Knowledge Category: Articles & Publications

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.

By George Michael (Mike) Gentry You might think I would take my work for granted after almost forty years of working with NASA photos. I never have, and even to this day I occasionally pinch myself.

We asked some long-time NASA people to describe events during their careers at the Agency that they consider especially vivid or meaningful.

NASA Celebrates Fifty Years Join NASA in celebrating its fiftieth anniversary by reviewing exciting discoveries and images from past missions, watching special lectures from NASA Administrator Michael Griffin and Dr. Stephen Hawking, or visiting interactive Web features that walk you through each decade since the Agency’s inception.