The Female Navigator Who Trained WWII Pilots and Guided Astronauts
Janislawski's career spanned 40 years, during which she taught nautical navigation and then transitioned to creating lunar maps for Apollo astronauts.
Before people typed addresses into Google maps, travelers charted their course by the sun and moon and other celestial bodies. When radios failed, and bad weather rolled in, the celestial navigational methods of Mary Tornich Janislawski helped save lives, especially during World War II. As a child, she wore an aviator helmet sewn from scraps of felt. Eventually, Janislawski pioneered the field of navigation in a similar way that Amelia Earhart shattered the boundaries of flight. She was declared America’s “most outstanding woman teacher of aerial navigation” in 1940 by the New York Times. Janislawski worked at Alameda Naval Air Station to train women in the U.S. Navy’s flight simulators for celestial navigation, and prepared Navy fliers for missions in the Pacific under radio silence. In the last phase of her career, Janislawski contributed to the burgeoning space age by creating lunar grid maps to help the Apollo astronauts navigate the surface of the moon. She also developed a new and altogether different way to navigate in outer space and safely return. This made inter-planetary travel possible.
