Meet the 24-year-old female rocket engineer on the NASA project to send men to Mars

Tiera Guinn Fletcher is not your average lady. When asked what she desired to know as a kid, she replied wanting to know how to build planes.

Today, she continues her impressive run, working with Boeing and serving as one of the designers and structural analysts building the Space Launch System for NASA which is set to send people to Mars.

The work Guinn is involved with is very crucial given U.S. President Donald Trump has tasked NASA to return humans to the Moon by 2024, five decades after the Americans chalked the feat.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) African-American graduate, who majored in aeronautics and astronautics, holds a Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering.

She is a Rocket Structural Design and Analysis Engineer and a full-time employee of the Boeing Company working to build NASA’s Space Launch System in New Orleans, LA, engineergirl.org notes.

She is married to a fellow aerospace engineer Myron Fletcher with whom she shares a baby boy. Myron holds a double degree in Aerospace Engineering and Physics from Tuskegee University, as well as, a Masters in Engineering Management from Duke University.

Guinn is keen to share her knowledge and encourage many more from her stock to take up science programmes and not be intimidated. She is doing this by availing herself to be contacted by educators for possible speaking engagements in schools or after school programs or summer camps.

In June 2017, at 22 years-old, Guinn was already a Rocket Structural Design and Analysis Engineer for the Space Launch System being built by Boeing for NASA. She designed and analyzed parts of a rocket she believes will be one of the biggest and most powerful in history.

The Atlanta native credits her mother, Sheila, an accountant, and her construction worker father as those who encouraged her to calculate things and measure things in her daily life.

These exercises, including coupon clipping, totalling up grocery receipts and learning about the applications of architecture sharpened her mind, such that, by eleven, she had settled on Aerospace engineering as her field of choice.

Both she and her husband share an interest in influencing young people to join the world of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

She’s received the 2017 Good Housekeeping’s Awesome Woman Award, which recognizes women who are impacting the world for the better by overcoming social constraints and influencing the world around them.

She is also a recipient of the Albert G. Hill Prize at MIT in 2017, which recognizes students in their junior or senior year who have excelled academically and impacted the environment at MIT in a way that improves campus climate for other minorities.

Guinn has also won the Most Promising Engineer – Industry Award at the 2019 Black Engineer of the Year Awards.

“You have to look forward to your dream and you can’t let anybody get in the way of it,” the female rocket engineer said in 2017. “No matter how tough it may be, no matter how many tears you might cry, you have to keep pushing. And you have to understand that nothing comes easy. Keeping your eyes on the prize, you can succeed,” she advised young girls who would like to follow in her footsteps.