Dr. Charles Justiz is a former research pilot at NASA Johnson Space Center and an aerospace engineering and risk management expert.

Sharing his remarkable journey from the U.S. Air Force Academy to NASA, you’ll hear about the variety of aircraft he flew, including the Space Shuttle training aircraft, and how he contributed to crucial safety and risk management programs.

You’ll hear about his most memorable moments working with Astronauts and team members and lessons learned from past missions. He shares why understanding and managing risks in space exploration is crucial. He also highlights the opportunities that come with these risks and how innovative processes can lead to safer and more efficient space operations.

In this episode, you'll discover:

• Dr. Justiz’s journey from the U.S. Air Force Academy to becoming a research pilot at NASA.

• The critical role of risk management in space exploration and the lessons learned from NASA’s history.

• How Dr. Justiz’s work in safety management has influenced current practices in aviation and space industries.

• Insights into the development of innovative aerospace technologies and the challenges of designing space vehicles.

• The future of space exploration and the opportunities for entrepreneurs and innovators in the space industry.

Quote:

"We had, 2 massive accidents while I was there, of course, which were devastating to us. But, the whole thing is, you can't make all the mistakes yourself. You have to learn from the mistakes of others."

- Dr. Charles Justiz

Episode Links:

• 🎧 Dr. Justiz in conversation with Kathy Sullivan: ‘The Man Who Carried Space Shuttles’ on Kathy Sullivan Explores…
• Connect with Dr Justiz via The Charles F. Bolden Group
• NASA
• Charles Justiz on LinkedIn

Credits:

Production by CxS Partners LTD

Executive Producer: Toby Goodman

Audio & Sound Design: Lee Turner

Artwork: Ryan Field

Production by CxS Partners LTD

Join our journey into the world of education and space: https://interastra.space

The first bit of advice is always you have to learn. You have to get as smart as you can in your niche. You want to do physio of space? Great. What's the literature say?

What's out there? What's the current thinking? Are they right? Do you think they're right? Oh, they're not. Okay. Why not? Have you written a paper on this? Is it jury paper?

Get out there and do the work. Businesses space, well, you know, if you're in Coca Cola, you know, God bless Coca Cola there, but they're not in the business space.

The business space is out there, you may wanna start it yourself.

Get into the business space and learn about it so that you can be a part of it.

Hi, I'm Charles Justiz, and you're listening to 'Your Business in Space'.

I was a research pilot at the NASA Johnson Space Center. And what that means is I flew the research aircraft. In short, that means that any airplane that we had, that we flew was never designed to do what we were doing with it. We took airliners and did zero gravity flights. We did, airliners, and we put orbiters on the back of them and flew them across the country, things of that nature. So that was my job, was to safely fly those airplanes and do those missions.

And I flew huge aircraft that flew up above most of the atmosphere in a pressure suit to take samples of the atmosphere. I flew a modified I was the captain and an instructor on the Boeing 747 that carried the Space Shuttle. I was the captain and instructor on 2 of the modified airliners that we had to do zero gravity work or micro gravity work as we called it. And, of course, I flew the shuttle training aircraft, was which was a modified corporate jet. So I trained all the astronauts how to land the space shuttle, and also got to fly as an instructor in the T-thirty 8, which we all flew at the time, and taught all the astronauts how to fly supersonic aircraft, especially the ones that never had flown one before. As a youngster,

I was quite young when we started the space program, and we got to see on television Mercury going off. I lived in Miami, so I felt the proximity of it as a kid. I remember John Glenn going up and finally orbiting the earth three times.

That was fantastic, and really motivational for me. And then, as I grew older, more and more space. And finally, I think this drove me towards aviation more than anything. And I do remember that I was in the civil air patrol, and, I was on a special program in the summer with the civil air patrol to learn how to fly airplanes when we landed the first time on the moon. I was in Melbourne, which is a stone's throw, and I got to see the Apollo takeoff and go towards the moon, took a whole bunch of flying lessons, finally soloed, and the next day, I got to see the them walking on the moon. So that kind of tied it in for me, and I said, this is something I have to do. As part of this, my dad, who was a surgeon, found out that he had a fear of heights. And, he said the best way to fix that is to learn how to fly an airplane.

Now, how he connected those dots, I don't know, but it was very fortuitous for me as a kid because he offered to share a couple of his lessons with his instructor in this, thing that looked more like a, a kite that's held together with duct tape and hope. And I thought that was the most magnificent thing I've ever done in my life was to be able to take an airplane up and fly it around. And that sense of freedom was unbelievable to me. So, I'm really glad that he had a fear of heights. He never became a pilot, by the way, but I sure did. I graduated from the United States Air Force Academy with an aerospace engineering degree and, went to, pilot training right away after that and flew airplanes. Vietnam was winding down effectively. Basically, it fell while I was in pilot training.

So I said, okay. And, I went and did flight tests for 3 years. And one of the first things I learned was I don't know enough to be doing this job. So I was very happy to get back in, and I started my master's program in engineering at that point. And, after that, I eventually ended up going to NASA as a research pilot. And I said, I really don't have enough knowledge to be doing this, especially, flying the shuttle training aircraft, teaching astronauts how to fly the space shuttle. So what I did is I went and did some more training and finally got my doctorate degree in engineering and used that, to learn a great deal about what we're actually doing, and how to do what we were doing in a more safe manner. My passion for space comes from, you know, as a kid, of course, but it just kept growing as I learned more and more about space.

And that's for a pilot, there's no bigger drive, no stronger drive than to go higher and go faster. Well, you keep going fast enough, you end up in orbit. So the connection is pretty linear. But for me also, it I looked at it, and I go, this is a dangerous business. We make it look easy. And, you know, we had, 2 massive accidents while I was there, of course, which were devastating to us. But, the whole thing is, you can't make all the mistakes yourself. You have to learn from the mistakes of others.

And unfortunately, there's not many groups that have spaceflight. At that time, it was pretty much us and the Russians. And the Russians at the time weren't really sharing a whole lot. So we had to make our own mistakes and try to avoid those mistakes. So I said, that's probably the most important thing is to learn where the risks are and how to avoid those risks and not let them drive the narrative, drive the engineering. You have to do this, not necessarily risk free, but understand which risks you're accepting. So, that's after the two accidents, one of the strongest things, were the lessons learned of the risk management and how you do that. And that particular science grew tremendously over those years, not just from us, but nuclear programs that had issues, oil rigs that had issues.

We learned how to you know, where those mistakes were made, why they were made, and how to avoid them. And so that I took that forward and applied those not only to the space program, but also to the work I did following the space program. Probably the most important pivotal moment that I had while at NASA, was the, Challenger accident. It was very personal to all of us. The research pilots and the astronauts used to go to the same meetings, used to go to the same happy hours. We were very close knit. The, PLT, the pilot for Challenger was Mike Smith. He lived two doors down from me.

His kid mowed my lawn. And every so often, I'd see Mike back there helping his son, finish up my lawn. They go, Mike, come on, man. And, he go, no. He's gotta get this done, and I'm gonna help him. So, you know, he was that kind of guy. And, our losing him on Challenger and having to drive, his car home from the airport that evening was absolutely, pivotal for me because that evening, I said this was an avoidable accident. And the more I learned about it, the more correct I felt about that.

And I go, I could have done something to keep this from happening. So that's kind of where, a lot of my motivation came from is, losing a good friend like that and seeing that this was absolutely avoidable. We, you know, we did this accident. We, as humans, did this accident. How do we, as humans, then get smart enough to keep something like this from happening? Towards the end of my career at NASA, I was writing manuals on how to do safety more effectively. I wrote a safety management manual when I first went into the safety program in aviation safety. And, I said, we're not managing this well. It's not a a truly managed process.

So I wrote this, and, later on it became I think everybody at the same time in the industry knew that this was absolutely required. So, now all the airlines and, most corporate flight departments have what's called a safety management system. We at NASA wrote one, before all of that became something. We, ended up writing a whole bunch of other processes and learning the lessons, from all the incidents and accidents, not only ours, but everybody around the industry with corporate flight and airline flight. There's a lot of data there if you can grab it. And it gave us a process, a series of processes that now kind of pointed at where the risk management is, not just safety management. At NASA, we started saying risk is what happens before you light the SRBs, the solid rocket boosters. Safety is what you measure after that point.

It really came to that as risk is your guess at what your exposures are, and safety is what you measure to see if you guessed correctly. So that, we took some of those processes forward. I made a company, that, after went with startup companies and, innovative process type companies, stuff that's never been done before. Self driving cars, autonomous vehicles, autonomous aircraft drones, all of those things that people had really never done before or done in a very marginal manner. And we went in, and I helped a lot of these programs to make sure that their risk profile was correct. And I wrote a bunch of processes for them, set up a lot of processes for them. And I'm quite pleased to say that, the ones that I was heavily involved with have excellent safety programs and excellent safety numbers, and we must have gotten risk correctly, I feel. Well, I never thought I'd get a chance to actually design a space flight vehicle or an experiment that would go into space.

And, as a research pilot, you kind of stop, somewhere, you know, about twice as high above where the airliners fly, but that's still, the atmosphere. But, pretty soon because of my doctorate work, I ended up getting involved with, helping to design some space vehicles and, got to delve deeply into navigation, communications, and then, fly experiments on that vehicle, and come back and, try to predict performances, and flows around these spacecraft vehicles, which turns out I got right, which I was very happy about. After that, designed several experiments that actually flew on the space shuttle that helped to categorize if a pilot's ability to fly an aerospace vehicle to touchdown after being in zero gravity was affected. And, we were able to, do what's called the pilot program, portable in flight landing operations trainer. And, that flew, it was over 50 space shuttle missions, which I'm very, very proud of the team that we put together and got to build that thing. I remember working with Boeing and Lockheed. They said, we can't do that in, fewer than 5 years, and it's gonna cost you a minimum of $5,000,000 And so I got together with the, the fellow nerds at NASA, and I said, what do you guys think? And set up a bunch of specs. And we said, We can do this in 6 months for, half a $1,000,000 And, we actually beat those numbers by quite a bit.

I think it was, we finally got something flying in 4 and a half months, and it was like $350,000 which sounds like a lot of money. But you'd be surprised, before we could fly something on the Space Shuttle, it had to go through about $250,000 worth of environmental testing, shake testing, all of it had to be categorized. And, so at the end of all of that, we had something that we could actually fly in space. Probably the biggest misconception is the risk involved. And there is some huge risk, but that is because our science isn't quite there yet. I see a lot of things on the horizon, a lot of people working on new ways. And by the way, spaceflight is not hard. Launches are hard.

Landings are hard. Spaceflight's easy. It's like an airliner. Airliners are extremely safe when they're up and flying. When you have a problem is usually when you get close to the ground. So, that's where your challenges are. So, and we still have those challenges with spaceflight. Spaceflight is difficult to get out of the gravity well.

Once you're up and away, I think we have those risks pretty well understood. And people have really done a great job of mitigating those risks and making sure that those risks are never really even approached. Besides that, everything is pretty well categorized. So, that's probably the biggest misconception is that it's dangerous. People don't wanna invest in it because there's an excellent chance I'm gonna lose my multimillion dollar satellite on launch. I think that risk is getting lower and lower. I think we're bringing those risks down day by day. To be successful in space today, I think we have opened it up to more, of an entrepreneurial approach, which I think is excellent.

NASA did some very necessary work on trying to figure out where's the risk areas with respect to launch? How do you build a rocket? It's called rock you know, people talk about rocket science because it is hard. It's, and we've proven that that it's hard, but we were able to come up with a lot of knowledge by doing it repeatedly, especially with space shuttle, and in a very complex manner. That was not the easiest way to get a spaceship off the ground. It was very complex with multiple modes. You have solid rocket motors, and you have liquid motors, and then it gets into space, and then you still have other motors. So it was complicated, and yet we were able to pull it off. And, it also unfortunately showed us the risks of certain approaches and not to accept those risks. So, we've opened that up.

People are more understanding of the risks and how to avoid those risks, how to design these vehicles, and also to be economically viable, to be more reusable, to carry more more payload for less, propellant, to get higher efficiency motors out there and different modes of getting into space. So we're trying all of these, and I like seeing that, it's not just a one trick pony NASA out there trying to do this. They're they're still in the game, but they're doing more bleeding edge technology that is, I think, necessary to get us out there that an entrepreneur can't take that kind of risk. So they're doing their job. They've got a very definite lane there. Now, the entrepreneurs and that side of it has to take over and start doing some more. So, the Boeings and the SpaceXs are definitely required to pick up their slack and to make this a business, make it an absolutely viable business. So, to be successful, that's what's going to require is more access to space and also more people trying to get access to space.

The only advice I usually give is people say, how do I get into the business of space? And I go, that's a big question. What part of the business of space? Because every single part of business is covered by it from the, management side of it to the engineering, you name it, and it is out there. Human resources, physio, especially, you're talking about people if you're talking about people in space, we still don't have a handle on all of that. So, the first bit of advice is always you have to learn. You have to get as smart as you can in your niche. You wanna do physio of space? Great. What's the literature say? What's out there? What's the current thinking? Are they right? Do you think they're right? Oh, they're not. Okay, why not? You written a paper on this? Is it jury paper? You know, get out there and do the work.

Businesses space, well, you know, if you're in Coca Cola, you know, God bless Coca Cola there, but they're not in the business space. The business space is out there, you may want to start it yourself, get into the business space and learn about it so that you can be a part of it. My basis is risk, and every time there is a risk that I see, I also see an opportunity, and sometimes the opportunities are small, and sometimes the opportunities are enormous. And in space, because the risk is the more unknown it is, the more advantageous to find the solutions. Space is absolutely wide open, and the risks are everywhere. And we haven't completely gotten our hands around and really gotten our arms into this thing to understand what all the risks are. The final answer to that is, there is opportunity everywhere. You wanna talk about management of spacecraft? You wanna talk business? How about AI with respect to space? How about, making things more robust for space because, the space environment is not a very benign environment? How do we fix that? How do we make things more robust and less error prone, when you get it up in space? There is still huge, huge, risks and huge opportunities, that go with those risks that, we've ameliorated some of them and we've mitigated some of them and we've avoided some of them.

What are those? And can you fix those? Can you make it better? So that's where I look. Whenever I see a risk, I see an opportunity. So where's the risk? And if you have a specific knowledge about something that has a risk assigned to it, oh, boy, that's ripe. Get in there. Right now, of course, we still have my company, JFA Inc, working with folks doing innovative processes and trying to get them enterprise risk solutions to their processes and to their products to get them safely into market and to especially since most of these have to do with the public getting on these vehicles, let's say. That is very important to make sure that the because all the free time I have.

I'm Charles Justiz. You've been listening to 'Your Business in Space'.

Check out the show notes. To discover more, head to interastra.space.