Wondering how this has anything to do with World Space Week? Well, the theme this year is to celebrate ‘women in space’. This year, we shall commemorate the women who have made significant contributions to the field of space exploration. The Weather Channel India brings to you six women who transcended boundaries and unwittingly opened doors for countless little girls who dare to dream big.

Katherine Coleman Goble Johnson (August 26, 1918-February 24, 2020)

As an African-American physicist and mathematician, Katherine defied all barriers of race and gender. She helped pioneer digital electronic computers in NASA, and her technical work at NASA spanned three decades. During this period, she made significant contributions to many flights like Project Mercury and the early NASA missions of John Glenn and Alan Shepard, the 1969 Apollo 11 flight to the Moon, the Space Shuttle programme, and even early plans for the Mission to Mars. Johnson co-authored 26 scientific papers throughout her career. Her story inspired the movie Hidden Figures (2016).

Valentina Tereshkova (March 6, 1937)

Valentina made history when she became the first woman to ever go to space. This textile mill-worker-turned-cosmonaut had no prior experience in space or engineering, but this did not stop her from qualifying to go aboard the Vostok 6 mission launched in 1963 by the Soviet space program. She orbited the Earth 48 times during her three-day mission. Tereshkova’s voyage nearly ended in disaster owing to a glitch in the spacecraft’s navigation software, but thankfully, Tereshkova noticed it, made modifications, and returned home safe and sound.

Margaret Heafield Hamilton (August 17, 1936)

Margaret was the software engineer behind the development of on-board flight software for NASA’s Apollo Moon missions. Hamilton developed the term “software engineer” because she believed that the job she and her colleagues were doing was as vital as the engineering that went into the rest of the Apollo spacecraft. She focused on the software that detects system problems and recovers data in the event of a computer crash. These factors were critical during the Apollo 11 mission (1969), which sent Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins to the Moon.

Sally Kristen Ride (May 26, 1951-July 23, 2012)

Chiaki Mukai (May 6, 1952)

Chiaki, also a physician, was the first Japanese woman to travel into space. On July 8, 1994, she travelled into space for the first time as a payload specialist on the space shuttle Columbia on the STS-65 mission. Mukai took part in several scientific and medical experiments, which were stored in a Spacelab module in the cargo bay of Columbia. She went into space for the second time aboard the Discovery space shuttle on October 29, 1998, as a payload specialist on the STS-95 mission.

Kalpana Chawla (March 17, 1962-February 1, 2003)

Any article about female astronauts would be incomplete without mentioning Kalpana Chawla, the first woman of Indian origin to go into space. Her first space flight was in November 1997, onboard the space shuttle Columbia on flight STS-87. On its journey, a Spartan satellite was launched by Chawla from the shuttle. Her second voyage happened in 2003 when, during the 16-day flight, the crew completed more than 80 experiments. However, disaster struck, and the entire crew died aboard the Columbia as their spacecraft disintegrated during re-entry to the Earth’s atmosphere. It was a profound loss that left the entire world mourning.