|
In 1996, then-director of Johnson Space Center George Abbey; concerned with the prospect of losing the collected wisdom gleaned from over 40 years of planning, executing, and achieving human spaceflight; commissioned a project to collect as many oral history interviews as possible with the “graybeards” of NASA before it was too late. The project soon expanded to capturing interviews for NASA Headquarters, and the original team of oral historians traveled to every NASA center to continue this work, establishing oral history projects across the agency.
Transcripts from the resulting projects are publicly available online and used by researchers, authors, and students across the globe. They also serve as a valuable resource for NASA’s management, engineers, and scientists when developing new spaceflight programs, not only for the information contained in the interviews, but also in identifying the former NASA experts who were pioneers in the field.
During an interview for the Orion Oral History Project in 2016, the Program Director for Exploration Systems Development, Daniel L. Dumbacher, explained the importance of capturing history at NASA.
(T)he History Office is just as important in my book as anybody else, because if we don’t learn from the history, we’re bound to repeat it. I love nothing more than making the young people go back and read the history, because they’ve got to learn it somehow.
After reading the available oral history transcripts with George Mueller, who headed the Office of Manned Space Flight from 1963 through 1969, Dumbacher had the opportunity to speak with Mueller personally. “I was trying to get his insight before I got too far into this job at Headquarters.” He credited talking to Mueller—doing his “own version of oral history”—with learning several key points for managing a large and diverse workforce.
Earlier, Constellation Program management realized that even with NASA’s talented workforce, “programs intended to carry humans to and from space are characterized by design, development, and testing challenges that differ greatly from those encountered by the orbiting International Space Station or operational space shuttle.” As a result, the SAGES [Shuttle and Apollo Generation Expert Services] group formed “to reach back and capture launch and return vehicle experience.” SAGES provided access to retired experts from NASA’s past for advice and mentorship. Constellation management recognized the value of past experience to transfer technical, flight operations, and program management knowledge to the next generation.
| 
