As a little girl, Laila Rahmatian Alieh’s eyes gazed skyward toward the bright stars with big plans of one day reaching them — literally. Growing up in Houston, Texas, with Johnson’s Space Center practically in her backyard, Laila dreamed of becoming an astronaut ever since she was in third grade. That dream finally came to fruition in 2008 when Alieh began working at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, as an intern and later a co-op engineer. She joined the team around the time NASA started the Constellation program, which focused on going back to the moon after the Shuttle program.
