“Go for launch.”
Phrases like these are sometimes uttered when a rocket is seconds from heading to area. On Wednesday, after a long time of American spaceflight and quite a few launches, a lady might be saying them for NASA.
The Artemis I rocket, now on Launch Pad 39B on the Kennedy House Middle in Florida and making ready to launch for the moon on Wednesday, is counting right down to ignition. The ultimate choice might be within the arms of Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, who has labored in spaceflight for greater than 30 years. As launch director, she’s the boss of the “firing room” throughout the countdown, and the buck stops together with her.
“Firsts don’t come alongside that usually and to be at first of a program that’s going to take the primary girl and the following man again to the Moon is fairly particular,” Ms. Blackwell-Thompson stated throughout a information convention this summer time. “It’s fairly particular to me.”
Ms. Blackwell-Thompson in contrast the Apollo and Artemis missions whereas talking at one other information convention. A long time in the past for Apollo 11, there was only one girl within the firing room of 450 males, she stated. At present, on launch day for Artemis I, 30 % of the roughly 100 engineers within the firing room are ladies.
“There may be, indisputably, a feminine presence as a part of this — in each the management of this program and the operations areas, in addition to the title of this system itself,” she stated. “So actually the make-up of our workforce has modified over the course of the 50 years.”
In accordance with NASA, Ms. Blackwell-Thompson oversees all countdown planning, coaching and procedures, together with creating plans if the countdown have to be halted and the launch rescheduled.
On launch day, Ms. Blackwell-Thompson and her crew in Firing Room 1 of the Launch Management Middle will verify that the rocket is prepared for flight. They’ll be rigorously “monitoring and controlling” the rocket each earlier than and after ignition, NASA stated in a information launch. These moments observe a number of years of preparation.
Ms. Blackwell-Thompson graduated from Clemson College in South Carolina with a level in pc engineering in 1988, based on NASA. She labored on NASA area shuttle missions first as a payload flight software program engineer for Boeing, a NASA contractor, and was a lead electrical engineer on a number of Hubble House Telescope restore missions. She turned a NASA worker in 2004, and she or he holds a number of patents on spaceflight techniques.
On a NASA podcast final yr, she described the joys of strolling into Firing Room 1 for the primary time in 1988 whereas touring the Kennedy House Middle throughout a job interview with Boeing, and seeing employees put together the area shuttle Discovery for the primary mission after the Challenger catastrophe.
“I needed to be part of that crew. I needed to earn myself a seat within the room, and I used to be fortunate sufficient over time, to try this,” she stated.
She was named NASA’s first feminine launch director in January 2016, setting her on the trail to guide Firing Room 1 on Wednesday.
Different ladies have additionally just lately performed key roles in area missions. Sarah Gillis, the lead area operations engineer for SpaceX, guided 4 novice astronauts throughout their journey to orbit in September.
Supply: NY Times
