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Alumni Spotlight: From Centennial to the Moon

Centennial High School graduate Jacki Cossette Mahaffey (’04) recently completed an out-of-this-world assignment: serving as the Artemis II chief training officer, where she successfully prepared the crew for their historic mission to the moon and back.

  • Many students feel they need their whole life figured out by 18. Did you always know you wanted to work in space, or did that passion develop later? Taking physics my senior year at Centennial was when I knew I wanted to go into Aerospace Engineering (Texas A & M University ’08). However, I was focused on airplanes and aerodynamics throughout my entire college stint, intending to design high performance jet engines. When I didn’t get the F-22 program internship I was hoping for, I instead took a summer job at NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, where I was exposed to the world of Mission Control and fell in love with it.
     
  • What was your path, from graduation day to your first day at NASA? Were there any unexpected 'detours' or challenges along the way? Texas A &M had a good reputation for engineering, but I also quickly learned it has an incredibly rich campus spirit and traditions, which made the college experience wonderful. Looking back, I was too focused on the ideal of finishing in four years, but in my junior year, my boyfriend at the time convinced me to do a study abroad semester in Ireland. It was 100% worth it in terms of the memories, experiences, and life skills all crammed into four months. And if it hadn’t delayed my graduation by a semester, I never would have had the internship at NASA that set me in that direction.
     
  • Your family has been helping humans reach the Moon for two generations. How much of your career choice (and now a part of the Artemis program) was inspired by your grandfather’s Apollo stories? I didn’t hear many details of my grandfather’s Apollo stories when I was younger and only learned the extent of his involvement as an adult. But his influence on my dad, who was also interested in airplanes and flying, flowed down to me. I once wrote a tongue-in-cheek essay in high school about how my interest was genetic!
     
  • From your perspective as a trainer, what was your most significant contribution to getting the Artemis team flight-ready? On paper, my job ahead of Artemis II was to lead all of the various systems experts to develop their individual lessons and teach them to the astronauts. However, since this was the very first time we trained people to fly the Orion spacecraft, it became much more about how do we actually do this? What should the procedures say and what do they look like? I became the person working with the team to put the crew’s feedback into practice.
     
  • How would you describe your typical day? What is the most 'out of this world' part of your job? I have no typical day, which is one thing I love about this job – the variety! Sometimes it’s meetings and desk work, sometimes practicing Capcom (capsule communicator) skills in Mission Control, and a few times, it has been putting on the orange Orion crew survival system suits and being the test student for some of our more interesting training, like swimming out the bottom of an upturned capsule in our Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory pool.
     
  • NASA is known for solving impossible problems. What is the most rewarding challenge you’ve tackled lately? Mission preparation includes thinking through and planning for what might go wrong. If the rocket had not worked perfectly, there was an option to do a different kind of mission where Orion would stay in an orbit close to the Earth. One of the things we had to work out was how to change our landing procedures if we were coming from that orbit instead of from the Moon. Instead of perfecting it in procedures first, we took a rough concept and then tried it with our simulator and mission control team. We learned some things, adjusted, and tried it again to make sure it was something we could do if needed during the mission.
     
  • Looking back, is there a specific moment or tradition at Centennial that still makes you smile today? It’s all the little things in and out of school: goofy adventures with the soccer team, showing up early to school because we decided to form a knitting club, riding bikes with friends to swim at the lake. The best memories were the ‘side quests’ with friends. Having a school and faculty who supported exploration of all kinds of activities and a student body large enough that almost everyone could find ‘their people’ was wonderful.
     
  • Who was a teacher or staff member who saw potential in you that you might not have seen in yourself? In high school, I didn’t need scholastic encouragement as much as I needed to be reminded that the path to excellence was in fact a journey and that my character along the way mattered most. Band director Mike Lien consistently expected, encouraged, and humbly set an example of that for us, whether it was in band rehearsals or taking a bunch of energetic students on a summer trip to Europe to expand our horizons.
     
  • In what ways did Centennial’s environment—whether it was a specific club, sport, or classroom—prepare you for the rigors of your career at NASA? One of the things I love most about my job, which can also be a challenge of it, is the sheer variety of projects, tasks, and interactions. Having been a part of different types of activities at Centennial – from classes, band, sports, to academic clubs, service projects, and even dances – helped me learn how to plan, balance, and prioritize my week, and how to switch between the differing skills and thought processes that each activity needed.  
  • If you could go back and sit next to your 16-year-old self in the lunchroom at Centennial High School, what piece of advice would you give them about the 'real world'? Don’t take it quite so seriously. There is room to make mistakes. Say yes to adventures!