He then pulls out some management
solutions, like co-location of the team, as new ways of thinking.
Unfortunately, the culture
that created the Mars '98 failures was not that the engineers were going
back to old, inefficient and ponderous ways of doing business. It was that
the demands on the missions made by the administrators at NASA Headquarters
were harking back to the old philosophy of loading everything possible
(or impossible) onto each mission. The problem was that Mars Surveyor '98
had about half the money of the 1996 orbiter and lander (MGS and Pathfinder)
and that they were constrained to about half the mass (because of the "Med-lite"
launch vehicle requirement), plus they were required to carry more experiments
than the '96 missions. The lander was also required to land in totally
unknown terrain with no earthly analogues to test the landing system.
All of these constraints
and demands led to the engineering team attempting to do the impossible,
overextending themselves and incurring failures attributable to lack of
personnel, money and time resources. As for co-location, it's a fine idea
if you go back to the old culture of having full-time people on a project
for the duration of the project. It's very difficult to implement if most
of the people are working fractional time on several projects, which is
dictated by the funding constraints and fast cycle times required. In addition,
I would like to point out that the Sojourner rover team on Pathfinder was
never co-located, except during operations, but achieved the development
and operations of the very successful rover mission well within their $25M
budget. There are a number of other (newer) ways of achieving communication
and teamwork without co-location.
Donna Shirley
Assistant Dean of Engineering
University of Oklahoma
A reader responds to Jeff
Federico's opinion piece
"Space Advocacy Needs Rethinking."
To the Editor:
I just read Jeff Federico's
article on space advocacy. I agree with him.
If the space agency has to
maintain an out-of-date weather satellite until they can get a new one
in place, this surely shows that the space agency is a vital part of our
society. Thus, there must be money in the U.S. budget for the space agency
to continue their work. Therefore there must be advocates with ample information
to tell the U.S. Congress to continue to fund the space agency and their
programs. The space program needs active advocates to push their agenda.
The U.S. Congress and the American people need to know what the space agency
is doing and that their programs are a vital part of our society and to
our survival.
Pat Robinson
Schenectady, New York
And finally, for now,
here's a comment on the implications of Earth's geography for the search
for life elsewhere.
To the Editor:
If any geographical details
have made the development of our civilization easier in a significant way,
one might argue that Earth is at present nearly "optimal" for intelligent
civilization and civilization might be rare.
Here are some geographical
examples of candidates for such "optimal" details:
1. There is a small natural
"bridge" of land between the two biggest pieces of land: Africa and Europe/Asia.
Without it, humans and other life forms may not have appeared or at least
spread.
2. The Mediterranean, the
Black Sea, the Baltic Sea are by a very small margin connected to the World
Ocean, which has been extremely important for the development and spread
of European civilization and thereby to modern global civilization.
3. The same can probably
be said about the importance of the Persian Gulf with its early civilizations
and perhaps even the Red Sea, which are both just nearly big lakes.
One might, from the examples
above, guess that technological civilization is probably far from inevitable.
Jan-Henrik Wegener
Denmark
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