Joanne Thompson has a special relationship with the moon.
I love to look at the moon.
Just look at it.
I even had a dream one time that I went to the moon, and, you know when the moon looks just like a piece of mist up there?
That's how it was in my dream.
I got there and I said, where am I supposed to put my feet?
Even though Joanne's only been to the moon in her dreams, something she made has been there.
Something that actually made traveling to the moon possible.
Joanne, along with a team of seamstresses in the 1960s, including Jean Wilson, sewed together the spacesuits worn by the Apollo eleven astronauts.
The person that we were making the suit for, that astronaut who was a human being, his life was in our hands.
If we didn't make that suit right, that's how important it was.
Jean and Joanna and a whole group of seamstresses were part of a team that included engineers and scientists working on something where the stakes were literally life and death.
It was the most difficult challenge these women had ever faced.
At a time when women were rarely heard or empowered.
It was an era of prejudice and chauvinism.
And without built in pragmatism and humility that some of the engineers had, there wouldn't have been anyone listening as closely to the seamstresses as was necessary.
I'm Gabriella Cowperthwaite, and this is team mystery, an original podcast from Atlassian.
This show is all about the chemistry of teams and what happens when people are so open to new ideas of working, innovating, and expressing themselves together.
They end up doing something amazing.
I remember looking up in the night sky when I was very little and thinking the moon was this abstract yellow circle, like something out of a storybook.