Who will be the first woman to walk on the moon? Almost 51 years after the Apollo 11 astronauts landed there we are still asking that question. Today we moved a step closer to knowing the answer when the Biden Administration announced that it will support NASA’s Artemis Program.
Women who were involved in the early days of the space program have traditionally received very little visibility, although that has begun to change. Space has predominantly been associated with men, with its close ties to the military/industrial complex and with the male-associated disciplines of science, math, and engineering.
Yet women have been part of the space program since its inception. Margot Lee Shetterly’s Hidden Figures (2016) is a massively important book that helped change perceptions by revealing the contributions of black women to the U.S. space program, including those of Katherine Johnson and Mary Jackson.
Many other women worked for NASA from its early days, including JoAnn Morgan (pictured above), an instrumentation controller for the Apollo 11 mission, Margaret Hamilton, a computer programmer who wrote the software for Apollo 11’s two computers, and Frances Northcutt, an engineer who plotting return trajectories during the Apollo Program.
Valentina Tereshkova, a Russian cosmonaut, was the first female astronaut and still the only woman to fly a solo space mission (in 1963!).
And we should never overlook the contributions of the astronauts’ wives, who were under enormous pressure during their husbands’ years in the space program. As Barbara Cernan said after the Apollo 17 mission in 1972, “if you think going to the Moon is hard, try staying at home.”
Sheer Ghosts 