Mike Massimino at FLOCK '26: Leadership Lessons from NASA

Mike Massimino flew two Space Shuttle missions to service the Hubble Space Telescope, on Columbia in 2002 and on Atlantis in 2009, and sent the first tweet from space. At FLOCK '26, NeuBird's Agentic Production Ops Summit in San Francisco, he told the story of how he got there and what the missions taught him about working under pressure.

NASA turned him down three times, the third time for failing the eye exam, before he trained his eyesight enough to pass and joined the astronaut class of 1996. He describes a culture where the mission comes first: people ask for help, share their close calls, and welcome ideas from the newest person in the room. One of those ideas, based on a child's grabber toy, became the tool his crew used to change out Hubble's gyroscopes.

The centre of the talk is a spacewalk that went wrong. A stripped bolt on a handrail blocked the repair of Hubble's Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, and the fix came from an engineer in a back room who asked what he would do in his own garage. Massimino draws the lessons out for any team that handles failure: reach out to mission control and be mission control, allow yourself 30 seconds of regret and move on, and remember that a bad situation can always get worse. He closes on how AI and modern spacecraft computing free people to do the work they are best at.