ABSTRACT
The central organization has a variety of structural decisions to make. The most obvious, traditional, and primary structural choice concerns the major vertical subdivisions of the organization. In business organizations these "backbones" typically reflect the major products, processes, or geographic divisions of the firm. Sometimes these are common to both spacecraft and aeronautics, which complicates the organizational decision-making. Spacecraft are designed in many different organizational units within the agency, and work on launch vehicles is performed at several centers reporting up different organizational lines. NASA has already experienced some modest destructive competition between program offices having somewhat similar jurisdictions. The large, multimillion-dollar procurement decisions at NASA are made by an organizational mechanism that brings lower-level technical personnel together with top agency officials. The Board members, having spent several months on the topic, are intimately knowledgeable about the specific procurement and understand in detail its cost, technical, and management aspects.
