Amanda Mitskevich could be a NASA cheerleader. Compact and energetic, she sprinkles her sentences about space missions with “pretty neat” and “really cool.” She even looks a bit like the female cheerleader in the 1990s Saturday Night Live sketches.

But Mitskevich’s job is no laughing matter. She runs with the big boys as manager of the launch services program at Kennedy Space Center. Promoted from deputy manager this past winter, Mitskevich oversees NASA’s provision and management of all domestic expendable launch services for robotic missions. It’s an organization of about 500 people, half civil servants and half support contractors.

She has been working her way up the NASA ranks since July 1987, just a couple of months after she graduated from Tech with an industrial engineering degree.

The notoriously skewed male-to-female ratio at Tech in the 1980s made the transition to the male-dominated NASA easy. In fact, Mitskevich can’t think of an instance in her more than two decades on the job in which she felt the tinge of discrimination because of her sex. A recent case of gender assumption only made her laugh.

Mitskevich recalled arriving on site for the February launch of a solar dynamics observatory. “I’m looking for where I’m supposed to park, and I pull in and it’s labeled Mr. Mitskevich. I took a picture of it” to show husband Geoff Mitskevich, Phys 86, she said. “It doesn’t bother me. They’re used to mostly guys.”

The difficulty of Tech course work also prepared Mitskevich for her roles at NASA.

“We have to solve a lot of hard problems, whether they be technical problems or just things that you learn in industrial engineering in terms of interactions with people, organizational dynamics,” she said. “I started out in shuttle logistics, which was kind of typical industrial engineering work. I was there for five years, and then I went into shuttle operations, more hands on with the orbiter and the shuttle.”

Mitskevich agreed that the launch services program, which she joined 12 years ago, doesn’t get the media attention that the space shuttle and its crews do. “But I would never trade this for the world. Each of the missions we do is so different. You have all sorts of science that each mission does. Last year we launched the [lunar reconnaissance orbiter and lunar crater observation and sensing satellite]. One of the missions circled the moon, and one of the missions crashed into the moon. It was the first mission back to the moon so it was really cool.

“We also do the Mars missions. Spirit and Opportunity, we launched those. Anything that’s scientific or exploration that doesn’t need human interaction we launch,” she said, looking forward to the 2011 launch of a Mars lander, “the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. It’s basically a roving laboratory. It’s going to be a really exciting mission.

“Pluto New Horizons arrives to begin its mission July 2015, so it takes close to 10 years to get there. The missions we’re launching you’ll hear about for a long span of time,” she continued. “There have been lots of pictures of Saturn recently. That was the Cassini mission that we launched. They all come through here, they sure do.”

Mitskevich’s group works on 25 to 30 missions at a time and averages six to seven launches a year. IMAGE was her favorite, she said, because she served as mission manager for the March 2000 launch.

“It was one of those that went out to the magnetosphere and had all sorts of different scientific aspects. I felt close to it because when you’re a mission manager you work on it five to seven years. Some of the scientists work 20 years on the science before they get it launched. They are so attached to that mission that you want every single thing in the world to go right for it. You get really close with that team and the mission itself. When you watch your own launch, it’s really something,” she said.

“Once the spacecraft separates, then we’re done with the mission. But it’s kind of nerve-racking after the launch. The launch will be successful, then you’ll have maybe an hour and a half to wait until the spacecraft separates. You can’t do anything about it if it doesn’t. You’re just watching the data at that point. When the spacecraft separates, it’s a huge wave of relief that everything is OK.”

A low point for Mitskevich’s team came with the February 2009 launch of an Orbital Carbon Observatory.

“The mission failed — the rocket failed. It was the first failure for the [launch services] organization since we’d been established in 1998. Most everybody in the organization had never been through a failure before. It’s almost like a death in the family. It’s heart wrenching to see and be part of. The images you remember are of the scientists who worked on it for a long time. When everybody came to the realization that it hadn’t separated, it was just a really, really sad thing to see,” Mitskevich said.

“Probably our biggest accomplishment as an organization was 10 days later we launched the Kepler mission” to look for other planets in the galaxy, she said. “We came right out of a failure and launched another mission.”

Glory, an Earth-observing mission, will launch about a year and a half after the 2009 failure. “It will be launching on the rocket that failed last February, so that will be a big one for us,” Mitskevich said.

She turns to her stored energy to combat stress. “I jog three times a week, and I exercise a couple of other times a week. That’s kind of my mind clearing, my therapy. That helps me focus on the important things I need to focus on. In fact, if it is a launch date and I feel stressed, I’ll definitely go for a run.”

Scoring firsts propels Mitskevich and her team. “A while back we launched the Messenger spacecraft. It will be the first to orbit Mercury. I’m excited to see that one get there.”

And Mitskevich hopes to see men and women set foot on another planet in her lifetime.

“I know the eventual goal is to get to planets, like Mars, and other bodies in the solar system, which should be really cool.”