Silver Snoopy Awards Presented to Kasperitis, Moore, Shelton, and Smith

Teledyne Brown recently hosted a ceremony in the Blue Bat Cafe honoring the latest recipients of the NASA Silver Snoopy awards.  Twenty-three people, including Teledyne Brown employees Kevin Kasperitis, Raymond Moore, Mark Shelton, and Jeff Smith, were presented the coveted Silver Snoopy awards by NASA astronauts Robert Behnken, Nicholas Patrick, Terry Virts, and George Zamka.

TBE President Rex Geveden opened the ceremony by welcoming all the attendees; he then turned the presentation of awards over to Robert Lightfoot, Acting Director of Marshall Space Flight Center.  The awards ceremony was followed by a reception and refreshments.

Kasperitis, who joined TBE in 1999, has worked various positions on the International Space Station (ISS) program, including real-time operations work as an ISS Payload Operations Integration Center (POIC) Timeline Change Officer.  This position was eventually merged with the Operations Controller (OC) position, and Kasperitis was one of the first controllers certified in the newly defined OC position.  Later selected to fill the OC Sub-team Lead position, he most recently was instrumental in the effective real-time planning for the NASA Payloads manifested on Increments 13 through 18.  Kasperitis has been recognized for his work ethic, outstanding training ability, leadership, and technical and interpersonal skills.  The Payload Developer community, the NASA Flight Control Team, and the International Partner Community have also commended his outstanding work.

Moore has 27 years of engineering experience in the aerospace industry, including extensive work in the areas of safety, validation/verification, stress and dynamic analysis, conceptual design, and data analyses.  In his current job as a POIC safety engineer supporting ISS, Moore has provided exceptional ISS pre-increment preparation and real-time safety support.  As a certified Safety Team member, he provides valuable information for Safety Data Pack Reviews, payload hazard matrix development, and on-call safety support.  In addition to his regular safety duties, Moore volunteered to serve as the SDOS contract POI representative for industrial safety.  He is considered by many to be one of the few individuals who has a complete grasp of the ISS safety process, thus his peers, payload developers, management, and the NASA customer look to him for expert advice on safety issues.

An employee of TBE since 1984 with almost 25 years of experience in the design, development, and integration of space flight hardware and software, Shelton currently works as the lead software engineer for the Microgravity Science Glovebox (MSG) project.  During his tenure as lead software engineer for MSG, the facility has accumulated over 5,000 hours of operational time and completed science activities with more than 17 experiments.  Shelton, who is known for his professionalism and calm nature, resolves many potentially frustrating situations by providing extensive software knowledge to investigate and solve problems.  He also provides insight and support to ISS payload developers and, in many cases, helps write experiment software code.  Shelton is considered a team player who always emphasizes the efforts of his co-workers on the MSG team over his own work.

Smith, who has over 20 years of experience in the design, development, and integration of space flight hardware, is an integration engineer for the MSG project.  He coordinates and assesses a wide variety of test data, analyses, and documentation in order to prepare payloads for launch and operation on the ISS.  Smith’s outstanding accomplishments include his support of five MSG payloads last year that were launched to the ISS, integrated into the MSG facility, and operated on-orbit.  These payloads accumulated over 1,500 hours of operational time and completed a massive amount of scientific study.  Smith also maintains an excellent working relationship with the Payload Engineering and Integration (PE&I) organization at Johnson Space Center.  His knowledge of verification and the PE&I process has proven invaluable to the success of MSG investigations.

Each recipient was presented a pin depicting Snoopy as an astronaut that has been flown on a previous space shuttle mission.  They also received a framed certificate and a congratulatory letter personally signed by an astronaut.

The Silver Snoopy award is the astronauts’ personal award given to individuals for exemplary work and outstanding effort contributing to the success of manned spaceflight missions.  The award reflects NASA’s and the industry’s sense of responsibility and continuing concern for astronaut flight safety.  Less then one percent of the space program work force receives the award annually.