ASK Magazine

The Inventions and Contributions Board works closely with the NASA General Counsel each year to help determine and fund the NASA Invention of the Year.

By James Wood The New Horizons mission encountered an issue with the Atlas V booster RP-1 fuel tank four months before launch — a remarkably complex problem that involved NASA Headquarters, Safety and Mission Assurance, NASA Engineering and Safety Center, and the folks at Lockheed Martin who designed the system.

Hugh Woodward Sometimes a delay is the best thing that can happen to a project. While I was program manager, funding problems that slowed and threatened to cancel our plans to improve the efficiency of our paper manufacturing processes gave us time to prototype and test new technologies repeatedly.

By Kerry Ellis Many project managers tout communication and collaboration as important elements for building a successful team. But what happens when an ocean separates team members? Tougher still, what if you throw in a few different languages?

By the SEED Team with Don Cohen In 1999, Becky Derro had been a mechanical engineer at Goddard Space Flight Center for seven years and was lead mechanical engineer on COR-1, a coronagraph that is part of the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) mission, when she decided that she wanted to try something different.

Question To keep your project on schedule, you need prompt decisions or approvals from a manager who often seems unavailable.

By Laurence Prusak How comfortable do you feel sitting at your desk reading a book related to your job or your area of expertise? I mean sitting in plain view, reading most of the day, and not answering your phone or responding to e-mail or instant messages.

From time to time, the editors will offer brief reviews of books they believe will especially interest ASK readers. Here are descriptions of two books, very different from one another, that we admire.

E-mail and virtual workspaces are important contributors to knowledge exchange in large, dispersed organizations, but face-to-face conversation adds essential depth and richness to collaboration, knowledge sharing, and trust creation. Here are three brief examples of how these conversations can be encouraged.