![]() "It would be called a hostile workplace" today, she said, but at the time, "we didn't even have that language." But she also discovered that co-workers had trained a camera on her that they secretly watched on a private channel. She soon figured out how to focus on particular conversations, and picked up on some non-scientific chatter: "There's a girl in here."Īs the Apollo launch approached, video footage from Mission Control was broadcast around the world, including shots of Northcutt that prompted heaps of fan mail. "How am I going to make sense out of this cacophony of voices?" she thought. She took a seat at a console, donned headphones and was instantly overwhelmed by the din of overlapping conversations. "It was a radical thing for the guys to wear a blue shirt," said Northcutt, 75, adding, "It was a pretty bleak landscape for women." Almost everyone working there was white, male and clean-cut, a sea of white shirts. When Northcutt entered Mission Control in 1968 with her long blond hair and miniskirts, she knew she would stand out. ![]() "I was thinking you have to integrate into the team." "I wasn't thinking of it in terms of breaking rules," she said recently at her Houston office. When Northcutt started at the agency, she knew nothing of fellow computresses at NASA's Langley, Va., research center-African American female mathematicians made famous in the book and 2016 film "Hidden Figures." What Northcutt knew was that she wanted to be part of the team putting men on the moon. Many were lone pioneers, fighting behind the scenes to not only build their own careers, but to advance those of other women and minorities at NASA. NASA has contracted with commercial companies SpaceX, Orbital ATK, and Sierra Nevada Corporation to deliver science investigations, cargo, and supplies to the crews living in space, and soon Boeing and SpaceX will transport astronauts to and from the station.Northcutt, then 22 and fresh out of the University of Texas at Austin with a mathematics degree, soon learned that at NASA, men were engineers, women "computresses" or "human computers," with less status and less pay.īut Northcutt persevered, and three years later, during the Apollo 8 mission, she would become the first woman to work in Mission Control.Īs the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing approaches, Northcutt and other women who helped America's space efforts are reflecting on their often unheralded roles-and the indignities they endured. National Laboratory, which the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS) manages for research investigations that improve life on Earth. Because molecules and cells behave differently in space, research in microgravity helps advance scientific knowledge. The space station is a U.S. Built between 19, the space station has housed humans continuously since Nov. The International Space Station is a model for global cooperation and scientific advancements that is enabling growth of private industry in low-Earth orbit and development of new technologies to advance human space exploration. ![]() One of many steps in assembling the International Space Station, Space Shuttle Atlantis delivered the S0 Truss Structure (the big set of solar panels across the top of the picture), which the crew installed on top of the Destiny module. ![]() Tragically, NASA lost two crews of seven in the 1986 Challenger accident and the 2003 Columbia accident. The space shuttle pushed the bounds of discovery ever farther, requiring not only advanced technologies but also the tremendous efforts of thousands of civil servants and contractors throughout NASA's field centers and across the nation. Humanity's first reusable spacecraft, the space shuttle carried people into orbit repeatedly launched, recovered and repaired satellites conducted cutting-edge research and built the largest structure in space, the International Space Station. Over 30 years, NASA's space shuttle fleet-Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour-flew 135 missions and carried 355 different people to space. and Soviet spacecraft and paved the way toward international partnerships in space. The Apollo-Soyuz Test Project docked together U.S. Astronaut Tom Stafford (foreground) and cosmonaut Alexei Leonov make their historic handshake in space on July 17, 1975.
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