This book is in full-color - other editions may be in grayscale (non-color). The hardback version is ISBN 9781680920512 and the paperback version is ISBN 9781680920505. The NASA Space Flight Program and Project Management Handbook (NASA/SP-2014-3705) is the companion document to NPR 7120.5E and represents the accumulation of knowledge NASA gleaned on managing program and projects coming out of NASA's human, robotic, and scientific missions of the last decade. At the end of the historic Shuttle program, the United States entered a new era that includes commercial missions to low-earth orbit as well as new multi-national exploration missions deeper into space. This handbook is a codification of the "corporate knowledge" for existing and future NASA space flight programs and projects. These practices have evolved as a function of NASA's core values on safety, integrity, team work, and excellence, and may also prove a resource for other agencies, the private sector, and academia. The knowledge gained from the victories and defeats of that era, including the checks and balances and initiatives to better control cost and risk, provides a foundation to launch us into an exciting and healthy space program of the future.

Every successful organization needs high-performance teams to compete and succeed. Yet, technical people are often resistant to traditional "touchy-feely" teambuilding. To improve communication, performance, and morale among NASA’s technical teams, former NASA Astrophysicist Dr. Charlie Pellerin developed the teambuilding process described in "How NASA Builds Teams"—an approach that is proven, quantitative, and requires only a fraction of the time and resources of traditional training methods. This "4-D" process has boosted team performance in hundreds of NASA project teams, engineering teams, and management teams, including the people responsible for NASA’s most complex systems — the Space Shuttle, space telescopes, robots on Mars, and the mission back to the moon. How NASA Builds Teams explains how the 4-D teambuilding process can be applied in any organization, and includes a fast, free on-line behavioral assessment to help your team and the individual members understand each other and measure the key driver of team performance, the social context. Moreover, these simple, logical processes appeal strongly to technical teams who eschew "touchy-feely" training. Pellerin applies simple, elegant principles from his physics background to the art teambuilding, such as the use of a coordinate system to analyze the characteristics of team performance into actionable elements. The author illustrates the teambuilding process with entertaining stories from his decade as NASA’s Director for Astrophysics and subsequent 15 years of working closely with NASA and outside business teams. For example, he tells how the processes in the book enabled him to initiate the space mission to fix the Hubble Space Telescope’s flawed mirror. Free downloadable resources will help you: Identify your teammates’ innate personalities Diagram your culture (And compare it to your customer’s) Measure the coherency of your project’s paradigm (Get this wrong and you will be fired!) and Learn to meet people’s need to feel valued by you. Further, you can download and use Pellerin’s most powerful tool for influencing the outcome of any difficult situation: the Context Shifting Worksheet.

The Aerospace Project Management Handbook focuses on space systems, exploring intricacies rarely seen in land-based projects. These range from additional compliance requirements from Earned Value Management requirements and regulations (ESA, NASA, FAA), to criticality and risk factors for systems where repair is impossible. Aerospace project management has become a pathway for success in harsh space environments, as the Handbook demonstrates. With chapters written by experts, this comprehensive book offers a step-by-step approach emphasizing the applied techniques and tools, and is a prime resource for program managers, technical leads, systems engineers, and principle payload leads.

Principal Investigator-Led (PI-led) missions are an important element of NASA's space science enterprise. While several NRC studies have considered aspects of PI-led missions in the course of other studies for NASA, issues facing the PI-led missions in general have not been subject to much analysis in those studies. Nevertheless, these issues are raising increasingly important questions for NASA, and it requested the NRC to explore them as they currently affect PI-led missions. Among the issues NASA asked to have examined were those concerning cost and scheduling, the selection process, relationships among PI-led team members, and opportunities for knowledge transfer to new PIs. This report provides a discussion of the evolution and current status of the PIled mission concept, the ways in which certain practices have affected its performance, and the steps that can carry it successfully into the future. The study was done in collaboration with the National Academy of Public Administration.

Apollo was known for its engineering triumphs, but its success also came from a disciplined management style. This excellent account of one of the most important personalities in early American human spaceflight history describes for the first time how George E. Mueller, the system manager of the human spaceflight program of the 1960s, applied the SPO methodology and other special considerations such as “all-up”testing, resulting in the success of the Apollo Program. Wernher von Braun and others did not readily accept such testing or Mueller’s approach to system management, but later acknowledged that without them NASA would not have landed astronauts on the Moon by 1969. While Apollo remained Mueller’s priority, from his earliest days at the agency, he promoted a robust post-Apollo Program which resulted in Skylab, the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station. As a result of these efforts, Mueller earned the sobriquet: “the father of the space shuttle.” Following his success at NASA, Mueller returned to industry. Although he did not play a leading role in human spaceflight again, in 2011 the National Air and Space Museum awarded him their lifetime achievement trophy for his contributions. Following the contributions of George E. Mueller, in this unique book Arthur L. Slotkin answers such questions as: exactly how did the methods developed for use in the Air Force ballistic missile programs get modified and used in the Apollo Program? How did George E. Mueller, with the help of others, manage the Apollo Program? How did NASA centers, coming from federal agencies with cultures of their own, adapt to the new structured approach imposed from Washington? George E. Mueller is the ideal central character for this book. He was instrumental in the creation of Apollo extension systems leading to Apollo, the Shuttle, and today’s ISS and thus was a pivotal figure in early American human spaceflight history.

America's first successful attempt at robotic lunar exploration, the nine Project Ranger missions culminated in close-up television images of the moon's surface. Sponsored by NASA and executed by the Jet Propulsion Lab, the project ran from 1959 to 1965. This official NASA publication, illustrated by more than 100 photographs, presents the program's complete history.