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bjbj$ Steve Altemus: What shaped me most has been being close to the hardware to my whole
career. Being at Kennedy Space Center and being able to walk around and crawl through
orbiters and understand the stack as you go up and down the boosters and see the processing
occurring and walk the launch pad before every launch, being close to the hardware, understanding
the scale and the size of the hardware has always been something that I would preach
to the younger folks, the coops, is stay close to the hardware. Even if you re just a designer
or an analyst or a test engineer, you ve got to be there with your hands dirty working
with the hardware and that s where you get a real appreciation where or as you grow in
your career, you get a more intuitive sense of what s a good design, of what s a decent
analysis, or when something doesn t look quite right and that comes from years and years
of being close to the hardware. So I think we need that in the agency. So it s really
fortunate that a lot of folks like Bobby and Mike Ryschkewitsch, the chief engineer, are
pushing for significant increase in the amount of in-house work that we re going to do in
the agency. That s so important to do to keep our young folks, all folks at different levels
in their career, working with the hardware and designing things. Bobby Braun: If I could
just follow on to that a little bit. That s something that we don t uniformly in the
universities. In the university setting we teach undergraduates, for instance, the foundational
skills that they need across all of the aerospace disciplines, but very few undergraduates get
to be part of a project from across the whole lifecycle: from concept all the way to flight.
So for our young engineers coming into NASA to have developmental experiences like Steve
s referring to here is very important. Steve Altemus: What shaped me most has been being
close to the hardware to my whole career hstephenson Normal.dot hstephenson Microsoft Office Word
VALADOR Steve Altemus: What shaped me most has been being close to the hardware to my
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