Blugold Alumnus Soars At NASA, Involved In Artemis Program
UW-Eau Claire grad Dr. Susan Lederer achieves childhood dream of working at NASA
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Growing up in Shawano, Dr. Susan Lederer would stay up late and stare at the sky.
“Our parents would let us stay up and get the lawn chairs out,” she remembers. “We would lay them flat and watch the northern lights. My grandfather loved constellations and loved space, so I would talk to him about those things.”
Lederer is now involved in the Artemis program, designed to eventually return humans to the surface of the moon. She is the lead project scientist for NASA’s Commercial Payload Services (CLPS) team.
Lederer still talks about it. But now the discussions often center around planetary systems she helped discover and mission payloads that have landed on the moon under her direction.
Lederer, a 1992 UW-Eau Claire graduate, is a planetary and space scientist for NASA. Based at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, Lederer found a career she knew she was destined for during those nights of stargazing in northern Wisconsin.
"It’s like a speechless moment. How did it end up being me? And the answer is it’s because it’s not just me. It’s a whole team that made this happen.”
DR. SUSAN LEDERER
ON LEADING THE PAYLOADS TEAM AS PART OF THE ARTEMIS PROGRAM
“Zero people that I knew growing up worked for NASA,” Lederer says. “But I somehow got in my head that that’s what I was going to do someday.”
Studying math and physics in undergrad – with professors whom she has kept in contact for the past three decades – built the foundation Lederer launched her career from.
Lederer went on to get her graduate and doctoral degrees in astronomy and astrophysics. While working on her doctorate, she got her first taste of what the future might hold.
While keeping an eye on NASA postings, awaiting that elusive position she always dreamed about, Lederer became a physics professor in Southern California.
“I got tenure and got promoted at the university,” Lederer says, before her dream finally became a reality. “A position with NASA came available and so I transferred over. It’s been about 15½ years ago now since I’ve been working for NASA full time.”
The dream was achieved. But what came next is something Lederer may not have even imagined while staring at the sky as a child in Shawano.
In 1999, a red dwarf star was discovered about 40 light years from Earth. In 2016, a team of scientists at the University of Liege in Belgium began studying that star more closely – and needed more telescopes in different parts of the world.
That need led them to Johnson Space Center and Lederer. At that time, she was the NASA lead for an infrared telescope called UKIRT on Mauna Kea, in Hawaii. She also used telescopes around the world.
Lederer became part of the international team researching the dwarf star. That research team discovered a planetary system of seven Earth-like planets orbiting that dwarf star, which became known as the TRAPPIST-1 system.
“That group was amazing because it’s the first discovery around any ultra cool dwarf star ever,” Lederer recalls. “They were some of the smallest planets ever discovered, and three were squarely in the habitable zone.”
Forty light years closer to home, Lederer is now involved in the Artemis program, designed to eventually return humans to the surface of the moon. She is the lead project scientist for NASA’s Commercial Payload Services (CLPS) team.
“The whole purpose of CLPS is to manifest different types of payloads, instruments on landers that go to the moon to help us better understand the environment that astronauts will experience,” Lederer says.
She says the magnitude of this latest endeavor hit her when she was sitting at the console overseeing operations for the landing of the IM-1 mission, a commercial venture launched by a company called Intuitive Machines, in conjunction with NASA.
"It’s pretty incredible to be here now after starting in such a small town in northern Wisconsin."
DR. SUSAN LEDERER
“I’m sitting on console with the headset on, and the director who oversees CLPS comes in and looks at me and says, ‘This is the first time that NASA has landed on the moon in 52 years, and you led the payload teams on that mission. How does that feel?’ ” Lederer remembers.
“It’s like a speechless moment. How did it end up being me? And the answer is it’s because it’s not just me. It’s a whole team that made this happen.”
That control room was a long way from the lawn chair in Shawano where she learned about the constellations with her grandfather, and the home where her parents provided the encouragement to follow her dream.
“It’s pretty incredible to be here now after starting in such a small town in northern Wisconsin,” Lederer says. “I wish that my grandfather was still around to be able to see it.”
This article, published by UW-Eau Claire, was edited for publication through Volume One • Read the full writeup online at www.uwec.edu • View Dr. Susan Lederer's profile on NASA's Astromaterials Research & Exploration Science website
