• Brooke Owens Fellow, Class of 2017

• Arizona State University, Graphic Information Technology, ‘18
  Journalism and Mass Communication, '17

• Host Institution: GeekWire

• Mentor: Emily Calandrelli

Chelsey Ballarte is a public affairs specialist at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. She works with the Flight Operations Directorate connecting the astronaut corps to the public and the media.

Formerly, she worked in the Office of Communications at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility. In this role, she created videos, news articles, multimedia, and social media content. During her career, she has supported numerous commercial resupply launches and spent 3 weeks in the field alongside NASA scientists to tell their story.

She graduated with a master’s degree from Arizona State University and is an alumna of ASU's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. She became interested in space as a career when she went night sky observing with her high school astrophysics class and saw a satellite fly by in the sky. Since then, her mission has been to help break down the science and make it something people could understand through video, animation, and journalism.

While an undergraduate at ASU, Chelsey was an officer in both the ASU chapter and the national organization of the Students for the Exploration and Development of Space and is a recipient of the Edward J. Sylvester Memorial Scholarship for Science Writing.

As a Brooke Owens Fellow, Chelsey worked at GeekWire as an aerospace reporter, writing articles and providing photography and videography for stories covering local aerospace companies and events.

After completing her Fellowship, Chelsey worked in the newsroom at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center supporting the Hubble Space Telescope which kickstarted her career at NASA.