In a recent podcast episode, Scott Woestman, Group Vice President of Public Sector at Sphera, an operational risk software company, talks about how the company has been helping federal agencies modernize how they handle hazardous materials.

They’ve been working with both NASA and the Defense Logistics Agency, part of the DoD, on hazardous materials management. The Sphera platform at NASA is helping to improve hazardous materials tracking, reduce waste, and strengthen safety. NASA has since adopted it as its agency-wide standard for hazmat management.

The conversation dives into how intelligent software goes beyond simple regulatory compliance to actively protect workplace safety, reduce waste, and build predictability into some of the world's most high-stakes operational environments.

"We really focus on that chemical lifecycle management, that cradle to grave, and regulatory intelligence that helps us support some pretty demanding operational environments across the world,” Woestman said.

While compliance with environmental laws is mandatory, Sphera’s work with NASA and the DLA is modernizing data by automating Safety Data Sheets (SDS) and standardizing packaging and disposal workflows. By doing this, the federal agencies can significantly reduce hazardous waste volume and protect the lives of personnel on the ground and in transit.

For organizations like NASA and the Department of Defense, hazardous material management is about mission success and survival. Sphera focuses on tightening data integrity right at the ground floor, Woestman said. This ensures complete visibility over every liquid, gas, or particle destined for a spacecraft or a military operation, allowing toxicologists and safety officers to map out strict control measures (like engineering controls and proper personal protective equipment) before a material is ever handled.

The Human Element in Tech Adoptions

Scaling a massive software platform across giant federal agencies comes with a major hurdle: culture. Woestman notes that people naturally default to working in silos because it feels efficient to them individually. To get diverse stakeholders to buy into a single, unified platform, leadership must establish clear objectives, agreed-upon metrics, and strict timelines right from the start.

Woestman highlighted several specific mechanisms driving efficiency and workplace safety within defense and aerospace logistics:

• Smart Connect & Safety Data Sheets (SDS): Automating how agencies retrieve, evaluate, and share real-time chemical safety worksheets across massive, interconnected networks.
• Standardizing exact configuration and packaging instructions to prevent disasters during the shipment of high-risk materials.
• Using data to help environmental specialists seamlessly manage a vast, worldwide network of disposal contracts cleanly and efficiently.

Cultural Differences vs. Shared Goals

"Often, the biggest challenge with rolling anything out is often culture and people... People tend to operate in silos. They have their way of doing things... When you're bringing in a new technology, there's change,” Woestman said.

While a civilian agency like NASA and a military wing like the DLA operate under different organizational cultures, their ultimate destination is identical. Whether the mission involves safeguarding astronauts flying on the historic Artemis 2 mission or protecting a warfighter deployed overseas, both entities rely on early metrics and process predictability to eliminate preventable errors, he said.

"As we've seen with Artemis 2, which is an amazing success, the average US citizen doesn't typically see the thousand steps behind that to make sure that those space warriors, as they like to say, are going up and they're getting down safely."

Predictability and AI at Scale

When asked about the future, Woestman expressed immense optimism regarding Artificial Intelligence. With tens of thousands of chemical combinations interacting daily across global supply chains, manual oversight has its limits. The next frontier of hazardous materials safety lies in predictable automation, which will allow software to handle back-end data analysis while human safety experts focus entirely on putting protective programs into action.

"One thing that AI brings to the table is automation... How do we build programs to be predictable, reliable, and automated so that people can focus on safety and putting those programs to work?"