Aerospace engineer Judith Love Cohen’s work helped save the Apollo 13 astronauts, a job she did while she was giving birth… to Jack Black!
On April 11, 1970, Apollo 13 took off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida towards the Moon. Two days later, he lost one of his oxygen tanks. The crew no longer had enough oxygen to carry out their mission and thus contacted Houston, uttering the legendary phrase: “Houston, we’ve had a problem” (“Houston, we had a problem” in French).
For the record, the “Houston, we have a problem” (“Houston, we have a problem”) that Ron Howard’s film Apollo 13 made popular was therefore a misquote. Before him, the TV movie Houston, We’ve Got a Problem by Lawrence Doheny (1974) also used an erroneous variant.
The ground crew then asked the astronauts to take refuge in the LEM, the Apollo lunar module, and use it as a lifeboat to return to Earth. A return path was made to take them home.
However, electrical power and water supplies were limited and the primary guidance and navigation system used too much water for cooling. As a result, after a lunar module engine burned, the Abort-Guidance System (AGS) was used for most of the return. Four days later, on April 17, the Apollo 13 crew landed in the South Pacific Ocean – a return broadcast live to more than 70 million people.
Among those who helped create the AGS guidance system was aerospace engineer Judith Love Cohen, who is also known for working on the Hubble Space Telescope project. His work on the Minuteman missile guidance computer and the AGS, however, was essential in saving the astronauts.
According to her eldest son, computer scientist and engineer Neil Siegel, his mother “generally considered his work on the Apollo program to be the highlight of his career. When disaster struck the Apollo 13 mission, it was the Abort-Guidance System that brought the astronauts home safely.”
She will also be present when the crew visits the engineers in California to thank them for developing the technology that saved their lives.
At work, in every sense of the word
But the most surprising thing is that when she worked on AGS, Judith Love Cohen was giving birth to her fourth child… Jack Black! Indeed, the circumstances of the birth of the famous actor and musician are the stuff of legend. In a tribute to his mother, Neil Siegel recounted the anecdote.
“She went to his office the day Jack was born”, he remembered. “When it was time to go to the hospital, she took with her a copy of the problem she was working on. Later that day, she called her boss and told him she had fixed the problem. And… oh, yes, the baby was born too.”
Thomas Jacob Black was born in Santa Monica, California, in 1969. Hollywood, however, knows him as Jack Black, an actor who can be seen in films such as Peter Jackson’s King Kong (2005) or in the cult Rock Academy by Richard Linklater (2003), to name a few. Jack Black is also a successful musician who notably won a Grammy with his group Tenacious D.
As for Judith Love Cohen, after retiring from the aerospace sector, she created a multimedia publishing company for children, publishing more than twenty pieces of content until her death in 2016 after a short battle with cancer.