By Joshua Finch,

NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, Florida

In the near future, Jon Cowart will lead mission-related activities on Kennedy Space Center in Florida for NASA as astronauts on Launch Pad 39A move through their procedures inside a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft. While SpaceX controllers and NASA work through their respective processes, the teams will perform go or no-go polling that will establish whether everyone agrees that the time to launch is at hand. Cowart will serve as mission manager, meaning he will support NASA’s efforts in determining “go” to confirm that the company’s rocket and spacecraft are ready to carry astronauts into orbit.

“NASA and the companies share responsibility for the missions. But, as mission manager, I will be trying to make sure that everything goes as planned,” said Cowart. “There are thousands and thousands of things that have to happen. It’s my goal to understand every single one of them.”

Cowart works with NASA’s Commercial Crew Program helping lead the nation’s effort to facilitate the development and certification of commercial spacecraft to enable the safe transportation of humans to and from the International Space Station.

On a typical day, Cowart is working to understand everything from what is technically going on with the rockets and spacecraft to what needs to happen to support the space station. It’s real life rocket science.

Cowart admits he didn’t always love space.

“At the time when I was a kid, you could only watch cartoons on Saturday mornings,” said Cowart. “Because NASA was always doing some sort of launch, and it seemed like those happed a lot on Saturday mornings, the TV station would show the launch instead of my favorite cartoons, which drove me crazy.”

That feeling changed for Cowart Dec.24, 1968 when his mother took him outside to look at the sky as Apollo 8 astronauts became the first humans to orbit the moon. It was that date that Cowart knew that he wanted to work for NASA.

That was an epiphany moment for Cowart who was not always the best student. Even in high school, he initially struggled with Algebra but still began to challenge himself to study hard and try difficult things.

“A lot of kids say engineering and science are hard, but don’t be afraid of hard things,” said Cowart. “You need to push yourself, get out of your comfort zone and understand the things that you don’t currently understand. You must tackle the hard things.”

Cowart first came to Kennedy in 1987 and started working on space shuttle Atlantis as a project engineer. During his first ten years with NASA, he was in the launch control center doing testing on the orbiter and learning how everything worked together in a complicated space system. Over the course of his career, he has been in the firing room 65 times during a launch countdown.

Cowart knows that NASA along with the two commercial providers, Boeing and SpaceX, are revolutionizing space exploration. He sees a future with safe, cost-effective access to space. Research is one of the major areas that will benefit as the new systems will allow the space station to add another resident crew member and double the amount of time dedicated to scientific research in orbit.

“Research is a great thing,” said Cowart. “In the future, I hope that we will be able to take project scientists up to the station to work on their own experiments rather than having the astronauts perform the experiment alone. In the event an experiment doesn’t go as expected, it would be great if the project scientist were on the station to support in person.

Cowart also dreams of the day that humans are on the surface of Mars.

“By enabling commercial companies to take over trips to the space station and low-Earth orbit, we are helping pave the way for further exploration of our solar system,” Cowart said. “Right now, our robots on Mars are doing fantastic things and have covered more than a marathon distance of the Martian surface, but humans could accomplish a lot more because of our ability to react much more quickly.”

Cowart says the great events in human space exploration are still in front of us.

“We have to remember that we are still explorers,” said Cowart. “You would not consider a nation a sea fairing nation if their ships never left the sight of shore. We are working to get outside of Earth’s shore. The universe is not going to come to us, we have to go to it. Commercial crew is enabling all of it. The future that you see in movies and dream about begins here.”

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