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From Moon to Mars
Amit Kshatriya, MA (BS '00), who is leading NASA's planned return to the moon, on the power of galactic ambitions
Photography: Courtesy of NASA
As the head of the agency's new Moon to Mars program office, Amit Kshatriya, MA (BS '00) has a historic charge: Return astronauts to the moon for the first time in more than half a century, in preparation for human exploration on Mars.
Amit Kshatriya asks questions of participants during the Artemis II Mission Integration Review, a checkpoint in the lead-up to the first crewed Artemis mission.
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It's an enormous undertaking, a $7.5 billion business employing some 10,000 people all focused on some of humankind's biggest questions. "What is out there? What does it mean about the origins of life? What does it mean about whether we're alone or not in the universe?" Kshatriya muses from his office in Houston.
Kshatriya has been looking to the stars for two decades. He has worked on NASA’s space shuttle program and on the International Space Station, and he served as a NASA flight director, one of just about 100 people to lead Mission Control since its establishment in 1965. But his interest in space has definitively terrestrial origins: a sense of hometown pride and childhood memories of a historic shuttle launch.
Kshatriya grew up in Houston. “Everyone that grows up in Houston believes that the program is super important,” he says. “It’s a civic thing, but also you kind of feel connected to the rest of the country.” Each time the United States sent astronauts into space, the world’s eyes turned to the nearby Johnson Space Center, home to NASA’s Mission Control.
He was still in elementary school in January 1986, when, 73 seconds after takeoff, NASA’s Challenger space shuttle exploded, killing all seven crew members. The tragedy had the unexpected effect of inspiring Kshatriya. He remembers watching the investigative hearings into the disaster, in particular the testimony of Richard Feynman, then a professor of physics at Caltech. Feynman sat before the cameras with a glass of ice water and a piece of an O-ring, which had been designed to seal a joint in the Challenger. On live TV, Feynman showed that in cold temperatures, such as those on the morning of the ill-fated launch, this small piece of rubber lost its flexibility, a tiny flaw that had led to massive failure. For Kshatriya, the demonstration was evidence that his respect for the United States and NASA was well placed: “We had a government that could sit there and question itself and have one of the most amazing scientists in the world stare down this committee and say ‘we need to get better.’”
Still, Kshatriya did not yet see himself in Mission Control. “I was more interested in playing baseball for the Astros than actually being a part of NASA,” he says of his earliest career ambitions. But Kshatriya’s parents, both Indian immigrants, stressed the importance of an education in math and science; his mother was a chemist and his father an engineer. Kshatriya began to see that as a path to “what I really wanted to do: be a part of big things.” That desire led him to Caltech. He first studied physics and later mathematics, but the most important lesson, he says, was humility. “You realize very quickly that you are not nearly as smart as you think you are,” Kshatriya says. “To me that was super liberating.”
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“Everyone you meet, everyone cares about the mission," Kshatriya says today. "People doing procurement, people cleaning the floors. It doesn't matter what your role is or how long you've been here. Everyone feels like they are part of this amazing thing."
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After graduating from Caltech, Kshatriya returned to Texas to pursue a graduate degree in mathematics and to care for his ailing father and woo his now-wife. In the challenging job market of the mid-2000s, Kshatriya pursued opportunities in the oil and gas industry and the medical sector before joining United Space Alliance, NASA’s primary contractor on the space shuttle program. That was the summer of 2003, just six months after the space shuttle Columbia broke up on reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere over Texas, killing seven crew members. “One of my first assignments was to read the Columbia Accident Investigation Board report,” Kshatriya says. According to the report, one of the factors in the disaster was the organization culture of NASA, and soon Kshatriya would become a part of the effort to improve it.
“Everyone you meet, everyone cares about the mission,” Kshatriya says today. “People doing procurement, people cleaning the floors. It doesn’t matter what your role is or how long you’ve been here. Everyone feels like they are part of this amazing thing.” That attitude is essential when you have two spacecrafts flying side by side at 18,000 miles an hour, 250 miles above the Earth, says Kshatriya, describing a 2012 SpaceX mission to the International Space Station. He was a part of the team that operated a robotic arm to connect the crafts and resupply the space station. “We thought a lot about the things that could go wrong,” he says. “It’s kind of fraught with peril.” The successful mission earned Kshatriya the Silver Snoopy, an award presented by NASA astronauts to someone who has made an outstanding contribution to the safety of human space flight.
On this late spring day, Kshatriya is about to launch into a three-day mission integration review of all the products that need to be built for Artemis II, which is the second mission of a four-part effort to establish a long-term human presence on the Moon as a step toward exploration of Mars, with additional Moon missions to follow. The uncrewed Artemis I mission was a successful test of the Orion spacecraft, NASA’s new space exploration vehicle and its most powerful rocket, the Space Launch System. The crewed Artemis II mission will conduct additional tests before the Artemis III mission lands astronauts in the Moon’s southern polar region, which may be home to substances that will help scientists create a source of water. Artemis IV will return astronauts to the Moon’s surface and build the Lunar Gateway, a space station in orbit around the Moon, which can be used as a base for longer missions.
These Artemis missions are, at their core, about scientific discovery. “What we’re trying to do is expand people’s brains,” Kshatriya says. Global leadership—what Kshatriya describes as “making sure that the exploration of space is covered by our values as a democracy”—is also an important motivation. But for Kshatriya, the most vital reason to return to the Moon is the same thing that turned his attention to the stars: inspiration.
The memories he treasures most from his time in Mission Control aren’t populated by astronauts, but by the children of his coworkers who came to visit a room most have only seen on TV and in movies. “They would walk in and they would look up on the front room board, and they would see astronauts bouncing around, doing experiments, and they would stop. They’d do a double take.” Kshatriya loved to take the time to explain what they were seeing. “At some point there’s a realization that what they’re seeing is actually happening. And this is something that they can be a part of. And whether or not they decide that they want to be a part of the space program, they recognize that you can do incredible things,” Kshatriya says. “All the problems we have—cancer, the environment, all the things that we need to do—will be solved because of that kind of inspiration.”
Kshatriya plays a pivotal role overseeing NASA’s efforts to send humans to the Moon and build a long-term presence there—an effort that began with the launch of the Artemis 1 mission in 2022.
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April White is an award-winning writer, editor and researcher. She previously served as a senior editor at Smithsonian Magazine. An experienced researcher, she has also collaborated with nonfiction authors on more than a dozen book projects.
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