Page 69 - All About History - Issue 180-19

Women Of Apollo

NASA’S

and so people could watch me. In earlier missions,
I received obscene phone calls and I never knew UNSUNG
where they came from. After the third time, I did ELEANOR ‘ELLIE’
report it to a man who saw the look on my face HEROES FORAKER
and saw me slam the phone down, and I concluded
that he must have taken action because those calls Foraker and her team of seamstresses
The women whose
stopped. I just tried to stay focused on getting my were responsible for sewing the A7L Apollo
job done and that was what really buoyed me. contribution to Apollo has spacesuits, a high-pressured task where the
been forgotten by history smallest mistake could have proven fatal for
What was the atmosphere like in the the astronauts.
firing room during the launch?
Things are fairly quiet in the firing room, the noise SUSAN KATHERINE
dampens down and you’re listening. There is FINLEY JOHNSON
nobody pushing a button to go, it was an automatic,
final countdown. In Florida, we did not have The longest-serving woman to have As one of the mathematicians and ‘human
that same ‘go’ system as mission control, so our worked at NASA, Finley built the Deep computers’ based at Langley, Johnson’s work
whole strategy was that you only said something Space Network, which transmitted was critical to the mission’s success as she
if you needed to cut off the launch. There were a Armstrong’s historic words from the Moon helped to calculate Apollo 11’s trajectory to
thousand people listening who could make that across the world. the Moon.
request, but we all wanted to go and if there’s no
reason, you’re not going to call for a cut off.
DOROTHY MARY
Where were you when Apollo 11 VAUGHAN JACKSON
successfully landed on the Moon? Vaughan was another one of the ‘human The first black female engineer at NASA,
The firing room in Florida is not needed at landing computers’ and the first black supervisor Jackson was ‘human computer’ alongside
and so most of the launch team were getting a at Langley, helping to calculate the flight Johnson and Vaughan, calculating flight
little bit of a break and I was actually on vacation. trajectory that landed man on the Moon. trajectories at Langley.
Like everybody else on planet Earth I watched
the landing on TV. My husband said, “Jo, you’re
going to be in the history books someday,” and JUDITH DOROTHY
that’s the first time I really thought about it from
the perspective of history. I knew from a scientific LOVE COHEN ‘DOTTIE’ LEE
standpoint, because my personal hook in desiring Cohen was an engineer who worked on As an engineer recruited straight from
to work in the space program was the new the abort guidance system for the Apollo college, Lee developed predictions for
knowledge, and so the idea that it was going to be programme, the same system that brought Apollo’s re-entry to Earth and helped to
so historic really hadn’t struck me until the landing the astronauts of Apollo 13 home safely. design the Command Module’s heat shield.
and then boy, it just walloped me!

Did you see yourself as a trailblazer at Morgan (second on left)
that time? stands inside the Atlantis
orbiter as Associate Director
In the 1960s, I did not see myself as a trailblazer. for Advanced Development
I was so intensely passionate and focused on my and Shuttle Upgrades
desire to be part of that space exploration and the
fact that I was a young woman doing it really was
not relevant in my mind, not until the 1970s. When
I got my master’s degree at Stanford University, it
was really my professors there who opened my
eyes to the trailblazer aspect.

Do you have any advice for young girls
and women in STEM?
Well, I certainly want to encourage all girls
and women to learn to be fearless about math
and science. I’m lucky I was fearless because I
had a father who gave me a chemistry set and
encouraged me, even though I cracked the concrete
on our patio with it he never fussed, he just wanted
to know how I did it! In some of the sciences, we’re
doing better but worldwide, we need women to
care about science and engineering because the
future of people on this planet is important. We’re
over half the population and if we don’t care, we’re
not going to get it right.

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