You Can't Build Alone

Growing up in El Paso, Texas, Ginger was one of four children. Her father worked at a creamery and her mom, who was born in Mexico, worked at home taking care of the family. When Ginger Kerrick was five, she checked out a book at the public library about astronomy and astronauts, and from that point on, her goal in life was to be an astronaut. She wrote to NASA to let them know she was coming — and they wrote back, encouraging her to stay in school, get good grades and work hard in math and science. When Ginger was 11, her father died suddenly of a heart attack, and her mother went to work in the cafeteria at Ginger’s school. Understanding that the only way she would be able to afford college (enroute to NASA) — was with scholarships, Ginger became a star athlete on the basketball team and a top student, ultimately graduating second in her high school class. When the first college she attended, the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), didn’t have a co-op program with NASA, she switched to Texas Tech University Lubbock, where she started as a junior. Away from home for the first time, she enjoyed her freedom a bit too much, and her grades dropped. She worked hard to get them back up, taking on part-time jobs to complete her master’s degrees in physics. Gradually, with great resourcefulness and tenacity, Kerrick made her way to NASA, first as a summer intern and then a materials engineer. Finally, at the age of 26, Kerrick was invited to interview for the astronaut program — but a kidney stone condition she didn’t even know she had meant a lifetime disqualification. Kerrick thought her life was over, but as she tells audiences — it was the life she had limited herself to that was over. Unable to go to space herself, she threw herself into training those who could and found that life had better experiences in store for her than she could have imagined herself. Kerrick went on to embed with and help train the first American and Russian crew assigned to the International Space Station, spending much of her time in Russia, where she watched “her crew” leave for the inaugural mission to the International Space Station. Soon after, she was selected as the first non-astronaut “CAPCOM,” the person in Mission Control who speaks to the in-orbit crew — the crew she had helped train for the previous two years. In 2005, she was accepted into NASA’s elite cadre of Flight Directors — the 60th in NASA’s history. For eight years, she led ISS and Space Shuttle missions at the helm of Mission Control and was the first CAPCOM, the first Latina and the fifth woman in the agency’s history to do so. Over the next ten years, as Kerrick moved up the ranks into NASA senior leadership and management roles, one of her greatest strengths was her understanding of what it took to equip, empower and motivate her employees to collaborate across NASA’s organizational boundaries; to partner with industry and academia; and to integrate across the design, development, test, and operations phases of NASA’s human spaceflight missions with the focus on crew safety. Today she shares those insights with audiences, showing business leaders how to apply the NASA model to build cohesive, high-functioning teams and an organizational culture based on high levels of trust. Ginger Kerrick has received many awards and honors in her career, but the most important to her was NASA’s prestigious Silver Snoopy award, which is given by NASA astronauts to employees and contractors for outstanding achievements related to human flight safety or mission success. In 2021, Kerrick was named Chief Strategy Officer of Barrios Technology, a woman-owned and operated technology firm that supports NASA and industry partners with systems engineering, software engineering and integration, strategic planning, training, and other mission-critical technical services. Kerrick is a vocal advocate for the importance of STEM careers and education to improving life on — and beyond — our planet. She has served as a part-time professor for the STEM MBA program at Texas Tech University's Rawls College of Business, and she speaks frequently to both business leaders and students in STEM programs across the country. In 2016, Kerrick was one of five women named to the Texas Women’s Hall of Fame, and in 2019 she was sworn in as a member of the Texas Tech Board of Regents. She has also served on the Board of Advisors for Rice University’s Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS) program. To promote STEM careers, she appeared on a panel at Comic-Con in 2018. Ginger Kerrick is profiled in the Universal Pictures documentary The Wonderful: Stories from the International Space Station (2021) and, representing the new generation of flight directors, in the 2017 documentary Mission Control: The Unsung Heroes of Apollo. She also appears in the hilarious 2019 Emmy-winning TV short starring Jeff Goldblum and Ron Howard, Peanuts in Space: Secrets of Apollo 10. The story of Kerrick’s path to NASA is featured in the book Making Space for Women: Stories from Trailblazing Women of NASA’s Johnson Space Center, written by Jennifer M. Ross-Nazzal and published by Texas A&M University Press in 2021.