Susan O’Connell got interested in the stars when she was in grade school.
By the time she died Sept. 2, she had turned that passion into a career, including work as mission manager for the launch of the Cassini spacecraft, which has circled Saturn since June 2004.
O’Connell, who suffered from diabetes for years, died just days short of her 59th birthday at a Wheat Ridge hospice.
“As a little girl, she loved space and the moon and stars and had pictures of planets on her walls,” said O’Connell’s mother, Ruth O’Connell of Lakewood.
She collected rocks and identified each of them. A dedicated shopper, she left a collection of fine jewelry.
She also left “boxes and boxes” of quotations she had clipped from publications, picking them because she liked what they said, not because of the person who had said them. She sprinkled the sayings liberally into conversations, said her mother.
When she started at Lockheed Martin in 1977, it was a man’s world, and the few women there were called “the skirts,” said O’Connell’s sister, Kathleen Wiggs of Denver.
“She always felt the glass ceiling,” said her father, Robert O’Connell of Lakewood.
But that ceiling didn’t extend to the spacecraft.
“Cassini is still sending back tons of information on Saturn and its moons,” said Gary Napier, Lockheed spokesman.
“She was a super-achiever,” said Wiggs. “She pursued her job with such fervor.”
“She was an articulate communicator and got right to the heart of the matter,” said Carol Giffen, director of quality assurance for human spaceflight at Lockheed.
Robert O’Connell said her job with Cassini was to integrate the various departments working on the project.
O’Connell was given the “very coveted” NOVA award, which honors employees for excellence, said Napier.
Susan Linnea O’Connell was born in Cheyenne on Oct. 12, 1951, and graduated from high school in Wheat Ridge.
She earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism at the University of Colorado and an MBA at Denver University.
She first worked at a Denver clothing store and then applied for a job at Lockheed because they needed a technical writer, Wiggs said.
O’Connell was active in several organizations, including the American Diabetes Association, Mile High Transplant Bank and Wise Women, an organization of corporate leaders that supports women’s advancement in the corporate world.
In addition to her mother, father and sister, she is survived by two other sisters: Shelley O’Connell of Seattle and Barbara Davis of Denver.
Virginia Culver: 303-954-1223 or vculver@denverpost.com
