Will We Really Go Back To The Moon?

With a recession, an oncoming Obama administration, Shuttle post 2010 utilization rumors, and other national flux, we ask ourselves: will we really go back to the moon?

The answer is yes, in only for one simple reason: We have nothing else to do. The Shuttle has enjoyed 100+ great missions. Mankind has lofted 12 space stations (9 Salut, 1 Skylab, 1 Mir, and 1 ISS,) we have built two fully reusable shuttleing spacecraft (Buran and Shuttle,) done space tourism, reusable suborbital craft, and most other things that people dreamed about back in Von Braun’s time. The marginal utility in discovery and inspiration decreases with each dollar spent. The price to launch a government kilogram to orbit remains the same, and in some cases increases. We have done every major accomplishment the ancients have dreamed about; well, everything they dreamed about doing in LEO.

Read more

How Does Participatory Exploration Scale?

At NASA Ames, we live in Silicon Valley and are exposed to a rather atypical set of 20- and 30-somethings who spend their weekends at things like SuperHappyDevHouse, and cupcakecamps full of the who’s who of web 2.0. It’s easy to think sometimes that if we could just make all NASA’s mission data available in some kind of magical XML, the entire world would rush to make innovative products from it.

While there is a substantive demand and use-case for this data by scientists, academics, and geeks the world around, overall we’re talking about a small subset of the population. This brings up (at least) two questions:

1. How do we generalize what we mean by participatory exploration beyond independently motivated technophiles, and
2. How can we design projects that actually scale gracefully with massive participation?

Read more

An *Official* Seat At The Table…

Yesterday, every Obama-Biden Transition staff member received a memo outlining the “Seat at the Table” Transparency Policy.  The policy applies to “official meetings” which are defined as a meeting with an outside organization or representative to which three or more outside participants attend.  The policy does not apply to non-public or classified information and internal memos, but it’s a real step forward in transparency by the transition staff!  Basically, what this means is that the American public are actually encouraged to take a seat at the table and engage in a dialogue about important issues and ideas — at the very same time the transition team reviews those documents themselves.  This is your opportunity to get involved.  If you take a look at the new website feature for this effort there are 11 documents posted already.  One of these 11 documents posted on November 23rd is regarding “Space Solar Power (SSP) — A Solution for Energy Independence & Climate Change.”

The memo also says that “this scope is a floor, not a ceiling, and all staff are strongly encouraged to include additional materials.”  To date, I’ve been personally very impressed with how open a number of agencies and transition teams have been.  I’m looking forward to the transparency and openness propagating into the NASA review process!  

Read more

How Online Organizing Lessons from ’04 and ’08 Can Help NASA in ’09

Recently I was asked to reflect on how the lessons of online organizing by those of us who worked in the 2004 Presidential campaign have impacted not only the 2008 Presidential campaign (in which Dean ’04 and Clark ’04 veterans teamed up to create Blue State Digital, the technology backbone of Obama’s online operation), but also the Federal Government, over the past four years.

Many 2004 campaign veterans have been working in the realm of making government more open in order to enable watchdog oversight of it. I have been working more in the realm of trying to make government more efficient and effective through technologies and organizing techniques that promote openness. I’m personally mostly focused on the cultural and policy side of things– trying to get people inside NASA used to being more open and sharing by default rather than only when explicitly forced to. There is also a great deal of work being done by reformers in the CIO’s offices and elsewhere on the communications technology side of NASA’s operations. They’re working on open APIs, open-source licenses, etc. I’ve told a bit of this story, in the context of NASA, in several presentations over the past year. Here below I’ve attempted to break down the problems, implications and solutions I see in a more structured format, again using examples we have encountered at NASA.

Read more

Why the Moon?

NASA is in the inspiration business. If you don’t know what I mean, take a trip to your local school and engage in a discussion with students. Ask them what inspires them. At the heart of most discussions, is space exploration.
Read more

OpenNASA Opening Doors

I knew that I was joining a special group of people when I became a contributing author here because of the passion everyone has shown for making NASA the kind of organization we all know it can be.  I consider myself fortunate to be in the company of such a group.

I have learned a heck of a lot in a relatively short period of time about the various perspectives that people bring to the table from all over the space exploration community.  I expected and hoped that would happen, though.  What I didn’t expect was that participating in this electronic forum would lead to even wider, once-in-a-lifetime opportunities.

Read more

Managing Your Leaders

I’ve been giving a lot of thought lately about what it means for managing organizations now that Generation Y makes up a significant part of the workforce. I’ve also been reading some articles that discuss the difficulty and frustration managers today have with the younger workforce. Hopefully this post will help managers as they try to navigate leading their leaders as well as Gen Y’ers who are entering the workforce and are looking for opportunities to do their part in changing the world.

Read more

Importance of Dissenting Opinions

Following Justin’s post today about the JSC Vision Forum, I wanted to bring up a point based off a question that was asked at the forum:

The JSC Vision Forum concluded with a debrief on the activities that had transpired that evening.  During that time, a young lady asked a very important question regarding dissenting opinions and how they tend not to travel as far as the popular opinion.  I answered her question in a quick and simple fashion but for the sake of time, I did not voice all facets of this topic.

Read more

Thoughts From the JSC Vision Forum

I had the opportunity to participate in the first JSC Vision forum this evening. It opened with a brief introduction to the 20-Year Vision for Johnson Space Center, how it was derived, and the five big ideas for implementation. We then split off into breakout groups to discuss the Vision as a whole and the implementation concepts. Lots of people went straight for the implementation groups, so I decided to split off with the smaller group that was analyzing the Vision itself.

I was easily the youngest person in my breakout group. Including the moderators, the only civil servant was the guy taking the notes (which will be distilled and passed on to JSC management in an anonymous format). There were six of us, plus two moderators and our notetaker. I’d say the big theme that kept coming up was that we need to figure out a way to communicate with and get buy-in from people who aren’t necessarily sold on high-level collaboration and integration… and that we desperately need “public input” to help make what we do at JSC relevant to people’s lives.

Read more

Defining NASA

In discussions lately with my fellow travelers at NASA, we’ve been getting down to the fundamentals of defining ourselves as an agency and determining our value. More than a few people I’ve talked to agree that we struggle with communicating that to the public because we haven’t really figured out the “why” ourselves. This is a conversation that we should be having at all levels, both internally and publicly, and OpenNASA is an ideal forum for it.

We need an answer to the question “Why?” that is stronger than esoteric notions of destiny and the role of great nations. Our answer should reflect the values and concerns of the people we share this great country with. Our answer to the question “Why?” could be how NASA is helping solve America’s present problems as we build for the future.

Read more