The Women in Aeronautics and Astronautics club hosted their seventh annual Women in Aerospace Conference Saturday at the Ford Motor Company Robotics Building. About 100 students from universities across the country attended the conference to hear from women working in the aerospace industry in fields such as oceanography, space exploration, astrophysics and research.
In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Engineering junior Elise Segal, WAA conference chair, said each year the conference, which advocates for women to learn more about the industry, is dedicated to a woman in aerospace who has died. This year, the conference’s honoree was Judith Love Cohen, an aerospace engineer who worked on projects including the Minuteman missile, the ground station for the Hubble Space Telescope and the Apollo Space Program. Her work on the Abort-Guidance System for the Apollo Space Program is credited with helping save the astronauts from the Apollo 13 mission in 1970.
“The purpose of the conference is to create a space for women in aerospace to come together and as a community and build stronger bonds with one another as well as inspire others,” Segal said. “We try to get speakers from the plane side and the space side of aerospace. There are different aspects within the aerospace industry as there’s academia, industry and government.”…