![\"Diamond](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/diamond-i-am-artemis-preview.jpg\")
<\/p>\nListen to this audio excerpt from Diamond St. John, engineer working on the Artemis III heat shield for the Orion Program at Lockheed Martin:<\/p>\n
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For four-generations, Diamond St. John\u2019s family has been supporting human spaceflight at NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Now, she\u2019s continuing the family legacy that reaches back to Apollo \u2014helping return humanity to the Moon with the agency\u2019s Artemis campaign.<\/p>\n
St. John is an engineer with Lockheed Martin supporting Orion, NASA\u2019s spacecraft built to carry crew to the Moon and return them safely to Earth on Artemis missions. She specializes in the production of Orion\u2019s heat shield at Lockheed\u2019s Spacecraft, Test, Assembly and Resource Center, in Titusville, Florida. As one of the most important elements of the spacecraft, the heat shield is responsible for protecting the astronauts from the nearly 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit temperatures as they re-enter Earth\u2019s atmosphere at the end of the mission.<\/p>\n
From start to finish, St. John is responsible for establishing a production workflow for the Orion heat shield \u2014 the largest of its kind in the world \u2014 and ensures each step is executed in the correct order along the way.<\/p>\n
Her team recognizes the criticality of their work and knows that their mission is to make sure astronauts come home safe. When it comes to quality of production, St. John embraces that mindset.<\/p>\n
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Diamond St. John<\/p>\n
Engineer on the Orion Program with Lockheed Martin<\/p>\n
St. John and her team are working on the Orion heat shield for the Artemis III mission that will land astronauts on the lunar surface. The team is in the process of bonding 186 tiles made of a material called Avcoat to the heat shield\u2019s underlying structure. \u201cOnce we start bonding operations, we first sand the blocks, to make sure that we minimize any gaps between them. Then we get into bonding, and we fill the gaps, and we test. After that\u2019s complete, we then paint and tape the heat shield.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Diamond St. John<\/p>\n
Engineer on the Orion Program with Lockheed Martin<\/p>\n
Though she is currently working on the heat shield for Artemis III, her journey with Orion began with the Artemis I spacecraft. St. John started on the clean room floor as a technician intern with subcontractor ASRC Federal. She then moved into a full-time role with the company for four years in quality inspection while earning her bachelor\u2019s degree in engineering. After that, St. John joined Lockheed Martin as a manufacturing engineer.<\/p>\n
\u201cEverything has been Artemis from the beginning,\u201d she said, in reflection of her career. \u201cKnowing that my great grandparents worked on the Apollo missions \u2014 it\u2019s cool to follow down that same path. I think they would be pretty proud.\u201d<\/p>\n