Four RS-25 engines and 2 million pounds of thrust put Penn alumna Kristin Houston on a trajectory toward the stars.
Of all her family photos, Kristin Houston (ENG’01) pulls out one when talking about her career. In the snapshot, her brother, a U.S. Army surgeon deployed overseas, is getting on a Chinook. The helicopter is one of several defense aircraft that Houston worked on during her 16-year tenure at Boeing. For her, the picture highlights the critical role engineers play in the world, and how doing “something that really matters” has been her driving force.
“People’s lives can literally be depending on the work that we do,” Houston says. “When I was leading Boeing programs, I would think about how somebody’s father, brother, sister or mother was on those aircraft.”
She is still guided by that principle at L3Harris Technologies, where she has been since 2021. As President of the Space Propulsion & Power Systems sector within the Aerojet Rocketdyne segment, her team supports NASA, the U.S. Space Force and commercial clients.
“I’ve met all four of NASA’s Artemis II astronauts several times,” Houston says of the crew scheduled to travel around the moon in 2026. For the mission, L3Harris made the main and upper stage rocket engines, thrusters and avionics for the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft. “They all have families, and they need to know that we’ve done all we can to ensure that the rocket and spacecraft are going to get them out there and return them home safely. We owe that to them.”
A Lofty Trajectory
Ambition and a Chemical Engineering degree may have led to a space sector job that Houston dreamed about as a child, but she very nearly changed majors.
“College didn’t come naturally to me, and I remember my mom saying, ‘you seem to have a business mindset,’” Houston says. She thought it through and concluded, “You can do business with an engineering degree, but you can’t do engineering with a business degree. I’m really glad I stuck it out.”
Her first job out of college was at a chemical process design firm in the Philadelphia region. That’s when she met her now husband, Jonathan Francis, who graduated from Penn Engineering with a master’s in Computer and Information Science in 2002, while playing Ultimate Frisbee in Fairmount Park. When she decided to take a leap away from chemical engineering after four years, he helped her decipher a systems engineering job advertisement from Boeing.
The posting was full of industry jargon, she says, but her Penn Engineering experience prepared her to succeed in the position. “Engineering teaches you how to think critically, how to solve hard problems. Those skills are portable,” Houston says.
She also credits Penn classmates hailing from Singapore, Azerbaijan and beyond with introducing her to different cultures and viewpoints, which set her up to navigate engineering projects with teams around the world. In one role at Boeing, she managed Apache helicopter partnerships in 15 countries. In another, as chief engineer, she had to handle different work styles when partnered with a British–Italian helicopter maker on the design, test and build of Chinooks for Italy’s army.
“There was a lot of coordination, collaboration and developing new processes. I had to get our team aligned and make sure we had all the checks and balances,” she says. “I’ve really enjoyed working internationally and understanding how you have to adapt. Penn set me up well for that.”
Engines on Full
Boeing sparked Houston’s passion for aerospace and defense, and the move to L3Harris set the stage for another career pivot. After the company acquired Aerojet Rocketdyne in 2023, she took on the leadership role in the Space Propulsion & Power Systems sector, overseeing business strategy and financial performance. (She did end up with a business degree after all, earning an Executive MBA from Villanova in 2016.)
“I’ve learned about rocket engine supply chains, additive manufacturing, chemical and electric propulsion, and nuclear fission surface power,” says Houston, who was recently named a 2026 American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Associate Fellow for her notable aerospace contributions and accomplishments.
At NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans, the first of four RS-25 engines from lead contractor L3Harris is prepared for installation on the core stage of NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS), the rocket that will help power NASA’s first crewed Artemis mission to the moon.
“When challenges come up, I’m getting help to the team where it’s needed. Having an engineering degree truly benefits you as a business leader in a technical field.”
Her current responsibilities have her thinking about everything from national security to the future lunar economy, which is estimated to grow to $170 billion by 2040. Additionally, space is “getting more congested and more contested,” with China and Russia in the race, she says. “We have to really start thinking differently by having offensive and defensive maneuvering of some of our space assets, which all require propulsion.”
The core stage of NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket for the Artemis II mission is loaded onto the Pegasus barge to begin the 900-mile journey from New Orleans to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Houston is also looking forward to the momentum generated by NASA Acting Administrator Sean Duffy’s August 2025 announcement about putting a nuclear fission reactor on the moon by 2030. “We’ve actually been working on that for several years,” she says, noting that L3Harris launched a nuclear reactor into space in 1965. “If we did it 60 years ago, we can do it again.” Her team’s efforts will also power commercial space stations coming online in the next few years.
On the Horizon
As for NASA, Houston lives in Florida, so she won’t have to travel far to watch the launch of Artemis II at the Kennedy Space Center. Thinking about it “gives her goosebumps,” she says. Houston’s team is also responsible for engines on Artemis III, which is slated to land humans on the moon. In anticipation of regular launches and a journey to Mars, the company is already building hardware for missions planned as far out as Artemis IX.
During launch and flight, the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket will operate for just over eight minutes, producing more than 2 million pounds of thrust to help send a crew of four astronauts inside NASA’s Orion spacecraft, including pilot Victor Glover, onward to the moon.
She anticipates that people who excitedly tune in to watch these future liftoffs will be inspired to follow some version of her career path: “As a country, we want to keep a strong technical workforce. We need a pipeline of engineers innovating solutions to the world’s toughest problems.”
According to Houston, there’s a need for engineers in the space sector who will use artificial intelligence to design components and further automate manufacturing processes. AI may be disrupting professions in unpredictable ways, but Houston encourages engineers to embrace new tools: “Engineering is about designing new things for what is happening in the world that we’re living in.”
Others will be needed to further develop nuclear propulsion capabilities that can shrink the lengthy journeys that once seemed insurmountable. “It takes a couple of days to get to the moon. It’s going to be nine-plus months to Mars. A nuclear propulsion system will help shorten those times, but there’s still a lot of development to do,” Houston says. “There are a lot of engineering roles out there, all serving a bigger mission, bigger than any one of us.”
Story by Janine White / Photo of Kristin Houston by Mike Labbe for L3Harris Technologies