Maggi Dutczak

Maggi Dutczak is the engineer in charge of the engines on the Discovery and Endeavour orbiters.   At launch she sits in the firing room of the Launch Control Centre at Kennedy Space Centre monitoring her engines.   If she and they are not happy she can stop a launch just 0.3 seconds before the engines explode into life and blast the shuttle into orbit. 

When I asked Maggi to pose beside this engine she described it as a cute little thing because compared to the Orbiter engines she works on it's a baby. Here's one of Maggi's that we found in the Vertical Assembly Building (VAB).

 Maggi loves her engines and the orbiters they power.      She talks about the orbiters as though they are people.   They are all female.   When STS 107 broke up on re-entry, I think that for Maggi 8 precious things were lost - the crew and her beloved Columbia.   She was drafted into the recovery team sent to Texas.   Her task was to identify the electronics.   Other engineers specialised in the other parts of the orbiter and astronauts handled material related to the crew.

Maggi explains how she helped recover Columbia.   Behind her is a map showing the distribution of wreckage across Texas.  To the right is one of her slides showing how Columbia material is being arranged in its hangar at Kennedy.

I asked Maggi and other engineers about criticism that the orbiter is too old to fly.  If engineers were given a blank canvass, could they design something better?   Their unanimous response is interesting.  Other than making it bigger (they sometimes get stuck trying to squeeze into spaces whilst servicing equipment) they think they have a superb modern machine.   The orbiters get completely stripped down every few years.  And between major refits equipment is frequently upgraded.   They are very different from the original orbiters of the 1970s.  Instead of 30 year old technology they have a third millennium craft that has evolved through three decades of technological development.   Given the funding for a new space craft, the engineers would build machines that were very similar to the current orbiters.   It's also worth noting that the loss of both Challenger and Columbia were not due to primary failures of the orbiters.   In the case of Challenger the failure occurred in the solid rocket boosters and in Columbia it is currently thought that debris from the external tank  damaged the orbiter.

Maggi went to the University of Florida and the University of Central Florida, gaining degrees in Electrical Engineering.   She loves her orbiters but hates flying.  She has no wish to be an astronaut.