Robert Lightfoot's last day at NASA was Monday, and the Alabama native can't wait to come home, even from a career that made him NASA's acting administrator for the past 15 months.

People who have worked with Lightfoot call him a visionary. "There are those that just crunch numbers, and there are those that set the path for the agency," former space shuttle manager Steve Cash said last week. "Robert has always had that vision. He sees where the agency needs to go, and he sees how to put a strategy together to go forward."

Lightfoot has testified before Congress, run a top NASA center, been the agency's top civil service employee and helped lead the agency back to flight after the Columbia disaster. It's a long way from his first public spotlight as the "guinea pig" on his father's science program on Alabama Public Television in the 1960s.

"When I was a little kid, and I mean a little kid, I was often the guinea pig that showed up on his TV show," Lightfoot remembered in an interview with AL.com. "He would do mean things to me. He would have the short, fat beaker and fill it with a certain amount of water, and he had the tall, skinny beaker and he'd go, 'Which one has more in it?' And of course it would be the same. It was always the same, and I never got it right."

Lightfoot's gotten a lot right since then, and some might say it all started with narrowly avoiding a career in journalism. Born in 1963 in Montevallo, where his father was a professor at the University of Montevallo, Lightfoot was heading to Troy State University with a full journalism scholarship. He'd been the editor of his award-winning high school newspaper and loved the news business.

But Lightfoot's scores on pre-admission tests led to a guidance counselor's recommendation that he become an engineer. He was always interested in math and science, but there were no engineers in the Lightfoot family. He jokes that, "I thought I was going to be driving trains."

When 'it finally clicked'

Lightfoot's girlfriend and now wife, Caroline, was from Huntsville, so he got a summer job there with Rockwell International. The company assigned him to NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, and it was there he saw parts for the space shuttle.

"For me, that's when engineering finally clicked," Lightfoot said. "I'm a very visual learner, not necessarily a textbook learner. It was very helpful for me to see the application of engineering, not necessarily the theory behind engineering. I was able to go back and finish my schooling with the mentality of what this was going to mean at the end of the day."

Lightfoot's NASA career started in 1989 as an engineer at Marshall. He would later manage the space shuttle main engine program and run engine testing at NASA's Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. He was assistant associate administrator for the space shuttle program and center director at Marshall, NASA's lead propulsion center.

'Part of great teams'

Asked which he enjoyed most - engineering, managing or administrating from the highest level - Lightfoot won't pick. "That's a hard one," he said. "There are pros and cons to all of them." He will say that he loved "the people he got to work with" in all three areas.

"I worked on some amazing projects," he said. "I was just so fortunate to be a part of teams that did unbelievable things, whether we were testing main engines at Marshall in my early days, whether I was part of a team on a console for a shuttle flight or even now when I'm talking to Congress or White House about what we want to do from an agency perspective ... I'm sure there are teams out there as good, but I just can't imagine working with a better set of teams than I've been blessed to work with my whole entire career."

The feeling is mutual. Todd May, the current director of the Marshall center, said Lightfoot changed things for the better.

"Robert began his career as a space shuttle test engineer working in Marshall's test area and as he departs NASA, the Huntsville skyline now includes two new test stands that will support our future exploration of deep space," May said. "His commitment to the development of new technologies and the space systems that push us deeper and further into space has never let up."

'Sees the future really well'

"He actually sets things in motion to help accomplish the goals NASA wants to accomplish," Cash said. "He sees the future really well. A lot of people have a hard time seeing the future. They can't get beyond one day. But Robert can see one year, two years, five years, 25 years out in the future, and he's good about laying out that vision for the agency.

"There are very few visionaries in NASA," Cash said. "If you really go back and look, von Braun was a visionary. There are others within the agency. We could look at the science centers and the things they've done. They had the vision. But Robert is one of those guys that has the vision showing how it is that we go from low-Earth orbit to the moon, to Mars and on throughout the solar system. You gotta have that. If you have no vision, you're stagnant. Robert has kept us from being stagnant."

'I'm not done'

Lightfoot is 55 years old, and he's coming back to Huntsville. He has two daughters: Kelsey, who lives in Nashville and Haley, who lives with her husband, Phillip, in Chattanooga with Lightfoot's grandson.

Speculation had Lightfoot taking a few months off then juggling offers from the big aerospace players in Huntsville. "Oh, I'm not done," he said. "I'm going to fail retirement miserably."

But in a surprise announcement Wednesday, the small Huntsville engineering and technical company LSINC announced it had hired Lightfoot as its new president. "We are growing," CEO Alicia Ryan said. "We've had a phenomenal couple of years and we've had a phenomenal 10 years.... With that growth, we've really had to think about how we're going to structure that growth going forward."

Lightfoot will lead the company in growing its defense and space business while taking care of its employees and the community, Ryan said.

Don't expect Lightfoot to disappear into Cummings Research Park. He has more in mind.

"I'm excited about getting back to Huntsville and being part of that community that's growing the way they're growing," he said. "I look forward to staying engaged. I hope I still have some gas in the tank to help maybe from a different perspective and a different way. Not only help NASA but also help Huntsville and get back in the fabric of that community.

"The community has supported me through my entire career, unbelievably, frankly," Lightfoot said. "I look forward to giving back a little bit when I come back home."

(Updated May 2, 2018 to reflect Lightfoot's new position as president of LSINC.)