Voices of Women Astronomers – Women and Space
VALENTINA TERESHKOVA (1937 – ), Russia
Russian astronaut, the first woman ever to fly into space (in 1963, for 3 days).
After a difficult childhood and a past as a seamstress, she became a parachutist and then a cosmonaut, following in the footsteps of her idol Yuri Gagarin.
She was selected from hundreds of candidates and was the only woman among the finalists to fly. Despite Russian propaganda describing her mission as a complete success, it was physically challenging and complicated. Upon her return, she was “shot” out of the capsule and landed with a parachute.
Her popularity was immense in the years following her space mission, and she even had a stamp dedicated to her. A lunar valley is named after her.
MAE C. JEMISON (1956 – ), USA
Doctor and engineer, NASA astronaut, she was the first African American woman astronaut to fly on a space mission (Space Shuttle Endeavour, 1992).
She was inspired to pursue a career as an astronaut by the character Lieutenant Uhura from the famous Star Trek series.
KATHERINE JOHNSON (1918 – , ) USA
After the “human computers” of Harvard, NASA also had its group of living calculators, the so-called West Area Computers: a group of African American women tasked with processing and analyzing data.
Katherine Johnson was initially part of this group, then reassigned to Langley’s Flight Research Division, where she worked on flight trajectory analysis for astronaut John Glenn’s (MA-6 Project Mercury). Her calculations were essential for the launch of the Space Shuttle program.
MARGARET HEAFIELD HAMILTON (1936 – ), USA
Software engineer. At just thirty, with a daughter who accompanied her to the lab, she became the director of the Software Engineering Division (a term she coined herself) at MIT, which developed all the flight control software for the Apollo missions. Her famous intervention during the moon landing: the system showed an error that risked overloading the onboard computer, jeopardizing the mission, but her code was able to bypass that error, organizing tasks based on priority and focusing only on the descent and landing information for the astronauts.
Her code proved to be robust and bug-free, so much so that it was used for subsequent missions.
SAMANTHA CRISTOFORETTI (1977 – , ) Italy
Engineer, aviator, pilot, astronaut. Samantha Cristoforetti is the first Italian in the European Space Agency crews on the International Space Station (ISS). With the ISS Futura 2014-2015 mission, she achieved the European and female record for the longest single spaceflight (199 days).
UNICEF ambassador since 2015. Mattel dedicated a Barbie doll to her as a positive inspirational figure.
