Here's how Jack Black's mother helped design a system that saved Apollo 13 astronauts

While Jack Black is known for his comedic talents, his mother, Judith Love Cohen, was a trailblazer in aerospace engineering. Cohen designed a critical system that ultimately helped save the Apollo 13 spacecraft crew during their life-threatening mid-flight accident.

Judith Love Cohen was an extraordinary blend of intellect and creativity, excelling as an engineer, ballet dancer, and children’s book author. From an early age, she displayed a knack for mathematics, a passion encouraged by her father who used everyday objects like ashtrays to teach her geometry, according to Los Angeles Times.

By fifth grade, kids started paying Cohen to do their math homework. In junior high school, she was the only girl in intermediate algebra. In high school, she decided to become a math teacher. But her guidance counselor squashed her dream by telling her that girls don’t go into math or science. “You know, Judy,” her counselor said, “I think you ought to go to a nice finishing school and learn to be a lady."

At a time when only 0.05% of the engineers were women, Judith worked as an electrical engineer and was the only woman in the room. It was not easy for her, but she didn’t give up. She took up exciting projects, including one for the Minuteman missile, the science ground station for the Hubble Space Telescope, the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite, and the Apollo Space Program. This project was called “Abort-Guidance System (AGS)” in the Lunar Excursion Module for the Apollo 13 space program, the third moon-landing mission.

On August 28, 1969, Judith was solving a vital math problem at work when she went into labor. Undeterred, she took the problem's computer printout to the hospital, solving it just before giving birth to Jack Black. ⁠ ⁠

A few months later, on April 14, 1970, the Apollo 13 mission had been going on for 56 hours, according to NASA. Just then, in the mid-afternoon, the power fans were turned on within a tank for the cryo-stir of the mission, a procedure to stir the liquid oxygen inside the tank. The fan wires were short-circuited and the Teflon insulation caught fire in the pure oxygen environment.

As heat built up, the oxygen pressure inside the tank increased until the wires ruptured, triggering an explosion. Within three hours, all oxygen stores were lost, and the spacecraft's electrical power and water supplies began to dwindle. At this point, Judith’s AGS became crucial to the crew’s rescue.

“My mother usually considered her work on the Apollo program to be the highlight of her career. When disaster struck the Apollo 13 mission, it was the Abort-Guidance System that brought the astronauts home safely. Judy was there when the Apollo 13 astronauts paid a ‘thank you’ to the TRW facility in Redondo Beach,” Judith’s other son Neil Siegel said in remembrance of her after her death in 2016, as per USC Viterbi School of Engineering. She was 82 years old when she died.

Apart from her masterly maneuver during the Apollo mission, Judith also authored several books during her lifetime, encouraging young girls to follow their dreams. Black, the Golden Globe-winning actor and the lead vocalist of Tenacious D, often shares photos of his mother on his Instagram profile, remembering her with kind words. 

This article originally appeared four months ago.