Thank you to Suzan Deison, CEO and Founder of the Greater Houston Women’s Chamber for sharing this story.
Although they both were among the very few women in engineering at Clemson, Vanessa Wyche and Charlie Blackwell-Thompson had never met before their paths crossed in pursuit of a return to the moon. Their trajectory to the top of NASA’s space program began with the influence of a public school teacher in South Carolina. Both were often the first women in their roles through the earlier years of their careers. Their stories are remarkably similar. Wyche is the director at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Blackwell-Thompson is the launch director at the Kennedy Space Center on Merritt Island, FL, where the unmanned spacecraft Artemis is scheduled to launch on Monday.