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Schedule including this lecture.
Goddard Space Flight Center Engineering Colloquium
Date: Monday, October 30, 2000
Many future space missions under consideration for funding are based on the expectation of "faster, better, cheaper" space flight. Nanosatellites, interferometers, second-generation launchers, and missions to Mars all make use of this reform. Analysis to date suggests an upper limit (based on cost and complexity) above which the principles supporting "faster, better, cheaper" cannot be applied. Dr. McCurdy will summarize the history of "faster, better, cheaper" (including the failures of 1999), review plans for future missions, and discuss the relationship between the two. Dr. McCurdy has written a history of NASA's "faster, better, cheaper" initiative (being published by Johns Hopkins University Press) and with Dr. Roger Launius, NASA Historian, has prepared a book on the next fifty years of space flight (in production at Chronicle Books).
Dr. Howard E. McCurdy is a professor of public affairs at American University in Washington, D.C. During 1998-99, he held the Charles A. Lindbergh Chair in Aerospace History at the Smithsonian Institution and during 1995-96 was a visiting faculty member at the University of Washington.
Dr. McCurdy is a specialist in space policy and author of Space and the American Imagination, Inside NASA, and The Space Station Decision. He coedited ">Spaceflight and the Myth of Presidential Leadership" with Roger Launius. "Space and the American Imagination" won the Eugene M. Emme Astronautical Literature Award and Inside NASA, a study of NASA's changing organizational culture, won the Henry Adams prize for the best book on the history of the federal government. He is currently writing a history of NASA's "faster, better, cheaper" initiative and a book on the next fifty years of spaceflight.
Professor McCurdy grew up in the Pacific Northwest, where he received his bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Washington and returns each summer to work as a volunteer at Mt. Rainier National Park. He earned his doctorate at the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University, and first came to Washington, D.C., to work as a management analyst in the Office of Management and Budget.
Colloquium Committee Sponsor: Brent Warner
Engineering Colloquium home page: https://ecolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov