NASA Finds Down-to-Earth Savings

NASA generates extremely high volumes of documents. Every maneuver in space, every bolt on every spacecraft has a counter in the form of stacks of drawings, technical descriptions and engineering memoranda. Every such document goes through many iterations and passes through many hands.

Beyond the documents pertaining to NASA's core activity of space exploration, there are countless papers related to running a large and extremely complex organization. These documents include research reports, policy directives, memoranda, vacancy announcements, bulletins, invitations for bids and proposals, news releases, forms, conference minutes, budgets, printed circuit negatives and photographic prints. The Division Manager of Logistics and Technical Information at Pasadena's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, one of NASA's 10 field installations calculates that his installation alone annually generates a stack of documents higher than Mount Everest.