Hidden Workers

Many of the people who helped the United States win the space race weren’t on NASA’s payroll. 

Tucked into a box full of file folders from Robert L. Foster, the short chain of delicate gold links was not in the right place when it first arrived at the National Air and Space Museum. The Museum’s archives acquired Foster’s papers in 2004. The reports, correspondence, photographs, and other documents testified to Foster’s long career at the McDonnell Douglas Corporation—and to his roles supporting Project Mercury and Project Gemini and his work at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

When the acquiring archivist started sorting through the folders, however, she found the gold charm bracelet. The chain was clearly broken, and the clasp was missing. The bracelet might not have been where it was supposed to be, but when the archivist brought it down the hall to show me, I took it as a sign that I was. I had been a Smithsonian curator for only two and a half weeks, but with my background in women’s and social history, I knew immediately that the bracelet belonged in the Museum’s collection.

A phone call to Foster’s daughter, Sarah (Sally) Foster-Chang, helped clarify the situation. The bracelet had belonged to her mother, Toni. Whenever her father Bob completed a project, she explained, he gave her mother a new charm. In the 1950s and ’60s, charm bracelets were quite fashionable. The gold or silver bracelets had open links onto which small charms could be attached. Individual additions were acquired one by one, sometimes as gifts and often to mark special events.

Because of Bob’s work as chief engineer on Project Mercury and as the operations manager on Project Gemini, the six 14K gold charms Toni had were unusual: a Redstone and an Atlas rocket, a Mercury spacecraft (with retropack), a Gemini spacecraft, and two engraved jeweler’s blanks. The gold spaceflight charms not only marked Bob’s major professional achievements, they also recognized a marital partnership: Toni supported Bob’s career by taking care of their children and home.

The two engraved charms illustrate the larger community in which the Fosters lived. Like the families of many engineers working with NASA at the time, Bob and Toni relocated to Cape Canaveral, the launch site of NASA’s human spaceflight program. Along with Sally and her two siblings, the children of those aerospace workers crowded the local schools, where Toni also taught. The engraved charms on the bracelet were gifts from two of her classes. An octagonal charm reads “Thank You Mrs. Foster,” with “1st Grade” / “62” on the reverse. The heart-shape charm (engraved with “Cape View 5th Grade Class” and “1967” on the reverse) is from a class at Cape View Elementary, a school that opened in 1964 to accommodate the local population boom. It was likely the bracelet’s last addition.

Given the gender roles of the time, while men built spacecraft, women built communities. Entire families uprooted their lives, moved to new places, and fashioned new routines to support the national effort to put astronauts into space, in orbit, and eventually on the moon. In a very real way, aerospace work depended on the growth of everyday municipal institutions, from grocery stores to grade schools. Toni Foster’s bracelet represents much more than a private gift from a husband to a wife.

The conversations with Sally Foster-Chang quickly led her to donate not only her mother’s bracelet but also some other pieces, including her father’s embroidered McDonnell work jacket. When my colleagues chose both the bracelet and the jacket for inclusion in Destination Moon, the Museum’s new exhibition about lunar exploration in a broader frame, they also requested a photo of the Foster family.

As curators and historians, we know that tens of thousands of people’s work supported human spaceflight, culminating in an estimated 400,000 working on the Apollo program alone. Toni Foster’s bracelet testifies to the wives, children, and larger communities who should also be counted as part of that history. What a powerful story captured in just six tiny gold charms—I’m so grateful I was there to receive them.

Margaret A. Weitekamp is the chair of the space history department at the National Air and Space Museum.

This article is from the Spring issue of Air & Space Quarterly, the National Air and Space Museum's signature magazine that explores topics in aviation and space, from the earliest moments of flight to today. Explore the full issue.

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