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The Women Who Brought Us the Moon
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of PBS
Posted: July 28th, 2019
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/chasing...
In 1965, Poppy Northcutt was the only female engineer at NASAs Houston Mission Control. As she gazed at the men around her she thought to herself, Im as smart as they are. Although she belonged among them, it was undeniably difficult to be the only woman in what sometimes felt like the domain of men. As isolated as Northcutt felt in the historic control center, she was one of thousands of women who began their careers at NASA as computers. It was a job created before the advent of electronic machines, when human aptitude was required to perform all the mathematical calculations needed for experiments. Women have historically filled these positions, as exemplified by the groups of female computers who worked at the Harvard Observatory and the Royal Observatory Greenwich in the late 1800s. At NASA, these women came from all over the world, working at centers across the United States, and comprising a diverse and potent force in space exploration. Their calculations would ultimately be responsible for sending astronauts to the moon. Unlike Northcutt, Sue Finley noticed the ubiquitous presence of female employees when she started work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA. Not only was her supervisor a woman, but all of her coworkers in the computing section were as well. Finley, who started in 1958, before NASAs formation, is still working for the space agency today. At age 83 and with a career spanning six decades, she is NASAs longest serving female employee.
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