The first woman to run the Marshall Space Flight Center says women at NASA have come a long way. They will literally go farther than ever before if the rocket she is building can put the first of her gender on the moon. Jody Singer speaks to Bill Whitaker for a 60 Minutes report on NASA’s Artemis Program, which intends to put a woman on the moon sometime in this decade. The story will be broadcast Sunday, March 7, at 7 p.m. on CBS.
When she joined NASA, Singer was once one of just a few female engineers there; today, she’s one of several running the Artemis Program. “Well, number one, I’d say we’ve come a long way. You know, Charlie and I, we know we’ve known each other for at least 20 years. We liked each other. But also, we were, you know, sometimes the only women in the room,” Singer tells Whitaker.
“Charlie” is Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, the first female launch director at NASA. She says 30 percent of the engineers in her firing room at Kennedy Space Center will be women when the first Artemis rocket takes off.
America’s space program has fascinated her since she was a child Blackwell-Thompson says. “I remember the last Apollo missions, the last couple. And I can remember the sense of curiosity and awe that I could go outside and I could look up at the sky, and that our astronauts were visiting the moon.”
Whitaker explores the various aspects of the Artemis program – named for Apollo’s mythological twin sister – including the nine men and nine women chosen for its pool of astronauts. The program has experienced significant delays and cost overruns, and Lori Garver, a former number two official at NASA, contends that those problems might have been avoided had Congress allowed the agency to rely more on commercial launch providers and less on expensive government contracts and political mandates.
Blackwell-Thompson says going back to the moon promises more valuable knowledge. “There is much more to learn. We are still learning from the samples that were returned during the Apollo program,” she says. “There is so much science– so much scientific discovery to come from returning to the moon.
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