Susan G. Finley
software engineer
Susan G. Finley, a native Californian, has been an employee of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) since January 1958, making her the longest-serving woman in NASA. Two days before Explorer 1 was launched, Finley began her career with the laboratory as a human computer, calculating rocket launch trajectories by hand. She now serves as a subsystem engineer for NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN). At JPL, she has participated in the exploration of the Moon, the Sun, all the planets, and other bodies in the Solar System.
Life and education
Education
In 1955, Susan Finley began studying art and architecture at Scripps College, in Claremont, California, with the intention of becoming an architect. Her knowledge of engineering was vast because of her talents in mathematical and drafting courses, so she attempted to learn art, but later realized that engineering was in her future. After three years at Scripps College, Finley claimed she "couldn't learn art." During her college experience, she majored in the humanities which allowed her to be successful as a subsystem engineer. At the age of 21, she left Scripps College to become a "computer" with a thermodynamics group at Convair in Pomona, California.
Family life
At the beginning of her career, Finley made sacrifices in her career for her family. Susan Finley married Pete Finley and had two sons together. She left JPL twice in the first few years of employment in order to support her husband's education and also took maternity leave for some time for her two sons, returning permanently to JPL in 1969.
“Susan G. Finley” enters the record as software engineer. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Susan, Finley and software can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q22277791. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1958, 1955 and 1969.
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This entry incorporates text from “Susan G. Finley” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.