I read an article by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker today about Nathan Myhrvold, former director of research at Microsoft, and his “Intellectual Ventures” endeavor. Their whole idea is to be a company that comes up with good ideas, patent them, and license to interested companies that have the technical expertise. As I was reading about what Intellectual Ventures has gotten itself into, I couldn’t help but think that this is precisely the sort of thing we’re looking to foster here at NASA with the innovation and collaboration initiatives.

Intellectual Ventures sponsors huge brainstorming sessions where the key people in the company bring in subject matter experts who can help them figure out which ideas will work and which won’t. Importantly, though, they understand that the vast majority of their ideas probably won’t go anywhere, but that’s okay because it will help them learn and eventually get them to an idea that will work. Read the rest of this entry »

A lot of thought and discussion has occurred lately concerning how to improve our internal communications in NASA. Here at JSC, this discussion has culminated with the release of the 20 Year Vision proposal. I am both honored and fortunate to have met with some of the people who made it happen and look forward to working with them on the implementation of those ideas.

With that in mind, I think that some of my professional experiences elsewhere can be brought to bear on this topic. In between undergrad and grad school, I worked in the intelligence community (IC) for a few years as a missile analyst. If you think the NASA community is results-oriented, the IC takes it to a whole new level.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m continually inspired by River’s posts about his career and experience at Goddard. I’ve been meaning to post for quite some time about the experience I’ve had within the Space Life Sciences Directorate at Johnson Space Center. We have some amazing leaders within the directorate who are definitely innovative, outside-of-the-box thinkers. I’d like to share with you a recent example of how NASA, particularly Space Life Sciences at Johnson Space Center in Texas, is using partnerships with academia to help with research and development related to spaceflight.

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, I had a very interesting and thought-provoking discussion about the future of JSC and how we’re going to get there.  (I’m trying to be careful about name-dropping, so as to keep the focus here on the ideas more so than personalities.)  One of the subjects we broached was how JSC is famous for its mission operations work, but that a lot of the good engineering work we’re doing here is going unnoticed by the public-at-large.  I’ll actually be meeting with someone tomorrow who is heading up the Engineering Directorate’s efforts to share their innovations both internally and externally.  However, that effort is inexorably tied to the larger question of what our focus should be as an organization.  That central question that has preoccupied my thoughts lately.

Successful organizations tend to be those that focus on a particular area and do that extremely well, as I was reminded yesterday.  In our case here at JSC, that would clearly be mission operations and support.  If that is going to be our focus, then we might need to be prepared to offload projects in the same vein as the now-defunct X-38 to other NASA centers and stay centered on our area of excellence.  When asked where I see JSC being in 20 years, I said that I would like to see JSC essentially serving as the staging area for lunar outpost and Mars sortie missions and support.  That doesn’t leave a whole lot of room for “the other stuff,” especially in an era where we must be prepared to expect static budgets.  However, I also believe that we must remember that operations are not an end unto themselves.  As the Global Exploration Architecture clearly shows, we must have achievable, relevant scientific goals to be working towards.  Our operations must be the means to accomplishing specific ends in science and exploration.

Read the rest of this entry »

For those who don’t know, VASMIR is an acronym that stands for VAriable Specific Impulse Rocket.  For those still a bit confused, it’s a plasma rocket.  The design of this rocket started with research in the 1960’s and 1970’s.  The research was focused on creating and sustaining a “sun-like plasma substance here on earth”.  To create this sun-like substance, material has to be heated to sun-like temperatures, which is in the neighborhood of 5,800 Kelvin (or 9,980 degrees Fahrenheit).  Of course, there’s not a container on earth that can hold this substance, so work was done on constructing massive electromagnetic fields to hold it.

Fast-forward a few years, a Ph.D. and the start of an astronaut career, and you have one Dr. Franklin Chang-Diaz, taking this idea of massive electromagnetic fields and transforming it into the next-gen space propulsion system.  The unique thing about VASMIR is it’s simplicity in concept (of course, the physics and mathematics behind it are a bit more complicated). Essentially, Dr. Chang-Diaz is taking some inert gas, using strong magnetic fields to transform this gas into a plasma by stripping away electrons and allowing nature to follow its course.  This course includes some electrons and ions swirling at various angles, gaining momentum, and finally transferring that circular motion into axial (or longitudinal) motion.  At this point, Sir Isaac Newton takes over with basic laws of motion (”equal and opposite reactions and such), and the bigger, heavier ions produce small amounts of moment on the engine, thus propelling it forward.

Read the rest of this entry »

Thank you Delia for summarizing the outcome of the sustainability panel at the 3rd Annual AIAA Space Exploration Conference. I would have loved to have been there in person but I was attending the Project Management Challenge (PMC) 2008 in Daytona, Florida. Thanks to Twitter, I felt like I was at both

It’s been very interesting to watch the Generation Y message make it’s way through the NASA world, up and down the lines of management everywhere. Most exciting is receiving emails from leaders around the agency and watching the NASA organization flatten (a little) before our eyes! I personally never imagined at the beginning of all this that a) NASA would listen, and b) that NASA would be so passionate about improving, growing and changing. I guess looking back, it only makes sense - NASA is filled with thousands of employees who are extremely brilliant, want to participate and who are here to change the world through exploration - no matter what generation.

Read the rest of this entry »