There was a time, during the heady race into space and to the Moon, when working at NASA was perhaps the ultimate dream for an engineer. And there was also a time a few decades later, when the space shuttle program felt stagnant, and working for NASA sounded more like a punishment to a graduating engineer.
I sense that we’re returning to the former days at NASA, and I had the privilege of interviewing Dr. Dava Newman, NASA’s Deputy Administrator, last month for our annual Leadership in Engineering issue—which will be arriving at your desk or inbox shortly.
When we sat down in her office at NASA’s Washington, D.C. headquarters, I knew that she would talk about her passions for exploration, for teamwork, and for promoting STEM careers. But I was a little surprised by how she excited me about the journey to Mars that we’re undertaking. The project is a huge one, and Newman’s leadership skills have been needed to break it down into doable parts. Newman said that NASA’s space launch system, the Orion capsule, will launch in 2018 with no astronauts aboard—that’s deemed Exploration Mission One. Exploration Mission Two, with astronauts aboard, will launch in the early 2020s.
“All the entire decade of the 2020s, we’ll just keep going back—Earth, Moon and deep space,” she told me. NASA will be busy proving the technologies that we’ll need for serious Mars exploration: space propulsion, solar electric propulsion, life support systems, deep space habitats. And after that is actually putting people in Mars orbit and then eventually on the surface.
People always ask her: will that be a round trip to Mars?
“It’s a round trip, yes, many round trips—hopefully we get to keep going,” she said enthusiastically. “Those astronauts are going to be someone who is in school today—probably in high school or maybe in college. Those students are going to be the first Mars astronauts. I will do everything I can to empower that, to help lead and inspire the next generation. I call them the Mars generation.”
For a decades-long plan like getting to Mars, Newman and her team have had to look at not only the innovation of the technology, but in the innovation of the organization—figuring out how can engineers work better together with both technical and non-technical people.
And although we engineers tend to focus on the physical problems of a particular design or system, it’s a nice reminder that we have to communicate with the other members of our company effectively and clearly. We have to break problems up into bite sized chunks when possible. And it doesn’t hurt to dream big once in a while.
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