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Hynes: It does not matter who gets the credit

  Commentary: I’ve heard this and I don’t buy it. People who work hard want credit for the results of their work. Money is not the solution either. Sometimes a thank you works best, so thank you Christine Anderson.

Milton Glaser is the Creator of the logo for "I Love New York." John Leland wrote recently about Mr. Glaser, who is 87 years old. They discussed what type of logo he’d create for the New York of 2016, as the original was created in 1977. New York has a different problem than New Mexico has right now. The city is growing so fast, the developers are displacing hundreds of thousands of people. Manhattan is used to millions of people living within its small footprint, yet this crisis has been brought on by success. The 1977 crisis in New York was brought on by crime, poor governance and a city that had a lack of vision and cohesion. I was born and raised 20 miles from New York. I left as soon as I could. It was a terrible place to live. I came and stayed in New Mexico, it is a beautiful state, and we have a great community here.

The design studio on East 32nd street is a vision of the type of studio I imagined when I created my studio here. I would have loved to work in Mr Glasers studio. And it would have been wonderful if I had the talent and experience that Mr. Glaser has. But I don’t. You see, really it’s not about the studio. He created the original logo on scrap of paper in the back of a taxi. To do the work that communicates like his still does, one has to be a philosopher, a business man, a social commentator, a philanthropist and a great artist. He gives voice to ideas, and put his mark on the metropolis that still tells the story, he loves his city. He loves what he does. We have that and being half Hungarian in common.  I am given the space to do my work here because I live in this great city and state. Sure, we are having a tough time right now. This will pass.

The logo on the original scrap of paper, for which he received a $2000 fee, hangs in the Museum of Modern Art. The logo generates over $1m in state licensing fees for the city each year, none of which Milt receives.  There is an understanding I have, and I share with other I work with. Work is a privilege. It might be that we remind ourselves we work for the benefit of ourselves and others. There is a sense of fairness we have. Over the year as our team prepares for the International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight, we have to work well beyond the borders of NMSU and Las Cruces. Four of the six awardees of a $65 million dollar public-private partnership enabled by NASA’s Next Step Space Technologies for Exploration are speaking at the Symposium. All of these awards went to companies who must have partnerships other than NASA to bring to the problem of building habitats for humans off earth.

They come here because they like our work. That’s it, work. We are working very hard right now on a SUMMIT on Inclusion that will follow the ISPCS on Friday, October 14th. This SUMMIT is being done in partnership with Virgin Galactic. We have been working on it for two years. Generally it is a workshop to increase the diversity of people we recruit and retain into this commercial space industry. Diversity of gender is not the only diversity we discussing. We are also looking at skill, geographic, academic discipline and institutional diversity. The space industry has been known to recruit from only certain academic institutions, certainly not state universities. The head of NASA’s Human Spaceflight program is a graduate of NMSU’s College of Engineering. I have written about Kathy Lueders before. We have to keep telling our story. We have to communicate a positive message, we are here and we are competitive. We will be hosting the Community Partnership Luncheon again on October 11th. I will be speaking at the Rotary Club today. My purpose is to ask them to tell me do they want to hear from one of the spaceport directors building an industrial park, or one of the billionaires coming who invest in space technology? Let’s me know. We have created a great event, in a wonderful city and I want people to know. It’s a team and we want them to know who we are. We heart Las Cruces and New Mexico.