Monahans to ground control

HOUSTON It wasn’t until she left Monahans that Sally Davis paid attention to how great the star viewing is there.

“One of the things I appreciate now is how (bright) the stars in the skies are in West Texas,” she said. “What a great place to study astronomy.”

While she may not have realized how well she had it growing up, nothing stopped Davis, 49, from having a career with NASA.

Davis, a 27-year veteran of the space agency, will be the lead flight director for the Space Shuttle Atlantis’s next mission, which is scheduled to liftoff Thursday from Kennedy Space Center, Fla.

The shuttle will be carrying the Columbus module, which will be brought to the International Space Station and connected to another module that was brought up a month ago.

While many kids dream of being an astronaut, Davis said she always wanted to be at Mission Control, helping keep the voyage on track.

“I guess it’s the geeky engineer in me,” she said. “I saw the Apollo missions on television and wanted to be one of those people with their back to the camera, solving problems.”

Besides, Davis said she doesn’t care for the clutter or cramped spaces found on spacecraft.

She said she’d only be interested in going into space, “If it were like a roller coaster ride you could get on a few times.”

This assembly flight will be Davis’ third as lead director. She said she served on many more in other capacities.

Davis also worked as Russian Interface Officer, coordinating communications between the Johnson Space Center and Russian mission control.

While most of Davis’s family has left Monahans, she still has ties to the community. She took a day off work last summer to show Shelton Burnett, a Monahans High graduate, around NASA’s facilities in Houston.

“It really made me feel good that she would take time out of her day to do something like that,” Burnett said.

Burnett, a first-year sophomore mechanical engineering major at Texas Tech University, is hoping for a career in aeronautics. He would someday like to be a flight director at NASA.

Coming from Monahans, it’s nice to have someone like Davis, who graduated from Texas Tech in 1980, to look up to, Burnett said.

“It really just kind of shows that anybody can do that — even if they come from a small town that nobody ever heard of,” he said. “It really makes me feel like I could get to do it.”

Although there weren’t many aeronautic programs, Davis said she had a happy childhood in Monahans.

“I had limited opportunities in a small town, but my parents made sure I saw a little bit of the world before I went to college,” she said.

Meanwhile, Davis said plenty of preparation goes into her work.

The Atlantis mission took two years for Davis to prepare for, she said. The European workers involved have been getting ready for more than a decade.

“I am excited for the Europeans to have the module up and running,” she said.