Aaron Cohen

Another Apollo veteran. The engineering world is smaller in stature due to his passing.

R.I.P.

That the Apollo program accomplished the impossible in such a short time has always had me wondering how the heck they pulled that off. Every once in a while when I have the good fortune to work with someone from that era for a short time, even just for a few hours as I did with Aaron Cohen, then I think "So that's how they did it." It always comes down to amazing people.

With no intent to diminish Mr. Cohen's abilities, the first two comments here suggest, perhaps unintentionally, the flip side to their compliments for a person from a previous generation: today's people are NOT amazing or do not have sufficient stature to "pull off the impossible."

Are such abilities solely a matter of personal, individual character, or has something happened generally to our society/profession (or NOT happened) that makes our current crop of space engineers seemingly that much less capable than their predecessors?

And if so, what? And how do we fix it?

I think Dr. Cohen answered that in part, himself in 1993:
http://www.ultimateclearlake.com/2010/02/former-director-johnson-space-center-dies

"What you need to do is get decision making down to lower-level people, where the knowledge really is. You would reduce your overhead, too.

Why is it that way today? It's just due to time. People bring their jobs with them when they get promoted. For various reasons - and this is in
corporations too - as you grow in age, decision making goes to the top.

We need to set the program content, schedule and dollars, and commit. You can't afford to be too conservative, either. You need to be right."

Bob:

Nothing has happened to our profession but too many in our society are no longer willing to follow exceptional people with exceptional leadership capabilities. Sadly we've raised a generation that thinks that because they have an opinion it just has to be heard and placed on par with more important or exigent issues.

I have my own ideas about how we "fix it" but they are not politically correct. Suffice it to say that any cursory reading of the history of Apollo reveals the use of the then familiar command and control structure of the military.

The old adage of "lead, follow, but get the hell out of the way" doesn't apply anymore especially lacking clearly defined goals with timelines much as a military operation.

Just to bring it up to date as far as how Aaron Cohen's statement would apply today: 20+ years ago, you came in as a neophyte engineer in the institution, like engineering, and were given some functions and responsibilities, and you were watched and guided closely. As you progressed through the ranks and gained experience in a particular discipline over a few years and projects, you were asked to take more freedom to make decisions as your responsibilities increased. You still had performance requirements. If you did not perform, you did not progress.

At least in HSF, things began to change for the worse during the space station reorganizations about the time Cohen left. At that time you got people with little or no applicable experience placed into positions where they really had no idea what the right decisions were or how to lead in the right direction.

In all prior programs, the program office was responsible for program management functions; NOT technical functions. In a series of power plays, the program office started taking over functions that had never before been program office functions. Their excuse was always that they would do things better, more efficiently, more effectively, with, of course, their own inexperienced management and staff. They had so little experience they would not have known what efficiency or effectiveness had been if it had bit them.

The technical people in the institution where the real knowledge was, to quote Dr. Cohen, no longer were allowed any decision making authority. And they no longer had the responsibility.

Within the ISS today you have several entire organizations that were sucked entirely out of the institution: payloads, operations/integration, vehicle (systems engineering).

In what I believe was a deliberate effort, very shortsighted, to shortchange the institutional technical organizations of their eyes, arms and legs, the program management shut down the Subsystem Manager system. This was the heart of how Shuttle and Apollo had been managed.

When Columbia happened, when they wanted to know how the RCC held up to impacts, there was no longer expertise since when they discontinued the engineering subsystem managers with responsibilities for the TCS a couple years earlier, those people quit and no one was left with the knowledge. No one recognized the RCC was a ceramic; very highly temperature resistant but very fragile.

These technical management changes went hand in hand with full cost accounting, which was a really stupid idea. Program management, who had all the authority, wanted to closely control the institution's budget, and wound up killing many functions. They were not just killing those elements of the institution, they were killing the continuum of forty+ years of expertise in some areas that were not high volume but were no less significant for building and flying a spaceship.

We saw these management errors come full circle in Constellation when a group of people were put in charge, beginning at the Administrator and Program Manager levels, who had none of the requisite experience. And yet they were going to take full control and make all the technical decisions.

In this system, there is no check and balance when they were trying to do all of the technical work themselves. The program is supposed to focus on requirements, budget, and schedule.

There also was no check and balance at the higher levels. When, year after year, the Program failed to meet schedules, budget and performance requirements, no action was taken. Who would have taken action when the program had all of the authority ?

Keep in mind beginning with Bush's Vision announcement, the first two goals were to shut down Shuttle and build the replacement. NASA, the last Administrator and the Program, took it upon themselves to focus their design on a Mars capsule. That was step 100. They needed to start with step 1. They should have been focused on their job, not lower level institution's technical functions.

After a lot of time, energy and dollars, they could not finalize a design for a spacecraft and rocket that really did not need to be any more than marginally different from several previous spacecraft. It could not have been much simpler than going back to the earlier plans, earlier designs, earlier requirements, updating them and working to plan. But when there is no continuity, in the technical workforce; when the technical work is being done by a bunch of neophytes with no experience and total budgetary authority in the program office instead of the technical organizations, they did not know how to do the job.

Aaron Cohen knew how to do the job. He'd been through the process as a subsystem manager; he had been the guy in charge of engineering. When he left is when you started getting people into the center director position and several other high level management positions who had no idea how to design, develop or build anything. Take a look at the people who succeeded Aaron Cohen. They did not have a clue. The programs got cocky, went awry and there was no one at the top who had ever done it before; there was no one to stop them.

I had the good fortune of studying under Dr. Cohen at Texas A&M. Dr. Cohen represented the sterling quality of the managers and system engineers that pulled off the marvels of both Apollo and Shuttle.

His obituary is listed here. Services will be in San Antonio on Monday afternoon.

He was a visiting professor at MIT in 2005, where he assembled a remarkable guest speaker list to discuss the design of the Space Shuttle. These lectures are available here. I highly recommend them to engineers and managers of aerospace projects.