On episode 302, hear from Johnson Space Center’s Safety and Mission Assurance Director who describes NASA’s safety culture today and how it has evolved over time. This episode was recorded on July 6, 2023.

Transcript

Gary Jordan (Host): Houston, we have a podcast! Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center, Episode 302, “NASA Safety Culture.” I’m Gary Jordan, I’ll be your host today. On this podcast, we bring in the experts, scientists, engineers, astronauts, all to let you know what’s going on in the world of human spaceflight and more. Human spaceflight is hard. That statement shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise, but in the dynamic period that we’re in with more launches, more companies, more missions than ever before in human spaceflight, it may seem routine. But behind every activity, whether it’s a human launch, a spacewalk, a scientific investigation, or even training here at the Johnson Space Center, safety is rooted in all of it as a core value. NASA’s safety culture is not just a culture or an idea, but there is a dedicated directorate here at the Johnson Space Center called Safety and Mission Assurance, with the purpose of embedding carefully crafted safety practices into every aspect of the activities we have here at the space center. From ensuring a successful launch to making sure the communal bikes we have meet safety standards. Joining us on today’s episode to describe this culture and the practices is Willie Lyles, the director of the Johnson Space Center’s Safety and Mission Assurance directorate. With more than 29 years of experience at NASA, Willie describes our culture today and how it has evolved over time. Let’s get into it. Enjoy.

[Music]

Host: Willie Lyles, thank you so much for coming on Houston We Have a Podcast.

Willie Lyles: No problem, Gary. Good to be here with you.

Host: Yeah, yeah. Really great to have you. I want to learn a little bit about just the safety culture we have here. A little bit of what you do in Safety and Mission Assurance. But you’ve been in NASA a long time. You said 1994 was your first day.

Willie Lyles: With NASA, I’ve worked out here, I started working out here in this area in ’90, working with Lockheed [Martin] for a little while before I came over to NASA. So I came over to space station in ’94, so I’ve been here 29 years.

Host: Space station was where you started?

Willie Lyles: I started in space station.

Host: You were there for quite a bit then, right?

Willie Lyles: I was in space station for most of my career. So I’ve been in the directorate now a little over two and a half years. So all of my career before that was space station.

Host: Wow. So you saw, I mean, probably ’94, was it International Space Station at that time? Or…

Willie Lyles: Yeah. It had just kicked off. It was International Space Station. We’d gone past the Alpha stage, right?

Host: OK.

Willie Lyles: It was International Space Station. And I hired on in Test and Verification when I first started and did that for a couple years. And I became an element manager, and I had the P6 element, if you remember, in the building of station, it was a 4A mission. And I, so I was the element manager for that element and development through all the way through all the assembly process and launching it and putting on orbit and activating. So that was like my second job after T&V. So it was pretty interesting. Good times. Really busy times.

Host: Well, you worked your way up. When I met you, Willie, you were in the space station side and kind of the safety person, right?

Willie Lyles: Yeah. I was the safety manager. And they call it a CAM, right? Cost Account Manager.

Host: CAM, OK.

Willie Lyles: Under the program manager, which is more like a division chief. So I was over the safety division for the ISS program when I met you.

Host: And so, what was that role? What exactly were you responsible for within the program?

Willie Lyles: So I worked directly for the program manager. At the time, when I first started was Mike Suffredini when I was doing that role. And then Kirk Shireman took over later. So I was his safety rep basically. So everything safety-related for space station, I was the Cost Account Manager. I was the division chief. I had three divisions set up beneath me that worked in safety quality assurance. And also, we worked a lot with the international partners on looking at the different vehicles that were flying. And later, we started working with Commercial Crew and all those vehicles that were flying also.

So we were responsible for the safety of the entire station, mainly protecting the crew. It’s always crew first. And then following that, we made sure we protected the assets, right, for the International Space Station. And in doing that, we worked really closely with all the international partners. So whether they had elements on space station or they were flying to space station, bringing different assets that they needed to supply for us, we would also work closely with them, ATV (Automated Transfer Vehicle), HTV (H-II Transfer Vehicle). So we’re closer with ESA (European Space Agency). And JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) worked with Canadian Space Agency and also with the Russians, of course. So we did all the safety, we had the safety panels set up, so any safety related activities that were going on that interface with station, where it’s going to be on the system side or if it’s on the payload side, it all came through our safety review panels.

Host: OK.

Willie Lyles: And outside of that, we also did the quality assurance for all the different pieces of hardware and all the work that was done within ISS also.

Host: How did you get, because you started, you said you started in testing and verification, you were working on different elements. You, it sounds like you had more of an engineering kind of role. How’d that sort of, how’d you weave through the…

Willie Lyles: Yeah. I could tell you a little bit about how I started. I mean, I’m a local Houstonian, first of all, right?

Host: Oh, OK.

Willie Lyles: So I, I grew up right here in Houston and I attended Rice University have a double E degree (Electrical Engineering) from Rice University.

Host: All right.

Willie Lyles: And a physics degree from Texas Southern University. So I’m a local guy, grew up here. I didn’t start working with Shell, I mean, with NASA originally, I went to work for Shell Oil Company when I came from school.

Host: Oh, before Lockheed?

Willie Lyles: Before Lockheed.

Host: OK.

Willie Lyles: So, well, I actually, while I was in school about three summers, I worked with Shell. And then when I graduated, I went to work for Shell full-time.

Host: OK.

Willie Lyles: So I worked with them in geophysics for about five years. And then I went to work for Lockheed, just saw how the industry was and I didn’t want to get labeled an oil guy, so I wanted a little bit more diversity in my background. And, you know, after about five years, your degree is not as worthy in some respects. So..

Host: It’s a lot about that experience.

Willie Lyles: It’s all about what you’ve done.

Host: Right? Yeah.

Willie Lyles: So I want to at least get, not be labeled just an oil guy. So I come to work out here for Lockheed and worked in hardware development for them. Also, space station, supporting space station, building hardware for diagnostic equipment for space station at the time.

Host: OK.

Willie Lyles: And I did that for about four and a half years. And then I came over to NASA in ’94. when they were hiring.

Host: OK. How did, as you were working your way through the space station program at NASA, right, you talked about this diversity of your experiences. You have engineering backgrounds, you have that testing and verification that you mentioned; you have other things. Where did, how did it, how did your career kind of nat — was it naturally navigating towards the safety aspect of things?

Willie Lyles: Not originally. I mean, I’m not, you know– I know a lot of guys that I work with, like my deputy, he grew up in safety, right? He’s been a safety guy his whole career and several people have. But I think that’s what makes it great that you have people with varied backgrounds. With me, I started out, like I told you in Test and Verification in the beginning. And then I worked more into SE&I (Systems Engineering and Integration) Systems Integration, Engineering and Integration area. And then grew from there, working the Element Integration, building the elements, getting everything ready to fly all the way through the design cycles and through testing and on orbit activation. And I also worked a lot with international partners looking at their vehicles and helping them put together test programs, when they were getting ready to fly and come to station. And then from there, I went to work over in Avionics and Software as a deputy division chief, and got more into the software side of things and avionics side. I worked with these guys before, but not as in depth, right? You get to see things from a different vantage point when you’re inside that team or on that team. So I did that for about three and a half years. And then, Mike and Kirk asked me if I was interested in going to head up to safety group at that time. So they approached me about it. And I had worked with safety quite a bit, but I hadn’t worked internally within the group before. Same thing. I mean, you’re still an engineer, whether you are working on the engineering side here or FOD (Flight Operations Directorate) or safety or Human Health and Performance, you’re still an engineer, right? And you just look at things from a slightly different perspective. So I worked closely with safety and a lot of the hardware development aspects of it, and I knew a lot of the teams that were working the safety review panels and also looking the quality reviews that they were holding. So it was a great opportunity for me. So when they offered me the opportunity to come over and work for them, I definitely wanted to gravitate toward that and do it.

Host: Yeah.

Willie Lyles: So it was a great time for me to do that.

Host: I kind, you might be the perfect person to talk about this then, is like, because you mentioned your deputy, Nathan [Vassberg], right? Is a safety guy.

Willie Lyles: Yeah.

Host: So he kind of grew up like that. But you have this perspective of the engineering side, safety side, but you’re talking about how they’re sort of related. From your perspective, when you look at engineering, you look at safety, where are those parallels?

Willie Lyles: Well, if you look at it, a lot of people look at the engineering side and they’ll say, “hey, these guys are the systems experts,” right? If somebody’s working in EP (Organization code for Power and Propusion), for example, on the power side, then they’re looking at those guys as being the power expert for those given systems. Same thing that you’re looking at for comm[unication] systems. Same thing you’re looking at for ECLS (Environmental Control and Life Support), different things like that. On the safety side, we also have subject matter experts that actually specialize. We look broad range across board, and we have them look at the safety engineering from a broader perspective. But we also have VSEs, the Vehicle Safety Engineers that look at more of a systems vantage point, right? So they’re right there in line, but they’ll look at failure tolerance. They’ll look at, you know, the guys that work quality, looking from a quality vantage point. Is everything being done according to procedure and process? Do we need to do more in depth, you know, if we’re looking at drawings and how those, how we’re building hardware according to drawings, are they built according to plan? Do we need to go back and do more? We have government mandatory inspection points, right? And that’s the old way we did with the contractor work. And it was all more oversight. And now, we have more inline work that we do with them also when we look at the work that’s going on, and we may do an audit and we may do surveillance instead of being there actually taking different government inspection points all through and say, we need to check and be there with you through each of these exercises. So now it may be more, hey, we’ve laid out the process. You’ve got the procedures; you’re doing the work. We’re going to check in from time to time and we’ll involve with you throughout this whole process. So now we can do surveys on you, and we can also surveillance on you. And we can also do audits at certain times and see how things are working.

Host: OK.

Willie Lyles: So, you work hand in hand a lot with the engineering guys and they depend on us to make sure of the product assurance side of it too.

Host: OK. That’s really, yeah. I think that’s an important thing is it’s not; it’s not engineering then safety.

Willie Lyles: No.

Host: It sounds like you’re married throughout the whole thing.

Willie Lyles: We’re married throughout the whole process.

Host: OK.

Willie Lyles: And that’s one of the things that have, I think have gotten better over the years is that we saw a need that we get involved earlier in the processes because, you know, if you look back, especially, we talk about some of the tragedies that have happened here, right?

Host: Yeah.

Willie Lyles: If you look at, even going back to Apollo 1, then you had the shuttle flights, Challenger and Columbia, and things have progressed throughout that time. One of the things that we looked at back, you know, with Columbia and post-Columbia, is that we need to make sure that we get involved earlier in the processes and that we stay attached at the hip, as you say, all the way through that process.

Host: OK. That was, that’s an important thing to bring up, is I think, those tragedies that you mentioned sort of, I think define in a sense, a lot of what we do. Those investigations were so detailed and now the practices that we have in place are really meant to avoid something like that in the future, right? You, sort of, you were here at NASA, I don’t know what role you were in, was…

Willie Lyles: When Challenger happened?

Host: When– I was going to say Columbia…

Willie Lyles: Oh, Columbia.

Host:…because you were, were here at NASA…

Willie Lyles: I wasn’t here yet, but when Columbia happened, I was here.

Host: Right. Right. Yeah. So I, yeah, you must’ve seen the before and after of particularly the safety processes, right? And how those evolved.

Willie Lyles: Right. I mean, I think that the biggest thing, I mean, and you’re probably aware of, I mean, that we looked at an Independent Tech Authority that was formulated post-Columbia. And before that, that didn’t really exist. So now you had, you asked me about my previous job. So, as a safety manager, I would be responsible for making sure everything’s done from a safety vantage point, a quality assurance vantage point, reliability vantage point within that program. But now we had a separate technical authority that did not report directly to the program that actually worked with OSMA, you know, Office of Safety and Mission Assurance at Headquarters. And also, responsible for answering for the chief there and also for the center director here. So you’d have an Independent Tech Authority. And that was on the safety side, on the engineering side, Human Health and Performance side. And we look at FOD as almost another tech authority. It was separate. But here at Johnson Space Center, it’s important to us, right? So that we look at them as another part of that tech authority, the foursome that we have here.

Host: How would you define tech authority? How does that relate to programs and what- how do you define…

Willie Lyles: It’s independent. It’s definitely independent. I mean, I think that it’s just not funded by the program. It’s actually funded separate, because even if the program’s funded it, I think that the intent would still be the same. And I think you would still get the same results. But it brings about a different perception. So I think if you look at the governance model that was set up, you know, post-Columbia, then they called for to have a separate Independent Tech Authority that would go in and really look at more. When we have our reviews, we have, on the safety side, we have SMSRs (Safety and Mission Success Review), we call them. But you also have view, reviews throughout in engineering and other areas that really work toward getting ready for certification of flight readiness. So when you’re doing that, you’re going to come up through the programs and they’re going to report out on where they are to get ready to fly. But you also have this Independent Tech Authority now that’s looking at the risk involved. And they’re doing their own risk assessment, looking at the highly, more high-rated risk that may be involved. And they’ll have an assessment on their own that’s independent from the program.

Host: Oh. The program’s not…

Willie Lyles: They’re working hand in hand with the program. So, don’t get me wrong. I mean the chief safety officers on the safety side work pretty closely with the safety managers and the team there. And they both have access to the same resources back in the directorate. So they can call on any of those resources and work closely with them. And they work hand in hand throughout the process. So it’s not that they come on at the end of the game and now they make an assessment all the way, they’re working throughout that whole life cycle. In the development process and all the way through operations.

Host: Is another way to sort of describe what you’re talking about with Independent Tech Authority, the way, when you say that is another way to describe it. Your mission directorate is just now you’re your own organization where there’s the Office of Safety and Mission Assurance, and then there’s the office of the International Space Station program. Is that another way to describe it?

Willie Lyles: In one light. In a sense though, with the director ourselves. So we support the programs, right?

Host: OK.

Willie Lyles: Everyone, my directorate, I have almost 200 civil servants, and overall, about 500 when you count the contractors in place too, with the prime contract. And we’re a matrix organization that support all the programs. So if you look at all the safety engineers, the VSEs (Vehicle Safety Engineers), the quality assurance guys, the guys that assess risk, do PRAs (Probabilistic Risk Analysis), those guys all work in their matrix support for the various programs around the site that we support here at the center.

Host: That’s important. You are a part of almost everything.

Willie Lyles: Every, every single program. Yeah. If somebody asks me what my primary role is, I’ll tell you it is to protect the crew and to protect all the individuals that work here at the institution. At Johnson Space Center.

Host: And I think, yeah. And that’s really, to draw those lines. I mean, protect the crew, you’re talking about in space. I mean, are you managing…

Willie Lyles: And through our development on the ground, when they’re doing training as they work, we work closely with FOD and Human Health and Performance and engineering throughout. So as they’re going through their trainings, they’re getting ready to fly. We still value, we still look at that as a important role for us to do as far as protecting the crew.

Host: Now, in terms of the, like, how you actually perform the work, how you actually do the safety, what does that look like? You talked about a safety review board. You talked about being embedded into the development of certain programs and having these checks along the way. What does the actual process of safety look like?

Willie Lyles: Yeah. If you look at the top level and you say, what is the role of our directorate? We’re responsible for the safety, reliability, quality assurance. And we also work closely looking at risk assessments throughout any, and we work closely with all the programs that are here at Johnson Space Center, or that are a part of maybe the enterprise efforts that are being done for Artemis also. So every single program that’s here, whether you’re talking Orion, ISS, Commercial Crew, even though we share that with KSC (Kennedy Space Center), and you look at the new programs that are starting up. EHP (EVA and Human Systems Mobility Program) and you look at Commercial LEO (low-earth orbit) development program. All those guys, they’ll have a very small safety or safety organization within their program. Maybe three to seven people. Then all the rest of their support comes from our directorate.

Host: Ah.

Willie Lyles: So, we work really closely with them. I’ve, you know, when I was on the ISS side, I was on the other side of it, right? I worked pretty closely with Scott [Seyl], now, who was my deputy at the time. But now he has the role that I had in the past. He’s the safety director of ISS. So we work closely with all the safety directors. We worked closely with the program managers and those organizations, and we help get the resources they need and the workforce that they need within our directorate. And that can be an area of safety. And that could be a safety engineer, it could be a VSE, it could be a, someone working in areas of quality or reliability. It could be someone developing PRAs, you know, risk assessments for them. And all of those people support each of those programs. Like I said, Orion, Commercial Crew, ISS, Commercial LEO, EHP. Those that are headed here. We also support HLS (Human Landing Systems) that’s headed out of Marshall.

Host: Oh yeah.

Willie Lyles: So we have some individuals that actually, some workforce that supports those efforts there also.

Host: So then how do you define– you’re talking about quality assurance, you’re making risk assessments. Is your directorate actually defining like those parameters to say this is a certain level of risk, and this is safe or not safe?

Willie Lyles: We work closely with the programs. And with engineering, right? I mean, I think it’s a– if you look at it in some instances, we do our own risk assessments. We look at, you know, you’ve seen the five-by-five matrices maybe that people look at. And that’s another thing that developed more after the accident.

Host: OK.

Willie Lyles: Right? The PRAs that people did was a probabilistic analysis. Those are much more detailed now. And they use them all the way through the design cycle to help them figure out if they need any changes to the design as they’re building the equipment, the hardware, and the systems.

Host: OK.

Willie Lyles: So we work closely with them in that light also. You talked about the safety review panels, the panel itself, usually within the program… Well, it’s a mixed bag, because some of the programs have their own safety panel chair, like ISS. They have several chairs within their program. But then when you look at some of the other programs like Gateway and some of the newer programs, they rely on us to have that safety review panel chair supplied for them also. And then we have what we call executive officers. Those are more like the deputies, but these are the guys that are very versed in all the rules and regulations say, right? All the requirements.

Host: OK.

Willie Lyles: So they’re really proficient in the requirements and they make sure that there’s different hardware’s coming through, if it’s a system or if it’s a payload, that they meet all the requirements that have been levied on them.

Host: OK.

Willie Lyles: And if they don’t, then they talk about why is it OK. And that’s– so one thing I’d like to mention here, I mean, I think that the panels have really changed a lot in the last few years too, because I guess, I would say formally the panels looked at, and some of the people in safety will look at more of a policing function, and they would tell you, “no, you can’t do it. And this is why you can’t.” And I’ll tell you now, we’ve really been nurturing the last few years as a “yes, if” mentality. And that’s more, “yeah. Yes, you can do it, if these things are done.” There’s alternate ways to do things. We’ll look at alternate standards that are being done. It doesn’t have to necessarily fit this requirement, but it meets the intent of this requirement. And we’re working with a lot of companies and being able to do that as we go forward.

Host: OK. So, yeah, if you’re thinking about that, I want to kind of focus on that culture, right, because that is, I think, that’s an important thing. You don’t want to be safety as the police. You don’t want to have them being– you kind of want to have this shared, trusted relationship.

Willie Lyles: Right.

Host: So how do you build that? How do you maintain that?

Willie Lyles: I think it’s happened over time. I think if we talk about some of the tragedies that have happened, you look at Challenger, you look at Columbia, when they first happen, there’s a lot of emphasis put on that we need to be focused on safety, right? We need to get together. So you get a lot of people focused on, even outside of safety. But as time goes on, things dwindle a little bit and you can lose some of that. So I think that’s when it’s important to make sure you do certain things to keep reminding people of how important it is, so you don’t have the next tragedy, right? And then one of the, a few ways to do that, I mean, we talked about risk-based approach. So working hand-in-hand with the programs and with engineering and with the other tech corps and really going through and assessing your risk. And it’s not that we’re going to all come up and assess it exactly the same, right? We may have our own vantage point, but we have meetings, we have discussions. So we have a lot of correspondence with each other, whether we’re here doing it face-to-face, which is always best. But even we involve our international partners, if it’s something that involves them. We involve other companies if it involves them. You know, like a Boeing or SpaceX or someone that’s working Commercial Crew. So I think it’s important that you make sure you have the right people involved and that you meet early and often. I’ll put it that way. I think the key thing is that you don’t wait until things are so far along in design process that it’s almost too late to do anything. You need to talk early and often, and you need to make sure that you have all the right people involved and the collaboration’s support, all the way throughout. I think that we talked about the better interaction with engineering, and we’re attached at the hip, as you say. And also, for operations, we’re attached at the hip with FOD. So we work very closely with those guys as we’re going through operations and looking at safety risks there also.

Host: When you’re looking at risks, you talk about perspectives. And so, you know, if I’m thinking about an engineering approach, there’s got to be some level of actually defining risk and measuring it, giving numbers to probabilities of risk. Is it, you know, is there that defined characteristics and where does that fluctuation go? Where does that perception on, is this risky or not?

Willie Lyles: Well, you can measure qualitatively and quantitatively, right?

Host: That what I’m getting at. Yeah.

Willie Lyles: And we talk about it. The quantitative risk we talked about is the PRA, the Probabilistic Risk Analysis.

Host: OK.

Willie Lyles: So you actually go through and you look at, if you’re getting ready to do a particular event or you have a particular piece of hardware in a particular situation, you look and see, has this been done before? So you can kind of look at what is the likelihood of these things happening, right? And you look at what is the consequence. So those things are high consequences. You want to make sure that likelihood is very low. So you can go measure those qualitatively also, because we can do the five-by-five that we talked about. And you basically can look at that based on, you know, what situation you’re in at that time. We look at also time and effect, if we’re talking about operations. So we’ll put all those things in a measure. And some of its intuitive and some of its engineering judgment, but it’s, some of it’s also based on experience based. So you look at lessons learned, have we had something similar? This happened before. If it’s not exactly the same, here’s something that we think kind of fits into the same category. Or we can at least leverage off of what we learned here. And now we can extend that a little further and then we can at least get a good feel about how this might be approached. So we use all of those tools and those tools develop over the lifecycle too. If I do a PRA early in the lifecycle, I don’t know as much about the design. It’s in the earliest stages. So I’m going to put some thoughts in there of what I think this might be, right? From what I know today. And then we can look at engineering judgment for some of the other things we think will happen. As we gain more insight, and we get further along in development cycle and get more information. Now we feed that data back into the models and then we get better insight and better, more knowledgeable about what we’re dealing with.

Host: So, this is critical for when you mentioned in the very beginning on these new programs, EHP, Commercial low-Earth orbit development, these are relatively new programs that have been formed in the last couple of years.

Willie Lyles: Right.

Host: There was this huge opportunity for Safety and Mission Assurance to be embedded right from the start.

Willie Lyles: Oh no, definitely. Definitely.

Host: And that’s been probably hugely beneficial to you guys, right?

Willie Lyles: No, it is, for sure. And then we have experience with people that have worked station, for example. And then some of those same people, they’re looking for some different things to do. They get involved with Commercial LEO development, because what we’re talking about is the next space station.

Host: Right.

Willie Lyles: So now we have the expertise that have worked in these particular areas before. So now, we can share those and move into other programs and share that knowledge there.

Host: So it probably gives you a significant amount of confidence, maybe more so than things where you talked about where you weren’t in the…

Willie Lyles: No, definitely.

Host: Yeah. Very cool.

Willie Lyles: Definitely. From the experience base of the employees and also from the knowledge of just working similar systems, right, because the more you work systems that are similar to those you had done before and utilizing, got to utilize the lessons learned, because sometimes people don’t do that enough. And then that’s key, right? We don’t need to recreate the wheel.

Host: Let’s focus on that, that reminders, because one of the things you mentioned is this idea of, I think, we talked about it ahead of recording, is this idea of battling complacency, right? You sort of get into this routine– what seems like a routine pattern of launch after launch. I mean, right now, we’re recording this ahead of Crew-7 launch, you know? So, the idea that there’s crew on board, ah, this is sort of routine. No. The idea is, you got to still have that safety in mind. You can’t get complacent. You got to remind folks of the risks.

Willie Lyles: No, you do. I mean, success breeds complacency.

Host: Yep.

Willie Lyles: Over time, right? I mean, that’s the key thing. So, you got to make sure you stay vigilant. You got to make sure that everybody’s still doing the work that they need to do to look at the details involved. As you look at every flight, and like, you’re right. I mean, we look at a Crew-7 flight, we can get into the mode of thinking, OK, SpaceX has done this many times. We work with those guys. Everything’s in good shape. We don’t have to check things as in depth as we normally would have. But we don’t do that. We make sure that we stay vigilant. We make sure that we look at all the details, never looking at any little change. But also, if something doesn’t change to make sure that everything was still done the product assurance side of it’s important to make sure that they’ve gone through and put the quality assurance in place that they need, right? Another thing is just reminding people on a, I’ll say daily basis, but throughout the year about how important it is to just continue to work closely, hand-in-hand. And also, to pay a particular emphasis on safety. Because if you, people may get tired of hearing it, but at least it’s stuck here a little bit, right?

Host: Yeah.

Willie Lyles: It’s in the brain. And we do things throughout the year, like at the beginning of every year we do the “Back in the Saddle” event, and that’s when people are coming back from Christmas vacation, New Year’s, you know, just getting people back into the mode of getting back into a work mode. But it gets you into the mode of also being aware of things coming back here on site, and being careful, but also get your back in the same mindset you need to be, before you left for the holidays. You had a break, which is much needed. But you’re coming back, so now you got to get focused again.

Host: Right.

Willie Lyles: So we do some of those events throughout the year, starting out “Back in the Saddle.” We have a safety day usually in November timeframe. And we put special emphasis on, you know, safety and how you need to stay vigilant and look into all the things that your organization needs. And you also got to look at the people. You always have to look after the people, no matter what you do. They come first.

Host: So these are sort of the tactics that you have to ensure that we have this safety culture always in the background. These special events, you have, you’re working with all the different programs. You’re embedded. You mentioned, even just as simple as a face-to-face meeting, just making sure you’re looking someone in the eye and reminding them and developing those relationships.

Willie Lyles: Yeah.

Host: To make, because I think that may be one of, I don’t know if it’s a challenge, because it seems like we’ve been doing a pretty good job at it, but I think it’s because everything you and your group have been instituting to have this constant reminder that this safety culture is truly embedded here at NASA.

Willie Lyles: It is. And it’s, and you maybe hit it, it’s also more difficult because when COVID hit, right? It kind of separated people.

Host: Oh. Yeah.

Willie Lyles: But it’s been a challenge getting everybody back into a new norm and getting back at work. We had an “All Hands” here a couple of weeks ago, and we have those in our group at least twice a year, right, because it’s just reminded that, first of all, let the guys know how much we appreciate all the effort they’re putting in and all the work they do.

Host: Yeah.

Willie Lyles: You always got to do that. And let be thankful for that, and just show them that you are seeing what they’re doing, right? And how important it’s to all of us. And then also to remind people that we got to stay vigilant, like you said, and we got to continue to work together closely. We do a lot of meetings also with, across with engineering and FOD, we meet every week. We have a technical meeting with all of us to talk about any kind of things that we think might affect the other orgs. So it’s always good to stay in touch with all these guys that you work with on a constant basis. I have a weekly meeting with the other safety directors at the other centers on the human spaceflight side. So the five of us get together and we talk about things that are happening at our center on our missions and how those interact with the roles that they have and the missions they have coming up. So it’s back to collaboration and communication, right? And that’s the key thing to just continue to talk often and make sure you talk the details that you need to.

Host: Have you seen sort of an evolution in your time? I mean, going back, even like your, I don’t know if the safety role in ISS was an introduction to safety or so, but have you seen an evolution just in the past couple of years on the culture and the collaboration and the how integrated everything has been? Have you seen, sort of progress in the right direction?

Willie Lyles: Oh yeah. No, definitely. I mean, I’ve seen it. The culture itself, I mean, I think that we’ve migrated, as I mentioned before, about a more risk-based approach, right? And we know that that’s all of our role. It’s not just safety, but safety’s there to help lead that and help work with everybody along the way, within the programs, within engineering. So I’ve seen a big growth in just more collaboration throughout the last few years. Also, I think that it’s a, you know, it’s a better understanding that we need to characterize this risk, but we also need to have the detailed conversation along the way. And also, a big emphasis we’re putting on is for people not to– we don’t want organizational silence. That was another big thing that OSMA (Office of Safety and Mission Assurance) rolled out a couple of years ago, right? And I think that was good because it made people aware that this could be happening, even though you may not realize it within your organizations.

Host: “Speak up” is the idea.

Willie Lyles: You got to speak up. And that’s important. I mean, the thing is, where I think we’ve grown also over the last few years is the diversity that I see around the center, right? And it’s been a big effort on DE&I (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion). And where you see it manifest itself is because you see people, as you mentioned earlier, my background’s different from my deputies. You see people from all different walks of life, have different backgrounds, right? No matter where it comes from. Different culture, different ideas, different thoughts. So it’s diversity and all of that. And when you bring all the people together and give them a chance to sit at the table and speak, that’s important. But you got to let them speak. And you got to sometimes help pull that voice out a little bit, right, because whenever you have changes like that, some people may not speak up enough, but you can, that’s why I like face to face. If I’m looking at you across the table, but you’re not quite speaking up, and I can look at and say, “Gary, hey, what’s on your mind?” Or if I see you fidgeting around a little bit and moving, you’re not quite comfortable, I can say, “hey, what are you thinking about? Tell me your ideas.” And I think it’s important for all of us to do that. Whether we’re in some type of board or panel, we have to look to every individual on the team and reach them and make sure that their voice is being heard.

Host: Do you think that’s an important characteristic of a successful safety representative? Someone who can read people, who can bring out those voices, who can bring out those…

Willie Lyles: Well, I think all around definitely for safety…

Host: All around.

Willie Lyles: Definitely for safety. But I think that’s great for program manager. I think it’s great for, you know, anyone in engineering or Human Health and Performance, FOD, I think that is just an important trait, an important thing for you to be able to pull on, because we don’t want to go along and have another tragedy like Columbia because somebody didn’t speak up.

Host:Right.

Willie Lyles: Right? And we put special emphasis also to make sure if anybody has any kind of, differing opinion along the wind, especially if it elevates to a formal descent, then we make sure it’s heard. And that’s one of the things we try to strive to do in safety is always remind the program guys and remind everybody, hey, got to listen to everybody. If somebody’s voicing this concern, it’s kind of growing and we hear about it, then we need to make sure that person’s being heard. And we have formal channels for that too, right? If somebody figures they’re not being heard within a different organization, whether the program or directorate, then they can come through, like we said on that, in that individual, that technical side. They can come back up through that in Independent Technical Authority, they can come up from there and their voice can be heard through that also.

Host:Yeah. I noticed that, that’s actually one thing I appreciate about NASA is there can be some intimidation factor, right? There’s a lot of smart people, you can have personalities and stuff, but sounds like a good manager is one who welcomes ideas, one who listens, one who can, you know– and if you can create a culture that allows people to speak up without necessarily pushing people down or trying to silence them, it’s a tough thing to combat, because you think about like early spaceflight histories. I watch all those movies, right? You had some personalities, right?

Willie Lyles:You did.

Host: Yeah.

Willie Lyles: And you still have some.

Host: Yeah. You still have some. [Laughter]

Willie Lyles: Not, probably not as many, but you still have some.

Host: Yeah. Yeah. But you have to combat that. There’s a lot of, I think, maybe natural forces that maybe you have to push against a little more. As with the safety idea, you have these, you know– we hear about schedule pressure trying to launch on time, trying to do these things. You hear about budget, right? Trying to stay within budget. And a lot of times have these, these safety can cause delays, they can increase budgets, they can slip launches, things like that. How do you build a culture that emphasizes more of the safety side and how do you weigh that, right? You still don’t want to go massively over budget, and you don’t want to slip a launch by years. But how do you weigh that?

Willie Lyles: Well, I think the key thing that we have to realize, that you’re never going to fly completely safe, right? And you’re never going to fly completely risk-free. You’re always going to have some risk involved. So what we try to do is buy down the risk as much as we can. And the key thing is that I think if you’re working this all throughout the process, through the whole development cycle, through DDT&E (Design, Development, Test, and Evaluation) and all the way through the op cycle and having this conversation, just having the communication along the way. And again, at every board you meet, in every panel, I think you have to always offer up to see if anyone has a differing opinion. And I’ve seen a lot of that done. I’ve worked on the program side, and I’ve worked now on the directorate side. And, definitely, I know most of the program managers, and they do that well. They, we keep emphasizing it with them. And they do that well. They look for different altering opinions as we talked about. And if something gets strong enough that it seems to be where they’re really wanting to take it to another level and say, “hey, this just can’t fly,” we’re not going to fly. We’ve had a couple things happen in the last few years where, especially last year, where certain things didn’t happen. Boeing made a decision not long ago not to fly the CFT (crew flight test) flight. And we were all right there with them. And it was great that Boeing came through and said that before the tech authorities all kind of came through and said, “hey, this can’t happen. We’re not ready to fly.” So I, I think the culture’s really changed a lot. I think with the collaboration, I think with the new partnerships we’ve found, we’ve really done a good job of communicating. That’s not to say, we won’t have differing opinions. That’s not to say, we won’t have long drawn-out discussions about our own opinions on it. But we at least discuss those. And end of the day, we know that everybody has a chance to bring that forward if they still don’t agree in the end.

Host: Right.

Willie Lyles: And I think that’s the biggest thing I’ve seen change in the culture, especially with this Independent Tech Authority.

Host: Yeah.

Willie Lyles: Because that route’s always there. The formal dissent route’s always there. You know, where’s the lowest level at a working group, or panel, or board coming all the way back up through the program boards and all the way up through Vanessa [Wyche], if that’s needed. So I think that what we’ve seen over the last few years is really just a really good collaboration and understanding on how we need to assess the risk, assess the risk properly, use the tools that we have, use the lessons learned that we have, and pull all those things together. And then, we’re able to make better assessments on the risk. And I think we have better conversations about it.

Host: As we welcome more players into the space, right? We’re working with more and more commercial companies.

Willie Lyles: Private partnerships. Right?

Host: Private partnerships. I mean, you worked closely with, you mentioned in the ISS there was the international component, right? So there’s established relationships there. And I’m sure those matured over time. But we have all these companies coming in. How do we get them on board and how do we get them to understand some of these safety things? Is it a constantly evolving process?

Willie Lyles:It is. I mean, it’s constantly evolving, right? And I think that one thing about a lot of these companies that are starting up now, they’re been in maybe lower partnerships with us that’s grown or the ones that are coming on board now, as much as we can communicate with them and infuse ourselves as being a part of helping them be successful, because they’re looking to be successful. And I think they still value NASA to help them to get on the right path and to help lead them in the right direction and help them grow. Right now, I think our, you know, some people started thinking about maybe our worth goes down a little more when you have the SpaceX’s and everybody being successful. But I don’t think that’s the case at all. I think SpaceX will tell you and all of us, because we have this collaboration, how we work together to be successful. So I think a lot of other companies see that and they understand that they need NASA involved with them and especially on the safety side, right?

I mean, if you’re looking at everything else, you may take some risk as far as maybe not getting something out of the mission that you wanted from a mission success vantage point. But you’re not going to be willing to take that risk on from safety, especially if it’s involving crew, whether it’s our crew, whether it’s their crew, or however you work that. And a lot of people are not going to take that risk on a lot of their assets either. I mean, billions of dollars of assets can be lost too. So, they value safety. I haven’t seen, we’ve worked with several of the newer companies. We’ve been, talked with them about different partnerships and how they go forward. And even at some point, we’ve been able to give a delegation of authority to some of the international partners on the ISS, where they would actually run their own safety reviews. They’d have their own panel and work that through time. But as you said earlier, that develops over time. It started very low-level, working some payloads and then it worked all the way up through their systems, within their modules on the space station where they would have their own panels for certain things. The integrated panels, we still ran with them. But the same thing will happen over time with these partners. I think that we’ll be asked to delegate authority to them more and more and they’ll work independently, but I think, it’ll be a gradual process as they pick up more and more. And they learn to do that. And that’s the key thing I think, if we’re there with them hand in hand, helping them be successful key.

Host: I see that a lots. The thing that came to mind when we were talking about this was the recent award for commercial collaborations two, with all these private companies, seven companies awarded. And, but, it’s an unfunded Space Act Agreement, but the idea is we are collaborating.

Willie Lyles: Right.

Host: Right. And I think safety is going to be a huge part of that. Those milestones and measuring and as you’re saying, these companies kind of learning from NASA expertise on how to have that Safety and Mission Assurance.

Willie Lyles: Well, we gave, we just gave one on not long ago, it’s called the Orion Quality Excellence Program that our Orion guys and Safety started up. And basically, a lot of, some of the companies started with Lockheed, who’s the prime contractor there, but some of their subs have actually been granted the permission to go ahead and have their own quality reviews, and work through, and we do surveillance on them, and then we’ll audit what they do. And they’ve, I think, we’ve granted three of those awards right now until Lockheed and two of the subs that are working, that’s doing their own quality inspections and doing their own quality work. And we just look at it, you know, do surveillance on it, and do the audits and make sure everything’s done according to what we agreed to.

Host: Yeah.

Willie Lyles: Because we agreed to the plans upfront with them. If they’re performing according to the plans we’ve given them, then they continue to do that. If that doesn’t happen, we can pull those awards back. But so far, it’s not even thought about those three that we’ve done so far.

Host: I’m equating it in my mind to like raising a kid, right? Like you, you’re holding their hand for a while…

Willie Lyles: Giving them responsibility.

Host:…and then, yeah, giving them more responsibility. You still have that oversight, right?

Willie Wyles: Right.

Host: But it’s less involved than maybe when…

Willie Lyles: Right. And the more you see them doing the things you’ve worked with them to be able to do and talk them to do, then the less oversight you need with that, right? You’re in line with them, so you guys are on the same, playing the same path as far as how you’re thinking about that. Then you can let them do more and more, so they get more authority, and more responsibility goes along with that. As long as they’re performing that level.

Host: Alright. What’s been, I think one, maybe some of the highlights of your time as the director of SMA, ever since you took on this role and started working with, you said 200 civil service, 500 contractors, that it’s a lot of people, it’s a big responsibility.

Willie Lyles: Yeah. No, it’s great. I mean, I think, so my world was Station, as you mentioned earlier, my world was Station for a lot of years. I mean, I worked in different offices within Station.

Host: Yeah.

Willie Lyles: You know, so in the vehicle office, I was there for about 15 years, you know, different jobs, different roles from T&V to SE&I to Element Integration to help work, you know, helping the partners get going with their, with the ATV and HTV as they were getting those ready to fly the station.

Host: Yep.

Willie Lyles: So, I worked in a lot of different areas. Station was big, right? And especially, vehicle office had a lot of pull in different directions, but I left there and went avionics and software, and then I worked in safety. So those were great times. But when I came here, I think the difference is now, it’s so many programs.

Host: Yeah. [Laughter]

Willie Lyles: And it’s a great time to come. I put it that way too, because it’s not just, I mean, you know, not only ISS, which I say I grew up in basically, and I’m still really fond of it and attached, but all these new programs, right?

Host: Yeah.

Willie Lyles: I mean, when you start talk– and new to me, some of them were new to me that were here. So I got more heavily involved with Orion, and looking and getting ready for the Artemis flight and working the enterprise level when they were getting ready to fly, but also, looking at Commercial Crew from a little bit different vantage point. I worked fairly closely with them in station, but looking from a station vantage point.

Host: OK.

Willie Lyles: And now, I get to see that from a different view also and working closely with KSC, but then looking at Commercial LEO development, looking at EHP, looking at, you know, the work that’s been done with Gateway and how things have evolved there and how they’re evolving. Also working with our team that’s supporting HLS, right? We’re supporting VIPER (Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover) program from Ames [Research Center]. So we have guys that are working, supporting almost every single program or project in this agency. So just the, the vastness of that, I mean, it’s impressive and just to be able to get to do that every single day, I couldn’t ask for a better job. And with safety, you know, we, our reach is across just about everything.

Host: Everything.

Willie Lyles: Every level too…

Host: Yeah.

Willie Lyles:…throughout the development process, throughout operations.

Host: Even here at the center, right?

Willie Lyles: Even here at the center.

Host: Yeah. Making sure the folks walking around are safe.

Willie Lyles: Well, and that’s another one, right? I can’t, if I don’t mention my institutional safety guys, they’ll get me. But no, that’s important. We definitely have to look out for the personnel and all the workforces here at the center. And that’s been a change too, right? When people are coming back to work. I mean, slips, trips, falls, that’s still the biggest thing we have to be concerned about. You know, we had to be concerned, at least when we came back on for the deer. The deer were looking at people like, “you don’t belong here anymore. Why are you coming here?”

Host: Post-COVID?

Willie Lyles: Right! Post-COVID. So people had to adjust again, driving around with the deer here.

Host: Right.

Willie Lyles: And I think people are still adjusting as they’ve been coming back. And the hybrid situation is good. I think it’s good that you have the option that you’re here on site some days, you working from home some days. It’s great. So we, we definitely got a great new capability that they came out of the whole COVID concerns, as far as working on Teams and doing things like that. But again, face-to-face is important. Especially here with the teaming environment that we have in NASA. So I think that’s important for us.

Host: Do you think there’s a tailored approach to each of the programs in the sense that, you know, ISS has their way of doing things and Orion has their way? Or is there a lot more crossover than maybe, I’m anticipating?

Willie Lyles: It’s a little bit of both. I mean, I think as far as the way ISS is structured, I’ll talk from a safety vantage point. You have an internal office that has about 18 people that they have in their core team, right? They have the division chief that I mentioned, and they have a deputy and then they have three different branches, and they support from that branch to a certain level. But then, they have matrix support for the rest of the jobs. When you look at Gateway, and the programs that have cranked up since then, Orion’s a little bit different too. But when you look at the other programs, they’re a little smaller as far as their safety office. And I think they’re a little bit smaller as far as most of their offices, because they’ll have a smaller core team, but then they’ll have matrix support, do a lot more of the jobs.

Host: OK.

Willie Lyles: For example, if you look at the way Commercial LEO development staffing up now, and you look at EHP, they have a safety manager. They have a deputy safety manager, and they may have one to two other people within their safety office. After that, their integration leads are within my directorate. So the, and that integration lead works with all of the divisions within the office. So they’ll work with the quality assurance guys. They’ll work with liability; they’ll work with the safety guys, setting up the panel or running the panel. Right? They’ll work with the PRA team of the division. So they’ll work closely with them. They’ll work with the TSOs (Test Safety Officer) that are supporting from the institutional side, you miss the institutional safety, you know. And institutional safety is also JSC and White Sands for us. So we have a safety team out at White Sands also that do a lot of the testing out there. So they’ll work that and they’ll integrate all those guys for them and work back with them. And they’ll work across other centers or other, with partners if needed, also, international partners.

Host: It sounds like. Yeah. I’m hearing, yeah, there’s a little bit of tailoring, but you were talking about a lot of these same things, these PRAs…

Willie Lyles: For the processes.

Host: Yeah. Processes.

Willie Lyles: I think a lot of the process and products are similar. Some vary a little bit, but I mean, the general premise of it, you know, the PRAs, the hazard reports, you know, you look at FMEA (Failure Mode and Effects Analysis) seals, different products like that, they’re going to be fairly consistent on how they do them. You have different little nuances throughout, maybe the databases are set up a little differently. How you access those a little bit differently. The risk-based approach, we’ll, using can vary a little bit within different programs. Whereas some, like ISS still use a lot of traditional GMIPs (Government Mandatory Inspection Point), like I told you, as far as the quality and how they do things. But they use surveillance also. But it’s a little less than you would say, some of the new programs. They’re going to go more with the less oversight and more insight, more inline work that they’re doing from that vantage point.

Host: OK.

Willie Lyles: So, they vary, but the products that you get out- the hazard, you’re going to get hazard reports, right? You didn’t get non-conformances. You’re going to get FMEA (Failure Mode and Effects Analysis) seals at some level. They may look a little bit different in how the products are, but you’re still going to get those products out. The PRAs, you’re going to get the PRAs done for all of those programs. So those products will be fairly consistent. The processes are consistent for the most part, how you bring them through a panel, how you work them through the quality reviews, whether it’s inline, it’s, you know, oversight, insight or a combination of the two. And that may vary a little bit from program to program, but it’s still those two general premises on how you work it.

Host: Do you feel, sounds like there’s, these processes are so well-defined and embedded that they’re across all of these different programs. Do you feel we have a pretty good understanding of how to work through these processes to make sure we’re making– and you said there’s always risk, right? There’s always going to be risk, but do you think we have it pretty well understood on the things that we can do to minimize that risk?

Willie Lyles: No, definitely. I think that the creation of these tools and enhancement of these tools over the years. And that’s something that happened post-Columbia also, right? I think it was more emphasis put on defining these tools, and refining these tools and making them more user-friendly, and working them across and make it more standardized in a sense. So I think that definitely the tool suite that we have and the process that we use across the board is really a good consistent process. And it gives us the best chance to assess the risk that we have and to buy down the risk as much as possible.

Host: Just to highlight a couple of those processes and different things. One of the things you mentioned, and I want to make sure we circle back to it, just to make sure our listeners understand it. One of the things you said post-Columbia, five-by-five, what is it?

Willie Lyles: The matrix?

Host: Yeah. What is that?

Willie Lyles: Yeah, I mean, that’s mainly likelihood versus consequence, right?

Host: OK.

Willie Lyles: So you look at the lowest, if you got a one-by-one, that’s low risk. I mean, it’s low likelihood, like low-consequence. If I have something that’s a high-consequence, but low risk, then I’m concerned about it. But if the risk is there because of maybe time to effect or something else that I can put in place to help, you know, mitigate that a little bit, then I’m not as concerned. If I get up something five-by-five, anything like three-by-five or higher, then I’m going to pay more attention to it, right? That’s going to get the attention of, if it’s a one-by-two, one-by-three, those are worked at the lowest levels. Those are really low risk items. So they don’t need much attention at all. The higher you go on that risk scale, you know the consequences and the likelihood, then you’re going to bring more scrutiny on it. So you need more eyes on it. So you’re going to get program managers, you’re going to get center directors, even maybe look at, something’s a five-by-five, I’m getting ready to fly, I got to know what that is. And…

Host: Risky…

Willie Lyles:…got to see what I can do to bring that down, right? Now, the more that we get into exploration, those risks are probably going to grow more. And then you have to look at certain risk trades.

Host: Because everything’s newer.

Willie Lyles: Everything’s newer, everything’s farther out. You may not have, you know, you won’t be able to do sparing, for example, like you do on station.

Host: Sparing, meaning like spare parts.

Willie Lyles: Like if I need a spare part. It takes me a long time to get, if I’m going to the Moon, I’m going to Mars, then that’s a different story, right?

Host: Yeah. Yeah.

Willie Lyles: So you have to address that a little bit differently. So you look at risk versus risk trades also, because I might have one risk here of doing something a certain way, but if I change that, then I incur a different risk and I need to weigh those to see which direction I should go.

Host: And that’s where that “risk is always present,” idea comes in is, you have to make those decisions. You’re buying down risk and there’s a certain level of acceptance, right?

Willie Lyles: Right? And when you have your, you know, CoFR, for instance, I talked about earlier. Certification of Flight Readiness, getting ready. But all those steps along the way, even getting to that flight readiness review, you’re going to talk about these risks and you’re going to look at how you can buy down these risks, right? PRA may help you buy down risk with a certain system. If you say, hey, if I just designed this to add another component, this may buy this risk down a little further. So you use it all the way through the development cycle also. And I think that’s one of the advantages that we’ve gained over the last few years.

Host: Yeah. Now, that’s where, that is the little safety thing, extra redundancies, those sorts of things. That’s where you’re talking about in the design process.

Willie Lyles: Right.

Host: We’ve been mentioning PRAs a couple of times, when you actually put that in practice. What is a PRA?

Willie Lyles: Oh, the Probabilistic Risk Analysis? This is an analysis.

Host: An analysis.

Willie Lyles: Basically, an analysis when you would collect data, as much data as you can have on a given subject, and then work that to see what the risk is involved with it.

Host: OK.

Willie Lyles: You know, if you have something that’s a one in ten chance, that’s a lot more risky than it is a one in one-thousand chance, a one in one-million chance, right? Of it happening. So you look at it and kind of figure out based on that, which, how do I approach this? And is this worth me doing any changes for? Or is this acceptable the way it is?

Host: OK. Another one, I think you said was FMEA Seal?

Willie Lyles: Yeah. Failure Mode and Effects Analysis. And then…

Host: Failure Mode and Effects Analysis. OK.

Willie Lyles: Yeah. And then critical items list. So you look at, you know, different mechanisms that you have in there and see the likelihood of failure for certain components. All the way down to the lowest level, all the way up to the assembly, sub-assembly and assembly.

Host: OK.

Willie Lyles: And if you have failures along the way, you address how you can mitigate those failures or how you can change something, the design maybe to help not have those failures happen.

Host: OK. See that, I think I’m getting more of a sense of that marriage between the safety approach and the engineering approach, right? Building it to make it work. But it seems like the engineers are probably going to do that. They’re thinking about that too.

Willie Lyles: No, they are.They are. And I, and I think that’s a good thing. I mean, it’s not just a safety organization, right? I mean, safety’s everybody’s responsibility.

Host: Right.

Willie Lyles: And I’ll tell you, a lot of the engineers are really versed in safety standards and different requirements also. And if not, they work hand in hand with the guys that are.

Host: See, yeah. I think I love talking this subject, because there’s so much history behind it, and there’s so much work that’s been put in over years and years and years that allows us to talk about this culture as so incredibly robust, all these different checks and balances to help us to get to this point. It is a robust thing. But thinking ahead, right? We talked about a lot of these processes. We have these confidence in the ways that we measure risk, and can move forward. And all these processes, even with the newer programs, we’re embedded from the start. That’s super important. Moving forward though, how do we keep this going? Is it more of the same? Is there an evolution?

Willie Lyles: Well, there’s evolution. I mean, I think that we, so you have to make sure that people are trained in the right way, right? So I think part of it is that you make sure that when we bring new people in, we’re bringing interns in, we’re bringing new hires in. We need to be able to sit down and share our knowledge with those new individuals that start working. I mean, that’s why I think it’s so important to be here in person. Again, it’s that teaming environment. If I’m down the hall and I’m interested in something you’re doing and you’ve been doing this for ten years or more, and I’m a new guy and I come in, I want to learn from you.

Host: Yeah.

Willie Lyles: I want to sit down. I want the OJT (On the Job Training), right? I want to come in and see. I mean, we have formalized training programs also throughout, right? Even in safety, we have the STEP program and that’s the safety technical excellence program. So we have a lot of our young hire, new hires that come in and they go through this training program and they learn the basics of safety. They also have, while they’re doing this, they’re getting the schooling and the teaching part. They’re also getting training working with an individual. And they actually shadow people, and they actually spend time with people and look at the job they’re doing and learn from them. I think we got to continue to do that. I think we have to share that more and more. I think that we also have to make sure that we look at the tools we have and continue to enhance them. I mean, as we learn more, we can actually utilize more. I mean, we can actually, you know, it’s tools that we don’t even know yet that we will need in the future, right? So I think we got to stay on the innovative side and keep digging in and grabbing tools, and looking at things that are out there in the industry, looking at things that are in other places that we could utilize, and learn from. We’ve been, I think we learned a lot from those private companies you mentioned, right? One of the things that people will say about NASA, we’re a little too slow on doing things, right?

Host: Sure.

Willie Lyles: I mean, I think that that’s one of the things you notice with a lot of private companies. They turn things around a little bit faster and they do it. So we can learn, we can learn to be more agile. So we’re working closely with them as they’re learning our processes and learning how to do things. We can learn from them too on different approaches and how they can maybe get through and do some things still safe, right?

Host: That’s important.

Willie Lyles: So we got to be safe. And we want to buy the risk down as much as we can, but still, there’s other ways to do business and we got to learn from those guys.

Host: Yeah.

Willie Lyles: So I think that’s the key is that we, as we start to keep evolving, that we collaborate more and more with these other private companies out there and with other industry. If we see something that we can gain from them, we need to continue to collaborate with them also. And just continue to learn from each other.

Host: When you speak with different companies, when you speak with young people and try to get them to understand why we do this and how we do this and why safety is important, what are some of those key, like upfront, top level messages that you try to push to help, help it to sink in?

Willie Lyles: Well, we always start with the crew, right? I mean…

Host: The crew.

Willie Lyles:…we always start with the crew, because I mean, I think that’s something that people get right away. You got to protect the crew as much as you can. You got to create the safest environment that’s possible for the crew. So I think that part sticks. I think it also, it’s important that we look at the assets that we have, and if we sit down and talk about, as you get into this environment… A lot of these guys that come in, they’re already kind of amazed with space anyway, right? I mean, they, whether they wanted to be it as a kid or whether that happened later in life, they’re still enamored a little bit and they want to come in and learn, and understand the details and the workings that go on. So I think the more we teach them about that, but also, as we teach them in engineering, as we teach them in operations, we got to continue to put those safety elements in there for them. And we got to stress that how we work together, how we collaborate, and how when you go out and think about doing certain things, you have to think about the safety aspects of it. I think that’s going to be key along the way. And it’s just, it’s a conversation to have. It seems simple, but I think the training and just continue to work with those teams. We, one of the other things, we have a safety cultural survey that we do every two years, right? And it’s kind of key because I think, you know, we had good participation last year. We had about 50%. We’d like more, but I mean, you talk about 50% of the workforce here, that’s still pretty good numbers overall.

Host: Right.

Willie Lyles: And that’s when we get the pulse of what people are thinking, right? You ask the questions about, is there a lot of scheduled pressure? You know, are people starting to pay more attention to that than the safety involved, and how people looking at things. So you get inputs. And this one also has written comments. So we had many, many comments that talked about how great of an environment this is to work out here and how the safety culture is alive in breathing. And people listen to them. We had a few comments, right? Of course, the people say, “well, sometimes I think some of the programs aren’t listening to me enough. I need to, you know, I don’t feel I have a voice enough.” So we got to address those. And we’re doing that. We’re proactively going back with the programs to say, hey, these are some of the comments we got. So we want you guys to be aware of this and we need to, we will help you address this with the employees on the team. But those were really few. If you look at it, they had a, I think the scale was like a one to six, and if you were a five, you were a satisfied employee. I think six was slight above satisfaction, right?

Host: All right.

Willie Lyles: We scored in all of the 22 categories, I think with NASA, we scored above five on 21 of them.

Host: Wow.

Willie Lyles: The only one that didn’t score above five, and it was about a 4.8, I believe. But it was more on looking at change and adapting to change. And I think that equates, looking at some of the comments, it equates in two different ways. One is, it’s been changed because of COVID. It’s been changed because of people coming back in the norms changing. And then, it’s also been a lot of change in programs.

Host: Yeah.

Willie Lyles: You got a lot of new programs and in certain instances we haven’t kept up the workforce that’s needed, hasn’t been kept up enough to help work some of the concerns that maybe some of the programs have, right?

Host: Sure.

Willie Lyles: So we’re still hiring up and we’re still getting people adapted and getting them engaged. So that part I think is understandable. And I think the important message there that we take from that is that, hey, we hear you, we understand you. We’re going to work with you, if you’re feeling you’re overworked, we’re going to get more resource to kind of help you in that. If it’s that you feel you’re not being heard, we’re going to make sure you’re heard. We’ll voice those opinions. And we do that as senior staff. We do that at different level of different meetings along the way, just to make sure that they understand what the whole workforce is talking about.

Host: Yeah. You have this excellent foundation, a lot of positive feedback, but you sound very optimistic about the future. There’s a couple of things, but really you, I think you sound very optimistic.

Willie Lyles: Well, I think safety’s the key, right? Because I think as these companies that we talked about, private industry, as they go out and do more on their own, I think that in certain ways they’re going to look at how they can be more independent and how they can work things. I think it’s going to be important for us to stay involved because safety’s going to be paramount. I mean, everything, no matter what you want to talk, we talked about mission assurance earlier, and they want to be successful on these missions, but they got to be safe first, right? So I think that, I honestly think it’s a bright future. I think that I look at the interns we’ve been getting in lately, and the new hires, we’ve been having several interns that have gone around to tour with all the different directorates and they’ve come back to safety.

Host: How about that?

Willie Lyles: So I feel good about that. [Laughter] I feel good about that. I’ve had some interns that have done two tours with us, right?

Host: Really?

Willie Lyles: They do a tour with the other directorates, and they come back and do a second tour with safety. So me, personally, I’m really happy about that, because it shows and I think what I get from, it’s because it’s a family within a family almost, right? It’s one of those things where it’s safety and even in the days when people weren’t listening, say before the accidents, and when people get a little bit more complacent, I think safety still felt like it’s kind of them against the world in that sense. We don’t feel that way. We feel like we’re a big part of this whole environment. So, and I think that, if you look at the other directors, they embrace safety in a different way today. I will have people call me or call some of our guys and ask, hey, what do you think about this? When they’re going out to do an idea. Whereas in the past it might have been, I’m not talking to safety, you’re going to tell me no, right? So now…

Host: And they’re purposely calling you up.

Willie Lyles: They’ll purposely call you and they’ll say, “hey, we’re thinking about doing this different programs,” right? Deputy program managers calling and saying, “hey, we’re thinking about doing this. Tell me your thoughts about this. How should we approach this?” And that’s a good feeling. So, I’m really optimistic about the future.

Host: That’s awesome.

Willie Lyles: Yeah. I think it’s bright.

Host: Willie, hearing your perspective is just, it’s inspiring. And I had a sense of the safety culture here at NASA. I knew it was there. And you guys and others within the agency do a very good job of reminding folks like me, who came to the agency after a lot of the accidents and are constantly reminding folks like me, just, the things that could happen to always think about risk, always think about those things. So it’s embedded. So I don’t have to experience it.

Willie Lyles: Yeah.

Host: So nobody has to experience it. We don’t have to lose crew.

Willie Lyles: Well, that’s key. And it’s personal. We know these people, right?

Host: Exactly.

Willie Lyles: You talked about Christina who talked to you about being in the first place. I mean, we know all these people. We want to help protect them every way we can. It’s personal.

Host: It is. It is. And you talked about that family. Yeah. We have strong relationships here. It’s a very powerful culture. Willie Lyles, thank you so much for coming on Houston We Have a Podcast. This has been incredibly inspiring and hearing the successes of this and what you have planned for the future, just the strong foundation of safety that is present throughout all of the different programs is very inspiring to hear. So thank you very much.

Willie Lyles: Oh, thank you, Gary. Appreciate it.

[Music]

Host: Hey, thanks for sticking around. I really enjoyed this conversation with Willie today, just understanding the strong foundation. And he talked about a couple of tweaks that could be made in NASA safety culture, but really, it’s so rooted in everything we do here and to spread it wider into the international partners are our private companies and partners. The commercial partners we have. It just seems like it’s the right thing to do. And hearing Willie and his sense of optimism on the future that we have was something that was really inspiring. I hope you learned something today.

You can check out more of NASA podcasts that we have across the agency at NASA.gov/podcasts. That’s where we are. Houston We Have a Podcast, and you can listen to any of our episodes in no particular order. If you want to talk to us, we’re on the NASA Johnson Space Center pages of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Just use the hashtag #AskNASA on your favorite platform to submit an idea for the show or maybe ask a question and make sure to mention it’s for us at Houston We Have a Podcast. This episode was recorded on July 6th, 2023. Thanks to Will Flato, Justin Herring, Dane Turner, Abby Graf, Belinda Pulido, Jaden Jennings, and Christina Koch for suggesting the episode. And of course, thanks again to Willie Lyles for taking the time to come on the show. Give us a rating and feedback on whatever platform you’re listening to us on and tell us what you think of our podcast. We’ll be back next week.