NASA is good and bad, just like other companies

William Atkins
Sunday, 15 June 2008 23:22

Opinion and Analysis

It takes a lot of effort and planning to launch manned or robotic missions throughout the solar system. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. With each, respectively, accolades and criticisms are deserving. The same can be said about your organization on Earth.

Whether you are working to explore Mars and the Moon, searching for a new way to make a computer game, or investigating how to make a more efficient car, you may do it right or wrong, good or bad.

For starters, an organization is just a group of people. You can criticize NASA, but in actuality, you are criticizing a group of people, which work directly as federal employees or indirectly as contractor employees, for an organization called the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

I’m sure the company you work for can also be blamed for errors and praised for accomplishments. Hopefully for NASA and your company, the accomplishments outnumber the errors. If not, your job security could likely be at jeopardy in the near future.

In the end, most organizations survive or fail on the number of errors they commit versus the number of accomplishments they make.

Let me give you two examples for NASA: one an error and one an accomplishment, and both concerning the planet Mars.

Bad NASA

The Mars Polar Lander mission consisted to two spacecraft launched separately: the Mars Climate Orbiter and the Mars Polar Lander. Both were designed to study the weather, climate, water and carbon dioxide levels, and other such characteristics of the planet Mars.

Both were lost. Both were errors on the part of NASA.

According to the SpaceFlight.com article “Units Blunder Sent Craft Into Martian Atmosphere: NASA,” a navigation error caused the Mars Climate Orbiter spacecraft to go too close to the Martian atmosphere.

The spacecraft was destroyed by stresses and friction from its interaction with the atmosphere. The specific error that caused this problem was the input of imperial units (pound-seconds) by a NASA subcontractor rather than metric units (newton-seconds) as specified by NASA.

Bad planning doomed the Mars Polar Lander spacecraft, according to The Houston Chronicle. The article states, “A NASA-sponsored investigation that followed concluded that the lander was doomed by the agency's poor planning.”

The article continues, “The Polar Lander investigation concluded that NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the space agency's lead installation for the development of robotic spacecraft, had failed to size up the mission's risks. As a result, the investigators said, the 1999 flight was underfunded, and the equipment and software were not adequately tested.”

“Making matters worse, NASA had made no provisions to collect signals from the craft while it plunged through the Martian atmosphere to its landing site, its speed slowed first by a parachute and then by landing thrusters. That left the investigators with no way to pinpoint the exact cause of the crash — crucial information to avoid a repeat.”

“Relying on production records and interviews with the mission's developers, the investigators concluded the likely explanation for the crash was a software glitch. The crash probably occurred after the lander shut off its braking thrusters too early, about 100 feet off the ground.”

Good NASA

The NASA Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission is a continuing robotic mission that is exploring the surface of Mars with two twin rovers, Spirit and Opportunity. The mission is led by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory—the same agency that was principally involved with the earlier mentioned failed missions.

However, this time, the mission is a roaring success. The rovers are still functioning over four years after landing on the planet. The mission was only designed to last three months! And, their missions have been extended “possibly through 2009.”

The amount of information received from this small robotic craft is amazing. Especially, when one considers the amount of Martian dust storms that these two guys have had to contend with over the past four years, and the extreme cold of the Martian winters. Dust covering their solar arrays has almost doomed their power supply on more than one occasion. However, because of the wealth of information gained from the twin robots two asteroids have been named in their honor: 37452 Spirit and 39382 Opportunity.

Improving or retreating

I have no problem what so ever with criticizing NASA (or any organization) for errors that they are responsible for in their operations. However, let’s be reasonable. In my opinion, let's look at all of the facts and all sides of the picture.

NASA is one scientific organization that is constantly in the news. This is not the case for most research organizations. You don’t hear too much about what CERN is doing in Switzerland, or Argonne National Laboratory is doing in Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A.

But, you hear, almost on a daily basis, what NASA is doing. It is a high-profile organization.

And, because of that, you hear much of the good and almost all of the bad. Remember the diaper-wearing astronaut? Bad publicity for NASA—but it only concerned one employee out of thousands. Unfortunately, it was an astronaut.

If it had been a flight controller at Mission Control, or a planetary scientist at one of its research centers, the diaper-wearing incident probably would have never made the international news.

Back to mistakes: If an organization continues to make the same mistake time and time and time again, then as far as I’m concerned “criticize away.”

NASA deserves to be criticized for the Challenger and Columbia disasters. They could have been prevented. Period! The problems were discussed before the disasters occurred and they were both dismissed as minor.

However, I do not feel NASA deserves the criticisms it sometimes gets for other incidents. For example, an oven on the Phoenix Mars Lander doesn’t allow a teaspoon of Martian soil to get inside, and people criticize NASA for a bad design.

For one thing, how do you know the oven had a bad design? I contend you don’t. Let the experts decide what is good and bad. Assume they know what they are doing.

If you hear about one incident concerning a bad design on a General Motors automobile, you probably won’t get too concerned. Now, if you hear hundreds of injuries or even one or two deaths from that same GM design, then you probably are going to be much more interested in the problem.

Assume NASA knows what it is doing. At least, assume that a group of NASA employees for a particular mission is doing all that its members can do to make the mission a success. They have a lot at stake.

If their mission is a failure and it comes out that someone input the wrong units into the computer and a multi-million dollar mission is doomed, it sure doesn’t look very good on your resume—which you may really need in the near future.

Projects are complicated. It takes many people and a whole lot of cooperation to make them succeed. Probably one of the main reasons why missions (at NASA or in your own organization) succeed or failure is cooperation and communications. Do the various companies, groups, individuals cooperate and communicate?

In particular, can employees freely go to management to make suggestions, to criticize, (even better) to improve conditions, to improve the way things are done so the company becomes a better place to work and produces better products and services? If they can’t, the company is heading for trouble.

NASA has been criticized in the past for now allowing its employees to be freely heard by management. This two-way communications--free of reprisals--must be a critical part of any organization.

NASA has thousands of direct employees and indirect contractor employees to deal with on a daily basis. The organization will succeed only if each layer of the organization functions well.

This is equally applicable to your organization at work. After all, it's not “rocket science.”

Are the employees honest? This includes management, because managerial personnel right up to the CEO, president, and all of the big cheeses, are just employees. Are they doing an honest job?

In addition, is the way they conduct their business appropriate for the whole organization? People have agendas—not always good ones. A person working for NASA should be trying to advance the mission of NASA. That is not to say each employee shouldn’t also look after their own best interest.

However, if that personal agenda gets in the way of producing a safe and reliable space shuttle mission, for instance, then that agenda needs restraining or even eliminating. Too often employees have agendas that counter the organization.

A supervisor looking for a way up the corporate ladder can step on employees to the detriment of the group. However, a supervisor advancing based on good work within his or her group is a valid way to get a better job.

Conclusions

There are good points to NASA and there are bad points to NASA. In my opinion, to form valid opinions about any organization you need to weight all of their pluses and minuses.

Look at the organization over its lifetime. NASA is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary in 2008. It has contributed much to U.S. society, and the general benefit of the world. The reason why many countries have space programs is due to the Soviet and U.S. space programs that began in the 1950s.

However, they haven't always done a good job. They screw up just like everybody else. That's not an excuse, by no means. The indicator of a good organizations is that they "learn from their mistakes," which, is also, not rocket science, but just plain common sense and logic.

Space exploration is a dangerous business. It is not going to go well all of the time. It just isn’t.
 
However, if a mission out there into outer space is based on safety, reliability, honesty, cooperation, and communications, then it has a much better chance in succeeding than one not based on such good attributes.

Look at your own organization and decide if your group has such attributes and if you are succeeding or failing in your mission on planet Earth.