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8 SMT007 MAGAZINE I FEBRUARY 2023 Nolan's Notes by Nolan Johnson, I-CONNECT007 The Trade Show Is Over: Now What Do You Do? When you're new to your career, your role, or even new to the industry, the pressure can be immense. en you find yourself at a trade show representing your company, tasked with bringing information back to your organiza- tion. But take heart, at least you're not Har- rison "Jack" Schmitt. Jack really understood pressure. Schmitt is a retired NASA astronaut from the Apollo, era but let me take a step back and explain some of the history. e U.S. space program, as you may recall, went to the moon with a science-based agenda; astronauts brought back lunar samples to study. But the earliest astronauts, understandably, weren't scientists; they were pilots with elite mili- tary backgrounds, so their skill sets were skewed toward suc- cessfully operating the complex equipment to get there and back safely with a moonrock payload. At first, it seemed, everyone was willing to sacrifice the quality of the samples for the sake of having any samples at all. By the time NASA got to the Apollo 15 mission, the astro- naut crews were becoming more comfortable with the flight sys- tems. ey weren't any sim- pler, but there was now a size- able body of knowledge to share regarding how the Apollo space- cra actually performed. e fly- ing of Apollo seemed to become almost, well, routine. is was fortunate because scientists started exerting greater pressure on the astronauts to bring back something greater than they had.