Working at NASA has been an extraordinary experience and I have a lot of memories I can tell you are my favorite. But there's one in particular that stands out above the rest.
I was a new flight director, only been in the office for two years, and we were executing the STS-120 mission, where we were taking these solar arrays that are in blankets, and you put them up on board the space station and you unfold them like an accordion.
As we were unfolding one of them, we saw it rip. And by the time that the power discipline expert could make the array stop, we had a huge tear inside the solar array. After several meetings, it became clear that we were not going to be able to undock the shuttle in that configuration and we had to figure out a way to fix the solar array.
At that time I was working at what we called a team four. So three teams used to support the shuttle mission, but we always had a fourth team waiting in the background for something to go wrong. So at that point we called together a meeting and a young engineer showed up who was about 24/25 years old. And [he] said "Flight! I have a solution!"
So he walks into my meeting with this. [holds up object] And I said, "what is that?"
And he says, "It's a cufflink, Flight, and I made it out of spare parts that are available to the astronauts on the space station. And if you take this and you weave it through some of the holes and you pull it tight, we'll be able to secure the solar array."
And so sure enough, we were able to take this cufflink and a couple more like it, and put one of our tallest crew members on board a stacked set of robotic arms and he installed a cufflink. And that cufflink is there today and keeps the space station solar array structurally sound. So best moment ever. You never know what a 24/25 year old can accomplish.
What has been the best memory you have so far at NASA?