Pursuing a Dream of Working for NASA

Lindsey Waitt grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts, dreaming of working for NASA. In middle school in the late 1990s, she met NASA astronauts Michael Lopez-Alegria and Albert Sacco Jr. during a visit to Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), where Sacco was a former professor. They recounted spaceflight experiences, including an experiment on growing cells on the Moon, and she posed for a picture and got autographs—an encounter that left a lasting impression.

Her passion led her back to WPI, where she studied engineering and absorbed different disciplines. She earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering with a concentration in aerospace engineering. After graduation, she worked as a systems engineer on radar flight test missions for a defense contractor, but realized it wasn't the aerospace engineering she desired. "It was an exciting program, and it was meaningful to be a part of a project focused on protecting the country from enemy attacks. But it wasn't space," she said. As the wife of a retired sergeant first class in the U.S. Army, she traveled around the world during her husband's enlistment while continuing to follow NASA missions. While raising her three young boys, she simultaneously pursued a master's degree in Space Operations from the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs. Twelve years later, she made the courageous decision to fully return to her first career passion—working for NASA—despite nay-sayers suggesting too much time had passed.

In 2020, Waitt vividly remembers watching NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken launch on the agency's first commercial crew mission to the International Space Station. She set up a rocket-shaped tent and pretended to blast off from her yard with her children. After moving to Florida in 2022 to work at a small satellite company in Cape Canaveral as a systems engineer and program manager, she continued searching for opportunities to work for NASA. She also watched Artemis I with her family. Now, as a NASA test project engineer with the Artemis launch team, she is an integral part of the missions that will enable humans to return to the surface of the Moon, launching from NASA's Kennedy Space Center.