ABSTRACT
In 1961, when President John F. Kennedy announced the goal of landing an astronaut on the moon by the end of the decade, the nation held great faith in modern technology’s ability to achieve seemingly impossible objectives. Despite the occasional setback, that faith was rewarded with repeated missions landing astronauts on the moon. Yet, after decades of stunning, sustained successes in space exploration, the nation came to learn that technology by itself was, tragically, not enough to maintain progress in space. Presidential commissions investigating both the Challenger disaster in 1986 and the Columbia disaster in 2003 indicated that a safe and successful space program depends at least as much on effective management as on advanced space technology. 1
