“Living in space is really hard!” As the woman tasked with putting American “boots on the moon” for the first time in half a century, Kathy Lueders ’81 should know. With its Artemis program, NASA aims to land the first woman and the 13th man on the Moon by 2024, and with her appointment as associate administrator of the Human Exploration and Operations (HEO) Mission Directorate, Lueders is leading the next generation of human spaceflight. A return to the moon is the first stage in their plan before NASA takes its next giant leap and sends astronauts to Mars. So how did the daughter of a Lutheran minister who spent her childhood in Japan, end up coordinating humanity’s quest to visit other planets? The Space Shuttle was an icon of the eighties and America’s supremacy in the Space Race. The first reusable spacecraft capable of taking astronauts beyond the atmosphere and returning to Earth, the Shuttle was the cornerstone of NASA’s human spaceflight program for three decades, flying a total of 135 missions from 1981 to 2011. The Space Shuttle launched and recovered satellites, delivered the payloads used to build the International Space Station (ISS), pointed the Hubble Space Telescope to look out at the edges of the universe, and made astronaut and cargo transit routine jobs. It put Steve Smith ’77 into space four times (see Fall 2011 Ambassador) and took former ASIJ faculty member Dan Tani (FF ’16–’18) to the ISS on Expedition 16. The Shuttle program also provided two key moments in Lueders career and the catalyst for her current role. Back in 1992, Lueders took her first job at NASA joining the propulsion lab at the White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico to work on the Shuttle program. “At the time they were just trying to figure out how to start repairing the engines off of the
shuttle orbiters in house—orbiters are the part of the Shuttle that returns and flies that kind of look like a big airplane,” she says. “I really lucked out because I came in brand new and they at the time didn’t understand anything about the kinds of processes that needed to be in place to be able to process flight hardware. And so I started off, and ended up, being the person that knew how to process flight hardware.” This would lead to Lueders becoming the depot manager of the Space Shuttle Program Orbital Maneuvering System and Reaction Control Systems, overseeing the repair of engines and other components that were exposed to hypergols, the toxic propellants that fueled the Shuttle. Lueders developed this new capability for NASA and her team processed the hardware on all the orbiters. “I would just go look at the orbiters and I knew all the numbers, all of the serial numbers that I’ve worked on... it was a very fun job for me and I worked on lots of flight hardware. I got to go to the Cape and got to go up on the elevator and go see my babies.” While working at White Sands, Lueders completed degrees in Industrial Engineering at the University of New Mexico, getting her Bachelor of Science in 1993 and her Master’s in 1999. Lueders had already graduated college with a BA in finance and initially begun a career in another industry. Her college roommate was a mechanical engineer and Lueders was intrigued by the kind of problems she was working on and thought she’d like to try to solve them herself. Nothing came of it at the time as “missionary kids don’t have a lot of money, you know. Your main goal is graduating and getting out with your student loans as minimized as possible,” she quips. Marriage and children came along and it wasn’t until later that Lueders explored engineering as a career.
THE AMBASSADOR \\ FALL 2020
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