NASA’s Science Head on Leading Space Missions with Risk of Spectacular Failure

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 18 October 2022

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In 2021, the U.S. space agency NASA launched a spacecraft toward a pair of asteroids more than 11 million kilometers away. The target? The smaller of the two asteroids, just 170 meters wide. The success of the $300 million, seven-year project demanded careful coordination of scientists, engineers, and project managers across different national space agencies. It also required strong leadership from NASA's head of science, Thomas Zurbuchen. He shares his path to an executive role at NASA, his management philosophies, and how he oversees trailblazing space missions with high risk of failure.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	So you got the job. Now what? Join me, Eleni Mata, on HBR's new original podcast, New
0:08.1	Here, the Young Professionals Guide to Work, and how to make it work for you. Listen for
0:13.8	free wherever you get your podcasts. Just search New Here. See you there!
0:30.0	Welcome to the HBR IDA cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Kurt Nickyf.
0:49.0	A year ago, the US Space Agency NASA launched a spacecraft the size of a vending machine
0:55.0	toward a pair of asteroids, one orbiting the other more than 11 kilometers away. The target,
1:01.6	the smaller of the two asteroids, just 170 meters wide. The spacecraft slammed into the
1:07.9	asteroid so fast it covered the last 10 kilometers in about a second. It's really hard to come up
1:14.2	with a down-to-earth comparison of that. It's kind of like hitting a billiard shot from one side
1:19.4	of a continent to the other and draining it. Not only did this spacecraft successfully slow
1:25.8	the orbit of the asteroid, which was what it was being tested to do, it also brought along its
1:31.1	own film crew for posterity. A tiny spacecraft made by the Italian Space Agency followed three
1:37.4	minutes behind, taking pictures of the smash. If you want to talk about complexity, highly technical,
1:43.8	risky, well this is a project for you, a $300 million that took seven years to plan and launch
1:50.5	with scientists and expert teams working on it around the globe. How do you execute a project
1:56.8	like that? Or the one that launched the James Webb Space Telescope that's now beaming extremely
2:02.0	high-resolution photographs back to Earth? Here to tell us how is Thomas Sirbuchen, the head of
2:08.3	science at NASA, he oversees a $7.6 billion budget for space science missions as well as more than
2:14.9	$1 billion for Earth science missions, like the ones making climate observations of our planet.
2:20.4	Hi, Thomas. Good to talk to you. Thomas, you were born in Switzerland. Your father was a prominent
2:26.5	pastor in a religious community there. How did you get started on your path to where you are now?
2:32.9	Yeah, exactly. I think the easiest way I would explain it, I basically grew up in a
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Harvard Business Review, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Harvard Business Review and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.