NASA envoy oversaw deals for space station

Michael O’Brien, a former naval aviator who later served as a top NASA liaison to foreign space agencies and led the team that secured agreements for the establishment of the International Space Station, died Feb. 19 at his home in Springfield, Virginia. He was 72.

The cause was cancer, said a daughter, Beth O’Brien-Shepard.

Capt. O’Brien — known to colleagues as “Obie” — joined NASA in1994 after a nearly three-decade military career. In Navy roles that prepared him for his diplomatic duties at the space agency, he served as an international political and military adviser to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and his duties included travel to Persian Gulf countries for bilateral discussions in the lead-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 1991.

At the time of his NASA retirement in 2015, he was associate administrator for international and interagency relations, with a portfolio that included communicating with other countries about aeronautics research, human space exploration and space technology. He also worked with executive branch offices as well as agencies such as the State and Defense departments.

“We’re not in charge of anything,” O’Brien said in 2007 for a NASA oral history, but he noted that his office “touches just about everything that NASA does.”

Among his most visible achievements: He worked with European, Japanese, Canadian and Russian space agencies on the International Space Station. Its first component launched into orbit in 1998, making it possible for humans to live and conduct research while orbiting Earth.

He also negotiated with foreign partners on other projects, including the Mars rover Curiosity, a mobile laboratory that landed on the red planet in 2012 and is part of NASA’s effort to study the landscape for clues to whether the planet ever was habitable and whether it still has conditions that could sustain life.