Women celebrated the first in space, long before this mission

Published

2025-04-14 12:27

12:27

April 14, 2025

Pm

On Monday, Blue Origins brought new shepard carriers to six women into space, about 62 miles above the earth’s surface, for the first all-women crew flight since a solo mission in 1963.

The new Shepard carrier vehicle has brought celebrities into space for short joyrids since 2021 when the Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos first took a flight. It is fully autonomous and has no pilot. The passengers on Monday were Bezos’ fiance Lauren Sánchez, the journalist Gayle King, the singer Katy Perry, former Nasa rocket scientist Aisha Bowe, the bioastonaut research scientist Amanda Nguyễn and the film producer Kerianne Flynn.

But women have been making significant and content-related contributions in the area of ​​aerospace for over 100 years. These are some of the pioneering astronauts, scientists, engineers and mathematicians who have redefined space travel For the whole of humanity:

• Pearl I. Jung was hired in 1922 as the first female scientist at NASA when the agency was called the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. As a physicist, she created a technical writing system that significantly improved the LARC approach (NASA Langley Research Center) and is still used today.
• Katherine Johnson the LARC joined in 1953 and calculated the trajectories for the Apollo 11 mission and many other US space ride. Astronauts like John Glenn, the first American who creeps up the earth, said they would only fly if Johnson checked the calculations. As a black woman, her groundbreaking work has been overlooked for decades. In 2015 she received the presidential medal of freedom.
• Margaret Hamilton Created the software that sent people to the moon. She headed the software engineering department of the Laboratory instrumentation when she was commissioned by NASA in 1961 to develop the guiding system of the Apollo program. Through her work, Hamilton – which received the presidential medal of freedom in 2016 – shaped the term and job “software engineer”.
• Valentina TereshkovaA Soviet cosmonaut was the first woman who traveled in space in 1963. As the first woman who circled the planet, she completed a three-day solo mission on board the Vostok 6 spacecraft.
• Sally Ride Became the third woman who flew in space and the first American woman to do this in 1983. At the age of 32, she was the youngest American, who traveled in space at the time, as part of NASA’s five-person crew from STS-7. In 2013 she received a posthumous presidential medal of freedom.
• Mae jemison Became the first black woman and the first woman of color in the world in 1992 into space. As a physicist and chemical engineer, she was a NASA astronaut for six years.
• Peggy Whitson Was the first woman to command the international space station in 2007, but she had already written history several times at that time. She spent more time in space than any other person: about 675 days over several room areas.
• Christina Koch took part in the first all-Woman SpaceWalk with the NASA astronaut Jessica Meir in 2019. The couple replaced a faulty battery loading controller at the international space station.