Baker Institute
Baker Institute fellow and former JSC director George Abbey attends the Sally Ride Science Festival.
George Abbey, the institute’s Baker Botts Senior Fellow in Space Policy, recently attended the Houston-area Sally Ride Science Festival. More than 1,000 girls were present for the daylong event, with Rice University and other local contributors sponsoring 400 of them. The festival, which aims to encourage girls to pursue studies and careers in science and engineering, is named after Sally Ride, the first U.S. woman in space.
Abbey, the former director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, also has a special connection with Ride — he assigned her to her historic flight. Below he talks about his involvement in the festival, and the larger issue of science and engineering education.
Q. What is the Sally Ride Science Festival, and why are you involved?
A. I have known Sally for many years, and I think the Sally Ride Science Festival is a great program to get young girls interested in careers in science and engineering. We need to have more young people choose these educational fields, and by bringing in women role models in these career fields, we can show girls it is possible to pursue these careers and gain a great sense of accomplishment and satisfaction. It’s a very positive thing to be doing and we need to do this for boys and for girls. But this event is focused on girls.
Q. How has the role of women changed at NASA?
A. Women have taken on increasingly responsible positions in the space program. You look at the Mission Control Center pictures from the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions and you won’t see any women, but in this same environment today, you will see a lot of women in the control room. And there are women engineers and scientists doing wonderful jobs all across NASA. There is a woman astronaut, Nicole Stott, onboard the International Space Station right now. She chose to pursue a career as an engineer and subsequently worked at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and the Johnson Space Center here in Houston, and then was selected as an astronaut.
Q. How successful are efforts to get more girls and women interested in science?
A. As time has gone on, there are greater opportunities being made available, and girls and women are going into these fields in increasing numbers. I think we’re fortunate because as the number of young people going into science and engineering has gone down overall, a number of young ladies have chosen those fields and that’s helped alleviate some of that shortfall.
Role models are very important in this. Role models can talk about how they ended up with their careers and the efforts that made them successful. Young people can look at role models and get a sense of, “They used to be just like me.”
Q. Why is this so important?
A. Young people today are choosing not to go into science and engineering, and the enrollment of U.S. students in these educational fields is going down in our universities. This matters because, as you can read in the recent report, “United States Space Policy: Challenges and Opportunities Gone Astray,” just published by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, in today’s world, technology is critical to this country’s leadership role. We don’t manufacture a lot of goods anymore, but we have maintained our leadership role with our technology. Without the input of bright, innovative young people, that leadership role is going to be affected. Look at all the problems we need to address — the environment, alternative energy sources, health care and our aging infrastructure, not to mention space exploration. The solutions all come down to technology and the availability of bright and innovative young people with questioning minds.