New NASA mentor program links Boeing, Southern University

 NASA has signed its newest mentor-protégé agreement. The latest arrangement is between Boeing and Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Under the 18-month program, the historically black university will get new expertise on how to win federal contracts. And Boeing will get a pipeline of engineering students to help fill jobs at the nearby Michoud Assembly Facility, where it’s helping to build NASA’s new Space Launch System. For more on how the partnership will work, Federal Drive with Tom Temin talked with Samuel Washington. He’s the director of Southern University’s Office of Governmental Contracting Services.

Samuel Washington: This agreement does a lot of things for the university. First of all, it provides training and business development for Southern as a how to become a computer engineer. And this training and business development done based on what they call a need assessment, which means that Boeing and Southern actually agreed on some of the things that the large corporations can provide to the university. This agreement also provides enhanced capacity for contracting opportunities, which is the main thrust of all of this. A lot of HBCUs, a lot of schools, they are acquainted with grants, but they’re not acquainted with contracts. They are large opportunities out there for schools being able to efficiently do contracts, and contract work. And we’ve done that for some time. This agreement actually helps us to enhance our capabilities, to make us more efficient. And the training, we have milestones over an 18 month period in which we will participate in the training. And all of this provides opportunities for our faculty, our staff, and students.

Jared Serbu: Yeah. And to that last point, you’ll correct me if I’m wrong on this, but the agreement is only for 18 months. But I think the relationship probably extends well beyond that, because I think the entire point is to help Southern University get a better understanding of how to build those business relationships and earn subcontracts through Boeing and probably other aerospace companies. Is that fair?

Samuel Washington: That is correct. It could go longer than that, because — let me kind of roll back a little bit — we’re actually supporting the Space Launch System inNew Orleans at the Michoud Assembly Facility. And Boeing supports Artemis, the Artemis program. And that’s the program that will allow our astronauts to go to the moon, and we are part of that partnering endeavor to do just that.