The women at NASA have had a far-reaching influence outside of the spaceflight industry.
The women at NASA have had a far-reaching influence outside of the spaceflight industry.
On June 18, 1983, a new era in NASA spaceflight began when Sally Ride became the first American woman to fly into space, but the groundwork for her accomplishments was laid decades beforehand in the early days of the agency.
NASA was officially founded on Oct. 1, 1958, with the first several classes of astronauts being composed of all males. But on the ground, women from diverse backgrounds were hard at work contributing to the success of the first flights into the great unknown.
Katherine Johnson was one of the first African-American women to work for NASA as a scientist and was portrayed as one of the focal points of the 2016 movie Hidden Figures. Johnson’s exemplary mathematic skills helped her to land a job in the early days of the agency.
“I counted everything. I counted the steps to the road, the steps up to church, the number of dishes and silverware I washed … anything that could be counted, I did,” Johnson said, according to NASA.
Johnson calculated the flight trajectories for the first American astronauts to fly in space, including Alan Shepard and John Glenn, and for Apollo 11 when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon.
In 2015, Barack Obama presented Johnson with the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her pivotal work at NASA.
At the same time that Johnson was calculating flight trajectories, Mary Jackson was working hard as the first Black female engineer in the agency.
Jackson had a long career, and she climbed through the ranks to eventually become the most senior engineer at NASA. She was also active in her community and pivotal in sparking children’s interest in science. In the 1970s, she worked with children to build their own wind tunnel at Hampton’s King Street Community, NASA said.
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“We have to do something like this to get them interested in science,” Jackson said in an article about the wind tunnel for the local newspaper. “Sometimes they are not aware of the number of Black scientists and don’t even know of the career opportunities until it is too late.”
More than two decades after Alan Shepard became the first American to reach space, Sally Ride took to the sky to become the first woman astronaut to fly in space.
Ride made two journeys into orbit around the Earth, both on the Space Shuttle Challenger before it suffered a catastrophic failure on a cold winter morning in 1986.
She first flew as part of STS-7 which launched on June 18, 1983, and, one year later, flew as part of STS-41-G. The latter mission was also notable as it was the first time that two women were part of one mission. Australian-born Kathryn Sullivan joined Ride for the 1984 flight along with five male counterparts.
Ride passed away on July 23, 2012, after a battle with pancreatic cancer. She is survived by her partner of 27 years, Tam O’Shaughnessy. While Ride was not out during her lifetime, she is now recognized as the first gay astronaut, NBC News said.
Dr. Mae Jemison was born just two years before NASA was founded and as a child dreamed about going to space. In 1992, after studying at Stanford University and Cornell University and serving two years in the Peace Corps, she turned her childhood dream into a reality when she flew on STS-47, the 50th Space Shuttle mission.
When Jemison left Earth on Sept. 12, 1992, she became the first Black woman to travel into space and logged 190 hours flying abroad Space Shuttle Endeavor.
“Sometimes people want to tell you to act or to be a certain way. Sometimes people want to limit you because of their own limited imaginations,” Jemison told students at her alma mater after her historic flight.
The women at NASA have had a far-reaching influence outside of the spaceflight industry.
“I was about 17 years old when Hidden Figures released,” Jania Dunbar, a meteorology major at Jackson State University, told AccuWeather in an interview. Dunbar went to the movies to see the film with her sister, mother and grandmother, a film that would have an everlasting impact on her life.
“I had pretty much already knew I wanted to do meteorology; however, my senior year I started to become a little discouraged because I felt as though I wasn’t going to be good at the math area or the basic science areas of meteorology,” Dunbar said. “But when I saw the movie, it just motivated me that I could pretty much do anything that I set my mind to.”
To this day, women continue to reach new heights at NASA. In 2019, Jessica Meir and Christina Koch participated in the first all-female spacewalk while repairing and replacing a failed power controller on the outside of the International Space Station.
This spacewalk was part of Koch’s 328-day stay in space, a new record for the longest mission by a woman and the second-longest mission for any U.S. astronaut.
“I also owe so much to the people that inspired me back in the day to get to where I am,” Koch said after returning to Earth. “If there’s any way I can feed that forward to the next generation, it’s really an honor to do that.”
The future is bright for NASA as the agency works toward sending humans back to the moon, including sending the first woman to the lunar surface.
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