About Us

Brad Files
NASA Scientist

Obviously, you have a great personal interest in science. Who or what jump-started your curiosity, and how was it encouraged? How important was that encouragement?

For me, I have a curiosity for how things work and a curiosity for flight. As a young child I had a feather collection and always liked birds. As I got older, this passion for birds turned into a passion for flight. I almost decided to have a career as a pilot. But I decided that instead of flying for my career, I was more interested in learning how airplanes fly and to build things that fly. This led me to my current career at NASA working on human spaceflight.

My parents always encouraged me to follow things that I had a passion for. They never pushed any one direction, but allowed me to determine the direction of my life. If they had pushed in a certain direction, I would have rebelled against it anyway. I got the fascination for how things work from my dad. I still can't believe all that he can do with a car's engine that I don't know. If he had had the same opportunities as me, he would have made a fantastic engineer.

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As a frequent visitor to classrooms, you may have heard a student ask at one point, "Why do I need to know science and mathematics?" How do you respond to that?

My answer may be different from some people. I don't believe that everyone in the world needs to know science and mathematics. It just depends on what you want to do and what you want to know and understand about how things work. There's always some math or some science in what you do, but you can get away with a minimal amount if you want to do something like be a truck driver. You still need the math, but not as much of the science.

But the science is what is fascinating about the world, so it's more a matter of interest about how and why things work the way they do. But if you want to do more with your life, then you really do need the science and math. If you want an advanced career in any field, you need this knowledge. For example, if you want to be a manager in the trucking company, you need a lot more knowledge about math due to the financial aspects of the job.

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Can you talk about one particular moment from a classroom visit that was particularly memorable for you?

The moments that stick out from my classroom visits are when the younger kids are just impressed to meet anyone who works for NASA or for the space program. There was one particular visit where a kindergarten student sitting on the ground in the front row just stuck out his foot far enough to reach mine in order to say that he had touched me. That's incredible for me to think that anyone wants to be close to me just because of what I do. At work, everybody works for NASA, so we don't think of it as anything special. But at the end of the day we can always look back at the product of what we do and see vehicles going into space, and that makes everything worthwhile.

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What do you remember most about the Challenger mission and its crew?

I started working on the human spaceflight program about four years after Challenger, so when I got to Johnson Space Center we were past the grief and past all the work necessary to getting us flying again. I was in high school during Challenger, so it was really prominent in my mind, and may have subconsciously gotten me interested in the space program.

More recently, I have been directly affected by the loss of Columbia and can now relate more easily to what it was like after Challenger. Beyond the loss of life, the exploration desire itself takes a hit every time there is an accident. Since the loss of Columbia, my job has centered on a project for on-orbit wing repair. Every time we have an accident we learn how to make spaceflight safer for those who will continue to explore. We must not let these accidents keep us from exploring the Universe, either in space or on Earth. I believe that exploration and discovery are what make life interesting.

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