Nancy Grace Roman, “Mother of Hubble”, has died aged 93. An American astronomer, the first female executive at NASA, she was instrumental in planning the Hubble Space Telescope. Throughout her career, she was an active public speaker and educator, and advocate for women in the sciences.
Born 16 May 1925 in Nashville, she became interested in astronomy at school but had to fight prejudice against women taking up maths and the sciences. In later years she said she always used Dr in front of her name otherwise she wouldn’t get past the secretaries.
She was a Sun Taurus square Neptune in Leo – Neptune is often found prominently in the charts of mathematicians. Her Sun was also trine Jupiter in Capricorn, sextile Uranus in Pisces – giving her confidence and luck which provided the openings for her to further her career; and focussed onto innovative Uranus helpfully in cosmic Pisces it would give her a bent for research. She also had an ultra-do-or-die-determined Mars Pluto conjunction trine Saturn in obsessively conscientious Scorpio, which wouldn’t hurt either.
Her North Node in Leo gave her the capacity to be a leader.
Her two strongest Harmonics were the helper/healer 12H and the super-star 22H. Her genius/breakthrough 13H was also notable.
We women really don’t know how lucky we are nowadays. There may still be glass ceilings and misogyny in science but it’s nothing like it used to be.
Amazing. As you say, thank God she had the perseverance, confidence and luck to get her talent through, so we could all benefit from it.
Women like Nancy Roman had to face extraordinary obstacles in their time, but I suppose we as women shouldn’t use that to minimise inequality today, like a variant of the fallacy of relative privation. We owe it to them to push on and to be outraged on their behalf as well as our own that we still have inequality in 2018/19, despite their incredible achievements.