Making Space for Women

In 1981, Ellen Ochoa, a Stanford graduate student studying optical information processing, watched as the space shuttle Columbia orbited the Earth 37 times. It was the first manned American flight since the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project six years earlier, and the excitement among Ochoa´s predominantly male classmates—many of whom had been in contact with NASA for years in hopes of one day becoming astronauts themselves—was contagious.