In a new study, Francisco Polidoro Jr., professor of management at Texas McCombs, finds present-day insights in an old innovation story: how NASA developed its space shuttles, which flew from 1981 to 2011. The lessons can inform today's rocketeers and anyone looking for breakthroughs cutting-edge fields, from phones to pharmaceuticals.

Rather than a straightforward sequence, NASA used a meandering knowledge-building process, he finds. That process allowed it to systematically explore rocket features, both individually and together.

“With breakthrough inventions, the number of combinations of possible features quickly explodes, and you just can’t test all of them,” Polidoro says. “It has to be a much more selective search process.”

High up in the earth’s orbit, millions of human-made objects large and small are flying at speeds of over 15,000 miles per hour. The objects, which range from inactive satellites to fragments of equipment resulting from explosions or collisions of previously launched rockets, are space debris, colloquially referred to as space junk. No matter the size, all of them create danger for operational satellites and spacecraft. Cleaning up space junk is technologically challenging and expensive—and there are currently no incentives for countries or private companies to do so. Without binding international regulations or an enforceable "polluter pays” principle with consequences for non-compliance, the circumstances have led to a "cosmic free-for-all." A new study proposes a way to fix this problem.