Range - David Epstein Page 0,107

how stressful it was,” he told me. Even before the latest snafu, he had a hunch held lightly—he was uneasy about how the electronics box had been managed. But as long as the box was attached to the probe, there would be no more information forthcoming.

Geveden joined NASA in 1990, and was a keen observer of the culture. “When I was coming through NASA,” he said, “I had the intuition that there’s a real conformance culture.” Early in his tenure, he attended a team-building class offered by the agency. On the very first day the instructor asked the class, rhetorically, for the single most important principle in decision making. His answer: to get consensus. “And I said, ‘I don’t think the people who launched the space shuttle Challenger agree with that point,’” Geveden told me. “Consensus is nice to have, but we shouldn’t be optimizing happiness, we should be optimizing our decisions. I just had a feeling all along that there was something wrong with the culture. We didn’t have a healthy tension in the system.” NASA still had its hallowed process, and Geveden saw everywhere a collective culture that nudged conflict into darkened corners. “You almost couldn’t go into a meeting without someone saying, ‘Let’s take that offline,’” he recalled, just as Morton Thiokol had done for the infamous offline caucus.

Geveden, in his own way, was in favor of balancing the typical, formal process culture with a dose of informal individualism, as Kranz and von Braun once had. “The chain of communication has to be informal,” he told me, “completely different from the chain of command.” He wanted a culture where everyone had the responsibility to protest if something didn’t feel right. He decided to go prospecting for doubts.

He deeply respected Stanford’s electronics manager. The manager had worked with the same kind of power supply before, and viewed it as fragile technology. After a formal meeting in which NASA’s head engineer and its head scientist on the project both advocated for leaving the box in place, Geveden held informal individual meetings. In one of those, he learned from a member of the NASA team that a manager from Lockheed Martin, which had built the box, was concerned. Like Challenger’s O-rings, the known problem with the box was surmountable, but it was unexpected. There were unknown unknowns.

Against the recommendation of the chief engineer and the Stanford team leader, Geveden decided to scrub the launch and pull the box. Once it came off, engineers quickly discovered three other design problems that had not been clear in schematics, including a case of having used the flat-out wrong parts. The surprises prompted Lockheed to go back over every single circuit in the box. They found twenty separate issues.

As if Gravity Probe B was required by the space gods to scale every imaginable obstacle, a month after the box was pulled there was an earthquake near the launch site. The launch vehicle was slightly damaged, but fortunately the probe was intact. Four months later, in April 2004, GP-B finally took off. It was the first direct test to support Einstein’s idea that Earth drags the fabric of space-time around with it as it spins. The technology left a greater legacy. Components designed for Gravity Probe B improved digital cameras and satellites; the centimeter-accurate GPS was applied to automatic aircraft landing systems and precision farming.

The following year, a new NASA administrator was appointed by the president. The new administrator demanded the kind of individualism and opinionated debate that could serve as a cross-pressure for NASA’s robust process accountability. He made Geveden the associate administrator, essentially the COO of NASA, and the highest position in the agency that is not politically appointed.

* * *

—

In 2017, Geveden took his lessons to a new role as CEO of BWX Technologies, a company whose wide purview includes nuclear propulsion technology that could power a manned Mars mission. Some of BWX Technologies’ decision makers are retired military leaders whose dearly held tool is firm hierarchy. So when Geveden became CEO, he wrote a short memo on his expectations for teamwork. “I told them I expect disagreement with my decisions at the time we’re trying to make decisions, and that’s a sign of organizational health,” he told me. “After the decisions are made, we want compliance and support, but we have permission to fight a little bit about those things in a professional way.” He emphasized that there is a difference between the chain of command and the chain of