Daniel Schumacher named director of key NASA Marshall Center office

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — Dr. Daniel M. Schumacher has been appointed director of the Office of Strategic Analysis & Communications at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

The Office of Strategic Analysis & Communications works to create and sustain advocacy and support for the Marshall Center and NASA. Under Dr. Schumacher’s leadership, the office uses sophisticated analysis for strategic decision-making and numerous internal and external communications conduits to communicate the center’s goals and successes to the Marshall workforce, NASA leadership and Marshall’s partners, customers and stakeholders.

Prior to accepting his new position, Schumacher was deputy project manager of Marshall’s Lunar Lander Project Office from 2007 to 2008. He led a team of more than 60 civil service and contractor employees and directed an annual technology budget of more than $60 million to develop hardware and integrated systems for crewed moon landings in coming decades.

Schumacher began his NASA career in 2001 as an aerospace engineer in the Marshall Center’s Second Generation Launch Vehicle Program Office, which laid the early groundwork for NASA’s current U.S. Space Exploration Policy and the Constellation fleet now in development — the Ares I and Ares V rockets and Orion crew module.

From 2003 to 2005, he was manager of systems engineering, integration and testing for the X-37 Project Office, overseeing development of an orbital demonstrator craft intended to test future launch technologies on orbit and during atmospheric reentry. In 2005, he accepted a one-year assignment to NASA Headquarters in Washington as the NASA chief engineer’s representative on the Nunn-McCurdy congressional review of the National Polar-Orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System. Since 1994, that system has combined satellites and technology from NASA, the Department of Defense and the Department of Commerce to monitor and share information about weather and global environmental conditions.

Schumacher returned to the Marshall Center in 2006 to manage the Exploration Flight Projects Office, where he was responsible for creating and overseeing the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle Project Office, which led early work on the crew module that will carry a new generation of human explorers to Earth orbit, to the moon and beyond.

In 2006, he was assigned to NASA’s candidate development program for the Senior Executive Service, the personnel system that covers most top managerial, supervisory and policy positions in the executive branch of the federal government.

Schumacher began his professional career in 1989 as a systems engineer at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, supporting the Theater High Altitude Area Defense Project, a key element of U.S. missile defense systems. In 1998, he joined XonTech, Inc., a commercial science and technology firm in Van Nuys, Calif. He worked as a systems engineer at the U.S. Space and Missile Defense Command at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Ala., in 1999, and joined NASA two years later.

Schumacher, a native of San Antonio, Texas, earned a bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering in 1989 from Texas A&M University in College Station. He received his master’s degree and doctorate in engineering from the University of Alabama in Huntsville, in 1990 and 2005, respectively.

During his years of federal service, Schumacher has received numerous awards, including an Achievement Medal for Civilian Service in 1998, presented annually by the Department of the Army to honor sustained, superior service or achievement benefiting the U.S. Armed Forces. He is the recipient of several NASA group achievement and special service awards. He has completed management and leadership courses at Georgetown University in Washington and the Center for Creative Leadership in Greensboro, N.C., and completed the Harvard Senior Executive Fellows Program in May 2008.

Schumacher, his wife Julie and their two children live in Madison, Ala.