![]() Before taking the unknown leap into space law, she was a practicing attorney in Washington, D.C. Though she was appointed to the role in 2014, Thompson-King has been at NASA for-wait for it-34 years, when she started in the office of Chief Counsel at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Sumara Thompson-King is NASA’s chief legal officer, overseeing a team of attorneys responsible for all aspects of NASA's legal affairs worldwide-basically, like an in-house law firm. And when that doesn't help, I do kickboxing.” “We respond to a lot of high-stress situations, so we practice a lot. Then, we’ll sit down and identify all scenarios that we think that we will face and systematically figure out which ones are likely enough for us to test.” On how she stays calm: We’ll have people playing crew members-maybe somebody's hurt, maybe nobody is hurt, maybe somebody is unconscious. We do training simulations to make sure that we can get them if there's a rescue or emergency. Those are all things we practice and plan for. There could be an event that would initiate an emergency or cause astronauts to abort the spacecraft and fall back to Earth. “An emergency landing is basically when the pods land somewhere that we were not expecting at a time that we are not expecting. ![]() Air Force and Navy) are waiting (for anywhere from 8 to 25 days) on a large Naval ship to bring them back to land. If all goes according to plan, capsules land in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego, where Jones and her team (along with crew from the U.S. Capsules-either manned or unmanned-catapult to the earth at 27,000 miles per hour before parachutes slow them down to 20 mph about 5 miles from the water's surface. ![]() As the director of landing and recovery at NASA, Melissa Jones is responsible for leading a team of 100 that retrieves capsules returning to Earth.
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