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By NASA
5 min read
NASA’s Modern History Makers: Sarah Tipler
Sarah Tipler poses in front of a mural of NASA astronaut Michael Anderson in Plattsburgh, New York. Credit: Sarah Tipler <back to gallery
Growing up, Sarah Tipler always felt out of place. She had trouble with time management, structuring her day, and focusing her attention, but she didn’t know why.
“For all of my undergraduate education, I really struggled to keep up despite understanding the material,” Tipler said. “It took a ton of work to make good grades happen, including asking for extensions and pulling last-minute all-nighters. I used to beat myself up for my apparent lack of self-control.”
Tipler enrolled in college after high school but withdrew after facing depression and other mental health challenges. A few years later, she took another stab at school to become a French teacher but found the career wasn’t for her. After realizing studying computer science and engineering fascinated her, she applied for a Pathways internship at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland.
“At NASA, I knew that I was working on the kinds of projects that are helping advance humanity’s knowledge of the universe and the world we live in,” she said.
It wasn’t until transitioning to a full-time computer scientist job at Glenn that she finally got some answers about herself.
“At NASA, I was feeling happy, I was in a great place in my life, and I was excited about where I was, but I was still struggling to effectively manage my workload,” she said. “That’s what led me to seek help and obtain a diagnosis of ADHD [attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder], which has really helped me understand a lot of the issues that I’ve had in my life and put a lot of things in a different perspective.”
Tipler’s colleagues provided her encouragement and a support system, and she’s now helping NASA take its next giant leap with the Artemis missions.
Tipler’s team develops code that models the power systems of the International Space Station, the Orion spacecraft, and the Power and Propulsion Element (PPE) that will help propel Gateway, NASA’s future lunar space station. This SPACE (or system power analysis for capability evaluation) code can predict how much power is generated by solar arrays and determine whether it is sufficient to support important spacecraft systems, like life support and propulsion.
For example, throughout Gateway’s journey, the solar arrays that generate power for PPE won’t always be able to face the sun and generate maximum energy.
“We need to make sure that when Gateway is using its thrusters, which require a lot of electrical power, we’ll have enough for the rest of the spacecraft,” Tipler explains.
Tipler’s team is also developing a graphical user interface that will make it easier for the Flight Operations Directorate at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston to use the code.
“It’s an incredible feeling to know that I’m some small part of that giant puzzle,” she said. “It makes all of the challenges and obstacles that I go through feel worth it when I get to sit down and look at things from the big picture.”
Learning to navigate ADHD has been a long journey, Tipler says, but her family, friends, fiancé, and five rambunctious cats have been there to cheer her up and encourage her. In addition, being able to work remotely from her home in northern New York has been critical to her success at work.
“I have found that teleworking and being fully remote has really helped with my ADHD because my focus isn’t always consistent, so this adds a lot more flexibility into my work life and has helped me be the best productive person I can be,” she said.
Ensuring open communication with coworkers and having conversations about expectations has also kept Tipler on the right track, and she has found ways to thrive.
“I think there are some really cool, unique perspectives that people living with different disabilities can bring to the workplace in the ways we think differently or work to overcome obstacles or problems,” she said.
Often, practices that help people with disabilities can be beneficial to all workers, Tipler says, such as offering written agendas and notes instead of just verbal information or being open to new workplace approaches.
“You don’t always need to know what someone is dealing with to make things better for everyone,” she said.
Tipler wants people working to overcome their own obstacles to know that they are not alone and to remind others that some disabilities, like ADHD, can seem invisible.
“Remember that you never know what someone else is going through,” she said. “The best approach is to operate with kindness.”
NASA is in a Golden Era of aeronautics and space exploration. In partnership with commercial and private businesses, NASA is currently making history with significant missions such as Artemis, Quesst, and electrified aviation. The NASA’s Modern History Makers series highlights members of NASA Glenn’s workforce who make these remarkable missions possible.
Ellen Bausback
NASA’s Glenn Research Center
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By NASA
4 min read
NASA’s Modern History Makers: Carlos Garcia-Galan
Carlos Garcia-Galan poses in front of the American flag in the Electric Propulsion and Power Laboratory at NASA’s Glenn Research Center.Credit: NASA/Bridget Caswell <back to gallery
As a little boy in Málaga, Spain, Carlos Garcia-Galan had his sights set on the Moon, Mars, and beyond.
“It’s something that called to me from the very beginning. I remember listening to the space shuttle countdowns and watching the launches on television,” said Garcia-Galan, European Service Module (ESM) Integration Office manager for NASA’s Orion program. “The entire sky would light up at night.”
Garcia-Galan wanted to be part of the team working behind the scenes to send astronauts on challenging missions to distant destinations. But there were few opportunities to work in space exploration from his home country, he said. To pursue his dreams, he’d first have to cross the Atlantic Ocean.
“Working for NASA was my only objective,” Garcia-Galan said. “My dad was a pilot, and my mom was a flight attendant. So, I had this adventure thing already, and I traveled a lot growing up because of them.”
Garcia-Galan came to America his senior year of high school as an exchange student in New Jersey, later attending the Florida Institute of Technology’s space science program. He graduated with degrees in space science and electrical engineering.
“As I was graduating with my second degree, all of my friends from the space science program had already graduated and started working in Mission Operations at NASA’s Johnson Space Center,” Garcia-Galan said. “NASA was just about to fly the first module of the International Space Station, so I was able to get a job before I finished my degree. It was great timing.”
At Johnson, Garcia-Galan worked as a flight controller for the space station, managing electrical power systems. He left NASA to broaden his knowledge by working in industry but eventually returned. Now, he works on the European Service Module — the powerhouse that provides electricity, water, oxygen, nitrogen, and propulsion to the Orion spacecraft. Proven during Artemis I, Orion will carry astronauts to the Moon and back during future Artemis missions.
The Orion crew module’s European Service Module is the spacecraft’s powerhouse, supplying it with electricity, propulsion, thermal control, air, and water in space.Credit: NASA/Amanda Stevenson Garcia-Galan manages the ESM and the team working with European counterparts to design, build, and fully integrate the mission-specific modules with their Orion spacecraft.
“It’s hard enough to build spacecraft across the United States with all the contractors; imagine doing this across different continents,” he said. “I want to make sure we’re one team.”
When the modules arrive from Europe, his team ensures that they are ready for pre-flight tests and, ultimately, the mission.
“On my team, I have engineers who represent different disciplines,” Garcia-Galan said. “The ESM is like its own spacecraft, so we have everything from propulsion to mechanisms to thermal systems. I keep the whole team synchronized and working to our full potential.”
Garcia-Galan encourages others interested in space exploration to pursue their interests, no matter where they are from.
“If you want to be part of something bigger than yourself — something that takes an entire team of people across different countries — space exploration is a great place to exercise that,” Garcia-Galan said. “We have engineers, communicators, teachers, and astronauts, and everybody is working toward the same goal. You can be part of that. Just be persistent, have a goal in mind, don’t get turned away by adversities, and you may end up here at NASA.”
NASA is in a Golden Era of aeronautics and space exploration. In partnership with commercial and private businesses, NASA is currently making history with significant missions such as Artemis, Quesst, and electrified aviation. The NASA’s Modern History Makers series highlights members of NASA Glenn’s workforce who make these remarkable missions possible.
Jacqueline Minerd
NASA’s Glenn Research Center
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By NASA
3 min read
NASA’s Modern History Makers: Abigail Rodriguez
Abigail Rodriguez poses in front of the concentrator mirror in the Electric Propulsion and Power Laboratory at NASA’s Glenn Research Center. Credits: NASA/Bridget Caswell <back to gallery
Finding a job at NASA doesn’t always happen on the first try.
For Abigail Rodriguez, she wasn’t going to let anything get in her way of working for NASA and was resilient in finding a job where she could use her civil engineering degree. Rodriguez attended multiple job fairs and applied online until she found an opportunity that was the perfect fit.
She accepted a spring internship at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and near the end of her time at Kennedy, she received a call from NASA’s Glenn Research Center offering her a summer internship in Cleveland.
“I went home for two weeks; then I was back on a plane again to come here for my summer internship,” Rodriguez said.
Home for Rodriguez is Añasco, Puerto Rico. Growing up in the public school system, she was involved with numerous extracurricular activities and always had her sights set on NASA.
“We grew up in the shuttle era, watching all the launches and landings,” Rodriguez said. “Building a space station was something as a kid you couldn’t comprehend, but it was so cool.”
Among her extracurriculars was an after-school program that promoted math and science among students grades 4 through 12.
“That’s where I got a lot of interest in going into STEM,” Rodriguez said. “We did so many interesting projects and learned the physics of everything. We were all creative minds, and it was something I really liked.”
She graduated from the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez with a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering and a master’s degree in engineering management. After four other internships with NASA, she accepted a Pathways Intership in safety and mission assurance in 2013.
A decade later, she leads safety and mission assurance for the Fission Surface Power project, which aims to design a fission power system that would provide at least 40 kilowatts of power — enough to continuously run 30 households for 10 years – and demonstrate it on the Moon.
“The farther we go away from the Sun, the more we will need to rely on innovative energy sources like nuclear,” Rodriguez said. “I’m setting the path for future projects and, hopefully, making this a lot easier for the person who comes after me.”
In her role, Rodriguez ensures the project and its technical planning are consistent with NASA’s safety and mission assurance design processes, specifications, rules, and best practices. She supervises reliability assessments, environmental impact statements, and approval processes, as well as collaborates with outside agencies like the Department of Energy and Department of Transportation.
Exposure to exciting projects like this has kept Rodriguez in the field of safety. She’s had the opportunity to work on projects ranging from an International Space Station experiment to one focused on monitoring environmental conditions in Lake Erie.
“In safety, you touch so many different areas that NASA is involved in,” Rodriguez said. “It’s intimidating, but it makes me feel proud I’m here.”
NASA is in a Golden Era of aeronautics and space exploration. In partnership with commercial and private businesses, NASA is currently making history with significant missions such as Artemis, Quesst, and electrified aviation. The NASA’s Modern History Makers series highlights members of NASA Glenn’s workforce who make these remarkable missions possible.
Jacqueline Minerd
NASA’s Glenn Research Center
Explore More
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By Space Force
U.S. Space Force Specialist 3 Dakota Desrosiers, an all-source intelligence analyst, made BMT history as the first USSF-trained Guardian to be named both the USSF Top Performer and Top Graduate.
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By USH
A NASA panel formed last year to study "unidentified aerial phenomena," commonly referred to as UFOs, held its first public meeting Wednesday ahead of hotly-anticipated report scheduled to be released in the coming months..
The 16-member body, which includes experts from fields ranging from physics to astrobiology, was tasked with examining unclassified UFO sightings and other data collected from government and commercial sectors.
David Spergel, chair of NASA’s panel on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), said Wednesday that stigma around the reporting of UAP has made the collection of data on the topic difficult. He said data collection is also “unsystematic and fragmented” across many agencies and that reported UAP sightings are often “uninformative” due to lack of quality control and data curation.
Similar to the Congressional hearings concerning the UFO/UAP phenomenon, last year, NASA's public hearing may not have provided groundbreaking revelations to those seeking confirmation of extraterrestrial life. Their findings will likely center around suggestions on how to develop better methods for collecting data on UAP events as well as the best methods for analyzing that information, but one can only wonder what they have discovered.
Well, 80 years of debunking and discrediting sightings of UFOs and now we have to believe that the current NASA and Pentagon efforts, mark a turning point for in the government's public stance on UFOs or UAP?
They say that all these UFOs/UAPs are completely unknown and they are working hard to figure out what is going on. And when they get that answer, they promise to tell us. In fact, this is an old story told to us repeatedly by a fundamentally dishonest institution which efforts are intended to erasure of UFO history in favor of the new narrative offered by the military establishment.
In the video below Richard Dolan interviews Ron James whose latest documentary, Accidental Truth, delves into current issues and analyses relating to the UFO "Disclosure" movement and one of the film's major themes is the erasure of UFO history.
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