Holly Ridings

Holly Ridings is the first female chief of NASA’s flight directors and helps lead the agency’s Gateway Program, an international partnership to establish humanity’s first space station around the Moon. In her role, Ridings will serve as the deputy program manager, where she will lead teams to build and launch NASA’s foundational infrastructure in deep space.

Ridings became chief flight director in 2018, leading NASA human spaceflight operations through the first commercial crew missions, to the International Space Station, to preparation for the upcoming Artemis I mission. Over the course of her career in human spaceflight operations, Ridings has spent thousands of hours in the Mission Control Center supporting the assembly and operations of the space station. Ridings led several key operational milestones in human spaceflight, including the first commercial cargo spacecraft mission to the space station in 2012.

Ridings began her NASA career in 1997 at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, before becoming a flight controller at NASA’s Mission Control Center in Houston, Texas, where she led various teams supporting the International Space Station. A native of Amarillo, Texas, Ridings earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Texas A&M University, College Station, in 1996.