Yvonne Brill, aeronautical scientist - FT.com Yvonne Brill was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame along with the creators of Post-its Aeronautical scientist, 1924-2013 Since Sputnik showed the way in 1957, upwards of 20,000 satellites have been launched into space. More than 13,000 are still up there but only about 3,500 remain functional and in their correct orbit. IN Obituaries That so many are still doing their job owes a lot to a rocket scientist who was a pioneer in more ways than one. In the early 1970s Yvonne Brill developed the hydrazine resistojet, the rocket thruster that kept satellites from slipping out of orbit. That meant they could carry less fuel and thus more equipment and stay in space for longer. Brill, who has died in Princeton, New Jersey, at the age of 88, was associated with several landmark projects. Both in their scientific goals and how far they were to travel, the range was vast - from earthly oxygen's outer reaches with the Atmosphere Explorer all the way through to Mars Observer, which in 1993 came close to entering the orbit of the red planet before it lost contact. Others included the Tiros series of early weather satellites and Nova, intended for lunar missions. They were achievements remarkable for someone with no engineering degree, though that was through no fault of her own. The University of Manitoba in her native Canada rejected her application for its course on the grounds that it required fieldwork for which there were no female facilities on-site. Eventually she gained her advanced degrees in chemistry and mathematics and landed jobs in California at a chemicals company and then at Douglas Aircraft before moving east. "Nobody had the right degrees back then, so it didn't matter," she said in a 2010 interview with the Star-Ledger in nearby Newark. I didn't have engineering but the engineers didn't have the chemistry and math. Born Yvonne Madelaine Claeys in Winnipeg on December 30 1924, she was the child of Belgian immigrants. In 1951 she married William Franklin Brill, a research chemist she had met at a lecture. Bill Brill died three years ago; their two sons and daughter survive her. For years Yvonne Brill had moved with him to whichever positions he landed, on the principle, according to family recollections, that "good husbands are harder to find than good jobs." Yet even while raising three children she was rarely out of work herself, employed successively by Douglas, its Rand Corporation spin-off, Wright Aeronautical in New Jersey and, from 1966, RCA's rocket subsidiary, where she developed - and personally held the patent on - her satellite propulsion system. She was almost self-deprecatingly conscious of her role as a pioneer both for her sex and in her field. She became a rocket scientist, she said, because "I reckoned they would not invent rules to discriminate against one person," though that was what happened to her at Manitoba university. In later life she urged girls to follow her example by studying maths and science. She was also quite lucky. In law, for instance, contemporaries such as the later Supreme Court justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg found it impossible to land jobs commensurate with their academic qualifications because they were women. Science was blinder, in Brill's case anyway. Her work brought her widespread recognition including, in 2011, the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, presented by President Barack Obama. "Satellites using her invention form the backbone of the worldwide communication network," the citation from the US Patent and Trademark Office concluded. A year earlier she had been inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, along with the creators of Post-its, prompting ironic comment that it took two men to come up with slightly sticky stationery and one woman to discover how to keep satellites aloft. This week brought similar but rather greater indignation on the internet after a New York Times obituary began by extolling her virtues as a good cook, dutiful spouse and wonderful mother before getting around to her professional accomplishments. Feminist outrage won the support of the newspaper's (female) public editor and the reference in the opening sentence to her making "a mean beef stroganoff" was duly excised. But that was not before one rival provocatively suggested that the (male) obituary writer be removed from planet Earth for not recognising it had long been the lot of even the most brilliant women somehow to balance home and work. Brill would probably have been pleased that people took such umbrage on her behalf but, then again, she was always very practical about life. As she said after Manitoba frustrated her engineering ambitions: "You just have to be cheerful about it and not get upset when you get insulted." Space, after all, was her final frontier and she did voyage scientifically where few men, or women, had been before.