Honoring the women who helped humans go to space
When NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson retired in 1986, she’d spent three-plus decades at the agency and only seen a handful of American women go into space. One, of course, was Sally Ride in 1983; the second was Judith Resnik, who died in the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. But it wasn’t for a lack of potential. “Girls are capable of doing everything men are capable of doing,” Johnson said in an interview years later. “Sometimes they have more imagination than men.”Though Johnson knew this about women and vouched for them through much of her career, it’s taken the U.S. space program much longer to catch on. By the time she passed earlier this year, the ranks of female astronauts had nearly pulled even with males. But NASA still isn’t quite there. Of the agency’s 48 active astronauts, only a third are women—and none have stepped foot on the moon yet.In a...