- Monica Lee Foley,  Chief of Staff for the NASA Johnson Space Center, joined the Let’s Talk STEM with Dr. Calvin Mackie podcast and shared her incredible story: an African American woman from Baton Rouge, LA who became a rocket scientist, flight controller for the international space station, overseer of its electrical power systems and manager of U.S. and Russia negotiations on behalf of the space program. 

 As a senior leader in the space program, she is a technical integrator for human spaceflight programs and is currently applying her expertise to meet NASA’s bold mission of landing the first woman on the moon and the first humans on Mars.

 She is an avid STEM and STEAM advocate. 

“I've been at NASA for nearly 25 years,” she says during the conversation. “I started off as a flight controller for the international space station. I was there from the very beginning of the building or the assembly of the space station.  I was responsible for the electrical power systems where I earned three certifications in that area, which was unheard of at the time. I was the first human being to do so, not the first female, not the first African American, the first human to do so.”

 Monica has over two decades of low-Earth orbit human risk mitigation, operational and sustaining engineering experience.  She has executed over 3,000 hours in the Mission Control Center-Houston as an International Space Station flight controller where she specialized in the Electrical Power Systems and was the first to earn three electrical power flight controller certifications.  The purpose of space exploration, Monica says, is to better understand the universe so it can influence quality of life on earth. “That's the whole purpose and vision of NASA. That's why we're going back to the moon. That's why we're going to Mars,” she says, adding that space travel may help us improve disease treatments, grow crops with limited water and soil or create clean water.