On August 5, 1943, Frances "Poppy" Northcutt was born in Rotan, Texas. She would become the first woman to work in NASA's Mission Control in a technical capacity — not as a guest, not as a clerical worker, but as a Return-to-Earth specialist who helped calculate abort trajectories for the Apollo program.

Northcutt graduated from the University of Texas in 1965 with a mathematics degree and joined TRW Systems, one of NASA's primary contractors. She was hired as a "computress" — the industry term for women doing trajectory calculations by hand, a job designation that would vanish as electronic computers took over the arithmetic while the women who had trained themselves in the mathematics were not always retained when the transition came.

Within two years, she had been moved to trajectory analysis for Apollo. She was the only woman in the back room of Mission Control during Apollo 8 — the first crewed mission to orbit the moon — running abort trajectory calculations for the crew's return to Earth. The mission's success depended on those calculations being correct.

The television footage that has become the canonical image of Mission Control during Apollo shows rows of white men in white shirts at consoles. The back room — where the support specialists worked — is not in most of the footage. Northcutt was in the back room.

During Apollo 13's emergency in April 1970, when an oxygen tank explosion forced a mission abort and threatened the crew's survival, she was part of the team that worked the return trajectory. The calculations that brought the crew home were done by a team that included her. The film Apollo 13 (1995) does not include her.

After leaving aerospace, Northcutt became an attorney specializing in feminist advocacy and criminal defense, serving as director of criminal justice reform at the Texas ACLU. She has given interviews about Apollo since the 1990s. She is still alive.