Brian Alpert wasn't supposed to end up at NASA's Johnson Space Center. Then, during his sophomore year in college, an aerospace engineer named Tricia Mack walked into his seminar and described her work planning spacewalks, training crews, and running operations from Mission Control in Houston. That conversation changed everything.
Eighteen years later, Alpert is the cross-program integration deputy for NASA's human landing system — the spacecraft that will carry astronauts to the lunar surface for Artemis. His job is to hold the pieces together: coordinating between different programs like Orion, resolving technical conflicts, managing data exchanges, and assessing risks to spacesuits, vehicle atmospheres, and mission timelines. It's the kind of role that only makes sense if you've lived the full arc of spaceflight operations.
Alpert's path there was deliberate. After joining NASA as an engineering co-op student, he worked as a spacewalk instructor, a flight controller in Mission Control, and a systems engineer. Each role taught him something he uses now. When things get complicated on Artemis — and they will — he's drawing on experience that includes managing real crises in real time.
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One moment crystallizes why that background matters. During International Space Station Expedition 32, a spacewalk went wrong. Spacesuit failures. Vehicle problems. Alpert was the lead spacewalk systems flight controller that day, the person in Mission Control coordinating the response. He helped bring NASA astronaut Suni Williams and JAXA astronaut Aki Hoshide safely back inside. Then, when a backup spacewalk was scheduled days later to finish the job, he was back on console again.
Those aren't the kind of decisions you make in a vacuum. They require teams of people thinking together, bringing different expertise, catching what one person might miss. That's what Alpert says he loves most about NASA — not the mission itself, though that matters, but the people doing it.
"Whenever work gets stressful or problems get hard, there are teams of people that have your back," he said. That's not sentiment — it's the operating principle he's learned to trust across nearly two decades of spaceflight operations.
Alpert has also learned to navigate change. NASA in 2009 — when he became a full-time employee — looked different than NASA today. He's watched the agency embrace public-private partnerships, watched programs shift and evolve. What keeps him steady is clarity: clear goals for himself, his team, their work. It sounds simple, but it's how you stay focused when the landscape keeps moving.
Now, as Artemis moves toward crewed lunar missions, that focus matters more than ever. Alpert is taking everything he's learned — the technical skills, the crisis management, the lesson that good people solving hard problems together usually find a way forward — and channeling it into getting astronauts to the Moon. The next generation of engineers and flight controllers will learn from him the same way he learned from Tricia Mack in that seminar twenty years ago.
