Getting It Right

(NASA photo of Kate Rubins, first person to sequence DNA in space, in International Space Station)

“Why do you do this to yourself?” my wife asks. “You know watching something like that usually upsets you.”

Once in a while I do this. I watch a movie or television series involving space travel in the near future. Sometimes the science is very close to right and I enjoy it immensely. The Martian was more realistic as a book than as a movie, but I forgave the movie for its bit of artistic license. Gravity strung together an incredible series instances where even the tiniest probability of success was enough, but the science was generally solid. In both shows, the way NASA behaved wasn’t far off the mark. Every endeavor by a group of humans is afflicted by at least some internal politics and irrationality. NASA is better at minimizing that than anywhere else I’ve worked.

I won’t sully your possible enjoyment of the show I’m watching now by telling you which one it is. If you don’t know much about intricacies of space flight, you might like it. The show is about the early going for human exploration of Mars, which leaves you with a long list of candidates ranging from cheesy to serious.

At first I thought they’ve got this bit right, and that… but the deeper I get into the show, the farther off the rails it goes. It’s an odd mixture of occasional correctness with key plot points that pivot on wild incorrectness in both science and portrayal of NASA.

What the show does get right is that there is no such thing as a mission which goes perfectly; and astronauts are people, not automatons.

I’ve been thinking about the series of failures in the show I’m watching, why I feel like shouting at the screen, and why NASA has become in most popular views a beacon of “getting it right” more often and in more challenging situations than most organizations.

I sometimes deliver a talk called Run Your Business Like a Rocket Scientist Without Being One. Today I’d like to boil that talk down even further. Instead of looking at how NASA does the basics so well, let’s get down to a few key principles.

What About NASA’s People?

Most people think NASA is what it is because its people are orders of magnitude smarter than the norm. One friend describes it as having a “brain the size of a small planet.” Some people at NASA are that smart, but it can’t insist on having a hyper-genius in every job. NASA also doesn’t have direct control over most of its workforce. Many people believe the space program must be filled with only the ultra smart, but it’s more of a mixture, so I should start by laying that out.

NASA isn’t supposed to do most of the actual work of space flight itself. Most of the work is contracted out to be done by companies under NASA supervision. This is a strategic choice about how NASA is structured. It facilitates the spin-out of inventions and learnings into the marketplace instead of hoarding that within the government. It’s also intended to get the companies to compete with each other to provide the best results, pushing each other to do better. NASA is more keen about quality and reliability of performance than it is about shaving costs. When a flight goes wrong, it’s expensive at best and catastrophic at worst. Nobody wants a flight to go wrong because someone saved money substituting a cheaper, lower quality part.

Remember, these are complicated long-term projects. NASA isn’t the direct employer of most of the workforce and the workers aren’t all Einstein. How does NASA do so much so well?

Team, Rules, Methods

Even if NASA and its contractors hired only people with an IQ in the stratosphere, that wouldn’t be enough to succeed. A crowd of geniuses is only a crowd. A team of people is something else entirely.

NASA is especially good at getting the workforce to focus on the mission more intently and consistently than most organizations of any kind. They turn their employees and those of the companies into a team. That doesn’t happen by magic. It doesn’t happen with just some empty words in a vision statement.

NASA is very methodical. It has room for inspiration, but inspirations get channeled so they can be poked, prodded and tested from every conceivable angle before anyone relies on them.

NASA also has rules for practically everything.

For example, NASA aims to have as much redundant capability in a spacecraft as weight and size constraints will allow. The main Whatchacallit failed? The secondary unit can take the load, or can take the load if reasonable economies are taken elsewhere, e.g. use less power, use less water, or turn off some non-essential instruments. High frequency, high data rate communications channel isn’t working right? Use the lower frequency, lower data rate channel and be patient about taking more time to transmit the data. (That happened on a mission I worked.)

If an item has to be the one-and-only to do its job, there must be an extraordinary reason to make an exception to the rule of having at least one backup system for every important system. Anything that is granted an exception to the rule has to be tested six ways to Sunday because it absolutely must not ever fail.

Notice that I said NASA imposes rules. This is not the same as micromanaging. Rules and methods provide a foundation to stand upon and guideposts to keep everyone moving in the same direction. They can be detailed where necessary, but when detail isn’t necessary, they are broader like the rule that each critical system should have a fallback.

Anybody can set rules like these. Think about what you need, really need, to accomplish your mission. Then don’t just find one way to go about it. Devise an alternative, and don’t stop when you’ve found it. Use the fallback from time to time to make sure it works and you know how to operate with it.

I know of an emergency telephone system that couldn’t be used when a crisis actually hit. At crunch time, the system was there, but nobody had practiced with it so nobody knew what to do with it.

This is why NASA runs so many mission simulations. By the time a flight launches, everyone involved (flight crew and ground crew) has plenty of practice using all the systems available in every way and every combination they could think of. They know both the primary and secondary systems backwards and forwards. Rules make sure redundant systems exist and also make sure methodical preparation keeps everyone moving in the same direction, getting ready for whatever might happen.

Simply Effective

Space flight is an incredibly complex venture, but what’s behind it is not all rocket science. Look at those key principles: the concept of your workers as a team, and using rules and methods to keep your team going together toward a goal.

If starting there is good enough for NASA, it’s good enough for the rest of us.