Dr. Charles Camarda on Research, Organizational Culture, and Going to Space

Dr. Charles Camarda has a resume that scares the heck out of me because there are so many technical elements of his background in research engineering that I know that I can butcher a lot of these words because it’s basically like speaking Chinese to me. I love this conversation because it’s actually not about a lot of the technical background that Dr. Camarda brings to it. You have Dr. Camarda, and you have Charlie. And I think this conversation was really with Charlie. He will seem down to earth the entire time, but just know the background is pretty wild. He has over 45 years of experience at NASA as a researcher, he worked at the Langley Research Center, and worked on numerous teams to develop and analyze and test advanced thermal structure systems for hypersonic vehicles such as the space shuttle. This is someone who is highly technical. He holds 9 patents over 20 national and international awards for his research. He is someone who is a scientist and cares deeply about creating culture and people around research. A lot of today is his challenging of NASA and their inability to bring a research culture forward and his concerns about that. A lot of those concerns stem from him witnessing the Columbia disaster, which happened in the early 2000s, that killed 7 people on board. The space shuttle disintegrated on its way back to Earth. At the time, Charlie was planning, prepping, and training to be an astronaut, which he ended up doing. He was part of the first mission to leave earth and go into space after the Columbia disaster. He has such a unique perspective having been in the lab and researching and spending time as a research engineer to try to understand how space shuttles need to work and how they need to properly prepare and test and make sure that things are the way that they should be, and then he’s also had the view of being in space. He’s going to talk about some of the mistrust that the astronauts had with their mission control and what that led to from a team functioning dynamic. He calls out some of the lack of strong culture that existed at NASA while he was there, and it is a good reminder for all of us to think deeply about our culture, with whatever organization we are in, and what are we doing to try to allow people to have the psychological safety to raise their hand and voice concerns. You are going to love Charlie, he cares deeply about culture, we talk a lot about organizational culture in today’s conversation, so much so that you’re going to hear me try to bring him back to his astronaut experience because I just think it’s so unique and it’s an experience that so few of us have. But, I do think the culture element that he discusses is so critical for all of us to think about and think about how we can intentionally positively impact the environments that we are in.

Dr. Camarda had a number of amazing insights during our conversation. Some of them include:

“The same people that made these bad decisions were extremely arrogant” (9:00).

“As a crew, we came together and said we can handle this” (12:25).

“We’re ready to fly. We will accept the risk” (15:00).

“There’s a big difference between researchers, research engineers, and engineers” (17:20).

“If something didn’t look right, they would ask probing questions” (24:05).

“The primary cause of [the Columbia disaster] was NASA’s culture” (26:25).

“I could sit at a meeting and I could tell the people in the room that were afraid to raise their hand. I could see the fear on their faces” (27:50).

“If we don’t correct these problems and go back to our past culture, our research-type culture, we are going to lose the race to the moon” (31:20).

“The entire senior management at NASA is we are going to do the bare minimum to meet the requirements” (36:50).

“NASA had no intention of fixing its culture” (37:40).

“Culture is very difficult to change” (49:40).

“More than 80% of companies that try to transform their culture fail” (49:45)

“I always wanted to be an astronaut” (53:05).

“If you have a fear, the way Charlie Camarda gets over that fear… [is to] face it head on” (1:03:20).

“I was not nervous at all [on launch day] because we were totally prepared” (1:04:50).

“The thing that I got the most joy from was working together with our team on the ground and our team on orbit” (1:07:15).

“The most rewarding aspect of flying into space is the amazing people you get to share the experience with” (1:10:10).

“If we don’t fix this culture, NASA and the United States will not be the number one country in space” (1:12:15).

“Let’s bring the data to the table and let’s learn together” (1:17:55).

“If it can happen to NASA, it can happen to any place” (1:21:35).

Additionally, you can check out Charlie’s podcast, Leading Edge Discovery, on any podcast platform. You can also find his website here and connect with him on LinkedIn.

Thank you so much to Dr. Camarda for coming on the podcast!

I wrote a book called “Shift Your Mind” that was released in October of 2020, and you can order it on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Additionally, I have launched a company called Strong Skills, and I encourage you to check out our new website https://www.strongskills.co/. If you liked this episode and/or any others, please follow me on Twitter: @brianlevenson or Instagram: @Intentional_Performers.

Thanks for listening.