Sam Ortega: be curious and ask questions

When I attended the NASA Social at WPI last month, I never expected the advice Sam Ortega gave us. That everyone should be curious and ask questions.

Sam Ortega runs the Centennial Challenge Program. He has worked at NASA for 25 years. He started doing structural analysis for experiments in the cargo bay of the Space Shuttle, doing micro-gravity experiments and getting them ready to fly, and working with scientists to make sure they were functional and would work. He has flown a couple of times in the KC-135A aircraft named the Vomit Comet to test experiments. He has also been a lead engineer for the nozzles on the back end of the solid rocket motors used during the shuttle program.

Ortega has a Civil Engineering degree. He said it doesn’t matter what degree you have, just that you have one. Then you can worry about what you want to do.

NASA hires all kinds of people, from lawyers to accountants, and even has an anthropologist. The anthropologist looks at satellite images of South America to determine human settlements. It is important to inspire students to get their degrees.

Though, if you want to work on the technical side at NASA, you do need a degree in Math, Science, Physics, Engineering, Environmental Science or others listed at USAJOBS.gov. He said that included any science, technology or engineering field.

Ortega stressed that curiosity is important. To encourage the curiosity of children and adults. If you are not curious, then start to become curious. You will experience so many things in life just by being curious. A simple curiosity such as talking with your neighbor, mom, dad, brother, or sister and quizzing them about their life story. Everyone has a life story. Ask them what they have been doing recently. They will have something to say.

Ortega recalled a time when he was stationed up at NASA headquarters in Washington D.C. when he was walking out of the metro station. An elderly woman was walking ahead of him. He started wondering what story she had. She happened to take the same turns Ortega was taking towards the headquarters building. As they neared headquarters, he wondered if she worked at NASA. Sure enough, she ended up entering headquarters ahead of him. Maybe she was a secretary at NASA, he wondered. The guard welcomed the woman and said “Oh, Dr. Lucid, so glad to see you today. Hope things are going well for you?”

It was Dr. Shannon Lucid, the first woman to live on the Russian space station Mir for six months.

So ask someone. Even the stranger standing in line at the Home Depot. He suggested saying something like: So hey, everyone has a life story. What’s your life story? What do you do?

Some people will look at you strangely, but most share a story.

Ortega encouraged the NASA Social attendees to ask questions of everyone we met. Questions like: What was the hardest thing you had to do to get here? What was the thing that you thought was going to be easy but turned out to be hard? What was your favorite Martian character?

Ortega shared another life story about flying a tethered satelite system. It was a sphere in the cargo bay of the Space Shuttle. They deployed the satellite out about 12 meters on a collapsible boom structure. From there they deployed it another 12 kilometers into space with a long tether string of copper wire. The safety officers panicked, worried that it would wrap around and become a mess.

He was fascinated how the voltage delta between the shuttle and the satellite was enough to create a plasma flow along the tether as it went through the electromagnetic force fields of Earth’s atmosphere.

Unfortunately, Ortega was in the process of recalling a visit to Italy, being jet lagged, parking a car illegally, trying to communicate with a local, and figuring out that the car was towed, but Astronaut Steve Bowen came into the room and took the spotlight. Ortega joked that one thing he has learned is never to follow an astronaut.

We never got to ask Sam Ortega questions. That was another life lesson. If you don’t ask questions when you have the opportunity, another opportunity may never present itself.