The space program of the 1960s was a man’s world. In a famous photo taken in Firing Room No. 1 of Kennedy Space Center on July 16, 1969, the day of Apollo 11’s launch, the consoles are populated by dozens of short-haired men in white shirts and skinny black ties, some of them in lab coats, many of them wearing pocket pen protectors. There is only one woman at a console, in a dark dress, her hand to her chin. Who is she?
I thought of this question again while writing about Apollo 11, the forthcoming documentary by Todd Douglas Miller that uses newly unearthed wide-screen film footage from the National Archives to tell the story of the first moon landing. During the mission’s launch phase, a pan across the firing room reveals this same very woman.
Her name, I learned, is JoAnn Morgan. At the time, she was a 28-year-old instrumentation controller and the first woman permitted to be inside the firing room—where all personnel were locked in 30 minutes before blastoff—during an Apollo launch. (There are other women in the photo, along the wall in the back, but that’s because the picture was taken nearly an hour after the launch, by which point some back-room staff members were allowed in to hear remarks by Vice President Spiro Agnew and other V.I.P.’s while awaiting the arrival of President Richard Nixon.)
Morgan retired from NASA in 2003, after a career whose inception more or less coincided with the agency’s own, in 1958. That year, as a 17-year-old about to attend the University of Florida, she interned at the U.S. Army Ballistic Missile Agency at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. She never looked back, becoming an engineer and executive at NASA. I recently spoke by phone with Morgan, a semi-hidden figure of U.S. space history. A condensed and edited version of our talk follows.
Vanity Fair: What was your position at the time of Apollo 11?
JoAnn Morgan: It was quite exciting for me, because I had worked on all the other Apollo launches, but they would never let me sit at the console during the liftoff phase. I was considered, until Apollo 11, a junior controller, and I had just been moved to a senior level.
What were some of the things you were entrusted with as an instrumentation controller?
Well, the guidance computers at the Central Instrumentation Facility, that’s the biggie. The whole lightning-detection and fire-detection systems at the launchpad. The operational communications and television systems. Monitoring the command carrier for any interference, which meant a ship or submarine trying to get on the frequency that we were using to send commands out to the vehicle.
And that had really happened in the past.
Oh, yeah, it happened. On Apollo 8, the Russians were offshore with a trawler and submarine, and they tried interfering with our transfer of command. They would try to block frequencies so we couldn’t give commands to the pad and the capsule. And it continued some on 9 and 10. What we had to do is put different antennas on and direct them differently so we could block them from interfering with our command process.
Was there someone who sat you down before Apollo 11 and said, “JoAnn, you’re going to be locked into the firing room this time”? Was that a moment?
It was, and I didn’t know it at the time—I learned this later—but it was a big discussion that went all the way up to the Kennedy Space Center director, Dr. Kurt Debus, who was one of the German scientists who came over with Wernher von Braun. My immediate supervisor had spoken with Karl Sendler, the director of information systems and another part of the German team. He talked to Karl Sendler and said, “I want to put JoAnn on console for liftoff. She’s my best communicator. I get clear information about how things are going. She’s also very disciplined.”