Through our doors first and maybe she will come back here to give a lecture of her own someday. Before spro deuintroducing our im really excited to let you know we have a special guest who was able to join us at the last moment. Her name is marion lee johnson. She was one of the Space ProgramsHidden Figures. Ms. Johnson was an engineer at Nasas Marshall Space Flight Center in huntsville, alabama, working for boeing, the sponsor for tonights event. She worked on the team that determined the path, the parts of the thsaturn 5, would take, the rocket fell back to earth. Their work was vital for safety planning. After boeing and successful career in Computer Technology she now teaches the next generation of computer workers. Please join me in recognizing and welcoming ms. Marion lee johnson. [ applause ] like ms. Johnson, tonights speakers certainly know what its like to blaze trails and defy expectations. Throughout this years 50th anniversary celebrations of the apollo 11 mission ive been moved by the stories that have finally shined a spotlight on the Inspiring Women who helped make our exploration of space possible. Were lucky to have three of them here with us on the panel tonight. Aerospace engineer joann morgan. Engineer poppy northcutt and researcher dr. Carolyn huntoon. Each of our speakers tonight will tell us a bit about her journey then well have time for audience questions afterwards. Joann, im going to start with you. 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. Oh, thank you. [ applause ] well, first, i want to thank you, dr. Stofan, and dr. Neil valerie, historian, and boeing for sponsoring Something Like this. I mean, this is so unexpected in my life. 50 years after i did something, all of a sudden, its important. And actually, i knew at the time on apollo 11 i was working on something incredibly important. I i was a kid in titusville, florida, and i was lucky enough to see explorer 1, our countrys first satellite launch and the satellite, itself, sponsored by jpl, discovered the vanallen radiation belt. At 17 in my mind i thought this is profound new knowledge for everybody on our planet. 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 aide right out of high school and been accepted at the university of florida and i was a wee bit of a math whiz in high school so i got the job. Thank goodness the ad said, student and they hired one boy and me. If it said boy, i wouldnt have even applied. But i hit the Gold Standard in supervision. I had a wonderful immediately that first summer supervisor who told everybody, no, this is not a coffee girl. Shes going to be an engineer someday. Were giving her engineering job. I was lucky i had a great supervisor to start me down the path of my career. But were celebrating apollo 11 and i wanted to tell you a few facts about women in 1969. You know, 400,000 people across this great country worked on the apollo 11 mission to make it happen. There were no there was no infrastructure in space. No satellites. Everything is on the ground, and you know what that meant if youre old enough. Tons and tons and tons of paper. Keypunch cards, paper tape, procedures, everything written. We had to write everything by hand. We had to do calculations by hand. Women were there, Kennedy Space center, of those 400,000 people, we had 24,000 people that year, 1969, 500 of the nasa team which were about 10 or 2,000 of the 20 some thousand, only 20 of those women were technical. I knew each one of them. Although each of us were separate in different rooms. I was in Launch Control. Judy kerzy was a guidance engineer. She was over in a computer room looking at a guidance computer. Judy shannonburger was over there helping buzz aldrin when he suited up and her friend, ann montgomery, you know, we were sprinkled around just one here and there. And, yet, somehow or another, we were part of a team. And that 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, every time i see it again, the landing, itself, i think of not only were we in this country unified, but people all around our planet cared. They were watching. I remember watching the landing with my husband because i had a holiday and i was over on the gulf of mexico with him, and we saw the news, Walter Cronkite saying, and heres people in japan and australia and around and all around the world, people caring so much. I thought it was wonderful. And actually, that launch launched my career. It was my first launch to be in. I mean, id been there working on propellant loads and other activities but they didnt 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 and my boss said, well, shes been working here for ten years, isnt it about time . So its a little bit about my story, anyway. Its great to be here with you. Thank you very much, joann. [ applause ] poppy northcutt began her career in aerospiace as a human computr but quickly promoted to engineer working in Mission Control in Johnson Space center on the rush retu return to earth trajectory. Her presence in Mission Control placed her in the public eye making her an inspiration to young boys and girls around the world. Poppy . Thank you. [ applause ] 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. Im from houston, and i found a job as a computerist. That really was the job title. A computerist at trw systems which was a contractor for nasa. I never worked for nasa proper. I worked for a contractor. Actually most of the people who worked on 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. I since then i found a lot of history about it. Many of you will have seen Hidden Figures and learned that those women were called computerists as well, then actually the job title goes further back in that into world war ii when women were used as cipherbreakers. They, too, were called computers or computerists. I was very fortunate. I worked my butt off, okay . I got promoted and became a member of the technical staff which was our word for being an engineer. By chance, i ended up being the first woman in Operational Support role in Mission Control. During the flight of apollo 8. What i worked on was the development of the return to earth capability. Thats the trajectory, calculating the trajectory to bring the spacecraft back to the earth from the moon. And im very specialized. Lunar operations was what i worked on. Not bringing them back from earth orbit, lunar. Okay . We were not expected to be in the control center, but they accelerated the schedule on apollo 8 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 sort of 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 didnt calculate this stuff by hand. Okay . Maybe they did at Launch Control, but we did not. If youre going to the moon, you do not calculate it by hand. Okay . Or coming back. You might miss the earth if you try to do that. Not a good plan. So, but the coming back to the earth from the moon is so different from coming back from earth orbit that the officers, the people in the control center, were not experienced at using the program and so we were asked the people that deve p developed this program to go over and sit in the control sent tore help on that. So i was privileged to be over there for apollo 8. That was my first, and to me, the most exciting mission because it was new. 10, 11, 12, and, yes, 13. My work was used in every one of the apollo missions. It was a very interesting time and a very exciting time. And im so happy to see all of these young women in the room. Because people think that we are inspirations, im inspired by you and i hope 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. [ applause ] dr. Carolyn huntoon worked at the Johnson Space center leading the study of how the human body adapts to spaceflight. In 199 4 she became the first woman to serve as director as Johnson Space center. Carolyn . Thank you. [ applause ] thank you, ellen. And thank boeing for their support of this lecture series and, of course, to pay tribute to john glenn, series named after, he was a hero for all of us, and its nice to be at the john glenn lecture. The i went to the Johnson Space center, i went as a National Research counsel research associate, and the experiment that i proposed and was accepted was to study the changes in the electrolyte metabolism hormonal controls in spaceflight crews. Okay, you got an experiment, yaw con go do it. Well, that was just 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 the 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 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 brought back urine and blood samples and food samples and fecal samples anded idea was to study very, in great depth, that crew of the gemini thats because we wanted to make sure 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 i had the opportunity to go down to nasa to continue these 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 and hard hours. I was the only woman in the group except for a couple of technical types. And we also had, as would happen, we had a nice support from the Center Management as well as all of nasa. Not necessarily the great support from the Astronaut Office because they didnt necessarily want medical people working on them, but it worked out. We had the opportunity at that time to do some most unusual studies. The job 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. And so it was so i sort of had to find my own way with that, but i had tremendous support from many great mentors. And id like to play homage to those guys because they treated me with respect as well as encourage my work and supported the work that i was doing. That i think is a very important aspect of anyones job. And identive tried to do that pass that on to people as i grew up in the Management System at nasa. The other thing that i would mention is we did a lot of things the nasa way or the apollo way apollo way and people could talk about, thats not the way they did it during apollo, thats what they should have done for apollo, wa hahat hav you. I came to washington many years later. Id be in meetings. People brought up how they did things during apollo. I was thinking, you werent there, how did you know . But it became a reputation, and you all know that for sure, but the things that i would mention that have stuck with me was the Team Building we did with apollo and i did that with my work all the way through the years that i worked at nasa. That is not just the people there at the Johnson Space center, but also the people that, from academia, we brought in export porperts from all ove world to help us on issues that we had. We also brought in people from industry, helped 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 Team Building, i think, was a very important aspect of the apollo way of doing things. We also followed setting very high goals. We set we decided we were going 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, i want to mention that we contracted to carry out things that we did not know how to do. 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 werent afraid to ask for help. We werent afraid to ask after we got the help. We werent afraid to have things reviewed. And we werent afraid to be criticized. And i think that is part of the way that we learned to do business. The other thing i would mention is that we were 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, the way to do things at nasa, way to do things with apollo, we kept them under our control, configuration control and things did not get changed unless you adjust the change to a highlevel committee. This held me in good stead for the rest of my career because i learned about getting it right and keeping it right and 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 at the center, women engineers, and 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. They did not know they and as soon as nasa decided to advertise and bring women in and bring women in on Research Associates and College Students and all, then women took 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. [ applause ] im going to stand so i can see you all better. So im going to ask a few questions but were actually going to leave a ton of time for both people here and in the planetarium to ask questions. So, please be thinking of questions that you would like to ask these amazing questions. Just to start out, poppy, you talked about working on the apollo 8 return to earth and obviously this is kind of a silly question because no one had ever returned to earth from the moon before. So, but what was the most challenging part of it . Is the answer everything because no one had ever done it before . But im curious how you even start, i mean, in that well, you start early is one thing. You start early and you work really hard. But you didnt have much time because that whole decision was made in august, right . To switch apollo 8. I mean, youd 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 how sort of how far you have to go, when we started working on developing the return to Earth Program, well, what people may not understand, they always landed in the middle of the pacific ocean. Right . If you remember that far. Thats because the miss distance when we started was bigger than the atlantic ocean. Now, by the time they were flying, they were landing almost in the ship. Right . But, you know, what we were doing was we were perfecting the solution to the threebody problem which is not a clo closedform solution. The big challenge is you have to do a lot of optmy decision becau optimization. You have to meet the reentry or you burn up. Have to minimize fuel and minimize time. Its just a tremendous amount of working on computers and improving your targeting and always trying to get better. The last two months were just crash, okay, as we try to find every bug because you cant have bugs when youre 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, you know, the tiniest little area is magnified tremendously when youre talking about distances, especially distances to the moon. So, its super important that Quality Control is just everything. Karne we can we go ahead. I just wanted to follow up on that. The folks at houston in Mission Control, we had 23 critical events to go to the moon and return safely. For the launch team, only five are what we had to worry about. We practiced all five. We practiced them on the apollo 8 and 9 and 10. Marshall, where ms. Johnson was, practiced engine testing. We rehearsed, rehearsed, rehearsed, for five years. They didnt get to practice liftoff off the moon. They didnt get to practice land