15 Most Influential Women of NASA

Sally Ride Day, which is celebrated on May 26 in honor of the first American woman to go into space, is celebrated on this day. In 1983,  She joined NASA in 1978. After Soviet cosmonauts Valentina Tereshkova and Svetlana Savitskaya, Ride was the third woman in space. We have compiled the NASA’s 15 Most Influential Women in honor of Katherine Johnson and all of the amazing women scientists who have contributed to NASA. In 1962, as NASA 

Dorothy Vaughan In an era when NASA is led by an African American man (Administrator Charles Bolden) and a woman (Deputy Administrator Dava Newman) and recent NASA Center Directors come from a variety of backgrounds, it’s easy to overlook the people who paved the way for the agency’s current workforce and leadership that are robust and diverse. 

Mary Jackson began her career in engineering during a time when women of any background were uncommon; She may have been the only black female aeronautical engineer working in the 1950s. She worked as an engineer for nearly two decades and wrote or co-wrote a dozen or so research papers, the majority of which dealt with the behavior of the boundary layer of air surrounding airplanes. 

American electrical engineer Kitty O’Brien Joyner worked for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) after NACA was replaced in 1958. She was the first woman to graduate from the engineering program at the University of Virginia in 1939, and upon graduation, she was presented with the Algernon Sydney Sullivan Award.

In 1967, Scissum presented methods for improved sunspot cycle forecasting in a NASA report titled “Survey of Solar Cycle Prediction Models.” She led activities in Marshall’s Atmospheric, Magnetospheric, and Plasmas in Space project and worked as a space scientist in the Space Environment Branch of Marshall’s Space Sciences Laboratory in the middle of the 1970s. 

Kathryn Hire joined NASA in 1989 and worked at Kennedy Space Center as a space shuttle orbiter mechanical systems engineer, test project engineer, and supervisor of launch pad access swing arms and mechanical systems. For more than 40 missions, Hire processed space shuttles from landing to ground preparations and launch countdowns. In 2010, Hire helped assemble the International Space Station on a second mission aboard Space Shuttle Endeavour for STS-130. Node 3, also known as the Tranquility module, and the Cupola, a seven-windowed portal for the space station that has served as the station’s focal point since its installation, were delivered and outfitted by Hire and her crewmates. 

In 1943, Kathryn Peddrew earned a chemistry degree from college. She faced numerous obstacles during this time period as an African American woman pursuing a career in science. Recruited just after graduation, Peddrew was relegated toward the West Region PCs at Langley, and started a profession at NACA/NASA that traversed 43 years. 

Melba Roy Mouton led a group of NASA mathematicians known as “computers” when she was Assistant Chief of Research Programs at NASA’s Trajectory and Geodynamics Division in the 1960s. Beginning as a mathematician, she was ahead mathematician for Reverberation Satellites 1 and 2, and she worked up to being a Head Software engineer and afterward Program Creation Segment Boss at Goddard Space Flight Center. Mouton’s parents, Rhodie and Edna Chloe, were born in Fairfax, Virginia. In 1950, she earned a master’s degree in math from Howard University. 

In 1955, Annie Easley began her career working for researchers as a “human computer.” Analyzing problems and manually performing calculations were part of this. She was one of only four African-American Lab workers when hired. Easley changed with the technology as human computers were replaced by machines. She used programming languages like Formula Translating System (Fortran) and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) to support a number of NASA programs and became an adept computer programmer.  

Nancy Beauty Roman was a prominent American cosmologist who made significant commitments to heavenly characterization and movements, and turned into the primary female leader at NASA, and filled in as NASA’s most memorable Head of Stargazing all through the 1960s and 1970s, laying out her as one of the “visionary organizers behind the US regular citizen space program”. She started NASA’s program for space astronomy and is known as the “Mother of Hubble” because she helped plan the Hubble Space Telescope. 

Ellen Ochoa is a former director of the Johnson Space Center, an engineer from the United States, and an astronaut. Ochoa served on a nine-day mission aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery in 1993, making her the first Hispanic woman in space. When Michael Coats, the center’s previous director, retired on December 31, 2012, Ochoa took over as director. She was Johnson Space Center’s second female director and the center’s first Hispanic director.

American computer scientist, systems engineer, and entrepreneur Margaret Hamilton She was in charge of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory’s Software Engineering Division, which was responsible for creating Apollo’s on-board flight software. More than 130 papers, proceedings, and reports on sixty projects and six major programs have been published by Hamilton. 

Kalpana Chawla was the first Indian-American woman to go into space. She was an American astronaut and engineer. In 1997, she took her first flight as a mission specialist and primary robotic arm operator on the Space Shuttle Columbia. Chawla was one of the seven crew members who perished in the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003 when the spacecraft failed to reenter the atmosphere of the Earth. 

Pearl Youthful was the main female expert employed by the NACA (which at last became NASA), during a time when most ladies in the public authority were compelled to staffing support positions like secretaries or regulatory helpers. She recognized the Langley staff’s lack of technical writing skills and the NACA’s lack of a methodical approach to the preparation of technical documents after a successful initial career in instrumentation.