When you hear about the history of space science and space exploration, it often seems like a laundry list of men and their achievements. The fact is, though, women have been doing science and making breakthroughs as long as there has been such a thing as science. History is often written by the winners, which in the case of a patriarchal society is pretty much automatically men, but recently more and more books have been emerging chronicling how women contributed to the space race and our understanding of the stars.

This is a list of books about just a few of the women who helped us survey the stars and reach them for the first time. These are stories of triumphs but also rejection due to rampant sexism. We’ve got a long way to go before the genders are truly equal, but reading these stories and understanding how women contributed to space history is a start.