Nasa Launch Quotes

It looked like Mission Control, if NASA's business was launching rockets full of rapping multiracial actors in colonial garb into space.

While play-acting grim scenarios day in and day out may sound like a good recipe for clinical depression, it’s actually weirdly uplifting. Rehearsing for catastrophe has made me positive that I have the problem-solving skills to deal with tough situations and come out the other side smiling. For me, this has greatly reduced the mental and emotional clutter that unchecked worrying produces, those random thoughts that hijack your brain at three o’clock in the morning. While I very much hoped not to die in space, I didn’t live in fear of it, largely because I’d been made to think through the practicalities: how I’d want my family to get the news, for instance, and which astronaut I should recruit to help my wife cut through the red tape at NASA and the CSA. Before my last space flight (as with each of the earlier ones) I reviewed my will, made sure my financial affairs and taxes were in order, and did all the other things you’d do if you knew you were going to die. But that didn’t make me feel like I had one foot in the grave. It actually put my mind at ease and reduced my anxiety about what my family’s future would look like if something happened to me. Which meant that when the engines lit up at launch, I was able to focus entirely on the task at hand: arriving alive.

I think about the sheer number of people who pulled together just to save my sorry ass, and I can barely comprehend it. My crewmates sacrificed a year of their lives to come back for me. Countless people at NASA worked day and night to invent rover and MAV modifications. All of JPL busted their asses to make a probe that was destroyed on launch. Then, instead of giving up, they made another probe to resupply Hermes. The China National Space Administration abandoned a project they'd worked on for years just to provide a booster. The cost for my survival must have been hundreds of millions of dollar. All to save one dorky botanist. Why bother? Well, okay. I know the answer to that. Part of it might be what I represent: progress, science, and the interplanetary future we've dreamed of for centuries. But really, they did it because every human being has a basic instinct to help each other out. It might not seem that way sometimes, but it's true. If a hiker gets lost in the mountains, people will coordinate a search. If a train crashes, people will line up to give blood. If an earthquake levels a city, people all over the world will send emergency supplies. This is so fundamentally human that it's found in every culture without exception. Yes, there are assholes who just don't care, but they're massively outnumbered by the people who do. And because of that, I had billions of people on my side. Pretty cool, eh?

Only since the collapse of the Soviet Union have we learned that the Soviets were in fact developing a moon rocket, known as the N1, in the sixties. All four launch attempts of the N1 ended in explosions. Saturn was the largest rocket in the world, the most complex and powerful ever to fly, and remains so to this day. The fact that it was developed for a peaceful purpose is an exception to every pattern of history, and this is one of the legacies of Apollo.

NASA has never launched a mission just because it “sounded like a good idea,” and neither should you.

Every time I see a USA rocket launch, I am reminded of the millions of disabled people that were denied their disability benefits in order to fund it.

I've already got the storm figured out. Some idiot blew up the sun. Some dumb Russian general pushed the wrong button and launched one of their million missiles, or maybe NASA misaimed one of our test rockets. Either way, the sun is gone and we're now engaged in a nuclear shootout. It's the end of everything. Batman and Superman aren't coming and James Bond doesn't have a trick up his sleeve to save us this time. In a week or a month, we'll all freeze to death, just like in that Twilight Zone episode where the pretty lady is burning up with fever, dreaming the sun is baking the world dry, when really the Earth has dropped out of orbit, is hurtling further and further away from the sun, rapidly turning into a big ball of ice.

The 5 Second Rule.” Just like NASA uses a 5-4-3-2-1 countdown to launch a rocket, I counted down 5-4-3-2-1 to launch myself into action before my negative thoughts pinned me down. I’m dead serious. Alarm rings. No staring at the ceiling. No panic attack. No snooze button. No rolling over and shoving your head under the pillow to blot out the day. 5-4-3-2-1: kick your own ass.

In 2012, a few months after Planetary Resources unveiled its plan at a press conference, NASA announced the Robotic Asteroid Prospector project, which will analyze the feasibility of mining them. Then, in the fall of 2016, NASA launched a billion-dollar probe, called OSIRIS-REx, to meet Bennu, an asteroid measuring sixteen hundred feet across that will pass the Earth in 2135.

NASA, fortunately, has already tackled the oxygen problem. When it launches the successor to the Curiosity rover in 2020, it will carry a type of fuel cell that will turn Mars’s atmospheric CO2 into oxygen and carbon monoxide.

In the early 1980s, managers at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) estimated that the flights would be 99.999 percent reliable, which represents a failure rate of only 1 in 100,000. According to the physicist Richard Feynman, who was a member of the commission that investigated the January 1986 Challenger accident, in which the shuttle broke apart shortly into its flight, killing all seven astronauts on board, this “would imply that one could put a Shuttle up each day for 300 years expecting to lose only one.” He wondered, “What is the cause of management’s fantastic faith in the machinery?” Engineers, who were more familiar with the shuttle itself and with machines in general, predicted only a 99 percent success rate, or a failure every 100 launches. A range safety officer, who personally observed test firings during the developmental phase of the rocket motors, expected a failure rate of 1 in 25. The Challenger accident proved that estimate to be the actual failure rate, giving a success rate of 96 percent after exactly 25 launchings.

My crewmates sacrificed a year of their lives to come back for me. Countless people at NASA worked day and night to invent rover and MAV modifications. All of JPL busted their asses to make a probe that was destroyed on launch. Then, instead of giving up, they made another probe to resupply Hermes. The China National Space Administration abandoned a project they’d worked on for years just to provide a booster. The cost for my survival must have been hundreds of millions of dollars. All to save one dorky botanist. Why bother? Well, okay. I know the answer to that. Part of it might be what I represent: progress, science, and the interplanetary future we’ve dreamed of for centuries. But really, they did it because every human being has a basic instinct to help each other out. It might not seem that way sometimes, but it’s true.

It wasn’t until years later that I understood that a management failure doomed Challenger as much as the O-ring failure. Engineers working on the solid rocket boosters had raised concerns multiple times about the performance of the O-rings in cold weather. In a teleconference the night before Challenger’s launch, they had desperately tried to talk NASA managers into delaying the mission until the weather got warmer. Those engineers’ recommendations were not only ignored, they were left out of reports sent to the higher-level managers who made the final decision about whether or not to launch. They knew nothing about the O-ring problems or the engineers’ warnings, and neither did the astronauts who were risking their lives. The presidential commission that investigated the disaster recommended fixes to the solid rocket boosters, but more important, they recommended broad changes to the decision-making process at NASA, recommendations that changed the culture at NASA—at least for a while.

The foundation of your greatness is in your head. Your brain is the most sophisticated computer there is. Its ten billion parts can store the equivalent of one hundred trillion words. It would take dozens of buildings to house computers capable of containing that much information. You have the potential to become a gifted genius, because you were born with the equivalent of a Pentium 10000 processor with hundreds of “cores” and millions of gigabytes of memory. However, like any powerful computer, your brain requires to be turned on and programed properly! Any computer today has more capacity and processing power than all the computers used by NASA to send rockets to the moon. However, you cannot launch rockets from your iPhone (or your Galaxy!) because you don’t have the necessary software (and hopefully nor the rockets...) However, with the right apps, you COULD! It is the same with that amazing computer in your head: You have to turn it on, and then upload the right programs or apps that will allow you to develop your potential and achieve everything you set out to do in life.

One reason was that rocket components were subject to hundreds of specifications and requirements mandated by the military and NASA. At big aerospace companies, engineers followed these religiously. Musk did the opposite: he made his engineers question all specifications. This would later become step one in a five-point checklist, dubbed “the algorithm,” that became his oft-repeated mantra when developing products. Whenever one of his engineers cited “a requirement” as a reason for doing something, Musk would grill them: Who made that requirement? And answering “The military” or “The legal department” was not good enough. Musk would insist that they know the name of the actual person who made the requirement. “We would talk about how we were going to qualify an engine or certify a fuel tank, and he would ask, ‘Why do we have to do that?’ ” says Tim Buzza, a refugee from Boeing who would become SpaceX’s vice president of launch and testing. “And we would say, ‘There is a military specification that says it’s a requirement.’ And he’d reply, ‘Who wrote that? Why does it make sense?’ ” All requirements should be treated as recommendations, he repeatedly instructed. The only immutable ones were those decreed by the laws of physics.

Discovery first flew in 1984, the third orbiter to join the fleet. It was named for one of the ships commanded by Captain James Cook. Space shuttle Discovery is the most-flown orbiter; today will be its thirty-ninth and final launch. By the end of this mission, it will have flown a total of 365 days in space, making it the most well traveled spacecraft in history. Discovery was the first orbiter to carry a Russian cosmonaut and the first to visit the Russian space station Mir. On that flight, in 1995, Eileen Collins became the first woman to pilot an American spacecraft. Discovery flew twelve of the thirty-eight missions to assemble the International Space Station, and it was responsible for deploying the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990. This was perhaps the most far reaching accomplishment of the shuttle program, as Hubble has been called the most important telescope in history and one of the most significant scientific instruments ever invented. It has allowed astronomers to determine the age of the universe, postulate how galaxies form, and confirm the existence of dark energy, among many other discoveries. Astronomers and astrophysicists, when they are asked about the significance of Hubble, will simply say that it has rewritten the astronomy books. In the retirement process, Discovery will be the “vehicle of record,” being kept as intact as possible for future study. Discovery was the return-to-flight orbiter after the loss of Challenger and then again after the loss of Columbia. To me, this gives it a certain feeling of bravery and hope. ‘Don’t worry,’ Discovery seemed to tell us by gamely rolling her snow-white self out to the launchpad. 'Don’t worry, we can still dream of space. We can still leave the earth.’ And then she did.

Beginning in 2011, SpaceX won a series of contracts from NASA to develop rockets that could take humans to the International Space Station, a task made crucial by the retirement of the Space Shuttle. To fulfill that mission, it needed to add to its facilities at Cape Canaveral’s Pad 40, and Musk set his sights on leasing the most storied launch facility there, Pad 39A. Pad 39A had been center stage for America’s Space Age dreams, burned into the memories of a television generation that held its collective breath when the countdowns got to “Ten, nine, eight…” Neil Armstrong’s mission to the moon that Bezos watched as a kid blasted off from Pad 39A in 1969, as did the last manned moon mission, in 1972. So did the first Space Shuttle mission, in 1981, and the last, in 2011. But by 2013, with the Shuttle program grounded and America’s half-century of space aspirations ending with bangs and whimpers, Pad 39A was rusting away and vines were sprouting through its flame trench. NASA was eager to lease it. The obvious customer was Musk, whose Falcon 9 rockets had already launched on cargo missions from the nearby Pad 40, where Obama had visited. But when the lease was put out for bids, Jeff Bezos—for both sentimental and practical reasons—decided to compete for it. When NASA ended up awarding the lease to SpaceX, Bezos sued. Musk was furious, declaring that it was ridiculous for Blue Origin to contest the lease “when they haven’t even gotten so much as a toothpick to orbit.” He ridiculed Bezos’s rockets, pointing out that they were capable only of popping up to the edge of space and then falling back; they lacked the far greater thrust necessary to break the Earth’s gravity and go into orbit. “If they do somehow show up in the next five years with a vehicle qualified to NASA’s human rating standards that can dock with the Space Station, which is what Pad 39A is meant to do, we will gladly accommodate their needs,” Musk said. “Frankly, I think we are more likely to discover unicorns dancing in the flame duct.” The battle of the sci-fi barons had blasted off. One SpaceX employee bought dozens of inflatable toy unicorns and photographed them in the pad’s flame duct. Bezos was eventually able to lease a nearby launch complex at Cape Canaveral, Pad 36, which had been the origin of missions to Mars and Venus. So the competition of the boyish billionaires was set to continue. The transfer of these hallowed pads represented, both symbolically and in practice, John F. Kennedy’s torch of space exploration being passed from government to the private sector—from a once-glorious but now sclerotic NASA to a new breed of mission-driven pioneers.

consider the fate of the space shuttle’s external tanks (ETs). Dwarfing the vehicle itself, the ET was the largest and most prominent feature of the space shuttle as it stood on the pad. It remained attached to the shuttle—or perhaps it makes as much sense to say that the shuttle remained attached to it—long after the two strap-on boosters had fallen away. The ET and the shuttle remained connected all the way out of the atmosphere and into space. Only after the system had attained orbital velocity was the tank jettisoned and allowed to fall into the atmosphere, where it was destroyed on reentry. At a modest marginal cost, the ETs could have been kept in orbit indefinitely. The mass of the ET at separation, including residual propellants, was about twice that of the largest possible shuttle payload. Not destroying them would have roughly tripled the total mass launched into orbit by the shuttle. ETs could have been connected to build units that would have humbled today’s International Space Station. The residual oxygen and hydrogen sloshing around in them could have been combined to generate electricity and produce tons of water, a commodity that is vastly expensive and desirable in space. But in spite of hard work and passionate advocacy by space experts who wished to see the tanks put to use, NASA—for reasons both technical and political—sent each of them to fiery destruction in the atmosphere.

Sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson later said that there should be a “consilience” between art and science. 79 Former NASA astronaut Mae Jemison took selected images with her on her first trip to space, including a poster of dancer and former artistic director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater Judith Jamison performing the dance Cry, and a Bundu statue from Sierra Leone, because, as she said, “the creativity that allowed us . . . to conceive and build and launch the space shuttle, springs from the same source as the imagination and analysis it took to carve a Bundu statue, or the ingenuity it took to design, choreograph, and stage ‘Cry.’ . . . That’s what we have to reconcile in our minds, how these things fit together.” 80 As a jazz musician once told me, musicians are mathematicians as well as artists. Morse’s story suggests that the argument started not because of the need to bring art and science together, but because they were once not so far apart. 81 When Frank Jewett Mather Jr. of The Nation stated that Morse “was an inventor superimposed upon an artist,” it was factually true. 82 Equally true is that Morse could become an inventor because he was an artist all the while. In one of the final paintings that laid him flat, the painting that failed to secure his last attempt at a commission, one he had worked fifteen years to achieve, Morse may have left a clue about his shift from art to invention, and the fact that the skills required for both are the same. He painted The House of Representatives (1822–23) as evidence of his suitability for a commission from Congress to complete a suite of paintings that still adorn the U.S. Capitol building. The painting has an odd compositional focus. In the center is a man screwing in an oil chandelier, preoccupied with currents. Morse was “rejected beyond hope of appeal” by the congressional commission led by John Quincy Adams. When he toured the picture for seven weeks—displayed in a coffee house in Salem, Massachusetts, and at exhibitions in New York, Boston, Middleton, and Hartford, Connecticut—it lost twenty dollars in the first two weeks. Compounded by a litany of embarrassing, near-soul-stealing artistic failures, he took to his bed for weeks, “more seriously depressed than ever.” This final rejection forced him to shift his energies to his telegraph invention. 83 By 1844 Morse went to the Capitol focused on a current that would occupy the work of Congress—obtaining a patent for the telegraph.

attenuate the city’s hold on my identity, and the more I explored places and people far from Hampton, the more my status as one of its daughters came to mean to me. That day after church, we spent a long while catching up with the formidable Mrs. Land, who had been one of my favorite Sunday school teachers. Kathaleen Land, a retired NASA mathematician, still lived on her own well into her nineties and never missed a Sunday at church. We said our good-byes to her and clambered into the minivan, off to a family brunch. “A lot of the women around here, black and white, worked as computers,” my father said, glancing at Aran in the rearview mirror but addressing us both. “Kathryn Peddrew, Ophelia Taylor, Sue Wilder,” he said, ticking off a few more names. “And Katherine Johnson, who calculated the launch windows for the first astronauts.” The

Russian mission control warns us it’s one minute to launch. On an American spacecraft, we would already know because we’d see the countdown clock ticking backward toward zero. Unlike NASA, the Russians don’t feel the drama of the countdown is necessary.

With Juno's launch, Dawn's arrival at Vesta, MESSENGER's arrival at Mercury, the Stardust flyby of Tempel l, and the launches of the Mars Science Laboratory, Fobos-Grunt, and the insertion into lunar orbit of the GRAIL (Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory) for the Disocvery program, 2011 was another landmark year for solar system exploration. This was even more remarkable for the fact that, except for the loss of Fobos-Grunt, all of these missions were run by NASA, an agency which had been criticized as having "a great future behind it" as a result of the absence of a clear vision by politicians for manned spaceflight after the retirment of the Space Shuttle.

Future destinations in our solar system neighborhood include potential probe missions to a few moons of Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune -- mainly by virtue of them being possible candidates for life, with their large oceans buried beneath icy crusts, plus intense volcanic activity. But getting humans to explore these possibly habitable worlds is a big issue in space travel. The record for the fastest-ever human spaceflight was set by the Apollo 10 crew as they gravita­tionally slingshotted around the Moon on their way back to Earth in May 1969. They hit a top speed of 39,897 kilo­meters per hour (24,791 miles per hour); at that speed you could make it from New York to Sydney and back in under one hour. Although that sounds fast, we've since recorded un-crewed space probes reaching much higher speeds, with the crown currently held by NASA's Juno probe, which, when it entered orbit around Jupiter, was traveling at 266,000 kilometers per hour (165,000 miles per hour). To put this into perspective, it took the Apollo 10 mission four days to reach the Moon; Opportunity took eight months to get to Mars; and Juno took five years to reach Jupiter. The distances in our solar system with our current spaceflight technology make planning for long-term crewed explora­tion missions extremely difficult." "So, will we ever explore beyond the edge of the solar system itself? The NASA Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft were launched back in 1977 with extended flyby missions to the outer gas giant planets of Jupiter and Saturn. Voyager 2 even had flyby encounters with Uranus and Neptune -- it's the only probe ever to have visited these two planets. "The detailed images you see of Uranus and Neptune were all taken by Voyager 2. Its final flyby of Neptune was in October 1989, and since then, it has been traveling ever farther from the Sun, to the far reaches of the solar sys­tem, communicating the properties of the space around it with Earth the entire time. In February 2019, Voyager 2 reported a massive drop off in the number of solar wind particles it was detecting and a huge jump in cosmic ray particles from outer space. At that point, it had finally left the solar system, forty-one years and five months after being launched from Earth. "Voyager 1 was the first craft to leave the solar system in August 2012, and it is now the most distant synthetic object from Earth at roughly 21.5 billion kilometers (13.5 billion miles) away. Voyager 2 is ever so slightly closer to us at 18 billion kilometers (11 billion miles) away. Although we may ultimately lose contact with the Voyager probes, they will continue to move ever farther away from the Sun with nothing to slow them down or impede them. For this reason, both Voyager crafts carry a recording of sounds from Earth, including greetings in fifty-five differ­ent languages, music styles from around the world, and sounds from nature -- just in case intelligent life forms happen upon the probes in the far distant future when the future of humanity is unknown.

Just think about the incredible transformation that took place in Steve’s life and career after Pixar. In 1983, Apple launched their computer Lisa, the last project Jobs worked on before he was let go. Jobs released Lisa with a nine-page ad in the New York Times spelling out the computer’s technical features. It was nine pages of geek talk nobody outside NASA was interested in. The computer bombed. When Jobs returned to the company after running Pixar, Apple became customer-centric, compelling, and clear in their communication. The first campaign he released went from nine pages in the New York Times to just two words on billboards all over America: Think Different. When Apple began filtering their communication to make it simple and relevant, they actually stopped featuring computers in most of their advertising. Instead, they understood their customers were all living, breathing heroes, and they tapped into their stories. They did this by (1) identifying what their customers wanted (to be seen and heard), (2) defining their customers’ challenge (that people didn’t recognize their hidden genius), and (3) offering their customers a tool they could use to express themselves (computers and smartphones). Each of these realizations are pillars in ancient storytelling and critical for connecting with customers. I’ll teach you about these three pillars and more in the coming chapters, but for now just realize the time Apple spent clarifying the role they play in their customers’ story is one of the primary factors responsible for their growth. Notice, though, the story of Apple isn’t about Apple; it’s about you. You’re the hero in the story, and they play a role more like Q in the James Bond movies. They are the guy you go see when you need a tool to help you win the day.

Voyagers, I’ve always wanted to write about you. And now, at 4:41 a.m. on an autumn morning, Words have found their way into my mind. I picture myself like you— Distant from life, Alone, Yet moving towards an unknown destination! Like you, in the early stages of my journey, I could see, I could gather knowledge and transmit it, I was useful and efficient. But sometimes, to keep connected to the world, To be able to stay on course and conserve my energy, I had to shut parts of myself down, To survive, To go blind, to be deaf, to be isolated, and just occasionally signal my existence to the world. The same thing I do, that you do, that so many others do. The boundless reaches of space Have become somewhat more comprehensible through you, Yet the depths of the human soul remain unfathomable, And its pain incurable. We live in an age surrounded by a torrent of information, Yet somehow, we remain lonely and lost. Language has advanced, There are words for nearly everything, Everyone can describe their own state of mind, yet we’re still at war with one another. Earth has turned into a vast ship, Perhaps like Noah’s Ark, With maximum diversity and multiplicity, Yet everyone on this ship plays their own tune, rallies their own cause! Someone steps forward, claiming each individual’s thoughts and personal benefit are like rare pearls to be cherished, While another insists that collective welfare takes precedence, That the needs of the masses outweigh individual desires. Some launch movements to claim their rights, While others start movements to flaunt the rights they’ve acquired. No one knows what they truly want; We’re all still lost. I don’t know how Earth looks from afar— Perhaps like a blueberry-flavored lollipop, A lollipop with a stick, But Earth’s stick is an invisible one made of sorrow. I find something common among all the passengers on this ship, All the inhabitants of this blueberry lollipop: sorrow. A fetus in its mother’s womb is also like a lollipop, But connected by an umbilical cord. As a fetus, Growing in the mother’s womb, Suffering, malnutrition, and physical ailments can be painful for us. If the mother’s state is stable, We may enjoy brief periods of security and calm, but after that, We must endure the pain of separation, Learn how to breathe, And besides the sorrow of leaving security behind, We face new emotions like fear and anger. Later in life, We each take our own path. No matter how much they try to show humans as social creatures, It’s always the individual who walks their own way, who has the freedom to choose, Even if one finds the meaning of their path in joining a group or a collective, it’s their individual choice that put them on that path. Today, people have countless options to join others who are like them, And these options themselves bring confusion, And when you join a group out of confusion, You treat the other groups with hostility. Science, philosophy, religion, politics…each of them has thousands of branches, and each branch Wants to disprove the other, cleanse itself of its shameful past. Freedom of speech has become an excuse for verbal assaults and psychological wounds, Non-violence has become a breeding ground for new and emerging dictators, For heartless sects and brutal factions. Knowledge and science alone cannot save us, Just as religion couldn’t. I don’t want to write about chaos, Life isn’t that disorganized, In some corner of the world, A lover is staring up at his beloved’s window, A child is laughing joyfully. But writing about sorrow, Speaking of chaos and Asking questions can reveal where we stand. Now, we know so much about space, And about the Sun, too. The James Webb telescope has mapped out the cosmos for us, and countless projects are underway for the future, crafted with flawless precision and extraordinary coherence, but the rift between humans remains deep.

In April 1968, a test launch with an unmanned Apollo 6 capsule aboard suffered from a “pogo effect.” Unnerved NASA engineers watched as their thirty-six-stories-tall rocket bounced across the pad for half a minute before finally achieving liftoff.

Even the most elite of engineers commits the most mundane and costly of errors. In late 1998, NASA launched the Mars Climate Orbiter on a daunting nine-month trip to Mars, a mission that fewer than half the world’s launched probes headed for that destination have completed successfully. This $327.6 million calamity crashed and burned indeed, due not to the flip of fate’s coin, but rather a simple snafu. The spacecraft came too close to Mars and disintegrated in its atmosphere. The source of the navigational bungle? One system expected to receive information in metric units (newton-seconds), but a computer programmer for another system had it speak in English imperial units (pound-seconds). Oops.

The watershed came from NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, the brainchild of Bill Borucki, another longtime denizen of Ames Research Center. Bill had been advocating for this planet-hunting mission for decades, seemingly forever. I remember him doggedly pushing the concept when I was a postdoc at Ames, twenty years before Kepler became a reality. His concept was to launch a small telescope into orbit just to obsessively stare at one little area of sky. He proposed that if we could precisely monitor the brightness of a large number of stars in one random area of the galaxy, watching for any flickering, we could tell if planets ever passed in front of any of them. A

Flying saucers aside, a visceral childhood fascination with what’s out there, launched by pop culture and propelled by real-life space missions during NASA’s heyday, is a recurring narrative among SETI researchers. “I’m a child of the Apollo era,” said Mark Showalter, a Sagan Center senior research scientist. “I’m in this room today because of Neil Armstrong. Watching the moonwalk — that was the most exciting thing I’d ever seen in my life.” To date, Showalter has discovered, or co-discovered, six moons in the solar system: Pan (orbiting Saturn); Mab and Cupid (Uranus); Kerberos and Styx (Pluto); and just last year, a Neptune moon, still unnamed. “We could be sending missions to all kinds of fantastic destinations and learning things for decades to come,” he said. But the scheduled NASA voyages to the outer planets appear nearly done.  The New Horizons spacecraft flies by Pluto next year; the probes to Jupiter and Saturn shut down in 2017. Even the much-heralded Clipper mission — the proposed robotic expedition to Europa — isn’t yet a go. So far, with a projected $2 billion cost, only $170 million has been appropriated. At 56, Showalter concedes that his professional career will conclude with these final journeys. “It takes twenty years from the time you start thinking about the project to the time you actually get to the outer planets,” he said. And without new missions, he worries, and wonders, about the new generation. “It’s the missions that capture imaginations. If those aren’t happening, kids might not go into science the way my generation did.

The Obama administration sees government agencies as political tools to advance its agenda, as we have seen with NASA’s new Muslim outreach, the IRS hounding of conservative nonprofit groups, and the patent office’s antagonization of the Redskins. The October missiles of 1962 were never launched, but the crisis still forced JFK to adopt a new realism about the Soviet Union. In contrast, for Obama to meet these current October threats head-on, he first would have to admit they were largely self-created.

It’s talk like this that thrills and amazes people in the aerospace industry, who have long been hoping that some company would come along and truly revolutionize space travel. Aeronautics experts will point out that twenty years after the Wright brothers started their experiments, air travel had become routine. The launch business, by contrast, appears to have frozen. We’ve been to the moon, sent research vehicles to Mars, and explored the solar system, but all of these things are still immensely expensive one-off projects. “The cost remains extraordinarily high because of the rocket equation,” said Carol Stoker, the planetary scientist at NASA. Thanks to military and government contracts from agencies like NASA, the aerospace industry has historically had massive budgets to work with and tried to make the biggest, most reliable machines it could. The business has been tuned to strive for maximum performance, so that the aerospace contractors can say they met their requirements. That strategy makes sense if you’re trying to send up a $1 billion military satellite for the U.S. government and simply cannot afford for the payload to blow up.

One of my favorite retailers has a release process that rivals a NASA launch sequence.

With an accelerated schedule of launch in just two months, NASA and contractor launch and support teams labor steadily with six-day work weeks by day and night shifts

At 5.30 a.m. Washington time, the Moscow News radio channel announced Gagarin’s successful landing and recovery. An alert journalist called NASA’s launch centre in Florida to ask if America could catch up. Press officer John ‘Shorty’ Powers was trying to catch a few hours’ rest in his cramped office cot. He and many other NASA staffers were working 16-hour days in the lead-up to astronaut Alan Shepard’s first flight in a Mercury capsule. When the phone at his side rang in the pre-dawn silence, he was irritable and unprepared. ‘Hey, what is this!’ he yelled into the phone. ‘We’re all asleep down here!’ Next morning the headlines read: ‘SOVIETS PUT MAN IN SPACE. SPOKESMAN SAYS US ASLEEP.

Consider this: in February of 1966, the Soviet Union soft-landed a space probe on the moon. Humanity has been launching programs ever since. NASA launched Voyager 1 in September of 1977. In 2012 it became the first satellite to reach interstellar space. At some point, Voyager will fall into the gravity well of a planet, or asteroid, or even another planet’s moon. Possibly a black hole. The point is that it will crash somewhere—maybe on a place like our moon, but orbiting another planet, very far away.” Yuri smiled. “And if that’s true, then why has it not happened here—on our moon, which is over four and a half billion years old? The greatest mystery in the world is why our moon isn’t covered with space junk.” “Space junk?” “Interstellar probes—like Voyager 1—from other sentient species across the universe, launched long before we evolved, launched long before there was even life on our world.

When NASA launched an internal investigation in the wake of the Challenger explosion, they made a startling discovery – many who worked on the project had misgivings about whether or not the shuttle was ready to be launched, but didn’t speak up for fear that doing so would hamper their careers and make it seem like they did not have faith in the NASA program.

The China National Space Agency (created in 1993) may be the formal NASA equivalent, facilitating international agreements and cooperation, but it still operates in tandem with the PLA and is involved in the defense industry.12 The China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation, a state-owned company, specializes in tactical ballistic missiles, anti-ship missiles, land-attack cruise missiles, anti-satellite interceptors, and small tactical satellites. The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation produces launch vehicles and large satellites. Both of these organizations operate closely together.

Charles Du designed NASA’s first iPhone app, an award winner and a huge hit with more than 10 million downloads. But he also faced challenges from NASA brass who tried to water down his vision for the app. In a guest blog for Aha!, he laid out a basic principle: Maintaining your product vision is just as important as getting buy-in for that vision. After I got buy-in for the NASA app, a project manager was assigned to our team . . . a project manager is not the same as a product manager. Since my project manager didn’t understand the difference between the two roles and had seniority over me, we fought many battles. The vision of the app was user-driven. So, I validated my product hypothesis by talking to users and looking at our website metrics — a user-centered design approach. The project manager took a different approach. She saw this app as an opportunity to get more resources for our local center . . . She was advocating for politics-centered design that was divorced from any customer conversations. To me, this is a clear case of why product vision should drive everything you do as a product manager. I had clearly communicated why the vision for this app would achieve NASA’s high-level goals. This allowed senior leadership to see that I was working to help grow the whole organization. And it prevented politics from entering the picture. . . . We ended up launching a pure product designed 100 percent for our users — and it was a huge success.11

I was asking people, "Have you ever seen a night launch before?" One guy answered, "Not from the outside, no." You have to be careful about trying to be cool at a Rockwell party.

The cluster was oriented so that it was pointing toward the sun; that way, boiloff of the cryogenic propellants inside the tanks was reduced. Shadows of struts and attitude thrusters lay long against the sunlit white-and-silver bellies of the fuel tanks. The booster’s underside was illuminated only by the soft blue and green of Earthlight. She could see the great flaps of the cluster’s solar panels, folded up against the sides of the MS-IVB stage like wings; the panels would be unfurled when Ares was safely launched on its trajectory to Mars. There was the bold red UNITED STATES stenciled against the side of the MS-II, and the finer lettering along the long thin protective flaps masking the solar panels, and the NASA logo; and she could make out the support struts and attachment pins which held the External Tanks in place against the flanks of the MS-II, and the gold-gleaming mouths of the MS-II’s four J-2S engines, upgrades of the engines which had pushed Apollo to the Moon. To assemble this much mass in Earth orbit had taken all of nine Saturn VB flights over the last five years—half of them manned. The booster stages and their tanks had been flown up and assembled more or less empty, and then pumped full of gas from tanker modules. The cluster was an exercise in enhanced Apollo-Saturn technology, of course, and the essence of its design went all the way back to the 1960s. But NASA had had to develop a raft of new techniques to achieve it: the assembly in orbit of heavy components, the long-term storage of supercold fuels, in-orbit fueling.

And then the omnipotent Integral intervened … a practical joker to the end! Early on the morning of April 12, the fabulous but anonymous Builder of the Integral, Chief Designer of the Sputniks, struck another of his cruel but dramatic blows. Just twenty days before the first scheduled Mercury flight he sent a five-ton Sputnik called Vostok I into orbit around the earth with a man aboard, the first cosmonaut, a twenty-seven-year-old test pilot named Yuri Gagarin. Vostok I completed one orbit, then brought Gagarin down safely, on land, near the Soviet village of Smelovka. The omnipotent Integral! NASA had really believed—and the astronauts had really believed—that somehow, in the religious surge of the mission, Shepard’s flight would be the first. But there was no putting one over on the Integral, was there! It was as if the Soviets’ Chief Designer, that invisible genius, was toying with them. Back in October 1957, just four months before the United States was supposed to launch the world’s first artificial earth satellite, the Chief Designer had launched Sputnik I. In January 1959, just two months before NASA was scheduled to put the first artificial satellite into orbit around the sun, the Chief Designer launched Mechta I and did just that. But this one, Vostok I, in April 1961, had been his pièce de resistance. Given the huge booster rockets at his disposal, he seemed to be able to play these little games with his adversaries at will. There was the eerie feeling that he would continue to let NASA struggle furiously to catch up—and then launch some startling new demonstration of just how far ahead he really was.

The Soviets persisted in offering no information as to the Chief Designer’s identity. For that matter, they identified no one involved in Gagarin’s flight other than Gagarin himself. Nor did they offer any pictures of the rocket or even such elementary data as its length and its rocket thrust. Far from casting any doubt as to the capabilities of the Soviet program, this policy seemed only to inflame the imagination. The Integral! Secrecy was by now accepted as “the Russian way.” Whatever the CIA might have been able to do in other parts of the world, in the Soviet Union they drew a blank. Intelligence about the Soviet space program remained very sketchy. Only two things were known: the Soviets were capable of launching a vehicle of tremendous weight, five tons; and whatever goal NASA set for itself, the Soviet Union reached it first. Using those two pieces of information, everyone in the government, from President Kennedy to Bob Gilruth, seemed to experience an involuntary leap of the imagination similar to that of the ancients … who used to look into the sky and see a clump of stars, sparks in the night, and deduce therefrom the contours of … an enormous bear! … the constellation Ursa Major! … On the evening of Gagarin’s flight, April 12, 1961, President Kennedy summoned James E. Webb and Hugh Dryden, Webb’s deputy administrator and NASA’s highest-ranking engineer, to the White House; they met in the Cabinet room and they all stared into the polished walnut surface of the great conference table and saw … the mighty Integral! … and the Builder!—the Chief Designer! … who was laughing at them … and it was awesome!

Every time they delayed a scheduled launch, they faced widespread public criticism and threats to funding. Each time they celebrated a flight that made it into orbit, they were encouraging their engineers to focus on the fact that the launch resulted in a success rather than on the faulty processes that could jeopardize future launches. That left NASA rewarding luck and repeating problematic practices, failing to rethink what qualified as an acceptable risk. It wasn’t for a lack of ability. After all, these were rocket scientists.

reforms at NASA that have incentivized innovative and effective programs can now light a path for other stalled government activities.

They were productively adversarial, like superforecasting team discussions. Managers grilled engineers and forced them to produce data to back up their assertions. The process had worked remarkably. The space shuttle was the most complex machine ever built, and all twenty-four flights had returned safely. But on the emergency conference call, that same quantitative culture led them astray. On their engineers’ advice, McDonald and two Thiokol VPs on the call initially supported a no-launch decision. The Challenger had already been cleared, so this was an eleventh-hour reversal. When NASA officials asked Thiokol engineers exactly what temperature range was safe for flight, they recommended setting a limit at 53 degrees, the lower bound of previous experience. NASA manager Larry Mulloy was flabbergasted. He thought the shuttle was supposed to be cleared to launch from 31 to 99 degrees. A last-minute 53-degree limit was setting an entirely new technical criteria for launches. It had never been discussed, was not backed by quantitative data, and meant that suddenly winter was off-limits for space exploration. Mulloy found it frustrating; he later called it “dumb.” How had the engineers arrived at that number? “They said because they had flown at 53 degrees before,” a NASA manager reflected, “which is no reason to me. That’s tradition rather than technology.” Boisjoly was asked again for data to support his claim, “and I said I have none other than what is being presented.” With the conference call at an impasse, a Thiokol VP asked for a five-minute “offline caucus,” during which Thiokol concluded that they had no more data to provide. They returned to the call a half hour later with a new decision: proceed with launch. Their official document read, “temperature data not conclusive on predicting primary O-ring blow-by.” When conference call participants from NASA and Thiokol later spoke with investigators and gave interviews, they repeatedly brought up the “weak engineering position,” as one put it. Their statements comprised a repetitive chorus: “Unable to quantify”; “supporting data was subjective”; “hadn’t done a good technical job”; “just didn’t have enough conclusive data.” NASA was, after all, the agency that hung a framed quote in the Mission Evaluation Room: “In God We Trust, All Others Bring Data.

But those achievements pale next to the audacity of trying to send humans to Mars, which remains far beyond the present-day capability of NASA or any other space agency around the world. Even with an annual budget approaching $25 billion a year, and some of the smartest scientists and engineers anywhere, the space agency that landed humans on the Moon remains several giant leaps away from sending a few astronauts to Mars.

A statue of Mary is smashed down to tears, in dawn Light.

Let's imagine we're standing together on the launch pad at NASA's Cape Canaveral facility near Orlando, and staring up at the stars together. As I write this, the last constellation above the horizon is Centaurus. The centaur's front head is a bright star. In fact, it's three stars—a pair called Alpha Centauri A and B, and, dimmest of the trio, Proxima Centauri. Here, look through this telescope. See? You can tell them apart. But what we can't see is that there is, in fact, a planet circling the faint light of Proxima Centauri. Man, I wish we could see it. Because that planet, Proxima Centauri b, is the nearest known exoplanet to Earth. [...] If we were to board a spacecraft and ride it from the outer edge of our atmosphere all the way to Proxima Centauri b, you and I, who boarded the ship fit and trim, chosen as we were from billions of applicants, would die before the voyage reached even 1/100th of the intervening distance. [...] At a speed of 20,000 miles per hour—the speed of our top-performing modern rockets—4.2 light years translates to more than 130,000 years of space travel. [...] So how will we ever get there? A generation ship. [...] the general notion is this: get enough human beings onto a ship, with adequate genetic diversity among us, that we and our fellow passengers cohabitate as a village, reproducing and raising families who go on to mourn you and me and raise new of their own, until, thousands of years after our ship leaves Earth's gravity, the distant descendants of the crew that left Earth finally break through the atmosphere of our new home. [...] A generation ship is every sociological and psychological challenge of modern life squashed into a microcosmic tube of survival and amplified—generation after generation. [...] The idea of a generation ship felt like a pointless fantasy when I first encountered it. But as I've spent the last few years speaking with technologists, academics, and policy makers about the hidden dangers of building systems that could reprogram our behavior now and for generations to come, I realized that the generation ship is real. We're on board it right now. On this planet, our own generation ship, we were once passengers. But now, without any training, we're at the helm. We have built lives for ourselves on this planet that extend far beyond our natural place in this world. And now we are on the verge of reprogramming not only the planet, but one another, for efficiency and profit. We are turning systems loose on the decks of the ship that will fundamentally reshape the behavior of everyone on board, such that they will pass those behaviors on to their progeny, and they might not even realize what they've done. This pattern will repeat itself, and play out over generations in a behavioral and technological cycle.

Barley, Stephen R. “Semiotics and the Study of Occupational and Organizational Cultures.” Administrative Science Quarterly 28 (1983): 393–413.

Becker, Howard S. “Culture: A Sociological View.” Yale Review 71 (1982): 513–28.

. “Organizations and Systematic Distortion of Information.” Journal of Professional Issues in Engineering 113 (1987): 360–70.

Bensman, Joseph, and Israel Gerver. “Crime and Punishment in the Factory: The Function of Deviancy in Maintaining the Social System.” American Sociological Review 28 (1963): 588–98.

For the better part of seven decades, watching rockets launch from Cape Canaveral has been a major tourist attraction, a favorite activity of locals, and a taken-for-granted part of Florida life. Few experiences in this lifetime are as awe-inspiring as watching a rocket launch not more than five miles from the launch site. When NASA lights the fuse on these babies, the solid rocket boosters blast the payload into space with several million pounds of thrust. Words cannot adequately describe the sight, sound, and feel of one of these events-- like the Grand Canyon and oral sex, it must be experienced to be appreciated.

In Craft and Consciousness, Bensman and Lilienfeld show the relationship between worldview and the occupational technique and methodology of many occupations and professions.

The public is deceived by a myth that the production of scientific and technical knowledge is precise, objective, and rule-following.

When technical systems fail, however, outside investigators consistently find an engineering world characterized by ambiguity, disagreement, deviation from design specifications and operating standards, and ad hoc rule making.

Marcus notes, somewhat ironically, that decisions about all the scientific and engineering problems that affect society lie someplace between the extremes of perfect knowledge and perfect ignorance.50

Although the results may convince a wider audience, the “core set”—the working engineers and scientists most closely associated with the technology—understand the precariousness of this closure, for they are most intimately aware of the test result that does not conform to the others, the limitations of design, the ambiguity surrounding the various engineering interpretations that are embedded in day-to-day engineering work.

The designer or his client has to choose in what degree and where there shall be failure.

Failure is inherent in all useful design not only because all requirements of economy derive from insatiable wishes, but more immediately because certain quite specific conflicts are inevitable once requirements for economy are admitted; and conflicts even among the requirements of use are not unknown.

Solutions are always a compromise among a number of standard requirements: safety; reliability; long-term economy; minimum of labor; practicality; ease of manufacturing and installation, maintenance, and operation; and aesthetics.

Safety, too, is integral to the engineering worldview. Engineers design to avoid failure.

Attesting to the nested quality of culture, NASA’s entire Shuttle Program exhibited the “unruly technology” that characterizes the engineering craft when complex technical systems are involved: interpretive flexibility, absence of appropriate guidelines, unexpected glitches as commonplace, “debugging through use,” extensive systemwide problems with technical components, practical rules based on experience that supplemented and took precedence in technical decision making over formal, universal rules, and cost/safety compromises as taken-for-granted.

So it’s that kind of engineering, quality engineering, reliability engineering, that has to go into every one of those single point failure modes.

Then they have to come up with the worst case: here’s the design; what’s the worst thing that can happen? And you do [calculate and test] worst cases. You just sit there and the guys go through that thing—worst case, worst case, worst case.

Failure History: No failures have been experienced in the static firing of three qualification motors, five development motors and ten flight motors.

By analogy Marshall’s Wiley C. Bunn, Director of Reliability and Quality Assurance, describes the engineering work and data that constitute the Rationale for Retention, necessary for all C 1 items:

C 1 item.

Fail-safe’ is defined as the ability to sustain a failure and retain the capability to successfully terminate the mission.

Bella argues that one way to combat the filtering of unfavorable information is to create checks and balances that systematically force it to surface. This strategy would also be an antidote to the ideological mind set that drives Clarke’s disqualification heuristic.

FRR debates were governed by rules, procedures, and norms deliberately created to seek unfavorable information that challenged the decisions to accept risk and fly that were being presented: a matrix system that brought in a variety of specialists; the “fishbowl” atmosphere; proactive inquiry via “probes,” “challenges,” and Action Items; competition between projects; adversarialism; and the certification at each level that implicated all levels in the outcome.

Each strategy has unique advantages, but each also has disadvantages that routinely undermine regulatory effectiveness.

Neither the SSCSP nor the ASAP identified the O-ring problems.

From the early development period of the Space Shuttle through the end of 1985, the SRB work group had consistently defined the SRB joints as an acceptable risk. Behind this determination was a scientific paradigm that established the redundancy of the joint. The belief in redundancy and the scientific paradigm behind it were institutionalized prior to 1986. They were crucial components of the worldview that many decision makers brought to the teleconference on the eve of the Challenger launch.

Here, the chapter 1 version is repeated in boldface type, juxtaposed against another version that restores voices, actions, and details omitted from nearly all other accounts. Reconstructed in ethnographic thick description, this restoration of the confusion, diverse viewpoints, complexity of the technical issue and engineering arguments, and little-known aspects of interaction is, in itself, stereotype-shattering.

As historical ethnography, this book is intended to create a social history that reveals how participants interpreted actions and events.

Karl Weick observes that whenever people act in a context of choice, irreversible action, and public awareness, their actions tend to become binding;9 they become committed to their actions, then develop valid, socially acceptable justifications. Committed action, justifications, and meaning become linked. Actions “mean” whatever justifications become attached to them.

We have an explanation of the normalization of deviance at NASA that includes the production of culture in the work group, the culture of production, and structural secrecy. In combination, they explain how an official collective construction of risk originated and persisted at the space agency,

This chapter brings home the striking connection between social location, information, worldview, and response to events and activities.

The shared official construction of risk is particularly interesting in light of the way understanding varied with position in the organizational structure

both the Presidential Commission and the House Committee fully agreed on one point: “Neither NASA nor Thiokol fully understood the operation of the joint prior to the accident.”132 Commissioner Feynman observed, “The origin and consequences of the erosion and blow-by were not understood . . . officials behaved as if they understood it, giving apparently logical arguments to each other often depending on the ‘success’ of previous flights.”133 Only in the wake of the tragedy was it clear they had not understood. At the end of 1985, they believed they did.

Unfavorable information is lost, not by malicious intent, purposeful concealment, or reluctance to say something superiors do not want to hear (all psychological in origin), but as a collective and systemic consequence of organizational structure and roles: people deliberately do not seek out unfavorable information. He notes, “The technological consequences of such distortions can be disastrous.

According to Clarke, a disqualification heuristic is an “ideological mechanism or mind-set that leads experts and decision makers to neglect information that contradicts a conviction—in this case, a conviction that a sociotechnical system is safe.

It enables them to selectively focus on confirming information while relegating disconfirming information to secondary or even trivial status. In the Exxon Valdez case that Clarke studied, the failure to take into account information that disconfirmed beliefs about system safety led to inadequate preparation for major oil spills.

self-regulation of risky technical enterprise may, by definition, be accompanied by dependencies that interfere with regulatory effectiveness.

unruly technology,

As Leon Ray said, “Safety people are not in a ‘doing mode’; they are in a ‘reviewing mode.’​

In particular, information dependencies affected regulators’ definition of the situation.

One way to overturn an entrenched scientific paradigm is with contradictory information that is an attention-getting signal, too strong to explain away, refute, or deny.

Thus, external regulators frequently become dependent on the regulated organization for information and its interpretation.

shared construction of temperature as a nonproblem,

Moreover, distortions occurred because people felt their jobs were at risk. As Marshall’s Jim Smith recounted: “A lot of people became scarce when the accident happened. It was very obvious they tried to divorce themselves from much knowledge of any facts and I guess they felt their job was going to be in jeopardy too. It was obvious people were concerned about whether they literally would lose their jobs, or be totally removed from their position and put someplace else, in a corner, or whether there would be a possibility of some legal action.

Peter Berger notes that the events that constitute our lives are subject to many interpretations, not just by outsiders, but by ourselves.7 When an unexpected event occurs, we need to explain it not only to others, but to ourselves.

We correct history, reconstructing the past so that it will be consistent with the present, reaffirming our sense of self and place in the world. We reconstruct history every day, not to fool others but to fool ourselves, because it is integral to the process of going on.8 So we would expect that, in addition to the initial failure to register the teleconference fully, the effects of forgetting, the media effect on personal recollections, and the intentional self-protection in response to occupational risk, accounts of that evening would also be affected by the unconscious editing that goes on as people attempt to rescue order from disorder—perhaps driven in this case by a need to be guiltless, a need to have been “correct.

Regulatory effectiveness was blocked by autonomy, or the fact that regulators and the organizations they regulate exist as separate, independent organizations, and interdependence, or the fact that regulators and regulatees are linked so that outcomes for each are, in part, determined by the activities of the other.

One kind of interdependence is when regulator and regulatee share a goal or interests: when harm or good fortune befalls one, the well-being of the other is similarly affected.

Shortly after the 1967 Apollo launch pad fire that killed three astronauts, Congress added an external regulatory body composed of aerospace experts: the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP). This legislative action was guided by the notion that expert outsiders, with technical experience and reputation throughout the aerospace industry, would have both the objectivity, the knowledge, and the influence to balance NASA’s self-regulating system.

Understanding the culture, as I discovered in the first year or so of my research, is absolutely essential to understanding what went on.

The structure of regulatory relations created obstacles to social control, limiting information and knowledge about the O-ring problems. It inhibited the ability of safety regulators to alter the scientific paradigm on which the belief in acceptable risk was based.

First, the organization of the book places the Challenger launch decision in its proper position as one decision in a decision stream begun many years before.