Susan Martinez
AEROSPACE SYSTEMS ENGINEER AT BLUE ORIGIN
IN 2020, WHEN MUCH OF THE WORLD PAUSED, Susan Martinez pivoted: She converted a dormant social media account from a nail art gallery into a science communication platform that now reaches thousands. “Some people made sourdough, I made a SciComm account,” she said. Under her handle @AdAstraSu, Martinez has since appeared in a Dell commercial, CBS’s Mission Unstoppable, Katya Echazarreta’s Space Camp, and she even contributed to Oprah Daily.
But Martinez’s journey began long before her social media stardom. Raised in a hands-on household—her dad a mechanic, her grandfather a lineman for Bell Electric—engineering ran in her blood. “He always made sure that we knew how to figure out things,” she said of her father. “Even though I’m the first engineer in my family, it runs in my blood.”
Homeschooled until college, Martinez earned a mechanical engineering degree and achieved her dream of working at NASA. But one of her proudest moments came when she chose to leave.
“The way that civil service works, nobody leaves. It’s unheard of,” she said. As a flight controller for the International Space Station, she felt stuck and made the difficult decision to prioritize her well-being. “It truly was just taking a look at what I felt like was best for me and actually choosing me instead of expectations.” Taking that leap led her into private industry—and her current position at Blue Origin.
“My life motto is, no one can be you but you. It seems super cliche, but it makes sense—I have an identical twin and we’re both engineers in the aerospace industry. I always tell students when I mentor them that it’s such a defining factor that you are the only person that thinks the way that you think.”
—Susan Martinez
Now a payload engineer focused on lunar missions, Martinez serves as a key technical liaison, translating client needs into action items that she sends out to teams like configuration and thermal engineering. “It’s a lot of fun—and a lot more in-the-weeds technical than people think,” she said. At Blue Origin, she built the company’s lunar payload integration process “from a blank piece of paper,” which will culminate in the flying of a NASA payload on the Mark 1 lunar lander.
With lunar payloads taking center stage in space exploration, Martinez is energized by what lies ahead. “We’re about to come into a place where we’re going to know a whole lot more about the moon than we knew in the last forever,” she said.
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