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Does a Good Engineer Make a Good Project Manager?

By George N. Andrew Many at NASA believe the myth that good engineers make good project managers. My twenty-eight years of experience in engineering and management have taught me that engineers are often poorly equipped to manage projects, but it isn’t always their fault.

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Making and Monitoring Critical Assumptions

By Hugh Woodward I remember the day I walked into the paper plant in Oxnard under a brilliant southern California sun with a pleasant cooling breeze blowing off the Pacific.

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Einstein for Children: Learning and Teaching

By Marc Spiegel Explaining to other people something complicated that you are working to understand yourself can be difficult. That was my situation when I began developing my Einstein Alive! program to introduce Einstein and the theory of relativity to students from kindergarten through middle school.

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Apollo: A Young Engineer’s Perspective

By Dan Holtshouse My first job was on the Apollo program. When I left Ohio State University with a graduate degree in electrical engineering, I went to work for AC Electronics in Milwaukee, Wis., then a division of General Motors.

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Space-to-Space Communications: In-House Hardware Development

By Matthew Kohut When Johnson Space Center’s Matt Lemke showed up for work as the project manager of the space-to-space communications system at the end of 1994, he looked forward to leading a team of NASA designers on the biggest project in his division.

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The Cassini Resource Exchange

By Randii R. Wessen and David Porter It’s amazing what you can do when you don’t have a choice. That exactly describes the Cassini mission to Saturn when its twin sister CRAF (Comet Rendezvous and Asteroid Flyby mission) was canceled.

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On the Wallops Range: A Geek’s Guide to Lessons Learned

By Charles Tucker “I tell people I’m a true geek,” Jay Pittman says, laughing. He’s driving on a two-lane strip of blacktop flanked by summer-green crops, heading seven miles southeast from the main base of Wallops Flight Facility toward a tiny barrier island off Virginia’s Eastern Shore, where the Wallops launch and research range stretches […]

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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 […]

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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.

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