Ohio native has an out-of-this-world job with NASA
LANCASTER − Allison Bolinger’s job is out of this world − literally.
She is a flight director for NASA and does a lot of work with the International Space Station (ISS).
“It’s been busy,” Bolinger said of her career. “It’s been a lot of fun.”
One of the more famous NASA flight directors is Gene Kranz, who led Apollo 13’s return to earth in 1970 after an inflight explosion. Ed Harris played his part in the movie “Apollo 13” in 1995 and that is Bolinger’s role with NASA.
She started her NASA career in 2001 as an intern and took her current position in 2018.
“I’ve been in charge of two different cargo missions over the years,” Bolinger said. “One of the highlights is I was what they call a lead increment flight director over increment 65, which was a time frame of April until October of 2021. During that six-month period I was in charge of basically all the day-to-day operations on board the space station.”
During those six months there was a Spacex mission coming up with two
sets of solar arrays for the space station.
“So we had to do two different spacewalks during that timeframe to install those new solar arrays,” Bolinger said.
She said that was an example of the tight time constraints NASA must deal
with to complete various mission objectives.
Bolinger, whose father is Fairfield County Treasurer Jim Bahnsen, is currently working on the Boeing Starliner mission.
“We’re scheduled to launch May 1 of this year,” she said. “And we’ll launch two astronauts, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore. They’ll launch up to the space station and spend about eight days up there. The big deal with this mission is it’s the first crewed test flight of the Boeing Starliner.”
NASA also wants to send astronauts to the moon in the coming years. Bolinger said she’ll probably be a part of those missions also.
Bolinger is a 1999 Lancaster High School graduate and said her math, science and calculus classes there helped her prepare for her NASA career.
She earned her bachelor’s degree from Purdue University in aerospace engineering in 2004. She then became a full-time NASA employee and worked with spacewalks, including serving as lead spacewalk flight controller for the space shuttle Endeavor’s last mission.
Bolinger went on to become deputy chief of the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory that trains spacewalkers and managed its daily operations before becoming a flight director. jbarron@gannett.com 740-681-4340
Twitter/x: @Jeffdbarron