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Typical of children my age, I had a Lego set and of course, I made a Saturn V rocket with my
Lego set. So, the space program was always a really cool thing. Even growing up, I had models
- plastic models of the shuttle and the Apollo capsule, and, you know, the lander.
That was always really cool stuff. But, it really wasn't until high school that I
said, "You know what? I can actually GO there. I can actually work at NASA!" And,
so, I committed myself and said, "You know what? I'm gonna do this. That's really
what I want to do, look out, because, here I come!" And I've never again lost focus
after that point. One of my earliest experiences that I remember very vividly, is
working on the instrument pointing system. It's part of Spacelab. It's provided by
ESA and operated by NASA. And, it's essentially a platform to point telescopes that's
mounted in the payload bay of the shuttle. It's quite a complicated piece of equipment. It has star-trackers,
and gyros and those types of things. It's kind of intensive to get checked out and calibrate it before
we actually use it. The particular time I remember, I was on console during the mission and we were having
trouble. Spacelab 2 was a solar mission, so, the telescopes were solar telescopes. And we were having
trouble with the star tracker. It was configured for a sun tracker. And, the sun tracker, the star tracker
was made by a French company and I can remember in the engineering control room, I was the lead for that shift.
We had ESA there and we had Dornier systems there from Germany who was responsible for the instrument
pointing system for ESA. We had members from the French company that were there supporting their star tracker.
When we were having trouble, we were all at the board talking pretty much at the same
time. I can remember four different languages were being spoken: American, French, Dutch
and German by different groups around the room to try and understand what was going on.
That always struck me, to this day. That was an incredible time, you know, we working
20 hours a day, trying to figure out what was going on for the first couple of days.
It brought everybody together, but it showed that even in a "One-NASA" approach, there
is still culture, and there's still different cultures and diversity amongst the workforce,
and amongst those that we work with in executing what needs to be done. I've always
remembered that. It's been pretty amazing. We finally figured out what's been going on and
we solved that problem. In so doing, it was a fun and exciting and challenging time.
It's been a lot of fun. I've always pushed myself. I've always challenged myself
to do the best at what I can do in the jobs that I've been given. I'm certainly
not bored! I look forward to continuing my work at NASA. I hope that NASA
continues that focus to continue to push the frontiers and continue to make progress in
pushing those frontiers as time goes on. I think it's incumbent upon us as employees
to remind our leadership that that should be one of the primary focuses of NASA to continually make progress.