Football players weren’t the only athletes I was privileged to associate with in 2010. That summer, Venus Williams invited me to the National Press Club in Washington, DC. She was there to sign copies of her new book, Come to Win: Business Leaders, Artists, Doctors, and Other Visionaries on How Sports Can Help You Top Your Profession. I had been honored to contribute a chapter alongside such luminaries as Earvin “Magic” Johnson, Soledad O’Brien, Vera Wang, Bill Clinton, and Condoleezza Rice. Venus had asked me to write about “the power of visualization.” The topic fit conveniently with my own athletic development. My dad had always coached me to think about the football route, the tennis stroke, the correct form when running. He reminded me to go through the motions in my mind, away from the field or court. Dal Shealy, my football coach at Richmond, had reinforced that technique.
Venus was truly a class act in person. She is no less impressive on the court, where her style of play demonstrates the value of grit and sheer will in pursuing championships. Like many of her admirers, I’ve always loved watching her and her sister, Serena, crush their opponents. They began on a court in Compton, California, not the likeliest place for tennis champions to launch their trajectories. Thinking about their humble roots took me back to my childhood, when I competed in tennis matches against Linkhorne, the powerhouse middle school where my parents both taught. My father beamed with pride when I beat Linkhorne’s top seed, who happened to be the son of my parents’ doctor. His play had been honed with private lessons at the country club while my own was shaped on the public courts. Like Venus’s dad, Richard Williams, my parents knew the value of grit. They stressed its importance not just on the field but in the classroom, too.
I saw the Summer of Innovation as a way to encourage grit in kids who may have demonstrated it outside of school but hadn’t necessarily shown it in class. In August, I was able to implement a nontraditional partnership with NASA Education when we got the opportunity to do a science hologram with the musician and actor Mos Def (now Yasiin Bey). A company that does powerful optical visualization, Obscura Digital, was able to film Mos teaching the science of sound waves and display holographic images of the two of us talking on stage. Our dialogue went something like this:
LM: It’s amazing when I think of the parallels that exist between music and science, especially when it comes to sound waves. Mos, can you share some of the science behind the music?
MD: One of the things we know about sound is that it travels by waves. Let’s take a look at a picture of a sound wave to see how its shape affects what we hear. In music, long wavelengths create low-pitched sounds and short wavelengths make high-pitched sounds.
I went on to tell our audience about sound waves in space. Mos Def followed with a timely reminder:
MD: There’s science all around us. Without advances in science and technology, we wouldn’t be able to enjoy radio, television, the Internet, or YouTube, or some of the common things some of us take for granted.
LM: The jobs you will have in the next twenty years haven’t even been imagined yet. You will be using technology that hasn’t even been invented. We need you to become the inventors. You all have the qualities needed for innovation: curiosity, creativity, vision, courage, and enthusiasm. What you need is the math and science skills to back up these qualities that you already have.
We simultaneously showed viewings of our new tool to a diverse group of students and parents at the Chabot Science Center in Oakland, California, while I was in Florida displaying it to kids and parents at the Tom Joyner Family Labor Day weekend. With special effects and the added sparkle of celebrity, it was a revolutionary way to engage our next generation of explorers.
In October, after enduring a rigorous application and interview process, I became NASA associate administrator for education. I was excited but missed the connection with Houston and the familiar rituals of training exercises and flights aboard jets. My new post was more of a bureaucratic job. It would require long hours testifying on the Hill, scrubbing budgets for cuts mandated by the federal Office of Management and Budget, and remaining responsive to the desires of an administration full of competing missions.
My coming-out party was a conference where we invited leading thinkers in education, philanthropy, outreach, theater, and publishing to see how we could make a difference in education. We had a great lineup of speakers, including Mae Jemison, Nichelle Nichols, and Charlie Bolden. After setting things in motion with inspiring talks, we rolled up our sleeves to see how we could all work together to improve learning outcomes for our nation’s young people. Another one of our speakers was author and “why” guru Simon Sinek. He spoke on the importance of starting a project by asking why, followed by how and what. His talk resonated with many of us, and we eventually called on him to help NASA determine its “why.”
I became cochair of the White House Committee on STEM Education (CoSTEM) in November. The committee was tasked to develop a five-year strategic plan for the federal government to share common practices and better ways to leverage its $2 billion investment in STEM. It was a difficult undertaking because many thought the exercise was simply a smokescreen to consolidate agencies’ efforts and ease the way for budget cutting. I got a break from all the negotiation and diplomacy in April 2011, when I went to a conference at the headquarters of Lego in Billund, Denmark, where I had the pleasure of meeting Stephan Turnipseed, an engineer turned educator and Lego evangelist. His remarks amounted to a sermon about the importance of motivating kids to build and create with their hands.
NASA, partnered with Lego, developed educational content that involved astronauts assembling Lego Mindstorm Robotics kits in space to help kids see the differences between their device on the ground and how it would behave in microgravity. I remember we did an exercise at the conference where we had to assemble a machine that had to move across the floor to a designated position, but we had to do it without using the wheels in the kit. It was a way to demonstrate creative problem solving. After the demonstration, the conference leaders showed us how eight-year-olds were able to do the same task in a quarter of the time. The youngsters’ relative speed illustrated our tendency to purge the creativity out of our kids by making them memorize passages, facts, and figures in preparation for standardized testing. The older children get, the less opportunity they have to be creative, unless they are in an environment that fosters that type of skill set. Hands-on, project-based learning is something that both Stephan and I believed in. Stephan had a farm also, and we talked of our shared desire to motivate and inspire young leaders through the beauty of the great outdoors.
By that point in my career I’d given more speeches than I could count. I’d spoken in various cities, states, and countries, before every kind of audience. You might think that it gets old but it really doesn’t. Sharing my ideas with new groups continues to be exciting, and carries the added bonus of stimulating my own thinking. In June I spoke at the United Nations in Vienna, Austria, where I discussed our efforts to bring nations together through space exploration and education. One night I joined a panel of astronauts from Russia, Japan, Malaysia, Switzerland, Germany, Spain, Italy, Canada, and China. The gathering reminded me of my first dinner aboard the space station, when we broke bread in fellowship with explorers from countries we’d previously regarded as enemies. Once again the potential of space travel as a unifying force was made wonderfully clear.
In September I attended an annual awards dinner and auction presented by Shades of Blue. The Colorado-based nonprofit encourages students to pursue opportunities in aviation and aerospace, among other STEM careers. The organization was founded by Willie Daniels who worked his way up from being a flight attendant to being a United Airlines pilot who flies Boeing’s flagship 777. I was pleased to receive the Ed Dwight Jr. Education Award, named after the pioneering black astronaut. After leaving NASA, Dwight eventually returned to school and earned an MFA degree. He went on to become an eminently successful sculptor whose commissioned works
include several acclaimed public installations around the country. In combining a life of science and art, he epitomizes the merits of STEAM, and I was proud to accept the award that bore his name.
The following month, I traveled to a continent I had only seen from space: Africa. I remember looking down on the continent, feeling awestruck by the light from some of the massive thunderstorms and the eerie darkness that covered remote areas like the Cape of Good Hope. On the ground in Cape Town, South Africa, I joined my colleagues participating in the International Space Education Board delegation to South Africa. Established in 2005, the board has a twofold mission: to promote STEM literacy and its importance to the space programs and the overall development of a well-educated and well-rounded workforce. Toward those ends, we met with the fledgling South African National Space Agency to bring them on board as a member. Our team also took books into the townships and built Lego-modeled solar cars that kids could take home and show their parents. The cars used the power of the sun to energize their small motors. Mabel Matthews and Carol Galica of NASA’s Office of Educational Programs were instrumental in making this happen. I was amazed at the work and impact my team could make doing international diplomacy through our most precious resource, our children.
Our group had the opportunity to visit the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls in Meyerton Gauteng. I will never forget when a young student from Johannesburg asked me how she could work for NASA. I responded by saying, “Did you know there is an African Space Agency? You should look into how to be part of that, bring it to prominence, and be the first government astronaut to fly from Africa.”
In truth, Mark Shuttleworth became the first South African to fly in space. However, he was a civilian who paid $30 million to fly as a tourist astronaut. It’s the same whether you are a tourist astronaut or a highly trained astronaut. We both want to explore space and make life better for our civilization.
I also had the chance to visit the Cape of Good Hope within the Cape Point Nature Preserve, the continent’s most southwestern point. I met Margie Kumalo at the board meeting, and she was kind enough to show me some of the sights. We rented a car and drove to the cape. From space, it looked like an eerie, dark void. Up close, it was a grass- and shrub-covered stretch of rocky terrain where the Atlantic and Indian Oceans meet. It’s not every day that you can stroll in a park and see baboons and penguins.
The food was different, too. In Capetown, I dined on local delicacies, like gazelle, kudu, and other wild game. Near the cape, we stopped at shanties along the road to sample fresh crab, cod, and rock lobsters. Biltong, a beef jerky, and dried fruit are also popular and plentiful. At the Cape of Good Hope, I bumped into some German flight controllers who thanked me for providing them with their job security by safely installing the Columbus research laboratory during the Atlantis flight. It really is a small world after all.
A few weeks later, I joined the pop star will.i.am at Cape Canaveral to watch the Curiosity rover take off for Mars. The $2.5 billion vehicle was about to undertake a two-year mission to search for signs that the Red Planet may have been habitable to microbial life. Will.i.am’s fascination with space is well known, and Charlie Bolden, NASA’s head honcho, had wanted to find a way for the agency to collaborate with him. Charlie put me in touch with will.i.am and we talked by telephone over the summer. We started brainstorming with a team including my friend Lars Perkins and we came up with a program called Stimulating Youth in STEM (SYSTEM).
Prior to the launch of the Curiosity space rover, we did interviews together with TV stations and networks throughout North America. I told a CNN anchor, “Maybe there’s going to be a kid watching Curiosity traveling on the surface of Mars and they may think—well, how do I become a scientist or engineer? How do I become a musician? Because music and math use both the right and left side of the brain. So, if you know music, you know math, and let them see that—there’s science and engineering in the arts too.” At the launch, will.i.am and I wore T-shirts promoting the new venture. Afterward, he performed a concert for NASA employees that had us dancing into the wee hours. Will.i.am was so inspired by the experience that he went home and composed a song called “Reach for the Stars,” an orchestral piece with a children’s choir. When Curiosity landed on Mars, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory flight controllers sent a command to the rover on Mars to upload the tune. Once done, will.i.am’s song found a new home on the Red Planet.
At home in DC, it sometimes seemed as if I had barely settled in when it was time to head out the door again. I was a fan of the open road and the friendly skies, so that was fine. Still, I also enjoyed quiet evenings around the house, walking the dogs after work, making and eating delicacies that I treasured, such as split pea soup and salmon grilled with rosemary. I didn’t even have to leave town for one of the year’s final events. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) had sponsored its “All Children Reading: A Grand Challenge for Development.” Alex Trebek, the host of Jeopardy!, emceed the event. It took place in the Ronald Reagan Building, a few blocks from the White House. About eight hundred people were on hand.
According to the program’s premise, 171 million people could be lifted out of poverty if all students in low-income countries left school with basic reading skills—equivalent to a 12 percent cut in global poverty. To improve student reading outcomes and access to future economic opportunities, USAID and its partners announced a $20 million effort to promote literacy among children in the primary grades around the world. The campaign dovetailed nicely with our own efforts at NASA Education and I was happy to attend and lend my support, along with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and other dignitaries engaged in the battle to improve learning skills. U.S. Representative Nita Lowey was also in attendance. “Literacy is one basic skill that opens door after door,” she told the audience. “Reading is the pathway to education, and education is a cornerstone of free and stable societies.” Remembering my childhood bedtimes when my mother led me through the pages of The Little Engine That Could and Curious George, I knew that reading could also be the pathway to the stars.
“All Children Reading” wrapped up a season of transition, during which I traded the blue suit of the astronaut program for the suit-and-tie uniform of an agency leader. The change, while comprising the challenges and surprising twists that any transformation involves, had still taken place fairly rapidly. I had been back from space for a year.
• • •
I began 2012 with more activities designed to introduce young learners to the kind of academic disciplines that could lead to careers in space exploration. Among the most rewarding of them was the Symposium on Supporting Underrepresented Minority Males in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, which we sponsored in collaboration with my friend Dr. Lorenzo Esters from the Association of Public Land-grant Universities (APLU) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAS). Our day-long conference coincided with the publication of an APLU report, based on a recent survey of minority students, higher education faculty, and administrators, that drew a sharp set of conclusions: To succeed in science-related studies and professions, motivated men from underrepresented minority groups need active engagement and mentoring by college faculty, personal involvement in undergraduate research, and adequate financial support. I had benefitted from the kind of engagement described in the report, and I pointed out as much in my opening remarks at NASA HQ in Washington. I credited my success to the village that nurtured me, including Woodrow Whitlow, my longtime colleague at NASA, and Charlie Bolden. They were two minority male mentors who impacted me at an early age and helped me get to where I needed to go.
“Our vision is to advance high-quality science, technology, engineering, and mathematics using our unique capabilities at NASA,” I continued. “We recognize there’s a gap that must be bridged as it relates to minority males in STEM. We identified the challenges and best practices. Now it’s time to go the next step and really have a call to actio
n to increase minority participation in STEM fields.”
I conveyed a similar message while speaking to educators at the National Science Teachers Association’s 60th National Conference on Science Education in late March. I was on a panel with Anousheh Ansari, the first Iranian woman to fly in space as a tourist. She paid $30 million to live on the ISS for a week. Anousheh shared her experience of immigrating to America, obtaining student loans, and working hard to get through college while learning English in the process. She started companies in the tech sector and was able to bankroll her ride to the cosmos. Like Venus Williams’s inspiring story, Anousheh’s tale was yet another demonstration of the value of grit and dogged perseverance. I collected such stories as I traveled and worked with successful people from around the world, intent on using their examples to motivate the next generation.
I recalled Anousheh and all the other exemplary people I met through my involvement in the space program later that summer, when my education team and I walked from our offices on E Street SW to the reflecting pond in front of the U.S. Capitol building, our eyes on the skies. The Shuttle Carrier Aircraft (SCA) did a fly-by before heading to the Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia, where space shuttle Discovery would be displayed for all eternity. I watched history being made while snapping the shutter furiously on my camera. As Discovery rode piggyback on the SCA, I was able to capture an image of the two vehicles perfectly aligning with the spire of the Capitol, where John F. Kennedy had petitioned Congress for resources to fund the space program more than a half century before. We later had a handover service at the museum, with more than sixty astronauts and thousands of space enthusiasts bearing witness. Charlie Bolden, who had flown two of his four missions on Discovery, signed over our bird to the Smithsonian and told them to take good care of her. I remember taking pictures in front of Discovery with many of my classmates, including Paolo Nespoli, Christopher Ferguson (“Fergy”), and Dex.
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