Hess, Mark - Biography

Mark S. Hess is the Chief of the Public Affairs Office at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. He assumed this position in January 2003 having served as the deputy chief of the office since April 1997.

Mr. Hess has worked at NASA for over 25 years, starting as a co-op student in 1976 in the public information office at NASA's Kennedy Space Center.

In addition to his NASA experience, Mr. Hess worked for nearly one year at the Headquarters of the Federal Aviation Administration in Washington, DC, from August 1996 to April 1997, as the Director, Special Projects where he served as the principal spokesperson and media strategist for FAA's role in the TWA 800 accident investigation.

Mr. Hess worked at NASA's Headquarters for 10 years in variety of positions including the Acting Director, Media Services Division, where he was responsible for the people and mechanisms by which NASA provides information to local, national and international news media, and to the public.

Much of the time he was at NASA Headquarters, Mr. Hess served as the senior public affairs advisor to the Associate Administrator for Space Flight where he managed NASA's overall public affairs program for the Space Shuttle and Space Station projects. It was also during this period that Mr. Hess oversaw the media relations efforts for the Phase One Program between NASA and the Russian Space Agency during which the world witnessed the first launch of American astronaut (Norm Thagard) aboard a Russian rocket, and the first rendezvous and docking of a Space Shuttle with the Russian space station Mir on STS 71.

He first came to the NASA Headquarters in 1985 as the public affairs officer for the newly formed Office of Space Station, which President Reagan established as a goal for the United States in his 1984 State of the Union address.

During his 10 years at the Kennedy Space Center, Mr. Hess was an information specialist, and the first information officer dedicated to covering and reporting on Space Shuttle processing activities at the Kennedy Space Center. With the launch of the eighth Space Shuttle mission (STS-8), he became the youngest commentator in NASA history to announce the launch of a piloted space vehicle.

Mr. Hess was born in 1956 in Louisville, Kentucky, but grew up in Titusville, Florida on Florida's "Space Coast" in the shadow of the Kennedy Space Center. He has a degree in communications from the University of Central Florida in Orlando (B.A. 1978). Today he lives in Washington, D.C.