Doing my part
Cross-posted at Cosmo.Sphere
One of the advantages of working in the ISS National Laboratory Office is that I get to support projects that actually fly in space. This morning, I got to sit with my Department of Defense counterparts on-console while astronaut Mike Barratt operated the SPHERES experiment.
Launch Scrubbed, but Go to Post
So an hour ago, I showed up at the ISS Mission Evaluation Room to watch the shuttle launch. Last night, a friend of mine was asking me if I was going to get up at 6 AM to watch the launch. I wasn’t that enthusiastic about doing it, but realized that I had to option to go into my console in the MER and not only watch it on a nice big flat screen but I could also hear the other voice loops beyond PAO and CAPCOM if I watched it in the MER and used my headset.
Got Communication?
A few weeks ago over lunch, I had the pleasure of participating in a discussion about how we improve communication at Goddard. In short, communication is currently a big concern on center - everyone knows that it is important, and most think that it isn’t currently particularly effective.
(By the way, I would personally propose that effective communication may be THE area that could raise NASA’s success to a whole new level. Look at our history: In 1986, Challenger exploded thanks to poor communication that manifested itself as a bad O-ring. Seventeen years later, the same thing happened AGAIN to Columbia, this time disguised as a piece of foam.)
Online social networking: The glue that binds people together at NASA
Did you know archeologists excavating burial sites dated 4000 BC discovered that people used tree sap to glue broken pottery? And did you know that the Greeks invented several recipes for adhesives that included things like egg whites, blood, bones, milk, cheese, and grains. I discovered this historic information while developing a presentation on glue and social networking. Today, NASA uses heavy duty adhesives for the Shuttle fuel tank and tiles.
Asked by a friend of mine, Tim Young, of Socialcast, if I was interested in presenting (May 2009) at a new conference called Glue Con, on social networking and using the NASAsphere study as an example, I said “of course.” Since data analysis is boring alone, I wanted to craft a good story and weave in the study results. Before writing my presentation, I researched glue–where it came from and how it works—out of curiosity mostly. During my readings, I discovered that glue is similar to human behavior in social networking.
Social > Media *
There is no doubt that social media in government has become a major topic of discussion recently. As an advocate and active user of social media, I’m often asked to create and/or give presentations on the potential application of social media at NASA. Up until now, I’ve actively resisted the temptation to accept the invitation because social media is so often misunderstood, taken out of context, or over-hyped. Yet, I do believe that there is enormous potential for organizations who utilize social media. Do I think social media can transform government by itself? Of course not. Do I think social media can be an effective tool to help transform and add value to government? Absolutely. Read more
Tweet Success
I’m closing in on Mars! Who is going to sleep tonight? Not the team, too excited/scared/anxious seeing 5 years of work come to this last day.
– 7:45PM May 24, 2008 from @MarsPhoenix
Does anyone remember seeing that tweet from the “MarsPhoenix” Twitter account last year? Probably not, because it was one of the updates posted before landing when relatively few people were following. During the initial days of the account every post felt like shouting into the wind, hoping that people might take notice and listen.
By landing day (one year ago this weekend) 3,000 people were following the mission’s tweets through atmospheric entry and touch down. The post-landing tweet, “Tears, cheers, I’m here!” reflected the scene not on Mars but in mission control where the Phoenix team literally laughed and cried knowing they had 90 sols of hard work and discoveries ahead of them. One discovery had just been made: a new way to communicate news of the mission using Twitter.
When I say, “communicate, ” I don’t mean simply pushing pithy updates to the public via the relatively new (at the time) Twitter. To be honest, that was my original intent – to post updates on the landing — but it quickly took on a different life. You see, while you were reading the updates posted by MarsPhoenix, I was busy reading the @replies. And the @replies changed everything.
The First *Human* Tweet from Space
In June of 2007, NASA’s Office of Space Operations and Innovative Partnership Program, NASA’s CoLab and the National Space Society hosted the Participatory Exploration Summit at Ames Research Center. The summit, among many other things, was really one of the first major catalysts for thinking seriously about how the agency could us the internet, information technologies, and gaming sectors to provide new and exciting ways to connect, engage, inspire, and educate the public about space exploration. If you have a chance, check out the proceedings from the summit - there are quite a few ideas packed into the proceedings document prepared by Delia that may really play into the future success of NASA’s exploration efforts.
One of the things we discussed (okay, dreamed about) at that meeting was astronauts twittering from space (see page 1 from the proceedings). Well, I’m happy to report that @NASA has really embraced and leveraged social media to offer a new perspective on spaceflight! This afternoon, Mike Massimino (@astro_mike) became the first astronaut to tweet from space with the following words “From orbit: Launch was awesome!! I am feeling great, working hard, & enjoying the magnificent views, the adventure of a lifetime has begun!” This is a really big step for our space agency! I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to hear about the rest of the Hubble mission first hand from an Astronaut who is there. As Mike said, this mission will truly be awesome.
Shaping the NASA workforce for 2020
As a participant in the April 2008 Strategic Management Council (SMC) meeting that first explicitly discussed the issue of “generations” and NASA, I wanted to add some new material some recent discussion in this space and elsewhere about our workforce. I thought it would be particularly timely, considering Nick Skytland’s recent posting of an internal NASA email about recent NASA Strategic Management Council decision to target-hire younger workers, and, the recent posts on NASAWatch about the state of the Federal workforce. Many of the comments that followed on that website requested some data – data about NASA and the contractor workforce. To that end there are two attachments to read in support of this posting.
First is a paper written by me and my NASA HQ colleague Garth Henning. It was first drafted in 2006 and was updated in 2008 in advance of the aforementioned April ‘08 SMC. That paper, titled “The State of the Next Generation of Explorers,” can be found here at OpenNASA. In the rest of this post I refer to this paper as “the white paper” for simplicity. The white paper gives some details about NASA’s demographic history; suggests that paying attention to the combined issues of age and generational differences is worth some detailed attention; discusses what NASA “does” and how that has changed over time; discusses NASA’s relationship with industry now and over time; raises the question of future NASA success; and then suggests different paths forward for NASA as ways to address this demographic issue.
