Charles J. Camarda has escaped the surly bonds of Earth and has faced death in the cold vacuum of space — and returned to share the story with students in Trustee Professor of Management Mike Roberto’s Leadership Seminar.

During his 46 years at NASA, Camarda, a former astronaut, director of engineering at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, and senior advisor for innovation to the office of chief engineer at NASA Headquarters, tested the limits of exploration and advanced the sphere of human knowledge.

Following Camarda’s recounting of a near-death experience that required an emergency spacewalk,  Chilhu Jambunathan ’25 posed the question: “How do you do it?” How, in the face of death, how do you keep your cool and stay sharp?

Camarda kept it simple — but his answer contained multitudes.

“You rely on your training,” answered Camarda. “And you make sure that training is as lifelike as possible, as real as possible.”

For a class of college seniors a little more than a month removed from graduation, that advice held special resonance.  

Roberto’s seminar is heavily experiential, using case studies, simulations, and role play exercises — from investigating the tragic loss of the Columbia space shuttle to navigating a perilous summit of Mount Everest — to turn students into key decision makers.

His students might never go to space, or the top of the world’s tallest mountain, Roberto admitted, but the lessons hold strong, wherever they do go and in whatever industry they pursue.

Camarda had been invited to the day’s class to discuss his time as an astronaut, yes, but also to discuss a very different kind of courage — the courage to speak up in the face of adversity and institutional structures.

“I think what I find most interesting about your career, Charlie, is the fact that you had the courage to speak up,” Roberto observed.

Before the session, the students had engaged in Columbia’s Final Mission, a bestselling and Codie Award-winning multimedia case study Roberto developed with HBS Professors Amy Edmondson and Richard Bohmer. In the multimedia case study, students had taken on the roles of several of the investigation’s key players, familiarizing themselves with their parts by reviewing the protagonists' actual emails, listening to audio reenactments of crucial meetings, and reviewing space agency documents.

But nothing beats actual first-hand experience. In the wake of the Columbia disaster, Camarda played a key role in NASA’s return to space. Not only was he a mission specialist on STS-114, the “return to space” mission following Columbia’s loss, he also was responsible for initiating several teams to diagnose the cause of the Columbia tragedy and an important voice calling for NASA to reinvent its safety culture to prevent future disasters.

“Being able to work through the case study in our class brought it to life for us in a much different way than if we had just read about it,” reflected Jambunathan. “And then, to be able to hear from a person who was really there firsthand for so much of what we looked at, that added even more dimension to it.”

The Columbia investigation, Camarda notes, was one of the first to cite “culture” as a key factor in a major disaster. It was a failure of engineering that directly caused the disaster, he pointed out, but it was larger organizational and workplace issues that made overlooking that failure possible.

“It was an Apollo 13 moment. We could have been the next accident.”

“Sometimes you have to zoom out and beware of everything around you before you zero in on the one blinking light that's got all your attention,” he noted. “Sometimes, you find yourself trying to figure out one system when, really, it's a system of systems that you have to look at.”

“Most organizations don’t go beyond the widget,” Roberto, an internationally sought-after consultant, agreed.

At one point during his talk, Camarda pulled out a well-used copy of Organization at the Limit: Lessons from the Columbia Disaster, to which Roberto had contributed a chapter, filled with different-colored sticky notes. Though he had begun his career in scientific research, where he internalized a mindset of constantly asking questions, it was a later interest in issues like organizational behavior, sociology, and decision-making — the same issues that Roberto’s students were currently learning — that helped him to expand his vision, Camarda noted.

When that mindset, and those skills, are forgotten, he warned, it can take a heavy toll. Even at an institution like NASA, lionized for its fearless astronauts and brilliant, meticulous engineers, institutional rot can take a heavy toll. The astronauts were afraid to speak up and potentially jeopardize their flight standing, Camarda suggested, and the engineers had become too proud to consider errors in their work or listen to outside voices.

“I could not tell if they were afraid that they’d lose lives or that they’d lose their reputations,” he reflected.

Those cultural issues almost cost Camarda his own life. The very same problem that doomed the Columbia, debris separating from the shuttle’s external tank during ascent, occurred during his own spaceflight, requiring the crew to initiate emergency repairs.

“If exceptional courage is required for your team, is that good leadership?”

“It was an Apollo 13 moment,” Camarda noted. “We could have been the next accident.”

Camarda cited many of the same issues that had plagued NASA in Boeing’s recent difficulties — another focus of Roberto’s class. Institutional failures, including an inability to accept the possibility of failure, contributed to the company’s disastrous problems with their 737 Max airliner and the issues with their Starliner spacecraft that left two astronauts stranded in space.

“This became a problem for the entire United States of America, just because they didn’t want to change their corporate culture,” Camarda observed.

Instead, he advised students, they should focus on looking for, and helping to create, cultures of psychological safety where it is not just acceptable to raise questions but encouraged. “If you’re on my team, I want you to correct me when I’m wrong,” he told students.

One of the questions he gets most often, Camarda noted, is “Why didn’t the dissenting voices speak up and, if they did, why didn’t they speak up louder?” He turned that question back around on the seniors preparing to face their own challenges and lead in the real world.

“If exceptional courage is required for your team, is that good leadership?” he asked.