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After Hartselle native Jody Singer learned last month that she had been named the next director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, her first call was to her husband.
“I just said, ‘My dream has come true,’ ” Singer recalled saying to Chris Singer and her son, who was with him. “And then, of course, I called my mom.”
Singer, who joined NASA as an engineer in 1985 through the agency’s professional intern program, is the first woman appointed to the director position. She manages one of NASA’s largest field installations with almost 6,000 civil service and contractor employees and an annual budget of about $2.8 billion.
“I am very proud and honored to be selected as the 14th director at Marshall Space Flight Center,” Singer said last week in her office at Marshall’s headquarters building. “When I look at the people that preceded me, I have a lot of respect for them and for their leadership.”
Singer also gives credit to the team in place at Marshall for the center’s success and her success.
“And it is, to me, a special time because I look at it as it also gives hope to others and it gives inspiration to young women that are starting school now or in high school or in college or even at Marshall Space Flight Center,” she said. “I think it also shows them that, definitely, there is opportunity. They just have to be resilient and be persistent.”
Singer was deputy director for about two years before becoming acting director in July. She was the manager of Marshall’s Flight Programs and Partnerships Office, with primary responsibility for Marshall’s work with human advanced exploration projects, science missions, commercial crew program and many aspects of International Space Station operations.
She worked for 25 years in the Space Shuttle Program, and was responsible for the development, testing, flight readiness, safety and performance of the shuttle’s propulsion elements, and was involved in Return-to-Flight activities after the space shuttle Columbia accident. She held deputy positions from 2010 to 2012 for three concurrent programs: the Space Shuttle program, Ares and the start-up of NASA’s Space Launch System.
The Marshall-managed Space Launch System is slated to launch astronauts in the agency’s Orion spacecraft on missions to the moon and eventually to Mars. According to NASA, more than 1,100 businesses from 44 states are helping to build it.
“I guess I would say my heart always belonged to NASA,” Singer said. “Because of the NASA job, I worked hand in hand with many of our prime contractors because we were partners.
“When we were flying the shuttle, there was definitely, as I call it, a badge-less society with our contractor partners,” she said. “With that exposure, I had the best of both worlds: working with NASA and working with our partners. It was a team effort, working for a common cause, and that cause being space exploration.”
Singer was part of the last class, in 1979, of then-Morgan County High School, which has since been replaced with Hartselle High. She earned a bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering from the University of Alabama.
She has family near her hometown, including her mother, Edith Sandlin, and an aunt and uncle, Bernard and Judy Aldridge, who live in the Danville area.
“I still have lots of great friends who live in the Decatur and Hartselle area,” said Singer, who lived in Decatur for more than 30 years before she and her husband recently moved to Huntsville. The Singers have three children, and she wanted to move to be closer to work and to her grandchildren.
Huntsville Mayor Tommy Battle said Singer has decades of experience at nearly every level of Marshall, and “that is the type of leader we want.
“At a time when NASA is embarking on its most ambitious missions since the space race, we are thrilled someone like Jody Singer is going to be leading the efforts out of Marshall,” Battle said. “Her executive role in the partnership office was all about helping private companies utilize Marshall assets, so when we are working with phenomenal space companies, she has the experience to deal with the private sector.”
Singer credits her mentors at NASA with teaching her, among other traits, how to lead.
“The support that my mentors gave to me is one of the things that, when I became deputy two years ago, I wanted to keep going,” she said. “We do have such a strong community and a strong workforce but we know that you’re only as strong as how you’re paying it forward.”
She sees that effort as central to Marshall’s continued success.
“To me, mentorship and developing the next leaders and having our senior leadership team involved with the next set of leaders is critical,” she said. “That’s one of the things I’m passionate about, paying it forward and developing the next leaders. I don’t think we have an option not to.”
Another goal for Singer is cultivating partnerships with industry, other government agencies and academia.
“Definitely executing our missions is critical,” she said, and those include the Space Launch System, International Space Station, support to the Commercial Crew Program and science activity that Marshall supports.
“One of the things we’ll be focusing on,” Singer said, “is our flexibility and agility as to how we execute future work because Marshall has a critical role to play in the lunar architecture, which includes the Space Launch System but it also includes developing the next systems that we’ll have to have to be in deep space.”
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