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In This Issue (ASK 36)

Don Cohen, Managing Editor “Looking back and looking forward” is one way to sum up the learning strategies considered in this issue of ASK.

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Managing Conversations for Performance Breakthroughs

By Gerry Daelemans Reorganizations can have unintended and unexpected outcomes. Sometimes they create new problems in the process of solving old ones.

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Nobody’s Perfect: The Benefits of Independent Review

By Mark Saunders and James Ortiz During a 1995 independent review of the development of Mars Pathfinder, Dr. Mike Griffin, a member of the review team, asked the project team how the spacecraft’s radar would determine the distance of the spacecraft from Mars’s surface while swinging back and forth below the parachute.

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Gettysburg Addressed: Common Ground for NASA Engineers and Civic War Generals

By Haley Stephenson Three days before the decisive Battle of Gettysburg, General Joseph Hooker, leader of the Union Army, resigned from his post.

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Magnetospheric Multiscale: An In-House and Contracted Mission

By Karen Halterman The Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission, a scientific satellite–development project managed by the Goddard Space Flight Center, is both an in-house project and a contracted one.

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Interview with Eric Gorman: Starting at NASA Now

After talking to George Morrow about his experience as a new NASA employee in the early 1980s, Don Cohen asked Eric Gorman about the experience of becoming a NASA employee today. When they spoke at the end of May, Gorman was just about to take a civil service position at Goddard.

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Interview with George Morrow

By Don Cohen George Morrow is the director of the Flight Projects Directorate at Goddard Space Flight Center, a position he has held since 2007. He began his career at Goddard in 1983 as an engineer working on spacecraft battery systems. Don Cohen spoke with him in his office at Goddard.

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Apollo Technology: Back to the Future

By Piers Bizony In April 2007, a team of awestruck technicians discovered that the apparently lifeless artifacts on display from a long-vanished era of space exploration were not quite so dead after all.

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In Their Own Words: Preserving International Space Station Knowledge

By Tim Howell As a new International Space Station (ISS) engineering manager in 1986, I quickly learned that having the right mix of people was the key to my team’s success and that sustaining success depended on an environment that encouraged people to pass on experiences.

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