Organization: HQ

By Matthew Kohut     Bryan O’Connor retired as chief of Safety and Mission Assurance on August 31, 2011, after serving nearly a decade as NASA’s top safety and mission assurance official.

By Paul Hertz   NASA’s Science Mission Directorate (SMD) provides opportunities for scientists outside the agency to determine what science NASA should pursue in future missions. Several different programs, such as Discovery and Explorer, publish announcements of opportunity so ideas can be proposed, vetted, selected, and flown in the pursuit of groundbreaking scientific discovery.

In November 2006, then–NASA Chief Engineer Chris Scolese brought together an advisory group of aerospace veterans to think about creative ways of giving young NASA employees the skills they will need to lead future projects and programs. Gus Guastaferro, an invited guest of this Management Operations Working Group, suggested developing a hands-on project that would […]

By Dava Newman   For the past dozen years, I have been working with colleagues and students here at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and with collaborators in various disciplines from around the world to develop a new kind of spacesuit.

By Bob Chesson   Most European Space Agency (ESA) projects are contracted to European industry on a firm fixed-price (FFP) basis. These FFP contracts and their statements of work transfer most of the project risks to the prime contractor, who then transfers as much risk as he can to subcontractors and equipment suppliers.

On August 1, 2010, almost the entire Earth-facing side of the sun erupted in activity from a C3-class solar flare, a solar tsunami, large-scale shaking of the solar corona, radio bursts, a coronal mass ejection, and more. This extreme ultraviolet snapshot from the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) shows the sun’s northern hemisphere in mid-eruption. Different […]

NASA in the News NASA’s Kepler mission has confirmed its first discovery of a planet in the “habitable zone,” the region where liquid water could exist on a planet’s surface.

By Laurence Prusak Every once in a while, some U.S. or other government agency or a nongovernmental organization issues a report that is actually very useful and—dare I say it—even startling in its implications.

January 26, 2012 Vol. 5, Issue 1   Given the complexity of projects today, the limits of hindsight, and the human inability to predict the future, is strategy a waste of time?