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HOUSTON, TX — NASA on July 10 announced its 2018 class of flight directors, which includes Indian American Pooja Jesrani, who will lead mission control for a variety of new operations at the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.
The six-person class, in addition to Jesrani, includes Marcos Flores, Allison Bolinger, Adi Boulos, Rebecca Wingfield and Paul Konyha.
Jesrani was born in England but immigrated to Houston during childhood. She began interning with United Space Alliance before graduating from The University of Texas at Austin with a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering in 2007.
In her work with the alliance and later NASA, Jesrani has supported the space station flight control team in many positions, including managing the life support and motion control systems, and then as a capsule communicator, speaking directly with the astronauts in space.
Recently, she has been working to integrate mission operations for upcoming commercial crew flights.
The new flight directors will begin extensive training on flight control and vehicle systems, as well as operational leadership and risk management, before they are ready to sit behind the flight director console in mission control supporting NASA’s astronauts, NASA said in a news release.
When they do, they will become part of a group that numbers fewer than 100.
This class will bring the total number of flight directors the agency has had to 97 since Christopher Kraft became the first flight director in 1958, according to NASA.
Joining the 26 active flight directors currently guiding mission control, this group will have the opportunity to oversee a variety of human spaceflight missions involving the International Space Station, including integrating American-made commercial crew spacecraft into the fleet of vehicles servicing the orbiting laboratory, as well as Orion spacecraft missions to the Moon and beyond.
As flight directors, they will head teams of flight controllers, research and engineering experts, and support personnel around the world and make the real-time decisions critical to keeping NASA astronauts safe in space.