Cathy Osgood

Catherine T. Osgood was an American aerospace engineer and one of the first few women to work at NASA. She is known for her work on spacecraft rendezvous for the Apollo lunar landing in 1969.

Early life and education Osgood grew up in rural South Florida. After high school, she worked for a year for a fruit shipper and at a service station to save money for college. She studied at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida. In junior year, she switched her major from Chemistry to Mathematics.

Career Osgood’s first job was at the parapsychology laboratory at Duke University. She worked with Louisa Rhine on extrasensory perception (ESP). While in Florida for a few years, she worked with the VA (Veterans Administration). Her next job was as a math aide at NASA with the Space Task Group. Just before moving to Houston in July 1962, Osgood's job changed to that of aerospace engineer. and with the help of a live-in nanny and grandparents who were able to help with the care of her three children Osgood determined how to coordinate rendezvous in space. and she was the leader of the Maths-Physics Branch of the Mission Planning and Analysis Division at NASA. Her early work involved mechanical calculators and then manually plotting the results, until they later moved to punch cards. She was a part of a team that came up with techniques to dock and connect in space which resulted in successful moon landings. In the 1970s, she worked as a rendezvous expert for space shuttles. She was also a part of the team that invented the launch window to be able to figure out what day/time/date the shuttle could lift off.

Osgood retired in 2009 after fifty years of service.