Katherine’s Military Service Story
Katherine served as an officer in the United States Air Force for 4 years. Her early career involved working as an aerospace engineer working at the AF Research Lab at Eglin AFB in Florida. She primarily worked on new missile technologies, like steerable bullets and changing cross-sections of missiles. She did occasionally get to work on the GAU-8 gun (the one from the A-10) and the JDAM (bunker buster bomb used heavily in Desert Storm.
You can read her two published papers:
Aeroballistic Range Tests of Missiles with Non-Circular Cross Sections
https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/10.2514/6.2003-1243
and
Free-Flight Testing of Generic Missile with MEMs Protuberances
https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/10.2514/6.2003-1242
When 9/11 happened, she decided she wanted to be a part of the “real Air Force.” So, she requested to change her AFSC to civil engineering so she could deploy.
In 2002, she re-stationed to McConnell AFB in Wichita, KS as a Civil Engineer and then, quickly deployed to Saudi Arabia and then to Iraq. Her 110-man team was the first Air Force boots on the ground in Iraq when the war officially started in 2003. It was her team’s role to build Kirkuk Air Base from scratch, so it could be used as a northern airfield. She was awarded an Air Force Commendation Medal for her time overseas and left military life in late 2004.
Other fun facts from her younger days:
Katherine completed the USAF SERE (survival-evasion-resistance-escape) training in 1999.
She has 17 hours of burner time in a Hot Air Balloon (Lighter-Than-Air).
