Enlarge / A new mentorship program seeks to honor the memory of Brooke Owens.

Brooke Owens Fellowship Program

Lori Garver had just boarded a plane last June when she heard that her young friend, D. Brooke Owens, had passed away. Owens, 35, had hadterminal cancer for a long time, but the moment still stung Garver, the former deputy NASA administrator. She'd mentored Owens toward her dream of running an airport, and the two had become close.

During those few minutes before the plane took off, Garver said she just couldn't let it go. So she dashed off an e-mail to friends and colleagues in the aerospace businesschief executives, managers, and bright, young chiefs of staff she'd worked with at NASA and in the White House. Would they be interested in mentoring young women interested in getting into the aerospace industry?

"My goal, sitting on that airplane, was to get five or maybe at most 10 internships," Garver told Ars in an interview. But by the time her flight had landed, Garver's inbox was full with interested companies. Two other close friends of OwensCassie Lee, the director of Aerospace Applications at Vulcan, Inc., and William Pomerantz, the vice president of special projects at Virgin Galacticsaid they wanted to help organize the program. On Wednesday, less than a year after her passing, theBrooke Owens Fellowship Program launched with 36 paid internships.

Garver said the aerospace industry has a fairly good record with breaking through the glass ceiling. The chief executives of two of the major players in the industry, Lockheed Martin's Marillyn Hewson and Aerojet Rocketdyne's Eileen Drake, are both women. "Ithink the bigger issue is our raw numbers, because we dont have nearly enough women in any part of the pipeline,"said Garver, who served as NASA's deputy administrator from 2009 to 2013 and is now general manager of the Air Line Pilots Association.

"I can say from first-hand experience, if youre in a meeting and youre the only woman there, or just one of a handful, youre much more easily dismissed or ignored," she said. "Iwatched Hidden Figures and just cried the whole time, that our industry hasnt changed more since then."

Recalling her mentoring experience with Owens, Garver and her cofounders figured the best way to remedy the problem was to bring young women interested in aviation and space exploration into major companies in the field, provide them each with two senior aerospace professionals as mentors, and give them experience. Each class of women will also attend a conference and, Garver hopes, form a cohort that will help them network throughout their careers.

Ultimately, it didn't prove difficult to find interested CEOs. Companies such as SpaceX, Blue Origin, Virgin Orbit, Orbital ATK, and many more provided internships. Some companies wanted to offer several. "It ended up being an easy sell," Garver said. "It wasn't hard to convince a company to bring in a fantastic young woman."

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After Hidden Figures, new program seeks to flood aerospace with women - Ars Technica