Listen to this audio excerpt from Diamond St. John, engineer working on the Artemis III heat shield for the Orion Program at Lockheed Martin:
0:00 / 0:00
For four-generations, Diamond St. John's family has been supporting human spaceflight at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Now, she's continuing the family legacy that reaches back to Apollo -helping return humanity to the Moon with the agency's Artemis campaign.
St. John is an engineer with Lockheed Martin supporting Orion, NASA's spacecraft built to carry crew to the Moon and return them safely to Earth on Artemis missions. She specializes in the production of Orion's heat shield at Lockheed's Spacecraft, Test, Assembly and Resource Center, in Titusville, Florida. As one of the most important elements of the spacecraft, the heat shield is responsible for protecting the astronauts from the nearly 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit temperatures as they re-enter Earth's atmosphere at the end of the mission.
From start to finish, St. John is responsible for establishing a production workflow for the Orion heat shield - the largest of its kind in the world - and ensures each step is executed in the correct order along the way.
Her team recognizes the criticality of their work and knows that their mission is to make sure astronauts come home safe. When it comes to quality of production, St. John embraces that mindset.
