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Alyssa Saenz: From El Paso to the International Space Station

Alyssa Saenz
Growing up in El Paso, Texas, Alyssa Saenz always knew she wanted to do something with space. Now she is an MSS Task Robotics Flight Controller for the International Space Station.

“My current favorite thing about working here is knowing that I’m pressing a button here on Earth, and something in space is responding to my command,” says Alyssa Saenz, an MSS Task Robotics Flight Controller for the International Space Station (ISS).

Growing up in El Paso, Texas, Saenz always knew she wanted to do something with space. Her favorite units in science class were always about the solar system. However, she didn’t discover a love for aerospace engineering until senior year of high school, when she started looking for college programs that would put her on the path towards a career at NASA.

“I wasn’t exposed to engineering growing up,” Saenz recalls. “There weren’t a lot of engineering jobs in general at my hometown.”

Although there weren’t many examples of engineering in El Paso, Saenz was vaguely aware of another El Pasoan who had followed a STEM career and ended up at NASA: Ginger Kerrick, who became the first female Hispanic NASA flight director in 2005.

“We had gone to all the same schools because we grew up in the same area of El Paso, so I heard her name a lot,” Saenz remembers. “It made the dream of NASA a little bit more realistic.”

In order to study aerospace engineering, Saenz attended Texas A&M University and moved from El Paso to College Station, on the complete opposite side of Texas.

“I had a lot of out-of-state friends who could get home quicker than I can,” she says. “It’s not so bad now, because I’ve done it so many times.” (These days, she is usually accompanied on her 12-hour roadtrips back home by her dog, Shipley.)

The journey from college to NASA was tough. Sometimes Saenz felt like she was “the only person in the room that didn’t understand the topics or the concepts in class,” and came close to giving up her dream. Minoring in astrophysics became her way of keeping the dream alive: “Whenever my engineering classes got really overwhelming, I could go to my astronomy classes and just really nerd out.”

It took determination and perseverance for Saenz to put in extra time when she felt she didn’t understand a unit in class: “I may not be the smartest person in the room, but you can’t tell me I’m not going to be the hardest-working person in the room.”

All of that hard work paid off. While attending Texas A&M, Saenz secured an internship at Johnson Space Center in Houston, summarizing research performed on the Space Station for the general public. Her managers encouraged her to check out different parts of the ISS program, and one day brought her to Mission Control to shadow one of the flight controllers.

“That was my first time walking into Mission Control and after that day, I was like, ‘okay. Yeah. This is where I want to be. I want to do flight ops.’ And so that kind of sealed the deal.”

Saenz applied to work for contracts within the Flight Operations Directorate, and after graduating, earned a full-time position in space robotics. As an MSS Task Robotics Flight Controller, Saenz helps plan and operate robotics on the ISS: “Whether we’re designing procedures for a new payload or testing a new capability, there is always a new challenge.”

Her ultimate goal is to pass all of the certifications and oral boards necessary to be eligible to become a ROBO flight controller, which is the highest flight control certification within her group. She is also looking forward to joining future Artemis programs, and being involved with the operations behind programs like Gateway or Orion.

“It’s still surreal to me every time I drive to work,” says Saenz. “NASA is always where I wanted to end up. At a time, it seemed like such a faraway goal — especially in college when you’re struggling to even understand what’s going on in class. But it’s pretty great to actually be here now and to get to contribute in a small way to human space exploration.”

Now, Saenz doesn’t just know Kerrick as an admirer — they’re colleagues.

“It’s really crazy. Someone who I’ve always looked up to, I see now in the hallways at work and we give each other a hug.”

Through her experience, Saenz hopes that she can serve as an inspiration to somebody else in the same way that Kerrick inspired her.

“I recognize now that having someone in your community that you can watch go after their goals and their dreams, it makes the goal that much more realistic,” says Saenz. “Now I hope that I can be the same person that Ginger was to me. So somebody else can look at me and say, ‘If she could do it, so can I.'”

#Artemis

Image Credit: NASA / Bill Stafford
Text Credit: Thalia Patrinos