Give a glen lecture of her own someday. Before introducing our speakers im excited to let you know athat we have a special guest who was able to join us at the last moment. Her name is marian lee johnson. Like the women featured in the movies she was one the women in the Space ProgramHidden Figures. She was in huntsville, working for boeing. She worked on the team that determined the path that parts of the saturn 5 would take if the rocket fell back to earth. They work was vital for safety planning. After boeing and a successful career in technology she now teaches the nextg generation of computer computer workers. Please welcojoin me in welcomins marion lee johnson. Like miss johnson, tonights speakers know what its like. Throughout these celebrations, ive been moved by the stories that have finally shined a spotlight on the Inspiring Women who helped make our exploration of space possible. Were lucky to have three of them here with us on the panel tonight. Joann harden morgan, poppy north cut, and medical researcher Carolyn Leach hon toou. Each will tell us about her journey and then well have time for questions afterwards. Joann hardin morgan, waurkd in large control in Kennedy Space center and was the only woman in the room during apollo 11 launch. She was also the first woman Senior Executive at Kennedy Space center and her tireless advocacy spans nearly five decades. Welcome. Oh, thank you. [ applause ] well, first, i want to thank you, and also dr. Neal, valerie, the historian, 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 its important. [ laughter ] and actually i new at the time on apollo 11 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. The satellite itself sponsored by jpl discovered the van allen radiation belt. At 17 in my mind, i thought this is profound new knowledge for everybody 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. Been accepted at the university of florida. I was a wee bit of a math whiz in high school. I got the job. Thank goodness the ad said student and they hired one boy and me. If it said boy i wouldnt have applied. I hit the Gold Standard in supervision. I had a wonderful supervisor that first summer who told everybody, no, this is not a coffee girl. Shes going to be an engineer someday. Were giving her an edge jooerg job. I had a great supervisor to start me down the path of my career. But were celebrating apollo 11. I wanted to tell you a few facts about women in 1969. You know, 400,000 people across this great country worked on the apollo 11 mission to make it happen. There were no infrastructure in space, no satellites. Everything is on the ground and you know what that meant if youre old enough. Tons and tons and tons of paper. Key punch cards, paper tape, procedures, everything written, we had to do everything by hand, calculations by hand. And women were there add Kennedy Space center, we had 24,000 people that year, 1969. 500 of the nasa team where we were about 10 , or 2,000 of the 20some thousand, only 20 were technical. I knew each one of them, although we were in different rooms. I was in launch control. Judy kersy was a guidance career. She was looking at a guidance computer. Judy shanonberger was over there helping buzz ald ren when he suited up. Her friend anne montgomery, we were spinkled around just one here and there. And yet somehow or other, we were part of the team. And that 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 this country unified, but people all around our planet cared. They were watching. I remember watching the landing with my husband, because i had a holiday and i was over on the gulf of mexico with him. And we saw the news from Walter Cronkite saying, and here is people in japan and australia and around, and all around the world people caring so much. I thought it was wonderful. And actually that launch launched my career. It was my first launch to be in the firing room. I mean, id been there working on propellant loads and other activities but they didnt 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, shes been working here for ten years. Isnt it about time . So its a little bit about my story anyway. Its great to be here with you. Thank you very much. [ applause ] poppy northrop gan her career but was quickly promoted to engineer working on the space Center Return to earth trajectory. Her presence drew the attention of the media and placed her in the public eye making here an inspiration to young boys and girls around the world. Poppy. 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. Im from houston. And i found a job as a computeress. That really was the job title. As a computeress at trw. I never worked for nasa proper. I worked for a contractor. 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. I since then found a lot of history about it. Many of you will have seen Hidden Figures and learned that those women were called compute ress as well. It goes further back. Into world war ii when women were used as server breakers, they too were called computers or computeresses. I worked my beautt off. I became a part of the technical staff, an engineer. By chance i ended up being the first woman in 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, thats the trajectory, calculating it to bring the craft back to the earth from the moon. Im specialized. Lunar operations was what i worked on. Not bringing them back from earth orbit, lunar, okay . 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. 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 cant calculate this stuff by hand. Okay . Maybe they did at launch control. But we did not. If youre going to the moon you do not calculate it by hand, okay . Or coming back. You might miss the earth if you tried to do that. Not a good plan. So but the coming back to the earth from the moon is so different from coming back from earth orbit that the retroforei retroforei retr retro foreign officers were not familiar. We were asked to go help. I was privileged to be over there 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 im so happy to see all of these young women in the room. Because people think that we are inspirations. Im inspired by you. And i hope that you will not be Hidden Figures. I hope you will be out and about and screaming your name to encourage other women to go into this exciting area. Thank you, poppy. [ applause ] dr. Carolyn leech hon tune worked at the Johnson Space center leading the study of how the human body aadapts. In 1984 she became the first woman to serve as director of Johnson Space center. Caroline . Thank you. [ applause ] thank you, ellen, and boeing for their support of this series, and of course i pay tribute to john glenn, the series named after him. Its nice to be at the john glenn lecture. I went to the Johnson Space center as a National ResearchCouncil Research associate, you could say a post doc. And the experiment that i pro posed, was accepted, was to study the changes in the fluid in electrolyte metabolism, hormonal controls. You got an experiment and didnt go do it . Well, 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 the 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 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 brought back urn aine and bl and food and fecal samples, and the idea was to study in very great depth that crew of the geminis guys, because we wanted to make sure that we could send the apollo crew members to the plan 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 and study with apollo, i jumped at the chance. It was a small medical group, tremendous people. We worked long 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 didnt 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. And so it was so i sort of had to find my own way with that, but i had tremendous support from many great mentors. And id like to pay homage to those guys, because they treated me with respect as well as encourage my work and supported the work that i was doing. That i think is a very important aspect of anyones job, and ive 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 weve we did a lot of things the nasa way or the apollo way, and people could talk about, thats not the way they did it during apollo or thats what they should have done for apollo or what have you. I came to washington later and be in meetings and people would bring up thats how they did things during apollo. I was thinking you werent there, how do you know . It became a reputation. The things that have stuck with me was the Team Building that we did with apollo. And i did that with my work all the way through the years that i worked at nasa. And that is not just the people there at the Johnson Space center, but also the people that from acdemia, we brought in experts from all over the world to help us on issues that we had. We also brought in people from industry, helped 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 Team Building i think was a very important aspect of the apollo way of doing things. We also followed 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. We did. We set high goals. 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 we werent afraid to ask for help. We werent afraid to ask after we got the help, we werent afraid to have things reviewed, and we werent afraid to be criticized. And i think that is part of the way we learned to do business. The other thing i would mention is that we were 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, the way to do things at nasa, the way to do things at apollo, we kept them under a configuration control, and things did not get changed unless you justified the change to a highlevel committee. This held me in good sted 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, center women engineers. And 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 they as soon as nasa decided to advertise add bring women in and bring women in on Research Associates and College Students and all, then women took a bigger role. And of course years later we decided to sect 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. Thank you, caroline. [ applause ] im going to stand so i can see you all better. So im going to ask a few questions. But were going to leave a ton of time for both people here and in the planetarium to ask questions. So please be thinking of questions that you would like to ask these amazing questions. Just to start out, poppy, you talked about working on the apollo 8 return to earth. And obviously this is kind of a silly question because no one had ever returned to earth from the moon before. So what was the most challenging part of it . Is the answer, everything, because no one had ever done it before . Im curious how you would even start on that . Well, you start early is one of the things. [ laughter ] you start early and you work really hard. But you didnt have much time because that whole decision was made in august to switch apollo 8 . We had been working, developing the return to Earth Program for aefseveral years. But to just give you an example of how sort of how far you have to go, when we started working, developing the return to Earth Program, well, what people may not understand, they always landed in the middle of the pacific ocean. Right . If you remember that far . Thats because the miss distance when we started was bigger than the atlantic ocean. [ laughter ] we dont like that. Now, by the time they were flying they were landing almost in the ship. Right . But, you know, what we were doing was we were perfecting the solution to the threebody problem which is not a closed form solution. And the big challenge is that you have to do a lot of optimization because you have the meet the reentry corridor or you burn up. And you have to minimize fuel and you have to minimize time. So its just a tremendous amount of working on computers and improving your targeting, and always trying to get better. But the last few months just a crash as we tried to find every bug. Because you cant have bugs when youre flying, you know, to the moon. Its too critical. We just had india just had a lunar mission. And, you know, im still hoping that theyre going to be in contact with their lander. But, you know, the tiniest little error is magnified tremendously when youre talking about distances, especially distanzs to the moon. So its super important that Quality Control is just everything. Can we i just want to follow up on that. The folks at houston and 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 practiced them on apollo 8 and 9 and 10. Marshal, where miss johnson was, practice the engine testing. We rehaes the, rehearse the, rehearsed, for five years. They didnt get to practice liftoff on the moon. They didnt get to practice landing on the moon. They had to do it perfectly the first time. Thats the miracle of apollo 11. Thats a good point. Joann, im curious, you said that being in the firing room changed when your boss advocated for you to go in and you were in there, that it changed how people traded you. But im curious, did it change about how you felt about yourself and your role . Or was it just purely how people treated you . Possibly, i did. I had the height of an alligator and the tenacity of a pit bull dog. I hadnt let go for ten years. I wasnt going anywhere so they were sort of stuck with me. But i felt more accepted and confident in myself that i really was accepted, because dr. Warner von braun was sitting up there on the top row and dr. Divas and the chief engineer and all these important people, and i was good enough to be in the room with them. And so that built a lot of confidence in me, so after that i was sort of unstoppable. I not only had that tough hide and that tenacity, but i got to be a little bossy too. Caroline, you know, obviously what weve learned over the years about the effects of microgravity on the human body has been enormous. Im krurs from your perspective the research you did, that you were involved in, whats been some of the most interesting things that you think weve learned from sending humans as a physical, you know, effect of space flight . Well, yes, youre right. Weve done quite a bit of work. And the work began back in the 50s if you might recall, because thats when they decided we might be able to send people into space because it would be too hard on them