Safe Space

The seat restraint is snug as you settle into a safe position a quarter of a million miles away from Earth. Beneath you surge the engines that will land you on the surface of the Moon. Your eyes lock on the cabin windows, revealing the profound vastness of space—and the first glimpses of the rocky terrain you’ll be exploring. As the daunting challenges ahead begin to sink in, you take great comfort in this: Celena Dopart ’12 has your back.

As a human factors system engineer, Dopart has already anticipated how you will interact with the technical marvels surrounding you in the cabin. She’s conducted risk assessments and predicted decision-making processes in the hopes of eliminating potential human error, analyzed ergonomics to optimize cabin comfort, and conducted user trainings to run through all manner of scenarios.

Dopart has her own heart set on traveling through space, a dream that began at a very young age. Her parents, both private pilots, routinely brought her to the National Air and Space Museum, a short walk from Dopart’s childhood home in Washington, D.C. She marveled at the museum’s solar-systems models and the spacesuit Neil Armstrong wore when he became the first person to step on the moon.

“I recall learning about the sun, planets, and areas in space where we might find life. As a kid, it sparked a sense in me that there’s a lot more out there,” she says. Almost 30 years later, with degrees from WPI and MIT under her belt, Dopart hasn’t just studied what’s “out there”—she’s helping humans explore space firsthand.

“I knew I wanted to be an astronaut when I was four years old,” she says. She recalls at a young age setting up family science experiments around the house and being awakened by her parents for lunar eclipses. With an educator mother and a father trained in aerospace engineering, science and curiosity were central to Dopart’s homelife. “There was a lot of energy in my family around STEM fields. My parents were all about exploring the world we live in and beyond,” she explains. “And when I learned that people could go to space, I thought, ‘I’m going to do that one day.’”

As her senior year at WPI approached, she struggled to reconcile her dream of space flight against the realities of the aerospace industry. “Being an astronaut isn’t a job you just apply for straight out of college, and the chances of it happening at any point throughout your career are infinitesimally small,” she admits.

In search of an earth-bound Plan B she could sink her teeth into, she searched for graduate programs focused on the practicalities of human space flight. She was accepted to MIT, where she joined a human systems lab researching the interaction between spacecraft interfaces and their human operators. As part of her studies, Dopart spent a summer at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, home of NASA’s human space flight program since 1961. It was there that she saw firsthand how astronauts are trained, paving the way for the human-centered design work she would do in the years to come.

Following her graduation from MIT in 2014, Dopart approached her job search with the strategic foresight of a chess master. NASA would soon select a private company to transport crew from Earth to the International Space Station (ISS), and she wanted to position herself well in this pivotal moment. “That program was the future of human space flight in the United States, so I was willing to delay a career decision,” she says. While waiting for NASA’s announcement, she accepted a six-month internship at the European Astronaut Centre in Germany, a move that gave her intimate knowledge of the training European astronauts received to both live and work at the ISS.

It was during her time in Germany that news broke of NASA’s groundbreaking decision. Rather than selecting a single contractor, the agency had split the contract between two aerospace giants: Boeing and SpaceX. This unexpected development presented her with a win-win choice. She set her sights on Boeing, drawn to its Starliner project—a partially reusable spacecraft poised to shape the future of human space flight—and in 2015 she accepted her first full-time job position as an aerospace engineer.

Her time at Boeing led to one of her most notable professional memories to date. The company was about to conduct its first unmanned orbital space flight with the Starliner spacecraft, which would enter orbit, dock at the ISS, and then return to White Sands, N.M., after an eight-day journey. Dopart was assigned to the recovery team, which was slated to support the post-landing operations in White Sands at the end of the mission. It also was tasked with “standing by” throughout the mission as a precautionary measure.

“We were there from the start of the mission just in case of an early de-orbit, but no one expected that to happen,” she says. However, when the spacecraft was unable to reach its intended orbit, Boeing made the decision to return the craft early to its landing target in the New Mexico desert.

“Despite the challenges of that mission, the reentry was one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen—watching the glowing spacecraft hurtling towards us in the early morning sky. It was a beautiful landing.” Once the literal dust settled, Dopart was the first person to open the craft’s hatch and climb inside the cabin, where she conducted crew interface checkouts for the crew-less flight.

During her five years at Boeing, she enjoyed a range of experiences, from supporting the design of the Starliner’s cabin interior to assisting with operation development. But she showed particular skill and interest in working on a spacecraft’s most unpredictable component—the people in it. This led to a niche specialty as a human factors systems engineer.  

As Dopart’s career at Boeing progressed, she found herself increasingly drawn to a crucial aspect of spacecraft design: the interface between human and machine. “How does the astronaut interact with the systems in the craft? And how does the technology they interact with make them safer and more productive?” Dopart asks. “Part of our job is to say, ‘Here’s where the human might make a mistake and here’s why.’”

At Boeing, she honed her skills as a human factors system engineer, improving spacecraft ergonomics and designing and building training simulators to better prepare astronauts for the rigors of space flight. “It’s fun to work through a person’s decision-making processes, thinking about the human as not just a user, but as an element of your system.”

She characterizes much of her job as a simple matter of risk analysis—a balance of likelihood and consequence. “We’re going to spend a lot of time thinking about a future scenario with high likelihood and high consequence, as well as low likelihood and high consequence,” she explains. “But if it’s a matter of pushing the wrong button and nothing really happens, well … we still don’t want that, but we have a framework to prioritize what we spend time optimizing.”

Dopart illustrates the role of a human factors systems engineer by drawing parallels to the everyday risk assessment we all do, such as when driving a car. While operating a vehicle carries inherent dangers, most individuals weigh these risks against the benefits of automotive travel and implement safety measures when possible. “Make sure you’ve slept well; keep your eyes on the road; don’t use your cell phone,” she says, further explaining how this approach translates to her professional work: “We’re just taking that mentality and applying it to a very specific set of risks and consequences—and also optimizing the design of the interface from the get-go, not just how the human uses it after it’s been built.”

Of course, flying a 30,000-pound spacecraft to the International Space Station is not entirely the same as negotiating rush-hour traffic, and unlike a luxury car bloated with fun but unnecessary features, the best design for a spacecraft is a simple one. “If you add a part to a vehicle, it’s another part you have to make, another part that can break, and another part the crew could use incorrectly. I sometimes think of our approach as ‘Marie Kondo engineering’—simplify everything.’”

As the COVID pandemic raged in early 2020, Dopart reassessed her career path. Though deeply satisfied with her “dream job” at Boeing, she felt compelled to position herself at the forefront of space exploration’s next phase—exploration beyond Low Earth Orbit. That year, she made the decision to join SpaceX to work on the Starship program, a revolutionary craft designed to be “a fully reusable transportation system designed to carry both crew and cargo to Earth’s orbit, the Moon, Mars, and beyond.”

Now the lead cabin engineer for the crewed variant of the ship, she oversees Starship’s interior structures and crew interface designs, with human factors systems engineering forming a crucial component of her broader responsibilities. However, it wasn’t career advancement that attracted her to SpaceX. Rather, it was the company’s bold vision for space exploration, not only returning humans to the Moon but also laying the groundwork for a mission to Mars.

In the short term, Dopart and the SpaceX team are focused on Artemis 3, a NASA-contracted mission to land a crew on the lunar surface—a feat last accomplished in 1972. “This is an opportunity to take everything I learned at Boeing regarding human factors, crew usability, and operations, and work on a blank-slate design,” she says. Although the short-term goal is to bring several NASA astronauts to the lunar surface and back, she emphasizes that every decision she and her team make has a much greater project in mind.

“SpaceX has a goal of making our species interplanetary, and it’s very easy to see how the choices we’re making today are the choices that will get us to Mars,” she says, explaining that Starship’s massive structure (standing about 165 feet tall) is ultimately with a view of transporting materials and people to the red planet.

“This is so different from the Apollo capsule, or even [Boeing’s] Starliner and [SpaceX’s] Dragon capsules. Starship turns everything you’d usually focus on in aerospace engineering on its head, in part because it’s so massive.” Although NASA has suggested that a crewed mission to Mars would be feasible in the 2040s, SpaceX has predicted that such a mission could take place within the next decade.

It’s not just SpaceX’s universe-sized ambitions that make the company a good fit for Dopart; she also finds a lot to like in the company’s fast-paced and streamlined culture. “People are not siloed at SpaceX; it’s a really collaborative environment,” she says. “You may not think that Starlink (the company’s satellite internet system) has a lot to do with a lunar landing mission, but we can learn a lot from that project. So, the engineers, the products, and the manufacturing lines are all very accessible. You can learn a lot here, without many firewalls.”

Dopart is also a fierce advocate for women in STEM, having been inspired by the many empowered women in her family. “My mom is strong, smart, and independent,” she says.
“I grew up with her as an example and an extended family that’s majority female, which gave me the innate sense that I’m smart and capable. I can hold my own in a male-dominated field and know that my gender has nothing to do with whether I deserve to be where I am.”

For the aerospace industry at large, she sees progress in this regard. She notes that many aerospace companies have made hiring decisions that diversify representation in both gender and race. “Since my days at WPI, I’ve seen that a range of perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds are increasingly valued, and although it’s incremental, we’re moving toward a more equitable industry. I’d love for it to happen faster, but it’s progress.”

Dopart draws inspiration from NASA’s commitment to diversity in future space missions. The Artemis 3 mission aims to land the first woman and person of color on the Moon—a goal that resonates deeply with her values and lifelong aspirations. “I’ve found this little niche that fits perfectly with the four-year-old me who thought, ‘I’m going to be the first woman on the Moon!’” she says. “It might not be me, but I sure am going to help make it happen.”