From the age of 4, Krys Blackwood knew she wanted to be an astronaut. Despite never meeting that childhood achievement, she ended up doing the next best thing.

“Obviously, I was not going to be an astronaut for 1 million reasons. But I thought that there might be some way for me to add UX into NASA's missions somehow” she says

Over at NASA JPL, the division of NASA JPL that looks after satellites, robots and the Mars Rover projects, Krys is the Principal UX Designer working with engineers and rocket scientists to ensure their team at NASA are able to unpack and learn more about Earth’s surrounding planets each day.

As the first UX design team at NASA JPL in eighty years, Krys and her team are specifically focused on human centred design. They work across an array of projects – from the planning behind building and designing the spacecraft itself, to mapping out the trajectory for a safe launch.

“With every single iteration of our designs we show [engineers] the first the ideas, then the sketches, then the wireframes, then the mock ups, and finally clickable prototypes to the real experts to get feedback. And we actively involve them in our design process” says Krys.

“And I think I'd say that our team provides like 1 million data points for the theory that if you involve your customer in the design process, you come up with a far superior project product than your super awesome designer ever could in their ivory tower.”

The benefits of having a design team at NASA JPL is that they can experiment and test different spacecraft trajectories. According to Krys, design teams are able to take risks – failing fast and failing cheaply. While other departments focus sorely on the end goal, the design team work to innovate and spend time doing additional research to understand pain points in their spacecrafts. This was critical was back in 2020, when Krys and her team launched the spacecraft Perseverance at the same time the entire NASA JPL team were required to work from home due to the covid-19 pandemic.

“The helicopter we launched hitched a ride on her belly and got dropped off and no one had ever flown anywhere other than Earth before. Like we've never flown a helicopter on any other body before. So it was amazing to do all of this in the midst of everything we've been going through here at home” she says.

“Both rovers are healthy. Perseverance has taken her first 10 samples, which is amazing. And the helicopter has far exceeded expectations. I think it was supposed to fly for 150 metres. And we're at 3000. I mean, it is just done so much more than we ever even wanted it to do.”

But at NASA, change comes with a billion-dollar price tag and the potential loss of decades worth of data if something goes wrong. In order to handle issues arising, which happens quite often, Krys says they plan for the worst.

“Oh, my gosh, every day something goes wrong. But the great thing is we plan for that, we expect that something is going to go wrong. So when it happens, it isn't a big deal. We probably already have a contingency plan for it. And if not, at least, there's going to be a team of people who are ready to jump in and fix it and figure out a solution on the fly.

“Because you expect things to go wrong, you don't have the big emotional shock and denial reaction that often happens when something unexpected happens to you. We are like the perfect pessimists, we just know, we just know it's going to be terrible. And so we plan for that” she says.

But the real question remains: When are humans going to live on Mars?

Krys has a couple opinions on the topic.

“So I think there are multiple answers to that. My personal answer is, I think it's going to be like 50 years before we can live on Mars, because we have a long way to go and a lot of things to figure out first” she says “

And do we really want to, I think, depends on the individual in question. There are people who moved out to the Wild West and lived, you know, in the cold wilds of Canada, there are people who moved to the middle of Australia and lived in the desert. And those people might enjoy living on Mars, because it's a harsh and unforgiving environment, where any day might be your last because resources are resource constrained. But I think the vast majority of people won't want to live on Mars, maybe ever . . . and I think the vast majority of people on this planet would not appreciate what life would be like on Mars.”