Orion was born from tragedy.

Early on a February morning in 2003, as Columbia flew back to Earth, its heat shield failed, and the space shuttle disintegrated above East Texas.

Kramer was in the field the next day, driving around the back roads near Lufkin. She had spent most of the previous two decades working in the shuttle program, so she could easily identify the debris. It was agonizing work, picking up pieces of a spacecraft that had been carrying seven people.

“We all felt like we had failed,” she said.

This was the spacecraft that had inspired her to join NASA.

She was 14, in the spring of 1981, when Columbia made its first flight. Before that, the girl from Indiana had thought about being a veterinarian, but her teachers had prodded her to consider engineering, thanks to an aptitude for math and science. The only engineer she knew was fictional, Scotty from “Star Trek.”

But engineering, Kramer decided, would be fine if she could build something like a space shuttle.

Five years later, as a freshman at Purdue University, she was accepted to NASA’s famed co-op program.

Kramer arrived at Johnson Space Center that summer, naively associating Texas with two things, deserts and cowboys.

The teenager shared an office with the old guys who had worked on Apollo. She keeps a picture of herself from that summer in her office. Kramer appears eager and earnest, and, in a sign of the times, sports a Flock of Seagulls hairdo.

On that first day, one of the Apollo vets dropped a stack of advanced calculus books on her desk. Brush up, he ordered.

Brush up? Kramer had taken a single introductory calculus course at Purdue. Overwhelmed, she went home that night and cried. She called her mom, lamenting her dying dreams of working at NASA.

It turned out that was just a joke on the rookie. The Apollo engineers took her in. After several more co-ops, she hired on at NASA in 1990.