‘I’m an explorer, an engineer and a fighter.’

Many girls in India have dreamed of working in NASA. As a curly-haired fourteen-year-old girl, Zainab Nagin Cox decided that she was going to achieve that dream. She is now one of the most important technicians of NASA, having worked in teams for iconic missions like the Curiosity Mars rover as well as the exoplanet explorer, Kepler. However, her achievements belie her struggle to get to where she is.

Conservative ideas in an orthodox Indian family have always played their part in subduing women. Cox was no exception, having had to grind her way to get to Cornell, where she would complete her undergraduate studies in engineering and psychology.

After graduating, she went on to become a space operations officer at the United States Air Force building F-16 aircrew training systems. Her love for the unknown in space finally took her to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in NASA in 1993. ‘If you really want to go where someone has never been, you want to be with the robots. They truly explore first. There was one place that did that consistently and that was NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL),’ she says.

She has worked for close to 30 years in JPL. To put things into perspective, Cox would never have attended Cornell had she not intercepted the letters before they reached her father, who used to tear the letters so that his daughter would not go to college. NASA and all of us are truly fortunate to have gained not just an explorer of space, but an inspiration to both researchers as well as the common man.

Cox became what that young girl from Kansas hoped to be so many years ago: an explorer of the universe. ‘I have never expected that anyone would remember my name,’ she says, ‘but I’m hopeful they will remember my missions.’