A College of Engineering alumna winds down the U.S. space shuttle program and positions the country for the next chapter of space exploration.

When the last space shuttle landed on July 21, 2011, the job for University of Rhode Island civil engineering alumna Dorothy Rasco began. The head of NASA’s Space Shuttle Transition and Retirement Office must wind down the country’s space shuttle program while ensuring that work on the next-generation space program advances.

Her work holds national political, research and economic implications for a country that – for the first time in three decades – cannot ferry humans into space. Last year, President Barack Obama noted the importance of the space shuttle program, but added that its end “ushers in an exciting new era to push the frontiers of space exploration and human space flight.”

As planning for that era begins, NASA must end the space shuttle program that started in the 1970s. In August, the agency placed Rasco in charge of the two-year, $400 million project.

She and her team of more than 1,200 people will dispose of 1.3 million personal property assets, several hundred buildings and more than 1,500 custom-built software systems while archiving tens of thousands of digital and paper records. The team will also devise a way to ferry space shuttles to museums in Los Angeles and New York City.

To ensure that the shuttles reach their destinations and the program winds down in an orderly fashion, Rasco has been leading a team of engineers, rocket scientists, lawyers, contract specialists, environmental experts and security personnel.

And she’s been challenging them: Will the plan work from technical, scheduling and cost standpoints? Is it safe? Can it be done less expensively? Faster? Can the obsolete equipment be salvaged for a future spacecraft or rocket?

While asking those questions, Rasco leans on her URI engineering degree.

“To be a successful engineer you have to be able to communicate,” she says. “You need to understand the basics that you learn from college from professors and textbooks, but it is also about being able to communicate and articulate and tell people about the requirements. I think URI gave me that ability.”

Rasco entered URI longing for an engineering degree. During her high school years, her uncle, a college engineering professor, mused about his research. The hands-on Rasco loved the idea of designing an experiment, undertaking it and analyzing the results.

After she graduated from URI in 1981, she found jobs in the oil and natural gas industry where she put her experience to work. In 1985, she began at NASA, first as an engineer designing physical facilities.

She would later run a division that outfitted the space shuttle’s mid-deck cabin before serving as business manager for the entire space shuttle program. Her latest position brings her NASA career full circle.

“I am proud to say I am a shuttle hugger,” she says. “These are my babies and are national assets to the country. We want to make sure they’re displayed in a wonderful way people can enjoy.”