When Victor “SALSA” Lopez was a high school junior in Houston, he had two competing summer internships to consider. One was a NASA Pathways Internship at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. The other was helping to produce a video for an emerging local rapper. At age 16, Lopez was all about the video shoot. But the project fell apart, and fortunately, NASA was still an option. At Goddard he worked on research trying to predict landslides and earthquakes — an experience that fundamentally shifted his future path.