Back to Top
Sustaining NASA’s Safety Culture Shift

By David G. Rogers It’s been more than twelve years since I flew planes on and off aircraft carriers. One flight in particular literally changed my life. I was the aircraft commander and was flying with my squadron’s executive officer, who was two pay grades above me but had limited experience flying this particular aircraft […]

Read More
Democratizing Knowledge at NASA and Elsewhere

By Thomas H. Davenport A couple of years ago, I assigned a case study on NASA’s approach to knowledge management to several teams of MBA students as a final exam.

Read More
CompanyCommand: A Professional Community That Works

By Dr. Nancy M. Dixon The term “community” has become ubiquitous—everything from list serves to “MySpace” has been tagged a “community.” The kind of community I describe here is one whose members are dedicated to mutual growth and development—so I might label it a professional development community.

Read More
Space Mission Excellence Program: Launching Systems Engineers at Glenn

By Kerry Ellis On January 8, 2007, twenty-three participants in Glenn Research Center’s Space Mission Excellence Program met for the mock preliminary design reviews they had been preparing for the past few weeks.

Read More
Featured Invention: Future Air Traffic Management Concepts Evaluation Tool

By Johanna Schultz The Future Air Traffic Management Concepts Evaluation Tool (FACET), a unique software program used to model and predict air traffic trajectories both for research and real-time use, received NASA’s Software of the Year award for 2006.

Read More
Searching for Life on Mars; Managing a Difficult Project on Earth

By Matthew Kohut The primary objective of the Viking science mission was the stuff of dreams: to look for evidence of life of Mars. One of the instruments at the core of the mission was the gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer (GCMS).

Read More
Crossing Boundaries to Build Change

On May 18, 2006, a small crowd in a Bolling Air Force Base auditorium in Washington, D.C., helped launch a new era at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).

Read More
Making a Deep Impact on Science

By Rick Grammier How do you hit an object zipping through space at 23,000 mph, 268 million miles from Earth, and capture what happens after the impact with a camera 300 miles away? In 1999, a team of more than 250 scientists, engineers, managers, and educators set out to meet that challenge and discover what […]

Read More
Living with the Contractor

By Edward Ingraham I began working with Stanford University, the Gravity Probe B (GP-B) prime contractor, in 1993 and worked full time at the contractor’s facilities from 1997 to 2005.

Read More