UW team asks how well NASA communicates during crises

How well do mission control crews communicate during a crisis? It’s an important question that two UW–Madison faculty members will explore on behalf of NASA.

Assistant Professor Mary Waller of the School of Business and Associate Professor Barrett S. Caldwell of the Department of Industrial Engineering are co-principal investigators on a new $460,000 grant from NASA to examine how patterns of communication change during a critical event and determine ways to improve them so teams can communicate more efficiently. Their goal is to identify factors that create communication bottlenecks and suggest strategies to make communications more effective.

Waller and Caldwell will examine intergroup communications of mission control crews at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. The research, to take place over three years, will assess the efficiency and communications patterns of crews during three cycles of flight: ascent, orbit and entry.