India-born engineer has key role in Nasa Artemis mission

As the first leg of Artemis, Nasa’s ambitious project to send a spacecraft into deep space, begins, overseeing the rocket’s core stage, or its backbone, will be Coimbatore-born Subashini Iyer.


“It has been nearly 50 years since we last stepped on the moon … We are getting ready to take humans back to the moon and beyond, to Mars,” Iyer told TOI.


Artemis I will be an uncrewed flight of the spacecraft Orion, the first of three complex missions for exploration on the moon and Mars. Orion will travel 280,000 miles (over 4,50,000 km) from Earth, thousands of miles beyond the moon in a three-week mission.

It will collect data while mission controllers will go over the performance of the spacecraft to set the stage for Artemis II, when a crewed spacecraft will orbit the moon. In 2024, Artemis III will take astronauts to the moon.

As the launch integrated product team lead with Boeing, Iyer is engaged with the component of the Artemis I which will take Orion into space — the Space Launch System (SLS) — whose core stage arrived at the Kennedy Space Center in late April.

She has been involved with SLS for two years now. “My role involves overseeing any support that Nasa needs once the core stage is built and handed over to Nasa,” Iyer said.

Iyer was one of the first women to graduate in mechanical engineering in her college, VLB Janakiammal College, in 1992. Now, she leads a diverse team of mechanical and electrical engineers.