Hello and welcome to EPR with your favorite environmental nerds, Nic and Laura. On today's episode, Nic and I talk about our interviewee’s inspiring career path. We interview her, Irene Jorden Romero, about rockets, environmental compliance at NASA, and space mission planning.

And finally, in the interview, Irene mentioned the upcoming Nancy Roman telescope, or just Roman for short. So here's some fun facts about it. Roman will be NASA's next major space telescope after James Webb, designed to answer big questions about dark matter, dark energy, and the structure of the universe. Sam will be watching and waiting.

The telescope will have a field view of about 200 times larger than the Hubble's, allowing it to capture huge panoramic images while keeping the same level of detail. Scientists expect the mission to collect more data than any previous NASA space telescope, enabling large statistical studies of galaxies and cosmic structures. It's planned to launch sometime in 2027, so look forward to it. It's going to be super cool, according to Sam and me. Hit that music!

This year, NAEP is hosting their annual conference and training symposium in Anchorage, Alaska from Monday, May 11th through Thursday, May 14th. The conference is a great opportunity to learn about new projects, share technical knowledge, network with other industry professionals, and engage with environmental leaders.

Not a member yet? Join NAEP with special discount code EPR for $25 off your membership. Register now at www.NAEP.org. Let's get to our segment.

Yeah, I mean, I love that her career is, you know, another example of like, this isn't what I thought I was going to do when I started, but more so, I love that she was just open to anything and that led her to exactly what she kind of wanted. And she was not afraid to say it.

And I think that's the other thing I think is really, really a valuable lesson for people. It's like she got a job and she's like, hey, I want to work for you. It took her 18 months. It was not immediate, it wasn't instant, but that's like she had a plan. And she executed that plan. It took time, but she did that and didn't just like she said it, you know, we talked about hustle a few times on the show and like I think her career path is an absolute testament to that.

You can get to where you want to be if you hustle and hustle doesn't mean bowling people over left and right. It means, you know, being an advocate for yourself, being tenacious when you need to be, and I think that's kind of the joy of looking back on a career like that. You can say, I did, I did it right, or I did it the way that it worked for me.

Right. At the same time, she mentioned, I think 3 people that retired in her path. So, no matter what, and I have to bring this up because for career seekers who feel like I'm just stuck, no doors are opening, they don't open like that for everyone, you know, but you still have to follow the same principles of work hard, do your best, stand out, and then when the door does open, you will be able to walk through it.

Yeah, and, you know, for, I mean, the doors were all there at NASA, but for someone else that the doors may be in different places with different companies or different organizations, but you get a foot in the door and there are a lot of other doors once you get in the house, you know, it's kind of like where we are, and I think that's, it's great, that's great to do.

Yeah, I think especially at places like the Nature Conservancy or NASA because they're so big, you're probably not gonna expect that in a small consultancy or something like that where there's less likely to have that many positions jockeying around, you know, so, but you have to recognize that if you want to stay and kind of wait it out or if you see that there isn't a place for me, then find somewhere that there might be and open that door yourself.

Yes, exactly. Even large companies can have that problem, you know, I think there's because they're so large that you, it's hard to stand out because everyone's trying to stand out and are they, are they? Well, no, not everyone, not everyone, that is fair. That is absolutely fair, but be one of the ones who is, and I think you will find that that's fair. People will notice.

Yeah, it's interesting. Every company has a different dynamic to it. Even larger companies, you would say, maybe they're all the same, they are different, but, you know, it is kind of fun. The consulting world is, you know, it still works pretty much the same way. It's just how it's organized is a little different and that part's pretty fun. It's kind of neat to see early career versus late career for me, just how different those that experience is.

But yeah, as you say, there's lots of different paths, but you have to be an advocate for yourself. I think that's the thing that I liked about Irene's career.

Yeah, well, and I think that I've noticed from the people that I've met who do work for NASA, they're very much willing to work with people that they have met and liked. Yeah. So it may feel like a place that's really difficult to get into or whatever, but like, network around the people in that space, if that's somewhere you want to get into, it probably applies to any, but I've seen it kind of firsthand, like with someone working for NASA who's like, just send someone to me, you know, send me a referral, and I was actually kind of surprised to hear that because I would think of it more as like, government where they say don't send me referrals.

I can't pull favors and I can't do this and that, you know, and it's a large organization, obviously, so it may be different in different areas of it, but I was still kind of like, oh, that's pretty cool, that's awesome.

Yeah, Irene's a great, great connection point. She knows a lot of different people in a lot of different places just because of how her career has gone, and yeah, and sometimes it's just finding the right person to help you navigate your way through either at your company or at a different one.

That's true, and I guess we can just shout out Ben Poulter, who was on before he's the person I talked about. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you're looking for another NASA episode to listen to, that would be the one.

Yeah, well, I mean, that was pretty good. Let's wrap that up and get to our interview.

Sounds good.

Welcome back to EPR. Today we are joined by Irene Jordan Romero, NASA Goddard's NEPA manager and cultural resource manager. Welcome, Irene.

Hi, welcome. Thanks, Laura and Nic.

Yeah. Have you here. And so, you know, NASA, everyone wants to learn about NASA and what it's like to work on these projects. So we're excited to talk to you today. And you have a very exciting career path that's taken you from architecture and engineering to sustainable architecture, construction, and then eventually to NEPA work at NASA. How did that happen?

Right? Some days I'm not sure.

So I'll be at NASA for 14 years, and but in the last like 20 years, it's been just an interesting winding path to get here. And I studied architecture in college and engineering at Catholic University in DC and would do my summer internships at like architecture firms. I worked for a master carpenter one summer, you know, just like a little dabble here, dabble there as one does, and I was graduating right with the last like building crisis, housing crisis, architecture was like not the place to go, so I entered the workforce instead of grad school.

I worked for a sustainable architecture firm up in Baltimore. We got to do everything from like a lot of LEED consultation projects, which was really, really cool. I'm working in the world of sustainability. We also did like 87 HUD homes in like the row homes in Baltimore in partnership with Habitat for Humanity. So some of them were sweat equity. So that was really fun community engagement, very fast paced.

And then from there I got into construction project management. One of my friends from college was like, Hey, Irene, you'd love this job. I'll bring you back to DC. I had gotten married. My husband at the time was working at NASA, so now you see part of the origin story, right? And so I came to DC and did construction project management, and we did a lot of historic high-end residents in the DC area. So you're talking about like $500,000 dollar, a million dollar reno jobs on these historic properties.

Also did a HUD conversion project in Southeast DC where we took like an old school and turned it into apartments, and that was a sweat equity format as well where we got to train up some of the folks that had lived in Section 8 housing their whole life and wanted to learn how to be a foreman or what have you and build those skills. So that was a cool project.

But also, I had some historical architecture that we did in Baltimore, but then the construction project management job in DC and pretty much every single one of my projects dealt with the different housing areas and the historic boards, and one of them was a landmark home and things like that. So it gave me a peek behind that curtain as well.

And then construction's just like not lovely sometimes for women in the workforce, and I had a volatile boss who would bring his emotions to work every morning at 6 a.m., all of his emotions, like pick up a conference chair and throw it across the conference room table. It just didn't feel like the place I wanted to be and my husband and I were starting a family and he had worked at NASA at this point for like, I don't know, 3 or 4 years, and he's like, it's great. Everybody loves their job. We do the coolest stuff like he was working on Hubble and I don't want to hear that. That's so jealous.

Yeah, so as part of like the reservicing missions and yeah, he'd come home and after a blissful 8 hour workday and kick off his shoes and be like, I had a great day at work and meanwhile, I'm still on the phone after having been in office for like 12 hours. So, um, I was ready for a change.

So I got into NASA as like a temp contractor doing space, but not like outer space, space, space. A really big part of federal actions have to do with utilization of their space. And you have these buildings, the taxpayers are paying for these buildings. You want every square foot utilized, right? And so part of the production of that was ensuring that we were using the space, right? And people weren't space hoarding or there was space that could be used for a project that they might have been out of sight, out of mind.

There's over 3 million square feet of space at NASA Goddard, which is where I started in Greenbelt, Maryland. And so it was a really, a really great way to kick off what is now a career at Goddard because I saw every nook and cranny of that center, like where the bodies are buried, right, or hidden in the closets.

From that temp job, I got picked up on that contract. Many of your listeners are probably part of the contract life, and I had 7 different positions in 4 years. So I kept getting promoted. Yay, go team.

So I went over into IT doing support work for the IT department, helping interpret plans, designs, our utilization there, space planning, master planning for them, and then was a resource analyst, which is the money person for like a year and a half, which was actually really great when you talk about having a career. You understand how contracts are written and funded, how the funding cycle works. So that was a great tool in the toolbox moving forward.

I bounced back over to facilities, which again, my background's in architecture and engineering, so it was good to be in a space where I really knew the vocab and ran our backfill and outfitting program for a couple of years, which is moving everybody around the center, closing out construction projects, and just making sure that all the cats are herded, right, and the customers are happy when they move in.

And then I got the job that I wanted when I stepped foot at Goddard. I wanted to be a facilities planner. I had met, his name's Braulio Ramon. He's since retired. When I had first started as a temp, I said, I'm going to work for you. Like that's the job I want. I'm going to work for you. I'd been there for like 2 weeks and it took me like 4.5 years, but I got there and I started as a contractor and then a year later I converted over to the civil servant, so I'm a federal employee.

And we just had a really good time. There is always a problem to solve in facilities, a lab to design, a new mission coming on board, other missions transitioning off. We were in, we had hit our master planning cycle, so we were developing the master plan.

And within my first couple of years there, Alan Binstock, who is now a glass artist who makes these amazing public installations and lives on like a yoga commune in Virginia, he retired and so he was the previous cultural resource manager and so now he's living his best artist life.

And then I was able to take on the cultural resource program, which really fed into a lot of interest that I had with the historic architecture, the history of Goddard, and what's really cool—so now we're going to start to dabble in the world that your listeners understand more of—is NEPA, right? Section 106 and NEPA walk hand in hand.

So I took over our cultural resource program and then I got to work with our, at the time, NEPA program manager because we did a lot of programs like hand in hand and her name was Beth Montgomery and she's also since retired because now I have her job. Spoiler alert.

So I did cultural resources as a facilities planner for about 4 years and then the opportunity when Beth was retiring came to instead of straddling the environmental and facilities world is to be fully vested in the environmental side of the house and do NEPA and cultural resources. So I still got to take my beloved cultural resources and historic architecture with me, but I ended up over doing NEPA work.

Having done a variety of projects side by side as the cultural resource lead, and then Beth was the NEPA lead, but really seeing behind the curtain how the process worked and Beth just had a lot of faith in me to be able to tackle NEPA, right? From a project management perspective and cat herding, bringing the right subject matter experts to the table, keeping people aligned to move forward, which are all just really valuable tasks when you're trying to get a project to the finish line through this process.

But yeah, so that is how I ended up being a NEPA program manager after starting in architecture. Yes, a perfectly straight line.

I think though, for a lot of people listening, especially when they're first starting or trying to, so I think it's a really great example of getting your foot in the door, what it really looks like. So, how does—before we move on some more about what you're doing right now—how did it feel at the time, or what were some of the key characteristics or something that you have that allowed you to kind of bounce into these different roles?

And sort of have the patience to kind of see it through to like, I'm gonna work with you one day and then 4 years later, you know, because I think a lot of people think about like getting their foot in the door feels like I'm going to be locked into this first position forever.

Yeah, I think that one of my professors in college in architecture had said that this degree will make you a problem solver and that you can take that skill and apply it to any job. So I really took that to heart moving forward—is I can help develop solutions. I can help bring people to the table to develop solutions, and that just allows like a really broad career bandwidth. So I already went into the workforce trying not to limit myself.

And then, when I was a contractor, so the temp project was 12 weeks. Like we had a 12-week deliverable, and then I was not guaranteed a job after that. Yay. So who doesn't like job security? And I had a kid at home at the time.

I was a hustler, man. I've had a job since I was 9 years old. So delivering newspapers to babysitting to refereeing. And I've always had more than one, never just one at a time. And I think that's part of being open to opportunity.

So when I came on doing the space studies at NASA and I knew I had like a 12-week timeline to impress upon the people that I was doing the project for, to be able to compete for the next job, right? Because these large contracts, they have a variety of like fingers in many pots, right? So they might say, hey, I've got a job for you, and you might be like, oh, that's not really what I thought I was going to be doing when I grew up, but guess what, you're not a grown-up yet. You just got to explore.

You got to be open for opportunity. Like, are we actually grown-ups yet?

Brilliant. Yeah, you're totally right. You're not grown up yet.

Yeah. So you shouldn't get in this mentality of feeling stuck. You should get in a mentality of evolution.

And so when I first went over to work in the IT department as like a customer service representative in a lot of ways and as the IT department as the customer, and I would go and do anything related to facilities and make sure that I came back and put it in layman's terms for upper management to make approvals. And I had done that for about a year when the RA was leaving, resource analyst was leaving the department that controlled a big pot of like management ops money for the IT department.

And my boss at the time was like, well, I think you'd be really good at that, Irene. And I was like, oh, I really don't know if I want to do spreadsheets and budgets. And the contractor lead—they're called like IPOs—but the team lead on the contract side was like, we want to make our customer happy and our customer really wants you in this position. I was like, Cool, cool, cool, sell it to me, right?

And they did. And I mentioned this earlier in my little story time, was that understanding the fiscal process in the government environment can be very convoluted, but when you have to sit in it and work through it for a whole cycle, plus, then you understand how the funding works. You understand how the budgets are made, right? You understand that part of the team a little bit better.

So, and he did. He called it, it's another tool in your toolbox, Irene. Try to do it for like a year or two before you leave. And I did. I did it for 18 months and then I moved on to the next opportunity. But it is very interesting. Like, even now in my career, I was in a meeting this past week where questions came up about, well, where do expiring funds have to be and does it have to be committed, or costed by then or what kind of money it is? And these all might sound very foreign to you and they sound foreign to even most people in the government if they're not working with it.

But I was like, oh, I got that. I can answer that question for y'all. So because you kind of took a left and then a right and then a lateral and you moved up and it's not always forward motion that takes you forward, right?

Yeah, that's like, yeah, exactly right, and I have to brag about you a little bit because I would say that you have your hand—I guess finger—on the pulse of what's going on. You have a really good understanding of how things work and it's great to see like that doesn't happen in a vacuum. You didn't just wake up one day and you're like, oh, I know how NASA works, you know what I mean? It took time and yeah.

Guests we've had though that another tactic to getting your foot in the door is to marry someone who already works there. Step one, yeah, that was definitely step one. When Anthony and I started dating, he was like waiting for his security clearance to pass at NASA. So, yeah, and he worked there for 11 years.

Yeah, well, I mean, OK, so let's talk a little bit about what you do now and how that works because I think a lot of times people look at NASA and they're like, OK, rockets. Satellites, that's it. What do you mean you do environmental review at all anyway? You just shoot a rocket into space, who cares about, you're not even in the environment, you know, and so what is your actual job entail and why is it so all encompassing?

Well, funny, let me touch on rockets into space first because NASA, we just published a year ago, but in federal time, that's nothing. But yeah. A whole new packet of categorical exclusions and one of them being non-nuclear payloads. So any payload—sorry, you're nodding yes, but who knows.

So a payload could be a satellite, could be a cubesat, could be a rover going to Mars, but it's the load that we're putting on a launch vehicle to shoot in outer space. So as long as it's non-nuclear, we've categorically excluded it because NASA, with such expertise and history of doing these successfully and safely without impacting the environment, we can now just categorically exclude them.

So am I still reviewing them? Absolutely. Is my review process substantially simplified over the last year for those? Also, yes, yes, yes. Also yes.

So interestingly, NASA is in a bit of a reinvention right now. We've moved to using commercial launch vehicles, so we are not the ones launching most of these, like these big launch vehicles out of Cape Canaveral with a variety of payloads and customers that aren't even NASA. So there might be 21 different like mini missions going up on one of those honking rockets and 3 of them might be NASA.

So it's interesting and that's very much in the FAA's court, Federal Aviation Administration.

That's good. That's good.

Yeah, and we do have some smaller rockets like sounding rockets we launch out of Wallops Island, which is a barrier island off of Virginia that is a NASA-owned launch site. They're much smaller than the size of the rockets we're launching out of Florida.

Well, yeah, and how do you, you know, we're talking about Goddard and Wallops and Cape Canaveral. How do all of these different installations work together, or do they all do different things? Is, you know, say Wallops launches smaller rockets. Is that primarily what it's used for?

Yeah, they do a lot of sounding rockets like the smaller rockets. They'll be for smaller rocket, less payload, right? So it might have a singular or just 2 or 3 payloads on it compared to like 20+ on some of these larger ones coming out of Cape Canaveral. And like International Space Station restock missions, we can hit the correct orbit to rendezvous and send supplies up to the ISS off of these Antares rockets off of Wallops.

And Cape Canaveral—so commercial launches, which is everything happening out of the Cape—something off like a Blue Origin or a SpaceX rocket. We're buying a ticket on the bus and we buy that ticket. Our payload gets to board the bus. We have a matchmaking service out of Kennedy, which is a NASA-owned site. They match payloads with rockets and that whole career is very interesting, that marrying of business and the needs out of the federal government.

And yeah, I mean, so yes, NASA does rockets and space exploration. Our big one is Artemis—getting to the moon again successfully very soon. And so you'll see a lot of that on the news. That's largely again, hosted out of Kennedy as far as launches, but we are doing a lot of the research and methodology and habitable worlds at Goddard Greenbelt where I sit.

We've developed 30+ years ago, Hubble, and then from there, James Webb Space Telescope. So Hubble got us seeing out into space. James Webb got us high definition space capture, and then certainly they're finishing up Roman and Roman is going to be like your wide angle lens, but also in a pretty high definition capture.

So you're going to be going from a field of vision that Hubble began and JWST put in better definition and just really getting a much bigger view of the universe. It's going to be very exciting to get some of those first images back when that launches in another year and a half.

Yeah, we have a lot of day to day work that gets categorically excluded, like administrative type work, science study type work that we've done again, a lot of. We also dabble in balloons to do like weather and we do small airplanes. They'll develop different systems that they're going to put on the airplane that's going to study whether or not it's reflectivity of the surface because they want to see where glaciers are melting.

We did a project down in the Everglades where the flyovers were capturing carbon monoxide outputs to understand where the Everglades were dying and where reforestation needs would be best targeted. That was our Blue Flux project.

We've done some sample returns. The one was OSIRIS-REx crash-landed in Utah a year and a half ago and had samples that we were able to take off of a moving asteroid and bring back to Earth to study. That was one that my predecessor had done the environmental assessment on.

And then its next sort of iteration was Mars sample return, which is currently on pause for funding it to completion, but we did complete the EIS. So that would be returning the samples from Mars rover, rendezvousing somewhere in space to get them and then again gently, gently landing them in Utah.

But poor Utah, what did they do? Is it just an open space?

Yeah, they have like one of the lowest probability ranges within an ellipse of any impacts, right? So because you're talking about like out near UTTR, like the Utah Test and Training Range, where you're by like the salt flats, it's not very inhabited, it's deserty.

Yeah, well, it's it's interesting. I remember doing a—yes, and you know, this is nerd talk, I'm warning you all now—but for a rocket spaceport in Denver. And one of the things that I learned is like if you're talking about noise with a rocket, it pulses, which I didn't really know, right? Kind of like balloons out and the clouds in the sky impact how far that sound travels, which is also something that I just never thought of.

So it's like you have to launch on clear days. I mean like there have to be—how do you do NEPA on something that you know is so unique? It's like you have these very specific situations that no other agency has that's got to be kind of a challenge. I mean, is it still mostly the same or do you have to deal with putting on your creativity hat and being like, OK, what is the actual impact of this thing?

Yeah, so it's interesting because like I'm baby NEPA, right? I've been doing this for 4 years. And as much as every mission has a uniqueness in what the mission is, we've been launching rockets for 60 years. So we do have just a wealth of background information and understanding of what we want the modeling to look like when we're looking at noise or air or vibration.

And those impacts—not to say that our inputs are like they're not always the same because we are constantly changing the envelope of the size of the rockets. Right now we're working with like the cadence. We want to launch more frequently at Wallops and at the Cape and what are those impacts to species that we hadn't thought about before because they're getting hit with those noise variations more frequently.

As a singular occurrence, we can study what that looks like, but then what does it look like compounded when the cadence is increased? One of the interesting things they're looking at is how does it affect the mortar of the buildings when they're getting blasted at a more frequent cadence with larger rockets and are we going to have a deterioration factor from some of our buildings that are within a certain radius of the launch zones. So just how do we improve maintenance.

But like I said, that also affects like animals or animal habitats and it makes it, you're not so neighborly when you're launching all the time.

Yeah, yeah. Well, it's, you know, it's funny actually, it's that study. I was reading a study on rocket flight from NASA, so I was learning about all this stuff for that project I was talking about and it was, um, they put in a deflector shield which reduces the decibels from 210 to 190. And then they had a note that said basically, yes, it's a reduction in decibels and that's great, but if you were able to survive the heat, it would still shake you to death and you're like, was that necessary? Do we have to put that?

But yeah, so yeah, you guys are allowed.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think that was one of the most like things that stuck with me when I read our full like Mars sample return EIS. Was the probability of death within the ellipse if we had like a failure and it was like exponentially insignificant, but somebody had to calculate that.

Yeah, exactly. How likely was this to come down into Earth's atmosphere and hit somebody when it's landing.

So I mean you also have to deal with like Wallops is a good example of like, it's a shoreline issue, right? So we have, you know, changing shorelines, affected climate changes and like, do you have to kind of think a few steps ahead on shoreline resiliency more than any other place would be, or is it just something that's part of the challenges you guys typically face in general?

Yeah, I mean, at this point it's typical. My counterpart at NASA Goddard is Sherry Miller. She does the lead NEPA out of Wallops, but we have so much going on at Wallops that I also assist on many of those projects, including our shoreline protection program and we are on our 4th iteration of like a tiered shoreline protection funded every 5 to 7 years, which could be bringing in sand to replenish the beach, so like beach renourishment.

Our last iteration, we put in breakwaters, like these giant stone mattresses to create like walls that will help take on—it both takes on the impacts of the waves to reduce the wave impact against the shoreline, as well as it starts to create some shoreline backfill naturally because of the fluid, like the ocean fluid dynamics and how it moves the sand.

And talk about getting nerdy—we do a shoreline resiliency study. We have studies going on right now and we had our annual presentation back in January and studying the geomorphology of the ocean floor is called like bathymetry and it's so cool about how you have your rock formation and then obviously like your sand is a layer of that and then how it moves within both like the way that the ocean moves and the wind moves.

And then you have these major weather events like hurricanes or tropical storms that also impact it. And then what do winter storms look like and what is the ebb and flow of the ocean floor look like and how that also impacts what your shoreline looks like.

So we were moving forward with putting in some more breakwaters. They worked really well. It's actually creating more habitat for some of these endangered species, which is lovely, as well as doing like beach renourishment, which we go out and dredge sand off the coast and import it and then dump it on our beach, and then eventually it kind of drifts back out to sea.

We're trying to prevent that as much as possible. I mean, barrier islands are just a hard investment. We just know that that's the cost of doing business there, and it's the same in Florida where we have to do shoreline protection and renourishment along the coast as well because of just natural events of that constantly kind of changing what we're working with.

But overall, I think they do, we have really great administrative support on making sure that we're doing the NEPA process so that we can support the mission and protect the assets that are there, like the launch pads and buildings and infrastructure we have out on the island, but in tandem with the environmental concerns. Which are largely, we've got some cute little bird species out there like piping plovers.

Yeah, which are adorable, truly, they're so cute.

Yeah, their little legs, you know, just—

Although they really like tire tracks and—I mean they got to think smarter, man.

I know, I know. I mean they nest on the ground and they're kind of like, this is a fine nest, right? You're like, no, it's just on the sand and they're like, but it's good, right?

It's not even covered.

Yeah, yeah, plovers.

This is the part of the show where we ask our audience to share their field notes, their stories from fun, awkward, scary, different experiences they've had in the field, because this is sort of an area that connects all of us as environmental professionals. And whether that's in an office or in the field or whatever, so we ask listeners to please share your stories with us at info@environmentalprofessionalsradio.com.

And then Irene, do you have—I'm sure with the many years of experience you have and the cool jobs you've been working on—something to share?

Yeah, so I know you guys had poised this question to see, but my most memorable field experience is actually just adorable and like a plover, like a piping plover.

So I'd mentioned before that I got to work on the Mars sample return EIS. We were doing public meetings out in Utah and so the first night the public meeting was out in Wendover, Utah, which is not a highly populated area. It's about an hour and a half outside of Salt Lake City, like past the salt flats and on the west side of UTTR, the Utah Testing and Training Range, but it's like local to a lot of folks that work at UTTR.

So we wanted to make sure we were giving employees that work there and residents a chance to ask the questions and come out and talk to us. And what's so funny—on projects in 2026—we're like, do we really need, do people read newspapers anymore? Do they? If we put this, if we put like flyers in the library or just post this online, aren't people going to see it?

Well, this is why newspapers are important.

So we're having this public meeting and a couple of people trickle in and we're like, oh, this is going to be a low attendance Tuesday night kind of gig. OK, hoping to be able to talk to the public and improve our process, right? That's the purpose of public meetings and make sure that we're not have any holes.

And this mom walks in with these two girls that'd be like 9 years old, and they're making their way around from—we did like a poster board session in an auditorium—and so they're making their way around the poster boards of the auditorium and they get to myself and the other woman running our board about cultural resources. And they're asking us some questions and the little girl's like, you work at NASA? And I was like, I do work at NASA.

They're like, we were so excited when we read in the newspaper that NASA was going to be in our little town. So we had to come out and see what this was all about. And I was like, that is amazing.

And then I asked the girls a little bit about like what they're studying and what have you, but I also let them know, I said, hey, this is a public meeting. Like we're going to take comments by the microphone at the top of the hour, or you can write down a comment, and when you write down a comment, you put your name in there and then you go into the administrative record of the EIS. So then you'll be on the administrative record of a NASA EIS.

And the little girls are like, wow, that's really cool.

And then we had another like somebody come up, ask us some questions, and then I didn't see them in the room anymore and I was like, I guess they left, you know, like dinner time or whatever.

And then at the top of the hour when we're starting the microphones, they come back in and sit down in like the audience chairs and wait their turns and they go up to the microphone and they make a public comment. And each girl, you know, got to state her name and you know, a couple sentences that they had practiced and they both concluded theirs with “and rocks rock.”

It was just the cutest and then the mom came up after with the girls and was like, thank you so much for encouraging us to do that and I cried. It was so sweet. They'd gone into their car and wrote down what they were going to say and practiced it. That's why they had left the room.

That's adorable.

That's adorable. I love that.

It was super adorable.

That is, yeah, and again, it's, you know, it isn't a snake in the water that you didn't see story, but it's still memorable and something that you only get to experience through the work that you were doing.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, considering we got thousands of comments on that action are in person because—and that is something that is probably relatable for prep. If you're going to work on a project that feels like it might create some public tension, and you're like, how are these public meetings going to go? Am I going to have to deal with somebody that doesn't believe in science, so they just want to argue you to death that the whole purpose of your project is invalid, or are they antagonistic, like NIMBY, like not in my backyard. They don't want this happening.

And so that's some of the prep we had gotten for Utah. That being like a really just a great experience. Our second night we were actually at the Science Center in Salt Lake City, and that was super cool because it’s like the science center after dark. So we got to like bop around it before we opened it back up to the public for a public meeting.

But Salt Lake City's jazz basketball team had a game that night, so we were thinking, wow, look at all these cars coming in and parking at the garage next door. Like we are going to have a bunch of people. They're so excited. We're here. We're all pumped—negative. They're going to the basketball game.

Yeah, the dream was real for a moment, so that's great.

Yeah, you always hope that you have a crowd. I mean, that's what all the workup’s for, right?

Yeah, it's much more fun when there's more people.

Yeah, it's good.

We are close to the end. It's over our time. So is there anything else you want to talk about before we let you go?

No, I know I didn't touch on it all about Hawaii, Nic. I'm sorry.

No, no, that's OK. That's all good. That's great. It's just how we met. That's all.

Yeah, you know, yes, and we're still sloshing through that process, and I don't—yeah, yeah, but um, I mean, well, if people do want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

My LinkedIn is gonna be the best way professionally, and so I provided you all with the link. Will you be able to—

Yeah, yeah, we'll put it in our posts and stuff for you. So there you go.

Thank you so much, Irene, for being here. It's great to have you.

Yay, thanks.

That's our show. Thank you, Irene, for joining us today. Please be sure to check us out each and every Friday. Don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review.

Bye.

See you, everybody.