Mastering the Leadership Role in Project Management: Practices that Deliver Remarkable Results

7. Exploring Space: Shaping Culture by Exploiting Location

by Alexander Laufer, Edward Hoffman, and Don Cohen

“Good Enough” Is Good Enough

The core science group that proposed the NASA Advanced Composition Explorer mission, or ACE, had worked together on other NASA missions and had even built instruments together. Two members of the group were from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), and they were quite experienced building the type of spacecraft that they thought they needed, so the group proposed using a spacecraft built by APL. The initial unsolicited proposal of the group was not accepted, but it raised their visibility. When an opportunity came along to propose a new mission five years later, they proposed ACE as an Explorer-class ...