STARKVILLE, Miss.—It’s a long way from Hernando, Mississippi, to Kennedy Space Center, but Matthew Ramsey’s decision to spend a few years in-between the two at Mississippi State University made the trip worth it.
Today, Ramsey is celebrating the success of Wednesday’s [April 1] launch of NASA’s Artemis II mission—the first crewed mission since 1972—as its mission manager. The 10-day expedition from Earth around the moon marks a major step toward returning humans to the lunar surface and setting the stage for long-term exploration.
The North Mississippi native enrolled at Mississippi State in the early 1990s as a pitcher for the university baseball team while earning a 1992 bachelor’s and 1993 master’s degree in aerospace engineering. He began his work with NASA in 2002.
He said in one of the agency’s website stories, “There are a lot of similarities between mission management and pitching. You control many aspects of the tempo, and there’s a lot of weight on your shoulders.”
On this history-making mission, that responsibility includes pre-launch daily preparations, addressing issues as deputy of the Artemis II management team, and resolving any flight changes.
One of his NASA interview comments about his immeasurable duties was, “Most of my time is focused on making sure we’re ready to fly astronauts Reid, Victor, Christina and Jeremy to the Moon and bring them home safely.”
Also involved with the success of Artemis II is Parker Glass, who works for NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems and has been overseeing budget development, project plans and resource allocation in preparation for Wednesday’s launch.
Glass was exposed to NASA and space exploration during most of his childhood in Yorktown, Virginia, where his dad was employed at Langley Research Center for many years. Glass became enamored with becoming an astronaut, but as he got older his interests changed.
He discovered the prestigious PGA Golf Management program at Mississippi State, one of just 16 in the nation. He said in a NASA article, “I first visited MSU in 2014 and fell in love with Starkville.”
After eventually changing his major to finance, he was surprised to discover there were internship opportunities with NASA and that brought him back to his original passion.
Glass wants students interested in NASA and the agency’s work to know that being an astronaut doesn’t have to factor into the equation of working in space exploration. “NASA needs everybody,” he said.
He graduated from MSU in 2018 with a bachelor’s in business administration and earned a Master of Business Administration degree in 2022.
