ERIE, Pa.—While attention is focused on the astronauts orbiting Earth aboard the International Space Station (ISS), it’s someone down below on the ground who’s turning the lights on and off each day and making the thrusters go.
Soon, that person will be Wattsburg native Mary Lawrence.
“We get to do the real flying of the International Space Station,” she said.
The graduate of Seneca High School and Penn State Behrend was one of five new flight directors named in September to manage International Space Station operations from NASA’s Mission Control Center in Houston.
Lawrence, 36, a daughter of Patrick and Judy Good, of Wattsburg, is in training and hopes to be certified in a few months to support real-time operations as one of 27 active flight directors for NASA.
“We’re the lead of the flight control team,” she said.
NASA said its flight directors lead teams of flight controllers, research and engineering experts, and support personnel.
Once certified, Lawrence said, she'll spend some days at a console in the Christopher C. Kraft Jr. Mission Control Center at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. Her responsibilities will include making final decisions for day-to-day operations, which she said removes that burden from the astronauts.
“The majority of the control of the space station actually happens from the ground,” she said. “The reason for that is we want the astronauts to focus on the real mission of the International Space Station, which is research and science.”
NASA describes the ISS as “a microgravity laboratory in which an international crew of six people live and work while traveling at a speed of 5 miles per second, orbiting Earth every 90 minutes.”
Flight directors help ensure that the crew has what it needs to conduct scientific research providing benefits to people on Earth and preparing for long-duration exploration in deep space, NASA said in a news release.
When Lawrence isn’t at a console in Mission Control, she could be in an office planning for future support missions to the ISS, for product development or for new equipment.
He thinks her selection as a NASA flight director can be inspirational to other women and to girls.
“I think it’s fantastic,” Lasher said. “I think it’s a credit to her and a credit to our program that we’re turning out graduates like her.”
Behrend wasn’t a hard choice for Lawrence. Her father and two of her sisters attended Penn State.
“I grew up in a Penn State family,” she said.
She also liked the engineering program and small class size at the Harborcreek Township campus.
Lawrence started focusing on math and science in high school. She said she took courses at Behrend the summer before graduating from Seneca and that got her interested in engineering.
“I was a fan of the movie ‘Apollo 13’ and all things space,” she said.
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She said the appeal of space is the unknown and the exploration of it is romantic.
Good said her daughter, who played volleyball, basketball and softball in high school and volleyball in college, has a good balance in her life that likely helped her get the job at NASA.
“She has an engineering mind but she is a great communicator,” Lawrence’s mother said.
Lawrence has often told her family that if asked to go into space, she would. But she said she’s found a “home in operations” and likes the challenge of the work she’s doing on the ground.
She said that as a flight director she can help figure out things that can be done now that will help make a mission to Mars happen in the future.
“I think this is where I'll stay,” she said.
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