Career
High school teacher
After graduating from college, Sullivan started her career as a high-school math and science teacher in Cocoa Beach, Florida. [3] [4] In 1966 she applied for employment at NASA, and was hired as an aerospace technologist and engineer. [3]
NASA
Sullivan was not recruited by NASA or even applying for a full-time job, but first applied for a summer job with NASA. [5] Sullivan was hired at NASA in 1966 as the first woman engineer in Spacecraft Operations. [6] In the 1960s, 17 percent of the staff at NASA were women, and most of those women were secretaries. [2] She was the lead biomedical engineer for the Apollo 11 mission and was the only woman to help Neil Armstrong in the suit lab before launch. [7] Sullivan was in the control room for the 1969 launch, keeping track of the biomedical systems; [8] while she could not see the launch, Sullivan commented on the event "My seat rumbled and you knew something powerful was going on". [3]
As a biomedical engineer, Sullivan was responsible for maintaining the medical telemetry devices worn by the astronauts, and monitoring the telemetry from those instruments prior to and during the launch process. [4] Sullivan would check the functioning of the medical telemetry instruments shortly after they were attached to the astronauts during the suit-up process. [4] Later in the flight, responsibility for that telemetry was shifted to the Houston center. [4]
Sullivan was quoted in a news story of the time as saying:
The astronauts wear our sensors which are attached to their bodies during major spacecraft tests and during flight. These sensors monitor their heart beat, take electrocardiograms, and monitor respiration rates and depths.
During spacecraft testing and live launches at KSC, a resident doctor and I, as biomed engineer, sit at the consoles and monitor the biomedical data coming from the spacecraft.
The doctor evaluates the crewman's physical condition, and I, the performance of the biomedical system. [4]
Sullivan notes that hers was the only female voice on the voice channels, so if she made any error, everyone would know who was responsible, while a male voice might not be recognized. [3] [4] [9]
Sullivan did not have an engineering degree, [3] but NASA policy at that time allowed her to be so classified as one based on her academic record in college, where she graduated in the top 20% of her class with a heavy focus on mathematics. [9]
Acting career
Sullivan was respected at NASA for her work with the Apollo 11 spacecraft, but after that mission they parted ways. After NASA, Sullivan's only son moved out and she started to experience empty nest syndrome. [10] Sullivan explored modeling, meeting with the Philadelphia Casting Company, but decided not to pursue it as a career after shooting one commercial. [11] She had a first lead role in a film about a soldier in Vietnam who finds a doctor's diary. [10]
After Apollo 11, Sullivan moved to Ithaca, New York with her husband Marshall Sullivan and taught middle school while her husband attended Cornell. The couple later moved their family to Pennsylvania, where she worked as a teacher and a food technologist for Kraft. [11] Today Sullivan is proud of her accomplishments with NASA and continues to encourage young women to go into the fields of science, math, and engineering. [3] [12]
On July 19, 2019, Our Daily Planet declared Sullivan its "Hero of the Week" for her role at NASA and for her encouragement of young women to pursue careers in technology and science. [13]
Apollo 13 was the seventh crewed mission in the Apollo space program and the third meant to land on the Moon. The craft was launched from Kennedy Space Center on April 11, 1970, but the lunar landing was aborted after an oxygen tank in the service module (SM) failed two days into the mission. The crew instead looped around the Moon and returned safely to Earth on April 17. The mission was commanded by Jim Lovell, with Jack Swigert as command module (CM) pilot and Fred Haise as Lunar Module (LM) pilot. Swigert was a late replacement for Ken Mattingly, who was grounded after exposure to rubella.
Apollo 12 was the sixth crewed flight in the United States Apollo program and the second to land on the Moon. It was launched on November 14, 1969, by NASA from the Kennedy Space Center, Florida. Commander Charles "Pete" Conrad and Lunar Module Pilot Alan L. Bean performed just over one day and seven hours of lunar surface activity while Command Module Pilot Richard F. Gordon remained in lunar orbit.
Extravehicular activity (EVA) is any activity done by an astronaut in outer space outside a spacecraft. Absent a breathable Earthlike atmosphere, the astronaut is completely reliant on a space suit for environmental support. EVA includes spacewalks and lunar or planetary surface exploration. In a stand-up EVA (SEVA), an astronaut stands through an open hatch but does not fully leave the spacecraft. EVA has been conducted by the Soviet Union/Russia, the United States, Canada, the European Space Agency and China.
Human spaceflight is spaceflight with a crew or passengers aboard a spacecraft, often with the spacecraft being operated directly by the onboard human crew. Spacecraft can also be remotely operated from ground stations on Earth, or autonomously, without any direct human involvement. People trained for spaceflight are called astronauts, cosmonauts (Russian), or taikonauts (Chinese); and non-professionals are referred to as spaceflight participants or spacefarers.
The Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center (JSC) is NASA's center for human spaceflight, where human spaceflight training, research, and flight control are conducted. It was renamed in honor of the late US president and Texas native, Lyndon B. Johnson, by an act of the United States Senate on February 19, 1973.
Judith Arlene Resnik was an American electrical engineer, software engineer, biomedical engineer, pilot and NASA astronaut who died in the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. She was the fourth woman, the second American woman and the first Jewish woman of any nationality to fly in space, logging 145 hours in orbit.
Gemini 9A was a 1966 crewed spaceflight in NASA's Gemini program. It was the seventh crewed Gemini flight, the 13th crewed American flight and the 23rd spaceflight of all time. The original crew for Gemini 9, command pilot Elliot See and pilot Charles Bassett, were killed in a crash on February 28, 1966, while flying a T-38 jet trainer to the McDonnell Aircraft plant in St. Louis, Missouri to inspect their spacecraft. Their deaths promoted the backup crew, Thomas P. Stafford and Eugene Cernan, to the prime crew. The mission was renamed Gemini 9A after the original May 17 launch was scrubbed when the mission's Agena Target Vehicle was destroyed after a launch failure. The mission was flown June 3–6, 1966, after launch of the backup Augmented Target Docking Adaptor (ATDA). Stafford and Cernan rendezvoused with the ATDA, but were unable to dock with it because the nose fairing had failed to eject from the docking target due to a launch preparation error. Cernan performed a two-hour extravehicular activity, during which it was planned for him to demonstrate free flight in a self-contained rocket pack, the USAF Astronaut Maneuvering Unit. He was unable to accomplish this due to stress, fatigue, and overheating.
Kathryn Dwyer Sullivan is an American geologist, oceanographer, and a former NASA astronaut and US Navy officer. She was a crew member on three Space Shuttle missions.
Ellen Ochoa is an American engineer, former astronaut and former director of the Johnson Space Center. In 1993, Ochoa became the first Hispanic woman to go to space when she served on a nine-day mission aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery. Ochoa became director of the center upon the retirement of the previous director, Michael Coats, on December 31, 2012. She was the first Hispanic director and the second female director of Johnson Space Center.
The Rocco A. Petrone Launch Control Center is a four-story building at NASA's Kennedy Space Center on Merritt Island, Florida, used to manage launches of launch vehicles from Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex 39. Attached to the southeast corner of the Vehicle Assembly Building, the LCC contains offices; telemetry, tracking, and instrumentation equipment; and firing rooms.
Flight controllers are personnel who aid space flight by working in such Mission Control Centers as NASA's Mission Control Center or ESA's European Space Operations Centre. Flight controllers work at computer consoles and use telemetry to monitor various technical aspects of a space mission in real time. Each controller is an expert in a specific area and constantly communicates with additional experts in the "back room". The flight director, who leads the flight controllers, monitors the activities of a team of flight controllers, and has overall responsibility for success and safety.
NASA's Christopher C. Kraft Jr. Mission Control Center, also known by its radio callsign, Houston, is the facility at the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, that manages flight control for America's human space program, currently involving astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS). The center is in Building 30 at the Johnson Space Center and is named after Christopher C. Kraft Jr., a NASA engineer and manager who was instrumental in establishing the agency's Mission Control operation, and was the first Flight Director.
A launch status check, also known as a "go/no go poll" and several other terms occurs at the beginning of an American spaceflight mission in which flight controllers monitoring various systems are queried for operation and readiness status before a launch can proceed. For Space Shuttle missions, in the firing room at the Launch Control Center, the NASA Test Director (NTD) performed this check via a voice communications link with other NASA personnel. The NTD was the leader of the shuttle test team responsible for directing and integrating all flight crew, orbiter, external tank/solid rocket booster and ground support testing in the shuttle launch countdown. The NTD was also responsible for the safety of all personnel inside the pad after external tank loading, including the flight crew, about 10 go/no go reports. He reported to the Launch Director, who has another about 5 go/no go reports. The Launch director declares if a mission is go for launch.
Kathleen Hallisey Rubins is an American microbiologist and NASA astronaut. She became the 60th woman to fly in space when she launched on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft to the International Space Station (ISS) on July 7, 2016. She returned to Earth in Kazakhstan on October 30, 2016, aboard a Soyuz. She was a crew member of Expedition 48/49 and Expedition 63/64 of the ISS. Rubins has spent a total of 300 days, 1 hour, and 31 minutes in space which is the fourth most days in space by a U.S female astronaut.
Women have flown and worked in outer space since almost the beginning of human spaceflight. A considerable number of women from a range of countries have worked in space, though overall women are still significantly less often chosen to go to space than men, and by 2020 constitute only 10% of all astronauts who have been to space.
Aprille J. Ericsson-Jackson is an American aerospace engineer. Ericsson-Jackson is the first African-American woman to receive a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Howard University and the first African-American woman to receive a Ph.D. in Engineering at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC).
Frances "Poppy" Northcutt is a Texas attorney who began her career as a "computer" and then an engineer for the technical staff on NASA's Apollo Program during the space race. During the Apollo 8 mission, she became the first female engineer to work in NASA's Mission Control.
The role of women in and affiliated with NASA has varied over time. As early as 1922 women were working as physicists and in other technical positions.[1] Throughout the 1930s to the present, more women joined the NASA teams not only at Langley Memorial, but at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Glenn Research Center, and other numerous NASA sites throughout the United States.[2] As the space program has grown, women have advanced into many roles, including astronauts.
The Women of Apollo is a book written by Robyn C. Friend, illustrated by David Katz, about 4 women who participated in the United States space program during the Apollo Program.
Charlie Blackwell-Thompson is an American engineer. Blackwell-Thompson is the launch director for NASA's Exploration Ground Systems Program, based at NASA's John F. Kennedy Space Center (KSC). She oversaw the countdown and liftoff of NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft during its first flight test, called Artemis I.
