Allison Mjoen, a NASA operations manager at Kennedy Space Center, watched an Artemis SLS launch with her family after helping plan and run critical ground operations.
Superchilled propellant streamed into the rocket’s core stage as NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) began the sequence that would end in a thundering liftoff. Standing with her family on Florida’s Space Coast, Allison Mjoen watched the vehicle rise on a day that felt unusually crisp and bright—April 1, 2026—taking in both the spectacle and the years of work behind it.
Mjoen serves as an operations manager in NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems program at Kennedy Space Center, where she helps design and run the ground-side processes that prepare Artemis missions for flight. For her children, the launch was a rare chance to see—literally—what their mother’s job enables. For Mjoen, it was an emotional marker: the culmination of decades spent learning how to move a spacecraft from plans and parts to a launch-ready system.
Her current role centers on “offline” spacecraft operations, the complex coordination that occurs well before countdown clocks begin. Mjoen supports the senior vehicle operations manager for ground systems, Matt Czech, helping build integration plans and managing ground operations involved in processing the Artemis vehicle. Her portfolio includes key elements such as the boosters and NASA’s Orion spacecraft—hardware that must be prepared, tested, and integrated through tightly choreographed procedures.
That work draws on a career spanning more than 20 years at Kennedy, with experience across multiple eras of U.S. human spaceflight. Mjoen began as a flight crew systems engineer with United Space Alliance during the Space Shuttle Program, working on mission-specific cabin setups. Her team ensured astronauts had the right internal configurations for each flight—ranging from food and spacesuits to cargo and payload equipment.
After the shuttle’s retirement, she transitioned to the International Space Station Program as a payload integration engineer. There, she served as a bridge between researchers proposing experiments and the organizations building the flight hardware, helping translate scientific goals into equipment that could be safely and effectively installed and operated in orbit.
Mjoen later moved into the Project Office on the Test and Operations Support Contract, and then joined NASA’s Operations Project Engineering Office. In that office, she took on a major Artemis assignment as the Spacecraft Payloads Integration and Evolution Element lead for Artemis I, the program’s first integrated mission using SLS and Orion.
Her preparation acquired added weight when she supported integrated firing room operations during Artemis I as a certified operations project engineer. Achieving the certification was a professional milestone; executing those duties in real time elevated the responsibility further. In Mjoen’s view, the firing room experience made the stakes unmistakable: each call, each coordination step, and each decision affects the team’s ability to carry out test procedures correctly and—most importantly—safely.
Working at the integration console reinforced principles she now brings to her daily work across Artemis teams: detailed preparation, strong collaboration, and mutual trust.
For Mjoen, Artemis is also about shared experience—families watching together and imagining what comes next. She sees the program as a chance to create another defining moment like Apollo 11, when the first Moon landing captured global attention. Artemis, she believes, is building that kind of inspiration for a new generation—this time with the aim of establishing a lasting human return to the lunar surface.
Why it matters
Artemis depends not only on rockets and spacecraft, but on the ground systems and operational discipline that make launches possible. Professionals like Allison Mjoen translate decades of shuttle and station lessons into safer, more reliable lunar mission processing. As Artemis advances toward crewed lunar landings, NASA’s ability to integrate teams and procedures across complex hardware will be a key indicator of how quickly—and sustainably—humans can return to the Moon.