Secaucus High Grad Is NASA Flight Director, Working On Mars Mission

SECAUCUS, NJ — It was actually at the Secaucus Public Library that Ronak Dave found his first book about American space missions, "Flight: My Life in Mission Control," by Christopher Kraft.

At the time, Dave was a Secaucus High School teenager, participating in the marching band and "not that great" at Patriots soccer. He was raised in town, having gone to Clarendon Elementary School and then Secaucus middle and high school.

"I always gravitated towards science and engineering in school; those topics always made sense to me," said Dave, now 31. "I was able to see problems and visualize how to solve them."

As a young boy and teen, it was his dream to one day work for NASA.

"But I wasn't sure how to get there," he said. "I was just looking to read anything I could about space and trying to understand space. But after stumbling on that book, I knew then that what I really wanted to do was human space flight operations, and support them from the ground, just like he did."

Kraft is considered one of the founding fathers of the U.S. space program: In the 1960s he commanded mission control from the U.S. Space Center in Houston, guiding American heroes like Alan Shepard and John Glenn on their world-changing walks on the moon.

Dave graduated from Secaucus High School in 2009 (he was actually in one of their inaugural classes of Science Academy) and went to Purdue University; he specifically chose Purdue because of their strong relationship with NASA. (Neil Armstrong graduated from Purdue.)

After his sophomore year in college, he applied and was accepted into NASA's Pathways Intern Program in 2011. Upon earning his college degree in astronautical engineering in 2014, he was hired full time by NASA.

Today, Dave is working at the Johnson Space Center as an on-the-ground flight director. He is part of a team at NASA working to send humans back to the moon and eventually send astronauts to Mars.

"Right now, we are getting ready to fly Artemis 1, which will go to the moon before the end of this year," said Dave.

Artemis 1 will be unstaffed, but after that, NASA will send a second shuttle, Artemis 2, to circle the moon a few times with astronauts on board. And then sometime in the next few years, NASA plans to send out Artemis 3, which will land astronauts on the moon, something that the U.S. has not accomplished since 1972. Read more about the Artemis missions here: https://www.nasa.gov/specials/...

The Artemis 1 mission will hopefully take off this summer, confirmed a NASA spokeswoman. With the Artemis missions, NASA plans to land the first woman and first person of color on the moon, and explore more of the lunar surface than ever before.

"Our ultimate goal right now is sending human astronauts to land on Mars," said Dave. "Getting to Mars and safely bringing astronauts home is something on the order of taking months and years to do in space, so what we're trying to do right now is build the building blocks to accomplish that."

At NASA, he's also helped monitor the International Space Station, logged more than 1,000 hours in mission control and helped deliver restocking supplies to SpaceX. (No, he's never met Elon Musk.)

So, would he himself ever like to go into space?

Dave laughed.

"It's definitely not the highest on my list of life goals to accomplish. But it would be interesting for sure. Living in space is hard; we've seen our astronauts do it and they go through a tremendous amount of training to do that," he said. "But it is something I would think about strongly if offered the opportunity."

Still, even being hundreds of miles away from the astronauts, on the ground in Houston, Dave said: "We are all one team. The astronauts, us in the control center: We are all one team and it is our job to make sure our team members stay safe while we execute the mission."

Working at NASA, Dave has gotten to meet a lot of fascinating people, including Kraft, who he "got to meet once for five minutes" before Kraft died at the age of 95.

But it is actually his mother, Darshana Dave, who he credits as being one of his best role models in life. Darshana still lives in town.

"I definitely credit my mother with making me who I am today. She taught me to value hard work, but also to be humble," said the young man. "She taught me to put my nose to the grindstone and do the work that needs to done and not look for recognition. It's something she taught me that I actually think about quite often."