Space programs Hidden Figures. Ms. Johnson was an engineer in huntsville, alabama working for boeing, the sponsor for tonights event. She worked on the team that determined the path the saturn v would take if the rocket fell back to earth. Their work was vital for safety planning. After boeing and a successful career in Computer Technology, she now teaches the next generation of computer workers. Please join me in recognizing and welcoming ms. Marion lee johnson. [applause] like ms. Johnson, tonights speakers certainly know what it is like to blaze trails and defy expectations. Throughout this years 50th anniversary celebrations of the apollo 11 mission, i have been moved by the stories that have finally shined a spotlight on the Inspiring Women who helped make our exploration of space possible. We are lucky to have three of them here on the panel tonight. Aerospace engineer joann hardin morgan, engineer poppy northcutt, and medical researcher dr. Carolyn leach huntoon. Each of our speakers tonight will tell us a bit about her journey, and then we will have time for audience questions afterwards. Joann, i am going to start with you. Joann hardin morgan. Joann worked in Launch Control at Kennedy Space center and was the only woman in the firing room during the launch of apollo 11. Your face has become incredibly familiar this year, which i absolutely love. She was also the first woman Senior Executive at Kennedy Space center, and her tireless advocacy for women in science and engineering spans nearly five decades. Joann, welcome. Ms. Morgan thank you. [applause] first, i want to thank you, dr. Stofan. Thank you, the historians, and boeing for sponsoring Something Like this. I mean, this is so unexpected in my life 50 years after i did something, all of a sudden, it is important. [laughter] and actually i knew at the time on apollo 11 that i was working on something incredibly important. I was a kid in titusville, florida, and i was lucky enough to see explorer 1, our countrys first satellite launch. And the satellite itself, discovered the van allen radiation belt. And at 17, in my mind, i thought, this is profound, new knowledge for everyone on our planet. And this whole launching business and going to space and putting satellites up there, its going to change the world i live in, and i am getting in on it. And i applied for a job as an engineers aide right out of high school. Id been accepted at the university of florida. And i was a wee bit of a math whiz in high school, and so i got the job. Thank goodness the ad said student. They hired one boy and me. If it just said boy, i would not have even applied. But i hit the Gold Standard in supervision. I had a wonderful, immediately, that first summer, supervisor who told everybody, no, this is not a coffee girl. Shes going to be an engineer someday. We are giving her engineering jobs. So i was lucky i had a great supervisor to start me down the path of my career. But we are celebrating apollo 11, and i wanted to tell you a few facts about women in 1969. 400,000 people across this great country worked on the apollo 11 mission to make it happen. There was no infrastructure in space. No satellites. Everything was on the ground. And you know what that meant, if you are old enough. Tons and tons and tons of paper. Keypunch cards, paper tape, procedure, everything written. We had to write everything by hand. We had to do calculations by hand. And women were there at Kennedy Space center. Of those 400,000 people, we had 24,000 people that year, 1969. 500 of the nasa team, which were about 10 , or 2,000 of the 20somethingthousand only 20 of those women were technical. And i knew each one of them, although each of us were separate, in different rooms. I was in Launch Control. Judy was a guidance engineer in the computer room, was looking at a guidance computer. Judy was over there helping buzz aldrin when he suited up. And her friend, anne montgomery. We were speckled around, just one here or there, and then somehow or other, we were part of the team. Apollo 11 was just such a great, great team, and so unified. And i think one of the most inspiring things to me in watching and every time i see it again, the landing itself, i think of not only were we, in our country, unified, but the planet itself were watching cared. , i remember watching the landing with my husband. I was on holiday in the gulf of mexico with him. And we saw the views and Walter Cronkite saying in here is and australia, and all over the world, people caring so much. I thought it was wonderful. And that launch launched my career. It was my first launch to be in the firing room. I had been there working on propellant loads and other activities, but they did not let me sit there at liftoff. There was always a man at that console. And my boss went to bat and got permission for me to sit there. And all of a sudden, it made a , difference. I got seen by everybody. And my boss said, well, she has been working here for 10 years, isnt it about time . So that is a little bit about my story, anyway. It is great to be here with you. Ms. Stofan thank you very much. [applause] poppy northcutt began her career in aerospace as a human computer but was quickly promoted to engineer, working in Mission Control at Johnson Space center on the return to earth trajectory. Her presence in Mission Control drew the attention of the media and placed her in the public eye, making her an inspiration to young boys and girls around the world. Poppy. Ms. Northcutt thank you. [applause] unlike joann, i did not have this big plan to be in the Space Program. I graduated from the university of texas with a degree in mathematics and went to look for a job. I am from houston. And i found a job as a computress. [laughter] that really was the job title. [laughter] as a computress. At trw systems, which was a contractor for nasa. I never worked for nasa proper. I worked for a contractor. Actually, most of the people who worked on the Space Program worked for contractors. Boeing was a contractor. Many, many contractors were out there. And i thought, a gendered computer . What is this . I had never heard such a title before in my life. Since then, i have found a lot of history about it. Many of you will have seen Hidden Figures and have learned that those women were called computresses as well. And then, actually, the job title goes further back than wheninto world war ii, women were used as cipher breakers. They, too, were called computers or computresses. I was very fortunate. I worked my butt off, but i got promoted and became a member of the technical staff, which was our word for being an engineer. And then, by chance, i ended up being the first woman in an Operational Support role in Mission Control during the flight of apollo 8. What i worked on was the development of the return to earth capability. That is a trajectory, calculating the trajectory to bring the spacecraft back to the earth from the moon. And i am very specialized. Lunar operations was what i worked at. Not bringing them back from earth orbit. Lunar, ok . We were not expected to be in the control center, but they accelerated the schedule on apollo 8. And we were a missioncritical function, for obvious reasons. If you are going to the moon, you do want to come back. [laughter] but they accelerated the schedule, and that meant that we were on, sort of, crash status to get our program into the realtime computer complex, get people up and aware. It was a complex program for the time. And there were the computers we did not calculate this stuff by hand. Maybe they did at Launch Control, but we did not. If you were going to the moon, you do not calculate it by hand. Ok . Or, coming back, you might miss the earth if you tried to do that. Not a good plan. But coming back to the earth from the moon is so different from coming back from earth orbit, that the officers, the people in the control center were not experienced at using the program. And so we were asked, the people who developed this program, to go over and sit in the control center to help on that. So i was privileged to be over for apollo 8. That was my first, and, to me, the most exciting mission, because it was new. 10, 11, 12, and, yes, 13. And my work was used in every one of the apollo missions. So it was a very interesting time and a very exciting time. And i am so happy to see all of these young women in the room. Because people think that we are inspirations i am inspired by you. And i hope that you will not be Hidden Figures. I hope you will be out and about and screaming your names to encourage other women to go into this exciting area. Dr. Stofan thank you, poppy. [applause] dr. Carolyn leach huntoon worked at the Johnson Space center, leading the study of how the human body adapts to spaceflight. In 1994, she became the first woman to serve as director of Johnson Space center. Carolyn. [applause] dr. Huntoon thank you. Dr. Huntoon thank you, ellen, and thank boeing for their support of this lecture series. And, of course, pay tribute to john glenn, for whom the series is named after. He was a hero for all of us. It is nice to be at the john glenn lecture. I went to the Johnson Space center i went as the National ResearchCouncil Research associate, you could say a postdoc. And the experiment i proposed and was accepted was to study the changes in the fluid and controlyte and hormonal in spaceflight crews. You think, ok, you got an experiment, go and do it. Accepting it was just the beginning. Getting the crews to participate and the people to get the involvement that we needed, from the trainers as well as all the medical people and all, that was a big chore to do. But we did it. I had studied at Baylor College of medicine with the researchers who had worked on the gemini program, and that was the first time that we had done actual measurements on astronauts from space. We got urine and blood samples and food samples and fecal samples. And the idea was to study, in great depth, that crew of the gemini, because we wanted to make sure we could send the apollo crew members to the moon and back without any problems. We worked on that for gemini, and we did a great job. I got very interested in it. So when i had the opportunity to go down to nasa to continue these studies with apollo, of course i jumped at the chance to do that. It was a small medical group, tremendous people. We worked long hours and hard hours. I was the only woman in the group except for a couple of technical types. And we also had, as it would happen, we had a nice support from the center management, as well as all of nasa. Not necessarily the great support from the astronaut office, because they did not necessarily want medical people working on them. [laughter] but it worked out. We had the opportunity, at that time, to do some most unusual studies. The job that i had did not exist anywhere else in the world. Not even in russia. No one was doing what i was doing at the time. So, i sort of had to find my own way with that, but i had tremendous support from many great mentors. And i would like to pay homage to those guys, because they treated me with respect as well as encouraged my work and supported the work that i was doing. That, i think, is a very important aspect of anyones job. And i have tried to do that and pass that on to people as i grew up in the Management System at nasa. The other thing that i would mention is that we did a lot of things the nasa way, or the apollo way, and people could talk about that is not how they did it during apollo, or this is the way they should have done it during apollo, or what have you. I came to washington many years years later, and people would talk about how they did things during apollo. And i was thinking, you were not there. How did you know . [laughter] but it became a reputation, and you all know that for sure. But the things that i would mention that have stuck with me is the teambuilding that we did with apollo. And i did that with my work all the way through the years i worked at nasa. And that is not just the people there at the Johnson Space center, but also the people we the people from academia. We brought in experts from all of the world to help us on issues that we had. We also brought in people from industry to help us a great deal in building, creating technical things that we needed for the spacecraft to do our medical experiments and our medical work. So, teambuilding, i think, was a very important aspect of the apollo way of doing things. We also followed by setting very high goals. We decided we were going to go to the moon, and we did. We decided we were going to learn as much as we could about humans in a weightless environment, and we did. We set high goals. We also i want to mention that we contracted to carry out things that we did not know how to do, and we worked with many people around the country to learn to do things. It was not an easy task, some of the things that we had. But we got help and were not afraid to ask for help. We were not afraid to ask after we got the help. We were not afraid to have things reviewed. And i think that is part of the way that we learn to do business. The other thing that i would mention is that we had a way of doing things, of looking at the way work was done. We called it configuration control. Once things got locked in, when you do things with nasa, when you do things with apollo, we kept them under a continuation control, and things did not get changed unless you justified the change to a high level committee. This held for the rest of my career, because i learned about getting it right and keeping it right, and then keeping it under control and not making a lot of changes. I mentioned that we had several other women in the medical group when i got there. There were only a few engineers at the time at the center, women engineers. We all eventually crossed paths and became friends. I think the big issue about having so few women at the time is that they did not know they could come to work there. They did not know. Decided tonasa advertise and ring women in bring women in as Research Associates and College Students and all, then women took a bigger role. And of course, years later, we decided to select and train women astronauts, and that really opened the doors for women to come to work there. So that also was very helpful. Thank you. Dr. Stofan thank you, carolyn. [applause] im going to stand so i can see you all better. So i am going to ask a few questions, but we are actually going to leave a ton of times for both people here and in the planetarium to ask questions. So, please be thinking of questions that you would like to ask. Amazing questions. Just to start out, poppy, you talked about working on the apollo 8 return to earth. Obviously, this is kind of a silly question, because no one had ever returned to earth from the moon before. But what was the most challenging part of it . Is the answer everything, because no one had ever done it before . But i am curious how you even start in that. Ms. Northcutt well, you start early is one thing. [laughter] you start early, and you work really hard. Ms. Stofan but you didnt have much time, because that whole decision was made in august. Right . But you had been working on it. Ms. Northcutt we had been working. We had been developing the return to Earth Program for several years. But to just give you an example of just how far you have to go, when we started working on developing the return to Earth Program, what people might not understand they always landed in the middle of the pacific ocean. Right . If you remember that far. That is because the miss distance when we started was bigger than the atlantic ocean. [laughter] now, by the time they were flying, they were landing almost in the ship. Right . But what way were doing was we were perfecting the solution to problem, which is not a closed solution. And the big challenge is that you have to do a lot of optimization, because you have to meet the reentry card, or you burn up. And you have to minimize fuel and you have to minimize time. So, it is just a tremendous amount of working on computers and improving your targeting and always trying to get better. But the last few months were just to crash as we tried to find every bug. Because you cannot have bugs when you are flying to the moon. Its too critical. We just had india just had a lunar mission. And, you know, im still hoping that they are going to be in contact with their lander. But, you know, the tiniest little error is magnified tremendously when you are talking about distances, especially distances to the moon. So, its super important that Quality Control is just everything. Ms. Morgan i just want to followup that. The folks at houston in Mission Control, we had 23 critical events to go to the moon and return safely. For the launch team, only five were what we had to worry about. But we practiced all five. We practice them on apollo 8 and 9 and 10. Marshall, where miss johnson, marshall, where miss johnson, was, practice engine testing, we rehearsed, rehearsed, rehearsed for five years. They did not get to practice lift off off the moon. They did not get to practice landing on the moon. They had to do it perfectly the first time. And that is the miracle of apollo 11. Dr. Stofan that is a good point. And joann, i am also really curious you said being in the firing room changed, when your boss advocated for you to go in, and you were actually in there, it changed how people actually treated you. But i am curious. Did it change how you felt about yourself and your role . Or was it just purely how people viewed you changed . But i am wondering did you change, knowing you were there . Ms. Morgan possibly, it did. You know, i had the height of an alligator and the tenacity of a pitbull