Earlier today, NASA highlighted one of the engineers supporting the NASA Commercial Crew Program, or CCP, the name of the program that forms the basis of the joint NASA-SpaceX partnership on these astronaut flights.
Jones said Crystal Jones is deputy director of NASA’s CCP Ground Operations and Missions, tasked with “assessing ground systems for crew safety for both lunch and recovery operations,” among other tasks.
She shared her back story:
“I always knew I wanted to work at NASA, since I was a very young girl,” Jones said.
But since she was a teenager, she said, her parents’ drug and alcohol abuse affected her life “in a cruel way.”
“We ended up homeless and had to stay in an abandoned bus and eventually moved to a homeless shelter,” she said. “After that time, we never seemed to be able to recover as a family.”
But Jones said she used school computers to learn how to apply for college and financial aid. She eventually earned a bachelor’s degree in astrophysics from the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne, Florida — which is a 40-mile drive from NASA’s launch facilities. Eventually, she earned a BA in Astrophysics and a MA in Space Systems.
Later in life, her parents overcame their addiction, although her mother passed away earlier this year.
“This necklace I’m wearing is made from her ashes,” Jones said on NASA’s live broadcast. “And I wear it at every shoot in her memory.”