When Alinda Mashiku was a little girl in Tanzania, she would look up at the night sky and dream of becoming an astronaut. The stars, she has said, felt almost impossibly far away.

This year, she helped keep NASA's Artemis II mission safely on its record-breaking journey around the Moon.

Dr Mashiku is the Program Manager of NASA's Conjunction Assessment Risk Analysis (CARA) programme — the team that stops the agency's satellites colliding with anything in orbit. In an interview broadcast by UN News, she has a message for girls in Glasgow, Clydebank and across Scotland who are wondering whether science is really for them.

It is, she says. There are no limits.

Born in New York, raised in Tanzania

Mashiku was born in New York City while her Tanzanian parents were studying in the United States. The family returned home when she was around five. Her father, an electrical engineering instructor, was — in her own words — "a passionate educator and champion for both men and women in technical fields."

He died when she was 16. His belief in her, she has said, is what still drives her today.

She finished school in Tanzania (she remains fluent in Swahili), then went to the United States for university, taking a Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering at Ohio State, followed by a master's and a PhD in aeronautical and astronautical engineering from Purdue.

In 2013 she joined NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center as a co-op. She has been there ever since.

The woman who stops space crashes

Her early NASA work included designing trajectories for the OSIRIS-REx mission to the asteroid Bennu — the moment, she has recalled, when "what I learned in school and what I was able to design and create on a computer actually meshed. That is when I saw and experienced the beauty of physics."

Today her CARA team provides collision-avoidance support for around 70 to 100 non-crewed NASA spacecraft, coordinating with operators at Goddard and orbital safety analysts at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. With low-Earth orbit growing more crowded by the month, her job is, quite literally, keeping space usable.

That work also underpins headline-grabbing missions like Artemis II, the crewed lunar flyby NASA flew earlier this spring.

A message for Scotland's girls

According to UN figures cited in her interview, women still make up only 35 per cent of graduates in science, technology, engineering and maths — a figure that has barely shifted in a decade.

Mashiku wants that number to move. Through Goddard's Women Engineers in Space and Technology group, and in regular school visits, she pushes back against the quiet voice that tells girls they are not the kind of person who does this sort of thing.

In one school session, she ran a three-hour workshop in which pupils designed their own spacecraft mission, complete with project managers, systems engineers and key decision points. The point was simple: this is not magic. It is work — and you can do it.

Her advice to young women considering STEM, as relayed by UN News, is to place no limits on their ambitions, and to aim for the stratosphere and beyond.

Closer to home

It is a message that lands neatly in Glasgow, where the University of Strathclyde, the Glasgow Science Centre and a growing cluster of small-satellite companies on the Clyde are all crying out for the next generation of engineers.

Somewhere in a classroom in Clydebank or Castlemilk this morning, there is a girl staring out of the window thinking the same thing Alinda Mashiku once thought in Dar es Salaam: maybe not me.

Dr Mashiku's whole life, in a sense, is the reply. Yes, you. Why not you?