SPACE RACE
PIONEER
Calculating career went from secretary to working on the space shuttle
By Mary Ann Koenig
In 1966, women couldn’t get a credit card
without their husbands as a cosigner. They
weren’t allowed to run the Boston Marathon,
and it wasn’t until 1973 that all 50 states
allowed women to serve on a jury. But in that
year, Jean Hopkins was working on calculating
the expectation of casualty on forced reentry for
an experimental space program.
Her career as a pioneering woman in the space
industry spanned 30 years and took her from a
secretarial position to working with the team who
returned the space shuttle program to flight after
the Challenger tragedy.
Career opportunities came to her in the new
and burgeoning space industry because of
her math capabilities. She initially worked at
Georgia Tech’s Engineering Experiment Station,
a research lab supported by a grant from the
National Science Foundation. They were utilizing
a new technology, a UNIVAC computer, and
Hopkins had a secretarial job working for William
Atchison, the head of the lab.
“Dr. Atchison had worked on some of the first
computers,” she says. “It took up an entire room.
It was full of tubes, and we had to program it in
machine language.”
She eventually learned computer language to
program the UNIVAC after Atchison discovered
she could type his equations correctly.
“He always promised me that when he had an
opening for a new programmer, I would get the
job,” she explains. “I always worked for nice
people, I’m so lucky.”
SMALL-TOWN GIRL
Hopkins grew up in the Cocoa area but was born
in Orlando because the closest hospital in 1934
was Orange Memorial.
Her parents lived in Sharpes, six miles north of
Cocoa, which she describes as a very small town.
They were Connecticut Yankees who moved
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ANTHONY INSWASTY
Jean Hopkins was born and raised in the Cocoa area and had a 30-year career in the space
industry spanning a period of legendary firsts in space exploration.
>>
to Florida because of her father’s
health. They opened a small general
store and Hopkins attended school
in Cocoa.
“There were 49 students in my
graduating class,” she remembers.
Hopkins excelled academically,
particularly in math, but that still
wasn’t enough to assure her a
higher education.
“My father thought, ‘what good is a
college education,’ ” she says. “But
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