Jennifer White

Class of 2003: Space industry

Jennifer White has held numerous high-profile positions supporting the space industry. Since May 2025, she has been a senior systems engineer at Reliant Space in Pasadena, Maryland.

“We are working with Firefly Aerospace on the next Blue Ghost missions as well as their first low Earth orbiting mission,” she said. Blue Ghost Mission 1 was a robotic Moon landing mission that culminated with a soft landing of the spacecraft on the lunar surface on March 2, 2025. Firefly thus became the first commercial company to complete a fully successful soft landing on the Moon.

White was born in November 1980 and grew up in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. Her passion for engineering developed early when she participated in a Women in Engineering Day in grade school for which she built a bridge made from popsicle sticks. In middle and high school, she competed in science competitions.

At Ripon, she majored in mathematics and physics and received the Knop Scholarship in Physics. She participated in choral ensembles, Student Senate, Judiciary Board, Student Orientation Committee, and athletics.

Professor of Physics Mary Williams-Norton helped White become one of 16 students nationwide to attend NASA Academy during the summer before White’s senior year. “Both Professor Norton and Professor (Brad) Halfpap were encouraging whenever I had a crazy idea to apply to NASA internships or other programs,” White said.

As a student, she also received a NASA scholarship to research string theory in California, participated in an internship program with the NASA Academy at the Goddard Space Flight Center, and was chosen to join the NASA Reduced-Gravity Student Flight Opportunities Program.

She earned her master’s degree in physics from The Ohio State University.

Prior to White’s current position, she worked at Stinger Ghaffarian Technologies (SGT) as an orbit analyst, producing and validating daily orbit determinations, propagations and covariances. She also worked as a satellite simulator operations engineer to configure the spacecraft simulator for the engineers to run their tests.

From 2017-2025, she worked for a.i.solutions, supporting NASA’S Flight Dynamics Support Services (FDSS) III contract as a project engineer supporting high-profile projects such as the Landsat Program, a space-based record of Earth’s land. “Landsat data give us information essential for making informed decisions about Earth’s resources and environment,” according to NASA.

Her participation in the work leading up to this launch is her proudest achievement.

“That work included years of testing and development of the flight dynamics ground system as well as many mission simulations which tested how we, as the engineers, reacted to anomalies,” she said.

As a certified NASA Conjunction Assessment and Risk Analysis (CARA) Collision Avoidance Operations Engineer, White worked with the 18th Space Defense Squadron and NASA non-manned missions to address space debris and assure the safety of the NASA satellites and the space environment for all missions, including NASA missions, private companies and foreign nations.

She was the task lead for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Flight Dynamics team which developed the flight dynamics software for the mission. The software is used to determine where the spacecraft has been and where it’s going, and to plan maneuvers to keep the telescope in the correct orbit.

The telescope is a NASA observatory designed to unravel the secrets of dark energy and dark matter, search for and image exoplanets, and explore many topics in infrared astrophysics, and it was just launched successfully on Aug. 30, 2026.

She also was the task lead for the AOS (Atmospheric Observation System) Flight Dynamics Analysis team. AOS is a new NASA mission that hasn’t launched yet.

“Ripon prepared me to be open-minded and provided me with the opportunity to learn how to learn and not be afraid to go for what you want,” White said. “I think having a liberal arts degree has given me a larger foundation from which to build a career.”