Who is Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, the first female launch director in NASA history?

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The launch of Artemis 1 is postponed to September 2 or 5. But do you know who is the person who decided on the postponement and who is also the one who will give the “go” when the time comes? For the first time in the history of NASA, it is a woman. Her name is Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, unknown in France spotted by American television channels.

>> LIVE. Liftoff of the mega-rocket of the Artemis mission to the Moon is postponed to Friday at the earliest due to a technical problem

And especially by female reporters, like one of NBC’s star reporters, Kristen Dahlgren, live from the Cape Canaveral launch pad: “We’re gonna have a new voice in the launch roomlaunches the American journalist. For the very first time, a female launch director! I’m so excited to introduce her to you. If you have young children, she is super inspiring.”

Charlie Blackwell-Thompson is a tall woman with long red hair. Behind a broad smile, she exudes a kind of serenity. Her age isn’t clear anywhere but you’ll do the math, she’s been preparing for 34 years since her computer engineering degree in 1988 at Clemson University, near where she was born and raised. , in Gaffney, South Carolina. His parents and grandparents were farmers. She says they worked hard and lived on their cattle and their land. Something she has striven to pass on to her three grown children, Matt, Cody and Lhotse.

Her passion for space came to her in the 1960s, with the Apollo missions that she watched take off on TV. She was then in primary school, and inevitably that marked her, but without directing a NASA launch becoming an absolute objective for her. On leaving university, however, she was hired by Boeing as a payload flight software engineer, then at NASA in 2004. She discovered for real the launch room where the Apollo 11 mission took place, in July 1969, and where it runs operations today.

She herself says, however, that she was confronted with the syndrome of the impostor before becoming very inspiring. “I grew up in rural South Carolinasays Charlie Blackwell-Thompson in an interview with Florida Today. I liked the space…”

“I knew I was good at math and science. But I wasn’t one of those young people who knew exactly what they wanted to do.”

Charlie Blackwell-Thompson

at Florida Today

“I would tell young women that if you are passionate about something, if you have a dream, I am proof that you can achieve it. message to all young girls: ‘Yes, you can do it!'”

Other women have been able to access important functions at NASA, but often at the cost of a tough fight. History records about fifteen of them, notably in 1939 the first female engineer Kitty O’Brien Joyner, who had to sue her all-male school to obtain her diploma. She worked on turbines in the wind tunnel and then did research on supersonic flight. We can also cite Katherine Johnson hired in 1953 as a “human computer” to calculate the trajectories of Alan Shepard, the first man in space, then in 1969, the trajectory of Apollo 11.

For this mission which should open the door to America’s return to the Moon, Chazrlie Blackwell Thomson has 91 engineers and 60 other technicians in front of her in an emergency room. All seated in front of hundreds of screens and clutching, deep in their pockets, on the one hand, their “Clemson 88” university cord, out of pride for their school. Ella has a host of small objects given to her by her three children, now adults: in particular a small plastic ring from a chewing-gum machine given to her by her daughter Lhoste when she was 3 or 4 years old. There was an umbrella on it and she told him “maybe it will stop the rain”, and that is what happened. Since then, she has had this ring on her little finger for every launch. But, she also has a lucky coin, a welded wire pin that says “mom” and a little note: “You are the best mom in the world.”


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