ANTHONY INSWASTY
A flow diagram that calculated the expectation
of casualty for the space shuttle is
among the memorabilia that Hopkins saved
>> in neatly organized scrapbooks.
WINTER 2022: 59
my mother, who was a nurse, said that because I
was a good student I should go to college.”
With a small-town upbringing, her parents were
reluctant to send her away to a big university.
So, a Presbyterian school, Maryville College in
Maryville, Tennessee, was the solution. After her
sophomore year she transferred to Florida State
University, which was still an all-girls college
that would not become coeducational until after
World War II. She graduated with a degree in
mathematics in 1949.
She met Dean Risher, married him in 1952 and
they moved to Atlanta when Risher was hired
as an engineer at Georgia Tech, which was how
Hopkins ended up working at the computer lab.
But she was homesick and the couple returned
to Sharpes to be closer to her family and live in
the house where she grew up.
EARLY SPACE RACE DAYS
The new world of space exploration was evident
all around them in Cocoa. She got a job, again as
a secretary, at TRW Systems, an aerospace NASA
contractor, and moved up from there. The Space
Race was on. The Kennedy Space Center had
opened the previous year and Hopkins began
her 30-year, full-time, problem-solving career
as her work evolved from missiles to rockets and
then to the space shuttle.
Today her extensive catalog of binders and folders,
chronicles of primary source documents, are
evidence of the meticulous approach she adhered
to throughout her career.
“I kept them in case I needed to refer back
to any of the programs we were working on,”
Hopkins explains.
There are flow charts, handwritten notes of
long-division equations, as well as letters,
accolades, and remembrances from an era in
American space exploration, both troublesome
and triumphant.
Her work, all with NASA contractors, involved
calculations for safety protocols and projections
that were, in the early years, placed onto IBM
punch cards.
In 1977, while with Computer Sciences Corp.,
she and her colleagues began work on the
microwave scanning beam landing system, a
contract that was later transferred to Lockheed.
“We just changed our badges and continued the
same work,” she says.
HONORED FOR SHUTTLE WORK
In 1981, space shuttle Columbia, piloted by
Robert Crippen and John Young, was the
first reusable spacecraft with a crew. Among
NASA
On Jan. 28, 1986, Hopkins
was among employees and
spectators who witnessed the
explosion of the space shuttle
Challenger and the loss of her
seven-member crew soon
after launch.
Hopkins’ memorabilia is a First Shuttle
Flight Achievement Award signed by
the astronauts and accompanied by a
representative medallion.
The MSBLS was transferred to a PDP-
11 computer. The system provided
precise elevation, directional and
distance data that guided the space
shuttle for the last two minutes of
flight until it touched down. The PDP-
11 was an early, smaller computer that
could be taken to various MSBLS test
sites, such as California, Africa and
White Sands, New Mexico. Hopkins
was sent to White Sands and Edwards
AFB in California to support the tests.
“They would track a test airplane
to certify that the system worked
properly,” she says.
Her second husband, John Hopkins,
also worked at the Kennedy Space
Center as a computer programmer.
“He was an excellent mathematician,”
she says. “And I’d get help from him
especially when it came to interface it
with the computer. And since we drove
back and forth to work together, we
could collaborate.”