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Milestone month for NASA

Started by UH60guy, January 27, 2014, 01:38:26 PM

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UH60guy

Just thought I'd share this reminder with fellow AEOs. Don't forget that in January, and in particular this week, are a series of key events in NASA's history that can be tied into both aerospace and leadership lessons. I think we'll talk a little about them at our meeting tonight, though I'm not building a formal class to share here.

Examples:
January 25, 2004: Opportunity rover landed on Mars 10 years ago on a 90 sol mission. Ten years later, thanks to excellent design and the brilliant adaptations over adversity (stuck wheels, etc) it is still roving. It could be a good class on robotics, orbits (such as Hohmann transfer to Mars, launch windows), and leadership.

January 27, 1967: AS-204/Apollo 1 fire. Loss of Ed White (first US Spacewalker), Gus Grissom (2nd US astronaut in space, 1st to fly in space twice), and Roger Chaffee. Could be used as both a history lesson about the start of the Apollo program as well as a leadership lesson if discussing the investigation.

January 28, 1986. STS-51L, loss of Challenger and her crew of seven. I can't think of much on the aerospace lessons for this one; it was the 25th flight and the Shuttle program was well underway. There wasn't anything particularly of note I can think of about this mission in particular other than the first teacher in space, but I believe this could be an excellent leadership class especially for some of the more mature Cadets. The Rogers commission had some harsh words about NASA's "normalization of deviance," which could be a talking point about how leaders need to enforce the standard and do the "hard right" over the "easy wrong." Cadets can learn the cost of lack of integrity or speaking up in the face of overwhelming pressure to launch.

February 1, 2003. STS-107, loss of Columbia and her crew. This could be a lesson on aerodynamics and physics- explain where the frictional heat from reentry comes from and why it's not as big a deal for suborbital craft that don't go at orbital speeds (like the first two Mercury missions and SpaceShip 1 and 2 which have no heat shield).

Maj Ken Ward
VAWG Internal AEO