NASA new investigator

Writing Successful Mission Proposals

On June 5, 2019, Dr. Thomas Zurbuchen gave a colloquium entitled “Writing Successful Proposals: Observations from NASA.” The talk detailed the process to develop and submit a mission proposal, and relevant stakeholders along the way. The talk also highlighted characteristics of proposals submitted during the last 20 years to share lessons learned about what makes a proposal successful, common mistakes, and experiences from the point of view from both proposers and the NASA selection official. Copies of the slides are available here, and the video can be viewed here.

The recording is well worth watching!

Major take aways from the presentation include:

• NASA is pushing for a diversity of applicant organizations and PI's
• NASA held a workshop in November 2018 on this topic and created a website: https://science.nasa.gov/researchers/new-pi-resources
• NASA will hold another workshop October 16 - 18, 2019 in Tucson, AZ to support developing a first proposal for PI's (get on the listserve to be notified regarding updates for the workshop: https://lists.hq.nasa.gov/mailman/listinfo/hq-smdpi-workshop-outreach
• Find future solicitations using the "SMD AO Planning List" at https://soma.larc.nasa.gov
• NASA has not figured out the secret sauce for leadership of a proposal/project, but proposal writing is a critical skill for leadership
• ASU has submitted a relatively high number of proposals to the medium-cost AO's (UA has submitted more)
• There are three common reasons for major weaknesses found in costs: cost reserve is too low, basis of estimate is flawed, and the TMC cannot validate the cost estimate