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By Jim Cawley
NASA’s Kennedy Space Center
The decision as to whether Torey Long would share the experience of viewing the historic March 2, 2019, SpaceX Demo-1 launch from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center with her family first required an important vote. A targeted 2:49 a.m. liftoff from Launch Complex 39A meant waking her children — ages 7, 5 and 2 — in the middle of the night.
“I put it to my kids the night before, ‘If any of you want to go, I’ll take you,’” Long said. “And JW, my oldest, was my only taker.”
As the Launch Vehicle Materials and Processes system manager supporting the Commercial Crew Program (CCP) at Kennedy, Long spent plenty of time working on Demo-1, the first commercially-built and operated American crew spacecraft and rocket to launch from American soil on a mission to the International Space Station. Watching the uncrewed Dragon spacecraft liftoff aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy property with her son offered an entirely different perspective.
“Being able to share that with him and experience it in a different way … it was just such a moment,” Long said. “He got to see what Mom does and why it’s important — the ‘why’ behind it all.
“Such a big part of my life goes into the launch vehicle; that’s the part for me that I’m watching and cheering.”
Long’s current responsibilities include working on NASA certification of all the materials and processes for the launch vehicles used by the agency’s commercial partners, Boeing and SpaceX. She reviews designs and certification products, verifying they meet the intent of the NASA standard for materials and processes.
“Having dedicated people willing to support a program — willing to sacrifice to support the program — is big, and Torey is a great example of that,” said Scott Colloredo, deputy director of Engineering at Kennedy. “You immediately know that she is very professional, gets her job done, and she has a really technically complex job to do.”
Long graduated from Auburn University with a degree in materials engineering, then earned her master’s in materials and science engineering from the University of Florida. These fields of study were sparked by a high school summer program that included a scanning electron microscope.
“And I was like, ‘whatever I need to do in life to end up working one of those, I want to do,’” she said.
Long started at Kennedy as a co-op student in 2002 and became full-time at the spaceport in 2007. She worked in the Failure Analysis Laboratory, on different failures and investigations, in the Space Shuttle Program. After shuttle ended, she worked payload design, including NASA’s Vegetable Production System (Veggie) and the Advanced Plant Habitat (APH), where she was materials and processes discipline lead. Her team fabricated the Composite Growth Chamber in the prototype shop.
Long’s first experience in CCP was as a Dragon subsystem manager, before moving into the system manager role. For her, coming out of a lab and moving into more design and certification work was a “natural progression of a skillset.” She continues to do important work with Boeing and SpaceX, both of which are targeting crewed launches from Kennedy this year.
“It’s fun working with innovative companies,” Long said. “We encounter new challenges that we get to work on every day.”
Each challenge that Long and her commercial crew coworkers overcome brings the program one step closer to a major milestone.
“It’s inspiring to get to where we’re going to launch people again from here — that’s the biggest aspect of it is, ‘wow, we are so close to the finish line; we are so close,’ Long said. “And being involved in that from years ago to now is the most exciting part.”