Mayor learned to lead as astronaut
Growing up in Wadsworth, Ohio, Mike Foreman yearned to travel in space.
“Hearing that John Glenn and Neil Armstrong were from Ohio made me, as an 8year-old, think, ‘If they can do it, I can do it,’” said Foreman, 62, who flew on two space shuttle missions and is now the mayor of Friendswood.
“I remember telling my parents when I was 8 that I had decided to become an astronaut,” Foreman said. “My first question was, ‘How do you do that?’ There was no Google, no way to look it up. I read the book (‘We Seven: By the Astronauts Themselves’) by the original astronauts and learned they were pilots and test pilots. My dad had been in the Navy; so I set out to be a naval aviator.”
Much later, when Foreman settled in Friendswood, he sought elected leadership positions, influenced by the example of his parents and uncles. His father had been elected a county prose
cutor, his mother served on a city council, and two uncles were elected to local government positions.
“I was proud that my family was so involved in public service, but I never thought about following their footsteps until I had left NASA,” Foreman said.
Foreman credited his NASA career with preparing him to lead Friendswood based on a philosophy he described as “consensusbuilding and collaborative leadership.
Foreman was 12 when he and his family watched the lunar module Eagle land on the moon.
“I will never forget that blackand-white TV set,” he said. “We didn’t get a color TV until later that year, when the New York Mets went to the World Series. The first thing I saw in color were Mets uniforms.”
Six months after Foreman moved to Friendswood in 1998, he saw Armstrong in person.
“He came and spoke to my astronaut class,” said the mayor. “What an humble guy. He shunned the limelight. He wanted to talk about anything besides the moon landing.”
‘Just call me John’
Foreman met Glenn when the first American to orbit the Earth returned to NASA to train for Glenn’s nine-day flight aboard the space shuttle Discovery in 1998.
“He was my hero and inspiration,” Foreman said. “I told him I didn’t know what to call him. Colonel? Senator? He said, ‘Just call me John.’”
In 2008, almost 20 active and former astronauts from Ohio were feted at a reunion in Cleveland. They included Jim Lovell, who was portrayed by actor Tom Hanks in the 1995 movie “Apollo 13.”
“The last time I saw him (Lovell), he and Buzz Aldrin cracked everybody up by how they remembered things differently,” said Foreman, who served on two space shuttle missions, STS-123 in 2008 and STS-129 in 2009, clocking 32 hours and 19 minutes performing construction tasks outside the International Space Station and space shuttles.
Foreman earned a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering from the U.S. Naval Academy and a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering at the Naval Postgraduate School.
He flew more than 7,000 hours in more than 50 aircraft.
Finding Friendswood
When Foreman and his family moved to Texas for him to enroll in the 17th astronaut class, he and his wife of more than 38 years, Lorrie, a civil engineer, bought a home in Friendswood. They raised three children: Jim, who graduated from Texas A&M University with a degree in mechanical engineering; Jack, who earned a master’s in business administration at the University of Houston; and Amyjo, now a student at the UH Law Center.
When Foreman retired from NASA four years ago, he joined Lorrie and Jim in launching Venturi Outcomes, a Houston construction project-management company.
“The strongest thing NASA taught me was to dream big,” the mayor said.
Foreman said that as an astronaut, he saw the effectiveness of working as part of a team where members worked together and developed a consensus.
“At the Naval Academy, you are taught autocratic leadership, a dictatorial style for a war scenario,” he said. “But when you’re running a team, you always want to listen to everyone and get a diversity of ideas and opinions.”
Foreman served two-thirds of a term as a Friendswood City Council member before resigning to run for mayor in 2018. Council and mayoral positions in the city are volunteer.
“I’m not really surprised that I love the job because it’s really about meeting and talking to people, which is something I like to do,” Foreman said of being mayor.
As to running for a higher office, he added, “I have no higher aspirations than remaining as the mayor of Friendswood for as long as the citizens will have me.”