WOMEN AT NASA KENNEDY SPACE CENTER CODE

Lawson was the first African American to work in a technical position in the JPL lab. Macie Roberts and Helen Ling were already working at JPL, actively recruiting young women to compute data and Lawson fit the bill. While it would not be an engineering position, it would put her in a lab.

WOMEN AT NASA KENNEDY SPACE CENTER CODE

She responded to a JPL job ad for “Computers Wanted” that specified “no degree necessary,” which she recognized as code for “women can apply.” They became attached to a specific IBM 1620, nicknaming her CORA and providing her with her own office.Īfter graduating in 1953 with a degree in chemical engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles, Janez Lawson had the grades, degree and intelligence to get any job she wanted. It comes as no surprise then that the first computer programmers in the JPL lab were women. Dismissing computer programming as “women’s work,” the men gave the new IBMs to the women of JPL, providing them with a unique opportunity to work with and learn to code, computers. In the 1950s, NASA was starting to work with what we now know as computers-but most male engineers and scientists did not trust these machines, believing them to be unreliable in comparison to human calculations. Paulson left JPL to have her first daughter, and thanks to Ling’s unofficial unpaid maternity leave, returned in 1961. It was Paulson and her fellow human computers that hand-charted America’s entrance into the Space Race. She was tasked with plotting the data received from the satellite and a network tracking station. On January 31, 1958, she played a role in the historic launch of the JPL-built Explorer 1, the first successfully launched satellite by the United States. Way ahead of her time, Ling offered her employees her own version of unpaid maternity leave, rehiring them after they had left to give birth.īarbara Paulson began working at JPL in 1948 when calculating a rocket path took all day. At a time when maternity leave did not exist, pregnancy could be detrimental to a woman’s career. Ling actively hired women who didn’t have an engineering education, encouraging them to attend night school. Helen Ling was one such supervisor who followed in Roberts’ footsteps. Roberts set a precedent for future female supervisors who made it their job to hire women, often taking a chance on young women right out of college.

When tasked with building out her team, she made the decision to hire only women, believing men would undermine the cohesion of the group and not take direction well from a woman.

Coming to engineering later in life, she was meticulous and driven, rising through the ranks and becoming a supervisor in 1942. Macie Roberts was about 20 years older than the other computers working at JPL.

Women at nasa kennedy space center