Before she mapped out the entire United States space astronomy program and paved the way for the Hubble Space Telescope, Nancy Grace Roman had to fight a high school counselor who mocked her for wanting to take algebra, a Swarthmore dean who threatened to cut her institutional support, and a University of Chicago professor who refused to speak to her for six months. This episode traces the life of NASA’s first female executive and first chief of astronomy, from organizing a neighborhood stargazing club at age 11 to earning her PhD in 1949 by mapping the Ursa Major Moving Group.

At Yerkes Observatory she discovered that stars with fewer heavy elements move faster on unusual orbits, a clue to how the Milky Way formed, and devised a color-based shortcut for identifying stellar composition without slow spectral analysis. Denied tenure, she moved to the Naval Research Laboratory, worked in radio astronomy and geodesy, used radar to measure the distance to the Moon, and became the first American civilian invited to the Soviet Union after the Cold War began. At NASA she won over hostile ground-based astronomers, championed shared space observatories, pushed for CCD sensors, and rejected a lunar observatory because of abrasive dust. The episode closes with her retirement work teaching underserved children and recording textbooks for the blind, and the 2026 launch of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.

• How ultraviolet excess revealed a star’s age without laborious spectral analysis
• Why bouncing radar off the Moon helped refine calculations of Earth’s mass
• How Roman nominated herself for the job of building NASA’s astronomy program in 1959
• The engineering problem of pointing a telescope in frictionless space and why small satellites came first
• Why she proposed exoplanet detection techniques decades before the first exoplanet was confirmed