Lincoln-Way Central alumnus takes career to new heights working with NASA, Boeing on Artemis moon launch
Since graduating from Lincoln-Way Central High School in 2014, Erik LeBeau aimed for the moon with his career — and made it there.
LeBeau, 27, who grew up in New Lenox, works for United Launch Alliance and collaborated with Boeing and NASA on Artemis I, the first launch of the space launch system which sent NASA’s Orion spacecraft into orbit to the moon, he said.
The Artemis I mission was completed Sunday when Orion landed off the coast of Mexico’s Baja Peninsula.
“Artemis I is the first mission in a set of missions that are going on that will bring us closer and closer to landing on the moon,” LeBeau said. “Artemis I is a flight that sends Orion out around to the moon, it orbits around it and comes back with no crew, as of right now.”
The goal, LeBeau said, is to send the first woman and first person of color to the moon in Artemis III, which is in the works.
While at Lincoln-Way Central, LeBeau said his science, technology, engineering and math teachers helped him get so far in his career. Particularly, LeBeau said his physics teacher, David Baran, inspired him to pursue engineering.
“I like to give him a lot of credit because education can be a lot of fun and it really depends on the teacher you get and you can just see where your career can go from there,” LeBeau said. “A lot of my STEM teachers just made what we were doing fun.”
Baran said LeBeau was a great student. During a unit on Kepler’s law of planetary motion, the class talked about space travel and the technology needed to make it practical. Baran said he believes it was during that lesson that LeBeau found his true passion.
“He was really excited to talk AP physics, and he often talked about a career in aerospace. I am lucky to have had him and thrilled and honored he remembers me so fondly,” Baran said.
As part of the Artemis I team, LeBeau is a trajectory engineer on the flight design team, which means he creates and optimizes trajectories as well as coordinates flight operations, he said.
LeBeau, who now lives in Littleton, Colorado, said he graduated from Marquette University in 2019 with a degree in mechanical engineering. After graduation, he got a job as a mechanical design engineer building gear box accessories for airplanes and helicopters.
But LeBeau said he always felt a pull to the space industry. During the pandemic, he saw an engineering position opened up at United Launch Alliance and he ultimately got the position.
Initially, LeBeau said he started working on Artemis II before Artemis I. For Artemis II, he helped develop the mission design requirements, he said, and after completing that work he talked with his boss to arrange a way to work on the technical side of the mission, which has been a decade in the making.
From there, he was given “a cross job” working with the flight design team to optimize the Artemis I trajectories, LeBeau said, and he ultimately switched to the Artemis I project. While working on the trajectories, LeBeau said, he didn’t realize how far out engineers have to start optimizing trajectories because the design process takes time.
“You always have to be designing and optimizing new trajectories for each of these launch periods as you come up to the launch, just in case there were to be scrubs or things that may postpone the launch, you have to make sure that you can move out to a new date,” LeBeau said. “So that happens months in advance.”
On the flight operation side, LeBeau said there is a lot of coordination during the mission between satellites and dishes to be able to receive accurate data. United Launch Alliance has a Denver operational support center where people monitored the mission as it happened and gave live updates as needed, he said.
For Artemis II, LeBeau said he worked closely with NASA and Boeing officials.
“It’s a lot of fun to get to work with these guys on a very unique mission,” LeBeau said. “We typically launch within low Earth orbit up to geostational orbits, nothing as far as the moon.”
