NASA at 50: Mike Leinbach : Discovery Space : Discovery Channel

Reflections on NASA at 50: Mike Leinbach

as told to Discovery Space's Irene Klotz

Mike Leinbach

Michael Leinbach is the launch director at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida and a structural engineer. Credit: NASA

I hate to relate to accidents in a positive way because they obviously aren't -- weren't -- but I remember Challenger.

I was standing out there on the mobile launch platform. I had pretty much just hired in, so I didn't understand the flight regime. But then for Columbia, I was launch director for Columbia. To see the agency and the astronaut corps bounce back from those catastrophes, I think is probably the highlight of my years at NASA. Just that we were able to rebound from them because it was so devastating, it was just so devastating.

The attitude after Challenger was to get that behind us and to literally bury Challenger, which we did, and to never look back. Columbia was different. We needed to find out what happened, we created that program to loan the hardware to colleges and universities to study, we opened up to the public about what happened and how terrible it was. We showed the human side of NASA a little bit.

We're always kind of held up as these stodgy engineers who have no emotion. We do. We have emotion. It was probably a shift in the country's attitudes too, just the way the country thought about things. It was much more open: "Here's what we did wrong. Here's what we did right," as opposed to "We're going to forget about that and move on."

There's no question [that] NASA is ready to take on the task of getting to the moon -- even if it means loss of life, as terrible as that sounds. We are America's explorers. There are other explorers across the country too, but as a government agency, we are the explorers. And I really firmly truly in my heart believe that the country wants us to explore. I just wish we did a better job of telling them what we do and why we do it.

It's the human spirit. It's the spirit of adventure and discovery and moving on, moving beyond what you have, wanting more and getting more, whether it's tangible, or philosophical, or emotional; just wanting more out of life.

Michael Leinbach is the launch director at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The views expressed are the author's alone and do not represent the official position of NASA or the Discovery Channel.

For more reflections on NASA's 50th anniversary, visit Discovery Space's NASA at 50 page and the When We Left Earth site's official NASA at 50 blog.

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