MAKING HEAVENLY DECISIONS
GRADUATE IS AT THE WHEELS OF NEW NASA PATHWAYS TO THE MOON, MARS BY [ Megan TRUSDELL ]
Simone Hutchinson and husband, James Hutchinson III, and their two sons, James Hutchinson IV and Jaxson Hutchinson visit the Tallahassee campus.
As a teenager in Fort Myers, Florida, Simone Hutchinson could see tiny plumes of smoke in the distant skies when space shuttles launched on the opposite side of the state from Cape Canaveral.
Hutchison’s role at NASA is the Gateway resource integrator, responsibilities include program planning, budgeting and execution, monthly and quarterly processes. CREDIT: SIMONE HUTCHINSON
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Thoughts of working at Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston and NASA, and trying to get people back to the moon, however, were even more distant. Yet, through a Florida A&M University (FAMU) connection and a bit of serendipity, Hutchinson has become key in building “The Gateway,” an orbital platform - think mini version of the space station- that is part of Artemis, the project working to return humans to the lunar surface, a feat last achieved via Apollo 17 in 1972. “I am excited that Gateway will be the orbiting lunar outpost and will be a part of taking humans back to the Moon,” said Hutchinson, who is the Gateway resource integrator. “It will be a testbed for technologies that will eventually be used when humans journey on to Mars.” As the Gateway resource integrator, her responsibilities include program planning, budgeting and execution, monthly and quarterly reporting processes, phasing plan development, and coordination of resources across nine NASA centers. “I have always been a person who loves math and numbers,” she said. “That love of numbers now allows me to look at budgets without bias, perform excellent analysis of resource performance, and provide fiscal advice to the technical community when hard decisions need to be made.”
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The Gateway program has about 300 civil servants and a budget of $700 million. “We all share in essentially getting people to outer space,” Hutchinson added. “There are the technical people who build the rockets and make sure they are safely putting them into space — bioastronautics, ‘what does outer space do to us.’ As a resource person, it’s our job to manage the money we get.”
Her Journey was Launched Via U.S. Army
Hutchinson, the third of four children, was born in Landstuhl, Germany. Her father, Nathaniel Bonner, was in the Army and stationed at Ramstein Air Base. When Bonner retired in 1993, he moved the family back to his hometown of Fort Myers, where Hutchinson attended middle and Bonner High School, from which she graduated in 2004. “It was a little challenging to find those who you might call your ‘forever friends,’ because you’re all always changing,” Hutchinson says about military brat life. “I think, ultimately, it set me up to being able to adapt and deal with change because I was constantly enduring it every three or four years until age 12.” Hutchinson initially wanted to be a teacher. After working in an afterschool program for several years,
