TCNJ

26 The College of New Jersey Magazine T he final launch of the space shuttle Atlantis began with a burst of smoke and fire that shook the nearby earth. Kevin Gilligan '09 felt the engines' vibrations rumbling inside his chest as he stood, astonished, three miles away on an observation deck at Kennedy Space Center. It was July 8, 2011. Gilligan, who'd worked at NASA for less than a year, was witnessing one of humankind's most extraordinary achievements, but his joy was tempered by the occasion itself. "It was exhilarating," he says. "But at the same time, it felt, from a human exploration perspective, like it truly was the end of an era. We were retiring the space shuttle. We were losing the ability to launch American astronauts, in American-made vehicles, from American soil." For years afterward, as Gilligan built a career supporting planetary- science missions that focused on advancing our understanding of the solar system, he fielded more than a few skeptical questions from strangers about NASA's purpose. "If I mentioned where I was working, people said, 'Oh, I thought NASA wasn't doing anything,'" he says. "I don't get those comments anymore." A decade after the last flight of Atlantis — what many feared signaled the end of NASA's fabled story — the pursuits of the reinvigorated space agency are once again mesmerizing the world. From hunting for life on Mars and plotting a spin around one of Jupiter's moons, to building the world's most powerful rocket to carry astronauts far beyond Earth, space exploration is in the midst of its most exciting stretch in a generation. And Gilligan once again finds himself amazed at what is possible as NASA navigates this potentially historic new era. Now a senior program analyst in the Strategic Investments Division, Gilligan and his boss, fellow alumnus and NASA Deputy Chief Financial Officer Stephen Shinn '97, are steering the financial operations and strategic- planning process of the agency's highest-profile projects. Many are mind-bending blockbusters that could, on their own, inspire entire sci-fi epics: the James Webb Space Telescope, a technological marvel that will allow astronomers to peer farther back in time than ever before toward the origins of the universe; the Perseverance rover, which successfully traveled nearly 300 million miles from Earth and now seeks rock samples on the surface of Mars in a search for ancient microbial life; and the Orion spacecraft, a deep- space vehicle whose heat shield measures a whopping 16.5 feet in diameter and will protect astronauts from 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit temperatures. Artistic rendering of the Perseverance rover on Mars.

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