I Am Artemis: Diamond St. John
Listen to this audio extract of Diamond St. John, engineer working on the ARTEMIS III thermal shield for the Orion program in Lockheed Martin:
For four generations, the Diamond St. John’s family supports human space flights at Kennedy Space Center in NASA in Florida. Now, she continues the family inheritance which dates back to Apollo – allowing to return humanity to the moon with the agency’s artemis campaign.
St. John is an engineer with Lockheed Martin supporting Orion, the NASA spacecraft built to transport the crew on the moon and make them safely on Earth on Artemis missions. It specializes in the production of Orion’s thermal shield in the center of Spatio-Spatial, Test, Assembly and Resources, in Titusville, Florida. As one of the most important elements of the spacecraft, the thermal shield is responsible for the protection of temperature astronauts of nearly 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit while they enter the earth’s atmosphere at the end of the mission.
From start to finish, St. John is responsible for establishing a production workflow for the Orion thermal shield – the largest of its kind in the world – and guarantees that each step is executed in the right order along the way.
His team recognizes the criticality of their work and knows that their mission is to ensure that astronauts return home. Regarding the quality of production, St. John embraces this state of mind.
Diamond St. John
Engineer on the Orion program with Lockheed Martin
St. John and his team work on the Orion thermal shield for the Artemis III mission which will land astronauts on the lunar surface. The team is linking 186 tiles made of a material called Avcoat to the underlying structure of the thermal shield. “Once we start the binding operations, we first puncture the blocks, to make sure that we minimize the gaps between them. Then, we enter the link, and we fill the gaps, and we test. Once this is finished, we paint and package then the thermal shield.”
Diamond St. John
Engineer on the Orion program with Lockheed Martin
Although she is currently working on the thermal shield for Artemis III, her trip with Orion started with the spaceship Artemis I. St. John started on the soil of the clean room as a technician trainee with the subcontractor ASRC FEDERAL. She then participated in a full -time role with the company for four years in a quality inspection while obtaining her baccalaureate in engineering. After that, St. John joined Lockheed Martin as a manufacturing engineer.
“Everything has been Artemis from the start,” she said, reflecting her career. “Knowing that my great-grandparents worked on the Apollo missions-it’s cool to follow this same path. I think they would be quite proud. ”
