Rodney Rocha
Retired Aerospace Engineer
NASA
Rebuilding and Maintaining Core Technical Competency
(For Informing Oversight-Insight & Risk Capture Processes Tied to Human Space Exploration)
In his 50-year aerospace engineering career at the NASA Johnson Space Center, Rodney Rocha has served several engineering and space projects which involved overseeing a mix of technical disciplines and approving their assessments, analyses, and test data in support of signing human flight and safety readiness. By interaction with these he observed and learned effective methods for informing and communicating complex technical information to flight decision management and thus leading to data-based flight risk scoring and human flight safety assurance.
Without a body of seasoned engineers possessing core competence and engineering skills to “see the whole” in a systems engineering approach, instead of just individual parts, any integrated aerospace vehicle and its operation would not be completely assessed and ready for human flight.
Mr. Rocha will describe how NASA (over the decades after Apollo, Space Shuttle, and International Space Station) had lost and continued to lose much of this core competence and insight and oversight into the integrated whole aerospace product. This led to a steady lessening of safety oversight and insight, and thus to unmitigated, unresolved, or even unknown elevated flight risks.
He will describe how it is imperative for NASA and any aerospace organizations to train for and regain core competency, and to incorporate a system engineering approach so that the whole integrated vehicle with human crew is indeed safe enough to fly.
Mr. Rocha was born and raised in Corpus Christi, Texas. He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a B.S. degree in Aerospace Engineering. He obtained his master’s degree in Space Science at the University of Houston-Clear Lake.
He was hired by NASA Johnson Space Center in July 1974 as an engineering intern in the Structural Engineering Division, where he has been ever since. From 2014 to 2015 Mr. Rocha was a part-time lecturer at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Rice University. Mr. Rocha’s spouse is Robyn Morgan.
Mr. Rocha’s engineering expertise is in the area of Newtonian dynamics, structural dynamics, and structural vibrations. He has served in diverse positions in his long NASA career, including Space Shuttle Chief Engineer within the JSC Structural Engineering Division. Mr. Rocha supported the ground test planning and pre-flight analyses of the Artemis-1 and -2 flight vehicle.
Now retired, before he left NASA, he supported defining astronaut-induced loads onto the Human Landing System and impact dynamics requirements and testing for the new lunar exploration space suits. These are NASA’s projects enabling NASA’s return of the US human exploration of the Moon.
For decades Mr. Rocha has volunteered to serving NASA’s education outreach programs. He has spoken many times to the public, school and university students, early-career NASA engineering and contractor interns, NASA project management training classes, other US government agencies. He makes flight safety recommendations relevant to NASA’s current needs for maintaining technical vigilance, and open communication of engineering issues and concerns to NASA management in order to assure flight safety.