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.