on the scene? Here’s one story that may answer that question.
By Kerry Ellis The pursuit of space science does more than reveal new facts and spawn new theories about the universe and our place in it.
By Rob Manning On July 4, 1997, half an hour before Pathfinder was scheduled to enter the Martian atmosphere, we had just finished the transition from Earth control to fully autonomous control: the spacecraft was now responsible for its own actions.
As told to Matthew Kohut by Butler Hine and Mark Turner When Pete Worden took over as the center director at Ames Research Center, one of the charters he came in with was to inject low-cost ways of doing spacecraft development into NASA as an agency.
By Joe Kerwin We who were not test pilots were delighted when NASA announced it was going to hire scientist-astronauts, that is, people with PhD or MD degrees that might prove useful in space flight. We didn’t think too much about what NASA’s plans were in detail. We just went for it.
