Making Space for Women: Stories from Trailblazing Women atNASA’s Johnson Space Center
Jennifer M. Ross-Nazzal, Editor
Texas A&M, 2022
The author of this unique book chose 21 women to tell their stories of working at Johnson Space Center, aka JSC. She set out to include an assorted group with diverse backgrounds, education, training, and life experiences, and she chose well.
This is one of the longest book reviews I've ever written, because it's all about these amazing women's autobiographical essays, and it was vital to touch on them all.
These women joined NASA through various avenues and worked
in a wide variety of jobs, some as early as the pre-NASA days at the National
Advisory Committee on Aeronautics (NACA). The author writes that women were
long excluded from many jobs in a heavily male organization (except of
course for the secretaries, who also have stories to tell here). At the end of
the Apollo era, women made up about 18 percent of NASA’s workforce. The
government-wide average was 34 percent. Change began in the early 1970s thanks
to both official programs and the efforts of individual leaders and managers.
The most visible change, of course, came in 1976 when the
newest group of astronauts included the first women. Sally Ride, who became the
first American woman in space in 1983, commented that the addition of six women
astros immediately doubled JSC’s population of women in technical roles. Most
of the astronauts don't report direct sexism or discrimination, but they and
the women in pioneering roles like flight controller all felt that the
spotlight was on them. They tried to be examples for other women who might want
to get into NASA and examples to the male leadership of what women could do. One
such woman remarks here their performance had to be mistake-free, which of
course was not always possible.
The author starts with the stories told by the women who
were always instrumental in the agency’s operations: secretaries and administrative support people.
By doing a book with such a broad selection of people, including everyone from these
women to astronauts and top managers, the author does two things. The first is
that she introduces us to these remarkable women, their experiences, and their
achievements. The second is that it shows us an inside view of the agency and
its programs, including the sorts of things that never make it into media focused mostly on astronauts.
Ross-Nazzal begins with Estella Hernandez Gillette, who
became a NASA secretary in 1964. She increasingly took on more interesting
tasks, like supporting the astronaut selection process in the early 1970s. She
estimates they had 500 qualified applicants to work through, and the secretarial staff’s taskings were very strenuous. When the Challenger
accident happened in 1986, she moved to helping the casualty assistance
program. She stayed in flight-related positions until after the Return to
Flight mission, Space Shuttle STS-26.
As the author works through the other 20 women involved here,
she edits with a light touch, I suspect doing only enough to keep the reminiscences at a
similar reading level. This works very
well. The reader learns, not only about the NASA organization and the
individual jobs, but even some technical material explained here in very clear
terms. I've been a reader on the space program for over 50 years and still
learned new facts about interesting things like the challenges involved in
getting a clean separation of the solid rocket boosters (SRBs) from the
shuttle. They also discuss unique assignments. Secretary Jamye Flowers Coplin
found herself with the unusual task of trading in the astronauts’ Corvettes. Since
they were provided by a dealer in Florida, she would drive an old Corvette to
Houston and drive a new one back.
Ross-Nazzal offers examples of mathematicians and
engineers, including mathematicians who joined as “computers.” Dottie Lee, who has
become famous, became a computer a decade before NASA was created in
1958. As her technical expertise improved, she worked in the Apollo program and
then was brought into the infant Shuttle project. She was part of the first group that saw Max
Faget’s first tiny model of a straight-wing spaceplane. She joined the Shuttle
design group, locked up in a windowless building for weeks. Some of the
challenges Lee worked on in addition to the SRBs included the laminar flow over
the Orbiter and the optimal balance of carbon-carbon and tiles in the shielding.
“Dilbert” once said the life goal of every engineer was to retire without being
blamed for a major catastrophe, and Lee says one of her first thoughts when Challenger
was lost in 1986 was to hope her work was not to blame. It wasn’t, and she stayed
with the agency a total of 40 years. Ivy F. Hooks worked on cost modeling and
then aerodynamics, where she also worked on the first Space Shuttle designs.
Her specialty became the separation system. Of one design she bluntly told her
colleagues and boss, “You’re going to destroy the orbiter with that" by burning
off the tiles with exhaust plumes. Changes were made.
Ginger Kerrick was the first non-astronaut to be a capsule
communicator (CapCom), and then, in 2005, the first to become a Flight Director.
With a lot of experience with Russians and their hardware, she saw before
anyone else that an unretracted antenna on a Progress vehicle was going to
impact and maybe damage the ISS. The Russians ignored her, and it took two EVAs
to undo the tangle between the antenna and a handrail. Next we met Sarah L.
Murray, the first Black woman flight controller, whose highlights included reorganizing
Mission Operations and becoming the second head of the Columbia Recovery Office
following that shuttle’s destruction on February 1, 2003.
Then to technicians, another forgotten group, with the
first two female suit techs. From S. Jean Alexander and Sharon Caples McDougal
we learn much about the testing, improvements, and fitting of the various
Shuttle items, including tweaking equipment built for men. On the medical side,
there is legendary nurse Dee O’Hara, medical support and confidante to
astronauts from Mercury to the Shuttle. Vickie L. Kloeris, beginning in 1985,
designed and ran the food service operation for spaceflight. It was simple for
Shuttle: MREs plus commercial items. For ISS, it was infinitely more
complicated, and she scratch-developed recipes for some foods to lower salt (it
raises intracranial blood pressure in microgravity) and other needs. She
participated in a long-term spaceflight simulation, carried food into Russia for
Americans launching from there, and did pioneering work on the psychology of
food for people spending a year with only occasional flights of fresh
vegetables and favorite treats.
Kathryn Sullivan is a scientific triple-threat –
oceanographer, geologist, and astronaut. She was picked in the first group of
women, and she offers a humorous account of the first exposure to the media. One
of the striking items in her account: she “would have loved” be the first American
woman in space but thought it was unlikely because she did not consider herself
telegenic. She writes about the way the women bonded as a group but wanted to avoid
being separated as “the girl astronauts.” In 1984, she performed the first spacewalk or Extravehicular
Activity (EVA) by an American woman. She flew on STS-31 in 1990 to deploy the
Hubble Space Telescope. After the period described in this book, she became Administrator
of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Engineer Joan Higginbotham was picked in the largest-ever
class of astronauts – the 1996 class, with 44 members. She spent time as
CapCom when the ISS became operational. She credits that for improving her understanding
of mission operations when she started training for STS-117. The Columbia
accident postponed her first flight for three years. She describes the tense
moments of maneuvering a gigantic truss out of the bay and into position on the
ISS. Her career was not marred by racism or sexism, but she does describe some
tension between old and new astros.
Eileen Collins is famous as the first woman to pilot a
shuttle and the first to command a mission. She came to the program from the Air
Force, as one of the pioneering woman pilots. The culture had not yet adjusted:
she was told Air Force wives didn’t want her doing cross-country fights with their
husbands. She had less trouble with sexism in NASA. She was the first pilot for
a Shuttle-Mir mission. She had a less than fun time working with all the media
attention, but persevered because she was convinced it was vital to promote the
program and American leadership in space. She headed the Return to Flight
mission and goes into some detail about the new rendezvous pitch maneuver to
allow visual inspection of the Shuttle underbody by ISS astronauts. She closes
with the need to admit mistakes and fix them, no matter your role.
Pam Melroy was another military pilot. She discusses
management styles and how hers differs from the classic military tough-guy approach.
She describes astronauts as competitive, smart, but more varied in leadership
style than people might expect. She goes into detail about STS-120 in 2007.
This complex multi-EVA station construction mission became harrowing when they
needed to plan a complex, potentially dangerous spacewalk for Scott Parazynski
to fix a damaged solar array. She closed, “I could not top that flight.”
The author drops the interesting tidbit that most senior
managers at JSC are now women, a truly striking change. She introduces us to
Debra L. Johnson, who joined at a low level and worked her way up to senior
management, which the women termed “getting the key to the men’s room.” As head of the Office of Procurement, she has
interesting stories of how she pushed hard for flexibility beyond the standard
“get three bids for everything including paper clips” mentality and made it happen.
JSC, she writes, can even barter with other agencies, something exceedingly
difficult under federal regulations. She’s very proud of JSC management
practices, which she holds up as a model for NASA.
Natalie Saiz performed numerous Human Resources roles until
she became Director. Some of her interesting stories include opening up JSC buildings to help the community after Hurricane Ike in September 2008 and
dealing with the April 27, 2007, event when a contactor employee killed his
supervisor and then himself. She also had to deal with the end of the Shuttle
era in 2011 and led the effort to help all the people whose jobs vanished.
Peggy Whitson, who’d logged a record 675 days in space, became
the first woman and first civilian to head the Astronaut Office. This is, she
writes, an interesting organization in that it has to keep justifying
everything from the length of crew training to the T-38 aircraft to its own
continuing existence. She handled the emergency in January 2011 when astronaut
Mark Kelly’s wife was shot. This included naming a backup commander if Mark could
not do the mission, something management talked over a great deal.
Astronaut Ellen Ochoa, a veteran of four Shuttle flights
beginning in 1993, was named head of the Flight Crew Operations Directorate in
2007. There she pursued one of the most difficult management goals of the
program: getting new astronauts flight time while best using the skills of the
veteran astronauts on the ground and on flights, and doing it all fairly. The
life of an astronaut revolves around flight opportunities, and these men and women
(especially men) can get extremely competitive. She was close friends with Rick
Husband, who died on Columbia in 2003. She spent long weeks coordinating
the help of astronauts and others in the field, supporting the Columbia
Accident Investigation Board (CAIB), and at the same time rebuilding all her
plans for budgets and flight crews because of the resulting stand-down. Then
she had to replan again when the Shuttle retirement date was announced.
At the top of the management pyramid here is Carolyn L.
Huntoon, who became JSC’s first female Center Director in 1994 and stayed until
1996. Dr. Huntoon was also unusual in being a life scientist, not an engineer.
Her first step was a long one – reorganization of the entire Center, trying to
clarify lines of responsibility and streamline processes. She created the
Technology and Transfer Commercialization Office, improved partnerships with
industry, and headed the effort to create the Space Biomedical Office and the
Sonny Carter Neutral Buoyancy Lab. Her tenure might have been short, but JSC
was literally not the same place by the time she left.
There are two essays by trainers, another group largely
ignored. Anne L. Accola came in as mission planner in 1967, found her
particular slot boring, and did graduate studies in information technology
before coming back to be a trainer. She played a key role in preparing
astronauts for Skylab. Lisa Reed was the only person in this book I’ve met
beyond handshake greetings. She joined in 1987. She developed instructional
technology, taught Shuttle and Station astronauts, and became part of the CAIB
staff. She became fluent in Russian, and she tells interesting stories of the
challenges and fun of working with cosmonauts. (For one thing, they learned English
but arrived in Texas without knowing what “Howdy” meant, a critical deficiency.)
Each of the women makes some mention of sexism. For most of
them it was not overt “you can’t do this job” stuff, although that subject was
whispered about. There were grumbles about “you’ll just get married or pregnant
and leave.” (JSC, which employed thousands, had no childcare center until
1990.) There were improper wisecracks, an office papered with Playboy
centerfolds, and assorted pranks. One woman had men hanging around her door
because they had put a four-foot snake on the top of her drafting table and
were waiting for her to freak out. They were disappointed: she just picked up
the snake and handed it back to them.
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