Management: Management Tips From the Real Rocket Scientists

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The greatest resource J.P.L. brings to the space game, of course, is not good ideas as much as the people who generate them. The lab has always benefited from having its farm team of apprentice scientists right next door at Caltech. The first thing young engineers who come to work at the lab must do is learn the ways of J.P.L. as an institution, something that's easier to do here than at most other places of business. As long ago as the 1960s, J.P.L. embraced a concept known as "each one teach one," under which senior members of any team were charged with the responsibility of bringing at least one junior member along. In recent years, that system has taken a bit of a hit.

Tight budgets in the '80s meant fewer missions and fewer new employees, and when the engineers with the institutional memory retired, no one took their place. "There were no longer chances for people to study under the masters and learn their trade," says Gentry Lee, J.P.L.'s chief engineer for solar-systems exploration. "The depth in the process of building the next generation to go where no one has gone before was a little bit broken." The money spigots opened up again in the '90s, but by then there were gaps in the lab's history chain.

J.P.L. is doing what it can to fix that problem, filling the mentoring hole by compiling painstaking lists of design principles--lessons learned when particular engineering techniques either did or didn't work. That system should serve in a pinch, but the lab is determined never to let the teaching system lapse again. "Mentoring is something we've been doing ad hoc for years," Manning says. "That's allowed us to collectively grow."

THE INCOMPRESSIBLE TEST

Of course, just passing on rules is not all there is to keeping things running. You have to enforce them too. Space deadlines are uncompromising things: miss a launch window when you're trying to send a probe to Mars, and you will have to wait two years until the planets line up properly again. The danger is that this kind of pressure can cloud the judgment of even the best project managers, leading them to rush as time grows short. For that reason, before a single bit of metal is cut on any spacecraft, J.P.L. bosses draw up what they call an Incompressible Test List--milestones that must be achieved before the spacecraft is certified to fly. "We do that early in the game when things are still calm," says J.P.L. director Charles Elachi. "We put it in a drawer, and I tell the team, 'I'm not going to let this thing launch until you verify that each item has been done.'" Sometimes a single rule can save a mission.

When Manning was helping design the two rovers now operating on Mars, he was faced with a problem of how to sever electrical cables so that the surface-bound vehicles could separate from their delivery craft. Rules require that power be shut down before the cables are cut in order to prevent a short, but there was insufficient space inside the ship for all the electrical relays to do that job. Manning's team designed a fix that he thought would sidestep the problem, but when he tried it out in tests, it failed--as the people who drafted the design principle had predicted. "People came back to me and said, 'Look, this really is a rule,'" Manning recalls. It's not one he ever broke again.

TOLERANCE FOR FLOPS