Pam Fusek ’13 Stoked Her Passion for Space Exploration at Lehigh and Landed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab

Her interests eventually led her to Lehigh and to Professor Terry Hart ’68, who became her advisor after she chose to minor in aeronautical engineering. Hart is a professor of practice in mechanical engineering and mechanics and, among other things, a former U.S. Air Force fighter pilot and NASA astronaut. In 1978, Hart was one of 35 applicants—out of a pool of 8,000—chosen for the astronaut program. His group included the first six women astronauts, including Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, and Kathryn Sullivan, the first American woman to walk in space. Hart’s crew logged 168 hours in orbit aboard the STS 41-C Challenger, NASA’s 11th space shuttle mission.

After NASA, he managed AT&T’s satellite system, and when he retired from the company in 2006, he joined the faculty at the Rossin College.

A Mission to the Europa Clipper

There’s a lot to look at in Hart’s office.

Like the framed photo series of his shuttle mission where he was the “rendezvous guy and the mechanical arm guy”—the pilot who captured and berthed the failed Solar Max satellite (a capsule launched in 1980 to study the sun) and operated the arm that took his spacewalking colleagues from the shuttle to the satellite for repairs. There are all the airplane models. Like the one on the windowsill he uses to show students what happens when a plane gets close to the ground (“It kind of floats.”). There’s the F-106 Delta Dart on his bookshelf, the interceptor aircraft he flew for over 1,200 hours as an Air Force fighter pilot. Below that, there’s the supersonic T-38 he flew during astronaut training. There’s a picture of the Telstar 401 satellite he launched during his civilian job, photos from space he took of the Nile River Delta, models of launch vehicles, and the blue, custom-fit helmet he wore as an astronaut, the initials “T.J.” printed in white on the back.

It’s a room full of stories. “Life lessons,” he calls them—often about how things can go wrong, how inexpensive parts can break or explode and million-dollar machines can literally fall from the sky—the kind of experiences he shares with his students because he wants them to learn and do better. He’s got stories queued up for every course, including one called Spacecraft Systems Engineering.

“It’s kind of a fun course, sort of a capstone course,” he says. “Students choose a mission they’re going to do as a team. Probably half of them do a deep space mission, but some do space communication, or asteroid defense networks, or come up with moon colonies. They detail their objectives, choose a launch vehicle, do the orbital mechanics. They have to calculate the propellant, design the satellite and antennas, and pick the electronics boxes for communication. They have to make sure it’s not too heavy. It’s all part of the process we call systems engineering. By the end of the semester, they’ve designed a spacecraft on paper.”

Rachel Sholder currently works at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in the space exploration sector doing modeling and analysis for NASA space missions. (Note: About 50 Lehigh alumni work at APL in different sectors that include air and missile defense and national health.)

Sholder has been the lead cost modeler for numerous competitive NASA proposals spanning various areas of scientific research: heliophysics, astrophysics, planetary and earth venture. This involves predicting the full cost of a future mission based on past costs for instruments and spacecraft, project management, systems engineering, testing and other areas.

She recently has tested software for NASA's first planetary defense mission and kinetic impactor, DART (the Double Asteroid Redirection Test). The DART spacecraft will crash into an asteroid to redirect its path as a technology test for future needs. She also has provided systems engineering support work as a reliability analyst looking at the potential engineering failure modes of the Europa Clipper mission, a joint effort with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

In March, Sholder will present a paper at an international aerospace conference, expanding on a presentation she previously gave at NASA's Johnson Space Center.

At Lehigh, Sholder studied mathematics as an undergraduate and statistics as a graduate student.

MOLLY HWANG ’19

Molly Hwang is a materials engineer at Lockheed Martin Space Systems in King of Prussia, Pa.

Her role includes failure analysis, material properties characterization, prohibited materials testing, materials selection, and materials development for multiple programs, mostly for re-entry applications.

In summer 2018, Hwang worked as a materials and processes engineering intern at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., working mostly on process development for additively manufactured metals, which has applications of decreasing payloads and allowing geometric complexity.

She also had the opportunity to participate in an Iacocca International Internship in Bordeaux, France, in the Laboratoire Ondes et Matière d'Aquitaine in summer 2017, working on nanoparticle self-assembly during evaporation. Her research experiences at Lehigh also involved additively manufactured metal characterization and bulk single crystal nitride synthesis, in which many skills and experiences became applicable in her current role.

Hwang studied materials science and engineering at Lehigh.

LAUREN MILLER ’18

Lauren Miller has worked for three years at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., as a part of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory Summer Internship Program, a branch of the California Institute of Technology Student-Faculty Programs.

At JPL, she studied exoplanet transmission and emission spectroscopy with Gael Roudier and Mark Swain of the Exoplanet Discovery and Science Group. She has determined the effect of non-uniform vertical mixing ratios, aerosol particle size and density, scattering phase functions, and temperature-pressure profiles on forward atmospheric models to forecast transmission and emission spectra from the James Webb Space Telescope and the Contribution to ARIEL Spectroscopy of Exoplanets, JPL’s scientific instrument contribution to the European Space Association's Atmospheric Remote-Sensing Infrared Exoplanet Large-Survey (ARIEL).

She has also contributed to the development of CERBERUS, a Bayesian retrieval scheme for efficiently applying high dimensionality model spaces to the study of exoplanet atmospheres.

Miller received her bachelor of science degree in astrophysics from Lehigh. She is currently a graduate student at San Diego State University, where she is pursuing her master of science degree in astronomy.

KRISTINA GONZALEZ ’13

Kristina Gonzalez serves as the fluids technical expert for the exploration payloads branch at NASA’s John F. Kennedy Space Center. She provides fluids engineering expertise and technical leadership for the servicing of the International Space Station payloads and orbital replacement units, supplying fluid such as breathing air, water, and ammonia for the Environmental Control and Life Support Systems on orbit.

Gonzalez also supports the Exploration Ground Systems program testing hardware that will service the Orion Crew Module thermal system for the Artemis missions. Additionally, she is the co-chair of the Kennedy Space Center’s Employee Resource Group for women, and she is the director of outreach for the Space Coast Society of Women Engineers. Gonzalez began her journey with NASA in 2012 as a student in the co-op program.

She earned her bachelor’s in mechanical engineering, with a minor in aerospace engineering from Lehigh in 2013 and her master’s in space systems management from the Florida Institute of Technology in 2018.