Western Washington native is helping plan space exploration, missions

One of the most critical posts at NASA is the people who help plan exploration and planning missions.

They basically figure out how to get people into space and what to do once they get there.

It’s been a focus lately with the space agency’s plan to send people back to the moon.

One of the main people helping to do the job is from western Washington.

“It’s the job I never knew I always wanted. I’ve always wanted to work in human space flight but I really like the big picture,” said Nujoud Merancy, chief of the Exploration Mission Planning Office at Johnson Space Center.

When Merancy gets to work, the pictures and puzzles she works on are really big.

“We get to play with putting things on the moon, and so it doesn’t really get much bigger than that,” Merancy said.

Merancy is helping to forge NASA’s biggest missions, including the Artemis program that has grabbed headlines for weeks. Her dreams of space started in western Washington.

“So I was born and raised in Tumwater, Washington, a little south of where you’re at. Grew up, went to Tumwater High School. Total native Pacific Northwestern,” Merancy said.

Her degree in aerospace engineering at the University of Washington catapulted her to NASA.

“Doing human spaceflight was always what I wanted to do and then now we actually get to go to the moon is the best part of all of it,” she said.

This week was supposed to be a big one for NASA but Tropical Storm Ian forced NASA to once again reconsider the launch of Artemis 1, the test flight for missions back to the moon. It has been canceled several times.

Merancy’s office helps put missions like Artemis together from space launches to landing on the moon, setting up on the surface and returning back to Earth. She helps engineer the mission, putting pieces together while making improvements.

“We’re already looking beyond and we’re looking beyond to Mars. Because we want what we do on the moon to inform the vehicles for Mars too,” Merancy said.

To Merancy, the cancellations are just learning tools.

“The things they’re fixing for Artemis 1 will already make Artemis 2 safer and better.”

She admits Artemis is more difficult than the Apollo missions of the 1960s.

NASA is relearning how to get to the moon with 21st-century technology while also landing on a different area of the lunar surface that is harder to hit.

“We’re trying to go to the south pole on the moon because there’s more science and exploration that we can do there than on the equatorial face where Apollo went but that’s a high-performance challenge,” Merancy said.

Because Merancy is a Palestinian American, her involvement with Artemis and NASA has created publicity across the Middle East.

“I grew up reading about Apollo and everyone was a very monochromatic of persuasion,” she said.

The woman who is helping rocket people into space also loves riding motorcycles, as her Twitter page shows.

She’s not an astronaut but she is helping them reach the stars and beyond.

“We’re setting the stage for the future and it really, I’m excited that it represents humanity. I have an incredibly diverse team and they’re all really incredible good people and engineers, and we get to do this for humanity and we really look like humanity,” Merancy said.

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