Management: Management Tips From the Real Rocket Scientists

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The two rovers currently rolling across Mars may never have made it to the surface if someone who saw the plans had not begun fretting about the Martian winds the ships would encounter and argued for additional thrusters to counteract them. The thrusters were added, and the design change made all the difference. More recently, the lab was planning the less publicized Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE)--a twin-satellite pas de deux designed to measure Earth's gravitational field and its effect on ocean currents. A critical step was eliminating any wobble between the ships. J.P.L. staff members had been working with engineers at Stanford University on a thruster that could nudge a spacecraft with boiled-off helium. It was perfect for GRACE's needs. "At J.P.L.," says Rob Manning, Mars program manager and former chief engineer for the Pathfinder mission, "anybody can go to any meeting and criticize or comment."

PIE-IN-THE-SKY THINKING

Sometimes those comments can get downright loopy, and that's how J.P.L. often likes things. Openness to wild ideas goes back to the 1960s, when the lab established an office to dream up plans for future missions, and an engineer crunching numbers one day happened to notice that in 1977, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune would fall into a rare planetary conga line that they would not form again for 176 years. This insight set the stage for the spectacular four-planet Voyager flights of the 1970s and '80s. Today the business of blue-skying ideas has become more institutionalized with a 20-person group called the Advanced Projects Design Team--or Team X--which meets three times a week.

Scientists with a suggestion for a future mission book time with Team X and pay for it out of their own operations budget. At a lot of institutions, that would be a little like buying the stool that will be used at your own public dunking. But J.P.L.-ers don't see it that way. Team X even has an improbable name for the scientists who come before it: customers. "We hardly ever end up where the customer came in thinking we'd end up," says engineer and team member Tracy Leavens.

That's no surprise. Team X manager Robert Oberto describes the several-day process during which an idea is discussed as "organized chaos," with all the dimensions of the mission being considered at once. That speeds things up by letting the engineers working on, say, the propulsion system know what the engineers working on the camera system are thinking--a good thing, since cameras add weight, affecting thrust. Of the 70 or so missions that come before Team X in a year, only one or two are ever recommended to NASA. The group technique assures that those two missions are well thought through and, by this time, well loved. "I need them all to own the mission," says Oberto. "That's very important."

EACH ONE TEACH ONE