By Jessica Fox and Don Cohen “I know what I have given you. I do not know what you received.” When he wrote these words, Antonio Porchia, an Argentinean printing press owner in the 1930s, wasn’t thinking about project management.
By Peter Lord I was standing in the dining room of a rambling white Victorian on Mount Desert Island, home to Maine’s Acadia National Park. Arrayed before me on a massive wooden table lay an antique sewing machine, an improvised pressure test stand, a glass vacuum chamber, and an immense collection of gloves and fingers.
By N. Wayne Hale, Jr. When I was a new NASA employee, my branch chief put together a training class that has been on my mind recently. Among the other things he taught us new employees was that we had to lead our leaders. That has always been good advice. I’d like to share some […]
By Carol Anne Dunn and Giny Cheong When the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) at Kennedy Space Center developed the laser scaling device for the Space Shuttle program, the inventors had no idea that the invention would become commercially successful with law enforcement and crime scene investigation teams.
By William Pomerantz On October 4, 2004, Brian Binnie piloted SpaceShipOne above 100 km, marking the third time ever—and the second time in as many weeks—that a civilian astronaut had taken a privately built craft to outer space.
By Peter Homer How does one guy in Maine transform a pile of failures sitting on his dining room table into one of the biggest innovations in spacesuit glove technology since the beginning of human space flight?
By Adam Sachs and Kerry Ellis When a 1981 tornado in Minnesota revolutionized the retail approach of Sound of Music, which later changed its name to the now very familiar Best Buy, those who founded the company never imagined that a series of hurricanes twenty years later would also help give it a cutting-edge lead […]
By Todd May On September 27, 2007, a Delta II rocket carrying the Dawn spacecraft lifted off from Kennedy Space Center. Part of NASA’s Discovery program, the $370 million Dawn mission began its three-billion-mile voyage to the asteroid belt to study the asteroid Vesta and Ceres, a dwarf planet.
By Philip Weber Ground crew veterans at Kennedy Space Center still talk about what they call “the summer of hydrogen”—the long, frustrating months in 1990 when the shuttle fleet was grounded by an elusive hydrogen leak that foiled our efforts to fill the orbiter’s external fuel tank.
