Public policy professor involved with space exploration issues

When the shuttle Discovery passed through Earth’s atmosphere into space in July, it marked the first launch of an American space shuttle since 2002. Few people from Connecticut were closer to the situation than Amy Donahue.

Three years earlier, the assistant professor of public policy at UConn had been one of the people in the fields of eastern Texas searching through the wreckage of the space shuttle Columbia, which disintegrated during its return flight to Earth, killing all seven astronauts aboard.

Following the Columbia disaster, Donahue, who joined UConn’s faculty in 2000, was appointed by the then-administrator of NASA, Sean O’Keefe, to serve on the Stafford-Covey Return to Flight Task Group. The group, named for the two former astronauts leading it, was charged with assessing NASA’s response to the Columbia tragedy, as well as determining safety issues and readiness for a return flight to space. Donahue also serves on a standing NASA aerospace safety advisory panel.

Originally from Old Lyme, Donahue began her career in the U.S. military, and then became a firefighter in Alaska and upstate New York. She received her Ph.D. in public administration from the Maxwell School of Public Affairs at Syracuse University, and later was a lecturer at Syracuse.

Donahue says O’Keefe was one of her mentors. Following Sept. 11, 2001, O’Keefe asked her to serve at NASA to develop its role in the new mission of homeland security, and she went on to become a technical advisor to the new U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Donahue watched Discovery take off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

“It really was an emotional moment for all assembled,” she says. “NASA has done an enormous amount of work since the loss of Columbia, and the launch was surely a celebration of those accomplishments. It also brings some personal closure for those who spent months in the field recovering Columbia and her crew. It feels like the central goal of that work – to get back to space – has been realized.”

Discovery’s flight was not without problems and lingering safety concerns, especially when a piece of foam came loose from the shuttle during take-off. A similar event had doomed Columbia when debris struck and dislodged one of the craft’s outer heat shield panels, allowing deadly heat to penetrate the shuttle during its re-entry to Earth.