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Intro music.

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Leading the team that ensures the health of the Space Shuttle's powerhouse requires an incredible amount of planning.

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Just ask Susan Johnson, a quality assurance and systems safety manager for Rocketdyne Propulsion and Power.

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Every day, her job revolves around the activities of the Space Shuttle Main Engine team at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

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"My day usually starts at six o'clock in the morning. I usually have a lot of employees that come in actually that early.

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We talk and discuss things that happened during the previous days and what's planned for that day."

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Even though she's the only female manager on the team, Susan says it's never been an issue.

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"We kid a lot, but we have a lot of respect for each other. I don't look at it as being the only female in my position.

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I just kind of look at it as being me, and what I want to accomplish in this program."

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The Solid Rocket Boosters, or SRBs, are jettisoned two minutes into flight.

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But the Space Shuttle's three main engines keep working during the entire eight-and-a-half-minute ride into space, until main engine cut-off, or MECO.

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When Susan and the team prepare the engines for flight, nothing is more important than safety.

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"What happens every day in the engine shop is we take our engines through the paces when they're not installed in the orbiter.

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We make sure the systems are good, we make sure there's no leaks in the engine, we make sure that the software is good that's loaded into it,

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and those are the engines that we prepare for launch each time."

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The payoff for all that hard work comes on launch day.

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"The most exciting part of my job is getting to watch a Shuttle launch from a couple miles away.

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We go outside and watch the launch, and the engine people are standing around,

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waiting for the engines to cut off, and we're waiting for that last MECO."

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