Lean and mean
APL, on the other hand, gives a lead engineer wider managerial latitude.
"We give both the responsibility and the authority to a leading subsystem engineer
to conceive, design and oversee the fabrication, the tests, the integration,
and the operations of their subsystem on the spacecraft," Krimigis said. "We
do not believe in generating huge documentation packages" and then having different
people in charge of each of these parts of the process.
"So we have this way of making decisions very, very quickly, on the fly. We
don't have a huge hierarchy [in which] someone who doesn't really know the details
is being asked to make a decision that properly belongs to the people who really
know what's going on."
In short, APL claims to be two key things that no one would ever dream of calling
JPL:
"We try to have a lean and mean organization," Krimigis said. "This helps us
in avoiding the pitfalls in terrific loads of documentation and rule making."
But there is a luxury associated with being small. The luxury of choice.
With JPL absorbing the bulk of the robotic missions doled out by NASA, Krimigis
can be selective, picking missions that APL is best suited for. And no interplanetary
mission, including NEAR, goes anywhere without the help of the Jet Propulsion
Laboratory, which manages the Deep Space Network of spacecraft-tracking dishes
located around the world.
"I don't really look at it as serious competition," Elachi said of APL. "Over
40 years, we have opened the door to space, and nobody is going to take that
away from us."
Elachi says he will select missions, and the portions of missions, that he
thinks JPL is best suited for. APL and subcontractors will find plenty of work
to choose from among the remaining NASA objectives, he says.
"We are going to pick the ones which are really difficult to do, almost at
the edge of impossible," Elachi told SPACE.com. "I want the whole nation
to be engaged in space exploration. But I want to be in the front seat."
Next Page: Competitive posturing?
advertisement
