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APRIL 2015
AEROSPACETESTINGINTERNATIONAL.COMz Interview: Julie Kramer White
I
n December 2014, President Obama
stood up and gave a briefing to
praise the work of the NASA Orion
spacecraft chief engineer. He even joked
that he might hitch a ride to Mars
himself one day. The chief test engineer
was Julie Kramer White, a woman who
is utterly dedicated to her work.
Obama said at the time, “Although
everybody here is doing remarkable
work, let’s face it, usually what we do
isn’t rocket science – unless it is. So Julie
Kramer White is helping America launch
a new era of space exploration. Julie is
NASA’s chief engineer for Orion, the new
spacecraft that could carry humans
further into space than we’ve ever seen
before. I’m sure you were all as proud as I
was to see Orion’s first successful flight
test. America was already the first nation
to land a rover on Mars; when an
American is the first human to set foot
there, we’ll have Julie and her team to
thank. And at that point, I’ll be out of the
presidency and I might hitch a ride. So
thank you Julie for your great work.”
High praise indeed, and well deserved.
Even prior to launch, as Orion was
slowly rolled out of the hangar toward
the launch pad a month before the
President’s words, Kramer White was
reported to have gushed: “Oh man,
that’s awesome. Me and my 3,
closest friends did that... it’s kind of
like sending your kid down the aisle.”DECEMBER 2014
It was on December 5, 2014, that
Orion launched atop a Delta IV Heavy
rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force
Station’s Space Launch Complex Flight
Test on the Orion Flight Test: a two-Feted by President Obama and lauded across the space world, Julie
Kramer White is dedicated to her leading role as chief engineer on the
Orion space program. Her accomplishments have helped put NASA
back on the map for deep space travelBY CHRISTOPHER HOUNSFIELDThe Orion
lady
OPPOSITE: Orion
chief engineer Julie
Kramer White waits
for the parachute
sequence to start
after Orion
re-entered the
atmosphere. The
Orion spacecraft
orbited Earth twice,
reaching an altitude
of 3,600 miles
above Earth
before landing
orbit, four-hour flight that tested many
of the systems most critical to the
safety of the craft for any future
missions. It was a huge success.
The Orion flight test evaluated
launch and high-speed re-entry
systems such as avionics, attitude
control, parachutes and the heat shield.
In the future, Orion will launch
on NASA’s new heavy-lift rocket, the
Space Launch System (SLS), which is
still under development. More
powerful than any rocket ever built,
SLS will be capable of sending humans
to deep space destinations such as an
asteroid and eventually Mars.
Exploration Mission-1 (EM-1) will
be the first mission to integrate Orion
and the Space Launch System.
Johnson Space Center, where
Kramer first arrived aged 19, has had a
hard decade and has an unsure future.
The loss of Space Shuttle Columbia in
2003 shook the USA’s faith in human
spaceflight. Seven years later, Obama
canceled Constellation, NASA’s
troubled exploration program, and
finally, in 2011, the shuttles stopped
flying entirely. The Orion and SLS
program have reignited an otherwise
empty space program, and Kramer has
been at the heart since the beginning.CHIEF TEST ENGINEER
Although Kramer really is the senior
person who built Orion (along with
others) and chief engineer across the
whole program, she is insistent about
her title: Orion MPCV, multipurpose
crew vehicle program chief engineer.
Kramer hails from Indiana and
attended Purdue University, andaccording to her biography, it was she
who owned and treasured her toolbox;
she was the one asked to fix the washer
or whatever was broken. So, when
strong academic talent in math and
science became apparent, she was a
natural recruit for efforts focused on
bringing more girls into math and
science fields during the 1970s.
Although engineering interested
Kramer, she knew she didn’t want to
design washing machines. Instead it
was the challenge of spaceflight that
appealed to her – and she set her sights
on NASA. At the age of 19, she arrived
at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in
Houston, home of the engineers who
designed Apollo and the space shuttle.
As a cooperative education student, she
began to learn what it took to fly
humans in space. It became her career
and her passion. During her 25 years
working on the space shuttle, she
learned a lot about engineering,
spacecraft, and ultimately how NASA
made human spaceflight look a lot
easier than it actually was. But it was
the space shuttle that forged her path.
“After the Columbia accident,
I worked with the recovery team
because of my familiarity with the
airframe. I went out in the field and
then went to the Kennedy Space Center
for about four months during the
reconstruction and worked on failure
analysis. So I led a big team of folks
from across the agency that were doing
all the destructive failure analysis to
the airframe and looking to support
the NASA side of the investigation.
After that was all said and done I went
on maternity leave, then came back