NASA is honoring a ‘hidden figure’ and all of the women who contributed to the Apollo program with the naming of a building in Houston, where at the time of the moon missions it was part of the “Manned” Spacecraft Center.
The agency’s Johnson Space Center (renamed for the president in 1973) marked the 55th anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing mission by dedicating one of its original buildings as the “Dorothy Vaughan Center in Honor of the Women of Apollo” on Friday (July 19).
The title recognizes one of the “human computers” whose calculations helped guide the United States’ early aeronautics research, while raising awareness of all of the women who were among the 400,000-person workforce behind landing the first Americans on the moon.
“On behalf of NASA’s Johnson Space Center, we are proud to host this historic event as the agency honors the significant contributions women have made to the space industry, particularly trailblazers who persevered against many challenges of their era,” said Vanessa Wyche, Johnson Space Center’s third woman and first Black director. “As we prepare to return to the moon for long-term science and exploration, NASA’s Artemis missions will land the first woman and first person of color.”
“It a privilege to dedicate Johnson’s Building 12 to the innovative women who laid the foundation to our nation’s space program,” said Wyche.
Vaughan led the segregated “West Area Computing” unit, an all-black group of female mathematicians, at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory (today, NASA’s Langley Research Center) in Hampton, Virginia.
In 1958, when the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) was transferred to the newly-founded NASA, Vaughan and many of the West Computers joined the new Analysis and Computation Division (ACD), a racially and gender-integrated group on the frontier of electronic computing. Vaughan became an expert Fortran programmer.
Vaughan’s leadership helped to advance NASA’s diverse workforce, particularly at Johnson, as human computers transitioned from Hampton to Houston, supporting Mission Control from Building 12. She was a champion for the human computers and for all the individuals who were under her management.
Vaughan died in 2008 at the age of 98. Seven years later, she was portrayed by Academy Award-winning actress Octavia Spencer in the movie “Hidden Figures,” based on the book by Margot Lee Shetterly by the same title.
(Mathematician Katherine Johnson, portrayed by Taraji P. Henson, and engineer Mary Jackson, played by Janelle Monáe, were similarly honored as Vaughan with the naming of the Computational Research Facility at Langley in 2016 and NASA Headquarters building in Washington, D.C. in 2021, respectively.)
Though Vaughan did not work at Johnson, other women held prominent positions at the Texas home of human spaceflight during the Apollo program.
Frances “Poppy” Northcutt, for example, began her career like Vaughan as a “computer” before becoming the first female engineer to work in Mission Control. Northcutt helped develop the trajectory that the Apollo 8 mission followed to return the first astronauts to fly to the moon back to Earth. She was also part of the team that devised the maneuvers needed to bring the crippled Apollo 13 spacecraft and its crew safely home.
Physiologist Rita Rapp, who arrived at the Manned Space Center in 1962, went on to lead development of the Apollo food system — the way the astronauts’ meals would be packaged for the trip to the moon and back. She personally oversaw the preparation of each Apollo astronauts’ menus. Rapp died in 1989 at the age of 61.
Other women at the center worked as secretaries in the astronaut office, supporting the Apollo crew members. Antoinette “Toni” Zahn, Charlene Stroman, Jamye Coplin, Charlotte Maltese, Penny Study, and Martha Caballero were each assigned to eight to ten astronauts as the corps grew in size.
Beyond Houston and Langley, JoAnn Morgan was the first female engineer and only woman on the Apollo launch team at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Nearby, at Kennedy’s Manned Spacecraft Operations Building (today, the Neil A. Armstrong Operations & Checkout Building), biomedical engineer Judy Sullivan was in charge of monitoring the Apollo 11 astronauts’ health.
Similarly, Dee O’Hara served as the astronauts’ chief nurse, while leading medical offices in Houston and at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California.
Margaret Hamilton at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston lead the development of the software for the Apollo spacecraft’s guidance and navigation system. And at Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, Ethel Bauer helped calculate flight trajectories while metallurgist Margaret Brennecke oversaw the materials selections for building the Apollo-era Saturn V rocket.
Barbara “Bobbie” Johnson was the Apollo program’s manager of Mission Requirements and Evaluation, the highest position that any woman had ever held in her department, giving her the responsibility of managing more than 100 (mostly male) engineers.
The “Dorothy Vaughan Center in Honor of the Women of Apollo” is one of Johnson Space Center’s original permanent structures built in 1963. Today it serves as an administrative support building.
The 65,000-square-foot (6,000-square-meter) building was overhauled in 2012 to incorporate energy-efficient features, including a rooftop garden that in addition to being a home to nesting birds and wildflowers, has helped to reduce potable water and energy usage, provide better better stormwater management and increased UV ray protection.
