Motivation

This an email sent to all of the ODIN group today by a guy named Stan Schaefer. He's a NASA ODIN and a very cool guy. I thought this would be appropriate considering tomorrow is the 2 year anniversary of the Columbia accident. Copied below is a note from Wayne Hale, the Deputy Manager of the Shuttle Program:

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During the last days of 2004, there was an electric atmosphere at the Michoud Assembly Facility as the ET-120 for STS-114 came to completion. Everyone there could see the work was wrapping up and the opportunity to ship out a finished tank by the end of the year was tantalizing. No management incentive or motivational technique could possibly have been as powerful as the as the vision of rolling that tank out of the factory and the pride that comes from a hard job well done. In those days the workforce at MAF had a spring in their step and a grin on their face and a quickened tempo to get the work done.

During the very the same days, exactly the same sense of accomplishment and excitement was filling the air at the McDonald Detweiler Robotics plant in suburban Toronto as the OBSS - that new invention to allow complete inspection of the orbiter - was finished and left snowy Canada for the warmer climate of Florida and its date with history.

Now, infectious optimism is rampant at the Kennedy Space Center. In OPF3, Discovery is visibly close to rolling out to the VAB and the workers on the floor can smell the heady aroma of success and completion of their work. Over in OPF1, the techs working on Atlantis have the same pride as their ship daily makes visible progress to be ready for its potential (and hopefully never used) role as a rescue craft. The SRBs are stacked, gleaming and ready on the mobile launch platform and the tank - the one that the folks in Louisiana are so very proud of - will be bolted with them in a matter of days.

The real stress in the system lies with the engineers and analysts who are striving heroically to complete all the paperwork necessary to prove the system is safe to fly. Alone in the program, these folks are the only ones where the end is not in sight. Long sleepless hours and weekends at the desk will be their life for the next three months or more. It will be a hard slog for them to dig out from under all that work over the next several weeks. But even among the engineering workforce, like crocus poking up through the snow, there are signs of hope that spring will come and optimism is possible.

In the midst of this sea of buoyant optimism, the calendar has rolled around to the certain red-rimmed dates: January 27th, January 28th, February 1st. Apollo 1, Challenger, Columbia. We must ensure that even the newest employee in our halls knows the history of those days. Most importantly, we must remember that none of those terrible events was inevitable. There is no reason that these days should not be ordinary dates. Human failing in every case mixed with multiple missed opportunities caused catastrophe. We can never again be complacent, lax, or persuaded that our business is ordinary and therefore requires only ordinary attention to detail. There must never be an Atlantis tragedy or a Discovery accident or an Endeavour disaster.

Almost forty years ago, Gus Grissom told the spacecraft assemblers at Downey "Do good work." Echoing down four decades of history, Gus Grissom's words inescapably speak to us: "Do good work." The plain message of this ultimately concise sentence is unavoidable; it leaves no room for misunderstanding, no place for lawyerly quibbling over the meaning of its words, no chance to plead ignorance. Prominently displayed at Downey in the Apollo days was a sign that proclaimed "Waste anything but time". In their rush to win the race, our predecessors failed to heed Gus's words and he and his crew paid the price with their lives. No matter what we are doing in this business, we must do it right, we must do it with a strict attention to detail. This is no ordinary business; the margin between success and failure-on the best day- is thin, the energies involved are too great, the materials are exotic, the environments are extreme. No room for anything other than good work.

In the final hours before ET-120 rolled out of Michoud, a huge team inspected every square inch of the foam on the outside of that tank, often using magnifying lenses. The tank is bigger than a grain silo, 154 feet tall by 27 feet in diameter; but it was examined under a microscope. That attention to detail is what is our business requires. Every smudge on that foam was examined in detail and evaluated against strict criteria based on rigorous engineering analysis. With the factory door ready to be opened, a quality inspector, almost in tears, pointed out a miniscule flaw that somehow crept into the foam in a critical area. It would take hours to cure the glue required in the repair. A technical meeting ensued with evidence indicating a repair might not required and other evidence indicating a repair would be required. Without a clear and positive assessment that the damage was safe to fly, the judgment was made to repair . . . and wait. And so, I offer the ET team's example: it has got to be done right.

So, take pride in your hard work. Find the heart to make it through these final weeks of long hours. Even enjoy the excitement of these days. But above all: Do good work. Make it certain that in the future we commemorate successful days.

Wayne Hale
Deputy Program Manager, Space Shuttle Program