By Matthew Kohut The former shuttle program manager talks about career-long learning and what the Columbia accident taught the agency. Former Space Shuttle Program Manager Wayne Hale’s career roughly paralleled the life cycle of the Space Shuttle program.
By Haley Stephenson and Matthew Kohut When NASA announced that the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) would upgrade from a Delta II to a larger Atlas V launch vehicle, a window of opportunity opened for an additional mission to the moon.
By Don Cohen and Matthew Kohut The Academy’s first Knowledge Forum brought together people from several industries and countries.
As told to Tracy McMahan and Matthew Kohut by Phil Sumrall This story draws extensively from a September 2007 interview with Ares Projects Oral Historian Tracy McMahan as well as a December 2009 interview with ASK Contributing Editor Matthew Kohut.
By Matthew Kohut and Don Cohen As its name suggests, a Flight Readiness Review, or FRR, gives teams responsible for various elements of a NASA flight mission an opportunity to ensure technical questions raised at earlier reviews have been adequately dealt with and to raise concerns about anything else that might affect mission success.
By Matthew Kohut The opportunity to build a new launch vehicle that can loft humans into space does not come along often.
By Matthew Kohut Suppose you had to design a door within a lunar lander module that would shield the crew habitat from solar activity during a moon mission. Assuming this isn’t already your day job at NASA, how would you begin to devise a solution?
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 Matthew Kohut It’s a story so familiar it has achieved popular status as NASA’s creation legend: when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in October 1957, it shocked the flat-footed United States into action, locking the Cold War gladiators into a space race.
