“Rocket Woman”: From a space shuttle engineer to a space historian

Linda (Getch) Dawson ’71 grew up during the space race between the US and the USSR. He remembers driving with his family to an observatory to hear the beep of the Soviet satellite Sputnik, which went through his mind. “It’s funny how your path takes different turns, but I always went back to that first love: aerospace,” he says. Dawson’s path took him from MIT to NASA, where he pursued a second career as a professor and writer, and earned him the nickname “Rocket Woman” from colleagues and journalists.

Dawson said he was working on his “most wonderful job” in aerospace as an aerodynamic flight controller at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. It was the late 70s, and the space shuttle on the control team for the navigation and orientation mission was responsible for safely re-entering the atmosphere. He conducted “endless simulations with astronauts and pilots” to determine how much fuel would be needed for the first flight, taking into account the most serious failures. He was in control of the tasks when he was launched and re-introduced, he did more simulations to define the rules of shuttle flight and change the conditions to redefine them. “When you’re flying at supersonic and hypersonic speeds, everything happens so fast that you don’t have to look at a book to see something luxurious if something goes wrong,” he says. He left NASA before the Challenger and Columbia disasters could show how dangerous human spaceflight can be, but he would share his perspective on these tragedies a few years later in his first book.

After a stint at NASA and Boeing Aerospace, Dawson spent more than 20 years as a tenured professor at the University of Washington, Tacoman, where she designed courses on the history and science of women in science and space exploration. But, he says, “I couldn’t find it reasonable [space] in my opinion, it was a book that satisfied what had to be covered in a condensed way — either it was too technical or it was a children’s book. ‘ So Dawson decided to write his own. Policy and risks of space exploration (Springer, 2017, has released its second edition this year) and War in space (Springer, 2018) tell the story of the space program and delve into the intricate current policies of space exploration as companies and different countries compete for access and resources.

Retired from teaching, Dawson continues to write and teach at the Seattle Flight Museum, where he is a longtime volunteer. “There are still very new generations of young people in the museum who want to take rocket classes and learn about space,” he says. “It’s impressive to see that.”