The skills Emily McBryan learned with MATE helped launch her career as high as the moon—literally. Her day job is as a lunar rover driver for NASA, and while she might not be physically flying into space herself, many of her designs have done just that over the years.
When she interviewed for her current position, she says it was her operator experience with ROVs through MATE that her interviewers were most interested in asking her questions about. Her days with MATE weren’t all high-flying, though. Emily joined the college team as a freshman at Arizona State University after competing in First Robotics in high school. As an aerospace engineering major, she wanted to find that robotics community to get involved with.
Her team made a lot of typical rookie mistakes that first year—most notably, designing an ROV that required three different drivers working in tandem to operate their vehicle. It required tons of communication, Emily says, so much so that before a competition once, the team even did a literal dry run in their hotel room. They managed to pull it off, though, and had a great time doing it.
“All that communication, now that I reflect on it—all of that is one-to-one with what I’m doing now driving a rover on the moon,” she said. “You think that it’s just pool games that don’t have an application for the real world, but they really do.”
After interning with NASA in college, Emily returned full-time after graduation and has been there ever since. She’s working with the lunar rovers now but has also had her hand in spacesuit development. While designing a robotically augmented spacesuit glove, she even invented a new type of knot that’s now patented by NASA. She credits a lot of her out-of-the-box thanking back to Marty Klein and his award she won her last year of MATE: Always ask how you can do things differently.
“I ask myself, ‘What is narrowing my vision? What is keeping me in this creative box?’” she said. “I try to challenge those things, and I think that’s what led me to inventing that knot - I challenged that basic idea of the constraint.”
