Thank you, Audrey (Powers), for that introduction, and thank you to the Commercial Spaceflight Federation and General Monteith for inviting me here today to talk about two of my favorite topics—safety and space.

If you ever need to remind yourselves of what an amazing time we’re living in, consider this: About a month ago, NASA experienced a weather delay for one of its aircraft. Now weather delays are certainly not unusual, but this was first time they had to ground a flight due to weather ... on another planet. 

The Ingenuity helicopter was set to take off on its 19th flight...Everyone was hoping for a “Go,” but a strong Mars dust storm made them reconsider. The great news is that the weather cleared out last week, and NASA put flight 19 into the logbooks. Here’s to flight 20!

Here’s another reminder of how amazing this moment is —On a bright clear Saturday morning in December, six civilians climbed into a Blue Origin capsule in West Texas, strapped in and launched into space on the New Shepard rocket. 

One of those onboard was Laura Shepard Churchley, the eldest daughter of the first American in space—Alan Shepard. Ten minutes later, they touched down gently under three massive parachutes and a cushion of air. This was spaceflight made simple…Exhilarating to be sure, but to the casual observer, someone hit the Easy button and on went the show.  

We’ve seen the youngest in space, the eldest in space, football players, billionaires and Captain Kirk himself. We’ve also seen three companies provide three different human spaceflight experiences. 

Through advances in commercial space transportation, we’ve made it so space is no longer the realm of governments. Through the public-private partnerships forged by the commercial space model, NASA in many cases has become one of several customers of the commercial space industry, allowing the agency to save on costs and focus on furthering space research and exploration beyond Earth orbit.

Last year was a record year for commercial space, an average of more than one launch or reentry per week. Five of those launches and reentries had people onboard, but they were not NASA missions. This year looks to be another record-breaking year. 

All of these activities occurred safely, for both participants and members of the public. That’s proof that it’s simple, right? 

Well we all know it’s not. Churchley and her fellow space travelers went through about 20 hours of instruction and 20 simulator rides to prep for the 10-minute flight. 

They experienced one launch scrub because of weather—just as her father did back in 1961. Churchley later said the training was intense, but that she was “cool as a cucumber on launch day” because of it. 

Space is uplifting. It’s majestic. It gets in your blood. The Mars missions and Ingenuity helicopter are certainly in mine.

But the second we treat it as simple and commonplace—and let launch fever take over—it can bite back with extreme vengeance. 

We’ve all seen it, and we all know we must avoid it at all costs. It’s not about hoping we get it right, it’s about living and breathing by tools that were built from the trials and tribulations of those who came before us.

In March 1961, Churchley’s father was supposed to have been the first human in space. But the NASA team had a problem—they had seen some anomalous data on a January flight that lofted a chimpanzee named Ham safely into space and back. They believed in the data. And despite massive public pressure to launch Shepard, NASA instead launched an empty capsule on March 24, 1961. 

NASA figured out the issue, but the delay allowed Soviet Union cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin to be the first human into space on April 12, 1961. 

Three weeks later, on May 5, Shepard went into space on the Mercury Redstone. President John F. Kennedy was so impressed and confident that a few weeks later, he made the commitment that the U.S. would travel to the moon by the end of that decade. 

Now we have no idea if Shepard could have in fact accomplished that March launch, but we do know that the U.S. ultimately was the first to the moon. 

Hard choices were made back in early 1961, and they were made for the right reasons, despite launch fever. 

NASA was in uncharted territory....they were writing the rules as they went. One thing that is clear from historic accounts even from the Mercury days, is that the seeds of a positive safety culture had been planted. Of course, we wouldn’t call it safety culture for a few more decades. 

Launch technicians from that era, when interviewed about the first person in space, said the NASA team had instilled a culture of not punishing people for mistakes if they admitted making errors—a fundamental ingredient for a healthy safety culture. 

“We got rid of a lot of our problems, what we called ‘phantoms’, by owning up to mistakes,” recalled one of the former technicians in an Air & Space magazine article from 2012. 

He told of one incident where a rocket on the launch pad experienced a power glitch. It turned out that a janitor had mistakenly disconnected—then reconnected—a power cable while he was cleaning the trenches where the wires were laid. The janitor reported what he had done. 

“We would have ended up replacing all the cables if that janitor hadn’t told us what he had done,” the technician said. What’s more, even though the janitor’s company wanted to fire him for the incident, the team insisted that he be kept on. They had his back.

That’s how a healthy safety culture works—If you’re treated fairly for doing the right thing, you’ll do the right thing next time too...When people are free to disclose, we know what’s happening in the system and we can correct the system. 

Otherwise we operate at our peril. 

Even with the seeds of a positive Safety Culture in place, not everything went smoothly for NASA.—We all know about the tragedy of Apollo 1 in 1967, when three astronauts were killed by a cabin fire during a ground test. 

We all know about the almost tragedy of Apollo 13, and the loss of the Space Shuttle Challenger crew in another case of launch fever. The Challenger accident, along with other disasters of the 1980s, is widely recognized as one of the triggering events for the development of modern Safety Culture principles. 

For Challenger, investigators determined that schedule pressure was allowed to overrule a “safety first” attitude. 

With a positive safety culture, productivity and safety do not compete one for one. But rather, safety is seen as part of the DNA of a sustainable organization. 

And here’s where I take off my astronaut helmet and put on my FAA hard hat.

Our commercial space industry is going gangbusters, as I said earlier. But the progress of this industry hinges on absolute commitment to safety principles, which grow from a positive safety culture. 

This is particularly important for commercial space, where Congress has dictated that much of the industry is self-regulated and outside of the FAA authority.

We don’t regulate vehicle and participant safety—at least at the moment—but we have provided the industry with best practices from the aerospace world. 

We delivered recommended practices for human spaceflight occupant safety, covering design, manufacturing and operations. It’s more than advice—it’s a blueprint for the various areas that we think should be the focus of regulations—should regulations be required.

Congress has given us a very narrow role for the moment—But I think the benefits of state-of-the-art safety concepts in place for aviation are clear examples of the best practices that work for space.   

That’s why we continue to engage with industry to develop a voluntary safety reporting system. Much of this work is done through the Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee, what many here call COMSTAC.

COMSTAC has been a great partner with the FAA for advancing this industry. It’s a mutually beneficial relationship. 

With COMSTAC input, we created and delivered the Part 450 Streamlined Launch and Reentry Licensing Requirements regulations last year. We’re working together on many efforts, including two Aerospace Rulemaking Committees—which we’re calling SpARCs for short—that will investigate further rules for human spaceflight and financial responsibility regimes for licensed launch and reentry activities.

We’re moving at warp speed, and while we don’t anticipate that it will slow down any time soon, I want to assure you that we aren’t getting launch fever. The FAA is laser focused on safety first, and that won’t change. 

But I understand how easy it can be to fall into the launch-fever trap—it’s always there. That’s why it’s critical to have a positive safety culture in place and to follow the rules and guidance already in place. 

It’s in your best interest, because anything that appears to be contributing to the contrary is only going to increase pressure for the FAA to take a draconian approach to oversight. We really don’t want to do that. 

And if anything appears to be contrary to safety, that will also erode the public trust....  

Laura Shepard Churchley was an eighth-grader when she sat in front of a black and white TV and watched her father become the first American in space. In an interview after her own flight, Churchley remembered that she wasn’t nervous watching her father’s launch. She said she knew he’d be fine, that he’d trained for two years and that NASA was going to bring him home safely. They had his back. 

That’s the kind of trust we must strive to achieve day in and day out in the aerospace business. There’s no other alternative if we’re to live long and prosper.

Thank you for listening, and have a great conference.