Working at the boundary: Making space for innovation in a NASA megaproject.

This study shows how occupational, organizational and institutional boundaries can be reworked to enable innovation. Based on an historical case study of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, which spanned three decades and two dozen organizations, I show how megaproject members made boundaries a target of strategic action. Megaprojects, in particular, require us to think about boundaries at multiple levels as they commonly draw on expertise and resources from different disciplines, organizations, and institutional domains. This case reveals several mechanisms by which boundaries can be modified to coordinate diverse innovation partners, from reconfiguring the ways members relate to one another (splicing, fitting and channeling) to reshaping the environment they work in (softening, fusing and corralling). Overall, this study contributes to our understanding of how actors make room for new ideas and cause institutional change as part of innovation processes. By treating boundaries as malleable and multiplex, I extend organizational theory, which tends to view boundaries as given and things to be spanned. I extend the STS literature that takes boundaries as fluid, identifying several mechanisms of making and unmaking them. A more dynamic treatment of boundaries is called for in both innovation research and practice, and this study opens a path for research that looks not only at boundary objects but also boundary actions, and moves from boundary organizations to boundary organizing.

From Planetary Quarantine to Planetary Protection: A NASA and International Story.

This paper treats the very specific history of one aspect of space policy and how it, or more specifically its name, developed in the first two decades of the Space Age. The concepts of preventing the biological and organic contamination of other planetary bodies, which also protect the biosphere from the consequences of finding extraterrestrial life and returning it to Earth, were established in the late 1950s with the beginning of the Space Age. Within their first decade, those concepts were labeled "planetary quarantine," a name that suggested the concepts but unfortunately came with latent baggage of its own. Over time, that sobriquet was replaced by the more prosaic "planetary protection," which has less of a baggage problem and has come to be used in common parlance to describe this contamination avoidance within the spaceflight community. This paper does not duplicate material found in the "official" NASA history of planetary protection (Meltzer, 2011 ), which covered this specific subject only broadly, nor was the same material presented by Meltzer's predecessor (Phillips, 1974 ), who could not cover it because it had not happened yet.

The Greatest Missions Never Flown: Anticipatory Discourse and the "Projectory" in Technological Communities.

This article introduces the concept of the sociotechnical projectory to explore the importance of future-oriented discourse in technical practice. It examines the case of two flagship NASA missions that, since the 1960s, have been continually proposed and deferred. Despite the missions never being flown, it argues that they produced powerful effects within the planetary science community as assumed "end-points" to which all current technological, scientific, and community efforts are directed. It asserts that attention to the social construction of technological systems requires historical attention to how actors situate themselves with respect to a shared narrative of the future.

An historical summary of advisory boards for aerospace medicine at NASA.

Over the past 50 years, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has interacted with numerous advisory committees. These committees include those established by NASA, the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, or through Congressional oversight. Such groups have had a relatively passive role while providing sage advice on a variety of important issues. While these groups cover a wide range of disciplines, the focus of this paper is on those that impacted aerospace medicine and human spaceflight from NASA's beginning to the present time. The intent is to provide an historical narrative of the committees, their purpose, their outcome, and how they influenced the development of aerospace medicine within NASA. Aerospace medicine and life sciences have been closely aligned and intertwined from NASA's beginning. While several committees overlap life sciences within NASA, life sciences will not be presented unless it is in direct reference to aerospace medicine. This paper provides an historical summary chronicling those individuals and the groups they led when aerospace medicine was emerging as a discipline for human spaceflight beginning in 1957.

Development of occupational health at NASA: five decades of progress.

OBJECTIVE: As NASA celebrates the 50th anniversary of human spaceflight, we reflect back on the individuals who forged a new way in the frontier of space. METHODS: While much has been written about the astronauts and the systems that got them into space and safely home; less attention has been given to NASA employees and its contractors. NASA has always been conscious of the unique nature of its workforce and its importance to the space program. RESULTS: NASA established a comprehensive occupational health program, which began as part of the Agency's Space Medicine function in the early 1960s. Over the years, this program grew in stature and capability. CONCLUSIONS: This paper traces the history and development of NASA's Occupational Health, highlighting the programs and people who focused their energies on ensuring the health and safety of its workforce.