How Poppy Northcutt became the first woman in the Apollo mission control room | Salon.com
▻https://www.salon.com/2019/07/04/how-poppy-northcutt-became-the-first-woman-in-the-apollo-mission-control-room
When most people think about the Apollo space program, and the people behind those historic missions, a slew of white men might come to mind: Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Jim Lovell — the astronauts who went to the moon. But as Frances “Poppy” Northcutt told me in our interview, just as it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to take someone to the moon, too. “The teamwork that was involved is one of the most incredible things about Apollo,” Northcutt told Salon. “The extent of the team — people don’t understand that team wasn’t just what you saw on TV.” Rather, it was about 400,000 people spread all around the world, she explains.
One of those 400,000 was Northcutt herself. As the first woman to work in Apollo’s Mission Control Room — as an engineer — she was responsible for calculating return trajectories for Apollo 8, the first mission to leave Earth’s orbit and circle the moon. Among other missions to the moon that she worked on, she famously helped retrieve the Apollo 13 astronauts after a mid-flight disaster. But you would never know a woman was behind that from watching the 1995 Hollywood movie about that near-deadly mishap. Northcutt’s erasure from “Apollo 13” embodies how women who were paramount to the Apollo moon missions were confined to the background for decades.