Nicholas Mastramico, a 2000 graduate of Boardman High School, is working on the Artemis Project, a collaboration between NASA and civilian ventures and private industries, including Space X and Blue Origin, focusing on landing an American spacecraft on the moon. Submitted photo

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Boardman High School and Youngstown State University graduate Nicholas Mastramico is helping to engineer a lunar rocket, with an eventual goal of his work being a home base on the moon so that earthlings can one day go to Mars.

More precisely, Mastramico is working on the Artemis Project, a collaboration between NASA and civilian ventures and private industries, including Space X and Blue Origin, focusing on landing an American spacecraft on the moon for the first time since 1972.

Mastramico, a 2000 graduate of Boardman High School, graduated from YSU in 2005 with a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering and followed this with a Master of Science in aerospace engineering from the University of Alabama in 2008.

“I decided pretty early on, probably about the sixth grade, that I was going to be an engineer, and a lot of luck, both at Boardman High School and at Youngstown State, set me up for success moving forward,” he said.

In addition to classes in physics and mechanical engineering, Mastramico engaged in drama guild and choir in high school. From these experiences, he learned how to perform, particularly in front of large groups of people, and how to speak to others.

“I really got my feet wet in being able to present to people, being able to go in front of a big crowd and talk about my work,” he said. “The thing about engineering is, you could be the best engineer in the world, but if you can’t discuss it or have a conversation with people about it, you lose a lot.”

Mastramico has returned more than once to the Mahoning Valley to talk to students about his experiences as a NASA engineer and to encourage other young people to follow their dreams too. His most recent visit was in February when he spoke at Boardman High School about the challenges of being a rocket scientist.

He has actually been proactive about bringing science to Youngstown since he was a college undergraduate himself.

During his senior year at YSU, Mastramico accepted an internship at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Mastramico did not know what he would find at the center, but he discovered a new perspective on his work and some important contacts.

And he remembered to bring something back to Youngstown. YSU had never competed in NASA’s Human Exploration Rover Challenge.

“I brought that back here to YSU from Huntsville,” Mastramico says. “Our team was the first one that YSU had.”

The competition pits teams of students against one another to design and build a rover vehicle capable of completing a NASA-designed obstacle course.

YSU’s team struggled with its first-ever competition, so the next year Mastramico served as the adviser to the YSU team as he completed the final requirements for his college engineering degree. The team designed and built a lunar rover on the YSU campus from parts donated by local businesses.

“We had no idea how hard the course was until you are actually in a machine you built, and you hit those moon craters and your wheels are whipping up in the air, and you almost go over backwards,” Mastramico said.

The YSU team won the NASA “Pit Crew” award in 2005, the year Mastramico was its adviser.

Hired first as an engineer with Jacob’s Engineering, Mastramico worked as a contractor on the Space Shuttle for its last 10 missions and then was hired in 2011 as a NASA civil servant. Since then, Mastramico has been working on the Artemis program, the sister program to the famous Apollo project that first landed an astronaut on the moon.

The name for the current moon program is appropriate. In Greek mythology, Artemis is the twin sister of Apollo, a god associated with archery and the sun, among other things. Artemis is the goddess of the hunt, and she is associated with the moon.

Mastramico’s job in Artemis is to build 3-D computer models that test load and stress factors on rockets.

“We use those to predict what the actual vehicle is going to experience, whether during a test or in flight,” he said.

Then NASA builds prototype rockets, launches them, and Mastramico and his team compare and recalibrate their findings based on actual data.

“We build the rocket and test it,” he said, “and then compare the real results to what we got and then tweak those, and once we do that, our models will be a good example and predictor of what the real vehicle will do.”

Officials hope Artemis 2, the second rocket of the project, will launch in 2025, “which will be orbiting the moon with people” in it, Mastramico said, and engineers are hoping to actually land Artemis 3 on the moon as soon as 2027. Construction of an actual habitable moon base will be based on the success of these missions, among other criteria, and online sources indicate a possible construction date of 2029.

“It’s all baby steps,” Mastramico said. “The nice thing over here in space right now is that for the first time maybe ever we are working with a lot of commercial partners, even international partners to develop different types of vehicles and landers that could make it to the moon.”

Artemis is also a deliberately multicultural effort and will send up a woman and a minority astronaut.

Mastramico said he is grateful to be a part of such an innovative endeavor, and he is grateful to his hometown and what it gave to him.

“I’m here as a NASA engineer from all the stuff I learned in the Mahoning Valley,” Mastramico said. “And I want to say to anyone in the area, that (aerospace) is not a field that is closed to you.”

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