NASA disasters forged career for flight chief
First woman to head Mission Control says grit, teamwork goals fueled her rise to top
Holly Ridings became a Mission Control flight director at Johnson Space Center in 2005, just as NASA officials prepared to restart human space flight after the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated upon re-entry two years prior.
Three years later, in 2008, she was awaiting the return of crew members from the International Space Station — the first mission she led as a flight director — when officials lost contact with the spacecraft. For a few agonizing minutes, everyone thought the crew was dead: No one saw them re-enter Earth’s atmosphere (the crew ended up being OK).
Even her interest in working at NASA was prompted by an accident. From her spot in the cafeteria in 1986, the then-sixth grader watched Space Shuttle Challenger explode 73 seconds after liftoff, killing the entire crew.
Ridings, who was named the first female chief flight director last month, describes these moments in tandem with the highlights of her career—each intertwined with the other.
At first it seems unusual. But spend some time with the gritty and direct 44-year-old and it begins to make a little sense: It’s the disasters, and how you respond to them, that define your character.
“My attitude is, ‘OK, let’s fix that; let’s make it better,’ ” Ridings said.
That goal-oriented outlook has carried her through childhood and into her job at the Houston center, where she has worked in the space station mission control room since 1998. And last month, it carried her into a new role: chief flight director.
Ridings is the first woman to ever hold this position — which puts her in charge of leading and shaping the
space agency’s cadre of 32 flight directors and flight directors-in-training — in NASA’s 60 year existence. Flight directors are tasked with keeping the astronauts and space station safe by leading teams of controllers, researchers, engineers and support personnel in Houston.
She’s a true trailblazer, a beacon of hope for women and young girls who want to run Mission Control one day. But don’t tell her that.
“I’m probably a reluctant role model: I’m more of the work hard, have a lot of grit and keep going kind of thing,” she said. So “I’m still figuring it out. One day I woke up and looked around and said ‘OK, I have this platform, what am I going to do with it?’ ”
A defining moment
Sitting in a conference room buried deep in the maze of hallways that make up the Christopher C. Kraft Jr. Mission Control Center — each wall plastered with more NASA memorabilia than the last — Ridings clears her throat to hide the lump that’s begun to form.
Just thinking about Jan. 28, 1986, when her 12-yearold self watched the Space Shuttle Challenger go up in a ball of flames, makes her choke up.
It was a defining moment in Ridings’ life — the day she decided human spaceflight would be her career path.
“In a strange way I loved space from that moment forward,” she recalled, saying that even then she wanted to ensure an accident like that never happened again. So, Ridings buried herself in math and science books. She went to space camp twice. And she fixed her sights on the historymaking agency.
But astronaut was never the goal. She didn’t know it at the time, but a flight controller job was tailor made for her.
“I like to build teams and relationships,” she said. “When someone says, ‘We want to go that way but we have no idea how to get there,’ well I’m the one that’s going to figure it out.”
So, Ridings attended Texas A&M University, where she majored in mechanical engineering. She brought her skills to NASA in 1998 as a flight controller for the space station, the same year NASA and its partners began to build the orbiting laboratory in low Earth orbit.
It took just seven years for Ridings to become a flight director, a coveted role that fewer than 100 individuals have held in the history of the agency.
As a flight director, individuals have to be able to make split-second decisions while holding someone’s life in their hands. A famous example is the 1970 Apollo 13 mission: Gene Kranz was in charge of an enormous team on the ground that helped bring the three astronauts home after an oxygen tank explosion forced them to abort their trip to the moon.
Only five women had held this job before her — something she didn’t really think about at the time.
“Going about your daily business, you don’t think about it very much,” Ridings said about being a woman in her role. “But you end up places — there’s enough places in the industry — where you’re in a meeting and you go ‘Oh. Wait.”
‘All super proud’
Ridings was just a teenager in Amarillo with big space dreams when Linda Ham made history in 1991 by becoming the first woman certified as a flight director.
It was a big moment for women in the space agency — even if it came three decades after the first mission control flight director, Christopher Kraft, took up his post in 1958. (Another woman, Michele Brekke, was selected as a flight director before Ridings in 1985 but was never certified).
Ham was known as an authoritative, tough leader, unafraid of making the hard decisions quickly, according to a 2004 Orlando Sentinel article. And long before she fell from grace after the 2003 Columbia accident — she was in charge of the team that investigators later determined failed to recognize possible warning signs — she paved the way for women who came to NASA after her.
Still, it took five more years for another woman, Sally Davis, to acquire the coveted flight director’s chair in 1996.
Fast forward two decades and a total of 13 women, including Ridings, have been certified by the space agency as flight directors. The most recent flight director class, announced earlier this year, has three women in it, but they have not yet been certified.
The 2018 class brings the total number of flight directors in the agency’s six decades of operation to 97 — meaning only about 16 percent have been women.
One of those women is Pooja Jesrani, a Houston native who has worked in NASA’s Mission Control for a little more than a decade.
Jesrani said she’s never felt held back by her gender at the space agency, but added that it’s a big deal to have Ridings in the top Mission Control position.
“I think it really defines that this is a possibility: that you, as a woman, can try to have this type of position,” she said. “The office is still predominantly male, but it’s just awesome to see a female at the helm. When she was selected, we were all super proud.”
It’s also helpful that Ridings is a mom and is understanding when it comes to picking kids up from daycare, Jesrani said, and having to take care of a sick kid.
Previous chief flight directors were understanding as well, Jesrani added, but there’s a special connection between mothers — “moms understand other moms and what they’re going through. It’s nice to have someone in that position we can relate to.”
Though only 16 percent of all flight directors have ever been female, Mission Control as a whole runs about 25 percent female, Ridings said. She’d like to see more women reach the leadership level she has, she added, if not higher.
So would human resources.
“NASA firmly believes that a diverse workforce is central to mission success, and strives to recruit a diverse set of applicants for all of its positions, including those in Mission Control,” Anne Roemer, acting director of Johnson’s Human Resources Office, said in a statement.
To achieve this, Roemer said NASA engineers and other officials participate in conferences, including those geared toward minorities, recruit at a wide variety of schools and do outreach at events such as the Superbowl in Houston.
Once individuals are actually working in Mission Control, Roemer said NASA offers a wide range of benefits to help employee needs: time off for family leaves for example, and part-time schedules. There also are employee resource groups geared toward different races, genders, sexual orientations and disabilities.
“Working as a Flight Director is one of NASA’s most demanding roles—having planned and trained to execute a certain mission for an extensive period of time,” Roemer said. “It requires hard work, and an extensive time commitment (shift work, etc.). That said, NASA … does what it can to support each individual’s needs to the extent practicable.”
Energy required
When Ridings dons her headset on the Mission Control room floor, a calm settles over her.
She turns off the part of her brain that struggles to corral her 7-year-old son and ignites the part capable of making unilateral, splitsecond decisions about the life and death of the space station crew.
“You end up having this sort of weird double life in your brain,” she laughed.
She has the energy for this job now, with it’s highly technical decision making and it’s unpredictable schedule that can stretch into the wee hours of the morning. But one day she won’t. One day, she’ll be exhausted, ready to put her headset in the red cloth bag embroidered with a holly — a gift from her mother — and store it in a drawer for good.
“There are people coming into the agency as leaders and they need an opportunity,” she said. “And the other thing is, it’s really hard. No one can sustain it with the right level of energy forever.”
She said she expects to stay in this role for five or so years and then move on. What she moves on to still is up in the air.
“My criteria is I need to make a difference, learn something and have fun,” she said. “I want to go somewhere where I can do those things. I love NASA and I would love to do that here.”