The space program of the 1960s was a man’s world. In a famous photo taken in Firing Room No. 1 of Kennedy Space Center on July 16, 1969, the day of Apollo 11’s launch, the consoles are populated by dozens of short-haired men in white shirts and skinny black ties, some of them in lab coats, many of them wearing pocket pen protectors. There is only one woman at a console, in a dark dress, her hand to her chin. Who is she?

I thought of this question again while writing about Apollo 11, the forthcoming documentary by Todd Douglas Miller that uses newly unearthed wide-screen film footage from the National Archives to tell the story of the first moon landing. During the mission’s launch phase, a pan across the firing room reveals this same very woman.

Her name, I learned, is JoAnn Morgan. At the time, she was a 28-year-old instrumentation controller and the first woman permitted to be inside the firing room—where all personnel were locked in 30 minutes before blastoff—during an Apollo launch. (There are other women in the photo, along the wall in the back, but that’s because the picture was taken nearly an hour after the launch, by which point some back-room staff members were allowed in to hear remarks by Vice President Spiro Agnew and other V.I.P.’s while awaiting the arrival of President Richard Nixon.)

Morgan retired from NASA in 2003, after a career whose inception more or less coincided with the agency’s own, in 1958. That year, as a 17-year-old about to attend the University of Florida, she interned at the U.S. Army Ballistic Missile Agency at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. She never looked back, becoming an engineer and executive at NASA. I recently spoke by phone with Morgan, a semi-hidden figure of U.S. space history. A condensed and edited version of our talk follows.

Vanity Fair: What was your position at the time of Apollo 11?

JoAnn Morgan: It was quite exciting for me, because I had worked on all the other Apollo launches, but they would never let me sit at the console during the liftoff phase. I was considered, until Apollo 11, a junior controller, and I had just been moved to a senior level.

What were some of the things you were entrusted with as an instrumentation controller?

Well, the guidance computers at the Central Instrumentation Facility, that’s the biggie. The whole lightning-detection and fire-detection systems at the launchpad. The operational communications and television systems. Monitoring the command carrier for any interference, which meant a ship or submarine trying to get on the frequency that we were using to send commands out to the vehicle.

And that had really happened in the past.

Oh, yeah, it happened. On Apollo 8, the Russians were offshore with a trawler and submarine, and they tried interfering with our transfer of command. They would try to block frequencies so we couldn’t give commands to the pad and the capsule. And it continued some on 9 and 10. What we had to do is put different antennas on and direct them differently so we could block them from interfering with our command process.

Was there someone who sat you down before Apollo 11 and said, “JoAnn, you’re going to be locked into the firing room this time”? Was that a moment?

It was, and I didn’t know it at the time—I learned this later—but it was a big discussion that went all the way up to the Kennedy Space Center director, Dr. Kurt Debus, who was one of the German scientists who came over with Wernher von Braun. My immediate supervisor had spoken with Karl Sendler, the director of information systems and another part of the German team. He talked to Karl Sendler and said, “I want to put JoAnn on console for liftoff. She’s my best communicator. I get clear information about how things are going. She’s also very disciplined.”

Karl said, “I agree,” but then he said, “But we’ve never had her locked in there.” Why would anybody be concerned about me being locked in with a bunch of men, and we’re all on TV anyway? We’re being monitored by the world. But it was a change in tradition, so they said, “Well, we’re just going to run it right up.” And it was no big deal to Dr. Debus.

Was there some resistance somewhere?

I did have little tidbits of resistance. I got obscene phone calls on my console a couple of times, and I would just report those to the communications people. The worst was, in the old blockhouses, there was no ladies’ restroom, so either the security guard had to clear the men’s room, or I had to walk, just like the ladies in Hidden Figures, to a different building to use the bathroom.

But you got to be a part of the launch. What was the experience like?

Sometimes I say to people, “Hey, my biggest decision was: What can I wear so that I don’t stand out like a sore thumb?” I knew that there was still hostility from some men about having a woman be part of the launch team, but I had been there for years. I had gotten out of college in ’62. So I wanted to be part of that team, and to blend in. I was a newlywed, and I said to my husband, “I don’t know what I should wear.” And he said, “Well, you went to Florida, you’re a Florida Gator, you’ve got that great dress I bought you.” It was a Lacoste with the little alligator on the chest. Of course, nobody noticed that tiny little gator, but it was a navy dress, and my husband had been in the navy. He always liked me in navy.

The hostility you mention, was it sexism in the sense of “A woman can’t do that,” or was it come-ons and things like that?

Well, it was both, because I was young, I was attractive, and I had a good figure. I didn’t feel like I should hide myself. One time, we had finished the propellant load after Apollo 9 or 10, I forget which, and they allowed the media to come in, one or two cameramen and a public-affairs officer from NASA. They would go down each row. I’ll never forget, one of the rudest remarks I ever got was from one of the photographers. He said, “I wish you could let her go out and put on some lipstick.”

I would get the whole variety: come-ons, “Oh, can you go to coffee with me?,” “Oh, you never get to see your husband.” But my husband was a great support system. Going through Apollo 8, 9, 10, 11, and through Apollo 13—that five or six years, they were very intense for me. I was working 12 to 16 hours a day, and lots of times he and I would basically pass on the street. He was a high-school bandmaster. And his older sister was a laser physicist, so he wasn’t afraid of smart women, and the science stuff didn’t baffle him because he’d been on an aircraft carrier in the navy.

If I hadn’t had the right kind of husband, that I could come home to and vent and say, “Oh, this yahoo in the elevator said . . .” He said, “You have to rise above that, JoAnn. You’re doing something important.” He really encouraged and helped me through.

But was it a lonely path to travel at work?

I definitely had some lonely moments. There were times when somebody would get a promotion, and I’d feel like I’d been overlooked, or I had a bad experience with someone saying something nasty in an elevator or stairwell. But I’m lucky. I saw [the first U.S. satellite] Explorer 1 launch in 1958, and as a high-school kid who liked math and science, I thought, “This is going to change the world I’m living in.” I had such a passion that overrode anything else, the lonely moments, the little bits of negative. They were like a mosquito bite. You just swat it and push on.

Where did you watch the moon landing?

My job was done, and there was nothing I could do to contribute to the activity of the lunar module going down on the moon. So I got to enjoy watching it like a real person and share it with my husband. My husband and I took our boat out. We went to Longboat Key, to a boatel where you can bring your boat in and dock it. We went fishing all day. We came in, got a bottle of champagne, and turned the TV on. After we watched the landing, my husband reached over and said, “Hon, you’re gonna be in the history books.”

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