Paula Ortiz Couder, the engineer who provides safety for humans going to the Moon: ‘What isn’t hostile in space?’
As a child she was expected to follow the family tradition on the tennis courts, but now she is a NASA safety expert tasked with transporting astronauts to the lunar surface
Paula Ortiz Couder, 31, says she was born with a racket in her hand. The daughter and granddaughter of professional tennis players — her grandfather was a Davis Cup team captain — her fate seemed set from the start. She played the sport from the age of three, with daily three-hour training sessions. One day, aged 12, she came home and said: “Mom, I’m going to study aerospace engineering.” Her mother replied: “Go for it, let’s do it.”
Ortiz speaks to EL PAÍS by videoconference from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, where she works as a crewed mission safety specialist. On April 1, just as the giant rocket for the Artemis 2 mission carrying four astronauts lifted off, four white metal cages, like cable-cars, slid down and moved away from the rocket, which by then was belching a huge column of flame in its slow initial ascent. In the event of an accident before launch, the astronauts would board this emergency evacuation system to get as far away from the SLS rocket as quickly as possible; the SLS is the largest controlled explosive device ever used to carry humans into space.
Those cages “are my baby,” Ortiz admits; she has worked on their design and refinement since 2019, first as a contractor for the U.S. space agency and, since 2024, as a NASA permanent employee. Her dream of becoming an aerospace engineer, elevated to a space level, came true in part thanks to tennis.
Ortiz is the daughter of Arturo Ortiz, nine-time Spanish high jump champion and still the national record holder in the event, with a mark of 2.34 meters. Her mother, Patricia, is a professional tennis player and still runs the tennis academy founded in the 1980s by her father, Juan Manuel Couder, on the outskirts of Madrid.
From her native Majadahonda, a Madrid suburb, Ortiz moved to the United States to study engineering on a tennis scholarship at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. One day, some classmates invited her to Titusville to watch a NASA launch. “That moment changed my career path,” she recalls. “It was so powerful to feel the vibration in my chest, the sound, everything; it’s hard to imagine anyone seeing something like that and not feeling inspired, fascinated.” During her final year of college she suffered an injury and stopped playing. According to her father, she put away her racket and never picked it up again.
The next challenge for this engineer is to help colonize the Moon. The motto of the department where she works, NASA’s Office of Safety and Mission Assurance, is that the response to a new project should never be a justified no (“no, because…”), but a conditional yes (“yes, if…”). That means finding ways for the mission to proceed while minimizing risks to the astronauts, even when those risks cannot be entirely eliminated. As Ortiz says: “What isn’t hostile in space?”
The greatest enemy NASA faces in its lunar settlement plan is microscopic and razor-sharp. The dust that makes up the lunar regolith is made of tiny particles with jagged edges — like shards of glass — that cling to anything they touch and are very difficult to shake off.
During the Apollo program that took Neil Armstrong to the Moon half a century ago, the first astronauts to set foot there had serious problems with this dust, which stuck to spacesuits, spread throughout the lunar module and even entered their lungs, causing allergic reactions. It is unknown what harmful effects this grit will have on future lunar settlers. On Earth, a similar type of particle causes silicosis, a common chronic disease among miners that attacks the lungs and can be fatal.
“NASA has been thinking for quite some time about how to try to manage it,” Ortiz acknowledges. “It’s a very small, sharp and electrostatic particle; it’s charged, and that’s why it sticks to everything. Designing systems that are compatible with this will be a major challenge,” the engineer explains of her new role overseeing the safety of transport, landing, and the project’s scientific missions for the agency’s Lunar Base program.
The first major milestone of this program will come when astronauts from Artemis 4 set foot at the lunar south pole, as early as 2028. The original plan, designed during Donald Trump’s first term, was for the crew to include a woman and a Black astronaut, although that objective has blurred since the Republican’s return to power. That same year, the last of his current term, there is a planned second crewed landing in that part of the satellite, which has never been explored and is now coveted by both the United States and China because it contains frozen water that could sustain permanent colonies. Later, NASA aims to lay the foundations for a colony so the Moon could be permanently inhabited within roughly six years, according to the project, whose leader is another Madrid native: 51-year-old engineer Carlos García Galán.
In the craters at the south pole, where the ice is located, perpetual night reigns and temperatures plunge to minus 200 degrees Celsius. Outside those craters, days last 14 Earth days, and the Sun never rises very far above the horizon. “It’s very different from what we’re used to here on Earth. The other day we watched some simulations and honestly my brain struggled to adapt. And that’s the lighting condition that exists year-round,” Ortiz concedes. One of NASA’s objectives, together with the U.S. Department of Defense, is to install the first nuclear power plants there to sustain settlements without relying on solar panels.
Ortiz supported the uncrewed Artemis 1 mission and Artemis 2, which was the first crewed mission to orbit the Moon in more than half a century. She also helped design devices that would have allowed mission specialist Christina Koch — the first woman to travel to the Moon — to open the Orion spacecraft from the inside after falling into the Pacific Ocean. Ultimately that wasn’t necessary, as U.S. Navy personnel were able to reach the capsule and open the hatch to extract the crew. At that moment, NASA’s live video showed two other innovations to which Ortiz contributed. They are the forward porch, an inflatable system that allows the recovery team to access the spacecraft even against four-meter waves, and the round upper flotation devices specially designed to prevent the capsule from capsizing in the water. “When you see them, they might not look extraordinary, but there’s a huge amount of engineering devoted to designing these things to make sure they work under different ocean conditions,” Ortiz explains.
The engineer had her first child a little over a year ago. The grandfather is only half-joking when he says that his granddaughter will never be short on good floaties at the pool.
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