She describes herself as a "onetime rocket scientist, sometime lawyer and a full-time women's rights advocate." She helped create a domestic violence unit at the local prosecutor's office and said she now works on reproductive justice issues. Motivated by her work and the women's rights movement, Northcutt became a lawyer. Just seeing women involved made a difference." The following year, she served as the city of Houston's first women's advocate, promoting legislation and executive actions that allowed women to serve as police and firefighters. By then, she recalled, "there were a lot of women in Mission Control. Northcutt stayed on as a NASA contractor until 1973. I began to be more aware of the discrimination that was going on," she said. "Being the first woman in Mission Control, I was being asked questions about the status of women at the time. (When she started, labor laws dictated that Northcutt and other women were not paid for working overtime.) She would go on to successfully advocate not only for better pay, but also for improved benefits for women, including maternity leave and affirmative action. "If they're early or late, it can be bad either way." "You know what time they're supposed to come out and acquire signal," she said. And it wasn't a TV she was watching, it was a clock. So during the historic Apollo 11 mission in 1969, it wasn't the lunar landing she recalls watching, but the orbit. Northcutt's job was to plan for the worst, be prepared to abort the mission quickly and bring the men home safely. As the astronauts rounded the backside, they would lose radio contact with Mission Control. She focused on her part of the mission: the return to Earth trajectory, the spacecraft's path around the moon. I think most women that experience things like that just go, 'OK, I got to get past this.'" "And again, I'm trying to integrate into a team. "They were just barely processing claims of sex discrimination at that time," she said. Northcutt never complained to supervisors. "It would be called a hostile workplace" today, she said, but at the time, "we didn't even have that language." But she also discovered that co-workers had trained a camera on her that they secretly watched on a private channel. She soon figured out how to focus on particular conversations, and picked up on some non-scientific chatter: "There's a girl in here."Īs the Apollo launch approached, video footage from Mission Control was broadcast around the world, including shots of Northcutt that prompted heaps of fan mail. "How am I going to make sense out of this cacophony of voices?" she thought. She took a seat at a console, donned headphones and was instantly overwhelmed by the din of overlapping conversations. "It was a radical thing for the guys to wear a blue shirt," said Northcutt, 75, adding, "It was a pretty bleak landscape for women." Almost everyone working there was white, male and clean-cut, a sea of white shirts. When Northcutt entered Mission Control in 1968 with her long blond hair and miniskirts, she knew she would stand out. "I was thinking you have to integrate into the team." "I wasn't thinking of it in terms of breaking rules," she said recently at her Houston office. When Northcutt started at the agency, she knew nothing of fellow computresses at NASA's Langley, Va., research center-African American female mathematicians made famous in the book and 2016 film "Hidden Figures." What Northcutt knew was that she wanted to be part of the team putting men on the moon. Many were lone pioneers, fighting behind the scenes to not only build their own careers, but to advance those of other women and minorities at NASA. Northcutt, then 22 and fresh out of the University of Texas at Austin with a mathematics degree, soon learned that at NASA, men were engineers, women "computresses" or "human computers," with less status and less pay.īut Northcutt persevered, and three years later, during the Apollo 8 mission, she would become the first woman to work in Mission Control.Īs the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing approaches, Northcutt and other women who helped America's space efforts are reflecting on their often unheralded roles-and the indignities they endured.
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