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James Barrowman on Defining Requirements

Ask OCE — February 8, 2006 — Vol. 1, Issue 3   “It’s the wrong thing to be doing,” I told the Director of Engineering, trying to head off a last-minute change in our X-ray Timing Explorer (XTE) project.

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Message from Chief Engineer — Defining Engineering Excellence

Ask OCE — February 8, 2006 — Vol. 1, Issue 3 By Chris Scolese When Administrator Griffin selected me to serve as Chief Engineer, my mandate was clear: to improve engineering by incorporating technical excellence and engineering authority into the day-to-day engineering processes for all of NASA’s activities. Since Columbia, we have learned and grown […]

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This Week in NASA History — Space Shuttle Challenger: 20 Years Later, Normalizing Deviance Remains a Problem

Ask OCE — February 8, 2006 — Vol. 1, Issue 3   January 28, 1986 is a day etched in the memories of everyone associated with NASA at the time. The impact of the Challenger disaster was not confined to NASA, of course; it was a national tragedy. The loss of the seven-person crew on […]

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Modeling the Way We Work

Ask OCE — February 8, 2006 — Vol. 1, Issue 3 by Maarten Sierhuis, Ames Research Center   NASA projects are inherently collaborative efforts. There are no solo ventures. Many require the work of hundreds, if not thousands, of individuals over the course of their life cycles. Anyone who tries to track all the moving […]

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Stardust Returns, New Horizons Takes Off

Ask OCE — February 8, 2006 — Vol. 1, Issue 3   Four days after a capsule from the Stardust explorer successfully returned to Earth from a seven-year journey of almost three billion miles, the fastest spacecraft in history began a three billion mile trip of its own to Pluto. The Stardust capsule landed as […]

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