Jim Van Laak grew up in the old industrial city of Schenectady, New York. During the Apollo program of the 1960s, he became enthralled by the space program that dominated the world stage. Entranced by aviation, he got his pilot’s license at age seventeen and soon thereafter survived a mechanical failure induced accident. Inspired to learn what he could about these machines, he worked for an airplane mechanic while also attending college at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. A low draft number led him to join Air Force ROTC and later become a pilot and maintenance officer in the 49th Fighter Interceptor Squadron.
After leaving the air force, his deep knowledge of aircraft systems won him a role at NASA Headquarters, where he expanded his expertise to space shuttle systems. He then transferred to the Johnson Space Center to lead maintenance and logistics planning for Space Station Freedom. Having found a weakness in Freedom, he was tasked to ensure the International Space Station (ISS) program would not suffer the same vulnerability.
For ISS, he helped integrate the US and Russian space programs, creating a comprehensive risk management process to ensure success. Later, he became deputy director of the Shuttle-Mir program that sent American astronauts to Russia’s aging Mir space station. His response to critical events developed the expertise and respect needed to manage spaceflight operations during ISS’s critical start-up phase. He became the focus of conflicts between the US and Russian approaches to spaceflight, as well as between the existing Space Shuttle and the emerging space station programs. This allowed him to guide the programs through several critical tests of cooperation that could have destroyed the program.
Van Laak later became a senior manager at NASA’s Langley Research Center, served as the FAA’s deputy associate administrator for commercial space, and assisted in the launch and activation of the James Webb Space Telescope.
