Technical career highpoint motivated professional pivot

Prasun Desai led the 50-member NASA Langley team responsible for the entry, descent, and landing of the twin Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity in 2000. A few years later, he left technical engineering to develop NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate and has since then risen to become a top administrator, managing its programs and its $1.1 billion budget.

“After the Mars landings, people all over the world were asking how we accomplished it,” Desai said. “And it wasn’t just about us. It meant something to humanity. It lifted everyone’s spirit, like when your sports team wins the championship, and it lifts the whole community. But after three Mars landings and two Earth landings, I was ready to do something different.”

For his doubly successful career, Desai is receiving a 2024 Distinguished Alumni award from the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Desai described the time in his life leading up to his major career change.

“Up to that point in my career, I was completely using my left-brain--analytical, methodical, logical. But I decided I wanted to develop further both as a person and professionally, so I forced myself into a position that was right-brained--artsy, creative, touchy-feely. I ask young engineers if they are the type of person who wants to do this kind of technical work forever. There are people who want to and they’re very happy. Frankly it snuck up on me. I thought I was that person.”

Desai had been at NASA’s Langley Research Center for approximately 20 years, when he took a one-year assignment at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C. He said, it was about that time the Obama administration wanted to revitalize the technological base of the country.

“NASA didn't have an isolated tech organization and I latched onto that,” Desai said. “I purposely forced myself out of the technical work and into an operations role. I was responsible for the general day-to-day management of the organization operations including financial resources, human resources, procurement, communications, IT, and facilities functions, etc.”

Desai said as a young engineer he shied away from the administration side of things, but now his work is largely in the soft-skills arena, saying, “Frankly, I was not good at it.” He said he feels more complete as a person having a fuller skill set and is happy he forced himself out of his comfort zone.

In his present role as deputy associate administrator of NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, he works with experts to define and make investments in what the next generations of space capabilities need to be developed in areas such as advanced propulsion systems, landing systems, autonomy, structures and materials, new avionics packages, mobility, and robotics. The goal of these technologies is to make future missions more capable, cost-effective, sustainable, and reliable going forward.

“Landings need to be more precise,” Desai said. “As we’ve seen with lunar landings of late, it’s not so easy, right? We need to make these systems much more robust so that they're successful. For example, we’re looking at a navigation Doppler LiDAR, which is a type of sensing capability that allows for the lander to get a better sense of its position and velocity, how it's moving laterally and vertically. You need that, because there is at present no GPS system that can be utilized on the moon, or Mars.”

Desai said it’s easy to get caught up in the “coolness of space missions,” but he likes to continually remind students and others why we do it.

“It’s about expanding human knowledge and trying to answer ancient questions about how we got here and are we alone in the universe. Space missions allow us to gather clues to answer these fundamental questions, to quench this age-old yearning desire that humans have about our place in the universe. In my view, that’s why we do all these space missions. I helped plan, design, and execute those missions in the past. Now, in this organization, I’m making them more capable so we can further probe the universe,” Desai said.

Desai has a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Rutgers University, a master’s degree in astronautics from George Washington University, and a Ph.D. in aeronautical and astronautical engineering, from the University of Illinois in 2005—the same year he received the National Engineer of the Year Award from American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics for his contributions on the Spirit and Opportunity rover landings on Mars.

Desai said the shift from technical engineering to managing programs that explore new space technologies brought him full circle.

“When I was grad student and an intern at NASA, we wanted to do human Mars missions, which is the topic of my master’s thesis, but we didn’t have the capability. There were many miracles that needed to happen. In those 20 years, we made little progress because no investments were being made in new technologies to overcome these miracles.

“It has been an amazing experience in retrospect, and I could not have imagined nor planned this journey,” Desai said. “I feel blessed and humbled having the opportunities I had, some from luck and others intentionally cultivated so I was prepared and ready to be successful when they arose.”