SISSY AUSTIN- This past week marked the 50th Anniversary of man landing on the moon . Names like Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins are somewhat easy to remember as they were the crew of the famous Apollo 11 mission. But there were thousands of other names that were part of that mission too. And in this next story we visit with one Laurel Ann “Sissy” Austin of Jacksonville, Texas who was part of the Apollo 11 team. Our East Texas reporter Wynter Chauvin has more.
Jacksonville, Texas native Laurel Ann "Sissy" Austin was not just a witness 50 years ago to NASA's historic moon walk, she was part of the team that helped make the mission happen. In 1963 when Austin, a senior mathmatics major at the University of Oklahoma was visiting the NASA site in Houston she had a very unusal experience.
"When I got out there I was visiting with the engineers out there and one of them said I got a problem I'm having trouble solving it,"explained Austin. "I looked down and it was something I happened to know and I said 'loan me your pencil', and they gave me a pencil and I wrote the answer out."
This would lead to Austin meeting with other engineers and when she returned back to Oklahoma she received a phonecall.
"I got a call from NASA and asked if I would go to work for them as an engineer," Austin said, "... back in those days most women worked as math aides regardless of their capability mainly because they were a woman."
Austin immediately began working on the Apollo program on a team that would tackle a specific section of the mission. Austin's group was charged with creating models that predicted movement of the vehicle in space.
"What they called 'orbit determination and prediction', it was what the flight would do in real time when they weren't taking off or landing or thrusting," explained Austin. "And so we would have a vehicle and say the vehicle is starting at 'point X' where is it going to be much later? And we'd predict it where it was going to be."
Austin said the team was driven by the desire to put America ahead of the Russians in the "Space Race".
"I'm not sure I could explain it, it was a feeling, a culture," Austin recalled. " We felt if we did that, it would unite the nation."
Sissy Austin continues to promote math and science education and serves to mentor girls who are interested in these areas of study. She firmly believes what her parents taught her.
Sissy said "I was always told I could be anything I wanted to be and achieve anything I wanted to achieve."
