It was never a part of the plan to work for NASA. But when life opens a door to the unknown, Annette Hasbrook ’85 says, give it a chance — after all, it is humanity’s destiny to explore.
Before becoming one of the first women to serve as a NASA flight director, Hasbrook first forged her path at Notre Dame. A mechanical engineer who was also a singer, she joined the Notre Dame Chorale.
“My sophomore year, when I joined, another cute guy happened to join — his name was Pete Hasbrook. We started dating, and he was an aerospace engineer,” Hasbrook said. “So he was the one that actually wanted to move to Houston.”
While Pete worked as a contractor for NASA, Hasbrook took a job with Arthur Andersen. Married one year after graduation, she began to settle into her life in Texas. Yet, she always remained open to the unknown.
“A friend of ours from Notre Dame said, ‘Oh, I think you would do really well at NASA. … Put in your resume, and I’ll have my boss review your application.’ This was back in the day when you filled out an application and mailed it to the HR office,” Hasbrook said.
She decided to give NASA a shot.
“So, I guess you could say I sort of fell into the space business,” Hasbrook said, “As they say, your degree gets you your first job and then it’s the people you know, the connections, which are oftentimes how you end up taking all your future jobs. So, Notre Dame got me to NASA.”
Hasbrook joined the Mission Operations Directorate, working at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. She spent the first part of her career as a payload officer in Mission Operations. In this role, Hasbrook was tasked with understanding the logistics of each experiment conducted on a given Shuttle mission, in order to troubleshoot any issues in real time with the shuttle’s flight control team.
Though it began with a space race, Hasbrook says that outer space exploration is truly a universal endeavor, requiring collaboration and cooperation with nations around the world.
“I started working with the international partners, I worked with the Japanese on some experiments that they were flying. So, I got the opportunity to do quite a bit of travel,” Hasbrook said. “And when the Space Station started up, I switched over to a Space Station flight control discipline called Assembly Operations.”
The International Space Station (ISS) project was the premier example of international collaboration towards one out-of-Earth goal. Five partner agencies participated in the station’s design and assembly, including Russia, Canada, Japan, the European Space Agency, and the United States. Each component of the ISS was constructed in various parts of the world and, through 36 Space Shuttle flights and 6 Russian Proton and Soyuz launches, was assembled and connected in orbit.
“Basically, our job was to figure out how to activate each of the elements as they went up,” Hasbrook said. “In that role, I got to go to Russia quite a bit because they launched the functional cargo block, which was the first element. We were joined at the hip from the very beginning of the Space Station, so we had to develop procedures and interfaces with the Russians.”
Then, in 2000, Hasbrook was selected to be a Flight Director — further helping to dismantle the traditional gender barrier in NASA leadership.
“When I first started at NASA, there were fewer women in leadership than there are now. But I also didn’t think of it as, ‘Well, this is unobtainable.’ My mom was a very strong role model for me, and she always said, ‘You can do anything you set your mind to,’” Hasbrook said. “And so that was just a fascinating job. Everybody has this extreme focus on accomplishing the mission objective. It’s such a fantastic feeling to be in the control room with a bunch of highly capable technical individuals all working toward the same goal.”
But working in such a high-stress environment had its challenges. The loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia in 2003 was a devastating reminder of the risk of space exploration.
“People knew these astronauts personally, and though I hadn’t worked with them directly, we were all part of the same team. It’s such a gut-punch for the agency and for the nation, and to think that we failed them,” Hasbrook said. “And so you have to redouble your efforts to make sure that it never happens again. You ask, ‘Are we doing the right thing? Are we building the spacecraft correctly?’ It’s always something you carry in your mind. So that’s always the challenge, balancing the risk of any mission.”
For Hasbrook, a source of support during difficult days was her husband, Pete, who was also working in human spaceflight at NASA.
“So, it was nice — when you’re facing challenges, having a partner in the same business that you could come home and talk to about it, and he understands what’s going on and can empathize,” Hasbrook said.
After years of overseeing expeditions as a Flight Director, Hasbrook switched to a role heading up the Training Management Office in 2011, overseeing the training of the next generation of flight controllers and astronauts.
After about five years overseeing training, Hasbrook shifted to her final role at NASA, Associate Program Manager for Technical Integration on the Orion Program, a spacecraft designed to take humans on deep space missions to the moon, and eventually Mars. The role came under Mark Kirasich ’82, Program Manager and fellow Notre Dame graduate. It also came with a change of pace.
Switching to the program office, where the team was responsible for developing, building and delivering hardware for the next launch, she gained a new perspective on the behind-the-scenes functions of NASA that make the organization whole. Looking back, she is grateful to have experienced both dimensions of NASA throughout her career.
As for the future of space flight, Hasbrook believes humanity will never stop pushing boundaries.
“I believe it’s human’s destiny to explore. There’s always something unknown. We’re always trying to figure out what’s the next boundary, the next adventure,” Hasbrook said. “I kind of think of it as airplane travel. They originally developed it to carry the mail. Now people fly everywhere. So hopefully someday, lots of people will be going into space, either to experience it or to live in it.”
But, this is a lesson beyond space. This is how Hasbrook has approached life: as an exploration.
Though it was by chance that she met her husband at Notre Dame, moved to Texas, and joined NASA, Hasbrook likes to think it is a testament to how she welcomes opportunities to step through life’s open doors.
Now, in retirement, the unexpected and the unknown continue to play a role in Hasbrook’s life. She and her husband explore through monthly trips and scuba dives, a pastime the couple has enjoyed now for 13 years.
“I think you always have to be open to the unexpected. I had no idea I was going to have a career in space. It kind of fell into my lap. But when the opportunity presents itself, you must be willing to go, take the chance, and try something different. The worst thing that can happen is maybe you need to try something else.”
Originally published at wearend.nd.edu by Kelsey Quint ’26 on January 28, 2025.