Blazing a trail inside NASA
First woman at Mission Control later launched career as an activist
“When you’re the only woman going into a sea of men, you want to be a member of the team. What you don’t want to do is emphasize that you are different, so you put up with some stuff that you shouldn’t have to put up with.”
— Poppy Northcutt
Poppy Northcutt’s headset crackled as a fellow mission controller again directed his colleagues to turn to a specific camera channel on their consoles.
It was 1968 and the 25-yearold Northcutt often was too busy running Apollo 8 simulations to pay this channel any heed. But on this particular day, she wasn’t quite so busy.
What she saw made her breath catch in her throat. Her male colleagues had trained a Mission Control room camera directly on her. And they had been watching it for months.
Northcutt didn’t tell anyone about the camera — or how it made her feel. As the first and only woman working in Mission Control at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, she knew the treatment could be a lot worse.
“The concepts of hostile work environment, of sexual harassment, those concepts didn’t exist at that time,” Northcutt, now 75, told the Houston Chronicle. “I did not think it would be a good idea to call attention to it. When you’re the only woman going into a sea of men, you want to be a member of the team. What you don’t want to do is emphasize that you are different, so you put up with some stuff that you shouldn’t have to put up with.”
Northcutt started working at NASA in 1965 as a “computress” — or a woman employed to work with computers — and primarily focused on the calculations that would bring astronauts home from the moon. Her computing prowess earned her a promotion to the Mission Control room floor for Apollos 8 through 13, but her experiences in the male-dominated arena, including unfair pay practices, prompted a lifetime of activism and a career change.
“Through all those experiences, I became interested in going to law school,” she said. “I had seen the effects of the law on women, and I wanted to go make a difference.”
From math whiz to activist
At a time when many women went to college to find a husband or get a teaching certificate, Northcutt entered the University of Texas as a math major.
Her parents were OK with that choice — she could be a math teacher.
But did she get a teaching certificate?
“No,” she laughed. She and her parents, who lived in Liberty County, often were not on the same page.
Never was that more apparent than when TRW Systems — the contractor that employed her at Johnson — featured her in advertisements prior to the Apollo 8 flight in December 1968.
She was their 25-year-old math whiz — the first woman to work in Mission Control. The ads were dispersed throughout the pages of Time, Newsweek and other major publications of the time.
Her father was proud, she said. But he’d be more proud, he told her, if her wedding engagement were announced in the Dayton newspaper near Houston.
“What can you say?” she said. “It was what it was.” He never got his wish. Instead, Northcutt blazed a trail in Mission Control, showing that women deserved a place there. She never experienced harassment, per se — the men in the control room were incredibly mission-focused.
But pay discrimination was quite a different matter. She watched as her male counterparts bought big, brand new homes, drove fancy cars and acquired sailboats. Meanwhile, she lived in a one-bedroom efficiency; drove a beat-up, 10-year-old Volkswagen Beetle and watched the moon landing on a used, 11-inch black and white TV.
At the time, she didn’t realize this was sexism. And it’s difficult to be upset about something that doesn’t have a name.
“All that affected my trajectory in life,” she said. “I just became increasingly aware of discrimination against women and how gender bias works, and I became an activist.”
Enduring legacy
Northcutt’s first foray into activism came about two years after she walked into Mission Ccontrol for the first time. On Aug. 26, 1970, she took the day off work to participate in The Women’s Strike for Equality, the National Organization for Women’s first nationwide action.
She’s battled for equal rights ever since.
Northcutt left NASA in the early 1970s — she’s not exactly sure which year — and went to work for the mayor’s office. She then became a lawyer in 1982, a job she still does today.
She hasn’t stayed active in the space program, but her legacy as a female first remains.
To this day, she receives letters and phone calls from women who were young girls in the 1960s. She inspired them to go into science or math, they said, and they wouldn’t have known STEM was an option for women without her.
The makeup of Mission Control is much different now than it was when Northcutt worked there. There’s more than one woman sitting behind the consoles — minorities, too.
In 1991, NASA certified the first woman, Linda Ham, as a Mission Control flight director. Flight directors are tasked with keeping the astronauts and space station safe by leading teams of controllers, researchers, engineers and support personnel in Houston.
And just last year, NASA named the first female chief flight director in its history. Holly Ridings, a Texas native, is in charge of a cadre of flight directors at Johnson.
Ridings has never met Northcutt but sees herself in the 75 year old: Someone who wants to be remembered for doing her job and helping move spaceflight forward.
“We do our jobs and appreciate the people that did those without as much support and structure as we have today,” Ridings said.