History & Culture
From Apollo to Artemis
Society today encourages a more thorough story about women in space history.
By Elisa Shoenberger
NASA/JSC
When NASA released the details of its return to the Moon, its Artemis program, in 2019, there was a lot of excitement about the plan. Even more exhilarating for many is that women would play a big role in that exploration. The two-person crew who next walks on the lunar surface will include a woman, according to NASA.
While the Artemis program will spotlight the contributions of women through the various exploration missions, these are only the tip of the figurative iceberg of women’s contributions to spaceflight. Society is getting better at telling the stories of female astronauts and cosmonauts.
And there’s much more story to tell. Alice Gorman, author of Dr Space Junk Vs The Universe: Archaeology and the Future, and associate professor at Flinders University, explains, that “women have always been part of the space industry.” However, many of their contributions have been overlooked or diminished. “We’re actually losing out on more complete and more nuanced accounts of our own industry by failing to tell these stories,” says Gorman.
Which women?
When talking about women’s contributions to space history, the first question you have to ask is which women, explains Margaret A. Weitekamp, curator and department chair of Space History at the National Air and Space Museum. Women have been in the administrative roles since the dawn of the Space Age in the 1950s, such as secretaries and administrative assistants, roles that have long been overlooked in the history books. “In the spaceflight world, there’s the science, there’s the technology,” says Weitekamp, “but there’s also just all of the organization that it takes to keep the systems running in order to make things happen.”
Not only were women performing these essential administrative tasks, but women were behind the scenes making necessary items like sewing the parachutes or spacesuits. Gorman notes that in her research for her book Space Junk, she found many photos of women making the aluminized mylar parachutes that would slow the space capsule down in reentry to work. “Their names aren’t in the reports, but you can see them in the photos,” Gorman says.
While there have always been women working, Weitekamp says, “it’s a question of access to professional work.” Advancement opportunities tended to be limited for women and people of color. Men and women may have been doing the same mathematical work, but the men were apprentice engineers who could advance while the women were seen in more secretarial roles. (Racial prejudices also played a role; mathematicians were segregated and limited in ability to be promoted.)
Of course, there were a few women engineers at NASA even from the very beginning, such as Jeanne Lee Crews, who joined NASA in 1964 as one of the first female engineers and worked on how to protect spacecraft from space debris. Then there was JoAnn Morgan who worked on the Apollo program and had the honor of being in the Apollo 11 Launch Room; she was the only woman in the room.
Even before the 1969 Moon landing, women were lobbying to become astronauts, starting with the “Mercury 13” project, or Lovelace Women’s Space Program. In this privately funded program run by physician William Randolph Lovelace II, some two dozen women pilots took similar medical and physical tests as the Mercury 7 astronauts — an effort to argue for women’s space in the U.S. astronaut program. Thirteen succeeded. It was cancelled, and despite congressional hearings with testimony from trail-blazing pilot Jerrie Cobb and other participants, the program did not continue.
Women did make it into orbit in the early years of spaceflight, but it would be the Soviet Union who made it happen. In 1963, cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova went to space, but it would take another 19 years to send the second woman, Svetlana Savitskaya, in 1982. The U.S. finally sent its first woman into space in 1983: that was Sally Ride.
Early in aerospace history, women were behind the scenes in aviation and related work. Here, a female "computer" worked with a microscope and a then-calculator (at the lower-right).
[NASA]
In 1995, seven members of the privately funded Mercury 13 project stood watch as the space shuttle (background) prepared for launch. Second from the left is Wally Funk; she is the only woman from the Mercury 13 project who went to space, and that was on a private mission in 2021.
[NASA]
Jerrie Cobb was the first woman recruited for physical and mental testing as part of the Lovelace Women's Space Program. In this photograph, she stands with one of NASA's Mercury capsules. While Cobb never made it to space, she was a pioneering pilot and aviator.
[NASA]
The boom years
So why did women suddenly have more opportunities to go to space in the 1980s, especially in the U.S.? Weitekamp explains that these new achievements came from a confluence of factors from prior decades. Thanks to the Civil Rights Act, Title VII, and social movements, women had greater access to higher education and equal funding of educational programs. Notably, U.S. all-male military academies began admitting women in 1976. Of course, women benefited from being able to access those programs and math and science fields, which had largely been denied to them save for the precious few.
All those converging influences led to the 1980s when women began to play a more visible role in spaceflight. Weitekamp points out that Sally Ride’s appeal to NASA was not only because she had a Ph.D. in physics from Stanford University but also the fact that she was a tennis player at the university. “She knew how to be trained, she knew how to be a part of a team,” Weitekamp says.
While decades have passed since Ride’s famous trip, more women have gained visibility in NASA’s space programs and have flown in space. As with any complicated and risky endeavor, there have been challenges along the way, epitomized by when Ride was asked if 100 tampons would be enough for her trip. And there continue to be issues. Even in 2015, women astronauts were being asked about makeup and shampoo in space. And in 2019, NASA cancelled an all-woman spacewalk because there were not enough smaller-sized spacesuits for the astronauts. While some may argue this was a one-off problem, other astronauts have mentioned how their suits did not quite fit, whether the suit’s legs were too long or the shoulders too broad. The suits were not made with a woman in mind, despite the clear need.
Astronauts Anne McClain and Christina Koch were originally scheduled for the first all-women spacewalk in 2019. Instead, the spacewalk was canceled because the space suits did not properly fit both women's bodies.
[NASA/JSC]
Multiple Story Paths
Thanks to historians and nonfiction authors like Margot Lee Shetterly (writer of Hidden Figures), we’re starting to better understand the contributions of women working behind the scenes in the space program. Another pathway to showcase the contributions of women is through museum exhibits. Student Elise Palecek recently created one such display at the Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA) Aviation Museum in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.
The exhibit, shown here, focuses on four women: Sally Ride, the first American female astronaut to go to space in 1984; Mae Jemison, the first African American in space in 1992; Eileen Collins, the first woman to pilot the space shuttle; and Ann Druyan, who worked with her astronomer husband Carl Sagan on the famous Cosmos series as well as on the Golden Record project — a time capsule on Voyager 1 and 2 with information about humanity. “Hopefully, my exhibit will inspire little girls,” to explore science and engineering, Palecek adds, and to dive into the history of women’s contributions in space. — E. S.
Pathway to advancement
Even as more women have taken front and center stages in space missions as part of the flight team and the supporting scientific studies, there’s pushback, both in telling these stories as well as making more equitable choices of who gets to participate. The momentum for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is part of all areas of life, and programs like Artemis can hopefully bring more visibility to women’s contributions.
The onset of commercial spaceflight can help these initiatives. For example, in 2021, Wally Funk, who was part of the original Mercury 13 privately funded program, finally got to fly to space on Blue Origin’s New Shepard spacecraft when she was 82. However, commercial spaceflight may prove to be a mixed bag in terms of equity and diversity, because private companies do not have the same oversight as NASA. Gorman points out that such private companies do not have to make salaries and employment rates public. And “we know [that DEI] often gets sacrificed in the name of profit,” she says. “This is one we have to keep a very close eye on.”
On the public agency side, Lindy Elkins-Tanton, Principal Investigator of NASA’s Psyche mission and Vice President of Arizona State University Interplanetary Initiative, was named to her post in 2017. Elkins-Tanton is the second woman to compete and win the chance to lead a planetary science mission. Psyche launched in 2023 to study a metal-rich asteroid between Mars and Jupiter.
Scientist Lindy Elkins-Tanton leads NASA's Psyche mission to an asteroid.
[NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU]
Even with these accolades, however, Elkins-Tanton hesitates to call herself a role model, and instead is focused on the greater community. Her effort has been to create a collaborative work environment with her team and not focus on what she calls the heroic leader, often male and definitely hierarchical. When asked about her thoughts for more diversity in space in the near future, Elkins-Tanton says that she was hopeful: “It’s a really good move in that direction.” ✰
(Published June 20, 2024)
ELISA SHOENBERGER is a freelance journalist and writer who has written for the WIRED, Huffington Post, Atlas Obscura, Slate, and over 90 other publications. She writes regularly for Book Riot, Murder & Mayhem, Library Journal, and Cheese Professor.
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