An Oklahoma native, McKinney earned her bachelor’s at the University of Tulsa, where she studied physics and applied mathematics. She had initially expected to pursue astrophysics, but a summer research internship at the University of Colorado at Boulder introduced her to plasma physics through a project involving dusty plasmas in the lunar environment.
“I thought it was an incredibly interesting problem,” she says.
At MIT, McKinney has developed a small reactor that can convert carbon dioxide into oxygen and other products. The challenge now is separating out the oxygen before it recombines.
“We can actually perform the conversion step really well,” she says. “But what happens in a plasma is we convert it, and then we get a mixture that needs to be separated.”
Her current work pairs the plasma reactor with an oxygen-selective membrane designed to extract oxygen rapidly. The integration process isn’t well-understood, leaving McKinney and her colleagues with questions about how the reactive plasma environment will affect the membrane.
“We are not entirely sure what we will see,” she says.
For McKinney, the possibility of connecting laboratory experiments to future human missions is what makes the work particularly rewarding.
“I get to work in a really cool lab and develop exciting experiments,” she says. “I get ownership over an entire experimental system, and then I get to connect that to performance requirements for a future Mars system. That’s just the dream.”
That same philosophy has shaped McKinney’s work beyond her thesis. Through MIT’s Space Resources Workshop, she has participated in NASA competitions focused on sustaining humans in space. Her first competition involved designing a self-sustaining Mars mission for 10 years.
“I had no clue what was going on,” she says. “I didn’t know anything about space systems. So, my mentality was, let me jump in and learn.”
She later co-led MIT’s CERBERUZ team for NASA’s LunaRecycle Challenge, which asked teams to develop ways to recycle waste on missions to the moon and deep space. The MIT team recently won first prize in Phase 2, receiving $775,000 in awards for a system that grinds mixed trash into powder that can be reused via injection molding to make spare parts and 3D-printing filament.
Another project McKinney enjoyed brought together engineers and architects through MAS.S66/4.154/16.89 (Space Architecture) to tackle a different problem: how to protect lunar habitats from radiation using only resources available on the moon. The students’ solution was to produce cast bricks from lunar regolith that could be stacked without mortar or another binder. For McKinney, the project demonstrated the value of bringing together people with different expertise.
“The kinds of innovative solutions that can be discovered when you work on a team that brings together different expertise and experiences was one of the project’s major takeaways,” she says.