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>>Ed Hoffman: Hello, and welcome to Masters with Masters.
This is a special edition of our program,
where we’re being hosted at the Kennedy Space Center.
And this week we’ll be looking at leadership and engineering
and working during a time of change and opportunity, as well as challenge.
And we have two legendary guests with us here today,
which will be focusing on some of the issues of leading during a time of change and transition.
We have Bob Cabana, who is obviously the Center Director for the Kennedy Space Center,
and Bob has also been in a lot of leadership situations throughout NASA,
as the head for the Stennis Space Center, as well as leadership positions at Johnson.
And obviously a veteran of four of the space shuttle launches as an astronaut, two times as a pilot.
And we also have Bob Sieck, who as well has had an extraordinary career at NASA.
He has been a launch director for 52 space shuttle missions.
Was responsible as director of the shuttle processing,
and also has had leadership roles in the Apollo program and started at NASA in 1964
as part of the Gemini program, as part of spacecraft systems engineering.
Both have obviously been through a whole history at NASA and in many cases,
in leadership positions during a time of moving into new directions with the major programs that we’ve had.
And part of what we wanted to focus on today is really how do you go through these programs,
from Apollo to shuttle, space station,
and obviously going through the changes that we’re going through today,
in terms of human space flight.
We talked previously in terms of Commercial Crew,
and what are some of the things that we’ve learned and how do we carry that over.
I’d like to get started with Bob Sieck. Obviously, you started with Gemini,
and from the standpoint of your personal experiences, how did you get into NASA,
and are there any particular things that started that you learned in the early years that, you know,
helped prepare you for the career that you’ve had at NASA?
>>Bob Sieck: Sure. Well, when I was the age of a few of these young people out here,
I was a student up in Virginia, in engineering school,
and my goal was to have a career in the military like my dad had,
flying airplanes in the Air Force specifically.
But about halfway through that college program, the Russians launched Sputnik,
and I made my first trip to Florida on spring break from college and went away with the impression,
you know, this is really a neat place to be down here,
and they launch these rockets and whatever and I think I’ll be a rocket scientist, if/when I ever graduate.
And it worked out that way. I spent three years in the Air Force on active duty,
supporting missile operations around the country, and then was able,
after I served my active duty time, to come down here to Florida and be part of the NASA team
that put people and payloads into space.
I initially kind of begrudged the time I spent in the Air Force,
because it’s, well, I’m just – you know, I’m losing time here for what I really want to do,
which is to be a rocket scientist, but in hindsight, it was good training.
The meteorology training that I got that helped later on as launch director,
as part of the launch decision process.
And again, you’ve got a 21 year old kid who has recently graduated, has his engineering degree,
commissioned in the Air Force, is really still kind of clueless about a lot of things.
So the Air Force military discipline helped me to grow up and learn responsibility,
accountability and that all played well for me throughout my career.
Hoffman: Okay. So the discipline, the preparation, the training, in terms of putting you into those positions of future success.
And Bob Cabana, you, I believe, joined NASA in 1985, in terms of the astronaut corps.
Again, what brought you to NASA and how did those experiences,
and also from the military, how did that shape you for the career that you’ve had?
>>Bob Cabana: Well, first off, I never dreamed I could be an astronaut.
I held those guys in such high esteem as a kid growing up,
watching Mercury and Gemini and Apollo on TV.
But I always had this passion to fly, this desire to be a pilot,
and so when I graduated from the Naval Academy, and that was my goal,
be a naval aviator, take off and land on aircraft carriers.
And I chose a commission in the Marine Corps, and marine pilots are naval aviators,
and I flunked my eye test when I got down to Pensacola.
It was the height of the Vietnam War, 1972.
They had more pilots than they knew what to do with.
And I said, “Well, do I qualify to be a naval flight officer?” and they said. “Yeah.”
And so I went through the training program, got my wings as an NFO,
and spent three years as an A6 bomber and navigator before I finally convinced them I could see.
See 20/20, that is. And I always passed my annual flight physicals.
And so, anyway, got back down to Pensacola as a pilot and graduated.
And I said, wow, it would really be neat to be a test pilot, use all that math and engineering
I had in school, along with my flying ability.
So as soon as I had 1,000 hours, I applied for Navy test pilot school, and they said, “Sorry, Bob,
we don’t need any A6 pilots right now.”
But six months later, I got picked up for test pilot school, and that was 1980.
And I graduated from test pilot school, and NASA took the first group of shuttle astronauts
in ’78 and then another group in 1980, and those guys had come back and talked to us in ’84
when they were taking the next class, and I said, I could actually do this.
You know, I’m qualified, I could be an astronaut.
And I filled out all the paperwork and went through all the interviews and stuff, and I said,
man, this is it. I just can’t wait, and this is what I want to do.
And I was just waiting for that call, and the call came, and they said,
“Sorry, Bob, you didn’t make it, but we’re going to take some more next year, and we’d like you to try again.”
So I reapplied in 1985, went through the whole process again
and was fortunate enough to get selected.
So, it wasn’t—it was kind of a progression, and when anybody asks how do you get to be an astronaut,
I tell them persistence, not giving up.
But I think the important thing for anybody in working at NASA, it’s have a passion for what you do.
You know, the passion that we have for launching rockets,
for being part of human space exploration, for being part of space exploration, the rovers,
the robotic works we do, everything, it’s just—it’s phenomenal.
And, we’re making history.
And I think having that passion,
you love your work and so you do really well at it.
And, you know, astronauts, flying in space is a very small part of being an astronaut,
and astronauts are a very small part of NASA.
But every day I get to come to work here at the Kennedy Space Center
and work with the most talented, motivated group of individuals anywhere,
and it’s been the same through every NASA center that I’ve worked at.
It’s an amazing team, and it’s just really fun to be a part of it.
So I can’t think of doing anything different.
I can’t imagine not doing this.
Hoffman: There are also – I mean, in looking back, I mean, again,
the kind of careers you’ve had have been centered around not only technical excellence, but leadership.
Obviously, having made hard decisions, you know, taking risks,
how did you or did you when you started,
did you have a sense of preparing yourself for doing great things,
or was it because you are so effective, you get tapped,
and suddenly you end up, you know, leading shuttle programs and flying and leading, you know, centers?
Cabana: The last job I applied for was to be an astronaut.
Every job I’ve had since then, I’ve been asked to go do.
And I just—you do your best at what you do.
And I think the 14 years that I had in the Marine Corps before I came to NASA helped hone my leadership skills.
I’m sure that the time Bob had in the Air Force, he learned a lot as a young lieutenant.
Sieck: Oh, yeah, for sure.
And like I say, I’m glad I had to spend the time in the military,
because it helped me grow up and mature and learn about accountability and responsibility.
The difference from when Bob came on board and I did,
everybody was really young when I came on board.
The veterans were those that graduated from – the engineers, graduated in the mid-‘50s
and had been a veteran now of the Mercury program, which was all of two years old at that time.
So the average age, I don’t know what it was, but it was really young.
So we learned by doing, and I recall the first time
I went in the block house over at Pad 19 with my procedures and my headset and my brown bag,
and I know I walked in the door and I just stopped and gazed around like this,
all these lights and these people at consoles with headsets and, you know, switches and this sort of thing.
And I said, wow, I’m really going to be a rocket scientist someday.
And thanks to the leadership and those who were experienced, had two or three year’s experience,
they spent a lot of time with us newbies and said,
“Here’s where the slippery spots are.
Here is what you’ve got to avoid.
Here’s what you’ve got to keep in mind.”
And it was already then part of the KSC culture that in human space flight,
it’s all about the crew and their mission.
Yeah, the rocket is important, yeah, the spacecraft is important, yeah, you’ve got to get all this ground stuff.
But never lose sight of the big picture,
that the quality of the products that are generated here are directly proportional to the safety
and success of the missions that these guys , they were all guys back then,
are going to fly, and never lose sight of that.
And the good thing about it was as new engineers just learning, we made our share of mistakes.
We made lots of mistakes.
But the approach of management was, “Okay, Bobby, you screwed up.
It’s not like if you didn’t do something irresponsible.
Now, let’s sit down and understand the root cause of – is it the training? Is it the tools?
Is it the procedures?
Because we’re going to the moon and we want to do this right.
So let’s understand it and get on with it, because you’re a member of the team that’s going to make this happen.”
It was a great attitude that management had for the workforce,
which, of course, got embedded in here for me later in my career.
Cabana: You know, what Bob said about making mistakes, I think it’s critical.
We can’t become so risk averse that we never allow people to make mistakes.
Failure is not an option, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make a mistake.
And the true measure of a person is not the mistakes he makes, it’s how he acts after a mistake is made.
Does he rise above it and continue on to do greater things,
or does he let it mire them down and bog them down and you’re unsuccessful.
I think we need to—and we’re working here at KSC to find more projects
where young engineers can get involved and actually learn.
And you want them to make mistakes on small projects
so that when they’re in charge of big projects, they’ve learned from making those mistakes
on the small ones, and they’re not going to make that same mistake again,
where it costs time and lots of dollars and could impact the safety in some way.
So I think it’s important to allow people to grow.
I was very fortunate in the Marine Corps.
You make mistakes, but you learn from them.
Ed Hoffman: Yeah. One of the themes, obviously, is you’ve worked –
and NASA tends to work on missions that are cutting edge, they’re breakthroughs,
they are totally new.
And in the current environment, we’re obviously going through major change,
and yet I sometimes sense we tend to think that the old days, you know, were very smooth
and there was a lot of money and everything went better –
Cabana: There wasn’t a lot of money.
Hoffman: Well, and just, you know, from Apollo to shuttle, you know, we lost,
you know, we went from 36,000 employees to 18,000 and, you know,
the percent of the federal budget was, I think, 3 or 4 percent, down to less than half of 1 percent,
and we didn’t have access between Apollo to shuttle for six years.
And when I joined, it was – we were dealing with the aging workforce,
and we were dealing with a lot of these challenges.
And that’s kind of when you were starting, and certainly, you know, when you were going through your careers.
Do you see parallels between the challenges,
you know, going from Apollo to a shuttle and then shuttle to station
that you could relate to today, and that – you know,
that you can help in terms of understanding environment
and being able to be successful as we continue?
Sieck: Well, yes. The short answer would be yes,
and some examples are in the case of going from Apollo to shuttle.
It’s a cultural thing. It’s, like, well, we want to do it the same way we did it on Apollo,
or the way you’re proposing to do it, management, is not the way we did it on Apollo.
And I would think back and say, okay, but I heard the same stuff
whenever we were going from Gemini to Apollo, and now it’s Apollo to shuttle.
It’s the same thing. You’ve got to understand that it’s a different mission, it’s a different system,
so we’re going to have to do things differently.
And in the case of Apollo here to shuttle at Kennedy Space Center,
we had an Apollo program, the organization at the center was, I think the term is stovepiped.
You had the, particularly for the processing, the launch vehicle folks had their own organization,
their own facilities, their own procedures,
and it was primarily they were all out here in the Launch Complex 39 area,
the VAB and the launch pad.
Totally separate from us spacecraft people,
who were back in the industrial area, with our control center, with our administrative home,
with all of our tools for processing.
When the spacecraft, which was really a payload left the O and C building, it was ready to go fly.
Brought it out to the VAB, did the simple connections to the launch vehicle
and the launch mount and spent little time out here in the process.
But the point is, we were totally divorced from a major component of the team,
the launch vehicle people, and their processing.
So the challenge for Center management was to bring these two cultures together,
organizationally and physically, which was not an easy task,
because we all had our own ways of doing business that we were comfortable with,
and obviously it had served well on Apollo, so why change it, right?
So that was a challenge, and we dealt with it in a number of ways,
by co-locating people in program offices and going out there and pestering the design centers
for their requirements early on, a lot of activity.
But that was a major thing to deal with, to affect the transition from Apollo to shuttle.
Cabana: And I think in some ways there are similarities.
In some ways, I think we have even a greater challenge today.
I mean, from Apollo to shuttle, a significant decrease in the budget,
but still, shuttle was a major program here at the Kennedy Space Center
and throughout NASA that paid for much of everything we do.
When we transitioned to station, it wasn’t so much a
transition—it was a payload for the shuttle.
And shuttle was still the major source of funding for about everything that went on here.
As we transitioned, and just by way of transition, during Apollo,
NASA had 4.5 percent of the federal budget, and now we’ve got less than a half of 1 percent.
At KSC, we had 25,000 contractors and civil servants working here.
We went down to 18,000.
And at the end of shuttle period, we had about 15,000.
Now we’re about 8,500. So, a significant change there.
You know, the biggest issue that you have moving forward is people’s adversity to change.
Everybody wants it the way it was.
But look at how much technology has changed from Apollo to shuttle.
Maybe not quite as much as it is now, from shuttle 1978 to today, technology is hugely different.
There are a lot of things that we can do better, more efficiently.
We don’t necessarily have to do them the same way,
but we don’t want to lose the lessons that were learned.
But we also have to step back and say, what’s the most efficient way to do this? Can we do it better?
Can we do it with less?
Can we actually do it safer, maybe, with less.
So it’s the ability to step back and get people to accept change.
Nobody wants to, but it’s the only thing that’s constant in our lives, is change.
We change daily, and we have to accept that change and use it to our advantage.
How can we make ourselves better?
And when Constellation got canceled, that was an impact to the team,
because they thought that was the transition from shuttle.
And then it’s, okay, where are we going?
Well, I think we’ve got a clear mission now.
We’ve got a vehicle, and we have a mission for it, and we’re moving forward.
Now, how do we make that happen?
But when you’re only launching once every couple of years, or even once a year,
to sustain the skills that you need, what else do we need to sustain the Kennedy Space Center?
And we need a Commercial Crew Program to get our crews to the International Space Station.
We need to continue to support our Launch Services Program to get our expendable rockets.
But we need to enable commercial space, and there is far too much here—too much talent, too many
facilities—we can utilize it to make ourselves even better,
to make us this multiuse spaceport that we want to be.
And that’s a huge change from the past,
where it was one government program that paid for everything, to where it is now.
There are facilities that are going to be dedicated NASA use;
there are facilities that are going to be joint use;
there are facilities that are going to be dedicated commercial use.
And laying out a path to make all that happen, that’s a challenge.
But I think the key is, you have to, with any change,
you have to clearly communicate the vision of where you’re going to the team,
and you can’t communicate enough,
and you’ve got to get everybody to buy into it
and help them become part of making that change happen.
But if you don’t know where you’re going. One of my favorite quotes is Yogi Berra.
“If you don’t know where you’re going, you’re certainly going to end up somewhere else.”
And I don’t want to end up somewhere else.
We know where we want to be. We’ve got to go make that happen.
Sieck: You know, Bob mentioned technology, a major challenge for those of us that were involved in Gemini and Apollo.
You know, the Apollo system was designed electronically. It’s early ‘60s technology.
Well, by the time the Apollo program finished in the early ‘70s,
that decade of technology advanced so much that folks like myself,
whose engineering degree was dated 1960,
back when the dictionary definition of a chip
was something you whittled of a piece of wood, we all literally had to go back to school
and learn electronics, computers, software, and a lot of our folks did.
Some took night courses, went on to graduate school.
There was a lot of brown bag programs, you’d call them, around the center,
to bring us back up to speed with the technology we were going to have to know
and understand to deal with the shuttle,
who it was an order of magnitude more complex than the Apollo system.
Hoffman: You both, you’re hitting on similar themes,
and it makes sense, you’ve worked together.
But one theme is that when we finish one, you know, very iconic program,
whether it’s Apollo or shuttle, then we as a community feel that we know how to do it a
certain way, and then going into a new direction, you know,
maybe is greeted with skepticism, or it’s hard for us to change.
Is that the, what you see, you know, as a leader, as the key issue that you deal with,
is preparing the workforce, dealing with communities or stakeholders,
to allow us to go into a new direction, even though we’ve had successes?
But is that the key challenge?
And if it is, how do you get people to be able to accept change?
Is it about explaining the risk?
Is it about the vision? Is it about, you know, just assurance?
Cabana: Well, leadership skills are the same. no matter.
It’s not just any one thing, it’s everything,
and you have to utilize them all. I mean, first and foremost, you put the people before everything.
If you really take care of the people and provide them with the tools and resources
that they need to be successful and point them in the right direction,
give them a clear vision of what you expect
and then allow them to go do it, this team is going to go off and accomplish it.
The key is making sure that you have the direction to the team,
the vision of where they’re going, and provide them with the resources.
And, you know, it’s been challenging, as we have transitioned,
getting everybody on board throughout NASA with, clearly, what it is that we’re going to go do.
And I think we have a very clear direction now. There should be no doubt.
Our Administrator has made it very clear what NASA’s priorities are and where we’re going
and what we’re going to do with them.
And resources are a challenge right now, and this is a very austere time for us as a nation,
and with the budget deficit that we have and sequestration and everything else added in,
but when it comes right down to it, NASA is still,
whether it’s 17.8 or 18.1 or whatever, billion dollars, it’s a lot of money,
and we’ve got to make sure that we utilize the resources that we have to the best way possible,
setting the right priorities in order to be successful.
But, you know, leadership comes down to taking care of the people.
It’s having the technical excellence to lead the team. It’s having communication—it’s key.
It’s integrity. You can go on and on and on, a list of things, and everybody at all levels can—nobody is a born leader.
There are people that are charismatic, but everybody can learn to be a good leader.
And we need to work at the lowest levels with our team leads, our branch chiefs,
our division chiefs, and so on, helping develop those leadership skills
that are necessary for the team to be successful.
Sieck: Well, right on, obviously.
You need to give the team the tools they need to be successful,
and history shows the team will take care of the rest.
And it’s much more difficult now. I’m glad I don’t have a job like Bob does.
I recall a war story as a GS 11 systems engineer in 1964.
I was responsible for the medical instrumentation that the astronauts wore inside the suits.
And we had a lab over in the O and C building that checked out all of the hardware that they flew.
And as a GS 11, I could sign sole source purchase requests for up to $50,000.00
with just a few sentences of justification,
and I put that into the system, and two weeks later I’d have my huge Ampex tape recorder
delivered to the O and C building.
The team doesn’t have that kind of empowerment today to spend money is the point.
It was much easier to get stuff done back then.
But the thing to do with the team is challenge them with, okay, here is all of these hurdles
and constraints to getting on with a new program,
now tell me management, as opposed to saying here is why we can’t.
Tell me here is how we can and we’ll go after those resources for you,
whether it’s change in requirements, whether it’s money for this equipment or whatever.
But we’ll go fight for it. Tell us what it will do to help you,
and that’s actually how we got through the shuttle program
and got a lot more efficient here with our processing. Challenge the team.
Say, okay, I know we can’t meet the expectation of the flight rate
and the turnaround time and a lot of the other things
that were advertised what the shuttle would do, but let’s not whine about why we can’t do it.
Let’s talk about how we could do it if you get the tools you need, and that’s what we worked on.
Hoffman: We have an audience obviously here at Kennedy,
and so in a minute I’ll see if there are any questions.
But one of the things, again, that strikes me is so obviously you’re making the decisions
in terms of launch director, you know, in terms of shuttle.
Can’t think of anything more pressurized in any timeframe.
And you talked about the importance of culture at NASA.
And so it sounds like one of the things you would use to the advantage
is that if you set up a clear challenge to the NASA community, then the natural tendency
is for us to go in that direction.
Is that one of the strengths of the culture we have, which is probably very strong and expert,
you know, and strong belief is that you have to set the challenge and then let folks go there,
or how else do you deal with the culture,
when you want it to go in a certain direction
with shuttle or implementing, you know, different direction?
Sieck: Well, you need to know where you’re going,
obviously, what the big picture of the mission and the goal,
and then you remind the workforce, okay, here is why they are an important component of the team
that is going to achieve that.
And the message we always gave in the shuttle program was, you know, you’re all important.
You can be working on the thermal protection system three months before launch,
and in the middle of the night in a building that doesn’t have any windows in it,
and you’re just as important as somebody in that control room on launch day,
that is pressing buttons with the TV cameras on them.
And the important thing was that those workers knew that, and the challenge to them was, okay,
what can we do to set you up to be more successful?
And I’ll take the example of tile.
In the early days, all of the new tile came from a facility somewhere out on the West Coast,
and we had had limited certifications here to make changes to that system.
Well, we pushed hard enough, went against the program management in
those in the other centers that didn’t want to change roles and responsibilities,
and finally got to the point where we could fabricate
and build our own tile down here at the Kennedy Space Center,
which made it a much more efficient process for that worker on third shift.
Cabana: I think, collaboration, you’re talking about working with other centers,
collaboration is very important today.
When I look at the Commercial Crew Program, it’s a huge change from the way NASA has done
business in the past with the Space Act Agreements
and how we’re working all through that.
Different from the past, but the team has risen to the challenge and is doing it extremely well.
But the cooperation that we have with the other centers, it’s a 50/50 split between us and JSC,
but there is also Langley, Marshall,
and other centers are involved also in helping us be successful in that.
And I think that’s really important, and I think it’s better than I’ve ever seen it at NASA.
The cooperation between the centers, working towards a common goal,
as opposed to protecting your rice bowl or whatever.
And I think that’s going to help us be successful,
especially with the limited resources that we have today. Collaboration is extremely important.
Hoffman: Let’s see what questions we have from the audience here.
This is NASA, so there is always questions.
Cabana: While they think of a question, you talk about Mr. Calm and Cool over here, you know,
how do you be a good leader, how do you handle things?
He launched me on my first flight.
And I’ll never forget, we were launching Ulysses into polar orbit on the sun,
and we went into a hold at 31 seconds
because we didn’t have a nitrogen purge in the payload bay for Ulysses
to keep it in this pristine environment that it was going to be in.
And they’re going back and forth on the loops
and we’re listening to all this in the cockpit,
and they’re arguing about what we need to do and stuff.
And then all of a sudden you hear this calm, cool voice come up on the net,
and it’s the Launch Director, and he says,
“Just remember, in 31 seconds, there isn’t going to be a nitrogen purge.”
And all of a sudden, okay, yeah, we’re good to go, you know?
Sieck: It’s called keeping in mind the big picture, you know?
Cabana: Boy, it’s really hard to get your back in a game though
when you come out of that 31 second hold (laughter).
>>Audience Member: Hi, my name is Joshua Santora,
and my question has to do with your comment, Mr. Cabana,
on the president setting our priorities.
And so my question is, in an environment of change,
how do you deal with maybe your disapproval of that mission or your workforce’s disapproval,
or even the public’s disapproval?
What is the response and what is the course of action?
Cabana: Well, I don’t think there’s any disapproval.
I think, if you get down and talk to the team,
I’ve talked to a lot of folks, and they’re excited about what it takes to go capture an asteroid
and bring it back to Lagrange point and then get a crew up there to go visit it.
And the technologies that we’re going to gain and learn from that and what it can be applied to,
I think it’s extremely exciting.
So, as far as NASA’s vision and where we’re going,
Administrators have made it very clear the priorities at NASA, and we’ve got three priorities,
and it’s SLS/MPCV, and the mission for that ultimate goal is to get to Mars.
That’s where we’re going.
And the first thing we’re going to do is meet the President’s commitment to get to an asteroid
by 2025, and hopefully, we’ll be able to do that,
develop the technologies with solar propulsion and a way to capture a small asteroid, bring it back, and then send a crew to it in 2021,
with that first flight of the Orion with a crew.
A lot has to happen between now and then to make all that work,
and we’re in the process of going through studies this summer to actually define the
mission and see what’s required and work it out.
The other priority, ISS, and to get to ISS, we need Commercial Crew.
So we’re enabling a commercial capability to get our crews to the space station.
And of course, the third main priority is to change Webb Space Telescope.
And I think KSC plays a key role in all of those missions.
I think that’s very important.
But the main thing is, I think, it’s a very clear definition of what’s expected of us
and where we need to go, and we’re on board.
I think it’s—now, it’s let’s define it, let’s go make it happen.
Hoffman: While we go to this question,
one of the things that you’re talking about, ultimately, leadership and execution
is about the decisions, you know, that are made.
You’ve both been in, you know, positions
that demand decisions.
How do you learn to make good decisions,
and does it change when there is heavy pressure on,
does your style change when you’re, you know, a minute from launch, or - -
Cabana: I’ve got to throw a quick quote out.
When I was Chief of the Astronaut Office,
my deputy was Tammy Jernigan.
And she said, “Just remember, Bobby, you have to have a mind in order to change it.”
And, you know, you can make a decision,
but having made a decision, you shouldn’t be afraid to change it in the light of new data.
If somebody can bring you new data that shows that you were wrong,
you didn’t have all the data when you made your decision, it’s okay to change your mind.
But I think the key is having all the data to make an informed decision; that’s very important.
And you want to make the team part of the decision process.
You’ve got to get their involvement.
If you really want the team to go off and execute something,
if you just tell them to go do something,
that’s totally different from having the team involved in the decision and being part of it.
And I think that’s key, is making sure that the team is with you.
And oftentimes, it means asking questions and listening even when you know the answer.
Ed Hoffman: Yeah. So bring data when someone is trying to impact –
Cabana: It’s mission ops., “In God we trust. All others bring data.”
Sieck: Right, absolutely.
And I would add two things about decisions.
One is know when you have to make the decision and make it at the right time.
You can make decisions too early, you can make them too late.
So the timing of the decision.
But other than that, in the launch director’s decision,
I learned early on from my predecessors as launch director,
that the launch director’s job really is to say no when everybody else wants to go,
but they really haven’t thought through the problems
and their working things too hard, which is natural tendency for people.
We’re known for Yankee ingenuity, and if something goes wrong, say,
“Well, if we change this, that, and patch this over here, this light comes on, it will probably be okay.”
Well, launch director’s job is to say,
“Well, okay, let’s see if you come up with the same recommendation tomorrow
after you’ve had a chance to look at more data and think about it.”
And the other is you develop confidence in the team, in this case, the launch team,
and always felt confident that the launch team wasn’t going to let me do anything dumb.
And if I was getting ready to do that,
they’d be the first to raise their hand and press the no go button.
Cabana: That’s why the crew doesn’t get to vote. You know, they’d say yes to anything.
Hoffman: Yeah, we have a question from the audience.
Audience Member: Hello, my name is Skylar Kleinschmidt.
And from a leadership standpoint,
what project would you say had the greatest impact on either your workforce or the public
and what was that impact and how did that sort of feedback affect you?
Sieck: Well, I would say my best learning experience
that I felt really good about after it was over was the approach and landing test program
for the Orbiter Enterprise when they were doing the atmospheric flight tests out in California.
And myself and a couple of other senior managers at this space center successfully
lobbied the program management in Houston at the time to let us, NASA Kennedy Space Center,
be responsible for the ground processing of the Orbiter Enterprise, for a number of good reasons.
It would give us the proverbial leg up on what these orbiters were really all about.
Even though this one didn’t have all the space flight systems,
it would give us the opportunity to develop some camaraderie with the design center
and the contractors and get used to this idea of processing the space vehicle for reuse.
That’s a first time thing. We ever dealt with that in Apollo.
In Apollo, everything was brand new, factory fresh.
And we should be the right people to do that.
Well, to make a long story short,
we were successful in that lobbying attempt
and the experience we gained from the approach and landing test program from my standpoint
carried throughout the shuttle program and helped make it the success that it was.
Cabana: I’ve been very fortunate to be involved with a lot,
but I look back on probably my last flight, that first space station assembly mission.
We slipped a little bit. We didn’t get off quite when we thought we were,
but when I look back on following Node 1 through all its assembly,
I remember when it was just an aluminum shell in Huntsville, before it ever came to the Cape.
But we spent an awful lot of time in the Boeing facility at Sonny Carter,
testing software prior to that flight.
And initially, the space station assembly was going to be ship-and-shoot.
Send it to the Cape and launch into space and that was it.
And we lobbied for MEIT testing here at the Cape,
and that was one of the best things we ever did.
And using emulators for the functional cargo block,
we did a serious ring-out of the software on the Node in the computer systems
for that first space station assembly mission,
and we found a lot of problems testing here at the Cape before we took it to orbit.
And I don’t believe we would have been successful had we not done that.
And I tell you, nobody was more surprised than me when I set the commands on the computer
to power everything up and it actually worked.
You know, it was pretty amazing.
But it was a testing by the KSC team here over in the SSPF that made that happen.
Sieck: Bob brings up a good point about transitions.
It’s important, KSC ultimately implements requirements.
Some of them we generate ourselves,
others come from those people who send hardware down here to be processed.
And it’s important to get in on the ground floor with the designers
and the development testing that goes of outside of KSC,
so that you can identify early on what the driving requirements
are for the program that you’re going to be involved in.
In the transition and development phase, folks out here know that the paper is just piled this deep.
Somewhere in there are the driving requirements that you really have to pay attention to
and sort out, and the way you get to that is to immerse yourself in the development process,
even though the reputation here is,
well, your operator is out in the field and designers are people way back there.
But you’ve got to cut through that barrier and get in bed with them, literally.
Cabana: It’s all ones and zeros, Bob.
Now, we don’t have paper this deep anymore.
It’s all on a computer. And we’re doing that now.
In the Commercial Crew Program,
we have folks out at the manufacturing facilities,
the design facilities, for the Commercial Crew vehicles.
You know, we’re getting ready on SLS as we get that space launch system tested.
When they do the testing over at Stennis,
there’s going to be KSC engineers and launch operation team members
over there participating in that testing,
so that when it comes here, we’re knowledgeable on the vehicle and how it’s done.
So that’s critical, to be involved early and know what’s going on and learn the system.
Hoffman: You’ve talked a lot about the improvements from,
obviously, over 50 years in the business.
What are the things that you see that we do at NASA, at Kennedy, better today than ever before?
Are there things that stick out?
Are we better at dealing with failure?
Are we able to innovate more effectively?
Are we, you know, obviously we deal with a lot of obstacles, but, I mean, any thoughts on that?
We’re certainly at a greater level of maturity
in terms of understanding systems and how they work.
Cabana: What impresses me are the tools that the younger workers bring.
They have so many more skills and it’s just amazing.
The computer skills, the design skills, and they are innovative.
They look at things differently from how we looked at them,
and they find solutions that we might not have thought of,
and it’s because of how they’ve been brought up, what they’ve learned in school.
You know, technology, it’s phenomenal, and the design skills, the computer, all the CAD design.
So work that’s being done today on SLS,
we’re saving so many problems that we would run into had you manufactured it
and designed it the way we used to; that’s being circumvented now
because of the computer skills that folks have and computer-aided design and so on.
So I think, yeah, I think we do a better job.
We utilize the technology that’s available to us now to avoid problems down the road,
so that we can be more efficient and have success sooner, at a lower cost.
Sieck: Yeah, I would echo.
Folks my age have a hard time thinking out of the box.
We have our way of doing business and we like to stay with it.
As I think back over the shuttle program,
it wasn’t until we got the next generation involved in the ‘80s and early ‘90s,
where we were really clicking the way we should have been with that program.
And that’s why when people compare Apollo to shuttle, they tend to think, well, Apollo was,
you know, the glory days, when you guys, we were all guys back then, you know, really knew how to do this.
And I said no, no, you’ve got it wrong.
The shuttle program is really the thing to showcase about what the abilities of the Kennedy Space Center are,
because think of it. In Apollo program, everything is brand new, unlimited resources.
When you flew the vehicle, you retired what you got back, put it in a museum.
All of the ground equipment is brand new, you had unlimited resources.
Compare to shuttle program, where we’re using a lot of the same tools initially that we used to process Apollo.
You’re re-flying the orbiter, the hardware, which is an order of magnitude more complex.
And they did that with half the resources at a higher flight rate, and in hindsight, higher quality products.
So, you know, credit the KSC team and the innovations that they did over the years of the shuttle program.
And, yes, Apollo was a great adventure,
but from a performance success standpoint, I would grade shuttle higher.
Hoffman: Yeah, greater challenges and having to go beyond and more maneuverability.
Yeah, you mentioned your generation not thinking out of the box,
but your generation created the box that we all work in.
So, you know, that may account for some of that.
You also mentioned that you see at NASA we work better across the centers.
You know, so I’ve been at NASA 30 years.
Remember the early years, there were sometimes directors that didn’t work together.
What do you account for the fact that we do work more effectively? We see the need of it?
You know, is it better leadership?
Is it people work across the different centers more?
Cabana: I think the necessity to be successful has driven it,
utilizing our resources to the best advantage.
I think it’s important. I’ve had the advantage of working at Johnson, Stennis, and here at KSC.
I know those guys.
You know, Robert Lightfoot, he worked here at KSC, he worked at Marshall.
He’s up at Headquarters.
I think the more we have an ability or an opportunity to move between the centers
and learn what goes on at the other centers,
I think that’s good, and I think that drives it also.
So I think anybody that wants to be a future senior leader at NASA,
I think you need to work on the institutional side and the programmatic side.
You can’t just be in one area, and you need the experience at other centers also.
Hoffman: We have a question again.
Audience Member: Hi, again.
So you sort of just touched on what you personally need to work on,
and before that you were talking sort of the technological tools that you needed to avoid
having problems later down the road.
So what sort of interpersonal skills or tools would you recommend the young leaders here develop
in order to lead the, you know, the programs of the next generation,
be it getting asteroids or going to Mars and beyond?
Cabana: Number one, you’ve got to have credibility
if you’re going to be a leader at least at some point in your career.
So be a technical expert at what you’re doing, know it well, and establish that credibility.
And then learn the leadership skills.
Find an opportunity to lead a team, be in charge of something.
But I think the most important thing is don’t say no when somebody asks you to go do something.
I had a lot of jobs in my career where I didn’t necessarily want to go do it.
I didn’t necessarily want to sell my house and pack up and move to Russia for a year and a half,
and it’s one of the best assignments I had, running our operations over there.
So given an opportunity, it doesn’t matter what it is.
If your boss wants you to go do it, then say yes, and go off and give it your best.
And it’s amazing what you might learn.
I’ve never had a bad experience.
I’ve always enjoyed what I’ve been asked to go do and found it extremely rewarding.
But work on those leadership skills.
You know, find an opportunity to lead a team, and we can all learn to be better at what we do.
Sieck: It’s attitude. Here is how I can, not why I can’t.
Hoffman: What do you see as we’ve joined this week, we were talking to Commercial Crew,
we’re talking to Swamp Works, we’re talking to some of the young professionals.
What is your excitement about the future for Kennedy
in terms of the future missions
and in terms of the future of human space flight, in terms of NASA?
Cabana: You know, I can’t say enough good things about our future.
First off, SLS/MPCV.
We are going to operate a vehicle that’s going to eventually take us to Mars.
How can you not be excited about that?
Anything that we do with it—leaving low Earth orbit again, exploring beyond our home planet—th
at’s what NASA is all about, exploration.
We’ve been going back and forth to low Earth orbit for 50 years now.
We can turn that over to a commercial company and let them do that.
Let’s go off and do something really hard and challenging.
Let’s bring an asteroid back and go visit it.
Let’s eventually go back to the Moon.
Let’s go to Mars.
We can do that. I firmly believe that we have the skills and the ability and the knowledge to go do that.
We just need to make it happen.
Making Kennedy a commercial spaceport—we have an opportunity right now to define what we want our future to be.
How many times in history do you have the opportunity to make your future what you want it to be?
We can sit back and let it happen, and it may not be what we want.
But we can define what it is we want to be and then go make it happen, and we’re doing that.
We’re putting agreements in place with commercial companies
to bring commercial launches here to KSC.
We are diversifying.
We’re not going to rely on a single government program anymore to be successful.
I think that’s hugely exciting. I mean, this is Buck Rogers. This is people flying in space.
And even people ask me, well, what do you think about these guys who are just, XCOR
and *** Galactic and stuff, that are just going up on these parabolic flights for 15 minutes being in space.
I think it’s great!
Anything that generates an interest in space flight, that gets people involved, it’s super.
It’s going to help us even more as we move forward,
to continue to grow and do the hard things that we need to do.
Sieck: When I was involved in shuttle and I would talk to kids, schools,
I’d go around with pictures of launches and landings
and astronauts working in a laboratory
and that sort of thing, and that got the kids interested.
Now what interests the kids is this big photograph I have of a nebulae
that’s so many light years away, taken from the Hubble Telescope.
And I said, “Now, this is out there. We don’t know much about it,
but wouldn’t it be great to be part of a great adventure to find out more about that,
and maybe it would tell us more about ourselves.” That’s what gets their attention now.
Cabana: Look at Kepler.
Look at how many; we’ve already discovered planets that are similar to what we think Earth
is like in that sweet zone up there.
One of my favorite pictures is the Hubble deep field picture,
where on the night sky, go up and look at the Big Dipper sometime and put your little fingernail up
in front of you like that in an area where there is absolutely nothing,
and that’s what Hubble did with the deep field picture.
And what you see is not stars.
You see galaxies. That’s what’s out there. It’s just phenomenal!
Hoffman: Questions from the audience?
One of the other things that I guess that I think about that you’re talking about is
in terms of these challenges, you’ve also both experienced,
you were flying during return to flight, in terms of having to do things,
and we’ve had to make a lot of adjustments to the different missions.
And how do you learn from failure and how do you, I don’t know if you can get comfortable with it,
but, you know, a large part of the advances we make, we make from when things have gone wrong and we get better.
Even, you know, Petroski argues that we only learn, people only learn from failure.
So how do we, I guess, embrace it and move forward, and, you know,
what’s your thoughts in terms of how you’ve learned from failure
and how do you apply it to how you lead and how you lead programs?
Sieck: Well, you have to approach any incident,
you look back at the major tragedies we’ve had and near tragedy in human space flight program.
And your takeaway has to be, well, two things.
One, the response to that and the recovery afterwards always seems to be NASA’s strongest suit.
We go fix the things that were the root cause of the problem and get on with it,
but you have to approach things from the standpoint of when you’re making changes, okay,
what could go wrong with this
before I move ahead with something that’s either an organizational change
or a philosophy change or a requirement change when you’re working down here in the details.
You have to think through the what could go wrong before you make the change.
And I think that’s what we learned from these in the past.
Just specifically prove it safe to fly, as opposed to prove that it’s unsafe.
Hoffman: Is your focus on, your point of focus and understand what is most important.
Sieck: And keep in mind, you know, what you’re trying to do, and NASA classically,
and this is going to happen in transitions too. Transitions are disruptive.
You know, people leave, there is responsibilities change, contractors change,
and NASA in the past and has to in the future provide the continuity from the one program to the other.
NASA has to provide the leadership.
NASA has to take the rough seas and bring them down so that everybody can focus on the new program.
And I think that’s the main lesson learned from all of the issues in the past.
It’s up to the NASA team to make it successful.
And the contractors, they’re all good and they will salute and do whatever the customer wants.
But you’ve got to provide the leadership.
Cabana: Asking the right questions.
I think that’s very important. One thing I learned at Naval Safety School
is that there is no such thing as an accident.
Even an act of God—somebody is struck by lightning out on a golf course.
Well, you shouldn’t have been out on a golf course. All accidents are preventable.
Somewhere along the way, there is something in that chain that could have prevented it.
I got to NASA in June of 1985, and seven months later we had Challenger.
And my perspectives between Challenger and Columbia are hugely different.
I had just come from the Marine Corps,
from four and a half years at Pax River,
where I had been to a number of funerals
for folks that were lost in aircraft accidents, and it was almost, well, this is part of flying.
This is what test flying is about; this is what it’s about.
And I had the office next to those guys, and it was a huge loss.
I mean, Onizuka was one of the nicest guys I ever met, and Judy Resnick was awesome,
and Mike Smith—they were just, they were all just really, really nice people,
but I kind of accepted it as part of the cost of doing business, and it’s not.
And we made hundreds of changes to the orbiter and the whole system after Challenger.
And during Columbia, I was in a little different position.
I was the Director of Flight Crew Operations,
and that was my first crew that I had ridden out to the launch pad with since I had been Chief of the Astronaut Office.
And when I was Chief of the Astronaut Office,
I went out to the launch pad with every flight for those three years.
I never delegated flying weather support for launch or landing to somebody else.
I just wanted to do it myself. And it was much harder assigning people to go to space
and riding out to the launch pad with them than doing it yourself.
I’d much rather take that risk on my own.
And I was out at midfield on the shuttle landing facility that Saturday morning,
waiting for Columbia to come home, and they never came home.
And I look back on the mission management meetings,
everything that led up to that and how that could have been avoided, and what questions weren’t asked.
And so how has it changed me?
You know, I don’t ever want to have to go through that again, ever.
And it is avoidable if you ask the right questions, if you step back and really look at things, and I just, I think it’s really important.
Everybody has a voice. One of the things I really stress at KSC is that everybody
deserves to be heard in the making of a decision,
and if the decision doesn’t go the way you want, you deserve to know why,
And we always have an opportunity to raise it to a higher level if you feel you didn’t get a justifiable answer
as to why it was that way. But the real key is, have you asked all the right questions?
Have you done the right things in order, it’s never going to be 100 percent safe.
This is a risky business we are in.
But we have to understand the risks, mitigate them as best we possibly can, and make sure that
we are taking known risks and not unknown risks.
Hoffman: We have time for one question.
It makes me think you started this,
we have to accept that we’re in control and that there aren’t just accidents. Things don’t happen.
You can control them. But you also started with, you know, good leaders ask questions.
And one of the things I wonder is do you have a favorite question that you will ask your team
or you’ll ask people, you know, as a way to get them to think
or as a way to understand the environment?
Do you have a favorite question?
Cabana: No, I think it kind of depends on what you’re being briefed at the time
and how it’s coming forward. I don’t have a specific question.
It’s kind of unique to the situation and the problem that you’re dealing with.
Sieck: Mine always was have you had enough time to look at all the data associated
with this and turn that into information in your mind.
There is a difference between data and information,
and do you have enough information to state your position or your recommendation?
Because if you don’t, we’ll give you more time.
Hoffman: Okay. Well, the crew here is telling me that we’re out of time.
And so it’s been fascinating. We covered a lot of different things. You’ve had incredible careers.
You continue to do that.
So we thank. I think Bob and Bob.
It’s been a wonderful hour.
And I also want to thank Bob again for supporting this week of Masters with Masters
and the Kennedy leadership, and in particular, Lisa Malone
and the great team from Public Affairs, NASA TV
and the Kennedy Chief Knowledge Officer, Michael Bell,
for helping to sponsor and set this up.
And I thank you all for joining us, so thank you.
Cabana: Thank you.
[Applause]