Meet Bhavya Lal, NASA scientist who would help put astronauts back on the Moon

NASA is celebrating the 53rd anniversary of the first Moon landing during the Apollo 11 mission as it prepares to get back to the lunar surface again later this decade. And contributing to this effort is an Indian-born NASA engineer, Bhavya Lal who is serving as the associate administrator for Technology, Policy, and Strategy (OTPS) as well as the acting chief technologist. Interestingly, her inclination toward science and engineering began with the first Moon landing, a historic feat that was inscribed in her mind by her father at an early age. 

Bhavya Lal’s incredible scientific journey

Remembering the story of her early life, Lal narrates the time when her father, who was in his 20s and was a newly trained electrical engineer at a local factory, took her into a tropical forest on the evening of July 20. It was the night when three NASA astronauts- Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldin and Michael Collins- landed on the Moon marking the biggest achievement of humanity. 

“We went to a clearing and sat down to look up at the Moon. And then he started narrating the Moon landing,” Lal said in a NASA statement. “It’s a faint but indelible and cherished memory.” She recalled that her family did not have access to television to watch the live Moon landing and her father only relied on big-city newspapers to get updates on the Apollo program. 

According to Lal, her father, being a fan of Flash Gordon comics, narrated an incredible story about how the three NASA astronauts must be bouncing on the Moon while the two watched from Earth. “I listened in rapt attention, hanging on to every word even when I didn’t understand what he was saying,” Lal said. “We looked up, pointed to the Moon, and imagined all the excitement until I fell asleep.”

She also recalled watching Star Trek with her father and having conversations about humans travelling through the universe, something that made her inclined toward science. After focusing on science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) in high school in Delhi, she later moved to the US to study engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). So far, she has had an illustrious career and is now helping NASA to put astronauts back on the Moon through the Artemis Program, which begins in August this year.