Jeanette Piccard

Jeannette Piccard was born in Chicago, Illinois, on January 5, 1895. She wanted to be a priest from an early age and as a student at Bryn Mawr even wrote a paper arguing for women’s admission to the priesthood. She graduated from Bryn Mawr in 1918 and went on to earn a Master of Science degree in Organic Chemistry from the University of Chicago in 1919. She would also earn her Ph.D. in Education from the University of Minnesota in 1942.

In 1934, Piccard earned her balloonist’s license, becoming one of the first women to do so. Four months later, on October 23, despite difficulties in raising funds for the voyage from organizations that did not wish to be affiliated with a project that would “[send] a woman - a mother - in a balloon into danger,” she piloted her balloon, “The Century of Progress,” to an altitude of 57,579 feet. On board were Jean Felix Piccard, her husband and research partner, and the family’s pet turtle. This journey made her not only the first woman to fly into the stratosphere, but also the first balloon pilot to successfully complete a stratospheric flight through clouds.

After her husband’s death in 1963, Piccard joined the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) where she was a consultant to the director of the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, from 1964 to 1970.

Piccard was ordained a deacon in 1971. In 1972, at the age of 77, she entered General Theological Seminary. On July 29, 1974, she fulfilled her lifelong dream. She was ordained a priest in The Episcopal Church alongside the other ten women of the “Philadelphia Eleven.” After her ordination, she served at St. Phillip’s Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she was a popular speaker. She died in 1981 and was inducted into the International Space Hall of Fame at the New Mexico Museum of Space History in 1998.