As America marks the 60th anniversary of the Explorer 1 satellite launch today, Dr. Joyce Neighbors will be remembering the start of America's space program in her home on a quiet Huntsville hillside.

Neighbors isn't as famous as Explorer launch leader Wernher von Braun or chief scientist James Van Allen. But maybe she should be.

Neighbors was the first woman to join von Braun's team in a technical role. A mathematician, she led her own team to calculate Explorer's trajectory - or path - so the team would know the highest point of its flight arc. That's when the upper-stage engines would be ignited.

It wasn't easy. No two rocket engines in those days were identical, no two fuel mixtures were exactly the same, and you couldn't put the fully assembled rocket on a scale to weigh it.

Her team did it, however, and her work on Explorer was important enough that Neighbors was asked to sign a now-historic mission chart along with von Braun, Ernst Stuhlinger and other giants of space exploration. But her boss asked Neighbors to use only her initials and her last name, because she was a woman. "They didn't think it would be as authentic if I signed with a woman's name," she said.

Just like NASA's now-famous "Hidden Figures" computer programmers, Neighbors wasn't welcomed in space world. "I was tolerated," she said. "And sometimes I was not treated very well."

Overcoming obstacles

But Neighbors had been overcoming obstacles for a lifetime starting on "a little rocky farm of 80 acres" in Randolph County. "My mother was extremely bright," she said, "and I think her frustration with her life, because there were eight of us, was one of sheer labor. I mean manual labor. I think she programmed all of us toward education. We were all expected to go to school. We never stayed out to work on the farm. We came home and changed clothes and worked on the farm. We were pretty poverty-ridden."

"I was always different," Neighbors said. "One time in the fifth grade, I was in a class - of course the teacher taught all the classes at that time - and she couldn't work a math problem and I could. I knew then for sure that I was gifted, and it was a gift."

Although she finished high school in 1948, Neighbors didn't start Auburn University until 1950. She needed to earn money to pay for her education, and she would work through her time there.

"They had plenty of women in the Math Department," she remembers. "The women at that time were pretty much characterized. If they wanted to have a career, they were either nurses, secretaries or teachers. Of course, they had to have math teachers."

Auburn discouraged women from engineering, she said, but its Physics Department "was quite inclusive." She would finish with a degree in mathematics and a double minor in physics. A year of graduate work in physics followed while her future husband, Bill Neighbors, finished Auburn after serving in the Korean War. "That was a very good marriage," she said. "We had a very successful partnership, much different I think than the average for that age and time."

'Nothing in Nashville'

The Neighbors came to Huntsville after Joyce couldn't get a job in Nashville, where Bill was working. She had been an engineering aide at the Arnold Air Force Base in Tullahoma, Tenn., but, "There was nothing for me in Nashville. Just absolutely nothing. I was told, 'We don't hire women.' I was just really discouraged."

But Huntsville was different. Bill would become a key player in America's shadowy Cold War intelligence struggle with Russia. Joyce would get a job with the Army Ballistic Missile Agency and join von Braun. That's where she was when the Army decided to lengthen a Redstone missile, do some fine-tuning on its engines, and be ready in case America wanted to launch a satellite for the International Geophysical Year of 1957-58.

"They were working with CalTech. JPL (the Jet Propulsion Laboratory) is the organization there," Neighbors remembers. "They were doing the upper stages. We were going to get them up out of the sensible atmosphere - or as far as we could."

Some of the rocket building happened at Chrysler in Huntsville, and some was done at Redstone. But the Army lost the honor of launching the first satellite to the Navy. "There was still a slight amount of hostility to the Germans," Neighbors said. "There were people in the system that were powerful enough to voice fairly prejudiced opinions. So, (President Dwight) Eisenhower said they would let the Navy launch the first satellite.

'But we went ahead'

"But we went ahead," Neighbors said. "The Army had built two missiles - the 27 C and the 29 C. And we launched the 27 in August of '57. I believe the Defense Department sent someone down to make sure we were not putting something in orbit. We justified it as testing and certifying the nose cone for re-entry."

Russia launched its Sputnik satellite on Oct. 4, 1957, and America was stunned and scared. Both countries had said they would launch satellites for the International Geophysical Year. But no one thought Russia would be first.

America's first try to duplicate the feat ended in disaster when the Navy's Vanguard missile exploded on the launch pad Dec. 6, 1957. Eisenhower gave the Army a chance, and the ABMA in Huntsville was ready with its second rocket, a modified Jupiter-C.

The rocket's first stage arrived at Cape Canaveral on Jan. 16, 1958. The upper stages followed Jan. 24. On the night of Jan. 31, the Jupiter C lifted off. Von Braun wasn't there to see it. He was in Washington with Dr. William Pickering, director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and chief scientist Van Allen, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Iowa.

"It was very successful," Neighbors remembers. "We went into a higher orbit that we expected, but they did (monitor), when they passed over the stations, bits and pieces of the magnetic field."

Van Allen had predicted the existence of a radiation field around Earth, and searching for it was the mission's chief scientific goal. There are actually two belts, now called the Van Allen Belts.

Back in Huntsville

Back in Huntsville, Neighbors eventually worked on Skylab and the Saturn rockets that would lift astronauts into space. She held a prestigious management position for an aersopace company in Denver. And along the way, she repeatedly faced the sexism of an time when a working woman was thought either a "quota" hire or taking a job a man could use to feed a family.

"Sometimes, I was not treated very well," she remembered. "But I always tried to make a joke of it. We were at lunch one day, and I said something about how in Huntsville you can tell where people live, because 536 were the only first three (telephone) numbers when we came here and shortly thereafter 539 was added, so that would be the periphery of Huntsville. I made a comment that you can tell where people live by their number.

"One guy said to the other guys, 'Isn't that just like a woman?'", Neighbors recalled. "I said, 'Well a man could have thought of that, too.' I never got into an argument. I knew I couldn't take on City Hall. I knew I couldn't win. But I wasn't going to lose."

After the moon landings, Neighbors' own job was threatened in a broad NASA cutback. "You don't really need your job," her boss said, citing her husband's good salary.

'He thought I would go'

"I had put this facade on," she said. "He didn't know what he was dealing with. He thought I would go quietly."

"I don't accept that," she said of the decision to separate her.

"There's nothing you can do about it," the boss replied.

"You may be surprised," Neighbors said.

"I turned into a tiger," she said. "I turned into my real self. I never covered who I am again. I was never pushy, I never stepped on anybody. But nobody was going to step on me."

Nobody stepped on her, and Neighbors stayed at NASA. She mastered project budgeting, advised center directors and worked hands-on with space hardware. At age 87, she still can't resist "a new gadget."

If any of that is surprising, you're still not getting Dr. Joyce Neighbors. Take a minute and look up from your device at a sky filled with satellites that make that device possible. And remember the men - and women - who helped put the first one up there.