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Aerospace Engineer at NASA

16:14 recording · AUTO · 2 speakers

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Brief overview

NASA engineer Jennifer Liu says talking to people, and documenting it, carries a career across programs.

  1. Go talk to the peopleDesigns fail on manufacturing, procurement and instrumentation details that only other teams know.
  2. Capture knowledge at three levelsPersonal notes, group meeting minutes and review boards, then systems-level documents and commented code.
  3. Career leaps can look like detoursA master's, industry, quitting engineering for the circus, then applying to NASA after COVID.
Executive Summary AI
  • Host Andres Almeida introduces Jennifer Liu, an aerospace engineer at NASA's Kennedy Space Center who worked on the Commercial Crew Program and Artemis and was previously a professional circus performer.0:00
  • Liu describes wearing many hats: aerospace engineer for Commercial Crew, mass properties representative for Boeing's Starliner, occasional work on Dragon, mechanical ground support equipment for the Launch Services Program, and the majority of her time on the Human Landing System with Marshall Space Flight Center, on the Starship variant alongside Blue Origin's Mark II.1:13
  • Her main career lesson is to go talk to the people — manufacturing, procurement, data acquisition and civil engineers — because a design that ignores welding order, bolt prices, frequency range or ASCE anchor ratings has to change anyway.3:18
  • She lays out three levels of knowledge capture: personal notes in OneNote or Word, group-level meeting minutes and review boards, and systems-level commented code plus NPRs, STDs and interface control documents, which she says she references constantly because nobody memorises standards like the 5,000 series or the NPR 8,000s.5:54
  • Artemis is the work closest to her — she has the SLS five-segment solid rocket booster and the Artemis I mission patch tattooed on her arm and named her pink-and-white GSXR Suzuki 750 Artemis — and she still performs circus a couple of times a month, applying mass properties and weight distribution to fire and circus props.11:09
Key Quote
“In fact, she has also been a professional circus performer.”
— Andres Almeida0:24
Key Quote
“Okay, my official title is aerospace engineer for the commercial crew program.”
— Jennifer Liu1:07
Key Quote
“Oh, there's always unexpected outcomes.”
— Jennifer Liu3:09