Since her brood of four boys have moved out and married, their bedrooms have become projects of sorts.
I walked into one bedroom after taking photos of her. It looked like the command center of a military installation with top-of-the-line technology jammed into the space. She has a Macintosh Notebook. "It’s all I have ever used," she said.
I felt as though I should have one, too. I won’t tell her about my IBM Thinkpad.
Townsend has always been ahead of her time. She enrolled in college at 15, was married by 18 and was the first woman to graduate from George Washington University with a degree in engineering. That year, she shared her graduation day with her husband Charles who had just finished medical school.
They were a power couple when Father Knows Best was Zeitgeist. She baked cookies. But she also built and launched small satellites.
Go figure.
Townsend began her career at the Naval Research Lab where, in eight years, she worked her way up from a junior engineer to one of the 10 youngest senior engineers there. During that time, she gave birth four times without ever taking a leave without pay. After each of the first two births, she said, her bosses assumed she wasn’t coming back. By the fourth baby, they kept giving her more work until she was practically on the delivery table. " I think they finally got it, " she said.
Looking for more challenge, she left for NASA in 1959 where she directed the design of the ground system for the Tyros 2 weather satellite. Eventually she took on a management role as project manager for NASA’s Small Astronomy Satellite (SAS) project, a joint Italian-American venture, which involved the launching of satellites to locate and map sources of X-rays and gamma rays in galaxies. The program revolutionized the study of X-ray emitting stars.
Despite her obvious achievements in her career, Townsend still resonates old-fashioned values.
She asked if I would join her and her husband for lunch. We spoke over pasta with pesto, reminiscent of her days in Italy. What really stuck her craw, she said, was the way the NASA treated the Russians during the days of negotiating the building of the space station.
"They were brought over to a meeting here in the United States," she said. "NASA officials went out to lunch and said to the Russians ‘see you after lunch.’ How are they supposed to know where to eat? I was appalled. It never occurred to me to be so inconsiderate of guests."
Until this day, Townsend has a tremendous amount of pride in what she accomplished at Goddard. She worked on projects that began to give us valuable information about our planet at a time when the media devoted most of its ink to the sexier story of human spaceflight.
NASA also perpetuated the image of the astronaut as the new American icon, focusing much of its energy on the program.
"It’s the same old, same old," she said. "They are more concerned about getting [astronauts] up there than they are planning on doing useful things," she said. "It comes back to arrogance and there is an enormous amount of arrogance at Johnson Space Center. It permeates the place."
In addition to what she considers an obvious bias toward the astronaut program, Townsend had to also deal with cutbacks on research and development.
"We could find amazing new data but we could never follow through because there was never enough data-analysis money," she said with a high degree of frustration. "The vision of a scientist sitting in his office for 10 years is not as exciting as a launch."
But Townsend said that her projects were always completed on time, and usually under budget.
Much like her obstetrician husband, she took on a maternal approach to her work. For instance, she would show the same foresightedness and precision, whether packing for her trips abroad or assuring satellites were swaddled in protective coverings to shield them from the sun and poor weather.
Did this maternal approach make it difficult for her at the mostly male office she worked in at NASA?
She’s unfazed about male attitudes. "Half the time it was happening, I didn’t even notice it," she said. But she points out that there was a scintilla of stereotyping now and then. For example, she said when a woman makes a judgment about something, men call it "female intuition." But when it comes from a man, it’s labeled "an educated guess."
Lunch is over and we retire to the living room. Her husband Charles is left with the dishes. "He always does the dishes," she said.
Our conversation comes full circle. We realize that much of what Townsend was talking about regarding the problems with the space program are as true now as they were years ago.
One problem in particular weighs heavy on our conversation.
"There was always that feeling, and still is, that men won’t work for a woman," she said.
Townsend worries that it may be the reason some women are staying away from engineering careers even when they have gone to engineering school.
Lucky for us, she has 11 grandchildren, six of whom are girls.
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