When the Space Shuttle launches due-east from the Kennedy Space Center the inclination of the vehicle’s orbit is 28.45 degrees. This is the same as the Space Center’s latitude. The “orbital inclination” is nothing more than the angle between the orbit and the equator, i.e., how “inclined” or “tilted” the orbit is. If the orbit …
Optimum Space Station Orbit Inclination for Space Shuttle Support Missions Read More »
Introduction to the C Programming Language As many books do, this started out as a set of notes for a class. I taught several C classes for the staff at Rockwell Space Operations in Houston when I worked on the Space Shuttle Program. What I wanted to do was to drive home that the engineers, …
Multi-Stage Monte Carlo Optimization Monte Carlo optimization has been a widely used optimization method for many years. It’s very easy to understand: For a set of factors (independent variables), randomly select values for each factor to make a set of inputs to the system and test the system response for each set. For example, referring …
What do project managers do all day? Why? Does it add value? What about all the artifacts (plans, schedules, reports, etc.) that are part of our days? What’s the value? This presentation aims to answer what we do and what value it delivers. How Project Management Adds Value Presentation (pdf)
Many of the same competing project forces which are common in the business world are also well represented in the Shuttle Program. The Space Shuttle has always been a work-in-progress, constantly being reviewed, revised, studied, and improved. How is this constant change managed? Projects compete for scarce resources (knowledgeable staff, funding, time, etc.). Complicating the …
Project Management Challenges in the Space Shuttle Flight Design Program Read More »
If you think about the title of the book for a minute you’ll start to understand what this book is all about. Suppose your company sold mobile phones and maintenance contracts for the phones. How would you pitch each product to a potential customer? You’d hand them the phone, let them feel the quality, maybe …
This was fun. Many times getting VMware Workstation to install and build with the current Linux (Fedora) kernel is “challenging.” Often times it takes a Google search or two, and perhaps a patch downloaded and applied. This time it was different but still a headache. First, take a look at this discussion on the VMware …
Quick Note: if you see an error like this when you upgrade to Fedora 12 and are running PHP apps such as Joomla: Warning: strtotime() [function.strtotime]: It is not safe to rely on the system’s timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of …
When we are in the planning phase of a project it’s common to iteratively build out the WBS and subsequent project schedule. Often as we learn more and dig deeper into the work required we will break out a task into a work package/summary task and a set of subtasks which are what’s needed to …
MS Project: Error of Assigning Resources to Summary Tasks Read More »
Often times a larger project’s Gantt chart gets “busy” and hard to read. All the summary bars are black. Everything looks the same. For a small project it’s not so bad but for larger projects it gets difficult to pick out what part of the schedule is being looked at. One simple way to improve …
