Women as an afterthought: Not anymore. Meet KSC's first female chief engineer

This is part of an occasional series about key space and rocket industry workers based on the Space Coast of Florida.

Near the beginning of Teresa Kinney’s career in the early 1980s, she was such a rarity as a female engineer that she recalled being out at NASA test facilities in Maryland and California and not being able to find a women's restroom.

“There just weren’t a lot of women in those roles, and it was funny – when you do some of these large tests, like large acoustic test, you find that the test facilities aren’t set up for women to be there,” said Kinney. “You say ‘I need to use the women’s room’ and they say 'We don’t have one. You can use the men’s room if you want, and we got a little sign you can hang up. Or you can just walk next door.'”

Women weren’t part of the initial building design.

A lot has changed since then for women engineering, for NASA and for Kinney.

Today, the 61-year-old is NASA’s Deep Space Logistics Team Chief Engineer — and her home base is right here at Kennedy Space Center. Out of all the chief engineers working on different NASA teams during KSC's history, Kinney is the Kennedy Space Center's first female chief engineer. To date, she is still the only female chief engineer at the facility.

Kinney oversees a team that’s 38 percent female. She might have lacked female engineering role models when she was starting out, but she didn’t lack the motivation to pave her own way. Today, she said, girls have both role models and inspiration, urging them to think differently about science and engineering.

"Originally I wasn't aiming to be a chief engineer. I thought that was a great job, but I just followed the challenging and exciting work," said Kinney.

Becoming an engineer: Kinney’s father ignited her passion for space

Kinney says her interest in space was fueled at a young age by her dad, a U.S. military man and space enthusiast. While her dad was stationed in Germany, Kinney vividly remembers her father waking her in the middle of the night to watch the Apollo 11 lunar landing on TV.

In 1975, when Kinney was in her early teens, her father brought her to Florida to see the Apollo-Soyuz mission launch from Kennedy Space Center. The mission was the first international collaboration in space — having a crewed Apollo capsule dock with a crewed Russian Soyuz.

“That inspired me. Seeing the hardware, seeing the people working on it.” Kinney said.

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Kinney on where to study engineering

When deciding on where to go to college, Kinney was given advice which she said helped her greatly: go to a school close to where you want to work. Doing so will give you a better opportunity at finding co-ops (cooperative education) in the field you are aiming to break into. Unlike internships, co-ops give students the ability to alternate between studying one semester and working a paid full-time opportunity the next.

At the time, her father just happened to be retiring to Huntsville, Alabama, the home of Marshall Space Flight Center. The stars aligned for Kinney, and she was accepted into University of Alabama, where she landed the opportunity to do co-ops with NASA in-between her studies.

Kinney graduated with a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering, and her years of hard work paid off when she received the opportunity to work full-time as a NASA contractor in 1984.

Starting her career as an engineer, Kinney became fascinated by how differently things behave in the environment of space.

“Once you get away from Earth, you can grow crystals in a matter of days, that will take years to grow on Earth … I can get really excited about this," Kinney said. "It’s hard, but it’s fun."

Kinney worked on the Solid Rocket Booster, Spacelab, and ISS programs as a payload analyst in the first decades of her career.

“So you say ‘okay, how can I do lots of tests on the ground, so I know what I’m going to see' and I can make sure everything’s going to hold together. I have mission success, good reliability, and safety,” Kinney said as she described her past work.

Kinney recalls her Space Shuttle work

Among Kinney's work was time spent on the space shuttle program.

FLORIDA TODAY asked Kinney about her most memorable shuttle mission, which she revealed to be STS-121, the return to flight after Columbia’s ill-fated STS-107 mission in 2003.

Space Shuttle Columbia tragically broke apart during reentry on Saturday, February 1, 2003, claiming the lives of all seven astronauts onboard. Foam from the external tank came loose and struck and damaged the underside of the shuttle's left wing during launch. When the shuttle made its fiery descent back to Earth, the heat penetrated through the damaged area.

During the accident investigation, Kinney worked on the impact debris analysis. Her team simulated the possibility of objects such as foam or metallic pieces striking the shuttle as part of an effort to understand exactly what caused the tear in the shuttle’s heat shield. The team at NASA needed to understand the sensitivity and all possible scenarios before returning the remaining shuttles to flight.

NASA’s space shuttle was retired after its last flight, STS-135, in July of 2011.

Kinney moved to Florida in 2005 to work as a NASA civil servant. She worked on the Launch Services program, served as an assistant Chief Engineer for Ares I-X Ground Systems, and supported the STS Chief Engineer in resolving technical, hardware and analysis issues during the final years of the shuttle program.

How Kinney became Kennedy Space Center's first female chief engineer

Kinney later received her master’s degree in industrial engineering from the University of Central Florida in 2009, after having worked in engineering for three decades.

“I spent the first three decades doing cool, dynamic, load analysis, structural analysis, fracture related work," she said.

It was not until she was further into her career that Kinney decided on the goal of becoming a chief engineer. She had the job experience but needed to gain some additional systems engineering experience.

“I was so excited by the work, that I didn’t want to keep going to school ... it took me years to say ‘okay, stop and start doing a masters’,” said Kinney.

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Kinney reached the highlight of her career in 2023, when she landed the role as the Deep Space Logistics (DSL) Team's Chief Engineer at NASA's Kennedy Space Center.

It was quite the accomplishment, as of April 2024, Kinney, is still Kennedy Space Center's only female chief engineer in history.

Women at NASA over the years

According to an interview posted on the Johnson Space Center's history site, the number of women working at NASA during Kinney's school days were few. In the 2011 interview, Harriet G. Jenkins stated that in 1974, a little more than half a decade before Kinney entered the workforce, 17.1% of the agency's workforce consisted of women. Jenkins served as NASA's assistant administrator for equal opportunity programs from 1974 until 1992.

According to the 2023 statistics report from NASA's Office of Inspector General, that number grew to 35.2% in 2012. As of 2021, that percentage remained about stable at 35 %

Kinney now working on humanity’s return to moon

With the Artemis project well underway, Kinney's DSL team is working on a payload arm, similar to the space station's Canada Arm, for the Gateway project.

The NASA Gateway will be a space station and science outpost for Artemis astronauts which orbits the moon. When traveling to the moon on future Artemis missions, astronauts will dock the Orion crew capsule with the Gateway before boarding the ship which will take them to the lunar surface.

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“Arms are very complicated. People underestimate them. They’re big, long, lengthy thing with a lot of mechanisms. So, packaging them, making sure that they function properly, making sure you don’t overload them … it’s a tall order to get one of those up there and have it function properly,” Kinney said.

With Gateway not being occupied continuously, the arm will need to function remotely. Since previous space payload arms always had someone manually control them, this takes the designing process to a new level of complexity.

There will also be the threat of lunar dust flying up from the surface. Kinney explained that lunar dust is not anything like dust on Earth – it’s sharp, rocky debris.

Kinney's advice to young girls interested in space

Kinney believes everyone can do better at encouraging young girls in the field of engineering.

“Don’t be intimidated. Don’t look at things as too hard, but a challenge. Because you never know what opportunities are in front of you.” Kinney said.

She noted that many seasoned professionals in the space industry will one day retire.

“We’re going to go to Mars, and we’re going to need some really smart people,” adding that this next generation can and will go further.

“This is the best time to get into space. You guys cannot even imagine what’s coming,” said Kinney.

Brooke Edwards is a Space Reporter for Florida Today. Contact her at [email protected] or on X: @brookeofstars.

This article originally appeared on Florida Today: KSC's first chief engineer and journey to break space barriers