Mike Kelly is chief of the Technical Excellence Office for the NASA Safety Center (NSC). In this role, he is responsible for planning, organizing and directing a full range of integrated services including Safety and Mission Assurance (SMA) curriculum and course development, SMA engineering support for over 2,800 NASA civil service and support contract employees agencywide, and the SMA Technical Excellence Program (STEP) — NASA’s university for safety. Kelly also serves as program manager for the Chief SMA Officer Summit and Executive Safety Leadership Program. He is located at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.
Prior to this role, Kelly served as the Technical Leadership Technical Discipline Team Lead (TDTL) and also as the Quality Engineering (QE) TDTL for the NSC. As the Technical Leadership TDTL, he offered a professional development path for the SMA Technical Leadership discipline through STEP and developed and defined the role of the SMA Technical Leadership curriculum participant through professional development opportunities, collaborative events and working groups. As the QE TDTL, Kelly was responsible for the professional development of NASA’s QE workforce.
Before joining the NSC, Kelly was the assistant director of the Goddard Safety and Mission Assurance (SMA) directorate in Greenbelt, Maryland. In this position, his duties included serving as the Contracting Officer Representative for the SMA Services contract and supporting both Continuity of Operations Planning and awards programs for the directorate. Kelly provided leadership as the center technical liason officer of the SMA 3 contract, which provides SMA support at supplier facilities for all Goddard projects.
Kelly spent four years as the chief of the Mission Support Division within the Goddard SMA directorate. Under his direction were the Chief SMA Officers, Reliability engineers, System Safety engineers, software Quality Assurance engineers, and Lean Six Sigma and Risk Management programs. Kelly provided SMA leadership, direction and support for all NASA Goddard programs and projects.
Kelly also served as the chief of the Institutional Support Office within the SMA directorate at Goddard. While in this office, he provided technical leadership for multiple activities at Goddard, which included the Goddard internal auditing program, SMA directives management, mission operations assurance, on-orbit anomalies investigations and Goddard Open Learning Design rules. Also included in his duties were the development and management of the NASA Goddard Supply Chain Management Program. Kelly has visited and led in-depth AS9100 and contractual assessments at more than 70 aerospace suppliers. Kelly was the original creator of the Supply Chain Conference held each year at Goddard.
Prior to his SMA management role, Kelly was the systems assurance manager for almost 17 years, working many Goddard projects, including the GOES Series, STEREO, SWIFT, SOLAR-B, EO-1, XTE, TRMM, ACE, TOPEX and MOLA.
