Rating: WORTHY!
Libby Jackson is a physicist and engineer who works for the UK Space Agency. She wrote this book to highlight the contributions women have made toward science and the various space programs, and have often gone unsung. Well...this book sings!
Divided into five sections, the book covers fifty women, and although the subtitle misleadingly says it's 50 stories of women in space, the majority of these women have not been in space, but have unquestionably and materially contributed to the success of everyone who went into space. The sections and the women covered are as follows:
- The Origins of Space Travel
- Émilie du Châtelet - or more formally, Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise du Châtelet, was a French author, mathematician, physicist, natural philosopher just before the mid-eighteenth century when women were not welcomed in any of those fields.
- Ada Lovelace, aka Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace was Lord Byron's daughter, but her mother kept her away from Byron and saw to it that she was educated in mathematics, which brought her eventually into the computing field invented by Charles Babbage. Lovelace was the first computer programmer.
- Jeannette Ridlon Piccard was an aeronaut before there were airplanes. She was the first licensed female balloon pilot in the US and the first women to enter the stratosphere - and that's not metaphor. Where do you think Jean Luc Picard of the Enterprise got his name?!
- Mary Sherman Morgan was a rocket fuel scientist who invented Hydyne which powered a rocket that put the United States's first satellite into orbit.
- Jacqueline Cochran was the first woman to break the sound barrier.
- The Dawn of the Space Age
- Valentina Tereshkova was the first woman to fly in space - in the Soviet space program as it then was, when the Russians were the ones setting the pace and making all the firsts: first satellite into space, first man into space, first multi-person spacecraft into space, first spacewalk. What this book doesn't mentions it had the early soviet spacecraft were rather simplistic things as compared with US space craft, and the cosmonauts have very little to do or control.
- Jerrie Cobb was an aviation pioneer and the first woman to fly in the Paris Air Show. She was also one of the little known Mercury 13 women trainees who passed the same tests as the Mercury 7 men did, but weren't allowed to fly a spacecraft.
- The Mercury 7 Wives were the longsuffering spouses of the first seven astronauts picked to fly spacecraft. They were unprepared for the intense publicity, but handled it just fine.
- Eilene Galloway was the first space lawyer, so to speak. You'll have to read the book to find out what that's all about!
- Mary Jackson you may recall if you saw the movie Hidden Figures - whi9ch was of course, Hollywood style, overly dramatic compared with the real story which I reviewed a while ago on this blog.
- Dee O'Hara was a nurse to the astronauts, involved in their care and medical education, and went on to even greater things, such as setting up the Flight Medicine Clinic at the Johnson Space Center
- Katherine Johnson was also featured in Hidden Figures and was responsible for figuring launch windows and spacecraft trajectories, including emergency return paths.
- Margaret Hamilton was the director of the Software Engineering Division at the MIT lab which developed the on-board flight software for the Apollo spacecraft.
- The Waltham "Little Old Ladies" wove the software for the Apollo guidance computer - literally. The copper strands were hand-woven to pass information as a series of ones and zeroes into the computer and were designed this way to be ultra-reliable.
- Poppy Northcutt was an engineer on the Apollo space program.
- Rita Rapp worked on a critical aspect of the Apollo program in developing food that could be eaten - and was appetizing and nutritious, for the astronauts, which was a lot harder than you might think, especially with crumbs not being welcome floating around in a spacecraft!
- Dottie Lee was another 'human computer' who worked on math calculations for the space program. When she retired it took ten men to replace her. She was responsible for the heat shield design for returning spacecraft, which is now also being employed on the new Orion spacecraft.
- "The ILC Seamstresses" helped outfit the Apollo astronauts, including the ones who walked on the Moon. I also review a children's book about this same topic on this blog in Papa Put a Man on the Moon by Kristy Dempsey and Sarah Green
- Space Stations and Shuttles
- Sally Ride was the first American woman and the youngest American astronaut into space, and she survived Challenger twice before it exploded when she wasn't on it.
- Svetlana Savitskaya was in the second group of Russian cosmonauts selected and the first woman to walk in space, probably an activity prompted by the USA's announcement that Kathy Sullivan was soon scheduled to do the same thing.
- Nichelle Nichols - actor in the original Star Trek series and inspiration to many women, particularly those of color.
- Christa McAuliffe and Judy Resnik both died in the appalling and inexcusable Challenger explosion. I'm not sure that being the first women to die in space is really a milestone, but it's something.
- Mae Jemison was the first African-American woman into space (Guy Bluford was the first African-American man almost a decade earlier) and she went on afterwards to found the 100 Year Starship organization (I didn't know it had been lost!).
- Helen Sharman was the first British astronaut in space and the first woman to visit the Russian Mir space station. Yeay Britain! Sends a woman up first!
- Eileen Collins is a (now retired) USAF colonel who piloted the shuttle Discovery in its docking with the Mir. She was also the first female commander of a US Spacecraft.
- Chiaki Mukai was the first Japanese woman in space.
- Claudie Haigneré was one of the first seven French astronauts and the only woman - one woman out of ten thousand candidates with very few females included - who was the first French woman to fly in space.
- Patricia Cowings was the first African-American woman scientist to be trained as an astronaut, but never went into space. She spent her time in research into physiology, and she trained people in the voluntary control of physiological responses which helped astronauts cope with weightlessness and motion sickness.
- Irene Long was the first female chief medical officer at the Kennedy Space Center.
- Living and Working in Space
- Peggy Whitson has the distinction of being the oldest female astronaut to fly in space and is also the holder of the most EVA time for a female astronaut. Having spent some 665 days in space, she's also done the equivalent of a trip to Mars and back - although not all in one go! At her retirement at the end of her last trip, she was the most experienced US astronaut - spending more time in space than any other American.
- Julie Robinson is the Chief Scientist of the International Space Station and founder of the ISS Program Science Forum.
- Suni Williams is an officer of the US Navy and I believe the first astronaut to have a haircut in space, donating her pony tail to Locks of Love, but maybe not given how long other astronauts have spent aboard various spacecraft and the ISS. I have no information about hair grooming in space! She is definitely the first person to run a marathon in space!
- Jeanne Lee Crews was the first waste disposal engineer in the space program - in the sense of designing a shield to protect the ISS from space garbage of which there is an endless amount after fifty years of space flights.
- Kalpana Chawla was the first Indian woman to fly in space, and Laurel Clark was a Captain in the USN, and a doctor. They died together in the inexplicable Columbia disaster. The US has killed more astronauts in space than any other nation: 14 in just two shuttle flights, plus three on the ground in the Apollo 1 fire.
The last section is The Future of Space and looks at what's coming and who's helping to usher it in. I commend this book as a worthy read for boys and girls.
