America's Credit Unions Ops & Tech Conference: Astronaut Mike Massimino on Mistakes, Mission Control and the Big Picture

By Steve Jensen

America's Credit Unions Operations & Technology Conference took place in Las Vegas, Sept. 21-24, 2026. The headline keynote speaker Tuesday was former NASA astronaut Mike Massimino, who flew two space shuttle missions to service the Hubble Space Telescope and now teaches at Columbia University.

Massimino built much of his talk around a mistake he made during a spacewalk on his final mission and how the team on the ground helped him recover from it. The lessons he drew from that experience apply to any team that has to work through an error under pressure, including the operations and technology leaders in the audience.

Six Seconds to Decide

Massimino opened by describing a typical shuttle launch. The main engines fire first, and for six seconds the crew, the onboard computers, and the ground can still shut everything down. After that, the solid rocket boosters ignite.

"Once you light those things, you’re on your way," he said. "It may not be where you want to be going, but you are on your way."

Eight and a half minutes later, the engines cut off and the violence and shaking give way to near silence. Massimino said he took off his helmet and let it float in front of him, just as he'd watched Tom Hanks do as Jim Lovell in the 1995 film Apollo 13.

The Easiest Task of the Day

On his final mission in 2009, Massimino's job was to do something that had never been attempted on a Hubble servicing mission – repair an instrument in place rather than swap it out. The Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph had lost its power supply to an electrical short, and there was no replacement. The engineers who built it had designed it so no one would ever open it again. The access panel alone was held on by 111 small screws. The team developed more than 100 new tools and practiced for years.

Before any of that could start, Massimino had to remove a handrail secured by four bolts. It was one line in the checklist, about 30 seconds of work. Three bolts came out. The fourth did not.

"I see a gnarled-up piece of metal. I have stripped that thing," he said. With the handrail stuck, none of the rest of the repair could happen. He remembered looking down at the Pacific Ocean and thinking he couldn't even get to a hardware store if he wanted to.

The fix came from the ground. An engineer working in a secondary back room stepped away from the discussion and asked himself what he would do if this were his car. After weighing the risk of metal fragments getting into the telescope or damaging a spacesuit, Mission Control told Massimino to carefully pull the handrail off. A couple of tugs, and it came free.

"It was the team that saved me that day," Massimino said. "I was horrified by what I had done, but I knew that no one was going to throw me under the bus."

His message to the audience was twofold. "When you need help, reach out to your Mission Control Center. Don't hesitate," he said. "And maybe even more important for the leaders in this room is be Mission Control for others."

For credit union operations and technology teams, that might mean the next bridge call during a conversion weekend.

Thirty Seconds, Then Move On

Massimino admitted he used to beat himself up over mistakes for days. As an astronaut, he learned the 30-second rule, passed to him by crewmate Megan McArthur, who got it from Marine Corps pilot and astronaut C.J. Sturckow. Give yourself 30 seconds of remorse, keep it to yourself so you don't scare anyone, then get back to being a contributing member of the team.

The second rule came from his training. "No matter how bad you messed up, no matter how hopeless the situation appears to be, you need to remember … you can make it worse," he said, to laughter from the audience. Rushing to fix one problem can easily create a second one that has to be solved before you can get back to the first. "Just 30 seconds of regret. Don't make it worse. Give the team a chance for redemption."

Advice from Neil Armstrong

Massimino also told the story of introducing himself to Neil Armstrong in a NASA cafeteria and asking how he came up with his famous line on the moon (“That’s one small step for man…”). Armstrong said he didn't think about it until after he landed, because if the landing failed there would be no reason to say anything. Then he warned Massimino not to get distracted by publicity or media attention in a dangerous business.

(As someone who works in public relations, I took that one personally!)

Years later, when reporters asked what he planned to write as the first person to tweet from space, Massimino channeled Armstrong and said he'd worry about it once he got there. Once in orbit, he admitted, he couldn't think of anything clever, sent a quick note that the launch was awesome, and ended up the subject of a joke on "Saturday Night Live."

What Technology Changed

Massimino noted how differently NASA sends people to space now, with commercial partners and touchscreen controls in place of the stick-and-switch cockpits shuttle pilots trained on. Astronauts were uneasy about both changes at first. He said one shuttle pilot told him nearly all of his training went unused in flight because so much of it involved memorizing responses to every possible emergency.

People are good at judgment, experience, and working together, he said, but not at remembering huge volumes of procedures or running calculations under pressure. Letting technology take on that work "made the job of flying the spaceship much easier, and astronauts can concentrate on things that we're better at."

Scared Later

During the Q&A, Massimino was asked about his scariest moment. He pointed to the spacewalk, and to a hydraulic failure in a NASA jet at 41,000 feet that had him preparing to eject. In the moment, he said, fear doesn't help. You work the problem and rely on your training. The fear showed up later, over a beer at the airport, when he realized he was drinking his colleague's beer instead of his own.

Asked what he learned from being turned down by NASA, including a medical disqualification, he said simply that one in a million is not zero. "Successful people that I've met in sports or business or music or whatever it is, they're not those that never fail. They're those who never let failure stop them."

The Big Picture

Massimino closed by talking about credit unions directly. As a government employee who "wasn't making all that much money," he said he could always go to his credit union to talk through a car purchase or get help when he was sent on temporary duty to another city.

"You're serving your communities and doing a great service to them. And I know it's not easy. There are regulations. There are all kinds of challenges," he said. "But please keep the big picture in mind when those times get tough."

He ended with the view from his last spacewalk, watching the line between night and day move steadily across the planet. "These are our days. These are our moments. These are our chances to make a difference."