On April 1, hundreds of thousands of spectators swarmed Florida’s Space Coast for a glimpse at a historic marvel.

Four astronauts embarked upon NASA’s Artemis II mission, the first to carry humans around the moon in over half a century.

From the ground, Spears School of Business graduate Dr. Brenda Rolls proudly gazed at the rocket roaring through the evening sky for liftoff.

“It’s an incredible achievement,” Rolls said. “Sometimes, I just can’t even believe all of the pieces that came together over the years to bring us to this point.”

Her Stillwater-based company produced at least 20 of those pieces, including the Orion spacecraft’s hand controllers and Space Launch System rocket components. Rolls is the president and CEO of Frontier Electronic Systems, which assembles and tests electronics for the aerospace and defense industries.

Oklahoma State University’s Cowboy Code proclaims, “We dream as big as the sky.”

Rolls routinely shoots for the moon.

“There is a lot of opportunity for aerospace right now in Oklahoma,” said Rolls, a Chickasaw Nation member who grew up in Stillwater. “There is so much going on, and we’re pretty excited about it.”

FES made headlines this spring with its Artemis II contributions, but the company has quietly powered aerospace advancements for decades. Ed and Peggy Shreve established FES in 1973, when their daughter, Brenda, was in middle school.

Peggy worked in OSU’s biochemistry department, and Ed was an electrical engineering professor. In 2018, Ed was posthumously inducted into OSU’s CEAT Hall of Fame and honored with the Melvin R. Lohmann Medal for distinguished alumni.

As a child, Rolls saw her parents’ ingenuity. She remembers her father assembling a digital clock years before the product was widely available.

“It was basically a timing device, and it had hours and minutes and seconds,” Rolls said. “I would just watch that thing.”

She joked: “There was no social media; there were three channels on TV, so learning how to count seconds was a good activity.”

Time flew, and the curious kid soon found herself as an OSU freshman trying to choose a major.

After taking classes across OSU’s departments and colleges, she kept coming back to business, inspired by her family’s company. While her parents ran FES with technical knowledge, Rolls wanted to support the business side.

In 1984, she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in organizational administration, similar to a management degree today.

“There was a real-life element because most of the business professors had been out working and then were teaching,” Rolls said. “They had real-life examples and real-life experience to bring to the classroom, and that was really helpful.”

Rolls launched her career in California, where FES had a secondary office for accounting and contract administration. In 1996, she obtained her Psy.D., or Doctor of Psychology, from Biola University in La Mirada, California.

By the time Rolls was elevated to president and CEO of FES in 2008, she had a keen grasp on managing people across departments at the Stillwater headquarters. From engineering to business operations, FES employs around 150 people.

Finding talent is easy with OSU’s campus only a couple of miles away. Step into the FES office, and it’s not unusual to see employees sporting OSU gear along with their protective smocks, which prevent static electricity from damaging the electronics.

“We typically have interns all the time, and we end up hiring a lot of them,” Rolls said. “Of our degreed people, probably at least 80% are OSU grads.”

In an inconspicuous tan building that was once a Sheraton Hotel, the busy team administers multiple projects for major clients. FES works with many industrial and government entities, including the U.S. Navy, Boeing and Honeywell.

The history with NASA’s Artemis program goes back to 2011. FES produced Orion spacecraft components for Artemis I, a lunar mission with no astronauts on board.

The mission took place in 2022, but FES worked years in advance to ensure the durability of components designed to withstand conditions beyond Earth’s atmosphere.

Before comprising NASA’s Space Launch System and the Orion spacecraft, each essential piece of technology passed through the vacuum chamber in the FES headquarters. Looking like a contraption out of Star Wars, the hulking chamber simulates space to test the electronics.

Nearly four years after Artemis I, the next mission carried people.

Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen went on the 10-day Artemis II voyage in April. Everyone on board made history: Glover as the first Black astronaut to fly around the moon, Koch as the first woman, Hansen as the first Canadian, and Wiseman, 50, as the oldest astronaut to complete a lunar flyby.

Using technologies assembled and tested in Stillwater, the crew ventured a record distance of approximately 252,756 miles from Earth – even farther than the famed Apollo 13 mission.

“We are actually seeing our products,” Rolls said. “When we’re watching them in space, we’re seeing things that we touched.”

As the crew safely returned to Earth on April 10 with a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean, Rolls and her team threw an office party in Stillwater. Rolls celebrated with her husband, Mark, who also works at FES.

One mission’s successful conclusion leads to another’s beginning. FES has already manufactured electronics for future Artemis voyages.

Artemis III, set for 2027, will carry astronauts in low Earth orbit.

In 2028, Artemis IV astronauts are expected to take part in the first crewed moon landing since 1972.

The eventual goal? Sending humans to Mars.

Though highly visible, the Artemis missions represent only a fraction of the vast number of recent aerospace breakthroughs, several of which are underway in Oklahoma.

OSU is committed to aerospace innovation through the Oklahoma Aerospace Institute for Research and Education with locations in Stillwater, Oklahoma City and Tulsa. Rolls also spoke of innovations at the Oklahoma Air and Space Port in the western Oklahoma town of Burns Flat.

Space exploration leads to a world of discovery in other scientific fields, from physics to biomedicine. Rolls said these wonders fascinate her and strengthen her faith.

She encourages young women to step into the aerospace industry, whether as engineers or in corporate roles like hers. Each day, Rolls combines her business and psychology skills as she motivates employees to work toward common goals.

“No matter what you do, you’re going to learn, and then you’ll take that forward into the next thing that you do,” Rolls said. “It may seem irrelevant, but chances are, you’ll find out somehow it applies. The sky’s the limit.”

Or, if you dream big enough, the limit’s the moon.