What everyone gets wrong about working at NASA, according to a former flight director

NASA Paul Sean Hill

• Former NASA flight director Paul Hill told Business Insider about some common misconceptions about working for NASA.

• He said the space program isn't made up of super-geniuses who "don't even need computers because they do all the math in their heads."

• The Texas A&M grad added NASA is made up of "normal engineers from schools from across the country."

Flying people and expensive machines into space is an intense business.

But former NASA flight director Paul Hill said the people who work on the space program are a bit more down to earth than you might think.

People tend to overestimate what it takes to work at NASA, according to Hill, the author of "Leadership from the Mission Control Room to the Boardroom: A Guide to Unleashing Team Performance."

"We must all be the 4.0s from MIT and we've got all these guys who don't even need computers because they do all the math in their head," he told Business Insider, of the incorrect perceptions.

Hill worked on 24 different space shuttle and ISS missions as a flight director over the course of his career. He was also appointed to lead the investigation into the 2003 Columbia disaster. The Texas A&M grad said the reality of working at NASA is a bit less flashy. He added many of the engineers and scientists who work there are state school graduates, like himself.

"We're a normal cross section of normal engineers that actually have this incredible work that we do," he said. "Normal engineers from schools from across the country — and, in some cases, from around the world — who just got the opportunity to do these phenomenal jobs and then took them seriously and did them well."

He said the reason NASA is able to do incredible work is that its team members are hyper-focused on solving specific problems.

"When we sit back and look at it we realize, 'This is cool. I can't believe they pay me to do this,'" he said.

But he said the idea that employees of the space program are all human computers is flawed.

"Outside NASA, you get, 'Wow you guys must all be geniuses and you're not scared of anything. You must have ice water running through your veins,'" he said. "Not true, we're just really, really well prepared, and that level of preparation helps keep us focused rather than panicking when many of us would love to panic. I've had those moments where you think, 'Holy s---.' But you need to put that out of your head and do what you need to do."

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