JSC Oral History Project Shut Down
Keith’s note: JSC announced recently they were terminating the Oral History Project that has been ongoing for several decades. People working on the project have received lay-off notices. Have a look at the first recently completed ISS oral history reports. Some of these recollections are rather blunt. One NASAWatch reader notes:
“Especially eye-opening, the Suffredini oral history where he says his greatest challenge was taking $3.5 billion from research and technology (Code U, C and T budgets?) to put into hardware development. This and its effects is confirmed by Julie Robinson (Chief Scientist) and Mike Read (National Lab Manager) in their histories (was the change of funding use authorized?) Or Mike Read’s history, where he was put in charge of payload integration, national lab and commercialization but without what he felt was the requisite experience or knowledge (both areas that have been suffering from lack of experience. Or John Charles, Chief Scientist for the 1 year mission, in his interview where he told the program manager, prior to the beginning of the one year mission, that ISS needed to get its house in order in terms of how they integrate payloads and science because the effort was totally disjointed. Gerstenmaier earlier pulled all funds for “lessons learned” beginning FY2014. There apparently is no interest in learning what is happening and why we wind up in the sort of shape we are in.”
Many lessons learned… even fewer to the general public if its all outsourced and privatized .
Max Faget: “Then John [F.] Yardley came up with the idea of using solid rockets….. I was working very closely with the people from Boeing, and they pointed out, well, you could do that….officials had already shown the solid rocket configuration to the President, and he said, “Go ahead,” ….Nixon…. The mistake we made on the solid rockets, it was a major mistake…
“The diameter of the solid rockets had to be less than twelve and a half feet in order for the existing rail transportation…The total amount of propellant in the solid rockets was limited by that, which meant that the solid rockets would only be able to help during the first couple of minutes of flight….
“We staged those solid rockets at only a little over 4,000 feet a second, which really meant that the Shuttle and its tank had a big job to do, and it really limited the performance and inhibited any growth in the payload capability….
“When [the solid rockets] stage at 4,000 feet a second, [the orbiter] had to have an awful lot of propellant left for the insertion, which meant that you had to have enough thrust to carry the weight of that propellant, and that increased the size of the engines in the orbiter…
“A consequence to that means that a good part of the front end of the payload bay is virtually useless, has been useless all the time”
http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/his…
Thanks for the link. I met Dr. Faget; he was an engineer with vision. Here’s more I did not see before:
Quote from Dr. Faget:
“But I’m just trying to illustrate some of the [arbitrary] decisions that were made as we moved along and that ended up providing a penalty to the program. … it it’s the only case that I know of where a major change, a major new kind of system has been created, put into operation, with no process of evolution to improve that vehicle. … [if] we had an opportunity to build a second [generation] Shuttle, we’d make it a lot safer, we’d make it a lot better performer, a lot more economical… The unfortunate thing is you can’t build a second one without building a first one, and we only had enough money for one.
The other thing that has been kind of bad is that the Shuttle has been so expensive to operate, there has never been any money set aside to improve it. It’s unusual. All of our airplanes that go into operation, they get improved. .. as they go along… there is an evolution within the particular vehicle. That didn’t take place [with the Shuttle]. Virtually, from an engineering standpoint, there’s hardly any difference between the Shuttle we’re flying today and the first time we flew the Shuttle.”
I’m not sure why you write, “I’m talking about military airplanes.” I’m fairly sure the “900” in “737-900” refers to ninth major new version of the (civilian) 737 aircraft. I certainly agree that no design evolution with experience is rare. Even the Apollo spacecraft were modified along the way (E.g. the much greater capability of the Apollo 17 versus the Apollo 11 Lunar Module.)
It was all a quote from Max Faget. But still true today. The Shuttle design was frozen before any prototypes had been flown to test its performance. The major problems (TPS damage from foam, O-ring leaks, and the high cost) were all known by the completion of the first few flights.
Agreed. And nothing was done to fix any of the big problems found during those five “test flights”. Instead, many wavers were written and the program was declared operational.
But the program was even worse than that. By the time of the Challenger disaster, it was routine to pull parts from other orbiters to get the next orbiter ready for flight. This cannibalization pointed to a significant spare parts shortage which in turn pointed to an overall funding shortfall. Improvements to critical systems wasn’t even a priority when parts were being cannibalized to keep the program flying.
The program was quite simply not being funded adequately to insure safe flight.
Anybody who thinks there are no thoughtful smart people at NASA should be required to read these remarks.
Indeed, the only major improvements that took place were due to the loss of an orbiter: Challenger, with redesign of the SRBs and the construction of Endeavor; and redesign of the foam on the external tank after Columbia — and they were constrained by having to use the existing system configuration.
Like everything, the devil is in the details with these type of things. When I was at the Lab, my experience with the Lessons Learned program was that we were asked to come up with LL. These were entered into a database with no particular rhyme or reason. As you can imagine, this dB quickly grew into thousands of entries.
The LL were never incorporated into the general processes, and remained just a collection of LL. Now, we were encouraged to consult the LL dB and make use of them, but the problem, of course, is that a large and unwieldy list of LL by themselves are next to useless. There are so many entries, many of which are unique to certain program or set of circumstances that did not apply to me, that it’s impossible to make good use of the list.
So yeah, I can see them shutting it down. I just wonder why it took so long…
That’s interesting to me, since I’m involved with the Cassini mission and that project is starting to work on documenting lessons learned over its ~25 year duration. There has been quite a bit of discussion, and some of the things I’ve heard mirror your comments: Is it going to be a massive list which is so cumbersome that no one reads it? Is there any point in discussing lessons learned that involve now-obsolete technology? (E.g. building a mechanical actuator for a purpose which is now always done with an electrostatic system.) One thing I do believe would be relevant are management and organizational issues: It was a large project involving a number of nations and with systems/instruments build all over the place (as well as subsystems and components built by even more organizations.) Lessons learned about how that sort of thing should be coordinated and the pitfalls (e.g. documentation with different institutions using different terminology) would be much more useful than more directly hardware-related items.
Shouldn’t there be some sort of a template that could be used? Followed by the use of keywords? Managing large and mostly disparate datasets isn’t- well, it is not rocket science anymore.
The first step is to try to capture the lessons learned in some human readable form (ascii and image files would be the lowest common denominators).
I would hate to think that some people (managers especially) would not try to capture lessons learned because current search techniques at their office aren’t adequate. There are commercial software packages “out there” that can help with searches and they’re getting better all the time.
With today’s information technologies, we can do far better than we have done in the past.
Google has a very sophisticated content-based indexing system for both text and images. If the files can be made publicly accessible then Google can index them and all interested parties can use them.
Someone else pointed out that, in practice, NASA centers may not even share their lessons learned with each other, let alone the public. Lessons learned by contractors would, probably, be considered proprietary. I believe ITAR makes a convenient justification for not making things public, if someone involved doesn’t want it to be. (I.e. the expense of ITAR reviews can be sited as a reason not to do so.) We are talking about large, expensive projects, with many, most or all of the work being competitively selected. So there is a motive for keeping lessons learned to ones self. I’ve even gotten the impression that some people in the field object in principle: Saying that you learned from your mistakes means admitting that you made mistakes. Doing so isn’t automatically good for your professional reputation.
The problem isn’t really the search engine technology, although that is part of it.
First, people have to produce the content. They do have finite time, and this sort of thing is often done when people are in the process of moving on to another project (i.e. once the project is winding down, but while it is still fresh in people’s minds.) That implies that some selectivity is important: Writing down the lessons learned with will be relevant to future projects ought to be a priority.
Second, I’m not sure how good the search engine technology is. One of the lessons I’m going to put down for Cassini is that different institutions use different jargon. The same term may be used to mean very different things, or different terms may be used for the same thing. If your project involves work by multiple institutions, either make them stop and agree on common terminology (good luck, this can be as difficult as the SAE/metric unit thing) or document it very throughly. This relates to the quality of the search engines for a lessons learned database: Using keywords is all fine and good. But if every entry is written by someone who uses different terminology, would the software be able to sort it out?
Finally, the whole lessons learned concept isn’t very useful on a project-by-project basis. If I’ve got a problem, and I want to see how other projects have solved it, I don’t want to face a massive research effort to see which other projects have faced that problem (or rely on word of mouth), and then search through a bunch of separate, databases, project-by-project. I’m just not seeing the inter-project coordination to produce one, consistent and usable database. Just high level guidance that lessons learned are good things to write down and projects should (individually) do it.
Now that’s just plain silly- the part about conducting a “massive research effort”.
Every scientific endeavor starts with a literature search. How is this different? My book-in-progress will look pretty silly to the publisher if an identical treatment turns out to have been published years ago, for instance.
Similarly every paper I’ve ever read included a lit research section right at the front.
Why is management different? OK, perhaps the reporting rigor isn’t there, but the concept is the same. The idea of learning from mistakes, so central to business schools, is well-understood and valuable.
I guess I didn’t write that part too clearly. The current “lessons learned” effort I’m involved in has, as far as I can tell, no external coordination. It’s being done entirely within the project, with no guidelines on how, or if, it would be merged into a larger, lab/center/NASA-wide database of lessons learned.
My point was that, without being merged into a larger database, the results would be rarely used. If someone has a problem, and wants to look for lessons learned by projects which faced similar problems, that’s great. But how is he supposed to know which projects faced similar problems? If it’s all merged into one database, that’s not hard to search for. But if each project has its own, idiosyncratic list of lessons learned, do you expect someone to actually search through each one individually? Without knowing which projects even did anything even remotely connected with the problem in question?
Expecting someone to go to the library is one thing (and quite reasonable.) But what I’m describing is asking them to go through the index of each and every book in the library, without using any library-wide card catalogue. That actually would be a big enough research project to discourage users.
Firstly, capturing knowledge is mostly documenting what you’re doing, when you’re doing it. Yes, at the end of the project there should be an end of project meeting to go over lessons learned. Roses and thorns, it is sometimes called (what worked well, and what did not work well). Good project managers will do this. Bad project managers almost never do this since they’re always flying by the seat of their pants.
Jargon and other related issues do make searches more challenging. But these sorts of challenges should never be used as an excuse for not capturing knowledge.
Your final paragraph is very defeatist. In the big picture, knowledge is within your employee’s heads. The problem is employees leave for various reasons (better job offer, health issues, retirement, and yes even death). An organization must actively work on capturing and/or transferring knowledge to the next generation of employees or that knowledge *will* eventually be lost.
As someone with 25+ years in the engineering/computer programming field, I’ve got a lot of experience I’m working hard to transfer to younger employees. I certainly won’t be around forever.
That is exactly what is driving my efforts, After nearly 30 years in the design business memories of feeling helpless as a newbie are still haunting me; I made simple dumb mistakes that could have been avoided.
I’m glad I had a good mentor for the first year or so in my first full time job. As someone with a lot of experience now, I spend a good part of my day answering questions, mostly from younger employees.
I don’t think lessons learned are worth a lot. No one reads them. I think the only way you infuse the knowledge from the past into what you are doing today is to use people who were instrumental in gaining that knowledge. I will add that I think NASA does a really poor job of using experienced people to ensure the lessons are infused.
However recording the stories for history and posterity is important, especially now that programs are so long and drawn out. If you wait for someone to come in and write a history a lot of the participants will be dead by that time, ISS and exploration are perfect examples. And I can’t imagine they are talking a lot of money to keep a historian or two available to conduct the history program. They are not high cost employees and with the amount NASA wastes every hour, they ought to keep some people on-board to ensure the story can be told.
Those who don’t remember history.. Don’t get their noses rubbed in their mistakes!! Burn the books.
Completely agree on both points.
Lessons learned are worth a bunch. And people do read them.
At NASA no one learns lessons or reads Santayana, it would seem.
When George Santayana said “Those who do not remember the mistakes of the past are condemned to repeat them.” he was referring to the invention of oral and written history as a way of remembering the past and preserving its lessons, one of the key developments which made modern civilization possible. It did not occur to him, writing in 1906, that a day would come when we had the technology to communicate such information instantly around the world but would consciously choose not to bother.
Bad NASA.
Somebody probably decided it’s “not a requirement” — a sterling example of why we can’t have nice things.
Is the implication in shutting down this project from someone realizing the stories people tell as lessons or experiences could embarrass NASA? The Sufredini story on the financial goings on moving R and D dollars, with some nuance of impropriety, would be one of many similar ones I wish I could share.
Until a few years ago NASA had the only people in the world with real hands-on experience reusing launch vehicles and spacecraft. Just before all the Shuttle workers were fired I proposed a very modest project, a website and some incentives to try to gather personal perspectives from them, not a specific “lessons learned” but at least their ideas about why the Shuttle was so expensive to operate and how the next generation of reusable LVs and spacecraft could be made more practical. The proposal was not funded.
Make the database accessible to google and it will be indexed and probably of some use to the public, or at least to space advocates like us.
On a related note, you mention sharing of lessons learned between Centers. What about outside NASA Centers? I’d imagine there are NASA lessons learned which aerospace companies would find useful. To what extent are these data generally available. And, to the extent that they involve lessons learned by contractors, to what extent do the contractors consider them proprietary information?
I hate that this credible resource is going away. Although ‘Joe Public’ might not access it often, I still view it as a vital resource against the rising and very REAL tide of anti-space ignorance. The Internet is already crawling with the memes that not just Apollo, but ALL space ventures are fake. Trolls are running rampant, saying that the BEAM module installation for instance is fake special effects, as is all of it. You may not care about the trolls and you may not even believe me, but it’s growing, hard and fast. We are only a few years away from the mainstream belief being that space exploration and travel is fake. God help us all… :'(
Would this be furthering the Not Invented Here notion that has so paralyzed NASA ?
This seems like a very unwise decision. If we don’t learn from history, we are doomed to repeat past mistakes.
Forget oral history. We can’t even keep track of critical written history documents like the 1983 Sierra Risk report. You’d think that would be key historical information for a manned ongoing SLS development program with solid rocket boosters…but just try to find a PDF of this document today.
http://www.upi.com/Archives…
It sounds like a cover-up, the canceling of Oral History Project. As for Suffs statement, its not a secret, he was proud of that. It’s what his leadership expected (remember Abby and others) and what a flawed manager is capable of. Connect the dots and you’ll see how that mismanagement has been the gift that has kept on giving…….negatively for well over a decade. What is/was the purpose of ISS? Its time that a house cleaning of Leadership (and I use that liberally) is performed, and replaced with honorable Men and Woman. I hope the next Administration is up to the task and not simply replacing collars. Our Country deserves better.
I agree, really if you trace whats happened, is the taking of the research budget wound up with so little science on board today. And where did the money go?
The money went to pay for the mismanaged increase in hardware resulting from flawed engineering integration. Because of the stove piped POV of each of the program’s offices, many viewed their responsibility ending at the interface of their system/sub-system. That resulted in mountains of Changes which translate into Dollars for Boeing and others. It was amateur hour.
This is the same sort of problem payloads face. Each office identifies their own needs, requirements, documentation, does not coordinate with others,. so even if there were payloads to fly-the money that was taken was funding payload programs-trying to get through their gauntlet of dysfunction is at best tedious..
The best cover up for moving money around in bad faith, for purposes other than the advertised results, is a cover up that is built into the system. Keep the movement of money complex enough, and it’s relationship to results even more obscure, and you end up with the Sufredini story.
The same money movement with goals other than results has reigned over vast scales (multi-billion dollar scales) in NGLT, SLI, OSP, ISS and Shuttle, especially upgrades, and in Shuttle / ISS together in the late 90’s. I’d say today’s money maneuverings in bad faith are mostly in STMD and AES, working with SLS and Orion.
Moving R&D money only for purposes of preserving a workforce, keeping the drama down, or for make-work, making researchers believe they have some relationship to going to Mars, are primary reasons today. For much R&D in NASA, this is as it has always been. Results, not so much.
Your historical account is right on, it boils down to a culture that that further rewarded that behavior. Your assessment of AES and STMD IMO is not driven by bad faith, but rather a lack of guidance or too much guidance. The AES and STMD investments contribute very little, percentage wise, to either SLS or Orion they are primarily Exploration driven investments. What they lack is ….
You have painted a very bleak picture.
Someone could, you know, leak a copy of the report to the press anonymously. Just a thought.
Not being a NASA employee and therefore not having access I wonder exactly how such a nefarious deed could be accomplished.
How could a person leak something anonymously? Jeez I need to get up to speed:-)
It is difficult for an observer to completely understand the degree to which the centers are separate. I tend to see NASA as a single entity when clearly that’s not the case, exactly.