Mohammed Santina
Achievements in spacecraft

Despite his corporate awards and industry accolades, Mohammed "Michael" Santina knew he'd made it when he could explain to his teenage sons in layman's terms just how his Boeing work on the Global Positioning System affects their everyday lives.

"I really take pride in telling my kids what I've done about it," said Santina, a 19-year Boeing employee who's internationally known for his control systems design expertise.

Santina knows the importance of his work on this satellite-driven system, a system whose technology is available to many people through cars, personal digital assistants and watches. And so does Boeing, which named him a Senior Technical Fellow. Not bad for a man who in 1969 watched Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin plant the U.S. flag on the moon and decided at that moment "to become a space engineer and to work for the company that built the Apollo spacecraft."

As the technical expert in Controls and the Line-of-Sight Group at the Space & Intelligence Systems unit of Boeing Integrated Defense Systems, Santina has contributed to more than a dozen major spacecraft programs ranging from GPS and Milstar to Teledesic and Future Imagery Architecture. He's also renowned for his expertise in complex space vehicle attitude determination, control and navigation.

Santina's work often involves proprietary programs, but one thing that's not undercover is his dedication to teaching and mentoring up-and-coming engineers.

Santina mentors engineers for one to two years, helping them build their satellite attitude control skills and mold their careers. He believes this is critical, as "senior engineers have acquired a wealth of knowledge that is very valuable to the company and should be retained. In many cases, we can teach in one month what we learned in one year."

It's not always easy, said Younkin, to find a brilliant scientist who has an equally keen understanding of people and what makes them tick. But he says Santina's one of them.

"He just seems to work well with everybody—bosses, peers, subordinates," Younkin said. "He's very humble, too. He's not bigheaded in any way, shape or form, so he's a joy from that standpoint."

—Maureen Jenkins