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Personnel News

Ken Souza

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
March 23, 2016
Filed under
Ken Souza

Keith’s note: I was deeply saddened to learn that my long time friend Ken Souza died suddenly yesterday. Ken was probably the first NASA life scientist I got to know when I started with NASA in the mid-1980s. Ken worked on just about every imaginable type of life science mission one could imagine and just had so much information in his head. I wondered how he had managed to know so many things. Over the years, as a mentor and a friend, he would impart a lot of technical knowledge, advice – and always, humor. During times when NASA seemed to want to walk away from space biology he kept it alive at NASA Ames. Ken was relentless in terms of his energy and never seemed to rest – even after he had technically retired from NASA. In fact the retirement designation in 2002 after 35 years at NASA Ames research Center meant that he could just stay equally busy doing more of what he wanted to do without all of the management headaches. A lot of us in the space biology family are a bit numb right now. At the time of his death Ken was engaged in putting together a memorial for his long-time friend and colleague Thora Halstead who had passed away just a few days earlier. Last week I remarked that space botanist Mark Watney from “The Martian” owed his life to Thora Halstead’s long legacy at the helm of NASA’s space biology program. Let me amend that. Mark Watney owed his Mars farming smarts equally to Thora’s program management and Ken’s trail blazing hardware. Together they were the first to do so many things in space. Ad astra Ken.
Ken Souza – Rest in Peace among the stars, ASGSR

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

4 responses to “Ken Souza”

  1. Scot007 says:
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    I had the good fortune of working around Ken for many years at Ames and then again on a variety of NASA advisory committees after I left. He was an extremely thoughtful and creative person, and was dedicated to promoting the life science programs at both Ames and NASA broadly. In the early days, that was a tough job, but he did it well. I saw Ken in the past few years while I returned to the Bay Area to head up the SETI Institute, and his passion for life science research had not lessened. He will be missed.

    • kcowing says:
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      He was one of a kind. I always thought that I wanted to be like him when I “grew up” at NASA.

  2. Homer Hickam says:
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    Aw, so sad. I worked with Ken for many months training the crew to run the Frog Entomology Experiment on STS-47 SL-J. You will be missed, Dr. Souza!

  3. Matthew Black says:
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    I’m sorry to hear of your loss, gentleman. Too many talented people are departing this world lately.