BATON ROUGE — Governor John Bel Edwards congratulated Southern University and aerospace industry leader Boeing after NASA named their partnership the Mentor-Protégé Agreement of the Year. They were given the honor at the NASA Small Business Industry Awards for their combined work on NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket.
Boeing’s partnership with Southern is their first mentor-protégé partnership with a Historically Black College and University (HBCU) institution. They provide mentoring, tactical business and technical support to Southern, who supplies alumni engineering skills to Boeing’s SLS program in New Orleans.
“Congratulations to Southern University and Boeing for winning this NASA award. I want to thank Boeing for recognizing Southern’s long and proud tradition of educating successful engineers and choosing them as their first HBCU mentor-protégé partner. HBCUs produce 42 percent of America’s Black engineers, and we know many of the best come from right here in Louisiana,” said Governor John Bel Edwards. “This award underscores the importance of our bipartisan work to invest in our higher education system and diversify our economy by attracting and retaining companies like Boeing. As I often say, our higher education institutions are our engines of economic growth.”
See below for more information from Boeing’s Press Release:
The NASA-sponsored Mentor-Protégé Program pairs large companies with eligible small businesses and minority-serving institutions to enhance the protégés’ capabilities enabling them to successfully compete for larger, more complex contracts. In 2022, Boeing subcontracted approximately $4.6 billion to small and diverse businesses.
The SLS will launch NASA’s Artemis astronauts to the moon, Mars and beyond. Boeing is the prime contractor for the design, development, test and production of the SLS core stage and the in-development Exploration Upper Stage, as well as development of the flight avionics suite. The program employs workforces in Huntsville, Alabama, at NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans, and at other Boeing sites and with suppliers across the United States.
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