From building rockets to learning to fly

Roos has always liked figuring out how things work. As a teenager, she spent hours woodworking in her family's garage. She knew she wanted to become an engineer, but aerospace wasn't part of the original plan. "Before college, I had had zero exposure to aerospace whatsoever," Roos said.

That changed at Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering in Massachusetts, where she joined the rocketry team and eventually became one of its leaders. Her first internship was in the movie industry, building camera controllers. The following summer, she interned with SpaceX's Starlink program in Redmond, Washington, where she worked on ground stations that help connect users to satellites. There, she designed and built a lifting tool to handle equipment weighing more than 300 pounds. She later traveled to facilities across the country to help repair seven gateways, ground stations that connect satellites to the terrestrial internet, that otherwise would have been discarded.

For another internship, she joined SpaceX's Dragon structures team in Hawthorne, California, working on heat shield components and structural analysis of flight-critical hardware. Unlike her work at Starlink, Dragon introduced her to human spaceflight and the precision required to build spacecraft that carry astronauts. "I think that's probably when I realized that I was very interested in all of that," Roos said.

Her final internship was at a launch startup, ABL Space Systems, where she witnessed a static fire test that resulted in the loss of the vehicle. After graduating, she returned to SpaceX as a full-time employee.

Roos works on Dragon's exterior structures. She oversees much of the parachute deployable system and the integrated structural analysis for the capsule's exterior. When hardware is damaged, she helps decide whether it can be repaired, flown as is, or scrapped. "I sign off on it, and then we go and we fly the astronauts," she said. "You're flying these four people, they all have kids waiting at home."

A failure analysis project in her senior year grew into a 2025 paper in Materials and Design on sustained load cracking in AA6351-T6 aluminum gas cylinders. Using CT scans and other testing methods, she and her co-authors investigated a cracked scuba tank, the same type of cylinder used by firefighters and medical providers. An eddy current inspection detected a flaw, but CT scans revealed additional cracks that the inspection had missed. Roos then reconstructed the largest crack from the scans before sectioning the cylinder for further analysis. The failure builds slowly under constant load and can be invisible from outside. "You kind of assume that the engineers that design this did their due diligence," she said. "I realized how false that sense of confidence can be sometimes."

She sees the lesson in aviation, where hidden fatigue and a hurried preflight can be a bad mix. Her advice: "Learn more about your plane and don't take anything for granted." Her flight instructor also taught her to stay extra alert right after maintenance.

Roos started flight training after friends told her it was more accessible than she expected, though still expensive. Launch trips to Florida and weekend work have slowed her progress, although she has soloed and is getting closer to her private pilot certificate. During an attempt at her first cross-country solo flight from Santa Monica to Santa Barbara in California, Roos encountered radio trouble. Knowing the airplane had experienced communication issues, she had brought a handheld radio as a precaution. But after being handed off to Southern California Approach, controllers could no longer hear her transmissions. A Southwest Airlines crew helped relay her messages to air traffic control, and she returned home.

Outside work and flying, Roos is an avid cyclist who once rode at least 200 miles a week, often climbing into the mountains around Malibu with friends. These days, balancing these activities have become difficult. "I kind of have to pick two out of the three," she said.

"For me, going flying is my time away from work," Roos said. Next on her list are aerobatics, bush flying, and building her own airplane—"once work is a little less crazy."