When Sandy Magnus read the 1978 newspaper article announcing that the astronaut class would include women for the first time that year, she breathed a secret sigh of relief. Those six women had broken a mold, shining a light in darkness to show that there was, indeed, a pathway between young girls like Sandy and outer space.
A freshman in high school at the time, Sandy had known since middle school that she wanted to become an astronaut. Like many of her peers, she loved the idea of space exploration and wanted to do it herself one day; unlike many of them, she latched on to that dream and didn’t let it go. Soon after the 1978 women astronauts showed her that a path was possible, Sandy began forging one of her own.
Though chemistry was typically a junior class at her school, she took it as a sophomore so she could take physics and advanced chemistry as a junior, and then advanced physics as a senior. She had a plan: she would major in physics in college, earn her masters and PhD in the subject, and become an astronaut. Now the Executive Director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), Sandy spent sixteen years as an astronaut, but the path that got her there was actually much richer and more fulfilling than the homogenous route she thought it would be.
Born and raised in Belleville, Illinois, a small town idyllically straddling the line between rural cornfields and bustling St. Louis, Sandy grew up the oldest of four children. Her mother was a nurse who became the coordinator of a medical assistant program at a community college, while her father worked in insurance. She was five when her parents woke her up late at night to watch the televised broadcast of Neil Armstrong walking on the moon, but it wasn’t a particularly defining moment for her. Rather, her character was forged in the perpetual string of questions she posed to her parents. She always wanted to know how things worked, to the extent that they bought her a book containing two hundred answers to “why?” questions.
Sandy took breaks from reading and exploring the world around her to play soccer starting in fifth grade. Her high school didn’t have a soccer team, so her father coached Sandy and her two sisters on a recreational team. She also ran track for two years and helped manage the boys’ soccer team, all the while remaining steadfastly focused to the rigorous science and math curriculum she had mapped out for herself. As a young lady excelling dramatically in STEM courses at a time when such intelligence wasn’t considered very cool, Sandy was quiet and introverted through high school, keeping her astronautic aspirations to herself except for a demure sentence in a journal assignment for junior English class.
All that changed, however, when she got to college at the University of Missouri-Rolla, now the Missouri University of Science and Technology. Her father decided to get his bachelors degree when she did, and without a firm guiding hand through the college selection process, Sandy landed at the prominent engineering school largely by chance. “Illinois and Missouri had a cooperative agreement that allowed me to enroll at the school and receive an in-state tax credit, which helped make the tuition more affordable,” she remembers. “There was no big scheme or plan behind any of it. I didn’t even know what engineering was at the time.”
With the start of her freshman year, Sandy decided to dispel the social anxieties that plagued her in high school. She was who she was—an engaged, somewhat geeky, passionate student of science and technology committed to understanding how the world works and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible—and people could either take it or leave it. Thanks to her father’s coaching, she was also an excellent soccer player, landing a spot as a starter on the varsity team all four years of college. “As a Division Two school, academics were our primary driver, but we were able to engage full-time in sports activities as well,” she explains. “It was a spectacular experience and taught me a lot about leadership, teamwork, discipline, and work ethic. It was also a big factor in helping me achieve my dream, as the Astronaut Office looks for well-rounded applicants.”
Sandy had planned to pursue degrees only in physics simply because she thought her only other options were chemistry and biology, but her eyes were soon opened to the world of engineering, and she became particularly fascinated in the electromagnetics side of electrical engineering. Upon graduating, she felt burnt out by academia and decided to experience the real world, accepting a job at McDonnell Douglas Aircraft Company in St. Louis. She took night classes toward her masters in electrical engineering at Rolla’s St. Louis extension center, earning the degree over a four-year period while working on the A-12 attack aircraft program. Nine months after she finished her degree, the program was canceled amidst the first Gulf War by Dick Cheney, who was Secretary of Defense at the time.
The cyclical world of aerospace contracted, but Sandy had mastered her skills in that capacity and was ready for a change anyway. She enrolled at Georgia Tech to earn her PhD in materials, learning how materials drive design choices in aircraft construction and impose limitations in manufacture and integration. With the work combined applied physics, chemistry, and engineering, offering an ideal blend of her interests.
It was there that she met retired Navy Admiral Richard Truly, head of the Georgia Tech Research Institute and a former astronaut. After making his acquaintance at a campus event, he agreed to sit down with Sandy to talk about the astronaut program, and in the midst of that conversation, he offered to be a reference for her application. “I wouldn’t have dared to ask him to do that because I had just met him, but I understand why he did,” she reflects. “Now, when I talk to people, I can get a sense fairly quickly sometimes of whether they’d be a good fit in the Astronaut Office.”
Now that she was a collegiate athlete with some work experience and escalating degrees in three different fields, Sandy felt ready to apply to the Astronaut Office at age thirty. The interview process is a week-long battery of medical tests on top of a meeting with the Board, and the selection process is highly dependent on the year and context. The demand for pilots, engineers, physical scientists, or medical doctors fluctuates wildly, depending on the demands of the office and the climate of the industry, so applicants are encouraged to apply again if they don’t make the cut but are truly committed to the profession.
Fortuitously, Sandy picked the best year in the history of the office to apply, as NASA was in the process of building out the space station. Of 3,000 applicants, 35 astronauts were selected, and Sandy was one of them. Over the next sixteen years, Sandy went on three mission—each special in its own way, and each an occasion for her parents to host a pseudo reunion for her extended family around eighty people to gather and watch the launches. Alone in quarantine, Sandy would reflect on the happy Christmases they’d all spend piled in her grandmother’s tiny house, with over a hundred presents around the Christmas tree. On the other side, her parents watched the launch nervously, but were genuinely happy their daughter was doing what she wanted to do in life.
For her second mission, Sandy spent almost five months living on the space station, and her third marked the last shuttle flight of the office. “There’s really no typical career in terms of your missions,” she says. “It really just depends on the timing of your flights, your interests, your personal situation, and what’s going on in the space program during your tenure.”
Between missions, astronauts are given technical assignments throughout the vertical office structure. Surrounded by outstanding people with their own strengths and weaknesses, there was no ladder to climb—only roles to fill and jobs to be done. Sandy found herself traveling to Russia for months at a time over several years to help with launches, team building, and defining the operational vocabulary that would allow English and Russian teams to communicate effectively. She worked with Europeans, Japanese, and Canadians, as well as Mission Control. In the wake of the devastating Space Shuttle Columbia disaster of 2003, she led the office’s return to flight efforts and monitored investigations into the cause of the accident. All the while, she maintained her proficiency training and flying skills, persevering through grueling spacewalk training sessions in heavy suits designed for body types much larger than the typical woman’s.
When Sandy became Deputy Chief of the Astronaut Office, she was still eligible for flight assignments, but her role had largely transitioned to one of management. She was comfortable in the position, so when she received a call from AIAA, she was under no pressure to make a rash decision. “The most important thing to me was finding something that really fit,” she recounts. “I wouldn’t leave NASA for anything less than ideal. It wouldn’t just be a job change; it would be a life change. So I did a lot of preliminary research.”
As the professional society for the aerospace industry, AIAA is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization with about 32,000 members that span the profession but trend toward science and engineering. The community has been around since the 1930s, when rocketry gained momentum, but the institute was first formally recognized some fifty years ago, when the astronautics and aeronautics merged together. “The aerospace community is an extremely passionate and engaged group of people,” Sandy affirms.
AIAA is essentially the curator and knowledge base of the industry. It publishes peer review technical journals and puts on conferences on industry issues to provide venues for the community to gather, forge relationships, develop new ideas for programs, and keep the industry alive and advancing. With local sections around the world, student sections, and national level committees focusing on specific technical or programmatic issues, the AIAA staff of 62 people supports a wide array of endeavors. “We advocate on behalf of the industry, but we’re not lobbyists,” says Sandy. “We’re the neutral ground where places like the Office of Management and Budget, NASA, or Capitol Hill can get the perspectives of the technical, scientific, and engineering community.”
What do you do when you’ve already done the only thing you ever dreamt of doing? At 48, Sandy found herself confronting for the first time what most of her peers experienced as they graduated from college and tried to find their paths in the world. She had always known exactly what she wanted to do, but now that she was on the other side of the path she had been focused on so intently her whole life, she wasn’t sure. “There’s no normal for what an astronaut does after that career is over,” she reflects. “Some of us are active duty military and continue doing that, while others retire and become civil servants. Some go to aerospace companies, academia, or consulting. Some retire, write books, or find other employment with NASA. There’s really no set path, but when I was offered the position at AIAA, I knew it would open more doors than it would close.”
Sandy has been the organization’s Executive Director since 2012, running its day-to-day operations while aligning them with the input of the Board, which is comprised of elected volunteer members who set its strategic vision. For the past year, the team has been focused on the fundamentals of updating its processes and finding ways to connect with the younger generation. “The Baby Boomer generation has defined much of the world, the culture, and how organizations operate,” she says. “Without abandoning that generation, it’s important to shift our emphasis, focus, operations, and identity so that the importance of our society resonates with young people.” Through Sandy’s leadership, the organization is also transitioning from a siloed mode of operation to a more integrated, vision and strategic plan.
As a leader, Sandy’s key outputs are energy and good decision making, which she accomplishes by asking the right questions. “If you follow the logic path in confronting problems, things tend to come to light,” she points out. Recognizing that being a good leader means also being a good follower, she pursues a consensus style of leadership and highly values the input of the people around her.
As she hones her management skills, explores the nonprofit space, and advocates for the industry at this critical time when slashes to federal funding of the space program means disinvestment in the nation’s future, Sandy still prioritizes her identity as a role model. Through the course of her career, she has talked to every public school in Belleville, as well as many parochial schools. She video-conferenced with students at her old high school while living on the space station, engaged with Girl Scout troops while in orbit, and wrote pen pal letters to various classrooms. “I felt that I could have the biggest impact by connected with the area where I grew up,” she says.
Over the years, she’s also fought actively against the stereotypes that prevent middle and high school girls from pursuing math and science courses. “It’s incredibly important that we counteract that trend in our schools, so I do a lot of outreach to those girls,” she explains. “I tell young people to pursue their passions, to never let anyone tell them no, and to never not try. You can only fail if you don’t try.” It was this determination that ultimately transformed her from a shy young lady growing up in a small town, to a winner of the “40 Under 40” Award given by the National Sports Group to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Title IX and gender equality in sports. The organization selected forty women athletes who had used their lives to make incredible impacts, and Sandy’s name amongst others like Sally Ride and Condoleezza Rice. “I’ve been surrounded by women in science and engineering through my whole career,” she says, “but there should be so many more—and I believe there will be.”
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