On April 30, Ellen Stofan became the first woman to head the National Air and Space Museum. Dr. Stofan brings more than 25 years’ experience in space-related organizations and a deep research in planetary geology to her new role as Director of the museum. She most recently served as a consulting senior scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. Having served as an intern as she a freshman at William & Mary, this is a homecoming of sorts for Dr. Stofan.
Between her two stints at the museum, Stofan was chief scientist at NASA (2013–2016), serving as the principal advisor to former Administrator Charles Bolden on NASA’s strategic planning and program development. She helped guide a long-range plan to get humans to Mars, and worked on strategies for NASA to support commercial activity in low Earth orbit as it transitions from the International Space Station (ISS) to sending humans to the moon and Mars in the mid-2020s. She supported NASA’s overall science programs in heliophysics, Earth science, planetary science and astrophysics. While at NASA, she worked with President Barack Obama’s science advisor and the National Science and Technology Council on science policy.
One could say that this role was her destiny. She is the child of a NASA Rocket Scientist and a science teacher. She saw her first rocket launch at age 4 and in 1976 when she was 14, she saw astronomer Carl Sagan Speak At the launch of the Viking lander - the first U.S. spacecraft to successfully land on Mars and send images back to Earth. She recounted that day in a recent interview on National Public Radio, "Carl Sagan started talking about why we were exploring Mars — the fact that Mars had this history of water; that potentially life could have evolved on Mars ," Stofan remembers. "I heard that speech and thought, 'that's what I want to do.'” Today she's charge of the exhibit that displays a test version of the Viking lander in the Air and Space Museum's Boeing Milestones of Flight Hall in Washington, D.C.
Much of her focus as director, she said in the interview, will be on representing diversity throughout the history of aviation and space exploration in order to encourage more of it in the future.
“One of the reasons That I’m so excited to come to the museum is to help tell the story that women have actually been involved in aviation and the space business from the beginning,” she said. “Telling stories of people of color, telling stores of women - to me, that’s what Helps the next generation think, ‘oh, well maybe I could do that.’”
