Michael Delgorio 🌎

Brooklyn, 1952. Judith Love Cohen, 19, asks her high school counselor about math classes. The counselor smiles like she’s talking to a child. “Honey, nice girls go to finishing school. Learn to pour tea.” Judith enrolls in Brooklyn College. Engineering. Hundreds in the lecture hall. Women: one. Her. “Boys laughed when I raised my hand,” she said. “So I raised it higher.” She transfers to USC. Finishes bachelor’s + master’s. Never sees another female engineering student. Graduates 1957. Class of 800. Women: 8. America’s engineers: 0.05% women. She’s one of them. Then NASA calls. 1960s. Apollo needs brains. Gender? Secondary. Competence? Everything. Judith joins the team building the Abort-Guidance System for the Lunar Module. The AGS. The “oh crap” button. If the main computer dies, this box flies you home. Or you don’t come home. “It had to work,” she said. “Because if you needed it, you were already dying.” Orbital mechanics. Electrical chaos. Code that can’t glitch. She lives in equations for months. August 1968. Nine months pregnant. Still at her desk. Coworkers: “Go home, Judith.” Judith: “The math isn’t due. I am.” Morning contractions start. She grabs her printouts — pages of trajectories, circuits, logic — and drives to work. Contractions get real. Team: “HOSPITAL. NOW.” Judith: “Fine.” Takes the printouts. Hospital bed. Nurses walk in. She’s between contractions, scribbling on computer sheets. “Ma’am, you’re in labor.” “I’m in math,” she says. Then it clicks. The final bug in the AGS. Solved. Then she pushes. Baby boy: Thomas Jacob. You know him as Jack Black. Next day she calls her boss. “I fixed the guidance problem.” Pause. “Oh. And the baby came too.” April 13, 1970. 200,000 miles from Earth. BOOM. Apollo 13. Oxygen tank explodes. Command Module dying. Three men crawl into the Lunar Module — built for 2 people, 1 day. They need it for 3 people, 4 days. Primary computer stutters. Backup comes alive. Judith’s AGS. It holds. Calculates burns. Aligns spacecraft. Verifies they’re not flying into deep space forever. “Without AGS, we don’t come home,” said Jim Lovell later. April 17, 1970. Splashdown. Alive. The world cheers the astronauts. Inside NASA, engineers hug. “The backup worked.” Judith’s backup. Apollo 13 crew visits TRW to say thanks. Judith shakes their hands. No speech. Back to work. She keeps going. Hubble Space Telescope systems. TDRS satellites — ran 40 years. Papers. Patents. Mentors girls. Writes kids’ books: You Can Be a Woman Engineer. “Girls need to see it to be it,” she said. “TV gave them lawyers. I’ll give them astronauts.” Raised four kids. Danced ballet with the Met Opera while doing engineering school. “My first loves,” her son Neil wrote, “were dancing and equations.” July 25, 2016. Age 82. She’s gone. Son Jack Black posts 2019: Photo of Mom, 1959, next to a Pioneer spacecraft. “My mom literally helped save Apollo 13. Finished the problem IN LABOR WITH ME. How do you top that?” The counselor said “finishing school.” Judith chose “finishing equations.” Three astronauts owe their lives to that choice. “They said I didn’t belong,” Judith said once. “So I built something that belonged in space. And brought them home.” She never flew. But she made sure others could. From a hospital bed. Between contractions. With a pencil.