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I wanted to work for NASA for as long as I can remember.
When I was in second grade,
our teacher asked us what we wanted
to be when we grew up
and I said I wanted to be
a female astronaut, the first female astronaut.
And a little boy in the class said,
"Girls can't be astronauts."
because this was the '80s, before the shuttle program.
And the teacher said,
"Girls can be whatever they want to be."
The professor from my first
aerospace engineering class
was a test pilot from Edwards' Air Force Base.
And Dryden came out to interview for co-oping.
And he knew that I loved
the high-performance airplanes
like the F-15, the F-18s
and he recommended that
I interview with NASA Dryden.
And I came out my junior year
and started co-oping.
And I was just so thrilled that
I was going to get the chance
to come to California and
work for NASA Dryden.
And it was just one of
the best days of my life.
My first project working for NASA
was in the structures group
and we were taking data from
they had collected on the wing
of an F-16 and they had all
these little LEDs on the wing.
They measured the wing twist of the F-16.
And so it was my job to transfer
all the data into a format we could use.
It was real engineering and it's
not something that you get in school.
I love working at NASA.
It's never disappointed me.
There were hard times but
when you get to have successes
like the launch of Hyper-X and Pad Abort-1 and
you get to see those launches
and have been a part of that
it's just such a great, great time and it is what I expected
NASA to be like, it's exciting like that.
The morning of the Pad Abort Launch
we came out and the winds were just howling.
And no one thought we could be
able to fly that morning.
And, we went down to the launch
site to get the final preparation
completed and the winds were
just not blowing like they were
up at the main base area where
the visitors were going to be
and the control room was.
We did the final preparations,
pretty much said goodbye
to the crew module
and told it it needed to fly right.
And then headed up to the
control room area.
And I was with the operations
team so I was outside and got
to watch it live
from outside and could hear
the countdown.
All of a sudden,
it just tookoff!
And it was supposed to.
It pulls the astronauts away
at approximately 17 times
the force of gravity so it's a
real, really fast ride.
Within 90 seconds it was back
on the ground.
So, in that 90 seconds,
we were essentially holding
our breath, to watch it launch,
turn the crew module around,
detach the rocket that was pulling it,
and then the parachutes come out
and they stage and then you
slowly land on the ground.
But it was, you know, five years
of work in just over 90 seconds
and it was just such a
quick ride.
And it worked just like the simulations.
But it was, beautiful.
One of the most rewarding
aspects of the Pad Abort-1
flight was knowing we were
really contributing to future of
manned space flight.
That, if there had been
astronauts on board that day,
that they would have been safe.
If there had been a problem,
that those astronauts
would have survived.
For most of my college career,
and since I've come to NASA,
I always felt that it wasn't so
much about being a woman
as it was what I brought
to a team and that I worked hard
and did the best job I could.
Loving what you do is the secret
to enjoying your work-life.
If you don't love what you do,
it's work.
But if you love what you do,
it's fun everyday.
I'm Cathy Bahm
and I work for NASA.