Apollo 11's JoAnn Morgan and Artemis's Charlie Blackwell Thompson in the Firing Room

For Women's History Month 2024, NASA sat two women down at a launch console at Kennedy Space Center: JoAnn Morgan, the instrumentation controller who was the first and only woman in the firing room for Apollo 11, and Charlie Blackwell Thompson, NASA's first woman launch director, who leads the Artemis launches from that same room.

JoAnn Morgan's road to the Cape

• Her career: instrumentation controller in this room for Apollo; later, for the shuttle program, director of payload projects; then a safety and mission assurance director and associate director of the center. She retired in 2003. Coming back, she says, "this is like home."
• The spark: at Titusville High School — her father worked for the Army and then NASA, and most of her classmates' families worked at what was then Cape Canaveral, before there was a Kennedy Space Center — she watched Explorer 1 launch and read about the Van Allen belt discovery. Until then she had expected to be a piano teacher with four to six children, like her mother and grandmother. The new knowledge coming from a rocket changed her mind: her freshman astronomy book, she notes, was rewritten nine times after she went to college.
• 1958: she started in June as an engineer's aide at the Army's missile firing laboratory — the first woman summer student the Army had there, in a work group with no other women. In October, the laboratory was folded into the newly formed NASA. An article announcing the summer students mixed up the captions and put her photograph over a young man's name.

Mentors. All her mentors at work were men. A math teacher saw her doing homework in class — math was hard on the school bus between Titusville and Mims — and kept her chapters ahead of everyone. Short of math courses when she started, she was guided by Wernher von Braun and Kurt Debus, who told her what to study; she rode a bus to Patrick for a course offered to young officers, and took classes at FIT and UCF when they were new. Her first supervisor, Jim White, told everyone she was not the coffee girl, his driver or a secretary, but an engineer trainee, to be treated as one.

Small indignities. Women had to wear dresses to work until the 1970s. Walking onto a construction site in one, she would cause a work stoppage, and the contractor would blame the delay on the young woman walking around — who was doing her job.

Apollo 11

At the time, Morgan was not thinking about being the only woman in the room; she was thinking about the mission, which she already saw as the greatest engineering achievement of humankind. Her husband, a high school bandmaster, saw the rest first: on the night of the landing, as she toasted with champagne, he told her she would be in the history books.

What the day gave her personally was respect. She sat in a row of five or six people who had built all this — von Braun, Debus, Ike Rigell, Rocco Petrone — and she had been on the site activation team that helped build the spaceport, still, she says, the most envied on the planet.

Feeling a launch. She wanted to feel the floor shake at Apollo 11, and did: through her chair's armrests she felt the vibration in her bones. Blackwell Thompson felt it for the first time at Artemis I — the windows rattling from the pad's pressure wave, then the floor vibrating under her feet as she watched the ascent. Both describe it as a whole-body experience.

Charlie Blackwell Thompson's road

• At home, her mother taught her she could do anything she was willing to work for — so she never saw roles as for women or for men, even in engineering classes with few women.
• At school, an 11th-grade physics teacher she called Doc told her to study engineering. When she asked what she would do with the degree, he answered: what couldn't you do? It was not much help at the time, she says, but it turned out to be true — and she later went back to thank him.
• In this room, as a college senior, she listened on the loops while Space Shuttle Discovery was tested to fly again after Challenger, and knew she wanted to earn a place there. About 30 years later she has never left.
• In 2019, prompted by Morgan a year or two before, she brought the Apollo 11 team back to Firing Room 1 for the 50th anniversary, to meet the Artemis launch team — one of the thrills of her career.

Advice

Morgan: engineering is an incredible profession — learn the math, do your homework, study hard. Build inner strength, help everyone at work be aware and accepting of one another, and earn respect by doing the job. To 12- and 14-year-olds afraid of chemistry and biology: it's fun — cooking is chemistry and biology. Think STEM: science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Blackwell Thompson: the same — and she hopes to be for someone else what Doc was for her, asking: what couldn't you do with that degree?

Sources

Based on "Fireside Chat with Artemis Launch Director Charlie Blackwell Thompson and Apollo 11's JoAnn Morgan," NASA Image and Video Library, with its transcript; NASA material, not copyrighted and in the public domain; rewritten in hubnx's own words.