CHARLOTTE – Boeing engineer David Rushing grew up in Mint Hill with his family. His parents, J.D. and Bessie Rushing, are also longtime Mint Hill residents. Growing up, Rushing attended Bain and Clear Creek Elementart Schools, Northeast Middle School, and graduated with honors from Independence High School in 1984. After earning a degree in electrical engineering at UNC Charlotte in 1988, he joined the Boeing Company in Huntsville, Alabama, commencing his career in space exploration.

For the next 20 years, Rushing worked on the International Space Station program while designing, building, and testing the onboard Avionics systems. He then was promoted and became the lead engineer for the Avionics systems on NASA’s Constellation program and its successor, the Space Launch System (SLS) program.

On November 16, the first SLS mission, Artemis I, launched the unmanned Orion spacecraft beyond the moon, which marks the farthest a human-rated spacecraft has ever traveled from Earth. The Orion spacecraft returned to Earth a few weeks later on December 11. Upon the success of Artemis I, NASA has scheduled manned flights in the next few years. The Artemis rocket stands taller than the Statue of Liberty and is known to be the largest rocket ever built.

Currently, Rushing, his wife Kim, and their two children live in Madison, Alabama. The Rushing family would like to thank Mint Hill public school teachers and consider it a privilege to have grown up in the small rural town of Mint Hill.