Kyle led the whole tour group across the polished floor of the museum, past the moon rock and the model capsule, to the tall glass wall at the back of the gallery where nine hundred names were etched in neat rows. He did not need to hunt. He went straight to the bottom row and put his finger against the glass beside the only woman name on it. His voice was thin. “Bernice Okafor. Flight Dynamics Officer. Mission Control, Houston. Nineteen sixty nine to nineteen eighty nine.” I am Bernice Okafor, seventy eight years old, and I stood at the back of the crowd in my lavender cardigan, with a little gold mission pin on my collar, holding the hand of my grandson Daniel.
In 1969, at twenty two, I was hired as a mathematician by NASA in a room full of men with slide rules. By 1975, I was the first woman ever to sit at a flight dynamics console in Mission Control, and I plotted the return trajectories for eleven shuttle missions. I never once spoke on the loop without being corrected by someone who assumed I was the secretary. The little gold pin on my collar, shaped like a capsule, was given to every controller on the night of a successful landing, and mine was from the first one.
An old volunteer in a red museum vest, eighty five years old and seated on a bench near the Apollo exhibit, got slowly to his feet. “Bernice,” he said. “Bernice Okafor. You called the burn on STS four. I was in the third row and I heard you do it.” The tour group, nineteen people, stood frozen in front of the glass. A mother with a toddler put a hand over her mouth. A teenage boy in a rocket t shirt lifted his phone to take a photograph and then, with a flush, put it down.
A small gold pin on a lavender collar gave one retired flight controller the length of a museum tour to bring a young guide back to the stars in Houston.
I gave my terms with a smile, since I never did learn how to be harsh with someone who loves the stars. “Kyle, you are not in trouble. You are twenty three years old, you adore this museum, and you were trying to protect the exhibits from people who might wear pins that do not belong to them. I would ask for two small favors. Add my row to your tour. And give me the microphone for five minutes, because I should like to tell these children how we brought eleven crews home using nothing but a pencil and a table of numbers.”
Kyle handed me the microphone and his hand shook. “Mrs. Okafor, I have given this tour four hundred times,” he said, and the tears came now. “I say that nine hundred men stood at those consoles. I say that the history of Mission Control is a history of brave men.” He pressed his knuckles to his mouth. “I have been standing in front of your name every day and I never once looked. I told you that the pin was a toy.” He bowed his head. “I told my own grandmother, a school teacher, that women did not do that work.”
But in his mortification he made a last mistake. Kyle reached out in a rush, unpinned the gold capsule from my collar, and hurried for the staff door at the side of the gallery, saying he would take it to the curator for verification. He was three steps away when the old volunteer in the red vest moved into his path with astonishing speed. Daniel, my grandson, ran to the door and put his back against it. The mother with the toddler turned her stroller sideways, and the teenager in the rocket shirt held out both arms.
Kyle stopped before the staff door, with the pin shining in his fist and a ring of visitors around him. The old volunteer spoke in a voice that had once called countdowns. “Son,” he said, “I have been in this building for forty years. There is only one rule that matters. You never leave a crew behind.” Kyle looked at the pin in his hand. He walked slowly back across the polished floor, and then, in front of nineteen strangers, he took my hand, put the little capsule in it, and closed my fingers around it.
The consequences were stellar. Kyle rewrote his tour that very evening, and he began it from then on with the bottom row of the wall. The museum director called me the next morning and asked if I would give a talk to the schoolchildren on Thursdays, and I said yes. I stood in front of two hundred seventh graders with a chalkboard and a model of an orbit, and I told them that math was only a way of being brave. Kyle sat in the back, taking notes.
In the name of my husband Emeka, who passed in 2016, I started the Emeka Okafor Fund. It pays for scholarships and summer science camps for girls who love mathematics and engineering, in Harris, Galveston and Brazoria counties. In the first year we sent thirty seven girls to space camp and funded eight college scholarships. One was a fourteen year old from Pasadena whose mother cleaned offices at the Johnson Space Center, and who built a working model of a re entry trajectory at the kitchen table.
In April, on a warm Thursday afternoon, I stood again in the gallery in front of the glass wall with Daniel at my side and thirty schoolchildren behind me. Kyle gave the tour. When he reached the bottom row, he stopped, and pointed, and in a clear voice he said, “This name belongs to the woman who brought eleven crews home. She is standing right here.” A little girl in pigtails, no more than nine, stepped forward and traced the letters of my name on the glass with her finger. Then she looked up at me and asked how to become a flight controller.