EPISODE 145: PAM MELROY: BEHIND THE STRATEGY

Transcript

Andres Almeida (Host): Welcome back to Small Steps, Giant Leaps, the podcast from NASA’s Academy of Program/Project and Engineering Leadership [APPEL]. I’m your host, Andres Almeida. Each episode dives into the lessons learned and experiences of the people behind NASA’s innovative missions and research.

We’re kicking off this new year with NASA’s deputy administrator Pam Melroy, who wraps up her 30-year tenure at NASA this month. Her distinguished career spans decades of service in space exploration and national defense. As a former astronaut with three space shuttle flights under her belt – including one flight as commander – Pam has made lasting contributions to human spaceflight. That football field-sized International Space Station orbiting Earth? Pam helped build that. 

She’s also a veteran of the U.S. Air Force as a retired colonel, having logged nearly 6,000 flight hours in more than 50 different aircraft, and is a respected leader in the aerospace industry. 

In her most recent role, Pam helped shape the NASA’s focus on long-term strategies, including Moon to Mars exploration, space sustainability, and a long-term vision for NASA’s future as an organization. 

Now, as she prepares to pass the torch, Pam joins us to reflect on her NASA career and share insights from her time as a pilot, astronaut, and public servant. 

Hi Pam, it’s an honor to have you here today.

Pam Melroy: Thank you, I’m excited to talk with you.

Host: You helped design the blueprints for significant NASA exploration strategies, including Moon to Mars, Space Sustainability, the Low Earth Orbit Microgravity Strategy, and NASA 2040. Was there a common theme for developing them?

Melroy: Several common themes, I think, which really reflect my views on strategy development, which is to architect from the right. And so, imagine the state that you want to achieve and then start working backwards from there. But I think also it reflects my profound philosophy, which is that a well-crafted strategy is obvious, elegant in its simplicity. People are like, “Okay, that makes sense.”

And those things I think, are really important because they’re simple. Everyone can understand them, and especially in an agency as large as NASA, being able to understand and get on board means you’re all rowing in the same boat together.

Host: As a space shuttle commander, you’ve seen firsthand that low Earth orbit offers unique opportunities for science and industry. With NASA planning to deorbit the space station in the future, what do you see as some of the biggest opportunities in continuing this research and development in LEO?

Melroy: I’m very excited, actually, about that. You know, the space station was a vision. It was a vision that, instead of running a major national lab, the space shuttle, [launching] six or seven times a year for 10 days at a time that we could do science, 24/7 in microgravity. And so that was a part of my career as an astronaut, was to help build it and to see it come to its fruition is amazing.

But what we’re seeing now is we spent the first decade building it, and the second decade trying to figure out how to really optimize science and research, and now we’re starting to get amazing results. So, for me, I think it’s so clear we’re not finished yet. We have so much more to learn. But also, for me, the insight that most of the trip for any destination, anywhere other than the Moon and the solar system, is going to involve a lot of microgravity. [It] means that we need to continue to advance the technologies that support microgravity science and keeping humans alive.

Host: And that’s for the benefit of people on Earth, yeah?

Melroy: Absolutely. I mean, that’s the research that we’ve done has already had a profound impact, particularly in the area of medicine. But a lot of people don’t really know that a lot of the other technologies that we’ve developed just to support astronauts living for long duration, like water reclamation, are also being used around the world.

Host: Can you share your thought process behind NASA 2040, and how you see it influencing the next generation of space exploration and technology?

Melroy: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think I always thought that what we were aspiring to do, which is to truly become the agency that I think everybody expected from us, Star Trek. And you know, everything else is that we would be the ones who would deploy humans throughout the solar system and figure all this out.

I always knew that there would need to be thoughts about how we would prepare our workforce and the infrastructure that we have. So, I always saw it as sort of the companion to our technical pieces that we have to have the business operations and training and all those other things to support those bold aspirations.

So, from that standpoint, I think we have this unique opportunity right now to think about what would advanced infrastructure, to support all these things that we will be doing in the year 2040, look like? So, we have a chance to reinvent all of our center campuses from a place that was built in the ’60s to support Apollo to a place that it was revitalized in the ’20s and the ’30s to support Artemis and Moon to Mars.

Host: Why is having clear agency-wide strategies, like the ones you’ve mentioned so critical to NASA success, and also, what lessons has the agency applied in crafting the strategies that we have?

Melroy: I think why it’s important is that what we are doing goes far beyond any one administration the choices that we make. Now, I see it all the time with Artemis. Choices that were made a decade ago really affect our ability to execute on the program, and so having a strategy gives you a point off in the distance that everyone knows that you’re aiming for, and then building a consensus around it, both inside and outside the agency gives us a chance to stay focused on that horizon goal and not sort of zigzag our way towards it, which is very inefficient.

I think it was really interesting watching the agency find its way in the processes that I worked closely with the federated board and ESD, such as the architecture concept review, the workshops where we do consultation, the framework of having goals and objectives, as well as a vision.

Everything for the LEO Microgravity Strategy went a lot faster, because everybody was like, “Oh, we know what we’re doing.” Now, that’s actually dangerous, because every strategy is a little different. And so, there were a couple of times in the LEO Microgravity Strategy where I had to say, “Nope, we’re not doing it that way for this one. And here’s why.” And what I think is fun about that is watching the agency learn how to do strategy at all levels, it’s pretty cool.

Host: And to that point about what might work, what might not work, NASA exists an environment where might be said that change is the only constant. How do you ensure strategies remain adaptable and flexible while remaining true to that core vision? And also, did you find yourself evolving the strategies that’s developing?

Melroy: Oh, yes, absolutely. We definitely pivoted in many cases where something wasn’t really resonating, or it wasn’t working or, more importantly, when a major point came out after just discussions, and it’s like, “You know, instead of talking about this, we really should be talking about that.” And we spent a lot of time going through that process with each one of the strategies to say, “This is the message. We thought it was going to be this when we started, but now we know this is the point that we have to make.” So, yeah, you have to be flexible.

But one of the things that I think is very important about the strategies is that idea that you have a vision that really can’t be argued with, such as leadership and science and exploration in low Earth orbit. How can you argue with that and the goals and objectives, when you look at them, they don’t talk about hardware, they don’t talk about “how,” they talk about “what.” And the same thing is true for Moon to Mars. And so, we have to be flexible. If there are new ways of doing things, if our commercial partners bring on capabilities that we never imagined, we need to be able to pivot the “how,” as long as we’re still staying focused on what it is we’re trying to achieve. That will actually help us, because rather than staying stuck with a system that might become outdated, eventually, we will have the framework that helps us make the decision to move forward.

Host: You’ve mentioned before the importance of every team member understanding their role in NASA’s mission. How does the agency foster the sense of purpose, especially because the workforce is so large and varied.

Melroy: I’ll tell you, that is probably the toughest thing that we’ve experienced here, is getting the word out.

I had to laugh at one point, sort of an informal one of the senior leaders just dropped by to tell me. He goes, “You know, I was, I was visiting so and so center, and then, you know, two or three other centers.” And he said, “So I asked the people in the room and online to raise their hands if they’d ever heard of NASA or of Moon to Mars strategy,” and how many of them have heard of the goals and objectives? And it was really interesting. He’d periodically come back and give me a report, and I was astounded that the numbers started to get upwards of 80 percent. Now, I think if you started the LEO Microgravity Strategy, you might not see that.

NASA 2040, we took that to heart, though, because it took a couple of years for people to really be familiar with it. And so, Casey Swails, our deputy associate administrator, she went out to all the centers and held roundtables. With early to mid-careers, and she asked the same question, “How many of you have heard of NASA 2040?” And of course, the first time she did it, less than a third raised their hand. The center director was like, “What? You know, I talk about this! I know I talk about this!” And it’s that, that disconnect between the top and the lower tiers how long it takes for information.

So, between the roundtables. And then [Casey] did something else that was really valuable. She and the 2040 engines set up NASA 2040 champions. So, anybody at the agency who wanted to get special briefings but then had an obligation to communicate about it in at least one forum every month, whether it was their own staff meeting or going to another event and talking about it. And over 200 people raised their hands to do this. They’re the, they’re the true change agents. They’re the real communicators out there. And it made such a difference. Almost the whole agency has heard of 2040 much more quickly.

Host: Yes, I like that you mentioned “NASA 2040 Engine.” I hadn’t heard that term before.

Melroy: Yes, they were the crank that kept moving. They made sure that meetings were being held. And when people got stuck or they needed to talk to another work stream, or didn’t know what to do next, or said, “This is a really hard problem you’ve given us.” they were the ones who kept pushing them forward. They would come back to Jim and Casey and I and say, “Hey, they need some help.” And then we were able to step in and help resolve things. But yeah, the engine was the engine behind NASA 2040. They kept it moving forward and got an incredible amount of work done in a year and a half.

Host: Seems so. I see that. Can you take us briefly through the process of developing a strategy from initial vision to implementation. Maybe share an example of how a specific strategy came to life.

Melroy: Yes, I will freely tell you that my favorite book on strategy is called Good Strategy, Bad Strategy: The Difference in Why it Matters by Rick Rumelt, and that has been important to me. I wouldn’t say that I completely follow it. The other thing is a book, another famous book called Leading Change by John Kotter, and they are two parts of the same thing.

If you have a strategy for an organization, by definition, it means there’s going to be change. And so, for me, they are deeply interconnected, and not only visualizing what you’re trying to achieve technically, but what good looks like from an organizational standpoint, these simple things we’ve been talking about, how do you make sure everybody knows about it? How do you make sure that industry feels like, and academia and other partners feel like they had a voice in it? Those things are kind of a combination of both the strategy development and so strategy starts with a diagnosis: What’s the problem? Like, what are we, you know, what’s happening in the world, and what is it that we actually are trying to achieve? And then you have a hypothesis of some kind.

Well, we could achieve that if we did the following things. So, for me, it was looking for the right forums, like the federated board or the Engine that would help manage a lot of consensus building and a lot of discussion. And then it ends with a clear list of implementable steps, and that’s where the change management comes in.

So, to pull the thread all the way through, when I came to the agency, I really wanted to understand, like, what was the plan? Like, how did we know when we needed a rover versus when we needed a power supply, you know, and a power grid on the Moon? How did we know the answers to those questions? And I just couldn’t find them from outside the agency. So, we did, in fact, have a strategic architectures office, but they were focused on very specific and narrow analysis.

So, what I felt was missing was a framework of some kind that at the end of looking at all the goals and objectives saying when we hit this much of these objectives, we are ready to go try it at Mars. And that’s really important to all of our stakeholders, right? We don’t want to just keep going to the Moon, because we’re going to the Moon and we have a vehicle that goes to the Moon. This isn’t about flags and boots anymore. It’s about exploring the solar system. So, pulling all that together was really, really important.

Host: With so many stakeholders, including government, industry, international partners and the workforce, how did you build consensus around these strategies?

Melroy: Yeah, I think consensus is important, but I think there also has to be some subject matter experts who are open minded, open minded, mind you, but also able to refine what they’re hearing. So, in many cases, the inputs we received were really questions, and it was things that we had to thrash out in our own head and the goals and objectives. And sometimes it was easy. It was like, “Okay, let me explain this to you. You’re asking why we are going to do it this way instead of that way? Here’s why.”

So I asked for in particular, for Moon to Mars and now for LEO Microgravity Strategy, show your work. Set up a series of white papers that are short, 2, 3, 4, pages long at the absolute most, that answer basic questions like, “Why are we using NRH [near-rectilinear halo] orbit around the Moon? What’s the influence of logistics on an architecture?”

Those kinds of questions, because I really felt that those were the things that were holding us back, the obvious questions that things people outside the agency, you’re reading in space news, and people are debating and you just kind of shake your head a little bit, and I’m like, “We’ll just show it to them.” Show your reasoning behind it.

And the white papers, I think, were really core to all of the workshops and the consultation we did, because we got a lot of the big questions out of the way. And now we’re all on the same page. We all understand why we’re doing what we’re doing in certain basic questions, and now you begin to talk about how.

Host: So, what do you see as the most significant upcoming opportunities and challenges that NASA will need to incorporate in future strategies? You know, based on your experience of what you’ve seen before?

Melroy: Well, I think it was really important give, given the way our stakeholders view the Moon to Mars program, and I think the imminent activities with the last decade of station and a follow-on commercial destination made it really important to focus on those two. But what’s really fun is seeing where those two strategies overlap and intersect and connect with each other. And the next step, really, for the agency, is to have interlocking strategies for all of our mission directorates and for the centers to then also be interlocked with those strategies and on the same page. And we are not there yet, but this is an agency that has learned the value of having a strategy.

And I think we’ve worked together across all the boundaries, all the centers, all the mission directorates, to achieve the strategies we have done, including space sustainability, climate and others as well. So, I think the agency is really ready to do something, and there is a strategic alignment task under NASA 2040 that will be going into 2025 to do something like that. So that, I think, is the next challenge, because then we really will have one strategy for the whole agency. It just has different parts.

Host: Many people see you as the visionary behind NASA’s key strategies. How did your personal experiences and career journey really just shape the way you approached and developed these blueprints?

Melroy: Yeah, that’s a good question. I have to say I’m not a very – I’ve not always been a very strategic person. Operators, pilots, astronauts have a series of operational problems you have to solve, and you become very good at solving them. But one thing that I think that I did take from that part of my life is the planning.

Here’s an old quote that test pilots have, which is, “You plan for everything that could happen, because the thing you didn’t plan for will happen.” So, if you don’t do [any] planning, you will have a lot of things happen that you could have been ready for but are not. But especially the way we do operations in space, is the things that happen that are unexpected always have elements of something someone has already thought through. So you begin, you can [say], “I’m gonna pull together these three checklists, because they’re all pieces of them on how I could deal with this situation.” So that planning for the future, I think, really set me up for the next steps.

But I think seeing at the executive level, seeing big changes – the cancelation of Constellation. I didn’t know why that happened. I had no idea why that happened. So, taking the steps to become more of a strategic planner and see why that happened and maybe posit that there were ways that we could have a strategy that was more resilient to change helped me. It just kind of just kind of evolved through the years, and I found I really had a passion. It’s really always been about thinking about the future.

Host: It’s noticed. We see it. What do you consider to be your giant leap?

Melroy: I think my giant leap was absolutely when I left the astronaut office, I spent my whole career wanting to be an astronaut, refining my skills as a pilot, as a leader, to be the best space shuttle commander that I could be. The only, only dream I had in my whole life. Leaving the astronaut office was really hard, but I think for me, the big leap was, “Hey, you’re a mountain climber. You want to find something hard and go do it. So go find the next mountain.” And, yeah, that was a big leap. Fortunately, it was a leap upwards, climbing a mountain instead of jumping off the edge.

Host: Well, we’re so grateful for your service. Thank you so much for your time.

Melroy: Yeah, thank you. 

That’s it for this episode of Small Steps, Giant Leaps. For more on Deputy Administrator Melroy and the topics we discussed today, visit our resource page at appel.nasa.gov. That’s A-P-P-E-L dot nasa dot gov. And don’t forget to check out our other podcasts who are coming back with new seasons this year. That’s Curious Universe, Houston, We Have a Podcast, and Universo Curioso de la NASA, NASA’s first Spanish-language podcast. As always, thanks for listening.

Outro: This is an official NASA podcast.