HERstory

Kalpana Chawla was the first Indian-born woman in space. To get to the stars, she received a degree in aeronautical engineering from a college in India before immigrating to the United States in the 1980s. After arriving, she received a masters degree from the University of Texas, then earned a doctorate in aerospace engineering from the University of Colorado. Soon after she began working at NASA at their Research Center. In 1994, she was selected as an astronaut candidate. After a year of very intense training and evaluation , she became a crew representative for the Astronaut Office and Robotics and Computer Branches, where she tested software for the space shuttles. She had her first voyage to space in 1997, becoming the first Indian woman to achieve this. She once said: "When you look at the stars and the galaxy, you feel that you are not just from any particular piece of land, but from the solar system." In 2000, she was supposed to have her second voyage into space, but the mission was delayed. In 2003, the mission launched , and the crew completed more than 80 experiments. On their way back to earth, the shuttle depressurized, and she died along with the six other crew members.

Althea Gibson came from a family who struggled to make ends meet. Gibson loved to play table tennis and she soon made a name for herself as a local table tennis champion. Her skills were eventually noticed by musician Buddy Walker, who invited her to play tennis on local courts. Gibson won 10 straight African American Tennis Association championships from 1947 to 1956. Tennis was segregated and only white dominated, so Gibson couldn’t play in the big leagues despite her talent. Alice Marble, a No. 1 tennis player, wrote a piece in a magazine roasting her sport for denying Gibson to compete in the world's best tournaments. The article caught attention and by 1952 Gibson was a Top 10 player in the United States. She became the first black player to win Wimbledon and the French and U.S. Open titles. In 1971, Gibson was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame.

Katharine Hepburn was the daughter of a doctor and a suffragette, both of whom taught her to speak her mind, develop it fully, and exercise her body to its full potential. At nine years old She said she went through a phase where she wished she was a boy because they had all the fun. She wanted people to call her Jimmy. Hepburn received an education at Bryn Mawr College and soon decided to become an actress. Hollywood was shocked when Hepburn would wear pants and not wear makeup. She was described as too masculine and too rough. Many considered her difficult to be cast opposite of leading men. People constantly tried to make her look and act more feminine, but she was described as too strong. While working at RKO, she would wear blue jeans to the studio, but that they had been confiscated from her dressing room while she was on set filming.

DID YOU KNOW... the character in the movie Hidden Figures that Kevin Costner portrayed wasn’t a real person? The film was made to be a “white savior movie” and didn’t let the true story of Katherine Johnson and her hardships take the forefront. Over the course of her three decades at NASA, Katherine Johnson's calculated trajectories for Alan Shepard's groundbreaking 1961 spaceflight (America's first human in space), she verified the calculations for John Glenn's first American orbit of Earth, she computed the trajectory of Apollo 11's flight to the moon, and she worked on the plan that saved Apollo 13's crew and brought them safely back to Earth.

5. SHE WAS AN AVID CHEF, AND WROTE TWO COOKBOOKS