Mark Geyer

"The very essence of leadership is that you have to have a vision. It's got to be a vision you articulate clearly and forcefully on every occasion. You can't blow a weak trumpet."

~Theodore Hesburgh

Today is my dad, Mark Geyer's, birthday and I can't think of a better person to write about a good example of leadership than him. My dad has worked for NASA for over 19 years on projects like the International Space Station and most recently Orion, traveled all over the world from Denver to D.C, Russia to Japan. As it's project manager, he's fought hard to keep the Orion funded even with the President's proposed budget cuts to manned missions. The most prominent qualities that make him a great leader are definitely his ability to articulate his vision and his constant vigilance to keep everyone involved informed.

A year or two ago Orion was part of the Constellation program which consisted of three projects meant to take humans to the moon and on to mars. However when President Obama started to make cuts to federal spending, Constellation was the first to go. Two of the projects were cut immediately but my father and many more of his co-workers worked together to create a proposal that would use the resources they had already utilized in the planning stages of Orion to fit something the President was looking for. Congress subpeona former NASA employees (such as Gene Cernan and Buzz Aldrin) to testify on the importance of continuing manned space exploration. After much fighting against the President's budget, Orion was allowed to continue it's research and production.

Throughout the entire process my father made sure that throughout the country, all members of the project were kept informed of his actions and what Congress was deciding. He held weekly meetings in which he teleconferenced all of the various sites and expressed his current plans for the project, what they should be doing, and opened the floor for any and all questions. He traveled constantly to every military base, research facility, and NASA site where his employees worked in order to establish connections and attempt to quell their fears of unemployment. Even though it was a very stressful time for everyone involved I never once heard him utter a foul word or give up hope. 

I hope that when I go into the workforce and have to face certain problems and difficult situations I can use poise and determination that I have always seen my father use when approaching something difficult. Happy birthday to arguably the best Dad on the planet, and the nerdiest rocket scientist I know.