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 move ...