MET Alum Leading NASA’s Kennedy Space Center Sees Promise, Possibilities in Private-Public Partnerships

For Janet Petro (MET’88), humanity’s grand aspiration for space travel was always within arm’s reach. Growing up on Florida’s “space coast” during the earliest days of the international race to reach beyond Earth’s atmosphere, her father worked on the NASA test programs that made the famed Apollo lunar missions possible. Now, the West Point and Metropolitan College (MET) alum has ascended to uncharted territory of her own, becoming the 11^th director of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, and the first woman to helm the prestigious post.

At BU, Petro graduated with a Master of Science in Business Administration, a degree formerly offered as part of MET’s programs in Business & Management. Over her 14-year career with the Kennedy Space Center, Petro’s business savvy has served her well—the former deputy director played a leading role in shepherding new partnerships between the national agency’s crown jewel launch site and the growing number of private enterprises seeking to make space flight and travel available to citizen consumers, at exceptional costs. But while those rarified costs have raised some eyebrows among the public, Petro believes that possibilities born of sharing such precious resources are preferable to seeing them go to waste.

“I joined [NASA] when the Space Shuttle program was ending, and it was going to be devastating to the Kennedy Space Center in terms of workforce and programs,” Petro tells Bostonia. “I was seeing all these great facilities and assets that space companies could use, but that NASA could not.”

Democratizing NASA’s resources by making them available to non-governmental organizations presents multiple benefits, Petro says, including that diversifying the pool of potential spacefarers can help defray costs. “If NASA owns and operates all the assets associated with that, you’re going to pay the price for being the sole customer of that one spacecraft. [Now], other users can use that, as well. So, the government wouldn’t be the sole funder of that vehicle.”

Petro is nonchalant about the newsworthy nature of her recent promotion as the site’s first female director. “I was born at the right time, when there weren’t a lot of women in STEM fields going to West Point, being in the Army,” she says. While she may be a trailblazer among her profession, she’s not the only one. “[In] more and more meetings, I’m not the only woman in the room. Kennedy Space Center has built our senior management team so more than 50 percent of them are women,” she explains.

As she looks forward to a slate of exciting upcoming launches—including Artemis I, the deep space exploration vehicle meant to circle the moon later this year—Petro recalls being a young girl, taking in the sights of those early NASA launches from beaches near to the Merritt Island facility she now leads. No longer a mere spectator, Petro is proud to help command a mission returning to the orb that’s captured her imagination all her life.

“We’re going back to where we haven’t been for more than 50 years,” she says of the moon mission. And given its large scale, she expects the launch will draw some attention. “Everybody on the space coast is going to hear this vehicle when it lifts off,” she says.

The sound might make someone feel as though a spacecraft is closer than ever before. And thanks to Petro’s capacity to find common grounds between private and public interests in the budding realm of space tourism, it may well be.

“I was never able to go up as an astronaut, so it’s really exciting that people like yourself and me [have] a possibility, as more companies are able to safely bring people up, to see Earth from high above,” Petro says.