When you love your work, you never work a day in your life. Perhaps you have heard this before? This is on display at NASA, Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas. Dr. Jennifer M. Ross-Nazzal’s “Making Space for Women” shows us that NASA JSC is fundamentally a very good employer for women today. But as a NASA Historian, Dr. Ross knew the path was not always easy for women to work in society, much less NASA, and she gave voice to the history of our nation’s space program and its impact on women in their own words, through interviews.

This book spans our nation’s space program beginning with how it was originally formed, its original selection of astronauts, and the events of our Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Skylab, Apollo-Soyuz, Space Shuttle and the newest Space Launch System Programs. Women not yet seen in motion picture films today are the secretaries, administrative assistants, technicians, astronauts, and upper management featured in all of these programs. Some stories told by employees actually interweave in time.

When our space program was young, there were no “space stores” to buy equipment. There were no instruction manuals on anything. There are women contributing to these functions. Women were mathematically proving where our astronauts could go. There are women making sure our astronauts suits are safe for their tasks, whether they are designing to sew and create the suit or fitting the suit on the astronaut in preparation for an actual mission. There are women building our space vehicles.