What a thrill it was to attend Launching Connections: A Business to Business Expo for doing business with NASA last week. Five NASA centers (Stennis, Michoud, Marshall, Johnson, and Kennedy) were on hand to give overviews of the work they do and how to do business with them. Updates on the Space Launch Systems, the Orion Program, and Ground System Development were given. One of the speakers used a sports analogy to talk about the space race and how NASA has long been America’s team. Yes, indeed.

Thinking about deep space travel and ultimately reaching Mars blows me away. But NASA has started the journey with Orion and SLS and I’m totally excited to watch this ambitious process unfold.

In case you don’t know how I feel about the NASA, here’s an excerpt from an previous blog post:

I am a big fan of the space program; maybe because I was born in 1962 and clearly remember someone’s parent hauling a big, heavy tv into our first and second grade classrooms so we could watch Apollo missions. And, of course the memory from July 1969 of family gathered watching Neil Armstrong walk on the moon is pretty cool. The world covets youth, but I kind of feel sorry for those so young they were not alive during the amazing and exciting early years of space travel. I daily use (and love) my microwave oven, memory foam mattress, scratch resistant eyeglass lenses and regularly use dozens of other consumer products made possible by space program research.

But, because I am an organizational psychologist, I am also tuned into some other things we’ve gotten from NASA – a lot of great knowledge about organization behavior including awesome examples of leadership, teamwork, problem solving, creativity, expertise as well as some very tough lessons on decision making and group think. I taught a college-level course in Organization Behavior for many years and often pulled from NASA examples to explain sometimes difficult concepts.

Apollo 13 is a movie worth watching yearly. It’s a movie about what happened on that mission but regardless, some of the scenes are classic. In one of those, seemingly random parts are dumped on a table in a conference room full of engineers. They are told that in a limited amount of time, using only those parts, to figure out a way to connect a square piece to a circular one and that “failure is not an option”. And they do. Another scene near the end, when someone says to Gene Kranz, NASA Flight Director, “This could be the worst disaster NASA’s ever faced” and he replies, “With all due respect, sir, I believe this is gonna be our finest hour” really chokes me up. Finally, when the Odyssey splashes down in the Pacific and the astronauts fall out into the rescue raft, surrounded by the greatness of the US military, I ALWAYS feel overwhelmed with pride that I am an American.

And learning last week about Orion and the plans for deep space travel makes me feel the same way. Mars, baby – go team!

Would love to know what you think of this. Please comment below.

My goal is to write 30 blog posts in 30 days the month of September.

#30in30