By Gina Hannah
Andy Schorr’s childhood encounters with the idea of space travel were awe-inspiring, if not intimidating. A Sounds of the Space Age record tucked inside the pages of his father’s December 1969 National Geographic magazine. Spying the Moon rock on display at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama during a family vacation in the 1970s.
“Even though the rock was encased in this thick glass display, I didn’t want to go near the thing because it scared me,” Schorr says. “It was like…. ‘That’s from another world.’”
That fascination with space, plus a knack for math and science, helped Schorr launch a career that led him to where he is today, as the manager of the Spacecraft/Payload Integration and Evolution (SPIE) Office for the Space Launch System (SLS) Program. SLS is the most powerful rocket NASA has ever built and the backbone of the agency’s Artemis exploration effort.
Schorr and his team are charged with development and qualification of SLS’s in-space stage, launch vehicle adapters, and secondary payload interfaces on the initial SLS configuration, Block 1.
Getting ready for the Artemis I mission requires integration of components and systems in a way that Schorr likens to one of his longtime hobbies: cooking. It’s a passion he’s had since his high school days, when he was a two-time defending champion in the pie division of the Future Teachers of America baking contest. During the COVID-19 pandemic, time in the kitchen has become a way to unwind after a long day of work, he said.
“To me, it’s an opportunity to relax and decompress after a stressful day. It helps me think about process. There are a lot of similarities between what we do engineering-wise to build the hardware and the process control, and the sequence that you do in cooking.”
Schorr had the opportunity to share those similarities with celebrity Chef Alton Brown several years ago, when Brown brought his show to Huntsville and Schorr arranged to give him a tour of Marshall Space Flight Center.
“I think he enjoyed it, and he mentioned NASA during his show that night,” Schorr said. “I told him ‘What we do here is a lot like what you do in cooking. You want to make sure you’ve got your recipe, you’ve got all your ingredients chopped up or measured, so when you go to cook you’re just cooking and not focused on other tasks. We’ve got to make sure we’ve got our engineering right, we’ve got the equipment operational, and we’ve got the material.’”
Before joining NASA, Schorr worked for Martin Marietta (now Lockheed Martin) in Denver, supporting development of propellant ground support systems for the launch site at Vandenberg Air Force base, then becoming part of the Return to Flight efforts following the Space Shuttle Challenger accident.
That work led to an opportunity to join NASA at Marshall Space Flight Center in 1991, as a member of the Redesigned Solid Rocket Motor Chief Engineer’s Office. When the Constellation Program was initiated in 2005, Schorr was selected as lead for design and development of the shuttle-derived five-segment motor that is now part of the SLS design. He joined the SPIE office as assistant manager in 2013 and deputy manager in 2017. He became manager in July 2021.
In addition to the office’s Block 1 work, under Schorr’s leadership, the SPIE team is developing a universal stage adapter and payload adapter for SLS’s Block 1B configuration, which will provide more power and payload capacity for deep space missions. The Artemis missions will expand humanity’s presence beyond Earth, starting with a long-term lunar presence and enabling the next giant leap: sending humans to Mars.
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