NASA’s first Black mission control director is Ugandan

Mission Control is a facility that manages space flights at NASA. To say that it is a seminal department at the organization is to understate it. Flights to the International Space Station (ISS), voyages to the surface of the moon and any shuttles sent to space are all piloted from Mission Control. The scientists and engineers here are top calibre.

These guys have mathematics for breakfast. They studied rocket science and came out on top. And in 2005, a Ugandan had risen to lead this team. He was 33 years old at the time, and the 59th mission control since the inception of NASA.

By the time of his appointment as flight director, Alibaruho had been at NASA for over 12 years. He first joined the organisation in 1993 as a student of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He had been one of two students specially selected (call it head-hunted) by NASA’s internship programme at the Johnson Space Centre in Houston, Texas. The young engineering student (avionics) would get employed at NASA in 1994, after his degree. He would steadily climb through the positions; from flight controller all the way to flight director, while excelling at everything in between.

In the days that followed Alibaruho’s appointment, he gave many press interviews. Ebony magazine, a premier black American publication, listed him among the most influential black people in the US. In an interview he gave to NPR (National Public Radio), Alibaruho attributed his astronomical rise to NASA’s Mission Control flight directorship to his exceptional love for academics. Ironically, this love for academics had earned him lots of mockery from people of the same skin color while growing up. He was, apparently, bullied for being too bookish.
He said in the interview, “Growing up, I had been told many, many times that I’m trying to be white. On the flip side, there were also individuals in my peer group who were very instrumental in encouraging me to be all that I can be and to do everything that I do with excellence.”

Alibaruho was born and raised in Illinois, in the United States of America. Dr. George Kwatsi Alibaruho (now deceased since 2016) was a Ugandan economist married to Dr. Gloria Alibaruho, a black American woman hailing from Macon, Georgia.

The two had been forced to flee the country in 1971, soon after General Idi Amin Dada became president of Uganda. Alibaruho was born one year later, in May 1972. Unfortunately, two years after he was born, his parents divorced. Fortunately, they both played a part in raising him, though he lived most of his childhood with just his mother.

Throughout his school, his parents would tell Alibaruho that being African-American was not something that should qualify him to be pitied. They pushed him to be disciplined and to work as hard as he needed to work to achieve what he wanted in life. By the time he was about 10, Alibaruho knew he wanted a career in space engineering.

“I caught the ‘science bug’ very early from watching science fiction programmes, and I wanted to learn about real science,” Alibaruho is quoted in the NASA article. He would use every chance he got to sign up for extracurricular activities on weekends and summers that were designed to inspire him further in his endeavors to get deeper in science and engineering.

“My mother always bought me elementary science books after realizing my passion for space and science fiction programmes. She grounded me and taught me never to expect less in life. I knew I had to have the willingness to work, especially given the value my parents attached to a good quality education. They really invested in my education,” he told Daily Monitor is 2011.

Flight directors like Alibaruho are very high profile individuals in America’s space program, only second to astronauts. They have the overall responsibility to manage and carry out space shuttle flights. As flight director, Alibaruho led a team of flight controllers, support personnel and engineering experts on several missions to the International Space Station expeditions were his forte.

When Space shuttle Antlantis embarked on it’s 33rd and final flight to space on July 8, 2011, Alibaruho was the flight director. It would his be last job at NASA. In the days that followed the final flight of this historic space shuttle, Alibaruho told Rice University’s news agency, “The thing I love the most about human spaceflight is the thing I’ve just finished doing — that is, leading a team of engineers in this war with gravity. For me, that’s the exciting part.”

Alibaruho would join United Technologies Corporation (UTC) in July 2012, where he worked as director of enterprise until 2015. UTC is an aerospace company and one of the world’s largest suppliers of aerospace and defense products, headquartered in West Palm Beach, Florida.

Today, Alibaruho works at Eaton Aerospace Group as vice president of Programme Management. Uday Yadav, president, Aerospace Group said this of Alibaruho. “Kwatsi’s experience in leading complex programmes, building teams and delivering results, along with his effective leadership style, position him very well for this important role,” said Yadav. “He will continue driving excellence in program management as we further expand Eaton’s capabilities across the Aerospace Group.”