Flight path
When Rick Henfling ’06 was a student on UD’s campus, he lived at 114 Woodland, the very last house on the street before entering Dayton’s Woodland Cemetery. He never ventured into the cemetery as a mechanical engineering student, he said, but on his first trip back to Dayton in nearly 20 years, he made sure to stop there.
Henfling returned to campus in February to visit assistant professor Rydge Mulford’s Spacecraft Systems Engineering course and talk about his most recent work as entry flight director for NASA’s Artemis II mission.
But before the class, Henfling paid homage to the directors of the very first flight, Orville and Wilbur Wright, both buried in the cemetery.
“I dropped off two Artemis II patches by the Wright brothers’ grave,” he said.
The Artemis II mission felt like a natural extension of the story the Wrights began in Dayton.
As class began, Mulford introduced Henfling, noting his work with both ascent and entry operations for Artemis II.
“He makes sure the crew leaves Earth safely and returns safely,” Mulford said.
Henfling put an image of the Artemis II mission map on the screen at the front of the classroom, pulled his hands from the pockets of his flight jacket and pointed to the flight path around Earth and the moon. One by one, students raised their hands with questions, most of them technical.
Several students from the Aeronautics Club, the Mars Rover Team and the course itself — along with several engineering faculty members — filled every seat, with more standing against the back wall.
“My favorite thing about my job is we started from nothing with the crew procedures for Artemis II,” Henfling said. “We would sit in rooms, and we would just go line-by-line through the procedure. We just started from scratch and now we're going to go fly the procedures that we all developed.”
Mulford asked, “What does it look like to be an engineer working in the space industry? Do you sit there and do math equations all day long?”
Henfling laughed, “I don’t. I have people for that. A lot of our stuff is very philosophical. Like, what predetermined decisions are we going to have on paper, so that if we encounter them during the mission, we don’t have to think about it from scratch.”
Henfling said his engineering degree from UD prepared him for his work today, as almost everyone he works with on the mission comes from an engineering background. But one thing that was missing from his education was a space-specific class.
“When I found out you guys had a Space Systems Engineering class, I got super excited because that wasn’t here when I was here,” he said. “That’s really cool. I’d love to take this class!”
After the questions from the class tapered off, the image of the Artemis II trajectory still glowed on the screen as students gathered around Henfling to meet him and ask more. One by one, as they shook Henfling’s hand, the distance between Dayton’s aviation history and humanity’s future in space didn’t seem quite so far.