I Was Hooked II

By Ingrid Desilvestre
Executive Officer to the Deputy Center Director
Ames Research Center

When I was a kid, my entire school would gather to watch NASA rockets launch and capsules parachute into the ocean. The space program would grow to influence all of our lives in a huge way – but it seemed a much bigger part of our lives then than it probably seems to be to your lives today. Today, we take the benefits of the space program more for granted.

But then – then, I was hooked. I thought it was so cool that, years later, when a NASA representative came to my grad school, I made a point of going to his presentation. At that point, working for NASA was an abandoned dream. I not only knew I wouldn’t be an astronaut, I knew I wouldn’t even be an Earth-bound rocket scientist. Instead, I had majored in political science and history and was about to get a degree in international affairs. But that day I found out that it takes more than astronauts and rocket scientists to manage the U.S. space program.

NASA, it turns out, accomplishes a lot of its goals by working cooperatively with other countries. The biggest and best example is the International Space Station. Sixteen countries partnered to build it, and so far astronauts from 14 countries have visited. Foreign astronauts have flown on the Space Shuttle as well. Also, many NASA missions carry foreign instruments and components (and vice versa). For example, the U.S. mission to Saturn, Cassini, carried a European probe that landed on the moon Titan. U.S. instruments flew on the recent Indian mission to the Moon, Chandrayaan. Space cooperation with the Soviet Union quietly kept the two nations talking during some of the coldest days of the cold war.

So I took my international degree straight to NASA Headquarters and became a Soviet desk officer, working on life sciences and solar physics cooperation with the USSR (you learn the science as you go along!). After that, my responsibilities included collaboration with Latin American countries, Germany, Canada, Scandinavia, and, for a little while, the European Space Agency and Japan. I got to travel a lot, learn a lot, and meet interesting people.

And then, I got the best job you can have at NASA if you can’t be an astronaut: I became the NASA Representative in Spain. NASA had representatives in Spain and Australia because we have deep space communications complexes there – stations with huge dish antennas that receive signals from and send commands to spacecraft exploring distant planets. I served in the U.S. Embassy and helped negotiate an agreement between the governments of Spain and the United States for the complex. It was fun, to be the NASA Rep and live abroad.

I came back to the United States to a different job, executive officer to the Center Director at Ames. Right now, I’m the executive officer to the deputy center director. That doesn’t involve a whole lot of international stuff, or science and engineering, but, like I said, it takes more than rocket scientists and engineers to build a space program.

(Ms. Desilvestre will be our LiveRoom guest for our Freshman chat Thursday, Nov. 5, 2009 at 8:00pm CT)