incredible career

JEANETTE EPPS Being an astronaut is latest chapter in incredible career

Ken Sturtz

There’s a story Jeanette Epps likes to tell when asked what sparked her interest in becoming an astronaut. She and her twin sister were about nine years old when their older brother came home from RIT for the weekend. The girls had their report cards and were excited to show him.

“He was really proud of us and he said, ‘Well you know with grades like this you could probably become an astronaut or maybe even an aerospace engineer,’” Epps says.

She thought it was impossible to become an astronaut, but an aerospace engineer seemed possible. That moment stuck with her. She says she tells the story often to remind people, especially parents, that words matter.

“And if you speak negative things into a kid’s life, they’re going to do negative things,” she says. “But if you speak positive things you never know what they’ll latch onto.”

Epps went on to become an aerospace engineer, but she never let go of her dream of being an astronaut. The dreaming, and years of hard work, eventually paid off. She’s preparing to make her first trip to space next year, including a six-month stay on the International Space Station. Epps was born in Syracuse and grew up on Kennedy Street. She and her twin sister, Janet, were the youngest of seven children. Epps says her mother married at 17 and her father moved the family from Mississippi to Syracuse. They initially prospered in Syracuse and enjoyed living in a tight-knit community. But Epps says their fortunes took a turn in the 1970s and 1980s. Her father, who worked in construction, lost several properties he owned. Her parents eventually separated, which put a burden on her mother.

“I’m sure she had to get a lot of help,” Epps says. “It was not easy.” The one constant was that her mother was adamant about the importance of education. Neither of her parents had gone to college.

Epps began thinking about her education while a student at Corcoran High School. Among the options she considered were the U.S. Military Academy, Syracuse University and a full scholarship to Colgate University. But those choices were too big or too far away for her mother, who wanted to protect Epps and her sister and didn’t want them to leave home.

“Our neighborhood was one of those neighborhoods that was really nice when she moved into it and then it turned,” she says. “So, she was really over protective of Janet and me.”

Epps and her sister applied to Le Moyne College at their mother’s urging and received full scholarships. Epps majored in physics and says Le Moyne helped prepare her to pursue a career as an aerospace engineer. She planned to do a dual degree program that included three years at Le Moyne followed by two years at an engineering school, but after undergrad she and her sister decided to attend the University of Maryland at College Park for graduate school.

When Epps and her sister moved to Maryland for graduate school, their mother moved to Maryland to be near them. Their other siblings had already grown up and moved away. Although she used to be embarrassed to tell people, Epps says graduate school required so much work and attention that it left little time for anything else and her mother’s help with everything from grocery shopping to laundry benefited Epps and her sister greatly.

She received a master’s degree and a doctorate in aerospace engineering in 1994 and 2000 respectively.

After completing her doctorate, Epps accepted a position with Ford Motor Company as a technical specialist in its scientific research laboratory. She worked on technology designed to dampen vibrations in vehicles. The work resulted in a provisional patent. She also contributed to research dealing with crash location detection and countermeasure systems. Continued on page 10

She was at an event in Florida recruiting for Ford and the man next to her happened to be recruiting for the Central Intelligence Agency.

“And we struck up a conversation and we exchanged cards and I was shocked that he called me and brought me on board,” she says. “I had no clue what I was getting into, but I knew it would be different.”

She spent seven years working as a technical intelligence officer; much of her work is classified. It opened the world up to her. In graduate school she’d worked on helicopters and smart materials, but as an aerospace engineer she could work on just about anything mechanical. At the CIA Epps did technical analysis on foreign weapons systems such as fighter aircraft, drones and missiles. It involved reverseengineering things like propulsion systems and avionics.

The CIA changed her view, especially as it related to being an astronaut. An astronaut has to possess technical skills as well as operational skills. Until she went to the CIA, Epps had mainly worked in labs. Being an astronaut requires the operational skills to handle things like a spacewalk, making repairs and conducting experiments. She says the CIA gave her that operational experience. Throughout graduate school and then working for Ford and the CIA, Epps had never completely given up on being an astronaut, but she knew it was a long shot. “I knew a lot of people in graduate school applying for the astronaut program and they weren’t getting in,” she says. “I never thought it was an option for me as an aerospace engineer.”

But when NASA began taking applications for a new astronaut class – the first since 2004 – Epps applied. She was 38 years old and she reasoned that she might not get another chance. A good friend who was an astronaut also encouraged her to apply. She made it past the initial hurdles, but after several rounds of interviews was left to wait and wonder.

In 2009, she was driving when she got a phone call from the head of the Astronaut Office. She pulled over and parked and got the news that she’d been selected as one of nine members of NASA’s new astronaut class, beating out thousands of applicants. “I was stunned, absolutely 100 percent stunned,” Epps says. “It was emotional too. I could feel the tears coming up.”

She couldn’t believe her dream had come to fruition. She called her boyfriend, her friends and her family. That night she was still trying to process the news. Her mother, who was in the hospital at the time and passed away less than a week later, was overjoyed to hear the news.

When Epps joined NASA it was an agency in transition. Its program to send humans back to the moon was canceled and its fleet of space shuttles was about to be retired. From 2011-2020, it didn’t have the ability to send astronauts to orbit and was forced to buy seats on Russian rockets.

Before becoming certified, astronaut candidates endure a roughly two-year gauntlet of intense and seemingly endless training. Candidates learn Russian, train for spacewalks and study robotics. There’s T-38 jet training, geology training and wilderness survival training. Even after being certified, Epps continued training. In 2014, she spent nine days working on the world’s only undersea research station, three miles off Key Largo and 62 feet below the surface. She’s also worked as a crew support astronaut for two expeditions and worked in mission control communications. Being an astronaut comes with many sacrifices. The days can be long and stressful. Extensive travel means time away from family. The demands can strain personal lives; divorce is not uncommon among astronauts. Epps says the challenges can be somewhat different for the men who become astronauts, especially if they’re already married.

“I got married during this whole thing and I think the sacrifice was not being able to share everything with your spouse,” she says. “I think that was one of the biggest sacrifices and not intentional sacrifices. That’s just how it worked out. Because it really is hard for someone on the outside to understand what’s going on.”

Epps subsequently divorced. At the suggestion that Jack Swigert, the lone Apollo astronaut who never married, was better able to handle the demands of training and travel, Epps agreed.

With so much training, so much to learn and so much on the line, it can become an all-consuming endeavor. Over time, however, Epps says that’s changed for her. “I’m at the point that I’ve been there so long that things are becoming routine,” she says. “The saving grace is that after having done it so many years, it becomes routine and then you can take a little bit of yourself back.”

She was preparing for a June 2018 launch to the space station on a Russian spacecraft when, six months before launch, NASA announced without explanation that it was bumping Epps and replacing her with another astronaut.

It’s not unheard of for astronauts to be pulled from missions for medical reasons, but Epps has said she didn’t have medical or family problems that would’ve kept her from going to space.

Photo courtesy of NASA Continued on page 12

The setback was difficult, but Epps says she has had a lot of good mentors who offered advice “on how to manage things and how I view things and how to see them correctly.” After years of training including logging more than 400 hours of spacewalk training in NASA’s giant neutral buoyancy pool, Epps says there wasn’t much else she could have done.

“You know I’m probably the strange one that I never thought about when I would fly,” Epps says. “I just felt like I want to be as prepared as I can and I’m just going to focus on that.”

Epps currently works in the International Space Stations Operations Branch. In 2019, she spent a week underground with a team of astronauts exploring a cave system in Europe. The experience is meant to simulate the challenges of living and working in space.

In 2020, NASA assigned Epps to the Starliner-1 mission, the first operational crewed flight of Boeing’s new spacecraft.

Boeing still needs to send its spacecraft on a successful unmanned mission to the space station and then perform a manned test mission before it can begin regular flights. During a test flight in 2019, Starliner failed to reach the space station due to several issues. A redo of that test flight was postponed last summer when valves on the

“I had no clue how much of a life change it would be and a great one, I would do it again in a heartbeat.” —Jeanette Epps

spacecraft’s pro-pulsion system became stuck. That flight is now tentatively scheduled for this March.

Epps’s flight could come as soon as early next year, depending on when Starliner is ready. She’ll launch atop an Atlas V rocket in Florida bound for the space station 250 miles up. While living on the orbiting laboratory she’ll zip around the Earth at 17,500 mph, or five miles per second, experiencing 16 sunrises and sunsets each day.

When Epps speaks to students she often repeats the story of how she was inspired to become an astronaut. She reminds them that although she knew it was an impossible dream, she never gave up. “I had no clue how much of a life change it would be and a great one,” she says. “I would do it again in a heartbeat.” SWM