\n\t\t\t\tA collection of features and graduate profiles covering Harvard\u2019s 375th Commencement.\t\t\t<\/p>\n
On any given day in the past year, Grier Wilt may have been, quietly,\u00a0the most interesting person in Cambridge.<\/p>\n
Not yet 40, Wilt has worked and studied on four continents. By now she\u2019s an advanced speaker of French and Russian, and currently studying Arabic and Japanese. She\u2019s certified as both a private pilot and an open-sea diver, with degrees or coursework in mechanical engineering, national security, business, and ethnomusicology.<\/p>\n
And weeks after Wilt receives her latest diploma \u2014 her master\u2019s in public administration, following a whirlwind year at the Harvard Kennedy School \u2014 she\u2019ll resume the life-or-death responsibilities she holds at NASA: as a capsule communicator, spacewalk flight controller, and astronaut instructor.<\/p>\n
You\u2019d never know it, her teachers note.<\/p>\n
Kessely Hong, who taught Wilt in a class last fall on negotiations, will remember her as \u201cincredible \u2026 insightful and generous\u201d \u2014 and, for a lifelong space obsessive \u2014 \u201cvery down to earth.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cShe\u2019s just an amazing human with an amazing background,\u201d agreed Eric Rosenbach, who taught Wilt in a survey course on emerging technologies this spring. \u201cAnd she has this humility, despite all that, that\u2019s unusual at Harvard.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wilt says she\u2019s just following through on a childhood commitment. Seeing a comet in the skies over her Central Pennsylvania hometown, she asked her father how she could go.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe said, \u2018Become an astronaut,\u2019 probably not thinking anything of it,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd I was like, \u2018Oh, OK. Now I know what I\u2019m doing for the rest of my life.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Wilt\u2019s neighbors still remember her as their town\u2019s \u201cspace girl.\u201d She realized only recently that her first contact with NASA came when she was just 7, when she participated in monthly science classes it funded. A first-generation college student, her first official NASA job was a 2004 internship.<\/p>\n
Taking a year off to study public administration just as human space exploration is reaching new heights, Wilt admitted, may not \u201cseem like a very logical step.\u201d<\/p>\n
But as Wilt\u2019s responsibilities have grown, she\u2019s realized there\u2019s more to NASA\u2019s work than rocket science. \u201cWe\u2019re working in teams, we\u2019re working internationally,\u201d she said. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of decision-making, a lot of leadership involved.\u201d<\/p>\n
Every launch, for example, involves a difficult negotiation. To reach escape velocity, a spacecraft must strike a delicate balance between its thrust \u2014\u00a0the power of its engines \u2014 and the weight of what\u2019s on board.<\/p>\n
Inevitably, she said, that means all of the various teams at NASA \u2014 among them human health, engineering, safety, and operations \u2014 \u201chave to give up something\u201d they had hoped to include to ensure the overall safety or functionality of the final vessel.<\/p>\n
Classes like Hong\u2019s gave Wilt a new perspective on how to read \u201cthe different positions, the overlapping interests \u2026 how you can come to a consensus collaboratively.\u201d<\/p>\n
For over a decade Wilt\u2019s primary NASA role has been as an EVA flight controller and instructor: in short, preparing astronauts for spacewalks. While a given \u201cExtra-Vehicular Activity\u201d is inevitably limited in duration \u2014 spacesuits hold only 6\u00bd hours of oxygen\u00a0\u2014 Wilt said her preparation for each one can take as long as two years.<\/p>\n
She guides astronauts through their tasks, both in \u201cneutral-buoyancy\u201d underwater rehearsals and in virtual reality. The job involves both rote learning and creativity: imagining surprises, including worst-case scenarios. \u201cYou\u2019re planning down to every single operation. What happens if a bolt breaks, or if it\u2019s not turning? What contingencies, what tools do you want to have in place?\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Unsurprisingly, another favorite course this year was \u201cThinking Analytically,\u201d taught by Dan Levy.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s about what to do when you don\u2019t have all the information \u2014 and how to think probabilistically.\u201d<\/p>\n
Grier Wilt<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s about what to do when you don\u2019t have all the information \u2014 and how to think probabilistically,\u201d Wilt said. \u201cIt gave me a different framework to look at the things that I was already doing, and to be more comprehensive.\u201d<\/p>\n
Finally, her work has come to require precise communications. Wilt became a \u201ccapsule communicator,\u201d or CAPCOM, in 2022. In that seat, she serves as the intermediary between a crew in space and mission control at the Johnson Space Center. \u201cIf you\u2019ve heard the expression, \u2018Houston, we have a problem\u2019? My call sign is Houston,\u201d Wilt said with a smile.<\/p>\n
When she got the job, she remembers a veteran colleague telling her, \u201cYou have to be a sponge\u201d: keeping earthbound anxieties from affecting the astronauts, and vice-versa, \u201cjust absorbing the emotion,\u201d and passing along information only when it is practical.<\/p>\n
The Midcareer M.P.A. aims to build up just that kind of intangible capability, said Hong, who also serves as its faculty chair.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs people rise to higher and higher positions of leadership, it becomes important to go beyond the technical skills \u2014 to understand what\u2019s motivating people, to integrate competing priorities, to move forward with everyone\u2019s full support.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wilt admits she occasionally felt some \u201cinternal conflict\u201d sitting next to classmates who run Indian police forces or fight famine in the Horn of Africa, \u201cworking on these really important humanitarian issues.\u201d<\/p>\n
But she came away recommitted to her path: not just as a source of knowledge but as a common cause for a divided planet.<\/p>\n
Ambitious space exploration has typically been motivated by great-power competition \u2014 Wilt noted that it is no coincidence that the Artemis program coincides with the Chinese National Space Administration\u2019s own moon mission.<\/p>\n
But at Harvard she was impressed anew by a mission\u2019s tendency to escape the terrestrial conflicts that motivated it.<\/p>\n
As classmates expressed their fondness for her employer, Wilt said, she \u201crealized how much soft power NASA still has abroad. To them, it\u2019s not just the U.S. doing something, it\u2019s, like, humanity \u2026 It made me proud to work there.\u201d<\/p>\n
If it weren\u2019t for her enrollment at the Kennedy School, Wilt might have been a supporting CAPCOM during the recent Artemis II mission, bearing four astronauts she helped train. She didn\u2019t even use a pass to observe the April 1 launch in Florida \u2014 she had class.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a little bittersweet,\u201d she said, to miss out on the first crewed flight to the moon since 1972.<\/p>\n
But some 1,100 miles north of the Kennedy Space Center, she and Rosenbach arranged the next-best thing on JFK Street: a launch-night watch party during the middle of his course\u2019s unit on space.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere were, like, 40 students who showed up in their own time, on a Wednesday night,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd Grier walked us through everything that the astronauts, and that NASA, were doing and thinking \u2026 It was one of those totally iconic Kennedy School moments.\u201d<\/p>\n
After Commencement, Wilt will have a rare break \u2014\u00a0one she may use to visit the far-flung friends she made in the past year.<\/p>\n
She\u2019ll also take a couple of weeks, she said, \u201cto let it all settle in, to reflect.\u201d She expects to be back in Houston by early July, where the lengthy preparations for future Artemis missions are already underway.<\/p>\n
With Artemis IV set to include a crewed return to the moon as early as 2028, Wilt is overseeing a U.S.-Japan effort to develop a pressurized rover to facilitate the first long-distance travel on the lunar surface.<\/p>\n
Her growing responsibilities leave little free time for Wilt to fulfill her original childhood dream: to go to space herself (though she hasn\u2019t given up on the idea).<\/p>\n
Rosenbach concluded that it would be unwise to set any limits on Wilt\u2019s future trajectory.<\/p>\n
\u201cI know she\u2019d like to be up there on a spacewalk herself,\u00a0and she could certainly do that,\u201d he said. But when he looks at his student from NASA, he comes away \u201calmost certain\u201d that she\u2019ll end up running the place.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A collection of features and graduate profiles covering Harvard\u2019s 375th Commencement. On any given day in the past…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":461021,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[61,60,82,247,163910,2055],"class_list":["post-461020","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-science","tag-space","tag-space-astronomy","tag-students"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/461020","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=461020"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/461020\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/461021"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=461020"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=461020"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=461020"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}