From New York’s projects to Nasa: aerospace engineer Dr Aprille Joy Ericsson on her journey
The high-achiever has had her eyes on the stars since high school. She talks about how athletics helped her become all-rounded and gave her the confidence to work in a male-dominated field
No fool I was born on April 1, 1963 – April Fool’s Day. I grew up in the projects in Brooklyn, New York. I went to school locally, in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighbourhood, until I was five and then entered into a busing programme, which sent me across Brooklyn to PS (Public School) 199 elementary. I did extremely well, especially in maths, science and reading, but it was a long commute every day.
I loved staying with my grandparents in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and wanted to go to school there, but Mom said I could go only if I got a scholarship to a private school, which I did. I ended up going to Cambridge School in Massachusetts – an even longer commute; 90 minutes from my grandparents’ house to school every day. It was a small school on a beautiful campus in the woods and we had creative professionals – photographers, artists, sculptors – who taught there, so I also developed an artistic side.
I was very athletic. I had a school friend who became a famous basketball player, Patrick Ewing. We grew up together and played at the rec centre. I shot pool. I found out later that was a good way to learn physics. My physics teacher would take us to the pool table at school and show us vectors and magnitudes and how you could visualise what you were seeing in terms of physics. I became good at pool because I understood that really well.
Pushy motherI have three younger sisters – the youngest is a half-sister who lived in New York with a different mother. My sister, Trina, looks a lot like me – we are three days shy of a year’s difference in age. My other sister, Dawn, is a medical doctor; she is the smartest of all of us and speaks multiple languages.
My mother was the pusher academically. When I was little, I used to look at my parents, who both liked to sketch. I liked to draw and had the opportunity to mature that a bit in high school. I think that, from a perspective of innovation or design, having a background of three-dimensional awareness can be helpful. I was an avid reader – I would even walk into signposts reading as I walked down the street. But maths was the thing I was always really good at.
Ready for take-off A high-school teacher who began to see me excel was an MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) graduate. She suggested I enter a programme for minority high-school students at MIT, so I applied that summer and got in. They took us to an airport base and I got to watch planes do touch-and-goes, where they touch down and take back off, from a control tower. I thought that was so cool. I got to go in a flight simulator and scored two points off a pilots’ score.
I got bitten by the bug of aerospace – I love things that fly, I love the stars and thinking about those kinds of things. After school, I applied to MIT and got in. I got my BSc in aeronautical and astronautical engineering. In my senior year, I worked with 130 other aerospace students on a project proposed by Nasa. It was a manned Mars mission.
Space for everyone In 1986, as I was getting ready to graduate, there was the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. I’d been really interested in manned space flight but, unfortunately, because of the disaster, the opportunities to enter that career path were put on hold. I ended up going to grad school. They kept offering me money (university grants) to go on, so I did a master’s, and then a PhD.
Midway through my PhD, at a job fair, I saw a booth for Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Centre. I got a summer internship at the centre and then they offered me a co-op position, which is where you become a civil servant as a student. I have been there 26 years.
It’s well-balanced and diverse – there are communities of people from all walks of life and cultures, very different from some of the other centres for Nasa. When you look at the aerospace field and corporations, which are traditionally populated by Caucasian men, it is nice to have women to work with, to not feel so isolated.
Watching the ice I worked first in the robotics group and then what we call attitude control systems, to control the entire spacecraft, the satellite. I did that for 10 years. I went off to Nasa’s headquarters (in Washington DC) for a while, then I was a programme executive for Earth Science and then a business executive for Space Science.
The latter part of my career has been spent creating instruments. The last instrument I worked on, and managed, was a US$5 million instrument launched last September and that is now orbiting the Earth. It is called ICESat-2, and is primarily looking at the change in the ice sheets. A lot of the missions I’ve worked on are for Earth science – you know you are having a direct impact on the understanding of the Earth. Having the ability to impact science every day is special to me because it’s important to know how we developed, but also to know how we will evolve and maintain this little blue marble we live on.
Playing ball When I was doing my PhD, I met my husband – I met him playing basketball. Between dating and marriage, we were together 12 years. Although we divorced, I’m still close to his family. I had my daughter, Arielle, very late; I was 45. Her father lives around the corner from my house but we didn’t meet in the neighbourhood, we met at a party. We dated for about five years. Arielle is 11 now, she’s a bright child.
I used to coach teams – tee-ball, baseball, basketball. I like giving children experiences and helping them to achieve things. For me, athletics was important to be rounded and it gave me confidence being around men, playing. As I moved into my career, I felt I could compete with them and work with them, I had something to offer.
Dr Aprille Joy Ericsson was in town last month as a consultant for Hong Kong’s first virtual-reality free-fall ride, Ocean Park’s The Abyss – VR Space Voyage, featuring a space mission to Titan.
