Announcing the Final Examination of Ledlyne Vazquez for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
NASA needs no formal introduction. NASA leads the world in space research and provides opportunities to other government agencies, educational institutions, and companies to explore space, launch into space, and conduct research in and around space. NASA has 11 formal locations based around the United States, and each has different goals and objectives to help NASA meet its overall mission. 2004, President George Bush announced a new vision for the Space Exploration program. During his grand announcement, he discussed that the Space Shuttles would retire due to the 2003 Space Shuttle Columbia accident, where the crew and the space vehicle were lost. Moreover, a new program would take its place. The Kennedy Space Center (KSC) would no longer manage the day-to-day operations of maintaining the US Space Shuttle fleet. Our NASA teams would continue working to finish the Space Shuttle program's mission to build the International Space Station fully. Afterward, NASA would transition to develop and test a new spacecraft, the Crew Exploration Vehicle. This would be the first spacecraft of this kind since the Apollo command Module. He also announced that the third goal was to return to the moon by 2020 as the launching point for missions beyond, to get humans from lower Earth orbit to the moon and then to Mars. (Secretary, 2004) The KSC engineering workforce had to prepare to transition from Operational support of the Space Shuttle program to the design and development of over 50 sub-systems for the future SLS and Orion Launch Systems at the Kennedy Space Center. These sub-systems developed within the Kennedy Space Center Engineering Directorate followed a comprehensive design process that required several different product deliverables during various phases for each sub-system. (Schafer et al., 2013) What allowed these systems to be successful? What enabled NASA KSC to complete over 100 Artemis 1 Design Certification and System Acceptance Reviews, closing over 20,000 Chief Engineer Board Requirements to deem the Artemis 1 rocket ready for launch? Little is known about the NASA engineering workforce agility characteristics that enabled the organization to transition from the Space Shuttle program that ended in 2011 and launch the Artemis Program's SLS rocket on November 16, 2022. Structural Equation Modeling was used to develop a model of relationships to test the hypotheses. The results show that organizational practices and psychological empowerment significantly support workforce agility. Implications from this study for understanding the characteristics of workforce agility are discussed.
Committee in Charge:
Waldemar Karwowski, Chair, IEMS
Timothy Kotnour, IEMS Department
Luis Rabelo, IEMS Department
Piotr Mikusinski, Mathematics Department