JoAnn Hardin Morgan: The Only Woman in Apollo 11’s Control Room
A photo from the Apollo 11 launch in 1969 shows a room full of men pensively watching the liftoff sporting their crips, white shirts and ties. Amid the sea of crisp white shirts and ties sits one woman. She is Joanne Morgan, an engineer and mathematician brought into NASA as a Junior Engineer and was serving as Instrument Controller for Apollo 11. When NASA hired Morgan, her supervisor called everyone in for a meeting. White told his crew to treat her as an engineer. He also made it clear that she was not their “buddy,” and they were to refer to her as Ms. Hardin. White set the limits – the men were to treat her as one of their own. According to NASA, one of the engineers asked, “Well, can we ask her to make coffee?” White quickly, and definitively, said, “No. You don’t ask an engineer to make coffee.”