Don Cohen

By Don Cohen COHEN: I want to talk about your take on the 7120.5D processes and requirements, but let’s start with the Mars program experience that has shown you how projects work.

Don Cohen, Managing Editor A few years ago, I spent a couple of days driving from meeting to meeting with a woman responsible for coordinating critical activities of a large organization.

By Don Cohen In 1999, Eileen Collins became the first woman to command a shuttle mission. She commandedDiscovery‘s return-to-flight mission in 2005, after the Columbia accident.

By Julie Gravallese, Ren Resch, Jean Tatalias, and Don Cohen The MITRE Corporation’s goal is to “bring the corporation to bear” on critical national problems — to apply all its relevant knowledge and experience to each of the complex projects it takes on for the U.S. government.

In one way or another, many of the articles in this issue of ASK are about the importance of seeing the big picture.

By Don Cohen Don Cohen and Ed Hoffman met with NASA’s Associate Administrator to talk about his NASA career and his view of the Agency’s current and future challenges.

By the SEED Team with Don Cohen In 1999, Becky Derro had been a mechanical engineer at Goddard Space Flight Center for seven years and was lead mechanical engineer on COR-1, a coronagraph that is part of the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) mission, when she decided that she wanted to try something different.

Ed Hoffman’s Director’s column (“Thinking About Excellence”) and Laurence Prusak’s Knowledge Notebook piece (“How Does a Learning Organization Learn?”) make related points that define key themes of this issue of ASK.

By Don Cohen Former astronaut Michael Coats joined NASA in 1984 and flew three shuttle missions before leaving the Agency for Lockheed Martin in 1991. He was appointed Center Director of Johnson Space Center in November 2005. He talked with Don Cohen in February 2006.