What The Hell America!

On Monday, Blue Origin’s New Shepard launch vehicle brought six women into space, roughly 62 miles above the earth’s surface, for the first all-women crewed flight since a solo mission in 1963. 

The New Shepard launch vehicle has brought celebrities on brief joyrides to space since 2021, when Blue Origins founder Jeff Bezos first took flight. It is fully autonomous and has no pilot. The passengers on Monday’s flight were Bezos’ fiancé, Lauren Sánchez, journalist Gayle King, singer Katy Perry, former NASA rocket scientist Aisha Bowe, bioastronautics research scientist Amanda Nguyễn and film producer Kerianne Flynn. 

But women have been making significant and substantive contributions in the aerospace field for over 100 years. These are some of the pioneering astronauts, scientists, engineers and mathematicians who have redefined space travel for all of humankind: 

• Pearl I. Young was hired in 1922 as the first woman scientist at NASA, when the agency was called the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. A physicist, she created a technical writing system that vastly improved the NASA Langley Research Center’s (LaRC) approach and is still used today.
• Katherine Johnson joined the LaRC in 1953 and calculated the trajectories for the Apollo 11 mission and many other U.S. spaceflights. Astronauts like John Glenn, the first American to orbit the earth, said they would only fly if Johnson double-checked the calculations. As a Black woman, her groundbreaking work was overlooked for decades. In 2015, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. 
• Margaret Hamilton created the software that sent humans to the moon. She led the software engineering division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory when it was contracted by NASA in 1961 to develop the Apollo program’s guidance system. Through her work, Hamilton — who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016 — coined the term, and the job, “software engineer.” 
• Valentina Tereshkova, a Soviet cosmonaut, became the first woman astronaut to travel in space in 1963. As the first woman to orbit the planet, she completed a three-day solo mission aboard the Vostok 6 spacecraft. 
• Sally Ride became the third woman to fly in space, and the first American woman to do so, in 1983. At 32, as part of NASA’s five-person crew of STS-7, she was the youngest American to travel in space at the time. She received a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013.
• Mae Jemison became the first Black woman, and the first woman of color in the world, to go to space in 1992. She was the science mission specialist on her flight, the STS-47. A physicist and a chemical engineer, she was a NASA astronaut for six years. 
• Peggy Whitson became the first woman to command the International Space Station in 2007, but she had already made history several times over by that point. She has spent more time in space than any other person: roughly 675 days over multiple spaceflights. 
• Christina Koch participated in the first all-woman spacewalk in 2019 with fellow NASA astronaut Jessica Meir. The pair replaced a faulty battery charge controller on the International Space Station.