Gig Harbor woman's mission is space exploration

Seattle Times: Gig Harbor woman's mission is space exploration
Humanity's farthest venture into space is in the hands of a woman who grew up in Gig Harbor and likes a unique opportunity.

"Everything NASA does is unique," Suzanne Dodd told me Monday as she settled into her new job.

Dodd is the latest Voyager project manager. She is, in effect, the captain of two spacecraft hurtling toward the edge of our solar system.

The manned space-shuttle program is winding down, but Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are continuing the work they began while Dodd was still a student at Peninsula High School.

Voyager 2 launched first, on Aug. 20, 1977, and is the longest continuously operated NASA spacecraft.

Voyager 1, launched a couple of weeks later, is the most distant active spacecraft, 17 billion kilometers from Earth and headed out of the solar system.

Dodd was already in love with math and science when those craft lifted off. She credits her high-school math teacher with setting her on that path.

She graduated in 1979 and went on to Whitman College and a Whitman-California Institute of Technology program that allowed her to earn a math degree from Whitman and an engineering degree from Caltech in five years.

Dodd had several job offers when she graduated in 1984 at Caltech in Pasadena, Calif. One of them was at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech, which was staffing for the Voyager encounter with Uranus.

It was a one-of-a-kind job, so she took it and stayed in Pasadena.

"I miss the Northwest," she said. "Believe it or not, I like the weather. Here [in California] it's dry and brown for months on end. Once in a while, I like the gloom and wet."

Her parents moved to Oregon, but Dodd still visits this area for work and to see friends. And she always tries to fit in a ferry ride, which is one of her pleasures.


At the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Dodd started out working "with the scientists to lay out the observations they wanted to make and to generate the commands that would do them — commands for instruments, or to maneuver the spacecraft and for returning the data to Earth."

She was a pioneer as a female NASA engineer. "I've seen a lot of growth with women in the space program" and more women studying engineering in college, she said. That includes her older daughter, who is studying engineering at Caltech.

The Uranus encounter that attracted Dodd to NASA was a major moment for Voyager 2, the first close-up look at an outer planet. The closest approach came Jan. 24, 1986; a few days later everyone's attention turned to the space shuttle.

On Jan. 28, the Challenger disintegrated shortly after liftoff. All seven crew members died.

Dodd said it's important for the public not to think spaceflight is routine. "Getting into space is hard," she said. "It doesn't matter how much you've done it, it's hard."

And we really haven't done it that much. Space exploration is still new, and Dodd said we aren't doing the same thing over and over but keep changing equipment and missions.

"NASA wouldn't be inspiring," she said, "if all we did was launch more rockets at the moon."

Dodd embraces change and adventure and has moved from project to project over her career. She left Voyager and worked on other projects, including Cassini, which launched in 1997 and continues to orbit Saturn. For the past 11 years she has been part of the Spitzer Space Telescope team. She was recently named project manager for Spitzer, and she'll continue in that position in addition to running the Voyager program.

She's still excited about the work. "Space and space exploration," she said, "is one of the few topics that's inspirational."

When she visits classrooms and asks young children what they want to do, they say hunt dinosaurs or explore space. "Exploration is important to humankind," she said.

The Voyager craft continue to return valuable scientific information, and in four to six years they will leave the edge of our solar system and send back the first data from interstellar space.

Dodd sees much more out there to explore. "I would like to send an orbiter around Neptune because Neptune has a lot of moons that are of interest." she said. "That would be really cool."

Searching, learning, innovating, it's what humans do, in space and here on Earth. Wrestling with challenges really is cool.