Lauren Arkell ’18: Mission to the Moon

Lauren Arkell '18 will steer lunar lander on its inaugural flight
Just three years out of college, Lauren Arkell ’18 is fulfilling one of her big career goals in aero-space: working on a mission to the moon. As flight controller on the mission operations team at Firefly Aerospace, she is playing a key role in the debut flight of the company’s lunar lander, Blue Ghost, which is scheduled to launch in mid-January.
During the two-month mission, the Firefly team will workaround the clock in the console room, with Arkell and two other flight controllers alternating in 12-hour shifts. “I’ll be sending all the commands from the ground to the spacecraft and working hand in hand with the flight director to run through all of our operations procedures,” Arkell says. The procedures “make sure we meet our mission requirements and do all of the payload operations we need to, as well as monitor the health and safety of the vehicle.”
Blue Ghost will spend nearly a month orbiting the Earth and about two weeks in lunar orbit before landing near Mare Crisium, a basin in the far northeast quadrant of the moon’s Earth-facing side, for 14 days of surface operations. Dubbed Ghost Riders in the Sky, the mission will use 10 scientific instruments (or payloads) to collect data as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative.
Arkell’s ties to Blue Ghost go back to a summer internship at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Ohio during college. She worked on a passive coating to mitigate lunar dust, the abrasive fragments from the moon’s surface that can wreck astronauts’ spacesuits and equipment. “That coating is one of the payloads that Blue Ghost will bring to the moon,” Arkell says.
After graduating from Davidson College in 2022, she worked on various projects for a contractor for NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland but kept her eye on the lunar dust mitigation project. When a position opened at Firefly, she jumped at the opportunity, moving to Austin, Texas, to fulfill her goal of working on a lunar mission. “Getting that data on lunar dust mitigation can solve the issues we saw during all of the Apollo missions and be super beneficial for NASA’s return to the moon,” Arkell says.

Rendering of Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander
A presentation by Tom Marshburn, a Davidson alumnus and former astronaut who made three flights to the International Space Station, inspired Arkell to enter the aerospace field. At the time, she was majoring in physics and on a pre-med track but was undecided on a career. “I was able to connect with him personally,” she recalls. “He was such a nice guy, so normal and willing to chat, that I saw myself in him and saw the path that he took as an option for the first time.”
But Arkell says she discovered her passion for STEM at Exeter, where she was a three-year senior day student from nearby Brentwood. She loved her chemistry and physics classes, and vividly remembers taking astronomy with Science Instructor John Blackwell, including regular trips to Grainger Observatory. “Mr. Blackwell had a great take on how expansive space is, and how we know so little about it,” Arkell says. A co-captain of the varsity lacrosse and soccer teams at Exeter, Arkell went on to play lacrosse at Davidson. She brings those well-honed teamwork skills to the work she’s doing on the Blue Ghost mission.
“So much of it is active troubleshooting, working with everyone in the room,” Arkell says. “You really have to trust yourself, your co-workers and the other people on console that are the specialists, and you’re constantly working through problems. It’s a lot of pressure, but I think it’s very exciting.”