Meet the School’s first alumnus to have ventured into space
Tim Kopra’s fascination with space can be traced back to the Apollo 11 mission of July 1969, which resulted in Neil Armstrong becoming the first man to walk on the lunar surface. “I was six years old and we had people landing on the Moon,” he says.
The educational journey
Unlike many others whose imaginations were fired by Armstrong’s feat, Kopra’s dream of becoming an astronaut never faded. He went on to graduate from West Point, and saw active service as a pilot in Iraq during Operation Desert Storm. After completing an MSc in aerospace engineering at Georgia Tech and graduating from US Navy Test Pilot School, he was assigned to the US Army Aviation Technical Test Center, as an experimental test pilot. But his big break came in September 1998, when he joined NASA, as a vehicle integration test engineer at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas and, within two years, he had been selected for the astronaut training programme.
On a Saturday morning, in early 2011, Tim had a cycling accident, which immediately ruled him out of taking part in the planned mission and brought him to London Business School.
“I’d been interested in going to business school for a very long time. I have a great job, and I’d like to keep it for the time period I’m scheduled to fly, but the School’s Global EMBA programme really appealed to me. I thought it would give me a chance to identify what other opportunities are out there for astronauts if I chose to do something different, and also to learn a skill-set that could be used both within and outside NASA.”
The leadership challenge
“Being commander of the space station presents a very interesting leadership challenge because, while you have a very small group of people on board, there is an enormous infrastructure on the ground that is working toward helping you succeed and getting the mission accomplished. That’s a very unique and interesting leadership challenge because it is largely based on communication and good relationships. That was a theme that we heard over and over again in the case studies at the School.”
As Tim prepares for his second space mission, he finds himself applying a number of the elements he had learned, while studying for his MBA. “There is not an easy join-the-dots answer between an MBA and specifically what I’m doing now, training for a space flight, but I oftentimes think back to my experience and the things that I learned, and relate that to the organisations in which we function as a space business.”
Kopra is due to take command of the International Space Station in early 2016. Once again, he will be travelling at about five miles per second and going around the planet every hour and a half. “The sunrises and sunsets are absolutely spectacular”, he says.
