Michelle Lear-Combs

Facility System Safety Working Group Lead

Michelle Lear-Combs serves as the working group lead and Institutional Safety delegate for Construction Safety and Fall Protection for NASA’s Office of Safety and Mission Assurance. In this role, she provided instrumental support of the development of the fall protection standard, as well as multiple sections of NPR 8715.3, NASA General Safety Program Requirements. She also serves as the program manager for several safety programs at Wallops Flight Facility, including Facility System Safety and Construction Safety and Fall Protection, which she has done since 2016. Her responsibilities include facility code compliance, fall protection program administrator, construction site safety, building inspections and many others. She leads a team of inspectors to inspect facilities at Wallops, as well as other sites throughout the U.S. She also leads the Wallops Executive Safety and Health Committee meetings where safety concerns are discussed with senior management.

Prior to beginning her federal career, Lear-Combs worked since 2007 as a pressure systems and lifting device engineer for a NASA support contractor at Wallops. Her responsibilities included pressure system and pressure vessel analysis, testing and inspection of pressure system and lifting device components, crane operator training, and test procedure writing.

Before coming to Wallops to support the NASA mission, Lear-Combs worked in the private sector as a project engineer for a major commercial construction firm on the eastern shore of Maryland. Her responsibilities included project bidding, procurement/contracting, estimating, Quality Assurance, and safety and project management for multimillion-dollar construction projects.

Lear-Combs graduated from Salisbury University in Salisbury, Maryland, with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics. She is a mother to three young daughters. She is an officer of the Wallops Fitness Club and is active in the Wallops running community. Previously, she served on the Wallops New and Developing Professionals Advisory Committee and was a member of the Women of Wallops.

Jose Caraballo 

Facility System Safety Program Executive

Jose Caraballo is the Office of Safety and Mission Assurance Facility System Safety program executive and liaison to the Aircraft Management Division.

Caraballo has worked at Langley Research Center for over 23 years. He served as the deputy director of the Safety and Mission Assurance Office since 2015; in this role he served as the center occupational health officer and also was responsible for overseeing the Center Clinic operations and to make sure that personnel were receiving the proper care required by law and NASA. 

In 2020, when the COVID-19 virus created a worldwide pandemic, Caraballo’s role realigned to provide center management with information, guidance and recommendations regarding the pandemic. He had to work closely with the center chief medical officer, agency medical groups and other agencies to ensure that the center was following the latest guidelines and requirements to prevent an outbreak of the pandemic within Langley.

Prior to these roles, Caraballo served as the center safety manager, beginning in 2006. In this role he led the Safety and Facility Assurance Branch to ensure the proper implementation of center, agency and federal requirements for mishap investigations, fire and rescue, emergency preparedness and continuity of operations, and occupational safety and industrial hygiene. Late, he worked with the new Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) research group that will be developing and building UAVs and testing their safety software in an indoors facility.

Before becoming the safety manager, Caraballo supported Langley’s Mission Assurance Branch as a System Safety engineer. In this position, he served as the Product Assurance Manager (PAM) for the CALIPSO program from 2001 to 2006. As the PAM, he was responsible for ensuring program success through the implementation of System Safety, Operational Safety, Reliability, Software Assurance and Quality assurance disciplines. This program was a joint venture with the French Space Agency and it required his leadership to coordinate the implementation of the mission assurance requirements with the French Space Agency and its contractor, the Langley team and Ball Aerospace, Kennedy Space Center-Vandenberg, NASA Headquarters, and Goddard Space Flight Center. As the safety engineer in the branch, he worked with the aviation system safety officer to review procedures for aviation operations to identify risks, hazards and mitigations. 

Caraballo worked at Kennedy for seven years as a Facility System Safety engineer in the Industrial Safety Branch. In this role, he developed and implemented policies and procedures regarding the Kennedy Industrial and Payloads Safety programs. He reviewed facility designs and modifications to ensure compliance with center, agency, federal and industry standards to protect personnel from harm and facilities from damage. He investigated and evaluated contractors’ and NASA organizations’ mishaps and their Corrective Actions to prevent reoccurrence. He also evaluated payload packages in support of the Ground Safety Review Panel.

Caraballo started his career working for the U.S. Army as a safety engineer for the Aviation Systems Command. In that role, he was the safety engineer for several aircrafts, which included all the fixed wing aircraft, CH-47 (Chinock), special operations aircraft and the special projects Ground Support Equipment. In this position, he was required to review designs and upgrades and airworthiness flight releases for those aircraft. He conducted operations reviews and audits to ensure compliance with Army regulation. His role as a System Safety engineer was to ensure that the aircrafts were able to meet the operations requirements safely.

Caraballo received his master’s in engineering management from the University of Central Florida in 1994 and his bachelor’s in industrial engineering from the University of Puerto Rico in 1986. He has received numerous awards, including the NASA Outstanding Leadership Medal (2012).

Every NASA center has a Facility Safety Management Point of Contact (PoC). For more information, contact the PoC at your center.