2012 Kickoff Breakfast

Blast Off with NAAA’s Astronautical Kickoff Speaker!

46th Annual Convention & Exposition ♦ December 3–6, 2012 ♦ Savannah, Ga.

Is this the real Most Interesting Man in the World? Quite possibly. NAAA is pleased to announce Story Musgrave as its 2012 Kickoff Speaker.For a convention boasting a buffet of programming, exhibits and networking, NAAA has whipped up the perfect starting dish to whet your appetite: the 2012 Kickoff Breakfast.

This year’s Kickoff Speaker personifies NAAA’s convention theme, “Charting a Confident Course,” in the extreme. Story Musgrave has charted a remarkable course throughout his life and career—so much so that Dos Equis ought to seriously consider patterning its Most Interesting Man in the World commercials after him.

An astronaut with agricultural roots, Musgrave is a true renaissance man. He was born in 1935 on a dairy farm in Stockbridge, Mass. The dairy farm delivery planted the seeds for a lifetime of adventures. When he was five years old he rode combines and floated homebuilt rafts down the river. He drove trucks and tractors at 10 and was repairing them by the time he was 13.

Being inside the confines of a classroom must have felt terribly constraining at the time because Musgrave never finished school. Instead, he joined the Marines and served in Korea as an aircraft electrician and engine mechanic. He learned to fly with the Marines, and in the 55 years since, he has accumulated 18,000 hours in more than 160 aircraft. As a parachutist, he has over 800 free-falls.

Musgrave spent more than 30 years as a NASA astronaut and flew on six spaceflights. He performed the first shuttle spacewalk on the Challenger’s first flight, conducted two classified DOD missions and served as the lead spacewalker on the Hubble Telescope repair mission. He even worked as a part-time trauma surgeon during his astronaut career.

Musgrave morphed from a young man without a diploma to a person in need of a double-sided business card to account for all his academic accolades and professional achievements. Some students graduate with a double major—he has seven graduate degrees in math, computers, chemistry, medicine, physiology, literature and psychology, as well as 20 honorary doctorates.

With seven graduate degrees and 20 honorary doctorates, Musgrave isn’t just an astronaut, his entire résumé is astronomical. Aviation’s Renaissance Man will share stories from his remarkable career Dec. 3 at the Kickoff Breakfast for NAAA’s 2012 Convention.Musgrave has barely slowed since leaving NASA. Today, he operates a palm farm in Orlando, Fla., a production company in Sydney, Australia, and a sculpture company in Burbank, Calif. He is also a landscape architect, a concept artist with Walt Disney Imagineering, an innovator with Applied Minds Inc. and a professor of design at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif.

Between the breakfast buffet and stories from Musgrave’s astronomical life and career, NAAA’s Kickoff Breakfast is sure to satisfy your physical and intellectual appetite. There are two ways to register for this event. Tickets for the Kickoff Breakfast and Farewell Banquet are included in the “with banquets” registration package. Anyone with a “without banquets” package can purchase tickets à la carte.