The actor was born into a family of engineers, including a mother whose work would become part of the story of how astronauts survived one of NASA’s most famous missions. According to IMDb trivia, Judith Love Cohen contributed to the Apollo program’s Abort-Guidance System, which played a crucial role in bringing the Apollo 13 crew home safely.
Jack Black’s Mother Played a Role in the Apollo 13 Mission
Born in Santa Monica in 1969, Black was the son of aerospace engineers Thomas William Black and Judith Love Cohen. While his father worked in the field of satellite engineering, his mother developed a remarkable career of her own. Cohen worked on several major aerospace projects during a period when women remained a small minority in engineering.
Cohen’s work included the guidance system for the Minuteman missile and the Apollo Lunar Module, as well as projects connected to the Hubble Space Telescope. Her work on the Apollo Abort-Guidance System became particularly significant during Apollo 13, when an oxygen tank explosion severely damaged the spacecraft’s Service Module and forced astronauts James Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise to rely on the Lunar Module to help them get home.
The Abort-Guidance System became an important part of that emergency return. With the Lunar Module’s resources limited and its primary guidance system requiring more water for cooling, the AGS was used during much of the journey back to Earth, including crucial course corrections. Cohen’s son Neil Siegel later described her Apollo work as the highlight of her engineering career and recalled that she was present when the Apollo 13 astronauts visited the TRW facility to thank the people involved.
That extraordinary professional background was part of the family environment in which Black grew up. His parents divorced when he was 10, and he later pursued acting at the Crossroads School before attending UCLA. He eventually left college to pursue entertainment, developing the career that would make him famous in films including “School of Rock”, “High Fidelity”, “Kung Fu Panda” and “Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle”. His mother’s legacy, however, remains tied to an entirely different kind of Hollywood story, one that began millions of miles away from a movie set.