As NASA celebrates its 50th anniversary this year and looks forward to celebrating the 40th anniversary of man's first footprints on the moon next year, I am marking my own anniversary of a sort. I have been a member of the NASA team for 35 years. As I reflect on my years as a civil servant in a relationship with NASA that means much more to me than just being an employee, I have had, and continue to have, a long-term, open-ended commitment to the agency in good times and in bad. I joined NASA out of college on the heels of the Apollo 17 mission - when Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt were the last NASA astronauts to set foot on our Moon. It was my dream from the time I was a young child to work for NASA and to be a part of exploring other planetary bodies in space. Little did I realize then that it would take so long to return. Even when I began working on the space shuttle's aerodynamic flight tests as a young engineer in the mid-1970s, I knew then that we would need the heavy-lift launch vehicle capabilities like the Saturn 5 rockets, the lunar landers, and capsule-shaped crew vehicles that can withstand high speed entries if we ever hoped to venture beyond low Earth orbit again and travel to other worlds. In the 1970s, I also saw first-hand the devastating effects to my fellow aerospace engineers who were out of work when the United States retreated from the frontiers of space, and NASA's budget dropped precipitously. The generation of engineers from the Apollo program now faced the bust times, a drought in U.S. human space flight, and NASA suffered greatly as a result as they left the space program altogether.
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