“More women should demand to be involved. It’s our right. This is one area where we can get in on the ground floor and possibly help to direct where space exploration will go in the future.” – Dr. Mae Jemison
(1956- ) American physician and former astronaut who became the first African-American woman in space in 1992. She left NASA in 1993 to start her own company on adapting technology to daily life.
“…Now and then women should do for themselves what men have already done – occasionally what men have not done–thereby establishing themselves as persons, and perhaps encouraging other women toward greater independence of thought and action. Some such consideration was a contributing reason for my wanting to do what I so much wanted to do.” -Amelia Earhart
(1897-Unknown)-Ms. Amelia Earhart was the first woman to make a solo flight across the Atlantic, May 20-21, 1932. The aircraft crew’s flight made headlines around the world since three women had perished within the same year attempting to be the first woman to accomplish such a feat. When the crew returned to the US, they were greeted with a fitting ticker-tape parade in New York City and a reception hosted by President Calvin Coolidge at the White House. It was, indeed, a momentous occasion. Ms. Earhart, among other notable recognitions, was also the first woman to make a solo round trip of the United States. Sadly, Ms. Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, disappeared on July 2, 1937 over the Pacific Ocean while on an around-the-world flight. A national rescue attempt was instigated immediately, according to the official Amelia Earhart website. It remains the most extensive air and sea search in naval history. On July 19, despite $4 million spent and 250,000 square miles of ocean scoured, the US government reluctantly retreated.
Sources: Amelia Earhart Official Website and National Park Service
“It was Franklin’s photographic skills that made the discovery possible.She could take photographs of crystals… and interpret the patterns…a particular genius at aligning hand and mind.” – Brenda Maddox on Rosalind Franklin, Author of Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA
(1920-1958) Dr. Rosalind Franklin was a British scientist with notable recognitions, the most famous of which was her X-ray crystallography images of DNA. Together with James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins, they discovered the building block of life in 1953. The three men shared a Nobel Prize in 1962, an award that cannot be claimed posthumously. Dr. Franklin succumbed to ovarian cancer in 1958 at the young age of 37.
“All of us have to recognize that we owe our children more than we have been giving them.” – Hillary Clinton
(1947- ) Hillary Rodham Clinton served as First Lady during her husband Bill Clinton’s presidency from 1992-2000. She then served as a U.S. Senator representing the state of New York from 2001-2009. Currently, she is the Secretary of State as part of the Obama Administration. Secretary Clinton came very close to being the nation’s first female presidential nominee in 2008, losing in the Democratic primaries to then Senator Barack Obama.
Source: The Department of State
“At a time when women had few options and were treated as property, Hypatia move freely and unself-consciously through the traditional male domains. By all accounts, she was a great beauty.” – Carl Sagan on Hypatia of Alexandria, in Cosmos
(ca. AD 350/370–415) Hypatia of Alexandria was a mathematician and philosopher. She was the daughter of a mathematician named Theon Alexandricus and last librarian of the Library of Alexandria in ancient Roman Egypt. Hypatia was educated in Athens and Italy and became the head of the Platonist school at Alexandria. Her notable students included Plato and Aristotle. Hypatia is regarded as the first woman to have made substantial contributions to math.
Sources: Oregon State University and Wikipedia (for birth dates)
In continuing our celebration of the great women around us, here’s a story that found its way into my inbox by chance. I was in overwhelming support to post this on our blog as these are the stories I love to hear. These are the stories that stand as reasons on why I took this post. These are the stories that well up my own pride in Women@NASA.
Janice Hall is the director of the Business and Institutional Management Office within the Space Life Sciences Directorate at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. Since Janice took over management of this office, she has continually worked towards and supported innovative solutions ranging from strategic communication inside and outside our parent organization (Space Life Sciences), to collaboration-focused information systems tools used to improve daily work activities, and Open Source technology applied to cross-organizational collaborative engineering and life sciences solutions. Through it all, Janice has been more than a manager – she has led her employees by example, embracing appropriate changes in work and communication, and always keeping an eye out for ways to do more with the resources available.
The most recent of these collaborative projects started with the Spring 2011 Innovation & Inclusion Team’s Innovation Charge Account proposal competition. Janice partnered her Space Life Sciences resources together with Nick Skytland’s Open Government Initiative team to submit a proposal for the JSC CIO’s ICA competition, which won one of the charge accounts to fund innovative projects. Over the course of the summer, members of her team and Nick’s team worked together to develop a Liquid Galaxy system, demonstrating the collaboration between NASA and Google for utilization of earth observation data in an immersive wrap-around environment. The initial goal of the project, to demonstrate the immersive capabilities of an open source clustered computing solution, were met with great success. The project was completed in time for the final outbrief presentations in September, and was requested by JSC Senior Management to be put on display in Building 1 from the end of October through the middle of January.
Beyond the initial activities of this project, Janice continued to support collaboration with Nick’s team, taking the functionality of the Liquid Galaxy exhibit to the next level. Discussions emerged for potential collaboration with various public and private organizations: Space Center Houston; NASA’s own Goddard, Glenn, and Langley Research Centers as well as NASA Headquarters; and the Pentagon. Several groups within Johnson Space Center have also requested collaborations on Liquid Galaxy or related technology spin-off projects: including Engineering Directorate’s robotics, telemetry, and future vehicle design groups; and Center Operation Directorate’s Emergency Operations Center and Dispatch Center groups. Based on collaboration with ongoing Engineering Directorate projects, several Liquid Galaxy systems in and around Johnson Space Center have been adapted to run new software, including the Mars Rover Simulator, the Habitat Demonstration Unit virtual environment, and International Space Station assembly timeline movie to name just a few.
This project has provided an inexpensive solution in the tens of thousands of dollars for many projects that used to require hundreds of thousands of dollars or more to achieve similar results. It also demonstrates the effectiveness of open source architecture for collaboration and utilization. None of this would have been possible without Janice Hall’s keen leadership and desire to pursue innovative solutions for business and technology uses.
“Is this America where we have to sleep with our phones off the hooks because we be threatened daily just cause we want to register to vote to become first class citizens?” – Fannie Lou Hamer
(1917-1977) Fannie Lou Hamer was a civil rights activist, with an emphasis on voting rights. Despite failures in actions she took, Hamer continued to work for things in which she truly believed. For instance, at the age of 37, Hamer joined the the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, working to teach African-Americans how to read and write so they could register to vote. As a result, 17 African-Americans tried to register to vote and were denied. Hamer and her family were threatened with expulsion from the plantation at which they were poor sharecroppers. Soon thereafter, she was targeted by the Ku Klux Klan. In her personal life, Hamer was unable to bear children due to a tumor and together with her husband, they adopted four children, two girls and two boys, all from poor families.
Sources: Howard University and Fannie Lou Hamer Site
“These men and women have assumed great risk in the service to all humanity in an age where spaceflight as come to seem almost routine. It is easy to overlook the travels of danger by rocket…These astronauts…[knew] they had a high and noble purpose in life. Because of their courage and daring and idealism, we will miss them all the more.” -Former President George W. Bush after the Columbia tragedy
(1961-2003) Dr. Kalpana Chawla was one of our nation’s astronauts with her selection in 1994. She was born in and grew up in India before moving to the United States to attend graduate school in Texas. She worked at NASA Ames Research Center before selection as an astronaut. Dr. Chawla and her crewmates perished in the Columbia tragedy on Feburary 1, 2003. In her personal life, Dr. Chawla enjoyed hiking and flying, and she held a commercial pilot’s license.
(1929-1993) Audrey Hepburn is most well known for her fashion iconic status and roles in Hollywood films in her early life as well as her humanitarian efforts. In the latter years of her life, she gave her time to UNICEF and countries around the world before succumbing to pancreatic cancer. Ms. Hepburn lived during WWII, having benefitted herself from the work of UNICEF shortly after the war ended. In these ways, she contributed to both the arts and social relief during her years in this world.
Source: UNICEF
