{"id":500675,"date":"2026-03-28T20:34:11","date_gmt":"2026-03-28T20:34:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/500675\/"},"modified":"2026-03-28T20:34:11","modified_gmt":"2026-03-28T20:34:11","slug":"the-british-engineer-with-artemis-ii-crews-lives-in-her-hands","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/500675\/","title":{"rendered":"The British engineer with Artemis II crew\u2019s lives in her hands"},"content":{"rendered":"

When the Artemis II rocket engines fire on Wednesday night, defying gravity to launch four astronauts on their way around the moon for the first time in half a century, all attention will be on the 140-decibel roar of history being made.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But Si\u00e2n Cleaver will only be half watching those giant engines become enveloped in flames as they lift the \u00a33 billion rocket off the ground.\u00a0At Florida\u2019s Kennedy Space Centre for the launch, the British engineer\u2019s attention will be set far higher, nearly at the top of the 322ft spacecraft, just below the Orion crew module housing the astronauts. There sits the European service module (ESM), a crucial part of the rocket which Cleaver, an industrial manager at Airbus, has been working on for the past eight years.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"AThe European service module at Kennedy Space CentreNASA\/Amanda Stevenson<\/p>\n

\u201cThat is the part that provides everything that the astronauts need for their journey to the moon, everything to keep them alive,\u201d said Cleaver, 36, from Chelmsford, Essex. The ESM holds the astronauts\u2019 air and water, the solar panels and batteries to power their equipment, and the thrusters which power them through space.<\/p>\n

Once the huge rocket engines have blasted the spacecraft out of Earth\u2019s atmosphere and dropped away, the astronauts\u2019 module<\/a> and ESM will fly for ten days for 685,000 miles around the moon and back.<\/p>\n

Cleaver, who has played a key role running the team which built the module, said the astronauts and their families were constantly on the minds of the engineers she works with. \u201cWe\u2019ve got these people\u2019s lives in our hands,\u201d she said. \u201cWhen you\u2019re sending humans into space, you have to be really sure that what you\u2019re delivering them is perfect.\u201d<\/p>\n

The team \u2014 150 scientists in the Airbus factory in Bremen, Germany, along with hundreds of subcontractors based in 11 European countries \u2014 first built the module for the Artemis I mission in 2022<\/a>, a successful unmanned flight around the moon. This second mission is the first time the system will carry humans, increasing the pressure on Cleaver\u2019s team.\u00a0<\/p>\n

They have also already delivered the module for Artemis III, which will go around the Earth next year to practise linking up with the moon lander, as well as for Artemis IV, which will land humans on the moon in 2028 for the first time since 1972. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe are always thinking a few years ahead and we\u2019re now focusing on the fifth and sixth European service modules. My job is to make sure that we get them delivered on time, that they do the job that they\u2019re supposed to do, that they work perfectly well.\u201d With 4,000 types of parts going into each module, logistics is everything.<\/p>\n

\"NASA'sNasa scientists are preparing for the Artemis II flight this week from FloridaEPA<\/p>\n

A team of Cleaver\u2019s colleagues will be at mission control in Houston, Texas, this week, ready to pitch in if anything goes wrong with the module. \u201cThey will be sitting at computer screens watching data come in from the spacecraft throughout the mission and hoping for a very boring time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cleaver, who has been based in Bremen since 2018, fell in love with space when she was five years old. Her parents \u2014 Joyce, a primary school teacher, and Stephen, a policeman \u2014 encouraged her passion. \u201cMy dad got really into astronomy because I was interested. They really indulged my interest \u2014 they took me to lectures at the Royal Aeronautical Society in London.\u201d At the age of eight they took her to visit the Kennedy Space Centre while on holiday in Florida \u2014 and this week they will both be back there with her to celebrate the launch.<\/p>\n

\"TwoSi\u00e2n Cleaver, left, visited Florida as a child and is now preparing for the launch of Artemis II, below PA<\/p>\n

\"SianSi\u00e2n Cleaver<\/p>\n

As a grammar school pupil at Chelmsford County High School for Girls, she thrived in her physics classes. \u201cBecause I went to an all-girls school, the idea of women being less interested in Stem [science, technology, engineering and maths] just wasn\u2019t a thing for me.\u201d But when she arrived at Durham University to study physics and astronomy, she realised her choice might have been an unusual one.<\/p>\n

\u201cI looked around and thought, \u2018Where are all the women?\u2019. There weren\u2019t so many of us.\u201d<\/p>\n

When she started her career as a graduate systems engineer at Airbus, including spells at\u00a0 Portsmouth and Stevenage, things had improved. There was a \u201csolid group\u201d of female trainees, she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But as she has progressed through her career, she has seen that women have tended to disappear from the field. \u201cI don\u2019t see so many inspirational, strong women in leadership positions in some of these aerospace companies. There are some, but not enough. I\u2019m really starting to notice that now I\u2019m mid-career \u2014 I\u2019m missing the people to look up to and be inspired by.\u201d<\/p>\n

One woman who does meet that brief is the astronaut Christina Koch<\/a>, 47, who will fly on Artemis II. An electrical engineer who holds the record for the longest continuous space flight by a woman, having spent 328 days aboard the International Space Station in 2019-2020, Koch arrived at Cape Canaveral on Friday having completed pre-flight quarantine in Houston with her fellow American astronauts Reid Wiseman, 50, and Victor Glover, 49, as well as Jeremy Hansen, 50, who is Canadian.<\/p>\n

Although she dreamed, as a small girl, of being an astronaut, Cleaver insists the Artemis programme shows that British scientists can play a role. \u201cYou don\u2019t need to despair that you\u2019re not American,\u201d she said, \u201cThere are plenty of opportunities. I really hope that it inspires people and that maybe that will ignite more involvement from the UK and maybe ultimately British astronauts of the future.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When the Artemis II rocket engines fire on Wednesday night, defying gravity to launch four astronauts on their…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":500676,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[90,416,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-500675","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-science","tag-space","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/500675","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=500675"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/500675\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/500676"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=500675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=500675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=500675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}