Persevering Through Outer Space

Alibay, 33, says her parents were instrumental in her becoming an aerospace engineer. She and her brother were born in the small town of Joliette, Quebec. They were raised without gender stereotypes, she says. She played with toy cars and Lego as much as with dolls, and had an insatiable appetite for learning.

“School was her life,” recalls her mother Nadine Soundarjee, who remembers her daughter crying when each school year ended.  

In high school, Alibay nearly went in a completely different career direction as she decided between medicine and aerospace. She recalls how she felt encouraged by many around her, including her religious community, to become a doctor.

Her parents, on the other hand, pushed her to follow her passion. “I remember my father saying, ‘If you want to be a farmer then have a farm, but do your best and put your heart into it.’”

“My brother was the one who was into space and I really liked dinosaurs,” she recalls. That changed when she was nine and they watched the movie Apollo 13. Spoiler alert: “I remember he was horrified. We had to fast forward to the end to show him the astronauts survived,” she says. “By the end of it, he was no longer interested in going to space and I was just fascinated.”

When Alibay was 13, her father took a job in Manchester, England. “For my parents it was an opportunity to expose us to something different and change our view of the world,” Alibay says. They also wanted their children to learn English. Alibay’s mother stayed at home to help her and her brother adapt during their first few years in England. 

After high school, Alibay earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Aerospace and Aerothermal Engineering from the University of Cambridge before interning at NASA. She then went to Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she completed her PhD in Space Systems while continuing to intern at NASA. She joined NASA full-time after completing her studies. Before Perseverance, she worked on the InSight Mars Lander, which measured seismic activity on the red planet. 

As a woman of colour in a male-dominated field, Alibay spends time mentoring other women and advocating for diversity in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). “I want to change the aerospace culture and the way we integrate young female engineers and celebrate differences,” she told the Huffington Post in February 2020.

Because of COVID-19, Alibay and her team have mostly been working from home since mid-March 2020. Even so, they pushed ahead with the Perseverance rover’s launch in July 2020. It was scheduled long before the pandemic. The rover had to be launched within a strict three-week window to reach Mars, she explains. “The planets decide when these things are due.”

“It’s kind of crazy,” she adds. “We’re trying to change humanity, landing the biggest, most complex rover we’ve ever landed on another planet, and we’re doing all of that in the middle of a pandemic.”