Space Shuttle Lessons: Backtracks Can Create Breakthroughs

NASA’s 1969-71 design process offers a road map for today’s breakthrough inventions, from rockets to new drugs

Based on the research of Francisco Polidoro Jr.

What does the space shuttle have in common with the original iPhone? According to Francisco Polidoro Jr., professor of management of Texas McCombs, they’re both breakthrough inventions that integrate webs of interdependent features.

In an iPhone, he notes, its size, weight, camera, and Wi-Fi capabilities influence one another. Push one feature too far, and the phone becomes heavier, bulkier, or more expensive.

Companies can’t test each feature in isolation, and they can’t experiment with every possible combination. So, how does an organization design a complicated product for which there’s no existing template?

In a new study, Polidoro finds present-day answers in an old story: how NASA developed its space shuttles, which flew from 1981 to 2011.

Rather than a straightforward sequence, NASA used a meandering knowledge-building process, he finds. That process allowed it to systematically explore rocket features, both individually and together.

“With breakthrough inventions, the number of combinations of possible features quickly explodes, and you just can’t test all of them,” Polidoro says. “It has to be a much more selective search process.”

His findings have implications for both modern-day rocketeers and other cutting-edge fields, from phones to pharmaceuticals.

It Is Rocket Science

To trace NASA’s design process, Polidoro combed through its archives with Raja Roy of the New Jersey Institute of Technology, as well as Minyoung Kim of the Ohio State University and Curba Morris Lampert of Florida International University.

The archives included 7,000 pages of books, papers, and technical documents — such as internal memoranda between engineers and managers — along with published and unpublished accounts and oral histories by NASA scientists, engineers, and historians.

From that material, the researchers created a timeline of successive space shuttle designs, from 1969 to 1971.

NASA recognized that the high costs of its Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs were largely due to nonreusable systems. At the outset, engineers working on a solution identified a series of performance features to test, including:

• The capacity to carry payloads of 50,000 pounds.
• Boosters with solid-propellant rocket motors that could be jettisoned and reused.
• An external fuel tank with liquified oxygen and hydrogen that could be jettisoned.

To achieve those goals, the researchers found, NASA engineers built new knowledge in two distinct ways that repeated and built on each other over time: oscillation and accumulation.

• With oscillation, engineers focused on achieving one specific performance goal. Then, they deliberately stepped back to explore alternatives, returning later to the initial goal with new insights.
• With accumulation, they steadily met more performance goals in later designs as they built up knowledge.

Shuttle Synergy

Past research has looked at oscillation and accumulation separately, Polidoro says. But it was the two processes working synergistically that drove the shuttle’s breakthroughs.

For example, in its first design iteration, engineers discovered how to burn fuel efficiently using a combination of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. Then, in subsequent designs, they temporarily reverted to an older fuel: kerosene.

They used kerosene while they tested other features, including solid rocket motors and reusable boosters. Those features were incorporated successfully into later designs.

“Stepping back and letting go, temporarily, of solutions that are superior creates a space for you to keep on accumulating knowledge,” Polidoro says.

“But that could be challenging, because technologists might be really proud of what they’ve achieved. It requires a humbleness to step away.”

Today, he says, engineers face an added challenge. Space technology innovation is spread across several private companies, not just NASA, making it harder to coordinate oscillation and accumulation.

He suggests that companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin pay attention to how they split tasks around design and prototyping. “Try to define the boundaries of tasks or modules around the features that are highly interdependent,” Polidoro says.

He adds that oscillation and accumulation aren’t limited to designing rockets. They can apply to other kinds of breakthrough inventions such as new drugs.

A researcher may initially identify a promising compound that targets a disease pathway with precision, only to set it aside temporarily because toxicity issues arise. After resolving the toxicity issues, the team returns to the compound.

“But in the process, you may have learned something,” says Polidoro. “A temporary retreat can become the foundation for the next leap forward.”

“Creating a Breakthrough Invention: NASA’s Internal Knowledge Generation for the Space Shuttle” is published in Research Policy.

Story by Deborah Lynn Blumberg