Wright State alum Lindsay Aitchison fulfills childhood space-agency dream

At quite a young age, Lindsay Aitchison had her “aha” moment of what she wanted to do.

“When I was about 4 years old, my parents took me to the Johnson Space Center in Houston as part of a family vacation,” she recalled. “I decided then and there, I wanted to work at NASA.”

Today, that’s exactly what Aitchison does, even working for a time in that very center. Now, she’s got her eyes on Mars.

Aitchison, who earned a master’s degree in industrial and human factors engineering from Wright State University, received the 2025 College of Graduate Programs and Honors Studies Outstanding Alumni Award from the Wright State Alumni Association.

She is the deputy director of the Mars Campaign Office in the Moon to Mars Program at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration headquarters in Washington, D.C. She oversees advanced systems and technologies that can expand human exploration on the Moon and enable human missions to Mars.

Her office provided these new technologies to the International Space Station and the Artemis Moon-landing program to test system performance before heading to Mars.

Her job is to help develop “everything it might take to get humans all the way to Mars.”

Aitchison previously was chief of the portfolio intelligence and analysis branch in NASA’s Office of the Chief Financial Officer. She led a team of analysts to evaluate the performance of programs, projects and offices to efficiently manage cost, schedules and risk across the space agency.

She earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Purdue University. But she wanted to go further, which is when Wright State entered her universe.

“Wright State gave me a lot of different opportunities in terms of coursework,” she said. “I knew I wanted to do human factors engineering. Wright State had a breadth of courses that really opened up a lot of new opportunities.”

Wright State engineering alum Lindsay Aitchison, left, with Subhashini Ganapathy, dean of the College of Graduate Programs and Honors Studies.

She added, “Wright State really gave me some great opportunities to try new things that I could immediately apply to my job.”

Since transferring to NASA headquarters in 2017, Aitchison held multiple roles in the Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate, including working on program executive for extra-vehicular activity (EVA) and human surface mobility program and the EVA strategy lead for advanced exploration systems.

Aitchison also worked at the Johnson Space Center as a leader in the EVA technology development department and manager of the high-performance EVA glove development program.

Aitchison tells those who are looking to develop a career path, especially young students, “The biggest part is having a goal in mind but not being so set on the specific path. I wanted to do engineering. What type, I didn’t know. Trying a lot of different things to see what fits got me excited. You want to choose a career that when you get up every day say, ‘This is a fun job.’ And so having that yes attitude helped me figure out where it is I fit.”