Color Lithograph – NASA, 2016
In honor of Black History Month, we are highlighting artifacts like this lithograph produced by NASA featuring women of color in aviation and space history. Portraits of these women pioneers and innovators who have been, or are currently, in the fields of aeronautics and astronautics illustrate the important roles these women played, inspiring a new generation to reach for the stars.
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Do you recognize any of the 21 women featured on NASA’s Women of Color lithograph? Hopefully some of them are familiar, but there may be a number that are not as well known. Who are some of these women pioneers and inventors in aviation and space history?
Bessie Coleman was the first woman of African American descent to become a pilot when she earned her international pilot license in 1921.
Felicia Jones is the current Director of Engineering at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, leading one of the largest engineering organizations at NASA responsible for the technical implementation of the spaceflight programs.
Ellen Ochoa is a former astronaut and the current Director of the NASA Johnson Space Center. She is the first Hispanic director there as well as the second female director. She also holds the distinction as the first Hispanic woman to go to space.
Jeanette Epps has been a NASA astronaut since 2009. She served on a 9-day NASA Extreme Environmental Mission Operations expedition in 2014, living with her team 62 feet underwater to investigate tools, techniques, and technologies for future space missions.
Mae Jemison was the first African American woman to travel in space on Space Shuttle Endeavor in 1992.
Stephanie Wilson participated in three space shuttle missions as the robotic arm operator for inspecting the shuttle, supporting spacewalks, and maneuvering the Multi-Purpose Logistics Module.
Annie Easley was one of the “human computers” at the Glenn Research Center doing computations by hand for researchers. She developed and implemented code used in researching energy-conversion systems, analyzing alternative power technologies.
Christine Mann Darden is an internationally known researchers in aerodynamics who authored over 57 technical publications about sonic booms, supersonic wing design, and other topics.
Mary Jackson was a research mathematician, or “computer,” at the Langley Research Center who became an aerospace engineer. She worked to analyze data from wind tunnel experiments and real-world aircraft flight experiments.
Dorothy Vaughn became the acting head of the West Area Computers in 1949, a work group composed entirely of African American female mathematicians.
Katherine Johnson helped track NASA’s orbital missions from 1953 to 1986. She calculated the flight trajectory for astronaut Alan Shepard during his history-making space flight as the first American to go into space in 1959. She also verified the orbital mathematics for John Glenn as he became the first American to orbit the Earth in 1962, and calculated the flight trajectory for Apollo 11’s historic Moon landing mission in 1969.
To learn about the other women featured, check out https://www.nasa.gov/stem-ed-resources/Women_of_Color_Lithograph.html.
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