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A NASA astronaut who said he was fired from his position as head of engineer at the agency’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston cited management differences as the reason for his departure.
In a statement released Wednesday, astronaut Charles Camarda said he was removed from his position by JSC director Michael Coats because “we did not see eye to eye on management style.”
Camarda, 54, served as a mission specialist on NASA’s STS-114 shuttle mission – the agency’s first post-Columbia accident orbiter flight – last summer and later took up the position as JSC’s director of engineering.
His removal, and subsequent reassignment to NASA Engineering and Safety Center, an independent safety oversight group in Virginia’s Langley Research Center, was announced after an e-mail written by Camarda on the job shift was widely reported in the media. The announcement came less than a week before NASA’s planned July 1 launch of its STS-121 mission.
Camarda’s statement said he has been assured that he “will be participating in the upcoming flight as part of the Mission Management Team.”
“I look forward to working toward the successful completion of STS-121,” Carmada’s statement read.
December 7th, 2006 at 8:42 pm
This is the old (old) story … a mis-match in a team. In the case of Charles Camarda, who can say what the problem was: either the team was ahead of Charles or he was too far out in front with ideas and work style for the team. Either way, a mis-match appeared and something had to give. I hope he is happy in his new position. For sure there would have been some sort of upheaval in the wake of his departure from JSC. I wonder if the situation could have been salvaged if, earlier, the right kind of corporate team building program could have been brought in. Many of these programs work wonders.