Shaping Science Organizations, Decisions, and Culture on NASA's Teams

Shaping Science: Organizations, Decisions, and Culture on NASA's Teams by Janet Vertesi
English | Oct 15, 2020 | ISBN: 022669108X | 352 pages | scan PDF | 63 MB
In Shaping Science, Janet Vertesi draws on a decade of immersive ethnography with NASA's robotic spacecraft teams to create a comparative account of two great space missions of the early 2000s. Although these missions featured robotic explorers on the frontiers of the solar system bravely investigating new worlds, their commands were issued from millions of miles away by a very human team. By examining the two teams' formal structures, decision-making techniques, and informal work practices in the day-to-day process of mission planning, Vertesi shows just how deeply entangled a team's local organizational context is with the knowledge they produce about other worlds.