12/04/2026
Astronaut Christina Koch has rightly owned the spotlight this week -- the first woman to orbit the Moon, the first to see the lunar far side with her own eyes, the electrical engineer who fixed the spacecraft's toilet an hour after launch and proudly declared herself "the space plumber." But she would be the first to tell you she didn't get to the Moon alone.
These two photos -- both taken inside the Science Evaluation Room (SER) at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston -- tell the rest of the story.
The top image captures the room at the exact second of launch on April 1 -- you can read the timestamp on the monitors: T0, two seconds into flight. The bottom image shows the same room during Monday's lunar flyby, as the team worked the crew's seven-hour pass over the far side of the Moon. Many of the people in these photos are lunar geologists. Most of them are women.
The SER is Mission Control's science hub, where experts in geology, data visualization, and crew imagery feed real-time guidance to the flight control room as the crew photographs craters, lava flows, and features no human has ever studied up close.
The room exists because of Dr. Kelsey Young, a planetary geologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center who became the Artemis Science Flight Operations Lead. Young designed the SER from the ground up -- its structure, its roles, its training pipeline -- then recruited and certified every member of the team. The room opened in June 2025. Nothing like it existed during Apollo.
During the flyby, one of the highlights of NASA's livestream was the direct back-and-forth between Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen and Dr. Young, guiding the crew's observations from 250,000 miles away.
The last time humans went to the Moon, in 1972, women couldn't open a credit card without a man's signature, couldn't take out a mortgage without a male co-signer, and were a rare sight in Mission Control. Now they are running the science operation that makes the mission worth flying.
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To introduce kids to trailblazing women of NASA, we highly recommend "Margaret and the Moon" for ages 5 to 9 (https://www.amightygirl.com/margaret-and-the-moon), "A Computer Called Katherine" for ages 5 to 9 (https://www.amightygirl.com/a-computer-called-katherine), Galaxy Girls" for ages 7 to 12 (https://www.amightygirl.com/galaxy-girls), and "Gutsy Girls Go For Science: Astronauts" for ages 8 to 12 (https://www.amightygirl.com/gutsy-girls-astronauts)
For a thrilling introduction to more pioneering women of space, we recommend the inspiring graphic novel "Astronauts: Women on the Final Frontier," for ages 10 and up at https://www.amightygirl.com/astronauts-women-on-the-final-frontier
There is also an incredible 1,087-piece LEGO set of the NASA Apollo 11 Lunar Lander for ages 16 and up at https://www.amightygirl.com/lego-apollo-11
To inspire the space-loving Mighty Girls in your life, you can find more books about mighty women of space and space-themed toys in our blog post "Reach for the Stars!" at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=16848
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