I recently watched NESC Deputy Director Mike Kirsch stand before a roomful of engineers at the Langley Research Center and tell them that with every passing day, NASA breaks a record: the longest stretch without a major accident in the nation's human spaceflight program since the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated during reentry on February 1, 2003. NASA's challenge, he told them, was to make sure the record keeps being broken.

Mike's sobering message set the perfect tone for my presentation of "Principles of Success in Spaceflight," the class I created with Victoria Kohl on the human behavior elements of success and failure in spaceflight projects.

On a sunny February day at Dallas' Frontiers of Flight Museum, a cluster of students lifted telescope equipment out of a bulky briefcase. A sticker on the case read: "stand back—we're going to science!"

Using a compass and a spool of green thread for alignment, the students fastened their telescope on top of a tripod with the sun framed in view.

On April 8, they'll set up the telescope again, this time on a riverbank 140 miles south of Dallas. They'll be capturing images of the total solar eclipse, when the moon will appear to completely block the sun, causing a brief period of darkness called totality.

Their work will contribute to a national research project called the Citizen Continental-America Telescopic Eclipse 2024 experiment, or CATE 2024. Led by the Southwest Research Institute the project will task crews of volunteers with handling 35 telescopes along the U.S. path of totality, with four in North Texas.

Citizen science efforts like this one will take place across the country during the eclipse, and are designed to bring scientific research out of the ivory tower.