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>> Kyle, all these have to go to the common power.
I never knew I wanted to join the agency.
I was a working mom.
Education wasn't my strong point, but I am smart,
I am talented it turns out.
Out of the chamber this way.
I do have a purpose, beyond being a mom, and that came later
in life to learn that I could be a mom and have a purpose.
I'm April Torres.
I'm an electronics technician telemetry specialist
at NASA Armstrong.
I discovered I had an aptitude for programming and software,
once I started here, and I think it had
to do is I had a clean slate.
I wasn't trained in anything, so I was trainable, I was moldable.
I had an extreme need to learn and show that I had value
and I was valuable for the team.
Keep me on, so I was always striving to do better.
And whenever I saw a need, I would always like kick in
and say, "I can help, I can help."
My skillset kept growing, and growing, and growing,
which made me more valuable to another team,
and would make somebody I worked with say, "Hey,
you want her on your team."
And that's one of the reasons I ended up in the job I'm in now
and because I was very good at what I did,
the instrumentation branch loaned me
out to the telemetry shop for the first crew escape vehicle,
Pad Abort Mission in order to help them test all
of the modules that were going to be on board that system.
>> Launch, launch, launch.
>> By the time we were done testing in the environmental lab
and doing all the functional checks after open covers,
we were confident when that system went off,
it was going to be a system.
>> Reorientation complete.
Apogee.
[Inaudible] jettison, FEC jettison.
>> We are currently working on the second phase
of the crew escape vehicle, which is called the Ascent Abort
and our setup is very involved.
There's a lot of wires, and a lot of connections,
and a lot of points of failure along the line.
When we're testing an environmental,
we connect harnesses that connect to each module.
So, those harnesses are all incorporated into a system
that comes into our Omega system that translates all the data
from the voltage and the millivolts
that we were injecting, and we're watching it on our side
to see that there's no dropouts,
there's no intermittent failures,
there's no complete failures.
So, they put it through extremes in environmental, thermal,
vibration to ensure that anything that gets put
on an aircraft or a spacecraft is going to succeed in flight,
that it will work as expected.
But you have to pay attention to every little detail
because if you miss one thing,
it could be the reason it failed.
How privileged I am to actually get to work
at a place that's doing the research we're doing
and transforming things that are going to happen in their future.
I've actually had a part in it.
My fingers just have touched things
that are changing the world, it's just a privilege.
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