The forgotten women o
Hers was one tiny, anxious face amid a sea of anxious faces in Firing Room No1 at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on July 16, 1969.
JoAnn Morgan chewed her nails with the same tension those around her crossed their arms, put hands on their hips and even briefly shut their eyes.
In the terminal almost 50 years ago today, the countdown was inching towards the lift-off of Apollo
11, the first mission to put humans on the moon.
Yet in the photo capturing that moment, she stands out a mile – as she is just about the only one not wearing a white shirt and tie.
JoAnn was the only woman locked in there for the blast-off. What’s more, the 28-year-old engineer, the mission’s Instrumentation Controller, responsible for all the ground systems in the area of the launch pad, was the very first
woman to remain in that historic room in Cape Canaveral for a rocket launch.
The first to feel the “shockwaves” of the blast and “the vibrations through bone conduction in my body”... JoAnn still becomes excited as she describes that moment today.
Days later, Neil Armstrong told the world as his boots met moon dust that his was “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” – sexist words accepted at the time, now part of history.
Well, according to JoAnn: “Getting to be there in the Firing Room was a very big step for me. I had been there since 1958, when NASA was founded, as a university student, then six years as an engineer, and I had worked my way up to a more senior engineer. We had already had Apollo 8, 9 and 10.
“Yet before that, I had to leave the room three hours before lift-off and watch in a different building.
“I don’t know why. There was fear about the explosion – and not wanting to kill a woman,” she adds, generously. JOANN MORGAN SPACE CENTER OPERATOR “But before Apollo 11 my director called me in and said ‘You’re going to be on the console, you are my best communicator, we really like the way you spot problems and get them worked rapidly’.
“I didn’t know he’d had to go to the director of Kennedy Space Center and convince him it was OK!”
She adds: “I did have some resistance. Before Apollo 11, I’d had obscene calls. I was like a goldfish in a bowl with all those men, there were 200 cameras and people could watch me on CCTV.
“But I had to think like a mosquito bite,” the strong-minded 78-year-old laughs, matter-of-factly. “You slap it and it’s done, it doesn’t stop you going on a hike where there might be mosquitoes!” The astronauts were, of course, men. Although Russian Valentina Tereshkova travelled to space in 1963, it was to be 20 years before another woman followed.
The only women we see in photos and footage of Apollo 11 are the astronauts’ worried wives. Yet among 400,000 people working on the Apollo missions, thousands were women.
Although the majority were more likely to be responsible for secretarial work or even sewing the space suits, there were talented pioneers among them instrumental to the landing’s success. Sadly, they’re often overlooked.
At Mission Control, in Houston, Texas, another young woman was qui making her mark. Frances “Pop Northcutt, now 74, was an engineer worked on building and designing return-to-Earth programme for Apo
She was the first woman in an op tional support role in the control ce and the only one in all Apollo missi
Poppy explains: “It’s when they their manoeuvres on the back side o moon that’s particularly danger that’s where they go into lunar orbi
“The particular concern is if they h an over or under-burn going into lu orbit they could be on a crash cou You lose communication and don’t k if things are going well or badly u
I was like a goldfish in a bowl with all those men