In the space business, we live up to a creed of excellence or die from the lack of it, and we make our entire society better for the acceptance of that challenge. We are not perfect; we do not have perfect knowledge of our machines or the environment in which they will be operating. Our machines are no more perfect than we ourselves. A quote that I love goes like this: 'Excellence is the result of caring more than others think wise, risking more than others think safe, dreaming more than others think practical and expecting more than others think possible.' My hope is that we inspire our people to work-and work hard-toward the goals of the missions placed before us, as our forebears did. That's what it takes. This is rocket science. NASA is a high-performance organization, working on large, complex engineering systems on their way to Mercury, Mars, Pluto, and with the Dawn mission, the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Weather permitting, my hope is that tomorrow or later this week we will launch Space Shuttle Discovery, commanded by Colonel Pam Melroy, to the station on the STS-120 mission. This shuttle mission will deliver the Italian-built Harmony Module to connect the European and Japanese laboratory modules that will be flown on the next two missions.
Rocket Team
2008
10 pages
Report
No indication
English