Rice alum led NASA’s final shuttle launch

Flight Director Kwatsi Alibaruho earned Jones School MBA while working on Atlantis mission

BY MIKE WILLIAMS
Rice News staff

When Kwatsi Alibaruho leaves NASA for the private sector this week with a Rice University executive MBA in hand, he will do so with the satisfaction of a mission well accomplished.

It’s been a full year for Alibaruho, who earned his degree from Rice’s Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business in the spring.

Last week when Atlantis landed in Florida, the Clear Lake resident completed his task as lead flight director for NASA’s final space shuttle mission. This week Alibaruho is departing Mission Control at Johnson Space Center (JSC) to assume a new role as executive director of systems engineering for Hamilton Sunstrand, a Connecticut-based subsidiary of United Technologies that develops aerospace, industrial and space system products.

When the shuttle touched down July 21, Alibaruho’s first sensation at the conclusion of nearly 11 months of intense work was one of relief. “In the midst of all the other emotions — the celebration, the mourning — what I and my team were focused on more than anything else was accomplishing this mission safely and ending it safely,” he said of his sixth mission as a shuttle flight director and second as lead director.

“At the very end of my NASA career, I feel an incredible sense of gratitude and completion. … I’ve spent this week meeting with a lot of people for whom I’ve made a mark on their lives and their careers, just as others left their mark on my career,” he said at JSC earlier this week. “So I feel good. I’m going to walk out of here on Friday feeling like I’ve done my part.”

Kwatsi Alibaruho, who earned an executive MBA from Rice University's Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business this year, was flight director for NASA's final space shuttle flight this month. Atlantis carried four astronauts on the service mission to the International Space Station.

Alibaruho, a native of Illinois, joined NASA as part of the agency’s cooperative education program while studying for his avionics degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; he took a full-time job upon graduation in 1994.

His goal from the beginning was to become a flight director. Before earning that status in 2005 (as NASA’s first African-American flight director), he served as a flight controller, deputy chairman of the Orbital Space Plane Source Evaluation Board’s operations committee and group lead for the International Space Station (ISS) Life Support Systems.

Alibaruho said he was grateful for the opportunity at NASA to fulfill a dream fueled by a childhood love of science and science fiction — though that didn’t include blasting into space. “The thing I love the most about human spaceflight is the thing I’ve just finished doing — that is, leading a team of engineers in this war with gravity. For me, that’s the exciting part,” he said.

Except for the astronauts, few carry as high a profile in America’s space program as the flight directors, for whom the template was set by NASA legends Christopher Kraft and Gene Kranz. The flight director is in charge of mission planning and implementation and is ultimately responsible for the safety of the crew and its support team. Since the Atlantis mission wasn’t a sure thing until Congress committed funding mere months before, the process of preparing for the final shuttle launch to the ISS was condensed into an unusually short time.

“I was assigned to this mission last August,” Alibaruho said. “One of the things that enabled it was the selection of an absolutely perfect crew.” He called the four astronauts on this shuttle mission “incredible, not only in their technical capabilities to execute but because they were one of the lowest-maintenance crews I’ve ever worked with, just a happy group of folks. They knew what they needed to do, they knew what they needed from us, they were able to articulate to us very clearly what they wanted — and they didn’t need much.”

Kwatsi Alibaruho works at the flight director console at NASA's Mission Control Center during the July 12 spacewalk by astronauts Mike Fossum and Ron Garan. While planning the mission, Alibaruho also completed his executive MBA degree at Rice University's Jones Graduate School of Business.

With construction of the ISS complete, the crew’s primary tasks were maintenance and logistics. “Shuttle missions are never, ever what you would call simple, but this was one of the less complex missions that we’ve flown. And that was on purpose,” Alibaruho said. The goal, he said, was to prepare the ISS “to be able to function autonomously for another year, in the event that the commercial cargo providers we have started to work with have delays or problems. That’s absolutely critical for buying down program risk.”

Alibaruho decided to pursue his MBA, something he had considered for years, during the financial crash of 2008. “I tend to believe that on the back end of major calamities, you often find opportunities, if you have the stamina to fight through your fear,” he said. “So I thought this was a perfect time to retool, to prepare for the next phase of my career.”

He began coursework at the Jones School in 2009, making two or three trips a week to Rice, including long Fridays and Saturdays every other week.

“One of the most challenging courses we had was mergers and acquisitions, but it was also the most interesting, because it took everything we had learned and really put it together,” he said. “To have a class like that taught by (Rice trustee) Jim Hackett, the CEO of Anadarko, a successful Fortune 500 company, provided a perspective on the work that I thought was incredible. It was certainly worth the price of admission.”

He admitted the rigorous schedule wasn’t easy. “I discovered many years ago I have what I believe to be a genetic defect in my brain that enables me to function without very much sleep,” Alibaruho said. “I figured I’d capitalize on that particular neurosis and pursue the MBA.”

Four to five hours of sleep a night — and “a very patient wife and an understanding son” — got him through it. “I was happy to see graduation,” he said.

Alibaruho said the depth of knowledge he gained at Rice will have lasting value as he launches a new career. “I very much view the MBA from Rice as an excellent set of tools to add to my portfolio skills,” he said. “When you’ve been in the work environment for a certain amount of time, an MBA’s value isn’t so much in the credentials you have; I certainly wasn’t going to command much of an increase in salary, if at all, by having ‘MBA’ by my name on my resume.

“The real power of the MBA, in my opinion, is the additional skills and knowledge you gain about how business works, how best practices in business allow for superior performance in leadership and superior earnings performance of private companies.

“I felt very fortunate to have an institution of the caliber of Rice University here in the city, so that I could make an executive MBA program work for me,” he said.

Alibaruho will keep a close eye on how NASA navigates the future, which in the short term will include launching Americans aboard Russian Soyuz spacecraft and, longer term, via commercial carriers like Space X and the Orbital Sciences Corp. “I hope JSC continues to be a leader in human space operations, in whatever form that takes. This is where a lot of the human spaceflight expertise resides,” he said. “I hope it continues to reside here, and continues to grow. And I hope JSC, as well as all of NASA, will strengthen its business acumen.”

Closer to home, he would dearly love to pass his dreams of space on to his 5-year-old son, Mitchell. That process is under way. “My son’s already into ‘Transformers,’ and we’re starting him on ‘Star Wars,'” he said. “We’ll get into ‘Star Trek’ later.”