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5.0

"Helen laughed when she saw one of the girls using her manicured fingernails to draw the curve of a new spacecraft's trajectory. 'You're plotting the path to the moon on your fingers.'"

My love affair with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory began in 2014 when I interned in the archives there. As you might imagine, I soaked up all I could of its unique, and sometimes kooky, totally Californian history. It's a very special place.

This feels a bit like it's riding the coattails of Hidden Figures, yet JPL is very, very different than any other NASA center. It's older, for one thing. It's co-run and staffed by Caltech, giving it a college campus vibe. And there were women there from the beginning, women who hired and trained women, who hired and trained more women.

It takes everyone to reach the stars.