In April, NASA completed the first crewed mission to travel beyond low Earth orbit since 1972. In completing its 10-day lunar flyby mission, Artemis II set a new record for distance traveled by humans (~252,756 miles from Earth) and covered roughly 695,000 miles in space travel.
NASA constantly pushes the boundaries of what humans believe is possible, always seeking new technologies and cutting-edge solutions. But it wasn’t always this way.
Moving Beyond “Failure Is Not An Option”
Have you seen the 1995 movie Apollo 13? It highlights the heroic efforts of mission controllers at NASA to bring astronauts—who were flying on a damaged spacecraft—safely home.
One of the lead Flight Directors, Gene Kranz, famously wrote a book about the experience entitled Failure is Not An Option. While that mindset and focus was critical to saving human lives for the 1970 mission, that same mindset ultimately permeated NASA culture. As a result, NASA was not taking appropriate risks when developing new technologies and systems that did not affect crew safety.
NASA had to create a new recognition program that rewarded a culture of appropriate risk-taking. NASA needed to nurture a culture of innovation, where failure was seen as merely a steppingstone to success.
Leaders began to emphasize to NASA employees, “Whenever you encounter failure, use it as an opportunity for learning. If you are a responsible risk taker and always strive for success, a few bumps in the road will only make you a better innovator.”
Whether a specific innovation involved creating something new, improving existing technologies or processes, or adapting a tried-and-true idea to a new context, NASA encouraged leaders to promote risk-taking.
Recognizing Champions of Innovation
Leaders play a key role in fostering innovation by supporting and encouraging employees to think outside the box. NASA even designed an award to recognize its champions of innovation.
To receive the award, excellence was required in the following:
- Leadership
- Did the leader foster innovation by creating conditions that enable the team to openly contribute to and achieve objectives?
- Did the leader articulate high performance expectations while giving individuals the ability to engage in innovative behaviors?
- Vision
- Did the leader recognize the opportunity to make things better and formulate a new or different path forward?
- Did the leader demonstrate how they gathered information, input and insights from others at every step?
- Did the leader establish challenging project goals and link those to the needs of the organization?
- Relationship Building
- Did the leader persuade others to contribute to an idea or initiative?
- Did the leader overcome objections by using personal credibility and prior positive relationships?
- How did the leader collaboratively interact with his or her staff to support high levels of teamwork and provide opportunities to share innovations?
- Role Modeling
- Was the leader respected and recognized by peers as someone who demonstrates creative and innovative behaviors?
- Were the actions of the leader perceived as creative by others, influencing and challenging them to question, observe, network, and experiment beyond the obvious?
- Did he or she lead by example?
- Did the leader ask questions, question assumptions, and challenge the status quo?
NASA recognized many “Champions of Innovation.” But recognition did not stop there.
The Lean Forward; Fail Smart Award
NASA recognized—like many companies that require innovation to survive and thrive—that failure is necessary to generate new ideas.
NASA needed to recognize the attitudes and processes that encourage failures to be educational, informative, and even transformative. The “Lean Forward; Fail Smart Award” was born.
For the award, NASA used the following criteria:
- Dare to Try
- Did the effort demonstrate risk-taking behavior to achieve ground-breaking innovation?
- Did the team show courage to depart from usual practice to enable new thinking to thrive?
- Perseverance
- Did the team show a determined will to succeed and a “never-give-up” attitude, even after repeated failed attempts?
- Did the team effectively respond to unforeseen circumstances?
- Was the effort a demonstration that failures are often inevitable steppingstones to innovation?
- Learning
- Did the team apply lessons learned after failing to achieve desired results?
- Did the team demonstrate an ability to distinguish between productive and unproductive failures?
- Did the team make decisions about whether to fail or scale, based on pilot and recurrent testing (in other words, did they “fail smart”)?
- Collaboration
- Did the team consistently share its knowledge with others, so mistakes would not be repeated?
- Did the team openly collaborate and network to gain perspectives from individuals with diverse backgrounds through relationship-building, participating in teams, and partnering with others both internal and external to NASA?
One of the first winners of the award was NASA’s Project Morpheus, which was chartered to test advanced spacecraft technologies—including an uncrewed planetary lander designed for future missions to the Moon, asteroids, or Mars. Project Morpheus would allow spacecraft to safely navigate and land on a rocky surface without human intervention.
Project Morpheus was an example of lean engineering development: it used rapid prototyping, accepted higher technical risk, and prioritized fast learning over building super-robust hardware up front. It had a very flat organizational structure, strong collaboration (both in-person and online), and used existing tools to keep things lightweight and efficient.
Project Morpheus accepted that “failure” (or partial failure) is part of testing. The team deliberately planned for test failures rather than treating every test failure as a catastrophe.
In a free-flight test for one of its vehicles, the Morpheus tipped over and crashed shortly after take-off, resulting in a fiery end to the vehicle and a small grass fire in the fields of the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Fortunately, no personnel were injured and only the test hardware was lost. NASA did not treat it as a “mishap” in the worst sense. Following the failure, the team improved the design.
Project Morpheus ultimately successfully completed a series of free-flight tests and demonstrated autonomous hazard detection and precision landing capabilities—all in a relatively low-cost, rapid-development context.
NASA’s Administrator praised Project Morpheus’s approach as a model for “learning fast, failing smart” and risk-aware innovation.
This recognition for Project Morpheus pushed NASA forward by serving as a model for a high-risk, high-learning, lean engineering initiative that didn’t shy away from failure, but used it to accelerate innovation.
The Lean Forward; Fail Smart Award helped NASA move from its “Failure is not an option” mentality toward a culture of innovation.
This is an excerpt from Pyle’s book Building Culture the NASA Way, which was published in April 2026.
