This piece is a profile of Poppy Northcutt entitled “One-Time Rocket Scientist, Full-Time Feminist.” In light of recent events with the federal government, I wanted to share this piece about how one woman altered the public’s perception of NASA and advocated for civil rights in her city.

 

If you know the name Poppy Northcutt, you likely recognize her as the first woman engineer in NASA’s Mission Control. A specialist in return-to-Earth trajectories, Northcutt provided calculations for the astronauts to return home safely. She was hired as a "computress,” but fought for equal pay for women when she was not equally compensated for the same work as her male counterparts. While at the Manned Space Center, Northcutt became a prominent figure for NASA. The novelty of a skirt among slacks brought several hours of interviews a week from journalists, public affairs officers, and others.

 

In the 1960s, Northcutt calculated trajectories for all but one of the Apollo missions. After the missions were completed, the space agency began anticipating the next step: Mars. Trajectory engineers, including Northcutt, began running the numbers. However, after the United States landed on the moon in 1969, President Richard Nixon began dismantling the space program.

 

During her final years at NASA, Northcutt focused on dismantling a different issue: workplace discrimination. After her publicity as the female face of Mission Control, Northcutt was nearly impossible to fire. While her company

promoted her to equal rank as her male coworkers, There was a systemic problem in the American Workforce to be addressed. Northcutt felt she was uniquely qualified to speak when others might not feel safe to do so.

 

After her first experience picketing outside a federal building in 1970, she joined the women’s liberation movement.

Northcutt and other Texas women targeted the most progressive candidate running for Houston mayor. At his campaign events, they doggedly asked questions about what he would do to equalize women’s workplace rights.

By day, Northcutt mathematically determined the flightpath for the Space Shuttle; by night, she navigated the path of convincing elected officials to commit to gender equality.

 

But Northcutt’s day job became lackluster. The excitement and challenge was missing. NASA wasn’t boldly going where we hadn’t gone before, just routine visits to low-Earth orbit. Northcutt began looking at her options. A new 18-month position opened at the mayor’s office: women’s advocate. The job description was fuzzy at the time, but Northcutt was brimming with a detailed agenda: eliminating height requirements that prevent women from the police workforce, opening firefighting work to women, increasing pregnancy benefits, and making childcare available. Northcutt was hired. 

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One major win was negotiating with the Houston Chief of Police to allow women to apply to the police force. After the change, the police academy saw six women join classes. In six months’ time, half of the class were women.

Within short order, they graduated and filled the “women’s jobs,” like running the juvenile corrections facility. Northcutt convinced the police chief to place women in a visible nonpatrol role: traffic officers. Texas women had a new career path open to them and they could see it in the Houston streets.

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She brought the same tenacity and relentlessness to changes to the city of Houston as when she had worked for NASA. One time, she counted every public restroom in Houston, determined there were more men’s than women’s,

and then advocated for gender parity in toilet count. In our conversation, Northcutt said "I was trying to do something in every area possible." When her tenure with the Mayor’s Office ended, Northcutt returned to NASA during the day and began attending law school in the evenings.

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In 1981, Northcutt graduated and then became a criminal defense lawyer. Her years of training as a mathematician and experience as an engineer came in handy. She questioned chemists on the stand about how they proved a substance was cocaine. At one point, Northcutt asked a witness about how he stored the chemical reagents

that helped identify particular substances. She got into the details, including freezing temperatures and the fine print on the box, that the chemist couldn’t care to read. If the chemical lab wasn’t planning for contingencies like when the electricity goes out, how could they ensure the reagents were stored correctly and would continue to work properly?

Northcutt found her own way to refute the expert’s certainty.

 

Today, Northcutt continues to provide legal representation to girls who need medical treatment like abortions, especially when the defendant cannot speak for herself. Her work isn’t as televised or public as it once was, but it’s still important.

 

Northcutt always carved her own path in life, despite the assumptions people made: college professors, engineers, supervisors, lawmakers, or even society at large. Whether calculating spaceflight trajectories or fighting legal barriers, Northcutt attacks those preconceived notions and challenges the status quo. Something she said in our conversation about her experience with the chemist seemed to apply to her entire life: “I learned early on, always think about what assumptions they’ve made and blow it up. Because they often had not dealt with the little gray area where the assumption stops being true.”