Annie Easley: The NASA Coder Cut From the Photo Who Powered Centaur

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Annie Jean Easley helped write the code behind the Centaur rocket stage that launched Voyager and the Cassini probe to Saturn, and her employer once cut her face out of a promotional photo display. This episode follows her 34-year career from Birmingham, Alabama, where she was born in 1933 and raised by a single mother who told her she could be anything if she outworked everyone. Valedictorian at Holy Family High School, she studied pharmacy at Xavier University, moved to Cleveland, found no pharmacy jobs, and answered a newspaper article about mathematicians needed at NACA.

Hired in 1955 as a human computer, she ran manual simulations for the Plum Brook reactor as one of only four African-American employees at the lab. She was promised a GS3 pay grade and paid at GS2, then denied the training aid her peers received. She taught herself Fortran and SOAP anyway, modeled the cryogenic liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen fuels of Centaur, and later turned her code toward batteries, solar and wind power, and the ozone layer.

• Back in Birmingham to vote, she was waved past the literacy test because of her Xavier education, charged a two dollar poll tax, and went on to coach others for the tests.
• She earned her mathematics degree from Cleveland State University in 1977 while working full time at NASA.
• As an equal employment opportunity counselor, she mediated discrimination cases and urged young women and minorities into STEM at college career days.
• She was among the first women in her department to wear pants to the office, and she founded the NASA Lewis Ski Club as its first president.
• In February 2021 the International Astronomical Union named a five and a half mile wide lunar crater Easley in her honor.