Voices Driving Innovation: Wayne Black's Career Lesson - Listen First, Then Solve

Wayne Black's greatest engineering skill has nothing to do with equations. After five decades solving impossible problems, he'll tell you the secret is knowing when to stop talking and start listening.

From NASA internships designing Mars spacecraft to troubleshooting satellite systems across six continents, Wayne's five-decade career reads like a technical encyclopedia. Today, he consults with Radeus Labs, where his deep understanding of orbital mechanics and antenna control systems helps the team tackle complex technical challenges.

But ask Wayne what matters most in engineering, and he won't start with orbital mechanics.

"Listen to your customers. Listen to your technicians. Listen to the system itself."

From Mars Missions to Challenger's Aftermath

Wayne's career started as a NASA intern at Johnson Space Center in the mid-1980s, working on theoretical Mars missions. His team designed a spacecraft two football fields long with a 50-megawatt nuclear power plant and thousands of electric propulsion engines. When Reagan's space commission complained about seeing "the same junk," NASA pulled Wayne's team in to present. Their papers made it into the commission's official report.

Then Challenger exploded. Wayne recalls:

"I was sitting in my advisor's office when the phone rang. It was a reporter. You could tell from the questions that something bad had happened with the shuttle."

Everything at NASA froze. Wayne ended up working for Rockwell on Space Shuttle operations anyway, spending three years on mission planning and on-orbit analysis. He ran the software development team for pre-mission planning.

"Before every shuttle lifted off after that, everybody held their breath until those solid boosters came off."

Listening Wins Contracts

After NASA, Wayne joined Vertex Communications in Kilgore, Texas, designing antenna control systems. The market leader was Electrospace, run by Ralph White, brilliant but difficult with customers.

Wayne saw an opportunity in a different approach. He describes one pivotal meeting:

"At the end, the guy said, 'I've never heard of you before today. But right now, you are way ahead of your competition.' And all we did was listen to them."

The contrast became stark when both companies bid on XBR, a radar system for the Star Wars ballistic missile defense program. Vertex proposed permanent magnet AC servo motors with one-third the weight and power draw of Ralph's traditional DC motors. Raytheon awarded the contract to Vertex.

When the companies later merged and Ralph's group tried to revert to DC motors, Raytheon refused. Ralph demanded a demonstration. Wayne set up a test in Chicago. For 45 minutes, Ralph ran test after test. Then he stopped, stood up, and said three words: 

"This can work." 

Then he picked up his jacket and walked out.

Wayne says:

"From that day forward, Ralph never used a DC motor again unless he was forced to. Goes to show, even an old guy can learn, but you have to get the right circumstances."

Teaching the Math That Makes It Work

Over the decades, Wayne has become known as a teacher. He's trained many engineers including a number on the Radeus Labs team. One of Radeus' engineers, Troy Wood, describes how Wayne works:

"Wayne doesn't give you answers. He helps you understand what question you're really asking. Once you know that, you can find the solution yourself."

Wayne's insight and guidance extends directly to Radeus's current work, helping the team understand the mathematical foundations behind complex technical challenges.

When they encountered non-orthogonality problems, where antenna installations aren't perfectly aligned, Wayne knew exactly how to approach the mathematical correction. He'd once worked on a site in Mexico where the entire antenna pad was tilted from improper construction. 

Rather than rebuilding, he developed software to automatically compensate for both the tilt and orthogonality errors. His real-world problem-solving now helps Radeus develop more robust antenna control systems.

Listen to Everyone, Assume Nothing

Wayne's troubleshooting philosophy centers on gathering evidence without assumptions:

"Ask everybody: What did they see? What did they hear? Not because everything they give you is correct. Their conclusions can be wrong. But you want to know why they reached that conclusion. You want the evidence."

He advocates using all your senses: 

"Go listen to the system run. Sometimes I would just close my eyes and listen. You would hear things happening; sharp sounds versus smooth sounds."

Wayne is equally adamant about listening to technicians. He shares a story about his brother at Intel who kept seeing bubbles in wafers under a microscope. Engineers dismissed him repeatedly until one engineer finally looked and confirmed a production problem.

"Listen to your technicians. They build these products over and over again. They learn them very well, sometimes better than the engineers who designed them."

Learning from Failure, The Right Way

Wayne contrasts NASA's cautious culture with more experimental approaches. He points to the Russian method of rocket engine development: they planned from the start to blow up 100 prototypes, learning from each failure. 

"They ended up building one of the best rocket engines ever made."

SpaceX follows a similar philosophy today. When their rockets explode during testing, Wayne notes the reaction: 

"Observers get bent out of shape; they blew up the rocket! But the people inside SpaceX are cheering because they have a mentality of: we will resolve this issue so it never happens again."

Wayne's favorite example of this thinking comes from Wernher von Braun and the Saturn V. The massive engines would sometimes fire normally and sometimes go unstable and explode unpredictably. Von Braun proposed an unconventional test: 

"What if we put a stick of dynamite in the flow and see what it does?"

The team hung dynamite inside the engine bell. During test fires, they detonated it, deliberately creating the same instability they'd been seeing randomly. Now they could trigger the problem on demand. They modified the engine design repeatedly until the system could absorb the explosion and return to stable operation. The random failures disappeared.

Wayne draws the broader lesson: 

"Sometimes when you have a problem that's random, if you can figure out a way to cause that problem and make the system handle it, you've often solved your real problem."

The Core Lessons

Wayne's advice distills to fundamental principles:

Listen first:   

"If you don't listen to your customers, it just makes them mad. You may know the best solution, but you've got to help them get to that point."

Question assumptions: 

"When you walk in thinking you already know what the problem is, often you just waste time and make it worse."

Create openness: 

"Create a culture that allows people to input issues and actually get them fixed, instead of the same issue coming through over and over."

Allow safe failure: 

"You've got to be free to make mistakes. Not mistakes that kill people, but designing is about learning what works."

Why It Matters Today

Companies like Radeus Labs face increasingly complex challenges in satellite communications and antenna control systems. The mathematics may be established, but applying it to new situations requires the kind of thinking Wayne developed over five decades.

Troy sums it up: 

"Wayne has helped us understand what we're really asking for. Once you know that, you can find the solution yourself."

The technical knowledge passes down through documentation. But the thinking (the listening, the questioning, the willingness to challenge assumptions) that comes from engineers like Wayne who've spent decades solving problems everyone said couldn't be solved.

About Voices Driving Innovation

Radeus Labs' ongoing interview series featuring the engineers, advisors, and industry leaders shaping the future of high-performance computing, SATCOM systems, and mission-critical technology.