An engineer in huntsville, alabama working for boeing, the sponsor for tonights event. She worked on the team that determined the path the saturn five would take if the rocket fell back to earth. Their work was vital. After boeing and a successful career in computer technology, she now teaches the next generation of computer workers. Clean join me in recognizing and welcoming ms. Mary lee johnson. Like ms. Johnson, tonights speakers know what it is like to blaze trails and of the apollo 11 mission, i have been moved by the stories that have finally shined a spotlight on the Inspiring Women who helped make our exploration of space possible. We are lucky to have three of them here on the panel tonight. Aerospace engineer joann hardin morgan, engineer poppy northcutt, and medical researcher, dr. Carolyn leach huntoon. Each of our speakers tonight will tell us a bit about her journey, and then we will have time for audience questions afterwards. Joann, i am going to start with you. Joann hardin morgan. Joann worked in Launch Control at Kennedy Space center and was the only woman in the firing room during the launch of apollo 11. Your face has become incredibly familiar this year, which i absolutely love. She was also the first woman Senior Executive at Kennedy Space center, and her tireless advocacy for women in science and engineering spans nearly five decades. Joann, welcome. Thank you. First i want to thank you, athe historians, and boeing for sponsoring Something Like this. This is so unexpected in my life, 50 years after i did something all of a sudden it is important. And actually i knew at the time on apollo 11 that i was working on something incredibly important. I was a kid in florida and i was lucky enough to see explorer one, our countrys first satellite launch. And the satellite itself was sponsored by jpl. It discovered the radiation belt. And at 17, in my mind i thought, this is profound, new knowledge for everyone on our planet. And this whole launching business and going to space and putting satellites up there, its going to change the world i live in, and i am getting in on it. And i applied for a job as an engineers aid right out of high school. Accepted at the university of florida. I was a wee bit of a math whiz at high school and i got the job. Thank goodness the ad said student. They hired one boy and me. If it just said boy i would not have even applied. I had the Gold Standard in supervision. I had a wonderful supervisor that first summer who told everybody, no, this is not a coffee girl. Shes going to be an engineer someday. So i was lucky i had a great supervisor to start me down the path of my career. But we are celebrating apollo 11, and i wanted to tell you a few facts about women in 1969. 400,000 people across this great country worked on the apollo 11 mission to make it happen. There was no infrastructure in space. No satellites. Everything was on the ground. And you know what that meant if you are old enough. Tons and tons and tons of paper. Cards, paper tape, procedure, everything written. We had to do everything by hand. Calculations by hand. And women were there at Kennedy Space center. We had 24,000 people that year, 1969. 500 of the nasa team, which were about 10 , or 2000 of the 20somethingthousand, only 20 of those women were technical. And i knew each one of them, although each of us were separate in different rooms. I was in Launch Control. A guidance engineer was in a computer room was looking at a guidance computer. Judy was over there helping buzz aldrin when he suited up. Her friend anne montgomery. And her friend we were sprinkled around and yet somehow or another we were part of the team. Apollo 11 was just such a great, great team, and so unified. And i think one of the most inspiring things to me in watching, and every time i see it again, the landing itself, i think of not only the landing itself, i think of not only our country unified, but the planet. Cared. I remember watching the landing with my husband. I was on holiday in the gulf of mexico with him. And we saw the views from Walter Cronkite all around the world people caring so much. I thought it was wonderful. And that launch launched my career. It was my first launch. I had been there working on propellant loads and other activities, but they did not let me sit there at liftoff. There was always a man at that console. My boss went to bat and got permission for me to sit there. And all of a sudden it made a difference. I got seen by everybody. Well, she has been working here for 10 years, isnt it about time . So that is a little bit about my story, anyway. It is great to be here with you. Thank you very much. Poppy northcutt began her career in aerospace as a human computer but was quickly promoted to engineer, working in Mission Control at Johnson Space center on the return to earth trajectory. Her presence in Mission Control drew the attention of the media, and placed her in the public eye, making her an inspiration to young boys and girls around the world. Poppy. Thank you. Unlike joann, i did not have this big plan to be in the Space Program. I graduated from the university of texas with a degree in mathematics and went to look for a job. I am from houston. And i found a job as a computeress. That really was the job title. It was at a contractor for nasa. I never worked for nasa proctor proper. I worked for a contractor. In fact most of the people who worked for the Space Program worked for contractors. Boeing was a contractor. Many, many contractors were out there. And i thought, a gendered computer . What is this . I had never heard such a title before in my life. Since then, i have found a lot of history about it. Many of you will have seen Hidden Figures and have learned they were called computresses as well. And in world war ii, women were used as cipher breakers. They too were called computers or computresses. I was very fortunate. I worked my butt off, but i became promoted and became a member of the technical staff, which was our word for being an engineer. And then by chance, i ended up being the first woman in an Operational Support role in Mission Control during the flight of apollo eight. What i worked on was the development of the return to earth capability. That is the trajectory to bring the spacecraft back to the earth from the moon. And i am very specialized. Lunar operations was what i worked at. Not bringing them back from earth orbit, lunar, ok . We were not expected to be in the control center, but they accelerated the schedule on apollo eight. And we were a missioncritical function for obvious reasons. If you are going to the moon, you do want to come back. But they accelerated the schedule, and that meant that we were on a crash status to get our program into the realtime computer complex, get people up and aware. It was a complex program for the time. And there were the computers we did not calculate this stuff by hand. Maybe they did at Launch Control, but we did not. If you were going to the moon, you did not do it by hand. You might miss the earth if you tried to do that. Not a good plan. But coming back to the earth from the moon is so different than coming back from earth orbit, that the officers, the people in the control center were not experienced at using the program. So we were asked, the people who develop the program, to sit in the control center to help on that. So i was privileged to be over there for apollo eight. That was my first, and to me the most exciting mission, because it was new. Ten, 11, 12, and yes, 13. And my work was used in every one of the apollo missions. So it was a very interesting time, and a very exciting time. And i am so happy to see all of these young women in the room. Because people think that we are inspirations. I am inspired by you. And i hope that you will not be Hidden Figures. I hope you will be out and about, and screaming your name to encourage other women to go into this exciting area. Thank you, poppy. Dr. Carolyn leach huntoon worked at the Johnson Space center leading the study of how the human body adapts to say supply to spaceflight. In 1994 she became the first woman to serve as director of Johnson Space center. Carolyn. Thank you, ellen, and boeing for their support of this series. And of course pay tribute to john glenn, for the series is named after. He was a hero for all of us. And it is nice to be at the john glenn lecture. I went to the Johnson Space center. I went as a National Research Council Research associate, you could say postdoc. And the experiment i proposed and was accepted was to study the changes of flight metabolism in spaceflight cruise. You think, ok, go do it. Accepting it was just the beginning. Getting the crews to participate and the people to get the involvement that we needed, from the trainers as well as all the medical people and all, that was a big chore to do. But we did it. I had studied at Baylor College of medicine with the researchers who had worked on the gemini program, and that was the first time that we had done actual measurements on astronauts from space. We got urine and blood samples and food samples and fecal samples. The idea was to study in great depth that crew of the gemini because he wanted to make sure we could spend we could send the apollo crew members to the moon and back without any problems. We worked on that for gemini and we did a great job. I got very interested in it. So when he had the opportunity to go down to nasa to continue to do studies with apollo, of course i jumped at the chance to do that. It was a small medical group, tremendous people. We worked long hours, hard hours. I was the only woman in the group except for a couple of technical types. And we also had, as it would happen, we had a nice support from the center of management, as well as all of nasa. Not necessarily great support from the astronaut office, because they did not necessarily want medical people working on them. But it worked out. But we had the opportunity at that time to do some most unusual studies. The job that i had did not exist anywhere else in the world. Not even in russia. No one was doing what i was doing at the time. So, i sort of had to find my own way with that, but i had tremendous support from many great mentors. And i would like to pay homage to those guys, because they treated me with respect as well as encouraged my work and supported the work that i was doing. That, i think, is a very important aspect of anyones job and i have tried to do that and pass that on to people as i grew up in the Management System at nasa. The other thing that i would mention is that we did a lot of things the nasa way, or the apollo way, and people could talk about that is not how they did it during apollo, or what they should have done what have you. I came to washington many years years later and people would talk about how they did things during apollo. And i was thinking, you were not there. But it became a reputation, and you all know that for sure. But the things that i would mention that have stuck with me is the teambuilding that we did with apollo. And i did that with my work all the way through the years i worked at nasa. And that is not just the people there at the Johnson Space center, but also the people we brought in from all over the world to help with some issues that we had. We also brought in people from industry to help us a great deal in building, creating technical things that we needed for the spacecraft to do our medical experiments and our medical work. So, teambuilding i think was a very important aspect of the apollo way of doing things. We also followed by setting very high goals. We decided to go to the moon and we did. We decided we were going to learn as much as we could about humans in a weightless environment, and we did. We set high goals. We also wanted to mention that we contracted to carry out things that we did not know how to do, and we worked with many people around the country to learn to do things. It was not an easy task, some of the things that we had, but we got help and we were not afraid to ask for help. We were not afraid to ask after we got the help. We were not afraid to have things reviewed. And i think that is part of the way that we learn to do business. The other thing that i would mention is that we had a way of doing things, of looking at the way work was done. We called it configuration control. Once things got locked in, when you do things with nasa, at apollo, we kept them under a continuation control, and things did not get changed unless you addressed it to a high level committee. This held for the rest of my career because i learned about getting it right and keeping it right, and then keeping it under control and not making a lot of changes. I mentioned that we had several other women in the medical group when i got there. There were only a few engineers at the time. We all eventually crossed paths and became friends. I think the big issue about having so few women at the time is that they did not know they could come to work there. So they decided to advertise and bring them in as Research Associates and College Students and all, then women took a bigger role. And of course years later we decided to select and train women astronauts, and that really opened the doors for women to come to work there. So that also was very helpful. Thank you. Thank you, carolyn. Im going to stand so i can see you all better. I am going to ask a few questions, but we are actually going to leave a ton of times for people here and in the planetarium to ask questions. So, please be thinking of questions that you would like to ask. Just to start out, poppy, you talked about working on the apollo eight return to earth. Obviously this is kind of a silly question because no one had ever returned to earth from the moon before. But what was the most challenging part of it . Is the answer everything, because no one had ever done it before . But im curious as to how you even start with that. Well, you start early. You start early and you work really hard. But you didnt have much time because that whole decision was made in august. But you had been working on it. We had been working. We had been developing the return to Earth Program for several years. But to just give you an example of just how far you have to go, when we started working, developing the return to Earth Program, well, what people might not understand, they always landed in the middle of the pacific ocean. Right . That is because the miss distance from when we started is bigger than the atlantic ocean. Now, by the time they were flying they were landing almost in the ship. But what we were doing as we were perfecting the solution to the three body probe problem, and the big challenge is that you have to do a lot of optimization, because you have to meet the reentry card or you burn up. And you have to minimize fuel and you have to minimize time. So, it is just a tremendous amount of working on computers and improving your targeting, and always trying to get better. But the last few months were just to crash as we found every bug. Because you cannot have bugs when you are flying to the moon. Its too critical. We just had india just had a lunar mission. And, you know, im still hoping that theyre going to be in contact with their lander. But the tiniest little error is magnified tremendously when you are talking about distances, especially distances to the moon. So, its super important that Quality Control is just everything. I just want to follow up on that. The folks in houston at Mission Control, we had 23 critical events to go to the moon and return safely. For the launch team, only five were what we had to worry abou,. But we practiced all five. We practice them on apollo eight and nine and ten. Marshall, where miss johnson was, practiced engine testing. We rehearsed, rehearsed, rehearsed for five years. They didnt get to practice lift off off the moon. They didnt get to practice landing on the moon. They had to do it perfectly the first time. And thats the miracle of apollo 11. That is a good point. Joann, i am also really curious, you said being in the firing room changed when your boss advocated for you to go in, and you were in there, that it changed how people treated you, but im curious, did it change how you felt about yourself and your role . Or was it purely how people changed . I am wondering if you changed also, knowing you were there . Possibly it did. I have the tenacity of a pitbull dog. I wasnt going anywhere. So they were sort of stuck with me. But i felt more accepted and more confident in myself that i really was accepted, because dr. Werner von braun was sitting up on the top row and the chief engineer, and all these important people, and i was good enough to be in the room with them and so, that built a lot of confidence in me. So after that, i was sort of unstoppable. I not only had that tough hide and that tenacity, but i got to be a little bossy, too. Carolyn, obviously what we have learned over the years about the effects of microgravity on the human body has been enormous, but im curious, from your perspective, the research that you did, that you were involved in, whats been the most interesting thing that you think we have learned from sending humans, as a physical effect of spaceflight . Yes, youre right, we have done quite a bit of work and the work began back in the 50s, you may recall, because that is when they decided to spend people in space because it would be too hard for them and they would not survive. So the research started then. The early flights with mammals, were0 followed that before our mercury cruise went. Each step of the way we went on what we understood and what our fear was with spaceflight for the crew members. By the time we got to the apollo program, we were pretty sure that we werent going to have any big problems that we were not aware of. There were some things that came up. We worked on them. It was really interesting. One of the missions had an actual fluid and electrolyte problem which was my specialty, so i go to go into the big meetings and talk about what would happen if we did not get that under control. So, that was an anomaly, but the thing that i am most proud of i guess is the team that we built that did the work to take the crews from healthy on the ground, get them in space, keep them healthy during spaceflight, and bring them home. We were able to start collecting inflight data when we started flying skylab. And then of course space lab and Space Shuttle missions, we flew more experiments and we learn more about various enzymes and hormones and how they worked in the body in weightlessness. Its fascinating stuff and its one of the things as we renovate are moving beyond earth gallery, where we talk about human spaceflight, we are going to really emphasize the work done especially on the iss over the years, but really this huge body of accumulated knowledge. A question for all of you and then we are going to go to the audience. You know, in a sense, i would be shocked if you all hadnt encountered obstacles along the way. A man telling you you are a woman, you cant do that, and i am curious, did all of you have some incident like that . I certainly did, and i would like to say that some of the young women in this audience are never going to encounter it, but i doubt it. So i am curious how you handled. And be thinking about the young girls in the audience when you answer, to give them some. You want me to go, first . Sure, now that we know you have the skin of a crocodile. Alligator. You mentioned those primates, i knew the two monkeys. They were in a hut behind the hangar where i worked when i was a college student. I never had a chance to tell you. I knew those two monkeys. I had something happened to me, it was on the Apollo One Mission that i was working. The first time i went in, my director had been, go and run this test. I had my procedure which i developed. I went in to run the test in the block house for complex 34 where apollo one was. And the test supervisor came down and literally slapped me on the back. Thwack. I mean, it hurt. He said, we dont have women here. I thought, uh oh. I have this german telling me to run this test and to have this ex navy hitting me on the back. I said to my director, i said so and so, the name and i said he said they dont have women in here, and he said, plug in your headset and go to work. I want the test results by 4 30. I used my chain of command and they responded. Nobody made me get out. I went to work, did my job. Later, apollo 11, i am sitting in my console. The tradition for apollo 8, 9, and 10, althought i was not there at liftoff, was that the test supervisor, the same man who hit me in the back, would hand out stars to the workers. On apollo 11, after large, he came up and gave me a cigar and i thought, this was pretty ironic. That was one of the confidence boosters for me. They always like in these incidents that happened to me, everything from obscene phone calls to men following me in the stairwells, to watch my rear end, i thought that was like mosquitoes. We had a lot of mosquitoes in florida. You just swat them, then you are done with it. You may kill them, but its mosquitoes. I never had anyone say i couldnt do it. Except that society as a whole said you couldnt do it. You didnt need individual people telling you that when society as a whole tells you you cannot. I guess i didnt really appropriately get the message because i came in as a computrix. I was doing peoples crunching numbers for these engineers. Then i looked around the room and said i as i am as smart as these guys. They met a lot more money for me than me. I decided i would become a member of the technical staff. Engineers is what they call them. Some had physics degees, some engineering. But we were all functioning as engineers. I just took stuff home and reverse engineer it and i did not Pay Attention to the laws. I disobeyed the laws. The laws were that woman at that time, if they were hourly workers, and i was, were not supposed to work for an employer for more than nine hours a day or 54 hours a week. I viewed that as, you werent going to get paid by an employer, they couldnt require this. I paid no attention at all to that. My supervisor would tell me it was time to go home, but i recognized that in order to be accepted as a member of the team and as the equal of these guys, i just have to work as hard as these guys did whether i got paid or not, so i just persisted in that. And i think that because of that, i became excepted. That was key that i was not thought of as different, although once i was in the control center, that was a whole different experience becaus ei was sitting there listening to the chatter, because we would hear, three or five channels at once, and i kept hearing a channel being mentioned. Someone single have you seen on channel whatever. I finally thought, i wonder what is on the channel. I tuned it in and it was me. It was a camera there were cameras all over the place. It was supposed to be on the whole room and i had no idea how long it had been on me. I did not say anything about it. We didnt even know the term sexual harassment, hostile workforce. There are two ways to think about that. One is that it is a little voyeuristic and it is harassing and uncomfortable. Another is let them look and let anybody who isnt in this room know there is a woman here. Im here, get used to it. Carolyn, how about you . I was pretty fortunate on the timing i went to the Johnson Space center, then the manned Spacecraft Center fortunate on the timing i went to the space center. There was so much work to be done, if you are willing to work, and not complain and stay late, go on trips, come in late, save samples, and all that, if you are willing to do it, they would let you do it. They would have loved to have had ten more like me. From that viewpoint, the job was not difficult. Personally, i had people say things to me, like i would have i would like to get him promoted because he deserves it, not because his woman. He is a woman. I would like to open it up for the audience questions. Both nasa and boeing have strong Stem Education for all students at all grade levels. I was wondering if you had that in your schooling growing up. The question is, boeing in the smithsonian focus on Stem Education programs for girls. The question was whether there were programs like that for you. No. Zeroprograms. However, i had great teachers. My math teacher, who was also the basketball coach, saw me doing my homework in class while he was teaching that chapter. He looked at that, and i will never know whether it made him mad over he thought, i need to give this girl more work. He would go over five chapters. He would say, your homework is to find the problems with chapter eight. I think im getting ahead, instead of doing it on the school bus, but i had all this other work. I had teachers like that. My biology teacher let me and my sister dissect an armadillo instead of a cat or a dog. It had seven perfectly formed babies when we dissected it. We were in the laboratory crying cause we were murderesses. For me, the teachers and our parents, my dad gave me a chemistry set. I believe the concrete on our patio. My mom and dad did not fuss. They said, how did you do that . Between between wonderful parents and great teachers, we didnt have a special program. I think all three of us might have been lucky in that because we were a generation with great teachers. Was it teachers for you that mentor due . Trend toward you mentored you . No. The expectation was that you are either a teacher, a nurse or an executive secretary. Even after the company or were four featured me in their national advertising, but my fathers remark was that he was proud of me. The only thing that would make you more proud if he saw my engagement announced from the local newspaper. If he saw my engagement announced in the local newspaper. I was a self motivator. I had tremendous teachers. We had a lot of teachers who liked what we were teaching. I had a very supportive family. Six children. His one thought they could tell me what i was going to do in life and what i would do. A lot of support. With all the changes in technology from 1969 to today, what technologies we have today that has made your lives and
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