Jeannette Piccard

Jeannette Ridlon Piccard, who lived from 5 January 1895 to 17 May 1981, was an American high-altitude balloonist and, in later life, an Episcopal priest. The source says she held the women's altitude record for nearly three decades and that several contemporaneous accounts regarded her as the first woman in space. She was the first licensed female balloon pilot in the United States and the first woman to fly to the stratosphere. With her husband Jean she reached a height of 10.9 miles on a record-breaking flight over Lake Erie on 23 October 1934, retaining control of the balloon throughout. After her husband's death in 1963 she consulted for the director of NASA's Johnson Space Center, and she was posthumously inducted into the International Space Hall of Fame in 1998. In 1974 she became one of the Philadelphia Eleven, the first women ordained as priests in the Episcopal Church, though the ordinations were regarded as irregular.