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.
A few weeks ago, the Joint Leadership Team (JLT) at Johnson Space Center (JSC) was treated to a day-long retreat of presentations from each of the Innovation and Inclusion (I&I) Council’s Engagement Teams. I know it seems like classic “NASA acronym soup”, but there was nothing classic about how far the audience was reaching outside of their comfort zone that day.
Perhaps the furthest-reaching team was called Barrier Analysis. You might be familiar with that team’s video, since as of now it’s received over 92,000 hits on You Tube. That’s right, it’s the one from Wayne Hale’s blog post and the NPR story. There’s even a good summary of its background here on OpenNASA. It has been great to see the conversation that has started among NASA employees and the general public alike. The other teams also had some very interesting (if not quite as controversial) contributions relating to the inner-workings of the JSC Community. They looked internally at challenges such as Recruiting, Mentoring, IT Infrastructure, or Work-Life Fit. Personally, I had the privilege of working with 12 others to study the latter, and in the spirit of being open, I’d like to share with the OpenNASA readers the results of our work.
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So for quite some time now I have seen the Lunar Lander as the project of choice that I see myself working on in my career in the mid-term. I have been getting familiar with the Constellation architecture since ESAS was released, and I am hitting the workforce at the Altair sweet spot. Plus, working at Boeing, Orion is out. Ares rockets don’t really get my blood going as much as the lander either.
Sometime during fall of last year, I was perusing the AIAA library and I came upon a paper that some Boeing guys had published in conjunction with the NASA Altair Broad Area Announcement (BAA) regarding the trade space for the physical configuration of the Altair vehicle. There were half a dozen Boeing authors, and one of them happened to be in Houston.
The first time I ever thought of culture, I did so kicking and screaming. It was World Cultures class in ninth grade. Everyone had to take it. I didn’t know why I needed to take any kind of culture or history class at the time. My eyes were on the future, my head in the stars. Thinking back, I have no idea what I was thinking.
Culture is cool. I get that now. And it’s important, too. It’s a unifying force and the unseen hand of progress and failure, tolerance and pride, beauty and injustice. It’s always there and might be the most important factor in our success as an agency and nation.
It was refreshing to read the previous post on OpenNASA that released a list of specific Participatory Exploration (PE) policy recommendations for NASA. The authors of the recommendations have witnessed first hand the problems with how NASA is managed, reacts, and is perceived by internal and external constituents. The hard lessons that my friends learned through the NASA CoLab experiment more than qualifies them as competent at offering specific solutions to some discrete and genuine problems within NASA.
Unfortunately, the PE Recommendations document does lend itself to some old criticisms as it carries over weaknesses of CoLab’s prior efforts to fix NASA. The suggestions only treat symptoms of an Agency wide disease, but they do not not offer a systemic cure. There needs to be cogent, material, and real offerings on how to change the minds and behaviors of NASA’s workforce from the top down. Instead of being told how to fix some of yesterday’s problems, NASA employees should be nurtured so the ideas of Participatory Exploration and Collaboration develop organically across the Agency.
In the comment section of the “Participatory Exploration” post, a few comments referred to employment opportunities at NASA. I started to respond to the comments, but then it turned into something much longer than comment worthy, so I’ll just post my comment here as a blog post. Here are few thoughts in response to career opportunities at NASA.
This is the first page you reach when you visit the nasa.gov website and look for information about working at NASA. If you go to nasa.gov and click “About NASA”, and then click “Careers@NASA” it will take you to what I’m talking about. The text here talks about how NASA is more than astronauts - and gives a list of folks who work within NASA including: scientists, engineers, computer programmers, personnel specialists, accountants, writers, maintenance workers. This is absolutely true and the actual list is much longer. There are people from all walks of life and backgrounds at NASA. So to address your question Brian, we absolutey need folks like you to give us a new and fresh persepective. Your background at NOAA and education as a geoscientist is invaluable. This is evidenced by none other than Justin, who was a former intel officer, and is now very active in the NASA community making huge contributions to what we do.
Whew-I made it!
One full year on the job.
(NASA, I’m writing you this blog entry as a combined present for our anniversary and your 50th birthday. Even though I’m technically late on both and you might have been hoping for a more substantial present like a bouquet of tulips or a nice dinner at that fancy French restaurant in town or a pearl necklace-yeah right on my salary!-I hope you won’t use that in future arguments over which TV show we’ll watch on Tuesday nights. I’m still voting for House, for the record).
I started full-time at NASA back in August 2007, having graduated the previous May after spending five co-op tours at JSC over the previous four years. They say you usually don’t start talking to yourself or addressing the agency as your significant other for at least 10 years, so I’m thrilled to be ahead of the curve on this one.
I thought it was interesting that JSC decided to suspend operations for Tropical Storm Edouard. Yesterday was a blue-sky day, perfectly clear night. Then we had steady but light rain all day today.
How has the 1.5 day hiatus affected your work? Will you be able to accomplish everything you needed to get done this week?
Last night (7/22/08), the JSC 20 Year Vision Team held a forum for all the JSC co-ops and interns (CS and contractors).
For those who were able to make it…Thanks for coming! We really enjoyed sharing the Vision with you and hearing all of your thoughts, comments, feedback, and concerns.
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.
July 3 |
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7:08pm | Did you see the first moon pictures sent back by LRO and released yesterday? Check them out at http://tr.im/qPkc |
July 2 |
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4:09pm | The Soyuz move is complete. The station crew will spend the wknd prepping for the shuttle's arrival and enjoying some off-duty time. |
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3:45pm | @benstanfield The Soyuz move opens the Zvezda docking port for the arrival of a new Russian Progress cargo vehicle later this month. |
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3:20pm | Three space station crew members will move their Soyuz form one docking port to another. Undocking @ 5:26pET. Watch it on www.nasa.gov/ntv |
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2:59pm | @Twit_nut Landers and rovers will be visible. Depending on lighting conditions, we could see a very high level of detail. |
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2:58pm | @illumicdigital No firm date yet, but in the very near future. |
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2:56pm | RT @ NASAGoddard Zoom and move on the first images from the LRO Camera. Is that sweet or what? http://bit.ly/yXPCB |
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1:52pm | Arctic forest fires have an impact on climate change? Yeah, and NASA airborne scientists are in the thick of it. http://tr.im/qFpB |
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12:12pm | Great response for the STS-125 Tweetup, registration is closed. Confirmation e-mails will go out mid-next week; more details to come. |
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11:55am | Check out the Apollo Anniversary Mission Control Peeps! http://tinyurl.com/mm5zbw |
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11:49am | NASA's LRO Spacecraft Sends First Lunar Images to Earth: NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, has transm.. http://tinyurl.com/nx4z2v |
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11:13am | Anniversary Apollo Peeps |
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9:05am | You've got that right! RT ilzamacario @NASA that is so awesome!! Our planet is beautiful!! |
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8:36am | Whoa! Look at all this Saharan dust blowing off of Africa yesterday, as seen by NASA's Terra spacecraft. http://tr.im/qCKQ |
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8:22am | There's a new astronaut to the Twitter-verse. He's @Astro_Jose and he'll fly on STS-128. Bio infor at http://bit.ly/AstroJose. |
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8:21am | Image of the Day: Refuge: Situated as it is near the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge, t.. http://tinyurl.com/m6cxx6 |
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7:52am | There's still time to sign up to attend the STS-125 crew Tweetup at NASA Headquarters July 21: http://www.nasa.gov/tweetup |
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7:10am | Earthquakes! - Live NASA chat & videocast with NASA scientists using space-based technologies. July 6, 8pm EDT. http://tr.im/qC0j |
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6:37am | Three space station crew members move their Soyuz from the Zvezda module to the Pirs Docking Compartment - watch live on NASA TV at 5 pm EDT |
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6:15am | @panicpack121 Atlantic hurricane season began June 1. For updates & info on NASA hurricane research ... http://tr.im/qBDa |
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6:07am | One month down in Atlantic hurricane season - see how hot the Gulf & Caribbean are, from NASA satellites. http://tr.im/qByj |
July 1 |
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10:00pm | Saluting Our Nation's Independence |
June 29 |
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10:00pm | Space Station Appearing Nationwide Over July 4 Weekend |