Inside Apollo mission control, from the eyes of the first woman on the job
In the 1960s and '70s, Poppy Northcutt planned the vital flight trajectories that got astronauts home from their missions to the moon.
Poppy Northcutt was serious, preoccupied by the lunar landing plans she checked over and over again for good measure. As an engineer for NASA’s mission planning and analysis support team, she was responsible for getting astronauts home from orbit and the moon during multiple Apollo missions.
Creating and perfecting that return trajectory was no easy feat—especially in the scramble to fulfill President John F. Kennedy’s famous 1961 mandate to land humans on the moon by the end of the decade, which accelerated NASA’s lunar ambitions.
“The control center really had not had adequate time to train,” she recalls. “[They had] no time at all, to be honest.”
For Northcutt and her team, this meant working long hours under enormous pressure while figuring
