NASA Women’s History Month Profile – Lora Bailey04:33

Lora Bailey has worked in the Engineering Directorate at Johnson Space Center for over 25 years and has a BS in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Cincinnati and a Masters in Mechanical Engineering from Rice University. As Project Manager, she has led numerous projects for many types of crew and vehicle equipment that have been flown and are currently used on the International Space Station, as well as a number of articles and experiments which were flown on the Space Shuttle. She also led the post-Columbia return-to-flight effort as project manager for tile repair and repair access in EVA, which led to her innovations in developing a new tile repair method as well as developing the 3-degree-of-freedom simulator of the Space Shuttle robotic arm and the 50-foot damage inspection boom. This simulator provided a ground test bed for astronaut evaluation of tile repair feasibility and access, which ultimately proved that tile repair could be performed using the Shuttle robotic arm and 50-foot boom, and was validated in an on-orbit flight experiment on STS-121. The new tile repair method was developed and flew on STS-114 all subsequent Space Shuttle missions.