Southern Wins NASA Award for Work With Boeing on Powerful Rockets

Sep. 4—For their combined work on the NASA Space Launch System rocket, the most powerful rocket in the world at the time of its first launch, Southern University and Boeing won NASA's 2022 Mentor-Protégé Agreement of the Year.

Nominated by the Marshall Space Flight Center, Boeing received the award at the NASA Small Business Industry Awards for its mentorship with Southern University while providing tactical business and technical support to the institution.

"The people at Boeing have been extremely helpful and we're excited about our partnership," said Samuel Washington, director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies at Southern University. "We're grateful and thankful to NASA and Boeing for this opportunity."

Southern alumni supplied engineering skills to Boeing's Space Launch System program in New Orleans and received Boeing's first mentor-protégé agreement award with a Historically Black College or University.

The NASA-sponsored Mentor-Protégé Program pairs large companies with eligible small businesses and minority-serving institutions to enhance the protégés' capabilities to compete for larger, more-complex contracts.

"We hired some of our engineers who graduated from Southern and they actually performed work for the rocket, the Boeing rocket that they used to send to the moon," Washington said.

Southern provided engineers to work on-site at the NASA Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans, working in wire testing and harness safety among other tasks, he said.

"We hired mechanical engineers for cooling design," he said. "They actually performed engineering work; they worked with Boeing engineers on the booster of the rocket at the Michoud facility and Kennedy [Space Center]."

Washington noted the award recognizes of the hard work put in by Southern's alumni engineers and is a sign the university's investment in developing talented engineers can pay dividends.

"We want to get more into contracting for the aerospace industry for looking at our students and staff, getting them the information that they need to be a vital part of workforce development," he said.

The Space Launch System was the most powerful rocket built by NASA and, upon launching Artemis I in November 2022, exerted more power than any rocket before it with a maximum thrust of 8.8 million pounds.

But, the title of most powerful rocket was surpassed by SpaceX on April 20 when the aerospace company launched the first Integrated Flight Test of its Starship rocket, which exploded less than four minutes after taking off.

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