Folks Magazine (Amazon/PillPack)
A hearing disability grounded K. Renee Horton from becoming an astronaut. But it didn’t stop her from realizing her dream of working at NASA.
For as long as physicist K. Renee Horton can remember, she has wanted to be a scientist.
Every Christmas growing up, in fact, the young Horton taxed both Santa’s wallet and patience with her STEM enthusiasm.
“I would be like, ‘I only want a telescope.’ Or, ‘I only want a microscope,’” she says. “My dad kept saying, ‘Is there nothing else? You need to give Santa a range here.’”
“I’m almost certain when my parents’ egg and sperm met, one of them said, ‘I’m going to be a scientist,’ and the other one said, ‘I’m going to make that happen.’ It was in my core.”
Horton is the Lead Metallic and Weld Engineer for the Space Launch System (SLS) at NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans, LA. Designed to enable deep-space exploration, the SLS will be the largest, most powerful rocket ever built.
“My job is to make sure that the welds and anything metal on the [SLS] rocket are good after we’ve built and put it together,” she says. “I am the person who oversees the requirements that deal with metals and welds.”
It’s inevitable — nearly impossible not to, even — to categorize Horton as her own kind of Hidden Figure. As a black woman in STEM and one of the self-described “SLS boots on the ground,” Horton and her work at NASA — though unlikely to make headlines directly — will be instrumental in sending the first human beings to Mars.
Factor in that she’s also a bald, hard-of-hearing, former college dropout and mother of three, and Horton breaks every fusty mold of the white male scientist stereotype. But doing so hasn’t been easy, particularly where her hearing was concerned. . . .
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