by Les Johnson
“How did you get your job at NASA?” is a question I am frequently asked. The answer most people expect involves a discussion of education, diligent preparation, and intense competition. While these are essential prerequisites and are not to be underemphasized, it also came down to a bit of luck and a series of conversations with a neighbor while watering my lawn. Back to the question at hand, how did this nerdy bookworm from Appalachia end up having a 30+ year career at NASA?
I was the third of three children, part of the post-World War II baby boom, born into a traditional American family in the heartland of the USA — Ashland, Kentucky. At the time, Ashland was the industrial powerhouse of eastern Kentucky with its steel mills, chemical factories, and other manufacturing plants that provided good-paying jobs that did not require a college degree. The kinds of jobs that used to be widely available in America and that created a large, affluent middle class. My parents loved their children and instilled within each of us a passion for learning and a belief that we could become anything we wanted to become.
I was 7 years old when Apollo 11 flew, and I vividly recall the night Neil Armstrong walked on the surface of the Moon. My parents awakened me because something important was about to happen and I needed to see it. It was way past my bedtime, about 11:00 pm, when I watched the grainy television footage of Neil and Buzz coming down the ladder of the Lunar Module to leave their footprints on the surface of another world. Not long after, I would stay up late with my sister, Gail, to watch reruns of Star Trek on our black and white television. My world forever changed.
I began reading every science fiction book I could get my hands on and every science-related entry in our trusty Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedia. At about age 12, I decided I wanted to be a scientist and work for NASA. I had no interest in becoming an astronaut, likely because I knew I would never be able to qualify due to my poor eyesight and lack of physical prowess. At the time, I really didn’t know the difference between engineers and scientists, I just thought being a scientist sounded more prestigious. I also thought that I would have to learn German since almost all the rocket scientists on television spoke with German accents (Wernher Von Braun, Willey Ley, and others). It helped that I was good at math and science and had some supportive teachers and mentors throughout high school.
My career path first led me to earning a BA from Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky. My time at Transylvania was, like college is for many people, a time of growth and increasing maturity. Transylvania, a liberal arts college, was very small, with only a little over a thousand undergraduate students enrolled at the time. Many of the students attended the university due to its outstanding record of its graduates being admitted to medical school. If you lived in Kentucky and wanted to be a doctor, then you would have had Transylvania on your short list of colleges to attend. I was not the least bit interested in biology or becoming a doctor. I just wanted to go to a good school that would help me prepare for landing a job at NASA.
I majored in physics, which is, by the way, a traditional liberal art. As would later surprise many of my friends and colleagues who attended much larger colleges and universities, I was the only physics major attending Transylvania at the time and many of my undergraduate physics courses had fewer than three to five students. In some classes, I was the only student. Since Transylvania only offered a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree, I was required to take courses in many academic fields to round out my liberal arts studies, including courses in psychology, sociology, history, English, philosophy, and religion. I credit my education at Transylvania with preparing me to be an engaged citizen and much more ‘well rounded’ than I would have been had I earned a BS elsewhere.
I then went on to earn an MS (physics) from Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, Tennessee under the tutelage of Dr. Norman Tolk, a Godly mentor during the toughest 2.5 years of my life. My master’s research was funded by NASA and as I neared graduation, I learned that the man who sponsored my academic work had a job opening at the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center just south of Nashville in Huntsville, Alabama. I applied and then traveled to Huntsville for an interview. I thought the interview went well and the sponsor seemed pleased with my work at Vanderbilt. I was optimistic that I would get the job. I didn’t. And I learned that disappointing news just before I left school to come home for Christmas. I was devastated.
What happened next hinged upon a quirk of the Vanderbilt Graduate Placement Office at the time. Since I was interviewing with NASA for a job that was related to my work at Vanderbilt, I had to have a resume on file with their office. I dutifully provided one just before my ill-fated NASA interview and promptly forgot about it.
Upon arriving back in Nashville and resuming work on my research, I was notified by the placement office that a company in Huntsville had reviewed my resume and wanted to interview me for a job. All I knew was that the company, General Research Corporation (GRC), was a defense contractor and they had a need for someone with experience using lasers and particle beams. My thesis research involved using a beam of electrons to change the surface properties of molybdenum and then studying what was emitted from the surface in the process using, you guessed it, a laser. Here is an equation to which I could relate:
Laser + Particle Beam = Job Interview
It wasn’t NASA, but it was a possible job. I accepted the interview and returned to Huntsville to meet with the man who would eventually become my new boss.
I was interviewed by three staff engineers and scientists and was on the spot offered a job that would get me into the development of space-based high energy laser and particle beam weapons in support of President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). I began working part-time remotely (at Vanderbilt) while I completed my master’s degree and then full time in Huntsville once that was complete. Remote work in 1986 was not like today with Zoom, email, and cell phones. This was the dark ages — they mailed me documents and I replied with written reports (On paper! Typed on a typewriter!) It wasn’t NASA, but it was space related. Close enough. My colleagues, apart from management, were all of my demographic — engineers or scientists in their mid-to-late twenties, mostly single, and all eager to begin their careers.
Shortly after I moved to the Huntsville area, I joined First Christian Church, which is where I met and married the love of my life and my soulmate. Her father was a NASA engineer since the formation of the space program. He was there at the beginning and worked on projects as diverse as the Saturn V rocket, Skylab, and the Hubble Space Telescope. None of his children elected to go into a technical field and, as the first to marry into the Peck clan, he and I instantly bonded over our love of space. I learned a great deal about NASA from her father as our friendship developed.
I spent a little over three years at GRC and loved every minute of it. I gained experience and confidence in my abilities and benefitted from some outstanding mentors, most especially, Steve Kosovac — the man who hired me. It was in this time period that the Soviet Union collapsed, and Congress began talking about slashing the defense budget as part of the ‘Peace Dividend.’ With the encouragement of my wife, I began thinking about leaving GRC to work on something related to NASA. But I was only thinking about making the change, I did not actually go out and apply for a new job — yet.
And then came the water crisis.
I moved to the rapidly growing Huntsville area in 1986. When I first came to town, it was the fourth largest city in Alabama. Every year, more science and technology companies formed or moved offices to Huntsville from elsewhere, driving yet more growth. (It is now the largest city in the state.) After we married, my wife and I decided to buy a house in Madison, a fast-growing suburb close to my office. Shortly after we moved into our brand-new house, we met our immediate neighbors. Nearly all of them were young couples, with the men being engineers and the women employed in a variety of professions. Our neighborhood, Governor’s Estates, was one of many popping up across the city. As sometimes happens, the city’s growth outgrew its infrastructure, and the water treatment plant could not accommodate the number of new hookups. In the summer of 1989, things came to a head and the water pressure dropped to near nothing.
To avert disaster, and to allow some time for Madison to improve its infrastructure, the city council adopted strict water usage rules that limited the watering of lawns to be no more than every other day, with even number houses able to water on Monday, Wednesday, or Friday and odd numbered houses on Tuesday, Thursday, or Saturday. It was on these even days that I met my neighbors. During those hot and dry summer evenings, we would each come home from work and immediately go outside to set up the sprinklers so that our newly planted lawns would not die. And, of course, while setting up the sprinklers, we struck up conversations and got to know each other.
At the beginning of the summer watering season, I learned that the man living in the house next door worked for NASA. The neighbor on the other side of his house worked for Teledyne Brown Engineering, an aerospace company that performed work similar to what I was doing at GRC. He and I shared the dream of working for NASA and talked about how we would be soon applying for jobs there. He was more proactive than me, and just a few weeks later informed us (while we were watering our lawns, of course) that he had been hired at NASA. Shortly thereafter, he pulled me aside and asked if I would like for him to circulate my resume among his new work colleagues because they were in the process of staffing up. I readily agreed.
In only a few weeks, he told me there was a group there interested in learning more about me and my background. It was then that I learned about the infamous form SF-171: NASA’s standard form for those seeking employment by the US government. I dusted off the typewriter and began filling out the multi-page form, correcting my many typos with Wite-Out. Those that have only known word processors need to be very thankful. Completing the SF-171 with a typewriter, lining up the blank spaces on the printed form with where the characters would appear when they struck the inked ribbon and transferred to the paper was an arduous and time-consuming task. Making too many mistakes and using the aforementioned Wite-Out to correct them could make the application look very visually unappealing.
A little after a month after I completed the form, I received an interview request. It was in that meeting that I met my future bosses, Carmine DeSanctis and Hermann Gierow, both veterans of the Apollo Program that had so inspired me as a youth. After the interview, they said they wanted to hire me and would begin the process. I was instantly on Cloud 9, thinking that in a manner of weeks I would be able to give my notice to GRC and begin work at NASA. Since I did not know how long the hiring process would require, I did not inform GRC that I planned to leave. Instead, I continued my tasks there while every day secretly hoping the phone would ring, informing me of my start date at NASA.
A month went by. Then another. During the wait, my GRC supervisor, Steve Kosovac, summoned me into his office and offered me a promotion.
Anxiety. I did not know what to do. Accept the promotion and then depart as soon as NASA called? Decline the promotion and explain that I was planning to take a new job, risking that they would say, “go ahead and leave now,” forcing me to leave without a paycheck until NASA called? Accept the promotion and then leave? I decided to come clean and tell Steve that was going on. He was very gracious and instead of immediately firing me, he said I should stay on and begin transferring my projects to others in the work group.
About a month later, the call finally arrived, and I began working for the Program Development organization at NASA’s George C. Marshall Space Flight Center.
I’m now ready to answer the original question, “How did you get your job at NASA?” I’ve given that a lot of thought and created this list of essential ingredients:
1. Desire and passion. Working at NASA is not just a job to earn a paycheck, it is part of my life and legacy.
2. Academic preparation. I knew early that to achieve my life’s goal, I had to be a good student. I studied the hard subjects and applied to good schools.
3. Tenacity. It would have been easy to accept not being hired by NASA at first and to find career satisfaction in another job. But that wasn’t what I really wanted to do so I kept trying.
4. Luck. This last one is the most difficult and perhaps the most important. I’ve met many people who are more prepared than me academically and share the same passion for space, yet they have been unable to get a job with NASA or one of our contractors. I was lucky.
My dream became a reality thanks to God’s providence, my parents, the wonderful and nurturing people of Ashland, Kentucky* (my hometown), Neil Armstrong, Captain Kirk, the faculty and staff of Transylvania and Vanderbilt Universities, the fantastic scientists and engineers at GRC, my visionary wife and her insights into global trends and geopolitics, NASA’s Program Development organization, and, of course, my neighbors and yard watering buddies without whom the opportunity might never have come my way.
To learn more about me and my writing, please visit my website: www.lesjohnsonauthor.com
*Amazingly enough, as of this writing, there are at least four employees at the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center from Ashland or Boyd County Kentucky (the county in which Ashland resides). Something in the water, perhaps? More likely, something in the culture…
