For University of Alabama junior Liz Bowman, a job working for NASA in Houston, Texas is only one small step in her journey to make the giant leap to the final frontier.
After landing an internship at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., and a spot in the co-op program at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Bowman has already accomplished what many of her peers dream of.
After all, she’s only 19.
“It makes you realize that if you work towards your dream, it can happen,” Bowman said. “I got to the point where I would look up at the moon, and everybody would say, ‘Oh, the moon’s so pretty,’ but I don’t see it like that. I see it as a destination, somewhere I feel like I could go one day.”
As an intern at Marshall Space Flight Center, Bowman is building a simulator for the water recovery system of NASA’s deep space habitat using a touch screen taller than she is. Bowman said the simulator could improve system configuration and make maintenance procedures simpler, decreasing the possibility of human error.
“If the deep habitat goes into space, we just want to make sure that the astronauts have a really easy time and don’t make a lot of mistakes,” she said. “You know, we might have saved somebody by just changing some things around.”
Bowman admitted opportunities were hard to come by in her hometown of Rainsville, Ala., which sits on top of Sand Mountain and boasts a population of less than 5,000 people. However, this only led her to seek opportunities through her own means. She attributed much of her academic success to a dual enrollment program through Northeast Alabama Community College, which she said she preferred to high school.
“In my graduating class, there were less than 100 people,” Bowman said. “My main goal is to eventually become an astronaut, and coming from a small town, nobody really gets out of it. People see that you have big dreams, and they laugh at them.”
Nevertheless, Rainsville’s proximity to Marshall Space Flight Center allowed Bowman to attend space camp several times, strengthening her desire for extraterrestrial exploration.
“Her Christmas presents and birthday presents went toward space camps,” Bowman’s father, Chris Bowman said. “We never pushed her in that direction. It was something she always really wanted to do.”
Liz’s mentor at NASA, Charlie Dischinger, is the human factors engineering team lead in Huntsville. He praised her self-confidence and personal initiative.
“When she came in, I didn’t have [a simulator], and when I talked to her about it, she told me, ‘Yeah, I can do it,’” Dischinger said. “She just went off and learned everything she needed to in order to be able to complete [it].
“I would say she’s done a whole lot better than most students and most interns. She’s mostly done it on her own, and that’s very admirable.”
Although Liz gushed about working for NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, she said she was worried about leaving her family in Alabama.
“When I told them I was moving to Huntsville, they were super excited because Huntsville is closer to them than Tuscaloosa, but when I told them I got this job in Houston, they were so excited at first because that’s a really big deal,” she said. “But now they’re just kind of sad because we’re a really close-knit family, and I’m going to be all the way in Texas. We’ve never been that far from each other.”
The space center is almost 800 miles away from her family in Alabama, but her dream destination, the moon, orbits the earth from 238,900 miles away, 300 times longer than the trip from Rainsville to Houston. Liz said her dedication is to the space program, so comparatively the move to Texas may end up being a relatively short trip from home.
“It really does sound crazy when you say it out loud, but I’ve really always wanted to be an astronaut,” she said. “I think that if I can’t do that, I want to help somebody else get farther into space. So if I’m working in mission operations or I’m building a rocket for NASA, I think I’m still doing my part.”
