Runner Up Southern California Book Festival
Runner Up Los Angeles Book Festival – Best Nonfiction
Runner Up London Book Festival – Best Nonfiction
Winner The Great Northwest Book Festival – Best Nonfiction
Winner The Great Southwest Book Festival- Best Nonfiction
Winner The Great Southeast Book Festival- Best Nonfiction
Winner The Great Midwest Book Festival- Best Nonfiction
After the deaths of his friends and colleagues aboard Columbia, a disaster that could have been avoided, Astronaut Charlie Camarda and his fellow crewmates worked diligently through their grief and many stress-filled days to return the United States to space on the next shuttle flight. This allowed NASA to once more take on the prideful mantle of success but only after paying a very steep price, a price that seems at times to have been already forgotten but may have to be paid again unless there are changes within both the organizational structure and culture of the agency.
Astronaut Dr. Charles Camarda has uncovered a recurring cause of accidents that no one has articulated yet—loss of a research culture that places a premium on learning and the quest for knowledge and what that means. He shows how to develop high-performing teams and networks of such research teams to solve anomalies rapidly, which can help prevent catastrophes in complex high-risk/high-reliability organizations.
What People Say
“The book does a remarkable job of pulling together every possible relevant concept and evidence from organizational research to support the goal of helping organizations get better.”—DR. AMY EDMONDSON NOVARTIS, Professor of Leadership and Management, Harvard Business School, author of the Fearless Organization (Wiley 2019) and several case studies on Columbia, Challenger and safety cultures
“Dr. Camarda describes a near miss not as a success but a ‘system failure’—Many Fire_ghters would not have died or been seriously injured over my 32 year FDNY career if the ‘Cultures’ and ‘Biases’ he teaches us about in his book were understood.”—COMMISSIONER THOMAS VON ESSEN, Commissioner of FDNY during 9/11 Tragedy, author Strong of Heart, Harper Collins, 2002
“Charles Camarda has drawn on his rich personal experience at NASA and extensive research to describe how a high-risk organization can build an elective safety culture, as well as how such a culture can erode over time. Managers in any high-risk environment can learn from this book.” —PROF. MICHAEL ROBERTO, Bryant University, author, Unlocking Creativity, Assistant Professor Harvard Business School, and Visiting Assistant Professor at the NYU Stern School of Business
“As an educational leader dedicated to fostering a culture of learning and growth, I found Dr. Charles J. Camarda’s Mission Out of Control to be both deeply inspiring and highly relevant. Drawing on his extraordinary career at NASA, Dr. Camarda underscores the vital importance of cultivating a culture that prioritizes learning and innovation—principles that resonate profoundly in the field of education. Just as he identifies the systemic flaws that can lead to catastrophic failures in high-risk organizations, we, as educators, must similarly recognize and address cultural and structural barriers to ensure the success and safety of our students and staff. His insights into building high-performing teams and solving complex challenges offer a powerful framework that leaders in any field, including education, can adapt to create lasting positive change. This book is a call to action for all leaders committed to shaping resilient, forward-thinking organizations.”– Dr. Joe Famularo, Educational Leader, NYS Superintendent of the Year, best-selling author of IOU Life Leadership
Courtney Stadd, Aerospace Commercial Leader | Public Policy, Regulatory and Business Development –
Charles’ “Mission Out of Control” should be mandatory reading for all senior officials at NASA and especially the incoming team. It is an absolutely brilliant analysis of the agency’s serious challenges, as well as proposed fixes. I held it up at a recent Washington Space Business Roundtable and urged the audience to run, not walk, in securing a book.
Jeff Nosanov –
The general public rarely sees an engineer, astronaut, or even civil servant pour his heart out at a scale as large, and from a well so deep, as Dr. Charlie Camarda does in “Mission Out of Control.” The reader will follow the story of a kid from Queens, NY inspired by the Apollo program, through engineering education, a NASA research career, a rare journey as an astronaut himself, and ultimately a bitter betrayal by a cost- and schedule- obsessed NASA culture. We see a search for truth following a tragedy shockingly stymied at every turn by cultural issues incomprehensible to the small child in all of us that looks up at the stars, and to NASA, for leadership.
Anyone interested in the Artemis moon program or its predecessor, the Constellation program, or interested in American space and technology leadership in general, will find the book riveting. Charlie tells a history invoking the best of halcyon American leadership of almost a century ago, molded and shaped by geopolitical events leading up to transition from NACA to NASA and ultimately the Apollo program. The tale turns morose as a post-Nixon NASA, flush with Cold War success, empowers bureaucrats and bean-counters over engineers and subject matter experts, becoming a federal government space launch workhorse in an abusive relationship with the Space Shuttle program. Several errors from this time, many for the first time described herein, were baked in to the space shuttle, causing problems – known and otherwise – for over 130 missions.
Errors from that era compound to this day, despite several major tragedies that should have led to agency-wide soul searching and reform. Dr. Camarda recounts unbelievably petty leadership dynamics embedded in life-and-death situations as he attempts to demonstrate major safety issues threatening both his own mission – returning to flight after Columbia (!) – and the remaining space shuttle missions prior to the program’s cancellation.
Anyone aspiring to or engaged in leadership or management should read this book, as it clearly demonstrates the fine line between confidence and arrogance, the power of institutional perceptions of success and failure, and the deeply human dynamics that fundamentally motivate all of us. The book concludes with a hopeful call to action based on Charlie’s decade of research and practice in improving engineering communication – identifying current and novel challenges in training and education that any organization should be thinking about.
Mission Out of Control is ultimately a deeply human exploration about the largest challenges we undertake, and the ways we can get in, or get out of, our own way.
Reviewed by Christian Sia for Readers’ Favorite –
In Mission Out of Control: An Astronaut’s Odyssey to Fix High-Risk Organizations and Prevent Tragedy, Charles Camarda explores the intricate connections between organizational culture and disaster in high-stakes environments like NASA. Camarda examines the cultural shifts from a robust research-driven ethos to a more bureaucratic, production-oriented mindset that culminated in the tragic accidents of Challenger and Columbia. He argues that technical failures did not solely cause these disasters but were deeply rooted in cultural deficiencies and organizational dysfunctions, including normalizing deviance, cognitive biases, and ineffective communication. The book offers a compelling analysis of how such a breakdown in culture can lead to catastrophic outcomes in complex organizations. It proposes a way to fix such dysfunction and effectively address problems that can have far-reaching implications in organizations.
Beyond its incisive analysis, the book shows Camarda’s journey from a research engineer to an astronaut who experienced firsthand the consequences of these organizational failings. His reflections on the tragedies he witnessed, including the emotional turmoil following the Columbia disaster, inject life into the book and give it an emotional underpinning. The book also emphasizes fostering a high-performance research culture, prioritizing physical and psychological safety, and open communication. Charles Camarda advocates for transforming organizational structures into networks of high-performing teams that prioritize rapid diagnosis and response to potential issues, thereby offering a roadmap for learning from past mistakes and preventing future tragedies. Mission Out of Control is a stark reminder of the consequences of allowing operational pressures to overshadow safety protocols. The author’s insights are critical for aerospace organizations and any high-risk environment where the cost of failure can be catastrophic. The book is essential reading for leaders, managers, and decision-makers in any field striving to cultivate a safety-oriented culture. It is well-researched, hugely informative, and expertly delivered.