As a National Defense Analyst for what’s now called the U.S. Congressional Research Service (an arm of the Library of Congress), Galloway was asked by Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson to advise the Congress on what the country’s response should be to Russia’s October 4, 1957, launch of Sputnik, the first artificial satellite.
She advised Congress to create a space committee, and then helped write the questions that the committee asked witnesses, and then helped to analyze their answers. She then helped draft the legislation that created NASA, and helped establish the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space.
She later was a founding member of the International Institute of Space Law (IISL), opposed the weaponization of space, and argued in support of the Outer Space Treaty, which states that “celestial bodies are not subject to national appropriations by claims of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.”
Dr. Galloway retired from the Congressional Research Service in 1975 as one of the foremost experts on space law, and was the first woman elected Honorary Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (2006), the organization’s highest honor. She was a fellow of the American Astronautical Society (1996), an honorary director of the IISL, and a trustee emeritus of the International Academy of Astronautics. She was the first recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from Women in Aerospace, and received the NASA Public Service Award and Gold Medal in 1984. She died May 2 from cancer at 102.