GROWING UP, JANELLE WELLONS HAD NO STRONG CONVICTION about the career path she’d take. As a student with diverse interests, her free time was spent just as much reading fantasies as it was preparing debates for Model Congress.
But a pamphlet in the mail for a summer program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) changed that.
“Once I got to MIT, I was tempted to pursue theoretical mathematics as my major,” she said. “After speaking to upperclassmen, I was inspired to try an engineering course.”
MIT is known for engineering, and freshman year is made for exploring. And as for aerospace: “It sounded cool! I couldn’t tell you about the evolution of rockets or jets, and honestly my only applicable skills were being able to make a mean paper airplane, but my gut told me that this was the path for me,” she said.
One Giant Leap
After landing her dream job at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, it took an enormous leap of faith to move thousands of miles from Los Angeles to Tokyo to pursue a new career opportunity, Wellons shared.
“It was not an easy decision to quit the place I had dreamed of working at,” she said. “I was head hunted to work in Japan and it was not an opportunity I had been seeking on my own. I actually took an entire year to come around to the idea.”
The hiring manager pitched the opportunity in such a convincing way that she couldn’t stop thinking about it. Moving to Japan would open up the chance to work as a flight director, a role typically reserved for people who put at least 10 to 15 years at NASA. The opportunity to immerse herself in a new culture in a prominent role establishing the company’s maiden missions to the Moon was a hard one to pass up.
“Choices like these do not have to be permanent,” she said. “Leaving NASA did not mean needing to shut the door forever.”
Life in Flight
Since accepting her role as flight director at ispace, Wellons has had no regrets. Her daily work can involve running the shift schedule, overseeing planned activities, and monitoring the spacecraft’s status.
On the missions she has worked, daily contact with the spacecraft has been the norm. “For about five months, my life is dictated by the shift schedule. Since no one person can operate the spacecraft daily (we need breaks), the shift determines who will be present on-console and in which role,” she said.
That work includes assessing the spacecraft’s health and safety by checking its vitals, performing routine maintenance activities, and executing specific tasks like an orbital correction maneuver, photo-taking, or a landing sequence.
No day is ever the same. Wellons also has to triage and resolve anomalies and other unexpected events. It’s the part of the job that relies on strong leadership and decision-making under pressure.
“People tend to panic when things go wrong, but at Flight, it is your role to remain calm in the storm, recover the spacecraft to a safe state, and investigate and determine the root cause with data and clear logic,” she said.
Wellons is currently playing the recently released game The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy on Nintendo Switch. She recently finished watching the third season of Jujutsu Kaisen and may need to read the manga—”because I really want to know what happens next!”
“By sharing my story with students, I hope that they will see that these “genius” engineers and scientists who work for places like NASA can also be funny, relatable, compassionate, and full of imperfections. I want for them to be able to see themselves in me and therefore be unafraid to reach for the stars.”
—Janelle Wellons, Lead Mission Operations Engineer, ispace, inc
The Future is Bright
From the historic Cassini mission to Saturn to the epidemiologist-supported Multi-Angle Imager for Aerosols (MAIA), Wellons is compiling an impressive mission roster. For the future, she looks forward to the doors that the Artemis mission is opening to the space domain and lunar ecosystem.
But even as her career reaches farther into space, her focus remains grounded in people here on Earth.
“I am a strong believer in contributing to the future that I want to see, and that future is more accessible, more inclusive, and more diverse,” she said. “For me to come as far as I have, growing up without STEM influences in my life to an education at MIT and subsequent career in space is almost unbelievable.”
She believes it is not only important to innovate, but also to communicate science effectively to the lay person.
“There absolutely is a way to make space boring!” she said. “It’s [a] reason why I got into speaking. I had sat through one too many dry PowerPoint presentations that muddied the punchline of why modern space missions are still awe-inspiring and important to the everyday person, and thought to myself, we can do better than that.”
Wellons hopes to see more engineering societies and STEM organizations embracing the fact that communication is easier now than ever, and using every avenue to recruit future leaders, inspire students to reach higher, and share the wonders of science, while rewarding the STEM communicators that do so in the process.
“I grew up as a big fan of fiction. I read the Harry Potter books, played games like Zelda and Pokémon, and loved anything fantasy,” she said. “I realized that a common theme of these stories is that the hero must always make a choice to start their adventure.”
Applying to a dream college or job can be nerve-wracking, but Wellons encourages aspiring engineers to focus less on rejection and more on inspiration. Instead of asking, “What if I’m rejected?” ask, “What if I get in?”
She added, “If you don’t pick up the sword in your own story because you are afraid of what may happen next, you risk not having a story at all and instead falling into the background, watching the Harry Potters and Ash Ketchums of the world live their dreams,” she said. “Do not be the roadblock to your own dreams. Take a chance on you.”
Reach out to Janelle Wellons via her website. Follow her space adventures on Instagram.
Sarah Alburakeh is strategic content editor.
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