The Life Scientific: Ginger Kerrick

Thank you so much.

Ginger, you've been involved in human spaceflight from the shuttle era right through to early planning for the Artemis and Mars missions.

What would you say are the biggest scientific shifts you've seen over that time? Has anything come in and just completely blown up the status quo?

Well, we

don't like to

use the word blown up in human space.

But I would say when SpaceX came onto the scene shortly after we retired the space shuttle and they had an idea of reusing their rockets.

And at first it didn't look like it was going to work, but eventually they were able to land those on a barge and reuse them.

And that saves almost 70% of the costs of a launch.

So that was game changing.

I mentioned your time in Russia, and we're going to come to that in a moment.

But your work there during the 1990s earned you a prestigious NASA Silver Snoopy Award for outstanding contributions to mission success.

For any listeners who might not know, can you explain how Snoopy, the lovable dog in the Peanuts cartoon, is connected to NASA?

Yes, I was always a fan of Snoopy growing up, but I also knew that in the 1960s, NASA had adopted Snoopy as its safety mascot.

Snoopy even flew on one of the early Apollo missions and orbited the moon.

So when I realized I was getting this award, which is only awarded to 1% of NASA's workforce, I thought, wow, this is a dream come true.

It's a tiny little Snoopy lapel badge that you wear, isn't it? It's very unassuming.

I have it up here in my office on my wall so I can look at it every day.