04/21/2026
In the mid-1970s, in the small southeastern Puerto Rican town of Patillas, a teenage girl named Olga González sat in her high school auditorium listening to a career-day speaker she had almost skipped.
Her math teacher had told her to go. She hadn't wanted to. She had no real idea what she wanted to do with her life.
The speaker began describing a profession the girl had never heard of before, a field that combined mathematics, chemistry, and the real, physical design of things that work. Engineering.
Olga would later describe that moment with a sentence that has quietly become famous among her colleagues:
"I heard my wings open. I actually heard pop, pop: this is it. It was a second, but it was right."
She walked out of that auditorium knowing what the rest of her life would look like.
The road was not easy. When she enrolled at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez to study chemical engineering, she was one of five women in her entire program. In her first drafting class, she discovered she could not draw two straight lines — because in her high school years, drawing class had been restricted to boys only. "Girls weren't allowed," she remembered being told, "because it was for boys."
She taught herself to draft. She finished her degree. In 1979, a young Puerto Rican chemical engineer walked into NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio.
At the time, NASA had a problem — a problem so quiet and so technical that most of the public never knew it existed, but a problem that was holding back the entire future of human space exploration.
The problem was batteries.
Every satellite, every spacecraft, every orbiting telescope, every eventual space station — all of them have one absolute vulnerability. They spend roughly half of every orbit in Earth's shadow, cut off from the sun. During that 35 minutes of darkness every 90 minutes, the onboard batteries are the only thing keeping the lights on, the systems running, and — in the case of the eventual International Space Station — the humans inside alive.
In the late 1970s, NASA's best space batteries lasted about three years. Nowhere near long enough to run a permanent crewed station. And the cost of launching replacements was, in Olga's own later phrasing, "astronomical."
In January 1984, President Ronald Reagan stood before Congress and made a commitment that would shape the rest of her career:
"Tonight, I am directing NASA to develop a permanently manned space station, and to do it within a decade."
The target for the batteries was brutal: 15 years of service life, no replacements, no upgrades, working reliably from −40°C to +60°C, cycling through charge and discharge tens of thousands of times without failing.
Olga González-Sanabria joined NASA's Electrochemistry Branch and got to work.
Her specific contribution — the thing that earned her and her team the 1988 R&D 100 Award — was with the separator: the precisely engineered thin layer inside each battery cell that isolates oxidation reactions and prevents voltage losses. A battery cell is only as durable as its separator. The nickel-hydrogen batteries she and her colleagues developed could cycle more than 20,000 times with 85% energy efficiency and run reliably for fifteen years and beyond.
They became the power system of the International Space Station when it went operational in 2000.
They were also adopted for the Hubble Space Telescope. When Hubble's original batteries were replaced during a servicing mission in May 2009 — more than nineteen years after Hubble launched — they had achieved the highest number of charge-discharge cycles of any nickel-hydrogen battery ever flown in low Earth orbit.
They powered the Mars Odyssey and the Mars Global Surveyor.
Between 2017 and 2021, NASA replaced the ISS nickel-hydrogen batteries with newer, lighter lithium-ion units. But for the first two full decades of continuous human habitation in space — the longest uninterrupted period of human presence beyond Earth in history — it was her team's batteries keeping the lights on.
Olga González-Sanabria herself went on to become the first Latina ever appointed to NASA's Senior Executive Service and eventually the highest-ranking Hispanic employee at NASA Glenn Research Center. She served as Director of Engineering, Director of the Systems Management Office, and spent more than three decades guiding one of NASA's most important research institutions through massive reorganizations. She was inducted into the Ohio Women's Hall of Fame in 2003. She received the Presidential Rank of Meritorious Executive in 2007. She was inducted into the NASA Glenn Research Center Hall of Fame in 2021.
She retired from NASA in 2011 after 32 years of service and founded her own consulting firm. She still mentors Latina students entering STEM fields. She and her husband, Rafael Sanabria — also a senior NASA engineer at Glenn — were featured together in HENAAC's technical magazine in 2004 as "NASA Glenn's Dynamic Duo."
And yet if you asked the average person who built the batteries that kept humans alive in space for twenty years, they would not know her name.
When schoolchildren read about NASA, they read about the astronauts. They rarely read about the electrochemists. They almost never read about the woman from Patillas who walked into Cleveland at 23, improved the invisible layer inside a battery cell, and quietly made a permanent human presence in space possible.
Olga was once asked what she tells young girls who ask her whether they should pursue science. The answer, like the moment in the auditorium that started her life, is something she has said in various forms many times:
Follow the thing that makes you hear a pop inside your chest.
Somewhere above you tonight, 250 miles up, the International Space Station is orbiting Earth at 17,500 miles per hour. It has been continuously inhabited since November of the year 2000. Every 45 minutes, it enters Earth's shadow. And for the first twenty years of its life, the reason it didn't go dark in those 35-minute nights, the reason its air recyclers kept running and its science experiments kept breathing and the astronauts inside kept living — was partly because of a battery separator designed by a girl from Patillas, Puerto Rico, who once couldn't draw a straight line because her high school wouldn't let girls take the class.
Some of the most important engineering in human history is done by people whose names never appear on the spacecraft.
Remember hers.