Maynette E. Smith
Deputy Director for Program Management
International Space Station/Payload Processing
Maynette E. Smith is the deputy director for program management for the International Space Station (ISS)/Payload Processing Directorate at NASA's John F. Kennedy Space Center (KSC), Fla.
Ms. Smith started her career with NASA at Kennedy Space Center in 1983 as a systems engineer working experiment integration for Spacelab and partial payload experiments. In addition to working payload ground checkout systems, she was a test engineer for the OAST-1 Solar Array and Dynamic Augmentation Experiments (SAE/DAE) on STS-14, and the OSTA-3 Shuttle Imaging Radar (SIR-B) Antenna and the Orbital Refueling System (ORS) on STS-17. In 1988, Ms. Smith became an experiment project engineer, responsible for integrating multiple engineering disciplines for experiment processing. She was the Tethered Satellite System (TSS-1) project engineer and earned a NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal for her work on this mission. From 1991 to 1996, Ms. Smith was chief of the Partial Payload Checkout System Branch. In 1996, she began working Space Station Utilization (Station Science Experiment Processing), serving as chief of the Utilization Office, responsible for developing the launch site capability for ISS payloads. In 1997, Ms. Smith became the chief of the Payload Engineering (later Utilization) Division, responsible for both launch site planning of station experiments and processing of the last of the Spacelab and partial payloads missions. As part of the KSC 2000 Reorganization, Ms. Smith became the chief of the Utilization Division in the ISS/Payload Processing Directorate. Under her tenure, the first seven payload racks and a number of smaller payloads were successfully processed at KSC and launched to the ISS. From 2003 to January 2006, Ms. Smith worked on the KSC center director's staff as the center strategic planning manager. In January 2006, she returned to the International Space Station/Payload Processing Directorate as the deputy for program management.
Ms. Smith has a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., and a Master of Science in computer engineering from the University of Central Florida in Orlando, Fla.
May 2006
Biographies - Current Employees