In 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first man to enter space
In 1969, Neal Armstrong became the first human
to set foot on the surface of our Moon
They ushered in the era of human space flight
You’ve probably heard of Sally Ride, the first American woman in space
She died in 2012
and was rightly lauded as an American hero
You may even have heard of Valentina Tereshkova
who became the first woman in space in 1963
just two years after Yuri Gagarin first orbited the earth
You may have heard of May Jameson the first African American woman in space
Judith Resnik who perished in the Challenger disaster
Helen Sharman, the first British Citizen to fly in space
although many media outlets seemed to forget this in 2015
when Tim Peake was referred to as the first British astronaut
Kalpona Chawla and Laurel B Clark
who both died in the Colombia disaster
In total 59 women have flown in space
An enormous amount of women made huge contributions
to the development of human space flight
Without them it’s possible the humanity would never have reached the moon at all
In the late 1800s
teams of women worked as human computers at the Harvard observatory
making critical breakthroughs in Astronomy
Among these women were
They received very little individual recognition for their work
and instead were collectively known as Pickering’s Harem
Although many of these women were astronomy graduates
they were payed less than the average clerical worker
This is Margaret Hamilton
she was the lead flight software developer for project Apollo
Her work saved the Apollo 11 mission
when it was nearly aborted for a computer systems failure
Without Hamilton and her team
Neal Armstrong would never have set foot on the Moon
Katherine Johnson is a physicist and mathematician
She calculated the trajectory for the 1969 Apollo 11 flight to the moon
She was considered so accurate
that NASA would ask her to manually check the calculations
performed by their computers
In 1959, more than 500 of America’s most elite pilots
applied to become NASA’s first astronauts
The successful candidates had to pass strict tests
and they became the famed Mercury 7
All eventually flew on manned orbital space missions
At the same time
a privately funded program invited a group of women to take the same tests as the male astronauts
13 managed to pass the rigorous tests
All were accomplished pilots, and some even out-performed their male counterparts.
This is Jerrie Cobb
one of the so-called “Mercury 13”
She was an pilot with more than 7,000 hours of flying
and a world record for distance flying under her belt
During the testing, she broke the record (male and female) for time spent in an isolation tank
According to all tests, she was as qualified as any of the official astronauts
And yet, Jerrie never had the chance to go to space
All astronauts were required to be to be graduates of military jet test piloting programs
and at the time, women were still barred from Air Force training schools
It would be more than 20 years before an American woman flew in space
In 2016, NASA announced that its newest class of astronauts is half women
Eight were selected from an application pool of more than 6,000
and four of the successful people are women
These women could be among the first people to set foot on Mars.
those who were denied recognition for their achievements
but helped humanity first leave planet Earth