Callum Parks
Rice University
Houston (29.7° N, 95.3° W)

featuring Marcum Reagan, Mission Director, NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO), Houston (29.7° N, 95.3° W)

Marc Reagan is an aerospace engineer, working mission director, and project manager of NEEMO (NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations), a NASA project using an undersea environment as an analog for human spaceflight. After graduating from Texas A&M University with a BS in aerospace engineering and the University of Colorado with an MS in aerospace engineering sciences, Marc’s NASA career began with responsibility of flight controller training for the International Space Station (ISS). He also worked as a Capcom (spacecraft communicator) in Mission Control. Marc has been working on his current project, NEEMO, since its inception in 2001. In our interview, Marc discussed what led to his position on the NEEMO project, the importance of training, and the future of spaceflight.

Marc’s experiences with the NEEMO project have led to his role as mission director. Marc volunteered to be a backup aquanaut for the first NEEMO mission in 2001, participated as an aquanaut on the NEEMO 2 mission, and has served as surface support, mission lead, and now as the mission director. I was struck by how little we talked about the engineering aspects of Marc’s position; it seems that in an environment where every team member already has extensive technical knowledge, the chief challenge is efficiently working together. As NEEMO’s mission director, Marc stated communication and coordination are the most important aspects of his job. He explained that his undergraduate experiences taught him communication and his experience in NASA taught him coordination. Marc uses this knowledge of communication and coordination to teach skills to future astronauts.

Similar to how Marc learned many of his coordination and leadership skills on the job, astronauts are learning coordination, communication, and leadership through ‘expeditionary training’ programs like NEEMO. Before the NEEMO project, astronauts would train on simulators; after training, they would go home with all mistakes forgiven and forgotten. NEEMO missions, which take place in the extreme subsea environment, carry very real consequences. I never considered the psychological aspects of going to space: staying sane while isolated, being part of a long-term functional team, and the possibility of spending a long time with someone you don’t want to spend a long time with. Having an environment where today’s failures are still broken tomorrow can communicate the weighty nature of being on a space station significantly more than training on a simulator. Astronauts have told Marc that NEEMO ranks as the best preparation for spaceflight they’ve received.

As the NEEMO project prepares astronauts for space exploration, a new commercial space industry is also preparing to send astronauts into space. The emergence of companies such as SpaceX in the private space sector has pressured NASA to change its model of business. Operating on taxpayer money, NASA cannot take the same risks as the private sector. It is a 60-year-old agency with 60 years’ worth of protocols, processes, and safety rules. With Vice President Mike Pence announcing a return to the moon by 2024, however, aggressive deadlines require an aggressive march forward. Marc said that many members of NASA leadership view this as a unique and rare opportunity allowing forward progress. As we look to the future of space exploration, I now understand the importance of Marc’s work; missions couldn’t be crewed if it weren’t for the invaluable type of training Marc directs with NEEMO.

Highlights from the interview:

When did you first see yourself in your mission director role in the NEEMO project, NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations?

The NEEMO project started basically with us saying, “Hey, we’ve got this wild idea of using the subsea environment as an analog and training ground for spaceflight.”

My friend Bill Todd and I both worked in spaceflight training in leadership positions and would conduct simulations during the day with astronauts, to train them. But then they would go home, and any mistakes or long-term consequences were forgiven and forgotten. We were looking for something a little bit more consequential, something a little more real that you didn’t just get to step away from. Something where your actions had consequences; what failed today was still broken tomorrow, that kind of thing.

NEEMO 1 was a feasibility mission for this idea of using subsea as an analog to human spaceflight. Then NEEMO 2 was a mission I was on. I wasn’t the mission director; I was a crewmember for that one. Then we just kept developing it and started making it more and more realistic as a spaceflight analog. So I guess by the time we reached NEEMO mission 3, I started taking the Mission Director role, and Bill started doing more of the logistics coordination with people that own the Aquarius habitat. I kind of just grew into the position because that’s where my expertise lay. I also worked as a Capcom in the control center for the International Space Station, and so that experience is what helped me take more of the mission director leadership role, being more involved in real time flight ops.

What are the skills you find yourself utilizing the most?

Communication and coordination. It always comes down to that. Any leadership role, and certainly this is true of an execution field operation like we run, is all about getting the members of your team to do their part: know where they need to be, when they need to be there, what they need to do, and pulling all of that together. And so it’s coordinating a lot amongst a lot of different people—many of whom are not even at Johnson Space Center. We’ve got international partners as well. So coordinating and communicating clearly amongst all of those partners is a skill that is almost all day, every day.

How much technical work do you do?

That’s a good question. I’m not sure how you tease our work apart, because what we’re doing is very technical. It’s all based on technical work. A NEEMO timeline is full of activities that are either testing out tools or ops concepts for spaceflight; we’re testing out experiments that are preparing to go to the space station, as flight experiments. So the technical is laced throughout everything I do or, at least, most of what I do. I’ve got budgetary responsibilities and stuff like that, but I would guess that there’s a technical overtone to 80 percent of the work I do. Eighty percent of it is in service of technical objectives and requires a technical background to fully understand what it’s all about.

In regards to the communication and coordination, how do you feel like your undergraduate and other college time helped you prepare for that?

I think college certainly helps prepare you to communicate. In my case, I had some professors that were very good at preparing us to communicate in written form. Concisely, clearly—so I definitely, came out of my undergraduate experience a much better communicator, and certainly in a written form, than I was going in. And I came out with a very strong technical baseline, which is the enabler for understanding everything we do at NASA. I think the coordination and the leadership skills were more developed on the job at NASA. We have a good pipeline for training people and giving successively more responsibility and opportunity to demonstrate leadership skills.

In regards to college, what should students do to prepare themselves for a position like yours?

Let’s say 50 percent of the position we’re talking about (mine) came from standard preparation. Learning the physics, learning the mechanics, learning how things work so I could be successful as a Space Shuttle Systems Instructor and then as a Space Station Training Lead and as a Space Station Capcom. All of those are things that just standard school stuff prepared me for.

But 50 percent of what I’m doing now came from being opportunistic along the way, too. It was following a pull that I had to go do things that were interesting to me and recognizing opportunities that were possible because I had managers that were open to these kinds of crazy ideas, like taking astronauts to live under the sea and making spaceflight analogs under the sea. The sea is not NASA’s domain, and this is something we had never done before at NASA, so there was quite a bit of institutional inertia getting past the inertia of the idea that, that’s not what we do here at NASA. So we had a rare alignment of leadership that was open to that and people who were willing to support it in the astronaut office. We had a good plan that we executed well and communicated well. And so, skill-wise it wouldn’t be accurate to say, “I’m the guy who had all the skill to be in this place at this time.” I can show you lots of people with similar or greater skills than I have, technically and in communicating and coordinating. I wouldn’t present myself as the guy with the corner on any of this. A big chunk of why I’m doing this is because I was opportunistic along the way, too, and recognized where the opportunities were to try something new and to grow that into something more. And keep it alive all these years. We’re now in our 19th year of NEEMO operations.

What sort of impact do you feel NEEMO project has on the astronauts?

We started this from the perspective of crew training specialists, and the idea was—very simply at first—to present a really good crew training experience. At that time, we were starting to work closely with the Russians on the Shuttle-Mir Program and going into the International Space Station Program. There became some awareness that the Russians do things very differently than we do on a number of fronts, including crew training. One of those things they did was survival training. There were variations of winter, mountain, desert and sea survival training. For example, they would take a Soyuz capsule crew and put them in the forest in the dead of winter for three days to try to survive, to prepare them for the case where they had to abort, or had to come back suddenly from space and landed in the middle of the Arctic, so that they could survive until help came.

And so in our astronaut office, there became this awareness that we’ve done space shuttle 10-day missions for so long, and we know how to do that, but we don’t have a whole lot of experience doing six-month missions where it just might be more important how you get along with people and how you keep yourself sane for six months than it is how technically excellent you are at some thing astronauts do. Also, we’re flying with people who aren’t Americans, that NASA didn’t select. We don’t have the same insight into their backgrounds. How do we come to trust and work closely together with them? I’m trying to paint the picture that the astronaut office was starting to become independently interested in what they call “expeditionary training.” These training exercises that bring people together that aren’t necessarily friends before, but they’re forced together into some kind of intense training experience where they learn leadership and followership and taking care of one another and getting the mission done. We originally conceived of NEEMO as mostly a crew training opportunity, but it became something more than that, more than just a simulation that had real consequences. It became an intense expeditionary training opportunity for the astronaut office. So that’s the background.

The astronaut office since the very first mission has come back and said, “That’s the best preparation we had for spaceflight. There’s nothing we did that was closer or more valuable for flying in space than those NEEMO missions.” We’ve added other objectives along the way, but as far as crew training and preparing crewmembers for spaceflight goes, I think NEEMO kills it for their objectives. And that also explains why our international partners have started participating regularly as well—the Canadian Space Agency, the Japanese Space Agency, and the European Space Agency.

Do they all send over astronauts to your facility?

Most of them have astronauts that live and train in Houston all year round. But yes, they all have sent numerous astronauts to participate in NEEMO missions, both as commanders and as rookie crewmembers, along the way.

Do you have an interesting fact or something about the whole flight analog project and NEEMO that most people don’t know but would really take someone off guard?

We have had 57 “aquastronauts” in human history, and 56 of those were created by the NEEMO project. We define an aquastronaut as someone who has both been an aquanaut and who has flown in space as an astronaut. The first one, the one we didn’t create, was Scott Carpenter who took a leave of absence from NASA to join a Navy team as a SEALAB II crewmember.

I’ve seen videos of this big pool, and they have the simulations in there, but I heard you mention the sea earlier. Do these exercises take place in an enclosed facility or in the ocean?

You are referring to what we call the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, and that is a gigantic pool we have here in Houston which is used for zero gravity spacewalk training. So it is extremely high fidelity for that purpose. We’ve got a big chunk of the space station mocked up inside that pool. We put on real spacesuits that are pressurized with real restrictions in reach and visibility and that kind of thing, and we practice doing microgravity spacewalks.

NEEMO happens under the ocean. The crew lives in the Aquarius habitat, which is the only remaining undersea research laboratory in the world today. It’s off the coast of Florida Keys and sits in about 60 feet of water. Our crewmembers live there for the entire duration of their mission, and they go outside to do simulated spacewalks in the ocean. We put on enough weight to make them partially buoyant—to simulate partial gravity environments like the moon. A big chunk of what we’re looking at on NEEMO missions is operations concepts for lunar exploration.

Would you say the most important part is the technical experience gained or more so just the psychological experience gained of being underwater for that duration of time for the astronauts?

The astronaut offices see this as a dress rehearsal for upcoming spaceflight. Not every astronaut gets to do this, but, basically, they try to send people that they plan to assign to be commanders on their next space station mission to be a NEEMO commander. And they assign rookies that will be assigned soon to a space station flight to get a rookie mission experience. So whichever of those two positions you will have as an astronaut, it’s a chance to go into a very stressful, high-intensity mission—experience and practice doing your part.

For a commander, there’s a lot to think about that has nothing to do with performing the mission. You have to think about things like, are we going to have a mission shirt? Are we going to design a mission patch? Are we going to have outreach events to schools or…is it going to include my kid’s school? Because it would sure be nice to do that with my kid’s school if so…So there are lots and lots of things that are considerations for a spaceflight that have nothing to do with your training and your actual execution off the timeline that day that are great experiences that come out of this. And, in addition, you’re assigned with a bunch of people you didn’t choose to be there with. You didn’t get any input on who they are. And whether you previously liked them or not, guess what? You’re going to be living very closely together and sleeping about 2 or 3 feet away from them for 10 days or so. And so you learn to be a functional part of the team in an extreme environment. In fact, you can say it’s something you learn, but it’s also something you practice. You can talk about it until you’re blue in the face, and you can learn about it over and over, but it’s also something you practice doing while being a good citizen during a stressful mission.

And then finally, there’s the mission itself with a timeline. On our spaceflight timelines, you have a red line that’s constantly marching across that timeline, and you’ve got little blocks—associated with your name—of all the activities you need to do today. And that red line is like a demon chasing you all day long, reminding you that you don’t have a moment to rest because there’s just that next thing coming up, and if you start now maybe you can get a little bit ahead on it. Or you’re currently behind on a task, and you better hurry up and try to catch up without making mistakes. So operating in an environment off of a timeline, off of procedures, all day long, day after day, is just something you can’t really practice except in an environment like this. So, to give you context, that’s what you get out of a mission like this that’s different than the training you got in a four-hour simulation in a simulator, followed by going home and picking up your kids from school and forgetting all about it by evening.

What is the team structure inside the Aquarius NEEMO lab, and what is the team structure outside—the supporting team structure?

Good questions. We lease the Aquarius habitat and the operations support from Florida International University. They operate it. So when we do a mission, there are six crewmembers that live inside Aquarius for the duration of the mission and two of them are professional staff members from FIU, professional aquanauts that do this kind of thing for a living. Their job is to keep the habitat running and keep it safe and basically allow everything to be in place to accomplish NASA spaceflight analog objectives.

Then NASA brings four crewmembers, and those crewmembers are some combination of astronauts—occasionally an engineer or a scientist from NASA and occasionally somebody from the outside world, say a researcher from a university that’s participating. So those are the four crewmembers that are part of the spaceflight analog. But all six of them are living together and are a cohesive crew.

Then you have what we call the topside team, which includes the rest of the FIU staff who man a watch desk 24/7 during the mission. Think of this as a small mission control, looking over monitors and making sure everyone’s safe and complying with diving regulations and CO2 levels and all of that kind of stuff inside the habitat. They’re also running boat support for logistics and for topside dive support everyday.

We also have a Mission Control Center we set up on shore that’s running everyday doing the types of things one expects of a NASA MCC. So we have probably another eight FIU staff members on shore running topside, boat, and dive, and watch desk operations throughout a mission, and we have 10 to 30 topside NASA-related folks running MCC, supporting experiments, ops and assisting with dive support ops every day.

So there are about 40 to 50 people total—which fluctuates, depending on what kind of experiments we have going on. So to summarize: there are 40 to 50 people back at the Aquarius Reef Base in Tavernier, comprised of FIU staff, mission managers, MCC operators, experiment Principal Investigators, and support divers to support the six crewmembers under the water for the duration of the mission. Many of us wear multiple hats.

That just sounds like so many people just involved in one project.

Yes, and a lot of them have one experiment, and they are the expert of that experiment, and it’s coming up once on the timeline every day, or maybe it’s coming up today and not again for two more days. So they may come and go as required, supporting their experiment and timeline reviews for upcoming days. So not all of those people are huddled around in a space all day everyday. But we have about that many people onsite at some point during a mission. Some fraction of them live there and are FIU staff, but a good chunk of them come from our different principal investigators with experiments and our core team that’s responsible for executing the missions.

How do you like the culture at NASA and your team?

NASA’s got a great culture. It’s very supportive. It’s very family friendly. There’s a lot of trust in the workers to do what they are tasked with doing without constant looking over the shoulder. Just a lot of work-life balance and flexibility of schedule. But we also have a really interesting mission, and we also have times and positions where, no kidding, you better be there, and you better have [your] game face on. And you better be well-trained, and you better be ready to face the fact that today your performance could have the ultimate consequences. And you need to be ready to do your part to make sure that today goes well. And so for all of those reasons, NASA is a great place to work. I’ve had a great career, and I can’t think of anything I’ve seen that seems like it would have been more rewarding to me.

On my team, on our NEEMO project, take all of that and distill it to a really small group of people (our core execution team) that have a yearly mission with a very well-defined focus. NEEMO is something that a lot of people think is cool and would do anything to be part of, so we can afford to be very selective of the team members that we allow to join our team. So we have a very, very high-performing team that works well together, that’s been together—for the most part—for a number of years, and is very cohesive. We have a very discrete goal, and when a mission is successful, we have something we can walk away and feel good about. So for all of those reasons, it is kind of a microcosm of all the best things about NASA to me.

That sounds like a dream place to work.

It really is a good work environment.

How do you feel like, in the past 19 years, technology has changed the project?

That’s a good question. The Aquarius habitat was built several decades ago, and it was not built for wireless. Thirty wireless devices being connected at once, and high-speed internet connections didn’t even exist in those days. So a lot of modifications to the facility have happened along the way, just to try to allow us to keep up with current technologies, and they’ve done a good job of that. We are able to make a high bandwidth data connection between the shore and the habitat. We are able to design a mission with the kind of data-transferring integrity and quality that we see on the space station today.

What I mean by that is clear voice, clear video, file transfers, all of that kind of stuff we can support to the same quality or better than we see on the Space Station. So what I would say is that we have been able to effortlessly keep up with the kind of technology demands that are capability enablers in human spaceflight right now. But I wouldn’t say that we’ve gone out and set the pace on that, for the most part. Occasionally we have experiments that come along that are pressing the boundaries of technology at the time. Like a few years ago, we were looking at a receiver that could make a solid Bluetooth connection with multiple discrete Bluetooth devices at once and interweave those data streams. That’s something that is not typical of Bluetooth. Bluetooth is usually a point-to-point, device-to-device, kind of solution. So occasionally, we are looking at new technologies and using it as a place to experiment with those in a high-intensity setting. But for the most part, I would say that we’ve just kept abreast of human spaceflight technology.

What do you think the biggest issue facing NASA right now is? Or the entire space industry?

Let me give you two issues. The first one is we have a lot of commercial space activity going on right now. The poster child of that is probably SpaceX, but that’s certainly not the only example. But we have companies led by billionaires that are doing really creative, innovative, and aggressive things in human spaceflight right now. It may be premature to say where all of that goes, and how successful all of that will be, but it’s definitely applying a lot of pressure to NASA’s model of business as we’ve developed it over the last 60 years.

And so I think one challenge that we’re struggling with is, how do we learn to be light on our feet again? How do we learn how to be more creative and innovating and more responsive to the kind of things that these commercial companies are able to do, while not losing sight of the fact that a lot of the processes and approaches that we use, that slow us down, are direct results of the fact that we’ve lost people in human spaceflight before? When people die, we implement more strict safety rules, and we implement more rigorous processes. Over 60 years, we’ve lost a number of crewmembers in the service of duty, and what you can rightly call our bureaucracy, to some degree, is a direct result of trying to learn from those lessons and be more rigorous in taking care of our hardware and our people that the taxpayers entrust us with. But throwing hardware out there, and testing it quickly, and turning it around quickly…that’s fundamentally opposed to more rigorous process-driven approaches. It’s hard to strike that balance. And just globally, that’s one of the challenges NASA has today.

The other one is that a couple of weeks ago the Vice President [Mike Pence] addressed the National Space Council and announced that not only is NASA going back to the moon, but we’re going back to the moon by 2024. Boots on the moon in 2024. And that is a very aggressive schedule based on the readiness of hardware today. And, moreover, that’s a very aggressive schedule based on the budget we see today. So layered on top of this challenge of just learning how to responsibly become more nimble and more agile and more light on our feet like some of our commercial partners appear to be, we suddenly have a very, very demanding challenge to meet laid upon us, and figuring out how to do that with no new budget is, I’m sure, keeping a lot of people up at night.

How is NASA facing these issues?

What I’ve seen from our leadership is very much, “Look, this is an opportunity that doesn’t come along very often. We may not know exactly how we’re going to make this happen, but while we have the support of the administration, and presuming we get equal support from Congress, we would be crazy not to run for the cliff and do everything we can to make this happen.” So it’s being addressed with the kind of seriousness, from the Administrator down, that I think people would expect us to address it with. It’s an enormous challenge, no doubt about it. I wouldn’t want to minimize the challenge, because at the end of the day, you and everyone reading your article expects us to bring those people back safely too. We only say “get people to the moon in five years” but implied is the rest of that, which is even harder—ensuring we get them back safely. We also take that as a personal challenge. And so, we’re doing the best we can to figure out the schedules and the budgets and the technical projects that will enable us to go do that. It’ll be a wonderful thing to watch.

Interview excerpts have been lightly edited for clarity and readability and approved by the interviewee.