Women's Work

Women's Work

Originally shared by Irina T.

The women who sew for NASA| BBC 100 Women

"Growing up in Vietnam, Lien "never dreamed" of working for Nasa, least of all sewing for the space agency.But when her family fled the country in the late 1970s after the fall of Saigon, she found herself in the US, needing to make enough money to support six siblings.The family bought two sewing machines and began to sell clothes from their home, sewing by night."We did dresses, blouses, shirts, and other things. We got paid maybe 50 cents per garment," she tells 100 Women.
Working a day job at a lingerie company, once a week Lien went to electrical engineering classes. At that time, engineering was a booming business in California. And Nasa were hiring.Lien's friend recommended that she apply for a job at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and in 1994 she started work at the space agency - on the cabling team for the Cassini mission to Saturn.
The intricate job of connecting all the separate scientific instruments on the spacecraft to a central power supply was very demanding - it took her team three years.
"Just like a sewing factory is mostly women… cabling is mostly women because we're good with our hands," she says."

Note: Don't miss the links provided in this article, I'm adding some of them here for an easy access
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8148730.stm.
https://gizmodo.com/5788241/how-to-sew-a-spacesuit
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-41887973

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