Growing up, Lauer spent many cold winter nights in the basement of his home in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, photographing the iconic space hardware from Hollywood space movies. “That’s really what got me into it,” he says.
Fast forward to today, and he is managing the production of RS-25 main engines for NASA’s heavy-lift SLS (Space Launch System), which will return American astronauts to the Moon as part of the agency’s Artemis mission. will send When the scale and complexity of the undertaking seems daunting, Lauer thinks back to earlier in his career, when he designed hardware for the International Space Station, now in its third decade in orbit.
“It just seemed to me that there was no way it was going to work, but we just kept building and solving problems and the next thing you know, we’re launching parts to the space station,” Lauer says. ” says Lauer. “The experience of seeing a program that seemed so big, so complex, and it worked, gives me great hope and confidence that we can do it again with Artemis.”
Lauer has family ties to space. Her father, Don Lauer, ran the U.S. Geological Survey’s Earth Resources Observation and Science Center in Sioux Falls, a repository for data collected by NASA’s long-running Landsat series of land imaging satellites. Lauer’s father even spent time at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, home of the agency’s human spaceflight program, exploring the role of astronauts in observing Earth from space.
But it was the artist’s fascination with imaginary hardware –– that ultimately led Mike Lauer to earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees in aeronautical and astronautical engineering from Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. “With engineering in general, there’s a relationship with art,” says Lauer. “We create things that have an artistic aesthetic to them, which is really cool.”
Cool is a word Lauer, a licensed pilot, deploys frequently in describing his career journey, understandably so. For example, he once participated in a space station assembly rehearsal with veteran astronaut Jerry Ross at Johnson’s Neutral Buoyancy Facility, a large pool that helps astronauts train for spacewalks. . “I’m in this spacesuit and Jerry Ross is in this spacesuit and we’re plugging in elements of the space station,” says Lauer, almost in disbelief. “Oh my God!”
While serving as Aerojet Rocketdyne’s lead engineer on the multi-mission radioisotope thermoelectric generator program, Lauer visited the U.S. Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory to observe the loading of plutonium-238 nuclear fuel into the device, which Powers NASA’s Curio Cortex. A rover on the surface of Mars. “Super cool,” he says.
For his next move, Lauer thought that, being at Aerojet Rocketdyne (now L3Harris), builder of the engines on NASA’s legendary Saturn V moon rocket, he should go business. It started with the J-2X, a modified version of the Saturn V second-stage engine that NASA had at one point planned to use on the SLS. Working from 1960s-era drawings, Lauer and his team created a modern, easy-to-produce design with more power that underwent hot-fire tests before replacing it in favor of a different upper-stage design. It was a successful series.
Now, as the RS-25 program director, Lauer works on another engine, this one originally designed for NASA’s now-retired space shuttle, critical to meeting new requirements and reducing production costs. Components have to be updated and redesigned. SLS flew its first mission without a crew, but future flights will carry astronauts, which gives Lauer a great sense of pride and responsibility.
“I’m amazed and inspired by what we’re doing,” he says. “Really cool.”
It’s also really cool: Lauer works as a volunteer pilot for the Civil Air Patrol, assisting the U.S. Air Force on search and rescue, disaster relief, and fire damage assessment missions. This keeps him busy on many weekends when he is not refereeing youth soccer.
In addition, Lauer is most looking forward to the day when four NASA astronauts board their recovery craft safely at the successful conclusion of the first human moon landing in more than five decades.