TAMEST Profile: Vanessa Wyche (NAE), Director, NASA’s Johnson Space Center

TAMEST Member Vanessa E. Wyche (NAE) is the Director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center, where she oversees more than 11,000 civil servants and contract employees, all dedicated to advancing human spaceflight. From her earliest days, she says she always had a curiosity for how things worked and a passion for math and science.

With a background in bioengineering and tenure at the Food and Drug Administration in Washington, D.C., she found her way to NASA through a unique blend of personal and professional chance. When moving to Texas, she was looking for a position that suited her engineering background and a colleague suggested a position at NASA that they thought she would be perfect for.

Starting as a Project Engineer in 1989, she has held many roles at the organization over her career, rising to oversee the entire Johnson Space Center after serving as the Deputy Director for three years beginning in 2018. Director Wyche is responsible for a broad range of human spaceflight activities, including developing and operating human spacecraft, NASA astronaut selection and training and mission control. 

Additionally, Director Wyche leads Johnson’s role in exploring the Moon and Mars with NASA’s Artemis spacecraft, including surface system capabilities for human and commercial robotic missions, and partners with academia, industry, and the international community to establish a sustainable lunar economy. 

TAMEST spoke with Director Wyche to gain insight into her extraordinary career and her vision for NASA’s future private and public partnerships and to learn more about her dedication to promoting STEM education and mentoring the next generation of engineers.

Please tell us a little about how you found your unique path to space exploration. 

In some ways, my path toward space exploration was not straightforward. Growing up, I was not exposed to NASA centers and never really thought about working in space.

However, I was a curious child and always enjoyed learning, doing math and science, and figuring out how things worked. That helped me make my way towards engineering. I went off to college at Clemson University and earned two engineering degrees. I started working at the Food and Drug Administration in Washington, D.C. My master’s degree is in bioengineering, and when I was working, I got the opportunity to move to Texas and get into space as my career after meeting someone from Texas who asked me to marry him.

I was encouraged by someone from the Food and Drug Administration to think about NASA and that’s how I made the connection. I started my career at NASA as a Project Engineer, experimenting with astronauts in space. It was just the full circle moment, and I’ve loved every minute of it.

You started as a Project Engineer and now are the Director of the entire Johnson Space Center. Talk about that transition.

I have had the opportunity to have multiple and various experiences at NASA. I started working on small projects, building hardware, and working with investigators. We were asked what we wanted to learn about the human body to help test astronaut suits in space. Then eventually I moved to the Space Shuttle program and became a Payload Integration Manager. I helped others external to NASA who wanted to fly things into space.

Eventually, I became the manager of Shuttle missions, including all missions assembled at the International Space Station. I then moved into an organization that looked at the mission planning and design for going to the Moon, returning to the Moon, going to Mars, and being responsible for all those things.

I also did rotational development assignments at NASA headquarters. So, I’ve worked in multiple organizations that are a part of Johnson and at the headquarters level, and all of them have led to the knowledge that I need to do what I’m doing today. I’ve been the Director here for the past three years and was Deputy Director of the Center before that. 

What is your day-to-day role like?

My role is to lead the entire Johnson organization. We have about 3,000 civil servants who work here and approximately 9,000 more contractors who all work together very seamlessly.

At Johnson, most of our work is in human spaceflight. Johnson is the home to America’s Astronaut Corps. We have engineers and scientists who work on putting astronauts into space through a variety of spacecraft and develop vehicles for spacewalks, spacesuits, and more. Flight operations of the International Space Station, Orion, and Starliner, is conducted from Johnson as well. Our workforce also includes the world’s leading sample scientists, and we curate the most extensive collection of extraterrestrial materials on Earth. So, it’s a broad portfolio, to say the least.

My role is to get the right leaders to lead organizations and enable them to work together and put missions together. I aim to get the right leaders in place and ensure they are empowered and have the resources needed to serve our mission.

Talk about how NASA works with the commercial space industry. 

We partner with industry and academia to advance the future of human spaceflight and expand the space economy locally and nationally. And Johnson is at the forefront of NASA’s human spaceflight and commercialization efforts. There are several startups and companies that are a part of making our missions work together.

This includes a responsibility for enabling and helping our commercial space industry become better to take on more prominent roles. Our Commercial Low-Earth Orbit Program Office works closely with the International Space Station Program to stimulate and manage commercial activities in low Earth orbit and build on the relationships with commercial companies, while also establishing new ones.

When space travel started, the Apollo missions, the Shuttle, and the International Space Station were all created in a way where the government owned those spacecrafts and platforms. We’ve since opened it up to have more public and private partnerships.

We have companies like SpaceX, that can provide us and our astronauts with a way to go back and forth to the Space Station. Another example, we’re building Orion, which we are responsible for here at Johnson. Orion will carry and sustain the crew to space on Artemis missions. It already has traveled to the vicinity of the Moon. In 2022, Orion launched uncrewed and traveled 280,000 miles from Earth and 40,000 beyond the far side of the Moon. However, there are other elements of going to the Moon that could be commercialized, like Commercial Lunar Payloads to deliver science and technology to the Moon. Intuitive Machines, a Houston, Texas company delivered and landed the first commercial payload on the Moon earlier this year.

How do you see these public-private partnerships continuing in the future?

To help set the vision for our organization on public and private partnerships we need to look at how we can get our workforce fully on board. We have to show them how to do it and give them a picture.

My role is to set the vision and identify a strategy for our organization. This involves working closely with academia, the State of Texas, our commercial companies, and international partners. By engaging with these external partners, we can bring our vision to life and make our strategy a reality. It’s crucial that we communicate the importance of this collaboration to our team, keeping them informed and involved in our progress.

What is the importance of these partnerships in continuing NASA’s mission?

The imperative is that we want to go to the Moon and we want to go to Mars. We know that’s what people who come and work for NASA want to do. However, we also understand that the Federal Government has a finite amount of money.

The country was all in during the Apollo missions that first got us to the Moon, and the government was fine with adding more money as we needed until it got us there. It’s different now because the government won’t dispense infinite money.

However, if we get others to invest with us, it increases the pie and adds skin to the game, and we can go further. NASA Johnson’s Office of Business Development and Technology Integration serves as the front door into the center for traditional and new space partners. The office is focused on capturing and developing new capabilities for human exploration. The process is transforming around us. We still have the same end goal and can do much more if we push the needle on public-private partnerships and investments. So, that’s what we’ve been focusing on.

Recently, NASA selected Texas A&M University as the first approved Exploration Park facility. Talk about this partnership and how it came about.

We are very excited about creating this campus next to Johnson and it is yet another example of a working public and private partnerships. NASA has a bunch of underutilized land next to our campus. We plan to lease the land and move back our fence line to make it available for this Exploration Park facility.

Texas A&M plans to have other universities join as part of the partnership with NASA, so they can further develop our ideas for human-robotic interaction. The aim is to support training, aeronautics research, advanced robotics, and work on lunar and Martian exploration toward developing a commercial space economy. It will be an extensive facility with a Moon and Marscape, enabling us to test different apparatuses at the A&M campus, right next door to our own.

From an academic standpoint, it’s wonderful to not only have professors and academics be able to utilize the site for research, but it will also enable a pipeline for students to learn and eventually join our workforce. To continue to bring in researchers and other engineers is enormous, and it also allows our employees and contractors to do mentoring right near our site.  

What makes you the most passionate about your work?

It’s the people and the excitement and pure joy we get. I’m a nerd and enjoy putting people in space and seeing them do experiments.

The discoveries we make in space are significant. A lot of people don’t think about the science and experiments that happen in space. At the International Space Station, more than 300 experiments are being conducted right now. Some of the studies are looking at the environment, cancer research, even ways to potentially grow artificial organs, etc. So, I’m very excited about that.

Yet, my true passion lies in empowering others. Every day, I’m filled with excitement as I see the impact of our work. Whether it’s an intern who’s been with us for just 6 months, sharing all they’ve learned, or a veteran of 30 years still filled with passion about their work, it’s these moments that truly inspire me.

Talk about the role of mentoring in your career and why it is essential to give back to the next generation of scientists and engineers.

When I came to NASA, I had a master’s degree in bioengineering and was fortunate to have someone to mentor me. He poured into me with his 20-something years of knowledge of flying hardware in space because he wanted me to be the best engineer I could be. Others have been willing to do that for me and my career.

It is important for us to continue to do that with each generation, so they can come in with their bright new ideas and learn to succeed. The younger generation knows how to do things very differently than what folks have been doing for a long time, and we should welcome their innovations.

However, there are still some fundamentals to be learned as well and transferring that knowledge to help people become more confident helps them understand what they want out of their careers. The aim should always be to empower individuals to have the best careers they can have. 

Mentoring STEM students has been a long-time focus of your career. Why are diversity, inclusion, accessibility, and equity important when discussing STEM?

It’s two-fold. One part focuses on getting the best innovative ideas and looking at a problem from multiple dimensions. As an engineer, having someone who looks at a problem differently than you is essential.  

The other part is from a practical standpoint of increasing the number of people to carry forth and do this work. As we advance into the future, we need as many folks with STEM backgrounds as possible to keep up with other countries. Diversity helps us do that and I don’t want us to be left behind.

You were elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2023. What does being a member of the NAE and TAMEST mean to you?

The academies are really a community, and I enjoyed the induction and meeting other academy members. However, I also view it as a responsibility. I’m on a workforce committee and learning about diversity in STEM, the basics of the numbers, and how we must increase them to stay competitive as a country.

Being on a workforce committee with others and hearing about the different issues around the country, even in various sectors, has been so interesting. I’m in aerospace, working next to someone in oil and gas, or someone in the automotive industry from a different part of the country. It’s been good to see what we share in common and to have a community of like-minded individuals all striving for the same thing. It’s a community of nerds and you have the freedom to be yourself.

With TAMEST, I enjoyed attending and speaking at the annual conference and meeting other members across academia and industry. Again, having that community locally in Texas has been great.  

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

I’m just excited that we, as a world, have this opportunity to continue exploring spaceflight, and I want to continue contributing and doing my part.