Courage and Bravery

SPS visitor and former NASA mission control director Ginger Kerrick shares the perspective behind her success.

BY KRISTIN DUISBERG

The first Latina director of NASA mission control and a 30-year veteran of the program’s Johnson Space Center, Ginger Kerrick visited SPS on Monday to share a message about resilience — a perspective she developed through multiple life-changing experiences. At the age of 11, she witnessed her father’s fatal heart attack. In college, she walked onto the University of Texas-El Paso women’s basketball team but suffered a career-ending knee injury days before her first game. At 26, she was one of just 120 applicants out of more than 3,000 selected to be evaluated for NASA’s astronaut training program, only to receive a lifetime disqualification when a medical exam ultrasound turned up more than a dozen kidney stones.

“So now my dream of basketball is gone and my dream of being an astronaut is gone, and I started to plummet, and I wanted to quit NASA,” Kerrick shared during chapel. “And then I realized that that’s not me. … I am the strong little girl that watched her dad die right in front of her and picked herself up and kept moving. So while this does feel like the end of the world, it’s not, and I have had the worst thing happen to me and I survived it, and I will survive this too.”

Today the chief strategy officer of Barrios Technology, a small, woman-owned aerospace company in Houston, Kerrick shared a brief summary of her career, which has included leading space station and shuttle missions and preparing the next generation of astronauts, and reflected on how mindset makes a difference when confronting adversity. “Recognize that there are opportunities out there that you may not have even imagined for yourself, and have the courage and bravery to take those on,” she said. “I wouldn’t have had these opportunities if I’d had a good knee, if I didn’t have kidney stones, and perhaps even if my father hadn’t died at the age that I was. When he did, it made me strong; it made me resilient. And you can be resilient today.”