This week, I had the honor of meeting with NASA’s Sabrina Thompson, an Aerospace Engineer at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and an artist who founded the Girl in Space Club.
As an Aerospace engineer, Ms. Thompson works in Maryland at the NASA GSFC as a Flight Dynamics Lead Analyst. After getting her degree at SUNY Stony Brook, she interned as a test engineer, which led to her understanding of her interest in working on complex systems. This led her to get a master’s degree in aerospace engineering at Georgia Tech. With a master’s in aerospace engineering, Ms Thompson interned at NASA, leading her to visit the Kennedy Space Center, the Johnson Space Center, the Ames Research Center, and even the Space X launch site during the summer. With this newfound love for using her physics and math skills at the NASA Space Academy, Ms. Thompson landed a job at NASA 6 months later.
Despite being a pioneer in flight dynamics, Sabrina Thompson told me about her brand, Girl in Space Club. For someone who has worked on many NASA missions behind the scenes, it was quite interesting to hear about her fashion brand, which uses her knowledge of aeronautics to create flight and space suits for female astronauts. Besides being extremely innovative, Ms. Thompson’s aeronautics designs have had a more significant impact than just the space missions themselves by helping space suits be more accessible and what she calls “user-friendly” through a new design, including a “lavatory hatch.”
When asked about the development of the space suit, she explained the work she has done with other female entrepreneurs and women with experience in her field. She even noted the feature on CNBC highlighting her journey of creating a suit while working at NASA and the feature her suit received in an edition of National Geographic.
Not only was it a privilege to meet with an influential woman in the fields of astrophysics and aerospace engineering, but it was inspiring to hear about how her impact has moved beyond her job and into a creative aspect that has started to change many space mission journeys.
In Orbit 