2023-08-11 10:23:18
On July 21, 1969 Neil Armstrong became the first human being to set foot on the Moon. His words after having touched the lunar soil are well known and emotional: “It is a small step for a man, but a great leap for humanity.” A day earlier, Apollo 11 had landed on the moon after launching from Earth on July 16.
The photograph that illustrates this writing was taken in the control room of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center during the launch of Apollo 11. Among the dozens of people in shirts and ties directing the takeoff of the spacecraft, it is difficult to distinguish the figure of a woman: it is the engineer JoAnn Morgan.
JoAnn Morgan (1940)
JoAnn Morgan She was NASA’s first female engineer. She didn’t have it easy in her early days when she joined an all-male team: some of her teammates saw her as an outsider, though many of them also supported her wholeheartedly.
Morgan worked on the shows Mercury, Gemini y Apollo and had access to the control panel in the launch room of Apollo 11.
When Karl Sendler, head of communications, personally requested her presence in the Apollo 11 launch room, Morgan was “practically ecstatic.” She commented in a later interview that her presence in that room at that historic moment “was enormous validation, absolute support for my career.”
His last great mission was to send robot-rovers to Mars: the Spirit and the Opportunity.
Although JoAnn Morgan was the only woman to have access to the launch room control panel during liftoff of Apollo 11, she was not the only woman in the room full of men. At the bottom of the photograph, observing with a little more attention, she can distinguish at least two other women (perhaps there were some more?): They were Katherine Johnson and Judy Sullivan.
Katherine Johnson (1918-2020)
Katherine Johnson is probably the best known of the women quoted in this article. And it is thanks to the movie hidden figures released in 2016. The feature film tells the story of this mathematician and a large group of African-American women calculators who, from the Segregated Division of Calculation of the West Wing of the Langley Research Center, helped NASA in its space race.
Known for her great precision in astronomical navigation, Johnson calculated, among other things, the trajectory for the 1961 Mercury mission (the one that carried astronaut Alan Shepard to make the first US suborbital flight) and the Apollo 11 flight to the Moon in 1969.
without the book hidden figuresby journalist Margot Lee Shetterly, the story of Katherine Johnson would probably never have been known.
Judy Sullivan (1943)
Judy Sullivan she was a math and science teacher when she joined NASA in 1966. She became the first female Spacecraft Operations engineer at the US space agency. She was responsible for the biomedical system of the Apollo 11 mission, although she also collaborated on the missions apollo 8, apollo 9, apollo 10 and in the twelve Gemini missions.
In the case of the Apollo 11 mission, Sullivan was tasked with observing and checking the operation of Neil Armstrong’s medical telemetry instruments. Any anomaly, any alteration in the astronaut’s heart or respiratory rate had to be reported.
Together with Katherine Johnson, he observed in a privileged place the launch of that ship that would make history.
Other women who contributed to the success of the Apollo 11 mission
A project as large as the Apollo 11 mission requires the work of hundreds of people, most of whom remain anonymous. from Playtex firm seamstresses From astronauts to the most specialized female scientists, numerous women (and, of course, men) contributed to the success of that mission.
Let’s remember some of them.
the astronomer Dilhan Eryurt (1926-2012) he worked between 1961 and 1973 at NASA. His work helped reveal some properties of the Sun and provided crucial information to the space agency for modeling the solar impact on the lunar environment. He received the Apollo Achievement Award in 1969 for his contribution to the Apollo 11 moon landing.
At astrogeóloga Mareta N. West (1915-1998) she was the only woman in the Geology Experiment Team for the Apollo 11 mission. She was the person who chose the place where that manned spacecraft should land on the moon. She subsequently helped select the “landing” sites for subsequent Apollo missions. She also worked on Martian geography in the 1970s.
Physiologist Rita Rapp in front of the food containers used in the Apollo 16 mission. Wikimedia Commons / NASA
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the physiologist Rita Rapp (1928-1989) led the team of the Apollo Food System and was in charge of the distribution of food in space. He worked with the Whirlpool company and a team of dietitians to determine how to prepare and package space foods. Rapp preserved food by combining dehydration techniques, thermostabilization, irradiation and humidity control. He was the contact person between the food lab and the astronauts, whose favorite food was cream of chicken.
Let us not forget, finally, the engineer of software Margaret Hamilton (1936), responsible for the development of the operating system for the Apollo missions. Its exception procedure and asynchronous task loading played a crucial role just before the Apollo 11 moon landing, when the on-board computer began sending error messages. His work, together with that of his colleagues, contributed to Armstrong being able to pronounce his famous words on July 21, 1969.
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