Have you ever looked back on your life and said “Oh, that changed everything”?  One of those moments happened to me.  It was when our new Astronaut class first got together in 1978.  There were thirty-five of us and most of us didn’t know each other yet.  A reception was planned and we all arrived at the venue.  As I walked in, I noticed two very good-looking fellows down the hallway.  One was blonde and the other dark-haired.  As I got closer,...

Despite NASA’s many accomplishments like the moon landing, the Space Shuttle and the Space Station, there were bound to be errors and mistakes, large and small along the way. Want to hear a few that I was aware of? During one of the Shuttle flights one of the females got her long hair caught in a piece of equipment and it pulled a bunch of her hair out. Ouch! NASA bosses (all men at the time) made a rule that all the women had to restrain their...

This past endless year of Covid, reminded me of other long waits in my life and the patience it took to get to the end of one thing to begin something better. I remember my many years at NASA and how long each step took to get into space. I had wanted to be an Astronaut since childhood, but NASA didn’t take women. I had faith they would someday. What education, what specialty, what physical requirements would increase my chances of becoming an...

The recent hurricanes that have been devastating so much of the Gulf Coast and beyond remind me what it was like to live near the Johnson Space Center several miles south of Houston near the coast. Over the course of our almost 20 years there, my family had to weather several large tornadoes and hurricanes. We soon learned what steps we had to take before the hurricane and what we would face after. Hurricane Alicia in 1983, a category 3 storm,...

When women were admitted to the Astronaut Corps in 1978, many decisions needed to be made. Some were very important and some were mundane. Most of those decisions had to be made with male engineers. There were no female engineers at NASA back then. Soon after we arrived, we were invited to a meeting with the engineers to decide on something of great importance. How would women contain their urine while waiting on the launch pad for liftoff?...

In the early 1960’s, NASA was ready to fly people into space. They chose from the ranks of the military test pilots. These men were called the Mercury 7 Astronauts because they flew during the Mercury program. They had gone through a great deal of testing to make sure they were physically and mentally able to withstand what had been predicted to befall humans in space. No one knew what the rigors of microgravity would do to the human body. Did...