When Kristen Bury was a child, she dreamed of exploring space.
“For a while, I wanted to be an astronaut,” the now 36-year-old said. “I loved space when I was a kid.”
She got a job at NASA while still a University of Toledo student and has spent the past 15 years working on the Orion project. Now the fruit of her labor is scheduled to launch on Saturday afternoon from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida as part of the organization’s Artemis I mission.
The two-hour launch window is scheduled to begin at 2:17 p.m., eastern time.
Artemis I will be an uncrewed test flight and, according to NASA, “the first in a series of increasingly complex missions” that will ultimately lead to an extended human presence on the Moon, and beyond.
“Nothing this powerful has ever launched before,” Ms. Bury said. “It’s going to be a spectacular show.”
Carried by the rocket will be the Orion spacecraft, which consists in part of the service module that is designed to provide support resources — water, oxygen, power, etc. — for any crew members aboard the crew module. The Saturday launch will be uncrewed, but the idea is to gather data about how the rocket performs and how the Orion operates in space, Ms. Bury said.
“Spaceflight is hard,” she said. “These are exceptionally complex vehicles.”
The service module is what Ms. Bury has spent much of her career working on, and she is so excited to finally see it go.
“It’s not PowerPoint charts, it’s not schematics,” she said. “It’s a real, living, breathing vehicle.”
Ms. Bury grew up in Sylvania and graduated from Southview High School, where she took so many math and science classes, she “didn’t have time to take art,” she said. At UT, she majored in chemical engineering with the thought that if she never made it to NASA then she’d still be able to do interesting work.
As it turned out, she managed to land a job with NASA before she even graduated. For her first 10 years there, she worked as an electrical engineer. Now she’s the program integration functional area manager for the European Service Module Integration Office, and has been coordinating with the European Space Agency, which is overseeing the development of the Orion’s service module, to ensure that everything is where it needs to be by launch time.
“This is the biggest group project I’ve ever worked on in my life,” Ms. Bury said.
The launch was initially scheduled for Monday but was scrubbed when the launch team could not verify that the engines were properly chilled to the correct temperature, said Brian Newbacher, NASA spokesman. Despite attempting to troubleshoot, the team ran out of time during the two-hour launch window and the launch was delayed.
“This is the most powerful rocket ever built, and it will enable NASA to fly further than ever before and set the pace for space exploration for the entire world,” Mr. Newbacher said.
The rocket will employ 8.8 million pounds of thrust, he said.
And for people at home, hearing stories about members of their own community taking part in projects like this one is important to show future generations that they, too, can do this type of work, Mr. Newbacher said.
“Kristen’s a role model for any young woman or young man for that matter,” he said. “If you think it, you can do it.”
Ms. Bury emphasized the NASA Glenn Research Center’s role in the launch as well as its construction of hardware for the next generation of the rocket. She also noted that thermal testing took place at the Neil A. Armstrong Test Facility in Sandusky.
“We like to say the path to the moon goes through Ohio,” she said.
Right now, she’s in Florida, eagerly anticipating Saturday’s launch. Her parents love what she does, Ms. Bury said, and have supported her throughout the years, and her mother is with her to see the launch take place.
For any young people considering a career at NASA, Ms. Bury encouraged an abundance of science and math classes and specifically engineering. Engineering is versatile, she said, and pointed out that her degree is in chemical engineering but she was hired as an electrical engineer.
“Take advantage of those opportunities you have in school,” she said. “Just be curious. Study hard.”
First Published September 1, 2022, 7:21 p.m.
