Michael Rubin is among less than 1% of total NASA aerospace program workforce to earn a silver pin that was flown in space to honor his work in human space flight safety.
Michael Rubin wore a dark navy suit from which he had just cut the tags. It was the latest addition to his closet, the only one of its kind among clothing he believes is older than his college-aged children.
The purchase specifically for the September 2024 occasion seemed well worth it though, because according to the management he works with at NASA Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, Rubin was “rocking it.”
“Being an engineer, we tend to not dress up,” he semi-joked. Most of his days are spent providing insight and oversight as a chief software engineer and juggling his duties as a Systems & Engineering Management doctoral candidate at Texas Tech University.
Even the American flag montage tie was a gift from a friend who refused to let Rubin wear his only other tie printed with dogs playing poker – although this Silver Snoopy Award ceremony prominently featured a cartoon beagle.
The Peanuts comic character, dancing in a spacesuit, was fashioned into a silver lapel pin and flown with hundreds of others in space for a month. Through no small effort, that pin, roughly the size of a dime, traveled more than 13 million miles so it could honor a member of the space program workforce who significantly contributed to human space flight safety and mission success.
Fewer than 1% of the aerospace program workforce receive the honor annually.
“It’s a prestigious award,” Rubin explained, which he first learned about around 2003. “I remember thinking, ‘Man, what do I need to do to get a Silver Snoopy Award?’ It’s something that a lot of folks really aspire to get awarded.”
The Silver Snoopy Award was created in 1968 in the likeness of the Smokey Bear Wildfire Prevention campaign to cut down on a substantial number of problems encountered during Project Mercury and Project Gemini that were traced to individual workers’ errors and lack of attention. With hundreds of thousands of workers in plants across the country, the associate director of the Apollo program wanted to take motivational action to change space flight safety awareness.
Instead of a hat-wearing bear, the already publicly adored Snoopy was enlisted as a watchdog for manned flight (even more relevant with his World War I Flying Ace fantasy identity that is frequently featured in the comic strip). Snoopy’s new job was to promote excellence in every phase of space flight to help ensure mission success.
Rubin was fascinated by the concept. But little did he know, at an impromptu work meeting secretly orchestrated behind his back more than 20 years later, it would be announced that his decades of commitment to NASA as a software engineer had earned him this accolade of his dreams.
Launching from Lubbock
Rubin always had high aspirations for himself growing up in Lubbock. At first, in middle school, he remembers dreaming of becoming a microbiologist.
“I wanted to have this ‘aha moment’ in a lab where I found the cure for cancer,” he recalled.
But the son of a musical/artistic mother and a mathematician father, Rubin found himself more drawn to a profession where he could draw from the analytical strengths of his left brain and the creative visualization perks of his right brain – engineering.
By the time he headed to college, Rubin decided the best fit for his talents would be to pursue a mechanical engineering degree followed by a master’s in robotics that gave him experience in programming.
Once he graduated in 1993, he became a mechanical designer and built heating and cooling systems in Lubbock. After a few years of that, he switched to industrial engineering work on fire sprinklers for Grinnell Manufacturing.
He acknowledges that this time in Lubbock was great, surrounded by his family and a solid support system, but his career wasn’t really what he had in mind. Since this was 1998 and the internet was not as utilized as it is now, Rubin went on the job hunt the best way he knew how.
“I literally had lists of companies and I physically mailed out paper resumes,” he mused. “I had a lot of interviews, but the one I landed was actually with a company called GeoControl Systems in Houston.”
That’s how Rubin first found himself performing duties for the International Space Station. He had taken one small step for himself, one giant leap for his career.
NASA Newbie
Rubin’s first role was a software engineer performing independent verification and validation of control software.
“That was back when the space station only had a couple of pieces to it, not the 100 that it has now,” he said with a chuckle.
This led to an opportunity to utilize his master’s degree even more by becoming a design engineer at Lockheed Martin in which he maintained and tested robot systems at the Johnson Space Center.
Over the course of the following 20 years, Rubin explored other software engineer jobs that gave him experience in the medical field, convenience stores and wholesale fuel sales industries as well as freelance software engineering and development and technical project management. He even worked as a programmer analyst who developed, maintained and upgraded web-based enterprise applications and mobile applications for the Texas Tech University System.
Rubin’s longest stint was the six years he spent at Boeing Corporation where he developed, maintained and upgraded embedded data recording software for the U.S. Air Force C-17 Globemaster III – known as the most flexible cargo aircraft to enter the airlift force.
But no matter the change, Rubin found himself drawn back to NASA somehow. One of his proudest achievements took place during his four years with Oceaneering, when he wrote all the firmware for a battery charger used in the International Space Station to charge the lithium-ion batteries for the astronauts’ extravehicular activity spacewalks.
“That’s an important thing, because if the batteries don’t get charged, the astronauts don’t get any work done and they can’t do maintenance,” he explained. “So that was a really good opportunity to do that.”
With time, Rubin’s roles progressed from developing, maintaining and upgrading software, to a technical lead and then his current role of chief software engineer at Amentum in Houston since 2021.
“I started off just doing software insight and oversight to make sure that the Boeing and SpaceX software were being developed according to good engineering practices and so forth,” he recalled. “But when the previous software chief engineer took another position, everyone remembered me and all the experience I had, so I became the chief software engineer for this contract.”
Rubin enjoys a wide variety of everyday responsibilities like tending to the NASA Commercial Crew Program at Johnson Space Center all the way to examining code from a Mars habitat simulator or software for the Gateway program that could lead to a people presence on the moon.
“It’s exciting,” he remarked, “especially since I didn't start off wanting to work within space.”
The impact of his work makes it hard to believe he never worked on software in college – and eager to learn more.
Takeoff to Texas Tech
It had been 28 years since Rubin earned his master’s degree, but when Texas Tech offered to waive the GRE during the COVID-19 pandemic, he couldn’t pass up the opportunity to continue working full time while becoming a distance Systems & Engineering Management student.
Rubin found humor in the fact that he was older than his fellow classmates and even half of his professors. However, he was thankful the decades that passed from his former college years brought new technological advancements that made learning from Lubbock in Houston manageable.
“Texas Tech has a really good distance program that’s been around at least since the ‘90s when they would send the distance students videotapes of lectures,” he said. “Now they’re online and so forth.”
Although a bit apprehensive, Rubin decided to take a full load of nine hours a semester. His dedication and work ethic immediately struck Dongping Du, an associate professor of Industrial, Manufacturing, & Systems Engineering.
Du met Rubin in 2021 during his search for a Ph.D. advisor. She was impressed by how he prepared for their meeting, arriving with several topics he was interested in researching. After further review, they agreed his dissertation would be “Improving Spacecraft Reliability through Dynamic Fault Management.”
Not long after, Rubin read more than 200 papers and investigated the limitations, gaps and challenges in his research area. He emerged with a novel design for research methodology to improve the current literature.
“I was surprised by how much he could complete, considering that he’s working while doing this Ph.D. study,” Du remembered. “He’s very responsible, motivated and curious about his research.”
The extra effort is well worth it for Rubin to continue what he considers a Red Raider legacy. His parents earned master’s degrees from Texas Tech, both having passed away from cancer in the past decade.
Rubin didn’t know as a middle school student that his aspirations to cure the disease would one day become so personal.
“The fact that I’m getting my last degree at Texas Tech is great, because it kind of honors them at the same time,” he shared.
He felt similarly during what he thought was a normal workday last year, when a routine section meeting was rescheduled from online to in person for a special circumstance.
“They got the entire section together just so the group manager could embarrass me,” Rubin disclosed. “He said in front of everyone, ‘Dear Michael, congratulations! You’ve been selected as a recipient of the astronauts’ personal achievement award, the Silver Snoopy Award.”
Selected for the Silver Snoopy
Rubin was taken aback partially because he did not know they had nominated him for the award that would celebrate his commitment to safety.
That was just the beginning of the surprises, though. Once Rubin attended the fall ceremony along with 20 other honorees, he was awarded the pin by Johnson Space Center director Vanessa Wyche and astronaut Nicole Mann, who signed his certificate and pinned the Silver Snoopy pin onto his new suit.
“Nicole Mann is the first Native American woman astronaut to go into space,” he said, proud to have also received an autographed picture from her.
Mann gave a speech during the event which was followed by a reception. Rubin’s wife was by his side as he soaked up his career highlight, along with his youngest son – who feels inspired to follow in his father’s engineering path.
“I was very proud to get it, and my family was proud of me” he said. “It was definitely unexpected, but I was very happy that that happened.”
Rubin is still unsure where to display his pin. He has heard of a recipient carrying it in her purse, but he wants to preserve his. He is considering a shadow box, but in the meantime, it will live on his shelf by his other meaningful possessions.
He did make sure to show it to Du, who remarked that the award was “cute” and gave Rubin a laugh. But she noted the award’s prestige overshadows its size by far.
She is proud of Rubin and believes his research will create even more notable safety measures in the industry to come.
“I feel very happy for him because this is really an impressive accomplishment,” she said. “I believe he will fill a big gap in the research field with his novel methodology, which will be helpful for him and also benefit his work.”
Shoot for the Stars
Since returning to work, Rubin’s coworkers have made sure to praise having a Silver Snoopy Award recipient in their meetings. They also refer to him as “pre-doc,” realizing within a year they will refer to him as Dr. Rubin.
“They’re already asking me, ‘Hey, pre-doc. Can you help us with this reliability thing?” he said. “So, it’s turning out to be an amusing thing at work, but it’s going to be useful there.”
In what he calls an interesting challenge, Rubin was not only able to pass all his classes, but he earned a 4.0 GPA. All he has left are some finishing touches on his research articles.
He still wears a “good luck” Texas Tech shirt to his regular meetings with Du, but in her opinion, he won’t need it much longer.
“In terms of studying and research, he’s independent and he always comes up with ideas,” she noted. “He identifies problems that we discuss, and then he continues to move forward toward the objective of his research. So, I think there are many things other Ph.D. students can learn from him.”
And Rubin is, in fact, interested in how he can educate the upcoming generations. He already teaches online classes part time at San Jacinto College and has considered the possibility of becoming a university professor.
Another career move he might make is advancing up the technical chain at NASA to a division chief.
“I’m not one of those people who wants to work until I have one foot in the grave, but I like working,” Rubin admitted. “I don’t really feel like retiring.”
Looking back, Rubin is thrilled his education led to pathways he never expected for himself – landing him in the industry where he was truly meant to be.
Looking forward, he can’t wait to see where the next turns will lead.
“I mean, I started off doing mechanical work and here I am a chief software engineer,” he said upon further reflection. “So, don’t give up on pursuing an eventual dream. It may take you on a circuitous route where you’re not sure where it’s going to end, and you might think you hit a dead end, but always be mindful of the future and what opportunities you have based on your current and past experiences.
“Always ask yourself: What new opportunities can I find or create that will help fulfill my dreams?”