Fossum seeks to promote "Valley Rats" at NASA

Jesus Castillo never imagined he would be working for NASA.

He thought of space exploration as too much for him and "out of his reach" when he was growing up in Hidalgo.

Castillo’s passion was fixing cars, and he dreamed of a career in the auto industry. But when he found out at a young age that the best jobs in the industry were based in Michigan, he knew he had to look for another career in engineering.

Preferably, he wanted something that would keep him close to his family in the Rio Grande Valley.

Years later, Castillo has that "impossible" engineering job he thought he’d never have: the 22-year-old is working in Houston as a systems engineer for Boeing, one of NASA’s key contractors.

Castillo is one of several Valley natives working for the space agency. It is a contingent that McAllen-raised astronaut Mike Fossum calls, endearingly, the "Valley Rats," a "term of pride" he heard Valley natives call themselves in college at Texas A&M University.

Fossum is hoping stories like Castillo’s and those from about two dozen other Valley natives working for NASA can be used to inspire school kids in the Valley that aren’t aware of the myriad job opportunities within the space agency.

"The astronaut thing may sound so impossible to them and they can’t relate," said Fossum, a McAllen High School graduate.

Fossum has visited several schools in McAllen since his first flight to the International Space Station in 2006. He hopes that in the future he will be joined by several of his colleagues.

"It’ll give kids the opportunity to see somebody they might relate to," he said. "Because everybody has different things that trigger that reaction where the thought of a dream becomes personal."

Fossum and his colleague, fellow McAllen High School graduate Janet Morris, began compiling a list of Valley natives working for NASA after a chance meeting about a year ago.

Morris has been keeping the list while Fossum prepares for his next trip into space in 2011. So far, she has discovered 23 other "Valley Rats" working either directly for NASA or for a company that the space agency contracts work out to on a regular basis.

The list contains engineers, technicians, analysts, administrative assistants and other positions with NASA and several other different companies. The list also continues to grow as Fossum and Morris get the word out.

"The space business, no matter how visible it is at the moment (to the public), is a booming business," said Morris, a space shuttle schedules analyst with United Space Alliance, a space operations company owned by Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

Officials from the McAllen and Pharr-San Juan-Alamo school districts praised Fossum’s idea and welcomed the prospect of more NASA employees coming to speak in school auditoriums and classrooms.

"When he comes to speak he has such a good rapport with the kids," McAllen district spokesman Mark May said. "He makes a genuine connection with them and they sense that and buy into that."

Fossum said it is especially critical to promote math and science now because of the technology involved in solving some of the world’s biggest challenges, like maintaining the world’s food and water supply, climate change, pollution and solutions for renewable energy.

"There’s technology involved with all these things and there’s great jobs to be had to help solve these problems," Fossum said. "And our country needs people to solve these problems. So it’s a very worthy endeavor."