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Linda (Getch) Dawson ’71 grew up in the midst of the space race between the US and the USSR. She recalls driving with her family to the observatory to hear the sound of the Soviet satellite Sputnik flying overhead. “It’s funny that your path takes different turns, but I always went back to my first love: the aerospace industry,” she says. Dawson’s journey took her from Massachusetts Institute of Technology to NASA, and then into a second career as a teacher and writer, for which her colleagues and journalists were nicknamed “Rocket Woman”.

UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON, TAKOMA

Dawson says her “most exciting job” in the aerospace industry is as an aerodynamic flight controller at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. It was the late 70s, and she was on the mission and guidance team responsible for ensuring the safe return of the space shuttle to the atmosphere. She ran “endless simulations with astronauts and pilots” to determine how much fuel would be required for the first flight, taking into account the most severe failures. She was on duty in flight control during launch and reentry, performing several more simulations to define and redefine shuttle flight rules as conditions changed. “When you fly at supersonic and hypersonic speeds, everything happens so fast that you don’t have the luxury of flipping through a book to find out what to do if something goes wrong,” she says. She left NASA long before the Challenger and Columbia disasters showed how dangerous human space travel can be – but many years later she shared her vision of these tragedies in her first book.

After NASA and Boeing Aerospace, Dawson spent over 20 years as a senior lecturer at the University of Washington, Tacoma, where she developed courses for women in science, as well as the history and science of space exploration. But, according to her, “I could not find a reasonable [space] a book that satisfied what I thought should have been condensed — it was either too technical or a children’s book. ” So Dawson decided to write her own. The politics and dangers of space exploration (Springer, 2017, second edition coming this year) and War in space (Springer, 2018) tells the story of the space program and delves into the complex modern politics of space exploration, with different companies and countries competing for access and resources.

After retiring from teaching, Dawson continues to write and lecture at the Seattle Flight Museum, where she has been a volunteer for many years. “There are whole new generations of young people in the museum who still want to do rockets and learn about space,” she says. “Nice to see that.”