Safety Messages

This Jan. 28, marks the 35th anniversary of the Challenger accident. The loss of the crew was a tragedy felt by their families, friends and coworkers at the agency, as well as people throughout the world.

The Challenger accident taught us tough lessons and brought forward what have become recognizable phrases: normalization of deviance, organizational silence and silent safety program. Sadly, we learned these lessons again in 2003 with the loss of Columbia and her crew. This shows how vital it is that we pause to revisit these lessons and never let them be forgotten. We cannot become complacent. 

In this month's Safety Message, Harmony Myers, director of the NASA Safety Center, discusses the Challenger accident and the lessons it continues to teach us today.

As explorers and scientists, we at NASA have been making risk trades since the beginning. This safety message illustrates risk trades such as taking one risk versus another risk, as compared to taking a risk to gain a benefit. Which option seems to give the best opportunity to succeed? When decisions are time-critical and you have minutes or seconds to decide, the first workable option based upon experience (training and operations), skill, and systems knowledge can save the day.

When hours, days or months can be used to make a risk trade, use your time to gather as much information as possible to make the best-informed decision. Johnson Space Center’s Safety and Mission Assurance Associate Director Nigel Packham reveals exactly how this was done to achieve the first moon landing.

As many of you have heard me say, I believe that taking care of your people is essential to success. I’ve told the story that in the U.S. Marine Corps, all leaders are asked to do two things: accomplish the mission and take care of your people. Usually, this is followed with “If you do No. 2, your people will take care of No. 1.”

An important part of taking care of your people and accomplishing your mission, is ensuring, throughout your organization, people feel comfortable speaking up, without fear of reprisal. We have seen first-hand the effects fear of reprisal can have on a culture, as it was a theme for both the Challenger and Columbia mishaps, and we need to ensure that we’ve learned from our past and cultivate an environment where speaking up is not just accepted, but applauded. We also need to look at the ways we engage and include all members of the NASA family.

I encourage you to review all the data available in the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey and consider how you can enact positive change at every level in your organization to create an open, safe environment for everyone.

For the success of our programs and projects and the safety of our people, it is essential that the lessons of Apollo 1, Challenger and Columbia guide our actions every day. It’s also important that we set aside time every year to remember those lost in these tragic accidents; this year’s Day of Remembrance is Feb. 7, 2019. One way we can learn from these accidents is to share not only NASA’s lessons learned, but also our personal lessons learned. 

This month, an inspirational TED Talk by former NASA Director of Mission Operations Paul Hill reminds us as managers and leaders to be “deliberate.” This means to be thorough when balancing our management of cost, schedule, technical and safety risk. He discusses the role leadership, values and culture have in enabling NASA to meet our mission, and what happens when we lose sight of those values and allow our culture to drift. It’s necessary to use the same commitment to excellence that we used as employees before becoming managers and inspire the organization to commit to the values that make it great.

In February 2016, the University of Hawaii had an incident where a highly reactive mix of pressurized gases within a high-pressure tank encountered a spark, likely from static electricity. As a result, the tank was blown apart, seriously injuring the researcher and causing significant equipment damage.

While this incident didn’t happen at NASA, we should ask, have we protected our pressure systems from similar risk? In this month’s Safety Message, Steve Lilley, senior safety engineer from the NASA Safety Center, briefs the recent System Failure Case Study on this incident, including how NASA can learn from this major mishap.

If you were having surgery, you would hope your surgeon was coming in well-rested and focused on the job — after all, your life is in her hands. While we may not be performing life-and-death surgeries, that doesn’t mean our employees lives aren’t in our hands. It’s essential that we all check on our employees and make sure they are fully prepared for the job at hand each and every day — whether that’s ensuring reasonable shifts, making sure everyone is up-to-speed coming off a shift change or checking on an employee’s ability to continue working after an incident. It's part of taking care of your people.

In this month’s Safety Message, Safety and Mission Assurance Director for Stennis Space Center Freddie Douglas III will present “Did You Check on Your Team?” with tips on how to assure a safe, productive and efficient work place.

After years of important warnings, we are now all aware of the dangers of traditional smoking. But what about vaping? Is it still risky despite the lack of tobacco? Are there still dangerous chemicals I could inhale second hand?

Vaping is the act of inhaling water vapor through a personal vaporizer or electronic cigarette. While this is a newer trend, there are some interesting statistics about their use, as well as some pros and cons. In this month’s Safety Message, Dr. Vince Michaud, deputy chief health and medical officer, discusses this information, governmental regulations and NASA's policies on vaping, as well as the agency's smoking cessation programs at center clinics. 

Your coworker collapses. Your boss falls and hits her head. An intern cuts his hand. What would you do?

The first few minutes after a serious injury are critical. While it’s only natural to feel a moment of shock, your quick thinking and ability to respond can help save the life of an injured person. You are the first responder.

This month’s Safety Message walks you through how the body responds to an emergency situation as well as what you should do should you ever be the first responder on the scene. These scenarios have happened: We’ve seen storms strike several of our centers that threaten to injure our employees and employees have collapsed on the job due to medical conditions. Eventually, these things, and more, will happen again. Are you ready?

In this time of high-energy research and testing, we need to learn from every example where planning and execution fell short of safety expectations. I am grateful to the U.S. Air Force for publishing its legal investigations of major mishaps. This month, we see a flight test mishap involving an AC-130J special operations aircraft.

This aircraft test flight story explores handling qualities at the edge of controllability under aircraft sideslip, or yaw. I encourage you to look beyond the military aircraft mission. Consider your process of test design, approval and conduct when people are at risk or Class A project hardware is being qualified for flight. When is exposure to risk needful and when does it become needless? How many data samples yield high confidence while sensibly managing risk exposure to crew? In this case, the crew had to explore the edge of an aircraft’s yaw envelope 183 times — on the final time it departed controlled flight and flipped inverted, yet fortunately held together to carry its crew to a safe landing — but the overstressed airframe was a total loss.

Does your test planning equip operators and crew to react to serious and possible off-nominal scenarios? Are there important safety data that exist but are hidden beyond your reach by a contract or proprietary agreement?