Audrey Powers, Member Of Blue Origin Spaceflight, Visits Her Alma Mater Mount de Sales Academy
CATONSVILLE, Md. (WJZ) -- Mount de Sales Academy alumna Audrey Powers returned to her alma mater Tuesday to discuss her journey to space.
"This is a big part of who I am and how I got there," Powers said. "So, yeah, I'm very happy to come talk about it."
Powers is the vice president of mission and flight operations for Blue Origin, the aerospace company founded by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos.
Last October, she was one of the four people aboard the New Shepard NS-18, the company's second spaceflight with a human crew. William Shatner of 'Star Trek' fame was also a passenger.
"I wanted to share my experience flying to space," Powers said. "[It's] something a little bit unusual that I don't think anyone from Mount de Sales has done before."
She grew up in Columbia and attended Mount de Sales Academy, a private, all-girls secondary school.
"To see a Mount de Sales girl be able to do that is incredible," student Sara Fleckenstein said.
Powers, who graduated in 1994, took questions from students and showed them photos from her flight.
"She is a woman who knows what she wants and goes after it and is not afraid of the limitations that have been set in our society and honestly, I want to become more like her," Fleckenstein said.
Powers hopes visiting her former schools shows students that they, too, can go to space one day.
"I think we have this view of the professionals who spend their entire lives training to go on these space flights and I think we're really changing, I think, the nature of people who can fly to space," she said. "I hope I do. I hope many other people fly to space here. I hope I help them."