Reaching for the stars

Text: Miriam Hoffmeyer

Grier Wilt has been fascinated by space ever since she first looked through a telescope at the starry sky over Pennsylvania when she was five years old. Today, she prepares international astronauts for spacewalks at NASA in Houston. All crew members of the International Space Station (ISS) have to ­carry out a variety of repairs and experiments in the extravehicular area. “They move forward on handrails and work in complete darkness or blinding light while the ISS orbits the Earth at 28,000 kilometres per hour,” says Grier Wilt. “I prepare them for these tasks. We train partly virtually and partly on our model of the ISS in an indoor pool the size of a soccer pitch.” The mechanical engineer is also preparing training for the team that will land on the Moon as part of NASA’s upcoming Artemis missions and is head of operational development of a new type of lunar vehicle. Since 2022 she has also been a CapCom, one of the people who communicate with astronauts in space from Mission Control.

From 2019 to 2021, Grier Wilt was Deputy Director of NASA Operations at the Y. A. Gargarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Russia. “I think international cooperation in science and technology is extremely important because complex issues need to be considered from different perspectives,” she says. “I first realised this in Germany.” A DAAD RISE scholarship enabled the bachelor’s student from Penn State University (PSU) to complete a three-month research internship at the University of Freiburg in 2007. “It was my first longer experience abroad and I really grew from it,” she recalls. “I had lots of exciting discussions with interesting people, not just about science, but also about politics.” This experience motivated her to complete a second bachelor’s degree in International Studies at PSU, which included periods in Australia and Morocco. She then completed her master’s degree in Mech­anical Engineering at the University of Washington (UW) in Seattle – and started working for NASA in 2013.

Grier Wilt has never forgotten how the free community education programme “Saturday Science” enabled her as a child to indulge and deepen her enthusiasm for the sciences. She has been a volunteer for many years, helping to get children and young people interested in science and technology. She was a mentor for girls and regularly gives talks in schools, for example. She herself is still aiming higher: her application process to become an astronaut is underway. —

Learn more about Grier Wilt’s work as a NASA instructor.

Read the interview with Grier Wilt