Inspirations and Accomplishments
Everybody knows famous figures like Neil Armstrong, the first to land on the moon, or Ed White, the first space walker. However, there are other figures that had as much importance as them, unfortunately shadowed by their accomplishments, sometimes only possible because of these other unknown people. Some of them were female, only unknown because of their gender despite making gigantic marks on the aeronautical industry.
Margaret Hamilton, ProgrammerMargaret Hamilton, a famous NASA programmer, was born on August 17, 1936 and is still alive today. She learned all of her programming and computer skills from self-taught, hands-on experience as there were a shortage of people experienced with computers to teach. Hamilton worked her way to the top as the director of the Software Engineering Division at MIT Instrumentation Laboratory. After joining NASA, she became the director of Apollo and Skylab at the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory. Margaret Hamilton invented "software engineering," and programs such as asynchronous software (consecutive commands), priority scheduling, end-to-end testing, and main-in-the-loop decisions (human interaction). She was a huge contributor to the Apollo 11 mission; in fact, without her, the first moon landing would never have been able to occur. Before landing on the moon, the Apollo 11 spacecraft was suddenly loaded with a long list of problems and controls that would have overrode the command to land on the moon. Thanks to Hamilton and her priority program, the spacecraft was able to ignore all other problems and land on the moon. She was given the Exceptional Space Act Award for saving and writing the code to land the Apollo 11 spacecraft.
She has over 130 papers, 6 major programs, and 60 projects. In the picture to the right, she is standing next to the written code of the Apollo 11 programs. The concepts she created were used as the building blocks for software engineering. In 1986, she founded Hamilton Technologies, Inc.. |
I didn’t do it because of male versus female; I was very conscious of what was fair and what wasn’t fair.
In her years at NASA, she never focused on the sexism she encountered, but instead remained focused on her work. She was treated lesser but she never noticed until years later while noticing the way women were treated in the popular show Mad Men.
Sally Ride, First Woman in SpaceSally Ride was born on May 26, 1951 and died July 23, 2012. She went to Stanford University, dual majoring in physics and english, receiving both bachelors degrees in 1973. She continued and received a Ph.D. in 1978. One of her teachers remarked that her mind was too scientific, and that she was wasting her potential on science. When applying to NASA, she beat over 1,000 other applicants, majority of them males. At NASA, she became the missions specialist, and eventually, on June 18, she became a passenger onboard the Challenger, the first U.S. female to ever embark into space.
I did not come to NASA to make history. Ride went on one more trip as a missions specialist in October, and her third trip was unfortunately unable to be pulled off because of the Challenger tragedy in 1986. Instead, she investigated the cause of the spacecraft's explosion. Later, she became the director of the California Space Institute at the University of California and made her own company, Sally Ride Science, to help inspire girls and young women around the globe to inspire the growth of science and math in female communities.
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