Welcome And What’s Ahead

Tom Mueller 0:06

Hey everyone and welcome back to the Leading in a Crisis Podcast. On today's episode, we have part three of our continuing conversation with James Hartsfield, who is the former director of communications for NASA's Johnson Space Center. On today's episode, we continue talking about the agency's response to the Space Shuttle Columbia incident, where the shuttle broke apart upon re-entry into Earth's atmosphere. We also dive into other crisis situations that the space agency has faced over the years. There's some interesting insights James offers into some of those, including a shooting that occurred down at the Johnson Space Center and an astronaut that went a little crazy in a love triangle. And finally, we talked to James about communicating when partners are involved. Recall the Boeing Starliner incident where there were some issues with the Starliner delivering astronauts into space. James gives us some deep insight into what was happening behind the scenes for that incident. So thank you for being with us for this episode. Let's rejoin that conversation with James now. So, James, that was some pretty horrific times there. What else do you remember about your after actions on after Columbia?

Handing Comms To The Investigation

Return To Flight And Closure

Partner Comms And Proprietary Limits

James Hartsfield 1:33

So that first week we had the press conferences in Houston, and the primary release of information was really from the shuttle program management. I will they also had a press conference from Washington, but uh but it was kind of uh secondary to the Houston one, which was giving out really all the all the information. It was just that the venue of Washington they felt required one because of all the news networks headquartered there. Um but uh of course we had hundreds of media that that converged on Houston and were there um you know at the press conferences. But uh after a week, uh the Columbia Accident Investigation Board had been formed, which was that was part of the plan for NASA to form an investigation board uh that was developed after Challenger. Um and when they were uh formed, they really took over communications, right? Because and I and I agree, it would have been inappropriate for NASA to independently be giving out information about findings from the accident, and uh NASA was being uh you know subject to the investigation, right? So we did not provide information unless requested by the board to do something, or uh we asked some special ministers to it. There was a NASA public affairs person that helped support the board. Um, and uh so they they didn't do a lot of press conferences. Uh they kept communications fairly minimal too, but that was okay at that point because I think, like I said, the first impressions and the openness had been set early in the first week. People understood the investigation taking place. A couple of other things on that first week I will mention is uh as as my reintroduction to NASA had been in the first place uh much earlier, right after Challenger, where I went to the memorial service that Ronald Reagan had at uh Houston. Um, you know, there was a similar memorial service held uh after Columbia um that uh um the president uh Bush came to uh and headed. And on that day, I lobbied very hard that we don't do a press conference in Houston, which which everyone agreed with because it just didn't was not appropriate, right? That was a day for the memorial, and um, and so we didn't do a press conference that day. Um and then the other thing I want to say is that uh I worked with I don't know, probably a half a dozen shuttle program managers over the years I was at NASA. Um probably the closest person I had ever worked with, and this was prior to Columbia, that I had the best uh working relationship, was uh the program manager during Columbia, Ron Didamore. Um, but I'd been working with him for a couple of years before the accident, um uh through a lot of shuttle missions, doing a lot of talking points and these kind of things. But um had a really good working relationship, a good trust established. That's critical. I think to have uh trust established um with your leadership, um, between uh communications and leadership, a person. I mean, I I'm sure you can get through a crisis without it, but uh, but boy, it's a hard place to build that trust and uh that uh belief in competency um during a crisis. You go into a crisis with that, it's much better. And I will say the same about the media. NASA's relationship with the media goes back and forth. It had gone back and forth many times over even small shuttle flights or issues that had happened between Challenger and Columbia as to whether we were being forthcoming and straightforward and answering things. Um there was a at times now and then there's a uh they use NASA as an acronym for never a straight answer in a essay, you know. So sometimes I want that crazy, but um, but it was good at the time. And uh and so you know that's that's critical because you're not gonna you you want to preserve your integrity and your credibility in a crisis uh with all forms of media and all the audiences you're communicating with, your employees first and foremost, your your uh uh stakeholders, elected officials, and the media and the public. Um so you want to maintain your integrity. But are you gonna build integrity and credibility during that time? Probably not. You'd be best to go into that time with some level of credibility and integrity. If you're going into that time with already a big shadow of doubt hanging over you in terms of your transparency, um you're gonna have uh order of magnitude more difficulty in the situation. So we were fortunate to have that at the time, and and that uh that helped a lot. And then uh one more thing, I mean before we get out of Columbia here, is that uh the crisis, you know, uh communications right, and eventually the Columbia Accident Innovation Board found that the foam had hit the wing and that had caused improved it through testing that they did out in San Antonio. Still remember when the first test happened that actually shattered that reinforced carbon to carbon. It was just uh a jaw-dropping moment. I'd gone to some of the testing out there, had uh seen it, and and um, and I got that call that that had occurred. That was a jaw-dropping moment to see that that could actually occur. And um and and then you know, the plan was made how are we gonna return the shuttle to flight, um, which was we were not flying for several years after Columbia, and then we we developed a plan where NASA developed a plan it could inspect the heat shield, it could do some repairs on the heat shield if needed. Um, you know, the foam. We tried to stop the foam from coming off the tank, although that's a really almost impossibility to do. We did do a lot to keep the gas which got underneath it and leveraged it off to stop that from happening. So we felt we resolved a lot of it, improved the imagery, you know. I think all of those things uh uh returned to flight. Safely, we said we wouldn't fly anywhere but the station, so that the crew had a way, if there was damage, that they didn't have to return on the shuttle. Um, they could stay on the station and return in another fashion. Um, all of those things were precautions to return to flight. And that crisis communications was not resolved until we had returned to flight.

Tom Mueller 7:37

Well, James, I was just thinking about some of the other incidents that have happened with contractors. You know, I think about Starliner and some of the mishaps that they've had getting payloads up to orbit. Of course, you know, you've been there watching all of that. Is there a special coordination that happens when you've got a you know a Boeing Starliner going up versus you know a NASA rocket? How complex does that get?

Starliner And The Stranded Narrative

James Hartsfield 8:05

So, yeah, probably not a short answer here for you, but it it's it's very different. Very different over the course of my career, things got very different, right? It uh and it started. I'm gonna get to Boeing and to SpaceX, but um really it started with we had international cooperation on the shuttle. We flew astronauts from many different countries on shuttle missions, and so we had to work with those space agencies, but it was not that those space agencies were a part of the program in the way that they became a part of the program with the International Space Station, right? International space station was a whole different animal. I ended up in I went to Russia for three months as we were doing Russia uh Shuttle Mirror, the precursor to the space station, and and worked with the Russians uh in communications on that. You know, that's hard, right? To to work with other countries and and uh you know to work with Russia on communications for it. Um, you know, you we have our tenets of transparency and forthcomingness with the media and the public doesn't necessarily hold true in other nations, you know. And uh they're their sovereign nation, so they can they'll do what they want. So we had to reach accords with them to decide what we do. Now, I I'm this is not in a bad way, but I'm saying that helped prepare for commercial spaceflight because very similar with commercial companies, right? They have good reasons to not have total transparency. They they have proprietary information, you know, they have developed systems, put in a lot of money into those systems. Um, they can't give away all the information about them. So the amount of information they can release, there's not gonna be an 800-page book on a Boeing spacecraft or on a SpaceX spacecraft like the shuttle was that is available to anybody to go pull out. You know, that's not gonna happen. Um so we have to find the common ground that preserves that integrity and and has the transparency to allow that integrity. NASA astronauts are flying on these spacecrafts, so that demands a degree of openness and transparency with things if there are issues. Um, but yeah, very different and more complicated than it was um when it was just NASA, right? And but but not totally different than it was for NASA to develop a huge international program like the International Space Station. In fact, you know, there's a lot of weird similarities about it because they they they both affect that basic, what used to be a single one-horse show that could do anything it wanted, and now we had to find common ground. But that said, I think the the foundations of good communications um from a commercial company perspective and from NASA not dissimilar, right? Those are pretty basic that what you need to do. So you build on those, but you do have to respect the proprietary nature of things. Um I I think uh in terms of a crisis like the Starliner, you know, that was difficult, right? And and uh and Boeing had certainly done a large amount of communications practice for crises, and uh they followed that um to a degree. They did they didn't technically, I don't think they agreed with what NASA found about Starliner in real time um during its last mission. Um so that created differences beyond the communications department, I think, um, that were reflected sometimes in the communications.

Tom Mueller 11:37

But the whole thing about the Starliner mission and the and the widely reported, you know, stranded crew on the space station, to me was an inaccurate reporting, mainly, because let's look at at uh the James Starliner recap for our uh audiences who may not be familiar, uh, but the Starliner was used to take crew up to the space station. Yeah, it had it occurred some uh small operational anomalies, but got the crew there safely. But then the decision became what?

James Hartsfield 12:17

Well, so Starliner, you know, it was the first flight of the spacecraft with crew on it. Just like uh we had had the first flight of the Dragon spacecraft for SpaceX with crew, and it was it was successful, you know, when the crew came back on the dragon. But but on both of those, those were the first time that NASA had flown a spacecraft for the first time, a test spacecraft flight, and had an option to not return the crew on the spacecraft. Artemis II just finished. There was no option. If there was some something wrong, the crew was going to come back on that spacecraft no matter what. You know, there's nowhere to go. But we had the option to basically change mid-mission by keeping the crew on the space station. That was known from the start. And it's a blessing. It's a great thing to have that luxury in a test flight. Um, and uh just like you have an abort capability at launch. Here you had an abort mid-flight if you needed it, right? To stay on the station. You know, to me, it was not surprising that when there were some thruster issues that developed on the way to the station, the decision was made to keep the crew on station and bring the spacecraft home without the crew to see how it performed. Now, the spacecraft came back and landed fine. And we could have brought that crew back. NASA could have brought that crew back from the space station pretty much right away on a different spacecraft, on the on the Soyuz or on a dragon. Um they could have brought them back. Had you done that, you would have impacted the station's ability to get all of the research done that it was planning. You would have impacted the ability to have a full crew complement on the station in the future because he would have interrupted the flow of spacecraft. So the decision was made to keep them on station long enough that we could bring them home without a big interruption to that. And the crew knew that was a possibility all along. But the whole media circus of here's a crew stranded in space, that's a prime example of, you know, you can never forget that the media exists to make money, you know, and uh from those small newspapers that media exists to sell groceries and furniture and have all those inserts that come in the paper, you know, or or commercials on broadcast or pop-ups that show up on your social media feed. That's what drives media. So if they're gonna come up with a story that they can get away with, it creates a lot of clicks, a lot of viewership, the price for their ads go up, they make more money. It's you know, used and we didn't have as much of the space-based media to deal with then too that we could basically that were traditionally covering us all the time to help us accurately report the story. So, you know, that story was wide, and it and it to me it was largely inaccurate that the crew was just stranded there because they weren't. It was a it was a deliberate decision and a deliberate decision to not exercise the means needed to bring them home right away, and the crew was well aware that that could happen. And it was actually a great thing that we had that ability on a test flight to do that because we never had usually had that before.

Tom Mueller 15:12

Um but the stranded astronauts made such a great story, right?

James Hartsfield 15:17

You know, if there's a great headline, sometimes it's and this is where it's hard to tell people sometimes that you're doing what you can. We don't want to go too far into combating it because then you're gonna if you if you try to fight it, there's a point where you fight it so hard that again you're throwing away your integrity, you know. Yeah, and and and actually the more you fight it, the the more the story takes off, you know. You also you go back to fan the flame, the fire's gonna get bigger. Um, so that's a challenge with management when you have to talk to them and say we just gotta weather things a little bit and uh and let it work, you know. And uh that that was tough, right?

Astronaut Scandal And Workplace Violence

Tom Mueller 16:01

Yeah.

James Hartsfield 16:02

It was one of but the other crises we were gonna, I I think that I would mention, you know, there was that, there were crises that weren't in space that we ended up dealing with. And when you look at crisis communications, right, they're image crises that I guess I would say that are common, I think, among organizations. But for us, the the huge one, and it was such a shocking was um astronaut uh Lisa Nowak, you know, was uh arrested in Florida at an airport after she drove cross-country um attempting to um assault, abduct a a uh girlfriend of a fellow astronaut that she had the whole love triangle thing going on.

Tom Mueller 16:40

Yeah, involving an astronaut, yeah.

James Hartsfield 16:42

That was a totally show, you know, we walked in one day and were just shocked with the arrest uh warnings from that, you know. I think uh, you know, that was uh one of those stories that's a great story, right? For headlines, you know, it was very um the the overall perception at NASA was it was just a very sad situation, you know. And um, and there was not a lot of crisis communications to be done, that we were treating everything with respect, that we are uh that we, you know, we felt uh our heartfelt um empathy went out to everyone involved, you know. That was the biggest statement we could give right away. We wouldn't comment on the veracity of anything that was alleged because it was a matter for the courts and for the authorities. Um, you know, so there was no we didn't have a communications plan, a contingency plan that was in effect for that, you know. We we had to pull that as we go. And uh in hindsight, I don't think you can really create one for that necessarily very much.

Tom Mueller 17:48

You know, James, I think about the uh you remember the cold play concert Kiss Cam, where the uh CEO and HR manager for a company called Astronomy were caught sort of fraternizing together, right? They're both married, but not to each other. And um, yeah, so think about the company now that suddenly finds itself front and center in this ethical and uh brand-related crisis. There's no plan for that, right?

Take The High Road And Wrap

James Hartsfield 18:18

And um so it's to your point, you just I would say the best plan for that, Tom, is take the high road always, you know. Take the highest road you can on it, you know, and that's the empathy and and and then uh you know that I think they they let go the person, right? And we eventually uh it was uh she was actually with the Navy. Um so she went back to the Navy and then the Navy did their thing with with her. Um, but um but you know it from the NASA perspective, it did show one thing, which was that uh astronauts are human, right? Astronauts have always been placed up on a and they don't like it. They get placed up on a pedestal as uh superhuman heroes, but uh you know, everybody is human, everybody's subject to the same things that happen to all humans, right? And they're all fallible and and and there's sad things that happen with humans, and there's a lot of sad things that happen with human relationships, and uh that's that's the way it is. Um, the other thing, and this was a very human thing that and a very shocking thing that was never in vision to happen, that we had happen um in 2007. Both these were in 2007, it was a tough year on the ground. Um, and uh it was a uh workplace violence incident, right? That uh we had a contractor um at uh the Johnson Space Center who uh took uh hostages and barricaded himself in an engineering building. Um and uh that was just a total shock. I mean, that was in the middle of the day, came back from lunch, and suddenly the site is locked down. Um we had no contingency plan to deal with that, right? Uh that said the dealing with that uh in itself from a external relations point of view is pretty simple is let the police do their job, you know. And they did, and and and so sadly, uh uh that person was killed, two two people actually, because the the the person committed suicide and killed a person. But um our role mostly in that was the internal communications following it because it's a huge workforce issue and to deal with and and then we certainly so that was really first and foremost, but and that was and we had great leadership, uh Senator Director Mike Coates at the time that helped work that uh and was really focused on it um for us to implement his plans to improve communications internally as a result of it. Which when uh uh the external world sees you doing that, in that instance, taking care of your people and your company in the way you need to, it's good press. Not because you were trying to get the good press, it's just because you were doing the right thing. Which I'll I'll go back to too is you can well, I'm I was gonna say you can hardly ever, but I'll say you you you can never go wrong, in my opinion. And and unfortunately, I think a lot of people don't always do. They look at what is gonna be the best outcome in communications, what's gonna be the best outcome in the media, what gets printed well, what will they follow. But honestly, just doing the right thing, which we all learned back in kindergarten, you know, what what is right, what is wrong, you know, doing the right thing is is usually gonna succeed in the long run, at least, you know. I mean it I think it will always succeed in the long run. It may not be the shortest route to good press right at the start, right? But in the long run, it's gonna be your best bet, you know, and you're gonna feel better about yourself when you do it, probably.

Tom Mueller 21:50

But we like to say always get caught doing the right thing. Yes, right. Yeah, there's a gotcha moment and they caught you doing the right thing.

James Hartsfield 21:59

It seems easy. Don't it? It seems easy, but when you're in a situation with people and with managers and with a lot of counsel in there that's helping you and this kind of thing, and and I I empathize with with the top leadership of uh uh organization, right? It's not easy, you know, it's hard. And uh I do know being in with leaders that said we're doing the right thing, but but I'll never make it through this because I'm gonna get canned and and I'm I'm gone, and and sure enough, that kind of thing happens. But um didn't stop them from doing the right thing, right? So it's uh it's hard, but I think for the organizations it's best. Probably best for the individual too, even if they have consequences.

Tom Mueller 22:42

Always get caught doing the right thing. You just can't get wrong with it.

James Hartsfield 22:45

I like that saying.

Tom Mueller 22:47

All right. Well, James, it's been a heck of a conversation here. So thank you for taking time to come out and join us here on the podcast. Uh, lots of great stories there that I know our listeners are just gonna love taking in. So thank you for taking time to be with us.

James Hartsfield 23:04

Well, it's my pleasure, Tom. It's it's really good talking to you again, and uh, I know we'll be staying in touch, but uh but uh also great to talk about NASA because this has just been a great, a great, great time for NASA and a great time for NASA communications. I I can they uh like I said, right people at the right place at the right time. And I was the right place because I was a spectator and it was wonderful to watch because I wouldn't have gotten to go, you know, had I been working there, I wouldn't have gotten to go to launch, man. I would have stayed in Houston. So I loved it. And uh and it's go NASA. Good time. Go NASA.

Tom Mueller 23:36

And that's gonna do it for this episode of the Leading in a Crisis Podcast. Thanks for being with us. And again, if you want to drop me an email, that's Tom at leadingin a crisis dot com. And we'll see you again soon for another episode. Take care!