BATON ROUGE, La. (BRPROUD) — Southern University and Boeing won the 2022 Mentor-Protégé Award at the NASA Small Business Industry Awards for their work on a space rocket.
Both groups worked together on NASA’s Space Launch System rocket, which will launch Artemis astronauts to the moon, Boeing said.
“This achievement is Boeing’s first mentor-protégé partnership with a Historically Black College or University so the award is such an honor,” said James Chavis, a Boeing supplier program representative at NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility. “This recognition highlights the hard work and collaboration between Southern University and Boeing.”
“Congratulations to Southern University and Boeing for winning this NASA award. I want to thank Boeing for recognizing Southern’s long and proud tradition of educating successful engineers and choosing them as their first HBCU mentor-protégé partner. HBCUs produce 42 percent of America’s Black engineers, and we know many of the best come from right here in Louisiana,” said Gov. John Bel Edwards. “This award underscores the importance of our bipartisan work to invest in our higher education system and diversify our economy by attracting and retaining companies like Boeing. As I often say, our higher education institutions are our engines of economic growth.”
According to Boeing, the NASA Mentor-Protégé program matches large companies with small businesses and minority-serving institutions.
“The NASA Mentor Protégé Program was successfully implemented between Boeing and Southern University. It provided a means to enhance the partnering effort by Boeing, in assessment and training, focused on the efficient processing of business and contracting using the university’s needs to increase contracting opportunities,” said Dr. Samuel Washington, director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies at Southern University. “As well, student tours of the Michoud Assembly Facility supplied valuable insight, by NASA and Boeing engineers, on the use of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics on the design and manufacturing of the booster used in the Artemis Project to send astronauts to the moon and to Mars.”
