The Collegiate
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NASA’s David Mitchell ’80 EXPLORING NEW FRONTIERS WITH
For the past three years, David Mitchell ’80 served as NASA’s Chief Program Management Officer, guiding the agency’s major projects and ensuring they were strategically planned and successfully executed. He was recently promoted to Associate Administrator of the Mission Support Directorate, overseeing all the administrative and operational support functions necessary for NASA missions to succeed. We talked with David about his career, the NASA missions he’s led and the impact space technology has on our life, now and in the future. Mitchell has spent decades exploring the cosmos, but his journey started much closer to home. On July 20, 1969, his seventh birthday, he watched Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins make history as Apollo 11 touched down on the moon. That moment ignited a passion for space exploration in Mitchell that never faded. Nearly two decades later, he joined NASA and in his own words, “felt like I had won the lottery.” Today, after working on everything from deep space missions to groundbreaking technology, he still feels the same way. A typical day in Mitchell’s role at NASA is anything but predictable. Like many of us, meetings, emails and strategy sessions fill much of his schedule, but the job extends far beyond the walls of NASA Headquarters. Whether he’s delivering town hall talks to NASA employees or traveling the country to visit NASA space centers and industry, Mitchell is constantly connecting and engaging with the teams and technologies shaping the future of aviation and space exploration. His work recently took him to the White House, where he met with representatives of the Office of Management and Budget and a separate visit to the State Department.
Fun Fact NASA has 10 field centers in the United States, including space flight centers, research centers and other facilities. (NASA.gov)
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