Army Veteran resupplies the International Space Station | VAntage Point

As engines ignited and a deafening roar rolled across the salt marshes of Wallops Island Virginia on Tuesday evening, Army Veteran Greg Cusimano sat inside the Range Control Center 7 miles away watching and monitoring the Antares rocket lift-off from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility.

The mission – sending over 8,000 lbs of supplies and scientific experiments to the International Space Station – takes years of work and hundreds of people like Cusimano to be successful.

“I’m an information broker,” said Cusimano in an interview the week before liftoff. “That’s why I am here. I don’t know anything about rocket-science, but my Army career prepared me perfectly for this job because I do know about logistics, and I know how to move information and make connections.”

Private to Colonel
Cusimano entered the Army as a Private (E-1) in 1982 and left as a Colonel (O-6) in 2008. After enlisting, he soon qualified for Officer Candidate School and was commissioned in 1984, spending 24 years as an ordnance officer specializing in multifunctional logistics.

“The Army gave me fantastic training to be successful in life. When people think about Army ordnance it’s easy to just think of bullets and bombs – our work was so much more than that,” he said. “The core of my work was logistics, maintenance, supply, transportation and engineering. To be successful in this profession a person must be able to manage complex operations effectively and efficiently. It’s my military experience that prepared me for a second career with NASA.”