Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day: Meet Gateway’s Stephanie Buskirk Dudley
When Stephanie Buskirk Dudley was growing up near NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, she never imagined that she would one day work for the agency. Dudley, an engineer approaching her 20th year at NASA, has served in the Space Shuttle, Constellation, and International Space Station Programs — and now, Gateway.
As Gateway’s mission integration and utilization manager, Dudley coordinates the integration of Gateway’s payloads and ensures mission requirements are prioritized and tracked. The lunar orbiting outpost’s early payloads include the European Radiation Sensors Array (ERSA) and the Internal Dosimeter Array (IDA). Both payloads will be mounted to Gateway’s exterior and track radiation exposure to help keep Artemis astronauts healthy and safe in deep space. Another payload, the Heliophysics Environmental and Radiation Measurement Experiment Suite, or HERMES, will study solar particles and solar wind created by the Sun, which is only possible given Gateway’s location outside the Earth’s protective magnetic field.
“We’ve learned so much from the International Space Station over the years,” said Dudley. “Our space has been limited to around the Earth, but studying the science behind these Gateway payloads gives us the ability to go further to the Moon and, eventually, to Mars.”
Dudley earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering science, a master’s degree in biomedical engineering, and a master’s degree in industrial and systems engineering from the University of Florida. While pursuing her undergraduate degree, Dudley was offered a research grant that set in motion her dream of working at NASA.
“It’s awesome to be a part of exploration, and it’s exciting and rewarding to learn for the greater good of humanity,” Dudley said. “Artemis is all about exploration, and Gateway is a steppingstone to making that exploration possible. I’m proud to be a part of it.”
Dudley credits her career inspirations to trailblazers such as Ann McNair, who was the first female supervisor in engineering at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. In an industry previously dominated by men, McNair calculated numbers for NASA and served as a giant force for women in the industry.
In honor of Feb. 24’s “Introduce a Girl to Engineering” Day, which aims to encourage and inspire girls to pursue a career in engineering, Dudley has one career message for all the young females out there:
“Try everything,” she said. “You may find something that you’re good at that you [didn’t] know you were good at. Even in the process of trying, you are learning something even if it doesn’t go according to plan. Just try and you will find things that you love that you will be good at.”
In her spare time, Dudley enjoys camping, hiking, and biking, as well as spending time with her husband, Brandon, and their two dogs.
Gateway, a vital component of NASA’s Artemis missions, will serve as a multipurpose outpost orbiting the Moon that provides essential support for long-term human return to the lunar surface and serves as a staging point for deep space exploration. NASA is working with commercial and international partners to establish Gateway.
Learn more about Gateway at: https://www.nasa.gov/gateway