Interview with Kevin Templin
Former NASA Aerospace Engineer and Legislative and Intergovernmental Affairs Officer
Current Position and Field
​
Q: Can you describe your various roles at NASA, both as an aerospace engineer and in legislative affairs?
​
A: Sure. I got my degree in aerospace engineering from Texas A&M. While I was there, they had a cooperative education program, now called internships, and I applied and got accepted into a position at NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston. I spent three semesters working while I was still in school at NASA, doing various roles. I started in mission operations, which is what most people think of when they think of the Johnson Space Center—astronauts and mission control. But I was more interested in design work, so I moved to the engineering directorate for my last two semesters, working on engineering problems like the Space Station and the Space Shuttle program.
As I got closer to graduation, NASA offered me a permanent position, so I went straight to work after graduation. I spent about 14 or 15 years in the engineering directorate, supporting the Space Shuttle program. Then I moved into a role as vehicle manager for the orbiters Discovery and later Atlantis, managing the team responsible for turning the vehicles around and getting them ready to fly again. That work was mainly done out of Kennedy Space Center, so my team was split between Houston and Florida. I also had the opportunity to spend time in Palmdale, California, where the orbiters were assembled and underwent major inspections. These were like aircraft maintenance cycles, where we’d take the vehicles apart, inspect them, and put them back together.
​
My role evolved over time from hands-on engineering and design work to more of a leadership and team management position. We were solving problems, managing solutions, and ensuring the shuttles were ready to fly. After the Space Shuttle program ended in July 2011, I spent some time helping to shut down the program, dealing with surplus hardware and preparing the orbiters for their final destinations in museums. For example, I helped get the shuttle Enterprise to the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in New York.
​
I also had the chance to work in legislative affairs later in my career. I served as a Congressional fellow in 2006, working for a Senator and doing defense appropriations. That experience eventually led me to a position in NASA’s Legislative Affairs, where I spent the last six years of my career, acting as a liaison between NASA and Capitol Hill, as well as state and local governments.
​
Typical Day at Work as a NASA Aerospace Engineer
​
Q: What was a typical day like as an aerospace engineer working on the Space Shuttle program?
​
A: It varied. The orbiters were usually in Florida at Kennedy Space Center, or sometimes in California for maintenance, while we were based in Houston. So, a lot of our work was done over the phone or in meetings, coordinating with teams across the country. Every morning at 7 AM Houston time, we’d get on a call with the Florida team to go over what was on the agenda for the day, any issues with the vehicle, and any fixes that needed approval from higher-ups.
​
The shuttles were unique, handmade vehicles, and after 30 years, many of the parts weren't available anymore, so we often had to find new ways to keep them operational. That could mean coming up with new solutions to replace old parts or finding alternative methods to fix problems. We’d then present these solutions to senior management for approval. So, there was a lot of coordination and communication with people in different time zones, and we had to make sure everyone was on the same page.
​
A lot of the job involved understanding the issues with different subsystems and working with teams of experts to come up with solutions. For example, I remember one time we had a meeting with NASA Headquarters in DC scheduled for 8 AM Eastern time, but we were in California, which meant a 5 AM start for us. Those time zone challenges were common.
​
When you're in a program that spans the entire country, you’re working with people from all over, dealing with different parts of the shuttle, and figuring out how to keep everything running smoothly. We relied on our experts to know the specifics of each subsystem, but as a manager, I was involved in overseeing the entire operation.
​
Comparing Careers at NASA vs. Aerospace Contractors
​
Q: What are the key differences between working for NASA versus a contractor in the aerospace industry?
​
A: When you work for NASA, you're more involved in managing the entire program. You might not be doing all the hands-on math or hardware production, but you're making decisions about how those things are done. Contractors, like Boeing or Lockheed, handle a lot of the detailed work, but they take direction from NASA. In my case, working for NASA got me into leadership a lot sooner than if I'd worked for a contractor. But both types of work are valuable and necessary for a program like this.
​
Roles and Responsibilities in Shuttle Missions
​
Q: Can you describe your experience working on specific shuttle missions and what kind of support role you played?
​
A: I can't recall specific missions; I worked on a lot of missions and saw a lot of launches. If you're a vehicle manager and your vehicles are flying, they're somewhere in the line to get ready to fly. You support the other vehicle managers, so whenever we would fly a mission, the shuttle program had to support mission control. We had an entire support room.
​
What you see on TV when you see mission control, you see the flight controllers sitting at their consoles. But there's a whole group that supports every one of those positions. The flight dynamics officer is worried about all the performance during the ascent, but he's got a room of people looking at specific things on engines and aerodynamics and heat, and they're all talking in this room. You don't see those support rooms.
​
During the missions, Shuttle would support—they had something called the Shuttle Mer, the Mission Evaluation Room. We would maintain a board; it was a whiteboard with markers where we wrote what we called anomalies on. If your vehicle wasn't flying, you had to staff that position around the clock while the vehicle was in orbit. The lead vehicle manager sits at console during launch or entry, but while it's on orbit, it's pretty quiet. The vehicle isn’t doing a lot; it's providing electricity, air, and environmental control for the cabin. But you might be working on issues that you saw during ascent. If something didn't look right, we’d start working on it to see why it didn’t operate as expected and if it could lead to a bigger problem.
​
When your vehicle's not flying, you're supporting that, which is an operational role. That's kind of rare because we're not mission operations; we're not the controllers per se that you see on TV. So that was as close as I got to doing that. In between, we had regular trips to the Kennedy Space Center to look at the vehicle in its turnaround mode—payloads going in, stacking operations to put on the tank, solid rocket boosters, and main engines. There was a lot of travel involved. There were times when people thought I lived in Florida because they saw me there so much, but I was based out of Houston.
​
I can't remember specifics, but there is one memorable mission. It wasn't my vehicle, and you'd have to go back and look at this, but if you ever get a chance to go to Washington, DC, or the California Science Center, those are actual orbiters on display. When you get up close to them, you can see the bottom of the vehicle covered with a bunch of ceramic tiles. These tiles are glass, fiber, and air, and they insulate the aluminum back structure from the hot plasma during entry. Aluminum melts at 900 degrees, so over 5-6 inches, you have this tile. The surface of the tile can be 2,500 degrees, but the back face is bonded to aluminum, which can’t exceed 900 degrees or the aluminum will melt. These tiles are very good insulators, but they’re very sensitive and easy to break, and there are about 30,000 of them on the vehicle. I kid you not, I can break a tile with my finger if I hit it hard enough.
​
The vehicle flexes—like an airplane wing. You can't have just one big tile; you need many small tiles with a bit of a gap to allow for flexure. We use gap fillers, a felt material that goes between the tiles to keep plasma from getting in. The Russians tried to build their own orbiter and reverse-engineered ours. They missed the gap fillers and ended up with melting tiles and structures because the plasma went between the gaps and melted the aluminum.
​
On one of the missions for Discovery, after the Columbia failure, we put a beam on board to inspect the entire vehicle once we were online in orbit. We had cameras and sensors to look at the entire vehicle. While inspecting the nose, we saw something sticking out. When astronauts went out to look at it, it was gap filler sliding out. We spent about 3-4 days in Houston analyzing whether to leave it in or pull it out. The final solution was to pull it out, as it probably wouldn’t cause significant issues for that one mission. The astronaut removed the gap filler, and we did inspections; it didn’t cause any damage to the tiles. I hand-carried that gap filler to the Air and Space Museum as I was going up to work on Enterprise. I gave it to the Curator of Space History as an artifact. So, that was a memorable mission where we worked in real-time on an orbiter and ended up with a piece of history.
​
Inspiration and Education in Aerospace Engineering
​
Q: What inspired you to pursue a career in aerospace engineering, and how did your education and early experiences shape your path?
​
A: That's a great question. As you can imagine with engineering and sciences, you kind of have to like math. I was always good with math. I could do calculations and get very close answers even as a kid. Math fascinated me. I was also fascinated with how things worked. My dad would work on the car, and as a 10-11-12-year-old, I was right there with him, changing brakes and alternators. I would take old parts apart to understand how they worked. I once took a clock apart, and my dad thought I'd ruined it, but I managed to put it back together, and it worked.
​
My fascination with how things worked coupled with math led me to engineering. Engineering is a field for people who want some certainty in the world. Many things in math and engineering can be modeled through math. Physics is a big part of engineering. At the university level, physicists and engineers don’t always get along because physicists model things with math, while engineers use those models to build something. Engineers are kind of applied physicists, using the laws of physics and math to solve problems with mechanical solutions or software engineering.
​
I also loved flying and thought I might become a pilot or work on military aircraft. When applying for college, my father tried to convince me to do mechanical engineering, as it would offer more job possibilities. Aerospace engineering is really mechanical engineering with wings and rocket engines. However, I changed my major to aerospace as soon as I got in.
​
I encourage people to take advantage of internship programs, as they provide real-world experience and show you how teams of engineers solve problems. It's valuable to get out of the classroom and see practical applications of what you're learning. Internships can help you realize that you’re not the worst engineer in the world, and that it’s okay to rely on resources and team support.
​
Application of Advanced Mathematics in Engineering
​
Q: What kind of advanced mathematics do you use in your profession, and how relevant is it in your day-to-day work?
​
A: That's amazing. Good question again. Because when you're in college, high school and college, you're going to be taking calculus and higher-end math. You'll need that to derive solutions when you work with the physics department and derive basic equations for physics. You’ll use your calculus.
​
However, depending on where you go, I hardly ever use calculus in my profession, especially today. There are so many software packages that handle a lot of the parameters. You use the software and need to understand how to get the answer. It’s like when your math teacher tells you to show your work, not just write the answer. There’s logic to that, because it helps you understand how you start with a problem and end up with an answer. Once you have that technical knowledge, it’s okay to go back and derive a program that makes it faster, but you need to understand what’s going on inside the program.
​
So, you had to study it, and it’s good to know. But I don’t think I’ve used calculus since I left college. If I did, it was a handful of times. A lot of it, especially in my role, is a bit specific. At NASA, you're not doing much of the design work but managing the contractors who do the design work. If you talk to someone whose career was at Boeing, Lockheed, or elsewhere, you might get a different answer—they may use that math a lot more than I did.
​
The Importance of Communication Skills in Technical Fields
​
Q: What advice would you give to someone entering your field, or to anyone in general, regarding communication and its importance in technical professions?
​
A: Specific to my area, the technical areas, I'm going to say engineering. I can say this because I am an engineer, and I’ve encountered this many times in my work. The sciences, math professions—they speak a different language. We're very technical. NASA is famous for acronyms, and the Department of Defense is the same. When I was in my first semester as a co-op student at NASA, they handed me a book, the Acronym Dictionary used at NASA. You could sometimes look up an acronym, and it would have 3 or 4 different meanings. If you didn’t know where you were operating, you wouldn’t know which meaning to use.
​
I would come home from work and talk to my wife, who’s a teacher, and during one of those “how was your day” conversations, I’d start talking like I was at work. She would look at me as if she didn’t understand anything I said. When I was talking to another NASA engineer, it was like speaking French or Latin, but outside of that, no one understood.
​
I’m coming around to it, but communication is so important. You can be the smartest person in the room, but if you can’t communicate with your fellow engineers or the general public, all that knowledge might not be as valuable. It would be better to have someone who might know a little less but can coordinate a team effectively.
This really hit home for me when I did legislative affairs. I had spent 29 years doing NASA things and talking to NASA engineers, and then I had to talk to someone from Capitol Hill—a staffer or maybe a Congressman. There are very few engineers on Capitol Hill; most are lawyers, doctors, or political science folks. They don’t speak NASA or technical jargon. You can’t talk to them like you're working at NASA.
​
Today, with technology and smartphones, people don’t have as many human interactions as before. There’s shorthand in social media, but you can’t write a report or communicate effectively with shorthand. Body language, eye contact, and sitting across the table from someone are all important.
​
So, I would say it's crucial, especially for technical fields but for all fields, to take some communication courses or engage in communication activities. Debate is a great way to learn how to discuss a subject. Organizations like Toastmasters encourage public speaking, which is an extreme example, but activities like that are important. If you have strong communication skills, no matter what profession you go into, you will stand out for leadership because people will understand and appreciate what you're saying.
​
Career Reflections and Personal Growth
​
Q: Is there anything you would have done differently in your career?
​
A: You know, it's hard to say. I had kind of a unique career that I went into it. I will tell anybody that goes into anything. I mean, I've talked to a number of students, even outside the technical field. It's really hard, right? You're in high school, and everybody's probably asking you, what do you want to do? What do you want to study?
​
A lot of people go to college with an idea of what they want to do. And so they're going to major in this field. And they get in the 1st semester or so, and some of them, most I will say, most people go, "That's not what I want to do," and they change. Some people look at that and go, "Well, what happened? Couldn't cut it." It's not that necessarily. As you're going to do this for a long time, probably you're going to go spend 4 or 5, 6, 7, depending on how many degrees you get in the field with the idea that you're going to go do that as a career. And I will say you want to be happy doing what you are doing. You want to get up in the morning and want to go do it. Not every day. Everybody's going to have a bad day. But more times than not, you want what you're doing to be kind of a passion for you because you spend a lot of time doing it, right? So don't be afraid to change, explore different things.
​
I, in my career, started out thinking, "I'm going to come in. I'm going to be this design engineer. I'm going to do this for 35 years. I'm going to retire." I did a lot of different things in the career. If you ever look at my resume, I can send it to you. I did design engineering, but once I got an opportunity, I rotated out to California. They asked the entire Johnson Space Center Engineering Corps for 2 engineers to go work while an orbiter was going through a MoD period, and they couldn't get 2 to apply most of the time. One of the best things I did in my career. I mean, to go from sitting a thousand miles away from hardware, seeing the pictures, talking to engineers who are looking at the problem to being there, looking at the hardware and working it, kind of scary, right, to pick up and say, "I'm going to go spend 12 or 10, 12 months away from home and do this thing." But once I did that, I said, "Holy Cow, this is great. What else can I do?" And that led to me going to Washington to spend a year in the Senate. I spent 2 rotations in NASA headquarters doing things. So stay open to opportunities. And it's, you know, by Mike. Okay, to do something and get to a point where you go, "I'm ready for something else," and look for other opportunities. And to do it maybe, maybe, like legislative affairs isn't in my wheelhouse as far as an engineer. But that was something I enjoyed doing, too. So always just stay open opportunities, but different opportunities. But don't be afraid to change if what you're doing isn't what you really want to do
​
Emerging Career Opportunities in Aerospace Engineering
​
Q: What do you think are the most interesting career opportunities that will emerge in aerospace engineering over the next 5 to 10 years?
​
A: So specifically for aerospace engineering. When I graduated, if you wanted to do space, you either had to go work for NASA, or you had to work for one of the contractors that was supporting NASA. Right? Because when you say aerospace, aircraft as well. And so aircraft is so much bigger as far as an industry than space. Space is a niche, especially when I came out. If you just look at what Boeing sales are, or Airbus sales are in commercial airliners, or you can go to the Cessnas or Beechcrafts and look at aircraft. They're making a lot of money in those fields. Not a lot, but a lot. They make a lot more than you do in space. As a matter of fact, I think Boeing and Lockheed and different companies were supporting NASA, not because they were making a bunch of money, but because of the prestige of being a part of the space program. That's changed since I've retired, and everything, if you look. And you're familiar with Elon Musk's SpaceX.
The Boeings and Lockheeds are still there. There's just a large number of companies now in commercial space. Amazon, not Amazon, but Jeff Bezos has Blue Origin, and he's designing spacecraft. He was the first, by the way, to actually land a booster after its use, not SpaceX, and they're developing rockets out in West Texas to get ready to fly people. They are flying people, as a matter of fact, to the edge of space. So there that field is emerging. There are a lot more companies involved in space. It shows you the evolution that for a long time to operate in space was not a money-making proposition. So if the Federal Government didn't fund it, it wasn't going to get done. Going to the moon was such a huge expenditure. No single company could convince its shareholders to go spend the money because there was no return on that investment other than, "Hey, my company went and planted the flag." There's no money coming in, and that's not what shareholders want, right? They want profit.
​
It shows you that in the time from there, then through my career that there are so many companies willing to go work in space now that there is some return on investment possible. They want to do it on their own. They want to develop their own rockets. I look at what SpaceX is doing and the success they're having and go, "Well, maybe NASA should pull back and buy tickets on those rockets," right? That wasn't the case 35 or 40 years ago when I was entering the industry, and certainly wasn't the case in the late fifties, early sixties when NASA was first set up to develop the space program. So a lot of possibilities, if you want to be aerospace, you don't have to be an aerospace engineer. As I was mentioning, mechanical, electrical, chemical, physicists, math, and outside the technical stuff, every company's got to have communicators and lawyers, and that. So lots of different roles within these companies to support that industry. If you want to be an aerospace, you don't necessarily have to be an engineer or scientist to do it, although I will say about 80 to 85% of the people at those companies at NASA are scientists or engineers.
​
Impact of Artificial Intelligence
​
Q: How impactful is artificial intelligence in the field of aerospace engineering today, and how does it affect organizations like NASA compared to when you were an engineer?
​
A: So I don't know. I don't know if this is changing, but the industry, the aerospace industry in general, because things have to work, they tend to be kind of conservative in how they approach things, whether it's materials or software or artificial intelligence. So they tend to follow those things. You can't have an airplane that puts a brand new material in the structure, and that structure fails because the wing falls off and people die, right? Space shuttle, surprisingly, most people, if you look at subsystems on the space shuttle, rocket engines, you know, environmental control and all that, and you go, what's the most expensive subsystem on the space shuttle? It was software.
​
Yeah, because we had to certify the software. And if somebody said, "All I need to do is change a line in the code on the software," they would almost always be turned down because that would mean re-certifying the software, which isn't just something like running a test and saying, "Did the answer come out right?" When NASA tests the software because the software has to work every single time, they would go and pull that code and start testing it, and it would take a year or 2 to test that code.
​
So I tell you all of that to say that I think AI will come to play at some point. But I would not be surprised in the aerospace industry if it's kind of something they're working on the side to see how it can help. But I don't think it's probably an integral player yet because they can't allow that to design something and not have the humans come along at this point at least, and really verify that it's going to work because you just, you've got people's lives at stake. And it's probably a trailing technology in that industry.
​
Evolution of Computing Power in Aerospace
​
Q: Are there any other factors that you think have changed in your field since you left?
​
A: Well, you know, as anything goes by computing power. We have. We take for granted how much computing power we have all around us. I mean, our smartphones. This will shock you. But talk about software and not upgrading software and shuttle. So they designed the shuttle in the mid-seventies to late, early eighties, and we flew the 1st time in 1981, and that thing had 5 general purpose computers on it. And anybody here is that today and thinks of a computer go, wow! You got a lot of computing power on there. What are you using, you know, Intel, Nvidia chips or using apple in twos? No, they lock that technology down. They built the software. And I kid you not? By the end. We were still using the same exact computers that we started with. And we had to build our own parts to replace it because there was nobody who would build the parts for those ancient computers. Your iPhone or smartphone that you have has more computing power than the 5 computers that are on space shuttle. And so we have so much power to go off and generate answers to the nth degree, so many decimals, that we take it for granted. So we can do a lot more work and a lot less time. Because we have all this computing power there. Programs where before we were. I never use the slide rule. But I was at NASA when the 1st desktop computers were coming in. When I came in. As a student. We were using mainframe computers. You went into a terminal room. You had a mainframe computer. You typed up code. You submitted a job. It compiled it. You ran the job and you would get printouts, and that's how you verified whether your code was working or not. So we went all the way from that. I remember the 1st desktops coming into an office. I set an office with 3 other engineers. This desktop computer comes in. The other 3 didn't want to have anything to do with it. They were older. I was a young guy there.
I jumped on and started using before there was excel. There was a program called Lotus 1,2,3. It's a spreadsheet program and started trying to code up stuff that I was doing manually with computers or programmable computers flash forward to where you are right now, and you probably have never been alive where you don't think about laptop computers, iPads, smartphones. It's just what you are used to. Right? Yeah. So you take for granted all that power. I look at it now, and I go. Wow! What could we have done if we had that 30 years ago 40 years ago. So that's the biggest thing. It's also you probably have heard. I mean, we're getting to where we use that power. So much for Bitcoin mining. Artificial intelligence. They are just eating up computing power, and they just take massive amounts of power to run those things. So those are challenges for society going forward to be able to use those tools and provide the power they need, and also do the other things we want to do, like the electric cars and things like that. So it's just something that if you live through that time period, and you go from no desktop computer to I carry around an iPhone and iPad everywhere I go. And I get my laptop right here again, like I say, my laptop is just so powerful compared to what we designed. I still can't believe that we went to the moon with out the big computers that we have today. And I teach you not those engineers were using slide tools to design a lot of that stuff. So we should be able to do bigger, greater things faster, with all the power we have nowadays.
​
Retirement and Personal Interests
​
Q: Kevin, what are your short and long-term goals for yourself now that you are retired?
​
A: So I am retired. I still follow the space industry. I still talk to folks on Capitol Hill about things that are going on, but I have pulled back quite a bit from all the technical work that's going on. So in my case, you know, it's a career that's behind me, so i'm able to enjoy my time off, and I have a passion for baseball. Huge Astros fan. So you know, I get to watch the Astros. I travel around the country going to Ballparks. I've been to all the major League Ballparks. So not the answer you wanted. But yeah, I'm at the end of my career. So yeah.
​
Favorite Aspect of Work
​
Q: Kevin, what was your favorite part about working in the aerospace field?
​
A: So I don't know. I think, going into it. He's kind of an introvert, and that that may be true of a lot of people who are technically inclined or mathematically, and I'm painting a broad brush here. But one of the things looking back that I most enjoyed was the team work. It's great. You know. It's great if you can get the answer, if you can solve the problem, and that's good. But solving stuff as a team is even more fun, in my opinion. So the relationships you've built I played a lot of softball. When I got to NASA I was playing like 4 nights a week, and I was on teams with people from other areas of NASA that I didn't think I'd ever know anything about. You know people who were doing business, writing contracts, legal folks. Communications folks. And we just enjoyed playing ball. But as I got further in my career, those relationships helped me so much because all of a sudden I had a problem. I needed the contract answer, hey, I'm gonna call Alan. I remember Alan. He played ball with him then. So personal relationships are one of the best things to come out of it. A lot of it is experience, too, and it's because I was open to new things going to California and working actual solutions, you know, on vehicles going to the Cape. Helping get vehicles ready for flight. Even later in my career, doing a lot of work, going to Capitol Hill, working with staffers and members of Congress to help them understand what NASA was doing, and why things cost so much or took so long. If you look at it, I'm talking about experiences, but if you look, it's teams of people that I was always working with. That really made that whole job fun. So yeah.
​
Differences Between NASA and Private Space Companies
​
Q: Kevin, what do you think is the most distinguishing factor about NASA compared to other space companies today?
​
A: So when I you know different time. Because when I started, NASA, as I mentioned, if you wanted to do human space flight, and you were an American. You work for NASA, or you work for a company that was doing support work for NASA. What's changed is all these other companies. Now that are entering the field. Some of which are working pretty independent of NASA, I think all of them consult with NASA. I know SpaceX consults with NASA, and they have contracts to support NASA. But if you look at what Elon Musk and SpaceX are doing, they're flying dragons, crew dragons. They're rotating crews to space station, taking cargo in that bag. So when I started, NASA was the only place to do human space flight. NASA does other things besides human space flight. You know they do aeronautics. They do the space telescopes. They send probes to other planets and stuff. But the budget for human space flight's huge because it's an expensive endeavor. So I think 55, 60% of NASA's budget goes to human spaceflight. When I left college, that was the only place in the country. If you're going to do it, you went to NASA, you went to the contract reporting as human space like today. There are myriad of companies trying to do this sort of stuff. Blue Origin and SpaceX are the big ones. Boeing's also developing their own crew carrier. So if you want to do human space, flight or space flight. In general. There are a lot of possibilities and it might be a good idea to look at some of those for some people to say a smaller company is a better way to enter this field than to be. NASA's got 18,000 people, you know. Boeing's got probably 100,000 people, but most of them don't work on space. Most work, either defense or commercial airliners. And then you. You have a lot more options to do things in this field today than you did when I was going into the field in 1985.
​
The Intersection of Aerospace and Legislation
​
Q: Kevin, can you describe the intersection between aerospace and legislation, and how it affects the work in the aerospace industry?
​
A: Aerospace, especially when it comes to space or defense, is heavily dependent on federal taxpayer dollars. For example, the Department of Defense funds major projects like fighter aircraft, bombers, and missiles. In the space sector, NASA is a federal agency, meaning it also relies on federal funding. Congress plays a key role in this process—they decide what the country will fund and how the money will be allocated. They write the checks, and the President either signs those into law or vetoes them. But basically. If you want to influence. Something big like that. If you're a defense contractor and you have a great new idea for a fighter aircraft. You start years in advance, telling people on Capitol Hill about it. You're telling people the Pentagon as well. And the Pentagon's talking to the Capitol Hill and your lobby.
​
​Start talking to people on Capitol Hill. If you're NASA, it's the same sort of thing your contractors are talking to people. NASA can talk to people on Capitol Hill, the Army Navy Air Force. They can as well, but they cannot do what's called lobbying right? They can't go in and say I need more money, whatever the President's budget requests. That's what you can talk about. But you can't talk about what you're going to do with that money. So it's very important that people on the hill get some sort of education. And and you would think I was talking about a Congressman, Congresswoman, Senator. Really, my experience was the staff that supports those people because they have got so many different things they're looking at. There's a staffer in there somewhere whose responsibility is NASA, whose responsibility is the Department of Financial Air Force. It's to get to know those staffers and to invite them down to see your hardware, to talk about what you're going to do with the budget and help them to understand, because they're the ones who are going to whisper in the ear of the legislator to say, I think this should be a priority. And here's why or Hey, let's get on a plane. Go to Houston and talk to the astronauts and do that. So it's this long process of how laws are developed. Budgets are developed, appropriations are made that companies involved with federal agencies are involved with. It's something that goes on under the radar for most people in the country. They don't know how this works. And it's a good thing if they don't want to know they shouldn't know, because it's kind of like making sausage. But I thought it was pretty cool, because, you know, I get to be one of those people that's helping them understand what we're doing. So there's a lot of money out there. If you look, you know, discretionary funding. The Department of Defense is almost getting a trillion dollars a year now. Not quite, but almost. And that's for all the branches of the military that's to keep the soldiers fed and the sailors warm, but it's also to build new ships and airplanes and missiles. NASA gets about 25 billion dollars a year by comparison, to fly the space station and develop new things. So yeah, if anybody's interested in policy. I would say. And and technical stuff like engineering, I would say, get good at your technical 1st make sure you can communicate well, and then look for opportunities to go over and work in that legislative area and everything, and you can take that all that technically, you can take it. And that's your bank of knowledge. And you can communicate with these people and influence things in the future.
​
​
We would like to thank Mr. Templin for the time he spent speaking with us, and we hope you were able to learn something from the insight he provided
​
From,
Finn and Cooper