Gallery: Meet the Heroes Fueling the New American Space Boom
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Bobak Ferdowsi | Flight systems engineer, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory | Pasadena, California | “I’m working on a mission to Jupiter’s moon Europa, and it’s absolutely fascinating—the idea that there might be an ocean under the icy surface, possibly a habitable environment. Space-history buffs 300 years from now are going to look back on this and think it was a pretty amazing time to be alive.”
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Nzingah Gross | Lead program budget analyst, NASA’s Johnson Space Center | Houston, Texas | “We track everything from people and their time to a screw for a robot—it’s like managing multiple million-dollar personal bank accounts. When I see equipment I helped procure, I feel like I’m part of something bigger, even if I’m not an astronaut on the launch.”
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Tinesha Ross | Project management specialist and systems engineer, United Launch Alliance | Centennial, Colorado | “I grew up in a single-parent home on government assistance, and never in my wildest dreams did I think I’d be working in this field. I took my 15-year-old son, Chris, to his first launch last year, and the look on his face when he saw that rocket just sent chills through my body.”
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Lien Pham | Thermal blanket technician, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory | Pasadena, California | “When we came to the US from Vietnam in 1978, I was fresh off the boat and didn’t speak very good English. I went to work for a company making lingerie and then, at night, I would go to school for electronics. Now I tell my kids I’m a spacecraft dressmaker.”
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Mark Kelly | Former astronaut; cofounder, director of flight crew operations, World View Enterprises | Tucson, Arizona | “In the 1930s, aviation companies started to generate revenue by flying people and cargo, and that’s really when the industry took off. I think that’s where we are right now in the space business. I hope a lot more people will get the opportunity to do what very few people have done: leave the planet.”
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Zach Reeder | Test pilot | Scaled Composites | Mojave, California | “Coming here is sort of like joining a weird technological monastery. We tend to work on ideas that are just coming out of the lab and 10 years away from being really useful. Which means we don’t get to see the satisfying consumer product—we get to see the promise of the emerging technology.”
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Karina Ogilvie | Mechanical integration and test engineer | Orbital ATK | Gilbert, Arizona | “For every one of me, who actually touches the spacecraft, there are hundreds of engineers who have thought about the shape, the form, the function of the part that I’m holding. It’s a great responsibility, and a constant reminder of the immensity and challenge of what we’re doing.”
