Judith Love Cohen

Judith Love Cohen was an American aerospace engineer who worked on the Apollo program's Lunar Module Abort Guidance System, the backup computer system designed to safely abort a Moon landing and return astronauts to the Command Module if the primary guidance computer failed. Employed by TRW Systems during the Apollo era, she was part of the small team responsible for the abort guidance system's software and hardware, work she reportedly continued in the hospital in 1968 while in labor with her son, who grew up to become the actor and musician Jack Black. She later worked on other spacecraft and satellite programs at TRW and Northrop Grumman across a decades-long career, including the Hubble Space Telescope and the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, and co-founded a publishing series of children's books profiling women in science and engineering careers, titled the You Can Be a Woman Engineer series.