FYI,

Go out and buy the February Issue of Popular Science so Constance gets
paid more. :)

"It Doesn't Take A Rocket Scientist"
Popular Science
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/aviation/article/0,12543,576889,00.html

: Space architect Constance Adams spent seven years at NASA. Here's
: her prescription for fixing the place.

: In a decade of professional practice in large-scale urban, medical
: and institutional architecture, I have always started any new
: project with an investigation into institutional memory. I need to
: know how previous programs arrived at their final designs before I
: feel qualified to propose next-generation solutions. But almost
: immediately after I arrived at NASA in 1997, I learned that trying
: to gather such information in the 18,000-employee, 16-facility
: agency was tough going. The standard response when I requested data
: on old projects was a quizzical stare. As I began working on the
: design of the TransHab, an inflatable habitat for long crew
: expeditions like a Mars mission, I realized I needed solid
: dimensions for Skylab interiors and furnishings. Those drawings
: always seemed archived somewhere beyond reach. Eventually I just
: went over to the Skylab 1G Trainer at Space Center Houston's visitor
: center with a tape measure and some gum-soled shoes. I'm sure it
: gave a few tourists a real thrill to come into the Trainer exhibit
: and find me dangling from the ceiling.

: In its collective knowledge and in the individual history and
: experience of its employees, NASA is a unique, living national
: treasure of know-how. But the know-how is frustratingly hard to
: access. Think of NASA as a computer with virtually no interface and
: rusty hard drives. Furthermore, its storage media are getting old:
: The only American men and women who have ever successfully designed
: and flown a spacecraft are retired or retiring; many others are no
: longer with us. Without a conscious program of mentoring within the
: organization, this knowledge is only intermittently and imperfectly
: transmitted to new generations of engineers and scientists. The
: result is that young engineers constantly redesign programs without
: being aware that previous designs for the same item already exist.
: They may thereby introduce a new problem or layer of risk, and this
: gets to the heart of the matter: As has been pointed out with regard
: to the Columbia disaster, there is within NASA a creeping lack of
: interest in real expertise. When any bureaucracy supports its
: mandarin culture over real intellectual capital -- precisely what
: the board that investigated the Columbia disaster accused NASA of
: doing -- it becomes stagnant rather than productive.

: What NASA needs to do is establish an active mentoring program,
: whereby new hires are apprenticed to senior technical staff for a
: certain period of time; allow real engineers (not a recruiting team)
: to select graduate students for internships; and open a direct line
: between each project office and the central archives so that records
: of a team's decision- making process and detailed information on the
: final product are readily available.

: But even these measures won't fully address the squandering of
: hard-won expertise, because the problem isn't confined to a failure
: of archiving. Any team that takes on a project is going to amass
: some truly valuable information. What happens then? At NASA, more
: often than not, project teams get disbanded and people with unique
: knowledge get poached away. Whereas other industries actively
: encourage the capture of knowledge in team environments -- where the
: sum of knowledge is measurably greater than any individual effort
: -- NASA seems unaware of the value of a stable, successful team and
: its ability to store, transmit, and use accumulated knowledge.

: Our TransHab project team was ultimately able to get far enough in
: our testing and design to warrant what NASA calls an Independent
: Technical Assessment. In our case, this meant that NASA invited some
: of the old guard (including Charlie Feltz, chief engineer of the
: X-15; Chris Kraft, Mission Control pioneer and former Johnson Space
: Center director; George Jeffs, chief engineer on the space shuttle;
: and Johnson Space Center director George Abbey) to come out of
: retirement for a few days and formally assess the project. Such
: events seem relatively rare, yet in their intensity, methods and
: relentless pace, they hearken back to the early days of human
: spaceflight. The panel picked apart our reasoning and process just
: as surely as they tackled the technologies we had developed, and in
: so doing taught us how they themselves had pulled off the feats that
: made NASA great. Finally earning their approval after three days of
: vigorous work felt like the greatest achievement of my life.

: Our final task, a six-week feasibility study on a different vehicle,
: was particularly exhilarating. By then we had absorbed all the
: questions and critiques from our advisers, and we started using
: their assessment tactics on one another. Now able to anticipate how
: our teammates would work, we came up with solutions that produced a
: truly elegant spacecraft.

: And then we were disbanded. The dissolution of a project team that
: could produce a vehicle like TransHab on a shoestring budget is a
: great loss to the space program, not necessarily because any one of
: us is particularly special but because the team's accumulated
: knowledge represented nearly 40 years of spaceflight, the results of
: thousands of failures large and small. As Charlie Feltz told us,
: "engineers learn by failures. We've had a lot of failures."

: Here's an idea: Why don't we borrow a pattern from design
: disciplines like architecture and industrial design, and develop
: "studios" populated by specialists from different fields -- and when
: one project is done, try keeping the team together.

: NASA has a bigger problem than the knowledge-capture failure noted
: above: It has an institutionalized inability to capture vision.

: In the past three years, we've seen three separate programs
: proposed: the Second Generation Reusable Launch Vehicle (2GRLV), the
: Space Transportation Architecture Study (STAS) and the Space Launch
: Initiative (SLI). Each set forth overarching new strategies and
: architectures for human spaceflight that differed only slightly in
: scope. And each took a few toddling steps before the rug was pulled
: out.

: A competition that was already under way -- and from which several
: potential bidders had been eliminated -- had been radically rescoped
: to meet immediate political goals within soaring budgetary
: shortfalls.

: Why? Probably because there wasn't enough vision or commitment
: behind the shuttle-replacement plans to begin with.

: What should have happened? NASA should have continued to develop the
: architecture for a true shuttle-replacement system and requested
: that the crew-transfer part of the program be fast-tracked; or, if
: that approach didn't seem responsive enough to the needs of the day,
: the table should have been swept clean and the process started
: afresh with a new set of problems on the boards.

: One result of the retrofitting rush that gave us the OSP initiative
: is that the smaller, more risk-taking and often more dynamic
: companies were knocked out of the bidding before it even got going.
: Now that the OSP only need accommodate four people and ride atop an
: expendable, commercial launcher, it's beginning to look to me an
: awful lot like the various vehicles being developed by the
: contenders for the X Prize. Yet by the nature of the bidding, none
: of those 25 teams has any chance of bringing its space-plane
: concepts to OSP. What would be the result if NASA were to enable
: this sharing of ideas by inviting competition and reopening the
: field of design solutions? Most likely cost savings and superior
: design.

: Here is the recent history of shuttle-replacement systems in a
: nutshell: Propose and study a succession of systems, then fight to
: keep a single subcomponent going when the budget is slashed
: -- without considering its long-term compatibility with the rest of
: the human spaceflight program. All these separate pieces somehow
: need to be made to fit the next wave of big-picture plans. And the
: Big Plan bogey keeps shifting -- it's anyone's guess how the OSP
: will fit into the Bush Administration's new space initiative. When
: the components' utility in a new scenario is hard to prove, they get
: shot down -- no matter how much effort has already gone into their
: development. They become ideas that go back on the shelf, only to
: get reinvented by future generations.

: What these pundits are really bemoaning is the lack of consistent
: vision, which ultimately stems from an issue that is much larger and
: older than NASA, and whose nature is of profound interest to
: architects and master planners, because it has a powerful effect on
: the kind and scale of projects we may build. Simply put, undertaking
: what we call Great Projects -- projects of a large, public scope
: whose completion will require 10 years or more -- is very difficult
: in a democracy.

: In an autocratic society, it is common for rulers to make their mark
: by commissioning massive works such as roads, fortifications,
: elaborate religious or magisterial structures. And once the order
: has been given, it becomes a goal of the government to see that the
: works are completed, and in such a way that they stand to the glory
: of the rulers who brought them into being.

: Under our democratic system, it is inherently impossible to ensure
: that any long-term program will receive funding, or remain
: consistently funded, from year to year. From this perspective, the
: four terms of FDR's nearly unchallenged administration may well have
: been critical not only to the establishment of the Works Progress
: Administration but, more important, to the completion of many
: individual WPA projects.

Mark Reiff