The Augustine Commission met in Houston on Tuesday to review the human space flight program, particularly Dr. Sally Ride’s subcommittee’s work, and get the public’s reaction. Here’s mine to two questions Mr. Augustine himself posed.
He asked:
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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.
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.
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.
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NASA has some strong leadership, and among the top of those ranks, is Bill Gerstenmaier. Gerstenmaier is the Associate Administrator for Space Operations and is the point man who directs NASA’s human exploration of space. Today at the Project Management Challenge, he gave a really great talk entitled “Thinking on the Job: Distractions, Multitasking, and the Erosion of Attention.” I posted my notes on the #PMC2009 blog, but thought I’d do the same here. Multi-tasking, or continuous partial attention, has been a subject that has came up quite a bit lately. Psychologists have experimented on the nature and limits of human multitasking and shown that multitasking is not as workable as concentrated times. Still, our increasingly complex, and information overloaded world, almost seems to demand it (or at least that’s the perception). It’s a problem we all share to some extent or another. I think Gerstenmaier offers some really invaluable insight into the subject so I wanted to share my notes with everyone. Oh, and Gerst, if you are reading this, I loved your slides!
Disclaimer: I multi-tasked and wrote this on my blackberry during his presentation. 
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.
January 27, 1967 – Apollo 1: Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom, Ed White, Roger B. Chaffee
January 28, 1986 – Challenger: Ellison S. Onizuka, Sharon Christa McAuliffe, Greg Jarvis, Judy Resnik, Michael J. Smith, Dick Scobee, Ron McNair
February 1, 2003 – Columbia: Avid Brown, Laurel Clark, Michale Anderson, Ilan Ramon, Rick Husband, Kalpana Chawla, William McCool
An interesting set of polls came out today on Twitter (See this post if you haven’t joined the Twitter bandwagon yet). Beth Beck, Space Operations Outreach Manager at NASA HQ, created a poll entitled “What NASA project would you most like to see accomplished?” with 8 options ranging from building an outpost on the moon to conducting missions beyond the solar system. Shortly after that poll was posted Michael Mealling, fellow twitterer and VP of Business Development at Masten Space Systems, posted a similar *but Non-NASA Sanctioned* poll with 3 additional options with a commercial space bent. I took the 2 polls here and here and thought the disparity between the results was quite interesting! At the writing of this post, 25 had taken Beth’s poll and picked “Establish a colony on the moon” as the #1 choice. However, given other options, the overwhelming majority on Michael’s poll chose either “Provide and/or purchase basic in-space infrastructure to enable private sector development of space” or “Figure out how to obsolete itself by creating a spacefaring society where everyone is capable of being their own NASA.” Granted, only 9 have taken Michael’s poll as of right now… so we’re not talking about scientific results. What’s your opinion? Maybe by the end of the day we’ll have more accurate results with a larger sample size. Take the poll and if you’re on Twitter, RT! (retweet)
What projects would YOU like to see NASA take on in the next 20 to 50 years?
