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

While Jack Black is distinguished as an adept Hollywood funnyman, his mother was a crackerjack of her own field. Judith Love Cohen, Black’s mother, was a trailblazer in aerospace and she designed a system that ended up saving the prestigious Apollo 13 spacecraft crew when they encountered a crippling mid-flight accident.

Judith Love Cohen was a remarkable combination of intellect and versatility, 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.

With heat baking up the wires like hot cakes, the pressure of the oxygen increased inside the tank. The wires ruptured as a result, causing an oxygen tank to explode. All oxygen stores were lost within about three hours. The supplies of electrical power and water in the craft became low. Hereafter, Judith’s AGS played an important role in the crew’s rescue operation.

“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.