“I grew up in a suburb of Seattle,” Gale remembered. “In high school, there was a class called Engineering Concepts that had thirty-five kids, and only two of them were girls. So I was exposed early on to this idea of going down paths that were nontraditional.” In college in the early 1970s, she was often the only woman in her engineering classes. “I was the only person who didn’t see a girl in class, because I was the girl.”
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Anita Gale lived an extraordinary life, which began as being one of the only girls in her engineering classes at Interlake, and led to her eventually becoming the CEO of the National Space Society (NSS). And, among many other accomplishments, she helped design the cargo bays on the space shuttles. She was a role model to many young engineers (particularly women) over her lifetime, and she is without question one of Interlake’s most famous alumni.
Anita discovered her interest in engineering in high school, where she was a member of Interlake’s very first graduating class (1969). She then went on to earn a B.S. and an M.S. in aeronautics and astronautics from the University of Washington, where she often found herself the only woman in most of her classes. She then began working on the space shuttle program for Rockwell International in Downey, California. She joined Rockwell in 1974, and stayed in the aerospace industry for more than forty years.
Anita eventually wound up as a Senior Project Engineer in Space Shuttle Payload and Cargo Integration for the Boeing Company in Houston. Here, she provided conceptual designs for cargo integration on future launch vehicles, and contributed to R&D for shuttle upgrades and reusable and expendable launch vehicles. She holds three U.S. patents on launch vehicle payload interface standardization and containerization.
Aside from her forty year career as a respected aerospace engineer, Anita was also known for a program she created in 1984 called the SSDC (Space Settlement Design Competitions). The SSDC are industry simulation games that engage high school students in designing future space settlements. The SSDC competitions have evolved into an international activity over the years, and now involve thousands of students annually, on six continents. They also led to the formation of the SpaceTrek educational program at Kennedy Space Center, of which Anita was the director. She dedicated a large chunk of her lifetime to getting children interested in space.
Before her retirement in April 2016, Anita not only became the CEO of the National Space Society (NSS), she not only created the SSDC high school design competitions, she also became one of the most prominent members of the IAA Space Colonization Technical Committee. She regularly chaired conference sessions on future space settlements. And she wrote many technical papers about space settlement requirements, designs, and the events that will contribute to the goal of constructing space settlements in the future. She was a luminary and leader in the quest to expand humanity beyond Earth. She never did lose her love for teaching people about space.
In fact, just weeks before her passing, Anita was still driving thousands of miles every few months, overseeing the space settlement competitions she had founded, conducting NSS business, and visiting friends all over the country. One of her motivating goals was to continue to help young people, especially girls, to realize their talents in technical fields. And she has been widely lauded by countless students over the years as their key inspiration to move into technical fields.
“Every culture has treated women differently than men,” Gale once said. “I think we’ll always know and see the difference between men and women, and just acknowledge it less in the workplace. The differences between us are not really what’s important; what’s important, especially as engineers, is getting things accomplished.”
Sadly, Anita Gale passed away on May 19, 2024. She was 73 years old.
(note: There are many more articles about Anita posted below, down in the comments section)
Her obituary can be found here.
