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Forbes
13 hours ago
- Science
- Forbes
Lessons From NASA: How Failure Begets Success
Organizations need to learn from failure, encourage constructive discussions, debates, and even ... More dissent, and move forward. Many organizations—and their leaders—don't recognize the value of trial and error. They want the Moon shot to succeed, perfectly, the first time. But as Martin Reeves, chairman of the BCG Henderson Institute, our internal think tank, describes, embracing 'experimentation, fast learning, adaptation, and innovation,' especially on big 'super-projects,' can make long-term success more likely. NASA, which has been dealing since 1958 with the challenges and (sometimes) chaos of trying to put people and machines in space, can attest to that. Failure Is An Option, And Sometimes It's Necessary Few projects have been bigger than the early U.S. space program, sparked initially by the then Soviet Union's 1957 Sputnik launch and then by President John F. Kennedy's 1961 challenge to the newly established National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to land U.S. astronauts on the Moon and safely return them to Earth. The U.S. space program encountered numerous setbacks and failures, both before and since the July 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing—most tragically, the Apollo 1 fire during a pre-launch test in 1967, the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986, and the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003, each of which resulted in multiple fatalities. The ultimate test for any organization or team, however, is whether it is capable of analyzing the source (or sources) of such failures, correct the problem(s), and move forward. What isn't an option—and shouldn't be an option—is wallowing in failure. As Robert (Bob) Gibbs, NASA's Assistant Administrator for mission support until his recent retirement, told me recently, whether an organization benefits from failure, or gets dragged down by it, largely depends on how its leadership reacts to setbacks. NASA, Moon Shots, Potholes, And Mars Today's space commercialization and exploration programs are driven by increasing collaboration between government and the private sector. These missions not only aim to return to the Moon, but to go far beyond. The science and technology are challenging and the missions unforgiving. Errors and failed attempts go with the territory. That means the road to success likely will have any number of dead ends, detours, and potholes—a familiar path SpaceX seems to be following with its super-sized, 400-foot- tall Starship rocket, designed to support interplanetary travel. First stop: Mars. At this writing there have now been nine Starship tests, several of them explosive failures. Every failure, however, produces valuable information and insights, bringing the team closer to success. How You React To Failure Is Key According to Gibbs, who also served as the U.S. space agency's chief human capital officer during his tenure there, organizations can react to setbacks in one of two ways. One common approach is the 'kill the messenger' approach, he told me. That's when leaders 'make it absolutely clear that failure is not acceptable, and ensure those associated with it don't advance and are seen to 'pay a price'.' This approach effectively kills discussion about what went wrong and guarantees that your team will become even more risk averse, he stressed. Yet, this is the way many leaders respond to adversity—probably because it's hard for many leaders, for both personal and financial reasons, to be open about failure. The alternative is to learn from failure, encourage constructive discussions, debates, and even dissent, and move forward. This is the approach that NASA has embraced, Gibbs says. It's how engagement and innovation thrive and learning from failure becomes part of the culture. One way an organization can demonstrate this principle is to talk candidly about failures. According to Gibbs, NASA does this through its publicly available lessons learned system. To evaluate whether your organization truly embraces failure as part of its learning process, Gibbs suggests that you take the test below. If you answered yes to all of Gibbs's questions--which come from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and are included in NASA's Lessons Learned Information System--you have created an environment where employees can fail, learn, innovate and move forward, an environment for success. One of the most-often repeated quotes about one of the world's most-impactful inventors is Thomas Edison's alleged description of his serial failures on what became known as the light bulb. 'I have not failed,' he reportedly said. 'I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.' The rest is history.
Time Magazine
22-07-2025
- Politics
- Time Magazine
Safety is at Risk Warn NASA Staffers in Protest Letter
On July 21—the 56th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon walk—287 current or former NASA employees signed or endorsed a strongly worded open letter to NASA acting administrator Sean Duffy. The letter objects to the space agency's draconian budget and personnel cuts proposed by the White House. Of those signatories, 131 openly wrote their names. The remaining 156, concerned for their jobs, lent their support anonymously. And then, too, there were 17 more names added at the bottom of the letter–belonging to 17 people who didn't have a say in whether their names were used or not. They included Gus Grissom, Ed White, Judith Resnik, Christa McAuliffe, Willie McCool, Kalpana Chawla and the other explorers who lost their lives in the Apollo 1 fire, the Challenger explosion, and the Columbia disintegration. The names were there for more than sentiment; they were there as pointed reminders of what can go wrong in the white-knuckle business of space—what too often does go wrong—when corners are cut, funding is slashed, and work forces are reduced in pursuit of short term budgetary gains. 'Safety is being compromised in every way,' says three time space veteran and retired NASA astronaut Cady Coleman, a signatory of the letter, in a conversation with TIME. 'We are courting another space disaster.' Coleman feels that danger more acutely than most. During the Columbia crew's training, she worked as their capsule communicator—or capcom—the sole voice between mission control and the astronauts. By the time the crew actually went to space, she was finishing up a rotation in Antarctica, assisting in NASA's meteor collection program. She was on her way home, staying with friends in New Zealand, when the terrible word from space came down. 'My friend called and said 'Cady, we lost Columbia. I remember thinking, 'How could we lose them?' It was definitely a hard journey home.' It's not just loss of crew safety that the 287 signatories of the open letter—dubbed The NASA Voyager Declaration—are protesting. There's the scrapping of projects like the Mars Sample Return Mission, which is already underway, with the Perseverance rover caching samples on the Martian surface for later return to Earth. There is the premature cancellation of the Space Launch System (SLS) moon rocket, and the Orion crew capsule, NASA's only crewed ride back to the moon. There is the proposed 50% cut to NASA space science missions, including the brand new Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, the all-but completed $4 billion observatory set for launch in May 2027—which now might be consigned to simply idling in its clean room in Greenbelt, Maryland. Overall, NASA faces a 24% budget cut, from $24.8 billion in 2025 to $18.8 billion in 2026—its lowest funding level since 2015. 'We dissent to the closing out of missions for which Congress has appropriated funding because it represents a permanent loss of capability to the United States both in space and on earth,' wrote the signatories. 'We dissent to implementing indiscriminate cuts to NASA science and aeronautics research because this will leave the American people without the unique public good that NASA provides.' And there's more. There's the loss of intellectual capital that comes when highly trained civil servant engineers are either sacked out of hand or pack their bags and go, taking their talents to the less political private sector, where job security is greater and compensation is higher. 'Thousands of NASA civil servant employees have already been terminated, resigned or retired early, taking with them highly specialized, irreplaceable knowledge crucial to carrying out NASA's mission,' reads the letter. Says retired NASA astronaut Terry Virts, now a candidate for a U.S. Senate Seat in the Democratic primary in Texas: 'These Trump personnel cuts to space exploration are undermining future generations of engineers and scientists as well as those mid-career employees who are at the height of their competency and productivity. It's as if a farmer is destroying his seed corn as well as his crops in the field. The damage that this administration is causing will last for a generation.' The number of anonymous signatories to the Voyager Declaration letter is perhaps a sign of wariness of an administration that is famously intolerant of—and punitive toward—perceived disloyalty. But NASA employees at least come with a modicum of institutional security. After the Columbia disaster in 2003—an accident that was partly the result of lower-echelon employees fearing for their jobs if they spoke out of turn about safety lapses they observed—NASA established its Technical Authority protocol, which provides protection for employees to report anomalies or dangerous corner-cutting to superiors outside their direct chain of command The signatories also cite an official NASA policy directive, similarly ensuring support for speaking truth to power. 'NASA supports full and open discussion of issues of any nature … including alternative and divergent views. Diverse views are to be fostered and respected in an environment of integrity and trust with no suppression or retribution.' The catch: The effective date of the rule was January 29, 2020, and the expiration January 29, 2025. Will the letter have any effect at all? Recent history doesn't portend good things. In June, employees at the National Institutes of Health penned a similar open letter, which yielded little result. Earlier this month, employees at the Environmental Protection Agency, filed their own letter, with even worse results; 140 of them were placed on administrative leave. But NASA backers are not giving up hope. For one thing, the steep budget cuts the White House proposes still have to be approved by Congress, and with thousands of NASA jobs in dozens of Congressional districts, lawmakers are disinclined to take money out of their constituents' pockets. The SLS and Orion were spared in just that way in 2010, when then President Barack Obama proposed scrapping them and Capitol Hill said no dice. And then too there is the less tangible, more lyrical side of space travel that may redound in NASA's favor. 'I'm an optimist,' says Coleman. 'There's something about space that's compelling. There are things out there we don't know about. I think that a letter about space is going to reach people. I think that people are going to understand that if we're saying this about space, we're saying it about microbiology, about sustainability too.' A single open letter may not be enough to change national space policy, but millions of voices expressing their support for it, just may.
Sky News AU
17-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Sky News AU
Resurfaced clips of Buzz Aldrin reignite Apollo 11 landing conspiracy theory as US marks 56th anniversary of first man to walk on the moon
Resurfaced clips of Buzz Aldrin have reignited an old conspiracy theory about the 1969 moon landing, with scientists once again having to debunk it. As the United States prepares to mark the 56th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, old clips of Buzz Aldrin have resurfaced, which have reignited a conspiracy theory claiming the iconic 1969 moon landing never happened. The clips, which show Aldrin on the Late Night with Conan O'Brien Show back in 2000 have, according to some social media commentators, given credence to the theory that man never made it to the lunar surface. In the video, Aldrin responded to a quip by host Conan O'Brien saying that he watched the moon landing as a boy. 'No, you didn't,' Aldrin snapped. "There wasn't any television, there wasn't anyone taking a picture. You watched an animation," he said. The video, which has since racked up more than a million views online, has led to conspiracy theorists in the United States taking it as gospel that the moon landings were faked and were staged by NASA to fool the Soviet Union. A subsequent 2015 clip has also gone viral, with an eight-year-old girl asking the NASA veteran why NASA has not returned to the moon since, to which he replied, 'Because we didn't go there, and that's the way it happened.' Doubt over the moon landing took root in the mid-1970s, fuelled by public mistrust after Watergate and the Pentagon Papers. Theories about staged sets, lighting inconsistencies, and suspicious interviews have persisted ever since. — Stew Peters (@realstewpeters) March 20, 2023 NASA has repeatedly dismissed such claims, pointing to telemetry data, lunar rock samples, and the testimonies of thousands of engineers, scientists, and astronauts as proof of the mission's authenticity. In fact, a Reuters fact check from 2023 has debunked the 2000 clip, with the news agency reporting that Aldrin's comments are related to animation graphics that television networks used to illustrate the moon landings. The news agency also debunked the 2015 clip, which was a question-and-answer session at the Oxford Union. They said the clips edited out elements where Aldrin was talking about his fears of a technical failure in the craft that could have caused a catastrophic fire like the Apollo 1 disaster or caused a decompression sending himself and Neil Armstrong into the vacuum of space. Aldrin is the only surviving member of the Apollo 11 team after Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins died in 2012 and 2021, respectively. In the 2024 US election, he endorsed Donald Trump for the presidency after he made a promise to put an American astronaut back onto the moon.
India Today
01-07-2025
- Science
- India Today
Shubhanshu Shukla shares ‘Go Fever' and ‘Overview Effect' from space
When astronauts travel to space, they experience more than just weightlessness and stunning views. Shubhanshu Shukla, now orbiting Earth as part of the Axiom 4 mission, has described two powerful psychological experiences: "Go Fever" and the "Overview Effect." These terms capture both the intense urge to launch after long delays and the profound emotional shift that comes from seeing our planet from above. Shukla's honest reflexions offer a rare glimpse into the mindset of astronauts and reveal how space travel can change a person's view of the world and humanity itself. advertisementLet's explore what these terms mean, why they matter, and how Shukla's words help us understand the emotional side of space travel.1. WHAT IS GO FEVER?Go Fever is the overwhelming desire to proceed with your mission regardless of any risks or sensible reasons to wait. Go Fever is often exacerbated by long delays in launching, which builds a sense of impatience. When Go Fever sets in, people will sometimes ignore safety concerns altogether, or jump to a hasty decision just to get going. The term originally came from NASA and was used to describe the state of participants in the Apollo 1 fire when, as with other instances of Go Fever, time pressure and excitement led to disaster. Go Fever has little to do with impatience or lack of risk awareness, and much to do with the pressure of being successful and the excitement of finally moving forward, sometimes at the expense of thorough THE 'OVERVIEW EFFECT'The Overview Effect is a powerful emotional and cognitive transformation that astronauts frequently feel when they see Earth from space for the first time. They realise, as they look down on the planet, that there are no visible borders for countries or other divisions, just one fragile world. This awareness is accompanied by amazement and a new perspective or appreciation of the beauty and fragility of our Earth. The Overview Effect ultimately leads astronauts to be more mindful and connected to all of humanity and to be advocates for protecting the Shukla's reflections on the Axiom-4 mission remind us that space travel is more than just science and engineering; it's, ultimately, a human journey. Go Fever reveals our insatiable drive to explore at all costs, while the Overview Effect shows us the extraordinary wonder and interconnectedness we experience during the journey. As we consider the universe beyond Earth, these lessons reconnect us to what we hold most important on Earth.- EndsTune InMust Watch
Fast Company
20-05-2025
- Business
- Fast Company
6 ways effective leaders think like astronauts
I've served the NASA space program for many years as an adviser, research scientist, flight surgeon—and astronaut. My career has encompassed both in-flight and non-flight contributions to NASA, supporting space missions, space medicine, and research in advancing human space flight. Space exploration encompasses a fair amount of uncertainty by nature. The space program's early days were fraught with a number of crew losses, including the Apollo 1 mission, and the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle missions. The challenges of space flight were on full display during the Apollo 13 crew's near-disastrous mission on the way to the moon in 1970. We all know those infamous words: 'Houston, we have a problem.' But the determination of a mission control team led by flight director Gene Kranz—marked by the phrase 'failure is not an option'—ended in a successful mission. Anyone, though, can pick up smart leadership lessons from space travel, even if you're not headed to the moon yourself. Here's how the best leaders think like astronauts. Recognize The Power of Vision Every great leader starts with a vision. Whether you are leading a company, a team, or a personal endeavor, the ability to see beyond present circumstances and chart a course for the future is what separates extraordinary leaders from the rest. When I first dreamed of becoming an astronaut, I had no road map. The road ahead was full of uncertainty, doubts, and obstacles. After determining that doctors were needed in the space program, my pathway was set. My goal was to become a physician with the knowledge and skills to work in space. But I learned early on that it's not about having all the answers—it's about having the courage to pursue a vision, adapt to challenges, and inspire others along the way. In business, just as in space exploration, those who succeed are the ones who remain focused on their mission despite adversity. Turn the Vision into a Mission The mark of a good leader is their ability to transform the vision into tangible goals and objectives for the mission. We accomplish this at NASA through extensive training and mission preparation. The flight crew and mission support team dedicate countless hours to training in simulators and facilities, preparing for every scenario, whether it's smooth sailing or unforeseen challenges. They focus on identifying the critical factors for success, then conduct 'nominal' training for ideal outcomes and 'off-nominal' training to tackle potential setbacks. We have a saying in the Astronaut Corps: 'Fly as you train.' Training reflects conditions similar to those of the mission so we're best prepared for the unexpected. Once those conditions are clear, we set high expectations to drive high performance. People and organizations can achieve amazing things when they know what's expected of them. The most successful leaders embrace challenges, set high expectations, remain adaptable, and focus on the greater impact of their work. Let High Expectations Drive High Performance Leaders who expect mediocrity will get just that, while those who challenge their teams to push beyond limits foster excellence. On my second flight, STS–63 in February 1995, we had multiple challenges. During my spacewalk, my fellow crew member and I experienced unexpected extreme temperatures of -165°F at orbital night and +200°F during the day, which exceeded the temperature capability of the space suit. There were other malfunctions on the mission, like issues with critical equipment on the spacecraft that almost canceled our rendezvous with the Russian space station. NASA's training program assumes that astronauts must be prepared for the unknown. The same principle applies in business. Leaders must prepare their teams for challenges that may not yet exist, setting expectations that encourage innovation, accountability, and excellence. If you want to see growth in your organization, ask yourself: Are you setting high-enough expectations? Are you fostering a culture where your team is encouraged to reach beyond what they believe is possible? Success is often the result of leaders who challenge their teams to think bigger, work harder, and embrace bold ideas. Buckle into Resilience in Challenging Times One of the most valuable leadership lessons is understanding that failure is not the enemy—complacency is. Some of the best business leaders I have met share one trait: they're not afraid of failing. They see failure as feedback, as a necessary component of growth. I also had moments of uncertainty during my first flight—STS-55 in April 1993. As we were about to launch, one of the three main engines of the Space Shuttle Columbia failed 2.5 seconds before liftoff. Fortunately, the safety system worked, cutting the fuel to the engine while simultaneously putting out the ensuing fire. This event certainly got my attention, as we say when things don't go well. I'm lucky to be here today. During my astronaut training and missions, I faced countless setbacks. Physical demands of endless hours of spacewalk training underwater in the neutral buoyancy facility pushed me to my limits, technical challenges of microgravity simulation forced me to rethink strategies, and high-stakes flight simulations that exposed weaknesses I needed to improve. Had I let failure define me, rather than energize me, I would never have made it to space. Resilience is just as crucial for leadership in life and business. Markets change, competitors arise, and setbacks occur. The best leaders are those who are resilient and thrive to adapt, learn, and continue forward with an unwavering commitment to their goals. Maintain Confidence in the Face of Adversity Great leaders possess both confidence and humility. Confidence allows you to make bold decisions, take risks, and lead with conviction. But humility ensures that you remain open to new ideas, feedback, and growth. In my career at NASA, in venture capital, and as an entrepreneur, I've worked with some of the most brilliant minds in science, engineering, and business. The leaders who stand out are those who strongly believe in their abilities yet understand they don't have all the answers. They surround themselves with talented individuals, listen more than they speak, and remain adaptable in the face of change. In your leadership journey, have the confidence to make difficult decisions and the humility to recognize that leadership is a lifelong learning process. Build a Legacy of Impact After my time at NASA, I joined SpaceHab as an SVP and chief medical officer, contributing to one of the pioneering companies in commercial spaceflight. In 2002, I founded a venture capital firm focused on telemedicine and healthcare technologies. Later, I founded the Harris Foundation and Institute, which has been involved in math and science education for over 25 years. Leadership is not just about personal success—it's about the impact you leave behind. For business leaders, this means looking beyond profit margins and quarterly results. It means fostering a culture where employees feel valued, innovation thrives, and measuring success by long-term impact rather than short-term gains. Ask yourself: How do you envision the legacy you wish to leave as a leader? Are you investing in people? Are you creating a vision that extends beyond yourself? Leadership lessons from space Leadership is a journey of vision, mission, expectation, resilience, and confidence. The most successful leaders embrace challenges, set high expectations, remain adaptable, and focus on the greater impact of their work. As you lead your organization, your team, or even your own personal ambitions, remember that the key to success lies not in avoiding obstacles and uncertainty, but in using them as stepping stones to greater achievements.
